The Denton memo: beyond blogging
At this point, half of the Argo-bloggers have already sent me the latest Denton memo, and I imagine the other half have drafts ready to go. For now, I present it mostly without comment. A few selected nuggets are below the fold.
Denton’s mercenary version of stock and flow:
We need a few breakout stories each day. We will push those on the front page. And these exclusives can be augmented by dozens or hundreds of short items to provide — at low cost — comprehensiveness and fodder for the commentariat.
How Gawker does video:
And we ourselves have learned more efficient techniques: curating video already posted up to Youtube or Vimeo, for instance; illustrating an app or video game with a quick screencast; creating a video slideshow out of high-definition images and text overlay; or making mashups from TV.
From weekly planning to hourly programming:
We’ve had some success with the editorial calendar that we built out at the start of 2010. The theme weeks provided structure; the list ensured we covered topics that might otherwise get washed away in the web news cycle; and they provided brands with attractive context against which agencies could place their advertising.
But the week-by-week calendar — as befits its origins in the magazine world — was rigid. The forward planning required is not our strongest suit. Some themes, enthusiastically adopted at the start of the year, became a burden as they approached and a chore during the week itself once the obvious stories were already mined. Online advertisers find it as difficult to plan ahead as we do. It was only rarely that their campaigns coincided with our theme weeks. And we cannot predict the popularity of these one-off sections. [...]
The editorial calendar will remain for event and seasonal programming such as CES and holiday shopping. But many topics are less time-sensitive and they will be moved to a programming grid which owes more to TV than to magazines. For instance, Lifehacker’s personal finance coverage is popular with both readers and advertisers; like much of our more helpful content it is often lost in the blog flow. From next year, it will be showcased at a regular time, say Fridays at 3pm, a personal finance hour.