Excellent advice: Merlin Mann’s post on what makes for a good blog.
In the Media
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Lest you think my obsession with content…
Lest you think my obsession with content planning and topic selection is my own personal hobby horse not actively espoused by bloggers out in the real world, here’s Social Media Examiner advocating much of the same advice.
Talking Points Memo’s “iterative reporting”
Talking Points Memo wants to hire a new reporter. In the job description, they require that applicants “must get how to build a story narrative, know TPM and our style of iterative reporting, and understand new media.” I’ve written before about TPM’s unique reporting approach, well-described in this GQ story from 2007:
“A key thing for us is people sending us articles in small publications that contain facts that have larger implications when seen in the framework of larger stories,” [TPM editor Josh] Marshall says. “So you end up with lots of chapters or vignettes of a story out there, but no one’s integrating them. Part of our niche is, we don’t have the slightest problem saying, ‘Hey, McClatchy’s got this great new scoop.’ And you take that scoop and see it in context of what the L.A. Times wrote last week and what the Arkansas Gazette wrote the week before and the original reporting we’ve been doing, and it all comes together. And that aggregation function, that pulling together of narratives, is a big part of what we do.”
Newspapers can’t do that, either; they have a finite amount of space, for which every story has to compete. “A reporter in San Diego could write a one-day story—Carol Lam got fired, yeah, it looks funny—but from an editor’s point of view, that reporter can’t come back the next day without a news peg,” Marshall says. “And we don’t need a news peg.” Web space, of course, is unlimited.
We can learn from several aspects of TPM’s approach. As well as their crowdsourcing and their “pulling together of narratives,” their independence from “news pegs” in developing a story is also an especially huge insight. It’s another reminder that on the Web, owning the story isn’t just (or even mostly) about getting all the scoops. It’s about owning the larger narrative.
The power of an algorithm
As we did some of the initial research for Argo, we spoke to several brilliant individuals who’d helped build sites that touch on aspects of our model. One of those people was Megan McCarthy, human editor of the media news aggregator site MediaGazer. Today that site got a shoutout from the Nieman Journalism Lab, which noticed that MediaGazer had leaped into its list of top 5 traffic referrers, after having existed for only two months.
What’s so special about MediaGazer? You might have noticed that I referred to Megan as the site’s “human editor.” That’s because the engine that powers the site is a sophisticated algorithm. Given a list of hundreds of sources around a topic, the algorithm constantly digests stories from those sources. It identifies which stories seem to have made a splash among that selectively-defined crowd. Then it clusters those stories and the reaction to them, and orders them by importance. It works a little like Google News, but thanks to its human inputs – the human-compiled source list and Megan’s constant feedback – it’s even better for getting a sense of the hot stories developing on a topic at any instant.
MediaGazer’s part of a family of sites that includes TechMeme (tech) and Memeorandum (politics). When the other sites were launched, they were purely algorithmic. But Gabe Rivera – the creator of the algorithm that powers these sites – discovered that the sites could be slow to surface a new story. In the age of Twitter, a story can become big news before a critical mass of bloggers or news organizations have written about it. So Rivera brought Megan on board to add human news judgment and speed to the algorithm’s decisions, to train it day by day and make the sites better.
We often say that “smart aggregation” is one of the three planks of the model we’re developing with Argo (the other two planks being the blogger’s guidance and the voice of the crowd). It’s also the area with the least amount of best practices and general knowledge to draw on. Models like Mediagazer show us what’s possible.
Are Web headlines just a cruel algorithm game?
In light of my “Headlines are hooks” post from last week, I’d be remiss not to flag this thoughtful David Carr column on Web headlines. He worries that the Web is making obsolete some of the artfulness that’s characterized headlines in the past:
When I scan my list of aggregated articles in an RSS feed, looking for information that I seem to need to know right now, I am ruthless: the obscure, the off-beat, the mysterious, frequently go unclicked.
But it leads to a sameness that can make all the information seem as if it were generated by the same traffic-loving robot. On Friday, two headlines from Reuters and Silicon Alley Insider about Google Street View camera cars that were unintentionally collecting data from unsecured wireless connections showed up two minutes apart in my RSS feed. Both started with “Whoops!” Whoops.
I agree with Jim Brady’s take on the question:
“We reject the idea that there are only two options, between a really creative and a boring headline. There is a lot of sunlight between those two options,” said Jim Brady, general manager of Politico’s coming local Washington site called TBD.com. “The headlines don’t have to be boring, but they have to be descriptive and direct so that they show up in mobile and RSS feeds in a way that lets people know what they are being asked to click on.”
Scott Rosenberg on moderating comments
Over at Salon.com, Scott Rosenberg lambasts editors who leave their comment threads unattended before complaining about how uncivil they are:
It is one of the great tragedies of the past decade that so many media institutions have failed to learn from the now considerable historical record of success and failure in the creation of online conversation spaces. This stuff isn’t new anymore. (Hell, this conversation itself isn’t new either — see this Kevin Marks post for a previous iteration.) There are people who have been hosting and running this sort of operation for decades now. They know a thing or two about how to do it right. (To name just a few off the top of my head — there are many more: Gail Williams of the Well. Derek Powazek of Fray.com. Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon’s Table Talk. Caterina Fake and her (ex-)Flickr gang.)
The great mistake so many newspapers and media outlets made was to turn on the comments software and then walk out of the room. They seemed to believe that the discussions would magically take care of themselves.
If you opened a public cafe or a bar in the downtown of a city, failed to staff it, and left it untended for months on end, would you be surprised if it ended up as a rat-infested hellhole?
Tour the Web with me, and I’ll show you a number of spots where the conversation can turn to abortion or race without descending into abject savagery. But it takes work and dedication. And if it gets to the point where it takes too much work for our Argo-blogger, we’ll tighten the technical filters until the load becomes manageable.
The rise of analysis
Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein was musing today about what was driving the success of organizations like NPR and the Economist, who’ve seen solid growth in an otherwise troubling time for the news industry. In his musings, he delivers what I’d call a spot-on assessment of the market opportunity online:
My grand theory of the media right now is that the rise of online media made newsgathering an extremely crowded and quick marketplace. That’s left a lot of publications that either aren’t used to the competition (think newspapers) or aren’t suited to the pace (think newsweeklies) a bit confused about their identity.
Some of them have responded by embracing opinion. That’s also a bad move. The opinion marketplace is, if anything, more crowded than the news marketplace, and it’s hard to really break through in it unless you’re willing to travel pretty far along the partisan continuum. But because news stories move so much faster and opinion is so much louder, there’s actually more demand for media that explains what those fast-moving stories are actually about. This is a need that is going largely unmet. Both the Economist and NPR are imperfect products, but that’s fundamentally what they’re doing. It’s not quite newsgathering, and it’s not straight opinion, though there’s occasionally opinion in there. It’s analysis. It’s how to understand the stuff that other people are reporting and opining.
I’d quibble with bits of this. (Not quite newsgathering? Tell that to Sorayya Sarhaddi Nelson or Laura Sullivan.) But I’m completely on board with his description of the unmet need in journalism right now.
There’s a bit of subtext here worth teasing out. Although he’s putatively talking about the rise of NPR and the Economist, Klein could just as easily be describing his own meteoric ascent to the Washington Post, where his blog is one of the site’s most popular sections. The Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU included his blogging of the health care reform process on a list of the top 80 works of journalism from the 2000s. “He is a new paradigm,” Post editor Marcus Brauchli said, “one we would very much like to replicate.”
“As a blogger, he has more latitude than reporters to reach conclusions,” Brauchli added. “It’s inevitable we will employ more people who have that ability.”
You don’t need to read between the lines to understand that Marcus Brauchli is looking for Ezra Klein 2.0. And it’s not hard to understand why. In a future post, I promise to dissect some of Klein’s blogging techniques that I think really work. But for the moment, I just want to underscore his emphasis.
For several of the Argo topics, I think solid analysis will trump even breaking news, both as a hook for an audience and as a way to keep them engaged. If you don’t want to take my word for it, take Nick Denton’s:
We can take ownership of a story even if it isn’t a strict exclusive. In case of both Tiger and Peaches, other sites (the porn star’s site and Reddit, respectively) carried the original material. But we added context and packaged the stories up. [...]
When remotely possible turn news into explanation. Straight how-to and why stories — such as Kotaku’s excellent Farmville guide — obviously resonate. But you can turn a news story into an explainer, as Lux did with the sexting scandals.
Public broadcasting has built its reputation on offering context. Ezra Klein (and, unbelievably, some of the Gawker bloggers) have really advanced the art of doing this in the blog format. We can learn a lot from them. More on this soon.
‘Context’ is king?
The ARGO team has been talking a great deal about the importance of context in telling stories. How do we avoid the trap of only telling readers/listeners the very latest story without providing the context to truly understand that story? And how do we make it easy to catch up, to understand complex issues in a relatively short period of time, while still drawing out the depth for which that public radio is known?
As has been noted in many places, that was one of the great triumphs of Planet Money’s The Giant Pool of Money. But we’re also thinking about it in associating related content to the most recent posts in a new and better way. Topics pages can certainly play a role, but we need far more than a link to another destination page that is simply a reverse chron list of stories mentioning that topic.
ARGO’s Matt Thompson has been doing a lot of thinking in this area. He was a featured speaker at South by Southwest, along with NYU’s Jay Rosen, on that subject. Terry Heaton’s PoMo blog quotes Matt and Jay from that panel in his post, “Context” is the new flavor for journalism.