Like I tweeted, I really can't exaggerate how important this is to hacker journalism. Nieman's introduction to data-driven approach and auto-tagging is just the first step. It's not terribly useful now--sort of a toy more than anything. There's so much work to be done, and this is, in my view, a profoundly important signal to the world of journalism to focus.
Is Google News opt-out? I was under the impression there was a vetting process before sources could be allowed in, which makes whining about Google News rather silly. If you don't want in, then don't apply.
That said, I don't think the burden should be placed on the source to opt out of aggregators. Aggregators should be required to get permission before they start scraping your stuff or republishing your RSS feeds (provided your terms of service prohibit commercial republication).
I would say it depends on how engaged the 1500 people are. I wasn't seeing many comments on stories. I wasn't seeing many readers. I wasn't seeing a specific focus on any one topic. These things add up to be worrisome.
1500 readers/day but 20 comments on each story would be something you could build on. 10,000 readers/day but 0 comments on each story would also be something to build on.
As someone who runs a successful nonprofit news site that gets less traffic than that, I'd say 1500 uniques a day is not terrible. My question would be, what's your business model? Cause if it's "free content online, for free" that might not pay the bills.
I agree with the Nieman folks. This sounds like a protectionist, already proven-failure idea. Why would someone choose I-News (shudder) over their RSS reader?
The President of the Cleveland chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists has figured out how to save newspapers:
1. We all know no one looks at online ads.
2. If we can prove this, advertisers will stop running ads online.
3. If they stop running ads online, they'll run more ads in print.
4. Hence, we'll save newspapers.
This won't work for a few reasons:
Advertisers are finding online advertising to be cheaper, more effective, more transparent and above all, easier, than advertising in print. So long as Google advertising offers a better experience than getting an ad into the paper, people will continue to advertise online and flee from print.
Updated: Given the title "A Modest Proposal" it's now been pointed out to me that this piece was meant as satire...and it flew right over my head. Whoops.
I count over 500 media staffers laid off and/or bought out in the past year, in Toronto alone, even though no major orgs have closed yet. Not all of them journalists, of course. And they wouldn't even have to inject cash, just donate time and skills to get something off the ground.
And I say this as someone who started a site about "original reporting on Chicago politics and culture."
After a month of introducing it to people in that way and getting zero response, I realized I was bringing zero value into the world, helping no audience in particular and creating no single community. Thus began the long pull-back, from blogs, reporting, links, features etc, to crowd-powered local links...which is becoming a lot of fun and quite social.
Can't speak to that. Clearly the guy makes his bones by getting hired by media companies to tell them what to do. The blog is meant to get conversation going and show off his expertise. It's a sound business model as far as I can tell. Much more sound than a web-only reporting-driven startup!
The 22 person number doesn't surprise me at all. If you started from scratch, or acted as if you were, as the PI seems to be doing, then you could choose to only cover stuff that readers care about or that advertisers care about. This is a good thing as it will get money coming in and numbers up, which gives you space for less fluffy stuff at some point.
Then you hire the helium buzzards to fluff out your pages with stuff to drive up the pageviews with original content (just make sure you pull out the links to their spam sites!). You bring in the blogburst guys to give you more cheap pageviews. Now you're humming along ok.
On a somewhat unrelated note, I chuckle every time I see reference to the "threat" of West Seattle Blog. That's just the wrong word for it. Threat implies that it's possible to compete with them. It's not. When your competition is willing to work 24/7, seven days a week, when they live in the neighborhood and you do not. When they have a three-year head start, and when YOU are limited to 9-5, 5 days a week work hours, you can't compete. I don't know what the word for that is, but it's not competition.
So this article is from an editor at a not-for-profit investigative site. The editor is saying that they're having trouble raising funds and might have to close if they don't raise more money.
The thing is, this article is now 5 days old according to the timestamp, and it has no comments on it. Where/what/who is their audience?
Looking at Quantcast for the domain, it looks like they started a few months ago and have about 1500 unique readers a day. That's not much.
http://www.quantcast.com/pubrecord.org
But it could be enough if these were people expressly seeking out and interacting with their coverage, which doesn't appear to be happening. I don't see comments on any of their front page stories. That's not a good sign of audience engagement.
What pressing problem is the Public Record solving?
"In-Depth, Decisive Independent Reporting" is what journalists tell other journalists they're working on. No marketing guy would ever try to sell a consumer product with that as it's subtitle.
I know this is harsh criticism, but the market has no time for products that don't make specific people's lives better. The journalism startups that will work are those that make a specific promise to specific people, and then come through on it.
Like that GregInHollywood.com site I posted the other day. When you go there, you're going to get Greg, doing stuff in Hollywood. If you like Greg, and like Hollywood, or like one or the other, his site is right up your alley. He's got to deliver on the goods, but if he does, there's an audience for it.
If I were these guys, I'd pick one story, one narrow topic, and just cover the heck out of it. Maybe torture, as that's the most specific of their topics. Be THE SOURCE for reporting/commentary/analysis on torture in the U.S.
Somewhere out there, there are people who care about that issue, who will read, support and follow a publication focused on that.
No where out there is there a devoted audience for In-Depth, Incisive Independent Reporting on Law, Religion and Politics. It's just to bland. No one loves "food" but they might adore "pizza" or "milkshakes." So you start with milkshakes and OWN it. Then expand to add more food later.
Is it the severance packages? If you get laid off, then you get enough cash to go start your site. If you leave, then you have to foot the bill yourself. Could that be it?
Why do news outlets have to close altogether before laid-off journalists in a metro area join forces in an online-only play? I ask the question in Toronto.
1. Citizen Journalism is officially a blacklisted word. "Editor of distributed reporting" is a ridiculous title. She's basically corralling and organizing a bunch of tipsters. This is a great thing. Having your own Amazon Mechanical turk force at the ready can't be but useful.
2. ProPublica's making a lot of moves these days. What's their money situation?
I dislike tagclouds in general so I'm not a fan of the big one on the right, but the categories on the left are useful and they've got a solid blog feed down the middle.
Does look like they have many comments yet, but it's too soon to tell.
Like I tweeted, I really can't exaggerate how important this is to hacker journalism. Nieman's introduction to data-driven approach and auto-tagging is just the first step. It's not terribly useful now--sort of a toy more than anything. There's so much work to be done, and this is, in my view, a profoundly important signal to the world of journalism to focus.
Is Google News opt-out? I was under the impression there was a vetting process before sources could be allowed in, which makes whining about Google News rather silly. If you don't want in, then don't apply.
That said, I don't think the burden should be placed on the source to opt out of aggregators. Aggregators should be required to get permission before they start scraping your stuff or republishing your RSS feeds (provided your terms of service prohibit commercial republication).
I'm sick of griping about aggregators. If you don't want your site included in Google News opt out!
http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?answer=94003&topic=11709
I would say it depends on how engaged the 1500 people are. I wasn't seeing many comments on stories. I wasn't seeing many readers. I wasn't seeing a specific focus on any one topic. These things add up to be worrisome.
1500 readers/day but 20 comments on each story would be something you could build on. 10,000 readers/day but 0 comments on each story would also be something to build on.
As someone who runs a successful nonprofit news site that gets less traffic than that, I'd say 1500 uniques a day is not terrible. My question would be, what's your business model? Cause if it's "free content online, for free" that might not pay the bills.
I signed up for an API key for this, and was told they're approving them by hand over the next few days. bah!
This looks really spectacular so far though.
I agree with the Nieman folks. This sounds like a protectionist, already proven-failure idea. Why would someone choose I-News (shudder) over their RSS reader?
I don't get it.
This thing is awesome. Well worth a read. Hilarious.
Hey, come on up! We're going in to the warm season :)
To Toronto, to start something with all these laid off folks.
Sorry, bad, oblique joke.
Road trip? Sorry, I don't follow you.
The President of the Cleveland chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists has figured out how to save newspapers:
1. We all know no one looks at online ads.
2. If we can prove this, advertisers will stop running ads online.
3. If they stop running ads online, they'll run more ads in print.
4. Hence, we'll save newspapers.
This won't work for a few reasons:
Advertisers are finding online advertising to be cheaper, more effective, more transparent and above all, easier, than advertising in print. So long as Google advertising offers a better experience than getting an ad into the paper, people will continue to advertise online and flee from print.
Updated: Given the title "A Modest Proposal" it's now been pointed out to me that this piece was meant as satire...and it flew right over my head. Whoops.
Road trip?
I count over 500 media staffers laid off and/or bought out in the past year, in Toronto alone, even though no major orgs have closed yet. Not all of them journalists, of course. And they wouldn't even have to inject cash, just donate time and skills to get something off the ground.
They need to do less, not more.
And I say this as someone who started a site about "original reporting on Chicago politics and culture."
After a month of introducing it to people in that way and getting zero response, I realized I was bringing zero value into the world, helping no audience in particular and creating no single community. Thus began the long pull-back, from blogs, reporting, links, features etc, to crowd-powered local links...which is becoming a lot of fun and quite social.
Lesson learned.
Can't speak to that. Clearly the guy makes his bones by getting hired by media companies to tell them what to do. The blog is meant to get conversation going and show off his expertise. It's a sound business model as far as I can tell. Much more sound than a web-only reporting-driven startup!
The 22 person number doesn't surprise me at all. If you started from scratch, or acted as if you were, as the PI seems to be doing, then you could choose to only cover stuff that readers care about or that advertisers care about. This is a good thing as it will get money coming in and numbers up, which gives you space for less fluffy stuff at some point.
Then you hire the helium buzzards to fluff out your pages with stuff to drive up the pageviews with original content (just make sure you pull out the links to their spam sites!). You bring in the blogburst guys to give you more cheap pageviews. Now you're humming along ok.
On a somewhat unrelated note, I chuckle every time I see reference to the "threat" of West Seattle Blog. That's just the wrong word for it. Threat implies that it's possible to compete with them. It's not. When your competition is willing to work 24/7, seven days a week, when they live in the neighborhood and you do not. When they have a three-year head start, and when YOU are limited to 9-5, 5 days a week work hours, you can't compete. I don't know what the word for that is, but it's not competition.
Also, it's bad form to use a short url here.
"Additional reporters" and "improvements to the website" do not count as "desperate" needs. I call BS.
I may come to regret the lack of decorum in this question. But I'm going to ask it anyhow because I think it's high time someone did.
Does Ken Doctor strike anyone else as a low-wattage hack?
So this article is from an editor at a not-for-profit investigative site. The editor is saying that they're having trouble raising funds and might have to close if they don't raise more money.
The thing is, this article is now 5 days old according to the timestamp, and it has no comments on it. Where/what/who is their audience?
Looking at Quantcast for the domain, it looks like they started a few months ago and have about 1500 unique readers a day. That's not much.
http://www.quantcast.com/pubrecord.org
But it could be enough if these were people expressly seeking out and interacting with their coverage, which doesn't appear to be happening. I don't see comments on any of their front page stories. That's not a good sign of audience engagement.
What pressing problem is the Public Record solving?
"In-Depth, Decisive Independent Reporting" is what journalists tell other journalists they're working on. No marketing guy would ever try to sell a consumer product with that as it's subtitle.
I know this is harsh criticism, but the market has no time for products that don't make specific people's lives better. The journalism startups that will work are those that make a specific promise to specific people, and then come through on it.
Like that GregInHollywood.com site I posted the other day. When you go there, you're going to get Greg, doing stuff in Hollywood. If you like Greg, and like Hollywood, or like one or the other, his site is right up your alley. He's got to deliver on the goods, but if he does, there's an audience for it.
If I were these guys, I'd pick one story, one narrow topic, and just cover the heck out of it. Maybe torture, as that's the most specific of their topics. Be THE SOURCE for reporting/commentary/analysis on torture in the U.S.
Somewhere out there, there are people who care about that issue, who will read, support and follow a publication focused on that.
No where out there is there a devoted audience for In-Depth, Incisive Independent Reporting on Law, Religion and Politics. It's just to bland. No one loves "food" but they might adore "pizza" or "milkshakes." So you start with milkshakes and OWN it. Then expand to add more food later.
Is it the severance packages? If you get laid off, then you get enough cash to go start your site. If you leave, then you have to foot the bill yourself. Could that be it?
Why do news outlets have to close altogether before laid-off journalists in a metro area join forces in an online-only play? I ask the question in Toronto.
Two observations:
1. Citizen Journalism is officially a blacklisted word. "Editor of distributed reporting" is a ridiculous title. She's basically corralling and organizing a bunch of tipsters. This is a great thing. Having your own Amazon Mechanical turk force at the ready can't be but useful.
2. ProPublica's making a lot of moves these days. What's their money situation?
I dislike tagclouds in general so I'm not a fan of the big one on the right, but the categories on the left are useful and they've got a solid blog feed down the middle.
Does look like they have many comments yet, but it's too soon to tell.