Metamedia

The paywall debate

An interesting post extolling the virtues of the paywall by Julien Rath as part of journalism.co.uk’s excellent TNTJ group blog has really gotten me thinking. Not because I agree – far from it – but it’s finally forced me to put into words my own views on the massive paywall debate.

I don’t like them. I don’t think that most papers have ever been bought on the basis of the news content - or even the op-ed and columns. (Sometimes the columns – Bridget Jones springs to mind – but rarely, and certainly not enough to subsidise an entire paper.) Asking people to pay on the web for things they don’t necessarily value enough to pay for in print – this seems pointless to me.

There’s a laundry list of ideological complaints about paywalls. They trap journalism behind a wall, cutting off access to information in a terribly anti-open-web sort of way. They create gated communities where dissent is unlikely and where the turbulent streams of the open web can’t intrude – for better or worse. They ensure a sort of private members’ club that cuts off those who can’t or don’t want to pay, which can be a blessing or a curse depending on your point of view.

Ideology aside, my most basic reason for disliking paywalls is business based. We have declining circulation in print, which means very few new paper readers will come to our websites based on what we’ve put in our newspapers. One of the obvious ways to gather new readers therefore is online, getting young people used to seeing our content linked on Facebook, Twitter, social networks they belong to and appreciate, in the hope that we can drive brand loyalty through those platforms and maybe, eventually, a few of those people will start reading the paper.

What happens to that model if there’s no accessible content online? It dies. What’s the plan to attract new readers to your brand above all others if it’s all behind a paywall? I haven’t yet seen one that works. It doesn’t matter how well-written or wonderful your editorials are – if no one can link to them they aren’t going to drive new traffic to your site.

Breaking news content online will rarely if ever be unique outside exceptionally specialist circles. Commentary, analysis, feature articles are more “valuable”, but very rarely irreplaceable given the vast amount of alternative and specialist content available for free elsewhere. And many news consumers now read what their social circle reads and links. We come through that to like personalities or subject-specific content, but that’s not the same as a brand loyalty – I read Charlie Brooker and the Guardian Datablog regularly, but that doesn’t mean I ever read the Guardian homepage. Paying for the whole Times website when I just want Caitlin Moran doesn’t make a lot of sense to me – especially when I can’t search for Times content using my normal methods (Google) and no one else links me to it because it’s all behind a wall, so I’d have to go hunting for it specifically if I wanted to include it in my daily reading. If many other net users are like me then they won’t be willing to pay for a whole bundle when what they want is one strand.

I’m more open to the idea of limited paywalls on sites like the proposed New York Times one, where only very regular readers – the folks who are already brand loyal – get charged for content. I still think they do more harm than good, because at that point you’re essentially punishing people for liking you too much. If the expectation is that content is free, suddenly charging is going to irritate people and drive them away from engaging too strongly.

Yes, journalists need to be paid for what we do. We need to eat and live, after all. I’m interested in the idea of micropayment systems that let me pay pennies at a time for content from any one of hundreds of news sources – from specialist science papers via Athens through the Financial Times through the Sun, I suppose, pretty soon. I’m interested in untapped affiliation potential – ticket sales, restaurant bookings, holidays, iTunes links next to band reviews. We can still make money from picture sales, family notices and so on, but we can do it in new ways – like the death notices my paper has set up where a single payment gets you not just the notice in the paper but also a living page that remains as a permanent and changing tribute. And that’s before we get into serious targetted advertising solutions, or the content changes that have got the Mail Online to where it is today. [Edit to clarify: I'm not suggesting that any one of these is a magic bullet that will save the news industry. I'm simply pointing to possible multiple revenue streams that I feel are worth exploring to see whether they could go some way towards paying for news.]

I’m not Rupert Murdoch. I haven’t sat in front of the figures or done the maths with real audience numbers, so like most other people I’m just having a good old reckon. Still, I reckon there are better ways forward than paywalls. What do you think?

Wikileaks, cultural discourse, and why the leaks might not make a big difference

In 1985 American literary critic Jane Tompkins published a book, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction. It was an attempt to attract critical attention to novels – often bestsellers – that had been traditionally ignored or even panned by the canon-makers who dominated literary criticism. It represented an opening up of “low” art to “high” critical modes. Among other books, it looks at Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin not just as a sentimental novel but as a persuasive political text that swayed the hearts and minds of Americans everywhere. It credits it with an important role in the Civil War – that of getting the word out and making it cool to be anti-slavery.

Tompkins talks about bestselling fiction as cultures speaking to themselves. Harry Potter and Twilight and Dan Brown’s works aren’t just bestsellers because they have a good story or they’re wonderfully written – if anything, they suceed despite that. What those books all do is take a central cultural dilemma and work it out in a safe, controllable way, helping to assuage the fears and worries of millions of readers and allowing them to reimagine the world with those conflicts resolved.*

Journalists are just as much a product of the cultures we write in and about, no matter how much we’d like to pretend otherwise sometimes. Perhaps the only exception is Wikileaks, because it’s outside national cultures; even so, its journalism work is subject to the same forces and influences as the rest of us.

Yesterday Wikileaks published, simultaneously with the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel, 92,000 logs from the war in Afghanistan that show the conflict at its most naked and basic. There are too many of the documents for the picture to be clear at this stage – there’s still a lot of work to be done – but the three news organisations have already done a great deal of work towards stitching coherent narratives together to make stories for easy consumption.

But the story resists consumption. There is no easy line through the logs that builds a narrative anyone can agree with; the documents are sticky and difficult and present problems that are simply insurmountable. As Wikileaks fouder Julian Assange said today:

The real story is that it is war, it’s one damned thing after another. It’s the continuous small events, the continuous deaths of children, insurgents, allied forces (…) This is the story of the war since 2004 and like most of the accidents that occur in the world, they are as a result of cars not buses, most of the deaths in this war are the event of the everyday squalor of war, not the big incidents.

But that’s not a comfortable story that gets us to sleep at night. It’s not our brave boys or the illegal war or Private Jessica Lynch, whichever version of the story you read. The good guys aren’t so great and the bad guys aren’t easily identifiable and everything is blurred right down to the level of individual decisions that might or might not be right, on the ground, in that time and place. That’s not a story that assuages any fears or resolves any conflicts neatly or easily.

And for that reason, I agree with @jayrosen_nyu. He says:

I’ve been trying to write about this observation for a while, but haven’t found the means to express it. So I am just going to state it, in what I admit is speculative form. Here’s what I said on Twitter Sunday: “We tend to think: big revelations mean big reactions. But if the story is too big and crashes too many illusions, the exact opposite occurs.” My fear is that this will happen with the Afghanistan logs. Reaction will be unbearably lighter than we have a right to expect— not because the story isn’t sensational or troubling enough, but because it’s too troubling, a mess we cannot fix and therefore prefer to forget.

Journalism, like literature, is a culture speaking to itself, defining itself, creating and reinventing itself. Whether fiction or non-fiction, a good story has to be in the right place at the right time in order to make real change within a culture. Yesterday’s Afghanistan log disclosures aren’t safe, or pretty, or easily understood. They don’t tell a story that anyone can nod along to. They don’t lend themselves to easy summation or even a coherent narrative. They remind us that the situation is far more complicated than we normally imagine. And I don’t think that’s a story we want to tell ourselves right now.

* Because those are all relatively recent works, it’s hard to pinpoint precisely which conflicts they’re resolving and how. If I had to: Harry Potter is dealing with anti-technology backlash, fear of rapid change, desire for an underlying order in a world without metanarratives, and the fact that the good and the bad guys all look the same these days; Dan Brown is dealing with surveillance and secrecy fears as well as the terror of the destruction of metanarratives and the worry that there might actually be no underlying purpose for anything; and Twilight is tackling changing and confusing rules and mores in male and female sexuality and transposing them into a “safe” traditional narrative where everyone knows the rules. But it’ll take a good few years yet before the picture is as crystal clear as, say, the way Peyton Place’s popularity came from how it dealt with fears and growing understanding of human sexuality in the wake of the Kinsey Report.

Braindump: just add points

Interesting presentation by Sebastian Deterding looking at what user experience designers can learn from game design.

Although news orgs face very different challenges from UX designers, the basic messages about shallow vs deep engagement, using multiple interacting points/currencies and measuring achievement, effort and attainment in a meaningful way are very relevant. Take a look:

It’s interesting to look at the Huffington Post’s community moderation badges in terms of this presentation. My gut instinct is that they fall, along with Foursquare, into a category of too simplistic game-like systems (“Just Add Points”) that don’t actually tap into the power and fun of learning that is one of the fundamental building blocks of good game design.

It’s also worth checking out this post on rescuing princesses at the Lost Garden. If you click through to the slides (PDF) there’s a thoughtful discussion of the differences between app and game design, and a very useful breakdown of STARS atoms – essentially, small chunks that introduce players/users to new skills, let them discover how to use them, and ensure they have mastered them.

Between them, these two posts and the thoughts behind them make a mockery of the idea of game mechanics as simple point systems you can pop atop pre-designed apps or comment systems or whatever it is you’re already doing. You have to design with exploratory learning in mind, with a learning curve that doesn’t flatten out horizontally or vertically and with end goals and nested goals to maintain engagement.

I wonder how the Guardian’s crowdsourced investigation into MPs’ expenses would have gone if they’d added this sort of rich game-led design? As well as giving long-term and short-term goals/rewards (like Twitter translator levels, perhaps) with status bars to show progress, perhaps they could have rewarded people who found something of real import with a status bump, or added exploratory learning elements by advancing users towards the goal of signing off on things other people had flagged as interesting. Or teaching basic maths, or collating data into a wiki-style “what does my MP spend” database, or encouraging/letting users learn to create their own visualisations of the data. Hard to say how well or whether that would have worked, but it’s easy to see wider possibilities in projects like that.

/end braindump

NCE refresher training

I’m on my second day of NCE training today in Wrexham. Tomorrow we’ll be doing a mock NCE day, taking mock News Report, Newspaper Practice and News Interview exams. This is in the lead up to taking my NCE exams – senior exams for working journalists, basically.

I’ve already had my portfolio scrutinised, and – thankfully – there’s not too much more work to do on it before the exams in July. Most of the work I have left is presentation – there’s a 10% presentation mark attached to the portfolio, which is easily the difference between a pass and a fail if you pick up most of the marks. Over the last 18 months I’ve written hundreds of stories, but for the portfolio we have to pull together 36 in total, 2 each in 18 different categories, and present them as they went into the paper along with our original copy. Under the mark scheme the presentation within the portfolio is worth the same as four of those stories.

Let me repeat that. Printing colour PDFs, making sure you put the right piece of paper in the right wallet and sign everything right, and sticking your stories on to black card is weighted equally with writing 4 of those stories. I’m not sure this is sensible.

Along with the portfolio grilling, we’ve done mock exams, including a Newspaper Practice paper that tests your ability to apply media law – that’s actually pretty useful – and then gives you examples of story ideas or beginnings and asks you to lay out how you’d cover them. I find these mildly depressing. Of course you say you’d set up video, live web chats, polls online, forum debates, interactive projects, complex data/FOI-driven follow-up stories – but the reality of my newsroom is that we’d rarely actually do this for anything but the biggest of big stories. There just aren’t enough people, there just isn’t enough time. But it’s good to get a chance to be aspirational, to talk about the ideal world and what you’d do had you the opportunity and kit necessary.

Then there’s the News Report and News Interviews exams. Honestly, bits of them are bizarre. We get a paper brief full of facts and figures, which is fine; someone reads a mock speech, designed to test our shorthand speeds and accuracy, which is fine, or we go and do a 20min mock interview, which is artificial but fine; we then have to write a story. Ostensibly it’s for the web but we’re told to use the same style we would use for print, and the word count is frankly brutal. Either 300 or 400 words, with only a 25-word margin on either side before we start getting penalised.

Even if we were writing for print, we’d have more margin than that. There’s flexibility in headlines and picture sizes – not loads, but more than 25 words. But that sort of brutal length limit for the web is mind-boggling when you can literally write as much or as little as you think you need.

I know, it’s an exam, it’s not meant to be real, it’s just testing skills we’re meant to be able to use in real-life situations. It still feels incredibly counter-intuitive to limit word counts so harshly. I’m not sure it’s actually testing anything useful any more. Each of the stories in these mock exams has been worth more space than we’ve been given, so I find myself pruning single words, rewording sentences over and over again to shave the last few clauses out, and – occasionally – omitting perfectly good, useful, interesting, humanising details. Essentially, making my stories worse in order to fit painfully artificial limits.

I’d love to know what the rationale is for such draconian strictness when it comes to word count. Anyone have any suggestions?

Blog-blocked by the Times paywall

What I wanted to do today was to write a blog post about how authorial identity affects the construction of meaning in articles published online. I wanted to use @caitlinmoran’s brilliant interview with Lady Gaga to talk about how Roland Barthes‘ 1977 essay on the Death of the Author might apply (a) to construction of an authorial figure within journalism like this and (b) to a literary context that includes Twitter.

But the article’s been sucked behind the Times registration wall, soon to become paywall, so I’m not going to. Not out of spite or a lack of willingness to register, but because pretty soon any link to that article will become essentially meaningless to anyone who isn’t subscribed to the Times. There’s very limited point in writing posts that build on content that no one can see – it goes against the basic principle of linking out.

I’m still going to write the post. I just won’t use that article as my example. That’s a shame, because it’s perfect, and I might have to wait a while before another perfect example comes along. But if blog readers can’t check my sources and make their own informed decisions on whether I’m talking rubbish, the post isn’t as useful as it could – or should – be.

Dummy demolition

Alison Gow recently wrote an excellent post suggesting that newsrooms should get rid of the dummy – the page plan that tells print new teams what space we need to fill in the paper and where.

She said:

Everywhere I’ve worked it’s been called something different – The Book, The Plan, The Dummy, the Flatplan – but recently I’ve started wondering if it should be called The Box, because we think inside it.

… the HOW of filling a newspaper can become more absorbing and demanding than the WHAT …

…I would love to hear the phrase ‘How many words do you want?’ replaced with ‘How do you want this told?’ Is that happening on any editorial floors in the UK’s regional press yet? I’d love to know – because that really would be a converged newsroom.

I’d love to know too. As a general print journalist without an official specialism – and as a trainee, too – I’m not yet at the stage where the demands of the dummy consume my day as much as they do the content editors who have to fill its hungry boxes.

But the demands are becoming more apparent. We’re in the process of switching from a Microsoft Word-based CMS to Atex, built around InCopy and InDesign – and designed to allow reporters to write directly onto the page.

In effect, that means many stories have to be written to an exact length. Things weren’t particularly flexible for us before – we were writing to imaginary boxes 30cm or 8cm or sometimes 450 words long – but we could tweak our stories if we discovered they were “worth less” than we thought. That’s still going to be possible, but not as easy. Instead of writing the story to whatever length reporters felt was best and letting subs pick the right story lengths to fill the page, we’re now starting to see a situation where we have to work out how long our story will be before we begin to write it and set pen to paper.

It’s a different way of working and it may well suit some journalists better than it does me. But for me, the psychological impact of writing a story into a box is that I find myself stretching stories to fit, squeezing an extra quote or two in or lopping off a few facts.

And I have to change that. If stories are too long or too short then they’re in the wrong box, and I have to move them to fit. But that process has illuminated for me the problems of writing for boxes in the first place, especially for the web. If we write the boxed-in print version first, the web version will never flow the way it could given the unlimited space we have there to play in.

Allen Ginsberg once said – though I can’t find a cite online for it, I’m informed by a university tutor – that the length of a line of poetry can be constrained by the paper you write on. (Another beat poet, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, wrote him a letter on a length of toilet paper afterwards.) His argument was that the words should fit the breath instead.

Boxes constrain and limit us, and force unnatural shapes onto the writing process. No matter how many journalists, editors and newsrooms begin to break away from the dummy and start asking how we can tell stories instead of what shape they should be, if the technology we use keeps dragging us back there, journalists will still be writing 30cm page leads first and thinking about everything else – including innovating for the web – as secondary.

Exploring the read/write world

Yesterday, Nick Booth at Podnosh posted a transcript of a conversation on Twitter where he asked for useful analogies to describe the internet to people who’ve only experienced radio and tv.

The conversation – and the comments – got me thinking about the way metaphors limit what we can understand about the online world and affect how we use it, particularly the page/document conceptual metaphor that pervades our language.

We use print language constantly online. Web pages, archives, scroll, above the fold, inbox, email, post. The metaphor is pervasive and often goes unnoticed as we use the language that reinforces it, making it hard to tease out the implications and assumptions of this mindset.

But pages aren’t flat, static, words on the screen as we see in print papers. What happens if we call a page a node? Or a window? Or a stream, a fall, a flow, a conversation, a connection, a junction?

Conceiving of pages as stories, for instance, opens up the idea of letting journalists develop an entire story online, rather than in our notebooks. Posting complete transcripts of interviews, not just the quotes we think are important. Including raw footage alongside the edit for those who are interested. Asking at early stages of a project where users think we should be investigating more. Incorporating links to our research and visualisations of our data not when we think they are relevant but when we stumble across them.

Conceiving of pages as junctions makes flat print-like design stand out as inadequate – not fit for their intended purpose, which is to facilitate forward movement and choice for reader.

And what if, instead of a reader, we have a traveller? The idea of a reader implies commitment, passivity, and above all a text-based medium. A traveller is someone who can leave at any moment, and opens up the idea of the page as a literal place – a location that can be moved through and explored rather than a document.

Thinking of the web as a series of pages gets us print design replicated online, lacking the myriad subtleties that are possible in a space that is simultaneously a limitless sea of connections and a location and a conversation and a lot of other things. Essentially, it gets you the front page of the new Times website – pretty and clean, but flat and without the cues many travellers use to make meaningful journeys through the web.

Thinking of it in any other way at all requires seriously examining the words we use, and playing with putting others in their place. Each conceptual metaphor has its own problems – calling the internet a brain inadvertently implies the organised hivemind that Twitter users protest does not exist, for instance – but we need a library (or bathtub, or pantry) that’s full of different options in order to open up new ways of thinking about what’s possible online.

Foursquare vs Gowalla – the battle begins

This week has been all about trying new things – www.instapaper.com, www.audioboo.fm, www.posterous.com and www.formspring.me, among others. I've also signed up for www.gowalla.com today.

I've been using www.foursquare.com for a few weeks now. I love the idea, but I've had problems with the iPhone app – it's been intermittently slow, buggy or failed to pick up on connections at all. Hopefully the new update will fix that, but I'm also giving Gowalla a try.

I'm particularly liking the look of the items feature at the moment, though admittedly I haven't tried it out properly yet. Basically, it's a primitive virtual geocaching system. Every time you check in somewhere you have a percentage chance to receive an item. You can swap items for the ability to do certain things – mostly to do with creating new locations, as far as I can see. And people visiting those locations later on have a chance of picking up those items and passing them on.

I don't imagine I'll be using both Foursquare and Gowalla in the long term unless I can find a way to link the services so I only need to check in once. One check-in is worthwhile; two is probably more effort than I'll spend. But I'll be trying them both out for a little while – will report back when a clear favourite emerges.

(Incidentally, this is also another Posterous test post, to see how linking and tagging work…)

Posted via email from InterMediaMary

Mucking around with mobile

via AudioBoo

Posted via web from InterMediaMary

Silver roses and cigars