Technology is media’s overwhelming context

Very smart piece on Buzzfeed today from Charlie Warzel, who writes off the back of Ezra Klein’s new venture:

media reporting today is, for better or for worse, inextricable from technology reporting. Tech — the internet, CMSes, distribution and production — is not just a factor for media companies, but an overwhelming context.

This goes deeper than simply CMS issues, though they’ve long been the biggest bugbears of those in the industry dominated by print requirements as they moved onto the web. Journalism and the technology used to distribute it have long been so deeply enmeshed that separating them would be meaningless. You can see that in the launch of things like Inside, which is aiming to aggregate content in short, fact-filled bursts designed for mobile reading but not for grammatical sense.

You can also see the context-blindness that Warzel mentions in the launch of the Saturday Paper, a new Australian print weekly which is relying on entirely different technology to Klein or Inside. The conversations around it have mostly been about editorial quality, with the CEO coming out swinging at the print incumbents. What’s missing from that analysis is any kind of conversation about the technology used, the difficulties of expanding a print model through rural Australia, and the issues of attention competition. Like Inside, like any news organisation on any medium, the Saturday Paper has to compete not just with other attractions using its own tech and distribution method, but also all those using other methods too. Print is no more a monolith than the internet, but the media reports around this new print product aren’t (yet) about innovations in design or in production, editorial strategy (beyond ‘be better than the others’, which is a little nebulous) or how the content will fit the form.

It’s that last part that matters most. Journalism, in whatever form it’s in, is symbiotic with the technology it’s using, in ways that go far beyond 140-characters for Twitter reports or design parameters for print. Increasingly, journalism online is shaped to match or to work with algorithms, tapping into what works to trigger broader pickup on different networks. Snappy front pages sell newspapers because of the technology and affordances of the newsstand; Upworthy headlines get links shared because of the technology and affordances of Facebook; Inside is betting that the technology and affordances of mobile readership will bring it similar success. The content strategy can’t be sensibly separated from the technologies involved.

Pocket Lint #2

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The problem with “do what you love”
“According to this way of thinking, labor is not something one does for compensation, but an act of self-love. If profit doesn’t happen to follow, it is because the worker’s passion and determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace.”

The Names They Gave Me
“Thank you for my name, mama.”

Drowning in money
“Instead of a steady flow sustained around the year by trees in the hills, by sensitive farming methods, by rivers allowed to find their own course and their own level, to filter and hold back their waters through bends and braiding and obstructions, we get a cycle of flood and drought. We get filthy water and empty aquifers and huge insurance premiums and ruined carpets. And all of it at public expense.”

Before and after
The slow and gradual process of gender transition, and how different that reality is from the crisp, sharply delineated “before and after” photos that are the common image.

The Naked Twine Game Jam
46 Twine games made over a weekend without using CSS modifications or Javascript.

Gun Home: the ultimate Gone Home DLC

Turning normal experiences of motherhood into depression
“Dr Spock told a generation of women that they didn’t need to learn how to look after their babies, that it was instinctive and that they knew more than they thought they did. He was completely wrong. ”

What Google knows about you
“We know Google collects the data. But what they do with the data we don’t exactly know. They might be using it for the best or the worst. Pessimists will think the latter, optimists will think Google will use it to build new great stuff for us which will make our lives better. Probably both are right.”

25 things a great character needs
Helpful advice for writers, especially number 17

Tumblr of the week: Cute animals, bad dates

Free game of the week: Catlateral Damage, a first person cat simulator

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8 tips for writing good web headlines

A very basic guide for people who write for the web and find themselves trying to build an audience.

ONE. Give people a reason to click

Why is your work worth anyone’s attention? That’s not a mean question: you must think it’s worth people’s time, otherwise why publish at all? So your headline has to explain in some way why they should click on you, why they should care about your thing ahead of the seventy billion other things people are trying to make them care about right now. If you can’t work out a value proposition and express it clearly in a headline, it might be worth editing your piece.

TWO. It has to work out of context

In print, you have lots of elements to work with that can tell a reader what something’s about – intros, pull quotes, images and head all work together. On the web, even if your site uses all those things as part of its design, your headline is going to appear in many places you can’t control, all on its own. Twitter, Facebook, Google and any number of other social sites are going to strip it from its context and force it to perform. If it doesn’t make sense when you look at it on its own, it won’t work as a web head.

THREE. It should probably mention what the piece is about

That might sound obvious, but it’s worth stating – it’s surprising how many fascinating pieces have incredibly obscure headlines. Anyone who finds you through search because they’re looking for the thing you’re talking about is almost certainly going to be lost if you don’t mention it in the headline.

FOUR. People like lists

That doesn’t mean you should write a list if your piece isn’t already a list. But if you’re writing a list and you don’t take the opportunity to use a number in the headline, you’re probably missing a trick.

FIVE. People like useful

This ought to be self-evident. Are you giving people instructions, a helpful way to do things, or information they might find useful? Then make sure your headline says so.

SIX. Don’t make promises you can’t keep

Make sure people know they can trust what they’re clicking on. Don’t pretend what you’ve written is better or more comprehensive or more emotional than it is. No one likes feeling foolish or disappointed, and people aren’t going to share things that create those feelings.

SEVEN. Keep it snappy

Too long, and it’s going to end up truncated in most of the places that count – Twitter has a character limit, Google has a display limit – and look ugly on your site on mobile, unless you’re specifically designing for it. You’re going to lose attention. Simple tends to be better; shorter tends to be better; if you can make it elegant, alliterative or amusing at the same time, that’s icing on the cake.

EIGHT. Work out what your audience responds to

This is the golden rule. It’s one reason why Upworthy is so good at the sharing game: Upworthy’s headlines are designed around two clauses, one with an emotional pull, because that’s what its core audience of mothers shares most. If you’re making things aimed at a certain audience and you know they respond to a certain type of sell, then you can cheerfully ignore the rest of this list, safe in the knowledge that your readers won’t care.

Pocket Lint: interesting links, by email if you’d like

Pocket Lint is an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while, inspired by Roo’s Letter and the weekly ritual of going through all my saved links in Pocket and clearing them out on a Friday. And by the fact that lots of the links I’d normally tweet during UK hours are now happening during Australian ones, and some folks I used to provide that service for might like it if it came back in some form. So this will be a hopefully-weekly pick of the best of my saved links, featuring interesting things on the loose themes of journalism, games, social justice, news and internet culture. As an experiment, I’m also turning it into a regular email: you can sign up here or using the form below if you’re interested. I promise not to spam you.

Why we should give free money to everyone
“Studies from all over the world drive home the exact same point: free money helps. Proven correlations exist between free money and a decrease in crime, lower inequality, less malnutrition, lower infant mortality and teenage pregnancy rates, less truancy, better school completion rates, higher economic growth and emancipation rates.”

A tale of two trolls
Two people were convicted of sending threatening tweets to Caroline Criado-Perez this week; Helen Lewis looks at what their different stories and circumstances say about online abuse more broadly.

How Buzzfeed mastered social sharing
Long Wired feature on the rise of Buzzfeed and its analytical approach to making things go viral

Headlines Against Humanity
Spot the fake clickbait headlines. Harder than you’d think.

The myth of the free market in American healthcare
“If everyone in the U.S. was on Medicare, the savings would move the federal budget from deficit to surplus.”

Reading and hypothesis
On story, backstory, narrators (reliable or otherwise) and interactive fiction, and how they relate to Gone Home. Spoilers ahoy.

Kids Won’t Listen
Why teenage girls are sick of articles about teenage girls written by grown-up men.

Not-games of the year
“There have been plenty of great Game of the Year lists over the last month or so, and I don’t feel like I need to add to them, a week into the new year. Instead I’m going to write about things that weren’t games, but which felt like they could inspire them; the experiences I had and things I saw that I want to think hard about this year.”

“I want all games to have more needless buttons.”

Despite the castration, it’s been a good year A 2004 look at Christmas circulars from sketch writer and journalist Simon Hoggart, who died this week.

Room of 1000 Snakes (Requires Unity web player.)

Tumblr of the week: Movie Code Free game of the week: Looming (because I’ve been playing it this week, not because it’s new)

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We work here: online abuse is a workplace issue

When harassment or threatening messages are characterised as “just the internet”, it’s doubly frustrating. On one hand, that’s a glib way to deny the reality of the harm caused and emotions experienced by the people on the receiving end. On the other, it assumes the internet is something you can switch off if you want – a harmless unreality that’s an optional extra, and not part of your real life.

The reality, however, is that many people on the receiving end of online abuse are being abused at work. The internet is not just a place of play and recreation; it’s also a work environment. Journalists, community managers of all kinds, marketers, and any number of other professionals cannot do their jobs effectively without the ability to access social media, and to speak freely there without being harassed for their presence.

Amanda Hess, in a long and excellent piece on women, harassment and the internet, speaks to this problem and a few others. She points out that online abuse, arguably, constitutes employment discrimination, as it discourages women from pursuing work online as well as causing significant distress to those who do and who are harassed in return.

Those who have reason to expect harassment are discouraged from promoting themselves and their work. They may employ particular strategies to protect themselves that aren’t necessary for those who are less likely to be abused, and that may hurt them professionally. (An illustrative example: I didn’t use my own image in profiles anywhere online for several years, because I was keen not to have my appearance used as ammunition, positive or negative. During that time I had more than one conversation with male social media journalists, seemingly unaware of these issues, who told me not using my own photograph was unprofessional.)

The prevalence of online abuse manages to put minorities who work online at a disadvantage in two ways: either they moderate their behaviour to be safer but take professional consequences, or they do not moderate their behaviour and risk more severe abuse. Either way there is an extra cost to working online, which is currently borne entirely by those on the receiving end of systematic harassment.

In addition to those employment issues, Hess also speaks about her experiences with police, and the fact that keeping track of her stalkers has cost her money. The police response to Twitter abuse is, in her account, frequently to tell her not to use Twitter. If your job requires you to use Twitter, or your work’s success relies on your personal ability to promote it, this advice is impossible to take without harming yourself economically and professionally.

Increasingly, for many careers, social media is not a space where participation is optional.  “Just ignore it” doesn’t work and isn’t appropriate when a customer in a shop starts yelling abuse at a retail worker. It’s not appropriate online either. We work here.

Break news everywhere, not just on Twitter

Steve Buttry has a great response to a reporter worried about being scooped by the competition if they post on Twitter. He argues that: “You can’t get scooped because competition gets tipped to a story when you tweet about it. Your tweets already scooped the competition.”

That’s true, but not quite complete. You may have scooped the competition, but you’ve only scooped them on Twitter – for readers who don’t use Twitter or who don’t follow you there, you might not have broken any news at all. The choice of where to break stories or how to develop them live isn’t just “Twitter and/or your own website”. Twitter matters, that’s certain, but what’s less cut and dried is whether it matters more than anywhere else, for you and for your readers.

Sometimes being first on Twitter is worth a huge amount of prestige and traffic for your work. Sometimes, in all honesty, it’s just nice-to-have – the traffic and prestige you really want is elsewhere. Would you rather be first to tweet, or would you rather be the first thing people see in their Facebook newsfeed or the first with a chance at a link from r/worldnews? Is the audience for what you’re writing actually using Twitter, or are they elsewhere? Are you better off dashing off an alert to your mobile app users, or an email to a specialised list, before you take to Twitter?

All Buttry’s advice for how to report live, digitally and socially, is excellent. And it all also has platform-agnostic applications. You can post to a brand Facebook page as well as – or instead of – a brand Twitter account; at the moment, with all the dials turned up, that’s likely to have a significant effect.

You can argue the Facebook audience will most likely disappear when Facebook makes another newsfeed tweak; that ignores the fact that right now is a good time to put your work in front of people who might never have seen it before and might never see it again unless you go where they are and show them.

It also misses the important point here, which is that no one platform is the answer in all situations for every news organisation all of the time. You have to build a strategy that will be flexible enough to respond when something changes, positively or negatively, on a social platform. Social and search sites do not owe you traffic, and relying on one at the expense of others is not sensible in the long term. You have to be willing to allocate resources away from the shiny media-friendly very-visible things and towards the more oblique, less obvious, less sexy things. You have to be able to go where your audience is, not just where you are as a journalist. If your audience is all hanging out on an obscure forum, go post there.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t or can’t also try to be first on Twitter – if you’re doing news seriously, you absolutely should. Twitter’s huge, and hugely important, but it isn’t all there is to social news, and it’s crucial to think about where else your readers might be. If you’re only thinking about breaking news on Twitter, you’re not thinking broadly enough yet. Break news in weird places, if that’s where your audience is.

Viral identities

Rob Horning has a very interesting meditation on the viral self over at the New Inquiry, touching on emotion, accuracy, viral content and the reasons why we pass certain stories on:

The point of viral content, in part, is not to learn about “little girls in Afghanistan who are better at skateboarding than you’ll ever be” or other such stories (which often turn out to be untrue) but to be the person who responds correctly to them and who tells someone else about them. The function of viral content is to permit vicarious participation in the emotions of the story, and vicarious participation in the social. The perceived virality, popularity, of the content, illusory or not, elicits a richer emotional response in the consumer of the content. Virality may function as disinhibition for a reader, authorizing fantasy and emotional investment, a suspension of disbelief that is sustained by apparent social support. Everyone is talking about this! In that sense it is “real” regardless of whether the details are accurate. The circulation of the story makes it a social fact.

Much of it is quotable for insight about how viral content taps a desire to be viral ourselves, to have our own identities spread and carried through social media alongside the things we post. His points about how viral sites themselves have a limited half-life – a sort of meta-virality – are particularly interesting. Especially given that this is presumably an element of what Buzzfeed is attempting to avoid by growing its more serious reporting side.

Once everyone knows about Upworthy and can source viral material from it themselves, though, its thrill is gone. Virality settles into traditional mass-media reach. And Facebook’s engineers, whose algorithms underlie virality in practice, retool how their site’s newsfeed works, as Ezra Klein explains here, to thwart overpopular or overliked content. And so new viral-content providers must be uncovered, new ruses to evade filters and stoke consumers’ vanity devised. Viral content sites themselves have a viral life span.

He also talks intelligently about the problems of identities constructed solely or primarily through social media, the way that becomes a responsibility with a watching audience – something that I suspect bites particularly hard for online “anchor” journalists, who tend to meld professional and public identities into a single social entity, and who tend to set great store by the numbers attached.

Flow, realism and violence

Diagram of flow states
Challenge, skill and flow, via Wikimedia.

The fundamental problem with this New Yorker piece on the psychology of first person shooters is that the writer doesn’t really understand game design. Now, I’m all in favour of mainstream journalists writing positive articles about video games, but despite its positivity this piece makes some fundamental misunderstandings about the psychology of gaming and the way game design works.

It’s clear that the writer is searching for reasons for the incredible success of first-person shooters, but it ends up in some extremely strange places. For one thing, FPS games aren’t the majority of the market; while the CoD and Halo franchises are very popular, so are World of Warcraft, GTA, Assassin’s Creed, and so on. Even the Wikipedia list of bestselling games the article tries to link to lists Gran Turismo, God of War, Uncharted and Little Big Planet alongside FPS games in the Playstation 3 category. The premise that FPS games are somehow special, justified by the sales figures, just doesn’t stand up.

But the biggest problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of “flow”, and the mistaken belief that it’s somehow intrinsically linked to genre, rather than anything else:

What is it that has made this type of game such a success? It’s not simply the first-person perspective, the three-dimensionality, the violence, or the escape. These are features of many video games today. But the first-person shooter combines them in a distinct way: a virtual environment that maximizes a player’s potential to attain a state that the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow”—a condition of absolute presence and happiness.

Flow is not an intrinsic element of first-person games, nor of shooters. It’s not just presence and happiness: it’s concentration and absorption in a task, to the exclusion of all else.  It is often an intrinsic element of good games – perhaps that explains why Kane & Lynch didn’t have the same effect as Half Life 2 – but it’s also an intrinsic element of lots of other experiences.

I get it from working out knotty Javascript problems in Twine, sometimes, from reading fiction, and from doing my day job during massive breaking news stories. I work like crazy to make sure that every player in our live games gets it at least once during the experience, too, because that’s often the clearest mark of a genuinely fantastic game. Whether it’s digital or physical, FPS or MMO, whatever your genre or even form conventions are.

And because of that, I’ve got to quibble with the assertion that “The more realistic the game becomes…the easier it is to lose your own identity in it.” The best flow situations I’ve built myself have come when people forget they’re playing, sure, but that isn’t linked to realism or to shooting or even to a first-person perspective and a sense of control. You can get it from dancing stupidly to disco music, from fighting in slow motion, from matching 3 jewels of the same colours over and over again, from Solitaire.

Realism and violence are not necessary for good game design. And good game design is not an adequate explanation for their popularity.

Medium’s reading time

“I think of competing for users’ attention as a zero-sum game. Thanks to hardware innovation, there is barely a moment left in the waking day that hasn’t been claimed by (in no particular order) books, social networks, TV, and games. It’s amazing that we have time for our jobs and families.

“There’s no shortage of hand-wringing around what exactly “engagement” means and how it might be measured?—?if it can be at all.Of course, it depends on the platform, and how you expect your users to spend their time on it.

“For content websites (e.g., the New York Times), you want people to read. And then come back, to read more.

“A matchmaking service (e.g., OkCupid) attempts to match partners. The number of successful matches should give you a pretty good sense of the health of the business.

“What about a site that combines both of these ideas? I sometimes characterize Medium as content matchmaking: we want people to write, and others to read, great posts. It’s two-sided: one can’t exist without the other. What is the core activity that connects the two sides? It’s reading. Readers don’t just view a page, or click an ad. They read.

“At Medium, we optimize for the time that people spend reading.

Medium’s metric that matters: Total Time Reading

Medium, as a magazine-style publisher(/platform/hybrid thing), wants a browsing experience in which every article is fully read through and digested, and where the next piece follows on from the former serendipitously. News publishers don’t necessarily want that, or at least not across the board. For features the approach makes a lot of sense, but for news that’s geared towards getting the important facts across in the first paragraphs – even the first sentence – it’s fundamentally at odds with the writer’s goals. News that aims to be easy to read shouldn’t, and doesn’t, take a lot of time to consume. So generalist publishers have to balance metrics for success that are often in direct conflict. (This is one of many reasons why, actually, page views are pretty useful, with all the necessary caveats about not using stupid tricks to inflate things and then calling it success, of course.)

Newsrooms also have to use – buzzwordy as the phrase is – actionable metrics. It doesn’t matter what your numbers say if no one can use them to make better decisions. And newsrooms have something that Medium doesn’t: control over content. Medium doesn’t (for the most part) get to dictate what writers write, how it’s structured, the links it contains or the next piece that ought to follow on from it. So the questions it wants to answer with its metrics are different from those of editors in most newsrooms. Total time reading is most useful for news publishers in the hands of devs and designers, those who can change the furniture around the words in order to improve the reading experience and alter the structure of the site to improve stickiness and flow. Those are rarely editorial decisions.

The clue’s in the headline – it’s Medium’s metric that matters. Not necessarily anyone else’s.

Things the Daily Mail thinks are evil

Not an exhaustive list, of course. More examples welcome.

For context: Ed Miliband’s response to the original Mail smear piece claiming his dad hated Britain.