CEO
Stomping Ground
@jimbradysp
Monetize Passion, Not Pageviews: A Q&A with Jim Brady
Former Digital First, TBD.com and WashingtonPost.com editorial executive Jim Brady is launching a new local site in Philadelphia this week called Billy Penn focused on developing communities around key local issues.
UF: How do you define user engagement? What are the metrics that you use to gauge engagement performance?
Brady: Engagement metrics are typically defined by site structure and mission, whether or not you’re trying to build page views to sell against or build engagement. In our case, our key focus is how many times we get people back to our site in a month. Our goal is to get people to read our journalism and take action in the community. To build and become part of affinity groups and groups of interest. So for us, engagement is the number of times they come back, if they’re leaving comments, if they’re attending events.
The metaphor is like having someone in a meeting and being bored out of their skull. They’re there, but that’s not engagement, that’s attendance. Engagement is action and a two-way conversation. Having people come to your site and learn something and leave with something to do.
UF: What are the key trends that are shifting consumer media behavior and forcing a rethinking of how we engage users?
Brady: The continued disaggregation of the traditional model is a key factor. It’s hard for any brand to attract enough audiences to build a business around. Today’s audiences’ affinity is not with traditional brands but with friends and influencers.
The battle today is not about getting the most page views but to get a smaller amount of people to your site and to come back often. The goal now is to be relevant enough to get people to think about your site as a place to go, whether through social or not. I don’t need a million people every month, I just need the right 150,000.
UF: What are the key characteristics that separate those media companies who are successfully engaging users with those who are not? Who do you think is doing it best?
Brady: Ninety percent of the most interesting things are coming from the new news sites. Buzzfeed is doing a really good job with engagement. They have won that war by understanding the platform and putting up compelling content. They understood for a long time that the average news consumer today is not wired the same way our generation was. They don’t worry a lot about juxtaposition of stories and tone the way older news organizations do so it’s OK to put cat pictures next to an Iraq story.
They also understand that a headline doesn’t have to tell you everything about the story. For traditional news organizations, the headline for the movie “Old Yeller” would have been “Dog Shot.” It’s OK for the headline to draw people in without giving away the ending. It’s the same issue with the traditional inverted pyramid. That structure is designed to get people to leave sooner.
NPR is doing it right, particularly with their NPR One app that lets listeners choose the stories they want to listen to. What Vox is doing with Vox Card Stacks that provide summaries and context for big news stories is also interesting.
Gawker has done some interesting things with commenting. They were not afraid to blow up the commenting model and try new things. The key for many sites is how to attract readers without having to put a lot of their own resources against it. That’s why comments are important and people shouldn’t shut them down just because 10 percent of the commenters are psychopaths.
Another great example is The Guardian in London. They got a raw dump of 700,000 MP expense reports. They offered up the database to their readers to comb through and if they saw anything odd, they could report it to The Guardian and they would investigate. They used the crowd to work the project and used them as a mass reporting force.
UF: How will your new Billy Penn site be different than other media ventures you’ve worked for, particularly around engagement?
Brady: The big difference is that what we are trying to do now is monetize passions and not pageviews. For example, we might curate a lot of stories about development in Philly. People will get one button to get deep information about development. We hope from there people will build groups around that topic and then we would monetize those groups.
On top of that is real-world engagement. If you’re covering a limited physical area, if you can get people in a room or bar, it brings engagement a level up.
Local media can only scale so far. We’re going to try to figure out how to scale all of those groups into a meaningful numbers. We also hope to get half of our revenue from events and memberships.
UF: What would you recommend to traditional media companies to help them compete more effectively with the Buzzfeed’s and Upworthy’s of the world?
Brady: Stop making fun of the new companies and look at what they’re doing well. Laugh all you want but in the digital news area, they are kicking a lot of asses. I get tired of the eyerolling and pissy comments. They are showing us the way.
UF: What are the key skills that future journalists (or marketers) should be developing to be successful in their craft?
Brady: Understand engagement and partnerships and the power of audiences beyond putting up comment boards. Students also need to know more about the business side. If we crank out 10,000 new journalists but only half understand the business, we’re not going to move the profession forward. Entrepreneurism is important for students to understand.
I also get a little worried that we are breeding a whole generation of journalists who are good at a lot of things but not great at any of them. We are trying to teach them reporting, video production, data analysis, social media. But to stand out in this environment, you need to build a specific expertise. You have to have a sun in your solar system. Pick something you can build around. All of the rest of the skills will make you even stronger.
Jim Brady is the CEO of Stomping Ground, a mobile-focused local news startup that will launch its first site, BillyPenn, in Philadelphia this fall. Jim is the former Editor-in-Chief of Digital First Media, where he oversaw the 75 daily newspapers, 292 non-daily publications and 341 online sites that are owned by Journal Register Company and MediaNews Group. He also oversaw the launch of Project Thunderdome, which redefined how DFM produces journalism by centralizing the production of non-local content so that local papers can focus on their local communities.
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