Don’t let Google be the Evil
Engineering the newsroom for good
“We need to sort it out” — almost every newsroom wants this.
It’s systemic and its viral, it spreads over thin air and has already affected every business running news in any form. Publishers are failing to achieve the necessary transformation to keep up with the pace of technology. And with changing customers.They are closing on themselves.
You might be prone to think that droids are trying to takeover your business, that Google is taking the most part of the cake, that people now lack of attention, and maybe also that tablet publishing is just scratching the surface with tiny revenues and expensive production.
The perception of the incoming disruptors is that they are low quality, and therefore not really worth paying attention to.
Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen said about the newspaper industry.
You might not understand the wealth redistribution between you, the publisher, and the platforms efficiently running services that once used to be on your complete control. If advertisement revenue is falling on any media outlet out there, it’s the evil of Google. If readers aren’t willing to pay for your digital content, it’s the evil of bloggers. If printed editions revenue is dropping 30% each year, it’s because people aren’t smelling paper anymore. And you can’t do anything other than raising a paywall on an underperforming web site.
From bad to worse, journalists are still working as they have already done, maybe more and better. They are better informed, they find sources, they fact-check everything — unless they are told not to do so. And they aren’t fairly paid anymore.
Excluding trend setters and opinion makers, who themselves are able to bring loads of traffic and drive sales, the 99% is struggling to earn a living from their respectful skills and experience.
We need to sort it out.
Far from being an acceptable compromise, the new advertisement salvation army is putting together sponsored content using journalists to please brands, and cheating readers with a contentlish advertisement that might be read as information.
The basic idea is that people don’t go around looking for products to buy. Instead, they take life as it comes and when they encounter a problem, they look for a solution—and at that point, they’ll hire a product or service.
Are you still providing a solution to the need of being informed?
I’m not meant to be the next prophet, so here are my points for you.
First things first
Information, trust and bias are the only values still living out there to be purchased. Easy, who wouldn’t say the same — but who is able to earn a living from that anymore?
Start from these three words and wrap around them a platform.
Properly done informative services won’t ever be manifactured in the far east, nor demanded to amateurs. We need foots on the streets, reporters with experience, first-hand narrations of facts. This costs money, experience, culture. These are the values to be sold.
Technology is making many of the mechanics behind the production much less expensive, and that’s why we are seeing more and more content produced and distributed overtaking journalism brands.
Technology is also making news more efficient and should be used to achieve quality re-engineering the workflows we are used to.
Layoff the fat cats
No business like news as ever seen such a wealthy middle class of stakeholders on un-efficient tasks that could now be accomplished by software.
Let them off before it’s too late. Politics will still do the trick for a limited time. The Internet has been created for transparency and scientific knowledge sharing, and so it’ll be. You can’t beat the system.
Know your balance sheets
Be honest with yourself. Is your content being purchased by advertisers or by readers? There’s no grey area here, one or the other.
A business model should be chosen and every decision must tailor the decision around the readers’ perceptions. You can’t provide quality information together with funny cats. You can’t have native advertisement and claim for trust. You can’t sell content and please brands.
Your balance sheets are made of the people that are buying your service.
Transition, or die trying
Many Internet services such as Twitter, Facebook, Google among the biggest, are now hiding between the shades. They have been created as platforms, and are now acting as media. They want to have control over the content that is distributed by their service, they want to please advertisers, and be able to censor the content that is out of their scope.
This is media, not platform.
They’d better totally transition soon, otherwise they might un-please too many. Irrelevancy is still an option.
Again, know your business model.
The Business Model
Making a living from doing the same mechanical tasks in the same old manner isn’t an option anymore. People are now experimenting uncertainty against cold comfort. Homo faber fortunae suae.
Digital replicas
One brand, one product
One audience
One media, more skeuomorphic ones
Newsroom separation odds: the media
You know what it works today? None of these.
Make a future proof plan
Continue producing your beloved quality content, feed the authors, give out assignments that are able to provide information to your audience. Know your audience better and only create new products that are able to measure their engagement and create an healthy flow of feedback and participation.
The data is your wealth.
Create the content on a digital native platform, make sure it is structured and semantic and can outlive the container.
Don’t ever think at the medium anymore. Think at the readers’ behavior. Have you hear of the lean-back experience? That isn’t the only one in place.
Outline a system for your news organization, not a media company.
Make the technology work for you
Unless you prefer to feed unnecessary workers letting down journalists, you should focus on the content and the experience of your editors.
Technologies built to support a vision may sort it out for you.
Given for granted you are producing content, and taking care of publishing it on different media, systems, platforms, aggregators, content management systems, etc.
The content cloud may be hiding the path to your audience. It might only be slightly organized and semantic, sometimes the media take over the content. You might have a ton of Indesign documents, text files, emails, posts on Tumblr, short burst on the Facebook page.
Everything is going it’s way to the outlet without you knowing if it’s effective, engaging, providing a service, perceived as a value. And you might end up making statements on things you don’t really know.
Let’s try this instead.
Outline a news organization on the three main keys: Value, Behavior and Package.
Once you have the values, you can produce coherent content.
Once you have the behaviors, decide for the style.
Once you have both of these, put a system at work for your editors.
Living in the past
Past revenues won’t ever come back, nor past behavior pleasing could turn the business up again.
Early adopters might deviate a coherent process of going mainstream again with digital products. It turned out that the very first tablet apps subscribers where print lovers with tablets, willing to jump on the new media because fascinated with the technology.
Going the distance, early adopters will be leaving in favor of print/digital bundle subscribers, thus generating losses and declining real circulation figures.
For digital to emerge and be sustainable, technologies need to go mainstream on niche audiences. Multiplying the products to target the three key driving factors for purchases is the minimum viable strategy for publishers to be back on track.
Digital products need to be sustainable and future proof, adopting semantic HTML as the universal content holder. Products can be easily generated on a streamlined workflow, able to support multiple schedules, multiple editorial decisions and multiple reading behaviors. These are all features of a well outlined digital only workflow, engineered to support fast decisions, rapid prototyping and pivoting.
Don’t let Google be the Evil.
