AR&D Reinventing Local Media

Lots of sites have a feature that turns a crowded, hard-to read web page into an easy, text-only, print page. You’ll often see this when you hit the “print” button on the site. Stories, often broken up into three or four pages are suddenly just a page long. And I have to ask — why not make all pages as easy to use as the “print pages?”

The answer, of course, is “page views.” Sites will break up stories into several pages (clicks, really) to inflate their page views. This is a cheat. If it’s designed so you can make the audience work harder, all you’re doing is inflating the cost of interaction. You’re not building a page the way the audience wants to use it; you’re building a story that will get more page views (should the reader choose to continue, of course).

There are several problems with cutting up stories like this. The first is that people don’t read the Web this way. They skim. You’re missing out on potential engagement time by having possibly interesting, skimmable material two or three clicks away. Next: According to web usability guru Jakob Nielsen, people only read about a quarter of the text on a page. You’re not helping yourself – you’re hurting yourself. And you’re sending a terrible message to the audience: “We make you work for this.”

This is never more maddening than when used in lists. You’ll often see the “Top Ten” or “Top 20″ whatevers. (Businesses, sports teams, etc.) Some sites will simply list them — a best practice. But others make you work — and work hard. You’ll get one item from the list per page. 20 clicks to get 20 items from a list? I’m just not going to do it.

The only exception is in slideshows. Pictures (good ones, anyway) should be seen nice a big. I’m fine if you take up the majority of my screen with a beautiful picture. And I will click to the next picture to see more. I understand that the cost of interaction here is different. In order to get something I truly want – a large picture – I will click ahead. Some sites have the feature that puts a moused-over arrow on the far right and left of each picture, meaning I don’t have to scroll down to the “next” link. Good choice.

Here’s another problem: by chopping up the pages, you’re making the story more difficult to pass along. Why? Because we like to copy and paste. Sorry – but we’re going to keep doing that. My standard method is to include the link, and then copy and paste the text. You’re thinking “big deal – I get no money for that.” But I say you should love that we do this. We’re promoting your site, and we’re telling our friends. That’s marketing, and we’re doing it for you.

Stop carving up those stories artificially. Make them easy to share and make them as easy to skim as a “print this” page. You’ll see results.

With the onset of hurricane season, and the first significant storm threat we’ve faced this year, it’s important that you’re ready for the emergency. I don’t mean having plenty of supplies on hand or having lots of meetings. I mean for your web presence — especially that front page of yours. In a big, breaking news emergency, you have to change it.

During the California wildfires in October 2007, KFMB did an outstanding job altering its website to give exclusive coverage to the fires.

This is substantially different from how the other San Diego stations reacted, using their existing templates to provide the usual variety of news. Yes, we still want other stories on our site. But when your city is in flames, that’s really all you care about. cbs8.com did a clever job of building a landing page that appeared “before” its regular site. If you look in the upper right, you will see the link that says “For additional news, go to cbs8.com main site.” That’s all you need.

As you can see, this special page was done up in blog format. This is the way to go for a big story. You can simply add items to the stream of information. People want whatever is latest, and they don’t need us to have a “lead.” The site also had prominent placement for a relief line. People from out of the region could still lend a hand through their donations.

The blog format is absolutely the best choice during weather events. Your team can update constantly, without having to go through the “finished news” process. In a quickly-changing situation like a hurricane, we need minute-by-minute items.

If, for some reason, your site won’t support a new front page — demand your developers provide the service. This is one of the key reasons why you need local control of your site. You want to be able to change, on the fly, the look and presentation of your site.

This is also the perfect time for Twitter. You want to be sending out tweets regularly. We usually suggest offering only one – two tweets per day, but this is an exception. Your other choice (and it’s a perfectly good one) is to set up a special Twitter page just for the storm. In fact, having the name twitter.com/stormname is a great idea, as it will draw attention from around the country. As soon as that tropical depression develops, get that Twitter name just in case.

Keep your updates brief. Let your viewers know, via your on-air broadcast, where to find the updates. Invite them to send their Tweets to you for updates. The best way to spread the word about your pages is via broadcast and “ReTweets.”

Local news has always geared up for storm coverage. The aggressive approach has to be no different online. Social media will improve the coverage as a whole, as you will empower your audience to work with you during the emergency. That’s when Being Social shines.

Russell Wilcox is President and CEO of E Ink, the company that invented the electronic ink best known for making the Amazon Kindle possible. When I met Russell, I was intruiged. I asked if he would do a Q&A for us to describe what E Ink is and in what future applications we may see it. I was especially interested in his take on how local media could use E Ink in the near future.

Russell won Ernst & Young’s New England Entrepreneur of the Year in 2009.

Give us the simplest explanation of E Ink.

Electronic ink is made of tiny clear microcapsules. Inside the capsules there are white and black particles. It looks a bit like a very tiny snow globe with both white and black snow inside! But there are millions of these tiny capsules and they are so small your eye cannot see them individually.

Now, to make an electronic display, we start with a glass sheet that has an array of pixels in rows and columns, and we coat that with a layer of microcapsules. When the computer gives the pixel a positive charge, all the black particles near that pixel are pushed to the top and the capsule looks black. When the computer gives the pixel a negative charge, all the white particles rise and the capsule looks white.

The secret of electronic ink is the raw materials. Our black pigments are the same carbon black that is issued in printer’s ink to make it black. Our white pigments are the same titanium dioxide that is used to brighten paper, and to make a lot of other things look white, including white wall paint, golf balls, and even non-dairy creamer!

How E Ink Works:

How did the idea develop? What was your role?

The idea came from Joe Jacobson at the MIT Media Lab. He wanted to invent a book that could be flexible and have all the pages change at the push of a button.

I was the business guy who helped start the company. My job was to get the funding, find some interested customers, and then cheer like mad while the scientists invented better and better versions of the technology so we could sell a great product.

What commercial applications is it used in now?

Our technology is found in many electronic book devices, including the SONY Reader and the Amazon Kindle. We are also used in other flexible and paper-thin display applications. The recent Alias2 cellphone from Samsung has a changeable keypad covered with an E Ink display – open it like a flip phone and the keys show numbers for quick dialing; open it like a laptop, and the keys switch to show letters for texting. We are also in displays for electronic shelf price labels, memory stick indicators, watches and signage.

Right now, we see E Ink in monochrome (and shades of grey) in products like Kindle and the Phosphor watch. You have colors — will we see them in the mainstream?

We have color at the demo stage now. You may see first products in late 2010 or early 2011.

The E Ink applications aren’t like TV – they don’t move so much as “draw.” Is there the possibility for enough screen refreshing for E  Ink that we could see motion? At some point, could local media use an E Ink product to show video or photo slideshows?

We can do some simple animation now, like menu bars and pointers. This will keep improving over time. The coolest “fast” feature we can support now is pen input for handwriting – so you can have the experience of an electronic pen to go with your electronic paper. Products with this are out now in China and may come to the USA in another year or so.

Although we are not targeting the TV market, in the lab we have versions that are fast enough to watch some video and this could be useful for mobile video applications like video phone or watching YouTube.

Put on your futurist cap: how could news use E Ink products in the  near future?
News organizations can publish to electronic book devices like the Kindle right now, and that does take advantage of vast cost savings on distribution.

Most Newspaper companies make their money with advertising though, and so the big change in the near future that will benefit media companies is larger display sizes and color, which will allow them to sell effective advertising space.

Here is a flight of fancy… imagine that you can call up the Boston Globe and instead of a quarter ton of newspapers on your doorstep for $300 per year, they just mail you a “Boston Globe in a Box”. Inside is a large newspaper reader device with a wireless radio. You open the box, turn it on and it automatically downloads the latest Boston Globe and remains up to date at all times. The Globe does not need to charge you anything, because the advertising sales cover all their costs of collecting news, (and) meanwhile they can cut out all their newsprint and trucking costs. For an added fee you can get more newspapers, buy books, or surf the web.

What’s the wildest application, prototype or proposal you’ve seen for E Ink?
Wow, there have been a few!

- Animated makeup: A couple of cosmetic companies have had interest, and one medical company wanted to animate the face of a large doll, so that student doctors could practice on it. They wanted the doll to make lifelike expressions as the students did what doctors do. Others have asked about digital tattoos.

- An animated cup that would use the acid in soda pop to help activate a power source – imagine Harry Potter riding his broomstick on a Big Gulp cup.

- A protective coating for a building roof that would turn white in the sun and dark in the shade to manage heat

- A roll-up electronic book that looks like an ancient scroll

- A cover for a magazine that blinks the title to attract attention at the newsstand – we actually did this one with Esquire and Ford last year!

- Signage on subway cars that would change so you always have something to read

- A counter on a sneaker that would show you how many steps you had taken

And of course the original idea that started it all:

- A book with hundreds of pages, that could rewrite itself as a new book at the push of a button

That one’s still a ways off because it would be so expensive, but even with just one page, eBook devices today offer a satisfying reading experience, which will only get better over time.

NYTimes.com has rolled out an offering that’s well worth studying, one that delivers news as it happens and not via a formal, “Here’s the lede” presentation. Times Wire publishes news to the Web as soon as the story is ready. While the Times has been publishing “instantly” online for some time, this is the first time they have put the stories up in a Continuous News, chronological format. The lede isn’t what the editors decide is the biggest story in the world. There is no lede, there is only the story that published most recently.

Whether you call this a River of News, as Dave Winer and Doc Searls have, or Continuous News, as Terry Heaton first began preaching, it means the same thing: publishers are finally recognizing we want the option to get news as it happens and to be our own editors.

The concept is not new. Anyone who has ever written for a blog has published a river of news. Winer rolled out his own proposed version of the idea in 2006. A year later, he wrote:

“Why doesn’t everyone else just go ahead and do it too. Think about it. When you want news, you want the new stuff, you don’t want to wade through sections looking for the new stuff. You want the computer to find it for you. Too many electronic news sites are patterned after newspapers, that published once a day. In the real world of today, news is published all the time.”

Also in 2007, Doc Searls endorsed the idea:

“To be truly alive, truly new, truly part of the life of its readers, a newspaper needs to be on the live web and not just the static one. It needs to flow news, and not just post it.

“It needs to flow rivers of news, or newsrivers.

“A year from now every newspaper will have a newsriver — if not many of them. Most papers will copy other papers, of course. But one paper will start the trend, take the lead, and break the ice that’s damned up their purpose in static sites and tombed archives.

“One of them will see that there’s a Live Web as well as a static one. And that the Live Frontier is where the action is, and will be.

“I’m betting they’ll follow the New York Times, just like they always do.”

Doc was slightly off in the time frame (close enough) but he nailed it on the Times. And you can bet he’s right about how this will tip other papers (and, hopefully, TV stations) to do the same.

Really, the Times Wire is no different from the AP News Wire we’re all used to seeing in newsrooms. The latest story is the top story. That’s it. This is a really, really simple idea. For crying out loud — it’s a blog or damn close to one. So why has it taken so long to have this as an “official offering?” Because it’s ceding editorial control to our audience, and that absolutely kills higher-ups who believe they know what we need to know and in what order.

You can customize your Times Wire to suit your interests (good) but you don’t then get an RSS of that customization (bad). You still need to go to the site to get your customized information.

Given that, there is a lot to commend the site. It’s cleaner than any TV site you’ll ever see. It has a good photo interface and all the latest social sharing tools. It’s a work in progress, and it’s good to see the Times “embrace beta.” What’s also nice to see is that the developers are blogging about the process, which is appropriate given the “bloggy” nature of the site. Writes developer Michael Donohoe:

“Times Wire provides something NYTimes.com just didn’t have before: a clear, at-a-glance view of the latest content, in reverse chronological order without any other weighting or sorting. Depending on the state of the world, otherwise interesting and relevant stories aren’t always able to bubble up to the home page, or may hover there for only a moment.

“Times Wire is a stream of articles and blog posts going back over the last 24 hours, and going ahead in regular Ajax-based requests every minute…. If an article or post is updated later in the day, it’s bumped back up in the feed. It’s really that simple, and simple is exactly what it’s meant to be.”

Donohoe gives credit to those who conceptualized this before he did, tipping his cap to Winer and others. The Times is trying, and it has been great to see how the site has turned things around. It regularly releases new APIs so developers can take its information and run with it. In February, it held Times Open which invited developers to look at the Times as a platform, not a site, and to build upon it. You can build your own NYTimes.com widget, which will post whichever sections interest you.

The Times is doing a laudable job here, and we have to pay attention. Yes, it has plenty of financial issues, and some of these ideas are late to market. But the ideas are here now. As Searls wrote: others will follow.

All it has really done is put “new” back into “news.” Yet, with this simple acknowledgement of how news rivers work, the Times is also telling us it’s listening — and going with the flow.

We have all seen this one coming. And we salute it. Four of Chicago’s TV stations are going to pool coverage of “non-exclusive” events.  WMAQ (NBC), WFLD (Fox), WBBM (CBS) and WGN are going to work together.

As Chicago Tribune media columnist Phil Rosenthal writes: “It’s going to be less crowded at some Chicago-area news conferences.”

The four outlets are establishing an independent news service to do the coverage. Rosenthal explains:

Tony Capriolo, a WMAQ sports producer, has been selected as managing editor of the service, which will be based at WBBM’s headquarters across from Daley Plaza but separate from Channel 2’s news operation. Each participating outlet will provide two news crews and an assignment editor, and they remain on their station’s payroll. Capriolo is an employee of the service, paid for by participating stations

What’s interesting to me is how much of a change this represents in editorial thinking. Yes, we’ve pooled cameras for court coverage in the past, but that was out of logistical necessity. Now it’s a financial need, and suddenly nobody in editorial has a big problem with it. The stations will still edit the feeds as they see fit.

I always figured some local entrepreneur would simply start a local news service and sell the video to the stations. (As some overnight stringers do now.) It’s good to see city outlets banding together to make more efficient use of their resources. This is by no means the only way to reinvent local news. But it’s planting the seed of the idea that we can’t do business the old way and cling to old ideals.