AR&D Reinventing Local Media

Big news from ABC – Charles Gibson is stepping down from the anchor slot at “World News Tonight,” and Diane Sawyer will take his place. The choice is interesting for whom they didn’t choose – Elizabeth Vargas, who briefly co-hosted “WNT” with Bob Woodruff.

Gibson will leave at the end of the year, with Sawyer taking over in January 2010. Why the move? Tough to say. ABC is second to NBC, not CBS, so this isn’t a “let’s take on Katie Couric” move. Then there’s the next question – who will replace Sawyer on “Good Morning America?”

What are the competitors saying? In typically dry fashion, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams told TV Newser “I would love to say that ABC’s loss is NBC’s gain, but then they went and appointed Diane Sawyer to replace Charlie Gibson. That doesn’t lessen the competition one bit.”

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.

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.

The inauguration was an event that was truly worldwide, and the Web was seriously stressed with traffic. The broadband video traffic pushed the Web to its limits, and many people experienced slowdowns – or even outages – as they tried to watch video. Wrote James Klatell at CBSNews.com:

“We here at CBSNews.com experienced streaming difficulties due to an unusually high number of requests…Clicking around to some of the other major news outlets, they seemed to be having similar issues. CNN.com had a note posted for potential viewers who came to see the historic moment. “You made it!” the message read. “However, so did everyone else.” The only thing to do? Wait in a line online.”

Depending on where you were and when you tried to log in, you may have struck out entirely. Mike Wendland of the Detroit Free Press found trying to watch video a maddening experience:

“I tried them all – Freep.com, MSNBC, Fox, ABC, CNN, the New York Times, CSpan and others – and without exception, they all failed. After about eight minutes into the speech, I had sporadic luck with the Washington Post stream, which, despite hiccups, delivered the only available live stream I could find on my Comcast broadband connection. Judging by the running commentary on chat rooms form others who couldn’t get the video streams, my experience was the norm.”

But those who did get through set records. CNN heavily promoted its coverage on Facebook. It wound up with traffic triple its previous record. According to C|Net, as of 1 pm EST, 18.8 million viewers had tuned in to the live feed, with 1.3 million concurrent live streams watching President Obama’s inaugural address. The numbers stretched CNN to its limit. Many visiting the live feed were put into a digital queue and had to wait for a “space” to open up.

The CNN Facebook Application paid off in promotional value as well. As of 1:15 PM EST, 600,000 “status messages” had been set using the app. An average of 4,000 status updates were set every minute. Millions of Facebookers checked in during the inauguration. CNN got plenty of facetime on Facebook.

Mogulus broke a company record, with 105,000 concurrent users and more than 1 million total users. Twitter was running at four-five times its normal rate. I experienced slowness updating with it, and I wasn’t alone.

Akamai notes that Tuesday was not a record day for Web traffic. Election Day, 2008 holds that honor. In fact, Inauguration Day traffic barely makes the top five. But alas – all that video…

It’s not surprising that the inauguration put such a stress on the system. To use the cliche, this was a “perfect storm” of demand. It peaked at Noon ET – prime time for the Web. It was video-driven, and was an event with international interest. Remember that much of our audience was at work, and because we were providing so much information online, we were doing the first job of journalism: informing.

So does this mean that video doesn’t work online? That the Web will never support a big video-driven event? Hardly. It only proves two things:

1. The enormous demand for online video
2. The woeful state of broadband in the U.S.

The pipes will get bigger and faster. The demand will grow. The infrastructure will support the Big Events. In the meantime, “normal” Web video traffic is supported very well. In the meantime, it’s good to see media outlets embracing complimentary technologies like Twitter and CoverItLive to supplement their TV coverage.