Advice

I wrote a post the other day about thinking beyond text and images with online journalism. Looking back, I sound a little bit grandiose while talking about something that some newspapers are already excelling at.

The New York Times‘ rent or buy real estate calculator is one example that I’ve been aware of for some time.

Right now, there’s an interactive graphic on the New York Times home page that elegantly displays the breakdown of various voter blocks in the democratic primary. Want to know how women in their 30’s voted by state? Click. Cool.

What I should be able to do is treat that graphic like a YouTube video, and embed it on my site. That way anyone who comes through here can play with the Times‘ brand, data, and journalism, and cool graphics can spread virally across the internet.

You could embed a directory of related graphics, so that people can play with a series of connected pieces. They could click through to nytimes.com for associated articles or more detailed explanations.

As it is, I can’t even figure out how to find a permalink to the graphic they have up right now. The best I can do is show you a picture (top of the post). Once they move it from the home page, it is lost.

Step one is creating really cool interactive content. Step two is leveraging the viral power of the internet to build your audience and get your content everywhere.

About a week ago my sister, who admirably reads all my drivel without complaint, sent me an e-mail about newspaper archives:

In looking for sources for my history paper, I was very annoyed to find out that I would have to pay along the lines of $2.95 or pay for a whole subscription in order to see archived articles of specific newspapers.

The Seattle Times and the New York Times were both free, but the LA Times and many other ones that a google news search turned up were not. What’s up with having to pay for the archives?

She’s got a kind of point: All the current stuff is free. Why do I have to pay for the old stuff? It’s not like it costs you anything to provide it.

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I‘ve tossed around the idea of using freemium services and mulled over the difference between a subscriber and a reader, and I think these are very important concepts to the future of newspapers.

I think this because I’m beginning to realize how securely the concept of a “subscription” is tied to the physical paper delivery. People are not going to pay to look at a newspaper web site. And while American newspapers might only get about 20% of their revenue from subscriptions, that’s an important source of cash to maintain.

Going forward, I think subscription revenue is going to be even more important to newspapers as new measurement metrics and a proliferation of online media channels give advertisers more places to spend their money (and consequently, bring ad prices down).

Not to mention, have a significant chunk of subscription revenue would ease some of the inherent tensions between good editorial and business practices.

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I’m Joe Consumer.

Joe Consumer wants to sell his old computer monitor because he got a shiny new one. What does Joe do? He thinks first about his options. Here are the obvious ways to sell his monitor:

1. Ask his friends and family if they want to buy it.
2. Put an ad in the newspaper
3. List it as an auction on eBay
4. List it for sale on Craigslist

I’m sure there are hundreds of ways Joe could sell his monitor. But those are the ones that occur to me quickly and without much effort, and it’s pretty likely that at least one of them will work. Of those four options, only one costs Joe money.

Listing it in the newspaper.

The funny thing is that when I talk to people at newspapers, they all know this already. I get the “duh, we’re effed, shut up about it Jason” response.

But newspapers are not completely effed when it comes to classifieds, and here’s why.
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If you’re tracking the recommended reading I have in my sidebar, you probably spotted the post on Poynter last week about the idea of using videogames for journalistic storytelling.

As a long time videogamer and someone who used to run a video game web site, I wonder if making videogames to inform people about journalism is really the right approach. The “serious games” market has suffered with the very community they hope to reach out to (the videogame community) because it tries to approach serious issues in a medium that people use for escape.

I think that journalism videogames developed in the same vein would suffer a similar affliction.

Which is not to say that they shouldn’t be made at all. Serious games have their purpose and it is a great one - interactive computer-based learning is undoubtedly going to be a key component in the way we teach people going forward.

But applied as a seasoning, think about what it could do culturally.

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This morning Bob Stepno’s Other Journalism Blog pointed me to a giant QnA type piece with the New York Times‘ Design Director Khoi Vinh.

Given my basic interest in design (both for print and the internet), and my complete admiration with the New York Times website, I dove right in.

While most of his answers are more vague than I’d like, it’s 100% clear to me that Vinh’s understanding of internet design vs print design is one of the big reasons that the New York Times web site is so far ahead of other papers.

If you read carefully, Vinh offers several good takeaways for other newspapers:
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Scarborough Research recently released its 2008 study of newspaper audience ratings. You can find a downloadable PDF copy here, if that floats your boat.

It’s really stunning to look at the difference between the print readership and online readership at most of the newspapers in this report. Up top here I’ve posted the numbers for the New York Times, arguably the paper with the biggest web presence of any news organization.

Their numbers are completely unrepresentative of the industry at large - it may be only 10% of their market, but 1.5 million readers is nothing to scoff at. It’s virtually half their print readership. I think this is because the NYT has done such a good job of positioning themselves online as the destination for national news in the US.

Here are a some numbers from a few other newspapers:

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Just to give you an idea of where I’m coming from, I have been blogging in some form or another since 2001.

I’ve been working for the Parnassus Group over the past couple of years, where I am currently the New Media Manager. We run several different blogs, help companies with blogger engagement, and put on the Blog Business Summit and Web Community Forum conferences.

Many if not most newspapers have already started blogging on their own, and those blogs are often written by excellent reporters who do in fact know a thing or two about the internet.

While I think that journoblogs really occupy their own subcategory of blogging as a whole (and therefore have their own rules and etiquette), if I were any of those reporters, these are the five things I’d want my editor to know:

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