Small Initiatives

Repeal SOX? Count me in!

Jay Small — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:40:10 +0000

Techdirt applauds new efforts to repeal or rework Sarbanes-Oxley, the overwrought post-Enron accountability laws and the mass of new compliance rules and regulations that resulted from them.

As someone who lives with the overhead of these regulations every day, I agree, it's time to take another look.

Print for older readers, online for rest

Jay Small — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 13:10:45 +0000

Steve Outing cautions that style-over-substance print newspaper redesigns miss the best chance to retain loyal readers from older audiences:

"The key ... is to retain older readers by making the thinner print edition emphasize serious, quality journalism, retaining or expanding your paper's watchdog role in the community. Forget the stuff that's solely geared toward attracting young readers; they're for the most part gone from print.

"Then use the print edition to guide your paper readers to the extra stuff and the goodies that are on the digital side of the business."

Outing's advice seems solid. For years, I cautioned that newspapers spend too many resources on print design. In an industry with what I call design affluence, almost all print redesigns I see seem only modest, incremental improvements. Under Outing's logic, some actually would not be improvements at all, since they move print newspapers away from their loyal customers.

Considering Outing's second recommendation -- guide print readers to online features -- I would add one thing: if loyal print readers trend older, promote the online features older people would be most likely to use. E-mail, for example, remains in heavy use among older Internet populations. So rather than steering people to a Web site for breaking news updates, consider pushing them toward sign-ups for e-mail alerts.

Link bucket: Distinctly non-election reading

Jay Small — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 14:26:58 +0000

Links all wishing I had gotten to them sooner:

No news is no news: Jeff Jarvis' thoughts following a conference on new business models for news.
Gannett pushes for more tech hires, data centers, niche sites: Mark Glaser interviews Jennifer Carroll, Gannett's vice president for digital content, about the company's Information Center strategy.
An update on our Drupal conversion: Steve Yelvington provides great insights into Morris newspapers' conversion to the popular open-source site framework. Drupal powers this site, too.
The ad network shakeout has started: Too much of a good thing, opines Om Malik. Cory Bergman recorded similar observations a few days earlier. My day-job company, however, sees much promise in the new Yahoo! Apt network.
Blogs on their way out?: Matt Sokoloff channels a Wired magazine article about how Twitter has supplanted blogs as the lightweight channel for opinion leadership. I dunno. Thanks to free little bridge components, every post I make to this site automatically becomes a tweet, which in turn automatically becomes my Facebook status -- so why does it have to be just one or another?
Slaughtering the cash cows a bit too early: Ken Doctor says consumers notice the effects of cuts at newspapers in the products themselves, and become less likely to buy them.
CNN courts newspapers with new wire service: Joe Strupp reports this new entrant in, by all accounts, a declining market dominated by The Associated Press. I say bring on the alternatives, CNN.
The cost of First Click Free: Nick Carr discusses Google's pass-through program for sites that require registration but still want Google search referrals. Carr says it's a "helluva good business idea." Agreed.
How do mobile users spend their time?: Texting, says eMarketer.
How to optimize your Web connection: For all you reluctant and frustrated home systems administrators, like me, Wired offers some battle-tested tips to squeeze more packets through your purported "broadband" connection.
Recommended Web strategy reading: What would a link bucket be without a link to another link bucket? Sorry for getting all meta on you, but this roundup from Jeremiah Owyang points to thoughtful posts about overall Web strategy. If you prefer your link buckets with more of a user experience angle, there's always ...
Look at the usability, SEO, Web design and cool stuff: Cre8pc rounds up a designer's nirvana of reading matter. Go for it, in your alleged spare time.

Endorsement overkill

Jay Small — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 15:29:56 +0000

In 1984, I earned my bachelor's degree in journalism and political science. That second major instilled in me only two things: a deep-seated suspicion of all politicians, and an equally deep-seated desire to avoid friends-and-family conversations about politics in favor of doing my own homework and making up my own mind.

The Internet, circa 2008, makes that desire almost impossible to fulfill, worse even than four years ago, the last time I brought this up.

Facebook and Twitter friends will make their political views known within far too many of their status updates. Bloggers who, most of the time, focus on one useful specialty subject or another will change course in election season to splay their political views.

I will fight for anyone's right to express an opinion using all available tools, including a blog or a tweet. But I do not actively seek out blogs for political opinions. Instead, I fill my feed reader with sites whose value propositions are distinctly utilitarian and nonpolitical: covering the media business, for example, or technology, or innovation, or the search business.

When a non-political-specialty blogger diverts from such a value proposition to endorse or advocate a candidate, at face value it bugs me -- especially if the blogger makes no effort to tie the advocacy to his or her particular area of coverage or expertise.

At least most bloggers make no secret of their purpose to express opinions. Endorsing in that framework sits better with me than a site that feigns unbiased coverage of an industry, but routinely serves articles with thinly veiled political messages and only tangential connections to its industry. Know any sites like that? I do.

In these situations, political commentary usurps the privilege of my attention, like a bait-and-switch.

Even social media status messages with political tones make me queasy. Staying away from politics remains a fine strategy for keeping friends, I find.

As such, to be clear: I won't tweet who I voted for (love that early voting!) or why. And I don't talk about politics here. I do talk about media, technology, interactive business strategy and how they all tie to customer experience. I might sometimes stray to other personal or offbeat topics, but not politics. If you see otherwise, call me on it.

Tales of print-online relationships

Jay Small — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 13:58:46 +0000

Two posts caught my eye for their discussions of print-online relationships:

Mark Van Patten of the Bowling Green (Ky.) Daily News, writing at MediaShift, describes "How the Focus on Print Hurts Our Newspaper Site":

"It's definitely no tangled bureaucracy, but even within this simple system you find conflicts holding the website back. The problem is that the different people in that system just have different priorities. As general manager, I want to see both a strong online presence and continued healthy print circulation. In contrast, the managing editor doesn't want to 'hurt' the print edition by making the online edition too strong, fearing that it could tempt subscribers to abandon print."

Read down through the comments to see Tim Windsor's reply, which describes how his online team at The Sun in Baltimore had, if not authority to influence sweeping collaboration between print and online staffs, at least a veto power regarding Web content.

Another post, on Online Journalism Review, comes from my old colleague Curt Cavin at The Indianapolis Star. He has covered auto racing for the paper and its Web site (still my proudest start-up) as long as I can remember. He describes the evolution of his online work from a crude weekly "ask the expert" format we set up in the mid-1990s to a very active blog today:

In the height of racing season, I receive about 150 questions a day and answer about 10, almost all before 9 a.m. ... I haven't kept track, but it's safe to say that I have received questions from all 50 states and two dozen countries. Many of them have followed me to a weekly radio show that began in 2007.

Here's a newspaper writer who builds steam for all his efforts, print and online, from the interaction with racing enthusiasts on his blog. In the process, he builds a personal brand as racing expert that complements the newspaper's brand as local information provider. Way to go, Curt!

Building plans from audience metrics

Jay Small — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 13:32:57 +0000

Content site leaders pay more attention nowadays to measures of engagement beyond the venerable but flawed page view, per an overview from Jennifer Saba, writing for Editor & Publisher.

Be it time spent on site, page views per session, or frequency of visits per user, newspaper.com executives interviewed for the article want to grow 'em all.

"Many advertisers still buy based on CPMs (cost per thousand) per page view. 'The cold hard reality now is still the more page views we get, the more ads we serve. That translates into more dollars,' notes Anthony Moor, deputy managing editor/interactive at The Dallas Morning News. But he adds that executives also pay close attention to time spent: 'As an editor, I like seeing time spent go up — that's a good thing.' ...

"Chris Jennewein, senior vice president and publisher of Greenspun Interactive, thinks that time spent is a metric that has gotten shortchanged — and one that will eventually carry more currency. 'As this medium matures,' he says, 'sites that can show greater time spent per user are going to be able to command higher CPMs.'"

All true, all good. I begin business planning for any Web venture from a set of assumptions, some about traffic, some about ad performance, some constant through the plan period, some variable as time goes by.

I make the traffic assumptions in this order:

Monthly Unique Visitors: This is the "reach" metric, a variable component typically presuming growth through the plan period. For a new product, the growth curve will be steeper, while a mature online product might see only limited growth from organic increases in Internet usage.
Monthly Sessions per MUV: This is the "frequency" metric, which experience shows does not vary through an introductory business plan cycle as much as I might hope. So I start most plans with this as a constant. Better to be pleasantly surprised later, I figure, and reforecast to the positive.
Session Depth: I could express this as "time spent," as Saba's article suggests, but today's Internet advertising economics do not allow us to translate time spent into money. So I use page views per session as my depth, or "engagement," metric. Again, experience shows this metric does not vary as much as I might dream as a site grows from introduction, so I start most plans with this as a constant.
Ratio of Indexes to Details: Most sites have a different ad inventory model for home and index pages than for article or detail-level pages. So it's important to make assumptions about the split of a session between those two page types. Increasingly, detail-level pages dominate most user sessions as people arrive at content on our sites directly from external searches. I treat this as a constant through my business plan period; it is unlikely to vary enough to break it out as a monthly variable.

Then I make the advertising assumptions separately for each ad form (banner/display, text/context, listing) like so:

Average Number of Units by Page Type: This assumption follows the ratio of indexes to details. If I have average four units on an index page and three units on detail pages, I can treat that as a constant in my plan.
Average Cost Per Thousand: The rate my hypothetical enterprise will get for ads it sells. Another constant, though it's fun to be able to make a rate increase stick during a plan period, and adjust forecasts accordingly.
Average Sell-out Percentage: High rate plus high sell-out plus high traffic equals success. Without high sell-out rate, all that unused inventory drags on a business' ability to manage rate and advertiser expectations. This metric, which I treat as a constant in business planning, remains critically important yet the hardest to maintain or improve even on a high-volume, fast-growing site. In fact, traffic growth naturally conflicts with sell-out rate, especially in Web environments where inventory forecasting is unreliable.

Now, it's one thing to say these are the metrics for which I make assumptions to build a business plan. It's quite another to devise reliable formulas for arriving at the assumptions.

Much as I would love to say the data to plot assumptions and forecast usage sits at my fingertips every time I do this, that's just not life. More often, we draw on personal experience, or call our pals who might be doing something similar, to see some shadow of the facts that might make our assumptions more valid than wet fingers held up in the wind.

Hidden costs of virtual meetings

Jay Small — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:34:31 +0000

I just got off two conference calls with slideshow-style Webinars in two consecutive hours.

In the first one, the meeting started at least five minutes late while participants struggled to get the Webinar slideshows to appear on their screens.

In the second one, the same problem held the meeting up for a couple of minutes. Not so bad. But about halfway into the call, a participant put the conference on hold, meaning the rest of us heard "holding pattern" beeps every 10 seconds or so from that one person's phone line.

Virtual meeting technology, be it WebEx, Adobe Connect, LiveMeeting etc., serves a good purpose for companies with distributed operations, consultants and vendors pitching their wares, or cross-enterprise collaboration. I have two conference calls a week with my teammates in the Georgia WebMBA program (we're more than halfway done now, woo hoo!), and without those, we'd fly off the handle in a hurry.

We know the benefits of virtual meetings, especially the speed and low cost of putting groups together. But days like today leave me wondering how much time we waste fiddling with what should be commonplace technologies by now, and dealing with people who never learned good practices or etiquette for using them. Those are the hidden costs of virtual meetings, and I sense they're greater than most of us ever ponder.

What do you think? What's the over/under on virtual meetings in your shop?

Not all Ajax goodness is good

Jay Small — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 19:51:20 +0000

Bloglines, long my RSS reader of choice, should either just adopt its long-running "new" beta service as its main production service, or fix up the "old" service it still offers as its default.

The default Bloglines service seems increasingly buggy. Case in point: When trying to move feeds around among my folders today, I got thrown into some kind of error loop involving the Ajax implementation. This kind of thing happens way too often.

The error dialog, as you can see, hardly helps. (If you're browsing this site without graphics, here's the text of the dialog: "error loading data for tree: undefined => XMLHttpTransport Error 0.") Click "OK" and it just comes back, over and over again. Finally I abandoned the effort and closed the browser. My folder changes did not stick.

Unfortunately, I have to be careful what I wish for. Though I imagine most or all of Bloglines' programming energy goes into buttoning down the beta software, honestly, I've tried that new interface and just don't like it as well. It seems harder, with more steps, to mark items as read. The colors may be more attractive, but I find the text a bit harder to read.

So if Bloglines does turn the beta into its default service, I'm hosed. If it doesn't, I'm hosed trying to use the buggy old one.

As a contrast, I give props to Yahoo! for one clever redesign trick, as seen in its Mail and My Yahoo! services: keep the old version available (and maintained!) as a "classic" mode for people who have whatever quirky reasons for just liking it better. Perhaps that's all the Bloglines folks are doing, except in reverse: keep the new version as a "permanent beta" (Gmail, anyone?) and the old version as a default.

Sherlock's probably shopping for a hybrid

Jay Small — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 19:25:35 +0000

One does not need to be the world's greatest detective, or even follow routine commodities stories online, to deduce what's happening to oil prices at a given time.

In my case, all I need to see is the swarm of red text in the airline stock tracker I have in My Yahoo!

And yeah, you guessed it -- oil shot back up above $112 a barrel at the time of the adjacent screen grab and this writing.

Coverage doesn't equal insight

Jay Small — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 00:44:10 +0000

Juan Antonio Giner calls this "commodity non-journalism": newspaper front page after front page, all carrying the same photo and strikingly similar, unfulfilling headlines trying to cover the scary crises in high finance.

I agree. Few in American journalism take on the challenge of explaining a story this severe and complex in terms that would be truly useful to everyday people that don't happen to be economists.

Exceptions? Yeah. One or two. But none are evident in Juan Antonio's gallery of so-so-ness.