newspapers

Technical excellence via hand work

Jay Small — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 23:14:26 +0000

A Slashdot post points to an online discussion with Khoi Vinh, design guru at NYTimes.com, in which Vinh is asked how the team there maintains visual consistency. His answer, in part:

"It's our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or
TextMate, to 'hand code' everything, rather than to use a WYSIWYG (what
you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like
Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results."

Like I keep saying, people ... like I keep saying.

Another good use for mute button

Jay Small — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 13:43:33 +0000

If video killed the radio star, I may soon have to claim responsibility for killing Internet radio.

At 2 p.m. Monday, Mel Taylor, webcasting from the Newspaper Association of America Marketing Conference and Connections in Orlando, will interview me about the conference, the world of newspaper-based interactive media and who-knows-what-else.

I'm just one of a dozen or so people Taylor will interview over two days on BlogTalkRadio.com. Any one of the rest will likely provide more astute commentary than I.

If, however, someone throws me a guitar from off-set, Elvis-movie-style, I might just break into a tune. Ahhhwwwww, mama! (karate move)

Hiring at Scripps Interactive Newspapers

Jay Small — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 13:08:10 +0000

Recession? What recession?

OK, let me snap out of my Pollyanna moment there. Times are extraordinarily tough in the newspaper industry, but we at Scripps still believe we have much to gain from growing investment in Internet services and products. As such, we're hiring in the Interactive Newspapers Group.

Please follow the instructions for applying to any of the following jobs, which is another way of saying please don't contact me directly. I'll just slow things down for you and the hiring managers.

Product Manager, automotive and classified specialties.
Project Manager, emphasis on rapid development.
Project Manager, emphasis on innovation projects.
System Administrator, emphasis on LAMP/open source/Python/Django.
Database Administrator, emphasis on PostgreSQL/MySQL in LAMP environments.
Business Intelligence Analyst, emphasis on Omniture, ComScore, HitWise.

(I realize these jobs all say Scripps Networks, but to be clear, they are in Scripps Interactive Newspapers Group. For now, we work with Networks' Human Resources department so our jobs sometimes get filed with theirs.)

Scripps papers now (almost) all Ellington, all the time

Jay Small — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 14:01:12 +0000

This is a milestone day. As of 1:30 a.m. Eastern time this morning, Scripps Newspapers Interactive Group and our many local sites completed the main phase of their 18-month content management system rollout.

All of these newspaper sites and affiliated niche products now run in Scripps' version of Ellington, the content system built atop the Django framework and Python programming language. In no particular order:

Albuquerque Tribune
Boulder Daily Camera
San Angelo Standard-Times
Redding Record-Searchlight
Rocky Mountain News
Evansville Courier Press (Our first conversion, June 2006.)
Knoxville News Sentinel
Memphis Commercial Appeal
Abilene Reporter-News
Wichita Falls Times Record News
Naples Daily News (Our latest conversion, just this morning. Naples had already been in a version of Ellington, but the overnight move put the Florida sites in the Scripps-managed version.)
Scripps Treasure Coast newspapers
Corpus Christi Caller-Times
Ventura County Star
Kitsap Sun
Blount Today
Anderson Independent-Mail

The project included much more than a systems conversion, though that alone represents a very heavy and difficult workload. All these sites took on new designs and new features, such as a video player/playlist platform, in the process.

Mind you, we still have some local niche sites and other projects to move into the new CMS in the coming year. But this list includes every site we set out to move in the main project, and a couple that we added along the way.

It took a cast of hundreds, on site in local markets and within the corporate team, to get this done. The teams' work, as manifested in these sites, speaks for itself. Mine was a bit part, and that allows me to be extremely proud of the fine creative and development work of the whole organization. Thanks, gang!

About the changes at Small Initiatives

Jay Small — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 20:06:36 +0000

The new design of this Web site means a lot more than just a visual dust-off. Small Initiatives, the company, no longer represents just me, my blog and my occasional Internet design consulting.

My wife, Ka, has reached a point in her executive career where she has amazing advice to offer her industry -- banks and credit unions -- as a business strategy consultant.
So SI becomes a consulting firm with two primary practices. Hers covers growth strategies, marketing and operations for financial institutions. Mine covers Internet user experience, including my longstanding design efforts, but adding site architecture and development projects atop the Drupal open-source content framework.

Ka's brand-new blog joins mine, which has posts dating to 2002. Her first post dispels some popular talking points in banking, refactoring a focus on "differentiation" to a focus on "relevance" -- both of and to customers. I think it's a useful read even for my regular non-banker crowd.

So that's why things look different here, and why the attention now splits between Ka's banking practice and my user experience efforts. If you really want to know the gory details, I've tried to provide them in this handy Q&A format:

Are you both consulting full-time? No. I still have my "day job" as general manager of the Newspapers Interactive Group at the E.W. Scripps Co. Meanwhile, Ka's still a banking professional, taking on consulting projects as she evaluates choices for her next great executive opportunity.
What does banking have to do with Internet user experience? Sometimes, nothing. Sometimes, everything -- such as the time I redesigned a credit union Web site. Our practices may overlap more than you'd imagine in the areas of interactive business strategy and overall customer experience.
You changed a lot about the way the SI site works. Why? As part of opening up my consulting efforts to include site development using Drupal, I thought it best to run this site in Drupal as a living proof of concept. That's nothing against WordPress, the excellent blogging software I used before, only an attempt to put my money where my mouth is.
What else are you changing? We're in the process of incorporating Small Initiatives. We also changed hosting providers as part of the relaunch of this site -- we're now happy SliceHost customers. And I replaced my old blogroll with the Drupal news aggregator, so you can see nearly live headlines from blogs and sites related to our two consulting practices.
How can I make my [site|blog|comments|tags|feeds] work more like yours? Sign me to a contract and I'll show you.
Are those rotating home page posters done in Flash? No, they're done as regular JPEG images that a Drupal module, Views Slideshow, rotates using a JavaScript library.
I'm an RSS subscriber to SI. Where can I find a list of all your available feeds? Use the site map. I'm also trying to make sure my old FeedBurner feed addresses work with minimal upheaval. Trying, I said.
I'm trying to find [insert name of old article here]. You moved stuff around. Where do I look? All the blog posts and most of the non-blog content from the old site should be here, though the directory paths are altered slightly. If you remember the headline or even a keyword or two, try entering them in the search box.
Don't you know changing directory paths will mess up your search engine rankings? Yes, but I had to do it sooner or later, and I'm taking steps advised in Google and Yahoo! Webmaster instructions to mitigate the effects. It shouldn't take long for the path changes to be reflected in search engines' caches of this site. I hope.
SI now has two newsletters. What's the deal? Ka and I wanted to develop separate e-mailing lists for our occasional alerts and longer-form newsletter essays. I had a list before, but it has been months since I sent out a letter to those subscribers. So I thought it best to let people choose subscriptions anew. You may subscribe to either newsletter with just an e-mail address, and unsubscribe anytime.
How do you say "Ka"? Just like you'd say "Kay," as in Diane Keaton's character in The Godfather. It's short for Karen. Around the house we all call her Katie. And yes, people do chuckle and ask, "Where's L?" when we introduce ourselves as "Jay and Ka."
You didn't kill Sid, did you? No. He wouldn't like that. You'll find Sid's sayings on the right side of all my blog pages.

What we think we know about interactive design

Jay Small — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 21:08:47 +0000

This article by Jay Small was originally published in 1997 in MediaInfo.com, an online-focused magazine by Editor and Publisher. Obviously, much has changed since then, and the author's updates and annotations are included in italics.

Youll hear it at least once from almost every Web site manager you meet:

Sometimes I feel like I know nothing about this medium. I cant keep up with all the changes.

Thats what we say, but we often design Web documents with bold assumptions that defy our spoken sheepishness. Look at the track record of the newspaper industry in online design:

The Wire, from The Associated Press, throws animated graphics, Java, JavaScript and a three-frame design at Web visitors in the very first screen. By modem, the page often takes two minutes or more to load fully. In fact, the AP has announced a pending redesign for the page, partly to address these problems. [The AP redesigned The Wire at least twice since this article was first written, then finally replaced it with CustomWire, which allows news sites to provide more of their own look and feel -- JS]
The Internet site of the Chicago Tribune (among others) uses Shockwave-enhanced information graphics, which require users to find and install a browser plug-in lest they see a hole where the moving pictures should be. [Again, the cited site has been redesigned more than once since the original writing -- though the Trib's site is one of many to use information graphics animated with Flash, which has inherited much of the hype from Shockwave -- JS]
Star/News Online of Indianapolis (a familiar site to this writer) offers display classified ads in Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format -- which, again, requires users to find and install a plug-in. [I was manager of that site at that time, and proud of the fact we could even offer display classified ads in ANY format. The PDFs are no longer on the successor site, IndyStar.com, though they lasted almost five years -- JS]
Even tiny newspaper sites run JavaScript clocks, animated banner ads and multiple HTML frame sets. And just about every Web site, newspaper-based or not, has at least a few pages that appear to be built for only one browser brand on only one operating system.

Do we know what were doing to our Web visitors? Its often doubtful. But we do these things based on assumptions: what we think we know about interactive design. Whether valid or not, all of our assumptions come with risks that should be measured. Thats the objective here. The statements that follow are culled from (a) at least one expert who said so in a seminar, (b) books on Web design, or (c) casual conversations with people who should know.

"Web visitors prefer clicking to scrolling"

When you see sites front-loaded with 40 graphic links and 10 news headlines, all visible without scrolling, its a safe bet the site manager either said this or believes it. And this statement is validated in usability studies on graphical user interfaces.

But its a user preference, not an either-or decision. Web visitors scroll when the content is interesting to them. They might not click at all if that front-loaded page is too busy or fails to explain whats behind those 40 links.

Still, its possible to build on this assumption as we present information.

Non-linear storytelling is a buzz phrase in new media circles these days. Put simply, its presenting a story in component parts (text, images, sounds or moving images), cross-linked so visitors can drill in from any angle at any level of detail.

Because the information is distributed, components in non-linear storytelling tend to be more concise than in a linear presentation. That means less scrolling and more clicking to move among elements.
It also means more production work for the online staff. Its especially labor intensive to collect materials prepared in linear format for print editions, then break them up and repackage them intelligently. Further, few newspaper companies have an online-only reporting staff to supplement newsroom coverage exclusively for the Web.

Where staff is limited, one approach might be to concede that print-edition content will run as-is on the Web site. That move saves staff time for exclusive online content, which can be planned and prepared in non-linear format. Sites that use shovelware (computer gear that automates publishing of newspaper content to the Web) are already suited to this approach. The newspaper articles and visuals become the underpinnings for Web-specific content. [All still true today, mostly -- JS]

Navigation links work better on the right side, near the scroll bar

This assertion is logical on the surface. The idea is that keeping clickable elements close to the scroll bar will reduce pointer movement and mouse activity for users.

Web sites and Usenet newsgroups on the subject of graphical user interfaces even report evidence of higher clickthroughs on the right side.

Swell. But its hard to do this right. HTML 3.2, the current flavor, relies on left-to-right, top-to-bottom geometry. Its easy to build a background image that puts a stripe of color behind a left-side navigation table. It's much harder to do it on the right side; impossible, even, to keep the links flush to that scroll bar without using frames. [No longer true -- JS]

Do we even gain much by trying? Pointer movement is much less an issue for users of trackpads or pills than for users of traditional mice. The Microsoft Intellimouse and comparable products permit scrolling from any pointer position on the screen. Gradually, navigation positions near the scroll bar may lose their benefit. [Indeed, though Eyetrack research also hinted right-side navs may help, Internet conventional wisdom pretty much shoots down this idea -- sites almost globally favor navigation on the top and/or left these days -- JS]

Still, there are ways to do this. Want right-side navigation with a vertical color stripe? Use an HTML table. Put a content cell or cells on the left side, and apply a background color to a vertical cell with navigation links on the right side. Center the table in the document; otherwise, that list of links that looks nice on the right side of a 640x480 display will appear in the middle of a larger window.

HTML frames are another option, though poorly designed frame sets can slurp up precious bandwidth and even cause browsers to crash. Handle with care. New flavors of HTML permit layering: precise placement of elements on a document, and even on top of each other. Layering has great potential to solve navigation problems, if only Microsoft and Netscape can agree on a standard method. A few sites offer Java and/or JavaScript navigation tools often drawn in separate browser windows so theyll stick around on users screens as they click from page to page. Again, handle with care: Java can be slow to load, poorly implemented Java or JavaScript can cause crashes, and neither approaches 100 percent compatibility with Web users. [Some things never change -- JS]

"The browser window is too wide for easy reading of text"

This assumption, adapted from the print design world, emerges from numerous studies of reading habits and typography. For that matter, its simply intuitive to anyone who has tried to read long blocks of text running all the way across a computer screen. Its hard. It strains your eyes.

Newspaper designers know the conventional wisdom that 9-point news text looks best in the 14- to 16-pica-wide range. Book designers, often working with type in the 12-point range, often use wider columns successfully.

Meanwhile, Web designers shoot at a moving target. Computer screens are significantly harder to read than printed text. And, though most site visitors mercifully leave their browsers set to factory defaults for text display, those defaults are far from standard. Sure, Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer both default to Times 12-point, but the type looks much larger (relative to graphic objects) on PCs than Macs.

Even if a designer settles on an ideal width, theres the matter of achieving it consistently. Plenty of newspaper- and magazine-based sites rely on HTML tables to pull text in from the left and right edges of browser windows. But tables have a quirk: browsers must draw out the entire table geometry before beginning to display its contents. Users stare at a blank table, often for several seconds, before text appears. The longer the run of text or the more complicated the table, the longer users wait.

Want to see this quirk in action? Go to Newsworks, the New Century Network megasite, using a modem. NCN has recently streamlined the design of this page, but youll still wait about a minute for anything but the top-of-page Newsworks logo to appear on this page. Its not necessarily sloppy work on NCNs part, its just the way tables work. [NCN and the Newsworks site are long gone -- JS]

The New York Times site, among others, eschews tables around stories in favor of the HTML block quote tag. [Not true anymore -- JS] Each application of this tag moves text in about one inch from the window margins. Its not as precise as a table, since users control the width of the window but the block quote tag is compatible with just about every browser and uses slightly less bandwidth.

No matter how you get them, narrower columns mean longer text. That means more screens to scroll through so this assumption butts heads with the idea that visitors prefer clicking to scrolling.
The best tactic for readability is brevity. But if a long run of text is required, consider using subheads tagged with internal document links. Visitors can then click from section to section of a long article.

"Visitors respond to things that move or make noise"

Part of the fun of Web design is the ability to appeal to the senses. Animated visuals are everywhere, especially in ads. We can send out audio and video feeds in real time, or shock information graphics to tell stories with interactive layers of moving content.

This is the stuff that makes sites cool, right? Well, yes, but its also the stuff that cuts into audience size. By conservative estimates, at least 20 percent of Web users dont have the right computers, browsers or plug-ins to work with all the common multimedia formats. [Some things DO change. The install base for Flash, PDF and streaming-media plug-ins is now well over 90 percent apiece, though version variations are wide -- JS]

With rare exception, you cant see streaming video or hear streaming audio without a plug-in. You cant play with Shockwave or Flash graphics without plug-ins. Animating a GIF image adds to its download time.

Worse, many sites using even one or two of these formats fail on a fundamental level: they dont explain to visitors how to get, install or configure the required plug-ins. Sure, you could link to the manufacturers site. But even assuming that sites documentation is adequate for general use, it is little help to visitors who want to make your multimedia files work.

Sites with high multimedia overhead, such as those that promote new movie releases, often offer visitors multiple entry paths. Got the gear? Take the bells-and-whistles path. Missing the plug-ins? Take the low-graphics path. Its a polite concession to the have-nots of the Web community, if you have production time to manage multiple paths. [Alternative views are still a great idea, and can be partly executed just through CSS -- JS]

If you really want people to see your dancing grasshoppers, tell them exactly how to get and use the plug-ins. If the manufacturer will permit it, offer the plug-ins for downloading from your site, with customized documentation and navigation suited to your audience.

"Visitors want to interact with each other and with us"

If you consider what Web visitors go through just to get online, its no wonder they expect a richer experience than simply reading text on a screen.

Fortunately, software to deliver interactive features on Web sites is commonplace. Products from Microsoft FrontPage at the low end to Web Crossing at the high end permit creation of message-board style forums. EarthWeb and I-Chat offer Java-based real-time chat within Web browser windows.

Yet, as much as users want interactivity, it isnt always easy for them. As you travel the Web, you begin to notice how each site has its own way of presenting message boards and chat. Each has its rules and modes of operation. There are no standards.

Veterans of Internet Relay Chat know how overwhelming its command lines and thousands of channels can be. IRC servers can lag maddeningly as they try to communicate with each other. A given user can upload a chat message that other users wont see for several minutes hardly equivalent to real-life chat.

Most disturbing is the lack of control publishers have over these forums. We facilitate discussions, then back off and watch them happen. Forum designers have to make room for long legal disclaimers and cumbersome pages of instructions. [Hoo, boy, if only I had seen the blogosphere and Facebook coming in those days! -- JS]

Here's where Web managers can take a cue from America Online. AOL operates perhaps the easiest-to-learn, easiest-to-use message boards and chat rooms. It's worth emulating that simplicity of design, if only because many of our Web visitors either started with or still use AOL for online access. AOL also is masterful in its use of scheduled chat events with celebrities and newsmakers.

Now what?

Though purists shudder, HTML is evolving from a document formatting language into a design language. Market pressures force the issue. Too many Web publishers, from advertising agencies to corporate information directors to media outlets, are frustrated with the limitations of the language and the lack of standards.

Trouble is, HTML is evolving willy-nilly. Microsoft and Netscape, the two biggest browser manufacturers, are headed in different directions as they implement more precise typographical and layout controls. So itll be easier in the future to design Web pages with the precision of print, but harder to make those pages look the same to all your visitors. That is, unless the two browser giants can agree and thats the riskiest assumption of all. [Now there's one browser giant with two very different versions, a rising but still small open-source alternative, and some also-rans. But standards compliance is improving across the board -- JS]

Economics 101 of Internet news

Jay Small — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 20:58:42 +0000

This article by Jay Small originally appeared in the Winter 2000 edition (3.6 mb PDF) of the Nieman Reports from Harvard University.

Sssss ... bzzfft ... whine ... screech ... "Eighty-nine, WLS, Chicago."

Ahh, I'm dialed in.

In the mid-1970's, even in a hazy coal town in deep southern Illinois, any youngster with a decent AM radio could pick up distant stations such as WLS. It was fun to listen to John "Records" Landecker and others spinning Top 40 music from the city. Between the likes of Wings and The Steve Miller Band, WLS sometimes played a certain memorable commercial.

In it, to the tune of Olivia Newton-John's saccharine hit, "Let Me Be There," a chorus extolled the virtues of "the new 24-hour-a-day Chicago Tribune." Did they say 24-hour-a-day? The idea that there could be enough journalists - enough news - in one place to write, edit, print and sell newspaper editions throughout the day was tough to grasp.

Mind you, at that time the Chicago Daily News was dying, and the remaining papers in the city postured to fill the void. But I grew up watching my dad and his dad put out a Monday-through-Saturday newspaper, The Daily Register, in Harrisburg, Ill. It was only one edition per afternoon and it almost never exceeded 20 pages or 6,000 circulation.

So this small-town boy was dazzled by the big-town ways: all-night radio you could pick up from 300 miles away and all-day newspapers fresh off the press.

Today, no one is amazed by AM radio, especially not its endless banter. And no one is amazed that news and information are available from myriad sources day and night, though the "24-hour-a-day Chicago Tribune" and other all-day papers of that era have pulled back somewhat from their ambitious print cycles. But 24-hour news isn't just the domain of broadcast networks such as CNN, either. News-oriented World Wide Web sites number in the thousands, operated by legacy print and broadcast media companies, and more than a few Web-only upstarts. Anyone using a computer with Web capability can go to the site of that little newspaper in southern Illinois as readily as the site of the mammoth Tribune.

Even as we contemplate the sheer volume of Web news content, engineers are developing methods to clear the next hurdles, permitting faster delivery to people at home, in the office or on the go: faster wireless networks, advanced home networks, and low-cost, portable devices that draw on both for communications, entertainment and information.

Consider the nature of news reports and the effects on newsrooms and business managers once cellular phones, touch-screen "tablets" and the like can send and receive data over the airwaves -- from just about anywhere -- much faster than the analog modem you probably have on your home computer. (Assigning editors: Do you have enough reporters to promise your news content is always up-to-date?)

Further, imagine using "intelligent agent" technology to behave like personal valets: beeping, flashing, vibrating or otherwise getting a user's attention when a fresh copy of a favorite magazine or a news item of likely interest comes in over the air. This isn't like the Web, where you must go out and pull down the information you want. It comes to you, when you want it, in a format you choose. (Copy desk chiefs: How do you edit for an intelligent agent?)

Further still, those devices may be components of a larger home or office "sphere" of interconnected electronics, synchronizing data with each other and with servers on the Internet at large. (Designers: Can you break that richly illustrated features cover into data components for a multi-platform user interface?)

This explosion of access and distribution points has its risks.

In elementary economic terms, when the supply of any good or service greatly exceeds the demand, the market value of that good or service falls. With today's Web, we have greatly expanded the supply of news and related information. But--and this is the question journalists should ponder most intensely--have we adequately nurtured the demand?

The evidence, again in economic terms, suggests we have not:

Consumers, with a healthy assist from content providers, have pushed the hard-money value of news content on the Web to near zero. A few newspaper-run sites tried paid subscriptions in 1995 and 1996, but almost all converted to free sites, ostensibly to boost their dismal traffic enough to justify higher prices for advertising. The Wall Street Journal still makes users subscribe to its Web site, but few other newspapers charge for access to the articles they post. (News archives don't count -- it's one of those strange Web phenomena that people seem willing to pay a small sum for old news but nothing for current news.)
The Web economy, meanwhile, has also driven the hard-money value of Web advertising to near zero. It's too much supply (a half-trillion Web pages, most with available ad space) and too little demand (the Web is not effective at delivering commercial messages serendipitously; just ask yourself when you last clicked on a banner ad).

Compare the Web model to the traditional ways newspapers make the cash registers ring. It's expensive to print and deliver each page of quality content in high fidelity to household doorsteps. People know this, but they want one or more parts of the end product enough to pay a portion of that cost. Ad space on such delivered pages is a limited, desirable resource. Advertisers know this, so they more than cover the rest of the cost of making and delivering the end product.

The cost to generate quality content stays pretty much the same even if the distribution method changes. Besides that cost, however, it is much less expensive to make one page of content available on a Web server than to deliver it in print. And once a server is set up to house the first page, it costs almost nothing extra to post the next thousand, or million, pages.

The Web represents mass aggregation and availability of content, like a library, not mass distribution, like a newspaper. Web "demand" consists of people hunting for individual bits of information from a diverse collective using inadequate, even maddening tools. That's not the same as Jane down the street ordering specific compilations of content for periodic delivery to her home.

Web readers feel they've paid enough just to get on the Web, then worked too hard just to find the stuff they want to read. They view ad messages as barely tolerable and hardly compelling. So ad space on Web pages is an almost unlimited, but much less desirable resource. Advertisers know this, so most Web ad inventory is unsold and the rest goes for fire-sale prices.

Good journalism -- the sum of skilled newsgathering, writing, editing, presentation and general management--is an expensive series of steps taken to produce quality content. The Web economy just can't afford it. Thus, without subsidies of capital and content from the core organization, you'd be hard-pressed to find any so-called "online newspaper" that could survive financially on its own. Indeed, media groups have started trimming back their largely Web-focused interactive divisions. The Tribune Company reduced staff count in its Tribune Interactive division as part of absorbing Times Mirror. Other entities are quietly turning their attention from experiments with Web-specific news content toward online activities with a clearer return on investment--such as Web/print advertising bundles.

And all this would be depressing if the World Wide Web were the end game for getting journalists' work into consumers' hands. It isn't.

In the mid-1990's, we all glommed onto the Web because it was the easiest way yet to combine the depth and breadth of print journalism with the instantaneous availability of broadcast. We loved to experiment with hyperlinked nuggets of text, audio and video clips, and rapid redesigns of our directory pages. Writers enjoyed unlimited space and the absence of finite deadlines. Finally, a TV station had a medium where it could act like a newspaper, and a newspaper had a medium where it could act like a TV station. What fun! We just forgot to ask if that's what our bread-and-butter constituents -- consumers and advertisers-needed us to do.

Luckily, the Web is just a first taste of what the larger Internet might yield as a future platform for journalism. Think ahead to that world of widely available network access to deep, rich media content that can be picked up through a variety of devices, places and uses. Think about a device that looks and feels like a book -- maybe it's "War and Peace" -- but with a swipe of a smart card, the text on its pages becomes articles from the Sunday New York Times. Think about pulling your minivan into a gas station and having the latest movies or TV programs instantly downloaded into a player the kids can use in the back seat. Think about being able to read, hear or see digital media (books, music, video) from your home collection while 1,000 miles from home.

Sure, newsrooms will need to adapt. Tweak all you want. Experiment with nonlinear storytelling, or three-shift-a-day news teams. But remember the fundamentals. Journalism largely as we know it today--without core changes to newsgathering techniques, writing style, news judgment or story priorities--has a place in that world. So does advertising. It's reasonable to assume that the two can continue to live closely together to mutual benefit in the next generation of digital devices.

This time around, I'd humbly suggest that friends in my old world of journalism take a cue from friends in my new world of consumer electronics: Let the methods of delivering the news flow from the business model, not the other way around.

Real R&D: An answer for the newspaper business

Jay Small — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 20:57:08 +0000

This article by Jay Small was originally published in 2001 in the Future of Print Media Journal at Kent State University.

Technology fans are easier targets for sarcasm than technology skeptics. Think about it. A technofan's boundless enthusiasm for the latest and greatest gizmos, games and gewgaws begins to resemble a happy addiction. A technoskeptic, confident in mainstream appliances and leery of new inventions by nature, comes to a discussion well armed with a hundred logical reasons not to try the Next Great Thing. Plus, a technoskeptic probably has a much more useful arsenal of insults - they're part of any skeptic's job description.

As a long-time journalist who now works for a consumer electronics conglomerate, I represent both camps: sometimes forward-looking gizmophile, other times quipping naysayer. I balance a greedy love of subwoofers, streaming media, plasma displays, digital signal processors and all sorts of flashing, buzzing toys with a simple desire to go home at night and spud out in front of some ball game on my plain old TV. I read personalized, instant e-newsletters on a computer screen while at work, but happily thumb through an old-fashioned printed newspaper at home. I have a digital satellite system with access to 200-some channels, but when it's on, more than half the time it's tuned to the same news channel.

I sometimes buy electronics for features I think are cool but will never use. That's the technofan. But I sometimes satisfy myself with old technology long after better alternatives are available, to save money. That's the technoskeptic.

Many people in the computer and electronics industries wish all consumers were technofans because they're the ones who buy cutting edge products with the highest profit margins. The risk is that technofans' enthusiasm fuels development and production of many proclaimed Next Great Things, which the technoskeptics, along strict party lines, will refuse to rush out to buy. Therefore, manufacturers resort to escalating hyperbole, which feeds technofans' happy addictions while providing inventory for the technoskeptics' insult warehouses.

Case-in-point: Microsoft, working with a couple of major electronics manufacturers, is launching a product called Ultimate TV. It combines Internet features like e-mail with a hard-disk-based video recorder, all in a set-top box. In effect, WebTV meets TiVo.

It's the Next Great Thing for technofans. For technoskeptics, this development raises four questions:

How many set-top boxes does it take to give consumers every feature they could possibly want on or anywhere near their TVs?
Why do they call them set-top boxes when almost no current TV cabinet is designed with enough flat space to put a box on top?
If this product is, as its name suggests, Ultimate TV, what are we supposed to think when the inevitable Ultimate TV 2.0 (or Ultimate TV Plus, or Ultimate Ultimate TV, or Ultimate TV: We Really Mean It This Time) comes out?
Will that release, in fact, force us to rename the first version (wire editors, please note) Penultimate TV?

The preceding rant came from my technoskeptic persona, or possibly from my spleen. We've sent a sample to the lab for analysis. Meanwhile, while trying to find roadmaps to the Next Great Thing for the newspaper business, I recently read an article written by flagrant technofan Alice Hill for ZDNet News, a Web-based technology magazine.

In it, Hill laments a lack of innovation in home electronics. She says we're under-teched. Cordless phones, she discovers, have more or less the same features they had 10 years ago.

"Where's the color LCD interface, the option to receive faxes and e-mail?" she asks. "Was caller ID integration the height of improvement? And what about the fact that we still have those ugly antennas?"

The ubiquitous television, Hill continues, is also a stagnant platform.

"Blinding technical achievements: When I mute the sound, it goes into closed captioning automatically," she writes. "I can also plug in my camcorder from a front panel instead of hunting around the mess of connectors in the back.

"My screen is flatter and I am also theoretically digital-ready. This took decades, and the rest is still pure 1970s."

Medically, this sounds like a case of technofan withdrawal. Hill looks around her house at objects that do what she bought them to do and says that's not good enough. The technoskeptic, on the other hand, appreciates something Hill forgets: the fact that those devices perform their intended functions better than older models at a lower cost.

So computer and electronics companies can't just think about the technofan - they apply their engineering resources to address late adopters, as well.

Research and development engineers connect emerging technologies to theoretically profitable consumer applications, competing with other companies' engineers to create whole new categories of electronics. These engineers are the auteurs of digital satellite systems, high-definition television, multimedia computers, DVDs and rich-media gaming consoles - all still comparatively new product lines, with their high ends pointed directly at technofans.

The Other Kind of Engineering

But another kind of engineering - cost engineering - comes into play as a product line matures. Cost engineers simply squeeze the same sets of capabilities out of less expensive components and assemblies. Cost engineering can be every bit as innovative as R&D engineering, but its results show differently. It's the reason high-fidelity VCRs now sell for $69 instead of $1,999. Clearly, cost engineering is aimed at the technoskeptic.

Newspaper publishers, whether they know it or not, regularly practice cost engineering. Every newsprint conservation project, pagination system, recycling program and carrier route remap fits this category. Its an effort to reduce (or steady) the cost of putting out products without reducing quality, but not to create a substantially new product or feature. And there's nothing wrong with cost engineering on a mature product.

So, yes, cordless phones are still just cordless phones. Except that you can get a clear-sounding, long-range phone today for less money than a bulkier, harder to hear, battery-sucking model 10 years ago. That's great news for the technoskeptic, apparently not enough for the technofan.

How should we suppose these two personality types would view a typical daily newspaper? Much the same, I'd guess.

Technofans probably pay little heed to a printed edition, except perhaps as a portable, analog diversion in an otherwise digital world. They would seem more likely to use a newspaper's Web site and expect the publisher to provide content and features well beyond the print product. Remember that a technofan wants a cordless phone that also faxes, plays video and makes mounds of julienne fries. Why not a digital newspaper that also tracks the technofans bank account and MP3 music collection?

Technoskeptics, it seems, would be satisfied with the print edition as long as (a) the carrier hits the porch every day, and (b) those @$%^#!! editors dont pull Crankshaft off the comics page again. They may have a PC and even use the Internet but spend the lion's share of online time in e-mail or other communications functions, not on the Web.

If you're a newspaper publisher, which audience do you want? Both, I presume.

Your marketers probably prefer the buying habits and demographics of technofans overall - and any newspaper probably has more room for market growth with them than with technoskeptics. But I think it's just easier for newspaper folk to relate to technoskeptics (journalists' classroom-honed skepticism is legendary, making them kindred souls). Thus it is easier to develop content and services tuned to their interests.

A Comfortable Kinship With Technoskeptics

Unfortunately, I think we fell back into this comfortable skeptic kinship when we first approached the Internet and digital media. Think back five or six years, to the time when the newspaper industry ramped up its collective efforts to seize the potential of these emerging technologies. Those of us who were new media managers in those early days love to talk about our freewheeling experimentation with Web sites. Looking back, I think the only reason it was remotely free-wheeling was that the corporate brass (a) spent only a blip of their operating funds on our skunkworks, (b) didn't have Internet-ready computers and therefore (c) never saw what we were doing.

And our experimentation was nothing like the R&D engineering youll find in the electronics biz. Compare how the two industries approached key developments in new media (stereotype disclaimer: yes, I realize a few newspaper online efforts are exceptions to the following general statements, but all too rare):

The Web: It looked a little bit like a newspaper, so the newspaper industry built or bought systems that put articles and pictures on it so it would look even more like a newspaper. But to the electronics gang, it didnt look much like anything they had dealt with before - so they designed entire new platforms (WebTV, Web phones and Internet appliances) to bring it out of the PC and into the living room.

E-mail and chat: Newspapers bolted chat channels and message boards onto their Web sites, trying to keep them loosely tied to news topics, but wrung their hands over the sometimes crude nature of unmoderated communications. Some finally have learned the distribution power of permission e-mail. The electronics gang brought e-mail into mobile phones, chat into pagers and myriad synchronized Internet applications into personal digital assistants.

Streaming media: Newspapers tinkered with sound bites on their Web sites. A few even worked out deals with local TV stations to share video clips. The electronics biz, meanwhile, is still heads-down figuring out the transition that will make these digital media formats readily available in audio shelf systems, portable players and mainstream televisions. Already you can buy a dedicated Internet radio that can pick up 4,000 stations and customize your music choices. Soon we'll see satellite radio receivers with commercial-free music in our cars.

You get the idea. The electronics gang saw the Internet as fertile ground for R&D engineering on entirely new products and applications. Our industry kicked into cost engineering before it had ever done the real R&D. Now newspapers are pained by meager Internet ad numbers, the near disappearance of paid content online and new cost pressures in the core print business. So the real cost engineering begins: new media staff cutbacks, Web site retrenchment and attempts to automate content producers' handiwork.

We missed the R&D step where we were supposed to connect emerging technologies to theoretically profitable consumer applications. Oh, we spotted the emerging technologies; just like everyone else it was hard to miss the Internet bus. We just failed to define appropriate consumer applications before starting our freewheeling experiments with news content.

So we learned, the hard way, that consumers don't see our Web sites as one-to-one replacements for the printed newspaper. They don't like having to log on, find our sites and then poke around through nonstandard user interfaces to find articles of interest. Though they hate the way advertising is presented on the Web, they miss the advertising they could get in the print product. And they feel they've paid enough just for Internet access, so by God, theyre not going to pay again to read one newspaper there.

Its a good thing for newspapers, then, that the rest of the world economy is learning the same painful lessons about the Web. Its a fine library, but not a very good entertainment medium. Interactive digital media have to get much better before they can grow out of the adolescent novelty of the Web.

Thus, the electronics business is cranking hard to build new, Internet-connected, consumer-friendly media devices. I believe some of these devices will make fine homes for newspaper-style content, among other things.

What's the Next Great Thing? I don't think there's only one. A steady stream of Next Great Things will keep technofans happy, and a few will even suit technoskeptics if they meet basic needs.

After 5, 10, 15 or more years of these Next Great Things, maybe not so many people will still need those drab cordless phones. But they will still need phones in some form. Though I cant speak for Crankshaft specifically, it follows to assume they'll still need most of what makes up a newspaper in some form.

Its up to the industry to do the R&D - the real R&D - to find that form and the business model that supports it.

Fewer analysts over shoulder: not so bad

Jay Small — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 21:03:26 +0000

Editor & Publisher channels a New York Times report: Morgan Stanley Reported to Drop Coverage of Newspapers.

On the one hand, the newspaper industry through Wall Street glasses must look like an airport baggage carousel an hour after the last flight: conveyor off, only a few unworthy bags gathering dust, no uniformed agents nearby to lock up the valuables.

But I look at this another way, since I still work inside one of the "bags": the fewer big-investment-house analysts looking over our shoulders, picking apart or misinterpreting our every move, the better.

Things happen fast around here

Jay Small — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 13:53:08 +0000

I've had a few weeks to enjoy my promotion to general manager of Scripps Newspapers Interactive Group -- something I didn't make a big deal about in this space because, well, it's not all that relevant to this space. But it's a big deal for me, and was just starting to sink in.

So I guess it's time for another big change. This morning we got word that the E.W. Scripps Co. plans to split into two publicly held companies.

Scripps Networks Interactive will include Scripps Networks (HGTV, Food Network et al), the networks' interactive services, and the Shopzilla and USwitch businesses.

The E.W. Scripps Co. will include newspapers, local TV stations and United Media, our syndication arm -- and all the related interactive services.

What's old is new again. Some of you might know this is my second tour of duty with Scripps -- the first being in the newsroom of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, late 1980s and early 1990s. In those days, the Scripps I just described was all there was (except the interactive services didn't exist, of course).

Shortly after I left, that apparently old-line company figured out how to grow, organically, a cable network that mushroomed into all the stuff that's about to be spun out into SNI. What's left in the "new old" company is a lot of smart people with their eyes trained on many next great things. I just hope they don't need me to leave again to spark another big round of innovation. ;-)