This post is cross-published from my new journalism/new media-blog. Previous posts in this series:

• Part 1: The revolution that never happened
• Part 2: The assets
• Part 3: Hypertext

In the fourth part of this series I will take a closer look at the research on interactivity  in online journalism and to what degree this asset of new technology has been and is utilized.

Content analysis studies

As with hypertext, the research on interactivity in online journalism is dominated by content analysis, even though a greater body of this research also relies on surveys and interviews with journalists. Kenny et al. (2000) concluded that only 10 percent of the online newspapers in their study offered “many opportunities for interpersonal communication” and noted that little had changed since the introduction of Videotex 25 years earlier: “Videotex wanted to electronically push news into people’s homes, and so do today’s online papers”.

Similar findings and conclusions are found in Pitts’ (2003), Jankowski and van Selm’s (2000) and Dimitrova and Neznanski’s (2006) studies of news sites in the US; in van der Wurff and Lauf’s (Eds) (2005) investigations of European online newspapers; in Quandt’s (2008) analysis of news sites in the US, France, the UK, Germany and Russia; in Paulussen’s (2004) investigation of Flemish online newspapers; Oblak’s (2005) study of Slovenian online news sites; O’Sullivan’s (2005) research on Irish online newspapers; Fortunati et al.’s (2005) (pdf) study of online newspapers in Bulgaria, Estonia, Ireland and Italy; and Spyridou and Veglis’(2008) study of Greek online newspapers.

Comparisons between these studies are, however, difficult to make, due to differences in both methodological approaches and theoretical understandings of what interactivity is. However, it might seem that the European online newspapers tend to offer slightly less interactivity than the online newspapers in the US.

In a longitudinal study of 83 online news sites in the US, Greer and Mensing (2006) found a slight increase in interactive features from 1997 to 2003. The possibility to customize news, however, decreased during the same period. Li and Ye (2006) found that 39.2 percent of 120 online newspapers in the US provided discussion forums – twice as many as in Kenney et al.’s study six years earlier. Hermida and Thurman (2008) found “substantial growth” (p. 346) in user-generated content in 12 British online newspapers from 2005 to 2006 (concerning features like comments to stories and “have your say”).

In an analysis of the level of participatory journalism in 16 online newspapers in the US, the UK, Spain, France, Germany, Belgium, Finland, Slovenia and Croatia, Domingo et al. (2008) concluded that interactive options promoting user participation “had not been widely adopted” (p. 334). However, their findings suggest a distinct increase in most such interactive options compared to earlier studies, especially regarding the possibility for users to comment on stories, which 11 of the 16 online newspapers allowed. The process of selecting and filtering news, however, remains the most closed area of journalistic practice, allowing the authors to conclude that: “[t]he core journalistic role of the ‘‘gatekeeper’’ who decides what makes news remained the monopoly of professionals even in the online newspapers that had taken openness to other stages beyond interpretation” (p. 335)”

Some content analysis studies offer insights into how interactive features such as discussion forums are used. Fortunati et al.’s (2005) (pdf) concluded that users “prefer to remain anonymous and silent” (p. 426). Li and Ye (2006) found similar results, and Thurman (2008) (pdf) found that the BBC News website’s comments system “Have Your Say” attracted contributions from not more than 0.05 percent of the site’s daily users.

J-blogs and interactivity

Some studies focus on interactivity in so called j-blogs, e.g. weblogs written by journalists and published on their online newspapers’ site. Singer (2005) found, in her research on 20 j-blogs in the US, that the journalists “are […] sticking to their traditional gatekeeper function even with a format that is explicitly about participatory communication” (p. 192). However, two other studies of j-blogs offer alternative findings. Wall (2005) investigated US j-blogs on the Iraq war in 2003 and found that these j-blogs emphasized audience participation to a much greater extent than the online newspapers in general. Robinson (2006) investigated 130 US j-blogs and found similar results.

Surveys and interviews

Studies relying on surveys and interviews with journalists contribute with similar findings as the content analysis studies. Riley’s qualitative interviews with journalists at a metropolitan US newspaper in the late 1990s offer some interesting insights into the attitude towards interactivity at the time. According to Riley (1998), most reporters were “horrified at the idea that readers would send them e-mail about a story they wrote and might even expect an answer”. In his 1999 PhD thesis (pdf), Heinonen found similar attitudes in his interviews with Finnish journalists during the same period.

However, this attitude seems to have changed. Schultz (2000) found a slightly more positive attitude towards interactivity among journalists at The New York Times, as did Quinn and Trench in their interviews with journalists in 24 online news organizations in Denmark, France, Ireland and the UK published in 2002 (MUDIA-report Online News Media and Their Audienc,e not available online). More recent studies suggest an even broader acceptance of interactivity among online journalists. In a survey of journalists in 11 European countries O’Sullivan and Heinonen (2008) found that 60 percent of the respondents agreed that linking with the audience is an important benefit of online journalism. O’Sullivan’s (2005) study in Ireland, Paulussen’s (2004) in Flanders, and Quandt et al.’s (2006) study in Germany and the US all found similar results.

In a broad scale study relying on 89 in-depth interviews with editors and journalists in newspapers and broadcasting stations in 11 European countries, Metykova (2008) (pdf) found that the relationship between journalists and their audience had indeed become more interactive, especially regarding email and text message interaction. However, this increase in interactivity “tended to be seen as empowering journalists to do their jobs better rather than blurring the distinction between content producers and content consumers” (p. 56).

Chung (2007) in interviews with website producers nominated for the Online Journalism Award in the US, and O’Sullivan’s (2005) found that online journalists, web producers and editors find it difficult to implement interactive features, even though they express a willingness to do so. O’Sullivan’s (2005) offers an interesting perspective: The use of freelancers may obstruct interactive features because freelancers cannot be expected to interact with readers to the same degree as the in-house editorial staff. Freelancers are generally not paid to participate in discussions with readers or initiate other kinds of interactivity.

Surveys of online newspaper users in Europe found that users lacked interest in participating on discussion forums and similar features (In Sweden: Bergström, 2008 (pdf); In Flandern: Beyers, 2004; 2005 (pdf); In Finland: Hujanen and Pietikainen, 2004; In Germany: Rathmann, 2002). The most important facility of online newspapers according to these survey studies seems to be that online newspapers are continuously updated. Already in the mid 1990s Singer (1997) found, in interviews with 27 journalists in the US, that those journalists who were positive towards the Internet and new technology emphasized the importance of immediacy in online journalism. Quandt et al.’s (2006)found that the online journalists in Germany and the US valued immediacy as the most important feature of online journalism. O’Sullivan’s (2005)found that immediacy was the “big thing” and that frequent updates was “the great strength of online media” (p. 62).

Interactivity summarized

To summarize the research on interactivity in online journalism, it seems clear that online news sites are becoming more and more interactive, first and foremost regarding human-to-human interactivity. Users are allowed to contribute to the content production by submitting photos and videos and by commenting on stories and participate in discussion forums. However, users are seldom allowed to participate in the selecting and filtering of news. The traditional norm of gatekeeping is thus still very much in place in the practice of online journalism. Fortunati et al.’s (2005) (pdf) concluded: “[…] the power relation between media organisations and readers is not in play” (p. 428).

Furthermore, the research reveals that online journalists and editors are becoming more eager to interact with readers, but organizational constraints like time pressure and the utilization of freelancers prevent them to a certain degree to do so. Last, but no least, user studies suggest an overwhelming indifference with interactivity – it seems that people prefer to be passive consumers, not active producers.

However, it seems that the picture might be slightly different when online newspapers report on major breaking news events, like natural disasters and other types of crises events. Several studies in recent years that focus on citizen journalism, like for instance Allan and Thorsen’s (Eds) compilation of case studies from around the world (2009), have demonstrated a boost in user participation and interactivity in the coverage of such events. In other words, it may seem that when crises strike, gatekeeping is to a certain degree abandoned.

In the next post in this series I’ll take a closer look at the third and final asset of new technology that was supposed to revolutionize journalism online: multimedia.

This post is cross-published from my new journalism/new media-blog. Previous posts in this series:

• Part 1: The revolution that never happened
• Part 2: The assets

In the third part of this series I will take a closer look at the research on hypertext in online journalism and to what degree this asset of new technology has been and is utilized in online journalism. The general assumption of researchers interested in hypertextual online journalism is that if hypertext is used innovatively it would provide a range of advantages over print journalism:

• No limitations of space
• The possibility to offer a variety of perspectives
• No finite deadline
• Direct access to sources
• Personalized paths of news perception and reading
• Contextualization of breaking news
• Simultaneous targeting of different groups of readers – those only interest in the headlines and those interested in the deeper layers of information and sources

This list is generated from several sources, out of which the most important are:

• Peter Dahlgren (1996) “Media logic in cyberspace: Repositioning journalism and its publics”, Javnost/The Public 3, no. 3, pp. 59-72 (pdf)
• Mark Deuze (1999) “Journalism and the Web: An Analysis of Skills and Standards in an Online Environment”, International Communication Gazette 61, no. 5, pp. 373-390.
• Martin Engebretsen (2000) “Hypernews and coherence”, Journal of Digital Information 1, no. 7
• Nicholas W. Jankowski and Martine van Selm (2000) “Traditional news media online: an examination of added values”, Communications 25, no. 1, pp. 85-102
• Kevin Kawamoto (ed.) (2003) Digital journalism: emerging media and the changing horizons of journalism. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield

Content analysis studies

Empirical research on the presence and relevance of hypertext in online journalism tends to rely on the methodology of quantitative content analysis to statistically count the amount of links present in online news sites. The findings are generally (but with many variations) categorized according to the three different types of hypertext identified by Chris Shipley and Matt Fish in their 1996 book “How the World Wide Web Works” ; Target links (links within documents), relative links (links to other pages within a site), and external links (links from one site to another site).

Most of the content analysis studies of hyperlinks in online journalism are snapshots of a situation at specific moments in time. A few of them are larger, cross-country studies, like Kenny et al (2000), who investigated 100 online newspapers (62 from the United States and 38 from “other countries”) at the end of the millennium and found that 33 percent of them offered links within news stories (target links) and only 52 percent of them offered some kinds of hyperlinks.

Jankowski and van Selm (2000) investigated 13 online news sites in the United States, The Netherlands and Canada and found similar results. A few years later, van der Wurff and Lauf (eds) (2005) presented studies of 72 European online newspapers and found that hyperlinks was the least developed “internet feature” (page 37). In their research on the front-pages of 26 leading online newspapers in 17 countries worldwide in 2003, Dimitrova and Neznanski (2006) found that use of hyperlinks had become “an established feature of online news”, but that the majority of the links was relative links (within-site links, mostly to archived material). Only eight percent of the online newspapers provided external links “despite the theoretically limitless possibilities for external linking”.

Compared to these studies, Quandt (2008) found in an extensive study of 10 online news sites in the United States, France, Germany, United Kingdom and Russia that hyperlinks were used to a somewhat greater extent: 73 percent of the 1600 full-text articles he analyzed had relative links, 14.3 percent had target links and 24.7 percent had external links.

Other, more nation-specific studies conclude that hyperlinks/hypertext is not utilized to its potential in online journalism, especially concerning the use of target links and external links (In Scandinavia: Engebretsen 2006; In Slovenia: Oblak 2005; In Ireland: O’Sullivan 2005; In Flandern: Paulussen 2004; In the United States: Pitts 2003; In Spain: Salaverria 2005).

A common explanation in these studies for the perceived lack of hypertext in the online news sites investigated is that a majority of the stories published online is shovel ware (stories that are originally published in print). Only a few studies offer more theoretically informed explanations of the findings, and even fewer offer a longitudinal approach.

One study that does both is Tremayne’s analysis of front-pages of ten online newspapers in the United States over a period of six years (1999-2004). He found that the amount of external links decreased during these years, while relative links increased. He explained this by network theory:

“[a]s each organization builds up its own archive of Web content, this material is being favored over content that is off-site. This is just one example of preferred attachment, which is the driving principle of network theory” (page 60).

Preferred attachment may be the result of a protectionist strategy aiming at keeping readers on-site, even though it is not portrayed as such in network theory. Such a strategy conflicts with the utilization of hypertext technology.

Surveys

While content analysis has been the preferred method to investigate hyperlinks/hypertext in online journalism, other methods have also been utilized. In their2002  report Online News Media and Their Audience (which is not to be found online) Quinn and Trench presents a survey of 138 “media professionals” engaged in online news production in Denmark, France, Ireland and United Kingdom. The respondents agreed that providing hyperlinks could make stories more valuable to the readers. However, they were skeptical as to whether the readers “should be left to make their own judgment about the relevance of links, rather than […] having the news services provide guidance to users” (page  35).

O’Sullivan (2005) interviewed Irish online journalists and found that few of them found hyperlinks to be an important feature of online journalism. On the contrary, they expressed concerns as to whether (external) hyperlinks would lead readers away from their site. In his 2009 PhD thesis The Online News Factory: A Multi-Lens Investigation of the Strategy, Structure, and Process of Online News Production at CNN and NRK (not available online) Krumsvik found that hypertext was to a little extent utilized – external links were “ignored” (page  145).

User studies

In an experimental study of how readers in the United States evaluate in-text (target) links in news stories Eveland et al. (2004) found that only the experienced web users found such hypertext structured news stories valuable. For in-experienced users, the hypertext structure was a disadvantage. Sundar (2009) found similar result in his experimental study. However, users seem to be satisfied with relative links. According to a survey amongst readers of Flemish online newspapers, the utilization of links to archived material (relative links) is regarded as an important reason to read online newspapers.

Based on these studies, it seems that relative hyperlinks, i.e. hyperlinks to other stories within the online news site, is the most common form of hypertext structure found in online journalism, while target links (links within stories) and external links are used to a lesser degree. A protectionist attitude might prevent utilization of external links; while utilization of target links may be obstructed by a high degree of shovel ware material and uncertainty as to whether users actually benefit from such links.

In the next post I’ll take a closer look at what the research on interactivity in online journalism might tell us. Until then – please feel free to comment any thoughts/disagreements.

Last week, the Guardian reported on a few promising citizen journalism projects in Africa that use mobile phone technology effectively to not only communicate with people but to also allow the audience to contribute to newsgathering. As opposed to the excessive – and even frivolous – growth of smart phone applications in the Western world, mobile phones in developing countries, which are nowhere near as sophisticated as ones in America and Europe, are being used as a reliable proxy for high-speed Internet access to perform basic functions, such as paying grocery bills and delivering medicines. Cell phone companies have bought into this as well, developing cheap, reliable phones with ease of use and practical functionality.

The Ushahidi crowdsourcing project that the Guardian article elaborates, is perhaps one of the best known and most successful mobile journalism exercises in Kenya. Ushahidi–which means “testimony” in Swahili–attempts to gather as much information from the public as possible and then verify this collected data with the help of computer and human confirmation. Launched during the post-election violence in Kenya in 2008, Ushahidi has since been implemented worldwide — from monitoring unrest in the Congo, tracking violence in Ghaza, to reporting on the Indian elections earlier this year.

The project allows people to contribute in the form of simple text messages, photos and video delivered through smartphones, or reports submitted online; this is posted in real time to an interactive map, accessible directly through smart phone technology. This information can also be converted to formats that are readable in various communities by news organizations in developing countries. The technology itself is open source, so anyone can help enhance and develop it. In order to verify the accuracy of information obtained in the case of breaking news events, Ushahidi has also launched the Swift River Project, which helps voluntary participants worldwide to separate good information from ‘noise,’ or in the team’s own words, in “crowdsourcing the filter.”

Basically, the way it works is that once the aggregated data comes in through multiple streams, be it Flickr, Twitter, or Ushahidi, people can go in and rate the data – the information is thus verified by the sheer power of numbers, as in any crowdsourcing project. In addition, the information is filtered through machine-based algorithms to confirm accuracy. Ushahidi used a similar method to track the Indian elections earlier this year through VoteReport.in. In India, “moblogging” or microblogging, made possible through the explosive popularity of cell phones, has been growing for the past few years. Sites like smsgupshup.com and Vakow.com – Indian versions of Twitter – allow people to disseminate 160-character messages to groups, enabling amateurs to deliver personalized, customized news through sms messages. This makes up for the relative lack of interactivity from mainstream Indian news organizations.

Cell phones as tools for information dissemination are particularly valuable in countries like Zimbabwe where radio transmission is often blocked. Text messages can allow an uninterrupted flow of information in such cases. The Guardian‘s Activate 09 project sends out headlines to tens of thousands of citizens in the Southern African country through sms messaging. In addition, the paper has been crowdsourcing ideas from its global audience on the different methods available to reach thousands of people during breaking news events.

The Grameen Foundation, a global nonprofit, has partnered with Google and a Uganda-based telecommunications provider MTN, to answer important queries sent in by residents via text messages; questions range from clarifications about deadly diseases to agricultural problems. In Kenya, RSS feeds from the Internet are fed into mobile phones to educate and inform people, and text-to-speech tools that convert sms messages into audio files are helping the visually impaired. Some Western companies are encouraging Kenyans to take part in crowdsourcing projects in return for micropayments. Citizens perform small tasks such as transcribing audio and tagging photos for small sums of money. The BBC is now providing English language learning capabilities in Bangladesh through cheap audio and SMS lessons through a partnership with mobile service providers.

Despite the availability of hi-speed Internet access in Western countries, the versatility of the cell phone as a vehicle for citizen journalism is very special indeed. The ability of a phone to provide real-time, on-the-ground coverage is undisputed, whether you see an unusual occurrence on the street on your way to a mall in Los Angeles or witness a riot in a displaced community in Darfur.

When media executives (and the occasional columnist on a deadline) talk about ‘the problem with the web’ they often revert to a series of recurring themes. In doing so they draw on a range of discourses that betray assumptions, institutional positions and ideological leanings. I thought I’d put together a list of some common memes of hatred directed towards the internet at various points by publishers and journalists, along with some critical context.

If you can think of any other common complaints, or responses to the ones below, post them in the comments and I’ll add them in. I’ll also update this blog post whenever I come across new evidence on any of the topics.

Meanwhile, here’s a table of contents for easy access:

1. Undemocratic and unrepresentative (The ‘Twitterati’)
2. ‘The death of common culture’
3. The ‘echo chamber’/death of serendipity (homophily)
4. ‘Google are parasites’
5. ‘Bloggers are parasites’
6. ‘You don’t know who you’re dealing with’
7. Rumour and hearsay ‘magically become gospel’
8. Triviality
9. ‘Unregulated’ lack of accountability
10. Cult of the amateur

Undemocratic and unrepresentative (the ‘Twitterati’)

The presumption here is that the media as a whole is more representative and democratic than users of the web. You know, geeks. The ‘Twitterati’ (a fantastic ideologically-loaded neologism that conjures up images of unelected elites). A variant of this is the position that sees any online-based protest as ‘organised’ and therefore illegitimate.

Of course the media is hardly representative or democratic on any level. In every general election in the UK during the twentieth century, for example, editorial opinion was to the right of electoral opinion (apart from 1997). In 1983, 1987 and 1992 press support exceeded by at least half the Conservative Party’s share of the vote. Similar stats can be found in US election coverage. The reasons are obvious: media owners are not representative or democratic: by definition they are part of a particular social class: wealthy proprietors or shareholders (although there are other factors such as advertiser influence and organisational efficiencies).

Journalists themselves are not representative either in terms of social class, gender, or ethnicity – and have become less representative in recent decades.

But neither is the web a level playing field. Sadly, it has inherited most of the same barriers to entry that permeate the media: lack of literacy, lack of access and lack of time prevent a significant proportion of the population from having any voice at all online. And those who are civically engaged online share many of the characteristics of vocal community members offline (although the research at that link notes “there are hints that the new forms of civic engagement anchored in blogs and social networking sites could alter long-standing patterns.”)

UPDATE [12 Jan 2012]: David Brake’s presentation on the ‘representativeness’ of online voices provides more useful resources and frameworks.

So any treatment of internet-based opinion should be done with caution. But just as not everyone has a voice online, even fewer people have a voice in print and broadcast. To accuse the web of being unrepresentative can be a smokescreen for the lack of representation in the mainstream media. When a journalist uses the unrepresentative nature of the web as a stick, ask how their news selection process presents a solution to that: is there a PR agency for the poor? Do they seek out a response from the elderly on every story?

And there is a key difference: while journalism becomes less representative, web access becomes more so, with governments in a number of countries moving towards providing universal broadband and access to computers through schools and libraries (and public media organisations). There is also evidence that social media in particular is more representative of the wider population in terms of ethnicity and age – although as the link above suggests, this is by no means comprehensive.

The ‘Death of common culture’

The internet, this argument runs, is preventing us from having a common culture we can all relate to. Because we are no longer restricted to a few terrestrial channels and a few newspapers – which all share similar editorial values – we are fragmented into a million niches and unable to relate to each other.

This is essentially an argument about culture and the public sphere. The literature here is copious, but one of the key planks is ‘Who defines the public sphere? Who decides what is shared culture?’ Commercial considerations and the needs of elite groups play a key role in both. And of course, what happens if you don’t buy into that shared culture? Alternative media has long attempted to reflect and create culture outside of that mainstream consensus.

You might also argue that new forms of common culture are being created – amateur YouTube videos that get millions of hits; BoingBoing posts; Lolcats; Twitter discussions around jokey hashtag memes – or that old forms of common culture are being given new life: how many people are watching The Apprentice or X Factor because of simultaneous chatter on Twitter?

UPDATE: From Nick in the comments:

“There’s strong evidence that the digital age (and the almost limitless choice it has brought with it) is strengthening common culture, not weakening it. I did an interview with Fred Bolza at Sony Music, who talked about the “compression of the head” (fewer artists getting bigger) here: http://tindeck.com/listen/bpyv and the Economist recently wrote about the same phenomenon, across the entertainment industry. Whether its shows like X Factor or films and books like Harry Potter and Twilight, the hits are getting bigger: http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14959982

“We crave common cultural touchpoints and we’re using the digital age to help us find them. I’d argue that Twitter, Google, Facebook, Digg and the rest are doing the same thing for news stories.”

The ‘Echo chamber’/Death of serendipity (homophily)

When we read the newspapers or watched TV news, this argument runs, we encountered information we wouldn’t otherwise know about. But when we go online, we are restricted to what we seek out – and we seek out views to reinforce our own (homophily or cyberbalkanisation).

Countering this, it is worth pointing out that in print people tended to buy one newspaper that also supported their own views* with one particular political leaning, whereas online people switch from publication to publication with differing political orientations. It’s also worth pointing out that over 80% of people have come across a news article online while searching for something else entirely. Many websites have ‘related/popular articles/posts/videos’ features that introduce some serendipity. And finally, there is the role of social media in introducing stories we otherwise wouldn’t encounter (a good example here is the Iran elections – how many people would have skimmed over that in a publication or broadcast, but clicked through because someone was tweeting #cnnfail).

Graph: online promiscuity of Telegraph readers

There’s also evidence that people seem to become more broadly and locally connected when they connect to the internet. From a Pew study:

“Ownership of a mobile phone and participation in a variety of internet activities are associated with larger and more diverse core discussion networks … Social media activities are associated with … having discussion networks that are more likely to contain people from different backgrounds. For instance, frequent internet users, and those who maintain a blog are much more likely to confide in someone who is of another race. Those who share photos online are more likely to report that they discuss important matters with someone who is a member of another political party … Internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with having a more diverse social network.”

Social media activities are associated with several beneficial social activities, including having discussion networks that are more likely to contain people from different backgrounds. For instance, frequent internet users, and those who maintain a blog are much more likely to confide in someone who is of another race. Those who share photos online are more likely to report that they discuss important matters with someone who is a member of another political party.

» When we examine people’s full personal network – their strong ties and weak ties – internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with having a more diverse social network. Again, this flies against the notion that technology pulls people away from social engagement.

That’s not to say homophily doesn’t exist – there is evidence to suggest that people do seek out reinforcements for their own views online – but that doesn’t mean the same trend didn’t exist in print and broadcast, and it doesn’t make that true of everyone. I’d argue that the serendipity of print/broadcast depends on an editor’s news agenda and the serendipity of online depends on algorithms and social networks. So, not worse, not better, just different.

UPDATE: A study by Hargittai, Gallo and Kane (PDF) looked at this question relating to political bloggers and found, as one of the team explained:

“Overall, it would be incorrect to conclude that liberal bloggers are ignoring conservative bloggers or vice versa. Certainly, liberal bloggers are more likely to address liberal bloggers and conservative bloggers are more likely to link to conservative bloggers. But people from both groups are certainly reading across the ideological divide to some extent. There is no clear trend toward becoming more isolated in conversations over time.”

*UPDATE: From Stuart in the comments:

“I’d dispute the claim “people tended to buy a newspaper that also supported their own views” – Sun readers have always been considerably to the left of their paper (MORI research in the guardian). There’s quite a lot of research in network formation in the political blogosphere, and research suggests that left-wingers in particular read/link almost exclusively to left-wing blogs (example) whereas they’re far more likely to read right-wing papers – at the 2005 election 40% of Mail readers and more than half of Times readers voted Labour or Lib Dem.”

Fair point – I’ve clarified the sentence quoted. I would, however, argue that the evidence above (in the ‘unrepresentative’ section) about the political formation of the broader population vs that of the press would lead to that result anyway: if there are more right-wing papers than there are right-wing voters, then a significant proportion of readers will be to the left of the editorial position. The fact that they are more likely to read left-wing material online merely suggests that there is more opportunity to do so than there is in print.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis meditates on serendipity.

UPDATE: Axel Bruns explores this concept in some depth in his wonderful book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond (2008) where he says:

“Such threats have been thematized ever since taste subcultures first came to be studied, and have as yet failed to materialise as dramatically as may have been expected; a reason for this is that no taste subculture ever operates on its own, and that no one community member ever serves as part of only one taste culture. In reality, our tastes and interests are always multiple, and more or less diverse and contradictory, our personas never unified or uniform; through our everyday interactions with others, and with culture itself, we sustain the continued engagement between the different cultural and social perspectives and communities in our society.” (more from this quote here)

UPDATE (Jan 2012): Research undertaken by Facebook (also here) – and the source should be taken into account, although I’m not sure how Facebook would benefit from the findings – found that:

“[E]ven though people are more likely to consume and share information that comes from close contacts that they interact with frequently (like discussing a photo from last night’s party), the vast majority of information comes from contacts that they interact with infrequently.  These distant contacts are also more likely to share novel information, demonstrating that social networks can act as a powerful medium for sharing new ideas, highlighting new products and discussing current events.”

UPDATE [Jan 24 2012]: More research on serendipity in news consumption here.

‘Google are parasites’

This argues that Google’s profits are based on other people’s content. I’ve tackled the Google argument previously: in short, Google is more like a map than a publication, and its profits are based on selling advertising very effectively against searches, rather than against content (which is the publisher’s model). It’s also worth pointing out that news content only forms around 0.01% of indexed content, and that news-related searches don’t tend to attract much advertising anyway. (If it was, Google would try to monetise Google News).

It’s often worth looking at the discourses underlying much of the Google-parasite meme. Often these revolve around it being ‘not fair’ that Google makes so much money; around ‘the value of our content’ as if that is set by publishers rather than what the market is willing to pay; and around ‘taking our content’ despite the fact that publishers invite Google to do just that through a) deciding not to use the Robots Exclusion Protocol (ACAP appears to be an attempt to dictate terms, although it’s not technically capable of doing so yet) and b) employing SEO practices.

Another useful experiment with these complaints is to look at what result publishers are really aiming for. Painting Google as a parasite can, variously, be used as an argument to relax ownership rules; to change copyright law to exclude fair comment; or to gain public subsidy (for instance, via a tax on Google or other online operators). In a nutshell, this argument is used to try to re-acquire the monopoly over distribution that publishers had in the physical world, and the consequent ability to set the price of advertising.

‘Bloggers are parasites’

A different argument to the one above, this one seeks to play down the role of bloggers by saying they are reliant on content from mainstream media. This draws on discourses of ‘original’ and ‘authorship’ to assert authority.

Of course, you could equally point out that mainstream media is reliant on content from PR agencies, government departments, and, most of all, each other. The reliance of local broadcasters on local newspaper content is notorious; the lifting of quotes from other publications equally common. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that – journalists often lift quotes for the same reasons as bloggers – to contextualise and analyse. The difference is that bloggers tend to link to the source.

Calling bloggers ‘parasites’ also betrays a perception of bloggers as ‘publishers’. The blog platform, however, combines publication with conversation. The vast majority of bloggers do not see themselves as publishers but rather as simply having conversations, in public. You wouldn’t accuse readers who gather round the water cooler to discuss the latest report on Iraq of being “parasites”, and yet the water cooler analogy holds for a lot of blogging. The difference, of course, is that by holding those conversations in public you become a competitor, which is why people may draw on the ‘Bloggers as parasites’ argument. Of course, if a blogger’s analysis or contextualisation is better-informed than the mainstream version, you hold an even greater threat, particularly to those claims to ‘authority’ that people using these arguments wish to defend.

Another point to make along these lines is some blogs’ role as ‘Estate 4.5‘, monitoring the media in the same way that the media is supposed to monitor the powerful. “We can fact-check your ass!” (see comments on Ken Layne)

‘You don’t know who you’re dealing with’

Identity is a complex thing. While it’s easy to be anonymous online, the assertions that people make online are generally judged by their identities, just as in the real world.

However, an identity is more than just a name – online, more than anything, it is about reputation. And while names can be faked, reputations are built over time. Forum communities, for example, are notorious for having a particularly high threshold when it comes to buying into contributions from anyone who has not been an active part of that community for some time. (It’s also worth noting that there’s a rich history of anonymous/pseudonymous writing in newspapers).

Users of the web rely on a range of cues and signals to verify identity and reputation, just as they do in the physical world. There’s a literacy to this, of course, which not everyone has at the same levels. Judith Donath’s paper ‘Signals in Social Supernets‘ is a very good overview of how we use different signals in establishing trust online – and the levels of risk we take in judging those signals:

“When the costs of being deceived are low, people may not care if something is an exaggeration. However, when the costs are high, they may demand a more reliable signal…

“Trustworthiness itself is not directly perceivable (Bacharach & Gambetti, 2001). People trust new information and acquaintances that come to them via people they trust…

“SNSs can actually increase trustworthiness, by placing people within a context that can enforce social mores. SNSs make people aware that their friends and colleagues are looking at their self-presentation.”

You might argue that it is in some ways easier to establish the background of a writer online than it was for their print or broadcast counterparts. On the radio, nobody knows you’re a dog.

Rumour and hearsay ‘magically become gospel’

They say “A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on.” And it’s fair to say that there is more rumour and hearsay online for the simple reason that there is more content and communication online (and so there’s also more factual and accurate information online too). But of course myths aren’t restricted to one medium – think of the various ‘Winterval’ stories propagated by a range of newspapers that have gained such common currency. Or how about these classics:

The interactive nature of the web does make it easier for others to debunk hearsay through comments, responses on forums, linkbacks, hashtagged tweets and so on. But interactivity is a quality of use, not of the thing itself, so it depends on the critical and interactive nature of those browsing and publishing the content. Publishers who don’t read their comments, take note.

‘Unregulated’ lack of accountability

Accountability is a curious one. Often those making this assertion are used to particular, formal, forms of accountability: the Press Complaints Commission; Ofcom; the market; your boss. Online the forms of accountability are less formal, but can be quite savage. A ream of critical comments makes you accountable very quickly. Look at what happened to Robert Scoble when he posted something inaccurate; or to Jan Moir when she wrote something people felt was in bad taste. That accountability didn’t exist in the formal structures of mainstream media.

Related to this is the idea that the internet is ‘unregulated’. Of course it is regulated – you have (ironically, relatively unaccountable) organisations like the Internet Watch Foundation, and the law applies just as much online and in the physical world. Indeed, there is a particular problem with one country’s laws being used to pursue people abroad – see, for example, how Russian businessmen have sued American publishers in London for articles which were accessed a few times online. On the other hand, people can escape the attentions of lawyers by mirroring content in other jurisdictions, by simply being too small a target to be worth a lawyer’s time, or by being so many that it is impractical to pursue. These characteristics of the web can be used in the defence of freedoms (see Trafigura) as much as for attacks (hate literature).

UPDATE: More on a variant of this argument in  ‘Journalism is not a zero-sum game’.

Triviality

Trivial is defined as “of very little importance or value”. This is of course a subjective value judgement depending on what you feel is important or valuable. The objection to the perceived triviality of online content – particularly those of social networks and blogs – is another way to deprecate an upstart rival based on a normative ideal of the importance of journalism. And while there is plenty of ‘important’ information in the media, there is also plenty of ‘trivial’ material too, from the 3am girls to gift ideas and travel supplements.

The web has a similar mix. To focus on the trivial is to intentionally overlook the incredibly important. And it is also to ignore the importance of so much apparently ‘trivial’ information – what my friends are doing right now may be trivial to a journalist, but it’s useful ‘news’ or content to me. And in a conversational medium, the exchange of that information is important social glue, what Bonnie Nardi refers to (PDF) as “the work of connection”

To take journalists’ own news values: people within your social circle are ‘powerful’ within that circle, and therefore newsworthy, to those people, regardless of their power in the wider world.

The Cult of the Amateur

This argument has, for me, strange echoes of the arguments against universal suffrage at various points in history. Replace ‘bloggers’ with ‘women’ or ‘the masses’ and ‘professionals’ with ‘men’ or ‘the aristocracy’ in these arguments and you have some idea of the ideology underlying them. It’s the notion that only a select portion of the population are entitled to a voice in the exercise of power.

The discourse of ‘amateur’ is particularly curious. The implication is that amateur means poor quality, whereas it simply means not paid. The Olympics is built on amateurism, but you’d hardly question the quality of Olympic achievement throughout time. In the 19th century much scientific discovery was done by amateur scientists.

Professional, on the other hand, is equated with ‘good’. But professionalism has its own weaknesses: the pressures of deadlines, pressures of standardisation and efficiency, commercialism and market pressures, organisational culture.

That’s not to say that professionalism is bad, either, but that both amateurism and professionalism have different characteristics which can be positive or negative in different situations.

There’s an economic variant to this argument which suggests that people volunteering their efforts for nothing undermines the economic value of those who do the same as part of a paid job. This is superficially true, but some of the reasons for paying people to do work are because you can expect it to be finished within a particular timeframe to a particular quality – you cannot guarantee those with amateur labour (also, amateurs choose what they want to work on), so the threat is not so large as it is painted. The second point is that jobs may have to adapt to this supply of volunteer information. So instead of or as well as creating content the role is to verify it, contextualise it, link it, analyse it, filter it, or manage it. After all, we don’t complain about the ‘cult of the volunteer’ undermining charity work, do we?

UPDATE: I deal with a variant of this argument – the ‘Bad Experience view of UGC’, in the second part of this post.

UPDATE 2: Clay Shirky writes particularly eloquently about the dumbing down meme: “Every increase in freedom to create or consume media, from paperback books to YouTube, alarms people accustomed to the restrictions of the old system, convincing them that the new media will make young people stupid. This fear dates back to at least the invention of movable type … Whenever media become more abundant, average quality falls quickly, while new institutional models for quality arise slowly. Today we have The World’s Funniest Home Videos running 24/7 on YouTube, while the potentially world-changing uses of cognitive surplus are still early and special cases.”

UPDATE: Cory Doctorow responds to 3 common groans about social media in this Guardian column.

UPDATE: Scott Rosenberg tackles both the ‘death of common culture’ and ‘echo chamber’ memes in the ‘Journalists vs Bloggers’ chapter of his excellent book on the history of blogging.

Shaun Milne, founding Director of digital publishing company Planet Ink, shares his decisions and ambitions for new online-only magazine ecoforyou.

Why did you go for a turn-page magazine format?
There were a number of good reasons, not least it is a fairly straightforward skill to learn. We purchase the technology on license so we don’t need to know much about coding, we can just concentrate on the journalism and design side.

Also we think it adds a familiar process to the art or reading. People are used to turning the page of a newspaper or magazine, and this allows them to retain the ‘idea’ of that. We see it as combining the traditions of print with the best of the web and hope to build a community around it. At this stage not everyone has had a chance to play with digital magazines yet, so there is a certain novelty factor.

Is this your vision of what Web3.0 will be?
Not completely, no. I do think it’s a step on the right path to where Web.3.0 will lead us in terms of greater interactivity, tracking and understanding of user habits. But as technology adapts further, so will publishers. We’ll have more touchscreen availability which will allow people to turn pages with their fingers; we’ll have mobile phones with five inch pull out screens; and e-paper itself, all of which if done the right way can have huge eco and financial benefits.

But the Holy Grail will be whoever can crack the best way to let readers decide themselves what content they want delivered to their handset or computer on a daily basis.

Is it to prepare for a paid content model, or will revenue come through advertising and sales, e.g. merchandise?
We could easily DRM protect the content and charge for it, but that’s not the plan at all. Given that we’re linking to a lot of content and video already available for free on the web, it would be a bit cheeky, and goes against trying to get people to share the magazine, forward it onto friends, colleagues and clients.

We hope that it’s an enjoyable, maybe even useful read, but it is in many ways something of a Trojan horse. By having a digital magazine, we expect people will read it who have never come across the format before, and won’t even realize they’ve broken their duck doing so. If we can educate people that digital is an easy, viable alternative to standards sites and print, then it can only be good for our business. Potentially it could be a loss leader for some time. But if we get the content right and attract the readers, then hopefully advertising will follow and at least cover costs.

What kind of user community are you building with the site?
Feedback so far suggests we are attracting a lot of hits from people at various levels of Government in Scotland and around the UK, quangos, charities, campaign groups, specialist businesses, dozens of PR and marketing companies – the target market you’d expect.

We’re thrilled with that, but we also want the general public to get involved. We want anyone and everyone to feel they can use the magazine. That could be a parent who wants to educate their child; it could be a business wanting to adopt the mag for their customers for CSR uses, or simply those interested in the environment.

That’s why we’ve set up a Facebook Group, a blog and Twitter alerts to sit alongside the website and, ultimately, the digi-mag which it’s all about, and begin to mould the content accordingly.

How will people interact with your content?
We hope people will start contacting us with their own ideas, stories and letters, but for now we’re just presenting information in a readable form. We’re using lots of Flash for interactivity. With the Facebook Group and blog, we’ve opened up a forum of sorts that they can use down the line, or simply keep up to date by signing up to Twitter or our subscriptions on the main site.

We’ll be able to track the way people read the pages, how long they spend on an article, what links they click, if they download, print or forward a section on; that way we will learn to understand what areas are popular and which are less so.

Is eco your thing, or was it a commercial decision?
Essentially we thought there was a gap in the market for a title like this and thought well, we keep telling our clients and future prospects how eco friendly these things are, why don’t we do something ourselves.

The result has been dramatic on everyone in the office. I’d say we have all in some way become greener. I live by the beach and felt I was fairly aware, but we’ve done all sorts of things in the past few months from starting a compost bin, to recycling our waste, turning the heating down, walking to the station rather than drive. It’s just made us more aware of the eco benefits, regardless of whether it eventually turns out to be a success in its own right.

Why did you choose to go solely online?
We’re all former national newspaper journalists so it would have been the easiest thing in the world to stick to the programme. But we felt strongly that, since we could use the technology, there would be little point trying to do something promoting the environment while using newsprint, ink and heavy machinery, long before we look at distribution issues.

There are drawbacks in trying to alert people to the fact that the magazine is there. It’s much easier to, say, flood the supermarkets and newsagents with copies, or put them in dump bins, to make the product easy for people to find.

And apart from the eco benefits, there is so much more you can do with digital – include video, audio, moving images and links. The way we consume news is changing, digital will be part of that, just hopefully without destroying the planet at the same time.

Continuing the final part of this series (part 1: Community is here) I look at conversation. I look at why conversation is becoming a form of publishing itself, why journalists need to be a part of that conversation, and a range of ways they can join in.

Conversation is publishing

In the first dotcom boom it used to be said that ‘Content is King‘. It’s not. As Cory Doctorow points out:

“If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you’d choose your friends — if you chose the movies, we’d call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.”

Jay Rosen, talking about journalism in 2004, noted that it was moving ‘from a lecture to a conversation‘.

And a year later Jeff Jarvis argued “Conversation is the kingdom“:

“In this new age, you don’t want to own the content or the pipe that delivers it. You want to participate in what people want to do on their own. You don’t want to extract value. You want to add value. You don’t want to build walls or fences or gardens to keep people from doing what they want to do without you. You want to enable them to do it. You want to join in.”

Look closer, and you could argue that the distinctions between conversation and publishing in an online medium are being eroded. Everything that we say is recorded, linkable, distributable.

Conversation is publishing.

The one-to-many relationships built by print and broadcast media have been disrupted by the arrival of the internet. By mixing these with the one-to-one cultures of telephony it has created a new, emerging, culture of many-to-many relationships.

For a long time the most popular use of the internet has been email. For the net generation, that is being replaced by social networking and instant messaging. All demonstrate that people don’t want to passively consume content online – they want to use it, produce it, and exchange it.

When the Chinese earthquake (among others) happened, it was reported on social networking sites before news websites. The information moved very quickly from people talking about what was happening to them; to people talking about what was happening to their friends; to people talking about what was happening to their friends’ friends: conversation.

Meanwhile, communities formed to pass on and clarify information more efficiently than the news organisations (for example, translating accounts, mapping, and mashing up). An online journalist who ignores this is ignoring a fundamental element of their job.

Conversation and community are closely linked: any editorial plan involving one is flawed without consideration of the other. Conversation leads to community, but it’s difficult to have a conversation without a community to begin with. It’s a chicken and egg situation.

Blogs are a classic example of generating a community from a conversation. Individual posts can gather global traffic if they touch a nerve, as conversations spread well beyond their points of origin – and back again. But how do you maintain that community when the conversation ends? (Should you even try?)

Building a conversation out of a community is perhaps harder, and why news websites have not always been successful in their attempts to do so. It is like having a room full of people with shared interests but who are too shy to talk.

You need an ice breaker.

The Professional Conversationalist

An online journalist should be a mix of the ideal party guest and the ideal party host, taking part in – and stimulating – conversations in a number of ways:

• Be involved in your communities, online and offline. Comment on blogs, post on forums, correct and update wikis, converse on Twitter, join and contribute to social network groups.
• Open up your own work for others to contribute editorially: include an email address; allow comments. In particular, don’t structure your work as a dead end: present it as work in progress; ask questions and leave them unanswered; acknowledge gaps in your knowledge; invite contributions there and elsewhere.
• Open your work up technically too if possible: make your content portable by providing an RSS feed; widgets users can place on their webpages; wikis for them to edit; or even raw data for mashups.
• Not only that, but you must respond to those contributions: That means reading comments on your own work and responding to them, in the comments as well as in the occasional follow-up post. That means looking at who’s linking to your work and posting comments there, or linking to them in your own work with an acknowledgement.
• You must show explicitly that you are part of the conversation, by linking to sources (who will in turn know that they are being quoted either through pingback or traffic)
• And finally, most importantly: you must listen. That means reading blogs, forums and other media in their sector, and then starting from the beginning again: comment, respond, link, open up.

It’s a conversation loop:

[UPDATE: A similar cycle was identified by Jason mKey in 2011)

As a journalist, doing all of these things has 4 significant advantages:

1. Your work will be informed by user contributions, and better for it
2. You'll be more likely to be 'there' when a story breaks - and to understand the context
3. As you talk about your work, and involve users in it, you will be distributing it as well. If your motivation is commercial, replace 'conversation' with 'distribution'. Nothing works better online.
4. Nobody likes a tourist. You'll be building the trust and social capital needed for other users to give you the information that you need - or to help you find it.

Without the help of your community, without an effort to engage in conversation, your work will be one-dimensional, as flat as the paper it used to be printed on. And the journalist who doesn't contribute to their communities and its conversations will look increasingly like Doctorow's sociopath. Not the kind of person people will want to talk to, or read.

--

Read the full BASIC Principles of Online Journalism series:

• B is for Brevity
• A is for Accessibility
• S is for Scannability
• I is for Interactivity
• C is for Community and Conversation
  

]]> http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2008/09/18/basic-principles-of-online-journalism-c-is-for-community-conversation-pt2-conversation/feed/ 22 http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2008/08/29/10-ways-that-ad-sales-people-can-save-newspapers/ http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2008/08/29/10-ways-that-ad-sales-people-can-save-newspapers/#comments Fri, 29 Aug 2008 08:00:19 +0000 Paul Bradshaw http://onlinejournalismblog.com/?p=1328 Read more...]]>

The biggest problem for newspapers is not falling readerships, it is falling advertising revenue. It is the move from local monopolies to a global platform where competition is everywhere, and advertising less lucrative.

For all the talk of how journalists can get a grip on new media, there’s been far too little on how ad sales people can do the same. So here I present ten ways ad sales people (and their managers) can save their jobs.

1. Stop treating web ads as second class

The first and most important change is a structural one. While management enthuse about a digital future, the bottom line for most ad sales people is this: incentives are based around print ads; web ads are typically sold as add-ons, and much cheaper ones at that. When it comes to earning your wage and your bonus, web ads are simply not the priority.

If newspapers are serious about a multiplatform future, they need to look at ways to change incentive structures to better reward web ad sales.

And part of this means making web ads more lucrative – because why would you put all your effort into selling a £50 banner ad when you could be selling a £500 half page ad?

2. Stop selling adverts on static pages

Most advertising on news websites still tends to take the shape of banners, sold against particular sections. This is the ad equivalent of shovelware or brochureware.

But the web is not a brochure: it is dynamic, constantly updated, and flexible. So why not drop the print mindset, and start selling against some of the following:

• how about a slot against the ‘most popular’ story of that minute (if it helps, think of it as the equivalent as the front page ad), second most popular, and so on (you could even auction these slots in the same way as Google does with AdWords).
• How about a slot next to breaking news? (Obviously you would put provisions into place to prevent embarrassing juxtapositions).
• Or exclusives? (If they still exist)
• Or personalised services such as SMS alerts on election results, school closings or local events (as the Cincinnati Enquirer’s James Jackson mentions)?

3. Sell advertising against search terms

While we’re stealing ideas from Google, here’s another one: instead of selling an ad on a particular page, sell advertising that will be targeted at people who search for particular things.

As soon as someone searches for a particular term, that advert is served up to them. Simple.

Then, why not turn the usual process on its head and sell the print ad as an add-on? Even when people spend money on search marketing, they often back it up with print ads, and the stats on user behaviour suggest they should do more:

“Two-thirds (67%) of search engine users are driven to search by an offline channel, and 39% of those offline-influenced search users ultimately make a purchase from the company that prompted their initial search. Moreover, it also shows television advertising to be the leading offline channel that drives users to search (37%).”

4. Give ad sales people access to the internet

Incredibly, many ad sales people are not allowed access to the internet at work. This amazes me. What happens when a client calls to ask about their online ad? Do they have to put them on hold while they find a computer? What happens when a client mentions a website they’d like to imitate? What happens when a client uses a web 2.0 buzzword that the ad sales person needs to quickly look up?

Most of all, what happens if an ad sales person is expected to sell online advertising, but has never used the internet and doesn’t understand its possibilities?

If this is your future direction, it helps if the place where most of your money comes from knows something about it…

Especially when they have access to online reports which say local newspaper websites are one of the most trusted places for advertising.

5. Enable the long tail of small businesses to advertise without you doing it for them

Online advertising means that small businesses who previously were not typical print or broadcast advertisers can now afford to advertise.

In other words, there is a potential long tail of small advertisers that could prove a significant source of new revenue.

Google’s own AdSense is one (particularly successful) example of this; Rick Waghorn‘s Addiply is another (built in response to his frustrations with AdSense).

Many newspaper websites carry AdSense adverts, but if a small operation like Waghorn’s can build a service to allow local businesses to buy and place their own advertising, why aren’t major publishers? Why give more money to Google? Why ask ad sales people to spend hours cold-calling for small web ads when you can cut out the middleman and focus your ad sales team on more creative work, like…

6. Think beyond the banner: get creative about online advertising

The web is not a one-way medium. We expect interactivity from a modern news website – comments, polls, bookmarking, chat – so why do we not extend this capability to the advertising? Here are some simple ideas:

• How about letting users work out their body mass index as part of an ad for a health club?
• How about selling that cute little widget to the health club website as well? Or showing them how to allow users to embed it on their own sites?
• How about allowing users to email an ad to a friend at a click?
• How about creating a branded game for the client – again, that can go on their own website too.
• How about a mobile-based weekly dining-and-entertainment advertorial touted as a roundup of things to do offered as part of a joint print/online promotional package for bars and restaurants.

If an ad sales person can pitch ideas like that to a client, they may be more successful. And they can charge more too.

Remembering that many businesses have websites too is key here – an advert can be sold twice: once on the news site, again as a piece of content on the client’s site.

As web readers become increasingly banner-blind, and CPMs/CPAs/etc. less reliable, standing out from the crowd becomes increasingly important.

7. Think about vouchers/coupons

This will not be new to readers in the US, where coupons are a big part of newspaper advertising. In the UK, however, what are better known as vouchers don’t seem to have the same importance in newspaper advertising, and I’m not sure why (if anyone can enlighten me, please do).

Vouchers online, however, are a power in themselves, with dozens of sites dedicated to simply passing on voucher codes. As a result, they can not only be a great way of driving business to advertisers, but also traffic through your site.

One publisher took this idea further at DeliveringQC.com (background in this report (PDF), p39), while the Tampa Bay Tribune took the idea mobile with XtraCoupons.mobi (background here):

“One of the biggest drivers of revenue for the [parent] mobile site has been the sales staff themselves. Media General made extra efforts to train ad sales reps to sell the mobile, including arming reps with demonstrations, PowerPoint presentations and other sales collateral.”

8. Sell advertising aimed at the non-local market

Your online audience is different to your print audience: typically only a third of local newspaper website users will be readers of the newspaper; another third will be local non-readers; and a further third will not be local.

That means you have a new market for ads, and therefore new clients you can pitch to.

The most obvious is to sell ads to local hotels, resorts and attractions for those people who read their old local paper and occasionally pop back for a break (most obvious places: sports pages; nostalgia features).

This also works the other way: with non-print readers you can create non-print products: take the old sponsored print supplement idea and do it online. Create a service. Build a platform. Do something with multimedia…

9. Sell video ads, as well as the production of video content

Video has enormous potential as a source of ad revenue – not just in terms of traditional ‘spots’ at the start of some video editorial, but as content in itself.

The drop in the cost of producing such video means that there is a new potential market for not only selling video ads, but selling the production of that video itself (and of course production of video generally). Small businesses who would otherwise not have considered video can now afford it.

Newspapers are starting to build experience in video. Production standards for web video are not expected to be as high as broadcast – a simple ‘video diary’ format can be filmed cheaply – and there’s the rub: on the web, production is incidental, but a good idea and good content is key, and newspapers could offer both.

The idea doesn’t stop at video: the NAA reports of TBO.com’s mobile operations:

“sales and online staffs are also selling services to help local businesses build their own mobile advertising and marketing campaigns. Using their experience and services in mobile, Media General is helping businesses build mobile microsites as well as offering text messaging services, which setting up and managing SMS campaigns. “That is proving to be where the major revenue is coming from,” [director of mobile Tim] Repsher says.”

10. Work in networks

We are in a networked era. A modern journalist should know how to team up with people outside their organisation, to connect with communities and readers…

Ad sales people should build the same skills.

On a basic organisational level this should obviously start with selling ads across titles, top-down – the most obvious being beer ads in football sections. That should be happening anyway. But it can equally work the other way – selling ads from one title across parts of the network, bottom-up.

Targeted advertising technologies make it possible to have ‘local’ advertising in newspapers 200 miles away from the client, if it’s relevant to the reader.

Then there’s looking outside your own organisation. A national newspaper executive recently told me they have an advertising and revenue share agreement with a number of blogs. Sounds like a sensible idea to me.

Bonus: don’t take digital growth for granted

Whisper it quietly: online ad sales by newspaper businesses are beginning to decline: “Upselling print advertisers is a losing business when those advertisers are fleeing print.”

Your ad sales staff may already be doing some of these things, or planning to – sing their praises here.

David Carter in Canada has added several news websites from Quebec to the Interactivity Index, which now compares the interactive features of news websites in the UK, US, France, Macedonia, Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Switzerland. Scores for the Canadian websites range from Voir’s 1300 points down to Quebec Science with 300. Anyone want to add Canadian websites outside of Quebec?

Try it out below:

Blogging recently on Newsquest’s relaunch of its websites, I feel I was a bit harsh on the Lancashire Telegraph…

Since that review the site has cleaned up and, more importantly, sped up. But here’s my frustration: the newspaper is one of the best in the country when it comes to innovation in interactivity, and the new website does far too little to show that off.

So, here’s my attempt to redress that. I’ve added the Lancashire Telegraph to the Interactivity Index – a comparison chart of the features of newspapers around the world (more visualisation options to come). If you select it from one of the drop-down lists below you’ll see it scores an impressive 1200 points thanks to its use of RSS feeds, text updates, blogging, slideshows and impressive video. That score is higher than the Independent’s 1000 points, and The Mirror’s 800, and puts the site level with the also relaunched Hull Daily Mail (which is also an innovator with interactivity).

In the interests of fuelling local rivalry, I’ve also added the Lancashire Evening Post. There must be something in the water around those parts, because they do even better, scoring 1400 points, making it as ‘interactive’ as The Times (yes I know that’s a subjective term and some things are more interactive than others, but it’s as good a guide as any).

Any other nominations for most interactive regional newspaper?

Alex Gamela looks at citizen journalism – or the lack of it – in the Portuguese media landscape

We’ve been watching a significant change in the Portuguese news media during the last few years. From national to local newspapers, radios and TV channels, everyone is building their presence online, with more or less aptitude or quality. Still, the effort is noticeable.

Portugal Diário is a exclusively online outlet that has recently gone through a deep redesign.

But this investment in new platforms of communication doesn’t mean the companies are following the latest trends, or leaving their somewhat conservative approach to the full possibilities of the web. The news websites in Portugal are mostly a repository for print content, since many don’t have exclusively online journalists, and the resources for online content are rather limited, especially as multimedia content is concerned, though slowly the tide is turning, mainly due to the efforts of major newspapers, that are trying to improve and take the step forward in online content.

This scenario, of slow and uneven development of new media content, is useful to explain why the interactivity between media and users is practically nonexistent. Many still don’t grasp the concept of participative/citizen journalism and community, but companies and newsroom managements aren’t the only ones to blame, since there are other factors to consider:

- Portugal has a low newspaper reading index, and despite an increase in the last years, it is still one of the lowest in Europe;

- the Portuguese, as a people, usually aren’t civically engaged;

- journalists, as a class, are quite protective about their job;

- there is no specific training for professional journalists regarding community management, content moderation, outsourced content;

So, if news information still runs downriver, it’s because there’s not only a structural problem, but also a passive-aggressive attitude towards citizen journalism: passive on the citizen part, aggressive on the journalists that defend their status as news bearers with tooth and nail, even if most don’t take any effort to understand the new reality.

To vouch for these changes and current mindset, I created a small survey in which I was trying to understand the conditions and openness of online media to citizen contribution. It was divided in 4 parts:

• company characteristics,
• main types of content and sources,
• forms of user participation, and
• a short opinion on citizen journalism.

This survey was sent to about 50 newspapers, TV and radios with online news features, sizing from national media groups to local companies. The response was baffling.

A quarter of the email addresses available for contact with the website or newsroom’s management were useless, and even after further attempts inviting the remaining ones that worked, only four companies replied and filled out the form.

The results are, therefore, inconclusive. But this is a good example to show how receptive most newsrooms and companies are to outside stimulation, even if it wasn’t only for the fact that the ones that replied are amongst those who are working to develop their presence online, in a well-thought-through, sustainable way, and embracing the new challenges posed by hyper-communication, while the vast majority is selling pigs in a poke.

Two newspapers (one national, the other local), one online news outlet and a TV channel responded to the survey.

• The local newspaper was the least resourceful, with no exclusively online journalists, against the online outlet with over 30 workers.
• The local newspaper had 30 to 50 thousand visits, against the over 330 thousand claimed by the TV channel’s online newsroom.
• All of them prioritized text over video, audio and photography, being video the less used format, except on the TV website, for obvious reasons.
• None used citizen or users as a source, sticking to the journalists’ investigation and agencies feed, although users’ images and videos were welcome.
• All are expecting to open their website to further user collaboration, and when asked about the future of citizen journalism, the best answer was “interactivity is one of the factors that increases the number of visits,(…) and the visibility and acknowledgement of the brand”. This line of thought is still a needle in the Portuguese news haystack.

The most recent reports on citizen journalism in the USA (State of the News Media 2008) show a decrease in user’s participation, though there are new websites and features popping up everyday, appealing to news readers to develop contents and create a tighter relationship with the online editions.

In Portugal, all the news related to media websites’ development is around announcing more multimedia and interactive features, for broadband usage: more video, more comments, more space for users’ opinions and input.

With very few notable exceptions, nothing is really changing; the main difference is that the contributions accepted by media companies are now being sent over the internet, instead of regular mail.

Portuguese users are actively creating their own media, such as blogs and podcasts; and commenting on the news websites, or sending small videos and pictures is still enough for most of them.

And on the day I’m writing this, Público presented a feature that links a news article to the blogs that refer to it, which may mean that the future is not necessarily in the embedding of citizen content, but by promoting the exchange of contents between corporate and citizen media.

But, apart from those small advances to integrate users in the building of the news landscape, there is nothing we may call citizen journalism in Portugal.

The reasons to proclaim citizen journalism as a part of the future of news media may be honest or pure marketing, but the fact is that it doesn’t rely solely on the companies’ shoulders. The main promoters of this movement must be the citizens themselves, and they should be the leading force in changing the face of corporate news, recreating the agenda setting, humanizing and lending depth to news content. The media outlets just have to be ready to accept that.

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After writing this article I even questioned how the local press is slowly commiting suicide. Assymetry is the main characteristic of our media landscape, which kind of follows the rest of the national economic and industrial scenery. The challenge is huge, and I don’t see many people facing it or even taking it seriously, with a few notable exceptions. But this setting is not ours exclusively.

Alex Gamela is the OJB’s Portugal correspondent. He blogs at O Lago.