Marc Andreessen's inspired post about the future of news

The future of news is fragmented, and that's a good thing, says Marc Andreessen.

"The news business is going to "grow 10X to 100X from where it is today. That is my starting point for any discussion about the future of journalism."

If that's his starting point, it can be ours too. The news business is booming, and hugely successful investor Marc Andreessen thinks that's a good thing. It certainly is if you're at the front of that wave, but anyone lagging behind should be very afraid, because it may already be too late.

"The main change is that news businesses from 1946-2005 were mostly monopolies and oligopolies. Now they aren’t."

The implications of the democratizing nature of the Internet and low-cost digital publishing available to anyone Andreessen summarizes in three points:

1. Anyone can create and distribute content
2. Formerly separate industries now compete directly online (think TV vs. newspaper vs. radio vs. wire service), which drives prices down.
3. Many more people consume news today than did 10 years ago, and in 10 years the volume of consumption will be vastly higher than it is now.

Obviously, after talking about lower barriers to entry and the increasing volume of news content we see as a result, Andreessen moves on to financing. He offers eight different sources of funding, though the takeaway is that a news organization must blend all of these to be successful at paying for itself.

1. Advertising: No tooth-whitening crap.
2. Subscription: They will pay if it isn't crap.
3. Premium content: Again, they will pay if it isn't crap.
4. Conferences: Human presence is a premium you can charge for.
5. Cross-media: Think books, TV, movies produced along with news.
6. Crowdfunding: This is a big one. People will pay to support a specific project they believe in. [See the Planet Money T-shirt].
7. Bitcoin for micropayments: Andreessen believes in Bitcoin.
8. Philanthropy: "There is around $300 billion per year in philanthropic activity in the U.S. alone. It’s WAY underutilized in the news business."

Andreessen is a believer, and counters the argument that lower barriers to entry means more crap with the fact that crap and quality can coexist, and the more crap there is, the more demand for quality and trusted sources.

He lists 10 organizations that are getting it right [follow them all on Twitter with this list]:

1. AnandTech: Don't know it, but a quick perusal does seem to show a fresh look at tech reviews.
2. The Atlantic: Big digital push with properties like the Atlantic Wire and Quartz.
3. BuzzFeed: Leveraging listicles to do "amazing in-depth long-form journalism".
4. The Guardian: Expanding its reach online with great reporting.
5. Politico: Must-read thanks to insider knowledge and aggressive online focus.
6. Search Engine Land: News about search, leveraged into lead generation. Brilliant.
7. The Verge: Tech news that is now a must-read, very good growth prospects.
8. Vice: Made a decision to go into video and into online, exploded.
9. Wirecutter: Innovative in its simplicity, takes reviews one step further with recommendations.
10. Wired: Example of blending print and digital content with great success.

I am happy to say that I'm a regular consumer of 80% of these sites (I've bought based on Wirecutter recommendations, I read Politico every day and Vice every weekend, and Wired's iPad app is probably the best in the business), and am looking forward to visiting Search Engine Land a lot more starting today.

But one thing that ties most of these sites together that goes unmentioned is DESIGN. The online audience is very sophisticated now, and expects a level of visual quality that they didn't before. I would argue that design is a huge part of the success of every organization on this list, especially The Atlantic, Vice, The Verge, Wired, Guardian.

Design matters, and if it's not up to the standard you think your content is up to, then you are doing a disservice to the reader, and readers are not as ready to forgive uninspired design as they used to be.

Finally, Andreessen really starts looking to the future.

What's holding the industry back? For Andreessen, it's fixed capital. Fancy headquarters, expensive machines, unions and their restrictive contracts. Oh, that and objectivity.

"But the objective approach is only one way to tell stories and get at truth. Many stories don’t have “two sides.” Indeed, presenting an event or an issue with a point of view can have even more impact, and reach an audience otherwise left out of the conversation."

To be successful, Andreessen thinks, news organizations should be more narrowly focused ("The U.S. alone has 15 full-scale national news organizations, plus more from international markets and all the online news organizations cropping up, That’s too many general news outfits."), leaders should be more courageous, and an organization's culture should include eight specific qualities:

1. Vision (not hallucination)
2. Scrappiness (not complacency)
3. Experimentation (try things and listen to your audience)
4. Adaptability (not inertia)
5. Focus (a small number of clear goals)
6. Deferral of gratification (it takes time for quality content to build a quality audience)
7. Entrepreneurial mindset (rules are still being written, so anyone can write them)

Here, I suppose, is the most important part of Andreessen's inspired post: These are all human characteristics, and it will be people who change the news business, not the huge companies that used to control things. 

Ken Lerer observes the state of media, in 8 Tweets

As an avid consumer of journalism, I am always on the lookout for news about the business of journalism. New ventures are starting all over the place, led by big names or big ideas, and there is money in journalism again.

One of the people behind some of that money is Ken Lerer, known primarily for his role in the controversial origins of the Huffington Post but with a track record of supporting innovative success stories like BuzzFeed, MakerBot and Warby Parker that prove he has an eye for products people want to consume.

Lerer took to Twitter last week, inspired by investor buddy Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, to share what are (so far) 8 observations about the state of the news business and its future. Let's pick them apart a little.

1. @pmarca has moved me to write some ideas down.
— Ken Lerer (@KenLerer) February 26, 2014

The first in the series comes after a Tweet pointing to an inspired post by Andreessen on why he is bullish on the news business. Among some choice quotes:

"Maybe we are entering into a new golden age of journalism, and we just haven’t recognized it yet.  We can have the best of all worlds, with both accuracy rising, and stories that hew closer to truth." 

2. 1981-1985: content became king in cable industry. Distribution was complete, needed content to fill pipes. Enormous value was created.
— Ken Lerer (@KenLerer) February 26, 2014

3. Fast forward: 2014. Web build out is complete. Massive social feeds are the future for now. They all need content. Content is king again.
— Ken Lerer (@KenLerer) February 26, 2014

Lerer starts by comparing the digital news business today to the early stages of cable television. The pipes are laid, the bandwidth is there, now we need content - quality content - to fill it. For Lerer, the future is in social media, the direct line to your audience's pocket, and one of the best ways a news organization can listen to its audience.

It used to be about what people were reading (NY Daily News vs. NY Post). Then it was about what they were clicking on (Huffington Post summary of the New York Times article), and now it's about what people are sharing, what they are talking about. And that conversation is happening on social media.

Now the audience just needs content worth talking about.

4. Digital content cannot succeed without the appropriate tech platform. Content without tech is a waste of time and money.
— Ken Lerer (@KenLerer) February 26, 2014

Favorite this tweet now because you don't want to forget this one: "Content without tech is a waste of time and money."

Implicit in this idea is the increasing sophistication of the information consumer today: they expect quality content and they expect a seamless user experience no matter what device they are using. The right publishing platform must be quick, responsive and integrated with the rest of the Internet, because the reader is.

5. Quality content flourishes in the digital world. Lowest common denominator content is a commodity with fleeting success.
— Ken Lerer (@KenLerer) February 26, 2014

He then turns to how to finance this quality tech and quality content:

6. Future digital content sites will see a massive commerce revenue stream alongside intelligent real-time native ads.
— Ken Lerer (@KenLerer) February 26, 2014

Intelligent ads, yep. Sounds great and I can't wait to see them. I'm assuming this is something beyond just targeted ads.

7. Only Thrillist is doing commerce and content the right way today. They are way ahead of the curve.
— Ken Lerer (@KenLerer) February 26, 2014

Here we have a plug for Thrillist, an e-newsletter and men's interest site that combines clean design, good photography, and editorial content that you can buy. Oh and this company that is way ahead of the curve and the only ones "doing commerce and content the right way"? It's owned by his son. Does it matter? I haven't spent enough time with Thrillist to say, but it bears mentioning for transparency's sake, right?

8. Chasing trending stories isn't good business and isn't good journalism. Editors must create content they believe in.
— Ken Lerer (@KenLerer) February 26, 2014

Lerer brings it back to journalism (what Andreessen calls "Capital-J Journalism") to reiterate that a sophisticated audience demands sophisticated content. Not whatever trending crack like BuzzFeed quizzes happens to be ricocheting around the social Web this week, but quality content.

I could not agree more, and wish more organizations had the courage to invest time into projects that need many iterations to get right. Any organization that does is and will be rewarded.

For my final words, I'll turn to Andreessen's original post that launched Lerer's 8-point burst of inspiration, in which he describes the future of news in what sounds like a bubble but just means a new economic reality that will see many failures for every successful new organization to get in the game.

"The big opportunity for the news industry in the next five to 10 years is to increase its market size 100x AND drop prices 10X. Become larger and much more important in the process."

Planet Money T-shirt: Making the news (very) personal

As an avid listener of NPR's Planet Money podcast, I was fascinated from the first mention of its ambitious T-shirt project, which would ask listeners to pre-order a new T-shirt, with the show tracking the process from seed to shirt. Having not purchased a cotton T-shirt of any sort in years (is that weird?), I figured it was time to update my weekend wardrobe.

The result? Wow. Besides the amazing storytelling and personal connection I now have to an item in my closet, who knew that a radio show could do visual journalism so well?

The well-designed website gives a simple, curated experience that takes you through the story in logical steps with clear connections and transitions among them. This was a priority for the design and development team at Planet Money, and they hit the nail on the head. There is just enough video, just enough text and just enough content to keep you engaged for every moment.

THE VISUALS

Every chapter begins with a full-width video player, and content with stunning visuals and engaging characters. The Machines video (chapter two) that shows the raw cotton turned into fabric, is particularly well-done, with an audio track that reminds you, in a good way, that this is coming from a radio program.

The heart of the project is the People chapter, with a video that tells the story of two garment workers, one in Bangladesh and one in Colombia. The choice of characters is excellent, both good-natured young women who live parallel lives in many ways. One of them, Jasmine, just happens to be living it in Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world. There is some arresting footage from the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in Bangladesh, which killed 1,000 people while this project was going on.

But there is lightness and honesty in their stories too, and we see them both smile more than once. The Columbian woman, Doris, laughingly notes how the shirts they make are "immense" so she imagines a bunch of obese gringos wearing them.

One of the first lessons I learned about video storytelling was that audio matters, and the narration in the videos showcases the radio origins of this project, in the best way. The thoughtful, conversational (I caught a "pain in the ass" in the Boxes chapter) and easy voiceover is more successful than you usually see in video journalism.

And while there isn't that much of it, the photography is beautiful. See the close-ups of yarn samples in the Machines chapter (left).

THE WRITING

The writing in this project is pure Planet Money: Conversational, and with a concerted effort to simplify the concepts at work in the narratives. At times it gets close to dumbed down, but implicit in that critique is praise for the accessibility of this material. You don't need to have ever heard of Planet Money or economic concepts to get sucked into this project.

"The newest John Deere picker needs just one guy to do what it took five guys to do a couple years ago."

"(Yarn, by the way, is what ordinary people call thread. In the garment business, it’s called yarn.)"

In a way, they are writing for radio, and I can see that because my journalist radar pays attention to things like that. But it may also be my coming into this project knowing it would be a rare piece of visual journalism produced by a radio show rather than someone who just came upon it from seeing a link (planetmoney.com/tshirt) somewhere.

So how does it end? Well, I have a pretty sharp grey t-shirt with a squirrel drinking a martini on it and a website that will tell its story, with no advertising whatsoever, forever.

On the radio, the story ended with a wonderful episode about the afterlife of an American T-shirt, tracking it from a clothing donation to markets in Kenya. [More text at this link] That still counts as one of my favorite Planet Money episodes ever, if not just for this project.

"You", the fifth and final chapter in the full multimedia project, is where the listener/viewer/audience gets to participate in the story, with an Instagram collage page featuring people's Planet Money T-shirt selfies. It's nice to see all of those fans/audience members on the site, smiling back out. It speaks to the personal connection that people have to the show and the shirt, one that I feel every time I see the thing in my closet. I've never had such a personal connection to a piece of journalism, and it is more meaningful than I expected.

And my Instagram selfie? I haven't added it yet. My living room seems an unworthy backdrop for something with such a back story.

Review: Distant Witness by Andy Carvin

"Distant Witness" by Andy Carvin (2013)
[cover image courtesy of CUNY Journalism Press]

Distant Witness: A book about Twitter, revolutions, and the Twitter revolution

I never thought reading tweets, retweets and hashtags could be so compelling.

Andy Carvin has done a wonderful job looking at Twitter as a new platform of information and interaction, and told that story using both his own narrative and the voice of the medium itself.

The result is a document both of an amazingly important time in international geopolitics (the Arab Spring that saw citizen-led rebellions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain) and a tool that allows the voices of the people involved to resonate around the world.

During the time of the uprisings, Carvin was a masterful curator, filtering the noise and bringing credible first-hand voices into the conversation around the news.

He has proven equally skilled at looking back and recognizing the unprecedented nature of a revolution lived by those on the ground but witnessed by the rest of the world in a way that had never been done before.

"Distant Witness" chronicles news - the Egyptian uprising in Tahrir Square, the Libyan rebellion through to the eventual capture and killing of Moammar Ghadafi, and also the unique ways that news lived and evolved on Twitter. The extended sections about the "Gay Girl in Damascus" hoax, the effort to identify supposed Israeli weapons in Libya and the story of the high schooler who advised rebels with field manuals collected and translated into Arabic.

You won't find these stories anywhere else.

I am sure Andy Carvin would admit that his book is just the beginning of a larger conversation, but it's an amazingly useful one with lessons that journalists should be aware of as non-traditional voices continue to find new ways to be heard in documenting history. "Distant Witness" is most of all about those voices, and Carvin does a great job at letting them speak.

Read this book. It will make you a better journalist and a better citizen of the world.

What Justin Smith, new Bloomberg CEO, gets wrong about digital media

Bloomberg LP is getting a new CEO, and though Justin B. Smith's track record of turning around The Atlantic and creating excellent products like Quartz and the Atlantic Wire are enough to say that Bloomberg got a major score here, what I've read about his vision for the company gives me two reasons for pause.

Smith has the mind of an entrepreneur, and has used that with incredible success in his career. And he clearly values speed as an essential ingredient of innovation, as Digiday quotes from his email of introduction to the staff:

"Moving quickly is paramount: the faster you move, the more you learn, and the sooner you can optimize for success. Fred Wilson, the VC behind Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga and others, argues that ‘speed’ is the quality he seeks out above all others in digital media entrepreneurs. I agree.”

For plenty of products, that's true, but as it relates to Bloomberg's media arm, my Spidey sense tingles whenever I see a hint of velocitatum super omnia. 

Speed is always going to be important, but I've seen brands diminished (TV news is a big offender in this category) because of a devotion to being first that can lead to unverified reporting and the spreading of false information. Speed, sometimes, kills.

My second reaction to Smith's email, though, is one that I think is much more problematic: I see no mention of the user in his vision for the future of digital media. Yes, he is quick (and correct) to assert that the future is not yet written:

“Anyone who tells you they can predict the future state of media and its consumption patterns or business models isn’t being honest. No one knows where things are going and how they’ll play out. To succeed, we must accept this state of confusion and embrace the chaos."

But I think the one thing we DO know about the future of media is that the balance of power is shifting always in favor of the user. Homepages are less relevant as users pick and choose content a-la-carte; the conversation around the news (read: social media) is often even more important than the news itself, and users, not editors, increasingly decide what the top story of the day is.

For me, any media organization that doesn't acknowledge this trend is leaving truth on the table.

Work for the page views, not the paychecks

Remember in the early days of Web journalism, when the backlash against chasing page views led people to pontificate about that fundamental axiom of journalism, that you must balance what people WANT to know (Kimye's baby name) with what people NEED to know (the government is spying on you)?

Now, chasing page views is falling out of vogue as news organizations that base their success on "engagement" and the many ways that can be measured, and it's not uncommon to hear my journalist friends look down their noses at sites like Buzzfeed, whose click-bait content seems to blatantly chase after the basest desires of the reading public.

I'd like to come out in defense of the page view, to a certain extent, because like it or not it's a rather pure measure of what your audience is interested in. Every click is a decision: Whether from Google search or from a visit to your homepage, that click is a choice to look at a piece of content before any other piece of content on the page at the time.

That is a pretty potent metric.

It's definitely not the whole story, and news organizations have a responsibility to pay attention to the many ways that an audience can give them feedback (time on the page, number of comments, number of shares, for example), but it is a part of the story that should be heeded.

What chasing page views also represents to me, and this is a good thing, is the snobbery of those writers and editors who would rather never publish any news about Lindsay Lohan, or the dog that befriended an injured raccoon in the next town over.

As the deputy editor of Newsday.com, I find myself working with every desk in the newsroom, every day. Video, graphics, desk editors, beat reporters, copy editors, social media moderators and upper management, not to mention the entire Web staff that sits around me.

That means I have a lot of time to observe the apparent motivations of the slice of life that ends up working at a major news organization like this one. What I see are some people who simply work for a paycheck: they do their jobs without making any great effort to do them quickly or to push their jobs to new heights.

Other people, who for the sake of the current discussion work for the page views, pay attention to what the audience is reading, what they are responding to, and what is animating the conversation around the news on social media.

It's not that complicated, but when it comes to the quest for page views, there are plenty worse motivations in the journalism business.

Fortune.com: One year later

A little more than a year ago, I wrote about 11 ideas to improve Fortune's lists online, since the company was looking for a new editor to manage franchise projects like the Fortune 500. I decided to check in on what's changed since then, using the 100 Best Companies list on which I based the initial exercise.

Organization

I much prefer the splash page with the top 10 items (each with thumbnail), and instead of the tabs to organize the list, now we have a row of features that are related to this list along the top, each with a big picture. I recommended these changes and clearly they were thinking along the same lines.

I also see that the box on the top right is now being used to highlight other Fortune lists rather than a job search tool, which is a much better way to use the space.

Video content, which used to be up top in a prominent place, now takes a more logical place below the list where it's intermingled with other featured content. I don't know many people who specifically go to a site looking for video content to watch; rather they go looking for interesting content, whatever form it takes. Fortune has apparently realized this, which is a good thing.

So it's a big step forward, pretty much involving all 4 of my original suggestions for organizing this content.

Content

In terms of content, I don't see much new here. Looks like the old lists, just packaged in a new way. Maybe this area will improve with time, but I still think that there should be more social media on this page, and there should be deeper integration with other Fortune lists.

Design

My biggest reaction to the new lists is that finally we have a lot of visuals to make the page stand out and give the reader things to latch onto. I would love to see more non-stock-photo art, but overall the page looks fresher and more modern than it did a year ago. I do think some persistent nav would do wonders for the user experience and would make the lists significantly more mobile-friendly though.

Finally, I am very happy to note that one feature I mentioned in my earlier posts, including one on social media recommendations for Fortune, has been made reality: Social Media Superstars, the companies with the most dedicated approach to using social media to connect with the public. It's a breakout list of the top companies master list, and I bet this one has done well both on the site and in terms of sharability.

Nicely done, Fortune, but there is still a way to go to make these lists sing on websites and, most importantly, phones and tablets. Good luck in that effort.

LIRQS: A formula for news

Journalism, a craft that can arguably include everything from "25 signs your boyfriend is going to dump you" to "How Wal-Mart used bribery to get what it wanted in Mexico" does not seem prone to sweeping generalizations about the "right way" to write a story.

But the news business looks for trends, and that includes trends in the news business itself. That's where LIRQS comes in.

The way I heard it told, from a New York Times veteran, was that a long time ago (maybe in the 70s), Times reporter Lawrence Van Gelder spent a long weekend analyzing the paper's most successful stories - front-page features, award winners, etc - to pull out what, if anything, they had in common.

LIRQS was the result of that effort. If not a formula then a structure, a framework to guide young (or just bad) writers in crafting a successful story, at least the critical first half of one. 

Here's how it works:

1. LEDE: There are a few ways to begin a story (factual lede vs. anecdotal lede, for two), but it should grip the reader and give them something to latch onto. To reference a good movie, your opening scene is your best footage. When writing for the Web, the lede needs to be quick and factual, and include the juiciest bits of your story, or nobody will continue reading.

2. IMPACT: Your 'nut graf' - the nut at the core of the fruit. Why this story matters and who it matters to. Basically answer the question "who cares?"

3. REACT: The other side(s) of the issue from that of your main character, or the reaction of those impacted by the issue. This section defines the tension, the drama of the story - the sides struggling against each other over the issue.

4. QUOTE: Your money quote. What is your money quote? Well it goes back to why you quote people in the first place - because they say something better than you could write it. Or because they have the authority to say something that you, as the neutral observer, do not. 

5. SCENE: Context. Now you can get into where this story takes place, with a brief history of the issue, statistics to back up different arguments made over it, etc. This is the rest of the article. Tell the characters' stories, give the facts, and write your article. Give us the scene where all of this is taking place.

With this kind of approach, you do have the bare bones of a news story that establishes some of the players and gives them a voice, illustrates the tension inherent in the issue and identifies the action-reaction of people impacted by an issue and those responsible for that impact.

It my not be a formula for journalism, but it's certainly a decent way to get some of the most important elements up at the top, which will give your readers a reason to keep reading. And that is what good journalism is all about, right?

What FastCompany missed about the MailOnline

As a former photo editor at the +Daily Mail, the Web's most highly-trafficked news website (since Jan. 2012) I was happy to see +Fast Company's take on what makes the site so damn successful [read it here].

But I think they missed the full story.

For FastCo, the MailOnline's success comes down to 4 design choices:

1. The homepage has a million stories and no ads

2. Sidebars on the story level point to a million other stories, eliminating dead ends
3. Stories are organized by category in vertical sections (duh)
4. Content targeted at women is especially successful

While these points are all true, I don't think you can explain the site's success without talking about its use of photos, which goes above and beyond what you see anywhere else on the Web (except for the NYDailyNews, which has basically adopted the Mail's design as its own).

PHOTO COMPOSITES are the MailOnline's killer app.

No photo on the MailOnline is just one photo. All of those stories in the right rail that deal with entertainment and celebrity news and other content targeted at women come with thumbnails that incorporate two or three other images.

The stories on the main page get composites as well, perhaps a crime scene and two mugshots, or a composite of the various main characters, and if the main story is big enough to occupy the entire width of the homepage, you might get a huge panorama that incorporates 5 images or more.

You get so much more content before even clicking on a story than you would on most other sites, which may offer one thumbnail/top image per story. For me this serves as a lure, to let readers know that they have the photos, they have the details, they will SHOW you the news as well as tell you the news.

Once you click in, you are rewarded many times over, as the MailOnline will break up the text every few paragraphs to give you photos of everything and everyone related to the story, and you become a return visitor.

Photo galleries are put together in the same way, as Buzzfeed does, by embedding dozens of images into the body text of a single article. All you have to do is scroll to see the photos, rather thank clicking through each one.

Granted, the use of photos isn't related to the website's design, but it is intimately related to the layout design and the editorial choices that the MailOnline makes, which FastCompany does address in its piece. Unfortunately it left the biggest part of the story out of the story.

My Media Diet

I remember an elevator ride with Carl Lavin, the lead editor of CNN.com, while I worked as an editor at TheStreet, when I asked him what he read; he looked at me with a quizzical expression that took me by surprise, as if he hadn't thought about the question in a long time.

"I read what comes across my desk," he said, "what friends send me or what makes its way into my Twitter feed, what people are talking about."

It was such a simple solution to the problem of information overload that so many of us suffer from, but as I have tried to follow that advice I have found that's it much easier said than done.

My media diet starts every day with the AP and Twitter apps on my iPhone, to see what is driving the conversation around the news, and quickly moves to the one piece of essential reading that Lavin did identify: Mike Allen's Playbook. The over-caffeinated genius behind Politico sends his daily digest of what is driving the day in Washngton to any Inbox that asks for it, and without fail I will see those stories In the major media by the afternoon.

In addition to Playbook, I rely on newsletters to catch up on anything I may have missed from the day before, including The Slatest from Slate, The New York Times's New York Today and the Muck Rack Daily for social media news.

I get my news about the media industry through daily newsletters from MediaBistro and IWantMedia at some point in the morning, and will read anything by the New York Times' David Carr, Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd and Tom Friedman thanks to alerts set up on nytimes.com.

Beyond that, I read what crosses my desk and what makes its way into my Twitter feed. I don't ever watch TV news, though I will occasionally catch an episode of the Daily Show or Colbert Report, and I rarely listen to the radio other than maybe 15 min to get the basics on my way to the office on Long Island. I simply can't stand the commercials.

Aside from getting caught up on the news of the day, I go out of my way to read some long-form journalism and magazine features, so my media consumption involves some "lean back" time as well.

I subscribe to Bloomberg Businessweek (brilliant features) and The Economist (essential for world and finance news), which I read throughout the week, and I will spend weekends on Vanity Fair, Wired, The New Yorker and the occasional Fast Company magazine. I read these almost exclusively on my iPad.

If I'm our running or riding my bike, I'm usually listening to a recent podcast from Brian Lehrer, Planet Money, the Moth or This American Life, all essential listening.

And somewhere in all of this I manage to read actual books (sometimes as audiobooks) to get immersed in narratives that take longer than a few minutes to read. It's amazing what a good feeling it is to take several days or weeks to read something.

If all of this sounds overwhelming, that's because it is. Staying informed is an exercise in triage and skimming. If a piece isn't written well, I move onto the next one. If the writing is good though, I read to the end.

Fundamentally, it all comes down to what Lavin told me: the best way to be informed is to read what comes to you. It's filtered by your network, curated by the people you know, trust and are in some way connected to. After that it's about taking pleasure in learning new things.

Otherwise what's the point of any of it?

Jeff Jarvis on his BBC rant and post-rant Twitter rant

After leading author and journalism professor ranted on-air to the BBC, and afterwards to the world of Twitter, I asked the man a few questions about the lessons to be learned from it all. True to form, he was candid.

Review: The Red Market by Scott Carney

The Red Market, by Scott Carney (2011)
[Cover image courtesy of www.scottcarney.com]

If you, like me, are fascinated with the corners of human society that one rarely hears anything about, The Red Market goes above and beyond the voyeuristic appeal of the subject matter and presents a nuanced view of the business of the human body in different corners of the world.

Scott Carney is a great writer, but most importantly The Red Market is an amazing piece of journalism. Exposing the very different ways that value is placed on the many different parts of the human body that the world needs (and uses), the book gives an inside look at the trade in human flesh that is extremely compelling.

The story touches on the completely criminal, the quasi-grey-market, and the completely-aboveboard markets for human hair, blood, organs and adoptive children, to name a few, and what is most amazing is that in each case Carney gives us a look at how it works on the ground – because he went to these places and talked to the people who make their livings off of these markets.

He doesn't tell you "hospitals in India make you bring your own supply of blood if you are going to have an operation that requires a transfusion", he tells you "I went to a food vendor across the street from the hospital, who took me into a back alley and offered to sell me a pint of B- for $20" (not an exact quote but you get the idea).

In some cases, people are abused and exploited. In some cases people are just meeting a need that the legal market is not meeting because our society has established a philosophy that voluntary donation (of kidneys, blood, etc) is the only ethical way to manage the supply. Meanwhile a whole host of middlemen (doctors, hospitals, "adoption counselors") make a ton of money off of those donations.

The result is a nuanced view of the global trade in human flesh that argues above all for transparency in the existing systems that, as they are set up now, offer too many opportunities for profit and exploitation to be of much good to people.

It's a brilliant work of journalism that addresses the micro-level and the big-picture view of the subject matter, which makes it both fascinating and useful.

5 stars.

Mashable redesign: 5 Pros, 1 con, 1 caveat

[Screenshot of Mashable.com from Jan. 16, 2013]

+Mashable redesigned its website in December, and while I don't think it does everything right, the folks at the popular tech site made some very interesting decisions about how to present content that I think reflect some new realities about how people navigate content on the Web.

It's a bold redesign that is almost consciously different than anything that currently exists on the Web. Here are the takeaways for me. [tl;dr at the bottom]

3-COLUMN LAYOUT: Using the eye's natural tendencies

Mashable has chosen to believe that the eye will gravitate to the right naturally, so instead of putting the biggest stories top left, they put their newest stories on the left, with small thumbnails that ensure more new content is visible above the fold in that column. 

In the second column you get the fastest-growing content (a friend at Mashable confirms these are the ones most rapidly growing in traffic) to see what's buzzing right now. Think of it like a Rally-car race: these stories haven't gone as far as the ones that went before them, but they are going the fastest. Each one even comes with a tiny line graph showing its speed.

On the right, with the biggest images and therefore most editorial weight, are the biggest stories on the site right now. Most-viewed overall.

INFINITE SCROLL: The killer app

While a bit buggy and jumpy, the most important thing about the redesign (though of course not unique to Mahsable) is the dynamic loading of content as you scroll down. This creates literally endless pages. The more you scroll the more content you get. Readers can go as deeply as they want.

And while this is great for section fronts, it is most innovative on the story level - if you read to the bottom of a story, the site basically loads the section front for that category below. Reading a lifestyle story or a story about social media? Well when you're done you'll get a basically endless amount of other stories in that category without clicking back to any section fronts. Very nice.

MINIMAL NAVIGATION: Goodbye stacks of subnavs

While you can navigate by content type along the top of the page, where a simple rollover will load links and images for 5 top stories, there are not a million subnavs and buckets breaking things up on the page. 

To me this reflects a new philosophy of what people look for when they come to your homepage. They don't come thinking "I wonder what the latest lifestyle/business/video game content is on Mashable", rather they are thinking "I wonder what's new, I wonder what's trending, I wonder what I should know about because everyone else does."

Adjusting to this reader mindset is a very smart move.

MOBILE-FRIENDLY: Perfect integration with a phone or tablet, whichever way you hold it

Consistent design is important in our multi-screen lifestyles now, and Mashable now delivers the exact same experience no matter what device you are using to access it. Stories are all easy to click and navigate on iPhone (1 column at a time) and iPad (2 columns in portrait mode, 3 in landscape), and everything works the same way.

IMAGES EVERYWHERE: Gives readers something to click on 

No plain headlines anywhere on the page, which is very satisfying. Click-maps that I have seen at several websites that I have worked show that people click on the thumbnail way more often than they click on the headline.

~There is one drawback~

NO CLEAR CATEGORIES: All stories look the same

When you have pages with infinite scroll, I believe it's important to give more at-a-glance information for people skimming the whole page. 

Some visual cues so you could see which stories are in which category (if you want to scan for the latest social-media-specific content, e.g.) would be helpful. The topnav, which follows you down the page, takes care of that to some extent, but they have to look somewhere else to get it.

THE CAVEAT: It's Mashable

While this type of design makes more sense for a narrowly focused site like mashable than a truly general-news website, I do think it's smart in some of the ways it adapts to the way people consume content online (coming in one story at a time instead of navigating section fronts), which I think is a relevant lesson for any news website.

Verdict: 5 stars, once they fix the laggy loading.

[tl;dr] 

Mashable's redesign succeeds in 5 big ways: Infinite scrolling, 3-column layout that emphasizes new content and works perfectly on mobile devices, minimal navigation menus and photo-heavy layout. It has one drawback in that categorization of stories is not very clear, but there are lessons to be learned for all news websites from the new Mashable.com

Review: Tension City by Jim Lehrer

Tension City, by Jim Lehrer (2011)
[Cover image courtesy of PBS.org]


For people who follow presidential debates, Tension City is both wonderful for its insights on the process and tiresome for its focus on the "key debate moments" that we have heard about many times through the years: George W. Bush looking at his watch, the "you're no Jack Kennedy" moment, Ford on Soviet influence in Europe, sweaty Nixon, etc.

So why did I like it? Two reasons:

1. Jim Lehrer has moderated more debates than anyone else, and his unique perspective from the moderator's chair gives insight that one rarely sees or hears about in all the discussion and punditry of presidential debates.

2. I listened to this book as an audiobook, narrated by Lehrer himself and including actual audio from the moments in debate history that he refers to throughout the book. That alone makes this a brilliant piece of nonfiction, because you can't read a quote and get the tone and tenor of the moment that is the most important aspect of how a statement is PERCEIVED in a presidential debate.

So it's a fantastic book when listened to in audio form, but otherwise just a good book about presidential debate history coupled with the view from the moderator's chair if you're reading it in print.

4 Stars.

5 Ideas for Fortune on social media

Fortune Magazine these days appears to be making a concerted effort to beef up its online presence, and in addition to its efforts to ramp up the multimedia content of its franchise lists, the magazine is looking to put some dedicated energy into social media.

I've thought a lot about Fortune's lists (see that post here) and decided to put together a few ideas I had about improving the brand's social media presence as well. 

At close to 500,000 Twitter followers, readers clearly have a ton of interest in following what the magazine has to say in real time, and I think more can be done to capitalize on those relationships.

1. Lists: One great way to easily maximize the value of so many Twitter followers would be to create lists with every existing feed for the companies that show up on each franchise project (@FortuneMagazine/100Best, @FortuneMagazine/40under40, etc.), as well as CNNMoney and Fortune feeds. 

These can be embedded in various parts of the website and people can follow them on their various Twitter management applications. Such a thing can be easily integrated into the iPad app, the splash page for the list itself, and can be referenced in the hard copy of the magazine to direct people to the online content and give some real-time immediacy to the print product.

2. Outreach: There is a great opportunity to use social media to create content by asking the magazine's half million-plus followers who they think are the most influential businesspeople on all of those social media platforms (G+, Tw, Fb) and use the answers to create a new list of the 50 who get the most votes as a 50 Most Influential on Social Media or the Fortune 50 Social Media Stars or some such. With so many followers across multiple platforms there is a great multiplier effect with this sort of effort.

3. Quora: For me, Quora is the next big thing in social media, and I think there is huge potential for Fortune to build the brand and attract new classes of followers there. There are currently 3600 users who follow the Fortune magazine topic, but there is no Fortune magazine account. 

Many of the questions under the topic (which sees new posts pretty much daily, sometimes multiple times a day) are people looking to discuss the current issue or who have questions about methodology, or why a certain decision was made about a certain story. This is a great opportunity for an official Fortune account to answer those questions and provide a bit of transparency to the process, all while creating interesting answers to readers' questions that are sure to get disseminated on other platforms. 

This is another great way to generate content as well, since the social media editor could get those questions answered by the relevant Fortune staff members (the cover artist, the photo editor, the list editor, the graphics person) on camera, and those videos could be put on the Facebook page (where "behind-the-scenes" content works very well) and other channels.

4. Video: Such behind-the-scenes videos could also be put on a YouTube channel, which Fortune does not currently have (though there is a specific Fortune MPWS account). While Fortune's video content appears on the CNNMoney YouTube channel I think a dedicated Fortune channel would pay significant financial dividends from ads as well as other gains in terms of visibility. Because the content just sits there and doesn't feel the effects of age as much as on the chronologically organized Twitter and Facebook, some good SEO-friendly headlines on the many evergreen Fortune videos can just sit on YouTube and be watched forever.

5. Twitter timing: As a basic Twitter strategy, I think the every-three-weeks publishing schedule of the magazine allows for an approach focused on a week of reflection and promotion of the latest issue, then two weeks of questions, contests and preview of the upcoming issue. This would take place over the ongoing strategy of "from the archives" links, promotion of new posts on the website (as well as RTs of Money and CNNMoney posts of course) and reactions to the news from writers and staff.

** See part 1 of this exercise: 11 ideas for the Fortune 500

11 Ideas for the Fortune 500

When I saw that Fortune.com was looking for an editor to oversee its franchise projects (Fortune 500 and the like), it got me thinking about what I would do to reimagine content like this for the digital age.

There is a lot of excellent data here, but the online presentation really appears to be an afterthought to the static version that appears in the magazine. The feature up right now is "100 Best Companies to Work For", so I made that one the subject of this exercise.

In thinking about how to package such lists I am guided by my fundamental belief about the power of multimedia journalism to allow a reader to go as deeply as he or she wants to into the content. I believe in layering information on the web - causal visitors should be able get all the top-level data they want at a glance, then one click takes the reader into the next level of analysis and another click gives people the raw numbers and customization they want to personalize the experience.

For me the overall concept should not be of making a bunch of digital lists, but rather of creating a deep and rich database of American corporations, and comparing them to each other in meaningful ways. With that kind of structure I think Fortune could bring in new readers, draw them in to more content, and not alienate the power users who want everything. 

Here is what I would do:

Organization

1. I would put the overall top 10 companies on the splash page. A row of clickable thumbnails with the logos of the top 10 would give readers the most important data without any extra clicks, and they are already able to get into the list wherever they want to depending on which company interests them most, without having to click in order.

2. The main articles and galleries ("They're hiring!" "25 top-paying companies" ...) are fantastic and I would do more to highlight them, like to make this a section of "Top Stories About the 100 Best Companies" populated with thumbnails for each story.

3. Instead of the nav bar at the top ("Full List | Near You | etc.") I would consolidate these sections and place them lower on the page. They could even go in expandable menus for "View list by TOP COMPANIES | BEST PERKS | Etc."

4. Instead of the video thumbnails (repeated in the video box on the right) I would add a video player right at the top, either with those four thumbnails that load a video in the box or with one on autoplay. 

Content

1. Create a Twitter list (@FortuneMagazine/100Best) populated with accounts from these companies (those that have them at least) and Fortune/CNNMoney's accounts, and embed the stream on the page. 

2. The more video, the better. While creating a video profile for each company is not realistic, if there is a video component for one out of every 10 companies (meaning 10 total) I bet the pre-roll ads will bring in significant revenue. Some could surely be pulled from past interviews with certain company or industry leaders that Fortune/CNN have run before as well. A great way to repurpose content.

3. I think it's important to relate this list to the other franchise lists. I would love to see a box on the right or lower on the page with a prompt like "Companies on this list also show up in:" and add linked icons for the other lists, whether they be lists of companies or of people who work for those companies. 

4. I like the idea of a "create your own list" feature across all of the franchise lists where a logged-in user can create their own database of companies. It would be like the "Perk Finder" but with a few more options and the ability to save it not as a custom URL but as a section on their "my account" page.

Obviously this one is a little bigger or long-term than the other ideas, but I think it would have the added effect of allowing journalists or news organizations anywhere to create their own mini-lists or galleries using FORTUNE's data, with all the links back and visibility that would entail.

Design

1. Persistent navigation is essential here. People should be able to jump around to some extent rather than going through each list linearly. Each page/entry should have the full list in a set of scrollable thumbnails along the bottom so that wherever in the list one is, one can decide where they want to go next in the list.

2. I think a set of logos for each list would be a great way to have some continuity across the features and would be a good visual cue that can be used elsewhere. Google appears on many lists, so its page on any of them could display the icons of the other lists the company is mentioned in, and a simple click goes to that new list.

3. Generally the ads are where all the color is on the page so they are what draws the reader's eye, a problem I would address by spicing up the title banner to look more like the main banner that has an integrated FORTUNE logo (rather than one in a box) and a minimal arrow for the dropdown menu. Doing that in a contrasting color like a silver could make it pop nicely. 

New content

I also see the potential to vet these lists a bit more for readers, always with an eye on the topics that are of most interest to readers in this changing business climate. Entrepreneurship and innovation, for example, does not have a very prominent role on these franchise projects. Some ideas:
Most innovative companies

Most-improved companies (turnaround stories are always appealing)
Rising stars (sort of a preview of next year's list)
Most charitable corporations
Most influential people in media
Most influential people on social media
Leading entrepreneurs

Who knows how these lists will evolve once the right person is hired, but Fortune needs to prepare for a day when the printed version may not even exist, and a Web-first mentality would vastly improve the interactive experience with the projects on Fortune.com.

This, I think, could help achieve that.

** Read part 2 of this exercise: 5 thoughts on what Fortune can do on social media

$5 million of grants for crazy digital media ideas...

Today I heard all about the Knight Foundation's News Challenge, "a contest awarding as much as $5 million for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news and information exchange."

Susan Mernit of the Knight Foundation made it clear that the contest is for INNOVATIVE ideas. As she said, "if all of the projects we fund succeed, then we are being too safe. We want 50% of them to fail. We want to fund experiments, not businesses."

That being said, anything goes. Here are some possible pitches:

1. Some way to enable major media organizations to make money while providing free content to users.

2. Node-based multimedia news aggregator: ever notices how aggregators are purely text? This doesn't work in print, so why should it work on the net? This site would allow users to flag photos, videos, slideshows and all multimedia bits they come across on the net, linking them to each other and to a central "node" which is a story or issue area (Hurricane Katrina, for instance).

4. A GPS-based tracking service that you sign up with your GPS-enabled cell phone. It will alert you to news stories and community-based blogs wherever you are.

5. Fairtrade online marketplace: a register of fair-trade online stores by country, so that anyone who cares to can shop in a way that will benefit projects in a certain country.

I am also considering some partnerships. My colleagues have some fantastic ideas as well. I know none of these are too revolutionary, but hey - the brainstorm is just getting started...

Live Continuing Coverage of the Obama/McCain ServiceNation Summit at Columbia University

Go to

Obama and McCain at Columbia

for insightful multimedia coverage of this historic event!

Subjective objectivity

Objectivity, many in the business will tell you, is a cornerstone of journalism. Reporters report, they do not analyze. Their mission is to dig up the facts of a story, without analyzing or passing judgment on what those may reveal. Judgment, in theory, is up to the reader.

True objectivity, especially in today's media culture, is an illusion that stands in the way of the media's role as a watchdog acting on the part of the people to root out hypocrisy and hold the right people accountable for injustices that occur in every city on earth every day. Journalists and news organizations seem to adhere to the idea that to be objective is merely to report, not to analyze, the news, leading them to often relay anything the Bush administration spins their way without pointing out the ways in which government spokespeople contradict themselves all the time.

Watch Fox News and you will see a clear conservative Republican bias through the thin smokescreen of its ridiculous motto of "We report. You decide.", or Bill O'Reilly's laughable "No-Spin Zone". It is not a problem that certain stations and their funders have agendas and views that they want to express, but they could at least be honest about it! At least Jon Stewart of The Daily Show is up front about his disapproval of the lies and manipulations of the Bush government.

Subjectivity is OK. Propaganda is not. Subjectivity does not mean covering only one side of an issue, but rather investigating both sides of an issue with the ability to acknowledge which side the evidence favors. Just because there are many sides to a given issue does not mean that each one makes as strong an argument as the others.

An easy example that bothers me concerns global warming and climate change, a hot hot topic (pun intended) that has gotten tons of media attention thanks to Al Gore. The truth of the matter is that scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports the idea that human activity is creating pressures on the ecosystem at rates never before seen on the planet. And this is, after all, a question whose answer lies in the realm of science and research, not politics and opinion.

So, as news programs and magazines grab onto the issue of the day, they do so in a way that they hope shows a balanced treatment of the issue, giving equal weight to alarmists and doubters. The end result is a grossly skewed coverage of climate change that treats global-warming skeptics as the other side of the coin, giving unwarranted attention - and, consequently, credibility - to loud, aggressive non-scientists with no expertise and pockets full of oil-company money to produce fancy-looking rebuttals to "An Inconvenient Truth".

Objectivity is rather impossible. Subjectivity is rather unavoidable. The happy medium is for news agencies to report based on a principle of Subjective Objectivity. Objectively presenting the arguments on any side of a contentious or newsworthy issue, while subjectively pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of each. The judgment comes in the reader/viewer's determination of how much value to give each of these strengths and weaknesses.

Responsible reporting means taking a stand and having an opinion, to speak on behalf of your audience. Mainstream media have lost it, but I must believe a solution is still out there somewhere.

Al-Jazeera on the air, in English!

Well, it was only a matter of time before the network that commands the eyes of the entire Muslim world decided to branch out into the non-Muslim world. Yesterday, Al-Jazeera launched its English-language channel, bringing its graphic images of dead Iraqi children to the Anglophone world.

Yes, it is propaganda, and yes, it is sensationalist. But anyone who has chanced upon Fox News while surfing to better channels has surely noticed the alarmist footage of “Things that will kill your baby in your own home!” and the like.

The value in Al-Jazeera is that it is sensationalism from another point of view. They are doing the same things as we are, but with the frank criticism of our administration that the American media seem incapable of producing. The idea of news organizations as public watchdogs holding hypocritical government to account is sorely missed in the United States.

Moreover, if we are serious about understanding “how they think” and “why they hate us,” then Al-Jazeera is a way of getting right to the proverbial horse’s mouth. With millions of Arab eyes glued to this Qatar-based news channel every day of the Iraq war, it would be helpful for those of us who actually care to see with our own eyes what they see with theirs.

This is another strength of Al-Jazeera’s new English channel. From my rudimentary understanding of Arabic, my experience watching Al-Jazeera with Moroccan Muslims, and my continuing dialogue with friends in the Maghreb, it seems that the English version, like the original, pulls no punches in its condemnation of the United States’ foreign policy decisions. The coverage is, purposely, as similar as possible to the parent, considering its use of anglophone journalists poached from BBC and CNN, among others.

Most important to keep in mind is that you can only get the whole story by listening to all sides. For once, we have an authentic Muslim voice to listen to in this new era of history where the Middle East and Islam are making news right on our doorsteps.

The next step is for Al-Manar (Hizbullah’s News station) and Al-Arabiya (the relatively moderate one based in Dubai, UAE) to follow suit. So call your cable/satellite provider, or just download RealPlayer and watch it streaming off of the website. It is well worth it to see things from the other side...