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.

My Media Diet: Aggregators vs. News orgs

I have catalogued my media diet a handful of times in the past few years (here's the last one from Feb 2013), and I must say it surprises me every time. Tastes change, available sources of news evolve, and I have seen my consumption habits evolve right along with them.

Here is where I get my news, new for 2014.

My primary source of news these days is Twitter. It has always been a big one for me, but the frequency with which I check my Twitter feeds and the frequency with which I click on the links I find there has made it by far my most reliable place for news.

Specifically I find myself drawn to social content shared by the Huffington Post, @AP, occasional Buzzfeed links and Politico.

More generally, I have spent a lot of time curating my Twitter experience, an important step in separating signal from noise on the increasingly noisy social network. I have lists for breaking news, buzzworthy/social news and science news that I keep organized on Tweetdeck and Hootsuite, and find myself checking all of them multiple times a day.

Facebook is another place where I find news - it does a great job of surfacing content that I will like, vetted by the people in my network, and Facebook learns the organizations whose links I click on. But I am simply not on Facebook as much as I am on Twitter, so I rely on it a bit less. For whatever reason Facebook takes me to a lot of Gawker, Daily Mail, Gizmodo and Deadspin articles.

Because social media - Twitter in particular - tends to have a short attention span (with the number of people I follow, my Twitter feeds only show me posts going back 5-10 minutes), I subscribe to a couple of email newsletters to check the top headlines, curated by the organizations sending them.

Every day, I read Mike Allen’s Playbook newsletter, from Politico, and use the New York Times’s daily newsletter as well as The Slatest from Slate to make sure I’ve read any big headlines that interest me. Mediabistro puts out a great daily newsletter about goings on in the media business, which I read every day, and Muckrack’s daily newsletter is a great place to make sure I didn’t miss anything buzzing on social networks the previous 24 hours.

Finally, I rely on mobile apps from trusted sources to check their top stories, several times a day. The New York Times and BBC apps are the ones I check most, but I use Flipboard and the BlinkFeed on my HTC One phone to scan a number of sources aggregated there.

An honorable mention goes to Circa, which I am not yet a power user of, but which I enjoy more and more every time I use it. Circa aggregates bite-size updates about big stories, and allows you to follow any you are specifically interested in, with Circa sending you a notice every time the story gets an update.

Overall, my media diet is pretty straightforward. In terms of platforms, I get 50% of my news on my phone (social media as well as news apps) and 50% on my computer (email newsletters and social media). Another way to break it down is 50% individual Twitter feeds, 25% email newsletters, 15% straight to a news organization’s app or website and 10% other aggregators.

But perhaps the most interesting metric I look at in my media diet is how much news I am getting directly from the organization that produced the content and how much I am getting filtered through my social network or news aggregators.

Because my Twitter feeds center on journalists and aggregators, with only a handful of original sources, the overall breakdown is around half and half. Email newsletters and official social accounts give me half of my news, straight from the organizations, and aggregators and news apps give me half of my news, curated by others.

What’s changed most for me since the last time I evaluated my media diet is my drastically reduced radio and podcast consumption. I used to listen to a lot of NPR and podcasts, and besides the occasional Brian Lehrer show, I now use my car stereo and my headphones to listen to music and audiobooks.

I must mention that, because I work in the news business, professional demands skew the picture if I include them. I watch a lot of CNN and News12 while I am in the office on Long Island, and check the Newsday site and app many times every hour, so at the end of the day those are technically my heaviest news sources.

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.

Review: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

"The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg (2012)
[cover image courtesy of Random House]

The Power of Habit: Self-help journalism

Self-improvement disguised as journalism is a very hit-or-miss genre, but with a reporter like Charles Duhigg (2013 Pulitzer at the NYT) writing it, you're in good hands.

'The Power of Habit' is all about understanding how the brain works, and what the latest research says about how patterns of behavior are formed.

But you also get a look into the latest psychology and practice of behavior modification to learn that it is indeed possible to reprogram your brain to break bad habits and develop good ones to achieve whatever it is you want to change about how you live your life, if anything.

It's very well-written, with substantive case studies and plenty of interviews, context and background to attack the issue from a number of angles, which is very satisfying.

The discussion about how responsible a person is for the subconscious habits at work in their brains (murderer vs. gambler) is particularly interesting and an issue that we are already seeing come up in the news as crafty lawyers try to argue that their clients didn't have control over the things they may have done.

You will learn a lot from this book, and you may even be able to improve your life as a direct result. That's a pretty strong takeway from this one.

Oh and speaking of takeaways, here is the book's 4-step formula for changing a bad habit:

1. Identify the habit loop - trigger, behavior, reward - that you see at work in your life.

2. Identify the specific cue - Pay attention to when you get the craving and you will probably find that what triggers this sequence of events is one of five common cues: a specific time, a specific place, an emotional state, the presence/behavior of certain other people, or what you were doing immediately before you had the craving.

3. Experiment with rewards - For a week, test different rewards and gather some data. You may think that donut is what you crave, but it may turn out that it's the getting-up-from-your-desk-to-take-a-walk that you crave. So just try going for a walk instead of getting the donut next time. Some of the other rewards will satisfy the craving, some will not. The one that does is the one you want to preserve in your new behavior.

4. Have a plan - When you are undertaking the difficult task of rewiring a bad habit in your brain, have a plan for how you are going to deal with the trigger, and some obstacles you are likely to encounter. If you have a plan, you're less likely to fall off the wagon and give in to the craving.


There is a ton more insight in the book, such as the factors that influence the success of a new habit and the theory of small victories, but the main takeaway - that habits can be changed if one goes about it the right way - is a meaningful lesson that can apply to all sorts of situations we encounter in our own behavior.

Opinion: Hipsters may have ruined Paris for you, but Paris doesn't care

I see two types of stories about modern Paris life: Stories about how French people love Brooklyn hipster culture, and stories about how Brooklyn hipster culture is ruining Paris.

The latest is of an American in Paris lamenting the gentrification of the Pigalle's loss of its dirty whorehouses, a Sunday Opinion piece in the New York Times by Thomas Chatterton Williams.

I for one find it terribly pretentious for an American to complain about the fact that his naive, romantic desire that charmingly gritty shitholes in Paris remain charmingly gritty shitholes forever may be under threat by the arrival of cool bars and restaurants serving interesting and healthy foods.

He mentions that the bars are packed, so Parisians are obviously happy for a neighborhood full of bordellos to get a bit of a facelift.

I think a lot of tourists and expats fail to realize one thing: The world is not there for you to escape to.

Yes, the homogenization of global culture is something that is happening and is ultimately not that interesting, but Paris doesn't give a damn if it's becoming similar to the neighborhood you left behind in Brooklyn. Paris isn't trying to lure you away from your home with promises of exotic and charmingly gritty shitholes. Paris is just trying to be Paris and to evolve as Parisians want it to evolve.

So sure, hipsters may have ruined Paris FOR YOU because you had hipsters back home, but it doesn't seem like hipsters have ruined Paris for Parisians. And they only ruined it for you because you were applying your own set of ideals that you wanted the city to live up to.

Let Paris be whatever Paris wants to be.

**Full disclosure: I have a French passport, I have lived in Paris, and I don't like Paris. But it's not at all because of the hipsters.

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.

Review: Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens

Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens (2010)
[cover photo from npr.org]

Hitch-22: A memoir, if you're up for it

For fans of Christopher Hitchens - that is, for people who know a bit about the guy beyond just his writings - Hitch-22 is a great look at what made the man tick and how he sees his legacy.

For those reading Hitch-22 as a way to get to know Christopher Hitchens for the first time, this might not be the book to do it, unless they studied English Lit in college and still have a deep interest in it.

It's clear from this book and his other writings that Hitch's first love was always English literature. It defined him, his thinking, and his impressions of himself. In Hitch-22 he yearns with as much humility as he can muster to be considered among his favorites W. H. Auden, P. G. Wodehouse, Martin Amis and many others whom he quotes at length.

For the first few hundred pages, you'll hear more about writers with two initials in their names than about Christopher Hitchens, so be prepared.

Aside from that, you will learn a lot about the mind of Christopher Hitchens. Some biographical details - family history, childhood in boarding school (including some interesting thoughts on the development of his sexuality) and role as a student of revolution, but this one is a memoir of the cerebral sort.

Rather what you would expect from a book about Christopher Hitchens written by Christopher Hitchens, actually.

But readers who, like me, are interested in gripping recollections of Hitch's many adventures around the world, the front-row seat to liberation struggles and back-room discussions with influential figures, will probably be disappointed.

Hitch-22 is a memoir that takes place in the mind; how Christopher Hitchens came to be himself, how he developed his thoughts, feelings, and talents, etc. Wherever an external event has shaped him, it is described only so much as necessary for him to ruminate at length about what effect said event had on his revolutionary thinking, or what role it may have played in the context of history and literature.

Interesting, yes, but not a terribly quick read and not one that I would recommend to anyone who didn't already feel a strong affection and admiration of Hitchens. I have been reading his writings for years, and I consider myself a fan. So while I know a lot more about him than when I started, I still know there are more stories to tell.

And it's too bad he's no longer around to tell them.

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.

Review: Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell (2005)
[Cover image courtesy of gladwell.com/blink]



Blink, like other works by Malcolm Gladwell, delivers so much more that you expect when first opening it up.

On its surface it's a book about snap judgments - the things that happen in our brains in the blink of an eye. By the end, it's a book about the illusion of free will and objectivity, and the power of human prejudice.

Through the stories he tells, the order in which he tells them and his skill with language, Gladwell takes us on a progression through the way the brain makes judgments and forms opinions, and ultimately what we can do about it.

First we learn about the unconscious processes that enable us to read minds and make amazingly accurate snap judgments.

Then we learn about the big ways that those snap judgments can mislead - when judgment lands far from truth.

After that Gladwell debunks the Pepsi Challenge to illustrate why different people will make snap judgments differently, and why some are better at it.

Finally we learn, through the story of Amadou Diallo, about how our judgments are informed by our prejudices, and how catastrophic errors of judgment can happen disturbingly easily.

We're left with deep insight into how this important but overlooked part of the subconscious works.

The only complaint I have is that Gladwell does not so much deliver on his promise that the book will teach you how to train your mind to make better snap judgments. Sure, you have some important takeaways about slowing down the process, trying to make first impressions happen in contexts that don't poison the well of objective observation, and to look at faces (hear with your eyes), but I'd love a few concrete suggestions on how to develop these skills deliberately...

Overall a great, easy read that delivers on many levels. You will be smarter after reading Blink.

Boston bombings: Why Lytro is a game-changer

Major public events like the Boston bombings reinforce the importance of spectators' iPhone photos, GoPro videos and surveillance footage from sidewalk cameras as officials enlist every source they can access in the search for answers.

The many hi-res iPhone photos we have of the scene are great, and better than what came before them, but all of them are grainy and unsatisfying, despite their apparent success in smoking out the Tsarnaev brothers.

There is better photo technology out there though, and my first thought is that THIS is what the Lytro camera was made to do.

If you're not familiar with Lytro, it uses what's called light-field technology that basically uses a 3-d light sensor to capture not a flat image but one with depth, with enough visual information to allow you to focus after the fact on whatever part of the image you like.

I don't have a Lytro, but I played around with one once, and this image from a crowded subway shows a little of how it works. Click on the face in front left, then on the blonde on the right, then at the back of the subway car and you see how the focus changes dynamically.


That means no matter what you were pointing your Lytro camera at when you took the picture, you can decide later on if you want the foreground, background, or middle ground in focus.

It's easy to criticize the apparent trend toward always-on lifecasting, even when you are not the one doing the lifecasting, (Google Glass, anyone?), but in times like these there never seem to be enough selfies, vlogs or surveillance videos with hi-res images that we want to use.

Imagine if iPhones somehow used light-field technology. Or imagine if surveillance cameras used Lytro technology? A few dynamic stills could definitely be more useful than grainy video in investigations like these.

We are still years away, sure, but the technology is here, and could be a game-changer in any situation where you need to scan an image of a crowd and produce usable visual information.

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?

Review: Boomerang by Michael Lewis

Photo courtesy of W W Norton & Co

BOOMERANG: Travels in the New Third World (2011)
by Michael Lewis

As a longtime reader of Michael Lewis's features in Vanity Fair, I found 80% of 'Boomerang' to be redundant, since it's based on his reporting on the global economic collapse in countries around the world. 

His reporting on Iceland, Greece, Ireland and the U.S. is fascinating and intelligent stuff - a great chronicle of how the world got itself so turned upside-down - but when you've read it before you find yourself disappointed that he seemingly didn't add much to his original reporting.

But for anyone who hasn't read much of Michael Lewis's features in Vanity Fair for the past 8 years, it is an essential and well-written chronicle of how the global economy can suffer such a complete meltdown in so many places at once. 

Lewis's writing style is casual and honest, smart in a way that sometimes reads as the personal musings and stream of consciousness of an expert in economics. Very readable, and there are even swear words! His journalism mixes personal experiences of visits to these other countries, but he gets the interviews with the people that matter and is able to tell the story through a multitude of credible voices.

Overall it's top-notch journalism, very readable, and useful for anyone who wants to understand more about how we got into this economic mess we are still living in. Despite the fact that I felt I had read it all before, it's an essential part of the economic history of the modern world.

4 Stars

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.

Review: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (2008)
[Photo courtesy of Goodreads.com]

Writing about "outliers" (above-average people who somehow achieve some level of greatness), Malcolm Gladwell takes a fresh look at the subject of success that proves his own outlier status as someone who sees the world differently than those who came before him. 

He's not the first writer to write about success and the secret to what makes great people great, but he is the best I have read and certainly the most honest. 

Outliers is not a debunking as much as it's a demystifying; it's not a "myth of success" type of book. Yes, Gladwell acknowledges that successful people have certain qualities (passion, drive, perseverance) that give them a good chance at accomplishing things in life, but his main point is that they owe as much if not more to their particular circumstances. 

Luck, sure, but birth and history and the legacy of the things that came before them over which they could not possibly have any influence are what pave the path to greatness for these people.

Gladwell's main purpose seems to be to dispel the magical aura of success caused by our society's obsession with individualism. Americans tend to assume that successful people have some genius that is unique to them, and that is what makes them great. By looking at some specific riveting case studies (Bill Gates, Canadian hockey players), he makes it clear that intangible individual genius is simply not the case.

Most interestingly, he is candid about the heights he has reached in his career as a writer and 'thought leader', if there is such a thing, noting that he is the beneficiary of a lineage and lucky circumstances that brought his Jamaican family to Canada at just the right time for him to have opportunities that would not have been possible had some initial conditions been slightly different.

The result is an understanding of success and achievement that is richer and more real, because of its reliance on history, environment, and destiny. It's a whole new way of looking at the world. Fantastic reading for anyone.

5 stars.