For the Content Hungry: The Eat Media Blog

When you work in the world of media, and take pride in your extracurricular reading on writing for the web, not being able to access information on a web site can be embarrassing, to say the least.

But that’s what happened yesterday when I signed up for an account at ETS.org (Educational Testing Service) to dig up the score for a standardized test I took nearly two years ago.

Here’s the sign-up screen:

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Easy enough to create an account, right? Here’s what happened:

After creating my account and logging in, I searched for my test results using an appointment number issued at the time I registered (thank you, Gmail). Error message. I entered and re-entered this code, along with my email address and test date. Nothing. According to the records, I never took this test.

I called up the automated line to order my score report by telephone. Knowing that the appointment number wasn’t working correctly, I searched for my test results by my social security number. Again, there wasn’t a record in my name. And, instead of being transferred to a customer service rep, the line automatically disconnected me.

I called back, and spoke to a customer service representative. Though she couldn’t actually provide me with the information I needed, she reluctantly clued me in on why I couldn’t locate my test scores. The problem wasn’t that I didn’t exist in the system, it was that my profile information did not match the information I submitted when registering:

• I didn’t enter my full first name, which is Wendy Joan. But, because the first name field specified, “Do not include special characters or spaces,” I entered “Wendy.”
• I entered my current mailing address, not the address I lived at when I registered for the test. Two years ago.

In Letting Go of the Words, Janice (Ginny) Redish offers seven steps to understanding your audience:

1. List your major audiences
2. Gather information about your audiences
3. List major characters for each audience
4. Gather your audiences’ questions, tasks and stories
5. Use your information to create personas
6. Include the person’s goals and tasks
7. Use your information to write scenarios for your site

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Though there are quite a few things wrong with ETS’ account sign up—in part due to the “secure nature” of test results—the site’s creators could benefit from gathering more information about their audiences and creating personas.

“You can start to understand your audiences by thinking about them,” writes Redish. “But that’s not enough. To really understand who they are, why they come, what they need and how to write web content for them, you have to know them and their realities.”

ETS offers a range of academic assessment tests for high education. We can assume that the majority of ETS’ audience range from teenagers to young professionals just starting out in their career. They have no likely purchased a home. It is even more likely that their mailing address changes every one to two years. Surely I can’t be the only frustrated user out there?

—Wendy Joan

Integrate rather than transcend

I recently read about a media company who was interested in “transcending print” and “increasing consumer touch points.” To some this may sound like the needle is moving toward a greater understanding and definition of publishing. But unfortunately it speaks more about a quantity of eyeballs over quality of interaction. While advertising will always be a numbers game, “good” matters more than “more” matters — and showcasing a lack of understanding regarding print-to-web integration (see content strategy) by duplicating content is a one-way ticket to “moving-right-along-then.”

—Who your readers are, where they are, what they want and why they want it has an entirely different context and potentiality than it did when print was your only option.

The medium matters and doesn’t matter

Your company’s story doesn’t discriminate across mediums. It should work as well on a post-it-note as it should a web portal. But the manner in which you tell the story, or what part of it you zoom in on, changes significantly based on a number of factors. (The medium being only one of those factors.) The pressure to move to digital medium(s) often brings to the fore internal discourse and forces organizations to take a hard look at their editorial strategy. This is good and hard work but your only other option is migrating poorly thought out content from ink-to-pixel, which employs waste across your organization and puts added pressure on sales to make up the difference.

—Editorial strategy mistakes require companies to spend more money clarifying their message.

Tips for managing mediums

1- Writing for the web has changed the way we write for print. (Technology motivates mediums.)

2- Your website and magazine should have complementary content, not identical content. (Information should embrace mediums.)

3- Calls to action go both ways: Print-to-Web and Web-to-Print. (Editorial strategy helps drive user actions and interactions.)

4- The medium does not define the message. (Everything has not been done before.)

5- Constraints are good. (Concentrate on what you can do.)

6- Done properly, content collection for two mediums should not be more expensive than for one. (Plan when planning is most useful — at the beginning.)

7- The web is not the only digital medium. (Apps are not websites on little screens.)

8- Find a designer who can write and a writer who can design. Put them in a room together. (WYSIWIDW: What you see is what is designed well.)

9- Calculate your print costs per page and web costs per page. (You already know these #’s right?)

Pushing the envelope

The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo

Magazines: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Future of The Book

—Ian

Stories from the last week or so worth mentioning.

Happy reading,

—Wendy Joan

Journalist Lawrence Wright’s ‘Trip to Al-Qaeda,’ Fresh Air

“Journalism is a flawed profession, but it has a self-correcting mechanism. The rule of journalism is: talk to everybody. In the course of writing my book, I interviewed 600 people and I didn’t get everybody but I got a lot of people. Some of those sources I interviewed dozens of times and I find that the more people you talk to, you get a broader range of opinion and facts than you can possibly get from any small group—but then you can go back and check things that don’t square with what you heard before.”

Right to Remain Silent, This American Life

Act Two: “For 17 months, New York police officer Adrian Schoolcraft recorded himself and his fellow officers on the job, including their supervisors ordering them to do all sorts of things that police aren’t supposed to do. For example, downgrading real crimes into lesser ones, so they wouldn’t show up in the crime statistics and make their precinct look bad.”

The World’s Worst Textbooks, Foreign Policy Magazine

“The Texas Board of Education ignited an international firestorm last spring when members approved a controversial new social studies curriculum. The new standards skew hard to the right—championing American capitalism throughout and suggesting religious intentions on the part of the founding fathers.”

America is a Joke, New York Magazine

“It wasn’t exactly an innocent year, given the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Columbine and the two frames of a topless woman hidden in Disney’s The Rescuers. But since 1999, when Stewart took over as host, the context in which The Daily Show operates has been radically altered. Terrorist attacks, two wars, and a global economic meltdown have charged the political atmosphere. More important for Stewart and his show has been the media transformation. Print is crumbling. The mainstream TV networks have steadily shed seriousness and viewers. The Internet, a minor player at the turn of the century, has become overcrowded with opinion silos. As the new century began, Fox News Channel was finding its fair-and-balanced footing and Glenn Beck, an itinerant radio shock jock, was trying on a new persona, “Limbaugh Lite.” Today, Fox News is an evil empire and Beck just led a messianic Washington rally. America’s politicians, willingly or not, often seem like they’re actors in scripts created by cable producers.”

Indus River Outsider, New York Times Magazine

“Some weeks ago I flew from New York to Islamabad, Pakistan, to experience summer in the country where my parents were born and where I lived as a child. I love summer in Pakistan: the mangoes, the monsoon and, this year, Ramadan, the mystical month of the Islamic calendar, all came in August. A week after I landed, the monsoon clouds arrived, but this time the Indus River swelled and burst its banks: my vacation coincided with the largest natural disaster in Pakistan’s history.”

(Photos: Lawrence Wright with some of the people he interviewed for The Looming Tower, his history of al-Qaeda, Courtesy of Larwrence Wright; Schoolchildren with flag photo from Foreign Policy Magazine; Jon Stewart photo by Danielle Levitt; Tent image by Holly Wales.)

What We Do

— Ian

Saying that print will go away is like saying that painting will be replaced by sculpture. There are certainly more dimensions to sculpture and it is more tactile, but the constraints and effect of painting overwhelmingly hold our interest.

Surviving requires evolving

No one media stands alone anymore. In order for both a media-type and a campaign to succeed there must be:

1- An understanding of each media-type’s strengths, weaknesses and inherent objectives

2- An understanding of how to integrate media-types

3- An understanding of how to measure individual and integrated media-types.

Sounds simple enough, but a quick look through your local magazine stand will bring to the fore magazine after magazine acting as if a URL mention was akin to an “integrated content strategy.” The evolution of print design is as much about the operational side of print as it is the contextual side. Publishing frequency, writing style and design have all been forced to adopt more web-like strategies and techniques.

While the doomsday-speak of print and reduction of publication frequency is a financial decision, it is also a logistical shift of dollars from one media-type to another. But the transition is not as much away from print to the web as it is to the web, to take place in a different type of conversation with readers/users.

Print represents and presents brand ideology without a feedback loop or a CMS — the web embraces that feedback loop. Sometimes you need that “this is what we believe and it isn’t up for discussion” channel. Other times you need to engage your audience. A comprehensive content strategy negates an either/or scenario between print and web and embraces all media types.  The challenge is integrating a declarative media-type (print) with an interrogative media-type (web).

The action of keeping magazines on your shelf is very different from saving bookmarks in your browser.

Integration requires convergence

At the core of the print to web conversation is content development and content gathering tailored by media type. This primary hurdle is often difficult for organizations as it requires a retooling of resources, operations and commitment to print/digital convergence. Additionally, new devices and media types are not requirements. I recently overheard the following statement: “We need our magazine on the Kindle, who can do that?” I couldn’t help thinking, “Why?”

Why should begin every conversation, how comes next, followed by another “why”, then when followed by “why,” etc. Why never stops providing value, especially as it relates to cross-channel content development and the integration of media types. The most common example of forgetting to ask “why” is the print magazine PDF link being proffered as a digital edition of a magazine. A close second is the iPad version of a website that is just a smaller, less functional version of the website. What is lacking in both of these examples is contextual relevance and an understanding of the relationship between the user, the content and the device.

It is better to chase change than have it chase you.

— Ian

Keep an eye out for Print to Web – #3 (How to ensure print and web get along).