For the Content Hungry: The Eat Media Blog

Content wants to be free.

We all want free content.

But somebody has to pay for it, and that somebody is you. And me.

What are we willing to pay to get our content for free? What costs are we willing to pay beyond the monetary?

How much of our privacy are we willing to have invaded to get the information and convenience we desire free of charge?

How good does the content need to be in order for us to part with our hard-earned bucks? I was certainly willing to pay for New York Times opinion articles when the Times Select program was in place, but apparently, there were not enough people like me as the program was discontinued.

Now, the Wall Street Journal is one of the few major content providers to charge for content, but it’s not content I’m willing to pay for. However, when an iPhone app recently appeared that allowed free access to WSJ content, I was all over it. Rupert Murdoch is, apparently, quite upset at the existence of the app, but the technology does not exist to charge iPhone users, yet.

Many sites exact a non-monetary toll, requiring you to create an account that collects personal data that, theoretically, can be used to market products to you. These sites do assume that you are faithful in reproducing your biographical information. I am not. I have signed up for many a site as Phil McCracken, Hugh Jass or Jacques Strappe. Age 104. Etc. (While this makes me feel better, I doubt this small-time deviancy really affects the value of the database.)

But there’s other information about yourself online that you can’t hide from the marketers.

If you have a Gmail account, as I do, you already agree to let Google read your email. Why do you think the ads you see are uncannily related to the content of the message you are reading?

Troubling? Yes. Worth giving up the convenience of my FREE Gmail account? Not yet.

(As an aside, it’s really wonderful when contextual advertising fails spectacularly. See this great juxtoposition between a swine flu story, an advertisement for White Castle’s new pulled pork sandwiches, and the cover of The Jerusalem Post. Kosher? No. Funny. Yes.)
Contextual advertising is just one of the tools the advertisers have to get their meat hooks into us when we’re partaking of the free content.

On a logical level, and this is coming from a former newspaperman, I know that there is a cost to producing content. I know that top-notch, unique content costs even more. For years, I readily paid a nominal fee every day to have that content delivered to my doorstep, but the internet changed the content landscape in a fundamental way.

(Interestingly, I pay more each day for internet service than I ever paid for a newspaper subscription; ironically, none of the money I pay my ISP goes to the content creators. It’s like if my newspaper subscription money just stayed with the paper carrier and never went to the New York Times.)

So I am conflicted. I know that advertising pays for content, but I am used to getting my content for free on the internet and there is a part of me that will do what it takes to make sure I don’t have to pay, monetarily or otherwise. However, there is exceptional content out there that I have paid for in the past and would pay for again rather than go without (Sunday just isn’t Sunday without The Times, printed or not.).

And I have resigned myself to the fact that Google reading my Gmail is probably just the beginning of the future of advertising that’s directed solely at me based on where I have been browsing and what I have been writing. Behavioral targeting is the next step, but that’s another post.

— Jonathan

Photo by Fagerjord

If you are just graduating J-school or have recently left another industry and for some odd reason, have a hankering to parlay your writing skills into the field of journalism, you may have heard that this is not the greatest time to be entering the business.

In one sense, you would be right. The field has lost thousands of jobs in the past couple of years as several factors have come together to put a serious financial crimp on the industry.

So, the likelihood of you landing a job at a major daily newspaper or national magazine is low. Very low.

But if you swing over to JournalismJobs.com, you will see that there are hundred of jobs available in the field. They are just probably not the sort of job you’d have previously considered. And they are not in the sorts of places you think of as journalism hot spots.

Idaho Falls, Idaho. Sierra Vista, Arizona. Waynesville, North Carolina. Sharon, Pennsylvania. And many other spots that line the blue highways of America.

But these jobs, most of them at small community newspapers, offer an immense number of benefits.

1.    You get to hone your craft every day in close proximity to your subjects. This is both a blessing and a curse. I won’t elaborate further.
2.    You get to practice every facet of journalism. You will write news and features, editorials and columns, sports and business, you name it. You will take photos. You will shoot video. You will learn a whole host of computer programs. You will blog.
3.    You will learn humility. You will screw up and it will be in everyone’s hands the next day. Your office will likely be on Main St. People won’t be shy about pointing out your shortcomings.
4.    You will get to know a community better than you have ever known any place in your life.
5.    You will get to experience the upside and the downside of the sort of Mayberry-like living that’s still present in broad swaths of rural America.
6.    The public will get to know you better than you’d ever dreamed of. People you’ve never met will approach you in public places with “something that has to go in the paper.” Depending on your personality, you may or may not get used to being a local celebrity.
7.    You will get creative. The paper must go out every week and some weeks, especially around the holidays (and during the off-season if you are living in a tourist town), there will be NOTHING going on.
8.    You will become a better writer because you will be writing a lot. You will learn to edit your own work, quickly and ruthlessly.
9.    You will also learn to edit the work of the barely literate and the hardly coherent, AKA, letters to the editor.
10.    Finally, you will hone you web skills. Even the tiniest newspapers have a website these days and you will be maintaining it.

Full disclosure: I spent 10 years working at community newspapers in Colorado, Nevada and Georgia. And if you decide to take the plunge, read Jock Lauterer’s Community Journalism, Relentlessly Local.

— Jonathan
Photo by Marcin Wichary

The swine flu outbreak has been hogging the headlines for a couple of days now. A quick survey this morning revealed 15 flu stories on the front page of WashingtonPost.com, nine on the front page of NYTimes.com, 14 on the front page of HuffingtonPost.com and 18 on the front page of DrudgeReport.com.

That is an awful lot of virus-laden porcine content.

And why? Thus far, only a small number of people have died, none of them in the U.S. The swine flu strain that’s behind all the headlines does not appear to be any more virulent than other strains of flu. Yes, swine flu (H1N1) does transmit easily from person to person, unlike the much more virulent bird flu (H5N1) that has been causing unease among epidemiologists for the last several years.

So where does the balance lie between informing and alarming? What are the ethical constraints of the content provider in a public health related situation?

Howard Kurtz, in his Media Notes column in today’s Washington Post, said that simply by virtue of the sheer volume of swine flu coverage, it would be reasonable to infer that there’s a real emergency.

Turn on your TV, hit one of the news networks and it’s “all flu, all the time.”

One commentator noted that the 24-hour news cycle necessitated bludgeoning viewers with the same information over and over. He also noted that scared people tuned in more often and for longer periods of time, so providing “context” for the news—i.e., running a story that goes beyond the headlines and that puts the risk of the swine flu in perspective—stood directly in the way of ratings.

So despite the sell-out that seems to be going on at every major news outlet, ethics still matter for content providers. Ethics matter because trust matters. Sensationalize at your peril. You may get a bump in traffic today, but it won’t be without cost.

—Jonathan

Photo by sarihuella

I went into a Dunkin’ Donuts Monday morning for the first time in I don’t know how long, and while I was initially annoyed that there was a long line, it gave me a few minutes to take a look around and see what had changed since I’d last been in…

First, and most importantly to me, I was able to see many trays of doughnuts glowing in a big rack behind the counter. And they had some Boston Creams left. Dunkin’ Donuts’ core content was not being neglected.

I looked at the dozen or so tables in the place and noticed something shocking: No one was eating doughnuts. Some people were tucking into breakfast sandwiches. Everyone was drinking coffee. And not just the 50-cents-a-cup black tar you associate with a doughnut shop, but fancy coffee drinks, the kind people pay $4.59 for at Starbucks without batting an eye.

I watched all five people in line in front of me order big, fancy coffees and not one single doughnut. Did I mention there was a six-car wait at the drive through and that all I saw being passed out the window was coffee?

The Dunkin’ Donuts content menu had been expanded, and at least in the very small sample I had (one data point), it appeared to be a resounding success.

The clerk seemed a little stunned when I order two doughnuts and no coffee, but someone else must have been eating them, because the two I had were fresh and delicious, just as I’d remembered.

Not a few blocks away at the nearest Starbucks, the same story was being told, albeit in reverse. The coffee was still headed out the drive-though window and people were still hanging out inside, mooching the bandwidth on the free Wi-Fi, but a quick look at the menu revealed new breakfast sandwiches and, wait for it, doughnuts. I had one of the doughnuts the other day, a cakey lemon-zest flavored ring that while good, was just a little too highbrow to work as a doughnut.

Starbucks had expanded its content offerings too, but success may prove elusive.

What’s interesting is that both Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks decided they could no longer survive as content specialists. Coffee wasn’t enough for Starbucks and doughnuts were not enough for Dunkin’. And it’s not that both brands’ signature products weren’t appealing. They just weren’t enough to sustain growth.

Which brings us to that content inventory you’ve been meaning to do. If  your focus is relatively narrow, are your customers being forced to look for elsewhere to fulfill some of their needs? You may be the recognized expert in your field, but do you need to offer a greater breadth of content to keep your customers happy? If so, choose the direction you expand with care. As both Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonalds (with the McCafe) have found out, its often easier to offer less expensive luxury goods than it is to go upscale with a humble product like Starbucks tried with its doughnut.

— Jonathan

The virtual world’s approximation of the real world is getting more precise every day. Virtual pets have gone from the crude Tamigochi to the strangely lifeless Aibo and it’s possible to take an online video tour of nearly anywhere on earth, but we have a long way to go before we reach the level of Star Trek’s holodeck, and can actually be immersed in a virtual world.

As I compose this post, I am listening to Birdsong Radio on iTunes, and were I to close my eyes, I might believe I was in a distant, verdant grove, winged creatures darting through green clerestories above me.

But soothing as the chirping, tweeting (Damn you, Twitter, for corrupting that word.) and trilling may be, it leaves out the rest of the senses. I can even set my screensaver to “Tropical Forest” but since I’ve had deep drinks from nature’s wellspring, I’m not fooled. The soft loam beneath my boots, the warm embrace of tropical air, the scent of, well… life, are all missing.

What, you may ask, does this post even tangentially have to do with content?

The following headline came through my news feed yesterday: “Humans may be losers if technological nature replaces the real thing, psychologists warn.” The story, from the online magazine Science Daily, summarized a study from Current Directions in Psychological Science which indicated that not only will humans suffer on many levels from failing to get enough exposure to real nature, but that the natural world, reduced to sound bites and panoramas on computer screens will suffer as humans become more and more detached from the real-life issues that threaten wild spaces.

The rest of this blog post contains a set of instructions that will take you away from this screen, so jot them down on some scrap paper, or better yet, simply commit them to memory.

1.    Stop.

2.    Take your hand off the mouse and slowly back away from the computer.

3.    Go outside.

4.    Start walking away from the noise.

5.    Don’t stop until you reach something that passes for a natural landscape, be it a city park, a beach or the Grand Canyon.

6.    Find a quiet spot.

7.    Sit down.

8.    Be still.

9.    Feed your soul.

10.    Repeat daily.

— Jonathan

Photo by Clearly Ambiguous

It’s not Billy Mays’ fault that his voice could drive a train down a dirt road.

How many times have you peacefully dozed off in front of the TV, a dog snoozing under each arm, only to be slapped into consciousness by:

I have removed startled dachshunds from my neck one too many times.

Apparently, loud commercials are also the bete noir of California Congresswoman Anna G. Eshoo, who introduced the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act last June. The bill would prohibit commercials from being broadcast louder than the programs they reside in.

The advertising industry is: a) up in arms about any more federal regulation of what they do and how they do it; b) denying that commercials are being broadcast louder than TV programs; and c) admitting that making the commercials louder may be annoying, but it is effective in getting people’s attention.

They’ve been drinking too much of their own Kool-Aid again. Do they really think that making consumers angry is the way to go? I know that annoying commercials have never gotten me to buy anything and have made me vow to never buy certain products, including everything pitched by the stentorian Mr. Mays.

Online, the ad assault on the senses continues, with purveyors of rich media advertisements continually coming up with new ways to annoy. Pock-up blocker enabled? Too bad. We’ve got your flashy, shaking ads, your auto-play video ads, your expandable ads (those awful things that fold across the page or explode in size when you mouse over them) and your floating ads (the ones that bob and weave across the page, daring you to click on the little “x” that will make them go away, then moving at the last second so you click on the ad anyway).

And with people up-armoring their browsers to block all advertising, what’s a marketer left to do? What is left behind once the ads are gone?

Content.

Learn to love it. It’s the final frontier.

We are devouring so much media these days: websites, emails, newsletters, TV, radio, print (albeit dwindling), online videos and social media. With this avalanche of content you’d think that we would be less detailed about picking up on the nuances, less effected by poor communication and design, but I find the opposite to be true. The more media I consume the more neon orange and off-putting the really bad content becomes and the more pastoral and engaging the well written/designed content becomes.

Here are a few examples of messages I recently received that turned me off:

WHERE’S THE BFF

“Hi Ian,

I’m thrilled to personally invite you to Mediabistro Circus 2009, Extraordinary Impact: Where Media Meets Technology. An impressive roster of new media MacGyvers will share ingenious ways to make the most of limited resources in a challenging economy.

At Mediabistro Circus, you’ll learn how to:

Turn your passion into a business with Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek
Give your brand personality with Gary Vaynerchuck, host of Wine Library TV
Build relationships that power success with Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone
Create a journalism of engagement with John A. Byrne, executive editor, Businessweek.com
Create your own social network with Gina Bianchini, founder and CEO of social networking platform Ning.com. And we’ll have entertainment, valuable opportunities to meet your colleagues, and some fun surprises.

One especially good bit of news is that we’ve reduced the ticket price this year to make it easier for you to attend and learn from these inspiring innovators. The early-bird 2-day pass for one person is $695, and the group rate is just $245. Register now to lock in these deals.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Laurel
Laurel Touby
founder & cyberhostess | mediabistro.com”

Communication Next Time

While I appreciate the “personal invitation” once I scroll past the fold I realize I am really not that special. “Personal invitation” is camouflaged marketing lingo for there is a field in our database named FirstName. If this was indeed “personal”,  Laurel Touby would have sent me an email not mailer@mediabistro.com. It is these small things that differentiate building real trust and just asking for the sale.

Next time just send me, and the other 100k people in your database, a more informative email and skip the personal business, it’s not personal, it’s business—and I understand we’re not bff’s.

WHERE’S THE DISASTER?

I, like much of wired America, order many things from Amazon. I have very few complaints—except this.

It wasn’t raining on January 27th; it was neither too hot nor too cold. Everything was perfect about the day except I needed dual monitors to get started on a content migration project and needed (4) Tritton TRI-UV100 SEE2 USB 2.0 SVGA Adapters and they weren’t in the office when I arrived. This created a wee bit of stress that was further amplified by the lack of knowledge concerning a potential “natural disaster.”

This got me:

a. Worried about the UPS driver.

b. Wondering if a tornado was headed towards me.

c. Wrestling with navigation at weather.com (which actually is a disaster).

Communication Next Time

Next time tell me my package is running late and give me a realistic date of when it’s going to arrive— “Delayed”, is just fine.

The world lost one of its greatest storytellers when radio-broadcasting legend Paul Harvey passed away at age 90 on Feb. 28.

Sure, his demographics skewed older, more conservative and more rural than a lot of the people on the East and “Left” coasts of the U.S., but for “flyover country,” Paul Harvey’s daily news and commentary reports were a part of daily life for decades.

And for anyone who has taken a cross-country road trip and made the romantic, if foolhardy, decision to stay off the interstates and stick to the “blue highways,” Harvey’s news reports, found on many an AM station, could be heard in areas far from any FM signal.

Harvey was never shy about including his opinion in his newscasts. He knew his audience well and spoke to them directly, with plain talk, a staccato cadence and a comedian’s gift for timing.

The talk radio giants of today, the Howard Sterns and Rush Limbaughs of the world, owe a huge debt to Paul Harvey.

We won’t get to hear “The rest of the story” again, but here’s a few words from Harvey’s final broadcast:

Good Day.

— Jonathan

It was only a 20-second fill before the top of the hour during NPR’s Morning Edition today, but I laughed so hard I nearly plowed into the bus that had suddenly stopped in front of me.

Here was what host Ari Shapiro said: “Author Jane Austen might be rolling over in her grave. A book called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies promises ‘all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action.’ And there’s the film: Pride and Predator. The New York Times says it will ‘Juxtapose brooding aristocrats with a brutal alien that lands in 1800s-era Britain, attacking residents and leaving them with neither sense nor sensibility.’

A quick search later in the morning revealed that, yes, there is a whole industry that marries literary classics with aliens or the undead.

Mashups of seemingly disparate concepts are nothing new, just look at what Harry Turtledove has done with historical fiction and his classic “Guns of the South.”

And now, they are part of the backbone of most user-generated content on the internet. I wonder, though, is the world is really ready to see what happens when Lizzie Bennett meets the living dead?

— Jonathan

If you’ve ever watched an episode of Hell’s Kitchen or Kitchen Nightmares, you have seen (and heard) the F-bomb machine that is Gordon Ramsay. It takes a lot of moxie to walk into someone else’s business and tell them they don’t know their a*$ from their elbow, but episode after episode Ramsay does it. While both shows are entertaining, Kitchen Nightmares showcases some quality project management and problem solving skills bloody relevant to content strategy solutions.

Here is the flow of the show:

1. Assess the problem as an outside observer—Ramsay inspects the restaurant, staff and food.

*Content strategists need to find the root of the problem. Is the design struggling due to limitations with the CMS? Is the CMS choking because of an IT issue? Is the content irrelevant because of usability issues?

2. Inspect the systems being used to manage the team/projects—Ramsay watches the way employees interact and inspects the physical and interpersonal ways they distribute information from management, to the front of the house staff, on to the back of the house staff and back to management.

*Content strategists often play the role of cartographers. They take migration maps, design specs, software limitations, internal politics, wishes-on-horses, the beggars-that-ride and put the puzzle pieces together. When they are one of many vendors on a project they must stitch together vendor and client systems from: Word, Excel, online collaborative tools, Visio docs, XML, forwarded emails, IM’s and phone calls. It ain’t always fun and it ain’t always easy.

3. Remove/replace unproductive team members. Simplify complicated systems. Create authenticity, transparency and accountability—Most of the F-Bombs and “you Donkey” comments are saved for this portion of the show, this is when Ramsay gets hands-on with the staff, operations and makes projectiles out of overcooked salmon and soggy veggies.

*Content Strategists are most effective if brought in at the outset of a project but often they parachute in during the middle of a project. When that happens, identifying your strong and weak links is essential. Create new transparent systems and get all vendors, team members and management focused on the same goal.

4. Give the new system a test run. Assess. Repeat—Chef Ramsay’s new menu is usually a struggle the first dinner service. There is usually push back from management and staff but in the end he reviews, adjusts and makes it work.

*The process of creating a content strategy is…a process. It is a living, fluid monster that learns and moves and occasionally leaves a little present in the middle of the room for you after a long day at work. The ongoing execution of a content strategy takes work, in our experience at least two cycles, before finding a balance between stakeholder/content creator/editor and end-user. Be patient. Execute one, cohesive strategy. Have lots of paper towels on hand.

A successful content strategy consists of many sciences, oftentimes multiple vendors and the ability to be both uber-macro and atomically micro. Though Information Architecture doesn’t embrace all categories it is incredible useful for the heavy lifting, “whose bucket does this go in”, decision-making.  Here is a great outline and introduction to Information Architecture sans F-Bombs and cockroaches.

“In today’s fast-paced world, everyone’s looking for a shortcut. It can be very difficult to convince people, particularly senior mangers with little hands-on web experience, of the importance of taking the time to do research and develop a solid strategy…The immediate perception of progress feels good but often comes at the expense of overall efficiency and effectiveness. Since information architecture forms the foundation of the entire web site, mistakes made here will have a tremendous ripple effect.”

Morville & Rosenfeld
Information Architecture-for the World Wide Web
1998

—Ian