Is it ever OK to lie with your content?

Quick answer: Yes, but only if you are very good. More on what “good” means in a second.

Back in July, spy photos and brief video surfaced on several automobile enthusiast websites. Depicted was a prototype Porsche station wagon, known in automotive parlance as a shooting brake.

The photos and video caused a sensation and spread throughout the enthusiast community, driving loads of comments on blogs and rampant speculation as to when the boys from Zuffenhausen were going to release the official car to the public. The Frankfurt Auto Show? Tokyo? People wanted to know.

The questions continued to pour in. Did this mean Porsche was abandoning it’s oft-maligned SUV, the Cayenne? Was this new shooting brake, clearly based on the entry-level Cayman, going to be Porsche’s only venture into the world of station wagons? Was Porsche going Volvo on the world, and completing its sellout?

The company had nothing to say. And if the voices clamoring in the blogosphere had calmed down for just a minute, they might have heard the faint sound of snickering.

As it turned out, Porsche’s shooting brake was a fake. The whole thing was dreamed up by the then soon-to-be-unemployed staff of Top Gear America as a parting gift to the show’s many fans.

Most people hate being duped, but in this case, there was no backlash against the show. Accumulate enough goodwill in a community and you will be forgiven the occasional whoopee cushion on the chair.

If you were inspired by the Top Gear crew’s antics and are determined to set the world afire with your own tall tale, here are a few things to keep in mind if you want to be good and do it right..

1. Execute. The only way you have even half a chance is to come up with something clever and then make it sing. It ain’t going to work if people don’t believe it.

2. Don’t mess with people’s emotions in a negative way. I think we can all agree that the Balloon Boy fiasco—originally dreamed up as a publicity stunt—managed to generate only the wrong kind of attention once the truth came out. Nothing that ends with a criminal investigation is worth it.

3. Enhance your cool. Some people don’t react well to being pranked. There isn’t much you can do about this, but you are required to have a sense of humor when dealing with those who don’t.

4. Don’t forget your audience. The Top Gear stunt worked well because the automobile enthusiast community is used to manufacturers trying to hide new models (often in plain sight) and used to manufacturers building show cars that never make it to production. Plus, these are enthusiasts; they love to talk about cars, the good, the bad and the ugly.

5. Be prepared for blowback. Some people, bless their gullible hearts, won’t understand the joke and may begin acting on some of the falsehoods you’ve laid out. Years ago, I wrote a newspaper column, published on April 1, which stated that the legislature had just passed a law changing Daylight Savings Time to mean a two-hour forward leap instead of the customary one. Despite naming my fictitious governor’s press secretary Jacques Strap and despite reminding readers to look carefully at the dateline of the newspaper, we were deluged with calls wondering when this was taking place. Exercise your power judiciously.

—Jonathan
(@bentpiton)

If you want great content, nothing beats a compelling story.

It’s the first rest day of the 2009 Tour de France cycling race and in the absence of having to follow live updates from the roads of Gaul today, let’s look at nine elements of great storytelling as illustrated by this year’s Tour.

1. A rich backstory. This year’s iteration of the Tour has something that has been sorely lacking for the past few years: a compelling backstory. The backstory is one that’s as old as human civilization: the conflict between the power and vitality of youth versus the wisdom and experience of age.
2. A young brash upstart. 2007 Tour de France champion Alberto Contador, known as “El Pistolero,” (The best cyclists get cool nicknames, unless they already have a Saturday matinee idol name, like Lance Armstrong.) was the heavy favorite coming in to the race. Not only was he riding for the strongest team, Astana, but he has proven himself to be one of the best climbers in cycling, winning the trifecta of cycling’s grand tours—Spain, Italy and France—already in his young career.
3. The old lion, back for one more shot at the title. Seven-time Tour champion Lance Armstrong stunned the cycling world last fall when he announced he was returning to competitive racing and planned to compete in the Tour de France, cycling’s biggest race. Armstrong, who spent more time in the tabloids than on his bike in the past few years, said he was mainly coming back to draw attention to his Lance Armstrong Foundation , one of the premier cancer education and support resources, but most pundits speculated that if Armstrong was going to race, he was going to race to win.
4. A grueling test. The Grande Boucle, as it’s known in France, is cycling’s most demanding test. Three weeks. Thousands of kilometers in the saddle. Tens of thousands of feet of climbing. Nowhere to hide. This year’s course is somewhat peculiar for several reasons.  The team time trial was back, but the individual time trials are short and technical. The race’s two forays into alpine territory feature only three summit finishes and one of the Tour’s legendary obstacles, the Col du Tourmalet, was placed in the middle of stage, reducing its race impact to nil.
5. A shot across the bow. In the race’s only summit finish in the Pyrenees, into the ski station at Arcalis in Andorra, a select group of contenders rode together toward the summit until Contador, apparently not acting on team orders, attacked the field and rode away alone toward the finish. This show of strength added fuel to the fires of discord between Armstrong and Contador and indicated a possible split in the team.
6. The French. Can you minimize the fact that this race is taking place in France? No way. The French love a good story and they love to be right in the middle of it. After a love/hate relationship with Armstrong while he was winning the Tour, the French have jumped on the Lance bandwagon this July. As Velo News editor-at-large John Wilcockson (@johnwilcockson) noted last week, “The French love an underdog—and old dogs.”
7. An unwritten code of conduct. When Contador took off on the road to Arcalis, Armstrong was bound by the part of the cycling code that does not allow you to attack a teammate once he goes up the road alone.  Armstrong instead stayed back to mark the other contenders, none of whom tried to follow Contador. Contador is bound by the same code (of course, they are more like guidelines than actual rules) and has stated that he won’t follow an attacking Armstrong when the race hits the Alps later this week.
8. A near insurmountable obstacle. What happens in the Alps may not even matter because of what stands in the way of riders on the penultimate day of the Tour. Two words that strike fear in the heart of every cyclist: Mont Ventoux. A summit finish on the “Giant of Provence” will likely decide who will ride into Paris the next day wearing the race leader’s yellow jersey.
9. Wild cards. Armstrong and Contador are not the only world-class cyclists competing in the Tour this summer. In addition to two other potential podium finishers on the Astana team (Levi Leipheimer and Andreas Kloden), 2008 TdF winner Carlos Sastre, two-time runner up Cadel Evans and others lurk, waiting for an opening.

Can Lance Armstrong beat back Contador’s challenge and the sands of time to win an eighth Tour?  Coming back to “win one more” rarely succeeds, but Armstrong can look at one other great champion who made it happen: Pete Sampras. Sampras won his fourteenth and final major championship, the U.S. Open, two years after most pundits had written him off.

The 2009 Tour de France has all the makings of race for the ages and certainly has more intrigue than the last few iterations. When will we know the true quality of this year’s story? Not for a while yet.

A story only becomes truly great when it passes into legend and someday when that legend becomes myth.

— Jonathan

(@bentpiton)

Photo of Mt Ventoux Summit by Pereubu

Photo of Tom Simpson Memorial on Mt. Ventoux by Welland

Despite being a self-professed non-tweeter with a twitter account, and an avid follower of tweetingtoohard.com, I have been fascinated by Twitter’s role in the disputed Iranian election.

Today, between 2:00–2:01 p.m. eastern standard time—10:30–10:31 local time in Tehran—104 new tweets were added to the #iranelection thread, the primary national news source for Iran since Iranian press coverage was suspended last Friday. Between 2:00–2:10 p.m., 671 tweets were added to #iranelection.

A tweet heard round the world, repurposed by countless major news sources, reads

“We have no national press coverage in Iran, everyone should help spread Mousavi’s message. One Person=One Broadcaster.”

I am excited by the power of a raw human voice without photos, videos or sound clips.

I am excited by the initiative of people to spread the news that is nearly impossible to spread.

I am excited that the rest of the world is listening and taking action.

This is bigger than Iran and the Iranian election.

What does the Iran election mean for the future of social networking?

—Wendy Joan

Simon Dumenco has a great interview with David Carr of the New York Times on Advertising Age’s Mediaworks blog. Carr talks about his new book (now out in paperback) and the rapid decline of media fortunes of late:

“I think one thing that people do not understand is, as recently as four or five years ago, to be a member of Manhattan media, you weren’t rich, but you lived as a rich person might. You went to the parties that a rich person would go to, you ate the food that a rich person would eat, you drank the vodka that a rich person would drink, and you’d end up in black cars, and you’d end up sometimes on boats and in helicopters. We lived as kings, and it convinced us, I think, that there was a significant underlying value to what we did. And I think we’re finding out now that the real, actual value of journalism in the current economy is not that high, and that what the dot-com bubble did and Tina Brown and others did to boost the value of journalism and writing to the point where some people were being paid $5 a word—well, I think there are a lot of people right now, really talented people, who are working for 50 cents or a dollar a word, and you know what? It’s pretty hard to make a living doing that.

So that’s one tier, and the other tier is I feel as if media has become a kind of reverse roach motel, in that once you’re out, you’re probably not coming back in.”

Read the rest here.

—Jonathan

As unassuming column, hidden in the corner of this morning’s New York Times (A15), has incited a message board race riot.

The article, “Made in India But Published in New Haven,” by Peter Applebome, chronicles a recent experiment by the New Haven Advocate. For a single edition, the alternative weekly recruited Indian journalists and content writers to report on news, art, film, dining, music and sex. The idea wasn’t to cut costs (à la Orange County Register), but to find out what happens when local stories assigned to writers halfway around the world.

The articles aren’t bad. They’re appropriately and knowledgeably written for an alternative press audience. Cultural taboos aside, a sex advice column, is generic in its inherent question and answer format, and doesn’t require any firsthand reporting. Neighborhood restaurant reviews and local news, on the other hand, raise an eyebrow, because you know in advance that the writer has never set foot in said restaurant and, arguably has never set foot in New Haven, Connecticut.

In their editorial, the New Haven Advocate staff explained the outsourcing project to their readers. Ultimately, the experiment boils down to a “what if” on a global scale. In a cheeky voice the alternative media knows all too well, the Advocate staff present their experiment as a word of warning to the news industry—it’s not that hard to outsource local news.

I thought outsourcing local journalism was subject enough but, delving deeper into the Advocate’s message board, a new story became overwhelmingly apparent.

Comments from the community reflect a vastly different story than the one Advocate editors are telling. The first commenter on a thread of many denounces the project as journalistic “betrayal,” “ludicrous” and coins the term “Slumdog Journalism” that is used over and over again throughout the thread. One or two commenters praise the project as an interesting exercise, while another criticizes the editors’ lack of knowledge on the business of outsourcing. The majority of the commenters bypass the Advocate editors’ intentions, and turn the conversation into a pro- or anti-outsourcing argument. Fair trade is brought in, as well as China and fluctuating global currencies.

And no one even mentions the fact that “journalists” have been doing online, rather than in-person, research for years.

Maybe these commenters are angry because American jobs are being replaced overseas. Maybe workers who telecommute feel like they aren’t taken seriously enough. “Outsourcing” has an extremely negative connotation. “Outsourcing” is linked to the idea of more work for less money and less quality.

The Takeaway
How knowledgeable are your journalists and content writers? Are they the most knowledgeable and qualified writer for the job, do they have the capacity and flexibility to become the best writer for the job, or should you expand your contact list?

—Wendy Joan

Photo from the New Haven Advocate

Freelance writers, ya gotta love ‘em. Sure, they can be a prickly and fickle bunch, but spend enough time prospecting and you will uncover the geniuses among them. Treat these gems right and they will take you far.

If you’ve ever worked as an editor, you’ve had to learn a lot about the care and feeding of this unique subset of humanity. Here are the top 10 tips for managing a stable of off-site freelance writers:

1. Write the most comprehensive creative brief you possibly can. Initially, some freelance writers are like Harry Potter’s house elf, Kreacher—they require extremely precise instructions if you want the desired result. Leave even the tiniest gap in the creative brief and the story you had in mind may not be the story you are returned.
2. In addition to the creative brief, provide as much background as possible about the publication the piece will appear in and who makes up the target audience. A story on fusion technology that’s written for engineers will look a lot different than one written for a general audience. The background is also a good place to tell the writer what NOT to do. Again, this will save a lot of time for both of you.
3. Specify the length, the tone, the takeaway and the format for the story. If you want 1,500-word case study written for MBAs that concludes with a list of five process implementation tips, ask for it.
4. Be clear, up front, about the expectations on revisions. If you have a kill-fee policy, be up front with it: writers need to know going in that if they fail to revise a piece to a reasonable point after two revisions, they will get the kill fee only (and probably won’t ever see another assignment from you). Though if you reach the kill fee phase, some of the blame lies with you, editor, for failure to vet the writer properly or for failing to adequately communicate what you desired in the story.
5. Tell the writer what they will be paid, how they will be paid and when they will be paid. Honor your financial commitment to the writer in a timely fashion.
6. If a piece needs major alterations, let the writer do them. Give as much direction as is necessary and let the writer do the work. The piece belongs to them. (At least until it’s published, depending on your contractual agreement.)
7. Remember that your writers will be working on other projects at the same time as yours, so you may not be able to get instant turn-around on revisions.
8. Be specific about the supporting materials you expect to be turned in with the piece. If you want source contact information, brief source biographies and source headshots, along with five links to related material and a 50-word call to action, ask for them. And if you want something in a specific format, ask. But be reasonable and respectful: If you think you need to ask for a full interview transcript, why did you hire the writer?
9. Be available for questions. No matter how good your assignment is, questions may come up—some may improve the story in a way you’d never considered. Writers must be able to reach you by phone, email or IM during normal business hours. The work you save may be your own.
10. Be clear about the deadline, but also be flexible with your writers, especially the ones you have an established relationship with. There should be enough room in your editorial calendar to wait a few more days for information from a key source. If there isn’t, build it in for the next round.

A final, bonus tip: Writers are people too. Treat them like adults (as long as they continue to act like them). Keep the lines of communication open, honest and timely.

— Jonathan

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

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

This was my first year at the IA Summit, which took place March 18–22 in Memphis, Tenn. Though Eat Media’s primary functions are content strategy, content delivery and content management, we love content and believe it is only as good as it is displayed and presented—making IA pivotal to our success.

In other words, if Gore Vidal wrote a daily column scoring Obama on his every move but it was buried four levels deep in 14pt Comic Sans on Havenworks, we’re guessing no one would read it. (And if they did, we’d be praying their seizure medicine was close at hand.)

You can read all the IA Summit reviews by searching on Twitter for #ias09, #IASummit, #contentstrategy. You can also check out many of the presentations from the event on Slideshare.

Since many of the posts have already reviewed the high/low points of the conference (see JJG’s closing plenary, internal strife over IA/UX/IXDA), I’ve decided to take a different tack with my post-conference review and go uber-macro.

The Power of Questions
Questions strengthen and define knowledge, they make or break a project and they are also great barometers for measuring the success of a conference. Presentations are sometimes eye dropping, other times insightful (occasionally neither) but the questions a presentation raises are often the genesis for bigger ideas, better thinking and greater results. This is an area where I think the IA summit could improve. There were funny moments, Jared Spool’s slides. There were still figuring it all out moments, Cindy Chastain’s “Experience Themes” presentation. And then there were the “you’re not as smart as me presentations” that littered the event.

The dialogue post-presentation, when an audience member makes the long walk up to the stage to engage with the presenter—that’s the good stuff and the even better stuff is the post-presentation dissection, rearrangement and evangelism over coffee and a bran muffin. Certainly there are scheduling issues, getting the next presenter on stage, giving people a break from input, providing time to process the information but there seems to be a drop off there. (Or perhaps an opportunity?) It seems too easy to come to a conference, hold a panelist on high and take them at their word. More so, it seems unfair to the presenter not to challenge them to clarify their hypothesis and see things through a different set of lenses. Yes, we come to hear the “experts” but the experts became “experts” through a combination of skill, dedication and being challenged*—by teachers, employers and peers.

*Challenge in the confrontational sense, which is usually a depicted by impugning ones experience, is pointless. But a challenge of a person’s focus, ideas and perspectives leads to more questions, and even better answers.

Which brings me to Foucault:

“…I am trying to show how a domain can be organized, without flaw, without contradiction, without internal arbitrariness, in which statements, their principle of grouping, the great historical unities that they may form, and the methods that make it possible to describe them are all brought into question.”

The high points and buzz-worthy lines are great, but forward motion requires questions and answers and the admittance there are two types of right at odds: Being right and doing right.

—Ian

Seriously.

Because as one of the sources in the Today Show segment said, “I just wanted to learn a little bit about a world that seems to be still asking for content.”

–Britta