So what’s up with USAToday’s traffic?

Obviously, before it’s big redesign, traffic was declining, but it’s fallen off a cliff since the relaunch.

Is the problem the design, or is the UGC/participation model failing, or is it something else?

Before we jump to conclusions that its UGC/participation, look at the past 12 months of traffic for Bakersfield.com:

We (clarifying point: I’m no longer affiliated with Bakersfield.com) relaunched the site in March 2006, with the UGC/participation tools being added a month or so later. As the graph above shows, traffic has been steadily climbing.

Bakersfield.com’s success could be related to improved site navigation, or boat loads of more video or the participation tools. The point is, it’s hard to believe participation tools are hurting USAToday.

WashingtonPost.com, a constantly evolving site, but one that went through some significant home page tweaks in about the same time frame as USAToday’s relaunch, is also showing steady growth:

WaPo is also heavy into user participation and conversation.

Based on just these couple of comparisons, either something is terribly wrong with the USAToday design, or there is some other unknown factor that is hurting USAToday’s numbers.

For sake of one last comparison: NYTimes.com

Again, steady growth (so it’s not an industrywide trend against national news sites).

Here’s more evidence that people won’t pay for online content: CNN is killing Pipeline as a paid site.

Over the years I’ve read various quotes from Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster defending craigslist’s business practices.

Every time there is a phrase pops into my head: Master politicians. They are as good at spin as any inside-the-beltway veteran.

Let’s parse this quote from Buckmaster:

“Walled garden” is a misnomer — this term arose to describe AOL’s attempts to keep their subscribers from accessing the internet at large — we do nothing of the sort, and in fact encourage users to go elsewhere

Here Buckmaster dodges the question by reframing the its intended meaning. Clearly, the intent is to use “walled garden” as a metaphor for craigslist’s unwillingness to open its site to third-party aggregators. Whether or not the original meaning of the phrase is as Buckmaster says it is matters not. He’s clearly spinning here. Instead of dealing with the criticism, he’s recasting the phrase into terms he can easily dismiss.

Of course, craiglist users can go elsewhere. That’s not the point. The real question is, are the people who supply the (mostly free) content that make craigslist what it is afforded the opportunity to benefit from wider distribution of their content? In that sense of “walled garden,” craigslist is, in fact, a walled garden. No amount of spin changes that.

I don’t mind that craigslist is a walled garden. I just think Newmark and Buckmaster should be honest about it.

Likewise, I have never before heard the term “proprietary” applied to craigslist, given our well-known near-exclusive reliance on free software.

Again, the question is being recast into a meaning that Buckmaster can wave off. Whether craigslist runs on open source software is irrelevant to the question of whether its business practices are proprietary. In fact, it’s ironic that Buckmaster would proudly wave the open source flag while defending very Microsoft-like business practices.

Newmark and Buckmaster are free to pursue whatever business practices they like, but they should stop hiding behind the spin of “we’re just here to serve the users.”

While I’ve said before that newspapers should not blame Craig for their woes, and I’ve also said Craig gets far more blame than he should, craigslist is also clearly not a friend of local newspapers. The company is far from harmless; it’s just that casting craigslist as the main villian is rather foolish.

That said, for all of Newmark’s and Buckmaster’s spin about how they’re not greedy capitalist, how they exist to serve users, how they care about communities, how they regret the decline of journalism, and value solid journalism, etc. — what have they done to help newspapers? Where are the partnerships that might benefit both a local paper and a craigslist site?

Newmark and Buckmaster owe newspapers nothing. They are under no obliation to seek partnership opportunities — opportunities that could benefit local communities on multiple levels — I’m just asking the question because I just don’t buy the craigslist spin that the company is all that White Hat.

Greed isn’t always about money. Sometimes it’s about control and attention. I suspect that Craig Newmark and Bill Gates aren’t all that different inside.

John Battelle shares an interesting new patent granted Local.com.

If you wanted to run a search of all the content on your newspaper.com and rank it by geographic location, Local.com might have something to say about it.

Cyndy Green sent me the link a few weeks back, and I finally just took the time to look through the blog of Kyle Majors, a video journalist back in my old stomping grounds.

While Kyle is working for a TV station, newspaper video journalists could certainly go to school on his site. He shares his work and experiences, and while his pieces drift toward a “shot for TV” style, they are generally more personal and interesting than straight TV news. He certainly comes up with some good topics to cover.

Also, check out his equipment list.

Oh, and I love his tag line:

It’s not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change - Unknown

To what extent should your company — your media company — be blogging?

Consider the example of Microsoft.

A Microsoft (MSFT) Web site for uber-geeks went live in April 2004 and, according to Wired magazine, immediately it became clear “The fears of lawyers, marketers, and PR consultants would, in fact be realized - and it would be good for the company.”

“The 71,000 employee company now has more than 4,500 bloggers posting on every imaginable tech topic,” explained writer Fred Vogelstein. Some of them, like Mini-Microsoft, are anonymous, fearing reprisals from the bosses, while others like Larry Hryb are public and prolific.

OPA commissioned a study of pre-roll advertising, and based on how the results are being presented, it would be very tempting to conclude that you know, what, pre-roll is OK after all.

OPA found pre-roll combined with a banner ad lifted brand awareness.

But here’s the cautionary note: In the early days of pop-up ads, marketers considered them effective because they drove brand awareness and click-throughs.

But few legitimate publishers allow poppers on their sites these days. Why? Because they irritate the hell out users. And their irritation factor eventually meant they were ineffective.
Previous studies found that pre-roll is irritating to users.

Internet trends point toward non-disruptive advertising (such as relevant text ads) as the most effective means to bring businesses and consumers together, while disruptive models lose traction over time (consider the decline of the lowly rotating gif banner).

The danger of pre-roll is that it could create a disincentive for viewers to watch a publisher’s video offerings. I know I’ve personally declined to watch some newspaper videos recently because I didn’t want to be bother with the pre-roll.

Newspaper sites can’t afford hinder audience growth. Using pre-roll is a risky proposition.

While other newspaper companies continue to announce layoffs, buyouts and hiring freezes, GateHouse Media has a robust pipeline of current openings.

Here’s a JournalismJobs posting of more than two dozen full-time reporter and editor jobs in New England.

More openings listed here.

I’ve mentioned before about the recruitment site in Rockford. We’re also looking for reporters in the Chicago area.

UPDATE: I forgot, more GateHouse jobs listed on the GateHouse Newsroom site. This page will show you journalism openings from papers all over the country.

One of the things I love about working at GateHouse Media is how many great, smart, talented, driven, passionate people I meet. There are a lot of such people with GateHouse.

Last week, I was sitting in office of Linda Grist Cunningham, our editor at the Rockford Register Star, talking about all of the work we have ahead of us and the transformations hitting our industry. The subject of Myers-Briggs came up and Linda made an interesting observation about the personality types you typically find in newsrooms and the kind of personality types best suited to our more turbulent media environment. They’re very different people.

As we talked, I thought, “This would be a great topic for a blog post.” But it was clear that Linda knew both more about Myers-Briggs than I do, and had far greater insight into the topic than I could muster.

So I asked Linda to write a guest post, and happily she agreed.

Here is her post:

Here’s what we’ve got: Thorough, exacting journalists who are systematic, hardworking, careful with detail; who want things to be grounded in fact and analyzed logically. Journalists who can thrive in chaos — as long as most of the things around them is structured and well-organized, preferably with deadlines. Journalists who can gather information steadily, then reach an assumption quickly. They’re prone to being comfortable with one (or, maybe) two interpretations of an idea or event, and “two sides to a story” is a religion. They work best with others who are realistic and focused on facts and results.

Here’s what we need: Journalists who are innovative, strategic, versatile, analytical and entrepreneurial. Journalists who enjoy working with others in start-up activities that require ingenuity and unusual resourcefulness; who create innovative, logical, organized and decisive strategic plans around valid concepts — and who can get them done. Journalists who can see a dozen possibilities when others can see only “two sides of a story.” Journalists who delight in a “slippery slope” just for the rush of the slide, and who then figure a way to bring it all together and get it done.

With apologies for a taking liberties with the Myers-Briggs personality type indicators, which I pretty much lifted verbatim above, the men and women whose styles and personalities have been the strong foundations of our print newsrooms struggle to meet the expectations of the “cyber-fiber” integrated newsroom.

I once heard the statistic that 80 percent of our newsrooms were ISTJs (that’s Myers-Briggs shorthand for a version of the “what we’ve got” above.) I can’t cite the stat, but after almost four decades in newsrooms, I happily accept it as true. The ISTJs fiercely uphold the First Amendment, get things spelled right, get the facts, send the bad guys to jail, get the press started on time, and don’t screw up grandma’s obit. They keep their own counsel and aren’t particularly inclined to be openly enthusiastic.

(Think I’m kidding? Ever watched a roomful of journalists listening to a particularly rousing speaker? Nary a one nods, and heaven forbid that they applaud. I have watched 900 editors at an American Society of Newspaper Editors convention sit without a single clap of hands, not even a polite one, at the conclusion of a presidential — that’s U.S. president — speech. When those same editors gave Richard Nixon a standing ovation — years after he “retired” — I was sure I was at a publishers meeting.)

That’s who we are, and that made us a formidable force when we were exclusively about the two-dimensional print newspaper. That’s not going to get us into the new media world. We need — again apologies to Myers-Briggs — a whole bunch of ENTJs and ENTPs (see description above.) Since we can’t and shouldn’t replace the ISTJs, which would be not only insane, but impossible, and since personality styles are non-transferable (we’re born that way, folks), how do we go about building the newsroom staff we need?

Lobotomies are out. So, we do three things:

1. Capitalize on the strengths of those exacting, fact-driven “traditional” journalists’ brains.
2. Hire the innovative brains when the openings occur so we move toward a diverse mix of thinking styles and personalities.
3. Teach new tricks.

*Capitalize: Just because they aren’t the first ones to grab the wireless laptop and video camera doesn’t mean our journalists can’t or won’t transform themselves into the new-fangled models. They will, and they’ll do it well. But, we can’t dump it all on them at once. Customize the explanation and the training; detail the facts and show the logic behind what we want them to do; explain the whys and the pros-and-cons. Develop realistic time lines and implementation plans. Create order and structure around the disruptions to the things they’ve been doing for years. Give them plenty of time to ponder and mull, read and research, ask questions, absorb and analyze. Challenge them to suggest other methods and solutions to arrive at similar goals. Give them plenty of time and room to let go of the past. They’ll get to the same place as the innovators; it just takes longer.

* Hire: We shouldn’t have to spend much time on this one since we’ve said it for decades. Let’s just do it: Instead of filling positions with the same kinds of people and job descriptions as the ones who vacated them, decide what you need to get the new jobs done, and hire for that position, not the one that’s open. None of us are going to get a bunch of additional bodies, so we have to hire smartly, and that may mean no more ISTJs for a while.

* Teach: Your “early adopters” and even your “early adapters” are going to be jazzed by the possibilities multiple platforms bring to “doing news.” They’ll be your leaders and drivers. But, give the ISTJ-type folks a chance. Grab a handful of the undesignated newsroom leaders — those reporters, photographers and copy editors who toil over the traditional print newspaper and to whom everyone listens no matter what. Hold them close. Bring them into the first brainstorming sessions. Give them the cool, new, expensive equipment. Challenge them to try it. Tell them that you need them to help lead the newsroom into the future. Instead of lamenting their lack of enthusiasm, make it important that they be among the leaders — and give them the opportunities to do some serious journalism with some nifty technology. It will work. And, once they find out that they can have fun and do serious stuff at the same time, they’ll tell the rest of the newsroom. Think of it as “Mikey likes it….”

If you haven’t taken Myers-Briggs before, I recommend it. It can be pretty insightful. It’s best if you take it through a professional environment where experts can help you understand better what it means and how to apply what you learn. That said, you might be able to find a free Myers-Briggs test through Google, which can still give you a basic idea of your personality type.

FWIW: I’m an ENTP.

I’m confused by this post from Chuck Fadely.

On one hand, he has this gripe:

This video stuff ain’t easy nor cheap. No matter how many well-intentioned bloggers tell you all you need is a $89 camera and the will to do it, the reality is far different.

It takes good audio gear, reasonable video gear, modern computers, and most of all, time, to produce intelligible video for the web.

But later he says this:

Video clips, on the other hand, can be done by almost anyone with a point-n-shoot. We’re talking the video equivalent of a page 4B traffic accident brief. A video clip appeals to the 17 people who were affected by the wreck (unless it’s a porn starlet).

So, let’s suss this out. You’re a “well-intentioned blogger” if you say low-end equipment is the way to go to get spot-news video, and um, this video stuff isn’t easy and it takes dedicated staff and big, expensive cameras, but, um, that 4B traffic accident should be covered by a reporter with a point-and-shoot camera.

Isn’t this a contradiction?

OK, I see his post is a rant against publishers who think video is cheap and easy and won’t spend money on training, talent or equipment.

But he doesn’t name any publishers who believe that, and I certainly don’t know any publishers who believe that.

So we must be back to the well-intentioned bloggers.

But he doesn’t name these bloggers, either.

I suspect a strawman.

The only bloggers I know who advocate putting inexpensive cameras in the hands of news staff are also experienced professional journalists.

After all, the father of inexpensive news site video is Jack Lail, one of my early online mentors. He runs one of the most respected news web sites in the country. His staff created Random This, which recently won a Digital Edgie award.

But KnoxNews.com isn’t all point-and-shoot. The staff there also produces a lot of polished video shot with quality equipment.

So who is it out there advocating a cheap-only approach to video?

Here’s what Chris Hendricks, VP of interactive for McClatchy, said at an Inland Press Association event earlier this year, which I blogged:

Hendricks on video: It’s part of the critical strategic path. “We need to be in the video business.” Some McClatchy sites have studios, but many just have $99 cameras and reporters are out shooting video. Chris endorsed the idea of doing whatever you need to do to get video on your site. It doesn’t need to be big, fancy or expensive.

So McClatchy is pursuing a duel video strategy: Expensive stuff and low-end stuff. McClatchy has video studios, but also believes in buying $99 cameras.

To me, it just seems smart to do both.

As news companies transitioning to the web we need to:

• Develop internal video literacy, so we can both produce better stuff with low-end equipment, and become better at shooting great stuff with higher end equipment, or however equipment might evolve;
• Condition our audience to think of our sites as a go-to place for video of multiple varieties, and the only way to produce a critical mass of video is to include easy-to-produce, reporter-shot video in the mix;
• Find our video voice, by that I mean figure out what works and what doesn’t and go in the direction of what works, and this means shooting lots of video and getting a lot of people involved in the process;
• Get our newsroom more engaged in online, and video has some real magic in driving this transformation (I’ve watched it happen in multiple newsrooms now — give reporters the power to shoot their own video and suddenly you have a lot of reporters caring a lot more about online).

Video is too important to our digital future to pursue with just a one-dimensional strategy.

And BTW: It’s not cheap to buy a lot of inexpensive cameras to outfit an entire newsroom. And if you do that, you do need multimedia staff (meaning new FTEs, or reallocating FTEs) to help support the effort. It’s a bit of a red herring to say that publishers are trying to cheap-out by investing in point-and-shoot cameras.

I’m still not sure what Chuck is really advocating, but a quick reading of his post would lead one to believe that he’s slamming the use of low-end equipment for news video and preaching an exclusive high-end-only approach.

Obviously, I disagree.

Mark Glaser is doing one of his periodic “round up of opinions” post (great way to get two posts for the price of one idea, eh, Mark?). He wants to know, do we think the glass is half-full or half-empty.

It’s been said that I’m a half-full kind of guy, and put in pretty good company in that regard.

But I think I want to fudge here and say, I think it’s one-third full.

I’m pretty optimistic, and optimism defines how I run the business side of my life, but I’m full of empathy for the half-empty crowd, even as I bemoan their cranky-old-journalist whines.

The fact is, while there are bucket loads of reasons to be optimistic, nobody has yet proven how we win.

There are still lots of scary trends.

• Circulation is declining
• Revenue is declining
• Disruptors abound and breed like flees
• Every day, we read about more layoffs

On the other hand:

• Online does extend our reach and overall audience trends point upward
• Online gives us a chance to be the disruptor (think yellow pages and video)
• Revenue is growing rapidly online (though not fast enough) and new revenue models continue to emerge
• We bring many strengths to the table in community standing, journalistic experience and resources, and talent and drive

While no newspaper.com has won yet, I think if you could aggregate all of the winning plays in the newspaper.com game, you would have one hell of a good news/community site, and I believe it would score big time in audience growth and revenue. To me, the game plan is there, it just hasn’t been executed right.

The big question is will enough of us execute it soon enough? We really don’t know how much time we have before the final buzzer. If we don’t get our act together quickly, we may find ourselves on the sidelines.

To me, that’s the real danger, and why I say, “one-third full.”

But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near
Andrew Marvell

Here are three recent newspaper-related web site launches to note …

McClatchy’s new national/international news service site, news.mclatchy.com. Note the attempt to be the platform, not just a static news site. Sure, it’s an aggregation of only McClatchy’s stuff, but there is ample opportunity for conversation, including comments and blogs. It’s a worthy experiment to highlight the substantial resources McClatchy puts into non-local news. Also worth noting, no advertising and no apparent plans for advertising (the design offers no obvious consideration for dropping in advertising later) . It’s all about the news and the audience. UPDATE: I just noticed remnant advertising on section fronts … off to the side. My recommendation: Drop remnant ads until real advertisers buy in. The CPMs of remnant aren’t worth it. UPDATE II: BTW, we can expect, I’m sure, to see some of Mike Drummond’s work on this site in the coming weeks and months.

From the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, RocMen.com, a site for men. I can’t think of another newspaper company that has created a site catering to men, so that’s unusual right there. There’s lots of repurposed content here, but also a chance to build community. The main thing to note is that like iGoogle or NetVibes, you can redesign the page, moving content modules around at will.

From SignOnSanDiego.com comes AmplifySD.com, a local music site. I was familiar with AmplifySD, the online radio station featuring San Diego music and musicians, but became aware only today that SOSD had turned the site into a local music wiki. Great idea. The radio station lives on, but now local music fans can add and modify content. Given San Diego’s strong local music scene, great move. I love the brand, too.

Two TV journalists have quit their day jobs and started an online video site, StoryBridge.tv.

From Lost Remote:

WISC news anchor Katy Sai and photographer Jay Olsen were tired of fighting for time to produce longer, relevant stories, so they quit and launched Storybridge.tv. It’s a showcase for in-depth pieces, but more than that, their goal is to create communities around great stories. “We found that communities of people were thirsty for information,” Olsen said. “When you do extended coverage, it allows people to gather around this story thread.”

I’m skeptical about the demand for longish video stories on the web, but on the other hand the idea of creating community around long stories is intriguing.

There’s a story under Katy Chronicles called Team Picture that I would like to link to and comment on, but there’s no permalink to that particular video.

Also, I can’t find an RSS feed, nor is it possible (at least in an obvious, user-friendly way) to embed a video in your own blog post.
So much for community.

But at least the videos are well shot and well edited. I recommend the site to newspaper video shooters looking for tips and techniques.

My friend Mike Drummond, a pretty hard-core trad-J type, has started a blog. He includes pictures!

He’s in Baghdad.

Drummond and I go way back … competing against each other for front page play and who could write a 12-inch story the fastest back when we were the Woodword and Bernstein of The Daily Californian, where we both met our wives and stirred up trouble for mayors and city managers.

When he’s not a reporter in Iraq, he’s a reporter in Charlotte for the Observer.

I love it when there is some empirical evidence to support my own assumptions.

For quite a while, I’ve maintained that if your goal with a group of photos is to have people view the photos primarily for the content of the photos themselves, the best way to do that is in a photo gallery where the user drives.

I’ve said before that SoundSlides can be mighty boring. And by that, I mean the SoundSlides that are nothing but a bunch of pictures thrown up with some music.

If you have a real story to tell, and all the proper media to do it, SoundSlides can be a great tool for getting the job done.

But when you want people to look at pictures and get something out of the photography, a non-automated photo gallery works best.

Now there’s an eyetrack study that supports that position. Of the 34 participants, 71 percent preferred to drive themselves rather than set the slide show on auto play (only 6 percent choose that option).

In terms of practical advice, this observation of navigational methods use makes clear that if you can only have one navigation method – the “next” method, moving linearly through the set of slides is the one to use. It was the primary choice of the majority of the participants and resulted in viewing the most slides.

However, if amount of time spent with the story package is your primary goal, people who clicked from slide to slide using the “arrow” spent almost a minute longer than the “next” users.

Google is making a fairly significant change to how AdSense works for advertisers.

In short, Google is dealing with what is known as the “blind network problem” - advertisers pour money into AdSense, and they get a sense of how the campaign performed in aggregate, but they have no idea which sites did great, and which sites did poorly, or often, even which sites they ended up on (unless they specified via the relatively new site specific buys on AdSense.) This new set of reporting addresses this issue, allowing advertisers to determine where their campaigns are doing best, and then they can optimize accordingly.

This is significant for publishers, too. If you care at all about how much money you make from AdSense, you will want to figure out how to ensure your site is one of the better performing sites.

I also think it will help knock down some of the made-for-AdSense sites … assuming they’re not among the better performing sites, and/or advertisers have more control to ensure their ads don’t appear on smarmy-appearing sites.

OK, more from J.D. Lasic — a video interview with Mike Orren of Pegasus News.

Player

There are only two people I know who first studied journalism at the feet of Spiderman-worshiping high school journalism teacher Geoff Anderson at Grossmont High School who are still working professionally in journalism.

There’s me and Daniel Weintraub, who was at GHS (wow, the same initials as my current employer’s stock symbol — I just realized that) before me.

Weintraub is one of the better journalist bloggers. J.D. Lasica interviews him.

Player.

If J.D. Lasica is blogging about Paris Hilton going back to jail, it must be real news.

And it’s strange to me how much I also care about this story.

Now, haven’t I been saying this all along:

“In the online video syndication space, the largest video owners will not be the broadcasters. It’s going to be the newspapers.” That prediction from Critical Mention CEO Sean Morgan …

“When we see these newspapers turn the corner by adopting new technologies that allow them to put a braodcast voice on their text news, the market is going to erupt.”