Howard Owens

Here is a must read article by David Greiner for everyone involved in designing, creating or specifying e-mail newsletters and e-mail marketing campaign.

Key points:

• Make sure your HTML e-mail looks good and is readable to peaple with images turned off
• Test in a variety of e-mail clients
• CSS is OK, but use with caution, and don't use for position -- and be sure to embed your CSS

There's no point in sending out HTML e-mail if you're not going to do it right. As they say, read the whole thing

It's a great time, it seems, to be a Cold Fusion developer. I only dabble in CF these days, but it is thrilling to see how the platform is evolving. The range of tools and options available now is staggering. And as the article points out, the development community is astounding.

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen has come into a fair amount of criticism recently. First, Jeff Jarvis squabbled with Nielsen about e-mail vs. RSS. From Frank Spillers I now learn (NOTE: See update at bottom of post for corrected time line information) that Nielsen has been criticized at Slashdot for this paragraph:

You can patent usability innovations to keep the competition from stealing them. Most Web projects are managed by marketing departments that have no experience with the patent system. Websites, however, are inventions and should be protected when you invest in developing something new. Talk to people in your legal department. They might know of a patent attorney who doesn't bite.

Spillers quotes from Slashdot:

So if I come up with a great usability enhancement, I should patent it? How does that increase the usability of the web overall? We live in a sea of unusable web sites and horribly designed programs.. now he's saying "hey, the goal is actually not to make web sites more usable. The goal is to come up with usability enhancements that one or two web sites will use. The other sites can go stuff themselves

I can imagine that there might be times when a company invents a Web usability concept so new, or so unique to its industry, that filing for a patent is the right thing to do, but for the most part I think usability is one of those issues that we should all share. Heck, in most cases just caring about usability is a huge competitive advantage.

One of Spillers most interesting remarks, though, comes at the end of his post:

The key issue here, I think, is that Jakob Nielsen has an unhealthy monopoly on Usability Consciousness. He promotes best practices, he preaches obedience to his guidelines and when he postulates opinions they are interpreted as instructions.

More later on how this has eroded Jakob Nielsen’s popularity within the usability community.

As far as I know or can remember, Nielsen was the first person on the Web to give a hoot about usability. Many in the usability community who are now critical of him probably owe their careers to him.

UPDATE: Ouch -- for some reason, my RSS reader picked up a bunch of old Spillers posts. The post I link to from above isn't new. It's from 2004! (I only came across Spillers' blog a couple of months ago.) So, this is no recent criticism of Nielsen. It's old news. However, since it's still interesting, I'm leaving this post up (this update comes only about five minutes after the original post). Here's Spiller's longer critique of Nielsen, and it's worth reading the whole thing.

In my news alerts for anything related to E.W. Scripps, PR for a new site, ColoradoMLS.com, has popped up. Apparently, one of the developers previously sold a real estate site to Scripps.

It's amazing to me that this little start up has managed to get a couple of mentions in the Colorado business press. First, calling the site "MLS" is terribly deceptive, since it doesn't really contain data from a bona fide MLS feed; second, it isn't hard to set up a classified vertical and offer free listings. This is hardly a revolutionary business model. In fact, Google "MLS" -- listing sites of all types abound.

The Coloradoan is the latest news organization to fall for this tripe, but at least the reporter asked some questions and talked to some sources.

On the issue of using the MLS initials:

"We don't see ourselves in direct competition with the MLS. We just saw the name as a well-recognized concept," said Peter Niederman, co-founder. "We're not advocating that people pull listings from MLS. This is just one more added exposure."

And the reporter found a source with a suitably skeptical quote:

Keeping track of so many listings as they go under contract, withdraw or change will be a real challenge for the new site, said Dave Pettigrew of Prudential Rocky Mountain Realtors in Fort Collins.

"It's easy to name and set up a Web site," Pettigrew said. "The difficulty is attracting users. And it's got to be a massive job to keep all the information current."

What really deserved a stronger reportorial challenge though was the self-reported traffic data:

... traffic has grown from 64,000 hits the first day to 150,000 hits Tuesday.

I haven't seen "hits" quoted as a business metric since about 1997. I thought that deceptive stat was retired with Mosaic. What I want to know is how many page views and how many daily unique visitors?

Well, at least Mr. Niederman is good at getting free publicity. That's good for more "hits."

A note to Online-News alerted me to a post by Jeff Croft titled "A Few thoughts on Journalism."

News companies ought to be hiring web geeks by the hundreds, like right now. If you don't have a web team that can turn a massive spreadsheet of data related to a story into a browseable, sortable, searchable web application (or interactive map, etc.) within 24 hours of you getting the data, then you’re falling behind. A few recent examples of sources we've had for this type of journalism include data on public salaries, local soldiers who've died in the war, and data from a survey of local street conditions.

Croft references the concepts of Adrian Holovaty, and largely restates Holovaty's main themes: the value of structured data and the need for programmers.

Like Holovaty, I adore structured data. Anybody who understands structured data has no shortage of ideas on what data to collect, store and disseminate. There is no doubt much of this would be a great public service. Further, I emphatically agree newspaper companies should be hiring more programmers.

But what I have yet to hear from Holovaty or Croft is a business model to support the expense. As much as I love the idea of just hiring a bunch of programmers and saying, "Come back and see me after you've built something cool," that undisciplined approach just isn't the best way to invent insanely great new products. Businesses need discipline and structure, and decisions need to be driven by data. Projects need the justification of audience growth potential, potential to increase market share or potential to drive new revenue.

ChicagoCrime.org is a worthwhile site and something newspapers might want to emulate. Crime and accidents do drive readership. But not all data is created equal. Some data is important, and some data is useful or fascinating, but important, useful or fascinating does not necessarily equal increased readership, or revenue. With that in mind, any structured data project requires a strong business case to justify it. No business model? Then move on to another project.

Of course, there are always more ideas than time, which is why hiring more programmers is a good idea. There are lots of good ideas to chase.

Setting priorities takes leadership. One thing I know about programmers -- they are energetic, curious, creative people, and given free reign, they will turn first to cool. Profitable isn't always fun. Sometimes, it's a drag.

The other issues newspapers face is that programmers aren't miracle workers. They can build all the structured data applications they desire, but who is going to manage the data? Not all data comes into a news room already structured, and even when it does, it still requires maintenance. Furthermore, most data is subject to eventual degradation. Time is the enemy of data. Addresses change, streets are renamed, annual events are canceled, bands break up, people die. Database maintenance is required.

It's been my experience that it's hard enough to get reporters and editors to enter keywords in publishing systems. As much as I love the idea of stripping out all structured data from news stories, it's going to be hard to get over-extended news rooms to do it. In most news rooms there are fewer clerks, librarians and researchers than there used to be, so who is going to maintain all this data? In an ideal world, the staffing necessary would become available, but we still operate in a real world.

That paragraph opens the door to a debate on newspaper economics, which is an entirely different issue. The only issue I've ever been in a position to deal with, and expect will ever be able to deal with, is working within the confines of reality, meaning budgets and P&L's -- and reality is, news room resources are always limited.

No doubt, news room cultures need to under go a complete change of heart. They must go from print-centric, deadline-driven, insulated environments, to participatory, creative and digitally focused operations. But hiring 100 programmers isn't going to change a news room. Only reporters and editors can change news rooms.

I'm just not interested in cool. I want solutions that work, make money, and/or grow readership, and/or increase market share. Throwing spaghetti against the wall isn't a business model.

Steve Yelvington cites Gordon Borrell who cites a figure saying 9 percent of the online audience went online to seek local news yesterday.

I've seen reports that range from 7 to 9 percent for online audience who went to a local newspaper Web site yesterday.

Here's a challenge for news site managers: Tally up your local wired audience (chances are it's 55 to 65 percent of your DMA adult population); now, look at the number of daily unique visitors for yesterday. Unless you're running a major metro, I bet the number ain't anywhere close to 9 percent, or even 7 percent. I bet it is a whole lot closer to 4 percent. And here's the real depressing news: About half of your visitors yesterday were from outside your DMA, so your real local market reach on a daily basis is about two percent.

To me, this is one of the of the major issues online newspaper sites face: audience growth. Weak daily numbers mean weakness in the market. This means it's easier for competitors like craigslist, the local TV stations and local start ups to gain traction.

Newspaper publishers need to get serious (read: invest dollars) about audience growth. They will do this through more original content (especially multimedia), more interactivity (community and user-content) and marketing -- lots and lots of marketing (house ads alone won't cut it).

I've never liked Rick Sutcliffe. For one thing, he's an ex-Dodger, but more importantly, during his first year as a Padres broadcaster (I never understood why he was hired), he dissed one of my favorite Padres, and a friend, the late Eric Show. Sutcliffe made a couple of insulting comments about Show (remember, this wasn't long after Show died), and that really bugged me at the time.

Bakersfield blogger Dusty, a Padres fan, has the tape: Sutcliffe making a drunken fool of himself while visiting the Padres booth recently. At least this time, Sutcliffe apologized.

Knoxnews.com is launching a cool new events/music site. (via Jay Small). It could use more user-generated content, but the basic calendar and search app is well executed. Also from Jay, I learned that my the man I've known the longest online, Jack Lail, has a blog. Jack ran the SPJ-L e-mail discussion list when I first got online more than a decade ago.

For all you gardeners out there, HGTV has launched a gardening zone finder, based on the USDA hardiness zones. It's build in Flash and with a little glitch or two, it's basically well designed and well conceived. You type in your zip code and a little box pops up that tells you your hardiness zone. It's more accurate than just looking at the USDA map. For example, I always thought we were in zone 9b, but it turns out we're actually in zone 8b. The best part is you can then view lists of various plants that do well in your region. As Paul James would say: "Cool."

Two quibbles: The zone popper box opens two low on the screen, so you can't see it unless you scroll down, and its plant recommendations doesn't include succulents, as far as I can tell.

Can a smart mob manage a baseball team? We're about to find out. For the second half of its season, the Schaumburg Flyers will be managed by fans. I associate myself with Business Pundit's predictions.

Jeff Jarvis is arguing with Jakob Nielsen over comments Nielson made in support of e-mail newsletters.

Jarvis writes:

... Nielsen sticks to his guns pushing email newsletters (I haven't subscribed to once since about 2002, myself and not being able to get rid of half of them that I no longer read I now mark them as spam and never open them) over these newfangled RSS feeds and blogs ...

Nielsen responds that Jarvis arguments are invalid because they are based on personal experience and not data. Of course, Nielsen doesn't offer any data either.

Here's a real simple test for a site with both newsletters and RSS -- how many people subscribe to feeds vs. newsletters? I currently don't have access to those numbers, but I'll bet bytes to buffers that newsletters remain more popular than RSS feeds at most general-interest sites.

To put it in usability terms, I go back again to "Don't Make Me Think." RSS makes users think. E-mail doesn't. RSS may one day over take e-mail, but so far the adoption rate seems pretty damn slow. For the average user, e-mail remains so much easier to understand.

Other than that, Nielsen's site in inexplicably ugly and hard to use. Jarvis and I agree on that much, at least.

UPDATE: Jay Small has his say.

Something I forgot to mention: For newsletters, number of subscribers isn't a reasonable metric, even if you're daily deleting bad addresses. The only meaningful measurement is open rates. For RSS, the best thing to track is downloads. If you're using a measurement tool like Omniture, this becomes problematic, as far as I understand how Omniture works -- it measures downloads based on clicks from pages with the Omniture tags installed. That means downloads via an RSS reader (or for video and audio, downloads by direct links from other sites, e-mail or IM) are not measured. To measure these downloads (not necessarily with 100 percent accuracy) you need a good old fashioned serve log analyzer.

Every news site should have both e-mail newsletters and RSS, and should be tracking both closely. If RSS really is the superior technology, it will eventually overtake e-mail, at which time sites can safely abandon e-mail newsletters.

I should also mention, I get a couple of e-mail newsletters -- my favorites are on gardening from Home Depot and HGTV. They work for me, in part, because I use Gmail, which has a great spam filter. The point is: Spam hasn't necessarily killed e-mail yet, and as Spam filters improve, the better for e-mail newsletters.

Newspaper Web sites need to get away from creating real estate sites that do little more than serve up listings (whether classifieds or MLS) and recycled news -- they need real content. They need to feed the dream. Here's a non-newspaper site taking big steps along those lines. What it lacks is robust multimedia, but there's lots of hyper-local content and plenty of opportunities for Realtor participation. (via LocalOnliner).

Two quotes from Jim Buckmaster that remind me why craigslist can be beat:

"It's unrealistic to say, but -- imagine our entire U.S. workforce deployed in units of 20. Each unit of 20 is running a business that tens of millions of people are getting enormous amounts of value out of each month. What kind of world would that be?" (via Susan Mernit)

"The Internet at large, and free classifieds in particular -- and even beyond that, Craigslist free classifieds in particular -- certainly pose challenges to the newspaper industry as far as being able to raise their profitability over time." (via Online News Squared)

Craigslist is oh so 2002. The basic self-referential, socialistic culture that seems to pervade craigslist is what keeps the company from innovating. Oh, sure, the company keeps expanding, but I'm not convinced that in most markets, craigslist is making serious inroads.

Unfortunately, most newspaper Web sites are still stuck in 1997.

In the hands of competent bluegrass or country artists, a punk or metal song can be reinterpreted with surprisingly good results. I've always been partial, for example, to Dwight Yoakam's version of "Train in Vain." The Hayseeds have made a career of reworking metal favorites as bluegrass pickers.

This, however, is just sad. It's David Lee Roth covering his own Van Halen tune with a string band.

In 1995, my friend Steve Saint and I launched East County Online. Steve was publisher of six community newspaper serving eastern San Diego County. At the time, only two other weekly newspapers had Web sites. We tried to build community around the site, creating a club, had online-only classifieds, invited online-only contributions from members of the community and tried to be an online portal into everything related to East County on the Web. Unfortunately, only about 20 or 30 percent of the local residents had internet access. We didn't get a lot of traction.

Now community Web sites are all the rage, and Steve is back at it. He's free-lancing for a new community Web site: HighPlainsMessenger.com.

The site seems to have some economic support, is getting some banner advertising, and has a stable of contributors. I don't see much in the way of citizen-contributed content (except for comments), but at least its an attempt to create geo-based community online.

I'm not sure publishing the site entirely in Moveable Type is quite as cutting edge as they think, but it does show the versatility of MT.

Interestingly, the site is openly pursuing FSBO advertising.

I'm not sure how much of a threat sites like this are to established newspapers, but in a market already fragmented by a multitude of advertising choices, new competitors are less than welcome. The advantages to newspapers remain the resources to build more robust classified sites, relationships with advertisers, stronger marketing vehicles, the money to buy technology for things like search and strong multimedia, and the ability to produce deep content. The MESS site (it's preferred short-hand name, it seems), sort of highlights these advantages with its shortcomings.

This all reminds me of a conversation I had with some fellow journalists at the SPJ convention in 1996 -- the biggest threat newspapers will face on the Web isn't from a Microsoft, but from some guy working in his back bedroom. Craig Newmark has already shown how one-man efforts can take a bite out of newspaper revenue -- more and more sites such as the MESS are coming, and some of them will be very successful.

Most newspaper sites are still woefully unprepared to deal with the threat.

Tim Porter, responding to a column by Memphis Commercial-Appeal Editor Chris Peck on "journalism as a conversation," writes about training today's journalist to be a new kind of journalist:

At the APME convention in 2005, Peck, after hearing a panel describe a laundry list of new types of journalism for the future, commented: We need "different brains" and different skills in the news room to do those things. Where are we going to get them? In reply I wrote:

"The answer, of course, is we have to grow them - through strategic training, through ongoing learning, through the same sort of professional reinvention other industries have sustained. We must retool the news factory. [Read: Rethinking the News Factory (Again).] The newspaper industry, however, is a training Scrooge, investing on average only 0.7 percent of payroll in professional development, only a third the national average. It has under spent its way into a work force that is under-prepared for cultural change or professional reinvention. All the good talk and assembled panels about change will amount to naught unless news managers put bodies and dollars into training - about technology, about audience, about communication and collaboration, about leadership." [Read: ASNE to APME: What Happened in Six Months?]

My concern is that this is more than just a training issue -- it's a motivation issue.

Anybody who has known me long knows that I started out in this business as print-centric and hard core about newspaper reporting as they come. The level to which I now embrace digital-age journalism is equally as hard core. I made the jump in belief systems not through training, but really by happenstance. I happened to not be working in a news room (though at a newspaper) when I got bit by blogging. I charged into blogging head on and didn't look back. It wasn't long before I saw the implications for traditional journalism, both the challenges and opportunities.

Among many of my colleagues that I meet, because they're still enmeshed in news room culture, they just don't get blogging, user-generated content, conversing with readers and the like. Many of them want to get it, or understand that maybe they should get it, but first, they've got to turn in this 12-inch story on the mayor's campaign report.

You can lead a reporter to blogger, but you can't make him type.

And I'm not just talking about the grey beards. Even kids right out of college seem more interested in practicing the kind of journalism they have been conditioned to believe journalism is, that they show even less interest in the new tools than some of the veterans.

Now, this is all anecdotal, of course. Your experience may vary. And I do know some people, both young and old, who are fully enthused about the new opportunities for journalism. But I'm not convinced news room cultures are changing fast enough. And I'm not sure any amount of training is going to solve that issue.

What it is going to take, and what some newspapers are doing, is creating whole new news teams that have nothing to do with the print edition. The teams need to be staffed by people who live and breath digital content.

Every reporter who has ever been assigned to city hall will find this video very familiar (via Media Orchard). Though, this is a bit more extreme than the typical gadfly's weekly rant.

More (all?) reporters should have blogs. As a former reporter, I've never understood the resistance many reporters have to blogging. Mike Sando is an award-winning reporter/blogger. Robert Niles does reporters everywhere a great service by interviewing him and asking the right questions. Reporters are hired to serve the public, and blogs help them do that better -- if, as Sando notes, they're good reporters to begin with.

There have been several citizen journalism sites spawned by newspapers over the past 18 months or so. None have been as financially successful (as far as I know or can tell) as YourHub.com. Now we learn that YourHub also engenders passion from its contributors. That is good news for newspapers looking to step into this space. (via E-Media Tidbits)

Web site design at Scripps sites (I used to work for Scripps) has been a slowly evolving process. If you look closely at any Scripps site, you'll see elements that carry over from site to site. The Ventura County Star site looks a lot like the Corpus Christi site.

These are Scripps 2.0 sites, so to speak, with 1.0 sites being more primitive. You can check the evolution of the Star's sites with these links: June 1997; Jan 2001; November 2004; May 2005.

Scripps is in a phase of building its 3.0 sites. In my opinion, the first 3.0 site was Knoxnews.com, launched a year ago or more. It features a less cluttered look, primary navigation on a horizontal bar, headlines without summaries, big box ads, large home page art, local search and a box at the bottom of the page that serves as a sort of site map, helping to cut scrolling.

TCPalm.com was the next site to get the 3.0 treatment, but it also evolved. There are a couple of nice artistic flourishes (but nothing detracting), more featured elements near the top of the page, and only the most important local headlines in the critical middle left of the page.

Now comes Evansville. This is easily Scripps best site yet. It takes all the Scripps team has learned over the years, drops it on a modern publishing system (Ellignton), and does a lot of things right. A small example: placement of the calendar. It's in a location that is normally visually dead for most users, but is a strong visual element, drawing the eye to it, and robust calendars are such an important site element for newspaper sites -- one that is a woeful weakness for many sites.

It's a great color scheme, too. They've also enabled comments on stories (tied to registration), which I like. Next, they should add profiles for users.

I'd be curious, though, if the placement of the classified links is really working -- it took me a minute to locate them, and I had some idea where to look.

I've also got to admit that I'm no longer convinced that headlines without story summaries is what the readers really want or will drive the most clicks. Of course, this is a bigger problem when news rooms won't rewrite headlines for the Web. For example, the headline in this story is "Mr. Mom." Without a subhead or summary, the headline doesn't really work as a link. It offers too little information about the subject of the story.

Jay Small has more the redesign on his blog.

Writing for Poynter, Tom Rosenstiel gives five content strategies for newspapers in the digital age. All are on target.

I was in Chicago last week and I took a whole bunch of pictures -- very photogenic town. The pics start here.

Television stations around the nation are getting more aggressive on the Web, but Cincinnati seems to be an exceptional fertile market.

Up until now, newspaper Web sites enjoyed certain competitive advantages against television sites:

• Newspapers generally have larger staffs and produce more content
• They already have content that works well on the Web such as calendar listings and classifieds
• Most newspapers are the biggest media in town, so they can better promote their sites

But in all but a handful of markets, newspaper Web sites have a tenuous hold on their market share lead.

Video is going to play an increasingly important role in attracting Web users. TV stations that get aggressive now could start taking over their markets in a few years. Newspaper sites should be ramping up their video offerings.

Yesterday, we visited the Huntington Library and I took lots of pictures.

This was my third visit to the Huntington (fourth if you count my trip to donate my Anthony Burgess letter). The first trip was led by Noel Riley Fitch and included a group of my PLNC literature department classmates. The second was with Billie and my step son. In both those trips, I was more interested in the library and art. This trip, is was primarily about plants, especially the roses and desert garden.

This time the trip was organized by the Kern County Rose Society.

It was a good day, and I got lots of ideas for the garden. On the West side of the house, I think I want to plant a Palo Verde and Mesquite, and I'm even thinking about taking out the lawn and planting some euphorbia, barrel cactus and more aloe. I'd like to include some native grasses, I think.

Leonard Witt has published an academic paper on citizen media called "Constructing a Framework to Enable an Open Source Reinvention of Journalism "

It's an interesting approach, drawing comparisons to the open software movement and open source journalism. However, if a publisher is looking for an actionable road map, this paper isn't it. It's more theoretical than operational. That may be understandable since of all the citizen media experiments being conducted by mainstream newspapers, none yet can be clearly defined as success, so we don't necessarily know yet what success looks like, or how to get there.

Witt provides some bits of good advice, though, such as:

Just as with the Los Angeles Times's Wikitorial failure, the Bayosphere's poor showing could have been predicted by a close reading of open source software and commons-based peer production literature. Beneath what might look like an open environment there usually is structure and someone with a vision actively providing guidance.

There's also this important bit:

An enduring criticism is that reporters and editors write for other reporters and editors and not for the audience -- or the users. An open source content model should consider serving both users and possible content producers with the aim of producing a more robust product.

And I think that's where a good citizen media effort should lead. It's the whole "journalism as a conversation" model.

Lost Remote reports that tech-focused social media site Digg is planning to expand into general news coverage. Well, here's another disruptor for traditional media.

Jack White, one of the most brilliant musicians of the last decade or so, has a new project -- The Raconteurs. Click the link. The site is marvelously chic old school geek. The music is great, too.

Of course, I suppose, if you don't know pre-Mac user interfaces, you might not know how to operate the site. That probably violates several usability rules.

Here's an obvious path to personalization for newspaper sites: Use RSS.

The first I've heard doing this -- not just using a branded RSS reader, but actually trying to get into personalization, is Austin.

So far, pretty basic, but it's a step in the right direction. (Via CyberJournalist).

Here's something else interesting via CyberJournalist: Alexaholic. Site managers should use this tool to track their traffic against local competitors. Here's a link comparing traffic for various San Diego media sites. Alexa is far from the final word in competitive traffic analysis, but in the absence of a better tool, it's helpful.

John Battelle has been experimenting with Google AdWords (as a buyer, not a publisher), and was confused to find many of his keyword bids inactive. More puzzling was that on many of his bids, he was the only apparent bidder.

Somebody at Google was kind enough to point him to a post on another blog (apparently, an official AdWords blog) that explains how Google AdWords "work." Basically, if you don't write a quality ad, you must bid more to get your ad to appear.

It's policies like this that make me think Google AdWords will never appeal to local, mom/pop shops. Your average small business owner is too busy to optimize ads, check bid rankings regularly, try to figure out the magic formula for the best ROI. They just want their advertising to work. No fuss. And they don't want to think Google is just jacking them around to make more money (which is certainly a reasonable suspicion). Keep it simple. This could be a key competitive advantage for local news sites.