The Evolving Newsroom

A few things that crossed my radar recently.

A rant about the failings of tech news and the (lack of) incentives causing it. From louisgray.com.

I believe “fast food news” also can refer to the mass hysteria over making sure every site posts the news that a major browser or a major operating system has issued a point release, or when a popular site has an outage, that the incident becomes front page news for every blog. At some point, given the vast multitude of interesting tech stories, individuals and companies out there, one must take a deep breath and realize that being the 10th site to report that Twitter got hacked last night didn’t really add a lot of value to readers.

First, the advertising model that forces many sites to drive page views and social interactions, through Digg, StumbleUpon, and Twitter retweets, is turning many tech news sites into post mills, staffed largely by inexpensive writers and freelancers. Instead of deep analysis posts that require interviews, backgrounds, and research, these sites are instead home to excerpts from YouTube, polls, user surveys, and whatever happens to be trending on Twitter that day. Quality is exchanged for quantity.

Second, many of these sites operate under the guise that they are the only site their readers see… Third, thanks to competition and personal interactions, not every site likes the others… Fourth, the rise of aggregation sites makes piling on to the news something that is rewarded.

…In essence, the incentives, for the most part, do not tilt in favor of writing unique stories or doing the required research necessary to get a full story, to get quotes from a source, or find data points that back up analysis.

That’s why you see people like Alex Payne (of Twitter) complain, saying “Rarely does technology journalism produce informed, correct, relevant, and readable content. This is a sorry and damaging state of affairs.”

A conversation evolved around the impact ‘content farms’ such as DemandMedia are having on the web,  search and journalism:

Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb kicked things off with a piece noting that great piles of content generated by content farms are clogging up search results.

I’ve been writing a lot about so-called ‘content farms’ in recent months – companies like Demand Media and Answers.com which create thousands of pieces of content per day and are making a big impact on the Web. Both of those two companies are now firmly inside the top 20 Web properties in the U.S., on a par with the likes of Apple and AOL.

From my analysis of Demand Media and similar sites, such content is very generic and lacks depth. While I wouldn’t go as far as wikiHow founder Jack Herrick and say that it “lacks soul,” it certainly lacks passion and often also lacks knowledge of the topic at hand. Arrington’s analogy with fast food is apt – it is content produced quickly and made to order.

In my view both writers and readers of content will need to work harder to get quality content. I know I’d rather read an article by The Economist on any given topic, than one generated by Demand Media. But we, as readers, need more help from Google and the other search engines.

Right now ‘quantity’ still rules on the Web, ‘quality’ is hard to find. Perhaps that’s why Reuters is betting on the subscription model – it hopes that consumers will just subscribe to quality content, thereby removing the need to search for it. I think there’s something to that, which if true implies that Google will become less relevant in the future. Should Google be worried about that? Yes; and they are.

I can only hope that Google and other search engines find betters ways to surface quality content, for its own sake as well as ours. Because right now Google is being infiltrated on a vast scale by content farms.

Jay Rosen from NYU interviewed DemandMedia chief Richard Rosenblatt.

Rosen: As you know, there’s a conversation going on out there about Demand Media, and I want to show you a bit of it. The premise, as Jeff Jarvis puts it, is that companies like yours (and Associated Content, to name another) “produce crap that’s just good enough to fool algorithms,” especially Google’s. This is said to be a problem for Google.

So Jarvis writes, “I think we may see search fall as the sole or even key means of discovery and filtering of quality content. I see three rings of discovery today: search (Google); algorithms (see: Google News, Daylife); and humans (see: Twitter). Note again that Bit.ly alone causes as many clicks a month — one billion — as Google News. Human power rises again. That’s what Fred Wilson says today when he argues that social beats search, because “it’s a lot harder to spam yourself into a social graph.” What do to you think of Wilson’s idea, “social beats search” because it cannot be gamed as easily? If he’s right, isn’t that a threat to Demand Media’s profits?

Rosenblatt: First of all, we’re not filling up search engines. We’re creating content that lives on some of the most engaging websites in the world. These sites have really amazing tools that truly help people – whether it’s managing your diabetes, motivating yourself to stop smoking, helping you drop your golf handicap, or determining what hike to take the kids on this weekend.

And I wouldn’t say we are even “search-led” any more. We are led by consumer demand. We are maniacally focused on giving users exactly what they want, where they want it. We have algorithms that tell us what search visitors want. And algorithms that tell us what YouTube visitors prefer. And we’re working on new algorithms that tell us what social network users desire. And we’re pretty sure the needs of mobile users will be different than all of the above – so we’ll tune our approach for them too.

A writer for DemandMedia, a journalist, wrote about how it works and what she gets paid (more writers show up in the comments):

My friends who first told me about Demand Studios are wordsmiths, copy editors of the highest skill levels, who worked for Demand Studios for $3.50 a story.

Yes, $3.50 a story. But one friend, once he had the hang of the system, managed to work fast enough to raise his rate to about $20 an hour, from his couch, on his schedule, while waiting to get a full-time job elsewhere.

Another friend also edited for Demand Studios, as a supplement to a part-time job before eventually getting full-time work, after about a year of underemployment.

Demand Media doesn’t need help with public relations from me. They’re compiling comments in an internal forum from their writers about why they love Demand Studios. And plenty of people have commented. They appear to be overwhelmingly women, often with children, often English majors or journalism students, looking for a way to do what they love and make a little money at it.

James Poniewozik asked in Time Online what we are willing to forgo for cheap journalism.

She continued: we’re dropping the daily paper and just getting the weekend from now on. I’m not going to keep giving all that money to a newspaper that’s riddled with typos!

There you pretty much have the dilemma of the old-line media outfit today. Your readers expect old-fashioned editorial standards, and they want you to maintain them with a new-fangled revenue stream.

And here’s the thing. Yes, I’ll admit I had a sarcastic comeback: “Yeah, that’ll really help them beef up their copy desk!” But really my neighbor had a perfectly good point. Why should she support with her money a product that she’s not satisfied with? You could make the argument that she’s only further beggaring the Times by cutting back her subscription, but if maintaining the subscription isn’t giving her a satisfactory product, why shouldn’t she?

It goes against my interests as a journalist to say it, but that kind of response is entirely reasonable—if you’re honest with yourself about the consequences. It’s true that technology can boost productivity; it may be true that papers like the Times should be finding a better business model. It is also true that you get what you pay for, to an extent: no one is going to copyedit the New York Times on a volunteer basis for the pleasure of it. But you could decide that, if paying full price, in the current economic climate, doesn’t get you the level of service you want anyway, you may as well choose to pay less and get less.

I’d make a small suggestion here: Make it really easy for people to tell you about the typos. There’s not much you can do about the paper after it’s printed but you can fix what’s online and people really want to help. Seriously. They actually do want to copyedit on a volunteer basis, just not for eight hours a day. There’s not a day goes by I don’t write or think about writing to a website owner to point out a typo – and always in a spirit of helpfulness. Typos mostly only get irritating when I have no way of pointing them out.

koordinates mapped NZ Historic Places Trust properties:

Some time ago I was interviewed via e-mail for an article and, as I often do, after providing answers to the nine questions, I asked the following: “Mind if I republish these answers in full on my blog after the piece goes live?”It turned out that the journalist actually did mind. In fact, in the correspondence that followed, the journalist explicitly refused me permission to publish my own answers before changing her mind and saying I could — but without the accompanying questions she had supplied.