John McCrory

I read a lot of news on the web, and I’ll tell you, it’s terribly annoying, because so many newspapers do the web badly. No wonder newspapers hate the internet; They fail miserably on it. Here’s an industry whose days are numbered, and what do they do on the medium that is killing them? Adopt the practices of the worst of the worst scammers, and then complain that no one wants to pay for their “respectable” product. Please!

Here are 10 reasons newspapers are failing on the web:

1. Pop under ads. We’ve all got pop-up blockers now, so you serve up pop-under ads that linger in the background. Ooh, tricked me! Classy.
2. Dancing ladies in silhouette, selling mortgages. You sully yourself by the poor quality of advertisers you keep. You’re like a Wal-Mart truck heading down the highway with naked lady mud flaps.
3. Multi-page stories and slideshows that require me to click for more — even though the concept of pages makes no sense on the internet. Why? Only to show me more ads. Bastards!
4. You actually believe the nasty comments on articles on your site are a guilty pleasure for readers. Truth? They make me digusted with my neighbors and wanting to take a shower.
5. 10,000 items I don’t care about on a web page are not a good experience.
6. You devote just 10% of the page to the story I want to read.
7. Splash “Welcome” pages featuring some kind of advertisement when I come visit you via a link from another site, Facebook, Twitter, or something. You are insane if you think such a page is welcome. For every one who watches the splash page, there must be a dozen of us who either click “skip” or leave.
8. Everything you have to offer is on your home page. Don’t act like a cheap whore. Show us some respect!
9. Classifieds. Ha ha. Cute.
10. You are my local paper. Yet, you blast me with news of the latest Hollywood celebrity who’s crashed a car and is going into rehab and you frontpage the crime in some village miles away in some hollow of the state where you have 10 home delivery subscriptions (but are hoping for 11!). Yet somehow you can’t be bothered to tell me why half the city whose name is in your nameplate had a blackout yesterday. What exactly do you think you are good for?

Why do you think newspapers are so terrible at the internet? Tell me, please!

The serious point here is that the format of your web presence provides a context by which you are judged. Every element of your site matters, not just your editorial.

The field of journalism is an early warning system, and the creative destruction now wracking the news and media industries is telling us how the Internet, or the connectedness of the open network, is going to fundamentally restructure power and authority in nearly every aspect of human life over the next hundred years. If you want to know what the future holds for your industry, be it marketing, publishing, art, politics—pay close attention to how journalism is changing.

The best primer I’ve seen on how the internet is changing journalism was delivered a couple weeks ago by Jay Rosen of NYU. His ideas and observations are just part of what makes the talk valuable. Note his attitudes, too. He doesn’t fear the Internet. He’s not angry or bitter about the changes underway. His perspective is not colored by the sense of loss that many journalists legitimately feel, but that is ultimately not very helpful.

Set aside a couple lunchtimes to watch. The sound is a little iffy towards the beginning, and you’ll need to crank the volume to 11, but after a couple minutes you won’t even notice. The content is that good. Below are some of the salient takeaways that intrigued me most, including his 10 maxims.

And here are my notes, quotes, and paraphrases:

Jay Rosen’s 10 Maxims (source)

1. Audience atomization has been overcome. (Link)
2. Open systems don’t work like closed systems. (Link)
3. The sources go direct.  (Dave Winer)
4. When the people formerly known as the audience use the press tools they have to inform one another— that’s citizen journalism. (Link)
5. “There’s no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure.” (Clay Shirky)
6. “Do what you do best and link to the rest.” (Jeff Jarvis)
7. “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; I just don’t know which half.” (John Wanamaker)
8. “Here’s where we’re coming from” is more likely to be trusted than the View from Nowhere. (Link)
9. The hybrid forms will be the strongest forms. (Link)
10. “My readers know more than I do.” (Dan Gillmor)
11. Bonus notion: You gotta grok it before you can rock it. (Link)

5 Elements of Ethics

• Know what you’re talking about
• Here’s where I’m coming from
• This is the best I could do, right now
• What do you know that I don’t?

It’s not a question of what are your organization’s ethics, it’s “How does your organization produce trust?”

Transparency and open systems

“Open systems released into societies that are not open can be a disaster. When transparency meets fixed ideas, fixed narratives, you don’t get the benefits of transparency, you just get more material for these fixed ideas to work with. In many ways, open systems are more chaotic. They can be more violent, more dangerous. We shouldn’t look at them just as benificent gifts.” See “Against Transparency” by Lawrence Lessig in the New Republic.

The future of investigative journalism

What’s the future for expensive, deeply-researched investigative journalism? I don’t recall if Rosen made this point exactly, but think about how many investigations have died prematurely in traditional media. For every one that hits the front page, 10 go nowhere. Through crowdsourcing, for example, investigations that have reached dead ends can continue, involving a wider range of knowledgeable sources than a team of journalists can reach.