Monthly Archives: March 2010

Social Media and the Decline of Editing

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Earlier this month, after writing his final column for Inc. magazine, Joel Spolsky blogged about his experience in the magazine world. His feelings, clearly, were mixed:

“Writing for Inc. was an enormous honor, but it was very different than writing on my own website. Every article I submitted was extensively rewritten in the house style by a very talented editor, Mike Hofman. When Mike got done with it, it was almost always better, but it never felt like my own words. I look back on those Inc. columns and they literally don’t feel like mine. It’s as if somebody kidnapped me and replaced me with an indistinguishable imposter who went to Columbia Journalism School. Or I slipped into an alternate universe where Joel Spolsky is left-handed and everything he does is subtlely [sic] different.”

What bothers Spolsky isn’t that his intent or his ideas were changed; in fact, he says, they were communicated more effectively. His problem is that his voice was changed.

Spolsky’s observation illustrates a key difference between traditional publishing and blogging. Publishing is about communication. Blogging is about speaking. Yes, blogging is about communication too, but the voice is essential—more so than in publishing, though it matters there as well. A blog, in other words, is conversational.

You can, and usually should, edit a written communication. But unless you want to be a jerk, you shouldn’t edit a conversation.

For traditional editors thrown into the digital world, that’s a problem. Why? Because much of what makes up the Web is a conversation, not publishing. Which means we don’t get to edit as much as we’d like. At best, we get to throw in a “sic” here and there (not counting wikis, of course, but that’s a topic for another day).

The blogosphere flash point for this conflict lately has been comments.  You can turn off comments, either altogether or selectively, but you can’t simply edit them. It’s as wrong as changing a quote. If you write it, I can edit it; but if you say it, I can’t.

From the old-media viewpoint, this just doesn’t seem right. Blogger Mark Schaefer wonders, for instance, “why newspapers, who have so staunchly defended the integrity of the published word, would suddenly open the floodgates of stupidity just because the forum has moved to the Internet.”

In a point-counterpoint blog post with journalist Jack Lail, Schaefer notes that “if I submit a letter to the editor of the newspaper and comment on a news story or issue, it has to come with clear proof of who I am, and even then might be subject to editing for appropriateness.” So why, then, he asks, “would the same newspaper allow the public commentary in their online versions to turn into a virtual free-for-all of hate”?

In response, Lail gives the new-media comeback:

“I don’t view comments as ‘letters to the editor.’ I often find them more akin to callers on talk radio, where people are identified as ‘Jim’ or ‘caller from Knoxville.’ (If you applied the ‘same rigorous identification standards’ to radio call-in shows, they wouldn’t have any callers.) The dynamics of online story comments are similar to what happens in forums and fairly open mailing lists.

They are, I think, a participatory experience unique to the online medium and whose benefits outweigh its negatives.

Intellectually, I side with Lail; emotionally, I’m with Schaefer.

I take some comfort in learning that Jeff Jarvis is torn about comments. No, he says, you don’t get to edit the “shit” out of them. But that doesn’t mean you have to like or accept the “level of discourse” they represent: “I’m coming to believe that comments—which I defended when I ran sites—are an inferior form of conversation.”

The solution he sees is not editing, but social controls of the sort found in Twitter and Facebook, built on “real identities and control of relationships”:

“The result is better discourse. I don’t find Twitter or Facebook littered with fools and nastiness and when I do stumble upon them, I unfollow; when they occasionally spit on me, I block (if only I could instead give them their meds).”

Jarvis doesn’t claim to know exactly how this can apply to comments, but “somewhere in there,” he says, “is a secret to improving discourse online.”

We may never uncover that secret, but the point is still valid. On the Internet, the only realistic  goal is not to improve individual expression, but to improve discourse as a whole.

So I’ll just have to face it. In the new-media world, editing is not what it used to be. I may yearn to fix Spolsky’s spelling or complete Jarvis’s sentence fragment at the end of paragraph six—but I’ll have to settle for blogging about it.

Comments, anyone?

Signals of Quality vs. Good SEO

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Last month, I wrote about a discussion on an episode of This Week in Google (TWiG) featuring Google’s Matt Cutts. I noted that Cutts seemed to say that Google was aware of the rise of so-called content farms like Demand Media and that it would adjust its search algorithm so that low-quality commodity content didn’t overwhelm better material.

The following week, TWiG host Leo Laporte cited my article at the start of an expanded discussion of Google’s intent regarding content farms. In the clip from the episode below, Jeff Jarvis speculates that Google will “try to get more links to original content . . . and have signals of quality.”

What that means, he said, is that “if all you do is rewrite the 87th page about how to fix your toilet,” no matter how great your search engine optimization, you shouldn’t rise up in the search results. Instead, “Bob Vila’s original masterpiece about fixing toilets should rise up because it’s original and high quality.”

As Jarvis suggested, Google isn’t directing this effort against Demand Media or other content producers per se. Rather, it’s trying to ensure that quality content always rises to the top, regardless of who creates it and what SEO tactics are used. In other words, it’s pretty much business as usual for Google.

The entire episode can be viewed at Twit.tv.

Blogging Strategies: Post in Haste, Promote at Leisure

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My lizard brain, always scanning the horizon for reasons not to publish, got very excited yesterday.

Thanks to a Twitter lead from @TomPick, I came across an article by Devin Sugameli offering “5 Tips for More ReTweets.” Sugameli’s final tip for how to get more views of your blog posts was “Don’t publish before noon on Mondays!”

She continued:

Image of Green Anole lizard

Photo by MotleyPixel

A 2008 study looked at the best times and days to publish content. Software developer Jake Luciani found that writers who posted on Thursdays had the greatest success in terms of comments, votes, and inbound links. Outside of weekends, Mondays were the worst days. The best times to post were between 1 pm–3 pm (after lunch) or 5 pm–7 pm PST (after work).

To my lizard brain, the conclusion was obvious: only post on Thursdays during those two 2-hour periods. And of course, if I should happen to be doing something else at the time, I should probably wait until the next Thursday. . . .

Even the the higher-level parts of my brain would have to conclude from what Sugameli wrote that there are days and times of the week when you shouldn’t publish. Looking quickly at Marshall Kirkpatrick’s source article on ReadWriteWeb seemed to confirm that idea, given its headline: “Want That Post to Go Popular? Here’s The Best and Worst Times to Post It.”

However, a closer look at the article changed the picture. What Luciani examined was not when posts were published, but when they were submitted to social-media sites Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit and Mixx: “He determined the best days and times for a blog post to be submitted to those sites if its author wants it to receive the maximum number of votes, comments and inbound links.” As Kirkpatrick notes a bit later in his article, Luciani’s analysis is “tracking the time that the post is submitted to the news site—not when it was necessarily posted on the blog.”

On realizing this, my lizard brain, I’m happy to report, slunk glumly back into its lair.

The lesson, for me at least, is clear: Never delay publishing to your blog. If it’s ready, hit the publish button. (You may not want to publish in haste, exactly, as my headline suggests—but I couldn’t resist the allusion.)

By all means, time your promotional efforts carefully. Though Luciani didn’t apparently include Twitter (2008 was premature, no doubt), I imagine his findings apply there as well. And lest this post be construed as a criticism of Sugameli’s helpful tips, it isn’t—provided you apply her advice about timing to your tweets, not your blog posts.

Your lizard brain already has enough excuses to keep you from publishing. Don’t let the timing of your posts be another.

A Lesson from Demand Media: Embrace Your Commodity Content

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Editors of trade publications are confirmed believers in the preeminence of high-quality content. In their minds, everything in their publications is or should be outstanding. But the fact is, across-the-board brilliance is rarely possible, or even, perhaps, desirable.

Like it or not, there is a role in most publications for run-of-the-mill, commodity content. The challenge for editors is not to eliminate such content, but to manage it effectively. Though it may sound like heresy to some to suggest it, Demand Media offers them a model for doing so.

In an article on eMedia Vitals this week, Sean Blanda details his experiences on “Demand Media’s Content Assembly Line.” Though he remains noncommittal about it, the process he describes is impressive in its efficiency.

As Blanda notes, Demand Media and other content farms like it have been criticized for, among other things, producing low-quality content. That’s a misguided objection. The content Demand Media produces is indeed ordinary and uninspired, but for the most part it works. It is commodity content, like commodity components in many usable and affordable PCs. There’s an important role for such low-end content. It answers legitimate questions and serves real needs.

The brilliance of the Demand Media model is that it understands that commodity content is best produced by mass-production methods. No one expects the model to produce long, insightful articles—feature writers, columnists, and essayists can rest easy.

B2B magazines probably have a higher percentage of commodity content than other types of publications. That’s partly due to the prevalence of service journalism in B2B. But it has more to do with the influence of advertisers. As advertising has become harder to sell over the years, B2B publishers have added increasing amounts of commodity content to their print versions to hook advertisers.

Such content takes many forms, including parboiled press releases, buyers guide listings, rewritten product sheets, and even the dreaded advertorial. From an editorial point of view, such content may be hard to abide, since it’s usually more valuable to the advertiser than the reader. But from a business standpoint, it has its merits.

Yet even editors who accept the need for such commodity content have cause to hate it. Why? Because it drains away valuable time and energy from editorial staff.  Asking a reduced number of full-time editors to spend an increased amount of their time on commodity content is a misuse of resources. It draws away from their work on high-end content. Rather than improving the quality of commodity content, it makes the longer-form content more like a commodity.

Since most editors can’t refuse commodity content, they simply choose to resent it. Instead, why not embrace it for what it is, the Demand Media way? Rather than ask the editors to spend their time on commodity content, why not outsource and automate it?

I’m not talking here about using traditional freelancing resources. Keep those for higher-quality content. Rather, I’m suggesting that publishers invest some resources in building systems similar to those Demand Media uses to process its commodity content.

There are some obvious challenges in adapting this model. Smaller publishers may lack the volume of content to sustain it. Likewise, they may lack the web-development resources to build their own systems. Perhaps there is an opportunity for someone to develop a Demand Media–style marketplace for B2B commodity content. And perhaps there are small-scale ways to implement the model.

For editors, I think, the first and most important step is to stop despising commodity content. There’s a place for it in most publications; accept it for what it is and you will be on the way to handling it more effectively.

The Shift to New Media Cannot Be Gradual

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CJR Survey of Magazines on the Web

CJR: Huge culture gap between print and online

In the B2B publisher’s dream world, the transition to online media would come as a natural evolution from print. The vocabulary, the ethos, the culture, the methods would all be organic extensions of print.

Reality, of course, is brutally different.

The shift to online media is not an extrapolation of the past but a sharp break with it. Until traditional B2B publishers accept and adapt to this reality, they will remain stuck in the past.

So far, it seems, they’re still looking backwards, to judge from two recent surveys of magazine personnel. One, from the American Society of Business Press Editors (ASBPE) and the Medill School at Northwestern University, focused on B2B publications. Though the other, from the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), looked exclusively at consumer magazines, its findings ring true for B2B.

The ASBPE/Medill study, announced February 26, found that editors feel unprepared and undertrained for working in new media. Moreover, they think that their publishers lack the vision necessary to succeed online. More than a third of them had no company training at all in the past year, and two-thirds found what training was offered to be inadequate.

The CJR survey, released March 1, looked more broadly at the relationship between print and online cultures within magazine brands. It found that the print side of magazines receives disproportionate attention, with the online side suffering as a result from lower editorial standards, inadequate online experience among staff, and restrictive or poorly defined editorial missions.

Not surprisingly for an organization of editors, the ASBPE sees corporate management as the problem, and tends to cast editors as victims. But it might be healthier for editors to share at least some part of the blame. If they sit back and wait to be trained, they are doomed. What training they may be given, if ever, will be limited in scope and quality. Editors need to take responsibility for their own training, and not wait for others to show them the way.

But as both the ASBPE and CJR studies show, the larger problem is with the organization as a whole. The ASBPE study seems to suggest that the solution is for those organizations to offer more training. But the CJR study underscores that the problem is not insufficient training but old-media bias:

“Magazines often privilege print publications over their Web counterparts. According to one respondent, for example, the Web version is ‘largely seen as inferior, compared to what runs in the magazine’ despite enjoying a readership five times larger, ‘because of a vestigial elitism as to its being more important if it runs in print.’”

The problem, of course, is that for most publishers, the bulk of their money is still coming from print. Since they want to keep the cash cow in the coal mine alive for as long as possible, their goal is a gradual transition to online.

And that, of course, is just a strategy for failure. You can’t serve two masters at once; you have to choose one. Moreover, you can’t adopt online media gradually. Trying to do so is really just choosing to keep print as your master.

Publishers, start by trying this: Tell your print editors they are online staff first and foremost.

And don’t just say it. Act on it.

“Web-first” is a strategy many have talked about, but few (such as IDG and Vance) have implemented. Talk has to be matched by action. Change the work your editors do accordingly. Make the transition, as one CJR respondent put it, “from a print publication supplemented with online articles to an online publication supplemented with print editions.” Follow the model described by another respondent: “Instead of developing stories for print and online and then republishing them online, we now do the opposite–develop for online, and . . . pick the strongest articles to appear in print.”

Editors, a word to the wise. Don’t wait around for your company to follow this or similar advice. The lure of the cash cow is simply too strong for them to reorient operations from the substantial but declining revenue flow from print towards the small but growing income from online. Learning your way around blogs, podcasts, online video, and social media is not like taking on vector calculus. Just jump in and start training yourself.

The ASBPE and CJR surveys should be a wake-up call to publishers and editors alike. It’s time to change masters.