What B2B Publishers Can Learn About Content from Circa

Screenshot of Circa AppIn Sarah Lacy’s recent review of Circa, a new iPhone news app, she identifies and critiques three innovations in the way it presents news information. Its content is atomized, aggregated, and personalized.

Though Lacy thinks Circa’s founders have overstated their case for these innovations, she says they have identified issues critical to the future of news media. I would add that these issues are particularly important for business-to-business journalism.

Circa reflects the thinking of its most prominent cofounder, Ben Huh (yes, that Ben Huh).  As Lacy notes, for Huh, the article is no longer the defining “atomic unit” of journalism. In Circa it is replaced by the much shorter “flash card,” a short statement making a single point about a news event. Each news story is made up of one or more of these flash cards.

Huh also argues that there is too much overlap and repetition in most news stories. While he obviously values analysis and original reporting, he says there’s too much of it. Circa dispenses with it entirely. Its news content, all sourced to the original, is entirely aggregated from elsewhere.

The third key goal for Circa’s treatment of news is to make it responsive both to its consumer and to its format. By remembering what flash-card units of news you’ve read before, Circa may omit them in future stories, since you already know the information. And just as importantly, Circa tries to match the form of content to its container. On an iPhone, the reasoning goes (though Lacy rightly questions it), a few screensful of content constitute the ideal form of presentation. In other formats and contexts, the approach might well include longer forms.

While she likes the approach, Lacy is critical of the excessive claims of saving journalism that the Circa founders make. Nor does she agree with their assertion that the article is outmoded. Nonetheless, she suggests that if their rhetoric is extreme, their strategies are not.

Though B2B publishers will not simply want to copy those strategies, they should pay them close attention. Here’s why.

First, B2B publications today still rely far too heavily on articles. Articles suit perfectly brands like The New Yorker, where subscribers seek out the pleasures of extended reading and reflection. That’s not what the readers of the trade press are looking for. But it’s still what too many B2B editors and journalists want to give them.

Similarly, trade publishers put too much emphasis on original analysis and reporting. This sounds like sacrilege, I know. But let’s face it. In practice, trade reportage often doesn’t match audience needs, often favors advertisers, and often, to be honest, just plain sucks.

Analysis and reporting are still important, but are best practiced selectively. In any case, even with the best writers, one publication cannot come close to meeting the information needs of its readers. So aggregation—sharing the best and most relevant content from other sources than your own—should therefore be part of any trade publication’s mission.

Finally, B2B publishers need to do a much better job of suiting content and format to the reader and the medium. Every publisher has to find the right mix not just for each type of reader, but for each individual reader.  In other words, content must be personalized. And content must also be sensitive to each form of media. In tablets, for instance, articles may still flourish, while in mobile, short-form aggregation may dominate.

There is no single right approach. The lesson to draw from Circa is not that aggregation is the future of journalism. The lesson, rather, should be that the tools and techniques we use as journalists will change constantly, depending on the medium and the audience. The future of journalism, that is, will be multiform.

Digital First, Not Foremost

John Paton

John Paton: Misguided, or misunderstood?

In all the recent debate on the merits of the digital-first strategy for publishers (neatly encapsulated today by Mathew Ingram), there is one strand of discussion that never quite comes to the foreground. Though the phrase digital first is often contrasted with digital only, for many—mostly the critics, but perhaps some of the advocates as well—the implicit message is the same: “Digital rocks! Print sucks!”

To my mind, that’s not what digital first means. The point of the phrase is not about which medium is better. It’s about which medium people use. And that medium is sometimes print, sometimes web, sometimes social, sometimes mobile, sometimes video, sometimes audio. Digital-first is about distributing content through all those media in the most efficient way possible. Digital is first, but not necessarily foremost.

The idea, as I see it, is not to privilege digital media over other forms, but to use a digital workflow to move seamlessly and efficiently from one format to another. That, of course is easier said than done. Alan Mutter puts it plainly:

“Publishers today are struggling to pivot to a new business model that they call ‘digital first’—whatever that means—while managing through the seemingly relentless decline of their existing one. Mastering either of those tasks individually would be daunting. The challenge of doing both at the same time is nothing less than epic.”

As Mutter points out, one reason that newspapers have failed so miserably at the digital transition is that they “unimaginatively tried to export their formerly successful print business model to the digital realm. ” That is, they employed a print-first strategy. And the print model is simply too rigid and too ponderous to be the starting point in modern publishing.

This, I take it, is what Digital First Media CEO John Paton, much criticized of late, is getting at when he said that his “digital first strategy is centered on the cost-effective creation of content and sales and not the legacy modes of production.”

The ultimate goal of digital first should not be to substitute one medium for another, but to achieve medium independence. Technology is shifting ground daily, and the way people interact is changing with it. As publishers, if we want to interact with them, we have to be able to deliver our content when they want it, where they want it, and how they want it. Such dexterity is only possible by going digital first.

The Case Against Content Worship

Via the Media Briefing, this thought-provoking if rambling takedown of publishers’ unwarranted faith in content:

“Once upon a time content in this industry was the reworked press releases that kept the advertising apart on the printed page. It was never valuable and it isn’t now. What is valuable is a deep understanding of what users need in order to better accomplish their work – and a determination to build technology and content into contexts that make improvements that people will pay for and where they will deposit their own content as well.”

The author, David Worlock, is rightly appalled that at a recent conference of publishers, the halls rang with the refrain that great content is the key to surviving the digital transition.

I don’t think Worlock would claim, any more than I would, that excellent content has no value. But what he does say, I think, is that content is not the end of successful publishing, but a means to it. As he puts it, the “new publishing” consists in ”understanding how users work and supplying . . . content in the right context and with the right interface.”

If you think content is king, you should ask yourself the question Jeff Jarvis posed last year: Is the greater value to be found in content itself, or in “the relationships and data it can spawn”?

Think carefully. Your survival may depend upon the answer.

Beats vs. Obsessions: More Lessons for B2B from Quartz

Gideon Lichfield

Gideon Lichfield

Last month, I wrote about how Atlantic Media’s new online publication, Quartz, offers business-to-business publishers a new advertising model to consider. Since then I’ve been thinking a lot about another new model Quartz embodies, this time involving its content. Instead of the traditional editorial beats, its coverage reflects what it calls obsessions.

Though this looks at first like a slightly precious and possibly meaningless distinction, on closer inspection, it isn’t. In fact, for the B2B world in particular, it is a crucial concept.

The idea is best understood by reading Quartz news editor Gideon Lichfield’s slightly nerdy but persuasive rationale for abandoning the beat.  As he explains, “Today almost every news outlet is organized around fixed beats: ‘financial markets,’ ‘real estate,’ ‘technology’, and so on.”

For Lichfield, the fatal flaw of the beat is that it is driven by the print model:

“Yet the beats aren’t so much an objective taxonomy as a convenient management tool, devised for an old technology. When news came in a sheaf of pages it made sense to divide them into sections—domestic, foreign, business, and so on—with an editor and a team of writers for each one, and make each writer responsible for a slice of that section: a beat.”

Lichfield’s post has provoked a range of reactions. C.W. Anderson worries that giving up on beats means abandoning the “monitorial” role of the press. Others, like Joshua Benton and Paul Raeburn, don’t think the distinction between beats and obsessions is very clear.

Benton does, however, underscore a key aspect of the concept: flexibility. “What I do like about the obsessions model,” he writes, “is that obsessions are destined to be temporary and responsive to reality.” This is clearly central to Lichfield. He repeatedly refers to beats as “fixed,” and contrasts them with his definition of obsessions as an “ever-evolving collection of phenomena.”

The other key concept Lichfield addresses is that of crossing traditional boundaries. Covering such phenomena through a traditional beat structure, he writes, “is difficult: they often cut across beat boundaries, taking in politics, economics, technology, and other issues. Our journalists have to be, to some extent, all-rounders, who aren’t afraid to get outside their usual expertise and track the topic they’re following wherever it leads.”

Lichfield adds that online, “when there are no pages and sections to constrain you, you are free to reframe your description of reality.” I would go a bit farther. That act of reframing is not simply an option, but an obligation, a key to survival.

The arbitrary distinctions and categories that characterize traditional B2B publishing—think yearly editorial calendars, ad/edit ratios, “controlled circulation”—make such reframing impossible. The niche still matters, but it is in constant flux, and to pursue it, you have to change with it.

In almost every way, the B2B print model is poorly suited to this pursuit. It commits publishers to a relatively fixed way of presenting information on a rigid production-driven schedule to an arbitrarily defined audience that may or may not want that information.

Thinking about B2B media from this perspective has been an interesting exercise. I’ve drawn, so far, three conclusions.

First, the way publishers cover information should not be driven by the needs of the print model. The insight is easy; acting on it, alas, is hard. Unlike the online-only Quartz, most B2B publishers want to protect substantial, if steadily declining, print revenues. One way or another, though, they will have to make the digital-first transition if they want to survive.

Second, publishers have to rethink their idea of their audience. It’s not 20,000 subscribers assigned to one of six demographic categories (and it never was). It is now a constantly shifting group of people that changes with every new article and every new keyword. You can’t write to them all (and you never could). So who are you trying to reach, and why?

Third, to succeed as an online publisher, you have to know when and how to change. When you substitute an evolving obsession for a fixed beat, you have to dig deeper and harder for things to write about. And when you write for an ever-changing group of readers, you have to be constantly assessing who they are.

The way you do it is through data. Most B2B publishers talk a lot about data, but mostly to ask, “Gee, how can we sell our data to companies and make a lot of money?” But the real value isn’t in the data set itself, but in how that data can help publishers strengthen their relationships with their audiences. If you aren’t actively mining and analyzing the data you have on your readers and their obsessions, you won’t keep up with them.

These are not particularly new or original observations. But they underscore for me something less obvious: to survive online, you have to abandon not just the mechanisms of print, but the very thought processes.

Is Advertising in New Media Doomed?

For many in B2B publishing, the future hinges on a simple question: Is online advertising viable? The answer, unfortunately, is not yet clear. But to me, at least, one thing is certain: advertising will only work where it is based on transparent, equal, and positive relationships among publisher, advertiser, and consumer.

Photo by Chris Wheal This was a topic raised in last week’s episode of This Week in Google. At about 46 minutes in, the conversation turned to a recent dispute between Microsoft and the Apache Software Foundation involving the way websites track users with cookies, a key requirement for many online advertisers. For unclear reasons, Microsoft’s newest web browser, Internet Explorer 10, comes with user preferences set to Do Not Track, rejecting all cookies by default. Apache, which makes the software that runs most websites, objects, saying users should make that decision, not Microsoft.

Whatever comes of this controversy, the danger it represents is clear. If advertisers are denied even basic information about who clicks on their ads, they will have little incentive to continue advertising. And independent content providers, in turn, will have even less revenue to keep them going.

As “This Week in Google” host Leo Laporte said, how people think about cookies and privacy really depends on how you frame the discussion. If you start by saying that cookies are used to track and collate information about your behavior on the web, it sounds bad. If you say instead that they help websites and advertisers deliver personalized information that you want, it’s more acceptable.

My point isn’t to say that tracking is always a good thing. It isn’t, particularly as used in a mass-media context. But in the healthy sort of relationship between publisher, advertiser, and reader/visitor that you traditionally find in the B2B world, it’s not just a good thing, but a necessary thing. As Jeff Jarvis said in response to Laporte, “media needs to build a relationship with people, but that relationship requires knowing you, and knowing something about you, and being able to act positively on that” (58:19).

In practice, this means two things for publishers. First, earning and keeping the trust of their users is paramount. They must respect their audience and practice transparency in all their dealings with them.

Second, publishers need to hedge their bets and search vigorously for advertising innovations and alternatives. As David Johnson wrote today on MediaShift, the “online advertising experience is awful. There’s no dancing around it, and all the talk about saving journalism isn’t dealing with that fundamental problem.”

Ultimately, audience and advertiser need each other, and will find ways to share their information. It is a necessary relationship. But if independent publishers cannot find persuasive ways to demonstrate their value in that relationship, they will be cast aside with few regrets.

Photo by Chris Wheal