The examples Kessler cites span the range of content creation, from automatically generated sports news to the use of [...]]]> In an article published last weekend on Mashable, Sarah Kessler asked the question, “Can Robots Run the News?” It’s an important question not just for journalists, but for anyone who creates or curates content on the Web.

The examples Kessler cites span the range of content creation, from automatically generated sports news to the use of algorithms to identify news topics. There’s obvious value to automated content creation, and as Jeff Jarvis has declared, “Data is (are) journalism.” But we should be careful not to confuse computed content with communication.

Computed content is a set of data; communication is the expression of an attitude toward, or perspective on, those data. Without a point of view, content is just an audience speaking to itself.

Using Web analytics from a test period to automatically choose between two headlines, as we’re told the Huffington Post does for its stories, can make sense—if both versions are true to the content. If you balance crowd-sourced feedback with the content creator’s point of view, you’ll have a productive conversation. But if the crowd takes precedence, it may simply replace content’s individual vitality with the bland mean.

Take, for instance, the English title for Stieg Larsson’s novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It may not have been crowd sourced, but it certainly plays to a corporate idea of the crowd. Is it really better than the literally translated original title, Men Who Hate Women? (That’s a rhetorical question. The original title nails the book’s central concern; the English version just wraps it in a pulp-fiction cover.)

Even in content marketing, where knowing what people want is critical to the content provider’s success, a one-sided conversation dominated by the audience won’t fly. For a conversation to work, there must be differences between the participants. The power of new media is the way it enables the audience to challenge the creator. That doesn’t mean, though, that the creator should stop challenging the audience.

This balance seems to be what Yahoo VP of Media Jimmy Pitaro is after in the company’s news blog, The Upshot. In her interview with him last week on All Things D, Kara Swisher noted that while some see computational journalism as a “‘democratizing’ of the news, others are more concerned about relying on algorithms to determine the best coverage and the implications for a society guided by its own searches.”

But as Pitaro noted in his video interview, “data and audience insights” constitute just one component of the content. In addition, Yahoo uses the “old-school” methods of “manually identifying topics” through its team of editors and writers.

Similarly, as Kessler mentioned in Mashable and as Claire Cain Miller explored at greater length in yesterday’s New York Times, the tech-news site Techmeme uses both algorithms and editors to produce its content. Why? Because “humans do things software cannot, like grouping subtly related stories, taking into account sarcasm or skepticism, or posting important stories that just broke.”

If readers didn’t care about such things, algorithms alone might be enough. But they do care. The same audience whose searches drive the algorithms also want the human touch in their content.  Until computers can pass the Turing Test, it isn’t likely that they will replace people in content creation.

“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 [...]]]> 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?

Like it or not, there is a role in most publications for run-of-the-mill, commodity content. The challenge for [...]]]> 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.

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 [...]]]>

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.

Is Google poised to slow the growing domination of its search results by content farms like Demand Media and Associated Content? At the end of last Saturday’s episode of the podcast This Week in Google, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, suggested that it would: “If your business [...]]]>

Matt Cutts: Raising the Bar

Is Google poised to slow the growing domination of its search results by content farms like Demand Media and Associated Content? At the end of last Saturday’s episode of the podcast This Week in Google, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, suggested that it would: “If your business model is solely based on mass-generating huge amounts of nearly worthless content, that’s not going to work as well in 2010.”

Cutts’s remark came in response to a question by host Leo Laporte near the end of the episode. Though Laporte only learned about Demand Media a week earlier in his This Week in Tech Podcast, as he glancingly noted, he left no mistake about where he stood on the merits of its approach: “it seems like a way to game Google by creating a lot of pages with . . . barely adequate content in a niche area [in order] to drive traffic.”

Though Cutts avoided taking a position on Demand Media itself, he made it clear that Google was looking to address the generic problem:

“Within Google, we have seen a lot of feedback from people saying, Yeah, there’s not as much web spam, but there is this sort of low-quality, mass-generated content . . . where it’s a bunch of people being paid a very small amount of money. So we have started projects within the search quality group to sort of spot stuff that’s higher quality and rank it higher, you know, and that’s the flip side of having stuff that’s lower-quality not rank as high.”

In response to a question from co-host Jeff Jarvis, Cutts gave some specific ideas of how Google might try to adjust for the content-farm effect:

“You definitely want to write algorithms that will find the signals of good sites. You know, the sorts of things like original content rather than just scraping someone, or rephrasing what someone else has said. And if you can find enough of those signals—and there are definitely a lot of them out there—then you can say, OK, find the people who break the story, or who produce the original content, or who produce the impact on the Web, and try to rank those a little higher. . . .”

Jarvis, it should be noted, is not a cookie-cutter critic of Demand Media. He argued that Demand’s system for determining what content readers and advertisers want is “very smart.” But he seemed to agree that its resulting product is ranked too high on Google’s results. In the link economy, he said, it becomes an “ethical matter” to support original content by linking to it “at its source.”

Jarvis took Cutts’s thoughts further by stressing the growing importance of “Twitter, Buzz, and Facebook,” or “human recommendation of content,” as a way “to get past this notion of spam and content farms.” The more Google and others can capture the value of this social-media validation, he said, “the less this content-farm chaff is going to be a problem.”

In a BuzzMachine post published on Monday, Jarvis expanded on the topic of how content will be discovered in the future. Thanks to new tools like Twitter, Facebook, Buzz, he wrote, “human links are exploding as a means of discovery.” Earlier forms of discovery, he said, have been prone to manipulation, but in the new “content ecosystem,” where we “discover more and more content through people we trust,” quality will again rise to the top.

Well, here’s hoping.

Forrester claims the move was made to protect its intellectual property. Koch’s view, though, is that Forrester’s motivation is to do the very thing it urges clients not to do: [...]]]> On his excellent B2B Blog last Friday, Chris Koch reflected on Forrester’s recent decision to make all its analysts move their blogs into Forrester’s web site.

Forrester claims the move was made to protect its intellectual property. Koch’s view, though, is that Forrester’s motivation is to do the very thing it urges clients not to do: exert control over the way its employees use social media.

Though he doesn’t cite it specifically, I have to wonder if a related motivation isn’t to avoid creating competitors. As Koch notes, “The most powerful example of one of these personally branded blogs is Web Strategy by Jeremiah, by Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst who left Forrester prior to the policy change.”

While Forrester obviously wants its analysts to be well-known, it probably doesn’t want them to become so well known that they don’t need their employer anymore. The corporate brand wants to dominate its personal brands.

That might have been a smart business attitude for a content company once, but it’s dead wrong now.

In the publishing world, it used to be that when you interviewed editors and writers, you looked for evidence that the candidate would stay with you long-term. Likewise, most candidates wanted a chance to build a career within your company.

For the employer, it meant minimizing your hiring and training costs and benefiting from the ever-increasing experience of staff. For the employee, it meant not just job security, but continuing opportunities in experience and career advancement. It was, of course, a pairing of unequals, a master-servant relationship. But in the publishing world of old, it was the only way for the individual to gain access to the machinery needed to do the work.

That relationship has changed dramatically in the last decade. In the new-media world, individuals no longer need employers to build and maintain a publishing career. With the tools necessary for online publishing now essentially free, the employee has become, in terms of production, the equal of the employer. As Jeff Jarvis put it four years ago, “The empowered individual can create a media company, using blog software; create a manufacturing company, using somebody else’s factory and somebody else’s distribution; create a multinational enterprise, using nothing more than a Skype line.”

In such an environment, it makes no sense to hire people because they are likely to stay put. What you want is just the opposite: people who are likely to burst through personal and professional boundaries, to innovate, to try out new and untested ideas and technologies, and to build up their personal brands. In other words, you want editorial and journalistic entrepreneurs.

The best employees in the new-media world are those who have the potential to become the employer’s strongest competitors. As an employer, your goal should be not to repress, but to nurture their competitive instincts. If you don’t, you won’t be maximizing your own competitive potential.

In one post, reflecting on today’s bankruptcy filing of Penton Media,  Paul Conley laments that traditional publishers have been too slow to die off.

In the other, Joe Pulizzi worries that media professionals have been too slow to [...]]]> A couple of blog commentaries today by B2B icons highlight two industry transformations that just aren’t happening fast enough.

In one post, reflecting on today’s bankruptcy filing of Penton Media,  Paul Conley laments that traditional publishers have been too slow to die off.

In the other, Joe Pulizzi worries that media professionals have been too slow to build their personal brands.

Taken together, these posts offer a much-needed wake-up call to those “lucky” people who still hold down old-media jobs.

For Conley, the likelihood that Chapter 11 will keep Penton going for at least a while longer isn’t good news, but bad. The complete demise of companies like Penton would be the best outcome, he suggests.

But instead, “these print-legacy, bond-selling dinosaurs get back on their feet and just lumber on . . . holding on to valuable properties that could actually grow if they were owned by people with more vision and less debt.”

The too-slow death of these behemoths is bad for the industry and worse for the people they employ. Conley notes that “Penton, like many of its peers, employs some talented people who produce some valuable material.” But talent alone is not enough. As ex-Pentonite Pulizzi observes, it has not saved many of his former colleagues from long periods of unemployment.

Yet they may be better off than those who have so far kept their jobs with the old-media dinosaurs. Far from being the lucky few, these are the people who, when their employers eventually collapse for good, are most at risk of falling behind in the new-media age.

It’s those employees that Pulizzi most urgently addresses in his post, offering them “Seven Ways to Position Yourself for Unlimited Work.”  If anyone is paying particular attention to his excellent advice,  it is surely the unemployed among us. It may be later than they like, but at least many of them are getting the message.

By contrast, the employed are not paying much attention, and so risk coming last to the new-media party. It’s for those people that Pulizzi reserves his most impassioned words:

“I’m urging you, especially if you have a full-time job that you feel is secure, to start doing this NOW. I can share hundreds (yes, hundreds) of examples of people who thought they were secure, didn’t do the work above, and are now taking unemployment.”

Between them, Conley and Pulizzi make it clear. The days of traditional B2B media jobs are numbered. The only job security you can count on now is what you build through your personal brand. If you aren’t doing that already, you need to catch up—and quick.

Silber’s beef with the so-called content farm is like that of many others from traditional publishing:  to pay freelance writers a paltry 3 cents a word, on average, is to  “demean [...]]]> Demand Media is evil. Or so Folio: magazine general manager Tony Silber implied yesterday in a blog post entitled “Demand Media Can Go to Hell.”

Silber’s beef with the so-called content farm is like that of many others from traditional publishing:  to pay freelance writers a paltry 3 cents a word, on average, is to  “demean and abuse professional content creators.”

Word that the company is looking to partner with magazine publishers was apparently enough to push Silber over the edge:

Tony Silber: Damned Media

“I hope no magazine ever partners with Demand Media. In fact, I hope Demand Media and any site like it goes out of business. They demean and abuse professional content creators, leveraging them to generate revenue from Google ads.

They’re sweatshops. No magazine should accept content from a company that treats content with such disrespect. In the end, too, you get what you pay for.”

I sympathize with Silber’s outrage and admire the frank way he expressed it. But is he right to demonize Demand?

I’ve argued previously on this blog that we should not fear content farms.  If they succeed—and so far that seems likely—it will be because they have accurately assessed the value of online content.

In Daniel Roth’s otherwise negative article on Demand Media in Wired last October, he observed that Demand has based its model on a persuasive belief that “online content is not worth very much.”  Rather than fight this cold hard reality, Demand is adapting to it:

“Most media companies are trying hard . . . to boost the value of their online content until it matches the amount of money it costs to produce. But Rosenblatt thinks they have it exactly backward. Instead of trying to raise the market value of online content to match the cost of producing it—perhaps an impossible proposition—the secret is to cut costs until they match the market value.”

Now maybe Demand is wrong, or maybe they are the exploiters Silber takes them for. But as content creators, freelancers would be wise to hedge their bets. Like Demand, they should be prepared to adapt to new-media reality.

What does that mean in practice?

First, think like an entrepreneur, not like a contract employee.  If the rate you’re offered isn’t good enough, start up your own Web site. It might not make you rich, but it could well bring you more than 3 cents a word.

Second, build up the value of your personal brand. If contributing pieces to a popular Web site for little or no pay helps you do that, it may be a worthwhile option.  Perhaps content is not worth much, but your perspective and expertise could be.

Third, look for multiple ways to channel your content, which can offer multiple streams of revenue. People like their content in a variety of formats, and if you’re not looking at podcasting, video, iPhone apps, and other ways of distributing your content, you’re not maximizing your earnings potential.

Finally, look beyond traditional advertising-driven media. Content marketing, as Paul Conley and others have argued for some time, is a compelling alternative for freelancers, even with the uncertain ethical issues involved.

So if Demand Media and their ilk offend you, by all means vent your rage. But don’t count on them, or the trends they represent, going away anytime soon.

*************************

UPDATE 2/5/09–Tony Silber offered the following comments via e-mail:

I . . . understand your point, and Jeff Jarvis’ in his comment on my post, about the economic reality.

I just think the Demand Medias of the world represent one type of content and one type of view of consumers. They’re one step ahead of natural economic forces, which I believe will produce higher value for quality content. As you say, they’re exploiters first, not true community creators and nurturers. They exist because Google has search-oriented ad-revenue programs.

Then there’s the practical question: if that is the true value of content—essentially worthless—what does that say about the future of content? If you can’t make a living creating content, then who’s going to create it?

Hey, people should go right ahead and sell their work for $15 if they want to. Good luck making a living. I’d rather do what you suggest: create your own web site and have a go at it. If you end up making peanuts, at least you know you’re paying yourself and some exploiter isn’t playing you for a sucker.