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.

Curation: Add Value and Pass It Along

Among all the topics that seem to rile journalists and publishers these days, perhaps the most contentious is curation. Is summarizing and linking to another person’s article an honorable act or a form of theft? How can you distinguish between good curation and bad curation?

Let me begin to answer those questions by summarizing and linking to Rex Hammock’s post last week on this very issue.

The act of finding great content and linking to it, he says, is a fine idea. Though he dislikes the term curation, he approves of the activity as it was originally practiced. But recently, he says, it has come to mean something less good:

Over the past three or so years, the term media curation has evolved in its meaning to being less-and-less an act of help and service and more and more a term that’s used to add lipstick to a pig of a business model that is based on something like the following: “go re-write stuff you find elsewhere that’s about whatever is trending on Google and bury a link to them somewhere towards the end of the story so we can claim it’s not merely re-writing their story.”

Hammock’s guideline for avoiding this fix seems pretty clear: If you can’t add value to a story, just link to it.

Perhaps not so clear is how to add value. I think most rational people would agree with him that many Huffington Post or Business Insider stories are really just rewrites. But short of that extreme, there’s plenty of disagreement.

The best recent example, perhaps, comes from Kashmir Hill’s Forbes.com story last February recapping Charles Duhigg’s New York Times article on consumer marketing and data mining. As Mathew Ingram wrote, opinion was sharply divided over whether Hill stole Duhigg’s story “in an attempt to get pageviews from someone else’s work” or whether she instead served a valuable function in highlighting and directing readers to his article.

When I read Hill’s story, I don’t see an attempt to get pageviews. What I see, rather, is someone who is intensely interested in Duhigg’s subject matter, admiring of his work, and intellectually engaged with his ideas.

I can’t find similar motivations in the pedestrian article Hammock criticizes. It’s simply the output of an aggregation serf.

The contrast between these two attempts at curation suggests to me a test that any writer should apply before blogging about another person’s story: Are you are genuinely engaged with it? If the answer is yes, chances are good you will add value in passing it along.

Reporter Failure, Editor Failure, or Tool Failure?

Telephone: Useful, but don't trust it.What are the new-media lessons, if any, to be drawn from the resignation earlier this month of Washington Post blogger Elizabeth Flock? Her immediate reason for resigning was having a prominent correction slapped onto one of her stories, the second in the last five months. Most of the discussion about her resignation has focused on who’s to blame. WaPo ombudsman Patrick Pexton says that “The Post failed her as much as she failed The Post.” On The Awl, Trevor Butterworth says WaPo is more at fault.

What caught my eye in this story, though, was a different kind of failure, one involving not reporters or editors, but the tools they use.

In an earlier article on Flock’s first corrected story last December, Pexton focused similarly on failures involving the human element. In this story, Flock incorrectly attributed to the Romney presidential campaign the use of an old Ku Klux Klan slogan. Although she tried to contact campaign representatives by e-mail, their reply correcting the story was lost in the WaPo spam filter. Quoting executive editor Marcus Brauchli, Pexton concluded that “‘We had a reporter failure and we had an editor failure.’”

But then he went on to raise a quite different kind of failure:

“Another problem here is that too many reporters see the computer as their main tool of the trade. I’m old-fashioned, and I think the telephone is still the first tool of the trade if you can’t do a personal interview. Fine to use the Internet for some basic research, or in a pinch to e-mail a source for a comment, but it’s faster and often better to call. You get more nuance, more spontaneity, and you usually get a real human being to answer a question. E-mail is too easily ignored; a person on the phone is harder to put off.”

My first reaction to this was an odd mixture of agreement and skepticism. I think it’s true that younger journalists tend to rely too much on online tools and not enough on old ones like the telephone. But Pexton’s suggestion that the Internet is only good for basic research or as a last resort is wrong too.

All of these tools are useful. But they all fail at times as well. The key is to use them all and to trust none.

Shakespeare Was an Aggregating Social-Media Pirate

Portrait of Shakespeare

Aargh?

In yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, theater critic Charles McNulty wrote a marvelous column inspired by his objections to the Roland Emmerich movie, Anonymous. Though he disputes the movie’s thesis that no one with Shakespeare’s lower middle class roots could have written such great masterpieces, that wasn’t his aim in writing. His goal, rather, was to remind us that the Bard’s works were not simply the output of an individual, but the result of a collaboration with a crowd of other writers, actors, scholars, and editors.

Nothing McNulty tells us would surprise even a casual student of Shakespeare. But without perhaps meaning to, he offers some enlightening arguments against those who doubt the validity or value of social media.

While Shakespeare “is indisputably the master architect of his work—the genius in chief, if you will,” McNulty writes, “his plays took a literary village.” His plays, that is, were the result of collaboration and conversation with predecessors, contemporaries, and even later generations. His plots and characters were frequently borrowed, his words undoubtedly shaped by interactions with his actors, and the final form of his output determined by later scholars and editors.

He was a master aggregator, one who would certainly be accused of plagiarism if he was a 21st-century artist. But the accusation would be false. As McNulty writes, what “we would call plagiarism today was considered borrowing back then, a practice cradled in the curriculum.” Shakespeare didn’t simply borrow, though: “Whatever he touched, he alchemized. His poetic and dramatic instincts could spin gold out of dross.” A useful reminder, perhaps, that the best aggregators improve the things they borrow.

Not only would our age treat a contemporary version of Shakespeare as a plagiarist, it would also spurn him as a copyright pirate. The Renaissance, McNulty notes, was “an age unconstrained by modern copyright laws.” As Mike Masnick asked earlier this year, would Shakespeare today “be able to produce any of his classic works, since they’d all be tied up in lawsuits over copyright infringement”?

No, I’m not defending plagiarism, or opposing copyright. But I am saying that an excessive focus on those issues is bad for our culture. Accordingly, I will borrow as my own McNulty’s eloquent conclusion: “Shakespeare’s legacy is pretty much assured. That of our own age is still up for grabs.”

Three Ways to Make Media More Personal

MUD day 20:

Back in the late 90s or early aughts, one of the hot topics in the Web 1.0 world was personalization. On the industry portal site I ran for much of that time, we had what seems now like a pretty lame concept of personalization. We wanted to let our registered users select their interests from a predetermined set of categories, then present a customized home page when they logged in.

We never implemented our plan, but it hardly mattered. The onset of Web 2.0 and social media, along with the impact of Google search, would have rendered our efforts irrelevant.

But the need for publishers to think about how to make media more personal is, if anything, more important now than ever. There are many ways to go about that, but here are three that should be at the top of every publisher’s list for consideration.

1. Aggregate. Personalization means giving readers the information they want. And they don’t just want your own, original information—they want all the relevant content they can find, regardless of where it comes from. So you must point them to it by identifying and aggregating good content from other sites—even from competitive sites.

2. Treat your editors and other content creators as publishers. The old editor-in-chief, top-down, command-and-control approach to managing a content team doesn’t work in an era of personalized content. To make your content more personal, you have to empowever every person on your staff and give them a bigger role in deciding what content to create and curate. You need to encourage and promote their Twitter accounts and other social media outlets, even at the risk of allowing their personal brand to outshine your own media brand.

3. Treat the readers as your staff. The people formerly known as the audience aren’t just your readers anymore. They are participants in creating and disseminating your content. They are in some ways functionally indistinguishable from your own editors and reporters. In practical terms, this strategy means encouraging and responding to comments and highlighting them when appropriate, offering readers platforms for their work (as the Huffington Post has done for its commenters), and even perhaps hiring them are fully-fledged, paid staff.

As I’ve suggested, these three tactics are neither the only nor the required ways to make content more personal. But any publishers who aren’t thinking hard about how to make media more personal are putting their futures at risk.