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.

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.

Rethinking the Role of “Advertisers”

Quartz websiteWriting last week for the Nieman Journalism Lab, Ken Doctor analyzed “The newsonomics of the Quartz business launch.” It should be required reading for every B2B journalist and publisher.

In identifying the key aspects and implications of the business news startup from Atlantic Media, Doctor touched on a number of key points for any business-oriented publication. One in particular stood out for me:

Call it underwriting, sponsorship, or share of voice, Quartz is leaping over the littered landscape of impression-based display advertising and selling sponsorships. It will start with four sponsors, who are paying based on their association with The New. In a twist we’ll see more of — another reason Quartz is worth watching — these advertisers are creating their own content for Quartz readers, through something called “Quartz Bulletin.”

Atlantic Media seems to have accepted what Lewis DVorkin keeps telling us (most recently last Thursday): Content is content, whether it comes from an editor or an advertiser. As company president Justin Smith told Adweek, “We believe branded content is going to be an essential part of the site itself.”

Like Forbes, with its AdVoice product, Quartz recognizes that the old advertising model—limited to hermetically sealed ad units dropped beside editorial content—must change. Though the process is fraught with danger, publishers will have to start breaking down the wall that separates editorial from advertising and find a new model for sharing their media with their “advertisers”—a name that may likewise need to change.

Forbes and Atlantic Media may not have found the right model yet. But unlike too many other legacy publishers, they have at least recognized that the old one is broken and will never be mended.

Lewis DVorkin: Content Marketing or Advertorial?

Photo of Lewis Dvorkin

Is Lewis DVorkin a visionary or a sell-out? I can never quite make up my mind. That’s never more true than when he writes about content marketing, as he did last Monday.

As Chief Product Officer for Forbes Media he’s done some impressive things to advance the publication’s online and social-media presence, and his “Copy Box” column is essential new-media reading. But whenever he explains AdVoice, the Forbes approach to mixing editorial contributions from advertisers with more traditional editorial, I start feeling queasy.

DVorkin describes AdVoice as an outlet for content marketing, which he defines as “brands using the tools of digital media and social sharing to behave like original-content publishers.” As he goes on to say, the “idea that a company—as a brand and marketer—can be an expert content creator and reach an audience by disintermediating reporters is confusing, threatening and scary to an entire profession that had its way for a century.”

True enough. But content marketing itself doesn’t worry me. As long-time readers of this blog know, I generally like the idea of content marketing.

Where I get uneasy with content marketing, though, is when it starts to look more like advertising.

I think of content marketing as owned media rather than paid media, as published by the originating brand itself, that is, rather than by and under another brand. So when DVorkin talks about integrating his advertisers’ content-marketing efforts into the Forbes brand, I worry that he’s really talking about advertorial.

His first line of defense against that charge is full disclosure. AdVoice, he says, is “a fully transparent way for marketers to publish and curate content on Forbes.com and in our magazine.”

But is transparency an adequate defense? When a publication buys content (from staff writers or contributors), that clearly counts as editorial. But when the publication is paid to publish it (by advertisers), is it still editorial?

For a traditional publisher, the answer would be no. In buying content, a publication is essentially saying that it is good, that it will serve the readers well. When the publication is paid to publish it, though, all bets are off. Good or bad, it doesn’t matter: it’s an ad, not editorial.

But, radically, DVorkin argues against such differentiation between an advertiser’s content and, say, Forbes’s own editorial: “content is content, and transparency makes it possible for many different credible sources to provide useful information.” To a traditionalist, that sounds plain wrong, if not evil.

But of course Forbes is in DVorkin’s view anything but a traditional publication. It is, rather, “a brand-building platform for journalists and expert voices.” In his model, the publisher does not differentiate and ordain content, but simply hosts it without prejudice:

For FORBES, everything we do cascades from a belief that there are five vital constituencies in the media business, each with a different agenda. FORBES certainly has a voice. So does the journalist, the consumer, the social community and the marketer. . . . AdVoice is organic to our experience, not an add on. Our marketing partners use the same tools to post and engage with readers that I do. AdVoice content appears on our home page; it breaks into the Most Popular module when rising page views push it there; it appears dynamically in our real-time stream and channel streams.

In other words, the publisher is no longer a gatekeeper for content, but just one of several equally privileged voices. The publisher’s role now is to provide and share a common platform for community voices.

I’m old enough to find this vision troublesome, and radical enough to see its potential. So I guess I still can’t answer my opening question. What do you think?