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.

Like It or Not, Journalism Is Now a Multiplex Trade

Earlier this month, Bill Grueskin, dean of academic affairs at Columbia Journalism School, wrote a thoughtful argument against the concept of journalists as Swiss Army knives. In his essay for Nieman Journalism Lab, he argued that “one-size-fits-all” journalists trained in a wide variety of digital media skills hurt journalism more than they help it. Asking journalists to do it all, he said, means few of them will do any of it well.

Although I’m sympathetic to his argument, and value the fundamentals of journalism as much as anyone, I think he’s fighting a losing battle.

More persuasive to me is Atlantic Digital editor Bob Cohn’s excellent piece today on the Folio: website, “Hiring in the Digital Age.” In Cohn’s view, the Swiss Army knife journalist is a reality that must be reckoned with, like it or not:

“This transition from vertical job descriptions to horizontal job descriptions is perhaps the most profound change in newsrooms that are full of change. I can’t say whether this is a sign of trouble or triumph for journalism. Probably both. But it is definitely a matter of fact.”

As Cohn points out, the multiplex skills and interests journalists need these days are essential to a world in which barriers are breaking down everywhere. Success in journalism is not just a matter of a broad skill set, but also of wide-ranging interests and open, inquisitive attitudes.

If you’re involved in training or hiring journalists, Cohn’s article is required reading. You may not like what he says, but, sooner or later, you will have to deal with it.

A Look Inside a B2B Editor’s Head

ASBPE Twitter Chat on Editorial Ethics

If you want to understand the state of mind of the typical journalist today, or to dig into the challenges they face in managing their careers, you don’t have to look far—as long as you mean the typical newspaper journalist.

Although there is plenty of online debate and discussion of journalistic issues, the mass of it concerns the daily press. To learn about how these issues affect the typical magazine journalist, you have to look harder. And if your interest is in trade journalists, well, good luck: they are the profession’s obscurest members.

That’s what makes a recent Twitter chat among B2B editors and writers a valuable resource. Sponsored by the ethics committee of ASBPE, an association for trade press editors and writers, the chat showcased the issues that particularly worry them.

Despite its length, I urge you to read through my Storified archive of the chat. The discussion is frustratingly fractured and incomplete (it’s Twitter, after all), but it will give you a good sense of the issues that keep trade editors up at night:

  • Preventing undue influence by advertisers (given the nature of B2B publishing, this topic was front and center).
  • Dealing with insufficient staffing and hiring.
  • Finding the proper level of involvement with marketing (particularly in sponsored webinars, a medium uniquely popular in trade publishing).
  • Managing freelancers, particularly with respect to expectations regarding plagiarism and attribution.
  • Effectively using ethics guidelines like ASBPE’s Guide to Preferred Editorial Practices.
  • Understanding the proper relationship between professional and personal use of social media.
These concerns are not unique to B2B journalists, of course. But the way they play out in the trade-press arena is in some ways very different from the rest of journalism. This twitter chat only gives a hint of that important difference—but it’s a start.

Are You Highly Digital? Try This Test

Ipad Face by Camila Andrea In a Harvard Business Review blog post discussed last week by Mark Schaefer, authors Jeffrey Rayport and Tuck Rickards asserted that most big companies are too far behind the digital curve. By their standards, only nine of the Fortune 500 corporations are highly digital.

That’s no surprise. But what interests me is the four-part test they use to assess companies. Could it be adapted to individuals as a way of testing their own digital chops, I wonder?

The authors’ four criteria for highly digital companies are pretty straightforward:

  1. The company generates a high percentage of revenues digitally.
  2. Its leadership has deep digital experience.
  3. It does business enabled by digital channels.
  4. It is seen as transformational within its industry.

I’m not sure Rayport and Rickards sufficiently explain these criteria, but it doesn’t matter. My concern here is with adapting these four tests to individuals—and particularly to editors and journalists.

So let’s say, then, that you can consider yourself highly digital if you meet the following versions of their four characteristics:

  1. Most of the work you do appears in digital form either first or exclusively. Most of what you earn you only earn because your copy appeared online.
  2. You generate your work on your own, with little need for assistance, using a variety of digital tools. You manage your CMS yourself, you are equally comfortable tweeting and posting on Facebook, you even adjust code occasionally.
  3. Your work is uniquely digital in nature. In other words, you are not simply producing second-stage shovelware, but genuinely digital content, shaped to take full advantage of its digital medium.
  4. The people you work with look to you as a model of digital competence. Others come to you not just for help using WordPress or sizing an image, but also for advice on their new-media careers.

You may be wondering, “Is all this necessary? Why do I need to determine how digital I am?”

The answer, for me, is similar to what Schaefer says about companies: “social media success is not going to be a function of marketing vision or budget. It’s going to rely on radical organizational transformation.”

Likewise, for traditional journalists, the only way to ensure a healthy career in the new-media era is to undergo a radical professional transformation. My proposed test doubtless needs work—please pitch in with suggestions or improvements in the comments below or elsewhere—but its intent is sound.

Are you highly digital? If you’re not certain of the answer, maybe it’s time to find out.

Photo by Camila Andrea via Flickr

Writing for the Web: The Human Algorithm and Zero-Sum SEO

Rockhopper Penguin Photo © Samuel Blanc [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Do you write for the Penguin, or the human?

I sometimes fear that search-engine optimization (SEO)  is the only aspect of new media that people have really cottoned to. Not that they’ve understood it, necessarily, but that they feel it is both justified and essential. It is something they simply accept.

But for any content creator, SEO (as most people practice it, at least) is the kiss of death. If you want your content to work, write for people, not for search engines.

I was reminded of this at last week’s SIPA meeting. In the course of a wandering and inconclusive presentation on writing for the Web, one of my fellow audience members asked the room, “Does anyone here think SEO isn’t important?” Out of perhaps 20 editors and writers in attendance, I was the only one who raised a hand.

This struck me as both worrisome and curious. No one there was particularly enthusiastic about SEO or how it aided their craft, but all glumly accepted its necessity.

In my defense, I argued that SEO is a losing game. The moment you achieve that precious optimization, Google changes its algorithm and reverses all your gains.

I might have added, it’s also frequently a zero-sum game. That is, whatever you gain from writing for search engines, your site visitors lose through irrelevant or shallow content.

My cynicism about SEO doesn’t mean I’m not in favor of marketing your content. Most writers, I think, need to do more marketing to potential readers, not less. But both parties should gain from that marketing effort. You should want your visitors to find your content because it’s exactly what they need, not because you successfully gamed a search engine.

Another way to put this is that, as a writer or journalist, you should worry less about Google’s algorithm and more about the human algorithm.

That to me is the takeaway from Guillaume Bouchard’s recent Search Engine Watch article on Google’s Penguin update.

Bouchard argues that the “solution for not getting pummeled every time Google changes its algorithm is to focus on providing the best possible relevancy to users.” You should focus on users, not SEO, in creating your content, he says, because “people, not just machines, have to get something out of it.” The best strategy for bringing your content to the attention of your target readers, he suggests, is to make it clean, clear, and useful.

That’s good SEO advice. Just as important, it’s good writing advice, too. Take it, and both you and your readers will avoid the zero-sum game.