Meet Ben Popken. You've probably never heard of him, but I recommend you learn what he's all about. He and others like him are rewriting the rules of journalism and, with it, the practice of media relations. Ben sits atop the editorial pyramid at the blog The Consumerist. In conventional media terms, that pyramid isn't very big – only seven people – but Consumerist's reach far outweighs its small staff. The site gets 15 million unique visitors per month, a number that has roughly doubled in the past year. Perhaps more importantly, it's closely watched by mainstream media outlets. For example, The New York Times has referenced Consumerist 381 times, The Wall Street Journal 114 times and BusinessWeek 37 times. Consumerist gets picked up on the popular social bookmarking site Digg.com constantly -- 34,000 citations and counting. Popken was recently featured in a cover story in BusinessWeek and just wrote a 2,300-word article for Reader's Digest. All without a day of formal journalism training.
That's right, no journalism background; at least not as that concept is traditionally defined. Prior to joining Consumerist two years ago, Popken's professional career had consisted of a variety of entrepreneurial sales ventures and odd jobs. He worked as a delivery man not long before joining Consumerist. He only got the job because the previous editor's mother read his blog.
What's even more interesting than his background is the way his staff reports the news. Consumerist gets about 100 e-mails a day from consumers talking about their horrible encounters with businesses of all kinds. Big box retailers, banks, cell phone providers, cable companies and airlines are popular targets. Editors read and respond to each and every e-mail and write up about 30 of those submissions each day for the site. They also monitor a variety of news services looking for important stories that affect consumers.
The New Journalism?
Consumerist editors do little fact-checking. They don't have time with the volume of material they process. If something is wrong, they expect readers to quickly correct it. This direct reader input is the heart and soul of the Consumerist model, which Popken describes as "to empower consumers by informing and entertaining them about the top consumer issues of the day. We give them a voice by directly publishing their tips and e-mails and then following up on them as warranted."
A lot of journalists shudder when they read words like these. No editorial oversight? No verification of facts? It sounds like an invitation to disaster. But so far it's worked. Consumerist gets the occasional legal threat, but it's never amounted to much. And its laser focus on reader interests has won it a fanatical following. Have you ever sent a letter to a newspaper about a story you read and failed to get a response? At The Consumerist, you are the story.
With his site having already passed the venerable Consumer Reports in traffic, by some accounts, you'd think marketers would be beating down the door trying to get Popken's opinion. Yet surprisingly, he told me he gets few invitations to speak or consult. Some companies that the blog has repeatedly spotlighted have taken proactive measures. Sprint, for example, set up a dedicated support line for Consumerist readers, but only after the site published direct phone numbers for many of its executives.
With no formal journalism training, no editorial oversight and none of the trappings of conventional media, Ben Popken is becoming one of the most powerful voices in consumer journalism. And what's funny is that if you ask him about the secret of Consumerist's success, he uses the same words that any good editor uses: "The secret is to be reader-centric in a fundamental way. The content is driven by the readers and reacted to by the readers. We're really just a curator of consumer-generated content."
Get used to this. It's the online journalism model of the future.
Labels: blogculture, consumer_generated_media, journalism
¶ 9:04 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
I got a call today from a journalist who’s doing a story on the future of newspapers and he shared an interesting tidbit. He said he had contacted a prominent thought leader in the journalism field, whom I won’t name. This thought leader had said that the impending collapse of the newspaper industry was “a threat to democracy.”
Excuse me, but what? A threat to democracy? Newspapers are dying, in large part, because of democracy. The rise of citizen publishing has made it possible, for the first time, for large numbers of ordinary citizens to publish to a global audience without the intercession of media institutions. What could be more democratic than that? If Thomas Jefferson was alive today, he’d be an active blogger. Social media is the most democratic process to hit the publishing industry in 500 years.
I’m going to give the thought leader the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was referring to the decline of investigative journalism as practiced by newspapers. On that point, I’ll defer to journalism professor Steve Boriss, who argues that a lot of what passes for investigative journalism today is simply reporters acting as conduits for whistle-blowers. Those malcontents will find other outlets for their gripes, whether it be Consumerist.com or something else. I’m quite confident that the market will take care of filling the need for advocacy reporting.
I think the threat-to-democracy statement is more a function of the arrogance of traditional news journalists, who believe that a system in which a few thousand editors decide what people should know is superior to one in which many millions of citizens make those same judgments. If citizen media is a threat to democracy, I shudder to think of the alternative.
Labels: journalism, newspapers
¶ 6:19 AM 3 Comments Links to this post
In a move that could serve as a model for the next generation of journalism, Google has announced that it will allow people to comment on stories indexed in the Google News search engine.
A lively debate sprung up on the Internet earlier this year when Jason Calacanis refused to conduct a telephone interview with a Wired editor out of concerns over being misquoted. The on-the-record interview is a staple of journalism, of course, and the idea that a source would want to publish a paper trail of his or her comments goes against the grain of most journalists' thinking.
However, I think Calacanis had a point. The existing model of journalism, in which a reporter interviews a source and then decides what is relevant about what that source said is based upon outdated assumptions. Until a few years ago, individuals had limited ability to publish. That left the job of deciding what to publish up to the people with access to printing presses. This model is error-prone and shot through with subjective value judgments. If someone was misquoted, which happens more often than a lot of journalists would like to admit, their only recourse was to ask for a correction, which might run days after the original article appeared.
Today, we have a new model. If someone interviews me for a story, I can post my version of the interview on my blog or publish an audio recording. I also think it's reasonable to ask the publication to link back to my comments or recording. After all, neither of us has anything to hide, right? This new approach to reporting would reduce the chance of error and provide readers with the option of reading a more detailed version of the information presented in the story.
I can't see anything wrong with this. A reporter's job is to get the facts, and if an error is made, the original source should have the option to present his or her version of what was said. I believe that over time this is the model of new journalism that will take hold. It will force reporters to pay more attention to accuracy and it will force publications to be more accountable. It also provides a service to readers by adding depth and perspective, if they choose to read it.
I'm sure this idea won't sit well with a lot of journalists, though. What do you think? Is this the start of the new approach to journalism, and are there downsides I'm not seeing?
Labels: journalism
¶ 10:03 AM 1 Comments Links to this post
The news came down today that technology publisher CMP is laying off 20% of its workforce and merging several publications out of existence, including Network Computing and Optimize. I don't suppose this is a surprise, for the print business in the enterprise technology market has been on the decline for a long time, but the scope of the cutbacks and the extent of the changes to CMP's portfolio were breathtaking. Most publishers have been bleeding away properties as print business has turned down. CMP's action was like an execution.
It's hard not to feel like an old codger at times like these, for I remember the days when Computerworld's print business was so healthy that the company had to start ancillary publications just to handle the overflow of ads because the printer couldn't produce issues that were large enough to hold them all. I don't pine for those days, though. There were times when the editorial staff was slapping almost anything it could find onto a page in order to fill space around the ads. No one was well-served by that. What’s different about online publishing is that the space expands and contracts to fill available content. There is much less of a need to provide some content -- any content -- to run around advertising. It's perhaps one of the great under-appreciated benefits of new media.
People sometimes complain that one of the shortcomings of new media is that space is unlimited, meaning that writers can write as much as they want about whatever they want. I suppose that's a problem in some respects, but isn't the ultimate arbiter of value the reader? If writers don’t produce interesting copy, then no one will read them, and it won't matter how many words they write. The Web is liberating in that way. In removing constraints of space and time, it frees the writer to focus on content and the reader to make choices based upon what they want to read rather than what the publisher chooses to give them. I think that, in the long run, we’ll realize that this was a great liberator and a step forward both for the craft of journalism and the service that publications deliver to their readers.
For now, though, I feel badly for the 200 people who lost their jobs today. They were victimized not by any failure on their part, but rather because of a structural shift in the market over which they had no control. I fear that they are simply the first casualties of a much bigger change in consumption habits that will sweep over much of the mainstream media in the coming years. In the end, it will lead to a richer, more vibrant media landscape, but there is bound to be a lot of suffering in the meantime
Labels: journalism, mainstream_media
¶ 8:37 PM 1 Comments Links to this post
We asked Sam to talk about the up-and-coming influencers in IT media and his response surprised me. He's evidently looking at media that tap into the real issues that IT pros wrestle with week-to-week more than new publishers and editors. He also had a lot to say about the ethos of the blogosphere and how PR pros should work with this new class of journalist. Bottom line: deal with it. These are the new journalists and their ethics and practices aren't all that different from the folks you've dealt with for years.
Good stuff from a thought leader who pulls no punches.
Labels: blogging, journalism, podcast, PR, social_media
¶ 9:14 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
"Print advertising sales for newspapers appear to be on track to plunge by $2 billion this year, which would make for the worst performance in a decade other than the disastrous period following 9/11," he writes, noting that this will be the first time newspaper revenues have ever declined in a time of economic prosperity.
First quarter revenues for classified advertising - the most profitable part of the newspaper business - were off a staggering 13.2% in the first quarter, Mutter notes. Automotive advertising, which is newspapers' Rock of Gibraltar, was off nearly 13% last year. Nearly all of this business is going online and it's not coming back.
I've characterized the scenario facing major metro dailies as a "death spiral" in my own writing on this topic. Alan Mutter's statistics and analysis bear this out. In a spiral, the speed of descent increases as the object hurtles toward the ground. The numbers indicate that a spiral could be developing. According to Mutter, print advertising revenues were off .5% in 2005, 4.6% in 2006 and are on track to decline 6.4% in 2007. It's too early to call this a pattern, but in an industry that Mutter notes "has been masterful at increasing its revenues in good times and bad," this twist of fortune is unprecedented and alarming.
Desperate acts like the San Francisco Chronicle's recent decision to eviscerate its newroom staff indicate that the industry is in panic mode. The Chron is basically committing hara-kiri rather than continuing the fight. I suspect it's only the first of many to do so.
Mutter, a newspaper-editor-turned-entrepreneur, offers some historical context:
"In retrospect, it is clear that newspaper publishers were lulled into complacence in the early years of the Internet by their prior skill in achieving consistent sales growth in even negative economic conditions. But the growth was not achieved as much by recruiting new customers – or even selling more advertising to existing ones – as by using their monopoly-like positions to force hefty annual rate increases on advertisers who essentially had nowhere else to go."
Monopolies thrive in the absence of competition, but they tend to let atrophy the skills needed to compete. Newspapers have almost no weapons with which to fight the online hordes that are devastating their business.
Labels: journalism, newmedia advertising
¶ 6:30 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Dean took the time to speak to me at some length on Monday evening. He also read the entire book, a fact that is both flattering and impressive in this continuously distracted world. It's a thrill to be cited in such an important newspaper and by a reporter whose work I respect so much.
Labels: blogging, journalism, NewInfluencers
¶ 6:03 AM 1 Comments Links to this post
In Tech PR War Stories episode 8, David Strom and I discuss the distinctions between "off the record," "not for attribution," "on background" and other types of digressions. We also give our quick takes on some recent breaking news in medialand.
Labels: journalism, PR
¶ 7:15 AM 2 Comments Links to this post
Our jumping-off point is last week's dust-up between Steve Rubel and Jim Louderback. Services like Twitter have lowered the barrier to putting your foot in your mouth, and Steve found out the hard way what problems an offhand comment can cause.
The show notes and download page is here.
Labels: journalism, podcast, PR
¶ 7:20 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Download the podcast here.
Labels: journalism, podcast, social_media
¶ 8:44 PM 3 Comments Links to this post
"I would never want to be quoted questioning Mr. Zell's wisdom or insight, since he is clearly a very successful investor. I was struck, however, by the fact that neither the Tribune article or the video interview went into any detail on the challenge that digital media presents to newspapers. In fact, I could find the Internet mentioned only once in the Tribune article, in the first paragraph.
"This seems curious to me, since online competition is clearly the biggest challenge facing newspapers these days, particularly in their classified advertising businesses. Longer term, the newspaper’s value proposition as a timely source of information is under siege. This article seems more interested in the Tribune's ESOP plan and ownership stake in the Cubs than in the serious long-term problems facing its industry.
"It’s been my experience that people of Mr. Zell's age are almost incapable of relating to the culture and lifestyles of today's digital youth. This is not their fault, for it’s almost incomprehensible to someone who grew up in the 50s or 60s to relate to the always-connected, always-interacting lifestyle of today's teens. It's hard enough for me, at 49, to understand it. I would think that anyone buying a newspaper today would have to look at what they’re going to do to court this next generation of consumers, who have almost no affinity for newspapers. The fact that this critical issue was not addressed in the Tribune interview or video is a glaring omission, in my view. I can't believe the editors didn't bring it up.
"Apparently a lot of them aren't even paying attention to it. As reported last week by MediaPost, “The first Newsroom Barometer survey--conducted by the World Editors Forum and Reuters--found that a staggering 85% of editors and news executives of 435 polled were optimistic about the fate of their publications.”
"As they say, denial is not just a river in
Labels: journalism, mainstream_media
¶ 8:37 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
I didn’t expect much out of Dan Rather’s appearance at South by Southwest and so wasn’t very disappointed that it didn’t deliver. It was a missed opportunity, though. There was the chance to question Rather about all sorts of things that the audience cared about, including the relevance of mainstream media in market with millions of voices, the low public perception of the media in general, the future of citizen journalism and the relationship between social and new media. Instead, the moderator, Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake, opened the one-hour session with a question about Rather’s confrontation with Richard Nixon more than 30 years ago. That was an event that I suspect scarcely 10% of the audience even remembers, much less cares about, and it got the session off to a bad start. The rest of the hour proceeded through a short series of relatively tame questions about the state of journalism, along with rambling answers by the newsman (this may not be the moderator’s fault; sometimes interview subjects put restrictions on topics they’ll address). Rather had some good messages for journalists, but they weren’t his audience. The issues that I believe the audience really cares about weren’t even raised until a brief Q&A.
The highlight was Rather’s pointed criticism of what he called “access journalism,” or a style of reporting that trades off aggressive reporting for access to inside sources. Journalists too often protect their sources in order to become part of the inner circle, he said, and political and business figures willingly exploit this weakness. He blamed this trend, in part, on the decline of media competition as media ownership consolidates and the increasing distance between news operations and their parent companies.
“Very often the source is using the reporter and the reporter is using the source, but when the source begins to believe that the reporter can be part of the team, that’s when things get dangerous,” he said.
Rather said that journalism needs a “spine transplant,” a return to its role as an independent advocacy for truth and disclosure. The role of the journalist is as a watchdog, he said. A watchdog barks when it suspects danger but doesn’t lie down or attack. It’s a warning system that keeps those in power on their toes.
“Do we still believe that the documents of government belong to the people and not the people in power?” he asked. “The president is not a descendant of the Sun God. This person is elected by the people and part of what [journalists are] expected to do is check on them.”
Rather’s message was a welcome call for a return to the values of Edward R. Murrow, whose name he invoked twice. But I think the audience was interested in hearing more about social media. Rather’s own knowledge deficit in that area - he didn’t mention YouTube or podcasts once and appeared awkward using "Google" as a verb - was painfully evident. As someone whose CBS career was arguably brought down by bloggers in the Rathergate incident, you’d think he would have more to say. But the question about Rathergate, like so many others, never came up.
Labels: journalism, mainstream_media, social_media, sxsw
¶ 4:36 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
The innovation I'm waiting for is when a major news site starts inviting readers to actually contribute to the reporting process. That doesn't mean deputizing citizens as adjunct reporters, but could involve them contributing background and first-person sidebars. I still think mainstream media could learn something from Wikipedia.org and its much weaker companion Wikinews.org. Wikinews, in particular, is a fascinating idea, but the site doesn't have enough traffic or contributors to really work. Could a site with USAToday's throw weight make a companion news wiki successful? Somebody's to figure it out one of these days.
Labels: consumer_generated_media, journalism, mainstream_media
¶ 8:45 AM 1 Comments Links to this post
Labels: journalism
¶ 6:01 AM 2 Comments Links to this post
Labels: blogging, journalism, mainstream_media
¶ 9:41 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
I’ve received a handful of e-mails from BtoB readers about the column and not a single one has disagreed with my position. Perhaps my argument isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. One writer asked whether I thought magazines were going to suffer the same fate as newspapers. My position on that is that magazines are a different issue entirely and it really depends on the type of magazine. High-end, lifestyle mags will be just fine (Cigar Aficionado, Golf, Travel & Leisure). News magazines have been in trouble for a long time and I think their situation will worsen. Trade magazines will be a mixed bag. I expect very few computer magazines to survive, for example, but CFO magazine or vertical journals in non-tech areas may see little change.
The economic model of magazines is very different from that of newspapers. Newspapers have huge fixed costs for production and delivery and that's why they're so vulnerable. Once they cover their fixed costs, the margins are great, but if they ever become unprofitable, the whole model starts to fall apart. They don't scale down very well. That's why I believe the collapse of newspapers will be so rapid. Remember that in many markets, newspapers operate as essentially legal monopolies. If they can’t make money operating from that position of strength, their situation is very dire indeed.
Another writer asked about the prospects for community newspapers. In fact, I believe those publications have a bright future. My expanded essay refers to resurgence in community publishing enabled by cheaper production costs. Small-town and community newspapers are well positioned to take advantage of the trend toward more localized publishing. They are the least likely to be marginalized by online competition.
In short, I think the rapid collapse scenario will be limited to metropolitan dailies. National papers will probably be okay and community papers could actually get stronger. But I’d hate to be the Detroit Free Press right now.
Labels: journalism, mainstream_media
¶ 5:38 PM 5 Comments Links to this post
What emerges from the rubble of the newspaper industry will be a fresh, vibrant and very different kind of journalism. It will make a lot of traditionalists uncomfortable. It will force us to re-examine our assumptions about everything from readership to libel law. But it will ultimately be an evolution of the profession into something that is richer, more inclusive and much more dynamic than anything we have ever known.
Print newspapers are modeled on assumptions that were defined by physical constraints but which are outmoded and irrelevant online. Basically, information is scarce and publishing is archival. In most metropolitan areas, the newspaper has been the principal or only source of news for many years. This required editors and publishers to take a very serious view of everything they set into type. Layout, headline selection, story lengths, story placement and design were critical considerations in a space-constrained world. The importance of a story was reflected by its location in the paper or on a page, the weight of the headline and the number of column inches dedicated to it.
Once a story was in print, it was permanent. This necessitated an almost obsessive attention to detail and fact-checking. All facts had to be assembled before the story was written. Often, multiple editors were assigned to review and challenge information in the article. If information wasn’t verified, it wasn’t published.
Structure was critical. Because stories were cut from the bottom, newspapers invented the “inverted pyramid” style of writing, in which more important information was placed higher in the story. Good information was omitted because there wasn’t enough space.
Of course, all that is irrelevant online, and the new journalism will be based on an entirely different set of assumptions. Any report may be quickly and easily updated and corrected. Search engine results and referral links are the principal drivers of readership. Layout is almost irrelevant to a web site. Blogs have no hierarchy at all. Stories can be as long for a short as they need to be, or can even be composed of many links to other content. Stories may appear in many places at once and even in many forms, depending on how they are tagged. Readers are able to comment upon and contribute to articles. Graphics, audio and video illustrations are easily linked to text. If something is wrong, you can always go back and correct it.
In short, the online world challenges nearly every assumption of conventional newspapering. It will dictate a very different approach to journalism.
For one thing, the craft of journalism will evolve to include far more aggregation and organization that has in the past. Editors will assemble their reports from a vast library of resources located across the Internet. Some information will come from paid staff writers, others from freelancers and still more from reports and opinions published by independent third parties and even competitors. Editors will still have a critical role, but their value will increasingly be in assembling and organizing information for readers who don’t have the time to sort through the vast Web.
The craft of reporting will become faster and more iterative. Rumor, speculation and incomplete information will be published far more readily, on the assumption that errors can be corrected. Stories will, in essence, be built in real time and in full public view. Reporters will file copy directly to the Web, often without a review by an editor. Readers will be a central part of the process, correcting and comment upon articles as they are taking shape. Reporting will become, in effect, a community process.
This new model will be very disruptive and very controversial. The idea that a news organization would publish information it did not know to be true flies in the face of all of our expectations. The concept of actively involving readers - who have no formal relationship with the news organization - in the reporting process will be too much for some editors to accept. There will be hand-wringing over fears of libel suits and other litigation. It is going to be an unholy brawl.
But this is where journalism will go, and it is happening now, every day, on blogs and community media sites across the world. There authors knowingly publish information that is unverified and unreliable. They do so with the expectation that their readers will set them straight and that the truth will be arrived at through a process of publishing and correction. More than half a million blog posts are logged every day, yere there has not been a single successful libel suit resulting from any of them. Libel law, after all, is based on the expectation of archival permanence. Nothing is permanent Online.
New models are already being tested at community-journalism sites like Backfence, iBrattleboro.com, Northwest Voice and
Journalism will become much more local. As the cost of publishing falls to near zero and citizens become more comfortable with the tools of publishing, thousands of mini “newspapers” will form around different geographies and topics. Aggregation sites will emerge to sift through and organize the reports and conversations going on in these small communities. Many of these sites will involve human editors who understand the needs of their audience and monitor online activity on their behalf.
This will be nothing less than a complete rebirth of journalism around the concept that information is plentiful and cheap. Instead of 1,500 print newspapers, there will be perhaps five to ten national “super-papers” and many thousands of regional and special interest community news sites. The process of getting there will be wrenching and controversial, but the new model will create a more dynamic and diverse information landscape than we have ever known. It will be incredibly exciting. I hope to be around for the ride.
Labels: journalism, mainstream_media, social_media
¶ 8:19 AM 2 Comments Links to this post
