OJR: The Online Journalism Review
May 15, 2012
By Robert Niles
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Journalists can be their own worst enemies when they try to interact with their audience online. If you think that the online medium somehow fundamentally changes the way that people interact, and that you need to adopt a new set of principles for interviewing and interacting with people online, you're just setting yourself up for failure.
It's like watching an actor psyche himself out before going on stage, or a golfer giving herself a harsh set of the yips when approaching the green. Journalists I've met and worked with too often talk themselves out of their natural state and familiar skills when they start thinking about online interactivity. And those fears of failure quickly become self-fulfilling.
Here's a success story story for you to consider, instead. Not to get all hokey on you, but I do believe that if you're thinking about success when you interact with your readers, you're putting yourself in a better place than if you go into conversations with negative thoughts. The key take-away from this success story is that it happened by using good, old-fashioned, print-era, j-school techniques for doing interviews. No special "online" skills required.
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More about: reporting, social media, Twitter
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May 8, 2012
By Robert Niles
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If you think that innovation is just about creating new products and services, you're missing what might be the most important step in leading a publication forward.
A publication makes its greatest progress not when it introduces new products and services but when it shows the discipline to leave tired or failing efforts behind. You must fight the inertia that's holding you back.
This month I began shutting down what where once the most popular services on my family's violin website. While these were the first services we offered on the site, and the ones that defined us to our early audience, they'd become a major time drain for me, and were failing to leverage any significant income for the site.
Making the decision to close these services not only created an opportunity for me to devote more time to the stuff that is working on the site, it also forced me to confront the reasons why these services weren't thriving anymore. An innovator who's also designing and launching, but never taking a look back at her work - axe in hand - never learns any valuable lessons from the audience and customers she's trying to serve.
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More about: entrepreneurial journalism, management
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May 1, 2012
By Robert Niles
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Great reader comments, tips and blogs can help elevate a news website into a true community, one where people come together to learn from each other, enjoy each others' company and maybe even help address some of the "real-world" problems that any community faces.
Of course, on the flip side, trolls and know-it-alls can make reading the comments on a website a visit to virtual hell. So when some of your readers begin to tick you off - either for what they do, or what they don't - here are 10 things to remember... after you've taken a deep breath.
You can't force readers to care
No matter how much work you put into a piece, no matter how much news you thought you broke in it, no matter well you think told the story, you simply cannot force readers to care. The best you can do is to think about your readers' needs and interests and then craft an engaging narrative or presentation that rewards whomever pays attention. But even then, some readers are just going to say "meh" and click over to the dancing cat videos. Even if you produce a dancing cat video, somebody's still going to say "meh" and click to someone else's dancing cat video. Don't let it upset you.
See what's keeping people from participating
While you shouldn't get upset by a lack of engagement, don't dismiss it, either. Always be curious about your site, and how people are - or are not - interacting with it. Create a new dummy account every few weeks, just to make sure your registration process is working the way you want. Ask friends to create accounts and jump in now and then, to get fresh perspectives on how newcomers react to your online community. Is there a tech problem that's keeping people from registering, commenting, blogging, or submitting or embedding photos or video? Are new users getting private message spam from lurkers on the site? Are new users having a hard time tracking the conversations they want to follow? Find the barriers that your site's putting up, and work to take them down.
Engage on social media - don't promote
Twitter and Facebook are great media for pushing new stories to your followers. But if that's all you are using those services for, you're likely leaving your readers cold. So don't get upset when your story links fail to elicit a slew of RTs and Shares. Try some new ways to engage your followers, instead. Post "wild art" photos. Ask questions about favorite places to eat, visit, etc. RT and Share the competition, too. Show your readers that you're not some uptight, Fortune 500 media conglomerate, but an accessible neighbor they can talk with.
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More about: grassroots journalism, social media
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April 24, 2012
By Robert Niles
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What do you think about your audience?
I'm not asking to recite any market research or website usage metrics you've collected about your readers. Give me your gut, emotional reaction to that question, instead.
Let's tweak the phrasing of my question. How do you feel about your readers?
Are you proud of them? Do they make you angry? Do they surprise and amuse you? Do they get on your nerves and annoy you? Do wonder if they're even paying attention to anything you do?
I'm going to take an educated guess here and assume that many of you would respond, "a little of all the above." I've certainly felt each of those reactions in dealing with the readers on my sites, not to mention on the newspaper websites where I've been entrusted to deal with reader-submitted comments and other content.
But I'd ask you to stick with the question and settle on just one reaction. What's the primary thought, emotion, or reaction that you feel about your readers and their participation with your website?
Why am I asking you for this? Because, as a leader of your news publication's online community, the attitude you bring to that community goes a long way in determining both the tone and the essential functionality of that community.
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April 17, 2012
By Robert Niles
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Have you been following the
Amazon eBook "price fixing" case?
Yes or no, don't let this story discourage you from eBook publishing. If anything, this case should be encouraging independent news publishers to jump into the eBook market.
Why? As Talking Points Memo explained, this case boils down to an alleged attempt by big book publishers to collude to get an "agency" deal where they would get to set the price of the books they published and were sold on Amazon.
The TPM summary didn't mention it, but that agency pricing model is the pricing deal that you get with Amazon as an independent eBook publisher. Why is that a price fixing offense for them and not for you? In short, because they allegedly colluded to get particular prices under that deal, according to the TPM summary.
Econ 101 lesson here: If you can enter a market where existing players are colluding to hold up prices, you have a huge business opportunity if you can undercut them on price. Typically, when big businesses try to collude on price, it's because they have high barriers to entry in that business that keep potential competitors (i.e. disruptors) on the sidelines.
And that certainly was the case in the book publishing industry just 10 years ago. Today, however, the barriers to entry to book publishing are about the same as the barriers to entry to website publishing were 15 years ago - pretty much zilch. You need some tech know-how, but it's nothing more than a sharp learner can teach herself or himself within a few weeks.
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More about: ebooks, entrepreneurial journalism
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