Unrelated, but relevant point to the discussion: pay for good long form content. It costs quite a bit to produce it. If you love it, buy it.
I have worked almost a decade in the online media industry in my previous life and I don't find this particularly surprising. Somewhere around 2005, everyone in the industry discovered this major obsession with doing stories based on SEO, than doing stories that did well on their own merit. Unfortunately, everyone jumped onboard with this idea as it made sense at scale. Fortunately, half-a-decade down the line, we seem to be waking up to the fact that not everyone can make a living at scale; only a few can accomplish the scales to justify that.
The others have to focus on quality, than quantity, to bring them the traffic.
The other unspoken part of the content business is that a tiny minority of the people who matter in the business actually understand the numbers. Most don't understand anything beyond total pageviews and then starts the hunt to increase them at any cost. The dumbest way to increase pageviews is to do more stories, but they often don't understand the fact that doing more stories don't come for free and that each story is not as productive as the other in getting them more traffic.
Quality works, but quality is not easy. It is hard work, time-consuming and there are no quick fixes.
I truly believe that quality will win out over quantity in the long run. The race to churn out SEO-based, high-volume, crap-quality content farms represented the first phase in online journalism. It was a race to the bottom. Sure, that race had some early winners. But the race has been run. The bottom has been hit. There's no more profit to be reaped there, and besides, the model makes less and less sense vis-a-vis today's internet.
That's because the future of the mass content aggregation business now belongs to Facebook, and to other social networking services yet to come. Aggregation websites are going to look very anachronistic in the coming years, while content-specialist sites will have to differentiate on subject matter and on quality.
So what does this mean for content producers? Well, it's no longer about mass aggregation of cheaply produced crap. It's now about being a high-quality producer, whose content is more likely to get pickup up ("earned," in media parlance) by Facebook users, as well as by Google's increasingly sophisticated ranking algorithms. Thoughtful pieces will matter. Well-written pieces will matter.
It's not easy, and there's no guarantee that it'll be profitable. And unfortunately, the advertisers will be monetized by the aggregation layer (Facebook, most likely) on which content producers will depend. So that leaves pay-gates and subscriptions, both of which can be circumvented, and which are often loathed by readers. But however the winning business model gets figured out, quality will almost certainly play a crucial role in it.
I sincerely hope you're correct. The analogue to the Internet in Neal Stephenson's Anathem is hardly used. Only those who specialise in digging useful information out of the piles of autogenerated crud bother with it.
David Simon, the co-creator of HBO's The Wire and former Baltimore Sun crime reporter, speaks eloquently during a PBS interview by Bill Moyers on the demise of print journalism over the past 20 years and the loss of "1st generation reporting". (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeNc5y7lpYA&t=8m10s)
It's certainly uplifting to see that online journalism has something of a light at the end of the tunnel. It's just my personal experience, but I find the shift towards "long-reads," particularly by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and other similar publications, to be a great boon to the people of the world. Is it so hyperbolic to say that "1st generation" journalism is as important to society as democratic government? I don't think so.
Either way, I'm glad that Salon has published this data to show that there is another way (a better way?). If you look at all the lemmings that simply followed the "quick-hits" journalism that Kerry Lauerman is talking about in this blog post, no one 5 years ago had the guts to turn the model upside down. I'm very glad and grateful that we are making progress to getting to a point where "1st generation" journalism can be found -- and will be sought after -- in online media.
Totally agree. Salon, The Atlantic, and New Yorker always have very good content. I never read the print version of Atlantic, but ever since they did a complete transformation to web, I've realized the quality of their journalist is really quite outstanding.
If that which the newspapers and television news agencies did was "1st generation reporting", what would actual transmission of newsworthy information be? 0th generation?
I mean, for instance, providing a live video feed or a riot, or videos taken by those in attendance, rather than a reporter talking about the event hours or days later. The video of Gaddhafi being killed, not the reporters seeking to let people know what happened without risking giving offense to any viewers?
It's not particularly relevent to Salon, but I'd prefer to see 'news' be reduced to uncommented raw feeds of actual video, with absolutely minimal editing. Show people what is happening. As soon as you 'explain' what is happening, regardless of intent, you introduce all sorts of biases and preconceived notions and the like. I would certainly like to see the continuation of long-form well-researched journalism of the past, which takes the raw news items and correlates them, provides context and meaning, etc, but I think that should be separate from 'news' reporting. It is article writing, which has been important in society for ages. Even though it was originally created due to the technological limitation of not being capable of finding original raw material, it does add significant value so it makes sense to keep it.
However, any medium like this responds to social trends. Society has been trending anti-intellectual for over 50 years with no sign of slowing. People do not want to stop and think, they do not want to be exposed to news that jars them out of their comfort zone. They do not want to read about ideas different from their own. They certainly do not want any analysis of the ideas they do hold as true, they see that as attack.
A big help to long-form journalism would be moving away from the concept of central agencies that employ these reporters. What do those agencies provide? Nothing. They used to aggregate reporters together, give them access to technological resources, editors, etc. All of that can be done by some software with an Internet connection. Take the entire revenue of one of those large agencies, and provide it directly to the reporters (they can contract freelance editors online without much trouble). See what kind of quality gets produced then.
I agree with some parts of your argument, but I really think that there is just too much content out there to consume. If you had "raw feeds of actual video, with absolutely minimal editing," I think you'll find yourself overwhelmed with information.
The job of the newspaper editor is to condense the material down, and like you say, correlate and aggregate it to form a narrative that is easier to consume. Sure, I'll concede that the majority of news editors choose to showcase worthless information -- particularly on television -- but you have to understand that it's a capitalist economic model and the newspapers are only delivering what the consumer wants.
"1st generation" reporting to me means a journalist who goes out and gets the interviews and video feeds. Do you think there were pre-existing "raw video feeds" out there for the Enron executives, the survivors of the Japan earthquake, etc.? "1st generation" reporting comprises the effort it takes a good journalist to identify which parts of the story need telling and going out and getting them. Yes, there is inevitable bias -- but we have to be able to take it with a grain of salt and make up our own mind based on potentially multiple narratives of the same story.
(Also, just to touch on this... I think you're underestimating the value of the news agencies. They provide resources to make quality reporting a viable economic model. In addition, they provide a name behind which the journalists' sources can trust. Would 'Deep Throat' have divulged his knowledge to Bernstein and Woodward if they had not been reporting for the Washington Post? Obviously, we'll never know the answer to that question, but I personally believe it's an important consideration for any potential source.)
The problem is that there are thousands of hours of video uploaded to the internet per minute. You can't watch them all, so you have to select what you watch. You need meta-information to select which videos to watch. That meta-information is inherently biased -- after all "which video is important" is an opinion, not a fact.
In other words, you're subjected to the editing process no matter how "raw" your news is. You can reduce it somewhat, but you can't eliminate it.
If you just show the raw data, don't you replace the reporter's biases and preconceived notions with the viewer's? You're certainly not going to get any "analysis of ideas they do hold as true" without any analysis at all.
Bill Simmons started www.grantland.com for the express purpose of having a place for long-form sports pieces on the web. I've found articles on the site to be hit or miss, but I enjoy the Bill Barnwell pieces on gambling and the occassional Chuck Klosterman piece.
The AOL-ification of journalism has gotten ridiculous over the last few years. It would be really nice to see content go towards Quality over Quantity.
Unfortunately, the quality has really gone down. Five years ago, I used to read Salon every day. They used to have very interesting well researched and well thought out articles.
Nowadays Salon is progressively obtaining the qualities associated with a bad blog. A lot of half thought out articles, a lot of lazy opinion pieces, a lot of random bitching about how this or that is sexist, practically no attempt to obtain first hand information, just regurgitating popular culture and what appeared on Gawker two hours prior, movie reviews that sheepishly praise the latest idiotic big budget movies. Oh and I read a book review where a reviewer panned a book she had not read.
Most people don't take the word "bitching" as a sexist term when it's used to refer to an entire group of unspecified complainers. The only ones that would find it "sexist" are looking to be offended.
You can also say someone's "dicking around", and it doesn't have the same gendered connotation as "dick."
I used to think the same way. Then I worked a summer in a place where the n-word was used in place of it: such as "Oh, that's -work," or "I'm not sitting * (in reference to the middle seat)"
I came to realize this was a case of guys growing up in a slightly backwards environment getting acclimated to such talk. They weren't particularly hostile toward African-Americans and in fact worked alongside them from time to time. This was just a manner of speech that they had gotten used to, wrong as it is.
But it made me also realize that just because I became acclimated to "bitch" and "bitching" doesn't mean that it's OK, or that I've fully and totally disassociated the word with it's sexist connotation. Same with calling weak people "pussies." Grew up with that in high school athletics, and now it's a word I would never use.
> Most people don't take the word "bitching" as a sexist term when it's used to refer to an entire group of unspecified complainers.
Just because your intent was not sexist does not mean the word isn't sexist.[0] It's the same reason we frown upon people saying "faggot" even though they might not be directing it at a gay person.
> You can also say someone's "dicking around", and it doesn't have the same gendered connotation as "dick."
Most people are too fucking stupid to concern themselves with such things as gender equality.
I don't find it offensive, but it is sexist. It just shows a lack of forethought on your part and a lack of understanding of gender norms/privilege/etc.
Subtlety assigning words like that is sexist. And dicking around does have gendered connotations, if you don't realize that then see statement one.
the phrase "dick around" is actually from "dicker around" which is a 19th c. term. "Dicker" is to "Engage in petty argument or bargaining" and "Treat something casually or irresponsibly; toy with something".
So when someone is "dick[er]ing around" they are treating serious matters lightly or doing things in an unnecessarily protracted way; which is precisely how we use it.
The word "dick" however, which I would gather, people would envision it meaning "penis" here, simply doesn't work. We don't use "dick" as a verb, yet alone a progressive verb. "To dick" or "to be dicking" a person, although fairly clear in its sexual connotation, is certainly not in use, "dicking (with) a person" however, makes perfect sense, because it's from that ye olden term "dicker" again.
So "dicking around" has nothing to do with the slang term for penis or the disused colloquial meaning of a rookie detective, or it being an everyman; all wrong. Sorry to bust your bubble.
this is at once the best thing i've ever read by esr, and also a perfect explanation of how open source's image will always remain on top of free software's.
the second part didn't occur to me until i read through it again, but esr himself has been putting rms and (much less appropriately) anyone that sees value in his perspective in an anti-theistic kafkatrap, an especially damning and potent snare considering that both esr and rms are atheists. that kind of diabolical abuse has soured me on esr forever, but i admire how brilliantly he explains it.
Gendered words aren't sexist (he/she), they are descriptive in the same way that black/white are.
Bitching is the (sort of) equivalent of the word niggardly. Niggardly has no etymological roots with nigger, but they sound similar and niggardly means stingy/miserly/has negative connotations. Lets pretend for a second that they are derived from the same root (They're not but I lack a better example off the top of my head).
Saying black would not be the same as saying niggardly.
Yes I did. I also read the salon.com homepage. Most of it is political editorials. There is also a harrowing story about how a writer could not find some new hot clothing collection in Target (the writer uses language associated with violence and massacres to describe what happened to her favorite clothes).
Honestly, I do not mind political editorials, and I usually agree with the political opinions of Salon writers, but it is annoying when that is all there is. Occasionally I want to learn something new when I read the paper. I want the occasional deeply researched article. These used to appear in Salon, but not anymore.
And also, if you do political editorials you have to make sure you say something interesting. I can form my own political opinions, you know. Editorial writing is only interesting if it is especially incisive, moving and/or funny. And it is very hard to do that when you churn those editorials by the dozen.
Since Google changed their algorithms to deal better with web spam and useless articles, even blackhatters and web spammers know that you have to serve useful content to get search engine traffic.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-search-and-sea...
Also, how much of this traffic increase has to do with the election, since Salon is a site that runs a lot of political stories? It is good they are seeing more traffic with fewer, better articles, but 2 months of record traffic in an election year would be expected of a political site. What will be their explanation in a year after the election is over and their traffic falls?
He specifically mentioned there were no outlier events that drove traffic, but is that really true? The Republican debates and early primaries have been dominating most news outlets for a few months now. It certainly drives the stories on Salon today.
Understanding what drives traffic, whether it be events, advertising, trends, etc., is essential to craft a content strategy that works in the long run.
I do believe longer, engaging, original stories are good for the user, whether they are scanning or reading the entire article. They are good for SEO too. It will be interesting to see what happens with Salon's traffic and their new-found commitment to better content.
"Short (a few hundred words) summaries or explainers about a major news event covered more in depth by somebody else. In its best form, we wrote short little decoders of a big story, and tried to link generously to the original source."
I think there's a place for this, if done well. My startup lets the community summarize popular stories with an emphasis on being short, unsensationalized and to the point. This means we sacrifice Google traffic but I prefer to consume most news like this and I know there are others who feel the same.
Of course, there are times you want a deep dive but that's when you go to Slate, NY Times and the like.
Edit: This is kind of similar to Open Salon but with a very narrow focus on the type of writing: summarized news in a dry, direct way with no puns or jokes. The stories should be as short as possible while giving the reader a good understanding of the topic.
Salon articles are constantly on the top feeds in Pulse News for me, and they're usually quite compelling. I've never regretted reading any of their articles.
You have to cross reference that against quality though. In these days of content farms high traffic does not necessarily correlate against high value.
If the higher quality of writing and audience attracts a more attractive advertiser audience Salon could get much higher CPM rates without having the same volume.
I have worked almost a decade in the online media industry in my previous life and I don't find this particularly surprising. Somewhere around 2005, everyone in the industry discovered this major obsession with doing stories based on SEO, than doing stories that did well on their own merit. Unfortunately, everyone jumped onboard with this idea as it made sense at scale. Fortunately, half-a-decade down the line, we seem to be waking up to the fact that not everyone can make a living at scale; only a few can accomplish the scales to justify that.
The others have to focus on quality, than quantity, to bring them the traffic.
The other unspoken part of the content business is that a tiny minority of the people who matter in the business actually understand the numbers. Most don't understand anything beyond total pageviews and then starts the hunt to increase them at any cost. The dumbest way to increase pageviews is to do more stories, but they often don't understand the fact that doing more stories don't come for free and that each story is not as productive as the other in getting them more traffic.
Quality works, but quality is not easy. It is hard work, time-consuming and there are no quick fixes.