New Media Rorschach Test for Journalists

Test Instructions

Take a few moments to stare at these inkblots:

The New York Times eliminates sections, reorganizes newsroom

The Washington Post eliminates sections, reorganizes newsroom

Diagnosis:

If these images produce feelings of doom, despair and anger, you are sentimental, nostalgic, resistant to change and are poorly engaged with reality. Rx: Retirement or an editing job for a government agency.

If these images produce feelings of excitement, curiosity and hope, you are clear-headed, forward-looking, adaptable and culturally aware. Rx: Double down on the blog, learn to use that Flip cam, and prepare for a thrill ride.

If you see a ducky being disemboweled by witch, seek medical help immediately.

5 Reasons to Celebrate Ads on A1 of the NYTimes

1. A “pure” front page with no ads is a Potemkin Village of journalistic purity, not the real thing. Reporters have always written on the back of advertisements. Car dealers and mattress stores funded Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate reportage. Nothing wrong with that. Allowing ads on the front page simply makes the newspaper’s fundamentally commercial nature transparent.

2. Since more people read the news online now than on pulp-and-petrol, they’re now used to seeing ads next to “front page” stories. Today’s NYTimes.com’s masthead appeared between two ears promoting Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, Air France flights and Holland America cruises, among others. Nobody got hurt.

3. Paul Krugman is still disruptively brilliant. Bill Kristol is still trying to figure out how to climb out of the hole he dug for himself as a Bush apologist. An ad stripped along the bottom of the front page will not alter these facts.

4. It makes plain–in a way that will be obvious even to status-quo-clinging news industrialists and their sentimental, shrinking, aging, purist enablers–that the glory days are forever gone. With the Gray Lady on her knees sadly calling out for customers so she can feed the children, nobody can pretend any more. Finally now, the process of saving journalism–not the newspaper–can begin.

5. Who knows? People might actually find the information in the ads interesting or useful. Although certainly not today’s debut–an excruciatingly self-conscious CBS billboardette that uses the potentially deceptive headline, “Front Page News,” running above photos in boxes very similar to what readers see elsewhere in the paper as keys stories inside.

So, Timesfolk: You’re going to stick an ad on the front page and allow it look like. . .it might not be advertising?

Now that’s the embarrassment.

Bring on the car dealers and the mattress stores, I say.

Just the Facts: Washington Post, NY Times at the Tipping Point

To start the week, let’s look at a set of six facts from the top of the American journalism food chain that on the surface may seem merely ironic or even typical. But aggregated in the cerebral cortex and shaken lightly, they are enough to make even a veteran journalism industry critic take a knee:

1. Washington Post chairman Don Graham has joined the board of Facebook

2. The New York Times had to take a $250 million home equity loan on its new Manhattan HQ building to pay the light bill, putting back in circulation the unsettling speculation that Google could/should/might acquire the New York Times.

3. Today paidcontent.org features an interview with newly appointed New York Times GM Denise Warren in which she discusses, among other things, Times Extra, a feature that for the first time automatically integrates journalism from outside sources alongside Times articles.

4. The interview appears on washingtonpost.com, which has a content-sharing partnership with  paidcontent.org.

5. The New York Times on Saturday published a significant news story previewing a unpublished draft of 514-page government report presenting a harsh assessment of the failed rebuilding effort in Iraq. It’s the kind of journalism that only well-funded major news-gathering organizations can do, the sort of personnel- and money-intensive public interest work that makes mainstream journalism worth fighting for.

6. The Times article was supported by ProPublica, an independent, non-profit investigative reporting operation funded largely by a $10 million annual grant Sandler Foundation.

Mr. Sulzberger, Tear Down that Wall[ed Garden]!

So the New York Times has capitulated: Its website now links to related content written by individuals not employed by the New York Times.

True, it is doing this with a tentativeness that’s almost sweet, like a shy child uncertain whether he is misbehaving badly enough to be punished.

To activate Times Extra you first have to find, below the masthead, an iconette the size of a Chicklet [the chewing gum, not the RSS thing]. See it? Just south of the “me” in “Times”?

Click it, and the home page is transformed. Little boxes appear below some stories, full of links to content published elsewhere on the web.

The links are admirably ecumenical, just as likely to point to frisky indie blogs ["Oliver Willis: Like Kryptonite to Stupid"] as they are mainstream news sources [U.S. News] or established online purveyors [Talking Points Memo.]

Having said that, there is plenty wrong with this alpha-ish iteration, aside from the find-the-little-icon game.

The link boxes feature retro-’90s scrollbars. If you want to see more than three links, you have to scroll. [Jakob Nielsen, code blue!]

The links are displayed on the home page rather than the article pages. This has the odd effect of inviting you to read content elsewhere before you’ve read the Times piece. Or maybe they figure you’ll read the Times piece, click the “back” button on your browser, scroll through the little link box, click on one of the links and then leave the site.

The usability errors are so bad that they almost make me question whether this whole thing is set up to fail. [Look, nobody used the Extra home page, and when they did, they didn't click on the links anyway!].

But let’s give the Times the benefit of the doubt and say they just haven’t worked through the details.

In which case the Times has demonstrated that it understands trying to contain news consumers on one’s site is a loser’s game. Online news consumers won’t stay in a walled garden, even the rather nicely tended one chez Sulzberger.

News consumers still value brands like the Times. They just don’t let their respect for a brand get in the way of native online behavior. They ricochet from link to link, impatient and curious, easily distracted and hard to engage. If the Times tries to trap them by failing to provide links to the outside, readers will leave anyway–but now with a residue of annoyance that adheres to the brand.

It’s significant that the related news is aggregated by Blogrunner, a newsmixing service owned by. . .The New York Times. Is the Times trying to amortize its investment in Blogrunner? Is it afraid it won’t able to sell the service to other media if it, um, doesn’t use it itself?

Beats me. But I do know this. Blogrunner has something far more odd and strange than Times Extra. Check out Blogrunner’s “Annotated New York Times.”

Say, do the Sulzbergers know about this?

Thanksgiving for Losers: LiveBlogging the Holiday

My friend Ed sends along this link to The New York Times’ Thanksgiving liveblog.

Writes Ed: “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should…..”

Well said, Ed. He could be offering a solemn prayer on behalf of all of those who have been battling this pernicious social media virus all year.

For the rest of us, let us be thankful for time with loved ones, far away from the keyboard and the perils of self-absorption.

Oh, wait. It’s 4:30 on Wednesday and I’m posting on my blog. Yikes. Gotta run.

Where’d that family go again?

So Simple. So Smart.

On Tuesday night, while results from the Kentucky and Oregon Democrat primaries were coming in, the New York Times had this wonderful tool above the fold on its home page.

Meantime, the folks over at CNN.com offer the considerably more complicated (if subtle) calculator shown below.

Making complex material simple but accurate is one of the highest callings of journalism. Both sites attack this particular complexity well. But I give the nod to nytimes.com.

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