Washington Post’s Masterful Failure of Online Journalism

The Washington Post has just published an important, two-part story about an unresolved local murder. It is available only online, an experiment in web journalism by one of the nation’s [still pretty much] great newsooms.

[Interest disclosed: I am a former Post editor.]

“The Robert Wone Stabbing: Anatomy of a Murder Case” is a masterful piece of reporting and storytelling by veteran staffer Paul Duggan and his editors, a work of significant public service. It explores two different versions of events, one involving an elaborate cover-up by the alleged perpetrators, the other a scenario where an unidentified murder breaks into the house and does his deed. There is a theme of peculiar, ambiguous sexuality throughout.

It’s precisely the kind of local journalism that only high-quality print-based newsrooms have [at least temporarily] the staff, budget and skills to pull off.

And yet “The Robert Wone Stabbing” is an amateurish stumble, an obvious mismatch of medium and message, a squandering of scarce newsroom resources that delivers very little benefit to the community and creates zero business value.

Why?

The story is written, edited and presented as if it were to have appeared in print. Over 8,000 words of American English.

To get through both parts you have to click through 10 long-as-your-arm screensful of text.

I tried to read it all online and found it untenable. My carpal tunnels began to burn. My attention faded. I printed the two pieces out and read them later. It was very enjoyable, like indulging one of those great New Yorker articles that you have to ignore your family to finish.

Hard, non-negotiable facts: People read 25 percent slower online than on paper and can rarely sustain even that slowed pace through multiple screens. [By my math, it would take at least 45 minutes in front of the computer to read just the text of the story.]  Online users also behave differently. They don’t read long stories from point to point. [One outlier study by a news organization contradicts this, but many others verify the reluctance to finish long stories.] They restlessly look for things to click. They get distracted by ads, which of course they must be in order for the site to generate revenue. [For more on online reader behavior, see this precis by the annoying  half-genius/usability expert Jakob Nielsen].

The Post’s Wone story proceeds in either complete ignorance or simple contempt of these realities–despite the fact that it is published only online.

The delusion that the web is “an endless newshole” where journalists “have the space to do what needs to be done regardless of length” dates to, oh, the first term of the Clinton Administration. Few people who are serious about web publishing have sustained this fervid wish for this long.

It is true that the Wone piece is dutifully enhanced with multimedia assets.

• Some are inane digital reflex: The photo gallery illuminates nothing about the case. Bios of the principals are insufficient and pop up as text windows for no good reason.
• But some are powerful: The 7-minute audio of the 911 call is emotionally potent and illuminating about the incident in a way no words on a screen can possibly be. The PDF of the police affidavit that gathers all the facts (plus the “facts”) and witness statements is invaluable.
• There is a superb graphic, masterfully reported and beautifully rendered, that illustrates how unrealistic the “outside intruder” scenario is. It also includes a timeline of events and inset photos of key items in the story line.  But it is nearly impossible to find as presented with the package, badly mislabeled and in any case a “dead” graphic [lacking interactivity]; it could easily have accompanied a print version.

Note the way the graphic is promoted as part of the package. Look for it. . .It’s the “79-minute Mystery” item, last on the list, presented with an icon that looks like cell phone signal bars.

You even had to expand this box to even see this tiny, baffling reference. The editors did not consider it among the “top items for this story.”

[Elsewhere, off a top navigation tab, it is presented, oddly, as part of the "watch" content, as in "read," "watch," "listen," "talk," etc.]

So [you say], what should the Post had done for an online-only presentation of this story?

Funny you should ask. I dropped a note to a former Post colleague answering this question about how a newsroom could approach this experiment in online story-telling differently. [To be fair, he also didn't ask the question. I like to think that answering questions nobody has asked is part of my boyish charm.]

The text of my note to my former colleague, cleaned up a bit:

Here’s the exercise I use when I coach people on this:

Imagine you have this story to tell AND MAY NOT USE A TRADITIONAL STORY FOR ANY ASPECT OF THE PIECE.

YOU MAY NOT DO THE COWARDLY, TYPICAL THING AND WRITE THE MAIN PIECE AND DECORATE IT WITH MULTIMEDIA FILIGREE.

Why?

You will suddenly create a situation where you have people who have spent their careers internalizing the important heart of the journalistic endeavor — far moreso than the often less experienced, sometimes shallow producer class — and have forced them to engage creatively with the journalism of the future.

But it’s vital that these folks–the sweating wretches who have told the stories about fires and murders, who have spent long nights verifying facts and trying to get that one last interview, who have felt the wrath of sources’ anger and the satisfactions of exposing bad actor, who have committed their lives to this hard and important work–that these people learn to tell stories in the way the web demands.

Otherwise they cede the most essential platform for public service journalism to people who have not had those experiences.

So what could Duggan’s piece be like without a “story?” [Blurbs and brief content forms are not only acceptable but essential]

• Rather than a dead graphic buried in the package, I’d make an interactive version the centerpiece: An interactive timeline presenting, the competing interpretations of the murder. You’d be able to compare the alternative scenarios, examining for plausibility and holes, etc. You’d also see which facts are undisputed.
• Each item on time line would be linked to an asset when possible. For instance, that fascinating affadavit should have been broken up into chunks for this use, with different versions of the story “told” with this information at appropriate moments in timeline. Different witnesses’ versions of identical moments could be stacked, their points of divergence visually highlighted.
• That chilling 7-minute 911 call would be linked on the timeline at the moment it occured. With a transcript as well, since [usability tests show] clicking on audio assets is a fairly rare web user behavior. That transcript would be annotated by Duggan.
• Then I’d re-sort those assets using a “geographic” navigation–the interior of the house and its location on the street, with pop-ups of what happened where under each scenario. Again, this is presented in the current package, but dead and buried.
• I’d have Duggan annotating the timelines with audio/transcripts/written comments at various points–refereeing, adding subtleties and insights the raw facts and assets could not provide and that only someone in command of the story journalistically could provide. Add snippets, in text and occasionally in audio, of his interviews.

There are many other non-story approaches, some far more sophisticated.

But I’d argue that even the product described above would be far more powerful to an online audience than the Post’s platform-ignorant, beautifully written 8,000 word narrative. It would reach more people. It would serve the public better.

And I would argue, just to play angel’s advocate, that it would be superior journalism.

p.s. Readers disliked the online presentation for different reasons–largely because it was. . .wait for it. . .published only online. See the Post ombudsman’s column.

Many Eyes on the Economic Stimulus: What Will They See?

ProPublica, a non-profit group funded by foundations and led by mainstream journalists to produce independent investigative work, has taken a big step into citizen reporting. The move is full of promise–and some peril.

The group’s “Adopt a Stimulus Project” invites volunteers to report in their own neighborhoods projects funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act–that’s the Obama administration’s plan to invest billions into a wide range of projects in order to keep people working and move federal dollars into the private economy.

The AARA has been portrayed as both an engine of economic growth and a pork-laden boondoggle. ProPublica is enlisting citizens to provide surveillance.

How it works:

• Citizens go to the ProPublica website and “adopt” a nearby ARRA project
• They visit the actual job site, gathering facts and observations and delivering them to ProPublica’s staff of veteran journalists
• ProPublica’s team uses the reportage to develop ARRA accountability stories for local and national audiences.

The need for well-informed analysis of such a huge government spending program is obvious. The administration’s “transparent” recovery.gov effort provides a positive spin. Opposition reports deride the effort.  Balanced assessments are few.

The Promise The volunteers can conduct far more primary field reporting than even the best-funded newsrooms. This is classic crowd-sourcing, where armies of people can [presumably] produce more value and intelligence than teams of professionals.

The Peril Raw reportage of uneven quality and filtered inevitably through a single active citizen’s bias needs intensive fact-checking, additional reporting and contexualizing if it’s to serve the public properly. Can ProPublica provide this for hundreds of ARRA projects? The promise of crowd-sourcing is scalability–that an effort can benefit from the imput of hundreds, if not thousands, of sources. But if a huge amount of granular reportage still needs to be filtered though experienced journalists’ brains bit by bit. . .well, that’s unlikely to scale to a project as ambitious as tracking the ARRA.

The Context Take a look at this excellent Washington Post report that appeared recently, looking at one of the first Washington, D.C.-area ARRA projects. In addition to checking out the site and tallying jobs vs. spending, the reporter [interest revealed: my former colleague and pal Steve Hendrix] looked at how the workers who were getting hired spent the money. Turns out it’s not on driving economic growth. Many are simply paying off debts. Useful and vital? Yes. Stimulative? Not so much.

The Post piece is subtle, ambitious–and expensive–professional reporting, devoted to a single ARRA project in a single town. Can a partially crowd-sourced plan deliver similar value?

We’ll see. Meantime, it’s encouraging that ProPublica is undertaking something that will help answer the question.

“Make Google Pay” and Other Hallucinations

The news industry has generated much sympathetic publicity lately about the woes of the news industry.

First, let’s say this: It’s easy to get positive coverage for an issue when you control so many ways to getting the message out. Pity the poor clowns who need to grovel to get major media attention for groundwater pesticide contamination.

Anyway, as the news industry continues to fight the inevitable, one phrase keeps coming up again and again:

Make Google Pay

The idea is that Google’s search results pages link to news content that costs a great deal of money to produce. Google makes money by placing ads around those search results. The content producers should get some of that money, the content producers argue.

I am bewildered–and a bit ashamed–that anyone who has achieved even middling professional status in a line of work that attracts a lot of really smart people can even say the words “Make Google Pay” and believe they have validity.

“Make Google Pay” is not a strategy, it’s a consensual hallucination of desperate minds. It is cognitive spatter that results from overwhelming stress. It is HAL’s final, dirge-like notes of “Daisy.”

I don’t want to get into a full-blown discussion about changing news ecology, user behavior, content abundance, link journalism, anti-trust law, etc.

I will make just three points. They seem so obvious to me that they don’t even need to be said. But as demonstrated at last week’s Congressional hearings about the future of journalism, people in the news industry, their lackeys and retainers appear not to have heard them. So:

1. Google is linking to content, not publishing it. I am amazed at how often Google is said to be “publishing” others’ news. Google points people to content that its algorithms determine to be high-value. Linking is not republishing. It is not a copyright violation. It is a way to direct people to high-value content that appears on the creators’ sites. The fact that Google is shrewd enough to extract value from its sift-and-direct service does not constitute unfair trade or thievery.

2. Publishers can block Google any time they want. If they think Google is extracting value from their content unfairly, they may choose to make their results invisible immediately. Any junior member of a news site’s web team can do this by 2 p.m. today.

3. Publishers instead are trying to make Google function as their utility. This is an astonishing act of delusional bravado. To wit: “Our content is so valuable that you must direct people to us and pay for the privilege.” Plus: “We need an anti-trust exemption to make this work, but our work is so important we deserve it.” This is not a business proposition, it is confiscatory collusion. I am stunned that various personages at the recent hearings entertained this proposal as if it were a serious idea worth consideration.

For god’s sake: “Make Google Pay” is a dead-end, an intellectually bankrupt proposition from a group of businesses that blew their big chance and continue to blow it every time they gather.

Trying to re-shape Google’s business to the demands of a failing method of distribution is a fool’s errand. If not precisely evil, it is at least destructively self-interested.

Every intercranial electrical firing, every synaptic twitch that news leaders devote to Make Google Pay represents a withdrawal from the central challenge they face: Creating bankable value that will fund the portion of  their journalistic work that truly matters to democracy.

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nb: Do a Google search using the words

Congressional hearings on future of newspapers

The pages that appear include no advertising. I mean, what are the chances?

The Latest Death-of-Journalism Spat, Condensed for Easy Reading!

Many pixels were spilt in last week’s sh*tspatter feud between digital news evangelist Jeff Jarvis and veteran print author Ron Rosenbaum.

I read the whole damn thing and, as a public service, present this tidy downboil. Links provided for future-of-news geeks and shut-ins.

1. Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi writes in AJR that neither journalism nor journalists are responsible for newspapers’ death spiral.

2. Jarvis responds in the Guardian, to Farhi and others, that inflexible print journalists are indeed at least partly culpable for the crisis.

3. Rosenbaum writes in Slate a bitter, personal attack on Jarvis, accusing him of profiteering and excessive glee at journalists’ misfortune.

4. Jarvis retaliates with a condescending, personal rebuttal of Rosenbaum, depicting Rosenbaum as sentimental and ill-informed.

5. The digisphere responds mostly with reflexive defenses of print journalism, from both mainstream and sidestream sources.

6. Digital news consultant [!] Amy Gahran does some impressive web reporting [!] that reveals evidence of Rosenbaum’s startling online naivete.

My two cents: Blame doesn’t matter. Journalists unwilling to think and work differently to save the profession should take the next buyout.

n.b. Each summary above is fewer than 140 characters, no longer than a Twitter update.

Dangerous Ignorance: Report from Tribune’s “Innovation Officer”

A friend sent along this “Think Piece” report from Tribune Co.’s “Innovation Officer” Lee Abrams. It’s based on his recent visit to the struggling, shrunken, limp-on-the pole “flagship” Florida Sentinel papers in Orlando and South Florida.

I don’t know Abrams and do not wish him ill personally. Hell, he’s known as the “inventor” of the album-oriented rock radio format, the ’70s answer to Top 40 pablum and, later, the vital cultural firewall against disco. Many of his contemporaries [he's in his mid-50s] smoked some fine dope while listening to Steely Dan and Pink Floyd, for which we should all be grateful.

But Abrams’ report on his autumn trip to Florida is so delusional [or dishonest], so dated and mundane, so vapid and cliche-riddled, so dangerous and desperate that he needs to be called out on it for the good of the profession.

Following is the top of the Think Piece: [Add your own "sic"s where appropriate]

Spend several days in Florida at the Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel. They reinvented themselves first so this trip was a re- invent of the re-invent. Great meetings that involved a wide range of people from all areas to discuss what works, what doesn’t and what we can do better. A lot came to table…including the things that are traditionally not discussed for fear of offending someone, or simply failing to be honest about ourselves.

The attitudes of the Florida papers amaze me. Professional, focused, zero drama, no baggage, no games. They are all about delivering quality and being in position to GROW. Now…and when the economy improves, they will be in perfect position to reach new levels. It’s all about re-gearing the product AND the culture to compete in the new world. They get it.

Especially positive was something we’ll be doing more of–people from Ft. Lauderdale coming to Orlando and vice versa. Cross pollination of ideas. I presented a series of things that are being done or discussed at other papers. Slightly lowering the target age without disturbing the core and increasing the number of days the paper is read were two topics we dove into. A few of the things we discussed are below— Things to think about…as components in re-inventing ourselves”

The ideas that follow will be numbingly familiar to anyone who was part of a newsroom retreat or re-launch since 1998. Make the paper easier to navigate with icons and lists! Interview local people! Don’t write in “newspaper-speak”! More photos! Cover sex and religion, “THE MOST IMPORTANT TOPICS IN THE WORLD!” Synergize with the web!

Set aside the whole “dumbing-down” theme, which is both self-evident and unselfconscious. More important is how the list carries the tone of a simpleton cheerleader who hasn’t been around very long and is driving people “forward” into a discussion that’s at least a decade old. That these ideas come from an “innovation officer” is funny-sad.

Between the Think Piece’s repeated uses of “gotta” and “wanna,” the superannuated thinking presented as the work of a “maverick,” and the desperate claims that the tide of public opinion can be reversed, Abrams eerily embodies the worst of the McCain/Palin ticket. This is not “the change we can count on.” This is more of the same failed policies of the past.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Every synaptic twitch, every erg, every creative spark, every focused thought devoted to such doomed efforts to stall the inevitable squanders a company’s most important resource: the brainpower of people committed to the survival of journalism rather than newspapers as they are currently known.

The way out, if there is one, is to create journalism optimized for digital platforms, take advantage of news consumers’ transforming habits, put edgy new technologies in play, develop new business models–and destroy the current paper product and replace it with a smaller, radically reshaped one. The way out does not involve this nervous, ignorant doodling.

Phew. I’m done. I publish the rest of the memo below.

*WEEKLY THEMES to encourage 7 day readership. Start on Sunday with a highly visible presence. The idea is to drive readership by super-focusing on a “hot” theme. It’s an old radio trick. Want to force listening? Do a “Beatles Week”–even though a station already plays them, FOCUSING and packaging/aggregating a core hot artist creates a must listen buzz. For papers, it could be:

Restaurant Week: Monday Celebrity Chefs; Tuesday Florida’s Killer Steak Houses; Wednesday 4 Star restaurant recipes that a home cook can handle…. etc…

Sex: SEX AND RELIGION ARE THE TWO MOST IMPORTANT TOPICS ION THE

WORLD! A weekly theme of Sex/relationships. Monday Gay Florida Tuesday Does E-Harmony work? Weds Teens & Sex exposed… etc…

Religion: Monday: Can Jews and Muslims co exist; Tuesday The religious ultra right; Wednesday Catholics in America…. etc…

The idea here is to take a wide appeal topic and DRIVE readership, OWN it…and present this topic in a ‘weekly themes’ format. Where every day the topic is superserved. And of course there’ll be revenue off opportunities with many of these

*STAR EVERYTHING. Are you a “listing service” or experts? Listing events for Kids? Star them. So Mom can say “Oh–The Sentinel gives the science fair three stars, lets take the kids”. Give events and places a ‘reason’…be the expert not just the lister. Same goes for restaurants of course, and well, just about everything you ‘list’.

*24 HOURS IN PHOTOS. We “own” photos…so why not act like we do and give them a HIGHER profile via this compelling feature? A good example of importing FROM the web as picture galleries certainly do well. Te Baltimore Sun has been doing this well, and selling adjacencies to camera stores.

*LOGOIZING. Creating logos for features makes them noticeable. I love the boxing gloves and the I-think logos that Allentown. (These are logos for a point/counterpoint and a high school student editorial) Those logos take these features to a higher level. It’s “competitive” thinking vs. ‘assuming people know these features exist’. Some do…most don’t unless we force it. A logo is a tasteful way to do just that.

*HEADLINES OF THE WORLD. A celebration of newspapers. What does the Teheran Times say about Obama? What does Pravda say about our economy? These are compelling and amazing headlines that shouldn’t be hidden on Newseum for other journalists to see. There may be no better way to illustrate global opinion than to use headlines from around the globe.

*WORDING. At the Sentinel there was a story about exotic Asian restaurants, and the reefer was “Learn about Tasty Treats”. Tasty Treats??? OK for Campbell’s in 1955 or for a candy article, but other than that, it’s old world newspaperspeak!

*SCAM PATROL. Identity theft…Infomercials that are questionable…Nigerian 419 scams…they’re everywhere. We need to inform and BUST these 21st century menaces. It’s REAL…It’s NOW.

*POKER. I know the Sun Sentinel does this. It’s HOT. Poker is the 21st Century Bridge.

*10 QUESTIONS WITH. Daily. A local icon. Ask him/her ten questions. Favorite restaurant…favorite vacation spot. PERSONAL questions, so you experience the “real” side of people you usually only read news about.
Fascinating insight into the ‘real’ side of politicians, celebrity chefs, sports figures, business leaders etc…

*GREEN ICON for environment stories. Are we engaged with green? Probably not in a noticeable way. A green icon is a classic example of thinking competitively. Green is important to many. STEP OUT AND TELL PEOPLE we are engaged!(and deliver)

*ARCHIVES. PRINT (NOT ON WEB) a classic front page from the past. We OWN this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Andrew Sullivan on Blogging: Unreadable Online

I periodically make a Print ‘n’ Read recommendation–a piece of writing about the social web that’s so compelling it’s actually worth firing up the ol’ HP Inkjet and printing out to read later.

In this case it’s Andrew Sullivan’s Why I Blog.

It is, of course, utterly unreadable on the web. At 5,200 words, on the website of the Atlantic it requires clicking through four “pages,” each of which is five screens deep. Even if you have an Aeron chair with lumbar support you’re courting orthopedic danger attempting to read this thing online.

But [or I should say, therefore] it’s one of the most thinking, engaging and true pieces of writing about blogging I’ve come across.

Giving himself the opportunity to reflect and dig–which, Sullivan points out, blogging does not–in this long-form article he surfaces many insights that will resonate with anyone who has spent much time typing into a blog’s vacant white box.

For instance:

It was obvious from the start that it was revolutionary. Every writer since the printing press has longed for a means to publish himself and reach—instantly—any reader on Earth. Every professional writer has paid some dues waiting for an editor’s nod, or enduring a publisher’s incompetence, or being ground to literary dust by a legion of fact-checkers and copy editors. If you added up the time a writer once had to spend finding an outlet, impressing editors, sucking up to proprietors, and proofreading edits, you’d find another lifetime buried in the interstices. But with one click of the Publish Now button, all these troubles evaporated.

Alas, as I soon discovered, this sudden freedom from above was immediately replaced by insurrection from below. Within minutes of my posting something, even in the earliest days, readers responded. E-mail seemed to unleash their inner beast. They were more brutal than any editor, more persnickety than any copy editor, and more emotionally unstable than any colleague.

But, alas, Sullivan & Co. push their luck. The printed magazine promises “More Online”–a video in which Sullivan and fellow Atlantic blogger Marc Ambinder discuss the blogging life. Sounded like a bad idea to me–a video of two guys talking about blogging. Ack.

But, as a dutiful student of digital media, I went looking. I couldn’t find it anywhere online. Huh. So I typed in the url the magazine published in ink on its paper pages. I hit “enter.”

Here’s what I saw.

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