Restructuring in a city up the road from us

The LA Times is doing what we need to do: Create one newsroom out of print and online.

Here are highlights from a presentation on their efforts delivered by Meredith Artley, exec editor LA Times.com; Aaron Curtis, the paper's innovation editor (with whom I competed in chasing sirens in the Valley when we were young bucks); and Russ Stanton, the paper's relatively new editor.

- LAT.com has 20 million uniques a month. Page views are 106% year over year. It has 50 staff-written blogs. One of them, Top of the Ticket, is the 72nd most-read blog in the world

- Artley said you need an experimental approach, need to not be overly scared of making mistakes. Need to have a broader reach in the local audience, more local than national, because
local spends more time on the site and is more engaged.

- We have a chance to create one news operation, a lot of folks wanting to help but don't know how. Need to be organized and tactical: focused on internal training/education. Stressing visual journalism. Need to have clear goals and tracking progress. Need to get he right people in right spots.

- Stanton: breaking down silos, increasing communication, identifying legacy practices and assumptions no longer needed.

On training:
- Times is rolling out 40 in-house courses, including 360-degree storytelling, search engine-friendly headline writing, using the blogging software, video training, web graphics, copyediting for the Web and online legal issues. The basic class for everyone is on how the web works, what is changing.

- Times has 800 people in newsroom, and they don't want to give everyone same training. Different classes are required for different skills.

- Web-friendly headlines have been behind burst in traffic.

- LAT has a morning meeting talking about only the web. They look for story ideas on Google trends to kick off the day.

- Blog editor tells folks that if they have a good post to tell at least five people about it to get word out. Artley: "We do everything we can to get the word out in guerrilla marketing."

On restructuring:
- one visual desk photo + video, trained photos on flash and video.,

- one data desk : print and web database and print and web graphics guys.

- KTLA will have assign desk in our newsroom.

- now hiring more specialists , as we already have a lot of journalists who can be generalists

- Hope to set up more topic-oriented teams.

- Artley said it's alright to say, "We're don't know yet, and that's OK. And you have to live with ambiguity. Were tyring so many things we don't want to lock it down and say this is the end."

- The dirty word is "control," Curtis said.

Rally the troops:

- Send out a daily email stats blast, widely distributed, showing what's doing well.

- Set monthly goals. "Let's set something high and see if they can reach it," Artley said.

- Pay attention to top search terms on the site, what are people searching for? They noticed it was immigraton, and set up a topic page in response.

I asked what tanked, what didn't work well. Artley said some blogs just didn't take off, that they give a blog three months to prove itself and then pull the plug if it doesn't draw an audience.

Them eyes don't lie

What do readers look at when they look when they look at a news site? This presentation by Nora Paul, director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota; and Laura Ruel, assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, covered the latest findings of their ongoing eye-tracking studies. It provided some good insights that we need to keep in mind in our redesign efforts.

Some lessons:
- Tight images of faces draw eyeballs.

- With slideshows, having the forward/backward command above the image works best, then left. The least effective is having the thumbs on the right.

- With carousels, people think the first story they see is the top story on the site, even if it's just one of several rotating through randomly.

- They tested pages with 22, 44 and 58 links on the homepage. People actually spent more time on the page with the fewest links, though they viewed more stories on the page with more links. The middle number seemed to be optimum. (Not our 450+.)

- List of top headlines was almost the most viewed. They want us to tell them what's most important.

- Which got more clicks, a headline, a headline and a photo? Surprise: the one with just the headline.

- Big blurbs discourage exploration. They give people enough on the homepage and they don't venture in for more. (Another flaw of our current page.)

- When the image on the page is larger, people tend to look at headlines more.

- Fewer images on the homepage actually resulted in the greatest user satisfaction.

- Evidence supports the theory that a story page is just as or perhaps even more important than the homepage, as that is the front door for many visitors.

- Seattle Times has copyeditors write two headlines for each story, one for web, maxed out for search; the other for the paper.

- Slideshows with both a timer and chapter tags were most viewed, hence most effective.

- Users spend more time on a site they view to be more interactive. More opportunities for feedback result in more engagement.

- The eyeball tracking clearly, and painfully, showed: Users read right around display ads even if they are embedded in the type. They studiously avoid it, skirting around it, even though they noticed news graphics.

- Text works better than display boxes. People notice things more when they don't look like ads but editorial.

- People don't waste much time looking at mastheads, though they do tend to notice banner ads.

- Top-of-page navigation clearly works best, better than side-nav menus.

As promised, here's one of the videos. (Thanks, Nora.) This one shows how people someone skirting right around an ad embedded in the story but then diving into a graphic in the same position.

Some new ways to cash in

Here's the ONA story on kind of a commercial panel on ways to make money online, which is a good thing.

All the ONA's student-provided coverage can be found on this conference page.

A Webb star's great presentation

My good friend Amy Webb just gave a fabulous presentation titled Ten Tech Trends You've Never Heard Of. I really can't do it justice here -- she could give lessons on how to give an effective and engaging PowerPoint presentation -- so here is a summary of the talk.

This is a must-read, folks. While the keynote speaker this morning (Robert Scoble, an innovative and influential tech video blogger who does Scobleizer.tv) gave kind of a geeky talk about how he uses a wide range of free sites to reach his geeky audience, her presentation focused on up-and-coming technologies likely to have big impacts on the news business, offering practical examples of how each technology could be applied to the news biz.

(She had a wonderfully entertaining PowerPoint presentation but she's too smart to cough it up.)

MSNBC's latest cool thing

I did not attend the session on MSNBC.com's Bridge Tracker tool, but here is the ONA's story on the cool web app they built.

Also a correction: I told some of you that MSNBC was using the Microsoft video player Silverlight. I found out today that the news site actually developed its own video player, and that it's holding readers on the player like glue.

Witness to history

My friend Phil took me for beers at the Natonal Press Club last night and we ended up chatting for a long time with a longtime member, John Cosgrove, who came to DC in 1937 and has met every president since Herbert Hoover. He even swore JFK into the Press Club.

He thought at one point he was boring us with his stories but I assured him it was fascinating listening to his tales, to hear from someone who once worked for California Sen. Hiram Johnson and could remember when D.C. was, as Kennedy put it, a sleepy Southern town.

Also, god willing, I should be so lucid at the age of 90.

It's just semantics

The phrase sounds intriguing: the semantic Web. But really it just means an online world in which everything is consistently tagged so that it can be better sorted, arranged, linked, related and presented.

I missed the first part of this, in which a Thompson-Reuters exec unveiled the company's new Calais content integration program, a tagging initiative it's offering free for most users. I need to do more research on what this is, but it didn't sound like something we'd be needing and we'll never use Reuters as much as we use AP.

But I was extremely impressed with the other product discussed, Apture, which was the creation of this innovative software engineer Tristan Harris. This very cool application inserts just a line of code in a story page. But that line of code enables a non-techy user to very easily embed links to definitions, more information, documents, photos, audio, video, a PowerPoint, what have you, inside the text of the story, displayed by a small icon in the text.

Unlike a link in a sidebar, which then opens up a separate full window, this app opens up a small pop-up window that you could use to, in his example, tell readers more about the bonobo chimpanzee with an encyclopedia entry; or add a video from YouTube showing downtown Rangoon to a story about Burma.

It's really great for maps but could be used to add just about any context or auxiliary material in an extremely easy-to-use interface. This keeps people on your site rather than sending them elsewhere for more information.

It's set up to search a wide range of video sites. It lives on the company's servers and really serves as a second CMS in tying together related material and embedding it in stories.

The best part: It's largely free. You pay for it by sharing revenue from an ad you'd sell on the pop-ups.

We have to get this. It's very, very cool.

Optimize and monetize

These three online advertising experts -- Bob Benz, formerly of Scripps Newspapers and now a partner in a start-up called Maroon Ventures; Joe Apprendi, CEO, Collective Media; and Mark Rose, the Tribune Co’s director of sales strategy, -- talked about the sad advertising picture, in which the industry took in $3 billion less than the year before, in which the $387 billion spent on online audience was the lowest since 1996.

Their bottom line: High-branded niche content sells. (Which means we are on the right course, folks.)

Mark - We need more product, more higher quality audiences drawn by specific brands and targets. in veriticals like auto and horizontals like women. We have an oversupply of inventory, but not the niche products that can draw those desirable audiences.

Joe - What's needed is audience monetization, strong news brands and an audience-centric strategy.

Bob - Look at competitors as possible allies. (Can they do something you can't do, and how can you take advantage of that?)

What Rob Curley did for content someone needs to do for advertising. "The sales culture of newspapers ... is stil very much mired in old thinking."

Joe - Do everything you can to build out content in high display areas.

Behavioral (ad) targeting is helpful to shoppers. Bob gave example of when he was shopping for a kayak and started noticing kayak ads on yahoo news, even though he'd never looked for a kayak on there.

Newspapers are not getting their share of campaign advertising dollars.

Video advertising is a problem. Studies show people don't like preroll and dislike ads around the video. What to do? One guy suggested advertorials. But Benz countered who really watches that? It's like the car dealer with ads on in the middle of the night, it makes him feel good to see himself out there but who sees it? How effective is it really?

These are smart guys who obviously know their business. But they were too caught up in display advertising. As I see it, the real money for us is going to be in self-service advertising targeting small businesses we can't reach any other way. Also in search and business directories.

Not nearly as much drama as we have

This session, Merging Newsrooms, Managing Drama, offered some insights on the convergence struggles of other news shops – specifically, the BBC, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Gannett.

At Gannett, with the exception of USA Today, their newsrooms have always been merged, so the sturm und drang of us v. them never got a chance to get going.

At the BBC, they have 1,000 journalists and $500 million of guaranteed income every year and the difficulty of merging radio, TV and online.

In Philly, the issue is two print newsrooms – the Inquirer and the Daily News – sharing a Web site put out by a third entity, Philly.com.

The Inquirer guy, Chris Krewson, the shop’s executive editor for online news, was very amusing. He said much of his job was “ego surfing,” which certainly sounds familiar, eh?

Like us, Philadelphia does not have “voicey, attitudey” blogs, but newsbreaking blogs.

A few lessons:

- The Beeb: Moving the chairs was a crucial element in the reorganization. (Something we have got to do.)

- Philly: Shades of our pre-merger era, the papers share photo, copy and news desks, along with a Web site. Copy editors all write two headlines, one for print and one for online, and are being trained in writing headlines that work well for search optimization.,

- Gannett: Can’t sequester the web. Online guys cannot be considered second-class citizens.

The exec from Gannett, Anne Saul, News Systems Editor, and I chatted later and agreed: The issues of convergence are really unique from shop to shop, from place to place, with cultures and issues and personalities all creating their own little issues (or baggage, if you will).

One thing unique to us: The Newsroom is the agent of change, not the online crew, which is really the opposite of the way it is in most other news organizations.

A shiny Sun, but no shiny pennies

Two of the guys behind the innovative site the Las Vegas Sun -- where Rob Curley and Chris Jennewein have landed -- gave a presentation on some of the cool features of their site. The theme was how they had to, or perhaps better, were able to, build it from scratch.

Take a look at it. The masthead changes depending on the weather and the time of day, going dark at night, snowing when it snows and even shows the Las Vegas sign melting on particularly hot days. They have some state-of-the-art features: awesome video player, slideshow and audio slideshow gizmos they built from the scratch.

Among the projects they showed were this Flight Delay Calculator and Prescription Narcotic Indicator. I was most impressed by this package on the history of the strip, Gamble in the Sand, with its fun and iconic map of the hotels providing a fun interactive feature.

They also have a good family of desktop widgets and a mobile site that is not just an RSS feed but more tailored to the experience. The company is big in TV, with four daily TV news broadcasts and an All In One Las Vegas sports scene show.

They do offer some lessons in building tools that allow for agile development and swift innovation, building tools once and using them for many applications. (They use Ellington as their CMS and Django as their development tool.) And they had a good organizational concept of three connected pods: production, editorial and programming.

But when asked if they were making money, the most specific response was "We're in start-up mode." And when I asked if they planned to try to capitalize on all the stuff they're putting on YouTube and Flikr, they said that would be up to Jennewein to figure out.

Major figure, not a major speech

The morning keynote address was offered by Tina Brown, who formerly ran The New Yorker and Vanity Fair and is now an online entrepeneur, with a new editor-driven web aggregator called The Daily Beast she's developing under Barry Diller's IAC.

Not much new in this. This gifted editor's basic message is that the cacaphony of news sources available online has renewed the need for editors to serve as curators of the news world, that people can obviously do better than algorythms in helping readers understand the world, that original thinking and quality editing matter more than ever.

Questioners tried to draw her out on what The Daily Beast would be, how it would work, what the business model would be. She declined to offer many details. It was clear she was still just learning about how online sites work, noting they are much more immediate than magazines and that their design is more limited than in print, not as easy to do radical design changes on the fly.

The funniest moment was when a student asked her how to get into journalism, saying she'd take any job in print or online. "Well you're an easy lay," Brown quipped.

(Here is the ONA's story on her presentation, if you want more.)

The few entertaining the many

Rule of user generated content: It's potentially valuable, but most people won't do it.

- Of 100 online users, 1 will create content, 10 will interact with it and the other 89 just look at it.

- Fifty percent of Wikipedia edits are done by .07% of its users.

- YouTube? 0.5% percent of viewers create the content.

What does this mean for us? We need to tap into that minority to create content that will attract the majority.

Some good ideas we should steal

I spent the afternoon in a workshop on best newspaper practices and, while having a wide-ranging group conversation with counterparts from across the world (OK, the US, Canada, Brazil and the Netherlands), I picked up some very good ideas we could emulate and some insights.

The session was introduced by my friend Anthony Moore from the Dallas Morning News, who had a well-conceived PowerPoint overview of the landscape that I'll add here as soon as it goes online. His bottom line: News is a feed, like electricity; and the story is just one point in the continuum. News sites are no longer final destinations, just another stop on the search.

The discussion was moderated by Jennifer Carroll, Gannett's VP of digital, and she and another Gannett exec offered a good list of innovations being done through the chain and elsewhere around the business.

Among the ideas and insights:

- Give readers desktop access to your Sports team blogs through a widget. Get on Facebook with your own applications.

- Cincy Moms - a very successful social networking site that has heavy traffic even, say, on a Sunday night. It draws a demographic very desirable to advertisers and users spend an average of 5-10 minutes on the site. Gannett is setting up similar sites in other cities.

- The value of beat blogging, creates a running conversation with readers that enhances the reporting, rather than detracting from it.

- Display advertising has plateaued - face it, it has. Video and search is where the growth is.

- Small spenders is where the big local dollars are. But it doesn't make sense to have ad salesmen contact every dry cleaner in town, so we have got to get self-service advertising (see Bakosphere's approach).

- Business directories have huge potential. Small dollars adding up to lots.

- Rearranging the furniture, who sits where, is crucial to restructuring.

The best lesson: Let readers do your work.

Example 1: Florida Today's watchdog page that urges readers: Blow the whistle!
Report waste, fraud, abuse to: Matt Reed, Investigations Editor.
E-mail here. (We have to do this.) Readers love it, generate a huge amount of tips and really appreciate the service. (that word again)

Example 2: The Rochester Press-Democrat got a huge database of police overtime. They put it online on a Thursday, allowing readers to see which officers in their precincts were claiming the most overtime and telling that the related story would be coming Sunday. Readers lapped it up. Even the cops, who crashed the department's servers looking up themselves and their colleagues. The Sunday paper had the highest single copy sales of the year. (More on that project here.)

John C. Calhoun looks as intense as he was said to be

Thanks to my buddy Phil, I got to tour the Capitol this morning. I was, of course, star struck. The art was amazing, the statues of men I've read about almost brought them alive for me and the rotunda really is an amazing thing to stand beneath. But I was also struck by what a remodeled and reremodeled labrynth the place is.

And one very old school thing: There's a cheap folding table next to the stairway up to the Capitol from the underground passage that leads from the Senate office buildings. It's the same sort of folding table you'd see at a church barbecue. That's where copies of any amendments are kept for the senators returning to the floor, just stacks of white Xeroxed papers sitting on a cheap table next to a handwritten note. Very old school, almost Third World.

Here we go again -- the conference, not the wildfires

Wow, it's been a year already.

When I wrote the last post on this blog, I had just gotten back from the Online News Association's conference in Toronto and just coming down from that amazing week of fire coverage.

Now, I'm on my way to this year's ONA conference, in D.C., hoping against the odds that I'll be bringing back a top award for our fire coverage. (If we win, will the company then pay for my travel expense?)

As I did last year, I'll be using this space to share my experiences and insights from the conference with you folks back home and anyone else interested. (But I hope without the hassles I found in getting online from Canada. It was nice so many people near my hotel had unsecured wireless accounts.)

The conference begins for me on Wednesday, with a workshop on ideas, insights, challenges and strategies from newspaper websites. I asked the moderator if we could focus on things that actually attract sizable audiences. Bells and whistles are nice, but we have a lot of mouths to feed.