Story Review

via Joanna Geary

I just think it’s cool.

Kevin Matthews writes over at his blog:

(…) we know from reader research that readers very rarely get beyond the third paragraph.

What’s more, reader comments are becoming as important to the audience as the story.

So, if reader behaviour surveys are to be believed, most readers will read the start of the story and skip to the comments below.

I commented that this could be seen as a case for journalists to write shorter stories for online and save the meat for the comments where they can truly engage with the readers. The more I think about it, the more things I can come up with for the plus side of such an approach.

Let’s see what it would look like. You’d have a website where every story is no longer than three paragraphs. That seems amply sufficient: you’d have the intro to tell people what the story is and a second paragraph to explain why it should matter to them. You’d also have a third paragraph for those stories where you just can’t go with only two, but those should be the exception not the rule.

Only the stories that attract at least some response from the readers will be pursued and expanded with background and meatier analysis in the comments. This would allow journalists to have a genuine conversation with their readers and would also be very efficient because each story would get minimum resources until proven worthwhile.

It could work, couldn’t it? In fact, I bet it is already working somewhere. I haven’t found where yet, but let me know if something comes to mind.

In a blogpost from Tuesday, Scott Karp of Publish2 said:

The publishing business has always been about packaging content. Newspapers. Magazines. Newsletters

Errr… No. At least not all. Actually, it’s just a tiny minority of them that have always been about packaging content. The rest have long crossed over to a business model that had nothing to do with content and was all about selling people to advertisers and advertisements to people.

That is why newspapers are finding it hard to charge for content: they haven’t done it for so long they’ve forgotten how it’s done.

There are some noteable examples of publishers who are selling content. For instance, you have to buy games TM if you want to read it: there is no free online version. It is hard to judge how successful they are, since publisher Imagine Publishing does not release financial results, but the firm has been snatching up assets (including the Linux User & Developer magazine and website and car-magazine publisher Total 911 and its website) while others have been desperate to sell bits of their business in order to survive.

This does not mean that any newspaper would flourish if they shut down their websites or make web content more expensive than the print product (like the Newport Daily News has done). Since games TM is in the business of selling content, it makes it its job to produce top-notch quality content that people will want to pay for. But this is not the case with the majority of newspapers.

Publishers want to charge for content and newspaper publishers specifically want to charge for news. However, they are new to this business and yet many of them still behave like they know it all. It’s time they got told otherwise.

If WolframAlpha sounds familiar but you’re not quite sure what it was, it is one of those new search engines touted to replace Google. Whether it will or not is the subject of another post entirely, for now let’s just focus on the main difference between the two algorithms (and please excuse the generalisations).

When you ask Google a question, it gives you the answers of potentially millions of people each of whom has some relevant information on the topic but not all of the relevant information. When you ask WolframAlpha a question, it gives you the potential answer of just one person who is immensely well informed and has the capacity to process all the relevant information. Google gives you the wisdom of the crowds and its answers represent the collective knowledge of a large group of people. WolframAlpha, which uses pre-categorised libraries of human knowledge, tells you how each individual person would be likely to answer your question, given the same information WolframAlpha has.

So now I’ve set up the stage for the main attraction. This is WolframAlpha’s definition of journalism:

I take this to be the likely answer to the question of what journalism is if you asked people who do not regularly think about it. In my experience, that is also often the answer from people who do regularly think about what journalism is. Even if they do not say it directly and even if they would not admit it when confronted, most people equate journalism with newspapers. Not TV, not radio, not news agencies.

So far, so not out of the ordinary. Using a narrow term for a much broader concept is something we do all the time. My problem in this case is that it spills over. For a year now I have been listening about a supposed crisis in journalism. There is no crisis in journalism. Journalism is doing very well from what I’m seeing. The business of making and selling newspapers is in crisis for reasons that have nothing to do with journalism. I’m not saying people should not be concerned about that crisis too, but the longer we continue to equate journalism with newspapers, the longer it will continue to be a hurdle for all other sorts of journalistic endeavour. Universities should focus on teaching journalism separately from teaching newspaper-making. Companies should focus on making journalism rather than making newspapers. It will be better for both journalists and newspapers.