|
Månedens Mening er skrevet af chefen for AOL News, Gary
Kebbel, der mener, at ingen nyhedsmedier i USA - og i Danmark?
- har forstået digitaliseringens udfordringer
Af Gary Kebbel, AOL News
Ingen i nyhedsindustrien har endnu forstået, at den er
en nyheds-organisation og ikke enten en avis, en tv-station eller
en radiostation med et online-sted. Men fremsynede virksomheder
indgår partnerskaber for at kunne dække det hele og
markedsføre hele organismen under én hat og med
deres navn.
Det er rådet fra Gary Kebbel, der har taget turen gennem
online-journalistikkens korte historie og nu er chef for America
Online News. Han har delt ud af sine erfaringer ledsaget af gode
råd på et seminar i American Press Institute. Da erfaringerne
på mange måder afspejler situationen i Danmark og
andre lande, har eJour fået Kebbels tilladelse til at gengive
dem her. De kan også læses på Content
Spotlight, og hos BlueEar.com
kan man tilmelde sig en diskussion om emnet.
Gary Kebbel kom fra avisverdenen til online-journalistikken,
han var med til at starte Newsweek.com og USAToday.com og har
været redaktør på Washingtonpost.com og USAToday.com.
Hvad gjorde vi galt?
Six years ago I was ready to leave my comfortable job at USA
Today to go where few had gone before -- and where no one with
any sense was going then.
I liked the idea that there was no wrong way to put a newspaper
online because no one knew the right way. Whenever you had a new
idea, no one could truthfully say, »No, it's better to do
it this way.« The excitement, energy, creativity, and free-flowing
money of those days covered up our arrogance and mistakes.
News organizations' new-media arms were being built by some
well-financed malcontents and a few visionaries -- two groups
not necessarily known for their desire or ability to put together
a profitable business plan.
It's time to ask, What were we thinking?
Have we learned anything in the past five or six years that
can help media dot-coms become profitable today?
First, let's take a short digression into how we got here.
Why did we think that giving away our only asset, our newspaper's,
radio station's, or TV station's content, was smart? The fear
of being left out of the gold rush drove media chiefs to gallop
blindly ahead without even asking to see the first ingot, much
less the vein. The stampede became justification for stampeding.
The most thoughtful comment from publishers was that anything
online was going to be the next big thing. Not even boards of
directors pressed them to answer, »In whose lifetime?«
Was everyone so afraid of being the next CBS, a network without
the vision to buy into cable? Or was it the hubris of the thought
that there's never been a mass audience that a media company hasn't
figured out how to make money from?
To compound our problems, the economy was in the best of times,
and the stock market was soaring. A great economy is very forgiving
of bad business decisions -- for a while.
Money abhors a vacuum. It started flowing to anyone who could
deliver an online audience. No one had to have a plan for what
to do with that audience, we just had to gather it. We made ourselves
believe that not having a plan gave us maximum freedom to try
to figure out what to do with the audience. After all, we
had all the time in the world.
Success in dot-com land was defined as getting your next round
of venture capital funding, instead of having a realistic business
plan. Success was having your newspaper online, instead of knowing
what to do with it once it was there.
When the editorial team didn't have much of a business plan,
the business and marketing teams filled the void. One effect of
this is that we didn't see the implications fast enough of accepting
the argument that a new medium can't function by the old rules.
We didn't understand that this argument would be used to tear
down the walls between editorial and advertising. We didn't see
that moving away from established news values and principles was
bad, no matter what the medium.
Nyheder lavet af reklamefolk
Now we have sites that look as if they were designed by the
marketing department as ad and commerce vehicles instead of news
sites. The lead news story is just another element -- and often
a minor one -- competing for attention.
Editors often are told that they don't understand the medium
and are being bound by the 'old ways' because they're not willing
to put links to a bookseller in a book review. We have sites seemingly
more worried about missing the WAP-phone, e-mail alerts, and broadband
gold rushes than they are about presenting the news of the day.
After all, an e-mail alert is a piece of technology that in
the long run is cheaper than having an editor put together the
news of the day. In an effort to cut costs, sites are going for
the technology, not the people. In the process, they are missing
their reason for existing: news - and not just the news that occurred
until the presses stopped or the evening broadcast ended.
The ability of this medium to use automation and templates
to save work and reduce staffing has worked against us. Most news
sites on the Web look as if they were designed by the same person,
with a banner across the top, left column for links to other sections,
middle column for stories, right column for ads and more links.
We've homogenized news sites so much, it's difficult for users
to tell when they've changed sites.
To save money, sites are abdicating the editor's function of
judging and grading the news. Because of our reliance on templates,
lead stories look nearly the same as the secondary stories. (Washingtonpost.com
is a laudable exception to this.) Few stories any longer are built
out as packages with sidebar links to other content on the site.
Most article pages do not have photos, interactivity, or community
-- but they do have links to a registration page for e-mail news
alerts.
Why are we focusing on our small audience for new electronic
services at the expense of our much, much larger base audience
for our core online news product?
Are we still afraid of missing the next big thing? Of being
left out of the next gold rush, even if this one hasn't panned
out?
In other words, are we learning anything from our short history?
Kom tilbage til kernen
- Get back to the basics. Remember that you're a news site
first, a marketing vehicle second. And if you don't do the news
well, your usefulness as a marketing vehicle dries up.
- Get sucked in by the core news organization.
Online news sites too often are seen as money losers, instead
of loss leaders.
So what if Washingtonpost.com isn't profitable yet? The Washington
Post sure is.
Why are we looking at the pieces instead of the news organization
as a whole?
Is the Metro section of the Washington Post profitable? I really
doubt it. It has the largest number of reporters and a low ad
percentage. Accounted for separately, it most likely would be
a financial disaster. But no one is saying the Metro section should
be cut from the paper because it's not profitable.
The same should be true for a news organization's online 'section'.
Online news media now have to fight against their origins:
They were created to be separate from the newspaper. This was
done so that in some cases they wouldn't be bound by labor contracts,
so that losses could be separated from the paper's profits and
so that the division easily could be lopped off and closed down
if needed. Out of necessity, online newspapers had to recreate
newsrooms, instead of using the newspaper's resources. This simply
caused antagonism between staffs at the old and the new medium,
and schisms developed.
Bryd murene ned
For a while, we thought these walls were good. We thought it
was smart to be separate from our plodding dinosaur parents. We
didn't want our energy, creativity, and entrepreneurial spirit
crushed. Those decisions have come back to haunt many online news
organizations. To our detriment, it's accepted that the online
divisions are separate from the core product. Now, when they need
it most, online divisions don't have the protection of being thought
of as an essential part of the still hugely profitable news organization.
The entire news organization still doesn't seem to get the
fact that it's a news organization, not a newspaper (or radio
station or TV station) with an online site. As a news consumer,
I want breaking news however I can get it, whenever I want it.
At work, if I don't have a radio or TV, I want news online. Commuting,
I want it on the radio. At home, I want it either in the newspaper
or on TV or online or in all those ways.
The smart news organizations are the ones making partnerships
to have all these bases covered -- and branded with their name.
Too many local news sites -- radio, TV, or newspaper -- still
are fundamentally misunderstanding their audience by thinking
that they are a local news site, instead of a news site. An online
newspaper's interest in the news can't stop once the presses stop.
The argument that »We're a local newspaper« is used
as a justification for only putting the newspaper's contents online
and as an excuse not to be a full news site.
Once you enter the world of the Web, your former identity as
a newspaper, magazine, radio station, or TV station ceases to
exist. Instead, you become a news organization, and you're judged
as such. If you're not willing to cover national breaking news
during the day because your franchise is local and you only have
two people working on the Web site, all you're doing is ceding
your audience to AOL, Yahoo!, CNN.com, and MSNBC.com. When your
news organization creates an online site, your franchise is not
just LocalCity news, it's all news. Not understanding that means
you won't be successful.
Folk vil have nyheder
News is one of the top reasons people go online. (E-mailing,
instant messaging, and chatting are first.) The No. 1 topic Internet
news consumers seek is weather news, according to the Pew Research
Center Biennial News Consumption Survey released last summer.
In order, the topics sought are:
- Weather
- Science/health
- Technology
- Business
- National/world news
- Entertainment news
- Sports
- Political news
- Local news
How many sites reflect that? Not many. The results, no doubt,
would have been different if the survey audience were just online
news seekers in a given community. Then, local news would be higher
on the list. But I'm not sure it would be as high as local news
site editors seem to think.
An essential part of online news is the online community talking
about the news. Few news sites exploit the uniqueness of this
medium to develop communities, and thereby to build ties to the
news site. If there is a community link somewhere among the multitude
on the left side of a page, that link goes to a general talk-about-it
area. Specific message boards and chat rooms are not created for
specific stories. But that's the only way community works. A »talk
here« link is not nearly as effective as a link on a school
vouchers story that says, »What do you think about the fact
that school vouchers won't be included in the education reform
bill?«
If you want to succeed as a news site, you need editors to
do it right. They will build an audience through the exercise
of news judgment, through the creation of news packages, and through
the proper use of community.
Betaling er ikke svaret
The road to profitability isn't to start charging for what
was free. News is not on the list of items the online audience
will pay for after it's been free for years.
- Specialized research for your job -- yes.
- Game sites for your kids -- yes.
- News -- no. (WSJ.com is a special case, with a special niche.)
- We can, however, successfully charge for some premium services
like employment ads and real estate ads available digitally the
day before they are in the newspaper.
If you want to make your online newspaper site instantly profitable,
get out of the news site business, fire most of your staff, automate
your newspaper's feed online, call yourself an alternative newspaper
delivery system, and be done with it.
If you want your brand to be seen as a news site, however,
you need just a few editors judging the news and building story
packages that include community and interactivity.
Either road will lead to profitability, but the latter route
will continue to build the entire news franchise -- online and
offline.
What won't work is setting a course for somewhere in between
those two extremes.
|