Endemic

Does the Star Tribune’s new Access Vikings Premium sound easy to you?

But in addition to the info, registrants have to accept the site’s e-mailed FYI Newsletter and FYI Offers. The offers can be customized, it looks like, but choosing from various categories. [By this point I would be pulling back.] Then they can pick from nearly two dozen e-mails; thoughtfully, three have been pre-checked—AM and PM Updates, Deals+Steals/Thrifty advice—meaning registrants have to uncheck them if they don’t the daily updates. Others range from zoned news to the Pet Central Newsletter. When I dug a little deeper, I found that I could delete the FYI Newsletter and FYI Offers but only from my member profile after registering.

That’s a requirement even if you sign up for a free account just to comment on content. Who comes up with these ideas? Staci Kramer at PaidContent puts it well:

Why does any of this matter? Day in, day out, we’re writing here about the ways news outlets are trying to get users to pay for content and registration is key in nearly every one. If it isn’t global, easy or transparent, the content had better be really good and the price better be right because the pool of people willing to complete the process—let along enter payment info—will get smaller and smaller along the way.

One of my biggest concerns with news paywalls is that I don’t trust news organizations — particularly newspapers — to make the process seamless and easy enough for consumers. It’s not enough to try to charge for something. We have to make the experience enjoyable.

Look at how bad most news Web sites are. Heck, look at how little thought most have put into their former cash cow classified advertising when it comes to the Web. What exactly have most news organizations done on the Web to inspire confidence that they could pull off a paywal?

I have grave, grave concerns that news organizations will spend too much time thinking about charging for news and content and not enough time thinking about how to make the user experience good.

Let’s change the world.

Mathew Ingram has a post over at The Nieman Journalism Lab asking if micropayments are the holy grail or a dangerous delusion? I think the answer is obvious.

Micropayments will not work for news. Why not?

• I don’t believe there is a market — News is one of those things that I think macropayments make a lot more sense for. There are certain news outlets that I value a lot more than others. I suspect I’m not alone. The issue isn’t that people aren’t willing to pay for news-related products, but rather the issue is that it will be tough to get people to pay for a product that has been free for years. How about we try creating new products that have never been free? My guess is that we’ll have much better luck selling people on these. Instead of trying to sell micropayments of throw-away stories, why don’t we try to create macropayment products that add value to our ad-supported content?
• Transaction costs — Yes, Apple makes money off of micro transactions on the iTunes store and does sell songs for $0.69-1.29. First, there is a huge difference between selling a song for 99 cents and selling an article for 3 cents. And that’s assuming that an individual article is worth 3 cents (many articles I’d say have zero value, while others are worth a bit more than 3 cents). But beyond that there is something journalists have to realize; Apple wasn’t making money off of 99 cent transactions. Credit card fees can easily be 25 cents a transaction. Add in giving labels more than half, bandwidth, etc and that doesn’t leave profit. That’s why Apple begun bundling transactions and billing people less often. If I bill you weekly, I’m much more likely to make a profit than if I bill you daily. Also, Apple’s iTunes store sells more lucrative content than individual songs: movies, applications and even complete albums (in fact, Apple and music labels would much rather you buy full albums). Beyond that, Apple makes monster margins off of the iPod and iPhone. Apple doesn’t need to make money off of the iTunes Store, but if it does, well that’s just gravy. Without a physical device like an iPod to carry profits, how exactly are micropayments going to work for news organizations?
• It can’t be piecemeal — Let’s assume that micropayements are A) going to happen and that B) people would be receptive to them. Even if I were down with micropayments, I wouldn’t be down with a different micropayment system for each news site. If I can’t have one account that follows me around the Web, it’s no dice. There is no way in hell that I am going to register and put my credit card info in at every single news site that I visit. I’d only agree to this if a trusted third party (perhaps Google) created a system that kept me logged in while I was surfing the Web. When I came to a piece of content that I wanted to purchase, I could easily do so. No fuss, one bill.
• It would have to be effortless — The beauty of the iPhone is how effortless it makes it to buy applications and songs. If the buying process were a big ordeal that required me to type in my address, credit card info, etc, I’d almost never use my iPhone to purchase content. But I do. Why? Because it’s effortless. The same thing with Amazon.com’s 1-click buying. It’s just a great shopping experience. Which begs the question: When have news organizations ever had great consumer experiences? Have you seen there online classifieds lately? It’s embarrassing.
• In sum — I think micropayments are a bad idea because A) consumers don’t want them, B) they present serious technological hurdles and C) I don’t trust news organizations to roll out effortless systems.

A lot of businesses could benefit from the I like to call the down and dirty principles.

Down and dirty says you should never make something that your users don’t care about. Down and dirty means focusing on return on investment. It means admitting that we don’t have unlimited time, money or staff resources.

Once we realize that we have limited resources, we’ll focus on maximizing our resources to produce the best overall product. The core of down and dirty is incredibly simple: How can we maximize time, money and staff resources? Instead of saying, “If we only had more of X,” you’ll be saying, “this is how we can make the most with Y.”

And, perhaps most importantly, down and dirty abhors the idea of, “that’s how we’ve always done things.” Listen, if you don’t know why you’re doing something, you’re probably doing it wrong.

I ran BeatBlogging.Org on the down and dirty principles. We never made subjective changes to posts for the sake of making changes. Every edit we made had a clear purpose.

We also weren’t afraid of making changes or corrections to posts. Especially on the Web, the idea of finality doesn’t exist. We can publish content as the story unfolds. That’s really liberating.

We didn’t put monster production values into our podcasts (they are still better than most journalism podcasts, however). Rather, we focused on providing great content and we realized we couldn’t do it all. We knew that we weren’t going to be able to match broadcast level production values, but we also realized our users didn’t care.

Down and dirty means less overhead, less meetings and more of listening to users. If there was ever an industry that needed down and dirty, it is journalism today. Resources are being drastically cut, and the old bloated way of doing things doesn’t work anymore.

Here are some of the core principles of down and dirty:

• Focus on ROI — With limited resources it’s all about getting the most out of what we have.
• Balance quality with quantity — After you admit to yourself how much resources you have, you need to realistically figure out how much of something you can produce. From there, the quality will follow. You can’t put quality before quantity in a world of limited resources. If you don’t produce enough content on the Web, for instance, you’ll drastically hurt your ability to get page views, find users and build an audience. The next principle will help guide you further.
• Good enough is usually good enough — With limited time and resources, our goal should be to produce a product that the vast majority of people consider to be quality. You can’t please everyone. It will never happen. If you try to, you’ll please no one.
• Perfection is an enemy, not a friend — The problem with perfection is it’s an inherently nebulous concept that leads to subjective changes and wasted time. Journalism is inherently an imperfect business. We can make changes down the road. Perfection suggests finality. There isn’t a lot of finality in the world, so why should we strive to create it? The pursuit of perfection is more of a mental disorder than a sound management principle.
• More content creators than managers — Journalism is all about content and products, not about managers, editors and meetings. A certain amount of managers and editors are needed, but most news organizations are very top heavy. You want to be bottom heavy. That’s called being down and dirty.
• Beta is the new gold master — There is nothing wrong with creating a beta product. Even so-called shipping products have mistakes. Gold master software always has bugs. Cars always have defects. If mistakes happen anyway, why not embrace them? Why not say, we’ll put out what we can now, solicit feedback from users and then create a better product? In fact, there is rarely a greater sin than trying to create the perfect product without user input. You’ll usually find better results with creating a limited product, and then getting users involved to help improve the product. Same thing with reporting a story. Don’t wait for the perfect story. Get out there and report. Connect with users. Collaborate.
• Don’t duplicate work — If someone else is already doing something, do not also do it. Link, embed or excerpt their content. If parents are taking pictures at a high school football game, for instance, it’s makes much more sense to work out a deal with them than to spend staff resources on taking pictures at said game. If another news organization already covered a story, link to it. If you have something new to add, add it to a post excerpting the other news organization, but under no circumstances should you ever re-report. Re-reporting is something newspapers did in the 1980s. Don’t be a fool.
• Embrace open source — If someone else has already created a great piece of software, use that instead. Proprietary software is usually a money pit that quickly becomes outdated. Unless a proprietary CMS, for instance, is substantially better than Drupal, WordPress or Joomla, don’t invest in it. You’re wasting time and money for an inferior product (open source CMSs like Drupal are rapidly improving too). Open source also applies to processes and ways of conducting newsroom business. Learn from the best. Don’t reinvent the wheel.
• Creative commons and social networks are your friends — There is a lot of good content available under Creative Commons licenses. There is also a lot of good content available on social networks like Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, etc. Utilize it.
• Understand your audience – Every news organization has a slightly different audience. Different audiences prefer different content and different ways of covering content. Some audiences like long-form content, while others like serial blog posts and bullet point lists. You better understand which audience you have, because if you don’t, you’re wasting your time and your users time. Maybe your users would like podcasts. If they would, give them podcasts. If, on the other hand, your podcasts are flops, move on to something else.
• Don’t follow the herd — News organizations constantly do this. Editors and publishers hear some buzzword (podcasts and Twitter) and they jump on it. Listen, everything you do should have a purpose. Maybe creating podcasts makes a lot of sense (this was a huge buzzword in journalism five years ago). For a lot of news organizations, podcasts were a huge mistake. Why? Most news organizations created radio-like crap, instead of trying to create a Web-friendly product like Buzz Out Loud. It ended up being a massive waste of time and money. If you’re going to create something, understand why you’re going to create it.
• Let your users help — I’m a big gan of big photo galleries, but many journalists seem to think they’ll take forever to make. I mean, imagine writing 100 captions! Yeah, about that. Most people aren’t interested in reading 100 captions for one event. So don’t do it. Write one overview, and then allow users to tag and create their own captions for each photo. It will provide a better user experience and will save a lot of time. Note: I’m talking about big photo galleries, not short photo essays that rely on detailed captions. But the principle still stands.
• Never turn down free labor — If users want to help, let them help. Maybe they’ll tag photos for you (this is how Facebook works). If people are taking photos and videos of events and uploading them to Flickr and YouTube, use them.
• You can’t do it all — The day you realize this and go about your work realizing this, is the day you finally get what down and dirty is all about.
• Light IT – Heavy IT usually equals big headaches and inferior productivity. IT should always help you do your job better, but Heavy IT leads to the IT department fighting people over changes. Instead, use Light IT and Web apps. I’d much rather go with Light IT and Google Apps, Zoho, wikis, Web-based e-mail, BaseCamp, WordPress, etc than rely on Heavy IT. How do you tell if you have Heavy or Light IT? Simple. Is your IT department about helping you figure out what’s possible or about telling you what’s not possible? Oh, and, Heavy IT is really expensive. If IT isn’t making you money, what is it doing exactly?
• Throw crap at the wall — While everything should have a purpose, experimentation is needed. But there is a difference between good and bad experimentation. First, any experiment should be based on some research and logical thought process. “We should do X because it’s a better way to convey Y to readers.” But the other key to experimentation is to not be afraid to pull the plug. Experiment fast. Experiment cheap. Always experiment to make a better product.

In future posts we’ll look at examples of down and dirty work in journalism, as well of examples of the opposite.