The Newspaperman and the Blogger
On July 9, Ian Shapira, Staff Writer for the Washington Post wrote a 1,500 word fluff piece about consultant Anne Loehr, who explains GenY to their cohabitants in the workplace. Then Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan blogged the story, reprinting some of Anne Loehr quotations from the Post piece.
Ian Shapira was initially happy: apparently even in mainstream media, getting a nod from one of the big blogs is now a coup to be celebrated (how times have changed).
The Outrage
But, his editor wasn’t so happy. He responded: “They stole your story. Where’s your outrage, man?” Where indeed?
So Shapira changed his tune, and now he is outraged (sort of). He spent about two days investigating and writing that 1,500 word story, only to get ripped off by some blogger.
Writes Shapira:
With all the pontificating about the future of newspapers both in the media and in Capitol Hill hearings, I began wondering if most readers know exactly what is required to assemble a feature story for a publication such as The Post.
When You Are Drowning, How Much Is a Glass of Water Worth?
A more pertinent question might be:
I wonder what most readers would think if they knew how much time & money the Washington Post decided to spend on this story?
All this points to some big problems in the news business – and the problem isn’t bloggers “stealing” stories. The problem is measuring the value of content. (See the cost breakdown & analysis of the controversy at the Neiman Lab).
Pre-web, written content was relatively scarce, and people wanted to read fluff. So newspapers paid writers to write lots of fluff, which filled a demand for a valuable commodity. The fluff was used that to sell newspapers & ads, and subsidize hard news.
But in the world of the web, we are swimming in a sea of written content. Much of it fluff. The overwhelming majority of it produced without a cent getting exchanged – by bloggers. Some of it is produced by professional blog outfits like Gawker, who produce it much cheaper than a newspaper does.
So, when other people are providing for free some of the kinds of content you used to sell, then you can’t keep selling it. And the “free” is on both ends: free for readers, and free from producers.
Put another way, can you imagine a Gawker blogger spending a *DAY* writing that post?
A quick investigation shows that the Gawker writer of the article, Hamilton Nolan, writes about 10 articles a day, I expect without an editor spending any time on his copy.
So: how can Washington Post compete against Gawker’s 10x content output advantage, and probably 40x cost advantage? Answer: they can’t, if they compete in creating the same kinds of content. Question: do you think the Washington Post piece was worth 10 times more to you as a reader than the Gawker piece was? Was it worth 40 times more to you as a reader?
Wikipedia vs. Britannica
See, for instance, Britannica’s original response to Wikipedia. Wikipedia offered basic general information, easily, for free, usually with links out to more substantial info. Whether or not Wikipedia is “as good as” Britannica matters not a whit to its millions of readers: it is “good enough” for them, meaning that the sale value of “just providing basic general information” got a lot closer to zero, all of a sudden. I’m not sure how Britannica is doing these days, but if it is to survive, it has to innovate in ways that deliver more value than “just providing basic general information.” And its in that added value where the new business opportunities lie (and I don’t claim to know the answers for Britannica).
In the same way, newspapers have to come to terms with an info marketplace where the value of fluff is approaching zero, while unique, good reporting has a value greater than zero.
Building a Media Business Around Value
So, again, my question is: why would newspapers pay a staff writer to spend a full day investigating & writing a 1,500 word fluff piece when there are a million fluff pieces all over the web getting published every day? What value are they adding to the info marketplace, and is that value worth the money/time they’ve spent on it?
One answer might be: why not strike a deal with some of the better fluff-piece content providers on the web (say, BoingBoing, Gawker, etc etc), and just republish those pieces (perhaps with a copyedit for style etc). In that way, newspapers could still provide the horizontal content that keeps people reading the serious stuff & ads; but could probably cut the costs of the junk they publish in half, or more.
They already licence lots of content from wire services, maybe its time to start licensing content from bloggers too.
And then they could focus on their strengths:
- aggregating eyeballs
- selecting a good mix of stories
and most importantly:
- investigating & writing about stories that other people won’t or can’t write about
18 Comments
Great piece, Hugh, right on the money. One of the key things for newspapers to figure out going forward is what kind of stories are worth their time and effort. For me, the original piece passes my sniff test in that although it’s (very) light and fluffy, at least there was some actual reporting done, as opposed to the growing number of pure, barely-researched opinion pieces newspapers also publish (whose commercial value has dropped to $0).
So you’re right that newspapers have to find a way to more efficiently produce the fluff so they can focus on the higher-value news stories that we (still) rely on them to produce. The other side of the coin, though, is that they have to figure out how to make money when a high-profile online source does note and comment on a story they’ve published. For me that has to come down to owning the means of production (heheh sorry for the Marxist language) i.e., having a much more efficient and productive advertising platform that they own and control.
I also think the conversation should go back to the issue of monetization and away from copyrights. Thanks for this thoughtful piece!
@michael: agreed re: advertising. I had another para at the end (that I cut), in which I noted in passing that the other thing newspapers need to do is go to “eyeballs-to-dollars” school & figure out what kinds of sites make real money online, and do a better job of leveraging their
re: content: sure it was well-written & well-researched. but if you were running a newsroom in the “newspaper of the future” would you spend money & a staff writer’s time on an article like that – or find some equivalently meaningless content from the web and republish it?
@stella: agreed – newspaper sites have lots of traffic. they need to figure out how to convert that traffic into money.
I’m studying to be a school librarian and this, believe it or not, is right up my alley. School librarians are beginning to halt subscriptions to print newspapers because their patrons can get the same information online and many times for free. The only way the Washington Post (WP) could put a leash on their competition is if the competitor outright plagarized, which they did not. The WP needs to get with the game, become forward thinkers and look for ways to attract online readers to their site. They don’t own stories, they’re merely lucky enough to write about them. If librarians can access the same accurate information from 2 places (print or online), they will always choose the one that’s cost-effective (free) as long as it’s accurate. Whether they like it or not, information dispersal is changing and it’s the producer’s responsibility (in this case the Washington Post) to change their ways. Otherwise they will lose their readers.
Okay,
But the question is also one of research, fact-checking and getting the quotes in the first place.
When a blogger paraphrases someone else’s article sure it doesn’t take a whole day, but does the blogger have to set up the interview, think up questions, transcribe in some manner the result of the interview, and then decide the angle, pitch the story, write the story, have it fact checked and then make sure it’s second and third edits are all still correct?
I am pretty sure they don’t and that’s why they can write 10 stories a day, and poorly paid, fluff-writing MSM journalists can still only manage to churn out 1 story.
Now, you may argue that the value of blogposts to fluff pieces is the same. But I am going to guess that when and if MSM dies like a giant rusting Ton-Ton in the snow, we’re going to get a lot more journalism via hearsay, and the possibility of trusting any kind of reportage is gonna hit the toilet. It’s already in the toilet but I really don’t see alternative publishing as a savior I just see it as a lot more of this murky, badly attributed pseudo-writing.
Writing takes time, requires preparation, and furthermore research. The underpaid hirelings at the Gawker and Huffpo are going to regret their haste to pimp their work for eyeballs once they have an obligation to actually come up with the stories themselves.
Sigh. I for one am going to sorely miss the New Yorker, The Walrus and several other paper-based relics that sit in the WC as reference materials for months on end.
I agree on all counts (i think) about reporting in general. My question is: why is the Washington Post spending so much money on *an article like this*?
I’m not crying “death to the newspaper”!
I’m saying: be smart about your strengths & the values you add to the info marketplace, and focus on that; and if you need other kinds of content, why not cull it from, for instance, the blogosphere?
I’m with Hugh – newspapers should be engaging in a big-time reality check about where their particular skills a) add value to the overall conversation and b) contribute positively to the bottom line. No one disputes that good reporters do a lot of work gathering and preparing stories: what Hugh questions is “which stories”?
One error to correct though: no daily newspaper does systematic fact-checking beyond a normal editor’s review. This always comes up wrt the future of news, but the newspapers’ record on this is far from stellar, especially compared to the better magazines who do regular, systematic fact-checking.
One last point – I regularly do analyses of the blog discussion around all kinds of subjects (with Exvisu) and in most public-affairs and political work we do we almost always see the beginnings of breaking news in blogs way before the stories appear in the printed media. This idea that there’s one group over here doing original reporting an this other group over there (bloggers) rehashing the stuff they publish is simply wrong. It MAY have been like that early on (say, pre-2004) but hasn’t been that way in some time now.
I just read in The Economist, while sitting in my study (the bathroom), that the only magazines lately posting anything like a profit/ growth are People and Us magazine.
So I guess in answer to your question Hugh, fluff pays.
I can’t really blame newspapers for thinking – if we run gossipy pointless stories with no value, maybe we’ll get some readers. The numbers back them up ;)
Re: breaking news, I don’t think newspapers should be trying to break news anymore, but maybe they should start focusing on the fact that the slower publishing cycle should give rise to more credibility? Even if as Michael points out it doesn’t right now. It should.
Hugh
When you called Ian’s WAPO piece a puff piece did you mean puff piece or fluff piece? May I apply for the copy editor job if still open? SMILE
Danny
RE:
Puff piece–
Puff piece is an idiom for a journalistic form of puffery; an article or story of exaggerating praise that often ignores or downplays opposing viewpoints or evidence to the contrary.
The Daily Doubter: New Yorker publishes fluff piece on Michael Savage
OOPS, come to think of it, you DID write FLUFF piece. My bad. I will now disapply for that job app as copuyeiteur. SIGH.
But that brings up my main point, Hugh, why do you call Ian’s lovingly transcribed and well-written WAPO news article, a feature really, a fluff piece. Why did you choose the word FLUFF? That was not very friendly to Ian. Why are people so mean online when they don’t even know other people and they throw words around like pieces of, well, fluff. Calling his piece a fluff piece is pretty insulting and you don’t even know the dude. That’s is the problem with screening. SCreening, btw, means reading on a screen, versus reading on paper, where better manners prevail.
Now, Hugh, I will tell you what the difference is betweem screening, which is what you are doing now, and reading, which is something you only do on paper surfaces. Ready? And feel free to blog pro or con on this, because this issue, believe it or not, is about the future of all of us, readers AND screeners.
I screen, you screen, we all screen
by Dan E. Bloom
Alex Beam, writing in the June 19 issue of the Boston Globe, in a very interesting column titled as above by a savvy copyeditor (is that copyeditor or copy editor?) began his piece by asking:
“Do we read differently on the computer screen from how we read on the printed page?
He then quoted Jakob Nielsen, a Web usability researcher, who reported that humans generally read 25 percent more slowly on a plastic pixelated screen, also known as a PPS.
Beam said he reads more quickly on the screen and edits out about 40 percent of what appears before his eyes. And then he warned readers online and on paper in the printed edition of the Globe: ”
“If you haven’t told me what you want by line four of your e-mail, trust me, I didn’t get the message.”
Beam then tells us about Dr. Anne Mangen of Norway, who has asserted in an academic paper that screen reading and page reading are radically different. (emphasis added by Danny Bloom on screen)
“The feeling of literally being in touch with the text is lost when your actions – clicking with the mouse, pointing on touch screens, or scrolling with keys or on touch pads – take place at a distance from the digital text, which is, somehow, somewhere inside the computer, the e-book, or the mobile phone,’’Dr Mangen wrote in her paper published in London last year.
And she concluded: “Materiality matters. . . . One main effect of the intangibility of the digital text is that of making us read in a shallower, less focused way.’’
When Mr Beam asked Dr Mangen if she thought there might be a future convergence of Kindle reading and Gutenberg reading, she told him:
“Reading digital text will always differ from reading text that is not digital (i.e., that has a physical, tangible materiality), no matter how reader-friendly and ‘paper-like’ the digital reading device (e.g., Kindle etc.). The fact that we do not have a direct physical, tangible access to the totality of the text when reading on Kindle affects the reading experience. When reading a book we can always see, and feel with our fingers and hands, our progress through the book as the pile of pages on the left side grows and the pile of pages on the right side gets smaller. At the same time, we can be absolutely certain that the technology [the book] will always work – there are no problems with downloading, missing text due to technical or infrastructure problems, etc.’’
Dr Mangen also said that the e-reader experience introduces “a degree of unpredictability and instability’’ that influences reading, even if we are not aware of it.
Beam then quotes William Powers on Cape Cod, who wrote a romantic defense of the ancient medium called Mr Paper. Powers’ 75 page essay, “Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Why Paper Is Eternal,’’ — set to be come a book in the middle of 2010 from HarperCollins — was widely quoted in the blogosphere, with this one passage often noted:
“There are cognitive, cultural, and social dimensions to the human-paper dynamic that come into play every time any kind of paper, from a tiny Post-It note to a groaning Sunday newspaper, is used to convey, retrieve, or store information.’’
Powers concluded: “It becomes a still point, an anchor for the consciousness. It’s a trick the digital medium hasn’t mastered – not yet.’’
So the final question, now that you have scrolled down to the bottom of this seemingly endless bottomless page — another of the drawbacks to reading on screens, it might be noted — is this: are you screening this on a screen (see the UrbanDictionary definition of screening to understand this question better) or are you reading it on paper?
There is only one answer. Dish!
Hi Danny,
By “fluff piece” I meant the content/subject of the piece, not the writing or the research, all of which are fine. Shapira is in fact apologetic when he introduces his article about the article:
“The story wasn’t Pulitzer material; it was just a reported look at one person capitalizing on angst in the workplace.”
He goes to pains to make sure we understand that he understands that the piece was not a work of great import, but something of value nonetheless.
Yet I would argue that newspapers should perhaps not be investing in this kind of content; it’s just not worth their investment. Other people are doing it better, for cheaper. So journalists/newspapers should:
a) focus on their strengths – aka stories that require in-depth reporting
and
b) leverage/license existing content out there produced by bloggers
Oh and as for critical reading/screening/critical thought, I’ve found & read more insightful articles/essays on the internet than anywhere else, by orders of magnitude; though I do agree that there is a difference in focus and attention to screen text and paper text.
On the other hand, I’ve read War and Peace and Moby Dick on an iphone, so maybe it’s just our reading tools.
Hugh
One more thing, semi joke semi serious. have you head of the BINDLE which I copyrighted and trademarked this week? it is a reading device for reading in the pre-Kindle days. call it a BINDLE. google it and you will see what i have created.
danny
I agree, Hugh, re:
” I’ve found & read more insightful articles/essays on the internet than anywhere else, by orders of magnitude…”
But I cannot READ them on the screen. I must print them out and read them at home later. on paper.
“On the other hand, I’ve read War and Peace and Moby Dick on an iphone, so maybe it’s just our reading tools.”
REALLY, but you RE-READ them right? you had already read them in paper print long time ago. SO this was not really READING WP and MD, you were just scanning and skimming to see the feeling. but imagine an entire new generaton in 2050 who never read a book on paper print. THEY WILL NEVER know the beauity and magic and mustery of true literature….
am i right or am i wrong.? that is why I hate these screens, they maean the END Of critical thinkibng for future gens who never knew what a print book or mag or newspaper was like. Thsi is the end . Hugh. I am serious. see my blog entires, all 2400 of them
Hi Danny,
It’s been years since I printed out articles from the web to read them.
I had not read Moby Dick & W&P before reading them on iPod, though I had a paperback copy of Moby Dick and bought a paperback copy of W&P. But I read them exclusively on the iPod. It was a joy.
If the reading environment on the screen doesn’t work for you, you might try this great plugin:
http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
And you might try loging in to bookoven.com and checking out our reader.
danny bloom said:
> Hugh. I am serious. see my blog entires, all 2400 of them
nah. if you were _really_ “serious”, you would collect those
2400 blog “entires” and print them up in a book for people…
-bowerbird
Hi bowerbird, i think i know your byline from bill hill’s comments sections, nice to see you here, too. I AM planning to print them up in a book, paper book, but first I need to find a publisher willing to lose money. So far, no takers. For some reason, most book publishers want to earn some money back when they gamble on a new book. In my case, they know it’s a money loser. Sigh. But I remain optimistic……. as I screen my way towards new heights…