Freelance Unbound

Here’s an interesting piece from the Guardian about the deep web – the more than 99% (it claims) of the world wide web that is invisible to everyday search via, say, Google.

Also interesting is the paper’s editorial stance on this. According to the standfirst:

Freenet software allows users complete anonymity as they share viruses, criminal contacts and child pornography

Nothing there about escaping political or religious repression in totalitarian countries, then. Which would also be a use for a more invisible internet.

Freedom is never easy – but it does strike me that it is often painted as essentially a bad thing nowadays.

Despite the one-sided set-up, the article is a fascinating read though.

[HT: Bristol Editor]

Anyone using the very much under-the-radar Sidewiki toolbar gizmo from Google to add browser-located comments to web sites will now be able to see an entry for Freelance Unbound on the left of the screen next to the home page.

I’ve only just come across Sidewiki myself – I caught a reference to it in an internet marketing newsletter I monitor. The author flagged it up as a major potential problem for brand protection:

The site owner has no editorial control – anyone can say anything they like about your page, your company, your product, or you. Your competitors can trash you. Sidewiki has the potential to be one of the most damaging and destructive things online.

That may be a bit extreme. Let’s face it – anyone on the internet can start up a blog slagging you and your site off. The only real difference is that, with Sidewiki, their posts will be linked to your pages in the same browser.

But he was also concerned that any attempt by a site owner to block Sidewiki from working might prompt Google to delist their site from search results. I’ve no idea if that’s true, but it would be a worry – I’m not alone in thinking Google (motto: “Don’t be evil”) is actually becoming the hated 600-pound gorilla of the web that Microsoft used to be in PC software. (Remember those days? I miss them somehow.)

So of course I had to download the toolbar to see how it worked. That’s journalism in action for you.

If anyone else is reading this using Firefox, or maybe IE6, feel free to download it too and put up a comment. It would be interesting to see how it works.

However – I too understand that brand protection malarkey. Bear in mind that any comments need to meet Google’s terms of use. Specifically:

• Keep Sidewiki spam and malware free
• Speak your mind without being hateful or threatening to others
• Keep it legal
• Respect copyright laws
• Don’t post or link to sexually explicit material
• Don’t pretend to be someone else (though I think using your internet identity should be fine)
• Don’t share personal or confidential information

Is all of that enough to prevent wanton web reputational carnage?

Well – probably. Although I suspect it will be a bit of a palaver to get Google to take action against any Sidewiki user with a grudge who disses your site (unless they post dodgy sexually explicit content, I suspect).

But the truth is that the internet opens up content to everyone – not only to read, but to comment about and respond to. The only difference is that you can’t turn them off, or delete them at will. I just hope it’s got Akismet installed…

How do you get your student news story at the top of the Google rankings? And without really breaking a sweat?

Basically: write it.

Last week’s talk by Karl Schneider of Reed to journalism students at UCA Farnham sparked some interest on the web.

Freelance Unbound provided a full report – complete with ropey video – and was rewarded with some good traffic and links from outside. But it was a bit of a slog. Transcribing the content, writing it up and editing the video took quite a few hours – and that’s without the hours and hours it seemed to take to compress to MP4 ready for upload to Vimeo.

But one UCA student didn’t bother with all that – and yet still nabbed Google’s top slot.

Max Raymond’s short blog post on Karl’s visit didn’t bother with all that video malarkey – and it didn’t even have a picture from the talk.

But, weighing in at less than 300 words, it did have a handy summary of the talk that covered all the salient points. And it also had a handy link to the Reed site, as a nod to that interactivity malarkey that sets online journalism apart.

As it turns out, that was enough to push Max to first place on a Google search for Karl Schneider of Reed [NB: search is dynamic, so this position will change over time. Correct as of 23 November 2009].

Here’s why:

Karl Schneider has very little web presence

Karl Schneider is fairly important in media terms – in that he’s a senior figure at a big, business-oriented publishing house. He’s also quite prominent as a speaker – he gave the keynote address at Evolved Media’s Fast Track to Online and Social Publishing event in July this year.

But for some reason he’s not that well represented online. Twitter, more so – but not the web. Bar a few business listing-type pages and some references on Computer Weekly, this is an open field.

This means that Max needed to put a minimal focus on search engine optimisation to achieve his result. One namecheck in the headline and one in the first paragraph, plus a company mention, was enough.

On the downside, Max heads the pack for one search string: Karl + Schneider + Reed. Try a range of others – Karl + Schneider + Reed + Business + Information, say, or “Karl Schneider” + Reed – and he appears much lower down, or sometimes not on the first results page at all.

In contract, Freelance Unbound is consistently at or near the top for a wider range of searches. That extra time and multimedia content did pay off.

So what might cement that top ranking?

Nurture inbound links

The video of Karl’s talk was interesting enough to prompt a number of sites and Twitter users to link to the posts on Freelance Unbound. In turn, that has helped boost their Google ranking.

It also helped to split the material into themes. The post on the changing nature of the journalist’s day was by far the most heavily trafficked. Having a few posts up in succession also gave readers a chance to catch up with the series. (Though this is easy to overdo.)

Tips for search engine success

Your subject should be:

• Of interest in your chosen field
• Not heavily represented online

Techniques:

• Use keywords high up in the story (but not so many you get mistaken for spam)
• Vary your keywords – pick up other searches with related terms
• Add value – eg with video
• Publicise your post – via other blogs/sites and social networks such as Twitter
• Develop incoming links

But most of all – write the damn thing. Max also had a clear run at the top of Google because he wasn’t competing with dozens of other UCA journalism students doing the same thing. Their loss is his gain.

It’s not the whole truth, honestly…

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Last in this series of videos and write-ups of Reed Business Information editorial development director Karl Schneider’s talk to journalism students at UCA Farnham.

The discussion comes as a result of a typically trenchant question from pugnacious student newspaper editor Michael Copus.

It’s one that probably bothers all journalists faced with the prospect of working under the glare of audience visibility. What happens when you screw up and post information immediately that then turns out to be, in Michael’s apt words, “a load of bollocks”?

Does posting inaccurate information undermine your credibility and that of your brand?

It can do – but it depends how you deal with it

Be open

• The audience understands you are human
• If you’re open and transparent, they will forgive you
• You can instantly correct your online posts

Best practice is to leave the error in place, but crossed out. This provides visual evidence not only of your willingness to correct mistakes – but also of the proportion of material that is right.

It provides more credibility as a news source – unless you are making errors all the time.

“Clearly, over time, if you’re covering a beat and half of everything you say turns out to be wrong, then absolutely it undermines your credibility”
Karl Schneider

Doesn’t remove the need for good journalism

• Checking facts
• Knowing how to gather information
• Developing good judgement about what you can publish and when

The boundary of where this point lies has changed thanks to the web – rapid publishing and rapid retraction.

“Often, the importance of getting stuff published early outweighs the risk of getting it wrong – as long as you’re honest”
Karl Schneider

Give the audience some context – let them be the judge of how valid and useful it is.

Journalists are learning how to use the medium – audiences are learning how to consume it.

Watch the tech media and the tech audience to see how journalism will develop – it’s at the cutting edge of practice.

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How does a cutting edge, web-aware journalist’s average working day compare to how it was five years ago? More from Reed Business Information editorial development director Karl Schneider’s talk to journalism students at UCA Farnham.

Then

Research for a beat (eg: crime)

• Calling contacts – police station, court
• Looking on the web at rival publications
• Confer with news editor to agree on the stories to write up
• Then write up a story before lunch
• Meet contact over lunch
• More phoning and web browsing
• Write up second story

Most of the stuff you do the audience never sees – it’s like an iceberg. 80% of it is research

Now

At Reed and national newspapers, journalists are working in a different way

• Research and contacts are much the same
• But journalists are communicating much more
• Virtually all Reed journalists are using Twitter now
• Virtually none were using it a year ago
• It’s an essential part of the way they communicate with their audience

“As they come across pieces of information, if they think it would be useful for the audience to hear it, it’s trivially easy – you can do it in seconds. If they’ve got a bit of information, why hold on to it – why wait until they’ve got five more bits and constructed it into a  complete story? Why not publish the bit of information now?”
Karl Schneider

• Audience gets it early
• Gives opportunity for feedback

You’re much more likely to write something that taps into their needs.

CASE STUDY: FARMERS WEEKLY

When foot and mouth broke out again recently, the story broke at 10pm on a Friday night. Farmers Weekly had recently gone live with a user forum. The first post on the forum came from a farmer who lived near the farm where the outbreak happened.

Within 20 minutes Farmers Weekly journalist Isobel David was on the forum to confirm the story and provide more information plus links to the MAFF web site. Over the weekend the journalist posted whatever information she had on the site and collected reader feedback.

At one point the Government announced an exclusion zone, preventing the movement of cattle between affected farms. Isobel David reported this online. A reader posted a question about whether the rule excluded cattle under a year old, as had happened during the previous outbreak. The journalist went away, found out the answer and came back to respond.

A conversational journalism emerged, where the readers were giving information as well as taking it.

The journalist’s day now is a continuous conversation with the audience – with some lumps of more structured forms.

It looks like 20 times more work – but is actually a lot less.

Tweets take a couple of minutes extra to write and post.

A blog post is a bit like writing up research notes.

All the hard work of research behind the Tweets and blog posts and forum posts is the work a journalist would do anyway.

All you’re doing is exposing it to public view.

“Imagine you’ve got your reader on your shoulder – think about what they want to know. With the web you virtually have. You can ask them what they want to know; they can tell you what information they need.”
Karl Schneider

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Just spotted at FleetStreetBlues (via Jon Slattery) – Haymarket closes Media Week.

Well, it’s going online only – but as FleetStreetBlues is so right to point out, the other two marketing titles that went online only this year have just been swallowed by Haymarket’s Brand Republic web portal. So they don’t really exist anymore.

As I wrote at the time, I was sorry enough to see Promotions & Incentives and Marketing Direct end their life in print. I spent many happy years at Haymarket Brand Media (though it wasn’t called that when I started), including Promotions & Incentives, Marketing Direct and the used-to-be-weekly, then-went-monthly, now-it’s-a-quarterly-supplement Revolution magazine.

I suspect Revolution doesn’t have long to live in print either. I’m actually surprised it’s kept going as long as it has. It’s a fine magazine – don’t get me wrong – but it makes no real sense to have a monthly physical magazine about the cutting edge of virtual web marketing. In fact, of all the titles, I would have expected it to go online only first.

I’m simultaneously very sorry about the closures and cutbacks – especially as I know many of the people still there – and also selfishly relieved to have moved on in the past couple of years to other areas. There’s no easy ride in media at the moment – but I’m glad I’m not relying on that division of Haymarket to pay my rent now…

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As promised yesterday, more from Karl Schneider’s talk to UCA journalism students. We’re moving into multimedia territory now – with a handy summary underneath the video in case you actually prefer, you know, reading.

Karl Schneider – editorial development director, Reed Business Information

Money

In brief:

On Rupert Murdoch’s plans to charge for web content:

“To a lot of journalists that’s very reassuring. But I’m very sceptical of the ability of mass publishing – for news as most of us understand news – to be charged for”
Karl Schneider

Key points:

• More than 50% of Reed business Information’s revenue comes from the web
• Newspapers aren’t viable financially if the only money they make is from sales
• None of Reed’s magazines is viable from subscriptions or newsstand sales alone

We will make money in a number of ways:

• Advertising will work (once the recession recedes)
• Old-fashioned, untrackable brand advertising in print is “smoke and mirrors”
• The interactivity and trackability of web advertising has much more potential to attract advertisers
• We haven’t come up with the definitive models to do this
• Don’t let the pursuit of the interactive advertising experience undermine your editorial content

How can we make this work?

• Forget the old print model. Publishing is much more like being in a virtual space – think of it as a big room.
• One analogy is with the world of events and exhibitions. You don’t just suggest an advertiser just sticks their ad on a wall. You let them interact with the audience.
• But you don’t let them run across the stage when the keynote speaker is on. Instead, you create a parallel exhibition space that lets the advertiser interact with delegates and add value to the event.
• We’re still only at the beginning of how to make this work.

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More from Karl Schneider’s talk to UCA Farnham journalism students (there’s no video for this section – stay tuned for the full multimedia experience in subsequent posts).

How does web journalism differ from print? What are its defining characteristics?

Five key areas:

1. Multimedia
2. Links
3. Global
4. Measurable
5. Interactive

Multimedia

Video is a key element. But it’s easy to get it wrong.

Broadcast is different from web

• TV – you need to show moving images all the time
• Web – you can use video only where it really adds value

Early mistakes:

• Picking an area where video is used and then replicating it
  So, taking the traditional TV news/interview package and repeating it on the web is a no-no.

Instead:

• Figure out what your site visitors might use video for.
  Reed’s Hairdressers Journal Interactive uses video guides to hairdressing techniques, for example.

Example: The 2004 tsunami had a lot of talking heads coverage after the event. But the content that got most visits online and had most impact was the user-generated video of the wave as it hit.

The model is not finished. Reed – and everyone else – is still trying to understand how video works best online.

• How do you combine video with text, pictures and audio?
• What’s the story?
• Which elements work?

Links

The web is pervasive and distributed. This means you don’t have to show everything

“Cover what you do best, and link to the rest”
Jeff Jarvis – Buzzmachine

There’s no point in reworking press releases for your news in brief column – someone has already done it better and sooner. In effect, that old trainee reporter’s job will be transformed into a links round-up

• A key part of the value of a good news blog is its links.
• News sites act as a pathfinder for the reader.

Global

Web content and formats are global – implications

• Go to where the audience is: YouTube, Flickr, Twitter etc
• Think about scheduling your content for different time zones.

Measurable

• Journalists need to get used to responding to numbers
• Follow up stories that generate traffic quickly
• But don’t be driven by stats – bring interpretation to web analytics

The web changes what and how people read…

…and quickly

How page views for Reed’s sites changed over a nine-month period

• Away from “traditional” journalism
• Towards user generated content – forums, user videos etc

There’s a lot of room for more user content growth, because half of Reed’s sites don’t yet even have a user forum

“The vast majority of journalism in future will be done by amateurs”

Journalists’ role will be editing, filtering, packaging.

Interactivity

Fundamental change for the role of the journalist

In some ways takes the profession back to its roots – (there was news before there were newspapers)

Journalists develop a closer relationship with their audience

Print – a burden or an asset for your web strategy?

• Pros: Print titles have an existing relationship with readers
• Cons: Costly to produce; print publication schedule shapes editorial thinking

Sites such as Tech Crunch or The Register can run with whatever the web offers without worrying about the impact on print, and without the cost base of print.

Print may in future be a millstone around publishers’ necks.

How long has print got?

“Everything we do in paper will go online in 10 years”
Karl Schneider, Reed Business Information

But print has some life yet as long as it  makes use of its advantages:

• High quality images (see recent double page spread images in The Guardian and the success of glossy magazines)
• Big space (easy to scan, lots of content)
• Portability (read it on the train)
• Cultural legacy (old folk – the over-40s – like it)

Some legacy formats survive – others don’t:

• Cinema coexists with TV
• Horse and cart was superseded by automobiles

“Journalism is valuable, but we are arrogant to think we are the only people who can tell stories effectively”
Karl Schneider, Reed Business Information

You can sell news when it is:

• Very niche and can affect financial decisions
• Packaged in a way that makes it easy to use

Example: Reed packages human resources news and information into guidance notes to help HR professionals do their job more effectively and avoid employment litigation. It’s the same information freely available elsewhere, but packaged usefully

It doesn’t look like journalism, but it is gathered by journalists.

Next: “Can we make money from the web?”

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Key elements of future journalism, according to Karl Schneider, editorial director of Reed Business Information:

• user-generated content – which will come to dominate
• interaction via Twitter, forums and blogs
• transparency and process journalism
• multimedia content – eg video and interactive graphics

This comes from this morning’s fascinating – and challenging – presentation to journalism students at UCA in Farnham.

I’m putting together a fuller summary – complete with grainy, shaky, poorly lit video! – for a post tomorrow. But one thing leaped out at me that’s worth stressing to journalism students.

If you want to work in tomorrow’s media, start being part of the media NOW.

It seems Reed is thinking about using participation in online media as a first-stage filter for job applicants.

So when you go for a job or placement interview at Reed, you may well be faced with questions such as “tell us about your blog”, and “tell us about your traffic”. No easy answer? Then the response may well be “thanks, but no thanks.”

I’ve said it myself, (though Karl Schneider said it better in his talk) – if you want to stand out in the media job market start a blog early and keep updating regularly.

It was one thing wanting to be a journalist in the olden days (ie about 15 years ago), with no real access to publishing if you weren’t actually working for a publisher. But publishing on the web is pretty much free these days, so there’s no excuse not to do it.

He likened it to approaching a record company for a record deal without being able to play an instrument. Saying “I was waiting to sign my contract before learning to play the guitar” is unthinkable. The same goes for journalism now.

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