Selling the News

The other week, when I wrote my post What Is the News and Do Reporters Matter?, I got an interesting response from long-time arts journalist and writer advocate Debra Cash (who gave me permission to quote her email and address this on the blog):

Mostly I'm in agreement, especially about the issue of "recognizing" news and of course the idea that all journalists don't go to journalism school!

However, when you say but ultimately, the audience decides what is news, not the reporters

I respectfully disagree. Sometimes, often -- and especially in international or technical news -- reporters on the ground/beat know something is significant early on and it can't interest the audience until it either builds up a head of steam or impinges on the personal/local/national concerns of the reader. It would have been easy for readers to say "who cares about break-in at the DNC at Watergate?" It would have been very easy to write it off as just another petty crime story. If it had not happened in Washington, with Washington Post readers having a vested interest in the DNC, it might have been. Can you imagine what would have happened if the office had been, say, in suburban Cleveland?

I thought my response to her might be worth considering:

What you’re suggesting is that sometimes, when you’re trying to sell an idea that you think is important, the sales cycle is longer than you might normally expect. And I’d agree. But it’s a thin line that separates a Watergate from a Spanish American War. Too often the press has turned something into “news” when it was crap.

There is a difference between making news, taking time to uncover news, and getting audience buy-in. Ultimately, if you can't get audience buy-in, you don't have news. That's not to say that the buy-in comes immediately. There will be stories that you have to develop because your audience may not see the implications right away. (I can remember having to do this with an editor who wanted to know why the business topic I suggested hadn't yet appeared in major media. The answer was that it was a growing issue and the business reporters simply didn't know about it or get it. Ultimately, it turned into a good-sized story.)

But this doesn't mean that journalists "decide" on the definition of news. They're still following what is of interest to the audience. Like good sales practitioners, they sometimes will find something that people don't realize they want. When that happens, you need patience and persistence to get the story out.

As I mentioned in that earlier post, news judgment is the ability to correctly guess more often than not when your audience will care and when they won't. And there is always the issue of having only so many resources to tell a finite amount of stories. Whether on paper or pixels, no publication ever has the people, time, and money to write every possible story. You have to make the best decision you can and hope that you're right.

Perhaps it's in the hope that the best antidote to journalistic arrogance resides. When you remember that you're mortal and fallible, the best you can do is hope that you're doing the best you can do, and remember your audience and why you write what you do. I recently had the experience of posting a story on BNET that had a couple of readers declare that I was being sensationalistic, bringing up something that they considered a non-story. I stood by my guns and said that the issue had been under reported. In this case, I was right, and the topic resurfaced in a big way a few weeks later.

Sometimes persistence pays off in a renewed sense of being on the right track and doing well in following your craft. There is that constant battle -- particularly online, with the pressure to increase page views -- between working with integrity and manipulating the system to use story topics and keywords as "link bait." But focused as I get on this blog (and in my work day) about the business of writing, I like to remember that there are things far more important than money.

What Is the News and Do Reporters Matter?

There have been a couple of blog entries -- Dave Winer on whether something is news if it's not reported, and Jeff Jarvis on journalistic narcisism -- that got me typing. Although I first started this as a comment on BuzzMachine, given the quickly burgeoning length, I thought it made more sense to post here. (I also skipped BNET Media for this post because it's a bit long and possibly theoretical for there.)

I've certainly disagreed with Jeff Jarvis in the past, but I do agree that there is too much self-importance in much of the press. Perhaps my view comes from never having formally studied journalism. My educational background was in math and engineering, and other than a brief exposure when I was much younger, I didn't get into journalism until my late 30s. So I'm something of an outsider and see the business and craft differently than someone who didn't spend time in corporations, in management, in consulting -- and also doing grunt work in restaurants, in construction, and in trucking.

When journalists feel that they are needed, I think they are reaching toward something, but making the mistake of seeing themselves as center of the issue, rather than serving the topic. (That mistaking the importance of self-expression and voice in comparison with story is one of the biggest problems I see in much writing.) News doesn't happen: events do. Circumstances do. News is a relative importance that people place on the events. But the problem is that it takes effort to put the events, people, actions, and so on into a context, so you're not just the mouthpiece for one aspect or another. That's where reporting becomes important, if you think that trying to get at least a half-way balanced view of the world is important. Someone has to be interested enough to do investigative reporting, to get views from more than one camp, to question the answers they get. That's reporting and I think that it's necessary to society that someone do it. That someone doesn't have to be a "professional" journalist. The person simply has to undertake the necessary skepticism, curiosity, open-mindedness, research, and patience ... and develop enough skills in writing to be able to coherently present something.

Unfortunately, I see journalists focusing more on enjoying vicarious power, building and maintaining careers, and congratulating themselves. Too many talk only among themselves and not to enough other people. Too many don't understand the topics they cover, although they begin to think that proximity is the same as understanding. There's been more than once when I've had to talk editors into a story that were for a given audience. All you had to do is know enough about the topic, the logical implications, and the interests and needs of the audience to see the connection. I saw it because I had been part of the audience at one time. The editors took convincing because they never had been, although they regularly wrote about the topic.

Of course something can be news if it's not reported. How else could you have journalists complaining about being pushed into doing too much celebrity coverage, say, and not being allowed to do "real" stories. But, again, they begin to mistakenly think that they are in the middle of it all. It's not that journalists decide what is news. They are supposed to recognize news, which is completely different. That implies being tied in to the readership well enough that you begin to understand their concerns, and that you then seek out information accordingly. Here's what Jarvis wrote:

I was trained to accept that myth: that journalists decide what’s important, that it’s a skill with which they are imbued: news judgment.

The problem there is the word "judgment." According to Merriam-Webster, it can mean "a formal utterance or opinion." But I think the intended meaning of the word is actually "the process of forming an opinion by discerning and comparing." Ultimately, it ain't news if the audience doesn't care. News judgment is the ability to correctly guess more often than not when they would care and when they wouldn't. It comes down to knowing your customers.

That shift from recognition to declaration is what makes much of the public so angry with journalists. They don't want to be told what to think and what they should find important or not. Look at what Winer wrote:

At least for me, the reporters are as irrelevant as paper delivery of the NYT, WSJ and SJM had become in 1994. I know what they're going to say before they say it. I also don't feel their ability to set an agenda anymore.

Ultimately, I think he's saying that journalists can't tell him what is important. Exactly. All they can do is present information that they think he might find interesting.

The positive thing about having more sources for various types of news is that you have more people looking and, hopefully, fewer things falling through the cracks. But ultimately, the audience decides what is news, not the reporters. Otherwise they could get paid for writing about any old thing, and anyone in the business knows that would last no longer than the end of the first pay period.

That said, I find that there is actually a mirroring of the same fault. (Remember the old saying that what bothers you most in another person may well be something in you as well.) It's also important for individuals like Winer, and for journalists, to remember that the country is big, including many individuals with different tastes, interests, and backgrounds, and just because something doesn't interest you, meaning you don't think it's news, doesn't mean that no one else finds it important. As Winer wrote:

The only reason Palin has any viability is that the press remembers who she is. For me, and I'd bet a huge chunk of the electorate, she's a fading memory of an election we've put way behind us as we've turned to face our futures. For me the last election was only important in that it got Bush and the Republicans out.

That may be true for him. It might even be true for a "huge chunk" of the country. But it certainly isn't true for everyone. It would help if individuals, as well as journalists, began to ask themselves, "Am I trying to decide what others should be interested in?" Perhaps the real problem the news faces is not the hubris of journalists, but the hubris of our culture.

Writing News Roundup (1/5/2009)

A look at publishing, writing, and freelancing:

• Wedding Copyright Cops -- An artists' and musicians' rights group in Spain has been crashing weddings in an attempt to document unlicensed use of music. But the group got fined for violating the privacy of the bride and groom. (Ars Technica)
• E-books Slowing Gaining Ground -- Widespread use of e-books probably won't occur until the devices are much cheaper and the experience better. (BusinessWeek)
• New York Times Sued for Copyright Infringement -- GateHouse Media is suing the New York Times because the Boston Globe's community web sites are allegedly using material from GateHouse without permission. (AP)
• Holocaust Memoir Cancelled -- Because of strong public skepticism over the book's authenticity, Berkeley Books is cancelling the publishing of a Holocaust memoir and demanding its money back. (Publishers Weekly)
• Online News Rockets Ahead -- According to a recent Pew pole, online news reading has pulled ahead of newspapers for the first time. (Ars Technica)
• BBC Review Fakes Car Battery Failure -- A review of a Tesla electric car on the BBC's Top Gear program took a big hit when it turned out that the reviewer had allegedly misled viewers into thinking that the car ran out of power when it hadn't. (The Guardian)
• E-books Hit Cellphones -- The cellphone-delivered novel is nothing new in Japan. Now people are starting to use cellphones as readers in other parts of the world. (BusinessWeek)
• New York Times Trying to Raise Money -- To stave off the problem in meeting more debt payments than its cash flow will allow, the New York Times is selling its headquarters, the Boston Globe, and its stake in the Boston Red Sox (oh, will Yankee fans ever forgive them for owing the share in the first place). (Silicon Valley Insider)
• Amazon Author Stores -- Amazon is launching new Author Stores with some name writers, and might expand the program to all authors whose books it sells. (Publishers Weekly)

Writing News Roundup

A look at publishing, writing, and freelancing:

• Golly, Former Tech Staffers Freelance -- Two CNET reporters turn into talking heads, covering how a former tech journalist is now freelancing. Of course, they don't interview him on camera, and the incredulous air of "You mean he can really find work in this tough environment; don't all the newly manufactured journalists create competition?" The lack of understanding, especially as they wonder whether the public will want "professionals" without bias, is profound. (CNET)


• Where's Your Online Pulitzer, Baby? -- The Pulitzer Prize will accept nomination from online-only publications, showing that the change in the landscape might now be considered official. (The New York Times)


• Reed Elsevier Pulls Mag Sale -- Publisher Reed Elsevier, which owns LexisNexis, has decided to end its attempt to sell its trade publication business, which, in the U.S., includes a whole lot of titles, some of which are Variety, Publishers Weekly, and a whole bunch of prominent names in construction, electronics, food service, and publishing. As the company can't sell off the assets, I do wonder whether it will start shutting down more of its least profitable titles, many of which use freelancers. (The Telegraph, Reed Business Information U.S.)


• Three Kills and a Classic -- Think the younger crowd is lost to publishing? Then consider that Nintendo, the manufacturer of the two top gaming consoles in the world, is partnering with HarperCollins to sell ebook versions of classic literature on a subscription basis for the portable Nintendo DS, turning the game device into an ebook reader. (London Times)


• All Things Cut -- NPR cuts seven percent of its workforce and will can two shows in March. (Wall Street Journal)


• Newsweek to Thin Magazine and Staff -- Newsweek is going to undergo an editorial makeover that will likely result in a thinner magazine, and it's going to cut additional staff. (Reuters)


• Living the YouTube Life -- There are people making six figure incomes, including one doing a humorous celebrity show with the investment of $2,000 in a camera, $6 in fabric for a backdrop, and some unknown amount for worklights from Home Depot. Income doesn't necessarily mean writing service pieces for a consumer glossy. (The New York Times)


• What's Not to Love -- or Hate? -- Fortune makes the case for and against Sam Zell's acquisition of the Trib. (Fortune)

Writing News Roundup

All the feedback I received was positive, so I'll try this again (and try to get it done at least once a week). Thanks to all that emailed or posted.

• Novel Publishing to Kindle The author relates hsi experience in writing a draft novel and making it available via Amazon's Kindle. (AaronRossPowell.com)


• Huff and Puff and Pull the Cash In HuffPo reputedly gets $25 million in additional investment. Even more cash not going to writers. (Silicon Alley Insider)


• Cable, Wire, What's the Difference? CNN is experimenting with offering a news wire services that competes with AP. The head of AP claims that it sucks. Yeah, but it's more affordable. (NYT, Silicon Alley Insider)


• Ruped Off Michael Wolff tells part of the story of how Rupert Murdoch got the WSJ. And speaking indirectly of News Corp., the company is launching a new gossip site. Oh, goody, we didn't have enough of those. (The Guardian, VentureBeat)


• Can You Hear Me Now? As the economy gets worse, cold calling will become more important. (Financial Times)


• Trib Files 11 The Tribune files for bankruptcy protection, suggesting that Sam Zell and others who are sure they know how to fix the newspaper industry might learn some humility. (AP)

Writing News Roundup

I do this in some other blogs, so thought I'd experiment with it here - an occasional round-up of stories that should be of interest to freelancers. Let me know if this seems like a good idea and, if so, how often you'd want to see something like this. My initial thought was weekly.

• Free Recipes as Cookbook Sales Mechanism Will Schwalbe, former EIC at Hyperion, has started a food site called Cookstr that gives away recipes from top-name and lesser-known but solid cookbook authors as a way to get people to buy copies. (NYT)


• Random House to Digitize Books Random House will make thousands of additional titles available in e-book form. Thius should make any writer who has published with RH check their contracts to see exactly what the company can and cannot contractually do. (AP)


• Writing the Unwritable in the U.K. Britain has much stricter (or looser, depending on your viewpoint) libel laws than in the US, as well as other impediments to freely publishing information. But journalists have developed all sorts of ways to report on that which could get them in legal hot water. (NYT)


• Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Stops Buying - For Now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has told its editors that it has “temporarily stopped acquiring manuscripts” in trade and reference. They can't say when the ban will end. Although claiming that the move is about "doing things smarter" than "the end of literature," note that not buying now means not having a selection of new titles in 12 to 18 months. Either the house has a massive backlog, or things are worse than management wants to admit. (Publishers Weekly)


• Obama and New Book Directions A Guardian blogger suggests that Obama's election will open the book industry to many new types of titles as well as creating a market for some backlist entries. (Guardian)


• US Branch of Manga Publisher to Close The U.S. branch of Broccoli International, a Japan-based manga, anime, game, and merchandise publisher, will close. Although probably few readers of this blog are interested in manga and anime, it's something to note. Graphic novels have become mainstream business and the same approach to story telling has been moving into the non-fiction world. This might be a very early indicator of changing tastes of younger generations, which could mean the necessity of changing longer-range business plans. (PW)


• EU Book Digitization Project The European Union has launched Europeana, a plan to scan and make available online "millions of books, artworks, manuscripts, maps, objects and films from the most important libraries, museums and archives, and provide them free to download from one website." It will also include video and audio of interest. Having paid attention to the suit against Google, the EU is focusing on works in the public domain. The site is currently down because there was such overwhelming interest that the traffic crashed the servers. (Guardian)

Online Stories Can Come Back to Haunt

There's an important lesson for digital age writers in a mis-dated reposting of a business story by the Sun-Sentinel:

Shares of United Airlines' parent company UAL Corp. were hit hard and briefly halted Monday after a 6-year-old story on the company's bankruptcy filing was reportedly republished with a new date on the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper's Web site.

The company's stock price dropped by over 75 percent in a few hours and trading had to be halted when a story about UAL emerging from bankruptcy hit the Sentinel's web site. The problem: the story was actually from 2002, but incorrectly redated.

It was only on one site, but when information gets sucked up by the Internet and automatically distributed, a single mistake in one state can spread internationally in a twinkling and have an overbearing influence. When you're working with online publishers and giving away rights, remember that if a story gets dragged up, possibly badly edited, your name might still be attached. Then, to some degree, many will perceive the mistake as yours, even if done so unreasonably.

To a big degree, I can't see how a writer might avoid this type of problem. There is only so often you can check the web (though, frankly, subscribing to the RSS feeds of publications to which you contribute might let you catch something like this). When you can't anticipate and head things off, you need to know how you'll deal with the aftermath. Maybe it's a blog post about the problem and using that mistake by the publisher as a reason to talk about the story's update and where things sit today. Or maybe you can directly post that as a comment to a story, showing that you, at least, know what's going on. But be ready in any case to take action and do what you can to protect your professional reputation. As a writer you have little else of value.

Market Analyst Suggests Explosive Growth for E-Books

Many of us have been wondering just how e-book sales, particularly with Amazon's Kindle, have been going and just how they could change the industry landscape. There's an article on that very topic:

Pacific Crest analyst Steve Weinstein argues that global e-book sales at Amazon could reach $2.5 billion by the year 2012.

To figure this, Weinstein starts with the handiest analogue: iPod and MP3 player sales. He notes that between 2003 and 2008, digital music sales grew from 2 percent of the US market to 33 percent, largely on the back of Apple's ( NSDQ: AAPL) twin offerings. He doesn't expect the Kindle/e-books to track as fast, but he does think the market is off to a strong start already, and that the cycle will pick up steam as the Kindle comes down in price (that's already started) and the ecosystem matures. He also suspects the consumers will be drawn to the instant gratification aspect of Kindle titles, as well as the lower price per book.

MP3 music and e-books aren't exactly the same. People had wanted to buy single tracks for years and not be forced to purchase an entire album for one or two songs. However, they are analogous and the logical is reasonable, I think. Read the article and pay particular attention to the projections he's making for Amazon's profits. Part of that comes out of far lower costs (no manufacturing, warehousing, or shelving), but I wonder how much would come out of the pockets of publishers and authors.

An E-Paper Roundup

Technology can have such an impact on the world that sometimes you need to keep in touch with new developments if you want your head to stay above water. I think e-paper is such a technology for the publishing business. This Kindle is just the beginning: these low-power, high contrast screens can start putting content anywhere:

E-paper displays are already showing up in consumer applications, even though consumers may not recognize them. Jennifer Colegrove, an analyst at market researcher iSuppli Corp., identified several product categories in addition to e-book readers, including displays for wearable and carryable products like watch dials, cell phones, credit cards and security-system cards; instrumentation applications like the capacity meter on Lexar JumpDrive USB drives; and signage. Point-of-sale devices like electronic shelf labels can be updated remotely, Colegrove explains, or promotional signage can be updated by time of day -- breakfast specials in the morning, for example, and dinner in the evening.

That means almost anything could display content, possibly creating entirely new markets. Can you imagine writing marketing copy to wrap around a product? I'd recommend taking a look at this Computerworld article.

Is It Delta Sky Good?

Nothing heavy - just a bit of humor from the Onion in the satircal form of a supposed letter from the editor in chief of Delta Sky magazine. Do you get the sense that maybe someone's query was rejected?

Young Readers Have "News Fatigue"

AP did a study - and wrote a story about it (and provided a link to the study) - that has some great insights into the news reading habits of younger (18 to 34) people, and points to some ways of addressing where their preferences and news delivery don't connect. The work was done by anthropologists in an ethnographic study:

• Overwhelmed by facts. Younger readers are drowning in information and have trouble navigating their way to deeper background and ultimate resolution of stories.


• Direct people. There needs to be a variety of content that satisfies consumer needs, with links that clearly get people to the relevant news they want.


• Old models don't work. Existing ways of packaging news simply don't work for younger audiences, and the new "let the user decide" self-aggregation approaches aren't any more satisfying for the audience than for the news organizations.


• Constant grazing. Younger readers "consume news across a multitude of platforms and sources, all day, constantly. That includes online video, blogs, social networks, mobile devices, RSS, word of mouth, Web portals, and search engines.


• Too many headlines. People are spending too much time "above the fold" (using the newspaper term) and actually see a problem in keeping up with news when everything becomes headlines and quick updates. A 24-hour news cycle produces excess of surface and a depth deficit.


• Repetition begets repulsion. People lose interest when the same stories get repeated and there is no development.


• Email is good - for some things. An email message is a natural vehicle for an update, and it's important to give people a way to get to depth from there.


• Readers are bored. As a result of seeing the same things in the same way, they keep moving from one place to another. It's important to give them ways to "quickly decide whether a news environment merits further exploration."


• In-depth links often aren't. Clicking on links for greater depth in stories often resulted in "the same content from a different 'news brand,' or on a different platform."


• Multitasking audience. Younger people tend to multitask when looking at news stories, so it takes more to catch their attention long enough to get involved with greater depth information.


• Learned helplessness. People find themselves feeling overwhelmed by news that they don't know what to do with, and feeling that it's all negative anyway, which makes them want to tune out. Satirical takes on the news in a way that at least lets them laugh while delivering information, providing an important emotional balance. "[Howard Stern] talks about things in a way I can relate to. I don’t need an anchor to tell me a script. I get it. For a lot of news it’s a case of if we don’t laugh, we’ll cry. I’d rather trust a satirist than a wax-faced suit on network news."


• Passive acceptance. Because of the emotional flailing, people were more likely to passively receive rather than actively seek news.


• Using emotional understanding to structure delivery. "The implication for the news industry is not to flood the marketplace with repetitive content, but to counter the audience’s anxiety and overload with compelling content delivered in innovative ways, whether it be with technology or tongue in cheek. It is important to keep in mind that learned helplessness is a chronic condition that can be reversed."


• Under promise and over deliver. Television trends show that younger audiences want things that deliver more than they appear to. That's a big reason why the cable fake news shows do well, because they start with entertainment, but actually dig into real questions that regular media often passes up.


• Get to the end. Story resolution is key to these people, with sports and entertainment being important, for one reason, because they offer a beginning, middle, and end. (Of course, the danger of using that sort of storytelling in other areas is that you could force journalists' narratives onto facts and ignore their actual implications.)

Here's my own digested summary. Younger people have different habits, but those are reinforced in unproductive ways by writers, editors, producers, and publishers who assume that they aren't interested in depth. The real problem is that navigation is poorly developed and labeled, and that more doesn't necessarily mean more depth, just more of the same.

The report is worth reading, because it also has examples of how some news operations are trying to address these issues. You need to know because this becomes a tool in many ways for a freelance writer: ammunition to help push for deeper reporting and longer stories on the web, an approach to electronic newsletters, and a help to structure your own reporting and story telling, to mention a few.

News and Photo Copyrights

There are some significant questions as to whether the press has a right to post the photos of the woman who allegedly had a sex for money relationship with former New York governor Elliot Spitzer. In my FotoCounty blog, I mention a piece in Photo District News as well as an angle that I haven't seen yet covered.