The Shirky Test

Those who can help the American newspaper industry find a business model or models that work in the Internet Age will be hailed among the publishing geniuses of the 21^st Century.

That sounds like hyperbole. I believe it is not.

Nor does Clay Shirky, Internet consultant, author and instructor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, who in an essay entitled “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” published at www.shirky.com on March 13, 2009, argues convincingly that the transition from print to Web is as revolutionary as the transition from hand-copied and woodcut texts to books, pamphlets and any other kind of printed matter mass produced by the printing press.

Johannes Gutenberg’s invention meant the Holy Bible could be mass produced, and in local languages, not just Latin, Shirky writes. At the same time, books and pamphlets of every stripe – from the erotic to the works of Copernicus and the Theses penned and subsequently printed by Martin Luther also spread, flooding Europe with printed matter and ideas unavailable to the common man before the presses started running.

“This is what real revolutions are like,” Shirky writes. “The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; bit changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.”

Shirky himself can’t predict what will happen. But he does offer in what he calls the “Unthinkable Scenario” a tool technical communicators and journalists may use to vet the models, tools, and ideas proposed as newspapers continue their transition to the Web. I’ll call it the “Shirky Test.”

The Unthinkable Scenario

Shirky’s “Unthinkable Scenario” goes like this, framed as a discussion that never happened:

The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.) Hardware and software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor would they regard customers as enemies. DRM’s requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.

The Shirky Test, extracted from the Unthinkable Scenario, sets a set of simple criteria technical communicators can use to determine whether an idea is different enough from what has already been tried to merit further study. The most important of those criteria include: 1) Imagining that traffic due to links and Google searches isn’t as important as traffic from traditional readers, 2) Making readers pay for online content after the content had been offered for free for more than a decade, 3) Overreliance on the traditional Internet advertising model of banner ads and other ads that depend on massive numbers of click-throughs for overall profitability, 4) Assuming that reader and advertiser habits in print media will be the same for online media, and, 5) Dependence on litigation to stop online copying of content. Another criteria, also from Shirky’s essay, is 6) Avoiding too literal a translation of the current business model onto the online model. Those familiar with the Web have seen many of these “unthinkables” come to pass:

• No one is getting the same rate for Internet advertising as they were for print advertising, even with the number of eyeballs looking at it increasing from thousands to hundreds of thousands.

• Walled gardens – think of the New York Times’ “Times Select” and that odd little era when CNN.com wanted Internet viewers to pay to watch their news videos – have fallen with the joyful noise of the Berlin Wall.

• Despite the Recording Industry Association of America’s failure to stop file-sharing despite copious litigation, the Associated Press is now considering such litigation not only against news aggregators like Yahoo! and Digg.com, but against individual bloggers with the temerity to use AP content in a fashion that falls outside the current loosey-goosey Fair Use Doctrine.

Further discussion of how technical communicators (and anyone else for that matter) can apply the Shirky Test to current and proposed online business model solutions is covered later on in this essay. An idea need not pass every Shirky Test criteria to be successful, but if an idea fails too many of them, it’s very likely the idea won’t work as the core part of a new online business model.

The Role of Technical Communicators

Technical communicators will have the primary role in applying the Shirky Test to new online news business models. That technical communicators need to be involved is clear, because old-school attitudes about the impacts of the Internet on journalism hold sway among most of those involved in journalism today. For example, a poll published in The National Journal on April 11, 2009, shows that of 45 media insiders (including representatives of television, newspapers, magazines and radio) polled, 29 agreed with the statement that the Internet has hurt journalism more than it has helped. Many of the comments by those surveyed echo tenets of Shirky’s Unthinkable Scenario:

• “The benefits flowing from the tremendous new availability of information have yet to adequately offset the damage that the rise of this new business model has done to the expensive, risky, labor-intensive work of gathering, editing, packaging and delivering reliable information from places and people that are often hard to get to and unwilling to help.”

• “I’ve always maintained that we benefit from the numbers and diversity of news sources in this country. The Internet is shrinking both those things without providing an alternative which is as good, at least so far.”

The Journal, fortunately, takes this poll a step further, asking 32 politically-oriented bloggers the same question. The numbers are startlingly different. Of the 32, 25 said they believe the Internet has helped journalism more than hurt it. Even three of the seven who said the opposite take it purely from the perspective that it is the newspaper business model that has been hurt, not journalism itself. Again, in the responses, we can hear echoes of Shirky’s scenario:

• “Traditional outlets have been damaged, and I think that bloggers underestimate the contribution of those outlets; however, lots of new people are producing good work in spaces that weren’t available 10 years ago.”

• “The old gatekeepers of the news have been overthrown. It will certainly change as we know it, but with the advent of true citizen journalism in the micro sense, the information is much more readily available and, at times, more in-depth.”

Technical communicators have clear roles in helping other professionals apply the Shirky Test. First, technical communicators are among the professionals recognized as knowing how readers interact with the Internet and are becoming increasingly adept in explaining this interaction to others. Technical communicators can work with journalists to construct agile Web design protocols to quickly test reader cognition of new ideas that pass the Shirky Test to see if they’ll work with readers’ online habits.

Second, technical communicators represent an outside group of communication professionals who can evaluate the newsroom, the Internet, and journalism education to identify strengths in both the media and the education, and to identify areas where the media and education are insufficient.

Third, technical communicators can help journalists identify what works in the old model. Much of that groundwork has already been laid by studies conducted by the likes of the Newspaper Association of America and the American Society of Newspaper Editors, which have long recommended that newspapers focus on local reporting over everything else to attract and retain readers. Though newspapers have these reports, most have been chided for going too slowly to implement the changes outlined in them. Reader cognition experts with a cold, outside eye ought to be able to spur newspaper innovation along more quickly.

And finally, technical communicators can help journalists identify what is not working as newspapers transition from print to web. A telling report published by the Readership Institute in July 2008 states that 62 percent of those polled had never visited their local paper’s Website, and that only 14 percent had visited their local paper’s Website within the last seven to 30 days. Technical communicators can outline tools and approaches online newspaper sites can take to increase not only their Web traffic but their daily relevance to current and potential readers. This could include asking readers what sites they find indispensible as they surf the Internet each day and then studying those sites to see what good practices newspapers could adopt.

Conversely, journalists can show technical communicators the best of journalism – from writing to commentary to ethics and credibility – as both work to integrate what makes journalism good into what makes the World Wide Web increasingly the place people want to find it.

Taking a critical look at journalism education will also identify likely gaps in how current journalism students are taught to use the Web in their chosen profession. Right now, it’s typical that a class might be offered in vague terms on “online media,” but the unfortunate truth is that, for most students, the assumption in journalism education is that they are already familiar enough with the Internet that no specific instruction on how to use it (or how not to use it) is offered.

Experimental Applications of the Shirky Test

So how can the Shirky Test be applied? Let’s take the example of two of the criteria outlined in the test and apply it to business models both proposed in the past and proposed currently as newspapers face unprecedented pressure to remain profitable while building their online presence.

Shirky brings up two salient points which make or break models for online journalism: First, the model where individuals pay for content, either through subscriptions or micropayments, is dead. Newspapers let that genie out of the bottle in the 1990s, and there's likely little that can be done to put it back in. Second, Shirky posits that a truly sustainable business plan can't result in a literal translation of the old business model of a newspaper being “a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion.” as Shirky says.

Applying the Shirky Test to the walled garden argument is simple, as many news outlets have already experimented with the model and given it up. Walled gardens are simply structures in which readers have to pay for all or a portion of an outlet’s online content, much as they have to pay for a printed edition (unless they borrow it from someone else). The New York Times, for example, in giving up its paid subscription model in 2007, stated the following:

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. [Vivian L.] Schiller [then senior vice president and general manager of NYTimes.com] said.

Technical communicators and savvy journalists ought to be able to jump in to explain to news outlets – including the Associated Press, which is currently considering walled gardens and micropayments as a business model – why what the New York Times discovered in 2007 still makes sense today.

Next, let us take another “unthinkable” from the Shirky Test: literal translation of the old business model into the digital world. Spot.us is a San Francisco non-profit organization which hopes to collect payments from readers interested in seeing a certain story published, either in the mainstream media or online. The company asks news seekers to pay $15 to $20 apiece to fund, say, a report on why it takes so long for the City of Oakland to repair potholes. The work would be done by trained journalists working on a freelance basis. They’d be paid through the donations sent in by readers before the reporting and writing was done. If a completed story is published in a paying venue, then the money that comes from the sale is sent back to the individual readers, who are encouraged to “invest” the money in another story.

The idea, unfortunately, fails to pass the Shirky Test, on at least two fronts. First, the idea of micropayments – of which the “investment” model is derivative. Secondly, spot.us’s model mirrors the current freelance journalism model – an attempt to translate the old business model into the digital world. Other evidence that this model violates the Shirky Test will be presented later.

What’s most interesting about applying the Shirky Test is to see that there are some in the Internet industry who don’t understand its implications. For example, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, according to TIME Magazine, told the Newspaper Association of America in early April 2009 to use the cable television model as its new revenue model: in other words, pay-as-you-go online news. Another walled garden. Another failed Shirky Test.

Others have proposed that newspapers work with Internet service providers to get a portion of the monthly fee Internet users pay for broadband access. Another walled garden – and a payment ISPs aren’t likely to shoulder themselves. Another failed Shirky Test.

To survive, those looking for the revolutionary ideas -- and I believe it will be a conglomeration of ideas, not one easy to summarize silver bullet -- will have to ensure their ideas pass the Shirky Test. This revolution will include things old -- notably niche publications that can focus, for example, on hobbies, travel, and entertainment -- to things new. But each will have to be brought to Shirky to see if the ideas pass muster.

"No one experiment," Shirky adds, (and spot.us’ founders are realistic enough to say this as well) “is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.” Technical communicators and journalists can use the Shirky Test to determine if ideas to be tested are different enough from the current business model to be worth a try.

Monetizing Will Be Critical

At the same time the Internet has liberated would-be publishers from the expense of the printing press, it has made it increasingly difficult for publishers to turn a profit.

“With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for an industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data,” Shirky writes. “It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves – the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public – has stopped being a problem.”

In other words – making the move from print to digital is fine, but the model that moves has got to be one that makes money. That a model makes money is an important addition to the Shirky Test.

For example, spot.us – realistic souls that they are – admit that the money their model is able to raise to fund a story “probably undervalue[s]” the time and talent of the writers involved, as David Cohn told ReadWriteWeb in an interview about the project in March 2009.

Additionally, Cohn told ReadWriteWeb that to sustain spot.us even as a non-profit, the company would be dependent on voluntary contributions from readers already funding stories. Growth would also be inhibited. Cohn said his idea is for spot.us to spread to other cities than San Francisco – but at the company’s expense. Its code and platform are open source, meaning anyone interested in starting a business that acts and look exactly like spot.us in any city on the planet can be done without those individuals paying a cent to its originators. This suggestion may pass the Shirky test in banning literal translations of the old business model to the digital environment, but it is hardly a way to make a living.

Monetizing isn’t a problem that’s limited to old media on the Web. New media is also struggling with a broken business model. Examples include Twitter, the popular micro-blogging site that has yet to make a penny for is developers, to sites like YouTube, which will lose its owner, Google, $470 million this year alone as the company struggles to pay for the Internet’s version of the expensive printing press: bandwidth. A report at Slate.com says Credit Suisse, a financial services company studying the Internet, says Google will spend $360 million this year alone to provide the necessary bandwidth for YouTube viewers to view their videos, while the company sells advertising on only 10 percent of its videos.

Some insist more radical approaches to finding revenue are needed. “We are in the middle of a crisis in advertising, not journalism,” writes Kirk Cheyfitz, a former journalist and CEO of Story Worldwide, a company that aims to turn traditional advertisements into a text that doesn’t interrupt what people want to watch or read, but is part of it.

“The heart of the problem,” Cheyfitz writes, is the narrow definition of what can constitute ‘advertising.”

This assumption automatically flies in the face of the print business model, which always calls for a wall between editorial and advertising – a recent example of that wall being breached occurred in early April 2009 when the LA Times ran a “story as advertisement” touting a new NBC television show on the front page of the newspaper.

That may be. But the concept passes the Shirky Test.

Conclusion

Using Delphi studies and reader cognition, technical communicators can outline tools and approaches online newspaper sites can take to increase not only their Web traffic but their daily relevance to current and potential readers. This could include asking readers what sites they find indispensible as they surf the Internet each day and then studying those sites to see what good practices newspapers could adopt.

Technical communicators and journalists who can successfully apply the Shirky Test to new ideas as a digital model of print journalism is built will be the heroes of the publishing world in the 21^st century.

Local Evidence of Mom and Pop Journalism

The past few weeks here have seen a lot of posting and discussion (well, a lot for this blog, anyway) about the future of online journalism, and how newspapers especially need to look for a new model for getting their news online. Part of that discussion has focused on how the Internet has freed people who want to express their voices -- in opinion, news or whatever -- from the cost of the printing press.

During those discussions, I've talked a little bit about what I want to call Mom-and-Pop Journalism, in which a small number of dedicated individuals create a website meant to serve their local community in spreading news. Little did I know that I'd stumble across a fairly good example of that very thing in my own backyard. Behold South Fremont News and Views.

This is a very snappy little Website dedicated to news -- right now, lots of school news -- in the St. Anthony, Idaho area. The city is small -- population of less than 3,000. Traditionally and up until a few years ago, it was served by its own local paper, the Fremont County Herald-Chronicle, where I actually worked for just over a year. At that time, the county actually had five papers covering the area -- the aforementioned HC, the Warm River Journal in Ashton, the Island Park Villager and the Island Park News in Island Park, and the regional Post Register out of Idaho Falls. Several years ago, the Post bought the Journal and the Villager along with another upstart St. Anthony paper called the South Fremont Stand, and turned out the Fremont Current, which ran for about a year and a half before it shuttered. Then a few years after that, Standard Journal, Inc., the Rexburg company that owned the paper, shut down the HC, leaving their Rexburg paper, the Island Park News, and the Post Register as the papers in the area.

Now that the boring history is over, on to the meat: South Fremont News and Views is treading on the localized, chicken-dinner journalism traditional newspapers say will be their saving grace in this Internet age. If I were the local papers, I'd be worried a bit, especially if this site can get a following. Right now, it's fueled, literally, by a mom and pop, a couple I remember vaguely as being civic-minded when I was at the Herald Chronicle. That's going to be the secret of online local journalism -- and the bane of newspapers thinking they're the only ones who can do it.

I've read a few of their stories. They're not necessarily journalism -- and that's not necessarily a bad thing, as journalism, especially for straight news in this area, tends to be a bit on the staid side. But this mom-and-pop group is giving it a good go. A story they've written on the closure of a local elementary school due to the state's financial crisis is just as good as anything I'd expect to read in a local paper. That right there ought to have local print journalists worried. All these folks need is a following, and the print papers will see their subscriptions dwindle.

These folks don't have any ads on their site. It appears they're writing out of a passion to help their community better. That, folks, is the future of online local journalism.

I Must Stop Now

I can tell I need to stop thinking about technical communicators and journalism for a little while. I just had some more thoughts this morning that I added to the essay in yesterday's post. I still don't know if it's worthwhile. But it's done, at least in the rough stage.

The Essay

Addendum April 15: Added to the "Role of the Technical Communicator" section today, concerning journalism education.

Addendum: Arrgh! Then there's stuff like this I keep finding. I must be on the front edge of something if I keep finding fresh material to read about it.

Blogger's Note: I'm floating this rough draft out here in the hopes that someone (anyone) will comment on it and let me know if I've gone to La-La Land here somewhere. I'm certainly no genius, I will confess to that.

Newspapers Desperately Need Technical Communicators who Know the ‘Shirky Test’

Brian Davidson
Utah State University 2009

Those who can help the American newspaper industry find a business model or models that work in the Internet Age will be hailed among the publishing geniuses of the 21st Century.

That sounds like hyperbole. I believe it is not.

Nor does Clay Shirky, Internet consultant, author and instructor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, who in an essay entitled “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” published at http://www.shirky.com/ on March 13, 2009, argues convincingly that the transition from print to Web is as revolutionary as the transition from hand-copied and woodcut texts to books, pamphlets and any other kind of printed matter mass produced by the printing press.

Johannes Gutenberg’s invention meant the Holy Bible could be mass produced, and in local languages, not just Latin, Shirky writes. At the same time, books and pamphlets of every stripe – from the erotic to the works of Copernicus and the Theses penned and subsequently printed by Martin Luther also spread, flooding Europe with printed matter and ideas unavailable to the common man before the presses started running.

“This is what real revolutions are like,” Shirky writes. “The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; bit changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.”

Shirky himself can’t predict what will happen. But he does offer in what he calls the “Unthinkable Scenario” a tool technical communicators and journalists may use to vet the models, tools, and ideas proposed as newspapers continue their transition to the Web. I’ll call it the “Shirky Test.”

The Unthinkable Scenario

Shirky’s “Unthinkable Scenario” goes like this, framed as a discussion that never happened:

The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.) Hardware and software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor would they regard customers as enemies. DRM’s requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.

Those familiar with the Web have seen many of these “unthinkables” come to pass:

No one is getting the same rate for Internet advertising as they were for print advertising, even with the number of eyeballs looking at it increasing from thousands to hundreds of thousands.

Walled gardens – think of the New York Times’ “Times Select” and that odd little era when CNN.com wanted Internet viewers to pay to watch their news videos – have fallen with the joyful noise of the Berlin Wall.

Despite the Recording Industry Association of America’s failure to stop file-sharing despite copious litigation, the Associated Press is now considering such litigation not only against news aggregators like Yahoo! and Digg.com, but against individual bloggers with the temerity to use AP content in a fashion that falls outside the current loosey-goosey Fair Use Doctrine.

The Role of Technical Communicators

Technical communicators will have the primary role in applying the Shirky Test to new online news business models.

That technical communicators need to be involved is clear, because old-school attitudes about the impacts of the Internet on journalism hold sway among most of those involved in journalism today.

For example, a poll published in The National Journal on April 11, 2009, shows that of 45 media insiders (including representatives of television, newspapers, magazines and radio) polled, 29 agreed with the statement that the Internet has hurt journalism more than it has helped.

“The benefits flowing from the tremendous new availability of information have yet to adequately offset the damage that the rise of this new business model has done to the expensive, risky, labor-intensive work of gathering, editing, packaging and delivering reliable information from places and people that are often hard to get to and unwilling to help,” writes one respondent – an echo of Shirky’s “Unthinkable Scenario.”

“I’ve always maintained that we benefit from the numbers and diversity of news sources in this country,” writes another. Then, in another echo of Shirky’s scenario, the respondent adds: “The Internet is shrinking both those things without providing an alternative which is as good, at least so far.”

The Journal, fortunately, takes this poll a step further, asking 32 politically-oriented bloggers the same question. The numbers are startlingly different. Of the 32, 25 said they believe the Internet has helped journalism more than hurt it. Even three of the seven who said the opposite take it purely from the perspective that it is the newspaper business model that has been hurt, not journalism itself.

Again, in the responses, we can hear echoes of Shirky’s scenario:

“Traditional outlets have been damaged,” writes one of the blogger respondents, “and I think that bloggers underestimate the contribution of those outlets; however, lots of new people are producing good work in spaces that weren’t available 10 years ago.”

“The old gatekeepers of the news have been overthrown,” writes another respondent. “It will certainly change as we know it, but with the advent of true citizen journalism in the micro sense, the information is much more readily available and, at times, more in-depth.”

Technical communicators are among the professionals recognized as knowing how readers interact with the Internet and are becoming increasingly adept in explaining this interaction to others. Technical communicators can work with journalists to construct agile Web design protocols to quickly test reader cognition of new ideas that pass the Shirky Test to see if they’ll work with readers’ online habits.

More importantly, technical communicators represent an outside group of communication professionals who can evaluate the newsroom, the Internet, and journalism education to identify strengths in both the media and the education, and to identify areas where the media and education are insufficient.

First, technical communicators can help journalists identify what works in the old model. Much of that groundwork has already been laid by studies conducted by the likes of the Newspaper Association of America and the American Society of Newspaper Editors, which have long recommended that newspapers focus on local reporting over everything else to attract and retain readers. Though newspapers have these reports, most have been chided for going too slowly to implement the changes outlined in them. Reader cognition experts with a cold, outside eye ought to be able to spur newspaper innovation along more quickly.

Second, technical communicators can help journalists identify what is not working as newspapers transition from print to web. A telling report published by the Readership Institute in July 2008 states that 62 percent of those polled had never visited their local paper’s Website, and that only 14 percent had visited their local paper’s Website within the last seven to 30 days. Technical communicators can outline tools and approaches online newspaper sites can take to increase not only their Web traffic but their daily relevance to current and potential readers. This could include asking readers what sites they find indispensible as they surf the Internet each day and then studying those sites to see what good practices newspapers could adopt.

Conversely, journalists can show technical communicators the best of journalism – from writing to commentary to ethics and credibility – as both work to integrate what makes journalism good into what makes the World Wide Web increasingly the place people want to find it.

Taking a critical look at journalism education will also identify likely gaps in how current journalism students are taught to use the Web in their chosen profession. Right now, it’s typical that a class might be offered in vague terms on “online media,” but the unfortunate truth is that, for most students, the assumption in journalism education is that they are already familiar enough with the Internet that no specific instruction on how to use it (or how not to use it) is offered.

Experimental Applications of the Shirky Test

As I'm in the alternative online news business with my work at Uncharted.net, a travel and adventure website where we seek to combine the worlds of journalism and social media, I like to observe and learn as other entrepreneurs try to figure out business models and sustainability plans for their online journalism projects. Our experiments are not perfect. Any opportunity to learn from the successes and failures of others will be a boon as we undertake our own reader cognition studies to make our Website – and our business – what we want it to be and what our readers think it ought to be.

Postmortems of many of our ideas show clearly how vetting them through the Shirky Test could have revealed flaws early on, saving us time as well as money.

Shirky brings up two salient points which make or break models for online journalism: First, the model where individuals pay for content, either through subscriptions or micropayments, is dead. Newspapers let that genie out of the bottle in the 1990s, and there's likely little that can be done to put it back in. Second, Shirky posits that a truly sustainable business plan can't result in a literal translation of the old business model of a newspaper being “a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion.” as Shirky says.

Applying the Shirky Test to the walled garden argument is simple, as many news outlets have already experimented with the model and given it up. Walled gardens are simply structures in which readers have to pay for all or a portion of an outlet’s online content, much as they have to pay for a printed edition (unless they borrow it from someone else). The New York Times, for example, in giving up its paid subscription model in 2007, stated the following:

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. [Vivian L.] Schiller [then senior vice president and general manager of NYTimes.com] said.

Technical communicators and savvy journalists ought to be able to jump in to explain to news outlets – including the Associated Press, which is currently considering walled gardens and micropayments as a business model – why what the New York Times discovered in 2007 still makes sense today.

Next, let us take another “unthinkable” from the Shirky Test: literal translation of the old business model into the digital world.

Spot.us is a San Francisco non-profit organization which hopes to collect payments from readers interested in seeing a certain story published, either in the mainstream media or online. The company asks news seekers to pay $15 to $20 apiece to fund, say, a report on why it takes so long for the City of Oakland to repair potholes. The work would be done by trained journalists working on a freelance basis. They’d be paid through the donations sent in by readers before the reporting and writing was done. If a completed story is published in a paying venue, then the money that comes from the sale is sent back to the individual readers, who are encouraged to “invest” the money in another story.

The idea, unfortunately, fails to pass the Shirky Test, on at least two fronts. First, the idea of micropayments – of which the “investment” model is derivative. Secondly, spot.us’s model mirrors the current freelance journalism model – an attempt to translate the old business model into the digital world. Other evidence that this model violates the Shirky Test will be presented later.

What’s most interesting about applying the Shirky Test is to see that there are some in the Internet industry who don’t understand its implications. For example, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, according to TIME Magazine, told the Newspaper Association of America in early April 2009 to use the cable television model as its new revenue model: in other words, pay-as-you-go online news. Another walled garden. Another failed Shirky Test.

Others have proposed that newspapers work with Internet service providers to get a portion of the monthly fee Internet users pay for broadband access. Another walled garden – and a payment ISPs aren’t likely to shoulder themselves. Another failed Shirky Test.

To survive, those looking for the revolutionary ideas -- and I believe it will be a conglomeration of ideas, not one easy to summarize silver bullet -- will have to ensure their ideas pass the Shirky Test. This revolution will include things old -- notably niche publications that can focus, for example, on hobbies, travel, and entertainment -- to things new. But each will have to be brought to Shirky to see if the ideas pass muster."No one experiment," Shirky adds, (and spot.us’ founders are realistic enough to say this as well) “is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.” Technical communicators and journalists can use the Shirky Test to determine if ideas to be tested are different enough from the current business model to be worth a try.

Monetizing Will Be Critical

At the same time the Internet has liberated would-be publishers from the expense of the printing press, it has made it increasingly difficult for publishers to turn a profit.

“With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for an industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data,” Shirky writes. “It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves – the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public – has stopped being a problem.”

In other words – making the move from print to digital is fine, but the model that moves has got to be one that makes money. That a model makes money is an important addition to the Shirky Test.

For example, spot.us – realistic souls that they are – admit that the money their model is able to raise to fund a story “probably undervalue[s]” the time and talent of the writers involved, as David Cohn told ReadWriteWeb in an interview about the project in March 2009.

Additionally, Cohn told ReadWriteWeb that to sustain spot.us even as a non-profit, the company would be dependent on voluntary contributions from readers already funding stories. Growth would also be inhibited. Cohn said his idea is for spot.us to spread to other cities than San Francisco – but at the company’s expense. Its code and platform are open source, meaning anyone interested in starting a business that acts and look exactly like spot.us in any city on the planet can be done without those individuals paying a cent to its originators. This suggestion may pass the Shirky test in banning literal translations of the old business model to the digital environment, but it is hardly a way to make a living.

Monetizing isn’t a problem that’s limited to old media on the Web. New media is also struggling with a broken business model. Examples include Twitter, the popular micro-blogging site that has yet to make a penny for is developers, to sites like YouTube, which will lose its owner, Google, $470 million this year alone as the company struggles to pay for the Internet’s version of the expensive printing press: bandwidth. A report at Slate.com says Credit Suisse, a financial services company studying the Internet, says Google will spend $360 million this year alone to provide the necessary bandwidth for YouTube viewers to view their videos, while the company sells advertising on only 10 percent of its videos.

Some insist more radical approaches to finding revenue are needed. “We are in the middle of a crisis in advertising, not journalism,” writes Kirk Cheyfitz, a former journalist and CEO of Story Worldwide, a company that aims to turn traditional advertisements into a text that doesn’t interrupt what people want to watch or read, but is part of it.

“The heart of the problem,” Cheyfitz writes, is the narrow definition of what can constitute ‘advertising.”

This assumption automatically flies in the face of the print business model, which always calls for a wall between editorial and advertising – a recent example of that wall being breached occurred in early April 2009 when the LA Times ran a “story as advertisement” touting a new NBC television show on the front page of the newspaper.

That may be. But the concept passes the Shirky Test.

Conclusion

Using Delphi studies and reader cognition, technical communicators can outline tools and approaches online newspaper sites can take to increase not only their Web traffic but their daily relevance to current and potential readers. This could include asking readers what sites they find indispensible as they surf the Internet each day and then studying those sites to see what good practices newspapers could adopt.

Technical communicators and journalists who can successfully apply the Shirky Test to new ideas as a digital model of print journalism is built will be the heroes of the publishing world in the 21st century.

Medieval Help Desk

I first saw this video a few years ago (under which circumstance I cannot recall). But considering what I've been blogging about here for the past week, it's pertinent once more. As Clay Shirky indicates in his essay "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable," the newspaper business is undergoing right now a revolution akin to when the printing press arrived. Seeing this IT help guy assist the monk struggling with the transition from scroll to book is hilarious, but at the same time telling of the struggles we're seeing in the print-t0-web platform today. Enjoy.

Somebody Moved the Media's Cheese, and They're, Well, Cheesed

More fodder:

The Atlantic reports today on a poll of "prominent members of the national news media," in which 65 percent said they velieve journalism has been hurt more, rather than helped, as readers and viewers seek more of their news form the Internet. You can read the entire story here.

A few interesting excerpts:

[The Internet] has blurred the line between opinion and fact and created a dynamic in which extreme thought flourishes while balanced judgment is imperiled.

Excuse me? Since when has our media (whether it leans to the left, leans to the right or sags in the middle) been a bastion of balanced judgment, or helped define the line between opinion and fact?

The Internet trains readers to consume news in ever-smaller bites. This is a disaster for newspapers and magazines.

Huh. This must explain why, in the past few months, I've read ginormous stories on the financial collapse of Iceland, gobs about the media's relations with the Internet, debates over gay marriage and all sorts of other things that, in the past, I have skipped over OR NOT BEEN ABLE TO FIND in my local paper or any of the handier magazines.

A few of these insiders understand a bit more than the others, however, that the Internet, like the advent of the printing press (again, you've got to read Clay Shirky's essay, linked in a previous post) is a revolution for good:

I think the shift to the Web has helped the practice of journalism It's subjected journalists to more real-time scrutiny and opened the profession to talented people not affiliated with major media organizations.

Yes, there's a democracy growing out there. Sure, as one insider is quoted as saying by the Atlantic, "there's sludge. And I can feel overwhelmed by quantity -- but the range and quality of twhat's at my fingertips every morning is astonishing."

My wife brought up a salient point to me tonight, which ties in with Spencer Johnson's book Who Moved My Cheese? The majority of these media insiders need to remember what Johnson says about monitoring change: "Smell the cheese often so you know when it is getting old."

Indeed, insiders, your cheese is getting old.

Bus Thoughts

Usually when I get on the bus at 5 am to go to work, I sleep. This morning, I couldn't. Kept having thoughts relating to yesterday's newspaper/Shirky post pop into my head. So I woke up and wrote them down. As often happens with the things I write down early in the morning, later when I transcribe them, they make less sense. See what you think:

Another way spot.us fails the Shirky Test: it’s only an iteration of the freelancer model already in place, where revenue from a previously published story subsidizes the research for a current story. That “investors” have a chance of getting their money back to reinvest in another story is the different twist, but is that enough?

Spot.us, like freelancing, will cater to the special interest market, which has operated this way for print – and even online – news for years.

The reader habit of selectively reading the news was well in place before the Internet. People read what interests them in the newspaper, skimming over or simply discarding the rest. With the firehose of information now available – mostly for free – on the Internet, it’s a given that newspapers would fade in their importance in daily life. It’s just as simple for me to keep up with the comic strips I like on the web as it is in the newspaper, and I no longer have to be burdened by the likes of The Born Loser or Alley Oop. As long as comic strip providers offer their stuff online for free – and that’s the vast, vast majority, especially of those already seen in newspapers – there’s no longer a reason for me to buy a paper to see the comics.

At newspapers, most beats are assigned by geography or, at best, specialization. Reporters might get to pick a few plum assignments, based on their interests and passions, but the nature of the newsroom now and always has been that with those plum assignments come some prunes. Some reporters do remarkably well in demonstrating their passion in all of the assignments they’re given. Others do not. Others let their passion for some beats and subjects override their objectivity – common currency at most newspapers today.

Newspaper journalists like to dismiss bloggers by saying they simply launch their lightning bolts and are not responsible to anyone. All I can say to that is: Look in the mirror, pal. There are plenty of print journalists, columnists, editors who use their positions to launch print thunderbolts and are responsible to the same people bloggers are: their readers. People who find a blog offensive are just as apt – no, more than apt – to rail rightly against the messenger as they are to rail against a messenger in print. The responsible journalist, as well as the responsible blogger, will strive, then, for accuracy and fairness, and respond quickly when errors are pointed out.

It’s almost as if it’s easier to interview the professor who can parse meaning from a poem than talking to the poet himself.

What might come to pass is the advent of Mom and Pop journalism – small teams, of maybe two to three individuals, working not for pay but through passion to produce local news content accurately and inexpensively on the Internet. We have things like the Riddenbaugh Press, operated by Randy Stapilus. The press, which does produce books, is best known for its news commentary on politics in the Pacific Northwest. Yes, he riffs off print and television journalism right now.

Then there are sites like Rexburbia.com, a growing spot on the Internet for local news and commentary in the Rexburg, Idaho area. It indeed serves a small audience. But it does serve that audience.

Addendum: Good reading here (Thanks, Carl) from the Christian Science Monitor which recently stopped publishing in print and went wholly online. (Love the line from reporter John Yemma, which is echoed heartily through the things I've been reading this week: "You can't take the old model with you. You can take your organization's values with you. But you can't take its work habits, as we are learning this week in our first week of the Web-first Monitor.") He brings up the idea of news wikis, in which -- and especially when -- traditional newspapers hide behind a paywall a challenge could come from outside journalists and others banding together with an internet-based news wiki. Unreliable? Biased? Prone to news-makers controlling the content? Yeah. But any more so than traditional newspapers? OK, maybe a little. But the crowd has more potential to sort out the rats in a wiki, because of the open-source nature of wikis themselves (think wikipedia).

And here, where one may read about suits being brought against people for linking their Web sites to other sites. Again, we see a few examples of online efforts failing the Shirky Test. His "Unthinkable Scenario" includes: "And, per [Gordy] Thompson, suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off." More evidence that Internet readers won't enter through your front door. (Those initiating the suite are upset that, since readers aren't coming in through the front door, they're (the company) missing out on the advertising on the front page. Again, how is this different than the traditional newspaper model? I don't read every ad on the way to the stuff I want. I chuck the inserts. I'm bypassing their advertisers.)

Alternative Snooze

As I'm in the "alternative online news" business with my work at Uncharted, I like to have my ear to the ground when it comes to other entrepreneurs trying to figure out business models and sustainability plans for the projects they're working on the online journalism world. The more of them that I encounter, the more I realize they've got to pass what I'm going to call the "Shirky Test," so called for Clay Shirky and his powerful essay "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable." Even with my limited experience in journalism (ten years as a professional print journalist with a career that ended in two erroneous stories and career burnout) and journalism on the web (four years with Uncharted, coupled with two and a half years of study for a masters degree in technical writing, with a heavy emphasis on web writing), I'm fairly confident Shirky's assessment of the search for newspaper journalism's model for the Web will be proven to be the yardstick by which successful Web journalism models will be measured. His "Unthinkable Scenario" will be played out in newsrooms nationwide. I believe this even in light of those who insist today's print journalism crisis is linked to newspaper chains and the debt they've saddled the industry with -- because readership was declining in favor of the Internet before mergers, buyouts and the debt they carried with them occurred.

Shirky brings up two salient points which I think will make or break any long-term sustainability for the future of online journalism: First, the model where individuals pay for content, either through subscriptions or micropayments, is dead. Newspapers let that genie out of the bag in the 1990s, and there's likely little that can be done to put it back in the bottle. There are some holdouts, notably The Post Register, my hometown paper and former employer, which has earned national ink for sticking to it's online subscription model. I don't have current numbers, but last I heard, the paper had about 800 online subscribers. That's admirable, but a clear exception to the rule.

Second, Shirky posits that a truly sustainable business plan can't result in a literal translation of the old business model of a newspaper being "a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion," as Shirky says. Newspapers can't present a plan, Shirky says, that will "preserve the old form of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies." This is basically what The Post Register is telling the Associated Press as the paper threatens to pull out of the service as the service forces papers to buy packages of content, some of which they will not use. To turn around and expect it's readers to do what the paper is questioning doing itself us, at best, disingenuous.

Now, I've been a newspaper reader since childhood, with the Post as my paper of choice. And, I have to admit, it's a paper I read selectively. I rarely read the sports page. I rarely read the advertisements. The highlights of my reading were -- and remain -- in this order: the comics, the opinions, and anything that related to city growth. Occasionally, I would read national science news in the paper, but only because it was there, easy to access. Those habits only shifted slightly after I became a news purveyor at the paper, rather than a mere consumer, and is ultimately why I decided to leave the industry.

So, to survive, those looking for the revolutionary ideas -- and I believe it will be a conglomeration of ideas, not one easy to summarize silver bullet -- will have to ensure their ideas pass the Shirky Test. This revolution will include things old -- notably niche publications that can focus, for example, on hobbies, travel, and entertainment -- to things new. But each will have to be brought to Shirky to see if the ideas pass muster.

Take, for example, spot.us, a San Francisco non-profit and startup "two strikes against us," jokes founder David Cohn in an interview with ReadWriteWeb (available here). In my opinion, the idea of "crowd-based" reporting, in which news seekers pay $15 to $20 apiece to fund publishing a bit of community journalism, say a report on why it takes so long for the City of Oakland to repair potholes, for instance, might pass the second part of the Shirky Test, in that the idea of letting readers decide what is worthy of bring published is novel enough that it is not part of the old school. However, the concept, with it's up-front payment, smacks right up against the first Shirky tenet. Sure, with spot.us, the readers may get the chance to read "their" story for free, but those who wanted the story in the first place risk having to pay for it twice, as part of the model calls for spot.us stories to be sold to old media for publishing. Yes, they get their money back to "invest" in another story, but the model requires a level of commitment that us not sustainable across the masses, as right now the masses are accustomed to free local news, provided either by local TV news stations, or by the Web sites maintained by newspapers. Special interests will see this as an avenue to get word out on their special causes, but getting consistent coverage of day-to-day operations of city, county, and school government will be problematic.

Also troubling is that in the five months spot.us has been active, only two stories have been published in mainstream media, with another ten going the open source route. A handful more are close enough to the monetary threshold to be published. That's less than a day's worth of news for your standard daily. As with Uncharted, building that critical mass is the rub, and not one that's accomplished easily.

Additionally, Cohn admits right now the money coming in to publish a story results in the reporter's work being "probably undervalued, " as he tells ReadWriteWeb. Freelance journalists -- and that's about all you'd get with this model -- would not be making the same amount of money than under the old, albeit broken, model. I know from experience that some money is better than no money, but for long-term sustainability, the prospects for spot.us seem limited. Additionally, spot.us seems as willing to toss out the baby with the bathwater as the old media it proposed to teach. Cash to sustain the business, even at a non-profit level, would come from non-mandatory reader contributions above what they pony up for a story. Additionally, Cohn tells ReadWriteWeb that part of the sustainability model hinges on bringing spot.us to other cities -- but then goes on to say that since spot.us is open source, anyone can take it and run with it without paying spot.us a cent. "Ive seen it pop up in Japan, and it looks just like spot.us, because they're using our open source code," Cohn tells ReadWriteWeb. What's that giant sucking sound?

The best part is: I'm likely wrong. "Any experiment," Shirky writes, "designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past." WHile there is much about newspaper journalism that is broken as far as it comes to applying it to the web, journalism itself is not broken, and is still indispensable even in the Internet age. No army of bloggers and novice writers -- willing to slave away at the less than desireable wages crowd journalism seems to offer, will make up for even local journalists worth their 20 years worth of salt building contacts and credibility.

"No one experiment," Shirky writes, (and Cohn is realistic enough to say his is not a silver bullet) "is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need."

What Was Time Again?

Even after only a half hour at Steve Krug’s website, www.sensible.com, it’s clear his site would benefit from a thorough user cognition study, in which we consider the impressions his site leaves on visitors (or at least on this visitor, since, right now, this is just one man's opinion). Even though his book, “Don’t Make Me Think,” is regarded as a Web usability Bible, I left his site with a rather poor impression of the product and the man.

First of all, I understand he’s spent a long time developing a very sellable product – two actually: His book and himself. He certainly has a justifiable, vested interest in promoting himself and his products, as that’s how he earns his bread and butter (and, if his prices are indicative of anything) his caviar and Dom Perignon as well. But the soft sell/hard sell on every page of his website is wearying. Perhaps that is his intent – he is using his site as a marketing tool, as is his right. Still, for me, this site could be so much more than what it is now.

The site is very centered on Steve Krug. Examples vary from the minor (the little flourishes in crossing out “we are” and “we do” in his menu bar and replacing them with “I am” and “I do,”) to the eye-rollers (“just me and a few well-placed mirrors”) to the near-insulting (he touts his workshop, but advertises TWO on the registration form, then relegates a description of the other course, taught by someone else, to a little yellow box on the workshops page that, at first glance, I skipped over because it did not look important).

Rhetorically, I am having a hard time trying to figure out who he is talking to. Overall, I get the feeling the pages at www.sensible.com are written for middle management, who want the quick lowdown on what he offers. He gives just enough detail on the website to fill in detail a middle management person might want after he/she heard about the book and the workshops and might want to send someone to them for the company, but wants to be convinced the stuff is worthwhile enough to pry open the pocketbook (although you actually have to get to the registration form before you find out how much the workshops cost). There were a few instances when the message wandered into talking to writers, editors, designers – the people who might actually be sent to the workshop – in the FAQ, but overall, I felt the message was aimed at the “check-signers,” not the job-doers.

What's surprising to me is that, despite the title of his book “Don't Make Me Think,” part of this site, well, made me think.

Being the cost-conscious individual I am, I want to know how much the workshop costs. So I go to the workshop page. I discover there that I can’t find out on that page how much it costs, but he does tell me that if I cancel, I’ll be out a $100 processing fee. So I click on the register page. Ah. There’s the answer. But wait. Do I want to sign up for one workshop, or both workshops? Both? I thought there was only one. Back to the workshop page. I read all about his workshop again. But just one. Then, after five minutes worth of reading, I find information on the second workshop – it’s not one of his, so it doesn’t get very good play on the page – I have to click out of his page to learn more about it, then go back to his page to register. I assume. I didn’t try registering at the other site.

(Lou Rosenfeld’s page, by the way, I liked a lot better. Rhetorically it speaks to me as a web site user and tinkerer much more than Krug’s site, as Rosenfeld’s site is less about Rosenfeld and more about what I can get out of the workshop – testimonials, referring to “me” as the customer, rather than “I” as the website guru. I also enjoyed the “Bloug,” Rosenfeld’s blog, on the home page. I get to learn more about him as a person, how he thinks, writes, et cetera, than I do with Krug’s static page and clumsy personal asides. Rosenfeld invites interaction. Krug seems to want to keep us at arm’s length.)

Krug's pages seem static. He confesses: He’s slow. A new web page has been in development since 2005. It’s 93 percent done! Coming soon in 2009! I’m not holding my breath. Also, he confesses you can write to him, but he’s slow responding. He also offer a “Tip of the Month,” but confesses it has not been updated since June 1997. That’s right. His tip of the month is twelve years old. Nothing here really tells me he's interested in what a visitor to his site might want – he wants to put across his message (buy my stuff) – and nothing more

I like that the site feels hand-built. In a way, it’s less intimidating that way. However, part of me would suspect that a website promoting a web usability guru wouldn’t feel like something I put together in college in 1996. The site is stuck in the early web era. Yes, it’s simple, and simplicity is a good thing. To a point. It just feels stuck in the 1990s. Even newspapers, a product of the 17^th century, redesign every few years to keep things fresh.

Basically, he’s telling me the same thing Dave Barry comes out front and says when he’s on book tour: “Buy my book [or my workshop, in Krug’s case]. Or send me some money in a box.”

And one final observation: Why does he slip into third person on the “Who I Am” page, when everything else about him is in the first person? It seems odd and boilerplated, as if it were cut and pasted from a book blurb.

Do NOT Scroll to Read This

I’ve begun to hate some of the commonly-held “wisdom” that is held in proposing what makes for good web writing. These tips, I believe, play too much to the bias that web reading ought to pander to the hyperkinetic, distracted, and lazy reader, rather than the reader who wants good information and is willing to slow down (even by a matter of minutes) to discover whether the information they regard as “good” is indeed good after all.

A discussion last week, for example, in my publications management class focused on whether it’s a good idea to “make” or “force” readers to scroll as they read. The common web wisdom is that short, concise writing with a minimum of scrolling is best, and that if a piece is longer than the confines of a standard monitor, then it ought to be cut, shortened or daisychained in a series of hyperlinks so the reader doesn’t have to do anything but stare at the screen and click a button to absorb the text.

We mostly agree this advice is hogwash.

It harks back to old media, or at least media as old as USA Today. When that paper was started in 1980, writers were urged to write short peppy stories that did not have to jump. Jumping, of course, is when readers had to go to a different page of the newspaper to continue reading the story as it “jumped” from one page to another.

Problem is the advice is only half right. I’ve written plenty of boring stories on municipal government that jumped, but should not have. Inverted pyramid style tells us that the most important stuff comes first, with the rest to follow in descending order of importance. If, at the jump, the information was already putting me to sleep, I never read the jump. Even if it was an article I wrote.

On the other hand, there are articles that jump once, jump again, and occasionally, jumped thrice, and they kept readers reading to the last paragraph. The difference? The genre, or the writing style. These longer stories that keep readers’ interest tend to be narrative. They tell a story or introduce a character, rather than provide a list of facts and quotes in decreasing levels of importance.

Same with the web. If a piece is well-written, captivating and telling a compelling story, readers will scroll. And scroll. And scroll. And scroll some more. Deciding whether or not to enforce the no-scroll rule ought to be applied on a case-by-case basis, not as a blanket policy. Readers will even scroll through page after page of comments on a story they only had to scroll through two or three pages to read, just because the comments, in the telling, tell a story, amuse, enrage or in other sundry ways engage the reader.

So why, on most writing for the web websites, do we see the old “Scroll and Die” rule bandied about like the embarrassing relative it is? And why do they embarrassingly resemble this website, which confused the hell out of me as it applied the no-scroll rule and, instead, offered hyperlinks in order to continue, as if I were reading a prepubescent Choose Your Own Adventure novel, not something actually engaging and worthwhile? (I admit, it’s more than a decade old. But check into more modern web writing forums like Kairos and you’ll find things that are eerily similar to this, but only moderately less clunky.) No one has been able to explain to me why a click on a hyperlink is more desirable than a scroll.

Good writing will carry the reader whether the reader has to click on hyperlinks or scroll to continue.I suppose we can argue the pros and cons of one method versus the other, but I, for one, would like to see the Scroll and Die rule put to death.

Start With No

Through our work on Uncharted, I've been introduced to the 37 Signals group's book Getting Real, a guide the group behind Basecamp, Campfire and the Ruby to Rails markup language markets to software developers. Though I'm not a software developer, I am interested in website development, and find that a lot of the things they bring out in their book apply to websites as well as software.

One of the most intriguing things they bring up is their "Start With No" concept, explained in full here. Here's what they have to say in part:

The secret to building half a product instead of a half-ass product is saying no.

Each time you say yes to a feature, you're adopting a child. You have to take your baby through a whole chain of events (e.g. design, implementation, testing, etc.). And once that feature's out there, you're stuck with it. Just try to take a released feature away from customers and see how pissed off they get.

Their reasoning is that adding every feature, every page, every this and every that which your customer asks for through usability studies can often lead to sites and software and publications getting unmanageable.

In my publications management class, one student brought up the website for students in tne tech writing masters program, complaining that it's hard to find pertient information among all the other stuff that's been added to the site. This is, I believe, evidence of someone who can't say no to their users. You'd think that class registration and getting to Blackboard would be important functions, but they're buried in all the other folderol on the page. But all that's been added is due to someone -- often just a someone, not a group someone -- asking for the addition. Sometimes the best thing that can come out of a usability study is the recognition that you can say no to your users.

Can A Tiny Detail Make or Break A Website?

Sometimes I wonder about myself, because when it comes to conducting my own little usability studies on various websites, I think in many ways I fail myself.

First of all – I’m a big disciple of the KISS method – keep it simple, stupid. I don’t like to jump through a bunch of hoops to make a website work. At Uncharted, for example, our designer INSISTS, in the photo and story submission process, that after completing each step we first have to SAVE our work, and then click an entirely separate button to move on to the next step. It only takes a few seconds to do, but it drives me crazy. It makes no sense to add that extra step.

Yet there are many sites I visit that require such extra steps and, for some odd reason, I don’t mind taking them at all. And the odd reason is just this: I’m used to taking that extra step.

Take digg.com for example. Most of the time when you click on a link, you get another Digg window, on which you have to click another link to get to the item people want to share with the world. (Sometimes you jump right to the item, which is a bonus in my book, right?) Over at reddit.com, however, they don’t do that. You click on the link and you go straight to the item others want to share with you. But guess which site I prefer? Digg. I had to ask myself why, since Digg is one step further away from KISS than Reddit.

So I asked why. It’s not the content. Though the content varies from Digg to Reddit, I can’t say there’s enough difference in what is offered on either site to make me prefer one over the other. And since I link directly to both, rarely getting to Digg or Reddit through any other portal but Digg or Reddit, I can’t say it’s due to the dominant position Digg has taken in the marketplace. Part of me wants to say it’s presentation. Reddit is a might simpler than Digg. In some ways, it has almost a Web 1.0 feel with the plain backgrounds and links that APPEAR the same as they did when I was tinkering with the Web back in 1996, plugging away at HTML with only trial and error. Digg is slicker, with a graphic presentation. But, when you sit down to compare them, they’re not really all that different. Blue links on a white page, with black text nearby. Digg has more pictures. Digg makes their “dig” count more prominent than Reddit in tracking its votes. Both Digg and Reddit offer to sort the selections by category – but I never use the categories.

So why do I prefer Digg over Reddit? I have a dual monitor so for the last 15 minutes or so, I’ve had both Digg and Reddit up, and I’ve stared at them. And stared at them. And stared at them. They function the same. They have roughly the same types of content. One is a little friendlier to the eye with graphics than the other, but I can’t say that really tips the scale.

Then it hits me. And this seems like a stupid, stupid reason to prefer Digg over Reddit, but, perhaps, it shows haw a seemingly trivial detail could, in my eyes at least, make me prefer one site over the other:

Reddit is too blue.

Their hyperlinks are waaaaay too long, sometimes spilling over two or three lines. Digg’s hyperlinks, by contrast, are short. Peppy. Rarely spreading halfway across the page, let alone onto an additional line. Even though those hyperlinks connect me to the same kinds of items, even though those hyperlinks, at Reddit, take me right to the item without having to swim through another layer, I like the Digg hyperlinks better. Because they don’t take as long to read, yet give me enough information to decide whether I want to make that dark blue hyperlink turn light blue.

That seems superficial, I suppose. But it’s how the sites make me react. Digg provides just as much textual information as Reddit provides – it’s just presented in black on white text, underneath the hyperlink. Some of Digg’s texts are even longer than Reddit’s hyperlinks. But they’re not hyperlinks. So they’re not blue. So the offerings on Digg seem more manageable than the offerings on Reddit.

I wonder how Reddit would react to this feedback. Would they think I’m crazy? Maybe I am. I’ll go see if others feel the same. At digg.com.

Can't We All Just Get Along?

"Frank, I swear I'm going to put in your record that you do not play well with others." (Col. Henry Blake)

Blogger's Note: More on Effective Publications Management, by Cathy Connor Lips. Thoughts on Chs. 6 and 7, regarding planning and personnel issues.

First impression: Help! I’m drowning in lists!

Second impression: Getting everyone in sync when you’re working on a publication is a maddening experience – but it can happen, depending on how critical the publication is to getting work done.

Bottlenecks change: If you’d talked to us six months ago, our entire writing group at my day job would have said that the worst bottleneck in our publication process was getting reviews out of the Unreviewed Safety Question group. These are the guys who look at our work and compare it to requirements in our safety basis documents. We have to have their signatures on about 95 percent of our documents for them to be approved. The USQ group used to be a terrible bottleneck, where work from multiple groups went to languish or die.

Ask us now, and we’ll tell you – USQ, while still overburdened, is not the bottleneck problem. We’ve worked on improving our communication with the group, letting them know where the priorities lie within our group and within the Operations group, which ordinarily is pushing for document approvals.

Ironically, now it’s the Operations group that is the bottleneck. If it’s urgent to them to have a document approved, they can turn things around rather quickly. If, however, a document we’d like to finish doesn’t excite their interests, it languishes, even though their input is required. Part of the problem here lies with a shift in management focus that has made the operations group much busier than they were in the past, so they have less time for document reviews. Naturally, they let slip what isn’t critically important to them.

Managing yourself: It’s interesting that Lips mentions this almost in passing. She’s shown throughout this chapter that her idea of publications management is a complex thing, with lots of items and variable to juggle, and in this section only mentions that we will want to find a way of tracking all this, “depending on [our] style.” I’d like to see some examples. She mentions calendars, wall charts, excel, a source mentions a FTP site, yes. But how? Because I’ve tried calendars, wall charts, Excel, FTP sites and other management items, from Basecamp to notes scrawled on paper, and I’ve yet to find something that everyone can agree on – because this isn’t something a good project manager is going to keep to himself or herself. Everyone involved ought to be able to see, at a glance, how things overall are working.

For example, I like that Lips emphasizes that the designer should be able to read the copy in order to understand what message to bring across in the design. Conversely, I think it’s important for the writer to be cognizant of what’s going on in design in order to help out with things like bulleted lists, pull quotes, and any other textual information that might translate better as an emphasized design element, rather than as mere copy.

Building the Team: I used to think that an individual’s talent should come first when it comes to deciding whether or not you want to work with them. Experiences – both happy and sad – over the past few years have proved to me that talent is No. 2, right after a good answer to the question “Can you work and play well with others?” This ability comes in degrees. I’ve noticed that the most friction comes from people who insist that it’s their way or the highway. Some people, like me, are able to moderate that feeling, by sticking to our guns on the things we regard as critical, but never ruling out compromise when it’s obvious that compromise is the only way to move forward. Others don’t have that moderating influence, and that leads to trouble in a hurry. Uncharted, for example, has lost two volunteers over the past few years, partly due to uncompromising natures, both in those who left and in those who have remained.

We’ve noted it’s important to be aware of any conflicts that may arise and to have a plan in place to nip those conflicts as quickly as possible. That process is core to Lips’ book: An emphasis on constant and clear communication, in forms that satisfy the varying preferences of individual team members. (For example, I would much rather exchange e-mails or IM than chat on the phone, because being on the phone limits my ability to multitask.) Others, however, prefer phone calls to other forms of communication. Again, the best team members are those who are willing to work past their own limitations and inhibitions to play with the team vibe. Those who can’t adapt are most likely those who will have conflicts.

“A lot of creative talents have strong egos and might exercise them more than most,” Lips says (p. 99-100) It can be difficult for anyone to hear criticism or handle rejection or work he’s created.” Though she writes this about writers, this certainly applies for any creative person you’ll want to include on your team. I find my ego rising and my inability to hear criticism rise when Uncharted’s copy editor is commenting on my copy – and Uncharted’s copy editor is my wife, herself no slouch as a writer, but infinitely more patient and open to constructive criticism than her hot-head husband. Thankfully, I’m learning to moderate my reactions. It’s one thing to get the copy editor mad at you. But when it’s your wife, that’s much more serious.

Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?

I read a review of the Adobe Dreamweaver software and came to this passage:

“The fun of producing a simple website in Dreamweaver is gone. The upgrades have not made it easier, they have made it much more demanding, and the never particularly good online help has become even worse. On the other hand, it is much more powerful. In effect, it has moved from an application most people can use to an application designed strictly for professionals.”

At first, I felt pretty sorry for myself as a technical communicator. As I have mentioned, I have limited experience in HTML, and my experiences with XML, CSS and other such alphabet soup boils down to tinkering I did on the web nearly 12 years ago to frustrating WYSIWYG editors to Dave’s class last semester, in which we learned to read the signposts but not converse fluently in the language. It’s not fair, I whined, that technology is changing things in my field so rapidly, leaving me behind even as I try to keep up with it all. As far as HTML, XML and CSS go, I’m still firmly in the “most people” category, and far from the “strictly for professionals” wing of the party.

So, how will this impact me? I’ve got to keep learning. Learning to tag in these languages is an important thing. Learning to work with people who know how to tag, in order to ensure that quality writing – my specialty – comes through in whatever form the future demands is more important.

Oddly enough, I’m taking some inspiration from a biography of Walt Disney by Leonard Mosley. In his book, Mosely details how, in 1933, Disney announced to his animators that many of the shortcuts thy relied on to produce their cartoons were going to be outlawed, and that teams of new animators were going to be brought in to the studio to learn techniques that would make Disney’s characters less rubber-limbed and jerky, turning them into characters viewers could believe were real. “To an increasingly apprehensive audience,” Mosley writes, “Walt warned that much of the expertise they had acquired at the studios over the years was now unnecessary, out of date, and would have to be unlearned.” Many animators were afraid they were going to lose their jobs because they didn’t have the skills he was looking for. But some of them adapted. They attended classes Disney set up for the new animators. In those classes, Disney then challenged the way things had been done, demanding, for example, that the models his animators were sketching move about and, indeed, sometimes leave the room after going through a range of fluid movements, hoping his artists could reproduce the movements from memory – thus getting away from the static drawing that made his earlier cartoons jerky.

We’re not the first to have new challenges and new technology impact our jobs. Like some of Disney’s animators, we can learn this new stuff too. But we’ll have to be willing to consider that some of the old ways we’re used to doing things are outdated.

That being said, the question arose somewhere this week on what will happen to quality writing as it moves into this new paradigm. The answer to that is that for the good writers who learn to adapt, the quality writing will follow. Disney – nor many of his earlier animators – didn’t give up the ghost when the new edict came out. They carried their desire to create quality cartoons through the new techniques and ended up with quality cartoons built a different way.

I Should Have Written It Down

Ooh how I love to see things written down.

First of all, I have a rotten memory. Check that. I have a great memory, but that memory is kind of like the hard drive on my computer – filled with current affairs mixed with memories mixed with bits of songs and commercial jingles with some really important stuff buried deeply but with other, non-important stuff channeled into E-Z Recall circuits for review any time my brain decides it wants to, like the time I was sitting at church and had to sneeze and then had to find the wad of gum I shot out of my mouth when I sneezed and how I had the ENTIRE bench shaking with my muffled laughter as I tried to find the gum I sneezed out. My brain loves to revisit moments like this. I did find the gum, by the way.

But I like Lips’ suggestion of writing out proposals and progress reports. Because, for me, when I see something like this written down, I get reminders of the things I need to do, I remember what I’ve forgotten and, in reviewing the written records, I have sudden flashes of intuition on where I need to go next to make the project even better. Most of the stuff that’s written down is stored in my brain somewhere, but re-reading it from the printed page (or, indeed, the glowing screen) helps my muddled brain pull things together sequentially and enables me to visualize the bigger picture.

Seeing things written down also helps me figure out where I have holes in my memory and helps me come up with questions to ask – and people to ask – to fill those holes. Writing things down forces me to think things through clearly and to recognize where my thinking or knowledge may be lacking. If I rely on memory too much, I’m more liable to filter out the gaps and believe, erroneously, that I have a complete picture of what’s needed.

But it’s more than writing things down. We have to have things written down, but put together in a way that makes it easy for anyone to pick up what’s written and get a clear picture of what’s going on. For instance, the communications and marketing team at Uncharted is fabulous at writing things down. But, here’s a bit of writing here, a bit of writing there, and it’s hard for a dim bulb like me to figure out how these bits of information fit together in the company’s communications and marketing plan – of which, I’m told, we have one, but it hasn’t been updated with new information and nobody has the time to do it because they’re too busy communicating and marketing to fix the plan. I’m no expert at communicating or marketing, but it makes me a little uneasy to know that I’m not on the same page as this team because I haven’t seen their plan as a whole, I’ve only seen pieces of it. (Maybe I have seen the whole plan, cut into various pieces. But it’s my perception that I have not.)

On a related note – I’m helping the business team at Uncharted write the business plan – which has existed in a few scattered documents here and there, but mostly as a philosophy inside heads more than anything else. It’ll be interesting to see how we can pull all this together in a way that helps us all land on the same page, businesswise.

What’s ironic here is that a lot of the stuff I’ve read for web design, publishing, texts, et cetera, leans toward getting people away from written documentation. It’s almost like they’re trying to reproduce that scene from “Spaceballs,” in which Dark Helmet makes fun of his adjutant, Col. Sanders, for always saying things like “Prepare to leave!” “Why are you always preparing,” Dark Helmet asks. “Just go!” So once, Sanders just goes without preparing, and Dark Helmet falls on his butt because he wasn’t prepared. (I haven’t really described this adequately. I’ll try to find a YouTube video.) The logic behind avoiding written documentation to a point, I suppose, is sound – they don’t want projects to get bound down by documentation, or be forced to eliminate innovation because it doesn’t fit in with the written plan. But nobody says (OK, the anal retentives say) you have to stick with the plan. You want these kinds of proposals to be living documents, than can be thought out, altered, changed, or just referred to. The spiral programming model, advice given by 37 Signals (the group behind Ruby on Rails) all want to avoid massive amounts of written documentation. I think it’s a mistake – and a misnomer, because they still rely on the written word (on whiteboards, e-mails, and such) to track progress and to pose and answer questions. A written proposal, a written update, doesn’t have to be a novel. Some of the best proposals and updates I’ve seen have been five pages or less, with pictures. But it all gives everyone in the group something they can easily refer to to know where the project is at a given point. That’s invaluable.

Writing things down and sharing what’s written with others is critical in making sure everyone involved in a project knows where the project is headed and what needs to be done to meet project goals. I have a higher degree of confidence of finishing a project to the satisfaction of everyone involved if things are written out beforehand, and if updates are written out as well. That means for fewer surprises, better planning if things are delayed and the opportunity to ask questions.

A few more things I found pertinent from the Lips chapters this week:

Responsiveness: My job hinges on how responsive others are to the questions I have. When texts I’m working on are in the “critical path,” meaning that they have to be done for work to continue, responsiveness is great. On other texts where the sense of upper-management urgency is missing, responsiveness for some reviewers disappears almost completely. And that I understand – these reviewers are incredibly busy with their own work duties, and with answering questions from all sorts of other people. I find I have to tailor my requests for information based on my perception of how busy they are, and how involved they want to be in certain document reviews. With some, a short e-mail is sufficient, allowing for a few weeks for them to get to their computers. For others – and when urgency is increased – phone calls work. But they can’t be off the cuff phone calls. I prepare a script beforehand, so I can quickly summarize my questions and needs concerning the texts, so they know what they need to know in a minimum amount of time.

Client involvement: Some clients want to be heavily involved. Others want to be involved only when they absolutely have to. This means a tailored approach to updates and such. For those who want to be involved heavily, they get lots of status reports, office visits, phone calls, et cetera. For those who want minimal involvement, they get contacted when their discipline is in the critical path. They don’t want to be bombarded with excess information.