Social tools help improve business communications, increase collaboration and nurture innovation, but what do you do if people won't use them? And how do you grow from a pilot to company-wide use?
The Email Problem and How To Solve It
3 Sept 08
Email is becoming a problem, with people sending and receiving hundreds each day. 'No Email Days' don't help, nor do inbox size limits. So just how do you reduce email and improve people's relationship with their inbox?
Suw Charman-Anderson is a social software consultant and writer who specialises in the use of blogs and wikis behind the firewall. With a background in journalism, publishing and web design, Suw is now one of the UK's best known bloggers, frequently speaking at conferences and seminars.
She recently launched Kits and Mortar, a blog about planning a green, cat-friendly self-built home. Her personal blog is Chocolate and Vodka, and yes, she's married to Kevin.
Kevin Anderson has been an online journalist since 1996, designing, editing and writing websites for both broadcast and print media. In 1998, he joined the BBC and became their first online journalist based outside of the UK, covering the US for its award winning news website. After coming to the UK in 2005, he developed a blogging strategy for BBC news, helped launch a programme on the BBC's 5Live covering weblogs and podcasts and was on the team that launched the interactive radio programme World Have Your Say on the BBC World Service.
Kevin is now the Blogs Editor for The Guardian, where he is responsible for management, strategy and 'leading by doing' for Guardian Unlimited blogs.
Andy Dickinson has posted this thought-provoking illustration on his blog. To sum up the illustration: The community feels used. The audience feels ignored, but the journalist? "I got what I needed." Andy promises more thoughts soon, but the post alone is a great beginning for a conversation.
Maybe the problem isn't about creating citizen journalists but re-awakening the citizen in journalists? Steve Yelvington has often mused that possibly one the unintended consequences of the professionalisation of journalism is that we've become isolated from the communities that we serve. Put succinctly, he said:
Arrogance is the cancer of professional journalism, and we need to stop it.
A few years ago, colleagues asked me why bloggers responded to my interview requests when they had trouble getting a response. The problem was, they were often sending out form e-mail interview requests and treating bloggers, usually ordinary people, as if they were members of government or industry spokespeople. I usually started my search for a blogger through a blog search engine like Technorati. When I found a relevant post, I would quote the post and ask them if they wanted to join a discussion about the topic they had blogged about.
I also use Creative Commons licenced pictures in Guardian blog posts (Attribution licence that allows for commercial use). Unless, I'm really pressed for time, I send the Flickr user a short note and a link. They always thank me for being a good member of the community, and the sometimes even blog about the post. I've acted in good faith, and they have reciprocated by flagging up their photo on a Guardian post. We can be good members of both virtual and real world communities, and I think it's one of the things that can rebuild journalists' relationship with the people formerly known as the audience. Becoming better citizen journalists might just save professional journalism.
My diary for the autumn is chock full of conferences, many of which I would highly recommend to anyone interested. Here's where I'm going to be:
Fruitful Seminars - The Email Problem and How to Solve it Wed 3 Sept, London
Email is becoming a problem, with people sending and receiving hundreds each day. 'No Email Days' don't help, nor do inbox size limits. So just how do you reduce email and improve people's relationship with their inbox?
There are still places available for this seminar, so if you're interested please sign up now!
Fruitful Seminars - Making Social Tools Ubiquitous Wed 10 Sept, London
Social tools help improve business communications, increase collaboration and nurture innovation, but what do you do if people won't use them? And how do you grow from a pilot to company-wide use?
There are still places available for this seminar, so if you're interested please sign up now!
Going Solo Leeds Fri 12 Sept, Leeds
I shall be reprising the talk I gave at Going Solo Lausanne, When Passion Becomes Profession (Balancing Work and Life).
Enterprise 2.0 Forum Thurs 18 Sept, Cologne
A conference mainly in German, but I shall be keynoting in English:
Keynote: Potentiale und Herausforderung bei der Einführung von Social Software für die interne Kommunikation und Kollaboration, or Potentials and challenges of the introduction of social software in corporations for internal communications and collaboration enhancements.
Unicom, Web 2.0: Practical Applications for Business Benefit Wed 1 - Thurs 2 Oct, London
Conference hosted by Dave Gurteen about the business benefits of blogs, podcasts, wikis, online video and other collaborative technologies. I'll be presenting:
The Email Problem and How To Solve it
* Occupational spam, cc/CYA email and fractured conversations are causing email overload
* Constant interruption reduces people's ability to focus and attain a state of flow
* Attempts to reduce email usage via "No Email Days" are ineffective
* The email problem is psychological, not technical
* Social media can help reduce email by providing alternative ways to work, collaborate and communicate
Be2Camp Fri 10 Oct, London
An unconference bringing Web 2.0 tools and ideas to the built environment community. I will probably present on the psychology of email.
Electronic Laboratory Notebooks Wed 28 - Thurs 29 Jan, London
Examining electronic data gathering, storage and sharing using electronic lab notebooks. I'll be giving a presentation:
Collaboration and communication using social tools
* How to use social software to both organise your own information and to share it with others,
* Collaborate with team members and across teams/departments
* How to improve communication and reduce reliance on email
Kevin: Rick Burnes gives an excellent review of the Faneuil Media, what worked, what didn't and most importantly what they learned. Learn constantly. Cycle constantly. What's the business?
Kevin: Colin Mulvany, the new multimedia editor at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, gives a list of brilliant tips for shooting video. Lots of shot ideas for new shooters.
Kevin: via Martin Stabe Spiegel Online reports that Deutsche Telekom is set to introduce an e-paper device. The 'News4Me' device is to be tested in the autumn. Just one problem: It doesn't have a news content partner yet…
Kevin: The intentions of Copley Press and Advance Publications to explore the sale of two of their signature properties represents a discouraging new lack of confidence in the future of metro newspapers.
For some editors, it's a dream story. It includes a British computer hacker who took down US military computer networks, taunted the American military, threatened to "continue to disrupt at the highest levels" and alleged that the security "stand-down" before 11 September was no mistake. As if that wasn't enough, the hacker admitted to breaking into the systems, but only because he was looking for evidence of alien technology.
It's the kind of story that sounds too good to be true. Unfortunately, most of the coverage in the British media has played fast with the truth and have left many claims by the hacker, Gary McKinnon, and his legal team unchallenged.
McKinnon has spent years fighting extradition. He and his legal team claim that he will be sent to Guantanamo and that American officials have said that they want him to 'fry'. They said that US officials threatened him if he didn't plead guilty and accept a plea deal, a claim that US officials denied in affidavits. In actual fact, these claims were based an unrelated case in Canada in which a prosecutor said on Canadian television when asked to describe 'stringent conditions' a person might face if they didn't agree to a plea bargain responded: "You are going to be the boyfriend of a very bad man if you wait out your extradition". McKinnon's legal team never claimed that such threats were made to McKinnon, but the insinuation successfully upped the ante.
The story also feeds into popular upset in Britain over what is widely seen as an unfair extradition treaty with the United States. This is despite the extradition request being made in 2002 under a previous treaty and not the contentious Extradition Act of 2003. Under the 2003 treaty, to approve extradition, the judge must be satisfied that the request contains admissible evidence of the offence sufficient to establish a prima facie case against the person. This requirement does not apply in respect of extradition requests from the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. (emphasis added)
Public upset over the treaty reached a fever pitch in 2006 when the US succeeded in extraditing three bankers who were charged with fraud relating to the collapse of Enron. After initial hostile coverage towards the bankers, their legal and PR team crafted a strategy to focus on the treaty. Ex-Guardian journalist Nick Davies explained the PR stragegy:
Fleet Street must stop talking about the alleged guilt and extravagance of these three men and must focus instead on one single aspect of their case, the new Extradition Act under whose terms the three men now faced trial in Texas. The act had been rushed through Parliament in 2003 as an aide to the extradition of terrorist suspects and yet here it was being used against businessmen.
The PR firm pushed the angle that the three bankers would never receive a fair trial in Texas, and the coverage traded on stereotypes about American 'rough justice'.
Gary McKinnon's legal team have followed much the same route, now claiming that his civil rights would be violated by serving time in terrible American jails. After losing his appeal before the Law Lords, he told The Independent:
All the time you hear about the rapes and beatings. Just the other month I read an Amnesty International report about how prison guards were using their stuns guns too much. As someone accused of supposedly attacking their country, I can't imagine I'd be too welcome, either.
There is a popular view that Gary McKinnon should be tried in British courts as a British citizen. It's a similar argument made by conservatives in the US against extradition and international criminal bodies like the International Criminal Court. It is an argument that claims that extradition infringes on the sovereignty of a nation and imposes the law of one nation on another's citizens. McKinnon stated a not uncommon view of US-UK relations in The Independent interview:
"I'm very angry," he says. "I genuinely believe that we are the 51st State. You see it everywhere you go, not just our foreign policy, but in our schools, our hospitals and now our courts. The British Government simply bends over backwards for America."
I think a more compelling question raised by the case is whether a person accused of computer crimes should be charged where he or she was when the crime was committed or where the 'victim' of the crime was. That's a fair question in this virtual age in which a person can commit a crime half-way around the world with the click of a mouse.
Myths in the Media
I'm a bit surprised and disappointed that after falling for the PR campaign by the NatWest Three, that the British media would fall for the same approach by McKinnon, aka the Crouch End One.
Let's take this point by point.
Myth 1: McKinnon is going to be declared an enemy combatant and disappear into George W Bush's extra-judicial black hole, Guantanamo.
The Indy says: "Even worse, because Mr McKinnon's hacking adventures targeted military computers, America could chose to prosecute him as an 'enemy combatant' – the same status given to those left in legal limbo at Guantanamo Bay". ITV is even more sure of his fate: "But he could be sent to Guantanamo Bay as a terror suspect if the US succeeds in extradition proceedings."
Facts: He has been indicted in US federal court with seven counts of computer fraud and related activity. This is a civilian court. ZDNet.co.uk says that former FBI legal attaché Ed Gibson wrote a letter in April 2003 saying that the US retained the right to try McKinnon under US military law. UPDATE: A source close to the case has disputed claims by the defence team that the letter reserved the right of the United States to try McKinnon under military law. The issue of military trials would only have come up, the source says, in the context of clarifying that McKinnon would not be tried under military jurisdiction.
However, at the extradition hearing in 2006, US officials gave the judge assurances that this case would remain in civilian jurisdiction. The BBC reported:
Receiving this guarantee meant, (District) Judge (Nicholas) Evans said, that "any real - as opposed to fanciful - risk" of Mr McKinnon being sent to Guantanamo had receded.
Furthermore, the US Supreme Court has been chipping away at the legal framework that allows Guantanamo. As the judge said, the idea that Gary McKinnon might end up in Guantanamo is 'fanciful'. Yet, that angle still appears routinely in reporting here. British commentators keep repeating that he's no terrorist, but the US hasn't accused him of being one. They've only accused him of breaking into US military networks and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage. (For the curious, the damage estimates are calculated by multiplying the hourly rate of military staff by the number of hours it took them to repair the alleged damage.)
Myth 2: The US is angered at his resistance to extradition. The US military is embarrassed by the intrusion and 'want to make an example of him'. They will give him the maximum sentence, a 'life' sentence, condemning him to die in a US prison.
Facts: Gary McKinnon was offered a plea deal, standard practice in the American justice system. While British audiences might find such deals unseemly, they are common in the US. By offering a guilty plea, criminals also are often seen as taking the first step towards taking responsibility for their crime. They also save the costs of a trial, and as the Lord Brown noted:
No less importantly, it is accepted practice in this country for the parties to hold off-the-record discussions whereby the prosecutor will accept pleas of guilty to lesser charges (or on a lesser factual basis) in return for a defendant’s timely guilty plea.
On this basis it was likely that a sentence of 3-4 years (more precisely 37-46 months), probably at the shorter end of that bracket, would be passed and that after serving 6-12 months in the US, the appellant would be repatriated to complete his sentence in the UK. In this event his release date would be determined by reference to the UK’s remission rules namely, in the case of a sentence not exceeding four years, release at the discretion of the parole board after serving half the nominal sentence, release as of right at the two-thirds point. On that basis, he might serve a total of only some eighteen months to two years.
McKinnon told the BBC this week that the Americans would not put the plea deal in writing. He said that he initially agreed to the deal, but that US officials wouldn't guarantee it. In his words: "They said: 'No we can't put it in writing.' Only a fool would have gone across.'" (Listen to the 5Live interview.) He told Jon Ronson in the Guardian:
"They said, 'If you incur the cost of the whole extradition process, be a good boy, come over here, we'll give you three or four years, rather than the whole sentence.' I said, 'OK, give me that in writing.' They said, 'Oh no, we can't do that.' So they were offering a secret trial, no right of appeal on the outcome, no comment to the newspapers, and nothing in writing.
That's not true. The Lords said the deal was in a 'lengthy document'.
Supporters, including his mother, have said that in the UK he would face a lesser sanction, possibly nothing more than community service. This also isn't true. In the ruling denying his extradition appeal, Lord Brown said:
As the Divisional Court itself pointed out, the gravity of the offences alleged against the appellant should not be understated: The equivalent domestic offences include an offence under section 12 of the Aviation and Maritime Security Act 1990 for which the maximum sentence is life imprisonment.
McKinnon also said that he would gladly serve in a few years in a British jail but not '60 in an American prison'. He has consistently played on the idea that he would face 'disproportionate' punishment in the US, saying that he would spend the rest of his life in a maximum security prison where he might face reprisals from patriotic prisoners. Even if he was successfully extradited and convicted, the Associated Press, quoted one of the prosecutors who filed the original charges as saying:
A 60-year sentence is "extraordinarily unlikely," according to Scott Christie, who was the lead prosecutor in the case in New Jersey before going into private practice. ...
"His general exposure would be in the range of between three and five years," he said.
I have yet to see a British report includes that quote from the Associated Press. In US coverage, reporters often include the top figure for sentencing, but always put it in terms of a more realistic sentence considering the particulars of the case.
Myth 3: Unnamed American officials have said that they want McKinnon to 'fry'.
Facts: This is irrelevant. Even if an American official said this, he's not charged with a capital offence. He is in no risk of being executed, and again, it plays into popular upset about capital punishment in the US. This allegation is meaningless in this case.
Why am I so exercised by this?
I started with a general unease about the coverage of this case, but after a few days of digging, this unease has given way to upset. I've worked for British journalism organisations for 10 years. I've been cheered by the more critical coverage they have given of the US, coverage that comes from a distance that would be difficult for an American journalist covering his or her own country. But occasionally, I'm also disappointed when they get basic facts wrong because they are dealing with a different government or justice system that they don't always understand.
Living in London for three years, I am familiar with some of the tensions between the United States and Britain. There is legitimate upset over Guantanamo, especially the fact that British citizens have been locked up there. There is disgust in some circles about the continued practice of capital punishment. There was and still is legitimate upset about the Extradition Act of 2003. It was seen as forced through Parliament in the wake of the 11 September attacks and a capitulation to George Bush's War on Terror. I can understand all of this.
As is often said, journalists are entitled to their opinions, but not their own facts. The general coverage of this story has been appalling. It has been fed by legitimate issues that some Brits have with the United States, but it's now being used to feed anti-American sentiment. I'm more than happy to take my country to task for its failings, including when it abuses the 'special relationship' with Britain. I can understand British journalists who are sceptical of the American government, but the coverage of this story is factually inaccurate and antagonistic.
If only the shortcomings in coverage of the US were isolated to this. I become frustrated when journalism with an agenda relies on stereotypes and prejudice instead of solid reporting. I was shocked by domestic reporting in the US in the lead up to the war in Iraq that poked fun at European countries who would not support the war. I thought it was a particular failing of the American media. Unfortunately, I was saddened to discover that such sensationalist and derisory coverage is all too common in the British media in coverage of the US. It makes me feel decidedly unwelcome in my adopted home.
So here's the thing. Some businesses are getting quite into social media, having realised that these tools are really rather useful. But I think it's fair to say that social tools aren't a runaway success - I'm certainly not seeing any evidence of massive adoption from my vantage point. I'm not fighting off clients with a big stick, for example, and the people I do talk to have little budget and are frustrated because they're not getting the buy-in they would like.
I wonder why. There are all sorts of reason why, once the tools have been installed in a business, they fail to proliferate, and I've spoken about many of these before. But could there be a reason why businesses are slow to even evaluate social tools?
The week before Kevin and I got married, we rescued a lovely ginger cat who was lost on the main road outside our flat. We managed to reunite him with his owner a few days later and then went off to be married.
A couple of weeks ago, Orlando's owner, Monica, invited us round to dinner, and we had a lovely evening talking to her about her time programming Ferranti Pegasus valve computers at UCL. When she asked me what I do, I said I was a social media consultant and I explained what that was.
Monica thanked me for the explanation, saying that she was glad I had elaborated as she had thought, and I hope she forgives me for paraphrasing, that 'social software was something awful, like social workers'. That really made me think, and I haven't quite got to the end of where that throwaway comment has led me.
Is 'social' the problem with social software? Certainly in the UK, 'social' has some rather negative connotations: Social workers are often despised and derided as interfering, and often incompetent, busybodies. Social housing is where you put people at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap. Social sciences are the humanities trying to sound important by putting on sciency airs. Social climbers are people who know how to suck their way up the ladder. Social engineering is getting your way deviously, by using people's weaknesses against them. Social security is money you give people who can't be bother work for themselves. Socialism is an inherently flawed system that is prone to corruption. Social disease is venereal.
Whether or not you agree with all of those descriptions - and for the record, I don't - you have to admit that the word 'social' does have a bit of a bad rap. I wonder how much that influences people - in business and elsewhere - to dismiss 'social media', 'social networks' and 'social tools' before they have even found out what they are and what they're good for.
As I’ve mentioned before, National Public Radio’s (US) On the Media is part of my weekly podcast diet. It was an interesting look at three different views on internet comments on articles and radio programmes. Host Bob Garfield interviewed This American Life's Ira Glass, 'professional writer and critic' Lee Siegel and Roanoke Times editor Carole Tarrant. It spawned a round of very interesting blog posts and comments - Comments on comments on comments, as Jeff Jarvis put it. It soon spilled out onto Twitter from with an interesting discussion between Jay Rosen and Kevin Marks.
But I’ve argued that we’re looking at commenting the wrong way. We spend so much of our time playing wack-a-mole with the dirty little creatures who dig up the garden that we miss the fruits and flowers. It is far more productive to curate the good people and good comments — whether they occur under an article or, better yet, via links — than it is to obsessively try to clean up life, which can’t help but be messy.
The tsk-tskers treat the web as if it is a media property and they judge it by its worst: Look what that nasty web is doing to our civilization! But, of course, that’s as silly as judging publishing by the worst of what is published.
And I have to agree with Jeff that it’s a bit rich for Gawker to be arguing against comments on newspaper sites. On the Media linked to the post, and Gawker sounds like many in the newspaper industry who pine for a simpler time when newspapers enjoyed a near monopoly when it came to people’s time and attention. Channeling their inner newspaper nostalgist, Gawker says:
Newspapers have more important things to do than worry about comments—like, say, report the stories that blogs so desperately need in their 24-7 quest for content! After all, blogs are often not equipped to regularly break the news, and we need content to chew on.
Of course, comments are OK on Gawker because they're a blog, they argue. Might the mighty Gawker be a suffering a crisis in ComScore with all the competition?
Of the three points of view, I almost said Amen out loud as I travelled on the Tube when Roanoke Times editor Carole Tarrant said, that she was surprised that newspaper are still having this conversation.
It's not the Wild West. I don't believe in putting comments on every story. ... I thought we had this (conversation) in 2002, and papers are getting in this conversation and acting surprised that there is this ugliness out there.
She then goes on and lays out a considered approach to comments and communities online. After the Virginia Tech shooting, they originally put up their standard message board. They took it down when it devolved into a loud discussion about gun rights and replaced it with a tribute site from Legacy.com (in the interest of disclosure, a good friend of mine works for Legacy), a site that powers the obituaries of several newspaper sites. The message boards are moderated by Legacy.com, and she said that the tribute site is still active.
Derek Powazek also wrote an excellent post criticising the On the Media segment. The main problem he saw with the piece was that Bob Garfield "lumps all commenters, and commenting systems, together. On the web, not all comments are created equal". He says:
Yes, if you open your site to comments from people who do not have to register or create an account, you’ll get a lot of unfiltered craziness. That’s because you’re not doing your job as a host. Imagine a newspaper of infinite pages with no editors where anyone with a keyboard could contribute. Sounds fun to me, but not a recipe for consistent thoughtfulness. ...
The story completely missed moderation queues, reputation management systems, or any of the hundreds of comment systems built over the last decade to address this very problem.
I'm with Derek. The media never focus on positive communities online, but it's not just the media's coverage of online communities that needs to improve. Most online communities hosted by media companies could use some improvement, but as Derek points out, there are tools and a lot of experience out there. Unfortunately, most of it is either outside of media organisations or was lost when digital departments at news organisations were gutted after the dot.com crash.
Some of the solution to improving online communities and conversations on websites is using the best technology, but there are also content and culture issues to be aware of. Kevin Marks shares wisdom and lessons learned about online spaces. For people who are part of internet culture, some of this is well known, but it's not common knowledge in media companies. (I'm fortunate to work with one of the best in the business, Meg Pickard, our head of communities at the Guardian.) Kevin highlights some great work done in terms of online communities and some common traits of those communities that don't work:
The communities that fail, whether dying out from apathy or being overwhelmed by noise, are the ones that don't have someone there cherishing the conversation, setting the tone, creating a space to speak, and rapidly segregating those intent on damage.
News websites were never a 'build it and they will come' proposition, especially in today's distributed world, and in the rush to build communities so that they will come, news oganisations are building the spaces but sometimes not preparing for when people come. Get enough people together online or offline, and not all of the experience will be positive or pleasant. The response shouldn't be to shut down the community and bar the door.
News organisations need to look outside of their immediate area of experience and find communities that have worked and learn from them. This isn't an area of blue-sky experimentation. There is a lot of experience and expertise out there. With a lot of this, news orgs will just have to look beyond other news orgs. There's a big world out there on the internet, but it's not always scary.
UPDATE: As Jay Rosen says via Twiter: "Jeff Jarvis tells Bob Garfield to join the conversation, and points out how many people online did the homework he didn't." Jeff highlights not only posts but excellent contributions from Doc Searls and Tish Grier in his comments. There is a lot of history to be learned from, and news organisations don't need to re-invent the wheel or feel that they are starting from scratch.
In defence of news orgs, I not only believe but have said publicly, that when the media adds community features, they need to be ready to manage that community from day one because they already are dealing with large amounts of traffic. They often run into teething problems that most communities don't reach until much later.
Paul Bradshaw invited me on Twitter to answer this question on Seesmic recently, and Paul reported on the responses on his blog. He asked the question in light of a punishing wave of redundancies, many in US newspapers, and hiring freezes and programme cuts in the UK. The blog Papercuts lists 6358 job cuts in US newspapers already in 2008.
Here's the full conversation:
One of my comments:
So many journalists think ‘If I’m a good writer, that’s all I need’. That’s bullshit. There is an arrogance among journalists about the craft of writing. Journalism students will need more than the ability to craft a good sentence.
not only caught Paul's attention, but also "twenty-something regional newspaper journalist" Joanna Geary (what's your new shiny title Joanna?) and my colleague Roy Greenslade. I'm not entirely sure why that hit such a nerve. (The particular comment is in a separate video on YouTube.)
One comment that caught my eye was that of David Cohn:
Partly because news organisations have a culture similar to the military, there’s a chain of command and no leeway to make your own decisions. Journalism schools are equally structured.
That's interesting, and I think it's one of the cultural conflicts that I'm seeing as news organisations integrate their digital departments. For my first online journalism job in 1996, I was an army of one. The news director admitted she could manage everyone's time in the newsroom down to the second except me. My next jobs at Advance Internet (MLive.com) and the BBC, I was either part of a small team or working in a foreign bureau, far from the command centre. It's a challenge as we move from these flat, often extremely collaborative, environments to these military environments with a lot hierarchy and rank. In some ways, it's a sign of the success of the digital departments that they are being brought into the core of the business, but hopefully, the departments can be integrated without losing the collaborative spirit.
I've found that the only way to defeat the resistance and win over the skeptics is to keep at them and continuing to engage them. Can it be frustrating as hell? Yes! Does it always work? Of course not! But it works more often than if you just give up. Treating skeptics as your enemies will in fact turn them into enemies.
I'll admit it. I first bristled a bit at John's comment, but as I recommend to other journalists, I never respond to a comment in anger. I bristled because as I said in response:
If there was a moment where I stopped short reading your post, it was because I felt it was a call for digital staff to keep putting out more effort to engage than sceptics. Yes, it's still the reality we live in, but it's not a fair or realistic expectation for digital staff to be more magnanimous, especially when we're often in the weaker political position in our organisations.
And I drew a distinction between sceptics and obstructionists, saying: "I don't even see this as sceptics versus digital natives conflict. Journalists are all to some extent paid sceptics. I see this as a problem with obstructionists."
I'm glad I waited to respond until after we had exchanged a few e-mails, and I had a chance to understand where John was coming from. He responded with some really good advice on how to win over the sceptics and not only achieve short term goals but encourage cultural change. It's a great comment, well worth reading in full. He gives a specific example of project he worked on and the lessons he learned:
Become intimately familiar with the processes that you are trying to change before changing them.
Be sure to get input from the people who will be most affected by the changes you're considering.
Do your homework on your plan. The more detailed, the better. Vague pronouncements tend to draw more skepticism for being impractical. Play the role of the skeptic and assault your plan for all its shortcomings so you can anticipate some of the criticism and devise solutions/responses.
As much as possible, pitch your plan from the perspective of how it will benefit the people who will have to change their routines to make it work. The biggest motivation anyone has for changing their routine is how it will help him/herself (aside from the "do this or your job is in jeopardy" thing, which is a threat, not a benefit). Your plan's main goal may not be to benefit those people, but as long as it gets their support, who cares?!
Be willing to make some compromises as long as they don't jeopardize the major goals of what your plan is trying to do.
Thanks John for sharing some really good advice.
I think one of my biggest challenges in the last few years has been shifting from a journalist with licence and autonomy to innovate to being an editor with management responsibilities. I'm going to keep these tips handy.
I thought I had shown this video to Suw. The link is probably in her inbox, but she hadn't seen it. And I hadn't watched it the whole way through. But when I saw the story that Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch had died from cancer, we sat down and watched it together. What a loss in so many ways, but his 'Last Lecture' is such a gift from a talented and dedicated teacher, husband and father. It's an hour and 16 minutes long, but it's worth every minute.
I took two things away from the video. One, I'm even more dedicated to enjoy every minute that I have with friends, family and with Suw. Condolences to Randy's wife, children, friends and colleagues.
Two, Randy said several times that brick walls give you the opportunity to show how much you want something. Sometimes in my work as a journalist, I feel frustrated as I push against brick walls. The simple equation for calculating work is:
Work = force x distance
Sometimes, when you're pushing against the brick walls, the equation looks like this:
Frustration = force x resistance
And sometimes it seems that frustration reaches an infinite level because the resistance increases in direct proportion to the amount of force applied. But throughout Randy's talk, he kept coming back to the 'head fake', the Jedi mind to help you achieve your goals. For example, his team has worked on a programme called Alice that will 'trick' students into learning computer programming. They will learn programming through telling a story. I am hoping to download it myself, and Suw is planning on showing it to our niece. It sounds like a truly great professional legacy that he is leaving.
Thanks Randy for reminding me to focus on my dreams and dedication and not the obstacles. I'm taking stock of my dreams and thinking new 'head fakes' for the dreams that I am working on now. Bis vivit qui bene vivit
Kevin: Mark Glaser has a lengthy and incredibly useful interview with Vickey Williams from the Media Management Center at Northwestern University. Increbily useful information on cultural challenges in news organisations.
Kevin: Kristine Lowe, Journalism.co.uk’s blogger on online journalism in Scandinavia, discovers how Norwegian newspaper group A-Pressen is finding success with its social network.
In the recent round of virtual mud-slinging in the 'curmudgeons' versus digital journalists, one of the arguments by way of assertion is that hyper-local doesn't work. It is, of course, a reductionist argument, lumping together a wide range of strategies. A lot of the assertions are short on facts, but Vickey Williams at the Readership Institute highlights two dailies that are succeeding in creating local community. From the Bakersfield Californian:
My thought is that it's because this paper lives up to its role as an essential connector and network builder. Some stats from Molen this week: 1,192 individual Bakersfield.com blogs launched since the newspaper's site began hosting weblogs two years ago this month; 314 updated within the last three months. Add in the newspaper company's nine other sites (including MasBakersfield, NorthwestVoice, NewToBakersfield; and their newest, RaisingBakersfield.com) and the number goes to 2,780 blogs launched, of which 655 have been updated in the last three months.
That community content represents about 18 percent of Bakersfield.com's traffic and 25 percent of total traffic throughout the local network of sites, Molen said. "It is easily the fastest growing source of traffic for us."
Another interesting metric is the number of people who have created public profiles in the company's online social network, and in doing so, essentially endorse its brands. For Bakersfield.com, the number is 16,792; across all 10, it's 31,868.
I would be curious to see their frequency numbers. What is the average frequency of their visitors? Is it better than the average visit of two pageviews per visitor per month?
Kevin: Details and discussion on the cancellation of NPR’s social media experiment, the Bryant Park Project (BPP). NPR struggling with it’s own organisation is hardly unique, but it faces some unique challenges.
Kevin: NPR’s CEO responds to the cancellation fo the Bryant Park Project. He says that it would take support from 25,000 people. That doesn’t seem like a lot of people to me.
Paul deals with distracting nature of the net by having two computers - one for ‘work’ and one for ‘online activities’ such as email and surfing. Question is, what do you do if your work resides online, in the cloud?
I have followed the trajectory of (US) National Public Radio's Bryant Park Project because they were experimenting with so many social media tools and ideas, and more than that, they seemed to have grokked the 'social' in social media. Their Twitter feed wasn't just an automated bland, bloodless promo for the programme but rather a way that the staff showed their humanity and personality as well as worked to engage people with the subjects on the programme. Just look at one of their latest Tweets:
For those of you not familiar with the Bryant Park Project, I'd direct you to Robert Paterson's post on BPP and their use of Twitter. I use Robert's phrase 'wrapping content in a community' as the title of a presentation that I give on social media and journalism. (Looking through Robert's recent posts, he and I are eerily on the same wavelength in asking why public media isn't being successful in innovating. Like many media organisations now, the cultural and political conflict is increasing as organisations shift from considering change strategies to, in some cases, fighting for survival.)
I'll give credit to NPR's interim CEO, Dennis Haarsager, for going to the BPP blog to address some issues and share some of the lessons of the project.
We've/I've learned -- or relearned -- a lot in this process. For non-commercial media such as NPR, sustaining a new program of this financial magnitude requires attracting users from each of the platforms we can access. Ultimately, we recognized that wasn't happening with BPP. Radio carriage didn't materialize to any degree: right now, BPP airs on only five analog radio stations and 19 HD Radio digital channels. Web/podcasting usage was also hampered -- here's the relearning part -- since we were offering an "appointment program" in a medium that doesn't excel in that kind of usage.
I would love to be a fly on the wall and know why NPR stations didn't pick up the programme, but I probably know why. I worked on World Have Your Say at the BBC, and NPR stations were resistant to that programme because they felt it to be too 'talk radio' even though we dealt with substantive international issues. However, the programme dealt with them from the point of view of people and not necessarily pundits and politicians. BPP was trying to attract younger listeners to public radio, but unfortunately, that might have been its undoing. Some NPR stations in the US can make the BBC's Radio 4 look like Radio 1.
For all those saying NPR should have raised money directly for BPP, there’s a political mess you’re not aware of here.
If NPR openly attempted to raise money for any program, with large or small station carriage, the nationwide collection of stations would revolt. And please note the Board of NPR is majority-controlled by stations.
In short, it would never be attempted and would certainly be killed if it were.
There are indeed structural and cultural problems within NPR that make a project like BPP fail and put all forms of new media engagements at risk. But never forget that many of NPR’s most anti-new media anti-innovation qualities are inherited from the codependent relationship with the stations. In a sense, it’s no one’s fault, yet it’s everyone’s fault. And that’s the center of the problem.
But I don't want to focus on the specific organisational issues that NPR is struggling with. The comments on Haarsager's post provide some of the clearest explanation of the power of social media. The producers and presenters of BPP tried to foster a community and develop a real sense of relationship with their listeners. I think they succeeded beyond anyone's expectations. I can't link to individual comments or I would. Here is a sample:
Sent by Matthew Trisler, Radio-Sweethearts.com | 3:54 PM ET | 07-22-2008
It's been said already on Twitter today, but the thing about BPP that Haarsager misses is that it never served as a "portal," but as an organic center for community involvement.
Sent by Carlo | 4:49 PM ET | 07-22-2008
People don't want an API. They don't want "tailored content delivery" or their "attention tracked."
Those are buzz words.
It seems to me, somehow, your outlook on the BPP was more about the neat, shiny technology than anything else.
More focused on the "networks" than the "social."
And that's too bad.
Sent by Matthew C. Scallon @mattsteady | 5:11 PM ET | 07-22-2008
As a reverted NPR listener, a listener who came back to NPR because of the BPP, I understand that the average NPR listener treats their show as a member of the family. Believe or not, the BPP community has an even greater attachment than that, not just to the show but to each other. This isn't simply a show; it's a community. Staff and listeners exchange with one another, sometimes on news items and sometimes on more personal stuff. There are many examples of personal and intelligent exchanges between staff and listeners, examples that, if you take some time to look at on the blog, you will find have a depth of affection not found in anything else NPR produces on-line. This is not to disparage those other shows but to show how special the BPP is as a community.
The show looks like it was reaching outside of its youthful target market. Sent by John Riley | 5:48 PM ET | 07-22-2008
I am 74 and live alone. Local NPR stations are mostly music. I get on the net and listen to NPR talk. I just found BPP and enjoyed it very much, intelagent but not stiff. It gave me many smiles and was topical. I wish I could have been saved. The idea of internet show funding should be explored. The net lets me listen any time I wish. The way of the future.
Sent by ronbailey | 8:48 PM ET | 07-22-2008
That's the sorriest dose of pablum I've ever had the misfortune of reading. If you say the audience isn't there for an "appointment program" on the web, then why not focus on formats that allow listeners to time shift the content? Most days I listened to BPP via the podcast around noon Eastern time.
Good riddance, NPR. You guys have screwed the pooch, and you've lost me as a listener and a contributer, and more importantly as a supporter via my blogs, podcasts, Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed.
That's just a teaser from a few hundred of the comments, but I think these listeners have said more about what social media means than most explanations I've heard. BPP was successful in using social media tools, a blog, a podcast and Twitter to connect with their audience.
BPP was not going to replace the venerable Morning Edition programme, which as one of the commenters said has been on air for more than 30-years and has some 30m listeners. That is the wrong metric for success, and frankly, that seems to be the problem. They tried to create a programme that would attract new audiences, but to succeed, it would have to displace one of its longest-running and most successful programmes in 9 months. I would never sign onto a project so designed to fail. And now I fear that obstructionists will use the programme as an example of the failure of social media and the internet. From the the comments, I think BPP succeeded as an experiment in social media. Too bad from a strategic standpoint and in terms of NPR's own structure, it had little chance to succeed as a traditional radio programme.
My article about social networking, It's not just Facebook, has been published in this month's CIO Magazine.
In it, I talk to Alastair MacKenzie and Brendan Tutt from IBM about how they transformed their internal phone directory into something much more useful and interesting using tags. John Meakin from Standard Chartered Bank tells me about how his company is using the Facebook app WorkBook to create an internal social network. Kevin Marks from Google discusses how he keeps track of the people he meets and talks to as the Developer Advocate for OpenSocial. I also hear from a woman - who asked to remain anonymous - who had a less than pleasant experience when her colleagues, and her bosses, flocked to Facebook.
All in all, it's 2000 words of social networky goodness that you should seek out at the earliest possible opportunity! (Before you ask, it's not available on the CIO Mag site, but I'll look into putting it up here in due course.)
Kevin: A Pew study of US newspapers released today finds that national and international news coverage is declining as ad revenue plummets an emphasis shifts toward local stories. While …
Kevin: The New York Times will deliver business news to LinkedIn users based on the verticals they are interested in. Paul Bradshaw sees this as another step torwards personalised news.
Kevin: Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is racing to transform the embattled New York Times for the digital age. Is he up to the job? Source: Columbia Journalism Review
Kevin: “Despite an image of decline, more people today in more places read the content produced in the newsrooms of American daily newspapers than at any time in years. But revenues are tumbling.”
The discussion on how to save newspapers - or I would say newspaper-style reporting regardless of the platform - is getting bogged down in mutual recriminations and some good old-fashioned name-calling. Journalists are blaming management, saying that 'they' didn't change quickly enough as if journalists bear no responsibility in the slow pace of change in the industry. 'Curmudgeons' and 'dinosaurs' are fighting with 'young journalists', digital enthusiasts and digital pioneers.
I agree with John Zhu that "stereotypes, labels, and close-mindedness" don't produce a constructive debate. We know that we need get past this and get to work building a multi-platform business that will support quality journalism. However, I started hearing John's argument in various forms about a year ago which run along the lines that digital pioneers can be as close-minded as the 'curmudgeons' that they rail against. A journalism professor put it to me that digital pioneers had been part of a start-up culture and now were resisting integration as much as the 'curmudgeons' were resisting a digital future.
I think something more complicated is going on, and I feel a false sense of objectivity and balance in John's post. I think it obscures the political conflict taking place in newspapers as they struggle towards integration. As Steve Yelvington said to me last year, the people with the most digital experience have the least political capital in their organisations. As I've argued, real integration can't be about traditional editors just folding digital divisions into their empires. That's not to say that digital editors should be atop the org chart either. Multiple-platform journalism requires a different editorial organisation, and that is bound to create political conflict. Some of the conflict spilling out onto journalism blogs reflects these wrenching changes that news organisations are going through. You can see it in the recent 'axing' of three digital executives at the San-Diego Union Tribune.
Also, although John spends more time and slightly more emphasis on comments directed towards 'curmudgeons', I would say that the abuse that he saw hurled toward Jessica da Silva by veteran journalists isn't isolated to comments on blogs. The commenter Robert Knilands (aka Wenalway) may seem your run-of-the-mill troll, but he expresses a virulent form of prejudice too frequently directed towards online and young journalists by some - and I stress, only some - print journalists. Robert Knilands says:
It can’t survive, though, as long as young journos are getting opportunities they are unqualified for and posting ignorant blog entries. All that does is destroy the present and the future.
We're not going to get anywhere by eating our young. But seriously, I've heard this myself through the years in various forms implicit and explicit. I recently had a senior figure in British journalism ask me whether I was a production person or a 'techie' as if I couldn't be both technically proficient and a competent journalist. If the 'dinosaur' label is used in anger, it has a context and a history. Sometimes it is used in the form of return of fire, not just a snipe coming out of nowhere.
Having said that, I agree with John. Name-calling only delays achieving the change that we need to prevent more newspapers from failing.
My best work has come in collaboration with print, radio and television journalists, and we collaborated well because we approached the work from a position of mutual respect. Let's bury the hatchet and move on to the future together.
Suw: An old but interesting post from Clay Shirky about how businesses create processes in a hyper-risk-averse manner, trying to stamp out any opportunity for mistakes and instead replacing mistakes with organisational process arthritis.
Kevin: Pulitzer prize-winning journalist John McQuaid says: “But there aren’t many true innovators out there yet in positions of authority, and those who are are struggling against an archaic institutional architecture that remains despite all the layof
Kevin: This is a BusinessWeek story from 1998 chronicling the death of the New Century Network, an online newspaper coalition that never coalesced. It’s a good lesson on what not to do. Well, they didn’t do much.
In the daily flood of links that stream by me via RSS or Twitter, I noticed a post by Mark Schaver, the computer-assisted reporting director of the Louisville Kentucky Courier-Journal, in which he challenged the view of newspaper executives as short-sighted and out-of-touch. He pointed to a couple of projects in the US, Videotex and Knight-Ridder’s early investment in Netscape (then Mosaic). Mark said that calling news execs short-sighted and lacking in vision is overly simplistic.
However, Videotex is a fine example of a disastrous technical project driven by the newspaper industry. The system was too slow, cost too much and didn't provide anything that couldn't be found easier in some other form. As often happens in the US, the FCC failed (or refused) to set a standard, hoping that the market would sort it out, and NTSC - the North American television standard - on which some of these projects were run provided too low of resolution to read text on televisions unlike the Ceefax system on the higher resolution PAL video standard in the UK. Maybe it was ahead of its time, and it’s definitely before my time. But I’ve never heard anyone in the industry hold up Videotex as an example of how to do a technical project.
Knight-Ridder was forward looking. They grasped a lot of the innovations early, partially because of their presence in San Jose. They even moved their headquarters from Miami to San Jose to plug into the new media revolution. In 1990, Robert Ingle, executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News wrote a memo that sounds eerily similar to the strategy that most newspapers are following now:
Give information to readers however they wanted it, integrate the print and online operations, and dream up new forms of advertising.
Knight-Ridder were part of the New Century Network, which was supposed to position the newspaper industry for the 21st Century. But there is a but. As BussinessWeek reported of the Network on its closure in 1998:
In a ballroom at the Newspaper Association of America convention in Chicago, a thousand bottles of champagne emblazoned with ”New Century Network: The Collective Intelligence of America’s Newspapers” awaited the hordes expected to come to toast the watershed new-media joint venture. When fewer than 100 people showed up, Chief Executive Lee de Boer made an abbreviated speech before retreating. ”They built a business and nobody came,” says David Morgan, president of the online ad agency Real Media Inc.
The reception was the first public humiliation for New Century Network, but only one in a series of blunders that culminated in the company’s abrupt shutdown on Mar. 10 (1998). Created in 1995 to unite newspapers against Microsoft Corp. and other competitors girding to woo electronically advertisers and readers, New Century Network came to embody everything that could go wrong when old-line newspapers converge with new media.
The real irony of this situation is that for 15 years KRI was, by far, the most innovative newspaper company in the country, including its early experiments in teletext and having the first online newspaper (the Mercury News on AOL in the mid 90s).
But as Matt says in the title of his post, sometimes innovation is not enough. Newspapers continued to be newspapers, just online, as he and most of us have said over the last decade. It is proving for some newspapers a fatal mistake, although one that many of us saw years ago. And I’d agree with Matt that it’s easier to imagine a new entrant making the changes necessary to survive in this new world rather than an established newspaper.
As my friend and former colleague Alf Hermida points out from Readership Institute data, people do not have the same connection with their local newspaper websites that they do (or possibly did) with their local newspapers.
Obviously, something isn’t quite working when it comes to newspapers, ‘new’ media' and innovation. As Mark Schaver is correct to point out, this is probably not for lack of trying at some newspapers. I know that a lot of journalists are exhausted and frustrated by reorganisations, restructurings and new strategies. I ask the following question not pretending that I have all of the answers but because I'd really like to hear people's experience: What has prevented newspapers from being successful in the digital age?
Two years ago, Steve Yelvington wrote a post after hearing someone refer to "NCN nostalgia", NCN being New Century Network. He said a few things that might speak to my question:
"But there was something else at work: technology was evolving faster than anyone's business vision."
"The notion that a we-tell-you news cartel would be relevant in a conversational universe may already be obsolete."
The newspaper industry hasn't adapted to the pace of news online or the pace of technological change. More than that, I think Steve is right that business vision hasn't kept pace with technology. In the wake of the newspapers 'are worth fighting for' discussion kicked off by Jessica DaSilva, Pulitzer winner John McQuaid said:
Meanwhile, the default attitude of newspaper management is still caution and probity. And if you point a gun to the head of caution and probity and say “innovate or die,” don’t expect wonderful things to happen. Instead, expect buzzwords.
Newspapers have only recently woken up that the real competitive threat isn't from other newspapers or print media, not even from TV but from new digital businesses that might not have even existed a few years ago. Even though Robert Ingle and others saw the competitive threat 18 years ago, there has not been a sense of urgency until the last 18 to 24 months.
However, unlike John McQuaid, I would argue the over-cautious nature of journalism change is not just about boardroom conservatism. Print newsrooms are some of the most conservative places you'll find. Journalists are paid sceptics (some might say cynics), and they approach their own business with that mix of scepticism and cynicism.
Some things have changed since Robert Ingle wrote his prescient memo on his Apple ][ in 1990. In the 1990s, tech was expensive, and I heard a lot of journalists argue that the internet was a money sink not a money maker. There was some truth to that, but very few disruptive technologies have a clear business model at the beginning. Did Google have a magical money-spinning idea with search? No, not until AdSense. But now, smart technology buys and clever use of open-source technologies can bring the cost of failure down to almost the petty cash level. Just look under the hood of Google's massive data centres and you'll find lots of commodity hardware lashed together with a lot of open-source technologies.
The newspaper industry also still seems to be thinking in industrial terms. Too many of the strategies I see are huge, heavy, expensive strategies instead of light-weight, nimble and low cost digital strategies. By the time the strategies are in place, the state of the art and, more importantly, audiences have already moved on. More importantly, you can attack the business model problem from two fronts. You can find new ways to make money, but you can also find new ways to make high-quality, compelling content with less money and not just with less staff.
Things are changing. A few newspaper companies are making the investments in flexible, scalable technology to prepare them for the future. They are getting serious about developing new income streams. They are freeing their content and taking it to where the audience is instead of forcing the audience to come to destination sites. But for some newspapers, it's too late.
What would you do and what are you doing to ramp up the pace of change at your company?
Kudos both to The Economist for one of the most creative corrections to a correction ever, and also to Stephen J. Dubner of the Freakonomics blog for his humour in accepting it. It is an excellent example of how bloggers should listen as well as publish.
Bill Densmore of the Media Giraffe Project dropped me a note about this.
What motivates people to launch a local online news community -- a "placeblog" and what are their challenges, their successes, the opportunities, vision and passion which accompany this work?
Kevin: The cover of a recent BusinessWeek about the runup in oil and gasoline prices framed the question of what’s causing it nicely: “Speculation or Manipulation?” But the story was maddeningly evenhanded.
Kevin: Mark Schaver rejects the view of luddite newspaper execs for the decline of the industry in the US. He points to several forward looking projects. But why did they fail?
Kevin: The World Association of Newspapers launches a rebuttal to the naysayers who say that print is dying. They are asserting the ‘power of the press’. Is this all about a loss of power?
Kevin: Journalist-intern Jessica da Silva weighs into the hyperlocal debate and comments on Rob Curley’s Loudon County Extra project at the Washington Post. Communication and integration at news orgs can definitely be improved.
