Loyalty over linkbait

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Broadcasting & Cable has some interesting quotes from Vivian Schiller, senior VP and chief digital officer, NBC News about why NBC broke up its joint relationship with Microsoft and moved away from its portal model to one of – according to B&C – “building a loyal following rather than blind page views.”

“What you get with a portal is a huge [influx] of traffic and you see a lot of unique visitors,” said Schiller during a keynote discussion with B&C programming editor Andrea Morabito as part ofB&C/Multichannel News’ Next TV summit on Thursday. “But the bounce rate is extremely high… It’s not really going to be your loyal, engaged audience.”

[SNIP]

“I think that how you measure success is changing,” she said. “It’s about finding your niche, finding your quality and tapping into what you can do best.”

Truth. Although how this squares with NBC’s decision to shutter Everyblock – as unique and niche a news site as there was with a loyal, engaged audience – is for others to answer.

In any case, unique content brings you loyalty. If your headlines or story structure are all about the quick-click you won’t stand out. If you can promise advertisers consistent traffic from a specific demographic or provide a type of content consistently to subscribers who want it, you can sell that. Traffic spikes and stories with empty calories that don’t speak to your core audience are not monetizable and a waste of your time.

Moreover, if you’re chasing the same stories as everyone else, that’s a mistake. As a news site, know your core subjects and develop your newsroom around them. You don’t have to weigh in on every little thing just because it’s “blowing up on social.” (For this week, we can call this the “Not-everyone-needs-to-cover-the-Check-Please!-host-search rule.) Frequent deviation from your core subjects will confuse your audience and dilute your site’s value. Know what you do and do it well and leave the rest to others who can’t.

The above developed from some things I posted to Twitter yesterday. Thanks to Benji Feldheim and Ernest Wilkins for their thoughts on it.

Today in “Questionable Use of Newsroom Resources in 2013”

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You’re The Washington Post. In the past year you’ve made headlines on all the news/media blogs about an incident where a young blogger you employed passed along an inflammatory rumor as fact in one post, which damaged your reputation for truth and reporting, and poorly attributed information in another, which led to cries of plagiarism. You end up firing her. In the post-mortem, there’s a lot of talk about the value of grindhouse blogging and how it contributes to errors like this. There’s also speculation as to whether the Washington Post can adequately support such an operation.

So obviously when you’re planning on hiring an arts and style blogger a year later you pretty much structure the job with exactly the same kind of pressures that led you to fire the other blogger in the first place.

“This blogger should be able to identify trends, cutting through the noise of the Internet to bring context and perspective to a Washington audience…We envision at least a dozen pieces of content per day, with the knowledge that one great sentence can equal one great post.”

Please cut through the noise of the Internet…and publish more noise. One great sentence can be a great thought – or a great tweet, at least – and be a thing of value but it hardly leaves room for context and perspective. And the suggested topics aren’t exactly ones that cry out for more words, particularly from the Washington Post.

Objections were made to the job posting and a writer from Slate objected to all the objections saying it was a great job because it was how he got his start at New York mag’s Vulture blog back in 2007.

Yes, this would be a great job if it wasn’t at the Washington Post and you were working at a startup where the expectations are different. And maybe if this was 2007.

Not only is the Washington Post ignoring what happened last year but it’s also pretending that there aren’t countless other blogs that do this sort of thing, do it better and do it without the ethical missteps. (Vulture, for one!) Why not task a writer with 3-4 pieces per day of varying length which strike a balance between aggregation, original reporting and analysis? It would be different enough, likely offer more value and be the kind of thing that breaks through the noise.  Locally, the Chicago Tribune‘s Eric Zorn and Chicago magazine’s Whet Moser produce great work in this vein and are duly recognized for elevating the conversation.

Not that I’m saying longer pieces are always the best idea. For example, an editor assigning one of its lead feature writers 1000+ words on (the midway point of?) the search for a new host of a popular public television show might not be the best use of constrained newsroom resources. How much more of a competitive advantage does that get you when you know all your competitors can write around the nut of the story by putting far fewer resources into it? Especially when the nut of the story comes down to little more than an audience data capture effort by the show* and is “influential but non-binding” according to the show’s producer?

In that case, one good sentence would have sufficed.

* Really? You need a street address for a vote? Sure you do.

You can’t have one without the other

Media

“…the community that sustained the Phoenix has passed from the scene. At one time the Boston area was awash in concert venues, record stores, guitar emporiums, independent book stores, head shops — the kinds of businesses that reached their customers by advertising in alternative weeklies. Now they are almost entirely gone. There was very little to offset the costs of producing a free magazine and a free website. Its no wonder that Mindich personally had to subsidize the Phoenix to the tune of $30,000 a week, according to a report in Boston magazine.

via MediaShift . How the Boston Phoenix Kept Its Readers But Lost Its Advertisers | PBS.

How publishers will live after the death of display advertising

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My friend Mike Fourcher, new media entrepreneur and erstwhile publisher of Center Square Journal, has a smart post on his blog about the death of the Boston Phoenix and Google Reader. Mike argues these two events further illustrate the death knell ringing for display advertising as readers become less passive and information becomes more readily available.

What’s the solution? Mike says:

The rest of the publishing world, especially start-up operations that lack a strong brand and ad sales team to support them (i.e. non- Condé Nast/Gawker/Disney/Tribune), will need to build their revenue plans around active reader interactions. Subscriptions are an obvious path, but so are ticketed events, survey participation and merely attending free events sponsored by publications. We will have to consciously choose to support publications either with our wallets, our feet or our data.

Three things I thought about after reading the above, most of which have more to do with larger brands/publishers than startups:

First, events are great but they should be more than “come meet the writer” or quasi-TED gatherings. The Chicago Tribune has a two-tiered approach that grew out of its Trib Nation community engagement. Not only do they hold events with columnists and primary sources but they also offer classes on how to build your own blog or how to find ways to pay for college. At its core, the Tribune is using the resources and people it has to offer something of value beyond a news product.

Along those lines, publishers have an opportunity to disrupt the traditional ad production model by providing more creative ad services for clients. These services include print and display ad production, experiential/event opportunities and branded/native content creation published on their owned sites. In the last year, a few digital publishers have experimented with the latter but traditional print publishers have lagged behind in part because of the structural and ethical considerations (exceptions are The Atlantic and The Economist though the former found itself tripped by a bit). Most publishers create sales and marketing staffs based on selling ads, not around the idea of a mini-agency within a publisher. As for the ethics, Time Out Chicago‘s Frank Sennett published a set of guidelines for sponsored/native content and I’ve yet to see anyone present a smarter argument for how to handle this.

Lastly, though display advertising as it exists now is still dying, advertisers will still look for branding awareness and agencies will still look for impressions, at least in the near-term. Publishers will need to provide other products – print and digital – that provide both. While sponsored content guides as inserts in your daily newspaper or weekly magazine are one possibility (and allow for an arm’s length between the primary product and the advertorial), the “presented by” types of placements found in apps and tablet products are another more traditional placement.

For roughly a year* before I left Chicago magazine, I spearheaded the launch two apps: a “best of” dining and drinking app for smartphones and a newsreader/digital magazine app for tablets. As you can see, the mobile app not only offers sponsor placement but also a spot for the client’s own branded content – distinct from the editorial (“Ketel One Guide to Drinking in Chicago”). Both the tablet app and the smartphone app had sponsor logo placement on the splash screen too and the client received a co-branded presence in any of the promotion ads for the apps that ran in ads in Chicago magazine, on the website and in other Tribune publications.

If I were doing the project again now, I’d argue for creating a co-branded, mobile-friendly microsite within Chicago magazine’s larger .com.  The dining and drinking content would be complimented by daily content and lists at the forefront. Sponsor placement would run throughout the site and perhaps even geotarget so users could find, say, bars near them that serves the client’s products.

All of this involves what Mike said above: getting beyond the products from the newsroom or the ads that traditionally supported it and finding the value elsewhere in the building or in new product forms.

* Admittedly, this should not have taken a year but that’s a story for another time.

Links to the past: C-word edition

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Here’s what caught my attention on Twitter this past week.

NASCAR’s removal of a YouTube video showing an accident on the track was unintentional. It’s funny to me how important this seemed a week ago.

Speaking of things that had everyone in a tizzy last week, The Onion apologized for that tweet during the Oscars. Former employees used it to bring attention to their new project no one had heard of yet. And speaking of the Oscars, Vulture’s Margaret Lyons dismantles every lame defense of Seth MacFarlane’s hosting gig. If you didn’t think it was that big a deal, here’s why that might have been. Finally, here’s an interesting roundup of brand-focused tweets during the ceremony.

Digiday argues brands are in a 24/7 marketing/conversation model. I had a good back-and-forth discussion with some folks on Twitter about this. Not sure all brands need to be 24/7 but not quite sure how to draw the line.

Art Spiegelman – author of the great graphic novel Maus – used to work on Garbage Pail Kids.

Farhad Manjoo on why Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer made a mistake in getting rid of work-from-home privileges.

Chicago might finally get its act together and create a real music industry for the city.

These pictures of little kids dressed up as iconic figures from black history might have been the best thing I saw all week.

Don’t lump Beverly’s Horse Thief Hollow in with the rest of the Western Avenue death march.

The Kansas University basketball team’s uniforms are half-Zubaz.

Which parts of the country say pop and which parts say soda? There’s a map for that.

Finally, here is Nick Offerman next to a quilt with Ron Swanson’s face on it.

Year Two

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Today is Abigail’s 2nd birthday. In re-reading the post I wrote last year about the intersection of my birthday and hers, I’m struck by what a difference a year makes.

I’m sure next year I’ll re-read this and think about how we spent that morning playing with her ukulele, listening to James Brown during breakfast and entering Day 3 of No More Bottle. A day full of things worth remembering.

It can’t possibly be a year ago that she was just getting off the bottle considering she now consumes everything from Cheerios to curry to granola bars but there it is. The uke is busted and sits behind a chair though she’s now obsessed with bongo drums. Still likes James Brown but is more into dance-pop lately (Robyn is a big favorite). She’s also got this weirdly awesome dance: moving back and forth while rhythmically bending her arms and hands. Vogue meets the Funky Chicken.

Plenty more changed in a year. We long ago lost count of Abigail’s words as mimicry gave way to sentences and context and intent. “Get UP!” she will say. Or “Take a walk” as she grabs your hand. “OK!” was a stand-in for “yes” until this week when it became “I did!” “Nay” became “Nooooo!” in a month. She now knows all her letters and can tell you her name (which has evolved from “Abby” to “Abigail” finally).

And Lord, our child is a daredevil. She wants to climb on everything. Yesterday she ran full-on through our upstairs (“I’m fast!”) and plowed straight into an Elmo-shaped plush seat which obviously couldn’t support 27 pounds of kid hurtling at 10-12 MPH and sent her head-first into the glass door of our entertainment center with a thunk. (No breakage. Thank you, Ikea. You’re tougher than you look.) I swore and scooped her up while she complained then shook it off and demanded to be set down so she could run around some more.

This year we were a little schedule-challenged – because Abigail’s parents just can’t not be busy – so we had a party for her two weeks before her actual birthday. Erin was in New Orleans for the half-marathon last week and our change in plans for the trip may have inadvertently led to a new tradition for me and AG: a father-daughter birthday trip to pick out her present. We’ll see if that holds up next year.

As for this weekend, I’m headed out of town for my traditional March guys’ weekend with friends. This year, our schedules just happened to align so my birthday weekend was the one that worked best. I’ll be home early in the afternoon on my actual birthday so I can spend it with Erin and Abigail but it’s kind of great that AG ends up spending a weekend around her birthday with one parent and the following with another. Each of us gets to be a little selfish with her.

But this morning, we played with hand stamps and dinosaurs. And tonight we had a Daniel Tiger cake together. She knew it was her birthday.

If you’ve read this far, I apologize. This post has no real agenda and nothing particular to say about where we are at two years into this whole child-rearing thing. More than anything I just wanted to make a few notes for Future Scott of 2014 who sits down to write a post then about co-celebrating his birthday and thinks “Oh man, that’s when she was in her Daniel Tiger phase.”

Tonight Erin asked me if there was anything I wanted to do on Sunday for my birthday. As I said last year, I felt like I already had my celebration.

Guys like Seth MacFarlane are why I bought my daughter a Tonka truck

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This weekend I was solo parenting Abigail while Erin was in New Orleans for a half-marathon. We were supposed to be down there as a family but a last-minute toddler cold and fever had us facing down a nightmare travel scenario for our first plane ride together. Less a noble act of chivalry and more self-preservation, I did wonder – after what seemed like Erin’s second Facebook status about beignets – if I’d chickened out a bit.  Midnight on Friday-into-Saturday morning with Abigail refusing to sleep unless she was leaning against me argued otherwise. It’s one thing doing that in your own house, another on a plane and other unfamiliar surroundings.

(Side note: Somewhere in my head is a post about how parenting is the art of things not going according to plan but I made two runs at it this weekend in between sick-toddler tantrums and I’ll be damned if I can fashion the ping-ponging thoughts into something coherent. Nora Ephron was right.)

Anyway, the weekend wasn’t without its merits.  Saturday we tested out the family-friendliness of  Horse Thief Hollow, a new gastropub-ish spot here in Beverly (passed with flying colors) and Sunday we went over to Toys-R-Us so I could buy Abigail a Tonka truck.

—

I’ve never much cared for Seth MacFarlane though I’ll admit to enjoying some of his Family Guy-fueled Star Wars parodies on a couple weekends away with some guy friends. Overall, I was disappointed that a dude who is clearly a song-and-dance man at heart felt the need to overcompensate with misogynist humor and gay-baiting.

Vulture writer and person-I’m-proud-to-call-a-friend Margaret Lyons sums up his hosting performance better than I can and explains why it’s not “just a joke” though I’ll add this: Just because there are other sexist aspects of the Oscars – the pre-show theatrics, plot elements of the films, etc. –  doesn’t mean we can’t object to a joke about Jennifer Aniston lying about being a stripper. What we joke about when we joke about women: appearance, emotion and sexual availability. All this time and so few are working with new material or imagination.

—

We were at a kid’s birthday party several months ago when Abigail grabbed the back of a Tonka truck and steered it around the basement with glee. I was thrilled: Here was our daughter, young enough to be blissfully ignorant of the concept of gendered play and enjoying the hell out of a truck, tossing stuff in the back of it and self-powering it all over the basement of someone she just met. And not just any truck but the fabled Tonka truck – the Bob Seger-soundtracked-Ford-F-150  of kids’ toys. I made a mental note to buy her one for her next birthday.

With Erin in New Orleans and me needing reasons to get us out of the house, the timing seemed perfect for a trip to the toy store. I’ve obsessed over written of my desire to not default Abigail to pink and princesses and give her some say in her play.  So, even with an agenda in my head, when we walked into that Toys-R-Us I took her hand but let her lead. She zipped past the shelves of Barbies but paused at an endcap of generic dolls. “Lala!” she exclaimed and ran over to the dolls, picking one up and inspecting it. Abigail’s first nanny was Polish. She bought her a doll and the Polish word for doll is “Lala” so there you go. After getting to know her, she hands me the doll. “Do you want this doll?” I ask. She nods yes.

As far as I’m concerned, we’re here to buy a truck. But I want to get her the truck for the same reason I don’t want to assume she’s genetically wired to like princesses. When possible, the world should be hers to explore and decide for herself what she’ll like and what she is like. Someone else’s expectations – even my own – are just that: someone else’s.

We walked through a few more aisles. I took her down the superheroes aisle just to see what would happen; she couldn’t have been less interested. When we got to the Tonka truck aisle there were three that caught her eye though we eventually settled on a dump truck of a size large enough for her to be challenged by it but big enough for her to master.

There was, however, still the matter of Lala, an issue made abundantly clear when Abigail placed her in the bed of the dump truck and proceeded to push the still-in-its-box Tonka truck across the floor. A dollar amount was in my head for this trip and Lala #2 put us over it by about 10 bucks. Plus, it’s not like Lala #1 wasn’t still sitting in her crib.

At this point, I’m rather charmed by Lala #2 so I’m happy with whichever toy makes it home. If it’s the truck, I’m pleased I’m introducing her to the concept of options. If it’s the doll, I’ll prove to my wife I’m not against girly things so long as it’s Abigail who decides it’s what she wants and not everyone else.

I put it to her:

“Do you want Lala or the truck?”
“Truck.”

Win. Except…wait…

“Do you want the truck or Lala?”
She thinks about it a moment.
“Lala.”

“OK, do you want the truck?”
She nods.
Do you want Lala?”
Nod.

At an end, I put the doll in my left hand and the truck in my right and hold them out in front of me. She looks back and forth between the two before charging at the truck, grabbing it with both hands and walking away. When we pass the endcap, I put Lala #2 back on the shelf, knowing I’ll remember this moment the next time I’m passing a Toys-R-Us and turn into the parking lot before the thought passes out of my brain stem.

—

All I’m saying is I don’t care if she wants a doll or a truck so long as she knows she has options.

Hopefully, she never sees Seth MacFarlane host the Oscars.

* In the interest of limiting the scope of this post, I’m not going to get into The Onion’s idiocy other than to say if we as a society can’t rally around the idea that if you’re going to send up the misogyny we aim at actresses you probably shouldn’t use a misogynist term and the name of a nine year old actress within the same 140 characters – yes, even “satirically” – then I don’t hold out much hope for us.

Links to the past: Lyndon Johnson’s pants edition

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Normally, these Sunday week-in-review posts will have a few blog posts in between. Guess it was a busy week. Onward then:

This past week was the anniversary of the E2 club disaster. Thomas Conner of The Sun-Times looks at how it changed Chicago club safety and licensing.

Won’t usually be self-linking in this space but Cork & Kerry in Beverly has a new exterior patio wall meant to ape the St. James Gate at the Guinness brewery. I posted a photo of it to Instagram. (Follow me on Instagram via ourmaninchicago).

Chicago comedian Kate MacKinnon was hysterical on SNL last week as a woman in a Russian village who witnessed the fall of meteorites. “Bear with me, Seth…”

Via Charlie Meyerson, here is an animated recording of Lyndon Johnson ordering pants.

I loved this piece by fellow Ohio U./ACRN-FM alum Jillian Mapes on Catfish, meeting people online and self-presentation. It was in Maura magazine, which you can subscribe to here.

Seth Lavin’s Chicago School Wonks e-newsletter used to be required reading before he stopped publishing it to take a full-time job teaching. But he’s still contributing to the Chicago school reform debate. Here are ten questions he asked in the wake of proposed Chicago public school closings with responses from CPS.

Playboy got the Wall Street Journal to run with the idea that it’s more about making money through licensing than nudes these days, a continuing effort to leave its past behind. Nevermind that revenue is down significantly and it missed its 2012 profit projections and its CEO earned both HR complaints about his behavior and a lawsuit accusing him of embezzlement.

Esquire‘s Charlie Pierce calls the waaaaahh-mbulance on Politico.

Taste of Chicago lost $1.3 million dollars last year.

Rainbow Cone opens March 6th!

Facebook conducted an audit of its Insights tool and “uncovered bugs that impacted impression and reach reporting.”

The posting, removal and subsequent re-posting of a NASCAR crash video should have some interesting implications on the attempts of brands to claim copyright of fan-created content.

And finally, it looks like someone started a new site with the old EveryBlock code at chicago.wikiblock.com.

Links to the past: Crain’s Chicago hip-hop edition

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Every Sunday, I’ll be posting a “best of” roundup of items I linked to via Twitter with some brief thoughts. Here’s this week’s.

The Beverly community’s first responders will be the grand marshals of the South Side Irish Parade (note: I am a volunteer on the SSIP committee).

For some reason, Crain’s Chicago Business published a timeline of Chicago hip-hop, most of which had nothing to do with Chicago hip-hop’s affects on business, Chicago or otherwise, which is a shame because that would have been interesting. Keep on slicing up an ever-decreasing share of media verticals, everybody!

This “all-headline, no body” post is the dumbest thing I read last week, possibly ever.

Kevin Willer is leavingthe Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center and the deservedly-heralded 1871 tech hub for a venture capital fund.

I’m 99% sure Billy Dec is in on the joke of this parody video of himself. Mostly because the joke isn’t that funny (for a Mancow-fronted video about an easy target it’s pulling its punches a bit, no?).

Not sure if this article from Digiday means Virgin Mobile sits in on the actual editorial meetings with Buzzfeed to discuss story ideas or an “editorial” meeting (read: advertorial) with creatives to help them craft story ideas. Either way, it should scare the crap out of everybody, publishers and agencies alike.

According to DNA Info Chicago’s read on neighborhood census data, Beverly has the 2nd highest number of married men in Chicago. And as Rob Hart replied to me when I posted it on Valentine’s Day: “they’ve all made reservations at Koda, so good luck getting a table.”

Finally, last week’s Time Out Chicago cover story on what you can do to combat gun violence perpetrated against Chicago kids is a must-read, including its list of 30 ways to do it and Alex Kotlowitz’s essay on why downtown and North Side communities need to pay attention to the plague eating away at the South and West sides.

This American Life devotes two shows to these issues, with a special emphasis on Harper High School “where last year alone 29 current and recent students were shot.” You can listen to part one here. (Part two goes up this week.) Throughout part one, you’ll hear a recurring theme: school as a refuge from gun violence. Perhaps now’s not the best time to be closing Chicago public schools on the South and West Sides.