I was reading the Wizard of the East, Jeff Jarvis, questioning the need for articles in the near future www.buzzmachine.com/2011/05/28/the-article-as-luxury-or-byproduct/.

Geoff and I have been conviced the article is antiquated and inefficent since around 2003.

The article is not the basic unit of storytelling, reporting, selling or anything else. It is an antiquated by product not of good journalism, but a quickly fading era. The article was forged in an industrial age when news was represented in physical goods with two key limitations: space and time. The paper or magazine was only so long. Deadlines prohibited covering a story for as long as it took, rather the article had to be ready for publication.

Of course many of us grew up in this age and therefore feel comfortable with the poor old article. We know how to read them and how to write them. It is designed to be edited in serial and fit in with the organizations we have created. It would be massively disruptive to the people who work in those organizations to abandon the article and worse, it would be foreign to readers.

In 2005 when Geoff and I started testing a new concept called a storyline instead of articles our potential readers didn’t like it. They had to learn a new way to interact with media off-the-bat just to get the story. We learned quickley that we had to present an interface that looked like the old and that would grow over time into something new. We hid the storyline concept as a feature. That proved to be a smart move.

It is easier to hire journalists, work with volunteer community contributors and showcase The Sacramento Press to potential advertisers. The minute you see the site you know what it is. If you want to go deeper, click on the storyline button on an article or even the author’s name and you will start accessing the advanced features that will be cruicial to the social, collaborative and platform agnostic future of journalism.

(see www.sacpress.com and play around – use the search too, it’s fun)

What do I mean about social, collaborative and platform agnostic?

1. Professionals and amateurs are just people and will want to gather to read, share and tell stories. They will want to debate and react and converse. Digital journalism will reflect the parlour or town hall meeting more than a TV show or a bundle of paper. People will be compelled by structured social communication like achievements and exclusive groupings. This is already evident with Groupon and Foursquare. We have integrated merit badges in our system and emails notifying contributors that editors have chosen their articles for our featured pages.

2. Collaborative journalism is common sense. We do too much in serial along a series of deadlines. Peer editing groups, stringers and reporters can work in parallel to tell stories on the fly. The key is this group of people must work synchronously. That is asking a lot of people so organizations will have to give more value to these contributors. Maybe that compensation is money like what we pay reporters and editors now. Maybe it will be social satisfaction or in exchange for training like interns. No doubt this will require new organizational structures.

3. We built a platform from scratch. How 2003 of us! Though I do love our platform, there will be value in being platform agnostic. Media organiations will have to learn to connect with communities of interest where they already spend time online. Luckily, platform makers have learned that they must be open if they wish to survive. They must let us interact with these tribes of influence and enthusiasm or those communities will leave their platform. Therefore we will have the access and the interest to reach beyond any wall.

This is how aggregation dies – it morphs from something people scoff at to something so core to our journalisic process we have to protect it to better inform the public. What we now chide and deride will become the norm in the future, but in such a sophisticated and beautiful form we won’t want to go back to the old days where real time meant un-edited and untrustworthy.

The article may still be part of the process – or something like it. Why? Why do we still use QWERTY keyboards? Because anachronistic things often survive if there is significant societal training behind them. In fact, it makes sense that headlines will survive as well. They seem to be more suited to short messaging platforms than other fragmented pieces of our antiquted model.

Transition from big to lean, from industrial to ethereal, and from utility to beauty is hard to achieve – but surprisingly easy to predict. The toughest part will be understanding your community and not flat our introducing the future just because you can. In practical terms someone gave me this advice years ago:

Give your audience two things they understand up front – then slip in one they don’t!

-Ben Ilfeld, follow me @benilfeld

For example, I hear people say that users comment or participate because of a sense of community. I hear this all the time, so much so that “community” may be the new “go viral.”

Users do things because they have incentive to do so. That’s it. That’s the grand thing. That incentive may be “community,” but it often is not. While not having a sense of community can create feelings of insecurity that dis-incentivize participation, it is often not the primary motivator.

For example, I do no participate in Groupon because of a sense of community. I do it because I like the deals and I like sharing the deals – not with Groupon’s online “community,” but with my own social graph.

I feel very safe using Mint.com, but it is not because of a sense of community. Rather, it was their clean design, one nice article in Techcrunch and a couple of recommendations from friends of mine and – voila: It feels safe.

Even in the above examples, there is another pattern. Not only was the makeup of the “community of users” of those services relatively unimportant, but my relationship with my own social graph was very important. My friends make me feel safe. I want to impress my friends.

And of course there are other great incentives to doing stuff online. For example, del.icio.us was just awesome at saving bookmarks across browsers and working collaboratively at work. But when my tags were aggregated with others’ tags, del.icio.us became a useful index of web services.

I did it for me. I tag for me. I tried Mint and use Groupon for my personal benefit. It’s the same with Facebook and on down the line. I continue to use the service because it continues to be the easiest way to get to that benefit.

So the question is: Why would users want to use your service? And, in relative terms, are there easier ways for them to derive the same benefit from another service?

I could have nabbed that line right out of a “how to write your first business plan” book. Yet we have gotten so bored with this simple concept that we wrap it in mystery. Nowadays, anytime I hear someone is offering an incentive to participate online, it is some form of “game mechanics.” This is another overused and often misleading term.

Groupon used to rely on game mechanics. Sure, early on you had to tell all your friends about a deal because you didn’t know if the deal would reach a threshold and become active. At this point, almost every deal in every market kills the threshold so fast I bet most Groupon users these days don’t even realize that rule exists. The “game” is really that you have only one day to purchase the deal. Wow, fun game! I can’t wait to play.

It’s applying a simple business rule to incentivize desired behavior. I guess you can call it what you want to, but I think it just makes corporate leaders seem like they are innovating something really novel, when they are doing something we all do.

Let’s take a look at Foursquare for a moment. It uses badges and points. It turns your whole life into a game, right? Game mechanics. Well, sure, but people are looking at the wrong side of the game to emulate. Think of when you were a kid playing your first RPG or maybe 3D platformer. One of the most fun things these game opened up was the ability to explore. Exploring the game world was fun, and stuff you found there was interesting. I liked to play RPGs on a TV with a friend so we could share the experience.

I love exploring, and I love sharing the experience with my friend. Did I really care, then or now, about scores? Sure, I did and do a little. But that is a byproduct of the game, not the real mechanism. The game mechanism and deep-rooted motivation for using Foursquare is exploring my world. It is adding a social layer and a scoring layer that completes the game of my world.

Going a bit deeper, mayorships are another game mechanism employed by Foursquare. Often, the mayorship is actually driven by simple incentives. There is an incentive to impress your friends. There is an incentive to feel like you own the place or that you are closer to the people who work there. I used to feel that about a little restaurant called Ink Eats & Drinks just a couple of blocks from my house. This was way before Foursquare, and it wasn’t scored.

OK, now how would you apply these findings in the local news space? For one, if you want to incentivize participation and good behavior on your site, try answering a simple set of questions:

1. What do you want users to do? Do you want them to comment, rate, tag, share or write an article?
2. What benefit do they derive from that?
3. Why would they chose to use your service to do that over other services?

Take the example of a comment. I would argue that not only are comments not “broken” as some would have you think, but comment behavior is much easier to understand in the context of the above questions than in the context of “community.”

So you want a user to comment. What makes you comment? I know what makes me comment every time – even when I’m on my stupid little phone. I comment when I virulently disagree with something in an article or another comment. Disagreeing makes me feel anxious and even a little upset. The comment lets me relieve that tension. Then I usually tell a bunch of people that day how stupid the “thing that made me mad” was and how smart and passionate my response was. I keep checking back to see if others agree in rating my comment or leaving their own. I get into small spats with people I may or may not have known before.

Break it down. Comments are spurred by emotion. They are designed as a reactive mechanism. They themselves can be the tonic – especially if you can easily share them in context with your social graph. This is why tying Twitter to comment systems is natural. This is why Facebook comments should work. I know they don’t, but that’s another subject.

Comments may do something useful in creating a community of people around issues over time. That is not why I do it, but a happy byproduct of the action. How media outlets then leverage these communities who have niche interests is up to them, but at this point, they don’t really do it well.

On The Sacramento Press, we have a really hot topic. All the articles are from community contributors and biased to different sides of a debate about how the local grocery co-op operates. So we want to write a less-biased story about the issue and then create a splash page to lay out all the advocacy pieces and our story in a balanced way. It would be splendid if we could make the same commentor community that was active on the earlier threads aware of our new work around the subject.

Going further, it would be nice to solicit many of those people who write comments to give us more context in a full-length opinion piece. We need to find ways to incentivize that behavior. And we have an advantage: We are local. We can meet the contributor for coffee. We can explore our city together. We can chat and interact. We can even play. As a local news source, we can be at the center of an actual community and facilitate crucial conversations amongst the members of the community most likely to have direct impacts on all of our lives.

Now that is not just jargon. That is not a misuse of the term. That is community.

Now read this quote from Gary Cowan of Datasphere in Street Fight today:

People throw out the word, “cookie cutter,” but what does that actually mean? Does it mean you have a website laid out in a way that makes sense and you use that layout across the board? Tell me why a New York website needs a different layout than a Los Angeles? What is so fundamentally different between those two markets that you would want a layout that’s completely different? That’s the only thing I can draw from the cookie cutter comment, and it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.

Problem 1: lots of reused and frankly bad content is spoiling the experience. For one, using the same everything, including content, is disingenuous to your readership and advertisers who believe they are supporting their neighborhood when they are actually only supporting your bottom line. It is cookie cutter for sure, but maybe even worse than that.

Problem 2: Let’s talk about layout for a second. Let’s face it, Starbucks works. It is efficient. It serves coffee at a local level and lots of people love it. But there are other people who prefer locally owned and run shops. When people call you “cookie cutter” they are simply stating the obvious fact that you are operate and look like a chain. Chains are not usually thought of as local or grass roots or deeply tied to the community.

One of the reasons people embrace local independent online media is because they identify with the place they live – a place that is quirky and unique. Why would the layout of a website in LA look different than in NYC? Because those places are themselves different. They have different economies, transportation, weather, people and most importantly people from those places think of themselves as different. And that difference is why they are interested in drinking at a quirky local coffee shop where they know the owner rather than Starbucks.

The funny thing is that I think you know that. You brand everything with your local media partners. When you make phone calls to sell ads you say you are calling from the local TV station. You know that people respond to local and you leverage your brand to seem local, established and engaged.

But I digress, I doubt any of this keeps you up at night. Although I bet high churn rates do. . .

But the problem is Google treats my identities as logins like everybody else. I cannot be simultaneously logged in to my personal Gmail and my Google Apps Gmail at the same time or even on the same browser. Worse yet, there are products that are central to Google’s strategy that were not at the time available for Google Apps customers, such as Google Voice, which is tied to my personal account.So if I want to use Google Voice and my business email account, I have to have at least two browsers open. In some ways, this shouldn’t be a big problem. However, these days browsers have to be very capable things to handle all the nifty HTML5 tricks that make web-based apps like the ones I need work. The problem is that browsers are now serious resource hogs. Two at once plus iTunes is enough to choke up my 1-year-old, top-of-the-line MacBook Pro. Really.

To make matters worse, I run a company with multiple brands and small groups of collaborative workers. I have ben -at- macermedia.com and ben -at- sacramentopress.com and my personal account. So if I want all my email, all my calendaring, all my Google Voice functionality and Google+ (I’ll get to that in a minute), I have to have THREE browsers open.

I wouldn’t really mind. I get it, I’m the exception. It’s just that it works so well in Android Honeycomb! Google seems to want to be my mail client, not just my ESP. It seems to want to be the hub I turn to.

Why don’t I use Google+? Simple. My main browser for sharing and interacting is the one I use for my work email, calendar and docs. That means I am logged into my work account and thus NOT logged into Google+. I can share on Twitter. I can share on Facebook. I can do it any which way – buttons on sites, copy and paste URLs, use third-party web apps like timely.is. What I can’t do is share or get notified via Google+.

But this is not really about Google+. That is just the most obscene example. What this is about is consistently having Google Apps stand for “Google six months ago.” I don’t want less than the average user – I want more!

What strings these two issues together is simple. Google must recognize that Google Apps is not a traditional enterprise product. But that is a great thing because work environments are changing. Therefore, to be useful in emerging work environments, companies should not be paying for special logins, but accounts within logins that have access to the right new features to help them work as a team.

Users need access to different identities and workspace applications like docs, Google+ and maybe even waves. Users need to be able to easily do this from one browser and on one mobile browser on their smartphones. Web applications must allow multiple identities and accounts to be accessed by one simple login.

So get on this Google! Either do that or let Google Apps wither on the vine if you don’t recognize the changing work environments and focus on the needs of stodgy operations that really don’t like you anyway.

Federal Communications Commission 445 12th Street, S.W.
Washington, D.C. 20554

Dear Chairman Genachowski:

October 3, 2011

The undersigned organizations are innovative local online news organizations serving communities across the country. We are new, start-up enterprises, and we are part of a growing movement of local online sites dedicated to news, information and community. As the legacy media industry has undergone increasing strain in engaging in local community and investigative reporting, our enterprises have stepped up to begin rebuilding local journalism.

Because we are dedicated to serving the local information needs of our communities, we read your working group report, The Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age, with great interest. The report pointed out that our start-up enterprises are not yet self-sustaining enough to fill the gaps left by legacy media cutbacks, and we do not disagree with this conclusion — as of today. But our potential to serve local audiences is being proven every day in our communities, and local online enterprises such as ours will emerge to be an important force in the lives of Americans.

The report correctly concludes that sustainability and workable business models will be essential to the future of local online journalism. Advertising is an important element of this future. In that regard, the report points out a modest change in policy that could make a real near-term difference in the sustainability of local journalism: a shift in the federal government’s advertising spending from national media to local media. As the report states: “Targeting existing federal advertising spending to local news media could help local news media models— both commercial and nonprofit, online and off-line—gain traction and help create local jobs, while potentially making taxpayer spending more cost-effective.” We understand that the Television Bureau of Advertising and the Newspaper National Network support this concept, on behalf of the local television and newspaper industries. We agree.

The report understandably focuses on the potential for such a shift in federal advertising policy to foster local newspaper and television coverage. But the potential benefit of such a shift in policy for local online news enterprises could be even more dramatic and important to the public interest. Our highly granular local orientation permits us to offer tightly targeted advertising models that could benefit government advertisers and make their efforts markedly more cost-effective. This result would provide the government with extremely efferctive advertising choices and allow taxpayer dollars to go farther. And the benefits of even a modest amount of government spending on local online news enterprises could be, in a relative sense, far more beneficial in sustaining local online journalism than expenditures on legacy

The Hon. Julius Genachowski October 3, 2011
Page 2

media. Even modest advertising revenues will permit us to expand news coverage, create new journalism jobs, and better serve our local communities.

Needless to say, these decisions should be made by professionals within the government and within advertising agencies on an entirely content-neutral basis. We believe that can be accomplished. The result would provide the government with extremely effective advertising choices. And the by-product of this more effective advertising policy will be a movement toward sustainability and self-sufficiency on the part of new, innovative local news organizations that can serve the information needs of local communities today and in the future.

We look forward to today’s hearing, and would be pleased to provide any further information that may be helpful to you.

Respectfully submitted,

The Hon. Julius Genachowski October 3, 2011

Signed:

/s Joel Kramer

Editor and CEO MinnPost.com Minneapolis, Minnesota

/s Ben Ilfeld

Operations Manager SacramentoPress.com Sacramento, California

/s
Polly Kreisman

Publisher and Editor theLoopNY .com Westchester County, N.Y.

/s Jeremy Iggers

Publisher
Twin Cities Daily Planet/ www.tcdailyplanet.net

/s Suzanne McBride

Editor and Publisher, AustinTalks Founder, Chicago Talks austintalks.org

Patch represents a huge ally of local and hyper-local sites. For one, more local media is welcome in my world. There still is not enough coverage. In addition, Patch does pay editors. This keeps good journalists working local beats. We can all applaud that. The fact that Patch is well funded means it can experiment with new models of journalism and with new business models without fear of immediate failure. All of this is wonderful. None of this scares me.

What scares some is that Patch could poach stories, resources and advertisers. I think Patch ought to address the first two concerns whenever they go into new communities. Patch must come in as an ally and a good neighbor. Patch editors must abide by the rules of the blogging roads just like everyone else. If they do not they will find themselves with less traffic and little good will from locals and local businesses.

As for poaching advertisers – it happens in competitive markets. And it can be a very healthy thing, because Patch has the resources to reach out to lots of advertisers who have never spent a dime on local online advertising. They have the capacity to build a larger market. This is not a zero sum game. Local online advertising is growing and more boots on the street selling means more local businesses buying. We have found it easier to sell an advertiser who has already been approached or bought ads from other sites.

The things that do go bump in the night are activities that do not contribute to a healthy local media ecosystem. For example, I am much more worried that people will just play Farmville, watch Hulu, and read their favorite gadget blog (I know I do). I’m more concerned the local businesses may not have an opportunity to try independent local online advertising and see how effective we can be. I lose sleep every single night because it it our job to offer better innovative products so we can compete. That is our job.

Our job is to create The Sacramento Local Online Ad Network. Our job is to create Deal Ticket (our Groupon competitor). Our job is to build community and then innovate business models that will be effective for our local business partners. We have to help local businesses thrive just as we have to help our larger community thrive!

And Patch can help. Patch can help by competing and pulling out all the stops. They can help by educating local businesses and paying local editors. Patch can help by creating more local news and innovating. Patch can help by being a good neighbor and reaching out to form alliances with local and hyper-local operations. Patch can be a huge ally. I, for one, say: welcome.

Blogs around the web (Wired, Gizmodo, Techdirt, TechCrunch) have reported that The New York Times pressured Apple to remove the most popular RSS reader from the App Store because the reader was making “commercial use” of the NYT RSS feeds. It is an interesting story and still developing as the app had been pulled earlier today and is now back up. Read the other accounts above for more information on the story.

But for me this is just another move in the wrong direction for the New York Times. Under the leadership of Vivian Schiller the Times set a benchmark for how a newspaper should adapt to digital media. It undertook local blogging initiatives, refined a beautiful site design and removed pay walls. The Times was experimental with graphics and use of data to tell stories. They were the benchmark.

Now that Schiller is with NPR it seems that conservatives within the organization have been taking reactionary steps to undo many initiatives. The idea of a paywall is back and being built right now. And fences around content apparently now extend to public RSS feeds. At this point why not just shut those down? I use google reader for my feeds and it is most certainly commercial. Then I reference all the knowledge I get from the feeds to do my job every day and make money, another commercial use. Heck I use a laptop I bought from Apple and a browser that makes money for Google – both commercial. But besides the bizarre attempt to fence in content, the magic just seems to have dissipated. It feels like The New York Times has packed up its toys and is leaving the playground.

My friend thought it was like the last season of Lost. Jacob was the cork who kept an evil spirit from spilling out into the world. It feels like Vivian Schiller was a cork that kept all the stupid ideas rumbling around in executives’ heads from spilling out into the world. She is gone now and dumb ideas are flowing out. Sad.

The speaker is Joelle Gropper Kaufman, Senior VP, Marketing, Adify – our fantastic technology partner. It is an amazing feeling to hear her talk about our network that has been live for only 2 months. Out of over 250 networks Adify powers she really focused on all of us from Sacramento!

Just wanted to share that we are making major waves with this innovative advertising network. Thanks for the acknowledgment and we will keep growing SLOAN.

Thanks Joelle!

Sacramento Local Online Ad Network (SLOAN) Introduction from Ben Ilfeld on Vimeo.

Today is not only another big day for SLOAN, it’s a great moment in the evolution of the Sacramento digital and advertising landscape.

SLOAN is the Sacramento Local Online Ad Network. In essence, it is a powerful coalition of local, online publishers who bundle their traffic so that our sales team can efficiently offer one efficient buy to advertisers. Rather than working with 25+ different web sites on a campaign, a company can work with one point of contact, deliver one set of creative, and SLOAN serves it up to all the sites, with detailed reporting. It’s a tremendous offering.

We hope you enjoy the launch of SLOAN and our new site, as this is truly a revolutionary moment for Sacramento’s media landscape!