Poll of the Week, #2: Innovation in Media (5)
This week, we will have a look at media, and specifically at how media groups in Québec deal with the current shift.
Much alike the rest of the world, newspapers and media in Québec have to deal with loss of revenues, mainly from their small ads section and from advertising, which both got transferred to the web. “Fagstein”, who is a freelancer for the Montreal Gazette, had recently an excellent post describing the problems facing newspapers. Québecor is a perfect example: they are fighting free dailies like Metro, journalists are in strike in Québec City, demanding higher salaries, the printing division is lagging behind Videotron, and now the founder/CEO wants to refocus on new technologies and media. I would also add that the Internet has given users immediacy, interactivity, quantity (quality is a different matter) and this has created expectations when they now get news from media. To give you a better picture, here’s what media groups in Montreal have done recently:
- Québecor has recently redesigned canoe,
- Radio-Canada has recently launched a new video section,
- Astral Media is getting their own advertising network and launching social networks at their key websites, like radio-energie.com
- Branchez-vous focuses exclusively on a web strategy and bought recently tonclip.com, a Québec video portal
- the Yellow Pages Group is expanding into internet advertising and bought key portals like lespac.com
Now, this week’s poll is different from the previous one. We will focus on innovation, but I am asking you what you will do if you were, say, CEO of Quebecor or a group like the GESCA network. Here are the choices:
- I would refocus back to print, and try to differentiate from what is done in the web. No matter what, people want objective and professional news.
- I would do user generated content, like nowpublic.com or currentTV
- I would ask reporters to change, with more blogging and suggest them to become mobile reporters
- I would do nothing, all of this is just a fad that will be forgotten.
- I would incorporate “web2.0″ elements, like commenting, links to blogs, and user-submitted photos
Thanks for participating!
The things you have listed here are exactly what’s wrong with current media thinking. They have no clue what they’re doing online, so they figure they’ll just sprinkle some Web 2.0-ness onto their crappy web properties as if that’ll magically attract more readers and advertising dollars.
Here’s some other suggestions:
1. Stop crippling websites out of fear that your subscription rates will go down. For $20 a month, very few people will make their subscription decisions based on what stories are free online vs. what needs subscriber access.
2. Learn Web 1.0 before Web 2.0. Hire people at more than $8 an hour to put print stories online. Link related stories together. When documents or websites are mentioned in stories, link to them. Spend more than three seconds on the formatting to ensure that hard and soft returns are fixed, or that tables don’t look like garbage.
3. Focus on the content. People go to newspaper websites for articles, not all the gimmicks, badly-produced videos, audio slide-shows and other stuff you throw at us on the homepage. Make the articles prominent in your design, and make finding them easier.
4. Use word-of-mouth to your advantage. This is one of the lessons of Web 2.0. Make linking to articles easy with short URLs, no pop-ups or crazy javascript toys that cripple the browsing experience. Encourage people to share excerpts from articles instead of threatening them with copyright warnings.
5. Allow moderated comments on all articles. Approve those that add anything useful to the article, like clarifications, corrections, responses, different points of view.
6. Get a fucking domain name and use it. Of the Montreal newspapers, only Le Devoir actually hosts its articles on a website with its domain name. Using canada.com, cyberpresse.ca and canoe.ca might make the corporate bosses happy, but it just confuses your readers.
7. Shorten your URLs, or at least have them make sense:
http://www.cyberpresse.ca/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=CPBLOGUES14
http://communities.canada.com/montrealgazette/blogs/tech/default.aspx
These are the homepages of these blogs. Individual post links will be even longer. I’m sure both have cute shortcuts that only their authors really use. But shouldn’t that in itself be an indication that there’s a problem to fix here? (At least Canoe got it right with their redesign: Dominic Arpin’s blog URL is the short (though redundant) http://doa.blogue.canoe.com/dominicarpin.
8. Put online advertisers on a leash. I have to close web pages with newspaper articles because my CPU time is being gobbled up with dozens of overly-complicated ads desperate to get my attention. Stop these automatically-playing videos, whether they have audio or not. Stop these ads that assume because you swiped your cursor over them to get to the close button that this is permission to take over your computer and block the editorial content. Limit ads on the homepage so people can find their way to inside content (would newspapers put this many ads on their page one?)
9. Pick a layout and stick to it. I want a simple homepage with links to individual sections. I don’t want to spend 20 minutes while my computer figures out how the 30 sections of this homepage, each with its individual layout logic, are put together on a page that scrolls down for eternity.
10. Use blogs better. Put beat writers on blogs. Have blogs by experts, not laypeople. Encourage people to visit and comment. Don’t force people to go through your 20-page registration process before they can comment on a blog or story.
11. Hire professionals if you’re branching out. I don’t want badly-lit videos of talking heads shot by writers.
12. Encourage, but do not rely on, user-generated content. Yeah, finding people who have been screwed over by companies or the government will be easy. But crowdsourcing is not going to make you money. You still need qualified professionals with the time and skills to do quality
13. Put your archives online. You have huge databases of content that just sits there for some unknown reason. Blogs stay online forever, and you’re just losing ad money and reputation when someone following a link comes to a page that says “this article is no longer available.”
14. Don’t hire newspaper people to do online work. Hire web professionals and listen to what they have to say. Make them work alongside real newspaper people who can concern themselves with putting out a quality pulp product instead of trying to figure out your online content management system.
15. Hire me as a consultant ;)
Also, people not only like to read news but they also like to participate (think slashdot or any other similar site). And strangely enough, some people don’t mind seeing the same stuff over and over (think digg where people decide).
This poll is very timely (sorry for the shameless plug) as I’m working on a startup which will focus on media in an entirely new way. That’s all I can say so far but I can keep you updated if you want.
Finally, I guess I would like to take the opportunity to ask everyone: “what sucks” and “what rocks” in today’s media sites?
[...] weekly polls. But anyway, the previous poll about media didn’t get enough votes, and I think fagstein had a very interesting take about what media owners should do now. Which should be enough for [...]
[...] Poll about innovation in media, with a detailed response from fagstein (July 3rd) [...]
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