Chip Oglesby

A hundred years ago, if you wanted to know what time it was, you had to make a significant investment–in a watch.

Twenty years ago, Timex made it clear that if you merely wanted the time (not jewelry) it would be about $15.

And five years ago, every kid with a cell phone got the time as a free bonus.

And yet there are still watchmakers. Still Rolex and Patek and the rest. Some of them are having great years.

Clearly, they don’t sell the time. They sell jewelry. Exclusivity. A souvenir.

This passage got me thinking again about how newspapers have failed to understand how people consume news. For ages newspapers were in the business of selling access to information through an ad supported platform. Your choices were simple: Television, radio, newspaper or magazine. Things were simple then and they worked well. Newspapers and magazines have always been a ‘perceived media’ whereas radio and television were ‘received media.’

When the internet became mainstream, it changed everything and the playing field was leveled. Passive consumers of media quickly became active publishers sharing blogs, photos and videos. They are now a part of the conversation and newspapers didn’t take notice of this.

In the day and age of everyone being a publisher or aggregator, what are newspapers selling? What’s their exclusivity?

The news organization of tomorrow won’t sell access to information as an exclusivity. News organizations of tomorrow won’t have to sell souvenir front page editions or highlight videos of your child playing football. No, the news organization of tomorrow will have to understand the balance between what news readers consume and how they consume it.

The news organizations of tomorrow will understand that it will take a massive about of data-mining that mixes consumption rates with location, devices and social reach that we haven’t thought of yet.

We live in an age when people buy water when they can get it from the tap for free; a time when growing a garden is cheaper than buying produce and eating out is more expensive than a home cooked meal. If this is the case, why are newspapers failing?

One of the strongest features in WordPress is the ability to change your site design as often or little as you please.

When you design your site, do you consider your readers’ wants and needs, or do you pick a design based purely on aesthetics?

One important thing to take into consideration when designing a site is monitor resolution.

If you’re using an analytics program like Google Analytics, it’s pretty easy to see screen resolution size. But this includes all traffic to your site. We want to focus on a unique segment of visitors: the most engaged visitors.

By creating a custom segment in Google Analytics, we can create a profile of users who stay on our site for at least three or more minutes. This allows us to look at users with a higher degree of engagement then fly-by visitors.

Take a look at the graphic below:

We can easily see that the majority of users who stick around on our site for at least three minutes has a monitor resolution of 1280 x 800. That’s an average size resolution for a 15 inch notebook computer. Users with 1280 x 800 account for 19.34% of total site visits for this segment.

Look below that and you’ll see that I have a pretty dedicated group of visitors with a screen resolution of 800 x 600. Yikes! They account for 8.36% of traffic that stays for more than three minutes.

You could easily ignore them and go with a layout that’s 900 pixels wide, but you would be ignoring a decent percentage of my traffic. As you can tell from the Avg. time on site and Bounce Rate, if this were an e-commerce site, this traffic would be pretty coveted. So I have to pick a design that balances a clean modern feel and looks good in browsers from 800 x 600 and higher.

You don’t always have to sacrifice good design to please everyone. You just need a starting point for what’s acceptable and you can build up from there.

Ok, it’s time to get serious about this site, no really!

Starting next week I’ll be doing a weekly column every Friday called online tools for small news organizations.

Since I’ve worked in small and medium sized newspapers my whole life, this is the market that I know best. I also know online journalism tools pretty well. I’m also fed up with crappy news sites that just don’t work.

So I’m going to give back to society and do my civic good. I’m going to share everything that I know with you.

This will serve as an online repository for all my collective knowledge. I’m going to help you build and produce a better online news site with a small or limited budget.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a small daily, weekly or even a nonprofit, this will help you improve your online presence.

Next week’s post will focus on building a content management system through WordPress.

While driving down I-26 to Asheville North Carolina last weekend, I noticed a sign that said “Project funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.” This was passed in 2009 under the Obama administration as a way to create jobs and promote investment and consumer spending during the recession. The measures of ARRA are worth about $787 billion.

The road sign got me thinking about acts that were passed as part of the New Deal: The Works Progress Administration (WPA) and The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). The WPA was created by President Roosevelt in 1935. Expenditures from 36-39 totaled nearly $7 billion. As a side note, my grandfather use to refer to the WPA as “We piddle around” for their lack of work.

The CCC was a public work relief program for unemployed men age 18-24 to provide development of natural resources in rural areas from 1933 to 1942.

In North Carolina, both the WPA and CCC helped build the Blue Ridge Parkway:

On June 30, 1936, Congress formally authorized the project as the “Blue Ridge Parkway” and placed it under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service. Some work was carried out by various New Deal public works agencies. The Works Progress Administration did some roadway construction. Crews from the Emergency Relief Administration carried out landscape work and development of parkway recreation areas. Personnel from four Civilian Conservation Corps camps worked on roadside cleanup, roadside plantings, grading slopes, and improving adjacent fields and forest lands. During World War II, the CCC crews were replaced by conscientious objectors in the Civilian Public Service program.

What does this have to do with technology?

The CCC and WPA were good ideas in the 1930′s, but there are new and greater demands that need to be met during our current recession. Government spending is at an all time high while red tape and bloat hinder a system that our founding fathers helped establish.

One of the main problems facing the government is a lack of innovation and creation with technology.

It’s time that we take the next step and create new agencies that will help bring us into the next era of a public and open government.

Large strides could be made by putting people to work in the technology sector of government. Designers, developers, community activist could all work in stride to help make how the government spends your money and help hold your elected officials accountable.

What could these jobs produce?

Designers across America for example could help redesign websites such as the South Carolina Governors Mansion website.

These jobs could help create databases of information that are publicly accessible by all. A good start would be to build a system for Roll Call voting as outlined in the South Carolina Policy Council’s 2009 transparency report. The US Senate has an XML feed of their votes available, a key piece of legislation that was championed by S.C. Senator Jim DeMint. Politico goes further into the pro’s and con’s of this.

Sites like scvotes should have API’s that work with counties GIS departments to report voting results for precints statewide in realtime on election night.

Any state ran or supported website should also make their analytics avaiable under FOIA laws. This could help determine the sites actually impact to cost ratio.

Copyright laws should also be updated and any text and photograph make publicly available. On the South Carolina Flim website for example, in the footer the following information appears:

Photographs and art on this website and any downloadable publications are copyrighted and cannot be reproduced without the written permission of the photographer and/or the South Carolina Film Commission. © 2010 by the South Carolina Film Commission, a division of SC Parks, Recreation and Tourism. All rights reserved.

All information on any taxpayer supported website needs to be licensed through a Creative Commons license. Government entities should also use open platforms such as drupal, django and share their code using Github.

SCPC also supports the idea of an online check registery. [PDF] After submitting FOIA’s to 85 district counties, 12 counties quoted an expense of more than $10,000 to complete the request.

A technological workforce reinvestment could help solve these problems by working with those 85 districts to move their financial records online using open linked data.

There are five stars to linked data: 1. make your stuff available on the web. (whatever format.) 2. make it avaiable as stuctured data (excel instead of pdf.) 3. use non-proprietary format ( csv, tab delimited instead of excel.) 4. Use urls to identify things, so that people can point to it. 5. link your data to other people’s data to provide context.

If you think about it, it’s a pretty simple idea. Why can’t citizens log in to one website and see a single view of their account with a city or state. (water, sewer, real estate, auto excise tax, registration, etc.)

All of this requires a massive amount of imagination and innovation, but it has to start from the ground up. People need to learn that they have just as much control of what happens in government as the people they elect. The media does a good job of informing what’s happening in government, but they miss a great opportunity when it comes to educating people on how to make changes.

In conclusion, it’s time to take a serious look at the types of projects we’re funding with ARRA and look for ways to promote real change through a digital workforce reinvestment.

I’ve seen enough articles about Nick Carr’s and Clay Shirky’s back and forth rhetoric over the internet making you dumber and smarter. Surprise, surprise, they’re both publishing books very soon (disclaimer: I plan on buying both because I like their work).

I think a lot of newspapers are missing the point of what these articles are saying. Instead of bickering back and forth about using readability or actually using links in articles, what I would like to see is more people encouraging newspapers to actually use links!

I’ve visited quite a few South Carolina based media companies this week, searching for their RSS feeds for my new job and their sites have a long way to go. Some papers like The New York Times do decent jobs at creating topic pages, which I’m a fan of, but there are very few outgoing links to other, competing websites.

When would this be helpful?

For beginners, linking out to other sites helps define you as an authority on news. It’s showing your readers that “hey we don’t know everything, but we’ll show you who does, and we’ll show you where you can find it.” Be a link authority in your community and at your paper.

How can we get started?

If you’re a reporter, you should have a delicious account. Delicious is a free online bookmarking service that allows you to store links online and tag this with specific keywords. You could do this with every story that you write, with items that you’re following or as your own personal clipping service. Here’s my delicious account.

Another option is to use Publish2. I used publish2 while at The State when the Boeing news story broke to aggregate stories from around the U.S. on Boeing’s big news in S.C. It received a lot of high praise for including supporting stories.

What should we do next?

Your next step is to talk to someone in your online department. More than likely, they’ll be willing to add the links as assets to your story (hopefully). If you have a system like CCI or some other offline system, it might add them for you automatically. You should also requests for your online CMS to your website and ask your Online Editor to let you go in and manually add the links yourself, you may get shot down, but you won’t know unless you try.

In conclusion:

Stop talking about how the internet is making us uber ADD and just look at it for what it is: a way to make the world more connected through a simple use of an HTML link.

Repeat after me “My newspaper site serves no purpose as a portal site.”

There, doesn’t that feel better? When newspaper CEO’s look to cut costs, they look at the bottom of the employee food chain to cut expenses, instead of cutting frivolous expenses like Associated Press feeds.

When your news site publishes AP feeds for example, you’re not only wasting money, you’re also helping to fragment the web.

Take for example the recent Associated Press headline “Some oil spill events from Tuesday, May 11, 2010.” This query in Google returns over 3,000 versions of the same story. Do we really need that many copies of one single story floating around the internet?

Jeff Jarvis has a great idea known as the link economy. His basic thesis: Do what you do best, link to the rest.

Links are the currency of the new media economy. We bloggers think we’re doing AP and papers a favour when we link to their articles. I teach my journalism students that their headlines and intros are more important than ever because these are the advertisements that will draw people to click links and read more.

The problem for AP and other syndicates is that they are trapped in an old-media economy, selling their content to publications to support their work. In print, we needed countless copies of an article. But now, online, we need only one copy with countless links to it.

If it’s better to link to a story, why run AP feeds at all? Most of the time, AP feeds are bundled with a print subscription service, therefore forcing sites to use both. In the case of chain newspapers, they don’t have a choice about running the feeds it’s a part of their contract. There have been a few cases of papers dropping AP feeds, but not as many as you would expect.

What can newspapers do instead?

Newspapers have always bundled news into their products. It’s a low cost, low value alternative to actually producing original news. Prior to the internet, Editors have made a living deciding what news is most relevant to readers. Most ed’s considered their “news judgment” superior to readers judgment.

Step one: Educate readers on how to consume news electronically. Show them how to use and subscribe to your RSS feeds. Show them how to collect different RSS feeds from around the internet. Show them free tools like Google Reader.

Step two: Create an OPML file of RSS feeds for them to get started with. Include feeds from the New York Times, Washington Post and other large daily newspapers from around the U.S. Include various types of feeds like news, business and sports.

Step three: Use the free service Publish2 to curate links from around the web. More than likely, your editors are spending a portion of their day hunting for the best links around the web and looking for the most interesting stories to publish in tomorrow’s paper. Why not give them the one click ability to share their favorite/most important stories with your audience. Publish2 also allows users to create a collaborative newswire so that everyone in your sports department can include their links into any given section.

Conclusion: Your site doesn’t have to spend thousands of dollars to keep your readers informed about current situations when services like Google’s living stories (which is open-source, available for anyone to use) can do it cheaper and more efficiently. Instead of focusing on waste and fluff, give your readers meaningful content and show them that you can be an authority on news by collecting and sharing the best of the best.

UPCOMING POST IDEA: Do you think the Associated Press and newspapers are fragmenting the internet by publishing multiple copies of the same story? What happens to the structure when there is more than one URL for the same story?

Quick on the heels of Jeff Sonderman’s announcement about joining allbrittion, I learned they’re hiring a social media producer, a job that was written for me! Below, I’ve written a few bullet points fleshing out why I think Steve should hire me for this job.

If you agree with me, be sure to send a tweet to @stevebuttry letting him know that he should #hirechip!

Managing social media outlets, such as Twitter feed(s), Facebook fan page(s), YouTube and Flickr channels;

I manage the following accounts: @thestate @thestatesports @gogamecocks @cophotog @smccolumbia.

From managing these accounts, I’ve learned that interaction is best. It’s great when someone asks a question and realizes that there’s a human being on the other side that is listening. Social Media goes much further than just listening though, it’s also about immediacy, which is why we’re getting news much faster on twitter than through traditional news services and the Associated Press.

I also manage fan pages for The State and SMC Columbia.

Monitoring and responding to social media references to our work;

I kept a close eye on @thestate during the coverage of Mark Sanford and we used twitter to help identify Joe Wilson as the “You Lie” commenter, giving us a jump on our local competition for the story.

Aggregating social media content for linking to or posting on our site; promoting our content and community-engagement opportunities using social media;

We crowd-sourced storm photos for thestate.com and fan photos during the Kenny Chesney concert. We’ve also used twitter to collect photos from accident scenes as well as football games. We also aggregate tweets at sporting events based on their physical location for our @thestatesports accout.

Using Twitter and other social media to crowdsource breaking news stories, supplementing staff coverage;

We used @thestate and @gogamecocks to post breaking news of Ben Axon, a USC recruit charged with simple marijuana possesion. We also used the account during the Travis Barker/DJ AM plane crash, Mark Sanford coverage, Michael Phelps marijunana saga, coverage of Joe Wilson’s “You Lie” comment and other small breaking news events in the area.

The biggest help with breaking news came with Twitter’s location API, we are now able to search certain areas for tweets related to events.

I’ve also used Qik on iPhones to stream live video from house fires in 2009.

Other accomplishments include conceiving and implementing the use of other social media tools including Cover it Live.

CIL was most recently used in the the USC Baseball tournament which was lead by Neil White and Dwayne McLemore and with the Soccer State Championships lead by Akaliah Nelson and I.

Both of these examples have a high return on investment for our website.

Planning tweetups and other social-media-oriented community events.

As president of Social Media Club Columbia, we hold regular tweetups and events for our community in Columbia. In October of 2009, we held our largest meeting about the future of journalism with Dan Conover, Doug Fisher, Holly Bounds, Adam Beam, myself and Jeff Elder. You can find more here: http://bit.ly/1wmEMr

In addition to my work responsibilities, I’m also an award winning photographer. You can view my work here: http://bit.ly/8NB7AZ

I was also a first round finalist in the this years Knight News Challenge with my idea for Augmented Reality using data relationships. You can read that here: http://bit.ly/39Zc00

The thing that intrigues me most right now is location based services. I feel like newspapers have a really great opportunity to harness LBS for news. Everyblock is a start, but I imagine something more granular than that. You can read about that here: http://bit.ly/5NzoX9

I’ve also been very critical over the media’s (mis)-use of twitter. I’ve written numerous position papers for my company on what we can do to better harness social media and most of those efforts went unnoticed. http://bit.ly/397JLR

Everyone sends out a goodbye note when they leave. Here’s mine:

I’ve always believed in the power of journalism. The platform and delivery of information is not important, a well informed society is.

Good night and good luck everyone.