Independent on Sunday

A different online strategy: Lag behind deliberately

Sunday, 25 March 2007, 10:52

The Independent on Sunday today contains an article that seeks to justify its editor-in-chief’s famous scepticism about new media.

Looking at the Telegraph’s multimedia newsroom, Tim Luckhurst says it’s working well, but wonders whether the Telegraph’s readership really cares. Despite its Hitwise claims, the Telegraph lags behind the Times and Guardian in online readership among the quality newspapers. Moreover, he notes, nobody seems to commenting on the Telegraph blogs. And the bloggers themselves don’t seem to be very enthusiastic, having failed, in some cases, to post for weeks on end.

Then come the quotes from various unnamed sources, including a “leading web site editor” and a Telegraph correspondent, who appear to share the Indy scepticism about newspapers blogging, podcasting and video.

And then, in the final paragraph, comes the Independent view:

It is already clear that Telegraph readers appreciate web coverage that emulates the content of a traditional newspaper. That is excellent news for newspapers in general, but it does not prove that rushing to embrace each new item of technology makes editorial or commercial sense. Waiting and watching has often been the astute response to revolutionary technology. Those who pioneer multimedia may not be the ones to do it best.

Judging by various interviews with editor-in-chief Simon Kelner and chief executive Ivan Fallon over the past few years, this seems to reflect the Indy’s position. Fallon has predicted problems for the Telegraph’s integration efforts. The Independent’s strategy seems to be that it will deliberately lag behind the other quality papers online, leave innovation to others, and then pick and chose which new media approaches to emulate. In his interview with the Guardian, Kelner said:

We’re happy not being pioneers, because it means we won’t get shot in the back. Our approach has been - and will be for the near future - that we’ll go about things more steadily, we’re not going to rush headlong into massive investment.

The Indy, of course, sees its online foot-dragging as a hard-headed businesses decision. Newspapers-printed-on-newsprint, they like to stress, are still booming globally (a valid point for a newspaper group with major interests in growing economies like South Africa and India), and they have sat backed and watched as their traditional rivals have invested millions into their web sites. The Times this year spent £10m on a web relaunch, and the Guardian will spend another £15m on its site over the next 18 months. Kelner, by contrast, can boast that his more humble web site is at least profitable — and increasing the revenue it generates significantly.

But if the Independent’s short-lived experiment with blogging is anything to go by, there is, of course no guarantee that this approach will be successful. The innovators will be way ahead, having learned what doesn’t work as well as what does. Those who follow the pioneers will have to reinvent the wheel every time.

Perhaps it’s most telling that the corner of Independent News & Media’s UK empire that makes all the money — the Belfast Telegraph — is not as reluctant about multimedia integration as the flagship in London.

Comments

No need to e-mail the Indy; the conversation will go on

Tuesday, 9 January 2007, 15:24

In his column this weekend (which is either not online or behind the paywall), Independent on Sunday readers’ editor Michael Williams noted that “the only column on the IoS with an e-mail address attached is this one”.

This came after Williams had quoted extensively from the hilarious rant against reader feedback and interactivity recently put forward by Los Angeles Times columnist Joel Stein and reprinted yesterday in Media Guardian.

Williams describes Stein’s piece as a protest against the “American habit that is fast spreading into newspapers over here” of publishing journalists’ e-mail addresses with their articles.

In one passage quoted by Williams, the American columnist wrote: “I don’t want to talk to you; I want to talk at you. A column is not my attempt to engage in conversation with you.”

It wasn’t clear whether Williams agreed with Stein that publishing e-mail addresses is a bad idea. But after a brief complaint about the spam he receives as a consequence of being the only person on his paper with a public e-mail address, Williams invited further e-mails, particularly “treasures” like the one from Lt Col Philip Robinson of Andover, who recently offered this biting critique of the IoS’s journalism:

I would like to compliment you on your coverage though ‘Letters from the Front’ of the circumstances and feelings of our military engaged in operations … It is something that should bring them pride.

I’m not sure I understand how sending fawning notes to the ombudsman will help improve a newspaper’s journalism.

It is certainly true that publishing e-mail addresses can lead to an unwelcome deluge of abuse which make Lt Col Robinson’s kind note stand out. Perhaps the IoS is onto a useful way of using the Readers’ Editor as a firewall between its journalists and us, the great unwashed. After all, as the experience of the Guardian’s blog Comment is Free demonstrates every day, the public brawl approach to reader feedback does not guarantee measured, constructive debate, either.

But why throw the baby out with the bathwater? Thick-skinned reporters and columnists have long ignored letters from the green-ink brigade, and they can safely trash the e-mail equivalent along with the correspondence from Viagra-pushers and offers of cash from Nigerian businessmen.
What journalists can no longer afford to ignore, however, is legitimate criticism and offers of new information provided by knowledgeable members of the people formerly known as the audience.

Stein’s jeremiad was a reaction to the new media orthodoxy, famously championed by former San Jose Mercury News journalist Dan Gillmor, that news should become less of a lecture and more of a conversation.

But Gillmor’s phrase did not mean that journalists must spend all of their time engaging in individual dialogs with each of their readers. He meant only that journalists need to understand that truth is arrived at discursively, and that they should welcome — rather than be instinctively defensive about — public feedback, corrections and criticism from their readers.

Journalists who have embraced this view have understood that for any given subject, some small subset of a their audience will know more than they do, and that facilitating communication with such readers can only improve their reporting.

Ultimately, however, personal e-mail correspondence probably isn’t the key issue: If we ignore readers’ e-mails, or don’t even give them the option of sending it, their conversation will simply go on without us on these readers’ blogs.
Stein is no doubt aware of this phenomenon himself, because while he has been studiously ignoring e-mails, bloggers have already pointed out one significant factual flaw in his piece.

Stein asserted that Martin Luther had, in 1517, nailed his 95 theses to the cathedral as a work of individual genius which would have been diluted if he had been forced to engage with feedback from the masses. In fact, the monk had actually included a passage inviting comment and debate based on his argument.
“The Reformation was, you know, sort of a wiki”, wrote one online wag after Brad DeLong, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, pointed out the error on his widely-read blog.

Just as Luther invited interactivity, so should journalists. Interactivity may be threatening to columnists accustomed to making pronouncements from on high, but it does not diminish their journalism. On the contrary, correctives like this strengthen flimsy arguments and improve the factual record, which all journalists interested in truth-telling should welcome.

Have I got anything here wrong? Let me know why in the comments below. Valid points will be graciously accepted and will improve interested readers’ understanding of what I have written. Unconstructive abuse will be summarily ignored.

Comments