WAN Quote of the week

“That Google guy makes me nervous… it feels like if I turn around he’ll shoot me in the back of my head,” and someone else quipped “…and apologise later”.
I heard this during some idle WAN chatter at the closing party last night and I thought it was quite amusing.

WAN over but not my stay in CT

Dan and I went to the airport today, tried to check in and discovered our booking was for Sunday not today so we called up some friends, organised a place to stay and are looking forward to a chilled weekend. Things seem to be taking on a gonzo feel right now.

Media 24: traffic from search engines “negligible”

I just heard Francois Groepe, CEO of Media Newspapers, Media 24 say that they don’t see search engines as a threat because the traffic they get from them is “negligible”.  This is news to me.

He then continued that, on a national level at least, media should co-operate to fight off this “threat”.

WAN Innovation discussion

I am in a session discussing a roadmap for media to become innovative.  There is a lot of talk about processes for making a company innovative.  I have to ask – is it not contradictory to put more processes in place to try engender innovation?

Is the idea that if you production-line “innovation”, is there a higher liklihood that something will come out that works?  I think the key to innovation is rapid development and prototyping, not processes – unless the processes are there to create barriers between the innovators and the beauracratic operations of the business.

Strategic uncertainty

On the stage we have a real strategist – those people who talk about strategy itself rather than anything concrete. I can learn something here. To be a good strategist you need to:

• Never mention an actual outcome unless it is another piece of strategy
• You must say things like “a vision of the future” in the same sentence as “commitment” and “prescience”
• Lament how hard it is to predict the future, while selling that as your golden art, kinda like alchemy without the gold
• Use random examples that no-one can challenge you on, like using the railroad as a metaphor for uncertainty
• Always attribute extremely large sums of money to strategic failures
• Know which books to quote from as the seminal texts of the strategic canon
• Reduce the complexity of life to the right strategic decision or the wrong one
• Directly after doing this, refer to luck as a key factor in choosing between right and wrong
• Make sure at this stage you have positioned yourself as the luckiest mofo to walk the earth, hence: you want their money and they cannot afford not to give it to you
• Have one of those scatter graphs that no-one can possibly understand, then refer to vague areas of it as low levels of commitment and sort of snigger at the little dots
• Make sure everyone knows that there are no empirical grounds upon which to dispute what you are saying, just don’t say it that way.
• Have a graph that shows a 50/50 split between two colours and then start referring, somewhat banefully, to the radical differences in variance between the two over the time. If someone challenges you on this, refer back to bad research methodology to explain the serendipity of your empirical results.
• Remind everyone that you’re there to combat uncertainty. If there is no uncertainty, emphasise that this is the condition of the HIGHEST level of uncertainty
• Don’t get drunk, people will see straight through you.
• Never refer to risk without a glint in your eye

Seriously though, you’re not a real strategist until you write a book.

Observations from WAN 2007 Part 1

Here is a collection of things I have noticed since I got here on Saturday:

1.  Anonymous bloggers would never say the stuff they do face to face – basically they are the kind of people that come out from behind the arras late at night and pour poison in your ear while you’re sleeping.
2. A lot of talk about online but not enough investment commitment
3. Example of a point I haven’t yet worked out yet.  Three me standing at a coffee table in suites.  The one says to the other, “Ek hoor net Internet Internet Internet, alles is net Internet” and one of the others says, “Ja, maar wat ek wil weet is – waar is die geld?”
4. Pink ties are cool in London but they look a bit silly here
5. Wifi and electricity cables are still not something you can bank on at the CTICC, even though there is a lot of it in places you don’t need it.
6. It seems like it takes an event like this for people to realise, as a group, that talking about the Internet all the time is a strategic rather than obsessive activity.

Eish, a punk night in Long street

Last night Matt and I hooked up with Nikki Friedman, Dave Duarte, Graham Knox, Chris Rawlinson, Amy Brooke, Porker, Salt Weasle, Uno De Waal and some other people and did a little drinking of beer. Here are some observations:

1. Dave Duarte is fun to party with but he, like me, sucks at pool
2. Nikki is not overrated, whatever that means
3. The new Stormhoek wine is delicious, dudes I want a case
4. Uno is a foozball badass
5. Brazilian is not just a shaving style
6. Mohammed makes the best boerewors rolls south of Pretoria

So, I am sitting in a most interesting session about free newspapers but I don’t have time to summarise it – I have some print media chores to do.

Front Page Design Vs Home Page Design

I have just sat through 5 minutes of Mario Garcia, the print design guru, talking about the relaltionship between print design and home page design. He is largely referring to his own experience and the Poynter Institute’s EyeTrac study.

As an aside, I have just sat through a lunch which was addressed by the deputy president. At our table was Dave Panos from social media company Pluck. I met Dave in Austin last year and love the Pluck business model.

Garcia just introduced Al Trivino as the next design guru. His presentation is called Secrets from an iPod generation. Newspapers face both a technological and aesthetic revolution. The changes can be embraced without foresaking the values of the traditonal press.

“Newspapers need to develop an attractive and dynamic syntax.”

“As technology is developing were are seeing how design in is becoming more image-driven,” he says referring to the redesign of The Guardian, which has 20% of its home page as images. He also pulls up Aftonbladet, which is over the top in terms of images and ad sizes.

Okay I have to duck out of this session, forgot to leave something for Dan at the hotel.

Reuters Masterclass with Adam Pasick the Second Life journalist

This is the session I have been waiting for. The Reuters bereau chief based in Second Life will betalking about his experiences, the type of news he gathers and how the process works. In my opinion this is one of the most innovative approaches to reporting on digital culture and the types of culture that are forming in MMORPGs.

The session is being introduced by David Schlesinger, Editor in chief, Reuters UK. He is talking about Facebook, user-generated content and how the industry is in flux. There era of one-way journalism is over. The need to bring together citizens and journalists is key to the Reuters strategy. They are working towards a collaborative model between audience, subject and journalist.

Adam Pasick, Second Life journalist, starts by walking us through the Reuters Island and discussing the currency. There are 6 million people on Second Life and as Reuters has gone into SL, so have other media. Reuters has a news site for SL, showing exchange rates, financial stats etc. They have done interviews with several people, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, inside SL so that the audience can join in. He shows the avatar they made for the Arch, looks great!

THESE ARE MY PEOPLE!!

Richard Sambrook, Director, BBC Global News says UGC comesdown to 4 different kinds of things:

1. Eyewitness contributions like the pics and videos of the London bombings. The BBC got more than 20 000 contributions. Last week the Cutty Sark caught on fire and the BBC footage used was from a reader because the journalists got there too late.
2. Integration of audience opinion with journalism. Nothing new here, it’s been around for years with radio phone-ins. Online you use blogs and comments and there is nothing difficult about this as long as the reader knows what comes from the audience and what comes from the journalists.
3. News is broken on the web- e.g. Rathergate and some of the military bloggers. Journalists follow this up and report on it.
4. Network journlaism: someone in the audience always has specialist knowledge that the journalists can tap into. Tapping into this can drive up standards and quality.

Social networking is becoming increasingly important via applications like Facebook, Twitter and other new social networking sites. There is a generational shift where interactivity and the social aspects of media seem natural and do not have the same set of dilemmas for young people as they do for the older generation.

Rebecca McKinnon, Co-Founder of Global Voices, is talking about the unequal distribution of media coverage in the world, especially the lack of international coverage of Africa.

One of important elements of the Global Voices project is to bring some of the voices and opinions to the forefront that one doesn;t, ordinarily, read in the newspapers.

She refers to bloggers commiting “random acts of journalism” and how there is always a mix of personal and public-relevant content – this goes to the value of aggregation and editing of blog content.

Didier Pillet, Director of Information Quest France. Er… but he is speaking in French so er… I have no idea what he’s saying. Anyway, time to do some work on Amagama while I wait.

Dave Panos, Pluck, comments that its nice to be on the stage after having to beg for audiences two years ago. Blogburts is a “Reuters for the Blogosphere” that produces wires that can be incorporated into news sites. I met this guy in Austin last year and the company is awesome – the model is also excellent for filtering the crap on the sphere.

His examples come from the Austin American Statesman and the Houston Chronicle and with Ganett on USA Today. In each case, network journalism is being used by the media to enhance or establish sections of their content.

USA Today nearly trippled their pageviews when they relaunched. They also get over 100 000 comments per months.

The questions are going to be very interesting. The discussion right now is around how social media cannot be a bolt-on for media, it must become central to the strategy. In reponse to a question I posed about the breakdown of specialist users with high levels of participation vs those who do not have enough attention available, the responses emphasised access to technology as a possible leveller of the playing field.

Day 2: Integrated Newsrooms – what print does best and what online does best

Eric Newton from the Knight Foundation is doing the introducion to this session. He has begun by saying the world needs honest and independent journalism. That said, everything else is on the table, i.e. who a journalist is, what the media comprises and so on.

The topic of discussion in this session is the change from paper to multimedia and its impact on the newsrooom. He asks whether we can use the analogy of a shift from an analogue clock to a digital clock.

Jonathan Landman, Deputy Editor, New York Times, begins by demonstrating how NYT the paper has changed over the last 150 years. “My newsroom is a place of restless creativity”.

This message is pretty consistent with what I heard from Len Apcar in Austin last year. The site now has multimedia, the Times Reader, podcasts, blogs and a myriad other formats and platforms. These are all part of the integration project that the NYT went through a year and a half ago.

“We are now allowed to call the result of sacred labours… content.”

Landman mentions that the new building they have occupied is not specifically designed for integration. “It’s less about architrecture and more about who occupies those specific desks.”

Discussing the prototype of City Room, Landman points out that an important lesson they have learned is how to roll out products in stages of incompleteness. This is a major lesson for news organisations who generally cannot comprehend the launch of a product that will grow much bigger than it is at launch.

“The times of evangelism are over. What we need now is ways to manage all of this.”

He concludes that the same values that have made The Times successful must prevail.

William Lewis, Editor, The Daily Telegraph, starts by discussing reasons for their readical change. The graph on the screen shows print revenues stable or dropping and online revenues growing at about a 30 degree angle. “We had to move very quickly in order to be leading rather than being led.” The key change was to get over the type of medium and give readers what they want in whatever format they want.

“We no longer simply compete with other UK national newspapers… but with other web sites.”

In January 2006 they went on a world tour looking for best practices. Part of what they learbed was that their departments wrked differently and that some were better prepared than others. In May 2006 they started planning for the move to their new buildings in Victoria. He found a bunch of angry journalists keen on change and worked with them to produce a dummy web site with video and audio, and a newspaper. This pilot happened from May to June 2006. They got to about 70 people working on the pilots and needed a different structure – a round table in the middle, no more offices for senior executives. Face-to-face communication was key to producing to content at that pace.

One of the main objections from staff was lack of trainging. Lewis devised a five day training program that changed the attitudes of many staff as they realised why the new media can be exciting.

In May 2006 they moved to a new building 67,000 square feet for the editorial room. The move happened over 6 weeks.

The pilot was crucial. It proved that the layout of the office and the training was critical to producing the same quality content on multiple platforms. Workflow changes were also neccessary. “We have been overwhelmed about the amount of UGC.”

Their stats: 650 000 video downloads per month, 71 million page impressions, 7.5 million unique users. They have big screens displaying the stats about their stories in the newsroom.

Jennifer Carrol, VP/New Media Content, Gannet, starts my talking about the Local Information Center project they are working on. Talking about the process she says “speed is an intoxicant.”

Gannet have a lot of small and local publications and are working on unleashing local community interactivity.

Carrol needs to visit the Lessig school of presentation – her slides are filled with text and she is talking about things on a very abstract level. Her demonstration of the snow page on Cincinatti.com is quite interesting. The event produced record-breaking traffic because of the levels of interactivity and the UGC contributions.

Another example is their work on coverage of Little League. The community that developed around this page has grown massively because of the contributions of the parents who attend the events.

The impression I am getting from listening to this presentation is that Gannet have been reposnding to gaps in the market rather than following a comprehensive strategy, except in very broad terms. It seems to have worked for them, but I wonder how many different or disparate platforms they have to manage as a result.

Mike Van Niekerk, Editor in Chief, Fairfax Media Online in Australia, discusses the size of the company and his experience of integrating The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. These two sites get a combines traffic of 8 million unique users a month.

Sorry this guy is boring. I haven’t been listening. (ADDED LATER: but Matthew covered it and didn’t find it boring)