Letting a Picture Tell the Story

A picture is worth a thousand words -- but did you know it could also represent one thousand pieces of content?

Two years ago I wrote about Financial Time's (shortlived) Newssift, a business site that strove to create a business model around a new type of search -- with metadata exposed. With a naive go-to-market plan and too many months (and dollars spent) in R&D, the patience of the parent company were taxed, and Newssift was shuttered mere months after it was launched.

As a business Newssift failed. But the concept to use the metadata to attract and engage readers -- even if the graphics were simple pie charts -- was a bold move. Today news organizations like the Washington Post, The New York Times & PBS are using vast troves of content to drive sophisticated visualization tools as a means of telling a more complex story -- in an engaging way.

In some cases they are tapping their own archives on a given subject, in others, they are tapping the crowds. In this NYT interactive that appeared on May 3, 2011, readers were asked to weigh the significance and emotional response to the news of Osama Bin Laden's death. Each comments was semantically analyzed by sentiment, and that metadata were plotted in the multi-dimensional graph. Each blue dot represents a comment, which can be clicked on and viewed. The Times tapped the audience to create a visual that sums up the visceral feelings of its readers. 

Patrick Sullivan, veteran UX guru, founder and CEO of Modus, a digital agency that helps organizations like PBS and Bloomberg create exciting digital and mobile applications and interfaces, finds this type of visualization tool a terrific way to engage and extend the long form story. "Look at the corners of the map -- where strong polarization of feelings reside," he explained. "Of course, overwhelmingly, there is a universal feeling of satisfaction and that this was a significant event."

All three variables of information were captured and related in this graph. As you mouse over the points, a portion of the comment appears.

So how do news organizations, government agencies, museums -- anyone with large amounts of content --  do it? It's simple really: by exposing the metadata -- which plays right into the strength of the MarkLogic server. Sullivan will be joining me and MarkLogic's Principal Technologist Matt Turner on Wednesday, May 18 webcast at 11am to talk about these visualization techniques -- and what organizations need to do in order to have the content in ready-form to drive these terrific engagement tools. Sullivan assures me that this graphic depiction can work on mobile devices too!

Schmidt's Advice to Publishers

I was stuck at home with the flu so couldn't get out to the Newspaper Association of America's conference in San Diego. Bad one to miss. Most of recent years' events would have tested an insomniac's affliction, but this year, Eric Schmidt was brought in as a headliner to kick some -- er, motivate publishers to seek new ways to reach out to readers and focus on, wait for it, advertising.

Now, really, that is priceless: The 10-year old Internet prodigy telling the century old media scions a thing or two about audience development and making money from eyeballs. According to my friend and Nstein colleague, Christopher Hill, who bore witness to Schmidt's carefully chosen words in his closing keynote, Schmidt attempted to move the dial from foe to friend, appealing to publishers' egos by calling papers trustworthy and curators of the public record. He almost sycophantically exalted the printed form versus the web presentation. Simultaneously he wove in bits on cloud computing, networking and data mining. All of these strings were tied up with the meme of innovation. With these technological tools and newspapers' strengths for story-telling, he gave advice on how newspapers be more relevant -- and make money. But the fun began when the Q&A started. Someone asked Schmidt to speak frankly about what newspapers have done right -- and what would he do if his 'fantasy' came true and he woke up to find himself a publisher! He praised them for getting onto the web back in the 90s. Then he took a circuitous path to a direct hit: "What have you done for a second act?"

He said that first and foremost he would try and figure out what his reader wanted. Ha!! Those words transported me back to 1995 -- when we were launching two new "ezines" for IN Jersey's portal: The Surf Report and Neo. The duo were unapologetic in its embrace of Gen Xers who shunned pro-sport coverage (a staple of newspapers) in favor of X-treme action like surfing and (snow & skate) boarding. Our coverage was superb (yes we used real writers) and our national and even international following for both were robust and enthusiastic. At the time we asked our sister dailies if they wanted to repurpose our efforts in print. I might have just as well asked them if they would like to pepper their food with cockroach feces.

Newspapers thought they could shovel their product from their editorial systems to their web content management systems, and all would be right with the world. Any attempt to create content outside the bastion of the newsroom was met with contempt. There was no room for innovation for a newsroom back then. Neither in how they presented the news online - nor in their understanding of what was news.

While everyone blames the Internet for eroding print sales, could it be that the real problem was that newspapers didn't adopt coverage to their changing audiences? As if playing hot potato with NFL and MBA coverage "no, really, you take it" the major tv networks realized they just couldn't get the fan following particularly in the 18-35 audience -- and cut back accordingly. And that was a decade ago. And yet, papers devote proportionally massive real estate and man-power to covering pro sports, yet are derisive when they cover surfers who "flaunt the laws, and surf during rough weather." Just whom are they appealing to?

Last month at NAA's MediaExchange, Chris Dorsey, Digital Media Sales Director for Forum Communications paper in Fargo, ND was on a panel on contextual advertising. Dorsey was explaining how contextually speaking, Fargo is a cold place, and what is of interest to his constituents is what to do when it is cold -- or when the river rises. Beer blasts and drying up wet basements. So Dorsey created a home-page product called "Marketplace Offers." For $149 a month, businesses can advertise Ladies' Nite Specials or offers to remove mold. Every listing has a print or mobile response -- all facilitated by the paper -- a vendor doesn't need to have an IT staff at the ready to do this. Readers can subscribe for daily emails of specials. This morning's count: 125 business offers, or nearly $20,000 in monthly revenue for something with that should be exceedingly high margin (self-serve sales origination page).

This is what Schmidt was talking about. Know your audience and create a service that reaches it. Don't try and lock your content behind a paywall -- unless you cover a niche market and have created value for that information. What information do people find valuable? Is it alerts to buy a new car or to be notified of job opportunities?

The lesson is not just for newspapers, but magazines, bloggers, ecommerce folks, anyone. People pay for that which they perceive to be valuable – whether it is a lead, a job tip, where the ladies' night specials are -- or how to dry a wet cellar.

Joe the Plumber, Sarah Palin Between the Covers

Great article by The New York Times guest opinionator Timothy Evans who implores manglers of the English language like Joe the Plumber and former Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin to stop the madness and tear up those publishing contracts. Now the chances of them doing that are as likely as Palin not uttering a sentence like the following:

I had great faith that, you know, perhaps when that voter entered that voting booth and closed that curtain that what would kick in for them was, perhaps, a bold step that would have to be taken in casting a vote for us, but having to put a lot of faith in that commitment we tried to articulate that we were the true change agent that would progress this nation.

In case you had wondered, the transcription is no better than the aural interview, you still need a crypto guy and perhaps a firewire into her brain to decode. So it does cause pause to ask why would a publisher do this? Why indeed. The book will sell.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt recently announced that it was suspending acquisitions of new textbook manuscripts. And while the industry was aghast, it should look in its own mirror; the bestsellers have more to do with writers (or subjects) having a built-in audience than they do prosaic ability. In these tough times publishers want to know they have a hit -- and a loyal following is the first -- and perhaps only criteria.

What is a good writer to do? Well, all is not bad news. The Web has provided a democratic forum for we smiths of the word to hone our wares and develop our audiences. With social networking tools like blogs and Twitter we can create, market and build ourselves into a brand. And then again, we could always have a press conference, make outrageous claims and mangle the English language. Digg it?