It's Time to Blog Hard News on Your Site

By: Steve Outing One of the most common criticisms of newspaper Web sites is that they aren't timely enough. Sure, we're long past the days when newspapers held on to news till the presses rolled for the print edition rather than publishing right away online. But most newspaper sites still don't treat breaking news with a publish-right-this-minute mentality. The thinking remains rooted in a print-based past -- a story is published only when it's completely finished.

OK, now combine that thought with the concept of the Weblog, or blog. It's time for increasing the speed of news sites -- to that of television news -- and Weblogs are the way to do it. And it's time to stop thinking of blogs mostly in the realm of feature and opinion content, and move the concept into breaking news.

Blogging in Her Spare Time

A couple of weeks ago, a reporter for NBC affiliate KFOR TV in Oklahoma City, Okla., Sarah Stewart, was covering a high-profile murder trial. She spent her days in court watching and reporting on the proceedings, and produced TV news segments for the noon, early-evening, and late-evening newscasts. But she also maintained a Weblog for KFOR.com during the trial, using a laptop and cell-phone connection to the Internet to post hourly text reports -- or more frequently if courtroom events warranted.

Right now, this kind of reporting is unusual; in time, it should become routine. Think about that. KFOR used its Web site to provide more in-depth, timely coverage of a major local story than even its TV program could offer. And its reporter used time spent sitting in a courtroom listening to testimony or during breaks to compose and send in short-but-enlightening text using easily available wireless technology. KFOR viewers who wanted to learn the latest from the trial didn't turn on their TV sets and wait, they went to the Web immediately and read the latest.

I'd like to see this technique for covering breaking news applied on an almost-daily basis. Certainly you won't treat every story this way, but on many days there will be a significant story that warrants frequent online updates.

Let's say a major (but not earth-shattering) story breaks locally -- for example, a snowstorm hits your city, closing roads, causing a traffic fatality, and closing schools and offices. Rather than having a reporter write a traditional overview story that's posted online once it's written, recognize that this is an appropriate Weblog event.

Such a blog starts with a simple overview introduction: "A fast-moving snowstorm moved into the metro area late this morning, snarling traffic, closing schools, and resulting in several fatalities. The Daily News reporting team is covering this story, and their reports are being filed through the day on this Storm Weblog. Check this page often for the latest reports." (You'll get bonus points if you take this concept and add e-mail or other alert systems that notify users when a new item has been added. Such an alert "subscription" can be short term; the list of subscribers is deleted once the story is no longer news.)

Below, in typical blog fashion, are short reports filed through the day from the news organization's reporters -- in standard reverse-chronological order, so the most recent news is highest on the page. The storm blog becomes an up-to-the-minute report of developments -- from a traffic tie-up on the interstate, to an announcement about schools closing, to a statement by the mayor at a press conference, to a missing airplane in the storm.

Such an approach doesn't preclude longer, traditional articles. When the education reporter files a 500-word story on the schools closing, the first paragraph can go on the storm blog, with a "More" link to the full article.

Think Local and Global

While every big local story is a candidate for this coverage approach, major national and international stories are, too. A classic example is the Weblog written by the staff of Florida Today in Melbourne when the space shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry to the earth's atmosphere. The newspaper's Web site had a precedent of blogging shuttle launches and landings, noting new developments minute by minute as reporters monitored the story. Obviously, this became a huge story mid-blog when the shuttle crashed, and the landing Weblog became one of the most compelling pieces of journalistic content that day.

For ongoing stories, adopting a Weblog approach for a summary Web page makes sense. For an Iraq-news section page, consider redesigning it in the blog format. It's an efficient way for people to stay informed on all the latest developments in that story.

Variations on the Blog Format

Why don't more news sites take this approach on significant stories? For one thing, putting news items in a reverse chronological order breaks the convention that editors should be deciding the importance of stories -- and conveying that priority to the audience. A by-date-submitted news Weblog is akin to a wire feed, so the editors' gatekeeping function is reduced.

Frankly, some readers will want a by-the-minute update on latest developments. That's not a bad thing. But introducing news-priority and editors' judgment onto blogs could help. A simple (in concept, if not necessarily execution) trick is to give the user the option of viewing the Weblog in either "reverse-chronological" or "news-priority" view. The latter, of course, reintroduces editors' judgments about what's most important among the wealth of items being published about a story.

I'll take this a step further and suggest that news sites consider adopting this approach on all their section pages (Local News, National, Business, Sports, etc.). Get over the idea that a Web site's sections should adhere strictly to the editor-decides-what's-most-important dictum. Give online readers a choice of that, or a Weblog view.

Whose Job is This?

If you're still with me and don't think I'm entirely crazy with the notion of turning your news site into a Weblog, let's think about who's going to be creating the content.

The obvious answer: Editors will bear the brunt of the workload, in many instances. Our hypothetical Storm Blog will be comprised of contributions from multiple reporters. The point person for a newspaper's coverage of such an event is likely to be a story editor or assistant city/metro editor, and that person is the most logical candidate for managing the blog. With reporters trained to submit brief blog items throughout the reporting process, this should be a minor task for the editor -- who's dealing with managing all the information flow on the story for the news organization anyway.

For national and international stories, the Weblog should fall on wire editors.

The key to employing the breaking-news blog starts with training the staff -- getting reporters to gather and submit bits of information that work in the Weblog model, rather than collecting large stores of data before beginning the writing process. Photographers too should be trained to feed the blogs. (They can carry photo phones to instantly send in lower-resolution images for the blog, sending in higher-quality ones later.)

Better Than TV?

The great thing about the blog concept for breaking news is that it puts online news organizations on the same speed footing as television. You could even argue that this model outdoes TV news, because a news Web site can publish a new bit of information instantly. TV news operations can do that too, but it's impractical to interrupt non-news regular programming for all but the most urgent of headlines. The Web doesn't have that limitation.

Of course, with Web news, people have to visit the site to see that urgent news posted there. Alert systems, then, are critically important -- to "push" news out to interested consumers. Web publishers should be thinking about setting up e-mail or RSS (Rich Site Summary/Really Simple Syndication) feeds to alert readers to new content on breaking-news blogs.

RSS (the topic of my last column) is often thought of as part of the blog experience -- though the technology is by no means limited to blogs. In terms of breaking-news Weblogs, you should be thinking in terms of setting up temporary RSS feeds that interested users can use to track a hot, frequently updated story. That's something I've yet to see. Most current news RSS feeds are on permanent topics, like News, Sports, Business, etc.

Actually, RSS feeds are superior to e-mail when it comes to temporary hot stories because it's very simple to unsubscribe from an RSS feed using RSS-reading software; it's not always so simple to get removed from an e-mail list, and publishers have to deal with e-mail customer service headaches. (The flip side is that RSS has yet to hit the mainstream -- and probably won't for some time. I'll be writing more about the future of RSS publishing in a future column. Stay tuned.)

Push the Envelope!

By now, I hope it's accepted by most everyone in the news industry that Weblogs are not a fad. The blog is a legitimate form of online content with many useful news applications.

Till now, the few news Web sites that have experimented with Weblogs have used them more for "feature" content than for hard news. But it's time to push the envelope to blogging hard news.

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Letters

My last column about problems with e-mail publishing and RSS as a possible replacement generated a lot of letters and feedback:

Chicken Little?

Yes, let's claim that the sky is falling. The increasing amounts of spam are certainly a problem, one that many of us have been warning about for half a decade.

Unfortunately, during that time the resolution of this problem has been following a characteristic technosocial path: (1) The direct marketing industry claims there's no problem doing online what it does in print and claims that self-policing is the solution (as if self-policing really prevents other types of crime). (2) Half-witted technological solutions are launched, such as SPAM filtering (as if computers -- which can't even accurately translate between human languages -- could read and understand its context). And (3) legislators finally wake up to the problem only once it becomes so bad that their constituents are clamoring for a solution. Meanwhile, errant technologists proclaim that the medium of e-mail is finished (as indeed they would proclaim that highways were finished as a transportation medium if highways weren't governed and policed).

Spamming is an abusive conduct that will be made illegal this decade. No, these laws won't make spam disappear, just as laws against burglary, assault, and robbery haven't made those crimes disappear; but these laws will make spam practically disappear, as laws have against other crimes. Spam-filtering software or abandoning e-mail for RSS are boneheaded and alarmist alternatives to legal responses against abusive conduct. Moreover, consumers obviously prefer e-mail to RSS and aren't particularly likely to begin using RSS just to receive publishers' content. And, for publishers, RSS is even more constraining to that content than shoveling it onto Web pages is.

As to the specifics of your article, Yes, recent studies do show that 17% to 38% of opt-in messages are blocked by spam filters, but what you didn't say was this measurement was of purely ADVERTISING e-mails sent by marketers (see the details of those studies), a form of e-mail that are chock full of keywords that spam filters are designed to block. The percentages of news e-mails blocked are far lower, generally in the single percentages. So when you categorically write in a newspaper trade journal, "Let me repeat: 17% to 38% of the e-mail you send out to customers who ask for it -- or even pay for it -- does not reach them," you are misleading newspaper executives into thinking that 17% to 38% of news e-mails won't get through, when in actuality the studies you cite aren't about news e-mails. At PublishMail, we're tracking HTML open rates of more than 85% daily at each of our newspaper clients; the reciprocal 15% are e-mails bounced back, blocked by spam filters, or unopened. Compare that 85%+ daily readership rate against the 55% daily readership of print editions (NAA figure) or the 15% daily visit rates for newspaper Web sites (Nielsen//NetRatings figure) and consider whether e-mail publishing is "dying" as a medium for newspaper publishers.

Vin Crosbie
Chairman, Publishmail LLC

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What About Permission-Based Marketers?

Some great points in your latest Stop the Presses piece.

I agree that e-mail has lost a lot of value as a permission-based distribution medium in recent months. And I definitely see the value of RSS feeds for content sites interested in drawing traffic to Web articles.

But I don't see how RSS can fill the e-mail void for permission marketers, because it is not distribution per se. An RSS document is another form of demand-based index, not all that different from an HTML index.

For a permission marketer to make money on an RSS feed, it must be able to:

1. Get people to want to receive its marketing messages.
2. Get people a method to do so via RSS (a software reader or feed aggregator).
3. Get them to remember to come back to the RSS reader periodically and go through the marketer's messages.
4. Track use of the RSS feed itself by target audience groups, plus clicks through to any Web articles or indexes.
5. Target messages in the feed or supporting articles based on user demographics and behaviors.

Part of the value proposition for permission e-mail is that, once a potential recipient opts in, the marketer has theoretical access to that person's in-box anytime up to an arbitrary frequency cap (too many messages and you risk losing permission). And because opt-ins may well furnish information about their personal and/or buying interests, that data combined with even rudimentary open-rate tracking can provide pretty good metrics for permission marketers.

RSS is a Web service that typically requires no authentication. It bypasses Web audience metrics methods such as sessions and cookies. If you put an RSS file out for general consumption, seems to me it's very hard to tell who's consuming it.

The media biz has just spent eight years of time and who knows how much money getting to a point where we can target e-mail messages or display ads on Web sites. RSS frankly isn't designed for marketing, so most metrics features that would be most appealing to marketers aren't there.

Jay Small
Regional Director, News and Operations, East
Belo Interactive

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Not the Best Experience

I really agree with your comment about RSS aggregators not being a good reading experience yet. You do hit the nail on the head that there is no newspaper metaphor. Unfortunately, most of the software that is available has taken an e-mail metaphor/approach to the problem, which duplicates all the headaches of clicking and marking as read.

For when you write your "review of News aggregators" article, I wanted to turn you on to MyWireService. We actually are trying to go after the consumer market and are aiming for some of the UI enhancements you mention, e.g. we will have a "news rollup" view so when 20 folks you subscribe to are talking about the same thing, we'll show it at the top and you can see who else is talking about it right in place. We are still just in beta testing on this one though.

Gay Gilmore
MyWireService.com

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And From the Unwashed Masses...

I read your recent opinion piece with some interest. A couple of points do stick out for me:

"The spammers won. E-mail, for anything other than communicating with individuals you know already, is useless." (Michael Fraase)

Well, I am not a publisher, but one of the unwashed masses. For me (and for most people), the whole point of e-mail is to communicate with individuals you know (or get into contact with individuals you don't yet know). As a simple user, I can bear the "death of commercial e-mail" with great equanimity.

I have never been a fan of e-mail newsletters, far preferring visiting the relevant Web sites whenever I have the time and inclination.

I also find most of the other evils of today's mail system to be greatly exaggerated. I don't run Outlook, so I am comfortably safe from e-mail viruses; my client does not automatically download graphics in HTML e-mail, so my address is not all that easy to verify, and what spam I get, is silently and efficiently taken care of with Spamassassin.

I am moderator/administrator for three medium-activity mailing lists, and the added burden of discarding the daily share of spam to the lists is quick and painless -- and only a burden for me and my fellow admins. The mailing list users are blissfully unaware of any such activity, as it should be.

The only fallout I noticed from the recent spate of viruses was an abrupt increase in bounce messages from various virus filters. A quick tune of Spamassassin removed these as well. Oh, and another thing: ignoring the viruses, my impression (from looking at my logs) is that the amount of spam has actually decreased, not increased, over the last couple of months.

So, e-mail will no longer be viable for commercial mailings? Great! Then we can proceed to use it as the private communication tool it was meant to be, in peace.

Dr. Janne Mor?n
Dept. of Cognitive Science, Kungshuset, Lund, Sweden

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It's a Great Tool, But...

RSS is a great tool and it has a big and bright future ahead. But, does it replace e-newsletters? Not right now. Though, I'm using Feeddemon from Nick Bradbury and feeding it a ton of XML, RSS, and RDF links. I only check it a few times a week ... and that's only for a few resources out of the over hundreds in it. But, when I get a subscribed e-newsletter in my e-mail box, I read it every time. In other words, I can be as lazy as I wanna be and it'll come to me. If I have to go to Feeddemon or another news reader, I might not ever see it because I am too busy and getting sidetracked by other things. Plus, there are so many news feeds, it is impossible to scan them all.

Meryl K. Evans
"Content Maven"

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It's a Sign

OK, this is a sign. I was discussing this very same topic with a senior member in our IT staff just before reading [your column]. And I mean seconds ago! This is the way to go, we have to. Our e-mail system has been bogged down the past 2+ weeks with spam and viruses. We are stopping 8,000+ spam messages a week. Also, our headline service, which has my e-mail address, is now in most spam definition files. So users are not even getting our headlines! Needless to say we are pursuing RSS aggressively as well as some other ideas.

Eric Kaiser
Web Editor, sunjournal.com

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What About Your Column?

Your recent article is interesting.

I agree with you that e-mail may be in difficulty. Your article misses one very important point, however. I have read the article because I was on the mailing list of E&P Online.

This is the important aspect of e-mail, newsletters, etc. They are teasers that ask users to go on a given Internet site.

St?phane Labr?che
R?dacteur en chef, lesaffaires.com

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Other recent columns

With E-mail Dying, RSS Offers Alternative, Aug. 27
The Trouble With Ad Targeting -- and a Solution, Aug. 13
Blogs Have a Place on News Web Sites, July 31
Attract the College Set With Design, Interaction, July 16
How the Web Can Restore Journalism's Credibility, June 25
Targeting Technology Should Boost Online Ads, June 11
Previous columns

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