James points me to Tom Loosemore’s blog and his post about the BBC’s Fifteen Web Principles. It’s a great list, that centres on the most important person, the user. Many sites seemed to obe designed around constraining the user to do what you want them to do, is this really necessary?
I have lots of friends who are journalists, and they work on a wide variety of titles. Sometimes they agree with what they’re writing and sometimes they have to write what their editor wants them to write. It’s just like any job really, you gotta make sure you keep the boss happy or you become an ex-employee.
This means that sometimes journalists have to, er, adjust a story to meet the desired angle. This is something that unsuprisingly doesn’t always go down well with people who’ve been interviewed. Of course it’s not always bad intentions, sometimes articles have to be cut down to meet a word limit, they’re subbed by someone else, the journalist doesn’t have the specialist knowledge to get the big picture, or they just make a mistake, and hey, we all do that.
Like any job, there’s techniques journalists use that benefit them rather than their interviewee. A key one of these is the way you interview someone, if it’s in person or on the phone, it’s easier to push someone to make a comment, that with thought, they may not have said. Selective quoting of a rushed conversation can then be tweaked to push an angle or fit within that 200 word article.
Being quoted out of context can be quite unsettling, but historically there’s been little that you can do. The upperhand is always with the publisher as their distribution network beats yours. The rise of the internet and blogging in general, lets everyone have their own right to reply. Commenting on the articles of mainstream media sites has also begun to let passive readers correct errors on actual articles, rather than be reprinted in tiny type on page 64 four days later.
This week Wired Magazine tried to get a response from two blogosphere A Listers, Dave Winer and Jason Calacanis, they were happy to answer questions, in writing, that they would also publish on their blogs. Not a traditional thing to do, but something that was fair enough. They don’t need the publicity, they were helping out Wired, and didn’t want to be mis-quoted. Wired writer Dylan Tweney wasn’t happy with this, Jason then blogged about it, stating his suprise that tech-friendly Wired doesn’t do email.
Amusingly there’s been another response from Wired, this time Ryan Singel again calling Jason out for his stance.
Traditionally this kind of attack from a publication is quite hard to deflect, just think of all the gossip stories you read where a newspaper makes snide references to people, there’s never any comeback from the celeb or for that matter the audience. However this traditional stance against Dave and Jason has spectacularly backfired against Wired, if you read the comments to any of the Wired posts on the subject you can see a torrent of abuse from readers about how disappointed they are with the magazine.
The power of using your audience reach to steamroller an idea through, true or not, is definitely on the way out.
Owning a newspaper, a radio station or a TV channel has always puts you in a good position. You’re a gate keeper deciding what happens. In the multi-media world that’s changed slightly with the power resting with the platform operator, usually a large media conglomerate. I guess it’s easier for you to compete when you stop your competition appearing on the same platform.
Now though, the internet is the biggest platform of all, providing opportunities for anyone with great content to become popular and accessible.
Al-Jazeera English, the cable TV channel, is a very well funded organisation that is trying to create a news channel with a more global perspective. It’s well-known big brother, Al-Jazeera, hasn’t helped its expansion as some countries, notably the US, aren’t big fans. This has stopped the network getting much cable/satellite carriage in the States. This has caused the channel to make greater efforts on-line and has recently launching a channel on YouTube.
Using YouTube is a perfect way to counter any assumption that possible viewers have about the channel. By making available content YouTubers can decide for themselves what kind of channel Al-Jazeera is and whether they want to encourage their cable operators to broadcast it. The other interesting point about the venture is that they’re producing YouTube only TV content for the site too. This is something I think we’ll see more of, and when you think about it, makes perfect sense. YouTube is after all just another platform with a particular demographic, both social and geographic. As a broadcaster wanting to get closer to their audience, tailoring content is a very sensible thing to do.
Recent news from Rolling Stone that they want to launch a social networking site. It seems everyone is after one, they see MySpace and think oooh, we’ll have some of that. It’s also now very easy to set one up as there are loads of off-the-shelf bits of software that you can install and integrate into your site. However, unless your site is very very focused I see absolutely no point in doing it.
I think part of it is that there’s still a desire for website owners obsessing with having people come to their site to do everything. You can tell that the sales manager is in the background screaming “we need more page impressions!”. It’s the same in most media - “we need more spots” or “can we squeeze in another promotion?”. Money is of course hugely important, but these sales decisions need to be weighed up against the effect it has on the product and the relationship you have with your consumer.
I think the danger of trying to do too much is you dilute everything you’re about and it confuses the people who visit you as they’re turning up for a different reason.
If the thought behind creating a social network is a desire for them to get closer to their consumers then I think that’s an honourable aim. You just don’t need to do it yourself. There are some super-social networks - the Facebook’s and MySpace’s of the world - where lots of people virtually live. Surely there’s more value in connecting to them in their home environment rather then forcing them to come to yours. It’s a bit like saying our audience all like going to the local pub on the corner, so lets build a pub on a corner and maybe they’ll all come to us?
Naturally there are exceptions, the succesful sites are those who built tools that let users do something useful and different and then this collective act of doing something similar made the users coalesce into a growing community. The enabler for MySpace was new bands uploading music and for someone like Virgin Radio, their community has been built from people posting news stories/forum posts all connected through an establised VIP system that they sign up to all them to enter competitions/email the DJ and such.
