Blog News Watch

The four or five owners of major newspapers with websites really took a bundle of cash home in quarter three, with a growth of 21.1 percent to $773 million compared with the same period of time last year.

Since the NAA started reporting online ad spending in 2004 the figures have continued to grow, grow and grow for - believe it or not - fourteen quarters in a row. The print papers, with advertising spending dropping off in huge sums, must be giving the online industry the envious eye right now as they pick up all the cash that wasn’t spent in the dying print industry.

What does this mean? Papers who are still print papers should jump ship now. Not only is there more money, but when a ubiquitous distribution system is in the hands of almost everyone you might want to distribute to, it’s simply irresponsible to continue running printing presses and contributing to an already dire environmental situation.

To anyone who still prints media: get online, now. Whether you’re Rupert Murdoch or grandma, I don’t care; the money is online. The responsible thing to do is to get online. I don’t know how much more clearly it can be said!

Are newspapers themselves becoming less of a source for the public and more of a source for gatekeepers who do not stick to a corporate bias? I’d love to see some comparative ad spending data, since in the end it’s all a matter of economics and if sites like Boing Boing, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon can continue to filter the mainstream media’s content the average individual gets to read more great content in less time.

It seems you’re depending on the list you’re looking at; either Impact strikes at number one or number three on the News Values list.

When I was studying journalism, impact was the first on the list, but the list of news values that I used to plan this series had it down on number three. I wish I’d picked up on this before, but it is how it is.

In my opinion, Impact is the most important news value in the world.

Consider these two example story headlines:

Neighbors Fight Over Fencing

OR

Mother Kills Daughter During Fight About Preschool

Both headlines possess the news value of conflict (timeliness isn’t apparent but can be assumed), but which one has more sheer Impact?

Nobody cares about neighbors fighting over fencing, but when a mother kills her daughter because she doesn’t want to go to preschool, the reactions are certainly not so apathetic. Why? Because the story, and the events, made an impact.

When does impact occur?

According to a dictionary, when something has a strong effect on someone. That means when it offends their sensibilities, makes them emotional, or has to do with something the reader has a Strong Emotional Investment in.

The higher the Strong Emotional Investment, the higher the impact

Impact is all about emotions, so think about your readership and what the people in your niche are likely to be emotionally affected by. Remember, impact doesn’t always have to be negative, and I believe that we need more positivity in our information channels while the mainstream media does nothing but pump hate, war, violence and doom into our heads.

So do me a personal favor, and when you first try implementing Impact in your articles, try and make it a positive impact.

It’s a good idea to sit down and really analyze the type of readership you’re likely to attract. What creates Impact in a story depends on your niche and readership a lot more than most other news values.

Here’s what you do: define what your readers have a Strong Emotional Investment in, and what they have a Weak Emotional Investment in (what they don’t care about). You can leverage your list by writing stories with the following components:

• A criticism of something the readership has a Strong Emotional Investment in
• An article criticizing someone who has attacked or done something to damage the subject of your reader’s SEI (this will gain you favor with the audience as their “voice”)
• An article that connects a topic readers have a Weak Emotional Investment in with something an SEI, therefore making their emotional investment in it stronger and opening up further possibilities for future articles

How you use Impact is up to you, but learning to define it is the first step.

Since Facebook removed the word is from their status updates I have been a little worried.

Flicking through my RSS feeds, it seems several publications I enjoy and respect have written about this “development” and in some cases the posts are embarrassingly long.

I recently wrote an article entitled 5 Ways to Avoid Blogger Blindness and I think that it may just be time for the blogosphere as a whole to read that particular article. It seems they may have become a little blind as to what’s worth writing about.

And then, of course, when everyone’s refreshed and ready to get back to writing, they might find the News Values for Bloggers articles here useful.

Come on guys, is the presence of a two-letter verb on a website really that important? Is its removal really making so much of a difference in your lives that you have to write long posts about it?

If the answer to that is yes then this is not the blog for you to be reading. This is.

Some bloggers got particularly excited about the fact that Twitter was rendered obsolete by this move, which really made me laugh. For starters, Twitter was never such a crucial service to anyone for any purpose that it could be rendered obsolete. And secondly, you have to be logged in to Facebook to see your friend’s status message. Sounds like too much hassle to find out some pathetically unproductive and useless piece of information about your friend’s nosepicking adventures.

I looked really hard to find something profound in my Facebook friend’s status messages, yet I’m still here quite uninspired on that deep philosophical level.

I realize that this post has ranted on quite long enough about people who rant about insignificant things. It’s a countermeasure, you know. You’ve got to counter every opinion with its opposite in equal force and length.

And with that bullshit theory of blogging, good night.

Like the Wraith of Stargate Atlantis (I just revealed my nerdishly huge appetite for good sci-fi), Google are showing themselves more and more to be sucking the life out of the Internet, attacking those who would make an honest living out of it, despite many of those sites having great content (and on that topic, here’s some irony).

All the while, the splogs abound, supported by income from Google AdSense, while the company singles out legitimate AdSense publishers and cancels their account without paying out the balance for no real known reason.

It seems to me that Cory Doctorow was right on the money when he wrote his short story, Scroogle. Maybe in the near future the frightening events he describes will come to pass.

Also scary is that the need for a service with the same name as Doctorow’s story exists in order to protect your privacy; since Google keeps your search data for two years, one man created a site that accesses Google through his own servers to keep your search terms anonymous.

I recently posted an opinion article here on Google’s attitude towards site ranking which flies in the face of the very nature of the Internet and the values it was founded upon as an open forum free of nearly unbreakable entry barriers; something quite unheard of in the rest of our materialistic and corporacratic world.

Well, I’m sorry, but I’m just sick of Google’s monopoly on the Internet and its privacy-endangering habits. I am sick of Google sucking the life out of the Internet, especially after the news of the past few weeks regarding paid text links and the trouble it has caused for reputable services for honest website owners like Text Link Ads and PayPerPost.

Google is a company that was started in a garage, and that the citizens of the Internet once loved. It used to deserve that love, and it made the Internet a whole lot more accessible for everyone.

What happened to the “Do No Evil” policy that once set it apart from thousands of other corporations that really don’t care if their dollars came to them through evil or good?

I wish good luck to anyone who is actively trying to break Google’s monopoly, such as the RealRank endeavor.

Conflict is the first news values journalists use to determine newsworthiness, and the first news value that bloggers can apply to make more compelling content.

The second news value bloggers can apply to their writing is timeliness.

The mistake bloggers make is putting timeliness at the top of the list. Sure, blogging is more time-centric than many mediums for your message, but certainly not as much as newspapers.

And if blogging is more timeless than newspapers, and journalists put timeliness as number two… well, you should to. Get the order right: it’s important!

Timeliness: The When Factor

It’s a pretty simple concept: timeliness as a news value means that the closer in time your blog post is to the event that you are writing about, the more valuable that piece is.

It’s also important if you care about search engines because if you’re first in and best dressed, you stand more of a chance of getting indexed on the first page for certain search terms.

Choose Your Timely Stories Wisely

Sometimes a bit of considered planning is better than being the first to publish a post on something. Use your discretion here. If you can get an article out before everyone else and it’s a considered, useful, valuable piece, you’ve hit the jackpot… while the news is still timely, anyway!

If something requires perusal of long, complicated documents - legal ones, perhaps - then peruse them (and understand them) before you jump to conclusions and write about it. You can be sure of two things:

• Smart bloggers you are competing with will wait until they have perused, so don’t worry about them beating you too much
• Stupid bloggers will fire off a half-assed article because they want to be first and be flamed to hell and back for all the inaccuracies and incomplete thoughts they publish

Want to be flamed because you’re stupid?

…

I didn’t think so.

Timeliness is an important factor. The news values exist because writers have identified what attracts the readers interest; however, that same factor has also imbued many news rooms with an unhealthy mentality that is all about timeliness. It means many papers are driven by disasters and crises.

Value For Readers is your first consideration. News values, including timeliness, are your second considerations; always, always, always put value first.

Here’s the question to ask every time you find yourself rushing: does getting this post out before everyone else really provide much value to my readers?

Don’t get me wrong, I may have spent most of this article warning of the dangers of this news value, but it is still important. And while it’s important, the most important thing that can ever be said about it is a warning.

So use Timeliness - when it is appropriate.

Boing Boing is one of those sites.

One of those sites that pump out ridiculously great content at ridiculously fast rates and constantly make you wonder, how the hell do these guys monitor so much fantastic material on the web and get the time to post about it too?

Well, the writers don’t do all of the news gathering. They do turn it in into a palatable, intriguing lead that quickly helps you determine if you want to check it out or not.

If you look at any given list of Boing Boing posts, you’ll find that most of them came about thanks to a process similar to the Digg process, given away by the little “Thanks, (person’s name)” at the bottom of most posts. Sites are submitted to the team through a form by loyal readers who have found something interesting, and the writers serve as gatekeepers, only allowing the best stuff through.

This is different from the Digg system, where users submit links and everyone with an account can potentially be a gatekeeper. In reality it’s more complicated than this and isn’t such a representative social news system. I think sites like Boing Boing push through a much higher quality of links and news than those that end up on the Digg front page.

Of course, the authors do find and post a lot of material on their own - I’m not discrediting their work, after all, I’m a big fan. You’ll find a familiar name in this post, though that’s not my reason for loving the site I got into Boing Boing after I read Eastern Standard Tribe by contributor Cory Doctorow, who has some of the best sci-fi I’ve read yet.

During my daily perusal of Boing Boing’s articles a few days ago, I read this post on Dvorak by Cory. It links to the Dvorak Zine, which explains the system using a comic.

Hours later, the site was down - reason? Out of bandwidth, as I mentioned here.

Lately I’ve noticed two things:

• The Digg effect is getting less and less terrifying for site owners as click-throughs and page views diminish
• Boing Boing at the point where it can push a site over the bandwidth limit pretty fast

Now, my music site was featured on Boing Boing earlier this year, and bear in mind, one of the first things a person will see after clicking through to the post on my site in question is a link to download a free mp3 file.

As we all know, it takes a lot less mp3 downloads to overload bandwidth than comic downloads.

My site didn’t suffer or slow down at all; it took it rather admirably, and while music downloads skyrocketed for twelve hours, my bandwidth didn’t expire.

On the flip side, at this end of the year, Boing Boing is getting a reputation for knocking servers down and bandwidth through the roof.

It was a huge site before. Has it really grown that quickly and to that point?

People are getting tired of social news. First, they wanted to get away from editors with a bias in the mainstream media. Now, they’re realizing that too many gatekeepers means only mediocre, middle-ground content reaches the top.

Digg has a very specific audience. Young white nerds, to put it simply.

The contention is that as social news sites grow, they either become overrun with the Internet’s single largest demographic (young white nerds) or they are designed from the start to cater to that demographic.

They form the primary gatekeepers for news while surfers, people who are less likely to get involved and traverse the Internet so much and so widely that they become frequent submitters, find they’re not satisfied with the more specific demographic’s choices.

Social news, to be truly social, needs people from all areas of life to share equal prevalence in submissions and the same from those who vote and surf. Maybe it’ll work in the next generation or the one after, but the world isn’t quite that Internet media centric just yet and wider demographics not as deeply involved in internet culture yet. Most won’t become internet gatekeepers.

But Boing Boing’s gatekeepers are multifaceted:

• Mark Frauenfelder, a writer and illustrator who co-founded Boing Boing when it was still a paper zine
• Cory Doctorow (as mentioned), who is a sci-fi writer and anti-DRM-and-other-things activist
• David Pescovitz, research director, engineering writer and Editor-in-Chief of MAKE
• Xeni Jardin, a tech culture journalist who is always on TV somewhere or writing for Wired

Most of them are intimately involved with technology, but they’re educated professionals who make much better judgments than your average Digg teen.

Is it really any surprise that Digg may be giving way to more controlled inclusive media like the Boing Boing blog?

I have a confession to make.

I’m writing this to you from a QWERTY keyboard.

No, I haven’t given up on the Dvorak layout since I started three days ago; in fact, at only day 3, I’m loving it. But I have kept one computer on QWERTY while I learn due to the sheer amount of writing I have to do in a day—not to mention that once I switched my other keyboard, I had to take up a mammoth task that requires a lot of typing and has to be done within the next couple of months.

That said, I’ve spent most of my time on the Dvorak keyboard. I elected to modify my iBook’s keys first, and I switched them around in a matter of minutes.

On my Mac mini, though, I’m using a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic, and with some keys quite a different size to the others, due to the unusual shape, it requires labels and can’t be switched around.

I’ll switch it, once I’ve ordered the labels and I’m fully competent on Dvorak.

But as I said, I’m on Dvorak most of the time anyway. This keyboard’s a backup. I spend a lot of time coordinating with colleagues around the world and use my iBook for things like that—Skype, for instance—pretty much exclusively.

Today I spent over an hour coaching a new editor at the Free Articulator. That’s a lot more intensive on the typist than writing blog posts, as it’s real time instant messaging. I did pretty well keeping up with him, though at times it was frustrating.

And that, I believe, is why I’m getting used to it so quickly. People say that it’s near impossible to learn Dvorak while you’re still using QWERTY. I know it’s only day 3, but my experience is suggesting the opposite —maybe those people need to try using heavy instant messaging while they learn

It just challenges and demands more from you, and even though you’ll want to scream at something because your friend is pumping out messages at a ration of ten to your one, it means you improve. Way faster.

I’m faster than most say they are by day 3, and I’m still capable of touch-typing on QWERTY (takes a minute to readjust though). I have found at least one other report of being fully capable to learn and continue using both simultaneously.

My wrist pain is pretty much gone, so long as I keep away from this keyboard as often as I can.

By day three, things are looking great, looking like you can actually keep up two layouts at once, and Dvorak just feels faster and more comfortable (and the spider-stretching sensation when you go back to QWERTY that some people have reported is true).

In short? It’s still looking like the best way to blog if you want to produce heaps of content, much more quickly, with much less pain.

Note: at the time of publication the fantastic site linked to through the picture is down - it exceeded its bandwidth after it got Boing Boinged, but I’ve linked here anyway because once it’s back up it’s a GREAT resource.

Journalists are pretty much professional bloggers.

Sure, there are a whole gamut of differences, but there are enough similarities that some journalistic knowledge can go a long way to improving your blog.

I mean, these guys spent three years or more of their lives learning how to write content that has to grab attention day after day, right?

For the next few days, I’ll focus on how news values can help your blogging. News values were the first thing I was taught in journalism school. They slammed that stuff down our throats as if they were trying to get a dog to take its worming tablet.

The First News Value: Conflict

How many popular stories around the blogosphere did you see in the past week that were focused around some kind of conflict?

Unless you only read blogs about blogging, probably a lot.

Even the blogs about blogging experience traffic spikes when conflict gets involved. John Chow and Shoemoney actually considered planning some conflict to popularize their contest.

Conflict attracts readers like day old food attracts flies.

It holds people’s attention. It fascinates people to see conflict and controversy arise, while they become spectators waiting to see which side wins.

There are always two sides in a good conflict story.

There are always two polarized, opposing sides in any good story about conflict. There’s lots of conflict in the Middle East, but it’s so multifaceted and complex we only hear about it when there’s a clear polarity; Lebanon against Israel. Israel against Palestine. The list goes on, and it’s all polarized pairs (and usually one of them is Israel).

People don’t get the same rush from conflict when it’s complicated. It has to be simple, down the line polarity where readers can pick a side and root for it. It’s not always right, it’s not a good sign regarding the quality of human thought, but that’s how it works.

People will hang around until there’s a resolution.

So hold onto that resolution. Don’t throw it out there straight away, but don’t dissipate the tension altogether by ignoring it. Hold the carrot out there. Let them come back for a bite the next day. But don’t hold out too long - you just want them to take that second look at your site so the seeds of a brand can be sown in their minds.

Conflict also has the power to divide your readership, and if you take too clear a stance on something, do it for the right reasons: because you believe in that stance. Otherwise you’ll alienate readers who disagree with that stance, even if you don’t fully believe in it.

By the way, I’ve got a post on ProBlogger today - it’s about how you are perceived by readers and how your voice can impact this.

More news values for bloggers coming soon.

As I begin to type this post, it is 6:14pm. A few hours ago I pulled the keys off my keyboard and rearranged them in the alternative keyboard arrangement known as Dvorak. It’s designed to be faster, more accurate and cause less muscle strain than QWERTY. After only a few hours I’m exhaustingly slow but I can already see the benefits appearing as I slowly get faster. I’m not too shabby with the home row now.

The truth is that I have gleaned some unexpected benefits from this experience. I feel disabled. I feel as though my voice has been muted and it is terribly frustrating, having words in your head but not being able to get them out when at one stage you could think those words and they’d be on the screen already. I have been using QWERTY keyboards since, I kid you not, I was a toddler. This transition could be difficult!

It has, however, given me a new level of respect and understanding for the disabled (not to trivialize their position but that is truly how it feels after a lifetime). That understanding can only be beneficial for my work, because I frequently work with disabled people and admire the amazing outlook on life most of them have.

Can Dvorak help you as a blogger? Yes, if it does all that it claims to do.

Fortunately you have me to do the guinea pig work; I’ll be reporting my progress as I go. Then, you can decide whether or not to try it for yourself. And I’ll be able to decide which layout to teach my son!

I had heard of Dvorak years ago at Lisle’s Forward Motion, but decided to try it today on a whim after reading Cory Doctorow’s post.

To my 451 Press employers: be nice, give me some time before you come after me for not posting as much in the next few days
By the way, it was 6:14 when I started - it’s 6:37 now that I’m done!

Tags: dvorak, touchtyping

“Content is king” - now there’s something I’ve heard again, and again, and again. And again. But it’s the truth, it’s a fact, and that’s why it’s repeated so often.

Sometimes we fail to act on the simplest advice because it seems too simple to be helpful.

It’s how the biggest bloggers built their thrones; plenty of high quality posts, released at a regular frequency. But how do you create great content?

I have six simple rules that I follow. Sure, there are a lot of other factors that can improve your content, but if you keep these in mind, you’ll have the most important basics down.

1. Make it valuable

Creating value for your readers is the single most important thing a blogger can do for themselves, and for their audiences. If you’re creating value, then readers are getting practical advice and great benefits out of reading your content.

Which means they’ll come back, for as long as you’re producing valuable content.

Before you start writing an article, ask yourself: how valuable will this article be to my readers?

If it falls bellow a six or seven, it’s not worth posting, and even then you should be thinking about how to add value.

2. Make it interesting

Keep your use of language lively; throw passive voice out the window. Use language that is in present tense as often as possible - this creates a sense of immediacy, and keeps content fresh.

Use imagery where appropriate, but don’t overdo this. Nobody wants to know what shade of off-yellow the gunk coming out of your ear is, right?

3. Make it scannable

See what I’ve done in this post? I’ve stuck to one or two sentences per paragraph.

This little guideline came from my time as a journalism student, before I jumped boat to public relations; it’s used in news to keep things scannable, just like we endeavor to do to aid screen reading.

It doesn’t matter if your post isn’t news, but one or two lines of text per paragraph can really be helpful. Of course, there will be situations where it’s just not appropriate; in-depth reviews spring to mind.

Using plenty of bold subheadings to break up the text is an invaluable technique.

4. Make it sharable

Here’s a really simple one: when you’re writing your post, ask yourself if you’d forward the piece to your friends.

If the answer is no, use the Delete key liberally.

5. Make it legible

This one is related to no. 3, but has some differences that are important to understand.

Scannability is only one consideration in writing easy to read content. It truly needs to be a breeze to read.

I don’t suggest that you support the dumbing down of society that we’re seeing in this era, but I do think for the sake of web and screen readability that you should keep your word choices as short as you can.

Not all the time. Not religiously. But do this if you can and the quality of your content will be much better for the standard web-reader.

6. Make it snappy

If you can say something quickly, do so.

See what I did there?

You’ll notice that these six rules keep two overarching principles in practice: the principle of giving your readers what they need, and the principle of making it easy to digest and integrate into their minds.

Of course, if you’ve got a case of blogger blindness you won’t be able to tell what’s valuable and what’s not, or even if you can, you’ll ramble on for ages trying to get it out clearly. Clear your head first.

As long as the solutions you’re suggesting are sound, then you’re well on your way to producing great content.