Last week we had a chance to talk with Wade Roush, the Chief Correspondent for Xconomy. Wade is a veteran science and technology writer and previously worked for Technology Review. He has a weekly column called World Wide Wade and you can also follow him on Twitter at @wroush.
We spoke with Wade about two topics: the future for newspapers and the evolution of Twitter. Below is the transcript of the first half of our conversation – we’ll post the second half next week.
RaceTalk: Since the news that the New York Timeshas demanded $20 million in concessions from the Boston Globe, there has been a lot of news, especially in the Boston area, about how they can survive. While I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone that the Globe has been in some deep financial trouble, hearing that the largest newspaper in our area might not be around much longer was a little shocking. What was your initial response when you heard the news?
Wade Roush: I wasn’t surprised about the extent of the Globe’s financial troubles, what surprised me was the public way it played out on the pages of the Boston Globe and the New York Times. What also surprised me was that of all of the things that the Times Co. managers could get really aggressive about, they chose to get aggressive about pursuing concessions from unions. I don’t hear such sort of aggressive language about how the Globe needs to do a better job for its readers or explore new revenue streams or become a nimbler or more flexible operation – all the things that are probably going to have to happen if the Globe is going to survive. That’s what surprised me.
RaceTalk: There has been a lot of discussion about how newspapers can increase their revenue, and one idea that has been heavily talked about is charging readers. After reading your story “Boston Can Survive, Even Thrive, Without Today’s Globe” and another story in Media Nation I was convinced that enough people will turn to other sites or news outlets if the Globe begins charging online subscription fees. Do you think Boston, and other areas around the country will see more niche sites develop as their regional newspapers struggle to survive?
WR: I think you’re right that charging people for content, even if you have a system where some content is free and some is behind a firewall, is a tricky and hazardous route to go. I think that has only really worked for publications like The Wall Street Journal, where the publication is indisputably the only place to get certain kinds of information and they have a captive audience in a particular industry, and obviously with The Wall Street Journal the captive audience is the financial industry. So I think that’s not a model that would really be transferable to a lot of other newspapers or publications. I do think that you’re going to see the journalism business breaking up, fragmenting in a way into lots of smaller publications, each employing a smaller number of journalists, publishing most of their content for free, and having to search around for a combination of other income sources to sustain themselves.
RaceTalk: What do you think about the way the Boston Herald charges for content that’s outdated by a week or so?
WR: That’s a really interesting practice that they have there. What that does for me personally, is when ever I go to the Herald looking for an old article and I run into that paid firewall, I stop. It stops me from searching the Herald. I don’t go further. It’s not worth it to me to pay for access to an article when I can’t really tell in advance if it’s something I need. There is no way to give a preview of the whole article without making you pay for it first so I think it retards people from having access to your content. I’d be really curious to know how that works out for the Herald; what percentage of people who hit that point where they’re asked to pay for something really do pay. I would be really surprised if it was more than ten percent. I’d be surprised if it was more than two or three percent. So I think the net affect is to drive people away.
RaceTalk: It seems like some newspapers are so used to the same revenue models that they have trouble adapting to the Internet and. Do you think newspapers will be able to find a successful online revenue model, or are they beyond that point?
WR: I think you need to separate out newspaper websites like Boston.com from their newspaper overlords in this question because I do think that there are a lot of newspapers that have a lot of smart people working on the website, who understand social media and have started to make use of it, and who have picked up on the more conversational and social nature of blogosphere and have emulated that and adapted it back to the newspaper setting in a way that also reflects the standards of journalism and objectivity. There are some promising examples of newspaper-owned websites that could well survive on their own as websites with a much smaller staff then the staff of the overall newspaper. So if you’re asking whether newspapers can find online revenues that would make up for the decline in print advertising and the decline in print subscriptions I think the answer is definitely no, there is no way that the Web is going to help newspapers survive as print newspapers. The print side is gradually going away, unless the newspapers can figure out some way that no one has seen yet to make print advertising more appealing to advertisers and to make paying hundreds of dollars a year to get a bunch of dead trees on your doorstep every day appealing to customers.
RaceTalk: It seems that some newspapers are reluctant to go online only. Do you think that they can learn something from Xconomy about becoming a successful online-only news outlet?
WR: I think Xconomy is just one example along a whole spectrum of examples of journalistic organizations that are making the decision to stay online only and looking for a number of ways to support that financially. In our case, we have a combination of venture and angel-type investing that’s backing us up, and relationships with local underwriters. Underwriters are basically companies that we have a long-term relationship with whom we promote by putting their logos on the site and we receive resources from them in return. It’s a very different kind of relationship than the very shallow relationship that a publication would have with its providers of display advertising. So that’s one way to do it. We’re only two years old and like most other start-ups, we have an idea, a proposition that we make to our readers and to our underwriters, and we’re still working really hard to show that our model can succeed. To be perfectly honest, it remains to be seen whether this model can succeed. We’re all going to work really hard to make sure it does, but I’m not sure that Xconomy in particular provides a solid model for newspapers to look to. I think it’s going to take lots of different experiments and lots of different types of revenue streams. Newspapers are going to have to look at lots of different ways of supporting themselves before they find a combination that works.
The Meltwater Social Web Analytics team came round today to tell me about their plans for their service. They are starting out with the confidence and aggression that typified Meltwater’s entry into the ‘traditional’ media monitoring six years back… and they’ve done pretty darn well in that regard.
For speed to market, they are currently white labelling Techrigy‘s rather nifty SM2 service (shout out to @aaronnewman), and I understand this will form a ‘base’ or a foundation for their endeavours going forward.
I enjoyed our conversation. In the short hour we had together we covered approaches to quantifying influence, assessing Twitter, semantic analysis approaches to gauging sentiment (aka tone), the growth in the number of Social Web Analytics vendors, the importance of the UI and ‘prettiness’ of charts, and pricing.
We debated my assertion that no one service serves all needs right now, and that a stable of differently capable services (often at different price points) is required. We even had time to chew over how Racepoint Group has achieved such distinct leadership in this field and the prospects for data visualisation.
Data visualisation
Which is a super segue to another couple of interesting videos on my continuing obsession with and search for data visualisation technology and approaches to assist PR consultants in influencing and be influenced more effectively and efficiently.
The AlloSphere space consists of a 3-story cube that is treated with extensive sound absorption material making it one of the largest anechoic chambers in the world. Standing inside this chamber are two 5-meter-radius hemispheres constructed of perforated aluminum that are designed to be optically opaque and acoustically transparent.
There are currently two projectors, soon to be multiple high-resolution video projectors, mounted around the seam between the two hemispheres, approaching eye-limited resolution on the inner surface. The loudspeaker real-time sound synthesis cluster (around 500 individual speaker elements plus sub-woofers) is/will be suspended behind the aluminum screen resulting in 3-D audio. Other clusters include simulation, sensor-array processing, effector-array processing, real-time video processing for motion-capture and visual computing, render-farm/real-time ray-tracing and radiosity cluster, and content and prototyping environments.
Anyway, probably best understood in the video. If anyone has two large hemispheres they no longer want, please let me know @sheldrake.
On a more immediately applicable scale, check out SweetNTweet below. It shows a lovely little application (built with the open source Processing 1.0) in which search keywords are entered and to which Tweets from Twitter gravitate in the form of candy-coloured petals. On reaching their destination they reveal their 140 characters of wisdom and beauty.
Does it really show any promise of helping PR consultants visualise their landscape. Nope, but it’s really quite pretty and might spark something more relevant in your mind!
Pizza Hut isn’t a Stranger to Creating Publicity Stunts out of New “Positions” (2007′s VP of Pizza Campaign)
Seemingly undaunted, and hopefully encouraged, by the the recent fallout surrounding Domino’s aptly named “booger-gate,” Pizza Hut (YUM) officially announced its search for the “Twintern” today, after Stephanie Clifford noted the open casting call in the New York Times a few days ago. As Bob Kraut, vice president for marketing communications at the company noted to the Times:
“They’ll be our social media journalist, chronicling in 140 characters or less what’s going on at Pizza Hut.”
With so many companies trying to figure out a social media strategy along with best practices for using tools like Twitter, the idea of a Twintern seems like a win-win. As long as Pizza Hut understands that it’s just the first step in getting their feet wet within the Twitter and blogo-spheres, and they’re not a “journalist” just because they’re creating content, or micro-content in this case.
Pizza Hut, isn’t disclosing what they’ll be paying the Twintern to manage their new Twitter handle (Already 1,000 plus followers), but they’ll likely find a very talented and capable individual (Read: Their IT people are about to get inundated with applications) for a bargain-basement price. More importantly, they’re creatively using the “casting call” as a social media publicity stunt to heighten their mind-share in the space.
While content creation will be a big aspect of the new Pizza Hut gig, Clifford rightly notes that social media monitoring may be the more important job responsibility:
“The Twintern must also play social-media defense, monitoring Twitter for any mentions of the brand and alerting superiors whenever anything negative about the Hut is being said. (Applicants should study last week’s YouTube gross-out video posted by Domino’s employees, which was quickly passed around Twitter, to understand why.)”
The Domino’s case study is yet the latest example in a line of recent PR fire drills which have bubbled up from social media platforms as companies failed to respond in a timely matter (Motrin, Amazon).
While Domino’s has done a lot of things right after missing the YouTube video for the first 24-48 hours (pictured above – as it has been taken down), the delay in reaction put them in very a deep hole. A hole that wouldn’t have been nearly as big if they had quickly identified the video through Radian6 or a similar service and responded quickly within the YouTube community and through Twitter.
Since then, they have done a good job of following the crisis communications’ handbook by creating their own YouTube video response (below) with CEO Patrick Doyle and fostering conversations with their new Twitter handle (100+ more followers than Pizza Hut).
However, while the fallout from “booger-gate” has created an “opportunity” to grow Domino’s social media presence, Pizza Hut finds themselves in the more enviable position: cautiously observing and moving slowly into the social media space rather than falling in backwards in reaction to a crisis situation.
In this age of media convergence, journalist Darren Garnick is a jack-of-all-trades, simultaneously pursuing careers as a newspaper columnist, TV field producer and documentary filmmaker. He is the Boston Herald’s “Working Stiff” business columnist, has written political and history specials for PBS and field produced for CNN, ESPN, Lifetime and The Travel Channel, and also blogs about pop culture at cultureschlock.com. We had a chance to catch up with Darren recently and ask a few questions about himself and the newspaper industry.
RaceTalk: What types of stories do you like to cover in your column for the Boston Herald? Are there specific topics that you really enjoy writing about?
Darren Garnick: My official beat is the American workplace. I mock outrageous corporate memos, stick up for the cubicle guys and search the universe for unorthodox careers, offbeat characters and inspirational stories. The business pages have a reputation of being boring, and lately, depressing. I strive to make business relevant to the average person, someone who might otherwise flip or click past biz stories for sports or empty celebrity entertainment.
I understand these readers, because I personally dread sitting through Chamber of Commerce and Rotary Club meetings. However, business is deeply relevant to everyone, regardless of income or social status. It’s what we eat, wear, drive and breathe.
RaceTalk: What is the most memorable column you have written?
DG: What I enjoy most about journalism is the excuse to experience the most outrageous things — subjects that most people would never have an opportunity to experience — just for the sake of good copy. I once slipped into big clunky alligator claws for a few hours as the mascot of the Lowell Spinners (Single A Red Sox). The claustrophobia made me appreciate the amazing limberness and agility of college student interns.
I’d never profess to understand the challenges of being a working mother, but I also lasted 24 hours in a pregnancy simulation suit called “The Empathy Belly.” The suit’s inventor told me I held the longevity record for fake pregnancy, but I cannot confirm this.
RaceTalk: You have written about some very interesting topics on your blog. What have you enjoyed most about blogging?
DG: Freelance writing is a daunting exercise, and requires a willingness to accept a lot of rejection. With my blog, there is no rejection. Every single one of my ideas is brilliant and gets eagerly snapped by the editor-in-chief, who yes, happens to be me. It also allows me to track, for my own amusement, how many people are interested in my old work. I’m quite delighted, for example, that there is a small underground cult that worships the Costa Rican sloth.
RaceTalk: You’ve been involved with all different types of media (newspapers, blogs, TV). Which do you enjoy most, and which do you think has the most advantages?
DG: I am in love with newspapers and am mourning their national decline. My grandfather drove a delivery truck for the Boston Herald and he used to save all the front pages from the 1969 moon landing and the Watergate scandal and even the 1967 “Impossible Dream” Red Sox. My basement is filled with newspaper headlines (hope my fire insurance people don’t read this) and I’ve had fun photographing my children with famous headlines so they can later remember what they looked like when they were totally oblivious to world events.
But I also love YouTube. Being able to post short films there have opened up enormous opportunities I would never have in the pre-Internet era. I think that once enough newspapers collapse and the bloggers have nothing to write about or link to, there will be smart business people who will rehire the best journalists and launch more on-line mags like Slate and Salon.
RaceTalk: What do you think of the whole Twitter craze? Have you been tempted to begin tweeting?
DG: Funny you ask. I’ve been a holdout for a long time on Twitter. I never understood the appeal of updating your Facebook status every 10 minutes and Twitter just takes it to the extreme. That being said, I’ve found my Facebook status to be one of the most effective, low-pressure ways to send out article links. I can still blitz the masses, but it is less intrusive than an email because people can choose not to click on it. Sure, people can also choose not to open an email, but the Facebook status just seems more of a soft sell to me.
As for Twitter, I recently signed up figuring it “can’t hurt.” But I’m not sure how it helps more than the Facebook status, quite frankly. I am NOT someone who carries around a BlackBerry. I’m glued to the keyboard at my desk enough, I need to be off the grid for at least 10 minutes a day. But what the heck, please “follow me” @darrengarnick.
RaceTalk: Time Magazine recently published a list of the ten most endangered newspapers in the United States. What was your reaction when you saw some of the names on the list (i.e.: Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle)?
DG: Time got a lot of credit and buzz for this doomsday list, but it actually was first compiled by 24/7WallSt.com. That being said, it was a list that frightened the hell out of me and every breathing journalist. How can the Globe, the paper that used to weigh 250 pounds on Sundays, possibly go out of business?
Then again, how could Ford or GM possibly disappear?
Ben Affleck, who stars in that new newspaper movie apparently has figured out the whole circulation crisis. He just told the Globe that newspapers kinda deserve their fate because they didn’t ask “tough questions” about the Iraq war and the subprime mortgage crisis!
Aside from Affleck’s dubious credentials as a media analyst, this is laughable because most of the print media was anti-war after an initial honeymoon period with Bush and Rumsfeld. Google “Mission Accomplished” and “Iraq” and my point is proven. And newspapers declining because of inadequate early coverage of the subprime mortgage crisis? Are you kidding me? Newspapers were losing ads to Craigslist and Monster.com YEARS before anyone paid attention to careless loans, Bernie Madoff or U-Pick-the-Scandal.
The most convincing evidence I’ve witnessed about newspaper woes happened before a recent breakfast at the Holiday Inn Express. Like many hotels, this one provides a free USA Today at your doorstep. I always swoop in like a vulture on my paper, eagerly devouring the box scores first, then swinging over to world and national news, following up with “Life” for dessert. As I walked the halls at around 9 a.m., when most people are awake on a weekday, I noticed that maybe only half the newspapers were taken. My friends, a 20-something and a 30-something, left their papers on the floor.
If you can’t convince people to read the colorful, mind-candy newspaper for free, then well, the newspaper industry has a huge marketing problem.
However, I do think that newspapers will survive and eventually thrive again. Just in a different form. Maybe there will be a once-or-twice-a-week print edition that contains magazine-style stories and columnists who you can cozy up to on the couch, leaving all the breaking news to the Net.
Journalists disappearing? Who else is going to show up to those Zoning Board of Appeals meetings?
The 
and the prospects for data visualisation.
