journalism as a product

Journalism as a ProductAlex Watson

@sifter

What is the Product*?*And why does he keep capitalising “Product”?

Because Lemonade🍋

– James Harding, Head of BBC News

“Dissecting journalism can be like analysing a joke. It takes the fun out of it and misses the point: whatever

change is to come, our job remains to find out what’s really going on and report it.”

– Marshall McLuhan

“The medium is the message”

$100k testYou’re running a big news site, and commercial need +20% more page views. Budget is $100k. What do you do?

• Hire a big name columnist

• Investigative journalism series

• Snowfallssss!

• Get the UX team to do infinite scroll like Quartz etc

Every choice matters

Real world slow information / instant interfacesDigital world instant information / slow interfaces

What game are we playing… & how do we keep score?

– Jeff Jarvis, journalism professor, blogger and writer

“We should measure our success not on old mass media metrics of thousands of eyeballs that watched our

message, but instead on the answer to the question, did our journalism help you meet your goals, improve your

life and improve your community?”

Some advice.

Interfaces & Networks.

Interfaces• Where can you still have that direct

connection with a reader?

• Why would someone choose direct, as opposed to reading on a platform?

• (eg Subscription / high quality data / features / interface / archive / community etc)

• This will not be your scale audience, so your business model needs to be about high value transactions… ironically, the front page is now for the core audience (exact opposite of what it was in print)

Networks• Put your journalism onto platforms,

and get a scale audience

• Hard to make it work commercially in isolation… so embrace it for what it is: a way to get people to try you out

• Accept that you need to be fast, popular, fluid, adaptive to get people into your brand

“Art challenges technology, technology inspires art.”Ed Catmull, Pixar co-founder

“Technology challenges journalism, journalism inspires technology.”

Thanks. @sifter

Further Reading• Jay Rosen on “product” as a term at news orgs: https://storify.com/

jayrosen_nyu/newsies-techies-and-that-troublesome-term-product

• Paul Ford on Product Managers: https://medium.com/message/its-kind-of-cheesy-being-green-2c72cc9e5eda#.qu58mi1bc

• BBC Future of News report: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-30999914

• Facebook and the News ecosystem: http://www.cjr.org/analysis/facebook_and_media.php