June 22, 2009
The British news site asks its users to help it examine thousands upon thousands of pages of expense reports of members of Parliament.
The Guardian is conducting a massive crowdsourcing experiment that invites users to help it investigate nearly a half million pages of expense reports and documentation submitted by members of the British Parliament.
The instructions are simple:
You’re amply justifying our hope that many hands can make light work of the thousands of documents released by Parliament in relation to MPs’ expenses. We, and others - perhaps you? - are still using these tools to review each document, decide whether it contains interesting information, and extract the key facts.
Some pages will be covering letters, or claim forms for office stationery. But somewhere in here is the receipt for a duck island. And who knows what else may turn up. If you find something which you think needs further attention, simply hit the button marked “investigate this!” and we’ll take a closer look.
How to get involved:
Step 1: Find a document
Step 2: Decide what kind of thing it is and whether it’s interesting
Step 3: Copy out any individual entries
Step 4: Make any specific observations about why a claim deserves further scrutiny
Examples of things to look out for: food bills, repeated claims for less than £250 (the limit for claims not backed up by a receipt), and rejected claims”
And the results are starting to show. Readers who combed through nearly 100,000 of 457153 pages of documents in the first two days of the experiment were turning up numerous questionable expenses or documentation.
The effort may not turn up any major fraud. But it’s a great way to engage a community as watchdogs and to increase awareness of how lawmakers spend public money. I bet the MPs will be more careful with their expenses if they know someone will actually look at them - and be able to post about them on the Web.
Could this be a model for local news organizations in the United States? Government expense reports, bids and contracts, and political contributions all seem ripe for crowdsourced scrutiny. The key may be to find a way to engage people with limited time in something that will end up worthwhile.
What’s your idea for a crowdsourced investigation in your community?
By Michele McLellan, 06/22/09 at 2:08 am
Posted in Audience development | Interactivity | Emerging roles and jobs
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June 18, 2009
Paul Gillin urges news organizations to re-invent their business model by becoming more service-oriented, seeking more small, local advertising accounts, and changing the game on Craigslist
Paul Gillin provided a hopeful - and challenging - revenue agenda for money-starved news organizations during his KDMC/NewsU Webinar “New Revenue for News Organizations.”
It is hopeful because Gillin believes local news organizations can use their local ties and expertise to serve residents and businesses and get paid for services.
It is challenging because news organizations must first give up the notion that advertising will come back in a big way or that they can charge for non-specialized content that’s available for free.
People who ask how to monetize their Web sites need to change their approach, he said. “Your opportunity really is monetizing your audience, monetizing your brand.”
Here’s a pdf of Paul’s presentation slides. A replay of his presentation, including audio, will be posted at NewsU by the end of the week and I will add the link to this post. UPDATE: Webinar replay ($24.95 at NewsU).
Focus advertising efforts on small, local accounts
The advertising market has become more efficient with the Internet and institutions that relied on inefficient mass advertising are hurting because of that.
“The advertising world will never be the same again,” Gillin said. “The question is not ‘How do we get it back?’ It’s not coming back. The question is how do we change the model?”
News organizations can better serve a $25 billion local advertising market that relies heavily on primitive means such as Yellow Pages advertising, signage and fliers. “Whole classes of business are not now effectively reaching their customers and need help in advertising more efficiently,” Gillin said.
“You’ve got to change your sales model away from large national contracts towards much smaller but more numerous local contracts. I’m not saying this is easy but this is where the opportunity appears to be right now.”
Do more than Craigslist with classifieds
Gillin cited the work of Reinventing Classifieds, saying news organizations cannot beat Craigslist at its game, but it can reinvent classifieds to provide more services than Craigslist.
For example, Craigslist does not enable users to compare offerings side by side or to rate products. It also doesn’t offer customers advice on effective advertising and marketing.
“Craigslist is not the be all and end all of classified advertising. I think there’s a lot Craigslist doesn’t do very well. So you can tap into classified with an eye to Craigslist’s weaknesses.”
Diversify the revenue stream by taking a service approach
Gillin says opportunity also lies in developing relationships with local consumers and businesses and figuring out how to save them time and money.
That might mean helping businesses organize and market events to sell their products, facilitating transactions (such as ticket sales) in exchange for a cut of the transaction, developing databases that save users time and money when they make consumer decisions such as buying a house in the local market.
News organizations also might offer memberships that entitle members special access to events and services.
If consumers are unlikely to pay for comment, they will pay for value-added information, Gillin said. That’s why the Wall Street Journal, Consumer Reports and Cooks Illustrated can charge - they save people significant time, energy and cost to research issues that are important to them.
Consumers will only pay for content with a “high level of perceived value. You can’t sell subscriptions to a commodity” that is widely available and often free.
By Michele McLellan, 06/18/09 at 1:34 am
Posted in 09 Class: Using Social Media to Build Audience | Advertising | Audience development | Business model
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June 06, 2009
At KDMC workshop for ethnic media leaders, USC/Annenberg journalism professor Dana Chinn advises editors to focus on specific audiences in developing new products
Dana Chinn presented ideas for identifying key audiences and missions for serving them online or in print at KDMC’s two-day workshop for leaders of ethnic media organizations this weekend in Atlanta, “Transforming Ethnic News Organizations for the Digital Now.”
“Focus on one audience and be as specific as you can,” Chinn advises.
Here is Chinn’s guide for planning a product for specific audiences:
1. Which online audiences do you need? Want?
2. OF those audience, which ONE audience is the mos urgent to address online? Is it:
- an audience you need but you’re losing in either print or online?
- an audience you don’t have but which is essential for your survival?
3. What will make a significant difference with this audience? Is It”
-a change in your current online produce?
- a new online product
I like this list because it forces editors to set priorities. There are a lot of great ideas out there. But connecting the best idea to the most critical audience sets the news organization up to be able to measure very specific results and see what’s working (or not).
As for what to measure, Chinn says unique visitor counts are unreliable (after all, a visitor is a computer not a person). She advises watching trend lines rather than fixating on the numbers and tracking weekly, not daily, uniques.
Chinn advises using measures that track engagement, typically ratios that show how people are using the site:
- Visits per unique visitor. Do weekly visits correspond to the number of times weekly you update the site? Are you updating a lot more than visitors are coming to the site (say daily updates for people who tend to visit twice a week?)
- Page views per weekly unique visitors. When they are coming to your site, are they really engaging with the content? Chinn cites an example of 3.8 page views fora daily newspaper and says that seems low. On the other hand, if the page view number is very high, it could indicate visitors are having trouble finding what they want.
- Bounce rate of top entry page, usually the home. What percentage of visitors land on the home page and then leave. Even with a high number of visitors, a high bounce rate spells problems.
By Michele McLellan, 06/06/09 at 5:50 am
Posted in Audience development | Metrics
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June 02, 2009
Aggregation, Facebook content, and personalizing reporting are part of social media inventory
I’ve been reading project proposals from 10 news organizations participating in KDMC’s class, “Using Social Media to Build Audience” which I am helping teach.
After a crash online course in social media, it’s exciting to see participants ready to adopt approaches that reflect a deepening understanding of how fundamentally the Web has changed the way people communicate and how news organizations can help them find and share information.
I’ll write more about specific projects as they take shape. For now a few themes are worth noting:
Aggregation. Editors see the potential value of becoming a guide to the local Internet, helping their users find blogs and online communities of interest off their sites, “creating a hub of networks that people might want to hook into,” as one editor put it. Coincidentally, one emerging model for this may be the Chicago Tribune’s ChicagoNow. Mark Potts explores this project in “The Future is Chicago Now.”
Pushing content onto popular networks. News organizations have often been reluctant to do this, instead thinking they must lure users onto their own sites. But some users probably aren’t going to come. So reaching them with content on such mega-popular sites as Facebook and Twitter becomes more of an option. Many news organizations have adopted Twitter news feeds and Facebook groups or fan pages. But there’s more to come. One class participant, for example, will explore publishing a youth-oriented edition on Facebook, using a new application developed by NewsCloud.
Personalizing reporting.The conventional voice of your standard news story sometimes sits stiffly in the informal spaces of the Web. Letting go of that detached tone feels risky to the traditional journalist, as risky as actually letting go of the effort to be impartial. The increasing personalization of content online reflects the rise of the individual brand. A couple of news organizations will attempt to navigate this challenge with class projects that take users behind the scenes via blogs and other reports on how they got the story.
The formal work of the class is finished until the project teams meet at Knight Digital Media Center at USC/Annenberg in July. In the meantime, class participants are working on their projects with coaches with expertise in social media.
By Michele McLellan, 06/02/09 at 4:23 am
Posted in 09 Class: Using Social Media to Build Audience | Aggregation | Audience development | Emerging roles and jobs
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