Alex Gamela - Digital Media & Journalism » future

Re-conceptualizing the news product – Guest post @ Innovative Interactivity

Alex Gamela — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 14:11:12 +0000

I wrote a post for Tracy Boyer’s awesome Innovative Interactivity blog. It is a bit different from the stuff that usually is posted there – it’s mainly about multimedia, and you should follow it – because I discuss the new characteristics that should be taken into account when creating digital news products. I’ll be writing an in depth series over each item soon, but meanwhile you can get the gist of it.

It’s not about just informing people anymore, it’s about creating a product that lets people do something with that information, creating richer and more immersive content, making it more valuable and with a longer lifespan.

The goal is to combine these features to create an integrated product, going beyond placing them along the content. Multimedia, interactive packages are a great example of integration of these items, but many tend to forget some that could make the information more useful and improve user’s experience.

These are just the main ideas for this concept, so I’ll highlight the most important characteristics for each element.”

Read the full post here

The failure of the single product business model

Alex Gamela — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 14:22:02 +0000

There's more than coffee at Starbucks, Baker Street, London, UK (© Copyright Gary Rogers and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Licence)

After a few months teaching online writing and multimedia narratives to journalists, I found out that their biggest question was never if links worked, how valuable video editing skills are, or why social networks have an impact in content distribution, they had already figured that out. Their biggest doubts were about how to make money with journalism. And I got some stunned reactions when I told them that was impossible.

My parents owned a business for 11 years, a small café, in the city centre,with a mixed clientele, from passing shoppers, bank workers, car mechanics, retired people and local fauna. In units, the product we sold more was expresso. If you ever been to Portugal you’ll know we love our shots of expresso throughout the day. But that was the cheapest product we had and without a great profit margin. So, if we relied our whole business on selling expressos, we would never make it.

And the clients changed according to the time of day, not only in type but also in needs: the working, early morning, breakfast yearning crowd had nothing to do with the late night binge drinking costumers. So we had different products for each one of those types: fresh bread and pastry in the morning, to go along with coffe and milk, and cold beer and spirits for an after dinner meet up over a football match on TV.

Key products for key types of clients. And that was just a local café. Take Starbucks for example: they will never be big in Portugal because they have already a huge competition in the coffee selling business and they have the worst and most expensive coffee that you can find in that block, yet they attract lots of people due to two main reasons: an attractive brand (you see Starbucks in the movies and the TV shows with lots of young, attractive, intelligent people), and variety when it comes to all the things you can do with coffee. Even so, they had to adapt and find refuge in shopping malls, when they prefer to be out there in the street.

So they figured out who were their clients, where they should find them and offered them not the same product as everybody else but derivatives from it, supported by an appealing image. So why don’t media companies do the same?

Information is out there, replicated at the speed of light, so it’s not scarce. Quite the opposite, as we know it rages in volumes. And though points of view may vary, the basic info is out there. Cheap coffee on the go. Different types of audiences, at different times of the day, having different needs. Yet the strategy is to serve them all bread and butter. Of course, there’s specialized media for specific audiences – sports, economics, music, etc – but I’m talking about generalist brands.

What was their product? Articles, usually wrapped in paper, that costed more than the product itself. With the internet, they lost the wrapper and the product no longer came in a package, but in pieces. So some decided to put the product in a box and charge for a peek inside. From coffee in paper cups to coffee in digital, exclusive mugs. Still coffee though, and most of the times as good as the competition’s.

The solution is to have more products than coffee, or sell beverages based on the black stuff but that only you can make and charge for it – I bet Starbucks here sells more cappucinos than expressos. This implies three things: new products, trained staff to make them, and know who are their consumers and their needs.

Unfortunately, many media companies haven’t been able to identify their online audience, erroneously believing it’s the same as their paper audience, and feed them the same stuff but in a different container. Worse, with the need to create better, more demanding, high quality products, they’re firing the most experienced to hire cheap labour. It’s like turning a gourmet restaurant with a good chef into a McDonald’s. Yeah, people go to MacDonald’s but it’s crap anyway. And they have their business strategy better defined.

So let’s get back to basics: what are the core elements of the news business?

Information

The amount of products based on information goes well beyond the 500 word article, but here are just a few ideas to use information in a more valuable way:

We have data, specialized professionals with access to specific sources so why not sell special analysis for specific audiences?

Databases are also valuable – imagine offering full access to all the data in archive to all the football matches ever covered in the first league.

Thousands of images are taken everyday by photographers, why not open a photo bank where they could be sold cheaply for specific projects or make them easily available for sharing and create a new stream of visitors to the original story? Think of the long tail.

Go beyond your “natural” market and expand. Have versions in different languages (at least one more, believe me it works).

New languages for new devices, unique content, immersive content.

Stop selling ad space, sell ads that are fit to be published in your environment.

And the one item that must always be constant: high quality information. Fast food will kill you in a more demanding world.

People

They do not only get the information, they distribute it and create on top of it. Support that. It’s like having millions of newspaper boys shouting out your headlines.

Transform the online audience into real people in the offline world: get to know them, organize meetings, gatherings, conventions. Make them pay for what you offer them there.

People have needs, identify them. The Guardian has a dating site, you could have your own real estate or job agency, whatever people need the most in your market.

Observe how their informational needs vary over the course of the day and the week, and offer them options to adapt your content to their routine. Understanding how your audience consumes news will help you create the right contents for it.

Make information useful. Being just informed is so 1.0. People must have the chance to do something with it.

Stuff

Instead of giving away books or DVDs with the Sunday paper, sell them cheap on your website.

Stop selling ad-space, get commissions for selling products directly on your pages.

You have a brand, if you get people to identify with it they’ll buy what’s associated with it. I don’t go to Starbucks, but I like their mugs.

And if you want more ideas from me you’ll have to pay me as a consultant. I’m joking, but depending on the strengths of each company there are many different options to make more money than with just the news. You have to evaluate what kind of information based products you can create and see if there are any markets for them, and stop thinking that you’re only a newspaper, or a radio station, or whatever news company fits you. And you are dealing directly with your audience, so you must get the most out of it.

You are a place where people go for coffee but have the option to get pastries, have lunch or a nightcap, and that’s what keeps you afloat. Not the least expensive product on the list.

Year Zero

Alex Gamela — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 15:01:49 +0000

A Brummie skyline. This was home for a good part of 2010

Though all the reflections about the year are usually made in its last week, I’m only writing them down now. 2010 was an amazing but busy year, so busy I had to leave this post to 2011. Here are my thoughts on it.

The first half of the year I was in Birmingham doing the MA Online Journalism with Paul Bradshaw heading the course. It was probably the smartest thing I have ever done in my life because I got to learn new things and meet amazing people, my colleagues included. I blogged extensively about my time there and some of my experiments during the course with online journalism tools and narratives, so you can browse the blog for more info on that.

I still have a final project to wrap up the MA, and that is one of my priorities for this year. But I’ll talk about this later, because I think I’ll need your help.

In the second half of the year I’ve been working as an instructor – which is different from being a teacher – training journalists to face the needs of the online medium. It has been a rewarding experience, and I’m surrounded by talented, skilled people, with different expertise and with whom I’ve been learning a lot.

In between I wrote a few articles for Journalism.co.uk, a big one for a documentary magazine, worked briefly for a major newspaper defining their social media strategy

And this is the good stuff. Not that there’s anything bad to say about 2010, it was a hell of a year, but with so many things happening I neglected a few things, like this blog. And I kinda lost my mojo (not mobile journalism). I am a reasonable juggler, but not at a Cirque du Soleil level. I had lots of ideas and opinions, you know, the stuff I used to share with all of you and that made me “famous”, but I never got to find the time to post them. That was my biggest regret in 2010, but on the other hand, I’m glad I didn’t, because it made me look at the big picture and see that there are too many “changes” going on. Yes, the inverted commas are supposed to have a ironic effect (both in “famous” and “changes”). No matter how interesting my ideas were, two weeks later they would be outdated.

We saw the iPad craze amongst the media tycoons, which is nothing but a feeble attempt to transport the print logic to a digital device (again). That is not the way, sirs. We watched the Wikileaks effect in different times of the year, and the debate about what is journalism, and what is not. I can say that debate is not journalism, and that once again media focused on the accessory and not on the important stuff. Facebook became the T-Rex of the web, and still many think it’s foolish. Sometimes it is, but it also has big teeth, and it’s smart to be in good terms with it. All in all, instead of broadcasting the news and make their content more interesting and valuable, most media faced the internet like if it was 1999. We’re a bit more advanced than that.

But this makes me happy and more confident about the future. The good stuff will survive and the bad will deliberately jump off a cliff. Never the Darwin theories have been so well applied to an industry.

2010 was year zero, for me and for the future of journalism. Changes are happening in different ways and in different paces, in different places, but the wheels are moving forward. We just have to enjoy the ride. 2011 is going to be the year to do things, after all the learning and thinking, all the mishaps and dead ends. Today is always a good day to start. I just need to be a better juggler.

Just do it, and make it consequent. That’s my motto for this year. What is yours?

PS: by the way, I’d like to thank to all the people that I met this year and helped me move forward, I could have never done this on my own. It’s a long list, but you know who you are. And to those who have always been there for me, well, you know…

The blog, the MA and the future

Alex Gamela — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 10:06:40 +0000

This blog has been neglected. There, i said it. Call the Blog Protection Services and i might lose custody. The problem is that i have a reason for that. Several, in fact, but these are the ones that matter, and most of them sound so lame i won’t even bother to list them, like “time” or “i needed a break” or a “fresh perspective”.

As you may know, i’ve been doing the MA in Online Journalism at Birmingham City University, under the guidance of Paul Bradshaw, for the last nine months. Best thing i ever done in my life: not only i got to learn with one of the best minds in online journalism, but i also had a great time living in a foreign country, a first for me. It wasn’t a life changing experience or anything like that, but it ‘s damn close. Now that i’m back in Portugal i’m slowly recognizing the effects it had on me, and i’m in what i call a “hangover period”. You know, you wake up a bit disoriented, and wonder about what you’ve done the night before? No regrets in my case though.

But since i was busy as hell, i put the blog aside for too long. I have a list of posts i want to write, and i’m starting to work on them this week. I have stuff waiting to be posted since last year, but now i know how to do it better. So pay attention to the forthcoming posts, i’m back.

Meanwhile, i was doing this MA like i said. I still have one project to do during the Summer, and i’ll talk about it here soon, but you can take a look at what i’ve done in the last six months in this blog post Paul wrote about the assignments and experiments me and my colleagues did.A timeline, the spontaneous online coverage of the Madeira floods, a multimedia project, those were some of my relevant efforts.

I’m proud of mine – though i think i could have done so much better - but my colleagues were great. Read the whole series of posts so you can have an idea of what we were doing. We got in touch with amazing people, and though sometimes the brits seem hard to reach, i met some of the nicest people ever related to journalism. Maybe i was lucky, maybe they were just polite, but what a difference! The small country blues hit me hard sometimes, but then i also realized that in Portugal we are not behind anyone, we have incredible people working in journalism and new media, the problem is that we don’t have many chances to grow. Well, we do, but no entrepreneurial attitude (i had a class on that), fortunately some people don’t think that way. But that’s for another post.

Anyway, i’m on a break now, doing this course in Porto, and then i’ll be working on my Summer project for the MA. And afterwards i may have a job that allows me to do lots of stuff on the side, and push the boundaries of journalism a little further. I have lots of ideas, so all i have to do is work on them, no matter if i stay here or change countries again.

The future is now, and there’s no better place than that.

PS: by the way, the reason why i’m writing english only posts is that writing both in portuguese and english is time-consuming and i’m a bit late, but i’ll try to go back to dual language soon.

Information is free. Experience and context are money.

Alex Gamela — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 10:02:27 +0000

All in? I don't think so...

If you are reading this via RSS go to the real post to enjoy its full effect. There’s free beer.

This has been in everyone’s mind: how to make journalism a profitable business? Ads, paywalls, premium and freemium contents, there have been many options, but none seems to be working. Murdoch builds walls while others tear them down.

Recently Johnston Press decided to give up their paywall since the subscription numbers were appalling, in the single or low double digits.

The stakes are high, and yet everyone is showing how bad poker players they are, going all in when they don’t have to.

The biggest problem is that there aren’t many users willing to pay for information they know they can get for free someplace else or that is not important for them. I’m not, for sure. Besides, most of the content news websites have to offer could be in print and my experience as a news consumer would be exactly the same, so why bother? So, how to keep those who want the free stuff, but how to profit from the content generated by journalists?

Imagine that you own a news content production company, and you have a team of talented people who can make good journalism, using different narratives;

video, audio, charts, maps, or mixed interactive content, like audioslides, mashups, etc;

Exhibit A

Imagine you have those people willing to engage and participate with the community, not only to dig for stories or disseminate their work, but to enrich the community member’s experience with information about the process, or personal views on the matter;

: information

I think that transparency and time are two valuable items, and that time is the most valuable of them. Communities are part of the newsrooms’ life whether we like it or not, both in the construction and the distribution process. Journalists are the quarterback/midfielder (choose metaphor according to origin) of the news process, receiving the ball and creating options and deciding part of its course, although when it’s out of its hands/feet they should still be focused on the game but let the ball go. The rest of the team is community and the goal is to inform, and like in a real game there are less players than passive audience. I’m still working on this specific metaphor.

Still, people would be part of it, pitch their own stories, creating a crowdsourced model within a traditional news structure.

Imagine you have tools that allow you to add context or media or extra information like raw bulks of data and that your reporters know how to build an online article with all its basic features but also with extra content that enriches the knowledge and experience of the user, using your own archives, other people’s archives, other websites that you found relevant to the story, ongoing conversations on Twitter and Facebook, ;

Imagine that. And think how you can do all of those things, with the same time, trained to deliver the basic and the ultimate news content. And consider to make some of that ultimate content available for free, just like the basic takeaway content you have. And ask people to pay a fee for the rest, and allow them to embed videos, slideshows, audio in their own websites, and help them look cool in their community because you create cool content. You don’t need to charge much because you are building a brand. The light bulb was sold below production price in the beginning because it was something everyone would use, and after a while, production costs lowered because there was a lot of demand, and then there was profit.

So this is how I perceive the future of the business will be, a mix between several models, that favors smaller endeavors than juggernauts, and based on quality and engagement, and new ways to create traditional content, in a contextualized way.

So, a rough example would be:

mock news picture

When,
tell if the situation is still ongoing and you can read more about it here (linked to related article) or it had a previous related event to which we will also link to or show the related media, or even better a timeline of the events
what happened,
specific details, more pictures, detailed info, background info
where , who was involved, how

Click here to view the embedded video.
yes free yourself!
and a basic WHY (that could be expanded to whatever you’d like). If it looks short to you, well, most of the info people read out of articles is all in the first paragraphs, where the w’s and h are.

People would have to pay for the contextual information in the expandable items. This doesn’t mean the free content would be poor, but that the extended content would be really rich.

I confess this is inspired/stolen from Kevin Sablan’s post, and he says context is personal. I say it’s valuable, and providing an experience through information is profitable. It is technically possible and with better results than i presented, and when you have algorithms gathering and producing readable information, it is wise to reconsider the whole news process, how information is collected, analyzed, produced and distributed, and do it in a way people can use it and be willing to pay for at the same time.

Did you clicked in all the links in this post? Why would you? And if you did, how different was your experience? Are you going back to click a few? I know you will now.

So, what do you think?

“The best and most influential reporters are becoming brand names”

Alex Gamela — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 10:07:22 +0000

Just a quick thought:

Journalists are embracing the tools of social media to create online personas. They are breaking free of the constraints of traditional media to blog and tweet everything from deep thoughts to random musings to personal information that was considered verboten not too many years ago.

Not everyone can be a one man media conglomerate, but reporters are encouraged by their editors to be more transparent and accessible to readers offering new opportunities for engagement. Brand name reporters are far more accessible than their counterparts in the era of old media. You now have multiple avenues to get to know the most important reporters covering your business. Keep track of their musings through various social media tools and connect with them when appropriate.

A reporter’s tweet can become an entry point for a conversation outside of the usual give-and-take dictated by a breaking news story.

A world without newspapers

by David Schneiderman

Some other good ideas can found there.

Looking back, looking forward | Olhar para trás, ver em frente

Alex Gamela — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 16:25:41 +0000

This is the time of the year where we look back and see how much we have accomplished, and where we are headed, or, at least, when we try to set a route for the next times. I always do that, but nowadays i’m basically going with the flow. Less talking, more doing, that has been my mantra.

But since i did a lot of talking (blogging) before about journalism, i wanted to recover a blog post i wrote 20 months ago. I think i wasn’t that far off from the truth, since i’ve been reading a lot of posts from smarter people than i am saying pretty much the same. Here’s a summary:

“There are five keypoints where changes must occur. Maybe there are more, but i’ll leave the others to you:

Method -> newspapers need to change the way news are gathered and presented;

Posture -> newspapers must change their editorial guidelines;

Involvement -> newspapers need to interact with the audience, not only regarding them as users or readers, but as people;

Investment -> newspapers need to spend money to make money, and charge less to more;

Technology -> use technology to make better, faster, unique;”

It’s newspaper oriented, but i guess it applies to any medium. Read the whole thing and let me know where i got it right and wrong.

Meanwhile, i’ll keep meditating on the path that led me where i am now, a small break for breath on the side of the road. I’ll resume my voyage soon. Happy New Year.

Esta é aquela altura do ano em que olhamos patra trás e vemos o que conseguimos fazer, e para onde vamos, ou, pelo menos, tentamos estabelecer uma rota para os tempos mais próximos. Eu faço sempre isso, mas hoje em dia ando ao sabor da corrente. Falar menos, fazer mais é o meu mantra actual.

Mas já que falei (bloguei) muito antes sobre jornalismo, queria recuperar um post que escrevi há 20 meses atrás. Penso que não estava assim tão longe da verdade, já que tenho lido muitos posts de gente mais inteligente que eu a dizer o mesmo. Aqui fica um pequeno sumário:

“Existem cinco pontos-chave onde são necessárias mudanças. Talvez hajam mais, mas vou deixar as outras sugestões para vocês:

Método -> Os jornais precisam de alterar a forma como recolhem e apresentam as notícias;

Postura -> Os jornais precisam de alterar as suas linhas editoriais;

Envolvimento -> Os jornais precisam de interagir com os seus leitores, não olhando para eles como utilizadores mas como pessoas;

Investimento -> Os jornais precisam de gastar dinheiro para fazer dinheiro,e cobrar menos a mais;

Tecnologia-> Os jornais têm que recorrer à tecnologia para fazer melhor, mais rápido e único;”

É sobre jornais, mas acho que se aplica a qualquer meio. Leiam o texto por inteiro e digam-me onde é que acertei e errei.

Entretanto, vou continuar a reflectir no caminho que me trouxe até onde estou agora, uma pequena pausa para ganhar fôlego à beira da estrada. Volto a fazer-me ao caminho em breve. Feliz Ano Novo.

(The Future of) Journalism in Portugal conference | (O Futuro do) Jornalismo em Portugal

Alex Gamela — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 09:03:17 +0000

Video: Comunicamos

If you are in the vicinity of Carregal do Sal and if you would like to join the debate around Journalism in Portugal, then you should attend the conference organized by the Rascunhos school newspaper. A high school newspaper!

The organizers, as you can see in the video above, are young, but eager to discuss journalism and present their project. Ricardo Sousa, the smart fellow on the left, invited me a few weeks ago to participate, but i had to decline, and now i feel sorry for it because it looks like it’s going to be good.

I was impressed with Ricardo then, when we exchanged emails, but after watching the video i am even more. This guy is going places. I don’t know his partner in the event, Romina Santos, but i know that their team effort will be fruitful, and i can’t express how much i admire them for doing this.

They’ll be having from young journalists to journalism teachers, to experienced reporters and newspaper board members. And they’ll take the chance to present the brand new edition of their school newspaper.

It looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun, and i will have to watch the video stream to compensate the fact i won’t be there. But i feel good knowing that there are kids willing to do stuff, and get into the debate. The future looks brighter this way.

Se estiverem por perto de Carregal do Sal e quiserem entrar num debate sobre o Jornalismo em Portugal, então devem ir à conferência organizada pelo jornal Rascunhos. Um jornal de uma escola secundária!

Os organizadores, como podem ver no video acima, são novos mas impacientes por discutir o Jornalismo e apresentar o seu projecto. Ricardo Sousa, o rapaz inteligente do lado esquerdo, convidou-me há umas semanas para o painel, mas tive que recusar, e agora lamento não poder ir, porque parece-me que vai ser bom.

Fiquei impressionado com o Ricardo na altura, enquanto trocávamos emails, mas depois de ver o video fiquei ainda mais. Este miúdo vai chegar longe. Não conheço a colega dele, a Romina Santos, mas tenho a certeza que o seu trabalho de equipa irá dar resultados, e não consigo expressar o quanto os admiro por fazerem isto.

Eles vão receber desde jovens jornalistas a professores de jornalismo, de repórteres experientes a directores adjuntos de jornais. E vão aproveitar a oportunidade para apresentar o seu jornal de escola, novinho em folha.

Soa-me que vai ser divertido, e vou ter que seguir pelo stream de video para compensar a minha falta de comparência. Mas sinto-me bem sabendo que há miúdos com vontade de fazer coisas, e entrarem na discussão. O futuro parece mais brilhante assim.

JORNALISMO EM PORTUGAL- Debate e apresentação jornal Rascunhos, 11 de Setembro 2009

Programa do Dia:

14h00min – Abertura Solene da Cerimónia

Intervenção do Presidente da Câmara Municipal de Carregal do Sal, Atílio dos Santos Nunes

Intervenção do Director do Rascunhos e Director da ESCSAL, Prof. Hermínio Marques

Intervenção da Co-Editora Principal do Rascunhos, Romina Santos

14h20min – Ínicio da Sessão de Palestras

“Um Jornal Escolar no Século XXI. Como? – Apresentação do Jornal”, Ricardo Sousa – 15 minutos

“Como se faz um bom Jornal?”, João Simão – 30 minutos

“Comunicação Oral Começa nas Escolas”, Carla Marques – 30 minutos

“Ética no Jornalismo”, Daniel Ricardo – 20 minutos

16h00min – Ínicio do Debate “Jornalismo em Portugal”

Paulo Querido, via Skype, Jornalista Freelance Multimédia

Vanessa Quitério, no local, Estudante de Jornalismo / Estagiária

Paulo Ferreira, no local, Jornalista, Editor Adjunto do Jornal Público

Bruno Faria, no local, Jornalista, Repórter para o “Jornal i”

Daniel Ricardo, no local, Jornalista, Editor Executivo da Visão

João Simão, no local, Professor de Jornalismo, Editor da UTADtv

Ainda em aberto a possibilidade de participação do Director do Diário de Notícias

moderam Ricardo Sousa e Rita Ferreira, Jornal Rascunhos.

18h15min – Final Oficial do Debate. Nota de Encerramento

Agradece a Presença e Fecha a Sessão:

Ricardo Sousa, Co-Editor Principal Jornal Rascunhos