links for 2010-05-13
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What a clusterfuck.
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Great story about 48 Hour Magazine in the SF Weekly.
This is the personal site of Derek Powazek. Deal with it.
How To Save A Newsweekly in 5 Easy* Steps
Newsweek is for sale. While sad, it’s also an amazing opportunity to reinvent what a newsweekly could be. And it got me thinking.
If I was in charge of a newsweekly, here’s what I would do:
- Make the website a central watering hole for people who care about the news. That means more than simply shoveling stories online (though that’s a start). It means really empowering your community, and including them in the news gathering and creation process. Invite participation. Realize that you’re not the only ones deciding what’s news anymore.
- Change the print publication to a high-quality monthly, containing the best of the best from the month. Create mouth-watering design that you can’t do online. Use the best paper you can find. Make something worth saving, collecting, and being proud of. Charge what it’s worth.
- Create the best iPad/iPhone app anyone ever’s seen, with design that’s specific to the device, and special content (video, audio, community interaction). Make the app free, but sell upgrades and digital versions of the issues. Remember that the app isn’t just a content consumption avenue, but also a content creation device. Include ways for the community’s voice to filter back to the website.
- Rely on members for revenue. Create member classes. Anyone can sign up online, but the free account has limited features (like, say, one comment per day, no profile page, etc). Add a paid Subscriber level that comes with more online access and includes getting the print version, a Supporter level that costs more but comes with more access and more goodies, and a Superhero level that costs the most and comes with yet more swag and status. (We did this on Fray and it helps.)
- Reach into the network. If your members use Flickr, Twitter, or Facebook, you should, too. Don’t expect everyone to come to you – you have to go where they are.
Moments like this tend to cause flare-ups in the old print vs. web debate, which is as tedious and pointless as it’s always been. Different mediums have different strengths. The web is just better than paper at delivering time-sensitive news. It’s idiotic to pretend otherwise. And paper is still good at things the web is not, especially in getting people to actually pay for it. The solution is to use each medium for what it’s good at.
It’s never been print vs. web – it’s attention vs. apathy. A bunch of people who care about the same thing is the most powerful, rare, and wonderful thing in the universe. It doesn’t matter how they find each other – web, print, a great disturbance in the force – it only matters that they find each other, and that they can do something with that shared attention to make the world a better place.
The real enemy is apathy. When no one cares, things get ugly. And the good news for newsweeklies is that there are more people who care about what’s going on in the world now than ever. They’re more connected than ever. And they want to put that energy toward accomplishing something.
If you can’t figure out what to do with that, someone else will.
* Okay, so it’s not easy. It’s actually very hard. That’s why Heather and I want to help. Hopefully it’s easier to change than to put yourself up for sale.
UPDATE: Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek, on the Daily Show tonight:
We have had it backwards. We produce a magazine all week, we close it Friday and Saturday, and it begins to go out online…. It’s probably time to flip that. You are solely focused on the digital, and by the end of the week you take the best of … then you print that magazine.
links for 2010-05-05
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In this explosive interview, we tackle the ins and outs of Facebook's Privacy changes.
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Watch it erode like a sandcastle.
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The net, at its best, can humanize corporations.
links for 2010-04-15
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I love this story.
links for 2010-04-09
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Joe Clark on the iPad's built-in accessibility. (And thanks for the compliment, too, Joe!)
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Daniel Sinker writes the "iPad is not for creation" debunking I've been meaning to write. Bravo!
I created this “content” on my iPad
Here’s a quick list of what “creating content” has meant over the course of human history.
- Mashing up plants to form a paste and smearing it on a wall.
- Dipping a feather in ink and dragging it against parchment.
- Lighting a fire and flapping a blanket over it.
- Tapping a cryptic series of beeps into a wire to someone trained to decode it.
- Fastidiously arranging backwards letters one by one in between leading, coating them with ink, and pressing them into paper.
- Tapping a numeric keypad in specific combinations in order to form words to be sent over a cellular phone network.
Given how much work communicating has been for the majority of human history, do you really think that a software keyboard is going to stop people from “creating content” on the iPad?
links for 2010-04-03
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Here's my version: Do it better or shut up.
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"If you care about the future of books, you need to understand the Google Book Settlement."
Fertile Medium
Heather and I have been avid Flickr members since the very beginning. So when Yahoo bought them and they started hiring, Heather was first in the door. That was 5 years ago.
During that time, Heather was responsible for the Flickr community as it grew from a small town into a worldwide superpower. As Director of Community, she’s learned some amazing lessons – the kind of lessons you can only learn running a gigantic creative community. Meanwhile, I started two companies and worked with dozens more. We both have traveled the world, speaking about design and community online.
Looking back at the combined 30 years of our work online, the theme is easy to spot. We love the web and the opportunities it gives us to connect, form relationships, create things, and grow community. The internet is the most fertile medium the world has ever known. It can grow beautiful things or ugly things depending on how you approach it. It takes a lot of work, and we love doing that work.
So when Heather decided to move on from Flickr, we talked a lot about what to do next. I’ve been a freelancer for a long time, but have never formalized my work life. This was just the kick in the pants I needed.
So we’re founding a company together. It’s called Fertile Medium. We want to help other companies to design better community experiences online. We’ll be saying much more over the coming months.
I should mention that I am, of course, still working with HP on MagCloud and will continue to do so as long as I’m able – I love the project – and Heather be continuing at Flickr until the end of April, and then will be taking a well-deserved break, so we won’t be available until June at the earliest. But if you think you might be able to use our help, you can reach us at “us” at fertilemedium.com.
Personally, I’d like to thank Flickr for all these years as a shining example of Doing It Right on the web. It’s a better web with you in it.
links for 2010-03-26
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"Episode 54 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week, Kevin Yank (@sentience) and Patrick O’Keefe (@iFroggy) conclude their conversation with Derek Powazek (@fraying), co-creator of JPG Magazine and creator of Fray, about the care and feeding of web communities."