News:Rewired -- valuable digital lessons for the book trade

Since its launch in January this year, I have been a 'serial' delegate at the News Rewired events (hashtag #newsrw  on Twitter) aimed at online journalists and anyone working in the digital field. Last December I went to event no.3, which was about building a brand and digital products to support and share content.

A link-by-link coverage can be found here, including reactions from delegates, and video footage of all sessions taken by the BBC College of Journalism are now available on YouTube.

To avoid repeating what dozens of other delegates have already blogged about in the journalism context, I will focus this post on what I learned at News:Rewired form the point of view of a publishing professional.

Doherty and C Words
Anthony Thornton , group digital editor at IPC Meda, talked about building a community, although 'building' sounds like a misnomer, since he says communities do not need to be built – they are out there already on the Internet, or they are people who just need to be connected and gathered into a community.

And how?

According to Thornton, there are four Cs to be followed:

• Connection - go out and link out to people
• Conversation - engage in a conversation, don't just host a forum
• Consultation - ask what people are thinking about something
• Collaboration - get people to help you with what you have built

He illustrated with his own success story of how his 2006 book on Pete Doherty's band, The Libertines Bound Together (Little Brown), ended up in eigth place in the coveted Sunday Times' Top 10 bestsellers' list, despite his publisher's naught marketing spend.

Thornton set up a page to promote the book on MySpace [today it would probably have been on Facebook] (Connection), ran tailored competitions for the band's fans, formed and interacted with a community of 1700 followers (Conversation).

He then persuaded his editor to allow readers to decide the book's cover design (Consultation); even the book's appendix was fact-checked by a number of key fans and 'influencers', who having been involved themselves, recommended it to others (Collaboration).

Going native
Thornton's success could have been partly down to the fact that The Libertines' fans already had a strong active online presence; even so I was delighted to hear how a little creativity on a non-existent budget went such a a long way in boosting the sales of a book.

As a digital enthusiast, I am surprised we do not hear more stories like this on a daily basis. After all...

(Image borrowed from James Lowery's presentation at News:Rewired on search optimisation for B2B and specialist media.)

Whether they have even heard of e-books or not, there is no denying consumers are spending more and more time online and not only through computers. In the age of Internet and information overload, attention spans are known to be shorter, reading habits hugely fragmented. But even those who don't have time to read books or newspapers, do find time to surf the Net on the go on their smartphones and iPads.

In order to get the attention of those time-poor but digitally savvy readers, and retain their custom, publishers should be learning to speak a language they can relate to, foreign as it may seem.

Forget discussions on iPad apps versus e-readers, debates about Google, Amazon and the agency model. They make great topics for forums and conferences for publishing types, but the average reader is hardly likely to be interested in what pricing issues are making book people hot under the collar. What readers seek, what all consumers seek, is added value for money – not only BOGOFs.

Social media sells brands
A valuable message I keep hearing at News:Rewired was that whatever the product, online exposure do help sell, and with minimum to naught PR cost involved.

A recent article in The Economist about public relations explained that, as mainstream media start to play less of a central role as the traditional gatekeepers of news, the value of their advertising slots also decrease for the PR man.

It is interesting that Nike, which, like Apple, is known as a brand so strong that it came to represent a certain type of lifestyle, uses both paid ads in mainstream media as well as Facebook, where, when I last looked, 3.5 million people had "liked" its page.

Anne Gregory, professor of public relations at Leeds Metropolitan University, however, explains that few PR firms run social-media-only campaigns. She told the Economist:

"All that is happening is that social-media elements are being added to traditional marketing plans."

So, a bit of the old, a bit of the new.

Nothing prevents publishers from taking a leaf out of Nike's book and maximising returns through free PR on social media outlets, building and managing an online community of 'likers' and 'followers'. There is of course the good old blogosphere, micro-blogging sites such as Twitter, plus a myriad of other social networking sites, but every publisher also has a website that serves as a portal to its products.

The questions that remain are: is that portal open wide enough and how many visitors are actually coming back?

Retention vs. acquisition

There are far worse things than paywalls to stop people from wanting to access what you have to show them, and that is a site which is closed to the outside world, a site that does not engage, invite participation or acknowledge users as a member of the community.

Joanna Geary, keynote speaker at News:Rewired, was inspirational in confirming the old sales motto that "the customer is king". Geary is communities editor at The Times, which is currently under a paid-for subscription model. From her days as a business journalist at The Birmingham Post, she was uncomfortable with the fact that an article's only measure of success was whether your editor was pleased with it. There was something missing: the reader.

Her new business strategy at The Times was based on engaging and building 'relationships' with the reader, something journalists are not accustomed to. Amassing numbers of what she calls 'eyeballs', or unique visitors to the site, for the sake of the advertisers, is less important than identifying and retaining those repeat customers/readers with a tribal sense of loyalty, she says.

The Times Online may have gone behind a paywall but Geary says there is now stronger loyalty among their regular readers, who keep traffic to the site stable. They feel they own and belong to the site they have to paid to get into, so they keep coming back. The site has become a place where community members meet to have grown-up conversations with each other. That makes sense.

You can see the video footage of Jo Geary' talk below, courtesy of the BBC College of Journalism.

Enhanced interacti..on
If building and servicing your community can keep readers loyal to a newspaper, why should it not be equally effective in the publishing industry? Imagine a book club type of space, where fans of an author could feed back impressions, write their own reviews, exchange recommendations on what to read next.

What if every book you bought came with a unique code that allowed you entry into such literary chat rooms? Similar fan sites may already exist for certain authors or product lines, but what about transforming entire pages within publishers' websites into community pages, where a staff member(s) in a sales/marketing+creative/editorial combination role could regularly talk with, not 'at', its public? Would it not make commissioning jobs easier, sell more books, create more buzz, keep readers feeling they are part of the tribe, and ultimately, loyal to the publisher's brand?

The really good news for cash-strapped publishing houses is that none of these possibilities require more than a good web developer and a personable community manager.

Conclusions

• Passive content creation and static, one-way PR are a thing of the past. Publishers of content, be it facts or fiction, ought to take heed and start re-evaluating their roles. Why shouldn't curated information be part of the creative process? 
• While UK publishers are obsessing about the future of digital books en masse, not enough are actively seeking to understand the 'lingo' the future consumers of digital products speak. What better way of doing that than reaching out for your own niche community in the online world?
• It is not what you sell but 'how' you sell it that will give you an edge in the future.

The News Rewired event may have been about digital tools and processes, but, as Neil Perkin, founder of digital and media consultancy Only Dead Fish, wisely said, we should not forget that ultimately...

 "It's not about the technology; it's about the people." 

A good place to start.

Why Cameron's open data Big Society will drive hacks to finally face up to technology

('Today We're Social' cartoon by Oliver Wibber - Geek and Poke)

On Friday the iPad finally arrived in the UK. If the frenzy of excitement among journalists on Twitter on the day of Apple's product announcement, and the number of hacks suffering from iPad-delivery anxiety last Thursday are anything to go by, it is possible the entire UK media community now owns Apple's new wonder gadget.

As if to justify their own purchases, a series of articles on "Why every journalist must have an iPad" is bound to follow, just as there have been articles written on why every journalist should own this phone, that camera, and the other recording machine. But must they really?

I am not one of those rushing to get my paws on what Apple-sceptic Charlie Booker called "the world's most expensive rectangle" in a Guardian column, but I have recently started acquiring a collection of other electronic appliances myself with the pretext that "I need them to develop my journalism work".

I do not randomly collect gadgets. I buy them as and if the need arises. The need is a very 21st century one, with tools helping journalists work more efficiently, be more mobile and flexible. But owning a piece of hardware, no matter how cutting edge, is only a first step towards making a tool effectively work for you. An electronic device alone will not write a story, let alone research it or fact check it on your behalf.

Journalism vs. technology
The first News:Rewired conference organised by Journalism.co.uk in January 2010, was an excellent eye-opener to what lies ahead for journalists in the digital age, as more and more tools and skills become necessary to keep up with the speed and complexity of information available.

Open University lecturer Tony Hirst (@pyschemedia), gave a fascinating presentation on data mashing (a summary is available on the News:Rewired site), which caused a collective brain meltdown among the audience of journalists, as he started demonstrating how to manipulate and analyse data using tools such as YahooPipes, Google Fusion Tables, ManyEyesWikifield, and several more. You name it, I hadn't heard of it.

The new  coalition government has since pledged to introduce radical changes in the public's 'right to data', making large volumes of government data accessible as part of their Big Society proposals.

From gatekeeper to masher
In the Media Guardian last Monday, Chicago-based web developer Adrian Holovaty was quoted saying that even though journalists may lose privileged status as gatekeepers of information because of the upcoming torrent of data availability, the more of it there is, "the more essential it is for somebody to make sense of it."

In other words, one of the key functions of journalists is about to shift from being fact reporters to that of also acting as data mashers and analysers. This could entail a hack being able to do more than simple sums and subtractions in Excel, being familiar with CAR (not an automobile but "computer assisted reporting"), knowing the difference between bag pipes and Yahoo Pipes, plus a smattering of coding knowledge thrown in for good measure.

Taking into account that government data will start being released in matter of weeks, not years, I wondered aloud on Twitter how many hacks actually have such skills today. The good-humoured tweet I received in response from James Ball of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism is not that far from the truth:

If geekery is not your cuppa
With so many  journalists coming from a humanities background and not exactly with a mathematician's nor a data analyst's head on their shoulders, this knowledge gap could prove to be a bit of a challenge in times to come.

The new generation of young journalists, on the other hand, may revel in this type of environment. Students of Paul Bradshaw of the Birmingham City University or of Murray Dick (former BBC trainer of online research at the BBC) at Brunel University, for instance, will have been trained in database journalism and are unlikely to shy away from experimenting with data scraping.

We could say all journalism is investigative. Yet if success in 21st century journalism is to be determined by how able you are to fish selectively from a sea of raw data, those who have been specifically trained in investigative technology, rather than techniques alone, are likely to fare better in the long run.

If the continuing recession further increases competition in the job market, will media organisations fill their rare vacancy with an old school hack with top-speed shorthand and traditional reporting skills or a freshly graduated young multimedia journalist, for whom social media tools, data mashup and most online technology may be second nature? Whereas one will have the experience and wisdom youth cannot buy, the other may have the resilience that brains hardened by experience may find awkward to handle.

Age matters
I was delighted to come across a blog by Andrew Brightwell, one of Professor Bradshaw's MA students in Online Journalism, describing how Tony Hirst's teachings had inspired him to use GoogleDocs to analyse swimming pool opening times in Birmingham. The same Tony Hirst, who had me dumbstruck with the complexities of the data mashing world had not intimidated this young journalist in the least but filled him with genuine "joy", as he himself admits in his post.

Those of us who are well past our school days, or not particularly technically-minded, however, may need a helping hand in sorting through and breaking down such great volumes of information. How else are we supposed to logically explain data to our readers, if we cannot ourselves make sense of it, analyse it and present it in small digestible pieces, maybe even with the aid of visuals?

(Photo: Infographics by The Guardian by tripu)

Back to school
Course providers may see a golden business opportunity there to cash in on crash courses for techno-phobe journalists, or those who may hate Excel. Conferences such as News:Rewired, geared towards digital journalists, are likely to become even more important as a place for acquiring technical know-how while networking with those who may have skills and knowledge you need but do not yet have.

While we wait for more specialised training opportunities to become available, some hacks have taken the initiative to spontaneously pursue coding lessons in a friendly, relaxed environment.

Two (or more) heads are better than one 
A group of journalists led by Joanna Geary, web development editor of The Times, and James Ball, started meeting up monthly in a London pub to learn a programming language called Ruby – over a few beers of course. You can follow their conversations under the hashtag #rubyinthepub or #ritp on Twitter.

Judith Townend, of Journalism.co.uk, went along to one of the Ruby evenings and wrote a report of her impressions here. Her general view was that whether the journalists actually managed to learn and digest any of the coding taught by the programmers, it was most significant that the Ruby In The Pub meetups opened up dialogue between the two parties.

The lesson might be that, if you are not nerdy enough to be a geek, you might as well have a geek as one of your friends.

Community
In the US technologists already collaborate with journalists within digital communities, such as Hacks/Hackers, aimed at helping "apply technology lessons to journalism".

The community even has a useful Question and Answer forum (image below) for media technology issues, which I believe might soon turn into a type of wikipedia for journalists struggling to keep up with the technology.

OWNI has published an interview with Hacks/Hacker's co-founder Burt Herman, which illustrates the spirit of collaboration among the founders.

In a dog-eat-dog world that journalism can sometimes be, partnership and teamwork risk being overlooked in favour of solo performances and a single place in the sun. But when outcomes are best achieved through conquering technological challenges not everyone may be comfortable with, forming specialist communities to respond to those emerging needs, to exchange and share knowledge, seems like a no-brainer. The age of journalists living in ivory towers is long gone.

United we stand
Friendship is not a bad place to start for geek wannabies either. Over a conversation about multimedia skills necessary for the modern journalist, Sarah Booker, of the Worthing Herald, and I discovered a common desire to learn how to podcast and are planning to get together in a few weeks' time to trial out our first joint podcasting session.

Once we become confident, it is likely we will each go off and do our own, but it is very comforting to be able to work with another journalist on such collaborative terms. It reminds me of how much fun I used to have as a child going over to a friend's house to do homework together. It may not be Ruby, but it still feels like a gem.

As the data dams open up and government figures come flooding in, it remains to be seen whether journalists, who have so long fought for their release, will die of ecstasy or simply stand frozen in sheer bewilderment. Whatever happens, if the data release will be as large in scale as the government is promising it to be, investigative journalism will  never be the same again.

Will hacks be able to hack it?

It might not be too soon to start joining hands, brains and gadgets, and order some more beer at the bar.