The Brash Boys at 37signals Will Tell You: Keep it Simple, Stupid
By Andrew Park, Wired Magazine
To the 300 software developers packed into a Vancouver conference room, David Heinemeier Hansson was more than a programmer. He was a visionary, the creator of Ruby on Rails, a software template that powered an increasing number of hot Internet applications. He was a philosopher-king whose minimalist ethos suggested a new way of thinking about business and software. And he was a celebrity, with boyish good looks, precocious self-possession, and fans who invoked his name so frequently they used his initials as shorthand: DHH. As Hansson took the stage at the British Columbia Institute of Technology for this, the first Ruby on Rails conference, the room was filled with the kind of giddy excitement that greets the opening chords of a Hannah Montana concert.
The program billed Hansson's keynote as a collection of "beloved rants" and "favorite tales from the land of righteous indignation," and he didn't disappoint. He began by congratulating the nascent Ruby on Rails community (and, by extension, himself), citing a litany of impressive achievements: 500,000 downloads of the code, 16 how-to books, mentions in Wired and other publications, and several industry awards — including, for Hansson, the prestigious Hacker of the Year title, bestowed by Google and O'Reilly Media.
But not everyone was convinced of Rails' revolutionary potential. Critics had been saying that Rails wasn't versatile enough, that it couldn't handle large amounts of traffic, and that Hansson himself was arrogant. "Arrogant is usually something you hurl at somebody as an insult," Hansson said. "But when I actually looked it up — having an aggravated sense of one's own importance or abilities' — I thought, sure."
Then he clicked over to the next slide, white letters against a dark background that spelled out his response to the naysayers: fuck you. The crowd erupted into laughter and applause.
Hansson's programmer-with-a-messiah-complex shtick may be a hoary cliché. But in the nearly two years since he delivered this presentation, he and his partners at software developer 37signals have backed up the big talk. Rails has continued its run of popularity; over the years, tens of thousands of programmers have used it to create countless online applications, including podcasting service Odeo and microblogging phenomenon Twitter. And Basecamp, 37signals' Rails-powered, easy-to-use online collaboration software, boasts more than 2 million account holders. Signal vs. Noise, the 37signals blog, pulls in 75,000 readers a day. Hansson and 37signals cofounder Jason Fried are "revered," says business author Seth Godin. "They are as close as we get to demigods online."
What's more, the pair's once-heretical vision — that there is beauty and wisdom in Web-hosted, bite-size software built to accomplish narrow tasks — has become conventional wisdom. In the two years since Hansson's keynote, Google released Apps, the relatively feature-free alternative to Microsoft's bulky Office suite; Facebook opened its platform to independent developers, unleashing a stream of mini-applications that offer everything from playlist-swapping to Boggle bouts; Salesforce.com's AppExchange gave corporate software developers a platform for selling tiny, downloadable programs; widget wunderkinds like Slide's Max Levchin and RockYou's Lance Tokuda became Web celebrities; and venture capitalists opened their wallets in the hunt for the next little thing. "Simplicity is the most important thing in technology," says Paul Graham, cofounder of early-stage venture firm Y Combinator. "And it's only getting more important."
None of this has helped Hansson discover any hidden wellsprings of modesty. He has called Microsoft "entirely optional," referred to Java as "grossly overused," and described Flash applications as "horrid."
But if Hansson hasn't changed much, neither has the programming framework he created or the business he heads. For some, that's a problem. Hansson and Fried have steadfastly refused to grow their company, beef up their products, or explain their plans for the future. Now, critics argue, the pair's reactionary embrace of all things minimal has made their products less useful and could cost them influence, customers, and millions of dollars.
Hansson has a predictable response to such charges. "I don't usually go around saying 'Fuck you' to everyone I meet," he says. "But sometimes it's the appropriate answer."
The defining characteristic of Ruby on Rails is, as the name suggests, speed. Using Rails, an adept programmer can create a simple blogging application in 15 minutes or a photo database in five. Two guys built Twitter in two weeks.
In exchange for that speed, programmers accept a Hansson-knows-best approach to software design. While most programming languages require coders to build every new application from scratch, Rails gives developers a set of configurations that lets them bypass the busywork. That makes Rails ideal for quickly creating lean, sparsely designed Web-based applications, which coincidentally enough is exactly what Fried and Hansson think software should look like: as Fried puts it, "stripped down to the absolute bare necessities."
Fried developed his theory of streamlined software design in 1994 as a junior at the University of Arizona. He was looking for a simple database program to catalog his music collection. "I downloaded a bunch and they all sucked," Fried says. Instead of focusing on the relatively easy task, they were overloaded with options that only complicated the process. "I said, I can make this way better.'" So he created his own program, dubbed Audiofile, and peddled it as $20-a-pop shareware, earning enough to keep himself in beer money.
After college, Fried returned to his native Chicago, where he formed 37signals — a Web design firm, named in esoteric reference to SETI — and posted a manifesto on his homepage that railed against the shortcomings of most software. ("The Web should empower, not frustrate," he wrote. "Just because you can doesn't mean you should.") On his protoblog, Signal vs. Noise, he further developed his philosophy. "Remember — size does matter: A small group of 10 great people will outproduce, outwork, outthink a large group of 50 average people."
Fried's missives struck a throbbing nerve, and before long Signal vs. Noise was drawing a dedicated readership of programmers and designers similarly fed up with bulky, inelegant code and enthralled by Fried's edicts. It was through his blog that Fried met Hansson: In 2002 Hansson, then a student at Copenhagen Business School, provided some programming advice after Fried posted a question about the best way to handle pagination using a programming language called PHP. The two became fast friends. "Our outlook was the same," Fried says: "Keep it simple." So when Fried wanted an online collaboration tool for his employees, he again turned to Hansson. Working 10 hours a week over four months, Hansson wrote the code to support Fried's spare, airy interface. Hansson used a little-known language named Ruby — which most developers felt was too slow and limited to be of much use — and developed a series of shortcuts to help him build the program quickly and easily.
The result was Basecamp, a lean but effective platform requiring no costly servers, tricky installations, or technical support. Although he'd developed it for in-house use, Fried realized the commercial potential of the program after showing it to friends and clients who wanted an inexpensive and simple way for small teams to work together. When he released Basecamp in February 2004, Fried expected the monthly subscription fees, which today range from $12 to $149, to generate sales of $5,000 a month by the end of Basecamp's first year; they reached that target in six weeks. Five months later, Hansson packaged his Ruby shortcuts and released them as Ruby on Rails, which started winning converts almost immediately.
At the same time their software was taking off, so was the duo's cult of personality. In 2005, Fried gave a 10-minute presentation at Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Summit, the influential confab of some of the Internet's biggest minds. The blogosphere lit up
with praise. (The response was so overwhelming that Fried himself posted a blog entry wondering if 37signals had "jumped the shark." Commenters leapt to his defense.) In 2006, the company compiled a list of contrarian dictates — don't plan, don't hire, don't fix every bug — and published it as Getting Real, to rave reviews.
But the key to Fried and Hansson's burgeoning celebrity may have been their $895-a-seat workshops at which acolytes celebrated the gospel of radical simplicity. After attending one, Ryan Norbauer was inspired to tear down Lovetastic.com, a successful personals site that he had spent eight months creating in PHP, and rewrite the entire thing using Rails. Now Norbauer runs a Rails consultancy. "Rails has become a very big part of my life," he says. "I don't think I would be doing programming for a living without it."
That kind of devotion is common. After Sean Tierney read Getting Real, he bought 10 copies for his employees at Grid7, an application development shop, and insisted they read it. "Jason Fried is a genius," says Tierney, who today runs a software startup called Jumpbox. "He's the opposite of everything corporate."
Tucked away on a grubby side street in a gentrifying loft-and-warehouse neighborhood about a mile west of downtown Chicago, 37signals' offices hew to the company's small-is-beautiful edict. Actually, offices is a strong word: Headquarters consists of four desks shoved up against a wall. 37signals leases its 500 square feet of floor space from a design firm whose employees surround 37signals's work area. There is no 37signals sign, no receptionist, no indication that 37signals even exists. The company has just 10 employees, five of whom telecommute and none of whom are expected to work more than 40 hours a week. But 37signals hasn't remained small out of sloth or through lack of opportunity; indeed, it's taken some effort to keep it from growing. Fried says he has rebuffed numerous inquiries from venture capitalists looking to invest in his company. (The sole exception: Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, whose investment firm, Bezos Expeditions, took a minority stake in 37signals in 2006 for an undisclosed amount. The company has said it accepted the deal because it offered access to Bezos, not because of the money.) Neither will Fried entertain acquisition offers. "Someone on the outside would look at what we do and say, Let's ratchet it up to some enterprise level,'" he argues. "I don't want to make our software more complicated. I really don't understand why everyone's interested in Fortune 500 customers. I just don't get that."
37signals may not be targeting corporate behemoths, but its pared-down offerings may be inadequate for even its smaller clients, some of whom have urged Hansson to adapt Rails so it is better suited to handle popular applications. In March 2007, a Twitter engineer told an interviewer that he was having difficulty getting Rails to handle his company's massive spike in traffic. Hansson responded by sending a heated email to Jack Dorsey, Twitter's CEO, and chastising the company on his blog for playing the "blame game" instead of solving its scaling problems itself. (The two firms have since resolved the dispute.) In January, an executive from hosting provider Dreamhost mused about the difficulty some of his clients were having running Rails applications. Again, Hansson responded on his blog: "Wipe the wah-wah tears off your chin and retract the threats of imminent calamity if we don't drop everything we're doing to pursue your needs."
This sort of hostility can't come as a surprise to anyone who has followed Hansson or Fried, but there are signs that their churlishness is beginning to generate some backlash. The Basecamp message boards are filled with complaints from unhappy users, fed up with the software's paucity of features — functionality of the Opera browser, say, or better version tracking of uploaded files — who have switched to competing products. "They take the position that they're right and everyone else is wrong," says Douglas Karr, director of technology for an Internet marketing firm, who stopped using Basecamp in April. "It really just put me off the company." Harper Reed, CTO of online T-shirt retailer Threadless, says that the belligerence of Rails' followers soured him as well. "It's very much like a religion," he says.
What's more, 37signals' ideological objections to outside funding could make them less able to withstand competition. Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, says companies like 37signals won't have the resources to fight should larger firms with huge economies of scale and backend infrastructure decide to take them on. "They're going to have a very tough challenge," he says.
Fried says he doesn't worry about losing individual Basecamp customers, since none of them pay more than $149 a month. He points out that the company's total revenue doubled in 2007. And in addition to Basecamp, 37signals' other products — subscription-based programs like group-chat app Campfire, content management tool Highrise, and information manager Backpack — pull in hundreds of thousands more users.
But, faced with a seemingly endless buffet of appetizer-size software, industry insiders have begun to question the basic philosophy that Web-based mini-applications are inherently better than their bulkier but more powerful competitors. "Running your application on Rails places a huge limit on what you can do," says Charles Forman, founder of iminlikewithyou.com, who has abandoned the framework for Merb, a rival programming tool. That promises more scalability. A recent survey by the NPD Group found that fewer than 1 percent of desktop PC users had replaced a desktop application — such as Microsoft Office — with a streamlined online alternative like Google Docs, even though the latter is free. Design expert Don Norman, a consultant for Microsoft, says that one reason for the disparity is that customers actually like and use the extra features. "Complexity is a necessary byproduct of the modern age," he says. "When you actually sit down and analyze what you need to get the job done, it's not simplicity."
That's heresy to Fried, Hansson, and their followers. Call it arrogance or idealism, but they would rather fail than adapt. "I'm not designing software for other people," Hansson says. "I'm designing it for me."
Andrew Park (andrewpark4@gmail.com) is a business writer in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Sunday, February 22, 2009
"How to Save Your Newspaper"
Thursday, Feb. 05, 2009
How to Save Your Newspaper
By Walter Isaacson, TIME
During the past few months, the crisis in journalism has reached meltdown proportions. It is now possible to contemplate a time when some major cities will no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network-news operations will employ no more than a handful of reporters.
There is, however, a striking and somewhat odd fact about this crisis. Newspapers have more readers than ever. Their content, as well as that of newsmagazines and other producers of traditional journalism, is more popular than ever — even (in fact, especially) among young people.
The problem is that fewer of these consumers are paying. Instead, news organizations are merrily giving away their news. According to a Pew Research Center study, a tipping point occurred last year: more people in the U.S. got their news online for free than paid for it by buying newspapers and magazines. Who can blame them? Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn't see fit to charge for its content, I'd feel like a fool paying for it.
This is not a business model that makes sense. Perhaps it appeared to when Web advertising was booming and every half-sentient publisher could pretend to be among the clan who "got it" by chanting the mantra that the ad-supported Web was "the future." But when Web advertising declined in the fourth quarter of 2008, free felt like the future of journalism only in the sense that a steep cliff is the future for a herd of lemmings. (See who got the world into this financial mess.)
Newspapers and magazines traditionally have had three revenue sources: newsstand sales, subscriptions and advertising. The new business model relies only on the last of these. That makes for a wobbly stool even when the one leg is strong. When it weakens — as countless publishers have seen happen as a result of the recession — the stool can't possibly stand.
See pictures of the recession of 1958.
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
Henry Luce, a co-founder of TIME, disdained the notion of giveaway publications that relied solely on ad revenue. He called that formula "morally abhorrent" and also "economically self-defeating." That was because he believed that good journalism required that a publication's primary duty be to its readers, not to its advertisers. In an advertising-only revenue model, the incentive is perverse. It is also self-defeating, because eventually you will weaken your bond with your readers if you do not feel directly dependent on them for your revenue. When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, Dr. Johnson said, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. Journalism's fortnight is upon us, and I suspect that 2009 will be remembered as the year news organizations realized that further rounds of cost-cutting would not stave off the hangman. (See the top 10 magazine covers of 2008.)
One option for survival being tried by some publications, such as the Christian Science Monitor and the Detroit Free Press, is to eliminate or drastically cut their print editions and focus on their free websites. Others may try to ride out the long winter, hope that their competitors die and pray that they will grab a large enough share of advertising to make a profitable go of it as free sites. That's fine. We need a variety of competing strategies.
These approaches, however, still make a publication completely beholden to its advertisers. So I am hoping that this year will see the dawn of a bold, old idea that will provide yet another option that some news organizations might choose: getting paid by users for the services they provide and the journalism they produce.
This notion of charging for content is an old idea not simply because newspapers and magazines have been doing it for more than four centuries. It's also something they used to do at the dawn of the online era, in the early 1990s. Back then there were a passel of online service companies, such as Prodigy, CompuServe, Delphi and AOL. They used to charge users for the minutes people spent online, and it was naturally in their interest to keep the users online for as long as possible. As a result, good content was valued. When I was in charge of TIME's nascent online-media department back then, every year or so we would play off AOL and CompuServe; one year the bidding for our magazine and bulletin boards reached $1 million.
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
See pictures of TIME's Wall Street covers.
Then along came tools that made it easier for publications and users to venture onto the open Internet rather than remain in the walled gardens created by the online services. I remember talking to Louis Rossetto, then the editor of Wired, about ways to put our magazines directly online, and we decided that the best strategy was to use the hypertext markup language and transfer protocols that defined the World Wide Web. Wired and TIME made the plunge the same week in 1994, and within a year most other publications had done so as well. We invented things like banner ads that brought in a rising tide of revenue, but the upshot was that we abandoned getting paid for content. (See the 50 best websites of 2008.)
One of history's ironies is that hypertext — an embedded Web link that refers you to another page or site — had been invented by Ted Nelson in the early 1960s with the goal of enabling micropayments for content. He wanted to make sure that the people who created good stuff got rewarded for it. In his vision, all links on a page would facilitate the accrual of small, automatic payments for whatever content was accessed. Instead, the Web got caught up in the ethos that information wants to be free. Others smarter than we were had avoided that trap. For example, when Bill Gates noticed in 1976 that hobbyists were freely sharing Altair BASIC, a code he and his colleagues had written, he sent an open letter to members of the Homebrew Computer Club telling them to stop. "One thing you do is prevent good software from being written," he railed. "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?"
The easy Internet ad dollars of the late 1990s enticed newspapers and magazines to put all of their content, plus a whole lot of blogs and whistles, onto their websites for free. But the bulk of the ad dollars has ended up flowing to groups that did not actually create much content but instead piggybacked on it: search engines, portals and some aggregators.
Another group that benefits from free journalism is Internet service providers. They get to charge customers $20 to $30 a month for access to the Web's trove of free content and services. As a result, it is not in their interest to facilitate easy ways for media creators to charge for their content. Thus we have a world in which phone companies have accustomed kids to paying up to 20 cents when they send a text message but it seems technologically and psychologically impossible to get people to pay 10 cents for a magazine, newspaper or newscast.
Currently a few newspapers, most notably the Wall Street Journal, charge for their online editions by requiring a monthly subscription. When Rupert Murdoch acquired the Journal, he ruminated publicly about dropping the fee. But Murdoch is, above all, a smart businessman. He took a look at the economics and decided it was lunacy to forgo the revenue — and that was even before the online ad market began contracting. Now his move looks really smart. Paid subscriptions for the Journal's website were up more than 7% in a very gloomy 2008. Plus, he spooked the New York Times into dropping its own halfhearted attempts to get subscription revenue, which were based on the (I think flawed) premise that it should charge for the paper's punditry rather than for its great reporting. (Author's note: After publication the New York Times vehemently denied that their thinking was influenced by outside considerations; I accept their explanation.)
See the worst business deals of 2008.
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
But I don't think that subscriptions will solve everything — nor should they be the only way to charge for content. A person who wants one day's edition of a newspaper or is enticed by a link to an interesting article is rarely going to go through the cost and hassle of signing up for a subscription under today's clunky payment systems. The key to attracting online revenue, I think, is to come up with an iTunes-easy method of micropayment. We need something like digital coins or an E-ZPass digital wallet — a one-click system with a really simple interface that will permit impulse purchases of a newspaper, magazine, article, blog or video for a penny, nickel, dime or whatever the creator chooses to charge. (See the 50 best inventions of 2008.)
Admittedly, the Internet is littered with failed micropayment companies. If you remember Flooz, Beenz, CyberCash, Bitpass, Peppercoin and DigiCash, it's probably because you lost money investing in them. Many tracts and blog entries have been written about how the concept can't work because of bad tech or mental transaction costs.
But things have changed. "With newspapers entering bankruptcy even as their audience grows, the threat is not just to the companies that own them, but also to the news itself," wrote the savvy New York Times columnist David Carr last month in a column endorsing the idea of paid content. This creates a necessity that ought to be the mother of invention. In addition, our two most creative digital innovators have shown that a pay-per-drink model can work when it's made easy enough: Steve Jobs got music consumers (of all people) comfortable with the concept of paying 99 cents for a tune instead of Napsterizing an entire industry, and Jeff Bezos with his Kindle showed that consumers would buy electronic versions of books, magazines and newspapers if purchases could be done simply. (See Apple's 10 best business moves.)
What Internet payment options are there today? PayPal is the most famous, but it has transaction costs too high for impulse buys of less than a dollar. The denizens of Facebook are embracing systems like Spare Change, which allows them to charge their PayPal accounts or credit cards to get digital currency they can spend in small amounts. Similar services include Bee-Tokens and Tipjoy. Twitter users have Twitpay, which is a micropayment service for the micromessaging set. Gamers have their own digital currencies that can be used for impulse buys during online role-playing games. And real-world commuters are used to gizmos like E-ZPass, which deducts automatically from their prepaid account as they glide through a highway tollbooth.
Under a micropayment system, a newspaper might decide to charge a nickel for an article or a dime for that day's full edition or $2 for a month's worth of Web access. Some surfers would balk, but I suspect most would merrily click through if it were cheap and easy enough.
The system could be used for all forms of media: magazines and blogs, games and apps, TV newscasts and amateur videos, porn pictures and policy monographs, the reports of citizen journalists, recipes of great cooks and songs of garage bands. This would not only offer a lifeline to traditional media outlets but also nourish citizen journalists and bloggers. They have vastly enriched our realms of information and ideas, but most can't make much money at it. As a result, they tend to do it for the ego kick or as a civic contribution. A micropayment system would allow regular folks, the types who have to worry about feeding their families, to supplement their income by doing citizen journalism that is of value to their community.
When I used to go fishing in the bayous of Louisiana as a boy, my friend Thomas would sometimes steal ice from those machines outside gas stations. He had the theory that ice should be free. We didn't reflect much on who would make the ice if it were free, but fortunately we grew out of that phase. Likewise, those who believe that all content should be free should reflect on who will open bureaus in Baghdad or be able to fly off as freelancers to report in Rwanda under such a system.
I say this not because I am "evil," which is the description my daughter slings at those who want to charge for their Web content, music or apps. Instead, I say this because my daughter is very creative, and when she gets older, I want her to get paid for producing really neat stuff rather than come to me for money or decide that it makes more sense to be an investment banker.
I say this, too, because I love journalism. I think it is valuable and should be valued by its consumers. Charging for content forces discipline on journalists: they must produce things that people actually value. I suspect we will find that this necessity is actually liberating. The need to be valued by readers — serving them first and foremost rather than relying solely on advertising revenue — will allow the media once again to set their compass true to what journalism should always be about.
Isaacson, a former managing editor of TIME, is president and CEO of the Aspen Institute and author, most recently, of Einstein: His Life and Universe.
How to Save Your Newspaper
By Walter Isaacson, TIME
During the past few months, the crisis in journalism has reached meltdown proportions. It is now possible to contemplate a time when some major cities will no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network-news operations will employ no more than a handful of reporters.
There is, however, a striking and somewhat odd fact about this crisis. Newspapers have more readers than ever. Their content, as well as that of newsmagazines and other producers of traditional journalism, is more popular than ever — even (in fact, especially) among young people.
The problem is that fewer of these consumers are paying. Instead, news organizations are merrily giving away their news. According to a Pew Research Center study, a tipping point occurred last year: more people in the U.S. got their news online for free than paid for it by buying newspapers and magazines. Who can blame them? Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn't see fit to charge for its content, I'd feel like a fool paying for it.
This is not a business model that makes sense. Perhaps it appeared to when Web advertising was booming and every half-sentient publisher could pretend to be among the clan who "got it" by chanting the mantra that the ad-supported Web was "the future." But when Web advertising declined in the fourth quarter of 2008, free felt like the future of journalism only in the sense that a steep cliff is the future for a herd of lemmings. (See who got the world into this financial mess.)
Newspapers and magazines traditionally have had three revenue sources: newsstand sales, subscriptions and advertising. The new business model relies only on the last of these. That makes for a wobbly stool even when the one leg is strong. When it weakens — as countless publishers have seen happen as a result of the recession — the stool can't possibly stand.
See pictures of the recession of 1958.
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
Henry Luce, a co-founder of TIME, disdained the notion of giveaway publications that relied solely on ad revenue. He called that formula "morally abhorrent" and also "economically self-defeating." That was because he believed that good journalism required that a publication's primary duty be to its readers, not to its advertisers. In an advertising-only revenue model, the incentive is perverse. It is also self-defeating, because eventually you will weaken your bond with your readers if you do not feel directly dependent on them for your revenue. When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, Dr. Johnson said, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. Journalism's fortnight is upon us, and I suspect that 2009 will be remembered as the year news organizations realized that further rounds of cost-cutting would not stave off the hangman. (See the top 10 magazine covers of 2008.)
One option for survival being tried by some publications, such as the Christian Science Monitor and the Detroit Free Press, is to eliminate or drastically cut their print editions and focus on their free websites. Others may try to ride out the long winter, hope that their competitors die and pray that they will grab a large enough share of advertising to make a profitable go of it as free sites. That's fine. We need a variety of competing strategies.
These approaches, however, still make a publication completely beholden to its advertisers. So I am hoping that this year will see the dawn of a bold, old idea that will provide yet another option that some news organizations might choose: getting paid by users for the services they provide and the journalism they produce.
This notion of charging for content is an old idea not simply because newspapers and magazines have been doing it for more than four centuries. It's also something they used to do at the dawn of the online era, in the early 1990s. Back then there were a passel of online service companies, such as Prodigy, CompuServe, Delphi and AOL. They used to charge users for the minutes people spent online, and it was naturally in their interest to keep the users online for as long as possible. As a result, good content was valued. When I was in charge of TIME's nascent online-media department back then, every year or so we would play off AOL and CompuServe; one year the bidding for our magazine and bulletin boards reached $1 million.
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
See pictures of TIME's Wall Street covers.
Then along came tools that made it easier for publications and users to venture onto the open Internet rather than remain in the walled gardens created by the online services. I remember talking to Louis Rossetto, then the editor of Wired, about ways to put our magazines directly online, and we decided that the best strategy was to use the hypertext markup language and transfer protocols that defined the World Wide Web. Wired and TIME made the plunge the same week in 1994, and within a year most other publications had done so as well. We invented things like banner ads that brought in a rising tide of revenue, but the upshot was that we abandoned getting paid for content. (See the 50 best websites of 2008.)
One of history's ironies is that hypertext — an embedded Web link that refers you to another page or site — had been invented by Ted Nelson in the early 1960s with the goal of enabling micropayments for content. He wanted to make sure that the people who created good stuff got rewarded for it. In his vision, all links on a page would facilitate the accrual of small, automatic payments for whatever content was accessed. Instead, the Web got caught up in the ethos that information wants to be free. Others smarter than we were had avoided that trap. For example, when Bill Gates noticed in 1976 that hobbyists were freely sharing Altair BASIC, a code he and his colleagues had written, he sent an open letter to members of the Homebrew Computer Club telling them to stop. "One thing you do is prevent good software from being written," he railed. "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?"
The easy Internet ad dollars of the late 1990s enticed newspapers and magazines to put all of their content, plus a whole lot of blogs and whistles, onto their websites for free. But the bulk of the ad dollars has ended up flowing to groups that did not actually create much content but instead piggybacked on it: search engines, portals and some aggregators.
Another group that benefits from free journalism is Internet service providers. They get to charge customers $20 to $30 a month for access to the Web's trove of free content and services. As a result, it is not in their interest to facilitate easy ways for media creators to charge for their content. Thus we have a world in which phone companies have accustomed kids to paying up to 20 cents when they send a text message but it seems technologically and psychologically impossible to get people to pay 10 cents for a magazine, newspaper or newscast.
Currently a few newspapers, most notably the Wall Street Journal, charge for their online editions by requiring a monthly subscription. When Rupert Murdoch acquired the Journal, he ruminated publicly about dropping the fee. But Murdoch is, above all, a smart businessman. He took a look at the economics and decided it was lunacy to forgo the revenue — and that was even before the online ad market began contracting. Now his move looks really smart. Paid subscriptions for the Journal's website were up more than 7% in a very gloomy 2008. Plus, he spooked the New York Times into dropping its own halfhearted attempts to get subscription revenue, which were based on the (I think flawed) premise that it should charge for the paper's punditry rather than for its great reporting. (Author's note: After publication the New York Times vehemently denied that their thinking was influenced by outside considerations; I accept their explanation.)
See the worst business deals of 2008.
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
But I don't think that subscriptions will solve everything — nor should they be the only way to charge for content. A person who wants one day's edition of a newspaper or is enticed by a link to an interesting article is rarely going to go through the cost and hassle of signing up for a subscription under today's clunky payment systems. The key to attracting online revenue, I think, is to come up with an iTunes-easy method of micropayment. We need something like digital coins or an E-ZPass digital wallet — a one-click system with a really simple interface that will permit impulse purchases of a newspaper, magazine, article, blog or video for a penny, nickel, dime or whatever the creator chooses to charge. (See the 50 best inventions of 2008.)
Admittedly, the Internet is littered with failed micropayment companies. If you remember Flooz, Beenz, CyberCash, Bitpass, Peppercoin and DigiCash, it's probably because you lost money investing in them. Many tracts and blog entries have been written about how the concept can't work because of bad tech or mental transaction costs.
But things have changed. "With newspapers entering bankruptcy even as their audience grows, the threat is not just to the companies that own them, but also to the news itself," wrote the savvy New York Times columnist David Carr last month in a column endorsing the idea of paid content. This creates a necessity that ought to be the mother of invention. In addition, our two most creative digital innovators have shown that a pay-per-drink model can work when it's made easy enough: Steve Jobs got music consumers (of all people) comfortable with the concept of paying 99 cents for a tune instead of Napsterizing an entire industry, and Jeff Bezos with his Kindle showed that consumers would buy electronic versions of books, magazines and newspapers if purchases could be done simply. (See Apple's 10 best business moves.)
What Internet payment options are there today? PayPal is the most famous, but it has transaction costs too high for impulse buys of less than a dollar. The denizens of Facebook are embracing systems like Spare Change, which allows them to charge their PayPal accounts or credit cards to get digital currency they can spend in small amounts. Similar services include Bee-Tokens and Tipjoy. Twitter users have Twitpay, which is a micropayment service for the micromessaging set. Gamers have their own digital currencies that can be used for impulse buys during online role-playing games. And real-world commuters are used to gizmos like E-ZPass, which deducts automatically from their prepaid account as they glide through a highway tollbooth.
Under a micropayment system, a newspaper might decide to charge a nickel for an article or a dime for that day's full edition or $2 for a month's worth of Web access. Some surfers would balk, but I suspect most would merrily click through if it were cheap and easy enough.
The system could be used for all forms of media: magazines and blogs, games and apps, TV newscasts and amateur videos, porn pictures and policy monographs, the reports of citizen journalists, recipes of great cooks and songs of garage bands. This would not only offer a lifeline to traditional media outlets but also nourish citizen journalists and bloggers. They have vastly enriched our realms of information and ideas, but most can't make much money at it. As a result, they tend to do it for the ego kick or as a civic contribution. A micropayment system would allow regular folks, the types who have to worry about feeding their families, to supplement their income by doing citizen journalism that is of value to their community.
When I used to go fishing in the bayous of Louisiana as a boy, my friend Thomas would sometimes steal ice from those machines outside gas stations. He had the theory that ice should be free. We didn't reflect much on who would make the ice if it were free, but fortunately we grew out of that phase. Likewise, those who believe that all content should be free should reflect on who will open bureaus in Baghdad or be able to fly off as freelancers to report in Rwanda under such a system.
I say this not because I am "evil," which is the description my daughter slings at those who want to charge for their Web content, music or apps. Instead, I say this because my daughter is very creative, and when she gets older, I want her to get paid for producing really neat stuff rather than come to me for money or decide that it makes more sense to be an investment banker.
I say this, too, because I love journalism. I think it is valuable and should be valued by its consumers. Charging for content forces discipline on journalists: they must produce things that people actually value. I suspect we will find that this necessity is actually liberating. The need to be valued by readers — serving them first and foremost rather than relying solely on advertising revenue — will allow the media once again to set their compass true to what journalism should always be about.
Isaacson, a former managing editor of TIME, is president and CEO of the Aspen Institute and author, most recently, of Einstein: His Life and Universe.
Friday, February 6, 2009
NOTE: Because of the delay in this material being available, your comments are due by the start of class on Wednesday, Feb. 11 at 5:45 p.m.
From Online Journalism Review,
Annenberg School of Journalism, University of Southern California
Q&A with Travis Fox, video journalist for washingtonpost.com
Emmy-nominated video journalist explains what works on the Web and what doesn't and where he thinks the medium is headed
By Sandeep Junnarkar
Posted: 2006-09-18
Shortly after Travis Fox joined the Washington Post in 1999 as a photo editor, he picked up a video camera that was sitting in the newsroom and slowly began producing a few pieces for the Web. Not that anyone was watching these videos--not even the Website's editors. The joke in the newsroom at the time, says Fox, was that he didn't want the executive editor to watch the videos because the pieces would invariably crash his computer and he worried that might dampen the editor's laissez-faire attitude.
"It was a great place to learn and to let my own style come to forefront," says Fox. "I didn't have deadline pressure, I didn't have editorial pressure, I didn't have many viewers."
How times have changed. Fox is now one of seven "Video Journalists" for the Washington Post. He has produced pieces out of the Middle East, Asia, Europe and the United States, viewable here. This year, two of his pieces "Fueling Azerbaijan's Future" and "Hurricane Katrina Coverage in New Orleans" are nominated for Emmy awards.
Travis Fox in 2004 reporting on tsunami damage to a Sri Lankan fishing village.
OJR spoke to Fox about how the role of an Internet video journalist is evolving at the Washington Post and what makes compelling video for the Web.
OJR: You said that hardly anyone was watching videos on the Washington Post site at first. What was the turning point that led to the creation of a "video journalist" at the Post?
Fox: I think it was the Iraq war. And it was doing stories that are high profile enough that people couldn't help but notice. That's when the top editors both at the Website and the newspaper noticed. They had known me before, obviously, but this was a chance to show that in a high pressure, dangerous situations we can tell stories and we can do journalism that's on par with the newspaper.
OJR: How were these videos different than those on television that they made the top editors want to nurture this media?
Fox: I can't speak for them but the fact that it was different from television was not necessarily so important. It was the fact that we were doing it. And I think my style in general is different from some parts of television but not all. It's not reporter driven and it's not celebrity-anchor driven. That's not to say that it's not heavily reported and heavily narrated because a lot of them are. I would say the ones we did in the beginning were more different from television--they were more character-driven pieces, less narration. We still do those types of pieces as well but we mix it up with more heavily-narrated pieces.
OJR: What is your subject's reaction to being in a multimedia presentation versus being in the print version of the Post? Is there still a preference nowadays?
Fox: I think when I say I am from washingtonpost.com and I have a video camera they automatically think Washington Post and they think video and the two don't match up--much to their surprise. I think it depends on where you are. I do a lot of foreign coverage and I think abroad it is not as surprising as it is here in the States. But I think here especially, in the last year, Web video is becoming so common that it is surprising fewer and fewer people. I should also say that a lot of my pieces do air on television in different forms. So I always say both. I say that it's for the Washington Post online but also for possibly for other places.
OJR: So do you frame shots differently for the Web and for TV, or do you work with the same material for both?
Fox: In terms of the production of the video, I think they are pretty close to being the same. You can make the argument that the video screen is smaller on the computer monitor, therefore we should shoot tighter. But shooting tight is a good technique, whether you are shooting for television or for film. People typically sit closer to their computer screens than to their televisions, so proportionally the Web video looks bigger. I don't think it makes any difference.
In the beginning, there was the notion that you should have everything on a tripod to be stable because any sort of camera shake would cause the pixels to be refreshed, which would slow down your processor, which would slow down your computer. So that's still a concern, if you are dealing with slower computers.
I would shoot it the same way, whether it was for television or whether it was for the web. I have a certain style and a certain way of shooting, that's considered a Web style or Web way of shooting perhaps because that's where I learnt how to do video. But it also works on television.
OJR: Do you cut it differently for TV than you do for the Web?
Fox: These are interesting questions. You know my friends who work for television tell me that I am so lucky because people actually click my videos. That means they want to watch them. Whereas their shows on television are in the background when someone is making dinner. And at the same time I am jealous of them because it's a better experience when you are on your couch and watching it on television than when you are on your computer monitor.
So there are different ways of thinking about how to cut it. This is something we constantly talk about and we constantly deal. How tight and how fast moving to cut it? On television you want it to be fast moving because you don't want anyone to click on their remote control and go to the next channel, right? You want to keep their attention all the time.
Whereas on the web you don't want someone to go to a different Website. Obviously you want it to be tight and you want it to be fast moving. I don't have the answers but it's a different medium and it is interesting to
think of it in different ways.
OJR: What new ways of conveying a news story have you tried with which you were pleasantly surprised?
I think the key is always finding the right balance between the different media. So when to do a video? When to do some sort of Flash graphics? When to do panorama? What's the combination? When to do a blog? And how to integrate them all? How to do that without getting completely overwhelmed by everything?
There are several projects that I think have been successful. Those would probably be ones where you took the various media and combined them in a way that was logical, using a blog for user feedback and conversation; using the panoramas to give you a sense of place; and using videos to give you a sense of people, the character, the location, and then combing the two to give you a full picture of the story. As opposed to just doing a video, just doing a blog, just doing a photo gallery. I think those are the most successful examples.
OJR: What new ways of conveying a news story have you tried that fell flat? Can you tweak it to make that idea work?
Fox: The project I am thinking of is both a success in some ways and a failure in others. I did one in Sri Lanka after the Tsunami. It's using videos to capture the characters' stories, panoramas for a sense of place and destruction, and a blog to update the stories that you initially got from the videos. In the beginning I feel like it was very successful in combining those media and telling the story, but at the same time this was one where we underestimated how much effort it would take to maintain the blog over the days and the months after the Tsunami.
OJR: So when you try something like that again or if you've tried something...
Fox: I'll think twice about it...
OJR: ...you'll think twice about it. That's a big issue: maintaining a blog.
Fox: Yeah, I think the lesson is that you just need to decide whether the story is worth that long-term work commitment or not. Or you see how it is for the first few months and you see what kind of readership you get and
then you decide what to do with it at that point.
OJR: Is there a model that has worked well that you plan to keep working with?
Fox: My job now is really to do evergreen projects. I'm not really doing news. I covered the Lebanon war and Gaza this summer but typically I am supposed to be doing these evergreen-type projects. And I think that's also a good model that we have tried in the past and we've liked so much that it is now kind of institutionalized.
These projects are thematic in nature. The themes will be reoccurring in the news. The themes, the issues that have been in the news, and will be in the news over and over again. The nuclear issue, and Iran, groups like Hamas or Hezbollah, for example. I did a piece a couple of years ago on the fence in the West Bank that Israel is building. This is an issue that's in the news over and over and over again. The piece had stories from each side of the fence, panorama photos, and a Flash graphic showing the route of the fence.
And now every story the Post has about the fence (we have had several and we will continue to have several in the future) this project will be linked to them This project gets traffic over, and over, and over again. Traffic on the web is not like a subscription to a newspaper--the same people reading it over and over again. You are going to get new traffic from different places constantly. Because this project is a couple of years old, our regular users have already clicked on it but the new user who are coming in to the new story from Yahoo or from Google are going to click on it. And it is going to draw traffic and it's going to give depth to the article. Now I am setting out in the next year to do these types of projects that are reoccurring themes that are in the news.
That's not the nuts and bolts but that's an example of trying something that has worked well. This Israel fence story is more than two years old and it continues to get good traffic and that's something that we noticed. So that's essentially a good model--not covering news on a day in and day out basis but the kind of stories that have legs and can go on for several weeks, several months, several years even.
OJR: You started with photography and moved on to video. How do you think your role is likely to evolve over the next five years?
Fox: I am content with video. Video is where I have made my mark. Video is what I want to do. I am not interested in doing still photography. There are many gifted still photographers out there. But it's more difficult for single individuals to produce videos from start to finish because traditionally television news has worked in a crew. It is a more unusual for people like me who produce video from start to finish. I'd like to keep exploring that. This video journalism vision of single authorship throughout the process will get you some really interesting results. And as the technology gets simpler, if more individuals shoot and cut video--like they create writing--you are going to get a lot more interesting styles, and a lot richer body of work as a whole. I am very committed to that process.
OJR: What about the role of video journalist within the paper and Website?
Fox: I think I it will be much more integrated with traditional news reporters at the newspaper. I think we will be working much more collaboratively. I would guess we are going work on their stories or work with them to develop their stories into video. We have had some successes with that but we haven't nailed that down as much as we really need to find the right working relationship. We don't want them to turn into television reporters, obviously. I don't want to produce that type of video and we want to give them the time that they need to do newspaper reporting. But we want to be able to leverage their expertise into the video.
I would say the direction we are headed in is that I will continue to do my own video reporting, but at the same time probably become more integrated with the newsroom--both the dotcom and Post newsrooms are becoming more integrated.
I did a piece in Azerbaijan with Philip Kennicott, a Post reporter, that was nominated for an Emmy. That's an example a successful collaboration. We didn't actually work together ever-- even our trips didn't overlap to Azerbaijan--but we compared notes and we shared the reporting. He went first then I went second. He wrote the script and I voiced the script and then I fed him my reporting and he fed me his reporting and we came up with something. So to me that's the kind of collaborative effort I am talking about.
OJR: Are there compelling pieces like that that you decide not to cover? Not because of time, not because of budget, not because of the topic itself, but that a new media treatment just won't be compelling.
Fox: No, I think there is always a compelling way to cover a story. But I don't think that that means in video. Certain stories are visual and good for video. Katrina, the tsunami, they are good in video and photographs. Certain stories are better in video but not so good in still pictures. And some stories are tough to do in either medium. For example, in Lebanon we did a series on Hezbollah during the war and this wasn't war action stuff, this is more of a behind the scenes of Hezbollah as an organization. I think in video it worked out really well because you get a sense of the characters and how the organization works. But in still photographs that would not be a very compelling photo essay. In southern Lebanon I was working with print reporters and photographers and it was really interesting to see where the focus of each of the group lied. I chose to go do video somewhere in the middle between the print reporters and still photographers.
A story about the new budget on Capital Hill would probably be tough to do in either stills or a video. That would be more of a print story or a Flash graphics story.
OJR: The Azerbaijan piece, did it appear on Web only?
Fox: Online and it also appeared on television on PBS's "Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria", it's on the podcast, it appeared as an article in the newspaper. This is convergence. We are leveraging this over multiple platforms.
We said that in some ways we are functioning like a production company. We are producing videos for the Website, for our podcast. We were also selling them to television.
So this is an example where we sold it to television, which is not only a very good money maker, it essentially pays for the expense of going abroad and covering the stories which aren't cheap. It is also a way to market our content to a lot of different audiences. Something like ten times the people that saw it on PBS saw it on the Website and at the end of the show Zakaria said something like "for more of this video go to washingtonpost.com."
OJR: Collaboration in the newsroom is more of a journalistic change. What impact do you expect from technical changes?
Fox: What's really going to be exciting is the Internet as a delivery means not as an end media. For us to really compete with television, we have to get our videos to your living room television screen. Because no matter how good it is on the computer it's never going to be as good as when it's on your TV or when it's on your high-definition plasma screen, right?
So I think in the next five years--or even sooner than that--we are going to see the Internet used as a means of delivery to compete with cable TV. We are already seeing that it's technically possible. Getting Internet content delivered to your television--either through your TiVo or through the new Apple set-top box that is going to come out or through whatever box--and watching it on television in the same high definition quality as cable television, that is exciting. So think about that when you are setting your TiVo or whatever box you are going to be using in the future, you select a Survivor episode, news reports and the latest Washington Post documentary. And the next day, when you sit down to watch them, they will all look the same but one of them came through the Internet and two of them came through cable TV. But for the user it won't matter.
I think a glimpse of that is through our video podcast that's on iTunes. That's kind of the first glimpse--it's a small screen but it's essentially the on-demand television that we need to get to. We sell the advertising against that. So we reap the benefits of that and we put it up and users download it and do whatever. But you know as soon as we make the jump onto your television, that's really when things are going to get exciting. The industry is excited about Web video not because it's good content or unusual content or it's better than television, but because of the advertising. Advertising on television in general is lucrative and to be able to capture that type of lucrative advertising by bypassing the juggernaut of cable or broadcast is very exciting.
It's not just for me or for newspaper sites, it's for people running their blogs. You can now essentially be your own broadcast station. It's another one of those milestones that we are crossing on the Internet.
Sandeep Junnarkar is an associate professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism (The City University of New York). He has reported for @times, the New York Times' first presence on the Web, as well as News.com. If there is a new media journalist who you would like to see featured in a Q&A, email Sandeep here.
From Online Journalism Review,
Annenberg School of Journalism, University of Southern California
Q&A with Travis Fox, video journalist for washingtonpost.com
Emmy-nominated video journalist explains what works on the Web and what doesn't and where he thinks the medium is headed
By Sandeep Junnarkar
Posted: 2006-09-18
Shortly after Travis Fox joined the Washington Post in 1999 as a photo editor, he picked up a video camera that was sitting in the newsroom and slowly began producing a few pieces for the Web. Not that anyone was watching these videos--not even the Website's editors. The joke in the newsroom at the time, says Fox, was that he didn't want the executive editor to watch the videos because the pieces would invariably crash his computer and he worried that might dampen the editor's laissez-faire attitude.
"It was a great place to learn and to let my own style come to forefront," says Fox. "I didn't have deadline pressure, I didn't have editorial pressure, I didn't have many viewers."
How times have changed. Fox is now one of seven "Video Journalists" for the Washington Post. He has produced pieces out of the Middle East, Asia, Europe and the United States, viewable here. This year, two of his pieces "Fueling Azerbaijan's Future" and "Hurricane Katrina Coverage in New Orleans" are nominated for Emmy awards.
Travis Fox in 2004 reporting on tsunami damage to a Sri Lankan fishing village.
OJR spoke to Fox about how the role of an Internet video journalist is evolving at the Washington Post and what makes compelling video for the Web.
OJR: You said that hardly anyone was watching videos on the Washington Post site at first. What was the turning point that led to the creation of a "video journalist" at the Post?
Fox: I think it was the Iraq war. And it was doing stories that are high profile enough that people couldn't help but notice. That's when the top editors both at the Website and the newspaper noticed. They had known me before, obviously, but this was a chance to show that in a high pressure, dangerous situations we can tell stories and we can do journalism that's on par with the newspaper.
OJR: How were these videos different than those on television that they made the top editors want to nurture this media?
Fox: I can't speak for them but the fact that it was different from television was not necessarily so important. It was the fact that we were doing it. And I think my style in general is different from some parts of television but not all. It's not reporter driven and it's not celebrity-anchor driven. That's not to say that it's not heavily reported and heavily narrated because a lot of them are. I would say the ones we did in the beginning were more different from television--they were more character-driven pieces, less narration. We still do those types of pieces as well but we mix it up with more heavily-narrated pieces.
OJR: What is your subject's reaction to being in a multimedia presentation versus being in the print version of the Post? Is there still a preference nowadays?
Fox: I think when I say I am from washingtonpost.com and I have a video camera they automatically think Washington Post and they think video and the two don't match up--much to their surprise. I think it depends on where you are. I do a lot of foreign coverage and I think abroad it is not as surprising as it is here in the States. But I think here especially, in the last year, Web video is becoming so common that it is surprising fewer and fewer people. I should also say that a lot of my pieces do air on television in different forms. So I always say both. I say that it's for the Washington Post online but also for possibly for other places.
OJR: So do you frame shots differently for the Web and for TV, or do you work with the same material for both?
Fox: In terms of the production of the video, I think they are pretty close to being the same. You can make the argument that the video screen is smaller on the computer monitor, therefore we should shoot tighter. But shooting tight is a good technique, whether you are shooting for television or for film. People typically sit closer to their computer screens than to their televisions, so proportionally the Web video looks bigger. I don't think it makes any difference.
In the beginning, there was the notion that you should have everything on a tripod to be stable because any sort of camera shake would cause the pixels to be refreshed, which would slow down your processor, which would slow down your computer. So that's still a concern, if you are dealing with slower computers.
I would shoot it the same way, whether it was for television or whether it was for the web. I have a certain style and a certain way of shooting, that's considered a Web style or Web way of shooting perhaps because that's where I learnt how to do video. But it also works on television.
OJR: Do you cut it differently for TV than you do for the Web?
Fox: These are interesting questions. You know my friends who work for television tell me that I am so lucky because people actually click my videos. That means they want to watch them. Whereas their shows on television are in the background when someone is making dinner. And at the same time I am jealous of them because it's a better experience when you are on your couch and watching it on television than when you are on your computer monitor.
So there are different ways of thinking about how to cut it. This is something we constantly talk about and we constantly deal. How tight and how fast moving to cut it? On television you want it to be fast moving because you don't want anyone to click on their remote control and go to the next channel, right? You want to keep their attention all the time.
Whereas on the web you don't want someone to go to a different Website. Obviously you want it to be tight and you want it to be fast moving. I don't have the answers but it's a different medium and it is interesting to
think of it in different ways.
OJR: What new ways of conveying a news story have you tried with which you were pleasantly surprised?
I think the key is always finding the right balance between the different media. So when to do a video? When to do some sort of Flash graphics? When to do panorama? What's the combination? When to do a blog? And how to integrate them all? How to do that without getting completely overwhelmed by everything?
There are several projects that I think have been successful. Those would probably be ones where you took the various media and combined them in a way that was logical, using a blog for user feedback and conversation; using the panoramas to give you a sense of place; and using videos to give you a sense of people, the character, the location, and then combing the two to give you a full picture of the story. As opposed to just doing a video, just doing a blog, just doing a photo gallery. I think those are the most successful examples.
OJR: What new ways of conveying a news story have you tried that fell flat? Can you tweak it to make that idea work?
Fox: The project I am thinking of is both a success in some ways and a failure in others. I did one in Sri Lanka after the Tsunami. It's using videos to capture the characters' stories, panoramas for a sense of place and destruction, and a blog to update the stories that you initially got from the videos. In the beginning I feel like it was very successful in combining those media and telling the story, but at the same time this was one where we underestimated how much effort it would take to maintain the blog over the days and the months after the Tsunami.
OJR: So when you try something like that again or if you've tried something...
Fox: I'll think twice about it...
OJR: ...you'll think twice about it. That's a big issue: maintaining a blog.
Fox: Yeah, I think the lesson is that you just need to decide whether the story is worth that long-term work commitment or not. Or you see how it is for the first few months and you see what kind of readership you get and
then you decide what to do with it at that point.
OJR: Is there a model that has worked well that you plan to keep working with?
Fox: My job now is really to do evergreen projects. I'm not really doing news. I covered the Lebanon war and Gaza this summer but typically I am supposed to be doing these evergreen-type projects. And I think that's also a good model that we have tried in the past and we've liked so much that it is now kind of institutionalized.
These projects are thematic in nature. The themes will be reoccurring in the news. The themes, the issues that have been in the news, and will be in the news over and over again. The nuclear issue, and Iran, groups like Hamas or Hezbollah, for example. I did a piece a couple of years ago on the fence in the West Bank that Israel is building. This is an issue that's in the news over and over and over again. The piece had stories from each side of the fence, panorama photos, and a Flash graphic showing the route of the fence.
And now every story the Post has about the fence (we have had several and we will continue to have several in the future) this project will be linked to them This project gets traffic over, and over, and over again. Traffic on the web is not like a subscription to a newspaper--the same people reading it over and over again. You are going to get new traffic from different places constantly. Because this project is a couple of years old, our regular users have already clicked on it but the new user who are coming in to the new story from Yahoo or from Google are going to click on it. And it is going to draw traffic and it's going to give depth to the article. Now I am setting out in the next year to do these types of projects that are reoccurring themes that are in the news.
That's not the nuts and bolts but that's an example of trying something that has worked well. This Israel fence story is more than two years old and it continues to get good traffic and that's something that we noticed. So that's essentially a good model--not covering news on a day in and day out basis but the kind of stories that have legs and can go on for several weeks, several months, several years even.
OJR: You started with photography and moved on to video. How do you think your role is likely to evolve over the next five years?
Fox: I am content with video. Video is where I have made my mark. Video is what I want to do. I am not interested in doing still photography. There are many gifted still photographers out there. But it's more difficult for single individuals to produce videos from start to finish because traditionally television news has worked in a crew. It is a more unusual for people like me who produce video from start to finish. I'd like to keep exploring that. This video journalism vision of single authorship throughout the process will get you some really interesting results. And as the technology gets simpler, if more individuals shoot and cut video--like they create writing--you are going to get a lot more interesting styles, and a lot richer body of work as a whole. I am very committed to that process.
OJR: What about the role of video journalist within the paper and Website?
Fox: I think I it will be much more integrated with traditional news reporters at the newspaper. I think we will be working much more collaboratively. I would guess we are going work on their stories or work with them to develop their stories into video. We have had some successes with that but we haven't nailed that down as much as we really need to find the right working relationship. We don't want them to turn into television reporters, obviously. I don't want to produce that type of video and we want to give them the time that they need to do newspaper reporting. But we want to be able to leverage their expertise into the video.
I would say the direction we are headed in is that I will continue to do my own video reporting, but at the same time probably become more integrated with the newsroom--both the dotcom and Post newsrooms are becoming more integrated.
I did a piece in Azerbaijan with Philip Kennicott, a Post reporter, that was nominated for an Emmy. That's an example a successful collaboration. We didn't actually work together ever-- even our trips didn't overlap to Azerbaijan--but we compared notes and we shared the reporting. He went first then I went second. He wrote the script and I voiced the script and then I fed him my reporting and he fed me his reporting and we came up with something. So to me that's the kind of collaborative effort I am talking about.
OJR: Are there compelling pieces like that that you decide not to cover? Not because of time, not because of budget, not because of the topic itself, but that a new media treatment just won't be compelling.
Fox: No, I think there is always a compelling way to cover a story. But I don't think that that means in video. Certain stories are visual and good for video. Katrina, the tsunami, they are good in video and photographs. Certain stories are better in video but not so good in still pictures. And some stories are tough to do in either medium. For example, in Lebanon we did a series on Hezbollah during the war and this wasn't war action stuff, this is more of a behind the scenes of Hezbollah as an organization. I think in video it worked out really well because you get a sense of the characters and how the organization works. But in still photographs that would not be a very compelling photo essay. In southern Lebanon I was working with print reporters and photographers and it was really interesting to see where the focus of each of the group lied. I chose to go do video somewhere in the middle between the print reporters and still photographers.
A story about the new budget on Capital Hill would probably be tough to do in either stills or a video. That would be more of a print story or a Flash graphics story.
OJR: The Azerbaijan piece, did it appear on Web only?
Fox: Online and it also appeared on television on PBS's "Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria", it's on the podcast, it appeared as an article in the newspaper. This is convergence. We are leveraging this over multiple platforms.
We said that in some ways we are functioning like a production company. We are producing videos for the Website, for our podcast. We were also selling them to television.
So this is an example where we sold it to television, which is not only a very good money maker, it essentially pays for the expense of going abroad and covering the stories which aren't cheap. It is also a way to market our content to a lot of different audiences. Something like ten times the people that saw it on PBS saw it on the Website and at the end of the show Zakaria said something like "for more of this video go to washingtonpost.com."
OJR: Collaboration in the newsroom is more of a journalistic change. What impact do you expect from technical changes?
Fox: What's really going to be exciting is the Internet as a delivery means not as an end media. For us to really compete with television, we have to get our videos to your living room television screen. Because no matter how good it is on the computer it's never going to be as good as when it's on your TV or when it's on your high-definition plasma screen, right?
So I think in the next five years--or even sooner than that--we are going to see the Internet used as a means of delivery to compete with cable TV. We are already seeing that it's technically possible. Getting Internet content delivered to your television--either through your TiVo or through the new Apple set-top box that is going to come out or through whatever box--and watching it on television in the same high definition quality as cable television, that is exciting. So think about that when you are setting your TiVo or whatever box you are going to be using in the future, you select a Survivor episode, news reports and the latest Washington Post documentary. And the next day, when you sit down to watch them, they will all look the same but one of them came through the Internet and two of them came through cable TV. But for the user it won't matter.
I think a glimpse of that is through our video podcast that's on iTunes. That's kind of the first glimpse--it's a small screen but it's essentially the on-demand television that we need to get to. We sell the advertising against that. So we reap the benefits of that and we put it up and users download it and do whatever. But you know as soon as we make the jump onto your television, that's really when things are going to get exciting. The industry is excited about Web video not because it's good content or unusual content or it's better than television, but because of the advertising. Advertising on television in general is lucrative and to be able to capture that type of lucrative advertising by bypassing the juggernaut of cable or broadcast is very exciting.
It's not just for me or for newspaper sites, it's for people running their blogs. You can now essentially be your own broadcast station. It's another one of those milestones that we are crossing on the Internet.
Sandeep Junnarkar is an associate professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism (The City University of New York). He has reported for @times, the New York Times' first presence on the Web, as well as News.com. If there is a new media journalist who you would like to see featured in a Q&A, email Sandeep here.
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