Jay Small's blog

Me, today

Jay Small — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:16:53 +0000

'Nuff said, Sam.

Borrell: Local online ads beat forecast

Jay Small — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:37:25 +0000

Gordon Borrell says local online advertising outperformed his Borrell Associates forecast by a fair piece:

"We may have been far too conservative earlier this year when we projected that local online advertising would grow 8% in 2009. At the end of the first quarter, the increase looked closer to 11%. When we finish collecting our second-quarter data in the next few weeks, I'm certain the number will be quite a bit higher."

He says some companies even indicate "triple-digit growth" in local ad sales, but notes not all players can be winners:

"We aren’t, however, seeing triple-digit growth from companies that continue to labor under the delusion that 'convergence sales' is a viable strategy."

Interpret as you see fit. I like the look of any advertising data that beats any forecast nowadays.

Photojournalism can be strategic

Jay Small — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:16:52 +0000

After wrapping up his 10-part series on what local newspapers should do to survive (he rolled up all the recommendations in one post), John Temple posted a wise reply to questions I asked him by e-mail last week.

My questions, in a nutshell: What about photojournalism? Can it be considered a strategic asset for local newspapers?

John wrote me back, but then expanded on his reply in the blog post. Good advice abounds these days on his blog, as the post exemplifies:

"Most people running newsrooms -- and that includes digital newsrooms -- came up on the 'word' side. It always bugged me to be called a 'word person.' But it is true that the perspective of most top editors is text first. That said, we've moved into a much more visual world and readers both expect and appreciate a much richer visual experience. Jay Small is right that still photography can play a huge role in making local newspapers more central to their communities. Watching events unfold in Iran reconfirms the significance and impact of photographs from people armed with cell phones. This is probably the most significant way that the public will contribute content, if newspapers make it easy for them to do so and reward contributors by treating their work with respect."

Thanks, John!

More on SND: Time to think bigger

Jay Small — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:13:35 +0000

Charles Apple, one of the primo bloggers at Visual Editors, picked up the discussion about the future of design at newspapers and the troubled Society for News Design, in particular. In Apple's post, he channels Dean Lockwood of the San Antonio Express-News:

"One of the realities we are facing in the industry is that the 'production' act of copy editing and building pages is being either outsourced or consolidated in chain's hubs. I don't agree with it and it's not going to happen everywhere but there is clearly a bean-counter's momentum to this that I doubt is going to be stopped by any arguments we make about story development and so on."

Agreed.

The comments roll through all the phases of grieving, and include posts from Alan Jacobson describing his redesign-for-ROI approach; others arguing that Alan's just self-promoting; and still others blaming media executives for all ills.

I dug back to find Apple's post and discussion because, frankly, the voices around what SND should become following its leadership crisis seemed to shout and goad for a while, then became really quiet. I find it hard to believe the discussion and debate could end so abruptly, or that so few people could care enough to keep it going.

Here's what I posted as a comment in Apple's thread:

Folks, remember that what pains the newspaper industry today also pains all forms of print, from periodicals to books to posters to billboards.

The way we communicate, one-to-one, one-to-friends, one-to-many and many-to-many, changes by the minute. Since print changes, um, by the decade, people find other, more efficient ways to do things they used to do in print.

Say what you will about tactile quality, well-understood interface, browsability, portability, or readability. Print forms may retain advantages there but in more and more cases they do not overcome digital advantages: instantaneous availability without boundaries, at much lower cost per unit of information communicated.

So the nut graf of this conversation becomes:

Information architects will see high and increasing demand in coming years for their skills and experience. Graphic artists focused on print will see gradually decreasing demand in coming years for their skills and experience.

Given that newspapers are leading the slide down the print crater, graphic artists who do not transition to information architecture might be able to climb back up into another print specialty for a while, but will never return to the glory days where we actually felt we were changing newsroom cultures and winning new readers.

So what is an "information architect"?

In my view, it is someone who thinks of the digital world in three distinct demand camps, with overlaps: communication, entertainment, and information. We play mostly in the information space, which, unfortunately, is the least engaging on average of the three camps.

Don’t believe me? Think about how much time people you know (NOT you, because you're in the news business and that makes you an outlier) spend sending text messages, ordering products, or watching online video vs. actually reading news articles.

So an information architect starts by knowing the difference. Her specialty is optimizing information to be communicated in its best, most efficient form for the broadest possible recipient set. But she does not stop there. She also knows how to engage people in conversations, and form communities, around specific types of information.

In that specialty, the graphic arts have a role, but it is just a small share of defining an overall user experience. A few former print designers I know have made this leap successfully. Others become frustrated at how much left-brain stuff is required, and how little time they spend exercising the right brain.

I know this for sure: Newspaper executives (at least in the United States, at ground zero of the business crisis) are in no mood these days to think of visual journalism as a savior. You get attention only when called on to help save money; for example, a redesign to fit narrower webs. The rest of the time, yeah, nice looking page, Jack, but ad revenue and circulation just fell double-digits again, so, like, cut some more costs ... oh, gotta run.

Say what you will about Alan [Jacobson]. His redesign projects start and finish with return on investment in mind. That’s how he gets executives to listen, and those of you trying to inspire change from the design desk outward would be well advised to observe and learn.

Please don't get me wrong. Print will not die for many years, if ever. But staking your success on print alone resembles trying to climb to the top of a mountain that slowly sinks into the earth. Less and less room at the top, more casualties at the bottom. Newspaper people happen to be on the least stable ground.

I believe much of the consternation around SND these days just reflects the frustration and vulnerability we all feel trying to ride the mountain. I would love to help, but I can’t do much if the conversation stays focused on "making graphic design important again in the newsroom," a futile mission I infer from this and other conversations.

Site 2 in Scripps' new UX rollout

Jay Small — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:46:45 +0000

While I joined my son yesterday on a college campus visit (yes, he's that old, meaning yes, I'm that old), our gang at Scripps Interactive Newspapers Group rolled out the second site in our latest cycle of user experience upgrades: redding.com, site of the Redding Record-Searchlight in northern California.

As with Site 1, courierpress.com of Evansville, Ind., redding.com demonstrates Scripps' latest thinking about news Web sites, in form and function:

Flexibility to showcase news of the day.
Emphasis on imagery. People wonder why we put dark backgrounds on some site components, and the answer is: to let photos pop more. It's the same logic by which TV makers surround the image area with a large, black frame.
Improving communication and the sense of community among site participants, well beyond just story comments.
Keeping and refining what was good about the old framework, including clean visuals, search optimization, streamlined administration and more.

The Redding site team explained the changes to site patrons, and opened up for comments that cover the good and bad of it. Your feedback is welcome there or here.

Customer privacy after shutdown? Hardly Clear

Jay Small — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:05:23 +0000

(Update [1:25 p.m. EDT, June 26, 2009]: Clear customer service just sent a note to members answering my questions and more. I added it in full at the bottom of this post.)

Greg Sterling noted the end of Clear, the program that let travelers pay to register with biometrics in exchange for swifter passage through security at several major airports.

As a Clear card carrier for roughly two years now, I got word of the shutdown last night. My first concerns, as I posted to Greg in comments on his post, are:

Do I have any prayer of a refund for unused months on my membership?
What happens to my personally identifiable information and the biometrics Clear recorded when I registered for the program? If I destroy my smart card, does that make my info in Clear’s database untouchable?

I can't be the only customer with these concerns, but neither the curt "buh-bye" e-mail nor the company Web site offers any meaningful explanations on these matters. So I responded to the e-mail from Clear with both of these questions. Just now, more than 14 hours after my inquiry, I got an automated response that says, again, Clear is shutting down, nobody home, nothing to see here etc.

The tone is: "Moved, no forwarding address." I realize the company ran out of money, and any remaining employees had perhaps scant warning that they would join the bread lines. Still, this episode seems worse than bad customer service: no attempt to address customers' concerns at all. The dead truly have no conscience in this case.

My concerns amount to little more than trees falling in an unpopulated forest. Fine. Lesson learned. But I will watch to see what the founders and investors in Clear do for their next great entrepreneurial acts, and take any of them with due caution before spending a dime on 'em.

E-mail from Clear customer service, dated June 26, 2009, 1:20 p.m. EDT:

Clear Member Update

Dear John Small,

In response to questions raised by our members, Clear would like to offer the following information:

Clear Lanes Are No Longer Available.

At 11:00 p.m. PST on June 22, 2009, Clear ceased operations. Clear's parent company, Verified Identity Pass, Inc., was unable to negotiate an agreement with its senior creditor to continue operations. Verified Identity Pass regrets that Clear will not be able to continue operations.

How is Clear securing personal information?

Clear stands by our commitment to protect our customer's personally identifiable information - including fingerprints, iris images, photos, names, addresses, credit card numbers and other personal information provided to us - and to keep the privacy promises that we have made. Information is secured in accordance with the Transportation Security Administration's Security, Privacy and Compliance Standards.

How is Clear securing any information at the airports?

Each hard disk at the airport, including the enrollment and verification kiosks, has now been wiped clean of all data and software. The triple wipe process we used automatically and completely overwrites the contents of the entire disk, including the operating system, the data and the file structure. This process also prevents or thoroughly hinders all known techniques of hard disk forensic analysis.

How is Clear securing any information in central databases and corporate systems?

Lockheed Martin is the lead systems integrator for Clear, and is currently working with Verified Identity Pass, Inc. to ensure an orderly shutdown as the program closes. As Verified Identity Pass, Inc. and the Transportation Security Administration work through this process, Lockheed Martin remains committed to protecting the privacy of individuals' personal information provided for the Clear Registered Traveler program. Lockheed's work will also remain consistent with the Transportation Security Administration's federal requirements and the enhanced security and privacy requirements of Verified Identity Pass, Inc.

The computers that Verified Identity Pass, Inc. assigned to its former corporate employees are being wiped using the same process described for computers at the airports.

Will personally identifiable information be sold?

The personally identifiable information that customers provided to Clear may not be used for any purpose other than a Registered Traveler program operated by a Transportation Security Administration authorized service provider. Any new service provider would need to maintain personally identifiable information in accordance with the Transportation Security Administration's privacy and security requirements for Registered Traveler programs. If the information is not used for a Registered Traveler program, it will be deleted.

How will members be notified when information is deleted?

Clear intends to notify members in a final email message when the information is deleted.

Who is monitoring this process?

Clear is communicating with TSA, airport and airline sponsors, and subcontractors, to ensure that the security of the information and systems is maintained throughout the closure process. Clear thanks these partners for their continuing cooperation and diligence.

How can I contact Clear?

Please visit our website, www.flyclear.com, for the latest updates. Clear's call center and customer support email service are no longer available.

Will I receive a refund for membership in Clear?

At the present time, Verified Identity Pass, Inc. cannot issue refunds due to the company's financial condition.

Has Verified Identity Pass, Inc. filed for bankruptcy?

At the present time, Verified Identity Pass has not commenced any proceedings under the United States Bankruptcy Code.

Clear Customer Service

Clear, 600 Third Avenue 10th Floor, New York, NY 10016

www.flyclear.com

What must SND become?

Jay Small — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 11:40:53 +0000

I am reposting here, with only a few edits for style, comments I posted in a heated thread about the recent resignations of the president and executive director of the Society for News Design. As background, my own long history with SND includes several years on its board of directors, putting on its 1996 annual workshop in Indianapolis, rebuilding and managing its Web site, and providing first-ever live Web reports from the annual competition judging at Syracuse.

These days, I serve no official role, but remain keenly interested in the society's future, as my comments describe:

Friends,

I begin to think why Matt [Mansfield, former president] resigned, and why Elise [Burroughs, departing executive director] is leaving, and why it takes so long to answer all the whys, all quickly become irrelevant questions. No time to waste here.

The only relevant question is: What must SND become not only to survive, but to remain relevant -- and help journalism thrive in whatever form it takes in coming years.

Some thoughts, more from outside than in these days:

SND must represent the brightest thinking focused on innovation in communicating the news. Typeface du jour? Web width of the month? Hell, no. Attracting and engaging news consumers and enabling communities around the news? Oh, yeah! Can SND honestly say it holds any industry leadership position there? Ask your publishers. Ask your interactive leaders. Hell, ask your editors. I don’t think the answer will be what you want to hear from any of them.
SND needs about half the legislative overhead -- and about twice the revenue streams to reinvest in Item 1 above. That means: smaller board, more functional/less celebratory annual workshops (I’m living proof they’re possible), less charity on pricing at the high end (veteran professionals) so it can offer more charity at the low end (students and newbies).
SND needs to recognize that "being international" does not require the financial and emotional drain of spreading workshops around the world. Global chapters can and do hold their own events, and they’re much more cost effective than all the trade-offs the society endures to move the big event away from its largest membership base in North America. We have entered an age of instantaneous global communications at incredible fidelity. Important strategic messages, best practices and just plain great work can be shared easily without face-to-face. All the offshore workshops do is put a very expensive exclamation point on the sentence that says "international." The media business can't afford to waste time or money that way.
Headquarters needs to be either in academic or professional quarters, probably wherever the new executive director resides. Negotiate leases with the nearest journalism school or nearest newspaper, either of which nowadays is likely to have office space and shared services at bargain prices.
The interactive training and competition are, well, OK. But interactive is headed in a profoundly different direction than Flash graphics. And again, SND has almost no voice among the interactive leadership of most media companies. You get that when you start focusing on holistic user experience: news, information, advertising, community, interactivity, data, and then visualizations. Remember that while SND regulars worry about elaborate feature page spreads, the world has turned the basic unit of communication into 140 characters of text (a tweet or social status message). How does SND apply to that?
SND headquarters needs respectable Web content management, tied to a respectable CRM system for membership management, tied to an enterprise-grade database management system for the competition(s), events, job bank, portfolios, all the stuff that sat in lil' ol' FileMaker all those years. I know it too well -- a lot of it still looks like guts of the stuff I built on the fly in, oh, 1997. And that scares me, too.
Which leads me to: SND needs to pay better than a living wage to its exec and staff, because managing all that stuff and cat-herding the board, officers and members (admit it, this is the most vocal and emotional group you'd ever expect to have to manage, right?) -- well, that commands a salary and bonus plan that will attract top talent.

All right, I'm done. I still pay for my membership. And I'll keep paying, I think, because I genuinely like the people behind SND and want to see it thrive again. But please hurry. And waste no more time than necessary airing the laundry.

Thanks for hearing me out.

More straight talk from Temple

Jay Small — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 12:17:40 +0000

John Temple's "what newspapers should do" essays make a lot of sense. Looks like he has plenty more where these came from, too, so stay tuned.

That is all.

Enough! Moving to Google Reader

Jay Small — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:30:44 +0000

Bloglines beta site remains down this morning, victim of an expired and apparently neglected security certificate. Meanwhile, "classic" Bloglines still exhibits the classic problems that led me to try the beta months ago:

Item refresh counts out of whack
Showing thousands of old items as new
Too many visits by the "Bloglines plumber" (outages)

No one seems to care, so I'm done. I exported my subscriptions as an OPML file and moved my Web feed reading habits to Google Reader. I had tried GR once before, and found it hard to get used to; however, today's interface has evolved to where it feels pretty natural to me coming off Bloglines.

Call me shocked, SHOCKED that any company could let its brand or its technology hang out on a limb so precariously as IAC has done with Bloglines -- not just this week, but over several months or longer. Maybe this neglect just demonstrates how completely Twitter and social nets trumped RSS as a consumer service to keep up with Internet content, leaving Web feeds mostly as a behind-the-curtain syndication/aggregation system from site to site.

Another great new Bloglines beta feature!

Jay Small — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:02:06 +0000

Along with the impressively frequent "Loading..." and "There appears to be a server communication problem..." dialogs, the long-running beta of Bloglines sported a lean, mean new home page this morning.

I know installing and renewing SSL security certificates can be tedious and time-consuming; however, if you force your beta project traffic through an SSL connection you pretty much have to consider the certificate at or near Job 1.

I can still use "classic" Bloglines, which has no SSL requirement, but seems to sport many of the same reliability problems as the beta. Anyone have an RSS aggregator/reader suite you just love?

[Update (7:11 p.m. EDT, 6/2/09): The Bloglines beta remains down, but what really gets me is how little dialogue I'm seeing about it after more than 24 hours down. Just a handful of tweets, few if any blog posts, and no official posts I can find from Bloglines on the subject (not even on the "classic" version). Does Bloglines have so few users?]