NewsFastForward>>

My name is Reid Williams. I read and think a lot about the future of the information business, and this is where I try to make connections and take notes. I'm the vice president of innovation and product development at Michigan.com. This is how I got here.

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So what has he really done? I personally think that the biggest thing Jeff has done is to set the right tone for our culture — which is one of experimentation, which is one of encouragement, which is one of ‘find the positive surprises and double down.’ We believe we have an owner who respects the past but at the same time wants us to be innovative.

5 things publishers can learn from how Jeff Bezos is running The Washington Post

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News meets AI

Extremely proud of the work my team has done on our latest prototypes.

We hear from a lot of people that they want to keep up with the news — need to in some cases, for professional or social reasons — but that they struggle to find the time.

We also regularly hear the complaints about existing news products, principally about what I call the “cognitive overhead” spent in engaging with them. See, we each only have so much focus and mental energy to expend every day. And every flashing pixel, every non-intuitive interface, every crowded visual presentation chips away at our psychological reserves. News products don’t do us any favors.

So we set out to drastically diminish that overhead. We also laid out a design challenge of significantly reducing the time it takes to consume the news, as well as boiling down the news to just the essentials.

If Michigan news is important to you, and you like the sound of the above, then you might check out Detroit Now.

If national news is more your thing, then you could try The Pulse.

What are these?

First, it’s real-time headlines determined by what people are already reading. It’s the important stories determined by what you’re most likely to end up in conversation about, not what an editor thinks is important.

Then it’s a 3-sentence summary, generated by a powerful blend of natural language processing (a type of machine learning, or artificial intelligence).

You can still read the full story, too, with the help of a speed-reading interface we developed.

Have fun. We’d love to hear what you think.

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The Year In Review

Innovation is an uphill slog.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is pulling your leg. 

Working in an established organization, optimized to do what it’s always done, with an immune system that sicks antibodies on foreign objects and the dangerous pathogens that ideas are — this is hard work.

What’s more, it can seem when you’re in the midst of the day-to-day, that you aren’t getting anywhere. That’s why it felt so good to compile an annual report. It felt good personally, and it felt good to remind my team of all that we accomplished, and it felt good to pass it around to colleagues (and family, who often wonder what the hell I do all day).

What did we accomplish in 2015? Some highlights:

We created over 40 code repos, amounting to thousands of code commits.

We launched 6 native apps, on both iOS and Android.

We built and launched a statewide rentals listing site, featuring more than 6,000 apartment and house listings.

We built a browser extension.

We played with bots and beacons.

We compiled numerous human centered design research reports.

And more. If you’re really curious, you can read the full report here.

What will 2016 bring? Stay tuned.

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Through our pursuit of further automation and maximization of margins…we built advertising technology to optimize publishers’ yield of marketing budgets that had eroded after the last recession. Looking back now, our scraping of dimes may have cost us dollars in consumer loyalty.

Scott Cunningham, senior VP-technology and ad operations at the IAB

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The evidence of a real problem isn’t based on aspiration, hypotheticals or hearsay but is rooted in actual experience. It looks like a swiped credit card. It looks like a checkbook stub. Like time invested fixing something, like pain felt frequently struggling with something, or like a person hired to oversee something. If you can’t find how it’s currently solved, then be worried.

John Collins, “Product Feedback You Should Ignore”

I’ve been preaching to people a lot lately about the jobs-to-be-done concept. There’s so much navel-gazing in product development and business — particularly the news product business. 

I keep seeing PowerPoint PDFs about what a new app or website section will do for the company, and no mention of what it will do for the user nor any indication that someone has asked those users what they want done.

Good luck with that.

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Perhaps I am being smug. But I see the fact that Daring Fireball’s revenue streams should remain unaffected by Safari content-blocking as affirmation that my choices over the last decade have been correct: that I should put my readers’ interests first, and only publish the sort of ads and sponsorships that I myself would want to be served, even if that means leaving (significant) amounts of money on the table along the way.

John Gruber, “Because of Apple”

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On Innovation & Acting Like A Startup

The HR folks roped me into helping plan a program.

We want to bring some of the up-and-comers together and give them a program that helps them be more innovative, better leaders, more collaborative and more creative.

How long is this program, I asked? 

Three days.

I don’t know how you do all that in three days. I explained that the best programs, camps, conferences, and seminars I ever attended were merely yardsticks that helped me measure where I was at and give me a direction to go in when I went back home to where the real learning and exercising was happening.

So what should we do?

I don’t know, I said. But if you want to know what I do, I can share that.

So, this is a reprint of an excerpt of an email:

There are books written on what innovation is and isn't, how it's not just one mythic figure, that it can be a learned, that it can be a process built into organizations, and on. I will not try to regurgitate or distill this, I'll just share what I do. I've built and maintain a personal system of discovery. I want to encounter new ideas, new technology, new business models, new people and new problems multiple times a day. I try to maximize this daily exposure with tools like email newsletters, Twitter, magazines, my choice of video consumption, events I attend, books I read and apps I install. I've engineered this in the same way other people build habits like working out or brushing their teeth. A related habit is observation and interrogation. Look harder. Look more broadly. Look more closely. Ask someone else if they see what you see. Ask what they see that you don't. Ask why. Ask why not. Ask what if. Repeat. This habit builds on the system of discovery, and it also helps grow and tune it. Then I make webs and shelves. For every new piece that comes in, the practice is to ask how it does or might connect to all the other pieces before it. Sometimes this goes as far as comical, unrealistic combinations, jokes in conversation: What about an Uber for toothpaste? Why can't I single-serving rent (Blockbuster) someone's Netflix password for a day? Whether I'm able to make connections or not, I try to put everything on a shelf where I'll be able to find it again. Some things you just remember, other things you need to store in Pocket or Dropbox. I write notes in books. I blog. Some things you send on a wave (in the form of email or a tweet) to someone else to see what ripples come back to you. When my instinct is really strong about a new piece of information, I'll go so far as to use tools that email it to me in the future. If you do these things, you're laying the groundwork for innovation. The dots will connect when the opportunity is right. Just like innovation, you can read untold books on startups. Here's what I think separates many startups from us and we would also be wise to address. Urgency. Although we should always be calm and collected in appearance, we need to move like our future truly hinges on acting. Today. Now. I deal with startups regularly. I've helped build one. They cannot comprehend why it takes us as long as it does to make decisions or execute. Skin in the game. The previous item stems in part from a startup founder's / early hire's fear that failure will reflect on them personally, both in reputation and financially. It is a big deal to walk away or quit before a startup astronomically succeeds or spectacularly crashes and burns, as a result. People persist, though, because of belief in the company and the promise of reward. So many hats. In contrast to our silos and departments, startups have people doing a plethora of jobs. As a result, they know what makes the company tick, they have more empathy for each of their colleagues, and that discovery-and-connection mechanism of innovation is more likely to bear fruit. Doing things that don't scale. The startups that become massive successes begin quite humbly. Their founders beg their family and friends to try the product. They walk the streets, go to meetups, whatever, pitching everyone they can. The founders of Paypal initially gave people $20 to sign up — they spent millions of dollars to initially grow their user base. We don't launch something without a P&L. We don't try unless we are confident of rapid scale. Comfort with discomfort. The reason people work for companies like ours and not startups is avoidance of uncertainty and pain. Startups ravage people emotionally and physically, it stresses family and relationships. There's a constant threat to Maslow's basic needs of shelter and safety. How much sleep are we willing to lose? How hungry are we willing to go? What would we sacrifice to get one more user or customer? Saying no. This rolls up the previous three items. When you're small you can't do everything. You have to do the things that get the most results, which means choosing. You have to accept that sometimes when you choose, there will be a painful result. Sometimes it's temporary, sometimes you have to go back and change your choice. Our organization has a chronic issue of not saying no, of not stopping doing things. We used to be everything for everyone in many ways, and we keep trying to be that. The most successful startups are ruthless about what they are and, more importantly, what they are not.

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3 Things to occupy my mind for a time

1. Commoditization. I was talking about this the last time, but I could have gone off the rails talking about programmatic, which once marketers really begin to grasp it, it’s going to hurt traditional publishers who will see pressure on CPMs like they haven’t seen before.

2. Mobile. Seriously. How will you monetize this? We’re in the midst of crossing the tipping point where this is where the majority of the audience connects, and there’s no going back to desktops.

3. Platform monopoly. Google created monopoly-scale economic conditions on the desktop web. Facebook has nearly achieved that on mobile. If publishers aren’t reading Zero to One and asking themselves some hard questions, they’ll end up content wire services, at best.

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Attention is the key, but is it really an economy?

I realized that I’ve gone far too long in my life with far too little formal education about economics. You couldn’t have convinced my 16-year-old self that I’d ever be this desperate to really understand macro- and micro-economic concepts, theory and history.

And I’m not just talking about figuring out whether the Fed will raise interest rates. 

Mathew Ingram isn’t the first to write about the “attention economy,” of course, but it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that the topic merits more, well, attention.

The underlying principle is simple: Where the attention goes, the money will inevitably follow. And right now, the attention of a large chunk of the population is being diverted away from traditional content and information channels, and platforms like Facebook and Google are busy vacuuming it up. Many existing media and content companies face a future in which they are just suppliers to these platforms — or even worse, find themselves cut out of the attention economy altogether.

But here’s the thing:

“Attention” is the label that helps contrast a business model built on impressions, and the world we increasingly find ourselves in, where economic forces make that model less and less viable.

This traditional business model also has as a key component a distribution channel that is owned by the producer (of content, in this case) and provides exclusivity — both scarcity, and a relationship with the customer.

In this new world, content becomes a surplus and so it’s commoditized to the point where its value is minimal. Similarly, ad inventory grows geometrically as content pages proliferate, increasing downward pressure on pricing. 

This is basic supply-demand economics. (I think.)

What I struggle with is substituting attention for content or CPMs — and isn’t that all this is, a substitution?

Yes, attention is finite. I only have so many minutes a day to devote to anything and, in a vacuum, increasing demands on my minutes makes their value go up.

But my first observation is that people’s daily minutes with digital media in total is on the rise. This has an upper bound, sure. But when the world transitions to screenless media, as it surely will, I suspect that that upper bound will approach our total waking hours in a day.

What’s more, I have a hard time conceiving how we would monetize attention in the way that we’ve monetized adjacency and exposure to messaging. In the end, I think it’s results that advertisers pay for. They won’t pay for CPMs or time-spent-viewing if they aren’t getting qualified leads and conversions, ultimately. 

I don’t think advertisers are more likely to spend money on a time basis than they are on impressions, I guess is my point.

I think “attention” is maybe just a proxy for the really valuable thing: behaviors. Do they use your app? Do they use it every day? Multiple times a day? (That is, really, what we’re talking about here, right?)

What the current winners named in Ingram’s article are really doing different is the context of the advertising — on mobile, anyway — in that it’s native. This starts to change the business model, but I think it’s really just a matter of degrees of difference for users. A native ad on Twitter or Facebook is only slightly less annoying than an adjacent display ad.

We can test this hypothesis if the ad-blockers that will soon start landing on iOS figure out how to block these native ads.

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Now we’re all online, but somehow we’re meant to accept that web advertising is how it is, and never question or deviate from it? Nuh-uh. Why should web advertisers be immune from evolutionary or revolutionary change in user habits? What’s sauce for the print goose is sauce for the online gander. I don’t recall the people who scolded me for using tracking detectors previously saying that everyone had to stick with print adverts because they made more money (which those ads still do).

Charles Arthur, examining the looming introduction of ad-blocking technology on iOS browsers.

Advertisers can resist or deny their responsibility for actively seeking better ways that connect businesses with the people they need, but the undeniable truth is that the best user experience will win. Somehow, some way, businesses will spring up — and thrive — that don’t piss off digital content consumers.

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Sage admonishments from Cory Bergman

If your time or attention span are limited, just start with #4 and #8 and Pocket the rest for later.

4. Faster, better and easier always win

As history has shown us, users always gravitate toward user experiences that are faster, easier and better. And as an industry, they’ve gravitated away from us, consuming our content through superior mobile experiences.

More people get news from Facebook – 41% of U.S. adults – than any other source. That’s because it’s a faster, better and easier experience to get news.

Told you this would sting.

Sure, the tech giants have more resources, but let’s be honest: our industry isn’t known for obsessing about our users (for example, see “News sites are fatter and slower than ever.”) Few media organizations practice human-centered design, product teams are a relatively new phenomenon and most mobile media products still do just one thing: display abbreviated content from a single brand.

If your question is, “Well, how do you do this?” read this piece on user testing at ProPublica and The New York Times.

8. Shorter content is not a mobile strategy

When starting to brainstorm an app or an email product, the discussion almost always begins with how to take existing content and “shorten” it for mobile.

Just shortening your website content for a mobile app — video included — is like putting radio on TV: adding a camera that shows the host talking awkwardly into a microphone. It’s the price of entry perhaps, but it doesn’t guarantee an audience. A beautiful design is great, too, but it doesn’t mean people will keep using it: Even worse with mobile, it certainly doesn’t guarantee any revenue.

Be sure to see Cory’s original post for the great design vs. UX photo.

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Herrman and Buchanan think the media industry is due for a reckoning. The transition from media hosted on websites to media built around social platforms is more profound than people realize, Herrman says. As more content is published directly onto Facebook, users will gradually lose a sense of who’s producing what. The most consequential journalism becomes just another unit of content in a single stream of music videos, movie trailers, updates from friends and relatives, advertisements, and viral tidbits from sites adept at gaming fast-changing algorithms and behaviors. Readerships that seem large now will turn out to be as ephemeral as Snapchats.

Josh Dzieza, in ‘Why are the most important people in media reading the Awl?’

Woe unto those who thought the reckoning had already passed.

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A cautionary tale

Mike, a software developer on my team, recently was describing how he really wanted a distraction-free workstation, something that didn’t have the internet and IM clients and the other things that interfere with just writing (or in his case, coding).

I told him a company had already made that. It was called “Smith Corona.” 

I chuckled, but the reference was over Mike’s head. He had no idea Smith Corona had been the dominant typewriter manufacturer. Which got me wondering, “What is Smith Corona up to these days? Are they even still in business?”

So I googled, and I read. And what I learned, I think, is a cautionary tale for media companies.

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As more business models emerge, and the number of revenue streams at any one business expands, it has become more important than ever for journalists to care about, understand and influence commercial strategy.

If you want to get journalists to heed this admonishment, I wouldn’t follow up with Buzzfeed as the example, whether it’s applicable or not.

But I still agree with the assertion.

Editorial culture’s aversion to commercial affairs results from fallacious thinking about Chinese walls: Since editorial content must be protected from advertisers’ influence, journalists must protect themselves from anything commercial. Sometimes it also results from misplaced snobbery: commercial activities may enable my good work, but they are also, somehow, dirty. 

The first step, maybe, is getting everyone to the table stakes of understanding just what a business model is.

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R.I.P. Cir.ca

Maybe that’s too extreme, since all they’re saying is “indefinite hiatus.”

Nonetheless, I had high hopes for Cir.ca (even though I was not a daily user, which maybe says something about the problem).

Of the commentary so far, I like best the eulogy from Wired writer Julia Greenberg.

But if you can solve the real problems that have faced news organizations since news first made its way online, you may have a chance of making it on your own. Do what no one else can do: find new ways to profit off the news. Otherwise, you’re in it with the rest of us.

Do what no one else can do: find new ways to profit off the news.

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What do you spend your site budget on? Performance or features? News sites go for features because business ... It’s for that reason that I think we web developers should advise news sites, and in fact any site that prioritises features over performance, to go native, since they stand to gain from it. In fact, we could argue that because the features that are necessary to them are such a drain on performance, the web is no longer the best medium to publish their sites.

Peter-Paul Koch

The author concedes in his post, however, that news sites need URLs (think archives, sharing, etc.).

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I think what we need to throw out are some old notions of what our readers need. We just have to be more responsive to what the audience wants. I think the tradition in newspapers has been that we have set the agenda and we’ve told readers what we think they want to know. I think we need to come down off of that mountain a little bit and ask people, involve people in the conversation a little bit more.

Mike Wilson, new editor at The Dallas Morning News

Nice interview with Wilson here.