Erin and I went up to NYC a few weeks back to give a presentation to members of the Magazine Publishers' of America about our study on the features of magazine websites.  If you are a glutton for punishment, you can download a copy of our Powerpoint presentation here.  

As a presenter, the questions/answer part of the session is always the most interesting. And the best questions are always the ones you can't really answer.  So here are some of the better questions we were asked.

(1)  How do journalists balance the time demands of their print duties with those of their online duties?

I basically said "umm" and then made a grunting noise. Seriously, I don't know.

It sort of reminds me of when I go into pitches to corporate clients and try to get them to start blogging themselves.  They always ask about the time commitments that are required.  "We're already overworked.  We don't have time to blog.  How can I do it without hiring someone?"  I can't really answer that one either.

I can only answer these questions from my own personal experience.  I'm a busy guy and I find time to blog.  How?  For me, my work and my blogging are accomplished in one motion.  Blogging feeds my work and my work feeds my blogging.  It's all kind of the same thing.  

So I'd say in an ideal world magazines should create an environment where writing web and print content can be achieved in one motion.  Write blog entries that provide insight into the process of creating the story itself.  Post notes from interviews.  Post follow ups on the story as more information becomes available.  Post links to discussion about the article.  Post about peripheral issues you got interested in due to your story research.  I think creating web content can be done in a way that supplements what you are already doing.

I don't know is probably the right answer though. 

(2) How do you balance the traditional role of magazines as gatekeepers with the trend towards user generated content and social news?

I don't really have a good answer to this one either.  I would just say I think there is a sweet spot between your traditional, editor-driven newspaper website and the free for all approach taken by sites like Digg that no one has really hit yet.  

(3) Assuming you open things up and allow readers to comment on stories, how do you manage this given the lack of resources?

Once again, I don't think there is a right answer here as people are still figuring this out, but I did take a stab at it. 

First, you don't have to allow people to comment on every article.  Why bother with comments on wire stories?  In order to preserve resources you could potentially allow commenting only on longer pieces and/or editorials.  This is the approach being taken by www.espn.com .

Second, let your readers/users help you police the comments.  Give them ways to report out of line comments through your site.  I think this is a much better and more practical approach than having magazine staffers waiting at the ready to review every comment as they come in.

Following on the heels of the New York Times, the Seattle Post Intelligencer has launched a news reader that allows you to read the print version of the newspaper through a desktop application.

I gave the reader a test drive and think it is a fantastic piece of technology.  The reader runs smooth and fast and creates a really pleasing reading experience.  It is much better than the PDFs of print editions I've seen in other places.

However, there are a couple of problems with this.

(1) You have to install the reader software on your machine in order to use it.  Not only that, the version of the reader is specific to each newspaper.  So if I want to read five papers online like this, I'd have to install five programs.  This is much more likely to be adopted if you could install the program once and then read all your newspapers and magazines on it.

(2) I don't want to read the print version of the newspaper on my computer, even if the reader is really slick.  I really don't.

If I'm on my computer, I'd rather just go to the website and quickly pick and choose what I read.   Maybe I'd use this thing for a glossy magazine, but I'm having trouble seeing why I'd use this application instead of just reading stuff on the newspaper's website.  I don't get it.

Am I missing something?

Erin and I wrote an article a few months back on trends in newspaper websites for the International Newspaper Marketing Association's Ideas Magazine. 

Entitled "Cracking the code for news sites," the piece sort of combines our newspaper research with our series of posts on how to improve newspaper websites. 

If you are interested, you can download a PDF of the article here. 

If you have better ideas or think we're morons, let us know in the comments. 

After our presentation for the Magazine Publishers of America in NYC on Tuesday, we received some requests for additional research.  I spent this morning trying to find some statistical explanations for the performance of the magazine websites by running some regressions, checking for correlation between the presence of Web features and traffic (as measured by Alexa).  However, much like our regression analysis of newspapers , this did not result in any significant results.

I wanted to find out which websites were performing the best in relation to print versions of magazines, so I created an online-print differential.  This figure represents the difference between the ordinal online ranking of a magazine website and the magazine's ordinal print ranking.  Large negative numbers indicate a website that outperforms the print magazine, where positive numbers indicate print versions that are outperforming their online counterparts.  Here is a table that shows our results.

As you can see, it's difficult to infer any patterns from this data.  I did see a few interesting things, however.

• The Popular Science website has the highest online-print differential of all the magazines we researched.  This makes perfect sense, considering that the demographic to which this magazine appeals is most likely tech-minded, therefore more likely to use the Web to access PopSci materials. Also, the Popular Science website is relatively full-featured and robust.
• Women's magazines made up the majority of the magazines at the bottom of the differential list, meaning that the print versions of these magazines drastically outperform the websites.  I guess I'm not really sure what to make of this, but I would be interested to see if there is any pattern here if we compared this stat to general usage rates for women vs. men.
• I was surprised that TV Guide had the differential it did.  TV Guide has a great website, so I found it odd that its website didn't fare better in this analysis.  I guess this can be attributed to the fact that TV Guide has a massive print audience.
• Endless Vacation is another surprising case.  This website is primarily a brochure site with no online functionality.  Yet, the print version of this magazine only slightly outperformed the website.  What exactly are people looking at on this website?  I can't figure that one out.

Overall, this analysis did not present any clear conclusions.  I think that a problem with this type of research is that obtaining data for magazine Web traffic is difficult.  I used Alexa to determine the traffic rates for magazine websites, but I am not confident in the true accuracy of these figures.  Since Alexa only tracks websites visited by people who have installed the Alexa toolbar, the results are probably skewed toward tech-minded audiences and are not an impartial measurement. 

Another problem with this sort of analysis is caused by what we dubbed "integrated sites"–magazine sites that are part of a bigger network of sites.  Redbook , Country Living , Money , ESPN , and Sports Illustrated are examples of this type of site (Redbook and Country living are part of the iVillage network; Money and SI are part of CNN , and ESPN the magazine is combined with ESPN the network).  Alexa could not read these magazine sites independently, and only presented data for the umbrella network.  For example, when you type the Redbook URL into the Alexa search function, it gives back data for the entire iVillage network rather than traffic just for Redbook.  As a result, we left these "integrated sites" out of the analysis, which probably left holes in the data.

While the analysis itself may not reveal any earth-shattering conclusions, it does draw attention to the lack of transparency in the industry.  In order to conduct a real analysis, we would need access to accurate traffic and page view data, which would probably have to be acquired from the magazines themselves.

Check out our magazine study here and our newspaper study here . 

Read/Write Web has an interesting post looking at the use of RSS and social bookmarking (Digg, del.icio.us and Newsvine) by fifteen or so mainstream media outlets.  Their post is similar in many ways to the newspaper and magazine studies we did a few months back that looked at the features on the major player's websites.

Below is Read/Write Web's chart analyzing which outlets are using what:

Two things here:

(1) I think RSS has definitely gone mainstream.  For just about any new website, having an RSS feed has become a basic type of features (all of our new sites include it).  To me, the more interesting question is how these organizations are using RSS.  Full, partial or headline only feeds?  Advertising in feeds?  When we did our own study a few months back we saw that mainstream media was using RSS, but in uninteresting ways.  All feeds were partial and nobody was really experimenting with ads in RSS.  In essence, they were using RSS like an email alert system.  The goal is solely to drive page views and serve ads.  Be interesting to look if that has changed.

(2) The adoption of the Digg/del.icio.us bookmarklets is interesting.  When we did our newspaper study back in August, only 4 of the top 100 newspapers were using these things.  So I think this feature is definitely picking up momentum.  However, I really don't think it means much.  Inclusion of these features is a sort of cheap way of showing you are down with the whole Web 2.0 thing.  The harder and more rewarding path is to build a community around your own site instead of simply trying to tap into external communities.

Update: Reading the comments over on Read/Write Web, an anonymous poster who claims to work for Time Inc. makes pretty much my same point.  Here is the relevant part of his comment:

Web 2.0 should be about creating and enabling communities and not shuffling them off to whatever becomes the next big social site. Also, I know that it's common to lump RSS into Web 2.0, but please, this is an old technology that is only now gaining traction at the same time as Web 2.0 is ascending. If you don't have an RSS feed at this point (and only 48% of the top magazines do), then you're not even doing Web 1.0 correctly.

Time magazine, as well as most of the top 50 magazines, has done little to empower its community to add value and collective intelligence to its site. To me, this is the essence of Web 2.0. If Web 2.0 is going to truly mean something beyond us interacting with a series of sites that got there first (read MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Technorati, "fill in your favorite one here"), then media outlets of all kind - magazines, tv, movie studios, the works - need to recognize that the revolution will happen with or without them: we are no longer just consumers, we are consumer-creators.

 The entire comment thread over there is worth reading and this has also popped up on Techmeme. 

On February 6th, Erin and I will be giving a presenation at the Magazine Publishers of America offices in NYC on the use of the Internet by magazines.  We will talk about how aggressively magazines are adopting Web 2.0 features, review examples of best practices and speculate a bit about what will come next.

The MPA website has the details.

We received some more feedback from our newspaper study we conducted last August.  For the Media posted an entry today about how South African newspapers are using the Web.

The two most surprising things from this research:  Of 19 South African newspapers, just one offers a blog(s) and just over half (10 papers) are using RSS.  I guess this blogger was correct in stating that South African papers have a ways to go in terms of their Web use.

In addition to looking for the features tested in our study, For the Media expanded the research to include Mobile phone alerts and newsletters, email newsletters, and email alerts. 

Here's a breakdown of the features and the percentage of papers using each tool:

RSS Feed: 52.6%
RSS for different sections: 10.5%
RSS includes ads:
Most Popular: 5.26%
Video: 10.5%
Podcast: 10.5%
Chats: 5.26%
Blogs: 5.26%
Blog Comments: 0
Blogroll:5.26%
Comments on Articles: 5.26%
Registration Required: 31.6%
Bookmarking: 5.26%
Message Boards: 15.8%
Email Newsletter: 10.5%
Email Alerts: 5.26%
Mobile Phone Alerts: 5.26%
Mobile Phone Newsletter: 5.26%

I have two questions related to this research.  For most of the tools, just one or two papers are using various Web tools.  Are the same papers consistently using the Web tools, or is use of various features spread over the whole sample of papers?  Also, I find it quite surprising that given the quality of these websites that 31% of the papers are requiring registration.  What exactly are people registering for? 

Reminder:  Check out the various research related to the newspaper study which has lots of information regarding newspaper research in different countries:

• Italy
• Denmark: here and here
• Japan
• Canada
• New Zealand 
• UK 

 Also check out our TBR wiki, which has an entire section dedicated to ways that newspapers can improve their websites.

The Politico, a new weekly newspaper that will provide in-depth coverage of the political/lobbying scene, launched yesterday to modest fanfare. 

Interestingly, The Politico will take a sort of hybrid approach to distributing its content.  They don't seem to be aiming to attract a large print circulation.  They will distribute around 25,000 print copies of the weekly paper to various DC types at $3.50 a pop (I've got a copy of the first issue here).  Presumably, the print edition will feature long form, deep dive type of stories (it does so far).

But most folks will read the paper through its website, www.politico.com.  The website appears to feature most of the content from the print edition, as well as timely, breaking news and a variety of blogs.  This strategy seems right to me.

Anyway, here's a breakdown of the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of The Politico's website.

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BlogBurst is a service that makes content from a pre-screened group of blogs available to a network of publishers, including the likes of USA Today and Reuters. We signed The Bivings Report up with BlogBurst right when it launched in May in an effort to get more folks to read our content. Since then we’ve had a few stories picked up by Reuters, which has generated a lot of headline views (around 850,000) and a modest number of post views (around 1,500).

From our perspective, there is no real downside to BlogBurst. That is 1,500 post views we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. The more people that read our stuff the better.

Then today I got an email from BlogBurst saying that during the fourth quarter of 2006 we were their 45th most popular blog based on headline views. They also offered us $100 as a reward, with the option to donate the money to charity (Periwinkle Foundation) or keep the cash for ourselves. After reading up on the Periwinkle Foundation, we chose to donate the money.

Obviously, $100 is nothing for a full quarter of blogging. But seeing as we signed up for BlogBurst for exposure and not money, it is a nice bonus.

Here is a list of our posts that have been picked up by Reuters so far, from most to least in terms of headline views.

• MySpace Welcomes Magazines
• AP Names Top 10 YouTube Videos in ‘06 (But Forgets the Video Part)
• Want to be President? Step 1: Buy a Video Camera
• Print Media Websites: Who’s Getting it Right?
• Reporting from the “Trends in Political Blogging” Panel
• The Results are in!
• In-Text Ads – Ensuring Contextual Appropriateness
• Hotsoup is a mess
• What is Daylife?

We have just finished a new mini-research study in which we examined the availability of mobile features for the top 50 newspaper websites and the top 50 English-language blogs. The results were surprising. Just 24% (twelve) of blogs provided mobile content, while 54% (27) newspapers offered a mobile browsing option.

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Chris Anderson, author of the Long Tail and the editor-in-chief at Wired Magazine, has written two (1, 2) though provoking posts outlining how online media might work in the future. In his second post, he outlines his vision for "radical transparency" by the media. There is some great thinking here. Describing the posts simplistically, Anderson wants to not only show readers what’s behind the curtain at Wired, but let them help control the wizard. Following are the main elements of this "radical transparency" (presented in quotes) and my quick thoughts on each:

(1) "Show who we are. All staff edit their own personal ‘about’ pages, giving bios, contact details and job functions."

Absolutely. I think another key here is to have the reporters actually interact with users via comments, posting clarifications and engaging in friendly bickering. Do this in real time, not through some delayed mailbag type of feature.

(2) "Show what we’re working on. We already have internal wikis that are common scratch pads for teams working on projects. And most writers have their own thread-gathering processes, often online. Why no open them to all? Who knows, perhaps other people will have good ideas, too."

I think it is a great idea to encourage users to submit story ideas and tips or even to ask for input in certain instances. But, frankly, as a magazine reader I don’t think I’d be that interested in knowing everything a magazine is researching. It is just sort of too much. I’d worry this would be used and abused more by interested parties (PR firms, companies, etc.) trying to impact stories before they are written than real people.

(3) "Process as Content. Why not share the reporting as it happens, uploading the text of each interview as soon as you can get it processed by your flat-world transcription service in India?"

I’m a big proponent of publications including the source documents when they publish a piece. And this may make sense for some big cover story type of thing. But in most cases I’m just not going to care. I want to read the short and sweet version and then dive into the source materials if my interest is piqued. Not the other way around. And once again, in most cases the only ones who will care are interested parties trying to slant the story.

(4) "Privilege the crowd. Why not give comments equal status to the story they’re commenting on? Why not publish all letters to the editor as they’re submitted (we did that here), and let the readers vote on which are the best?"

On the comments, no thanks. I think allowing comments on every story is enough. I’m comfortable with the comments being below the story. Of course, Anderson may have some way of doing this design wise that I can’t envision. On the letters to the editor, absolutely. This is something that came up in a follow up to our 9 Ways to Improve Newspaper Websites post. I would love to see this process opened up.

(5) "Let readers decide what’s best. We own Reddit, which (among other things) is a terrific way of measuring popularity. Why should we guess at which stories will be most popular and give those preferential treatment?"

Absolutely. This is exactly what I was hoping for when they bought Reddit. I would just say that there is a sweet spot between a popularity-based news view and an editor-controlled view that hasn’t really been hit on yet (I know Netscape is trying). How about giving the user the ability to switch between the popular and editor views of the site? This was what we tried in our redesign of USA Today.

(6) "Wikifiy everything. The realities of publishing is that at some point you push the publish button. In the traditional world, that’s the end of the story. It is a snapshot in time, as good as we could make it but inevitably imperfect. The errors (and all articles have them) are a mix of commission and omission–we hope for the best yet brace ourselves for the worst. But what if we published every story on a wiki platform, so they could evolve over time, just like Wikipedia itself? The original story would be the foundation of what could eventually become a version expanded and updated by readers."

Great idea. The web isn’t print. Let the story be a living breathing thing and not something disposable.

You can read his full post here. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Update: Netly News has a good piece exploring another problem with this approach: giving away scoops to competitors.

Update 2: Jeff Jarvis weighs in.

We've been somewhat critical of newspaper and magazine websites in the past few weeks.  Two of our studies, "The Use of the Internet by America's Newspapers" and "The Presence of Magazines on the Internet", concluded that newspapers and magazines aren't maximizing their presence on the Web.  By using a larger number and variety of Web tools, we fell that magazine and newspaper websites can be significantly improved.

This doesn't mean that all newspaper/magazine websites are terrible.  In fact, I've listed here some sites that do some things on the Web quite well.

• Best Use of RSS Feeds:  The Houston Chronicle does a great job of  making its RSS feeds clearly available from its home page.  While this may seem obvious to some, a large majority of newspaper sites make users go through several clicks to access the site's RSS feeds.   The fact that the Chronicle makes them accessible directly from its homepage is somewhat unique.
• Best Blog Network:  The Boston Globe has an enormous network of journalist and citizen blogs that cover a wide variety of topics.  Definitely worth checking out, especially if you live in the Boston area.
• Best Use of Bookmarking:  For newspapers, the Washington Post  is a great example of a site that gives users a variety of options for external bookmarking.  For magazines, Sports Illustrated is the only publication that allows both internal and external bookmarking options (users can save articles on their si.com account or their facebook account). 
• Best Commenting Features:  There are a few newspapers that have fantastic mechanisms for user comments on articles.  For example,   on the Philadelphia Inquirer website, users cannot comment on every article.  But the site does enable comments on popular articles about local news or special interest items.  On the main section pages, articles with commenting functions are highlighted by a special icon.  The Morning Call and the Virginian-Pilot take a different approach, allowing comments on just about every article on the site.  Also noteworthy is the commenting functions for The Guardian (UK).  This publication has a separate site dedicated to user comments, called Comment is Free.
• Best Use of Tags:  We found three magazine websites that used tags:  US Weekly, Popular Science, and Parenting.  All three sites have tag clouds on their homepage, which makes searching for article pretty easy.

The great use of these features is encouraging in that it shows that not all publications are clueless when it comes to the Web.  Some magazine and newspaper websites are, in fact, starting to get it right.

Know of any other interesting uses of Web 2.0?  Let us know!

For the first time (I think), a piece from our blog was highlighted on the news aggregator site, Techmeme. A lot of people criticize Techmeme as being elitist and thus boring, since it only tracks a small number of high profile blogs and online media outlets. Jeremy Zawodny sums up the criticism pretty well in this post:

“TechMeme is a useful service for many people. I used to be one of them. But I lost interest a while ago when it became far less useful for discovering stuff on that long tail of blogging. Anymore, a small subset of blogs (and increasingly non-blogs) hog much of the attention. That happens to be exactly what I’m not looking for most of the time.”

Personally, I find it reassuring that our blog is included since we are most decidedly NOT a part of any elite blogging club. It is also reassuring that the post that was highlighted from our blog was a substantive look at the magazine websites and not one of our more frivolous posts. If I had to pick a single post from the last month or two to highlight, it would have been that one.

Of course, it is a lot harder to criticism something when you are included in it….

Screenshot from Techmeme.

TBG has recently completed a research study called "Analyzing the Presence of Magazines on the Internet". In the wake of success surrounding our previous newspaper study, "The Use of the Internet by America's Newspapers ", we decided to conduct similar research on the magazine industry. Our study reviews the websites of the top 50 most circulated magazines in the United States and evaluates them based on the presence or absence of various Web 2.0 features. After finishing the research, it became clear that magazines are not making use of Web 2.0. Despite their failure in terms of Web features, it should be recognized that magazines have taken on a more effective general strategy than newspapers when it comes to the Internet. Instead of replicating printed content online, as newspapers do, magazines have made efforts to publish unique, Web specific, and easily digestible materials on their websites. In this way, magazines are using the Internet as a supplement to, rather than a replacement of, their printed publications. Magazine websites limit their article content and focus on pushing customers to purchasing printed subscriptions. Here are some key findings from our research:

• The most common online feature offered by magazines is RSS feeds (48 per cent). All of the RSS feeds offered by magazine websites are partial feeds. In addition, none of the magazines are including advertisements in their RSS feeds, while just 28 per cent of magazines divide their RSS feeds into different sections.

• Message boards/forums are offered by 46 per cent of magazine websites. This seemingly old-fashioned form of communication is extremely popular on magazine websites, particularly on the sites of women’s magazines.

• 38 per cent of the magazines require registration to view all of the site’s content. While this feature is only present on 23 per cent of the nation’s top 100 newspaper sites, it seems that magazines are still heavily reliant on website registration. It must be noted, however, that newspaper and magazine online registration is very different. The large majority of the magazines we investigated allow users to view article content free of registration. However, to participate in forums, registration is required. This seems to serve as a mechanism for monitoring content that people post on message boards rather than to collect demographic information, as is the case with newspapers. Thus, this 38 per cent figure largely represents magazines that require forum registration, not registration for the purpose of reading articles.

• 40 per cent of the magazines offer at least one reporter blog. Readers can comment on 17 of the 19 magazine blogs, while eight reporter blogs offer blogrolls, or external links to other blogs.

• Video is an offering on 34 per cent of websites.

• Just 14 per cent of websites use podcasts and bookmarking; eight percent allow comments on articles; and six per cent use tags.

You can read the report in its entirety here and view our data sheets here Please take a look and let us know what you think!

Steve Outing from Editor and Publisher wrote a good column yesterday about the progress newspapers have made in transitioning to online strategies.  He gave the industry a B- for their transition efforts thus far.

Here is a quick summary of his main criticisms of newspaper websites, all of which I agree with:

• Not enough are using video.  Based on our study, 61 of the top 100 newspapers offer video on their websites.  That number seems ok, but the truth is that many newspapers offer video as an afterthought.  It is rarely a fundamental part of the overall strategy.
• Better blogging still needed.  Newspapers are blogging (80 of the top 100 according to our research), but Outing believes papers should focus more on breaking news in their blog strategies.
• Classifieds still stink.  Outing rightly points out that classified ad sections at newspapers are stuck in the 1990s.
• Not enough interactivity.  In my opinion (and Outings), this is the big one.  In a nutshell, newspapers need to use their website to foster two way communication between readers and journalists.

Personally, I’d give the industry a C and add the following as additional areas of improvement:

• Work with your local blogging/podcasting/vlogging community.  Newspapers need to figure out ways to effectively incorporate user generated content into their offerings.
• Focus on local and special interest content.  Too many website emphasize generic national and international AP content that folks can read anywhere.  Newspaper should highlight their own original content - that is where they add value online.
• Give users different ways to discover site content.  Let users view your homepage based on the most viewed on content in addition to the traditional editorial view. 

You can read Outing’s piece here. 

[Via Techmeme]