(Rich Gordon)

Location, location, location.

It's not just the best advice for investing in real estate - it's an important emerging frontier for media content and services. A frontier that newspapers and other local media ignore at their peril.

When it comes to location, three important trends are converging:

• Web-based mapping technologies are becoming simpler and, consequently, ubiquitous. The "My Maps" function of Google Maps makes it easy for anyone to display information on a map - and Google has also made it amazingly simple to embed a map in any Web page. Beyond that, thanks to open-source mapping tools, Web developers (like those at EveryBlock) can now create their own map interfaces that have functionality and design features not allowed by Google.


• Mobile phones are getting smarter and are gaining "location awareness." The first-generation iPhone does a remarkable job of identifying its owner's location by reading nearby WiFi signals and checking them against a database of wireless hotspots. The new iPhone 3G, due for release this month, will be even better because it will actually communicate with GPS satellites. And credible research suggests that within a few years, GPS will be included on most cellphones and other portable devices.


• The market for vehicle-based navigation systems is growing fast. ABI Research projects that systems like OnStar and the newer SYNC system will soon be standard equipment on new cars. New navigation systems won't just tell you where you are and how to get where you're going. Already, users of XM satellite radio can get real-time traffic alerts on their in-dash GPS systems - an early indication that geographically relevant content can be delivered to automobiles as well as phones.

Here at Northwestern University, I recently had the pleasure of overseeing "Team LoJo," a class of six journalism master's students who set out to explore "locative journalism" in Medill's New Media Publishing Project. The team came up with this definition of locative journalism:

Using location-based technologies, such as GPS-enabled mobile devices and interactive maps, to provide geographically-relevant content that enhances a participant’s connection to a given place.

Team LoJo reported a series of multimedia stories about Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympics, and experimented with different ways of presenting those stories - via online slideshows, Web-based maps and location-aware portable devices. They documented their research and reporting on a blog (lojoconnect.com), created several multimedia stories and produced a comprehensive report (downloadable PDF) with findings and recommendations for journalists, newsrooms, media companies and journalism schools. For today, I want to focus on two of their most interesting recommendations:

1. News organizations should geotag their content


2. Harness the power of audio

The importance of geotagging

A dozen years ago or so, when most news organizations began publishing on the World Wide Web, almost all of them made the same mistake. They assumed that the Web was a text-based medium, and shoveled (hence the term "shovelware") their text content online with no change except to add HTML coding. We've since learned that adding structure to the text content - whether coding pages consistently so they can be found by search engines, or putting classified ads into a searchable database - is critical to making online content accessible and useful.

Today, news media are making the same mistake with geography, which is - after all - an extraordinarily powerful way of making content relevant. For decades, consumers have told us that "local" is the most relevant category of news. While people define "local" differently in different situations, I'm confident that organizing content by geography can make it more relevant to more people.

Local news organizations are trying to capitalize on geography by building new "hyperlocal" Web sites to serve neighborhoods, cities and towns. It makes sense to do so. But the problem with a hyperlocal Web site is that people have to go to the site to see the content. Our students concluded that geographically relevant content will reach more people if it is geotagged - meaning that the content is marked up so it can be displayed on maps, on Web sites organized by geography and on location-aware portable devices.

As with the PC-based Web, content that's appropriately formatted will end up being displayed and distributed in ways that the original creator didn't anticipate. For instance, the New York Times now routinely includes an XHTML meta tag on its articles that identifies the geographic locations the story focuses on. For instance, consider this article about bus riders in the Bronx. In the header of the Web page, this code is included:

<meta name="geo" content="Bronx (NYC);Manhattan (NYC);Inwood (NYC)">

From a programming standpoint, what the Times does is simple (though it's important to note that some human being has to categorize each article by geography). Because of this small step, some Google developers were able to make it possible to browse New York Times articles through the Google Earth interface.

I'd like to say that there is a commonly accepted format for how to tag content geographically, but as far as I can tell, no such standard yet exists. The Times certainly could be doing more - for instance, including true GPS latitude/longitude coordinates when relevant. But at least the Times has put a simple system in place that ensures its content can at least be sorted and aggregated by municipality. It may not be enough, but it's something every news site should be doing.


Why it's time to reprioritize audio

Radio is the second-oldest of the "traditional media," but it hasn't been an important local news medium for a very long time. (I love NPR as much as anyone, but its wonderful content is mostly national and global.) But as the Project for Excellence in Journalism puts it, "What we once knew as radio is now something more complex and in many ways more interesting. In addition to the AM and FM dials, now there is satellite, HD, Internet, MP3s, podcasting, and increasingly, cell phones."

I wish I had a dollar for every person I've heard talk about the potential significance of cellphones as media delivery systems. But referring to phones, most people talk about "screens" - as in "the third screen" or "the small screen." The assumption - which seems to be driving the content strategies of the cellular carriers - is that people want to watch video on their phones.

Our students came to a different conclusion. First, they participated in a variety of audio tours, which have proliferated far beyond their original uses in museums and no longer require proprietary hardware thanks to the popularity of portable music players. Audio tours are available now from private companies, nonprofit groups, and news organizations. The students found that the best audio tours could be powerful, immersive storytelling experiences.

Our student team also experimented with locative stortyelling on GPS-enabled portable devices, using free Windows Mobile software from Hewlett-Packard. On a sunny Saturday morning in May, they invited people to come to Washington Park in Chicago - the proposed home for Chicago's Olympic stadium - to experience "locative journalism" for themselves. The students came away convinced of the potential power of stories rooted in a physical location, but they also found that when people are paying attention to their surroundings, photos (and video) are a distraction while audio is complementary.

The kind of story our students created - which required people to walk around a newsworthy location - may never be extraordinarily popular. But the students' work underscored two larger points. First, that content can be more relevant when cued by the user's geographic location. And second, that users of portable electronic devices often are not likely to want photos or video content. These devices are portable, and people using them are often in motion (think of all those people you see on the street with earbuds sprouting from their heads) or multitasking. Considering both points, I have been wondering if a new golden age of audio might be coming soon.


Other perspectives

Whether or not I'm right about the growing potential for geographically triggered audio stories, I'm confident that geotagged content and mobile devices will create new opportunities - and threats - for local media. Newspapers, especially, should be best positioned to create content tied to geography (not to mention location-based advertising) - but they can be bypassed just as they have been on the Web. It's time for local media companies to start focusing on locative content and the future of mobile devices. Here are some places to start exploring:

• Al Ries, a marketing consultant and author who writes frequently for Advertising Age, recently posted a video entitled "Birth of a medium," in which he predicts that location-enabled cellular phones will become a new mass medium.


• This post from probably my favorite blog these days, Read/Write Web, describes 10 startup companies focused on making social networks mobile.


• The Center for Locative Media is a good resource, especially its blog and the posts by its director, Leslie Rule, on the PBS Idealab site.


• A group of journalism bloggers recently weighed in with answers to this question: "Is (digital) journalism better the more local it is?"


• If you're interested in geographically tagged news and information, of course you should check out EveryBlock and its blog. If you're not impressed right away, keep checking back - Adrian Holovaty and his team keep adding cool content and new features.


• Lance Ulanoff, editor of PC Magazine, recently wrote a column entitled, "Good-Bye Desktop PC, Hello iPhone" in which he predicts that young people will one day make fun of older generations "who sat down at desks and worked on 20-pound boxes."


• Wired magazine recently offered a fascinating article about Google's project to build an open operating system for mobile phones - which could dramatically expand the possibilities for mobile content while weakening the mobile carriers.


• Two valuable blogs are mocoNews, Rafat Ali's news service covering mobile content, and All Points Blog, "The Weblog for Location Technology & GIS."

By Rich Gordon (richgor-at-northwestern.edu)
Rich Gordon is Associate Professor and Director of Digital Technology in Education at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

(Limor Peer)

These days, young people's attitude toward the news is: "If the news is that important, it will find me," according to Jane Buckingham, founder of the Intelligence Group, a market research company. Many (older) people who hear this, just shake their heads.

They shake their heads because this goes against two common beliefs: First, though often unarticulated, is the belief that in any well functioning society all citizens should get at least a minimal level of news. And second, this attitude reveals a passive posture toward the news - which flies in the face of the prevailing credo of an increasingly active audience/consumer/citizen.

So, let's examine these two beliefs. What unsettles many is that an idealized model of reality - people care enough about politics that they will proactively seek news and information about the goings-on of government as to exercise their right to hold the government accountable - does not seem to work. But has it ever worked? And is it realistic to think that it will in the future?

Michael Schudson of the University of California, San Diego makes a convincing argument that the ideal notion of the "informed citizen" - which is part of the basic set of civic ideals we hold which includes good government, an objective, watchdog press, and an engaged citizenry - never really existed.

So if that is true, what are we really saying? I think the main thing we take away from this is a realization that not everyone is interested in what news organizations put out to the same extent.

At a conference on the Future of Journalism last week, Phil Meyer of the University of North Carolina reminded participants that the news has always "trickled down" from elites to the masses, as has been described by Katz & Lazarsfeld's "two-step flow" model documented in their book "Personal Influence" in 1955. Certain people - Katz & Lazarsfeld called them "opinion leaders" - are more tuned into the news and they serve as sources of this information to their social circle. Using today's terminology, these people are "hubs" in an information network.

The implication for news organizations should be straight-forward: Don't try to reach everyone. As was repeatedly pointed out at the Harvard conference last week: You never really did. All those people who bought the newspaper didn't buy it for the news, or to be "civically-informed." Many read it for the crossword puzzle, the sports pages, or the classifieds. Since there was just no way for them to unbundle that information, newspapers benefited financially because they were able to aggregate a mass audience and professionally because they were able to subsidize news with entertainment.

Today, news organizations need to reach out to those who like and care about the news - and not try to get everyone. It is unclear exactly how large this group is, some speculate that about 10% of the population prefers news to entertainment. But in any case, contrary to what many believe, these people are not necessarily "elites." Markus Prior of Princeton University showed that the preference for news content (vs. entertainment) cuts across gender, race, income and education and that age matters only slightly.

So, thinking in terms of specialty or niche products rather than mass products means you have to rethink your audience - don't try to reach everyone, try to reach the people who want what you have to offer. In doing so, keep in mind that,

1. This group does not want to be passive consumers of news. Those who like and care about the news, are not just your best consumers - they are also the ones who are more willing to participate in the production of news. This group is active - they will not wait for the news to find them, but will actively seek news, interact with it, and create it.


2. And they will share it - they will participate in the distribution of news and information. They are the ones who pass on, blog, comment, Twitter, and post a link - and the people who know them will pay attention.

As Matthew Ingram said, "Are most websites designed with this kind of principle in mind? Not really." What would your Web site, and your newspaper for that matter, look like if it really went after this group?

Implications for a democracy in which all citizens can equally vote but not all are equally informed are and should be debated. But regardless of your view on that, news organizations should seriously consider having a lively, relevant, and engaging conversation with those who are willing to do so.


By Limor Peer (l-peer@northwestern.edu)
Limor Peer is research director for the Media Management Center and Readership Institute.

(Steve Duke)

At the risk of this page looking like the Lee Abrams' cheering section, I'm going to pick up where colleague Mary Nesbitt left off a couple weeks ago with a new memo from Abrams that was posted to Romenesko this week.

Abrams, Tribune Co.'s new chief innovation officer, is a bit of a lightening rod for newspaper journalists because he comes from broadcast, writes in ransom-note style, and seems to be constantly wagging his finger at the professionals.

But much of what he is saying isn't new and shouldn't be surprising. He's pointing out things we've learned on the job or that studies - including ours at the Readership Institute - have shown newspapers for years, but that we have failed to act on.

This is an urgent time for the industry. MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton warned in a speech to the World Newspaper Congress earlier this month, that "survival is not guaranteed" and predicted that "some newspapers in the U.S. won’t make it through this transition." (You can find the entire speech in the coverage by BusinessWeek's Jon Fine.)

Meanwhile, Alan Mutter in his Confessions of a Newsosaur analyzed the numbers behind McClatchy's layoff this week of 10 percent of its workforce and concluded that the savings will cover just 23.7 percent of MNI's anticipated revenue shortfall. More pain is just around the corner.

So instead of mocking Abrams, we should look at what he says and how it fits into what we know.

"If grocery stores were organized like newspapers, you'd wear out your shoes looking for vegetables, as carrots would be in aisle 6, tomatoes in aisle 8, etc..."

Abrams was observing that the Los Angeles Times covered entertainment business extensively, but by scattering the stories throughout the paper lost the opportunity to establish itself as the entertainment business authority. He recommended that newspapers work harder to compartmentalize stories, particularly on topics they want to own, so the heft of coverage is obvious.

We've been making the same point in workshops, seminars and speeches around the country since 2000. Our original Impact Study found that making the paper easier to read was a key driver of readership, and an element of "easy to read" was improved navigation, which includes clustering stories on the same topic.

But I didn't need the Impact Study to tell me this. I remember focus groups from 20 or more years ago when I worked at the Chicago Sun-Times telling us we didn't have much national or international coverage, then being surprised by its volume when we took them through the paper page-by-page and pointed out the stories. It wasn't organized, so they didn't think there was much of it - exactly Abrams' point.

Related to this issue of "easy to read," Abrams wrote:

"Newspapers have a habit of making things SO hard to read absorb and engage in. We're in the age of Media ease. Make it hard, and they'll go away faster than a CD buyer.

His observation is spot-on. Ease of reading is at the heart of readership, and it has a lot of components beyond organizing stories by topic. For more see this from the Impact Study.

"90% of the Section indexes are throwaways... afterthoughts. Take a look. It's sort of like 'Oh... incidentally, here's what's inside.' These are DRIVERS."

He's right on both counts. Promotion is a readership driver (it's an element of "easy to read"), and yes, newspapers do a bad job with indexes, reefers, skyboxes and other promotions. Too often they are throwaways promoting routine news coverage or standing features instead of high-impact, exclusive content.

Every newspaper should make promotions the responsibility of a high-ranking editor who recognizes their importance. Further, the promos should be created by the paper's best designers and wordsmiths - as they are at magazines.

For guidance that we have offered on improving promotion since 2000 see this, this, this, this, and this.

"Before I joined Tribune, I had NO idea that reporters were around the globe reporting the news... Because the paper 'assumed' I knew. ...People DON'T know that you have REAL people exclusively reporting, because we ASSUME they do."

OK, it sounds a little silly that he didn't know there were actual people on the ground doing this work. But in context, it's clear he is saying he didn't know it was Tribune Co. reporters (note the word "exclusively" in his quote), as opposed to generic wire reports. His point is that exclusivity is worth bragging about.

Two of our studies support his point. As noted above, the Impact Study made it clear that content promotion is a strong driver of readership, and what he is talking about is content promotion.

Also supporting his specific point about connecting readers with journalists, our 2003 Newspaper Experience Study found that one of the experiences that drives readership is feeling a connection with the journalist. In our research, readers said things like "I feel like I get to know the people writing the articles" and "I look forward to reading certain writers in this newspaper."

You can improve that connection by promotion, and by featuring the journalist's picture, providing a brief bio, including email addresses and phone numbers. (Here's an example from The Day in New London, Conn.)

"LIBERATE THE PHOTOGRAPHERS... Or at least do everything in your power to maximize this STRENGTH."

Crikey! Why does a radio guy need to point this out to us in 2008? We've got stacks of studies going back to Poynter's original "Eyes on the News" eye-tracking study in 1991, shouting the importance of photos and other visuals to readers. Yet most newsrooms are managed by people who came up on the "word" side, so in the tug between photos and text, text usually wins.

"Don't look to other papers (except foreign ones). YOU are in the position to re-invent. If you look at other papers... you'll continue to live in the past."

The follow-the-leader nature of the industry has been one of my biggest frustrations as I have conducted workshops about our research around the country for the past eight years. At every session someone says some variant of "Yeah, great ideas. But tell me who has implemented any of these ideas and seen success." Actually, the comment is usually even narrower: Who of my circulation size has done this successfully? Everyone wants to follow someone else's template. No one wants to lead.

Except, as Abrams hints, abroad. I have never heard that question in the workshops I've done in Europe. My colleagues don't hear that question in Latin America. Instead we've seen experimentation, trial-and-error, risk-taking and innovation outside the U.S.

Further to Abrams' point, as groundbreaking and valuable as our original Impact Study was, it is limited because it only measured what newspapers were currently doing, so only tells us how to do those things better. It's like trying to drive your car forward by looking in the rearview mirror. The value of the Experience Study is that it gives insights into reader behavior and motivation that can help us innovate things we haven’t done.

"Tweaking will kill you. Aggressively and NOTICEABLY changing the look and feel can and most likely WILL grow you."

It takes a lot of change before readers notice anything. We did some work a few years ago with a mid-size newspaper that made what it thought were bold, aggressive, mold-breaking changes - so radical, they said, that they worried about turning off loyal readers. Then we talked to focus groups about the newspaper. No one - not a single person - had noticed the changes. What journalists think is major change is unnoticeable to the average reader.

"The biggest problem is lack of urgency."

Hazel Reinhardt, our director of market research at the Media Management Center, has been using a chart in our executive education programs since about 2000 that tracked the slow newspaper circulation decline of one-half to 1 percent per year through the '70s, '80s and '90s - then predicted a dramatic tumble off a cliff in about 2006. Nobody believed her, but here we are with most newspapers showing losses every ABC reporting period of 3, 4, and 5 percent - even into double-digits in some markets. Now can we get urgent?

This failure to take action on what we know is a consequence of newspapers' change-resistant culture, which my colleague Vickey Williams writes about frequently. This change resistance is at the heart of the pummeling Abrams takes. It could doom newspapers.


By Steve Duke (s-duke@northwestern.edu)
Steve Duke is managing director for training at the Media Management Center and Readership Institute, and an associate professor at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism.