Matt McAlister

Any good news organization knows how to use its brand and the media vehicles it owns and operates to both inform and influence.  We’ve seen this up close on several occasions at the Guardian.

We’re learning how to inspire people through things that we don’t own and control now, too.

The great example is the Trafigura case.  Alan Rusbridger tipped the world via Twitter that there was a story we couldn’t tell, and the twitterverse came to our rescue, helping us to unveil the details we were prevented from sharing.

“Twitter’s detractors are used to sneering that nothing of value can be said in 140 characters. My 104 characters did just fine.

By the time I got home, after stopping off for a meal with friends, the Twittersphere had gone into meltdown. Twitterers had sleuthed down Farrelly’s question, published the relevant links and were now seriously on the case. By midday on Tuesday “Trafigura” was one of the most searched terms in Europe, helped along by re-tweets by Stephen Fry and his 830,000-odd followers.

Many tweeters were just registering support or outrage. Others were beavering away to see if they could find suppressed information on the far reaches of the web. One or two legal experts uncovered the Parliamentary Papers Act 1840, wondering if that would help? Common #hashtags were quickly developed, making the material easily discoverable.

By lunchtime – an hour before we were due in court – Trafigura threw in the towel. The textbook stuff – elaborate carrot, expensive stick – had been blown away by a newspaper together with the mass collaboration of total strangers on the web. Trafigura thought it was buying silence. A combination of old media – the Guardian – and new – Twitter – turned attempted obscurity into mass notoriety.”

The combination of our work and what other people do creates a very powerful bi-directional relationship.

However, there are different aspects to this relationship…the things that we work with (words, pictures, software, paper, etc.) and the ideas that we work with (stories, insights, opinion, facts, etc.).

The things are the ways we all express ourselves and transfer something from one person to the next, the tangible ouputs.

The ideas are the meat, the knowledge and intents that we all use to make decisions about our world.

We can then think about what we do as a business in terms of fueling a news media platform, a self-reinforcing ecosystem, a generative network where we use what we know to make things that people use and act on subsequently improving what we know…the cycle then continues and evolves.

Our operational model then falls into four areas:

1. Things that we make.
2. Things that people use.
3. Ideas that people share.
4. Ideas that we evaluate.

Here are some things that we are doing now at the Guardian in each area.

MAKE
Most of our output falls into this category.  We write articles, edit a newspaper, post to liveblogs on the web site, etc.  We design and package things.  We make apps.

Using the lens of mutualization we can also see some very progressive approaches to what we make.

One of the strengths of the Open Platform is our plugin architecture we call MicroApps.  This allows us to work with independently operating services that can exist anywhere on the Internet and integrate them seamlessly into Guardian digital products.

We’ve used the MicroApp framework to work with partners such as WhatCouldICook.com who built a wonderful recipe search that now exists both on guardian.co.uk and on whatcouldicook.com.

We’ve also used the framework to develop some new sponsorship approaches.  We built a crowdsourced ‘interesting places’ app with the tourism service Visit England.  It runs both on guardian.co.uk and the EnjoyEngland web site.

Success is easier to measure in this category than the others.  It’s mostly a cost center.

These are the kinds of results we would like to see:

• We make things quickly and cheaply
• The things we make perform well, have acceptable errors
• We make interesting, creative, groundbreaking things
• Our work is of a high standard, considered better than most competitors
• The amount of what we produce is sufficient for demand

We can also measure our success in terms of the work our partners are doing when we co-create.

USE
Every publisher has circulation and marketing teams that find ways to encourage use of the things we make.  We want people to buy our newspaper and to visit our web site.

We also want to distribute our work through partners of various sorts.  This is what the syndication business has been doing for years.

The production-consumption relationship can now benefit from the power of the network and ‘hypercharge’ syndication with things like APIs and RSS feeds, for example.

One of the most interesting examples of this in my mind is the Guardian WordPress plugin.  Anyone who blogs can get a feed of Guardian articles pumped directly into their site, and they can then choose which articles they want to republish.

As Mike Smith said,

“If content is king, then this is service is a hundred of the king’s best horses, and thousands of his best messengers, sending the Guardian far and wide.”

We’ve also seen some incredible work by people using the data we’re publishing as part of the news cycle in the Data Store.  There are hundreds of people posting images of ways they are using that data on a group on Flickr.

Success in this category is easy to measure using some more traditional metrics and a few new ones.

Again, here are the kinds of results that would indicate success:

• People buy our paid-for products, and we make a profit on those products
• People see our free products, and we receive a high value subsidy for that
• People dive into our products and spend time with them
• Partners are using our stuff, and they are making money as a result
• Our partners offer successful paid and free things by using our stuff
• People buy access to our people, processes, platforms, partners
• Our market share in all the things we offer is strong

SHARE
It used to be that once our work made it into our customers’ hands we had very little idea what happened to it.

The Internet changed all that, too.  People tell their media sources exactly what they think about what they produce.  And they also tell all their friends in massively distributed public spaces.

What’s clear from examples like Trafigura, people want to share their thoughts.  The tools to do so are getting better and better all the time, so why not fuel that activity?

Twitter has become a sort of extension of our brains, but we’re also creating very simple ways for people to share their thoughts and to socialize with the news.  For example, during the TV debates for last year’s UK general election, we posted a ‘Reaction Tracker’ so that people could vote positively or negatively to things the politicians were saying them…as they were saying them on TV.

The lines you see in the chart below formed in realtime as the debate unfolded and were visible to everyone who visited the Guardian home page during the 90 minute debate.

We’ve also embraced expert voices from around the world to participate with their contributions directly to the Guardian platforms.  We have developed several blog networks in addition to Comment Is Free which has become a very rich conversation platform in its own right.
Success in this area may feel a little more fuzzy, but there are some obvious metrics that social businesses tend to use.

These are the kinds of things that we would like to see happen:

• People both implicitly and explicitly indicate interests in things
• They spread our work through their social nets.  Their social actions result in more actions from those connections.
• They participate in conversations we trigger and add to them with their ideas, both within and away from our products.
• They actively contribute by giving or selling us material to evaluate and then make things
• Things change in the world as a result of our work and the impact of our readers, users, and partners acting on it

EVALUATE
Research and investigation got much easier as the Internet increased the speed, access and volume of information available to all.  Among the many things it did, the web made it easier to locate details and contacts.

These benefits also flattened the competitive field.

Not unlike the religious leaders who originally controlled the printing presses, many media organizations resisted acknowledging the value of the participants in new media doing similar work.

Rather than hide behind a thin veil of authority and broadcast knowledge, the best journalists mine the activity happening at the center of a story or an issue to improve their understanding of what’s going on wherever that activity is happening.

Of course, nothing beats a great contact at the heart of a story willing to share information exclusively, but capturing those signals at scale is getting easier as a result of the interconnectedness of the social web.

There are insights to be gleaned from social activity happening on Facebook and Twitter, expressed via Google Trends, and posted on blogs and photo sharing services everywhere.

We actually have our own firehose of news signals gushing out of our Apache referral logs.

Media businesses that embrace what’s happening across the network and even enable more useful activity to happen will be more effective in evaluating important information.

They will get a first look.  They will have more inputs to choose from.  They will be able to construct stronger outputs.

This happens when excellent investigative reporting surfaces important stories as David Leigh and Nick Davies have done with WikiLeaks.

It can also happen systematically with things like Dan Catt’s Guardian Zeitgeist which captures activity signals from the web to present a different view of what Guardian articles people find interesting.

Alastair Dant’s World Cup Twitter Replay animations are fascinating in the way they help you relive a match through the eyes of twitter…bubbles of words World Cup watchers were tweeting grow and shrink in response to each match, as if you are watching the match with everyone again rather than being the recipient of a leanback-style highlights package.

Lastly, our data journalism work such as the recent government spending search tool demonstrates very clearly where the future of all of this is going.

With Simon Rogers leading the way, a small team of developers built a search interface to an otherwise completely unwieldy database.  We published the tool and kicked off a liveblog to cover activity as it was happening throughout the day.

We received several emails from people digging through the data, including one user who discovered that the cost to the taxpayer of flying the British flag is nearly £100k.  It would’ve been hard for the person who found that data to get a response from the government as to why this is, but our reporter Polly Curtis was able to get a statement from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, even if it was a bit unsatisfactory.

Again, how do we measure success in this area?

It’s a matter of tracking some of the basic functions of journalism but doing it in a way that scales and takes into account the activity happening around us whether we have been seeking it out or not.

These would be some of the kinds of results that indicate we’re doing well in this area:

• We see important trends early, generally before the competition
• People with important information share it with us directly
• We are good at verifying information, recognizing it’s value and knowing what to do with it
• We are honest and fair in our assessments, and the market validates that view
• We are accurate and truthful by most objective standards

Measuring success with metrics

By isolating the activity happening in each area of the business in this way the metrics required to understand success and therefore to make decisions might look something like what’s below here.

And to be clear, these aren’t our metrics at the Guardian but rather a strawman for how one would think about applying real numbers against this strategy:

MAKE

• Time to develop, number of people involved
• Real cost of development
• Ease-of-use, performance and errors
• Aesthetic appeal
• Strengths against competition
• Weaknesses against competition

USE

• Number or amount of things produced
• Number of people using each thing
• Number of repeat uses
• Amount of time spent
• Breadth and depth of usage
• Supply vs capacity ratio
• Number of things purchased
• Amount received from buyers
• End-user response to promotions
• End-user conversion rate on promotions
• Amount received from advertising promotions
• Number of partners using our stuff in their stuff
• Revenue partners are earning from using our stuff
• Amount partners are spending to use our stuff
• Market share: end-users
• Market share: partners

SHARE

• Implicit interests collected from end-users
• Explicit interests collected from end-users
• Number of shares (tweets, RT’s, likes, mailto’s, etc.)
• Number of referral URLs posted
• Number of clicks from shares and referrals
• Number of comments within our stuff
• Number of comments elsewhere as a result of our stuff
• Quality of insights from comments

EVALUATE

• Number of articles/posts/pictures/video pitched to us
• Cost of acquiring articles/posts/pictures/video, etc.
• Amount of information intake
• Cost of data analysis on external inputs
• Success rate in surfacing strong signals in the data
• Low failure rate: verifying information
• Low failure rate: accuracy

When tracking performance indicators across all these areas, it becomes very easy to then understand what is going well and what isn’t.  Different metrics have different values in different contexts, but one could roll everything up into a framework that helps with decision-making.

For example, here are two imaginary products or features or story packages or any ‘things’ produced and measured using this approach compared back-to-back.

For the sake of argument, I’m contrasting a well-crafted digital product with modest commercial outcomes against an innovative but faulty experiment that inspires a lot of interesting activity.

Again, it would be a mistake to take this approach too literally, as it’s merely a tangible way to reflect the model I’m talking about here.

You can imagine the model working to both narrow the scope of what media businesses spend resources developing and also how the commercial model becomes a sort of fuel for making the ecosystem generative.

Products are then built to capture traditional revenue streams, but they also get built because they will have impact and create measurable and real value for the network.

Of course, stating that things must be built with the intent of creating value across a network is much easier said than done.  We have to look toward some of the pioneers in this area to get a better idea of how to apply those concepts.

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This series is an attempt to assemble some ideas I’ve been exploring for a while.  Most of it is new, and some of it is from previous blog posts and recent-ish presentations. I’ve split the document up into a series of posts on the blog here, but it can also be downloaded in full as a PDF or viewed as a sort of ebook via Scribd:

Market context may seem far away to when you’re reporting and editing the news every day, building web pages, writing code, selling display ads, presenting marketing plans, managing managers, etc.  But, equally, failing to recognize when market conditions are affecting you and your company is a sort of occupational hazard.

Let’s get to the real question: “What is different today?”

Where media businesses once believed that winning digitally meant attracting eyeballs to web pages today there’s a greater understanding about the role of the various platforms around the network and the value of the network itself.

This blog post from Jeff Jarvis articulates the idea well:

“In the new distributed world you want to be where the people are…The media brand is less a destination and a magnet to draw people there than a label once you’ve found the content, wherever and however you found it.”

This is very much the kind of thinking that inspired the Open Platform.

The Open Platform is the suite of services that enable people to build applications with the Guardian.  We have a Content API that gives people access to republish Guardian content.  The Data Store offers raw data for people to download and reuse.  Our Politics API is an open database of candidates, voting records, election results, etc.  And, finally, the MicroApp framework is a plugin architecture for integrating apps built by partners and our own teams into our platform.

What this platform enables is a different kind of relationship with everyone and everything around us.

Whereas the pre-internet newspaper world looked like a one-way relationship, the new era is one where we grow as others grow, a circular relationship, a self-reinforcing marketplace.

Increasing bi-directionality through mutualization

Alan Rusbridger has given a couple of fantastic speeches this year that put more perspective around this philosophy.  Of the many quotable passages in the Cudlipp Lecture from January 2010, Alan says,

“Our most interesting experiments lie in combining what we know with the experience of the people who want to participate rather than passively receive.”

He refers to some wonderful imagery by Andrzej Krauze, the first depicting a staff of journalists chucking newspapers over a wall to people scampering about madly, the second of two men standing nose-to-nose with a hole through the newspaper as if the journalist and reader are both uncomfortable with their proximity.

Alan is embracing “mutualisation”, breaking down the wall between publisher and reader, reinforcing the strengths of ideas through collaboration, making a greater impact by working together.  It’s an approach to social media that has a clear intent.

There are many many approaches to evolving journalism in this new world, and we therefore must get back to some basics and consider what it’s for.  I think Jay Rosen is often very insightful in this context.  He recently said:

“Journalists should describe the world in a way that helps us participate in political life.”

On a macro level, journalism should inspire people to change the things that they can change or at least to understand what it is that they are accepting that won’t change as a result of inaction.

On a tangible level, the results of good journalism mean that people read, watch, think, talk, write, participate, help, challenge…that people do things.

The commercial intent is the same, of course.  The media business wants to inspire people to explicitly show interest in things, to promote things, to sell things, and to buy things.

If a media organization can make a virtue of inspiring action across all the things that it does, empowering people to do things, whether as individuals or as groups and organizations, then more people will want to participate and partner, building more value for everyone…creating a generative media network.

To be clear, this approach mustn’t be mistaken for advocacy journalism.

Time spent, referral activity, sharing and re-use, commenting, and response can all be used to measure what kind of actions result from a story without threatening a journalist’s independence from external influences, either political or commercial.

Equally, spaces must exist for biases to be expressed.  This is particularly important when there’s an expectation to form a relationship with people.

At the Guardian, our future is dependent on trust, on our ability to produce insightful, responsible, and accurate information.

We can wrap general editorial policies and standards around our work to reinforce that trust, but we must also make extra efforts to ensure people don’t misinterpret any biases and feel deceived as a result.

As Jonathan Stray blogged recently:

“Journalism has no theory of change — at least not at the level of practice.  I’ve taken to asking editors, “what do you want your work to change in society?” The answer is generally along the lines of, “we aren’t here to change things. We are only here to publish information.” I don’t think that’s an acceptable answer.

Journalism without effect does not deserve the special place in democracy that it tries to claim.”

The core mission of the news business is still about good journalism.  It always will be.

The business side of the house needs to worry less about controlling how journalism is delivered to people and more about what people do as a result of it affecting them…and, crucially, that it is, in fact, affecting people.

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This series is an attempt to assemble some ideas I’ve been exploring for a while.  Most of it is new, and some of it is from previous blog posts and recent-ish presentations. I’ve split the document up into a series of posts on the blog here, but it can also be downloaded in full as a PDF or viewed as a sort of ebook via Scribd:

What’s happening in the world that defines the wider context for news ecosystems?  What do we know about how the world is moving and where it’s going that can create some clarity on a more tangible level.

The more obvious techtonic shifts affecting us all across the market include things like:

• The increasing numbers of people going online globally
• Increasingly easy and more powerful software tools for creation and ongoing industry standards battles
• The changing distribution methods, including increasingly influential nodes in the network or “points of control”
• Tighter relationships between the network and real world things and vice versa
• Cashflow paths moving online, new streams of revenue and old streams reinvented
• Human behaviors, new norms, real cultural shifts
• New regulation, industry decision-making and the long view of rules

The people, companies, technologies, economics and social issues are going through massive change.  The intensity across the space is incredible, in some cases expressed through exponential growth curves.

The proven models for success online tend to embrace the whole network as the medium.  The global network itself is the distribution platform.  The network is the market, the medium, the space in which we’re doing our jobs every day.

I’ve been wanting to test a hypothesis, but I think my time (and skill) are going to come up short.  So, I’m hoping I can use my blog here to get people to help me and shortcut some of the madness that comes when tinkering with code for hours on end.

The idea is that WordPress could be used as a mobile app publishing platform.  Ideally, people with little or no technical expertise could build, deploy and manage really good apps.  If WordPress can do that for publishing on the web, then why can’t it (or something similar) do the same for publishing in an app container?

So, what I’m trying to do is pump topical articles, images and video from the Guardian’s API into a WordPress instance that will then render everything in a nice HTML5 theme.  And then I want to package up that experience which is mostly just for the iOS web view into an app for the app store.

I’ve asked a few people about this, and after we get through the common debate, “why should it be a native app and not a web site?” the conversation about the approaches then varies quite a bit.  (I’m not convinced it should be an app and not a web site, but I want to try it nonetheless.)

To start with, there aren’t many known iPad-friendly themes for WordPress.  There’s WPTouch which is very popular (1.3M downloads).  And Mobility which looks very nice.  But there’s a lot of room for theme developers to come up with some better iPad options.

Then there’s the issue of flowing content into WordPress.  Is it better to pull the API via a plugin or to post content via XMLRPC?

We have a plugin that could be reused to accomplish what I’m after with some tweaks, but I want to simplify it to something that’s essentially invisible to an editor.  I was playing with the auto-post via XMLRPC idea the other night, and stumbled into a Simon Willison script meant to make this easier.  Is there any advantage to one solution over the other?

Now, let’s say we solve the theme and auto-posting issues…how do we package up the app for delivery via the app store?  The iOS publishing tools seem pretty incomplete, so far.  I nearly had Titanium Appcelerator setup before finding my Mac is incapable of running the iOS SDK.  I’m stuck on the deployment part of this project at the moment.

Anyhow, if you accept the premise that WordPress could be a useful delivery platform for mobile apps, then I’d love to hear your thoughts on how to do that.  Obviously, it could easily be a flawed idea in the first place, and I’d love to hear other solutions to the problem.