I spent eight years at Aol chasing The Number of the moment. First it was unique visitors. Then it was page views. Then it was unique visitors again. Forget the ugly machinations you went through… Just make that number.
In the end, it was always about the photos. People love to click on them. Who knows if they read the captions. Give them hundreds of photos in an automated gallery and they’ll click till they find their own money shot. It just never fails. You can also turn text into photos. Just transform every paragraph into a photo and a caption and rack up those page views.
I love photos, too, but enough already.
I started True/Slant because I care deeply about journalism — and its future. For me, it began in college with Watergate, Roe v. Wade and the student newspaper. Thirty five years later, I’m still hooked, maybe more so. Journalism was more than dynamically generated photos back then, and it’s certainly more than what appears to be coming next: Google-driven “fast-food content” or “content farming.” Find the hottest Google search terms, get somebody — anybody — to write the post, then match the content with the advertiser willing to bid the highest price.
So for this post, I am going to bury the traditional newspaper lede, which, of course, would be The Number (forgive me, Bill Zima, the University of Iowa professor who patiently taught me how to write one). Instead, let’s talk about journalism.
Some say journalism is in crisis. I don’t buy it. The digital age makes journalism all the more important, and it’s providing new tools and methods of communication and interaction that make journalism more exciting than ever. How so? Well, finally editors, reporters, bloggers and all content creators can be challenged by the audience. It’s no longer the one-way street that resulted in media control and arrogance.
Now the doors are open to new models. You just have to be willing to experiment.
So how are we experimenting at True/Slant?
1. We’re paving the way for “Entrepreneurial Journalism” at a time when traditional media jobs and roles are evaporating.
2. We’re enabling talented content creators to build their own individual brands.
3. We’re building “The New Newsroom.”
4. We’re providing credible and insightful content amid a sea of passion-fueled bias (or worse, posts cynically created to capture search engine traffic or to leverage Twitter).
5. We’re breaking down the traditional walls between news providers, news consumers and marketers.
6. We’re enabling content creators and our audience to participate in the social news stream.
7. We’re giving marketers a more effective way to engage with news consumers through the T/S Ad Slant.
What’s in store for journalism and content on the Web as we enter 2010?
Well, one camp is “racing to the bottom” — whatever content will sell. Another remains too calcified to change standard conventions. Yet another traffics in traffic — posting to ride the waves of Google and Twitter trending.
There will be more content produced based on popular Google search terms in the hunt for advertising. There will be more titillating content produced through payments to “sources” in the quest for unique visitors. There will be far more empty content produced in the name of digital journalism and niche markets simply to feed “professional” egos.
There will be far more, “Just give them what they want.”
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big proponent of high brow/low brow journalism. So was Don Hewitt, who used that strategy to turn 60 Minutes into perhaps the most respected TV news show ever. But it’s all relative. One person’s high brow is another person’s low brow. For 60 Minutes, low brow was represented by segments about entertainers; for some web sites today, it’s every imaginable sordid fact or photo about entertainers.
Then there’s the old media camp. Despite multiple rounds of layoffs, traditional news providers can’t seem to shed their high-cost editing bureaucracies. It’s their way of retaining a monolithic voice, even in an era when news consumers increasingly gravitate to and respond to authentic individual voices. They’re also putting their hopes in e-readers or tablets or whatever they’ll be called. Does anyone remember when the CD-ROM was the media’s next great salvation?
Fortunately, a few news sites are getting inventive. True/Slant is among them.
T/S is all about combining the values and standards of traditional media that served the public interest so well for so long with the dynamics of the Web. We’re about knowledgeable and talented content creators who self-publish, self-market and build an audience and a brand around their topic-specific news expertise. We’re about enabling news consumers to develop relationships with T/S’s individual voices — and to do so within a larger social news stream. And we understand that marketers have credible “slants,” so they are provided the tools to be full participants in the T/S content-generation process.
Now for that buried lede. Last month, True/Slant reached a major milestone: 1 million monthly users.
How’d we get there less than nine months after our launch? Simple. More than 250 talented and passionate Entrepreneurial Journalists built their individual brands, attracting audiences to their topic-specific knowledge and insight in an open and participatory environment. It’s our model to help move journalism forward in the digital era.
You can find all our T/S contributors here. And please join the conversation to let us know what you think.
