This Oct. 27, 2011 blog post is mirrored from an internal site at Lee Enterprises, my current employer. I thought it might be handy to those outside the company too, so I’m cross-posting it here.

It’s easy to get caught up in all the razzle-dazzle of mobile and tablet apps when we think about new products, audiences and revenue opportunities but, we shouldn’t neglect or ignore the potential that e-books can offer also. Apps are great for providing utility and new technical products and functionality and e-books can compliment that by leveraging our core strength or what Jim Collins calls the “Hedgehog concept” in his book “Good to Great” by creating accurate, detailed, engaging local narrative content. E-books offer us the opportunity to repackage and resell a lot of our deep and valuable information in a digital format for rabid readers.

The Kindle platform, which works on just about every mobile, tablet or computer device, is especially intriguing, including their special category of “Kindle Singles” which Wired writer Charlie Sorrel described as, “one-off pieces of non-fiction and journalism which are typically much shorter than a novel, but longer than a magazine article.” The content can vary largely from single long-form narrative articles to combining a series of columns from a popular columnists into one digital document, or even a full-fledged narrative book built around a local topic, person/team or issue in the area (from the local mysterious murder case to the local team’s Cinderella climb to the championship).

Here are a handful of reasons why we should take a closer look at e-books and Kindle Singles for spreading our content:

• E-books enable and create rabid reading habits, like crack addicts. The Wall Street Journal sites a study that says 40 percent of e-reader owners said they read more now than they did with print books. Anecdotally, I know this is true with myself and people I know who use e-readers, but even beyond e-reader users, the ability to always pick up any book I’m currently reading at at my current place on my phone, computer or tablet in any idle-time moment really helps feed a bibliophile’s addiction.
• E-books are continuing to grow (up 153 percent in the past year). This will only grow exponentially as Amazon is launching the Kindle Fire tablet, the first what some are calling a serious competitor to the iPad. Their OS software is modified to showcase and feature your media content including books and movies. Amazon is actually selling the Kindle Fire at about a $10 loss per unit, hedging that the users will buy so many digital goods through them that they’ll make up the difference. Read Write Web declared eBooks as one of the top trends of 2010, pointing out: “At the end of October Amazon announced that for its top 10 best-selling books, customers bought the Kindle edition twice as often as the print copy. According to Amazon’s VP for Kindle, Steve Kessel, Kindle eBook sales also topped print sales of hardcovers and paperbacks for its top 25, top 100 and top 1,000 bestsellers.” Even the traditional university book presses are starting to publish ‘singles’ to take advantage of this new market and technology.
• Potential audiences are huge; rather than just creating content for desktop users, or iPad or iPhone users, Kindle singles and e-books are available on almost all platforms so the potential audience is much larger.
• Revenue can be substantially larger. Robert Niles illustrates this perfectly on the Online Journalism Review:

Here’s why you should consider amplifying your investment in eBook development. Here are the prices of the top 20 paid apps in the iOS app store, as of last night:

$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$2.99
$0.99
$0.99
$1.99
$1.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99

Now, here are the prices of the top 20 paid eBooks in Apple’s iBooks store, for comparison:

$9.99
$14.99
$12.99
$2.99
$12.99
$12.99
$0.99
$9.99
$12.99
$1.99
$12.99
$11.99
$14.99
$14.99
$12.99
$3.99
$14.99
$9.99
$12.99
$14.99

In which market would you rather try to make money?

Let’s sharpen the focus a bit. In the News category in the app store, most expensive paid app in the top 20 is Instapaper at $4.99. There is no News category in the iBooks store, but let’s use Politics & Current Events as the closest approximation. Of the top 20 paid eBooks in that category, 19 of the top 20 sell for $4.99 or more.

Clearly, the public is willing to – and does – pay more for content in eBooks than it does in apps. That fact should encourage any serious news business to take a serious look at eBooks.

• E-reader owners also tend to be regular newspaper readers according to Scarborough Research, so they’re familiar with and trust our content and brands. So they will be easier to market new e-book products to through our existing properties.
• E-books can help reach and target different audiences, a recent consumer research survey of 26,000 respondents found that women are 52 percent more likely than men to own an e-reader, and men are 24 percent more likely than women to own a tablet.
• Save on publishing costs compared to traditional book publishing. Rather than having to go though book publishers for all the raw materials, e-books don’t cost any glue, paper or ink and depending on your product price, with Kindle eBooks up to 70% of the cost can go straight to the author/publisher.  (Apple’s iBook store is another option, but it is much more restrictive, requiring an ISBN number for the book, which can cost more than a hundred dollars to register.)
• Incredibly simple publishing process. Any block of text has the potential to become an e-book. The Kindle store can take formats from PDF, to Word Document, to ePub, to HTML and more. So any series of articles, or even a big Sunday feature story could be turned into a Kindle Single.
• Added functionality and sharing are growing user benefits, from book sharing to note-taking and sharing to Amazon’s new HTML5-based format that allows for much more design and interactivity in e-books.

Here’s a handful of media organizations that have started to experiment with E-Books and Kindle Singles for various content types:

• The Guardian has started offering Kindle e-book “Shorts” from some of their series/issue coverage, including breaking the News Corp phone hacking scandal for £2.29
• The Chicago Tribune published the “Chicago Bears 2011″ which is literally a series of their training camp articles organized into topics for The Monsters of the Midway.
• Ars Technica sold a 19-page, $5 Kindle e-book of their OS X 10.7 Lion review, and eclipsed 3,000 copies in the first 24 hours of the sale (Thanks to Chris Keller for the tip!)
• The Boston Globe produced a series of books about historical crime and gangesters from their region, the most recent about Whitey Bulger.
• The Washington Post created a $2.99 e-book about The Hunt for Bin Laden after his capture

[Headline fine print: * = Or keep your corporate video player and at least distribute your content on YouTube also.]

News media content management systems have a long history of getting in the way of innovation, audiences and in general, creating an enjoyable user experience.  Video content management systems are no stranger to these challenges and after years of using several different systems and comparing them to other options out there, I believe most news organizations would be better off abandoning their corporate brewed or vendor created video content management systems in favor of using YouTube for the following reasons:

1 – Search Engine Optimization.
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? What about a video that no one can see or find — even when they’re searching for it? YouTube has been the Internet’s #2 search engine for almost two years and besides that, it’s given high visibility in results and high priority in Google Search (the #1 search engine). If you want your video content watched, it needs to be on YouTube.

2 – It plays on anything, anywhere.
Mobile, tablets, desktops, just about anywhere you can get an Internet connection on a computer from the past 12+ years, you should be able to watch YouTube video. Most mobile phones come pre-installed with a YouTube app. Some older browsers beyond Internet Explorer 6 might lose some features, but you’ll still be able to experience the content. Even with the newest revolutionary devices that refuse to support Flash, YouTube will work because they offer non-Flash versions.

3 – It can stream just about any speed, offers virtually unlimited bandwidth.
YouTube encodes multiple speed streams of each video and can adjust on the fly if your connection slows (this is something Flash video does remarkably better that other video formats). This feature is critical for mobile video viewing, which has to deal with shoddy wireless networks. Google’s international content delivery network also isn’t going to buckle under your video streams, no matter how viral it spreads. So your granny, who’s still on dial-up, will be able to see your triple rainbow freak out video when it hits the big time.

4 – YouTube can display at amazingly high resolutions.
This summer YouTube announced their support of 4K video resolution — that’s 4096 x 2304 pixels (That’s 4 times standard 1080p resolution).

5 – Loading speed.
Google won the search war because of their speed, not just their search results. They know how critical this is to users, how it effects user abandonment and it’s why they’ve bought up thousands of miles of dark fiber (unused fiber optic cable) around the country and it helps speed their network along. It’s why they also use speed as a search ranking metric.

6 – Metadata.
One of the challenges with video content is the information contained within is difficult for many search engines to dig through. Putting your content in YouTube, gets it in their meta data format. It also opens the content up for…

7 – Transcription and accessibility.
YouTube offers these services for video and once they can transcribe the audio of your video content, Google can tell what the content is and rank it more accurately and higher. Everyone wins!

8 – Annotations.
They can be incredibly annoying used poorly, but there’s also some opportunities to add context and more information to videos (as well as icons to click through to your website, increase followers, get people to like the videos, etc. Here’s an example of what we’ve been doing at the Post-Dispatch to add context, information and fact check political campaign videos.

9 – Customization and branding.
This might be a draw, depending on what video content management system your using, but YouTube definitely offers a lot of opportunities to customize your design, even embeddable player sizes and colors.

10 – Rich analytics.
Google has an amazing “Insight” analytics suite attached to YouTube videos. Along with the basic user data, you can track how long users watched each piece of the video with specific “Hot Spots” to show where people focused or re-watched the video. This kind of granular analytics can be fascinating and depressing, but maybe it’ll finally teach you to lead with your most interesting part of the video as Colin Mulvany, Richard Koci Hernandez and any excellent multimedia trainer will tell you. [Ed. Note: The screen grab to the right shows the "Hot Spot" analytic for a quick video I did from a flash mob some friends and I organized. The upswing at the end is likely because of a URL on the video and not normal web viewing behavior.]

11 – Partnerships for monetization.
YouTube is being turned into a cash cow for Google and they’re looking for content partners, their ads and ways to monetize quality content.

12 – Copyright protection.
YouTube’s made huge strides in reviewing their content and reacting to copyrighted content on the service. Their fact-stripping copyright-stripping robots scan for musical copyright violations and automatically remove the offending audio. If you have an account for your organization, it’ll help pick out copyrighted content faster than if you had your content in a separate silo on your site and someone posted it to YouTube. You can also flag and get the offending content moved faster.

13 – Social snazziness, sharing and embedability.
YouTube is the de facto standard of embeddable web content. Users know how to use it and do frequently. You’re creating content on a platform that is optimized for, not just locking it up in your ivory CMS tower. YouTube also pioneered video social features including following users, liking and favoriting videos, commenting and video replies. And social media is supposed to save journalism, right?

14 – Google TV & other emerging “leanback” platforms
Google’s making big moves to revolutionize TV (along with many other major players including Apple and several hot startups). YouTube’s new “Leanback” experience is just a taste of what’s to come. This new experience bringing web video to the living room, tablets and other devices will lead to an explosion in video viewership. You want your content to be available and optimized for this, right?

15 – It’s free.
Perhaps the most important issue for resource-starved mid- and small-market news organizations — the cost. Video content management systems are not cheap. Depending on the deal and features you negotiate, it’ll cost at least 1 full time staff reporter’s salary a year for subscription/license fees, all the way up to six-digit figures for some of the most robust, feature rich systems.

—

YouTube drawbacks:
I’m not going to say YouTube is all peaches and cream, it’s about 80-90 percent awesome. Here are some issues that bug me:

• There’s a whole lot of ‘noise’ to quality ‘signal’ on YouTube. Maybe this is an advantage? Your professional, interesting video content will be valued, shared and watched more? (That’s assuming you have professional, interesting video content.)
• I’ve seen comparisons where YouTube’s encoding can be a slightly rougher on quality than other providers, but part of that is providing an optimized speed stream so that you don’t have to wait. I consider this a draw.
• Putting all your eggs in one basket can be dangerous in this rapidly evolving environment. I doubt Google’s going away soon though, but maybe they’ll turn evil or something.
• I haven’t done a side-by-side case study of the monetization running on YouTube’s network compared to a news site, but the results there would vary immensely based on your staff’s ability to sell video ads, how they package the deals and it’d include all sorts of proprietary information that I couldn’t share publicly. It is pretty clear (from the points above) that you’d likely get a lot more views on YouTube, which if all ads were created equal and worth the same on both networks, you’d come out ahead with YouTube’s viewership/bandwidth/cross platform/SEO/social boosts.

First, I must appologize for this taking so long to write this. Most of June and July I was wrapped up with a bunch of training workshops and tying down loose ends before I left for the Reynolds Fellowship and then getting up to speed on the fellowship and three weeks of travel in September sidelined me a lot.

Second, the results are very mixed, so to be honest, I debated even sharing them because I wasn’t comfortable with the number of results. Where as last time we did the survey, we had a lot of feedback from organization leaders and management, this time around the overall submitted survey results were smaller (by 36 %) and generally, the jobs people posted about were not as diverse and not in multiple levels of the organization. In fact, there was very few submissions from management of any sort and many from folks starting out their career.

General trends and thoughts from comparing the results between the two surveys:
Results weren’t as diverse as I’d wished
I’d hoped for more feedback on folks working in specialized areas –SEO optimization, CAR analyists, data divas, news programmers, social media managers, mobile directors — but we didn’t get a lot of that. Which could mean a lot of things, most likely that the folks most interested in the results of this are those in mid-level jobs looking to see how they compare. Folks who’ve specialized perhaps are more comfortable with their careers and don’t care.  Job roles from two years are generally very similar to what this survey produced previously, so I won’t re-write all that here (except for some minor things such as “social media editor” is more popular now than “community editor” as a job title). Having acknowledged the lack of diversity, we did get an interesting range — salaries from the low-$20k for entry level reporters to $170k for upper management in the big apple. There was also some weird (potentially fake) postings — including a incredibly detailed and well-paid job profile from a railroad welder in the Great Plains — that I didn’t include. Note to self: Look up community college classes for railroad welding if this journalism thing doesn’t work out.

More skills, with less depth
Overall though, comparing results between the two surveys, skill sets have grown immensely (many of the specialized technical areas above weren’t mentioned in basic web producer positions), but the depth is very minimal — as one respondent acknowledged “I’m not a programmer by any means, I usually end up Googling things and figuring out how to fix the problem.” In this survey’s results, many of the basic web producer positions were expected to have at least a running start understanding of SEO, social media and some very basic programming.

Programming skills are brought up frequently, but trail off quickly
The top programming skills were CSS and HTML by far (mentioned specifically by about 37 percent of responses). Javascript (and various plugins Jquery, AJAX, Mootools) and PHP was mentioned about 15 percent of the time. Flash, Ruby and Python were each mentioned about 2-4 percent, and generally only by folks with specific full-time programming responsibilities.

Program skills seem to be highly valued
Maybe it’s a sign of how news organizations are built now, with journalists just working as cogs in the content management machine, but specific content management and analytics programs were mentioned more frequently than programming languages/applications — Omniture, Google Analytics, Caspio, several different CMS/blog systems, a bunch of third-party vendor tools for CMS systems. These tools are ment more for a computer operator than a programmer/creator. (This again could be skewed because the bulk of responses were from web producer-type positions.)

Captain Obvious: Wages / benefits are down for most
Salaries from these survey results are down for most part — not quite as bad as this comical Journalism Jobs ad — but they were down comparing the two surveys. Part of that may just be due to the decreased number of management and senior staffers participating. Part of it could be the economy/news industry tanking. Eighty-eight percent of survey responses acknowledged some sort of salary or benefit reduction in the past couple years. The last survey had the mode salary in the $60k range. This one is in the $45k range.

There are people getting pay raises!
The news isn’t all bad — just over 5 percent acknowledged receiving a raise in the past couple years. So there is growth out there! These positions generally tended to be a larger organizations, for specialized positions such as programming or for someone who left a corporate job for a non-profit gig (which surprised me, I thought non-profits were supposed to pay horribly, but maybe newspapers have sunk below them now with all the cuts?).

Big city doesn’t necessarily mean big money
In the last survey, folks who worked in larger, more expensive markets were generally paid significantly more than in mid and smaller markets. This time around, that difference was minimal and in some case non-existent.

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Final lessons learned from this time around
There is a glimmer of hope, some people are getting raises in this rough environment. I think this reinforces my prescription for learning “Peace Out” skills and to never stop learning. It may be a little more challenging to find a job initially if you specialize, at least compared to a “jack of all trades” skill set but your benefits, job security, wages and (most likely) job enjoyment will be higher. You’ll be less likely to be outsourced or easily laid off and hopefully you’ll be able to create excellent things, instead of just feeding the content machine. And if you find you can’t create excellent things at your current gig, you can give them the peace out and move on to something better. I’d also seriously consider non-mainstream / traditional publicly-traded media organizations. There’s a lot of journalism startups out there and some of them appear to be paying nicely (especially their top management) and there’s a lot of new non-profit, NGO, and commercial organizations that value the skills journalists have that pay well also.

Got 2 minutes and don’t feel like reading all this mumbo jumbo?  Please take our totally anonymous, 10-question job title, responsibility and salary survey to help us define job standards for our industry.

A couple years ago, I pulled together an online survey from folks working in the journalism and tech fields to try and figure out what all the different job titles peppered with buzzwords really mean: Interactive reporters. Web editors. Multimedia journalists. Website directors. Content strategists. Assistant deputy managing producers. It’s not like we’re plumbers where we can go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupation Outlook Handbook and look up any of these modern online media jobs to get real, accurate information that applies to our industry and skill sets.  Job titles, responsibilities and pay rates are really not uniform in the industry and through the original survey we received a little clarity. Feedback was fantastic and the results were very popular for some time and including getting referenced by several professors and career service departments as a general (non-scientific) guide for understanding.

It’s been a while since that original survey and over the past couple months I’ve had several people each independently ask me to do the survey again, so I’m kicking it off to get another glimpse of what job titles really mean in the online media and technology industries.

Juxtaposing the previous results to this survey should provide for some enlightening perspective on the profession. There’s still a huge need for more clarity, as most job responsibilities still vary vastly from organization to organization — especially in our layoff-filled industry where jobs are constantly juggling more and more. There’s also new specialties in the profession that didn’t really exist in the previous survey — “social media” wasn’t really a full time job, multimedia was just cracking out of the egg and mobile hadn’t blossomed at all. Beyond that, many of those who were once in the industry at traditional media organizations have scattered and taken their unique skill sets to new positions, in new non-traditional media organizations that value them. We’re looking for all types in this survey — from folks working at traditional mainstream organizations to independent bloggers, media startups, database managers, SEO experts, usability experts, multimedia producers at commercial agencies — anyone related to the increasingly blurred field of online media/content production.

So please take two minutes to fill out this completely anonymous 10-question survey. Also if you could share this with your colleagues in/out/around the media industry (especially if they work in the media, but at non-traditional organizations), that would be excellent. It will help us all get a better grip on how our jobs are structured collectively, what technologies and responsibilities are really needed for various positions (and not just the laundry list of every program and programming language known to the recruiter) and (perhaps most importantly) what we all are/should/could be making for our skills.

I’ll keep the survey open for about two weeks or until we get comparable responses to the previous survey and then post some analysis on the results afterwards.

To fill out the survey, please follow this link or just fill it out below:

PBS legend, Charlie Rose, has been interviewing a lot of leading media and Web execs this Spring about the future of the Internet and media. This weekend I finally got around to working my way through all thoughts from the mogul minds and I highly recommend you find time to do the same:

• A conversation about print journalism in the digital age with Arianna Huffington of Huffingtonpost.com and Tom Curley of the Associated Press

• A conversation about the future of newspapers with Walter Isaacson of “Time,” Robert Thomson of “Wall Street Journal” and Mort Zuckerman of “The New York Daily News”

• A conversation with Marc Andreessen, co-founder and chairman of Ning and an investor in several startups including Digg, Plazes, and Twitter. Best known as co-author of Mosaic, and founder of Netscape. He is on the Board of Directors of Facebook and eBay

• A conversation with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google

• A conversation with Marissa Mayer, V.P. of Search Product and User Experience, Google

• A conversation with Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn

• A conversation with Evan Williams, Co-founder of Twitter.com

• A conversation with Jeff Bezos, founder, president, chief executive officer and chairman of the board of Amazon.com

• A conversation with Chris DeWolfe And Tom Anderson, founders of Myspace.com

While we’re at it, here are a few old but goodies from last year:

• A discussion about Google and emerging technology with Ken Auletta of The New Yorker

• A conversation with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com

• A conversation with Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine

• A conversation about Wikipedia, web technology, and the future of search with Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia