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 gangsters 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

Greetings Carnies!
For this installment of the Carnival of Journalism we’re going to go ultra practical:

What are your life hacks, workflows, tips, tools, apps, websites, skills and techniques that allow you to work smarter and more effectively?

As a recovering RSS-aholic, (my Google Reader account peaked around 2,100 about a year and half ago, I’ve paired it down to 931 currently and am looking to drop that by a half this summer) I’ve always marveled at people like Robert Scoble who seems to be everywhere and tracking everything. Part of this is because he’s an information hound, part social media addict and it’s also part his job to be out there in the conversation with the tech industry. Tim Ferris interviewed him four years ago about his 600+ feeds and how he digs through them for good information.

In my effort to cull my RSS feeds, I’ve relied much more on social networks for network curation but in that transition I realized I was doing it wrong, again. This Winter while meeting with a group of news nerds talking about their workflows, most confessed that they read only a very small portion of their Twitter alerts. At this time, I was close to reading around 70-80+% (obviously that fluctuated but on the average day I’d hit that number or higher); almost everyone else in the room was in the 5-15% range.

So during 2011, I’ve tried to focus on finding more tools and techniques to help boost productivity and save time, while not compromising the quality of information/work completed. Everyone has different ideas on what makes their workflow work, and while sites like Lifehacker.com does a fantastic job, I believe journalists especially manage and filter a lot of information every day, so it would be fascinating to share some of our best practices with the JCarn community.

So for instance, what tools, plugins, apps and websites do you use to get the most out of the day?
For example, here are a few that I’ve tried at various times:

• Use a personalized aggregates like TweetedTimes, Summify or Flip Board on the iPad
• Use Tweetdeck to track social network updates, then clear the ones you’ve already read using the “Clear All” button in the column so you only read stuff you haven’t seen
• Build a series of custom Google alerts to track topics and filter it using Yahoo Pipes
• Tracking , filtering and sharing your archive and bookmarks through Delicious, Diigo, or Pinboard (Journerdism’s Jambalaya Links have been half published by using Delicious for years)

What work techniques and strategies have you learned over the years that help boost your productivity and effectiveness?
More examples of things I’ve tried to get you thinking:

• Only use the “http://five.sentenc.es/” technique for (most) email responses (Or four or three or two sentences)
• If it’s not time-critical, try to focus on emailing people around 8-9 a.m. in the morning so it’s at the top of their mailbox as soon as they get in, responses tend to be higher because they haven’t developed email fatigue yet
• Use the phone / IM for all quick messages, only check mail twice a day as Tim Ferris recommends in the Four-Hour Workweek
• Use the 37 Signals “Getting Real” technique for managing and organizing effective meetings

Other ideas?

• What do you read each day to get the most bang for your buck? I love the series the Altantic does about this with various gadflies and influentials on their content consumption habits.
• How do you stay up to date on your beat and interest areas? Marshall Kirkpatrick posted an amazing behind the scenes guide to how he tracks tech for Read Write Web
• How do you find stories, track and filter information on your beat/interest areas? I really dug the ingenuity of this reporter using their site search analytics to find uncovered story ideas.
• How and what do you track to see what’s working and what’s not in your workflow? Personal analytics is a fascinating area to track, test, iterate and improve your performance.
• What do you find it’s better to just pay for rather than spend the time doing? iAnnotate is an iPad app that I love for quickly signing off on PDF’s and documents for papers and contracts that require signatures (rather than trying to find a printer, printing it off, signing it, then scanning or faxing the pages)
• … What else?

Our deadline for publishing will be Friday, June 10th. I hope we can all help each other become better, more productive and informed journalists.

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:

Some of you may know this already, but I figured I might as well break this here and now before Hartnett scoops me on my own job announcement:

I’ve accepted a job at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as their new Interactive Director!

I’ve really been debating how to explain how I feel but as Derek said when he announced his NY Times move, everything I write sounds corny.

So basically, I’m mega stoked. (That’s not corny, is it?)

The PD has a really passionate, talented crew up there that I fell in love with. The city is a great Midwestern balance between Chicago and Toledo. The corporate parent generally has a hands-off approach on the PD website. Perhaps most influential: the paper’s leaders read Journerdism and love the awesome science I’m kickin’, so they want me to bring my vision there.

I’m very thankful for all the opportunities, friends, experiences and awesome colleagues I’ve had in Florida at both TCPalm / Scripps Newspapers and The Palm Beach Post / Cox Newspapers but I had to jump on this opportunity. (Ok, this is totally corny. But true.)

Being a Cubs fan in Cardinals land is going to be rough but if that’s the hardest thing about this new gig, I’ll be just fine. STL, here I come. (I start in January, btw.)

Now I must get back to judging the NAA Media Innovation Awards before the quickly-approaching deadline this week.

Onward and upward.
Will

P.S. Know any rockstar developers? Shoot me an email at: will (at) journerdism.com. We’re going to have a lot of awesome opportunities in St. Louis, from a redesign to some very special niche projects.

P.P.S. Wanna buy a 2 bed, 2 bath condo 5 mins from the beach in beautiful, sunny, Stuart Florida!? Motivated seller!

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

If your newspaper website has an awesome blog / article / section / multimedia piece / feature / whatever and no one knows it exists except for the members of your web staff that posted it, does it really exist?

User navigation of news websites is perhaps the biggest problem for the publishing industry since Craig Newmark did what newspapers should have been doing for years.

Lately I’ve noticed four consistent newspaper navigation designs emerging among websites and one solution I really think is a step in the right direction.

First, the two old school models:

Vertical Navigation

There’s still a lot of newspaper sites that use vertical navigation, including all the Tribune-wide site redesigns. The NYTimes shook design trends (that were moving to horizontal nav.) with their redesign last year when they integrated vertical navigation on their homepage. Although their site changes to horizontal navigation whenever you click inside the site, so it’s kind of a mixed bag. The UK Telegraph’s recent redesign also integrates a hybrid horizontal and vertical navigation.

I’m still perplexed by vertical nav. (If you can explain it’s major benefits, please do so!) It may just be a legacy format, but so were animated gifs and we don’t use those anymore because better practices emerged. I just don’t really see the logic here putting a static object like navigation in the area with the hottest views–the F-Shape! And I really don’t understand why you’d want to bury some of your navigation ‘below the fold.’

Perhaps one benefit to vertical nav is there might be a slight SEO boost for having it buit static into the site, rather than as an item in a CSS list. And well, the flip side of the F-shape argument could hold water. (‘Put your static navigation where users are going to look for sure.’)

Overall, I’m a reader that digs big pictures. Big video. Wide views. And any static elements that cut that content well down aren’t cool in my book. It’s like advertising. I just gloss over it. (That is, if I actually had to look at ads and didn’t use Firefox and the greatest invention since the Internet — AdBlock Plus.)

More Vertical Navigation examples:

• Chicago Tribune
• Columbus Dispatch
• MSNBC
• San Diego Union-Tribune

Horizontal Roll Over Navigation

This decade, as CSS was widely adopted, many sites integrated the roll over navigation offering deep links into their content. This style still persists on many sites and definitely gets the job done.

Traditionally the options for this roll out vertically once the site viewer rolls over the link, but a new version with a second horizontal bar showcasing the second-tier options is making its way around the net.

More Horizontal Roll Over examples:

• Atlanta Journal-Constitution
• Denver Post
• Detroit Free Press
• Rocky Mountain News

Now, a new trend that has me puzzled:

Basic Horizontal Navigation

Normally, I’m all for simplicity. Newspaper sites need it. But having a horizontal navigation without roll over limits you to at about only 12 options for deep linking (including advertising’s four — Homes, Jobs, Autos and Classifieds).

Most* of Scripps Newspapers sites are big on this with their corporate template and while I appreciate the cleanliness, we need to offer deep utility. (* = The Rocky Mountain News uses roll overs and is a linked example above)

The logic behind static roll over confuses me less than vertical navigation, but it’s still perplexing that on a website with 10,000+* pages of content, why wouldn’t you want to at least give readers an option to go deep and find that content from the home page? ( * = This would include articles, bridge pages, blogs, section level pages, multimedia, etc. and vastly depends on your company’s content archiving policy, so it could easily flex to hundreds of thousands of pages if you don’t expire articles after 7 – 30 days, as most sites do.)

Or maybe the Simple Horizontal Navigation is really, really brilliant. Brilliant like MySpace’s page inflating site design, which makes people have to click multiple times to get deep into your site. Bean counters love it. Brilliant!

What about the audience though?

I just don’t buy that people are going to work that hard to find your content. I subscribe to Tim Harrower’s old school design belief that anything deeper than 3 clicks and you’ve lost most people (I’d wager my paycheck that by forcing them to click a fourth time you’ve lost 70 percent of the audience. And I’d bet two paychecks that you’ll lose 97 percent for those on slow dsl or dial-up). I’m talking about the casual, daily reader surfing around (not someone not looking for the article that mentions their son by name). They don’t have to wait and dig through your site when the entire Internet is easier, quicker, more entertaining and only click away.

More Basic Horizontal Navigation examples:

• Indy Star
• NY Post
• The Oregonian
• Courier Press

The newest solution I’m intrigued by:

Site Map Navigation

The newest newspaper website navigation trend is, what I’m calling (because I haven’t seen a industry term yet), Site Map Navigation.

It’s Horizontal Roll Over Navigation, on steroids.

Using a horizontal roll over navigation, some sites are blowing out that roll over box to really showcase all the content and related sections available deep within the site. This essentially provides sitemap above the fold, on the home page without calling it a “site map” or some other insane jargon word that my mom (or other casual users) wouldn’t understand.

This method also helps combat the challenge of having immense levels of content and only one home page to showcase it on (which must be updated and changed constantly). AND it if done right, it can organize related content together so readers can understand what else is out on your site.0

My favorite live example so far is TampaBay.com and SacBee.com, who both not only get a lot of deep links in there but organize the content in logical chunks under each site sections so readers can logically see how things are organized and how deep it goes. Ohio.com also employs this method and the Sydney Morning Herald’s recent redesign integrated a “show site sections” button that is kind of a half-navigation, half-site map hyrbid.

Site Map Navigation examples:

• Sacromento Bee
• Tampa Bay
• Ohio.com
• Sydney Morning Herald

Conclusion

In conclusion, San Dimas High School football rules!

And…

The Site Map Navigation may not be the ultimate solution, but we need to integrate better logic and utlity into our newspaper site navigation because they’re a jumbled mess. We need to find a way to balance simplicity while also showcasing our vast expanses. This isn’t an ultimate fix by a long shot but it’s a step towards organizing our content — and perhaps more importantly — easily communicating to readers how the site is organized so they can connect with related content and what they want, when they want, as quickly as they want.