On the reaction to USA Today’s new social features
Here’s something that’s been bothering me. USA Today, relatively recently, relaunched their website with a new design and some interesting community features, notably comments and ratings. Reception of this was decidedly mixed. Some of the complaints are about the design and while I don’t really love it, I don’t particularly hate it either, it’s kind of a neutral experience for me. What I was surprised about was the fairly widespread negative reaction to their implementation of their social features.
Before I go much further let me say that I’ve worked at and for several magazines and newspapers so I have some experience with how such companies may view things. Take first that this is the print world, a more old school industry you would be hard pressed to find. This is an industry largely run by folks two generations older than me who’s industry finds itself embattled by the emerging internet. They don’t use the web, much less understand it - and that lack of understanding is a large factor in breeding fear. That fear is a fear of losing readership, losing relevance and ultimately losing revenue. More often than not it shapes their approach to the web and can cause some irrationality in the face of it. Their business is selling paper not selling bits, in their minds - everything is secondary to selling that paper.
I’m not one to say whether that fear is warranted or not. For example, one fear is that online access to content will cannibalize subscriptions. In my experience this is probably not true, but there’s so many variables involved with each magazine having different demographics, different values, who is to say whether or not it’s true in any specific case. So my point is not to make a value judgement on whether or not the fear is warranted, it is simply to say that that fear exists in many of these publishing companies.
Now, back to the problems. You read on the internet mild outrage by bloggers everywhere that they didn’t go far enough, why can’t they add this or that to the profile, why is the ranking such a small icon, etc.. I have to say I’m slightly baffled and mildly annoyed at all this web2.0′er than thou attitude (of course, to some degree, this attitute seems inherent in web2.0 in the first place, but that’s for another time). Let me take as an example techdirt’s review. I single it out, because I had it left in my tabs and it seems fairly representative, not because of any beef I have with techdirt - I think it’s a great blog and read it regularly.
It starts with some mildly positive comments on the newspapers work. But then begins its critique with this:
However, it appears that while USA Today has embraced some aspects of breaking down the barrier between the newspapers and the people it serves, they’re still pretty scared of having those people associated with USA Today’s brand. The new social features are designed such that the information that people put into them is hidden from search engines like Google.
Ok, that’s a legitimate beef. It’s kind of strange that they hide the user generated content from the search engines, but it seems fairly minor a point. It follows that:
A company representative told Marshall that the newspaper is worried “about what content is associated with the brand….”
Ok, that’s a reasonable worry, I don’t know if the brand would be affected, but big companies are certainly cautious with such things. I don’t know and I’m pretty sure tech dirt doesn’t know, but wait, this is apparently a crazy thing to do, because:
That seems silly however. The comments here on Techdirt are wide open and indexed by search engines — and while there may be a few people who somehow think that a random commenter represents the views of Techdirt, most people recognize that they’re the views of someone else, but posted here.
Oh! Techdirt does know! Because Techdirt’s amazing brand wasn’t sullied by it’s user comments, well there it is, that must be definitive. Right, because their brand is comparable in any way to that of a national paper. USA Today’s print circulation was 2.25million last year, their *paid* *print* circulation. As for online, according to alexa, usatoday’s reach (percent of global users who visit the site) is an order of magnituted more than techdirt’s. Alexa’s numbers are obviously skewed, but if I had to lay down a bet, I’d guess that techdirt’s tech savvier audience would skew alexa towards it, so if anything that difference is even greater. Using the blog’s self-selected tech savvy audience is not reasonable substitute for the reaction of USA Today’s audience of people with and without technical sophistication who don’t know their web2.0 from their web1.0.
Just taking a quick perusal of homepages, I see an article on USA Today that has 62 comments another with just less than that. Techdirt’s high is 26. The point of this is that the scale of USA Today makes it a different game and this is just the start of USA Today’s community, it’s been there for 1 week, as more people come to the site and get accustomed to using it, I would expect it’s usage to grow significantly. My friend Scott also points out that pages are being penalized for being “too long” in Google’s Webmaster tools and also notes that a site with USA Today’s traffic and pagerank will be hard pressed to deal with the influx of comment spam.
Outright calling this comment hiding silly because a little blog has had a different experience… well, that’s a just silly.
Wait. There’s more problems:
The USA Today representative followed up his statement by saying: “We’re still a newspaper.” But, that’s just the thing. They’re no longer really a “newspaper,” but a business that’s delivering news and information in a useful way to a community of people.
Hmm, so a newspaper was not a business that delievered news and information in a way that was useful to a community of people. Right, before blogging and user generated content, we didn’t have useful information and we certainly didn’t have any communities. Gosh, we were all living alone caves until we creeped out to see the sun when the web hit the scene and only now are we forming relationships with people with the advent of web2.0 and social media.
And they close out with this coup de grace:
Devaluing that community by suggesting they’re not worthy of being included in Google isn’t a particularly friendly “welcome” gesture.
Right, because techdirt values its community so much that it treats us all like spammers. That’s right, every link I put into techdirt gets the ol’ rel=”nofollow” treatment so google won’t follow their links. Why does techdirt devalue their community by suggesting that they’re links are not worthy of being included in Google’s crawl? Because techdirt obviously hates their community and thinks everyone that posts must be a spammer. Oh, that’s not obvious? Right.
Don’t get me wrong, I think blogging and social media and all that are genuinely great. My problem lies with the hubris of all these people that have already decided that they’re way is the only way. That unless you do things in just the right way, you may as well not do them. That their experience with their blog is the experience that everyone will have, regardless of size or industry.
Look at what USA Today’s competitors are doing in the same space. The NYTimes? They have a digg button. Boston Globe? Not even that. What about slate.com? Surely that online only publication must have taken some bold steps? No, they have some old style ghettoized message boards. Why was scorn and derision not heaped on these institutions for failing to take even the tentative (or bold by measure of it’s peers) steps that USA Today has taken?
I’m not saying that we should fall at the feet of every new step taken in the direction of allowing more social features. But I think that the moves that USA Today made were brave in the face of the fear of the internet inherent in their industry and I hope and suspect that as they move forward and see how it works, more steps will be taken in the right direction which may pursuade it’s more timid fellows to do the same.
