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Print, on-line operations come together at Hershey showHERSHEY, Pa. -- The beauty of attending the America East/New Media World conference and trade show here is simple: You can get a lot more from supplier meetings and training sessions if you're all hopped up on handfuls of miniature Mr. Goodbars. Chocolate, that foil-wrapped fringe benefit, was a force once again at this year's show, April 3-6 at the Hershey Lodge and Convention Center. But the people came to see a newspaper and new media trade show, perhaps less formidable than NEXPO or Connections, but no less valuable to attendees from small- and mid-sized Eastern newspapers. For them, America East may be the best or only chance to hook up with suppliers for the print side, and New Media World offers three concurrent tracks of training for growing on-line operations. It's in that on-line realm where a couple of compelling seminar sessions popped up. (Conflict-of-interest alert: This writer attended the conference partly to deliver presentations on Web design and effective circulation service sites. That said, we'll focus on what other presenters had to say.)
Use and usability
Meyer is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Illinois, the managing partner of NewsLink Associates and a research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. His New Media World session, "Web site usability: tips on how to attract and retain more users to your web site," drew from research he has conducted and compiled while wearing each of those hats. Meyer attacked the slapdash approach of most newspaper site launches: throw some things up and see what sticks. "We haven't ever stopped and thought about what these people are out there doing with this stuff," he said. "How do they process information?" For one thing, Meyer added, people simply aren't exposed to the Internet to the same extent as older media. "The Web doesn't perform as well as print, not broadcast either," he said. As examples, Meyer quoted studies by the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, showing:
"That should tell us something important. They don't like what's there," Meyer said. "If they liked it, they would become habituated to it." Further, Meyer explained:
"Print is best suited for habituation," Meyer said. "We know why they regularly look at print and broadcast, and we sort of even know why they do on-line." "Guess what? They're not different." So what explains the difference in habituation? Meyer pointed to three things:
What's that he says about interactivity? Isn't the Internet the great, communications-rich, interactive vehicle long promised to us? "Print and broadcast are more interactive than on-line. How can I say that? This is an interactive medium, right?" Meyer said. "Well, in print I bet if you close your eyes you can still find the sports section. You can choose how you're going to consume that product without even thinking about it," he said. "A lot of things about interactivity are not necessarily what you think. It's not necessarily talking to other people. It's casual browsing, as opposed to intense seeking," he said. Meyer explained key differences in how print products and Web products are perceived. For starters, a printed newspaper has an area of roughly 275 square inches, compared to a maximum of about 108 square inches for a Web browser window. When looking at the printed page, readers go through stages from evaluating the entire page to focusing on very small components. "That puts the Web at an immediate disadvantage, because you can't put in as many hooks," Meyer said. Readers process printed newspapers as hierarchies of information, but process web sites by category, he added. "The Web is inherently more suited to people intently seeking information," Meyer said. "For example, I might say I need to know that stock price. "In some cases we can succumb to that pressure, and build our sites to work that way -- but there's only one problem." Meyer explained research that indicates that 98.5 percent of all the information people learn is acquired by browsing activities, while seeking activities account for only 1.5 percent. "That means if we convert our web sites into little information-seeking paradises, we confine ourselves to a very small niche, and virtually no mass medium can survive that way," he said. A browsing approach to content also doesn't bode well for a portal-style, categorical presentation. Instead of putting regular headlines on articles, for example, sites might tend to link them all from a category heading such as "City Council Coverage." Meyer said that may appeal to categorical searchers, but browsers need headlines and hierarchy to learn information. Still, a Web crowd is a tough crowd. "We say we're doing this to reach readers we don't reach normally," Meyer said. "Well, there's a reason we don't reach them normally. It has to do with other things about their life. "When I was graduating from journalism school, we were told all our readers would be dead in 20 years," he continued. "Now they've been replaced, by a new generation of people who, as they become more invested in their communities, have also become more likely to develop regular reading habits." But those are print-edition readers. Printed newspapers typically have an audience that is 95 percent local, Meyer said, while a given paper's web site may have an audience that is only 35 percent local. "The Web audience is not as vested in its given community," Meyer said. "They tend to be more mobile people who don't have a lot of local ties." Sociology isn't the only component in the Web usability equation. Basic human factors also affect how useful and relevant a web site can be, Meyer said. For one thing, presentation of news on a computer screen isn't an ideal match for the way we use our eyes. "Watch people read a newspaper. They almost always begin by holding the paper out in front of them, then when they get to the details, they pull the paper down, maybe to a table or desk," he said. "It's nature's own bias toward bifocals, and it's hard to do with a computer."
Before you surrender
Meyer laid out some ideas:
"All 'push' means is simply making sure this thing arrives at readers' computer screens without them having to pull it down," he said. The push application of choice these days is electronic mail. Meyer described studies that showed high audience acceptance of an application that combines e-mail-pushed news on one part of the screen with an e-mail manager on the other. "Of course, I'm describing America Online," he said.
"Don't rely too much on graphics for links and navigation," he said. "Our research shows 18 percent of people are still turning graphics off when they browse."
"The studies are absolutely compelling," he said. "Everyone would think if you broke these stories up into smaller elements, people wouldn't like them, remember them or use them. But they do." For ease of navigation, Meyer recommends "informational layering" into logical areas of interest to allow readers to skim quickly to what they want.
"Or in an information graphic, instead of a rich [Macromedia] Flash work, maybe just a simple animation that lets time bring something up or accentuate something." And remember, Meyer said, you can't pin all your hopes on the local crowd. "Local news is our franchise, we say, but so it was for the local shoe store that lost out to Wal-Mart."
Size isn't everything
And yes, David Sutton, managing partner of 1Up! Software of Kokomo, Ind., had a good crowd. Sutton focused on marshaling existing resources, and carefully selecting new staff, for a successful on-line venture. "When you think about using new staff versus existing staff to build an online service, there are pluses and minuses to each," Sutton said. Newly hired staff may be more aggressive, have more relevant skill sets and take more responsibility for results, he said. But they may also cause friction with existing staff. Reassigning existing staff to an on-line venture may help build a sense of ownership within the company overall, but existing staff members tend to push aside new ventures to address their core responsibilities. Even if a newspaper company builds its entire on-line organization from existing staff, it helps to have a specialist. "You really still need a person who lives and breathes only this," Sutton said. And if the technical resources to publish successfully on the Web aren't hanging around the front counter, it's time to hire programming help -- a different breed of employee, Sutton said. When scouting for programming help, Sutton recommended asking a few questions:
"The weakness of the Web is a lack of discipline, especially about deadlines," he said.
Suppliers in the house
Sonic Factory's server records the calls, converts the audio to RealAudio format and sends the resulting file via File Transfer Protocol to a customer-specified server. The company is developing support for Windows Media Player, according to Edward Costick, product manager. Speaking of service offerings, how do you do anything on the Web when you work for a really small newspaper? We're talking about the kind of paper where Ma stops writing next week's column long enough to deliver this week's edition, and Pa just got back from selling an ad to the corner store in time to typeset the Help Wanted classified ads.
The price in most cases is $100 per month, said Stephen Larson, president of Our-Hometown. The resulting site may not bowl over the judges at the Art Directors Guild, but all the local stories are linked, it includes an archive search engine and even interactive features like votes and chats.
Smart Layout, which was demonstrated as pre-release software, will feature a method to preserve relationships among all the elements in a layout group (headline, text, photo, caption etc.) for sizing and positioning. It also will include a tool to automatically wrap type boxes around elements already affixed to a page, such as advertisements. Smart Styles, which has been released, is essentially a supercharged tool for managing InDesign style sheet attributes to the nth degree. WoodWing Software, a company recently spun off from Mediasystemen B.V. of Bloemendaal, The Netherlands, developed both "Smart" tools. -- Jay Small
John Juliano Computer Services, See also The 10 myths of on-line publishingFrom THE COLE PAPERS, May 2000, Copyright © 2000, All Rights Reserved.
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