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Eric Ulken 4:51 am on October 16, 2014
Tags: Product managementPermalink | Reply8 things I learned in moving from news to product
The newsroom, by Flickr user Rick Harris
Two weeks after the 2014 Online News Association conference, I finally hit upon a topic for the session I should have pitched.
Let me back up: A little more than a year ago, I left the relatively comfortable confines of journalism — a place, squarely on one side of the church-state divide, where I’d spent nearly my entire career — for the strange new world of product management. I wanted to help my news organization make better digital products that would, I hoped, help pay for its journalism.
In the course of this transition, I absorbed a few kernels of truth I thought might be useful to those making the leap today (or those still on the news side who want to get along with their product colleagues).
Since I’m too late for the conference, I thought I’d deliver this talk — on what I learned in moving from news to product management* — in list format, taking a page from the folks at Buzzfeed.
*(Thanks to CNN’s Etan Horowitz for sparking this idea.)
1. ‘Process’ is not a dirty word.
Newsrooms are full of complex processes. They’re just so time-worn and embedded in the culture that it’s hard to identify them as processes at all. For journalists, they’re more like habits.
In product development, process is more defined, more deliberate, but not necessarily any more rigid or structured than it is in the newsroom. In fact, others have observed that agile, the widely used software development methodology, has a lot in common with the rhythms of a newsroom: Fixed deadlines, collaborative approach, emphasis on performance over planning, etc.
Why, then, are journalists so skeptical of the notion of process as it’s presented in product development terms? (I’ll admit: I was dubious myself.) My guess is it’s often the terms themselves that get in the way. Words like “scrum master” and “cadence” sound scary and foreign. (Though I guess non-journalists would feel the same about “slug” and “nut graf”.)
Not long into my product immersion, our CTO bought me this book on agile product management. (Yes, I learned agile from a book.) It’s a quick and easy read and effectively demystifies the terminology, bringing out agile’s elegant simplicity — a notion that should appeal to jaded journalists.
2. SMART goals are your friends.
It’s not enough to say, “I’m going to increase social traffic to my website.” If you don’t know how much and by when, all you have is a vague wish. You certainly don’t have any way of measuring your progress toward that goal.
Try this instead: “I will increase social traffic from 10% of article visits today to 20% within three months.” If, six weeks in, social represents 15% of your article traffic, you can say you’re halfway to your objective. Doesn’t that sound good?
So what is SMART? It’s just an acronym to help you remember to define your goals in ways that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound.
3. Technology should be an enabler, not a constraint.
An unfortunate dichotomy is in evidence in the way technology is seen in different parts of the enterprise: To the product manager, technology is the lever, the means by which a problem is solved. To the content creator, technology often is the problem that needs solving, the obstacle you learn to work around.
Years of technical debt in many news organizations have perpetuated this notion, so journalists today tend to view technology through the lens of what it cannot do: “The system I compose my story on won’t let me insert hyperlinks into articles.” (Hard to fathom, I know, but still true for some.) Or, “This article template won’t let me use a vertical photo in the main art spot.”
Meanwhile, if you ask a developer whether a certain piece of functionality can be made to work, the answer is invariably, “Sure, it’s possible,” hopefully followed by an estimate of the level of effort required to implement it.
The job of the product manager, of course, is to keep track of all those things that are possible, how much effort each will take and how urgently it is needed, and continually prioritize what should be done next — so that, hopefully, fewer end users (internally and externally) complain about the limitations of the technology and begin to see the value of iterative improvement.
4. No product is ever finished.
Another place where traditional journalistic practices and product development are at odds is in the notion of “finished”. There is a certain liberation in being able to hit “publish” and head home, knowing you’ve done an honest day’s work and produced something of value to the public — and then to be able to come back the next day and work on something new. For many journalists — even in the digital world — this is the reality.
In product development, though, launch doesn’t really signify the completion of anything but rather the beginning of the next phase of a product.
Also, in journalism, we publish only when a story is perfect, or pretty close. In product development, we release things before they’re even really finished. This is the goal of the “minimum viable product”, the notion that you should launch as soon as you have something that’s useful and valuable, and adjust your future development based on feedback on the initial version. After all, why spend months building a fully-formed, feature-rich product and release it to the world, only to learn that it isn’t at all what the world was waiting for?
How long does this cycle of design-built-test repeat? As long as the product is still alive. Try telling that to a reporter: “Your job is to just keep updating the same story forever.” (Then again, isn’t that kind of the idea behind Circa, as well as Vox.com’s card stacks?)
5. Strategy by vendor is not strategy.
I’m convinced that many news organizations have abdicated control over their destiny by outsourcing too much of their product strategy to alluring third-party products purpose-built for publishers.
On one hand, vendors enable news organizations to focus on what they do uniquely well — publishing news — and to hire out the technical work that is never going to be their forte, simultaneously benefiting from the combined investment of many publishers. (After all, how many times does an analytics tool or ad delivery system need to be built?)
But some functions are too important to leave to third parties. For example, how many revenue-sharing deals do we have to sign before we’ve learned that with each one we give up a little more of our ability to monetize our own audience.
Barriers to entry keep falling. Off-the-shelf technologies, with some modification and integration work, can solve many of the complex problems publishers previously relied on expensive purpose-built tools for. (Witness Journal Register’s Ben Franklin Project, for example, which I’ve praised previously.) Many of us essentially missed out on the democratization of technical innovation brought about by the open source movement, but it’s not too late to be part of this community and benefit from its work.
Another thing to consider in deploying third-party products is user experience. If you load up your pages with widgets and doohickeys, you will end up with microhate — those little annoyances that add up for users. (Hat tip to The Atlantic’s J.J. Gould for this evocative term.)
6. A single metric rarely tells the whole story.
Everybody can see the unfortunate effects of digital publishers’ obsession with a single metric — the impression — as the primary determinant of advertising value. It has turned content sites into Christmas trees, lit up with a thousand blinking, multi-colored ornaments. It resulted in photo-gallery pageview padding, pointless article page pagination and the vast right-rail wastelands you see on so many sites. It is why most publishers still chase clicks instead of actual engagement, which in turn has led them to value catchy headlines over quality content.
And ultimately, it’s our reliance on this measurement that has caused the perverse oversupply and collapse in value of digital display ad inventory. All because we equated impressions, which are infinitely inflatable, with attention, which is finite and the thing advertisers actually want to buy. (Gradually, we see sanity prevailing, but it’s taken us two decades to get there.)
Variations on this story are repeated on a daily basis, though usually with less enduring effects, in business scenarios around the world. Focusing on one metric at the expense of others oversimplifies the problem being measured and often leads to new ones. This is why you should always be on the lookout for the potential unintended consequences of each metric you use.
7. Your perspective is valuable.
When you find yourself in a meeting about some aspect of the business — a new ad product, let’s say — and you look around the room and realize you’re the only person there who has ever worked in a newsroom, your first instinct might be to lean back and let the businesspeople do their thing. Don’t do this.
Almost as often as I’ve had to push back against business initiatives that didn’t make sense from a journalistic perspective, I’ve seen colleagues censor good ideas in order to avoid any possibility of running afoul of the high priests in the newsroom. And while you can’t necessarily represent your journalist colleagues if you work in product, you can speak with some authority about journalistic values and priorities. As a product manager in a news organization, your most valuable asset might be your understanding of the organization, its capabilities and its limitations.
8. The mission still matters.
It’s a truism among journalists that we’re not in this business for the money. Most of us are drawn in some way to the public service mission, even if what we do on a daily basis doesn’t always look like public service. Even many non-journalists working for news companies, I’ve discovered, are there in part because they like the notion of working for an organization that’s shining light in dark corners and contributing to the betterment of a community.
Especially if you work in a large organization, with disparate departments that often don’t get along, you can use this shared sense of purpose to find common ground and unite people.
And uniting different kinds of people in pursuit of a shared goal is perhaps the most important thing that product managers do.
Posted from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. -
Eric Ulken 6:43 pm on April 18, 2014
Tags: The Seattle Times ( 3 ), WordPressPermalinkWhy WordPress?
Here at The Seattle Times, we’re preparing to replace our decade-old digital CMS with WordPress. Can a free blogging tool power a complex, high-traffic newspaper website? We think so, and we’re not alone.
Newspapers have long used WordPress to power blogs (as if blog posts were somehow wholly different from articles), but a growing number of “old media” sites have moved their primary digital publishing activity over to WordPress, so we’re in increasingly good company. A few such sites with WordPress at their core:
- Metro UK, perhaps the largest newspaper site powered entirely by WordPress
- Bangor Daily News, one of the earliest newspaper WordPress converts
- New York Observer
- Germany’s Die Tageszeitung
- Canada’s National Post and Global News
- Tribune Broadcasting Sites
And of course, a much larger number of digital-only news sites — including many that get way more traffic than we do — use WordPress. So it’s not a question of scale, I think, but more a question of culture.
In our quest for culture change here, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the inspiration we took from Journal Register Company’s 2010 Ben Franklin Project — a bid to publish in print and online using only free tools — and Bangor’s pioneering and well-documented switch to WordPress.
Want to help us realize our own open-source digital news future? Check out our job openings in technology, design and product management.
Posted from Seattle, Washington, United States. -
Eric Ulken 12:43 am on December 5, 2012
Tags: Storify, The New York Times ( 3 ), The Seattle Times ( 3 ), Twitter ( 7 )PermalinkAn experiment: The Seattle Times in 10 Tweets
Inspired by Patrick LaForge‘s Times in 10 Tweets experiment at the NYT, I decided to do the same with a day in the life of The Seattle Times, based on the tweets of Seattle Times staffers. Here’s the result:
What do you think? Interesting? Or a waste of time?
Posted from Seattle, Washington, United States. -
Eric Ulken 1:54 pm on September 8, 2012
Tags: newspapers, predictions, Robert G. Kaiser, technology, The Washington Post ( 2 )PermalinkRequired reading from 20 years ago
The world is changing with amazing speed, and we need to pay close attention to what is happening. … No one in our business has yet launched a really impressive or successful electronic product, but someone surely will. I’d bet it will happen rather soon. The Post ought to be in the forefront of this — not for the adventure, but for important defensive purposes. We’ll only defeat electronic competitors by playing their game better than they can play it. And we can.
Here is a fascinating glimpse of the future of digital media and newspapers’ place in it as seen from the year 1992 by then-Washington Post Managing Editor Robert Kaiser. Read Mark Potts’ write-up, and then read the full memo.
As an aside, it’s worth noting that Potts debunks the now-popular notion that newspaper execs’ “original sin” was not pursuing paid digital models from the get-go. In fact, newspapers tried many variations on paid content over the years, and most failed. (Newspaper executives were negligent in many other ways where digital is concerned, but on this count I think they deserve a pass.)
What’s most striking to me, though, is how the radical changes in technology that were predicted at this conference 20 years ago have unfolded more-or-less the way the technologists foresaw. (Remember, this is before anybody outside academe and big science had heard of the web, and 2400 bits per second was probably the most common connection speed for home computers to online services.) In fact, one of the few major technological advancements of the last two decades not mentioned in Kaiser’s memo is the explosion of mobile.
The thing nobody seems to have adequately imagined is how these changes in technology would shift the foundations of mass media in two fundamental ways: By disrupting the advertising business model and by giving rise to search and social media (and thus disaggregating the “bundle” that gave newspapers much of their value).
It would seem the near future is fairly easy to predict in purely technological terms. What’s harder to see are the economic and social implications of those changes. Credit to Bob Kaiser for trying.
Posted from Seattle, Washington, United States. -
Eric Ulken 5:13 pm on January 25, 2011
Tags: The Seattle Times ( 3 )PermalinkBack to the newsroom, off to Seattle
When I left the Los Angeles Times in the depths of the 2008 financial crisis — a time when the newspaper industry’s future looked particularly bleak — I wondered wistfully if I was walking away from my last newspaper job. I’d worked for newspaper companies my entire career, and despite their sometimes frustratingly slow advance into the digital age, I’ve always loved newspapers and the work they do.
Turns out, I’m not finished with newspapers. Or they are not finished with me.
I am starting a new job next month at The Seattle Times as assistant managing editor, digital. I’ll be guiding editorial efforts on the paper’s online products, including SeattleTimes.com. The Times has earned a reputation for innovation in local digital journalism, and I am looking forward to being a part of the talented team that makes it happen.
I’ve missed the newsroom, and I can’t wait to get back there.
Photo: Clock at Pike Place Market, Seattle, by Flickr user mikeensor (Creative Commons)
Posted from Boston, Massachusetts, United States. -
Eric Ulken 7:57 pm on January 23, 2011
Tags: LibrariesPermalinkLibraries: An appreciation
If I couldn’t be a journalist, I think I’d be a librarian. I decided this after spending a lot of time in libraries in the last couple of years and interacting with some very smart (and completely unstuffy) librarians.
Maybe it’s because, as it turns out, journalists and librarians have a lot in common.
Fundamentally, we’re both interested in making information useful and meaningful to the widest possible audience. Beyond that, practitioners in both fields are committed to public service, free speech, open access, transparency in sourcing, etc.
Librarianship might not be the hippest profession — one more thing we share, I suppose — though, as my former LAT colleague David Sarno points out, this is changing.
Librarians with an eye to the future speak not of books but of an information commons — an open network of places, both physical and virtual, where people come not just to receive knowledge but to create and share knowledge with others.
In the U.S., public libraries are seeing record numbers of visitors. Even circulation is up.
Unfortunately, budgets are down. Libraries are a convenient target for cash-strapped local governments looking to save money.
But cuts to public libraries, especially in bad economic times, are short-sighted. They hit job seekers, community groups and people engaged in independent study, among others.
It’s time civic leaders took a closer look at libraries and the services they provide and imagine how much poorer our society’s information commons would be without them.
Photo: Seattle Central Library by Flickr user pmorgan (Creative Commons)
Posted from Boston, Massachusetts, United States.
Eric Ulken
7:56 am on August 20, 2010
Tags: Flash, iPad, performance
Flash in the pan?
I am an ex-Flash user. I uninstalled the Flash plug-in on my primary browser about a month ago, and I haven’t looked back. Here’s how it happened:
Back when Apple announced that its forthcoming iPad would lack Flash support, it sounded to me like a boneheaded move. If a device built for consuming multimedia doesn’t support the web’s leading format for multimedia presentation, what good is it?
But after using my own iPad for a while, I decided I didn’t miss Flash nearly as much as I thought I would. (And I discovered that a lot of web apps I’d assumed were Flash-based were actually built with JavaScript.) Which got me thinking: Could I do without Flash on my main computer as well?
I use a woefully underpowered first-generation MacBook Air that I’d rather not replace just yet. I’d done about all I can think of to squeeze a little more performance out of it, including installing a solid-state hard drive and upgrading the OS to Snow Leopard. Still I found many common activities, particularly web browsing in multiple tabs or windows, painfully slow.
So I decided, as an experiment, to remove the Flash plug-in from my primary web browser, Google Chrome. I still have it in Safari, which I fire up when I need to look at Flash content.
After about a month, here are my impressions:
- The speed increase on web browsing is much more dramatic than the performance boost I got by adding Snow Leopard and the SSD. And since most of my computing time is spent in a web browser, that gives my old laptop a new lease on life.
- Fewer obnoxious ads! That alone might make this “upgrade” worthwhile.
- YouTube and Vimeo both have stable HTML5 video players, though most of the commercial content on YouTube is available only in the Flash player.
- The Wall Street Journal’s video player works beautifully. (NYT and CNN not so much.)
- Interactive charts in Google Analytics and Google Finance, sadly, are Flash-based and don’t downgrade gracefully.
- The Google Maps API is JavaScript based (though ther