JC / Railbird

#ONA15 Notes and Quotes

I’m attending the 2015 Online News Conference (#ONA15) on Thursday and Friday and to keep from over-tweeting — and to gather all the great stuff that’s being said — I’ll be adding notes from the panels and events in the occasionally updated post below. (There likely won’t be much that’s racing specific, although I’ll do my best to make those connections.)

Friday: We Belong Here with Soraya Chemaly (@schemaly), Dr. Michelle Ferrier (@mediaghosts), Amanda Hess (@amandahess), Laurie Penny (@Pennyred), and moderated by Sarah Jeong (@sarahjeong) #ONA15keynote

Whose Idea Of The Future Is This? with Teresa Jusino (@teresajusino), Sherryl Vint, Ytasha L. Womack (@ytashawomack), and moderated by Matt Thompson (@mthomps) #ONA15future

I’m pairing the Friday morning keynote and a panel from the last session of the day because I can’t shake the connections between them. The first was a thoughtful, nuanced, and at times, harrowing discussion of online harassment and its effects. The second was a philosophical conversation about futurism and rethinking communities, media, and technology. Both were very much about who gets to speak, the backlash to diversity, and imagining better.

We Belong Here tweets:

Future tweets:

Thursday: A Three-Part Plan for Audience Engagement with Greg Emerson (@emersongreg), Alexandra Smith (@alexandraleighs), and Carla Zanoni (@carlazanoni) #ONA15plan

Solid advice from all three panelists: Go where your audience is, know what your goals are, and deliver value.

How do you market your journalism? Zanoni talks about how at the Wall Street Journal, engagement editors ask, “Where is the best place to tell the story — and what kind of data can we add to it?”

“Traffic data doesn’t tell you about your content, it tells you about your audience,” says Emerson, who stresses the importance of defining what it means for a piece to “do well.” What does it mean to be successful?

Also: “Your audience does not equal community,” and “Your audience is not one audience,” it’s segmented. Understand those segments. Know that it’s no longer enough to hire digital natives to navigate these channels: “You have to hire social natives, data natives, mobile natives,” says Emerson. “We all need to up our game.” Talks about how everyone is reading on phones, which is nice crossover with the Wednesday night ESPN longform panel and Kate Fagan pointing out how she reads long, deeply reported stories on her phone, but doesn’t want writers to change how they approach their work for that reality. It’s not about how you’re creating the work, but how you’re presenting it and measuring its effect on the audience.

Smith on a related topic: Goals, she says, look different for every newsroom, every beat. “You can’t be everything to everyone when it comes to metrics.”

Zanoni on social media: Stick to being present on the platforms where your users are already spending their time. Smith adds, “Do what you can well.”

What’s most important is that you’re adding value, says Emerson, who gives a few tips for how to do that: “If you give different context than everyone else, you will get more engagement.” Also, it’s no longer about being first, having a scoop [changing idea about what it means to win] — you might be alone out there with a story on Twitter for a few minutes, but you will be overtaken. “Think like a curator, not a megaphone.”

Another tip? Be clear, not vaguely clever or cute [something to balance when it comes to establishing a voice]. Remember that Google is indexing tweets now and people want to know what they’re clicking. “The more specific you are, the more value you bring.”

Plan tweets:

Thursday: Deep Dive into Google with Emily Bell (@emilybell) and Richard Gingras (@richardgingras) #onadeepdive

Emily Bell, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, and Richard Gingras, Google Head of News, get the conference off to a rousing start with a lively hour-long exchange covering such topics as the Trust Project, mobile, ad blockers, local news, and the Google algorithm.

Gingras begins by warning that there will be no letting up in the pace of digital news. Quoting Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf — “[George] can keep learning the games we play as quickly as I can change them” — Gingras says that tech skills are as essential as journalism skills and that “news organizations today have to treat technology equal to writing and storytelling.” Combined tech and journo skills “enable better journalism.”

Re: the Trust Project: Gingras raises the role of editors and the question of making their work more visible. “How can we surface the work that goes into journalistic verification to consumers?”

Moving on to the user experience of news, Gingras jolts the room by declaring, “The mobile web is in crisis.” He cites the the too-common experience of disruptive or obnoxious ads. Users are telling publishers ads have so degraded the experience that they’ve lost trust — “Ad blockers are a symptom of the problem,” he says. “The experience is so egregious, people can’t stand it.” The way forward is open source and open web. “We need to create experiences on the mobile web that are powerful, elegant, and sustainable.” (Google, through Gingras, is clearly staking out a position as being for the open web in opposition to the closed platform of Facebook and now, Apple.)

Bell asks him about Apple News: “Do you think Apple will actually succeed in moving people from the open web to a closed version of the web?” He replies: “I certainly hope not.” (Is this an awkward moment to mention that Railbird is available via Apple News?)

Gingras, though, believes publishers “should use any and all means to build audience,” answering a question about the Washington Post planning to publish all content on Facebook through Instant Articles.

Also discussed: The atomic unit of news. Gingras initially cites the article as the atomic unit (raising questions about what that means for content management/development/reaching readers through alternate forms), pointing to the decline in the website homepage as an entry point for audiences, but later speaks of videos/photos/all types of content as potentially being atomic units.

Audience member asks skeptical question about trust vis-a-vis Google’s algorithm. “We show our work,” Gingras answers. The results can be analyzed. Also says, feed the algorithm: “The more signals we have the better.”

Gingras leaves the audience with questions at the end — “What is the nature of the evolving form of the article?”, “How do we take full advantage of the opportunities in data journalism?” — and wraps up with, “It’s [all the questions that are being asked in this transition] only going to be solved by the collective efforts of everyone in this industry.”

Deep dive tweets: