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Ashir – With your permission, I’d like to turn this email string into a blog post. Your point about reinstating order is pretty much the whole point.
R

From: Ashir Badami
To: Rebecca Rolfes
Subject: Ferocious!
Greetings from somewhat sunny California! I’m an avid reader of, among other things, the Orange articles. First of all, great job on the whole project. It’s a pleasure to dive into the content and my kudos to your breadth of coverage.

That said, I don’t always agree with – or understand – the opinions expressed. I recently read the first installment of the A Fresh, Ferocious Wave, and had a few questions and points to make.

I agree with 80% of this piece, especially the assertion that there is a growing class of 21^st century innovators who are taking publishing into the future. They’re of all stripes, and increasingly they’re not even journalists or media professionals – they’re entrepreneurs and free thinkers concerned with creating sustainable, scalable models for publishing quality content for a growing (not shrinking) audience – as the piece itself notes.

But here’s the 20% percent that I’m not in agreement with: The value of news judgment in the current publishing ecosystem.

As a trained journalist, I understand the inherent value of news judgment and believe you’re right to say that it’s a valuable component of the content-generation and marketing processes. As a member of the online publishing sphere, however, I have to respectfully disagree with the notion that we’re in the business of “telling people what they don’t know.” The rise of SEO and the dominance of search engine results – not to mention Twitter – have rendered news judgment a bit player in the algorithm-driven world of media consumption. By that I mean that news judgment is valuable and imperative within a site, but outside a site it’s user and search engine “judgment” that drive the consumption of content. Within this new paradigm, publishers are focusing on SEO programs and the almighty search engine results page (SERP) with the implicit statement that we don’t tell people stuff they don’t know; we tell people stuff and hope they want to know.

Couldn’t we say that curation – i.e., the selection of content regardless of who created it – is the skill du jour and that curation is based not on “newsworthiness” per se, but is usage-driven. In some instances (“Russian Spies Arrested in U.S.”), the content is newsworthy in the sense of public need-to-know, but in others, it’s not (“Justin Bieber Hates Apples”).

Pardon my long-winded response and the fact that I’m a nerd, but I was intrigued by the statement.

Ashir

Ashir –
I see what you’re saying and don’t really disagree. I think this is more of a semantic argument than anything.

We’ve always searched for content we were interested in from what the media provided—flipping through a publication till something caught our eye and subscribing to things that we liked because they came closer to giving us more of what we wanted. Search online certainly turbo-charges that process and adds mountains of content from all sorts of never-before-available sources. (I had no idea Justin didn’t like apples and have only a vague idea of who he is.)

Readers were always more interested in the fluffy stuff; witness the ratio of hard news to fluff in any daily paper. News judgment told them things they didn’t know about all sorts of things, not all of it meaningful or worthwhile or even interesting beyond the nanosecond it took to read it. But you are absolutely correct that it was and still is a process of telling them things we hope they will want to know.

Curation is a fancy word for plagiarism to me and I hate envisioning it as a legitimate part of the media—although I’m sure it will be part of the mix. Readers “curate” the content they read by picking and choosing. Sites that simply curate are lazy in my opinion.
R

From: Ashir Badami
To: Rebecca Rolfes
Subject: Re: Ferocious!
I get a better sense of what you’re saying now, and I’m glad I asked. Though I wouldn’t go so far as to say curation was plagiarism, I do agree that it is a lower life form on the evolutionary ladder of content, especially if it’s sole use is to drive traffic with no thought to user experience.

It takes less to cherry pick than it does to create content—no question there. That said, I think the renewed attention curation is receiving is the direct result of the obsession with getting Google’s attention. Content creators and publishers pay less attention to what is newsworthy in many ways, in an effort to get eyeballs. Consequently news judgment no longer derives from a desire to publish content that is worthy of attention, but rather from a desire to publish content that is attention seeking. One could argue that this is the same tactic tabloids have used, but the very reputation such publications have is evidence enough that the tactic smacks of opportunism.

I believe we’re both circling a larger issue here: How to reinstate order in a sense. The dominance of SEO and the obsession with platforms (iPhones, iPads, apps and more) has led to a strict focus on making content available rather than making content desirable.

Keywords aside, I think the rise of content factories (Associated Content, and Demand Media, etc.), has led to a glut of meaningless material that clogs up the drain.

As users tire of finding nothing but keyword-rich, but shallow content, my hunch is that they will seek out quality sites—but not the type of quality sites you and I envision. By that, I mean they’re not going to flock to a Harper’s website, some web presence with intellectual heft. Instead they’re going to seek out quality sites produced by publishers and innovators who understand how to blend rich content, engaging experiences and usability.

And that begs a simple question: What tools have we – publishers, marketers, writers and editors – developed to drive the user to engage with content? Yes, we have always “recommended” content to a certain extent whether by virtue of news judgment or editorial planning, but we’ve always assumed that those two aspects alone would drive engagement.

Without being cynical, I think the point is that users have become inherently lazy, and they’re dependent on Google and Twitter to tell them what’s worth reading. I’ve been trying various methods to get people to read what I know to be relevant to my demographic only to see them go straight for the “big topics,” which inevitably are only big because they’re being circulated more.

It is semantics, but there’s a subtle (or not so subtle) point about how we have to re-engage the user with great content and experiences. Basically it means we have to find a way that goes beyond mere words on a page, to create a milieu that drives use. In other words, in order to teach a man (or woman) to fish we must take him/her to the ocean so that they can experience the act. Doing so will allow us to not only create great content, but also great experiences that are, at their very essence, great brands. .

Ashir

For more on curated sites, read this recent post. The venture capitalists that surround Ashir in Southern California can smell financial opportunities that traditional publishers may be ignoring.

If you’d like to join the discussion about the fresh, ferocious wave that will reinvent media, use our commenting function at the bottom of each page (expand the box to comment and share) or send us email to ffw@imaginepub.com.