Gawker Media recently announced a new site design approach, along with access to their beta site (which now appears to be removed) via a long memo from their online overlord, Nick Denton. This memo, entitled Why Gawker is Moving Beyond the Blog touched on a number of issues near and dear to our ongoing river of news conversations at NPR. I wanted to touch on one in particular that I feel has helped me see our station content in a new light.
Denton goes on at some length about the power of the news scoop:
One law of media competition applies as strongly to web properties as it did to their predecessors: scoops drive audience growth.
And again, but more broadly on the value of original news production:
We learned our lesson: aggressive news-mongering trumps satirical blogging. Gawker.com’s growth since 2008 — from 300,000 people a week in the US to 1.4m — came in steps. After each story-driven spike… the audience settled back down, but at a higher level.
This focus, however, isn’t what got Gawker on the map, it’s only what’s helped them build to new levels of audience over time. In the very next section entitled “Aggregate or Die,” Denton reinforces the need for continuous coverage along with the “aggressive news mongering”:
[exclusive scoops] can be augmented by dozens or hundreds of short items to provide — at low cost — comprehensiveness and fodder for the commentariat.
And it is this very proposition – low cost comprehensiveness – that our pilot project aims to leverage.
One of the biggest challenges Denton identifies with these split objectives is the real estate competition between the audience-drawing scoops and scanable, curated coverage.
…in our current layout — there is no meaningful distinction between the quick post and a deeper story. Simple blockquotes and other short posts rapidly push our big exclusive down the page. If you’re a writer, why bother expending energy? Pursuing one objective (effective aggregation) undermines another (the promotion of big stories and features.)
One way he suggests coping with this is to divide the staff responsibilities between different people, presumably to reduce a conflict in objectives:
The solution? First, the creation or recognition of two different classes within the editorial teams: the curator or editor; and the producer or scoopmonger.
Which is something that has emerged – at least to some degree – within our pilot stations between reporters who are tasked with keeping the river flow going and those who’s function has always been to produce deeper original pieces for the radio. There’s still the challenge of ensuring the deeper piece is timely and compelling for a web audience, but the role division likely makes more sense in a traditional news shop like public radio newsrooms.
Denton’s other solution is more complex and involves flipping the scanable blog flow to a subservient right rail and featuring a single lead story in the primary content well. For me, the jury is still out on the suitability of this approach, as it assumes a right rail is attractive for scanning and a news outfit can produce highly appealing original content to feature in a consistent enough fashion.
[...] to implement the Core Publisher platform that follows the “River of News” publishing model, blogged about Gawker’s new design. In the newsrooms that are piloting Core Publisher, he saw a [...]