Opportunopoly

Online media opportunities abound if publishers are but willing to look beyond their traditional definitions. Opportunopoly examines emerging technology and market game-changers, thought leaders and, well, opportunities that may lie beyond the usual newspaper comfort zone.

Not many publishers think of their Websites as a "prison." Yet even those with a very "open source" view of the world often weave a tightly compacted and overly restrictive "platform" [rigid jumping off point] for "publishing" [setting a formal table for] their news and information.

No matter what intellectual lip-service gets paid to interactivity, most news flows one-way, downhill, in a single channel that's been dug to carry water to our readers. Even the term "publishing platform" or the even the more constricting-sounding "content MANAGEMENT SYSTEM," seem designed to put news into a drawer, or several drawers, that get pulled out when the user wants to see what's inside.

Even the very open-sourced systems we use as envelopes can come off as static in their ability to interact with other innovative communication conduits. At GateHouse Media, we were quite fond of Zope for Publishers, but turned to WordPress when we needed to plug in a blog, or Drupal when we wanted to demonstrate how one journalist, a police scanner and a point-and-shoot camera could captivate a whole neighborhood where we didn't publish a paper. Making this happen, though, as an exception, was like trying to carve a tributary into a concrete culvert. Blogs were a click away from the artfully crafted template, not integrated into the publishing system itself. Search was another wormhole that had to be carved into its own "section front." Templates changed not daily, not with the news-flow, but once a year if that.

I'm being overly dramatic here, perhaps, because, having built a system -- ANY system -- that adheres to templates, I can say that they may be efficient as heck, but they afford only modest trickles of true interactivity. Readers looking in from time to time can be forgiven for thinking that they're looking at a lap lane where news and information is channeled the same way day after day. They may be excused for thinking that they only need to take a dip once or twice a week because when they arrive at our digital destinations, their immediate reaction may be, "been there -- done that." 

News should be exciting, and the chance to explain what we've seen and experienced as journalists should take whatever form best fits the mediums available, regardless of our official "site" constraints. A live stream of the House vote Monday on the financial rescue plan would have been captivating. It would even have made for a fascinating Twitter. As soon as Nancy Pelosi rose to speak, this trickle should have launched a torrent; flip the switch to broadband. Take the lessons of Morris Communications' first live leaderboard at a Master's Tournament and put the vote "live" at right on your home page. Juxtapose that with a web cam of the Dow. Give the left rail over to user-generated YouTube reaction to the bill debacle, or maybe even "video twitter," which is how I described Seesmic.com in a recent conference report for the Edge.

News itself, when it is relevant, happens all around us and the reader in real time. Online opportunity comes of BEING digital -- putting ourselves in the reader's flip-flops, if you will -- and seeing news and events and information as a fast moving current rather than a swim lane. Sometimes the event itself calls for a new channel, as did the events of Katrina, which ended up being blogged more than broadcast. Sometimes it must escape the bounds of the channels we've built to control it, and become something else.

We have the tools today, behind the scenes of these gridlines, to set news free. RSS is one way to organize it, but letting readers "subscribe" to individual reporters as tweets or even live broadcasts, may be another.  

In trying to think of how to describe our need to approach the delivery of real-world events as they intersect interactive media, the best term I can come up with is "multi-dimensionalism." But even this falls short, because the dimensions of which I speak are themselves fairly conceptual.

Try to picture something like the UPS "Whiteboard," and of our daily work as a box. The first, and typically the only dimension most publishers adhere to as their bottom line is "readership." This is a good thing, but as it's currently conceived, it looks more like a number than a state of mind. So, scratch that. 

The new dimensions we need to think in are themselves evolving:

1. Selection evolves to incorporate user generated content -- from the selection of what IS news, not just via commentary.

2. Interpretation evolves to incorporate reader reaction, opinion, the writer's own reflection, often in the form of a blog.

3. Presentation evolves to become communication. In thinking about of what a story consists, might weconsider not just the "beautiful cage" that is our shiny, templated Web site built to "hold" it, but also the means by which our users themselves may be resorting to share it?

4. Perspective remains, but NOT from a fixed position. Instead, we have to challenge our own singular perspectives of a news event, or even what we consider important, and take the perspective of our reader/reactor in all this. 

Rather than terming this "thinking outside of the box," I'm tempted to say, open the box and GET IN.

Our readers already behave digitally; our operations make it difficult for us to do the same, which is why the "blogosphere" (a strangely un-box-like metaphor itself) has so captured the new news flow. We can only anticipate -- we can only communicate -- if we behave digitally too. The audience with which we now interact have what one very savvy agency observer called "digital expectancy." Our job is to make a connection, to fire a synapse, to inspire a response, and to facilitate that connectivity, we have to be where they are, when they're ready to communicate.

You'll be astonished to observe that, if you think about this long enough, these same "new dimensions" (with a nod to Wilson's NDN) apply to advertising too. Television is almost on the verge of being able to capture this. Imagine a world in which TV acknowledged that an increasingly smaller audience actually watched the commercials in line with their favorite programs (which they now time-shift in any case. (This is the selection dimension. The audience picks what it wants to watch or read when and where they choose.) Now, when a program reaches a natural "pause" or shift of scene, what if a flashing icon in the lower right of the screen let the viewer know that there might be something they'd like to check out at that opportune moment. 

Sounds like, "Wow. Heavy thought. Need a break. Want a snack food idea to go with that?" (Good time to stretch and check out Backchannelmedia.com...) To the extent that video -- and even our own "sites" can carry -- and evoke impulse from -- contextually relevant messaging <rewindPeer39 spiel as refresher>, people will watch what they WANT to watch, and not skip over the more creative or relevant diversions. Imagine a clicker that can "page" between waiting commercials for viewing after the show, or while fixing dinner (playing to lessoned attention, not lessened curiosity). Imagine a commercial delivery system that will afford you choices of what you want to watch, and make these available when they don't interrupt your viewing experience, but rather when you're willing to pay attention as a way of getting more of your favorite shows for free. ("Like this episode? Vote with your attention. Watch any three of the following commercials as a way of registering the popularity of this show in this week's Nielsen ratings...")

It may sound a little crazy, but this is the way truly savvy marketers talk these days. Did anyone else notice the conversation between Heroes' teleported detective in the desert and the mystical Aboriginal figure that lamented not having chosen Sprint for cell service (the implication being that the cop could have called a cab from the bush if he'd only picked the right carrier....) This goes way beyond product placement, and almost begs for opt-in. Sprint's accompanying video messaging, BTW, was the new head honcho sitting in a diner inviting phone users to come in and have their phones "personalized" free. Message: we're available when you're ready to get more out of your phone.)

This becomes a way of thinking about sponsorship and ad adjacencies that goes way beyond "packaging." To fully appreciate how we might employ these principles -- again -- you have to get in the box and experience advertising the way your users do.  

Let users play with the box, rip it apart, put it back together elsewhere, make paper airplanes out of it if they wish. Allow them to play with, tag, parse, search, video, YouTube, Facebook, and yes Twitter it. Hypersyndication doesn't exist absent the threat of plagiarism, misinterpretation, or even -- dare we say it -- Drudgeitization (which I'd define as the act of being made both instantly relevant and irrelevant at the same time.) But it provides the reader with the option of making us, and our connected advertiser, intensely relevant because the messaging is "pulled" when the user is ready. Marketing is really just the conveying of advertising or messaging to the cnsumer when he or she is most likely to be in response mode. And, this applies not just to certain people -- a rathole that BT may have lead too many newspapers down without the heft to deliver segmentation -- but to ANYONE who is engaged enough to respond. 

This, friends, is when both news and advertising sing. From inside the gilded cages of a static Web "site," our message doesn't utter so much as a decent "tweet." (Pun intended.)

Like any good metaphors, this box can carry us only so far. Feel free to suggest your own. 

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