Turning News Into Knowledge

Have you ever jotted down an idea for a blog—then let it swirl around in your brain for awhile to get your thoughts in order? I do this all the time and quite often never get around to writing the blog in the end.  I’m trying to find a cure for this laziness, I think it’s called Twitter.

This was just the case a few weeks back when I read the first half of a feature story in the August (print) edition ofVanity Fairabout Politico–a politically obsessed news organization that reports every whisper heard in Washington on-demand.

On the first go around I had only read page one of the feature and I was already thinking about the great blog post this story was going to make about how Politico could salvage the future of newspapers.  You see, the sub-headline read as follows

Four old-media veterans may have solved the future of news with the Politico Web site, whose audience of six million obsessives and insiders consumes–and feeds–a real-time download of power data. The twist? Politico’s print version is what’s helped make it profitable.

few paragraph’s into the story I was extremely intrigued.  Four mainstream print guys had bucked the institution, created their own gig, figured out what their audience craved, and were profitable…and get this: it was the print edition that was helping them roll in profits.

They had 100 staffers, 6.7 million unique monthly visitors for politico.com, and seemed to scoop all the mainstream media on a daily basis.  What was the secret to their success that they could share with the rest of the media world? I was curious to find out and blog about it—but got pulled away from the story with something more pressing.

A week later I finished reading the article, and to my dismay, there was no secret.  There were no profits. Just projections of perhaps breaking even according to the CEO.

‘it appears….according to C.E.O. Fred Ryan, that Politico, paying its staffers at nearly the level that The Washington Post pays (starting salaries for reporters at the Post are about $45,000 per year), has hit breakeven.’

As the story unfolds we find out the online advertising wasn’t strong enough to keep it afloat, so a print version with almost verbatim copy is being produced as a freebie. The additional ad revenue from print is bringing in just enough to help keep it going.   Unfortunately, despite how much politico’s love Politico, they had not as I hoped figured out a secret business model for media to thrive.   All of their ideas have already been tried by mainstream media in attempts to survive:

• • Pay journalists peanuts. Check.
  • Build up our online audience. Check.
  • Help journalists become trusted brands. Check.
  • Scoop the competition. Check.
  • Try a freebie print version supported by ads. Check.

I’m definitely being a little unfair to Politico; building an online audience of 6.7 million people with a century mark of employees is a great success story.  But the sub-headline of the story had promised me so much more—it had sparked a good idea for the blog and I thought I knew what the message would be.  And there’s the saving grace and an actual link back to media analysis. You can never judge an article by just the headline or even the first few paragraphs.  To properly assess an article the full story needs be taken into account, and inherently that is problem with automated sentiment analysis the way it is being done today. It can take words and phrases out of context (or in this case in context) and not properly relay the right information to decision makers in an analysis report.

Over the years we’ve relied on our analysts to provide clients with a human touch–including toning and sentiment analysis. I’m a big believer in automation – and I think there are strides being made to increase accuracy and insights – but any proper media analysis program needs to have human intervention at various checkpoints to ensure the information being shared can be trusted and acted upon.  Otherwise you might just think that the solution to the newspaper industry’s woes have been solved…I’m still waiting, but hopeful.

United Airlines just got a brutal lesson on the viral nature of media.

According to Canadian musician Dave Carroll, United Airlines broke his $3,500 Taylor guitar.  For nine months, he unsuccessfully tried to get United to pay for the repair costs.

So, he took his case online to Youtube with a pretty slick music video called ‘United Breaks Guitars‘.

The video has had over 500,000 views since it was first posted Monday and now United is scrambling.

I was first referred to the video via a story in the Ottawa Citizen by Sarah Schmidt and Blair Crawford.

The term viral in the Ottawa Citizen story was in relation to Youtube and the Internet. However, ironically, as have already stated, I first heard about the story from the Ottawa Citizen – a traditional media outlet.

At last count, the story has appeared in over two hundred traditional outlets and thousands of blogs, which now includes this one.

Also, to add another layer of complexity for United,  when viewing the video on Youtube, you are given other anti-United videos to chose from, including a pretty funny Madtv skit.

Viral stories can jump medium to medium and organizations need to be more effective when monitoring and analyzing media as a whole and they need to be able to correlate the different media to one another.

In the case of ‘United Breaks Guitars’, all United can do is apologize and show humility, which they are doing. The video is too well done and has momentum.

I would also recommend that they analyze the ongoing situation and aftermath, so they can better understand what happened and try to figure out how they can repair some of the damage.

That said, they seem to be saying the right things to the media and they need to make sure they stay on message and show humility.

Again, to make sure they are being successful with their attrition, they should be constantly monitoring and analyzing all media, new and traditional.