JOSEPH STASHKO

If you’ve ever built a product from scratch, you’ll inevitably have come up against the dilemma of whether to build it until you think it’s perfect before releasing it to users, or making a minimum viable product that ticks a few boxes and lets the users dictate the next iteration.

The latter is the approach we took with Ocqur, which is liveblogging software that I’ve been working on with Jonathan Frost and Andrew Fairbairn.

I’ve been overseeing the first round of user testing since we started building the service at the beginning of the year. It’s been really educational and also thrilling to see it being used outside of our small circle, so I  thought I’d post a few thoughts about lessons learnt and what we’re planning for the future.

Structuring feedback is really tough

Early testers of Ocqur have been giving us feedback over the testing period. Some emailed me their thoughts, others blogged or tweeted about it, but testers were also required to fill out a questionnaire I’d written.

The difficulty in providing a useful arena for feedback lies in getting an equal balance of serendipity and structure that allows you to get specific metrics. For example – you write a question that asks the tester “Which feature is the most important for Ocqur? A, B, or C?” What if there’s a “D” that you haven’t thought of? The tester might have “D” in mind as the most important feature, but you’re not giving them the option to suggest it.

I think I managed to get the balance fairly well – so we’ve got a workable set of percentages and figures regarding questions that can be answered with a yes or no, as well as long form feedback that’s the result of more free choice questions.

There is a gap in the market

When we set out to build Ocqur, we saw it as an opportunity to create a liveblogging system that was simple but powerful and married good design to nice functionality. A lot of the feedback we got from testers was that they were surprised and pleased with how simple the product was.

I’ve had some people ask me about the comparisons to Storify, and how to differentiate it from their offering.

To ask that kind of question is to miss the point a little. Storify is a great tool – I use it frequently. But it’s not what we’re after. Publishing a Storify “as live” requires the user to constantly republish the page (which doesn’t automatically refresh if you’re a viewer) and inevitably constantly notify viewers that updates have been made. It works so much better to collect thoughts after an event has happened.

We think that liveblogging shouldn’t be as complicated as it has been in the past. We think the current offerings are either poor or unaffordable to the majority of  bloggers, freelance and student journalists. Luckily at this early stage it seems like our testers felt the same.

People interpret features in different ways

The reason we decided to release to testers so early in development is because we didn’t want to spend another 10 weeks building something only to find out that no one wanted it. User input at this early stage was vital.

At the same time, it’s interesting when testers throw up something that you really didn’t think would be a big issue. For us this was being able to upload content from your desktop onto a liveblog.

I have never done this, having worked with pretty much all the consumer liveblogging services out there. I tend to scrape content from various web sources, and if I need to take any photos from my phone for a liveblog I either post to Twitter or share to Dropbox.

But clearly our testers want this feature, and they’ve voted overwhelmingly with their feet.

So now the question is, what do they use it for? Documents? Audio? Video?

Asking users to rank the importance of desktop upload may seem fairly specific, but in reality people may have all sorts of ideas of why it’s important to them and what they actually want. To that end I’m going to chat to those people who ranked it as very important individually and dig a bit deeper into why it’s an important feature.

The future

We had an overwhelming response when we put out a call for testers – over double the amount of registrations that we needed for the first stage. If you’ve signed up and haven’t been contacted this time round, don’t worry – we’ll be sending out another iteration of the software in the next couple of months and you’ll be the first ones to get your hands on it.

A big thank you to everyone who’s participated so far, we’re really looking forward to sharing our plans for Ocqur with you in the months ahead.

Earlier this morning, Storify announced that they were releasing a free iPad app. I’ve downloaded it, and these are my first impressions.

The app works in landscape mode only. Getting to the login screen means typing in your username and password – slightly confusing for me because I’ve always logged in via twitter since the beta version. Having tried all the possible iterations of my twitter password I then had to do a password reset to my email in order to get in – this might just be me being forgetful, but those of you who’ve associated your twitter account with Storify may also hit this problem.

Anyway once you’re in you get access to all your Storify stories in a nice gallery view. You can edit them all from here, but I thought I’d create a short story just for this review.

The page for composing your story is similar enough, with the familiar tabs of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Flickr and browser links available for you to run searches in.

The only difference between the desktop version is that there isn’t a tab for Google content, which normally pulls out web searches, news and images. I never use that tab, but worth bearing in mind.

Once you tap on any of these, it’s very much like the desktop version. You can filter tweets by user, search and images, and the drag and drop interface makes it really easy to quickly create the story. Interestingly the iPad app also has one feature that the desktop version doesn’t – the ability to tweet from your own account while inside the app.

Pulling content from Flickr and YouTube is similarly pain-free, once you’ve run a search just pick up a piece of content by tapping and holding and then moving it over to the desired area on your story.

I can see the iPad app being incredibly useful for a couple of reasons.

The first obvious one is conference use. iPads are already ubiquitous at conferences – they’re better for tweeting and note taking than a smartphone without being as cumbersome as a laptop.

But because the iPad app’s drag and drop interface is so intuitive, you’d easily be able to collect together content in the break between a conference session. I’ve already written a few blog posts entirely in Storify, and I think this will only increase that trend.

The second obvious use is news coverage combined with mobile journalism. If you’re out and about covering an event with your smartphone – taking photos, video, livetweeting, it’s now really easy to just sling an iPad in your bag for some post-event curation in a nearby coffee shop. Again, getting rid of that laptop.

Once you’ve finished your story, you’re presented with the publish screen which thankfully has all the functionality of the desktop app – publishing to Facebook and Twitter, and the ability to @ reply anyone who’s been quoted in your story.

Maybe the announcement wasn’t as big as some people were expecting. It wasn’t an acquisition like some were predicting, but the Storify iPad app stands on its own two feet.

It has a few bugs (it crashed several times when swiping between stories) but that’s to be expected from an app that’s just been released.

In the long run this’ll mean only good things for Storify – capturing a particularly savvy audience of content creators while they’re on the move and giving people yet another reason to ditch their laptops in favour of an iPad when they’re covering events.

Here’s my finished story that I made on my iPad in about 5 minutes:

By now you’re all likely to be aware of Sky News making significant changes to their employees’ social media usage via an email to staff last Tuesday.

In this week’s Media Mouthwash podcast I called the policy “anti-web”, but I’ve deliberately left it this long before writing something about it because I think it’s a much more nuanced issue than some dissenting voices have made out.

Don’t tweet when it’s someone else’s story

This is probably the most galling aspect of the policy. If an employee isn’t particularly social media-savvy, then there’s no harm in another journalist using Twitter and other networks to promote and share their content in a way that means it’ll get maximum exposure.

If I was the only person sharing my own work around Twitter, then it’d get very limited traction, and there’s no harm in staff helping get extra eyeballs onto a colleague’s piece.

Always pass breaking news lines to the news desk before posting them on social media networks

There is fundementally nothing wrong with this. If we’re acknowledging that Twitter is a medium like any other, and one that should sit alongside videos, blogs and audio reports amongst Sky News’ output, then it makes sense that it should be properly integrated with the news desk.

Communication with the desk is essential in order to make the news operation an efficient one. I don’t have a lot of experience with them, but I can’t imagine the vast majority of news editors being too happy with a journalist breaking a story on Twitter and then strolling over and telling the desk about it a few minutes later.

Breaking news without context on Twitter holds little or no value for the journalist or his/her audience in itself. The value comes from using Twitter as the start of a narrative.

When I was covering the bomb blasts and shootings in Oslo, I started by using Storify to collect information and photos about events in the city centre. Then when people became aware of the shootings, I moved to turning my Twitter feed into one dedicated to covering new developments.

My follower count didn’t rise because I was constantly breaking new information on Twitter, but because I was able to organise it more efficiently into an understandable narrative than others covering it at the time. I didn’t retweet everything I saw, I thought carefully about how people following me would be able to easily understand what was happening.

Breaking news in itself holds little value – were my parents really any the worse for getting the full picture of the London riots on Newsnight rather than watching it unfold in real time on Twitter?

Passing lines to the news desk before tweeting makes good sense in a large organisation because the news desk is the hub that controls their coverage. They can distribute information to correspondents, multimedia specialists and graphics teams.

The ego of a single journalist itching to grab a bit of social media limelight should be able to bow to the collective nature of a news operation in order to strengthen its overall coverage. As Martin Belam notes, “being first really mattered when your rivals had a 24 hour print cycle before they could catch up”.

If anything, this shows that Sky would like to step away from the “never wrong for long” tag that indicates they’re happy to be wrong as long as they correct themselves quickly.

The BBC are rarely quicker than Sky when it comes to breaking news, but hold far more trust because they seem to pride context and verification much more. Is it a bad thing that Sky want to move toward this model more? I don’t think so.

Do not retweet information posted by other journalists or people on Twitter.

This is slightly more problematic, but I wouldn’t go as far as saying that it’s removing the social from social media. As a Sky News employee, I certainly wouldn’t have been able to cover Oslo or the riots in the way that I did if I’d adhered to this rule.

However, if you look at the social media usage of many journalists, they primarily use it as a promotional, rather than as a news gathering tool. Sky News’ new social media policy does not stop journalists from seeking out sources on Twitter, or finding photos that can be later added to strengthen news coverage. There are lots of journalists with big followings on Twitter, but only a fraction of them seem to use social media to actually dig things out and add another aspect to traditional sources.

If anything, the whole debate seems to be a microcosm of the divide that often seeks to engulf any rational discussion about online journalism. That is, if you don’t agree entirely with the popular view of mainstream media persistently “not getting it”, then you’re old news, you’re irrelevant, or Victorian.

I think it’s important to understand that there are many shades of grey – what works for Sky News wouldn’t work for Tech Crunch and vice versa. This policy is neither surprising nor as draconian as some commentators have implied – what’s more interesting will be observing if it becomes indicative of Sky News’ shift to a markedly different kind of news provider.

Yesterday Brian Stelter reported that Tumblr, the popular blogging platform, is hiring two journalists. They come in the form of Chris Mohney, senior vice president for content at BlackBook Media and Jessica Bennett, a senior writer at Newsweek and the Daily Beast.

This comes at a time of significant buzz around Tumblr – it’s nearing 100 staff members and it recently passed 15 billion (!) pageviews per month. Its founder David Karp has been profiled in a national newspaper, and the type of curation pioneered by Tumblr is the type that has held journalists agog at conferences over the last six months.

Traditionally a favourite online hangout of creative teens, journalists have got to Tumblr relatively late (it celebrates its 5th birthday this year), but what does the move to hire editorial staff tell us?

From Stelter’s piece:

Andrew McLaughlin, a vice president at Tumblr, said that in telling stories about its users, the company wanted Mr. Mohney and Ms. Bennett, the only two hires for the time being, to “do real journalism and analysis, not P.R. fluff.”

Looking at Tumblr as a city of 42 million residents and telling their story has very real benefits, both to users and advertisers. Reuters’ Anthony De Rosa has shed a bit more light on what Tumblr’s content strategy might be in his interview with Bennett, where she says:

Think trend stories — the democratization of creation. Think on the ground: who are the teen tumblr users in a remote town in Ukraine, and how did they find the platform? Think big picture: how is social media changing the way we interact and engage? Think data: what can Tumblr users tell us about the current presidential race? The mandate is broad, and the format will go beyond the written word.

So is 2012 the year when players like Tumblr, Facebook and Google get into the content game properly?

In Facebook’s case, it’s a maybe. The company has just hired Daniel Fletcher, a 2009 journalism graduate with previous stints at Time and Bloomberg to become their managing editor.

Hiring a journalist isn’t a new thing for Facebook – last year they hired former Mashable employee Vadim Lavrusik as their journalist program manager, tasked with building the site’s reputation as a home for journalists. But this new hire seems like it could be closer to editorial – whether it’s creating original content or smartening up Facebook’s many corporate pages.

So what about Google? Larry and Sergey’s employees always stay resolutely tight-lipped about whether Google sees itself as creating original content in future. Some clues may lie in how it seems to be shifting its purpose on the web.

One of Google’s maxims is “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. In simple terms, their search bar acts as a conduit to pass you on to wherever you wanted to go on the web – quickly, efficiently, accurately. Now Google seems to be wanting you to hang around on its services, and bring them all into one place.

It’s done this in three distinct ways.

First – making logins and business accounts one and the same – your email account will now log you in to all Google services.

Second – Reorganising search to integrate with Google+ and allowing normal searches to crawl through Google+ accounts (unlike Facebook or Twitter).

Third – An overhaul of privacy policy which means that all Google services (Picasa, Maps, YouTube, Gmail and more) are interconnected. No privacy walls, just one authoritative policy which applies to all services and means that Google have access to a wealth of interconnected data based on your browsing habits.

Newspapers dream of knowing as much about their users as Google do.

If Google were to become a content creation company tomorrow, their recommendation system would be second to none, and their ability to dictate the flow of news would be unprecedented.

Of course Google doesn’t need to take a step in that direction in order to continue to be monumentally successful, but the concept of Google producing their own content service rather than just serving up a platform isn’t too hard to fathom given how much behavioural data could be fed into such a service.

If you look at trends and buzzwords in journalism over the last few years, it’s easy to see how they link up with Tumblr, Facebook and Google.

Tumblr thrives on curation, Facebook on community and Google on data. Given the trickle down effect to the journalism industry (tools like Storify becoming popular, community managers being increasingly in demand and the growing area of data journalism) it seems like any of these companies would find that they slot into the current ecosystem rather well.

Whether any news organisations would be pleased about that remains to be seen…

Yesterday The Times opened up its paywall to allow open access to its leader article on the future of the press regulation in the UK. The piece itself takes in different forms of regulation, and outlines some of what’s happened in the Leveson Inquiry so far. My personal favourite was:

“As the evidence of wrongdoing came to light, News International, Rupert Murdoch’s company that also owns The Times, was unable or unwilling to police itself. This was a disgrace”

For those who persist in the narrative that everything that Rupert Murdoch touches is inherently interlinked, the piece offered a solid riposte and made a several interesting arguments concerning the British press.

But it wasn’t really the content of the article that mattered. It was the timing.

Faces who made appearances at Leveson yesterday included James Harding, editor at The Times and John Witherow, editor at The Sunday Times. So the decision was taken to publish this leading article outside the paywall because it had direct relevance to events happening later in the day that concerned the paper.

“Today, the inquiry is hearing from The Times. This seems the appropriate moment to make clear to our readers the newspaper’s view on the future of the press.”

By dropping the paywall The Times ensured that attention from readers (and potential customers) was maximised because the topic of press regulation has never occupied a larger space in the public mindset. I’ve no idea of the traffic generated by the article, but it’s a surefire bet that it’s higher than usual in addition to increased social sharing on Twitter.

Why’s this important? Because you can easily see The Times using this kind of leverage again in the future, and not just on leading articles.

Imagine something extraordinary happens in the Republican party primaries. The Times’ Nico Hines gets an exclusive. Rumour is all over Twitter, but Hines is the only one who has the story. Editors at The Times hit publish and put the article outside the paywall. It would follow that there’d be an avalanche of traffic to the article, not only because it’s unusual for a newspaper that operates an airtight paywall policy to allow free access, but also because of the strength of the story.

The acid test would be to see how many readers would then decide that The Times were producing the kind of journalism that they liked and stump up £2 a week.

This kind of approach would lend particular articles more weight in the modern times of disposable content, because those not paying would race to see what they were missing. If they deemed £2 a fair price for more content of the same quality, they’d become subscribers.

Without stretching the analogy too far – it’s a bit like my relationship with the Frontline Club. Frontline organises excellent events with authoratative speakers on a range of topics covering journalism and current affairs. I go to its events, but I can’t afford the membership fee. The content is good, but the pricing isn’t right for me.

If people deem what they see ocassionally slipping out of the Times paywall to be worth the price of entry (I can count the people I know on two hands who subscribe for Caitlin Moran’s columns alone) then this kind of tactic could well be a new way to attract loyal subscribers to their brand. And, just like at Frontline, members are loyal.

So a few days ago I blogged about the initial reaction to the Guardian’s iPad app when they announced it on Monday. Yesterday it finally hit the app store, and after several hours of stress-inducing load times, I’d upgraded my iPad to iOS 5 which meant that I could download the app.

The app features on Newsstand, Apple’s new system whereby you can see all your magazine and newspaper subscriptions in one place. So far mine is rather sparsely populated with the New Yorker and the Guardian, but it’s nice to know that there’s a dedicated place for my more long form reading.

I think that’s also the key here – it doesn’t make sense for me to put the New Yorker in the same “news” folder as Huff Post, Sky News and Flipboard – it’s a different reading experience, and so is the Guardian.

Anyway once you open up the app you’re given a free trial – mine doesn’t expire until 13 January next year, which gives you more than enough time to work out whether you like it or not and are likely to stump up the £9.99 monthly subscription fee.

It’s an issue based app, which has drawn some criticism, owing to the somewhat static nature of the app. However, I’m inclined to think that it’s a shrewd move by the Guardian, and one which shows that they’re very savvy when it comes to working across multiple platforms. Martin Belam also hinted at integrating story updates in a comment on my post earlier this week.

Data shows that the majority of tablet use is in front of a television or in bed – things that happen primarily in the evening after a day of work. This echoed Alan Rusbridger’s sentiment when he spoke about the Guardian’s printed output, saying that he viewed it as more Newsnight than News at Ten. So why not continue that kind of thinking with the iPad?

I’m on board with the concept behind the iPad app, because I think it epitomises Martin Belam‘s idea of stopping the shovels, but what about the functionality of the app itself?

Well, on starting up you’re presented with a crisply designed homescreen that provides a quick look at all the sections. You can scroll through the top bar independently to skip to a specific section, or browse down the front page if you’re after a more general read.

On opening the comment section, the app presents you with a few commentators’ mugshots as well as the cartoon of the day. To my eye, it’s far more attractive than the web version of Comment is Free, and feels right on an iPad. Tapping on a header takes you into the article, which is again a clean and uncluttered affair that screams “long read” at you.

Amazon’s Kindle is often the favoured device for voracious readers, but if executed well iPad apps can hold their own. From the article page you can share via email, Facebook and Twitter, taking advantage of the new iOS 5 functionality.

Cycling through the various sections of the app, you get the sense that each one has been tailored for its content. The Arts page, for example, is very strong on visuals with some arresting images, while others are more pared down.

Overall the app is a joy to use- and that’s what you want from a news app, something that compels you to pick it up each evening because you know the content is going to be presented elegantly and with attention to detail.

If I had one quibble it would be that in order to access the video section of the Guardian you have to visit the “on the website” category, which redirects to guardian.co.uk. It’s a shame that the iPad’s functionality as a mobile video viewer hasn’t been taken advantage of, but that’s a minor issue.

In fact, I’d go as far as to say that the app could be one of those hallowed few that become strongly associated with the device itself. Simply put, it should make you want to buy an iPad after using it. So give it a go, and let me know what you think.

UPDATE: Some discussion on Twitter this weekend revealed that at the moment the Guardian have decided not to include their weekend edition or the Observer in the app.

I was made aware of this by Patrick Smith, who opined that the Times app launched in May 2010 with all its sections. He was swiftly corrected, but the point remains that it feels a bit lacklustre that the Guardian haven’t included weekend editions from the outset – it would follow with the more contemplative attitude of the app which is suited to weekend reading.

However, as emphasised in another post, they are waiting to see how readers use the app before adding upgrades and changes.

“Big Media is at the mercy of the tech giants and it’s their own fault”

That was the title of a piece which I read over the weekend by Daniel Bentley, my co-presenter on Media Mouthwash.

Daniel tackles a number of issues, and includes quotes from Jeff Jarvis and Mathew Ingrams as to why news innovation is facing a bit of a stumbling block.

But the idea that you can put the likes of Amazon and Apple in the same box as news organisations is absurd.

News organisations are obviously looking for ways to make money in the brave new world of digital journalism. I am in favour of this, because I’d like to be employed.

Conventional wisdom amongst many advocates of digital media (Twitterati sounds dated now) believe that paywalling content will kill traffic, audience and jars heavily against the nature of the web. But there’s no clear picture really.

But how about this – news organisations have never charged for content, have they?

They’ve charged advertisers for precious access to readers and charged consumers a token amount to subsidise the cost of delivering that content to them.

But consumers of the news have paid and continue to pay only for the medium of that content. The paper, the television, the internet contract, not the news.

A commenter on Daniel’s post:

“This is not true. The internet is an open platform. All it takes is for anyone, regardless of whether its a new business or a legacy player, to set up shop, understand how to do business on a platform (which it should already know how to do, having done it previously) and marry an audience to that offering. That’s the ‘secret’ behind the ‘tech giants.’ Super simple!”

Why have Amazon and Apple been successful? Because they control the medium in which we receive content. We don’t pay for news stories, but we buy iPhones, Kindles, Macbooks and desktops in their millions. Again, the medium, not the content itself.

The above comment oversimplifies the concept of ‘setting up shop‘ on the internet, and marrying an audience to that offering. News organisations have been in the production of news for hundreds of years. Now they are essentially expected to be involved in the business of retail. That’s difficult. It will take time.

However I do agree that we should be seeing more successful startups establishing themselves – I think it’s easier to do that when you’re a more nimble operation with no print legacy or retraining staff to be digitally savvy.

But again that takes time.

How many people of my parents generation (mid 50s) go to say, Slate over the Guardian, Storyful over Sky News? Established media still hold incredible sway through their recognisable brands, which is why they continue to be the biggest players in the game.

I’m far from being a stoic defender of established news organisations. Little leaps forward are being made – but all on the content side of things. That’s because it’s much easier to see how Facebook and Twitter have succeeded in terms of content delivery and mirror that by employing journalists who understand good delivery methods for news content.

The economics of this are obviously more complicated, and it’s telling that a news organisation who might seem to be in financial dire straits like the Guardian also have one of the strongest digital content offerings in the world.