What Can NGOs Learn from the Great Canadian Newspaper War?

In 1998, Canada’s major newspapers went to war.

That was the year the National Post was launched, sparking a circulation battle with the Globe and Mail and the Star in Toronto.

It was a fierce fight. But instead of going to war against each other, they should have been focusing on a common enemy: The Internet.

That's the view of John Stackhouse, author of the new book Mass Disruption: Thirty Years on the Front Lines of the Media Revolution, 

In a chapter in the book titled, appropriately, “The Wrong War,” Stackhouse notes that the real fight was against Google and the other digital upstarts that aggregated and, later, created news and other content.

It’s not like newspapers weren’t warned about their real enemy. 

As early as 1992, Bob Kaiser of the Washington Post wrote about a visit to Apple and what he saw as the danger to newspapers of the coming digital world.

In a memo, Kaiser wrote that the Post needed to do two things immediately: Create electronic classifieds and publish an electronic edition.

“Both ideas,” Stackhouse writes, “were ignored.”

So why did newspapers fail to react and respond to this new enemy?

For one thing, life was pretty good for newspapers in the 1990s. They were one of the main ways people got news, and how advertisers reached the public. They were making lots of money.

For another, they had invested heavily in buildings, presses, shipping departments and work forces.

The result? When the online world took off, both for news and advertising, newspapers were left behind.

It didn't matter which newspaper won the printed circulation war; the battle was already lost as subscribers and advertisers drifted away to the new digital world.

What does this have to do with the international relief & development sector? 

Like newspapers in the 1990s, I think the sector is fighting the wrong war.

Instead of focusing on the big challenge of how to grab attention in this noisy world or expand the total number of Canadians who support relief and development, groups are fixated on how to address their own funding and communication challenges.

This is understandable; there are programs to be supported and staff to be paid.

The problem is we are fighting against each other, not against public indifference in general.

Of course, being non-profits, we don’t talk that way. We don’t speak about competing with other organizations.

But that is exactly what we are doing.

Worse, instead of expanding the overall donation pie, we are fighting for the attention and money of a small, and decreasing, number of givers.

According to a report in The Philanthropist, only about eight percent of total charitable giving in Canada goes for international purposes (very broadly defined).

And who is giving those funds? According to other research from the Canadian Centre for Philanthropy, the typical international donor is more likely to be older and to cite religious motivations for donating.

Since religious attendance in Canada is declining, especially among mainline churches, and since many donors are getting older, this should give all international NGOs pause. 

But instead of recognizing there is a problem, groups are busy using scarce resources to develop new and ambitious marketing and fundraising plans to either get traditional donors to give more, or to reach outside their donor base—to steal someone else's donor.

Instead of combining our efforts to make a larger splash in this noisy world of communications, most of our efforts hardly raise a peep outside our own little worlds.

In the end, like newspapers, we could find all these efforts are for nothing. We might hang on a little longer, but ultimately be defeated in the larger battle against public indifference. 

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that groups abandon their unique identities, missions or audiences.

I’m only suggesting that this might be a good time to come together to talk about creative ways to unite for a common cause and purpose—a United Way of international relief and development.

One group that is trying to do something like this is the Humanitarian Coalition, which is sponsoring the World Refugee Day campaign (June 20). 

Through it, the Coalition is trying to bring together NGOs to focus on the theme of refugees—with over 60 million displaced people in the world today, it is a huge crisis.

Maybe this experiment will work, maybe it won't. Or maybe it will spark new ideas for working together, instead of fighting the wrong war.

Thumb-Stopping Online Content and Other Thoughts About the Digital Revolution from the Head of CBC Digital News

One of the guest presenters at the April 27-29 Canadian Church Press convention was Brodie Fenlon, Senior Director for Digital News at the CBC. 

In a wide-ranging presentation, he covered a number of topics about the digital revolution overtaking legacy media—print and broadcast.

A summary of his remarks is below.

Is the content on your Facebook page “thumb-stopping”?

That’s the question Brodie Fenlon, Senior Director of CBC Digital News, asked at the April 27-29 Canadian Church Press convention in Toronto.

“You have to stop the thumb,” he said of the way most people get information today—on their phones.

“It has to be thumb-stopping.”

Good content, he went on to say, “is no good if doesn’t work on a phone.”

The New Legacy Media—Digital

Fenlon also noted that while we tend to view newspapers as a “legacy” media that the Internet disrupted, the Internet, or digital, itself has a legacy that has been disrupted.

In the case of the Internet, it has moved from the Web and desktop to mobile—that’s how most people access information today.

He noted that no communications technology has been adopted as quickly as the phone, with over 90% of people 18-34 now owning one.

“The war is on to win the audience on this thing,” he stated. “Over the next few years, the battle is to be one or lost on the smartphone.”

He said that already 63% of CBC’s audience comes to its website via a mobile device.

The CBC “still has a huge desktop audience, but future growth is phone,” he said, adding that websites and home pages are becoming legacy media themselves.

At the CBC, he said, “we treat our Facebook page like our website.”

And what’s on that CBC Facebook page?  Stories. “The thing the audience lands on is the story page,” he said.

Facebook: Eating the World

As for where users go on their phones, the answer, he said, is Facebook.

And it’s not only older people on Facebook, he said, dismissing a commonly-held notion.

90% of millennials use Facebook, he said, with YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram following in second, third and fourth place.

And, as he noted, that’s also where many people get their news—not from traditional news sources.

It’s the same for the next demographic, 35-54 year-olds—Facebook is first for them, too, followed by YouTube.

Snapchat is way back for that demographic, not surprisingly.

“Facebook is eating the world,” he said, quoting the title of the much-talked-about article by Emily Bell. 

“If you are going to win mobile, then you have to think social, and you have to start with Facebook,” he stated.

“If you would be stuck on an island can could only choose one social media platform, Facebook would be it,” he said—quickly adding that’s for right now.

“Who knows what I might say in a month,” he said.

Share and Share Alike

And when it comes to Facebook, the goal is to get people not just to like, but to share.

With that in mind, groups need to make it easy for people to share.

“Share buttons matter,” he said, and so do headlines and images.

The problem is that designers design Facebook posts on desktop computers, he said. They need to check the posts later to make sure they display the way they intended.

When it comes to headlines, they need to grab and hold attention.

On websites, it’s important to include key words like names of people, places, organizations or groups. But on Facebook, emotion is vital if you are going to get thumbs to stop.

“Headlines on websites are for robots,” he said. “You need different headlines for social media. You need to speak to the heart on social media, not to the robots.”

This means the sometimes there needs to be two different headlines and images—one for the website, and the other for Facebook.

Need for Speed

Speed is also important on mobile, he said.

According to Fenlon, studies show that 47% of people expect a site to load in two seconds or less. If it takes longer, 40% say they will leave.

What this means is that the websites—especially for mobile—need to be streamlined.

This is the reasoning behind Facebook’s Instant Articles, and Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages).

With Instant Articles, material loads faster, but organizations have to give it to Facebook—something very controversial for news organizations..

“This means we are building an audience for Facebook,” Fenlon said, “but the user experience is better.”

Facebook Leaning to Video

As for Facebook itself, he noted that it has once again changed it algorithms and now it is favouring video.

But, he noted, the kind of video that works on TV “won’t work on Facebook.”

On TV, video segments “are too long, they build-up to the moment.”

Facebook video, he said, has to be short and get right to the point.

Something new for them now is putting text over the video, so people can read what is being said.

“People usually use their mobile devices with the sound off,” so adding text helps to catch attention.

As for length, shorter is always better, he said.

The ideal length of a Facebook video is no longer than 90 seconds. YouTube hosts longer videos, “but the longer you go the better it has to be. If you are going to ask for two, three or four minutes of my time, it has better be worth it.”

What about Twitter?

Twitter is also important, he said, but it doesn’t reach the mass audience of Facebook.

Twitter users, he said, tend to be highly engaged audience, with a lot of journalists and a lot of influencers on that platform.

Facebook Worries and Paywalls

Fenlon admitted there are worrying things about the dominance of Facebook.

Its algorithm isn’t Canadian, he said, and it doesn’t prioritize Canadian news.

Instead, it “favours what your friends like, what you like.”

But that is also its genius, and why people spend so much time on it, he added.

“Facebook is a great experience—that’s why people spend time there,” he said. “You can rage against that, or try to build your own brand and presence in that space.”

As for the future, “we are In this weird grey zone, not sure where it is going,” he said of the Web and social media.

One place he is sure it is not going is towards paywalls and people paying for content online.

“I’m not an expert on monetizing content, but a paywall is a tough sell,” he said. “It only works for biggest players.”

As for the younger generation, they “will not pay,” he stated, referencing a study that showed that 70% said they will never pay for news.

Subscribing to things, he noted, is something people over 50 are used to doing—not the younger generation.

The Future of TV News

As for traditional CBC TV news, “we will see real withdrawl from local news,” he said.

The idea of the supper hour or evening news—what is called appointment viewing—is something only older people do. Younger people don’t consume news that way.

They have no interest in a traditional hour-long format, where they wait until something they are interested in comes up, he shared.

The supper and evening news is “a relic,” he stated. “We have to re-think the newscast. Instead of telling people what happened today, we need to tell them why it matters, and what will happen tomorrow as a result.”

This will involve a psychological change for broadcasters, he added.

Today it is video first—the needs of TV. In the near future, it will be digital first, and TV second.

“We are still trying to republish TV stuff to digital,” he said. “We need to do digital first, then go to TV.”

Media, Communications and the Fog of War

I’ve just finished reading Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific 1942-44 by Ian Toll. It’s a magisterial overview of the strategy, plans and the ultimate outcomes of the conflict in that theatre of operations—the kind of book that could only be written after the war.

According to the overview, the book is a “masterful history” that “encompasses the heart of the great Pacific war, when a ‘conquering tide’ of Allied air and sea power supported the U.S. Marines in reclaiming the thousands of Japanese-held islands on the road to Tokyo.” 

Sitting where we do today, we know how those battles, and the war itself, turned out. During the war, however, things were never that clear.

For participants, it was often about what is called the fog of war.

The phrase the “fog of war” was coined by Prussian military leader and theorist German Carl von Clausewitz who said: "War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.” 

This was one of the points of The Face of Battle, by eminent British historian John Keegan.

In the book, Keegan notes that for the average soldier a battle takes place in a space of not more than 50 meters wide—and for much of history, that 50 meters of battlefield was shrouded in impenetrable smoke.

Only later could historians impose order on what was, at the time, a chaotic and confusing scene made up of thousands or hundreds of thousands of individuals making individual decisions and blindly, hopefully, doggedly pressing forward towards some far away and hoped-for goal.

Rick Atkinson, the author of The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe 1944-45, another magisterial overview of World War II, expanded on this theme.

In the book, he notes that people today look back at the war and see, from the time of the D-Day landings until the surrender of the Nazis, an inexorable march to a successful conclusion.

It was, in fact, not like that at all. For much of the time, victory was anything but assured or foregone.

“War is never linear," he wrote, "but rather a chaotic, desultory enterprise of reversal and advance, blunder and élan, despair and elation."

Why write about war in a blog about non-profit communications?

As communicators, we are not in a war. But we are on the “front lines” of a communications revolution.

Today it feels like we are lost in smoke and fog, taking one step forward then two steps back, maybe making progress, trying this, giving up on that, sometimes gaining or losing ground.

Sometimes we are even unsure what the grand plan is, or if there even is one.

For Internet guru Clay Shirky, this is “what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.”

Fifty or a hundred years from now, someone will write a book and make sense of all the things we are going through in communications and media today—just as has been done about the Gutenberg revolution.

In the meantime, it’s all foggy. And that’s perfectly normal.

The Winnipeg Free Press: Not a Newspaper—It's a "News Engine"

The Winnipeg Free Press is not a newspaper.

It used to be, editor Paul Samyn said at Going Barefoot 5, the bi-annual communications and marketing conference at Canadian Mennonite University.

But not today. 

“We are a news engine that produces a newspaper—and a website, a Facebook page, video, livestreaming, and a salon at the News Café,” he stated.

Today, he went on to say, the Free Press is “trying to shake off the print legacy. That legacy doesn’t work any more.”

“We are not a newspaper, but we publish one.”

This change is being forced on them, he went on to say.

“The biggest change is the pace . . . we used to make people wait 24 hours to get the news from us. People don’t want to wait that long any more.”

One thing they no longer think of are “print deadlines,” he stated. “If something is ready, we post it.”

This is different than in the past, when a newspaper would wait until it had all the information before publishing.

“Now, we know we can do more digging later,” he said.

Samyn’s comments reminded me of what Barth Hague, Chair of the Board of The Mennonite, the official publication of Mennonite Church USA, said a couple of years ago about changes at that publication.

Writing about the resignation of then-editor Everett Thomas, he observed that under his tenure the magazine had moved from being “a print magazine to a content distribution system.”

Like at the Free Press, The Mennonite was no longer just a magazine, he told me.

"We're transitioning from being a magazine to a content distribution system," he said of how The Mennonite now offers a traditional print magazine, website, blogs, podcasts, video and a weekly information e-mail.

"The traditional methods of sharing content are waning—it’s rapidly becoming digital now," he said. "The media are being transformed."

What does this mean for non-profits?

Just like the way the media is being transformed, non-profits are changing, too, or should be.

Like with the traditional media, non-profits also need to stop thinking about deadlines and publications. 

Today, our supporters are like subscribers to a newspaper. They are no longer willing to wait until when we are ready to share information—until the fall issue of a newsletter, or the spring issue of our magazine. 

Today we live in a web-first (or, as ESPN has said, a mobile first) world. 

If something is ready to be shared, it should go up immediately on a website, ready for sharing via social media.

It could still be published in a printed publication for those who prefer to get their information that way. But that should never be the first use.

Why? Because just like the Free Press isn’t a newspaper, non-profits are no longer in the publishing (print and deadline) business when it comes to sharing their information.

We are a news and information engine.  

Memento Mori: Closure of Canadian Hunger Foundation a Reminder to Non-Profits That They, Too, Can Die

Last summer, the Canadian relief and development community got a shock when the Canadian Hunger Foundation suddenly closed down.

CHF, as it was known, was no fly-by-night organization.

Founded in 1961, it was well-respected by other NGOs and the Canadian government, which provided generous funding for its programs in the developing world.

But it all came to an end on July 31, 2015, when it shut down.

What was the reason for the closure? Lack of investment in fundraising.

“While we were reaching more people [with international programs] than ever over the last couple of years, we weren’t investing what some other organizations were on marketing to donors, and ultimately that meant we couldn’t keep pace with our fundraising needs,” said former President and CEO Stewart Hardacre.

At the root of the problem was too much success: CHF was able to win a number of matching grants from the federal government for its overseas programs.

While the grants helped the organization help many more people, CHF was required to come up with $1 for each $3 or $4 provided by the government.

Unfortunately, CHF couldn’t come up with the matching funds.

"The fundamental problem was they were too successful in getting projects, and not successful in raising in a very significant manner the donations to CHF," said management consultant Garry Comber, who also served as interim executive director.

Adding to their woes was the loss of a major foundation donor, which provided $1 million a year—a loss that was impossible to make up.

The fundraising challenges came together “into sort of a perfect storm” that ultimately meant CHF had to cease active operations, said former Director of Communications Mike Jones.

So: What can other non-profits take away from CHF’s demise?

The number one lesson is the importance of investing in donor relations, marketing, communications and fundraising.

It’s all very well to have great programs; every NGO and non-profit should. But if you don’t have the money to support them, it ultimately won’t matter in the end.

In my experience, this is something many NGOs are loathe to do. Fundraising is overheard, after all—and we want to keep that as low as possible.

Plus, most NGO executive directors and presidents I know rose to their positions through the program side of things. They're great people, but their primary interest is in the delivery of assistance overseas—not marketing and fundraising. 

The result is that many NGOs routinely underspend when it comes to resource gathering. 

The result? Overworked and under-resourced staff do their best, but there’s only so much a few people can do to raise funds.

In the end, it's sort of like the children of Israel in the land of Egypt in the Old Testament who were told by their Egyptian overlords to make more bricks with less straw.

You can do that for a while. But one day the weakened bricks will give away and the whole edifice can crumble—as it did with CHF.

In that respect, CHF has become a memento mori for other Canadian NGOs:

Memento mori is Latin for “Remember, you too will die.”

In the middle ages, it was common for paintings to feature memento mori in the form of skulls and other death motifs. (As in the picture above.)

It was a reminder of how precious life is, and how quickly it can be over.

Instead of a skull (too macabre), maybe every NGO leader should keep the CHF logo on his or her desk or desktop screen.

It will be a reminder that every NGO, like CHF, can die if they don’t invest in fundraising and communications.

So, farewell CHF. And for the rest of us: Memento mori.

Mobile is Everything for ESPN, and Soon Will be for Everyone Else

ESPN revolutionized TV. Almost single-handedly, it made cable TV a must-have service for tens of millions of people.

But now ESPN's future is in doubt as more people cut the cable cord. And where are those people going? 

To their phones.

To help it succeed on that platform, ESPN is developing "a smartphone-first content effort that combines personalization, journalism, video and personality,” as the internal memo announcing the change described it.

According to Chad Millman, ESPN's new vice president and editorial director for domestic digital content, the broadcaster is going in this direction because "mobile is everything. We always have to be thinking about mobile first. If we’re thinking about anything else, we’re failing the audience."

And what does it mean to do mobile first?

"You need to keep re-imagining how things look," Millman said in an article in Nieman Lab.

Among other things, this means how it looks on a phone and how long the headline is. 

"What is it (the headline) going to look like and where is it going to cut off on a mobile device," he said. 

What makes all of this challenging, he added, is that pages destined for mobile are designed on a desktop.

"There’s no magic formula to simulate what it looks like on a phone," he said. "So you’re decreasing your browser before you publish it, you’re checking it on your phone as soon as you publish it to fix something right away."

Creating for mobile also means not trying to make it look like ESPN on TV.

"We’re creating for the platform or device that we most expect people to see it on, and not thinking that we have to create something that looks like it belongs on television. 

"Can you understand the story with the sound off? How long should it be? When are people dropping out of videos? 

"All of that stuff makes us rethink how we might have produced something even two or three years ago."

One example of ESPN's mobile-first strategy is its 60-second preview of the week in the NFL. The minute-long segment is designed, produced, and edited with mobile in mind. 

"It is quick cuts, it is tightly written, and it gives you information, but it does it quickly and in a sort of whimsical way. That is something that we wouldn’t have done a year ago," he said.

How quickly things change—in  the mid-2000s, when the web began to take off as a main vehicle of communication, media and others started to move from thinking print-first to web-first. 

There was a lot of agonizing back then over the need for shorter articles, and the end of an edition or issue-based mindset (see Life and Communications Unbundled, on this blog.)  

Now here we are, about a decade later, and we're beginning to hear talk about doing everything mobile-first. Which isn’t surprising, considering the growth of mobile around the world.

Today, mobile is first for ESPN. Soon it will be that way for everyone else.

Study Shows Attention Spans Today Shorter Than Goldfish or, I'm Sorry—We're You Talking to Me?

Intuitively, we know it to be true. But now research from Microsoft confirms that people today have shorter attention spans than goldfish.

According to the study, which surveyed 2,000 Canadians last year, a goldfish has an attention span of nine seconds. 

But people today generally can only stay focused on one thing for eight seconds.

“Heavy multi-screeners find it difficult to filter out irrelevant stimuli,” said the report. “They’re more easily distracted by multiple streams of media.”

Added Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: “We are moving from a world where computing power was scarce to a place where it now is almost limitless, and where the true scarce commodity is increasingly human attention.”

The study also found that 19% of people leave a website within the first ten seconds—if they don’t immediately see what they are looking for, they’re gone.

On the positive side, the report says that our use of multiple screens and devices is training our brains to be better at multitasking.

What this means for marketers

For those of us trying to catch the attention of people online, this inability to pay attention means a) it is hard to catch attention and, b) it is hard to keep it.

Says the report: “With today’s digital lifestyle, marketers need to make an almost immediate impact before consumers switch off/move on.”

It goes on to say that people are “suckers for novelty. It's more exciting to jump from subject to subject or device to device than to concentrate on a single thing at any one time.”

Get to the point—quickly. “Hook consumers right off the bat with clear and concise messaging that’s communicated as early as possible,” says the report.

And since many people won’t read much on a web page, “craft headlines that can say it all.”

Be personal and relevant. Make sure your brand is “personal and communicate clear consumer value. How will paying attention make their life be better?”

Today’s marketing, it goes on to say, “is about instant gratification and appealing to consumers’ needs and desires to ensure your message is relevant.”

Be short and clear. “What consumers can see in one glance has everything to do with what they’ll do next,” the report says.

“If overwhelmed by input . . . their brain will stop taking it in. Exclude unnecessary information. Stick to the main message. If something doesn’t play a significant role, it’s not needed.”

(Those who know how to write journalistically, using the inverted pyramid style of writing,  will have an advantage here.)

Use rich media and movement.”Human survival has been based on the ability to focus on what’s most important (generally what’s moving),” the report says. “Harness the power of peripheral motion.”

“Rich media ads help capture attention and dramatically improve engagement.”

Include calls to action. What do you want people to do once they have read your content? Is it easy to find a donate button? A link for more information?

It’s a big challenge, especially for small non-profits with limited resources. But there’s no way around it.

Fortunately, there’s a bit of good news. According to the report, our increasingly digital lifestyles is also making us more efficient at processing information.

We are, apparently, able to do and recall more—even with less ability to pay attention.

And it you made it to the bottom of this article, congratulations on your great attention span!

When it comes to being focused, you are much better than a goldfish.

Unfortunately, there's no direct link to the PDF of this report. For more information, Google Microsoft attention span study.