Creating Thumb-Stopping Content in a (Formerly) Page-Turning World, Part 1

I was the keynote speaker at the Oct. 27-28 Anabaptist Communicators Conference at Bethel College Newton, Kansas. I was asked to speak about the challenges facing communicators today, and some ideas for going forward. Below find Part 1 of my address, about the challenges; click here for Part 2 about some ways forward.

Introduction

Before I begin this morning, you should know I almost didn’t come.

That’s right—I almost passed up an all-expenses paid opportunity to come to Newton, Kansas.

Hard to believe, isn’t it?

And why did I almost not come?

When the conference organizers first issued their invitation, they asked me to speak on the topic of how we, as communicators, could “overcome having to do more by having with Less.”

I said no.

Why did I say no?

I said no because I am tired of talking about how communicators are always expected to do more with less—and oh, by-the-way says the board, we are raising the fundraising target by 10% again this year.

I said no because I’m tired of seeing organizations find the money to add new programs to serve more people with new program staff—but not be willing to find more funds for those of us who raise the money and do the communicating so that all those new programs can keep going and those new staff can be paid.

I said no because I am tired of hearing boards and bosses say to communicators and fundraisers yes, we know you are over-worked and understaffed, but we can’t hire more people because we need to keep the overhead costs low.

I said no because it’s frustrating to see our work considered peripheral to the “real” work of the organization—helping people in need—something evidenced by how little time many boards spend on the communications and fundraising reports whenever they meet.

I said no because over my long career I grew tired of being treated like the children of Israel when they were slaves in Egypt—being told to make even more bricks, but with even less straw.

What I did say yes to was a chance to be part of an event where we, as communicators, can re-frame the conversation for and about ourselves. 

I said yes to an opportunity talk to you, my counterparts and colleagues, about how we could shake off old paradigms which see our work only as “overhead” and, instead, think about new ways to invite our boards, bosses and colleagues to see how vital our work is to the success of our organizations.

(More about that in my workshop, tomorrow.)

And I said yes to a chance to share with you about my experiences and observations as I reach the end of my 30-plus years career in non-profit communications, marketing and fundraising—about where we’ve come from, and where we could go, and why I am excited by the younger people in this profession who are dreaming new things I can’t even imagine.

Because the fact of the matter is many of our organizations are facing uncertain times.

The challenges include:

Aging memberships.

Declining attendance, in both Canada and the U.S. 

Waning denominational loyalty.

And fierce competition for time, attention and dollars.

In both Canada and the U.S., the fastest-growing “religion” to today is the unaffiliated, those who when asked to choose a religious group or denomination say “none of the above.”

Many of these newly unaffiliated people are younger; in both countries they are less religious than their parents and their grandparents by large margins.

But it’s not only the young. Older people are also dropping out of the church.

If the unaffiliated are known as the “nones,” these are “dones”—done with going to church every Sunday, done with listening to sermons, done with volunteering to keep church and denominational structures going.

Just plain done with all that church stuff.

For them, a walk in the park on a Sunday morning is a lovely break in the decades-old church-going routine.

All of this lack of connection and decline in membership, attendance and loyalty has got to the point where I like to say there are only two kinds of denominations or church-related non-profit organizations in the Mennonite and broader world today: 

Those that are in trouble, and those that will be.

I don’t know about you, but I marvel when I see the EDs and CEOs of church-related groups acting so calm.

Personally, I think they should be running around like their hair is one fire—but that’s just me.

And into this world, amidst these challenges, are we—the communicators, marketers and fundraisers.

It’s our job to somehow overcome the challenges, break through the noise, clamber over the clutter—and give people a reason to connect with the missions and visions of the organizations we work for.

It’s our job to tell the stories, create the new information channels, share the photos, make the videos.

Without us, our organizations would fail.

But I digress—in a good way, because I really, really want you to know that the work you do is beyond important for your organizations and the church as a whole.

Which makes you all the more important as you respond to the changing communications universe and find ways to create thumb-stopping content in a page-turning world.

But before we take a look at that, let’s take a deeper look at the changing world we inhabit today.

Part 1: The challenges we face

The world today is certainly very different from the one I started my career in over 30 years ago.

Back then, things were much simpler.

Almost everyone read a daily newspaper, a national magazine, listened to radio news, watched TV news or, if they were religious, read a denominational publication.

If I wanted to reach the most people, I just needed to catch the attention of a few media outlets and I was pretty much done.

That world is gone—fractured into thousands of pieces.

And it happened so quickly.

It was just 25 years ago, in 1991, that the World Wide Web was made available for public use.

We couldn’t imagine life without it today.

I made my first website in 1994. Back then, there were about 3,000 websites—in the world.

Today there are over 800 million.

Twelve years ago, nobody had ever heard of something called Facebook. Today over 1.6 billion people use it.

In 2007, the first iPhone was released. Today, almost 70% of people use one—that figure is over 90% for young people.

And since the early 2000s, newspaper circulation has been falling.

There’s no doubt the change from print to digital is one of the most significant changes we have encountered in, oh, say 500 years.

For centuries we have lived in world created by Gutenberg and his printing press.

It was a stable, predictable world. Entire industries rose to take advantage of it. 

Today, that world is disappearing fast. 

Most of the changes have happened in the last 20 years.

The number of journalism jobs at newspapers has shrunk by 20,000.

Since 2007, the number of newspapers in the U.S. has gone from 2,700 to 2,000.

According to Pew, in 2015 newspaper circulation experienced a decline not seen since the recession of 2008-09.  

Coupled with falling advertising, many newspapers are on the ropes.

As of this year, only 20% of U.S. adults gets their news in print from newspapers. That figure is just 5% for younger people.

In Canada, media expert Ken Goldstein predicts that by 2025 there will be no news in print in my country.

“Canada’s daily newspapers now are engaged in a 10-year race against time and technology to develop an online business model that will enable them to preserve their brands without print editions,” he stated a year ago.

Even the News Media Alliance—what used to be called the Newspaper Association of America—is acknowledging the changes.

In September the Association, founded in 1887, changed its name to News Media Alliance.

Why the change? 

According to David Chavern, the Association’s chief executive, the word “newspaper” has become meaningless in reference to many of its members which today reach many of its readers via the Web.

“Newspaper’ is not a big enough word to describe the industry anymore,” Mr. Chavern said. “The future of this industry is much broader.”

Meantime, church publications are struggling, too.

In Canada, two church publications closed in September. Since 2003 over 25 church publications have shut down.

And why is this happening? The Web, of course—and mobile in particular.

The conversation has moved online.

In particular, it is moving to our phones—a misnomer of a name if there ever was one.

The move is affecting us all, from the biggest media giants to the smallest organization.

Take ESPN for example. 

ESPN revolutionized the world of 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 or other mobile devices. 56% of the TV and film viewing by Millennials today is on computer, smartphone, tablet, or a gaming device.

And that figure is growing.

To help it succeed in the future, ESPN is developing what it calls "a smartphone-first content effort that combines personalization, journalism, video and personality.”

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."

His comments are backed up by a recent Pew survey, which found that 72% of Americans now get their news via mobile.

(Which is why Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, for short, is so popular. AMP pages load four times faster than regular pages, which means people are more likely to read them.)

It’s got to the point that I am hearing people describe the World Wide Web—that thing you open on your computer when you get to work in the morning—as “legacy” media, just like newspapers and the evening news. 

In other words, if it doesn’t fit on my phone, I won’t be reading it.

Whew! That’s a lot of challenges. But there’s more.

The decline of TV news. Supper hour or evening news is something only a shrinking number of mostly older people watch. 

This type of journalism is called curated appointment viewing—someone else decides what is news and gives it to you on their schedule. 

When information is available anywhere and anytime, fewer people have interest in that—especially younger people.

Or, as one commentator put it: “Tell a bunch of 19-year-olds that it should be up to the professionals to determine what news is most important, and they’ll laugh until their earbuds fall out.”

Changes in way people get information. Consuming information used to be linear. As the King said about reading stories to Alice in Wonderland: “You begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” 

Today, the way people get information is more episodic. We watch this show for a bit, then change the channel, then change it again. We open that web page, then hit a link and go to another page. 

One of the main ways this affects us is that home pages simply aren’t as important anymore.

When the Web started, we thought of it like a book or magazine.

The home page was the table of contents. It’s where we placed the information we wanted people to see—the information we thought was the most important.

Darned if people don’t follow our lead anymore. Through Google and Facebook they are apt to end up anywhere on our website, following all sorts of unique and circuitous paths.

The home page is much less important these days.

In other words, linear is out, and chance is in. You never know how people will find you, or where they will end up when they do.

Audience Fragmentation. The age of mass media is coming to an end. It is impossible to reach people through a few main channels. You need dozens or hundreds of ways to get the message out—mostly through social media.

Shorter attention spans. Studies of website use indicate that if visitors are not engaged within 10 seconds of landing on a web page, they will leave. 

     Those that stay will stay for about 60 seconds on a web page, and read about a quarter of the text on that page. (About half don’t read beneath the bottom of the screen on a computer monitor.)

As one author put it: “The more I write, the more of you tune out. And it’s not just me. It’s everywhere online. When people land on a story, they very rarely make it all the way down the page.”

If it sounds like people today have the attention spans of goldfish—you’re right. 

Research last year by Microsoft shows the average Canadian has an attention span of nine seconds online—about the same as a goldfish. That’s how long they can focus on one thing before being distracted. 

Media are responding to this new way of paying attention. In 2014 Associated Press and Reuters instructed their reporters to write articles of no longer than 500 words.

“Most readers give up by the 500-word mark," said an editor (although she qualified by adding that "if you have nothing original and compelling to say.")

•    Information Overload. Research indicates that people are exposed to about 600 ads or messages a day—that’s 219,000 a year or over 18 million in a lifetime (if you live to be 85 years old). 

Meanwhile, between 300 to 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, up from six hours a minute in 2007. Over 3 billion hours of video are watched on YouTube each month. 

Reflecting on all this, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said a few years ago that one day it will be “possible to have an iPod-like device that will have 85 years of video on it. So you will be dead before you watch the whole [thing].”

•    Attention Crash. The amount of information has increased exponentially, but one thing that has not increased is the amount of time we have to consume it. We still only get 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year—and you have to sleep some of that time.

Said 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.”

Looking over all the changes and challenges, I have come to describe it as the “great unbundling.”

The idea of unbundling comes from the world of Cable TV, which for decades—to the annoyance of subscribers—only sold “bundles” of TV channels.

A typical bundle contained channels you wanted—like CNN—bundled together with channels neither you or many others had any interest in.

In Canada, the CRTC, the body that regulates TV is beginning to force cable TV providers to unbundle their offerings—something they are reluctant to do.

In so doing, the CRTC is finally catching up to the great unbundling that has been going on in society for a while now.

iTunes unbundled music; no more buying a CD of ten songs to get the one you want.

Digital photography unbundled the connection between the photographer and the camera store, eliminating the need to transfer photos from film to prints.

Online shopping is unbundling the shopping mall. There’s now no need to go to a central location to find a collection of stores when you can visit thousands of retailers using the Internet.

Online courses threaten to unbundle universities. Why do I have to take a course in the place and time of the university’s choosing? Why can’t I take it when or where I want?

And, of course, the Web unbundled traditional journalism.

For centuries, the most economical way to share information was by bundling it into daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly or quarterly packages called issues.

It made no financial sense to publish individual articles and then mail them to subscribers. The costs were prohibitive. It would lead to financial ruin.

So publishers waited until they had enough articles, coupled them together with advertising, and bundled them into a daily, weekly or monthly issue.

In other words, publications were not set up for the convenience of the readers, but for the publisher—the people who ran the publication.

But the Internet has eliminated that financial constraint on distribution—and delivered the power to choose when to read an article to the customer.

Today, if an article is finished, it can be released to the public immediately—online. There is no financial penalty.

By making people wait a day, week or months to get information, publications—and organizations—risk a different kind of ruin—the ruin of irrelevance.

When people can Tweet or Facebook about events in real time, nobody needs a publication, or an organization, that promises to tell them tomorrow what happened yesterday.

For those of us who are accustomed to bundling material into packages—newsletters, magazines, even e-newsletters—this is a scary time. 

But there’s no going back.

No longer does it make any sense to make readers wait until we're ready to share information. 

Their universe is unbundled. They're ready now.

+++++++++++++++++

So: Where do we go from here? How do we respond to this changing communications universe? How do we create thumb-stopping content in a world that is used to turning pages?

What follows (in Part 2) are on person’s ideas—a few half-baked ideas, opinions and best-guesses. Which makes me just like everyone else in the room, I think.

The End of Curated Appointment Journalism, or Farewell to the Six O'Clock News

Is the end of curated, appointment journalism coming to an end?

Some are saying yes—and the data backs them up.

But first: What is curated journalism?

That’s another way to describe what you get in your daily newspaper or TV or radio newscast—stories selected for you by others (editors or news directors).

As for appointment journalism, that’s what happens when the news is delivered to you on someone else’s schedule—the 6 o’clock news on TV or radio, the morning newspaper.

For a long time curated appointment journalism was all we had available to us as news consumers.

We got our news when it when the media delivered it to us—and only what they determined was newsworthy.

But those days are coming to an end.

Keith Olbermann of ESPN was quoted in Slate in June on this topic as it pertains to the falling ratings of the network’s signature show, SportsCenter.

“All the attempts to modify it [SportsCenter] are predicated on the idea that it can be what it was two years ago, five years ago, 20 years ago, and it can’t,” Olbermann said.

“There is no motivation except for old-time guys, who are our ages or even older, who want that sort of leisurely, well-done, paced kind of stroll through all the sports news. But we’re dying off.”

The same is happening to other radio and TV news shows, such as NPR: The audience for those shows is aging and declining.

“Tell a bunch of 19-year-olds that it should 

be up to the professionals to determine 

what news is most important, and they’ll 

laugh until their earbuds fall out.”

As Steve Lickteig put it in that Slate article: “News of all kinds is available at a pace that was unthinkable even 10 years ago. And as Olbermann pointed out, the desire for the ‘leisurely, well-done’ show is very much on the wane.”

Older people, he went on to say, are fine with this; they don’t mind consuming news as it’s served.

“Tell a bunch of 19-year-olds that it should be up to the professionals to determine what news is most important, and they’ll laugh until their earbuds fall out.”

Lickteig likes curated appointment journalism like NPR (as do I).

But, he says, “I believe that 15 years from now, those stories won’t be delivered by appointment and in that magazine format.”

A 2016 report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism confirms Lickteig’s forecast.

The report found there are significant declines in traditional television viewing, replaced by online video and social media.  

TV viewing in countries like the UK and the U.S. has declined by 3% to 4% per year on average since 2012, the Institute reports.

At the same time, “the average audience of many television news programs is by now older than the average audience of many print newspapers,” the report says.

As for the future, “there are no reasons to believe that a generation that has grown up with and enjoys digital, on-demand, social, and mobile video viewing across a range of connected devices will come to prefer live, linear, scheduled programming tied to a single device just because they grow older.”

Adds the report: “If television news providers do not react to the decline in traditional television viewing and the rise of online video—in particular on-demand, distributed, and mobile viewing—they risk irrelevance. “

Legacy media—newspapers, radio and TV—are experimenting with new ways to attract younger consumers.

But, the report notes, “no one has found the right recipe for doing online video news in this rapidly changing environment.”

Lickteig has an idea for radio, at least.

“Here’s what I think the future sounds like,” he says.

“You will get in your car and say, ‘Play my news briefing, plus all of last night’s baseball scores, including highlights from the Yankees game. Oh, and give me last week’s Vows column from the New York Times.’”

Then, like magic, “your audio system will assemble this playlist. That news briefing you asked for? It will come from sources you pre-selected, places like NPR and news organizations yet to be created. 

"If you don’t know what you feel like hearing, you’ll ask your system to surprise you. If you don’t like what you hear, you’ll tell it to skip to something else.”

You are the curator, in other words. And you decide when you will get the information you want.

“In the audio future, you’ll never have to hear a story you don’t care about again,” he states.

Apparently, this is technologically possible—Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Echo both offer basic versions of this functionality.

But what about discovery? One of the brilliant things about curated journalism is that smart and informed people find news that I might not be looking for—and didn’t know was important.

I think it’s important but, and so does Lickteig.

But, he points out, “millions of people younger than me do not.”

It’s not that they’re stupid or don’t care, he says.

It’s just that current content delivery systems “don’t satisfy” their interests and passions.

So is that future—in radio, and maybe on TV and the web, too?

People are already doing it now, creating their own news feeds online. And Facebook and Google, using its knowledge of users, is sending us information tailored to our tastes.

So it sounds like it’s farewell the 6 o’clock news.

It was nice while it lasted.

Shaking Off the Print Legacy: Newspaper Association of America Changes its Name

Earlier this year I wrote about how the Winnipeg Free Press is no longer a newspaper.

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

“We are not a newspaper, but we publish one,” he stated, adding that the Free Press is “trying to shake off the print legacy.”

Well, add the the Newspaper Association of America—er, the former Newspaper Association of America—to the list of those who are shaking off the legacy of print.

On September 7 the Association, founded in 1887, announced a name change: Now it will be known as the News Media Alliance.

Why the change? Simple. The number of newspapers in the U.S. continues to decline, down to 2,000 from 2,700 in 2008.

But that’s not the only issue. According to David Chavern, the Association’s chief executive, the word “newspaper” has become meaningless in reference to many of its members which today reach many of its readers via the Web.

“Newspaper’ is not a big enough word to describe the industry anymore,” Mr. Chavern said. “The future of this industry is much broader.”

(The move will also allow non-print news organizations, like Buzzfeed, to join the Association—a good move in light of falling membership.)

In an article about the name change in the New York Times, author Jim Rutenberg pointed out that although news on print is disappearing, it’s not as if people don’t want news anymore.

“Through online exposure, newspapers are reaching more people than ever,” he wrote. “The problem is how they make money. Circulation for physical newspapers is declining, and so is print advertising; digital ads remain far less profitable.

“The trick is finding a way to make up the lost revenue.”

Yes, that is the trick—and a big one, at that. Maybe changing the way we look at how we get news, and what we call it, is a start.

Happy 25th Anniversary, World Wide Web

The world's first web page.

Twenty-five years ago today,  the World Wide Web was born.

It was conceived in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, a Briton working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research. But August 23, 1991 is the day the first public website went public. 

Now August 23 is now called “Internaut Day,” a name that combines “Internet” and “astronaut,” as early technical Internet users were called.

Since the Web is so ubiquitous today, it is hard to remember that it is really a young technology—or how novel it was to create one back then.

Which is what I did, in 1994, with my creative and inventive friend Ryan Rempel.

It was for my employer at the time, Mennonite Central Committee. Ryan came up with the idea, at his home in Ottawa. He invited me over to see what he had made, and asked if MCC would want it. 

I said yes, and the rest is history.

(At the time, I had colleagues who wondered why anyone would bother with such a thing; who would want to use a computer to find information? It's easy to smirk now but, to be fair, nobody knew back then what the Web would become.)

At the time there were fewer than 3,000 websites in the world. Today there are over a billion.

MCC home page from 1999

I also remember going to a technology conference around that time about this new thing called World Wide Web. 

To demonstrate how it worked, the presenter used overhead slides. He put up on slide, pretended to click a button, then replaced it with another slide to show how the Web would work.

I created another website in 1997 for a national Faith and Media conference I was organizing. 

To make it, I learned HTML code—everything on it was created manually.

Faith and Media home page, 2000

We’ve come a long way since then!

Today, the Web is already being considered a legacy media, as Brodie Fenlon, Senior Director for Digital News at CBC, noted. The CBC “still has a huge desktop audience,” he says, “but future growth is phone.”

That sentiment is echoed by Chad Millman, ESPN's new vice president and editorial director for domestic digital content.

According to Millman, for ESPN "mobile is everything. We always have to be thinking about mobile first. If we’re thinking about anything else, we’re failing the audience."

Fun fact: Model Railroading played a role in the invention of the Web. Berners-Lee, as it turns out, enjoyed trains a young boy, tinkering with the electronics.

As a result of making gadgets for his model railway, he “ended up getting more interested in electronics than trains.”

He went on to build his own computer out of an old TV, study physics at Oxford and then, in 1989, laid out his vision for what would become the World Wide Web.

As Stephanie Lynn put it on her blog, “the boy who tinkered with circuits for his model trains became the man who invented the single most valuable creation of our time.”

So, once again, happy anniversary World Wide Web!

Kodak Moment No. 2: What Business Are International NGOs Really In?

In a previous post I told how Kodak missed the opportunity of a lifetime by forgetting what business it was in.

After dominating the photographic film scene in North America for over 100 years, Kodak thought it was in the film business.

It wasn’t.

Kodak was in the memory and image preservation business—film was just the way people preserved their memories and images.

So when the digital camera revolution came, Kodak, with its dependency on film, was steamrolled. In 2012, the company went bankrupt.

For non-profit communicators, the lesson of Kodak is to not forget what business they are in.

They are not in the magazine or newsletter or website or even social media business—they are in information sharing business.

All those things are just channels for sharing information. And they can change. 

Information in print is disappearing, TV news is in serious decline, and even websites are being considered legacy media today.

But it’s not just non-profit communicators who can forget what business they are in. Non-profit organizations themselves can forget it, too,

Since I work for an international NGO, what does the lesson of Kodak mean for my sector?

If I were to ask colleagues or board members, I’d expect to receive answers such as this: We are in the relief and development business, in the poverty alleviation business, in the peace and justice business—and many more.

And, to some extent, I agree. International NGOs do all those things. But those are simply channels for their main business, not the main business itself.

And what is our main business? Receiving money from Canadians and giving it to people in the developing world.  

We are in the resource transfer business, in other words.

Surprised?

Some might be. And maybe offended, too.

After all, when the boards of international NGOs meet, most of the time is spent on international programs, not on fundraising or engaging the public.

And, of course, overseas programs are important. Without those programs, there would be no reason for us to exist.

But without donations, and the donors who provide them, those programs would cease to exist altogether.

Don’t believe me? Just let the donations stop and see what happens. Soon programs would be closed, shipments halted, staff laid off.

We’d go out of business, in other words.

The Canadian Hunger Foundation found that out the hard way in 2015 when they couldn’t raise enough money to keep going.

By all accounts, they had excellent programs in the developing world. They just couldn’t raise enough money to support them.

“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.

Of course, programs are important. But without donations, they would cease.

In economic terms, it's a matter of supply and demand.

When it comes to human need, there is no shortage of demand. But donations and donors? They may be harder to find, as many denominational NGOs are discovering.

Despite the challenges of fundraising, my experience is that little time is spent on that topic in the average board meeting.

And when NGOs hire new executive directors or CEOs, many still lean towards program experience as the determining factor in their selection process—despite the fact that their major needs are in the areas of fundraising, marketing and communications, not programming.

It's like they aren't paying attention to suggestions from the non-profit industry that CEOs of charities need to spend half their time or more in fundraising and marketing these days.

As for their communications, marketing and fundraising staff, many of the people I know involved in those things are overworked, understaffed and under-resourced—even as demands for more donations increase.

So, what's the solution? 

Of course, every NGO needs good programs; otherwise, people won't give. But they need to spend as much time thinking about fundraising, marketing and communications as they do about their international work—not just a few minutes at a board meeting to hear a fundraising report, followed by a polite silence before moving on to other things.

Otherwise, one day the only fundraising report they'll get is the one that says there aren't enough donations, and they, like Kodak, are out of business.

What do you think? Is this post way off the mark? Response is welcome.