Do you like my headline here, on this post? Can you write a better one?

Headlines are critical. I’ve noted that, with some frustration (I’m not so good at headlines) on this blog before, here.

Headlines come up today because being in New York last week to  judge the Forbes.com business plan contest gave me a chance to visit with my son Paul, who lives in New York, and is CTO of Huffington Post. And he told me what they’re doing on the Huffington Post about headlines.

Why do you care? Maybe because (whether you like its political views or not) in the last 2-3 years Huffington Post has posted huge growth in traffic and advertiser and investor interest and visibility and traffic. So they have to be doing a lot of things right. And, if you’re writing or blogging, you should know about how they do headlines.

It starts with a lot of testing. Paul was quoted in How the Huffington Post uses real-time testing for headlines in Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab:

The Huffington Post applies A/B testing to some of its headlines. Readers are randomly shown one of two headlines for the same story. After five minutes, which is enough time for such a high-traffic site, the version with the most clicks becomes the wood that everyone sees.

And then there’s Twitter. As a Twitter user, I enjoyed reading Huffpost crowd sources headlines in Snoo.ws. Here are highlights:

Using the hashtag #headlinehelp, visitors will be able to click on a link to an article and help write an appropriate headline that fits the story. Through social byproduct, the best headline will filter through to editors.

The Huffington Post made its first attempt at using the hashtag late yesterday asking participants to replace the headline, “No, YOU Lie,” regarding a story about Rep. Joe Wilson’s interjectory fireworks during President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress.

Hashtags are not perfect aggregators by any means, as previous use of them has seen contests hijacked and critical messaging spoiled. With Huffington Post’s reputation, they surely have gained some followers who may wish to use this idea in a negative way for the company.

How cool is that? I’d love to copy that idea. But reality rears up its ugly head: Huffington Post has hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter; I have barely four thousand. Mine are smarter and better looking, but still …

Or no, perhaps, not so cool? Maybe data-driven headlines are a problem (quoting The Noisy Channel on this subject):

I’m sure this approach must rattle some old-school journalists. And there is a real danger of optimizing for the wrong outcome. For example, including the word “sex” in this message might improve its traffic … but to what end?

OK, good point, but the discovery that there are some words (sex, violence, naked, brutal) which get better results is nothing new. It’s older than I am (I posted about words I won’t put into titles despite the temptation on this blog a couple of years ago).  What’s new is the ability to test quickly and bring a crowd into it in a practical way.

It’s not about asking people what’s new, or changing the news content. It’s about headlines. And gaining readers.

Interesting juxtaposition: while much of the world worries about where we get real news, and particularly investigative reporting, iPhone users are up in arms about CNN charging less than $2, once, for an iPhone app that includes ads.

Megan Berry posted Do You Get What You Pay For? yesterday on the Huffington Post:

CNN’s new iPhone app is creating quite a stir. First of all, they’re the first major news site to have a paid app ($1.99). Secondly, they’ve included ads in it. Users are in quite an uproar over this. They wouldn’t pay for something with ads in it!

There’s no doubt that the iPhone world is new and strange. I have an iPhone myself, and I love it; but how did $1.99 for an application end up as expensive? In what world? Maybe I’ve been in software for too long. Megan (disclosure: she’s my daughter) adds:

Yet, what about newspapers, magazines, television, and increasingly games? We constantly pay for media that includes ads, and we don’t even think twice about it.

Meanwhile there’s a lot of real worry about what’s happening to journalism, and especially investigative journalism, as newspapers and magazines fade. Within a click or two of that same CNN-iPhone-related post on Huffington, there’s this post in which Arianna Huffington frets over the debate over online news, another about whether the New York Times should charge for news, and yet another titled What Google Can Do for Journalism. I posted about that here just a couple of months ago.

On The Huffington Post, meanwhile, they took a Quick Poll on how people feel about paying for an iPhone application with advertising in it. Almost half the respondents said no: “If I pay for an app, I shouldn’t have to put up with advertising.”

I’m not saying that iPhone users shouldn’t worry about a couple of dollars, but … no, wait a minute, maybe that is what I’m saying. Skip a cup of coffee, once. Not that I even like CNN, but if nobody can figure out how to pay the reporters, we’re not going to have Journalism. I can imagine a world without newspapers, but a world without Journalism would be a lot worse than that. If saving Journalism (note: not newspapers necessarily, but investigative reporting) takes some ads, I can deal with ads.

So I just bought the CNN application for my iPhone.

(Photo credit: cen/Shutterstock.)

Here I was writing this post about new FTC rules for social media, feeling self-righteous about it, when it occurred to me that Shutterstock.com gives me a free stock photos account, which I use to illustrate this blog. And I’m an Amazon.com affiliate. I accept review copies of books, some of which I’ve reviewed here (although I bought most of the books I’ve reviewed, and I don’t go around asking for review copies, just accepting them, occasionally, when they’re offered). And I’m an employee of Palo Alto Software. So I don’t want to be a pot calling kettles black. Or a wolf disguised as a sheep.

Still, it’s about time. A new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ruling aimed at blogging and, I assume, Twitter starts Dec. 1. This is from the New York Times story on it:

Beginning on Dec. 1, bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers, as occurs frequently. The new rules also take aim at celebrities, who will now need to disclose any ties to companies, should they promote products on a talk show or on Twitter. A second major change, which was not aimed specifically at bloggers or social media, was to eliminate the ability of advertisers to gush about results that differ from what is typical — for instance, from a weight loss supplement.

I’m glad they made it specific. I hope they enforce it. The same general idea was previously built into basic journalism ethics and it should have been obvious that it applied here as well. Ethics? I mean what do you think, when people are paying people to blog about their products, tweet about them, and do reviews on social media sites. Making endorsements look like honest opinion, or reviews pretending they’re objective, is ugly. I hope it’s obvious why.

What if some company offered to pay you under the table for talking it up with all your friends? How would you feel to be a walking talking advertisement parading as a person?

But it happens all the time. I got an email last month offering me money to endorse products on this blog. It was blatant and unembarrassed. The offer to shill for money was couched in terms like “business models” and “revenue streams.”  But it was pretty simple: if I would endorse products in my blog, they’d pay me. No, thank you.

Time magazine’s last issue included a story called Brought to You by Twitter, about tweeting for money:

A company called Izea, which made its name connecting bloggers with firms willing to compensate them for plugs on their blogs, has set up a similar service for the Twittersphere. At a site called Sponsored Tweets, Twitter users can sign in, set the price they want companies to pay them for tweeting an ad on their behalf and wait for the offers to come in. Jocelyn French, the mother of a 2-year-old boy and 1-year-old girl, has tweeted for a parenting website, a college-information site and Kmart, among others, at $1 a pop. “I figure, hey, why not get paid at the same time?” French says. On average, companies are paying Sponsored Tweets users $29 per tweet.

I hope you see the problem with that: first, it’s dishonest, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, because it’s presented as conversation.

Back in the 1970s when I studied Journalism in grad school, the generally accepted ethics were pretty obvious on this. Disguising ads as editorial was clearly out of bounds. But that was way before Amazon.com revolutionized consumer reviews, and then there was the proliferation of blogs and now Twitter blurring the boundaries. But still, put it back onto the personal level: if a company pays you to pretend you’re giving a legitimate personal opinion, that just doesn’t feel good. Right?

(Photo: Sarah Heinman/Flickr)

Back in the old days editors decided what was news. Not advertisers and not readers. There was this concept called “news values.” Full-time professionals laid out the front page. They tried to highlight important political, economic, and social trends, coverage deemed important, rather than celebrities, fashions, nudity, and violence.

This was a long time ago. Back in the 1970s.

Which is not to say that media don’t play to audiences. The original Yellow Journalism was Pulitzer vs. Hearst in the 1890s. And when I was a mainstream journalist, in the 1970s, playing to readers’ baser instincts was already commonplace. Some words in headlines–naked, violent, brutal, for example–produced better results than others.

Still, the idea was that editors protected news values. They were gatekeepers. So the front page had important news, that people should be reading, rather than sensational news. The idea was embattled, but treasured.

Today, however: not so much. Nicholas Carlson posting on Silicon Valley Insider proclaims NYT.com Front Page Editors Ignore Reader Clicks, and he’s not writing about how the editors are intrepidly holding out for news values. I’d like to imagine the crusty old editor saying no, resisting the temptation to appeal to audiences’ taste for gossip and sensationalism, insisting on highlighting important news and analysis. But no, this is criticism. He quotes a New York Observer story:

“In terms of minute-to-minute news decisions, I think that would pretty much drive me crazy,” NYTimes.com’s digital news editor Jim Roberts told the Observer.

“I don’t want people to call up NYTimes.com and feel like that they’ve just landed in an environment that is alien to them,” he said. “It isn’t necessarily The New York Times in print, but it needs to reflect the same attitudes and standards.”

He thinks they’re sadly out of date, and, in the background, doomed. He cites the Huffington Post as the example of the right way to do it, by following the clicks. He says editors have to watch the clicks for two reasons:

1. It’s the main way readers can show what kinds of stories they care about.
2. The New York Times is a deeply-in-debt, for-profit enterprise that needs to grow its traffic online in order to survive. Web editors should not pretend that it doesn’t matter how many ad impressions the Times serves each day.

I can argue with that first point. Call me old fashioned, elitist maybe, but I’m okay with Jim Roberts’ comment above. I don’t want the National Enquirer to replace the New York Times. I’m happy to think that humans are still guarding news values. Somebody has to. Right?

But how do you argue about that second point there, in the quote above: the money? What if doing news right is an obsolete business model? It could happen. Could? No, it is happening.

Irony: I’m glad to see that the New York Times made a profit in the second quarter of the year,   but I read that news on the Huffington Post. And I don’t subscribe to the New York Times, either; I get it free online.

(Image by B.K. Dewey on Flickr)

This — the TechCrunch publishes stolen information flap last week — is why I worry about the gradual disappearance of Journalism as newspapers and traditional advertising disappear.

You may or may not have read about it. Somebody stole documents from Twitter’s computer and sent them to TechCrunch. They stole more than 300 memos, presentations, projections, and lots of private work about the business.

And TechCrunch, one of the premier blogs in the world, on just about everybody’s list of top blogs, decided to publish it. Not because the world needs it, not to defend anybody against anything, just for the fun of it. There’s no public good involved, not that I can see.

This is not Daniel Ellsberg and the New York Times with the Pentagon Papers, this is just business voyeurism. Publishing other people’s private stuff.

Why? Simply because they can. And I object. TechCrunch should know better.

I like the idea of professional journalism, with standards. Like what Wikipedia suggests, or, even better, the Code of Ethics of the Professional Society of Journalists. I know that a lot of journalists trashed ethics long before blogs came along. Still, at least there was a general understanding of right and wrong.

It seems to me inevitable that newspapers as we’ve known them, printed on paper, are going extinct. Blogs can replace a lot of what newspapers have been doing. So who says that ethics don’t matter in blogs? Not me. You don’t have to appear in print to be a journalist; but you do have to have a code of conduct. I hope.

I wish I’d thought of this first. But I didn’t. So instead, here’s 10 Reasons You’ll Actually Miss Newspapers, by Dan Frommer on businessinsider.com (he’s got it illustrated one picture per item, too, worth clicking on the original just for the pictures):

1. Starting a fire
2. Wrapping presents
3. Espionage (that one really needs the picture, a guy with a newspaper hiding his face).
4. Pet bedding
5. Papier-mâché
6. Feeling good about recycling them
7. Wrapping fish and chips
8. Party hats
9. Around the house (needs some examples; the picture shows newspaper crushed around the edge of an air conditioner)
10. Quality international and investigative journalism. Dan adds:

Sure, today’s new, lean-staffed Web publishers are good at reporting and analyzing the news back home. But who’s going to staff the Baghdad bureau?

And I say, really? Baghdad bureau? Today’s new lean-staffed Web publishers are good at reporting and analyzing the news here in the United States?

Do you want to make meaning? Solve a problem? Disrupt the status quo? Then solve this problem: figure out a way to monetize investigative journalism. In the new media world.

No, not just journalism, thanks, but investigative journalism. By that I mean the product of professional journalists paid to dig for (relatively) objective truth, like facts. To uncover the hidden scandals, expose the corruption, clear up the misconceptions, and look beyond the spin.

Don’t confuse investigative journalism with breaking news, gossip, politics, expertise, and opinion. Maybe — just maybe — citizen news and crowd sourcing will compete with straight news media. We’ve got Twitter, news blogs, political blogs, and self-styled expert and personal blogs, among other new media, supplying breaking news and opinion. You’ve probably read the arguments along those lines. I’ve posted about it on this blog here.

Watergate: Flickr image by dbking

The problem is that investigative journalism is real work. It takes digging, research, interviews, and more digging, and more work. Volunteers don’t do it; professionals do it. And the organizations that pay those professionals depend, traditionally, on advertising revenues. And we’re in the midst of a rapidly changing media landscape, in which big audiences seeking impartiality are growing harder to find. The audiences are splintering, dividing into finer groups, getting lost in the long tail.

Breaking news? We get that in the new media world. In-depth reporting? Not so much. New York Times online? Washington Post online? Maybe. But your local town government? Who covers that? And are a few online sites of former great newspapers enough? Will the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report generate budgets and credibility for proactive in-depth reporting? What do you think?

So, in this new world, is somebody going to sponsor true investigative journalism? Will the Watergates of the future  be uncovered? For that matter, who’s going to go to those town council meetings?

So there’s a problem; a need. Do you have a solution?

I feel like I’m watching Journalism fall apart; watching with interest, horror, and dismay … but just watching, like watching a fire from far away, powerless.

Like you do, I read about the newspapers folding, falling like trees in a rotting forest. Even the New York Times is in trouble. Many of the newspapers I grew up with are either dead or dying.

News flash: this isn’t new. It’s been going on since I can remember. It was already a big deal in the 1960s. (News at 11!)

We blame it on different things: blogs, 24-hour news networks, mainstream network television news, declining education, apathy, the Web, Fox News, Huffington Post, the new president, the old president, whatever.

I got a grad degree (MA) in Journalism, with honors in fact, in the early 1970s. That was so long ago we actually called it Journalism, not communications.

Back then newspapers were already dying because television network news was killing them. People liked their news in 30-second bite-size pieces. Professors wrung their hands about the loss of analysis and in-depth reporting.

And we all worried a lot, back then, about the impact of television violence in general. And sensationalism. Like that would turn the news business into show business. It’s a good thing that didn’t happen, right? (Show of hands, please).

Not that it was ever just academic for me. Before I reached my 30s, grew up and sold out (I became an entrepreneur, got the MBA), I spent eight years as a journalist. I was a foreign correspondent, based in Latin America. I worked for UPI, freelanced for Business Week, Financial Times, etc. Even after business school I wrote columns in several magazines, although mostly computer magazines.

It’s also a bit of the present for me as well, because of my new job blogging and writing. You can see that here on the right column: I’m on the Huffington Post, USNews.com, plus several business blogs.

So where does that leave us? With this:

Accident of history: journalism and business

We tend to forget that journalism grew up to fill pages between ads. It wasn’t about the the sanctimonious needs of society, or the fourth estate, or fundamentals of democracy.

They needed readers to sell ads. And in the old days, before Fox News or Huffington Post, when freedom of the press was limited to those who owned presses, the best way to get and keep readers was to do real news; to pay Journalists to investigate and report.

In the heyday of great journalism, bias was bad business. So the owners paid the reporters and, with many very well known exceptions, tried not to meddle. Good journalism was also good for business.

And we got professional news reporting because that was good business. They paid somebody to attend town hall meetings, and somebody else to travel the globe covering wars and revolutions, because that kept the readers happy and, because of that, the advertisers happy.

Journalism wasn’t about the public good. It was about making money.

Fast forward to the Internet, the Web, and the collapse of the printing press and big owners as the oligarchy of the “media.” Suddenly the media is splintered up into hundreds of millions of websites, in infinite variety of degrees of professionalism or lack of it. And even on the television, far less free, it’s six hundred channels instead of three, so we have the Fox News people talking to their tribe, and the Jon Stewart-Bill Maher people talking to their tribe, and CNN talking to whomever has 24 hours a day to listen, and NBC and CBS and ABC news trying vainly to compete with Joan Rivers and Entertainment Tonight. All bets are off.

And there’s this other trend mixed in: Even before the Web, while few people noticed, newspapers spent the last generation or two cutting costs by cutting news staff and using AP and UPI, and lately, Reuters.

So what happens next? Who’s going to pay whom to sit through those boring town council meetings, or risk their lives in wars and revolutions, or report politics and democracy fairly?

I don’t know. But, in the time-honored tradition of the back side of journalism, I’m going to tell you anyhow. Later. Not now. News at 11.

(Photo by mphotos on flickr)

True confession: I love writing. I love short sentences, strong words, making myself understood.

I think most, if not all, good bloggers like writing. Video people do vlogs and YouTube, poets go to Twitter (say, what?), but bloggers are writers. Almost all of my favorite blogs — I’ve got the blogroll on this blog, rightmost column, near the bottom — are written by people who care about writing. Not that they don’t care just as much about business, their main content area; but they’re writers.

Yes, I’ve done all the startups in my bio; yes, I have the MBA degree; and yes, I built Palo Alto Software. But if I could have made a decent living just writing, I would have.

Flashback: 1970, I was 22, wanted to write, studied literature. I was in a PhD program in comparative literature, briefly; ended up with MA in Journalism. UPI, McGraw-Hill, Mexico City, and whoosh, the 1970s all gone.

Flashback: 1979, journalist, bored filling space between ads, enrolled in Stanford University business school. Then I fell in love with business planning, helped to start Borland International, founded Palo Alto Software, founded bplans.com. And grew it, slowly for years, no outside investment. Tough times, good times.

And suddenly it was 2007, 40+ employees and a great management team, me struggling with changed technology, and I changed jobs. And started blogging. That change was Part 1 of this series.

So what helps me a lot is that I like writing. As a journalist I wrote a lot for many different publications. I also wrote published fiction (not very good, by the way, not worth citing, but they paid me) (and I’m not including market research that was wrong, either) and a full-length novel that got some second looks, but never got published.

So now, you can see how much blogging I do by looking at the sidebar here on the right. You can’t see that I’m also writing a lot on a family site, a personal site, and even an anonymous pure writing site.

If you’re going to be blogging a lot, you have to like writing.

In the olden days, when I was a grad student in Journalism, for instance, or a night editor for UPI, the business model of the news business was fairly clear:

1. News organizations sold advertisements.
2. They needed news to get readers to be able to sell the ads.
3. News needed credibility to get the readers.

So we had a news business.

We tend to forget the factor of volume, as related to credibility. Newspapers, and later, television news, had to appeal to a mass audience in order to make a living. That helped us generate a news ethic, such as objectivity — covering the news, trying to keep opinion out of it.

News was never really objective, of course. But there was the goal of objectivity. As journalists, most of us tried to be objective. And when we weren’t being objective and we knew it, we tried to make our bias clear, and label the content something different from news.

“Yellow journalism” was about sensationalizing the news. And it was always a problem, back in those olden days. Some media did it more than others.

News values changed with the growth of television news. The business of selling ads got better with more audience, and the audience liked celebrities, violence, puppies, and things that could fit into 30-second spots.

What we didn’t imagine, back then, was the splintering of the audience into different interest groups; the impact of having 600 channels on the television, and millions of websites. That changed the business entirely, and we — not just the journalists, but the world at large — haven’t figured that out yet.

Specifically, what does that mean? Well, to start with, now you can make a good business being the blatantly conservative television cable news channel, for example. You don’t have to appeal to a cross section; you appeal to a segment. And you can do the same as the blatantly liberal blog/news source.

So what does this mean for news?