The Economist invites Blogger Ideas

When Tom Shelley of the Economist invited me for drinks in London last June, I got really excited.  I thought he was a reporter and I was about to be interviewed. The Economist is the last paper magazine I stopped reading. I found it amazing in its depth and accuracy.  I also found it disturbing that they did not give reporters bylines, making it the publication of the corporate "we voice," a voice whose time I think should pass and is likely to.

It turned out that Tom was not a reporter, after all, but worked on the advertising side. He was also the staid publication's blog champion. I immediately liked him and quickly got past the disappointment that I was not about to be interviewed. Tom wanted ideas on how to get blogging going at the Economist and how they could benefit the Economist. I told him I thought it would be a steep uphill climb at that staid organization, whose look and feel had not much changed during the 35 years I followed it.

Every few months Tom pinged me.  I would reply with quick notes of encouragement and gave little thought to the matter at all. Tom was trudging, but the uphill trek was long and steep.

Now, low and behold,in the middle of the New Communcations Forum, a conference about how new media is changing traditional organizations I received a note from Tom telling me that there is a shot the Economist will be among them. If he has not yet reached the summit, he has at least made it to base camp, with authorization to start a skunkworks to investigate how to use blogging and the social media to improve and modernize the Economist.

He was ideas, not just from me, but from you as well. It's called, Project Red Stripe, I assume in reference to the strip on a financial document a compan drafts before it goes public. To understand what they are up to go to Tom's Blog. That will point you first to an official Economist page followed by a place where you will be allowed to fill out a form with suggestions on how the Economist can harness the power of us citizen journalists.

Tom, my first suggestion is that you change the way the Economist asks the questions.  we bloggers are not the fill-out-the-forms and submit-to-a-gatekeeper types. But if you change the venue into one that is more interactive and conversational, one that is  more egalitarian, I think you will find an enormous opportunity to have a great number of conversations, a few of which will be most valuable to the Economist.

In Tom's email to me he noted, "the Economist has been called the local paper for the global village." That comment leads me to my first and strongest suggestion.  As a blogger, I'm going to post it here and not on any steenking form.

(1) Braid blogging and social media into the Economist's existing fabric to actually be the local [online] paper for the global village. This is something I've been talking about for quite sometime. News organizations have several assets we don't have. You are a news gathering organization noted for impeccable accuracy and relevance. You  are masters of refined, quality writing.  You have significant financial resources  You have advertising revenue. people pay subscription fees to read you.

Bloggers have none of that.  I have little doubt that in the space of this blog I have one or more grammatical errors.  I hold a master's degree in unfortunate typos. This blog has not produced a single penny in direct revenue to anyone but Typepad, my authoring host.  Like traditional  reporters, I am available to serve as your stringer to cover what I see and to gather information from what I know.

So are my 60 million associates.

But the real power of what I offer is not just on my availability to you, but the fact that I am a node on a massive, relentlessly expanding network that is more than 60 million strong.  We are the feet on the street of your global village.  We walk around with cameras and microphones. Collectively, we know a good percentage of the people who occupy the developing world.

(2) Share ad revenue. A fact savored by every Big Media mogul is that writers are cheap help. We have too much passion for what we do. We negotiate deals badly. We value the prestige and distribution of your branded publications and we want in.

But if you want us to serve as your stringers, there is a great revenue share.  Online technology allows you to use the Internet's infinite space to become a conduit for low cost ads.  More important, the technology lets you sort by geography of topic.  We bloggers can make the Economist richer, which I'm certain appeals to your uppermost management. Just cut us in on the deal. If you use me to cover an event here in Silicon Valley, sell ads that are likely to click through from my page. Give me a cut.  Let's start negotiating at a 50-50 split.  Give me half the revenue for my small contribution. Give me no salary, not even gas money.  Do it for my 60 million associates and you will end up doing very well and so will we.  Trust me.

(3) Adjust for speed. The Economist is a venerable organization.  It's brand is connected to accuracy and eloquence and  it would be damaged if it lost those qualities.  It is also still tied to an antiquated publication and distribution system that involves takin perfectly good trees, thin slicing them, smearing them with dead berries, binding them, transporting them via fossil burning machines.  This is expensive, environmentally damaging but most it is dreadfully slow. The process talks a full week.

With all its shortcomings, the blogosphere is terribly fast. It is also always on.  We are there when news breaks. We don't know when the news will break, but we take pictures of a tsunami as it hits the beaches of Phuket, when policemen use excessive force, when a terrorist detonates death in a London tube.  We are there and we are very fast in distributing the news.

A challenge you face is how to integrate the speed of social media with the filters of the Economist.  There are ways.

(4) Hire someone like me, someone who has been a part of the social media explosion, someone who sees the impact of what is happening and the future of where it is heading. I would love to work with you.  if you find me geographically unacceptable, there are some really great UK bloggers who can also make you smart fast.  If Red Stripe is a six-month skunkworks project, you are going to need to harness the wisdom of experience as well as the wisdom of the crowd that you are going after with your request for input.

(5) Move it all to a blog. Make this entire project transparent and online. Ditch the lame forms and turn this into a conversation.  Let visitors argue with each other over the best ideas. join conversations on other blogs.  Ask bloggers, in their own neighborhoods, what you should do.

Good luck, Tom.  You've gotten further up the hill then I thought you would get.  You just might make it to the top after all.

Comments

[Ed Lee]

Hi Shel,

We met very briefly back in September at the Third Tuesday Toronto event you spoke at.

While I respect your views and quote you to clients on a regular basis, I can't agree with your assertion that The Economist should adjuct for speed. As I say here here, one of The Economist's strengths is the depth of thought and the analysis that goes into their content.

I agree that some blogging principles are needed - most notably comments and trackbacks - these will simply serve to bolster the page view count; not the amount of unique visitors.

To do that, I believe you need to increase engagement with the content - what were/are the writers thinking; why is the editorial policy the way it is and what research went into the article that didn't make it into the final cut.

That's the sort of stuff I want to see. One final thought - you can never consistently compete with the blogosphere on speed, if you want to win. Instead, focus on the insight, context and analysis.

Cheers,
Ed

[Tom Shelley]

Shel, thanks so much for the ideas. They're very neat but I'd really like to address the questions around the form so I should tell you how we came up with it.

We've got 6 months to come up with a company from an idea, not a long stretch for a small team. We were thinking about the best way we could get ideas from our community as well as getting them in the best format for us to look at them. That way we could really how we could make them work.

This led us to using the form which allows us to put it in a database with tags to see how ideas are clustering.

Now, if we were to get the ideas off blogs etc, we couldn't guarantee to find them all, as we're a small team.

I hope that answers your questions and we'll make sure your ideas makes it into the mix.

[shel israel]

Tom,

Darn, I thought this was going to be a consulting offer. In fact, you can easily find all the comments by using simple blog tools--Technorati, Google Alerts, Blog Pulse, to find every comment. You can also suggest a tag, so that all bloggers will make it even easier to have their comments found. You will get more suggestions this way trust me.

[Kempton]

Hi Shel,

Insightful post. Like your suggestions (5), (2), (1) [in this order].

The reason I like "(5) Move it all to a blog" so much is that we, the people in the community, learn as a part of the process. We get to see what other people are thinking and may be improve on the ideas or simply be "wowed" by them. In the current one-way-submit-idea format, I am exactly as smart or dumb as I were before the exercise (after all, I cooked up that smart/lame idea). Now, in an open forum, I am guaranteed to be smarter after participating because of how the others inspired me.

By "how ideas are clustering", is Tom trying to find out which idea is popular? Or which idea is good? A good idea doesn't have to have many people suggesting it.

Just my 2 cents.

Cheers,
Kempton

P.S. Thanks for spreading the news of "Calgary Blogger Dinner".

[mike]

actually this kind of affair cuased with me too many times and i also shaked like you, then i relax and became comfort when i heard that there is nothing like that i was thinking.