National
Editorial Conference
Blogger Paul Conley
Blogger Paul Conley:
“No
more cushy
B2B jobs left”
Online registration
now available.
Upcoming keynote speaker warns editors
to fight for Web ethics and explore
multimedia
He
would rather not fire his friends. Yet
go to Paul
Conley’s
blog. The title to the
Dec. 3, 2007, entry reads, “It’s
time to fire
my friends.”
Conley says it’s time to give
up on journalists unwilling to
explore multimedia or what he
calls “Web-first publishing.”
Conley
will talk about “Web-first
publishing” and other business-to-business
(B2B) publishing issues on July 24 in
Kansas City as the
keynote speaker at ASBPE’s National
Editorial
Conference. Perhaps the most well-known
B2B blogger in the publishing industry
and a
consultant for B2B publishing
organizations, Conley has
worked for Bloomberg, CNN,
and Primedia.
As
a blogger, Conley has broken many important
publishing
stories, especially on
Internet publication ethics,
whose problems are more
prevalent than ever.
While
Conley often talks about how the Web
is changing the game,
he also believes that journalism
ethics should remain the same for the
Web as for print. For example, Conley
gives his
views
on IntelliTXT links in his Jan. 29, 2007,
blog
entry titled, “eWeek
crosses an ethical line.”
“Unethical people
and people who don’t
think seriously about ethics like to say
that
the rules have changed online,” he
says. “The
line I have repeated thousands of times
— and
this is what I tell B2B editors and reporters: ‘The
rules of ethics have not changed online,
and you should not let them.’
“There is nothing about publishing on a
computer screen that exempts us from
the
ethical rules that we live by when we
publish
on paper. It is absurd and evil for
people
to suggest otherwise. And our industry
is full of absurd and evil people, and
they
have pushed dozens of reputable magazines
into disreputable activity online.”
A
pet peeve for Conley is when journalists
tell him they like how he stands up
for
ethics although their job security keeps
them from doing the same thing. Conley
says B2B journalism is also his job.
“I’m a consultant, and when I go to
war
with one of these companies, it costs
me
money,” he says. “Those are
companies that
will not do business with me. They
become
my enemies. They do everything they
can to
sabotage my business and my reputation.”
Today’s
B2B journalists, Conley says, could learn
from wire-service reporters
and
TV-broadcasting pioneers. The movement
to place more emphasis on Web creations
and less on print publications reminds
Conley of the transition made last
century
from radio broadcasts to TV broadcasts.
“Radio in the 1940s was gorgeous, fantastic
work, and people like my dad who
were raised on it, loved that stuff,” he
says.
“… but then something else came along.
Television came along. There was a period
of time where people didn’t know how
to
tell stories on television.”
Reading from a script worked on
radio,
but television demanded more visuals.
Likewise,Web-first publishing requires
a
different approach. Text serves
a role, but
not in the form of a long narrative.
Use
service journalism for the Web
“Pull quotes,
photos, many subheads, lists, bullet
points—all that sort of stuff
works
well on the Web,” Conley says.
Reporters should learn how to write
for
two audiences: the human audience
and
“bots,” which is short for robots.
Bots pick
out keywords and phrases to decide
what
stories go on search engines, which
leads to
more page views.
“Page views are
money,” Conley says.
“With online ads, people generally pay for
them on a CPM basis, which is a cost per
thousand
page
views.”
Print reporters can
learn how to write for
the Web, he says, but not every
print reporter
will be good on video made for
the Web.
B2B journalists also can learn multimedia
skills such as digital photography,
and video
and audio editing techniques.
“When
there is big news … and
[people] go to your Web site and
there is nothing there,
they don’t
think,
‘Oh, I guess they’re holding it for
the January
issue.’ They
think, ‘You
suck.’ ”
When consulting for B2B publishers,
Conley says he asks them whether
they
want to teach multimedia skills
to the existing
staff or to recruit a new class
of younger
journalists. Generally, it’s cheaper
to train
the existing staff, especially
if staff members
have learned some multimedia skills
on their own.
‘Train yourself’
“I tell B2B editors
and B2B reporters, ‘Go
out and train yourself,’ ” Conley
says.
“For reporters,
for storytellers, for editors, stop expecting
somebody to teach you
to do this and go out and learn it.
There are
thousands of people every
day on the Web
talking about this stuff and
sharing this information,
and some of these people are
just
wonderfully brilliant people.”
Conley gives examples
of how to do this
in his May 7, 2007, blog entry, “Teach
yourself.” (Also
see sidebar, below right,
for other places to
look.)
Writing in the mode
of Web-first publishing
mainly involves getting a
news story
up on the Web site as soon
as possible.
“The priority
becomes the Web site and not the print
product,” he says.
If a company’s
resources allow it, a story
might appear 15 times in updated
versions
on a Web site before it appears
in print. The
managing editor must decide
if a story has
enough importance to be updated
throughout
the day.
Web writing is like
wire-service writing
“This is akin
to wire-service reporting,”
Conley says. “One thing I try to
get across
to B2B reporters, and newspaper
reporters
as well, is that in this environment,
that is
what all of us have become. We’re
all wire
service reporters now.
“So our workday
has to be like the day of
somebody at Bloomberg or at Reuters
or at
the Associated Press. It’s no longer
like the
workday of somebody at a monthly
magazine. None of us is working
at monthly
magazines anymore. Anybody
who thinks
they are working at a monthly
magazine is
out of touch and perhaps delusional.”
Business readers no
longer must wait for
a weekly or a monthly publication,
he says.
“When there is big news happening in
their industry, and they want to know
about it, and they go to your Web site
and
there is nothing there,
they don’t
think,
‘
Oh, I guess they’re holding it for
the January
issue,’ ” Conley says. “They
think, ‘You
suck.’ And they go to
your competitor.”
B2B
journalists will have to accept the
extra workload.
“There are no more cushy monthly B2B
magazine jobs left,” Conley says.
This story
was written by Jeff
Gelski, Associate Editor, Food
Business News;
Secretary, ASBPE Kansas City Chapter
Related links:
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