Content Evangelism, or, Why Big Media Should Pay Its Readers

Tonight I emailed someone I follow on an un-named social network. It felt a little bit creepy and a little bit exciting, much like friending a not-quite-mutual acquaintance on Facebook once felt. I have been following this person for over a year, and almost all of their posts resonated with me because we share a similar aesthetic sense of what it means for something to be well-done, or successfully designed, or generally pleasing to the senses.

So why, after nearly a year of asymmetric loyalty (web voyeurism, almost) did I reach out today? The answer is relatively simple, but it tells a complex story about how media trends are changing. I wanted to know where this person found the inspiration for their posts, many of which contain fantastic photos seemingly culled from a vast repository of design-oriented source material that I can't find, despite what I consider relatively exhaustive searches.

What's more, I'm convinced that any sources this person returns to me will be of a higher quality and have a higher degree of relevance than the results of a continued search on my own (I'll follow up and let you know if that's true). While I often preach the benefits of social curation, and Pinyadda's design places this act at the very center of our user experience, this struck me as a particularly tangible example of how and why this type of connection is important.

I'll be adding all the sources I receive to our index (and tagging them under the 'Design' topic) so that all of our users can enjoy them. I'm willing to bet that most of these sites will have content whose quality far outpaces the quantity of their audience. And hereinlies the beauty of content-specific aggregation: other users will be able to find them and follow them, without having to beg and plead with their followers in a creepy, email-based way. Good content finding its audience is what we're all about, and I'm proud to be part of a company that's trying every day to make that vision a reality.

The story, then, has two morals:

1) Social curation is incredibly valuable. By following this un-named design maven (who may not even know I consider them as such) I was privy to hundreds, nay thousands, of awesome articles, posts, photos and music that more accurately matched my tastes and preferences than any publication or blog, no matter how niche-focused, might have. This isn't to say I don't like niche blogs (I do, a lot), but instead that humans like me will almost always do better at finding the stuff I like.

2) Good content will find a way to find its audience. I truly believe that the end result of the disruption we're seeing in the media industry will be a complete eradication of barriers to distribution and the ultimate triumph of content. I think that Pinyadda and others like us can play a huge role in helping consumers and producers of content find each other. If we provide readers with the tools to find the content they want and then make it easy for them to share it with each other, we can create viral marketing and distribution loops that move faster and wider than all the trucks in the history of newspapers ever could.

This is what big media doesn't seem to understand, and it's the beauty of the web we're helping to build: when people find great content, they want to support it, evangelize it, and help it be found by others. It's not a chore or a burden but a real feeling of goodness that comes with adding value to other people's daily lives, if only in small, small ways. Instead of trying to find ways to trick me into paying for their content, big media should be trying to find ways for me to pay it forward.

Do you have any blogs or publications you find yourself evangelizing, even by accident? I bet you do, and I'd love to hear about every one of them in the comments.

Defining Quality Content

As the media landscape continues to change and we move away from traditional forms of content like daily newspapers and monthly magazines, it's becoming harder and harder to distinguish quality content from the barrage of information that's available everyday.

At Pinyadda, we've made a commitment to present our users with content that's "high-quality" - but like many others, we continue to find it incredibly difficult to define a set of standards for internet content. Before we try to answer that question, let's go back to the beginning:

Used to be there were newspapers - big newspapers. At least one in every city. What they printed was considered fact; it could be reasonably asserted that leads had been followed, investigations had been performed, sources checked, editors consulted. With relatively few exceptions, these papers represented the definitive source of information for businesspeople, laymen, and housewives alike. They print it, you read it. Simple game.

Over time we saw the reach of radio and television extend, but the mechanics remained the same. It took lots of money and smarts to run a station or a channel, and the barriers to entry remained high: formal training, infrastructure, and approval from the media cohort. One could still reasonably assume that these sources met at least some minimum standards of professionalism and journalistic integrity - otherwise they wouldn't be on the air.

Yet once the internet gave everyone the ability to become a publisher, these assurances vanished altogether. Certain old media stalwarts (and some new ones, ProPublica and Politico come to mind) have successfully established brands that serve the purpose of validating the quality of their content. So create a powerful brand, problem solved. Instant legitimacy.

But what about the other 10,000 sites that are producing quality content on a daily basis? The small-to-medium blogs with a couple of writers who focus on local and niche issues, and probably do it better than the big brands - what about them? Here's where it gets tricky.

From our standpoint, there's a very fine line between providing readers with the information they want and maintaining high standards of quality. So we have to establish some benchmarks - a job much easier said than done. There are a few basic metrics:

Traffic:
Unique visitors over time.
Pros: Gives an accurate approximation of how many people read and/or trust a given web property.
Cons: Quantity doesn't necessarily denote quality.

Staff:
Does the source have professional (paid) content staff?
Pros: Professional staff indicates a seriousness of purpose that definitely increases the likelihood of quality content.
Cons: Tough benchmark for many sites to meet.

Frequency of Publication:
How often does the source publish?
Pros: Acknowledges and recognizes obligation to an audience (or perceived audience).
Cons: Publishing poor content every day doesn't make it good content.


None of these are decisive metrics, and none can be used in isolation. Furthermore, each of them ignores the most subjective aspect of the debate: quality is, in many ways, in the eyes of the beholder. Who's to say that the NYTimes is of any higher quality than TMZ? Both have lots of readers, both publish oodles of content, both have full-time staff. And for some readers, TMZ's content might be far more interesting.

We tend to say something along these lines: "Nonsense. The NYTimes is a much higher quality source than TMZ. It's all fact-checked and very serious. TMZ is nothing but unfounded gossip." But is it really true? What about the Op-Ed section? The blogs? Suddenly the two sites seem closer than we thought. The example is a bit of a stretch, but the concept holds.

And what about a well-reasoned, thoughtfully-prepared, and oft-published blog that has little traffic? It might well be the most "quality" source available on a given niche topic, but if no one reads it, who cares? It a blog post falls in the internet forest, does it make a sound? More importantly, should it?

These are hard questions, and ones that have vast implications for the future of media on the internet. Without a way to define legitimacy, the big boys will continue to feel the air sucked out of their advertising revenues, as more and more traffic defects to the little guys. But it's our hope that finding a way to create a set of standards for quality content will raise the bar a little for everyone, creating a media ecosystem where everyone is encouraged to do more with less, not more of less. In other words, finding a way to grant legitimacy to sources who deserve it can both improve margins for those that meet expectations, and encourage others who might be capable of high quality content production to step up to the plate a little sooner.