"Smart" Slate: New Game, New Rules?
Is Slate at the end of an old trend, or the beginning of a new one?
Megan Garber makes an intriguing case for Slate’s longer-form journalism push, using the metaphor of its Fresca program, which gives Slate staffers Google-like “free” work time — ah, the precious commodity of the digital age — to follow their own longer-form journalism muses. Her “Smart editorial, smart readers and smart ad solutions, Slate makes a case for long-form on the web” post lays out a future with a bit of hope for those who care about meaningful journalism, a journalism beyond the McNugget digests that often seem to drive our Google News, Twitter and aggregator-mediated news diets.
I’d like to be hopeful that she’s right, and she may be, though the evidence is confusing and in midstream. We see support for the argument in the redesigns of Reuters and MSNBC. Both are moving away from page-view-inducing designs, with the aims of actually engaging a repeat reader, engendering a loyal customer. They — and big, mainstream news companies generally — have also come to understand they can’t win the numbers game. In the McNugget culture, McDonald’s, or Google and its fellow aggregators, win; these companies are finely tuned engines for the mass products of news bits. So, they are taking the quality route, both in the presentation of content, and commercially more important, in how they are selling their audiences to advertisers. Early results are encouraging, but not definitive.
We could say that news companies — from Slate to the Journal and Times — have figured out that playing the ad game by someone else’s rules didn’t make a lot of sense. In the game of gross numbers, they couldn’t win.
Yet, I wonder. The rampaging changes in ad targeting raise questions about how effective selling quality, branded audience will be. Take the news of Google’s deal with Omnicom, the global ad agency today, as just one data point. Omnicon, on behalf of “5,000 clients in more than 100 countries” commits to spending “hundreds of millions of dollars to buy display ads for its clients through Google over the next two years.” Part of its payoff: Google agrees to share more data with Omnicon on specific ad effectiveness. (Goodbye, data exhaust; hello, data as a key driver of ad buying.)
As Greg Sterling smartly points out in Search Engine Land, the deal brings into questions publishers attempts to sell that quality audience at a premium.
Longer-form journalism may well have a revival — I’m bullish on the iPad to offer new news reading experiences there — but monetizing that journalism will depend more and more on the vast data-analytics driven networks, and those are owned by non-news companies.