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Extremely proud of the work my team has done on our latest prototypes.

We hear from a lot of people that they want to keep up with the news — need to in some cases, for professional or social reasons — but that they struggle to find the time.

We also regularly hear the complaints about existing news products, principally about what I call the “cognitive overhead” spent in engaging with them. See, we each only have so much focus and mental energy to expend every day. And every flashing pixel, every non-intuitive interface, every crowded visual presentation chips away at our psychological reserves. News products don’t do us any favors.

So we set out to drastically diminish that overhead. We also laid out a design challenge of significantly reducing the time it takes to consume the news, as well as boiling down the news to just the essentials.

If Michigan news is important to you, and you like the sound of the above, then you might check out Detroit Now.

If national news is more your thing, then you could try The Pulse.

What are these?

First, it’s real-time headlines determined by what people are already reading. It’s the important stories determined by what you’re most likely to end up in conversation about, not what an editor thinks is important.

Then it’s a 3-sentence summary, generated by a powerful blend of natural language processing (a type of machine learning, or artificial intelligence).

You can still read the full story, too, with the help of a speed-reading interface we developed.

Innovation is an uphill slog.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is pulling your leg. 

Working in an established organization, optimized to do what it’s always done, with an immune system that sicks antibodies on foreign objects and the dangerous pathogens that ideas are — this is hard work.

What’s more, it can seem when you’re in the midst of the day-to-day, that you aren’t getting anywhere. That’s why it felt so good to compile an annual report. It felt good personally, and it felt good to remind my team of all that we accomplished, and it felt good to pass it around to colleagues (and family, who often wonder what the hell I do all day).

What did we accomplish in 2015? Some highlights:

We created over 40 code repos, amounting to thousands of code commits.

We launched 6 native apps, on both iOS and Android.

We built and launched a statewide rentals listing site, featuring more than 6,000 apartment and house listings.

We built a browser extension.

We played with bots and beacons.

We compiled numerous human centered design research reports.

And more. If you’re really curious, you can read the full report here.

John Collins, “Product Feedback You Should Ignore”

I’ve been preaching to people a lot lately about the jobs-to-be-done concept. There’s so much navel-gazing in product development and business — particularly the news product business. 

I keep seeing PowerPoint PDFs about what a new app or website section will do for the company, and no mention of what it will do for the user nor any indication that someone has asked those users what they want done.

The HR folks roped me into helping plan a program.

We want to bring some of the up-and-comers together and give them a program that helps them be more innovative, better leaders, more collaborative and more creative.

How long is this program, I asked? 

Three days.

I don’t know how you do all that in three days. I explained that the best programs, camps, conferences, and seminars I ever attended were merely yardsticks that helped me measure where I was at and give me a direction to go in when I went back home to where the real learning and exercising was happening.

So what should we do?

I don’t know, I said. But if you want to know what I do, I can share that.

So, this is a reprint of an excerpt of an email:

1. Commoditization. I was talking about this the last time, but I could have gone off the rails talking about programmatic, which once marketers really begin to grasp it, it’s going to hurt traditional publishers who will see pressure on CPMs like they haven’t seen before.

2. Mobile. Seriously. How will you monetize this? We’re in the midst of crossing the tipping point where this is where the majority of the audience connects, and there’s no going back to desktops.

I realized that I’ve gone far too long in my life with far too little formal education about economics. You couldn’t have convinced my 16-year-old self that I’d ever be this desperate to really understand macro- and micro-economic concepts, theory and history.

And I’m not just talking about figuring out whether the Fed will raise interest rates. 

Mathew Ingram isn’t the first to write about the “attention economy,” of course, but it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that the topic merits more, well, attention.

The underlying principle is simple: Where the attention goes, the money will inevitably follow. And right now, the attention of a large chunk of the population is being diverted away from traditional content and information channels, and platforms like Facebook and Google are busy vacuuming it up. Many existing media and content companies face a future in which they are just suppliers to these platforms — or even worse, find themselves cut out of the attention economy altogether.

But here’s the thing:

“Attention” is the label that helps contrast a business model built on impressions, and the world we increasingly find ourselves in, where economic forces make that model less and less viable.

This traditional business model also has as a key component a distribution channel that is owned by the producer (of content, in this case) and provides exclusivity — both scarcity, and a relationship with the customer.

In this new world, content becomes a surplus and so it’s commoditized to the point where its value is minimal. Similarly, ad inventory grows geometrically as content pages proliferate, increasing downward pressure on pricing. 

This is basic supply-demand economics. (I think.)

What I struggle with is substituting attention for content or CPMs — and isn’t that all this is, a substitution?

Yes, attention is finite. I only have so many minutes a day to devote to anything and, in a vacuum, increasing demands on my minutes makes their value go up.

But my first observation is that people’s daily minutes with digital media in total is on the rise. This has an upper bound, sure. But when the world transitions to screenless media, as it surely will, I suspect that that upper bound will approach our total waking hours in a day.

What’s more, I have a hard time conceiving how we would monetize attention in the way that we’ve monetized adjacency and exposure to messaging. In the end, I think it’s results that advertisers pay for. They won’t pay for CPMs or time-spent-viewing if they aren’t getting qualified leads and conversions, ultimately. 

I don’t think advertisers are more likely to spend money on a time basis than they are on impressions, I guess is my point.

I think “attention” is maybe just a proxy for the really valuable thing: behaviors. Do they use your app? Do they use it every day? Multiple times a day? (That is, really, what we’re talking about here, right?)

What the current winners named in Ingram’s article are really doing different is the context of the advertising — on mobile, anyway — in that it’s native. This starts to change the business model, but I think it’s really just a matter of degrees of difference for users. A native ad on Twitter or Facebook is only slightly less annoying than an adjacent display ad.

Charles Arthur, examining the looming introduction of ad-blocking technology on iOS browsers.

If your time or attention span are limited, just start with #4 and #8 and Pocket the rest for later.

4. Faster, better and easier always win

As history has shown us, users always gravitate toward user experiences that are faster, easier and better. And as an industry, they’ve gravitated away from us, consuming our content through superior mobile experiences.

More people get news from Facebook – 41% of U.S. adults – than any other source. That’s because it’s a faster, better and easier experience to get news.

Told you this would sting.

Sure, the tech giants have more resources, but let’s be honest: our industry isn’t known for obsessing about our users (for example, see “News sites are fatter and slower than ever.”) Few media organizations practice human-centered design, product teams are a relatively new phenomenon and most mobile media products still do just one thing: display abbreviated content from a single brand.

If your question is, “Well, how do you do this?” read this piece on user testing at ProPublica and The New York Times.

8. Shorter content is not a mobile strategy

When starting to brainstorm an app or an email product, the discussion almost always begins with how to take existing content and “shorten” it for mobile.

Just shortening your website content for a mobile app — video included — is like putting radio on TV: adding a camera that shows the host talking awkwardly into a microphone. It’s the price of entry perhaps, but it doesn’t guarantee an audience. A beautiful design is great, too, but it doesn’t mean people will keep using it: Even worse with mobile, it certainly doesn’t guarantee any revenue.

Josh Dzieza, in ‘Why are the most important people in media reading the Awl?’

Mike, a software developer on my team, recently was describing how he really wanted a distraction-free workstation, something that didn’t have the internet and IM clients and the other things that interfere with just writing (or in his case, coding).

I told him a company had already made that. It was called “Smith Corona.” 

I chuckled, but the reference was over Mike’s head. He had no idea Smith Corona had been the dominant typewriter manufacturer. Which got me wondering, “What is Smith Corona up to these days? Are they even still in business?”

If you want to get journalists to heed this admonishment, I wouldn’t follow up with Buzzfeed as the example, whether it’s applicable or not.

But I still agree with the assertion.

Editorial culture’s aversion to commercial affairs results from fallacious thinking about Chinese walls: Since editorial content must be protected from advertisers’ influence, journalists must protect themselves from anything commercial. Sometimes it also results from misplaced snobbery: commercial activities may enable my good work, but they are also, somehow, dirty. 

Maybe that’s too extreme, since all they’re saying is “indefinite hiatus.”

Nonetheless, I had high hopes for Cir.ca (even though I was not a daily user, which maybe says something about the problem).

Of the commentary so far, I like best the eulogy from Wired writer Julia Greenberg.

But if you can solve the real problems that have faced news organizations since news first made its way online, you may have a chance of making it on your own. Do what no one else can do: find new ways to profit off the news. Otherwise, you’re in it with the rest of us.

Peter-Paul Koch

Mike Wilson, new editor at The Dallas Morning News