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November 26, 2014

Filed under: journalism»new_media

Ex Post Facto

I had hoped, personally, that we were past the app craze in newsrooms, particularly since the New York Times (eternally the canary in the coalmine for the rest of the industry) started killing off its unsuccessful subscription apps. But there's a sucker born every minute, and this time it's the Washington Post, which is launching a special Kindle app, the main goal of which seems to be to remind everyone that Jeff Bezos bought the Post last year:

The app, which was designed to reduce the noise of the Web to something as streamlined as a print publication, will be automatically added to certain Kindle Fire tablets as part of a software update. It will feature two editions each day, at 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. Eastern time, when the company believes it will reach the most readers.

Two things stick out in that paragraph: first, the "noise of the Web," as though that's a thing that exists in and of itself and not a product of newspaper websites being largely assembled at the whims of a huge number of competing interests (advertising, editorial, IT, etc). If your web site is noisy, it's because you made it that way, and maybe you should fix it instead of launching a new platform.

Second, two editions? In a world of twenty-four hour online news, someone's making a digital news publication that updates (with exceptions for breaking events) twice a day? That's not a strategy for reaching readers, it's a sop to a print-oriented workflow that has to produce distinct physical "products" instead of a stream of content. It's not like they have to lay out a page, so what's the point? Why make people wait?

I expect this thing to go the way of The Daily within a year, quietly killed when the Post announces some new shiny object, probably. Of course, as a long-time web partisan, I think launching another native journalism app is a silly move anyway. The reasons for this are well-rehearsed and familiar: ease of production, greater audience reach, and creating a single path for content. But ultimately what makes native news apps fail is that they can't interoperate with other services the way the web can.

A lot of ink has been spilled about the NYTimes innovation report, for better or worse, but one of the big takeaways for me was the graph on page 23 of home page visitors compared to page views. The Times has seen no real drop-off in overall traffic, but the number of people seeing the home page has dropped by half over the last two years alone. And the reason for this is simple: most people don't go looking for journalism anymore. It finds them instead, when stories are shared through Facebook and Twitter and (increasingly less) RSS/Atom feeds.

Whether you're thinking of your app as a new home page or as a new publishing platform entirely, this trend seems equally grim — a choice between apathy or obscurity. It's probably possible, somehow, to make an app share to Facebook or Twitter. But it's never going to be as quick, as smooth, or as easy as sharing to those services via a simple URL. As much as anything else, this dooms native news apps from the start: if users can't share your content, it might as well be stored in a sealed vault. If you make the app share a web link as a workaround, everyone ends up on the site anyway, so why bother creating the app in the first place?

(Incidentally, this is why the line tossed around by some pundits that "native apps are too on the web, because they use HTTP" is nonsense. Does your native app have a front-facing URL? Can I link someone to a specific page in your app? No? Then it's not on the web.)

Don't get me wrong: I'm not necessarily sanguine about this state of affairs. The increasing role of social media in discovery and spread of journalism is worrying, from the silencing effects to the loss of control for publishers. One day I'd like to think we'll be out from underneath Facebook's thumb, or anyone else seeking to wall off the web until it pays up. We need better solutions for that problem, ones that don't make us sharecroppers on anyone else's land.

Meanwhile, however, this is the world we live in: the social networks dominate, and ultimately they run on URLs, not on binary blobs stored in a native bundle. Publishing two gimmicky "editions" a day through a fancy app, on a device that relatively few people use, is not going to change that anytime soon. If you want people to read your news, it had better be on the (sharable, linkable, endlessly flexible) web.

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