Big Data is “an umbrella term for a variety of strategies and tactics that involve massive data sets, and technologies that make sense out of these mindboggling reams of data”. The report explains that the media industry can think of Big Data as “the Four Vs, including:

• volume of data;
• velocity of data, meaning it needs to be analysed quickly;
• in a variety of structured and increasingly unstructured data formats;
• which all have potential value in terms of high quality journalism and business insights and revenue.”

Media companies can use Big Data analysis to improve many aspects of their business performance, such as understanding their audience and better targeting customers, crunching huge data sets to uncover stories, directing campaigns, improving decision-making and creating business efficiencies.

The report provides detailed examples from several leading media companies using Big Data to develop their audience and business, including:

• Huffington Post, which “uses Big Data to optimise content, authenticate comments, ensure efficacy of native advertising, regulate advertising placement and create passive personalisation”.
• BuzzFeed, which uses Big Data pre-publication to predict the virality of articles by identifying “characteristics with predictive relationship to virality”, and post-publication to “optimise the article’s promotion”.
• The Financial Times, which uses registration data collected through its metered paywall “to serve the customer better, create targeted advertising campaigns and create new products based on information collected on background and areas of interest to its readers”.

The report also examines training data journalists and data-driven automation in journalism, as well as lessons from beyond the media sector.

The internet is not a deli: “The first misconception newspaper veterans have is the notion that interactive news teams are simply new-fangled print graphics desks.” While there are similarities in their creativity, editors shouldn’t turn to the web team as a support desk once they have finalised the story. Journalist-developers should be included in the assigning process and involved in stories from the start.

Hire new skills: You won’t find people with skills in web design, programming and motion graphics if you advertise positions in the usual journalism job pages/websites. These are the types of skills you’ll need to bring to your newsroom either through staff development or external recruitment.

Herd all the cats: Doing digital news well means bringing together staff with a wide range of skills, often from different departments. In this type of situation, the traditional newsroom chain of command doesn’t work, so you’ll have to foster new ways of collaboration. “Anyone can lead a project, but somebody must lead.”

You need a sandbox: An interactive team needs space to experiment in a way that doesn’t jeopardise the entire system: “Most CMSs are designed to prevent the kind of monkeying around that this new kind of online storytelling requires…If you’re starting a team from scratch, the very first thing you have to do is give it the tools it needs to succeed, and an autonomous development sandbox is at the top of that list.”

Iteration leads to bigger success: Experiment and adapt. Be prepared to fail. Carry out post-mortem reviews for all your projects, note what worked, what didn’t and how you’d fix it next time.

Be the journalist you want others to become: Start building a culture that supports the digital development of your company. Encourage journalists to learn about data analysis and web development – you might be surprised at how many want to be part of the digital future.

Read more: Things I never learned at newspapers about making news on the internet

As is usually the case though, the most effective and helpful tool – or rather a technique from those mentioned above – is the one that also costs the least. Have you done usability testing yet? No? In that case, if you’re going to do one single thing, throw away all the other tools and techniques and start doing usability tests – they will take your website the farthest.

In this article, we’ll take a look at what you need to do and what you should know before you start testing.

What we’ll need

A usability test is nothing more than tracking a user during the time he or she is using your site. Really, that’s it. No measuring of eye movement, level of stress or anything else that needs hi-tech tracking – just a simple recorded (shot of the computer screen they’re sitting behind and their voice) dialogue between you and them. And of course the tasks you request them to do on your website.

So, no measurable indicators – CTR, time spent on site, etc.? Precisely! Questionnaires or Google Analytics will provide you with lots of data, but it doesn’t get much better than seeing the person in action with the possibility of asking what they think. I guarantee that after a usability test, you’ll know right away what needs to be done even without knowing exact percentages or having data to feed into a graph.

Like with any cooking recipe, we too will start with the ingredients we’ll need. There isn’t much of it, yet it’s still a good thing to specify them.

• A quiet room – it may sound strange but if there is something that can ruin the result of a usability test, it’s having someone disturb you. Are you in an open space office? If so, forget right away that you would do a usability test at your work station. An ideal place for a usability test is a small room, two chairs and a desk – no disturbing elements. Let people know not to disturb you during the time of the test. Turn off your phone.

• A standard computer and browser – although the object of testing during the usability test will be your website, people you’ll be working with will have a feeling you are testing them. Despite being told otherwise, they will not get rid of this feeling. Don’t add to their stress by making them learn to use your gaming mouse or keyboard with different characters. Use the most standard computer most people are used to. In the author’s country, this would be a laptop with Windows, a plain mouse and Chrome browser. Have more browsers prepared and let the participant choose which to use. The more they feel at ease and as if working with their own computer, the better for them and you too.

• Microphone and a program for recording your computer screen – During the test, you will record what the participant is saying as well as the browser window they’ll be surfing in. This is important because you won’t have time to take notes and will not remember all the issues that will come up. Laptops, as well as desktops, often have built-in microphones; however, it has proven useful to the author of this text to have an external microphone. A simple cheap mic for Skyping will do very well.

Selection of a recording program may be something of an obstacle as there aren’t many good quality solutions. For us, a good choice proved to be Camtasia Studio. It can record the screen as well as sound and later allows the recording to be cut, highlight parts of the video such as a mouse click, rolling over an element, etc. The program is not exactly cheap but has a 30-day trial version, so you can start with tests for free and later decide whether investing in the software is worth it.

What will we test?

Question “What will we test?” may sound ridiculous to you. You probably already know about the weak spots on your website – perhaps you were notified by email from users, or you’ve seen something in the statistics. Maybe you’ve asked yourself already why no one clicks on the Editorial Team link at the bottom of the page, while at the same time you get asked by users whether you’ve considered having one.

If you haven’t done usability tests before, I would guess the first ones you do will be of a very general character. You will want to look at your website as it is and its key functions, and find out whether users know how to use them or if they have a problem using them, and last but not least, how you could improve and simplify the way your website is used.

Later, you will probably concentrate more on in-depth issues and usability tests will focus on only one of the sections or just an individual function of your website. Either way, your task now is to transform all intentions into assignments for the participants in your test. How do you go about it?

Close your eyes and imagine all the key functions that make up your website. You can forget about the details for now – the most important elements will do for now. Imagine an average person and what he or she actually does on your website. Usually arrives, looks at the homepage, clicks on an article. Then what? Perhaps he wants to enter the discussion? Or maybe he wants to sign into your system email and read messages? Obviously, it’s different for every website but you should always keep in mind the most frequent and concrete scenarios of your website’s visitors.

Once you have them, you can start turning these scenarios into a story with assignments, ideally with some update theme. Set up concrete and fun assignments.

For example: “You’ve seen on TV that the government wants to increase taxes for people with higher income. You missed some parts of this information, therefore you decided to visit our website and confirm the missing details. Where would you look for this information on our website? Find out the percentage of this planned tax increase and the date the tax law should become effective”.

Notice that I haven’t used in this assignment the name of the section (go to section Economy, in the left-side menu click item xxx). This is exactly the method you should use too, as normally a user doesn’t know where things are. Since nobody tells users on the homepage where to find the information they are looking for, they have to find it on their own. Effectively, the user will now test your site for you and whether you have developed it well. Following the user’s path to finding the right link will show you how to make your website better.

Prepare about ten assignments in a similar manner. For each of them, try to create a specific situation and make it interesting or fun so as not to bore the participant. Be sure to make it clear exactly when the given assignment can be considered finished.

Are you testing one specific part of your website? It’s good to have the first two assignments of a different kind – “to trick” a little, but also for loosening up the user. When testing a specific thing, I personally try to hide it by breaking it into a number of different assignments so I don’t give away my intention. Ideally, at the end of the test, the participant shouldn’t really know what the main purpose of the whole test was.

Ready for some inspiration? A complete usability test can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QckIzHC99Xc

Selecting participants

How many people need to take the test in order to reach the optimal results? It may come as a shock to you, but 6-7 people will be enough.

Are you wondering why so few are needed when for any A/B testing questionnaire you need to have at least a few hundred participants to consider the data reliable? The answer is that when it comes to usability issues, we are all very much alike. You will find this out as soon as you start testing: the second participant will have very similar problems with your website as the first one, and this will repeat until you get to the last one. Using, say, 20 people instead of ten of course means finding slightly more issues on your website, but I guarantee that testing 6-7 people is absolutely sufficient for finding the most significant ones.

Which people to choose? You may be tempted to strictly adhere to demographic distribution, so here is my tip – don’t take it too seriously. (In the end, it will be hard to stick to a demographic distribution of users in a sample of 6-7 people.) Include men and women, younger and older, but the best thing you can do is to call on users that could potentially have a problem with your site.  If you call on a programmer to take part, he’ll probably be able to manage almost anything, but how about a user who isn’t so good with computers in the first place? You are better off choosing participants that will show you as many deficiencies as possible.

An important rule: never invite someone who is a “heavy user” of your site – a member of your editorial team for example, if you have a news website. Of course, there are exceptions when this rule does not apply (e.g. intranet testing), but for the majority of websites, inviting outside people – strangers not familiar with your website – is crucial. Ideally, of course, you would call on people that do not know your site at all. This, however, cannot be done in all cases – if your website targets brokers, an ordinary person won’t be able to help you much.

Another thing to consider is the question of payment for taking the test. You’ll find out in US literature that you should. My personal experience is to invite people without the promise of remuneration but rewarding them at the end anyhow (usually not with money though, but rather in the form of a small gift such as a book).

You may now have a good idea of who to invite. If not, here are a few tips from practice:

• Create a site with a simple questionnaire for people who would like to help with website development and link to it from your site. In a few hours, you are sure to have perhaps hundreds of contacts for willing people.

• If there is a place where users come, e.g. the reception area of a newspaper office where they renew subscriptions, position yourself there and ask directly whether they have time to take the usability test. Another way to do this is for the person on the desk in reception to ask and take the interested users directly to your office.

• Place an ad in the classifieds or post it on your Facebook page.

If you don’t want to do any of the above? We all have friends and acquaintances who don’t even know where we work or have never visited our websites – use them. Just one rule to keep in mind: never, never invite the same person for tests twice, especially if it’s the same test!

Carrying out a usability test

You have a quiet room, you have a computer ready (you’ve tested the recording and mic functionality), you have people coming and you have the assignments ready for them. What now? It’s time to carry out the usability test.

At the beginning of the test, you have to tell people what awaits them. In order not to influence the results, it’s ideal to tell everyone the same thing – that is, read the same text to all of them. You don’t have to come up with the wording on your own; usability expert Steve Krug has done it for you already, so don’t worry. You can download the English version of it here.

The text describes what will happen during the usability test and also includes a printable form of agreement for making sound and video recording. So now you can smoothly begin your assignments.

Now comes the most important part. You could have done everything perfectly up to now, but this is the point when everything can go wrong – your communication during the test. The following are the three most fatal mistakes. Avoiding them and sticking to the following method can make usability testing a brilliant tool.

• Do not help. Do you remember how you deliberately didn’t include specific instructions about what to do? This is exactly what you shouldn’t do either while the test is in process. Let’s say a participant has a problem with completing your assignment (can’t find a link to a page or has forgotten her password). Do not help her under any circumstances. You can try a formulation such as, “Try thinking about it some more”, “What would you do if I were not here?”, or “Unfortunately I can’t help you but as soon as the test is over, I’ll answer any of your questions”. If the participant cannot complete the assignment for a long time, end it. It is difficult not to help a person who is obviously in trouble. I personally managed to “fail” a few times when I administered my first usability test. While it is difficult, it is very important because if you help the participant, you may as well throw the results away because you can’t be sure that you didn’t bring the user somewhere she wouldn’t otherwise have got to on her own. There of course are situations when you can help – for example if a strange window, not relevant to your website, pops up, or the mouse is disconnected, etc. – but don’t ever say, “And why don’t you try clicking here?”

• Ask what they’re thinking about – keep on prompting the participant to say what he’s thinking about, to verbalize what he’s trying to do as much as possible. The instruction to do so was already included in the introductory text you read out at the beginning, however, some participants will tend to forget – you should do all you can to make sure there isn’t silence in the room and the participant speaks as much as possible. That is the key to improving your website – every one of the participant’s thoughts will move you forward.

• Praise and eat humble pie – many people you invite will say, “I’m not smart enough for this” and when they can’t do something, they will repeat the phrase. Participants will constantly feel as if you are testing their abilities. Use every opportunity to disagree with them: “I’m not sure where to click?” “Thank you – you have just found a huge shortcoming in our website. Actually, you’re doing it right, and it’s us who developed the website who got it wrong because you can’t find what you’re looking for.” After the test is over, tell them again how much they have helped you. You can even show them the right solution to their task.

After the test

The first thing that shows you’ve done the usability test right is that the results are absolutely horrible. Users had problems finishing your tasks, you’ve noticed mistakes you made in planning the site, users do things in a very different way than you thought when building the site. These are the results you’re looking for. If you, the website developer, feel miserable, be assured that this is exactly the kind of feeling you needed to reach.

In order to transform the usability test results into a better website, do the following:

• Share the results with everyone – Do not keep, under any circumstance, the test results just to yourself. Let as many colleagues as possible see the video recorded during the test. Definitely show it to designers, project managers and programmers. Don’t be shy to show it to other people who worked on the development of the site. Practically anyone from the team can learn something from a usability test. Before you show them the video, give them a pen and paper and ask them to take notes with ideas on what to change on the web in order to prevent some of the problems the next time around. I’ll bet everyone will have a paper full of various thoughts. Are you all too busy to watch a 5- or 6-hour long recording? Cut the usability test video – leave out the parts where participants succeed in their tasks and pick out the “cherries on the top”.

• Have a discussion and make a list of changes. After watching the video, compare your lists and write the problems on a big board. A huge discussion is surely to arise. A long list will be created. Set a priority for each item – mark the issues according to how big they are.

You will notice as you go along how the view of the web changes in the team. At the beginning of the exercise, someone may say something like, “Are these users completely stupid?” And then, when they see that every test participant had a problem with the same thing, they will go quiet. You will notice the effect of a usability test on the work of the team in the future. A programmer will try to simplify everything as much as possible right in the beginning. A project manager may want to run a usability test during the design stage. The owner will approve a budget for usability tests.

The possibility of seeing users utilizing your site in real time is something that will completely change the way you work.

How to solve issues discovered

One of the things that happens to you after a usability test is that you suddenly get a feeling that you completely need to change your website. You’ll probably feel that it’s badly designed; programmers may arrive with an idea to re-program the whole site. One of the worst things you could do, though, would be succumbing to these temptations.

Any usability issue found can be resolved in two ways: the complex way (total redesign) or the dilettante/superficial way (do the absolute minimum in order to remove the problem). Based on a number of years of experience, I recommend choosing the second option.

If you don’t believe me, take a look at the following list:

Dilettante solution vs. complex solution

• Much less people will be affected by the issue / No one or almost no one will be affected by the error
• Easily implemented / Requires much effort to implement
• Finished in a few minutes, a day the most / Can take a month or two, and may actually never be finished

Complex solutions seem to be clean and thorough. In reality though, it means you are starting from zero. In the end, the fact that you have done it over again doesn’t mean that you have not made the mistakes again or haven’t created new ones. On the contrary, if you redo something completely, you will end up facing a dilemma at the end what to do with the new issues.

Usability expert Steve Krug introduced a rule he calls “Do as little as possible”. Always look for the fastest solution to fix an issue. Only when that doesn’t work, use something more complex.

Here is an overview of Krug’s points:

Do not redesign, tweak (Krug’s No. 1 rule of successful mistake correction)

• Everybody hates redesigns, so if you suggest a wholly new solution, they will complain anyway.
• You may solve your problem with a redesign, however, it’s almost certain you will make at least five other, perhaps more serious, mistakes.
• Do the smallest changes possible – tweak until the problem is solved. If that doesn’t help, revert to a more serious solution.
• It often means that you want to increase the font, change the background color of a message or something along those lines.

Do not add, removing something is much better (Krug’s No. 2 rule of successful mistake correction)

• People usually feel that adding something will work better, let’s say a new notice or phrase. Often, it’s much better to remove something. Most mistakes are actually caused by organization on the site being so complicated that it becomes chaotic. This is a very frequent reason for mistakes.
• Always consider the list of issues in relation to effectiveness. If there are small issues which affect only a few users and would take too long to fix, don’t bother with them. There are probably ten larger issues that can be addressed quickly. Focus on these first and then on the others.

How do you find out whether you have improved the product? Simple, run the same usability test again … with different participants, of course.

Now you know everything important about usability tests. If you’d like to know more, I recommend two of Steve Krug’s books: Don’t make me think and Rocket surgery made easy. They are short, funny and will tell you everything you need to know.

1. Know Your Exit Plan Before You Buy

This is a big, often-overlooked issue and one software providers often don’t like to address. You need to know what file format your data will be when you receive it back. The more standardized the file format, the better. Packages that operate in Microsoft SQL are the best because SQL is widespread and you will find an abundance of programmers to prepare your files for your next package, should you ever have to leave. Most, but not all, large providers use SQL, but smaller providers may use various kinds of freeware or proprietary database structures that are not easily converted to other formats. Always ask what file format your data would be returned in and also ask if there would be any charge to return your data. Some providers make it as difficult as possible to leave and do everything from charging a high fee to return your data to giving it to you in a format which is so archaic that your next software installation is likely to fail. Know your exit plan, before you buy! Don’t assume that software marriages last forever. You may outgrow it down the road or find it just wasn’t the right product for you.

2. Find Out What Kinds Of Support Packages Are Available

If you are buying a package that is worth its salt, it is powerful enough, complicated enough and customizable enough that your use, expansion and improvements in your processes will require ongoing support. Nobody who buys software wants to hear this. Software sales reps want to minimize the cost of the product, and buyers want to hear that it’s turnkey once purchased, but it’s not. Systems that run your business can be tweaked, customized and adjusted to continually improve your business. It’s not a static process. You should find out what kind of ongoing consulting packages are available, and meet regularly (preferably monthly) with your software provider, to address business systems that you find time-consuming or less than optimal. By improving and evolving your systems on a monthly basis, you’ll make your consulting fees back tenfold. Your employee costs will always be your main company costs, not your software costs, so focus on ways of improving efficiency, saving man hours and reducing labor costs and you’ll make a lot more money in the end. Buyers who go into a software relationship on the cheap have high failure rates, don’t fully utilize systems, and never achieve the kind of economic efficiency they can have if they continuously attack inefficient processes within their companies.

3. Drill Down Into The Details

The smartest companies draft up an RFP outlining what features they are hoping to have in their software package and they have the vendors fill them out. The best companies look forward to this comparison and the weaker vendors will not.

4. Require Your Potential Providers To Rank Their Competitors

The good vendors usually know the market and know what they are good at and what they are not good at. Ask them to name their competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. You’ll find out pretty quickly which competitors they respect and those they genuinely think are weak competitors.

5. How Long, How Big and How Many?

Find out how long the vendors have been around. It’s very hard to start a software company and compete with companies with mature products. The mature products have a decade or more of a head start and usually ten million dollars or more in development. Find out how many clients your vendors serve. The ones with the broadest customer base will have larger development staffs and tend to race ahead while other vendors can’t due to their small size. Find out how many full time employees each vendor has. If the answer if five, you should think twice. It’s almost impossible to provide any sort of support and development process with so few employees.

6. Touch The Product

Ask the vendors to use an actual copy of the software. There is no safer way to evaluate than to get your hands dirty and really experiment with the actual product.

7. Don’t Be Sold By “We don’t have that feature, but we’ll throw in custom development of that feature if you’ll sign right here”.

This is what companies that don’t have robust products do to try and get a deal done. Many clients are fooled into thinking that company A is more helpful than company B. But its fool’s gold. Any software company that becomes tied up in custom work for each client won’t be focused on developing new features that serve its overall client base. Custom work adds to maintenance costs of the overall software package and the best companies will focus their efforts on making their software package customizable by you, not trying to create custom reports and features for you. You may be the focus while they are trying to get you to sign on the dotted line, but they’ll move onto the next custom project once you are on board, and you’ll notice that your future needs are not being met because the company’s development staff is doing custom work for the new client. It’s a slippery slope that the best software companies don’t go down.

So, do features matter? Yes, but don’t fail to realize all of the other important considerations when investing in software for your publishing company.

In late May 2013, the Financial Times launched a new, mobile-friendly news service called fastFT. It’s a mixture of traditional news wire and Twitter-like stream with an emphasis on speed and brevity, delivered both in a newsfeed on FT.com as well as on the standalone page. The article “6 product development lessons from how the Financial Times built fastFT” summarizes lessons to be learned from the product development.

Is it the right time to erect a pay-wall?

Before making a decision, you should know the answer to the following basic questions:

• Is the volume of traffic to my site sufficiently saturated or does it continue to grow significantly, thus leaving some space for traffic growth (due to e.g. the growth of penetration of internet connection or consolidation on the local market)?
• Are the visitors to my site sufficiently loyal? What proportion of the traffic consists of returning visitors? What is the average amount of time spent on page per user? How many pages on average are visited by a user? How often do readers return to my page during a day/week/month?
• If traffic to my site drops due to the introduction of a pay-wall, will it jeopardize revenues from online advertising? What percentage of my monthly ad inventory is sold? What will it mean for revenues should the decline in the number of unique visitors be 10% and the decrease in the number of page views reaches 20%? (The percentage of drop in traffic here is only illustrative – it may vary according to the form of pay-wall and many other variables, however, it is advisable to prepare several scenarios that will make the theoretical implications of introducing a pay-wall clear ahead of time.)
• What are you going to charge for? It is not only your premium content that your visitors are willing to pay for. Do not be afraid to experiment – you can charge for many different features or services on your website, not just for access to content itself. To give you a few examples, you can charge for additional features to your online weather forecast, you can charge for readers’ comments to articles, m-version of your website, ad-free version, uncut versions of interviews, or earlier access to articles from the printed edition.
• Will you be the first on your market to introduce a pay-wall? If not, what success have your direct or indirect competitors had with the pay-wall? What did they do wrong and what can you learn?
• How popular and developed are online payments in your market? Are online transactions available and how wide-spread are they? Do your local banks support recurring payments (these are crucial for any subscription!)? Have your local banks developed an interface for e-banking payments? What are the most popular other forms of payment on the Internet (e.g. SMS payments, pre-paid card, cash on delivery, etc.) Note: without having the ability to enable readers to pay quickly and easily, the success of the introduction of charging for your content is very dubious.
• Will you develop the system of online subscription internally or will you prefer to use the service of external companies which specialize in pay-walls and have optimized tools and experience gathered from previous implementations?
• Do you have a clear idea about the pricing for accessing your content? Are you planning to conduct a survey among your online readers to determine the boundary between a “low” and a “high” price? Attempts to make online subscription cheap – or, more precisely, affordable to the public – have at large proven not to be effective. The introduction of a pay-wall does not lead to a mass conversion of visitors into subscribers and so it is reasonable to set the price not too low, so that effective marketing could attract random subscribers and then you have to try to keep them at normal price. You may also consider price discrimination for companies or organizations (discounts for volume licensing) while offering a price advantage for the financially disadvantaged (students, seniors).
• Will the introduction of a charge include any other forms of your electronic assets (e.g.  mobile phone version, mobile applications, tablets, e-ink device version)? Making use of “opt-out” print-digital bundle offers you an opportunity to boost circulation revenue by delivering more value to existing subscribers. Under this approach, print subscribers are automatically enrolled in a digital access subscription at an additional cost unless they opt out of the enrollment.
• How much will the implementation of the pay-wall (whether internal or external) cost? What fees are associated with the various forms of payments available for accessing your digital subscription? What time should be allocated for the implementation of the pay-wall? How much time will be allocated to marketing communications and/or free trial?
• What form of charging will best suit the needs of your title: do you offer specialized coverage, which cannot be found anywhere else on the market? Or is there a real danger that following the introduction of a pay-wall, the readers will begin to migrate to the competition where a similar type of information and its processing can be found free of charge? Is it therefore more appropriate to introduce a metered pay-wall?

“I don’t want to and I won’t pay”

First of all – charging for online content meets with resistance from readers, which can be summarized into two groups. One group protests in the following manner: why do I have to pay for access to content when I already pay for the Internet connection to my ISP? Why are revenues from online ads not sufficient to cover the costs associated with the production of content?

Another group of people opposes a different way: charging for access to content on the Internet is in direct conflict with the Internet’s very essence, i.e. the free dissemination of information. Restricting free access to information is a limitation of the freedom of speech and is thus in conflict with the principles of democracy.

I think there is no need to disprove these arguments – it is more than obvious that such arguments are based on distorted, sometimes naive ideas about the online ecosystem and free access to information. Of course, when free of charge access to an online edition of a newspaper has been provided for over a decade, naturally, a habit has been created and therefore the resistance to any change is very strong. And it will probably take several years from the introduction of a pay-wall for the average reader of online newspapers to adjust to the new paradigm – i.e. that not all sources of information on the Internet are for free.

Therefore, when deciding whether to start charging, it is necessary to develop a consistent communication campaign, which helps to explain the objective reasons for the introduction of charging. Results of a survey used in the study “Paying for What Was Free: Lessons from the New York Times Pay-wall” suggest that people react negatively to paying for previously free content but change can be facilitated with compelling justifications that emphasize fairness. Framing the pay-wall in terms of financial necessity moderately increased support and willingness to pay (find more here).

Which kind of payment will you choose?

There are several approaches to charging for online content. So far, the most effective way of charging for content shows to be the metered pay-wall – the publisher sets a limit to the number of articles accessible free of charge for a certain period of time (e.g. 20 articles per month); as soon as the reader exceeds the set limit, the system prompts for payment (or registration with subsequent payment). This method of charging for content does not fundamentally jeopardize your website traffic and thus does not ruin your advertising sales (it is commonly known that a vast majority of visitors is not very loyal – they do not read more than a few articles per month; of course, details of your visitors’ behavior and their reading habits need to be carefully examined prior to defining the limit for free articles in case of a metered pay-wall – some interesting insights might be found here).

In addition, the homepage or the section fronts tend to be excluded from the measurement of the number of pages visited by a metered pay-wall – visiting these is not real content consumption. You are free to decide what to exclude from the metered pay-wall count – I would strongly suggest excluding content generated by users (e.g. blogs, users’ comments to articles, discussion forums, etc.). In addition, I recommend imagining a situation when you do not want your visitors to be constrained by charging fees for access to your content (e.g. emergency situations or special coverage of important social events in your country, when you want Internet users to choose your coverage as primary source of information). As soon as you incorporate a functionality that disables the counting of traffic of a given article against the set limit of the pay-wall into your CMS, it will allow your newsroom to play an active social role.

Apart from the metered pay-wall model, you have an option to use the so-called “hard” pay-wall. Using this approach, you disallow your readers to access your content without having to pay a fee. This model, chosen by London’s The Times, had caused a substantial decrease in traffic to their website (reportedly over 90%). This form of a pay-wall model is recommended more for very specialized and exclusive type of information – not for general interest news. You can combine both models (metered and hard-lock), although it will probably lead to a confusion among your readers and it will be more difficult to explain why there are different rules in place within the same website.

What are the hosted solutions?

Micropayments (also pay-per-view) – Charging readers a very small amount of money for single pieces of online content never gained much popularity among Internet users. The main disadvantage comes from the fact that processing fees charged by the payment processor are quite significant. That is why the idea has never really taken off with publishers. An alternative would be micro-donations – users have the option to easily donate small amounts of money.

• Flattr.com – bank transactions and overhead costs are involved only on funds withdrawn from the recipient’s accounts.
• PayPal.com – offers support for micropayments to merchants for US to US, GB to GB, AU to AU, and EU to EU transactions only. This feature is offered at a special rate of 5% + $0.05 per transaction.
• Znak it! – creates a virtual currency „znaks“, which can be purchased through PayPal. Znak it! fee is 6% from a transaction.

Metered pay-wall – metering enables casual readers to continue sampling content for free – so it does not impact SEO or limit exposure for “big” stories that cause traffic spikes. The only readers asked to pay under the metered model are the readers most likely to pay – the ones getting the most value from your content.

• Cleeng – offers micropayments, metered pay-wall or subscription model. Pricing models and features differ, Cleeng charges a flat rate to publishers. There is no commission rate for conversions – more details.
• Press+ – focused on metered solution since 2009, the leading digital subscription system for publishers in the US, now serving over 440 affiliates worldwide.
• TinyPass – offers metered pay-walls, micropayments, and downloads as well. User’s initial fee is deposited on an account and debited by payments.
• MediaPass – metered and hard-lock pay-wall product, mainly designed for bloggers.
• Piano Media – a national pay-wall system, Piano gets a 30% cut of the proceeds and divides up the rest to partner sites. In 2013 Piano introduced metered system which can be applied in conjunction with their national pay-wall (hard-lock or freemium) model or separately. (Disclosure: The author of this article worked for Piano Media.)

Alternatives – value exchange for access to content, visitors choose to complete an action you define (engagement advertising, take part at a microsurvey) or they can subscribe to access the content.

• Google Consumer Surveys – consumer surveys work as a pay-wall: a reader visiting your content have the option of responding to a survey to access content for free.
• DoubleRecall – adds interactive advertising to users and then allows them to read the article after interaction for the rest of the day. “Captcha” content release system based on a premise – users may prefer typing in two ad words per article than paying for content.
• Social Vibe – similar to Double Recall, an interactive advertisement suited for integration into an overall monetary plan.
• SponsorPay – an advertising monetization platform emphasizes mainly mobile interactive ad experiences in exchange for access mainly to games.

News start-ups covering specific niches such as technology or politics are finding the most commercial success in using events, and general interest news groups are using events build audience and increase audience loyalty, which has also had a positive impact on revenue. In fact, some news groups have even regretted not pursuing events as a possible revenue stream, which was part of a larger lack of business focus at launch, Batsell said.

“A lot of news start-ups tend to come from very idealistic roots, from journalists who haven’t had much business training, and they feel like if they go out and do great watchdog journalist that it will pay for itself,” he said, adding, “That is not always the case.”

His research on events, which has been released in a peer-reviewed paper and will be included in an upcoming book, explores how to decide whether an events strategy is right for you and how to develop that strategy.

In a presentation (see at the end of the article) at the International Symposium of Online Journalism in April, Batsell summarised the best practices he identified in 100 interviews with more than 20 news organisations during his research.

• Designate an event planner.
• Seek out sponsors to make money.
• Networking is a key attraction for attendees.
• Build support in the newsroom.
• Provide memorable experiences.
• Don’t expect a “golden goose”, a huge revenue generator, “but with an authentic approach, events can produce revenue and audience goodwill – preferably both.”

Evaluate the opportunity costs

“I think there is an opportunity in just about any market to put together some kind of event that is going to be meaningful to your community, to assemble your community in a way that only you can as a media outlet,” Batsell said.

Almost every community has key business or cultural groups that can form the basis of an event, and asking the right questions will help you evaluate the opportunity:

• Are there leading business communities in your area, such as agricultural, technology, transportation or the media, that you could create an event to serve?
• Could you provide these groups an opportunity network?
• Do you already have special sections covering these business areas?
• Does your community have key cultural dates during the year that you could create an event around?

Identifying the most promising business or cultural group or demographic will help you identify sponsorship opportunities and estimate potential income.

To be successful with events, Batsell suggests appointing a person who is responsible for the events business.   He said:

Ideally, if you have a director of events, that is great, but not everybody can afford that. If you’re a newsroom who has a social media manager or community relationships manager, that might be a place to go where someone can handle that on part-time basis.

In some instances, a journalist or journalists will be involved, to host and/or cover the event, and Batsell says that key in determining whether or not to pursue and events strategy is to determine the opportunity costs of the staff involved. The opportunity cost is the value of the best opportunity that you have to forego to carry out your event. In other words, does the value, both commercially and editorially, of hosting an event outweigh the staff time spent doing existing responsibilities or another activity?

Build sponsorships

While some event strategies are focused more on building audience numbers, loyalty or both, most events are developed with a specific commercial goal. To be successful commercially with events, sponsorships are essential because the bulk of revenue from events is generated by sponsorships, not ticket sales.

It is essential to identify clear sponsorship opportunities early, at the project evaluation stage. If you can’t locate enough sponsors, or if sponsors aren’t willing to pay enough to help you earn meaningful revenue from the event, you might want to either change the type of event or drop it entirely.

Batsell says that is why it is essential to have a member of staff whose job, either part-time or full-time, it is to develop the events.  He said:

You have to have a point person coordinating these events and seeking sponsorship for these events because that is really where these events make their money. It’s not through ticket sales. It’s through finding a good corporate sponsor who wants to put themselves in front of a demographically desirable audience that a news start-up can assemble.

Build newsroom support

After analysing your market and weighing the opportunity costs, Batsell found that news leaders need to make sure that they solicit the support of journalists and editors. He said:

There are still many journalists who were trained that journalism and business were separate entities that should never be mixed. Of journalists that I encountered at these events, some were very comfortable, more or less serving as emcees at these events and intertwining it with their journalism. Others were not so much. They saw it as a marketing exercise, and that is not what they signed up for when they went to journalism school.

If I were a news manager of newsroom where there were some sceptics, what I would point out to these journalists. “Hey, if this can generate more revenue that can save more jobs and pay for more journalism, aren’t we all for that?” I think some managers are better than others at communicating that goal and underscoring to your staff that being ambassadors for your brand and reaching out to your audience in person is part of the job these days. There may be some resistance to that in the DNA of journalists but you gotta get past that because it can help feed the journalism.

Successful examples

Batsell found the most financially successful examples were those news organisations or news start-ups that targeted a commercially desirable demographic and gave them opportunities to network.

Geekwire

In Seattle, he looked at Geekwire, a site that covers the tech start-up community. In 2012, they held nine events which made up 40 percent of their total revenue, boasting a 20 percent profit margin. The events include their tech start-up awards, which provide not only sponsorship but also a chance to generate coverage for the site. Other events are just for fun and act to bring their audience together socially, such as a ping pong tournament. The events are “designed to bring the local tech community together like no one else does”.

Geekwire was profitable during their first full year, but they fell just short of profitability in 2012. Co-founder Todd Bishop told Batsell the shortfall was partly due to costs they inherited from an event they took over from another organisation, which highlights some of the challenges of events. “Events are not a panacea,” Batsell said.

Texas Tribune

Texas Tribune is a non-profit news organisation in Texas that provides coverage of state government. They have a number of events including a regular series called Trib Live, in which Texas Tribune editors and journalists interview newsmakers in front of a live audience. In addition to streaming the video on the Texas Tribune site, it is also streamed on Facebook.

It is paid for by a small number of corporate sponsors. Batsell said:

It’s free to the public, but it often produces news content. Newsmakers say newsworthy things, and the insiders feel like they have to be there. There are 200 to 250 lobbyists with legislative staff at 730 in the morning at the Austin Club, all there convened by the Texas Tribune.

The Texas Tribune makes about 20 percent of its total revenue through events. As a non-profit, the Texas Tribune has a number of sources of revenue and financial support, including foundation support, member contributions and sponsorship. Last year, their revenues were higher than their costs.

Mount Pleasant Sun

The Sun is a newspaper in Mount Pleasant Michigan, and they held an Art Walk event in conjunction with the local arts council. They set up a satellite newsroom at the event and had staff working there for half the day over several days during the event. They didn’t have corporate sponsors, but they did have a special tabloid advertising section in conjunction with the event.

Batsell said events like this were difficult to analyse in terms of success. While it was good for the community, the commercial outcome was more difficult to assess, and Batsell said that in cases like this, being clear about the opportunity costs were key in helping news organisations decide whether this was the best use of their resources.

WBEZ radio Chicago

WBEZ is a public radio station in Chicago. Public broadcasting in the US is supported through a mix of listener contributions, corporate sponsorships and some public funding. Like most public radio stations in the US, WBEZ broadcasts a mix of news, discussion programmes, music and cultural programmes. They have an eclectic range of events, which they believe appeals to their listener members such as themed movie nights or Chicago chef competitions. WBEZ says that the goal of their events is to create a memorable experience that people associate with WBEZ.

While it was again difficult to quantify the success of these events, WBEZ did have some indication that events were playing a part in maintaining their member support. Over the past five years, the number of contributing members had gone down, but the amount of contribution per member had risen. Public radio stations solicit contributions and new members on-air in what they call pledge drives, and they have been able to reduce the number of pledge drive days by 30 percent despite the lower number of members. “Events are a piece of that, but it’s not the only part,” Batsell said.

While success might be difficult to quantify in every instance, Batsell believes that events can be a key alternative revenue stream for news organisations. He said, “I think that every news organisation needs to explore because the opportunities are there.”

Here is the presentation that Batsell gave at the International Symposium on Online Journalism:

Since the days of the Dead Sea Scrolls, it has been about finding the best and most effective system for production and distribution of content. Gutenberg simplified the work but the digital revolution has opened a world of new possibilities.

In my eyes, too many of our colleagues listen too much to the companies that are trying to sell a product based on old ideas, instead of using some energy to figure out what they really need.

If you’re planning to start a war, it would probably be smart to invest in an aircraft carrier. But if you’re only interested in checking out the local waters or doing a spot of fishing, you’d be better off with a small speedboat or a canoe.

If you are a TV-station, a radio station or a newspaper with a tight budget, I would go for the speedboat. It is fast when needed, easy to manoeuvre and has small operating costs.

Go open source – unless you’re building the Eiffel Tower

I have worked with online media for about 15 years and haven’t seen many products that I really like. Very few of the CMS companies have shown a real interest in the needs of news organisations. I have seen a lot of great engineering, but we’re not looking to build another Eiffel Tower. We just need a publishing system that reporters can easily learn to operate and which gives us the ability to publish quickly to a (hopefully) fast-growing audience on smart phones and computers.  If it also is scalable and open to modern thinking, even better.

As a grumpy old man  I’m not even a big fan of WordPress, but I love the idea of WordPress being open source and it’s the first place to look. Second in line is Drupal, which is preferred in some markets – like Russia – because it is easier to find programmers.  Though there are some competitors emerging in the open source world, for now in most markets it will be wise to go for WordPress.

When I strongly recommend open source, it is – among many other things – about money. If you can save costs on technical investment and instead hire one or two people with technical skills to work with you in the newsroom, you’ve got a much better chance of seeing the kind of development you’re dreaming of.

Another good reason for choosing open source is that thousands of people are working for you; when they develop plugins for Drupal or WordPress, you can also use them.

A last point: choosing open source will also save you a lot of time. Instead of spending time on negotiating with a company that is trying to sell you more than you need, you can just start working.

The commercial option

If you insist on something more specialised for news production and with a higher possibility of finding help or support at all times of the day, there are companies that can deliver decent products. The stand-out reason for choosing a commercial CMS is guaranteed support.  However, while that might feel good, it can be expensive and rarely necessary.

The worst result of choosing a commercial CMS is that you will be lagging behind in development. Because you spend so much money to buy it, you probably won’t be able to afford to hire technically skilled employees, which means you will be stuck with a system that normally is not very flexible or open to new ideas.

It is when we can go outside the borders of a CMS that we can create the journalism of the future though, to be realistic, at least 90 per cent of our content will for years to come be produced and published inside the safe confines of a CMS.

Don’t build your own

The only thing you never should do is build it on your own. Some clever developers might explain that they can build something better than the CMS’s that are already out there. They might be right, but you don’t have the time and money for that. And you don’t want a system that is built so only one person knows how it really works, and only one person can maintain it.

What I’m looking for is more or less a blank piece of paper the reporters can fill with words, images and hopefully something that shows you are a website, not a newspaper or a TV station. If you do that wisely, including smart tagging your content, and are able to present the content on a nice front page or gain traffic through social media, you are well on your way.

It’s as simple as that. Later, if you can see that it works, that traffic is growing and ad sales or a paywall are creating good revenue, you can consider going to the next level and invest a little more in your software and hardware.

Change comes slowly to the print business

I have worked  30 years in the newspaper business. It is surprising how slowly it has developed, even if the technical evolution or revolution made many changes possible years ago.

It is a bit depressing to see that newspaper companies with a serious decline  in circulation and a nicely growing online business still spend more resources on discussing the situation of the declining  part of the industry, rather than discussing what to do with the growing part.

Luckily, in some areas of the world we can see growing newspaper circulation, but even there it looks like the future will be digital.  As they say, the future is already here, and digital means probably mobile.

From mobile, for mobile

Start thinking how you can best produce content for the mobile platform. Figure out how you can publish text, photos and video from mobile for mobile, instead of thinking how you can forward the content from today’s paper – that was written yesterday – to digital platforms.

Soon we will all be working in digital because that’s where the biggest growth will be. Even if the old media platforms are still providing a better business now, it looks like we will see digital growth for many years to come and we need to focus our efforts on the digital arena to see how we can build a viable business for the future.

And maybe we might even strengthen today’s core business and core products by spending more energy on digital development.

But there is no reason to over-invest in technical solutions. It is better to spend money on programmers and reporters, instead of paying for a product you only use a part of.

I had the pleasure to meet a group of Arabic reporters in Egypt a few years ago. I discussed web-TV with brave women, some with veils and some in smart European clothing,  and men, both in jellabiya and with a casual Western look. After a great day of journalistic work, some wanted advice on what camera they should buy, which editing system they should choose and which videoplayer to invest  in for their website.

I believe that’s the wrong place to start. You can make decent quality video with an old cell phone and fantastic video with a new smartphone without a lot of investment. You can edit it with freeware and you can publish it with YouTube and embed it on your site. Some of the reporters looked a little bit disappointed with my answer, but there is no point in investing heavily until you can see that there is growing interest. If you see that your users are enjoying it, you can move to the next level. Maybe buy a microphone and FinalCut or Adobe Premiere for the editing.

I mostly use an Android smartphone with a standard built-in video camera, but I have also seen impressive videos filmed and edited on an iPhone, published on YouTube and then embedded in articles.

This will unfortunately not give you the possibility of selling your own pre-rolls on the video, but you can move to that when you can see that your audience likes what you’re doing.

So, the same thinking applies to video or web-TV as to a CMS. Start simple and move forward to more complicated and more expensive products only when you feel the time – and money – is right.

What about the newspaper?

Many newspaper guys rolls their eyes when I complain about the old fashioned newspaper CMS. I get a lecture on the importance of stability, history, importance of archive systems and the danger of simplifying too much.

Well, it’s really just about writing and editing articles, storing them in a secure place and placing the articles and pictures on templated or designed pages so they can be printed, distributed and hopefully sold and read.

If you can use your online CMS  for all text-based content production, it should be possible to export it to a page-making system, maybe a cheaper variation of Adobe InDesign.

If we look a few years ahead, I’m pretty sure this will be the way we will all work. But then we will need old guys like me in media houses to forget about how things used to be and try to imagine how it might be in the future.

One good test is to ask yourself what you would do if you were starting in the news business tomorrow. That answer will probably be pretty far from how you are organised and how your technical set-up looks today.

Could your organization use Google docs for content production and storage, instead of something that comes with a multimillion cost? I know some have tried it and I know it worked out on some smaller projects. One of the best examples is Bangor News in Maine, USA. A very small Norwegian newspaper is now trying to copy the use of Google docs for writing, WordPress for publishing online and InDesign for the paper production.

Here is one early article on the project in Bangor News  and a search for Bangor, WordPress and Google docs will give you more inspiration and information, such as this article from the developer who helped create the system.

 In summary:

• Don’t ask the multimillion dollar CMS industry what they would like to sell you.
• Ask yourselves what you need and try to find cheap or free products that meet your requirements.
• Spend the money you save on programmers and reporters – and ad sales!
• Start simple and move on if you can see your traffic and business growing.
• Forget what is nice to have until you need to have it.

Remember that relevant content, published at the right moment and presented in a way that gets people interested is much more important than the technical solution. But remember that the content has no value if your site is unstable, so don’t take it too easy.

And you should still try to figure out how you would organize your business and what kind of hardware and software you would like to have if you were starting your media company tomorrow.

You can’t change from reality to your dream in a week, but you will be better off if you start moving in that direction.

In a statement, Patrick Grove, CEO of Catcha Media was transparent about the goal of the RM60 m (nearly $20 m) tie-up:

Digital marketing is the future; social media marketing is the apex of this future and is the fastest growing media category on the planet.

This new company offers a tremendous opportunity to dominate the future of digital marketing in Malaysia by pairing two clear leaders in the space in a manner that creates a holistic and complete solution for any brand looking to ride the crest of the new media wave.

It is not just a general new media trend that Catcha is looking to ride but rather the group hopes to take advantage of Malaysians’ social media obsession. Says.com is a social news aggregator that crowdsources trending news items from social media users. It encourages these social media leaders to curate and share news items by paying them when they share advertiser-sponsored content. It’s a low-cost editorial model that differs greatly from traditional news sites, but it is a model that has attracted major global brands including Nike, Coca-Cola and Nestlé.

“Says.com is designed to put advertiser content at the centre of social attention, positioning brands to capture the new generation of consumers,” site co-founder and CEO Khailee Ng told Digital News Asia. Says operates country-specific sites, and Ng says the site is looking to expand to the Philippines, Singapore and India, according to the Next Web. Ng added that the two companies saw a number of opportunities for the “future of advertising” in combining Says.com’s model of social media distribution and Catcha Media’s content.

Catcha Media is building what it hopes will be one of the most profitable new media businesses across Southeast Asia, and Grove said that the Catcha Media will be considering an initial public offering in the next 12 months. It operates Microsoft’s online presence in Malaysia, including the MSN portal and Windows Live site. The group also has 15 national magazines, an Asian auto classifieds business and a luxury goods e-commerce site, Hauteavenue.com. The merger of content, classifieds and e-commerce mirrors the international strategies of other media groups such as Scandinavia’s Schibsted and South Africa’s Naspers.

The fight for advertising

While Says.com doesn’t look like or work like a traditional news website, its low-cost editorial model smartly leverages the intense social media activity in South and Southeast Asia.

One of the most damaging mistakes that news groups in developed digital markets have made was to underestimate the impact of non-traditional news sites like Says.com on the business of journalism. Too many editors, journalists and ad teams didn’t realise the competitive threat these sites posed, either because they defined their competitors too narrowly, seeing only other newspapers or broadcasters as competition, or because they sneered at what they saw as low quality content.

With this merger, it should be clear that Catcha and Says.com mean business, and they already count lucrative international advertisers as customers. In the digital era, anyone who competes for digital advertising is your competitor, and as publishers, media executives and sales team leaders, you need to be able to compete not just against your traditional competitors but also this new breed of business.

To respond to this threat:

• Think of how you can fight for the attention of social media users. Develop strategies to reflect, capture and retain the attention of social media users in your audience.
• Don’t narrowly define your competition for attention and advertising too narrowly as digital grows. Newspapers and magazines are producing more audio and video that could compete with broadcasters, and any ad-supported site is a competitor for digital ad revenue.
• Be creative with your advertising products and strategy. The business and advertising model of Says.com isn’t complicated, but it has obviously been attractive to advertisers. How can you make your advertising products more social?
• Know your audience, which in digital means investing in market research and analytics. It will make for stronger journalism and a stronger proposition for advertisers.

It’s also important in the early stages of the digital transition in your market to be proactive in developing not just your digital editorial but also your digital business. This will put you on a better footing to compete with national and international players when they enter your market.

When that many tweets are flowing by, it’s very hard to make sense of it all. Fortunately, there are a number of ways a journalist can manage Twitter as well as advanced search techniques to help them find the updates, photos and videos that they want.

Twitter search: The basics

When you first search something on Twitter, it will show you tweets, updates, that relate to your search.

1. Twitter first shows you “Top” tweets, tweets from people or accounts with a larger number of followers or tweets that have been retweeted often. You can also filter your search to people you follow or see all tweets.

2. If you look to the left of the updates that relate to your search, you will see accounts that relate to your search under the heading of people as well as images under the heading Top Photos and videos under the heading Top Videos.

When your search returns updates from prominent people, if you see a check mark in a blue rippled circle, this means that Twitter has verified the account. For instance, this is the official account of Malaysian member of parliament Anwar Ibrahim. That doesn’t mean that updates from prominent people without the check aren’t verified, but it does give you some confidence with well-known figures that you have an official account.

Twitter search: Advanced options

Similar to Google and other search engines, there are a number of advanced search options and some options unique to Twitter. Clicking on the gear icon in the upper right hand reveals a drop-down menu with three options:

1. Save search
2. Advanced search
3. Embed this search

Before looking at the advanced options, we’ll look at the other two options. Saving searches can be helpful not only in keeping searches that you commonly do but also in applications that help you monitor Twitter and other social media services, such as Twitter’s Tweetdeck or Hootsuite. Saved searches allow you to have a column featuring the results of that search.

For instance in Tweetdeck, below, you can add columns allowing you to monitor your favourites, your searches, replies to you or hashtags all at the same time. On the Twitter website, you can access all of this information, but you cannot have multiple columns with this information. Tweetdeck and other social media dashboard applications are commonly used by journalists monitoring social media.

To add a column to Tweetdeck:

1. Click on the plus symbol inside a button.
2. That will bring up a window with all of the options for columns you can add including columns of your saved searches, Twitter lists, direct messages or replies. You can also add a column with your Facebook news feed.

Tweetdeck and other tools are a very useful way for journalists to monitor social media, and we’ll cover these tools in future guides.

Now, looking back at the other search options in Twitter. You can embed the results of the search in another site using one of Twitter’s widgets. Note, the results of the search can be set to update as new results arrive. Search is only one widget that you can create. We will also cover the widgets in Twitter at another time.

Finally, we return to the advanced search options. The options are broken down into three different sections: Words, people and places.

1. Words

This section will be immediately familiar to anyone who has used the advanced search options common to major search engines including Google or Yandex. You can search by any or all words or an exact phrase. If you add keywords to “None of these words”, it will exclude words from your search. If you are seeing results unrelated to what you are searching for and have a common search term, you can exclude that term to deliver more relevant results.

You can also search by a hashtag, a keyword preceded by the # symbol that is used by Twitter users to organise updates around an event or topic.

One very useful element for international journalists is the ability to search by language. While not comprehensive, the search by language option allows you to search by all of the languages most popular on Twitter including Russian, Spanish and Bahasa Indonesia, to name a few. One major language it does not include is Chinese.

2. People

You can also filter your search based on accounts, so you can filter you search from a certain account or accounts or that mention an account.

3. Places

The final option allows you to filter your search by a place. This can be especially useful if you want updates only from accounts near an event rather than people mentioning an event, such as during a disaster or bombing. Twitter uses information from where Twitter users say they are in their profiles or location added by phones with GPS or other location technology. Many Twitter users never change the location in their profile so the location would imprecise and possibly inaccurate. Try to contact the user to verify the location.

If you see a map pin, similar to the pins used on Google maps in a Twitter update, the location was added by a smartphone or added by an image that had location embedded in it. You can be more confident with the accuracy of the location of updates with these pins, and the location will be more precise.

Twitter: More advanced options

There are even more options that are only available by adding text options to your search. These options can be very powerful, but they are only available on a special search page that is not easily found on Twitter’s site. Here is their search option guide, available from the “operators” link on the search page.

Many of these operators are simply text versions of the advanced search options. For instance, putting two or more keywords in quotes, e.g. “Zambia elections”, will look only for that exact phrase. This will return the same results as the exact phrase option in the advanced search. Adding a ‘-‘ in front of a word will exclude that word from the search, which is like the ‘None of these words’ option in the advanced search.

However, there are options that are only available using these text operators. For instance, if you use the options, since:2010-12-27 or until:2010-12-27, it will only show updates since 27 December 2010 or until 27 December 2010. There is no other way to filter by date using Twitter search except by using these operators.

Another option only available using these operators is the ability to filter by a more precise location. For instance, you can search for updates posted 5km from the centre of Jakarta with the following search, “near:Jakarta within:5km”.

You can also filter your search for specific types of media. You can filter updates that include links, photos or videos by adding the filter option. For instance, you can add filter:images to the previous search to find all updates with images 5km from the centre of Jakarta.

These search operators will have to be written in English, but you can use other languages as search terms.

With these search tools, you can quickly find the updates you want and that are relevant to the stories you are covering. You can tame the flood of updates and find what you want quickly and on deadline.