Jake Ludington’s Digital Lifestyle

Most magazine and newspaper articles waste our time. They start off with meat and gradually work their way to fluff, before wrapping everything up by summarizing what you just read. Instead of wading through the fluff, try reading the 100 word summaries available at Brijit.com. It’s like a Reader’s Digest for information overload. Summaries are tight. You get a good sense for what’s going on in the world without needing every word from the real article. If you want to know more, you can always click past Brijit and read the full article. Think of Brijit as a free personal assistant providing a daily summary of important topical events. Summaries include The Economist, Time, The New Yorker, Fortune, Wired, and a host of more general high level topics so you can track your favorite niche.

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As a parent, I’m regularly offering carrots in exchange for the things I want my son to do. If you put your toys in your toy box first, you can watch your favorite show; if you read me this book first, I’ll play that game with you, etc. In most cases, this is a great way to get the results you want without having to butt heads in the process.

This same methodology also works for self-motivation, if you’re willing to stick to the requirements you set for yourself. While I love what I’m doing most of the time, there are days where my projects seem somewhat tedious. To get past it I set similar rewards for myself. Finish editing that how to video and you can play Xbox games for the 30 minutes it will be encoding is a common one. For bigger projects, like the ebook I’m currently working on, I break the project down into smaller chunks and reward myself for completing a new chunk.

A more famous example of this is the Martini Method used by A Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess. Burgess was a prolific writer, supposedly penning 1000 words a day every day of the year. Upon finishing his daily word count, Burgess rewarded himself with a Martini (or three) and relaxed for the rest of the day. While I’m not advocating being a functioning alcoholic, there’s method to this madness in getting what you need accomplished while still enjoying the things you love. Shane over at Academic Productivity talks about the Martini Method in more detail, along with several other ways to tackle large projects. He frames it in the context of completing your PhD, but you could easily apply the process to any large project in your life.

If you’ve got your own methods for completing tasks, feel free to share them in the comments.

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It’s exciting to see Robert Scoble is headed for Fast Company. Robert’s got the guts to push the comfort zone of what is a more traditional publishing company and Fast Company has the editing talent to help channel some of Robert’s enthusiasm in a way that should show us some of his best work to date. As a side note, if everyone made career decisions with the kind of thinking that Robert outlines in his list of reasons for going to Fast Company more people would be working at things they love instead of showing up for jobs they hate.

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I’ve never written for a newspaper, but my mom did. I held jobs at both the Des Moines Register and my hometown paper, The Altoona Herald. I still fondly remember the smell of newsprint filling the air when I stepped into the Herald’s offices each week.

I do make a living writing online, which is why I’m weighing in on the latest announcement of newspaper financial woes. Newspapers are no longer printed paper businesses. They are news gathering and distribution companies who should be engaging all viable means of delivery to reach the widest possible audience. The information provided by newspaper companies has tremendous value, which makes it troubling to see that newspapers are cutting the most important assets in their business; the people who write the news.
According to Joe Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle,

” Eighty reporters, photographers, copy editors and others, as well as 20 employees in management positions are expected to be laid off by end of the summer.”

The Chronicle is one of the papers doing a decent job of making their Website worth visiting and apparently it’s not making a difference on their bottom line. Clearly newspapers need to do something different.

The Chronicle’s woes are being widely reported on blogs, without any real suggestions for resolution. As someone who makes a living publishing online, here are a few key observations that might save the newspaper industry from changing times:

Accountability for Search Engine Ranking – Every newspaper in the United States (the world?) needs something like a Chief Search Officer. Search drives traffic, which ultimately translates to more ad views. Search rankings for newspapers in general are abysmal, largely because papers haven’t designed their sites to make them search friendly. Search should not fall under the CTO responsibilities, it should be a separate task force. Create a search team, make them accountable for increasing traffic from both organic and paid results. This also means sites like the New York Times need to allow the search team to knock down the pay wall and make the story archives available to the world.

Newspapers Need Video – if declining ad revenue due to lost ad channels like classifieds are a problem, invent new ad channels. Every newspaper should be doing video on the Web today. The ad rates for video are significantly higher than text advertising. The newspaper sites that embrace video will be the newspaper sites still thriving for the next 50 years. Maybe it’s time for the Chronicle to get re-married to KRON to re-form (reform?) a local multimedia powerhouse.

Think Global About Your Locale – Newspapers are experts on their communities. Newspapers are lousy at promoting their communities to anyone outside the community. When I take a trip, for business or pleasure, I search the Web for information about the place I’m visiting. I almost never see newspaper sites in my search queries. If I visit newspaper sites specifically, the leisure information is almost always geared toward locals who already know the community, which makes it hard for an outsider to navigate. When people take vacations, they plan their trips around sites to see and things to do. Newspapers could be the authority on these topics if they simply focused on providing travel information to outsiders as part of their Web offerings.

Think Local about Your Locale – Better local coverage of the things people in the community care about means increased community participation. Cover the local sports teams (I mean high school and little league, not the Giants and A’s) – you’ll get relatives from all over the country reading and the pass-along factor will be higher. Cover more local business news beyond new business openings and closings. Get every writer on the staff to write about their favorite places to eat – they don’t need to be food critics to know what they like.

Keep Your Best Assets – The reporters and journalists at a paper are the papers reason d’etre. Instead of firing them, change the way they are compensated for their efforts. Many of the blogging conglomerates offer performance bonuses to blog authors based on the amount of traffic they drive to the site. This may mean picking story topics with a wider appeal, or it may mean grunt work engaging potentially interested communities by commenting on forums and blogs. Writers may resist this notion, but if they are doing their jobs, they’re already lurking in these online communities in the first place. If they aren’t willing to engage online communities, give ‘em the boot.

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