The Breakdown: In this week’s SXSW Q&A, we talk with Margaret Wheeler Johnson (@mwjohnso), Editor of HuffPost Women, about her panel “Is Women’s Media Too Girly?” Along with a stellar group of panelists, she will explore the rise and implications of “girly” media.

Scatter/Gather: How do you define ”girly” media? 

Margaret Wheeler Johnson: When we ask whether women’s media has become “too girly,” we’re referring to content we’ve seen more and more over the past few years on sites targeting adult female audiences. I’m thinking of stories about nail art and frozen yogurt (HuffPost Women has published at least one), odes to Ryan Gosling (we’ve run several), puppy cams, essays about breakups and fighting with your BFF — content that would also be at home on a teen site.

I don’t think it’s bad for women’s sites to publish these stories — obviously, since we’ve done it as well — but I do think it’s interesting.  Our panel will discuss whether this phenomenon undermines women by making them seem superficial, or gives voice to tastes and aspects of being female that we were once afraid to acknowledge because women are still fighting to be taken seriously.

S/G: You have gathered an impressive group of panelists. Tell us a little background about them and what we can expect from the panel.

Margaret: Our panelists are impressive, indeed, and we are lucky to have them.  Anna Holmes (@AnnaHolmes) is a journalist and author and the founder of Jezebel.com, arguably the most influential women’s media project in the last 10 years.  Deb Schoeneman (@debschoeneman) literally wrote the book on our panel topic. Her Kindle single “Woman Child“ explores the idea that women are embracing more childish interests and personas to find common ground with each other. Rebecca Fernandez (@ParksFernandez) is the editor-at-large for HelloGiggles, a unabashedly girly women’s site founded by “New Girl” actress Zooey Deschanel, Sophia Rossi and Molly McLeer.

When I asked the panelists for their perspectives on our topic, Anna told me that while she’s very aware of the ways young women’s issues have been unfairly dismissed for ages, “there is a cult of perpetual girlhood among some adult women that I find very exhausting, perplexing and sort of ridiculous.” Deb, on the other hand, said she thinks ”it’s empowering and progressive that women’s media can be girly.” And according to Rebecca, “the real problem isn’t media being too girly, it’s being judged for being true to yourself, no matter if you like to wear high heels or play baseball or listen to Taylor Swift or study biology. We’re all girls and we should all be celebrated no matter how we look on the outside, how we ‘decorate’ ourselves, or what our hobbies include.” I want to dig into what it means that so many women’s sites have embraced girlishness, and what statement the women who create and enjoy “girly” media might be making about their lives and the culture at large. So that’s what you can expect from our panel.

S/G: Are there topics you think women want to read about online, but are not readily available? 

Margaret: I think most women can probably find online content on the topics that interest them. It’s the Internet – there’s something for almost everyone. That said, the way online media outlets cover women varies widely. Like print magazines and TV programs targeting women, many women’s sites still start from the assumption that any woman’s major goals in life are to get married, get pregnant, lose the baby weight, make fast, perfect, nutritious dinners and have multiple orgasms all night long.

I think women want what men want online: information and entertainment. But in my experience women in particular want community as well. A huge part of community is being spoken to, and spoken about, in a way that makes you feel like you belong, like you are interesting and complex and deserve to be heard, not belittled or sequestered. It’s possible to write about both entrepreneurship and nail polish in a way that makes women feel respected and understood — or not. It’s up to media companies to decide which approach they’re going to take.

S/G: Name three female media or content creators who have inspired you and why. 

Margaret: One is definitely Anna. With Jezebel, she exploded the myths about women that so many media outlets perpetuate. From the beginning, Jezebel’s bloggers welcomed controversy, didn’t even entertain this idea that feminism is a bad word or a dusty 70s relic, and their humor, intelligence and willingness to call bullsh*t was addictive. Anna paved the way for our site and every other popular women’s site that has a distinct mission and voice.

The second is Lena Dunham. I can never get over the fact that in an era when I’ve so often felt that it’s all been done before, Dunham assumed that her vision could be realized and that her voice was worth hearing. She assumed that other people would want and need to hear what she had to say — about body image, privilege and how scary and unglamorous being a woman in your early 20s can be. I think Dunham lives a message so many young women need to hear: that they don’t have to wait for permission to create something meaningful, that their stories and experiences are valuable and should be shared.

The third is, collectively, the mom (and dad) blogosphere. I had the privilege of working with many parenting bloggers when I was an editor at Babble, and they never ceased to amaze me. By writing openly about the very personal and challenging experience of raising a child, they formed a powerful, enduring and lucrative online content network – also without asking anyone’s permission.

S/G: What are you most looking forward to at SXSW 2013?

Margaret: HuffPost is developing exciting new products internally all the time, but at South By you get a sense of how many ideas and tools are being hatched beyond your immediate horizons. I’m looking forward to my second dose of that this year. I also think that at big conferences, you’re lucky if you get to really connect with one or two people whose vision impresses you. Last year for me that was Intel social innovator Ekaterina Walter (@eKaterina), whose passion for what she does left me energized for days after.

South By is also great because it gives us an opportunity to share what we do at HuffPost Lifestyle. I’m excited for executive lifestyle editor Lori Leibovich‘s panel on Toddlers and Technology, and a panel on Keeping Working Parents In & Innovating from our senior columnist for life, work, and family, Lisa Belkin. Both will talk about a goal at the center of our editorial mission: to find a better balance between the roles of family and technology in our lives. And I’m obviously excited about HuffPost Women’s panel, which is very much in line with the kinds of conversations we have on our site. With HPW, we’ve created a place for women online that’s inclusive, informed, fun, honest and smart. Most importantly, it reflects our commitment to the idea that there is no one right way to be female and that everyone’s story matters. I’m very proud of that.

Explore the rest of the SXSW 2013 Q&A Series.

Image credits, from left to right:
Austin – by Dice.com
Badge – by Jeremy Keith
Microphone – by Hidde de Vries
Robot – by Jason Yovanoff
Breakfast taco – by Aaron Parecki

The Breakdown: Next up, we spoke with Molly Steenson (@maximolly), an assistant professor of journalism at University of Wisconson-Madison. In their dual presentation, “The New Nature vs. Nurture: Big Data & Identity,” Molly and Jen Lowe (@datatelling) propose that “[a] baby born in the US today will live an algorithmed life.” They’ll explore the impact of growing up in a world where everything that child does can be tracked and collected.

Scatter/Gather: What can people expect from your panel?

Molly: Jen Lowe, my fellow panelist, is an associate researcher at the Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University. She and I put together this panel after conversations we had at the Eyeo Festival in Minneapolis last June, where she gave a great Ignite talk called “The Entropy of Memory” on memory, data and information. “When we remove memory from data, we experience a kind of memorylessness,” she says in the talk. You can’t tell the whole story with data alone.

I’ve long been interested in genealogy and have contributed to my family tree. I also have had my DNA analyzed by 23andMe. I have pictures of my great-grandmother as a girl, she has the same mouth as me, as my mother, as my niece. This is something that I understand through heredity, through story, through memory, through information: it is a part of my identity, of who I am and where I came from. But also, someone on 23andMe wrote to me and said that she and I share a run of 1800 “snps” (chromosomal letter pairs) on Chromosome 2. That, too, is heredity, information, memory. But we don’t usually think of a mouth, or a hometown in the same way we think of gene runs on a chromosome. Yet both produce my identity.

In our panel, Jen and I will be taking a critical and interpretive look at the implications of big data on privacy. What is the new nature and the new nurture that it brings to bear? How are we defined by things we don’t see or have access to, and what choices does that give us? And how are the implications of those choices both beautiful and frightening?

S/G: My first few attempts to write the questions for this Q&A went very deep, very fast – the loss of anonymity, an inability to reinvent ourselves, self-awareness vs. neuroses, insidious mind control, etc. This struck me as strange, because I fundamentally believe that more information is better, and Big Data creates a lot of opportunities for improvements in human knowledge. Why do you suppose we tend to be drawn to the dark places when the topic of Big Data intersects with personal identity? And is there reason to be optimistic?

Molly: One thing that occurs to me is that we say the phrase “Big Data” a lot and it’s already crossing into cliché territory. We could start with the fact that “Big Data” sounds monolithic. It sounds like something that you generate but that somebody else controls—somebody else you can’t see or know because it’s some entity bigger than you, whose goals for using that data may not be to your advantage. It’s dark because everyday people tend not to have tools at their disposal to make sense of complex flows of data—or even their
own digital footprints.

We have the version of ourselves that we believe we are portraying. Then there’s how our data portrays us. Those two visions do not necessarily—or probably very rarely—align.

So is more information better? Yes, but.

I want information. But overwhelming amounts of information can be used to obfuscate a corporate or governmental agenda. We all know the concept of “information overload” that Alvin Toffler coined in 1970: we shut down in the face of too much. We need to be empowered with interpretation, too.

S/G: What sort of things should we (as both digital professionals and digital consumers) be thinking about to better protect people’s ability to control the stories told by their own data?

Molly: As a starting point, it should be clear what data is being collected, by whom, and for what reason, and there should be ways to opt out—that should go without saying. More than that, though, people should be able to see what those stories are. And they should be given the opportunity to tell their own stories with their data, in the way that they have choices about what and how they portray themselves in the world.

S/G: One of your areas of expertise is pneumatic tubes. They’re pretty awe-inspiring. When the algorithmed child of the future looks back on the early 21^st century, what technology is going to make her say, “Can you believe that’s how they used to do that?”

Molly: Pneumatic tubes are amazing, it’s true. It was easier in the late 19th century to run a network of cast iron tubes underneath the city that could ferry messages than to solve the traffic jams on the surface, the ones that made it so difficult to get a telegram to its recipient.

Many of my students—first year college students—were born in 1994. That’s the year that the Netscape browser came out. That’s the year I started working with the web. They can’t remember the first time they logged onto the Internet (though some of them have vague recollections of the sound a modem made). They won’t go on an exchange program and write letters on airmail paper, they won’t send handwritten notes to their parents, they won’t ponder the answer to a question without reaching for their laptop or smartphone. And I’m talking about college students. So really, the algorithmed children of the future are already here.

S/G: What are you looking forward to at SXSW?

Molly: This is my 16th consecutive SXSW Interactive and my 15th year on the Advisory Board. Crazy. I’m looking forward to finding old friends in the crowd, having random conversations with new friends, not sleeping enough, enjoying amazing conversations on the Hotel San Jose patio. It’s 30 or 40 times bigger than when I first started coming, and yet I get so excited each year. It generates such good ideas.

Explore the rest of the SXSW 2013 Q&A Series.

Image credits, from left to right:
Austin – by Dice.com
Badge – by Jeremy Keith
Microphone – by Hidde de Vries
Robot – by Jason Yovanoff
Breakfast taco – by Aaron Parecki

The Breakdown: In this week’s SXSW Q&A, we talk with our own Robert Stribley (@stribs), a Senior Information Architect who sometimes wears a Content Strategist hat (and is also a regular contributor to Scatter/Gather). In his upcoming SXSW talk “Everything Is Not Important,” he will elaborate (but not too much) on how to diagnose and address “information bloat,” as well as navigate the political waters that often surround the issue. “Everything Is Not Important” is part of SXSW’s Future15 series: 12-minute solo presentations, grouped into two-hour blocks of programming related to a single theme, in this case the theme is Content and Distribution.

Scatter/Gather: Why does the issue of “inflated importance” interest you?

Robert: As someone who peskily tries to straddle the fields of both content strategy and information architecture, I guess I’d say I’ve always had an interest in organizing information. I mean, I alphabetized my books as an elementary school student and thought it unusual other kids didn’t. After all, libraries do, don’t they? Anyway, organizing information, giving it structure requires determining whether content or features are important or not. Or at the very least, it means determining where those things are important. Because having determined something is important, that doesn’t mean it has to be plastered or promoted everywhere. As Ben Franklin supposedly said, “A place for everything and everything in its place.” Experiences become simpler, more elegant and more digestible when we remember that.

S/G: In a Scatter/Gather interview you conducted with Matthew Diffee about his 2012 SXSW panel “How to be an Idea Factory,” you asked about the delicate editorial art of “killing babies” – a topic closely related to your own. Where are you these days with the idea of “killing babies”?

Robert: “Killing your babies” has such a distressing sound to it, doesn’t it? It’s a writer’s commandment. Some use the somewhat more polite version, “kill your darlings.” I think it’s sound advice, easily remembered, and less often practiced. When we conjure up a good idea, as writers, as designers, we sometimes have a hard time letting it go, even when it doesn’t really fit the need. So “killing your darlings” means letting these ideas go, even when we’ve become attached to them, for the sake of the greater good. In the context of my theme, “Everything is not important,” it would simply mean, you can’t be afraid to take a scalpel to an experience, even if it means extracting some of your favorite features.

S/G: Your talk inspired me to look up the phrase “less is more,” and I found its origins in a Robert Browning poem called “Andrea del Sarto (The Faultless Painter),” written in 1855. How has our struggle with this issue evolved (or not) over the years?

Robert: I think it has evolved, yes. Hit the Way-Back machine and take a peek at those sites from the 90s, jammed with content, no white space unsullied. The best sites often look simpler now – or perhaps it’s more accurate to say, their complexity is better displayed. Folks like Apple and Nike have mastered the art of progressive disclosure; they’ve demonstrated how to lead users (or “customers”) to important content, instead of barraging them with all the “important” details at once.

S/G: What is your digital pet peeve in terms of “information bloat” and how would you fix it?

Robert: It would have to be the inability for people to trust users to find their content if it’s been properly organized (and tagged, another topic dear to my heart!) I find it most difficult not to roll my eyes when I hear someone roll out the old “Everything must be three clicks away” chestnut. An appropriately flat hierarchy is one thing, but a steamrolled hierarchy that treats everything as important in order to catch the user’s eye defeats the entire purpose of properly organizing information.

S/G: What are you most looking forward to at SXSW 2013?

Robert: I’ve never been before, so I look forward to navigating the SWSW experience and to soaking up new ideas, wherever I find them. Truth be told, I’m looking forward to some warmer weather and to eating my fair share of Texas brisket, as well.

Explore the rest of the SXSW 2013 Q&A Series.

Image credits, from left to right:
Austin – by Dice.com
Badge – by Jeremy Keith
Microphone – by Hidde de Vries
Robot – by Jason Yovanoff
Breakfast taco – by Aaron Parecki

The Breakout: Our next SXSW Q&A is with Calvin Reid (@calreid), a senior news editor at Publishers Weekly. When he started working at PW in 1986, they had almost no coverage of comics. He successfully lobbied the reviews editors and by 1989 they were publishing reviews of graphic novels regularly. Today Calvin is co-editor of PW Comics World (@PWComicsWorld), which covers the graphic novels in the book trade, as well as the conventional comics industry. They review more than 250 graphic novels each year, publish a monthly newsletter and cover a variety of comics conventions and festivals around the country.

It’s an incredible time for comics. Comics storytelling has never enjoyed so much mainstream popularity. Not only do comics provide the source material for blockbuster movies that even my grandmother loves, but people from Tim Gunn to President Obama are making appearances on the pages. And brands like Google and Coke are using comic-style storytelling to reach their audiences better. At the same time, there’s a huge wave of opportunity for independent comics creators, who are now better able to self-publish, self-distribute, and directly reach their readers in ways they never could before.

Calvin spoke to us about his SXSW panel, “Publishing Graphic Novels in the Kickstarter Era,” in which he’ll be joined by cartoonist Karl Stevens (@KarlStevensart) and publisher Josh Frankel (@ZipComics) to explore how crowdfunding has impacted the comics industry.

Scatter/Gather: What’s happening now that’s causing the comics industry to grow in both the mainstream and independent realms simultaneously? Do you think they’re related or independent trends?

Calvin: The growth of comics can be traced to a variety of trends including:

• the growth of the internet (empowering and connecting fans and artists)
• the transformation of librarians, who were formerly hostile to the category, but now represent a younger generation that has grown up with the category and see how it impacts circulation, and comics’ ability to teach as well as entertain
• the influence of manga in the late 1990s, especially providing comics aimed for girls (shojo) and leading to the explosive growth of manga sales in the years 1999 to about 2005, becoming a prime category in the bookstore market
• the impact of superhero blockbuster films as well as the literary impact of memoirs (Alison Bechdel, Art Spiegelman for instance) seemed to break comics into a wider world of readers

Indeed I believe that manga, in particular, has been very important because it is a global style of comic and its original market in Japan produces comics for all kinds of readers, not just adolescent boys, as has been the case in the U.S.

I also believe that our coverage of comics at Publishers Weekly has had a powerful effect on the growth of comics—historically a periodical business in the U.S—as a category in the general book trade. Many editors at Big NY houses like Macmillan, Del Rey, HarperCollins, Farrar, Straus & Giroux and others said repeatedly that our reviews and coverage of the nascent category gave them to the support they needed to make acquisitions and even set up whole graphic novel imprints at the big houses.

The launch of Diamond Book Distributors in 2002, with a focus on getting graphic novels in the book market, was a watershed event. And now the growth of digital comics, the popularity of the iPad and digital vendors like Comixology are bringing comics of all kinds to a new generation of readers who are not only interested in superhero comics but treat graphic novels like any other book.

The so-called mainstream/indie split is a bit of an odd ball notion. In the U.S. mainstream comics means superhero (and Marvel and DC Comics). So if you create comics about guys in tights fighting space monsters it’s mainstream; if you write a naturalist love story about two hipsters grappling with life—in the prose world this would be mainstream—you’re “alternative” or marginal or a maverick in some way.

What’s happening is that there’s a market now that’s not ONLY interested in superhero comics but just wants a good book. I like to joke that today we see a huge new market of readers who are curious about reading graphic novels they hear about; they’re just not completely obsessed with comics like the people I know. I’m not knocking superhero comics—superhero comics made me into the comics nut I am today—just that the comics audience has grown and we can also expect that today’s readers, both men and women, want a broader range of genres, from memoir and crime fiction and thoughtful literary work to fantasy and serious nonfiction, as well as superhero comics.

S/G: This renaissance is especially astounding when you consider that, just a few years ago, everyone was predicting the impending demise of the comics industry. Is there anything that other “dying media” can learn from the resilience of the comics world?

Calvin: The comics market has been growing like gangbusters since the late 1980s and by about 2007 it was roughly just under $300 million a year in sales, just on the book format side, a category that almost didn’t exist 10 years before. The book-format comics category (or graphic novels) grew so quickly over the last 15 years it was bound to plateau; plus manga has been plagued by scanlations and digital piracy and its sales have declined.

But the growth of digital and the gradual recovery of the economy over the last year have helped the category, and retailers we spoke with for our annual comics retail feature are very optimistic. All of them said they were having their best year in a while. They mostly point to DC’s New 52, which sent a lot of lapsed superhero fans back into comics shops; independent publisher Image Comics which showed off a bunch of popular new nonsuperhero comics; the Avengers movie (which also sent fans into comics shops) and digital comics and the rise of the iPad, which allowed comics to be easily read on-screen without scrolling or radically changing the size of the comics page. Indeed retailers who, just a year ago, were terrified that digital comics would undermine print sales now say that digital is sending new readers into their shops looking to buy print comics.

I’m not sure other analog media can learn much from this—I think print comics are unique and will always attract readers in ways that prose may not—but really it’s that digital reading also seems to make fans interested in well-done print products as well. You kind of can have your comics cake and eat it too. Even manga looks to be on the rebound as manga publishers move to more simultaneous releases (worldwide release in both Japanese and English) in digital editions, with reasonable prices, to fight back at piracy.

S/G: What are some of the more interesting independent comics projects you’ve seen succeed, that probably couldn’t have happened before the “Kickstarter era”?

Calvin: I don’t know if these projects couldn’t have been done without Kickstarter, but the crowdsourcing option has certainly given artists and publishers a new set of tools to raise funds for projects that would have been difficult to fund. There are so many now it’s hard to know where to start. Books like Sullivan’s Sluggers, a supernatural baseball tale, raised $97,000; the Womanthology comics anthology raised $109,000 and the astounding success of Rich Burlew’s Order of the Stick campaign that raised $1.2 million (!) to fund a reprint of the back issues of his book collections. There are many more.

S/G: What are you looking forward to seeing at SXSW?

Calvin: You know, I haven’t looked over the programming completely so it’s hard to say specifically what I plan to see at SXSW. But SXSW blows me away each year (this is the third time PW has attended). So much of the new technology seems to have either obvious or subtle ways for the people to connect and that’s kind of what publishing these days is all about—using technology to connect people and then watching them use it to transfer some kind of information. So, as always, that’s what I expect to find at SXSW: new ways of people connecting and communicating using technology.

Explore the rest of the SXSW 2013 Q&A Series.

Image credits, from left to right:
Austin – by Dice.com
Badge – by Jeremy Keith
Microphone – by Hidde de Vries
Robot – by Jason Yovanoff
Breakfast taco – by Aaron Parecki

The Breakdown: It’s the beginning of a new year, the perfect time for us to kick off our annual SXSW Q&A series. The first talk we wanted to highlight is one about a topic very near to our hearts: Social TV. Jenn Deering Davis (@jdeeringdavis) is the co-founder of Union Metrics, and co-creator of TweetReach, a tool that helps analyze the impact of tweets. She’ll be giving a presentation called “How Twitter Has Changed How We Watch TV” this year at SXSW.

S/G: There’s been a lot of concern about the durability of “old media” for years now. Do you think Social TV is a sign of TV’s metamorphosis, or just a pause on the way to extinction?

Jenn: Oh, I don’t think TV is going anywhere. If anything, advances in social technologies have made TV more interesting and relevant over the past couple years. Live television is on the rise and more people are watching shows when they air than they have in several years. We love TV, particularly in the United States. Yes, the media landscape has changed a lot over the past few decades, but I don’t think we need to be concerned about it dying out. But I’m not sure I would call social TV a metamorphosis. Maybe more an evolution.

S/G: We’ve been looking at Social TV apps for a while, and none of them seem to be compelling enough to compete with Twitter’s open platform. Why haven’t any of the pure play Social TV apps broken through yet?

Jenn: I don’t think audiences are particularly interested in single-serving experiences like what many of the current social TV apps provide. We don’t need a separate app to talk about TV shows – we want to socialize with our existing friends and networks via channels we use all the time. I think this is why Twitter has been so successful with television networks and audiences. It’s a great space to talk in real time about what’s happening on the television screen with people you know and like.

S/G: Do you think any of them are getting close? Which are your favorites?

Jenn: I actually think Twitter and Tumblr are the best social TV apps, even though they’re not explicitly “social TV apps”. Both allow for in-depth and highly engaged social experiences. Both host millions of interactions about TV every single day. Shows like Pretty Little Liars get tens of thousands of posts per minute during peak episodes on Twitter. That’s huge!

Twitter is great for watching live shows. Fans tweet when exciting moments happen on screen, commiserate when something bad happens, speculate about cliffhangers, and just generally share the TV experience. They can even tweet along with characters in the shows! It’s an incredibly rich and immersive way to watch TV.

Tumblr, on the other hand, gives fans a space to remix and create their own content related to their favorite shows. They can post GIFs and screencaps, share their reviews, even upload fan fiction. Where Twitter allows for real-time responses, Tumblr allows for post-viewing reactions. Together, they’re a powerful mix for TV viewers.

S/G: What do you look for in a Social TV experience?

Jenn: I look for an experience that is easy and engaging. I might not be typical, but I generally don’t want to install a separate app for each show I’m watching, and have to load it up to participate. I like to participate in social channels where I’m already comfortable, with people who like the same things as me. And I love anything that gives me “content exhaust” from my favorite shows – bonus content, behind-the-scenes photos and stories, previews for upcoming episodes, quotes from the cast. Anything that feels extra and special for the biggest fans.

S/G: According to your website, your project TweetReach was conceived over breakfast tacos in Austin. Was this at SXSW? What is it about SXSW that makes it such fertile ground for new solutions to problems?

Jenn: Actually no, our company wasn’t started at SXSW. My co-founder and I are from Austin, so that’s why the company started there. I was working on my PhD at UT, and Union Metrics developed from some ideas my co-founder and I had about social media. Later, we moved to San Francisco to build the company to the place it is now.

SXSW is a great place to get motivated to start or work harder on your startup, though, With so many smart, energized people talking about big, interesting ideas, it’s the perfect breeding ground for solving problems. That’s why it gets bigger every year – it’s a terrific event.

S/G: What are you looking forward to seeing at SXSW?

Jenn: Mostly the people. SXSW is great for catching up with old friends, conecting with our customers face-to-face, and meeting new people. I also love a chance to go back to Austin in the spring, when the grass is green and the weather is warm. And the breakfast tacos! San Francisco does not get breakfast tacos at all.

Explore the rest of the SXSW 2013 Q&A Series.

Image credits, from left to right:
Austin – by Dice.com
Badge – by Jeremy Keith
Microphone – by Hidde de Vries
Robot – by Jason Yovanoff
Breakfast taco – by Aaron Parecki

If stars could grant wishes (photo by Andrew Rose)

For our last post of the year, we’d like to make some content wishes for all of our readers, our colleagues, our clients, and the content-consuming public. Ok, and maybe some of these are a little bit for ourselves, too. If we could wave a magic wand and solve a content problem for everyone, here’s what we’d wish for. Happy holidays everyone!

Michael Betts: May you stay content nimble

In today’s world, speed to market can mean the difference between owning a customer segment and being an also ran. In the world of websites, it’s often content that stands in the way of the agility required to stay ahead of the competition. With that in mind, we wish for everyone to achieve a state of content nimbleness.

Robert Stribley: Metadata for all

I wish everyone would truly embrace the consistent application of meaningful metadata to content. One day, someone’s going to create a cheap, reliable out-of-box tool, which engages artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic to analyze content and tag it effectively, so it can be displayed, aggregated, disseminated, searched on and generally enjoyed. Until then, we need human beings not just generating content, but tagging it properly, so it isn’t just created and immediately flushed down the memory hole. I am not talking about diabolically skewed marketing SEO either!

Erin Scime: Content operations

I wish that every business would realize how important content operations are and create a job for a content czar – someone who heads up and sees through long term content strategy. I also wish that we could destroy all klugy CMSs in the world!

Allison Zell: Truly agnostic

For the children of the world, I’d like to wave my magic content strategy wand on Santa Claus’ headquarters.  The new content vision allows him to deliver his content (gifts) not just to Christian children with parents who can afford them, but to all children all over in the world, even the “naughty” ones. The strategy also includes a nomenclature proposition: replace Santa Claus with Special Sauce.

Michael Barnwell: Lifecycle aware

I wish for all clients to have content that self-archives. As relevance dwindles due to lack of interest (as measured by clicks and hovering and downloads), content removes itself from the presentation limelight and slides into the inactive bin, accessible still but no longer taking up prime space.

Mary Butler: Content first design

In 2012, many of our clients started asking for “mobile first” digital experiences. In 2013, I would love to have them ask us for “content first” experiences. This will allow us to create experiences that start with the content, not the device.

Rachel Lovinger: New business models

I wish for people and organizations to adopt new and interesting ways for their content to pay for itself – whether this be by making the content so valuable that their audience is happy to pay for it, developing new product partnerships, or creating novel, non-disruptive advertising. Or maybe something entirely new that we haven’t thought of yet.

Jake Keyes: Better filters

In 2013, as publishing becomes ever simpler, I wish for us all to consider that sometimes it’s better to limit the amount of content we publish, and better to thoughtfully put a constraint on access to content, if this will provide a better content experience.

And one final wish, from the whole S/G editorial board:

We’d like to welcome the new son of Liz Bennett, one of our NYC Content Strategy team members and a regular contributor to Scatter/Gather. We wish him a lifetime of delightful, meaningful, useful content; accessible whenever and wherever he wants it.

When I first opened Sara Wachter-Boettcher’s Content Everywhere: Strategy and Structure for Future-Ready Content, my heart sank with the realization that I’d blindly signed up to review a veritable tome, against a tight deadline. The book weighs in at more than 220 pages, which trends a bit higher than other recently published content strategy books. I’d seen Sara talk about her upcoming book at a local content strategy meet-up earlier in the year and enjoyed her straight-shooting humor and insights; I’d assumed her book would exhibit the same lean, witty style.

It does. Kudos to Sara’s first effort, which in fact was a fast read full of visuals, stories, interviews, case studies and tips that helps get folks thinking about how to chunk up content in a meaningful way so that it can flex and flow across multiple platforms, channels and experiences in order for users to access it wherever and whenever they need it. Written not just for us content strategists but also for anyone involved in user experience design, online writers and editors, content managers, SEO specialists and everyone in between, Content Everywhere is intended to make our jobs easier, by showing us how to organize and prepare content just once as well as build systems that will enable the reuse of said content in multiple places for multiple purposes.

Let Go, Let It Flow

Organized into four sections, Part I starts by unpacking the problems with fixed, inflexible content. Content fixed to its webpages—that is, not chunked up and tagged appropriately based on its meaning and purpose as well as the relationship it has with other content items—makes for a lot of manual updating and poses a problem for how content gets displayed on devices other than the original format that content was intended for (typically desktop).

Sara shares a couple of case studies to illuminate the problems and then in contrast points to the success of the NPR content model, which has seen its overall page views increase by 80 percent in 2010. NPR’s approach called COPE (Create Once, Publish Everywhere) involves creating a single set of content for each story that is then entered into its CMS with structured attributes and accessed by NPR’s API by member stations and NPR’s suite of products. Though by no means perfect, NPR’s COPE approach has reaped multiple benefits including “better content in more places, less duplication of editorial efforts, higher consistency, more control over quality, and easier story updates.”

The Content Modeling Nitty Gritty

Part II gets into the nitty gritty of content modeling, and how identifying content’s meaning, purpose, goals and priorities are paramount in developing a content ecosystem actually worth developing. Here’s where performing a content audit is key—to evaluate the types of content you have and decide what to keep vs. cut based on your users’ needs and company’s objectives. These content types then get broken down into elements—distinct units of information such as a byline, summary or pull quote.

In addition to developing these labels for your content chunks or elements, Sara stresses the importance of developing metatags and taxonomies that define and describe your content, so that when your users—or folks accessing your CMS for that matter—search and sort, they’ll get returned relevant content. Even as you restructure your content to become more flexible, you’ll likely rehaul CMS author workflows to ensure content is tagged and uploaded in the right way.

The rest of the section covers off on what responsive design is, using Starbucks as an example; explains the basics of markup and why it matters (read: it allows content to keep its shape and form, along with its metadata, when it flows from your CMS to wherever it needs to go); and the rise of APIs, which Sara says speaks to a future filled with “even more connected devices: Internet-enabled televisions, cars, refrigerators and thermostats.”

Change Is Good

In an increasingly interconnected world, where multiple devices are talking to each other, organizing and developing content so that it’s more findable, adaptable, reusable and transportable will certainly make life easier for content authors not to mention give users what they want, when they want it. In Part III, Sara works her way through a number of examples—from the BBC’s Wildlife Finder and Zappos to Amazon’s API and flu.gov to demonstrate how well-structured and stored content frees that content, allowing it to get accessed in a multitude of useful—and in some cases revenue-building—ways.

Of course, all of the work you’ve done to free your content will be for naught if your company doesn’t change with it. In the fourth and final section, Sara describes the three ingredients—a clear vision, customer focus and collaboration—that will help drive change in your organization. Writes Sara, “The Internet is going to change. The business world is going to change. And it’s all going to happen very quickly, without a lot of time for big bumbling slowpoke organizations to catch up.”

Acting as an agent of change, encouraging your organization to adopt practices that put the audience at the center and make content sustainable, is a must, says Sara. Though I agree with her, I would add that there’s probably a lot more involved in this process—from getting leadership buy-in to training and educating the people in your company. After all, change management is a business unto itself.

Be that as it may, it’s time to get cracking—adapt, embrace new ideas and rally your peers around a fluid strategy and flexible structure that will allow your content to retain its message and meaning even as it travels out of your control and to the true owners of your content: your users. And whether you’re just starting out or well on your way, Content Everywhere will serve as a great thought-starter and reference.

The Breakdown: We hope you enjoy this review of Karen McGrane’s Content Strategy for Mobile by one of our London colleagues, Ian Waugh.

Full disclosure – I love Karen McGrane.

If you’ve ever seen her speak you’ll know she is an honest and compelling advocate for all the good things in content strategy. (If you haven’t seen her speak, watch this).

With A Book Apart I think Karen has found the perfect publisher for her first book. The series has built up a strong following – one which should allow Karen’s message to reach beyond the content strategy world and have an impact on anyone who works in digital.

This little volume is small but deceptively powerful. You’ll find inspiration and instruction on making content truly adaptable. It might even permanently change the way you think about your work in content.

There is no primary channel

McGrane gets it out of the way on the first page: this book is not just about mobile. Mobile is the wedge that we will use to force open the door to structured, user-centered and nimble content.

Before the mobile revolution, it was easy to deny that we really need to make our content lean and structured, but the proliferation of new devices is now making that impossible. We can only design so many stand-alone apps and mobile websites, and create so many maintenance headaches, before we realise the importance of a clean content base for everything.

The first chapter makes an excellent case for why we should get our content ready for the multichannel world. And it goes further – we are short-changing our users if we only present them with a cut-down experience or one which we guess is “appropriate for the mobile context”.

Maybe the need to make every item of content available on mobile will still be a hard sell with clients in the medium term. It can seem tempting to only consider simple tasks and those which are clearly done “on the move”, but Karen McGrane makes a strong case for why this just will not cut it.

We’ve all experienced it intuitively. Yes, our mobile users want to find their nearest store and check stock levels, but what about the student looking for careers information or the shareholder looking up the annual report on the train?

Forking hell

The rest of the first half of the book talks frankly about the problems of “forking” – splitting our content across different channels – and the nightmare of making changes multiple times across sites and mobile applications.

McGrane is also interested in the limitations of our current web CMS systems and how they tie us to design templates and limit our productivity through bad user experience.

I think every content strategist needs to focus more on this aspect of great content. Choosing the right CMS and implementing it as a usability project is a missing link in many content chains.

Last week, Rachel touched on this in her post Strategy on the Inside. Content Strategy will only be successful if we deal with the internal problems that prevent organisations from producing the best experiences for their external users.

Adaptive content

So the solution to managing in the multichannel world? Adaptive content of course.

Karen outlines what makes adaptive content and how it can be achieved. She goes on to explain the strategy and planning required, the importance of thinking ahead and the danger of relying on imperfect data.

It seems obvious really – of course we shouldn’t rely on our measurements of current mobile experiences to learn what users would ideally like to do. But we often do just that. Karen McGrane to the rescue again, saying what needs to be said.

Architecture, people and processes

The second half of the book is a great practical outline of how we can make adaptable content happen. By this point you will be thoroughly convinced. I know I was.

Karen covers writing and editing, information architecture and analytics through the lense of structured content. She encourages us to focus on the content “package” instead of the page.

I think this is a challenging but liberating concept for everyone from content managers and producers to web designers. Finally separating content from presentation is good news for everyone. Writers can focus on the message, designers have clear content components to work with.

Overall

Karen McGrane has written a very important book, at a time when structured content is gathering momentum.

The challenge is a big one, but if you weren’t convinced before you will be after reading this book. And not only that, you will be armed with evidence and techniques to move things forward in your organisation.

[Editor's Note: You can read the first chapter of Content Strategy for Mobile at A List Apart]

This discipline runs on strategy (photo by ribarnica)

For the past couple days, I’ve been having fun casting “Content Strategy: The Movie,” but this morning I woke up and it’s starting to look like this indie film project is going to be a tense drama. So now it’s polemic time, people. We need to talk about this big “S” Strategy vs. small “s” strategy debate. I think many of you are missing part of the picture.

Maybe I shouldn’t look at Twitter in the morning before I get ready for work, but I do. And today a tweet from Destry Wion alerted me to a discussion about a Wikipedia page on Content Engineering. It describes an engineering specialty that includes “content production, content management, content modelling, content conversion, and content use and repurposing.” The woman who started the discussion is Kate Towsey, a self-described content strategy consultant in the UK. In a series of tweets, she speculated that maybe Content Engineering was a better description of what she does.

I understand Kate’s concerns – I’m interested in similar aspects of content, and sometimes it seems like these topics are in the margins of content strategy discussions. But I (and others) firmly believe these discussions do belong in this discipline, so we keep at it. I tweeted back:

Elsewhere in the Twitterverse, two leaders in UX and Content Strategy seemed to be about to throw down. I don’t know the back story, but the exchange led me to discover a blog post taking the opposing point of view, that content strategy has been too tactical, to the point where our use of the word “strategy” has become a meaningless buzzword. This view of “strategy” seems to be very marketing-oriented. That is to say, exclusively outward facing.

A few weeks ago Luke Wroblewski told me that he considers “structured content” to be a tactic, not a strategy. I shrugged it off, even though I strongly disagree, but I was left with lingering mixed feelings about it. Why would the very people who have turned up the volume on the rallying call for structured content – the Future Friendly Responsive Web Designers – be so nonchalant about how structured content happens? There are no magic content elves who come into your servers at night and leave you a shiny pile of structured content in the morning.

Structuring content requires synthesizing a swath of sources, designing usable systems, changing organizations, training personnel, soothing egos, adjusting priorities, allaying fears, reallocating resources… all while trying not to disrupt an existing content production process that cannot just stop while you sort out all this stuff. Does that sound easy? It shouldn’t. This is big “S” strategy, and it requires understanding, insight, diplomacy, negotiation, and persuasion.

So yes, it’s an implementation. It’s engineering. And it’s strategic. But it’s the kind of strategy that faces inwards, at the needs and pains of your (or your client’s) organization – the poor people whose day-to-day lives are about to be completely upended by the launch of your new widget. The small set of users whose buy-in you absolutely need in order to make sure your digital product has a longer shelf life than a few months. You need them to love this product and own it, not gripe and cry and phone it in. If they don’t love it, they will never be able to sustain the delightful, engaging experiences you’ve envisioned for your end users.

Between that conversation with Luke and the Tweets I saw this morning, I had a thought-provoking conversation with Paul Ford that renewed my sense of commitment to this point of view. Like me, he has a background of working with traditional publishers and he brings this experience to bear on his work in the digital realm. He seems to share my sentiment that it’s shortsighted, and perhaps a bit naïve, to ignore the impact of organizational change when introducing new “content tactics.” Failing to recognize that Strategy (big “S”!) is necessary in order to pave the way for new tactics is a great way to make sure your project, initiative, or shiny widget fails.

Don’t just take my word for it. Other people thinking about these issues:

• Erin Scime: There’s a People Problem Lurking Behind Your Digital Strategy
• Sara Wachter-Boetcher: New Forms, Old Places
• Karen McGrane & Jeff Eaton: Baby Got Backend: Content Administrators are Users Too

Quiet on the set! (photo by earsaregood)

I’m kind of a pop culture fiend. My DVR is constantly in danger of running out of room. I may not qualify as a Cinemaniac, but I’ve I’ve had my moments (my record is 23 movie screenings in 11 days, during the Tribeca Film Festival). For over six years I worked for a major entertainment journalism website, where the vast majority of my expense report claims were for movie tickets. For the past three years I’ve hosted a documentary viewing series at the office once a month. I also studied film in college, where I also held a student job as a projectionist for film classes and student association groups that showed movies on campus. And my uncanny ability to recognize celebrities “in the wild” has led some people to speculate that celebrity spotting is my mutant power. A significant portion of my brain is devoted to to IMDb-like information.

All of which is to say: I don’t know why it took me so long to do this. After CS Forum was fully over (read my recap if you missed it), I was reflecting on the conference with Kerry-Anne and I casually started nominating the actors I thought should play some of the speakers – as well as other members of the CS Community – in the unlikely event that someone should decide to make a movie about our discipline. [Note: In some cases, we took the unrealistic position of disregarding the current age of the actor.]

So here’s what I came up with so far, with a few suggestions by Kerry-Anne.

Kerry-Anne Gilowey	Emily Blunt
Rachel Lovinger	Kate Winslet
Kristina Halvorson	Ashley Judd
Karen McGrane	Meryl Streep
Rahel Anne Bailie	Megam Mullally
Margot Bloomstein	Molly Ringwald
Kate Kiefer Lee	Amy Adams
Sarah Cancilla	Ellen Page
Richard Ingram	Stephen Merchant
Luke Wroblewski	Channing Tatum
Elisabeth McGuane	Christina Ricci
Randall Snare	Juliet Landau
Relly Annett-Baker	Helena Bonham Carter
Jonathan Kahn	Christopher Mintz-Plasse
Angela Colter	Julie Andrews
Keri Maijala	Julianne Moore
Lucie Hyde	Cherry Jones
Destry Wion	Liev Schrieber
Gabby	Napolean Dynamite

This list is by no means comprehensive, but I wanted to leave some of the fun for the rest of you. Who would you cast as your favorite Content Strategist (including yourself!)? Add your own casting suggestions in the comments, or tweet them to @scattergather, and we’ll incorporate some of our favorite recommendations back into the article. Read the rest of this entry »