When you’re told to stop linking to competing news sites, explain that the journalism business is about helping customers make music out of noise
Summary: Story consumption is driven by a need to bring order, significance and meaning to information and experience. Stories are to raw data as music is to noise. Well-summarized links to other (and competing) stories are tools you can use to become a better meaning-building service.
In this interview with Harvard Business Review, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos discussed Amazon’s much-debated decision to put the merchandise of third-party sellers on the same page of Amazon’s merchandise of the same type.
The move cut into purchases from individual buyers because third-party sellers would sometimes sell the same goods for less than Amazon.
Bezos recalled this criticism of the decision:
“Maybe you don’t understand your business. You make money when you sell things.”
His response:
“We don’t make money when we sell things; we make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.”
Amazon’s concern about losing a sale reminds me of media outlets’ (fading) concern about losing customers to another news site if they provide links.
Actually, the loss occurs when you don’t provide well-described links, if you see journalism as a business of helping people construct meaning. Referencing the work of others allows you to tell a more complete story, allows you to extract more music from the noise. That serves your customers’ need to create meaning, which is why they’re on your news site.
Shameless theorizing
Storytellers transform experience and information into a shareable unit of meaning called a story, much like a musician transforms noise into songs by ordering it.
We consume and produce stories to create order and meaning out of the raw material of our experience, which allows us to make decisions.
Do this
Give your customers the best tools to make meaning out of chaos, music out of noise. Give them well-summarized links. When summarizing, try to:
- Highlight information you do not have;
- Note if the new story agrees or disagrees with any points in your story (that should be interesting if facts are different);
Link
Check out this article by the Journal of the National Association for the Education of Young Children. It enhances this post by explaining the importance of storytelling in mental development and pointing out the dynamic nature of stories: “Plots and endings are ever changing and relevant in new and different ways, depending on each person’s understanding.” That makes me see blogs as an extremely useful tool for handling and encouraging a story’s evolution. The article supports my description of stories as a building block of meaning.
YouTube Adsense test after the break (it was slowing down my page load time too much).
Playing with Adsense for video
