When I talk to college students about working in communications the only thing that I say that I can guarantee them about a career in communications is that people always love to read, see, hear well told stories and that how will tell will continue to change.

If you’ve been on Facebook the day a change is made you’ve certainly seen it in your news feed.  Today, for example, Facebook changed up the contents of the primary feed, made the photos larger and added a widget to the right sidebar about what your friends are doing. If your friends feed is like mine, then it is full of all manner of whining about how people want facebook to switch back and hints on how to find the old interface. On the otherhand, I like it. It’s an improvement. I think it makes facebook more useful for me while removing steps I took in their old interface to see what I wanted to see.

If you’ve ever redesigned a web site, you’ve heard about how much people hate change. My favorite redesign story about how people hate change was when I worked at The Commercial Appeal a decade ago and we launched their new design in January 2000. The design eliminated frames from a Pagemill design and started to implement CSS– we designed the whole thing in Dreamweaver. It wasn’t a great design, but a huge step forward. Faithful readers of The Commercial Appeal’s web site reacted like we had dug up Elvis and moved him to a hidden grave.

One particular set of emails from a retired lady who had moved to Chattanooga stood out from the rest. The day after the redesign she reamed us for moving things around and messing up her daily return to Memphis via the Internet. Her email was pretty similar to the other 1000 or so emails we received about the redesign. What was unique about this lady from Chattanooga was the 2nd email we received from her two weeks later. She emailed to apologize for her first email and to let us know she actually liked the new design and now everything she wanted was easier to find.

So, the moral of the story is Users Hate Change, but eventually with a good well-tested design, they will come around and use the site.  I promise you all those people swearing at Facebook today will have forgotten about it in a weeks time.

For me, I like change– for better or worse. Innovation and improvement are hard. If you are unwilling to change you’ll never know if that next step is two steps forward or a step backward.

–

Jakob Nielsen has a great related post on how users are resistant to change: Fresh vs. Familiar: How Aggressively to Redesign

The site is built on WordPress with all the feeds pulled in using the RSS widget. WordPress uses iThemes Builder Astro child  theme customized with the builder style manager plug-in.

“Therefore, Newsday’s web strategy has two parts: 1) to provide Newsday’s print subscribers with a rich web experience that goes far beyond what they can get in the newspaper alone, thereby motivating them to remain, return, or choose to subscribe to Newsday; and 2) to provide Cablevision’s high-speed Internet customers with reasons to remain with Cablevision, reasons to return to Cablevision, or reasons to choose Cablevision.”

Unfortunately, the memo doesn’t mention their mobile web strategy which happens to be wide open for anyone to visit completing discouraging anyone from ponying up the $5 a week subscription to their full fledged web site.

Along the same line of thought, Newsday is three months into it’s paywall experiment charging $5 a week for access to their website (print subscribers and Cablevision Cable subscribers have free access) and they have 35 paid subscribers. In the three months since starting the experiment Newsday has lost over 50 percent of their web traffic peaking at 1.5 million visits per month in July 2009 down to 460,000 visits in December 2009.

Outside of the fact that it’s not breaking news, the NY Times has decided to try out the middle ground in the payment wall debate, again. Last time with Times Select they hid their “premium” content from those who didn’t want to pay. This time they are going to ask the power users who access their web site more frequently to pay. Unfortunately, they aren’t ready to release simple details about the plan so we really can’t make a judgement call on it.

It would be nice to know how much is frequent? How many article can I access before I have to pay? How much will I have to pay? Then maybe we can make some comparisons to how much they are making on advertising revenue versus how much they will make for charging for access.

You think if they were sending a news alert about charging in 2011, they could have at least gotten the full story from their bosses.

The commission also examined issued the media is facing recommending:

• Direct media policy toward innovation, competition, and support for business models that provide marketplace incentives for quality journalism.
• Increase the role of higher education,community and nonprofit institutions as hubs of journalistic activity and other information-sharing for local communities.

• Paid Subscribers both online and in print – To justify paid content model you must show an increase in print newspaper subscriptions because the reason you switched to a paid model was to stop the cannibalization of your print subscribers by your free online site. Of course most studies show that the revenue generated from paid online subscribers will barely cover the cost of running the website.
• Web Site Visitors – Nope. You can keep measuring your web site visitors if you want to, but the dropoff from when it was free will be so discouraging you might change your mind and open it up again.
• Web Display Ad Revenue – Strike Two. Won’t work. You just killed your audience with the paid wall. Any advertiser who runs on your site behind the pay wall doesn’t know what they’re doing.
• Online Classified Revenue – Strike Three. This isn’t working for many newspapers anymore, but if you’ve killed your audience then who will pay to get their classifieds seen online by nobody.

So, the only real workable metric is an increase in paid print subscribers. That’s right a continual increase. If you only slow your decrease, then you’ve just slowed the print newspaper death spiral and given yourself another year or two until the presses stop running.