All Articles
Be Careful What You Ask For: Google Licensing News Won’t Feel Like Justice
Publishers are still on the long ramp down in referrals from organic search, although I still maintain that “Google Zero” is more marketing than prophecy. One hoped-for outcome commonly discussed is that AI crawlers, including Google, will enter into content licensing agreements with publishers. My worry is that publishers will like a world where Google…
You Say You’re Quitting Google? I Don’t Believe You
At a conference earlier this month, an executive at a major publisher who was participating in a panel proclaimed, in high dudgeon, that they were going to block Google. Why? Because Google reneged on its “deal” to send traffic directly to publishers. When are they blocking Google? Well, not today. But soon! This line of…
Reducing Noise in Group Judgments Through Smart Survey Design
Soliciting feedback from many different stakeholders is well-known to be valuable to firms as input to their own improvement processes. Restrooms at airports have smiley-face buttons that translate to numbers on the net promoter scale, and it’s easy to imagine how that one button press is contextualized: Time of day, day of week, month, year,…
Should News Organizations Build Community Forums Again?
After ceding their communities to social media for years, some newsrooms are rebuilding forums from scratch and discovering that building one is the easy part. Recently, newsrooms have been returning to an old question: should we be in the forum business again? In June, WIRED announced a forum-style app that will launch as a perk…
Control Charts Make AI Agents Cheaper, Less Necessary, and More Useful
According to my new control charts, it’s been 35 days since I posted to this blog. Subjectively, that’s too long. Objectively, it raised an alarm in an email I get every morning. I have long wanted a better and more holistic picture of “how things are going” but instead of settling for an agent like…
The Capital Trap for News Product Startups
I have learned to be skeptical towards the role of private capital in systemically important tool providers for journalism organizations. Capital’s requirements for growth and margin expansion can be uniquely bad for journalism tools, and even more so for the systems we rely on to manage audience data. To be clear, I don’t have a…
A News Product Perspective on Two Hundred Fifty Years of Independence
The day we celebrate as the birthday of the United States is, strictly speaking, the day in 1776 that Congress adopted the wording of the Declaration of Independence and sent it to print. Congress had voted for independence two days earlier, on July 2nd — the date John Adams assumed we would mark. With the…
A Short History of Paying for News: Why We’re Building Allegro Audience
The commerce layer has always been core to publishers and must be treated as a first-class part of the technology ecosystem. News organizations have been charging for regular access to the news for hundreds of years.
Allegro Audience: An open customer data toolkit for publishers
Alley is launching a new toolkit called Allegro Audience in public alpha. Allegro Audience is a customer journey, identity, authentication, payments, and data platform. We’ve been in production with our pilot partner, LAist, for several months now, and we’re about to go live with our second partner. We already support payments, gating, dynamic calls to…
A Five-Step Approach to Deploying AI in Labor-Intensive Businesses
A recent academic paper about the economic significance of the “up or out” employment system used by famous consulting firms got me thinking about the economic liberty of employees in the age of artificial intelligence. Consulting is labor-intensive and thus very attractive to both consulting firms and AI tool-builders, but the early returns have mixed…
