2. Vision & Imperatives
1. The Brand Vision
Brand Personality
The current brand personality and its priorities that we know about are:
For the Common Man: News, Perspectives and Data that is disseminated from Awani
is done keeping in mind the common man and his news needs.
Tonality: Friendly, First Person, Didactic (%age)? Controversial (%age)
The brand personality as well as the tonality has to be set going forward. Which
perspectives are important to be brought forward in order to maintain integrity as a brand
as well as gain authority. At the same time, make friends with the target audience.
The Vision for News
The vision for news going forward is to
Maximize Reach: Reach the most number of common people in Malaysia as possible.
Through as many platforms as possible – TV, Web, Mobile, Tablet, Wearable?, X-
Box? Social?
Maximizing Perspectives?: The value of news to the common man is maximized if
Awani were to show him news in a new perspective. (Usable News?) To make him
see what he can’t see through other sources of news. The Novel Perspective. The
perspective that is most appropriate for his use case of news. (social, mobile etc.).
What will that elusive perspective be? An attempt to do that was made with the
Budget Timeline.
Grassroots up: Bringing the newsroom on-board with every new technology, every
new product idea from the word go. Collective ideation. Collaborative design.
Cohesive implementation.
2. The New Newsroom
Building Capabilities across departments
Capabilities that have to be built from the ground up in all newsroom inhabitants – from
editors to social media to marketing etc. Resulting in a much more powerful newsroom with
every editor empowered to deliver the best results (readership, shares, comments – reach)
in the shortest possible time.
Digital First Thinking: Currently the newsroom thinks in video especially the
broadcast team. The thinking process has to be updated to Digital & especially
3. mobile first thinking. From the perspective of contextual news, location specific
news etc.
Analytical Thinking: Keeping in mind the foundation of journalistic integrity and
keeping that intact first and foremost, a mindset of innovating in terms of news
structure according to user needs and contexts has to be built on a foundation of
data.
Data streams: The everyday newsroom process has to become more data centric in
nature and for that data about consumption patterns etc is to be fed real time to the
newsroom.
Distributing stake to the stakeholders: The restructuring of the CMS should be done
in a way that decentralizes editorial decision making. Let the editor become
empowered to decide the direction in which a content piece is taking. Content
packaging with respect to digital in mind can bring more perspectives that may be
important. In short, if we make them stakeholders in the content strategy then the
reward generation for successful content pieces should also be distributed to them.
In terms of recognition and image building. Enable them to link directly to their
content from their blogs through a widget for example.
A more powerful CMS
For servicing the needs of user led newsroom thinking, the editor will be required to think
and ideate on the fly about the whole news reading experience. Which they are currently
doing as well but the CMS fails to support that in so many ways. The CMS has to be made
more powerful to withstand the pressures of the newsroom.
Information Architecture: The tagging taxonomy is currently quite unorganized due
to long standing tagging processes which have perhaps not been updated since 3
years or so. It has to be tightened and should begin to reflect the effect of a more
structured IA on the CMS as well. An efficient taxonomy will result in effective
targeting, packaging and re-packaging.
Recommendation Processes: The recommendation processes for the way forward
from news require editorial thought. What completes the experience for the user? In
addition to standard recommendation engine based processes, perhaps some sort of
editor intervention can be built into the process to enhance the effectiveness and
add brand value to the content.
Faster ‘package’ & template creation: The template creation process will need to be
enhanced as well. Both in terms of having much more powerful templates and many
more default templates like Twitter, Facebook, Crime, Cooking, Historical, Event etc.
4. 3. Redesign of AstroAwani.com
Structured tagging taxonomy and processes
A more structured approach to tagging going forward will affect the design in various ways:
Pervasive IA: The navigation of news going forward into the future is more of a
pervasive and in context process than a menu led process.
Redefined Navigation: A more structured navigation with subcategories etc will lead
to more findable news.
SEO Friendly Design
The current design of IA & page design does not support machine reading in the way that it
should
Intelligent perma-linking: permalinks have to be made more structured and SEO
friendly.
Social Media optimized Content: Content structure has to support the navigating
pattern on social media. Analytics to be fed back into content structure.
Mobile friendly TV Content
The catch-up TV on mobile use case has been identified as a major part of mobile
consumption patterns. Mobile news becomes even more important going forward.
Including the context of the user into news tagging, for example location tagging for crime
news has to become the norm. Astro Awani should be especially geared towards providing
that perspective.
A visible, meaningful program guide on the Live TV screens would really be helpful in
navigating towards VOD content. As would automated recommendations coming from the
tagging taxonomy. On mobile, more than on any other format, it is important to meet this
use case without extraneous cognitive load to the user. This will require both CMS changes
as well as changes in page design.
The TV content should be broken down into ‘Nuggets’ or ‘Snacks’ as well as ‘Small
Meals’ to support both micro and macro breaks. These can be called ‘Glimpses’ and
‘Mobisodes’. Mobisodes can also be upto 5 minutes long.
TV content should be structured according to the user’s mind map. What does he
see TV on mobile as? What does he want to consume during the commute? In bed?
In the kitchen? While travelling?
User Centric Design
As we go forward we know solving the user’s problems solves the company’s problems as
well. So what are those problems in the context of news. Identifying those has to become
key to the strategy. Towards that it makes sense to involve users into the design process be
5. it in terms of ideation or even usability testing and prototype testing. This has to be built
into the plans for the product so that with every new build we are solving problems for our
users and not creating new ones.
4. New Content Streams
New Language Frontiers
Language wise the Malaysian public can be broken up to many culturally diverse groups.
Each of those groups have different content needs. The trick is to go forward and find the
cultural groups that resonate the most with the Awani business strategy. And to serve those
content needs honestly and with vision to cohesively unite it all under the Awani brand.
Target Audience Identification: Identification of target audience will be according to
the revenue streams that may come from them.
Additional Revenue stream identification: The revenue streams can come from
aggregation of content, curation of content or syndication.
Language specific Content Strategy: The content strategy can follow our overall
brand strategy and tonality. Establishing that is the value add over the various
sources of additional content that we will be plugging into.
Aggregating Content Streams
The competitive landscape shows that users like to read news from different sources.
Aggregation is the way forward. Both in terms of aggregating news on the home property,
perhaps even on social and being a part of aggregated news feed in novel and interesting
ways. The branding strategy determines how you add value to aggregation. The ‘Awani
Perspective’ should add value in meaningful ways.
Being a part of aggregated content: All aggregators are working towards building a
magazine experience for users, including notifications, geo-tagging, maps and other
novel and interesting ways going forward. It makes sense to look at aggregators as
another platform for publishing rather than a necessary evil to conform to. Standard
RSS feed publishers like Geo-RSS, PubSubHubBub etc allow you customizations
which make the feed more machine readable and available for novel displays like
Maps etc. We should make our content available and ride that wave as well.
Aggregating content on the home property: There will be two ways of aggregating
content going forward. One is to brand the content as Awani content by adding
value to it. This content will be intermixed with indigenous Awani content. The other
is to aggregate content from brands which the users want to read in the context of
the news. Content that adds value to the reader’s experience. For example, we may
have aggregated content from Manorama displayed in a Manorama branded box on
the Tamil interface. BBC on the English interface etc. All outbound traffic to that
6. should generate revenue for Awani. If the user’s going to read that content side by
side anyway why shouldn’t we facilitate that.
5. Content Restructuring
Enhancing Content Structure
There are clear indications that the content needs more structure going forward. In order to
mold it into any kind of novel streams be it aggregators, social media or in-house novel
displays like timelines, maps, word clouds etc, the content needs better structure in terms
of tagging, summarization, cheat sheeting processes, video structuring, image structuring
etc.
Structure for Malleability: The content needs to be meaningfully tagged. Location tagging is
different from people tagging is different from date tagging. To build the recommendation
engine in a scalable manner, to publish in frontiers where no man has been before, the
content needs to be structured in more meaningful ways.
Making content container free
Content Structure goes a long way in making content container free. The monetization
strategy going forward will stem from how meaningfully we can disseminate, highlight and
syndicate content.
Container free design: Each piece of content should be able to standalone or to be
used in conjunction with other items that give meaning to it. For example a photo
RSS feed may link into image syndication platforms like Getty Images etc, or into an
application that allows the user to browse news using pictures alone as ‘Headlines’.
An effective design for the content will make it container free. Will make it fly. As a
brand ambassador, and as a revenue source.
6. Maximizing Social
A typical use case of social is to enable short dives into the content in a news portal. The
discovery and discussion of content still remains with the social network itself. We have to
maximize these dives and turn them into longer reading sessions as well as enable the
whole experience of the user on the social network end as well.
Maximising Perspectives from Social: Social parameters can be used to add new meaning to
a piece of news. The CMS should be empowered to do that to any and every article not
knowing which one will eventually cause a stir and thus great discussion.
7. Maximizing the social news reading experience: How can we add value to the user’s
experience while they are navigating from there. Will polls add a perspective that makes
sense? For example on the GST issue, everyone has a view point. How can be bring forward
that viewpoint from a user perspective. Users are both interested in the result of polls if
disseminated right and a smaller cross-section is also interested in expression opinions in
opinion polls. A ‘Morning’ Digest of whatever happened in the night may perhaps add value
to the twitter user’s experience. Or showing news on the twitter trends in a particular
location may have value for twitter users
7. Maximizing Mobile
Using context
News has various use cases on mobile. Lets look at some use cases
Catch-up TV: We all understand this use case and can accommodate for it going
forward with carefully chosen content running from a mobile recommendation
system.
Location centric news: Its widely known that users like to contextualize news to
location. For example: Crime news in a local neighborhood or city, environmental
news in an industrial area, travellers to a new city who want to be where the action
is etc. The mobile is highly conducive to providing this perspective because of
location targeting. In how many more ways can we maximize the location to provide
news.
Cooking and Parenting: When a person is cooking in the kitchen and consulting
recipes, parenting news, health news, nutrition news brings in more perspectives.
What are other ways that context brings in more perspectives which can be used to add
value to a user’s news experience. Shopping? News can add value to grocery lists by
bringing up news articles related to the content there. Enabling better decision making on
the shopping.
Selective Notifications:
Users will be making a lot of their decisions on the fly today. Enabling the exact quality and
quantity of news that they get is a feature that is a part of the experience on google, in the
context of google news, apple & android in the context of mobile news etc. So it will be
widely used on mobile applications, on the web experience and within aggregating
platforms as well.
It’s important to do three things in that perspective:
8. 1) Enable granularity of news so that it forms meaningful patterns to which users may
want to subscribe to. So in context of the Andhra Hurricane a user may want to
subscribe to ‘HudHud news’ or all ‘Hurricane’ news. Similarly a user who is interested
in a new car launched in the market may be interested in getting news about all new
cars in the ‘luxury segment’ or all new ‘honda’ cars. Let the reins for that decision lie
in the hands of the user.
2) News structure should support this granularity to enable selection of notifications
going forward. IA and tagging taxonomy to be made keeping in mind these use
cases.
3) Allow users to perform those functions on the fly. Let the recommendation engine
i.e. editors to begin with, determine the ‘Notification worthiness’ of news. So which
tags turn into subscribe-able categories for the user depends on what the editors
enable from their end.
8. Recommendation Engine
Building the foundation
Going forward a malleable, scalable, home-grown recommendation engine should be a part
of the value add that Awani adds to news coming from various sources. The basis for the
recommendation engine has to begin with a well thought out infrastructure that will scale
to hitherto undiscovered needs in users and editors. The basis for the recommendation
engine has to be set now. As learning flows from the editorial team, some processes that
they follow in terms of providing recommendations using the newly structured CMS, may be
more apt for a recommendation strategy. As organically they are added to the engine, the
intelligence in the engine will grow over time. The structure of the engine should be poised
for knowledge growth in this manner to refine and fine tune the recommendation process
in various ways.
9. Standardization
Standardizing for machine readability
The way facebook & google determine interest categories is the similar, the way location
tags are read by most standard applications is determined by the structure of GeoRSS feed.
It is important to adhere internal standards to popular standards in the market so that our
content is readable, findable and usable.
