Tell your own stories

dont tell me what to do Mr. Bishop

I am not much a writer. 30 years old, so college was about 9 years ago for me. I was going to school at NMU. (northern Michigan university). So my home mountain was marquette. While marquette is a tiny little hill, they honestly do have a wicked park. So coming from IL, I didn't get to ski as much as some people.

^ sigh...

Don't worry Bish, I gotcha!

^ sigh...

...hgis ^

I actually have a strong desire to write up some news articles and put them in there. The problem I'm facing is that without winter I feel like I have no content relevant to the demographic on here. I've written a couple things up as threads just because I wanted to share them and put it in NSG, but I don't want to spam News with that random "here's what just happened to me" stuff.

Come winter i plan on posting in there at least a few times.

I find this a very solid point. Quoting for emphasis.

I quit writing when we lost the "blog" aspect of it.

Ill try to post in there this winter, but I feel like that could be a hard thing to do without coming across as kind of a douche bag.

We must have royally fucked up the communication of what is happening -


What we want in there is absolutely everything.

Seriously - we want every journalistic atom in your body that exists to literally pour its unfiltered soul out into the format of news articles. Zero fucks given to the quality, topic, timeliness, professionalism and overall format.

The thing you must face is the fact that only upvotes will get your words read. No upvotes, you are buried with the rest of the shit.

This is the exact same challenge that we've given all staff. You think your shit is interesting?

Get it voted to the top without help.

so what you are saying is that there is a new NSG/SG but in news article format? or a news blog that gets upvotes?

i dont really understand at the moment but im sure once more people utilize it and it gets more comfortable i will have a better grasp.

we got thaaangs coming in this department this fall, keep ya eye's peeled for some content coming monday and much more throughout the fall

on the real though what happened to all the exclusive NS journalism that died with the old front page format? that shit was so tight, it would be cool to see more of that and it would help place a bigger emphasis on good stories on this website, articles used to get like 4000 views minimum and now they are lucky to get a thousand. That hurts incentive to write, thats for damn sure

Given these new revelations I'm jacked about the News section. Watch out, I'm gonna write some shot.

I wrote my first article the other day and I was impressed by how easy it was. I really hope that we'll see more user generated content as well.

I'm planning on writing reviews for this seasons ski movies. I'm doing one for mutiny that will be done soon.

Fuck autocorrect. I always type what I want to say.

I really miss the old front/main page format.

There are ups and downs to both styles. The new version is definitely better for video, threads, and sometimes photos. Where the old one had a much bigger push on news, video of the day, dedicated NSTV postings, as well as other things like contests, camp and park updates, and all that other stuff down below that I probably never looked at. I also have a feeling very few people adjust their home pages and just leave them as is...

so much this.

I'm still surprised at how much emphasis is put on this TBH.

What happened is that well before we changed the format of the news, most people stopped really reading it. The stats showed clearly that views on articles had been on a decline since about 2008, and that the average time reading articles was only a few seconds - likely a scroll through to look at photos.

Occasionally there would be a banger article that went up and it would get a ton of views and have a ton of people seeing it... but these were accounting for something like less than 0.5% of the total views on the site. News overall fell below 2% of overall traffic.

As well, there was a single person gatekeeper to the content that went in the news. Any time you have that, it becomes really easy to favorite some people over others, and to post advertiser messages within the space that was reserved for content.

At the same time as this, all the other sites had dramatically upped their journalism efforts. Freeskier, Powder, Ski The East, TGR - hell even BroBomb (and many others) are doing great things for writing interesting content.

So we changed to the new format to shift Newschoolers' position within the ski industry. Instead of us standing next to the Freeskier guys at the X-games and writing the exact same article on two websites, we wanted to just be able to showcase the good stuff over at Freeskier (or any other site). We wanted the gatekeeper of popularity to become the community, and implemented a very advanced voting system to make this as fair as possible.

Finally, we realized that newschoolers was about way more than just news. Videos have grown to almost 30% of overall site views, conversation makes up 50% and photos have grown close to 10%. Why weren't we showcasing more shit that people like The Hood Crew were doing? It wasn't always a news article... but should that matter?

Why is news the only good way to find out what is going on in skiing?

Finally, the open submission process and the ability to share articles were something that I thought was going to get used a bit more than it is. When we have an ultra popular article, it gets right to the top and easily cracks that 4k view mark. I do agree that the views are a bit lacking over what they used to be in general, but when something deserves it, it gets it.

Plus you don't have the same amount of re-posted content going up on 4 different sites, and you really get rid of the boring company press releases that seem to always get snuck into the 'news' on most websites.

In the end though, I think a big thing that happened is we stopped spending ungodly amounts of money to fly around gathering news, and started re-distributing this money into our video program. So the reason that you guys are now making money is because we aren't spending so much on news. There's logic behind the fact in my mind that perhaps video is more entertaining than news... and if we have to prioritize due to budget... well maybe video is a better investment. I'd also potentially argue that investing in The Hood Crew is way more worth it than staffing our own one video guy that makes things we think are cool and only promotes people he likes.

What needs to happen to really build a new era of news on this site is participation on all fronts.

I think from our end, we need to get a little bit more funding back into the news program, which is why we launched the journalist monetization program this year. This will help attract more Journalists to begin contributing.

On your guys side, we need people to start telling those stories that wouldn't usually get funding... that story of your crew, that story of your mountain or that story of that local guy that just needs a bit of exposure and he'll blow up. Who cares if you don't have a degree in journalism... give it a shot. Good stuff gets upvoted, bad stuff gets downvoted and you either get the exposure or you learn better for next time.

On both sides, we all need to be doing a better job of sharing news found at other sites. There is a TON of quality journalism out there on the internet, and I think having it all in one place to read would be totally awesome. We only need a couple of people to share what they are reading, and a couple more people to get initial upvotes going so that news gets exposure just like everything else.

TL;DR - The news died before the format change you're just lying to yourself that you still liked it by the end. The new format can have good news, we just all need to put a tiny smidgen of effort in.

Word, thanks for the extensive response, that really breaks it down, especially on the numbers side of things. Having NS guys write the same article as freeskier and powder about the X-Games and other comps is inevitable and pretty pointless as well, there is only so much you can write about a generic slopestyle comp. I guess I was more referring to some of the old interviews and exclusive stories. Those were more original and exciting to read anyway. When you break it down in the numbers sense though it makes a lot of sense. This website is more setup these days to provide instant gratification EX. video's, pictures, and there is nothing wrong with that, its rad. The target audience is way different than a powder or ski journal anyway, not many 14 year olds are gonna sit down and read a well written long article. I also can really feel you about wanting to pump more money back into the video side of things, that is too cool and will continue to make NSTV go off in the coming years. My question is this now, why not have a good mix? Have some of the NS staff write 2 or 3 exclusive articles every month, it keeps some of the audience happy and draws more attention back to the news side of this website and who knows, maybe it will attract more people to write some stuff. Like I said though, keep an eye out for a bunch of cool exclusive articles coming from the hood crew in the coming months, really looking forward to supplementing our videos with some behind the scenes write ups and profile's, maybe some of you wont end up thinking were so brain dead after all ;)

Also stuff like the Q&A's are really cool, that is like some progressive journalism in my mind. Gets the community involved and asks questions that people really want to hear answered, the stept one was $$$$, ours on the other hand, looking like a bit more of a shitshow haha but thats too be expected, thanks to everyone that was involved with that and asked questions and provided some always entertaining hate!

I think this might have been the one mistake we didn't put enough effort into. It wasn't actually the intent to stop doing that sort of stuff... it just kind of happened that way. I couldn't even really tell you why.

You're dead on when you say that we need to get that flow of really quality and interesting articles back, and our own staff should be doing them in addition to users and other pro journalists. That is exactly why the Q&A series started. That thing was a project that was supposed to start happening like last september, but it never really got off the ground. I talked about the idea with Mousseau and he grabbed it and ran with it.

The key to success is balance. I don't think the answer is to take away the ability for Threads, pictures and Videos to be featured at the top of the homepage, but we certainly do need to give a better reason for people to check the news articles and more quality that deserves to be voted up.

Again, if we all work together this thing is going to be awesome.