Selasa, 12 Juni 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Triumph of the human-powered aggregator: Dan Shanoff on moving Quickish to Gannett

Posted: 11 Jun 2012 02:11 PM PDT

In adding Quickish to its quickly expanding nest of digital sports properties, Gannett’s USA Today Sports Media Group is signaling the importance of aggregation to readers’ media diets. But in Quickish, they’re getting more than a piece of machinery that sputters out topical, logical, computer driven news. Launched last year by Dan Shanoff, Quickish is a human-powered news discovery engine that emphasizes the best sports reads in any given moment.

The sports media group picked up Quickish for an undisclosed sum this morning, announcing they plan to keep the site running and incorporate its technology into other parts of the company’s sports outlets. That’s a growing list, with recent purchases like the Big Lead Sports and sites like High School Sports Net and MMA Junkie.

Dave Morgan, senior VP of content and editor-in-chief of the USA Today Sports Media Group, said Quickish-style aggregation could be popping up on a number of their sports sites, as widgets or themed modules —perhaps a Quickish for high school sports or a Quickish for MMA. When I spoke with Morgan Monday, he said aggregation has an important role to play in delivering sports news: “I think the right answer for us is not one or the other. We’re going to be creating something unique for our properties and audience,” he said. “I always think the human touch on top of anything we can do from an algorithmic standpoint will be very key.”

For sports in particular, readers’ loyalty starts with their teams, not necessarily any particular website. Providing the best, comprehensive information on what players and teams are up to is what’s valuable, Morgan said. Aggregation feeds into that by giving readers a broader range of writers and sources. “I think it’s important as we build out our digital properties and presence that curation plays an important role,” Morgan said.

Shanoff is making the move to the sports media group along with Quickish, which means the company is bringing on someone with deep online sports experience that includes AOL, Associated Content, Sports Illustrated, and ESPN among others. He’ll be taking on a new role working in audience development, a job that makes sense given Quickish’s focus on delivering the best stories to readers.

In between his Gannett new employee orientation sessions, Shanoff emailed me to talk about why he took Quickish to USA Today. “The cardinal dynamic of entrepreneurship is that you want to be at the nexus of an amazing team and an amazing opportunity. That's what has me so excited about the Sports Media Group. Brilliant people wanting to do huge things,” he wrote.

In his 18 months running the site, Shanoff said he’s learned a lot about the reading habits of online audiences and the rhythms of sports journalism. “When it comes to curation, less is more. You are doing a greater service for news consumers by cutting down on their clutter as much as you can,” he said. Though Shanoff wouldn’t go into specifics about the site’s traffic, he said Quickish gets a lot of eyeballs, with people looking for updates during sporting events or catching up during the workday.

Quickish readers come to the site looking for a handful of things, among them of-the-moment analysis, sometimes even during a game, as well as postgame reaction. Shanoff said that experience has been driven in many way by Twitter, where we as readers want an real-time backchannel to follow as games are in-action. Having spent more than a year channeling the pulse of sports news, Shanoff said the volume of sports content has never been higher. Even with all the noise, great pieces still find a way to stand apart and be discovered. “There is a value to being first, sure, but in a world where social currency has become preeminent, it is so much more important to be good,” he said. “In real-time, ‘first’ isn't even a factor anymore; everyone is chiming in within 3 minutes of a news event happening, but it is the truly outstanding analysis that gets passed around.”

Being an aggregator provides a unique perspective on a particularly busy year in sports. With labor disputes in the NFL and NBA, Tebowmania, and the rise and fall of Jeremy Lin, Shanoff said the Penn State football scandal was what dominated. “You saw the emergence of remarkable reporting talents like the Patriot-News' Sara Ganim, a dominant national columnist like Yahoo's Dan Wetzel doing as superlative work on Twitter as he did in his columns and what I contend was Grantland's signature piece, Michael Weinreb's ‘Growing Up Penn State,’” he said.

Shanoff said he’s excited about the resources the sports media group can put into Quickish and seeing how it can be expanded. “They have a big commitment to a couple of things Quickish is trying to do well: Real-time consumption, short-form publishing, curation and editor-vetted analysis,” he said. Though Quickish was a solo operator in its most recent past, Shanoff said the future of publishing means combining, not siloing off, things like aggregation and original content. As part of a company as big as Gannett, that can influence changes in the world of journalism, Quickish, and what it represents, could have far-reaching effects.

Three takeaways for news orgs from Apple’s WWDC keynote

Posted: 11 Jun 2012 12:59 PM PDT

Today’s Apple keynote at its Worldwide Developers Conference featured some pretty remarkable announcements. (That new MacBook Pro with a Retina display looks tremendously foxy and may be the only thing on the market that can eat into MacBook Air sales.) But there weren’t any reveals likely to have a big impact on news organizations, like the announcements at previous events of Newsstand or Apple’s subscription model for iOS apps. (Here’s a roundup from The Verge of all today’s announcements.)

Still, there were a few items that news organizations should probably pay attention to in iOS6, the next version of Apple’s phone-and-tablet software, out sometime this fall. (One was only briefly mentioned: a redesign of Apple’s app and book stores, which will likely have an impact on your work’s discoverability. We just don’t know enough yet to know what that impact will be.) Here are three worth knowing about:

Siri: Prepare for people to talk to your app

Siri, Apple’s conversational voice assistant, is expanding to a new device, the iPad. But more importantly, it’s also learning from apps. Apple showed off integration on topics like sports (“What’s the score of the Giants game?”) and movies (“What’s playing at the Kendall Square Theaters?”) and noted that Siri can now launch apps (“Launch Angry Birds”).

Now, it’s unclear how much further app-by-app integration can go; the rest of WWDC is under NDA, and it will probably still be another development cycle before things can get really specific. But at the very least, news orgs should start brainstorming about the kinds of integration they’d like to see:

New York Times, what’s the latest in Syria? Does Paul Krugman have a new blog post?

NPR, what’s the NPR affiliate in Pocatello? And when does Wait Wait air here?

WSJ Live, has Markets Hub started yet? And what’s AAPL trading at?

CNN, where is Wolf Blitzer right now? He owes me money.

It’s worth asking these questions now, both because these changes are coming and because it’s a useful exercise at contemplating the questions your app can provide answers for. Siri, when fully built out, could be a way to strengthen brand relationships and make news organizations news appliances in addition to media outlets.

And if I was a really big player — say, the Times, Journal, or CNN — I’d be inquiring with my friends in Cupertino about when they can be the first news organization to join the likes of Yelp, OpenTable, and Rotten Tomatoes as special Siri partners.

Passbook: A new kind of loyalty card

Passbook was a curveball, an app not on the rumormongers’ radar. It’s essentially a wallet-replacement, but in the holder-of-little-scraps-of-paper-and-plastic sense, not in the cash-money sense. Your Starbucks card, your Apple Store gift card, your Amtrak ticket, your boarding pass — Passbook can hold all those in a single app. And it’s got what looks like a smart set of features (like geolocation, letting you know when you’re near a Starbucks if you have a card).

While it doesn’t come with an payment mechanism attached (as Square’s Pay with Square product does), you can easily imagine that getting tied into iOS 7 this time next year.

But for the moment, it looks like an excellent tool for news orgs that are experimenting with membership models. Say you’re a local NPR affiliate and your membership program gives listeners a 15 percent discount at your local dry cleaners. Add Passbook to your iPhone app (there’s an API) and (a) you get an easy way for your members to use their privileges and (b) you get a tool that reminds them when they’re in membership-friendly stores or situations. And — at least from what we can tell from today’s keynote, details TBA — there’s no apparent financial cut for Apple here. Definitely a place for membership-oriented outlets to explore.

Maps: Meet the new boss

News orgs that use maps in their apps — not many, but a number that could increase as news orgs get smarter about using location data to channel news flows — will want to make sure to adopt Apple’s new mapping APIs, which replace Google’s. The advantages of Apple’s setup don’t seem extraordinary for the moment — better representation of place information is the one that stood out to me — but this is where Apple’s going to be putting its energy going forward and there’s no reason to fight it.

Finally, one note that doesn’t apply to news organizations as much as to the journalists who work for them: Apple’s integrating dictation into OS X Mountain Lion, the next version of its Mac operating system, due next month. That’ll be music to the ears of many a hack, particularly those with carpal tunnel.

Coming attractions: Upload Cinema moves online video from the laptop to the theater

Posted: 11 Jun 2012 11:20 AM PDT

Watching online videos can be a social experience, in the same way sharing any story, slideshow, or Internet curio is social. It can be a link swapped among friends, and yes, from time to time we gather around a monitor to watch the Bedroom Intruder or Double Rainbow. But for the most part, we see these things alone, swaddled in headphones.

But if you step inside the confines of Upload Cinema, those same videos — the time wasters, the mind blowers, the utterly incomprehensible performances — become a true shared experience. Since 2008, Upload Cinema has been gathering audiences in movie theaters in Europe to sit down for a night of, well, communal YouTube. It’s the Internet transferred from private terminal to the big screen, with each event featuring a curated, themed selection of online videos. Look, there’s Star Wars as told by a three-year-old, and our old friend Nyan Cat. Here’s some Rebecca Black in full stereo, and, yes, the Leave Britney Alone guy.

The scale’s key here: seeing these videos on a screen that far exceeds our laptops, phones, or tablets. But Upload Cinema is really an exercise in collective entertainment that bridges digital bits and celluloid and tries, one night at a time, to find a shared experience in the fractured niches of the web.

“Besides music, film is the most dominant art form of our time,” Dagan Cohen, co-creator of Upload Cinema, told me. “What you see happening is that all of a sudden, that medium became so accessible for everyone that, all of a sudden, everyone became a filmmaker.” Of course, many probably didn’t set out to be filmmakers; online video is a hodgepodge of the personal and the bizarre, and that, says Cohen, is part of its beauty. “Everyone is gravitating towards video as a form of self-expression,” he told me.

In 2008, Cohen and Barbara de Wijn started gathering friends together at a failing art house movie theater in Amsterdam for informal video nights. The events quickly grew and they created a formal process for Upload Cinema. Each event has a theme decided by Cohen, de Wijn, and a small editorial team. Once the theme is set, the doors are thrown open for people to submit videos — either their own or, more commonly, others culled from the Internet. Upload Cinema has now expanded to 12 cities in the Netherlands as well as Madrid, Istanbul, and Antwerp; Cohen said he’s looking for partners to start a series in a U.S. city (hint, hint).

What’s curious about the growth of Upload Cinema is that many in the audience may already be familiar with some of the videos. (Cohen said they ask video auteurs for permission to show their work as part of Upload Cinema; they don’t pay, but he said they haven’t been turned down yet.) If you’re a YouTube or Vimeo connoisseur — the type of person not only aware of the latest memes but likely to vote on which videos get selected — it’s the equivalent of paying to sit in a theater and watch reruns.

And yet they never have a shortage of people coming to shows. (It originally started out one night a month before switching to two.) Cohen said it’s the theater environment, something far removed from sitting at your desk staring at a computer, that helps drive audiences. “It does create a strange bond because there is this kind of knowledge — people know. You have people who are really Internet savvy and know half of the videos, and then you have, really, laggards,” he said.

But the universal reason we go to theaters is the same, regardless of whether we’re watching “Prometheus” or a clip from Italian Spiderman. We can watch almost anything in our homes now. But we choose to go to the theater to be with a crowd, some whom we know, most we don’t. “By choosing themes that are broad, we combine stuff that is inspiring and makes you think, stuff that is hilariously funny, or shocking, or just beautiful,” he said. “We go through a lot of emotions in one show. That is the thing that is shared.”

Upload Cinema is experimenting with new ways to increase the community feel of its events. For example, at a recent event in London, the audience was asked to give feedback on its favorite videos by smartphone; these talking twin babies took the top prize:

Of course, one of the problems with online video is that sometimes the quality of the video — not necessarily the subject matter — can be less than perfect, thanks to the not-exactly high def nature of some camera phones. Blowing that up into theater-sized proportions doesn’t sound optimal. But Cohen said one truism of web video carries over to the movie screen: If a video is captivating, it doesn’t matter if the picture quality is poor. “If the quality if rough but the ideas are fresh and there’s a sense of urgency behind it, all of a sudden the quality of execution becomes less important,” he said.

Splicing together close to two hours of the Internet’s greatest hits is a fun challenge. Having a theme helps focus the process, but Cohen and the rest of his team are still left with ample submissions each month. When your raw materials are two-minute videos, it takes a good editor to install order and some kind of narrative structure. The videos are a constant juxtaposition, new finds alongside older “classic” videos; it’s like putting together chapters of a really abstract book. Alternately, Cohen said it can be like making music. “Start well, then let it dip in slightly, then go up and try to end with a crescendo,” he said. “I think it’s more closer to composing music, in a way, than real drama.”

Cohen believes all the things we relish about online videos only gets amplified in the theater environment. “We do like to see people who completely and utterly lose themselves and are not as restricted as we are in daily life,” he said.

It makes sense that online videos would find life in other media. The language of online video is a kind of pidgin derived from TV, movies, and real life, a low-rent cinema vérité. It shouldn’t be surprising these videos bleed over into offline life at ROFLcon or on TV on Tosh.0. In that way, it also becomes more participatory: not just people making videos, but people watching videos of people who made videos. “I think it’s also a window on the world, it’s not just a bunch of funny videos,” Cohen said. “It is a reflection on society and culture via online video.”

What makes something go viral? The Internet according to Gawker’s Neetzan Zimmerman

Posted: 11 Jun 2012 07:30 AM PDT

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In March, I wrote about Gawker’s new quantity-over-quality experiment. Each day, one Gawker staffer was tasked with pageview-chasing duty, a quest to post enough cat videos, Miley Cyrus pics, and local news ephemera to keep the clicks coming en masse. That staffer’s work would free up others to work on longer, more involved pieces. Pageview duty rotated, because — who could stare too long into the Internet’s bright raw id and not go blind?

Neetzan Zimmerman, apparently. Editor A.J. Daulerio hired him two months ago to focus exclusively on viral content. Zimmerman’s title at Gawker is Editor, The Internet. He is assigned to cover the Internet.

This machine-like person has generated more than 300 bylines for Gawker since he started on April 9. These are not lengthy tomes, usually; nearly every post is just a funny photo or video, with body text barely longer than a caption. The average word count of a sampling of his recent stories is about 200.

Zimmerman sits comfortably atop Gawker’s leaderboard, garnering two to five times more pageviews than his highest-performing colleagues. Zimmerman is so prolific, his posts so magnetic, that Daulerio has now relieved all 10 full-time Gawker staffers of their pageview chores.

“A taxidermied cat being that's been turned into a helicopter — that's clearly going to be successful, right?”

“He’s a total freak, a specialist, if you will, and I’d much rather have him (one person!) taking care of the backend of Gawker and letting the rest of us grow the site a little more traditionally,” Daulerio told me in an email. “He’s doing an outstanding job so far, now it’s a task for us to keep up and build more around him every day.”

The reaction from readers to my previous story was split between “Journalism is doomed!” and “Journalism is saved!” A lot of people interpret Daulerio’s motives as trying to figure out how to maximize pageviews. That’s true, but I think the essential question is, more precisely: Can Chinese goats subsidize substance? Can farting babies pay the bills, so journalists can focus on real work?

Consider the reach of Zimmerman’s recent work (approximate pageviews parenthetical):

Zimmerman, 30, was previously the one-man operation called The Daily What, a Tumblr site he created in 2008 while bored at work. He’s the guy who elevated Double Dream Hands to meme status and Rebecca Black to global fame. (It is so documented in Know Your Meme, the paper of record for the Internet.)

The Daily What was scooped up by Ben Huh’s Cheezburger Network in 2010. In April of this year, Zimmerman parted ways with Cheezburger to get a little break from the relentless schedule and maybe pursue some more serious work. He was pumping out about 35 posts a day at The Daily What and never took a weekend off. At Gawker, he tells me, he averages 13-14 posts a day. “The least I’ve ever done was 9, and that was on an excruciatingly slow day,” he said. Weekends are mostly free now.

What makes something go viral?

Last week Zimmerman posted This Is How You Make Something Go Viral: An Impractical Guide, an essay five times the length of his usual work. I devoured it, expecting to finally learn the secret of virality. I came away unsatisfied. It seemed more like a guide to discovering — dare I say, curating — viral content, a complex system of early-warning signs that seems to make sense only in Zimmerman’s head.

He describes an Internet food chain, a series of tiers of websites that disseminate viral content. The highest-performing, most visible websites — BuzzFeed, Boing Boing, Gawker, Reddit — often graze on content discovered by lower-visibility sites. The lower-tier sites are often the ones to lift TV news bloopers or funny Facebook photos from obscurity. But they depend on their mainstream predators/enablers to elevate something to meme status. Zimmerman described his system thus:

In order to stay as current as possible, I make sure to run a spot-check of the most visible sites at least once a week. Refreshing the index with the most fruitful lower tier content sources is only half of it: Losing the dead weight is crucial as well. My rule is simple: If a site hasn’t produced at least on[e] item of value during the week, it drops down a tier. If it bottoms out and still hasn’t proven useful, it’s gone.

“In nature,” Zimmerman told me, “you can’t really say the fly or the mosquito are not as important as the animals that eat them, because they still provide sustenance for those animals…It’s the same thing with these lower-tier sites — they’re sometimes even more important.”

As in any competitive ecosystem, there are days when sustenance is scarce. On slow news days, Zimmerman wrote: “Insipid, pointless, patently unintesting and unfunny items are brought to the fore when they would otherwise remain unmissed in obscurity.”

I pressed Zimmerman to reveal precisely what it is that makes something viral. News organizations, marketers, and C-list bloggers could really use this. He talks about this vague quality called “Internet bent.”

“When I talk about Internet bent, it’s sort of, what’s viral, versus just what’s making headlines? Those tend to be two different things. When something goes viral, it tends to be something that is not expected to go viral,” he said. So when the U.S. kills al-Qaida’s No. 2 man in a drone attack, that’s a big headline, but it’s not bound to be viral content.

“A taxidermied cat being that’s been turned into a helicopter — that’s clearly going to be successful, right? Because it’s got that element of shock, it’s got that element of a cat, you know, it’s basically just tailored to the Internet,” he said. I am laughing at this point.

A Neetzan for news?

This would seem to disappoint people in news organizations who want to learn from the masters and grow their traffic. Not only is viral content so unpredictable, it tends to not really be news content. So instead of creating viral content, maybe news organizations should be aggregating viral content. Maybe every news organization needs a Neetzan Zimmerman.

But how does a Washington Post or St. Louis Post-Dispatch create its own Daily What and not look ridiculous?

“My approach to this whole thing from the start, it was…take everything that’s going on on the Internet seriously. Treat it as you would something that you might read in The Economist,” he said. “If you read Tumblr, for instance, there’s some smart people out there…They’re not dumbing down the content, but they’re still introducing it in a way that they know will be palatable to this new audience.”

As an example he points to GIF HOUND, a Tumblr site that presents the day’s news in the form of animated GIFs. Take this image that condenses a four-minute Obama campaign video about Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts jobs record:

That image reached a lot of people who might not otherwise watch the video. Maybe it compelled viewers to click through and watch the whole thing.

And then this happened:

When’s the last time someone with 16 million Twitter followers shared your content?

A.J. Daulerio, the Gawker editor, has said more than once that he does not like pageview-chasing — but, in essence, You got a better idea for paying for journalism? As he wrote last week:

I hate cats in hot tubs, cats sitting on babies, Keyboard Cats playing off babies who suck at singing, etc. Looking at them is fine. I mostly hate that, at some point, a viral video becomes the default hit-switch for a slow news day. But when your job is to grow a site’s traffic, it’s tough to ignore — and for the sake of the other writers, it’s a necessary cog.

Even if Neetzan Zimmerman could save journalism, his defect is that he’s human. Human beings wear out. Human beings want to try new things, branch out. I asked him, could he be automated? Could we turn Zimmerman into A MACHINE? He laughed and said math was his weakest subject in school. “You could probably find a way to do that.” You could write a program that checks the high-performing sites for stories and cross-checks them against other sites, dynamically ranking aggregators and awarding more points to those whose content goes viral more often.

But you can’t replicate his gut, not yet. There are no hard-and-fast rules, he said. Zimmerman’s many stories cohere somehow. They have wit and soul in a way I can’t quite describe. Robots can’t do that.

Zimmerman is skeptical that mainstream newsrooms will learn from Gawker. “They want to keep the integrity of the old guard in place, and they’re very concerned that any sort of shift from that would be seen as trying to pander,” he said. “That is something that’s going to end up with them going out of business.”

And he does not say that dismissively. Zimmerman grew up in Israel reading two national newspapers every day, cover to cover. He does not want traditional news organizations to disappear, he said, but they have to start catering to their next audience now.
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