Kamis, 28 Juni 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Five things The New York Times learned from its three-year hyperlocal experiment

Posted: 27 Jun 2012 12:34 PM PDT

With yesterday’s news that The New York Times is ending its affiliation with The Local — a pair of hyperlocal blogs that the newspaper launched three years ago — an experiment came to a close. And from the outset, the Times made it clear that it thought of its dive into neighborhood coverage as just that — an experiment, not an investment likely to generate financial returns. As the Times’ Jim Schachter told us in 2009, The Local would be, within the context of the Times, “barely enough to create a ripple in a pond and not enough to be profitable.”

But nonetheless, even with expectations set low, when the Times moves, people notice — and 2009 was a boom time for interest in hyperlocal, Times or no Times. Some running home-grown hyperlocal sites — the kind more recently assembled under the Authentically Local banner — questioned whether a big institution like The New York Times would have the right mix to pull off neighborhood coverage. (Check out the comments on that 2009 post to see the back-and-forth between Schachter and West Seattle Blog’s Tracy Record.)

The Local project started with a pair of community-focused sites covering neighborhoods in Brooklyn and New Jersey. By June 2010, the Jersey version of The Local was shuttered. Months later, the Times and NYU jointly launched an East Village iteration.

The Local was billed as an open-ended project with some specific ideas in mind. Blogs would be helmed by a couple of professional New York Times reporters, but story ideas and contributions would come from the community. If all went well, it might create a platform the Times could license to other communities.

“We, at least, have not figured out how to extract the professional journalist, or minimize it close to anything nearing zero”

As it turned out, the Times ended up handing off editorial control to local journalism schools — CUNY along with NYU — while keeping The Local branded as a collaboration with The New York Times. The schools have now formed committees to figure out what to do now that the newspaper is exiting, and Schachter — whose own Times goodbye party is tomorrow — told me that the newspaper “is giving them time to figure it out.”

Meanwhile, the newspaper is sussing out what it learned from the experiment. “What we have been trying to figure out at the Times — and I think what lots of people in this space have been trying to fiure out — is how do you prompt communities, and can you prompt communities into the act of covering themselves in a meaningful way?”

Schachter says there’s plenty to consider, and that “the truth is, we are not as good as we should be about learning from these initiatives.” Here’s a start, with five takeaways on what he believes The Local taught The New York Times.

1. It just doesn’t make sense for big media companies to pay their staffs to go hyperlocal.

The New York Times is a national and global news organization. Schachter says while covering neighborhoods has been “useful to become familiar with commercial issues related to hyperlocal,” it hasn’t been altogether practical.

“Honestly, if hyperlocal is not core to a media organization’s business, then a media organization cannot possibly be fully engaged in it,” he said. “Large media organizations cannot afford to cover large geographic areas in a hyperlocal way using exclusively paid staff.”

That doesn’t mean there aren’t hyperlocal projects that can benefit both big newspapers and community reporters — Schachter cites offering basic journalism training courses. “Doing online courses on how to develop a hyperlocal blog and how to do community journalism,” Schachter said, “I think that that’s something that news organiaztions ought to learn from and think about: What skills do they have that, without undermining their own efforts, they can share and can make money from…inviting people into newsrooms and showing them how to do journalism.”

2. Hard-hitting hyperlocal coverage benefits from some professional journalism.

Schachter believes that “if you want to get really good content that gets hard questions answered, you need a fair amount of professional journalism.” Whether that’s a New York Times reporter or a NYU journalism professor, you need someone who knows his way around a courtroom or a city council meeting or a FOIA request. Not every citizen has those skills. “We, at least, have not figured out how to extract the professional journalist or minimize it close to anything nearing zero,” he said.

3. Create a platform that makes it easy for people to participate in diverse ways.

Not everyone can write an account of the day’s news that The New York Times would publish. But that doesn’t mean that only professional journalists can produce meaningful work. From Schachter:

“If you can lower the barriers to participation, you’ll be more successful. If people think the only way to contribute is to write a New York Times quality article, you’ll only get so much engagement…But if sending in a photograph, answering a question, tweeting, taking notes for posting at a community board meeting — if all those are ways that people can participate, then you’ve broadened participation.”

Schachter also says the technology must facilitate participation. One way that The Local East Village tried to do that was through its Virtual Assignment Desk, a WordPress plugin that helps organize story pitches in a way that’s viewable by the public. The blog’s Open Assignment page details story ideas that haven’t been executed, and enables people to support or volunteer for coverage.

4. Understand the power of email.

Both of The Local sites have daily email newsletters, which is nothing usual among major news organizations, but is also a distribution technique that Schachter says smaller outfits shouldn’t overlook: “Media organizations overlook the power of this very simple tool. If people will opt into letting it into their mailbox, you are so far down the path of making them loyal audience members. The things you can lead them to do once they’ve made that choice are just immense.”

5. Don’t abandon experiments in “innovation land.”

The Local may have been billed an experiment from its inception — but more integration with the Times’ regular city reporters would have helped it thrive, Schachter said.

“I would have been much more aggressive, acting faster about pulling the experiment directly into the orbit of the Metro Desk,” he said. “Once you get an experiment going, by whatever means, get the people who are doing similar things in a nonexperimental, day-to-day way. Getting them to take ownership of it and love it and make it theirs is just critical.”

Schachter says then-metro editor Joe Sexton was “incredibly generous with resources and enthusiasm and support,” but the Times failed to truly embed The Local sites in the newsroom.

“They would have been a better teaching tool if they were less peripheral,” Schachter said. “Just sort of editorial ownership of it being right on the Metro Desk, as opposed to it being something that was considered independent, autonomous, budgetarily distinct…It stayed in innovation land, as opposed to ‘we’ve incubated it.’”

Schachter says the Times has already applied this lesson to its India Ink blog, which launched last September and “has ownership” by the foreign desk. (We wrote about India Ink a few weeks ago.)

That being said, The New York Times has incorporated some of what came from The Local into its basic metro coverage. Schachter says The Local has helped refine ideas on effective crowdsourcing, and features that are now part of the City Room. Urban Forager, for example, had its beginnings in The Local.

So what does any of this tell us about the future of hyperlocal news, and the extent to which industry attitudes have shifted in the past three years? Around the time The Local was starting up, there was a lot of buzz about Maine’s Village Soup as a hyperlocal model; most of its operations shut down in March. And plowing some of The Local’s same New Jersey turf at launch was Patch, whose financial life under AOL has been challenging. Many Authentically Local-style sites continue to do well, but their models haven’t scaled at the rate some would have hoped a few years ago.

“The industry was cratering at the time [in 2009], and a lot of news organzations were trying to figure out how do we save ourselves,” Schachter said. “They saw what was going on all around them — in the sense this was back to their roots — enough to say, ‘Can we figure out how to go back to providing coverage of local news?’ Most of the news organizations that engaged with this had so devastated their reporting ranks that, in my view, they were left to be shadowboxing with the idea because they couldn’t engage with it. Meantime, AOL, of all organizations, poured heart and soul into it. God bless them.”

How do you tell when the news is biased? It depends on how you see yourself

Posted: 27 Jun 2012 08:30 AM PDT

Take a moment with the headlines from this screenshot of The New York Times homepage from January. Really — it’s a little experiment. Click the image above for a larger view if you need to.

Ready?

How did you feel about these headlines? Does it matter to you to learn that they actually came from Fox News on the same day? (Screenshot for proof.) This faux home page was created by Dan Schultz, the MIT grad student also responsible for Truth Goggles, using his NewsJack point-and-click “remixer.”

Knowing what you know now, do these headlines seem different to you? If so, you’ve just proved that we detect and judge bias based on things other than what journalists actually write.

This effect has been noticed before. At the University of Michigan, William Youmans and Katie Brown showed the same Al Jazeera English news clip to American audiences, but with a catch: Half saw the news with its original Al Jazeera logo intact, and half saw the same video with a CNN logo instead. Viewers who saw the story with the original Al Jazeera logo rated Al Jazeera as more biased than before they had seen the clip. But people who watched the same footage with the fake CNN logo on it rated CNN as less biased than before!

Does this mean that we judge “bias” by brand, not content? Many people have tried to define what media bias is, and attempted to measure it, but I want to try to answer a different question here: not how we can decide if the news is biased, but how each of us actually does decide — and what it means for journalists.

The hostile media effect

During the Lebanese civil war in 1982, Christian militias in Beirut massacred thousands of Palestinian refugees while Israeli solders stood by. In 1985, researchers showed television news coverage of the event to pro-Israeli and pro-Arab viewers. Both sides thought the coverage was biased against them.

This effect — where both sides feel that a neutral story is biased against them — has been replicated so many times, in so many different cultural settings, with so many types of media and stories, that it has its own name: hostile media effect. The same story can make everyone on all sides think the media is attacking them.

Like a lot of experimental psychological research, the hostile media effect suggests we’re not as smart as we think we are. We might like to think of ourselves as impartial judges of credibility and fairness, but the evidence says otherwise. Liberals and conservatives can (and often do) believe the same news report is biased against both their views; they aren’t both right.

But why does this happen? Specifically, why does it happen for some stories and topics and not others? Discussion of climate change often provokes charges of bias, but discussion of other hugely significant science stories, such as the claimed link between vaccination and autism, usually produces a much smaller outcry.

You see bias when you see yourself as part of a group

Communications researcher Scott Reid has proposed that we can explain the hostile media effect through the psychological theory of self-categorization. This is a theory about personal identity and group identity, and it says that we “self-stereotype,” placing conceptual labels on ourselves just as we might make assumptions about other people. We all have multiple identities of this kind: gender, age, political preferences, race, nationality, subculture, and so on.

To test this, he performed a series of recently published experiments with American students. In the first, he used a survey to ask people whether they thought the media was biased, as well as their personal political orientations, both on a numerical scale from liberal to conservative. The catch was different groups got different cover pages with different sets of instructions. The first set of instructions was neutral:

The purpose of this questionnaire is to get your views of the news media in general.

The second set of instructions was designed to play up feelings of partisanship:

In recent times the differences between Republicans and Democrats have become highly polarized. Many of the issues discussed in the media are seen very differently by Republicans and Democrats. In this context, it is important to gauge people’s views of the media.

The third set of instructions was also designed to reinforce an identity, but in this case an identity that might be common to both liberals and conservatives — that of being an “American” versus the rest of the world.

With increasing globalization, it has become apparent that the media differs across countries and cultures. Al Jazeera has become the voice for much of the Arab world, both within the United States and in the Middle East. Given these changes, it is important to gauge people’s views of the news media in the United States.

And, oddly enough, the same survey gave different results, depending on the instructions:

Each of the lines on this graph shows how people’s perception of bias varied with their political orientation. The downward slope means that the more conservative someone was — the farther to the right on the “political position” scale — the more they perceived the media as hostile to Republicans, just as expected.

The surprising thing is that the strength of this perception depended on the framing each group had been given. When people were prompted to think about Republicans and Democrats, they perceived more media bias against their views, as indicated by the steep dashed line. When they were instructed to think about America vs. the world, they perceived slightly less bias then the neutral condition, as indicated by the shallow dotted line. Our perception of bias changes depending on the self-identity we currently have in mind.

This self-categorization explanation also predicts that people who are more partisan perceive greater bias, even when the news is in their favor. In Reid’s second experiment, people read an article about polling numbers for the 2008 presidential primaries, containing language like “among Republicans, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani maintained a 14-point lead over Arizona Sen. John McCain for the Republican presidential nomination,” and similar statements about the Democratic candidates. This time, the source of the information was manipulated: One group saw the poll attributed to the “Economic Policy Institute, a Democrat think tank and polling agency,” while the other was told it came from the “American Enterprise Institute, a Republican think tank and polling agency.”

In this purely factual scenario — dry-as-toast poll numbers, no opinions, no editorializing — respondents still had completely different reactions depending on the source. As you might expect, people who believed that the poll numbers came from the American Enterprise Institute thought that the story was biased towards Giuliani (and vice versa), confirming the hostile media effect. But the perception of favoritism increased not according to whether the reader personally identified as Republican or Democratic, but on how strong this identification was. The implication is that if you feel strongly about your group, you’re likely to see all news as more biased — even when the bias favors you.

Reid’s final experiment tested perceptions of overt attacks. He used a scathing review of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911, originally published on Slate, which begins:

One of the many problems with the American left, and indeed of the American left, has been its image and self-image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring.

The copy given to subjects (falsely) claimed the author was a member of either a Democrat or a Republican think tank. (In reality, the author was the late Christopher Hitchens.) As you might expect, people who identified as Republicans saw the review as more neutral, regardless of who they thought wrote it. The strange thing is that strong Democrats actually saw the review as slightly in favor of Democrats when they believed it was written by a Democrat! We interpret criticism completely differently depending on how we see the relationship between ourselves and the author.

What’s a journalist to do?

The first defense against accusations of bias is to report fairly. But the hostile media effect pretty much guarantees that some stories are going to be hated by just about everyone, no matter how they’re written. I suppose this is no surprise for any journalist who reads the comments section, but it has implications for how news organizations might respond to such accusations.

This research also suggests that the longstanding practice of journalists hiding their personal affiliations might actually be effective at reducing perceived bias. But only up to a point: To avoid charges of bias, the audience needs to be able to see the journalist as fundamentally one of them. This might require getting closer to the audience, not hiding from them. If we each live inside of many identities, then there are many possible ways to connect; conversely, it would be helpful to know, empirically, under what conditions a journalist’s politics are actually going to be a problem for readers, and for which readers.

We might also want to consider our framing more carefully. Because perceptions of bias depend on how we are thinking about our identity in that moment, if we can find a way to tell our stories outside of partisan frames, we might also reduce feelings of unfairness. The trick would be to shy away from invoking divisive identities, preferring frames that allow members of a polarized audience to see themselves as part of the same group. (In this regard, the classic “balanced” article that quotes starkly opposing sides might be a particularly bad choice.)

Encouraging the audience to perceive itself as unified — this seems simplistic, or naïve. But the consideration of identity is foundational to fields like mediation and conflict resolution. Experimental evidence suggests that it might be important in journalism too.

The newsonomics of the News Corp. split

Posted: 27 Jun 2012 05:12 AM PDT

Are two Ruperts even better than one? We may soon find out, as News Corp. moves forward today to clone itself.

The cloning, or splitting, of the $34 billion company certainly has its logic. Hive off those pesky newspaper assets and the company’s book arm HarperCollins into a separate company. Then let the News Corp. entertainment conglomerate — satellite, cable, broadcast, movies, and more — focus on global opportunities as both the Internet and old-fashioned pipes offer seemingly unlimited upside for the distribution of entertainment content. (Fox News, best understood for its entertainment value, would go appropriately with the entertainment company, not the publishing one. That raises the question of whether those two operations, to be owned by separate companies, would continue to uneasily share prime Times Square office space. And who gets the News Corp. name? The company with the news or the company without it?)

The split made sense even before Hackgate. Viacom, Belo, and Scripps all split off growing assets over the last several years to investors’ cheers. This sequestering of no-growth — what the newspaper business, charitably, has become — businesses has its logic. Media ain’t what it used to be. And now it’s businesses like Fox Sports, Searchlight Films, and Sky Italia more than old newsprint-based life forms.

News Corp.’s high-end Wall Street Journal and lowlier Sun may still be turning some small profits. But other News Corp. properties — from The Times of London and Sunday Times to the New York Post to The Australian — are in bad shape. Just last week, News Corp. announced a major restructuring of its Aussie operations, while the Times properties and Post have hemorrhaged money for a long time. The newspapers have become a drag for News Corp., literally and figuratively.

Of course, Hackgate has upped the pressure to do something. Investors who had disdained the earnings impact of the newspapers on the company’s bottom line, watched in amazement as the whole lowly news trade allowed insolent MPs to upbraid and condemn it publicly. They’ve seen a News Corp. leadership distracted by the mess.

More importantly — and to the point here — is Murdoch’s relentless goal to dominate global entertainment and sports distribution.

Expect the new publishing company to last as a Murdoch-family-directed enterprise as long as Rupert lasts.

This split is a new play, a long play — an end-around, really — to finally buy full control of SkyTV. That goal was apparently upended by Hackgate, but one that Murdoch still pursues. News Corp. has considered placing the U.K. papers in a trust (“The newsonomics of trusts, news trusts, and Murdoch trustworthiness”) and now a company split looks like Plan B. The entertainment News Corp. can say to authorities — not now, but later — “Sure, those untrustworthy news guys did awful things, but that was them, not us.”

Expect that in the split, of course, the Murdoch family will do quite well financially. Investors will be happier, as they showed Tuesday in bidding the stock up 8 percent. The new road to BSkyB will be paved. And Rupert will still be able to play publisher.

Rupert, the old newspaper man, has been the one-man barrier to sale of the newspapers and to this kind of split. Rupert the Gamesman gives a little ground here and there, only as he needs to, keeping his eye on the big game. We can see that game playing out around the world.

News Corp. has been a relentless juggernaut, building mighty entertainment/sports businesses, TV distribution, and movie franchises. In Australia, Rupert’s home base, even as his press operations (which have an astounding 70 percent market share there) prepare for significant cuts, he’s making a $2 billion bid to gain control of the largest pay-TV operation there. Earlier this year, he made satellite moves in the Middle East to add to his holdings across Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.

Unleashing the bigger business from the annoyances of news simply lets News Corp. double down on its five-continent plan to dominate entertainment programming. Let’s take a brief look at the newsonomics of what the News Corp. split may mean to its newspapers.

What would become the publishing company generated just 10 percent of News Corp.’s total profits in its last fiscal year. That’s even though it accounted for 27 percent of News Corp.’s revenues. Those revenues are down another 4 percent so far this year.

For the next full year, it should generate about $8.3 billion in revenues and $600 million in profit. Even with HarperCollins’ revenues (of about $1 billion) separated out, the new company would still be the largest news company in the world. Second-place Gannett reported $5.2 billion in revenue and $458 million in profit in 2011.

The Journal/Dow Jones would be about a seventh of the publishing company, but clearly its jewel, the newspaper trophy mistress that Rupert can’t give up. Those old Dow Jones operations — including Barrons, Marketwatch, All Things D, Factiva, and other business research lines — account for about $1.3 billion in revenues. The Journal and news businesses make up about $1 billion of that.

Just last week, the Journal/Dow Jones operations saw a major shakeup. (The Dow Jones name remains attached to that spate of properties, though for most consumer-facing purposes, the Wall Street Journal Digital Network is gaining favor as the umbrella term for its mouthful of brands.) Five years after Murdoch bought the Journal, all its products have been brought under one leadership for the first time. New CEO Lex Fenwick, appointed to replace Hackgate-tainted Les Hinton, put fast-rising Alisa Bowen in charge. The Reuters grad will now bring unified business management to the newspaper and print businesses, as well as newswires and the Factiva/B2B businesses.

That B2C/B2B integration has bedeviled Dow Jones, as it has Reuters. However it plays out under Bowen’s leadership, it’s just one of numerous transformations to watch. Dow Jones shares the same menu of intriguing challenges and opportunities with its peers.

At the top of Bowen’s list, she told me this week:

  • News-everywhere strategies. The company’s been a leader in Facebook-connected TV and just announced a Pulse deal Tuesday. Expect to see more deals like the recently announced NYT/Flipboard deal as digital subscription pass-throughs become more common.
  • Video, video, video. WSJ Live, its tablet app now available on the desktop web, is a hit. Bowen notes recent shows launched from Hong Kong, London, and Washington. Video is doubly satisfying audiences and advertisers.
  • International expansion. The Journal launched a German language site in January, and Bowen says there’s more to come later this year.

Everywhere. Video. Global. The words are both highly strategic and increasingly commonplace, especially in the hypercompetitive business news marketplace.

The new company would face Bloomberg’s voracious competitiveness in business news and data. Giant Reuters, with the largest single journalism workforce globally, is (again) reorganized to do battle in the news and financial spaces. Its most head-to-head competition comes from the Financial Times. Both aim at the global business class, newly digitized and energized.

Comparing the circulations of the two “papers” isn’t easy. The FT reports about 600,000 combined circulation, 285,000 of it digital. The Wall Street Journal reported 2,118,315 “total average circulation” in its last report. One thing we can count here is numbers; the other, reader revenue. The FT, with majority reader revenue, is a high-priced buy, an aggressive price leader. The Journal has a long, continuing history of discounting, which boosts sales, but results in significantly lower yield per customer. Will the next-gen Journal price more like the FT?

The new company’s New York-based branch (minus the Post) starts to look a lot like the FT and its parent, Pearson. With a leading business news franchise (the Journal and the WSJ Network), a consumer book publisher (HarperCollins) and an education business (headed by Joel Klein, who may take on a larger role within the new company), it looks a lot like Pearson’s lineup — though Pearson, of course, is a leader in the education market, while Dow Jones’ efforts are more startup-like.

For the new publishing company’s general interest newspapers — and doesn’t that term seem increasingly outdated year-by-year? — the future is much murkier.

In the print turndown, the New York Post, The Times, and Sunday Times have been largely saved from the worst fears of their news peers, who now stare extinction in the face. The deep pockets of News Corp. provided a soft pillow against those night terrors. The proceeds of Titanic and The Descendants have been offsetting many journalists’ salaries for years.

In the absence of that constructive subsidy, how much and how well will the publishing company be capitalized, and where will the liabilities go? It’s common for the struggling spinoffs in these media company separations to be set up without debt, to give them a better chance at resetting themselves. For News Corp., it’s a unique question, with an open liability issue attached to the newspapers themselves due to Hackgate-related suits that may well stretch on for some time and number more than 500.

As to cash, News Corp. has about $11 billion on hand. Certainly, some can be apportioned to the new company — but the entertainment conglomerate’s appetite for big, expensive acquisitions is only growing.

What will newspaper resources look like in 2013 and 2014? Without deeper and deeper cost-cutting, given print advertising’s continuing spiral downward, the new publishing company’s thin 7 percent profit margin would disappear quickly. Even with a Murdoch squarely in charge, it looks a major round of Australia cost-cutting is imminent, but that may not be enough in Sydney or London.

However capitalized, we can assume the standalone publishing company would be more subject to the market pressures than it has been as a division of a singular company. Sure, we know Rupert plans to keep feeding all his newspaper children for the foreseeable future. Still, the creation of a news-plus-books company increases the performance pressure on these newspapers; no longer can their subpar performance be obscured in the larger News Corp. quarterly reports.

Such pressure could lead to sale, closure, or deeper cutting of costs, no matter which Murdoch or non-Murdoch is running the company. Don’t expect Warren Buffett to be a buyer. In fact, as U.K. analysts assessed who might buy News Corp. properties there if Hackgate forced Murdoch from the market, only a few distant possibilities were raised — and their interest lies primarily with The Sun.

Expect the new publishing company to last as a Murdoch-family-directed enterprise as long as Rupert lasts. After Rupert, the Journal (and Dow Jones) plus whatever remains of his regional newspapers, will pass to someone else. The next Murdoch generation has made it abundantly clear it wants to focus on the global entertainment business.

For us, as readers who care about serious, well-reported, well-weighed journalism, done by talented people, it’s another long game. The hope: The Journal’s journalism, in scale and quality, survives this next change and is still here in 10 years.
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