Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Krugman, translated: The promise and risk of The New York Times’ Chinese-language site
- Save your darlings: Blank on Blank gives new life to old tape
- The newsonomics of the only metric that matters
| Krugman, translated: The promise and risk of The New York Times’ Chinese-language site Posted: 03 Jul 2012 10:33 AM PDT
How well does Tom Friedman translate into Chinese? (The world is flat, after all.) Or David Carr? The nuance of language is just one of the questions The New York Times faces as it makes its online entry into China. The Times is extending its global reach with the addition of cn.nytimes.com, a Chinese language edition that will offer a full slate of politics, business, culture and opinion. Chinese readers will have a full slate of news from the Times, a mix of reporting from the mothership in New York along with stories produced by Chinese journalists. It means exporting the Times brand and, yes, its personalities like Friedman and Paul Krugman. But more importantly, at least to the Times, it may mean broadening the future of the Grey Lady through international audiences.
It’s easy to understand why the Times would want to go into China — there are a lot of potential readers there. That also means a brand new audience for advertisers. It’s a land of opportunity, which is why the Times is joining the likes of The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times in a yuan rush. “We already have half a million readers on our website from China. It’s a big market for us already,” Joseph Kahn, the Times’ foreign editor, told me. “But there are millions, tens of millions of others who we think would be interested in a fuller New York Times report in Chinese.” A look through early stories in the Chinese editions found Charles McGrath’s Nora Ephron obituary, a Friedman column on the Egyptian election and the latest on News Corp.’s split. (The site’s lead story at the moment is, remarkably, this Steven Erlanger piece piece interrogating the meaning of “socialism” in contemporary politics — cheeky, considering China’s a communist country where economic policy has long strayed from the traditional definition.) At the moment, they’re calling it a beta as they perfect new features, like the one-click English/Chinese tab on top of most stories. “We have a lot of people come to the site now and say one way it helps is to improve their English. So why not give them more of that,” Kahn said. The Times doesn’t make blind decisions, and Kahn told me they’ve done surveys to see what the appetite is like for their journalism in Asia. Of course it also helps they’ve been able to sit back and watch the progress of Western competitors who have also taken a stake in China. “We’ve seen how some of those traffic and what reception they got in the market,” he said. “Part of our offering has been tailored from watching what others are doing too.” (The Journal and FT both have Chinese-language sites, for example.) The plan is for two-thirds of the Chinese edition to be made up of stories from existing English-language stories found on nytimes.com, with the rest coming from Times staff in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Kahn told me the Times has seven staff reporters based in China, but the complete staff for the Chinese edition, including editors, reporters, and translators, will round out to about 35 people. The bulk of that staff will work on translation, which requires more than simple word matching.
On a global scale the Times already has The International Herald Tribune, which publishes in English, and India Ink, the nine-month-old English-language blog aimed at an Indian audience. China looks like a profitable next step thanks to a burgeoning middle class with money to spend. That’s a marketer’s dream. Denise Warren, the general manager of the nytimes.com, told a Times reporter they’ve already got luxury brands like Cartier, Bloomingdales and Salvatore Ferragamo on board. (While The New York Times is trying to show luxury ads to wealthy Chinese in China, oddly enough, The New York Observer is trying to show them to wealthy Chinese visiting New York.) Yuezhi Zhao, a professor who studies media and communications in China at Simon Fraser University, said the shifts in government and rise of a middle class have created an opportunity for media companies like the Times. “There is definitely an emerging Chinese middle class who are willing readers of this kind of Western media,” Zhao told me. People in China are hungry for information and willing to look outside state channels or traditional media, Zhao said. Western media companies can act as a kind of wedge to get more stories out in the open, and Zhao expects some will be more than willing to be sources for companies like the Times. “There are willing Chinese sources high in the Chinese state willing to leak information and give access to things they are not giving Chinese media,” she said. Zhao points to the story now getting international attention about a woman from the Shaanxi Province who had a forced abortion after breaking the state’s one child law. A story like that gains traction in international media with the help of sources inside the government, she said. Of course what makes publishing in China different is the ongoing threat of censorship. The Internet in China remains subject to the whims of the central government, which can slow or halt access to sites at they choose. But Zhao argues the situation is more nuanced than that. “I don’t think the simple framework of censorship vs. Western media really operates,” she said. “Yes, at a certain level. But looking at the bigger picture, I think it’s more complicated.” In May, the Beijing correspondent for Al Jazeera English left the country after the government did not renew the broadcaster’s press credentials. While a number of outlets within the country self-censor or are subject to government review, Kahn was adamant that the Times would do nothing different from their U.S. operation. “Our feeling is, while we’re publishing ourselves in Chinese for the first time, our strategy is not affected by what China does,” he said. “We’re not a Chinese media company. We won’t submit to their censorship regime.” But while Times stories won’t face government editing, it’s the central authority that still has control over the Internet access available to most Chinese. Access to nytimes.com, just like many U.S. news sites, has been blocked in the past. And while cn.nytimes.com so far has remained unblocked, the same can’t be said for its social media presence there. Its accounts on major Chinese weibos — microblogging sites like Twitter — have been shut down, leaving behind only colorful “account not found” pages:
It’s unclear whether this is temporary or permanent; earlier, its Sina Weibo account was suspended for a brief period just as the China site was launched. The Times is taking precautions, including keeping its servers outside the country. Even though Kahn is optimistic about dealing with the Chinese government, he said he expects the site will be blocked from time to time. “In all likelihood, there will be times when access is restricted or certain article pages will be difficult to access there. But that’s an internal matter for China,” Kahn said. “We’re just trying to produce a vigorous, competitive site that will be interesting to the Chinese and present a broad selection of the best of what we do.” |
| Save your darlings: Blank on Blank gives new life to old tape Posted: 03 Jul 2012 10:33 AM PDT
As journalists, we are taught early to “kill your darlings.” The material may be punchy, savory, heartbreaking, or hilarious, but if it’s not necessary for the story — or if it’s redundant or tangential or in some other way doesn’t fit — don’t use it, and get over it. David Gerlach wants to help you bring those forgotten interviews out of the shoebox (or the 2007 folder on your hard drive) and onto public radio, podcasts, mobile apps, YouTube, and other platforms. Through his nonprofit DG Multimedia, Inc., the former TV producer founded Blank on Blank, a Brooklyn-based project to resuscitate never-before-heard tape from journalists’ reporting archives. Journalists submit old tape, and his production team polishes it up. In some cases, they even animate it. Here’s an example of the “lost tape” from Anthony Bozza’s Rolling Stone interview with U2 frontman Bono in October 2001: If this anecdote sounds familiar, you may have read it in the December 2001 issue of Rolling Stone. But there’s nothing like audio to illustrate how magazines sometimes tweak quotes and altogether change an interviewer’s interjections. (Example: When Bono says his father’s last words were, “Are you all f--king mad?” Rolling Stone prints Bozza as having responded: “That’s amazing. To whom was this addressed?” but listening to the interview, Bozza actually said: “Are you serious? Oh good lord.”) Other examples of material you’ll find from Blank on Blank: a conversation with Martin Scorsese about the use of soundtracks in his movies; Radiohead’s Thom Yorke on his reputation; Alan Ginsberg’s recording of a hospital visit to actor/director/poet/activist Julian Beck; and puppeteer Caroll Spinney on voicing Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch. These aren’t just raw tapes: Blank on Blank includes reflections from the interviewers, and context from producers. You’ll hear gravelly phone sound, horns honking, the stuff that so often gets smoothed out in a professional broadcast. (Though it must be noted that purists will cringe at the way Blank on Blank producers sometimes insert their own sounds — clips of records referenced, the growl of a car starting up at the mention of a taxi cab, and so on.) “The pauses are one of my favorite things,” Gerlach said. “The silence in the interview. That is when you can sense someone’s optimism, someone’s discomfort, someone fumbling for the right words. There’s an intimacy that you get that’s just different. It’s not edited for time. If there’s that choice moment, I want you to hear it. And I want you to hear the police siren in the background, and the papers rustling.” Gerlach says his years in television left him with a nagging sense of loss over the material that never aired. “It always amazed me I had this great stuff on tape that I never did anything with and no one ever got to hear it,” he told me. “It just stuck in the back of my head: All this amazing content that was going nowhere, dying on the vine.” So in December 2010, Gerlach applied for a Knight News Challenge grant. Blank on Blank was just a part-time project back then, but when it became a finalist, he says, “I was like, ‘All right, we’re on to something,’ and that was kind of it.” Gerlach’s project didn’t end up winning, but he says being in the final 28 was all the inspiration he needed. He began fundraising and incorporated as a nonprofit then early this year quit his TV job to work full-time on Blank on Blank. “I was at ABC when Steve Jobs died, and everyone was scrambling,” he said. “They wanted something someone had never heard. Everyone was playing the commencement speech, and it was just, ‘This is what we can do.’ Obviously not just when someone passes but journalists all over the country have these amazing sound bites, these great outtakes.” Blank on Blank doesn’t just want the lost Steve Jobs and Bono tapes. Gerlach says he’s just as interested in interviews with “everyday Americans.” He says that’s the kind of tape that could ultimately pull in big-brand advertisers. “So many brands want to be part of culture,” Gerlach said. “They want to be seen as content creators. They want to hear American moms on blank, or blank on first love, American dads on blank, powered by Miller Lite.” Blank on Blank gets revenue from private donors and in part from licensing fees. (Public Radio Exchange distributes Blank on Blank content.) Journalists don’t get paid for sharing their archived tapes, but Gerlach says it’s a way to promote their work and help them stay relevant. His “ultimate hope” is to make a viable business model that includes compensation for contributors. “It’s an exposure thing but I kind of want it to be a double win for everyone,” Gerlach said. “One of the reasons why we incorporated as a nonprofit — you know how competitive the media is — I wanted to be seen as a neutral, Hulu-like space. The best of American journalism.” Blank on Blank is in the midst of a 30-day Kickstarter campaign, which Gerlach says he launched to promote the project more than to raise money (with the caveat that “obviously money is great.”) They key for now is to get the word out. “There’s a huge historical impact we could have, just getting journalists to dig into their archives,” Gerlach said. James Davies’ image of cassettes used under a Creative Commons license. |
| The newsonomics of the only metric that matters Posted: 03 Jul 2012 09:24 AM PDT
Amid the big news of the News Corp. split, The New York Times announced its deal with Flipboard. Then, the next day, The Wall Street Journal reported its own deal with Pulse. It looked like Tablet Aggregator Wars, with the two big head-to-head print national news companies going head to head. In fact, there’s a lot more here than first meets the eye. Get beneath the surface, and we find two very different approaches to selling news content away from publishers’ own sites. But you can expect these two new approaches — each a major departure from business as recently usual — to keep growing together in the year ahead. The deals:
The deals seemed out of the blue, but both represent a maturation in digital circulation thinking. We’re moving beyond Paywalls 1.0, to a more nuanced world of digital circulation. The WSJ/Pulse deal took about four months to get done, while NYT/Flipboard took longer. We could say, though, that both deals took more than 15 years. Why? The idea that news companies could get paid as someone read their valuable, and expensive-to-produce, news content on an aggregator sites seemed a distant dream. First, of course, news companies had to make the critical decision to charge for digital access to their content, a movement now sweeping the globe. The enduring principle, just re-learned by news companies in the past three years: If money isn’t flowing, you can’t get a share of it. That’s a corollary of this truism: If you don’t charge them, they won’t pay you. Now digital circulation has opened up whole new horizons, not just for news companies, but, surprisingly, for the aggregators like Flipboard and Pulse. These companies started up with germs of ideas that the tablet offered new ways for readers to enjoy reading. Neither had much of an idea of how to make money, and both are still in the early stages of proving out business models. They may pass the way of tablet aggregator Zite, acquired by CNN, or emerge as bigger, independent companies. Now, though, owing to money moving where it hadn’t before, it’s not only the Journal and the Times can figure out new ways to money — so can the startups. The newsonomics of these deals are intriguing. In a way, they’re marvelously simple, so let’s call this the newsonomics of the only metric that matters. Out of these partnerships, we can see this new blinding reality: the metric that matters most is dollars (or pounds, euro, yen or kroner). Both deals allow the news companies to get more dollars for reading. For almost two decades, news companies have counted so many things: first unique visitors and pageviews, then conversion rates from Google and now Facebook and a myriad of other sites. They’ve tried to compute how useful and valuable differing kinds of referral content really is: Does a Facebook referral really read more pages, once they hit a news site, than a Google referral? How likely is a referral from Techcrunch or HuffPo or ESPN to actually buy one of the new digital subscriptions? What’s the percentage of those that register on a site coming from Twitter as opposed to LinkedIn? The permutations are endless. The Financial Times has fairly won its reputation for propensity modeling excellence — deciding which of these many metrics, tossed into the mixmaster of its smart analytics department, makes the most difference in driving the FT’s business forward. Yet all these calculations — this search for numbers that matter in building a big digital business — can be summed up in the universal language of exchange: money. All these metrics remain vital to understanding the new landscape, but the discipline of seeing how much actual new currency can be generated by deals is the single greatest metric. All those other metrics just serve that one. So these deals are about reader revenue (“The newsonomics of majority reader revenue”), and maximizing it. They begin to put a new face on all the talk of news everywhere and anywhere, terms that, like “digital first,” are getting lots of lip service but wildly uneven execution.
Two different strategies. Two different tablet aggregators. Yet, expect these two strategies to come together, and soon. Expect The Wall Street Journal to start offering off-site — on Pulse and a couple of more sites — access to full Journal content for its subscribers. Expect the Times to sample for new readers, similarly to how the Journal is now doing it, with differing pricepoints for subsets of content. Expect the Financial Times, a company that has used parallel third-party distribution in its B2B business, to join in the testing as well. Expect magazine publishers to adapt the strategy for their own niche content, and maybe large, regional newspapers as well. Further, expect Facebook, as it figures out how best to sell media, to become a middleman here as well. It’s only logical for a company that is making possible “social reading.” These strategies are a logical extension of digital circulation. It’s a recognition that the relationship between a publisher and a reader, while paramount, can be fulfilled on sites or apps other than a publisher’s. We’ve come to think of all-access as meaning multi-device access — smartphone, tablet, desktop, and laptop, as well as print. These deals extend all-access to the reading experiences — the magazine panache of a Flipboard or the elegant conveyor belt of Pulse — as well. This extension of all-access is significant. Where today 20 percent or so of Times readers may do a lot of of news reading on aggregator tablet sites, we can easily see a world in five years in which 80 percent of Times subscribers are. Who know what kinds of reading experiences — new kinds of tablets, new presentation styles — will be available? What’s important to the Times and all news companies is maintaining a branded, paid news experience. As important to the all-access subscription business as these deals may be, the Journal’s deal with Pulse is potentially more interesting. It breaks the one-product, one-price mold, and leads us into the future of many news products at many price points (“The newsonomics of 100 products a year”). It fishes for that elusive “will they pay for it” audience — people younger than 50. And it may be as much about growth as retention of current digital subscribers. Pulse matched up its most-used topics — technology and politics — with WSJ strengths, says Dmitry Shevelenko, head of monetization for Pulse, and more topical WSJ packages will follow. Some of those 99-cent-plus buyers will upgrade to a full Journal subscription, currently going for $260 a year. When they do it, Pulse will get a one-time commission. The Journal deal is a model for Pulse: “You can imagine a catalog of premium sources,” he says. For the Journal, it’s about “putting our toe in the water,” says Alisa Bowen, just promoted to chief product officer at Dow Jones. “We’re hoping we acquire younger readers.” Currently, Pulse is using Apple to do its e-commerce of the Journal 99-cent monthly payments, with the small revenue splits among Apple (30 percent), the Journal, and Pulse. The simple checkout experience (because Apple iPad users can one-click their way to purchase, with a credit card already in the system) and the simple 99-cent pricing is key to making payments work, says Shevelenko. As important as reader revenue is to these experiments, ad revenue plays a part as well. There’s a mix-and-match, we-can-sell or you-can-sell-and-we’ll-share-revenue approach to ad sales on these tablet apps going on. In the end, it’s the same two metrics, advertising dollars and circulation dollars, and how many of each can be generated through these off-site relationships. Those are the metrics that will matter and will determine how much news anywhere grows in meaning to news consumers. Says Shevelenko, describing Pulse’s strategy, “Both [ad and circ] revenue models are critical to the future sustainability of news, but both are in desperate need of innovation and simplification. The challenge is not about picking the right side — it’s about being bold enough to change how ads look and feel (moving away from IAB units to native experiences) and to change how subscriptions are priced and consumed (even at the risk of cannabalizing existing paywall structures). This is the real story and we’d love to participate in a substantive exploration of it.” |
As the Times’ Denise Warren pointed out, 20 percent of current Times digital subscribers reported in a survey that they used aggregation apps like Flipboard to read news. That meant extending the Times’ all-access strategy to enable subscriber reading apart from The New York Times’ own products. For the Journal, news anywhere means not only serving WSJ subscribers on the evolving multiple screens of our lives, but also finding new readers everywhere and anywhere. Its first strategy with Pulse is finding new paying readers, so it’s sampling, with its three less-than-full-access products.| You are subscribed to email updates from Nieman Journalism Lab To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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