Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Chris Hughes on turning The New Republic into a technology company that adapts to readers
- Better together: Colorado nonprofit news site I-News and Rocky Mountain PBS join forces
- Social media editors: Do you have a robot deputy?
| Chris Hughes on turning The New Republic into a technology company that adapts to readers Posted: 05 Feb 2013 02:11 PM PST
“I think it should be profitable,” he said Tuesday at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. “I think it’s our challenge to ourselves, and to the world, to prove we can find a profitable model.” Hughes was in town to talk about The New Republic’s place in the shifting media landscape. He made it clear he intends to take ideas from companies like Facebook and apply them to the media business: “One of the key things we’re trying to do at The New Republic — which I think is very much in the DNA of Silicon Valley, but not so much in this industry — is take a highly experimental approach,” he said. Audio for Hughes’ talk has been posted to Harvard’s Soundcloud account. Did you know you can also listen to the Nieman Lab podcast, Press Publish, on Soundcloud? In its relaunch, The New Republic took on a variety of new forms: a newsweekly in print, a minimalist responsive site on the web, and an iPad app with multimedia features. Of those three, Hughes said their main focus is on the HTML5 site, which he said offers the greatest potential to snag a new audience through features that improve the reading experience. It’s not just that the site can bend to fit a desktop browser as well as your phone, but it can sync up between the two, allowing subscribers to pick up a story from the point they stopped, regardless what platform they were reading on. The site has a number of other interesting touches, like audio versions of each story and a visual indication of how far you’re into your reading. “One of the things we want The New Republic to do is build the type of technology that adapts to how consumer are reading and consuming content today,” he said. Hughes said 20 percent of the people coming to newrepublic.com are on mobile. Similarly, 20 percent of the site’s traffic comes from Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, doubling the rate from the previous year, he said. But there are a few obstacles the magazine may have to overcome in its quest to be more webby. The new site’s front page doesn’t do the best job of illustrating what new content is available; users must click through to “Our Latest” to see what’s new. The front page of NewYorker.com — produced by a magazine Hughes has cited as a model — contains over 50 links to stories, blog posts, and multimedia content; the front page of NewRepublic.com has nine. There are design arguments to be made in favor of that choice, but it also could hurt repeat front-door traffic.  The front page of NewRepublic.com, February 5, 2013. With the new site also came the return of the magazine’s paywall, now with a meter, allowing non-subscribers only eight stories a month per device. That wrinkle was not promoted as loudly as other new features; it could prove either problematic in attracting readers or useful in attracting revenue. (And TNR’s position as an opinion journal — and thus one aimed at influence — complicates the equation of open vs. closed. Hughes worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign; his husband filed papers to run for Congress a few days ago.) Still, it may be the business side that presents the biggest challenge to The New Republic. Magazine journalism, like all journalism, is having its difficulties, something Hughes is acutely aware of: “From my perspective, the era when there were sizable profits in this industry is over,” he said. Under Hughes, The New Republic will follow the tack of many other publishers by putting greater emphasis on generating online revenue from readers. But doing that means changing the relationship with the audience, Hughes said. Titles like The New Republic now have to make the case that you get more for your $35 annual subscription than a print product delivered to your mailbox. “People are not willing to pay for access to content in a digital environment,” he said. “But I think they are interested in supporting brands they believe in, and I think they are interested and willing to pay for experiences.” Experiences, to Hughes, could be anything from the immersive setting of an iPad app to subscriber-only events held in cities around the country. He also wants the magazine to experiment with advertising, something noticeably in short supply in both web and print version of The New Republic. Hughes said the way to improve advertising is by focusing on reader metrics that are valuable. Rather than measuring pageviews and unique visitors, look for data that can tell you about reader engagement and retention, he said. Advertising and editorial play into one another — quality stories and reader experience can grow an audience, which can in turn build capacity for better advertising, he said. Hughes sees himself as an idealist when it comes to the journalism, saying he believes in “the power of great writing to shape how we view the world.” But on the business side, he says an open, practical approach to technology and revenue are what will help The New Republic succeed. |
| Better together: Colorado nonprofit news site I-News and Rocky Mountain PBS join forces Posted: 05 Feb 2013 08:00 AM PST
Nonprofit news sites have a knack for pairing up. It’s a birds-of-a-feather type of thing — or maybe just the ability to recognize how each other’s skills can be mutually beneficial. In Colorado, several news outlets are making a partnership a little more permanent. I-News, the Rocky Mountain Investigative News Network, Rocky Mountain PBS, and radio station KUVO are merging to create a cross-platform news operation that can better cover the state. The newly combined newsroom will continue the investigative focus that has been the mission of I-News since it was founded in 2009, while also expanding day-to-day news reporting and arts coverage. For Rocky Mountain PBS, the move helps strengthen their news division and allows the station to become more competitive. For I-News, the merger is a little bit like a startup finding the right exit: The work and mission will continue, while the funding questions get addressed with greater resources. I-News and Rocky Mountain PBS have partnered on various stories and projects for years, said Laura Frank, executive director of I-News. Collaboration has always been a part of the work I-News has done, and the merger is a continuation of that. “I think what we’re able to do with both will be of tremendously greater value to the public than any of us are able to do alone,” she said. Doug Price, president and CEO of Rocky Mountain PBS, said audiences in Colorado will see the effects of the merger immediately, online, on TV and radio, and at live public events. “It’s audacious,” he said. “To our knowledge no one else is doing what we are in terms of levels of service.” Joining forces means projects like I-News’ new investigation, “Losing Ground,” which looks at economic disparities between Colorado’s black and Latino residents and the rest of the population, will have broader reach across the state. But Frank said they’ll also continue their relationships with other partners like The Denver Post, Colorado Public Radio, and KUSA, a Gannett-owned NBC-affiliate in Denver. “In the old model, this would have been the end, publication,” Frank said. “Now broadcast and publication are just the beginning.”
Like many nonprofit news sites, I-News was born out of layoffs. But in this case, it wasn’t a workforce reduction — it was when Scripps closed The Rocky Mountain News in early 2009. Frank, a Denver native, was an investigative reporter at the Rocky when the paper was shuttered. Though she never planned on being an entrepreneur, Frank said she couldn’t look past the void left by the demise of the Rocky. Quite a few other startups were spawned by the death of the Rocky, with names like The Rocky Mountain Independent, Inside the Rockies, and INDenverTimes, but most struggled to find a foothold. Now, almost three years into I-News’ life, Frank said the challenge for independent media is developing a stronger relationship between the public service aspects of journalism and public support for that work. “What you have to do is get to the point not only where you have the capacity to do this kind of journalism that legacy media has difficulty doing, but also have the capacity to build sustainability,” Frank said. I-News drew support from organizations like Knight Foundation, McCormick Foundation, and The Fund for Investigative Journalism among others. Frank told me I-News comes into the merger with its budget for the year funded. Finding a lasting business model has been tricky for nonprofit news sites, with many trying to find ways to become less reliant on foundation support. Rocky Mountain PBS provides a new measure of institutional stability. Price told me the station went from 47,000 supporting members to 63,000 over 18 months. For the 2012 fiscal year, Rocky Mountain PBS had operating expenses of $10.9 million and brought in $11.6 million in revenue, through support from members, foundations, underwriters and others. With the increased operational costs from the merger, about $500,000 for I-News, the membership support will have to rise, he said. “We have a risk with what we’re doing,” he said. “We have to increase our membership between 7,000 and 8,000 people to put the foundational support under I-News.” I-News will bring its five reporters, all veterans from the Rocky, into a newsroom that includes reporters for Rocky Mountain PBS as well as journalists from smaller public media or independent media outlets that use the station’s space. Price said the total reporting staff should be around 12. Rocky Mountain PBS is Colorado’s largest public television operator. But as a legacy operation, the process of adapting to the changes in media, in particular how news is produced and distributed, has been slow, Price said. The merger isn’t a reset so much as a faster way to change direction. “Broadcasting now is like golf,” Price says, “you don’t get to pick the ball up and move it. You have to play the ball as it lays.” Price expects the membership growth to come organically, thanks largely to the increased news coverage that will result from the merger. One component of that, he said, will include community events. For the “Losing Ground” series, for example, the station is holding community discussion events around the state. The merger allows them to invest in the new ways people consume news, but also transform the relationship the audience has with journalism. “Public media can tend to be nostalgic, old, or elite,” Price said. “And we don’t want to be that. We want to be adaptable.” Image by Russ Glasson used under a Creative Commons license. |
| Social media editors: Do you have a robot deputy? Posted: 05 Feb 2013 06:00 AM PST
It was only about a year ago that Liz Heron — then a social media editor at The New York Times, now in a similar role at The Wall Street Journal — predicted her job title wouldn’t exist in five years. The job has already changed a lot, “some in ways I predicted, some not,” Heron wrote in a recent Digital First Media chat. (Disclosure: I’m a reporter for DFM.) “The most significant change is that an editor has to focus a lot less on evangelizing and training — convincing people that social media is worth incorporating into the news,” Heron wrote. “We also have more people in newsrooms who can write for social media. For instance, my team is responsible for most of the tweets from @WSJ, but we also have two homepage editors who write them as well, and I see that trend increasing.” As more people in any given newsroom are publishing to social platforms — and as more people bypass the homepage and instead use Twitter and Facebook as the entry point to any given news site — analytics companies see new opportunities to help media companies leverage real-time social data. Visual Revenue, a predictive analytics firm that focuses exclusively on media companies, is this morning rolling out a bundle of tools to help editors measure the effectiveness of social publishing in real time. “So, if you push a story right now on Nieman Lab, 40 clicks into it you might see 17 retweets, two favorites, some manual retweets and that’s all great, actually,” Visual Revenue CEO Dennis Mortensen told me. “But how do you really add all of it up?” More importantly: Once news organizations can precisely measure the effectiveness of their social publishing habits, how will that highlight how their social publishing behaviors ought to change? Visual Revenue is already working with companies like The Atlantic, USA Today, NBC, Forbes, and dozens of others, using data about those sites’ audiences to help them determine optimal publishing frequency, how regularly to switch stories featured on the homepage, when to try a new headline for a story that isn’t doing as well as expected, and so on. There are other companies — SocialFlow and Gnip come to mind — that deal in real-time social data. Visual Revenue likes to say it’s in a class of its own because it focuses exclusively on the needs of news clients. With its new social toolkit, the company wants to give news organizations more exact measuring tools — a way to determine the difference between tweeting something at 4:23 p.m. and 4:35 p.m., for example — then recommend actions based on that real-time performance data. (Visual Revenue’s system takes into consideration what day of the week it is and whether it’s a notable day — Christmas eve, Super Bowl Sunday, election day, and so on.) Here’s what the interface looks like:
“Even fantastic content can die if you don’t put it out right,” Mortensen said. “We’ve spent a long time trying to figure out the patterns on a per-news-property basis and it’s very different… The Atlantic can put out content from four o’clock in the afternoon to nine in the evening and it’s equally powerful. It is very much property-specific. I can’t take my learning from The Atlantic and copy over to the Economist.” What works for one news organization won’t for another, and that’s largely because audiences are as fractured as ever. And yet the behaviors of any given audience are undergoing dramatic changes. “Fragmentation has been an issue certainly for advertisers and for publishers for the past 20 years,” said Rich Ullman, vice president of marketing for Visual Revenue. “As it progresses it’s my belief that we’ve gone through this period of fragmentation into 1,000 little bits or more and now we’re in a stage of re-aggregation: You put together your feed, I put togther mine, everybody has their own and there are thousands and thousands of different media properties now. It creates a need for all of them to be distinct from one another.” But there are some constants. Across the board, tweeting more is better than not tweeting enough but tweeting all at once is worse than not tweeting at all. “Most people end up being just a little bit too conservative,” Mortensen said. “I’m not sure they’re being fully rewarded for it. I’m an advocate for the data and letting that speak for itself. Putting out 20 [tweets] versus 100, you get more out of 100. Do more and you’re rarely going to be penalized.” The exception to the more-is-more rule is when news organizations tweet or publish to Facebook in concentrated, often-automated bursts. “There tends to be some penalty for clustering together your pushes,” Mortensen said. A true breaking-news destination can get away with more rapid-fire tweeting than magazines, which do better when they let at least 20 or 30 minutes lapse before tweeting again, he said. Where Visual Revenue believes it can add real value is in being able to recommend specific actions within an editorial framework outlined by the organization — that is, using an algorithm to tell a newsroom when it should tweet and also what it should be tweeting. Mortensen likens these computerized suggestions to the role of a deputy editor: Someone who knows the editorial values of the paper, and can determine the best publishing strategy as a result. Except, in this case, that someone is a robot. “We set out with this idea of empowering the editor, but not to beat him to the extent where we can automate his job,” Mortensen said. “We actually sit down with the editor in chief and ask him, ‘Give me my instructions just like you tell your deputy editors what they can and cannot do.’ Then we simply adopt those, adhere to those as strictly as possible. And if I’m brutally honest with you, of all of the editors, you’ll see that we’re the only ones that only adhere to the guidelines because we’re an algorithm not a human.” Another upshot: Non-humans aren’t tethered to print-era concepts that have bled into an online era of publishing. A robot doesn’t care about newsroom culture or tradition; it only cares about the data. Mortensen says before The New York Daily News started working with Visual Revenue, it was updating its homepage about 80 times a day whereas today, it updates about 160 times a day. He expects real-time social analytics will inspire similar changes to publishing habits. “They will end up doing more simply because they are able to and more confident to do so,” Mortensen said. “The other part is, I think we’ll be seeing them rethinking some of their strategies for some of these specific categories they put out to be more in tune with the audience. Of course, if you think about it, the one thing nobody gets — Buzzfeed included — nobody can predict which specific content is going to go viral. You can increase the probability of that happening by being even slightly more in tune. It’s not about having to conquer every single reader. But sometimes you get them to fall in love.” Photo by David DeHetre used under a Creative Commons license. |
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