Jumat, 08 Februari 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Mark Armstrong: The death of EveryBlock and why I suddenly care about local

Posted: 07 Feb 2013 01:57 PM PST

I was saddened today to learn that NBC News is shutting down Everyblock, the Knight-funded local project created by Adrian Holovaty, Wilson Miner, Dan O’Neil and Paul Smith. It was an exciting attempt to help organize information and data for cities and neighborhoods — and it was inspiring to watch them attempt something both local and scalable, in a way that many people (aside from maybe Patch) have abandoned.

I’ve lived in some amazing neighborhoods over the past five years, but I can’t say I ever knew them like a local should. We’ve had kids and moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan and now to Oakland.

Now, after seven months on the West Coast, it occurs to me that I know my neighborhood more deeply than I ever did in New York.

It’s not because New York is crowded and anonymous. It’s because preschool has started.

There is suddenly a geographic social scene in which we are automatically included. And it made me realize that when we talk about local, many of us are really talking about kids.

Our social media lives are global, but in our pre-kid lives, the geographic social scene revolved around bars and restaurants and concerts and sporting events. But we were never tied to our neighborhoods. We could go out in Cobble Hill, but we could just as easily go out in the West Village. Our friends were dispersed everywhere around the city. It was relatively easy for everyone to travel to each other.

School changes the boundaries dramatically. Where you decide to live can be decided by the reputation of the school district. And suddenly, you must care about what’s in your immediate vicinity.

For many, the best scenario is to live within blocks of the schools that your children will attend. Being close to school makes everything easier—for friendships, playdates, sporting events, fundraisers, carpooling, and when they’re old enough, walking to school. My parents were newcomers to Fresno when I was born, and they told me what every parent tells me: We met all of our friends through our kids’ schools.1

In the 1980s, my dad also met people through a local club called the Junior Chamber of Commerce, or Jaycees. For him, there were business reasons for getting to know people in his community. He was an insurance agent, so his network of potential clients came from local businesses and the relationships he developed in his neighborhood.

Think of your friends. Are many of them still working for a truly “local” or locally dependent business? Or do they commute by car or train from their suburb to a larger city? Or do they simply work on the Internet?

The truly local business is an endangered species, which means there are fewer advertisers for small local newspapers, and fewer people who are interested in their cities for “business” reasons. I’m not necessarily worried about how things are changing so rapidly, but it could help explain why none of my friends are members of the Jaycees, or Rotary Club, or Kiwanis. Local clubs are aging, and there are fewer young people coming in to replace them. Their social lives are elsewhere. They are connecting globally for global work.

This is all to say: I think the app or company that “solves” local will probably be a parenting app. Not necessarily a “local” app.

I'm certainly not suggesting that only parents care about their communities—that's not the case at all, and every city will have a diverse makeup of people who make their community special.

But what I am suggesting is that parenting is something can force a passive resident (like myself) to suddenly pay closer attention to what's going on around me. It's what made me realize there is a lot of local information missing from my media diet. And I want a remedy.

When we moved to Oakland, we asked people: How do we find out what’s going on? They suggested blogs like Susan Mernit’s Oakland Local, but they also recommended a number of different Yahoo Groups and Google Groups, mostly for parents. These private forums (and parents want them private) are still the backbone of local conversation across the United States, and no one has introduced a better approach yet.

I’m seeing more possibilities everywhere I look: Jeff Atwood’s Discourse.org, announced this week, seems perfect for local. So could something like GroupMe or Couple or Avocado.

It’s nice to see that Patch is still here, but it’s also slightly depressing to think they’re the only ones trying. If you’re working on something local, I’d love to hear about it.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if, one day, we all discover a great new parenting app that sneaks up on us and then reveals that it’s really for everyone in the neighborhood.

Mark Armstrong is the founder of Longreads and editorial director of Pocket. This piece originally ran on his Tumblr.

Notes
  1. It’s not quite true that I never cared about “local.” I cared enough in 2002 that I started a blog about Fresno (RIP Fresyes). But I was living in New York at the time and it was mostly about Kevin Federline. So it doesn't quite count.

The newsonomics of pressing innovation

Posted: 07 Feb 2013 08:54 AM PST

columbus-dispatch-cc

Technology changes everything, right?

We’ve seen that truism restated as iPads reignite longer-form reading, as smartphones and tablets increase minutes of news usage, and as Kindles increase the number of books bought by as much as 4x.

Against that digital backdrop, place a burning hunk of 20th-century (and far earlier) technology: the printing press. In Columbus, Ohio, a heart of the proverbial Heartland, the “three-around” is the technology du jour. Last week, the family-owned Columbus Dispatch started rolling its presses with the new three-around addition. The move won some industry ink for what the 3Volution press conversion service from Pressline Services can do: more color, more compact paper, more flexible sectioning, and faster throughput — moving papers through the press 50 percent faster than the old configuration, while saving as much as 33 percent on newsprint cost. “Three-around” means that the press’ cylinders are designed to print three, rather than two, sheets in a single revolution. For press nerds, check out a demo here; in short form, it’s an innovation of folders and rollers that makes the new process possible.

(One patent neither Google nor Microsoft is likely to buy: Patent No. 8,220,390 to Pressline Services for its 3V conversion methodology, issued July 17th, 2012.)

All that’s true, but the story behind and around the Dispatch’s three-around introduction is a more interesting tale of reinvention. It’s a story that tells us a lot about how the tired old daily is in the midst of reinventing itself, against all apparent odds. In Columbus, it’s a reinvention of both business model and of editorial product for a 141-year-old paper. Its daily print product has been reinvented page by page, section by section, all based on reader research and continuous loops of reader feedback.

The Dispatch initiative is by no means a revolution, nor is it a sexy Silicon Valley tale. It shows us that the current struggle and reinvention of the local daily press — hugely important to the democracy — encompasses lots of nitty-gritty change.

The root of the Dispatch evolution is familiar: money. Gannett, owner of the Cincinnati Enquirer, liked the new three-around concept. But its presses weren’t a great fit for the three-around adaptation technology. So Gannett approached its neighbor 100 miles northeast. (Rick Edmonds well describes the history here.) How about using the Dispatch’s presses (they are what the industry calls “newer” — bought in the ’70s) to print both the Dispatch and the Enquirer? A deal was born. So 10 days ago, the Columbus Dispatch became the first paper anywhere to roll off presses in the new three-around, compact format. It’s now 14.6 inches tall and 10.5 inches wide, Slim-Fasted from its former 22″-by-11.5″. Bigger than a tabloid, smaller than a broadsheet.

Broadsheets are an old tradition. Dispatch CMO Phil Pikelny notes that it, too, was birthed by financial considerations: taxes. In 1712, the British taxed newspapers on the basis of how many pages they printed, and te big, broad sheet was born. (Ironically, this very week a new government initiative to tax newspapers as part of “information services” is stirring controversy in Minnesota.)

The Gannett/Dispatch deal, in and of itself, marks one big evolution in the newspaper business model: Smart publishers are either outsourcing their printing to someone else, saving significant costs, or insourcing printing, paper handling, and distribution business. Either minimize a major cost center, or turn your Big Iron ops into a profit center. While I’ll cover that in more depth in a future post, consider that this three-around deal was born on that concept. The Cincinnati Enquirer, a paper that’s seen a lot of cuts, is the only remaining daily in its city since Scripps shut down the Cincinnati Post six years ago. Within the next month, it will be printed by the Dispatch and trucked to Cincinnati. The Enquirer outsources its printing. The Dispatch picks up some new profit, which justifies its investment in the three-around. And now the Dispatch is on the hunt for other new customers.

Rationalizing the old printing business is one significant part of what’s going on in Columbus. Let’s look, though, at the deeper and wider newsonomics of the press-led innovation. The three-around change both supported the Dispatch’s new emerging, reader-focused business model and offered editor Ben Marrison the opportunity to reimagine the daily.

The business model

The Dispatch, like smarter dailies around the world, redoubled its reader focus in the last two to three years. Reader revenue now runs at about half of Dispatch’s total revenue, a percentage up markedly in the last five years. Its strategy: satisfy those remaining core readers — and charge them appropriately. So seven-day subscriptions now cost $28.99 a month, roughly double the price of 2009. The quick math: double the price and lose seven to eight percent of subscribers. It’s a math that works, and results in circulation revenue going north, as ad revenue heads southward.

Like other dailies employing the strategy, the Dispatch also now spends less on discounting subscriptions to bring in new customers, reducing print “churn.” That’s in part due to the Dispatch’s digital paywall. It went up last July. “Hundreds” of people told the paper they subscribed in ensuing months because digital access was no longer free. The Dispatch closed the loop between $360 paid print and $0 free digital. That, too, is a math pervading the wider paywall revolution. (Today’s New York Times Co. earnings report is a data point in figuring out how long growth in digital circulation revenue can persist.)

The Dispatch’s philosophy is to charge readers more for more. On the print side, that means you’ll pay a bit more for Sunday home delivery (a rather nice 20th-century convenience that endures) than if you buy the Sunday paper at Starbucks. On the digital side, that means, seven-day subscribers have to pay $2 a month extra for digital access; Sunday-only subs pay $5. Web digital access is $9.95 a month; its e-edition product costs the same as a print subscription.

Importantly, the multi-headed new pricing strategies of the Dispatch are not determined the old-fashioned seat-of-the-pants way. They are data-driven. The numbers roll off the tongue of the Dispatch’s Phil Pikelny:

  • 23 percent of 18-plus adults in the one million-plus Columbus DMA say they prefer a newspaper as a means of keeping up with the news (“traditional subscribers”). Another 11 percent (“media sophisticates”) are both web and print oriented, according to the Dispatch’s own research. That’s the bullseye group for print marketing.
  • Through the end of 2012, about six months into the paywall, 13,625 people paid something extra for digital access. The Dispatch had sent a goal of getting about 4 percent of its Sunday circulation (252,091) to pay for extra for digital within a year; it’s at 5 percent six months in. (Its daily circulation is 135,988; both Sunday and daily, as with most metro dailies, are down significantly over time.)
  • As the Dispatch doubled its subscription prices — serving that large, if reduced, set of core customers — sure, it may have lost 8 percent of subscribers. But its gain in circulation revenue outdistanced its loss of revenue from those readers by as much to 5 to 1.

It’s easy to pick apart individual Dispatch strategies here and there, but the point is they are based on research and ongoing analytics. Newspapers like the Dispatch that work with data have lots of flexibility to twist and turn as they learn more about reader behavior. The t-shirt of the moment for Pikelny’s team features a numerical pricing formula with this tagline: “This really is rocket science.”

For Pikelny, the business utility of going to the three-around press configuration is also about growth: “We now have the ability to take the printing plant and fill up all its hours.” That’s insourcing as a new business line to join resurgent circulation revenue, even as ad revenue struggles. An added production savings: The Dispatch now enjoys Gannett’s lower cost of newsprint. The fact that the paper’s chief marketer also got a new editorial product out of the press change is turning out to be a big bonus.

The print product

When Ben Marrison, the Dispatch’s editor since 1999, heard about the proposed change in the size of the paper, he saw it as a chance for reinvention: “We decided to do something pretty radical, to snip the paper down to the nubs and rebuild it based on research.” The Dispatch, like many dailies, has used panels of readers for ongoing feedback for years. Like most papers, it had made tweaks here and there.

The new printing process allowed the newsroom to completely reconfigure the paper. They could run six daily sections, create supplemental sections (for sports), run more color, and try to make wholesale sense of the feedback they’d long gotten. So for an intense 15 months or so, they prototyped and tested with focus groups. First, they showed readers models with some generic nameplate; only late in the process did they put the Old English masthead of the Dispatch masthead atop the test product.

The final product is markedly different than the old one. When the broadsheet disappeared into history, it has been replaced by a paper that is the size of an iPad when folded in two. Readers have remarked on the new portability, on planes or in purses. Older readers like its ease of use, as do test groups of Ohio State students. Reader response within the first week is running 2 to 1 in favor of the redesign. That’s a remarkable feat for any redesign.

The space devoted to news has remained nearly constant, says Marrison. So even though Pressline touts a potential newsprint savings in the use of 3V, the Dispatch has opted to maintain its newshole as part of the renewed reader focus.

The new daily offers six sections: A, Nation/World, Metro, Sports, Business, and Life & Entertainment, a feature section that rolls through different niches during the week. The separate sectioning of Nation/World and Business is a giveback to readers. The new Insider feature gives readers new handles on the topics they have said they care most about.

Despite the great availability of national, world, and business news on other platforms, the research consistently showed that Dispatch readers — those now paying that doubled price — appreciated the editors’ packaging of news in that section. That may seem counterintuitive in the news-anywhere age, but it’s a reality many newspaper publishers are figuring out anew: Print and digital audiences may overlap, but they retain distinct differences in reading preferences 20 years into the Internet revolution.

In part, it’s the content, says Marrison. In part, it’s applying other media’s lessons on branding and packaging. Marrison said the paper has always run an assortment of national and global stories, “but they weren’t displayed well. We didn’t get credit for it.” Packaging and sectioning have been two of the quieter casualities of the daily decline. As broadsheet pages have been cut, the old more-is-more philosophy of separate sectioning has gone out the window at many papers. Here, the marriage of technology and re-invention have allowed, a new kind of sectioning for these loyal print readers.

Those readers are still getting used to the new Dispatch, of course. “We told readers: Be prepared to spend more time inside the paper,” says Marrison, of the consequence of featuring less news on the section fronts. Marrison thinks his readers are open to that, as long as the paper keeps it promise to readers. That social contract: “They told us whatever you do, don’t lessen your content.” So the newsroom of 160 (which saw a loss of about 45 in the great industry downsizing of 2009, but has remained fairly steady in size since) is newly aimed at fulfilling that promise.

We can note that the big change here is to the print product. Marrison says the company is now beginning a new look at its digital products, and will have a native iOS app in the market this year to join its Olive Software-produced e-edition product. Such a sequence may seem anachronistic in 2013, but there is a certain logic. The Dispatch, like most dailies, still depends on print for more than 90 percent of its revenues. That’s where most of the money is driven.

In fact, in the all-access digital circulation/paywall era, print subscriptions now support the digital business, in an odd way. It will become increasingly difficult to separate circulation revenue into print and digital buckets for many companies, as one price buys the access. Even in Columbus — which upcharges its print subscribers $2 a month for digital access — the paying reader’s satisfaction is largely based on the print product.

That’s 2013. It makes sense for dailies to solidify their base first, as Obama did in 2012. All-access, and investments in the news product (“The newsonomics of Aaron Kushner’s virtuous circles”) do that — but that’s only step one. Growth is dependent on acquiring new readers (and advertisers). We believe that most of that growth will be digital. So the kind of reimagination that Marrison and crew did with the print paper is required of the digital products as well. That’s tougher; it’s outside the comfort zone of many newspaper people. For the Dispatch and hundreds of dailies going paywall, that’s the next big challenge. There’s no time to enjoy a mild plateau reached; the job of delighting new, local readers, probably digital-mainly ones, to pay for news must also top their agendas.

Photo by Gabe Taviano used under a Creative Commons license.

The Boston Globe tightens up as executives seek ‘the optimal balance’ between free and paid

Posted: 07 Feb 2013 06:21 AM PST

boston-globe-truck-cc

The flexible paywall that The Boston Globe introduced for its subscription website about a year and a half ago has slowly gotten a little less flexible. Fewer Globe stories are available on the paper's free Boston.com site, and restrictions have been placed on social sharing.

The reason, according to Globe spokeswoman Ellen Clegg, is that the paper's executives are still trying to figure out how to get paid online journalism right in a world awash in free news.

"The core of our two-brand strategy," she told me by email, "involves trying to find the optimal balance between a free, ad-supported model and a premium, consumer-supported model."

The restrictions were brought home to me recently when I learned that the paper had started limiting social media sharing to only two free links a month — a serious limit on someone like me, who regularly shares links on my blog, on Facebook and on Twitter. As a subscriber, I can share as many links as I like, of course. But non-subscribers can only click on two before getting a message that they cannot pass go.

So let's run down the changes, shall we?

First, those social-media links. Clegg says that when BostonGlobe.com went live in the fall of 2011, social sharing was limited to five links per month. If so, it wasn't well publicized. I've gone back and looked at some of the coverage, including my own for the Lab and the Globe's own FAQ, and can find no mention of a monthly cap.

In any case, Clegg says that in December 2012, that number was cut to two links a month from search and social media — "per device, and per browser." In other words, eight a month if you want to juggle among Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer (but who wants to do that?), and more if you move back and forth among other screens. "Email sharing," she adds, "is unlimited."

Second, when BostonGlobe.com debuted, the editors selected five stories a day that would also run on the free Boston.com site. Most sports stories ran on Boston.com as well. Last April, the number of free news stories was cut from five to four, and some additional sports content was moved behind the paywall.

"This is part of an effort to continually experiment, test and analyze how our readers engage with us digitally," Clegg says. "We have been trying to find the right balance between the free-sharing culture of the Internet and paid access to premium Globe content. We believe that we can only arrive at that balance through experimentation."

How well is it working? The Globe's digital subscription base has risen, but slowly. Currently, Clegg says, the Globe has about 50,000 paid digital subscribers — but that doesn’t mean 50,000 people paying directly for a digital subscription. It’s a figure that includes digital-only subscribers; Sunday-only print subscribers (I'm one of them), who automatically get seven-day digital access; and seven-day print subscribers who access BostonGlobe.com at least once a week.

That's how digital subscriptions are counted by the Alliance for Audited Media (formerly the Audit Bureau of Circulations), and it's a pretty expansive definition. As I've written before, about half of those counted as Globe digital subscribers get the paper delivered to their doorstep all seven days.

So is the decision by Globe executives to tighten the paywall smart or dumb? It's hard to say. From the beginning, the idea behind the paid BostonGlobe.com site was to find a way to get regular readers to pay without turning away occasional readers and without hurting the free, advertiser-supported (and just-redesigned) Boston.com site. (Here is how Globe publisher Christopher Mayer explained it to me shortly after plans to build the paywall were announced in the fall of 2010.) Today, Clegg says, Boston.com attracts about 6 million unique visitors a month. Another 1.5 million uniques a month visit BostonGlobe.com, mainly as a result of the site's free-access features.

I know that since I learned about the two-links-per-month limit, I've been looking for the equivalent content in Boston.com's news blogs or elsewhere. I tend to shy away from BostonHerald.com unless I'm writing specifically about the Herald, since much of its content moves into the paper's paid archives after two weeks. But there are plenty of other sources of free local news, even if it's not always of the same quality as the Globe's.

I'm inclined to cut the Globe some slack as Mayer, editor Brian McGrory and company grope their way into the future. But the new rules have already nudged me away from Globe content, and I'm a paying customer. That can't be a good thing.

Dan Kennedy is an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University and a panelist on Beat the Press, a weekly media program on WGBH-TV Boston. His blog, Media Nation, is online at www.dankennedy.net. His book on the New Haven Independent and other community news sites, The Wired City: Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-Newspaper Age, will be published by University of Massachusetts Press in May.

Photo by Scott LaPierre used under a Creative Commons license.
di