Jumat, 22 November 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

The big trend in indie hyperlocal: Strong women

Posted: 21 Nov 2013 12:53 PM PST

Over at Street Fight, Tom Grubisich hits on a trend I’d noticed but hadn’t been smart enough to write about: the disproportionate representation of women in the leadership of hyperlocal indie media. (Disproportionate to Big Media leadership, I should say — not particularly disproportionate to the actual population.)

Of the 12 top revenue-producing community news sites, eight have a female editor-publisher-owner, based primarily on my calculations from the authoritative Michele's List — compiled by journalist and community news researcher Michele McLellan — as well as my own research. There is just one site in the list's top revenue bracket of $501,000-$1 million — St. Louis Beacon — and it is headed by two women: Editor and co-founder Margie Freivogel and General Manager Nicole Holloway…

Another number: Six women editors-publishers now sit on the 13-member board of the Local Independent Online News (LION) Publishers, the major association representing "indies”…

Crucially, none of these women had to make their case in corporate board rooms, which are overwhelmingly male-dominated. These women just rolled up their entrepreneurial sleeves and went to work. But their success wasn't, and isn't, guaranteed. The odds against the small businesses owner — male or female — being successful are considerably longer than a blackjack player's chances in Las Vegas. So what do women bring to the community news space to produce so many winners?

“The Only Metric That Matters”: Total Time Reading

Posted: 21 Nov 2013 11:49 AM PST

That’s the claim of this piece by Medium product scientist Pete Davies, which goes into why they prefer to push past vanity metrics that create giant PR-friendly numbers.

We've crossed a point at which the availability of data has exceeded what's required for quality metrics. Most data scientists that I meet tell me that they're gathering way more data than they can ever hope to use. And yet, in many cases, they still don't have useful metrics…

I think of competing for users' attention as a zero-sum game. Thanks to hardware innovation, there is barely a moment left in the waking day that hasn't been claimed by (in no particular order) books, social networks, TV, and games. It's amazing that we have time for our jobs and families.

We measure every user interaction with every post. Most of this is done by periodically recording scroll positions. We pipe this data into our data warehouse, where offline processing aggregates the time spent reading (or our best guess of it): we infer when a reader started reading, when they paused, and when they stopped altogether. The methodology allows us to correct for periods of inactivity (such as having a post open in a different tab, walking the dog, or checking your phone).

OJR’s not alone: An old Poynter website has become a spamblog too

Posted: 21 Nov 2013 10:22 AM PST

Maybe you saw my two stories this week on the fate of OJR.org, previously the website of the once-essential Online Journalism Review, which was turned into a spamblog by Marcus Lim, CEO of an Australian startup called Oneflare — one that initially fraudulently tried to appear it was still the old OJR, a product of USC Annenberg. (Since those articles, OJR.org has been blanked entirely. Sometimes sunlight really is the best cure!)

Well, kudos to Rhonda Roland Shearer at the website iMediaEthics, who found that another old journalism website, PoynterOnline.org, has met the same fate. Except in this case, it’s been a spamblog for years without anyone noticing, with someone named Evgeniy Varlashov apparently to blame. Check out all the details on her post.

(PoynterOnline.org was an alternate URL for Poynter’s website for much of the 2000s; they consolidated on Poynter.org around 2008.)

Shearer notes that PoynterOnline.org claims to have “won more than 100 awards in the past five years alone.” I’d also note that the language PoynterOnline.org uses to make that claim are straight lifted from Computerworld’s about page. And I’d also note that, unlike OJR.org, PoynterOnline.org is also running Google ads, so there’s likely a small-but-nonzero amount of money being generated off Poynter’s reputation here.

People: Don’t let your domains expire. In this case, unlike OJR’s, the decision was likely made on purpose — Poynter switched from PoynterOnline.org to just Poynter.org a few years ago. But particularly when you have a brand to protect embedded in that URL, it’s totally worth the 10 bucks a year to just keep renewing and autoforwarding. If you’re thinking about giving up a domain, ask yourself the question: Will I be okay with this domain becoming a spamblog in a few weeks? If the answer’s no, pay up.

Third time’s the charm: Will the new Potluck app be the best commenting section in news?

Posted: 21 Nov 2013 09:53 AM PST

To understand what Potluck’s new iOS app will mean, you have to understand where Josh Miller thinks he went wrong with the first two tries.

Though the products have different names, Miller says the new app is really his third stab at the same idea — trying to build a platform that can improve the digital engagement and conversation space.

The first attempt was Branch, a company he cofounded with Hursh Agrawal and Cemre Güngör, and that was supported financially and otherwise by everyone from Jonah Peretti to Lerer Ventures to the founders of Twitter. “Our original hunch with Branch was, well, people aren’t tweeting and they aren’t blogging, even though they have opinions. Why is that?”

But what Branch actually ended up being was a way for publishers to curate digital expert panels. “A lot of people loved it, but the people that loved it were the people who were already used to creating content,” says Miller. It’s been used by everyone from The Atlantic to The New York Times to Al Jazeera, but Miller’s original goal eluded him. While Branch is still active, Miller says they’ve stopped designing new features for it in order to focus on Take Two.

“Branch was a dynamic where, if a Branch took off, it was all over the place — Twitter, Mediagazer, Hacker News — everybody knew about it. But if you looked at the number of people that used it everyday and were addicted to it, there was a very small number,” Miller says. “Potluck is the opposite. Potluck, you’ve probably never seen on Twitter, but there’s a significant community of people coming back four to eight times a day.”

Potluck, the frequently used analogy goes, was supposed to feel like a dinner party, a place where you could have intimate, interesting conversations with the people you know and people you might like to know. But there was a problem.

“We said, ‘This is going to be a great dinner party!’ And nobody showed up. Nobody brought food. It’s like, there’s nothing here,” says Miller. “Our goal with these snacks is that we think there’s a huge demand for a mobile application where you don’t have to wait for anything to load, where the content is easily digestible, where you can very quickly learn about what’s going on in the world while you’re taking a bathroom break or in line at the grocery store.”

“Snacks” are what Miller hopes will be the core attraction of the new app, Take Three: news stories condensed into three, swipeable cards.

potluck cards actually“Most people, when they’re on their phone, which they increasingly are, they really just want these quick hits. They don’t want a thousand words, or even 500 words. That’s what we see the snacks being. You get a title, we’ll give you three slides and then, if you find it interesting enough that you want to read deeper, we’ll link you to a third party that we think does a good job of giving you more information,” says Miller.

Although Potluck’s editors will be creating these content snacks in the beginning, Miller says he’d be open to outside publishers — and users — contributing as soon as possible. “We don’t consider ourselves a media company. We don’t want to consider ourselves a publisher,” says Miller. “We just think that’s very important for us to establish content in the community we want early on.” Commenting, the bet goes, will be better if there’s something built in to comment on.

What Potluck wants is to be the best commenting platform, the “best content and conversation experience” available in a native iOS app today. For Miller, that meant building an intimacy that the original Branch lacked. “Everybody is going to see the same content. What our editors create is what everybody in the app is going to read. But the conversation thread you see is only going to have your friends, and friends-of-friends,” he says. “It would be like if tomorrow Facebook said, ‘We’re launching a new iOS app and it’s called The News. And in The News, you only post links and articles and you talk to your Facebook friends about the news.’ It’s that, but with a smaller graph.”

Miller believes his credentials as a platform builder, plus his experience with Branch, make his team uniquely poised for success in the “fuzzy area” between content creators and tech startups. If media companies are already willing to farm out comments to third parties like Disqus, Miller believes Potluck has an opportunity to become the platform that’s “owning the engagement.”

“Most publishers, when they created a native app, not a lot of people downloaded them. So they said, ‘We’ll just create a nice mobile web view, so at least when it’s shared on Twitter and Facebook it will look good.’ That’s them thinking like a media company,” says Miller. “Products-focused companies will always be best at building those products, and content-focused companies are always going to be focused on creating the best content.”

As far as media tech companies go, Miller singled out BuzzFeed, Gawker, and (sister company) Medium as well as messaging apps like MessageMe, GroupMe and Kik. But the company that comes closest to swimming in the same waters as the new Potluck app is Circa, which also uses a card metaphor to tell news stories in a mobile context. Says Miller: “We’re similar in the sense that we both don’t want you to have to wait for a URL to load, and we think you need bite-size chunks at a time. In that sense, we’re both on the same page — but we still think content should be shorter.”

In other words, Miller believes that the audience looking for news that’s longer than a tweet but shorter than an article is being underserved. “There’s a little pie of people who are interested in reading a New York Times article on the shutdown,” he says. “We think there’s a much, much larger pie that is interested in the government shutdown but doesn’t find any of those articles that approachable.” Ultimately, he wants Potluck to offer just enough information to generate conversation.

But can it scale?

Miller does have some plans for monetizing Take Three, although he readily admits that most of them are half-baked. Indeed, his suggestion that at some point premium Potluck content — industry-specific news, for example — might only be available to subscribers seems rather unlikely when you remember that we’re ultimately talking about three to five sentences, based on things reported elsewhere. That said, he did point out that, once upon a time, nobody thought people would pay 99 cents for iTunes music files when they could be downloading the same music for free.

“The reason people started doing it was, it was the fastest way to do it, it was easy, it was intuitive,” he says. “If Potluck is the quickest, easiest, fastest way to consume content, maybe there’s an opportunity to do something similar to what Apple did.”

But clearly, with its focus on content, advertising is the most likely route to revenue for the new app, although Miller says they have no immediate plans to hire a sales team. But Miller’s not interested in banner ads.

“You can imagine a world in which the top card is The New York Times with three slides on the government shutdown and the next is GE on why their new jet is going to be amazing,” he says. Although they have no plans to create video content, Miller said he hopes swiping cards, which he claims is “by and large, the most fun, addictive, mobile interaction,” will ultimately generate price points comparable to preroll ads for video content.

Says Miller: “I think it would be really interesting to say, ‘Hey Nike, make a snack about your new shoes and why they’re so awesome and we’ll put it in the stack with anyone that follows ESPN.’”

Potluck’s core challenge will probably still be getting people to use it. While there are undoubtedly users looking for a more intimate, faster, mobile platform for engagement, the barriers to conversion from Facebook, Twitter, or your social network of choice still seem high. Plus, call me an optimist, but Miller seems to be depending rather heavily on the assumption that New York Times content is too highbrow for most consumers.

That said, if neverending Internet chatter is to be believed, comments are something we still haven’t fixed. If Potluck manages to not only solve that problem, but do it in the mobile space, Miller might be on to something. As he says himself, if you don’t think “conversation as the core of content” is the next big thing, just look at how hard Nick Denton is focused on Kinja.

“Nobody wants to talk about news on Instagram. Nobody wants to learn about the government shutdown on Snapchat, because that’s where you’re trading selfies with your girlfriend or posting photos of the sunset,” Miler says. “I think the big play for publishers, or a tech company, is to try and become the place where you talk about this stuff. Whether it’s Potluck or Gawker or Curbed or Vox or whatever — or maybe it’s going to Facebook if they do a standalone app, or Twitter — I think there’s going to be a single platform where people talk about this stuff.”

The newsonomics of The New York Times’ Paywalls 2.0

Posted: 21 Nov 2013 07:46 AM PST

Listen to Mark Thompson and you hear echoes of early 2011.

“We have the theory. We’ve done the research. We’ve done the modeling,” the New York Times Co. CEO told me last week. “Then there’s reality.” 

Thompson, as intense and self-assured as many Timespeople often describe, punches at the air to make that last point. The new reality he is outlining will roll into existence in the second quarter of 2014. The Times will furiously break new company (and industry) ground with at least three new Paywalls 2.0 paid digital products and, at some point, a new “premium” tier.  Within the Times building, teams of editorial, business and tech staff are shaping those new products. If it succeeds, the Pied Piper of the paywall revolution — having led the march that more than 40 percent of the U.S. newspaper industry is now following — will be leading a merrier band toward more new revenue.

For the Times, the new products are biggest initiative since the January 2011 launch of the metered pay system itself. Their success will determine how much gas there may be in what we can call the revolution of rising reader revenue. The Times leads the industry with 56 percent of its revenue coming from readers — but it needs more. Its three-year-old initiative has been a success, running at a rate of $150 million in new digital reader revenue annually. It has signed up 727,000 digital-only subscribers. It has transitioned its print subscribers to an all-access model — and gotten an astounding number to link their print subscriptions to digital accounts. 

But it needs more. Both print and digital advertising revenue are still shrinking, and a turnaround in either over the next two years is more a hope than a certainty. That’s the driver behind Paywalls 2.0. Can it extend the lessons of the first revolution in reader revenue — proving out the theory, research, and modeling that say there really is a consumer appetite for new paid digital news and features products?

It’s important to contrast late 2013 with early 2011. Walk the corridors of the Times building and talk to staff today and you’ll sense a budding confidence — a quality I believe is fundamental to the industry’s rebuilding (“The newsonomics of outrageous confidence”). No one has any illusion that the Times’ future is assured, and the recent defections of Brian Stelter, Nate Silver, and David Pogue and others have sent a bit of a chill through the place. But Times staffers know that their finances are a lot less shaky since the tenuous days of the Carlos Slim loan — and that a lot of people value what they do every day. The all-access digital pay strategy has not just brought in cash: It’s served as a statement that millions of readers value the Times enough to pay a fair amount of money for it. It shows people care.

I asked Paul Smurl, who led the development of the paid digital business as general manager of core digital products, why the new paid products won’t be introduced until the middle of 2014 when it was clear the all-you-can-eat subscription model had begun to plateau by the middle of 2013. (For that 727,000 total at the end of September, the Times showed just a four-percent increase since the end of June.) Smurl answered in three words: It is complicated. The Times has both a big news business to protect and lots of data to test.

In fact, it’s been busy preparing for Paywalls 2.0 for a while now. Smurl says the company has tested “a hundred different products and price points.” Qualitative studies, quantitative studies — and, of course, financial modeling. That modeling is aimed at one goal: maximize Times EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. In other words, don’t just increase revenues: Increase profits. That makes fundamental sense for a company that eked out a $12.9 million net operating gain in the last quarter. In part, that means creating products that generate lots of new customers but don’t significantly cannibalize that new hard-earned customer base.

So what’s come out of that process? Three new niche products, to start:

  • Food & dining: Sam Sifton, a former Times restaurant reviewer and national editor, is heading up this project. Expect lots of video and how-tos. This product will grow out of the Times’ well-read Dining section. The big question won’t be interest; it will be what kind of product might the Times create that consumers will value enough to pay for separately. Food and dining is a big, free world, with television content hugely popular. Recipes won’t be enough — nor will thoughtful and entertaining commentary. What might help would be third-party content, a partnership with a food outlet that has affinity with the Times, or functionality that extends the experience. How about some kind of special deal with OpenTable that gives subscribers some kind of preference or deal, for instance?

    Michael Zimbalist‘s R&D staff demoed “Julia” for me last week. Julia (check out the demo here) is a magical Internet tablet, using gestural and voice interfaces to use tablet-like content and then see ingredients displayed on the countertop.

    The R&D Lab describes Julia as “an experiment to think about how usage data and sensor data could be tied into a feedback loop between a publisher and its users to improve future offerings.” Julia may not be ready for prime time — or kitchens may not be ready for it — by mid-2014, but it’s the kind of wow that could get people to buy, much as the new Mayday feature on the Kindle Fire HDX is doing. Sometimes you sell the steak, and sometimes you sell the sizzle. What will be the Times’ sizzle here and in the other products?

  • Need to Know: Cliff Levy, a much decorated Times editor, is at work on this smartphone-first (tablet-second, web-third) product. It’s intended as a first briefing on the world: Put down that Facebook and smell the globe. Thompson talks about it setting a news agenda, with an “American voice” and a witty, engaging tone that Levy has surfaced in the Times’ NYC Metro coverage.

    One big key for this product: aggregation. Ah, aggregation. It sounds so easy, but legacy news companies — and you can’t get more legacy than The New York Times — have had such a hard time of it. BuzzFeed has been all the buzz among European newspaper companies, for instance. “What do you think of BuzzFeed?” is usually one of the first five questions I’m asked by those publishers. They’re fascinated by it. Then I ask: Are you doing any aggregation? “No” is the usual answer. Maybe the Times can crack the code here. After all, it has some of the best editors in the world, and aggregation is in a sense just great editing — with all the web as your raw copy.

  • Opinion: Andy Rosenthal, the Times’ editorial page editor since 2007, heads up this one. We know less about this one, other than it will probably have a tough road to get people paying. Consider it a counterpoint to the Guardian’s Comment is Free. There is so much free opinion on the web, some of it actually good, that this product may have the toughest go of it. How will the Times’ voices rise to must-pay levels?

Mark Thompson emphasizes the common threads among these products: “They are all an expression of classic journalism. There’s no dumbing down. Each has its own voice.” And: “Each will express the mother brand.”  That combination of characteristics is a tall order. My bet is that the Times will be fortunate if one of the three new products generates substantial profits. Two would be a big win, and three would tell us that the Times has arrived at a new level of data-mastering strategery.

Perhaps as interesting as the three new products will be the as-yet unnamed (and unscheduled) “premium” tier for subscribers.  The Times is figuring out what fits in that tier. Events (TimesTalks and its separate growing conference roster) will be part of it. Its ebook singles business, partnered with Byliner, will likely be part of it. Then there’s the possibility of commercial discount and loyalty programs, plus the other kinds of perks the Chicago Tribune is testing out with Trib Nation “membership.” The idea: Give brand-loyal subscribers more and charge them more. In part, they pay more to get more; in part, they pay because they like the idea of being “premium” or VIP. The Financial Times, adding its well followed Lex column, e-paper access, and letter from the editor to its premium offer, has gotten a whopping 33 percent of new digital subscribers to take “premium.” They pay $2.49 a week more for the privilege. That’s a lot more for about zero in extra cost. Premium or VIP subs are one innovation any self-respecting quality publisher should be thinking about for 2014.

What you won’t see as part of “premium” is the word “membership.” The Times has looked at a membership program, and backed away: The relationship just doesn’t feel right to the paper. It may well may be right about that. The Times isn’t our kissing cousin; it’s more like our brainy, sometimes-know-it-all uncle, respected but not exactly cuddly. Membership implies some closeness, and the Times likes — for good reasons and other reasons — to maintain its distance. We may prefer to keep our distance — getting the news, but sometimes disagreeing with its news judgment and editorials — and the Times is more comfortable that way too.

As the Times moves toward its ambitious 2Q goals, it does so on a base of quite a bit of learning, an education that’s useful to everyone in the publishing industry now peddling digital content:

  • Take down the fences. “Everyone wants unlimited content,” says Smurl, underlining one of the lessons of Paywalls 1.0. The Times learned that lesson painfully with Times Select, which limited access in confusing ways — but it learned it well. All-access means use on all your digital toys, and all the content. Perhaps that thinking is most useful to the many European publishers who continue to offer freemium products, offering access to some stories for free and charging for others.
  • “Free” has a new partner. “People are settling into a consumer mindset,” Smurl adds. That mean seem like nothing novel now, but consider how much our thinking has changed in four years. It’s not just all-access newspaper subscriptions that affirm the point: Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, Pandora, and more prove out the point across news and entertainment media.
  • People say they will pay — and do. Early on, 40 to 50 percent of Times readers told the company they’d pay a dollar a month or more for good content. Now, Smurl estimates that number would be 60 percent or more. That’s a big confidence booster as the new products are readied.
  • Expect $9.99 or less as a monthly price for the new products. Part of the appeal of the new product is passion or utility, but part of it is also price — less than the cheapest digital subscription of $15 per four weeks, which is what a majority of the Times digital subs take.
  • The Times has digitally linked close to 90 percent of its print subscribers. That’s a hugely important number. It means the Times can have a largely singular view of its whole audience and what it reads and spends. The number stood at about 40 percent before the pay system went into place, and for most newspaper companies, it’s been a struggle to reach 50 percent or more. The lesson: Do everything you can do to build the database; it’s a starting point for the next business models.
  • The rest of the globe may well be the Times’ long-term big opportunity. Ten percent of its digital subs come from outside the U.S., where 95 percent of the world’s population lives. Thirty-five percent of its unique visitors are driven from the wider world, though a smaller share of the pageviews. The Times has abandoned its Portuguese-language planned product in Brazil and its China site is in play with the Chinese government. It is the English-language offering that Mark Thompson says will drive the Times’ business forward.
  • Youth, or maybe slightly lower middle age, will be served, digitally. The average age of the Times print reader: 52. The average of age of the digital reader: 47. 
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