| This new blended reality: Rafat Ali says companies that see data as content are the future of media Posted: 02 Dec 2013 07:32 PM PST Don’t miss this insightful post by Skift founder Rafat Ali just because it was published on LinkedIn (where Ali has over 13,000 followers). He highlights a group of companies that he thinks illustrate a new business model, one that turns data and data literacy into a revenue stream. Some examples of media entities already leading in this area, according to Ali, include Bloomberg and FiveThirtyEight. These companies are also riding a few other intersecting megatrends enabled by digital: — The blurring of personal and professional lives of users, because of ever-accessible digital devices, pervasive connectivity, and always-on social media mean users want more and more information, when they want it, and in more atomized ways than their predecessors. — Millennials raised on intuitive, open-web services — media among them — demand more from the business information companies they rely on for their professional lives. If everyone’s coming in as an informed user driven by web-research, how should mediata companies service this generation of users? — The rise of the prosumer, or to use a more lay term, the rise of fanboy. If everyone’s an expert, what does it do the the potential userbase these companies can build? Mediata companies are rethinking the traditional userbase and casting a wider net, and going beyond industry-defined silos, to build a larger brand. — The traditional silos in almost all industries are collapsing because of digital –media, tech and finance are best examples of it — and that creates opportunities for new ways to look at industries, and build new digital-native information brands. — The ubiquity of embed code — YouTube's under-appreciated contribution in making it mainstream — and widgets as a precursor to it means any kind of media, including data and its visualization finally gets unlocked from its proprietary containers, and can freely flow in any kind of environment.
We talked with Ali back in May about how Skift fits into this data-journalism-hybrid model.  |
| A crowdfunded Dutch site goes from concept to reality Posted: 02 Dec 2013 08:17 AM PST Back in April, we told you about De Correspondent, a new Dutch news site backed by a remarkable $1.3 million in crowdfunding. Jay Rosen declared it the most interesting startup he’d read about this year: With the benefit of a few more months’ experience, De Correspondent publisher Ernst-Jan Pfauth wrote up some of what they’ve learned so far. (The total raised eventually reached $1.7 million.)  By now, we have a staff of 7 full-time and 19 freelance writers, a website that adjusts itself to every reading device, and almost 24.000 subscribers who have a year-long subscription of 80 dollars (60 euros). To put that in perspective: with The Netherlands having only 16,8 million citizens, this would be the equivalent of 450,000 subscribers for an American publication. We have a physical home in the offices of a former Shell laboratory on the shores of the river IJ, in Amsterdam…
Therefore, De Correspondent aims for its authors to report on themes that transcend classic beats: themes like energy, privacy, or the economy of the future, to name a few. This reporting takes place in their own 'gardens' — sections of the site they can call their own, and in which they can build a relationship with readers who choose to 'follow' them. The main goal of this approach is to establish a lasting and meaningful relationship with our readers. Conceived of as 'members' rather than 'subscribers,' readers are asked to contribute their expertise on specific topics. While vigilant about its editorial independence, De Correspondent believes that a unidirectional, one-to-many relationship between a news medium and its readership is wholly of the past, and that active audience involvement is crucial for maintaining a healthy, thriving platform.
Also, this is interesting from a how-to-push-sharing-on-a-paywalled-site perspective: Apart from promoting some of our articles in Facebook posts, we don't advertise. We think our readers are our best ambassadors; therefore they can share as many of our articles as they want. When they share an article, a notification bar tells their friends and followers: 'This article has been shared with you by …', followed by the member's name. This strategy seems to work for now, since the 'New visitors' and 'New members' graphs show similar patterns. Moreover, we can tell that a lot of new readers sign up right after they've read an article. Our most popular article (203,676 unique visitors) inspired at least 147 readers to sign up right away.
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