Nieman Journalism Lab

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• Tomorrow’s metric for news is action
• Find starters, not stars
• Getting past the data paradox
• Appreciating the digital difference
• A toddler’s view of the future of media
• The veracity of viral
• In Japan, loyalty among newspaper readers is strong, but digital natives are the future
• The newsonomics of how the news industry will be tested in 2014
• Paying more attention to the public
• News that anticipates the reader’s needs
• Understanding the billionaire media gambles
• Big can learn from small in public radio
• Mobile, social, video
• Brand balance and the rise of middleform
• The continued rise of single-subject sites
• The blog is dead, long live the blog
• The future of news is… Sasha Fierce
• Think audiences, not just metrics
• Hashtags will matter again
• The stronger citizen reporter
• Startups need to address real needs

Tomorrow’s metric for news is action Posted: 19 Dec 2013 05:08 PM PST The tools we use to measure the value of our journalism seem to fail us: Metrics don’t match our lofty objectives, or their innate inflexibility forces us to chase the wrong goals. They’ve proven especially vexing in the digital era, with so many available and wide disagreement over which ones ought to matter. On both the editorial and business sides of what we do, the measurements we’re using consistently seem behind the times. But metrics are important, because what we measure, we tend to become. Chasing ratings tilts TV news toward celebretainment. Chasing pageviews leads to annoying slideshow page reloads. This year, the problematic pageview seemed to give way to “social lift” or some measure of sharing reach. And time on site or time reading became key proxies for the “engagement” we all seek. The innovative platform (and aggregator) Medium considers time reading its key metric. And the squishy definition of “quality” for Facebook includes “something that leads you to stay away from Facebook for awhile.” By next year, I expect someone will crack the code of how to measure something more sophisticated: journalism’s influence, be it in civic action or cultural outcomes. Today’s metric may be time, but tomorrow’s is action. This isn’t a new issue. Public media held “impact summits” nearly four years ago identifying the five elements we need in order to measure journalism’s impact. These days, ProPublica diligently tracks reactions to its work — their investigations follow the impact of their revelations. The Solutions Journalism Network identifies solutions or actions by design. And the Knight-Mozilla Fellowship at The New York Times is crafted specifically around figuring out how we measure the results of our work in the civic sphere. So getting to a more sophisticated metric is work that’s already well under way. 2014 could be the year we figure it out. We’ve arrived at a choice cultural moment for an action or “impact” measurement. We have smaller, more fractured communities, highly decentralized civic involvement, and ever-personalized media. Since the link between journalism and civic action often reveals itself most clearly at the local level, the circumstances are right for a new way to measure it. First, the community situation. On my beat, the one clear theme that’s emerged is how often connections in the cloud have fed the formation of tighter and more specific offline communities. Tomorrow’s hot communities are as narrow as “the people of Powder Mountain, Utah,” a group that came together to purchase a single mountain for the purpose of creating place around a shared ethos. Or “the people who live in one house in San Francisco” — a community of like-minded millennials who came together to build community in a house by sharing food, cars, and ideas. Local communities are becoming smaller subsets as software reorganizes the world. At the same time, we’re also seeing civic participation get decentralized and highly personal. Ethan Zuckerman of MIT’s Center for Civic Media outlined this notion in a talk he gave at the Nieman Foundation’s 75th anniversary — arguing that when it comes to young people and digital activism, a new form of civics has taken shape. It focuses on agency, participation, and making an impact at a very small scale. “It’s rarely people saying, ‘I need to be involved in a giant wide slate of issues.’ It tends to be a very pointillist approach to involvement. It’s trying to figure out ‘How can I help economics with a single loan?’…Or giving through Donors Choose, giving to a specific campaign around a specific teacher.” Then there’s the media moment, in which we can all create our own media — Facebook updates and beyond — and easily see the results of our participation. How is news connecting these narrowly drawn communities with their ability to make an impact? News organizations consistently do this kind of work already, notably after crises. In the wake of the Moore, Oklahoma tornado or Hurricane Sandy, news organizations become bridges between people who want to help and ways to actually help. “We need media to step up and say: If you want to have an impact on society, if you want to be an educated citizen, we have to help you how to figure out how to be involved, and involved in a way where you can actually see the impact of what you’re doing,” Zuckerman says. As journalism gets more one-to-one, causes become more personal, and communities divide into subsets of subsets, someone will find a metric to meet the moment. That’s my prediction, anyway. I could be way off and 2014 could be the year singing maps take over the Internet. Elise Hu is a reporter at NPR covering the intersection of technology and culture.

Find starters, not stars Posted: 19 Dec 2013 05:08 PM PST 2013 was a big year for “stars” in the news industry — Nate Silver (and Jason Whitlock and Keith Olbermann) to ESPN, Peter King staying at Sports Illustrated to launch his spinoff site The MMQB, David Pogue (and Katie Couric) to Yahoo, Brian Stelter to CNN, and Kara Swisher, Walt Mossberg and the All Things D team leaving News Corp for Comcast-powered indie life. Here’s the issue: Your star pundit is not Nate Silver. You don’t have ESPN’s cash flow or distribution firehose or sales strategy. And if you aren’t ESPN, to try to replicate the so-called Grantland model (or the “Marquee Brothers” model, as Reuters’ Jack Shafer cheekily labeled it) — hiring a very expensive individual “brand” to run their own product, perhaps adding in the extra cost of letting them hire an entourage of editors and writers — is folly. The star system qualifies as a bold branding move for a media company. However, between the small number of true individual stars (ones who combine entrepreneurial acumen with the ability to deliver a healthy ROI) and the constrained financial resources of most media divisions, the strategy is largely reserved for a handful of deep-pocketed media monoliths that can afford what effectively becomes a marketing expense. What about everyone else? Forego the star and invest in the starter. The starter system is built on recruiting talent to work entrepreneurially — a showrunner, to compare it to pop culture — and building startup (or startup-ish) franchises and products around their strategy and ability to execute. A few advantages: Starters are wired to think about the larger opportunity, not just their personal brand. Starters’ efforts are scalable across more people and not leveraged on a single name. Starters are almost always less expensive to compensate, fund, or acquire. Starters’ initiatives come with a built-in business model rather than an incidental one. Starters are more likely to seek out data to ask the right questions. Starters are more likely to produce multiple wins than personal brands. There is a bigger, more dynamic pool of starters out there than bonafide stars. There are plenty of examples of starters in news media from the past year (or two), and if the people’s names aren’t recognizable, their companies should be: Inside larger media companies, folks like Atlantic Media’s Kevin Delaney, Digital First’s Jim Brady, NPR’s Matt Thompson, Newsweek’s Alex Leo, my USA Today Sports colleague Jamie Mottram, The New York Times’ Aron Pilhofer, Twitter’s Geoff Reiss, and many others. In the media startup ecosystem (alphabetically listed and apologizing for glaring omissions), it’s folks like Skift’s Rafat Ali, The Awl’s Alex Balk and Choire Sicha, Vox’s Trei Brundrett, Lockhart Steele, and Alexis Juneja, Circa’s David Cohn and Anthony DeRosa, CityNotes’ Dan Frommer, MediaREDEF’s Jason Hirschhorn, Medium’s Kate Lee, The Information’s Jessica Lessin, Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti and Ben Smith, MediaTakeOut’s Ron Mwangaguhunga, The Toast’s Mallory Ortberg and Nicole Cliffe, PolicyMic’s Liz Plank, TheList’s Rachel Sklar and Glynnis MacNichol, serial starter Elizabeth Spiers, The Skimm’s Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin, NowThis News’ Katharine Zaleski, and others — including longtime industry kingpins like Gawker’s Nick Denton and Gigaom’s Om Malik. To be sure, there is a small handful of uber-stars who combine huge personal brand and an entrepreneurial ethos — Swisher & Co, Silver, Bill Simmons. But keep in mind that in those unique cases, individual stardom was necessary but not nearly sufficient to leverage it into a full-fledged business. The question then becomes: Where can you find starters? Start internally. Quality starters can be sourced throughout your organization — identify internal editors and product managers who have shown a track record for starting new things, then give them the license to think up new opportunities. (This isn’t the same as handing the keys to a popular columnist or reporter; it’s a trap to conflate popularity and the ability to build a new property.) Take advantage of the fact that entrepreneurship is increasingly popular: Put out a call for relevant new business ideas throughout the organization and modestly fund initially promising ideas with money and dedicated time for the starters to see if bigger opportunities are there. At Gannett, we run an internal innovation grant program that sees eight to ten new ideas get funded a year, in addition to the many others proposed — it gets people thinking in the right ways. Source externally. Media companies can recruit starters from other organizations. Pay less attention (and less money) to the reporters winning prizes or earning tweeted accolades for individual stories and pay more attention to people launching products that seem to move the needle. (In a rich-get-richer example, ESPN did just that when they hired product honcho Ryan Spoon from the West Coast VC firm he was working at after founding his own startup.) Create two internal investment groups, neither of which have to be costly. The first group should manage a modest seed fund that leverages new platforms like AngelList to make small very early-stage investments in relevant media startups, both for the potential of the startup and, arguably more importantly, the access to exactly the kind of starters that could define your company. (This could also be the group that supports an internal grant program.) The second group — in conjunction with your traditional corporate development group, if you have one — should be monitoring the media startup landscape for companies that are potential strategic investments or acquisitions, which brings in not just new products but the starter talent behind them. If media companies are going to make bets under more restrictive and realistic conditions, they should recognize the inefficiency of conflating expensive star power with enterprising starter savvy. They should allocated more resources and funding to the folks whose entrepreneurial chops have the potential to scale and impact a business in a way that the stars — however individually brilliant — might not. In the end, innovation in the news-media industry in 2014 and beyond will be driven by people who are earnestly entrepreneurial about opportunities to build something beyond their personal brand. Starters don’t generate the headlines of the stars, but they will make up many of the true stars of your organization in 2014. Dan Shanoff is the founder of Quickish, a quick-hit news curation service acquired in 2012 by Gannett, where he now helps develop new content ideas for USA Today Sports Media Group.

Getting past the data paradox Posted: 19 Dec 2013 05:08 PM PST A perfect storm has been brewing for 2014, but don’t worry there’s no thundersnow. It’s the data revolution that’s already ripped through e-commerce, sports, and politics, and it’s ready to sweep through news. We’ve already seen Big Data touch some aspects of journalistic life. There are data scientists at the Times and elsewhere focusing on reader behavior to help maintain or build readership. Trove just recently split off from The Washington Post to focus on personalized news full time. But there’s so much more we could be doing: We’re barely scratching the surface of the data that’s available for analysis. The content and experiences we might develop from the data that news organizations could gather passively from their subscribers — through the host of connected devices that the public continues to integrate into daily life — is a treasure trove of behavioral insight. All of that juicy, juicy data would allow everyone in the news pipeline — from user to advertiser — to find more value in their participation with the media landscape. Admittedly, there are several issues with this master plan, not the least of which is the public’s concern over data privacy. In the wake of the Snowden affair, I’m sure these concerns will only continue to inflate. To put this in perspective, according to one Pew survey, people are actually more concerned with advertising agencies tracking their habits than the government. The biggest problem with this fact is media companies are partially supported by ad dollars. The public increasingly sees advertisers as evil, shadowy villains trying to use an individual’s behavior against them, coercing them into spending their life savings on a year’s supply of diet aids or male enhancement drugs. And so, by extension, the public is wary of the media’s attitudes towards data privacy. Organizations will first have to figure out how to extract themselves from this quagmire before they can convince the public to offer up their networked behavior for predictive analysis. The good news is that studies have shown people are more likely to share more data when they are asked to opt-in and that they may actually value contextual, targeted advertising. News organizations are fighting an uphill battle in the search for meaningful data, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel. If privacy concerns are met, the world is an organization’s data-oyster. The Internet of Things, the Quantified Self movement, wearable tech: The objects associated with these buzzwords are all now source points — along with the organization’s traditional web and mobile presence — for rich data that could yield a plethora of unknown unknowns about our subscribers. Computational social scientists are already using these kind of data to improve employee productivity, analyze disaster response, and yes, even predict that a woman is pregnant before she knows. The biggest hurdle is maintaining and continuing to build trust between the consumer and the organization. So fast forward to the time we solve the data paradox. Media organizations are now able to use an individual’s behavior to granularly target their news experience across a range of connected devices. Subscribers are happy that they no longer have to check four different news outlets to get a comprehensive view of current events. Their data isn’t being broadcast or sold to the highest bidder, and they know it. Maybe they’re even allowed to opt-in to levels of data sharing! The ads consumers must see (because everyone is well aware that advertising is inescapable) are offered contextually and at times that are useful to them. And advertisers are happy, because the likelihood of each impression becoming a click has skyrocketed, even if the ads are being shown less often and in fewer places. It’s a venerable newstopia! Obviously, this is a vast oversimplification of a fair data future, but reality may not end up looking much different. The bottom line is that our future as an industry lies in our ability to tap into the resources and empirical insights that Big Data offers without eroding the trust of our users. It’s a tall order, but absolutely achievable if we’re willing to be take our place as innovators. Adrienne Debigare is the new media catalyst for GlobeLab at The Boston Globe.

Appreciating the digital difference Posted: 19 Dec 2013 05:07 PM PST The emerging field of digital journalism has been subjected to intense scrutiny over the past decade. This scrutiny has often focused on the ways in which digital is different than print and broadcast journalism — with the differences usually portrayed as shortcomings. Sometimes, the criticism has been fair. A lot of early experiments in digital journalism produced experiences that were not informative or helpful for readers. Because the economics necessary to support high-quality digital news production had not yet developed, moreover, few digital newsrooms had the scale necessary to produce it consistently. In recent years, however, most of digital’s early shortcomings have been overcome. And the field is now developing into a rich, deep, and extraordinarily versatile way to keep the world informed. Companies like BuzzFeed, Vox Media, Gawker Media, Huffington Post, Business Insider (my employer!), and the digital divisions of some traditional publications now have big editorial budgets, and they are using them to produce and distribute digital stories that hundreds of millions of readers love. Importantly, these stories are designed for digital, not for print or television. They are not square pegs shoved in round holes. Over the history of media, each new medium has developed its own “native” forms of journalistic storytelling. Story formats in TV and radio evolved to be entirely different than those in newspapers and magazines. In the early years of television, print journalism looked down on TV journalism, dismissing it as a playground for those who couldn’t report or write well enough to make it in print. Over several decades, however, TV journalism evolved to become totally different than print — and even more influential. Similarly, digital journalism is evolving to be markedly different than print and television journalism. And it is the newsrooms that are embracing these differences, as opposed to fighting them, that are growing and innovating as the medium develops. How is digital different? A thousand small ways, but three big ones: Different editorial approach (from news gathering to storytelling to production) Different distribution (multiple screens, software distribution instead of hard papers and pipes) Different cost structure (digital economics cannot support print or TV — but they can support digital) Over the next few decades, digital journalism will continue to grow and evolve rapidly, with today’s mid-sized newsrooms expanding to become global newsrooms of hundreds or even thousands of journalists. The depth of digital reporting and storytelling — both narrative and visual — will continue to grow, as will the precision with which publications customize their story selections for each reader. So what will 2014 bring? This, I think, will be the year in which most observers begin to fully appreciate digital’s differences — and why these differences should be celebrated, not feared or criticized. Digital is by far the most versatile and convenient journalism technology human beings have ever developed. And with global social media, digital publishing, and digital newsrooms finally hitting their stride, the world has never been better informed. Henry Blodget is founder and CEO of Business Insider.

A toddler’s view of the future of media Posted: 19 Dec 2013 05:07 PM PST To get a sense of how we will consume news, information and entertainment in the future, I only need to look at my son Jack, age two and a half. While my wife and I do our best to limit his screen time and steer him towards offline pursuits like jigsaw puzzles and coloring, he already has favorite shows, apps, and digital activities. There are three things that describe the way Jack likes and expects to consume media: on-demand, personalized, and available seamlessly on any screen. If Jack wants to watch the PBS show Curious George, he can watch it on cable on-demand, on Amazon Instant, on Netflix, on YouTube, or on iTunes. And he can watch it on any of these platforms on our TVs, computers, phones, tablets, or through devices that connect to our TV like Apple TV or Google’s Chromecast. And because we watch on all these services, when we pull one up, we never have to hunt around for what we want — because all of our favorites are right there in our digital library, watchlist, instant queue, or viewing history. The Curious George brand also extends to thousands of other products and platforms, like the Curious About Shapes and Colors app, one of Jack’s favorites. This on-demand, personalized, and any-screen experience also extends to communication. If he wants to have a video chat with his grandparents in Philadelphia or Boston, we can do it via Skype or FaceTime, on our TV, computer, or tablet. And if we’re not home, we can do the same on our phones. To prepare for consumers like Jack who expect to access personalized news, information, and entertainment instantly on any screen, here are two predictions for 2014. More personalized mobile alerts: The mobile app alert is perhaps the most intimate of all forms of news delivery, as information is sent directly to your pocket regardless of where you are or what you are doing. Since it is so personal, consumers only want to receive alerts that are relevant to them. Sports apps like ESPN’s ScoreCenter and Bleacher Report’s Team Stream have been doing this for a while, but in 2013 we saw news organizations including NBC’s Breaking News and ABC introduce some form of personalized mobile app alerts. We also saw the growth of startup Circa, whose entire mission is built around personalized alerts and news. Expect to see many more news organizations allow their users to personalize the mobile alerts they receive in 2014. Favorite content in unfamiliar places: For the past few years, we’ve found our favorite media brands in a few familiar places — newspapers in print, online, and mobile, or TV stations on TV, online, mobile. But just like Jack expecting to find the Pixar movie Cars on whatever device or screen is in front of him, consumers will increasingly expect to find their favorite media brands on new devices and platforms. And they will expect to be able to watch their favorite programming both live and on demand. The biggest place this trend played out in 2013 was on Apple’s Apple TV set top box. Apple TV has always had a few news and entertainment channels, but they ramped up their offerings dramatically this year with the addition of HBO GO, WatchESPN, SkyNews, Watch ABC, Bloomberg, PBS, Disney, the Weather Channel, and more. Some of these channels, such as HBO GO, require consumers to have a cable subscription to watch shows and movies, while others allow users to watch without a cable subscription. And many allow consumers to create watch lists or favorites so they can immediately access personalized lists of programming. This trend also accelerated in 2013 with the introduction of an inexpensive Apple TV competitor from Google called Chromecast. While its content offerings pale in comparison to Apple TV, they are growing and there’s even a Chromecast channel from an old media brand — PostTV from The Washington Post. And don’t forget the Roku box, which boasts that it has “more news than any other streaming player.” In 2014, we will see more news organizations making their content available on devices such as Apple TV, Chromecast, and Roku and we will also likely see news content starting to pop up in wearables like smartwatches and perhaps even smart appliances. The result will be that when consumers want to watch the latest show from CNN and or read a favorite columnist, they’ll just have to reach for whatever Internet connected device is nearest to them. Etan Horowitz is the mobile editor at CNN.

The veracity of viral Posted: 19 Dec 2013 05:07 PM PST 2014 is going to be the year of a big debate about what news is — and especially about whether and how news organizations can ethically report on activity in the virtual world. The first time I saw this debate take place in public was in October, on Nick Denton’s Kinja commenting platform, where a fascinating conversation broke out between Denton, the founder of Gawker Media; John Cook, the editor of Gawker; and Neetzan Zimmerman, the viral wunderkind who singlehandedly generates most of Gawker’s traffic. Zimmerman had put up yet another of his dozen posts a day, all of which feature (which is to say, recycle) various pieces of content found on the internet. This post was headlined “Grandpa Writes Letter Disowning Daughter After She Disowns Gay Son,” and featured a letter which Zimmerman found on a gay-friendly t-shirt site named FCKH8. Denton quickly jumped into the comments, saying there was something fishy about the way in which FCKH8 kept on finding such heartwarming letters; he also pointed out that the company’s founder, Luke Montgomery, has a long history of “stunts.” Cook replied to Denton: Part of our job is to make sure we’re writing about things that people are talking about on the internet, and the incentive structure of this company is organized to make sure that we are on top of things that are going viral. Neetzan is explicitly tasked with doing so. Unfortunately, that involves covering charlatans and bullshit artists, whether it’s Montgomery or Jimmy Kimmel… I’d rather be calling bullshit on stuff like this than calling attention to it…But we are tasked both with extending the legacy of what Gawker has always been — ruthless honesty — and be reliably and speedily on top of internet culture all while getting a shit-ton of traffic. Those goals are sometimes in tension. Zimmerman, who’s surely one of the world’s greatest experts on viral content, then replied to them both, pointing out that the tension was even bigger than that: Most viral content demands from its audience a certain suspension of disbelief. The fact is that viral content warehouses like BuzzFeed trade in unverifiable schmaltz exactly because that is the kind of content that goes viral. People don’t look to these stories for hard facts and shoe-leather reporting. They look to them for fleeting instances of joy or comfort. That is the part they play in the Internet news hole. In other words, there’s things which are true on the internet — like that letter from a disappointed grandpa, or a video of a failed twerk. The Internet is getting increasingly good at generating such content — so good, indeed, that the bar is getting raised, and the chances of successfully viral content simply emerging naturally from the world are getting ever slimmer. There’s now so much fake content out there, much of it expertly engineered to go viral, that the probability of any given piece of viral content being fake has now become pretty high. The result is stories like this one, in The New York Times, headlined “If a Story Is Viral, Truth May Be Taking a Beating,” which says that “digital news sites are increasingly blurring the line between fact and fiction”: When the tales turned out to be phony, the modest hand-wringing that ensued was accompanied by an admission that viral trumps verified — and that little will be done about it as long as the clicks keep coming… …Gawker, BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post and Mashable among them — do not see invented viral tales as being completely at odds with the serious new content they publish alongside them. The Times story even quotes Elan Gale, who hoaxed the internet with his Thanksgiving plane-ride tweets, saying that the people who embedded and Storified his tweets were “deceiving their audience” by doing so. The appeal of the moral high horse appears to be irresistible: Look at Dave Weigel, for instance, tearing into BuzzFeed for their rebroadcast of the Gale tweets, calling it “the sort of shoddy reporting that would get a reporter at a small newspaper fired.” What Weigel misses — and even Gale too, it would seem — is that the BuzzFeed story is not a journalist reporting about happenings on a plane. “Someone is rude on a plane” is not a news story. The BuzzFeed story is rather a journalist reporting about happenings on the Internet — specifically, on Twitter. Here’s how BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti sees his publication: I think of BuzzFeed as this platform that enables us to understand how people are sharing and distributing things like entertainment content, journalism, branded content, all these various types of content that we distribute on this platform that we built… What we’ve found is that content spreads on different networks for different reasons. There are underlying human dynamics for social content. There are reasons why people share. This is where the tensions come in: The reasons that people share basically have nothing to do with whether or not the thing being shared is true. If your company was built from day one to produce stuff which people want to share, then that will always end up including certain things which aren’t true. That’s not a problem if you’re ViralNova, whose About page says “We aren’t a news source, we aren’t professional journalists, and we don’t care.” But it becomes a problem if you put yourself forward as practitioners of responsible journalism, as BuzzFeed does. It has become abundantly clear over the course of 2013 that if you want to keep up in the traffic wars, you need to have viral content. News organizations want to keep up in the traffic wars, and so it behooves them to create viral content — Know More is a really good example. But the easiest and most infectious way to get enormous amounts of traffic is to simply share the stuff which is going to get shared anyway by other sites. Some of that content will bear close relation to real facts in the world; other posts won’t. And there are going to be strong financial pressures not to let that fact bother you very much. Indeed, that fact doesn’t bother me very much. I very much love Analee Newitz’s “valley of ambiguity“: It seems to me that if a site has a bunch of viral content, and some of it is on the left-hand side of the valley and some of it is on the right-hand side of the valley, then it’s entirely reasonable to apply journalistic strictures to the right-hand side but not to the left-hand side. It’s also possible, if Facebook really does start cracking down on the left-hand side of this valley, that the incentive to create fake viral memes will naturally dissipate. But that’s not going to happen in 2014. So expect, over the course of the coming year, a large quantity of debate about questions like whether it even makes sense to fact-check a twerking video. My undergraduate philosophy thesis was about the semantics of belief ascription, and the way in which “Lois Lane believes Superman can fly” is true, and “Lois Lane believes Clark Kent can fly” is false, even though Superman is Clark Kent. I think this debate is similar: When you point to a twerking video, are you pointing to the video, or are you pointing to the actions which take place in the video? BuzzFeed says it’s doing the first kind of pointing, which means that it’s true, while the likes of Dave Weigel see instead the second kind of pointing, which means that it’s false. To a large degree, this is a discussion which only journalists, and maybe the occasional underemployed philosopher, could ever care about. But it’s going to be hard to avoid in 2014. Update: In fact, you can fact-check a twerking video. Felix Salmon is the finance blogger at Reuters, where this piece also appears.

In Japan, loyalty among newspaper readers is strong, but digital natives are the future Posted: 19 Dec 2013 01:26 PM PST Editor’s note: We spied this piece at Nippon.com a little while back and thought it was worth a read before the end of the year. Professor Hayashi Kaori of the University of Tokyo looks into print news circulation and age demographics in Japan, and warns that significant changes must be made in how resources are allocated in the journalism industry within the next few years. Thanks to Nippon.com for allowing us to republish the article. Last August the world's media were abuzz with the news that the venerable Washington Post was about to be sold to Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. It was the latest installment in a story of upheaval that has forced such American institutions as The Wall Street Journal (taken over by media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. in 2007), the Los Angeles Times, the Star Tribune, and The Philadelphia Inquirer into bankruptcies, mergers, and acquisitions. In Japan, by contrast, one rarely hears of bankruptcies or buyouts in the newspaper industry. Are Japanese newspapers somehow immune to the trends that are shaking up the print media overseas? In the following I examine some of the characteristics of Japan's newspaper business and contemplate the industry's long-term outlook in the digital age. Circulation holding steady One obvious indicator of an industry's health is revenue. In Japan, total newspaper revenue has declined over the past 15 years (see Figure 1), albeit not as steeply as in the United States and Europe. By 2011, industry revenue had dropped by more than 20 percent from its peak of ¥2.53 trillion, recorded in 1997. Figure 1 also identifies the main source of this decline. Advertising revenue, which accounts for roughly one third of the total, has fallen off, particularly since the recent global recession. In comparison, the decline in circulation revenue, which accounts for almost 60 percent of the total, has been negligible: In 2011, circulation revenue was down less than 10 percent from the 1997 peak. (In the United States, circulation revenue accounts for 27 percent of total revenue, according to the latest survey by the Newspaper Association of America). Newspaper circulation figures remain remarkably high in Japan. Among the major national papers, the Yomiuri Shimbun — Japan's largest — puts its circulation at slightly less than 10 million. The number two, Asahi Shimbun, has an official circulation just shy of 8 million. Japan's regional newspapers typically reach 50 percent of households in their market, and a fair number boast a penetration rate of 60 percent or higher. Moreover, Japanese regional papers are almost all independently operated — unlike their US counterparts, which are mostly owned by nationwide newspaper chains like McClatchy. In short, although advertising revenue has declined as a result of the economic situation, Japanese newspapers have remained relatively strong for the simple reason that readers are not canceling their subscriptions. What explains this loyalty? The chief reason is that for most Japanese adults over a certain age, newspapers not are merely an information medium but an integral part of their lifestyle. If you are an adult in Japan, chances are that one of the first things you do after getting up in the morning is to go to your mailbox and collect your morning paper. Later, when the evening newspaper arrives, you scan the headlines to catch up on the day's events (although growing numbers of regional newspapers have suspended their evening editions). Home-delivery network To some extent, this behavior reflects the Japanese fondness for printed reading matter of all kinds. But from a practical standpoint, what has made it possible is the newspapers' extensive home-delivery network, which penetrates every corner of the archipelago. Close to 20,000 local distributors form the hubs of this network. Most of the distributors have exclusive contracts with a particular newspaper publisher and work in close cooperation with its sales department to sell and deliver its newspapers as efficiently as possible. They have worked long and hard to carve out their territory and secure as many subscribers as possible. They are able to augment their earnings by folding advertising inserts into the newspapers prior to delivery. This system has created a vast nationwide home-delivery network that accounts for a full 95 percent of Japanese newspapers sold. Even in Germany, which has a market close to Japan's in size and a well-developed delivery system, the percentage of papers delivered door-to-door is only 70 percent. Part of the community In Japan, personal and community relationships are the key factors that determine subscriber loyalty. Japanese newspapers have little of the ideological coloring that characterizes certain European newspapers, which began as party publications. Japanese readers remain loyal to one newspaper or another simply because their family has always subscribed to that newspaper, or because they happen to know the neighborhood distributor. In Japan, newspapers have always been more than a news medium. The "paperboy," for example, occupied a prominent place in Japanese urban society in the years of rapid growth following World War II. Many of the young people who thronged to the cities to pursue higher education actually boarded at neighborhood distribution outlets as they supported themselves by delivering newspapers. A good number of them also received generous scholarships. The newspapers' role as benefactors to thousands of struggling young migrants is presumably part of the reason for their popularity among Japanese aged 50 and older (particularly those who migrated to the city from the country when they were young). Newspaper delivery is no longer a popular option among college students looking to earn their school tuitions and livings. In fact, the number of people working at delivery stations has plummeted by about 75 percent in the past 20 years. However, newspaper distributors have found other ways of cementing their position in the neighborhood. In the rapidly aging communities of Japan's depopulated rural regions, many have adapted their business model to their elderly clientele, offering wheelchair rental or home visits to check on people living alone. Since the immediate postwar years, newspapers have secured the loyalty of an "ironclad readership" by contributing to the local community with services that filled the gaps left by local and central government. These are some of the reasons Japanese newspapers are so firmly embedded in Japanese life and culture. No turning back for "digital natives" Notwithstanding the loyal readership and financial stability enjoyed by Japanese newspapers today, it is hard to be optimistic about their future prospects. In fact, the industry's current ability to coast along on the strength of its former success makes it all the more difficult to envision a happy outcome farther down the road. The nature of the threat is no great mystery. In Japan, as in the industrially advanced nations of the West, new subscriptions have fallen with the spread of the Internet and smart-phone technology. Students at the university where I teach seldom subscribe to newspapers, particularly if they are living on their own. Young people are prepared to pay considerable sums for their cell phone subscriptions, but they are reluctant to spend even a fraction of that amount on newspapers. Figure 2 depicts this trend in stark statistical terms, using data from a time-use survey conducted in 2005 and 2010 by the NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute. In 2010, men in their twenties reported spending four minutes per day with a print newspaper on average, as compared with 68 minutes online. The conventional wisdom has always been that men begin reading newspapers in earnest once they have settled down as mature adults with steady jobs. But even in Japan, this pattern appears to be breaking down. It seems highly unlikely that today's "digital natives" — young people in their teens and twenties who grew up with digital technology — will return to print media as they grow older. Victims of their own success Japanese newspaper publishers have adopted a variety of strategies to attract younger readers, but these all fail to address the basic problem head-on. Standing atop their vast paper empire, built with the aid of thousands of local distributors, newspaper executives seem incapable of doing anything more than watch in concern as the shift to digital media threatens to leave them in the dust. In the course of my research, I have carried out interviews with many Japanese newspaper executives regarding their business strategy for digitization. Virtually all of them expressed the same concern — that any major shift toward paid digital content would trigger a backlash from the local distributors that support the home-delivery network. "We can't ignore the distributors," they explained. This is why the Yomiuri, Japan's largest daily newspaper, makes its paid digital edition, Yomiuri Premium, available only to print subscribers. Similarly, the Asahi Shimbun and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun hype their print-plus-digital packages but discourage digital-only subscriptions by pricing them almost as high as print subscriptions. Most regional newspapers, meanwhile, have balked at publishing a digital edition. Their websites carry only free content in the form of "article teasers" designed to spark interest in the print edition. Japan's newspaper business is a prime example of a successful domestic-demand-driven industry that skillfully tapped into the consumer base at a time when it was growing rapidly. But Japanese newspapers have remained wedded to the same old business model in a dramatically changing world — even while bankruptcies and buyouts have catalyzed the restructuring and renewal of the newspaper industry abroad. When will renewal come to Japan's newspaper industry? How will newspapers sustain and develop demand 40 or 50 years from now, in a society of digital natives? Trapped in their own twentieth-century formula for success, Japanese newspapers have yet to formulate a clear vision for the twenty-first. Image by akaitori used under a Creative Commons license.

The newsonomics of how the news industry will be tested in 2014 Posted: 19 Dec 2013 09:10 AM PST Our 2014 stage is set, and oh what a marvelous assortment of characters will be walking across it. Many of these characters — the Bezoses, Henrys, Kushners, Omidyars, and Buffetts — are new non-newsies thrusting themselves into the news world, unexpectedly and in short order. The competition they face is unprecedented, as many media — news and entertainment — converge on the same models of digital advertising and revenue from readers, viewers, and listeners. There’s only so much money to go around, and the losers here are likely to outnumber the winners. Sometimes, a few words can sum up the futility of a competition. As Ukraine sadly fell back into the arms of the Russian bear this week, one commentator correctly noted that the “European Union had brought a baguette to a knife fight.” Now, as we celebrate 20 years since the first newspaper website, we see that the news industry early on armed itself in the digital wars with the First Amendment, the AP Stylebook, and a rate card — tools that have been little match for the power of databases, aggregation and digital scale. 2014 is Year One for some of the news novices — and Year 21 for those in the print/digital transition since the first news sites launched. Let’s take a look at the year ahead, looking at the big actors, major themes, and tests of the year ahead. Consider these nine big themes that will further separate the winners from the losers when we look back a year from now: Braveheart meets newsies The future is staring down the news industry, and the business doesn’t have an eternity of blinks left. Best practice strategies and their execution — the core of what I cover — are the only way forward, but this year has surfaced the intangible of what I’ve called “outrageous confidence.” Jeff Bezos’ buying of the Post (and the Grahams’ selling) startled people in the press worldwide and crystallized the sense that a new generation of owners may seem a real future in the news business. In 2013, all the new owners — Buffett and his growing BH Media, John Henry and his Globe, Bezos and his Post — have been consumed with getting-to-know-events and rearranging the furniture. The test for 2014: Will these owners beat their chests, open their wallets, and most importantly fund and support new products, new kinds of customer engagement and new thinking not invented here in Newspaperland? Will they not settle for incremental small experiments but, while staying within journalistic values, make some big new bets? The Last Man Standing theory of local media Here’s our most Darwinian theme. The theory: As first newspaper print and then local broadcast advertising continue to winnow down, there just won’t be enough left to support the number of local media news outlets we have today. Digital advertising and even TV paywalls could help with funding. If you want to be running a local newsroom of significant size in 2020, be prepared to be one of only two or three that may then exist. It’s a only-the-paranoid way of looking at the Blade Runner news future, but it’s also, unfortunately, a logical extrapolation of the last half-decade. That future could play out in a number of ways. We see one playbook being executed in real time in Southern California. There, new Freedom Communications CEO Aaron Kushner has deployed not one but four strategies in his first 17 months of ownership. His Last Man Standing theory has led him to (1) invest in doubling the size of the Orange County Register newsroom, albeit with about 75 interns as part of that mix; (2) march competitively into neighboring Long Beach with a cavalry of 20 editorial staffers; (3) announce — without additional staffing noted — the creation of the Los Angeles Register, moving into a county 3x bigger than his home one (“New Hollywood Sequel: Aaron Kushner’s L.A. Register”); (4) buy — and start cutting costs at — the next-county-over Riverside Press-Enterprise. Add up the costs and likely revenues of all those forays and it’s not yet easy to see a sustainable business strategy. But clearly Kushner fits the profile of the outrageously confident, one seemingly bent on surviving whatever new traumas are tossed the way of the news industry. The Southland has been ripe for consolidation for quite a while, as its three biggest newspaper groups all endured bankruptcies. The question has been who would want to stay and who would want to go. I’ve written about roll-up — another route to Last Man Standing — and my friend Martin Langeveld has maybe more correctly labeled the merging of these low-financial-value companies as mop-up. Consolidation is happening in every legacy industry. 2013 was the biggest year of TV station ownership consolidation, led by Sinclair, Gannett, and Tribune. As cord-cutting begins to age the cable industry a bit faster, Charter is actively pursuing Time Warner Cable, as Comcast considers its options. In Europe, too, we’ve seen the emergence of consolidation. Axel Springer sold two of its standard-bearing German dailies to consolidator Funke Media, while in the U.K., Local World — a roll-up of two big newspaper chain properties — has turned a first-year profit, even as its executive ranks are roiling. Even when ownership isn’t consolidated, every operation that can be shared in a matured industry will be. As just one of many examples, old competitors in both the Twin Cities and the DFW Metroplex agreed to share presses this year. As consolidation happens, newspapers should not have the sense they have a guaranteed position in the 2020 standings. Consistent with that local TV consolidation and the WCPO Cincinnati experiment, big broadcast companies want to be in the survivor group. Then there’s public radio, profoundly trying to be come public media. Monday’s announcement that NPR had put together six of the leading big local public radio players to produce a “seamless local-national listening platform” is indicative of that movement. Maybe as important will be the individual development of top station’s own local public media experiences, such as the just-launched KPCC tablet product in L.A. Consider the moves a five-year strategy to be one of those possibly few substantial local newsrooms when 2020 comes around. The test for 2014: As we witness newspapers trying to do video, TV stations trying to write stories, and public radio aspiring to be text/audio/video producers, who will get it right first? Don’t expect the definitive “right” within a year, but 2014 is a pivotal year to get legs up on the competition. The back pages Face it, print advertising is becoming a niche, even if it’s a big one. Through the end of last year, newspapers’ print ad revenues were down 60 percent since the height of 2005, to $18.9 billion from $47.4 billion in the U.S. That’s almost a $30 billion difference in seven years. This year’s decline should roughly match last year’s of 9 percent, and many publishers project about the same loss for 2014. If those numbers hold, that means by the end of 2015, print ad revenues will total $15.6 billion — only around $4 billion more than where reader revenues may then come in. The continued decline of print advertising is the very dark cloud hanging over the news industry and the darkening ones looming over the magazine industry. While digital advertising overtook print advertising in 2012 in the U.S. and globally, the accelerated pace of the print to digital movement is clear and fairly unwavering. The test for 2014: How can publishers mitigate their print losses, pulling from an expanding toolbox of sponsored sections, events packages, custom publishing, and more to minimize as much as possible a near-universal negative number? Digital advertising separates the pack Last year, U.S. newspapers were up 4 percent in digital advertising, to a total of 11 percent of revenue. This year’s reports indicate that growth could well be less, closer to flattish, with many publishers struggling near the zero point. Yet some, which we’ll investigate in early 2014, are in double-digits. That’s a combination of executing on some of the ad buzzwords of the time — content marketing, native ads — but also on much less glamorous and written-about work like audience extension and yield optimization. The test for 2014: With print ads spiraling downward, will the failure to execute on a strong and diversified digital ad strategy doom news organizations to even deeper cuts in staff and product? The sweet smell of success Paywalls perfumed an otherwise overripe business model over the last year. Astounding, more than 40 percent of U.S. newspapers will have one in place by mid 2014, with at least 650 titles globally by then. Consumer magazines have embraced them. Circulation revenue is up — probably another 5-6 percent in newspapers this year, following similar results last year — and that growth is one steady plus line in most newspaper company reports. It’s important to acknowledge that success, and its valuable contribution to any kind of digital transition, as even long-time critic Digital First Media’s John Paton recently did. Getting long-time print readers to pay for all-access (including digital) is a big step in the mostly digital future. But too many publishers mistake this first step as a leap. They’ve made the long jump and are busy taking satisfaction of where they stand in the sandpit. Fine, they deserve to take a bow for a move that has smartly adopted across industries in record time — but they better not stand there for long. Few publishers are selling many digital-only subscriptions to non-print subscribers; the highest metros reaching to 40,000-plus. While The New York Times has worked that digital-only niche well — moving into a go-to checkpoint role on smartphones and apps and racking up more than 700,000 digital-only subs — its success is not being replicated well enough in the regional press. The goal here is simple: sell more stuff to new and old customers. The now-decade-old problem is that too few people at news companies know how to create new products. And newsroom walls have only exacerbated the problem, as Raju Narisetti outlines so clearly in his year-end prediction. One print product development area getting too little attention is Sunday. It’s the one print product with the longest shelf life and longevity and it’s the fulcrum for many long-time readers’ print/digital toggle. Look at the trend lines and we can see that the bump publishers have gotten from reader revenue should hold, but they may well have trouble finding future growth. The test for 2014: How will publishers prepare for the soon-to-come leveling off of reader revenue increase by producing what I’ve called Paywalls 2.0 products? The New York Times with its planned spring launches (“The coming of the New York Times’ Paywalls 2.0″) is one of the few to make such products a key next-wave reader revenue strategy. If other publishers don’t, they should expect to find the plateau of reader revenue at which the pioneering Times has already arrived. Mobility, mobility, mobility There’s simply no way to over-emphasize the centrality of getting smartphone and tablet experiences right for news customers. This year, we’ve seen newspaper access move from around 25 to 35 percent mobile access, with TV stations in a similar range. Startup news sites, significantly, report 50 percent or more of their views coming from mobile. As importantly, mobile advertising in the U.S. will double to $9.6 billion from $4.4 billion. Google will take about half of that, Facebook 15 percent, with only a couple of dozen publishers are taking in serious money. The test for 2014: If news publishers don’t make 2014 the year of mobile-first content and sales development, they have slim hopes of growing digital ad revenue over the next several years. Sorry, your audience does not compute We’ve seen a bigger divide between those companies (global, national, and regional) who harness analytics to drive their business and those who don’t. Just yesterday, I heard from a news-facing tech company about cookie licking and browser entropy fingerprinting. We need to go no further than the Lab’s predictions this year to take in a new language of how technologists view the business of news-making. From The New York Times’ Allen Tan: “Ambient interfaces will begin to appear as data trickles into watches, televisions, clocks, cars — but with new affordances. While smartphones and tablets are deeply personal and interactive, these new devices sit in communal space, in the background: How do you design something that accepts minimal input but is aware of its environment? What does glanceable information look like?” Ready to take a holiday break before you begin tackling the tech-infused challenges of 2014? Data science is at the core of the major global news brands’ agendas — and sketchy across the rest of the news landscape. Hiring one nerd to figure it out is so 1999. Not only is data science driving ad and reader pricing, much of the best storytelling of the year was accomplished by pairing journalists and technologists. Then there is the data-as-assets opportunity/challenge, as companies move to allow publishers to “control” and perhaps market their own data in exchanges. Of course, the biggest story of the year — unveiling the massive government spy apparatus, post-Snowden — points further to how much technology remains the biggest underlying driver of many businesses, now including publishing. The test for 2014: Can your company pass a basic tech literacy test? Your customers expect that you can. The business press gets a makeover The three iconic U.S business magazines are in the throes of change. Forbes is on the block. Fortune is going off with the new Time Inc. spinoff and casting for how to find new digital audience. Bloomberg Businessweek is showing some signs of vigor, in ads and brand campaign, but faces the same print trends as its peers. All confront what it means to be a print creature in a business world that is digital-dominant, one now being exploited by interlopers like digital-only Quartz. In the digital world, the magazines’ reader and ad competition is Bloomberg overall (with its own identity issues), the FT, and The Wall Street Journal. Then, of course, all the big digital companies can sell business-like audience profiles out of their deep data. Something’s gotta give, and much of it will in 2014. The test for 2014: How soon will the business magazine space change as radically as the once-seemingly-permanent reign of newsweeklies Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report? One is the loneliest number In the year ahead, we’ll see the naked results of publishing assets set adrift from bigger, diversified companies. 2013 was the year of the big publishing quarantine. With print advertising in deep freeze and digital ads largely lukewarm, spinoff and separation was the name of the game. At mid-year, News Corp hived off its newspapers, reeling in a three-continent downturn, putting its growth-oriented TV, video, and movie operations into the forward-reaching 21st Century Fox. Tribune, avoiding the backlash of a Koch Brothers buy, spun its top-drawer newspaper brands (L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune) out of sales mode and into spin-off. Those newspapers, drained of real estate and digital classifieds assets, may go into a separate company, unless they are sold first (Joe Cahill picks apart the new “Tribune Publishing Company” financials). Time Warner Inc., finding new buyers for Time Inc., spins off its assets about the same time. In each of these deals, the questions of which assets and liabilities move to the new company is big (Allan Sloan dissects that part of the Time Inc. spinoff). All the plays here are about maximizing the public value of the non-publishing assets. With the first new News Corp results, the continuing loss of major publishers only becomes more clear, as the previous filings of the media conglomerates purposely clouded poor publishing performance. Tribune and Time titles are being tossed into the public markets as they’ve cooled on publishing assets and the biggest movement has been from public to private hands; we’ll see how long both companies stay public. The test for 2014: How fast can these new companies hit the ground running, paying more attention to their competitive marketplaces than to the internal reordering or organization and power? Photo by Dan Moyle used under a Creative Commons license.

Paying more attention to the public Posted: 19 Dec 2013 06:35 AM PST What might 2014 bring for the world of news? Lacking a crystal ball, we can look forward by making sense of the year that is coming to a close. This analysis — and not wide-eyed wishes — helps us think critically about the future. In my opinion, two major events marked 2013 for news and journalism. The first was the sale of The Boston Globe by The New York Times Company to sports mogul John Henry for $70 million in cash. The Times had acquired the Globe for $1.1 billion in 1993, “the highest ever [price paid] for an American newspaper” until then, according to a story in The New York Times. That’s a loss of 93 percent value in absolute terms in just 20 years. A more accurate calculation taking into account consumer price index increases reveals that the Times lost 96 cents on the dollar with this investment. (To put things in financial perspective, the Dow Jones Industrial Average more than quadrupled during this period. And this calculation doesn’t even take into account the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, which was purchased separately for $295 million but included in the $70 million sales price.) This staggering loss of value is a parable of the failure of established news organizations to take advantage of the opportunities that arose during the first couple of decades of the digital age. If the Globe were located in an economically depressed part of the country, one might be able to argue that the loss could be due to local economic factors. But Boston is a hub of innovation in biotechnology and information technology, two of the main engines of economic growth in recent history. Purchased at top price and with great fanfare at the time Mosaic was paving the way for more sophisticated graphical user interfaces and the commercialization of the then-nascent World Wide Web was about to explode, the sale of the Globe is resounding evidence that these news organizations are not among the winners of the first decades of the digital age. Among those winners, however, there is eBay, the online auction giant. Its founder, Pierre Omidyar, became a lead character in the second event that marked 2013 for the world of news when he announced this fall his decision to invest $250 million in the creation of a new media venture with Glenn Greenwald as the front person. For me, what makes this development so noteworthy in the context of what 2014 might bring is the way in which it was received by the news industry. Article after article, media analysts greeted the news with hyped expectations and an uncritical tone. For an occupation that is proud of its skeptical attitude, this reception is quite paradoxical. For instance, in case the reader would not go beyond the first scroll and the headline did not make the author’s take clear, the lede in a Columbia Journalism Review article headlined “The Extraordinary Promise of the new Greenwald + Omidyar Venture,” states “Adversarial muckrakers + civic-minded billionaire = a whole new world.” When I started researching online news back in the mid-1990s, there was talk of the “new economy.” We know how that went. It now seems the economy is not enough and we got ourselves a “whole new world.” Resorting to a saving development or a killer app has been a common pattern for news organizations since the dawn of the digital age. (Remember when Rupert Murdoch declared the iPad the vehicle to reinvent newspapers — only to close The Daily less than two years after its launch, tired of bleeding millions?) What is so telling about the reception of the Omidyar/Greenwald venture is the sad yet implicit recognition that market dynamics will not support public service journalism to the extent that we got used to during the twentieth century. Surely $250 million will go a long way, and I personally look forward to reading the coverage that will come of out this new venture. But nonmarket solutions will not scale up to generate a new “golden era” of journalism that is comprehensive and local enough for a country as vast and complex as the United States. An attempt to scale it up might not be socially desirable anyway: With so many systemic problems in this country and the world that remain chronic under current market dynamics (infant mortality, disease prevention, global warming, and so on), what is the ethical justification for investing a growing portion of philanthropic resources in the news? So if 2013 has brought us two powerful reminders of the market failures of high quality and public-service journalism in the digital age, then what might we expect for 2014? Economically strapped and disheartened after years of losing ground, leading news organizations might finally begin paying more attention to what the public does and deliver services and products to meet it where it is at. But what is it that the public wants and what will be the consequences of catering to their preferences? An analysis of more than 50,000 stories from 20 leading news sites in seven different countries shows two clear and consistent patterns of information preferences among the public: a lower level of interest in public affairs news in comparison to what the media consider newsworthy, and the prevalence of tried-and-true storytelling formats. A contrast between the most newsworthy stories (those that make it to the top of a site’s homepage) and the most viewed stories on each of these sites reveals a gap of almost 20 percentage points across sites, with journalists highlighting substantially more public affairs news than the stories that the audience clicks most often. For the final assignment of this fall’s undergraduate seminar in the sociology of online news at Northwestern University, I asked my students to undertake an analysis of the media’s and the public’s preferences on two sites of their choosing over a three-day period. When we debriefed their findings, there was a recurrent two-word answer: Paul Walker. This divergence in the information preferences of the media and the public is not new. Over the past several decades, journalists, consultants, and academics have championed a number of storytelling solutions to overcome this divergence, from softening the news to turning the public into co-producers of content. But what does the public want? The answer is again two words: straight news. A concise and straightforward rendition of the main facts is the format of the majority of the most popular stories in the sample, with feature-style storytelling coming in a distant second place. What about the appeal of the harbingers of the brave new world of the Web 2.0? Virtually nonexistent. One in 100 of the stories placed at the top of the homepage were contributed by users. That’s not a lot in absolute terms, but it is ten times greater than the interest of the public in the stories contributed by their fellow readers: only one in 1,000 of the most popular stories were user-generated content. Endeavors like CNN’s iReport might seem an attractive way for news organizations to appear cutting edge, but the public does not gravitate towards them. Would giving the public more of what they want and less of what they need in order to function as informed members of the citizenry be good for society at large? Increasing the proportion of brief straight news stories and decreasing the resources devoted to soft news, longform reportage, blogs, and user-generated content will not likely have negative societal consequences. But a substantive decrease in the provision of public affairs reportage might. Public deliberation and political participation benefit from the supply of a steady and generous dose of public affairs news. Sometimes what we want is not what is necessarily good for us. Junk food might satiate our appetite, but is bad for our health. Stuffing our news diet with sports, weather, crime, and entertainment stories might give us engaging topics of conversation, while also having negative effects on the health of our body politic. But when the market talks loud and clear while profits decline, it might be really hard not to hear. In sum, the year ahead might bring news organizations that will pay more attention to the public. While that might be good for their bottom lines, it might also be bad for the quality of our democratic life. Pablo Boczkowski is professor and director of the Program in Media, Technology and Society at Northwestern University, and author of three books on online journalism, most recently The News Gap: When the Information Preferences of the Media and the Public Diverge (with Eugenia Mitchelstein).

News that anticipates the reader’s needs Posted: 19 Dec 2013 06:34 AM PST The year 2014 is going to be all about you. And me. And him and her. It’s going to be all about all of us — and what we are doing on all our devices. The job in news is to be exactly there for people, no matter what they’re doing or where they’re doing it, to take advantage of their platforms and deliver the best journalism we can for that device — what I call adaptive journalism. Adaptive journalism accounts for everything — your device and its potential (accelerometer, anyone?), your live environment (Sunday night couch with a tablet? smartphone at the airport?), where you clicked or tapped from (social? washingtonpost.com?), or even where you’re going next (want to switch devices? or couches? airports?) This won’t be easy, but there’s payoff for everyone: users, publishers, manufacturers, advertisers. It’s a return to storytelling with a device-first sensibility. One of crafting news and news experiences that put the user first. The most exciting part is that it gives room for experimentation — demands it, in fact. Show me the digital journalists who don’t want that as part of their mission and I’ll tell them they’re in the wrong business. Next year is going to be the greatest year yet to work in digital news and it’s going to be because of a rush to adaptive journalism. Wait for it…anticipatory news By paying attention to personal data and preferences that users self-select, news organizations will have a wealth to offer. The moment is now to re-up your newsroom geotagging and metadata efforts. Not because we expect that a reader will drill down to a subsection for “hyperlocal” news — rather because passive data sharing is allowing us to literally anticipate a user’s next move. Jane just landed in Washington, D.C. at 6 p.m. on a Thursday. Her calendar, which she shares with us, says so. She’s staying in Georgetown. Here are the restaurants from the 2013 Fall Dining Guide that she won’t want to miss. They’re tailored to her because Jane has read and shared food content before. But first, tell the cabbie not to take Key Bridge — it’s closed for the next three hours. Jane’s in New York the next day — there’s a meeting on her calendar at 10 a.m. in midtown. We’ll put the story about the dreaded nor’easter at the top of her reading stack. Also the piece about the FTC hearing on native advertising, because Jane’s meeting is with an advertising agency. Small screen gives the biggest gifts The desktop Internet gave news organizations potential for unprecedented scale, for exciting new user participation, for live delivery of news around the clock — and on and on. But the small screen — the devices in your hand, on your wrists — does all of that and more. The forward-thinking digital newsroom must be considering the specific capabilities of these devices and create stories with those capabilities. For example, during last year’s inauguration, The Washington Post produced a panoramic photo of the event specifically for smartphones. The navigation of the photo relied on the device’s gyroscope. This is taking advantage of the “gifts of the device.” The Post just ran a big package around “Super Zips” — the clusters in America with the wealthiest Zip codes. If you came to us on mobile, and opted into sharing your location, we gave you the Super Zips around you first. Watch out! Wearable tech: It’s still early, and it’s still not as fashionable as some of us would like — but it’s real. Someone is going to build the Snapchat for news on a watch next year. It’s the perfect platform for delivering the moment, the now. Cards are all the rage. Just look at how we’ve built projects over the last year: Twitter, news orgs, apps — they’re all broken into consumable cards with aesthetically pleasing visuals and atomic pieces of information. These work well for watches and your new small screens to come. Second screen first We’ve all spent evenings with friends and family in parallel play — where folks are sitting in close quarters, in a shared space, but each person is on his or her personal device. The television sits idly in the center of the room. Voices pop up occasionally: “Have you seen…” Then three folks gather around a tablet or phone for a collective moment. Things like Apple’s AirPlay, Google’s Chromecast, or a good ol’ HDMI connection allow for viewing on the big screen — the television. This will become your next desktop. The family desktop. News organizations need to think about how they can tap into creating experiences there — how to gather folks around. On-demand video is one way, but that’s simply the beginning. Put a team on this, stat. FOMO no ‘mo We all live in some version of Fear Of Missing Out. News organizations’ role has always been to help you with this. It’s just gotten a lot harder; the cycle can be insidious. And social media has created an entirely new hypercycle that rings around the news constantly. In 2014, you will see more of that ringing baked into the actual products of new organizations. Especially, and here is the adaptive journalism piece, if you are coming from social. This is something the publisher can easily detect; social referral traffic is up across the board. Users come to news links because they want to verify breaking information — they want to learn more about what they are seeing in the stream. This also works the other way: Users, on what I would call primary sites such as The Washington Post, are reading the story first, but then they want to learn more about the social conversation. These are the social stories that are spun off. Publishers are going to be offering this in more than a Twitter feed or aggregation: This will and should be a platform play. Native product is the new native advertising It’s not just the content a publisher or brand puts in an allotted “sponsored news” hole that makes it valuable — it’s also the where and how. The medium is the message. Converse launched a campaign recently on Complex, a beautiful parallax scroller built with inline media. It’s using the same tools, platform, and storytelling techniques as editorial — more native product than native advertising. The Post did this with Land Rover with the launch of our experimental editorial product, Topicly. The custom platform that editorial content flowed into — that was built as an out-there cutting-edge product — those same design and presentation tools to create were given over to the brand. Clearly labeled, same rules of content, and all that good stuff. We’re going to see more of this. In an era of adaptive journalism, this is the adaptive advertising piece and it’s more about platform than it is about content. Many of the things I’ve mentioned are in the works or have a proof-of-concept floating around. They are combinations of editorial enterprise, user behavior, technology, design, and yes, the world of advertising. Now is the time to push the boundaries and use the best of those worlds in the service of storytelling. Here’s to breaking innovative ground in 2014 at the same time we’re breaking news — adaptively. Cory Haik is executive producer and senior editor for digital news at The Washington Post.

Understanding the billionaire media gambles Posted: 19 Dec 2013 06:34 AM PST Our journalism business never ceases to provide surprises and fodder for speculation — that’s what makes this year-end round of prediction posts so much fun and, often, so far off base. For example, none of the Lab’s prognosticators a year ago predicted that one billionaire would toss $250 million into a business that has been dying for years, while another would pony up the same sum to launch an as-yet un-named and largely mysterious “new mass media organization.” So the big question is what will these gentlemen bring to the table besides money — in particular, can they find business models around digital news that have so far eluded everyone else? As the economy started pulling itself out of the doldrums a few years ago, some like the Lab’s Ken Doctor expected the newspaper industry to undergo broader consolidation — a “roll-up,” in Doctor’s words — of the kind long sought by MediaNews founder Dean Singleton and others. My question at the time was whether it would truly be a roll-up (a consolidation toward strength derived from national network efficiencies and opportunities, like the consolidations in the radio industry) or a mop-up — a sweeping-up of cheap, obsolete assets, with a strategy of squeezing the final years of cash flow out of them. The expectation was that with easier credit, major newspaper groups might find the financial backing needed to merge, acquire, and swap assets in order to build stronger regional and national groups and to make the necessary R&D investments to build toward their digital future. But with cash still hard to come by, we’ve seen few steps of that kind. Instead, most of the action in the newspaper business has come from billionaires and near-billionaires getting into the game. They’ve included legendary investor Warren Buffett (whose BH Media Group has picked up 28 local newspapers and about 40 other titles in 10 states for $344 million), money manager and Red Sox owner John Henry (who dropped $70 million on The Boston Globe), greeting-card magnate Aaron Kushner (Freedom Communications including The Orange County Register), and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos ($250 million for The Washington Post). Are these investments roll-ups, mop-ups, or something else? Buffett’s real strategy I think Warren Buffett is really pursuing a mop-up strategy. He says otherwise, of course: “Wherever there is a pervasive sense of community, a paper that serves the special informational needs of that community will remain indispensable to a significant portion of its residents.” What else is he going to say? He may actually believe this, and believe that printed newspapers will remain viable for a long time, and may prefer to read news on paper like most people in his generation. But Buffett’s backup strategy is this: He is buying newspaper assets cheap and not investing much into them, in the expectation that even if they lose all value over the next 6 or 8 years, he will have made a decent return on his investment. Interestingly, this is precisely the strategy that Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway followed in the 1930s through 1950s, under the control of the Chace family of Providence, before Buffett bought what was left of it beginning in 1962. At the time, he just needed a company — any company — that was publicly traded and easy to get control of to use as a vehicle for his investment strategy. The Chaces had seen the textile business move south; they mopped up in New England, buying mills and consolidating equipment to milk whatever cash could be extracted. (And as it happens, they lucked out more than the luckiest lottery winner, because they retained a minority share after Buffett’s arrival that’s now worth hundreds of millions.) After gaining control of the company in 1965, Buffett continued the textile sector mop-up, finally closing the last mill in 1969. So here’s Prediction No. 1: Warren Buffett will continue buying newspapers wherever he can do so very cheaply. No grand strategy, no new business models for news will emerge from Omaha. Ultimately, these papers will be closed or sold. It’s a mop-up. Philanthropic journalism The other billionaire news tycoons, including eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, are obviously neither rollers-up nor moppers-up. They are motivated by something else. Undoubtedly, they’d love to make some money on their investments. But for most of them, what they are putting at risk is small potatoes compared to their net worth. (In Bezos’s case, his initial Post investment comes to less than 1 percent of his net worth. It’s like the rest of us buying a cheap used car. Conceivably, we might make a buck by selling it later on at a profit — but we really don’t care.) Here’s why they do it: These folks are motivated by pretty much the same philanthropic impulse that motivated many newspaper barons during much of the 20th century. The barons’ business model was that if merchants wanted to get their messages out, newspaper advertising was pretty much the only game in town. As a bonus, people were willing to pay for single copies or home delivery, which covered all the printing and distribution costs. Profit margins ranged as high as 50 percent. News was at the heart of the “product” (you were not supposed to call it that in the newsroom), but news didn’t pay for itself. News was a gift to the community, a bit of philanthropy on the part of the news barons, just like the museums, libraries, opera houses, and schools built and endowed by others in the moneyed class. The quality of one’s newsroom was a way to flaunt wealth and demonstrate generosity while also enriching the community. We’re now seeing a 21st-century version of that same philanthropic motivation, probably coupled with some hubris — the kind that says, “Even though nobody else has found a way to make this business work, I can, because I’ve started and fixed a lot of other businesses.” It’s hard to find a parallel to this phenomenon in other legacy businesses that got disrupted. No tycoons that I know of got into the horse-drawn carriage business, the typewriter business, or the photographic film business once those businesses started their slide. The closest parallel I can think of is railroads. Railroads were historically prone to boom and bust cycles and wild speculation, and were all pretty much on the ropes in the 1970s due to disruption by cars, trucks, and airplanes. Since then, the industry has done pretty well (on the freight side) and attracted various well-heeled investors, including Buffett (BNSF), Phil Anschutz (Union Pacific), Forrest Mars (Tongue River Railroad), PayPal founder Elon Musk (Hyperloop proposal), Bill Ackman (Canadian Pacific). But it’s not a real parallel, since the railroad business model didn’t really need total reinvention. Mostly, the media investments by tycoons other than Buffett spring simply from what they see as an interesting, potentially lucrative and very public entrepreneurial challenge, at which they think they can succeed — even if they have no idea, initially, what the solution may be. Basically, they think, if newspapers were a license to print money for 100 years, and if there’s still a huge appetite out there for news, there has to be a way to do that digitally, even if nobody has really been able to figure one out in the last two decades. And so, Prediction No. 2: We will continue to see some laudable investments in journalism by very wealthy people — but in the near term, we will not see real, transformative business models coming from them. Instead, these investments are laudable simply because, following that philanthropic impulse, they generally add more journalists, improve the product, and make communities happy to have a good newspaper. We’ll probably see some more super-rich people jumping into the game, perhaps acquiring the papers like the Worcester Telegram & Gazette (being split from the Globe by John Henry), and the Providence Journal (being jettisoned by A. H. Belo). The Omidyar thing Finally, we come to the mystery that is Pierre Omidyar’s $250 million gamble and his hiring of Glenn Greenwald (effectively acquiring the motherlode of Edward Snowden secrets), along with Laura Poitras and Jay Rosen. Of all the current big-money players, I think Omidyar may have the best prospects. Thus, Prediction No. 3: Even though nothing much has leaked out about what shape this venture is going to take, I’m predicting that what we’re going to see is a global news system (not a just a website), combining the best features of The Texas Tribune, GlobalPost, and the investigative news networks. There will be news digests if you just want to know what’s going on; there will be personalized news streams if you have a set of niche interests; there will be longform journalism, great photography, and video. The idea will be to build a global community around news that matters. There may be spinoffs like books and events. It will be a for-profit venture, but like Google, Facebook, Twitter, et al, it will not unveil any real revenue strategy for several years. The focus will be to build an audience first. The best parallel to the “Omidyar thing” is probably Ted Turner’s launch of CNN in 1980 (which only cost the equivalent of around $70 million in today’s moolah, giving an idea of the magnitude of Omidyar’s gamble). CNN was a brand new model, it was global, it was disruptive, and it hired great people. It took five full years to become profitable. So give Pierre a chance — this may take a while. Martin Langeveld spent 30 years in the newspaper business, 13 of them as publisher at The Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, Mass., the Transcript in North Adams, Mass., and the Reformer in Brattleboro, Vermont.

Big can learn from small in public radio Posted: 19 Dec 2013 06:34 AM PST Let’s make it clear from the start that the new year will not bring final resolution to the hot pursuit of a methodology for determining impact. Nor will we find a solid new business model to ease the pressures brought by having to deliver sharper content across more platforms and, it seems, with greater speed than ever before. Not yet. But public media is well past its crossroads, and far enough along some new paths that we’re able to see patterns emerge. We remain, in 2014, in a prolonged period of disruption. For some, it’s a time to invent and thrive. Others are eager to move back into a new phase of predictability, when we’ve locked down new models for generating, distributing, and monetizing our work. My basic advice for now is: It’s okay! We’re exactly where we’re supposed to be! Relish this time of uncertainty. It won’t last forever. Stretch out. Be different than you’ve been before. There are many angles for looking into a crystal ball. Mine is based on a series of experiments I’ve led since 2008 designed to tap our brightest talent to disrupt the public media system, reveal new approaches to journalism and storytelling, and lay new pathways to Americans not currently served by public media. What’s come into focus is a new and promising vision of a public media network comprised of 1,200 community hubs, each with a distinctive culture and an exciting opportunity to form a new relationship with more citizens. And we have another important network — of talent, individuals who operate with greater flexibility and capacity for experimentation than legacy institutions full up with day-to-day operations. AIR’s talent network is rooted in audio, but it’s expanding almost as quickly as the technology that is driving so much of our change. Yes, they are our reporters, hosts, and editors. But this network, 1,000 strong across 46 states and 25 countries, now also includes technologists, social media experts, podcasters — more than 60 job titles in all. Above all, our makers are skilled collaborators who bring agency to one another, and to institutions seeking to adapt and thrive. With that, here are five pivot points to look for in 2014: Talent on the move. The value of crafty makers will rise, especially in top markets and at stations with a strong local production culture in place. Stations and distributors will move assertively to become platforms for the best and brightest from within their organizations. They’ll compete to attract outside talent. And we’ll see new moves to aggregate talent into podcast networks, more experiments with crowdsourced fundraising, and more talent cutting loose from their stations and networks to start their own enterprises. Local communities, local stations forming a new frontier for experimentation, and expanding public media service to more Americans. As we continue to work to build and strengthen the legacy network model built around national programming, principally Morning Edition and All Things Considered, there will be exciting new work underway in local communities fueled by new investment. This will give rise to new collaboration between local stations across the country. We will begin to see fresh faces and hear new and unexpected voices on public media platforms that will grow over time. Strategic investment in building capacity, not only for digital, but for “street” infrastructure. In the decades before consolidation of commercial radio, it was common for a local radio station’s staff to be out every weekend in their remote van, broadcasting from strip mall parking lots, or carnivals, or little league baseball games. We’ll see a return to this past, with a small but meaningful number of public media stations following the lead of MapJam at Austin’s KUT to create live events to reach new citizens, or establishing new access points for their stations à la La Burbuja at KCRW in L.A., or launching new community journalism projects imitating Curious City in Chicago. What’s old is new. Besides stations moving to create physical platforms of interaction with more citizens, we’ll see producers and stations engaged in field research to better inform digital strategies — and more discipline and intention behind figuring out how to turn the available tools of technology in the right direction. As we move from summer into fall, knowledge sharing among stations, producers, and networks will begin to flourish. A celebration of good old-fashioned shoe leather is in our future. What’s small is big. We’ll be excited and inspired by what programs and producers are able to do with micro-scale visibility — tens of thousands of podcast listeners, for example, versus a tens-of-millions broadcast audience. By the end of the year, we’ll have become more shrewd with our expectations, but for the first half of 2014, expect to see played out the continuing “gold rush” for new business models that tie together crowdsourcing, new distribution platforms, mobile apps, and new approaches to digitally aggregated media. As we move through this period of invention, remember that progress is usually made up a series of small, sustained nudges over time. There is no magic bullet, no holy grail. It will be at least 10 years for the seeds we’re now planting to blossom. Keep digging, and keep your eyes open for the green shoots that start to appear. Sue Schardt is executive director of the Association of Independents in Radio.

Mobile, social, video Posted: 19 Dec 2013 06:34 AM PST News is a growth business. People have never consumed more news, and there have never been more creative opportunities available to those who cover it. NowThis News is built on three bedrock principles: Mobile. Social. Video. We believe the future of news — in 2014 and beyond — is on mobile devices, via powerful social platforms, and through the unique storytelling power of video. Instagram, Facebook, Vine, Twitter, and Snapchat (srsly) are news mediums — because that’s where the audience is. The mobile + social generation doesn’t need to find the news; the news finds them. That’s the future of news in 2014. Ed O’Keefe is editor-in-chief of NowThis News.

Brand balance and the rise of middleform Posted: 19 Dec 2013 06:34 AM PST Predictions! Change, the poets say, is the only constant. But I think that we’re going to see several slow-moving trends solidify rather than another Big Disruption in 2014. Social media, for instance, will continue to dominate discussion of both how news is reported and disseminated. BuzzFeed, of course, exists at this intersection: It is what people are talking about, and then it reports on what people are talking about. For my organization, a new media company called Modern Farmer, this means that we will continue to remain sutured to our phones and computers, trying to stay on top of Facebook algorithm changes (which seem to be about to undergo the same sort of fundamental shift Google’s did with Panda in 2011) and begging Twitter to verify us. As a publisher, it means using more and more analytic tools to zero in on who is sharing what content. (Google Analytics’ new demographic information should be helpful, and should make companies like ComScore and BlueKai nervous.) The why will likely remain mysterious, because humans are weird. Print media, online media, audio, events, books, pop-up stores — extensions of brands — will all get even more jumbled, in a good way. It’s fun to think about how a story could live as an event, as part of a digital package, as a data app, etc. At Modern Farmer, we got really excited at the news that Pitchfork would be doing a print quarterly. We have a print quarterly and I feel strongly that there is value in a physical product. (It still commands ad revenue, for starters.) But for us, the print quarterly is only the beginning. The most successful media companies have figured out how to translate their core ideas into any number of forms (think Vice and video or Rookie and its yearbook). Another slow-moving change is the developing relationship between institutional media brands and individual employees. At one point, the conventional wisdom seemed to dictate that media brands would be subsumed by personal brands — that The New York Times would just be a collection of “voices” like The Huffington Post. But now that The Huffington Post has made its persona-driven blog content only part of its larger staffed enterprise, it seems that these two models are not a binary split. You can love Bill Simmons but go to Grantland for Katie Baker’s New York Times wedding power rankings (as I do.) I doubt Nate Silver will be sticking his face next to every FiveThirtyEight post. At Modern Farmer, we are less interested in elevating any particular writer as creating a healthy mix of stories with a recognizable style. Is that old-fashioned? Plus ça change. A bonus prediction from Modern Farmer’s digital director, Jake Swearingen: Social media will continue to be a bigger and bigger chunk of how digital publishers get traffic, and Facebook will continue to dominate who gets what traffic. At our publication, and most publications I’ve worked at, Facebook delivers about five to ten times the amount of traffic as Twitter — even if most edit types (myself included) tend to spend a lot more time on Twitter. But the territory of viral memes has been so thoroughly colonized that publishers who haven’t already figured it out are probably too late to the game. BuzzFeed and Upworthy might have figured why people share stories on Facebook — no haters, basically — but imitators abound. Even The Washington Post’s Know More seems a bit like when AOL-Netscape launched Propeller back in 2006 to chase after Digg, and then quietly killed it a few years later. (And beyond the diminishing returns of meme traffic, a world of unending Upworthy is too depressing to consider.) So publishers will have to go for other ways to make things go viral. To crib from Annalee Newitz, there’s busting common myths or digging up an unknown truth about a common item. There’s also digging up new trends, reporting on a new bit of tech that’ll actually help the average consumer, or (luckily for us at Modern Farmer) finding ways to work pictures of very cute animals. So assuming Facebook is truly serious about being the Only Website You Ever Visit and wants to make its News Feed a place of unendingly interesting news, how will publications respond? One of the keys, I believe, is nailing the middleform. If Facebook is serious about designating high quality sources and publishers (even though there’s a lot of debate about what they actually mean by that), churn-and-burn aggregation artists will take a hit. And longform, while admired by journalists, is only sometimes successful. It’s putting tremendous amounts of resources in one basket, which is a risky bet at best. Which is why sites like The New Republic, The Atlantic, the online version of The New Yorker (and, ahem, ourselves) all seem to be settling in on middleform stories. By which I mean around 750- to 1,000-word pieces that introduce a topic, explore it, and then quickly get out. It’s not a blog post with an intro, a block quote, and a snarky kicker, but it’s also not a deeply reported story with 14 sources and the manpower of a research desk behind it. Middleform is the five-minute read, not the one-minute list of GIFs or the 30-minute deep dive. It allows online publishers who (barring some seismic shift in CPMs) will always remain resource-strapped to deliver interesting, original, reported pieces without spending the tremendous amount of money and time longform requires. Online publishing is, unfortunately, a lottery. It’s very hard, with a few exceptions, to know exactly what will hit. So the more tickets, the better your chances. For a long time, that meant whoever could push out the absolute most content, regardless of quality, got the most traffic. If Facebook holds true to what they seem to be saying, quality and originality will suddenly start to matter quite a bit more for publishers that rely on social traffic. Middleform will allow publishers to continue to push out content at a speedy clip, while hopefully capitalizing on whatever changes Facebook’s algorithms will bring us. Reyhan Harmanci is executive editor of Modern Farmer.

The continued rise of single-subject sites Posted: 19 Dec 2013 05:33 AM PST Five years ago, when I first started building the news organization that my colleagues and I now call Chalkbeat (then known as GothamSchools), a friend asked me an innocent question. “So you cover education now. But what will your next beat be?” My prediction for 2014 is that more nonprofit news entrepreneurs will answer that question the way I didn’t yet know how to do five years ago. “Nothing,” we will tell our politely inquiring friends. “We only cover [insert-your-nerdy-public-policy-specialty-here]. That’s it.” Much has been made of charismatic star reporters becoming brands and then businesses. At Chalkbeat, our story is different. Yes, like The Dish or Deadline Hollywood or TV Newser, we have grown from a small reverse-chron blog to a full-blown news organization with employees and living wages and HR policies. But in our case, the main currency we are trading is not personality, point of view, or even a particularly distinctive voice. The coin of our realm — the thing that took us from a couple of reporters squatting in somebody else’s basement to a soon-to-be more than $3 million-revenue news organization — is much less sexy: subject matter expertise. We simply took one topic — in fact, one sliver of one topic: not just K-12 public schools, but K-12 public schools in low-income communities undergoing change efforts — and knew more about it than anyone else in the geographic areas where we work, ditching the political back-and-forth and scandal-driven coverage that would probably would have delivered us more pageviews in favor of context, substance, and analysis. Over time, our expertise grew into a brand. And lately, the brand has become a full-fledged business. In 2014, my bet is that this same story will unfold with more public-policy topics. (It is already happening with health, transportation, higher education, Syria, and climate change, among other subjects.) More niche nonprofit news organizations will be unmistakably good for democracy. The more knowledgeable our news sources, the more knowledgeable we can be as citizens and policymakers. Even better, subject matter expertise also seems to have a real shot at becoming self-sustaining. Like any single subject in the commercial sector, individual public policy issues comprise their own industries. In our K-12 education universe, that means we don’t just have to rely on the tiny set of usual-suspect journalism supporters to give us grants or on local businesses to buy sponsorships. We have a defined audience that a defined set of foundations, donors, and sponsors want to reach — and so raising money, while always a challenge, is relatively easier. I began to learn this lesson one night at a fundraising dinner, when a donor told me that monetizing our journalism was as simple as learning to play the piano. The hard part, he said, is building a loyal and targeted audience. After that, a monkey could do the rest. At the time, I restrained myself from punching him in the face. But three months later, we’d raised nearly half that year’s budget in sponsorships. Good thing I didn’t punch him. Elizabeth Green is cofounder and editor of Chalkbeat.

The blog is dead, long live the blog Posted: 19 Dec 2013 05:31 AM PST Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice. Sure, blogs still exist, many of them are excellent, and they will go on existing and being excellent for many years to come. But the function of the blog, the nebulous informational task we all agreed the blog was fulfilling for the past decade, is increasingly being handled by a growing number of disparate media forms that are blog-like but also decidedly not blogs. Instead of blogging, people are posting to Tumblr, tweeting, pinning things to their board, posting to Reddit, Snapchatting, updating Facebook statuses, Instagramming, and publishing on Medium. In 1997, wired teens created online diaries, and in 2004 the blog was king. Today, teens are about as likely to start a blog (over Instagramming or Snapchatting) as they are to buy a music CD. Blogs are for 40-somethings with kids. Instead of launching blogs, companies are building mobile apps, Newsstand magazines on iOS, and things like The Verge. The Verge or Gawker or Talking Points Memo or BuzzFeed or The Huffington Post are no more blogs than The New York Times or Fox News, and they are increasingly not referring to themselves as such. The primary mode for the distribution of links has moved from the loosely connected network of blogs to tightly integrated services like Facebook and Twitter. If you look at the incoming referers to a site like BuzzFeed, you’ll see tons of traffic from Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Stumbleupon, and Pinterest but not a whole lot from blogs, even in the aggregate. For the past month at kottke.org, 14 percent of the traffic came from referrals compared to 30 percent from social, and I don’t even work that hard on optimizing for social media. Sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy aren’t seeking traffic from blogs anymore. Even the publicists clogging my inbox with promotional material urge me to “share this on my social media channels” rather than post it to my blog. The design metaphor at the heart of the blog format is on the wane as well. In a piece at The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal says that the reverse-chronological stream (a.k.a. The Stream, a.k.a. The River of News) is on its way out. Snapchat, with its ephemeral media, is an obvious non-stream app; Madrigal calls it “a passing fog.” Facebook’s News Feed is increasingly organized by importance, not chronology. Pinterest, Digg, and an increasing number of other sites use grid layouts to present information. Twitter is coming to resemble radio news as media outlets repost the same stories throughout the day, ICYMI (in case you missed it). Reddit orders stories by score. The design of BuzzFeed’s front page barely matters because most of their traffic comes in from elsewhere. So, R.I.P. The Blog, 1997-2013. But this isn’t cause for lament. The Stream might be on the wane but still it dominates. All media on the web and in mobile apps has blog DNA in it and will continue to for a long while. Over the past 16 years, the blog format has evolved, had social grafted onto it, and mutated into Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest and those new species have now taken over. No biggie, that’s how technology and culture work. If you want something to cry about, cry about the decline of the open web, the death of which would be a huge blow for us all. But perhaps that’s a topic better left for 2015. Happy trails, old friend. It’s been grand. Jason Kottke is a 40-something with kids and a blog — kottke.org, one of the longest continuously running blogs on the web.

The future of news is… Sasha Fierce Posted: 19 Dec 2013 05:31 AM PST In 2014, the future of journalism is Beyoncé. Stay with me for a minute. The pop star announced the arrival of her next, highly anticipated album with a video on Instagram at midnight on a school night. A few short days later, it was certified a number one hit by Billboard and sales soared past the one million mark. No one saw it coming. No one leaked rumors or songs in advance. And people can’t stop talking about it. Beyoncé completely upended the conventional model by which major album releases are done by the sheer amount of material that she airdropped simultaneously — more than a dozen new songs and videos. Her strategy, and its success, could shine a light on what consumers want and what is possible for all content creators, entertainers and publishers alike, in the future. It’s important to note that Bey’s strategy isn’t popular in a commercial sense — brick-and-mortar retailers like Target have promised not to sell her album because it was available digitally before it was made available physically, which feels like an egregious error on their part, given the overall popularity of the album — but it earns points with me for not being afraid to upset the incumbents, to experiment with something new. Her monumental success with the release may also be an indicator that the direct-to-consumers model, the same one that startups like streaming services VHX and ebooks startups like Emily Books are using, can create increasingly viable and sustainable businesses. Beyoncé’s album is currently only available through iTunes: People had to pay for the content and download it in order to listen to it. And many, including myself, didn’t hesitate to buy it, and those of us who did are not disappointed. The digital-first release didn’t compromise the quality or the originality of the album — it’s one of her best releases to date. The demand is there if the experience is new enough and original enough. Of course, Beyoncé has millions of followers around the globe. She has a built-in audience for anything she releases. But given the glut of content vying for people’s attention each day, especially in music, it’s interesting to observe the delight and excitement around such an immersive and fresh experience. Her fans weren’t barraged by a series of advertisement and reminders about her coming album for months. They were thrilled by the surprise and can’t get enough of it. Beyonce’s massive drop completely wiped out anything else in the music and entertainment industry for the rest of the year and probably for part of the new year. It will also likely set off a new trend for artists to think about how they release music and whether or not they have to adhere to the traditional model of distribution. Jenna Wortham is a technology reporter at The New York Times.

Think audiences, not just metrics Posted: 19 Dec 2013 05:31 AM PST There’s no doubt that data-driven newsrooms are in vogue. Editors are increasingly glued to Chartbeat; social savant Neetzan Zimmerman is enjoying Nate Silveresque fame; and a Cold War-esque battle for supremacy in terms of total “uniques” rages on. But this obsession with scale obscures the real opportunity for news organizations: using analytics to better understand their core audiences, no matter how large or small, and to develop meaningful relationships with them. In other words, 2014 is the year that newsrooms will begin to think of analytics as a way to increase the quality of their readership, not just the quantity. This shift in focus is starting to happen at subscription properties, where user-level insights from the business side have inspired editors to think about how concepts like audience segmentation, multivariate testing, and propensity modeling can be applied in the service of their journalistic mission. But for all types of newsrooms, developing a more qualitative understanding of audiences will be increasingly important. As publishers continue to invest in longform journalism and experiment with new types of storytelling, questions will naturally arise about the ways in which people actually read and engage with these pieces, beyond the feel-good tally of how many visitors they attract. (Likewise, the true value of social media may not be best quantified by a simple accounting of referral traffic.) And editors are beginning to realize that these relationships are a two-way street — not just for publishing out, but as an important tool for sourcing stories as well. Even though an analyst’s technical toolkit has advanced significantly in recent years, useful audience insights still do not come prepackaged in a shrink-wrapped box. It’s easy to blame veteran editors for not “getting” advanced quantitative techniques or concepts — actually, few people do — but even the smartest data scientists often lack an intuitive understanding of what makes newsrooms tick. If analysts can start thinking like journalists — and vice versa — the rewards will be incalculable. James Robinson is director of news analytics at The New York Times.

Hashtags will matter again Posted: 19 Dec 2013 05:31 AM PST Earlier this year, Daniel Victor published a righteous takedown of Twitter hashtags, pointing to the use of #SuperBowl as a case study in the worst excesses of the form. On Super Bowl Sunday, by his count, #SuperBowl showed up 3 million times during the five-hour broadcast, at an average rate of 167 tweets per second. “Hashtags for big news stories are particularly vulnerable to mathematical futility,” he wrote. “Getting any single person’s attention is just short of impossible, like a single Niagara droplet screaming for notice as it shoots down the falls.” Point taken. During Occupy, for instance, reading my news feed felt like hacking through a jungle of #ows #occupy #occupyny #nypd, as news outlets tried reaching too many audiences at once. Of course, there are plenty of good ways to use a hashtag: as a knowing wink or a signal of sarcasm, a way of finding friends at a conference, or, one of my favorite uses, an ephemeral vehicle of crowdsourced wordplay, like #bookdrinks (Tequila Mockingbird, Gone With the Wine). But a quick scan of recent tweets from @nytimes, @slate, and @buzzfeed doesn’t reveal a single earnest or seemingly traffic-seeking hashtag. Outpaced by better Twitter search features and downvoted by those with good taste, the utilitarian, crowd-gathering hashtag has come to feel useless and passe. But lately, I’ve been noticing an interesting trend of hashtag usage that’s got me thinking about the possibilities of the form again. This weekend, for instance, you may have noticed #NotYourAsianSidekick bubbling up in your feed (especially if you follow a sizeable number of people who aren’t straight white men). It was the top trend in the U.S. for much of Sunday, started by writer and activist Suey Park to crowdsource messages about stereotyping and the Asian-American experience. Sample tweets from the nearly 50,000 messages with the tag in just over 24 hours: “The clothes I wear to weddings aren’t for you to wear on Halloween #NotYourAsianSidekick” and “#NotYourAsianSidekick because I don’t co-sign the anti-blackness implied when we’re propped up as the ‘model minority.’” Anyone who’s ever dismissed the possibility of serious discussion on Twitter would have to admit: That’s some real talk. Salon said the tag “ignite[d] massive conversation about race, stereotypes and feminism,” and Park’s “campaign” was covered by the BBC, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and Al Jazeera, among many others. Digital feminism has been busy on the viral hashtag front this year. #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen called out thorny issues of race and class in feminist media, with Gawker site Jezebel drawing much of the heat. BuzzFeed included Mikki Kendall, who started the tag, in its roundup of “30 Women Who Kicked Ass In 2013,” for “bringing race into the online feminist conversation.” (Meanwhile, several sites got dinged on Twitter for initially failing to credit Kendall as the originator of the meme, bringing up interesting issues of attribution and sourcing when covering these fast-moving, viral conversations.) But what’s the offline payoff of all this online conversation? Can campaigns like Park’s move the needle IRL, or is this another case of “clicktivism” masquerading as political action? As David Carr noted in a rumination on “hashtag activism,” #Komen helped push the Susan G. Komen Foundation into reversing a decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood. And #bindersfullofwomen certainly didn’t help Mitt Romney’s attempts to win over women voters, and probably helped drive more of the crucial demographic to Obama. Then there’s #blacktwitter. If you haven’t heard of #blacktwitter, you’re missing out on one of the best parts of Twitter. Shani O. Hilton at Buzzfeed describes it as “loosely speaking, a group of thousands of black Twitterers (though, to be accurate, not everyone within Black Twitter is black, and not every black person on Twitter is in Black Twitter) who are interested in issues of race in the news and pop culture and b) tweet A LOT.” Much more than a hashtag at this point, Hilton notes that Black Twitter has been widely credited with bringing the Trayvon Martin case to national attention, the success of Scandal, and the toppling of Paula Deen over racist remarks. More recently, Black Twitter hijacked the #AskRKelly hashtag hosted by the singer and alleged child molester, turning a PR gimmick into a searing conversation on Kelly’s stardom and the treatment of young black women in the broader culture. “Sure, hashtags come and go,” writes Carr, “and the so-called weak ties of digital movements are no match for real world engagement. But they are not only better than nothing, they probably make the world, the one beyond the keyboard, a better place.” So what are newsrooms supposed to make of all this? In the case of #NotYourAsianSidekick and several of the Black Twitter memes, the hashtag wasn’t used to keep up with an event. The hashtag was the event. So far, most mainstream sites covering these hashtag happenings end up simply embedding a curated list of the tweets in the form of a roundup (or a Storify), with a bit of intro up top that often feels perfunctory. Keeping a record of these events is well and good, but it seems to me there’s a lot more to be mined here. If you really want to be #winning, think of these tags as hunting grounds for future hires and (paid) contributors. The levels of wit, critical thinking, domain knowledge, netspeak literacy, digital acumen — and, of course, diversity — on display in these conversations should have editors sitting up and taking note. As #solidarityisforwhitewomen was surging, Roxane Gay started a new column at Salon soliciting paid submissions from feminists of color (of any gender) to run on the site. “The #solidarityisforwhitewomen conversation about digital feminism and inclusion has made it clear that more publications need to create opportunities for feminists of color to share their perspectives,” she wrote. That’s a great move, and smaller steps are also good. Journalists, especially journalists who write about cultural politics and marginalized groups, have both a professional incentive and an ethical obligation to seek out authentic, fresh, informed sources on issues they’re trying to write about. Think of hashtags like #NotYourAsianSidekick as the best Rolodex you could ever have for sources on these issues. Don’t think of the conversations they spawn as just free content ripe for cutting-and-pasting into a blog post and call it a day. They’re springboards for reporting, at the very least. You could research the often decades-long backstories to these conversations, for instance, and write a piece that adds historical context to the trending topic. And I’ve seen plenty of unsourced stats and claims that surface during these conversations — from all sides of the debate — get passed around like Twitter hotcakes: Fact-check that mess. Thankfully, the days of broad, generic callouts — #china, #politics, #food — from serious media sites seem to be behind us. But the use of micro-targeted hashtags that land with big impact is fascinating, and we’re going to see a lot more of these in 2014. #bringiton Tasneem Raja is interactive editor of Mother Jones. She thanks Tim Carmody for contributing smart ideas to this piece.

The stronger citizen reporter Posted: 19 Dec 2013 05:31 AM PST Citizen journalism is not a new concept. In the digital age, prior to the advent of Twitter, bloggers were the flag bearers of the movement. While innovative (citizen coverage of the 2004 tsunami is widely cited as an early watershed moment for the movement), pre-social media blogging lacked distribution and organizational power. The rise of social platforms changed that, spurring a greater democratization of media. The examples are by now well known, from the “Miracle on the Hudson” to the Egyptian revolution. With the ubiquity of Twitter and more so Facebook, every citizen is not just a potential source but also a potential reporter. And it’s no longer just the major stories, like political unrest, a plane crash, or a natural disaster. Covering the realities of everyday life — car accidents, house fires, general police activity, weather emergencies — is well suited to the citizen journalist, many of whom are now armed with mobile devices and reporting in real time. It’s Facebook, not Twitter, that’s leading the charge, which is not surprising considering that as of October, Facebook claims 1.15 billion monthly active users compared to Twitter’s 220 million. As a journalist that started reporting as a citizen (“on the scene,” curation, and aggregation), I created Jersey Shore Hurricane News (JSHN), a two-way news outlet based exclusively (for now) on Facebook and Twitter in the days before Hurricane Irene August 2011 in order to provide citizens with a “news for the people, by the people” platform that is strict on journalistic integrity. While the objective is to supply news, traffic, and weather information to the community, it’s also a community platform, allowing people to interact, collaborate, and discuss local issues. It provided wall-to-wall coverage before, during, and after Superstorm Sandy and to this day assists with the storm recovery. The citizens, dubbed on JSHN as “contributors,” are both the sources and reporters, and with over 220,000 of them between Facebook and Twitter, the ability to disseminate information quickly is powerful. What makes JSHN — as well as other notable citizen news outlets like Monmouth County Police, Fire, and EMS and Anne Arundel County Breaking News and Events — unique is that they’re run by regular citizens, not traditional news organizations. Accordingly, the ethos is inherently bottom-up, which proves to be a major disruptive force. My predictions for 2014: Citizen reporters will have more robust tools at their disposal. Social media (particularly Facebook) will continue to play a vital role in citizen journalism efforts, but with smartphone numbers continually growing, we will see an influx of feature-rich citizen news apps developed by regular citizens who are simply interested in keeping their communities informed. These apps will allow citizens to share news with each other in real-time in an organized multimedia environment, combining text, photo, and video reports. Editors will monitor the apps to ensure journalistic standards are met and will build stories as they evolve, potentially taking a page out of Circa’s playbook. More collaboration between citizen journalism platforms and traditional media. It’s nothing new for mainstream media to rely on citizen reports posted on social media sites, but we will see increased in-depth collaboration with established citizen news organizations. This will benefit both sides, allowing for a rapid pipeline of information and increased credibility for the citizen news organization. WHYY/NewsWorks, the public radio outlet in Philadelphia, recognized the mutual benefit, forming a content-sharing partnership with Jersey Shore Hurricane News. Organizations like the New Jersey News Commons, formed to strengthen ties between news outlets in New Jersey, will continue to assist and promote citizen journalism efforts. Progressive-minded foundations will support citizen journalism efforts. They’ll recognize that these outlets were originally created not with building an enterprise in mind, but simply to keep people informed. But with the movement still young, it will require support to stimulate growth. The Dodge Foundation’s New Jersey Recovery Fund, created to support catalytic ideas and projects with an emphasis on collaboration, innovation, and sustainability as New Jersey recovers from Hurricane Sandy, granted money to Jersey Shore Hurricane News to develop platforms outside of social media. More foundations will fund the effort in the coming year. With communities already relying on established citizen news platforms, advertisers will take notice. With traditional media, including national hyperlocal efforts like Patch, cutting back, advertisers will flock to citizen platforms. This will happen for two overarching reasons: growth and community support. Established citizen platforms already have active participants who live in the communities in which they report. The nascent nature of these outlets is fertile ground for advertisers to grow and strengthen bonds with the community. Twitter and especially Facebook will nurture and assist the platforms. As more citizens band together to report news and community oriented information, their power will increase, and the social media sites will create tools to facilitate the growth. Citizen journalism may not be a new concept, but it’s still in its infancy, and 2014 will be the year when we’ll witness the more powerful citizen reporter. Justin Auciello is founder of Jersey Shore Hurricane News.

Startups need to address real needs Posted: 19 Dec 2013 05:31 AM PST I’m excited to see what 2014 brings for the many media startups that have launched over the past few years and hope to both fill the void left behind by struggling legacy institutions and tap digital tools to create more informed and engaged communities. I’ve spent the past year and a half or so immersed in learning about entrepreneurship from a variety of different people and perspectives. The excellent Scripps Howard Journalism Entrepreneurship Institute, led by Dan Gillmor, offered journalism professors expert help in introducing entrepreneurial concepts into our teaching; Memphis Innovation Bootcamp was an intensive three-day introduction into design thinking; our local accelerator Start.co introduced me to the business model canvas and other startup principles with their ongoing programming, and PBS MediaShift’s Collab/Space Atlanta offered the chance to get a close look at the challenges and successes of a group of fledgling media-related startups. Suffice it to say: Startups have been top of mind. If there is one thing I’ve learned from all of this, it is that the most important thing startups need to succeed is a relentless focus on their customers’ problems and the ability to constantly iterate. The news startups that do this are the ones we will see succeed in 2014 and beyond. This applies to nonprofits as well — at least the ones hoping to sustain themselves for the long haul. As more than one startup expert has told me: “Nonprofit isn’t a business model. It’s a tax status.” While I don’t think there’s any doubt that communities need information and tools to engage with each other in order to thrive and to self-govern, I think some media startups are a bit vague when it comes to articulating precisely what their readers’ needs are and how they will meet them. Journalists have long talked about serving “the public” even as, unconsciously or not, they have succumbed to writing for their peers and Pulitzer judges. Doing that in the startup environment is risky and may lead to failure or at least lackluster results. Spending so much time with entrepreneurs has taught me to be suspicious of business plans or pitches that don’t start with an intensive period of observation and discussion of how customers experience problems and what kinds of solutions would best meet their needs, followed by developing an ongoing process of testing new product features with users. One example of a journalism-related startup that I think shows promise in its focus on a concrete problem to-be-solved is Clear Health Costs, and I look forward to seeing what they achieve in 2014. This startup uses journalistic skills to bring transparency to the notoriously opaque medical industry and meets a demonstrable need for more information about the costs of health care procedures and drugs. Particularly for people with minimal health insurance and high deductibles, this information is an obvious, pressing need. Another example of a promising media startup I hope to see do good things in 2014 is Groundsource, which uses a simple system to ask people questions via text message. It works even on basic feature phones, and thus can be used throughout the globe. Not only is this of obvious use to journalists seeking to broaden their source base and do better reporting, it’s also easy to imagine how pollsters and other experts in public opinion or market research could also use the tool, perhaps subsidizing its journalistic and pro-social aims. I’m also encouraged by the substantial number of new and established hyperlocal news startups, many of them nonprofits. I think many show great potential for 2014, but the most likely to succeed will be those that are closest to their communities and that have an intimate understanding of their readers’ information-seeking behaviors and motivations. Carrie Brown-Smith is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Memphis.

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