Selasa, 07 Januari 2014

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

If a tweet worked once, send it again — and other lessons from The New York Times’ social media desk

Posted: 06 Jan 2014 08:33 AM PST

With contributions from Hanna Ingber, Sona Patel, Daniel Victor, Lexi Mainland, and Sasha Koren.

The social media desk at The New York Times expanded in 2013 with the addition of three editors and a broadening of our roles in the newsroom. Beyond editing Times social media accounts, our team devotes an increasing amount of labor to working with the paper’s editors and reporters to integrate reader engagement into our most important journalism. But with nearly 5 million more people following @nytimes in 2013, more and more consumers of The Times are finding their way to our journalism using our main presence on Twitter.

For that reason, we took stock of what worked and what didn’t on @nytimes. We examined some of 2013’s most successful tweets, measured in terms of clickthroughs and retweets, to see what connects with these readers and where our investment of editorial effort really paid off (the data comes from SocialFlow, whose system the Times uses to manage some of its major Twitter accounts). We also looked at some of our strategies and tactics to encourage a variety of types of reader engagement with our journalism using Twitter.

Here are some lessons we learned in 2013 from what we did on @nytimes and other institutional Twitter accounts.

News rules

Readers come to @nytimes for many reasons. But in major breaking news situations, it becomes abundantly clear that large numbers of readers are glued to our Twitter feed and waiting for the next update. And while Twitter’s misuse in breaking news situations was well lamented in 2013, it is what readers are coming to us for more than anything else. The more prepared we have been with clear protocols for how our Twitter efforts fit into The Times’s overall coverage of a developing story, the better we’ve performed.

The Times takes a thoroughgoing and cautious approach to using Twitter when major news occurs. The social media desk operates in concert with, not independent of, our main newsdesk, which is comprised of homepage, front-page, and masthead editors. The updates we tweet are pegged to news reports that editors have approved and never seek to get out ahead of our news report. We focus on retweeting reporters and editors who are directly involved in covering the news, steering clear of external sources of information whose accuracy we cannot count on.

The @nytimes feed became a primary vehicle for delivery of the latest moment-to-moment updates from The New York Times during the week of the Boston Marathon bombing. We stuck to the protocols described above during our extensive coverage of the attack and its aftermath. Those procedures helped our desk avoid any major errors over those days.

During one of the biggest news weeks of the year, readers stayed with our Twitter account. Of the 10 most clicked links delivered via @nytimes in 2013, five pointed to Times coverage of the Boston bombing.

The Times’s coverage of other major breaking news stories was also well represented in the most clicked and retweeted stories of 2013: the terrorist attack on the Westgate mall in Nairobi; the papal transition; the crash-landing of Asiana Flight 214 in San Francisco; the conflict in Syria; the Supreme Court’s rulings on gay marriage; George Zimmerman’s encounters with the criminal justice system; the memorializing of Nelson Mandela; and more. The strong response to these tweets signals the need to continue to prioritize readiness to cover major news developments thoroughly and accurately.

Let journalists deliver the news

The Times is fortunate to have skilled, deeply sourced reporters all over the world, covering major news as it develops. When they are early to a story and share the news via Twitter, retweets from @nytimes are responded to heavily by our readers. That includes some of 2013’s notable deaths:

Other cases were breaking news situations, like the moment when we learned an Argentine cardinal would be the next pope, or the opening stock price of Twitter:

There were also tweets from situations like the Boston Marathon which didn’t necessarily update the story, but did give a sense of the tense atmosphere in the moments and days after the bombing:

Letting our trusted reporters deliver some news first helps them connect directly with an interested audience, and delivers news in a timely manner without sacrificing our commitment to accuracy.

Amplifying discussion with Twitter

Beyond clicks and retweets, our institutional Twitter accounts, of which we have several beyond @nytimes, were effective tools to advance storytelling by the Times’s journalists. Some methods, like sending callouts for sources on major stories used a variety of methods, including social media. Others relied solely on Twitter.

One effective method was organizing highly structured Twitter Q&A sessions with reporters using institutional accounts as a moderator. At times when there was a heightened reader interest in a complex, developing news story, New York Times Twitter accounts curated discussions with Times reporters.

The effectiveness of this approach was visible during the political crisis in Egypt, when The Times’ David D. Kirkpatrick answered reader questions that were selected and filtered by an editor who was managing the @nytimesworld account. The use of Twitter in this fashion proved highly accessible to a burgeoning Times audience. It also was easier to follow than Q&As between individual reporters and readers using Twitter to speak directly to them without an intervening agent.

Our Twitter accounts are better when we staff them

The second most clicked tweet of 2013 on @nytimes went out over our feed automatically without the intervention of a social media editor, using the same headline as the one on the article at the time it was published:

And the editors who write our print and web headlines sometimes write excellent tweets without realizing it:

But another of our top tweets of 2013 was something that went out on a weekend when @nytimes was largely automated. And it was not a good thing that it did:

Andy Murray is Scottish, not English. Had a social media editor been minding the feed at the time this tweet was published, it is likely she or he would have jumped in to correct the error, which was resolved more quickly on the website. On a Twitter account that was automated at the time, the error snowballed around social media and the web for hours. When our hands are minding the feed, errors like that either don’t happen or have less of an impact.

In other cases, a small amount of editorial effort was the difference between one of the best tweets of the year and a headline from print that was less effective in the context of social media:

Twitter is a platform that helps extend The Times’s journalism to an audience that is not always the same as the one that visits our website directly. When we fit our storytelling to the medium, we do the best possible job of connecting with that audience.

Clarity works better than being clever or obscure

As social media editors, we spend a lot of our time writing headlines. And as headline writers we like nothing better than trying to outdo each other with well-placed zingers. We mean tweets like this one:

We love these tweets, the reader reaction to them, and the wisecracks they evoke from our peers at other companies. But readers don’t click on or retweet us when we’re being clever nearly as much as they respond to clearly stated tweets describing the meat of the stories they point to:

We also engage in the practice of being coy and trying to make readers curious enough to read a story. But even then we find that the best results were more direct and straight-forward about what the reader could expect after they clicked:

Ultimately, we don’t always need to try so hard to write an unforgettable tweet, or one that tempts the reader too much. Clarity and straightforwardness around interesting subject matter are ultimately rewarded by substantial reader interest.

If a tweet worked once, send it again

Many New York Times articles, videos, slideshows, graphics, and blog posts don’t need to be read only at the very moment they were published. There is an enduring interest in coming back to them at moments that are more convenient for the reader. That’s why we see some articles floating on The Times’s Most E-Mailed list for a week or more. The same is true of Twitter.

During 2013, we began consistently scheduling multiple runs of tweets highlighting some of our best enterprise material, especially during weekend hours and overnight, when @nytimes is mostly automated. It goes without saying that if you tweet more, you’ll get more traffic overall. But what we found when we scheduled tweets on Saturday and Sunday was that the average click per tweet grew substantially. What that meant to us was that a story that was of great interest to readers on a Tuesday afternoon is likely to be of interest to readers grazing Twitter on a Saturday night who didn’t see it the first time around. It also encouraged us to think about how our Twitter accounts can better serve The Times’s global audience.

A balance has to be struck in terms of what you recycle, and how often. For instance, a breaking news story that was of great interest Monday afternoon will likely be passé on the following Sunday night. But, when used thoughtfully, we found that recycling enterprise material served our broader audience by delivering our most interesting journalism to them at times when they were available and ready to read it.

Surprises happen

We tweeted some stories without any expectation that they would be popular on social media. But suddenly a story buried deep in the paper, targeted toward a niche audience, was widely and heavily shared across social media. We couldn’t always pinpoint the origin of the great interest in an article, but we liked finding the nowhere from out of which a wave of social media attention came.

For instance, why was this tweet of an article from The Times’s real estate section one of the most clicked in 2013?

Because Pink, the pop singer best known for songs like “Just Give Me a Reason” and “Raise Your Glass,” chose to retweet it to her tens of millions of Twitter followers:

You can’t plan for that kind of a lift. Sometimes we were greatly surprised by the audiences that connected with our journalism via social media. May we be ever surprised in the year ahead.

Michael Roston is a staff editor for social media at The New York Times.

Ezra Klein illustrates why news orgs should embrace the network

Posted: 06 Jan 2014 07:18 AM PST

What should a 21st-century news organization look like? A single entity, run from the top, with a common set of values? Or a loose network of related projects, sharing a brand and to some extent a mission but operating semi-independently?

With the likely departure of Ezra Klein from The Washington Post, the management of one of our last great newspapers might be showing signs of preferring the former approach. Klein, who founded and runs the widely read Wonkblog at washingtonpost.com, is reportedly leaving for a new venture, as yet undefined. According to Ravi Somaiya in The New York Times, Klein sought an eight-figure Post investment in the new project. Klein already has his own Wonkblog staff, but clearly he has something much bigger in mind — perhaps an all-purpose independent news organization along the lines of Talking Points Memo. (Although it wouldn’t be called Wonkblog — the Post owns the name and will be keeping it, writes The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone, who broke the news about Klein’s proposal last month.)

ezra-kleinWe can’t know everything that went into the decision. Maybe it came down to money. But Wonkblog generates a hefty amount of web traffic — more than 4 million pageviews a month, according to a profile of Klein in The New Republic last February. “It’s ‘fuck you traffic,’” a Post source told TNR’s Julia Ioffe. “He’s always had enough traffic to end any argument with the senior editors.” Apparently, that’s no longer the case.

Significantly, the Times reports that new Post owner Jeff Bezos was involved in the decision to let Klein leave. Last September, shortly after announcing his intention to buy the Post for $250 million, the Amazon.com founder lauded the “daily ritual” of reading the morning paper — which led to some chiding by one of the Post’s own journalists, Timothy B. Lee.

Despite Bezos’ well-earned reputation as a clear-eyed digital visionary, he appears to have some romantic notions about the business he’s bought into. And allowing entrepreneurs such as the twentysomething Klein run his own shop inside the Post might not fit with that vision.

What makes the likely Klein departure even more significant is that in 2006 the Post, under the ownership of the Graham family, allowed John Harris and Jim VandeHei to walk out the door and start Politico. Now, I have a lot of problems with Politico’s gossipy “drive the day” approach. But as Times columnist Ross Douthat has observed, much of the media conversation about Washington politics has shifted from the Post to Politico, threatening one of the Post’s franchises. It would have been enormously beneficial to the Post if Politico had been launched under its own umbrella. And Politico itself might be better.

So if the Post is reluctant to loosen the reins, are there any other news organizations that are taking a different approach? Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher walked away from their AllThingsD site at The Wall Street Journal and set up a new project called Recode in partnership with NBC. Perhaps the most famous example is Nate Silver, who brought his FiveThirtyEight poll-analysis site to The New York Times a few years ago and then moved it lock, stock and barrel to ESPN. In that regard, I suppose you could say NBC and ESPN have embraced the network approach. To some extent you might say also that of The Huffington Post, as it combines professional journalists, unpaid bloggers (I’m one) and a dizzying array content — from Calderone’s excellent media coverage to the notorious Sideboob vertical.

Jeff Jarvis recently argued that Patch — AOL’s incredibly shrinking hyperlocal news project — might have stood a chance if AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong had taken a network approach. Rather than running cookie-cutter community sites from the top down, Jarvis asked, what if Patch had offered advertising and support services to a network of independent or semi-independent sites?

The problem with such scenarios is that media executives — and business leaders in general — are not accustomed to the idea of giving up control. Calderone reports that some Post staffers have long grumbled at what they see as “preferential treatment” for Klein, which suggests the depth of the problem. But entrepreneurial journalists like Harris and VandeHei, like Mossberg and Swisher, and like Silver and Klein have a proven track record.

Legacy news organizations need to find a way to tap into that success outside the old models of ownership and not worry about obsolete notions of employer-employee relationships. Reach and influence are what matter. And they are proving to be incompatible with the ambitions of young journalists like Ezra Klein.

Dan Kennedy is an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University and a panelist on Beat the Press, a weekly media program on WGBH-TV Boston. His blog, Media Nation, is online at dankennedy.net. His most recent book, The Wired City: Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-Newspaper Age (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), tracks the rise of online community news projects.

This Week in Review: The NYT backs Snowden, and journalists’ personal brands break away

Posted: 06 Jan 2014 06:18 AM PST

This week’s post covers the past two weeks, including everything from Christmas up through this weekend.

The Times pushes for Snowden’s clemency: U.S. National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden received some strong support from a rather unexpected source last week, as The New York Times editorial board made a forceful case for the U.S. to grant Snowden clemency, allowing him to return home to face “at least substantially reduced punishment.” The Times argued that Snowden should be given clemency because he was acting as a whistleblower who knew that the only way to reform the NSA’s abuses was to expose them to the public. “When someone reveals that government officials have routinely and deliberately broken the law, that person should not face life in prison at the hands of the same government,” The Times wrote.

The editorial predictably outraged Obama administration officials and some members of Congress, though other members have begun to come out in favor of clemency as well. Times public editor Margaret Sullivan reported some of the background on the editorial, and Andrew Sullivan offered a sampling of opinion on the piece from the political blogosphere.

The Times’ editorial was echoed by a Guardian editorial published almost simultaneously, and others affirmed the Times’ points as well, including CNET’s Charles Cooper and Techdirt’s Mike Masnick. Slate’s Fred Kaplan disagreed with the Times, arguing that Snowden’s revelations and associations with Russia and other U.S. adversaries go beyond a whistleblower’s actions, and that clemency is highly unlikely anyway. On the other hand, Jack Shafer of Reuters noted that the NSA has publicly floated this clemency idea before, too.

The political blogger Digby voiced her surprise that anyone thought a newspaper would or should believe other than the Times board does, drawing from past words by The Washington Post’s Barton Gellman on the proper attitude of journalists toward government secrecy. Firedoglake’s Kevin Gosztola wondered why The New York Times hasn’t given the same support to WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning, while Kalev Leetaru of Foreign Policy noted that Snowden has displaced WikiLeaks in the public eye.

nsa-hq-ap

Making sense of the NSA news: There was plenty of other NSA surveillance-related news over the holidays, starting with the continuing stream of stories about newly revealed NSA surveillance programs and capabilities: The NSA has a catalog advertising back-end break-ins for a variety of common electronic gadgets, it’s intercepting laptops to install malware that gives them remote access, it generated these back-door routes through a secret contract with computer security industry giant RSA, and it’s trying to build a quantum computer that could break most types of encryption in existence.

In case all of these NSA revelations are starting to blur together for you, The Washington Post’s Andrea Peterson put together a brief summary of the main things we learned about NSA surveillance this year, and NYU’s Jay Rosen listed three of his bigger-picture takeaways, including the the role of freedom rather than privacy as a core value of anti-surveillance activism and the value of Snowden’s going public. Arizona State’s Dan Gillmor, meanwhile, said the Snowden case shows what’s possible when journalists collaborate to create a critical mass of attention to an issue.

A federal judge upheld the NSA’s phone surveillance program, countering a ruling against the NSA by a federal judge in a different case earlier last month; The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson offered a good explanation of the two rulings. Others called attention to corporate surveillance: At All Things D, Michael Dearing criticized tech companies’ cooperation with the NSA, and The Guardian’s John Naughton and journalist Dan Conover both said we need to be more concerned about the surveillance tech companies are doing in addition to the NSA.

Snowden made a couple more public statements — an interview with The Washington Post in which he declared “mission accomplished” and a Christmas message on the U.K.’s Channel 4 in which he called for a restoration of privacy. Based on the interview, The Post’s Ruth Marcus derided Snowden as insufferable. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick wondered whether we’re now getting information from non-Snowden NSA leakers, and The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf suggested that NSA staffers voice their willingness (via the media) to meet with members of Congress as a way to blow the whistle without leaking.

Two other NSA-related media stories that continue to develop: 60 Minutes’ soft piece on the NSA spurred more criticism, this time from The New York Times’ David Carr. John Miller, who reported the story, left for a New York Police Department job. And Glenn Greenwald, who broke the Snowden leaks for The Guardian and is now starting up First Look Media, promised many more Snowden documents to come and defended himself against charges that he’s become a spokesman for Snowden.

kara-swisher-cc

Personality-driven subsites break away: Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg’s AllThingsD made its long-awaited separation from News Corp’s Dow Jones, whose banner the tech site has been operating under since it was founded in 2007. Mossberg said farewell at AllThingsD’s site on New Year’s Eve, then the pair relaunched as Re/code the next day. The New York Times has more of the details: The investment firm Windsor and NBCUniversal News Group are minority investors, and News Corp’s Wall Street Journal launched a replacement tech news site called WSJD.

Another personally driven brand within a news org may be on the move as well, as The Washington Post political blogger Ezra Klein was reported to be looking to start his own site elsewhere. Michael Calderone of The Huffington Post reported before the holidays that Klein was talking to people both inside and outside the paper about launching his own site, and two weeks later, The New York Times’ Ravi Somaiya reported that Klein’s proposal of an eight-figure site dedicated to explanatory journalism was turned down by The Post, so he’s planning on starting it with someone else.

Calderone gave some more details about the situation and compared it to the birth of Politico in 2007 after it was a rejected proposal by Post journalists. Klein’s proposal, Calderone said, represents the first test of new owner Jeff Bezos’ stewardship. BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel speculated that Klein’s recent Twitter follows might be a clue to a jump to the growing Vox Media.

Meanwhile, Neetzan Zimmerman, the viral content guru who accounts for a large chunk of Gawker’s traffic, announced he’s leaving to become editor-in-chief of the social sharing app startup Whisper. We also got an update on the progress of last year’s personal-brand media departure, Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish. Sullivan finished the year with $851,000 in gross subscription revenue from 34,000 subscribers, just short of his initial goal of $900,000, and talked to Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram about his lessons learned and plans for the future.

Reading roundup: A few other stories that you might have missed over the holidays:

— A British study of social media use by teens led to a handful of attention-grabbing headlines about Facebook being “dead and buried” for young people. Several others, like the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones and David Brake at The Conversation, warned that such a characterization of the study’s conclusion was overblown, since the study was based on data from students at just a few U.K. high schools. The lead researcher himself, Daniel Miller, also explained why his study shouldn’t be interpreted that way. Meanwhile, Pew released its newest survey numbers on social network use, which TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden broke down, and music technologist Ethan Kaplan argued that the phone, rather than the various platforms like Facebook that are used on it, is becoming the main technological form of identity for young people.

— There were no shortage of media-related reflections and lists as 2013 came to a close — you can check out Mathew Ingram of Gigaom’s list of 2013′s media ventures to watch, Josh Stearns’ list of the year’s best online journalism and storytelling, or the Future Journalism Project’s much more arbitrary best-of list. BuzzFeed’s John Herrman argued that this year was the culmination of Internet giants’ domination, while Quartz declared this a lost year for tech, an assertion Ingram disagreed with.

— Y Combinator founder Paul Graham gave an interview to the tech news startup The Information in which he was quoted as saying that he can’t make women see the world from a hacker’s perspective because “they haven’t been hacking for the past 10 years.” The quote was breathlessly picked up by Valleywag and briefly turned into a controversy, with debates and opinions about women and coding popping up all over. Graham responded that he was misquoted and was only referring to women who aren’t programmers, and The Information’s Jessica Lessin acknowledged that the quote in question was edited but denied that her organization did anything unscrupulous. Tech bloggers like John Gruber and Michael Arrington supported Graham, and tech PR exec Sean Garrett offered some lessons from the episode.

— News Corp bought the social news site Storyful, which focuses on social photos and video, just before the holidays. News Corp’s Raju Narisetti explained to Poynter and to Gigaom that Storyful will give News Corp an ability to verify, use, and syndicate viral video, giving it a new revenue opportunity and a building block toward a social news agency. Poynter’s Craig Silverman gave several reasons Storyful is worth our attention.

— Finally, the tech story everyone was talking about last week was Alexis Madrigal’s captivating piece at The Atlantic on how Netflix comes up with its extremely specific movie genres. It’s long, but well worth the time.

Photo of NSA headquarters by AP/Patrick Semansky. Photo of Kara Swisher looking badass by Lois Le Meur used under a Creative Commons license.
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