Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Bill Keller, The Marshall Project, and making single-focus nonprofit news sites work
- 4 Headlines that Will Restore Your Flagging Faith in Journalism
- First Look Media publishes its first stories
| Bill Keller, The Marshall Project, and making single-focus nonprofit news sites work Posted: 10 Feb 2014 12:25 PM PST “When you have a startup, one of the most challenging things is to establish yourself as a credible news organization,” Neil Barsky, founder of a new news nonprofit focused on criminal justice issues, told me.
That’s what Barsky did for the Marshall Project yesterday, bringing the former New York Times executive editor over to be its first editor-in-chief. We’re at a point in the evolution of nonprofit news organizations where metaphors become more useful. Is this a single-topic ProPublica? An InsideClimate News for courts and prisons? Like ProPublica, the Marshall Project came to public notice with the hiring of a big newspaper name (The Wall Street Journal’s Paul Steiger); like InsideClimate News, it aims to focus dedicated attention to a large, systemic problem that sometimes gets lost in the day-to-day news budgets of other outlets.
“Part of the appeal of it is that it’s scary,” Keller told me Monday. “I’ve spent the last 30 years operating over the safety net of The New York Times, which is great. But the opportunity to start something from scratch, to build it yourself and really make it the way you want, is pretty cool and challenging.” Keller said the response to his jump to the Marshall Project has been overwhelming. “Usually when I get this many emails in my inbox it means I’ve pissed someone off,” he said. The nonprofit’s annual operating budget will be $4 million to $5 million, with the funding coming from Barsky, philanthropies, and a number of donors. Barsky estimates that will make for a newsroom headcount in the mid-20s. While many of the particulars are still being discussed, what Keller and Barsky want to create is a site that produces both short- and long-term investigations that can be distributed on the web and through partnerships. Keller said he expects to take some cues from ProPublica, partnering with other news organizations on some investigations that will help combine resources and expand the reach of a story. (Under Keller’s watch, the Times and ProPublica collaborated on the Pulitzer-winning investigation into hospital deaths during Hurricane Katrina.) Moving from the Times to the Marshall Project will mean a shift in scale for Keller. While the Times offers vast resources, they are spread across, well, all the news that’s fit to print. Keller said reporters for the Project will provide persistent coverage on stories over time. Keller sees The Marshall Project as a single-issue site with a million story possibilities, covering sentencing reforms, prosecutorial misconduct, and the war on drugs. “The stories out there are really rich, but they add up to something,” Keller said. One big obstacle the nonprofit will face is growing an audience. “There will be a sort of automatic fraternity, or sorority, of people who are experts in the field, academics who study the criminal justice system, corrections officers — those people will make us a regular stop,” he said. “The real effort will be to raise these issues with the general public. And that’s where you need social media.” (Keller has a notably mixed set of feelings about social media.) Barsky said he knows there will be financial support available for a news organizations focusing solely on criminal justice. He expects much of its funding will come from issue-specific foundations and philanthropy, as well as individual donors who want to make a contribution to a meaningful cause. (Presumably, with his Wall Street background, Barsky knows some people.) That funding mix will be important. Unlike ProPublica, which had a large sum of initial funding from the Sandler family committed up front, Barsky says the site will need to raise its budget annually, either through philanthropy or earned revenue. But looking over the journalism landscape, Barsky said he believes nonprofit journalism has the potential to be more sustainable over time than for-profit journalism. “A nonprofit organization has to sustain itself by being excellent and having an impact. So does for-profit, frankly,” he said. “But the difference is there are people of good will out there who are willing to support us if we do great work.” (Wondering about the name? The Marshall in question is Thurgood Marshall. “I was inspired after reading Devil in the Grove, which depicts Marshall's courageous efforts to spare the lives of four black men falsely accused of rape,” Barsky said.) The landscape for nonprofit news is still relatively young, but has shown signs of maturing as some organizations have found success in diversifying their business models beyond philanthropy. The Texas Tribune is probably the poster child of revenue diversity, but it’s something others in the criminal justice nonprofit news world have sought. Leonard Witt, publisher of the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, said finding funding is a constant issue for nonprofit news sites. Based at the Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University, JJIE publishes news and research on juvenile justice issues. Since its launch in 2010, the Exchange has relied on funding from places like The Harnish Foundation, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation, among others. The narrow focus of JJIE has helped in fundraising efforts, as has the gradual growth of the site’s readership over time. But Witt said they’ve had tried to find other ways to support its mission, through things like events and even publishing Youth Today, a magazine for youth services workers that provides subscription and advertising income. “Any nonprofit has to find as many revenue streams as possible,” he said. Keller said he's hopeful that The Marshall Project will be able to capture an audience because there is a growing concern about the state of criminal justice in the U.S. That’s one reason Keller said he doesn’t see The Marshall Project as advocacy-driven, but “journalism with a sense of purpose.” Both Keller and Barsky agree that they want the site to bring more visibility to the problems with America’s courts and prisons. Keller said his career as a journalist has provided plenty of opportunities, particularly at the Times, where he covered varied beats before joining the editing ranks. It’s because of that perspective, and seeing the transformation taking place in the industry, that he believes audiences — and funders — will support The Marshall Project. "Ten years ago that would seem bizarre and speculative,” he said. “I guess it is a little speculative, but it's no longer bizarre. It's the new normal.” |
| 4 Headlines that Will Restore Your Flagging Faith in Journalism Posted: 10 Feb 2014 07:48 AM PST
Lots of great stuff in there as usual; the main theme of the issue is the state of journalism in China, with a number of terrific reports both from Chinese journalists and foreign correspondents posted there. In addition to the China package and other good stuff, I’m now writing a column for the print edition of the magazine. Here’s my first one. A Kid Came Up To Her In The Hall And Told Her She Saved His Life. He Wasn’t The Only One In Tears. Having A Bad Day? Here Are 46 Powerful Things You Should Really Hear. A Firefighter Went To Put Out A Fire, But He Had No Idea He Would Be A Hero Of A Different Kind. Clear Your Next 10 Minutes Because This Video Could Change How Happy You Are With Your Entire Week. Those are all recent headlines on Upworthy, a website that launched in early 2012 and, in less than two years, was generating an astonishing 88 million unique visitors a month. (NYTimes.com gets about 30 million.) If you spend any time on Facebook, it’s likely you’ve come across at least a few Upworthy stories, shared by friends who found them inspiring, infuriating, or otherwise irresistible. Put 10 of them in a row and chances are you’ll find it hard to click just one. For those of us who’ve written a lot of headlines, Upworthy’s stand out for a number of reasons, but chief among them is their comfort with emotion. These headlines aren’t afraid to tell you how you’re going to feel about clicking them. The sentiments they inspire are part of the sales job in a way that wasn’t the case in traditional media. It’s not that journalism pre-Internet was unfamiliar with the power of emotion to reach audiences — or unafraid to use it. Tabloids were and remain the print exemplar here, with their lurid tales, clear good guys and bad guys, damsels in distress, and easy-to-hate pols. Television news has long known the value of a rescued dog story. And even the stodgiest of broadsheets trafficked in feel-good features and anger-driving columns. But Upworthy — and BuzzFeed, Quartz, NowThis News, and other web-native outlets that one could (loosely) lump together as viral-friendly media — are different. And the prime driver of that difference is a major shift in how readers find content online. Online news organizations spent the 2000s focusing a lot of energy on search engine optimization — tailoring their content to the needs of Google. Many outlets found that a third to a half of their readers were coming from Google searches, and there was no shortage of consultants promising to boost your stories to the top of those rankings. That led to a lot of journalists sitting through boring SEO training and a lot of keyword-clotted headlines aimed at capturing any stray “I’m Feeling Lucky” it could. But SEO turned out to be a game that others could play better. Content farms like Demand Media sprung up to create ultracheap, low-grade work — paying $7.50 an article! — that popped to the top of search rankings. (The downside of the SEO gamble is that you exist at Google’s mercy, and a series of changes in Google’s algorithms have left Demand Media an empty husk, its stock price down nearly 80 percent from its peak.) More importantly, search declined in importance as a traffic driver because something rose to take its place: social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other networks built their businesses around person-to-person sharing — of what you had for breakfast this morning, yes, but also of news and other online content. Every day, social’s share of online news traffic grows as more and more people get headlines from Twitter on their phones rather than a news website at their desks. (That new environment is, for instance, the main reason headlines have become so much more emotional and evocative. In a print newspaper, a headline is surrounded by lots of other contextual clues that tell you about the story: Is there a photo with it? Do I recognize the byline? Is it blazed across the top of Page 1 or buried on C22? Online, headlines often pop up alone and disembodied amid an endless stream of other content. They have a bigger job to do.) This shift is, on net, a good thing. You get better work when you’re trying to please actual humans instead of opaque algorithms. Making work good enough to inspire someone to tell their friends about it encourages a lot of healthy behavior. But it also encourages changes to old news forms that some traditionalists might find disorienting. It turns out that the stories that you share with your friends don’t line up perfectly with the ones old-line news organizations produce. At Quartz, Atlantic Media’s business news site, it leads to a near-deconstruction of the traditional news story into its constituent parts — inverted pyramids traded for standalone charts, intriguing data nuggets, and other highly sharable chunks of information. At the ever-growing BuzzFeed, it leads to lots of stories in listicle form, expressive animated GIFs where text used to be, and headlines optimized for clicking. At NowThis News, a social video startup, it means news updates as short as six seconds and a visual aesthetic that recalls MTV in 1983. This too is healthy. The newspaper article, the television package — these are forms born in and tied to their medium, and too much of the first 20 years of the news web was spent pouring old wine into new wineskins. In 2013, we saw a lot of old formats inch closer to feeling indigenous to the web; witness the transformation of many longform pieces from grey text into multimedia, browser-native experiences. As has been the case at every step of the digital news transition, there will be awkwardness and missteps along the way. Those emotional Upworthy headlines rub a lot of people the wrong way — even in the moment they click on them. But take them as signs that online content is evolving in new ways, ways that traditional outlets will be able to learn from and that will lead to a healthier future for journalism. Image of dengue virus by Sanofi Pasteur used under a Creative Commons license. |
| First Look Media publishes its first stories Posted: 10 Feb 2014 07:29 AM PST First Look Media, the Pierre Omidyar-backed nonprofit news org, announced the first in a series of digital magazines today, as promised in its launch video. The Intercept will cover issues of criminal and civil justice, especially as it relates to the NSA story.
So far, they have two articles up: the first by Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald on NSA targeting for drone assassinations, the second a series of aerial photographs by Trevor Paglen. |
One quick route there: Hire Bill Keller.
The Marshall Project sounds like a mix of both, at a time when we’re seeing a wider variety of models debuting across the news web, from 
Editor’s note: The 
Our focus in this very initial stage will be overwhelmingly on the NSA story. We will use all forms of digital media for our reporting. We will publish original source documents on which our reporting is based. We will have reporters in Washington covering reactions to these revelations and the ongoing reform efforts.| You are subscribed to email updates from Nieman Journalism Lab To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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