Rabu, 12 Februari 2014

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

The Pierre Omidyar-backed legal aid clinic wins a public records case in Hawaii

Posted: 11 Feb 2014 12:51 PM PST

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Honolulu Civil Beat creates a legal aid clinic to help the public fight for better records access
We wrote last fall about how the Hawaii news site Honolulu Civil Beat was spawning a separate legal aid clinic to help the public — or even other news organizations — fight for better records access. (Civil Beat is probably best known as the other nonprofit news site Pierre Omidyar started and backs.)

Well, the Civil Beat Law Center for the Public Interest just fought and won its first case.

For nearly 20 years, Hawaii police officers who were suspended for misconduct have been able to hide behind an exemption in the state's public records law that prevents officials from releasing their names and details of disciplinary actions.

The public also has been prohibited from finding out whether police officials are handling discipline properly, whether it’s effective, and whether the public safety is being compromised. Even cops who have committed serious crimes have been allowed to remain anonymous.

But on Monday, in a case brought by Civil Beat, Hawaii Circuit Court Judge Karl Sakamoto ruled that police cannot be above the law when it comes to disclosure of their misconduct.

Sakamoto said police officers have no right to privacy when it comes to getting in trouble. The judge also reaffirmed the public's interest in scrutinizing government officials, especially those with a badge.

Feel free to send this post around to your local billionaires to see if they’re interested in funding something similar in your community.

How Gawker buys traffic (rarely, for advertisers)

Posted: 11 Feb 2014 10:42 AM PST

gawker_mediaOver at Gawker, there’s an interesting discussion going on in the comments of this story about Facebook, BuzzFeed, and the impact of buying traffic. (“Buying traffic” in this case meaning paying Facebook to promote your stories within its walls.)

The conversation is happening right now as I type this, so there may be more gold to come, but a few highlights. First Gawker boss Nick Denton:

Not that there’s anything wrong with Buzzfeed buying traffic on Facebook. But we don’t. Slow and steady. Oh, for the record, we’ve tried a few experiments with bought traffic. But the numbers never added up.

Then Gawker editor John Cook:

Nick, I am reliably told by people in the ad department that Gawker Media does in fact actively buy Facebook traffic for sponsored posts. And Joel Johnson, our editorial director, is exploring the idea of buying Facebook ads for editorial posts. For the record, I’m agnostic on the idea of doing it for ads—not my side of things, though I do think it’s important to be open about the business model. As for editorial, I don’t really like the idea of trumpeting our numbers when some of those were simply purchased. I prefer, as I think you do, earning them.

Gawker staff writer Adam Weinstein:

Agreed with John. I don’t see such buys as a problem in principle, provided that 1) a media organization is very transparent about them and 2) said media organization doesn’t then promote ad-buy-related successes as the successes of “organic” content. That’s Adorno-esque “culture industry” territory there. In practice, the distinction between “bought” and “earned” popularity is pretty artificial. My only concern, and the one that motivated this piece, is to challenge anyone who claims without warrant that an artificial boost is the product of natural forces.

(Yes, that was an Adorno reference.)

Then James Del from the Gawker ad team:

James from the Gawker Ad Team here, wanted to just provide some context to what Cook & Co are talking about.

For posts that are published on the Studio@Gawker Kinja or individual brand Kinjas (like Netflix, for example), we do occasionally utilize Facebook and Twitter ads to reach a wider audience for stories that are organically performing well. The company we use to buy those ads is a company called Simple Reach, which was actually started by some guys who were tangentially involved with Buzzfeed’s early traffic experiments.

But to be clear: The traffic we’ve purchased on Facebook and Twitter for promoted stories has equaled less than 20,000 pageviews in total over the course of the last 2 months.

Again, the sole purpose of buying this traffic is to provide extended reach for branded content to an audience not currently on our site, not to artificially boost traffic numbers. The strength of our editorial wildly eclipses any amount of traffic we could or would purchase; it’s effectively a drop in the bucket.

And yes, our advertisers are fully aware that we’re promoting their sponsored posts on Facebook and Twitter…in fact the only reason we do it is because so many advertisers expect it now.

As for whether or not it makes sense for editorial to try buying Facebook promo, I personally think it makes sense for certain stories that are already organically successful. Taking an excellent Gawker post from a million views to two million views with a $500 Facebook spend seems like a no brainer, but becoming reliant on Facebook to prop up every story we publish is a great way to create a rickety business model akin to Upworthy or ViralNova.

And Nick again:

In case anyone missed the key line, 20,000 page impressions bought from Facebook. That compares with total Gawker Media traffic in excess of 600m pages per month.

Just so we’re absolutely clear, bought traffic for individual posts from Facebook represented 0.003 per cent of organic.

So we’re at a point where advertisers expect publishers to buy ads for their ads — even when it’s not particularly effective.

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Gawker creates a new writer pipeline with “Recruits”

Posted: 11 Feb 2014 10:27 AM PST

The path to enter the journalism business is changing. Some media companies are abandoning unpaid internships; others are terming them reporting fellowships.

Enter Gawker, which is adding a new metaphor to the game by creating a new “Recruits” program. Under the Recruits system, aspiring writers will get short-term contracts, a stipend, their own Kinja blog, and the potential to pull in better pay based off their traffic. Recruits recruits may eventually make their way into a regular gig with Gawker, either as a full-time staffer or as a long-term freelancer.

It’s more of a formalized farm system for Gawker, which has a history of plucking sharp writers out of the comments for a full-time gig.

Since this is Gawker, the emphasis for recruits is not just on becoming a better writer, but also mastering the economics of online media. Here’s Gawker editorial director Joel Johnson on how recruits will get paid:

Recruits will operate on a $5 eCPM — earning $5 for every 1,000 uniques they bring in each month. We will “spot” Recruits their first $1,500 a month; we’re not monsters. Recruits can post as little or as often as they’d like; determining the sweet spot will be part of their learning and tuning process. Monthly uniques over the first 300,000 ($1,500) a month will be paid out at the $5 eCPM, up to a maximum of $6,000. (An atypically aggressive bonus for Gawker, reached at just 1,250,000 uniques per month, but we want to reward initiative.)

Are publishers overselling social traffic at the expense of search? A dialogue with Danny Sullivan

Posted: 11 Feb 2014 08:45 AM PST

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4 Headlines that Will Restore Your Flagging Faith in Journalism
You may have seen my column yesterday on the rise of content designed for social sharing — a category that for me includes everything from pure-viral outlets like Upworthy to more newsy but still sharing-optimized sites like Quartz.

This was my basic argument: It’s easy to be put off by viral headlines — even in the exact moment you’re clicking them. And I get that. But I argued that even the most Upworthyesque headline is a welcome sign that media companies are getting more comfortable creating content meant for digital platforms — not just taking old forms (the newspaper article, the TV news segment) and shoving them awkwardly into a new medium. Even though there’ll be missteps along the way, I think it’s healthy and a net good that we’re seeing content forms that stray further from what came before.

But one of the other things I mentioned in the column was that, broadly speaking, social traffic was growing in relative importance to publishers, taking over some mental turf that previously belonged to search traffic:

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…

…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 brought Danny Sullivan to the comments. If you don’t know Danny, you should: The site he runs, Search Engine Land, is the single best source of information on the world of search and a valuable, reported window into what Google is up to on any given day. He didn’t like some of what I wrote:

We had a good back-and-forth in the comments on that post, and so that others can see it, I’m republishing it below.

Danny Sullivan: Social media didn’t rise to take the place of search. That’s a common fallacy, and it’s really one that should be stomped out. It’s the rare publication that will find that its search traffic has dropped over the years.

No, what’s usually the case is that social has emerged as an entirely new source of traffic alongside search and, which for some publications, may drive more traffic than search.

But that didn’t mean search somehow went poof.

Think of it as a pie of traffic. In the past, we have a 6 inch pie that was mostly full of search, maybe 75% of it was search. Social made that pie get bigger, maybe 12%. The “slide” of search as a percentage of the pie might be smaller, but that doesn’t mean the actual amount of traffic dropped.

It’s also a terrible, terrible journalist who comes away thinking that SEO is “boring.” The core part of SEO is understanding how your audience is seeking your content and writing in the words they are searching for.

If you’re writing a story about an important person, subject or concept and fail to use the words that your audience is seeking, you’re potentially missed that audience.

But hey, if people want to think that it’s all about the “you won’t believe” headlines and you can ignore search, there are plenty of search-savvy publications that will gladly take their traffic — along with the social traffic, too. Because you don’t have to be exclusive to one or the other.

Joshua Benton: Danny, I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying. But a few thoughts:

— In most news organizations I know of, SEO gets less emphasis than it used to. Part of that is because the lessons they’ve learned over the past few years still work — they don’t need to keep relearning them. Part of that is that news orgs are putting more emphasis on social and, as a share of *organizational effort* (if not a share of *traffic*), social is up and search is down.

— I think there’s a broad perception in news orgs that social traffic is *more valuable* than search traffic on a pageview-by-pageview basis. If I’m a business selling widgets, I love search traffic, because that’s coming from people specifically searching for widgets — likely with an intent to purchase. But if I’m a news site, a reader “converting” likely doesn’t mean “reader purchases widget.” It means “reader signs up for our daily email,” or “becomes a repeat visitor,” or “signs up for our paywall,” or “follows us on Twitter.” For that kind of a “conversion,” social traffic is more likely to align the user’s interest and what the news org can provide. In other words, search traffic is still quite substantial, but I think most news orgs value it less than they used to.

(There are, of course, exceptions, e.g. Demand Media and others with similar strategies.)

— It’s also just a matter of momentum. Social is growing rapidly. Search didn’t go poof, but it isn’t growing at the same rate as social, which is why it gets more emphasis.

But your points are very well taken. (Although I do still think that a news web optimized for social rather than for search is one I prefer. It’s not an either/or world, but I think social’s ascendancy has, on net, been better for journalism than search’s.)

Danny Sullivan: I see it more like this. It’s not that search is about the person seeking widgets, for a news publisher. It’s for a person seeking content about a specific subject, as opposed to social which is more about discovery.

To put it another way, the search and social readers are like this:

Search: What the hell just happened! Or, I’m interested in some topic and would like to know more. In short, they are active readers.

Social: I’m bored. Entertain me. Oh, that’s interesting. In short, they are passive readers.

I don’t know that social / passive readers convert better than search / active readers. I’ve seen articles that go both ways. If conversion means getting sign-ups to come again, I can see social working better, since someone might want discover more entertaining content from a particular publication, versus the active searcher who might not care what the publication is from day-to-day but just wants the answer.

I also don’t know that news is “optimized” for either search or social. News is optimized for humans, and both the search and social platforms are trying to appeal to the humans that use them. That’s expressly what Google’s algorithms are trying to do — match real human beings with the content they seek, using signals that they think equate to what humans like.

The bulk of what you’ve highlighted here has been more about headlines — and there, you bet, you can have headlines that are more search-oriented than social-oriented. Until recently, those actually could work together. A search-oriented headline didn’t mean shoving in every keyword under the sun. It meant making sure your headline was both compelling from a clickthrough standpoint and also containing descriptions so people understood what it was about.

Upworthy has broken some of that. “Clear Your Next 10 Minutes Because This Video Could Change How Happy You Are With Your Entire Week” doesn’t tell me anything about what’s going on. The chances of it ranking for anything it’s related to a pretty bad — I mean, what the heck is it about?

That’s fine for Upworthy, which probably doesn’t care about the search traffic — unless it turns out that the social traffic dries up. Then it becomes a bigger issue.

And then, as it turns out, that article/post could easily have had a headline that worked in search and a headline that still got the clickbait in social.

Overall, I don’t know that the shift toward social is somehow inherently better for journalism, especially as it might pull away from the focus on good evergreen content that can also do well long-term in search. But I also don’t tend to think we’re writing stories for either / or.

We’re producing journalism which is distributed through channels, as opposed to publications. That’s the fundamental change and the key to understanding how to survive the change.

It’s not “right, here’s how to write for social” any more than it’s “here’s how to write for search.”

Instead, it’s getting that there’s a huge audience out there which wants to consumer news content not by going to a particular publication each day, at a given time, but instead will encounter your journalism through channels you don’t control but can tap into and optimize for.

That means your story needs to be told through YouTube. And written to attract on Twitter. And maybe you want to use Tumblr. And perhaps you need to be better designed for Flipboard. And how can you ensure you are doing better in Google?

That’s what’s to me, potentially good for journalism. That good stories can potentially reach larger audiences than ever before. As you say, it’s healthy that the old formats are being broken. But it’s not healthy to think the new format is somehow “the web” or “social” or “search.” It’s that the new format is always going to be changing, because the new format is wherever the audiences are and how they want to consume.

At the risk of taking the last word (it’s not really the last word, since there’s a comments box below):

— I think it’s absolutely true that news can be optimized for search or for social (or both). “What time is the Super Bowl?” is optimized for search. “Just In Case You Need Help Figuring Out Whether A Dude Is A Real Man, Here’s A Handy Chart” is optimized for social. And that goes beyond headlines, too: Think of how many social-friendly stories are just a single chart or a single paragraph with a video embed. Danny’s right that the two don’t have to conflict by definition, but it certainly seems to me that optimizing for social is where the energy’s at for most publishers I know.

— I think this from Danny is very smart: We’re producing journalism which is distributed through channels, as opposed to publications. That’s the fundamental change and the key to understanding how to survive the change.

— The key missing word in this discussion is mobile. Here’s a single datapoint: A far greater share of my web browsing goes to Google search on desktop than on mobile. I’m far more likely to come across news on my iPhone via a social platform (Twitter, mostly) than in Safari. And while that’s just me, I don’t think I’m alone. Part of the reason is that Twitter/Facebook/et al fit the mobile paradigm so much better than typing URLs or search terms; part of it is the growth of push notifications. If I’m right, the broader push toward mobile devices for content consumption is likely to lead to greater relative social growth vs. search.

— If there’s one thing I do disagree with Danny on, it’s this: Most SEO training in news organizations is really boring. SEO as a subject can be really interesting, at least to nerds like me, but I can’t tell you how many journalists I’ve spoken with whose least energizing day in the newsroom was the day they were told to cram lots of keywords into their headlines. (I remember sitting through one terrible one in 2007 — and I’m into this stuff!) There could be many people to blame for that — bad trainers? curmudgeonly reporters? poor SEO advice? — but I don’t think it’s something I’m making up.

What do you guys think? How do you see the emphasis on search or on social playing out in your news organization? Am I wrong about SEO training being boring? Is your phone changing how much of your browsing is via search or via social? Let us know in the comments.

Photo of Danny Sullivan by Michael Dorausch used under a Creative Commons license.

CEO Andrew Miller: “Membership-type propositions” will be key to The Guardian’s revenue growth

Posted: 11 Feb 2014 08:11 AM PST

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The newsonomics of The Guardian’s new “Known” strategy
Guardian Media Group CEO Andrew Miller discusses the paper’s digital strategy in an interview with The Media Briefing’s Jasper Jackson. Miller expounded on The Guardian’s “known” strategy, which aims to collect more information on the site’s 40 million monthly visitors to better target products to them.

Miller acknowledged that The Guardian needs additional reader-generated revenue, but said its strategy is different than a standard paywall:

Will it be a wall between the reader and the content? No, it won’t be. It’ll be adding more value for people who want to get more involved in the Guardian, who feel passionate about the Guardian.

We recognise we have to get more direct-to-consumer revenue over time and the way we will do that is through membership-type propositions, but it’s going to be much more than a paywall. A paywall is to me an inverse loyalty scheme, where the more you consume the more you pay, which doesn’t seem to work.

From Nieman Reports: Weibo and WeChat have brought a degree — a degree — of freedom to Chinese political discourse

Posted: 11 Feb 2014 07:00 AM PST

Editor’s note: The new issue of our sister publication Nieman Reports is out and online. There’s a lot of great reading in there on a variety of subjects, but the primary focus is on the state of journalism in China, with a number of terrific reports from both Chinese journalists and foreign correspondents posted there.

This week, we’ll be sharing excerpts from some of those stories that would be of the most interest to Nieman Lab readers. Here, Luo Changping, a former deputy editor of Caijing Magazine and winner of Transparency International's Integrity Award in 2013, writes about how platforms like Weibo and WeChat are breaking the government’s information monopoly.

nieman-reports-winter-2014-coverAs the profitability of traditional Chinese media plummets, journalists are increasingly beginning to transform themselves, with the acceptance of bribes for writing positive stories becoming more and more common among news outlets. Social media have displaced print and broadcast to dominate the Chinese news industry. Weibo, China's version of Twitter, and micromessaging service WeChat have brought a degree of freedom of speech and freedom of association, emphatically replacing the stringently regulated traditional media and becoming the main battleground of social discourse.

Sociologist Max Weber defined power as the ability to compel obedience, even against the wills of others. Some may suggest that power is the same as brute force, but this is incorrect; a ruler can achieve complete dominion without violence, simply by controlling the flow of information. The Chinese government's monopoly on power can be represented by four objects: a gun, money, handcuffs and a pen. The gun and handcuffs show domination by force, while the pen and cash symbolize the rule of information. At times, all four elements may work in combination. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) may still be in firm possession of the gun, handcuffs and money, but the Chinese people themselves are increasingly wielding the pen.

Information about the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood — for which Gu Kailai, wife of former Politburo member Bo Xilai, was convicted, while Bo himself remains under investigation for corruption — emanated entirely from sources other than traditional media. This was an important turning point. As the case of Bo Xilai shows, the gathering, dissemination, collation and analysis of news now takes place through processes completely different from those of traditional media, repeatedly breaching existing limitations on free speech in the process. In a desert of information, it is essential to gather information and professional knowledge through the Internet, piecing together a picture of each sensitive incident like a mosaic.

Keep reading at Nieman Reports »
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