Rabu, 19 Februari 2014

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

BostonGlobe.com is moving to a metered paywall

Posted: 18 Feb 2014 09:34 AM PST

bostonglobe-com-top
Four observations (and lots of questions) on The Boston Globe’s lovely new paywalled site
That’s one of the takeaways from this long profile of the John Henry-era Globe by Jason Schwartz in Boston Magazine. The Globe famously split its web presence in 2011 into a completely free Boston.com and a mostly hard-paywalled BostonGlobe.com. Stories that appear in the newspaper (with a few exceptions) only appear on BostonGlobe.com, while Boston.com is the land of slideshows, blogs, wire stories, and weather.

Meanwhile, changes are afoot at sister site BostonGlobe.com. Around the same time as the Boston.com relaunch, Boston Globe.com will switch from a hard-paywall model, where all Globe content is behind the curtain, to a New York Times–style metered model, where readers will be given a certain number of free stories each month before being asked to pay. "It was being talked about before he came, but his presence accelerated it," [Globe DME for multimedia Bennie] DiNardo says.

The bigger shift is in a new design for Boston.com, which has been in the works for a long time — I remember seeing an early version of it two and a half years ago — and which now aims to be out in the next six weeks or so.

Inside the Globe, Boston.com is regarded as a great, underutilized asset. Publisher Chris Mayer's plan was to slowly separate the site from BostonGlobe.com, but as Globe execs have continuously pulled Globe material away from Boston.com over the past three years, the site has suffered, losing both its sense of purpose and traffic. The Boston Business Journal has reported that, between 2010 and 2012, page views plummeted 24 percent, from 188 million to 143 million, according to the sale book on the Globe commissioned by the Times Company. Globe editors refute those numbers, though, and say that an uptick in mobile users has pushed traffic up from last year.

The vision for the new Boston.com is to be, as Henry puts it, "a phone-first website" and totally independent of the Globe—something like a mixture of the Huffington Post with BuzzFeed. He's dropped in on several meetings and made additional visits to the Boston.com boiler room.

Schwartz also outlines a coming investment in content-specific verticals — the Catholic one that’s been reported elsewhere (and which strikes me as a very good idea), a local tech site built on The Hive that would seem to compete with folks like Xconomy and BostInno, and maybe future sites built around education and medicine.

There’s lots of great stuff in there, of interest to both Bostonians and people who care about the evolution of newspapers, but there’s also one detail I can’t resist including. One of the other bidders for the Globe was a group led by Doug Manchester, who owns U-T San Diego (née The San Diego Union-Tribune).

"Do you have any idea what it was like to sit in a conference room at a downtown hotel, day after day, eating God-awful catered food," [Globe editor Brian McGrory] continues, "sitting there with people who you know just wanted to cut the living bejesus out of the place that you love the second they got their hands on us? And you had to be polite, you had to be informative, and these meetings stretched on forever, five, six hours at a time—most of the time I got so bored I just had to leave."

During the U-T San Diego presentation, people who were in the room attest, Manchester at one point instructed McGrory to call him "Papa Doug." McGrory did not call him Papa Doug.

Should The New York Times become a platisher? (Or at least something similar that doesn’t have the worst name in the history of names?)

Posted: 18 Feb 2014 08:30 AM PST

Over at the Riptide blog, Martin Nisenholtz has a post lauding and pointing to Jonathan Glick’s piece for Recode promoting the idea of a “platisher.”

(Still can’t get past that name.)

A platisher, Glick says, is “something in between a publisher and a platform — something that weaves together the strengths of both.” (Examples include Gawker, BuzzFeed, and Medium, all of which combine an open publishing platform for anyone to use with staff-produced or staff-edited material.) Martin:

Interesting, in Glick's analysis, not a single legacy media company is mentioned. No one. Is this an oversight? After all, companies like The New York Times Company now have hundreds of developers. Lots of interesting tech projects are in the works. Can publishers like The Times become platishers? Should they?

Glick replies in the comments:

You asked if the NYT is a platisher or could or should become one.

Now, to back up, my definition of a platisher is either

a) a publisher who broadly opens up their publishing system to outsiders (celebrities, intellectuals, politicians, other publishers, or brands) to directly create first-order content objects. (By first-order, I mean not just subordinate content objects, like message board comments, but full content, on the same level as the publisher’s own.)

or

b) an open platform who employs or otherwise funds editors, curators, writers and other creators to make content for their platform.

I say ‘either’ because I consider both of these to be essentially the same thing, and facing the same challenges. And it is to address those challenges that I came up with this silly word in the first place…

Now, on the question of The New York Times:

By the definition above, The NYT is certainly *not* a platisher today despite its investment in a world-class engineering and design organization.

A recent and salient proof for this can be found in the controversy over whether the Times should have published Dylan Farrow’s and then Woody Allen’s (I don’t know what to call them) letters (columns? posts?).

A platisher, like Sulia or Gawker-Kinja or Buzzfeed or Medium, would have been thrilled to have either of them posting on our platforms. For The New York Times, on the other hand, the idea of publishing content that the NYT’s careful editorial process has not thoroughly examined is terrifying.

And that, I suppose, is my answer to the question about whether the NYT could or should be a platisher. Which is: Boy, it would be extremely hard.

The Dylan/Woody affair proves that high-profile people — and I didn’t even mention Mr. Putin — would be delighted to post within the pages of the NYT. So it certainly has the opportunity to pivot this way if that’s what Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Thompson decide. But it seems to me the soul of the Times lies in very different virtues.

In Connecticut, the Independent Media Network tries to succeed where Patch couldn’t

Posted: 18 Feb 2014 08:00 AM PST

AOL’s Patch was perhaps the most noteworthy attempt to network local online news. It was built around hundreds of locally focused sites, yes, but it relied on a common technology back end and a shared ad sales staff. Part of the idea was that local-at-scale might work better if key non-reporting parts of the business could be centralized.

Patch, having just laid off hundreds of employees, hasn’t worked according to plan. But we’re seeing some interesting attempts at that shared backend model in a smaller scale.

One example’s in Connecticut, where Lon Seidman and Doug Hardy have slowly and cautiously been connecting the dots between small, independent digital publishers throughout the state.

Their Independent Media Network is a pragmatic and, financially at least, unambitious group of around 80 Connecticut websites — from parenting blogs to religious conversation sites to hard news outlets. Membership in the network is free, and flexible; revenue is shared between a salesperson, the sites, and the network.

For some members, the main draw is IMN’s ad network, through which Seidman has built relationships with advertisers by offering an ever-increasing number of impressions. Others rely on IMN for tech support; Hardy has designed a few WordPress templates specifically for members, and their team tries to answer any technology questions members may have, no matter how rudimentary. Recently, the network has started to offer other perks as well, including a daily email blast with the day’s Connecticut-relevant headlines.

Seidman and Hardy are an unlikely pair, having met through a series of side projects. Seidman’s primary business is The Safety Zone, a glove company founded by his father. (“Which, by the way,” Seidman says, is not dissimilar to the news sales business because “it’s a commodity product, and content has become commoditized.”)

After a brief stint in politics, Seidman embarked on a digital video project with Connecticut journalists Anna Sava and Steven Kapsinow called LocalOnlineNews. In the process of building that company, he came to know Christine Stuart, who runs a popular Connecticut news site, CT News Junkie. Her husband, Doug Hardy, manages the business.

“One day in late 2010, Doug called me to say he had some political campaigns looking to buy more advertising than he had available inventory to sell,” says Seidman. “So we decided to call up all of the other local independent content producers we knew to see if they’d be interested in splitting some of the buy. I installed an OpenX ad server and, by the next evening, we delivered almost triple the impressions we thought we’d serve. That idea hatched the Independent Media Network.”

“Overhead should be zero”

Both founders are very clear that the network is more a labor of love than anything that will make them rich. “I’m under no illusion that Doug and I are going to be tying our yachts up together in Nantucket,” Seidman says. They have no personal financial investment in the company, nor have they sought outside investors. The goal is simple: to turn local reporting into something a good journalist can survive on.

Seidman thinks that Connecticut is uniquely fertile ground for hard-nosed, independent journalists to build beats. “We don’t have a county government system,” he says. “What happens is, every town has a school, every town has a town government and a town budget. You have very small units. Economically, it’s very difficult to cover as a newspaper.” In addition, the state’s relative proximity to the New York City metro area and well-off demographic tend to increase the price of the network’s average ad placement.

What makes local a unique challenge, Seidman says, is how expensive it is on a per-reader basis. “[A reporter] has to go to the town meeting and sit there for four hours. It doesn’t scale well. The economics of it don’t support a middle management structure.”

That’s why the IMN encourages members to use free platforms like WordPress, though not all do. “There’s a lot of redundant services and stuff out there that people don’t need to be paying for,” Seidman says. “Their overhead should be zero.”

Local business caters to local business

In the years since the network’s founding, Seidman has found that national brand campaigns are not as profitable for local news sites. “BuzzFeed might make a couple million bucks a year, even though the CPM is low, because they have so much traffic volume. If somebody is getting 1,500 pageviews a day, they’re not going to be able to live off of that,” Seidman says.

National advertisers are looking for the greatest number of impressions, while local advertisers want — and are willing to pay for — genuine engagement with a specific and attentive audience. By reporting reliably on town issues and generating quality, local content, IMN members can offer advertisers just that.

Many IMN members have experimented with using Google AdSense before teaming up to sell premium content to local businesses. Steve Mazzacane, who has a background in politics, runs Branford Seven and The Guilford Atticus full time. “AdSense is filler,” he says. “I can make $15 a month with AdSense. I only use that if I have empty space to fill.”

When Mazzacane was launching Branford Seven, he thought the ideal business model would be to sell expensive ad packages — around $700 a month — to a handful of major brands. What he found was that getting as many small businesses to advertise as possible created a more reliable revenue stream.

“We’re a local business. We want to cater to local business,” he says. “Once you get above $300, $400, $500 a month, small businesses can’t afford you.” Mazzacane is currently putting together a special offer for companies that want to pay less than $200 a month; he’ll be launching a new website in a third Connecticut location this spring.

Solving the ethical dilemma

That each member has the independence to sell ads to whomever they want for however much they want is an essential part of the Independent Media Network’s structure. “We don’t want to collide with our members,” says Seidman. “Part of what we do is trust. People don’t sign a contract.”

For example, although the network doesn’t sell sponsored content on behalf of its members, members are free to sell it independently. Hardy is wary of sponsored content, saying “It makes you look like you’ve been bought — and it’s bad.” But some members, like Mazzacane, have given it a try and are satisfied with the result.

“There’s a lot of companies that want to pay for content,” says Seidman. “We’re leaving a lot of money on the table there.”

Even selling traditional ad placements can be problematic for lifelong journalists who have recently struck out on their own. Mark Chapman helps his wife run Nancy on Norwalk, a local political site. Chapman says, in selling ad space to political campaigns, he’s had to tell multiple people: “You’re buying ad space, not editorial space.” One candidate even threatened to pull their ads based on “editorial treatment.”

With the Independent Media Network, journalists don’t have to worry about the ethical conundrums of both producing news content and selling it. Patrick Scully runs The Hanging Shad, an IMN member site for which he writes statehouse news from an insider’s point of view. “I’m not an advertising person. I’m a writer, I’m a reporter, I’m a commentator, an analyst,” he says. “I prefer to keep a firewall between myself and the advertising. I don’t want to sell it. I don’t want to have anything to do with it.”

A whole bunch end up doing karaoke

Different members rely on the network for different things. For some, Hardy’s technical expertise is the main draw; for others who are just starting out, like The Wolcott Whisper’s Christopher O’Brien, content sharing and traffic through external linking are some of the biggest benefits. In the end, the most valuable tools for the members are the basics, not, Seidman points out, buzzwords like big data, geolocation, or SEO.

Of course, not everyone is thriving. Chapman and his wife, who use their son as technical support for their site, collectively have more than 60 years in journalism experience. Chapman’s wife left her last job as a reporter in Norwalk in order to focus on reporting corruption in local government. Today, he says their site gets more engagement than the local daily, and many community members credit her work with the election of a new mayor for the first time in eight years. “We hit a nerve,” Chapman says. But so far, it’s not enough to pay the bills.

Before starting the site in Norfolk, Chapman and his wife ran an independent news site, the Englewood Edge, in Florida. They used Google AdSense to generate revenue, meaning a check would arrive whenever they earned more than $100, usually every few months. Since opening up shop in Connecticut and teaming up with the network, however, Chapman says money has been coming in much more regularly. “I am a believer in the network. I’m a believer in that we may well have the answer here,” says Chapman. “We’re not going to get rich because of them, but I think it will be sooner rather than later — by spring or summer, we could be at least paying the bills and breaking even.”

But, as Chapman — who used to sing cabaret — points out, it’s anything but easy. “As American Idol and The Voice show you, you have a whole lot of really talented people, but only .001 percent of them seem to become stars,” he says. “Then you’ve got a whole bunch who make a living, and you’ve never heard of them. Then you have a whole bunch who wind up doing karaoke.”

These days, breaking even is the primary goal of many independent local news reporters. The role of networks like Seidman and Hardy’s in simultaneously reducing overhead and increasing revenues for such sites has the potential to make possible journalism that, as Patch’s decline shows, is increasingly challenging to finance. Though it’s not clear whether IMN is sustainable for the long term — or whether its success is replicable in less monied states — for now, at least, Connecticut residents, be they cigar aficionados or Red Sox fans, are getting content that, without the network, might struggle to exist.

Image by UConn Libraries MAGIC used under a Creative Commons license.

Some people want a lot more Winter Olympics; some people want no Winter Olympics at all

Posted: 18 Feb 2014 07:30 AM PST

sochi-olympics-logoThe folks at NBC’s Breaking News have a post up looking at how their users responded to the arrival of a huge story — the Sochi Winter Olympics. (Breaking News is ahead of the pack at encouraging readers to curate their content — by blocking stories they’re not interested in and asking for more push alerts on others.)

Since the Olympics began on Feb. 6, “2014 Sochi Olympics” has become our most muted topic ever as users choose to avoid spoilers and consume Olympics coverage in their own time. And while more users are muting “2014 Sochi Olympics” than anything else, it is also our second-most alerted topic, meaning many users want real-time alerts on the Olympics.

Breaking News editors have published around 225 news items since events first began in Sochi on Feb. 6, including news on cultural moments, weather reports, pictures, video and of course, event results. When it comes to event results specifically, Breaking News users are choosing a spoiler-free experience. Nearly three times as many users are choosing to mute “Olympics event results” as oppose to alerting it.

(As an NBC property, of course, Breaking News has an incentive to encourage people to get their results at night on TV.)

It’s a dead horse I’ve beaten many times, but I wish more news sites had similar capacity for user filtering — to tell NYTimes.com “I don’t care about sports,” or Gawker.com “Never show me media stories again,” or Wired.com “I’m insane, make sure to highlight every last story about wearables.” It’s a real issue for news sites that produce large amounts of content but can only show so much through their front doors.

After the demise of its network, The Colorado Independent is born again on its own

Posted: 18 Feb 2014 07:00 AM PST

Susan Greene got the call about six weeks after she became editor of The Colorado Independent in early 2013: The American Independent News Network, which funded the nonprofit online news organization, was closing the site. At its peak, AINN had built a network of a half-dozen state-based sites to cover local government and politics from a left-leaning perspective. But over time, cutbacks trimmed their number until it was Colorado’s time to go too.

“It was disappointing, and a little confusing, and a little scary,” said Greene, a former Denver Post reporter and columnist.

But The Colorado Independent wasn’t willing to go quietly. Despite the impending closure, the Independent was able to stay afloat by wrangling funding from two local foundations, revamping its staff and updating its web presence — “Founded 2006. Born again, 2013,” the Independent’s homepage blares. And Greene says that, with a growing readership and plans to expand its staff, the Independent is primed to continue to grow.

One of the promises of digital media was that it would encourage a more networked kind of journalism — using the reduced cost of publishing to build news sites at multiple scales, benefiting from shared resources and the fact that any article is only a link away. But The Colorado Independent is an example of a news outlet moving in the opposite direction — from part of a network to a more focused solo player.

Since the Independent re-launched last year, Greene said the organization has been able to better focus its coverage on Colorado and not deal with management in Washington because “their mission, at AINN, was ever-changing, especially at the end…Essentially, there were some frustrations that there were generations of people coming and going in Washington. It wasn’t managed out of Colorado, and it needed to be managed in Colorado.”

IRScc
Passing the nonprofit test: A guide for nonprofit news outlets on how to get 501(c)(3) status
But creating an independent Independent wasn’t a clean break. Though the Independent has since unveiled its own website and is editorially independent, AINN still serves as its fiscal agent as it waits for the IRS to grant it 501(c)3 status — a notoriously lengthy process for nonprofit journalism outfits.

“We feel really confident about our application because we don’t sell ads and we don’t sell subscriptions,” Greene said. “Those are the big red flags for the IRS. They don’t apply to us. Our relationship with AINN is that they are our fiscal sponsor. So, if people make donations to us, then they’re donating to AINN.”

(It’s a little unclear what AINN actually is these days. It hasn’t posted new content on its website since September, and judging by their Twitter and LinkedIn profiles, all the AINN staffers listed there now work elsewhere. When I asked Greene who I could talk to about AINN’s status, she directed me to David Brock, the conservative-turned-liberal who founded Media Matters for America and is listed as a member of AINN’s board of directors. Brock told me that AINN’s board has something in the works to revive the the organization’s remains, but he said it was too early to disclose the details of the plan.)

Most of The Colorado Independent’s funding since it relaunched has come from two local foundations — The Gill Foundation and the Bohemian Foundation — which had previously supported the Independent and AINN. It’s also more recently attracted what Greene called “sizable grants” from the Zell Family Foundation and the Douglas H. Phelps Foundation, in addition to “dozens of individual contributors, just people who read us and support us.”

She would not disclose how much the Independent has received in grants, but said the site is “within our budget, and we’re paying our bills, and we’re planning on growing actively.” Greene also said the Independent is in the process of attracting new donors to contribute.

But the Independent’s independence has come under scrutiny from some due to the site’s donor base. The Independent was denied credentials for its staffers to access the floor of the state Legislature during the 2014 session. A committee of five Colorado capitol correspondents reviews credential applications and then makes recommendations to legislative leaders on who should or should not be credentialed to get floor access.

The committee was created in 2008, and it has rejected requests from the Independent a number of times, said committee member Joe Hanel, a correspondent for the Durango Herald. He said the backers of the Gill and Bohemian foundations have been longtime Democratic supporters and are “credited widely with being indispensable in flipping the state House and flipping Colorado from a red state to a fairly blue state right now.” (The Washington Independent, which used to be AINN’s national news site, faced similar problems getting Congressional credentials a few years ago.)

“The [Colorado] Independent has been a vehicle to advance a partisan agenda for several years now,” Hanel told me. “It has a few different employees now, and they say they are very different, but the money remains the same.”

The Independent is still waiting on a final decision from the president of the state Senate and the speaker of the state House on whether it will be credentialed, but a lawyer representing the publication sent a letter earlier this month to the legislators calling the committee’s decision “counter-sensical.”

“The Colorado Independent, is, in fact, is a truly independent news organization, unbeholden to, and not operating under the auspices of, any political advocacy group,” attorney Steve Zansberg wrote.

Greene cites the site’s five-person staff, which includes former Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News staffers and is bolstered by a corps of freelancers, as a means of showing that the Independent is committed to nonpartisan journalism.

Only in late December did the Independent get the ability to track its own web analytics — AINN previously managed that — and in January it recorded 75,627 pageviews. Greene said she hopes to double or triple that this year, with plans in place to expand the staff and increase the amount of content it publishes.
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