Nieman Journalism Lab |
- LinkedIn is now a platisher (there’s that word again)
- Expect more mobile apps from The New York Times
- Are quizzes the new lists? What BuzzFeed’s latest viral success means for publishing
- Facebook friend of the court: The complicated relationship between social media and the courts
- Measuring how much print newspapers matter
- What to do when your video is winning social media, but it’s a copy that’s getting the clicks?
| LinkedIn is now a platisher (there’s that word again) Posted: 19 Feb 2014 10:24 AM PST Prior to today, only the likes of Bill Gates, Arianna Huffington, or Ban Ki-moon could post extended content on LinkedIn. But starting Wednesday, LinkedIn said it was expanding the ability to publish content to the masses beyond its select group of “influencers.” In a blog post announcing the move, director of product management Ryan Roslansky said 25,000 users would initially gain access to the publishing tools, with more added over the next several months. Why would LinkedIn want to join the plastisher ranks of Medium, BuzzFeed, and others? In his post, Roslansky said LinkedIn influencer posts typically generate a fair amount of traffic:
The average user obviously won’t drive that much traffic, but collectively they may help redefine how LinkedIn is perceived and attract more users — especially paying premium users — to LinkedIn, Mike Isaac at Recode argues.
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| Expect more mobile apps from The New York Times Posted: 19 Feb 2014 10:13 AM PST I think that’s a fair takeaway from this job posting for an iOS developer (emphasis mine). Nothing shocking there, of course, but it would seem to confirm the idea that the new set of paid products expected in the coming months will have both native-app and web components to them. It’s also the first time (I think? could be wrong here) we’ve seen travel and health mooted publicly as top-tier candidates for new-product status. (Dining, the new Need to Know product, and something from opinion were the three candidates Ken Doctor got out of Mark Thompson late last year.) |
| Are quizzes the new lists? What BuzzFeed’s latest viral success means for publishing Posted: 19 Feb 2014 08:32 AM PST Lately, it seems like the hardest content format to avoid on the social web is the BuzzFeed quiz. What city should I actually live in? Paris. How will I die? Eaten by piranhas. Should I learn to code? IDK, maybe? Which Al Roker am I? I’m Too old for Drake Al Roker. The quizzes, ranging from the almost serious to the utterly absurd, have been gaining so much traction on the web that Slate saw fit to publish a quiz of their own titled, “Which BuzzFeed quiz are you?” — which, Ouroboros-like, prompted even more metacommentary: Summer Anne Burton, BuzzFeed’s managing editorial director, is leading the quiz initiative. “I had a data team pull numbers for the end of 2013, and there was a quiz that our entertainment editor had done months previous — Which Grease Pink Lady are you? — that hadn’t really been on my radar before,” she says. “Somehow, over the course of the year, it had accumulated the most digital shares of any post of the year.” (I’m Rizzo. Joseph is Sandy. Justin is Frenchy.) After that, Burton kept an eye on quizzes and came to realize how intensely shareable they could be. Ashley Perez, BuzzFeed’s travel editor, made the quiz “What city should you actually live in?” — over 20 million views. “We had a few staff meetings where I mentioned it,” Burton says. “Our staff is very excited when things get a response. People started experimenting even more around the beginning of the year.” BuzzFeed developers built a template for quizzes into their custom CMS about a year ago. “We wanted to have interactive games, but not have the developers build them every time, so that we could experiment freely,” says Burton. After around a month of experimentation and data collection, Burton made a comprehensive tip sheet for building successful BuzzFeed quizzes. (The first rule: ”Make sure you break some of these rules sometimes.”) Burton encouraged quiz makers across the editorial team — both reporters and non-journalist BuzzTeam members — to put real thought into their quizzes, with serious consideration to how the questions would lead to the answers. She also told her team that quiz results should be more pleasant than dire, sticking to yet another BuzzFeed truism: No haters. A quiz is not, generally speaking, journalism, and it’s far from a new form. But it’s a highly compelling type of reader engagement that, despite its long history in media, BuzzFeed latched onto only recently. “For me, it’s almost impossible to not take a quiz,” says Burton. “You’re like: I must know what Muppet I am.” As we saw before with the rise of lists, once BuzzFeed find a format that works, expect to see a lot of them. The rapid pace at which BuzzFeed employees, including the news team, are producing new quizzes — several are published every day — says something about the companywide quest for traffic. It’s a feedback loop: recognizing the trend via analytics, strengthening the proprietary tools in their flexible publishing platform, and capitalizing quickly. With lists, BuzzFeed sought to put likable content into the most appealing, clickable format possible. Quizzes work the same way: “People really like to have organization and structure — it’s just appealing,” Burton says. “There’s something reassuring about it. Quizzes have that in common with lists — they make content accessible.”At the end of the day, while quizzes are formally comprised of questions and answers, what you’re getting is content that interests you disguised as a narrative about yourself. “It’s like the plate you serve your food on,” Burton says. “You don’t talk about the plate — you talk about the food.” Consider, for example, this Katie Notopoulos quiz that is actually a snarky commentary on the media’s tendency to exaggerate “learning to code” as a cure-all for any career. The quiz-as-vehicle-for-self-discovery is nothing new either, in either print or digital. From Teen Beat to Cosmo to LiveJournal, publishers have long taken advantage of the quiz for its ability to attract reader attention. Recently, journalists and academics alike have been thinking more about the quiz as an educational device for the audience — another method of delivering information. Author Jordan Shapiro writes in Forbes that quizzes tap into our narcissistic desire to be categorized, which has been exploited in quiz form since the early 20th century.For others, online quizzes are reminiscent of playground games like MASH and paper fortune tellers, both of which aim to predict the players’ future through random means. In the same way, BuzzFeed quizzes are crafted to create the illusion of truth, or potential truth. “You sort of write them like horoscopes, with tidbits people can relate to,” says Burton. Creating a character type that readers can compare themselves to is a genre of content that BuzzFeed has long been working to perfect with its lists about identity, which features centrally into the company’s strategy for sharing. “The quiz is kind of like the broken-down-to-its-core of what BuzzFeed is — it gives someone something that they can relate to well enough that they can share it with others,” says Burton. “When people share things, it’s partially because of what it says about them. Quizzes are like the literal version of all that.”Quizzes have always been about sharing, according to Burton. What’s fun about taking quizzes in Seventeen Magazine with your girlfriends is the sharing of personal information and opening up to each other face-to-face. From a technological standpoint, BuzzFeed is working to recreate the pleasure of that experience on the web. That’s why, in addition to making quiz questions more attractive, BuzzFeed developers also focused on making your quiz results easily sharable.
Burton says she saw the introduction of easy, clean looking ways to share your quiz results on Facebook and Twitter as a “big turning point” in the rise of quizzes at BuzzFeed. Also key to sharing was making them more easily usable on mobile, where they already perform well. (BuzzFeed content gets around 50 percent of its traffic from mobile, but the most popular quizzes are getting mobile traffic closer to 70 percent.) “For me, anecdotally, quizzes lend themselves to mobile because people are taking them with friends or administering them to each other,” says Burton. In that way, quizzes go from being digitally social to a literally social game for users. Its rapid adoption of quizzes is a useful window into understanding how BuzzFeed sees itself as a platform. “We’ve talked about whether or not people would like it if there was a place they could share the results of different quizzes as a snapshot of themselves,” says Burton. “We’ve joked that it would be a great dating service.” BuzzFeed’s marketing team also has access to the quiz template as a platform that brands could possibly take advantage of — think “Where should you go on a road trip?” sponsored by Hertz. Says BuzzFeed spokesperson Catherine Bartosevich: “You can expect lots of sponsored quizzes in your Facebook and Twitter feeds soon.” For the time being, BuzzFeed collects only the same data on quizzes that it does on other content types — engagements, shares, unique visitors, etc. But the company says it’s working on building custom analytics for them. What information will be collected, and how it will be used, remains to be seen, but suffice it to say that plenty of people would be interested in knowing the favorite foods, songs, artists, places, cars, jobs, brands, and more of millions of BuzzFeed readers. Though quizzes are, in some ways, perennially popular, there’s also a significant chance that BuzzFeed’s quiz bubble could burst — either because of outside forces like a Facebook algorithm change or just because people get tired of seeing them. Some recent quizzes are almost mocking in tone, suggesting, perhaps, a bit of internal quiz fatigue. (For example, “Are you in love?” which only offers the options Yes or No and a taunt, or the borderline Dadaist “Who are you?” quiz.) Some have asked the same question about lists — whether or not they’re a fad that readers across the Internet will inevitably grow tired of. What BuzzFeed’s embrace of quizzes suggests, however, is, should that ever happen, its employees — from reporters to developers — stand ready to jump on the next big thing. |
| Facebook friend of the court: The complicated relationship between social media and the courts Posted: 19 Feb 2014 08:00 AM PST In February 2013, a Massachusetts Superior Court Judge barred the use of Twitter in the courtroom by reporters covering a murder case — while still allowing other forms of media such as cameras and liveblogging. Judge Peter Lauriat later said reporters could send tweets only from a separate room while covering the murder trial of Nathaniel Fujita. Liveblogging okay, but livetweeting not? It was another example of how unsettled the rules are when it comes to social media in the courtroom. Marilyn Krawitz, a law lecturer at the University of Notre Dame Australia, has studied social media and the criminal justice system in the U.S., the U.K., and Australia. For journalists covering the courts, the good news is that a growing number of courts allow tweeting and other forms of live chronicling, but the rules for how vary widely, not just across countries, but even within the same state, county, or federal court jurisdictions, Krawitz said. While no tweeting — or cameras, for that matter — are allowed in the U.S. Supreme Court, a metro reporter is often able to tweet from their local district court. (Our friends at the Digital Media Law Project have a handy guide that looks at different jurisdictions.) Krawitz has studied the issue for a number of years, publishing several papers that look into the effects of social media on the criminal justice system. She spoke recently at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and said plenty of uncertainty remains when it comes to social media and the courts, between how journalists use it, as well as judges, jurors, and lawyers. Even when reporters believe they know the social media guidelines for a given court, they can still run into problems, Krawitz said. In January 2012, Guardian sports reporter Jamie Jackson tweeted the name of a juror during a trial, as well as information presented in court while the jury was not present. The juror was replaced and the judge banned the use of Twitter during the trial. In April 2012, a judge declared a mistrial after a reporter at The Topeka Capital-Journal accidentally tweeted a courtroom photo that showed a juror. In some ways, social media is just another spin on the age-old tension between journalists and the courts, a tension that’s often focused on technology. The benefits of using Twitter and Facebook in court are obvious to journalists, Krawitz said: “The public becomes more engaged, you hold the court up to more scrutiny,” and you don’t have to leave the courtroom to publish information, she said. But in the broader sense, Krawitz said things like Twitter and Facebook help support “the idea of what happens in courts should be open to the public, that the public has a right to know, and that increases the probability that what happens [in court] will be above board.” The number of examples of this conflict keeps building up. In 2011, the Arkansas Supreme Court order a retrial for a man convicted of murder because a juror tweeted during the case. That same year, a juror in the U.K. was sentenced to eight months in jail after contacting a defendant on Facebook. Last December, the U.K.’s attorney general issued an advisory warning the public that publishing information about court cases on social media could potentially lead to being held in contempt of court. In other court systems, judges are considering banning phones and mobile devices, or asking jurors to disclose their social media accounts, Krawitz said. One reason the criminal justice system has such a complicated relationship with social media is because lawyers and judges don’t always use or understand the technology, Krawitz said. “If judges use social media, it can be permanent and it can be public and it has potential for the public to lose confidence in the judiciary,” Krawitz said. In her research, Krawitz found that judges, like the rest of us, can make the mistake of tweeting or posting the wrong thing or friending the wrong person. But for judges, the consequences can be more severe than online embarrassment. After a judge in Florida was found to be Facebook friends with a state attorney in a trial he was hearing, the case was later appealed to another district. In 2009, Ernest “Bucky” Woods, a judge in Georgia, resigned from his post after it was discovered he was exchanging Facebook messages with a defendant. In a way, judges face some of the same problems as journalists when it comes to social media: The appearance of a “friendship” on Facebook or Twitter may not be as strong a tie as it seems. A number of states have taken steps to prevent judges and lawyers from friending one another. But whether or not being connected on Facebook is a sign of true and lasting friendship, Krawitz said it often comes down to public perception: “A reasonable person could believe there was an appearance of impropriety.” As a result of these kinds of policies, as well as the confusion around them, some judges simply forgo being involved in social media at all, Krawitz said. “These judges, I think, don’t understand how social media works — or it’s just too easy for them in an impulsive moment to write on social media and lose their job,” Krawitz said. While a policy of abstinence might seem logical, it can create a more problems in the future. If a judge doesn’t engage with social networks, what happens when those judges are called on to make rulings in cases involving online media, Krawitz asked. Image of New York courthouse by Jorge Martinez used under a Creative Commons license. |
| Measuring how much print newspapers matter Posted: 19 Feb 2014 07:30 AM PST The Boston Globe brought my attention to a paper recently published in the journal Political Communication: “Dead Newspapers and Citizens’ Civic Engagement,” by Lee Shaker. As the title suggests, Shaker wanted to measure how losing a newspaper changes the way residents interact with each other, and with civic issues. While academics have struggled to accurately measure the impact of newspapers on communities in the past, Shaker says, their demise actually provides a unique opportunity to do so. He finds that civic engagement, as measured by a suite of indicators, declined notably in Seattle and Denver when their second papers (the Post-Intelligencer and Rocky Mountain News) closed a few years back.
There’s prior art here; Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido found in 2009 that the closure of the Cincinnati Post (which primarily served the city’s Kentucky suburbs across the river) was correlated to a decline in a number of behaviors related to voter engagement. The next question: Does the observable decline persist over time, or do the news ecosystem and the audience respond to the one-time shock of a closure? |
| What to do when your video is winning social media, but it’s a copy that’s getting the clicks? Posted: 19 Feb 2014 07:00 AM PST What should a news organization do when an unauthorized copy of video they produced is going viral on YouTube? That’s the question Dallas ABC affiliate WFAA faced when a commentary by its veteran sportscaster Dale Hansen about gay football player Michael Sam, started to spread like wildfire on social media. In case you haven’t seen it: Or, as Upworthy put it: Old White Guy Drops A Monster Speech On Anti-Gay Football Teams. Seriously Impressive Performance. People loved it and spread it far and wide across their social networks — over 4.5 million plays at last count. One problem: That wasn’t an official WFAA video that was spreading. That was someone else’s rip of WFAA’s video — specifically, someone who runs a YouTube channel named MyDailyWorldNews. WFAA wasn’t getting the benefit of those ad dollars on YouTube, and it wasn’t getting the benefit of any viewers who might decide to follow their YouTube channel. Someone else was. At the NewsBiz blog, WFAA web editor Matt Goodman writes about the thinking going on at WFAA at this point:
Their answer: Let it ride.
I think that, as far as it goes, that’s the correct answer. Issuing a takedown on the samizdat YouTube vid in the hopes that you’d push people to WFAA.com is basically hopeless. Videos go viral on video platforms — YouTube 95 percent of the time, maybe Vimeo or couple others once in a while — not on individual TV station websites. I’m reminded of the blowback the Columbus Dispatch faced when they had a YouTube clip taken down under similar circumstances. But let me suggest a further answer, which is that the truly correct choice would have been to have posted the video to YouTube in the first place. WFAA did eventually post a copy on YouTube two days after the fact — but only after it had already spread far and wide. In fact, by the time WFAA posted to YouTube, not just one or two but seven different YouTubers had already uploaded versions of the video. For instance, Dallas resident Noreen Choudhury was so inspired by Hansen’s comments that she hit rewind on her DVR and posted a shakycam video of her television set: She tweeted about it at the time: If seven other people thought this was a commentary that YouTube viewers were going to have outsized interest in, maybe WFAA should have too. I get that every news outlet is trying to maximize on-site video plays and ad impressions. But when you have a video with this kind of obvious viral potential — and with a potential audience that far outstrips the local audience who would come to your website — throw it up on YouTube and get ahead of the uploaders who’ll otherwise beat you to it. The audience WFAA.com normally attracts — people in North Texas — is a tiny subset of the people who reacted to this video. And that strikes me as a pretty predictable fact. (Just as I suspect that two follow-on WFAA videos — Dale reacting to all the hubbub and his next commentary a week later — would be getting a fair amount of play on social media if they’d been posted on YouTube. At this typing, each video has been tweeted…three times.) I hope that Goodman’s right that letting the video spread “expose[s] WFAA to a viewership that may have otherwise had no idea about who we are…perhaps some of these folks will return to us for news because of the experience Dale gave them.” Maybe! But roughly 98 percent or so of those web viewers don’t live in Dallas and will likely never think of the letters W, F, A, and A in that order again. You shouldn’t let a local-audience strategy prevent a national-audience play on those occasions where it’s available. And if your goal in posting video really is to increase content discovery and brand recognition, YouTube is 1,000× better at that than your own site. It’s possible I’m invested in this because seven years ago, when I was working at WFAA’s then-corporate-sibling Dallas Morning News, there was a piece of WFAA archival video that we wanted to feature. We had the video in digital form, but it wasn’t embeddable — so I was asked to upload it to my personal YouTube account because that was the simplest (only?) way to make it available to our readers. That video — of a WFAA reporter getting her lips frozen during a winter storm standup — was pretty funny, and it’s gotten 26,900 views to date and 18 comments since. Nothing huge — but substantially more than it would have gotten if it remained solely on WFAA.com. Anyway, I just hope that the next time WFAA or any local TV station or newspaper has a piece of video they think might blow up in social media, they at least consider seeding the viral beast themselves — rather than watching someone else do it and reap all those views. |
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