Nieman Journalism Lab |
- The Boston Globe offers newspaper delivery in Florida
- All Alternatives Considered: How Slate thinks a daily podcast can fit into your evening commute
- Come work for Nieman Lab
- New U.S. guidelines on protections for journalists aren’t clear on who they apply to
| The Boston Globe offers newspaper delivery in Florida Posted: 26 Feb 2014 11:31 AM PST One of the benefits of your newspaper’s publisher also being the owner of a baseball team? He sees spring training as a circulation opportunity. The Boston Globe announced today it will begin delivering the newspaper around Ft. Myers, Florida. That means if you live in Lee or Collier counties, you can get the Globe delivered to you seven days a week or pick it up down the street at the 7-Eleven. Having satellite markets for newspaper circulation — particularly in snowbird paradise — is not entirely unusual; you can, for example, get The New York Post delivered to you in Florida as well. With Nana and Pop-Pop among the ranks of retirees in the Sunshine State, Florida makes sense as a market for out-of-town news. But in this case there’s also a bit of John Henry magic at play. The new owner of the Globe is preparing new products for the paper, online and in print. Expanding circulation to Florida could be a boost to both of his franchises, as his newspaper and his ball club (and his newspaper’s coverage of his ball club), are coming together for Grapefruit League play. From the Globe’s news release:
|
| All Alternatives Considered: How Slate thinks a daily podcast can fit into your evening commute Posted: 26 Feb 2014 09:02 AM PST When Slate decided to get into the daily drive-time podcast business, they decided to take a cue from a proven winner: sports radio. At least the public radio version of sports radio: Specifically, they decided to hire NPR’s Mike Pesca for the launch of a new daily podcast — a departure from Slate’s other podcasts which are delivered mostly in weekly installments.
“Slate loves podcasts,” Bowers said. “They do really well for us, and everyone wants to be involved. We want to figure out how to smartly grow without overextending ourselves, but we’re going to keep growing.” Pesca’s new podcast is one step towards that. Everything from the host to the format to when the show will be released, is designed to try to capture the best possible audience, Bowers told me. The currently unnamed show will run 20 minutes (as opposed to up to an hour or many Slate podcast episodes), and be delivered to listeners in the afternoon just in time for the evening commute home, Bowers said. Expect it to launch in April. This means building a new habit in Slate’s audience, moving listeners used to a weekly fix to a daily routine. While Slate releases podcasts nearly every day, no single show is produced on a day-to-day basis. Most of Slate’s podcasts are released overnight, and listeners typically download them in the morning, Bowers told me. By releasing Pesca’s show earlier in the day, they hope to push people into developing a regular habit. Bowers said the show will be topical, with conversations and interviews on the day’s news, recognizing that people already get their breaking news in other ways. They want the show to fill in the lines of top stories a little more. “We thought it would be fun to take the most interesting things about the flood of information coming across the screen and drill down more,” Bowers said. Though Pesca was already a host for Slate’s Hang up and Listen, it’s his previous life for NPR that will be helpful in not only making the show lively and accessible, but also in delivering something timely, Bowers said. Slate also plans to bring on a dedicated producer specifically to work on Pesca’s show. The genesis of Pesca’s new show came from an experiment with the popular Political Gabfest podcast in the fall of 2013. During the government shutdown Slate decided to take the show nightly, with a recap of the day’s developments on the budget talks between President Obama and Congress. Bowers said the Gabfest Extra shows, which lasted the duration of the shutdown, proved successful, drawing in what he said were “big numbers, much bigger than expected.” (Bowers declined to offer more concrete figures.) Gabfest Extra proved Slate’s listeners had an appetite for a higher dose of shows. They’ve since produced “Extra” installments of other podcasts tied to timely events or news. “It made all of us realize there could be a market for a kind of evening, drive-time companion to the day’s news,” Bowers said. An audience pulling down 2 million downloads a month (granted, downloads is a somewhat murky metric for gauging listeners) may not seem like a lot in comparison to a radio audience. (NPR’s All Things Considered — probably the most popular evening drive-time option among much of Slate’s audience — gets around 11 million listeners a week.) But at the scale of what Slate is doing, the number looks good. More importantly, advertisers are paying to get on Slate’s shows. Slate publisher Matt Turck told Business Insider that podcasts now make up between 5 percent to 10 percent of Slate’s advertising revenue. “We’re making money, there’s great advertiser interest, and we have a lot of ambition for other things we can do,” Bowers said.
Photo by mbschn used under a Creative Commons license. |
| Posted: 26 Feb 2014 07:38 AM PST
This job will join our bustling little Harvard newsroom (currently made up of three reporters and me) to report on journalism innovation — innovation in how news gets reported, produced, distributed, discovered, consumed, and paid for. If you enjoy the sort of stories you read here and would like a chance to report, write, and edit them full time, you might be a good candidate. For more details, see my writeup from a previous time we had an opening and, of course, the job listing linked above. A few notes about the position, which is awesome: — While we'll look at candidates with different levels of experience, I'm particularly looking for someone who would be able to split time between writing and editing. Someone who already has some experience and skill in that part of the job — assigning stories, working with freelancers, editing copy, writing headlines, making art decisions, and so on — would be especially welcome to apply. — This person’s work would have a special emphasis on mobile: how smartphones (and to a lesser degree tablets) are changing the landscape of news. — Because of the way Harvard hiring works, the job posting lists this position as “a term appointment ending June 30, 2014.” Many (nearly all, I believe) Harvard jobs of this type are officially run as a series of one-year term appointments that end at the end of Harvard’s fiscal year. In the five years since the Lab launched, every full-time position we've had has been posted under these terms, and every one of them has been renewed every year. Changes in funding could alter that in the future, of course, but if we’re happy with the work being done, our expectation is that this person would stay well beyond that date. Don’t let that be a hindrance. — To be considered for the position, you must apply at the Harvard HR site linked above, where you should include a cover letter telling me why you think you'd be right for the job. (Don't email me a resume directly; I'm not allowed to consider anyone who doesn't go through the official HR process.) |
| New U.S. guidelines on protections for journalists aren’t clear on who they apply to Posted: 26 Feb 2014 07:00 AM PST Our friend Jeff Hermes over at Harvard’s Digital Media Law Project has a post noting with concern a just-released set of U.S. Department of Justice guidelines around the propriety of investigating journalists:
|
We have an opening for a staff writer here at Nieman Lab. If you're interested, | You are subscribed to email updates from Nieman Journalism Lab To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |