Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Paywalls are not a cure-all: Evidence from Gannett
- BuzzFeed’s got style (and it ain’t AP’s)
- Watch new First Look employee Andy Carvin talk about a cat in a tree (and linguistics and evidentiality)
- Welcome to Radiotopia, a podcast network with the aesthetics of story-driven public radio
| Paywalls are not a cure-all: Evidence from Gannett Posted: 04 Feb 2014 06:31 PM PST The invaluable Rick Edmonds has a useful analysis of Gannett’s latest earnings and comes away with some disquieting findings. Key among them:
To sum that up: Gannett did get a boost in circulation revenue by putting up paywalls at its newspapers. But that’s tapped out: Gannett has already made about as much as it will from its paywalls, at least as currently structured. When you announce a paywall, you get a one-time boost from people who are willing to pay. But it plateaus. And maybe some of those subscribers eventually drop off. It’s not a growth model that does anything like replace the ongoing decline in print advertising revenue — which continues to decline somewhere in the high single digits every year. As Jeff Jarvis put it: So yes, it’s better to have $100 million than not to have $100 million. (The paywall skeptics, I think, generally don’t wrestle with this — that’s real money, and I don’t think there’s strong evidence that paywalls in the main have substantively limited newspapers’ ability to launch other innovations or engage with its audience.) But it is not a long-term “solution,” in any sense, to the real problem: the continuing decay of the print-centric business model that newspapers were built on. To put it starkly: Barring a significant change, newspapers will make less in 2014 than they did in 2013, less in 2015 than in 2014, and so on. The trendlines are not changing. Rick notes that the Gannett conference call included a question about the possibility of the company spinning off its newspapers, as Belo, Tribune, and others have done before. “In essence, Martore's answer was not now, but maybe later,” Rick writes. That Gannett — the largest newspaper company in America; the company that mastered the profit margin; the amalgamator of family papers — would be thinking of tossing its newspapers overboard tells you all you need to know about where most of the American newspaper business is headed. |
| BuzzFeed’s got style (and it ain’t AP’s) Posted: 04 Feb 2014 11:23 AM PST To the delight of Internet writers everywhere, BuzzFeed published their internal style guide today. There are some obvious points of humor — the correct capitalization of “catfished” and “?! (never !?)” are just two examples. But as was mentioned on Twitter this week, the Internet is a place where new words are invented all the time, and inevitably, journalists need rules around how to type them. Here’s BuzzFeed on how they came up with guidelines for everything from acronyms to headlines, corrections to formatting:
And one last bit of inadvertent, uh, advice:
Editor’s note: I’m happy to note that BuzzFeed style and Nieman Lab style agree often: no exclamation point on Yahoo, the serial comma, spaces around em dashes, startup vs. start up vs. start-up. But we use ebook rather than e-book, still capitalize Internet, use liveblog and livestream as one word rather than two, and take no firm position on the capitalization of “Juggalo.” |
| Posted: 04 Feb 2014 10:37 AM PST Andy Carvin, the social media guy at NPR for the past several years, is moving to First Look Media, the Omidyar/Greenwald startup.
This is as good a time as any to post a video I’ve been meaning to post for a while — Andy’s presentation at News Foo last November, a five-minute run through the language journalists use in breaking news. It’s entertaining — parsing “confirmed” vs. “reported” vs. “alleged” — but it’s also an quick, interesting detour into the linguistic concept of evidentiality. You can also see the dummy Twitter feed Andy was showing through the talk. |
| Welcome to Radiotopia, a podcast network with the aesthetics of story-driven public radio Posted: 04 Feb 2014 06:52 AM PST The idea behind Radiotopia is a simple one: strength in numbers. Radiotopia is a new podcast network launched this morning by PRX. Or it’s a “collective of the best story-driven shows on the planet…a new model for audience engagement and revenue growth in public radio,” to use its language. It brings together existing shows like Roman Mars’ 99% Invisible, Radio Diaries, Benjamin Walker’s Theory of Everything, and more. With $200,000 in funding from the Knight Foundation, PRX will attempt to create a new model for what they call “digital-first audio programming.” The seven shows will make up a collective, helping to market one another, providing guidance on technical issues, and sharing lessons on growing audiences. Radiotopia will provide the framework for raising money through grants or Kickstarter campaigns, selling sponsorships across the network, and sharing revenue between the shows. It’s the latest iteration of PRX’s long-term efforts to inject digital savvy (and a little unpredictability) into public radio — or whatever the digital equivalent of radio might be called. The broader mission of Radiotopia, says PRX CEO Jake Shapiro, is to create strategies to reach new audiences as well as a business model to support and grow independent audio programs. “We’re convinced there is a much bigger audience for each of them out there than they’ve been able to reach so far,” said Shapiro. (The shows collectively are downloaded more than 1.3 million times per month, according to PRX, although podcast listens are notoriously difficult to measure.) The money from Knight will help in the startup phase of Radiotopia, with some of the funding going directly to the producers of shows. The rest will be used by PRX to help in the marketing and distribution of the shows, Shapiro said. They’ll also be helped by Mailchimp, which signed up as a launch sponsor for the network and is working on email and distribution strategy with PRX. In its role as a technology maker and distributor for public media shows, PRX has worked with shows like Radiolab, This American Life, and The Moth. PRX has helped build apps, as well as been an advocate for getting shows and segments from independent producers on the air at public radio stations around the country. Podcasts come in all shapes and sizes — and a variety of business models. Some are passion projects whose only expenses are a nice microphone and a Mac with GarageBand installed; some run sponsorship messages from businesses before, during, or after the show; some rely heavily on donations from listeners. Some remain happily digital-only, while others — like 99% Invisible and Jesse Thorn’s Bullseye — also air (sometimes in sharply edited form) on public radio stations. The shows in the Radiotopia network all have a similar sensibility when it comes to audio, with programs that mix journalism, storytelling, radio drama, and found sounds. (This won’t be the place for two-hour shaggy-dog conversations about Apple’s latest iPhone.) The aesthetic might not be traditional public radio, but in many cases they’re NPR-ready. Shapiro said they’re aiming for digital audiences, growing listeners through apps, websites, and audio aggregators like Stitcher. But the programs in Radiotopia could also wind up on terrestrial radio if they can find the right fit, Shapiro said. “We see trends converging, and we’re not alone in that,” he said, “Mobile listening audience is growing, the advancing of the connected car, and the new ways smartphone listening is becoming seamless in comparison to the cumbersome days of podcast listening in the past.” The overall goals are to help these shows become sustainable and to keep adding shows to the Radiotopia family, Shapiro told me. That means helping producers create revenue through the network as well as individually, he said. For Radiotopia to work, Shapiro said, they’ll need to find the right balance between leveraging the network and enabling the shows’ identities to flourish. Think of Radiotopia as a public-radio-esque analog to what Earwolf is to comedy podcasts or 5by5 is to technology podcasts — which is to say, a mothership network to offer support, resources, and a launching pad. “We have confidence, both because of the programs, but we’re also bringing this into a growing market for story-hungry listeners,” Shapiro said. It’s a market PRX has been taking aim at for some time. Last summer PRX launched the PRX Remix app. The app is an endless stream of stories, segments, podcasts, and more, all curated from PRX shows by Mars. While podcasts and public radio shows can occupy the same space in listeners minds, the economics for each are very different, Mars told me. “The path to success for an independent public radio producer is pretty murky and can be quite dire,” he said. The barrier to entry for starting a podcast remains low and there are lots of opportunity to build an audience. While it might take a budget in the millions – not to mention an open slot in the schedule – to launch a public radio show, you can launch podcast off small, direct, donations from fans, he said. Podcasts can take any shape or format, and can have a direct relationship with fans, two elements that can be difficult for public radio shows, he said. Radiotopia can act as a platform for producers to become more entrepreneurial, focusing on improving their shows as well as ways to pay the bills, Mars said. “We want to create a place where really high-quality, story-driven stuff can live and people can make a go of it,” he said.
Mars said in his experience that kind of support and passion is only possible through the unique relationship a podcast can create with its audience. “People really want to champion you, they want to be a part of the show,” he said. As Mars wrote during the Kickstarter:
Mars said he thinks podcasts will continue to see a gradual growth, both in shows and in audience. It’s not an industry without its problems — Mars says the mechanisms for getting podcasts to listeners remain too complicated, even if it’s improved from the old iPod-docking days — but the potential for creativity and sustainability are there. “I’m excited for it to work, and for people to fall in love with these shows and to create an ecosystem for this stuff,” Mars said. |
This is something Mars obviously has experience with 99% Invisible, which now employs four people, including himself. (For those unfamiliar, 
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