Kamis, 06 Februari 2014

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Should The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other top publishers pool their video in a consortium?

Posted: 05 Feb 2014 10:43 AM PST

Interested in the business of high-quality web video? There’s a lot of good stuff from Washington Post video GM Steven Schiffman in this Beet.TV interview about the Post’s broad-strokes strategy for the business side of video.

But maybe the most interesting piece is an idea Schiffman keeps coming back to: For video to be a really significant business for someone like the Post, the key missing ingredient is scale, both in number of videos produced and in number of viewers watching them.

Scale matters both because of the obvious CPM math — More Viewers = More Ad Impressions = More $$$ — and because many potential advertisers won’t bother to engage with a video publisher until the number of eyeballs it can offer reaches critical mass. And individual news organizations, even very good ones like the Post, have trouble producing enough videos and views to matter to advertisers. After hiring more than 30 new journalists to produce video and building a separate video brand, the Post now gets about 5 million video views a month. But as Schiffman says:

Right now, four or five million video starts — even 10, even 20 million monthly video starts is still not enough to make this a vibrant business for premium publishers to do what they need to do to create the type of content in the ecosystem.

So if you need scale, how do you get it? Schiffman throws out a few ideas, but he returns twice to the idea of a video consortium among top publishers:

Perhaps premium publishers, rather than going through very large aggregators, can create consortiums amongst themselves and work together to build aggregate news brands, in the case of The Washington Post and other premium publishers. That’s one idea.

[...]

There’s an opportunity to potentially partner with what might be seen in other industries as a competitor, where other premium publishers along with The Washington Post could band together and create a service that potentially could be very competitive and very valuable to media buyers and advertisers.

In other words, imagine if the Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time Inc., and other top publishers decided to create a new unified, separate brand for all the high-quality video they produce. Videos could appear under that separate umbrella — what Hulu was for the networks whose content fed it — and they could also appear on publishers’ individual websites. So a great Times video could appear on washingtonpost.com and vice versa.

Maybe then you could then syndicate that total package to other, smaller news sites, with an ad rev share. The potential result would be more good video reaching more people, a pathway to much larger scale, and a way to increase time-on-site across all member publishers’ sites.

That’s an interesting idea! There’d be any number of hurdles to deal with — industry egos not least among them. Business ideas that can be pitched as “Hulu for X” or “iTunes for Y” don’t have the best track record. Other companies, like Watchup, are playing in the same territory; the CIR-led I Files tries do something similar in spirit, but limited to investigative reporting and hard news and set up as a YouTube channel rather than as an independent.

But Schiffman is talking about a very real problem: Producing quality video takes investments in staff and time, and getting people to watch the final product hasn’t been as successful as most news brands would like. If you want to improve the return on that investment, you need eyeballs, and it might be time to think of some nontraditional routes there.

What can make audio go viral? NPR experiments with building earworms for social media

Posted: 05 Feb 2014 09:33 AM PST

Editor’s note: Public radio produces a lot of audio — but it doesn’t always get the attention on sharing platforms that it might deserve. Our friends at NPR Digital Services want to fix that, which led to a series of experiments. Here, NPR's Eric Athas shares some of what they found.

digg-viral-audioBy now you’ve likely come across Digg’s terrific piece on viral audio. And if you haven’t ventured beyond the headline, it’s worth a read. The piece picks apart this question: How come audio never goes viral?

That’s a question we’ve been exploring over the past year here at NPR Digital Services. We set out to solve the viral audio challenge and we’ve discovered a few things worth adding to the conversation.

(Keep in mind: These findings are based on a small sample size.)

What’s keeping audio from going viral?

So why doesn’t audio go viral? (Or, as Stan Alcorn points out in his piece, why does it only sometimes?) It’s not because shareable audio doesn’t exist — it does. If you’re an audio listener, you’ve probably heard something amazing, surprising, or funny that you really wanted to share. But in many cases, there are boundaries that prevent shareable audio clips from spreading.

When we started experimenting around audio and social, we identified three hurdles:

Finding shareable audio takes too much time

Those must-listen, must-share audio clips are often buried within a four- or five-minute story or an even longer podcast. And the only way you’ll happen upon one is by listening to an entire piece. That’s starkly different from photos and written stories, which you can easily stumble upon through social media. This magnifies the challenge of viral audio: What will compel people to not only listen, but to share as well?

Shareable audio isn’t portable

Let’s say you’re listening to a podcast and you hear something amazing that you want to share. How do you do it? First of all, as Jesse Thorn mentions in the Digg article, you’re often doing something while you’re listening to audio — working out, driving to work, on the train, etc. And “when you’re driving a car, you’re not going to share anything.” Second, shareable audio doesn’t come with context, like a headline and image. This makes sharing in a place like Facebook challenging because a shareable moment within a larger piece can’t easily be extracted as a standalone post. You have to share the entire thing, and signal the exact time to listen.

Shareable audio isn’t produced for virality

Audio doesn't translate to the Internet the same way an image, video, or text article does. It’s not produced for the social web, which means it doesn’t have the look and feel of the things we’re used to sharing and seeing on Facebook and Twitter. That’s why NPR and member stations often “webify” radio stories. This process turns an audio story into a text story.

Viral audio experiments

What happens if these impediments are eliminated? How can we get more eyeballs (or ears) on audio? We put together a series of experiments to test these questions. We did this by creating digital packages that emphasized interesting sound, not text.

Here’s what we did:

Step 1: Find must-listen audio

For this step, we partnered with eight NPR member stations: KUNC, KPLU, KALW, WLRN, OPB, KUT, WBUR, and WHYY’s NewsWorks. The stations scoured their audio content for clips that just had to be listened to — in other words, the experience of listening to it was better than watching or reading it. This is important: We needed to offer a compelling reason to present it as sound.

Step 2: Package audio with web-friendly elements

Once we discovered must-listen audio — which was usually one or two minutes within a much longer story — we plucked it out. The station editor then created a digital package that showcased the sound, including a headline promising a unique listening experience, an image to make it portable on social media, and some text for context. At the bottom, it linked to the full version for listeners who wanted to dive deeper. That’s it. We were careful not to distract from the most important thing we had to offer — distinctive audio.

Step 3: Share it

With a published audio package in hand, we wanted to see how it would fare in the wild. We shared it far and wide on the Facebook and Twitter pages for NPR and stations. Then we watched and measured how people responded.

How we measured success

When we began this experiment, we focused on five questions to measure the success of each story: Did people share it? Did people comment on it? Did visitors click play on the audio? Was it a popular story on the station’s site? Did it attract a social audience? That’s how we determined whether or not these audio packages were effective.

Shareable audio packages

Station editors found all sorts of interesting audio and then created packages for the web. Here are just a few of these stories in the wild.

1. Mount Redoubt’s primal scream

Ever hear a volcano’s primal scream?

kplu-volcano-pageThis 10-second clip was pulled from a longer story by KPLU reporter Gabriel Spitzer. What’s interesting here is that after this was posted on the NPR Facebook page, some people clicked through, listened, and returned to Facebook to share their reactions to the primal scream. “Reminded me of a teakettle about to boil!” said one commenter. This page was the second most popular kplu.org story the week of July 15. Visitors listened to the audio: The SoundCloud clip has more than 6,200 plays. And 98 percent of the visitors came from social media.

2. Sounds from inside a hurricane

Here’s what it sounded like inside Hurricane Andrew:

wlrn-hurricane-pageIn 2012, WLRN produced an hour-long radio documentary marking the 20th anniversary of Andrew. The full documentary is chock full of sound from the 1992 hurricane. But this post is packaged around one incredible minute. The visitors, 89 percent of whom arrived from social media, clicked play more than 1,700 times.

3. What prison sounds like

I could write about how San Quentin State Prison inmates acted out the sounds of prison life, but you’re much better off listening to it yourself:

kalw-prison-pageNotice how the headline promises that you’ll listen to something? People who came across the headline understood that they were getting a listening experience. This piece, which was the most popular KALW story the week of October 7, generated more than 4,700 plays. And 94 percent of the page’s visitors came from social media.

More tests

Here’s What Advice From Colorado’s Talking Urinals Sounds Like (KUNC)

Hear What It Sounds Like Inside The Pacific Ocean (Oregon Public Broadcasting)

Listen: ‘Bending’ Sound Makes It Difficult to Hear Firefighter Alarms (KUT)

Listen: A Woman Describes What It’s Like To Nearly Drown (WBUR)

This is what sculptures sound like (NewsWorks)

Hear What a Familiar Tune Sounds Like with a Hearing Implant (KPLU)

What can we conclude?

As you can see, all of these experiments tackle the obstacles we outlined above, making the sound discoverable, portable, and simple to listen to. And although we aren’t ready to draw concrete conclusions based on this series of tests, we’re intrigued. People clicked on these headlines, came from social media, shared the posts, and listened to the audio at high rates.

These experiments are just the start. We will continue to examine how audio can work better on the social web. We also plan to expand this project to include other audio formats, such as news stories, analysis, audio, and shows. As we do, we'll be sure to share ideas, challenges, and discoveries.

Audio producers: Have you tried this approach? Do you have ideas for producing audio for the social web? We’d love to hear from you. Tweet at me @ericathas or shoot me an email at eathas@npr.org.

Graphic by Russ Gossett.

NBC News puts more emphasis on original digital video in its relaunch of NBCNews.com

Posted: 05 Feb 2014 08:02 AM PST

Television networks are good at producing video for broadcast. They haven’t always proven good at producing video for the web and mobile devices. What works on a big screen at 6:30 p.m. isn’t the same as what works on an iPhone.

NBC News is expanding its efforts in the original digital video arena and trying to bridge that divide. “We wanted to build a site that doesn’t feel like TV content chopped up for the web, but born for the digital age,” said NBC News president Deborah Turness on a conference call on Tuesday.

The network relaunched its website today with the goal of merging its television programming more fluidly with digital production, while simultaneously creating content for a digital-only audience. Design updates are meant to give the site a cleaner, more elegant feel and encourage what NBCNews.com executive editor Greg Gittrich called “continuous consumption.” (It also looks like a site designed for small screens first: It’s responsive, it features tablet-friendly large tap targets, and it asks you to navigate via the increasingly ubiquitous hamburger button, even on desktop. Even though NBCNews.com is now separate from MSNBC.com, you can detect some shared design DNA.) In addition, a new NBC app will launch this week, running off the same API as the website, allowing for what developers hope will be a more seamless user experience.

nbcnews article page

From a structural perspective, Turness says core digital teams will be working more collaboratively, and NBC producers will all be working to create multiplatform content. Specifically, she cites an upcoming investigative project about the Snowden files, which originated with digital journalists at NBC but will soon air, in part, on the network.

In addition, NBC will feature native advertisements on its homepage as well as native ad placements in the navigation. They’ll also be experimenting with new formats for display ads.

nbc news navigation

Julian March joined the NBC News digital team as senior vice president of editorial and innovation last month from ITV, where he was instrumental in building a very popular, very webby news platform built around small, iterative updates meant to harness the power of social and mobile. March says that his history at both Sky News and ITV has provided him plenty of experience in converting news outlets into multi-platform publishers.

“What you see here really is the beginning of a much bigger, deeper, story which will be to a great extent the reincarnation of NBC News into the 21st century,” he says.

A lot of the activity in creating digital-first video has come from print outlets that didn’t have a broadcast legacy — think of The Wall Street Journal’s forays into WorldStream, or The New York Times’ efforts around projects like Op-Docs. TV news operations, already producing tons of video, sometimes defaulted to simply putting the same pieces online that appeared on air.

NBC is launching at least two individual products aimed at exclusively online eyeballs. One, called Debunker, features NBC personalities factchecking major news stories, or, as Gittrich put it, “pulling apart the conventional wisdom.” Gittrich says NBC will also be making a big investment in animated video with Show Me, which will be voiced by Win Rosenfeld, a senior editor who came to NBC from NowThis News. Before that, he worked for Nova, where he first became interested in using illustrations to make complex, abstract ideas more simple.

“The idea behind Show Me is there are some concepts that are hard to make into compelling web video, because they’re so entrenched in non-tangible things,” says Rosenfeld. “We can illustrate something like GDP or gas prices without having to show the usual b-roll of people lining up at the pump, or a cash register opening and closing.”

Animation is fun, but it’s also a relatively low-cost video production process that allows publishers to take advantage of high CPMs for video ads without investing in video teams to do time-consuming, on-the-ground reporting. Taiwan’s Next Media Animation has gotten the most attention recently for pursuing this strategy. (NPR is currently hiring a visual journalist with a background in animation, as is Vox Media.)

Rosenfeld was hired before NBC announced a major investment in NowThis News last month. NowThis specializes in making compelling, native video content across a wide variety of platforms, including Instagram, Vine, Zeega, and Snapchat. They’ll cover the same story at different lengths and different framings depending on what platform it’s being targeted on. Gittrich says that partnership is just one way NBC plans to pursue “original video for social and mobile.”

For example, NBC partnered with NowThis News on coverage of the Chris Christie bridge scandal, producing a video that summarized the those events.

And yes, they’ve also collaborated on a short video entitled “The Life and Times of Justin Bieber.”

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