Selasa, 25 Maret 2014

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

At The Oregonian, reporters will be evaluated in part on how much copy they crank out for the web

Posted: 24 Mar 2014 08:32 AM PDT

In the Portland alt-weekly Willamette Week, Aaron Mesh has word of a new evaluation system for journalists at The Oregonian — one of Advance Publications’ daily newspapers that have been rendered less than daily in print.

Internal documents obtained by WW show that a quota system is being put in place that calls for steep increases in posting to Oregonlive.com, and promises compensation for those employees who post most often.

The new policy, shown to the editorial staff in a PowerPoint presentation in late February, provides that as much as 75 percent of reporters' job performance will be based on measurable web-based metrics, including how often they post to Oregonlive.com.

Beat reporters will be expected to post at least three times a day, and all reporters are expected to increase their average number of posts by 40 percent over the next year.

In addition, reporters have been told to stir up online conversations among readers.

David Carr has a column tied to the same information and riffing on the general idea of tying compensation to metrics.

Mesh called me a few days ago to ask what I thought of this arrangement, and I think it’s fair to say I’m less outraged by it than a lot of people:

"Advance, for better or for worse, has been the most aggressive American newspaper company in moving to the web," says Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab. "This is their bet. It makes sense that they would want to align their staff with that bet."

Here’s what I mean. Advance has decided the way forward for newspapers is to get to a digital orientation as quickly as possible. Remaining tethered to print means that reader behaviors won’t change fast enough, ad sales behaviors won’t change fast enough, and editorial behaviors won’t change fast enough. Keeping the focus on print may well mean more revenue in the short term, but it delays the changes that’ll be necessary for the long term, since no one thinks print is going to make a stunning comeback anytime soon. So Advance has chosen radical action: stopping daily printing and/or daily home delivery at its papers, laying off a big chunk of their newsrooms, and demanding a shift to shorter online content and audience engagement.

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The newsonomics of Advance’s New Orleans strategy
That’s their bet. It may be a good bet or a bad bet. I tend to side with Ken Doctor when he argues the print losses end up being greater than the digital gains. And it’s a strategy that relies on the assumption that you’ll have the remaining print market to yourself — which is what makes the incursion of Baton Rouge’s Advocate into New Orleans so threatening.

But it’s their bet. And even though there are parts of it I don’t like — and even though there are good questions about whether these metrics and these standards are the right ones — I for one am happy to see newspaper companies making big bets. Because even if some (most!) of them are wrong, we know that continuing down the road the industry’s been on the past decade — cuts every year, smaller papers, weaker but still traditional journalism, neverending advertising decline, constantly aging audience — leads nowhere. That really can’t be emphasized enough: Other than what’s looking like a one-time bump from paywall revenue, the basic narrative of metro newspaper revenues has been virtually unchanged for years.

So we need big bets. And if we’re going to have big bets, we should have staff and incentive structures that line up with that bet.

Look at a paper making a different bet, The Globe and Mail. Canada’s national newspaper is betting that a paywall will be a big part of its financial future. So how is it aligning its staff resources? It’s tying compensation for some employees to paywall performance — how successful a given section’s articles were in converting readers to subscribers. A very different bet, but a similar alignment of incentives and goals.

Slate gets into the membership business with Slate Plus

Posted: 24 Mar 2014 08:04 AM PDT

Slate hopes its readers want to become members.

This week the site plans to launch Slate Plus for $5 a month or $50 a year. The membership program is something like a modified digital subscription, but not a traditional paywall, as nonpaying readers will still have unlimited access to most of the features on Slate.com.

What will members get? From The New York Times:

A Slate Plus membership will give readers special access to the site's editors and writers, as well as members-only discussions with Emily Yoffe, Slate's Dear Prudence advice columnist. Members will also be invited to give advice on which politicians or entertainers they would like to see profiled.

On top of that, members will also be able get access to ad-free versions of Slate’s network of podcasts. Members will also get reserved seats at Slate events (not free, but at discounted prices).

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All Alternatives Considered: How Slate thinks a daily podcast can fit into your evening commute
This is not the first time Slate has tried to convert readers into paying customers. In 1998 the site experimented with a paywall, asking readers for $20 a year. That plan was subsequently scrapped and the site reverted to a free model.

But the site began offering hints it was again moving into paid content in 2012, when it polled readers on their willingness to pay for Slate’s content. At the time, Slate Group chairman Jacob Weisberg was very adamant that the site was not pursuing a “pay model.”

Back to the newsroom: A new program lets professors go back to the thick of today’s news work

Posted: 24 Mar 2014 08:00 AM PDT

Before joining the faculty of Savannah State University last year to teach multimedia journalism, Jessica Sparks had spent her career working for local, community news organizations like Bluffton Today in Bluffton, S.C. But this summer, Sparks will have the opportunity to work in the newsroom of a slightly larger outlet: The Wall Street Journal.

Sparks is one of five journalism instructors who will have their own internships of sorts as part of the initial class of Back in the Newsroom, a program run by the International Center for Journalists that aims to improve instructors’ digital journalism skills while also fostering diversity in newsrooms. It’s an effort to better align what students are learning and the real-world demands of today’s news business.

“This is a way to keep the professors on the cutting edge of what’s really going on and what the needs are in the newsroom and the technology that’s new in the newsroom really is, ” ICFJ president Joyce Barnathan told me. “Plus, obviously, what they see and what they learn gets transferred into a new and better curriculum.”

The program, which will initially focus on professors from historically black colleges and universities, is funded by a $183,000 grant from the Knight Foundation (disclosure: Knight also supports Nieman Lab), and The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, CNBC, and The Washington Post are the participating news organizations. The profs will all have a two-day orientation in Washington with ICFJ and then spend about nine weeks this summer in their respective newsrooms, where they will focus on operational areas like multimedia reporting, data-based reporting, social media, and more.

After the professors head back to campus in the fall, ICFJ plans to check in with them periodically to see how they’ve implemented their programs and whether the summer in the newsroom changed their approach toward teaching. With that feedback, ICFJ, Knight, and the participating news organizations will look at whether to continue the program and how to possibly expand it to additional universities and newsrooms while making it self-sustaining.

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Monday Q&A: Raju Narisetti on designing for mobile, the paywall fallacy, and reinventing ads
Raju Narisetti, News Corp’s senior vice president for strategy and an ICFJ board member, was influential in bringing the proposal to Knight; Knight saw Back in the Newsroom as a way to advance its efforts in encouraging newsroom diversity and further its work with historically black colleges and universities, said John Bracken, Knight's director of journalism and media innovation.

“The cutbacks in newsrooms have disproportionately affected minority journalists, and I think African-American journalists even more, so that’s something we’ve been conscious of,” Bracken said. “And second, journalism programs at HBCUs, where we’ve done a little bit of work over the years, have also faced a series of challenges where their faculty are more likely to be overworked and teaching a fuller slate of courses per semester.”

While minorities make up about 37 percent of the U.S. population, only 12.37 percent of the journalists in today’s newspaper newsrooms are racial minorities, according to the American Society of News Editors’ latest survey of newsroom diversity. By focusing the program on historically black schools, the ICFJ and participating news organizations hope they can reach a more diverse pool of aspiring journalists.

And the participating instructors, a number of whom who have not worked in a newsroom for several years, also said that they hope to use their time in the program to gain skills and build relationships that will ultimately help their students.

“My students really deserve the opportunity to show the world that they are not a stereotype,” Sparks said. “Many of them do come from hard situations, so I’d like them to get in an opportunity like an internship at The Wall Street Journal.”

Sparks will work with the Journal’s real-time news desk, “the desk where everything comes together,” said Michelle LaRoche, the Journal’s editor for development. Staffers there write, edit, and publish news for the Journal’s newswires, website, and apps. And she’s not going to be there just to observe, LaRoche said. She’ll be an active member of the team that deals with breaking news on a daily basis.

“It’s going to give her a really good picture of working in a fast-paced, real-time environment in the newsroom,” LaRoche said. “I think that’s the heart of any newsroom now where real-time news is so critical.”

The instructors all stressed the importance of what they’ll be able to take back to their students. Each will have to develop a project during their fellowship that they will then implement in their classrooms when they get back to campus next fall. Morgan State University professor Jerry Bembry, who will work on USA Today’s video team, is still developing his plan, but said he would like it to include his students producing videos that will be published on USA Today’s website.

Similarly, Howard University’s Yolanda McCutchen’s background is in broadcast news, having worked for Dateline before joining the faculty at Howard in 2009. But this summer, she’ll work for The Washington Post, attached to the Post’s video team for half the summer, and she said she hopes to use the experience to demonstrate to her students that there are broadcast opportunities outside of traditional television.

“You may not be breaking in at a news station, but you’re still doing news, but for what used to be a traditional print outlet,” she said.

Photo of The New York Times newsroom in 1942 from the Library of Congress.
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