Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Know your user: Learning how different journalists approach data with Census Reporter
- How some journalists are using anonymous secret-sharing apps
- Quartz increases newsletter readers by going simple
- Marty Baron on Ezra Klein’s departure: “The company is owned 100 percent by Jeff Bezos, so any decision to fund a new venture would be his to make”
- We need to talk: 26 awkward questions to ask news organizations about the move to digital
- Optimism is the only option: The Washington Post’s Marty Baron on the state of the news media
- This Week in Review: Local news innovation and Thunderdome, and Facebook’s brand clampdown
- Reinventing the story experience at SND Prototypes
- NYT Now, out today, mixes lots of good mobile-centric ideas with moments of caution
- The newsonomics of Digital First Media’s Thunderdome implosion (and coming sale)
- What’s New in Digital and Social Media Research: How editors see the news differently from readers, and the limits of filter bubbles
- A club that will have me as a member: Voice of San Diego and MinnPost are building out their membership models
| Know your user: Learning how different journalists approach data with Census Reporter Posted: 08 Apr 2014 08:00 AM PDT About a year and a half ago, a team of developers and journalists won $450,000 from Knight to redesign Census.IRE.org, now known as Census Reporter. The funding for that project expires this spring, after extensive user interviews and demos. It’s interesting to look at what nearly half a million dollars and a year can do to the accessibility of a data set to a journalist. Understanding how people think differently about quantitative information can be a serious challenge — and it’s a useful example to any number of editorial projects that could benefit from structured thinking about user needs before planning get too far down the road. With a wide diversity of possible users in mind, project lead Joe Germuska, of Northwestern’s Knight Lab, hired Sarah Schnadt, an information architect with a background in the arts, as a community liaison and designer on the project. “In a way, I feel like I’m an outside eye on this project. All the challenges are new to me,” she says. “When I look at the interface, I just want it to make sense — I haven’t been using census data for the last ten years.” To get a sense of just how much has changed, take a look at the results for a search for our hometown of Cambridge on the Census.IRE.org site:
And compare it to how basic census data for Cambridge looks on the new site:
There are two primary ways to access data in Census Reporter. For a journalist seeking to understand the narrative of a location, the place page is the best entrance. It’ll automatically generate a map, basic profile information, and charts on the most commonly used census data — population, gender, income, race, and so on. The charts are interactive — hover over a bar on a graph and you’ll see useful contextual information for data points. They’re also responsive for mobile. The place profiles, says Schnadt, are great for answering the question, “What can I find out about the place that is my beat?” But other journalists are looking for a more quick and dirty service — they want to get in, find the tables they’re looking for, and download them quickly in the format of their choosing. “More statistically oriented journalists talked about not knowing if they have the right data set until they’ve downloaded,” says Schnadt. “They download one and see, and then download another and see. It takes five different downloads to even see if maybe three of those tables might be the ones they want to combine together to get at maybe two numbers that they want for a story. We know from those kinds of conversations that we’re making a process much easier.” Schnadt also wanted to make it easier for reporters to understand how the tables correspond to what they’re looking for. “There are 1,500 tables but only 60 questions that are asked. It can get kind of overwhelming,” she says. To figure out how best to surface the most important information, Schnadt analyzed census-based stories to try to figure out which queries matched the most frequently used data points. In addition, Census Reporter has built some static resources around explaining census terms. The core challenge of the Census Reporter project was to figure out how build an interface that would be as helpful to newcomers as to developers and trained data reporters. To get a sense of users’ needs, Schnadt administered a survey in which she “tried to identify the level of detail in which a journalist is using the data — how they think, what kind of background they have, what kind of newsroom they’re working in, and a little context into how they’re using the data,” she says. This process produced user profiles that went beyond the basic expert-beginner dichotomy. In between the end points of “narrative thinker” and “app developer,” there were roles like graphics journalists, who typically want to work with raw data via tools like ArcGIS or Tableau and are often the most technically skilled person in the newsroom — but who may not always have a set of skills or needs that perfectly aligns with the “journo nerds” — journalists learning to become developers. “The thing that’s hard is building for all of them at the same time, because they have very different needs,” says Schnadt. “If we can make the process of getting at this data a pleasure and also make the tool seem very useful, than we can also serve this broader goal of encouraging more journalists to use data in interesting and creative ways in their stories.” As development of Census Reporter reaches its conclusion, there are a few final steps for the team. By June, they say publishers will be able to embed their charts, and they’ll be using elasticsearch to make the full text of the database easily searchable. They’ll also be taking steps to make the source code for the project convenient for other developers. (Those features will be the handiwork of front-end developer Ryan Pitts and back-end developer Ian Dees.) The biggest challenge, however, is preparing to move the project into “life support mode” — one that falls to Germuska, as well as project board members Pitts and John Keefe. The primary issue there is updating with new data as it’s released, but they’re also interested in continue to develop new features. Some, like adding deeper economic and social context to the place page charts with more specific data, could potentially be good projects for journo-nerd students, like those Germuska has met through his work at Knight Lab. Other projects, like comparative place pages that allow users to look at two locations side by side, could be good candidates for Knight Prototype Fund grants, Germuska says. The team is working on basic design sketches that could help guide future Census Reporter code contributors. Even so, not every feature can get built — for example, providing year-over-year historical context proved to be too complicated, because of the way that data is gathered and shared. “After spending a year and a half on this, I have so much sympathy for the Census Bureau,” Germuska says. “Our problem is a lot easier, because we’re able to draw circles around what we do and don’t do. I would love to see better government data provision, and I hope it keeps getting better, and I’ll share my opinion and experience with anyone that wants to know — but I have a lot of sympathy.” The goal for Census Reporter was not only to make census data available, but to build a tool that makes it easier for reporters to understand what census data can tell them. Census Reporter looks at only a single body of data, but census numbers have long served as a way for reporters to grow their skills obtaining and understanding data. “I think there is a certain kind of literacy that can be acquired,” says Schnadt. “Having that particular cognitive syntactical skill set is so valuable, as we have access to larger and larger data sets. The site could be very hopeful to lots of people outside the journalism world as well.” Photo of an “enumerator” administering the 1940 Census by the U.S. Census Bureau. |
| How some journalists are using anonymous secret-sharing apps Posted: 08 Apr 2014 07:00 AM PDT Gwyneth Paltrow’s divorce from rock star husband Chris Martin is not an event with great civic impact. But it’s big news to the many writers whose salaries depend on highly trafficked stories about celebrities, as well as to the massive audience that loves to read them. What’s interesting, however, is that while the couple’s uncoupling was officially announced on Paltrow’s personal website, rumors of trouble in the water started circulating weeks before. In February, Gawker’s Lacey Donohue reported on its Hollywood vertical Defamer that a user on the anonymous app Whisper was accusing Paltrow of cheating on her husband. Neetzan Zimmerman, who left Gawker to become Whisper’s editorial director, says he was confident that the poster was a person with close ties to Paltrow. But whether or not the rumor was true, there’s something to what one Gawker reader wrote in the comments:
Gossip mongering in anonymous social networks isn’t the future of journalism, but it sure seems to be part of it. Journalism has long debated the merits of anonymous sourcing — witness the latest hubbub at The New York Times — but at least in those cases the reporter (and hopefully the editor) know the identity of the speaker. Apps like Whisper take the blind item to a whole new level of blindness. It makes sense that anonymous apps, whose purported purpose is to give users a place to share their innermost feelings and frustrations, could have a second life in the news business. Right now, the two apps leading in that space are Whisper, which has been around about a year and half and boasts a staff of 30, and newcomer Secret. Neither app has released its number of active users, but at this point, Whisper’s seems much larger, with 3.5 billion views a month. The biggest difference between the two is that, on Whisper, everyone can see all posted content. On Secret, each user sees only one feed, which is personalized based on contacts from their cell phone.
These differences may seem minor, but in practice, they make information gathering on the two platforms fundamentally different. Journalists are already finding a variety of ways to take advantage. Whisper, BuzzFeed, and mining the Internet for sentimentAt Whisper, 90 percent of the employees are developers. “Before they brought me on, they didn’t have anyone looking at the actual posts,” says Zimmerman. “They were working on product all the time.” When Zimmerman left Gawker, few in the media world knew what Whisper was, and fewer understood why an anonymous messaging app required an editor. But Zimmerman has high hopes both for what Whisper can deliver to publishers and for the app as a news product itself. Zimmerman sees Whisper as an almost unending generator of fresh content. Users type messages, add an image, and share them publicly, with no author name or handle attached. Other users can then reply to the content or message them directly. The subject matter is overwhelmingly personal, even intimate. “It seems a shame that content should get lost and decay, when it could be exported to live on a publisher’s website,” Zimmerman says. Whisper recently announced a content partnership with BuzzFeed and is also already collaborating on posts with The Huffington Post. Zimmerman says more partnership announcements are forthcoming, some of which will be made on BuzzFeed. He’s already begun using their website to demonstrate some of what is possible for storytelling with Whisper. In a post titled 5 Things Whisper Can Tell Us About America’s Top Party Schools, Zimmerman surfaces trends around colleges and drinking discovered by analyzing Whisper’s raw data, which is organized by tags and location. There’s something contradictory in an anonymous app called Whisper that ultimately wants to publish the juiciest tidbits its users create for the enjoyment of a mass audience. But Zimmerman says users are aware that, at the end of the day, what they post to Whisper is public. “At this point, we have publishers coming in and already sifting through the content for their own purposes, without our involvement,” he says. “All we’re trying to do is make that process easier for them.” For BuzzFeed, that means a couple of things. Right now, only the Whisper staff has the capacity to search all of the data at once; their partnership means BuzzFeed has access to that feature. “It’s hard to find things as a user,” says BuzzFeed’s Summer Anne Burton. Now, when a member of her staff finds something interesting on Whisper, they can call the company and ask them to search for similar content — for example, 21 Things All Cat Owners Secretly Think Sometimes. (I said interesting, not earth-shattering.) For the time being, BuzzFeed won’t be using Whisper to report news. “We are thinking about it in terms of entertaining, BuzzTeam, basically fun list-type posts, not breaking news,” says Burton. (For those unfamiliar with what BuzzFeed calls its BuzzTeam: “BuzzTeam makes entertainment and experiments with formats — that can include storytelling, lists, quizzes, games, and whatever is next.” That’s as distinct from its more traditional news operation.) “I’ve been trying to think of an analogy for what’s similar to what we’re doing, and what it reminds me of is embarrassing stories submitted by our readers.” Of course, words like “submitted” and “public” can mean different things to different people. BuzzFeed was a prominent case study of those gaps in perception recently when it was criticized by some for republishing sensitive, personal tweets about sexual assault — even though BuzzFeed’s reporter reached out to most of the tweets’ authors before publishing. Whisper, like Twitter, is public, but amplifying that content still has impact for the reader. Burton says she would be certain to get in contact with Whisper users via direct message before republishing similar content. There are a few different ways BuzzFeed is using Whisper to generate stories. For example, the app has a comment feature that Burton says some users have started using like a message board. When someone asked, What’s the weirdest food combination you’ve ever tried? BuzzFeed turned it into a list, 25 Weird Food Combinations You Might Just Have to Try. Another feature allows users to upload original images, which can have an almost newsworthy value — consider Katie Notopoulos’ post, Heartbreaking Military Confessions of Whisper. Geotagging shows that some of these posts are actually being made in places where the U.S. military is active. “On Whisper, we have people, service members based in Afghanistan, in places Google Maps won’t go, talking about things in their daily lives — their difficulties, their regrets, things they could never divulge to their commanding officer,” says Zimmerman. “So they turn to Whisper.” For now, Whisper, with its massive flow of emotionally charged content, is more useful for what the non-news producers at BuzzFeed are trying to do — build traffic by capturing “authentic emotion.” But, Burton adds, “I don’t think it’s out of the question that someday there will be some really interesting news that will break on Whisper, or that some source will be whispering about secret important things.” Secret, Gawker, and leveraging gossip into newsCompared to Whisper, Secret is nascent — “not even 60 days old,” according to Sarahjane Sacchetti, who handles marketing for Secret. But despite its relative newness, one thing is clear: Secret is not interested in the publishing game. “We’re absolutely not looking at partnering with any sort of media company to be a platform for the content our users create,” says Secret cofounder David Byttow. “We’re much more about facilitating the conversation — not so much the secret itself, but what comes out of it.” On the surface, the two companies seem similar — because Secret is newer, it makes sense that they want to define themselves in opposition. “I would say ultimately, Whisper is a media company, and Secret is a communication company,” says Byttow. But that hasn’t stopped tech reporters from taking advantage of the app for what it is. For Secret to be interesting, you have to have friends who are using it — or at least, you have to have saved the phone numbers of people who are using it in your contacts. For the time being, that means the majority of people actively engaging with each other on the app are in the tech industry, largely in the Bay Area and New York City. As has been well documented, that’s led to quite a lot of industry gossip, some of it not exactly harmless. For reporters like Nitasha Tiku of Gawker’s Valleywag, that makes Secret pretty irresistible. “The camera roll on my iPhone used to be all screenshots of Instagram comments,” she says. “Now it’s all screenshots of Secret.” Gawker has yet to break any news on Secret, though they have used posts to provide context and to fan flames. Tiku says users have openly stated their intent to use the app to mislead reporters, and indeed, within the first ten days, false rumors of Valley acquisitions were both ignited and summarily squelched. Still, gossip does have its place in the overall journalistic spectrum, especially at Gawker, where Nick Denton has always worn the gossip label with pride. “I don’t have a negative connotation attached to gossip, particularly when it comes to the tech industry, because anything that’s not a regurgitated press release, they’ll dismiss as gossip,” says Tiku. “A lot of times it’s just what they don’t want talked about.” Says Tiku’s fellow Valleywag reporter Sam Biddle: “I’m still figuring out ways to use it as a deeper tool, but it’s good for testing the waters. If you see multiple posts about the same person, the same company, expressing the same sentiment, it’s not just one anonymous voice in the void. It starts to have a little more weight.” For now, potential is all Secret has; users have even taken to joking about the app’s failure to predict major news in the tech sector.
But even if it’s not breaking news, Secret can give reporters a sense of broader trends in the culture. “It helps give you the texture of how people feel,” says Tiku. Jenna Wortham, a tech reporter for The New York Times who has written about Secret, agrees. Nothing she’s seen on the app has radically altered her thinking about tech figures or companies, but she says “I do think it gives insight into what a community is thinking about.” Both Tiku and Biddle say they’ve started saving more phone numbers than they used to in hopes of expanding their networks — an unusual case of a new platform providing unexpected support for an old one. But if the app fails to hold Silicon Valley’s notoriously fleeting attention and the technorati move their anonymous chatter elsewhere, the reporters will move on, too. “I would pay for Secret right now — I might not in a few months,” says Tiku. What Secret will look like in a few months is an unknown, including to its founders, who say they’re focusing on product and the short game for the time being. But at Whisper, Zimmerman has big plans. “My intention will be to possibly set up a news unit at Whisper, which will be doing both investigative reporting, where they will be going out and finding a lead and then bringing them back to Whisper, but also mining existing content for potential stories,” he says. In addition, he wants to make Whisper’s API available to publishers, so they can analyze the data and create their own trend pieces. He’s also asked the engineers to create a feature that pushes out an alert every time a user uploads an original photo. Whether or not Whisper would charge media companies for these services Zimmerman didn’t know, saying matters of monetization are left to the business side of the team. Anonymous sharing online is nothing new. Tiku points to Fucked Company as a predecessor to this idea; Reddit and 4chan are also, in their own ways, points of comparison. For BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, and their ilk, Whisper is just another way to feed a voracious appetite for user generated content. For Gawker, Secret is a more ephemeral, third-party Kinja. But clearly, these apps are tapping into a desire for places to share private knowledge that might have value to the public — even if that value doesn’t move beyond mere titillation. Says Wortham: “The idea will stick around, even if the companies don’t.” Photo by Anthony Gattine used under a Creative Commons license. |
| Quartz increases newsletter readers by going simple Posted: 07 Apr 2014 01:16 PM PDT
But the staff decided that its email newsletter subscription rate was not climbing as fast as they liked. They simplified the signup process for the email and have seen the daily subscriber rate for the newsletter double since February. But what was complicating the signup process before? Connecting the newsletter signup to Quartz’s reader registration system:
|
| Posted: 07 Apr 2014 11:34 AM PDT It’s remarkable, I think, how much mainstream-media attention the departures of Nate Silver from The New York Times and Ezra Klein from The Washington Post have gotten over the past few months. I’ve admired the work of both men enormously, and I look forward to reading their new sites for years to come. But I think the chatter has been so loud in part because it fit into the preconceived narrative that Newspaper People Are Dumb And Internet People Get It. That narrative’s been right plenty of times over the past decade — but it’s also a little too pat for my liking, a default frame for every question.
At ISOJ this weekend, Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron gave a speech about the state of news today, which we covered elsewhere. But he also, in the Q&A that followed, talked a bit about how the Klein departure went down from his perspective. I thought it was worth presenting that perspective. This sort of he-said-he-said shade-throwing is kind of boring, in the end — more about internal politics and personalities than ideas. Today we have a really interesting new news startup, embedded at maybe the smartest online news company, one that I’ve always hoped would move beyond sports/tech/games and into more traditional news. And we have one of America’s great newspapers, adding net staff for the first time in years, trying new things, and with a close to ideal ownership situation. It’s good all around! So maybe a little less trash talk? Until then, let me ironically contribute to the chatter by sharing Baron’s comments:
Here’s audio, if you want to check my transcribing skills, and the full Q&A starts around 5 hours and 56 minutes into this day-long ISOJ video. |
| We need to talk: 26 awkward questions to ask news organizations about the move to digital Posted: 07 Apr 2014 08:30 AM PDT Here are 25 awkward questions (and one counter-question) that I wish media reporters/critics would routinely ask of editors and mainstream news organizations, each year. These might be uncomfortable, if truthfully and publicly answered, but even if you “no comment” your way out of that query, the questions might actually help spur newsroom leadership to focus on what really matters. In no particular order of importance, here is a starter kit of questions: 1 What percentage of your digital audience is accessing your brand/journalism only on mobile phones? (Not to be confused with tablets — and don’t settle for a “We have so many millions of digital visitors each month” answer.) What was that number a year ago? 2 Approximately how many journalists are there in your newsroom globally, from the top editor to the full-time-equivalent temp? Of those, how many are part of a dedicated mobile team? And, in that mobile team, how many are focused on phone products and not the tablet? 3 Approximately how many developers (front-end and back-end) does your news organization have? Of those, how many are dedicated to mobile? Can you break down that developer number by phone vs. tablet? 4 For newsrooms with pay models (hard walls, subscriptions, or meters), what percentage of your total unique visitors last month were paying customers? 5 For newsrooms that bundle print+digital subscriptions (almost all mainstream newsrooms these days), can you tell what percentage of your print subscribers have even registered on your website or mobile app so they can access digital content for free as part of their print subscription? 6 How many paying subscribers (digital-only or print-bundled) actually visit your site or mobile products each day? What do they represent of your daily average digital readers? 7 Who formally owns the goal of increasing the number of visits from readers who already pay but don’t come to your digital offerings more than once or twice a month? 8 What has been the change in pageviews per visit on your website year-over-year? What is that number now? 9 What percentage of your total advertising revenue is now digital? Of that, what percentage is coming from phones (again, not tablets)? If you can answer this, then compare that percentage against your answer to No. 1. 10 When was the last time your news organization came up with an advertising innovation that has been sold more than five times to customers in the past 12 months? What was it and can you point to specific use cases? 11 Is there an advertising innovation team in your news organization? Who are its members and how does it work? 12 What is your average advertising sell-through of ads that you sell directly for your website? What is that sell-through for your mobile phone offering? (Particularly for those that have just started digital paywalls.) 13 What percentage of your print ad sizes are also available in your tablet edition? 14 What is your digital subscriber churn rate? Is your new acquisition of paying customers ahead of the churn? And by approximately how much? 15 Can you list the five most important, written, newsroom-wide performance measures on which news staff is evaluated annually? 16 How is the performance of your standards/public editor/ombudsman, if you have one, actually measured? 17 How many people from the newsroom are listed on the publication’s masthead, especially at print publications? Of those, how many are women? How many are non-white? 18 Assuming most of your masthead people are likely to have been journalists for at least 15 to 20 years, if not more, how many of them have spent at least three to five years in pure digital roles, either in your newsroom or outside it? 19 Of the top operational newsroom editors and managers of your homepage, mobile, video, graphics, and visuals teams, how many are on your masthead? 20 What percentage of your total monthly digital audiences (unique visitors) are from outside your primary home country/market? 21 What percentage of your total paying customers in digital are from outside your primary home country/market? 22 Who owns the daily decisions on what content is free or behind the wall on your products? (This applies even for so-called “hard” walls.) Do these owners have any goals for paid customer acquisition? 23 Where did your last five U.S. newsroom departures go? Where did your last five U.S. newsroom hires come from? 24 Of your masthead editors, how many have accompanied your ad team on a sales/ad relationship building call in the past six months? 25 What percentage of your digital audience comes — and goes away — between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m.? What time is your first major morning news meeting? Happy answering. Unless, of course, you want to pose your own question: Isn’t it time Corporate stops asking such awkward questions in the first place? Raju Narisetti is senior vice president of strategy at News Corp. He has previously served as managing editor of The Wall Street Digital Network, deputy managing editor of the Journal, editor of WSJ Europe, managing editor of The Washington Post; and founding editor of India’s Mint newspaper. |
| Optimism is the only option: The Washington Post’s Marty Baron on the state of the news media Posted: 07 Apr 2014 07:36 AM PDT
In recent weeks, much of the talk about the Post has centered on the defection of Ezra Klein and a handful of other staffers to start Vox, which launched last night to much interest. But despite the outsized chatter that move prompted, Baron told the ISOJ audience he’s optimistic about the future of the Post and the broader news world. Here are his prepared remarks. (We added all the links you’ll see, for clarity and context.) He started off by noting that ISOJ honcho (and friend-of-the-Lab) Rosental Alves had asked him for a title for his talk, and he’d offered up “The untold story: Why we should be optimistic about journalism.” I knew that title would be a bit of a risk. Our profession and our business face many problems, many pressures. Optimism is not always easy to find, and sometimes it’s perilous to admit, especially when you’re in the middle of the turmoil, as I have been for 14 years as the editor in chief of a newspaper. When I mentioned the title to the head of another news organization, he looked shocked. He then handed me his card: “Send me your speech,” he said. “I’ve got to read that.” He then asked me to define what I meant when I said something was good for journalism: Did I mean it was good for the customer? Did I mean it was good for journalists looking for jobs? Did I mean it was good for existing journalistic institutions like his or mine? I responded that the third one — journalistic institutions — was not relevant. That would have to sort itself out on its own, and it largely depended on what these institutions do on their own behalf. I’ll just note here, because I can’t help myself, that I volunteered the title to this speech well before Internet pioneer Marc Andreesen wrote his now much-cited blog post on how bullish he is about the news business — and before others chimed in with similar thoughts. There may be reason for me to feel particularly optimistic this year. I’ve been, as I said, a top editor for 14 years. And this year is, I’m fairly sure, the first year I haven’t had to cut the budget and to reduce staff. So it’s a good feeling — but, I recognize, not one that’s universally shared by my colleagues at other news organizations. So I don’t want to be Pollyanish, and I don’t think I am.
OK, so I’m going to try a device with these remarks that seems popular these days — a list, or listicle as it’s come to be known. This is more list than listicle. So what follows are 9 reasons to be optimistic about journalism. 1. Let’s start with the basics. We’ve survived. We’re still here.Real journalists doing real journalism. Not too long ago, people said The New York Times would go bankrupt. It didn’t. A few years back, The Boston Globe was threatened with a shutdown (and a gleeful critic advised me, its editor at the time, to practice saying “Would you like fries with that?”) The Globe survived to do outstanding work. About 25 years ago, I was at the Los Angeles Times as a senior editor. Ted Turner, founder of CNN, had come to visit — and I was among those invited to a nice lunch. He returned our hospitality with a warning, more accurately a prediction: In 10 years, he said, the Los Angeles Times would be out of business. That would be due, he said, to 24-hour cable news. The L.A. Times has had its struggles, but it’s still very much in business — doing very good work — and its struggles today have had little, if anything, to do with CNN or 24-hour cable news. They’re due to the Internet, which has put pressure on a wide range of industries, not just ours. So, the point is, we as an industry and a profession are more resilient than people give us credit for. More resilient than even we give ourselves credit for. 2. New owners are bringing needed new capital and a range of disparate ideas, rethinking business models.
You don’t have to believe in any one of these approaches to recognize that we’re in a period of tremendous experimentation with the business models of legacy media organizations. Not all of these will work. My wager is that something will, and then others will follow. The variety of approaches is a big plus. We now have a living laboratory of business model experimentation. And the good thing is that some of these new owners have long-term perspectives. The payoff on experimentation doesn’t have to be immediate. That’s the case at The Washington Post, where our owner has spoken of giving us “runway” for experimentation. We will try a lot of things, and we’ll have time to see if they work. 3. I just spoke about legacy journalism organizations. As important is the blossoming of new journalistic organizations.Some of these have been the creations of people who left legacy organizations to create ventures of their own, staffed solely by web-savvy, digital-era journalists. We recently experienced that at the Post with some staffers going off to form their own venture, funded by Vox Media. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have seen similar departures. Capital is now available for journalism entrepreneurship. It doesn’t make my life any easier when people leave, but overall it is healthy for journalism. Media pundits have a habit of viewing these spinoffs as a sign of dysfunction in businesses like ours, a sign of the failings of legacy institutions like mine. In fact, these spinoffs are a sign of health in the industry, just as the availability of capital for entrepreneurial spinoffs in Silicon Valley or here in Austin is a sign of health. Not all of these ventures will succeed — saying you’re the “next big thing” and hiring a bunch of people is the easy part. Nor, by the way, are legacy media organizations ordained to fail. (The Atlantic, an old media organization once known for its magazine, has become a vibrant online venture.) But the new competition will translate into enormous innovation — and, I might add, a bounty of jobs. New journalism nonprofits also add to the mix. Some are national in orientation, some regional, some investigative. Wealthy philanthropists are willing to fund them, and they have filled in some of the reporting gaps as traditional organizations have retrenched. Evan Smith and The Texas Tribune have certainly done that here, and I’m not just saying that because he’s about to grill me. [Smith conducted the Q&A after Baron's speech. —Ed.] The overall journalism ecosystem is more varied than before. Today’s journalistic organizations have more distinct personalities. They have disparate approaches to informing readers. There is far less uniformity. Our field is more colorful. We are in an era of journalistic entrepreneurship, and journalists will have to be entrepreneurial — building entirely new companies, working within new entrepreneurial ventures, or behaving as internal entrepreneurs to transform organizations that have stood for decades. That leads to No. 4: 4. New forms of storytelling have emerged, and they have proved particularly effective at connecting with readers.They can vary from listicles to data visualization that helps readers process a mass of information as never before. In many instances, the storytelling combines a variety of techniques. New article formats have been developed that ease readers into supporting material, or supplemental material, when they wish to know more. Interactive graphics, videos, and other devices are presented contextually, integrated into stories in appropriate spots. The reader experience is enhanced. Readers are more engaged. And in the end, readers will be more satisfied. 5. The pressures on our industry have forced us to pay keen attention to our customers — readers, viewers, listeners.We always talked about this. We didn’t always practice it. We often imagined that what we ourselves wanted to do was what our customers wanted from us. At the very least, we said it was good for them. Maybe it was. But the fact is, customers were not always consuming what we were feeding them. In some instances, we just assumed they were. We assume that print readership equaled readership of our stories. But, if you ever sat in a coffee shop and watched people back then flip through a newspaper, you might have watched in dismay as they flipped right past your story. Now we can be sure that if our journalism doesn’t connect with readers, viewers, and listeners, someone else will emerge to do it better. There is only one guarantee left in our business, and that is competition. Intense competition. 6. The current conditions in our industry are opening up a vast array of new opportunities.Every year, I am asked by summer interns about job prospects. And I say that, when you look at media defined broadly, we’re seeing an explosion of opportunities. Don’t judge job prospects solely by what’s happening at legacy institutions. New career possibilities have opened up, and young people coming into journalism need to see them and embrace them. By the way, many of those new opportunities do exist within legacy organizations. Their process of digital transformation requires talent with a different set of skills and a more contemporary sensibility about how to connect with readers, viewers, and listeners. These legacy institutions still need strong traditional reporting and writing skills. But while those skills are necessary, they are not sufficient. New recruits need technical skills — perhaps in coding, perhaps in video. More important, they also need an instinctive, or highly developed, sense of how the public is receiving and processing information today. This year in The Washington Post newsroom, we are hiring three dozen people, all with the goal of digital transformation. And we are doing exciting things. Lost in all the focus on change is that some of the most transformative developments in media are taking place at some of the industry’s oldest institutions. 7. We are now seeing a whole new generation of journalists enter our field.This is hugely encouraging. They come with the skills required, with the right sensibilities. They can think well, write well. They’re bright, they’re energetic, they’re enthusiastic. They love what journalism can do. They understand its vital role in society. And they appreciate that there are new, highly effective ways to tell stories that need to be part of our daily toolbox. These young journalists are true digital natives. And it shows. Journalists of a previous generation can learn new digital skills. They can adapt. They can work hard and diligently at telling stories in new ways. And they can be really good at it. But digital is not their native language. It’s like those who immigrate to this country as an adult. They can speak perfect, even elegant, English. And yet their accents are unlikely to disappear. These new journalists enter the field without an accent that hints of foreignness to the new medium. Their familiarity with the digital idiom is complete and natural. 8. Perhaps most important: Amid all the turmoil in our field, amid the persistent and pervasive anxiety among journalists, we’re doing strong and important work.We’re continuing to fulfill the journalistic mission. I’ll talk about papers other than my own and other than the biggest ones. Over the past year or so, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel disclosed a breakdown in the blood-screening system for newborns, causing delays of days or weeks in treating ailments that require immediate attention. The Sacramento Bee reported on a Las Vegas psychiatric hospital that over 5 years discharged 1,500 patients by putting them on Greyhound buses out of Nevada and bound for other states, where they had no housing, no plans for treatment, and, in some cases, knew no one. Some were violent offenders who went on to commit crimes, including one murder. The Boston Globe reported on an abusive system in which the owner of the city’s largest taxi fleet subjected hundreds of drivers to a system of continuous exploitation. Amid all the anxiety in our field, we should not forget the enormous amount of pioneering and profoundly difficult journalism that is produced. Now, I want to make clear, to repeat, that I’m not a Pollyanna. I recently heard the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, describe himself as a “dissatisfied optimist.” That describes me, too. I fully recognize that we face enormous challenges. To name just a few: There are serious, unresolved questions about how investigative reporting will be funded, particularly at the local and state level. There are too few journalists providing the most basic coverage of state and local government, as well as their congressional delegations, not to mention serving as diligent watchdogs of politicians and policy-makers and the people in the private sector who exercise influence over them. Digging takes time and money and, often, expensive lawyers. Understanding of world affairs is weakened when American coverage comes from too few media outlets and too few reporters on the ground. There is no assurance that thoughtful, quality, in-depth journalism — which takes a lot of time — will not give way to gimmicks and click bait that lead only to a lot of social sharing. The business models are unsettled, and digital ad rates are declining, as our product inventory — page views — keeps growing. In short, we have not found the answer, or answers, and we don’t know for sure if there are conclusive answers to be had anytime soon. But in our business, pessimism too often seems to prevail. Today’s experimentation will involve failure. It requires us to try and then try again. People need to realize that. And those of us who are experimenting need not be embarrassed by it. All of you who are entering the profession, or hope to stay in it, need to be smart about this. Do not look at our field through the wrong end of the telescope. Look into the distance and see the genuine opportunities ahead of us. And that leads me to my final reason for being optimistic about journalism, No. 9: 9. There is no acceptable alternative to optimism.We cannot be successful if we are not optimistic, if we do not recognize opportunities and seize on them. If we are not optimistic, why work to succeed? What use would it be? And if you are not working to succeed, no matter the obstacles, you are not working as you should. So if we hope for a better future, we must be confident that it is within reach, even if it is not within easy reach. And we must keep trying. I believe there are, in fact, ample reasons to be optimistic. I’ve cited some of them for you here today. I’m encouraged. I’m excited. But I also choose to be optimistic because only as an optimist can I envision a route to success. Only through optimism can I have faith that our important journalistic mission will be sustained. That conviction is what carries me to work every day, and what drives me from one day to the next. Photo of Baron speaking at ISOJ by Bryan Winter/Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas used under a Creative Commons license. |
| This Week in Review: Local news innovation and Thunderdome, and Facebook’s brand clampdown Posted: 03 Apr 2014 06:59 PM PDT This week’s essential reads: If you’re short on time, the key pieces this week are Ken Doctor’s analysis of Project Thunderdome’s shutdown, Joshua Benton’s review of the new NYT Now, and Alex Howard’s interview with The New York Times’ Aron Pilhofer about data journalism. Thunderdome and the long, hard road for local news: The newspaper chain Digital First Media shut down its ambitious Project Thunderdome this week, a stinging reminder of the difficulties in large-scale digital media innovation within local newspapers. Thunderdome, which was launched three years ago as a digitally savvy centralized news production site for Digital First’s 75 papers, was shut down as part of larger cuts at the company, with about 50 Thunderdome employees laid off. Digital First CEO John Paton said some of what Thunderdome did would be discontinued, and some would be distributed among Digital First’s papers. Poynter’s Jill Geisler gave a sense of the mood in the newsroom, and one of Thunderdome’s journalists, Steve Buttry, said the project didn’t fail because “you can't fail unless you were given a chance to succeed.” USA Today’s Rem Rieder focused on the schadenfreude that others in the news industry were reportedly feeling over Thunderdome’s demise, based on their perception of Paton as a digital-media showman with more brash style than actual solutions. But the Lab’s Ken Doctor, in the most thorough analysis of the shutdown, argued that while Thunderdome’s demise is a bitter pill for Paton, his overall transformation efforts at Digital First have been impressive: “Paton parlayed a small hand on a way-down-on-the-food-chain (Journal Register Co.) into a major U.S. digital news company.” Likewise, Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram saw the shutdown not as a failure, but simply as an indication of how tough it is to reinvent a newspaper company, and J-Source’s Melanie Coulson praised Digital First for its digital experimentation and called for more. A few observers tried to pinpoint exactly what sunk Thunderdome. Rick Edmonds of Poynter highlighted the chain’s outdated technology with which the project had to work, exemplified by its widely varying and clunky set of content management systems. Media analyst Alan Mutter focused on Digital First’s owners, the hedge fund investors of Alden Capital Investors. “The objectives of the Digital First investors were the antithesis of the patience — and multimillion-dollar commitment — required in the slog to identify successful interactive publishing models,” Mutter wrote. Journalism professor Dan Kennedy made a similar point while looking at Digital First’s New Haven Register, wondering if local journalism can really be reinvented by a company owned by a hedge fund.
Facebook chokes off brands’ reach: The tech world has been talking for a couple of weeks about reports that Facebook is cutting the amount of reach brands can get with their posts, forcing them to pay if they want to reach more than just a small percentage of their fans. One company, the food delivery service Eat24, complained about the change in an post announcing it planned to delete its Facebook page. Facebook responded with a retort of its own saying that it’s not showing its readers content that they’ve shown they don’t care about, though Recode’s Mike Isaac said Eat24 has a valid point, and The New York Times’ Vindu Goel said its concerns are quietly being echoed by many other, larger companies. Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram said the change reinforces the distinction between Twitter’s flood of information and Facebook’s carefully controlled stream, and the notion that Facebook isn’t the kind of social network we’ve assumed it was: “It is not an open platform in which content spreads according to its own whims: like a newspaper, Facebook controls what you see and when.” At Recode, marketing executive Michael Lazerow defended Facebook, arguing that companies are naive to expect free distribution from Facebook forever, and they need to respond by making their posts more relevant and spreadable. On the other side, Dijit Media president Jeremy Toeman argued that when Facebook users like a page, they expect to get that page’s updates. He urged Facebook to disclose to users that they won’t see every update when they like a page and to give them an option to subscribe to all of a page’s updates.
NYT Now launches: NYT Now, The New York Times’ much anticipated (or at least much promoted) news digest and aggregation app, launched this week. The Lab’s Ken Doctor analyzed the Times’ business strategy behind the app, looking at who’s going to subscribe at an $8-a-month rate. The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer expressed his excitement at the idea that NYT Now is trying to reward regular readers with a single, contained news package rather than a stream of news to dip in and out of. The Lab’s Joshua Benton gave the app a mostly positive review, noting that its stories (and story selection) closely resemble the Times’ main product, but its aggregation and voice are a new arena for the paper. “Here's hoping that the DNA of NYT Now can spread back into the core apps and that it can push harder at bringing an experimental edge to sharing great Times content with the world,” he wrote. Poynter’s Sam Kirkland also noted that NYT Now isn’t emphasizing breaking news and suggested that readers will switch back and forth between NYT Now and the main app. Reading roundup: A few other stories to catch up on during a relatively slow week: — The mobile analytics company Flurry published a set of data on use of apps vs. mobile browsers, concluding that the former have left the latter in the dust. Poynter’s Sam Kirkland said the mobile web is still very much alive for news, while BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel said the data help explain Facebook’s recent purchase of WhatsApp.
— Local billionaire Glen Taylor signed a letter of intent on a cash offer to buy the Minneapolis Star Tribune from the two investment firms that currently own most of the paper’s shares. Fellow Minnesotan David Carr of The New York Times reflected on the Star Tribune that was and its prospects with Taylor in charge. — A few fantastic pieces on data journalism: The Tow Center for Digital Journalism conducted illuminating interviews with The New York Times’ Aron Pilhofer and NPR’s Jeremy Bowers. And at Source, Jeremy Merrill and Sisi Wei offered a very useful guide to getting a job in journalism and coding. Photo illustration of the Burning Man thunderdome by Homies in Heaven, photo illustration of a Facebook dislike by Owen W. Brown, and photo of the Minnesota Timberwolves playing by Doug Wallick all used under a Creative Commons license. |
| Reinventing the story experience at SND Prototypes Posted: 02 Apr 2014 09:00 AM PDT How can media companies re-invent the story? Specifically, how can the designers, coders, and other product-minded people help make storytelling a richer experience through technology? This is the question teams of journalist tried to answer at SND Prototypes, an event that was part of the Society for News Design’s World’s Best competition for digital design. Journalists from Vox Media, The Boston Globe, USA Today, BuzzFeed, and CNN Digital were among the participants who worked on projects designed to improve mobile reading, build forms for context in stories, and track social conversations around the news. Here’s a sampling of the projects. There’s also more background and discussion as well as working prototypes and code: Skim: A tool that could make longform stories easier to browse by using summary cards to split the story into chunks or a system of anchors that delivers readers to key parts of a story. Backstory: This team wanted to find a method for explaining how new stories relate to other narratives or older information. Here’s how they approached it:
Sluice: This javascript app would allow readers and people inside news organizations to aggregate specific discussions around stories in social media. Sluice would be a way to pinpoint the specifics of why a story is being shared: “We are trying to create a system that showcases that behavior around the story, in a sense showing the exact point of "here is where the conversation is" by highlighting the words or phrases being used in social shares.” Moving Stories: This prototype would make it possible for viewers to better skim video content without losing important information. As the team writes:
|
| NYT Now, out today, mixes lots of good mobile-centric ideas with moments of caution Posted: 02 Apr 2014 04:58 AM PDT If you’ve got an iPhone or an iPod touch, NYT Now is out now and a free download. The new app from The New York Times promises to offer a subset of the Times’ content to a mobile-focused audience that gets its news on the go and wants a lower price point. It’s the most interesting mobile app from a traditional news company in years.
The story selection looks very similar to NYTimes.com.If you were hoping for a radically different presentation of individual Times stories in this mobile-optimized context, you’re not getting it. And if you were hoping that NYT Now would rethink the idea of a digital front page — pulling together different bundles of Times content for a different target audience — that doesn’t look to be in the cards, either. At this writing, the top eight Times stories in NYT Now are the same top eight stories on the desktop version of NYTimes.com. The headlines are identical or very nearly identical to the ones appearing on the web. (Headline in NYT Now: “Obama Claims Victory in Push for Health Insurance.” Headline on the story page on NYTimes.com: “Obama Claims Victory in Push for Insurance.”) NYT Now stories do seem to use different lead art in a healthy number of cases, often elevating a photo that appears lower in the story on desktop to top billing in the app. But it’s pretty darned similar. (Update: I should note that I don’t cover here NYT Now’s morning and evening briefings, which are rollup summaries of top headlines and intel. You can see an example here. I really like the idea — scratches the same itch as the thousand morning roundup emails started by news orgs in the past year or two — but for some reason, I couldn’t get the briefings to show up in my app. Still haven’t seen one in the wild. But they are a significant differentiator from the web Times.) There’s a layer of mobile optimization for Times stories.But it’s a pretty thin layer. The main difference in how those stories are presented is in the bullet points broken out underneath each headline. They’re more self-contained than the brief story summaries on NYTimes.com. For example, for this story (“Abbas Takes Defiant Step, and Mideast Talks Falter”), the NYTimes.com summary text is:
In NYT Now:
Or on this story (“To Protect Foreigners, Afghanistan Shuts Down Their Hangouts”):
In NYT Now:
Minor changes, oriented around chunking up the content. Sentences are shorter, more declarative, and bulleted from scannability. I like it, but it only goes so far. The taglines attached to stories seem to have a little more voice than you might expect from the Times. This Charles Keating obit, for instance, earns a “BANKING SCOUNDREL” tag, which is rather on-the-nose. And smaller stories sometimes get a different treatment in the stream, with a nice simple sentence rather than a formal newspaper headline. In general, as one might expect or fear from a mobile experience (depends on your perspective!), the story presentation in NYT Now is more stripped down than on the web. This story on a laptop has four photos, a five-minute embedded video, and a link to an interactive. In NYT Now, it just has one photo. Even the mobile web version of the story comes with all those bells and whistles. (Also, no comments on NYT Now— you can’t read ’em and you can’t write ’em.) But the biggest consistency is that stories appear in fundamentally unchanged form across all these platforms. This very fine Middle East story is the same 29 paragraphs and 1,437 words whether you’re at your desk or scrolling through NYT Now. That’s about 40 inches, if you still think in newsprint, and it’s pretty long for a phone. I hope in the coming months we’ll see experimentation in summarizing, bulleting, or just plain shortening Times stories in the app — offering the full article if desired, but also giving something that lies between a headline/summary and the full experience. I also expect the breaking news/updating experience will evolve with time. This story is listed in the app as an update of this one, which is good — but there’s no way for me to know what exactly has been changed without rereading the whole thing and trying to suss out what seems new and what seems familiar. (This is admittedly an edge case, but granular in-story updates are the raison d’être for Circa.) The aggregation/curation is well done.The second tab of the app, one swipe or tap away, is Our Picks, where NYT Now editors pick the best of the web. They do it well! NYT Now is willing to link out even when there’s a competing Times story on the same subject; for instance, it links to Greg Kot’s Chicago Tribune obit for Frankie Knuckles rather than the Times’ own. Among the sites linked at this writing: Wired, National Geographic, Yahoo Tech, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, Time, and Esquire. There’s even one Our Picks link to an old New York Times story. (Aggregator, curate thyself.) In all, it’s a nice mix of newsy and feature-y, and the link text is freeform. It feels a bit like a news nerd’s Tumblr, and it’s an interesting contrast to the more straight-arrow collection of the Times’ own content. I hope that NYT Now editors bring a little bit more of that Our Picks DNA one tab over to the Times stories and let their presentation (and content mix) loosen up a bit. Three miscellaneous thoughtsNYT Now makes stories seem shorter than they actually are. I have no idea whether this is a bug or a deviously clever feature, but when you load a Times story, initially only a portion of the top of the story is fully loaded into the viewport. That makes the scrollbar nice and long, which makes it seem like there’s only another screenful or so of story to read. It’s only as you scroll further than the rest of the story is added to the viewport and that scrollbar shrinks down to the appropriate size. If it’s intentional, it’s a very subtle way of saying Don’t worry, this story isn’t that long. (Update: As I suspected/feared, this appears to be the result of a bug in iOS 7, not a design choice. Still, it’s kind of interesting to think of design cues to make longer pieces feel more inviting and manageable. I think there’s a real sense in which ambitious, snowfallish designs for longform alert the reader the exact opposite: Watch out, this will take a while.) Saved articles get a lot of real estate. One of the app’s three tabs is reserved for Times articles saved by the user. (Only Times articles, not Our Picks.) I was surprised to see it get that much prominence; it’s not a feature I’ve ever felt like using. Of course, the Times has far more data on user behavior than “Josh isn’t that into it,” so it would appear they’re expecting a quick-skim experience to pair well with a save-for-later experience: a quick scroll on the morning commute, say, and saving longer pieces for the evening or weekend. That makes sense, even if for me that instinct was long ago given over to Instapaper and Twitter favs. (It’s also important because NYT Now has no search function and stories disappear from it all the time.) It’s not always clear what’s been updated. I don’t just mean within a story — also within the mix of stories. Our Picks is in reverse chronological order, freshest stuff at the top, so it’s easy to see what’s new. But the Times stories are positioned in an editorially derived order, laid out like a front page with only one dimension, up and down. That means sometimes new stories are added to the mix several screens down into the stream. You see a blue dot that indicates “New Stuff!,” but once you go to find out what’s new, you have to scroll and look around for a bit to find out the new story’s down in the sixth position in the stream. It’s awkward. Can it attract a new paying audience?There’s an awful lot to like about NYT Now. There are a number of elements that the core Times iPhone app would benefit from stealing: embracing the long scroll; giving more visual oomph to tempt readers to each story; experimenting (however meekly) in summarization for mobile; bringing in aggregation with a bit of voice. NYT Now makes the core app’s completist ethos feel a bit like, say, the completism of a Phish fan who needs every bootleg of every show: admirable, in a way, but also a bit nutty. Just as the MP3 let us sell our CDs and Spotify let us stop managing our iTunes catalogs, mobile devices have traded “all the news” for “the right news at the right time.” Much of the evolution of the Times’ apps over the past few years has been toward content parity — to ensure that every bit of content the Times produces was accessible in the native apps. (It’s easy to forget the iPad app once contained only an “Editor’s Choice” selection of articles.) That evolution was important from an infrastructural point of view and in elevating online content culturally within the organization. But it also meant the core apps ended up feeling a little overstuffed. The Times produces hundreds of pieces of content in a typical day — articles, blog posts, slideshows, videos, interactives. Putting the right ones in front of the right users is going to be a key part of the way forward. The audience that has NYTimes.com bookmarked in its desktop web browser is quite different from the ones that it’s trying to attract with NYT Now; it’s disappointing that the content mix appears to be nearly identical. I’ve said before that I think the Times’ recommendation engine should be a big part of that; it’s disappointing that there’s no sign of personalization in NYT Now. (Imagine a recommendations engine that could tell the NYT Now reader specific desirable stories she’s missing out on by not upgrading to the full digital subscription.) Even though I’m a full digital subscriber, I expect I’ll be using the NYT Now app more than the core iPhone app. The presentation is better, the aggregation adds real value, and the surface-level content is almost identical. It’s also an escape from Apple’s Newsstand ghetto. (But I also expect I’ll still read 20× more Times stories each week via Twitter.) As much as I like individual elements of NYT Now, I’m not anticipating big subscriber numbers. A digital subscription to the Times runs $15 every four weeks; NYT Now costs $8. I have to think the population of people for whom $15 is too pricey but $8 is just right is pretty small. Getting people to pay for digital content is hard, but the big challenge is getting someone from $0 to $0.01 — the act of commitment to payment. I don’t expect NYT Now to be able to do that for hundreds of thousands of users. (Happy to be wrong! The Times has far better behavioral data than I do about what their users want or choose.) But even if NYT Now isn’t the success the Times’ original paywall was, it should prove a valuable lesson in building for a mobile audience — which is, increasingly, just the audience. Here’s hoping that the DNA of NYT Now can spread back into the core apps and that it can push harder at bringing an experimental edge to sharing great Times content with the world. |
| The newsonomics of Digital First Media’s Thunderdome implosion (and coming sale) Posted: 01 Apr 2014 11:34 PM PDT Today, we’ll hear official word of the demise of Project Thunderdome, one of the news industry’s highest-profile experiments in centralized, digital-first, mobile-friendly, new-news-partner content creation. Digital First Media CEO John Paton first announced the creation of what became a 50-plus person, New York City-based operation three years ago. In the closing, and in other cuts at Digital First Media, we see the impact of unending high-single-digit loss in print advertising. The ongoing devastation in print is overwhelming even DFM’s relatively faster pace of digital innovation. The move also signals the fatigue of majority DFM owner Alden Global Capital — and that it is readying its newspaper properties for sale. They’re not yet on the market, but expect regional auctions of DFM properties (with clusters around the Los Angeles area, the Bay Area, New England, Colorado, Texas, New Mexico and Pennsylvania) — unless Alden can find a single buyer, which is unlikely. Closing Thunderdome is just part of a major north-of-$100-million cost cutting initiative that is putting the best glow on some tough financials. The reason for the sale: Despite CEO John Paton’s aggressive remaking of the company, Alden’s investments in cheap newspaper company shares (“The Demise of Lean Dean Singleton’s Departure and the Rise of Private Equity”) haven’t worked out the way private equity bets are supposed to. The current incarnation of Digital First Media was formed on Dec. 31, with the formal merger of large newspaper companies MediaNews and Journal Register; DFM had been managing both since 2011. And while its name might not be as well known as a Tribune or a New York Times Co., Digital First is a big player. Ask how big, and it won’t emphasize the number of dailies that it owns (75), but rather its digital position: “800 multi-platform products reach 67 million Americans each month across 18 states.” Some of the biggest impacts from this change will be felt in southern California — already facing an uncertain ownership situation at the Los Angeles Times, questions about sustainability at the Orange County Register (soon to be joined by a Los Angeles Register), potential changes further down I-5 (more on that below), and now DFM’s papers facing question marks. The idea of Thunderdome was to use DFM’s scale to provide its many local properties with a deeper, richer product than they could produce on their own. Thunderdome produced national-ready topical sections on core topics that could also be localized, which some of the bigger DFM properties (San Jose Mercury News, The Denver Post) have done more of than smaller-staffed dailies. Thunderdome only had time to roll out about eight of its topical sections, less than halfway through its original plan. Those — national/world news, health, tech, travel, food, pets, baseball — are in place at DFM’s 75 sites.
Those media partners have included numerous authoritative, but non-traditional news sources:
In its short life, Thunderdome showed promise, with multimedia and data-rich specials, including Firearms in the Family, Decoding the Kennedy Assassination and an interactive March Madness Bracket Advisor. A four-minute best-of video now will serve as an historic marker of Thunderdome, an experiment short-circuited, another case of digital journalism interruptus. Jim Brady (“What's Project Thunderdome, you ask? Inside Jim Brady's new job at Journal Register Company”) has been a prime architect of Project Thunderdome, most recently as editor-in-chief of DFM. Brady’s own career trajectory tells us a lot about the travails of digital innovation in the newspaper industry. A sports guy who, as an early editor of washingtonpost.com, helped make the Post a clear leader in web news, Brady decamped after a major management shuffle at the Post. He moved over to TBD, the Allbritton D.C. local news startup that aimed to create a new model of TV-partnered, blog-driven, visually strong local news. Its rise seemed meteoric, and so did its fall, as advertising didn’t meet expectations and disagreements between Brady and CEO Robert Allbritton torpedoed the project (“The newsonomics of TBD”). Now, Brady’s bid to once again reshape digital news is on hold. Thunderdome wasn’t universally received well within the company. Talk to the locals and you heard grumbles. Traffic to the new Thunderdome sections didn’t impress them. They didn’t like national imposition on local news judgment. That grumbling, however right or wrong, isn’t surprising: For 20 years, national news chains have bobbed and weaved through different ideas about national news centralization — first in print and then in digital. Only more recently, as the financial vise has tightened further, has accepting such centralization been seen as an inevitabilty. (Consider Gannett’s recent efforts to print sections of USA Today in some of its local dailies.) If it’s inevitable, the big question is execution: How good a product are you giving the readers, and is it better than what individual papers can do? With Thunderdome folding, the creation and production of national content will presumably fall back to the papers — though don’t expect new resources to be added back, even though some were cut in the move to Thunderdome.
Whatever the merits of the new Thunderdome sections — my own sense is that they show a good diversity of content and could have evolved well in their presentation — it’s clear that Thunderdome’s elimination is driven by cost-cutting. One DFM project, Project Catalyst, has swallowed another, Thunderdome. Catalyst is aimed at taking more than $100 million out of the company’s costs, a number a little greater than Tribune’s much publicized $100 million cut ordered by CEO Peter Liguori last fall. Recent DFM cuts in Philadelphia and the Bay Area, eliminating dozens of jobs across all divisions, are part of that process. Catalyst is led by Steve Rossi, a former Knight Ridder COO, who recently moved into that same position for DFM. Thunderdome’s demise, in least in the short term, helps DFM achieve its Catalyst goals, saving about $5 million a year. The end of Thunderdome has got to be a bitter pill to swallow for CEO John Paton, who declined to comment to me on its termination. Thunderdome has been a keystone of his argument for faster change in the news industry. The end of Thunderdome is likely to bring a smile or smirk to some of Paton’s detractors in the industry. Some think he’s too much of a showman, and some question his numbers. Paton loves to tweak his fellow newspaper execs, and we can expect a fair amount of publisher schadenfreude at the latest development. As recently as January, at the Online Publishers Association meeting in Miami, he told his audience this about other newspaper CEOs:
Undoubtedly, though, Paton’s been right on the need for faster transformation. His early presentations showing newspapers’ disproportionate press-and-trucks cost structure were clear-eyed. His investments in marketing service leader AdTaxi, in video, in blogging, and now in mobile stand out. The many efforts of the company, detailed in the Lab’s Encyclo entry, to break out of the newspaper mold are impressive. He says his company’s operating profit is up 40.8 percent from 2009 to 2012. Paton parlayed a small hand on a way-down-on-the-food-chain (Journal Register Co.) into a major U.S. digital news company. Readers have seen the major changes wrought at the JRC papers, which Paton had run the longest (since the beginning of 2010), though fewer at the bigger metro-oriented MediaNews papers he later took over. Changing the MediaNews metros has been a tougher nut to crack. Where DFM goes from here is increasingly unclear. How much can now be invested in digital growth, and how much more cost cutting will its owners require? How soon will papers be put on the market, and how quickly will new owners appear?
And if Alden puts DFM’s Los Angeles News Group on the market soon, it may not be the only property for sale. In San Diego, word on the business street, now rebounding among a number of daily publishers around the country, is that the ownership of the San Diego Union-Tribune, now renamed U-T San Diego, wants out. That’s right: Rumor has it that flamboyant owner Papa Doug Manchester (good David Carr rundown on the “pro-business” Manchester era) wants to sell. His sometimes-CEO John Lynch has been assigned the task of finding a buyer, that rumor says. Lynch has previously talked publicly about wanting to buy more papers. 2014 is sure to bring more churn to the newspaper industry — and it’s looking like southern California could end up being the epicenter of all that change. Photo illustration of a different thunderdome — at Burning Man 2010 — by Mayhem Chaos used under a Creative Commons license. |
| Posted: 31 Mar 2014 10:00 AM PDT Editor’s note: There's a lot of interesting academic research going on in digital media — but who has time to sift through all those journals and papers? Our friends at Journalist’s Resource, that’s who. JR is a project of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and they spend their time examining the new academic literature in media, social science, and other fields, summarizing the high points and giving you a point of entry. Here, John Wihbey sums up the top papers in digital media and journalism this month.
“Shares, Pins, and Tweets: News Readership From Daily Papers to Social Media”: From Duke University, published in Journalism Studies. By Marco Toledo Bastos. Drawing two weeks of data from The New York Times’ and The Guardian’s APIs, as well as the APIs of various social media platforms, Bastos set out to answer an important question: How much overlap is there between what editors choose to focus on and what social media users grab on to? This revitalizes an old debate over editorial judgment, gatekeeping, and norms of “newsworthiness.” The author looks about 16,000 articles on the news sites from late 2012; he also analyzes article links circulated on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, Delicious, and StumbleUpon. Some raw data findings relating to links posted on social media prove interesting: Times articles earned an average of 39 retweets on Twitter and 445 shares on Facebook, while Guardian articles saw an average of 50 retweets and 190 Facebook shares. Bastos concludes: “The results show that social media users express a preference for a subset of content and information that is at odds with the decisions of newspaper editors regarding which topic to emphasize.” Social media users tend to favor hard news over soft news, especially on Twitter. Only a quarter of the Times sports articles studied, for example, ever showed up on Twitter or Facebook. Likewise, news editors’ preferences for more articles about the economy do not track with social media user’s apparent preferences. Further, Bastos says, “although most news sections are uniformly and symmetrically distributed across newspapers and social networking sites, we found remarkable differences on the number of news items about arts, science, technology, and opinion pieces, which are on average more frequent on social networking sites than on newspapers.” The variation may be partly explained by the more urban, educated and youthful characteristics of social media users, the study notes. “Ideological Segregation and the Effects of Social Media on News Consumption”: From Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft Research. By Seth Flaxman, Sharad Goel, and Justin M. Rao. A noteworthy contribution to the “filter bubble” debate, the research — one of the “largest studies of online news consumption to date” — suggests that overall ideological segregation because of online media channels and personalization is rather limited. Flaxman, Goel, and Rao analyze a dataset of the nearly complete (and anonymized) web browsing habits of 1.2 million Internet users over a three month period, some 2.3 billion pageviews. The researchers use machine learning tools to assess ideology of the persons studied, looking at county-level voting patterns and demographics. For descriptive news articles accessed through social media, the level of ideological segregation is “marginally higher” than for those read by visiting a news site directly. The pattern is “more pronounced” for opinion pieces, and there is a higher degree of segregation in web search, roughly the “ideological distance between the centrist Yahoo! News and the left leaning Huffington Post (or equivalently, CNN and the right-leaning National Review).” Flaxman, Goel, and Rao conclude that a “relatively small amount of online news consumption is driven by the polarizing social and search channels, and opinion pieces which are typically the focus of laboratory studies constitute just 6% of articles relating to world or national news…[W]e find that individuals typically consume descriptive reporting, and do so by directly visiting a handful of their preferred news outlets.” Thus, while it is true social channels and search lead to segregation and filter bubbles, people are not primarily getting their news through those channels, and the “overall impact of these factors appears to be limited at this time.” Related: For a more precise, quantitative sense of how much Google actually filters results, see “Personalization of Web Search,” a 2013 paper by a team at Northeastern University. That study finds that on average “11.7% of search results show differences due to personalization.” “Can Cascades be Predicted?”: From Facebook, Stanford University, and Cornell University. By Justin Cheng, Lada A. Adamic, P. Alex Dow, Jon Kleinberg, and Jure Leskovec. A group of in-house data scientists at Facebook and select academic partners are increasingly sharing publicly some insights from the holy grail of network data. Hence this paper, which looks at how information cascades unfold and whether they can be predicted. It analyzes about 151,000 photos uploaded to Facebook and shared 9.2 million times over in June 2013. The network scientists try to figure out if it is possible to predict a viral cascade (multiple generations of peer-to-peer sharing, originating from a single “seed” or node). They work backwards, doing detective work to try to pick out viral signatures. Tentative findings include: Viral cascades typically start fast; early reproduction speed, the initial velocity across the network, seems to be a key marker. Further, as the photo spreads, it begins to matter less (the variable diminishes in importance) who spread it originally, and the actual kind of content matters less — though captions do seem to matter. Having a broader first generation of resharers also counts, too. Because the researchers could see the same photos being uploaded by different persons, they also noted that the first times the photo was uploaded, it was more likely to go viral compared to the later instances of uploading. Related: Another hugely important paper in this area is “The Structural Virality of Online Diffusion,” by Sharad Goel, Jake Hofman, and Duncan Watts of Microsoft Research and Ashton Anderson of Stanford. They analyze a billion links (news, images, videos, petitions) shared on Twitter. One of out every 3,000 links produced a “large event,” or a sharing phenomenon that reached 100 additional persons beyond the seed node; but truly viral events (many multiple generations of sharing, several thousand adoptions at least) occured only about once in a million instances. The researchers finally define what it is to be a viral event: There is an average of at least 10 nodes between any points on the entire network graph, suggesting the content has genuinely travelled far by virtue of grassroots peer-to-peer sharing, not just a big broadcast. “Social, Search and Direct: Pathways to Digital News”: From the Pew Research Journalism Project. By Amy Mitchell, Mark Jurkowitz, and Kenneth Olmstead. A hugely insightful new report, the data that Mitchell, Jurkowitz, and Olmstead analyze suggest that those accessing media through social media channels do not spend much time with news content, and news is consumed mostly “incidentally” on social platforms. Some of their salient conclusions are: “among users coming to these news sites through a desktop or laptop computer, direct visitors spend, on average, 4 minutes and 36 seconds per visit. That is roughly three times as long as those who wind up on a news media website through a search engine (1 minute 42 seconds) or from Facebook (1 minute 41 seconds). Direct visitors also view roughly five times as many pages per month (24.8 on average) as those coming via Facebook referrals (4.2 pages) or through search engines (4.9 pages). And they visit a site three times as often (10.9) as Facebook and search visitors.” Pew breaks out some of the other top insights here.
“Sourcing the Arab Spring: A Case Study of Andy Carvin’s Sources on Twitter During the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions”: From University of British Columbia and University of Minnesota, published in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. By Alfred Hermida, Seth C. Lewis, and Rodrigo Zamith. The study looks at the mix of sources Andy Carvin used during his social media-focused reporting for NPR. Hermida, Lewis and Zamith examine the mix of “elite” sources and “alternative voices” in a dataset of 60,000 tweets during 2010-11; they plug this data into a wider debate over how the new network ecosystem is changing the mix of media voices and sources. The researchers conclude that “nonaffiliated activists accounted for the greatest single share of tweet mentions, overall (35.3%) and for Egypt (37.5%).” However, “in the overall population of individual sources, mainstream media employees accounted for the largest group by far (26.7%).” This general mix of evidence, the study concludes, suggests of a “new paradigm of sourcing at play.” Other noteworthy papers in brief“Networked Press Freedom and Social Media: Tracing Historical and Contemporary Forces in Press-Public Relations”: From the Annenberg School, USC, published in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. By Mike Ananny. Ananny argues that the contemporary social media policies of some news organizations still fit into an age-old “defensive” and “conservative” pattern of distancing media members and institutions from their audiences and mitigating risks. The audience is seen in utilitarian terms — as a way of generating traffic or merely producing more efficient sourcing. Thus, old gatekeeping customs emerge in new clothes. “Twitter in Politics: A Comprehensive Literature Review”: From the University of Bamburg (Germany). By Andreas Jungherr. This giant literature review — 115 studies, from around the globe, across many election cycles — finds that research typically falls into one of three categories: “the use of Twitter by politicians and campaigners, the use of Twitter by publics in election and issue campaigns and the use of Twitter by various users to comment on mediated campaign events — such as televised debates, party conventions or election day coverage.” Jungherr concludes that despite the somewhat haphazard and emerging nature of the field, there are some “stable findings” being arrived at. For example, “candidates belonging to opposition parties take more frequently to Twitter than candidates from parties in government.” “Seeking and Sharing Health Information Online: Comparing Search Engines and Social Media”: From Microsoft Research. By Munmun De Choudhury, Meredith Ringel Morris, and Ryen W. White. This study examines what kinds/amounts of health information people publicly disclose on Twitter (and compares and contrasts with search engine use for health-related inquiries). It turns out people share a lot of health information publicly on Twitter, although “high-stigma” conditions are not as frequently shared. Based on this evidence, the researchers hypothesize some needed digital innovations: “New kinds of health information search systems may be built that support standing queries over search and/or social media to keep users apprised of new developments related to different common health concerns , since seeking new research about conditions and diversity of health content were the goals of many respondents.” Also see a related Microsoft Research/Carnegie Mellon/University of Washington/MIT paper “Is There Anyone Out There? Unpacking Q-and-A Hashtags on Twitter.” “Network Issue Agendas on Twitter During the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election”: From the University of Alabama, University of Texas at Austin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, published in the Journal of Communication. By Chris J. Vargo, Lei Guo, Maxwell McCombs, and Donald L. Shaw. This “Big Data” study (38 million tweets analyzed) looks at how Republicans and Democrats operated differently on Twitter and how they responded to different forms of media — both “vertical,” or traditional media, and “horizontal,” or niche forms of media that target like-minded communities. The researchers conclude that “although vertical media could best predict Obama supporters’ behaviors on Twitter, the Republican horizontal media offered the greatest predictor power in explaining Romney supporters’ network agenda.” “Political performance, boundary spaces, and active spectatorship: Media production at the 2012 Democratic National Convention”: From the University of North Carolina, published in Journalism. By Daniel Kreiss, Laura Meadows, and John Remensperger. An ethnographic look at the 2012 DNC and media produced there, this paper provides some interesting insights into how conventions — now so ritualized and scripted that journalists find them impossible to cover — can actually empower attendees as “active spectators.” Social media at a convention now allow non-elite participants opportunities for “public critique and accountability over both political and journalistic actors.” “Siren songs or path to salvation? Interpreting the visions of Web technology at a UK regional newspaper in crisis, 2006–2011″: From Bournemouth University (U.K.), published in Convergence. By Phil MacGregor. This five-year case study on Britain’s Northern Echo newspaper shows how technological adoption in a media organization is not “unidirectional”: rather, it is “neither smooth nor uniform and is marked by uncertainty as to which of several actions is rational. Doubt is spread throughout the hierarchy.” The observations will be familiar to many in news organizations, but for scholars it’s another good data point showing a complex transition to the web. Photo by Anna Creech used under a Creative Commons license. |
| Posted: 31 Mar 2014 08:54 AM PDT About 300 people filled an event space in San Diego a couple weeks ago to take part in a discussion sponsored by Voice of San Diego on innovations with origins in the area. The assembled crowd served as a physical representation of an amorphous concept that’s on the rise in nonprofit journalism: membership. Every single person in attendance was a paid member of Voice of San Diego, with some of them having joined in order to attend the event. The following week, the site had to rent out an entire restaurant to fit all the members who would attend its monthly coffee talk. News organizations have long tried to turn casual customers into regular ones. In newspapers, that meant turning an occasional single-copy buyer into a seven-day subscriber. For many online news sites, it means convincing occasional visitors to hand over their credit card info to get past a paywall. For nonprofits — dedicated to making their content freely available, but in need of stronger community connections — membership models are increasingly popular. “Membership is the most important because I think it is the measure of whether you have a passionate following,” said Joel Kramer, CEO of the nonprofit MinnPost. “Because plunking down money is a great measure of people's passion and intensity for what you do. Putting down money is a very good measure of intensity and the business models that are based on an intense following are generally more stable and more promising than models that are just based on a lot of traffic,” he said.
The two news orgs will work together to improve their customer management systems that will allow MinnPost and Voice of San Diego to better manage how they deal with their members. They’ll then each work to better integrate membership data into their respective websites. “[Voice of San Diego and MinnPost are] two organizations that have dynamic readership and who have kind of staked out a beachhead and have created a space where they both survived for several years,” said John Bracken, Knight's director of journalism and media innovation. (MinnPost was founded in 2007 and Voice of San Diego launched in 2005.) “Now it’s sort of a matter of taking that initial progress and adding to it and not for just those two publications but for others in the space,” he said. (Disclosure: Knight is also a funder of Nieman Lab.) The two organizations began working together in January with a common consultant. They’re transitioning to a system using Salesforce.com that will automate many tasks and streamline how each publication deals with attracting and retaining members. “We’re building tools and systems so that we can really understand what’s going on with members and with prospects and be able to communicate with them in a targeted way, because we have good data and all our systems will be talking with each other,” said Kramer. Both outlets want to make it easier for donors to give money repeatedly, and they want more information about each membership to be readily available to both the user and the organization. So, for instance, they’ll be able to tell if someone has donated recently and thus choose to leave them out of an email solicitation as to not overburden the donor. The second phase of the grant will also work toward that goal and enable MinnPost and Voice of San Diego to better integrate membership information with each outlet's website to utilize that data to increase users' ability to customize the site and encourage membership. Voice of San Diego CEO Scott Lewis said he wants the final product to feature “a very prominent and very user-friendly invitation to login, to select your preferences and the things you want to follow, and to follow our email newsletters,” as well as a way for members to detail their interests to better filter the VOSD content they most value.
Both sites have seen membership grow in recent years, and as part of the Knight grant they’ve set goals to triple their totals over the next three years. Voice of San Diego's membership grew 27 percent in 2013 to about 1,850 members, Lewis said. MinnPost finished 2013 with 2,226 members, an increase of 6 percent over 2012. Both publications hope increased membership will boost revenues and allow them to invest in improving their journalism. Voice of San Diego, which also plans to launch a capital campaign this year, plans to expand its geographic coverage area as well and redouble its efforts to cover topics like education, politics, and policy, and the economy. “We’re a store that’s filled with people, but that has only one dysfunctional cash register,” Lewis said. “We need to make it as easy as possible for people to support things that they appreciate and support what they want to see happen. It’s not that easy right now, and it needs to be a lot easier. That’s what we’re hoping to fix.” Photo of this month’s VOSD Meeting of the Minds gathering courtesy Voice of San Diego. |
For all its attention to mobile, Quartz has also been trying to use 
Last night, the Klein & Co. project 
Editor’s note: At this weekend’s 
![attmingoals[1][1]](http://www.niemanlab.org/images/attmingoals11-315x177.png)
| 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 | |