Selasa, 13 Desember 2011

The Guardian’s n0tice platform adds ads and revenue sharing


Nieman Journalism Lab

Posted: 12 Dec 2011 11:30 AM PST

Earlier this fall, we wrote about an intriguing new initiative at The Guardian: n0tice, an open platform for community messaging. (Think Craigslist, as run by a global news organization.)
One of the most interesting aspects of n0tice as it rolls out to users has been the business model it’s been developing in the process. The platform would be ad-supported, the plan went, but through a system that fits in well with The Guardian’s notion of “mutualization” — one that would allow noticeboard owners to offer up their message boards to advertisers. The idea was to rethink what classifieds might look like when they’re done collaboratively.
Today, that collaboration is no longer just a nice idea. n0tice has launched ads on its community sites, allowing noticeboard owners to profit from the social spaces they’re creating online. Those owners — who can create custom message boards for free (or for “nothing, zero, zilch,” as the site’s FAQs make clear) — can offer their customized noticeboards to advertisers both paying and non-, creating a space for other community members to publicize products and events, and otherwise publish classified ad listings (“offers,” in the n0tice terminology). The ads live on noticeboards’ sidebars, and owners can sell featured positions — which includes visual enhancements as well as priority rankings on the page — for £1/day or the equivalent base-level regional currency. (Payment takes place through PayPal and its 25 currencies, allowing n0tice — though it’s run in the U.K. — an international scope.)
So n0tice is taking the Craigslist approach to ad sales — Mostly Free, with A Few Key Exceptions — except that advertisers pay based on ads’ appearance rather than on their content.
The idea is to bring the age-old logic of advertising — joining messages with the people who might want to see those messages — to community space, and via digital tools. Those who have commercial or classified messages to share with a particular community can reach that community in a highly targeted way. And, given n0tice’s local focus, a geographically targeted one, at that. Think of it, suggests Matt McAlister, The Guardian’s director of digital strategy, as a kind of Yellow Pages for the digital space.
n0tice is also announcing — collaboration again! — a revenue-share arrangement to accompany today’s ad rollout. Noticeboard owners will keep 85 percent of the revenue generated on their noticeboards; n0tice will take the remaining 15 percent. (Noticeboard owners also have the option of donating their earnings to charities.) And the owners, in keeping with the platform’s focus on social analytics tools, will be able track their revenue over time.
While the n0tice team, McAlister told me, is still working on one of the most intriguing aspects of n0tice’s revenue plan — a “space and time”-oriented ad model that makes the price of an ad contingent on both its geographical reach and its length of appearance — today’s launch hints at the potential for advertising done in collaboration with a community, and on a hyperlocal scale. And it suggests that innovation in that space may well have a back-to-the-future orientation. Now that the ads have rolled out, n0tice has also created a mechanism — based on QR codes — that gives users an easy way to print offer pages. The logic? To allow people to take online ads and post them “on real world noticeboards.”
Posted: 12 Dec 2011 11:00 AM PST
Argo Gold Mine & Mill (Vilseskogen via Flickr) 
It was called the Argo Project, NPR’s $3 million experiment to expand the digital footprint of member stations. From nothing sprang blogs about health care reform in Massachusetts, education in San Francisco, immigration in Southern California, the environment in the Pacific Northwest, global health in Seattle. NPR provided the tools, training, and tech support.
How much of an impact can one blogger make?
A little more than a year ago, 12 public radio stations set a goal: Hire a reporter, teach him or her how to blog, and create the most authoritative local source of news on a single topic — a vertical.
As the project winds down this month, stations seem to have found the experience valuable — valuable enough that 10 of 12 are trying to keep their blogs alive (with the other two still trying to keep their bloggers employed), even though funding (from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Knight Foundation) dries up at the end of this year. NPR plans to continue supporting existing stations in the long term and find ways to expand the network.
And for some stations, it’s been an eye-opening experience in how original, web-native publishing can expand audiences in ways that repurposed radio content might not on its own. At four of the 12 stations, their Argo blog drew monthly audiences bigger than every other part of their news sites combined.
“Really, by hiring just one person, you can build an audience, build engagement, and demonstrate knowledge of a particular topic,” said Joel Sucherman, the project’s director at NPR. The first year of traffic for the whole Argo network surpassed published traffic numbers for startups such as the Texas Tribune and the Bay Citizen in their first years, he said.
Together, the dozen Argo sites attracted more than 400,000 visitors in a one-month stretch this fall, according to internal data furnished by a person who isn’t authorized to share it. KQED and KPBS were the top performers, each averaging more than 100,000 monthly visitors. Both stations have committed to keeping the blogs alive next year.
But there is more to success than pageviews. NPR’s Matt Thompson, Argo’s editorial product manager, said the primary measure of success was the impact and authority of the journalism. “And that, of course, is impossible to set one common metric for across all 12, but for each of the 12, I think we’ve got a pretty strong case to make,” he said.
Project ArgoAt San Francisco’s tiny KALW, for example, Rina Palta covers cops, courts, and communities for The Informant. Early on, Palta caught a good story: California was short on sodium thiopental, the lethal drug used for executions. She became a leading reporter on the story, not by writing one big investigative piece but by filing frequent, incremental updates, Thompson said. (Even Stephen Colbert cited her work.) Thompson calls it the quest: The body of work makes a bigger impact than any single post.
At Boston’s WBUR, CommonHealth has become a major driver of traffic to the station’s main site, said John Davidow, executive editor of new media (and my boss when I previously worked at the station). The two most viewed wbur.org stories of the past year both came from CommonHealth. One of those, “10 Things Not To Say To Parents Of Preemies,” got the attention of Brigham And Women’s Hospital, which asked to distribute a copy for staff. Davidow said CommonHealth gets an extra traffic bump from NPR.org, which features Argo blog posts on weekends.

Reaching new audiences

Another Argo goal was to help stations reach new and different audiences on the web. “For example,” Sucherman said, “at KPCC in Pasadena, Calif., with their site Multi-American, they’re able to reach an audience of 1.5- and second-generation Americans that might not be predisposed to listening to their radio programming currently.”
In San Diego, KPBS’ Home Post engages military families, an uncommon demographic for public radio, said News Director Suzanne Marmion.
Some of the largest stations saw the smallest growth over the year.
“We serve them with news and information, and our blogger can channel their comments and find good sources that then appear in our programming,” Marmion said. “It’s a dialogue with the military community that we would not otherwise have.”
At San Francisco’s KQED, MindShift attracted 125,000 visitors in October. KQED has since used Argo’s customized WordPress platform to build new verticals covering the environment, state government, and food.
“Our criterion for picking a topic area for Argo was finding something is particularly reflective of, and somewhat unique to, the Bay Area, but that is having impact nationally,” said digital media VP Tim Olson. ”A topic that KQED is well positioned to cover given our geographic proximity to many of the players and events, but that would appeal to people across the country.”
That may explain part of the blog’s traffic success. Olson said the MindShift audience is evenly distributed across the United States, proportional to population.
The most trafficked Argo sites, yes, belong to big stations like KQED, stations that already have robust websites. But some large stations — WNYC, Minnesota Public Radio — showed the smallest or most erratic audience growth over the past year. That could be because those blogs cover highly local topics, such as New York state politics and higher education in Minnesota.

Searching for funding models

WIth the grant period over, Sucherman, Thompson, and designer Wes Lindamood will get to keep their jobs at NPR. (Developer Marc Lavallee has since taken a job at the New York Times.) The stations will have to find ways to keep their Argo bloggers employed, and not all of them have yet.
“I think that radio stations are still learning how to, ultimately, sustain digital successes from a financial perspective,” Sucherman said. “I think that’s something they need to continue to work at.” He said some stations have found support for the blog next year, others are adding it to the digital media budget to fundraise against.
At WXPN, a Triple A music station in Philadelphia, The Key figured out something novel. A popular feature on that blog is the Key Studio Sessions, a series of downloadable performances by local bands in XPN’s performance studio. In May, the Knight Foundation awarded the station a $50,000 grant to keep the Key sessions running next year.
Now the Argo team hopes to take the lessons of the project and provide training to more member stations. A perfect laboratory is the newly created State Impact project, which makes Argo look small — a partnership between NPR and stations to cover government in all 50 states.
Photo by Vilseskogen used under a Creative Commons license
Posted: 12 Dec 2011 08:30 AM PST


Editor’s Note: Jeff Israely, a former Time magazine foreign correspondent in Europe, is in the early stages of a news startup called Worldcrunch. He occasionally describes and comments on his startup process here at the Lab. Read his past installments here.
This is the hardest post: On Fundraising.
The process of raising money for a startup can seem deceptively similar to other professional activities. I’d come from a line of work that involves asking all sorts of things of perfect strangers (their time, their secrets, maybe even their soul) — but never their money. My business partner Irene Toporkoff has spent years marketing and selling digital content — closing deals — but that’s not quite the same as trying to get someone to sign a personal check.
Asking someone to hand over their hard-earned cash — to essentially bet independently on your ideas and capacities — is something altogether different than inking a sales deal or squeezing someone for an exclusive interview. Right now, we’re set to move into a whole other world of venture capital — where the checks aren’t necessarily personal, but the bets are still on.
More than a year into it, the process of looking for investors is still largely a mystery to me, and I have been as baffled by some of the yeses as by some of the nos. It is clear that betting these days on news content is a particular kind of wager, an intriguing but troubled cousin to the high and fast returns that investors think they see in certain new e-commerce sites, social platforms, and killer apps.
But beyond whatever insight I might be able to impart — from both the failures and success, as both a news guy and startup dude — it would still be difficult at this stage for me to write openly about raising money. We are, in fact, still on the hunt. And thus I am keenly aware that implicit in this post is a sort of public confession that the next next thing that we’ve been stirring and hyping and sweating day and night on, won’t actually work like magic…that our mission of building a new model for the production and distribution of global news, of doing right by our readers, requires that others do right by us.
The myth of the lone entrepreneurial maverick is just that: a myth. Every risk we take is calculated, every leap we make cushioned by the help of others. Irene and I happened to both be ready to make a rather bold professional pivot, but neither one of us is foolhardy (nor 22 years old!). So every dollar found, not to mention the pavement pounded for those sought in vain, is a hedge placed against the heights of our own ambitions.
In a more immediate sense, this is an even trickier post to write at this particular moment, as we are just about to begin a concerted round of fundraising. After having obtained some seed cash over the past year in a not-very-systematic way, we are now working with professional finance folk here in Paris — and our target figure is indeed much more ambitious than before.
So why write about fundraising now? It came up as Irene and I were telling someone about one of the more, er, extreme encounters we’ve had over the past year. We went to meet someone we’d been told might want to invest in Worldcrunch. Instead, after a not-very-polite hello, he started pitching his latest project to us! At 90 miles an hour, without pausing to breathe or remembering why we were there or who we even were. It was the one time where, when the elevator door closed, we both just burst out laughing. And the kicker: Irene, ever the businesswoman, turns to me after we stopped laughing, and says: “Maybe he can buy some of our content?” We paused for a moment — and then started laughing even harder.
But beyond the hijinks, I realized that we have accumulated some real experience over this past first year…and it is still fresh. So in the spirit of this ongoing, occasional series on launching a news startup, it is most useful for readers — and I am convinced, also for us — if I try to wean something from the ups and downs of our fundraising efforts to this point — just at the moment our attention is most focused on the topic.
The best way to proceed, I think, is to take it chronologically. And this story starts two years ago, well before I had found that kick-ass business partner, launched the killer company — before I really had any practical business experience at all.
In the beginning, there was just one person who could solve the financing question. He had no shortage of funds. He knew my work. He loved media. He was under 40. I had even once talked to him about the idea that I now had transformed into a 22-slide PowerPoint business plan and had printed out and carried under my arm as I strode toward his office on a hot September afternoon.
I had spent the summer convincing myself that there was a solid 50/50 chance he would write me the check I needed to launch the thing — and I could just get on with it. You guessed right: It was the wrong 50. Actually, the story of this entire project (including my musings here) is the fruit of not getting that check — how much I had to learn before having anyone’s money to play with.
The truth is, I never even got the chance that day to ask if he would invest. (I am about to now!) He had brought along a top guy from his marketing office to hear about the project, who would end up helping me to begin to sharpen that business plan. They both asked good, tough questions. They saw some potential. It was not the meeting I had anticipated, in either of the 50/50 scenarios — but it was the first of many good meetings.
Takeaway No. 1: No one will give you money just because they have it.
Takeaway No. 2: Anyone who doesn’t give you money probably can offer something else (or at least a good laugh).
Fast-forward six months. Still flying solo, blissful in my ignorance, though a bit wiser in my ways. I still hadn’t actually asked anyone for money, and wasn’t thinking too much about it. I didn’t understand much, but I’d understood that it was actually too early to be seeking funding. Bootstrapping is a concept I learned to appreciate over time. At first, it seemed like a euphemism meant to encourage those who couldn’t manage to raise money. Now, I know, for some it can also border on religion. And little by little, as I learned more about what you can give up when you do raise money: not just ceding shares of the company and potentially control of the business, but it can start to change the natural order of things — make you move too fast, or slow you down.
Still, in the end, I knew that this news startup couldn’t be pure bootstrap: it was not a blog or software or a design shop or whatever else can potentially be launched alone. Rather, it was going to be a professional news company and content producer; and as such, would need human capital — and as such: some upfront cash.
I understand now, in a way I didn’t at first, that money — both up-front investment and revenue generation — is so much a part of every other aspect of building a business. It is fuel to arrive from here to there, the chance to turn out our product and find good people, and present ourselves to our potential customers. (And, of course, future investors too.)
But in our fundraising efforts, I also learned that it’s never just a pure question of how much cash you have on hand or how many people you can hire or how much of your company you still own. Fundraising is strategy. How you go into the process and how you come out of it is destined to shape the very nature of the company: it is simultaneously about dreaming big, and surviving tomorrow.
The relatively low barrier to entry that the Internet affords renders fundamental the to-bootstrap-or-not-to-bootstrap question for just about everyone. To launch a small enterprise at more or less full capacity, by traditional newspaper standards, would be a tiny operation: four in-house editors, a few webmasters and multimedia folk, one or two marketing and admin staff — and a global network of stringers who would be paid for their work. Overhead would be low, ad sales and subscriptions outsourced. Small, yes, but still north of 1 to 2 million bucks a year on the cost side.
But I discovered that there is vast territory between no funding and fully funded, that we could start small, go live early, and keep costs to an absolute minimum. We could show people, ourselves included, what we had. We could develop best practices, build partnerships, gauge the market…
This would wind up being far more than just a budgetary decision. It would become our strategy.
Takeaway No. 1: Fundraising is more than a means to an end.
Takeaway No. 2: Bootstraps can come in all shades of gray.
And then it began. Sort of. We weren’t going big/fast, but we needed some cash for these first months. We had to get the site designed and built, pay the journalists to produce our articles, figure out legal and admin costs. So, with Irene taking the lead, we started making the rounds. In retrospect, it’s all a blur. We had meetings with people who we thought could have some money, or ideas, or both, or might know someone who did. Sometimes we went for the ideas, and left with some money. Other times, it was the reverse. In any case, more ideas than money.
Of course, when someone does commit, it is just about as exciting — and humbling — a moment in the life of a startup as any. It is pure fuel to feed the little engine you are building — and a very real commitment from someone who was indeed a perfect stranger when you first asked if you could borrow a few minutes of their time.
Still, fundraising can be exhausting, and time-consuming. Especially as the calls and meetings and emails start to pile up, as certain hot leads turn cold, as real interest in someone’s eyes across the table somehow fades when the follow-up email goes out.
There will also be the occasional encounter that can just make you mad, someone who not only doesn’t believe in the project, but decides to take you to school while he’s at it. One entrepreneur/angel investor who had made his millions in his 20s told us that news wasn’t a real business, that he made it because he hacked away around the clock, slept by the warmth of his humming computer hard drive, and finally — when I’d mentioned that I had a wife and two kids — he declared that this was “a real problem” for the potential success of our company!The twist, I realized afterwards, is that it is actually a good thing, every now and then, to run into someone who openly doubts you, who wants to cut you down. That’s a different kind of fuel!
But even for those who believe in the project, there are other obstacles. The valuation we’ve assigned to the company prompted raised eyebrows from some, requests for a special rate from others…in exchange for promises that they will contribute in other ways, not be sleeping partners, etc. (A rule of thumb is to always count on them sleeping in the end — we learned that the hard way too.)
Then there are others who are truly interested, cool with the terms, and apparently ready to jump on board — but you still have to get them to sign that check! Back in September, with a shred of doubt still lingering with a certain key investor, Irene rushed down to Gare Montparnasse one Friday evening to literally pick up the signed deposit papers by hand on the train platform. Humble indeed!
I’ve only scratched the surface of just our one little startup, still at an early stage, not even mentioning how our written business plan and live pitch have evolved. Perhaps after our upcoming round, with the professional help of Lionel Le Maux, I can return to those topics.
I thought I would conclude by returning to what is particular about what we are doing, i.e., finding new ways of producing and delivering quality news content. In our case, it is global news — and it goes like this. But this can apply for anyone with an idea related to content production: from hyper-local to worldwide, topic-specific or otherwise.
Right now, we would-be professional content producers are decidedly not the flavor of the month in the eyes of investors. Beyond the hunt for the next Facebook or e-commerce fix, even for those with a particular affinity for media, it’s all about the stuff around it, the tools and trimmings: the technology, the platforms, the gaming, the social networks.
But I am convinced that we can begin by simply distinguishing between information and worthwhile information. Noise and news. Yes, technology and the crowd will play an ever bigger part. But without a professional layer or two, it is bound to fall short: for the technology, because it’s not human, and for the crowd, because it’s not paid.
But as much as the money, the investment is in the time and thought and effort to figure out the right models that involve professionalism — and as such help to redefine what it means to make a living doing journalism. Of course we should be doing journalism with technological changes very much in mind, and we should know that journalists aren’t going to paid in the same ways — and probably never as much — as they once were, if only for the simple reason that more people are doing it, including a few good ones who will in fact do it for free.
But just because the definition and economics of the profession are changing doesn’t mean we just wait for the clock to run out on the old models. If we start looking now for new ways to find worthwhile information, we can actually make quality coverage part of this transformative moment, rather than its victim — and, as you should remind potential investors, we can discover some great business opportunities along the way.
Takeaway No. 1: Keep on pitching…
Takeaway No. 2: You gotta believe!
Photo by Thomas Hawk used under a Creative Commons license.
Posted: 12 Dec 2011 07:00 AM PST
 
“Ben is a new breed of reporter who merges journalistic values with digital fluency,” Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti told me, in an email, of the hire. “He grew up in newsrooms and knows how to chase down a scoop. But he is web native and understands how social media moves a story.”
Late last night, in a move “sure to surprise the political and journalistic classes,” Buzzfeed announced that it’s made a new hire: Ben Smith. The Ben Smith, of Politico fame, the blogger who helped define what it means to be a political reporter who just happens to do his reporting in the digital space.
So, starting January 1, Smith will leave his blog at Politico (he’ll stay on as a weekly columnist) to become Buzzfeed’s editor-in-chief. He’ll be charged with expanding the social aggregation site’s editorial coverage through the launching of new content sections (topics to be announced), the writing of his own content, and the hiring of reporters whose work he’ll be editing.
Yep, reporters. More than a dozen of them, in fact.
“My basic view, all along, has been that you can take the values of good, straight reporting and apply them” to web reporting, Smith told me in a phone call. At the same time, though, “you don’t have to be yoked to the conventions.” The online space is above all an experimental space.
Smith is known not just for his reporting, but also for the the entrepreneurial drive he brings to it; as surprising as his move to Buzzfeed might be on the surface, it’s also a logical place for him to experiment with combining traditional reporting and experimental methods of social distribution. As he puts it: “This just seems like a very natural thing for me.”
The idea is to continue the type of work he’s been doing at Politico — reported blogging — and to combine that content with the social elements of Buzzfeed. So: Reporting, amplified. Reporting, viral-ized. Smith and Peretti will be starting from the premise — less a theory than “just the reality for me,” Smith says — that people are now mostly (and increasingly) getting their news from social sources like Twitter, Facebook, and aggregators. Journalism is increasingly part of the social web. And “when you think of your news organization that way,” Smith says, “it’s very liberating.”
And within the social space, Smith points out, one of the things people most like to share is news that is actually, you know, new. As Peretti told me last week, people are increasingly aware of themselves not just as consumers of content, but as curators of it. They increasingly appreciate the role they play as, if not breakers of news, then disseminators of it. And that means that newness itself has viral potential — and that Buzzfeed, newly Smith-ified, will put a premium on new content. Explanatory reporting, as well as Buzzfeed standbys like graphics and video content, will also be part of the mix — but the core of it all will be hard news. “Great reporting and scoops will speak for themselves,” Smith says.
And though Smith and his team will certainly be using all the tech tools at their disposal to get those scoops — Buzzfeed’s staff “have amazing technical abilities,” Smith points out — “I’m not hiring coders,” he stresses. “I want to hire reporters who get scoops the same way they have always have.”
So…phone calls, shoe leather, boots, ground, the whole thing?
Yep: “Phone calls, trips to Iowa, drinks with political operatives,” Smith says.
All that will mean big changes for Buzzfeed, which has so far been known less for reporting the news than for providing friendly distractions from it. But “I think Buzzfeed wants to do something really new — different from what it’s been doing, and different from what anyone else is doing,” Smith says. “We want to be a real, important voice on topics people care about.”
Smith describes his new role as “trying to help build the first true social news organization — that is, an outfit built on the understanding that readers increasingly get and share their news on Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms.” Peretti’s vision is equally grand: to build, he told me, “the definitive social news organization.”
The challenge in all that — and, potentially, the big opportunity — will be to combine reporting and reach to maximum effect. And to combine the distractional element of Buzzfeed with the informational. As one Twitterer put it, “So many people think its cool that @benpolitico is going to @buzzfeed, but look at @buzzfeed, complete pap, and old-paradigm as well.”
To which Smith replied: “Stay tuned.”
Image via Politico.
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