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AIR names 10 winners for Localore, its $2 million initiative to shake up public media Posted: 30 Jan 2012 12:30 PM PST The Association of Independents in Radio has named 10 public-media producers who will participate in its multi-million-dollar digital storytelling initiative, Localore. Projects will cover climate change, music, the immigrant experience, and education, among other subjects. The winners will pair up with “incubator” stations across the country for up to a year and share in $1.25 million to experiment with new kinds of journalism. As I wrote in September, Localore is meant to reinvigorate the experimental spirit of public media that can get lost in day-to-day newsgathering. The mandate was to create place-based projects that would stir up engagement in specific communities — hence the name, Localore. “It riffs off of this sort of contemporary notion of ‘locavore,’ which says, ‘Pay attention to where you’re getting your sustenance’,” said Sue Schardt, AIR’s executive director, at the time. "Localore, likewise: Pay attention to where you get your news, where your stories come from — source them close to home." In tiny Paonia, Colo., producer Julia Kumari Drapkin will work with KVNF-FM to create a crowdsourced reporting project called iSeeChange, which draws on citizens’ everyday observations about the weather to build a narrative about climate change and its impact on local ranchers and coal miners. At KUT-FM in Texas, Delaney Hall proposes Austin Music Map, a documentary series revealing the “third places” where musicmakers meet and perform. The project will culminate in a music festival. At Twin Cities Public Television, Ken Elkund plans to create a participatory “alternate-reality” game that asks the community for solutions to the high-school dropout crisis. The game will focus on a fictitious character named Edwina, whose interactions with other real-life participants will shape the game’s outcome. Todd Melby will work with Prairie Public Broadcasting to report from the oil patches of North Dakota, producing multimedia portraits of workers joining the drilling rush and the families they leave behind. Melby plans to map active oil wells and produce data-driven reporting. AIR posted details about all the projects on its website. The organization said it received applications from 130 producers, who tended to be under 30, white, and not already employed at a station. Seven of the 10 stations selected are in major markets. Several winners will work with new-media startup Zeega, a team building dead-simple software for interactive, media-rich, pure-HTML5 stories. (The Zeega team emerged from AIR’s last big big initiative, Makers Quest 2.0.) Zeega’s Kara Oehler wrote last week for PBS MediaShift: We believe firmly that great storytelling and storytellers should drive the design and development process. As opposed to traditional software development that begins with generic specs, we’re committed to building out Zeega’s core features through real projects tied to real producers, communities and users. And importantly, as opposed to just ending up with a bespoke mix of technology experiments after Localore ends, these projects will make a lasting contribution to the tools for public media. Zeega’s source code will be made open-source and rigorously documented, Oehler said. It will be up to stations to decide what to do with producers and their projects at the end of the funding term. AIR hopes the projects will lead to a permanent expansion of R&D at stations. Altogether AIR raised $2 million for Localore, which comes from Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the MacArthur Foundation, the federally funded National Endowment for the Arts, and the Wyncote Foundation.

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This Week in Review: Debating Google and evil, and a case study in breaking news accuracy Posted: 27 Jan 2012 08:00 AM PST Google, social search, privacy, and evil: Two weeks after Google raised the ire of Facebook and Twitter by privileging Google+ within its search results, engineers at the two companies (plus MySpace) came out with a sharp response: A browser bookmarklet not-so-subtly titled “Don’t Be Evil,” that removes the extra weighting Google+ results get in the new Search Plus Your World feature. Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan has a thorough explanation of what the tool does, and search veteran John Battelle described what this “well-timed poke in the eye” means within Silicon Valley. Some tech bloggers agreed with the sentiment behind the new hack: PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy said Google needs to acknowledge to its users that it’s no longer presenting unbiased and objective search results, and her colleague MG Siegler and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber argued that Google’s big problem isn’t ethical but practical — it’s damaging its product by making results less relevant. Others didn’t see Google as the villain in this situation: Tech entrepreneur Chris Dixon argued that Twitter is asking for a sweetheart deal — top Google search rankings for their information without giving Google firehose access to it. Om Malik and Mathew Ingram of GigaOM pointed out that Facebook’s record in putting user needs before its own gain is pretty spotty itself. Danny Sullivan proposed a truce between Google, Facebook, and Twitter based on making users’ public information public to any search engine, treating social action as proprietary and profiles as search metadata, and making contacts portable. Google fueled more suspicion of evil later in the week when it announced a new privacy policy that will unite its tracking of users’ behavior across search, Gmail, YouTube, and Google+ — a change users can’t opt out of. TechCrunch’s Eric Eldon explained the reason for the move: Google’s trying to improve the quality of its social data to compete with Facebook’s growing pool. The obvious question here is, as Mathew Ingram framed it, will all this information sharing be good for users, or just Google’s advertisers? Gizmodo’s Mat Honan led the way in charging the latter, saying that Google is taking away the user control that helped form the cornerstone of its “don’t be evil” philosophy. Devin Coldewey of TechCrunch and Christopher Dawson of ZDNet argued the opposite, that Google is only simplifying its privacy policies, something that should be easier to understand and maybe even more helpful for users. Danny Sullivan’s response was mixed, as he pointed out both potential benefits and concerns for users. That ambivalence was shared by Wired’s Tim Carmody, who concluded that Google is not evil, but “something else, something more than a little uncanny, something that despite conjecture, projections, fictions, and a combination of excitement and foreboding, we haven't fully prepared ourselves to recognize yet.” Elsewhere in the Google empire, Google+ announced a change to its real-names-based policy, allowing “established pseudonyms.” ZDNet’s Violet Blue noted that the allowance of pseudonyms is still quite limited, and Trevor Gilbert of PandoDaily said this change is probably related to Google+ pseudonyms’ value in Google’s new integrated social search function. Adam Shostack of Emergent Chaos argued that the initial insistence on real names was a big part of Google+’s disappointing start, and the AP’s Jonathan Stray wondered why Google is so insistent on real names in the first place. JoePa’s death and breaking news accuracy: We saw an interesting case study in breaking news, accuracy, and Twitter last weekend when the death of longtime Penn State football coach Joe Paterno was falsely reported Saturday night by a Penn State student news site called Onward State, then spread across Twitter. (Paterno died the following morning.) Jeff Sonderman of Poynter put together a useful Twitter timeline of the mishap, which prompted an apology and resignation by the site’s managing editor, Devon Edwards, though he’ll stay on staff there. Some other news organizations that repeated the error, most prominently CBSSports.com, published their own apologies, too. The following day, Onward State explained how the error occurred — one reporter got an email that turned out to be a hoax, and another reporter was dishonest in his confirmation of it. Daniel Victor of ProPublica gave a more detailed account with some background about how the site has combined reporting and aggregation. Poynter’s Craig Silverman gave a parallel explanation of how the AP decided not to run with the report. Silverman also reviewed the aftermath of the erroneous report, concluding that journalists are too focused on the benefits of reporting news first, without looking enough at the risk. He chastised CBS Sports for not crediting Onward State with the scoop, but then passing it off on them when the story was shown to be false. Sports blogger Clay Travis said CBS’ dubious behavior — particularly running with an unconfirmed bombshell report without linking to the source — was a function of “search whoring,” a tactic he said is running rampant in sports journalism. GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram went easier on Onward State, saying their process wasn’t much different from that of established news orgs and praising them for their quick corrections and transparency. King Kaufman of the sports site Bleacher Report may have drawn the simplest, best lesson out of all of this: “Only report what you know to be true, and tell your audience how you know it.” And while writing about an unrelated story, the Lab’s Gina Chen gave some other tips on bringing clarity to breaking news in a real-time environment. Lessons from the SOPA/PIPA fight: The web declared victory last Friday in the fight over SOPA and PIPA with the postponement of both bills, then shifted promptly to postmortem mode for much of this week. Talking Points Memo’s Carl Franzen had a great account of how all this happened, and New York magazine’s Will Leitch said this was a seminal moment in the ascendancy of the web’s ethic of collaborative creation above Hollywood’s traditional gatekeeping model. On the What It All Means front, one post stands out: Renowned Harvard network scholar Yochai Benkler’s seven lessons from the SOPA/PIPA fight, in which he explained the tension between Hollywood’s desire for increased copyright control and freedom of the web that gives rise to the networked public sphere. Last week’s events, he wrote, gave a glimpse of the power of that networked public, which he argued is more legitimate than the power of money: “if the industry wants to be able to speak with the moral authority of the networked public sphere, it will have to listen to what the networked public is saying and understand the political alliance as a coalition.” Several others, including the Guardian’s Dan Gillmor, also warned of the entertainment industry’s lust for control and the copyright fights that will continue to flow out of that desire. NYU prof Clay Shirky argued this point most forcefully, cautioning us not to underestimate how far the industry will go to regain its control, and Instapaper founder Marco Arment told us not to underestimate how much the industry loathes assertive users: “They see us as stupid eyeballs with wallets, and they are entitled to a constant stream of our money.” Venture capitalist Fred Wilson was more positive in his assessment of what’s next, urging the entertainment and tech industries to come together under a set of shared goals and principles. Reading roundup: Several other ongoing discussions were still on slow burn this week. Here’s a quick review of those: — New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane issued his formal follow-up to his much-maligned “truth vigilantes” column, saying that he’s okay with the Times doing routine fact-checking and rebutting of officials’ false claims in news articles, as long as it does so very carefully and cautiously. Brisbane also stated his case on CNN’s Reliable Sources, and NPR ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos examined the issue as well. Voice of San Diego, meanwhile, published its own manifesto for truth vigilantism. In other fact-checking news, Politifact, still smarting from the controversy around its Lie of the Year choice, faced renewed criticism over its rating statements in President Barack Obama’s State of the Union as only “Half True” despite also saying they were factually accurate. That earned blowback from economist Jared Bernstein, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, and others. Politifact revised its rating to “Mostly True,” but Maddow wasn’t satisfied, saying to Politifact: “You are undermining the definition of the word fact in the English language by pretending to it in your name.” — Textbooks for Apple’s newly updated iBooks platform are flying off the digital shelves, though concerns about rights issues are lingering. John Gruber explained how different Apple’s proprietary file format looks depending on where you’re coming from, and Cult of Mac’s Mike Elgan argued against Apple’s rights critics. Here at the Lab, Matthew Battles said it’ll take a lot more than Apple to fix what’s wrong with education publishing. — A Pew report found that tablet and e-reader ownership nearly doubled over the holidays. As The New York Times explained, growth was particularly strong among women, the wealthy, and the highly educated. The Atlantic’s Megan Garber wondered if the gift-giving bump is really as good as it seems for Apple and Amazon. — A few interesting pieces on online sharing: Reuters’ Felix Salmon reflected on how it will disrupt the web’s traditional model, and Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman wrote a guide to making news content shareable. The Lab’s Justin Ellis also gave some engagement tips based on Facebook data, and ProPublica’s Daniel Victor looked at the viral success of images on Facebook. Researcher Nick Diakopoulos crunched some New York Times numbers to see what news gets shared on Twitter. — Finally, a couple of enlightening exit interviews with Raju Narisetti, who is leaving The Washington Post’s top digital post for The Wall Street Journal: One at the Lab and another at Poynter. Photo of Joe Paterno statue by Penn State used under a Creative Commons license.

David Skok: Aggregation is deep in journalism’s DNA Posted: 27 Jan 2012 07:00 AM PST Below are a few quotes. Can you guess when each was written, and to what they refer? Just what I want to read and just what I have time to read. It enables one to keep abreast of the times without wasting a lot of time reading a whole column to obtain a single fact. Sounds a bit like an online aggregator, doesn’t it, pulling a few salient points from much longer work? One more: Your magazine is concise and to the point. It represents five good magazines in one. These are, in fact, a series of subscriber comments sent to Time magazine in the weeks following its launch on March 3, 1923. This past weekend, I was out with a friend who happens to be a former editor at Time. We were analyzing the current state of the news media in light of recent developments, including The Huffington Post’s plans to launch a 24-hour live web TV network and Buzzfeed’s aggressive push into politics. These organizations — often lambasted for aggregating other’s content while producing little of their own — are repositioning themselves with new strategies, with more room for distinctive, often original content. My friend argued this was nothing new. Henry Luce’s Time started as a full-fledged aggregator almost 89 years ago. A quick visit to the library confirmed his statements. Sure enough, all 29 pages of the black and white weekly — its signature red-border cover not yet developed — were packed with advertisements and aggregation. This wasn’t just rewrites of the week’s news; it was rip-and-read copy from the day’s major publications — The Atlantic Monthly, The Christian Science Monitor, and the New York World, to name a few. Today, of course, Time, between print and online properties, reaches a global audience of 25 million; it employs celebrated journalists and editors, and it remains among America’s preeminent journalism institutions. Using history as our guide, we shouldn’t be surprised in the recent developments at the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed — nor should we be surprised when, in the coming months and years, other sites disdained by some make similar moves. These are organizations beginning their march up the value chain — beyond LOLcats to politics, beyond aggregation to original content, beyond cheap to upmarket. My friend is right: This is entirely predictable, and furthermore, precisely what disruption theory predicts. Clay Christensen’s theory of disruption, first described in the seminal book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, argues that this pattern repeats itself from industry to industry. New entrants to a field start at the low end, establish a foothold, eat away at the customer base of incumbents — and then move up the value chain. It happened with Japanese automakers in the 1980s, who started with cheap subcompacts and moved up to making Lexuses. It happened in the steel industry, where mini-mills began as a cheap, lower-quality alternative to established integrated mills, then moved their way up, pushing aside the industry’s giants. In the news business, newcomers do this by delivering a product that is faster and more personalized than that provided by the bigger, more established news organizations. They also create new market demand by engaging new audiences. (A 17-year-old may not read The New York Times, but they may stumble upon Buzzfeed to see that viral cat video.) Herein lies Christensen’s critical point, and one that media companies should not forget. Because new-market disruptions initially attract those that aren’t traditional consumers of The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, these incumbent organizations feel little pain or threat. So they stay the course on content, competing on “quality” against these new-market disruptors. Meanwhile, the disruptors, once they establish themselves at the market’s low end, move into the space previously held by the incumbents by producing cheaper, personalized content. It is not until the disruption is in its final stages that it erodes the position of the incumbents. This is the definition of the innovators’ dilemma. There are two critical points to be made. First, the aggregators of today will be the original reporters of tomorrow. Those of us who care about good journalism shouldn’t dismiss the Buzzfeeds of the world because they aren’t creating high-quality reporting. Their search for new audiences will push them into original content production. Buzzfeed may be focused on cat videos and aggregation now, but disruption theory argues that content companies like it will move into the realm of the Huffington Post — which in turn, has already indicated its desire to compete more directly with The New York Times. Second, and perhaps more important, is that despite the obituaries for quality journalism, we can take comfort in remembering that we’ve been here before. We need look no further than that same 1923 volume of Time magazine. Under a passage entitled “Machines Do It“: “The public,” says Mr. Bliven in effect, “is always asking about Newspaper morals. But equally important with newspaper morals is newspaper intelligence. And both of them are changing drastically, dangerously, because of mechanical progress.” Mr. Bliven is Bruce Bliven, at the time former managing editor of The New York Globe and soon to become editor of The New Republic. Bliven’s quote wasn’t given in an interview with a Time reporter. It was a rip-and-read from an article Bliven had written in that month’s Atlantic Monthly titled, “Our Changing Journalism.” Time’s report went on for several more paragraphs, summarizing and quoting. We’ve been here before. The question is not, how aggregation is ruining journalism, but how traditional journalism will respond to the aggregation. Editor’s Note: Reading David’s piece made me want to hunt down Bliven’s original essay. Closest I could find is this, an old how-to-write instruction book for schoolchildren that includes an excerpt of Bliven’s original piece. It still makes for provocative reading, almost a century later.

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MinnPost ends 2011 in the black Posted: 26 Jan 2012 03:00 PM PST MinnPost, the nonprofit regional news site in Minnesota, ended 2011 in the black for a second year in a row, according to its annual report published today. Its year-end surplus — a bit more than $21,000 — isn’t exactly retire-to-the-Caymans money. But in a sector where so many nonprofit news outlets are struggling to find sustainability, the four-year-old operation is demonstrating that it can support itself. MinnPost makes money from public radio-style memberships, advertising, grants, and events, including its annual MinnRoast. CEO Joel Kramer told me he is most pleased with the growth of individual and corporate support, which now represents a majority of the revenue pie, about $815,000. Grants made up about a fifth. Altogether, MinnPost raised $1.5 million. Kramer said he expects foundation money to shrink to 10 percent of revenue, but that’s a projection, not a goal. “We’re happy to get all the foundation support we can get, but our long-term goal from the time we launched was to become steadily less dependent on foundations,” Kramer said. Foundation money is more volatile; the money usually comes with strings attached and an expiration date. And as MinnPost enters its fifth year in operation, it’s no longer really a startup. “Many of them are more excited about you if they see you as asking for seed money, startup money, early-stage development money,” he said. MinnPost in 2011 also opened up the option for donors to auto-renew their membership. (Inertia is a powerful force for donor retention!) About 700 of MinnPost’s 3,300 donors are now sustaining members, he said. Individual gifts start at as little as $10 per year and go as high as $25,000 a year; the typical donor gives $100 to $150 per year, he said. “A visit by a Minnesotan, a page view from a Minnesotan, is worth far more than us than a visit or a pageview from elsewhere.” As far as how many people used the site versus how many supported it, Kramer said there are a few ways to slice the numbers. “It’s not meaningful to make the denominator unique visitors,” he said, because that number includes hundreds of thousands of people who land on MinnPost from a search or a link but are “not really interested in MinnPost.” Kramer’s preferred denominator is people who visit MinnPost at least twice per month, which is roughly 55,000. That means 6 percent of MinnPost users are contributing members. Kramer wants to see that rise to 10 percent. For comparison’s sake, the site most similar to MinnPost is probably Voice of San Diego, which had its struggles in 2011. The organization laid off four people at the end of last year, saying it raised $1.1 million but spent $1.2 million. VOSD projects its revenue will fall in 2012. And as I wrote Tuesday, the more government-and-policy-focused Texas Tribune raised $3.71 million but ended 2011 in the red. (It expects to be break-even or better by year’s end.) Traffic to MinnPost.com grew, too. Pageviews rose 20 percent over the year before. The number Kramer prefers, though, is visits from Minnesotans: 3.7 million in 2011, versus 2.8 million the year before. “Our advertisers and sponsors, what they’re interested in is communicating with Minnesotans. Also, our donor base overwhelmingly comes from Minnesota,” Kramer said. “So we actually believe, strategically, that a visit by a Minnesotan, a pageview from a Minnesotan, is worth far more than us than a visit or a pageview from elsewhere.” Those figures come from Google Analytics and publicly available Quantcast data, he said. The brief and very brief presidential campaigns of Rep. Michele Bachmann and Gov. Tim Pawlenty might have given MinnPost a boost. One goal for 2012: Improve the stickiness of the site, Kramer said. (The average MinnPost reader views two pages per visit.) MinnPost is moving from a proprietary content-management to Drupal, an open-source CMS, which will free up developers and designers to make user-facing improvements more quickly.

The newsonomics of global media imperative Posted: 26 Jan 2012 09:00 AM PST Let’s elevate, for a moment. Let’s take a NASA view of the media landscape, enjoying the clear, whole-earth picture of our struggling news planet. The wide view would tell us that, although the U.S. often believes itself to be the straw that stirs the global drink, we make up but 5 percent of the world’s population. Our special friends in the U.K. make up only another 1 percent. While much of the world’s digital inventiveness and entrepreneurial investment is born in the U.S.A., the marketplace for digital news, media, and information products has been going increasingly global. The global digital media revolution is transforming how, in economic terms, we now think of the business. Global growth is no longer an add-on to the usual in-country business model; it’s becoming a major driver of business — and product — planning. As we look at the newsonomics of the global media imperative, let’s pick out just a few of the many diverse datapoints on which we have to draw: The Financial Times, probably the single best model of print-to-digital transformation success, has announced that its digital business leader, Rob Grimshaw, is leaving Number One Southwark Bridge, astride the Thames, for New York City. Grimshaw is managing director of FT.com, and his business is truly global. The company, founded in 1888, now finds 31 percent of its readers in the Americas and only 23 percent in the U.K. — with another 13 percent now in Asia. For the FT, Grimshaw’s move is logical: Go where your customers are, and to the heart of digital innovation. (Talk to Europeans in the digital business, and they’ll tell you how America-centric, and West Coast-centric, the digital business is, somewhat to their dismay.) For the FT, even with its good number of American consumers, the U.S. is “an emerging market,” a belief held by Reuters as well. If you were to name the FT’s most head-to-head competitor (for time, and thus indirectly for money), it would be The Wall Street Journal. The Journal’s digital audience is now 30 percent international, and just last week in launched still another international local (in native language) edition, for Germany. The Journal’s crosstown rival, The New York Times, is moving globally as well. Already 12 percent of its paying digital subscribers are international, with the Times applying its pay strategies to its European operation, the International Herald Tribune. Last year, it also launched India Ink, focused on that country’s news and culture, with an on-the-ground team there. Expect the Times to move into China this year. Less than a year after launching its first non-U.S. site in Canada, Huffington Post last week added an Italian site, alongside its French one. It continues negotiating with publisher partners in several other western European countries, following up on Arianna’s meet-and-greets there last fall. The (second) British invasion of the U.S. continues apace (“The newsonomics of the British invasion“), as the Guardian (reinvigorated U.S. product), the Independent (using Press+ to sell access to U.S. consumers), the BBC (staffing up editorial and ad pushes) and the Daily Mail, which announced a new U.S. push last year and said last week it is now moving on to India. This isn’t just about news media. Netflix, in yesterday’s earnings report, tells us that almost 10 percent of its streaming business is now global, almost two million of 21 million streaming subscribers. That global growth — and huge upside — is balancing Netflix’s 2011 pricing stumbles. For an even bigger picture perspective on the global imperative, let’s look at the four digital behemoths that are reshaping everything in their paths (get out of the way, if you can, or accede to junior partner status). Consider how much revenue each of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon earned from outside the U.S in the first three quarters of 2011, from my recent report for Outsell, “Getting it Right with GAFA”: Google: 54 percent Apple: 54 percent Facebook: 38 percent Amazon: 46 percent Yes, there’s lots of current political hullaballoo about “bringing jobs home to the U.S.,” but the truth is that much of the digital industry, as with their brethren in the Fortune 500, is now truly global. Look at those GAFA numbers and you have a harder time thinking of them as American companies, in the traditional sense of serving American customers. Forget the 99 percent meme; think of the 95 percent (outside the U.S.) as the real opportunity for the companies formerly known as national. (And, yes, the global imperative further illustrates the difficulty that metro and community newspapers face in finding growth. Other than metro newspapers’ smartphone, tablet, and web city-guide potential for international visitors — $1.34 trillion spent by 60 million of them last year — the lure of global riches doesn’t do much to support community journalism in our far-flung land.) It’s a stark fact for what once were nationally defined media businesses: If you don’t go global, you’re at an increasing disadvantage to your competitors — and who isn’t a competitor for audience or advertising? If you stay nationally focused, you’re trying to wring as much revenue out of a much smaller market, while competitors are building their top line and their capability to innovate with global revenues. So increasingly, I think we’ll see media companies that are either global or regional/local, with national ones more the exception than the rule. Yes, there’s a role that the English language plays here, as about a billion people worldwide may read English well enough to be eligible audience, and, that, too adds to the imperative to compete against other English-first media based in London or New York. Yet as proven with the Journal’s non-English editions, this is about more than language domination. We also see early signs of non-English products finding their way to English speakers, as Worldcrunch (“All news is global”) brings translations of top worldwide titles to the market. There are lots of ways to play the global game. Many newspaper companies are putting out editions of their core product, aimed at in-country issues. Some are putting a new face on the same content. Then there are those truly becoming multi-national news and information companies. You’d have to put Oslo-based Schibsted in that group. Now eighth overall by revenue in the global news industry, the company operates online classifieds businesses in 28 nations; in 20, that’s its main business. Those nations can be found on three continents and now include such populous growing markets as India, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia, as well as much of Latin America. That’s a truly global play that is supplying Schibsted with 49 percent of its profits, on just 25 percent of total revenues. News Corp. — the leading company by news revenues worldwide — is certainly flexing its muscles, even if it contracts them for the time being in the U.K. amid scandal. Just in the last week, we saw the company’s moves in Turkey and Afghanistan, which aim to add to its presence on every continent. As a pipes (satellite and cable) and content company, the lines between the two will blur. Expect for instance, products like the innovative WSJ Live (“The newsonomics of WSJ Live“) to find carriage all over the world as digital distribution and monetization mature. A lot of what we are seeing in the marketplace today is prologue. If you look at how small the non-home-market revenues are for many companies — in the low single digits — we see not global businesses, but national businesses with stronger global intentions.

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• New Facebook data: Be topical, ask questions, and tell jokes to win audience
• Gina Chen: Breaking-news situations require a breaking-news approach
• The Public Insight Network, now swimming in data, launches its own reporting unit

New Facebook data: Be topical, ask questions, and tell jokes to win audience Posted: 25 Jan 2012 12:02 PM PST Write about current affairs. Add in a little commentary (or a question). And, for the love of all that is holy, include a link. Those are three of the takeaways from some new data that Facebook just released on the use of its Subscribe feature —  the social network’s way to let journalists and readers connect without broaching the knotty issue of “friending.” Facebook’s Vadim Lavrusik and Betsy Cameron write: “People discover journalists to subscribe to on Facebook through their friends in News Feed; Facebook search; our "people to subscribe to" recommendations engine (which shows you who your friends are subscribing to and recommends journalists based on your interests); and other organic discovery mechanisms, such as simply seeing who your friends have subscribed to.” But onto the stats, specifically, the ones that stick out about what content journalists are posting: About a quarter of posts by journalists pose a question to readers, a tactic earlier Facebook research substantially increased engagement. Posts that include both links and a little commentary or analysis generated about 20 percent more clicks. Ask for it: Language like “read my story” or “check out my interview” bumps up engagement (clicks, likes, etc.) 37 percent. The post also outlines some fuzzier numbers on how content types and styles can increase engagement: Commentary and analysis on current events and breaking news receives 3x as many likes and 2x as many shares as the average post. Also, highlighting controversial stories on debatable subject matter can double the number of likes and shares the post receives.​ Reader shout-outs can increase in feedback by as much as 4x. Also, asking for recommendations can lead to a 3x increase in comments.​ In-depth analyses on global issues can yield a 1.5x increase in likes and 2.5x increase in shares.​ Powerful photos can yield an increase of a 2x in engagement (likes, comments and shares). Also, behind-the-scenes photos resulted in up to a 4x increase in engagement (likes, comments, shares).​ What else works? Being funny: “Humor in posts or a humorous picture can yield a 1.5x increase in likes and almost 5x increase in shares. Humor often shows the lighter and more personal side of the journalist, which is likely why it results in higher engagement.” Go check out Facebook’s post for more details and data.

Gina Chen: Breaking-news situations require a breaking-news approach Posted: 25 Jan 2012 10:30 AM PST I have new duty to add to journalists’ jobs: Imagine how readers will use the information news organizations disseminate. In the past, it was enough to gather the information, accurately explain it, and make some sort of sense of the news for readers. Now journalists need to imagine what it’s like to be the consumer of that information — and to use that knowledge to better craft the messages, regardless of what medium or format (text, video, photo, audio, social media) they employ. Let me give an example to illustrate my point. My family and I were driving back north from a New Year’s trip to New Orleans. We were about halfway through the 20-hour drive, when we hit the snow-and-ice covered roadways of Interstate 81 in southern Virginia. We were going along at a decent clip when suddenly traffic stopped. We tried to find a AM radio station to figure out the cause of the delay — and how long it might last — but we couldn’t find one for that area. So we turned to Twitter. As my husband drove, I typed I-81 into the search field and instantly found tweets about the delay and — even better — descriptions of what the road was like miles ahead of where we were. These were real-time observations from motorists — hopefully from passengers, not from drivers tweeting behind the wheel. I continued to monitor Twitter throughout that harried night, which included multiple stoppages on I-81, including one caused by a massive pileup that came after we passed through that stretch of roadway. A few aspects of this example are notable for journalists. We were relying on tweets mainly from “regular folks,” not journalists. A few television and radio stations were tweeting, and a highway-safety Twitter account was quite helpful. But a newspaper was noticeably absent from Twitter until the next morning, when a traditional news story was posted. The news story was helpful to fill in the blanks of the night, but as a news consumer what I really need was information in the moment. What was most helpful were the tweets from local motorists who offered suggestions for alternate routes to bypass I-81 for a stretch, or tweets that explained at what milepost marker traffic was flowing again. That way, we would know when an end to the waiting was in sight (or not.) The most frustrating part was not knowing the local geography. People would tweet that I-81 was bad in a particular town. But, not being from the area, I didn’t know if that town was in Virginia (where we were) or another state where snow was falling along I-81 — or if it was ahead of us or behind us. In some cases, it was an easy problem to solve: I switched to the maps app on my phone and searched for the town. But sometimes this was futile (towns too small to show up on the map, tweets contained local nicknames instead of town names) — and it was always an extra step. I could sometimes figure out where people were tweeting from based on their Twitter accounts — but honestly, that was too much work. I needed information fast, with as little effort as possible, to figure out whether a tweet about “bad roads” on I-81 would pertain to the part were were going to be hitting soon. For journalists, this example offers two lessons: Pause a moment from writing your story and let your readers know what the heck is going on now. The massive pile-up was certainly a major news event for this community, and it sure deserved a traditional story in print and online. But communicating the story in the moment is the most important part of your job in the middle of a breaking news situation. I was thankful for the non-journalist tweeters — but I would have loved more official information in tweets from more news organizations. As they say in real estate, the key issue is location, location, location. Whether you are tweeting about a massive pileup, slick roads, or just a road stoppage caused by construction, include location information. I know traditional AP style rules dictate that the state name should not be used when writing about the community where the news organization is located, under the theory that people already know where they live. But this rule should not apply to social media or online news, where people from outside your community may be using your information. Having a “VA” somewhere in the tweets I was reading about I-81 would have simplified my efforts to figure out which tweets applied to the stretch of road we were driving on and which did not. For journalists, the best way to figure out what information readers need from you when you are covering an emergency is to imagine yourself in their position. In my example, imagine yourself craning over your smartphone trying to find out what’s going on, as your tense spouse tries to keep the car on an icy road and your two children sleep in the backseat, blissfully unaware of any trouble. What information would you want and how would you want it in that situation? Then give that to your readers.

The Public Insight Network, now swimming in data, launches its own reporting unit Posted: 25 Jan 2012 08:30 AM PST American Public Media’s nine-year-old Public Insight Network now claims more than 130,000 sources — that is, ordinary folks across America (and as of November, South Africa) who contribute their personal experiences to PIN’s massive database. It’s a gold mine for journalists reporting stories about, say, families facing foreclosure in San Diego or business owners deciding when to hire in St. Paul. As it describes itself: Every day, sources in the Public Insight Network add context, depth, humanity and relevance to news stories at trusted newsrooms around the country… Using our industry-leading platform, journalists and citizens reach beyond pundits, PR professionals and polemics to inform themselves and each other, strengthening the communities they serve… Thanks to our technology, editors, reporters and producers can quickly find and learn from thousands of people who have experience or knowledge on a story we are covering. We call this the Public Insight Network, and it relies on everyday people — our public sources. The problem is, most of PIN’s rich data is going to waste. “One of the things we learned early on,” said Linda Fantin, director of the PIN initiative, “is the amount of intelligence and amazing insights and stories that people have shared with us quickly overwhelm a journalist’s ability to get that information out there.” So APM, as part of its unflagging hiring spree, is bringing in journalists to help turn more of the data into stories. While PIN will continue its primary mission serving 60 newsrooms, the new team will generate original reporting. And they’re starting without a distribution plan, or even a defined medium — radio? print? Tumblr? — hoping to let people drive the reporting and story forms. “How do you do journalism in an environment of abundance?” PIN is full of “unstructured data,” as Fantin calls it, “that’s never seen the light of day, because most traditional story forms are about quoting three or four people and getting a lot of context, and the rest of it is kind of buried in the reporter’s notebook.” What if, instead of three or four people, you could talk to a thousand people? The team’s upcoming first project is an election-focused, month-long “virtual road trip,” asking Americans how their expectations and values have been tested or changed and whether presidential candidates reflect those values. Journalists will follow the established PIN model: The network puts out queries to its pre-existing sources and encourages new people to participate with a simple web form. Sources who can answer a query from experience are asked to fill out a questionnaire and, if willing, agree to be interviewed on the record. The reporting is “a little different than certainly a lot of the reporting I’ve been involved in for 35 years,” said Jacqui Banaszynski, the recently hired editor of PIN’s reporting efforts. “As we report, we’re going to constantly go back into the network and talk to people and ask questions, and we’re going to let the discovery process help us keep determining where the story goes.” It’s journalism as a process, not a product. And Banaszynski hopes to find a news outlet to pick up the work — be it a print partner such as The Washington Post or The Charlotte Observer, one of many participating public radio stations, or someone else. For now, the reporting will live on a Tumblr blog called Dispatches from the American Now, which is launched today. The PIN website is being reconfigured to serve more as a news site. “At first that was a frustration for me, because when I do journalism I like it to actually go out into the world,” Banaszynski told me. But now it’s liberating, she said. Banaszynski and Fantin have deep newspaper experience; others on the team contribute radio skills. “We’re going to let our skills determine how we’re going to tell the story, as opposed to taking a story and shoehorning it into an existing frame.” PIN has also hired two reporters and an engagement editor; the team is now hiring an associate editor and, soon, an additional journalist to focus on the results of news games such as APM’s Budget Hero. Fantin said PIN’s new emphasis on process journalism ties in nicely with its recent acquisition of Spot.us, David Cohn’s platform for crowdfunded reporting. Individual journalists who raise money for stories will now have access to the Public Insight Network. “One of the ideas we’re kind of toying with is a notion of funding a query,” Fantin said, as opposed to a story. “A journalist puts together a set of really interesting questions, and a community says…’we would love to see those questions put out to knowledgeable people and hear back what they have to say.’” The difference is the journalist has not decided ahead of time what the story is, because the questions could yield unexpected answers. Fantin said traditional news operations are built on a model of scarcity: A small number of people have the information that a large number of people need. She hopes PIN will change that paradigm. “How do you do journalism in an environment of abundance? How do you have more voices shape the story, help you know where to go, and even help vet some of the assumptions that you’re making?”

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The forgotten history of Access Atlanta

Nieman Journalism Lab

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The forgotten history of Access Atlanta, one of the early web’s most innovative newspapers Posted: 24 Jan 2012 11:00 AM PST Not many people remember it now, but the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was one of the leading pioneers of the early Internet age. It was the first newspaper on the Prodigy Internet service — one of America Online's two main competitors back in the early 1990s — and within 90 days of launching its Access Atlanta service, it had twice as many online subscribers, 15,000, as any other newspaper in the country. Eight months after launch, Neil McManus wrote in the magazine Digital Media that all other newspapers interested in pursuing a digital strategy should visit Access Atlanta "with notebook in hand." But that was the apex. Prodigy's membership stopped growing, crushed by the less staid and more freewheeling America Online, and within a year and a half the AJC was forced to end its association with Prodigy, turning to the web later than many other large newspapers. Because the company viewed the digital strategy as a supplement to the print product rather than an eventual replacement, the paper did not see the web as an impetus to change its print-based business model. In short order, the pioneers became also-rans. Obviously, the Journal-Constitution bet on the wrong horse — and, in this case, the wrong technological platform, since after AOL drove Prodigy and Compuserve out of business, the World Wide Web rendered AOL's proprietary service irrelevant. But it's hard to fault the Journal-Constitution for failing to predict the future correctly. After all, nearly every newspaper failed in that. Even though the AJC guessed wrong on the answers, its management and editorial staff asked a lot of the right questions. And they placed a decent-sized bet on their guess. At the time of Access Atlanta's launch on Prodigy in March 1994, AJC technology columnist Bill Husted interviewed Internet analyst and provocateur Josh Harris about the newspaper's moves. Harris believed the paper was on the right track, though he sensed (probably correctly) the lack of organizational urgency regarding the venture. “In about six months, all your key management will be saying, ‘Why didn’t we do this five years ago?’" Harris told Husted. “This project was cigarette change for Cox. I don’t think they believe in their guts, or their wallets, in what they’ve done. In time, they’ll see what a smart move they made.” “In about six months, all your key management will be saying, 'Why didn't we do this five years ago?'" Harris was right. Even though partnering with Prodigy was a bad decision, investing serious money in a unique electronic identity was a smart move. In some ways, the Journal-Constitution's digital rise and fall mirrors that of the San Jose Mercury News, which Michael Shapiro wrote about in the November/December issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. The Merc started out on AOL but quickly abandoned it to build its own website, Mercury Center, which quickly became one of the indispensable sites for Silicon Valley — but then crested and cratered along with the rest of the newspaper industry. The Journal-Constitution had a number of smart people pushing it forward, including director of information services Chris Jennewein, who left Atlanta to perform a similar role at the Mercury-News, and webmaster Chad Dickerson, who is now the CEO of Etsy. The AJC and Cox had enough clout within the news industry for their executives to be able to persuade other papers, including the Los Angeles Times and Newsday, to make similar deals with Prodigy. And they had enough clout for a Cox executive, Peter Winter, to become the interim CEO of the New Century Network, the industry's abortive 1995 attempt to form a web cartel and control access to their journalism. But the collective was sunk by the inability of all the principals — including Cox, Knight-Ridder, Advance, Tribune, Times Mirror, Gannett, Hearst, The Washington Post Co., and The New York Times Co. — to agree on strategy. The failure of the New Century Network prefigured the web woes that each company would experience in the decade to come. The idea of digital newspapers had been around for a long time. Going back to the 1970s, decades before Craig Newmark started Craigslist and eroded newspaper dominance in classified advertising, newspaper companies realized that their business models depended on preserving their monopoly on classifieds — and they were afraid that a new competitor could weaken that position through a new technology. So, in the early 1980s, the Associated Press led a number of newspapers (including the AJC) in an 18-month experiment in digital newspapers hosted on an early version of Compuserve. But not many people had access to modem-enabled personal computers in those days — Compuserve had around 12,000 subscribers across the country — and the low audience and difficulty of using the cutting-edge technology paradoxically led most of the newsmen to affirm, rather than challenge, the status quo. "They perceived it as less of a threat after having been party to it," said Henry Heilbrunn, an AP executive who led the experiment. Chris Jennewein was an early advocate for the Journal-Constitution's digital future. In the late 1980s, he started working on audiotex and videotex, two technologies aimed at combatting the informational time lag associated with a daily newspaper.1 The first was an automated system of phone numbers that would allow users to call for up-to-the-minute stock prices, sports scores, and weather reports. The second was a primitive dialup system that would allow them to check out news archives and the next morning's classified ads. Beginning in 1990, the AJC dialup service was called "Access Atlanta," and rather than following the phone company's paradigm of per-minute pricing, they charged a flat $6.95 a month for it. (That was the same price that they would charge four years later, when they launched on Prodigy.) In the meantime, flush with cash, the company was in the mood for experimentation. "[It's] a classic skunk-works venture," said Cox executive vice president Jay Smith in 1993. "We put our toe in the water." The technology was ahead of the consumer base, but that was fine with Cox. "Archives, movie reviews, primitive email, primitive chat, and we had, most interestingly, the business section up early at 9:00 pm the evening before," Jennewein told me. "I think at the height we had 600 subscribers." In late 1992, the AJC decided to move Access Atlanta from an in-house operation to a third-party service. Cox looked around and even considered purchasing Prodigy, which was number-one at the time, with more subscribers than either Compuserve or AOL. Prodigy also offered the newspaper a far larger cut of subscription revenue than AOL was willing to offer, and far greater flexibility for the paper to create its own branded version of Prodigy's software. Access Atlanta was a proprietary service on a proprietary service: Subscribers could pay either the standard $6.95 a month, or if they subscribed to Prodigy for $9.95 a month, they could add Access Atlanta service for an additional $4.95 a month. But while the service itself was getting appreciative nods around the news industry, Prodigy's growth was already stalling. One reason is that, unlike those of America Online, Prodigy's executives wouldn't allow unmoderated bulletin boards, requiring that every user comment be edited before it was published. Another was Prodigy's retail strategy, influenced by its corporate parents, Sears and IBM. Unlike America Online, which targeted computer manufacturers to install AOL software on new computers and flooded mailboxes with a seemingly infinite stream of AOL disks, Prodigy sold its software in stores — and separately branded Access Atlanta software was also sold for people who didn't want to subscribe to Prodigy. Retail was hardwired into Prodigy’s corporate culture. As Fred Lowy, who headed the Access Atlanta team over at Prodigy, explained to me: "The hidden agenda was always to promote IBM and Sears." “I was thinking, ‘Who are these people who signed up with Prodigy? No one uses Prodigy. Everyone uses the web.’” As the first paper on Prodigy, the AJC had an incentive to try to get other newspapers to join the service, so that more readers would want to subscribe. Cox moved all the papers it owned over to Prodigy and also worked on persuading selling other newspaper companies to join them. They were successful with Times-Mirror, which owned the Los Angeles Times and Newsday. They had been on the cusp of a deal with America Online, but switched to Prodigy after a successful eleventh-hour pitch by Cox. Cox, Times-Mirror, and Prodigy soon formed what they called a "newspaper alliance," in which Cox and Times-Mirror would get a cut of the proceeds whenever a new paper signed up with Prodigy. But the partnership was already nearing an end. When Access Atlanta was launched in March 1994, its publisher, David Scott, announced his hopes of obtaining 10,000 subscribers by the end of the first year and 40,000 by the end of the third. It reached the first milestone, announcing its 20,000th subscriber in August of 1995. It awarded twenty free months of service to the lucky 20,000th customer, Seth Ehrlich. It never reached a third year, though, and Ehrlich never got all twenty months of service. Prodigy had fallen behind Compuserve and AOL by late 1994, and subscriptions had plateaued for both Prodigy and Access Atlanta. Finally, the Journal-Constitution moved Access Atlanta off Prodigy and onto the free World Wide Web in late 1996.2 Before that happened, the newspaper had very little content on the web. The Access Atlanta team was kept separate from the web team, which maintained a barebones placeholder at www.ajc.com that linked to several other websites the newspaper created, like a baseball-focused one called fastball.com. The newspaper also maintained other sites that it didn't link on its front page, including a Southern humor site called yall.com and a sex humor site called brazenhussy.com. Chad Dickerson was hired out of college in 1995 as a webmaster for all the newspaper's content that was not on Access Atlanta, and he could see that restricting online access to proprietary subscribers was limiting growth. "I had just turned 23," Dickerson told me. "And I was thinking, 'Who are these people who signed up with Prodigy? No one uses Prodigy. Everyone uses the web.' That was what motivated me to get them out of this stranglehold." At that point, the newspaper started putting its content on accessatlanta.com, but the site was maintained more as a neighborhood and lifestyle portal rather than as a breaking news site. So, in 1998, the newspaper launched AJC.com as its news site, and ever since then, the newspaper has operated both accessatlanta.com and AJC.com. After spending most of the decade selling subscriptions for its online content, the newspaper offered its web content entirely free. But the newspaper was still so overwhelmingly profitable that the change in online revenue streams hardly made a dent — and hardly mattered. And that was hardly surprising, said AJC.com editorial director Hyde Post. "How many folks are willing to think, 'I'm gonna make a decision that's gonna cost me $100 million on the newspaper side, in the hope that I'll get it back in five years on the other side'?" "I think the industry could see the future, but were not prepared to take the risks," said Heilbrunn, the former AP and Prodigy executive. "The newspaper industry looks at itself as a local franchise with a local brand, but isn't willing to step out of that particular perception so that it invents Monster.com for employment ads or Zillow for real estate. There were a lot of opportunities for individuals or industry to do these things." Though the Access Atlanta brand name survives in a website and a free weekly paper, the pioneering Internet service remains nearly forgotten today. Access Atlanta was a way to re-imagine the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on a new platform, but it could never replace the print newspaper's revenue stream. "Except for the forward-looking groups, it was the old railroad paradigm," said Fred Lowy. "'We're not in the transportation business, we're in the railroad business.'" And that applied all the more to advertising revenue. Dating back to the 1970s, newspapers thought they were in the classified ad business, when they were actually in the much broader business of serving their communities by connecting people with the information, news, products, and services that they wanted. Cox made a few savvy investments in the new world order, such as founding AutoTrader.com. But neither Cox nor its competitors made those types of moves with any kind of urgency.3 Back when Cox was flush enough to afford spending money on a skunkworks, Access Atlanta could be brilliantly innovative. But when it became clear that the market had shifted, the Journal-Constitution was caught on its back heels, and it didn't have the same financial cushion as before to continue to innovate from comfort. And though the Access Atlanta brand name survives in a website and a free weekly published by the AJC, the pioneering Internet service remains nearly forgotten today, so that as of this writing, it does not even have a Wikipedia page. The Journal-Constitution could not predict the changes in their business that the Internet would bring about; few did. The newspaper industry failed to take advantage of Web 1.0, and a decade later, it failed to take advantage of Web 2.0, standing by as social media redefined how people learned what was happening in their communities and in the world. If large news organizations want to survive the next wave of technological change, they will need to do more than just dip their toe in the water. They will need to dive in. Notes Videotex was another of the great technology misses of the decade, though it only failed in America — the technology caught on with teletext services in the UK and elsewhere. But despite a well-funded Knight-Ridder videotex system called Viewtron, which was finally shuttered in 1986 after costing its parent company $50 million, videotex never gained traction in the United States. It required users to have dedicated terminals, which none but the furthest-out of technology futurists were likely to purchase. In 2003, the Journal-Constitution launched a free weekly paper to compete with Atlanta's main alternative weekly, Creative Loafing. It's also called Access Atlanta, and it's co-branded with the website, which is now a joint venture between the AJC and the WSB radio and television stations. One company that did succeed is Norway's Schibsted Media Group, a media conglomerate that maintained its dominance in classified advertising by investing heavily in the 1990s. It's the subject of a Harvard Business School case published in 2007.

How Rick Perry helped America discover the Texas Tribune Posted: 24 Jan 2012 08:00 AM PST On Aug. 13, 2011, Rick Perry delivered a gift to the Texas Tribune: The governor announced his candidacy for president. Two days later, reporter Jay Root would break the story that Perry had backpedaled on his controversial effort to vaccinate girls against HPV. Root’s story was viewed about 150,000 times in total in 2011 and generated the biggest-ever traffic day for the online startup. “There’s no question Rick Perry was good for business,” said Trib CEO and editor Evan Smith. “Even if his presidential campaign wasn’t successful these last five months, we were.” In 2011, the Tribune’s second full year in operation, the website served 5.2 million unique visitors, up from 2.2 million the year before. The plurality of those visitors came from Austin, but out-of-staters in New York and Washington represented the fifth and ninth most represented locales, respectively. The site’s list of most viewed stories for 2011 is chockablock with Perry, Perry, Perry. The governor has been well known to Texans for the past 11 years, but less so elsewhere. Suddenly, the Tribune’s deep well of local knowledge had found national relevance. Tribune reporters could “explain and demystify him for the rest of the country, including for the national press,” Smith said. And Smith knew his audience at home would not be satisfied by wire copy and good aggregation. “There’s nothing that Texans hate more than non-Texans explaining the world to them. So it made a lot of sense to have our guys on the road.” Putting their guys on the road — at various times, four reporters (including another following Rep. Ron Paul in New Hampshire), a photographer, and a videographer — was costly. (The Trib’s total staff headcount is 30.) Smith estimated the campaign coverage cost about $5,000 per week, once you add up the cramped Southwest flights, the motel rooms, and the midnight meals. And those expenses were not included in the 2011 budget. “The fact that we’re a nonprofit doesn’t mean we get a friends-and-family rate,” he said. But it does mean Smith could turn to donors for help. The Tribune raised just under $300,000 specially for Perry coverage, he said. All together the Tribune raised $3.71 million in 2011, almost double the year before, and spent $4.01 million; Smith projects the Tribune will be in the black at the end of 2012. The Tribune posts all of its financials online. Smith said the Tribune did nothing unusually innovative in their Perry coverage, at least by their standards — just more (“covering the waterfront, flooding the zone, and assorted other journalistic cliches,” he wrote in a New Year’s recap post.) The data journalism team created an interactive Perry tracker, showing where the candidate had been and where he was headed. And a landing page — er, vertical, I guess — called Perrypedia aggregated their own stuff — videos, narrative stories, campaign finance reporting — as well as material from some national sources. A partnership with The New York Times, now into its second year, paid off too. Dozens of Tribune articles about Perry appeared on nytimes.com and in print; one article made it to A1, above the fold, Smith points out. The Times also prints Tribune articles in its Texas edition twice weekly. Even though Perry’s campaign is over — and was more or less dead for some time before it became official — Trib traffic is still exceeding expectations. Smith projects January 2012 traffic levels will beat last January’s by 70 percent. “When you have a spike in traffic for a particular purpose, when that purpose dissipates, and you resettle, you resettle at a higher plateau than you did before. And I think that we we’ve certainly seen is that we’re resettling at a higher plateau.” Photo by Gage Skidmore used under a Creative Commons license.