Rabu, 18 Januari 2012

Surprise! The news shows up in the least expected places


Nieman Journalism Lab


Posted: 17 Jan 2012 11:30 AM PST

You’re flicking through tweets, reading email, Googling recipes, or watching dogs sticking their heads out of car windows in slow motion when a headline catches your eye. Before you know it, you’re reading the news, even though you didn’t mean to. Maybe you didn’t even want to.
A lot of readers get their news just like this — incidentally — according to a growing body of research. That is, they don’t turn to the web seeking news. The news finds them. And that has implications for how that news gets produced and distributed.
Borchuluun Yadamsuren, a post-doctoral fellow at Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Institute, studies how people get information and how it makes them feel. In 2009, she surveyed 148 adults, mostly highly educated, in the college town of Columbia, Mo., then followed up with 20 one-on-one interviews. Some respondents said they don’t trust the news, some were ambivalent, but most said they get informed one way or another — often by accident.
Yadamsuren quotes a respondent who exemplifies the incidental news reader:
She finds news when she is searching for something else on the Internet or she finds links to news stories from her e-mail. She said ‘it feels more legitimate and less like wasting time’ if she has gone to news from her e-mail. She thinks her husband is wasting his time as he constantly looks at all of the regional newspapers as part of his daily routine.
Yadamsuren draws on a lot of previous research about information behavior, most notably the work of Denis McQuail, et al., on the “uses and gratifications” theory from the 1960s and ’70s. (She cites other work heavily, if you want to dive in.)
She identified four types of consumers: avid news readers, news avoiders, news encounterers, and crowd surfers.
Avid news readers are perhaps the most familiar to a typical Nieman Lab reader: They visit news sites multiple times a day. They include traditional news sources in their media diet. They have higher trust in media. “They continue monitoring for news to feel empowered, to be informed, to get over boredom, and to have a break from their work,” Yadamsuren wrote.
News avoiders deliberately choose not to visit news sites. They are more sensitive to negative stories. They tend to distrust the mainstream press. But that doesn’t mean they don’t get news. Yadamsuren quotes a respondent in her study:
Sometimes those who are sensitive to negative news may use incidental exposure to online news as their main way to get informed about news events. R14 said she does not search for news because she thinks the mainstream media cover too many depressing stories. She mostly runs across news at the Yahoo! portal.
News encounterers are more ambivalent about news. They neither search for nor avoid it. They don’t have established habits. They know that important news will find them one way or another.
Crowd surfers rely on friends and online communities for news. They tend not to trust the mainstream “filter.” They start at Reddit or Digg. “They like reading ‘newsworthy’ stories voted on by visitors to the site rather than relying on the stories selected by news media,” Yadamsuren said. “They trust the ‘wisdom of crowd’ rather than the viewpoints of journalists.”
Yadamsuren has also found the route to discovery — not just the content of the news itself — provokes emotional reaction in readers. For instance, unexpected positive news feels better and more awesome than expected positive news.
“It seemed that the incidental element of discovering the news story strengthened the respondents’ reaction to the news item,” she writes in recently published research. “The respondents described the encounters as finding a treasure, unexpectedly learning something new, or unexpectedly encountering something that evoked their curiosity. All these reactions may also occur during general news reading, but the chance element is likely to make these reactions stronger.”
Again, Yadamsuren quoting respondents in her report:
R1 explains: ‘I’m not looking for something in particular, but sometimes it’s there right in front of my eyes, and it makes me happy and like you know it’s perfect for me, let’s explore further’. R2 compared incidental exposure to online news to the feeling of discovery of treasure: ‘I guess it’s kind of the thrill of the chase, like you really discovered a treasure or something’…
One respondent (R19) says she feels lucky to find stories to read that she might have missed. ‘I usually feel pretty lucky when I find something that I would have otherwise missed…makes me want to search more’. Another respondent (R12) agrees: ‘many times it will be something that either I haven’t heard or it jogs my memory, oh yeah, I want to read more about that’. (R12)
Discoveries are not always joyous: Stumbling upon bad news can amplify the feelings associated with bad news. And some readers reacted negatively to incidental exposure regardless of the content, because it wound up being a distraction or a waste of time. That induced feelings of guilt.
Regardless of how they feel, surprised readers are more engaged readers. Yadamsuren did not study how people feel about the brands they encountered; we don’t know if the joy of surprise translates to more positive associations with The Washington Post, for example.
Yadamsuren suggests news organizations syndicate their content and advertise in unlikely places. Maybe that axiom, “go where your users are,” should be revised: “Go where your users least expect to find you.”
Posted: 17 Jan 2012 10:00 AM PST
When NewsRight — the Associated Press spinoff formerly known as News Licensing Group (and originally announced by the AP as an unnamed “rights clearinghouse”) — began to lift the veil a couple of weeks ago, most of the attention and analysis focused on “preserving the value” of news content for content owners and originators. In the first round of reports and commentary on the launch, various bloggers and analysts quickly made comparisons to Righthaven, the infamous and all-but-defunct Las Vegas outfit that pursued bloggers and aggregators for alleged copyright violations.
But most of that criticism misses an important point: Would NewsRight’s investors, all legacy news enterprises, really invest $30 million in a questionable model just to enforce copyrights? Or are they investing in a startup that has the capacity to create revenues from new, innovative ways of generating, packaging and, distributing news content?
While some of the reactions point to the former, I believe the opportunity (and NewsRight’s real intention) lies in the latter: NewsRight has the potential to create revenue for any content creator large or small, and to enable a variety of new business models around content that simply can’t fly today because there hasn’t been a clearinghouse system like it.
(As background, here at Nieman Lab in 2010, I first described the potential benefits of a news clearinghouse months before AP announced the concept. Then after AP made public their plans, I described a variety of new business models it could enable, if done right.)
First, let’s have a look at some of the critics:
  • TechDirt, disputing whether NewsRight would actually “add value,” asked: “AP finally launches NewsRight…and it’s Righthaven Lite?”
  • InfoWars, posting a video talk with Denver radio talk host David Sirota, inquired: “Traditional media to bully bloggers with NewsRight?” In the interview Sirota said, “What I worry about is that it ends up being used as a financial weapon against those voices out there who are citing that information in order to challenge it, scrutinize it, and question it.”
  • GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram pointed out that while NewsRight itself says it will stay out of pursuing copyright infractions via litigation, “one of the driving forces behind the agency is the sense on the part of AP and other members that their content is being stolen by news-filtering services…and news aggregators.” Ingram concludes: “What happens when an organization like The Huffington Post says no thank you? That’s when it will become obvious how much of NewsRight’s business model is based on carrots, and how much of it is about waving a big stick.”
  • Nieman Lab’s own coverage by Andrew Phelps also focused on the tracking and enforcement aspects of NewsRight’s core technology.
NewsRight’s launch PR didn’t do much to dispel these concerns. CEO David Westin said himself in a video: “NewsRight’s designed…to make sure that the traditional reporting organizations that are investing in original journalism are reaping some of the benefits that are being lost right now.” And the company’s press release, quoting Westin, went no further that the following in hinting that there were new business opportunities enabled by NewsRight: “[I]f reliable information is to continue to flourish, the companies investing in creating content need efficient ways to license it as broadly as possible.”
Those traditional news organizations (29 of them, including New York Times Co., Washington Post Co., Associated Press, MediaNews Group, Hearst, and McClatchy) are the investors who scraped together $30 million to launch NewsRight. The Associated Press also contributed technology and personnel to the effort.
Given those roots — along with the initial PR, Westin’s own background as a lawyer, and the fact that NewsRight’s underlying AP-derived technology, News Registry, was explicitly developed to help track content piracy — it’s not hard to see where all the skepticism comes from.
But ultimately, if NewsRight is to be successful, it will have to create a new marketplace. It’s going to have to do more than trying to get paid for the status quo — that is, to collect fees from aggregators and others who are currently repackaging the content of its 29 owners. It can do that, but in addition, like any business, it will have to develop new products that new customers will pay for; it will have to bring thousands of content sources into its network; and it will have to enable and encourage thousands of repackagers to use that content in many new ways. And it will have to focus on those new opportunities rather than on righting wrongs perceived by its investors.
I spoke last week with David Westin about where NewsRight was starting out and where it might ultimately go. While he repeated the company mantra about returning value to the originators of journalistic content — “NewsRight is designed with one mission: to recapture some of the value of original journalism that’s being lost in the internet and mobile world” — it’s clear that his vision for NewsRight goes well beyond that. Here’s some of what we covered:
— NewsRight’s initial target is “closed-web” news aggregators. Media monitoring services like EIN News, Meltwater News, and Vocus provide customized news feeds to enterprise clients like corporations and government entities, typically at $100 per month or more. Essentially, they’re the digital equivalent of the old clipping services. Currently, these services must scrape individual news sites, and technically, they should deliver only snippets with links back to the original sources (although whether they limit themselves to that is not easy to monitor). What NewsRight offers the monitoring services is one-stop shopping that includes (a) fulfillment: an accurate content feed (obviating the need to scrape, and eliminating uncertainty by always delivering the latest, most complete version of a story); (b) rights clearance; and (c) usage metrics. The monitoring services will have the option to improve their offerings by supplying full text (or they can stick with first paragraphs); the content owners share the resulting royalties.
— While NewsRight currently must individually negotiate content deals, it’s working toward a largely-automated content-exchange system. Clearly, as NewsRight grows, there will have to be an automated system with self-service windows. “I hope that’s right, because that means we will have been successful,” Westin said when I suggested that would have to happen. The deals with private aggregators being worked on now all require one-off negotiations for each deal, both with the aggregators and with the content suppliers. That’s marginally possible when there are 800 or so content contributors to the network, but to be a meaningful player in the information marketplace, the company will need to grow to encompass thousands of content creators, thousands of repackagers, republishers, or aggregators of content, and many millions of pieces of content (including text, images and video) — requiring a sizable infrastructure and high level of automation.
— Any legitimate news content creator can join NewsRight for free for the duration of 2012. “Anyone who generates original reporting, original content, can benefit from this. We’re open to anyone who’s doing original work.” Westin says. That includes not only newspapers and other traditional news organizations — it can include hyperlocal sites and news blogs. Basically, that free membership will bring you back information on how and where your content is being used. NewsRight’s system is currently tracking several billion impressions for its investor-members and is capable of tracking billions more for those want to use the service. (All this is rather opaque on the website right now, but if you’re interested, just click on the “Contact us to learn more” link on their homepage, and they’ll get back to you.)
— Down the road, NewsRight is looking for ways to create new content packaging opportunities. Westin: “There is a large number of possible businesses [that we can enable]. We don’t have any of them up and running yet; it’ll be a better story when we’ve got the first one up. But I do envision a number of people who might say, ‘I wanted to create this product, dipping into a large number of news resources on a specific subject, but it’s simply been too cumbersome and difficult to do’…We should be able to facilitate that.” What he envisions is something that reduces the friction and the transaction costs in setting up a news feed, app, or site on a niche topic and allows a multiplicity of such sites to flourish — “new products based around the content that don’t exist now.” That includes personalized news streams — products for one, but of which many can be sold: “As we continue to expand News Registry and the codes attached to content, it makes it possible to slice and dice the news content with essentially zero marginal cost.”
— While the initial offerings to private aggregators carry a price tag set by NewsRight, in the ultimate networked and largely automated point-to-point distribution arrangement — individual asset syndication — NewsRight will likely stay out of pricing. The “paytags,” or the payment information embedded in the Registry tags, will be able to carry information on a variety of usage and payment terms — not only what the price is, but nuanced provisions like time constraints (e.g. this can’t be used until 24 hours after first published), geographic constraints (to limit usage by regional competitors), variable pricing (hot news costs more than old news), and pricing based on the size of the repackager’s audience. Content owners would likely have control over these options, but there’s also the potential for a dynamic pricing model — something similar to Google’s auction mechanism for AdWords — in order to optimize both revenue and usage.
— The NewsRight network could make it possible to monetize topical niche content that’s too difficult to syndicate today. There a lot of bloggers, hyperlocals, and other niche sites today that earn zero or minimal revenue and are operated as labors of love. The potential for NewsRight is to find new markets for the content of these sites. And general publishers like newspapers might find it profitable to jump into specialized niches for which there’s no local audience, but which might generate revenue via redistribution through NewsRight to various content aggregators.
Could that grand vision come to fruition? As I’ve pointed out before, a very similar system has worked very nicely for ASCAP and BMI, the music licensing organizations, which not only collect royalties for musicians but enable a variety of music distribution channels. (This is on the performance and broadcast side of the music biz, not the rather broken recorded music side.) Both AP CEO Tom Curley in launching NewsRight and Westin in discussing it refer to ASCAP and other clearinghouses as models — not just for compensating content creators but for enabling new outlets and new forms of content. NewsRight’s is purely a business-to-business model — it doesn’t involve end users. So the traction it needs will come when it can point not just to compensation streams from private aggregation services, but to new products and new businesses made possible by its system.
Posted: 17 Jan 2012 05:30 AM PST

It’s not just the platform — it’s the tools.
That’s the line that kept coming to mind this morning as I read this Ars Technica scoop on what Apple has in store for its press event in New York Thursday. Here’s Ars reporter Chris Foresman:
While speculation has so far centered on digital textbooks, sources close to the matter have confirmed to Ars that Apple will announce tools to help create interactive e-books — the “GarageBand for e-books,” so to speak — and expand its current platform to distribute them to iPhone and iPad users.
…[A]uthoring standards-compliant e-books (despite some promises to the contrary) is not as simple as running a Word document of a manuscript through a filter. The current state of software tools continues to frustrate authors and publishers alike, with several authors telling Ars that they wish Apple or some other vendor would make a simple app that makes the process as easy as creating a song in GarageBand.
We’ll see on Thursday, of course — but making ebook publishing easier has the potential to have a significant disruptive impact on information industries.
The first disruption of the web, after all, was making it possible for people to publish online without caring about money. Ebooks have already allowed a new generation of small-scale (and large-scale) publishers to reach an audience — sometimes for money, sometimes just for passion’s sake. But the process of ebook publishing today reminds me a bit of the early days of blogging, when publishing online was possible but still a pain.
The web as a platform dates back to 1991, and nerds like me were publishing personal webpages not long after. But it took the development of tools like Blogger, Greymatter, and Movable Type — nearly a decade after the web launched — for the power of personal publishing to start to be fulfilled.
Doing it by hand meant learning HTML, then manually FTPing an updated .html file to a remote server. It wasn’t outrageously complicated, to be honest — but it was enough of an obstacle to keep most folks from writing online. When tools reduced personal publishing to typing words in a box and clicking “Post,” a whole new universe of potential contributors was suddenly ready to pitch in, and you saw the blogging explosion of the early 2000s.
And further improvements in tools — think Tumblr and Twitter — have brought even more people to publishing. For a host of creative endeavors — think desktop publishing, motion graphics, video editing, data visualization, coding — it’s the arrival of tools or frameworks that abstract away complexity that marks when they move from niche to something closer to mainstream.
While there are many hundreds of thousands of them published every year, books have historically been the most constrained form of publishing. Getting a book into print usually meant convincing an agent, then an editor, then a publishing house that your work was worthy — and that’s before trying to convince the Barnes & Nobles of the world it should have a place on their shelves.
Ebooks have blown open that world of exclusivity — but the ease of use still isn’t there.
There’s a long list of tools that try to make ebook creation easier, from big names (Apple’s Pages, Adobe’s InDesign) to smaller ones (Scrivener) to open source alternatives like calibre. But it’s still a complicated enough business that there’s a healthy ecosystem of companies offering ebook conversion services.
Their task is made more complicated by the format divide between Amazon, which uses a proprietary .mobi-based format called AZW, and most other ebook platforms, which tend to stick to flavors of .epub. My girlfriend is a book editor (buy her books!), and that’s given me a front-row seat to the still-frustrating world of ebook conversion and formatting. The world of iBooks is particularly frustrating because its greater multimedia and formatting capabilities make you want to use them. (The Kindle keeps display options significantly simpler. Although that too is changing with Format 8, the engine that runs underneath the Kindle Fire and, presumably, future tablet Kindles.)
Here are a few questions to ponder as we wait to hear the details from Apple on Thursday:
— Will ease of ebook authoring come with greater ease of ebook publishing? Once you have a properly formatted file, getting your ebook in the Kindle Store is a breeze. That’s not true of the iBookstore, where — perhaps inspired by Apple’s app-approval process — it can take weeks from submission to first sale. That’s kept some publishers from jumping on Apple’s bandwagon, particularly in the journalism world where a couple weeks’ wait can have a significant impact on a work’s timeliness. If Apple wants to make the production process easier, will it also make its go-to-market process easier?
— Will there be an iBooks for Android? The Kindle and Nook platforms have the advantage of living on multiple types of devices: both on their own e-ink and tablet devices and on iOS and Android smartphones and tablets. Apple’s iBooks thus far lives only on iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads. If they’re aiming at widespread adoption in schools, sticking to Apple-only devices could be a hindrance. Apple’s bitten this bullet before, putting out a version of iTunes for Windows when it became clear keeping music purchasing Mac-only was a recipe for irrelevance. An iBooks for Mac seems like an obvious next move, but are sales of non-iOS smartphones and tablets sufficient to also spread the platform in new directions?
— Will this new tool publish in multiple formats or simply create iBooks? Apple’s platform is in either second or third place in the ebook race, well behind Amazon and possibly behind the Nook. Will Apple see a new easy-to-use tool as a way to support its ebook platform — by pushing more content into it — or as a way to gain widespread usage by also supporting the bigger Kindle market? The former would support iBooks; the latter would support Apple’s Mac business, since presumably the software would only run on Macs.
Apple’s gone both ways on this before. GarageBand creates MP3s that will play anywhere; iWeb creates webpages that can be uploaded to any server and viewed in any browser; iWork apps will export into the more popular Office formats like Word’s .doc and Excel’s .xls. In each of those cases, Apple supported market-standard technology because the market had the power. But for years, music purchased through its iTunes Store famously included DRM that only let it work on its industry-leading iPods.
— If ebook publishing really does become super easy, how should news publishers fit it into their workflows? Imagine it really did take just a few clicks to get a work onto an ebook platform. What would it make sense to publish there? Should every three-part newspaper series be turned into an ebook? Should every sports season produce a newspaper-generated ebook made up of the year’s game stories, player profiles, and so on? Should a compilation of a newspaper’s restaurant reviews be pushed out as a $2.99 ebook each year?
To the extent that news publishers have dipped their toes into ebooks, it’s been for only the most special projects. But if publishing is dirt simple, what other kinds of content should find its way into the paid-content marketplace? And, on the flip side, how would publishers (book, news, and otherwise) respond to an even greater flood of competing content than the ebook world has already produced?
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