Nieman Journalism Lab
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- A Post-mortem with Raju Narisetti: “I would have actually tried to move faster”
- Meet Deep Dive, the New York Times’ experimental context engine and story explorer
- How a tightly paywalled, social-media-ignoring, anti-copy-paste, gossipy news site became a dominant force in Nova Scotia
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Posted: 23 Jan 2012 11:00 AM PST
 Others can parse whether his most recent move — from managing editor of The Washington Post to managing editor of the WSJ Digital Network — counts as an advance, a retreat, or something else entirely. Narisetti, 45, is a Wall Street Journal alum and will help fill a void created with Kevin Delaney’s departure to The Atlantic. Narisetti arrived at the Post three years ago to integrate its digital and print teams, which were literally separated by the Potomac River. “It was fairly traumatic, not in a bad way, but we changed our entire publishing system for print and online, we redesigned the website, we redesigned the newspaper, we physically emptied the newsroom and redid it and put everybody back in,” Narisetti told me. “We changed the overall structure of the newsroom. In all this we ended up reducing our workforce by close to 200+ people.” He was hired three years ago to integrate the digital and print teams, which were literally separated by the Potomac River.“So yeah, we put the Washington Post through a lot of change. And to be where we are now, where we had a record for the year in digital, an all-time record, entering a presidential election year, makes me feel good that it has gone well.” Narisetti has said his singular goal was to bring Post journalism to as many readers as possible. With that came a “culture of measurement,” he says, gauging success by pageviews and time on site. Maybe not something a lot of print journalists want to hear — and probably one of the reasons Narisetti found some naysayers inside the Post and many outside (his words). The paper’s ombudsman went so far as to suggest Narisetti’s digital team was “innovating too fast.” And a disgruntled Post staffer came out of the woodwork — anonymously — to complain to Jim Romenesko: He may have had great ideas, but you have to judge him by the end results: a desktop web site that loads too damn slow, has video that doesn't work on an iPad and can't present a mobile version of a story to a mobile device; a mobile site that lacks an article-search function and won’t display story comments; a series of mobile apps that function like packaged versions of the mobile site; the Godawful mess that is [content-management system] Methode that caused some of these issues.Narsietti also wants to be judged by the end results, he said: “A single newsroom serving audiences across multiple platforms and breaking all-time records in page views, unique visitors, visits to the site and time spent on site is what the Washington Post newsroom is today—all measurable, all audience-focused data points not just some anecdotal talking points is what the Post is today.” In 2011, the Post’s website saw a record number of pageviews, 26 percent more monthly unique visitors year-over-year, more video plays, more stickiness, more repeat visits, and, with the launch of iPhone and Android apps, 70 percent more mobile visits over 2010, according to internal Omniture data. He acknowledged, however, that the Post missed some goals, including growing its local audience, by a considerable margin. Narisetti wrote in an email: I am happy to take ownership of both success and problems, both of which we have plenty and always will. [...] Like many traditional media companies, the Post is also finally recognizing that the future will play out at the intersection of Post journalism and technology, in creating great “experiences” for readers. And its journey of not treating technology as a service function but as a strategic partner to news, something I have flagged for a while, has just begun and will succeed. Finally, I would have actually tried to move faster than we have. Big established newsroom cultures can get into trouble when we focus on the rear-view mirror and only talk of how far we have come.“He was not afraid of hurting people’s feelings and that’s a good thing,” publisher Katharine Weymouth told a Post reporter. “He’s a change agent.” In January 2009, Post Editor Marcus Brauchli created a system of dual managing editors: Narisetti ran the editing staff, producers, photo desk, social media people, and graphics and design teams, while his counterpart Liz Spayd ran the reporters. The dividing line between their jobs was job function, not medium. Narisetti assigned “innovation editors” to the desks — sports, opinion, politics, the investigative team — for day-to-day and medium-term projects. Over the last few months, Narisetti has assembled a small, centralized team of digital project managers who focus on bigger-picture, sitewide projects. That team’s first product was the @MentionMachine, which gulps data from the Twitter fire hose and the Post’s own Trove APIs to track which candidates are talked about most in a week. The goal, he said, is for replicable innovation, code that can be re-used for other stories, not one-off projects. The most aggressively digital-focused people might criticize a structure that includes distinctive digital editors instead of integrating digital into all jobs in the newsroom. Narisetti acknowledged that, but called it a transition. “At the beginning of our evolution to become a single newsroom, we did specifically need innovation catalysts in each of the groups because the groups that are print-focused are probably not digitally focused. So they needed somebody who understood what digital can do for their piece of content.” Narisetti said he is leaving the Post amicably and sees the Wall Street Journal gig as a new challenge. There he’ll be responsible for WSJ.com, SmartMoney.com, MarketWatch, and foreign-language editions of WSJ.com. “To talk about print and online integration now feels a little bit like Web 1.0, I think, been there, done that in some ways. It has become a baseline rather than actually the goal,” he said. “To me the biggest challenge going forward this year and beyond is, How do you integrate technology and content? Because I think that’s going to be the defining characteristic of successful media companies. Can you create engaging news experiences that create loyalty and engagement?” |
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Posted: 23 Jan 2012 09:00 AM PST
 Thinking about the sheer volume of information — stories, images, videos, data — available from The New York Times can evoke a simultaneous glee and terror. Skimming Times Wire gives you an idea of the hundreds of pieces of content they produce each day. For readers, it’s a tip-of-the-iceberg thing: Yes, on a day-to-day basis you have access to the news and a decades-spanning archive, but you’re not seeing anything close to all of it. The task (or, more accurately, one of the tasks) for beta620, the Times experimental projects group, is to find a better way to make the newspaper’s information more readily available — both to readers and to the Times itself. Their latest stab at the problem is something they’re calling Deep Dive, a project that aims to give readers a richer, more nuanced understanding of stories. Deep Dive uses the Times’ massive cache of metadata from stories to go, as the name suggests, deeper into a news event by pulling together related articles. So instead of performing a search yourself within the Times and weeding out off-topic results, Deep Dive would provides readers a collection of stories relating to a topic, based on whatever person, place, event or topic of their choosing. So let’s say you’re interested in protests in Yemen, with Deep Dive you could use an article from nytimes.com as a seed and let the system collect a history of previous items relating to news from the region. It’s a novel project, still just in demonstration phase — one that aims to let the Times put its extensive archives to better use, but also to create a different experience for consuming news. David Erwin, a software engineer with beta620, said they began building Deep Dive to address problems they were having in following the life of a single news story — and the realization that they were in a position to do something about that. “It kind of came organically from a need that we felt ourselves to better understand what was going on as well as an expression of the potential of in our data and technology,” Erwin said. The use of the Times’ rich metadataDeep Dive relies on the extensive tagging system the Times uses for all its stories and makes the Times Topics pages possible. As part of the editing flow tags are applied to stories by editors or producers, with suggestions provided by an internal algorithm. Deep Dive looks for connections among topics, so in the case of our Yemen story, it would likely find other stories on protests in the Middle East.At the moment Deep Dive is limited to topic tags, which are mostly broad terms like “Middle East and North Africa Unrest (2010- )” and “Demonstrations, Protests, and Riots.” That means that that Yemen story connects with stories in on protests in Egypt and Syria, not more stories about what’s going on in Yemen. Erwin said they hope in the future the system could incorporate other factors to make connections through semantic data, editorial data, or time elements. The Times’ metadata is likely the richest of any news organization. Part of the challenge will be to figure out what level of specificity readers want in a dive — how related they want their stories to be. In other words, does someone “diving” off a story about Italy’s debt crisis want more stories about Italian politics? The Euro crisis in places like Greece or Spain? The state of the global economy? How do you weigh an older story that’s spot-on versus one that’s breaking now but slightly more off-topic? “What Deep Dive does it brings you some of the relevance of the topic as you’re reading the article itself,” Marc Frons, the Times CTO for digital operations told me. “So you’re immersed in a topic and you’re going further in. You don’t have to leave the page, which I think is very powerful.” The user interfaceWhat Frons is referring to is Deep Dive’ unique interfact, where the related articles flow into the same frame as the main story when selected. You need never leave the page; jumping backwards or forwards in articles all happens in the same space. That’s a departure from the pageview-driven way most news sites are designed. But Deep Dive’s UI matches its underlying thesis: that individual articles are really pieces of a larger story, told in pieces over time and across bylines and datelines.Frons said the design is just one possible look for the project and not locked in. Still, the design in some ways aligns with Times Skimmer and Times Reader, which may be why Frons sees a future for it. “To me, this sort of notion you have to click and go to another page and wait for the page to load is something that is going to seem very quaint in the not too distant future,” he said. “It’s probably going to seem like using the international operator to place a call to France.” Saving your “dives”More interesting, Deep Dive will also allows users to save their “dives,” which would be constantly updated with new articles. While there are plenty of tools that let a person tailor what news they read online, they’re often based around broad categories (like sports or politics), keyword searches (like Times email alerts), or social networks. What Deep Dives promises is an alert more directly based around a specific developing story — story in the “Arab Spring” sense, not story in the one-specific-article sense. Erwin said the idea is to create a personal news experience that will provide contextual information and be consistently updated. “It basically allows you to keep up with your interests over time by providing custom feeds of articles as they are written,” Erwin said.“The reader who wants to dive into a topic and better understand an article in the context of a story isn’t really reading the news in the same was as a reader who is browsing current news,” Erwin said. But the audience that wants to pull back the curtain on a story exists, the Times is seeing it, Frons said. There are heavy users — often subscribers — but also others like researchers and professionals who consume a lot of content from the Times, he said. But the lines between heavy users and casual browsers can often blur, and the reader who stops by the Times for a Newt Gingrich story might wind up looking for more context, Frons said. “What Deep Dive and some of the other things we’re thinking about do is make it almost easier to serve both people at once,” he said. It could also be a method of converting those browsers into heavy users — making the grazer a hunter. The ability to save dives — or as Erwin says, “putting a pin in a progression of articles along a certain story” — could be useful when you’re trying to follow a story but then miss the latest developments because you didn’t check nytimes.com on a given day. Another thing beta620 would like to explore is the idea of sharing dives among friends, Erwin said. It may be some time before Deep Dive is ready for the spotlight, both Frons and Erwin say its likely to stay in the experimental stage as they try and refine the product, especially to make its ability to find commonalities between stories more granular. Frons said it’s too soon to know how something like Deep Dive would be affected by the Times paywall, but ideally it would be available to all readers whether or not they’re subscribers. “Now that we’re a paid site we really want to build things that encourage the subscriber to use the site more and encourage people to subscribe by giving them dynamic and innovative features,” he said. |
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Posted: 23 Jan 2012 07:30 AM PST
 Every morning, the business and political elite in the biggest province on Canada’s East Coast turns to an unlikely source of information about their own world. Among all the online news organizations trying to find a way to profitability, consider AllNovaScotia.com, which has just celebrated 10 years online and now challenges its historic print rival for the attention of the province’s leaders. It’s done that by not following the rules: It has a nearly impenetrable paywall, no social media presence, no multimedia, and only rare use of links. It doesn’t cover crime and barely covers sports and entertainment. However, it delivers up-to-the minute coverage of business, city hall, and the provincial legislature via the web and apps for iOS and BlackBerry. It scoops its news rivals almost daily and has won loyal readers through dogged combing of public records and often by prying into the personal lives of the province’s movers and shakers. The site is based in Halifax, the capital city of Nova Scotia, a province of just under a million people in Atlantic Canada. Ask 10 people on the street about AllNovaScotia and it’s likely eight will say they’ve never heard of it. “I think it might be nine people,” says Parker Donham, a former journalist for the now-defunct Halifax Daily News, communications consultant, and blogger. “But the one who did would be an assistant deputy minister or a regional manager. Between people paying for it and a limited amount of advertising, they’ve got a business model that seems to work.” “On the whole, I think they are the paper of record now,” adds Donham. “I don’t think there are many serious business or political people who don’t see that every morning.” AllNovaScotia has 5,950 subscribers, whose monthly dues generate 80 per cent of its revenue. The site doesn’t come close to having the broad appeal of its 137-year-old print competitor, the Halifax Chronicle Herald, which has a Monday-to-Friday circulation of 108,389. Three people with different email addresses can share a $30 a month subscription, but they can’t pass the stories on to anyone else without some effort. The publication — produced by a staff of 14, 11 of them reporters — is locked down in Flash, making sharing usually a cumbersome ordeal of cobbling together screenshots. No sharing buttons here. A representative for 5,200 small- and medium-sized businesses in the region says AllNovaScotia’s influence among her association’s members is narrow but strong. “I would suspect that most have never heard of AllNovaScotia,” says Leanne Hachey, vice president of the Atlantic Canadian chapter of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. “However, among those with some influence over politics or public policy or government relations, everybody knows about AllNovaScotia and everybody, as far as I know, pays very close attention to it.” In many ways, AllNovaScotia is similar to Statehouse News Service, the Massachusetts online outfit that offers “gavel-to-gavel coverage” of state government for lobbyists, government officials and business people. However, AllNovaScotia’s approach is both broader and spunkier. The guts of each edition are development permits, court documents, and land transfers — and the stories of triumph and failure inside them. One January issue was a typical mixture of hard news and betcha-didn’t-know information about the province’s movers and shakers. The 25-story edition included:
“The strange thing was they liked to read about other people within their circle. Not in a satirical way…but in a serious way,” says Cox, a former Globe and Mail reporter who still writes commentaries for the site, but who is now studying to be a United Church minister. “How do the Fountains spend their money? How do they make their money? Who did they give it to?” As it turns out, the Fountains, one of the province’s leading philanthropist families, spent a chunk of their money on a surprise appearance by crooner Tony Bennett at their Dec. 10 Christmas party. The lead story in AllNovaScotia’s next issue detailed the lavish event, Bennett’s set list, and the who’s-who-of-Nova-Scotia guest list. This focus on people and their wealth makes AllNovaScotia a different beast from typical business coverage that focuses on companies. People’s names are bolded in stories, frequently paired with their corporate compensation and the assessed value of their house. An almost-daily feature is Who’s Suing Whom. “We wrote about property. We wrote about local stocks. We wrote about the old families,” says Cox, of his time managing the site beginning in 2004. “We wrote about the big business deals and the little business deals. We wrote about the breweries and the coffee shops. Some of it was micro-news that no one else was paying any attention to.” The character of the site can be attributed to its creator, David Bentley, who co-founded a gossip publication called Frank Magazine in the 1980s. Frank is an irreverent print and online journal that chronicles everything from local celebrity divorces, petty scandals and social faux pas. Many in this conservative province read it, though fewer would admit it. Bentley had started a separate newspaper a decade earlier that would become the Halifax Daily News. That paper, a scrappy tabloid that became the first Canadian newspaper with a website in 1994, folded in 2008, two decades after Bentley sold it. Bentley, who no longer operates Frank, says AllNovaScotia’s readers are business people, government officials, academics, and health-care administrators. They are people who need to know what’s going on but who also read the publication “just to keep an eye on who’s in the courts and owing people money.” Cox says AllNovaScotia writes about personal lives of the province’s business elite if it affects the way that business is run. “Just because you’re Colin MacDonald of [seafood giant] Clearwater doesn’t mean we’re not going to pry a little bit to see what’s underlying the value of that stock or the lack of value of that stock. And it’s not to say that we won’t pry into people’s personal lives,” says Cox. That approach hasn’t rankled MacDonald, chairman of the international shellfish company that does about $300 million in business annually. Clearwater received extensive coverage by AllNovaScotia in 2011, when it was the target of a hostile takeover. One AllNovaScotia story in August, headlined “Colin Goes Fishing,” asked whether “the most committed Clearwater founder was losing his passion” after MacDonald went salmon fishing in Newfoundland during the takeover challenge. MacDonald stated in an email that AllNovaScotia “provides me and I suspect other business leaders with a real-time heads up on what is happening in the business community” — an advantage over other news media in the province, which he said are slower and “lacking the business focus and insight.” In reaction, the Chronicle-Herald played catch-up in 2011, launching a rival morning business newsletter and hiring additional business reporters. But a major component of AllNovaScotia’s success is style, not just substance. “We speculate about an awful lot of stuff — this could happen; that might happen,” says Cox. “We write about it with a certain amount of self-righteousness that a lot of business publications won’t take to.” How much of this style can be attributed to Bentley’s roots with the gossip magazine Frank? “I think a substantial amount,” adds Cox. “We’re criticized harshly in the [local] journalism school for using anonymous sources, because we do. But we have people who talk to us who won’t talk to anyone else. If they’re going to give me the legitimate news and I can verify it somewhere else, I think that’s my job to get it out there.” For Bentley — who co-owns AllNovaScotia with his daughter, the publisher — “getting it out there” simply wouldn’t happen without the site’s uncompromising paywall. “We’ve got to do that, otherwise they won’t buy the bloody thing,” he says flatly. “Our competition is people who want to read it for nothing. That’s the great big overarching thing that attempts to suck our blood every day. It sounds a bit paranoid. But that’s the problem.” The result, says the consultant and blogger Donham, is a web site that would appear not to get the Internet at all, by today’s online news norms. But that’s fine with Bentley. He knows what his content is worth to his audience — in contrast to many media excutives who “think what they’ve got is more valuable than it is.” He acknowledges the value of social media in the Arab Spring uprisings, but insists, “You can’t be in the content business and not get paid for it.” Even so, he cautions against viewing AllNovaScotia as a model. “This thing has been going on for 10 or 11 years. It’s one little place,” he says. “What sort of success is that? It’s not as though it has taken off like wildfire and spread across the continent, has it?” Note for transparency: Cox is a sessional instructor and colleague of mine at the University of King’s College School of Journalism. |