Nieman Journalism Lab |
- The L.A. Times tries to differentiate itself through award-season analysis with The Envelope
- Eat your vegetables: Ideas from news nutritionists to reform our media diets
- The newsonomics of ads that go bump in the night
| The L.A. Times tries to differentiate itself through award-season analysis with The Envelope Posted: 16 Feb 2012 10:00 AM PST
For all of the pageantry, glamour, and prestige of award season, it can be rather ordinary — even mundane — particularly for the people and companies that cover the trail of celebrity. The pattern’s familiar, from the late-fall buzz to the Christmas prestige releases to the nominations and finally the awards themselves. So, if you’re a news outlet that puts a lot of effort into entertainment, how do you shake things up? If you’re the The Envelope, which exists as a website and weekly print supplement, is the Times answer to how to feed both an increased general interest in awards season, but also readership in the entertainment industry itself. “We’re sort of in this unusual position where we cover the Oscar race as any newspaper might for the general reader, but then we have a whole constituency of hometown readers who consider this their lifeblood,” LA Times film editor Julie Makinen told me. What the Times did, Makinen said, was try to create a site that both covers awards and gives multiple perspectives on the competition. What they created was a vertical that in some ways approaches the Oscars the way ESPN or Yahoo approaches fantasy sports: blow out the coverage; give the insider-y details; put as much data analysis behind it as possible. One example would be what they call the Oscar Senti-meter, a tool that mines tweets for how the public feels about the various Oscar categories and contenders from day to day. The Times worked with IBM and the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California to create the sentiment-analysis tool, which gauges positive and negative reactions using language-processing software. For instance, Makinen says it tells you “a lot of people on Twitter thought Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was very confusing but still love Gary Oldman.” The Oscars are perfect fodder for an effort like this, since opinions typically run strong (WHERE IS GOSLING?). “This tool now allows us to tap into a much larger ocean of comments about this and examine it in an analytical way,” Makinen said. Similarly the Heatmeter attempts a statistical approach to measuring the momentum of any given movie, actor, actress, or director. Using an in-house points system that assigns different values to things like awards (Oscars > Golden Globes > Screen Actors Guild, etc.), the meter tries to put data behind the anecdotal notion that The Artist and Meryl Streep are going to win their respective categories. “Everyone in Hollywood likes to talk about the horse race and momentum,” Makinen said. Aside from its innovation merits, The Envelope also opens up another avenue for for studios, talent agencies, and others to advertise. (Think of those “For your consideration” ads you see everywhere this time of year.) But The Envelope is also a response to competition in the entertainment-reporting market. While the Times has long had to deal with the likes of Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, these days it contends with sites like The Wrap and Indie Wire, not to mention entertainment coverage from The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast among others. While Makinen wouldn’t go into specifics, she said The Envelope sees a healthy amount of traffic, which, considering the Times is breaking records for pageviews and other marks, means its probably doing okay. The competition is a good thing, Makinen said, as it forces organizations to be creative in how they pursue their awards coverage. At the end of the day, there are only so many things George Clooney can say in pre-award interviews, which is why readers are looking for sites that offer more than the norm, she said. “This time of year in particular, it can feel like we don’t have anything fresh to give our readers,” Makinen said. “These kind of things can help do that, and set us apart from other publications as the same time.” |
| Eat your vegetables: Ideas from news nutritionists to reform our media diets Posted: 16 Feb 2012 08:30 AM PST It seems simple, when you think about it. Clay Johnson, author of The Information Diet, argues that America is not obese because of bad food — but because we’re eating too much of it.
We are evolved to survive scarcity in a land of abundance. Likewise, Johnson says, America’s information problem is one of overconsumption, not overload. We’re stuffing ourselves full of junk. It’s a business model encapsulated in The AOL Way, he said, the leaked memo that reduces journalism to pure, quantifiable data. Johnson laid out his media nutrition metaphor Wednesday night at the MIT Media Lab in a panel discussion with two other people concerned about nutrition: Ethan Zuckerman, whose students at the Center for Civic Media are attempting to design nutrition labeling for news, and Sean Cash, a nutritional economist at Tufts University who studies the policy and politics of actual food. Johnson likens big media to big agriculture. “They have to produce very cheap, very popular information. Just like our food companies weren’t concerned with nutrition…as much as their fiduciary responsibility,” he said. “We get media that caters to our base emotion of affirmation and fear. We want to be told that we’re right” — confirmation bias, in other words. He demonstrated: A June 2011 Associated Press poll found President Obama’s support eroding with voters concerned about the economy, particularly women. The AP headline: Economic Worries Pose New Snags for Obama. The story that hit the wire was 827 words. The Fox News headline? AP: Obama Has a Big Problem With White Women. That version of the AP story is reduced to two paragraphs. “The recovering activist wants me to believe it’s because Fox has a conservative agenda,” Johnson said. “But the businessman in me knows that’s what gets people to click. That’s what their readers want to read.” Every click is a vote, he says. Every search is a vote. More like this, please. He demonstrates another example. What does Google suggest when you type in Republicans are…
And Democrats are…?
People aren’t going to Google wondering Are Republicans stupid? Are Democrats socialists? and searching for answers. They’re going, Johnson argues, to find affirmation. And media companies who cater to search traffic, who worship the pageview, will produce more media to satisfy that demand. Cheap, high-calorie, easy-to-manufacture media. Nutritional labeling for newsZuckerman’s work to label the news, to help people make more healthful choices, is hard and complicated. Descriptive labels, rather than prescriptive labels, connote truth. But who is to determine the ingredients of a news story? And if we know how much of our news intake is opinion, celebrity gossip, and fluff, will that change our behavior?
Cash said companies are reluctant to embrace labels voluntarily if they could be seen as bad for business. And consumers tend not to trust them if they’re voluntary. (What if Fox News disclosed that the following program was 85 percent fact, 15 percent speculation?) Mandatory labels, on the other hand — labels imposed upon companies by the government — can stir up resentment in consumers who don’t like being told what to do, not to mention, in the case of news, run quickly into First Amendment problems. Companies can also manipulate labels to suit their interests. “I don’t know that we want government to give us those information content labels, and if we did have that information from government, how would we respond to it?” Cash said. Johnson argues that nutritional labels serve a self-selecting audience. They don’t persuade people to change their behavior. “If you go into a grocery store as a fat person, as a person with a poor diet, it is not the case that a nutritional label is going to make you go, Oh, I should go on a diet!” he said. Johnson cites a study published in the July 2011 British Medical Journal. After New York City enacted a law requiring nutritional labels appear on fast-food menu, the researchers tracked fast-food patrons in low-income areas to find out whether they made more healthful choices. By in large they didn’t, as compared to a similar sample studied before the law took effect. Only one in six people bothered to read the labels, they found, but those people did make lower-calorie choices. (The researchers conducted interviews and checked receipts.) Does the market allow for high-quality content?The business incentives for cheap media are obvious, at least if you buy Johnson’s narrative. But is there a market opening for news that satisfies a higher-quality news diet? Johnson says yes, there is, and he returns to the food metaphor. He explains that Walmart is building a store three blocks from his house in Washington, D.C., and plans to sell organic food. His theory: “Walmart needs the Whole Foods customer to grow, because they’ve got no place left to grow in the U.S.,” he said. In news, Johnson says, the market is saturated with cheap content. Johnson believes high-quality news should be paid for and that consumers — at least a subset of the population — are willing to pay for a differentiated product. Think of New York Times paywall subscribers as Whole Foods shoppers. “Maybe media will chase us like Walmart is chasing the Whole Foods customer,” he says. Really? I asked him after the talk: Can most newspapers persuade enough people to pay for content on the web? “I think that people are willing to pay for content. The success over the past four years of iTunes, which is now a $2 billion business, is people saying I want high-quality, ad-free content.” Same goes for HBO and Netflix, he said. “Now with the iBookstore and the iBooks Author tool that they’ve just released a couple weeks ago, they’re making it so that me with my blog can write a 5,000-word piece and maybe sell it for a dollar. And instead of running ads on my blog to support myself, I can write — not even mini-books, but two- or three-page papers,” he said. Johnson shoulders a lot of the burden for healthier living on the individual news consumer, not the producer. He acknowledges, however, that the target audience for his book — and the people in the audience at MIT — may not be the people whose info diets need the most help. Pizza photo by Aaron Olaf used under a Creative Commons license. |
| The newsonomics of ads that go bump in the night Posted: 16 Feb 2012 07:00 AM PST
We live in two worlds. In the afternoon, on our desktops or laptops, we read news like the new Pew study showing yet another way that newspapers are going to hell. This one was hardly news to anyone in the industry, but it put the issue plainly, if dryly:
Pew’s report underscores the fact that many of us have written about: Digital advertising, once the little sister, is surpassing print (newspaper and magazines) in the U.S. and Europe, and will pass whatever we mean when we say “TV” by 2016 or so. So news companies’ failure to get a larger piece of the fastest-growing ad segment — perhaps the fastest-growing ever — is a big problem. And the problem is growing: Three years ago, the top five digital companies took 63 percent of U.S. digital ad revenue; this year, they’ll take 72 percent, eMarketer estimates. Those companies: Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, and AOL. That 9 percent differential is worth about $3.5 billion a year. Yes, it’s getting worse, by so many standards, as we’ll continue to see over the next month as final 2011 financials come in and more jobs go away.
In the evening, though, on our oh-so-lean-back tablets, we can open up our au courant news apps and face a quite different reality. Open up The Wall Street Journal tablet app this week, and you’ll find a garden’s delight of interactive ads. These ads grab the potential of the tablet and run with it — joyously. They move beyond what we’ve known as “advertising” and sprint into a new field of commercial conversation. These truly interactive ads are increasingly targeted to users, but more importantly they attract top-end advertisers, at good rates, into news products. An early adopter of the iPad — the Journal’s launch date of April 3, 2010, slips easily off the tongue of Daniel Bernard, chief product officer of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network — the WSJ has a half-dozen or so cousins in early experimentation. Add The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, the Financial Times, Reuters, AP, and a few others to that short list of news companies with two years of development experience under their belts. It’s the Journal, though, that seems to be making the most headway with this next generation of ads. In fact, perusing the Journal tablet edition reminds me of the wonder many felt viewing that Wonderfactory-created SI demo a month before Steve Jobs launched the iPad. Consider a few of those ads:
These aren’t ads that simply take you away to separate brand page when you touch it. They offer more useful information, within the app. They are the fruit of the Journal’s partnering with top agencies and advertisers to build applications that take advantage of the tablet, a partnering that has been “top of mind for us,” Bernard says, for at least a couple of years. They begin to understand what the target audience wants beyond being “sold.” This is information-as-advertising, advertising as a gateway to connection beyond simple pitch and simple impression. Brands are important here, but their ability to tempt engagement is the key. Commercial conversation, especially targeted commercial conversation, is the Internet’s next generation of advertising. The first generation of impression-based web ads has been a low-clicking disaster. These new ads — some better executed than others, of course — insult our intelligence less and provide what we could call a freemium ad experience. We’ll pay you for your time, they whisper, by giving you information or perspective you may find useful, and then you may want to buy something from us. The play goes well beyond the Journal and business/financial products, of course, to cars, real estate, furniture, and health. Of course, any news (or entertainment or social) medium has to offer a ready-for-prime-time tablet experience in order to qualify for such commercial conversation. Those that don’t — or only put up barely interactive, PDF-plus tablet products — won’t fool readers or advertisers. Of course, this new world of commercial swipes, taps, tilts and downloads is extremely measurable. WSJ’s Bernard notes that each “event” — as our every touch of the tablet is called — can be recorded. Talk about metrics, data, and the emergence of conversion analytics. He notes that, at this point, “some advertisers ask for more event metrics, and some for less.” Interestingly, the Journal isn’t selling such high-touch ads on the basis of their effectiveness, although we can see models emerging as pay-per-touch, alongside pay-per-click and pay-per-action. Rather, the Journal is making these ads part of its broader selling — some bundled with print and/or “online,” some not. Bernard makes the point of how his product team — which serves both journalists and advertising staff — is focusing heavily on the tablet, given its unprecedented ability to get us to interact. He defines “mobile” and “tablet” separately for development purposes. The smartphone — with 257 million to be out there in America alone by 2016, according to Forrester — is a more elusive ad medium, its commercial potential so far under-realized. The tablet, though, with its print replacement + interaction abilities, offers game-changing selling and buying possibilities. For this interactive world, it’s beyond tilting and tapping — it’s time to shake, rattle, and roll the worlds of advertising. So, yes, while the Pew survey accurately shows the sorry state of advertising readiness at many sites, the potential of harvesting the newest of news-heavy technologies offers the promise of a reprieve. Yes, news companies may have been slow to the parties of search, social, video, and mobile, and most have unfortunately taken a go-slow approach to the tablet — but platforms like the iPad offer a way out of the ad desert Pew paints. In 2012, it’s still early, for both ad and editorial adoption of tablet benefits. “People are building toolkits,” he said. “They are experimenting. They’re making things easier to build.” If you are in the publishing business, are your people building toolkits, experimenting, and getting faster at time-to-market? The ad interactivity we’re seeing is mostly app-based right now. HTML5 development for the iPad’s Safari browser is next up for the Journal. Various flavors of responsive design — allowing content to format more automatically for multiple devices, as The Boston Globe has done — are in the works. Ironically, on an average day we may see more touchable interactivity in ads than in editorial. Yet the editorial future of swiping and swooshing, now typically saved for special projects, is right in front of us. As Raju Narisetti, late of The Washington Post and now returned this week to the Journal, has put it: The next big change frontier in news is the integration of journalists and technologists. Incorporating the real interactivity of this newest medium into the daily workflow of the news trade is but in its infancy. |
Johnson and Cash, the nutritionist, both take issue with labels. It’s not that they think they’re inherently problematic — a faux nutritional label for news is the cover of Johnson’s book, after all — but that they don’t solve the fundamental problem of overconsumption.
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