Nieman Journalism Lab |
- What kind of challenges does the L.A. Times face in creating a membership program?
- With new iPhone app, News.me moves toward a ‘purpose-built network’ for sharing news
- The newsonomics of crossover
| What kind of challenges does the L.A. Times face in creating a membership program? Posted: 01 Mar 2012 12:30 PM PST From a marketing standpoint, the word “paywall” is pretty terrible. Right away, it tells you there’s a barrier between you and what you want, and the only way to negotiate it is to pay.
The Times plan isn’t surprising as a paid-content strategy — more and more papers are asking readers to pay, even within the Tribune empire. But the Times’ approach is worth looking at from the standpoint of how a newspaper brands itself, and how that can entice readers to pay for a product that has been free-ish for a long time. When I spoke with Emily Smith, the LAT’s senior vice president for digital, she said she believes readers already understand the importance of the journalism the paper produces — a membership approach is an attempt to build on that. “We want to make this a great value, to be a part of the L.A. Times,” she said. “I think the burden is on us to prove that. I welcome that.” What would a L.A. Times membership look like? Smith said benefits could include free or discounted ebooks from the Times, which began publishing them last fall with reporter Christopher Goffard’s A Nightmare Made Real. Members could also get special access to events the Times hosts, such as their annual festival of books or movie screenings. But Smith didn’t want to get too detailed about the membership program, which is supposed to officially launch on Monday, March 5. She said the Times wants to be careful not to define the benefits of membership too strictly and limit their room to launch new features or perks. While that flexibility may be an asset for future growth, it makes how the Times defines membership to its readers all the more important. Smith told me the move is “not a marketing-copy trick,” that the Times really wants to reshape the connection between a newspaper and its community. “It is definitely a shift from what newspapers have been using to describe their relationship with readers historically,” she said. “It just reflects the times we are in.” A matter of definitionsIt’s still an odd thing to consider, the idea of a newspaper having members instead of subscribers. Readers historically paid an access fee that provided them with a day’s worth of news and ads; whatever connection existed beyond that was likely found on the editorial pages or, if you needed to sell a used car, the classifieds. There was little prestige or badge of honor that went along with reading — or identifying with — most newspapers; at most you got a box with the newspaper’s logo on it to attach to your mailbox. Membership clearly implies something more, a means of aligning yourself with a group or organization that either shares your beliefs or provides a service or product above and beyond what you could do for yourself. I’m a AAA member (and have been since college — thanks Aunt Rose!) for the simple reason that I wouldn’t be able to fix my car were it to break down in the middle of nowhere. In high school, I — like many of you, don’t lie — was a member of the Columbia House CD club because they (theoretically) provided me with access to more music than I was willing to walk down to the record store to get by myself. In recent years, news organizations have experiments in programs that offer readers benefits outside of news, but those are typically attached to promotions with local advertisers or Groupon-esque deal programs like the New York Times Times Limited. The newer nonprofit online news organizations like MinnPost use the language of membership to secure donations, sometimes promoting hosted events as incentive to join. While there’s no clear comparison to a membership program in newspapers, public media provides some examples: We’re all familiar with local NPR or PBS pledge drives that regularly asks the audience to contribute funds to help stay on the air. This is a system with a number of physical, as well as psychic, benefits — not least the endorphin rush from knowing you support your local station and they’ve thanked you for it on air. Lessons from public radioJay Clayton, a consultant who works with public media stations on strategy and marketing for their fundraising, said those infamous tote bags, coffee mugs and more, are less member benefits than enticements. While there are a number of public media outlets that offer exclusive events or discounts through listener/viewer programs, the phrase “membership” has a loose meaning at most stations, easily interchangeable with “contribution support.” Still, the mugs, bags, shirts, and the rest do provide public media fans a kind of totem and means of self-identifying that acts as a way to spot kindred types elsewhere in their community. They create a kind of ad hoc membership group even if a formal one doesn’t exist. That group, as real or loosely defined as they may be, make for a solid block of (paying) supporters once pledge time comes around. “The format will always be the cause for giving,” Clayton said. “The mugs and extras act as a catalyst for giving a certain amount and giving at a certain time.” What Clayton means by that is the audience goes into the whole thing knowing public radio survives off donations. Yes, there are those who don’t support public radio and TV, but enough do to keep stations solvent. The proposition is different with newspapers, he said, because the nature of online news has changed how people associate their money with keeping their paper afloat. Though public media would seem a good example of memberships as a means of supporting journalism, the structural differences with for-profit media show there will be plenty of challenges in making a similar system work for newspapers like the L.A. Times. Public media in all its forms has a kind of implicit appeal for donations, and newspapers don’t, Clayton said. That’s important, he said, because it’s the seed that motivates people to spend money to support news in their community. Absent any kind of physical benefits, the idea of a membership — whether you have a card or just nod to a person with a “I heart NPR” shirt — is secondary to that. For the Times, or any other newspaper looking to create a membership program, they must not only find a way to entice people to make that first step to join, but also demonstrate why their membership community is worthwhile. “Unless there is interest from the beginning, all the mugs and extras are not going to provoke them to donate,” he said. Photo by Leo Reynolds used under a Creative Commons license. |
| With new iPhone app, News.me moves toward a ‘purpose-built network’ for sharing news Posted: 01 Mar 2012 08:00 AM PST
Remember how disappointed people were, around Halloween of last year, when Google Reader was suddenly stripped of its social features and redesigned to look like the rest of Google’s properties? Robin Sloan lamented:
For many users, Google Reader was a tight, private, conversational network. But it was doomed never to be compatible with Google’s belated embrace of social media and a network — Google+ — designed for scale. “I think because Google wasn’t quite paying attention to [Reader], it never built in the incentives to grow that network as large as it could possibly be,” said Jake Levine, the general manager at News.me.
Reader was effectively a purpose-built network, like Instagram or Foursquare, a place for people to gather around a single thing — in this case, news. Now News.me is trying to create the same thing, starting with a new iPhone app out today. News.me is in the category of apps (Percolate, Flud, formerly Summify) that cut through the din of social media and serve personalized story recommendations based on what a user’s friends are sharing. But News.me wants to stand out by becoming its own social network. A user can import friends from Twitter and Facebook, but what happens in the app stays in the app. Buzzfeed-style “reactions” on stories (ha!, wow, awesome, sad, really?) are not visible elsewhere — like Instagram, News.me has no desktop interface. “Not only is discovery a challenge on networks like Twitter and Facebook, in that there’s so much stuff, but conversations are a challenge…These networks are evolving from conversational media to broadcast media,” Levine said. There are a lot of people you might follow whose news judgment you don’t necessarily trust. “So we asked ourselves, how do we build something that takes the discovery value of Twitter and Facebook and combine that with the ease of use and conversational nature of a platform like email” — still the No. 1 way that people share news.
When we last covered News.me in September, the company had spun out from Bitly and ditched its paid content model. There isn’t a business plan yet. (One of the company’s principal investors is big brother Betaworks.) In typical startup fashion, Levine said he is focused on building a large user base before figuring out how to make money. The iPad app, previously $0.99 a week or $34.99 a year, was launched in April 2011 but didn’t get much traction. The News.me daily email digest, launched at the same time, “consistently had high engagement and continued to grow,” Levine said, with open and clickthrough rates averaging above 40 percent. So the iPhone app is drawing on what Levine sees as the “latent network” of the email product. It’s early and the app is basic. News.me is a “read-only” consumption app, for now. You can’t yet share articles within the News.me ecosystem. And that’s the challenge for the company: With purpose-built networks like Foursquare and Instagram, the consumer and the producer are the same person — the creating happens inside the app. With News.me, users are sharing things created elsewhere. One clever feature available now demonstrates how this might work down the road: Whenever you “favorite” a tweet on Twitter, that link is automatically ingested into your News.me Reading List. It’s dead-simple bookmarking. Call the nascent network a niche or call it a silo, but news organizations are also experimenting with the “closed” approach. With Facebook apps such as WSJ Social and the Washington Post Social Reader, the experience occurs entirely inside Facebook, keeping the reader captive. Those apps may not drive traffic back to the home page, but they do serve up more ads and increase time spent. Levine said he will watch carefully to see how users adapt to the network, or the other way around. That’s more useful than tallying download numbers. “The download number is an indicator of how good our PR is, not how good the product is. What matters is what happens after launch. Is it growing? Do we have a group of users that come back to it every single freakin’ day? And are they telling their friends about it? Those are the metrics that we’re paying attention to.” |
| Posted: 01 Mar 2012 07:00 AM PST
The signs are everywhere — the signs of crossover. We’re not there yet, but publishers are starting to sense that the time when their business models become more about digital and less about print gets closer every day. Since the web’s dawn, publishers have lived in a mainly print/somewhat digital world. We’re on the brink of a heavily digital/somewhat print world. The difference means hundreds of billions of dollars, euros, pounds, and yen to content creators and distributors. Get it right, and you win the prize: America’s Next Top (Business) Model. Let’s take a top-line look at the data that tells us we’re approaching crossover — we’ll return to this topic often, as a defining one for this year and next — and the newsonomics of that crossover. Some quick datapoints:
So how do publishers play the crossover game? If there were a magic formula, publishers would happily buy one. Yet, the crossover is so complex and so fast-moving that we are reminded of Einstein at the blackboard, and his observation: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” A print-to-web translation: Simply counting dollars, subscribers, pageviews, and unique visitors won’t get us to crossover. With digital mobility upending conventional truths held as recently as a couple of years ago (“readers only consume news snippets online”; “we’re stuck with the digital ad formats we have”), navigating the crossover is increasingly complex. What will help us figure it out? For publishers, emerging crossover strategies should be based on good metrics (see “The newsonomics of 2011 news metrics to watch”). But what to measure? Let’s look at some conversion metrics, signposts on the road to a successful crossover — or a business implosion along the way. Advertising revenue
Other potential conversion metrics in advertising:
Audience
Costs
Finally, there’s one other scary crossover number to consider: When will ad spend meet up with time spent, and maybe cross over there, too? While TV’s ad take equals the time consumers spend with the medium (42.2 percent of U.S. ad revenue compared to 42.5 percent of time spent), according to eMarketer, newspapers take in 15 percent of the national ad spend, but now only account for 4 percent of time spent with media. Magazines, too, are vulnerable to equalizing forces: Their take is 9.7 percent of the ad pie, while they serve up a thin slice of time spent at 2.8 percent. Destined to gain share: Internet, with four points less revenue than time — and mobile, with time spent 10x ad revenue. So in this equalization, as newspapers and magazines inevitably lose more core revenue, their potential upside comes in those two categories. |
So it’s not surprising that media companies, used to working with words, are using alternatives. The New York Times uses 
And that was its charm. “It was hard for people to figure out. So those barriers, those product problems…those bugs were features, because it limited the size of the network and it made it inherently more conversational,” he said.
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