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- New media, meet new old media: CmdrTaco joins WaPo Labs
- Alt weeklies eye an AP of their own with a content exchange
- Reporters’ Lab searches for ways to make reporting cheaper, without cheapening the reporting
- Where’s the money coming from? Fresh Pew data on the uncertain economics of newspapers
| New media, meet new old media: CmdrTaco joins WaPo Labs Posted: 05 Mar 2012 01:30 PM PST
Rob Malda, known to most people on the web as CmdrTaco, the founder of early nerdy community news site Slashdot, tweeted today he is joining The Washington Post as chief strategist and editor-at-large of WaPo Labs, the digital team responsible for Trove and Social Reader. The response on Twitter can be summed up, mostly, as “Wait, really? Whoa, cool!”
It’s a surprising hire (and a marketing coup): The Washington Post is a traditional news organization, and CmdrTaco, er, Malda, built the kind of online counterculture that wants to be an antidote to mainstream media. “Rob is a true online media pioneer,” said Vijay Ravindran, the Post’s chief digital officer, in a statement. “The number of innovations that Slashdot brought to the online news world is hard to match — from what is still the best commenting experience on the web to creating a hyper-loyal community that led to sites referenced in Slashdot posts to being ‘slashdotted.’” (Indeed, few people can claim to have created new verbs.) Malda left Slashdot last August after 14 years to try something — he didn’t know what — new. He talked to more than 35 companies, Malda wrote today, before falling for the Post:
I exchanged emails with Malda after the announcement to learn more about his new job, which starts today; here is our conversation. Andrew Phelps: Why WaPo Labs/The Washington Post? What’s the appeal? Rob Malda: The Labs team is a pretty small group, focused on some more experimental stuff. The Post itself does real, important, significant, big journalism that is really important to me personally. I want to do a job that I think matters…but the labs is actually thinking about distribution, consumption, and community…the sort of stuff that I have been working on for years, but these guys are able to blend mainstream news into the whole thing. They are a bit more skunkworks and nimble. So it’s the mixture that makes me excited. Phelps: What will you be doing there?
Malda: They have a number of products in various states of deploy here: Social Reader and Trove are 2 of the biggest ones. Initially I’ll be working with those teams to help bring some of my ideas to those tools, but hopefully I’ll be able to take my interests and experience in community/social news to new products. Phelps: What new projects are planned? Malda: Wouldn’t YOU like to know! Obviously the short term we will focus on improving Social Reader, and getting it out onto more platforms, but beyond that, I’m looking forward to seeing where we can improve the Trove news aggregation system. I think there’s something broadly appealing there. Phelps: Is this why you “retired” from Slashdot? Malda: I retired from Slashdot really for personal reasons. 14 years is a long time, and I really felt like it was just time for me to move on. In many ways, Slashdot was my baby that had moved on and gone to college…I needed to accept that and let it live its own life, and hope it remembers to call every few weeks and tell me how it is doing. But this job is a pretty perfect place for me: I get to exercise my experience in product design, community, and social news, but in a more mainstream news arena. I really can’t wait to start contributing! Phelps: Thanks. That Slashdot question must be getting as old as “How do you think the iPod will fare?” :P Malda: I stand by that quote BTW, the first iPod sucked. People forget that the original spinning wheel and the tiny capacity was super lame! Phelps: What strikes me is that you’re very “new media,” as much as a 14-year-old website can be new, and WaPo is “old media.” I’m not implying something bad about the latter. It’s just interesting to see you traveling in the “reverse” direction. A lot of digital people leave news organizations because they can be more nimble and create new web communities (and maybe make more money) on their own. But here you are joining a large, traditional organization. Malda: I think those are exactly the question that the WaPo Labs is trying to answer. Traditional Media does important things that bloggers and tweeters DON’T do. Feet on the ground, old school journalism. This is important stuff to everyone, even if we don’t realize it. You could just run a newspaper into the ground, watch revenues decline, and the sun set. But what we as a culture lose in that scenario is giant. Journalism is bigger than print. And my perspective is that The Post knows that, and they are trying to figure out ways to achieve the best from micro blogging to traditional journalism. The world needs both! I bring the other perspective here. And I think I can help. Photo of Rob Malda by webstock used under a Creative Commons license |
| Alt weeklies eye an AP of their own with a content exchange Posted: 05 Mar 2012 01:00 PM PST
The recently launched AltWeeklies Content Exchange lets papers like the Boston Phoenix, Minneapolis’ City Pages or Oakland’s East Bay Express swap stories, photos, video, or other interactive multimedia to bolster their coverage of national news. While AAN members will be able to use the material for free, outside news organizations — think newspapers, broadcast networks, or news sites — will be able to pay to license it. On a local level, the exchange would also create a platform for citizens and freelancers to offer (or sell) work to their local weekly. (Or another AAN member: The “N” switched from “Newsweeklies” to “Newsmedia” last summer, and the group has started admitting alternative online-only news sites.) What AAN is trying to do is take advantage of scale — providing extra copy for its members as well as larger, mainstream outlets that don’t have the time or resources to cover the issues the weeklies specialize in. If the program proves successful it would not only increase the amount of journalism readers are exposed to, but it could contribute to papers revenue, said Tiffany Shackelford, executive director of the AAN. “From my point of view, in the news association space, which is a weird animal, I think we all tend to get excited about the shiny object or huge success story and aren’t able, or can’t, give members somewhat basic and easy to use tools,” she said. “That’s what I hope this does.” Shackelford told me the exchange doesn’t currently have set rates for content licensing; most prices will be negotiated on a case-by-case basis. If the program takes root, that could change, she said. AAN members have free access to the exchange through the dues they pay to the group. The exchange was built on Cont3nt, a larger system for connecting freelance media producers with news organizations. “This is an opportunity to get paid from larger news organizations,” Shackelford said. “Think about things like Occupy in cities around the country, or the upcoming presidential election and the footage that could come out of that from smaller places that large organizations don’t have the money to cover any more.” This is not the first time alternative weeklies have banded together to share their stories. One historical precedent is the Underground Press Syndicate, a network of countercultural papers that started in the mid 1960s. The group was a kind of wire service to provide reports from across the country. Wikipedia tells us:
The need to share stories remainss, but the tools have changed. (This content exchange won’t operate via second-class mail.) Shackelford told me the idea to create the exchange came from a desire to create a simple means of offering up the best work from weeklies around the country and make it available to their peers. Weeklies pride themselves on the time and reporting that goes into coverage that falls outside traditional media, and this is a way of promoting that work, she said. It’s also a way to tap into broader stories or trends happening in the media. For topics like Occupy or the protests on changes to union laws in states, those stories have a component that plays on the local and national level. Another example would be features, profiles, or interviews of musicians or other touring artists whose schedule may take them from one alt-weekly community to another. Weeklies have faced many of the same challenges as their larger, mainstream counterparts in terms of circulation and revenue declines, and the content exchange could offer a means of providing additional stories at minimal costs. (If weeklies choose to take part: Many have chain ownership and already share content among sister publications; they may choose to keep that sharing in-house.) Still, Shackelford said her goal is to create a suite of tools that will allow individual weeklies to use the network to improve their bottom line. Shackelford said the AAN will also be launching an ad exchange within the next few weeks. If the exchange takes off, and traditional media or other websites develop an appetite for the alt weeklies work, Shakelford said she could imagine the AAN taking steps to become a more formal content network by packaging material from members and syndicating that curated work. Underground Press Syndicate image from Wikimedia Commons |
| Reporters’ Lab searches for ways to make reporting cheaper, without cheapening the reporting Posted: 05 Mar 2012 07:00 AM PST
Labs are all the rage in journalism these days. There’s the Drone Journalism Lab, the Globe Lab, WaPo Labs, the New York Times R&D Lab, and more.
Sarah Cohen, a professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy and Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, is director of the center, which formally goes by the title Project for the Advancement of Public Affairs Reporting. “Lawyers get to have software that listens to depositions and does speech recognition on them, but we don’t have anything like that that works on our interview notes,” Cohen told me. “When we can’t get public records, we end up having to write elaborate programs to take data off the web.” Why can’t reporters have better tools? The Reporters’ Lab is a vehicle for Duke’s computational journalism initiative, a phrase popularized by Cohen, Jay Hamilton, and Fred Turner in a series of papers. Computational journalism, Cohen says, refers to the use (and study) of technology to improve journalism production.
For example, a newspaper reporter covering a town meeting might be expected to live-tweet, file quickly, and maybe even get reax on video. That makes it tough to take good notes. Lab developer Charlie Szymanski is building a multi-function note-taking tool called Video Notebook. The software can line up tweets with video recordings of meetings to serve as navigation aids. As the reporter starts typing to transcribe, the video stops, patiently waiting for the typing to finish. The Lab is also working with Carnegie Mellon University to bring usable speech recognition to audio recordings. Consumer software such as Dragon NaturallySpeaking is good at adapting to one voice in a quiet environment, not so good at making sense of meetings and press conferences. Cohen wants to eventually get high-quality transcription in the hands of reporters at a low cost. (This is, like, every reporter’s dream.) “Public records held in audio and video are like lost records,” she said. “When I go into a courthouse and do reporting, I can no longer get a transcript in any reasonable amount of time — I have to just go listen to the audio and grab an MP3 of it. There are so many public meetings and public events that are only available on audio and video. I think that’s a huge problem.”
Another project — just an idea at the moment — would mine RSS and Twitter feeds to identify trending topics on a reporter’s beat. “There are maybe 100 to 150 different sources that you have to monitor every day to see whether there’s news you need to cover, from government agencies to small blogs to your neighborhoods, whatever,” Cohen said. “There’s no efficient way to monitor that and kind of group everything by topic, instead of by source or date.” The ideas are simple, Cohen said, but no one else is tackling them. A recent conversation with a Google News engineer illuminates the difficult of attracting bright engineers to tackle problems of journalism. “They listened to my complaint about RSS feeds and they’re like, ‘Well, RSS feeds will eventually go away.’ Well, they’re not away yet!” she said. Engineers “tend not to be interested in solving today’s problems but future problems,” she said. The Reporters’ Lab website, too, will be a public-facing resource. Managing editor Tyler Dukes is charged with writing about what the team is learning as well as how other journalists are using tools in unexpected ways to aid reporting. Dukes writes software reviews and posts FOIA’d documents, transcripts, and databases. The project is not just about generating solutions but identifying who else is doing so, or at least trying. It is a collaborative effort to help journalists focus on the core product in a world of increasing demands of distractions. “What we’re trying to do is find ways to cut time out of doing drudgery work in reporting,” Cohen said, “and get us back out into the field to do the good work.” Photo of beakers by tk-link used under a Creative Commons license |
| Where’s the money coming from? Fresh Pew data on the uncertain economics of newspapers Posted: 05 Mar 2012 05:30 AM PST It’s a story that wouldn’t exactly merit a “BREAKING” crawl on CNN: American newspapers aren’t in great financial shape. But a new report from Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism fleshes out that fact, showing that within the industry there’s quite a bit of diversity in how well newspapers are adjusting to the disruption of their business models. Pew found that, while some are doing better than others, the gap between digital and print revenues is still yawning, and that efforts at expanding the digital base — through daily deals, mobile advertising, or other experiments — are only slowly having an impact. Even with digital advertising rising at most newspapers, the report found a 7:1 ratio of print advertising dollars lost to digital advertising gained in 2010. Perhaps what’s most remarkable about the report is how Pew put it together: using private data from 38 newspapers in six companies, as well as interviews with executives from 13 media companies. At the newspapers surveyed:
Aside from the data, the report’s interviews with executives offers some troubling evidence of the industry’s resistance to change. This sentiment from one of the surveyed execs seems to capture it:
In order to get access to newspapers’ numbers, Pew promised to keep their identities secret. That’s a very reasonable tradeoff to get access to granular data, but nonetheless, there are points in the report where a bit more background data would be useful in interpreting the numbers. Where Pew provides it, it illustrates that “success” can have different meanings. For instance, Pew notes that the newspaper with the highest growth rate in digital revenue saw that number grow 63 percent in a year — a truly remarkable number. But the study points out this newspaper was a small one (20,000 circulation) where, even with that kind of growth, digital revenue made up only 6 percent of total revenue. And that growth was driven, in part, by a hiring boom in the city’s major industry. In other words, that kind of growth won’t be easily replicable elsewhere. 2011 saw seemingly every decent-sized paper in the country adopt daily deals — either Groupon or one of its clones — as a revenue stream, and they provided newspapers with different results. One paper said deals made up 55 percent of digital revenue — but the average across papers was only 5 percent. There was one universal truth, and it’s a depressing one: Mobile isn’t big money yet. More than half the papers surveyed told Pew they generated zero ad dollars on mobile platforms in 2011. At least the trend line’s moving in the right direction: Mobile increased from 0.1 percent of digital revenue in late 2010 to 0.9 percent in late 2011. (At least newspapers aren’t alone in struggling to make money from mobile ads.) One thing the survey does is back up the other recent Pew report that found banner ads make up the bulk of advertising on news websites. What this new study tells us is the reason why: It’s what the ad staff is pushing hardest. Of the papers surveyed, 92 percent said digital display and banner ads were a “major focus” of their sales, versus 40 percent for targeted advertising and zero percent for video advertising. And as much as executives talk about retooling their ad departments, their staffing tells a different story:
The thread that runs through the report is culture change within newspapers. The executives Pew spoke with offer a kind of dissonance, advocating the virtues of the digital game while bemoaning the state of their staffs. Another excerpt:
Or this:
The report ends on a decidedly gray note, asking executives to look ahead five years. Some predict cutbacks on home delivery days; one said papers would “limp along” and predicted doom if another recession comes. It’s on the second to last page where the report turns shockingly blunt: “Still others said that at this point, they just didn’t know what the revenue structure would look like going forward.” |
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Cohen’s staff at Reporters’ Lab is small, and she wants to grab on to partnerships wherever possible. Software projects are posted publicly as “
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