Jumat, 09 Maret 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Hacking for truth, whatever that is: Ideas to fight misinformation

Posted: 08 Mar 2012 11:45 AM PST

True and false

After a day of deliberating on Big Ideas — what is truth? how do we defeat its adversaries? what if they’re robots? — the academics and technologists at the Truthiness in Digital Media conference gathered Wednesday at M.I.T. to drum up real-world solutions to tractable problems. (The conference, co-hosted by Harvard’s Berkman Center and the Center for Civic Media, generated a lot of interesting blog posts. I live-blogged the event here.)

Facebook ads that target people likely to believe in political myths and hit them with facts. Common APIs for fact-checking websites. A data dashboard for journalists that guides the writing process with facts about subjects that appear in the text. “Pop-up” fact-checking that interrupts political ads on television.

While en route to the Truthiness hack day, I ran into Matthew Battles, managing editor at Harvard’s metaLAB and a Nieman Lab contributor. He had an idea for some kind of game, call it “Lies With Friends,” that would play on the joy in lying and, maybe, teach critical thinking. It would be like an online version of the icebreaker Two Truths and a Lie. Or maybe Werewolf.

We gathered a group to sketch ideas for two impossibly brief hours. First, the parameters: Would this game be played against the computer, a human opponent, multiple opponents? We settled on the latter, which fits with a socially networked world. Maybe it would be a Facebook app.

Would the game evaluate the veracity of players’ claims, or merely their persuasiveness? We picked the latter, because persuasiveness — not truth — is what wins debates. To quote Harry Frankfurt, author of On Bullshit (PDF):

Bullshitters aim primarily to impress and persuade their audiences, and in general are unconcerned with the truth or falsehood of their statements.

Indeed, that’s what Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” means: “the quality by which one purports to know something emotionally or instinctively, without regard to evidence or intellectual examination,” he said in his show’s first episode. What we want to be true, not necessarily is true. Truthiness is a more effective political tool than truth.

That theme ran throughout Tuesday’s conference. It’s why fact-checking websites have not extinguished misinformation and have become themselves political weapons. Even Kathleen Hall Jamieson, founder of FactCheck.org, has argued fact-checking may perpetuate lies by restating them.

Truth is irrelevant. “We’re trying to ensure fidelity to the knowable.”

On Tuesday morning, Jamieson helped frame the conversation: “What is truth? That is an irrelevant question!” she said. “We’re trying to ensure fidelity to the knowable. That is different from the larger world of normative inferences about what is true and what is false. What is desirable and what is good is not the purview of FactCheck.org.”

Chris Mooney, author of “The Republican Brain,” said he used to be wedded to the Enlightenment view, that if you put forth good information and argue rationally, people will come to accept what is true. The problem, he said, is that people are wired to believe facts that support their worldview. It’s called cognitive bias.

Mooney described a phenomenon he calls the “smart idiots effect” — “the fact that politically sophisticated or knowledgeable people are often more biased, and less persuadable, than the ignorant.” He cited 2008 Pew data that showed Republicans with college degrees were more likely to deny human involvement in climate change than Republicans without — but the effect was opposite for Democrats.

Mooney turns to Master Yoda for wisdom: “You must unlearn what you have learned.”

Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth professor and media critic conducted his own research: He gave a group of students bad information (President Bush banned stem-cell research) — and then provided a correction (no, he didn’t). Liberal students’ minds were unchanged, while conservatives were more likely to accept the correction as true. He calls this disconfirmation bias. Being told you’re wrong threatens our worldview and makes us defensive.

“People are much more likely to retweet what they want to be true.”

“In our effort to combat misinformation, if we’re not careful, we can actually make the problem worse,” he said.

Gilad Lotan, the chief scientist at SocialFlow, has access to a wealth of data from Twitter’s “firehose.” He demonstrated that false information often, but not always, spreads wider and faster than the eventual correction.

Take the case of @NBCNewYork erroneously tweeting that NYPD had ordered news choppers out of the air during Occupy Wall Street, less than a week after protesters were evicted from Zucotti Park. It was just the ammunition the OWS supporters needed, evidence of the NYPD’s evil, anti-speech tactics.

The NYPD replied on Twitter that it has no such authority, but it was too late. The data tells all:

Graph showing spread of erroneous tweet versus corrective tweet

“People are much more likely to retweet what they want to be true,” Lotan wrote.

So that gets us back to the game. We wanted to create a game that challenges our cognitive biases and stimulates skepticism. (And hopefully a game that would be fun.)

We didn’t get very far on the execution. Perhaps a player would select a category and the computer would present two pieces of trivia, asking for the user to write in a third. Those items would be passed on to the next player, who would have to pick which claim to believe. Maybe it would be timed. We would build an experience that rewards players both for advancing claims (true, false, or otherwise) and for calling out bullshit. A leaderboard would show which claims traveled the longest and farthest and which friends were the most critical thinkers.

The hack day was more like a think day, one that I hope moves us to actually build something. I would like to try, when I get free time, but I would be delighted to see someone else beat me to it.

The newsonomics of paywalls all over the world

Posted: 08 Mar 2012 08:00 AM PST

By the end of this year, figure that about 20 percent of the U.S.’s 1,400-plus dailies will be charging for digital access. Gannett’s February announcement that it’s going paywall at all its 80 newspapers galvanized attention; when the third largest U.S. newspaper site, the Los Angeles Times, went paid this week, more nodding was seen in publishers’ suites.

More than a dozen dailies in Europe are charging, led by Finland’s Sanoma (see “Sanoma’s Big Bundled Success”), Axel Springer, and News Corp.’s Times of London. It looks like more than a dozen in Germany alone may be charging by year’s end. In Asia, the powerful Singapore Press Holdings is first out of the gate, with other dailies there planning to follow.

Suddenly it’s paywalls all around the world. We’ve moved — in a couple of years — from the question of whether to when. The big question that should be asked now: How?

Charging for digital access is a nuanced question. For smart publishers, it’s part of a much larger strategic shift, touching every part of their operations: circulation, content, and advertising.

Let’s look at the newsonomics of an increasing paywalled world. The well-publicized New York Times digital scheme has gotten most of the attention, but it’s a global news source — more akin to The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, The Guardian, and CNN than to regional and local dailies.

While the Times is a fledgling pay model success, we can’t say, broadly, that paywall models are widely successful. Most aren’t failures, but few can point to the significant revenue difference that The New York Times, WSJ, or Financial Times plans have made to their transitioning businesses. Why? And what are the emerging successful formulas?

First, it should be said that the sky has neither opened up into a dazzling blue future nor fallen. A couple of years ago, predictions about the impact of paywalls mostly fell on the doomsday side of the equation. About the same time that going pay was proclaimed as another sign of the imminent death of Old Media, some were poking fun at the new iPad as a big smartphone that no one would want to hold up to her ear. Time to chill on the whole doomsday storytelling — we’re all in for lots more twists and turns.

So if charging for digital access — a too long phrase, but one that’s most accurate than paywall — is neither a panacea nor a tombstone on the way to the inevitable, what is it? It’s a building block, and it’s a way to re-envision the business.

It’s about a major shift in strategy, says Star Tribune publisher Mike Klingensmith, whose paper went pay on Nov. 1.

“We’re changing the nature of the customer relationship,” he told me. “Instead of the website undermining pricing of your content, it supports the pricing of your content” — seizing on the profound difference the all-access revolution is beginning to make. Relationships don’t change overnight, and that’s one important lesson to draw here: If newspaper companies can do more than offer lip service about relationship and “membership,” they have the ability to recreate an updated version of the trusted, community-oriented relationship that the better dailies long held. If they can reinvent the relationship, they have a shot at transforming themselves (“The newsonomics of crossover”) as they move into the mostly digital era.

Let’s look at some of the metrics learned from the early pay period, in talking with a number of the business executives who have been at the forefront of this grand experiment.

The big bogeyman of digital ad loss

The first big question that’s been laid to rest is the journalistic corollary of the Hippocratic Oath: Do no (advertising) harm. Remember the big fear about “going pay”: Would a paywall decrease digital visitors so much as to harm the only part of newspaper publishers’ businesses that’s growing, digital advertising? Metered models, like The New York Times’ (“At Almost 400,000 Digital Subscribers, Inside the New York Times Pay Strategy, Year 2″) and the Los Angeles Times’, are now the trade’s standard, having been advocated strongly by Press+ when it got rolling in 2009. Allowing 10-20 free articles a month has meant that traffic loss has been minimal; given the near-infinite amount of digital ad inventory, such traffic loss has had practically no effect on digital ad sales.

“All of the almost 300 publishers now using Press+ have kept their online ad revenues because we use data to make sure there is plenty of ad inventory to meet advertiser demand,” says co-founder Gordon Crovitz of Press+, which was acquired by RR Donnelley last year.

Even if some papers experience a small negative impact, new digital revenue quickly outpaces it. “In our first month of paid service, online subscription revenue was 3x the network advertising we lost because of the drop in pageviews, and our online subscription revenue has grown every month since,” says Andy Waters, general manager of the Columbia Daily Tribune in Missouri, which went pay on Dec. 1, 2010.

Pageview loss has ranged as high as 40 percent (at the Columbia Daily Tribune) and has typically run about 10-15 percent. Interestingly, from Minneapolis to Columbia to Hamburg, traffic often begins to grow markedly after the initial shock of a paywall. It may take months or a couple of years, but traffic is essentially reset and can then be rebuilt. Clearly, the most important readers — core readers who really use the news product through the week — have stayed the course.

The flipside of a tougher paywall is a higher signup rate, and more revenue, from those valuing the content.

Remove one major fear.

Selling more papers

One reason some papers went pay: Try to reduce the number of subscribers fleeing print. So far, there’s been a minimal impact on retaining subscribers, or “reducing churn,” as it is called in the business. The Memphis Commercial Appeal’s publisher Joe Pepe points to a 1 percent increase in Sunday home delivery, similar to what The New York Times has found. In Minneapolis, the Star Tribune has gotten 20 percent of its 15,000 “digital-only” subscribers to pony up an additional 29 cents (!) a week to get the Sunday Strib.

The Sunday sale is a major part of the how we see rolling out. At the Strib, it’s an inside-out, outside-in offer. If you only take the Sunday paper (subscribers who get two or more days of the paper delivered get free digital access), you’ll get a low, introductory rate to add digital access; if you’re a digital signup, you’ll be pitched on the 29-cent deal.

The L.A. Times is putting its own spin on the Sunday deal: pay 99 cents a week for the first four weeks (and $1.99 thereafter) to get free digital access and the Sunday paper. Want just free digital access only — that’ll cost $3.99 a week. You don’t have to be a coupon professional to figure out the better deal. The LAT approach mimics the NYT approach, which charges readers about $60 a year more if they refuse to take the Sunday paper. Maybe we should call it the Godfather offer.

How much will Sunday (“The newsonomics of Sunday paper/tablet subscriptions”) grow, given such pricing — which I expect more metros will adopt, given that they still have relatively weighty, ad-revenue-rich Sunday papers? The first job is to stop the Sunday bleeding, and if combined digital/Sunday products do it, consider it a tourniquet that publishers hope to get a couple of years out of, even as daily print circulation continues to decline. The Sunday angle — the Sunday paper angle — is a big one.

New money

While The New York Times is on a double-digit circulation (print + digital) revenue trajectory, other papers are having a hard time reaching that number. Columbia points to a 5-6 percent lift, enough to cover several newsroom positions for the small daily. Minneapolis points to a 3.75 percent lift, based on its new $1.5 million revenue stream, earned at $100 a year (or $2/week) from 15,000 digital subscribers. Others say the circulation revenue is flat to a little up.

One little secret of the trade: the opt-out. Build in higher pricing for combined print and digital access, and allow readers to take print only — if they affirmatively opt out. Eighty percent or so won’t opt out, and so we’ve seen high retention rates among newer subscribers.

The wild card here is how much the all-access offer — part of the changing customer relationship the Star Tribune’s Mike Klingensmith suggests — allows papers to price up their overall print/all-access subscriptions. He says the paper priced up its overall subscriptions 9 percent last spring, with little negative impact, the first time it had priced up in recent memory. Another increase is in order for this fall.

That’s the big key here, I think: If you tell customers “we’ll get you our content however, wherever you want it” — and deliver on that proposition with products that match the tablet and smartphone age — the creation of added value makes sense to readers. So it’s important to look beyond digital-only revenue itself, and look at the total reader-revenue-producing potential of smart pay plans.

As Gannett points to a goal of adding $100 million in new revenue, which would be a 10 percent circulation rev boost overall, look for as much of that to come from upward pricing in general as new digital-only subs themselves.

That said, it’s useful to pay attention to a new emerging metric: what percentage of a newspaper’s site unique visitors are signing up for digital access-only subs. The New York Times broke the 1 percent barrier last year, 390,000 subs compared to 33 million U.S. unique visitors. The Commercial Appeal is at .8 percent; The Star Tribune is at .25 percent with its four-month initiative. The Columbia Tribune is at .2 percent. It’s just one metric, but one that tells us about comparative traction. Though, it seems like a tiny number, it’s not. Fly-by traffic, supplied by Google and now Facebook, supplies so much traffic that about 3 percent of most newspaper sites’ unique visitors equal their paid print circulations. The digital-only conversion metric provides an apples-to-apples comparison, even as overall print/digital circulation impact remains key — and is measured in that old standby, dollars, euros, and pounds.

The goal here: Head to 50 percent of overall revenues being paid by readers.

These numbers are only a snapshot and come from some of the better practitioners of the digital pay craft. Many more are underachieving. The point is that there is an emerging playbook of how to get pay working right.

For now, let’s boil it down the how to 5 P’s:

  • People: As in customers. Few newspapers — probably a dozen or fewer in the U.S. — know their combined print and digital audiences as a single audience. It takes a lot of technology moving to get a single, whole view of a customer, matching the subscriber database with the digital registration database to get a holistic view. Without that view, it’s tough to operate a modern, somewhat digital/somewhat print business — and maximize the value of new pay propositions. The New York Times, the Star Tribune, and the Commercial Appeal are among those who do, and papers as small as The Day are getting there.
  • Product: This is a simple question of content. How much strong local coverage are readers missing after a half decade of staff cuts? The better a news organization covers its community, the more it can dare to charge and still get customer traction. Some papers may simply have already cut too much.
  • Presentation: Consumers — us — understand the all-access pitch. News (and magazine) publishers have to make it real. That means real ready-for-the-tablet (and smartphone) products, app-based and HTML5. Replica-plus products will satisfy paying readers less and less over time — and won’t compete with Flipboard-esque experiences.
  • Pricing: Enough said. Newspaper (and magazine) pricing has been fairly dumb over the years, a follow-the-leader, seat-of-the-pants exercise. Playing with the value equation, print and digital, requires both testing and matching of new value to new price.
  • Promotion: More than just marketing, the new promotion makes better psychological sense of the all-access proposition to older and newer (and younger) customers.

So 5 P’s — or maybe more.

“You have to do eight things right,” says Gregor Waller, a former exec at Axel Springer and now CEO of Digital Age Consulting, who is in the midst of advising a number of major media globally on pay models. “It’s like a golf swing. If you miss out on one, you can’t hit the ball correctly.”

PRX hires Silicon Valley journopreneur Corey Ford to run the Public Media Accelerator

Posted: 08 Mar 2012 06:45 AM PST

Corey Ford

Corey Ford, a former Frontline documentarian who left public media to reinvent it in Silicon Valley, has been named director of the Public Media Accelerator, a $2.5 million incubator launched by PRX and funded by the Knight Foundation.

Ford, 34, produced 17 films in six years at Frontline, sharing in duPont and Emmy awards, before quitting to earn his MBA at Stanford and eventually become a venture capitalist.

Public Media Accelerator logo

“I had a tremendous career in public television, but for me, I thought…Media is changing so dramatically. Business models are changing so dramatically. This is not a growth industry. We’re not changing at all,” Ford told me.

“That’s when I started thinking, I want to get out to Silicon Valley, and I want to learn more about how entrepreneurship and innovation work.”

That kind of thinking is very much in line with the PRX ethos: We love public media, but we wish it could be so much more.

“It’s almost like he was dreamt up in our laboratory,” said Jake Shapiro, the executive director. “He shares a lot of DNA with PRX.”

The idea for Public Media Accelerator is built on Y Combinator and TechStars. Entrepreneurs and engineers compete for seed money and the chance to work heads-down on a new project for 12-week stints. The resulting work is presented to high-rolling investors for the opportunity to build a business. Applications open this summer.

“You may or may not save the current institutions, but you can have the mission of journalism at the core of what you do.”

While at Stanford, Ford discovered the Institute of Design, the d.School, and became a disciple of design thinking, the multidisciplinary, blank-slate approach to problem-solving.

After finishing the program he became a teacher, leading an experiment to “redesign journalism” in 2009 that helped inform Stanford’s revamped, project-focused Knight fellowships. Ford’s students included Burt Herman, co-founder of Storify and founder of Hacks/Hackers, and Andrew Haeg, co-founder of APM’s Public Insight Network.

Ford was then recruited to join a new venture-capital firm for Google’s Eric Schmidt, Innovation Endeavors, where he created a paid nine-month entrepreneurship program not unlike the Public Media Accelerator’s. After a year building that program from scratch, Ford is taking on the new role at PRX beginning April 1, bringing his career full circle.

Ford stresses the parameters are still being worked out. “Like any good design thinker,” he said, “I need to start with empathy and need-finding and low-res prototyping before jumping to ‘This is the solution.’”

Ford will stay put in Palo Alto, which is not what PRX originally had in mind. Shapiro had hoped to give the accelerator a strong Boston/Cambridge identity. “My fantasy is everyone’s working elbow to elbow,” Shapiro told me, but in reality PRX’s own staff is spread across the country. Ford said he will have to figure out whether the accelerator is “a place or a distributed thing,” how much value physical space has in the digital world.

Public media has a problem attracting hungry 20-something tech stars.

This is all very new for public media, for journalism in general. The industry has a little bit of an image problem when it comes to attracting tech talent. Just this week, Sarah Cohen at Duke’s new Reporters’ Lab said it best: “Bright engineers tend not to be interested in solving today’s problems but future problems.”

For a lot of hungry 20-something tech stars, journalism might seem like today’s problem.

“Entrepreneurs come from all different walks of life — technologists, designers, business people, media people, storytellers who are passionate about this mission,” Ford said. “Yes, the biggest talent war is going in Silicon Valley right now, as we speak, but I’ve learned from personal experience that if you set up something that really celebrates the entrepreneur, and gives them a chance to pursue their passion and treats them…like entrepreneurs, you can attract amazing talent.”

Ford continued: “It’s not about looking toward the past. It’s more about reimagining the future…You may or may not save the current institutions, but you can have the mission of public media and journalism at the core of what you do.”

Disclosure: The Knight Foundation is also a financial supporter of the Nieman Journalism Lab. The photo of Corey Ford is provided as a courtesy of the Stanford Institute of Design.
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