Nieman Journalism Lab |
- New high score: How the NYT created its “stupid game”
- Still no cameras allowed, but Supreme Court coverage has changed more than you think
- The newsonomics of the Next Issue magazine future
| New high score: How the NYT created its “stupid game” Posted: 04 Apr 2012 12:30 PM PDT
When Jon Huang was younger he was the type of kid who spent his time making mods for Duke Nukem 3D. So it makes a kind of sense he’s now turned The New York Times into its own kind of shoot ‘em up. Huang was the multimedia producer behind the game embedded in the Times Magazine cover story on the addictive allure of “stupid games.” A reader stumbling on the story for the first time would see the video game feature at the top of the piece, be compelled to press the enter key, only to find they now have the ability to blast away various bits and elements of the story page itself. And it gets better: Your nondescript little ship can break outside the multimedia box and destroy all of the page, from the most-emailed stories (BOOM goes the DOWD!) to the navigational links and ads, right down to the “Inside NYTimes.com” promo. And, to the secret delight of editors everywhere, you can finally blast away commenters with impunity. That surprise factor, mixed with the fact that it’s the Times having a little fun, has the Internet (or at least Planet Journalism in the Twitter universe) going bananas. “I give all the credit to the guys behind Kick Ass. They’re a really excited pair of 18-year-old twins in Sweden,” Huang told me Wednesday. “I love that’s how the Internet works these days.” Kick Ass is the open source game that made the Times’ interactive possible. It’s essentially a bookmarklet that allows you to wreak havoc on any given site you find yourself on. It was a perfect fit for the the theme of Sam Anderson’s Sunday magazine story, which examines the rise of games like Angry Birds, Plants vs. Zombies, and others that inhibit a world very different from what we might traditionally think of as regular video games. Huang said they knew they wanted to create a game to go along with the story, specifically something that would surprise people by letting manipulate the story itself. The game is a part of the editorial message of the story. Want to know what it’s like to play a distracting, oddly addictive, and utterly unnecessary game? Try this one, Times reader. Huang said they knew they would have an audience that might not be familiar with the world of Bejeweled, Little Wings, or Words with Friends, so in order to entice them into the story, they’d offer up a game. “This is one of those rare circumstances where we can say we’re going to do something to let readers play the article and explain the journalism in a way,” Huang said. In the discussions over the game they wanted to also draw inspiration from classic video games like Space Invaders, Tetris, and Breakout. Huang was a fan of the game from the Swedish sensations and began working to adapt its code for the Times. One of the biggest considerations was that they had to give readers instructions on how to play, and didn’t want to destroy the sharing tools and the text of the story itself. Beyond that, it was open ended. “Originally we thought there would be a very strong push back and people would say this is not The New York Times,” he said. “But there’s been a lot of enthusiasm” — even from advertising, he told me. You would think of all the pixels involved on a web page, the advertising would be the last thing you would want to get rid of, especially in the journalism business. But Huang said the ad staff was on board, telling the multimedia team that if they couldn’t find cooperative clients they’d run house ads. It would be hard to categorize Huang’s work at the multimedia desk: He’s now worked on interactives for everything from photo galleries of the war in Iraq to Kate Middleton’s dress to the Radiolab audio visualizer. Huang said multimedia features have become an integral part of the storytelling process at the Times, and as a result they’re often working with different departments, from the foreign desk to the dev team, at any given time. What makes all of that work, without stepping on toes or overreaching, Huang said, is the openness to experimentation. In the case of Anderson’s magazine story, the game will likely be another element to help garner interest in the piece ahead of the Sunday paper. Of course, whether people are actually reading it or just trying to get a new high score while evaporating Google ads is another question. Huang said he expects most people will take the time to read the story, once they finally stop playing the game. “We didn’t really think about that. Some people probably are just going to play,” he said. “But they may not be in the mood to read anyway.” |
| Still no cameras allowed, but Supreme Court coverage has changed more than you think Posted: 04 Apr 2012 10:30 AM PDT
It’s tempting to look at the Supreme Court of the United States as frozen in time. Cameras are still banned from recording proceedings, audio can’t be live streamed, and don’t even think about live tweeting from inside the courtroom (or across the hall). No question: The court is overdue to enable public access through the tools that have long since become standard in reporting the business of the government to the people. (C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb recently told me that he sees the Supreme Court as the “best example” of an area where improved public access is lagging and sorely needed.) So in some ways, covering the Supreme Court today is not much different than it has ever been — even though justices did approve same-day publishing of audio from last week’s healthcare arguments due to “extraordinary public interest.” New Yorker writer and CNN legal correspondent Jeffrey Toobin has covered SCOTUS for decades, and calls the court “unique among American institutions” for how little, from a technological standpoint, it has changed.
“I don’t think it’s changed very much, I really don’t,” Toobin told me. “Because the language is so peculiar and because it’s not live, the audio doesn’t get a lot of play in the mainstream media, but the audio is the only technological change that I can recall other than the fact that people report things faster because you can just put stuff out on the web — but that’s not the court changing, that’s everything else changing.” Those who cover the court have found plenty of ways to use “everything else” in innovative ways. In addition to a Supreme Court public affairs website that does “an excellent job within the limitations imposed on it,” Toobin points to SCOTUS Blog as a leader. A specialized site finds a big audienceThe site launched 10 years ago, and has covered the healthcare challenge since it was at the appellate level. It got nearly 1 million hits during last week’s oral arguments, according to site manager Kali Borkoski, but SCOTUS Blog started its comprehensive coverage of the challenge long before oral arguments began. Following a potential case from the moment a petition is filed is part of SCOTUS Blog’s editorial strategy. Publisher Tom Goldstein selects petitions that he thinks have a good chance of being granted, and from there starts publishing stories and key documents — amicus briefs, analyses, transcripts from oral arguments, and so on. (Goldstein personally financed SCOTUS Blog until it scored sponsorship from Bloomberg Law last year, Borkoski says.) “We try to have a complete database [for the cases and petitions that SCOTUS Blog tracks], which the court doesn’t have,” Borkoski said. “We follow [cases] basically from cradle to grave. Somebody files a petition and we start watching it. It gets granted, we follow it through to when it’s decided.” Last summer, SCOTUS Blog hosted a symposium to discuss constitutionality questions that the healthcare challenge raised. The blog provides in-depth coverage for readers in the legal community, as well as explainer pieces — under the subhead “Plain English” — for general readers. Data geeks will delight in the blog’s statistics section. In November, SCOTUS Blog ran its first story in a 10-part series analyzing the key issues in the case. The author, Lyle Denniston, produced SCOTUS Blog’s most heavily trafficked articles during last week’s oral arguments. He has been covering the Supreme Court for a staggering 54 years and has watched a lot change in all those years. “Probably the most important — vitally important — change to legal journalism is that we are providing the original documents,” Denniston said. “The law can be really very complicated, and yet we do not assume that our readers are incapable of processing mentally the contents of hard, substantive documents. We don’t write about anything unless we give you the original materials.” Denniston also argues that SCOTUS Blog’s “really expansive coverage and niche journalism” sets it apart in a media landscape that has become increasingly political and “lighthearted.” Here’s how he puts it: “We just don’t pay attention to the theater. We’re not exactly a lonely voice, but we’re a lot lonelier than we used to be.” The only way allowing cameras in the court would trump the significance of being able to post primary documents online, Denniston says, would be if the audio were live streamed in its entirety or otherwise recorded so that members of the public could watch it in full. Reducing a Supreme Court argument to soundbites, he says, would amount to obfuscation. But all the primary documents in the world don’t eliminate the need for experts like Denniston and Toobin to distill what’s happening for the general public. Not everyone has the time — let alone the autodidactic impulse — to dive into source documents and attempt to make sense of them. (A spokeswoman in the Supreme Court’s press office said information detailing how many people downloaded or streamed the audio it posted is “not available at this time.”) If there’s any beat that naturally resists the increasing urgency for immediacy and brevity in contemporary journalism, it’s arguably the Supreme Court beat. It’s a complicated and jargon-rich environment; the court works at its own, measured pace; and making the nuances of a Supreme Court case accessible to a general audience is a challenge even for seasoned reporters. “It’s very hard to cut the tape,” NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg told me. “Most people, they really don’t understand the role that justices are playing. You would have to listen to a lot of arguments to understand that it’s not often the case, but it’s frequently the case that justices ask very hard quesitons that don’t represent their own point of view. They’re testing their point of view. The argument is not a political debate.” Nature of the beastOf course, that doesn’t mean that Supreme Court coverage operates in a political vacuum, especially given the enormous election-year implications of the pending decision on Florida v. United States Department of Health and Human Services (can you believe we have to wait until June?). Where there is a huge, politically messy case to be covered, reporters who don’t normally cover the court come with it. “Even the trade press comes in,” Totenberg says. “Okay, so they don’t do a great job. They do an okay job. That’s sort of the nature of the beast. I did eight minutes each night, and eight minutes in the morning. We had an hour-long special on it [for each day of oral arguments]. Anyone who really wanted to hear more extended cuts…we would play a lot of tape. I think you would get a really complete idea as to what happened, but it takes time and devotion to do that. The networks? I think they gave it two minutes.” The coverage that reverberated most last week can be summed up in just two words: Train wreck. Just after noon on the second day of oral arguments, Toobin offered this analysis for CNN: “This was a train wreck for the Obama administration. This law looks like it’s going to be struck down. I’m telling you, all of the predictions — including mine — that the justices would not have a problem with this law were wrong.”
The comments caused a predictable firestorm in Washington, but what do they tell us about how Supreme Court coverage has changed over the years? A lot, Denniston says. “It’s the instantaneous spread of conventional wisdom as it develops about anything,” Denniston said. “Look, for example, at the propagation of the idea that Solicitor General Donald Verrilli did a really bad job of arguing for the government. That went viral instantly, and is now accepted wisdom across the country that Verrilli really blew it. On closer examination, that’s not true. Some parts of the argument substantively could have been sharper, some parts of his argument tended not to be responsive to the court, but he had a really challenging task of doing this over three days of time. A serious observer of the requirements of oral advocacy would say that the easy judgements — the easy conclusions — are not really supportable.” Others have argued similarly, including Totenberg, who says the “tea leaves are a little ominous” for the Obama administration but that the train wreck comment was too much. “It was a way overstatement to say it was a train wreck,” she said. “As a reporter, there’s always this line between being cautious and being electric. And I said to somebody, ‘Every scoop I’ve lost in my life, it’s because I was too cautious.’ But that’s balanced by the fact that there are an equal number of times when people went on a limb, and I was right, and I was saved — saved from looking like a complete fool.” Toobin acknowledges that he “could be wrong,” but says he went on his instincts and that he stands by the Tuesday analysis. “If it looks like five justices are ready to throw out the central accomplishment of the incumbent president, as it did to me, I think it’s my job as a journalist to tell people that — with the caveat that it’s a prediction and I could be wrong,” Toobin said. “And I’m not going to kid you: Predictive journalism is not my favorite form of journalism, and I try to do it with strained and informed eye, but I’m not going to shy away from reporting what I’m seeing, and what I’m seeing is a train wreck.” One thing the three can agree on: television is not the ideal medium for Supreme Court coverage, which does its business with spoken and written words. (It should be noted that if cameras were allowed, they might capture gestures or facial expressions that can’t be fully articulated by even the most astute observer.) “There is nothing inherently pictorial about the Supreme Court, and I suspect there never will be,” Toobin said. “What ultimately matters about the Supreme Court are its decisions, and the decisions are words, and words can be distributed and analyzed.” The ability to distribute coverage globally would have been unthinkable when Denniston got his start. He remembers the days when proceedings were covered mostly “by congressional reporters who came across the street on decision days and caught up with it as well as they could.” “Now I can post any time of the day or night,” Denniston said. “I can assure you, when I do, I still hear from people. I guess they’re all insomniacs. I hear from people literally from around the globe. In my newspaper business, in all of those years, I never heard from anybody in Indonesia. It’s a process of ongoing and immediate interaction with your readers. It’s a really, really, very strange phenomenon. I’m having the time of my life.” Photo of the Supreme Court by Kjetil Ree used under a Creative Commons license. |
| The newsonomics of the Next Issue magazine future Posted: 04 Apr 2012 05:23 AM PDT
So what is it? iTunes for magazines? Maybe Hulu for periodicals? How about Piano Media for American titles? Tivo for print? In the hurly-burly of digital content innovation and monetization, it’s hard to figure out what things are, so we try to find apt comparisons. With the new Next Issue digital newsstand, let’s think Netflix or Pandora or Spotify as the closest cousins. Next Issue, the offspring of five prosperous parents (Time Inc., Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, and News Corp.), launched last night what I think will be a model-changing product for publishers. In short, the Next Issue kiosk idea is transformative — though we’ll have to see how quickly customers take to its unknown brand. It offers single-priced, all-you-can-eat access to top-shelf magazines, including Time Inc’s People, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and Time; Conde Nast’s Vanity Fair, Allure, and Conde Nast Traveler; Hearst’s Esquire and Popular Mechanics; and Meredith’s Better Homes and Gardens and Fitness. Thirty-two magazines in total, at launch. Magazine publishers long eschewed the web as largely detrimental to their business, and they participated on it unevenly and haphazardly. Without the loss of classifieds threat experienced by their newspaper cousins, they could better afford to hold back, though many titles have seen a steady decline in both circulation and advertising revenues. So when the tablet came along, they sniffed it with great interest. In terms of size, it looked like…a magazine. Sports Illustrated demoed it first and that WonderFactory-wow-of-a-prototype has generated 1.135 million YouTube views in three years. Since then, magazine publishers have moved faster than newspaper publishers to embrace the tablet. Some have told me they expect the tablet to grab a third or more of their print subscriber bases within two to three years. Many have put all-access pay-me-once subscription models into place, making it easy to pay for print and get tablet, too. They’ve grumbled and growled about Apple’s onerous customer data and revenue sharing, but have moved ahead, in varying degrees with Apple’s Newsstand and other sales outlets. Additionally — and here’s the big difference with the newspaper industry — they pooled their efforts in Next Issue. That company is owned by the five behemoths, and it had difficult birth pangs. At times, it has seemed that Next Issue would become a side attraction (as so many publishing industry consortia become), just dabbling in the Android slice of the tablet market (though the slice is thickening). Behind the scenes, though, it looks like Next Issue has become a major play of magazine publishers. Though the kiosk at launch only works with Android devices, expect iPads (and then iPhones) to be on board by late summer; Next Issue is about to offer up its product for Apple approval. Non-Android users can get a sense of the product at Next Issue’s website, though the tablet, of course, is the best way to experience it, as Next Issue CEO Morgan Guenther affirmed yesterday in an interview: “It’s all about touching product.” Guenther, a former TIVO exec, is a West Coast guy, and interestingly Next Issue seems like a bi-coastal play. Last June, Next Issue released some beta products, all in run-up to this kiosk. “In Silicon Valley, we call it beta. In New York [where most of his owners reside within a few dozen blocks of each other], they call it ‘preview release.’ Business operations are in New York, but it’s the 40-plus product people and engineers in Palo Alto that have worked to create this Next Issue experience. “It’s all about the USP,” says Guenther. And you can’t have a unique selling proposition, if you don’t have a compelling, ahead-of-the-crowd customer experience. While I’m Android-less, there are a number of reasons to believe that Next Issue may have gotten the new product right, or at least, righter than many of the products or consumer propositions out there. Let me outline seven things to watch as you take a look at Next Issue: One way to read: Sign up once — and the new site is offering relatively generous 30-day trials — and you have but one navigation to learn. While the full content from each of the magazines is present, with added video, Next Issue says customers need only learn one way of getting around. If it’s an intuitive design, that’s a huge plus, as news- and feature-hungry readers find ourselves forced to learn the navigation nuances of each of our favorite apps. One price: Well, almost. Next Issue’s pricing seems simple enough:
The 32 launch titles are premium, not the low end of these publishers’ collections. Next up: adding more owners’ titles, and then non-owners’ magazines. Newspapers? Well, maybe some, says Guenther. If so, think large regionals like the L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, or Houston Chronicle, and not a proliferation of small, local paper apps. Not (yet) represented: Next Issue Media owner News Corp.’s The Daily, which as a magazine-like newspaper might fit in well here. Revenue splits built on “engagement”: So Next Issue, for its work and investment will take a “industry standard” commission, which we can figure is in the 25-40 percent range. While Guenther won’t disclose the formula for divvying up the subscription revenues among publishers, he does say it will be built on “interaction by the consumer.” That sounds similar to what Piano has pioneered in sharing revenues by tracking actual reader usage of content. Consortia often fall apart on revenue sharing issues, so just getting an initial deal done is noteworthy. New accommodations with Apple: Just as Netflix is newly playing with Apple and ponying up its commission cut, Next Issue looks like it will play along as well. The big reason: Next Issue owners have found, says Guenther, that most of their digital subscribers are new, non-print ones. With cannibalization of the print base less of an issue, paying a rev share to Apple becomes a less emotional cost of doing business. Get ahead of Flipboard: It’s not a Flipboard-killer, but it’s intended to aggregate before tablet aggregators get the better of the aggregatees, as they’ve done on the web. Flipboard remains a superior browsing experience — cool, comfortable and serendipity-pleasing — and importantly offering a blend of changing content all within one interface. While Next Issue offers a single navigation, it’s not a blended product in the same sense that Flipboard is. Down the road (how far will be the question), says Guenther, are the additions of search and personalization — and maybe, should the publishers allow it — cross-title topical bundles of health, fashion, or travel products. (Remember Mine magazine?) Should Next Issue continue innovating, combining the best of high-branded bliss with Flipboard fun, it could triumph. Flipboard, for its part, could still find a place in this adjusted ecosystem funneling some new (and younger) readers into Next Issue’s payment system, for a cut of the action. It’s all a set-up for the print-to-tablet transition: So will a third of print magazine readers prefer the tablet sooner than later, as surveys seem to tell us? Readers love tablet magazine reading. If they transition quickly, and are paying subscribers, then the big business question is advertising. Tablet ads continues to fetch rates (mainly for national publishers) five times or more greater than web ads. That differential may moderate, but the tablet’s immersive, customer-educating, consumer-grabbing capabilities offer major upside to advertisers and sponsors. It will take a couple to several years to reach some maturity, but the tablet ad ecosystem is developing quickly. Consider that earlier this week, we learned that both Hearst and Conde Nast will start releasing key-to-advertiser metrics on tablet usage, and that the Association of Magazine Media announced its own guidelines. The association goals: “to drive growth of advertising on tablets,” by providing data on:
In another words, just as Next Issue launches, the ad foundation is being thickly laid. A model and a warning for the newspaper industry: In one sense, newspaper titles are very different than magazines. Other than the U.S.’s three national titles, newspapers are by nature local, appealing only to tiny slices of the national population. Yet in creating a single place to buy subscriptions, or single copies — and then potentially packages of content (“The newsonomics of 100 products a year”) — Next Issue is well ahead of the U.S. newspaper industry. Piano Media, in Slovakia and Slovenia and soon farther west, is testing the newspaper portal notion, with fledgling, if small-scale, success. AP’s new mobile apps create a better national/local aggregation that its first-generation did, but they don’t lead to digital subs. Press+, with now more than 300 customers, has the capability to create a newspaper kiosk, but has seen little enthusiasm among its customers to do so. One big question for Next Issue is who will notice it? It’s been a business-to-business brand largely. Consumers know how to buy magazines from magazine sites or from Apple or Amazon, but they don’t know much about Next Issue. That stealth position may be one of the reasons its publisher owners have gone forward with it. They can hold onto, they think, their current print subscribers, transition them over to all-access over time, and use Next Issue — as it tests out new markets — to find new readers and customers. So what is Next Issue? It is a Netflix wannabe, in the CEO’s vision. Visit, see a bunch of choices, queue ‘em up, and pay a single price for unlimited usage. It’s not iTunes with individual price points. It’s more like the Pandora or Spotify pay-us-once-and-forget-about-it model. And like all digital-native companies, it will focus as much on harvesting data on its customers and their usage, knowing that intel may be a large part of the company value going forward. That makes consumer sense. It could make a lot of consumer sense. Let’s recall the innovative New York Times paywall model. The Times priced digital + Sunday print $60 below digital only. That meant a significant number of new Sunday subscribers (home delivery Sunday subs went up for the first time in five years), but it also meant some number of seven-day print subscribers giving up the print habit for Sunday print + digital. In the Next Issue case, well-magazine-read consumers may do the math and find the $180 a year premium bundle (all-you-can-read, including archives, of all the magazines in the kiosk), such a good deal that they’ll drop individual magazine subs. My first math shows that if you subscribe to seven or more titles, that price point may be economical, though if you get the Next Issue pass, you’ll be passing up the print editions of the magazines, which publishers are almost throwing in these days, à la NYT. So we can see the planning in the pricing: preserve print if you can, bring in new digital-only customers, and then upsell those into print for as little as five bucks a year more. Aggregation. Customer ease. Pricing that psychs out consumers. We see the makings of our new print/digital/print world. |
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