Rabu, 02 Mei 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

A Twin Cities turnaround? The Star Tribune carves a path back through growing audience

Posted: 01 May 2012 11:32 AM PDT

In 2009, the Star Tribune found itself on a dubious list: Time’s 10 Most Endangered Newspapers in America. That was the year Minnesota’s largest daily entered into bankruptcy after rounds of cost-cutting couldn’t help the company ease its debt load. It wasn’t particularly unusual to see a newspaper company enter into Chapter 11 in those dark days. But as someone who grew up reading the Star Tribune — I still have the front page from when the Twins won the World Series in ’87 — the thought of my home paper going under was frightening.

The Star Tribune today, four years later, seems to have lifted itself off the endangered list — although, to extend the species metaphor, it still has work to do before its survival becomes a matter of Least Concern. It’s out of bankruptcy; its debt has been reduced from around $500 million to $100 million. And, maybe most importantly, it’s growing its readership in print and through digital and keeping an eye towards growing consumer revenue.

Publisher Michael Klingensmith tells me the paper’s first-quarter revenue was up over the same period last year — a claim not many papers its size have been able to make since the mid-2000s. According to freshly released Audit Bureau of Circulation numbers, Sunday circulation is up about 4 percent in the most recent reporting period, while daily is up around 1 percent. They also saw a jump in single copy sales for Sunday in the second half of 2011, up to 120,000 from 115,000. Since launching digital subscriptions in fall 2011, the Star Tribune now has 18,000 digital subscribers. (The Star Tribune has a meter model that allows 20 free stories a month.) Overall subscription revenue is up 7.5 percent in the first half of this year from a year ago, Klingensmith said.

On the advertising side, Klingensmith would not provide specific data, but he said declines in ad revenue are shrinking: “Total advertising revenue declines have shrunk to the low single digit range in this year, to the order of magnitude that can be offset by increases in consumer revenue.” On top of all that, for two years in a row, the company has been able to cut employees a check as part of the paper’s profit-sharing agreement.

That’s a good story, but there’s a difference between turning the ship around and charting a new course. Klingensmith, a Minnesota native himself, wants to push the paper into new territory by meeting people where they are (or where they read) and by co-mingling the value of print and digital products.

“We’re trying to transform the nature of the subscriber relationship,” he said. “You no longer subscribe to the paper or an app. You subscribe to the Star Tribune brand.”

Bundling and the case for protecting print

The Star Tribune, like so many papers with digital subscriptions, wants to protect its print base from eroding. Seven-day print subscribers get digital access included in their subscription, as do readers who get the paper more than more than 2 days. But Sunday-only? You pay an incremental 99 cents a week to get digital access. So instead of the Frank Rich Discount of The New York Times — using digital subscriptions to push Sunday print — the Star Tribune wants to push readers to pick up more than just the Sunday paper.

“We want to control the subscriber relationship and want people to have a subscription through out system”

In other words, the Star Tribune wants you all-in, across platforms. While some media outlets are content to offer a menu of apps at various price points (the sports app, the entertainment app, the politics app), Klingensmith said he thinks that approach has a limited ceiling for revenue. Rather than break up your audience and allow them to have dissociated relationships with your company, create a product that appeals to various parts of your audience while giving them a door to the rest of your work.

“Pieces that appeal to segments, like entertainment apps or high school sports, if you put enough in a package I think you can charge more for the entire package,” he said. “My back of the envelope math says, so far, that’s the way to go.”

One complicating factor in their digital growth has been the hand-off between Apple’s App Store and the Star Tribune’s own subscriber system. The Star Tribune is not a part of Apple’s Newsstand, so in order for readers to connect their app access to their account they have to work through the Star Tribune’s own authentication system. “It’s not about the 30 percent we’d have to pay Apple. That would be fine,” he said. “We went to a lot of pain and effort to build a system that is customer-centric.”

Though Newsstand can provide visibility and discoverability, that’s not as critical for a local paper like the Star Tribune. Klingensmith said their audience is the within the boundaries of the state of Minnesota and anyone who grew up there, and that audience already knows about the Star Tribune. The more important issue is creating a deeper connection with readers — and, not incidentally, holding onto the valuable data each reader brings with it. “We want to control the subscriber relationship and want people to have a subscription through our system and have those people in our database,” he said.

Changing the Sunday paper

Before he came to the Star Tribune, Klingensmith was at Time Inc. for over 30 years, working at places like Time, Sports Illustrated, and Entertainment Weekly (which he co-founded). So the narrative goes that Klingensmith, with his years in the magazine business, saw the appeal of reader research — surveys and focus groups — and applied it to the daily newspaper. It’s not like audience research was foreign to newspapers — but considering how tight budgets have become at most papers, they haven’t been top priority either. Star Tribune editor Nancy Barnes said it had been at least four years since the paper undertook any significant research, so it was time for some fresh insights from readers. Barnes said they tested readers on everything from the design of the paper to its digital offerings. That work helped influence the redesign of StarTribune.com and changes to the print product, Barnes said.

“You have to have an ongoing dialogue with consumers because things are changing”

It also directed changes to the Sunday paper. If there’s a conventional wisdom in newspapers about Sundays, it goes like this: Sundays are for the takeout pieces, the long features, the narratives, and other elements that don’t fit in the shrunken daily news hole. But that wasn’t what Star Tribune readers had in mind for their paper: “We heard over and over, ‘Features are nice, but we want the hard news,’” Barnes said.

More specifically, readers wanted hard news and investigations on A1, along with a mix of national and international reporting. It wasn’t that readers didn’t enjoy features; rather, their Sunday news diet gave them time to ingest more serious news along with features, and they prefer the news at the top of the meal. Klingensmith said readers believe the front page is the chief indicator of a story’s importance and set a high bar for what is placed there. They adjusted the Sunday edition and now have more news up front, which Klingensmith thinks is one of the reasons single-copy sales increased.

“You have to have an ongoing dialogue with consumers because things are changing,” he said. “It’s important for us to understand where people want to get what sort of news.”

What comes next?

Klingensmith is quick to not take too much credit for the Star Tribune’s turnaround. He came to the paper after it came out of bankruptcy in 2010. While Klingensmith didn’t set the table, he shaped what happened next. (He was named Editor & Publisher’s 2011 Publisher of the Year.) The outlook for the paper is much improved from a few years ago, but both Kilingensmith and Barnes say they have plenty of work to do.

One area of focus is their iPad app, which they say has underperformed since its release last year. Putting aside the issue of authenticating subscriptions, the content on the app itself could be more dynamic and take better advantage of the tablet’s features, Barnes said. They plan — no surprise — to do research on it. “I think there is an appetite for work we are doing on the iPad — I don’t think we’ve nailed the right approach to it yet,” she said.

Klingensmith had his sights set on evening out the revenue picture, bringing the advertising revenue and consumer product revenues into closer balance. That would mean an increase from the consumer side of things, which Klingensmith estimates sits around 43 percent at the moment. He said it wouldn’t be out of the question to raise the price of the paper again. He doesn’t expect they would reduce the number of free stories in their meter, as the Times has, but he won’t rule it out either. “Generally speaking, over time, the print product in particular will have to carry a higher price. For the continuance of the enterprise, consumers are going to have to carry the cost,” he said.

Fortunately, Klingensmith has some perspective. Yes, the Star Tribune is caught up the same uncertainty that all newspapers around the country are facing. But Klingensmith’s happy for the ability to focus. Instead of a stable of magazines, he’s just got one title. Instead of multiple audiences, he’s just got one state-sized market. “We just have one little newspaper to run here, and that simplifies things,” he said.

Image of the Star Tribune building from Matt Green and Star Tribune newspaper box from smcgee used under a Creative Commons license.

You might not be a journalist, but you play one on Twitter

Posted: 01 May 2012 11:05 AM PDT

Though it might only come in 140-character bursts, everyone’s a publisher on Twitter. But how many of those publishers are journalists, or acting like journalists — and how does that affect what kind of information ends up getting passed around?

A study in the works at Indiana University aims to examine the extent to which Twitter users behave like journalists, even if they aren’t journalists in the traditional professional sense. Specifically, researchers Hans Ibold and Emily Metzgar are looking at “politically-oriented” Twitter users, and how they wield information.

“The writing is on the wall that people are turning to social media often, over and above traditional legacy news media,” Ibold told me. “It’s become a go-to source. That’s one of the reasons we wanted to ask: What kinds of journalistic storytelling are some of the more popular tweeters employing? The implication is that Twitter is becoming a news source — but what kind of a news source?”

By the nature of the platform, Twitter users perform functions that were once often limited to professional journalists — they publicly share ideas and information, engage with political issues, and otherwise connect and empower citizens. On the most basic level, this highlights Twitter as a disruptive force in the changing media ecosystem. Even as a relatively small percentage of online adults use Twitter (about 13 percent, according to Pew), people are able to act journalistically without relying on traditional channels to do so.

Metzgar and Ibold opted to find groups of politically oriented Twitter users the same way many people search the site: by using hashtags. With data from the university’s Twitter-analyzing Truthy project, they compared tweets using the conservative #tcot hashtag with those using the liberal #p2. A couple of examples:

Now, Metzgar and Ibold are still in the process of evaluating tweets — 250 so far, but ultimately 2,500 — for journalistic behaviors. For example, do these Twitter users verify the information they’re sharing? Do they simply assert information? Do they affirm preconceived notions? Or do they demonstrate some other special-interest approach?

Former Nieman Foundation curator Bill Kovach and Project for Excellence in Journalism director Tom Rosenstiel developed this evaluation framework — verification, assertion, affirmation, and special-interest —  in their book Blur. (For the purposes of their study, Metzgar and Ibold added a “none of the above” category.)

Researchers are also evaluating tweets for political rhetoric using three categories: attack, acclaim, and rebuttal. Their early findings have yielded some interesting results. Metzgar and Ibold find the most prevalent journalistic mode among their politically-oriented sample is assertion, which Kovach and Rosenstiel characterize as placing the “highest value on immediacy and volume and in so doing tends to become a passive conduit of information.” (Sound familiar, web users?)

“What’s going out on Twitter is truly broadcast with mass media potential.”

We’ve repeatedly seen the ease with which misinformation can spread on Twitter. (See also: Joe Paterno, Fidel Castro, and Nikki Haley.) Of tweets that demonstrated journalism behaviors, researchers found affirmation was also more likely than verification. Looking through the filter of political rhetoric, Twitter users were most likely to attack than rebut or acclaim.

Their preliminary findings also offer some hints as to distinction between partisan groups’ Twitter behaviors. For example, left-leaning Twitter users in their sample group were more likely than their right-wing counterparts to “retweet without any context,” Metzgar said. But overall, she and Ibold found “little difference” between how the two groups use Twitter. Regardless of political orientation, tweets were likely to be “scandal-oriented with emotional charge.” (Again, sound familiar, web users?)

What may be more telling is how both of these highly engaged Twitter groups — in addition to an “overall disregard for verification” — ignored traditional media, and one another. In instances when Twitter users did attempt to provide verification, it often came in the form of a link to an outside source. But rarely was that source a traditional journalistic outlet.

“Based on the small sample examined here, these politically focused conversations are happening without explicit reference to more traditional media outlets,” Metzgar and Ibold wrote in a working draft of the study.

And yet they found that the “echo chamber effect,” even as it excludes traditional media, still follows a familiar dynamic. Whether it’s in the newspaper, on cable TV, or on Twitter, people seek information that reinforces preconceived notions. Here’s how they put it in a draft:

People associate with those with whom they have something in common. Politics is a contentious topic — even among friends, partisanship is a fact of political life in the United States. People who are engaged civically in real life are more likely to be engaged online, too. Although early praise for the Internet suggested access to technology would end inequalities in society, the reality has been that new technologies simply reinforce already existing structures and the political Twittersphere is one place we expect to see the same dynamics repeated.

These findings are beginning to form a “view from 30,000 feet,” Metzgar says, but there are plans to dig much deeper. She wants to be able to analyze tweets right down to policy-based levels. Ibold wants to develop a framework for analyzing how people tweet about emotion, and what effect that has on the way people share.

“What’s going out on Twitter is truly broadcast with mass-media potential,” Metzgar said. “We think there are discussions happening out in the wide open that previously weren’t happening in the wide open, and people who are interested in those discussions can — if they choose to — track those discussions, see where things are headed and even sense tone, sentiment and emotion to get a feel for where the really engaged, activated public stands.”

Image derived from illustration by Matt Hamm used under a Creative Commons license.

A lesson in collaboration: How 15 news orgs worked together to tell a single education story

Posted: 01 May 2012 10:00 AM PDT

Shared bylines are common enough. But what about a story with the names of 15 reporters and more than a dozen news organizations attached to it?

Last month, Education Week, the Education Writers Association, and nonprofit news organization The Hechinger Report jointly produced a lengthy story that had a single byline — Alyson Klein’s — but listed 14 other reporters from 12 additional news organizations as contributors. Check it out:

This article was produced by Education Week, The Hechinger Report, and the Education Writers Association. Additional reporting was contributed by Liz Bowie and Erica Green of the Baltimore Sun, Sarah Karp of Catalyst Chicago, Antoinette Konz of The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Jennifer Brown of The Denver Post, Lori Higgins of the Detroit Free Press, Nancy Mitchell of Education News Colorado, Rachel Cromidas and Philissa Cramer of GothamSchools, Scott Elliott of The Indianapolis Star, Paul Takahashi of the Las Vegas Sun, Leslie Postal of the Orlando Sentinel, Jennifer Jordan of The Providence Journal, and Brian Rosenthal of The Seattle Times.

This is the second such collaboration between Ed Week, EWA, and Hechinger. Education is a beat that’s national — with federal policies and research — but intensely local, with thousands of school boards making decisions at a community level. So the idea is to have local and national reporters join forces to cover a major education story that’s playing out in different areas of the country, and at various levels of government. Ed Week produced an overview story with a national angle, then local partners — who helped feed state-based information for that national story — could reprint all or part of it in their regional publications. In this case, the assignment was to track the local use of $3 billion in federal School Improvement Grant stimulus money.

While Ed Week handled much of the writing and editing, EWA executive director Caroline Hendrie says it made sense for her organization to serve as the link to reporters participating from newsrooms around the country. “We work with reporters and editors across the country — these are our members and they’re already actively engaged with us,” Hendrie told me.

Davin McHenry, web producer and news editor at The Hechinger Report, says he handled project logistics like enforcing deadlines and “making sure the project was on track, getting information out to everyone.”

It may be true, as Hendrie told me, that we as journalists are “better together.” But it’s also true that a project of this scope presents a host of challenges. Here are some of the things Hendrie, McHenry, and Ed Week assistant managing editor Mark Bomster say they learned along the way, and the advice they’d give others who are considering a similar undertaking.

Find likeminded partners

McHenry: Our main thrust up to this point has been collaborating with newspapers, and providing them with content. We’re kind of that midpoint between the Education Writers Association and Ed Week…At the same time, we know how to provide high-level news content that’s accepted by the largest and most stringent news orgazantions.

Hendrie: It was very much a three-way collaboration from the beginning, with the idea that we would work to define clear roles for each of the organizations. That meshed well with our different but somewhat complimentary audiences and activities.

This kind of collaboration won’t work for every story

Bomster: You have to be sure you actually have the will and resources to follow through with it. Then you have to find a subject that will really resonate, and still hold up given such a long reporting and planning cycle…It has to be something that’s sort of a perennial topic, but also at the same time newsworthy, and something that hasn’t been plumbed as deeply as you might think.

Establish clearly defined roles, and cede control

Hendrie: It makes total sense for us to take the lead on the recruitment…Our community is comprised both of the national reporters and editors and local. We have news outlets of every stripe in all media — not just print, not just online, not just radio, not just TV, but all of those things. To the extent that we can pool our resources, we’ll all produce better information for the public.

Bomster: It’s kind of unusual because those of us who are news editors and reporters tend to be such control freaks. We had to cede a certain amount of that control. The way that it really turned out, we each decided we were going to play our positions.

Think big, but start small

McHenry: The first time around, we went out and recruited as many papers as we could in one big fell swoop…We asked them to dedicate a reporter for a week, maybe two weeks, to investigate the topic. I think at our high-water mark, I want to say we had 50 news outlets that had initially signed on. But what we ran into was, a lot of these places, they had eyes bigger than their stomachs and very quickly that number started dwindling. [The fix this time around, McHenry said, was to allow time-strapped news organizations to help with certain stages of the project, without feeling bad about not being able to commit from start to finish.]

Know your limitations

Hendrie: Always be aware of just how overtaxed journalists are today in the modern newsroom. One lesson that we’re learning is always to simplify, and find more streamlined ways to communicate. People are so pressed for time and pulled in so many directions…Put extra time into thinking how you’re messaging.

Realize the potential reward

Bomster: This model puts a big premium on collaborative work. We all maximize our resources, and there’s a lot of leverage you can get out of that with just a couple of organizations who are in tune about coverage philosophy and expertise.

Hendrie: So much of education policy and practice happens at the state and the local level, but there’s huge commonalities and, more and more, the national and federal impact is increasing. So it’s very important that education journalists compare notes, learn from each other, help one another know what’s going on in other communities because there is so much — the overall context varies, certainly, but there are threads running through that are the same everywhere.

Photo by Twix used under a Creative Commons license.
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