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| When is a website not a website? For Talking Points Memo, the turning point was in 2012 Posted: 17 May 2012 07:30 AM PDT
About six months ago, Talking Points Memo publisher Josh Marshall had a realization. It was something that had been bouncing around in his head for a while, but only then was he sure: It was time to formally deconstruct the idea of TPM as a website first — even though it was a website first, some 12 years ago when he started it. “If someone were to ask me a year ago, I would have said, ‘Well, yeah, we’re not just a website — it’s this, and we have that, and the other.’ But I think it was when I saw mobile growing as fast as it was that it just sort of hit me at a different level,” Marshall told me. “Inevitably, as long as mobile was something like five percent of traffic, it was just something you made available on the side. But you start to see, this is going to be half of our audience. We can’t be approaching it in a way that the website is the thing, and we’re making imitations of it — because this thing is losing its primacy. In a lot of ways, it wasn’t until late last year that it hit me at a different level. It hit me as more than a concept. It was really true.”
As of late March, mobile — smartphones and tablets — accounted for 19 percent of TPM traffic. By early May, when I sat down with Marshall in his New York office, mobile traffic to TPM had passed the 20 percent mark. “I don’t have much doubt that that number will be 30 or 40 percent in the next year or two,” Marshall said. “My only question is at what point tablets overtake smartphones.” So what does this realization mean, from a practical standpoint, for TPM? “More than anything else we had to shift our own thinking, because that was constraining with how you do things on mobile,” Marshall said. “Realizing that TPM is not a website — it’s a bundle of knowledge and expertise and ongoing coverage that exists inherently on no particular platform, and we are consitently trying to find ways to make it adaptable on as many platforms as possible.” But the rethinking process also means rejecting the idea that TPM content can be one-size-fits-all, which deputy publisher Callie Schweitzer calls “a game-changer for all publishers.” “We’re giving a lot of thought to three different kinds of consumption: Active consumption being at the desktop, on-the-go consumption being on your mobile phone, and passive consumption being in your bed, on your tablet, something like that,” Schweitzer said. “For me, it’s literally about the physical way you’re doing it. You can certainly actively consume at all of those different places but when you’re reclining, looking at a beautiful visual on an iPad, it’s very different than being on a mobile phone or sitting at a desktop.” It’s with this kind of thinking that TPM is approaching its election-year coverage, and another expansion planned for next year. In June, TPM is set to launch some new “basic features to make election coverage awesome.” Over the course of the next year, Marshall says they’ll roll out “some mobile-only stuff” (and that’s as specific as he’ll get for the time being). In 2013, you can expect new verticals that will fall broadly into categories like business, technology, and telecommunications. The mobile shift is also a driving factor behind TPM’s decision to return big to video after scaling back in the past. “There are some places that video can go that text can’t, and there are times of the day that you watch things,” Marshall said in a later conversation. “We’re taking that bundle of ever-evolving knowlege and expertise and putting it into a video format. It’s all part of that same rethink…That’s the core reason we’re making such a push back.” With the launch this month of weekly mini-shows like The Set-Up (Mondays), Polltracker Crosstabs (Wednesdays), and The Wrap (Fridays), TPM is delivering bite-sized news and analysis with the quality production sheen that some smaller news outfits forgo. Each show is about three minutes long, which Marshall says is the “logical attention span.” Here’s an example: “These are supposed to be quick updates on contained questions, so we think that’s sort of the sweet spot,” Marshall said. “We’ll do some longer than that…but we think that’s sort of the normal length. You don’t write a 5,000-word op-ed in The New York Times, and you don’t write a 300-word profile in the New Yorker.” Political coverage is TPM’s bread and butter, so as the election season progresses, Marshall says there will be more and different kinds of video. That includes live video from conventions and election night, as well as video interviews with newsmakers. Marshall says he’s been wanting to get TPM back into video for years. “We were heavily involved in original video in 2007 and 2008,” Marshall said in an email after our initial interview. “I did a daily show for almost two years. The reason we ramped back was because it was a strain on our staff capacity — there were many fewer of us back then — and we didn’t feel like the video ad market was mature enough for us to effectively monetize it. Now makes sense basically because both things have now changed. We have a much more robust video production capacity now. So it’s not so deeply reliant on me the way it used to be. The other part of the equation is monetization. Certainly lots of sites have been running pre-roll for a long time. But until relatively recently, the market for pre-roll for us was just spotty.” In recent months, that’s changed “dramatically,” Marshall says. After growing his staff in recent years, he now has a combined force of 28 full-timers between TPM’s New York and Washington offices, and the ad revenue is available to help foot the bill. (Most videos are preceded by 15-second pre-roll ads.) “If you look at the third-party studies that ad agencies look at, there’s just a lot of great data about how much more powerful pre-roll advertising is,” Marshall said. “Basically one of the big triggers why we’ve moved ahead [with video] is because — whereas in the past the market for pre-roll video was kind of inconsistent, now it is very different. Even in the last six months, it’s changed.” Yet video ad revenue remains a relatively small piece of the pie, and Marshall says he expects it will stay that way because “so much of endemic advertising is non-video, the things on pages.” He views the growth of mobile and video as simultaneous more than causal, but both drive home the same point for him: News organizations need to embrace the idea that “disruption is the norm now,” and explore content distribution through multiple channels. “Hypothetically, if you have, say, six basic platforms and maybe one of them accounts for 75 percent of your revenue — as a publisher, you don’t know how that mix is going to evolve as things go forward,” Marshall said. “In the same way that mobile has gone from low single-digits up to almost a quarter of our audience, it’s very important to have good profit margins and a good model across a bunch of platforms because you wouldn’t want the platform that you have not invested in to be the one that people go crazy for. That would be perilous.” |
| Posted: 17 May 2012 06:00 AM PDT
What’s the difference between being informed and being educated? What’s the line between learning something new and being taught something new? Are news media and universities just two ways to do the same thing: gain knowledge? As Coursera, Udacity, edX, and several other offerings begin to unravel everything we thought we knew about post-secondary education, we can’t help but make links to the world of news. You gotta love the geeky name that applies to this new hybrid for-profit/nonprofit industry: MOOCs, or massively open online courses. For top-rank universities, the embrace of online education promises to be transformational, upending many of the millennium–old rules of academe, as education, learning, certification, payment for services, and measurement of teaching effectiveness all inevitably succumb to major rethinks. For daily newspapers, themselves becoming mainly digital news products ever more quickly, it’s a time ripe for redefinition, for declaring new and expanded roles as the digital age removes long-ago built barriers — some real, some always imaginary. At first glance, the question of whether professors and journalists are in the same business seems almost absurd, doesn’t it? We know what a college is, and we know what a newspaper is. One’s got ivy-covered walls, demands on-site instruction, costs tens of thousands of dollars a year, and grants certificates of completion, or degrees. The other is a physical, throwaway product that until lately cost a quarter a day and now can go at the top end — in print — for $650 a year. No prizes are awarded for reading daily — or for 50 years. Online, though, these historic differences seem to fade rather quickly. We read to learn, whether it’s a course on European history or the latest twists and turns of current European economic drama. Greek tragedies of two different era. We read to understand and make sense of things. What indeed, then, might media’s greater role in society be, and how can it now harness technology to multiply its impact? MIT, Stanford, and Harvard, among others, are wandering into that territory — testing the reach of technology — without knowing where their travels will take them in this terra incognita. We know that news media may be well suited to new educational roles. Why? It’s what we produce — information and perspective, building blocks of learning — and it’s what we believe when we talk about “public service.” This emerging blur between media and education joins others. In its mischievous disruption, that’s much of what digital does. It blurs. As the tablet makes mincemeat of the historic differences among newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio, we see another bright line ready to dim: that seeming line between what a news organization and what a college each do. This is still another stopping point for all those leading the craft of journalism into the new age to ask what business we’re really in. What business does it make sense for us to consider, test, or ply? What fits with our mission? Let’s take “mission” for a moment. Our history offers lots of punchy “raise hell and print the news” missions. But scratch deeper and you find a commitment to learning and its cousin, community building — one that reaches beyond simply pitching the news. How about The Wall Street Journal’s simply elegant, “The daily diary of the American dream.” Or: “The Scotsman. It’s thinking time.” Or The Everett (Wash.) Herald: “If It Matters To You, It Matters To Us.” While we all know about The New York Times’ “All the news that’s fit to print,” consider its deeper declaration: “The Company’s core purpose is to enhance society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news, information and entertainment.” Beyond mere words, we can see small educational extensions of the news companies’ basic businesses. Most every paper has participated in Newspaper in Education programs, providing papers and, sometimes, lesson plans for elementary and secondary students. The New York Times sponsors many talks, lectures, and other learning events in the city. Education in the pre-online sense has long been part of its brand, and its Knowledge Network has offered “adult and continuing education opportunities.” Consider the Texas Tribune’s forays in events, both as a business line and a way of extending its journalistic raison d’etre beyond publication. Many newspapers sponsor candidate forums or public debates on an issue. Largely, though, newsies inhabit an industry focused on the day. We trot out the well used quote, “News is the first rough draft of history,” but we let others make sense — and value — out of the incredible riches of newspaper archives. Let others create courses, connect the dots, and create knowledge. We’ve always been into a snapshot approach to the world. What’s news today lacks sufficient lineage to yesterday — or to tomorrow. We see such innovations as Storify and a few Google efforts (Living Stories, Timeline) that are efforts to connect the dots of news time. All these efforts, though, are piecemeal, not intended as new ways of gaining mass impact, as in massive — think thousands or hundreds of thousands of people — open online courses. So in the emerging age of the democratization of education, let’s consider how news companies could rethink their role in news, and education. Let’s call it the newsonomics of News U. Coursera, which has gotten a huge amount of press, is more than a collection of online courses. Working with the University of California, Princeton, Penn and, of course, Stanford, the Palo Alto-bred company has pioneered an “interactive online learning system.” Read its near-revolutionary mission statement of this Kleiner Perkins-funded company:
What if we take the Coursera’s thoroughly democratizing aspiration and apply it to a modern news media company that wants to stake a greater claim to learning and community as part of its mission?
Too high-minded? Or is that simply another way of saying, with the aid of technology, what The Guardian, Journal, and Times first said more than a century ago? What’s increasingly possible here — recognized by the pioneering elite educational institutions, but available to media institutions as well — is the ability to both increase the institutional reach of their brands and to provide transformational learning opportunities at small incremental cost. Few traditional media have the know-how internally. One fascinating exception: U.K.-based Pearson. It owns the global Financial Times news franchise, Pearson Education is a leading K-12 publisher, and Penguin Books is positioning itself well to extend ebook links between “media” and “education.” While at Pearson, the press and the educational press share a home, most media will have to partner to test forays into learning, or to position themselves as Pearson does as “always learning.” Beyond high-minded mission statements, what are some practical ways we can test media/education links? How about these to start:
So where do media companies look for partners? Consider that this is much more than putting words into lesson plans, or creating education replicas of news products. At the MIT/Harvard-based edX, video lectures, embedded quizzes, interactive learning, online labs, and much peer interaction. So these new MOOC companies themselves could be partners. Other natural partners would be educators themselves, as school districts and community colleges, as well as the bigger, more prestigious colleges in the forefront of this movement. The Knight Foundation — the funding pacesetter of the new journalism — should be of help. Its DNA is media and community-building. Just last Friday, Knight’s Eric Newton challenged journalism school educators to adopt a “teaching hospital” model to create greater community engagement and betterment. If transformative technology needs to be applied to enable media to become educators as well, maybe Knight would be a source of aid. So where is the money here? Is there a business model to be found? The facile Silicon Valley answer may seem unpalatable to current newspaper company owners: Become more essential to people, and the money will follow. And what can be more essential, and more relationship-building, than lifelong education? We see three other major web concepts in the business thinking of the MOOC founders: freemium, gathering data, and aggregation. On business model, most MOOC courses are free to students at this point, a wonderful price point that brings in lots of customers, er, students. On data, Coursera’s goal is to “analyze student data to obtain a better understanding of online pedagogy and student learning…and understand human learning at a scale and depth that has been never been possible before.” Think of the power of that data. On aggregation, look at edX’s statement about the project, “The gathering of many universities’ educational content together on one site will enable learners worldwide to access the course content of any participating university from a single website, and to use a set of online educational tools shared by all participating universities.” Become the go-to source, globally, nationally or locally for something people value, and the digital world rewards you. One other way we can look at building value and revenue here. Let’s take the prism of manufacturing. Publishers manufacture content (and ads), use it for a single purpose — the paper, the site — and then discard it. News is a raw resource, whose value is poorly amplified; better for publishers to move up the food chain and find higher-end uses for it in the creation of learning and knowledge. Establishing new relationships and deepening old ones should create a future pipeline for products and services still to be born. Forget Udacity — let’s think audacity. The audacity to think, in spite of news organizations’ shrinkage, they can make a larger, not smaller, contribution to their readers and communities. Many non-profits, like NPR, like to tell the public that they are “mission-driven organizations,” words, I assume, that are meant to separate them from profit-seeking media. With news media profitability now only achieved by keeping the scalpel handy and well-oiled, the profit line works less as a defining difference. More important may be that, in comparison, much legacy news media seems mission-free. It still exists, but in economic decline harbors increasing doubt about its own purpose. With self-doubt and its apparent clout receding, it has grown less clear about its role in democracy, rather than more clear. Maybe a mission-based exhortation to adapt the technologies of the day to further community education, engagement and civic problem-solving is a tonic for the deepening media malaise. Let’s let The Guardian’s C.P. Scott bring us full circle, reconnecting journalism and education. Scott’s clear-eyed, pre-cable, pre-web view of what journalists — and educators — do rings even more important today: “Comment is free, but facts are sacred. ‘Propaganda’, so called, by this means is hateful.” In fact, one of the greatest shared values of the news and education industries is that both are fact-based enterprises, operating against longer odds as misinformation and disinformation can be funded on a different massive scale. In 1921, he wrote:
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