Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Jeff Israely: To B2B or not to B2B, that is our question
- Reverse engineering Chinese censorship: When and why are controversial tweets deleted?
- What is it that journalists do? It can’t be reduced to just one thing
| Jeff Israely: To B2B or not to B2B, that is our question Posted: 30 May 2012 11:30 AM PDT
 Editor’s Note: Jeff Israely, a former Time magazine foreign correspondent in Europe, has launched a news startup called Worldcrunch. For the past two years, he’s been describing and commenting on the process here at Nieman Lab. Read his past installments here. In 2011, when we launched our site, the focus was on building our product. Now, the next stage in the startup climb is to build the business. As the editor, I still spend the majority of my time on the product side: helping to pick, produce, and package our news content in the best old and new ways possible. But I am also busy working with my business partner Irène Toporkoff on the essential how-to-make-the-product-make-money piece of the puzzle. It’s the first time for me on this side of slowly crumbling wall separating business and editorial, and it’s a whole lot of fun. It’s also a whole lot of hard work, made harder by the fluid and fraught state of our industry, the changing habits of news consumers, and the very fact that we are indeed a startup, with limited means and constant choices between the possible and the practical. There’s an extra dose of awareness in the Worldcrunch pit of what we can call the Miles Davis rule of business: what you choose not to do matters just as much. I know that folks in much bigger news organizations are grappling with some of the same choices and pressures. Stakes are high, budgets tight, time short. Over the next three posts, I will try to unpack how it looks from my particular vantage point in a miniseries I will presumptuously call The False (And True) Dilemmas In Finding Your News Industry Business Model — laying out some of the big opposing choices our fledgling news company faces: B2B vs. B2C; paid vs. free; content quality vs. content quantity. Of course, as the title suggests, there’s plenty of spillover within and across these apparent alternatives, not to mention over that once mighty wall. So let’s talk business! Until two years ago, B2B (meaning business-to-business) didn’t mean much more to me than those yellow pages that didn’t arrive at my home — or office. The first time I met Irène for coffee to tell her about the project (mostly the product, as it were), she took it all in, asked lots of questions…and had this to offer as her first full affirmative sentence: “B…to…B.” She had both bought and sold digital content at previous jobs, and she knew that — particularly online — it is still easier to get a business, rather than the equivalent individual customers, to actually pay for something. It would be, Irène explained, B2B2C…business-to-business-to-customer/client. The alternative path is to simply aim straight for the C. Be a destination site, build your brand, reach the consumer! Soon enough, we realized that this is still the big prize. It not only plays to our own sense of mission (and vanity), but also just seems like more fun: pursue your vision rather than sniff out the market and be forced to react to the needs of intermediary third parties. If we post it, they will come. Anyway, those were — and are — the two choices of this true-and-false dilemma. And people (including potential investors) continuously ask whether we will be B2B or B2C. Timidly at first, and now with confidence, we say both. The B2B is a way to find revenue in the short term, while the brand grows and the B2C model reveals itself to us and the industry as a whole. Of course, pursuing both is neither easy nor simple. Indeed, it’s the implicit tension in many of the week-in, week-out choices we have to make, on both the business and editorial sides. A decision to focus on selling Article X to third parties may force us to forgo investing in some technical or human tools that could help us push the same article directly to readers. It also finds its way into our editorial choices: We might actually end up producing Article X rather than Article Y, which would have been better suited for our own site and our search for readers. Major news organizations are also weighing the dilemma, as the old models fade and new opportunities present themselves. Reuters, traditionally a B2B and B2B2C outfit, wants to become more and more a direct source of news for consumers. The New York Times, which has always banked on readers reaching directly for the brand, is committed to its global syndication business as a steady source of additional revenue. Nieman Lab columnist and news business guru Ken Doctor recently encouraged media companies to pursue lots of little golden eggs of revenue, now that the historical twin rivers of advertising and circulation are turning to smaller streams in a much more crowded information ecosystem. Two years after that first meeting with Irène, and one year after going live on the website, we have built a nice little chunk of loyal readers who offer a mini egg of ad revenue — which nonetheless will alone clearly not be enough to build a business around. So we’ve just begun to sell our stuff to other media outlets. The potential syndication revenue is real, though may ultimately be more modest than we had once hoped. It also must be built one deal at a time, which requires run-up time and investment into sales operations, and/or working with third-party syndication services that take a major cut. Where things stand today, in a world of digital pennies, there are clearly still some nice dollars to be made in print licensing. But what is equally clear is that the future is indeed digital. So your legwork and brainwork — your strategy — should be geared toward that future. Being a digital-only venture, we don’t have the monstrous dilemma of weighing what to do about our own print product. And yet we are (in a number of ways) part of the bifurcated world of the mainstream media. How important are those print dollars we can gather now? How long will print even be around? Should we focus instead on emerging digital syndication possibilities? Or should we move away, as much as possible, from B2B altogether? As a Paris-based, French/American company looking to get our business rolling, we’ve had the good fortune of getting introduced recently to a successful U.S.-based French entrepreneur, Thibaut de Robien, who wants to work with us on both business development and our overall strategy. He is now busy pounding the pavement stateside and joining Irène and me (via Skype) on the hard thinking about these tricky choices we face. One of the many strengths Thibaut brings is the very fact that he comes from another industry: online gaming. Beyond his know-how around digital user experience, his battle scars in a decade of actually finding a new business model for an existing product is a great asset for a news startup. B2B or B2C — for us, for now, it’s both. It’s what one smart businessman said he likes to call “holding up some gas stations on the way to robbing the bank.” That’s the startup’s outlaw spirit we like. But building a new company from scratch is also about being ferociously pragmatic — which we might also call preparing to thrive tomorrow by perfecting the art of surviving today. Photo by Jeremy Brooks used under a Creative Commons license. |
| Reverse engineering Chinese censorship: When and why are controversial tweets deleted? Posted: 30 May 2012 10:35 AM PDT
Censoring the Chinese Internet must be exhausting work, like trying to stem the flow of a fire hose with your thumb. Sina Weibo, a popular Twitter-like service, says its 300 million registered users post more than 100 million weibos, or tweet-like posts, a day. (In Chinese, weibo means microblog or microblog post.) And of course the entire Chinese Internet isn’t as censored as some might think. So why are some tweets deleted, not others? Which topics are seen as the biggest threat to harmony? Chi-Chu Tschang wants to unwrap the black box. Tschang is an MBA student at MIT’s Sloan School and former China-based correspondent for BusinessWeek and a student in Ethan Zuckerman’s class this semester, “News in the Age of Participatory Media.” For his final project, Tschang built on data collected on thousands of deleted weibos in China to look for answers. (I summarized some other interesting ideas from students in a previous post.) “We know that certain topics are censored from blogs hosted in China, Chinese search engines and Weibos,” Tschang writes in his paper. “But we don’t know where the line lies. Part of the reason is because the line is constantly moving.” Tschang drew on the work of researchers at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Center. Cedric Sam and King-wa Fu helped build WeiboScope, which visualizes the most popular content on Sina Weibo in something close to real time. On top of that app, they built WeiboScope Search, which includes deleted weibos — more than 12,000 since Feb. 1 — in its huge archive. Using the data visualization software Tableau, Tschang plotted those deleted weibos on a timeline, then superimposed politically sensitive events to provide context. (Click to enlarge.)
The day that saw the highest volume of deletions, in a dataset covering Feb. 1 to May 20, was March 8: the day rumors of Bo Xilai’s fall from power began to spread. Bo was a high-ranking party secretary who was under scrutiny for, among other things, his tremendous apparent wealth. Bo’s son, studying here at Harvard, attracted a lot of attention when he reportedly picked up Jon Huntsman’s daughter in a red Ferrari for a date. The second-busiest censorship day was March 15, the day Bo was sacked. Here’s one more interesting data point: On March 18, word spread of a deadly car accident involving a Ferrari (a black one, not a red one). Nearly all information about the crash disappeared from the Internet, fueling speculation about who was involved. Even the word “Ferrari” was censored. Tschang observed moderate deletion activity that day on Sina Weibo. There is one day of missing data: April 22, the day civil-rights activist Chen Guangcheng escaped from his house arrest in Shangdong. Why? An error message dated April 23, the day after, reports “load problems” that temporarily disabled data collection — disappointing timing. It could be that the Chinese Weibosphere was so jammed on that momentous day that the servers were crashing. Or it could be something else entirely. (Reader Samuel Wade notes that news of Chen’s escape was not widely known until days later.) Tschang crunched the raw data and generated a word cloud, to see which terms in deleted weibos appear most often.
Word clouds, though pretty, don’t provide a whole lot of context. Tschang said he wants to examine the list more carefully, filtering out words like the Chinese equivalents of “RT” and “ha ha.” He also wants to examine the relationships of the 3,500 most censored Weibo users, creating, I don’t know, a Klout for civil disobedience? Tschang’s hypothesis — that Sina Weibo deletions correlate highly with spikes in media coverage of sensitive stories — is consistent with the findings of a similar study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, who evaluated 56 million weibos, of which about 16 percent were deleted. Those researchers found some key words were far more likely to get a weibo deleted: Ministry of Truth, Falun Gong, Ai Weiwei, Playboy, to name a few. “By revealing the variation that occurs in censorship both in response to current events and in different geographical areas,” the researchers wrote, “this work has the potential to actively monitor the state of social media censorship in China as it dynamically changes over time.” Finally, Tschang also evaluated how long it took for deleted weibos to be deleted. He wrote:
Tschang said he suspects some weibos get deleted months later because they are about topics that suddenly re-surface in Chinese media. Tschang even tried posting spare, scandalous messages to his own Sina Weibo account, just to see what would happen.
Here’s Tschang:
One caveat: Tschang cannot be 100 percent sure that a deleted weibo wasn’t deleted by its creator, rather than Sina’s “monitoring editors.” But Sina Weibo’s API makes a helpful distinction in the way it returns data for deleted weibos. The error message for a non-existent weibo comes back as either “Weibo does not exist” or “Permission denied.” So one could assume, as do Tschang and the HKU researchers, that “permission denied” equals “censored.” And the best time to weibo something politically sensitive in China? After 11 o’clock on a Friday night, according to the data. “Interestingly, deletion of Sina Weibo messages tend to hit a low on Saturdays,” Tschang wrote. “I’m not too sure why that is, except that maybe censors want to take time off on weekends as well.” |
| What is it that journalists do? It can’t be reduced to just one thing Posted: 30 May 2012 07:30 AM PDT
There’s a craving in the air for a definitive statement on what journalism is, something to rally around as everything changes. But I want to do the opposite. I want to explode journalism, to break it apart into its atomic acts. I’m beginning to suspect that taking it apart is the only way we can put it all back together again. In the endless debate about what the “future of journalism” holds, “journalism” doesn’t have a very clear meaning. We’re in the midst of hot arguments over who is a journalist, whether social media is journalism, whether data is journalism, whether cherished tenets like objectivity are necessary for journalism. As the print advertising model that funded the bulk of working journalists collapses and forces transformation, it’s pressing to know what is worth preserving, or building anew. After decades where “journalism is what journalists do” was good enough, there is a sudden a bloom of definitions. Some claim that “original reporting” is the core, deliberately excluding curation, aggregation, and analysis. Others say “investigative reporting” is the thing that counts, while a recent FCC report uses the term “accountability journalism” liberally. These are all efforts to define some key journalistic act, some central thing we can rally around. I don’t think I could tell you what the true core of journalism is. But I think I have a pretty good idea of what journalists actually do. It’s a lot of things, all of them valuable, none of them the exclusive province of the professional. Journalists go to the scene and write or narrate or shoot what is happening. They do months-long investigations and publish stories that hold power accountable. They ask pointed questions of authorities. They read public records and bring obscure but relevant facts to light. All of this is very traditional, very comfortable newswork. But journalists do all sorts of other things too. They use their powerful communication channels to bring attention to issues that they didn’t, themselves, first report. They curate and filter the noise of the Internet. They assemble all of the relevant articles in one place. They explain complicated subjects. They liveblog. They retweet the revolution. And even in the age of the Internet, there is value to being nothing more than a reliable conduit for bits; just pointing a camera at the news — and keeping it live no matter what — is an important journalistic act. There’s more. Journalists verify facts and set the record straight when politicians spin. (You’d think this would be uncontroversial among journalists, but it’s not.) They provide a place for public discussion, or moderate such a place. And even though magazine journalism can be of a very different kind, like Hunter S. Thompson writing for The Atlantic, we still call it journalism. Meanwhile, newspaper journalists write an enormous number of interpretive pieces, a much larger fraction than is normally appreciated. The stereotypical “what just happened” report has become less and less common throughout the last 100 years, and fully 40 percent of front page stories are now analytical or interpretive, according to an excellent piece of forthcoming research. And, of course, there are the data journalists to cope with the huge rise in the availability and value of data. Can we really say which of these is the “true” journalism? I think it depends hugely on the context. If some important aspect of the present has never been represented anywhere else, then yes, original reporting is the key. But maybe what the public needs is already in a document somewhere, and just posting a link to it on a widely viewed channel is all that is needed. At the other end of the spectrum, verifying the most basic, on-the-ground facts be can challenge enough. I saw the process that the AP went through to confirm Gadhafi’s death, and it was a tricky undertaking in the middle of a conflict zone. In other cases, the missing piece might not require any new reporting at all, just a brilliant summary that pulls together all the loose threads. There are a lot of different roles to play in the digital public sphere. A journalist might step into any or all of these roles. So might anyone else, as we are gradually figuring out. But this, this broad view of all of the various important things that a journalist might do, this is not how the profession sees itself. And it’s not how newsrooms are built. “I’ll do a story” is a marvelous hammer, but it often leads to enormous duplication of effort and doesn’t necessarily best serve the user. Meanwhile, all the boundaries are in flux. Sources can reach the audience directly, and what we used to call “technology” companies now do many of the things above. Couple this with the massive, beautiful surge of participatory media creation, and it’s no longer clear where to draw the lines. But that’s okay. Even now, news organizations do a huge number of different things, a sort of package service. Tomorrow, that might be a different package. Each of the acts that make up journalism might best be done inside or outside the newsroom, by professionals or amateurs or partners or specialists. It all depends upon the economics of the ecosystem and, ultimately, the needs of the users. Journalism is many good things, but it’s going to be a different set of good things in each time, place, and circumstance. Photo by Niclas used under a Creative Commons license. |
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