Sabtu, 30 Juni 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

How online journalism’s shaken up political coverage in Mexico

Posted: 29 Jun 2012 10:15 AM PDT

[Editor's Note: Read a Spanish-language version of this story.]

Mexico will elect a new president on Sunday, completing a 90-day campaign in which the media has been one of the key issues. Traditional news outlets have been sharply criticized for playing favorites — most notably Televisa, the largest Spanish-language TV network in the world. The ledes of a couple Guardian stories lay out the case:

Mexico’s biggest television network sold prominent politicians favourable coverage in its flagship news and entertainment shows and used the same programmes to smear a popular leftwing leader, documents seen by the Guardian appear to show.

The documents — which consist of dozens of computer files — emerge just weeks ahead of presidential elections on 1 July, and coincide with the appearance of an energetic protest movement accusing the Televisa network of manipulating its coverage to favour the leading candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto.

A secretive unit inside Mexico’s predominant television network set up and funded a campaign for Enrique Peña Nieto, who is the favourite to win Sunday’s presidential election, according to people familiar with the operation and documents seen by the Guardian.

The new revelations of bias within Televisa, the world’s biggest Spanish-language broadcaster, challenge the company’s claim to be politically impartial as well as Peña Nieto’s insistence that he never had a special relationship with Televisa.

The scandal and the blowback from it have some people talking about a “Mexican Spring” — one powered by social media and ground-up movements. (Read about Yo Soy 132 — a movement prompted by this viral video and this tweet — for more background.)

When traditional media is untrusted, it opens up space for new competition — new outlets, new voices, new approaches. And that’s what’s happened in Mexico, where a generation of digital-native news organizations has changed how at least some Mexicans have learned about the election.

“Digital outlets’ main contribution was that they’ve dared to do a different kind of coverage: more in-depth and investigative reporting, and they are faster and more flexible to update the news,” Gabriela Warkentin, a communications scholar at Universidad Iberoamericana, told me.

This new digital generation has nowhere near the reach of a network like Televisa, she said. (Less than one-third of Mexico’s 111 million people have Internet access.) But their impact comes from doing stories others won’t. “They have provided much more information and analysis [than traditional media] that could help voters on their decision-making process — and that’s not a minor thing,” she said.

As in the earlier days of the United States blogosphere, the number of readers may be small compared to traditional outlets — but those readers are disproportionately politically engaged and influential. They’re also younger, a demographic that could be decisive in the election.

La nueva generación

Animal Político (Political Animal), ADN Político (Political DNA), and general news site SinEmbargo.com are the most prominent new players. All launched within the past 18 months and report audiences ranging from 900,000 to 1.3 million unique visitors a month. (For context, Mexico’s most visited news site claims 2.2 million unique visitors per month.)

The editors of the three sites say there’s a hunger for independent political coverage attached more to audience needs than to politicians’ interests.

“Traditional mass media has lost credibility in Mexico, and portals like ours have made a difference,” Alberto Abello, ADN Político’s editorial director, told me. His site does some original reporting but also relies on aggregating content produced by other publications from Grupo Expansión, a media conglomerate owned by Time Warner and to which the site belongs.

“There are newspapers where journalism is not the priority because they don’t depend on their readers. The scandalous majority of papers live from public funds,” Daniel Moreno, Animal Político’s editor, said.

Animal Político, SinEmbargo.com, and ADN Político are funded by investors who, they say, have no ties with any political party and who believe editorial independence should be the foundation of their business. “If a politician wants to dictate us the content in exchange for advertisement, we don’t want it. Being independent editorially could bring you immediate economic consequences, but it will assure sustainability,” ADN’s Abello said.

“Revenue is a very important issue and a big concern now for the digital-only orgs,” Warkentin said.

None of the three organizations gave specific details on the amount of their initial funding, but all three said they expected investment support would continue until they reach break-even financially. In the cases of Animal Político and SinEmbargo.com, that will be “soon,” their editors say, while ADN Político estimates it will end the year with no financial losses.

“We are optimistic that Animal Político will have a long life,” Moreno said. Daniel Eilemberg, president of Elephant Publishing, the Miami-based company behind Animal Político, acknowledges that online advertising in Mexico is still immature, but he says it’s growing rapidly. (IAB Mexico projects online ad spending stands will approach US$500 million this year and is grew 33 percent last year, with particular strength in automotive and financial services.)

Trying new things

Not everyone is sold on the impact of the digital outlets. Guillermo Osorno, a veteran journalist who edits the magazine Gatopardo and who writes a column for newspaper El Universal, says “digital coverage has became more important during this campaign, but I wouldn’t say that journalists are making a difference on the Internet.”

León Krauze, a Mexican journalist who’s a columnist at SinEmbargo.com, said that the new outlets are headed by experienced journalists with background in broadcasting and print. “I don’t think there’s innovative digital journalism in Mexico,” he said. But he added that the mere presence of more outlets is refreshing. “It is the beginning of a phenomenon that’s here to stay,” he said.

Animal Político, SinEmbargo.com, and ADN Político have each tried to innovate. A few examples:

  • Animal Político crowdsourced what questions should be asked of the candidates under an effort called 10 Preguntas. It used the Personal Democracy Forum’s platform; you can see the questions and answers from most of the candidates here. “Animal Político has done a great job using social media, not only to share its contents but to monitor what its audience wants and to discover stories that were not covered,” said Warkentin.
  • ADN Político offers Encuestas de encuestas (Poll of polls), which compiles data from all public polls and lets the users interact with and visualize the data, comparing different pollsters and subgroups.
  • SinEmbargo.com runs video op-ed pieces. “They get as many hits as the written columns. That’s a big paradigm shift in Mexican media,” the site’s content director, Alejandro Páez Varela, told me. SinEmbargo.com also tried interactive graphics to visualize controversial statements, flip flops, and achievements by each candidate during the campaign.

With election day approaching, all three sites are focused on providing the best coverage Sunday. But the biggest challenge will start on Monday, when they’ll face the same question American political sites face: How do you sustain interest — and revenue — once the election cycle is over? Eilemberg of Animal Político says they’re hoping to expand in new ways, like events and syndication.

“That’s why we are also thinking about diversifying our revenue streams,” he said.

Photo of Andrés Manuel López Obrador campaign rally by Rosa Menkman and photo of anti-PRI graffiti by Randal Sheppard used under a Creative Commons license.

De cómo el periodismo online sacudió la cobertura electoral en Mexico

Posted: 29 Jun 2012 10:15 AM PDT

[Nota del Editor: Una versión de este artículo se puede leer en inglés aquí.]

México escogerá un nuevo presidente el domingo, cerrando una campaña electoral de 90 días, durante la cual los medios de comunicación fueron uno de los temas centrales.  Organizaciones noticiosas tradicionales han sido fuertemente criticadas por favoritismo político, especialmente  Televisa, el grupo mediático en español más grande del mundo.  Los siguientes extractos de informaciones publicadas por el diario británico  Guardian resumen por qué:

La cadena de televisión más grande de México vendió presuntamente a importantes políticos un tratamiento informativo favorable en sus noticieros y shows principales y usó los mismos programas para desacreditar a un líder de izquierda, según unos documentos vistos por The Guardian.

Los documentos, que consisten en docenas de archivos informáticos, salen a la luz tan sólo unas semanas antes del Proceso Electoral Federal del 1 de julio y coinciden con la aparición de un enérgico movimiento de protesta que acusa a Televisa de manipular la forma en la que cubre las noticias para favorecer al candidato favorito Enrique Peña Nieto.

Una unidad secreta de la cadena de television dominante en México, estableció y financió una campaña para que el candidato favorito, Enrique Peña Nieto, ganase las elecciones presidenciales, según unos documentos vistos por The Guardian y gente familiarizada con el operativo.

Las nuevas revelaciones de la falta de objetividad de Televisa, la cadena de medios más grande del mundo en lengua española, cuestionan la afirmación de ser polítcamente imparciales hecha por la compañía así como la insistencia de Peña Nieto de no haberse beneficiado de una relación especial con Televisa.

Este escándalo y sus consecuencias han motivado, incluso,  que algunas personas hablen de la "Primavera Méxicana", por la influencia de las redes sociales y las organizaciones civiles. (Para más antecendentes, lean sobre Yo Soy 132, un movimiento provocado por este video y este tuit).

La pérdida de confianza en los medios tradicionales genera oportunidades para competir: nuevos medios, nuevas voces, nuevos enfoques. Y es eso lo que ha pasado en México, donde una generación de organizaciones noticiosas exclusivamente digitales han cambiando la forma en que –al menos- algunos mexicanos se han informado acerca del proceso electoral.

"La principal contribución de los medios digitales es que se han atrevido a realizar una cobertura diferente: más reporteo de profundidad y de investigación, y también son más rápidos y flexibles para actualizar las noticias", me dijo Gabriela Warkentin, académica en Comunicaciones de la Universidad Iberoamericana.

El alcance y la proyección de esta nueva generación digital ni siquiera se acercan a las que tiene Televisa, aclaró Warkentin (menos de una tercera parte de los 111 millones de ciudadanos en México tienen acceso a Internet). Sin embargo, el impacto ha sido mayor cuando se trata de cubrir temas que otros medios no toman en cuenta. "Han dado mucho más información y análisis (que los medios tradicionales), lo que al final puede ayudar a los electores en su proceso de decisión de cómo votar,  y eso no es menor cosa", aseguró.

Como ocurrió en Estados Unidos durante los comienzos de la “blogosfera”,  el número de usuarios en la web en México puede ser pequeño comparado con el de los medios tradicionales, pero esos lectores son muchos más activos e influyentes cuando de temas políticos se trata. También son más jóvenes, un grupo que puede ser decisivo en esta elección.

La nueva generación

Animal Político, ADN Político y el sitio de noticias SinEmbargo.com son las jugadores más prominentes en el escenario mediático digital de México. Todos aparecieron en los últimos 18 meses y ya reportan audiencias entre los 900.000 y 1.3 millones de visitantes únicos por mes. (Para contextualizar, el sitio de noticias más visitado en México reporta 2.2 millones de visitantes únicos por mes).

Los editores de estos tres sitios coinciden en que hay una gran demanda de una cobertura política más focalizada en los intereses de las audiencias que en los de los políticos.

"Los medios de comunicación tradicionales en México han perdido credibilidad, y portales como el nuestro han marcado una diferencia," aseveró Alberto Abello, director editorial  de ADN Político. Su sitio produce contenido original pero también agregar contenido producido por otras publicaciones de Grupo Expansión, un conglomerado mediático propiedad de Time Warner y al que pertenece ADN Político.

"Hay periódicos donde el periodismo no es la prioridad porque ellos no dependen de sus lectores. La escandalosa mayoría de los periódicos viven de recursos públicos", me dijo Daniel Moreno, el editor de Animal Político.

Animal Político, SinEmbargo.com, y ADN Político están financiados por inversionistas que, aseguran ellos, no tienen vínculos con ningún partido político y que creen en que la independencia editorial debe ser la base de su negocio. "Si un politico quiere dictarnos el contenido a cambio de darnos publicidad, nosotros no queremos su publicidad. Ser independientes editorialmente puede tener consequencias económicas inmediatas, pero asegura sostenibilidad a largo plazo", agregó Abello.

"Generar ingresos es un tema muy importante y una gran preocupación para los medios digitales", aseguró Warkentin.

Ninguno de los tres medios proporcionó detalles sobre el monto de la inversión inicial, pero los tres aseguraron que cuentan con apoyo económico de sus inversionistas hasta que alcancen el "punto de equilibrio" financiero. En el caso de Animal Político y SinEmbargo.com, eso será "pronto", de acuerdo con sus editores, mientras que ADN Político estima que terminará el año sin pérdidas económicas.

"Somos optimistas de que Animal Político tendrá una larga vida", dijo Moreno. Daniel Eilemberg, presidente de Elephant Publishing, la compañía que respalda Animal Político (y que está ubicada en Miami, Florida), reconoce que la inversión en publicidad online en México todavía está dando sus primeros pasos, pero aclaró que está creciendo rápidamente. (IAB México reportó que la inversión publicitaria online alcanzará $500 millones este año, lo cual significa un aumento de 33 por ciento en comparación con el año pasado. Los mayores anunciantes son la industria automotriz y financiera).

Intentando nuevas cosas

El impacto de los medios digitales no es reconocidos por todos en México. Guillermo Osorno, un experimentado periodista director de la revista Gatopardo y columnista del diario El Universal, dice que "la cobertura digital ha adquirido más importancia durante esta campaña, pero no diría que los periodistas están marcando una diferencia en la Internet".

Leon Krauze, otro periodista mexicano y columnista de SinEmbargo.com, manifestó que los nuevos medios están dirigidos por reconocidos periodistas con amplia experiencia en radio y televisión. "Yo no creo que haya un periodismo digital innovador en México", dijo. Sin embargo, él agregó que la mera presencia de más medios es refrescante. "Es el principio de un fenómeno que está aquí para quedarse".

Animal Político, SinEmbargo.com y ADN Político han tratado de innovar a su manera. Una serie de ejemplos:

  • Animal Político pidió a sus usuarios que enviaran preguntas para los candidatos como parte del proyecto 10 Preguntas, que utilizó la plataforma de Personal Democracy Forum;  uno puede ver las preguntas y las respuestas de la mayoría de los candidatos aquí. "Animal Político ha hecho un gran trabajando usando las redes sociales, no solo para distribuir sus contenidos sino también para monitorear lo que la audiencia quiere y para descubrir historias que no se han cubierto", explicó Warkentin.
  • ADN Político ofrece Encuesta de Encuestas, que reúne todas las encuestas que se han realizado y le permite a los usuarios interactuar con los datos, a través de visualizaciones, comparando la información entre diferentes casas encuestadoras y variables.
  • SinEmbargo.com introdujo las columnas de opinión en video. "Tienen tantos hits como las columnas escritas. Ha sido un cambio de paradigma en los medios mexicanos", aseguró el director de contenido del sitio, Alejandro Páez Varela. SinEmbargo.com también utilizó gráficos interactivos para visualizar declaraciones controversiales, errores y aciertos de los candidatos durante la campaña.

Con el día de elecciones a la vuelta de la esquina, los tres sitios están concentrados en dar la major cobertura el domingo. Sin embargo, el mayor reto empezará el lunes, cuando tengan que pensar en respuestas a la misma pregunta que se hacen los sitios de cobertura politica en Estados Unidos: ¿Cómo mantenemos el interés –y los ingresos- una vez que termine el ciclo electoral? Eilemberg de Animal Político dice que espera expandirse de nuevas maneras, como organizando eventos y "sindicalizando" el contenido.

"Es por eso que también estamos pensando en diversificar nuestras fuentes de ingresos", concluyó.

Fotografía de Andrés Manuel López Obrador en una actividad de campaña por  Rosa Menkman y  fotografía de un graffiti anti-PRI por Randal Sheppard utilizadas bajo una licencia Creative Commons.

#Realtalk for the j-school graduate on the first five years of your career

Posted: 29 Jun 2012 08:30 AM PDT

I’ve spent most of my own admittedly short journalism career mentoring the younger writers and editors coming up behind me — especially those who graduated from journalism school, which seems to instill a false sense of preparedness that dissipates about two weeks into the first post-graduate internship. I end up repeating myself a lot. Now that I find myself without a staff editor job for the first time in years, it seems like a good time to share these few lessons with the wider world. Plus, there’s nothing like a professional shakeup to make you think back on your career choices.

Write something short every day. Don’t wait for an invitation to write for a major publication. Or even a minor one. Invest time and energy in the spaces you control: your blog and Twitter account. (I’m assuming you already have both of these things because you are no fool.) Use them to dash off quick opinions and keep track of things you’re interested in exploring at greater length. This won’t prevent you from pitching these ideas to paying outlets or combining them into bigger projects — it’ll prepare you to do exactly that. When you apply for a job or pitch a freelance piece, editors will google you. Until you’ve got a lot of great clips (which will take a while), you want them to be able to find your awesome idea. You want them to be able to, at the very least, see what other publications you read and what kind of thinker you are. This is because…

Your ideas matter more than your prose. Sorry to crush your illusions, but it is possible to succeed in journalism without being a great writer (*cough* editing *cough*). It is not possible to succeed without having great ideas. For many editors, knockout prose is a bonus, not a requirement for making an assignment.

If you read something you love, ask yourself, “Why’s this so good?” Then read it again.

Fake it ’til you make it. I mean, don’t lie on your resume, but feel free to be a little…aspirational in your description of yourself on your personal site and in your Twitter bio. Do you obsessively follow tech news and want to write for Wired, but pay the bills by writing up community meetings for a suburban newspaper? Change your bio to “Reporter at Podunk Daily and freelance tech writer.” Then write about tech on your personal platforms, where you’ll develop ideas and build credibility. Never describe yourself as an “aspiring” anything.

Write every piece three times. And I don’t mean three drafts. I mean you should be pitching and writing every idea, with three similar but not identical angles, for three different outlets. This is a bit of journalistic advice that an older dude-journo passed along to a young dude-journo I know, who passed it along to me, and I’ve since imparted it to lots of other people. The only person who’s paying attention to your entire body of work is your mom. You will be the only ones who notice the close-but-not-overlapping theses. Warning, though: Don’t just cut and paste!

Read good articles twice. If you read something you love, ask yourself, “Why’s this so good?” Then read it again. One of the most valuable exercises in journalism school is picking apart pieces by established journalists to figure out how they did it. It’s harder to keep doing this once you’re out of school. I like to go through my Instapaper archive every once in awhile and re-read the things I’ve liked. (What? You’re not using Instapaper or Readability or a similar app? Remedy that immediately.)

Make a list of places you want to work (or want your writing to appear), people you want to work with, and milestones you want to hit within the next five years. Don’t think you’ll accomplish these in any sort of order, but do use this list to shape the small-bore decisions you make. Because your career, like your life, is made up of a lot of little decisions — not just which of two jobs to accept.

Email the people who have the job you want tomorrow. Assistant editors and blog editors and up-and-coming freelance writers are going to have career advice that is way more relevant to your life than wisdom from 20-year veterans. (Their advice is valuable too! Just…different.) When you reach out to these young-ish journalists, don’t just ask them to coffee or for general “advice.” Send concrete questions: How did you hear about the job you have now? What sorts of interview questions were you asked? What do you wish you had known five years ago? Which publications are you paying attention to? Why? Keep in touch.

Read the publications you want to write for. Read them religiously.

This is a small industry, and if you’re doing it right, jobs and networks will bleed seamlessly into one another.

Learn to write headlines, even if you don’t want to be an editor. Headline writing is about distilling complicated ideas and selling what’s sexy about a piece. This is also called, “being good at Twitter” or “effective pitching.” Practice this by writing a headline for every piece you want to write. Set high standards for every post title on your personal blog. You’ll get better at it, I promise.

Be an early adopter. Mess around with new reading apps, new blogging platforms, new social media sites. You don’t have to use all of these things every day, but you need to be familiar with them. One of your main selling points as a newbie journalist is that you’re “hip” to the “Internet sites” and “gadgets” that “the young people” are using today. Deliver on that stereotype. And while you’re at it, learn a lesson that your journalistic elders have largely failed to grasp: Evolution is a lifestyle, not a conference you attend once a year. Keep at it.

Know that “colleague” is a lifetime affiliation. Let go of the idea that you’ll work with one set of people, then work with another set when you switch jobs. This is a small industry, and if you’re doing it right, jobs and networks will bleed seamlessly into one another. The negative way of putting this is, “Don’t burn bridges,” but the positive way of putting it is that every journalist is your coworker.

Practice horizontal loyalty. Prioritize your relationships with people who are at a similar stage in their career. Yeah, it’s helpful to befriend accomplished older journalists, but it’s really the relationships with people on your level that will sustain you. Include all types of media people in your network, not just writers. Send your ideas and drafts to these people. Retweet each other. Connect each other. Collaborate on a short-lived but hilarious Tumblr, or apply for a reporting grant together, or put together a panel. Make awesome stuff now. Don’t wait your turn.

Image from Dave Herholz used under a Creative Commons license.

This Week in Review: News Corp. breaks up, and CNN and Fox News’ breaking-news gaffe

Posted: 29 Jun 2012 06:53 AM PDT

News Corp. undertakes historic split: In a move that’s been predicted for at least a year or two, News Corp. took a drastic step this week to try to contain the damage from its phone hacking/bribery scandal, splitting its news and entertainment properties into separate companies. Its news company will include all of its newspapers in Britain, the U.S., and Australia as well as its Dow Jones newswire and book publisher HarperCollins; the entertainment company will include 20th Century Fox, the Fox TV channel, Fox News, other cable channels, and BSkyB and other satellite TV properties. The Murdoch family will retain about a 40 percent share in both companies.

Wall Street loved the idea, with News Corp.’s shares jumping at the news that the company was discussing a split. The reason, as The New York Times’ Dealbook explained, is that it could free News Corp. from what’s known as the “Murdoch discount” — the depressed value of the company because of Rupert Murdoch’s influence. Splitting news and entertainment, the thinking goes, frees entertainment to make more money without being weighed down by the newspaper division.

That, said Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review, might harm the newspapers just as it helps the entertainment properties. The Guardian’s Michael Wolff contended that the newspapers will lose the upside of being tied to the entertainment side, but keep the downside of being tied to Murdoch. As Reuters’ Felix Salmon put it, “Up until now, Murdoch has never really needed to worry very much about his newspapers' profitability, because the rest of his empire was throwing off such enormous profits. That's going to change.” According to Ad Age, though, News Corp.’s papers might do better on Wall Street than many others.

Murdoch said the split wasn’t related to the phone hacking scandal, but pretty much everyone else found that claim preposterous. As Paul Sawers of The Next Web put it, the cracks from the scandal had spread too far. More specifically, according to the Guardian’s Roy Greenslade, this allows News Corp. to invest in the properties it finds profitable (entertainment/BSkyB), and dump the liabilities (British newspapers). Here at the Lab, Ken Doctor said the split will work out quite well for the Murdochs — investors will be happier, and Rupert can still play newspaperman while clearing the way for further entertainment domination.

As for what the move means more specifically, paidContent’s Staci Kramer has a good rundown of what it means for each division, and she and the Guardian also looked at who might head up each company. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM urged News Corp. to let the content flow freely across platforms, though Murdoch said his newspapers would be pushed even harder to charge for news online.

A Supreme breaking news error: The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act on Thursday was the occasion for one of the biggest media gaffes of the year, as CNN and Fox News both initially reported erroneously that the act’s individual mandate had been found unconstitutional. Both networks issued statements, though only CNN — whose mistake was more prominently displayed and took longer to correct — could be construed as apologizing. Fox claimed it “reported the facts, as they came in,” a statement with which both Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon and the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple took issue. (Wemple also objected to CNN’s explanation of its error.)

The reaction against CNN in particular was quick and relentless: AP reporters were even ordered to stop taunting via social media. Within CNN, as well, the error was anonymously described to BuzzFeed as “shameful,” “outrageous,” and “humiliating.” Rem Rieder of the American Journalism Review said it was a terribly timed stumble for the struggling CNN, and Wemple admonished, “Someone needs to tell CNN: There is no such thing as fashioning a scoop over something that's released to the public.”

Others put the blame within a broader context: The Huffington Post’s Jason Linkins described it as a “There but for the grace of God go I” situation for journalists, which was the kind of approach Reuters’ Jack Shafer also took. The American Copy Editors Society’s Charles Apple called it the product of a too-fast media cycle meeting the constantly changing nature of breaking news.

Other news orgs reinforced that emphasis on speed: A Washington Post profile on SCOTUSblog, the top destination for instance Supreme Court analysis, noted the site’s obsession with getting the news first. Meanwhile, mainstream news orgs fought over who broke the story first (Andrew Beaujon’s answer: it depends), and Rem Rieder said that issue is not only unimportant, but harmful to good journalism.

Flipboard and Pulse’s models compete for publishers: The New York Times extended its online pay plan this week to include the aggregation app Fipboard, allowing subscribers to access all the Times’ content there, while limiting nonsubscribers’ access to a few free articles. At All Things D, Peter Kafka pointed out that this is the first time the Flipboard has gotten a major publisher to give it full access to its content there, as well as the first time the Times has given out full access to its content through another platform.

Kafka also wondered if Flipboard access is really going to add much for Times subscribers, since they already have access to the Times on just about any device they could want. On the other hand, GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram liked the idea as a way to acknowledge new ways users are getting news while maintaining control over the pay plan. Jeff Sonderman of Poynter had a few notes for other news orgs, pointing out the Times’ statistic that 20 percent of its readers use aggregation apps and suggesting that this might be a good option for smaller news orgs that can’t afford their own extensive app development. And TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis weighed in with an angry, drunk anti-Times post.

At the same time, though, Conde Nast’s Wired and The New Yorker announced they’re stepping back from Flipboard, giving up selling ads and pulling most of their content. Publishers told Mashable’s Lauren Indvik it’s just easier (and more profitable) to sell ads on their site once Flipboard takes its cut, and paidContent’s Jeff John Roberts said Flipboard may need to reconsider its revenue-sharing arrangement with publishers.

In addition, a day after the Times announced its Flipboard pay plan, the Wall Street Journal announced a similar plan with one of Flipboard’s competitors, Pulse. The Journal’s move was part of a strategy shift by Pulse toward paid subscriptions that the company expects to launch it into profitability. Ingram of GigaOM compared Pulse’s subscription-based model (which involves subscription revenue sharing and Flipboard’s ad-based model — though both are “competing with their publishing clients even as they try to serve them.”

Is BuzzFeed stealing ideas?: BuzzFeed, one of the most popular viral content sites on the web, got some scrutiny this week that raised questions in the ongoing discussion about the validity of online aggregation practices. Slate’s Farhad Manjoo looked behind the curtain at where BuzzFeed gets the material for its most popular viral posts and found they mostly come from Reddit, with attribution (possibly systematically) stripped. Philip Bump of Grist said Manjoo didn’t go far enough in his critique, saying that BuzzFeed isn’t just aggregating but stealing ideas. Gawker’s Adrian Chen found much more blatant plagiarism at BuzzFeed, though he pinned some of the blame on the Internet’s love of context-free images and text.

But The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson pushed back against the BuzzFeed criticism, comparing their raiding Reddit to movie studios grabbing ideas from bestselling books. “BuzzFeed is a hit-maker making hits the only way reliable hits can be made: By figuring out what’s already popular and tweaking them to make something new,” he wrote. Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman also drew some lessons for journalists from a couple of BuzzFeed’s recent popular posts, concluding that one key to taking things viral is to make readers feel something (preferably something positive).

Reading roundup: A few other smaller stories going on in the background this week:

— Google formally unveiled a number of new products at a press event this week — a streaming media device called the Nexus Q (powered by other Android devices on the same network); a $199 tablet called the Nexus 7; its much-anticipated augmented-reality glasses, Google Glass; and a tablet app for Google+, among a few other things. For some analysis, here’s All Things D on the Nexus Q and Google Glass.

— This week in paywalls: The Chicago Tribune’s redesigned website will require registration for some content, a mechanism designed to transition to paid subscriptions. (It’s also including some content from the Economist and Forbes in that plan.) U-T San Diego also launched a metered pay plan, and The New York Times will begin charging for crossword puzzles even outside of its subscriptions. Meanwhile, Gannett said its circulation is down but revenue is up at its paywalled papers, and Steve Outing argued against the metered model.

— Two thought-provoking pieces on reinventing journalism, from different perspectives: The Online Journalism Review’s Robert Niles on how to reboot newspapers by breaking up the chains, and Technology Review’s Christopher Mims on the red flags in many proposals to reinvent journalism (abandoning the news story, lack of knowledge of the business model, vagueness about the medium).

— Finally, some great pieces here at the Lab this week: An interesting post by Jonathan Stray on how our perception plays into news bias, Clay Shirky on the importance of Gawker’s innovation in commenting, and Adrienne LaFrance’s illuminating postmortem on The New York Times’ involvement with NYU’s The Local.

Obama “Dewey Defeats Truman” photo illustration by Gary He.
di

Jumat, 29 Juni 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Anatomy of a spike: How SCOTUS Blog dealt with its biggest traffic day ever

Posted: 28 Jun 2012 02:18 PM PDT

Ten-year-old SCOTUS Blog has been a go-to authority on the health care challenge since the beginning, which made today its Oscar night, Super Bowl, and Christmas morning all wrapped into one. But on the Internet, success comes with a darker side: server crashes. SCOTUS Blog was prepared. The traffic buildup was already intense on Monday:

To put that 500,000-in-one-day in context, it had nearly 1 million over the three days of oral arguments this spring. (Other sites were prepping too; just before the decision was handed down, New York Times developer Jacob Harris tweeted a graph showing a huge traffic spike.)

For SCOTUS Blog, preparing meant investing in server upgrades, even if they would only be used for a short burst of traffic.

To help offload the burden, SCOTUS Blog shut down its main site at peak times and redirected visitors to a dedicated page off-server. That was hosted on WPEngine, a server company that specializes in optimized WordPress installations. And the minute-by-minute liveblog was pushed off to CoverItLive, with an embed put on the WPEngine site. The liveblog page had its own special “Sponsored by Bloomberg Law” message in its header.

And for the moment of maximum interest — the seconds after the decision was announced — SCOTUS Blog publisher Tom Goldstein advised they’d be going to Twitter first. “As a purely formal matter, we will ‘break’ the story of the health care decision on Twitter. So you can follow @scotusblog, if you'd like,” he wrote in the liveblog. “But don't follow us just for that reason, because we will have the news here on the live blog less than 5 seconds later.”

By 9:08 a.m., he said there were already 70,000 people reading the liveblog and that the site had already logged 1 million hits for the day. His guesstimate for the day’s traffic? “My best bet is 250,000 [concurrent liveblog readers] at the time of the decision.” Goldstein kept liveblog readers updated.

9:16 a.m.: “100,000 live blog readers.”

9:29 a.m.: “145,000 on the liveblog.”

9:33 a.m.: “The previous record for our live blog was 100,000, on Monday. The previous record for our daily hits was 500,000, also Monday.”

9:43 a.m.: “218,000″

9:43 a.m.: “We are at less than 1% of our own server capacity. We’ve shifted the principal processing to CoverItLive, which expects it can handle >3 million.”

9:56 a.m.: “FWIW, the count going into 10am is 344,000 contemporaneous readers.”

10:03 a.m.: “1,000 requests to the liveblog per second.”

10:06 a.m.: “520,000 contemporaneous readers.”

At 10:09 a.m., SCOTUS Blog broke the news on Twitter. At this writing, that tweet’s been retweeted 2,927 times and favorited 142 times. (Also, it was accurate.)

10:22 a.m.: “866,000 liveblog readers.”

That’s roughly the city of San Francisco.

From there, SCOTUS Blog switched into analysis, commentary, and smart aggregation of other sites’ analysis and commentary. But the traffic kept coming, if at a slower pace.

1:11 p.m.: “SCOTUSBlog just clipped over 3 million hits!”

2:17 p.m.: “Thanks to everyone for sticking with us this whole time. There are still over 80,000 people following the live blog.”

CoverItLive said it was the second most popular U.S. event they’ve hosted in 2012, behind only ESPN’s NFL draft coverage.

By 2:46 p.m., SCOTUS Blog staffers were ready to celebrate:

And by 5:09 p.m., they were really ready to celebrate:

Photo of the Supreme Court by Kjetil Ree used under a Creative Commons license.

The iTunes effect, seven years later: Podcasting in a world where Apple is kingmaker

Posted: 28 Jun 2012 12:00 PM PDT

iTunes 4.9 screen shot

Seven years ago today, Apple embraced a digital-native medium called podcasts. The iTunes 4.9 software update turned a somewhat geeky hobby into a mainstream product. Users could now browse a menu of audio offerings from all over the web, without having to worry about RSS feeds or MP3 enclosures. (You can see video of Steve Jobs promoting it at D3 here; jump to 17:30.)

A prophetic St. Paul Pioneer-Press article in July 2005 described the “iTunes effect” for indie podcasters:

Suddenly, the obscure, geeky podcasting world was thrust into the mainstream as millions of average Windows and Macintosh users discovered the downloadable shows and took to them in droves. Within about two days, iTunes fans subscribed to podcasts more than a million times for use on their Apple iPod players.

When it comes to media, Apple is a kingmaker; something like a subscription service that is peanuts to Cupertino can be business-model-shifting for a publisher. The company reinvented the music business and invented the apps business. So when Apple released a standalone Podcasts app for iPhones and iPads on Wednesday, it seemed like a big endorsement of the medium. Long-overdue features and a user-friendly interface have made podcasts that much more accessible to a mass audience.

And then there’s that iTunes effect. The podcast 99% Invisible was highlighted as a “Top Station” in the Podcasts app, and host Roman Mars told me downloads of his show were double the normal number on Wednesday — and he hasn’t released a new episode for almost two weeks. Mars told me has not seen a corresponding increase in site traffic, which normally comes from a prominent blog mention.

Podcast producers expressed mixed opinions about the move: While it’s good that Apple is elevating podcasts to a dedicated app, they say, they’re worried about its separation from the main iTunes Store, which provides a lot of exposure.

“I agree some casual listeners would be lost if the app isn’t built-in, but I believe the net will be additional downloads,” said Jeff Ullrich, who co-founded the Earwolf comedy network. “And let’s not forget, Apple is a pretty good marketer and I can’t imagine their goal in doing this is to kill podcasting.”

Andy Bowers, the executive producer for podcasts at Slate, said: “The old iPhone iTunes podcast interface was next to useless. I agree that if this is an attempt to hide podcasts that’s unfortunate, but I actually think this will be a net benefit” because of greater ease-of-use.

Dave Winer, who invented the podcast, asked on his website whether it was time to “reboot” the podcast.

Maybe it’s time to try out some new ideas. I’ve been thinking about a server-based app for subscriptions that hooks into Dropbox. All the shows you’re subscribed to show up in a folder. And they have clients for all the mobile devices. A podcast service that doesn’t have pictures of tape decks from the 20th century. How does this sound?

I took that to mean Winer was disappointed with Apple’s latest offering, so I asked him about it. On the contrary: Winer sees this as an opportunity for a renaissance of sorts. “It’s is a net positive for podcasting, absolutely,” he said in an interview.

Back in 2000, Winer introduced the “enclosure” element in RSS feeds — before the word “podcast” existed — and then became an evangelist for the medium. He acknowledges the paradox of Apple’s place in the ecosystem: He’s an open source crusader while Apple peddles a walled garden. But Apple has introduced new content to millions of listeners.

Winer and I talked about Apple’s role in podcasting and what he sees as the future of the form. Here are excerpts from our conversation.

Winer: I’m an old-fashioned, an old-school dude when it comes to podcasting. I think that the big companies — and obviously it’s not really big companies, plural, it’s really Apple — has a, not a pure vision of podcasting. It’s not pure. I mean, there’s an element to podcasting that they do not embrace, which is the level playing field, and the anything-goes attitude.

Is it the web, or is it Disney? Those are the two extremes. If you like the web, then you’re going to get a lot of crazy stuff along with it. You’re going to have to do your own filtering, and you might hear a bad word every once in a while. But, if it’s Apple’s version of the Internet, it’s all G-rated and highly controlled and maybe there’ll be a 30 percent commission. There’s all this stuff that comes with it that’s just Apple’s way of looking at things.

I believe in, you know — I like feeds, and a feed means that I can plug your feed, I can plug your flow into anything I want, and that’s the power of it. That means that new things can happen, because it doesn’t require your permission upfront. But when it’s a big company doing it, then you end up supporting their platform. And people start — and a lot of people want to do that, because if you can do a promotion deal with them, they can get a lot of people listening to what you’re doing.

And for the people that Nieman cares about, there’s plenty of reasons to care about what Apple’s doing, but I’m very much in the — I want the Internet, I want the web. I want podcasting to be of the web. And that’s very, very important to me. And I’m happy to say that podcasting still is of the web. Everybody still produces feeds. I have my own river-of-news aggregator that handles podcasting just perfectly. And so what I described there in that thread is more or less what I do, how I do my podcasting. And it somehow feels that now, people may be open to some new ideas. That’s kind of what I’m dreaming of now. That we could start rebooting some of these things and go back and explore some ideas that seem to have been cut off because the whole thing had been sort of taken over by Apple…

Phelps: I got the sense that you didn’t like the app…You said “I think it’s time to reboot podcasting,” and that to me suggested, oh, well, he must not be happy with the way Apple is going about this.
Winer: …It’s not for me. I’m not going to use it. It’s not my product. But I’m not unhappy with it, no. Like you said, podcasting had been buried [in the iTunes software]. It looked like they had taken it over and then just forgot about it. You know, that’s how it felt.

And what can you do in that situation? I care about it. A lot of people care about it. Podcasting. A lot of people use it. But if they’re not caring for it, then that doesn’t look good. But now they’ve made an investment. It’s visible again. It gives us something to talk about. So yeah, I think it’s a good thing. I think it’s not in any way, shape or form a software I would design. It’s not even remotely close to a software that I would design…

I also like highly functional software. I don’t like whatever they call it — skeuomorphic. I don’t like that. I think it’s hokey. All the software they have that works that way, I am just repelled by it. The bookshelf, I just think it’s silly. Why do you want your computer to look like a bookshelf? I don’t think anybody likes that, but they like it, so they do it. But those are small things. It’s just not my cup of tea.

I also like server-based applications. I really do. Because then you don’t have the synchronization problem. I don’t have to synchronize five different devices if I’m using those devices to access the server…Just sort of pushing bits around into different places. It’s making the devices more expensive, which, of course, is kind of what the device guy would like to do.

Phelps: I wrote a piece for Nieman recently about Slate’s success with podcasts. I think they’ve got 19 now, and they have three more on the way…And Andy Bowers said it’s all about finding niche audiences for different topics and speaking to them. It works for them and they have success with that. Their numbers are growing and all kinds of things. And of course, as I mentioned in the piece, The New York Times and the Globe killed off podcasts after many years because they said they were not worth the time and the money.
Winer: Yes, you know they were putting a lot of money into them. That was the thing. I used to listen to their TimesCasts…They were great interviews that they did and they were wonderful. But very high production values. I kept thinking, how could they afford to do this? But I don’t think The Times can do anything in a seat-of-the-pants way, whereas I don’t think Slate has a problem with that. I don’t think the listeners care. I don’t think they care. I think what they care about is getting into a different space for a little while, while they’re driving or walking or on the subway or something. And the Slate guys really do that. Their podcasts are excellent.
Phelps: When the Times killed off their podcasts, or most of them, anyway, it renewed this question that doesn't seem to die of, like, Are podcasts dying, or are podcasts on the way out? But of course, Andy Bowers, and I would expect you…say that it’s not.
Winer: No, of course it's not. That's objectively observable. I mean, if it were, why can I not keep up with them? I mean, you know, it's silly. It's not, of course it's not on the way out. There's an incredible supply of them coming from NPR where they're doing the production anyway. It's not like the production cost is in any way like what the Times was experiencing. Speaking honestly, the Times were out of whack because the Times is a newspaper. They produce print, they produce words, written words. For them, the podcast was an independent expense; for NPR it's just another channel of distribution. It doesn't cost them anything to do it. So why would they ever stop? If they ever stopped they would lose a lot of money at NPR, because probably the people who care the most about NPR are probably the ones who listen to podcasts.
Phelps: When I was talking to Andy, we were referring to that 2012 State of the Media Report from Pew. And there’s a little section on podcasts, and there’s a sentence in there that says something to the effect of “Only 25 percent of Americans [listened to a podcast in 2011].”
Winer: Oh my god, “Only!”
Phelps: And Andy said, Only? Wow. I hear that and think that’s a lot of people. That’s many millions of people.
Winer: My God, if the NBA had that, they would be in seventh heaven. I don’t believe it. People use to say stuff like that about RSS feeds: “Oh, only six percent of the people on the web are using it.” I go, “Wow, we really accomplished something there, didn’t we?” And then they came to the other conclusion that it’s dead, it’s over. People don’t know how to think about things. They don’t understand media. It doesn’t have to be 100 percent for something to have substantial value. There was this great line in the new Sorkin thing [The Newsroom], and it went by so fast I don’t think a lot of people heard it…She said, “Maybe we’ll only reach five percent of people” — and she’s screaming at him while she’s saying this — “but as you know, that’s how we make decisions in this country.” She’s right! Or he’s right — Sorkin is right. If Obama could get another five percent vote, he’s got a landslide. Everybody would call that a landslide. So you have to remember the context here. If the podcasts can influence even one percent of the people, it’s totally worth doing. We just don’t have that many sources of intelligent news to be thinking about throwing one away. And it’s not happening, anyway, so it’s not even an issue. People can go on dreaming about it, the Times can make all the excuses they want, it’s simply not happening.
Phelps: So is there a way that the programmers of the world, the Dave Winers of the world, can make this a more appealing medium to more of a mainstream audience? To push it beyond the niche?
Winer: The answer to that is if we can get a small community going to interact with them, to develop features for them, the answer is absolutely. It’s always been the problem. And when I say small, I just mean hundreds of people. Podcasting grew out of a community of 100 people, if that. I mean, it doesn’t take many people, it just requires focus and attention…

Phelps: It’s interesting that your ideas are people-based and not technology-based or code-based.
Winer: Well, who do you think this stuff is for? The technology problems usually aren’t very hard…The enclosure element in RSS took five minutes. After that, it took four years before podcasting took off. So you tell me which is the hard part. The hard part is getting people to — well, I mean it wasn’t even getting people to do it, because before I could get other people to do it I needed to know what it was they were supposed to be doing.

You know, just throwing it out there and saying, here’s the enclosure element, use this tool — got no response whatsoever. People scratched their heads and they said, I don’t understand it, and I said, well, I don’t think I understand it either, you know. But three years later, I did when I was dragging a microphone around downtown Boston interviewing everybody, and there were so many celebrities all over the place, you know, interviewing everybody I came across, and then riding on the T down to the auditorium and whatnot — it was like, you could hear the excitement. We were figuring it out. And that, once people heard that, they understood it.

It’s always only about people, and media, and that’s what I do. I’m a media programmer, I mean — I don’t know about other areas. I mean, if you’re doing large-scale databases, I imagine users never even know what you’re doing. But that’s never true with what I do. It’s always about users.
di

Kamis, 28 Juni 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Five things The New York Times learned from its three-year hyperlocal experiment

Posted: 27 Jun 2012 12:34 PM PDT

With yesterday’s news that The New York Times is ending its affiliation with The Local — a pair of hyperlocal blogs that the newspaper launched three years ago — an experiment came to a close. And from the outset, the Times made it clear that it thought of its dive into neighborhood coverage as just that — an experiment, not an investment likely to generate financial returns. As the Times’ Jim Schachter told us in 2009, The Local would be, within the context of the Times, “barely enough to create a ripple in a pond and not enough to be profitable.”

But nonetheless, even with expectations set low, when the Times moves, people notice — and 2009 was a boom time for interest in hyperlocal, Times or no Times. Some running home-grown hyperlocal sites — the kind more recently assembled under the Authentically Local banner — questioned whether a big institution like The New York Times would have the right mix to pull off neighborhood coverage. (Check out the comments on that 2009 post to see the back-and-forth between Schachter and West Seattle Blog’s Tracy Record.)

The Local project started with a pair of community-focused sites covering neighborhoods in Brooklyn and New Jersey. By June 2010, the Jersey version of The Local was shuttered. Months later, the Times and NYU jointly launched an East Village iteration.

The Local was billed as an open-ended project with some specific ideas in mind. Blogs would be helmed by a couple of professional New York Times reporters, but story ideas and contributions would come from the community. If all went well, it might create a platform the Times could license to other communities.

“We, at least, have not figured out how to extract the professional journalist, or minimize it close to anything nearing zero”

As it turned out, the Times ended up handing off editorial control to local journalism schools — CUNY along with NYU — while keeping The Local branded as a collaboration with The New York Times. The schools have now formed committees to figure out what to do now that the newspaper is exiting, and Schachter — whose own Times goodbye party is tomorrow — told me that the newspaper “is giving them time to figure it out.”

Meanwhile, the newspaper is sussing out what it learned from the experiment. “What we have been trying to figure out at the Times — and I think what lots of people in this space have been trying to fiure out — is how do you prompt communities, and can you prompt communities into the act of covering themselves in a meaningful way?”

Schachter says there’s plenty to consider, and that “the truth is, we are not as good as we should be about learning from these initiatives.” Here’s a start, with five takeaways on what he believes The Local taught The New York Times.

1. It just doesn’t make sense for big media companies to pay their staffs to go hyperlocal.

The New York Times is a national and global news organization. Schachter says while covering neighborhoods has been “useful to become familiar with commercial issues related to hyperlocal,” it hasn’t been altogether practical.

“Honestly, if hyperlocal is not core to a media organization’s business, then a media organization cannot possibly be fully engaged in it,” he said. “Large media organizations cannot afford to cover large geographic areas in a hyperlocal way using exclusively paid staff.”

That doesn’t mean there aren’t hyperlocal projects that can benefit both big newspapers and community reporters — Schachter cites offering basic journalism training courses. “Doing online courses on how to develop a hyperlocal blog and how to do community journalism,” Schachter said, “I think that that’s something that news organiaztions ought to learn from and think about: What skills do they have that, without undermining their own efforts, they can share and can make money from…inviting people into newsrooms and showing them how to do journalism.”

2. Hard-hitting hyperlocal coverage benefits from some professional journalism.

Schachter believes that “if you want to get really good content that gets hard questions answered, you need a fair amount of professional journalism.” Whether that’s a New York Times reporter or a NYU journalism professor, you need someone who knows his way around a courtroom or a city council meeting or a FOIA request. Not every citizen has those skills. “We, at least, have not figured out how to extract the professional journalist or minimize it close to anything nearing zero,” he said.

3. Create a platform that makes it easy for people to participate in diverse ways.

Not everyone can write an account of the day’s news that The New York Times would publish. But that doesn’t mean that only professional journalists can produce meaningful work. From Schachter:

“If you can lower the barriers to participation, you’ll be more successful. If people think the only way to contribute is to write a New York Times quality article, you’ll only get so much engagement…But if sending in a photograph, answering a question, tweeting, taking notes for posting at a community board meeting — if all those are ways that people can participate, then you’ve broadened participation.”

Schachter also says the technology must facilitate participation. One way that The Local East Village tried to do that was through its Virtual Assignment Desk, a WordPress plugin that helps organize story pitches in a way that’s viewable by the public. The blog’s Open Assignment page details story ideas that haven’t been executed, and enables people to support or volunteer for coverage.

4. Understand the power of email.

Both of The Local sites have daily email newsletters, which is nothing usual among major news organizations, but is also a distribution technique that Schachter says smaller outfits shouldn’t overlook: “Media organizations overlook the power of this very simple tool. If people will opt into letting it into their mailbox, you are so far down the path of making them loyal audience members. The things you can lead them to do once they’ve made that choice are just immense.”

5. Don’t abandon experiments in “innovation land.”

The Local may have been billed an experiment from its inception — but more integration with the Times’ regular city reporters would have helped it thrive, Schachter said.

“I would have been much more aggressive, acting faster about pulling the experiment directly into the orbit of the Metro Desk,” he said. “Once you get an experiment going, by whatever means, get the people who are doing similar things in a nonexperimental, day-to-day way. Getting them to take ownership of it and love it and make it theirs is just critical.”

Schachter says then-metro editor Joe Sexton was “incredibly generous with resources and enthusiasm and support,” but the Times failed to truly embed The Local sites in the newsroom.

“They would have been a better teaching tool if they were less peripheral,” Schachter said. “Just sort of editorial ownership of it being right on the Metro Desk, as opposed to it being something that was considered independent, autonomous, budgetarily distinct…It stayed in innovation land, as opposed to ‘we’ve incubated it.’”

Schachter says the Times has already applied this lesson to its India Ink blog, which launched last September and “has ownership” by the foreign desk. (We wrote about India Ink a few weeks ago.)

That being said, The New York Times has incorporated some of what came from The Local into its basic metro coverage. Schachter says The Local has helped refine ideas on effective crowdsourcing, and features that are now part of the City Room. Urban Forager, for example, had its beginnings in The Local.

So what does any of this tell us about the future of hyperlocal news, and the extent to which industry attitudes have shifted in the past three years? Around the time The Local was starting up, there was a lot of buzz about Maine’s Village Soup as a hyperlocal model; most of its operations shut down in March. And plowing some of The Local’s same New Jersey turf at launch was Patch, whose financial life under AOL has been challenging. Many Authentically Local-style sites continue to do well, but their models haven’t scaled at the rate some would have hoped a few years ago.

“The industry was cratering at the time [in 2009], and a lot of news organzations were trying to figure out how do we save ourselves,” Schachter said. “They saw what was going on all around them — in the sense this was back to their roots — enough to say, ‘Can we figure out how to go back to providing coverage of local news?’ Most of the news organizations that engaged with this had so devastated their reporting ranks that, in my view, they were left to be shadowboxing with the idea because they couldn’t engage with it. Meantime, AOL, of all organizations, poured heart and soul into it. God bless them.”

How do you tell when the news is biased? It depends on how you see yourself

Posted: 27 Jun 2012 08:30 AM PDT

Take a moment with the headlines from this screenshot of The New York Times homepage from January. Really — it’s a little experiment. Click the image above for a larger view if you need to.

Ready?

How did you feel about these headlines? Does it matter to you to learn that they actually came from Fox News on the same day? (Screenshot for proof.) This faux home page was created by Dan Schultz, the MIT grad student also responsible for Truth Goggles, using his NewsJack point-and-click “remixer.”

Knowing what you know now, do these headlines seem different to you? If so, you’ve just proved that we detect and judge bias based on things other than what journalists actually write.

This effect has been noticed before. At the University of Michigan, William Youmans and Katie Brown showed the same Al Jazeera English news clip to American audiences, but with a catch: Half saw the news with its original Al Jazeera logo intact, and half saw the same video with a CNN logo instead. Viewers who saw the story with the original Al Jazeera logo rated Al Jazeera as more biased than before they had seen the clip. But people who watched the same footage with the fake CNN logo on it rated CNN as less biased than before!

Does this mean that we judge “bias” by brand, not content? Many people have tried to define what media bias is, and attempted to measure it, but I want to try to answer a different question here: not how we can decide if the news is biased, but how each of us actually does decide — and what it means for journalists.

The hostile media effect

During the Lebanese civil war in 1982, Christian militias in Beirut massacred thousands of Palestinian refugees while Israeli solders stood by. In 1985, researchers showed television news coverage of the event to pro-Israeli and pro-Arab viewers. Both sides thought the coverage was biased against them.

This effect — where both sides feel that a neutral story is biased against them — has been replicated so many times, in so many different cultural settings, with so many types of media and stories, that it has its own name: hostile media effect. The same story can make everyone on all sides think the media is attacking them.

Like a lot of experimental psychological research, the hostile media effect suggests we’re not as smart as we think we are. We might like to think of ourselves as impartial judges of credibility and fairness, but the evidence says otherwise. Liberals and conservatives can (and often do) believe the same news report is biased against both their views; they aren’t both right.

But why does this happen? Specifically, why does it happen for some stories and topics and not others? Discussion of climate change often provokes charges of bias, but discussion of other hugely significant science stories, such as the claimed link between vaccination and autism, usually produces a much smaller outcry.

You see bias when you see yourself as part of a group

Communications researcher Scott Reid has proposed that we can explain the hostile media effect through the psychological theory of self-categorization. This is a theory about personal identity and group identity, and it says that we “self-stereotype,” placing conceptual labels on ourselves just as we might make assumptions about other people. We all have multiple identities of this kind: gender, age, political preferences, race, nationality, subculture, and so on.

To test this, he performed a series of recently published experiments with American students. In the first, he used a survey to ask people whether they thought the media was biased, as well as their personal political orientations, both on a numerical scale from liberal to conservative. The catch was different groups got different cover pages with different sets of instructions. The first set of instructions was neutral:

The purpose of this questionnaire is to get your views of the news media in general.

The second set of instructions was designed to play up feelings of partisanship:

In recent times the differences between Republicans and Democrats have become highly polarized. Many of the issues discussed in the media are seen very differently by Republicans and Democrats. In this context, it is important to gauge people’s views of the media.

The third set of instructions was also designed to reinforce an identity, but in this case an identity that might be common to both liberals and conservatives — that of being an “American” versus the rest of the world.

With increasing globalization, it has become apparent that the media differs across countries and cultures. Al Jazeera has become the voice for much of the Arab world, both within the United States and in the Middle East. Given these changes, it is important to gauge people’s views of the news media in the United States.

And, oddly enough, the same survey gave different results, depending on the instructions:

Each of the lines on this graph shows how people’s perception of bias varied with their political orientation. The downward slope means that the more conservative someone was — the farther to the right on the “political position” scale — the more they perceived the media as hostile to Republicans, just as expected.

The surprising thing is that the strength of this perception depended on the framing each group had been given. When people were prompted to think about Republicans and Democrats, they perceived more media bias against their views, as indicated by the steep dashed line. When they were instructed to think about America vs. the world, they perceived slightly less bias then the neutral condition, as indicated by the shallow dotted line. Our perception of bias changes depending on the self-identity we currently have in mind.

This self-categorization explanation also predicts that people who are more partisan perceive greater bias, even when the news is in their favor. In Reid’s second experiment, people read an article about polling numbers for the 2008 presidential primaries, containing language like “among Republicans, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani maintained a 14-point lead over Arizona Sen. John McCain for the Republican presidential nomination,” and similar statements about the Democratic candidates. This time, the source of the information was manipulated: One group saw the poll attributed to the “Economic Policy Institute, a Democrat think tank and polling agency,” while the other was told it came from the “American Enterprise Institute, a Republican think tank and polling agency.”

In this purely factual scenario — dry-as-toast poll numbers, no opinions, no editorializing — respondents still had completely different reactions depending on the source. As you might expect, people who believed that the poll numbers came from the American Enterprise Institute thought that the story was biased towards Giuliani (and vice versa), confirming the hostile media effect. But the perception of favoritism increased not according to whether the reader personally identified as Republican or Democratic, but on how strong this identification was. The implication is that if you feel strongly about your group, you’re likely to see all news as more biased — even when the bias favors you.

Reid’s final experiment tested perceptions of overt attacks. He used a scathing review of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911, originally published on Slate, which begins:

One of the many problems with the American left, and indeed of the American left, has been its image and self-image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring.

The copy given to subjects (falsely) claimed the author was a member of either a Democrat or a Republican think tank. (In reality, the author was the late Christopher Hitchens.) As you might expect, people who identified as Republicans saw the review as more neutral, regardless of who they thought wrote it. The strange thing is that strong Democrats actually saw the review as slightly in favor of Democrats when they believed it was written by a Democrat! We interpret criticism completely differently depending on how we see the relationship between ourselves and the author.

What’s a journalist to do?

The first defense against accusations of bias is to report fairly. But the hostile media effect pretty much guarantees that some stories are going to be hated by just about everyone, no matter how they’re written. I suppose this is no surprise for any journalist who reads the comments section, but it has implications for how news organizations might respond to such accusations.

This research also suggests that the longstanding practice of journalists hiding their personal affiliations might actually be effective at reducing perceived bias. But only up to a point: To avoid charges of bias, the audience needs to be able to see the journalist as fundamentally one of them. This might require getting closer to the audience, not hiding from them. If we each live inside of many identities, then there are many possible ways to connect; conversely, it would be helpful to know, empirically, under what conditions a journalist’s politics are actually going to be a problem for readers, and for which readers.

We might also want to consider our framing more carefully. Because perceptions of bias depend on how we are thinking about our identity in that moment, if we can find a way to tell our stories outside of partisan frames, we might also reduce feelings of unfairness. The trick would be to shy away from invoking divisive identities, preferring frames that allow members of a polarized audience to see themselves as part of the same group. (In this regard, the classic “balanced” article that quotes starkly opposing sides might be a particularly bad choice.)

Encouraging the audience to perceive itself as unified — this seems simplistic, or naïve. But the consideration of identity is foundational to fields like mediation and conflict resolution. Experimental evidence suggests that it might be important in journalism too.

The newsonomics of the News Corp. split

Posted: 27 Jun 2012 05:12 AM PDT

Are two Ruperts even better than one? We may soon find out, as News Corp. moves forward today to clone itself.

The cloning, or splitting, of the $34 billion company certainly has its logic. Hive off those pesky newspaper assets and the company’s book arm HarperCollins into a separate company. Then let the News Corp. entertainment conglomerate — satellite, cable, broadcast, movies, and more — focus on global opportunities as both the Internet and old-fashioned pipes offer seemingly unlimited upside for the distribution of entertainment content. (Fox News, best understood for its entertainment value, would go appropriately with the entertainment company, not the publishing one. That raises the question of whether those two operations, to be owned by separate companies, would continue to uneasily share prime Times Square office space. And who gets the News Corp. name? The company with the news or the company without it?)

The split made sense even before Hackgate. Viacom, Belo, and Scripps all split off growing assets over the last several years to investors’ cheers. This sequestering of no-growth — what the newspaper business, charitably, has become — businesses has its logic. Media ain’t what it used to be. And now it’s businesses like Fox Sports, Searchlight Films, and Sky Italia more than old newsprint-based life forms.

News Corp.’s high-end Wall Street Journal and lowlier Sun may still be turning some small profits. But other News Corp. properties — from The Times of London and Sunday Times to the New York Post to The Australian — are in bad shape. Just last week, News Corp. announced a major restructuring of its Aussie operations, while the Times properties and Post have hemorrhaged money for a long time. The newspapers have become a drag for News Corp., literally and figuratively.

Of course, Hackgate has upped the pressure to do something. Investors who had disdained the earnings impact of the newspapers on the company’s bottom line, watched in amazement as the whole lowly news trade allowed insolent MPs to upbraid and condemn it publicly. They’ve seen a News Corp. leadership distracted by the mess.

More importantly — and to the point here — is Murdoch’s relentless goal to dominate global entertainment and sports distribution.

Expect the new publishing company to last as a Murdoch-family-directed enterprise as long as Rupert lasts.

This split is a new play, a long play — an end-around, really — to finally buy full control of SkyTV. That goal was apparently upended by Hackgate, but one that Murdoch still pursues. News Corp. has considered placing the U.K. papers in a trust (“The newsonomics of trusts, news trusts, and Murdoch trustworthiness”) and now a company split looks like Plan B. The entertainment News Corp. can say to authorities — not now, but later — “Sure, those untrustworthy news guys did awful things, but that was them, not us.”

Expect that in the split, of course, the Murdoch family will do quite well financially. Investors will be happier, as they showed Tuesday in bidding the stock up 8 percent. The new road to BSkyB will be paved. And Rupert will still be able to play publisher.

Rupert, the old newspaper man, has been the one-man barrier to sale of the newspapers and to this kind of split. Rupert the Gamesman gives a little ground here and there, only as he needs to, keeping his eye on the big game. We can see that game playing out around the world.

News Corp. has been a relentless juggernaut, building mighty entertainment/sports businesses, TV distribution, and movie franchises. In Australia, Rupert’s home base, even as his press operations (which have an astounding 70 percent market share there) prepare for significant cuts, he’s making a $2 billion bid to gain control of the largest pay-TV operation there. Earlier this year, he made satellite moves in the Middle East to add to his holdings across Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.

Unleashing the bigger business from the annoyances of news simply lets News Corp. double down on its five-continent plan to dominate entertainment programming. Let’s take a brief look at the newsonomics of what the News Corp. split may mean to its newspapers.

What would become the publishing company generated just 10 percent of News Corp.’s total profits in its last fiscal year. That’s even though it accounted for 27 percent of News Corp.’s revenues. Those revenues are down another 4 percent so far this year.

For the next full year, it should generate about $8.3 billion in revenues and $600 million in profit. Even with HarperCollins’ revenues (of about $1 billion) separated out, the new company would still be the largest news company in the world. Second-place Gannett reported $5.2 billion in revenue and $458 million in profit in 2011.

The Journal/Dow Jones would be about a seventh of the publishing company, but clearly its jewel, the newspaper trophy mistress that Rupert can’t give up. Those old Dow Jones operations — including Barrons, Marketwatch, All Things D, Factiva, and other business research lines — account for about $1.3 billion in revenues. The Journal and news businesses make up about $1 billion of that.

Just last week, the Journal/Dow Jones operations saw a major shakeup. (The Dow Jones name remains attached to that spate of properties, though for most consumer-facing purposes, the Wall Street Journal Digital Network is gaining favor as the umbrella term for its mouthful of brands.) Five years after Murdoch bought the Journal, all its products have been brought under one leadership for the first time. New CEO Lex Fenwick, appointed to replace Hackgate-tainted Les Hinton, put fast-rising Alisa Bowen in charge. The Reuters grad will now bring unified business management to the newspaper and print businesses, as well as newswires and the Factiva/B2B businesses.

That B2C/B2B integration has bedeviled Dow Jones, as it has Reuters. However it plays out under Bowen’s leadership, it’s just one of numerous transformations to watch. Dow Jones shares the same menu of intriguing challenges and opportunities with its peers.

At the top of Bowen’s list, she told me this week:

  • News-everywhere strategies. The company’s been a leader in Facebook-connected TV and just announced a Pulse deal Tuesday. Expect to see more deals like the recently announced NYT/Flipboard deal as digital subscription pass-throughs become more common.
  • Video, video, video. WSJ Live, its tablet app now available on the desktop web, is a hit. Bowen notes recent shows launched from Hong Kong, London, and Washington. Video is doubly satisfying audiences and advertisers.
  • International expansion. The Journal launched a German language site in January, and Bowen says there’s more to come later this year.

Everywhere. Video. Global. The words are both highly strategic and increasingly commonplace, especially in the hypercompetitive business news marketplace.

The new company would face Bloomberg’s voracious competitiveness in business news and data. Giant Reuters, with the largest single journalism workforce globally, is (again) reorganized to do battle in the news and financial spaces. Its most head-to-head competition comes from the Financial Times. Both aim at the global business class, newly digitized and energized.

Comparing the circulations of the two “papers” isn’t easy. The FT reports about 600,000 combined circulation, 285,000 of it digital. The Wall Street Journal reported 2,118,315 “total average circulation” in its last report. One thing we can count here is numbers; the other, reader revenue. The FT, with majority reader revenue, is a high-priced buy, an aggressive price leader. The Journal has a long, continuing history of discounting, which boosts sales, but results in significantly lower yield per customer. Will the next-gen Journal price more like the FT?

The new company’s New York-based branch (minus the Post) starts to look a lot like the FT and its parent, Pearson. With a leading business news franchise (the Journal and the WSJ Network), a consumer book publisher (HarperCollins) and an education business (headed by Joel Klein, who may take on a larger role within the new company), it looks a lot like Pearson’s lineup — though Pearson, of course, is a leader in the education market, while Dow Jones’ efforts are more startup-like.

For the new publishing company’s general interest newspapers — and doesn’t that term seem increasingly outdated year-by-year? — the future is much murkier.

In the print turndown, the New York Post, The Times, and Sunday Times have been largely saved from the worst fears of their news peers, who now stare extinction in the face. The deep pockets of News Corp. provided a soft pillow against those night terrors. The proceeds of Titanic and The Descendants have been offsetting many journalists’ salaries for years.

In the absence of that constructive subsidy, how much and how well will the publishing company be capitalized, and where will the liabilities go? It’s common for the struggling spinoffs in these media company separations to be set up without debt, to give them a better chance at resetting themselves. For News Corp., it’s a unique question, with an open liability issue attached to the newspapers themselves due to Hackgate-related suits that may well stretch on for some time and number more than 500.

As to cash, News Corp. has about $11 billion on hand. Certainly, some can be apportioned to the new company — but the entertainment conglomerate’s appetite for big, expensive acquisitions is only growing.

What will newspaper resources look like in 2013 and 2014? Without deeper and deeper cost-cutting, given print advertising’s continuing spiral downward, the new publishing company’s thin 7 percent profit margin would disappear quickly. Even with a Murdoch squarely in charge, it looks a major round of Australia cost-cutting is imminent, but that may not be enough in Sydney or London.

However capitalized, we can assume the standalone publishing company would be more subject to the market pressures than it has been as a division of a singular company. Sure, we know Rupert plans to keep feeding all his newspaper children for the foreseeable future. Still, the creation of a news-plus-books company increases the performance pressure on these newspapers; no longer can their subpar performance be obscured in the larger News Corp. quarterly reports.

Such pressure could lead to sale, closure, or deeper cutting of costs, no matter which Murdoch or non-Murdoch is running the company. Don’t expect Warren Buffett to be a buyer. In fact, as U.K. analysts assessed who might buy News Corp. properties there if Hackgate forced Murdoch from the market, only a few distant possibilities were raised — and their interest lies primarily with The Sun.

Expect the new publishing company to last as a Murdoch-family-directed enterprise as long as Rupert lasts. After Rupert, the Journal (and Dow Jones) plus whatever remains of his regional newspapers, will pass to someone else. The next Murdoch generation has made it abundantly clear it wants to focus on the global entertainment business.

For us, as readers who care about serious, well-reported, well-weighed journalism, done by talented people, it’s another long game. The hope: The Journal’s journalism, in scale and quality, survives this next change and is still here in 10 years.
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