Nieman Journalism Lab |
- The commuter’s dilemma, solved: News.me and (now) Instapaper ready stories when you walk out the door
- In Brazil, the nonprofit model for journalism is just being born
- Slate doubles down on podcasts, courting niche audiences and happy advertisers
| Posted: 04 Jun 2012 10:42 AM PDT
Raise your hand if this scenario sounds familiar: You’re rushing to catch the subway/plane and only moments before boarding do you stop to think about what you’re going to read en route. Suddenly you remember that one great story you saw and wanted to read later. You scramble to launch your favorite reading app only to find you can’t update it in time. The subway/plane door closes, and so does your window of opportunity. Okay, sure, the commuter’s dilemma falls squarely in the category of first world problems. It’s an annoyance, but an important one given the increasing amount of time we spend with mobile devices and our access-anywhere expectations. Now two reading apps — News.me a month ago and, as of Saturday, Instapaper — have updated their apps to allow location-based background downloads of new stories. In English: It grabs your newest stories whenever you enter or leave a place. In News.me, you define your home location in the app and whenever you leave those coordinates, it grabs the latest news. Similarly, Instapaper lets you set 10 different locations (home, office, classroom, gym, your favorite bar, etc.) that will trigger updates. All of this is possible thanks to geofencing, the same idea that pings us when we’re near a restaurant we want to try on Foursquare or shoots us a reminder to pick up laundry detergent when we’re near a market. Geofencing is popular in retail circles because it’s a way of potentially pulling in customers. Instapaper and News.me are putting a new spin on it, an ingenious nod to the old/new reading habit that is being developed. In one way or another, we geofenced our reading in analog ways in the past. You made sure to have a magazine or book with you when you hopped on a plane or subway. Of course, back then, you didn’t have to wait for that latest article from New York to download before you could read it. Jake Levine, general manager of News.me, told me over email most of the News.me team are subway riders, so they ran into the offline reading problem frequently. Paperboy, the geofencing feature they created, was made by iOS developer Rob Haining, who detailed some of the back-end specifics. Levine said they wanted to adjust the social reading app to the new news routine. “For some people it starts with waking up, sitting down with a cup of coffee, and flipping through the newspaper. For many, it’s leaving home, commuting via public transportation, and powering up their iPhone,” he said. “Unlike newspapers, which are built for offline consumption, digital applications require some extra effort on the part of the user to work offline.” These new location-based features are something of a hack. Apple allows a limited number of apps to download content in the background, most notably newspapers and magazines in the Newsstand. Arment writes on the Instapaper blog:
If you own a smartphone, it’s likely you do a fair share of reading on it, which is why news publishers and the universe of reading apps that surround them are trying to find more effective ways of delivering the content you want. Filtration and customization have been big areas of focus, but smarter delivery appears to be the next step. While these location-based features are designed for readers who find themselves suddenly offline, more granular updating for stories could prove very valuable to all readers. It’s not hard to imagine the possibilities this opens up for mobile devices: top stories in the morning when you leave home, your favorite blogs delivered as you leave for lunch, saved stories updated in time for evening commute. And the best part? It’s all ready when you open the app. Image by F.C. Photography used under a Creative Commons license. |
| In Brazil, the nonprofit model for journalism is just being born Posted: 04 Jun 2012 09:30 AM PDT
In the United States, the nonprofit model for journalism has been around for decades, but in Brazil, it’s a novelty. For three award-winning journalists, it’s a novelty seen as the the only way to reporting on issues and in areas neglected by traditional media organizations. That’s why, in March 2011, Tatiana Merlin, Marina Amaral, and Natalia Viana founded Publica. Publica (“everything that belongs to the public” in Portuguese) is the first nonprofit investigative journalism center in the world’s fifth largest country. But as it enters its second year of existence, its leaders are more sure than ever than nonprofit models can’t simply be copy-pasted from one continent to another. The team has been inspired by models overseas — particularly the U.K.’s Bureau of Investigative Reporting, which Viana followed closely while she was living in London — but Publica demands invention. “It works very differently for every country,” Viana said. “You have to be very creative in all aspects.” Brazil doesn’t have as long a history with a free and aggressive press as some countries; it was governed by a military dictatorship as recently as 1985. Viana said there is investigative reporting that focuses on corruption in the federal government, but that other areas don’t get as much attention. “There’s not a thriving culture of investigating corporations, human rights violations, or social issues,” she told me. And that’s meant that Publica has chosen to focus on a few key investigative areas where it sees a need for digging that isn’t being done enough elsewhere, areas they consider “essential” for Brazil’s future and the “quality of its democracy,” especially now that the country is on its way of becoming an economic superpower.
Publica operates with a small team — six people, their roles often interchangeable. Other outlets can republish (and buy) Publica’s stories only, but only if they don’t edit them. “Our focus is always on the public interest,” Viana told me. Not surprisingly, the most challenging task in these 14 months of operations has been creating a network of funders and partners. Publica didn’t have revenue until early this year, when the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundations made a seed investment. Both groups are giving money for a one-year project Publica pitched to them, hoping that the site will find sustainable revenue streams. Along with that investment and donations, the center is working on a few other ideas:
Publica’s dealt with some doubt from their peers in the news business. “Media executives don’t believe this model of not-for-profit is possible,” Viana said. But Publica’s worked to build a set of partners around the country, starting off with independent bloggers, and now working with a number of larger, traditional outlets like Agora (one of Sao Paulo’s major dailies) and three newspapers from the Amazon region. They’ve also built content partnerships with a number of U.S. and South American news outlets. Viana doesn’t rule out future collaboration with the largest big media corporations in Brazil: “We want our stories to be spread.” |
| Slate doubles down on podcasts, courting niche audiences and happy advertisers Posted: 04 Jun 2012 07:30 AM PDT
The New York Times started making podcasts way back in 2004, when the form was barely more than a concept and the term itself was new. In December 2011, the Times dropped nearly all of them, saying, in an opaque statement, “there may be other venues and programs that may be more advantageous in connecting with our audience.” And then Boston Globe editor Marty Baron tweeted: “We dropped podcast years ago. Big time commitment, little gain.” Are podcasts on the way out? “We just all laughed at that,” said Andy Bowers, Slate’s executive producer of podcasts. Bowers, a 20-year veteran of NPR, came to Slate in 2003.1 He has created every one of Slate’s 19 podcasts, including four new ones in the last year. Three more are in the planning phase. Podcast downloads now top 1 million a month, Bowers said, almost double the numbers from 2010. Hundreds of people show up for live tapings of the podcasts and pay for tickets. And they’re apparently a big hit with advertisers, who pay higher rates to advertise in Slate podcasts than any other kind of content. So the Times announcement was a head-scratcher. “We thought, really? This isn’t working for you?” Bowers said. “Because for us it really is the part of Slate that people are absolutely most engaged with.” Gabfest, the podcast that started it allSlate’s first podcast, the weekly Political Gabfest, remains its most popular. That show spawned the Culture Gabfest, in 2008, Slate’s second most popular. Bowers had the idea for the Gabfest almost seven years ago. “I would listen to our Slate editorial conference calls, where people just love to throw out ideas and debate them and argue about them, and they were really funny and fun and insightful,” Bowers said. (It must have been a sea of counter-intuitive Slate pitches!) “I thought, you know, if I could just capture this in a podcast, I think people would [find it] really interesting. It would be like the discussion the political reporters have at the bar.”
Today, about 375 episodes later, Bowers said downloads typically reach five to six figures per episode. What makes it work is not a groundbreaking format but an expertly arranged mix of personalities: editor David Plotz and writers Emily Bazelon and John Dickerson have an infectious rapport. (And they love to do it. To cancel one of these shows, Bowers said, he “would have to pry the microphones out of their cold, dead hands.”) The Gabfest counts among its fans Stephen Colbert, so loyal a listener he once phoned Plotz to ask why the hell a particular episode was late getting out. (I confirmed this with Colbert.) Today Slate’s slate of podcasts includes Hang Up and Listen, a sports show; Lexicon Valley, a language show; and Manners for the Digital Age, hosted by Slate’s tech columnist and its advice columnist. A big hit with listeners was Negotiation Academy, a limited-run podcast that ran for 10 episodes. Jill Barshay and Seth Stevenson offered lessons for negotiating in real-life situations — rent, salary, cars, children. That podcast was more like an audiobook, a nutritionally dense show that covered a single topic. Bowers said he’s developing concepts for similar shows. Slate podcasts have ballooned not only in number but in length. The Gabfest was originally 15 minutes, the longest Bowers thought listeners could take. But listeners kept writing in and asking for the podcasts to be longer, then longer still. Now most programs are about 45 minutes long. “Where else on the Internet do people go and seek out something that’s 45 minutes long and listen to it week after week after week, year after year?” Bowers said. “That kind of engagement is pretty extraordinary.” Advertising appealThat kind of engagement is what appeals to advertisers, said Slate publisher John Alderman. He would not tell me how much money Slate makes from podcasts but that “it is definitely a profitable part of the business.” Slate charges a higher ad rate for podcasts than for any of its other content. And Slate podcasts have the highest sell-through rate; that is, Slate sells fills a higher percentage of its ad slots in podcasts than in story pages or videos. “What we found, and what the advertisers found, is it’s incredibly powerful when the person is speaking to you, whether you’re in the car or making dinner,” Alderman told me. “The conversational tone of podcasts and especially the Slate podcasts make it a truly personal connection.” The model is not unlike commercial talk radio, or television newscasts of the 1950s. Hosts drop sponsored product mentions into the middle of conversation. They are encouraged to describe their personal experience with the product. Because the ads fit no particular formula, they are hard to tune out. Listen to how Plotz drops in this ad for GoToMeeting, between topics: “The podcast is incredibly intimate, people connect with us deeply,” Plotz said in a live taping of the Gabfest last month in New York. “And they connect with Slate because they like spending time with us on the show.” Plotz tells me he has been stopped “tons of times” by passersby who identify him by the sound of his voice. Niche audiencesSo why didn’t podcasts work for The Boston Globe or The New York Times? In an email, I asked Baron to explain that tweet:
The Times and the Globe are general-interest publications with different audiences. General interest may not work so well in podcasting, where listeners have so much choice. “I think what the Times did is, they made a choice,” Bowers said. “They could have done front-page style or op-ed page style. And they chose front page. And I think that was the wrong choice for podcasting. I think opinion and criticism and personality are important in podcasting, and they chose not to do that. In the political one, they said ‘Mr. Obama’ and ‘Mr. Romney,’ and I think that’s a little too formal for the medium.” The Times’ two remaining podcasts are Book Review with Sam Tannehaus and Science Times with David Corcoran. Both are highly produced, with music, billboards (introductions that tease upcoming segments of the show), and recorded interviews. Slate’s Gabfests require little editing, Bowers said, making them efficient to produce. It sounds like the host turns on the microphone and starts talking — and that’s pretty much what it is. Bowers did virtually everything you can do in radio during his time at NPR: London bureau chief, Moscow bureau chief, White House correspondent, media correspondent. He oversaw the innovative collaboration between Slate writers and Day to Day, NPR’s erstwhile midday magazine. “Coming from radio, where real estate on the air is incredibly valuable — I look at the Internet as a great place to experiment and try things,” he said. And the next frontier for podcasts? The car. “I have a Ford that has a Bluetooth connection to the phone. I get in the car and I start listening to the podcast, and I get to the store and it pauses. And then I get in and it picks up again,” he said. “It’s even easier than TiVo, because you don’t have to remember to set the timer.” Photo of Andy Bowers (center) at a 2011 live taping of Political Gabfest courtesy of Grinnell College. Foreground, left to right: John Dickerson, David Plotz, Emily Bazelon. Notes
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