Rabu, 06 Juni 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Sometimes, less is more in a world of information overload

Posted: 05 Jun 2012 01:00 PM PDT

Read Never

From time to time I’ll Gchat with News.me general manager Jake Levine about future-of-news things. Today I quizzed him about what he learned from Last Great Thing, a 20-day experiment in which Internet tastemakers shared one and only one great thing every day.

Every night, yesterday’s Great Thing disappeared, replaced by the new. There were no archives, “the most controversial part of the experiment by far,” wrote Levine and collaborator Justin Van Slembrouck:

Some readers were taken with the distraction-free experience of getting just one smart thing to read or view. Some of our contributors also found it refreshing to think that their posts wouldn’t necessarily be etched on the web for all time.

But other readers and contributors were less enthusiastic. Contributor Khoi Vinh felt that users were needlessly punished for not having visited the site in time to catch a given day’s post. And soon enough, we at News.me started to see some of the downsides of an archive-free site. Logistically, not providing posts with permalinks proved to be incompatible with services like Readability and Findings — a fact that a few users found irritating.

Attention information hoarders: News.me has now released an archive of all those great things, allowing you to catch up on whatever you missed. Whew, aren’t you glad you have more to read now?

I’m not. I’ve had to upgrade the RAM in my iMac to handle all of Chrome’s open tabs. And like so many others, I declared Instapaper bankruptcy months ago. (I have not yet taken the frightful step of clicking the big red Archive All button; it’s so final.) I renamed my Instapaper bookmarklet “Read Never.”

To make matters worse, I recently signed up for a Pocket account and use that to save articles because it’s so nice to have a relatively empty queue again. And when I find an article I really want to read later, I find myself saving it to both my Instapaper and Pocket queues. Absurd.

This guy went even further with something called “Instapaper Placebo”:

I don't need a nice mobile app for reading. I don't need a way to remove all the clutter from the page. I don't need an online cross-platform bookmark syncing service. I just need a way of offloading all my good intentions. A way to stop hoarding links. And with less stuff to read I can make more stuff instead.

So when I receive the News.me daily email every morning, which tells me what stories my friends are talking about (kind of like a personal Fuego), I’m filled with dread. As I scan each story, I am relieved whenever I discover (a) I’ve already read it, (b) it’s something I wrote, or (c) I have no interest in it. Deleting a News.me email without having to open a single link is a good morning indeed.

I am what Levine calls a sadistic news consumer. As he said of my kind in our chat:

They’ll tell you that they want less but they actually want more.
Or they enjoy complaining about having too much to consume.

Levine’s team is employing usage data, as well as some of the lessons learned from the Last Great Thing experiment, to develop the next update to the News.me iPhone app. And the direction they’re headed is less, not more. Again, from our Gchat:

People are coming into the iPhone app and spending about 2 minutes reading a few articles.
Not 100 articles, not 50 articles, not 10 articles.
So in this latest version, we’re bringing people into an experience focused on just the top 5 most relevant articles to them, based on their social signals.

Won’t most users open the full feed, just to see what else is available? I know I would, at least at first. But maybe, after a little while, the extra tap would be enough of a disincentive. I might not be able to mark all articles on the Internet as read, but at least I can knock out this list.

It reminds me of the early days of Facebook’s News Feed, when Facebook felt so much smaller. There was a time when the News Feed limited the number of items in the stream. Remember? And the company actually polled users on whether they wanted more in their news feeds, less, about the same, or as many stories as possible. Users overwhelmingly voted for as many stories as possible. When you can have more, you want more.

This is the same reason I will eat a whole bag of Starburst, no matter how large the bag.

Levine:

I wonder what would happen if NYTimes ran that same poll…
Kevin Slavin, who sometimes advises us, said something really insightful.
He said news is like gas. It will expand to fill any space you create for it.

So Last Great Thing “was an exploration in providing an incredibly bounded set of content,” he said. As readers are overloaded with more every day, many of them — at least the ones who aren’t sadistic — may put their trust in outlets giving them less.

Wilson Quarterly is ending print publication, moving to digital

Posted: 05 Jun 2012 10:57 AM PDT

The Wilson Quarterly — the sometimes wonky Washington-based public affairs magazine — will apparently put out its final print edition this summer. With that same issue, WQ will make its debut on Apple’s Newsstand, a move that suggests a digital-only future for the 36-year-old publication.

Perhaps it’s fitting that its most recent issue was branded “The Age of Connection,” and explored the cultural impact of technological advances.

Wilson Quarterly hasn’t explained the decision to stop printing, other than to say on its website that the quarterly will be “available in print form thru the Summer 2012 issue” and that, along with Apple’s platform, it “will also be available on the Nook, Kindle Fire, and Sony Reader.”

The magazine is published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, which was established through an act of Congress in 1968, and now gets about one-third of its funding from the federal government and the rest through private donations. (According to the center’s most recent annual report, some of its most generous donors include philanthropic institutions like the MacArthur Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, as well as private companies like defense contractors and Exxon Mobil.) In 2010, the center spent $1.96 million on the magazine against $950,000 in revenue.

The Quarterly, launched in 1976, characterizes itself as “a nonpartisan and nonideological window on the world of ideas,” including coverage of foreign affairs with a policy-not-politics approach, as well as extensive book reviews. (The Quarterly’s blog is occasionally home to lighter fodder — take the recent “What We’re Drinking” post that coincided with the long Memorial Day weekend, for example.)

A shift to digital will no doubt cut expenses for the quarterly, and it could give WQ staff more ability to focus on the web, where much of the world of ideas has shifted. But it also risks its connection with readers: If WQ’s readers are print purists — and the cerebral, dense content in the magazine suggests they’re more likely to carry AARP cards than fake IDs — then how likely are they to follow the quarterly into a digital realm?

It’s unclear what pricing will look like. Digital PDF copies cost $6 apiece, while single print copies are $9 (shipped), so it will be interesting to see what WQ charges for access to a tablet edition. (It already sells a Kindle edition for $7 an issue or $24 a year.)

I couldn’t immediately reach editor Steven Lagerfeld on Tuesday afternoon, but he articulated his worries about the larger digital media shift in a column last year:

So let me introduce myself. I am a wristwatch. Or, more accurately, a wristwatch maker. Okay, so I'm really the editor of a print magazine — the media world's equivalent of a wristwatch.

Now, if you're a wristwatch-maker and cell phones come along, you have some choices to make. You could go into the cell phone business. But that doesn't seem like a very good idea. Or you could drastically reduce the quality and price of your watches — dumb them down — in order to sell more of them. Also not a good idea. Actually, it looks like it's really not such a bad thing to be a Rolex in a cell phone world. A fancy watch isn't just a device for telling time. But I don't think I'd want to be a mass-market watch, like Timex.

Lagerfeld went on to describe himself as “agog” at the web, which he characterized as a great place to experiment, but also a space that makes journalists susceptible to misplaced “mania” over what’s to come. (“When the iPad came out, I thought, ‘Oh my God, we have to have an app!’ Well, I cooled down and it turns out it really didn’t make sense to go to the expense of creating apps right away. You’ve just got to keep your head.”)

He concluded:

Will the iPad and other tablets be the salvation of magazines and books? I don't know. What I do know is that print-based people like me need to be prudent, but not gloomy or defensive. It's a scary time but it's exciting too. We need to throw ourselves into it with the same dedication and passion we bring to print.

In sum, you could say my position is that we need to embrace the web but wear a condom. Thank you.

For The New York Times, India Ink is a step toward figuring out how to please a global audience

Posted: 05 Jun 2012 10:44 AM PDT

The New York Times may have a city in its name, but its reach has long been much broader. The birth of a national edition in 1980 and a big push in the 1990s cemented its spread far beyond the tri-state area, and of course the Internet has pushed that reach around the globe. Now an established worldwide player, the Times, like other major news organizations, is trying to figure out its place in the international mediascape.

But just because the Times’ audience is defined more by demographics and interests than by geography, that doesn’t mean location has become meaningless. One of the newspaper’s most important experiments in the space is India Ink, a nine-month-old, English-language, blog-style account of Indian news — including politics, culture, sports, lifestyle, and the arts.

“One of the things the Times is figuring out is what do we do in English around the world? Where do you go with an English-language site in India?” said Jim Schachter, associate managing editor at the Times. “What do we do in foreign languages? What do we do that’s The International Herald Tribune brand, and what do we do that’s The New York Times brand? We’re not decided or settled on any of that. It’s all interesting.”

The Times has used social media, geo-targeted ads (so readers in India see ads for the blog when they visit nytimes.com), and events in India to get the word out about India Ink. India was the right country for such a project because the newspaper already has a “very large number” of readers there, Schachter said. (He wouldn’t give more precise numbers other than to say that India is “very high on our list of international audiences.”)

“The hypothesis was if you heavy-up on content there, and you focus on that audience, there’s something to nurture,” said Schachter. “There’s a thread to pull on. That’s largely what we’re doing. In fact, there’s some work going on now to try and use the ability of our website to target geographically — just sort of get even more in people’s faces.”

“What do we do in foreign languages? What do we do that’s The International Herald Tribune brand, and what do we do that’s The New York Times brand? We’re not decided or settled on any of that.”

Yet despite the promotional work in India, so far, most of the blog’s readers are outside of it. Heather Timmons, who runs India Ink for the Times, estimates that about half of readers are in the U.S., 40 percent in India, and 10 percent elsewhere. The fact that the majority of readers are visiting the blog from outside of India doesn’t surprise Schachter, who suspects that many India Ink readers are from the Indian diaspora “everywhere around the world.”

“If you look at, say, the Google analytics, which is an imperfect gauge, there is large readership where there are large populations of the Indian diaspora: London, greater New York, Houston, Northern California,” Schachter told me in an interview at the newspaper’s New York headquarters. “I mean, those are also big populations. If you start looking at the commenters — so commenters’ locations, Indian surnames — it enforces that impression. That’s a very good thing because, I don’t want to cast dispersion, but there is not a great media diet for the non-resident Indian. So if we’re that, that’s a great thing.”

But it remains to be seen whether that’s enough from a business standpoint. Part of wanting to attract Indian readership means looking for ways to attract Indian ad dollars. And Schachter points out “there are not a lot of marketers who are setting out specifically to hit a global Indian diaspora audience.” But he also says that India Ink is growing, and that “you have to build the audience before you sell the audience.”

As its audience has evolved, so has the blog itself. Timmons runs India Ink with the help of four other full-time reporters who make up The New York Times India team. (India Ink also has some local part-time contributors, Schachter said.) Timmons says she originally envisioned India Ink mainly as a discussion site, rather than news driven. Today, the blog publishes around two pieces of analysis, seven features, and up to 15 news stories a week.

“We would have one big essay/analysis-type piece a day on a topic in the news, with maybe two other short pieces related to news of the day or to NYT stories about India — an interview of someone in the article or a short vignette carved out of a recent story,” she wrote in an email. “But, we have really moved in the direction of reporting on breaking news and sometimes breaking news itself.”

To get an idea of the content mix, here are the stories India Ink offered readers on Thursday:

— An 830-word article on a national strike

— A brief on India’s slowing economic growth rate

— An excerpt from a longer follow-up Times article on the growth numbers

— A 17-photo slideshow of modernist architecture in Mumbai

— An excerpt from a Times article on Indian chess champion Vishy Anand

— An excerpt from a Times article on how India’s “Ultra High Net Worth Individuals” are affecting the global art market

— An Image of the Day, showing an army inspection.

Or consider the package India Ink offered Monday. The Times had an article by Jim Yardley on the excitement surrounding India’s brief mango season. (“Mangoes are objects of envy, love and rivalry as well as a new status symbol for India's new rich.”) India Ink featured an excerpt of the story. But it also ran separate pieces riffing on the topic, telling the diaspora where authentic Indian mangoes could be found in New York and in London and examining the mango’s place in Indian literature.

For The New York Times’ larger India coverage, the existence of India Ink advances coverage in the way that many blogs do. Real-time online coverage of breaking news means that the story that ends up in the printed paper can follow more of a second-day approach. The New York Times’ newspaper coverage of India’s Agni 5 missile launch demonstrates how India Ink coverage feeds into newspaper stories.

Timmons, sharing a byline with the Times’ New Delhi bureau chief Jim Yardley, says the piece they produced was richer in analysis than a traditional first-day story because India Ink had already collected and published reactions to the missile test.

It would have taken a reporter “hours to collect and sift through [what] was there ready and waiting thanks to the Ink team,” Timmons wrote in an email. When it came time to write the story for the paper, she says they were able to think “farther ahead,” and make calls they normally wouldn’t have made. Schachter says this approach is what the Times is increasingly doing across the board “to have any sort of competitive advantage in a world of instantaneous reporting.”

There’s also the benefit of having material ready for print editions around the world — like the International Herald Tribune’s Asia edition, for example. (The Times, which had shared ownership of the IHT with The Washington Post since the 1960s, took over complete ownership in 2002.) The ability to publish to multiple platforms and at just about any time on the world clock raises larger questions.

India is increasingly a media battleground, featuring a fast-growing local sector and numerous foreign players. “Others are there — the FT is there, the BBC is there,” Schachter said. “And then you’ve got a very large and growing indigenous media presence in English and a dozen languages. There’s clear hunger for high-quality news with Western ethics…The upper crust reader doesn’t really trust the Indian press.”

Of course, The New York Times isn’t the only U.S. news presence in India either. The Wall Street Journal launched an Indian news section in 2009 and the blog India Real Time in 2010. Six months after launching the blog in English, it launched a Hindi version of India Real Time that features distinct coverage from its English counterpart. And in the past decade, more than 2,000 new newspapers launched in the country, according to the Los Angeles Times.

“Whether it’s the Press Trust of India or the Times of India or the Hindustan Times, these are all organizations with tons of journalists,” Schachter said. “We’ve got Heather and her band of warriors. And so, you know, it’s this question of whether you can sort of ride the wave — not by aggregating but by being incredibly selective — and have an impact on a conversation in as big a place as that. It’s an interesting test.”

Schachter considers India Ink a small-scale experiment in the Times’ larger international strategy. He doesn’t dismiss the idea of similar country-specific efforts at the Times, but he doesn’t reveal any specific plans either. But the Times has focused on expanding and branding its verticals. (Last month we wrote about the newspaper’s redesigned health living blog, Well.)

“I think you’ll see both core growth and verticals,” Schachter said. “We just put down a heavier bet on Well. A few months ago, we put down a heavier bet on Bits, the technology vertical. Dealbook is a continuing growth story. But, you know, the heart of the enterprise is The New York Times core thing. And I think it’s really incumbent on us to make that grow, too — both from a serving-the-world perspective, and from a making-money perspective, that’s probably where the biggest things are going to come from.”

Photo by Ryan Ready used under a Creative Commons license.

Better know a reader: Umbel wants publishers to have better data on their audience

Posted: 05 Jun 2012 09:06 AM PDT

It’s a question every publisher asks: Who is my audience? It’s a question that can guide your editorial decisions and affect what advertisers you attract. Umbel, a technology company based in Austin, is trying to develop a kit publishers can use to extract a richer set of data about their audiences. And they just got funding through the Knight Foundation.

The Knight Enterprise Fund, Knight’s venture investment arm, recently took part in a $3.7 million Series A funding round for Umbel. The specific investment amount was not disclosed. This is the third project Knight has invested in as part of its $10 million fund for media innovation. Ben Wirz, director of business consulting for the Knight Foundation, told me the foundation was interested in Umbel because of its potential to help make for- and nonprofit media more sustainable through better data. “Traditional publishers have a hard time identifying what it is the audience is responding to in their content,” Wirz said. “Umbel brings scalable ways of doing that.”

The company describes its product as a combination of old-school market research and new-school web analytics. Imagine a scenario where a publisher is able to cross-reference a reader’s profile on their news site with information gathered through social media profiles and other online behaviors. The product, still in private beta, triangulates all the signals we leave around the Internet to try to create a unified picture. You can see how this would be useful to a news outlet that wants to better tailor its content for readers or simply needs better ammunition to raise their CPMs. (And you can see how it might raise the hackles of privacy advocates.)

“I think really our core value proposition is to enable publishers to take value of their inventory and give them data that is more precise,” said Paul Krasinski, Umbel’s CEO. The value return comes from reducing reliance on ad networks to sell inventory at lower rates and take a cut out of the revenue, Krasinski said. With the data provided by Umbel, a publisher has more nuanced information to take directly to advertisers. And they can do so without relying on audience surveys, which invariably rely on a small sample size and often yield little more than basic demographic information.

Umbel aims to build on the work done by companies like Nielsen or Arbitron and merge it with web analytics like Omniture as well as information gathered through social channels. The output is something better than just a sheet of pageviews, time-on-site stats, or generic demographic background on readers age 18-34 with income that ranges from $50,000 to $200,000. Instead, Umbel can tell you what percentage of readers in a given geographic area engage with a product at what time of day. If a reader on your site spends their time at Starbucks and talks a lot about their Subaru on other networks, Umbel can gather that information.

“It’s as if we’re conducting a real-time survey of the audience without actually asking them questions,” H.O. Maycotte, Umbel’s CTO told me. “They never see Umbel.”

As promising as the process sounds, it’s the type of thing that sets off alarms for people worried about online privacy and unwanted information sharing. Krasinski said Umbel only builds its data from profiles that publishers have collected or have been given permission to access by users. Essentially, they’re looking for people who link their user registration with networks like Twitter and Facebook. Krasinski said they anonymize the profiles they collect. Once they have the data, it’s only available to publishers, he said.

Maycotte is the former chief technology officer for the Texas Tribune, an organization well known for its efforts to include more data in its journalism. But Maycotte said the Tribune was like many media organizations that have a difficult time applying the same level of ingenuity to collecting information on their audience. News organizations have an added leeriness when it comes to gathering — or being perceived as gathering — information about their readers, Maycotte said. That sets journalism apart from other industries that have no problem being more aggressive when it comes to user data. “I think in general for the media, having access to technology and being a technology organization, versus being a content and media organization — there is a balance,” he said.

Coming from the Tribune, Maycotte has a special appreciation for the predicament of nonprofit news outlets, which often don’t have much margin for error when it comes to making sponsorships and advertising work. Because a number of nonprofits are trying a membership model, what could make Umbel useful is the ability to build a robust profile of the membership to see what content they respond to and what events they enjoy. In that way, it could be predictive and create better fundraising opportunities.

What Umbel offers sounds promising, but it’s still in private beta, which makes it hard to evaluate. The people concerned with giving data to publishers first have to collect a little data on themselves. At the moment, they’re adding new staff (thanks to the investment from Knight and others), as well as finding news partners to test their platform. What Krasinski and Maycotte hope to do is put some power back in the hands of news organizations when it comes to online advertising. That’s more than a little ambitious.

“At the end of the day, this is all about publisher empowerment,” Maycotte said. “They have been at a disadvantage for some time from digital information.”
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