Nieman Journalism Lab |
- The newsonomics of good news about news
- From Nieman Reports: Is your source secretly a lobbyist?
- Are you sure that’s true? Truth Goggles tackles fishy claims at the moment of consumption
| The newsonomics of good news about news Posted: 12 Jul 2012 10:05 AM PDT
Admit it: Good news is boring. All of us in and around the news business know that. Bad news gets read and gets our juices flowing. So when that news DNA is challenged by reality, the news can be easy to miss. As we head into the second half of 2012, amid much despair given downward ad trends in print and stalling ones in digital, let’s pause to consider some good news about the trade. The good news is too well balanced by the bad, but it’s still important not to lose sight of it. It’s not a matter of being Pollyannish, but of being realistic: Within that good news are seeds of what will sustain whatever forms the next stage of the news business. Let’s call it the newsonomics of good news. I’ll make it a top 10 list, as is appropriate with a good news feature. As we move down the list, we see some of the elements that are among those encouraging some outside the industry — Warren Buffett, San Diego’s Doug Manchester, Halifax’s Michael Redding, Chicago’s Michael Ferro, Jr. and John Canning, Jr. — to buy into the flagging news industry. 1. Digital circulation can work.Digital circulation (a.k.a. a paywall strategy) is working and fast becoming the default among daily newspapers — from Tokyo, Singapore, and Sydney to Minneapolis, Boston, and Augusta to London, Madrid, and Helsinki. At the top end, right now, we can call it a 10 percent solution: That’s the kind of circulation revenue bump top publishers are seeing. This is a big piece of new puzzle. (Caveat: See #11 below.) 2. Digital circulation vastly improves circulation revenue margins.Last week, faced with a Wall Street Journal renewal notice, I opted for digital-only for the first time, knowing that WSJ’s tablet format and easy right-hand navigation makes it far quicker to read than the paper version. That choice is also greener, both for the environment and for the Journal. The pricing of digital access — $260 — is only a dollar cheaper a week than the print — with far lower costs for the Journal. As readers tip into digital, these margins will make a big difference in bottom-line performance. 3. Third-party content sales take off.As the Journal explained about its Pulse deal, it’s just a toe in the water. Expect whole feet and legs to plunge in over the next several years. Once digital circulation strategies are put into place, extending them makes perfect sense for news companies. This movement is not only about new revenue sources — it’s about cheaply and easily leveraging the best design and presentation on tablets, smartphones, and other devices, as they come along, without news companies having to develop them themselves. So The New York Times doesn’t need to build its own Flipboard model — it can piggyback on Flipboard’s substantial investment and harvest new revenues. Multiply this strategy by more distribution outlets, and it goes way beyond experimentation. Big caveat: How and how fast can this strategy be adapted for the regional and local press? 4. Readers love tablets.From Pew’s several studies to Roger Fidler’s Reynolds Journalism Institute surveys, the news is almost unreservedly good. People like to read news on the tablet. They read more of it, from known sources, for longer periods. If the news industry were just stable, euphoria would be in order, but since it’s not, this astounding turnaround from splintered, bit-sized, aggregator-driven desktop news reading has been under-appreciated. 5. Ad sales are growing beyond selling impressions.Selling pageviews is so 2005. The most innovative companies are moving as fast as they can beyond cost-per-thousand-based advertising sales. Two big trends here: First, selling share-of-voice — sponsorships of sorts, borrowing strongly from broadcast models. These are working to boost effective rates for publishers from the FT to the innovative, newer products, like the Orange County Register’s The Peel tablet app. Second, becoming a digital regional agency, offering local merchants of all sizes ways to leverage the digital world, well beyond simply placing an ad. Marketing services (“The newsonomics of small things”) is a tough, tough business, with lots of competitors (note that One on One Ads All-Star game commercial), but it’s an area of growth for many news companies. 6. The Googlejuice thins.For half a decade at least, news publishers have found themselves hugely dependent on Google. The search giant sends a third to half or more of the web referrals that news sites get. That’s created a great reliance on Google. Now, though, referrals are diversifying. Several publishers tell me that the percentage of Google referrals has dropped a good ten points in the last year. The reason: the rising importance of the social web and social referrals. Facebook is the fastest growing source of referrals, and Pinterest, Twitter, and Linkedin are all growing as well. The key to finding new value here: mining the referring data to see how different kinds of samplers may be turned into regular customers. 7. Community-generated blogs mature.This movement is now several years old, and in its most worthwhile forms, is beginning to form both new identities and new revenue streams for newspapers. Take The Seattle Times, which has expanded an experiment that started with five regional blogs, produced by non-staffers, and built it into a 50-blog News Partner Network. The Times pays the bloggers with recognition and traffic, currently sending about 115,000 clicks a month to partners, says Times executive editor David Boardman. The benefits to the Times are both tangible and intangible. “Recently, we created an ‘Around the Sound’ page in our Sunday newspaper that features neighborhood content provided by the blog partners. That’s low-cost, quality content we would not have otherwise,” says Boardman. “We have made consistent use of the network partners for both news tips and for reporting stories. And it works both ways, with us providing tips and reporting and photography to them.” Then there’s the community warmth factor, as J-Lab’s survey has found a surprising 80 percent of the local population showing appreciation of the notion. 8. Computer-generated journalism’s tough birth.A new surprise entry. The reaction to Journatic’s byline faux pas has been predictable, right at its core — and totally overblown. Journatic and Narrative Science are far from the only companies plying this territory. The fact is the computer-generated editorial content is here to stay, and it must be mastered by editors. One such editor is David Arkin, GateHouse’s vice president for content and audience, quoted in David Folkenflik’s NPR story on the contretemps. Says Arkin, “As we look at what our content goals are in our organization, we need and want more enterprise storytelling.” Exactly. Hold on to as many of those real enterprise-plus reporting jobs, and then use comp-gen technology to do the heavy lifting, to which reporters add minimal value. 9. Journalism gets more mobile.No, not as in smartphones and tablets, but as in mobile journalists. Digital First Media is testing the next generation of its community reachout strategies, outfitting mobile vans in the Bay Area, Twin Cities, Connecticut and York, Pa., well documented at Steve Buttry’s blog. Some of what DFM is trying to do will work; some won’t, but there’s no doubt that real engagement with news readers — online and offline — is a major key to the future, especially as reader revenue becomes the dominant revenue source (“The newsonomics of majority reader revenue”) feeding journalists. 10. Publishers are getting to know their readers far better.Still another consequence of digital circulation: Some publishers are learning much more about their readers. From The New York Times to New London, Conn.’s The Day, publishers have seen the necessity of creating a single unified customer view. That means connecting up print readers and their digital reading, shopping, and buying habits. As I wrote last fall, the goal here — someday — is close to a 100 percent connection (“The newsonomics of 100% reach“). The Day is almost halfway, ace audience tracker Daniel Williams told me this week. It has now linked 45 percent of its print subscribers. That sets up 2013 as a year to better serve those readers — and harvest more revenue accordingly. Let me add a bonus eleventh, one both sobering and elevating: 11. Quality sells.In this age of digital circulation and readers opening their wallets to all-access models, we’re seeing that big national/global providers of news are convincing readers to pay up in substantial numbers. For the regional press, it’s a mixed record so far. We can attribute that mix to a half-dozen questions about the papers’ execution of digital circulation. In addition, though, it’s becoming increasingly important to point out that readers are more likely to pay up when they believe they are getting something sufficiently filling. Those that have concentrated on saving as much of their newsroom capacity as possible are generally faring better. As Press+’s Steve Brill just put it, as his company released a report this week on the relationship between content and digital circ revenue: “If you want to sell journalism, you have to do journalism.” Publishers best heed that truism of the new, and old, business. |
| From Nieman Reports: Is your source secretly a lobbyist? Posted: 12 Jul 2012 10:00 AM PDT
Editor’s Note: Our colleagues upstairs at Nieman Reports are out with their Summer 2012 issue, “Truth in the Age of Social Media,” which focuses on issues like verification, crowdsourcing, and citizen journalism. Over the next few days, we’ll give you a glimpse at some of their stories — but make sure to read the issue in full. In this piece, a conversation with the head of the nonprofit government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
As her organization keeps an eye on abuses of power on both sides of the aisle, Sloan has also noticed that lobbyists have gotten more sophisticated in pushing their agendas. Nieman Reports’s Stefanie Friedhoff spoke with Sloan about how journalists are being deceived, how experts with no expertise end up in news articles, and why “he said, she said” reporting isn’t helping. Edited excerpts of the interview follow. Stefanie Friedhoff: CREW has documented how lobbyists, grassroots organizations, and other special interest groups succeed in getting biased or false information — often presented as facts and expert advice — published in the media. How does this work? Melanie Sloan: Yes, it happens all the time. Every special interest imaginable seems to be headquartered in D.C., and some speak louder than others, sometimes thanks to their greater financial backing. The proliferation of cyber advocacy has shown that while it may now be easier to educate the public about important issues, the potential for abuse is greater than ever. Friedhoff: Can you give us a few examples? Sloan: Richard Berman stands out as the unrivaled king of manipulation. You may not have heard of Berman, but you have undoubtedly — and possibly unknowingly — seen his work. He runs the for-profit public relations firm Berman and Company. His particular gimmick is to start up so-called nonprofit organizations — which receive favorable tax treatment by the IRS — financed by corporations with specific agendas, but which don’t want their fingerprints on the message. Berman names himself executive director of each organization and then contracts with Berman and Company to handle the organization’s activities. By CREW’s count, he has created more than 25 such groups and websites, all of which are “staffed” by those who work for his PR firm, with each employee holding any number of different positions. One Berman and Company staffer, for example, at one point served as the chief administrative officer of Berman and Company, senior economic analyst and senior research analyst with the Employment Policies Institute, government affairs director at the Center for Consumer Freedom, and director of state affairs, spokesperson and lobbyist for the American Beverage Institute, among others. Through these alleged public interest groups, Berman and his minions push their corporate sponsors’ views in the media and are regularly cited in news articles as “experts” on subjects ranging from labor law to drunken driving to childhood obesity. Their real, well-financed agenda is hidden from unsuspecting readers. Keep reading at Nieman Reports »Photo of the U.S. Capitol Rotunda by ctj71081 used under a Creative Commons license. |
| Are you sure that’s true? Truth Goggles tackles fishy claims at the moment of consumption Posted: 12 Jul 2012 07:30 AM PDT
True or false? No googling.
Now, what if I told you President Obama uttered those words? Do you trust the statistic more or less? What if Mitt Romney said it? The claim is neither true nor false, really; truth is three-dimensional. For the answer, click here to activate Truth Goggles. Click the text Truth Goggles highlights and you’ll see that PolitiFact rated the claim (it was Romney’s) as “mostly false.” It is true the unemployment rate for Hispanics and Latinos rate rose during that period, but the numbers actually fell if February 2009 — Obama’s first full month in office — is used as the baseline. Imagine if every factual claim were highlighted in news articles — true, false, or otherwise. The gap between consumption and correction of bad information effectively would be reduced to zero. That’s the goal of Truth Goggles, a tool created by MIT master’s graduate Dan Schultz. (Go ahead and drag this Truth Goggles link to your bookmarks bar and try it around the web.) Truth Goggles draws on PolitiFact’s database of about 5,500 fact-checked claims and flags any matches in the article you’re reading. Schultz has open-sourced the code and posted it to GitHub, about eight months after we first covered the idea. The front-end is written in the JavaScript library jQuery, and the back-end is written in PHP (mixed with some Python he’s still working on). Truth Goggles communicates with PolitiFact via private API, so Schultz’s code won’t do you much good without a database to check against. Schultz is now working as a Knight-Mozilla OpenNews fellow at The Boston Globe, where he will try to continue developing the project part-time. Bill Adair, the editor of PolitiFact, said his operation is considering adopting the source code and building a PolitiFact-branded version of Truth Goggles. Schultz created this project as his thesis project at the MIT Media Lab. He identified three major technology problems that need to be solved or improved for Truth Goggles to be a fully functional, user-friendly product and recently shared them with me. 1. Paraphrase detectionYou’re unlikely to see Truth Goggles work on the vast majority of news articles. Truth Goggles matches only exact instances of fact-checked phrases. Taking the example form the top, a reporter could have written: Romney said the unemployment rate for Hispanics has increased from 10 percent to 10.3 percent since President Obama took office. That sentence would be invisible to Truth Goggles. Figuring this out is the Holy Grail of automated fact-checkers, Schultz said. Natural language processing is advancing in its quest for code to understand language the way we do, but truly reliable NLP is a long way off. And if the software gets close but still messes up, highlighting the wrong claim would just confuse the user. 2. ScaleTruth Goggles is limited to those claims which PolitiFact has checked — an impressive corpus of journalism, sure, but a wimpy number compared to all of the things politicians have ever claimed. You could add FactCheck.org’s database to the mix. And Snopes, if it ever released an API. Say that gets the number up to 15,000. “That’s not nearly enough to create a system that will be actually relevant on a regular basis,” Schultz said. “Let’s say everything was perfect…you’d still rarely see a highlight.” This is a problem with fact-checking, not fact-checking software. It can take days to verify a claim that leaves a politician’s lips in seconds. By the time PolitiFact publishes a judgment, that particular claim may be old news. Or it might not have made the news at all. Or maybe it didn’t made the transition from words in a video to words in text. I googled several dozen claims in search of news articles that included those claims — I wanted to blockquote a real article for the lead of this story, instead of a hypothetical. It was all but impossible. Virtually every result is a fact-check of the claim, or people linking to a fact-check of the claim, or a transcript of whatever it was the claim appeared in — rather than the false claim itself. So Truth Goggles will not work on most articles, because journalists aren’t writing stories about every claim. (And that’s a good thing, right?) 3. User interfaceSetting aside the back-end wizardry, the front-end design of Truth Goggles proved to be a massive project of its own. For Truth Goggles to work, the software has to interrupt a user’s reading without driving him or her crazy. Schultz conducted a user study in which he presented three interfaces: “Goggles Mode,” which blurs all of the text following the first highlighted claim; “Safe Mode,” which blocks out claims until a user clicks each one to reveal it; and “Highlight Mode,” which highlights claims in yellow while leaving the other text alone. Seventy percent of participants selected “highlight mode” when given the choice. (Schultz stresses his user study was not very scientific, since people probably wanted to play with all of the options.) Then there is the matter of color. Truth Goggles always highlights text in neutral yellow. Red and green are automatic cues — False! True! — which can defeat the purpose of the software. Red and green are so final, literally opposites on the color spectrum. That reflects the false polarity of truth, not the continuum. (In fact, PolitiFact uses six flavors of “true” and “false.”) If I’m an Obama supporter and I see that Romney claim highlighted in red, I only become more deeply entrenched. I might be less inclined to click on the claim to learn more. I might not want to click on it. “I didn’t want it to be possible for people to become less thoughtful,” Schultz told me. “You’re in a spot where you don’t have to take any more action as to why it’s false. Plus, PolitiFact can make mistakes. It does update its judgments from time to time. “If you highlight something red as false, and you made a mistake, that is much more damaging than highlighting something as yellow and saying, ‘This has been fact-checked,’” Schultz said. Indeed, the people problems might prove more daunting than the technology problems. “This is the great challenge in political journalism that, to use a different eyewear metaphor, people see things through their own partisan prisms,” Adair said. “Even if you are a nonpartisan fact-checker, you’re going to anger one or both sides, and that’s the nature of this disruptive form of journalism. And at a time when people are going into echo chambers for their information, it can be a challenge. The one thing I would say to that is I don’t think what we’re doing is telling people what to think. We’re just trying to tell them information to consider.” That was the biggest lesson Schultz said he learned: “Trying to tell people what to think is a losing battle,” he wrote in a blog post. The winning battle is telling people when to think. Photo by photobunny/Earl used under a Creative Commons license. |
A lawyer who once was a federal prosecutor and counsel to powerful Congressional committees, 
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