Kamis, 19 Juli 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Wielki sukces! Piano Media expands its national paywall model to Poland

Posted: 18 Jul 2012 02:43 PM PDT

Piano Media in Central Europe

Piano Media, the Slovakian company with plans to erect a pan-European paywall, expanded today into its third and largest market, Poland. Seven major media companies have agreed to put some of their content behind a single national paywall.

The company is betting on the cable TV approach to news: Pay once, log in once, get access to a diverse package of content (including stuff you might not care about). Piano gets a 30 percent cut of the proceeds and divvies up the rest based on which partner sites get the most traffic. The company says its model is a success in Slovakia and Slovenia, though it won’t provide sales data.

Forty-two websites are included in the Polish package, including major daily newspapers, magazines, and Polish National Radio. After a free trial period, Piano will charge about $5.85 a month (19.90 zlotys) or about $58 per year (199 zlotys).

Among those sites is Forbes.pl, which is putting about 10 percent of its content — mostly commentary and analysis — behind the paywall. That site’s participation is notable because it’s owned by Ringier Axel Springer, a joint venture that includes Axel Springer, the largest publisher in Europe — which means the potential impact of a success could be much broader.

Aleksy Uchanski, chief digital officer for Ringier Axel Springer Poland, said Forbes.pl makes sense as a test site because it offers “premium or super-premium content,” the kind of niche journalism that might persuade Poles to pay. Forbes.pl wants to avoid walling off its whole website, lest new users turn away in droves. This is a cautious experiment for the company.

“Paid content in Poland is a 2012 topic — this is a topic that started this year, more or less,” Uchanski told me from his office in Warsaw. People are not accustomed to paying for news. Piano hopes the convenience of a single, low-cost subscription will help reset years of consumer expectations about free content. (That problem is not unique to Poland, I assured him.)

It gets more complicated: “A lot of people (in Poland) still don’t have credit cards,” Uchanksi said, “while others are still extremely afraid of using credit cards in online transactions.” A popular payment method is by way of SMS, in which users pay for services by tacking the fee on to a cellphone bill. Polish telcos take a staggering 50 percent cut of each payment, which means SMS payments are a non-starter for Piano. (Piano accepts SMS payments in Slovakia and Slovenia, where telcos take a 20 percent cut of each payment.)

Peter Richards, who is managing the Poland expansion for Piano, says he aims to convert 0.5 to 1.5 percent of Poles to paying users. “Based on our data after 14 months of operations, there are definitely high income, educated, urban users who comprise this 1% average,” he wrote in an email. “If we have half of the Polish Internet in our package at launch, then one could assume it’s possible that 100,000 Poles could pay. The real question is whether they see value for the money they pay and in our case for the price of two coffees you can have access to 42 websites.”

Richards said he found 40 percent of printed content in Poland is not made available online. Some publishers plan to offer paid access to this material, a unique selling proposition. For publishers in Poland or anywhere, the fear of erecting a paywall is that it will cut into pageviews, which sell ads. Piano does not “cannibalize ad revenues but provides a new revenue stream to publishers,” Richards said. The company provides reams of data and market research to help publishers determine which content goes premium.

“It’s a bit of a craps game when you launch,” he said. “We conduct a detailed content analysis of the site using quantitative and qualitative techniques. Publishers get a massive report explaining our rationale for including a particular piece of content in Piano’s system. Ultimately it’s up to them to decide what to close.”

Poland, with 38 million people and 19 million Internet users, is a big leap in scale for Piano, compared to Slovakia’s 5 million people and Slovenia’s 2 million. Like its predecessors, though, Poland is a single-language country whose media is relatively isolated — likely a better fit for a national paywall than other, larger European countries. Piano would probably have a much tougher time in the geographically expansive, multilingual United States. (Can you imagine Dow Jones and The New York Times Co. agreeing to unite behind a common paywall?)

Uchanksi said he has no fixed expectations for Forbes.pl; he does not yet know what a “successful” number of subscribers would be. The site attracts about 400,000 unique visitors per month, Uchanski said, and about 2 million page views. Ringier Axel Springer runs news sites 10 times that size, he said. He will study the data carefully over the next several months.

“How does [a] paying user behave in this situation? How does [a] nonpaying user behave? How much do paying users want to spend? And what’s the retention rate of those users? Et cetera. I don’t have a feeling that this is a ready-made business model. It’s a beginning,” Uchanski said.

Piano says it is “in negotiations with publishers on several continents” and plans to launch in another market by the end of 2012.

The Guardian formalizes audience curation with #smarttakes

Posted: 18 Jul 2012 11:50 AM PDT

If nothing else, The Guardian is persistent in its desire to ask the public for help with its journalism. Today The Guardian U.S. is launching #smarttakes, a way to aggregate timely news and analysis from Guardian readers. When a big story develops, the paper wants readers to drop a #smarttakes hashtag in a tweet with a link and it will be added to a curated roundup on The Guardian. As the paper puts it:

#smarttakes is a collection of the best ways of thinking about the issues that matter, brought to you by Guardian staff and readers

Hashtags-as-content-aggregators aren’t new — #longreads and #MuckReads being two prominent examples where curation gets outsourced to Twitter, then culled for an editorial product. Unlike those two — which focus on narrative nonfiction and investigative stories, respectively — #smarttakes is organized around specific major stories rather than a type of story. And while The Guardian is proud of its status as an online experimenter, it’s nonetheless interesting to see the idea escape from startups and nonprofits to a major international newspaper.

The Guardian is giving #smarttakes its own home on the site under Comment is Free, where posts will focus on a particular news story and feature links, quoted text and attribution both for the media outlet and the reader who flagged it. Ruth Spencer, community coordinator for The Guardian U.S., described #smarttakes as a pop-up aggregation tool that can help foster discussion and bolster their journalism. “It’s really about fleshing out the issues as a whole rather than saying The Guardian itself is providing the only take,” she said. “It’s like Wikipedia in a way. We’re telling the whole story. That’s the spirit of open journalism.”

That phase should sound familiar by now: The concept is as much an ethos for the Guardian’s work as it is a clever marketing tool. This kind of reader engagement and collaborative journalism is something The Guardian wants people to associate with its brand as it navigates its digital transition. The launch of #smarttakes marks one of the first big developments for the still young U.S. arm of the Guardian, which the paper said yesterday had grown its U.S. audience by 80 percent since its launch last year.

In some ways, #smarttakes is reminiscent of the New York Times short-lived aggregation experiment Times Extra, which brought related links to stories outside the Times. But that was driven by in-house aggregation, not social input.

Spencer told me The Guardian U.S. had been experimenting with news curation for several weeks on stories such as the Facebook IPO and student protests in Quebec. With #smarttakes officially going live, they’ll be opening up the system to a broader audience, namely the Twitter audience. (Quality links will also be retweeted by @GuardianUS.)

It’s not surprising that #smarttakes shares similar DNA with #MuckReads — Amanda Michel, the open editor at The Guardian, who previously worked at ProPublica and had a hand in creating #MuckReads. Over email, Michel told me one lesson from #MuckReads was how to create a long-term commitment to using a hashtag. That helps not just to populate the project, but to build support, she said. “By regularly sharing great investigative reporting using #Muckreads we could support a community of readers and create a living, long-term resource. We’re going to start with a commitment to #smarttakes and take it from there,” she wrote.

You can check the raw #smarttakes feed on Twitter, of course, but on the Guardian’s site, links will be compiled by hand into an individual topic. That means some people’s tweets on particular stories may not be of particular interest to the Guardian for roundup purposes.

Spencer said part of open journalism means transparency in how you work and how others are covering a story. “We think in adding and acknowledging great journalism produced elsewhere, we can provide a much fuller perspective of the implications of these issues and give readers the opportunity to show us what they think is great and bring it onto The Guardian,” she said.

From Nieman Reports: The “New Verification” means high stakes in an age of social media

Posted: 18 Jul 2012 07:30 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 past few days, we’ve been giving you a glimpse at some of their stories — but make sure to read the issue in full. In this piece, Craig Silverman explores the complexity of verifying content in real time, and across multiple platforms.

In a handbook for aspiring journalists published in 1894, Edwin L. Shuman shared what he called one of the “most valuable secrets of the profession at its present stage of development.”

He revealed that it was standard practice for reporters to invent a few details, provided the made-up facts were nonessential to the overall story. “Truth in essentials, imagination in nonessentials, is considered a legitimate rule of action in every office,” he wrote. “The paramount object is to make an interesting story.”

It was easy for a reporter of the time to get away with a few, or even a bushel of, inventions. Information was scarce and could take days or weeks to make its way to the public sphere. The telephone was not yet widely in use, and the first transatlantic wireless transmission was years away. The early mass-market Kodak Brownie camera was close to a decade from release. The machinery of publishing and distribution was in the hands of a few.

If a reporter wanted to fudge a few details to make his story a little more colorful, well, chances are no one would notice or call him on it. Shuman’s advice is objectionable, but something about it — and the information and reporting environment in which it was offered — seems quaint and charming by today’s standards.

It also highlights how much things have changed when it comes to accuracy and verification.

Keep reading at Nieman Reports »

Image of fail whale by Brent Payne used under a Creative Commons license.

ProPublica gets $1.9 million from Knight to expand its efforts in data journalism

Posted: 18 Jul 2012 06:30 AM PDT

ProPublica is getting a $1.9 million data journalism grant from the Knight Foundation, the nonprofits jointly announced on Wednesday.

The money will be used to support ProPublica’s News Applications team, including adding one full-time staffer. ProPublica has already hired that person, Lena Groeger, who first joined the team in a pilot fellowship program. The grant will also help make that fellowship program — which is essentially a paid internship for tech-savvy journalists — a permanent fixture at ProPublica.

News applications editor Scott Klein says the grant will primarily help increase his team’s metabolism to execute data-driven projects.

“Obviously, we’re going to be doing a lot of news apps,” Klein told me. “What’s important to me is that we continue to do great work that supports the mission of ProPublica, which is to have impact in the real world. I think it’s important that ProPublica be a leader in this new discipline in journalism, and to whatever extent we can help other organizations do this kind of work as well.”

Since its launch five years ago, ProPublica has aimed to be a “moral force” in news. But did its founding team envision data journalism as being a driving force for the site?

“Very honestly, no,” general manager Richard Tofel told me. “It’s really Scott Klein who led us into this. It’s fair to say that when we hired him, we thought we were hiring him to work on our website — and some other things — but principally to run our website. It was really Scott who had the vision of what this field could be.”

Data journalism has become the area into which ProPublica has poured the most additional resources, Tofel says, and Knight wants to help the site lead the journalism industry into a new age of data journalism. To do that, ProPublica has also committed to using grant money for a new job shadowing program nicknamed P5 — short for the alliterative ProPublica Paired Programming Project — that will invite one non-ProPublica journalist per month to work with Klein and his team.

“We feel like it’s important for them to kind of help us move the field forward in the space of data journalism,” said Michael Maness, vice president of journalism and innovation at the Knight Foundation. “One of the key things for us was trying to facilitate networking between not only grantees but people working in this space. We think this is a really rich area.”

Klein believes that data could play a part in the evolving business models for news. “I absolutely see our industry as a revenue opportunity,” Klein said. “Newsrooms across the country have within them data sets that would be very valuable to their communities.”

ProPublica’s own business model doesn’t include plans to sell data just yet. Tofel says the path to sustainability remains a “significant challenge” for the site. Its goal for this year is to continue to reduce its dependence on the Sandler Foundation, which provided its launch funding and continues to provide major support.

“Major support like this certainly helps,” Tofel said. “Foundations are a piece of it. Major gifts from individuals or family foundations are a piece of it. Earned revenue is a piece of it, and actually small gifts from online donors and checks in the mail are not an insignificant piece. We’re trying to move forward on all fronts, but sustainability is a significant item on our agenda all the time.”

Klein says to expect more news apps focused on the election, and projects that are designed to explore how campaigns are run and financed. One ongoing example: The ProPublica Message Machine, which collects and compares candidates’ mass emails in an effort to see how campaigns track and target voters. What it all comes down to, he says, is finding the best ways to produce compelling, high-impact journalism.

For ProPublica, “publishing is not the end — impact is the end,” Klein said. “Being free from the idea that publishing is the whole goal, the goal is really about having real-world impact — it enables you to see lots and lots of techniques, not just telling narrative stories.” In the still nascent field of data journalism, Klein says “it is going to take a lot of hard work and making mistakes and fixing them and figuring stuff out.”

Disclosure: Knight is also a funder of the Nieman Journalism Lab.
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