Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Live broadcast: Why The Huffington Post and Boston.com are getting into streaming media
- In the Philippines, Rappler is trying to figure out the role of emotion in the news
- This Week in Review: The Olympics’ media lessons, and Google’s copyright crackdown
| Live broadcast: Why The Huffington Post and Boston.com are getting into streaming media Posted: 13 Aug 2012 02:01 PM PDT
Can a news site become a TV network? Or a radio station? Or if it can’t become one, can it at least grow to include one? These aren’t theoretical questions, as Monday saw the launch of HuffPost Live, the new streaming TV-style video network from The Huffington Post, and RadioBDC, an alternative streaming radio station from Boston.com, the webbier side of The Boston Globe. The launch of two media-jumping online ventures is likely a coincidence — though getting clear of the Olympics was probably a motivator for each — but they share many commonalities and the same goals. On their first day, both gave early indications of what they see as their strategy for success. Both Boston.com and The Huffington Post want to use digital distribution to offer something like a traditional broadcast product, but at a much lower cost than what starting a TV network or radio station ran pre-Internet. They both also want a shot at a new channel of advertising dollars to complement the display-heavy advertising they rely on with their main products. In order for both to work they’ll need to find, maintain, and grow an audience and advertisers. On launch day, HuffPost Live counted Cadillac and Verizon as their “founding partners” for the network. On RadioBDC, launch advertisers include Miller/Coors, Anheuser Busch, and Comcast, a spokeswoman told me. HuffPost Live, the latest spinoff of Arianna Huffington’s media empire, is an attempt at merging live TV with the expediency and interconnectedness of the web — to get the engagement promised by second-screen visions of television watching by building for the web from the start. HuffPost Live promises 12 hours of live weekday programming that combines hosted segments and audience contributions. “With HuffPost Live, you're invited to be part of a different kind of conversation, whoever you are, wherever you are,” Arianna herself said in the network’s opening minutes. But while the medium may be shifting, a lot of the content looked familiar. On day one, HuffPost Live had many of the familiar trappings of cable news: a well appointed studio, handsome hosts, and various treatments on the day’s news. But instead of Wolf Blitzer barking at reporters and pundits in the Situation Room, HuffPost Live relied on Google Hangouts. Monday’s first segment, a roundtable on Mitt Romney’s pick of Paul Ryan as his running mate, featured a diverse cast of contributors live from their bedrooms/guest rooms/home offices. As novel as that was, the guests still fit into familiar archetypes: a conservative, a liberal, a knowledgeable reporter, and an everyman. That seems to be the model for HuffPost Live, as a segment later in the day on home foreclosures featured Huffington, the head of a mortgage-resolution organization, actor John Cusack (!), and a California man struggling to keep his home. Of course, HuffPost isn’t the only one investing in live video. The advertising dollars are typically better than in traditional web display advertising; as Raju Nasrietti of The Wall Street Journal told us in June: “We are sold out. There is no shortage of demand to generate more video views.” HuffPost Live wants to differentiate itself from other online video in terms of its content and its “live-ness.” The segments are like taking a dive into different HuffPost verticals — politics one minute, entertainment the next, technology later. (No sideboob yet.) But what sets it apart is the audience experience: The interface features a video player on the left, a comment stream on the right, and a big red “Join This Segment” button. A module above the video player lets the audience keep tabs on what stories and segments are coming down the pike, like the left rail on ESPN’s SportsCenter. Boston.com’s move into radio
With no terrestrial signal, that desktop crowd, along with the mobile crowd, will be RadioBDC’s main audience. They’ve already launched apps for iPhone and Android, but the power of Boston.com promotion will likely be key. The site is always among the most visited regional news sites with over 6 million uniques a month. RadioBDC has its own page under the Boston.com umbrella, but it also receives prime billing on Boston.com’s homepage, with a banner ad and button to launch the radio player as well as a widget near the top of the page. By default, RadioBDC pops out into a separate window, making it meant for hanging out in the background during the work day. If you’re the type of person that wants to hear Elvis Costello, Weezer, or R.E.M while you work, you can now hear the music you love while clicking through Red Sox news or updates on the Massachusetts senate race. For Boston.com, that potentially means exposing the audience to double the ads, on the site as well as on the radio stream. Lisa DeSisto, general manager of Boston.com, said over email that “streaming spots are just one component of the marketing packages which include digital assets, event sponsorships, social media tie-ins, and promotions.” HuffPost Live also seems designed for the specific purpose of keeping the audience around, either to keep tabs on what’s being talked about in comments or to contribute to an upcoming story. HuffPost also wouldn’t mind if you kept it open in a tab all day and popped in from time to time. While they share a launch date, RadioBDC and HuffPost Live operate at different scales: RadioBDC has a handful of people on staff, HuffPost Live hired around 100 people for the launch. Success will look different for the two entities. But they’re both counting on a similar audience: the bored-at-work crowd, desk jockeys looking for something other than an Excel spreadsheet to pay attention to. Considering how much time we spend tethered to our computers this strategy makes a lot of sense. Individually our stray, off-task web surfing may not amount to much, but HuffPost and Boston.com are hoping that, collectively, it adds up to many millions of hours. TV and radio originally brought the news and music live into people’s living rooms. Now HuffPost and Boston.com want to bring news and music live to your computer, tablet, or phone during the day, probably at work. Think of it as the earbud audience. |
| In the Philippines, Rappler is trying to figure out the role of emotion in the news Posted: 13 Aug 2012 08:30 AM PDT
As news organizations fracture and specialize, it’s often suggested that audiences seek out the kind of coverage that reflects their own preconceived perspectives. It’s the idea that right-wingers are watching Hannity while left-wingers are watching Maddow. But when it comes to how we decide what information to share, there’s more than political ideology at play. Maria Ressa, a longtime TV journalist and CEO of the Manila-based news startup Rappler, has been thinking about the overlap between emotion and social interaction for a while now. Her forthcoming book, From Bin Laden to Facebook, examines social media’s role in the spread of terrorism. “When you look at how terrorism spreads, you look at how emotions spread through large groups of people,” Ressa told me. “You take the idea that emotions are important in decision making. And on social media, what spreads fastest, it’s actually emotions more than ideas.”
So Ressa had an idea. Why not find a way to track the emotions that news stories elicit from members of an audience? Enter the Rappler Mood Meter, which gives readers the opportunity to click on the emotion that any given Rappler story made them feel. The options: Happy, sad, angry, don’t care, inspired, afraid, amused, or annoyed. (Ressa says Rappler developed the mood categories with the help of a group of psychologists.) Mood Meters feed into a larger Mood Navigator, which determines the mood of the day and features a visual, story-by-story representation of the mood breakdown. On one recent day, for example, most people were happy — despite one big story that made most people sad, and a couple that made most people angry. Check it out:
Readers can mouse over any of the circles — each one represents an individual story — to see the mood breakdown. For example, a story about Bam Aquino’s 2013 Senate candidacy made most people happy, but even more people were either annoyed or angry:
“The idea behind the Mood Meter is actually getting people to crowdsource the mood for the day,” Ressa said. “If you actually go through the exercise of identifying how you feel, you’re more prone to be rational. If you can identify how you feel, will you be more receptive to the debate that’s in front of you? I hope. That’s really the rationale, aside from the fact that it’s cool.” The Mood Navigator is also revealing. Rappler’s two most popular stories ever made most people either inspired or sad. The former was a story about a Filipina physicist who helped prove Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity on a cosmic scale. The latter was about how a Filipino-Mexican would have won American Idol had voting not been limited to U.S. residents. Ressa says both stories had “geeky” components to them. “It’s about trying to understand our world today,” Ressa said. “I think everyone is trying to understand our world today and we’re doing it together. Too few media companies are actually in the space where most Filipinos are going.” The idea of tying readers’ moods to specific stories isn’t new. NBC’s local O&O station sites debuted them back in 2009, although they disappeared in a later redesign. News.me wants to know if a story elicits a “Wow” or an “Awesome,” while Buzzfeed wants an “LOL,” “OMG,” or “WTF.” But the Mood Meter, and Rappler more generally, is proving to be a significant new force in the Philippines, where Internet use is not yet mainstream but where the connected are very connected. Only 30 percent of Filipinos reported using the Internet within a four-week span, according to an October 2011 Nielsen study. But those who did reported being online for more than 21 hours per week, among the highest in Southeast Asia. Mobile phones and social media are both hugely popular in the country, which is seeing a rapid shift as more consumers buy multiple devices, including tablets and smartphones with Internet access. Ressa says the lion’s share of advertising revenue in the Philippines still flows into television, which may help explain why Rappler is a relatively rare online news startup in the region. “In 2010, we were doing very well on television but you could already see the market fragmenting,” Ressa said. “This was really an experiment to see: Could we survive purely online without any ads on print or television? It’s actually much more potent than any of us had expected.” The country’s largest TV networks and newspapers have web sites, but most have the cluttered design that tends to reflect a supplemental approach to an outlet’s online presence. Ressa credits the site’s web-native DNA for its rapid growth. “In Rappler’s first month, we hit the traffic it took the largest Philippine news group a decade to reach. That’s the power of social media.”
In its first six months, Rappler grew quickly. Its best month of traffic saw nearly 3 million pageviews, with most months clocking between 2 million and 3 million hits. Ressa says most traffic comes through social media channels. On one hand, the Mood Navigator draws people in by “gamifying things a little,” but it also helps demonstrate “the way emotions flow through society.” Inside the newsroom, it helps journalists better understand how to tell stories that resonate with people. “We’ve been journalists a long time,” she said. “And you get tired of telling the same stories without any resolution.” In future iterations of the Mood Navigator, the plan is to enable people to be able to click on an emotion for a list of mood-customized content. That way, you can create reading lists that include only the stories that made most people happy, or angry, or amused, or whatever other emotion you choose. (The New York Times’ Show Tuner is a niche experiment in the same wheelhouse; it lets users select their moods along a sliding scale from light to dark in order to find targeted theater reviews. Get ready for more filter bubble articles.) Ressa, who spent more than two decades of her journalism career in television, is excited about opportunities to interact with audiences online. (Perhaps it’s not an accident that both NBC Local and Rappler approach emotion from a broadcast perspective — a medium that’s long been more comfortable with audience emotion than newspapers.) Another crowdsourcing project that Rappler recently launched, #HealthAlert, involves developing a local map of cases of Dengue fever, the potentially deadly mosquito-borne illness that tends to occur in tropical regions during their rainy seasons. “We know this is a yearly problem, and yet we could never get a map of where it happens,” Ressa said. “Tap the wisdom of crowds to help strengthen government initiatives — actually ask the people who are reading Rappler, ask our community, if there’s an incident of Dengue, map it. The map is simple: It’s a Google map with an Ushahidi overlay. Then we’ll be plugging into the department of health so that they can see, in real time, hopefully, a nationwide map of incidents of Dengue. It then means the authorities, maybe they can more proactive.” Being proactive is largely what Rappler is about. Ressa says she sees the site as the first “truly multimedia” news organization in the Philippines. What that means is merging journalists with broadcast, print, and tech expertise. Rappler produces news broadcasts that are optimized for mobile devices. (Ressa anchors.) “We’ve moved from the age of authority to the age of authenticity,” Ressa said. “Professional journalists now have to move from that old ground of authority — because we’re losing ground, and frankly it’s hard to be an authority now. In the areas where breaking news happens, they’ll know more than the professionals. So what can we add to this changing landscape?” |
| This Week in Review: The Olympics’ media lessons, and Google’s copyright crackdown Posted: 13 Aug 2012 07:02 AM PDT
Lessons from Olympic coverage strategies: The Olympics ended yesterday, but it may have a long-term impact on the interaction between television and social media. After a week of complaints about tape-delayed coverage on NBC, a Pew poll found that most Americans are following the Olympics closely on TV (and some online, especially the young), and are also largely giving NBC high marks for its coverage. Time’s Josh Sanburn noted what a surprising success the Games have been for NBC. NBC executives defended their strategy in a couple of interviews: NBC Sports Chairman Mark Lazarus told Sports Illustrated’s Richard Deitsch that NBC was hesitant to air events both live and taped, among other reasons, because their research indicates that people are more likely to rewatch something they’ve seen online than something they’ve seen on TV. His predecessor, Dick Ebersol, told Joe Posnanski that the conflict comes down to whether you see the Olympics as a sporting event or a family television event (NBC sees the latter). Others defended NBC as well: The Washington Post’s Michael Rosenwald said the #nbcfail brouhaha only highlighted the failures of Twitter to connect Americans, and Time’s Graeme McMillan said there’s nothing particularly wrong with the reality TV-ification of Olympic coverage. Still, according to a Gallup poll, most Americans wanted to see NBC broadcast events both live and on tape delay (a plan for which Deadspin’s John Koblin made a good case), and a sizable number of people were using proxy servers to access BBC’s coverage. NPR’s Linda Holmes parsed out the debate between critics of the quality of NBC’s coverage and defenders of its business sense, concluding that the latter shouldn’t necessarily be a consideration of the public. “It’s one thing to suggest that business strategists should care only about the bottom line and the business plan when being critical; it’s quite another to suggest that everyone should.” Meanwhile, the BBC offered a very different model from NBC, trying to make its content available just about everywhere for just about everyone. The BBC gave its own conclusions from its Olympics coverage — multiplatform viewing was big, and online viewing mirrored that of TV. Looking at both models, The Guardian’s Emily Bell concluded that the major lesson of this Olympics is that media coverage works best when it’s about giving people want they want — something traditional media outlets say they’re trying to do, but in reality aren’t very good at.
Google tightens up on copyright: Google is tweaking its search algorithms all the time, but it made a change this week that could end up being an extremely important one: It’s going to start ranking sites lower as they accumulate valid copyright violation complaints. The New York Times had some good basic background on the move, emphasizing the fact that the giants of the entertainment industry (the same folks behind SOPA and PIPA) have been pushing for this for a while. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land went further into the Google/Hollywood relationship and explained a bit more about how this change will work. Sullivan also explained how Google’s own YouTube, with its never-ending stream of copyright violations, will escape the ramifications of the change, as well as other popular sites. Hollywood may have been encouraged by the change, but many online free-speech advocates were skeptical. The Electronic Frontier Foundation expressed concern about the process’s opacity and the prospect of false positives, and Mike Masnick of Techdirt articulated a variant of the latter objection — many legitimate technologies are initially painted as forms of piracy, and could get incorrectly swept up in this crackdown. Forbes’ Tim Worstall raised the possibility of malicious false reports in the name of sabotaging rivals, which could be interpreted as valid by Google, and John Bergmayer of Public Knowledge explained the difference between Google’s copyright notices and the legally required copyright notices, and how some more prominent sites might be more disproportionately targeted. On the other side, tech investor Fred Wilson called this move a step in the right direction and suggested going further by developing a commercially competitive market for copyright whitelists and blacklists.
Do we have a plagiarism problem?: Another revered journalist was caught up in an ethical scandal this past week — this time, Fareed Zakaria, longtime Time columnist and, more recently, a CNN host. His recent column on gun control contained some striking similarities to an April New Yorker piece, first noticed by the conservative media-watching site Newsbusters. National Review’s Robert VerBruggen noted a few other similar passages, and the observations quickly spread across the web. Before the day was out, Zakaria had apologized and was suspended from CNN and Time. Meanwhile, the fallout continued for former New Yorker columnist Jonah Lehrer, who was busted for plagiarism the week before Zakaria for fabricating quotes by Bob Dylan. Michael Moynihan, the journalist who uncovered the problem, found more fake interviews in Lehrer’s books, as well as plagiarized passages. Blogger Kevin Breen also detailed another case of fabrication involving magicians Penn and Teller, and Lehrer’s publisher is now reviewing all of his books. Many writers have been attempting to answer the “Why?” question regarding Lehrer’s ethical sins over the past couple of weeks. Science writer Seth Mnookin said it’s tempting to blame busyness and shoddiness, but Lehrer’s acts are more indicative of arrogance than anything else. Boston University journalism professor Tom Fiedler tied Lehrer’s problem to his ignorance of how to do journalism. Others spread the blame more broadly. The Guardian’s Stuart Kelly looked at the fallen status of facts in our society, while the L.A. Times’ Meghan Daum criticized modern shortcut culture and avoidance of complexity. Meanwhile, Reuters’ Felix Salmon linked Lehrer to TED and its habit of subjugating scientific fact to nifty narrative. “TED-think isn't merely vapid, it's downright dangerous in the way that it devalues intellectual rigor at the expense of tricksy emotional and narrative devices.” Journalistic reporting, false balance, and truth: The New York Times highlighted a few of President Barack Obama’s criticisms of the press last week, noting in particular his disdain for false balance — when journalists portray conflicts as if both sides are equally weighted when they’re actually not. (This is a critique he’s voiced more formally in the past.) Reuters’ Jack Shafer was skeptical of the validity of Obama’s complaint: “I fear false balance less than I do those who would silence the false balancers.” NYU professor Jay Rosen brought up another aspect of the problems surrounding journalism, truth, and objectivity by breaking down a particularly egregious he-said, she-said Washington Post blog post and contrasting the impulse toward that post’s political savviness and the fight for truth among journalists. The Nation’s Greg Mitchell echoed his points, and Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic also made an alternative truth-based proposal for political reporting. The Boston Phoenix’s David Bernstein pushed back against Rosen, however, by arguing that the Post blogger was acknowledging the absurdity of the situation. A warning for j-schools: Several major journalism funders, including the Knight Foundation, sounded a warning to American journalism schools by saying their continued financial support of those schools would depend on j-schools speeding up their pace of innovation, specifically moving toward the “teaching hospital” model of education that incorporates actual journalistic practices at a much deeper level. Poynter’s Howard Finberg explained the importance of the statement and included a few responses from those inside j-schools. Later last week, Google’s Richard Gingras told those gathered at the annual AEJMC conference that they need to prepare students for a radically different form of journalism than what’s out there now. Professional journalists are looking for that kind of radically ramped-up training, as well, according to a Knight report issued last week and summarized well by Finberg. But there is some good news yet for journalism students: A Pew study found that the job market is improving for journalism and communication grads. Reading roundup: There were bunches of other interesting stories and issues being talked about this week. Here are a few of them worth keeping up on: — The latest circulation data on magazines revealed more steep drops for much of the industry, especially women’s magazines. The New York Times’ David Carr warned that magazines are on “the edge of the cliff” just as newspapers are, focusing particularly on Newsweek’s decline. Digital replica circulation is still just a small share of magazines’ total numbers, and both Adweek’s Charlie Warzel and GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram wondered whether the magazine-style tablet publication model is fatally flawed, and Mike Masnick of Techdirt said it’s just an attempt to create artificial scarcity in digital form. — Animated GIFs have officially become a capital-t Trend in web culture, with the Olympics acting as, in the words of the Lab’s Andrew Phelps, its “coming-out party.” Phelps explained the background and appeal of the humble GIF, and The New York Times’ Jenna Wortham also talked about how well they fit the Olympics. For journalists hoping to take advantage, Poynter’s Ann Friedman put together a useful how-to. — Time Warner bought the sports site Bleacher Report for $175 million. As Bloomberg reported, Bleacher Report will operate under Turner Broadcasting, which had managed Sports Illustrated’s ads until last year. GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram called the acquisition an important affirmation of the maturation of user-generated content sites. — All Things D reported that The New York Times Co. is planning to sell its low-cost content site About.com to Answers.com. Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici gave some background on About, and Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review argued that About has always been a poor fit for the Times. — Finally, a short but thoughtful piece by longtime tech blogger John Battelle on the difficulty of founding, running, and properly valuing a digital media startup in a time of such significant flux. Photos of Olympics TV broadcast by Bert Kimura, Google refrigerator by Aray Chan, and Fareed Zakaria by James Willamor used under a Creative Commons license. |
The strategy at Boston.com’s RadioBDC also seems to borrow a lot from its terrestrial peers. The streaming station is 
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