Jumat, 03 Agustus 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

The Future of News As We Know It, July 2012: A new ebook collection from Nieman Lab

Posted: 02 Aug 2012 11:49 AM PDT

It’s the start of a new month, which means it’s time to reflect on what we learned in July. And that means it’s time for our second ebook collection, The Future of News As We Know It (*as of July 2012).

Just as we did last month, we swept up our most interesting stories from July into one easy-to-download package for e-readers. It’s designed to look best in Apple’s iBooks, on iPads and iPhones, but it’ll also work well on Kindles, Android phones, or desktop or laptop computers.

This was another good month at the Lab, with a nice mix of breaking news, analysis, and commentary, from our own staff and from outside contributors. (It’s a little bit shorter than June’s ebook — 263 iPad pages vs. 376 for June — but hey, we took a couple days off around July 4, okay? Stop pressuring us.)

As with last month, it’s available in two formats, EPUB and MOBI. EPUB is the best choice for everyone unless you want to read it on a Kindle — then you’ll need the MOBI. (Amazon’s stubbornly refused to get on the EPUB-as-standard bandwagon.)

Q: How do I install this ebook in my ereader?

A: For iBooks on your iPad or iPhone, any of these methods will work:

— Visit this webpage on your iDevice, tap the EPUB download link above, then select Open in iBooks.

— Email the EPUB to yourself and open that email attachment on your iPad or iPhone.

— Move the EPUB into your Dropbox folder and then open it from the Dropbox app on your iDevice.

For other EPUB readers (Nook, Sony Reader, etc.), follow the directions that came with it. You can probably load it via email or USB. If your device has a web browser, downloading it from this web page might work too.

For Kindle, you can load it onto a device by USB or by emailing it to yourself at your Kindle email address. All the options for iBooks will also work for the Kindle app on your iPhone or iPad.

Q: I don’t have an ereader, iPhone, or iPad. Can I read this?

A: Yes! There are a number of good EPUB readers for other devices.

Desktop/laptop computers: There’s the cross-platform Calibre, which is available for Macs, Windows, and Linux. Barnes & Noble’s Nook has apps for Mac, Windows, and Android that will read the EPUB file just fine. Adobe Digital Editions works on Windows and Mac.

For readers interested in sharing: I rather like Readmill, which bills itself as “a curious community of readers, sharing and highlighting the books they love.” It lets you read share highlights within and comments about your EPUB books with other readers. It’s built around an iPad app and stores your books in the cloud.

In browser: You can also read .epubs directly in your web browser, using EPUBReader for Firefox or MagicScroll for Chrome. I’m sure there are others.

Android: There are also a number of EPUB apps for Android. I’ve heard the best is Aldiko.

Kindle apps: The MOBI version of our ebook will open in any of the various Kindle apps, including for Mac, Windows, iPad, iPhone, Android, Windows Phone 7, Android, and BlackBerry — or on the web via the Kindle Cloud Reader.

Note that ebook readers are still a growing field, and different platforms choose to display books in different ways. If you do have an Apple device, iBooks will give you the best results.

You can thank Ralph Lauren for free access to The New York Times’ iPad app (well, some of it)

Posted: 02 Aug 2012 10:00 AM PDT

Good news for Olympics fans and New York Times readers: Much of the Times’ iPad app will be free to access for almost two weeks. For the second year in a row, Ralph Lauren is doing an ad takeover of the app. Just like last time, the free access it provides will be to some of the sections you might imagine the makers of Polo to be interested in: Sports, Fashion, Travel, Home & Garden, and T Magazine. The sponsorship is tied to the Olympics and will feature ads with U.S. Olympians, which will partner well with the Times’ special Olympics section. (Sorry, readers of in-depth national, international, or political news — that’ll still cost you.)

Along with some extra revenue, the deal gives the Times a new way to let readers sample their wares in the hopes of upselling them to a digital subscription. On the web, that sampling takes the form of the 10 free articles readers are allowed each month; in the Times’ iPhone and iPad apps, readers only get to sample an editor-selected group of top stories, with the rest locked behind the paywall. For iPad users, the Ralph Lauren deal gives them a new taste of some of the softer sections they might find appealing.

“It’s an opportunity for us to open up additional sections of content for people who have the app,” said Todd Haskell, group advertising director for the Times. According to a spokeswoman, the Times iPad app, which ranks in the top 5 free iPad apps for news, has seen more than 5 million downloads. The Times’ digital subscribers total only about one-tenth of that number, and many of those don’t have access to the iPad app, which costs more. That suggests there are plenty of people left to upsell.

The trade off for free access, in this case, is a selection of Ralph Lauren ads seeded throughout the app, on section fronts, in between article pages, and whenever the app is opened. But the ads in this case will be more sophisticated than a static image: The package includes video, features on Olympic athletes, and an e-commerce option should you find yourself interested in a $145 Team USA polo (er, Polo).

“When someone is in engaged in our Olympic content, they’ll be able to see our slideshow of the opening ceremonies and go into the Ralph Lauren environment in the app and purchase some of the apparel worn by athletes in the opening ceremonies,” Haskell said. “I think that’s a great advertising experience, I think that’s a great reading experience.”

Haskell said the results of the first ad sponsorship with Ralph Lauren last fall received good feedback from readers. “What we have seen is ads that do have immersive content, whether it’s a gaming element or additional slideshows or videos, they perform very well,” he said.

What the Times wants people to do is get to know the iPad app a little better by spending lots of time with it. The feature-y content in many of the newly free sections fits in well with the iPad’s lean-back environment. And by tying in the Olympics, the Times can also try to get in on some second-screen action as people watch events taking place in London.

The Times produces a lot of work on a daily basis and that leaves lots of entry points for new readers. Haskell said part of the idea behind the promotion is to expose people to parts of the Times they may be less familiar with. “When someone has the opportunity to read more, it emphasizes the fact we produce an enormous amount of content they may be interested in and might be worth their while to access all the time,” he said.

The newsonomics of Syndication 3.0, from NewsCred and NewsLook to Ok.com and Upworthy

Posted: 02 Aug 2012 08:04 AM PDT

Of the many failed digital news dreams, digital syndication is one of the greatest enigmas. We’ve seen companies like Contentville, Screaming Media, and iSyndicate (Syndication 1.0) followed by companies like Mochila (Syndication 2.0), all believing the same thing: In the endless world of digital content, there must be a big business in gathering together some of the world’s best, creating a marketplace, and selling stream upon stream.

In the abstract, the idea makes lot of sense. Producers of content — AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, The Street, Al Jazeera, Getty Images, Global Post, and many more — want all the new revenue they can get. They want to see the content they produced used and reused, over and over again, helping offset the high cost of news creation. The enduring problem is the buy side. We’ve gone oh-so-quickly from Content is King to a content glut. In a world of endless ad inventory and plummeting ad rates, why take syndicated content just to create a greater glut of news, information, and ad spots? That dilemma still hangs in the wind, and has bedeviled news industry consortium startup NewsRight, as it tries to find a future. Yet I’ve been surprised by a new wave of news syndication that’s been developing, here and there. It’s worth paying attention to, because it tells us a lot about how the digital news world is developing.

In part, it’s about new niches being found and exploited. In part, it’s about responding to deep staff cuts at many newspapers. In part, it’s about a slow-dawning wave of new product creation, aided by the tablet. Each of the newer efforts sees the world a little differently, and that’s instructive, though technology and video (see The Onion’s “Onion Special Report: Blood-Drenched, Berserk CEO Demands More Web Videos”) play increasingly key roles. So let’s look at the newsonomics of Syndication 3.0, and a few of the newer entrepreneurs behind it.

NewsCred

As 31-year-old CEO Shafqat Islam notes cheerily, finding investors for his startup was complicated by the fact that “there are a lot of dead bodies in this space.” With 1,000 fairly top-drawer sources and a staff of 50 (35 of them in tech), NewsCred is the big new mover in text and still image syndication, launched earlier this year (“NewsCred wants to be the AP newswire for the 21st century”). Its 50-plus customers divide roughly equally into two groups: media and big brands.

Media, says Islam, are using NewsCred for two reasons. One is to build new products, as the New York Daily News has done with its March-launched India news site, recognizing a locally under-served audience. Skift, Rafat Ali’s new travel B2B startup, is getting 30 to 40 percent of its content through NewsCred. The other is the emergence of the paywall: Charging for digital access, he says, has meant some news companies are wanting to bulk up, offering a better value pitch to would-be digital subscribers. The Chicago Tribune launched a biz/tech “members only” product, powered by NewsCred, at the end of June.

The brand use of news content has a bigger potential. Check out several case histories, showing the use Pepsi, Orange Telecom, and Lenovo has made of NewsCred-distributed entertainment and tech content. Brands are publishers and want an easy, one-source way to populate their sites. Islam says his seven sales people are working as consultants of a sort, especially with such brands. Figuring out how to create content experiences for brands-turned-publishers is one part of the syndication puzzle.

Lessons Learned:

  • In a sense, this is syndication meets marketing services: As news companies both produce content and try to act as regional ad agencies, the synergies between the two are becoming more evident.
  • Timing is everything: We’ve seen a maturation in curation technologies, as metatagging gets easier and cheaper, allowing niched feeds. Then, an increased emphasis on niche product creation is combining with brand need for news content, creating new potential markets.

NewsLook

With 70-plus top video news sources and 35 clients, the three-year-old NewsLook also hopes to build on the archeology of syndication ruin. Like NewsCred, it positions itself as a technology and curation company, adding value to a mass of content. For CEO Fred Silverman, the technology means, importantly, better integration of text and video content.

“We see an awful lot of guys with a video page, or a video way down at the bottom — it’s not integrated. Our push with the publishers we work with is to fluidly integrate it into a news page. You are eleven times more likely to watch that video if it is integrated into a story.” That seems like common sense — put the words and pictures together — but Silverman’s experience resonates way too deeply if you journey through news websites. For his part, he’s been working on improving both NewsLook’s own video metatagging and the ability to match that with text. Now he’s got to convince more customers to make the integration.

Using a license model — “we’re not really an ad company” — NewsLook has found its customers in three segments. He sells to content aggregators like LexisNexis and Cengage, and he sells to news companies. It’s the third area, though, vertical sites, that represent the biggest growth opportunity, especially in the tech area. NewsLook, with its video emphasis, is now partnering with text-centric NewsCred, looking for joint opportunities.

Lessons Learned:

  • Think niche. Think video. Both have audiences that may be paying ones; video ad rates are still holding up far better than text.

Deseret News Service and Ok.com

Clark Gilbert caused quite a stir when he took the reins at Utah’s largest newspaper company two years ago (“Out of the Western Sky, It’s a Hyperlocal, Worldwide Mormon Vertical”). Combining Harvard Business smarts, wide media knowledge, and traditional religious values, Gilbert promised to reshape the LDS-owned media Utah media properties in a way no one else could. Now, midway through that Utah transformation, he’s also moving on a wider world of syndication.

Ok.com has launched. It’s a movie guide like no other. Less Rotten Tomatoes and more wholesome salad, it is a “family media guide.” It’s social (Facebook login) with user-generated comments and ratings, and it offers many of the features (trailers, photos, theater times, online ticketing) that you’d expect. It’s also just the beginning. Ok.com will add TV listings, books, music, and other media to its site. Just syndicated, it so far has signed up a half-dozen customers.

“We want to own the family brand,” Gilbert says, citing his own commissioned research to indicate that it could be a large market. His segmentation of faith-based readers finds not only great dissatisfaction with the perceived amorality of Hollywood, but also questioning of the values of mainstream media.

To address the latter market: the new Deseret News Service, a “values-oriented syndication service.” That service, available for both print and digital, now reaches five markets, with a couple of dozen more on the horizon.

Business models, like cars.com, Gilbert notes, include both straightforward license fees and revenue share models, with Deseret selling advertising.

Gilbert, ever the modeler, believes Deseret is creating one for the industry.

“If you look at the product strategy, we started with the newspaper. We knew we couldn’t be good at everything…..For the Deseret News, that meant our six areas of emphasis [Family, Financial Responsibility, Values in Media, Education, Faith, and Care for the Poor]. For other newspapers, that can be something else. For Washington Post, it is politics. For Sarasota, it is retirement. What I’ve seen in the failure of the newspaper industry is that we’ve lost half our resources, but we’re going to cover it all rather than having the rigor to say, ‘What are we the best at?’

“The web rewards deep expertise. You have a lot of newspapers with high cost structures, producing average commodity news. [We looked] at what can can be the best in the country at. That led to a national edition in print and now syndication.”

Lessons Learned:

  • Combine your values — editorial, religious, or whatever — with the best web tools of the day to satisfy currently unsatisfied audiences. Then scale.

The AllMedia Platform

Critical Media CEO Sean Morgan may be the last man standing whose career has spanned syndication from 1.0 through 3.0. A founder of Screaming Media, circa 1995, his Critical Media company has been building syndication and other products (media monitor Critical Mention, video capture and creation platform Syndicaster, news video licensor Clip Syndicate) since 2002. Now, his company has produced AllMedia. Its primary function: a platform allowing clients “to collect and curate user-generated video content from their online communities.” It’s another component of its analytics-based enterprise business.

Morgan’s play here is wider than syndication, but syndication plays a key role. Critical Media’s technologies offer publishers (and others) value. In return, Critical gets the right to license news video assets, and it has amassed three million of them, and 100,000 are being added monthly; 350 (200 newspaper; 150 broadcast) local media companies are participating in Critical products. Clip Syndicate, its news video product, isn’t yet well promoted, but when it is, it could be powerful. It already enables “grab a channel” functionality for licensees. Clip Syndicate operates on a 50/50 revenue share model, with Morgan saying he is getting $21.40 CPM rates. The goal: monetize the “the biggest news video archive.”

Lessons Learned:

  • Syndication may be a long-term proposition, taking years of building infrastructure, or partnering with those who do.
  • It’s not the content — it’s the metadata about the content that unlocks its value, allowing niching and enabling product creators and editors to find what they need.

California Watch

Now incorporating content from its Bay Citizen merger, California Watch continues to expand out its syndication business. Executive director Robert Rosenthal estimates the news startup will take in about $750,000 this year in licensing money, funding about 10 percent of its budget (“The newsonomics of the death and life of California news”). California Watch offers yearly, monthly, and à la carte sales.

Its model really is the old-fashioned media wire, vastly updated with multimedia at the core and a strong enterprise journalism emphasis. With 16 significant media partners throughout California, just adding NBC Bay Area and including big TV stations and newspapers, it has been able to double some of the prices it charges over time. Further, it’s on the verge of syndicating to a major national/global news player. “Don’t silo potential audience by geography. A good story from a neighborhood in San Francisco may be the top story on the Internet one day,” Rosenthal says.

Like a traditional wire, its value is in more than its stories. It also acts as a news budget or tipsheet for subscribing news editors. With one of the largest news contingents in the state capital, Sacramento, for instance, it helps drive coverage overall.

Lessons Learned:

  • Collaboration with customers creates utility as well as content itself — and cements financial relationships.
  • Syndicated content, here, works on the older concept of scale: Do it once and distribute to many, without the burden of legacy costs and constraints.

Upworthy

Upworthy is like Hollywood Squares for progressives. No Whoopi Goldberg, but nine rectangles of meaningful video, well described by the Times’ David Carr.

Launched in March. It’s an on-ramp for Facebook, feeding the kinds of videos it prizes into the social sphere with headlining that would make a tabloid editor proud. Founder Eli Pariser (of Moveon.org and author of The Filter Bubble) says he borrowed headlining techniques from Slate, which he says writes “the best headlines on the web,” without slavishly pointing at Google search engine optimization. (Examples: “Donald Trump Has Pissed Off Scotland” and “How a 6-Year-Old With Ignorant Parents Just Became the Best Republican Presidential Candidate“).

Its declaration defines its would-be audience: “At best, things online are usually either awesome or meaningful, but everything on Upworthy.com has a little of both. Sensational and substantial. Entertaining and enlightening. Shocking and significant. That’s what you can expect here: No empty calories. No pageview-juking slideshows. No right-column sleaze. Just a steady stream of the most irresistibly shareable stuff you can click on without feeling bad about yourself afterwards.”

Upworthy is really syndication simplified. It uses the social sphere to see content re-used. Its currency isn’t licensing fees; no money changes hands in its viral promotion of content. Currently, its single revenue source is referral fees it gets from progressive organizations that pay it on a cost-per-acquisition basis for traffic.

Lessons Learned:

  • People — many, many people — will do the syndication for you if you learn the tricks and trades of headlining, SEO, and the social rumble. While Upworthy’s referral-fee business model may have limited extension, its use of social to extend syndication (perhaps with sponsorships) can be used by others.

Consider Syndication 3.0 a puzzle, with more of the parts found but the full picture still incomplete. Technology, as in all things digital, plays a midwife role, but understanding customer use — and helping would-be customers imagine use — is fundamental. Let’s face it: Costly content creation must be paid for somehow, as ad revenues falter and reader revenues build slowly. Making more use of the content that has been created makes basic sense, and the basics of that business are being built out anew.
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