Jumat, 28 September 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Dan Gillmor: Journalism school should provide an excellent liberal arts education

Posted: 27 Sep 2012 09:00 AM PDT

Editor’s Note: It’s the start of the school year, which means students are returning to journalism programs around the country. As the media industry continues to evolve, how well is new talent being trained, and how well are schools preparing them for the real world?

We asked an array of people — hiring editors, recent graduates, professors, technologists, deans — to evaluate the job j-schools are doing and to offer ideas for how they might improve. Here Dan Gillmor — ex-newspaper reporter, media thinker, Arizona State professor of digital media entrepreneurship — lays out his ideas for making journalism education more useful and relevant.

Accepting an award from Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School for Journalism & Mass Communication in 2008, former PBS NewsHour host Robert McNeil called journalism education probably “the best general education that an American citizen can get” today.

Perhaps he was playing to his audience, at least to a degree. Many other kinds of undergraduate degree programs could lay claim to a similar value; a strong liberal arts degree, no matter what the major, has great merit. Still, there’s no doubt that a journalism degree, done right, is an excellent foundation for a student’s future in any field, not just media.

Even if McNeil overstated the case, his words should inspire journalism educators to ponder their role in a world where these programs’ traditional reason for being is increasingly murky.

Our raison d’être is open to question largely because the employment pipeline of the past, a progression leading from school to jobs in media and related industries, is (at best) in jeopardy. We’re still turning out young graduates who go off to work in entry-level jobs, particularly in broadcasting — but where is their career path from there?

If traditional media have adapted fitfully to the collision of technology and media, journalism schools as a group may have been even slower to react to the huge shifts in the craft and its business practices. Only recently have they embraced digital technologies in their work with students who plan to enter traditional media. Too few are helping students understand that they may well have to invent their own jobs, much less helping them do so.

Yet journalism education could and should have a long and even prosperous life ahead — if its practitioners make some fundamental shifts, recognizing the realities of the 21st century.

If I ran a journalism school, I would start with the same basic principles of honorable, high-quality journalism and mediactivism, and embed them at the core of everything else. If our students didn’t understand and appreciate them, nothing else we did would matter very much. With the principles as the foundation, we would, among many other things:

  • Emphasize undergraduate journalism degrees as great liberal arts programs, perhaps even more valuable when viewed that way than as training for journalism careers. At the same time, we would focus graduate journalism studies on helping people with expertise in specific areas to be the best possible journalists in their fields.
  • Encourage, and require in some cases, cross-disciplinary learning and doing. We’d create partnerships around the university, working with business, engineering/computer science, film, political science, law, design and many other programs. The goals would be both to develop our own projects and to be an essential community-wide resource for the future of local media.
  • Teach students not just the basics of digital media but also the value of data and programming to their future work. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they need to become programmers, but they absolutely need to know how to communicate with programmers. We’d also encourage computer science undergraduates to become journalism graduate students, so they can help create tomorrow’s media.
  • Require all students to learn basic statistics, survey research, and fundamental scientific methodology. The inability of journalists to understand the math they encounter in their reading is one of journalism’s — and society’s — major flaws.
  • Encourage a research agenda with deep connections to key media issues of today. More than ever, we need solid data and rigorous analysis. And translate faculty research into language average people can understand as opposed to the dense, even impenetrable, prose that’s clear (if it really is) only to readers of academic journals.
  • Require all journalism students to understand business concepts, especially those relating to media. This is not just to cure the longstanding ignorance of business issues in the craft, but also to recognize that today’s students will be among the people who develop tomorrow’s journalism business models. We’d discuss for-profit and not-for-profit methods, and look at advertising, marketing, social networking, and search-engine optimization, among many other elements.
  • Make entrepreneurship a core part of journalism education. Arizona State University, where I work, is among several schools working on this, and the early experiments are gratifying. Several of our student projects have won funding. At City University of New York, Jeff Jarvis has received foundation funding for student projects to continue after the class is over, based on semester-ending competitive “pitches” to a judging panel of journalists and investors. We need to see more and more of these and other kinds of experiments.
  • Persuade the president (or chancellor, or whatever the title) and trustees of the university that every student on the campus should learn journalism principles and skills before graduating, preferably during freshman year. At State University of New York’s Stony Brook campus, the journalism school has been given a special mandate of exactly this kind. Howard Schneider, a former newspaper journalist who now is dean of Stony Brook’s journalism school, won foundation funding to bring news literacy into the university’s broader community, rather than only to those enrolled in journalism courses.
  • Create a program of the same kind for people in the community, starting with teachers. Our goal would be to help schools across our geographical area bring mediactivism to every level of education—not just college, but also elementary, middle and high school. We would offer workshops, conferences and online training.
  • Offer that program, or one like it, to concerned parents who feel overwhelmed by the media deluge themselves, to help turn them into better media consumers and to give them ways to help their children.
  • Enlist another vital player in this effort: local media of all kinds, not just traditional media. Of course, as noted earlier, they should be making this a core part of their missions, given that their own credibility would rise if they helped people understand the principles and process of quality journalism. But we’d very much want to work with local new media organizations and individuals, too.
  • Advise and train citizen journalists to understand and apply sound principles and best practices. They are going to be an essential part of the local journalism ecosystem, and we should reach out to show them how we can help.
  • Augment local media with our own journalism. We train students to do journalism, after all, and their work should be widely available in the community, particularly when it fills in gaps left by the shrinking traditional media. At Arizona State, the Cronkite News Service provides all kinds of coverage of topics the local news organizations rarely cover, making our students’ work available to those organizations.

All this suggests a considerably broader mission for journalism schools and programs than the one they’ve had in the past. It also suggests a huge opportunity for journalism schools. The need for this kind of training has never been greater. We’re not the only ones who can do it, but we may be among the best equipped.

This piece was adapted from Dan’s book Mediactive.

The newsonomics of Pricing 201

Posted: 27 Sep 2012 08:35 AM PDT

Don’t call it a price increase. Call it a re-valuation of the customer proposition.

Really.

Now, waist-deep into the digital circulation revenue revolution, we’re adding fact to hunch, data to intuition.

Take The Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C., and its spring paywall launch. The 85,000-circulation daily benefited by being a fast follower, learning from early paywall adopters, when it launched on May 1. The big result so far: a run rate that will produce a 10 percent annual circulation revenue increase.

That’s serious money, especially as advertising dollars wend farther south. Further, it’s an indication that a key brick in the foundation of the new news business model is being laid. I’ve pointed to the quick ascendance of reader revenue (“The newsonomics of majority reader revenue”) and that trend is gaining steam as we push into 2013. In fact, if you look at Charleston’s own trajectory, it now generates 37 percent of its revenue from circulation, up dramatically from 15.7 percent in 2000. (For those long in the business, we can call this Revenge of the Circulation VPs).

Circulation has turned from a means (getting ad-rich papers to shoppers) to an end unto itself, actually getting readers to pay a significant share of the journalism costs. It’s a simple proposition: You ask the people who really value you and your journalism to pay you more. Surprisingly to some, it looks like many of us are willing to. Why didn’t we think of this earlier, before the carnage of cuts overwhelmed the profession? Call it a brew of misunderstanding the digital transition, of timidity, of Steve Jobs’ iRevolutions…and of desperation. As Disraeli put it, “Desperation is sometimes as powerful an inspirer as genius.”

In Charleston, Steve Wagenlander’s inspirations were the multiple experiments he saw going on around the country and more widely. Wagenlander is in charge of audience development at The Post and Courier.

Which leads us back to that re-valuation of the customer proposition. Wagenlander says The Post and Courier is “playing off the American Express line of 20 years ago: Membership has its benefits.”

“Why should I spend $20 a month on the paper?” was the deep question Wagenlander and his colleagues asked themselves. The answer both takes papers both back to their community roots and propels them forward into this digital age.

The Post and Courier decided that it wouldn’t make a point of charging its 60,000 subscribers extra fees for digital access, as some papers are now doing. They focused on “the bundle.” That bundle is a promise, a growing bag of goodies that quickly moves users to readers to subscribers and now to members. That membership notion — also being tested at The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and The Day in New London, Conn. — restates both the consumer value proposition and backs it up with a vow to take care of its customers’ reading and shopping needs in ever-expanding ways.

The Post and Courier’s Daily Advantage membership program offers a baseline of benefits:

  • A seven-day print subscription
  • Full access to websites with online commenting
  • Full access to its digitized archives
  • Mobile and tablets apps
  • Specialty magazines; The Post and Courier’s free Tideline and Lowcountry Parent magazines, once only bulk-delivered around town, are now home-delivered to members
  • Subscriber Rewards; commercial deals of all kinds, some of which can access by simply showing a page on your phone
  • E-edition access

That’s a good beginning bundle, and Wagenlander says it will build on. The results of the new value proposition so far are noteworthy:

  • The “best value” Daily Advantage membership program is priced at $20 a month. Seven-day subscriptions had been priced at $17.50. Do the math: That’s a 14.2 percent price increase, if the apple-to-apple change hadn’t been mixed up in the fruit salad bundle.
  • Wagenlender says he budgeted for 5 percent subscriber loss, and so fair, it’s running at 1.3 to 1.9 percent. That means circulation revenue should show about 10 percent year-over-year increase.
  • As of Tuesday, The Post and Courier has signed up 1,058 digital-only customers and they’ve generated $120,000 in new revenue. Digital-only “Advantage” members pay $10 a month or $99 a year.
  • To encourage that digital-only revenue and membership overall, the paper set its paywall at a modest five articles a month, again learning from the experience of its partner RR Donnelley-owned Press+. About 2,200 people a day hit The Post and Courier’s paywall, forcing a pay/no pay decision.
  • Of The Post and Courier’s 60,000 subscribers — an incredible 96 percent of whom take seven-day subs — almost 10,000 have registered for digital access in the first 150 days of the change.

Overall, we can figure the paper should be en route for $2 million or so of increased annual revenue.

Building on The Post and Courier’s example, let’s flesh out what we’re learning about paywall strategies. I’ll call it The Newsonomics of Pricing 102, following up on my spring Pricing 101 post.

With digital circulation becoming mainstream worldwide (“The newsonomics of paywalls all over the world”) from Finland to Spain to Australia to Japan to North America, we should now see “paywalls” as vital strategy, not experiment. In fact, digital circulation provides a talisman of certainty — as certain as things get these days — in a world of flux. Quite simply, established newspaper readers are voting with their wallets. They like their local news papers and sites. If those companies offer a trusted hand, transitioning and toggling into the tablet/smartphone/Roku-assisted world along with the readers, the great majority of those readers are willing to shake on it.

Price isn’t a big deal. We’ve learned that trusted news access has been long undervalued, and we’re now testing not pricing floors, but pricing ceilings. How much is too much? How much forces too many readers to stop paying? That’s a good problem to have. Certainly, we’ll see ceilings bumped soon, as publishers further price up, but this year and next, there’s new money to be had.

A few further lessons, culled from lots of executional wisdom now being shared:

  • Digital can be used to reinforce print — for now: Most newspaper subscribers are togglers, travelers in the print/digital netherworld. Offer them a good enough deal to take both print and digital — at least the valuable Sunday paper — and most will do it. Consider this, though, a two-to-five year play. “The Sunday paper is the new Saturday night stay,” suggests Matt Lindsay, head of Mather Economics, which works with more than 250 U.S. dailies on pricing. Meaning you can force it, if the deal is good enough overall. Southwest Airlines, and others, though put an end to forcing travelers to a trip containing a weekend, and the market will eventually make newspaper’s “forced” bundles harder to maintain. Whose bundles will last longer, print newspapers’ or cable’s?
  • Content counts more than ever: Press+ now is munching more digital circ data than anyone else, with its 400-plus clients. One clear correlation: The more content on a paid digital access site, the more sales. A Steve Brill truism worth restating: “If you want to sell journalism, you have to do journalism.”
  • Focusing on overall subscriber revenue — meaning current subscribers mainly, but not solely — produces the biggest revenue increase: Many papers charge their print customers a digital up-charge, but they seem to be increasing overall circulation revenue less than by including digital access within print prices — and pricing up all-access subscriptions. Consequently, many publishers are moving to “opt-out” selling, with customers having to take affirmative action not to accept higher pricing.
  • 2 percent: How much pain is too much pain? Print circulation has been ebbing for a long time (try post-World War II) — a “natural” decrease, given aging print readers and digital migration, is inevitable. Experience has shown that 1 to 3 percent “incremental” loss of subscribers — due to higher pricing — is the price of doing this business, and a good yardstick of how valuable readers think your products are.
  • Membership is a platform, not a fixed program: Cynically, it’s easy to say that newspapers are tossing together a number of older programs and features, and putting a prettier bow on the package. Yet, in the Post and Courier package, we see a great start. Now it’s up to both the editors and the marketers to keep adding journalistic and shopping value to “the bundle.”
  • Setting the meter ever lower is key to creating member value — and revenue. Many papers started at the safe 20. Press+ clients now average 11, with one in four publishers under 10, The New York Times’ current number. A big difference between those who have made more than 5 percent added circulation revenue and those who have made less is where that meter set. Why? Simple math. Publishers tell me that 40 to 70 percent of their pageviews come from 10 percent or fewer of readers; those are the ones likeliest to pay. Yet given a generous 15 or 20 articles a month, within busy lives, they may not run into the wall often enough to pony up. Additional data: Press+’s numbers says that only 7 percent of visitors view more than five articles a month. Consequently, it says, “a high meter of 20 will affect only about 0.7 percent of visitors in an average month (or about 10 percent of the engaged population). A meter of 5 will affect about 5.5 percent of all readers, but 79 percent of engaged (those who do read average of 5-plus articles per month).” It is the engaged readers — mainly print habitués, but also digital-only ones — who are the customers.
  • Timing of change is critical: Put a price increase into effect and tell readers you’re doing it because you’ve added digital goodies, and you may be inviting customer backlash — as in, “I didn’t ask for these improvements.” Add apps or services before (best) or after a price hike, and it will be better accepted, says Mike Klingensmith, the Star Tribune CEO. In addition, how often to raise prices — especially when they’re going up in high single or low double digits — is an open question. Annually may be too much, but longer time spans complicate year-over-year budgeting.
  • Pricing itself: It’s, curiously, all over the board, with too little correlation with revenue yield. Some publishers try to peg digital-only rates at some percentage, high or low, of all-access, but again, there’s little correlation on results. That makes sense to circulation consultant Lindsay: These are two different audiences, two different markets, he says, so you have to figure out the price tolerance, within any given market, for each.

Look at this in the bigger picture. Ad revenue is in decline and circulation revenue among those who put in paywalls and do it right — a small number of “free” articles, added membership value, sufficient editorial quality, an optimized mobile experience — is up. It’s less a question, of course, of when reader revenue surpasses ad revenue. The question, can reader revenues — plus other newer initiatives — make up for ad losses and lead newspaper companies, shriveled as they are, back to a path of modest growth? As publishers budget for 2013, no one can answer with a strong affirmative “Yes!” But that potential is now surfacing.

Photo by Jessica Wilson used under a Creative Commons license.

Free the Files! ProPublica taps the crowd for a database-building sprint to election day

Posted: 27 Sep 2012 08:00 AM PDT

Political transparency geeks got both good news and bad news from the Federal Communications Commission last April.

Good news first: The FCC decided it would require television stations to put information about political ad buys online.

The bad news: Only stations from the top 50 markets are required to do so, and stations can post the files as image PDFs — meaning there’s no easy way to search records by the name of the ad buyer from the FCC database.

And what good is a bunch of data if you can’t extract meaning?

“It’s a news app that our readers are essentially building in real time.”

ProPublica is coming to the rescue — it hopes, with your help — with a project launched today called Free the Files, the latest iteration of an ongoing effort to examine political ads and the shadowy groups that often pay for them.

Within the top 50 TV markets, ProPublica is focusing on ads purchased in swing states like Virginia, Florida, Nevada, and Pennsylvania.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

    2. Pick a document — either by television market, or by clicking the random “Give me a file!” button
    3. Answer four questions about that document: Who bought it? What agency? How much? What’s the contract number on the ad buy?

There are plenty of group names already in the system, so when you start typing “American…” for example, a list of nonprofits or super PACs like American Crossroads pops up. It’s a feature that promotes consistency in data entry in the same way that including a contract number is meant to eliminate duplications. Help buttons attached to each question guide volunteers on properly reading the files. There’s also a box to check if you notice “something else notable” about any given file.

“The beauty of this is its simplicity,” ProPublica senior engagement editor Amanda Zamora told me. “We’re asking for very specific data points. We’re not asking people to do that next step and say, ‘What kind of group is this?’ We chose to focus, to make it something that people would likely do. We want to give people incentive but also don’t want them to feel, ‘This is a Sisyphean task, we’ll never make it.’”

But the task ahead is still a major one. ProPublica has more than 15,000 files on hand with 40 short days until the presidential election, and each datapoint on a file needs to be verified by at least two users before it can be officially entered into ProPublica’s database. Developing verification infrastructure has been the biggest challenge for ProPublica’s Al Shaw, who calls the project “one of the biggest and most advanced crowdsourced efforts ever done.” ProPublica is known for its ambitious data projects, but it usually cleans up and organizes data in-house before sharing it with the world.

“The whole thing is a huge experiment, and we’re not sure if it’s going to work,” Shaw told me. “It’s a news app that our readers are essentially building in real time. One thing we’re worried about: Are we going to have an empty room, just a super structure with no data?”

ProPublica’s also in the thick of another real-time crowdsourced database project this election season. The site has been asking readers to feed its Message Machine with campaign emails — readers also provide demographic information about themselves to ProPublica — in hopes of better understanding how campaigns target different groups. (That layer of analysis comes later. The real-time component is the ability to mouse over a graph of emails, sorted by candidate and subject line.)

ProPublica isn’t measuring its success based on whether an army of volunteers can work their way through every last last file — although, of course, that’s an outcome the site would welcome. If this effort helps identify even one otherwise unknown ad buyer, that’s a journalistic victory in Zamora’s eyes.

There’s also an opportunity to pick up where Federal Election Committee filings leave off — as well as identify so-called dark money groups that may be spending money on campaigns without reporting it to the FEC. ProPublica has its reporters ready to take the work of the crowd and apply traditional, aggressive reporting techniques. (Bonus: Other news organizations can dip into the database and do their own reporting.)

The basic strategy: Crowdsource the assembly of a database but leave it to the reporters to take on more complicated and time-consuming legwork and analysis. Already ProPublica has a group of more than 500 volunteers — people who said they were willing to physically visit their local TV stations and send files to ProPublica before the FCC required the stations to do it.

For volunteers, incentives are built in all around them. There’s the overarching idea that they’re contributing to important work, but they’ll also get to see the fruits of their labor as it happens. The Free the Files map that they’re populating with data will become more robust with their efforts. There’s also a gamification aspect to the project, which features a leaderboard that ranks volunteers by how many files they’ve freed.

Plus, Zamora set up a Facebook group for the volunteers, a place where people can discuss their work, share information about ads they’ve seen in their home states, and so on. ProPublica has had success with crowdsourced projects in the past when they’ve assigned meaningful but doable tasks and created forums that reinforce the strength of the community that’s doing the work. Also, ProPublica frames the mission narrowly — that includes making clear not only the goal but explicitly telling volunteers what not to do.

“We’re saying, ‘Look, this is not a place for political rants or partisanship,’” Zamora said. “We have a mission: We’re trying to increase transparency around political spending, and we’ve got a lot of documents and a lot of work to do in a short amount of time. We’re embarking on something really different, asking out readers to help us fill in the blanks, and visualize and log the data before it’s complete.”

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