Rabu, 03 Oktober 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Talking Points Memo launches membership-only program, wades into longform

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 10:15 AM PDT

Encouraging mass readership within a niche coverage area is at the heart of Talking Points Memo’s ad-supported business model.

So when founding publisher/editor Josh Marshall began to assess the best ways to diversify the site’s revenue stream, he had to think about the subgroups within that already refined audience.

First things first: Not everyone is going to pay for a subscription. And Marshall didn’t want to put TPM behind a paywall anyway. What he wanted was to find people who would be willing to spend money on TPM so that it could expand in ways tailored to serve those paying customers.

Enter TPM Prime, a membership/subscription service that launches on Oct. 15. For $50 per year — or an as-yet-unannounced month-to-month rate that would wind up being more expensive per year — subscribers will pay for “backstage pass” access to TPM staffers, newsmakers, and one another.

The membership is more about the community of people involved than exclusive content. So whereas Politico Pro produces super-insidery coverage that you won’t see on the core site, TPM is keeping its coverage paywall-free and instead building a premium service around the people who read it.

“We want to be totally upfront: We’re trying to build as big a revenue base as we can.”

TPM Prime perks include invites to live chats with reporters and political figures, a members-only commenting forum, and downloading rights to about half a dozen ad-free mini-ebooks called TPM Singles. TPM Singles will clock in around 10,000 words apiece, and represent the site’s first foray into longform journalism. (Those who aren’t Prime subscribers will be able to pay to download individual singles.)

“For ages, I have felt most books about politics and news are basically a couple of chapters long, but we’ve got this thing called ‘the book’ where it has to be 150 pages or there’s no business model to sell it,” Marshall told me. “Over many years, we’ve made a speciality out of tracking the whole issue of voter fraud and voter suppression. We can now, if we choose to, do a definitive mini-book on what happened in the 2012 cycle. If we put those 20,000 words on the front page of TPM, maybe it would get 5,000 views. It’s way too much of an investment of time in revenue terms, because it has to live or die on the pageview model.”

(Marshall wouldn’t reveal which topics TPM Singles would explore, calling the voter fraud example “hypothetical.” The two ebooks now in the works “will become relevant immediately after the election,” he said.)

The editorial shift that can come with getting past pageviews — that is, a 100-percent-ad-supported model — is as important as what it does for the bottom line. In other words, diversifying revenue isn’t just key to survival; it also affects day-to-day operations: how to cover something, the extent to which you can focus on boosting the quality of commenting, improving user experience, and so on.

“Our money comes from advertising, so that is inevitably an overwhelming priority for us, because that’s how we pay the bills,” Marshall said. “You create a set of incentives internally to cater to advertising. I’m proud to say we have really been as pure as the driven snow on the important things. We don’t fiddle with things to suit advertisers. But internally you do put a lot of resources into selling ads. It’s simple as that. What I noticed is that we didn’t have really strong internal financial incentives focused on our core readers.”

And TPM’s core readers — Marshall estimates tens or hundreds of thousands have a regular TPM habit — are a huge part of what shapes the site’s identity. “I didn’t like that we were growing in a way where we didn’t have really clear parts of the bottom line that were tied to servicing that community,” Marshall said. (He tweeted that in the first 10 hours after TPM Prime opened membership, more than 1,000 had signed up.)

Marshall says he’s been thinking for a couple of years about the right way to embark on TPM Prime. One of the things that kept nagging at him was how much to charge.

TPM’s readership is “very affluent” relative to the general population, and friends in the publishing industry told Marshall that $50 per year was too low. Some said he should charge $100, even $200. On the flip side, Marshall didn’t want to alienate those core readers who might struggle to pay $50. The solution he came up with, perhaps taking a cue from Radiohead: Sell memberships for $50, but suggest members can pay as much as they want (in increments of $50) to sponsor readers who don’t have the cash. The win-win is that more readers get access and — more importantly — TPM gets more money.

“We’re not presenting this as ‘You need to give more money for the starving TPM readers in Africa,’” Marshall said. “We want to be totally upfront: We’re trying to build as big a revenue base as we can. This seemed to be a way that fit with those needs for us.”

As for how TPM will determine eligibility for freebie membership: No tax returns necessary, Marshall says. TPM is still working out the infrastructure for these kinds of memberships but the site will probably just ask for proof of student or senior status, for example, in cases where readers claim they have a low fixed-income or could otherwise use a Prime handout.

Marshall’s goal is to get about 10,000 subscribers in the first year-plus. In the immediate future, he is hoping to get enough early members to be able to hire one full-time staffer devoted to Prime.

Depending on how many subscribers the premium service gets in the longer term, there are other deep-dive forms of journalism Marshall wants to explore. (Data journalism is one example.) Come 2013, TPM is expanding its core site with new verticals — he’s thinking about business, technology, and telecommunications — and plans to hire in its Washington, D.C., newsroom.

“I like being involved in innovative journalism and innovative publishing,” Marshall said. “There are things that we have not been able to do in our current model that we will be able to do now. I’m excited.”

Jeff Israely: In the quest for speed and quantity, there’s still a place for quality

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 08:13 AM PDT

Editor’s Note: Jeff Israely, a former Time magazine foreign correspondent in Europe, has launched a news startup called Worldcrunch. For the past two years, he’s been describing and commenting on the process here at Nieman Lab. Read his past installments here.

Consider this the second of three installments in what I’m calling The False (And True) Dilemmas In Finding Your News Industry Business Model. Last time it was the question of B2B vs. B2C. Next time it will be paid vs. free. For this post, my true-and-false dilemma is content quality vs. content quantity.

From corporate suites to startup basements, a lot of brainpower is pouring into finding new business models for the news industry. We too are in this scrum, and spend as much creative energy on this pursuit as we do on designing cool features and producing great stories.

And yet — what if we pulled an old, brutally simple business concept off the shelf to serve as the lantern that will guide us through the dark corners of this tricky, transformative moment for the news business?

Last spring, in a different context, Canadian entrepreneur Ashkan Karbasfrooshan summed up the pursuit of digital value in a way that just kind of stuck in my head: Ultimately, the company that can create the best content at the lowest cost possible will create most value over time.

It seems so simple and irrefutable — but the truth is that over the past five or so years this approach has come to be seen by many as quaint, if not outright naïve in the face of news industry economics that seem to exclude the very possibility of factoring in quality. The potential instead seemed to rest in both how much can be produced for so little (plugging into the crowd or computer algorithms to take care of producing the content) and in how best to make it all circulate.

Even those who still relied on paid professional humans to bake the daily bread have been swept up by the pursuit of “traffic generation,” the quest for the proverbial eyeballs. You could even tweak the old business adage to: Whoever produces the highest quantity (of clicks) at the lowest cost wins.

But now, it seems the equation is changing yet again: With the advent of the tablet and its ‘quality-time’ experience, and a growing willingness amongst consumers to pay for digital journalism — as well as the sinking returns on digital display ads.

Though highest-quality-at-lowest-cost is hardly sufficient to solve the broader industry trends – yes, brand new business models and revenue streams are still very much needed! – the dictum does provide some bearings, particularly for those of us who are building (and rebuilding) news brands around a core of original journalistic production.

There’s more to news than speed

The craft of journalism is potentially as infinite as our attention spans are short. The best editors will tell you first to report the hell out of it and then write it as long as it needs to be — and then they’ll swiftly (and rightly) cut your epic masterpiece for space or taste or both. That’s the traditional, high-quality journalistic process working on all cylinders: smart story selection, deep reporting, space for writing, tough edits — and without regard to cost.

Karbasfrooshan’s dictum above reminds us that quality exists along a continuum, often (but not always) linked to the cost of achieving it. Quantity, of course, come with its price as well. The imperative is to find new, economical ways to increase both.

A news business, however, is all about making choices, both about which story to do in what way, and which new product to launch in what market — and of course, ever more these days, what must be left undone and unlaunched for lack of time or money.

Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal recently spent some time on the job with Kevin Reynolds, who runs Bloomberg’s “Speed Desk,” which serves up the latest news flashes from around the world, often whooping the competition. Weisenthal noted the resources that go into churning out such a “mind-blowing” news product — identifying two factors that always play up against cost: speed and accuracy.

That’s a wire model (Weisenthal is himself a one-man news wire), a good starting point to think about the economics of how news is produced and distributed. But to take into account other forms of journalism, I would expand the list to five: speed, accuracy, range, depth, and…grace.

We should also note that beyond traditional first-hand reporting and editing, the shift to digital makes such things as curation, creation of digitally native and multimedia content, and social media engagement also have their place in these tradeoffs.

In our particular case — a global news site that gets the best foreign-language journalism into English — we saw the tradeoff between quantity and quality a couple of months ago when we went beyond just full-length translated articles from licensed partners and added in shorter aggregated pieces culled from a variety of sources. We did it in part because it allowed us to be more reactive to events happening anywhere (speed, range), but we also did it simply out of a need to increase our content output (quantity) at a lower cost.

But we are well aware that if we focus too much on this formula, we will suffer in a loss of depth and grace. (Accuracy must be the non-negotiable — though it too can suffer from all the competing pulls on limited resources.)

The business questions that dovetail with these editorial choices are many. Who is your audience? What place do you want to occupy in the market? In the news cycle? How do you want to be consumed? Where is your revenue coming from? Very quickly, once you start producing content in a new way, you see how long it takes to turn out each piece, how much it costs — and soon after, your return on investment.

The price of talent

The great news brands, of course, manage to do it all — and figure out how to calibrate their choices to achieve the right mix at any given moment. Finding the best people — yes, those humans again — is of course central. Some will be better at cranking it out, some at digging deep — others will have the master’s touch. Not everyone can be a Hemingway, or a Weisenthal.

But more to the point, just saying “we’re gonna find great people” is not a game plan: You’re competing with (almost) everyone else who has the same objective in mind. We know that the best people also have their price.

When I was starting out in the news business in Northern California in the mid-1990s, the highest-paid journo in town was San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen. It was said that you could find a whole newspaper in his daily column, a potpourri of scoops, scooplets, witticisms, and observations about his hometown and whatever crossed his radar that day.

Caen worked his sources. He aggregated bits of worthwhile information found elsewhere. He provided quality and quantity, on a wide range of topics with a writerly grace to turn – and sometimes coin – phrases. If he were alive today, Caen no doubt would have San Francisco’s premier city blog. The only question: Who could afford to host it?

Photo by Jim Rees used under a Creative Commons license.

The New York Times debuts an HTML5 iPad web app to complement its native apps

Posted: 02 Oct 2012 05:42 AM PDT

Step aside, Financial Times and Quartz — there’s now a higher-profile adherent to the HTML5 web app faith.

The New York Times today debuted an HTML5 web app for iPad users. The FT broke ground by abandoning Apple’s App Store in 2011 and investing in an HTML5-driven experience that could readily cross platforms — and didn’t require giving Apple its 30 percent vig. Quartz drew attention just a week ago by debuting a new business-news site that aimed high demographically but bet on a sharable web platform over native apps. And yesterday’s Pew study — which found mobile news consumers using the web over apps 2-to-1 — would seem to support a web-first strategy.

But as we’ve explored here before, going web-first still comes with a mix of advantages and disadvantages. And, as is the case whenever The New York Times does anything, lots of news organizations will likely to watch its moves and, six months later, follow in step. So what does it mean for the Times to build an app-like experience — and, it should be said, a pretty darned good app-like experience — on the web? A few thoughts:

An experiment more than an investment

The Financial Times abandoned its iOS apps entirely in favor of a web app strategy. And Quartz never had iOS apps to abandon. The New York Times, on the other hand, has invested significant resources into being platform-native, building out apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows Phone, along with Times Reader for desktops and laptops and plain-vanilla NYTimes.com. (They did jump off the Good Ship BlackBerry this summer, knowing a Titanic when they see one.) Arthur Sulzberger has spoken about the need to be “platform agnostic”; one can read that as an endorsement of being on lots of platforms, or one can read it as an endorsement of being on HTML5 everywhere.

(At the moment, that cross-platformness is more theory than reality. While a web app can run on almost any device, the Times web app says it will only install on iPads and in Safari. Presumably that could change as more tablets gain popularity.)

It makes sense for the Times to build an HTML5 platform; at a minimum, it can eventually fill in the gaps for platforms that it doesn’t want to develop native experiences for. (A particular issue as tablet sizes metastasize from 5-inch to 10-inch and beyond.) But I wouldn’t read this as writing off a native-app strategy just yet; this app seems to be more a supplement than a replacement. A good HTML5 app can obviate the need for a native app — but the Times already has a pretty darned good native app on the iPad, one that’s better in most ways than what debuted today.

Then again…it could someday serve as a useful hedge against Apple and the power of both its App Store and its 30 percent cut. (That said, I doubt Apple’s in any mood to be friendly to the NYT these days.)

Update: As Times emerging platforms editor Fiona Spruill tweeted:

Not quite smooth as silk

I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but the Times web app doesn’t feel nearly as smooth or app-like as its native iPad app. It feels a bit like an older version of Android — scrolls are a little jerky, taps a little less responsive. The most recent version of Android included something called Project Butter to make the UI dairy-smooth, and that butteriness is what’s missing from the Times web app.

There are a variety of reasons for this. Most obviously, native apps will almost always have the edge over a HTML/JavaScript mashup. But on top of that, Apple doesn’t give access to its Nitro JS engine to self-contained web apps, which is how the NYT wants you to access the site. As web developer Nathan Huening put it on Twitter yesterday, it’s really, really hard to create an HTML5 experience that feels as smooth as a native app:

In the long run — or even the medium run — it’s likely that this problem will go away. JavaScript engines get faster; CPUs get faster; the computational needs of a decent scrolling view aren’t particularly absurd. But in the short term, it’s likely that the web app will feel cheaper and less developed than a native app. And that’s important — both because users get frustrated quickly at a janky user interface and because the Times serves a high-expectation, high-demand audience. The frustration index here isn’t quite as high as it is with Quartz, which is mixing in some new user interactions in addition to its JavaScript, but it’s still an issue.

In other words, if I were a native iOS developer at the Times, I wouldn’t be too worried about my job.

Fitting into the paywall

The Times’ web app is “available exclusively to NYTimes.com + Tablet subscribers, All Digital Access subscribers and Home Delivery subscribers.” In other words, not only is this app unavailable to non-paying customers — it’s unavailable even to paying subscribers at the lowest tier. (For the Times, that’s the $15/four weeks level for NYTimes.com + Smartphone.)

The delicate dance of any paywall is figuring how to maximize revenue at all price points. There are some people who will pay $15 a month — how can you get them to pony up? But there are others who will happily pay $30 a month — how can you harvest their money at the same time?

The Times’ tiered structure is based on devices, which at one level seems retrograde — the paper’s offering the same set of stories on any device, after all. But in the long term, maximizing digital subscription revenues will depend on the paper’s ability to move people up that value chain — not just from free to paying, but also from paying a little to paying a lot. Trimming the number of free articles per month from 20 to 10 was a move in that direction. And if this web app catches on, that’ll be another small push for some bottom-tier subscribers to level up.

(Also of note: The web app features some really quite prominent ads, all of them currently for Lincoln, which was also launch partner for the Times paywall last year.)

Promoting a new view

Times Wire — the pure river of all Times content, from the smallest blog post to the most epic magazine piece, ranked only by time published — has been with us since 2009. But it’s spent that time buried, snuck into two links a ways down the NYTimes.com front page. I wouldn’t be surprised if 95-plus percent of NYTimes.com readers had no idea Times Wire exists, and I’d be shocked if it got even one percent of the Times’ homepage’s pageviews.

But in the Times’ web app, Times Wire (rendered as TimesWire, no space — the paper hasn’t been consistent about it, to the frustration of anal-retentives like me) gets a prime spot in the sidebar, just below the main navigation. I’ve written before about the tension between an editorially driven front page and the allure of simple reverse-chronology — most recent story at the top, everything else below — and this app seems to be the closest the Times has come to giving both equal weight.

Personally, I find Times Wire to be usefully disorienting. It’s always excellent evidence of the wide range of stuff the Times produces — from Connecticut restaurant reviews to City Room tidbits to brunch recipes. Times Wire gives you an entirely different perception of the Times — one that, in timely acknowledgement of Punch Sulzberger, acknowledges how much of its work is in the “softer” sections.

Promoting an old view

Along with Times Wire, the web app also promotes a “Today’s Paper” view, which promises to recreate the experience of reading the print New York Times, section by section. The carefully manicured layouts are gone, but the basic story assemblages remain — Front Page, International, National, Business Day, et al. (The main NYTimes.com also offers a similar view, but somewhat less prominently than the web app does.)

The inclusion of a Today’s Paper view makes me think the Times means business with this web app, because so many of the Times’ highest-value customers want that print-aligned view. It’s a print replica without being an actual print replica, and the Times wouldn’t bother with it if it didn’t expect or want established print readers to be interested in the package. While I read the Times almost completely online — I’m a Sunday print subscriber, but it almost never comes out of that cellophane bag — I will confess an attachment to a print-centric view, if only because it has an end. Twitter never ends; Facebook never ends; NYTimes.com never ends. But Today’s Paper? That ends, and that point when you’ve swiped past the final article provides a satisfying sense of closure that a river of news never does.

“Trending” is trending

One other view — and I hope you’ll forgive me for obsessing a bit on how news organizations choose to rank and present their stories; it’s a sickness — the Times promotes is a new “Trending” view. It promises the “most popular New York Times articles trending on Twitter in the past hour.” You might even say it’s a New York Times-specific cousin of our own Fuego. (Did you know we have a last-two-hours view of Fuego? It’s called Supafresh. Shhh.)

The Times has built its social ranking of stories around a few key metrics — most emailed, most popular (pageviews, one assumes), and most blogged (as determined by NYT-owned Blogrunner). But I think it’s safe to say that social relevance of news is determined more by Twitter traffic these days than by blogs or email. The universe of independent, content-driven blogs has withered or corporatized; email, while still powerful as a distribution mechanism, is no longer the primary sharing tool. While Facebook no doubt still drives more traffic to NYTimes.com than Twitter, it’s that little blue bird that has become the heartbeat of news distribution among Times readers.

There’s a reason the Times R&D Lab’s Cascade tool looks at Twitter, and it’s not just a flexible API — it’s because Twitter is, in a real sense, the new wire service. So it’s interesting to see Twitter’s social pulse used to recommend stories to Times readers. I wonder how long it’ll take for this web app view to make its way back to the mothership at NYTimes.com.

Update: The New York Times R&D Labs confirms that Cascade is used to create Trending:
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