Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Wednesday Q&A: Jake Levine on the fate of News.me, personalized news, and reinventing Digg
- Game on: How Polygon wants to rethink video game journalism
- Data, uncertainty, and specialization: What journalism can learn from FiveThirtyEight’s election coverage
| Wednesday Q&A: Jake Levine on the fate of News.me, personalized news, and reinventing Digg Posted: 31 Oct 2012 10:03 AM PDT
But News.me, like a growing list of companies, says Twitter is largely to blame for the end of their run. More specifically, Twitter’s recent tightening of its API terms and display requirements — which has been a cause for concern (if not freakouts) for developers in and outside newsrooms — and Twitter’s own push into discovery products. Jake Levine, general manager of Digg and News.me, writing in the News.me blog, said the apps were “deemed to be in violation” of Twitter’s new requirements. So they made a choice: “Here’s what it comes down to: we don’t want to invest time and energy into an application that competes with a platform on which it relies.” News.me won’t entirely die. While the apps have been pulled, Betaworks will support it for people who have already downloaded it, and they’re also continuing the News.me email newsletter. But we can expect to see the lessons, if not some of the tech, from News.me to show up in the new Digg, which Betaworks bought in June and relaunched in August. I spoke with Levine about what they learned from News.me’s short run, how platforms affect how we read news, and what from News.me will wind up in the new Digg. Here’s a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. Justin Ellis: Let’s start with the decision itself. How difficult a decision was it to make, given what you’ve invested in the product? Jake Levine: It was a tough decision. There are users that use the app every day, and fortunately, as I said in the blog post, we’re going to continue to support the apps for those users. I would say that, though we’re investing fewer resources into the News.me brand, we’ve got this new thing called Digg were I think we have an even bigger chance to make an impact on how people find and share news. Yes, News.me as a brand, as an app in the App Store, is going away. But the exact same team with the exact same challenges is investing their time in what I think has an even stronger chance of having an impact on how people find and share news. Ellis: What’s your read on why Twitter is tightening its API? Levine: I don’t know. Anything I say would be totally speculative. Your guess is as good as mine. When we looked at the trajectory of their products — like everyone, trying to read between the lines of their latest API blog post and messaging — and it became clear to us that investing in a product that looks a lot like their current product is probably not a good idea.
Ellis: Andrew Phelps wrote about this for us a while back, how this was a wakeup call for people about relying on third parties when you build something. Was it a wakeup call? Levine: Not really. When you’re a little startup and you’re looking at ways to evaluate or test a certain market thesis, building depends on using the core players like Twitter and Facebook. It’s an obvious choice, because it gives you distribution quickly and it gives you data quickly on which you can experiment — although you know that comes with a tradeoff. And at some point, depending on the direction of the larger company, you may have to adjust. It’s a pretty well-known tradeoff, one that goes back pre-internet. Ellis: You said in the blog post you guys are going to be taking some of the lessons from News.me and incorporating them into Digg. What have you learned about personalized news and figuring out what people want to read through News.me? Levine: A lot. The mobile thing goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway. We spent a year building products for iPad, iPhone, email — and we shouldn’t forget that email is in many way a mobile product, particularly if you are sending it early in the morning. So thinking really carefully about what sort of experience that form factor lends itself to has been important. And I think that’s validated itself over the last couple of months with Digg. When we took over Digg there was no mobile experience, I think there was probably somewhere between 10-15 percent of all traffic was on mobile to Digg.com. In the last 12 weeks we now have, of our total daily active user base, 30 percent of them are on a mobile device, either a phone or tablet. So the importance of thinking carefully about a mobile experience and catering to that type of engagement can’t be overstated. That’s something we’ve taken a lot from our experience at News.me. We learned that news has this sort of informational utility to it. These aren’t new ideas — but this sort of informational utility, like “is there a hurricane bearing down on me right now?” But there’s also this social utility to news — we read news in order to interact around it. My Twitter stream right now, and I’m sure your Twitter stream right now, is like a chat room about the hurricane. So these objects, like maps, articles, images — they serve as opportunities for humans to connect. That’s something we spend a lot of time thinking about at News.me. I mean, it was a personalized product — it was built on top of things shared by your friends on Twitter and Facebook. The ideas was to make the discovery of news by other people a little bit more convenient, a little bit more, I guess, approachable and digestible for people. One of the things that happens to come with this notion of social discovery is just information overload. Twitter is a great social product, but it’s also a product that will give you 50 articles to read every hour. There’s a type of news reader that wants both the social product and the product that gives them 50 articles per hour. But most people really don’t. I think in some ways our experience with social news has conflated those two things over the last two years. It doesn’t have to be the case that a social news product is overwhelming, I guess is my point. I think there’s room for something that is social, that’s conversational and has opportunities for interaction, but that isn’t overwhelming for people. Ellis: One of the things I really liked about News.me was the daily email, because it was a simple digest of “here are eight things.” It was contained, and it seemed to offer a simplicity of design.
Levine: The reasons why most newsletters dump as many links as they possibly can into the newsletter is to drive traffic back to an ad. One of the things we did in the email is we said, “Okay, let’s keep it tight, let’s keep it small, let’s not put so many links in there.” In fact, we tested this thing at one point where in the bottom section of the email we would write little blurbs about the three big stories that are happening right now. We would have a link at the bottom. But the goal was not to get you to clickthrough. In fact, our clickthroughs didn’t increase. But people told us over and over again that they really enjoyed that part of the experience. Part of the way that news is designed, that news is distributed, that news is produced, is based on this business logic of “we need more pageviews to pay for our journalists and our costs.” That business logic, I would say, has nothing to do with the user experience — and sometimes makes the user experience worse. I don’t really have a great solution, and we’re fortunate that we are a venture-backed company so we don’t have to worry about pageviews at the moment. I realize we’re fortunate and that’s a luxury. But that does mean that when we design, both from a visual design perspective but also a content design perspective, we’re not thinking about how do we drive more people to Digg, or how do we drive more people to News.me. We’re thinking about how do we make people happy so that they come back and use us more. And we’ve got something like 78 percent of all our visits on the web on Digg are returning visitors. Those are the metrics we’re paying attention to, not pageviews. Ellis: I’m wondering about the delivery method. We talked about the newsletter, the iPad app, the iPhone app for News.me. How does that delivery method or platform affect how we read and what we choose to read? What did you guys see in how people interacted with those? Levine: The most recent data we have is with Digg, and people are reading about five times more on their iPhone than they are on the web. Now, part of that has to do with the fact that when they’re on the iPhone, they’re not leaving the Digg experience and can easily go back. But part of that, I think, is also an appetite and the pace at which people are consuming. There’s been lots of research and data around how people are using iPads and iPhones and I won’t bore you with that. Our data pretty much maps to the rest of the industry, in terms of people are using their iPad at night and in the morning, and people are using their iPhone pretty steadily throughout the day. The web dips on the weekends and iPhone and iPads remain steady. It goes from maybe 30 percent of use to 40 percent of use on weekends. There’s sort of a time-of-day component, and I think time of day can also be translated into type of content. So if it’s a Sunday afternoon, people are probably more likely to be reading longer thought pieces than quick, snappy updates. I think what we try to be careful about — and we haven’t really done this with Digg, but it’s important we start thinking about it — what type of content does each device lend itself to? Ellis: Who’s reading Digg? You talked about the breakdown on iPad and iPhone, but are these people that were fans of Digg before? Are they discovering Digg for the first time?
Levine: It’s all direct traffic cause we have no pages. We’re just this sort of thin layer on the Internet, and 90 percent of the links on the page are out to other publishers. So the growth outside of existing users has been word of mouth and some press coverage. I would say we’re trying to still get a handle on the users that are coming into the new Digg experience. There’s certainly a strong base of users from the old Digg, people that were continuing to hit the site up until we took it over. That’s probably the vast majority of our users. But we do seem to be attracting a new type of user, and these are people that we’re just getting insight to on Twitter. People are saying, “I found this cool new thing called Digg I’ve never heard of before.” It’s unusual, but there is that category of users that seem to be finding it for the first time and seems to be enjoying it. We have a lot of work to do to make it more social and make it more open to participation. But the type of user who went to the old Digg and thought “there’s too much community here,” those people are finding a fairly approachable product in the new Digg. I think we need to figure out how to please both types of users, so that’s what we’ve got to be focused on in the next few months. Ellis: What do you mean by find more ways to make it social? Levine: When we set about rebuilding it, there were two constraints we had in mind. One was we had six weeks to do it, so we had a really tight focus on what was going to be important to the users and what people would be expecting when they came to Digg. What we learned through early use of the product and as much research as we could do talking to Kevin [Rose] and others at Digg, is that people were coming to Digg to find great news stories. We knew we had to deliver on that promise. The second thing was that we needed to build it for a new social web. In 2004, when Digg was founded, there were very few places to talk about news on the Internet. You could publish a website and there were comments. But there was no conversation on Twitter. Facebook was a list of profile pages. A place to share links and vote on links and talk about links? Digg was one of the few places where that could happen. Fast forward eight years to 2012: We now have way too many places to talk about things and way too many places to share things and essentially vote on them. When you retweet something, you’re voting on something. When you “like” something on Facebook, you’re voting for it. We said we have six weeks to do this. We need to get great stories on the Digg homepage. Trying to rebuild a community in weeks is something we know takes time and attention. With the kind of features that you build for community products, it’s not actually about shipping quickly — it’s about listening to your community. And in some cases — and Reddit has done a good job of this — it’s about shipping slowly, following your community, finding out what features are important, and building them alongside the community. We knew that in six weeks we weren’t going to be able to accomplish that. But we still wanted to infuse it with this conversation and give people insight into corners of the Internet, and pockets of conversation that they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to find. So, here we were sitting on top of a bunch of Twitter data via News.me, a bunch of Facebook data via News.me. We’re sitting on the Bitly dataset, which is what people are clicking on across the web, the Chartbeat dataset, which is what people are looking at across the web. We want to try to piece together this sort of combination of algorithms — sitting on top of these datasets — and try to bubble up meaning by way of machines, networks — which is this social interaction, which we want to form the foundation of the Digg experience, and also represents what we want people to do with the content once they read it and enjoy it — and, finally, editors. We think there’s a role for human editors, human moderators in social products, community products, and news products. We have a team of folks who sit on top of all these signals — Twitter, Facebook, Bit.ly, Charbeat, and Digg — and they try to piece together a representation of what the Internet is talking about. That’s the new Digg product. To my point about where we want to go in the next few months, it’s about creating a space for that community — the Digg community — on Digg.com. Not because we want to own pageviews, but because the walls of a domain name actually make for a decent space for community and affiliation to emerge. |
| Game on: How Polygon wants to rethink video game journalism Posted: 31 Oct 2012 07:30 AM PDT
At this point, Vox Media has established something of a formula: Use one property to serve as a launching pad for a new sibling. Before the launch of The Verge, Josh Topolsky’s team was operating on the stripped-down This Is My Next. Before Polygon debuted last week, the team was already publishing on The Verge. Maybe Vox is just keeping it in the family, the way you let a brother or cousin sleep on your couch until they’re on their feet. But in the media business, there are risks and rewards that come with pulling back the curtain. Trying to gain an audience prior to launch can be very beneficial, but it requires a certain amount of exposure. “On day one, we have not only a backlog of content, but we have a lot of the formulations already determined,” Chris Grant, editor-in-chief of Polygon, told me. “The downside — part of it is you’re tipping your hand. You’re saying, ‘Hey guys, this is the kind of content we’re going to make.’” Polygon is a video game website very much in the same focused spirit of The Verge and SB Nation. It’s got news and reviews. There are video offerings, and a healthy dose of long-form features. To some degree their approach to video games — the industry, the culture, the people on either side of the controller — will likely follow that of their siblings. But Polygon is entering a different kind of field than its siblings. Vox’s other properties jumped into very crowded pools — sports or technology might be, along with politics, the beats most overrepresented among news companies on the Internet. Now, gaming isn’t by any means uncovered as a topic — enthusiast sites have a long history online, many of today’s young-ish adults grew up reading gaming magazines, and some larger media companies have invested — but it is a different competitive space. It’s potentially a very profitable market with an audience as passionate and ferocious (and vocal) as Patriots fans or Android devotees. Polygon’s path to success, as they see it, is fairly straight-orward: combine technology, community, and storytelling for the win. “We want to look at video games and video game creators through the lens of enthusiasm,” Grant said. That, maybe more than any technology or design elements, may be the thread that connects the Vox sites — a “Can you believe how much fun we’re having?” approach to journalism. Going beyond new game reviews and product releases“One of the things we said was, the games industry is getting older and the industry is getting more mature,” Grant told me. “Shouldn’t the journalism also match that?” When they started planning Polygon several months ago, they didn’t really have an idea of how that would take shape.
Justin McElroy, Polygon’s managing editor, said they wanted to take an approach to video game coverage that wasn’t as product-centric — which is difficult since games are items which are bought and sold. McElroy said their challenge is to think bigger, to find unexpected stories about people who make games and people who love games. “With our features especially, we have an opportunity to change the story and make it about people,” he said. “People are infinitely more interesting than products and brands.” One reason to do that is to open up the audience beyond the kind of core gamers who would head to a gaming site religiously. The increasingly social spread of stories favors the creation of compelling narratives that can have universal interest, regardless of whether you’ve ever played a game, he said. “It’s a constant challenge and struggle to make a video game website that doesn’t only speak to people who play video games every day,” he said. Polygon wants to take what you could call a holistic approach to games. Sure, you pay money for them and they’re good entertainment. But who makes them? Where did the idea come from? Why are they worth buying? McElroy said the same thinking applies to their reviews. They want to tell a story, not just give a thumbs up or down. “We want to move away from reviews that treat games like a vacuum cleaner,” McElroy said. What does that mean? McElroy continues: “I think we can do reviews that are more about the experience of playing the game, how highly we can recommend the experience, and move beyond is it worth my dollars.” They decided on a core of news, reviews, and features, three areas that could draw independent audiences but also have a crossover appeal. If you’re interested in news on fighting games like Tekken, there’s a possibility you’ll want to check out a feature about the world of competitive fighting games. Grant says there are separate, fragmented audiences which they want to serve, as well as a more general audience. For some readers, Polygon will offer utility though news and game reviews. But more broadly, Grant and the other editors want the site to be part of the bigger conversation about gaming culture today. That’s one of the reasons they produced “Press Reset,” a series of behind-the-scenes videos looking at people behind the launch of Polygon. It’s also why Polygon has an open forum on its site where readers can take discussions beyond a story or review. “In general, in journalism I think there’s a growing desire to have that sort of connection to the people whose content you read,” Grant said. A bet on two industries in flux
When I asked Vox CEO Jim Bankoff why gaming would be his company’s next vertical, he said it, like technology and sports, features a passionate and engaged online community. And, like tech and sports, video games appeal to a sought-after group of readers — largely male, young, with money to spend. “From a business and advertising perspective, this fits well in our portfolio in between sports and technology,” Bankoff told me. It helps that Vox can take advantage of that scale through its advertising and technology assets. Polygon will share a common ad sales staff the rest of Vox uses and will use Chorus, the in-house content management system that The Verge and SB Nation run on. Having that framework allows you to focus on building a team and devising a mission, Bankoff said. Bankoff told me he thinks Polygon is coming along at the right time, when both video games and journalism are experiencing disruption to their business. “What’s most remarkable about gaming, perhaps, is it’s undergoing some pretty seismic changes,” Bankoff said. “It’s no longer talking about consoles and shrink-wrapped games.” While gaming remains a profitable industry, sales of games and devices fell in 2011 and appears on a similar track in 2012. At the same time, the audience for video games has expanded beyond consoles like the Xbox 360 or Nintendo Wii. People are just as likely to play games on the phones or social games like Farmville. “It’s different from 10 years ago. It was a pre-teen-, teenage-dominated audience,” said Jesse Divnich, vice president of insights and analysis for video game research firm EEDAR. “Now with the rise of accessibility, mobile games, and social games, it has broadened and opened up the demographic even more.” Gaming used to be primarily the domain of larger companies whose titles became events, on par with a summer blockbuster movie opening. But that’s shifted now; Divnich said the same factors that have transformed the business model in other parts of media and entertainment have also affected video games. “You don’t have to have millions of dollars to make and release a game to consumers. You can produce a video game in your garage,” Divnich said. This means more developers are creating games and more people are playing them. For Polygon, that’s two audiences they could attract readers and advertisers. But it’s also an audience that sites like IGN, Gamespot, Joystiq, and Kotaku are going after as well. Those sites not only have been on the block longer, but some have backing from big parent companies like AOL, News Corp., and CBS Interactive. Grant sees Polygon’s newcomer status as an advantage over competitors. “Part of being a startup, it gives us an alacrity that others don’t have,” he said. “We can identify places to invest and move on it quickly.” McElroy said their short-term focus is appealing to readers through storytelling and building conversations around gaming. They’ll also continue to adapt the site based on feedback from users. Having worked together to get the site ready for launch over the last several months has given the small staff a sense of ownership, he said. Depending on how Polygon fares, that could be a mixed blessing. “The terrifying part is, if it doesn’t work we literally have no one to blame but ourselves. It will be a grand sweeping proclamation we don’t know what we are doing,” he joked. |
| Posted: 31 Oct 2012 06:30 AM PDT
Nate Silver’s FiveThiryEight blog at The New York Times really only does one thing: It makes election predictions. But it does this differently than pretty much everyone else, because it aggregates all available polls using a statistical model calibrated with past election data. He has his critics among the political class, but to my eye, it makes pretty much all other election “horse race” coverage look primitive and uninformed. FiveThirtyEight has obvious lessons for journalism about data-related topics such as statistics and uncertainty. But I think I also see wider implications for the evolving role of the political journalist. At heart, these changes are about the response of journalism to a world that is increasingly complex and networked. Data literacySilver’s approach has had remarkable success in past elections, correctly predicting the winner in 49 of 50 states in 2008. That doesn’t necessarily mean his model is going to get 2012 right — as Silver will be first to admit — but there is at least one reason to recommend FiveThirtyEight over other sources: It takes the statistics of polling seriously. Polls are subtle creations, careful extrapolations from a small sample to an entire population. Although the basic theory is centuries old, the details are complex and tricky. See, for example, this lengthy analysis of why Gallup polls consistently favor Romney slightly more than other polls. Silver understands all of this this, and his model accounts for dozens of factors: “house effects” that make particular firms lean in particular ways, the relationships between state and national polls, the effect of economic indicators on election results, post-convention bounces, and lots of other good stuff. Yes, you can talk about all of these factors — but without quantifying them there is no way to know whether the cumulative effect is up or down. UncertaintyRecently CNN aired a chart that showed one candidate ahead 49 percent to 47 percent, and the commentators were discussing this lead. But up in the corner in small print, the margin of error of the poll was given as 5.5 percent. In other words, the size of the “lead” was smaller than the expected error in the poll result, meaning that the difference was probably meaningless. Expected error — quantified uncertainty — is the price you pay for polling a national sample instead of asking every person in the country how they’re going to vote. It means that small variations in poll numbers are mostly meaningless “noise,” because those last 5.5 percent are effectively down to a coin toss. In other words, you’d expect the very next poll to show the lead reversing about half the time. This 2 percent difference with a 5.5 percent margin of error would never pass standard statistical tests such as the t-test — so you couldn’t publish the result in a scientific paper, a medical board wouldn’t authorize treatment based on such weak evidence, and you certainly wouldn’t want to place a bet. So why do journalists spend so much energy talking about a result like this, as if there’s anything at all to learn from such a roll of the dice? One possibility is a widespread misunderstanding of the limitations of statistical methods and how to interpret measures of uncertainty. But I suspect there’s also a deeper cultural force at play here: Journalists are loathe to admit that the answer cannot be known. “Unexpected Reversal in Polls” is a great headline; “Magic Eight Ball says ‘Sorry, Ask Again Later’” is a story no one wants to write — or read. To his great credit, Silver never shies away from saying that we don’t have yet enough information to know something, as when he cautioned that we had to wait a few more days to see if the Denver debate really had any effect. AggregationThe big data craze notwithstanding, more data isn’t always better. However, in the limited field of statistical sampling, more samples are better. That’s why averaging polls works; in a sense, it combines all of the individuals asked by different pollsters into one imaginary super-poll with a smaller margin of error. This is the idea behind Real Clear Politics’ simple poll averages and FiveThirtyEight’s more sophisticated weighted averages. All well and good, but to average polls together you have to be willing to use other peoples’ polling data. This is where traditional journalism falls down. We have the ABC-WaPo poll, the AP-GfK poll, the CNN/ORC poll, and then Gallup, Rasmussen, and all the others. FiveThirtyEight shamelessly draws on all of these and more — while individual news outlets like to pretend that their one poll is definitive. This is a disservice to the user. This situation is not unlike the battles over aggregation and linking in the news industry more generally. Aggregation disrupts business models and makes a hash of brands — but in the long run none of that matters if it also delivers a superior product for the user. SpecializationIt’s not just statistics. To report well on complicated things, you need specialized knowledge. As Megan Garber put it so well, “While it may still be true that a good magazine — just as a good newspaper — is a nation talking to itself, the standards for that conversation have risen considerably since people have been able to talk to each other on their own.” The traditional generalist education of the journalist is ill suited to meaty topics such as law, science, finance, technology, and medicine. It’s no longer enough to be able to write a good article; on the web, the best is just a click away, and the best on these sorts of subjects is probably being written by someone with the sort of deep knowledge that comes from specialized training. Silver is a statistician who got into journalism when he began publishing the results of his (initially sabermetric) models; the reverse, a journalist who becomes a statistician when they start modeling polling data, seems like a much longer road. Journalism today has an obvious shortage of talent in many specialized fields. I’d like the financial press to be asking serious questions about, say, the systemic risks of high-frequency trading — but instead we get barely factual daily market reports that, like most poll coverage, struggle to say something in the face of uncertainty. But then again, most finance reporters have training in neither quantitative finance nor computer science, which makes them probably unqualified for this topic. I suspect that we will see many more specialists brought into journalism to address this sort of problem. The role of the political journalistFor the last several decades, both in the United States and internationally, “horse race” or “political strategy” coverage of politics has been something like 60 percent or 70 percent of all political journalism. Certainly, it’s important to keep track of who might win an election — but 60 or 70 percent? There are several different arguments that this is way too much. First, it’s very insider-y, focusing on how the political game is played rather than what sort of information might help voters choose between candidates. Jay Rosen has called this the cult of the savvy. As one friend put it to me: “I wish the news would stop talking about who won the debate and start asking questions about what they said.” Second, this quantity of horse race coverage is massively wasteful. Given the tall problems of uncertainty and attributing causation, can you really produce all that many words about the daily state of the race? Can you really say anything different than the thousands of other stories on the topic? (Literally thousands — check Google News.) So why not cover something else instead? I find it noteworthy that it was not journalists who crunched the numbers behind Romney’s centerpiece tax plan. That task, really nothing more than a long night with a spreadsheet, fell to think tanks. Third and finally, FiveThirtyEight has set a new standard for horse race coverage. We should rejoice that this is a higher standard than we had before, and hopefully represents a narrowing of the data gap between politicians and journalists. It’s also a complicated and presumably expensive process. Because there are many assumptions and judgement calls that go into such a complex statistical model, we really do need more than one. (And indeed, there are other models of this type.) But we don’t need one from every newsroom — and anyway, you need to hire a statistician to produce a statistical model. The politics desk of the future might look a lot different than it does today. Photo of Nate Silver by J.D. Lasica used under a Creative Commons license. |
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