Jumat, 14 Desember 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

The newsonomics of college news innovation

Posted: 13 Dec 2012 09:00 AM PST

On May 29, the news of the death of daily newsprint swept two ends of the country.

In New Orleans, the rumors were verified: The Times-Picayune would be going to three days a week of printing. In Eugene, Oregon, one of the country’s oldest college papers, the Oregon Daily Emerald announced it would print only on Mondays and Thursdays. Both institutions implemented their plans this fall. While the newspaper world is still awaiting fragmentary signs of success or failure out of New Orleans (“The newsonomics of Advance’s New Orleans strategy”), we can begin to learn a few lessons from the Daily Emerald’s first-quarter experience. Those lessons, importantly, apply to all newspapers; colleges, here, are really a new kind of lab for the press overall. And some of those lessons are surprising.

What makes it interesting is that, in transforming from five-day-a-week print to a “media group,” the bones and tissue of a newspaper organization are laid out naked. That forces the kind of top-to-bottom, side-to-side reassessment of both business and journalistic practice fundamental to all news media change.

The Daily Emerald’s decision got a lot of ink, in part because its publisher Ryan Frank laid out an ambitious strategy and rationale for the largely unprecedented move in the college press (“Why the Oregon Daily Emerald is transforming what it means to be a college newspaper”). (Disclosure: Decades ago, I served as features editor at the Emerald, wrote a “Beef Box” campus-complaints column, and now serve, unpaid, on the Dean’s Advisory Council for the School of Journalism. The Emerald has long operated independently of that school.)

The Emerald’s move is just part of a wider movement of transformation and innovation in the college press. There are several other major college papers going this direction. The State Press, Arizona State University’s paper, recently announced its own move to weekly print, formally joining the Emerald and the University of Georgia’s Red and Black. The Red and Black’s experience in going digital, well chronicled by Poynter, involved much staff turmoil. In talking with a number of those involved in and around college dailies, it appears that as many as another six to 10 college dailies may soon join the trend.

The reasons are familiar: the decline of print ad revenue, print readership falling off, student readers whose lives are now natively digital. College frosh literally grew up on Facebook; it’s not something that they, like most of us, adapted to. Steve Buttry described a rationale of college papers going digital in part due to that recognition. More ironically, waves of wannabe journalism majors have, when asked by j-schools, described relatively traditional journalism jobs as their ambitions — even though, when surveyed, they showed tiny print usage among their digital news habits. That disconnect was amusing from the outside, if not to those students’ parents.

Now, finally, that’s changing. J-school curricula are in the midst of great change. The college press is going increasingly digital. The jobs that graduates are moving into are more hybrid, says Tim Gleason, University of Oregon journalism dean. Rookie reporters do legwork, but increasingly their social, video, and multi-platform skills are put to use early on.

In Eugene, The Daily Emerald’s results are based on only three months of real experience. That’s not enough to draw conclusive datapoints. Yet, the early metrics are encouraging, so let’s look at the newsonomics of the Emerald’s change.

  • Ad revenue is up 0.5 percent for the second half of the year; with holiday break having begun, the year is essentially over. Ad revenue makes up 76 percent of the Emerald’s revenues. Though print copies are free, student fees pay 23 percent of the Emerald’s costs. Ryan Frank says that the number of advertisers has dropped a bit, but on average, their spending has increased. Significantly, the Emerald’s two editions — a Monday one heavy with sports and a takeout or two, a Thursday weekend-directed one — are still what sells the advertising. The Emerald has bundled its buys; when you buy print, you get digital, and though digital-only sales are offered, they make up a small percentage of revenue.
  • Digital readership is up. Direct comparisons to fall 2011 don’t work, because of the Emerald’s misuse of Google Analytics, Frank says, but previous-year comparisons look promising.

    • 2012 v. 2010: Pageviews up 40 percent; uniques up 88 percent
    • 2012 v. 2009: Pageviews up 43 percent; uniques up 92 percent
  • Expenses are flat. The Emerald traded reduced printing and production expenses for an investment in technology and app creation.

Given the massive amount of change, Ryan Frank is fairly happy with flat; he says the pickup rate for print is up some as well. Many college papers are reporting declines of 10 to 20 percent in ad revenue. Yet he can’t plan to take those numbers to the bank. Fundamentally, the Emerald is testing out the stability of its new platform. As it proceeds into next year, it can draw on its own early learnings and those of others, like innovators at UNC and UCLA, in the trade:

  • You can call yourself a media company, but that’s an aspirational positioning. The revenue is still in print. That’s what advertisers want, and that’s still what delivers customers, emphasizes Kevin Schwartz, general manager of The Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina. Schwartz is looked to by his peers as a leading digital innovator. Yet his paper is producing just 12 percent of its revenue from digital, up from 8 percent last year. That’s a still-small $135,000. The Emerald is moving to becoming a media company — the Emerald Media Group — but all papers, from these college ones to Advance to The New York Times, all base their near-term fortunes on print.
  • You can call yourself digital-first, but flexibility in when and how to deploy print is essential to this transition. Frank, an Oregonian reporter for 11 years, modeled his new print product on Portland’s Willamette Week, long a leader in editorial quality and now a city institution. Yet, with the advice of Willamette Week publisher Richard Meeker, he adjusted that alt-weekly format to fit his own student audience and its rhythms. That meant two print editions a week, and going big on print — including back to daily for the first week of classes. Those moves are a big reason that ad revenue hasn’t dropped. For each print publication, knowing audience and advertisers may lead to differing deployments of print; in New Orleans, the Times-Picayune added back a Monday-after-Saints games edition for similar reasons.
  • Innovation, digital and otherwise, may be led by well-worn feet on the street. Even though college print is free, its pickup rate has declined across the country, as students turn to their smartphones for news and info. UNC’s Schwartz is among those who say better physical distribution is part of the answer. “If you are on one side of the brick walkway, you move 150 papers, and on the other side you move 20,” he says. “We take siting seriously.” Schwartz says it takes 215 locations to move 90 percent of his 17,000-copy press run; in the old days, it took only 100 to move 20,000. It’s more than physical, of course: UNC uses Twitter and Facebook to promote the next day’s print stories, so social media and print are associated in new ways.

    UNC’s street team also aggressively hawks the paper. The street-team notion is one the Emerald has borrowed. Further in the Emerald’s strategic plan, the team provides more and more physical distribution — fliers and such — to merchants. Real-world bulletin board meets the innovation of marketing services, which we see leading daily newspaper sales strategies.

  • The local retail market is the key to success or failure of these college enterprises. National ad revenue to college papers is down by as much as 50 percent, as those advertisers are in the lead in switching print budgets to digital. That means effectively transitioning, and transitioning with, local merchants will decide these operations’ futures.
  • Dominate the new space. UCLA’s Arvli Ward, long-time director of student media, has an ambitious, ahead-of-the-curve strategy — and he’s implementing it. His plan is to dominate the campus-related mobile space. “We want students to use 15 of our apps before they graduate,” he says.

    Ward has created an app farm, powered by 10 to 15 paid students and 40 to 60 interns. In less than a year, they’ve created 85 apps; Ward says his goal is three a week, starting in January. (Check them out in iTunes.) The idea: Devise an app for every activity, from Bruin football to sororities and fraternities to campus departments and clubs. Ward has also produced a Pac 12 basketball app for 8 (so far) of the league’s 12 teams — each separately branded, but built on the same platform. The key: developing technology that allows quickly replicable native app products, at a low cost. Mobile monetization — maybe at the rate of $12-15,000 a year each for the top dozen of so high-performing apps — will come, says Ward. We can also see how a larger college (and greater) mobile ad network can develop. Curiously, Ward says his surveys show more than 60 percent of UCLA’s student body is on iOS, so that’s where his development efforts focus.

    The Emerald, with its new investment in tech, is following this model, planning to debut a housing app (modeled on a successful UNC housing app). Hugely important here: knowing your audiences, knowing where they are moving (mobile) and betting (large scale, small incremental cost) on it. That’s a strategy every local publisher should consider.

  • Pay attention to what’s gained and what’s lost: Huge shifts in product and workflow mean big changes in the journalism done. Emerald editor-in-chief Andy Rossback already sees the reader value in “cutting out the stuff people don’t read.” Importantly, the Emerald still covers campus meetings — that boring news of record that is vital to understanding governance — but now often files three-paragraph digital briefs, rather than its former standard of 17-inch print stories. It’s also been able to focus on larger takeouts, but Rossman says, he sees how “we’re missing personality profiles.” Change lesson here: It’s not a one-time or two-time thing, but a continuous process to get it right.

Better (not second) screens, document clustering, and mobile-native news: Some of Spark Camp’s big ideas of 2012

Posted: 13 Dec 2012 08:00 AM PST

Editor’s Note: What were the most interesting and provocative ideas in journalism in 2012? We’re partnering with Spark Camp to produce a special end-of-year series to ask a group of smart people — Spark Camp’s alumni — that question. (Learn more about Spark Camp at the first post in this series.) Here are thoughts from:

— Amy Webb, a Spark Camp co-founder and CEO of Webbmedia Group, a digital strategy agency. Her new book, Data, A Love Story: How I Gamed Online Dating To Meet My Mate, will be out on January 31.

— Scott Klein, editor of news applications at ProPublica, where he directs a team of journalist/programmers building large interactive software projects that tell journalistic stories. Scott is also co-founder of DocumentCloud.

— Jim Frederick, editor of Time International. Jim oversees all of Time’s international news coverage appearing in Time’s four global editions, on Time.com, and across its other digital and mobile platforms. He is co-author of The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial and 40-Year Imprisonment in North Korea and author of Black Hearts: One Platoon's Descent Into Madness in Iraq's Triangle of Death.

Amy Webb

Amy WebbVideo was what everyone talked about last year, and it will continue to be an important topic in 2013. By the end of 2012, 72 hours of video were being uploaded to YouTube alone every minute. We’re obsessed with creating video — but do we care as much about watching it?

Some media organizations think so, and they spent tremendous resources last year experimenting with new ways to distribute video content. Politico, The Washington Post, The New York Times, NBC Universal, New York magazine…I can’t think of a single major media outlet that wasn’t pushing video in 2012.

One of my favorite projects was the smartly-designed HBO GO, which does a lot of things but is most useful when delivering helpful content during time-shifted viewing. I’d argue that HBO’s “Game of Thrones” is nearly unwatchable on my living room television — but when viewed through the HBO GO I’m able to get the critical details about the show's many, many characters who are inexplicably left out of the storyline. (Like, who’s this new guy in a lion cloth, and why is everyone so mad at him?)

It brings to mind ongoing conversations about second screens. Why build a second screen experience at all? What we really need is a better screen. HuffPost Live may not have launched brilliant (or sometimes even comprehensible) commentary this year, but the dashboard offers an interesting alternative to traditional broadcast news. So does Fora.tv.

The news cycle is fickle, and broadcast journalists often subject viewers to an echo chamber of buzzwords. (Where, exactly, is this fiscal cliff?) If we must truncate public discourse while a story is active over a period of weeks or months, then news orgs should at least offer viewers the opportunity to get more information from them. If not, the video they’re streaming live or putting into elaborate online players will only cause consumers to leave that news site for Wikipedia to learn that the fiscal cliff is a “number of laws that (if unchanged) could result in tax increases, spending cuts, and a corresponding reduction in the US budget deficit beginning in 2013.”

Scott Klein

Scott KleinIn 2012, as part of our Message Machine project, we started using new (to us) techniques like topic modeling, document clustering, and machine learning. We found these tools to be hugely useful and very powerful, and enable bigger assignments than we ever thought possible, like adding structure to very large sets of unstructured text.

We had conversations with academic computer scientists to make sure we were getting the math right and using the right tool for the job. Out of those conversations came a pretty simple observation: Computer scientists have great tools but sometimes boring data (there’s a lot of Twitter firehose out there) and data journalists have great data but aren’t using the latest techniques to analyze it. Perhaps most tantalizing: One computer scientist, who was a bit surprised that journalists only pursue a single story at a time when analyzing data, suggested that academic CS can even provide journalists “hypothesis generation at scale.”

The missing piece, which it’s our endeavor to help develop next year, is the “middleware” between the two disciplines. We need a matching service and coordination assistance so CS folks and data journalists can find each other, and some mechanism by which the collaborations can yield the best, most widely applicable, results.

Jim Frederick

Jim FrederickMost mobile sites are still just websites scrunched onto a tiny screen. This is like when TV was new and anchors just read newspaper stories, or when the web was new and sites just posted static articles. Now we’re finally getting serious attempts to exploit mobile as a unique medium and create news that is created exclusively for it rather than as a port from a legacy system.

So we have attempts to understand “what is news?” almost in its most elemental sense, to break it down to its atoms so that it can be consumed and shared in far smaller chunks than ever before — but in ways that are still satisfying, both on the go and on an small screen. It’s going to take a lot of work before anybody gets it right, but the Circa iPhone app is the best first try I have seen at this.

ProPublica: Why we use Creative Commons licenses on our stories

Posted: 13 Dec 2012 07:00 AM PST

Editor’s note: On December 16, 2002, the first Creative Commons license was issued. The idea behind CC — giving content creators an easy way to let others copy, modify, or build on their work — has made a major impact on a number of fields, from music to photography to journalism.

One of the most prominent journalistic producers of CC’d content is the nonprofit ProPublica, which releases nearly all of its work under a Creative Commons license. With CC’s 10th birthday upon us this month, we asked Richard Tofel and Scott Klein — ProPublica’s general manager and editor of news applications, respectively — to tell us what allowing their work to be shared so broadly has meant for the organization.

Happy birthday, Creative Commons!

ProPublica has made important use of Creative Commons since our launch four and a half years ago. While we make a few exceptions at the request of publishing partners, our preference (and our general practice) is to make all of our stories available for republication under a Creative Commons license (in our case, the “Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs” version), with some extra requirements specific to our needs. The terms are described on a page headed “Steal Our Stories,” which is, in turn, linked to from every page on our site.

Moreover, every story has a “republish” button, which makes republishing our stories and complying with the license easy: Pushing that button reveals a box containing an easy to copy-and-paste version of the story using only common html tags, without multimedia or other elements that often make republishing difficult in content management systems. The code also contains our special tracking tag (more on that later).

In the last year, republication of ProPublica stories under our CC license has increased dramatically. Through November, we’ve recorded more than 4.2 million pageviews this year for authorized reprints of our work, which is up 77 percent over the same period in 2011, and is the equivalent of an additional 29 percent on top of the traffic to our own web site.

Among the literally thousands of sites that have reprinted ProPublica stories in 2012 alone are Ars Technica, the Atlantic Wire, CBS News, the Charlotte Observer, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Foreign Policy, the Houston Chronicle, the Huffington Post, the Las Vegas Sun, the Los Angeles Times, the Miami Herald, MinnPost, Minnesota Public Radio, Mother Jones, MSNBC, Nature, NBCNews.com, the Newark Star-Ledger, the New Haven Register, the New York Daily News, the San Jose Mercury News, Scientific American, the Seattle Times, Slate, Talking Points Memo, the Tampa Bay Times, the Trentonian, USA Today, the Utne Reader, Wired, and Yahoo News.

Why do we do this? ProPublica’s mission is for our journalism to have impact — that is, for it to spur reform. Greater reach — the widest possible audience — doesn’t equate to impact, but it can help, and certainly doesn’t hurt. So we encourage it. And, of course, we started in 2008 with almost no audience or reputation at all, and needed — and still need — to increase the circle of people who know us, and our work. CC helps us achieve that goal.

There are a few catches, though. Our stories are (we hope) carefully crafted, and often a bit tricky — controversial, frequently somewhat damning. So we insist that they be reprinted in full, essentially without editing. The “NoDerivs” part of the CC license makes that requirement very straightforward. And we are interested in readers coming back to our website to read related stories and see related multimedia, so NoDerivs helps us require that internal links in a story be maintained. In addition, while we’re a nonprofit, we see no reason why others should be able to sell our work without sharing the proceeds with us, so we prohibit commercial use of our stories via the “NonCommercial” license. We define “noncommercial” to mean that the stories themselves may not be sold, nor may advertising be sold specifically against them. We try not to be commercially naïve, and we’re hardly anti-capitalist, so we’re fine with ads appearing on pages along with reprints of our stories, and we are happy to have our stories appear behind paywalls or count against pay-meter thresholds.

One other thing: We do want to keep track of all this activity, so that we can understand how our material is being used, and can report to you and others (including funders and our own board) what’s being republished where, and roughly the size of the audience for the republished stories, just as we did above. So we created a simple JavaScript beacon that we call Pixel Ping. We designed it, working with developers at DocumentCloud, to be as lightweight as possible and so that it doesn’t violate, either in spirit or letter, the privacy policies of the sites that republish our work. Pixel Ping simply counts the number of times our stories are read on sites that republish them. It doesn’t collect any information about visitors, and it neither sets nor reads browser cookies. It’s open source, too.

These extra requirements, set out on our Steal Our Stories page, effectively constitute our own glosses on the CC license we employ.

Creative Commons solves a particular problem for us — how to encourage republication at scale without tying up staff in negotiating deals and policing unauthorized uses. We’ve found it an invaluable aid in building our publishing platform, in reaching additional readers, and in maximizing the chance that the journalism we publish will have important impact.
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