Nieman Journalism Lab |
- The supercuts of our lives
- The arrival of trophy newspapers
- A new window on race
- New packages, new channels
- So long, editorials
- Mobile, location, data
- Local news gets automated
- Think like the audience
- A market-driven comeback for high-quality reporting
- A new, mainstream solutions journalism
- Breaking is broken
- You can’t always get what you want
- Hope ≠ reality
- Do the math
- The value (and weakness) of niche
- Journalistic skills are still marketable
- “Updated horse parser”: The year in journo-code commit messages
- The newsonomics of 2013 wizardry: Tribune, Buffett, Murdoch, Paton, Bloomberg, and more
- Questioning the network: The year in social media research
- The normalization of the smartphone
- Eye-controlled tablets and tools for clouds
- Making people proud of what they share
| Posted: 20 Dec 2012 09:38 PM PST Rise of the storytelling sites: 2013 should be an interesting year for online narrative, with Ev Williams’ Medium asking members to post around a prompt and Jonathan Harris’ open-ended Cowbird. One of Cowbird’s many features is the “retelling” — similar to reblogging on Tumblr — and a “serendipity” option that encourages those in the site to wander. News sites haven’t nailed integrating readers’ emotional response to stories yet, so storytelling is the new geo- and may be layered on, then integrated, then ultimately no longer a feature in a few years.
We Tumblr for you: Editorial tone remains critical to success on external content platforms; queueing up timely posts for optimal reader sharing and transparency around the identity of hosts/curators/sherpas will hold strong as social strategies to build news brand trust in 2013. The supercuts of our lives: Is this what listicle content diets roll up into? The interest in Timehop and One Second Everyday app suggests that our tenuous grasp on ephemeral personal data collected on mobile in 2012 still needs to be managed, and that content filters continue to feature either a same-day parameter or same-year goalposts. In 2013, clustering data points in news may lead further into clustering content in all formats including video on a given topic page. Cable news supercuts will go forth from “The Daily Show” and prosper in truth-telling assists, debunking hoax photos, assertions, and Morgan Freeman quotations. Cameras and crossposting: Much of 2012 has been about pulling photos out of Instagram (not as easy until the web profiles launched), sorting photos into meaningful sets (try Swirl), and returning to update Flickr contacts, with the launch of a robust mobile app as a holiday gift. For journalism, the Flickr refresh means many more recent photos to pull from within the full spectrum of Creative Commons licenses. In 2013, Instagram will become even more like Chinese microblogging service Sina Weibo, as television news screenshots and mugshots mix with picnic tableaux. Stenography aligns with steganography. Ain’t no party like a GIF party: During the Olympics, GIF guides (especially of the U.S. gymnastics team from The Atlantic’s Elspeth Reeve) were the best way to catch big moments, as NBC’s televised coverage followed a time-delayed, prime-time programming schedule from the “Mad Men” era; even as spoilers, the best GIF medleys were highlight reels that prefigured YouTube clips. During the U.S. elections, GIFs were a way to participate in political memes. The overabundance of political GIFs during debate nights filled Tumblr dashboards (Facebook doesn’t support gifs) and the GIFs that spread widest were a useful gauge of interest in a certain political position or expression. For journalists in 2013, GIFs may continue their annotating march as a tl;dr nod preceding longer features. Slowed journalism: While slow journalism is a reaction to the accelerated news cycle, the nearer term may see wide journalism, as outlets try to throttle search results by covering every angle of a story. Throttling infrastructure capabilities, super weather storms will continue in 2013, downing servers and upping fail aquaculture of all sizes — to say nothing of repressive governments flipping off the Internet switch when their citizens’ voices conflict with their agenda. As Anil Dash points out, if a certain global web service is your entire online experience, or even if two or three together are your online world (remember the late June storm that knocked out the Northern Virginia Amazon data center for Instagram, Pinterest, and Heroku?), when those sites go offline, and especially when the outage isn’t related to your local weather, then you are fresh out of Internet. Maybe in 2013, we will finally learn how to play nice. Kristen Taylor is senior editor of open reporting at The Huffington Post and leads their Off The Bus and Firsthand projects. She is founder and editor of Saucy Magazine, an independent food and story print quarterly. |
| The arrival of trophy newspapers Posted: 20 Dec 2012 09:38 PM PST It’s enough to give even the bravest forecaster triskaidekaphobia trepidation, but let me assert 10 predictions for the year ahead.
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| Posted: 20 Dec 2012 09:38 PM PST The wall-to-wall coverage generated by the Sandy Hook elementary shooting elicited empathy and compassion from even the world’s most jaded and objective journalists, but also evoked some soul searching and uncomfortable analysis from many of us, particularly journalists of color. As I noted in my own coverage of the tragedy, while 26 people were murdered in one day in Newtown, equally tragic are the 26 people shot, and two killed, in one night in Chicago this summer. Those shootings did not elicit similar wall-to-wall, worldwide coverage, and many media critics, as well as those of us in the media who are people of color, have been forced yet again to examine the role that class and race play in who and what we choose to cover and how much we cover what we choose to.
I predict this will change in 2013. The reason? Because with his re-election safely in the rearview, President Obama will no longer feel encumbered by the politics of discussing race and racial issues as he did in his first term. As a result, the media will likely be privy to much more candid discussions of complicated policy issues — many of them having to do with race in some way, such as gun violence, the epidemic of black male unemployment, race-based health disparities, racial profiling, and many others — and as a result it will be more likely to cover them. Additionally, 2013 will mark a historic one for civil rights. Both the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 100th birthday of Rosa Parks will be commemorated, ensuring the media revisits our country’s evolution on civil rights and where we stand today. Such coverage will be good not only for journalism, but frankly for our country. Keli Goff is a political correspondent for The Root and author of Party Crashing: How the Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence and The GQ Candidate. |
| Posted: 20 Dec 2012 09:38 PM PST News organizations will focus on monetization of their audience through paid content and premium membership rather than advertising.
However, the type of paywalls that Gannett and others have erected (or will soon put into place) will not be recognized as successful by the end of 2013, primarily because they aren’t providing readers with content worth paying for — and at the moment, such paywalls exist only to buy time. While there is another model that shows promise — a reverse paywall, along the lines of what Matthew Ingram suggested in his piece about following the Reddit model — many news organizations will not be able to innovate in such a way, due to decreased investment and lack of patience (and lack of community-mindedness) for such a model to pay off. Also:
Jane Friedman is web editor for the Virginia Quarterly Review. Previously, she was an assistant professor of e-media at the University of Cincinnati and publisher of Writer's Digest. |
| Posted: 20 Dec 2012 09:37 PM PST Newspapers will start to taper off writing editorials. They'll find that they can be a leader in their communities by engaging audiences, moderating forums, holding events and curating round table discussion — while avoiding the pitfall of alienating a significant percentage of their audience by telling people what to think.
Some smart media company is going to realize that tablets, rigged a specific way, can be the new cable TV box — loaded with news apps and bundled premium content, then leased monthly to subscribers who don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars to buy one. Forget the second-screen experience. 2013 will be about maximizing the third-screen experience. Mark Katches is the editorial director for the Center for Investigative Reporting, which includes California Watch and The Bay Citizen. Previously, he built and ran investigative teams at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and The Orange County Register. |
| Posted: 20 Dec 2012 09:37 PM PST Three words: mobile, location, and data. MobileThe mobile device is becoming ubiquitous. The statistics speak volumes:
In 2013, we’ll see:
LocationAccording to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, about 74 percent of smartphone owners access location-based information on their phone. Services like Foursquare and Google Maps are just the beginning of what is possible in providing location-aware services that allow mobile phone owners to see how location can provide different meaning and context for daily experiences. In 2013, we will see more mobile apps with location-aware services. We will see more apps being developed in 2013 that will allow the user to incorporate their location into using the app and getting information — whether that is by zip code, address, or landmark. The developers of these apps most likely will come from outside the news industry — and driven by specific brands and/or products. This will pose a unique challenge to news organizations to innovate in order to keep pace. DataData was the star in 2012 and will continue to be big in 2013. The difference will be the power of mapping data. We have seen the beginnings of how powerful data can be when mapped as part of a story or news coverage ranging from mapping crime data to location (at the street level) to mapping presidential election results to location (at the district, city, state, and national levels). In 2013, we will see:
Amy Schmitz Weiss is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism & Media Studies at San Diego State University. |
| Posted: 20 Dec 2012 06:10 PM PST One of the bellwether “scandals” to hit journalism in 2012 was the dramatic fall of hyperlocal syndicator Journatic, which helps publishers cut costs by streamlining and outsourcing the production of rote local news stories. When NPR’s This American Life took a microscope to Journatic’s practices in late June, the company was revealed to have employed fake bylines on its sister site, Blockshopper — and many news stories for local American newspapers and sites it served were being routed through low-pay freelancers in countries like the Philippines.
While we at Street Fight of course don’t condone Journatic’s fake bylines or the more egregious outsourcing practices brought to light by the scandal, one thing that’s clear is that local journalism, when produced by full-time, professional journalists, is expensive — possibly too expensive to justify the revenues for many kinds of stories. Just ask AOL’s Patch, which has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in its 850-plus local news sites around the country, so far achieving only modest returns. Meanwhile, the CPM rates and niche pageviews generated by local (and hyperlocal) content aren’t nearly enough to make the numbers compute. Local news organizations no longer have the luxury of throwing skilled reporters at procedural news stories that are only important to niche groups — but that doesn’t mean those stories shouldn’t be produced in some fashion. The focus on automation and more-efficient online information by companies like Journatic will produce a form of local publishing that is sustainable — online stories that will attract pageviews and provide local information in a way that otherwise wouldn’t be worth the cost to publishers. And what’s more, when the table stakes are handled by outsourced providers such as these, it perhaps leaves publishers with the luxury of spending more editorial time on the kind of quality stories that can help define and strengthen the voice of that site in a community. That seems like a good thing. David Hirschman and Laura Rich are cofounders of Street Fight, a media, events, and research company focused on the business of hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology. |
| Posted: 20 Dec 2012 05:48 PM PST Put yourself in the shoes of the audience. This is the real challenge for journalists in 2013. I’m not sure if journalists will do it or not, so this is not exactly a prediction. I do know it’s necessary. It’s more necessary than a business model, because if no one wants what you’re selling, you won’t be able to sell anything.
If you talk to people with no connection to the journalism business, they’ll usually tell you they get news online. They’re not lying. But they don’t take the same approach to news that a news junkie takes. They’re not trying to stay up to date on Syria, or the fiscal cliff. They may be following closely everything relevant to their fantasy football. Lots of college students regularly check sites such as IGN for news about video games. These are their newsgathering behaviors. If you’re a journalist and you’re sneering right now, this is what I’m talking about. Put yourself in the shoes of the audience. Syria is far away, and the fiscal cliff is something over which the average citizen has no control. Then consider that for a few days in mid-December 2012, people all over the world searched for news about a small town in Connecticut where more than two dozen human beings, most of them children, were shot and killed in an elementary school. We know that both Google and social networks bring people to news sites. We all follow links that sound interesting or that promise to amuse us. When we search, we have all kinds of reasons, including to find information about something we heard teased on TV for the 11 o’clock news. And then what? Put yourself in the shoes of the audience. When people arrive at that page, if it’s on a traditional news site (mobile or web), what other kinds of content are available to them? Will they find themselves getting lured in to some other interesting stories? Usually, no. The content they came for will be surrounded by repulsive ads and lists of random “latest news” headlines. I’ve been thinking a lot about single-article sales and small Internet publications and subcompact publishing. If an article page was a place that did not offer us 300 navigation choices and 25 butt-ugly ads, but instead provided several appealing doorways to a diverse selection of high-quality content, what would be the result? What if instead of that hideous local real estate ad, there was a gorgeous photo, and clicking it took us to a wonderful photojournalism story? And what if the photo story was a teaser for a longer story (with more great photos) that you could download (in multiple formats) for a dollar? Put yourself in the shoes of the audience. Mindy McAdams is a professor at the University of Florida, where she teaches courses about online journalism. |
| A market-driven comeback for high-quality reporting Posted: 20 Dec 2012 05:19 PM PST When the judges and juries sit down in early 2014 to review the journalism entries for the Pulitzer Prize, they’ll be awash with some of the highest caliber submissions in decades. It is this author’s humble opinion that 2013 will be remembered as the year investigative and beat reporting makes a comeback. This past year, I had the privilege of studying with Harvard Business School Professor Clay Christensen. We tried to apply his theories of disruption to the media industry. We outlined our research in the Nieman Reports article “Breaking News.”
Let’s start with the traditional news organizations. What began as a trickle with The New York Times instituting their metered-model paywall in March 2011 turned into a flood in 2012. More than 300 newspapers in the United States now charge for online content. That number has doubled in just one year. What these news organizations are realizing is that you can’t charge for content that is available elsewhere for free. For these pay models to work, traditional news organizations need to make sure that they are satisfying the jobs that audiences, through their subscriptions, effectively hire news organizations to fulfill. At a most basic level, this means providing what Jim Moroney from The Dallas Morning News calls PICA: perspective, interpretation, context, and analysis. In 2013, when the initial subscription results from all those paywalls comes in, those news organizations will recognize that they have no choice but to produce high-end journalism that stands out above the crowd. They’ll need to better satisfy their audiences’ jobs-to-be-done, and that means investing in high quality, in-depth reporting. Now let’s turn to the disruptors. They’ve been riding high for several years. It’s easy to cheaply aggregate and curate original journalism when others are investing in the resources necessary to generate those pageviews. But the days of “link bait” are coming to an end. The disruptors have themselves been disrupted. A cursory Google search on the news story of your choice shows that virtually every media organization is now in the curation game. The challenge for these aggregators is that drastic cutbacks in many of those traditional newsrooms mean they can no longer rely on traditional newsrooms to do the heavy lifting. In order to stand out, the disruptors now need to invest in some original reporting of their own. We’ve already seen this happen with The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and Gawker. They’ve launched impressive original content verticals, not because they’ve wanted to (although no doubt their intentions are noble), but because they’ve had to fill the vacuum left by diminishing providers of original content. Disruption theory argues that they’ll continue to move up market. They have no choice because as they grow, they need to further increase their audiences. 2013 will be a unique snapshot in time: the incumbents, fighting to stave off the disruptors, will invest in original journalism, and the disruptors, fighting to increase their market share, will also invest in original journalism. This is great news for all of us. Making predictions is a dangerous game, especially in a world where an article will live on for all to see. But my prediction is based on a theory, an underlying understanding of what causes what and why. Understanding Christensen’s theories and how they apply to journalism is about as close to predicting the future as one can get. For example, those familiar with how the automobile industry was disrupted by low-end manufacturers like Toyota, and recently, Hyundai and Kia, know that what happened was exactly what Christensen predicted. Here’s hoping that these theories apply equally as well to journalism. If they do, 2013 will be the next great year for all of us. David Skok is director of digital for the Canadian news portal Globalnews.ca. He was a 2012 Martin Wise Goodman Canadian Nieman Fellow. |
| A new, mainstream solutions journalism Posted: 20 Dec 2012 04:47 PM PST All last weekend, the tragedy of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting has played out on what feels like every news outlet. The faces of the dead, their stories, their lives seem to be everywhere. Also ubiquitous: the questions of what happens next. How do we heal? How do we prevent this from happening again? What can we do?
It’s a positive sign that the media is paying attention and participating in these conversations, too. In less than a week, we’ve seen polling from The Washington Post, poll analysis from The Huffington Post, a mass shootings map and timeline from Mother Jones, a state-by-state breakdown of gun control from The Globe and Mail, facts on mass shootings from The Washington Post’s WonkBlog, and sensitive, deep reporting from the Christian Science Monitor including ways to helpand an attempt to find answers. These are examples of what the birth of mainstream “solutions journalism” looks like from the ground floor of crisis. It’s reporting that seeks to build context and community around a politically and emotionally charged subject. It is journalism that engages in meaningful conversation. My prediction for 2013: What we learn from our approach to the Sandy Hook shooting will inform our approach to many key social issues on the front burner in 2013: immigration, healthcare, and now gun control. Solutions journalism typically refers to reporting that focuses on solutions to community problems, offering up ideas for change. When done right, it does more than turn a beat’s focus to the betterment of the future. It builds community by sharing the tools necessary to have a conversation and creating an open space for that conversation to happen, much as we’re beginning to see in coverage of Sandy Hook. What could a solutions journalism response, grounded in context and community-based reporting, to major issues of 2013 look like? It would rely on four criteria:
Reporting. Community building. Commitment. Smarter applications of these traditional reporting techniques have the ability to cement solutions journalism into the mainstream, and to transform the ways we cover some of the most serious issues in the coming year. More importantly, this contextual, community-centric approach has the ability to raise the level of conversation and build understanding and consensus around volatile subjects. It’s important for the community of Sandy Hook Elementary. And it’s important for building an engaged democracy. Laura Amico is founder and editor of Homicide Watch D.C. and CEO of Glass Eye Media. She is a 2012-13 Nieman-Berkman Fellow in Journalism Innovation. |
| Posted: 20 Dec 2012 04:12 PM PST The approach that large traditional news organizations take in breaking news needs to be re-thought in the age of social media. Hurricane Sandy provided an example of how resources are often wasted by journalism organizations during breaking-news events while also demonstrating how vital authenticating coverage can be.
What is needed are newsrooms that can filter, verify, curate, and amplify social media for their audiences, in addition to journalists reporting in enterprising and contextual ways. Andy Carvin at NPR excelled at this during coverage of the Middle East and I think we should and will see more of it in 2013. Other predictions:
Michael Maness leads the Journalism and Media Innovation program at Knight Foundation. Previously, he was Gannett's vice president of innovation and design. |
| You can’t always get what you want Posted: 20 Dec 2012 02:09 PM PST We live in a time of unprecedented access to entertainment, news, information — even to each other. But that access requires navigating a digital labyrinth, with toll booths, hidden doors, gates that only open in one direction, false exits, and misleading turns — along with some clear paths and dazzling topiary. I wish I could say that will get easier in 2013. It won’t. And if there’s one prediction I feel safe in making, clarity isn’t even in our mid-range future. Why? Three reasons: MoneyOr more bluntly, the need to make it. That applies to traditional media businesses, Internet powerhouses, and nimble startups alike. (On the most basic level, the folks who produce cat videos and sunset photos still have to get devices and someone has to pay for or subsidize storage and distribution.) Nearly all rely on advertising, subscriptions, sales, licensing/syndication, or a mix of those to make money with some other revenue sources sprinkled in. How they manage those revenue streams governs much of what we can access.
Traditional players like The New York Times or the part of CBS that makes the most money have to balance between getting as much income as possible from their legacy media for as long as possible with finding ways both to make the most from digital and make up for the gap. That takes us to rights deals that may block access for a day, a week, or to everyone except subscribers to certain services. It means paying for access after 10 or 20 articles, finding other ways in, changing news providers, or perhaps answering a question to read an article. We can pay to watch out-of-market MLB.com games at home; we can watch all the play at Wimbledon from anywhere in the U.S. if we pay a provider who has a deal with ESPN and have the right apps on the right devices. The “get an audience first, money will follow” startups add to the uncertainty, especially when the ways that money might be made aren’t spelled out well from the start. In the most recent public example, a number of Instagram users deleted their accounts rather than accept terms of service related to possible future advertising plans, leaving in their wake myriad broken links and gaps. Features, products, and entire companies disappear when reality doesn’t make enough money to match the audience or fulfill the funding — leaving disappointed, sometimes disoriented users behind. Pivots leave divots to trip over. Without money to produce, store, or distribute, content has a hard time surviving and good content has a harder time getting made at all. One of the biggest pluses of 2012 has been the use of crowdfunding for a wide range of niche projects, from Plympton’s serial books to Read Matter’s longform science writing and a lot of video. In 2013, we’ll get a better sense of how crowdfunding is faring, as well as the beyond-Kickstarter viability for those tapping in. RightsA lot of content is available in digital format. A lot isn’t. My 12-year-old niece wanted to read To Kill a Mockingbird on her Nook or her mom’s Kindle. Companion story guides can be downloaded, but the actual Harper Lee classic isn’t available in digital — legally. She stuck with the paperback. Some of this is the whim of the author: Ray Bradbury withheld permission to digitize most of his work until just before his death earlier this year; now HarperCollins is producing a digital backlist. His editor at HarperCollins, Jennifer Brehl, told me soon after his death she’d urged him “to step boldly into the future” and he finally agreed. All of the books will be available to libraries, even if the publisher’s policy for other authors and titles doesn’t match. Some rights are too difficult to obtain retroactively (“China Beach” isn’t on legal DVDs yet let alone streaming). Even when books, movies, or songs are digitized, availability isn’t guaranteed. A movie Netflix offers today might be out of the rotation next month, based on the studio deal. A publisher might only allow some libraries to get some titles or allow lending only in certain device-linked formats. Titles might be exclusive to Amazon or Nook. You can make MP3s out of Beatles CDs, but you can only buy the songs digitally through iTunes. You can share an article from a news site, but not everything in its app. The CBS-Vevo concert series “Live on Letterman” can be watched live through Google Chrome on a PC, but not through Google Chrome on Google TV. Pay in the U.S., and you might not be able to watch in Germany. Trying to insure offline access to cloud-based media or that downloads will play can be like playing a shell game, sometimes without anything in the shells. Forget to sync? It could be a long, silent plane ride. TechnologyTech advances make it easier for us to get anything anywhere — but also easier to control what we can get, when, and how, unless you are more into hacking than the average consumer. Tech decisions like blocking Flash from an operating system or skipping walled-garden apps for browser-based HTML5 change who can get access and how or what is available where. The single most important decision News Corp. made in launching The Daily was to plant it in the walled garden of iOS. Nearly everything else — the cost, the early delivery problems, the lack of the right kind of exposure, and ultimately, its demise — stemmed from that. One way for consumers to get through the labyrinth is to find an ecosystem and stick with it, accepting the limitations from the start and knowing that more are coming. It’s reductive but alluring. You can play device and subscription roulette, hoping that the mix you pull together covers allow the options you care about. You may get satisfaction but you probably won’t get everything you want where you want it — even if you’re willing to pay — in 2013. Staci D. Kramer, the former editor of paidContent, has been writing about and taking part in the intersection of technology with media, entertainment, and sports since the days before the web. |
| Posted: 20 Dec 2012 12:10 PM PST What should happen
What will happen
Raju Narisetti is managing editor of the WSJ Digital Network. Previously he was a managing editor at The Washington Post. |
| Posted: 20 Dec 2012 11:25 AM PST The coming year will feature a surge in evidence-based journalism. A high point of this month’s NewsFoo gathering of journalists and technologists was a call to quality by a prominent non-journalist. Asked what advice he had for the craft, Harper Reed, chief technology officer for the Obama campaign, said “Fucking do math.”
Caring about evidence will mean several things. In doing the math, journalists will tell their audiences what the data show on a given topic, and explain nuances such as relative risk. For example, when reporting a medical finding allegedly showing a correlation between some new pharmaceutical and higher incidences of rare cancers, they’ll note that the odds of any single person getting the disease were vanishingly small in the first place — and they’ll dig hard to find out whether a drug company that stands to gain from this finding also paid for the study. Local TV news programs will stop leading every show with violent crime and explain to their audiences that, actually, the crime rate has been plummeting in most places for several decades. And articles about climate change (assuming it returns to the public agenda) will note the overwhelming scientific consensus that (a) the planet is getting warmer, (b) this could have catastrophic consequences, and (c) humans are causing a significant amount of the change. That will lead to another welcome change: Climate change reports won’t feature skeptics nearly as often. Indeed, journalists in all arenas — politics in particular — will stop quoting “both sides” of issues when one side is lying, or at least they’ll feel obliged to tell their audiences that one side is lying. Their sources will be upset in many cases, but there will be an added benefit here as well: Once it becomes clear that news media plan to hold the powerful accountable, journalists will forfeit their coziness with the powers-that-be in politics, business, and other fields. The rise of evidence-based journalism will be a breath of fresh air, especially in politics, and will be good for media organizations’ bottom lines, too. As the volume of information rises, the value of any individual piece of information becomes more and more questionable, and the journalists who do the math will have more credibility. When enough news consumers are hopelessly confused — or have been burned by low-quality information — they’ll retreat to quality. (As always, this reflects my hope more than my expectation. Call me an optimist.) Dan Gillmor is founding director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. His most recent books is Mediactive. |
| The value (and weakness) of niche Posted: 20 Dec 2012 09:26 AM PST Next year, I expect to see more people taking a hard look at whether — and when — paywalls really work. We have seen evidence that they generate revenue (but not nearly enough) at the biggest sites, but I am not sure what the takeaway is for the local level. The harsh reality that hackfests, news startups without business models, and open source and hacker journalism will not provide any financial opportunity may be more clear, even if all this work leads to more reinvention in journalism.
To me, the question about partisanship is deeply concerning as these folks (on both sides) are information-seekers, while the majority of people tend to become most involved when an issue presents itself as relevant to their daily life (think the Connecticut school shooting and gun law debates). These information-seeking behaviors are deeply concerning — especially when we think about a decrease in the availability of quality local news. (If, of course, that news indeed was quality to begin with — a presumption we must question.) It seems to me that David Carr is always right on, and his most recent column suggests a pattern that we will be increasingly cognizant of: that niche is useful — if not hamstery, and can succeed if it isn’t — because it’s niche. But online advertising is still fleeting, and no amount of social metrics canoodling, in my view, is likely to change that — even for Facebook. I would be delighted to be wrong about this. Nikki Usher is an assistant professor at George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs. |
| Journalistic skills are still marketable Posted: 20 Dec 2012 09:24 AM PST Content marketing and revenue opportunitiesSurging interest in “content marketing” among brands will open up important revenue opportunities for people trained as journalists, and reinforce the broad importance of storytelling, writing and multimedia production skills in today’s economy. At this point, even more traditional marketers and small businesses have embraced the need for social media and digital strategies, but I think soon a wider number will join thought leaders in recognizing that just having a Twitter account or blog is not enough — to engage customers you need something interesting and relevant to put there, and that’s not so easy to do. Indeed, an October survey of marketers found that while 92 percent had embraced “social marketing,” their second-biggest concern next to measuring ROI was the difficulty producing a constant stream of fresh content.
I’m a journalism professor, so I’m biased, but I also think this trend augers well for the sustainability for journalism education. The skills we teach remain not only important but also marketable. I’d also note that marketers are, like journalists, just on the tip of the iceberg in terms of really embracing mobile strategies, and there will be opportunities for more and better content creation in that realm going forward as well. EngagementIt’s not news that news organizations are beginning to shift some of their attention away from pageviews and toward building an engaged and loyal audience. But based on my research with Jonathan Groves of Drury University, I think 2013 and coming years will see an increased awareness among journalists that they must not only give their readers news where and when and how they want it, but also build a community around it with a sustained commitment to a more participatory style of journalism. This prescription has been widely discussed, but as other researchers have also documented, there remains widespread resistance in newsrooms to a more active audience. Truly participatory journalism is difficult, time-consuming, and messy, but organizations seeking engagement can’t rely on the production and distribution of great content or the capricious whims of search-driven traffic alone. Carrie Brown-Smith is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Memphis who blogs at The Changing Newsroom. |
| “Updated horse parser”: The year in journo-code commit messages Posted: 20 Dec 2012 08:00 AM PST
The commit message is a funny artifact of writing software. Its purpose is utilitarian: summarizing each incremental addition or edit of code. Yet they also capture the genius, the wit, and the agony of the person behind the keyboard. Take, for example, this existential message from my coworker Marc Lavallee, when working on our question-and-answer application a couple months ago: Commit: 1619d38d02eb3c8547f4751faa53a2fd9016f0b5For the increasing numbers of developers who work in newsrooms, these messages join a long tradition of editing notes. There is a century of story drafts dotted with TK’s, CQ’s, and annotations from the messy process of reporting and refining. But the quantity, permanency, and fragility of computer code make commit messages a species apart. Frequently quotidian and obvious, they will sometimes morph into boastful swagger or shameful admission. Often, it’s a panicked plea to the coding gods when breaking news collides with broken code. As 2012 comes to a close, I collected commit messages from my coworkers at The New York Times and colleagues across the industry with the hope they would provide a snapshot of the year in news apps. A fellow member of my team, Jacob Harris, outlined the dichotomy nicely:
First observation: The messages can pile up. For example, Ryan Pitts, at the Spokesman Review in Spokane, tallied all his team’s commits for the year and concluded: “What I can tell you is that we had about 2,700 commits to our primary repo, and only one ‘fuck,’ related to a z-index problem caused by an ad. We only had one ‘shit,’ prompted by a series of troll accounts. But we had 20 ‘derp’s. So there’s that.” The Times’ Summer Olympics site logged 14,670 commits from our team over the span of a year. From humble beginnings in the first (and self-evident) “Initial commit” message by Jacqui Maher, scanning through the messages is akin to browsing through storage boxes in your parents’ basement and being overwhelmed by nostalgia. The following messages note changes big and small, including the basic (supporting genders for horses) and the regretful (my only use of profanity, for a missing “s” that briefly broke our result pages): Commit: 59983e55a58e634dd1b53fdc380609b78915e8d1Meanwhile, some fixes simply fulfill a programmer’s OCD. Dan Nguyen corrected 25 grammatical errors in the documentation of Mongoid, an open-source framework for the MongoDB database — places where “it’s” should have been “its.” A few days before the polls closed, Wilson Andrews’ commit message for The Washington Post’s election results map exemplifies the tragedy and triumph of coding furiously toward deadline: Date: Fri Oct 26 15:08:42 2012 -0400Andrews described the commit as the moment “when I actually began to see light at the end of the tunnel.” I asked developers to include a “diff” — a before-and-after comparison of edits to the code — but he replied, “A whole bunch of code, so a diff is worthless. The true diff was my sanity.” In a similar vein, Gabriel Dance passed along two commit messages from the final days of work on The Guardian’s election results and electoral college game: Commit: 1d3e7ce2f6848c8b778c4489c91321ae3c1361b2And although each commit does contain a fair amount of context (a line-by-line indication of what changed, when, and by whom), scanning through them can produce its own kind of schadenfreude absent the stress of that particular moment. To wit, Scott Klein of ProPublica sent along a sampling of his team’s commits this year: Commit d7915dd9a06e7fe4fbbc86909501bd98011a2af9Thanks to all the developers named above for sharing a look behind the scenes. Here’s to many happy (and better written) commits in 2013. Tyson Evans is a deputy editor for interactive news at The New York Times and an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Horse photo (not Rafalca) by lhourahane used under a Creative Commons license. |
| The newsonomics of 2013 wizardry: Tribune, Buffett, Murdoch, Paton, Bloomberg, and more Posted: 20 Dec 2012 07:45 AM PST
It takes at least three special qualities to be in — much less to enter — the newspaper business these days. We can borrow them from L. Frank Baum: heart, courage, and smarts. 2012 marked unprecedented change in the top leadership and ownership at American dailies. The end of the year is a good stopping point to consider the most influential captains of this industry. Who will prove lionhearted or chicken-hearted? Who, looking into the deepening abyss of advertising loss, can maintain fortitude? Who has the intel, or is acquiring it, to navigate a new course? Certainly, news gathering and news distribution, a.k.a. journalism, in the second decade of the 21st century isn’t only about the poobahs. Here at the Lab, and in my Newsonomics columns over the year, we’ve focused much on innovation and the innovators. Surely, companies and products from KPCC, California Watch, The Lens, and Texas Tribune to NewsCred, Quartz, and The Huffington Post to The Verge and BuzzFeed are changing news as we know it. But they are changing it slowly. They are seeds — a few of which will sprout into major operations, while others will be hybridized into news creatures yet unborn. (It also isn’t just about the U.S., though we can be myopic about that. Check out CJR’s recent piece on cutbacks in the European press.) Today, though, most of the reporting power, much of the brand power, and the political power still resides in big companies and their leadership. We may well get our strongest display of that early in 2013: In Washington, the FCC cross-ownership debate may move to center stage in January. And around the same time, we’ll probably see the Tribune newspaper auction. As new Tribune CEO Peter Liguori, a broadcast exec, remakes the company as a TV/video shop (WGN America, here we come!), some of the most influential American nameplates — the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Baltimore Sun, among them — will all hit the market at one time. Though 2012 has been a time of unprecedented change, it may prove to be prologue to the year to come. So let’s focus on 13 leaders — would-be, wannabe wizards of a kind — as we countdown to the new year, nostalgically remembering that yesterday’s oracles (Media General’s “Down from the Mountaintop” Marshall Morton, or financier extraordinaire-turned-charlatan Sam Zell) didn’t always work out so well. Feel free to photoshop their faces into your favorite scarecrow, tin man, and lion portrait.
13. Gary Pruitt, new head of Associated PressTaking over as CEO in July, Pruitt left one fireman’s job for another. He tamped down blazes as longtime CEO of McClatchy, paying down debt from the ill-fated 2006 Knight Ridder purchase, cutting expenses and testing digital strategies along with his peers. At the wire, he succeeds Tom Curley, really the first modern AP head. Curley started a vast transformation of AP, and quelled a rebellion of its newspaper owner/members. Now Pruitt must rationalize the pieces of the business. Those newspaper owners only contribute 22 percent of the company’s revenues, yet they control it, with Lee Enterprises CEO Mary Junck, one of the most commonsensical news execs, now chairing the board. The impact of AP’s 2,300-strong news-gathering corps remains hugely impactful and eternally underestimated. Pruitt and his team must now figure out where a modernizing wire plays in an evolving world of socially driven, tech-improved aggregation and curation. As competitor Thomson Reuters spent much of the year re-strategizing its own media business future, letting go much of that division’s leadership and not making much headway with Reuters America, AP had a bit of a breather. Expect hyper-competition to pick up in 2013 from a host of giants like Bloomberg and the new News Corp. and an assortment of niche sports, entertainment, and news sites. 12. Carlos Slim, billionaire telecom playerConsistent rumor in L.A. places Carlos Slim as one of the potential bidders for the Los Angeles Times, as the post-bankruptcy Tribune Company gets its newspaper auction into gear. Why not? The globe’s richest human, Slim already has shown an interest in newspapers, his usurious depth-of-the-recession deal with the New York Times being one example. Media and telecom are cousins, and América Móvil is his signature company, with almost 40 percent mobile market share in Latin America and the Caribbean. As that company gets increasing pressure from regulators, why not head north (as Murdoch moves west) and exploit more of the California market, which itself is almost 40 percent Latino. Even if Slim paid $300 million for the Times, which is probably a high price, it would amount to a rounding error amid his $68 billion fortune. 11. Aaron Kushner, Orange County Register owner, would-be buyer of the Los Angeles TimesAt 39, Kushner is the youngest on this list, and maybe the most bullish about newspapers. That’s news on paper: Dubbed the Pied Piper of Print by OC Weekly, Kushner makes the direct, and public, connection between unique local content and reader revenue that only a few of his contemporaries do. Kushner’s strategy is to deepen the essentiality of the Register, and then to put in a metered paywall, mimicking the success of the smartest implementers of all-access circulation strategies. That combo, if matched with a likewise next-gen advertising strategy, will become a business school case study — one way or the other. 10. John Paton, CEO of Digital First MediaMr. Digital First has had to keep his head more publicly down in the second half of 2012, after his Journal Register Co. entered bankruptcy for the second time. There are all kinds of ways to read this bankruptcy (“Journal Register Co. declares bankruptcy…again: Is this the industry’s first real reboot?“) and to extrapolate the wins and losses of his prominent strategy. Into 2013, we’ll be watching both this next JRC small-daily push and the company’s attempted remake of the larger MediaNews properties in L.A., the Bay Area, and Denver. Those digital transformations are of a magnitude higher than the JRC properties, and after more than a year of Digital First re-direction, that transformative strategy’s impact is still unclear. 2013 may be a make-or-break year for Paton. 9. Mike Bloomberg and post-mayoral retirement plansIt’s not a bad position to be in. As the tenth-richest American and finishing a third term running New York City, Bloomberg may well turn back to media for a third (at least) act for his Third Way agenda. Bloomberg the company is now a serious global business news player, and its Businessweek foray into consumer media appears to have boosted the company’s confidence in a more-than-B2B future. So, Bloomberg’s been floated as a potential buyer of both the Financial Times, if Pearson actually puts the paper on the market, and, in recurring rumor, The New York Times. The Times won’t be for sale until Mark Thompson has taken a shot at finding a new growth path, but could be within two to three years. The FT may be more likely, and the big metros, like the L.A. Times and Chicago Tribune, may make less business alignment sense — but provide the kind of powerful journalistic platform that Mike Bloomberg 3.0 could relish. Into 2013, we’ll have to wonder: Could Bloomberg be the anti-Murdoch?
8. Jim Moroney, Dallas Morning News publisher, and Mike Klingensmith, Star Tribune publisherAs the chasm widens between the go-forward abilities of the national/global news outfits and the regionals, these two regional publishers stand out for forward thinking — and action. Wednesday, the Morning News announced another acquisition — its fifth buy or startup in 2012. This acquisition is local and niche: DG Publishing, a magazine publisher of high-end resource guides including Design GuideTexas and The Texas Wedding Guide. It follows investments in marketing services (Dallas 508 and Speakeasy) and in the events business. Klingensmith, a magazine (Time Inc.) guy brought into the newspaper business, post-Strib bankruptcy, has implemented one of the highest-achieving paywalls in the country and is now going full tilt into marketing services as well. Both publishers see the news landscape for what it is: hugely challenging in advertising, offering unexpected reader revenue — and making possible third and fourth streams of revenue that only optimism that investment can grab. 7. Kinsey Wilson, NPR’s chief content officerWilson is no longer a newspaper guy, though he won plaudits for his editorship at USA Today. His potential impact on local news, though, could be huge. He and his new boss Gary Knell, who has been on the job a year, stand at the nexus of public media in the U.S. It’s a crowded intersection, with lots of jostling, more than a few historical accidents, and no clear traffic improvement plan…yet. Watch for how much progress Wilson and the alphabet soup of innovators and incumbents — CPB, PBS, PRI, APM, PRX, plus the power center regional stations (WNYC, WBEZ, WBUR, KPCC, KQED, MPR, OPB, and more) — can make as they try to create the Public Media Platform, which issued a 2013 announcement just Monday. For us public media consumers, it’s a snap to say what we’d like. We’d love to see a consistent set of public media apps that work across the web, smartphones, tablets, and connected cars. You know, just let us pick our favorite stations, programs, and personalities, local or national, by time of day or week, and import. Yet just as with AP and newspapers, or TV networks and their local affiliates, money and power divisions continue to hamper satisfying clear consumer want. Wilson wins much credit for his collegial style, but it’s far from clear that he can untangle historical divisions that prevent public media from making the most of the all-access age. 6. Julius Genachowski, Federal Communications Commission ChairmanYou have to give Genachowski credit. He’s taken on many issues and constituencies over his first term as FCC chair. Now he’s trying to impose science on the banal restrictions airlines put on mobile device usage. Whether he gets a second term or not, he’ll be remembered by news media for what does or doesn’t happen with cross-ownership in 2013. Out of the apparent blue, with no new hearings on the matter, he’s resurrected relaxed cross-ownership rules. These would make it easier, in the top 20 markets, for newspaper and broadcast companies to pool assets. With scant evidence of potential value — no increase in news, in public service, or in survivability — the debate is an abstract one, with both newspaper owners and broadcasters lobbying for deregulation. Yes, in the tablet era, we should be entering a world of true multiplatform, multimedia news production — but it still rolls along on training wheels, much tougher to master than anyone had suspected. Beyond the abstract merits of “cross-ownership,” it’s easy to see one big, early winner of relaxed rules: News Corp. With broadcast properties in both Chicago and L.A., a possible bid for the Chicago Tribune and L.A. Times is much more appealing if both TV and newspapers could be controlled by the separate, if both Murdoch-dominated, new News Corp. and new Fox Group. While the News Corp. interest here is the juiciest news, a real change in the decades-only rules could lead to many unintended consequences in local news ownership.
5. Andrew Miller, Guardian CEOMiller is a Brit, and he is based in London. But the Guardian is truly a global news source — an important one, with growing reach in the U.S. The Guardian has twisted and turned its U.S. presence, trying to figure out how the two words Guardian and America best fit together — and how they can be monetized. In October, it hired a highly recognized and authoritative U.S. voice, the Twitterrific Heidi Moore (ex- of Marketplace and the Journal) as its U.S. finance and economics editor. Miller’s made some headway, but nearly enough yet, as the Guardian continues to lose substantial money, with an operating loss of more than $70 million. The uniqueness and differentiation of its journalism is clear, but matching that to paying digital audiences in the U.K., U.S., and Europe has proven more challenging than Miller, and most of his U.K. publishing colleagues, expected. Developing big out-of-home-country audiences is one things; making money off them is quite another. 4. Robert Thomson, incoming CEO, the new News Corp.A respected newsman, 10-year News Corp. veteran Thomson, is catapulting into a position heading the largest news enterprise, by revenue, on the globe, from his post as The Wall Street Journal’s top editor. He faces a slew of challenges, as the Australian dailies — long News Corp.’s publishing cash cow — restructure and retrench, the U.K. quality papers hemorrhage money, and The New York Post requires subsidy. Of course the Journal, with its emerging WSJ Digital Network, is the jewel here. This week’s subscriber notice that the Journal is succumbing to Apple’s rough charms and joining Newsstand reminds us, though, that even the Journal is in a tough fight for growth. Thomson’s opportunities — and challenges — could multiply if Rupert, the chairman to whom he’ll be reporting, adds newspapers to his portfolio. 3. Mark Thompson, embattled New York Times CEO.Thompson knew he was taking on a tough job. Even with a high single-digit increase in circulation revenue, built on its paywall strategy, the Times’ ad decline is swamping that gain. So Thompson faces huge immediate challenges. For the Times — and the reason the British broadcaster was hired — that means in strong part an expanded global strategy. Yet, its forays into China (2012) and Brazil (2013) will take several years, at least, to make much revenue impact. Thompson is in race against time, as the Times battles competitors with much deeper pockets in the U.S. and worldwide; it’s on thinning ice. The cloud of the BBC child abuse scandal that hangs over his head may lift by mid-year — or make his tenure a short one. As the year dawns, the anti-Times press will discover one — imagined or real — smoking gun after another about Thompson’s knowledge of the BBC wrongdoings. Yet this week’s release of the first of three inquiries into who-knew-what-when cleared the BBC and Thompson of conspiracy or cover-up — instead skewering the organization Thompson led for eight years as confused, chaos, and incompetent. 2. Warren Buffett, Main Street publisherWant to find a buyer for a non-metro paper? Simple: Email Warren. That’s what the Allentown Morning Call found when it asked him directly if he’d consider buying the paper. “If the phone rings, I’ll answer it,” he told the paper. Berkshire Hathaway has no silver bullet, but as a long-term, buy-and-hold company, it recognizes beat-down assets that can be re-energized. BH Media head Terry Kroeger is clear that his company is searching for a new growth formula, along with its peers. Buffett’s advantage: the ability to buy cheap, offering deals others can’t, as with the financial engineering that made the Media General sale happen. Paywalls going up around the company will significantly help 2013 results.
1. Rupert Murdoch, American publisher.Murdoch always commands attention. Much of that in 2012 was negative, as Hackgate appeared to change the trajectory of News Corp.’s news future forever. But “forever” is a short time in Rupertland. Though his head U.K. honchos are going in the dock for bribery, he and son James have moved the center of the empire west. Though originally interpreted as a loss for Rupert, the splitting off of the company’s three-continent newspaper assets looks as much like the start of something as the end of an era. Murdoch, with pockets as deep as $9 billion in cash, will have no trouble, if he wishes, outbidding others for the Tribune newspapers. While he paid $5.6 billion for Dow Jones a scant five years ago, he could take home the L.A. Times and Chicago Tribune for about a tenth of that. |
| Questioning the network: The year in social media research Posted: 20 Dec 2012 07:00 AM PST
Editor’s note: There’s lots of new and interesting academic research into social media every year — but who has time to sift through all those journals and papers? Our friends at Journalist’s Resource, that’s who. JR is a project of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and they spend their time examining the new academic literature in media, social science, and other fields, summarizing the high points and giving you a point of entry. John Wihbey, JR’s managing editor, has gone through the research they examined in 2012 and picked out some of the most compelling academic papers. The range of social media research produced in 2012 has been wide and diverse: from what works on Twitter to explorations of meme “virality”; from Facebook’s power to motivate to the hidden dynamics of friend networks; from SMS power in the Arab uprising to the questionable creep of social “Big Data.” We offer this list with the usual disclaimer: Our selection is meant to be useful, not definitive. Missing from this list is a lot of great scholarship, including analysis of bullying in a networked world, as well as much more on how social media is changing the way we participate in politics. In any case, here are 10 papers from 2012 worth considering — some light reading for your holiday downtime:
A parting thought: Journalists interested in exploring this field further might consider following some of journals in the field, including Information, Communication and Society, New Media and Society, Journal of Information Technology and Politics, Political Communication, Policy and Internet, and First Monday. |
| The normalization of the smartphone Posted: 20 Dec 2012 06:17 AM PST Where others look to Mary Meeker or a bunch of supposedly digitally savvy journalists to understand the future of technology and its impact on our culture, I look to my mother. Three years ago, she joined Facebook. After the inevitable there-goes-the-neighborhood jokes (no doubt the same ones made behind my back a few years earlier, when they let in professionals like me with dot-com email addresses), I came to understand that online social networks are not separate from real life. They are part of it.
If the previous sentence already seems obvious, remember that you are a Nieman Lab reader and your voracious mobile news consumption routine (or mine: Tweetbot; the occasional New York Times notification for breaking news; ScoreCenter for Knicks scores and trades; Downcast for listening to On the Media while I run; a handful of email newsletters; Instapaper for things I find there and on Twitter) probably isn’t a good template for my mother, at least not now. When I showed my parents the YouTube video of the substation explosion that knocked out their power when Sandy came through, I did it on my iPhone and it was almost like doing a magic trick. She does not recoil in skeumorphobic horror at the thought of a wood-shelved rendering of a Newsstand; she wants to know what it’s for. She wasn’t looking for news when she bought a smartphone. She thinks of it as a better cameraphone and address book that has a calendar and email. Plus there are apps, and those will be the gateway to her mobile news experience. She’s got NPR on every radio in the house, so we’ll download that one. Then there are the apps from print titles that I know she trusts (The New York Times, The New Yorker, Consumer Reports), where I see to it that her subscriptions get connected. I will get her a free trial subscription to The Awl: Weekend Companion, a new app published by my new company, because she would like pieces such as the one on crossword economics — but if family loyalty is the only thing keeping her getting it, there are forthcoming 29th Street Publishing titles that I’m sure will fit her interests. I will show her how to bookmark web sites as tiles on her home screen, and I will nudge her toward time-shifted reading and podcasting, but I know she has a lot of other things to read and listen to, and habits are hard to change, until they do. I can’t sit over her shoulder all of the time, so mostly she’ll be on her own. Over the course of the year, her friends and my sister and I will send text messages and emails with links in them, and those will lead her in new directions. And then something big will happen — I hope not too catastrophic, but there’s always something — and that event will cause further change, even if cellphone service is disrupted for a while. I don’t know what my mother will be doing with her phone a year from now. All I know is it will have become part of her, and those of us who gather information, tell stories that help make sense of it, and deliver them to her and to the rest of the public have to be there. Blake Eskin is editorial director and cofounder of 29th Street Publishing. Previously, he was editor of NewYorker.com. |
| Eye-controlled tablets and tools for clouds Posted: 20 Dec 2012 06:14 AM PST Native advertising
Aggregation (again)In 2013, many organizations will focus on aggregation to produce more content for their channels with fewer staff resources. NewsCred, Percolate, and Magnify are just a few of the existing startups promising to provide rich content for websites, while dozens more are launching Q1/Q2. A successful aggregation strategy must rely on editorial curation rather than algorithm alone. And it should dutifully credit those from whom an idea originated. I recommend reading The Curator’s Code for insights on how best to credit aggregated content. VerificationDuring the 2012 campaign and election, some verification initiatives, such as MIT’s SuperPACApp, showed how critical information could be revealed in real time. With a proliferation of social networks, new websites, and a faster-than-ever news cycle, consumers are having difficulty discerning which stories can be trusted. At the same time, they are motivated to look for credible information and to learn more about the sources behind the content they consume. Eye controlsFrom iris scans to eye-tracking cameras, 2013 will be the year of the eyeball. New startups already have prototypes that can identify us by simply scanning our eyes. Some police jurisdictions in the U.S. have already deployed similar technology, while other companies are creating personal security systems (software that unlocks a mobile phone only after positive authentication via an iris scan). Researchers in Copenhagen have developed an eye-controlled tablet for anyone to use. After passing an infrared light to the user, a smartphone or tablet’s camera can be operated by moving the eye. This system promises to help those with disabilities. It will also aid night owls read silently next to their sleeping partners. Gesture-based computingMany people spend countless hours browsing for recipes online. Once they send a recipe to their tablet or smartphone and they’re in the kitchen cooking, home chefs face a universal problem: How can they scroll through the instructions without dirtying the screen? A few companies launched innovative fixes in the past year, from a single large button intended for the elbow to a modified screen with all of the information in one place. Next year, we should see the integration of gesture-based computing, offering consumers the option to wave their hand over a phone or tablet’s camera to advance to additional screens. We’ve already seen great success with gesture-based games in the Microsoft Kinect and PS3. E InkI think that one of the most exciting devices launched in 2012 was Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite, which offers an E Ink display that works regardless of direct light. E Ink, which is actually the name of a proprietary product rather than the technology itself (think “Kleenex” vs. “tissue”), is powering numerous devices, from ereaders to watches to retail displays. Early in 2013, smart credit cards that can display real-time account information will launch in Asia, while a startup called PopSLATE will begin offering a second E Ink screen that can be attached to the back of a smartphone to double the display capacity. There’s even a concept baseball glove that shows the speed of a fastball and sends pitch signals to the catcher in total secrecy. Hidden wearable technologyIn 2012, cellular companies turned us each into invisible hotspots. Next year, many startups will do what previously seemed impossible: transform us each into walking, charging batteries. Early in 2013, the Everpurse will begin shipping its line of battery-powered handbags which include a charging station hidden in a secret compartment. Power Felt, another startup, offers a thermoelectric layer that transforms our body’s natural heat into enough energy to power a mobile phone. Simply slide your modified phone into your pocket and prevent battery depletion. Speaking of pockets: The new Fitbit One is so tiny it easily gets lost in pockets. But it offers big personal data possibilities. This device tracks steps and stairs climbed, vibrates to remind the wearer to get up and walk and synchs wirelessly across phones and computers. There are a number of affordable personal sensors coming to the market that will track energy burned, quality of sleep, and even posture. Information can be saved to a private web page or shared with the outside world for additional motivation. Personal cloudsWe are storing more and more information in personal clouds. Between Dropbox, Google, and Evernote, we can easily conduct business, share photos, and maintain our personal calendars without having to own a computer. While we rely more on personal clouds, it will be increasingly important to maintain clean, searchable data and to protect our accounts. In 2013, there will be a new crop of search tools helping us to search through our own cloud-based information. We’ll also see different options to safeguard our sensitive files from unwanted eyes — and to ensure that content isn’t accidentally deleted or corrupted. Demand for both search and protection will increase throughout the year. Amy Webb is CEO of digital strategy agency Webbmedia Group and cofounder of Spark Camp. Her new book, Data, A Love Story: How I Gamed Online Dating To Meet My Mate, will be out in January. |
| Making people proud of what they share Posted: 20 Dec 2012 06:14 AM PST Substance is viral
Lists and quick takes have a place in 2013, just as 30-minute sitcoms and dramedies will always have a place on television. They make you feel good. But there will always be a demand for a higher level of content that makes you think, react, and reflect on a deeper level. It’s fun to watch shows like “Revenge” and “Vegas,” but they’re not rewarding or challenging the way shows like “Mad Men” or “Homeland” are. This second category of shows inspires real conversation, debate, and introspection, and ultimately, we like to talk about that much more. There is a place for both “Revenge” and “Mad Men” in a 2013 world, and they both matter — but only one will really stay with us. A focus on personalitiesTwitter personalities are the new morning television anchors. The days of waking up and getting the news from Katie Couric and Matt Lauer on “The Today Show” are long gone. Now the news begins before you turn on the TV, and the delivery mechanism, your smartphone, is the first thing you check when you wake up. Broadcast anchors like Katie and Matt have been replaced by your personally curated go-to Twitter feeds — the people you rely on for the news. Best of all, it’s 24-hour programming. Take someone like Andrew Sullivan who has built a media empire off his name. He has a following that travels with him from his Twitter feed to The Daily Beast to television hits and beyond. The biggest change in this focus on personalities is that people no longer need establishment news organizations behind them in order to build a following or credibility. It’s not about whom you work for — it’s about who you are and what you’ve built. Social media has given us a new lens into the lives of the people we get our news from, which allows the individual to stand alone. The emotional connection we build with human beings will always be stronger than one with any network or brand logo. Callie Schweitzer is director of marketing and special projects for Vox Media. Previously she was deputy publisher at Talking Points Memo. |
Explainers: Moving beyond mansplaining, explainers prefacing sections and breaking events will include more links to different outlets’ coverage. Timelines will be prettier and less likely to crash a browser. Data journalism will continue to show, not tell stories, perhaps with cheekier names à la NPR’s election 
There was much hope generated by the election of the first black president four years ago, with many unrealistically presuming he would solve all of America’s remaining racial ills. While that was not a fair burden to place on President Barack Obama or his administration, it did seem fair to anticipate that coverage of a black president would result in more diversity in the overall subjects we the media cover. Yet despite the fact that gun violence has long been a leading cause of death of young black men, and despite the fact that the president is from a city that has experienced some of the worst gun violence in America in the last year, it still took gun violence affecting a predominantly white community to generate extensive coverage of the topic. 
Even as online and mobile audiences continue to increase, the value of online advertising will remain stagnant, or even decline. Other organizations will see what The New York Times has done, with 
Traditional media will increasingly look to forge partnerships with nonprofit news operations — and even broaden their direct relationships with nonprofit foundations to help fund specific parts of their journalistic operations.
In the wake of the story, Journatic lost a number of contracts with newspaper companies like Tribune, Sun-Times Media, Gatehouse, and others, who said that the service wasn’t living up their their standards (Tribune 
It’s not the people who come to the newspaper website every morning that journalists need to worry about. They’re coming no matter what. And it’s not the people who already subscribe to 
I’m bullish on high-quality journalism because, as the dust settles, we’ll see traditional news organizations move further up-market, investing in the kind of journalism and story telling people will pay for. We’ll also see disruptive news organizations further establish themselves as forces to be reckoned with, moving into the space abandoned by those news organizations that have cut back on in-depth reporting. 
The depth of our sadness is equal to our need to prevent these tragedies. Whether our preferred solutions are gun control, accessible mental health treatment, improved school security, or something else, it’s clear that right now, across the United States, we are having these conversations with our friends, families, and communities.
There were reporters standing on various shorelines letting us know that there was is a hurricane making landfall. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of YouTube videos were being uploaded and Twitter was a frenzy of micro-updates on the situation. Obviously, not all of this content was reliable, but these reports create a vibrant, real-time environment of news that mattered to people in a way that even a collection of large organizations could not accomplish.
That is not new to the digital age; relatively few cable networks are fully distributed, for instance, and programming packages were sold at different levels long before we started watching TV on cellphones. Studios made exclusive deals with premium channels like HBO, Showtime, and Starz. Wire services were for members and clients. But digital makes it different by opening options for consumers, creators, and distributors across devices and platforms. As any regular reader here knows, the increasing reliance on digital also changes the economic structure, as people shift access points.
In 2013, journalists will start seriously doing math. This isn’t just about the embarrassments of the 2012 election campaign, when so many top media pundits — not just politicians — went with their gut instead of the numbers and looked like idiots on Election Day. Nate Silver’s solid statistical analyses demonstrated more than the value of numbers, however. This was about evidence.
The long slow bleed of money, advertising, and resources from newspapers will continue, and we will see (in less obvious ways) similar patterns emerge for network news. People are excited about partisan and hyper-involved cable news viewers as revenue streams (and niche viewers), but we need to remember just how small, ultimately, these audiences are in the grand scheme. (Fox News averages about 
It wasn’t long ago when the a phrase like “content marketing” would have made me reach for the nearest trash can, but the simple fact is journalism needs diverse revenue sources, and as Chris Anderson, Emily Bell, and Clay Shirky point out in the recent 
This month, my mother finally ditched her “feature phone” for an iPhone 4S. Usually I buy her books for Hanukkah, but that stopped when she got herself a Kindle — so this year I offered to set up the phone, load it with apps, and show her how to use them. So 2013 will be the year when my mother starts to get news on her phone. By extension, the public is no longer seeing mobile devices as novelties: They are becoming a normal, convenient, and unsurprising tool for getting information and analysis, so much so that this sentence might seem too obvious to type in 12 months’ time. 
Every content producer hopes to publish a story that has a killer headline and is produced so well that that a consumer can’t help but to engage with it and share it with others. In the second half of 2012, some publishers began publishing exceptional — though sponsored — content. It was a seamless experience and every bit as good as what consumers might find elsewhere on that same website, though it was clearly written for or produced by a paid advertiser. See 
Quality will be rewarded in 2013. There will be a renewed focus on longform digital storytelling of the sort you’re already seeing at companies like Vox Media and ProPublica. My boss, Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff, touched on this | You are subscribed to email updates from Nieman Journalism Lab To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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