Sabtu, 22 Desember 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Look beyond news for mobile innovation

Posted: 21 Dec 2012 09:21 AM PST

Mobile news will start growing up

The list of breakthrough interfaces for reading news on smartphones is a short one. Instapaper is arguably the pioneer in this area, with its focus on a simple reading experience. Vox Media’s SB Nation iPhone app cleverly grouped news updates about the same topic (Vox tweaked that design in its current web app approach.) But many mobile news apps and sites are little more than re-skinned RSS readers, and surprisingly few publishers even bother to format their email newsletters for easy reading on iPhones and BlackBerries. When we were creating Quartz earlier this year, we needed to look for inspiration to non-news applications, such as the Clear to-do list app — it’s hard to find boldness and creativity in the news industry’s smartphone products.

Recent arrivals such as Circa have been bolder in their efforts to tailor content and design architecture to the smartphone. It’s certain that 2013 will bring an acceleration of efforts to reinvent the smartphone interface for news.

The reason is that nearly all of the growth in Internet usage around the world for the foreseeable future will come on mobile devices. Roughly two billion people have access to the Internet today, with over one billion more in the developing world expected to come online — primarily using phones — without much delay.

Given the rapid growth of smartphone usage elsewhere, it’s very possible — if not likely — that the most interesting consumer interfaces for reading news develop outside of the U.S. Look for new formats for content and improved integration of photographs and interactive graphics. More content specifically for mobile will come. Better touch- and place- and motion-optimized interfaces are likely. Comments and sharing have the potential for radical breakthroughs. It’s possible that the media will need to look to non-media products to identify improvements they can apply.

HTML5 will get another look

Most news publications have to date prioritized native iOS mobile applications over their mobile websites.

Responsive HTML5 approaches to building web apps rather than native apps can be technically difficult and frustrating for consumers when they don’t work right. Mark Zuckerberg is among those who have raised questions about HTML5.

But all too often creators of native news apps run into even more fatal challenges. As Jason Pontin recounted, Technology Review spent well over $124,000 on iOS and Android apps whose user base never justified the effort. Among the limitations of News Corp.’s now-defunct The Daily was its requirement that users download an iPad app to access its full functionality.

In contrast, an HTML5 web app allows a publisher to be fully part of the open, social web. It can minimize any friction holding back the sharing of content and that content’s successful travel through the social media slipstream. With Quartz’s web app, we have no paywalls, no application downloads, no separate article page urls for each device a reader is using.

Native apps have advantages for computing-intensive and image-heavy offerings such as video games, but that’s generally not needed for news sites. And web apps’ performance should get better in the coming year, thanks to improvements in the mobile and tablet hardware they’re running on.

Clearly, more publishers will reconsider their native app focus in 2013 in favor of HTML5.

Publishers will continue to wrestle with how to improve commenting

Most news sites have a love/hate relationship with their comment sections. They love the traffic and reader engagement it represents. They’re embarrassed by the vitriol and name-calling that often dominate. And they have no idea how to structure comments to make any sense of them for readers.

Gawker Media’s Nick Denton is among those who have made admirable efforts to improve commenting, and Nick has rightly proclaimed that comments on their own can represent as high-quality content as any article. But most of the best discussion takes place off publishers’ sites, on Twitter, Facebook and in private emails. This is a reality that won’t be fully addressed in 2013, if ever.

Will 2013 be a turning point in the use of machine translation?

The Wall Street Journal is a leader in generating content and translating its English articles for local-language websites in Asia and Europe. Few other American news organizations have the financial resources to tackle that opportunity.

Will Google or others achieve sufficient advances in machine translation for newsrooms to launch mostly automated local-language versions of their websites? Will improved machine translation allow journalists to accurately gather ideas and reporting from sources in languages they don’t speak? I hope that happens in 2013 — but for this prediction I’m not holding my breath.

Kevin J. Delaney is editor-in-chief of Quartz, the global business news site launched in September by Atlantic Media. He was previously managing editor of The Wall Street Journal Online.

The disrupters are being disrupted

Posted: 21 Dec 2012 08:55 AM PST

I know people have been saying for years that we’re in a weird “transitional” period, but every day it feels increasingly true to me. The web has been mainstream for about 15 years now, and in the first five years of that we saw traditional businesses like television and newspapers and music succumb to the disruption of the Internet. Later, we saw Web 2.0 become a buzzword and various services sprung up to further the disruption among existing Internet industries.

What I’m noticing now is the feeling that the disruptors are beginning to be disrupted themselves. Many of the companies labeled Web 2.0 in the mid-2000s are either no longer with us (Friendster, Bloglines, etc.) or were long ago sold off and subsumed into larger companies. The rise of blogs in the early 2000s seems to be following an opposite trajectory in the early 2010s. Social media/software is taking over not just blogging, but search, and events, and existing location-based startups. Even the giants of the social space aren’t showing signs of blockbuster success beyond their registered user numbers (Facebook is struggling with revenue and its stock price, Twitter is slapping ads on everything and hoping for the best).

Everyone is rushing to iOS and Android development as the wave of the future, and it’s true that mobile is going to keep getting bigger — but at the same time there aren’t proven models beyond a few blockbuster successes (e.g. Angry Birds). I’m seeing people pouring lots of money into mobile apps (they seem to start at $50K and go upwards fast) while big splashy projects like The Daily are closing up shop.

I look into my crystal ball and I don’t see very many winners or breakout trends that I would bet on. What I do see are a heck of a lot of existing industries declining further, as well as the first and second wave of Internet disruptors fading away, as the pace of change picks up and one startup after another outdoes a competitor and exists for a brief period in the limelight before they begin their descent into the scrapheap.

TL;DR version: Hey Internet, We’re Craigslisting Ourselves Now.

Matt Haughey created Metafilter, one of the web’s earliest community weblogs, and a number of other sites.

The coming death of seven-day publication

Posted: 21 Dec 2012 08:20 AM PST

My (newspaper-centric) predictions for 2013 in a nutshell:

  1. Because of the rapid adoption curve of tablets and the convenience of news consumption on them, the business model for seven-day printed newspapers in most markets is toast. We’ll start to see frequency reductions to two or three days a week at an accelerated pace. By the end of 2015, fewer than half of the current dailies will still be on that schedule.
  2. While we’re still seeing more papers hopping on the paywall bandwagon, there will be a growing realization that simple paywalls that just provide access to the content of a single newspaper are not the answer. So paywalls will begin to morph into membership models, where subscribers get access not only to content but to a range of services and benefits.
  3. As part of membership thinking, newspapers will finally start adopting the “jobs to be done” thinking advocated in the American Press Institute’s Newspaper Next project (2005-2008) — the idea that the resources of the news organization can address a wide variety of problems that readers and advertisers need solutions to.
  4. Membership thinking will also encourage the idea of paid (or unpaid) access to content from a network or cooperative of news organizations — sort of an E-ZPass approach, in which your paid digital subscription at a local news site might also provide you with access to regional and national news sources along with topical news from sites that specialize in business, finance, travel, sports, food, design, or whatever suits your fancy.

Let’s look at each of these in detail.

Frequency reductions

I’ve been suggesting since 2008 that to transition from a print-centric business model to a digital-centric one, newspapers need to go through an essential and strategic transition: cut print publication from six or seven days a week to two or three days. And when they do this, the printed product should be understood as a niche byproduct of a news organization that understands itself as being above all a digital-first enterprise.

In 2008, the financial and technological environment had not yet created much urgency around this question. But the industry has now experienced 25 consecutive quarters of advertising revenue declines. Print readership has declined to the point that only 23 percent of US adults “read a printed newspaper yesterday.” The industry has reacted with multiple rounds of cost-cutting, managing to preserve a semblance of its high historic profit margins in the process — and thus further postponing the day of reckoning. For example, at the McClatchy Company, which is a pure newspaper play and good stand-in for the industry as a whole, the cash flow margin (EBITDA) in 2011 was still 25.4 percent, and it is on track to match that in 2012.

A company making that kind of EBITDA doesn’t have a big incentive to reinvent itself, which is why we haven’t seen many frequency reductions at newspapers. But one company — Advance Publications — has been moving aggressively to cut frequency at its newspapers, usually from seven days to three. Its first experiment was in 2009 in Ann Arbor, Mich., where it replaced a seven-day paper with a rebranded twice-weekly, and its most notable conversion was the New Orleans Times-Picayune in October this year. Advance has also thrown the frequency switch in Birmingham, Huntsville, and Mobile, Ala., and at its eight Booth newspapers in Michigan including Grand Rapids and Flint. It has announced plans to cut frequency in Harrisburg, Pa. and Syracuse, N.Y., and is in a decision process for similar cuts in Cleveland and possibly Portland, Ore. All together, this represents more than half the dailies owned by Advance.

Elsewhere, in Detroit the jointly-operated Free Press and Detroit News moved to 3-day home delivery in 2009 while still printing newsstand editions on the other days; a handful of newspapers have dropped one or two days from their weekly schedule, and in Canada, Postmedia’s Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal and Ottawa Citizen dropped Sunday editions this year.

But despite the continuation of healthy profit margins, I’m convinced that moves of this type are being contemplated in every newspaper company’s executive suite, and that the prime mover in these discussion is the seismic shift in readership habits brought about by tablets.

The newspaper moguls are digesting a slew of recent findings from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism: Currently about a quarter of US adults own a tablet, and nearly half own a smartphone. More than half own at least one or the other. About two-thirds of tablet and smartphone owners get news on their gadgets, with 37 percent of tablet owners getting news on it every day. And there’s much less age-related skew in this than you might imagine: 32 percent of 65+ tablet owners go to it daily for news. Moreover, Pew found that many tablet owners (31 percent) report that they spend more time with news since acquiring their device, and they report spending an average of 51 minutes — daily — consuming news their tablet (54 minutes for those who own both a tablet and a smartphone). That’s an astounding finding. Imagine what this does to the ability to sell a printed newspaper when tablet penetration triples and begins to approach 80 percent — which it is certain to do as it follows historic adoption curves for everything from AM radios to cellphones. The advertising dollars are following the eyeballs to mobile platforms.

Publishers are doing their best to hide the fact, but the zooming tablet trends are clobbering what’s left of printed newspaper subscription and single-copy sales levels, which had already been dropping at an accelerating rate since peaking in the mid-1980s. This downtrend is no longer regularly reported every six months as new “ABC FasFax” reports come out, because by lumping together the reporting for print and digital editions in the last few years, newspaper owners have engineered Audit Bureau of Circulations reporting so as to obscure the print declines. It takes a little digging now to find the print decline numbers. Alan Mutter, the Newsosaur, ran the numbers last spring when ABC reported a total print/digital combined gain of 0.7 percent, and found that in contrast to the total circulation, at the top 25 dailies, print circulation had plummeted 7.3 percent year-over-year during the six months ending March 31. I’ve rerun those numbers for the fall reporting period, and found a similar 7.9 percent decline at the top 25 dailies (Mon.-Fri.) for the six months ending Sept. 31.

Folks, I know I’m laying on a lot of statistics here, but the point is that numbers like that are not the hallmark of a sustainable business model. That’s why the Newhouse family is systematically converting their Advance Publications newspapers into two- and three-day print operations. And that’s why the rest of the industry is trying to figure out when, not if, they should follow suit. As noted, count on a lot of conversions during 2013 and an avalanche during 2014 and 2015.

Membership models and “jobs to be done”

It has been interesting to follow the arc of the conversation around paywalls since 2009, when Walter Isaacson urged their adoption in a Time Magazine cover story and Steve Brill launched an outfit to make them widely possible. Both of them endured considerable derision from the journoblogosphere, and indeed, adoption was cautious. Currently, some 400 papers have a paywall of some kind (which means about 1,200 are still free), with more set to impose them in 2013. That it has taken four years to get that far is an indication of the resistance to change that still permeates newspaper organizations, but you can also see how how attitudes have evolved when various analysts jump on The Washington Post for not having a paywall yet.

But. Can we really imagine a future, a few years out, where all of America’s newspapers have paywalls on websites and subscription-based apps on tablets and smartphones? Can those newspapers retain any semblance of leadership in their communities? Won’t they simply be yielding the field to Patch.com, the Huffington Post, local independent news sites and topical news sites of all stripes? Is there really nothing better than the rather simplistic metered paywall, in which you get 5, 10, or 15 stories every month, and then a pop-up that keeps you away until the first of the next month?

Well, yes, there is. The alternative is a membership model, which is far more attuned to addressing the needs of readers than any paywall. It’s nothing new — public radio and television have been doing it for decades. The Texas Tribune has very consciously followed that model with a range of membership tiers that offer monthly newsletters, online recognition, invites to receptions, “conversation series” events, and even reserved parking for events. If this works for the Austin nonprofit (and for others like MinnPost) why shouldn’t it work for for-profit local news sites?

And consider this: In the membership model, the news organization can know far more about individual subscribers than they do in a simple paywall model — ranging from detailed socioeconomic metrics to topical interests and buying habits. This in turn allows them to deliver more targeted advertising and offers, both in print and online, at higher CPMs.

Among newspapers, one pioneer on this front is the New London (Conn.) Day, which launched a membership model in Sept. 2011 and is a partner in the development of a “data-driven audience management system” with Leap Media Partners LLC, and is now lining up additional newspapers to follow the same model.

At The Day, there’s a tiered set of membership options, all of which include enrollment in the paper’s The Day Passport “membership rewards” program. Membership has its privileges, including discounts on events and services, chances to win gift cards and tickets, and (occasionally) invitations to special events.

But these membership arrangements, in my view, are just scratching the surface. Look at it this way: As a member of a community, you have certain needs. Those needs include news (knowing what’s going on), connections (to shops, restaurants, and service providers), as well as entrée (mixing and mingling in the right places). The Texas Tribune, The Day, MinnPost, and others are offering packages including those ingredients. But there’s even more to being a member of a community than that. You need recommendations and answers to questions; you want curation in the form of best bets; you want to connect socially with neighbors; you want to spend wisely and locally; you need things delivered and stored; you have personal needs ranging from exercise to art lessons. Those are your “jobs to be done,” and smart publishers can help you with them.

As Michael Skoler suggested a couple of years ago in Nieman Reports, when paywall thinking gives way to membership thinking, the business model becomes community rather than audience. “To harness this model,” Skoler wrote, “news organizations need to think of themselves first as gathering, supporting, and empowering people to be active in a community with shared values, and not primarily as creators of news that people will consume.”

Community as a business model is not a new idea. A few decades ago, some publishers (and some readers) liked to talk about their papers as “community glue.” And indeed, just about all the threads of a community connected via the printed newspaper — politics, religion, commerce, education, health, entertainment, sports, births, and deaths. Now that model is fragmented, the newspaper’s reach and connectivity is diminished. The glue has dried up. The membership approach offers a way to begin to bring the threads back together in a viable enterprise, or perhaps a network of enterprises.

Networking news content

Outside of print-only local newspaper readers who don’t watch TV news, does anybody still get most of their news in one place? Nearly everyone who gets news online is used to skipping from source to source, especially when hunting for more details on a breaking story. News comes to us — we don’t go to the news anymore — and it comes to us from multiple directions: social networks, blogs, aggregators, news organizations of all kinds.

So as the ecosystem around news evolves toward a membership model that solves “jobs to be done” problems for consumers, doesn’t it make sense for one of those jobs to be access to lots of news, from multiple sources, with a single sign-on — sort of an E-ZPass for news? Imagine signing into your trusted local or regional news site or app, and then having access, without any further tollbooths, to a network of news sources. This network could be one of your own choosing, or one assembled by that local news organization. In it, you’d find local and regional news sources, national and international news sources, and topical news of various kinds — sports, travel, food and wine, gardening, design, finance — whatever you select, or whatever the network infers from your behavior is interesting to you.

Disclosure: I’m a partner in CircLabs, a back-burner startup (with an out-of-date website) that aspires to supply services to such a network and is currently developing a demonstration project under a contract with the University of Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Lab.

This can be accomplished through limited, defined, cooperative networks established by individual agreements, or by a grand, global collaborative agreement among news creators. Somewhere in the background, there’s a settlement system that allocates subscription and advertising dollars among the content suppliers (as described in my Nieman Lab suggestion for an “ASCAP for news,” (a business model to which the AP spinoff NewsRight could still make a smart pivot).

Some industry execs (like MediaNews chair Dean Singleton) have long held that the future of the newspaper is consolidation. But even with major newspaper properties selling for negligible sums (essentially the value of the real estate they own, or less), there hasn’t been much movement in that direction, nor is it clear that at the end of the day, consolidation offers any solution to the long nightmare of declining readership and advertising. Ultimately, consolidation is just a mop-up strategy — one that simply squeezes out the final remaining profits before the lights are turned out.

Given the depths to which newspapers have declined, and their overall lack of entrepreneurial spirit and investable resources, perhaps a mop-up is the only realistic thing left. But at least in some quarters, there’s hope that a collaborative strategy of networked access to content, along with the membership approach, could pay off.

Martin Langeveld spent 30 years in the newspaper business, 13 of them as publisher at The Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, Mass., the Transcript in North Adams, Mass., and the Reformer in Brattleboro, Vermont.

Verticals, reality TV, and Donnie Darko social

Posted: 21 Dec 2012 08:00 AM PST

Apple. Okay, fine, you finally get your iTV in 2013. It won’t “disrupt television” in the way that annoying quasi-pundits predict, but it will create new tantalizing screen experiences. Just as an iPhone is only nominally a phone, iTV will only occasionally be a television. Through gaming, voice and gesture inputs, and video communications, it will create new social experiences for group interaction. By the end of the year, you start to see iTVs in unexpected places — restaurants, karaoke clubs, airports. More than a television, it becomes a “social screen,” causing the app economy to erupt with innovation again. On the downside, people start using the phrase “the app economy” again.

“Homeland.” In a horrific moment of vengeance, writers from the show are inexplicably taken hostage by their Twitter followers. The Twitter terrorists demand rewrites of the show, which Showtime eventually succumbs to, but only after Carrie completely loses her shit.

Netflix. After all that cord-cutting bombast about unbundling HBO from subscription cable, someone observes that Netflix is adopting that exact strategy: A high-quality cable network minus cables. “House of Cards” and “Arrested Development” shockingly become must-see-tv. Steve Holt!

Rupert Murdoch. “Bloody hell,” tweets @rupertmurdoch, while announcing he’s stepping down from News Corp. Rather than hand the company down to one of his kids, Murdoch executes a complicated land-for-news swap with Ted Turner, who become the new CEO of News Corp. while Murdoch retires to Turner’s ranch in Montana. While Turner tinkers with Fox News, someone shows Murdoch the new Apple iTV and, in a dream, he becomes inspired to relaunch The Daily as an interactive cable news network. “HAS RUPERT MURDOCH NEVER HEARD OF CURRENT TV?” screeches a headline from Business Insider.

Online publishing. We continue to see the surprising emergence of broad lifestyle brands springing forth from vertical categories. Like the way Grantland is ostensibly about sports but is really about a broader pop ideology, or the way The Verge is seemingly about gadgets but is really about a lifestyle, or the way that BuzzFeed seems like it’s about everything but is actually only about everything on the Internet. In a think piece for this publication, this very pundit clumsily tries to call the publishing trend “the magazinification of verticals.” But then Alexis Madrigal, writing for The Atlantic, mysteriously dubs it “Donnie Darko Social,” which sticks because it sounds cool.

Consumer web. Finally, some new consumer web products are released that don’t rely on massive overvaluations (Tumblr, Twitter), problematic buyouts (Instagram, Skype), or contorted native advertising schemes (Facebook, Foursquare). Instead, a bunch of small- and medium-sized companies emerge whose services — hang on, this one is radical! — people are willing to pay for. It’s a miracle: People pay for things they love.

Twitter. While the chatter about disavowing the open web will go unrecognized by its peers, Twitter, a company that actually has a conscience, continues the internal battle to federalize their platform without pissing people off. Luckily for them, every other over-capitalized social media company pisses off their users more, so they win by default.

“Silicon Alley.” Bravo announces “Silicon Alley,” a new reality show about the NYC tech scene. Nielsen reports 49 total viewers, all of whom recently moved from San Francisco to New York to launch fashion startups.

“Amphetamine Logic.” On the same day, Bravo also announces a new show starring Cat Marnell. But rather than condensing her juicy life into one hour of pseudo-reality per week, they instead just hand over the whole network to livestream her entire life, 24/7. When asked about the reasoning, Andy Cohen cites what MTV2 did with Courtney Love a decade ago. Bravo vows to keep the show on until Marnell falls asleep. She last 27 days.

The New York Times. The Old Gray Lady adopts a form of so-called native advertising in which people pay for space to write op-ed pieces. Margaret Sullivan, The New York Times’ ombudswoman, has a seizure reminiscent of Claire Danes Cryface.

Tumblr. Absolutely nothing. It ends 2013 looking the same as it did in 2008.

Google. Google Glass is here! But yeah, it bombs. “[Something, something] Microsoft [something, something],” writes Anil Dash in Wired. Meanwhile, Google Fiber begins creeping into public consciousness, and by the end of the year, there’s a public outcry to get the service in more cities — but it takes a half decade to roll out to most of America.

Lena Dunham. Among her many known accomplishments, we also see: a McSweeneys-published graphic novel titled Boxed; an advice column in Glamour called “About a Girl”; a high-end line of low-thread-count sheets in Target called “Bedded”; something at Sephora called “Ick”; and an impromptu mic-dropping karaoke rap that Taylor Swift incorporates into her next album, Boys Are Dumb.

Foursquare. Nope, Apple doesn’t buy it, but they become long-term partners in data exchange and product integration, thereby alleviating monetization concerns for a couple years. Everyone is happy that Facebook doesn’t buy it and therefore destroy it. Meanwhile, Michael Bloomberg claims that holding the Foursquare mayorship of Gracie Mansion entitles him to a fourth term. A SurveyMonkey poll of New Yorkers agrees.

Yahoo. The things you expect to happen — announcing major new products, buying large startups, releasing major redesigns — don’t happen. Instead, Marissa Mayer implements incremental tweaking from the inside, which surprisingly works, and the stock climbs 30 percent by the end of the year. “It all makes sense,” observes Kara Swisher, who has run out of memos to leak. “It’s the Google Way.”

Aol. After Aol’s stock price doubles again (as it did in 2012), an “investigative report” co-authored by jealousy-engorged reporters at Business Insider and Forbes tries to determine why. They best reason anyone can supply is changing the name from AOL to Aol.

BuzzFeed. The publishing empire that seems impervious to criticism finally starts to show cracks after Jonah Peretti buys The Onion and The New York Times on the same day.

YouTube. It’s still, sadly, not the year that YouTube creates a breakthrough hit that enters in public consciousness. They continue to fund niche shows, which report incremental growth, but no one really notices. Finally, in 2014, it begins to experiment with high-quality programming, after first trying to buy HBO.

Hulu. Sad days ahead. Without the support of its owner to break free, and without the capital to innovate itself out the box, Amazon finally buys it for cheap, mostly as a massive licensing deal to combat iTV.

Gawker Media. Nick Denton releases a major standalone technology product based upon its commenting system, Kinja. When it flops, an anonymous commenter from inside the house says, “Nick has gone soft. His heart just wasn’t in it.” He fires everyone and moves to a Hungarian expat enclave in Nairobi with Nate Silver.

Facebook. On December 31, 2013, the stock closes at an all-time high of $38.01, exactly one penny above its opening day price. “Victory,” writes @peterthiel in his first tweet ever. It is quickly retweeted by @sparker, adding “w00t.”

Rex Sorgatz is a media and technology consultant who lives in New York.

Newsrooms as war rooms

Posted: 21 Dec 2012 07:59 AM PST

Newsrooms have come a long way since the time they were just wooden desks with typewriters on top, booze in the drawers, and reporters and editors rushing around deciding what the populace should read. In 2013, it will be increasingly clear that the newsroom will not be a staging area for the day’s news, as it has been for a century, where the day’s events are hunted down and wrangled into well-defined paragraphs, with the occasional graphic or sound file to go along.

The model for the new journalism, as it develops in 2013, will not be the old journalism, which is still based on the revenue models and layout of a newspaper. Mobile — where readers are growing — has killed that.

Newsrooms will be less about the day’s news — much of which has already been taken out of our hands by the 24-hour, minute-by-minute news cycle — and become more like a war room, or a science lab, where teams of researchers think about how to contextualize, present, illustrate, and spread key information, whether it happened that day or not.

The model will be more like science, or education: Journalists will be paid not for scoops, but for contextualizing information, organizing it in a way that serves the reader, and presenting it in multiple media. A news homepage will — or should — look more like a periodic table, with small boxes of usable information grouped by kind, not by publication date. That will eventually replace the vertical and unwieldy story-by-story format of many current sites, which are ruled mostly by temporal concerns of “what is the news now.” Instead of “news,” journalism will be about “emphasis,” and each journalistic organization will define itself by how it defines “emphasis.” Advertisers, in turn, will have a clearer idea about audience reach.

A relative minority of those teams in newsrooms, by the way, will be “journalists” as they have been defined so far, with a background in newsgathering and reporting. Instead, prominent roles will be played — as they have been already — by interactive departments, social media experts, programmers, video experts, audio experts, and others with technical expertise. A journalist will be, to use a euphemism, “an information worker” or “an idea worker,” so that everyone in newsrooms, from programmers to engineers to copy editors to designers, will have to become trained in how to treat content responsibly. There has already been significant progress toward “multimedia” newsrooms, but in many places the silos are still clear: Journalists dig up information and then the proper interactive, video, or audio folks create a template to suit that information. It hasn’t gone as far as it has yet to go.

Heidi Moore is U.S. finance and economics editor of The Guardian. Previously, she was New York bureau chief and Wall Street correspondent for public radio’s Marketplace.

This Week in Review: Lessons from Newtown on restraint in breaking news and tragedy

Posted: 21 Dec 2012 07:00 AM PST

Are breaking-news reporting errors inevitable?: This week has been dominated by one unimaginably awful news story — the murder of 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. — and neither old nor new media had their finest moments in covering it. We’ll look first at the problem of misinformation about the shootings, particularly online, and then in the next item we’ll tackle the issues of over-coverage, privacy, and interviewing children.

As the story unfolded on Friday, reporters got virtually every detail of the story wrong at some point or another; they erroneously reported that the shooter was Ryan Lanza, that his mother was a teacher at the school, that he was let in by school officials, that he killed someone in New Jersey first, and that he primarily used a handgun. All of those errors found their way onto TV coverage, as NowThisNews documented.

Online, one of the big errors came after the shooter was mistakenly identified as Ryan Lanza (it was actually his brother, Adam). Ryan’s Facebook page was quickly found and identified by news orgs, then barraged with threats from users. Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis issued a mea culpa for his role in erroneously publicizing a Ryan Lanza Twitter account, and The Guardian’s Michael Wolff targeted NPR’s social media maestro Andy Carvin as “a fevered spreader of misinformation” (though Carvin responded point-by-point).

There were plenty of explanations for these errors, most of them quite reasonable. New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan talked to a Times editor who pinned them on the pressure to be faster than ever in a Twitter-dominated news cycle. The Washington Post quoted a professor, W. Joseph Campbell, who cited our tendency to fill in the blanks with our narrative assumptions during complicated, incomplete news events. BuzzFeed and the Post’s Erik Wemple noted that several of these errors originated with law enforcement officials, rather than media speculation.

Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon noted that breaking news in process has always been messy, and GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram said the crowdsourced news verification that goes on online looks even messier in process, though its benefits outweigh its disadvantages. That why, Reuters’ Jack Shafer said, you should know not to put much stock in initial reports in the first place.

But others said those explanations simply weren’t good enough. Eric Deggans of the Tampa Bay Times argued that we need to rid ourselves of the notion that errors like these are simply the inevitable result of a real-time news environment. This “sounds like a forward-looking acceptance of social media’s impact,” he said, “but it’s really embracing a path which could destroy the news industry.” Mashable was one of many echoing the “be right, not first” refrain, and Charles Apple of the American Copy Editors Society said that not every fact in a breaking news story needs to be reported immediately. Poynter’s Craig Silverman advised journalists to make a virtue of restraint and note to readers what they’re not reporting. For non-journalists, GigaOM’s Bobbie Johnson urged us not to join the rush-to-judgment social media mob.

There was also some debate about the degree to which social media itself is to blame for real-time reporting errors. GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram said it’s unfair to pin any of the Sandy Hook reporting errors on social media. Cartoonist Matt Bors, who was a Facebook friend of Ryan Lanza’s, said social media didn’t get anything right or wrong on this story, but it does tend to bring out the worst in people in these situations. Reuters’ Ben Walsh argued that Twitter is adopting much of cable news’ high-speed cycle of unverified facts and instant analysis during breaking news, while Danny Groner at The Huffington Post said social media is better at delivering insight than information for these stories.

Guardian reporter Katie Rogers said we’re dealing with complicated consequences of the fact that social media is finally being taken seriously as a publishing platform, while David Holmes of PandoDaily wondered if Facebook needs to take any action when people are threatening a user based on false information.

A call for restraint in reporting tragedy: After all those initial errors, the news media did what they usually do in the wake of tragedies like this — they swarmed the community involved, trying to wring out every last drop of information and emotion for an audience they believe to be insatiable. Though The New York Times depicted a more mixed set of reactions, Digital First’s Adrienne LaFrance and the BBC’s Jonny Dymond reported on the angry exasperation this media deluge was causing among Newtown residents.

Others outside Newtown were indignant as well. Microsoft researcher danah boyd urged the media to let Newtown residents grieve with dignity and chastised the public for “gawking at the public displays of pain.” Baristanet founder Debbie Galant and The Week’s Matt Lewis were among the others calling for the media to show some respect and go away.

One practice in particular that chafed at many observers was reporters’ interviews with children who had been in the school during the shooting. The Atlantic’s Rebecca Greenfield chronicled the social media outrage, and Time’s James Poniewozik and several experts interviewed by The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone and Politico’s Dylan Byers also urged journalists to refrain from interviewing children. Poynter’s Mallary Tenore and Kelly McBride offered some tips for determining whether and how to interview children in traumatic situations, and Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman also gave some advice on soliciting social media interviews after tragedies without being insensitive.

There were a few proposed solutions to the media overload: One Romenesko reader suggested a pool system to reduce the number of reporters on the scene in tragic situations, an idea Debbie Galant endorsed. Others called for less information about the killers themselves, in order to reduce the attention-seeking motive and copycat crimes. Digital First’s Steve Buttry called for news orgs not to name the killers in public shootings or try to psychoanalyze them, and sociology prof Zeynep Tufekci also suggested that law enforcement not release details of the methods of the shootings, though former newspaper editor Guy Lucas said such ideas would be impractical.

The Guardian’s Martin Robbins and the Columbia Journalism Review’s Curtis Brainard also decried the attempts at amateur psychology after the shooting, and Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon argued that we need better reporting on mental illness in order to properly understanding these shootings.

Instagram uproar and the free online service model: Facebook’s newest property, Instagram, got a taste this week of some of the user outrage over privacy and content rights that Facebook is used to getting. Instagram updated its terms of service to ensure that, as The New York Times explained, it could share users’ photos with Facebook and advertisers, even using them in ads without their permission. The terms, which go into effect next month, also note that Instagram ads may not be labeled as ads.

Instagram users were quick to express their outrage, and Wired’s Mat Honan deleted his account in protest. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Kurt Opsahl and journalism professor Dan Gillmor also made the case for concern over the changes, noting that this is in keeping with Facebook’s spotty record of user rights and that users can’t opt out without quitting the service entirely. Instagram’s Kevin Systrom responded to the uproar with a post (kind of) clarifying the changes and insisting the company doesn’t intend to sell users’ photos or use them in ads.

There was quite a bit of backlash to this user backlash, though. Tech bloggers came up with a variety of reasons that the anger over these changes were overblown: Instagram has always had plenty of license to use users’ photos and advertisers are still restricted in what they can do (The Verge); users shouldn’t have expected any different with Facebook running Instagram (Forbes); most Instagram photos are essentially ads anyway (Forbes); most of these angry users didn’t read the terms of service in the first place (Techdirt); and users always keep threatening to quit social media services over this type of thing (Time).

The most commonly recurring counter-argument to Instagram alarmists was essentially that this is how free online services make money: They get the rights to the content people post there and use it to get money from advertisers. “This is the cold, confusing, largely invisible relationship that defines the internet as we know it today,” said BuzzFeed’s John Herrman, arguing against the idea that we “own” any of our content on the web. New York’s Kevin Roose and Gizmodo’s Sam Biddle also made this point.

Mathew Ingram of GigaOM and Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic made a similar point, contending that this is the inevitable result of using social media services you don’t pay for. “Truly, the only way to get around the privacy problems inherent in advertising-supported social networks is to pay for services that we value. It’s amazing what power we gain in becoming paying customers instead of the product being sold,” Madrigal wrote.

Web editing veteran Derek Powazek pushed back against that “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product” mentality, saying that we still have the right to complain about how companies treat their customers, and paid services won’t necessarily treat them any better. Likewise, CNET’s Casey Newton countered that it is, in fact, perfectly reasonable to be upset with this move by Instagram.

John Paul Titlow of ReadWrite said Instagram’s quality may suffer as professional photographers leave over this change, and Free Press’ Josh Stearns suggested it might be time for news organizations to start building open, non-commercial alternatives to these services as a way to give back to the web that’s given them so much.

Funding a free press: A new foundation, launched this week, intends to be a conduit allowing anonymous donations to organizations like WikiLeaks that do journalistic work geared toward government transparency. The New York Times’ David Carr has a good introduction to the group, called the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The highest-profile person involved is Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, but the foundation’s board also includes Guardian blogger Glenn Greenwald and ties to the Electronic Freedom Frontier and Free Press.

Several of those board members wrote pieces explaining what the foundation is about. Ellsberg and co-founder John Perry Barlow described the foundation as a way to preserve fledgling government watchdog efforts, as did Greenwald, who focused on its mission to thwart government secrecy. Free Press’ Josh Stearns also tied the group’s goals to the challenges of journalism collaboration and decentralized news consumption.

Outside the board, The Guardian’s Dan Gillmor noted that the foundation’s broader base could help protect against the type of blocks by financial institutions that WikiLeaks faced, insulating each individual group from public and private pressure. And GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram expressed hope that crowdfunding can help fill the gap for some of these valuable public-interest journalism projects.

Reading roundup: Beyond Newtown (and Instagram), there were tons of other media stories going on this week, too. Here’s a quick rundown:

— The BBC released a damning internal report on its handling of the Jimmy Savile sexual abuse scandal and previous cancellation of an investigative broadcast into the scandal. Here’s a review of the report from The Guardian and The New York Times, as well as some key points from The Telegraph. BBC News’ deputy director is being forced out as a result of the report, but former BBC director-general (and current New York Times Co. CEO) Mark Thompson was spared criticism in the report.

— NBC News foreign correspondent Richard Engel and his production team were released this week after being kidnapped for five days in Syria. NBC tried to enforce a media blackout on the kidnapping, but news began to creep through via social media and blogs after a few days, as BuzzFeed documented. Poynter and the Christian Science Monitor outlined the debate over media blackouts during journalist kidnappings, and Gawker presented a pro and con.

— The Guardian and The Washington Post both announced they were taking their Facebook social reading apps off of Facebook, with The Guardian shutting it down and the Post moving it to a standalone site. Former Guardian designer Martin Belam explained how their app was conceived and why Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” didn’t work, and GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram took the opportunity to note that with a Facebook app, Facebook, not news orgs, control the content.

— Finally, tech entrepreneur Anil Dash wrote a brilliant two-part post on the more open, user-centric, non-commercially oriented social web we’ve lost and what we can do to rebuild it. Reuters’ Felix Salmon expressed sympathy for Dash’s nostalgia but said that Facebook’s model has shown that “the way to win capitalism is to break the web.” And Free Press’ Josh Stearns urged professional journalism to play a role in rebuilding the open social web.

Newtown photos by tedeytan and dipfan and Facebook/Instagram logo by Karl Nilsson used under a Creative Commons license.

Pocket readies for a paywalled world with new site subscription feature

Posted: 20 Dec 2012 09:28 PM PST

If you’re a fan of reading on the Internet, it’s hard not to notice there are more walls going up around the stuff you want to look at. Publishers are putting up paywalls and registration gates, which can make it difficult to find and read stories even if you’re a subscriber to a site. Login credentials are turning into a kind of unwieldy and easy-to-forget baggage.

Pocket (née Read It Later) wants to make it a little easier for users to keep reading their favorite saved stories from around the web, even the ones tucked behind a paywall. The time-shifted reading app recently relaunched a feature called site subscription allows users to keep their login info within the app, making it easier to save and read stories from a site with subscriber content.

At the moment, The New York Review of Books, Matter, and Virginia Quarterly Review are the only publishers partnering with Pocket. But sites like The New York Times, The Economist, Financial Times, The Washington Post, and ESPN’s Insider are available under the site subscription feature. That means subscribers can avoid the hassle of having to enter their credentials multiple times: They don’t have to sign into both the news site and again in Pocket when they want to read a story.

It’s a small move meant to make jumping between the discovery and reading of new material less difficult. But Pocket’s new trick may prove useful as an increasing number of newspapers and magazines are paywalling their work.

“We want to make it easy for Pocket users to save the content that interests them, and this should work if they also subscribe to paywalled sites,” Mark Armstrong, Pocket’s editorial director, told me over Gchat.

Handing off authorization information to Pocket isn’t a terribly difficult task. As Pocket CEO Nate Weiner told me, it’s roughly the same as when you tell Chrome or Firefox to remember your email password. The net effect is the same, creating a seamless, “set it and forget it” functionality that makes life easier for the user and encourages deeper use. Pocket wants to have the kind of ubiquity of an email client, or, another example Weiner is fond of, a DVR. “Pocket is essentially an empty vessel people are putting things into,” he said.

As a kind of intermediary, Pocket is only useful if you have stuff to read, and increasingly people are finding things on social channels. Like a number of delayed reading services, Pocket is already integrated into services like Facebook, Twitter, but also apps like Flipboard and Zite. Those kind of connections have helped Pocket grow to 7 million users and 1 million items saved daily in the same year the app went from paid to free.

Working with publishers is a step towards making delayed reading a frictionless affair, but also demonstrating a direct connection with people who produce stories, videos, and other digestible (and savable) content. Services like Pocket take criticism for leading eyeballs away from publishers sites, not to mention their ads, and into an isolated 3rd part app. But at the moment the benefits of a publisher partnership with Pocket mostly fall to the reader by making their life a little easier. Weiner said publishers who collaborate with Pocket don’t receive any analytics or other data on readers at the moment. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be perks in the future, he said. Though Weiner didn’t go into specifics, he said the referral traffic to publishers from Pocket exceeds pageviews within the app itself. “This is the tip of the iceberg in a sense,” he said.

Weiner and Armstrong said another way Pocket can help support publishers is by providing a phone-friendly reading experience for sites that don’t have dedicated apps or mobile sites. Since Pocket is available on iOS and Android, it could act as a mobile reading alternative for some publishers. Matter is a good example, Armstrong said, because the company is putting its focus on producing long-form stories, not technology. “The added benefit for a publisher is that there’s no dev work or cost on their side, so it solves a pretty big problem almost immediately: How can I make my stories available to the widest audience across iOS, Android, and beyond, both online and offline, if I’m not going the app route yet,” he said.

Though Pocket could provide a stripped down, device-friendly method of reading, the company still lacks an incentive for publishers to hand-off their mobile experience. Site subscription is the first of what the company hopes are many new features that will entice publishers. Weiner and Armstrong said their goal in the next year is to increase collaboration with content producers. “Save-for-later has become a critical piece of the user experience, especially when it comes to reading long form content or watching long form video. So they’re very complementary when you’re talking about premium content like this,” Armstrong said.
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