Nieman Journalism Lab |
| Posted: 15 Jan 2013 09:34 AM PST I’m not the first person to launch a single-story website. But I may be the first person who left a cushy TV job to do it.
I saw an audience of people thirsty to understand more. It was a niche audience, perhaps, but it was there. And it was vastly underserved. From that, I was driven by a deep consumer need and a profound personal mission to build Syria Deeply, a platform that fuses journalism and technology to better cover a complex story. It is part news aggregator, part interactive backgrounder, part original reporting space. Most importantly, it aims to fuse all of the kinds of content that have become critical to this crisis: professional reporting, citizen journalism, and social media. We wanted to visualize more, convey greater nuance, and focus on civilian stories, rather than just emphasize the big shots and the battle action that normally lead our headlines. As I was building the model, from a hand sketch in my notebook through to a working prototype, it was clear this was a platform that could grow. I imagined that as we continued to hone the model, we could apply it to other complex issues. We launched, gratefully, to reviews that we had outsmarted the news and redesigned crisis coverage. In the weeks that followed, we saw a movement of people interested in expanding our model, to new geographies (Iran Deeply, North Korea Deeply, Pakistan Deeply) and broader complex issues (Cancer Deeply, Drug War Deeply, Euro Debt Deeply). Since the launch of Syria Deeply a little over a month ago, Syria Deeply has had a steady flow of visitors, 80 percent of whom are English speakers and who are predominately from the U.S and Europe. We have had a 48 percent return rate with an average visit duration of 2:10 minutes, which shows that our readers consistently find value in our site and return to stay up with the crisis. Naturally, being part of the social media age, the large majority of our new visits have been referred through our Facebook and Twitter pages rather than through search, with a good amount of those new visits directed to the conflict timeline and our infographics, which serve as introductory tools to people wanting to learn more about the fundamentals of the Syrian crisis. In the future, we’ll expand the single-story model, essentially serving as news R&D, toward optimizing more sophisticated delivery for sophisticated content. As with all startups, it’s on us to mange our growth — choosing how to scale at the right time, with the right partners, on the right subjects. Meanwhile, here’s what I’ve learned so far from the single-story model and what I think it says about the future of news, in 2013 and beyond. It’s collaborative.Single-topic platforms, such as Syria Deeply, are not made up of a team of journalists and editors reporting to a passive audience. Instead, they embrace participatory journalism in which civilian journalists can collaborate and contribute to the news process with personal stories and firsthand accounts. As a platform, we are then able to aggregate and curate the most useful content on that topic into one space. That does call on the journalist to serve a stronger curatorial function. Columbia’s “Post-Industrial Journalism” report summarized it nicely: “The journalist has not been replaced but displaced, moved higher up the editorial chain from the production of initial observations to a role that emphasizes verification and interpretation, bringing sense to the streams of text, audio, photos and video produced by the public.” That is what we’ll aim to do, issue by issue. It’s educational.Single-topic platforms can serve the deep domain expert and capture the interest of the topical dilettante. The idea is to capture people at their level of knowledge and help lift them to a greater understanding. Background can be made interesting. Historical content can be made engaging. Personal stories — civilian stories — can add texture and enhance interest in the macro picture of what’s going on. At Syria Deeply, we put background elements like a Conflict Timeline and Regime Map alongside news of the day which, as previously mentioned, is drawing readers who are perhaps unfamiliar and new to the Syria crisis. Those background elements add context to content, and adds value to the news user’s overall experience. It puts the user experience first.Working on a fundamental redesign of the news, at the story level, gives us the opportunity to put the user experience first. We design for it and we program for it, as we look for ways to engage, inform, and delight people. Since we’re building on the mandate to serve the niche, those interested in getting smart on an issue, we can stay within that mission and still innovate wildly, in service of the end user. While we iterate toward the best possible user interface, we already know we are providing a experience that is fundamentally different that what’s in the news marketplace. Our audience, like our reporters, gets pulled left, right, and center across a flurry headlines ranging from troops leaving Afghanistan to the latest move toward a fiscal cliff. The story-specific platform is a relief: profound by the nature of our content, calm by the focus of our mandate. Do one story well and filter out the noise. Spread knowledge and build a relationship with the user, based on how well you serve them. We have had the luxury of starting from scratch. But there are lessons even the big guys can learn from our model. For the sake of an informed public, I hope they do. Lara Setrakian is co-founder and managing editor of Syria Deeply. She has been a foreign correspondent for ABC News, Bloomberg Television, the International Herald Tribune, and other outlets. |
| Across the world, money to support journalism startups comes from a variety of sources Posted: 15 Jan 2013 07:00 AM PST  Editor’s note: Late last year, a team of researchers put out a usefully comprehensive report on how digital journalism is being financed. The project was called Submojour — sustainable business models for journalism — and it looked at 69 different journalism startups across 10 countries to ask where they were getting revenue and how they were building for the future. You can download the full report, “Chasing Sustainability On the Net,” which is worth a read, or go through any of the 69 case studies they compiled, browsable by country, business model, organization size, or revenue. But two of the project’s researchers, Johanna Vehkoo and Pekka Pekkala, have written for us a summary of some of their findings. Many journalists invest their future hopes in the idea of the paywall — the notion of readers paying directly for access to online content sounds tempting for an industry struggling to find revenue. But finding journalistic startups who make a profit by selling original content directly to an audience is a challenge. Our international research project, Sustainable Business Models for Journalism (submojour.net), built case studies of 69 startups in 10 countries and found only a handful startups where charging for content was a significant part of their business model.1 So if it’s not paywalls, how are the world’s journalistic startups making money online? Our research project looked for answers from three continents. We found that revenue sources differed quite remarkably from country to country — an indication that there are lessons to be learned across boundaries. Hyperlocal sites still depend on advertisingBoth the U.K. and the U.S. have seen a considerable boom in community or ‘hyperlocal’ journalism. Openly Local lists and links to more than 500 of hyperlocal blogs and websites in the U.K. and Ireland, and J-Lab has listed over 1,200 American community news sites in its Community Media Directory. The new group LION aims to be a organizing force for U.S. hyperlocal online publishers. We interviewed three local websites for our study in the United States. Each sold banner ads at weekly or monthly rates. At DavidsonNews.net in North Carolina, 75 percent of revenues came from banner advertising and classifieds, sold on a monthly basis. David Boraks, the editor-in-chief, noted that some of the stores they work with simply don’t understand the web well enough to grasp alternative advertising sales mechanisms based on clicks or traffic. At The Batavian, operating in upstate New York, most ads are priced per month, some per day. Across the country, West Seattle Blog offers monthly flat-rate display advertising to local businesses. Typically, these hyperlocals are tiny companies — often so small that ad sales and editorial are handled by the same person. When Howard Owens took over The Batavian, the company had ad reps but it did not work. So he started carrying around media kits, door to door, to almost every business in Genesee County. This is how he describes the sales pitch:
It was almost a disappointment for our research team to find out how strong the old model of display advertising was among many of the websites we studied. But although ad dependency remains strong, some of the sites had found alternative and sometimes innovative ways to monetize their journalism. Do journalism, sell something else to fund itIn the U.K., we found a few journalistic startups who’ve experiment with business models and have found somewhat unexpected revenue streams — including money made selling something other than their journalism, most often technology. One British example is Tweetminster, which gets its name from a mashup of Twitter and London’s Westminster. Tweetminster automatically curates what experts in U.K. politics and current affairs think is important, based on data and without human intervention. For its clients and partners, however, the company produces analysis of particular industries, topics, or markets — all based on what experts of those fields are paying attention to online. “Everything we do outside of politics we charge for. We sell a license to use our software. It’s an API, so as the clients make more calls, the price goes up,” CEO Alberto Nardelli said. Blottr is a U.K.-based citizen journalism news service, but its income also comes mainly from its technology. Founder Adam Baker said he realized early on that it would be too difficult to make meaningful revenue on advertising. He said in our interview last year: “We took the view that we’ve got some great technology that powers Blottr. So we’ve engineered that to be able to license it as a white label to other publishers, to enable their users to be contributors as well as consumers. To give you an example, one of our customers is a cosmetic surgery magazine that’s got 12,000 of the world’s best cosmetic surgeons reading their magazine. With our technology powering their site, they’re able to get those users to contribute as well.” In October, Blottr announced a content syndication division called Newspoint, where Blottr’s breaking news will be made available for professional clients. This pushes Blottr also in the new generation of newswires. New kinds of news agenciesAnother kind of development can be found in Italy, where journalists have founded digital news agencies. The Italian-founded company China Files operates in Beijing, offering in-depth multimedia coverage of China-related news for around 30 Italian and Spanish media outlets. Effecinque focuses its content on media, innovation, and the Internet and serves as a subcontractor for large Italian newspapers and outlets seeking innovative news reporting and visualization products. As the company’s slogan, “Refreshing Journalism”, and its name (it means F5, the refresh key) imply, Effecinque also develops new web-native ways of digital storytelling. The Irish company Storyful describes itself as the “first news agency of the social media age,” employing more than 20 journalists who discover and verify newsworthy content (like videos from Syria) from the social web and deliver the vetted material to clients, mostly in traditional media. Storyful’s clients have included YouTube, Google, The New York Times, France24, Channel 4, ABC Australia, and The Economist. The CEO of the U.K.-based Demotix, Turi Munthe, describes his company as “the citizen journalism AP.” Munthe says Demotix has around 5,500 paid contributors around the world. Demotix sells their photographs, videos, and stories to mainstream media, notably The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, and The Wall Street Journal. The revenue from sales is split 50/50 with the contributors. “We’ve completely ignored the U.S. and are really focused on places like Iran and lots of African countries,” Munthe said. “Our understanding is that AP doesn’t have a staff reporter in 40 percent of the world’s countries, whereas Demotix is in almost every country.” (In November, Demotix was acquired by its main investor, Corbis.) So have we found the Holy Grail? Nope.Can journalism thrive as a digital business or is it doomed to merely survive — as the Reuters Institute’s report “Survival is Success” suggests? In our opinion, it looks like there are numerous possibilities for constructing a profitable business. But most might be difficult for traditional media companies to adopt; the newcomers are small, lean, and nimble, and they use both technology and their audience to create greater efficiency in their operations. And unlike their predecessors, these online publications are not generalists but specialists: They do one or two things exceptionally well and leave the rest to others. It remains to be seen if there is still room for traditional media that tries to bundle “all the news that’s fit to print” on a single website, newspaper, or newscast. Based on our research, the new publishers are not finding sustainability with bundles. Notes
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Six months ago, I was a correspondent for ABC News and Bloomberg Television, covering the Middle East from our base in Dubai. It is a job I loved, and still love. But most of my time now is spent focused on the Syria story, in a digital redesign of the foreign news experience.
As the months of 2012 rolled on, Syria’s Arab Spring uprising descended into all-out civil war. The story was excruciatingly opaque (foreign journalists were heavily censored) and fundamentally complex (it drew on decades of Baath party politics and centuries-old sectarian rifts). It was asking a lot of our news users to grasp it, especially in a mainstream news cycle that doesn’t afford us the chance to provide context, history, or much depth. That is particularly true on foreign stories.| 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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