Nieman Journalism Lab |
- C.W. Anderson: How journalists’ self-concepts hindered their adaptation to a digital world
- The newsonomics of the body shop
- Wikipedia plans to expand mobile access around the globe with new funding
- A new class of Knight News Challenge winners focuses on mobile in the developing world
- Shane Snow: What the sponsored-content business can learn from Scientology
| C.W. Anderson: How journalists’ self-concepts hindered their adaptation to a digital world Posted: 17 Jan 2013 09:00 AM PST  Editor’s note: CUNY professor and long-time Nieman Lab contributor C.W. Anderson is out with a new book, Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age. It’s an exploration of the evolution of local journalism from print to online, viewed through the lens of the Philadelphia media ecosystem. I think C.W. (we call him Chris, or @chanders) is one of the brightest young academics studying journalism — look for him soon on an episode of Press Publish — and his work is always worth watching. The subject of his book is, fundamentally, why news organizations responded so poorly to the disruptions of the Internet — or, as he puts it, a “study of the legacy systems that made the news organizations I studied behave in deeply irrational ways.” Chris and his publisher, Temple University Press, have allowed us to reprint this excerpt from the book’s introductory chapter, “Local Journalism on the Brink,” here. In August of 2000, a hoary political institution — the Republican National Convention, assembling in Philadelphia — confronted a new kind of media network. As the national Republican Party descended on the city in the summer of 2000, its delegates were met by hundreds of convention protesters carrying cell phones, videocameras, and old-fashioned pencils and paper notebooks, all calling themselves reporters and all networked into a website that displayed reports from the street protests as news broke. Growing out of the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999 and expanding to several other American and European cities in the months that followed, these Philadelphia protester-reporters identified themselves as members of the Independent Media Center of Philadelphia (also known as the Philly IMC) and promised their readers overtly biased political reporting, by amateurs, directly from the scene of anti–Republican National Convention protests. As the political protesters clashed with Philadelphia police on the convention’s second day — “thousands of roving demonstrators and helmeted police faced off in intersections around the city yesterday afternoon,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote, “trading blows at some junctures, while in Center City several delegate hotels locked their doors…as the two sides sparred for control of the streets” — amateur Indymedia journalists did more than simply comment on the drama as it unfolded. They were instrumental in documenting it online for a mass audience. These Independent Media Center volunteers were among the first group of digital activists to directly pose the question of who counted as a legitimate journalist in an era of low-cost, digital information gathering and distribution.  Protestors a half-block from city hall at the Republican National Convention, Philadelphia, August 2000. Photo by Brad Kayal/CC. Six years later, at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, a few of the radical reporters who had first stormed the journalistic barricades during the Republican Convention in 2000 sat down with local bloggers, newspaper editors, cable television executives, and new-media thinkers to plot a future for local news. The pace of the changes buffeting journalism, changes that first announced themselves in dramatic fashion during coverage of the 2000 convention, had only accelerated in the intervening half decade since the Republican National Convention. “Do-it-yourself journalism” was no longer a practice confined to political radicals and anarchists. It had manifested itself as part of a “war-blogging” revolution, a “mommyblogging” revolution, a YouTube revolution, a MySpace revolution, a flash mob revolution, a “hyperlocal citizens’ media” revolution, and in hundreds of other trends that lacked only a catchy moniker. Perhaps more ominously, the first signs of deep economic distress inside the news industry had begun to filter out of Philadelphia; in late 2005, the Knight Ridder news chain, which owned both daily newspapers in Philadelphia (and had, for decades, posted double-digit profit margins), announced it was breaking itself up and selling its multiple media assets. In the face of the citizen media explosion and these distant economic rumblings, the Annenberg meeting was nothing like the occupational uprising in 2000 that saw radical journalists eviscerate the “lackeys of the corporate press” and professional journalists snidely dismiss their scruffy, decidedly non-objective challengers. Instead, participants in the oddly titled Norgs [new news organizations] Unconference” came together, in their words, “in a spirit of cooperation…to save local news in Philadelphia.” The Norgs Unconference was one of the first meetings explicitly to raise the question: could traditional journalists and the new breed of professional-amateur hybrids work together to improve local journalism? On February 22, 2009, three years after the Norgs Conference, a decade after the earliest meetings to plan a global Indymedia news network, and twelve years since the first newspapers in Philadelphia went online, the journalistic center finally collapsed. Philadelphia Media Holdings, the local ownership group that had purchased the city’s two leading news institutions — the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News — amid much hope, goodwill, and optimism, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The news was first broken by a local blog, analyzed breathlessly on Twitter, and reported (hours later) in lengthy, accurate depth by the bankrupt papers themselves. For more than a year, the newspapers labored in a kind of Chapter 11 twilight zone, as local ownership fought a desperate rearguard action to maintain their financial control over their ailing media properties. In April 2010, these efforts were finally thwarted, with the newspapers becoming one of several media outlets across the United States controlled by banks and post-bankruptcy hedge funds. Yet even as the newspapers labored under the weight of their debts, journalistic networks at the edges of traditional media institutions continued to organize and experiment. The weekend before the bankruptcy auction, technology geeks from across the country descended on Philadelphia to brainstorm the future of news. The very month the newspapers were bought by distant banks, a local foundation announced plans to fund a collaborative news network outside the walls of Philadelphia’s legacy media organizations. If 2008 was a year of uncertainty for Philadelphia journalism, and 2009 was a year of bankruptcy-addled stasis, 2010 seemed like a moment when innovation and energy would outpace the general economic gloom enveloping the news industry. In 2011, continued hopes for a rebirth — the new Philadelphia Media Network announced new revenue plans and launched an in-house “startup incubator” — sat uneasily alongside fears that large news organizations were incapable of making the kind of transition needed to survive in the digital twenty-first century. These fears — fears that the journey to a new world of local news would fail before it could really even begin — only increased as word arose in early 2012 that the Philadelphia newspapers were again on the verge of being sold. Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age narrates these journalistic moments of confrontation, collaboration, and collapse, filtering them through the lens of a single American city. Written and researched during a period of tremendous upheaval in the news industry, Rebuilding the News argues that, in the face of the chaos pressing in on them from all sides, local news organizations made particular choices about how best to adapt to emerging economic, social, and technological realities. The book analyzes the economic, organizational, and cultural factors that helped shape and direct these choices. In particular, local journalism’s occupational self-image, its vision of itself as an autonomous workforce conducting original reporting on behalf of a unitary public, blocked the kind of cross-institutional collaboration that might have helped journalism thrive in an era of fractured communication. This failure, in turn, highlights the central normative problem at the heart of this book. Local journalism’s vision of itself — as an institutionally grounded profession that empirically informs (and even, perhaps, “assembles”) the public — is a noble vision of tremendous democratic importance. But the unreflexive commitment to a particular and historically contingent version of this self-image now undermines these larger democratic aspirations. The story of how journalism’s vision of its unified public unraveled, how long taken-for-granted practices of news reporting were suddenly rendered problematic, and how news organizations struggled to rebuild local journalism — to network the news — is the story of this book. What happened to journalism in the last years of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first? What did it feel like to be a reporter or editor in Philadelphia as newspaper companies were sold, bankruptcies were filed, and an audience that was assumed to be mute and passive suddenly began to talk back? How did these systemic shocks ricochet through the institutions and daily work routines of journalists, bloggers, and media activists? What can these local events in one city teach us about the future of news in general? What do these on-the-ground developments teach us about the fate of journalism, one of America’s most vital democratic institutions? And how does this particular story — the development of a specific media ecosystem at a specific moment in time — intersect with the more theoretical claims made above? As Rebuilding the News unfolds, four major narrative themes emerge that connect this local study to larger questions about the evolution of news and point toward problems and opportunities that will continue to affect the news industry. First, Rebuilding the News chronicles how journalists’ conception of the local public began to unravel. Second, the book describes the importance of reporting within the journalistic imagination, as well as the ways that bloggers and aggregators challenged this notion of “original reporting.” Third, the book discusses the “non-diffusion” of innovation within news organizations and the non-diffusion of collaboration between news organizations. I take seriously the idea that the future of journalism lies partly in networked collaboration but conclude that the creation of networks is not inherently a networked property. Deinstitutionalized organizations have a complex relationship with institutions; in many ways, they are dependent on the stability and organizational heft of the very institutional structures they scorn. Fourth, and finally, Rebuilding the News describes the slow-motion collapse of the industrial work model on which much of journalistic content production is based, as well as attempts to rebuild that model on firmer ground. In sum, this book is the study of the legacy systems that made the news organizations I studied behave in deeply irrational ways. It is also a study of the attempts by individuals and organizations to overcome these often debilitating, locked-in processes, usually under situations in which they had few resources and little institutional support. This tension between stasis and change is the driving force behind the narrative that propels this book. The first thematic development chronicled in this study of the Philadelphia news ecosystem is the fracturing of the idea and image of the metropolitan public. Over the course of my research, I became conscious of the degree to which “the public” occupied a particular pride of place in the journalistic imaginary. Philadelphia journalists were quick to invoke the way their daily newswork informed the local public. On a deeper level, they often talk about the manner in which their newswork called that very public into being. And the importance of this public was not just affirmed by status-conscious traditional journalists at the major Philadelphia newspapers. It was a claim echoed by radical citizen reporters and even by some bloggers. It was in part this unexpected rhetorical overlap that helped me first recognize the importance of the local public in the journalistic consciousness. One of the arguments of this book is that the idea and the materiality of the local public have come unbundled in the age of the Internet. Over the course of my research, the notion that “the public” was capable of being captured by any single set of work practices or institutions seemed increasingly difficult for many journalists to honestly believe. Nevertheless, it was a belief that many of them continued to voice, often in increasingly desperate tones. This gap between this rhetoric of the local public, informed and embodied by journalism, and the dawning realization that this public was breaking the communicative shell traditionally designed to house it is one of the stories of this book. A second narrative thread analyzes the work practices of local journalism. Over the course of my time in Philadelphia, I was struck by the degree to which the act of simply “reporting the news” continued to loom large in journalists’ rhetoric about who they were and what they did. When journalists wanted to validate themselves and their profession, they noted that reporting was what distinguished true journalism from other activities. When they wished, on the other hand, to denigrate themselves, many of my informants would sheepishly admit that they “didn’t do reporting,” and were therefore less valuable than “real” journalists. In reality, however, my research demonstrated that the practice of original reporting was far from being either pure or unproblematic. The kind of work that constituted “original reporting” seemed increasingly difficult for journalists to define. Reporting existed side by side with other forms of newswork such as blogging and aggregation, often within news organizations that heaped rhetorical scorn on these so-called lesser practices. At the same time, these traditional institutions would reappropriate newswork practices such as blogging and news aggregation and shape them to reportorial ends. All of these complexities are described in the pages that follow. For now, I simply want to highlight this important pairing: acts of reporting and images of the public. These linked concepts encapsulate much of the narrative that follows. A third thread, which is also concerned with newswork practices but from an ecosystemic and institutional perspective, revolves around the strange persistence of the industrial work model of traditional journalism, along with emerging challenges to that model from the edges of journalistic space. In his newsroom ethnographies from the 1970s, Herbert Gans quoted one executive saying that daily news routines are “like screwing nuts on a bolt.” No metaphor that I am aware of better captures the industrial processes most associated with traditional journalism. Indeed, these practices remained dominant in most Philadelphia newsrooms I studied. Reporters and editors still worked to build news stories in an assembly line-like fashion, and news organizations struggled to collaborate with people and groups outside their formal institutional walls. Around the edges of these industrial-era practices, however, there was increasing decay. Technological artifacts and communications practices pressed in on static workflows. Economic challenges made it harder and harder for news organizations to maintain the staffing levels necessary to manage the complex process of gathering the news. Insurgent news organizations harnessed digital technologies and new employment regimes in ways that allowed them to open up their work routines to outside institutions, volunteers, and loosely affiliated freelancers. The industrial-era ecosystem of news assemblage that I observed in Philadelphia appeared simultaneously solid and on the verge of collapse. A final theme of this book, then, might be labeled the “non-diffusion of collaboration.” Each of the threads above — the fragmenting of the image local public, the continued centrality of reporting, and the decay of industrial production models — would seem to point to a scenario in which journalistic innovation and cross-organizational collaboration were not only rhetorically praised but also institutionally optimal. In other words, developments in the local Philadelphia news ecosystem seemed to be creating a situation in which it made rational sense to “network the news” through institutional collaboration, hypertext linking, and formal and informal partnerships. In the first round of my ethnographic research, such collaboration and innovation not only did not occur; it seemed to be purposefully thwarted. In the second round of my research, from 2009 through 2011, the situation had changed somewhat, and active attempts at building a local news hub and news network were underway. In all, however, these networked developments were slow in coming and did not rest on particularly firm ground. Many of them seemed fragile, as if they might disappear at any time. Ultimately, I conclude that the difficulties in networking the news stem as much from journalistic culture — journalism’s vision of “its” public and the importance of the act of reporting in the journalistic imaginary — as they do from logistical or transaction-cost difficulties that can be easily remedied through managerial solutions.  A closed newsstand, corner of Broad and Vine, downtown Philadelphia. Photo by Paul Sableman/CC. Over the past decade, practices of newsgathering in America have been transformed. Just as the 1830s saw the invention of the penny press and the 1960s saw the rise of an aggressive form of national investigative journalism, the last years of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first century constitutes an equally important moment in the history of news production. During the time period studied here, some news organizations in Philadelphia thrived, while others literally struggled to survive. This book focuses on the slow-motion collapse of a major urban institution — Philadelphia’s local newspapers — and the many attempts to reform and rebuild the larger news ecosystem in which they are embedded. Rebuilding the News describes the emergence of citizen journalism in Philadelphia in 2000. It describes how the local news “went online” between 1997 and 2010. It describes some attempts at collaboration between journalistic amateurs and their corporate counterparts. It zooms in on local news practices and describes how, exactly, local news gets made in 2010, as well as how that news circulates on- and offline. And it chronicles how Philadelphia’s newspapers slid into bankruptcy and how other institutions, individuals, and journalists struggled to rebuild Philadelphia’s media ecosystem — to “network the news” — at a moment when the odds seemed decidedly against them. The book spends time inside the newsrooms and editorial suites of Philadelphia’s major news organizations. It travels to gentrifying neighborhoods with names such as Fishtown and Northern Liberties to see how ordinary citizens are creating their own, quasi-journalistic practices of digital communication. It looks to Philadelphia’s suburbs to chronicle how a new breed of bloggers is rewiring the production of sports journalism. And it lingers in the neighborhoods of West Philadelphia, where the first citizen journalism organizations rose up in opposition to the “corporate media,” never honestly expecting that, ten years later, the mainstream media organizations would themselves be struggling to survive. These varied thematic threads — of individuals, institutions, collaboration, competition, and collapse — weave the narrative of this book together. C.W. Anderson is an assistant professor at the City University of New York. Rebuilding the News is out January 18. |
| The newsonomics of the body shop Posted: 17 Jan 2013 08:47 AM PST
We can look at the first 15 years or so of newspapers on the web as a slow-motion car wreck: agonizing to live through, fascinating to watch. As we pull the pieces apart, we find one key culprit: misalignment. Now, in the age of paywalls, membership, and marketing services, we’re finally seeing a time of realignment. The wheels are back on the car, though still wobbling, as they try to regain forward direction and speed. Yet it’s still too early to know what will happen as publishers try to accelerate their increasingly digital businesses. Before we look at how the realignment is coming together, we’ve got to understand what caused the problems in the first place. Sure, it’s easy to say that the great digital disruptions upended business models, turning dollars and euros into dimes. More important, as we look back, is what we miss in our retelling of history. Digital disruption pushed publishers and editors to weaken relationships with their customers, to lose an alignment with advertisers and readers that had sustained the business for decades. The customer fit got out of whack. For decades, that value chain was clear and fairly unquestioned. For readers, it was the daily download, the world in 28-64 pages. Must-reads plus serendipity. For advertisers, while they grumbled about high rates, they willingly bought a mass market they could not otherwise reach. In a word: alignment. Publishers’ interests aligned with readers. Publishers’ interests aligned with advertisers. As the great disruption began, we can now see, publishers and editors lost their way, meandering off down dead-end roads, running out of gas in cul de sacs, and investing in construction that hit brick walls. Wheels a-wobble, traction difficult. Out of rhythm, and almost out of gas. Let’s go back to the ’90s. A relatively small group of us back then championed the Internet as a future of publishing. Early demonstration projects bloomed, some given the silly “skunkworks” monicker, though that well described the growing “us and them” divide. Web publishing was considered experimental, something added on, and certainly not a part of the wider journalistic or ad-selling craft. If culture has been a continuing issue, then the business models of a decade and a half made it worse. It was the dedicated-to-print (how’s that for an epitaph?) people who brought in the money, while the digital people still played in the sandbox. The “dollars-to-dimes” myth reinforced how low-value the digital end of the business was. The fact the print readers paid a couple of hundred dollars a year, minimum, for the product while freeloaders consumed web news simply reinforced the division. Readers themselves knew their papers were doing something on the web, but didn’t connect it strongly with the print products they were using to getting; one was expensive, the other free. Misalignment grew, with readers and advertisers, as both themselves went increasingly digital. Think about it. In the old print world, advertisers paid up but really got a huge — and effective — audience, which moved goods and services. In this new digital world, they could buy online display that has never approached the results of print. Clickthrough rates tumbled toward the miniscule, tangible evidence of the growing disconnection. Shoppers found little usefulness in the advertising. Online advertising may have brought in a few billions, but publishers came nowhere close to creating the kind of local marketplace the newspaper had created. Cultural misalignment. Reader misalignment. Merchant misalignment. Shopper misalignment. Publishers searched for new models but came up short, and too many stayed the course as the world was changing. You can listen to Click and Clack and realize that lots of people, including publishers, drive ailing vehicles for way too long. Now, though, finally, publishers and editors have been heading in for some repairs — clearly still bodywork in progress — and getting better realigned. Let’s call this the newsonomics of the body shop, the realignment of business models and mindsets. This realignment is fundamental to the survivability of the news industry. It is taking a number of forms. While many of us look at this through the prism of business model, this realignment first and foremost rests with relationships. Start with the relationship — “If there’s one reason we have done better than of our peers in the Internet space over the last six years, it is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience, and that really does matter, I think, in any business,” says Jeff Bezos — and the business model will occasionally follow. As we survey the news initiatives and innovations of the moment, let’s look how they focus on customer relationship. That’s the unseen thread that connects them and offers us hope that the news industry may have the capacity to revive itself — because no one else is going to do it. Let’s look at how re-aligning with customers is at the root of the major change initiatives underway at the press worldwide:
What else can news people do? What comes to mind: new features, new apps, new community involvements, more ways for readers and merchants to both get good deals. Jeff Bezos’ approach is one that should apply in our new business, too: “You have to use your judgment. In cases like that, we say, ‘Let’s be simpleminded. We know this is a feature that’s good for customers. Let’s do it.’” How we all need to hear that more from people within news companies of every kind. In the arena of relationship marketing, publishers and editors are latecomers. They borrow key lessons from the biggest, fastest growing companies of our, or any other, day. Bezos’ Amazon built a juggernaut (annual growth rate of 28 percent) by aligning so smartly with the needs of its consumers, removing little friction after little friction (customer reviews, easy returns, 1-Click, same-day delivery, etc.) from its service. Google makes lead generation so direct with paid search “intent-capturing” advertising that it owns 79 percent of that market. Apple seamlessly integrates music — through iTunes and iPods — and is now on a mad march to do the same with as much media as it can on iPhones and iPads. Facebook, with its new Graph Search, attempts to make our social connections semi-automatic; think people, find people. All operate on the notion that selling — to individuals and to merchants — is an ongoing process. That way of thinking was well summed up by David Edelman, co-leader of McKinsey’s global digital marketing strategy practice, when he described in Harvard Business Review the new relationship companies have with consumer. He calls it the customer decision journey. The CDJ touches a number of points — sharing, experience, price comparison — that make common sense. They culminate in the “loyalty loop,” keeping customers coming back. This is one tough journey for modern media companies, yet their willingness to undergo it is underlined by one clear reality. Contrary to folklore, the wheels on the bus don’t go round and round forever. |
| Wikipedia plans to expand mobile access around the globe with new funding Posted: 17 Jan 2013 07:01 AM PST
Wikipedia Zero was designed specifically to give access to the site to people in developing countries with low quality networks or high data costs. Using funding from the News Challenge, Wikipedia will aim to improve the user experience on feature phones, increase the number of languages available on the mobile site, and provide new ways to access the site via SMS. In most Western countries, Wikipedia is usually a few clicks or taps away, whether on a computer or a smartphone. That’s not the case elsewhere. “There’s still a lot of people with old Nokia phones,” said Kul Wadhwa, head of mobile and business development for the Wikimedia Foundation. “A large part of the world still uses that. We want to make sure we support everybody.” Wikipedia Zero is like normal Wikipedia, just stripped down to its essential parts. It comes in two flavors: a mobile-friendly site and a text-only site. But beyond making these barebones versions of Wikipedia, Wikimedia partners with telecommunications companies that agree to provide access to their customers free of charge. So far Wikipedia Zero is available through mobile providers in countries like Kenya, Uganda, Tunisia, Thailand, and Malaysia. (It comes after Facebook found significant success in poorer countries with the similar Facebook Zero, which launched in 2010.) Wadhwa told me mobile access to Wikipedia grew 40 percent year-over year in 2012, while non-English mobile usage jumped 66 percent. Making Wikipedia Zero work comes down to two big issues — cost and access, Wadhwa said. Cutting deals with mobile providers is one way of addressing those problems. Creating more efficient software for feature phones is another, he said. In order for the program to expand, they’ll need to continue usability testing on different types of feature phones, as well as adding new functionality, such as accessing the site through SMS. They also need to pursue more research on how people use Wikipedia in different counties and what their needs are, he said. One problem is that no two communities or mobile users are alike. Because phone usage and network strength varies so much, Wadhwa said it’s been difficult to develop a standard software for feature phones. The next step after making Wikipedia readable across multiple phones and languages, is allowing users to edit the site. Given the limitations on feature phones, that could present problems. “Editing an encyclopedia on a phone is not entirely practical, but there are ways to contribute,” he said. Like many News Challenge winners, Wikipedia will be releasing their work as open source once it’s complete. Given that Wikipedia is primarily built on open source software, Wadhwa said it’s fitting they’ll be able to give back to the developer community with their project. With a sizable global market for feature phones, Wadhwa expects their software could find plenty of uses. “Hopefully it’s not just Wikipedia people access on their phone. If they can use the same codebase, that can work for others.” |
| A new class of Knight News Challenge winners focuses on mobile in the developing world Posted: 17 Jan 2013 07:00 AM PST Moments ago, the Knight Foundation announced its latest class of Knight News Challenge winners. The theme of this round was mobile, and thus it’s fitting that most of the projects are focused where mobile’s impact has been the most transformative: the developing world. (Easy access to your email in bed and the ability to play Tiny Wings on the go are nice, sure, but they don’t quite compare to the scale of the mobile revolution in poor, rural areas for which cell networks are the first networks.)
Since smartphones don’t (yet) have the same market share in Angola and Bolivia as in Austin and Boston, many of the projects focus on bringing some of the information-navigation powers we associate with iPhones and the like to feature phones, like the old Nokias that blanket much of the world. Money for Wikipedia will support its Wikipedia Zero project, which through deals with mobile companies lets people have free access to the free encyclopedia. Abayima wants to use SIM cards as a storage mechanism. WeFarm wants to use SMS to allow farmers to seek answers to their questions about crops. RootIO wants to turn cheap phones into ad hoc radio stations. This crop of winners (who will receive a combined $2.4 million) also continues the News Challenge’s gradual drift away from what might be defined as innovation within traditional journalism and toward finding other ways to meet the information needs of communities. It’s unlikely that any of these projects, for instance, will be of great use to, say, a night cops reporter in Des Moines. It’s not that such uses are unimaginable; a little creative thinking could twist some of these projects to be of interest to the enterprising journalist interested in building engagement with local citizens. But they’re not the target in the same way that they might have been in the earlier rounds of the News Challenge. One wonders whether “News” Challenge will always remain the appropriate name. (Knight already has a Community Information Challenge, aimed at connecting local foundations with local news and information efforts.) Knight’s press release also confirmed the (rough) start date of the next News Challenge round: A competition themed around open government will open in February. Another round, subject TBA, will follow later in the fall. You can watch the winners present their projects on Knight’s webstream Friday at 12:30 p.m. Eastern from the campus of Arizona State University. (Also, full disclosure: Knight Foundation is a funder of Nieman Lab, although not through the News Challenge.) Here’s a breakdown of the winners.
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| Shane Snow: What the sponsored-content business can learn from Scientology Posted: 17 Jan 2013 06:00 AM PST
For the past decade, media critics have crooned, “What’s the business model that will save journalism?” As new publishers seem to jump into sponsored stories every week — joining the likes of Forbes, Mashable, and BuzzFeed, who charge a premium to place paid posts in their streams — the answer to that question may be, at least in part, branded content. But this week, the collective fury over The Atlantic’s latest sponsored content campaign — where The Church of Scientology posted a propagandistic story about its “unprecedented” success — shines a light on the inelegancies of an evolving model. The Atlantic quickly took the story down, apologizing. The Scientology story is truly an outlier among the magazine’s other, successful sponsored programs, such as Boeing’s Innovation Series, but it highlights the challenges media companies experience as they navigate new turf. (I should disclose at this point that I work as chief creative officer for a company named Contently, which works with all of the above-mentioned media companies; they use Contently’s software tools and freelance journalist network to power some of their brand content campaigns. Contently was not involved in the Scientology campaign, but perhaps more than any other company, we get a close-up of the insides of some of the world’s most aggressive branded-content operations.) Up until this point, the emerging branded content industry — a lucrative one compared to the declining banner-ad biz — has for the most part been careful, if not benign, with a focus on share factor — that is, “Will people be willing to put this on their Facebook walls?” Typically, branded content has manifested itself in photo galleries of cats, or human interest stories that avoid mention of the sponsor, but address topics the sponsor cares about. At worst, it’s snore-worthy corporate blog posts. But take a more polarizing brand like Scientology (or say, the NRA, or Planned Parenthood) and the hypervigilant Internet will flip out at anything that feels off. This is a good thing. By analyzing the most extreme example, we expose the cracks of which media companies — and their sponsors — should be aware as the brand publishing tide rises. A cautionary taleIn the Scientology kerfluffle, people flipped out for two reasons. First, there was the shock of discovering, upon second glance at the glowing story, that it was actually created by the Church of Scientology and not an Atlantic reporter. This is a design issue. Though The Atlantic does mark sponsored posts at the top and bottom, it’s often easy to miss the memo until the end of the story. Indeed, the “Sponsored by” text at the top of the post is in the smallest font size on the page (or was at the time of this writing). In most cases, the shock value of discovering “Gee whiz, this post was sponsored” is minimal, if existent at all. But the more controversial the sponsor — and the more the story smells like advertising — the harsher the jolt. Second is critical distance. A BuzzFeed story about expensive suits (one of today’s sponsored posts) that reveals that the TV show “Suits” is the sponsor elicits at worst a groan, but more likely an “Oh, cool — that was a good one.” But that’s because such posts focus on a subject the brand and readers both care about, not the brand itself. Sure, “The 8 Most Expensive Suits In The World” is about men’s jackets, but it’s not about the show itself. Readers in this case care about being entertained, and they got what they wanted. Qualcomm’s Spark, a digital magazine about technology, for example, tells stories about mobile, gadgets, futurism, and science. The brand wants to be known for those things — but it leaves out the “Oh, and you should buy phones with Qualcomm chips in them.” The audience consumes and shares the content, appreciating the brand for giving them content they like. Most sponsored submissions at The Atlantic go through an editorial wringer to ensure quality and minimize surprises. Yesterday’s Scientology post for some reason defied best practices, and people flipped out. The underlying principle behind all good content — sponsored or no — is maintaining the reader’s trust. How Scientology could have done itDespite being a controversial organization, The Church of Scientology could have sponsored content that didn’t betray readers, perhaps even built its brand reputation among them. What if Scientology had sponsored a series about happiness? Or the need for humanitarian relief in Africa? Or stories of the world’s greatest free-thinkers? These are values the church believes in, and they wouldn’t need to discuss the church or church members. Shoot, even a HuffPo post on “20 People You Didn’t Know Were Scientologists” might not have been unsettling to that particular audience. Any of the above would aid the branding effort and leave readers to decide on their own what they think of Scientology. No tricks. Would people have flipped out had The Atlantic’s offending sponsor been Jell-O? Probably not. The double standard is unfortunate; in my opinion, all should be held to as high an editorial standard as the most controversial brand. But as sponsored content continues to surge as a promising model for media monetization, some will, naturally, need to tread lighter than others. I’m betting that branded content becomes a permanent part of the business cocktail that eventually “saves media.” (I have an incentive to say that, as my company provides plumbing to power such storytelling, and I’d be a hypocrite not to disclose that — but I do believe it.) However, if brands are going to provide win/wins for readers and publishers, they need to learn, as media companies have, what readers want, and how to give it to them ethically. Journalism is growing a new arm. These are the growing pains. |
On the list of this round’s winners of the Knight News Challenge, there is no bigger name than 
Past News Challenge winners have been interested in these issues before, of course; 
The majority of mobile phone users around the world use simple feature phones which, unlike smartphones, do not have advanced storage or secondary communication options like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Abayima wants to build an open source application that people can use to store information to SIM cards — effectively turning the cards into storage devices and their mobile phones into e-readers. This app is particularly useful for sharing news and information in countries where communication networks are unsafe to use due to surveillance or where authorities or other circumstances have shut off access to the Internet altogether. The team has successfully piloted a program with Ugandan activists during the country’s 2011 elections, while all SMS traffic in the country was monitored for voices of dissent. With challenge funding, Abayima plans to build the kit as an open source, full service, easy-to-use platform which enables publishing to SIM cards.
Radio continues to be a powerful tool for community information, and the RootIO project amplifies it by mixing its power with new mobile and Internet technologies. RootIO is an open-source tool kit that allows communities to create their own micro radio stations with an inexpensive smartphone and transmitter, and to share, promote, and collaborate on dynamic content. The project will be piloted in Uganda in partnership with the Uganda Radio Network, UNICEF Uganda and UNICEF Innovation Unit.
As mobile technology is increasingly the primary opportunity for billions of people around the world to access the Internet, the Wikimedia Foundation is working to remove the two biggest hurdles to access free knowledge: cost and accessibility. News Challenge funding will help create software to bring Wikipedia to lower-end, more basic phones — the kinds the majority of people use to access data outside of the West. Specifically, efforts will be focused in three areas: developing features to improve the mobile experience regardless of how feature-rich the device is – including new ways to access Wikipedia via text; increasing the number of languages that can access Wikipedia on mobile; and improving the way feature phones access the platform.
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