Kamis, 02 Mei 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

A community news co-op, aiming to build a replicable model, moves a step closer to reality

Posted: 01 May 2013 11:58 AM PDT

haverhill-by-dan-kennedy-cc

It was as incongruous a situation as I could imagine. April 19 was one of the most gripping news days we have ever experienced in Massachusetts. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger of the suspected marathon bombers, was in hiding. Boston and several other cities were under voluntary lockdown. And that morning I was driving north, toward Haverhill, on my way to a meeting where earnest community activists were making plans to revive local journalism.

While all hell was breaking loose elsewhere, the Haverhill Matters Organizing Committee met in a sunny conference room at Haverhill Community Television. The committee's goal is to launch a cooperatively owned news site to be called Haverhill Matters sometime this year.

It's been a long time coming. Tom Stites, a veteran journalist who's worked at The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, came up with the idea of local news co-ops a few years ago. He founded the Banyan Project to serve as an umbrella; Haverhill Matters will be the pilot. I wrote about his plans for the Lab last year, as well as in the epilogue to my forthcoming book about online community journalism, The Wired City. The launch date for Haverhill Matters has slipped a few times, but at this point it looks like 2013 will be the year.

The hour-long meeting was taken up with fairly mundane planning issues, but I could see that the site is moving toward reality. Currently the committee is at the first of a four-stage process, outlined in considerable detail on the Banyan website. The organizers envision everything from crowdsourced reporting projects to quotidian coverage of local news; a board of directors will hire two full-time employees, an executive director and an editor. The site will make ample use of freelancers, neighborhood bloggers, and college and high school interns.

After some back-and-forth about liability issues, the committee members agreed to sign on with the Cooperative Development Institute to handle Haverhill Matters' finances. There were charts about finances and timetables, and about how the yet-to-be-hired editor should spend the 520 hours he or she will be working each quarter.

"We're really at a go/no-go moment, and I think we've decided to go," said Tim Coco, president and general manager of WHAV, an online radio station based in Haverhill.

"Well, we want to," replied local activist Mike LaBonte, co-chair of the organizing committee.

Coco professed some skepticism about what he was hearing but supported the idea of moving ahead. "It's not feasible," he said, "but that's never stopped me before."

The Banyan Project is aimed at serving what Stites calls "news deserts" — less-than-affluent communities that tend to be shunned by high-end advertisers and, thus, by the news organizations that rely on those advertisers. Haverhill, a city of 61,000 on the Merrimack River at the New Hampshire line, meets that definition. The Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, or MassINC, lists Haverhill as one of 11 "Gateway Cities" — former manufacturing centers that are struggling with a lack of resources and economic investment.

Yet in other respects, Haverhill is an unlikely "news desert." Though the days when two daily newspapers battled it out are long gone, The Eagle-Tribune, based in nearby North Andover, continues to publish a daily Haverhill edition. The Eagle-Tribune also publishes a weekly paper, The Haverhill Gazette, that offers local staples such as school news, feel-good features, and announcements. Add in Haverhill Community Television, with its robust lineup of local programming, and WHAV, and it would appear that more than a few flowers are sprouting in this particular desert.

The real target, then, is the unaccountability of local journalism controlled by out-of-state corporations. For years now, The Eagle-Tribune’s owner, Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. of Montgomery, Alabama, has been decimating its properties. Neither The Eagle-Tribune nor the Gazette has an office in Haverhill anymore. Thus Haverhill Matters represents an attempt by local residents to tell their own story.

In reporting The Wired City, I learned that there are problems with both the for-profit and nonprofit models of independent online local journalism. The owners of the for-profits — including sites like The Batavian, CT News Junkie, and Baristanet — have to spend so much time selling advertising that it limits the amount of journalism they can afford to do.

Nonprofits such as the New Haven Independent, the main focus of my book, are more robust. But not every community is willing to support such a venture, and the Internet Revenue Service has made it increasingly difficult for such sites to attain nonprofit 501(c)(3) status. Moreover, nonprofits are prohibited from endorsing political candidates, traditionally an important activity for local news organizations.

A cooperatively owned news site — analogies include credit unions and food co-ops — would occupy a space somewhere between the two models, and would not be banned from publishing endorsements. Tom Stites is currently soliciting contributions for Haverhill Matters' launch. He hopes to attract 1,500 members at $36 a year, bringing in $54,000, as well as advertising and grant money. A chart Mike LaBonte displayed showed an initial $45,000 expenditure, with the site reaching break-even in two and a half years.

Unlike one-off projects such as the New Haven Independent or The Batavian, the intention behind Haverhill Matters is that it be replicable. Stites hopes the Banyan Project will be able to offer a "co-op in a box" to communities looking to start their own cooperatively owned news sites. But first he has to prove the model can work. Which is why Haverhill Matters matters.

Dan Kennedy is an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University and a panelist on Beat the Press, a weekly media program on WGBH-TV Boston. His blog, Media Nation, is online at dankennedy.net. His book on the New Haven Independent and other community news sites, The Wired City: Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-Newspaper Age, will be published by University of Massachusetts Press this month.

Photo of Haverhill by Dan Kennedy.

The New York Times launched a revamped mobile site today

Posted: 01 May 2013 11:42 AM PDT

nytimes-mobile-redesignYou can check it out at mobile.nytimes.com. A few quick thoughts:

— In typography and story layout, it’s much closer to the Times’ iPhone app, edging closer toward cross-platform parity. (Headlines are still just Georgia, not the custom version of Cheltenham it uses in print, in apps, and on Skimmer. But they’re now black — no longer 1994-weblink blue.) Presentation of images, captions, and credits on article pages are also much closer to app styles.

— It’s responsive — to a very limited degree! You’ll still find different layouts at mobile.nytimes.com and www.nytimes.com — this ain’t BostonGlobe.com — but mobile.nytimes.com does reflow at widths of 600px or narrower. The Times mobile site caps its width there — unlike, say, the Guardian’s mobile site, which will expand all the way up to 1250px.

— There’s less cruft at the top of the mobile homepage — no more weather or stock indexes, and the search bar and section navigation get significantly less real estate. (Market data’s pushed down a few screens.)

Overall, the takeaways seem to be: a common visual experience across mobile platforms (app/web — see also the new Reuters site) and a cleaner, more premium look.

Mobile is becoming (or should be becoming!) a big deal for every news organization, but as Fiona Spruill wrote for us back in December, it’s already a big deal at the Times:

In the next 12–18 months, many news organizations will cross the 50 percent threshold where more users are visiting on phones and tablets than on desktop computers and laptops.

In November, 37 percent of all visits to the Times (including to NYTimes.com, our mobile site, and all of our apps) came from phones or tablets. That's up from 28 percent in 2011 and 20 percent in 2010. When media organizations see numbers like this, they will be forced to decide whether they can continue to put the majority of their digital efforts into the presentation of their desktop report. If you do that, your product, and your journalism, will not be tailored for the majority of your digital readers.

Some tech notes from Twitter: It’s powered by Node.js; they’re using Varnish for caching. And:

Every page is your homepage: Reuters, untied to print metaphor, builds a modern river of news

Posted: 01 May 2013 11:06 AM PDT

Reuters LogoReuters, as a wire service, has the concept of a minute-by-minute stream of news deep in its DNA. So it’s natural that its digital presence would echo that — a flowing river of information, where moving from story to story feels unencumbered.

Yesterday Reuters unveiled a preview site for the future look and design of Reuters.com; it had given a sneak peek earlier. It’s a river-of-news type of approach that mirrors the flow of data on one of Reuters terminals, but has also become increasingly popular in the era of social media. Go to an article page and you find that you’re actually placed in the middle of a larger stream of content — scroll up or down and you’ll find your story’s text actually lives in a bifurcated version of the Reuters front page. If every page is your homepage, why not treat them all like one?

The team responsible for the new site and apps sees the project as less of a redesign and more of a rebuild: Instead of adding new flooring and fixtures, they’ve taken the house down to the foundation. (See below for more.) “This goes back to the history of Reuters. This news organizations has access to so much information being delivered in real time,” said Jim Roberts, executive editor for Reuters Digital (and until recently of The New York Times). The goal of the new digital products is to merge the worlds of traditional newsgathering and social media: “I’m also a fan of what social media is doing to conventional media to have the ability to smartly inform people in real time about the information we are creating with our 2,800 journalists.”

The stream approach has become somewhat fashionable in the world of news, said Daniele Codega, design director for Reuters Digital, partially because audiences (and publishers too) no longer have a fear of scrolling. (Some, like Quartz, have built an entire navigation hierarchy around scrolling rather than clicking.) “We have a ton of content coming through at Thomson Reuters in general,” said Codega. “It’s truly real time, and by its nature it’s different types of news in 15 different content types, from articles to slideshows to liveblogs, tweets, and videos.”

In an era when many newspapers and magazines are using typography and layout to make their apps look like their print product, Reuters — with no print edition to ape — is instead making its website look a lot like its new apps, building a consistent experience across platforms. (Also of a piece here is today’s redesign of The New York Times’ mobile site, which looks an awful lot like the Times’ mobile apps.) In Reuters’ new apps, stories open and close within the flow of news, and gesturing up or down navigates through to other stories within a topic area. On the web, a bit of JavaScript makes the loading of separate pages look a bit more seamless, using loading indicators and rapid scrolls between articles to further break the click-to-load metaphor.

The preview version of Reuters.com retains many of the expected features of any news site, including a front page that gives prominent placement to timely stories, photos, and videos. While the navigation bar offers basic directions to topics, top news, markets, and the wire, the bulk of the homepage eschews modular front page design — headings for “U.S. News,” “Sports,” “Multimedia,” and the like — in favor of a feed of news and tweets that are happening right now. Articles opening within the stream keeps readers surrounded on all sides by news. In other words, Reuters has been Twitter-ized.

Alex Leo, head of product for Reuters.com, said the larger theme of the new digital offerings is to create interconnected, contextual streams of information. “We wanted to create an experience for users that would give them the right amount of breadth and knowledge that they need from Reuters,” Leo said. In the new river of news, stories are surrounded by similarly related content. If you’re reading a story about Jason Collins becoming the first openly gay NBA player, you might see articles about basketball, gay rights, or sports. It’s similar for other stories, so with Pfizer, you’ll get drug manufacturers, and the pharmaceuticals industry. Context, in this case, cuts across different dimensions, Leo said, not just background on a story but also information on a particular industry, a region of the world, or people and places associated with a topic. Reuters is able to manage this through a deep tagging system, which means stories can pop up in different areas.

Redesigning a news websites is an exercise in sacrifice and testing assumptions, because no matter how well you optimize a page it’s likely readers won’t get exposed to all of your work. Designers and editors have to deal in tradeoffs: How much room should you dedicate to headlines vs. story excerpts? How big can you make photos at the expense of text? What tools are readers really looking for on the page, and what are we keeping for our own vanity?

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On the new Reuters.com, articles will be more or less elements on the page designed to point readers in a direction they may have some interest in. If you wound up on Reuters.com because you clicked on a Apple story from Twitter, they want to offer up as much related fare as possible. Because if you came to read a technology story, it’s likely you’ll have some interest in similarly related tech content. By mingling individual articles among other content, Reuters wants to prevent them from becoming a dead-end street. As Leo put it, “We don’t want readers to run around the site to fetch stories.”

It’s a move that recognizes the ascendance of individual articles over homepages, largely powered by social media. Leo said Reuters is taking some cues from services like Twitter and Tumblr that “display news and create engagement around the news.” But the emphasis on article pages also makes sense for a news company that, while having a long history and significant news-gathering resources, may lack the name recognition with consumers that other news sites do. If you’re someone familiar with a Thomson Reuters finance or legal products, you probably associate the name with news. By making a social-friendly site, Reuters wants to broaden that association to a larger audience.

Roberts said news sites homepages are still a powerful driver of traffic, but the tide is shifting in another direction. “The days where you could drive big portion of audience to any single page? That’s pretty much done,” he said. The media have to be willing to adapt to changing times, Roberts said, and that means having a highly adaptable website and apps. “This is just the beginning,” Roberts said. Expect the new Reuters site to regularly tweak features and roll out new tools, he said.

Curious about the technology behind the new Reuters site? Reuters.com Technology Editor Paul Smalera, who was a project manager on the site, tweeted out a few of the details yesterday:
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