Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Amazon wants to sell you groceries
- What news orgs can learn from political campaigns, starting with the tough stuff
- Tracing the links between civic engagement and the revival of local journalism
- Green, yellow, blue, and red: The Globe and Mail’s paywall of many colors
- From Nieman Reports: From a few Goliaths to a sea of Davids
- “The consensus among the experts” never said the NYT’s paywall was foolhardy
- A new kind of activist journalism: When finding solutions are part of journalists’ job, too
| Amazon wants to sell you groceries Posted: 04 Jun 2013 11:40 AM PDT Reuters’ Alistair Barr reports that Amazon is planning to get into the grocery business:
Why does this matter to news? As Ken Doctor wrote in these pages last summer, Amazon’s invasion of local retail will only put more pressure on media that relies on local businesses for advertising dollars — most notably, newspapers. Those grocery-store inserts you get in your Sunday paper (if you get a Sunday paper, that is) are very important to your local daily’s bottom line, and they’ve been one of the few relative bright spots in recent years. It seems unlikely Amazon would approach advertising the same way Kroger does. |
| What news orgs can learn from political campaigns, starting with the tough stuff Posted: 04 Jun 2013 09:21 AM PDT New York Times developer Derek Willis writes today about how data journalists can learn to better cover elections, specifically when it comes to “targeting and predictive analysis.” He warns against analyzing political campaigns as though they were consumer ad campaigns, and urges restraint both when it comes to panicking about control of personal data and imagining the potential Big Data has to actually change elections.
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| Tracing the links between civic engagement and the revival of local journalism Posted: 04 Jun 2013 09:00 AM PDT
Editor’s note: Our friend Dan Kennedy has a new book out, and it’s right up Nieman Lab’s alley. The Wired City: Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-Newspaper Age takes as its subject local journalism in cities where new online outlets — some for-profit, some not — have set up shop. His primary focus is New Haven, Connecticut, where the New Haven Independent has been one of the new world’s biggest successes. In this piece, Dan examines the main lessons he took from reporting and writing the book, which you should read. We’ll have an excerpt from the book and a more thorough interview with Dan later this week.
I had driven to New Haven on this day in late November 2010 to see if Paul Bass, the founder and editor of the New Haven Independent, could pull off an audacious experiment in civic engagement. The Independent, a nonprofit online-only news organization, is the principal subject of my new book, The Wired City. The subtitle — Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-Newspaper Age — reflects my belief that news can't survive without public participation. What we got that night was full immersion. Stage right, Ravitch sat with 11 other people — principals, teachers, school officials, a high school student, a board of education member, and the like. Stage left, a half-dozen media folks and elected officials, including Mayor John DeStefano, were liveblogging the event. The forum was webcast on television and radio, as well as on the websites of the Independent and the New Haven Register, the city's daily newspaper. Viewers at home — and, for that matter, those in the auditorium who had laptops — were able to engage in a real-time, online conversation with the livebloggers. Afterwards, readers posted a total of 53 comments to the two stories the Independent published (here and here). The archived video was posted as well. Finally, in a touch that seemed almost old-fashioned, the 200 or so people who attended were invited to line up at two microphones during an extended question-and-answer period. Among the myriad crises facing journalism, perhaps none is more vexing than civic illiteracy. Starting in the 1990s, leading thinkers such as New York University's Jay Rosen began sketching out ways for news organizations to listen to their audience's concerns and to shape their coverage accordingly. This "public journalism" movement, as it became known, fizzled as newsroom budget cuts and criticism from traditional journalists took their toll. But if the audience doesn't care about the public-interest aspects of journalism, then there really isn't much hope for a revival. Over the years, newspaper publishers have responded to the decline of civic life by loading up on celebrity gossip and so-called news you can use, such as personal finance and cooking tips. It's a losing game, because there are always going to be better sources of such information than the local newspaper. More than a dozen years ago, the Harvard scholar Robert Putnam, in his classic book Bowling Alone, found that people who were engaged in civic life — voting in local elections, taking part in volunteer activities, attending religious services or participating in any number of other activities — were also more likely to read newspapers. "Newspaper readers," he wrote, "are machers and schmoozers." Trouble is, Putnam's machers and schmoozers were aging even then. And so it is up to news organizations not merely to serve the public, but to nurture and educate the public so that it is engaged with civic life, and thus with the fundamental purpose of journalism. C.W. Anderson, in his book Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age, writes that "journalists [report] the news in order to call a particular form of public into being." Along similar lines, I argue in The Wired City that creating a public is at least as important as reporting on its behalf. No longer can it be taken for granted that there is a public ready to engage with news about last night's city council meeting, a speech by the mayor or plans by a developer to tear down a neighborhood landmark and replace it with yet another convenience store. Howard Owens, the publisher of The Batavian, a for-profit site in western New York that I also write about in my book, once put it this way:
In researching The Wired City, I learned that the readership for the New Haven Independent comprises a wide swath — elected officials, city employees (especially police officers and teachers), leaders and activists in the African-American community, dedicated localists, and members of what struck me as a surprisingly large and politically aware group of bicycling advocates. Though the Independent's audience is not as large as that of the New Haven Register, its concentration inside the city limits and its popularity among opinion leaders — "the grassroots and grasstops circles," as Michael Morand, an associate vice president at Yale, described it to me in an interview — gives the site outsize influence. Indeed, it was the Independent's relentless coverage of a controversy over the video-recording of police actions by members of the public that led to a clarification from the police chief that such recording was legal. It also led to mandatory training for all officers. Thus what we see in New Haven, in Batavia, and in other places where news organizations are trying new methods of bridging the divide between journalism and the public is a revival of the ideas Jay Rosen and others first began championing two decades ago. "What we today call 'engagement' was a central feature of many civic-journalism experiments, but in a way we were working with very crude tools then," Rosen told me in 2011. "It's almost like we were trying to do civic engagement with heavy machinery instead of the infinitely lighter and cheaper tools we have now." The "wired city" that I argue the New Haven Independent brought into being is a community built around local news, empowered by the "lighter and cheaper tools" that have become available during the past decade and a half. Through events like the Diane Ravitch forum, through carefully (if not perfectly) curated user comments, and through the now-taken-for-granted convenience of always being just a few clicks away, the Independent has succeeded not so much as an entity unto itself but as the hub of a civic ecosystem. As Clay Shirky has observed, with local newspapers slowly fading away, no single alternative will replace what they once provided. We need a variety of experiments — for-profit, nonprofit, cooperative ownership and voluntary efforts. The challenge all of them face is that serving the public is no longer enough. Rather, the public they serve must first be assembled — and given a voice. Photo of the line at New Haven pizza institution Pepe’s by eschipul used under a Creative Commons license. |
| Green, yellow, blue, and red: The Globe and Mail’s paywall of many colors Posted: 04 Jun 2013 08:47 AM PDT Sarah Marshall at journalism.co.uk has a report from a talk at the World Newspaper Congress in Bangkok from John Stackhouse, editor-in-chief of The Globe and Mail. I hadn’t realized the Globe’s paywall was so complicated:
For instance, this Rob Ford-related piece is subscriber-only — not for the non-paying metered crowd. Presumably, that’s “red.” But as far as I can tell, there’s no easy way for the reader to know which stories are green, yellow, or blue.
The journalism.co.uk piece has some other interesting tidbits, most notably this, which was a surprise to me:
Ninety percent conversion from trial to full price? That is quite a feat. (Insert Canadian stereotype here.) If you didn’t see it back in October, check out our Q&A with Globe publisher Phillip Crawley about their paywall plans. |
| From Nieman Reports: From a few Goliaths to a sea of Davids Posted: 04 Jun 2013 08:00 AM PDT Editor's note: Our colleagues at our sister publication Nieman Reports are out with their new issue, and there's a lot of great stuff in there for any journalist to check out. Over the next few days, we'll share excerpts from a few of the stories that we think would be of most interest to Nieman Lab readers. Be sure to check out the entire issue. Here, Harvard’s Nicco Mele, author of The End of Big, argues that digital technology will lead to new, smaller news organizations.
It was hard for me to get too worked up about the end of big newspapers. But then a funny thing happened. I was asked to judge a big journalism prize. As part of the judging, I read more than 200 investigative news stories from outlets big and small, although almost all of them newspapers. They were stories of terrible depravity and corruption, in some sense the worst humanity has to offer. But I finally understood in a tangible way the crucial role newspapers play in a democracy—and I began to get afraid, very afraid. The Internet and mobile phones — a combination I call “radical connectivity” — profoundly empower individuals in ways that spell disaster for traditional “big” organizations. Big news organizations have seen both news production and advertising revenue disrupted by radical connectivity. The entertainment industry, from publishing to record companies, is in its own death throes. Big armies face distributed cells of terrorists instead of nation-states, while ad-hoc hackers the world over look for disruptive opportunities for “lulz.” Big political parties find themselves besieged by insurgents like Tea Party candidates, while citizens crowdsource solutions to public problems outside of big government. Tenured professors at big universities are growing large audiences on YouTube outside of tuition-paying students. Even big manufacturing faces a growing challenge from desktop 3D printers, spelling an end for big brands. Keep reading at Nieman Reports » |
| “The consensus among the experts” never said the NYT’s paywall was foolhardy Posted: 04 Jun 2013 07:05 AM PDT Jay Rosen writes about how history of the The New York Times’ paywall is being reshaped after the fact. His argument is with a quote from NYT Co. CEO Mark Thompson, speaking at Columbia’s business school graduation, about the paywall’s reception two years ago:
Here’s Jay:
Jay’s post is a useful corrective. Lots of Nieman Lab material (and me) quoted in there. |
| A new kind of activist journalism: When finding solutions are part of journalists’ job, too Posted: 04 Jun 2013 07:00 AM PDT Four years ago, UrbanMilwaukee.com zeroed in on South 2nd Street, a pocked roadway in the city’s Walker’s Point section that seemed “ripe for improvement,” said site co-founder David Reid. The local community weighed in with ideas, then graphic artist Kieran Sweeney sketched a possible redesign. It included, trees and access for pedestrians and bikers as well as cars. His sketch was entered in a livable-streets competition, and it took second place. That was just the news peg traditional Milwaukee news outlets needed to publish the images. Before long, a local alderman got on board and the idea of a redesign got put on the public works agenda. Two years later, the community cut the ribbon on — voila — its new streetscape. This example (from J-Lab’s “Engaging Audiences” report) and many more struck me as I listened on Friday to a panel at the Ashoka Future Forum wrestle with ideas on how to move news from a commodity to a catalyst for empowering citizens.   From 2009: A photo of South 2nd Street in Milwaukee (top) and a concept image by Kieran Sweeney. “We’re seeking to go from knowledge to movement,” said Jonathan Wells, managing publisher of the Christian Science Monitor, which is crafting a survival strategy that involves more than just going all-digital. “In five years, the Monitor will be building communities around intention and intentionality,” he said. If one shifts the periscope from new business models for journalism to new journalism models for news, I see the convergence of several trends that are beginning to provoke a new conversation about whether journalists can — and should — craft a more deliberate suite of tools that inspire movement and action. And if these tools were effective, would citizen begin to pay as much for news as they pay to go to, say, a TED conference? To be sure, advocacy is still a dirty word for legacy journalists, unless it’s an editorial-board crusade. But activating examples are rising from both inside and outside mainstream media. In addition to its before-and-after streets visualization, Urban Milwaukee, for one, has also invited readers to plot new trolley routes. Several news outlets have employed budget calculators, news games, and clickable maps to give news consumers a way to wrestle with public choices. They usually fall short, however, of becoming actual change agents. My colleague Matt Nesbit has chronicled the rise of “knowledge journalists,” such as Bill McKibben, who use their expert logic to analyze problems and political logic to help point to policy solutions. Now we see the return of “solutions journalism,” a notably successful tool in the civic and public journalism toolbox of more than a decade ago. With the rise of the “Solutions Journalism Network,” David Bornstein, who writes for The New York Times’ Fixes blog, aspires to persuade journalists to include a solutions component in their stories. “Journalists say: I am allowed to cover the problems and then go home and my job is done,” Bornstein told the Ashoka gathering. “Why not cover the other half of the story?…If the solutions don’t work, we can cover that, too.” “Society will become better when you show it where it’s going wrong and how it can be done better,” he said. Bornstein advocates doing deep dives on “positive deviance.” Rather than focusing on failures, journalists can pull out the contrarian success stories in data sets and unpack the elements of their success. From my perch, I see many indie news startups embrace what I call more of a “soft-advocacy” comfort level with news. ClearHealthCosts.com is partnering with WNYC to map widely disparate costs of mammograms in the New York region. PlanPhilly has not only spotlighted the enormous problem of delinquent property taxes in Philadelphia, it reported on how the city might fix its broken system. When Catalyst Chicago reported there were too many empty seats in the city’s pre-school programs, it didn’t stop there. It worked with local community organizations to produce a series of forums on early childhood education. A year later, nearly all the pre-school slots were filled. There may be much to learn from how TED has evolved. Initially, its talks spotlighted speakers at luxury conferences who had ideas worth spreading. But TED Media executive producer June Cohen told the Ashoka group that in an effort to spread the good ideas, she invited interest from television networks. When they got no takers, they videotaped the talks and put them online. “Our worry was this would capsize our business model of luxury conferences that costs $4,000,” Cohen said. “What happened was precisely against conventional wisdom. We raised our prices by 50 percent to $6,000 and we sold out within a week with a thousand-person waiting list.” Now, 10,000 volunteer translators translate TED Talks into other languages, and groups can sign up to do their local TedX events “to find their own stories and bring them out.” “TED has gone from being a conference in California to being a global media platform,” she said, with aspirations to figure out how to inspire audiences to take the next steps in addressing problems. Cohen points out that “sponsors want to be associated with positive change.” In five years, she sees the TedX networks of bottoms-up storytelling “driving us” to be a “network of idea generation that will be tied to action.” Her thinking aligns with the Christian Science Monitor’s Wells, who sees the relationships changing significantly between the news organization and its consumers and advertisers. “People are looking for a sense of empowerment and an ability to take action,” he said. Can it be monetized? “People pay for the Harvard Business Review,” Bornstein points out, “because it solves their problems.” Jan Schaffer is executive director of J-Lab, a journalism catalyst for igniting news ideas that work by funding pilot projects, awarding innovations and sharing practical insights from years of working with news creators. J-Lab is based at American University’s School of Communication. |
The star attraction was supposed to be 
While that all seems complicated, I understand the appeal of putting the wall in different places for different types of readers with different usage patterns. Presumably, they can tinker based on the uptake data they’re seeing. It’s still quite opaque, though. (I know I read many more than 10 Globe articles in May — 
I am not a journalist. I’m a digital guy. I am well versed in the trends of newspapers’ decline, but at the age of 35 I’ve never read a daily newspaper. My entire information life has been digital and, consequently, fragmented. | 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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