Nieman Journalism Lab |
- The New York Times is building a new TimesMachine
- In New Orleans, public radio, local startups, and more are teaming up for the news
- Tablet users are sticking close to the wifi
- The newsonomics of Tribune’s detour
| The New York Times is building a new TimesMachine Posted: 11 Jul 2013 11:17 AM PDT
Zooming in on pages provides not only great detail but an amazing depth of context you might not get through searching the archives. Browsing the front-page of the October 5, 1957 edition you’ll see the big story of the day is the Russians launch of Sputnik. That story itself is surrounded by other interesting historical events: Jimmy Hoffa elected president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the beginnings of an Asian flu outbreak in New York, and Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus saying he would not back down on integration after President Eisenhower sent National Guard troops to escort black students into Little Rock Central High School. There’s some interesting technology under the hood of the new TimesMachine that comes from an interesting place:
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| In New Orleans, public radio, local startups, and more are teaming up for the news Posted: 11 Jul 2013 09:16 AM PDT Editor’s note: Our friends at J-Lab have a new report out on an interesting subject: how public broadcasters — in radio and television — are trying to fill some of the void created by cutbacks at newspapers. In a number of states, the strategy has been to build new collaborative networks and make a greater investment in doing journalism. You can read the full report online, but we’ve been pulling out some of the most interesting elements from it here at Nieman Lab this week. Today, a New Orleans public radio station tries to build up its news presence through collaboration. In New Orleans’ topsy-turvy world of journalism — where alliances shift, talent is raided, and a newspaper war is blossoming — WWNO public radio has, for the past year, steered a determined course. Informed by research and bolstered by a sense of opportunity, it is erecting, piece by piece, the components for an all-news format, complete with its first news director, hired in February. “WWNO has never had a news department or news director in its 40-year history,” said Paul Maassen, general manager of WWNO, which serves about 1.5 million people in New Orleans and across 11 parishes in southeast Louisiana. By moving WWNO’s jazz and classical music offerings to digital channels, Maassen created the window to do more news and features — what his audience said they wanted. Now, he is looking to add more local news and information. “I said, ‘All right, we need to be working towards this,’” Maassen said. “Do you bring in a news director and three reporters?” he asked. “We didn’t have the money to do that. We had to work with partnerships.” Propelled by a $102,000 Knight grant awarded last July, WWNO cut deals with Nola Vie, a two-year-old arts and culture startup, the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, and The Lens, the investigative news nonprofit launched in 2009, which anted up $10,000 to help match the Knight funding. Now, Nola Vie turns its content into three WWNO features a week with Knight funds helping to pay freelancers. The Lens, known for its crowdsourced charter-school coverage, has held school-board election forums with WWNO, shared its enterprise stories, and participated in reporter debriefs with the station. It’s about to hire a producer-in-residence, embedded at The Lens, to help inject audio life into its many data-driven stories. “What has come out of this has been a very collaborative-driven approach to news in a city,” Maassen said. “What’s different here is that we are doing it as the fiber of how we develop this news department instead of: Here’s a news department, let’s add some partnerships.” The Knight grant was awarded a little more than a month after The Times-Picayune announced major changes: cutting its news staff, reducing print publication to three days a week, and putting more emphasis on its website, Nola.com. A communitywide outcry fueled a flurry of media activities and the launch of a New Orleans edition by The Advocate in Baton Rouge. (The Times-Picayune has since announced a return to daily publication of a sort, with a smaller, non-home-delivered tabloid three days a week.) The Times-Picayune’s announcements last year “just kind of underscored what we were doing,” Maassen said. Shortly after, he announced plans to build a nonprofit newsroom to be called NewOrleansReporter.org. But WWNO soon pivoted. A revised plan sought to “avoid duplication and build on existing resources” and opted instead for an expanded partnership with The Lens to cover government, education, crime, and flood issues. WWNO will do general assignment reporting and Nola Vie will contribute arts and culture. “It’s a thing where everyone does what they do best,” he said. “NPR was working closely with them on that,” said Russell Lewis, NPR’s Southern bureau chief who spent many months covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Lewis, who is now based in Birmingham but has been helping WWNO with the transition, said he had not seen this kind of collaboration anywhere else. NPR is also helping to convert the station’s website into more than a programming grid, Maassen said. “We see our role in this not as just a content developer, but as a catalyst,” Maassen said. “I am trying to raise the profile of nonprofit, independent journalism. I am saying this is valuable and it should happen. Because of the situation here in New Orleans, it’s being paid attention to — to a degree that it’s not in other communities.” Editors at both WWNO’s partner startups are former Times-Picayune journalists. They subscribe to what Steve Beatty, Lens editor and long-time investigative journalist, called a “write-once/publish-many” model of distribution. In addition to working with WWNO, their stories can appear on Nola.com; in The Advocate, whose new owner has moved aggressively into the New Orleans market; on the air of television partners; or on the websites of the four-member New Orleans Digital Alliance. The Lens rents space in the newsroom of WVUE, the local Fox affiliate, another partner. (Nola Vie got its early start with a J-Lab grant.) “We may do six stories a week,” Beatty said. “There have been days when I’ve seen our stories published in four different media.” The partners see these arrangements as win-wins. The emerging attitude among nonprofit news startups is that “it’s better to be ubiquitous than syndicated.” Impact and awareness, they say, trumps clickthroughs to their websites. “We want to be able to tell our funders: If it were not for your money, this problem would not be solved,” Beatty said. Airtime, in particular, really builds their brands: “We want people to hear The Lens on the air,” he said. For Nola Vie, the WWNO partnership means “we take our reporters and our copy and work with WWNO producers to turn them into on-air segments,” co-founder Renee Peck said. It’s a learning curve for the print reporters. They must be mindful to avoid what Beatty calls “those kind of small, head-slapping things” like saying “uh-huh” during an interview or drumming fingers on a table. In February, Maassen hired news director Eve Troeh, a Marketplace reporter, who had earlier stints as a New Orleans reporter and producer. She now must weigh when to do an interview and when to do a highly produced feature, with all the scenes and sounds that are public radio’s hallmarks. “When you start creating more local content, the audience expects that content to be better,” she said. She’s working hard to marry the station’s audio tech skills with journalism skills. In June, she worked with Nola Vie to produce Voices on Violence in response to the city’s Mother’s Day shootings that injured 20 people. In one-on-one interviews, people were taped talking about how they experienced violence in the city. Nola Vie, in addition to the podcast, also rendered the interviews as Q&As. Troeh takes heart that the station in June raised a third more than expected in a one-day mini-campaign for local-news funding. “We’re getting close to getting enough content, and it’s good enough where we feel we need to create space for it,” she said, in addition to the local-news cutaways in the national programs. “It feels like we are really pioneering this in a way,” Peck said. “The overall product is very good for the community.” Nola Vie launched in 2009 with a formal partnership with Nola.com but found WWNO’s overture appealing. The site’s other co-founder, nonprofit executive Sharon Litwin, had reported for BBC radio earlier in her career and now does regular Notes from New Orleans radio stories for WWNO. In any partnership, Peck said, “What you try to police is that you get your credit for the story and links back.” Increasingly, however, Nola Vie’s founders want to engage its stakeholders in a four-to-five minute story rather than posting its content on a partner site that wants “people to drop in for just a nano-second” so they can count the traffic. Maassen said he thinks communities will increasingly lean on public media and radio stations to get their news. “I think we should be prepared to respond. We should recognize that as an important part of what we do as service to our communities. Perhaps what we are doing here other communities could adopt.” Photo of old New Orleans postcard by Infrogmation used under a Creative Commons license. |
| Tablet users are sticking close to the wifi Posted: 11 Jul 2013 08:12 AM PDT Over at All Things D, Peter Kafka breaks down an interesting new report that includes a look at how consumers are connecting their tablets to the web:
Given the choice, most folks would rather rely on their own home network or search out wifi elsewhere over paying for a data plan. For media companies, that might mean shifting news and other offerings from the on-the-go model of the phone to something that lets readers lean-back or catch up. |
| The newsonomics of Tribune’s detour Posted: 11 Jul 2013 07:23 AM PDT Is it a detour of some kind? Is it a deke? Or is it a Koch-around? The big question is why Tribune would go through the time, money, and bother to split the companies when it doesn’t want to be in the newspaper business and has would-be buyers waiting for company data. As we speculate on that quandary, let’s look at what yesterday’s semi-surprise Tribune announcement — that it would split its broadcast and newspaper assets into two companies — will do. Let’s also look at how the newsonomics of the split further confirms the poverty of newspaper financials, a downward slope so severe that the sequestration of newspaper assets is becoming a near-universal strategy (“The newsonomics of Tribune’s metro agony”). First, expect that the papers will still be sold. They may go as a whole of individually, but they’ll go, and they may go before a spin-off is spun. The plan further certifies that by this time next year the Tribune Company will be a polished jewel of a broadcast/video company. It will have completed its just-announced acquisition of Local TV stations, making it the largest independent local owner of top-25 broadcast stations in the United States. This jewel of a property won’t have to absorb the nicks and dents associated with newspaper publishing. Broadcast TV may not be a hockey-stick growth business, but it is relatively stable, is growing modestly, and projects much more stable cash flow than print over the next three to five years (great Brian Stelter rundown on those economics). In other words, Tribune Company’s owners — Oaktree Capital Management, Angelo, Gordon & Co., and JPMorgan Chase & Co. — have set up their endgame well. That endgame could be either a sale of the new, restyled company or an IPO. Either way, the owners, having persevered through the tribulations and many trials of the Sam Zell era, will get their payday. They’ve made the next new Tribune Company — as compared to the to-be-split-off Tribune Publishing Co., which would hold the newspaper assets only, with unknown assigned cash and debt — an ever better proposition by keeping the digital and real estate assets usually associated with the newspapers. I’ve confirmed that Tribune Company intends to hold all the real estate under and around the staffs working from Chicago to Baltimore to Fort Lauderdale to L.A. That includes office buildings and production facilities. The value of newspaper-owned real estate varies widely — location, location, location — but over the last three years of newspaper sales, real estate value has often justified half of overall deal prices. The hard asset of real estate has been a powerful motivator in deals as diverse as Warren Buffett’s for Media General properties (“The newsonomics of near-term numerology”) and Halifax Media Group’s for The New York Times Co.’s regional properties. It’s a financeable asset as well. The flipside of no real estate: Buyers will have a new cost to consider, leasing or buying their own space for large workforces and print production. So Tribune keeps that value in the old company, and would-be newspaper buyers can now lower their appraisals of the papers. That’s one deduction in market value. Tribune also keeps its 32 percent stake in online recruitment leader CareerBuilder and 28 percent of auto/apartment sites run by Classified Ventures. That’s not a surprise, but it’s a point that hasn’t been clear up to now. Those digital classified companies were structured by their newspaper consortium owners to create the greatest value for equity owners, like Tribune, and less for affiliate newspapers. Whoever buys the Los Angeles Times or the Chicago Tribune will probably be offered the opportunity to continue, at least temporarily, as an affiliate, but the value of affiliation is relatively small. So that’s another deduction in market value. Today, as part of the splitting, long-term syndicate leader Tribune Media Services rebranded itself, becoming Tribune Content Agency. The low-cost, higher margin operation has been all about newspapers, but it, too, is staying with the broadcast-centric Tribune Company, and saying a big hello to content marketing. Meanwhile, those would-be profits that could have flowed to a buyer of newspaper assets now won’t. That’s a third deduction in market value. Tribune, in its split announcement, took all the reliably profitable parts of the enterprise. It left for the spun-off newspaper company the assets that will lose another five to 10 percent of their print advertising this year, and will likely continue to show overall revenue decline. We can figure that whatever the papers were collectively worth Tuesday, they’re worth maybe two-thirds of that today. So why might have Tribune taken this course? Take your pick of three scenarios I’ve heard or read in the last 24 hours:
Maybe something will change, given that extra time. In the meantime, the new Tribune has publicly and internally charted the path it wants to pursue. As one savvy insider told me: “The process for putting the papers on the market and for preparing for a split of the two companies is essentially the same.” Put that understanding together with the Koch theory and Tribune’s move makes a certain sense. Tribune has had a lot on its shiny new plate. New CEO. New board. Negotiating the major Local TV purchase. Figuring out which assets it wanted to keep and which to sell. It still faces decisions, on what to do with its newspaper obligations and on how to best resolve its stakes in the digital classifieds businesses when the papers are finally sold. Add all that together, and mix in the explosiveness of the Koch question to Tribune owners’ core business, and you can see how Tribune may have arrived at this alternative. Let’s remember its overall goal: make sure the newspaper assets don’t muddy the big broadcast play, and set the clock to do that. Chart the path. Buy some time. Hope for the best. It’s clear that Tribune gets its TV/video/digital enterprise, the kind of company clearly envisioned when it appointed its post-bankruptcy board and hired TV exec Peter Liguori at the beginning of the year. Its decision to separate its newspaper assets parallels the industry’s. As of June 28, the new News Corp took over the newspaper assets of the old News Corp., which became Twenty-First Century Fox, a global TV/entertainment behemoth. Media General dispatched its newspaper assets, selling all but one to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Media and the Tampa Tribune, separately, for a song. Belo split itself into two, newspaper and broadcast five years ago, and just sold those broadcast stations to Gannett. Gannett, now mainly a broadcast company in terms of its street valuation, remains a hybrid; who knows when it could re-work its own structure. What’s clearer and clearer: Metro newspaper companies are finding they are no longer creatures of the market. Public markets value them lowly, given their seven-year revenue decline and uncertain prospects. This Tribune move seconds that notion — and soon we’ll see what The New York Times can fetch from a Boston Globe sale. |
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