Rabu, 03 Juli 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

27,349: That’s how many subscribers Andrew Sullivan has, six months in

Posted: 02 Jul 2013 09:15 AM PDT

He provides an update on his subscription-model experiment:

But we won't really know how sustainable we are until we see if we can get all our most devoted Dishheads to give the same amount next February when their subs come due. I'm pretty confident we can – but enough of a worry-wart not to declare success until then.

A buck ninety-nine: Esquire sells a new story online for the first time

Posted: 02 Jul 2013 08:59 AM PDT

Luke Dittrich might be my favorite magazine writer, and his “The Prophet” — a skeptical profile of Dr. Eben Alexander — will be in August’s Esquire. But the magazine’s also posting it for sale separately on its website. Editor David Granger:

This is the first time we’ve asked online readers to pay for a story, but for good reason: Because stories like Dittrich’s matter and they don’t come along often. Because great journalism — and the months that go into creating it — isn’t free. So, besides providing the story to readers of our print and digital-tablet versions of the August issue, we are offering it to online readers as a stand-alone purchase. Thank you.

Great journalism, indeed, isn’t free. It’s paid for by full-page Salvatore Ferragamo ads.

Felix Salmon found the purchasing process taxing:

I didn’t have the same issues — a quick PayPal payment, pick a password, and you’re done. (Esquire’s using Tinypass.) Without giving away too much, it’s also worth noting that this is barely even a paywall technically. Very easy to evade with a well-timed keystroke or a trip to the web inspector. I would imagine that Esquire, like The New York Times, will probably leave its initial paid-content experiments intentionally leaky and tighten up over time.

Evening Edition looks to build beyond its simple model

Posted: 02 Jul 2013 07:00 AM PDT

Mule Design co-founder Mike Monteiro has never argued that Evening Edition — the five-stories-delivered-at-5 o’clock news roundup from Mule Design — is a complicated idea. “Evening Edition is ridiculously, stupidly simple,” he told me. “We got this thing done in 24 hours after thinking it up. It was crazy.” The news summary isn’t exactly a new form.

But that didn’t stop it from being received rapturously in some corners. Jon Mitchell at ReadWriteWeb, for instance: “These Designers Did for Fun What News Sites Can’t Do to Save Their Business…It did in a week's work what news organizations can't seem to do at all: deliver their output in a form that’s comfortable and convenient for the audience.” Others praised its simplicity and predicted “it won't be long before Monteiro and his group are clocking millions of page views.”

A year later, some of that buzz has worn off; pageviews have leveled off at around 30,000 a week, around what it was earning around launch and last fall, and Evening Edition isn’t raised as a savior for media as often. But Mule still believes in the formula and is expanding — even if that means adding some complexity to their simple model.

Monteiro just brought on friend-of-Nieman-Lab Miranda Mulligan (whose day job is executive director of Northwestern’s Knight Lab) to oversee the content as its editor-in-chief, and a New York edition launched last month to accompany the existing Paris, London, and San Francisco editions. (Evening Edition is published at 5 p.m. in each “local” time zone.)

“I have no idea what it’s going to look like in a month,” Mulligan said. “We’re figuring that out as we go.”

Two of her priorities are clear: creating more interesting content, and finding more ways to get people to read it. For instance, last year, when some suggested that push notifications might be a useful way to get people to read Evening Edition, Monteiro argued for simplicity:

Now, he’s warmed up to the idea of an app to provide push notifications, if it means more people paying attention to the publication. “One of things we’ve heard is that people forget it’s there, because people don’t get those alerts for emails the way they do with an app,” Monteiro said, adding that they would be very interested in new desktop push notifications as well. “We’re trying lots of stuff; some of it might stick.”

Mulligan said editions for more cities are coming soon, and she is also working to make that content more reader-friendly. Evening Edition emails typically focus on international news — the four headlines in a recent New York edition email were about Taliban peace talks, global refugee numbers, toxins in the Fukushima water supply, and protests in Brazil — and she acknowledged that the generic writing style can be unappealing.

“I think we might try not necessarily going lighter with the news, but I think we’re going to be trying to be more approachable,” Mulligan said. “Some of it will be style and presentation; some of it will be a more approachable way of writing the stories.” (As she put it in her intro post: “Perhaps we'll pivot to something more locally focused. Perhaps we'll shoot for something more dinner-party-esque.”)

Evening Edition is still a side project for Mule, supported in part through sponsorships, which include a small ad on the Evening Edition website, links at the bottom of their daily emails, and a 20- to 30-second spot at the beginning of their daily podcast. “We’ve done okay with that,” Monteiro said. “I don’t think anybody’s getting rich here, but we’ve paid people, you know, a kick past being a volunteer.” (Eight people work on Evening Edition in some capacity, including freelance writers and Mule Design employees who work on other projects as well.)

There’s still lots of power in summarization, but another effort that got some attention last year is also still operating on a small scale. The Brief, a tech-focused publication that also attracted attention for its simple, curated summaries of the day’s news, is a much smaller operation, designed and compiled exclusively by Richard Dunlop-Walters, who also compiles The Feature (née Give Me Something to Read) for Instapaper. Unlike Evening Edition, the site’s identity isn’t staked on being once-daily, Dunlop-Walters says, and now he says he’s considering scrapping that model altogether.

“I’m still deciding the right format for it,” he said. “I think a lot of people, more news junkie people, like to read things through the day. I want to appeal to those people too.”

The Brief, which launched last October, has about 700 subscribers to its free daily email of the day’s tech news, and about 100 of them pay $3 per month for additional content. Dunlop-Walters admits he’s not interested in marketing and promotion, and he’s happy that his readership has slowly expanded in the site’s first six months without worrying too much about the business model.

“It would be nice if it were sustainable, if it was a full-time thing, but that seems a long way off,” he said.

Image from Olivander used under a Creative Commons license.
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