Nieman Journalism Lab |
- The newsonomics of big and little, from NBC News and GlobalPost to Thunderdome
- Gawker’s trying native advertising in its comments
- If you use WordPress, you too can have tweetable sentences like in that New York Times SNL story
- AIR’s Localore is putting down roots and trying to build a more networked public media
| The newsonomics of big and little, from NBC News and GlobalPost to Thunderdome Posted: 29 Aug 2013 12:22 PM PDT Ah, the joys of big and of little. In media businesses, little means few if any layers of bothersome decision-making. Agility. Nimbleness. Independence. All great and positive values. But little can also mean limited reach and resources. Little can mean a tough, long slog to success of any satisfying scale. Big, of course, means impact: power of product, of story, of idea. Ability to reach lots of people and customers. Big, though, inevitably means greater expense and often cumbersome, sometimes laughable, response to market changes. At worst, it means paralysis. What if you could mix big and little — and take advantage of the best of both worlds? That’s the aim of one of the more interesting new partnerships in news media. In early August, NBC News and GlobalPost announced an unusual mating. No immediate cash is changing hands in the deal, but there’s a lot of other currency involved here that tells where smart content companies — big and little — are going in the next digital age. Let’s look at the newsonomics of big and little, and their mating. NBC is one of the behemoths, with tremendous reach and substantial expense — and, historically, not one of the nimblest companies around. Boston-based GlobalPost is a four-year-old for-profit startup that improbably launched an ambitious international news site — built on in-country original reporting — in the immediate aftermath of the Great Recession. It’s been much decorated with awards, including a Peabody, since. What did little GlobalPost and big NBC News see in each other? GlobalPost founder and CEO Phil Balboni knew what he wanted in a mate. After four years of learning, he’d found that his original hopes for a well-diversified business model couldn’t be realized. While syndication of GlobalPost content accounts for 19 percent of the company’s revenue and membership and “other” about 12 percent, both those numbers are significantly less than what Balboni had hoped. Even before the digital ad challenge got tougher, Balboni knew he didn’t want to become too dependent on advertising. But today, digital advertising accounts for 69 percent of revenue. GlobalPost is finding some real success in direct selling, bringing in high-profile clients like Shell, Xerox, Lockheed Martin, Chevron, and Liberty Mutual, some of the same brands we see populating a number of premium news sites. However, the ubiquitous downward price pressure on non-premium ads is having an impact. That led Balboni to look for a big brother. While he’d done various kinds of editorial partnerships with CBS and PBS over time, none had produced a game-changing business impact. What GlobalPost needed was two things:
What NBC News needs is more high quality international news content, at a low cost. Staff-produced content is expensive, and NBC, like its network peers, have seen significant cutbacks in staffing for years. For David Verdi, NBC News’ senior VP for worldwide news gathering, the GlobalPost deal is an extension of a commitment he made long ago: produce more content than ever before to feed the multi-platform beast, at a lower budget than ever before. Ten years ago, many editors, print and broadcast, would have said it can’t be done; many of those have left the field of combat. NBC first partnered with U.K. broadcaster ITN in 1994. Verdi says that relationship has doubled NBC News’ global reach and made possible lots of shared resource efficiencies. Full circle, in March of this year, ITN/ITV news chief Deborah Turness assumed the presidency of NBC News, becoming the first female president of one of the Big Three U.S. network news broadcasters. Inevitably, top editorial managers are facing a new world of metrics that no one taught in journalism school. Verdi has to take into account costs per program and per story as he strives to remake the business. It’s the high-end professional content that drives this relationship. “In a world of social media and smartphones, everybody’s a journalist,” says Verdi, a 23-year NBC News veteran. To continue its differentiation, NBC News must stay at the top end of the trade. It’s not just the actual reporting that’s of value — it’s the in-country eyes and ears aware of trends and sentiments before big news, giving NBC a window into “events that you can see coming.” Says Verdi of the GlobalPost reporters: “They are living it.” The GlobalPost deal helps fill some holes in NBC’s global map. GP’s editorial strategy places 13 full-time senior correspondents largely in parts of the world it sees as undercovered: Bangkok, Brussels, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, Lima, London, Mexico City, Moscow, Nairobi, New Delhi, and Seoul. GP also works with a roster of 50 in-country freelancers worldwide. NBC News gets the ability to run three GlobalPost stories a day and tap into the GP reporters on air and for online video. Already, the month-old deal has accounted for Cairo correspondent Louisa Loveluck appearing on MSNBC several times, as has editor-at-large Charlie Sennott. (Founding editor Sennott is now heading up a push to expand the site’s “Special Reports,”, gaining foundation grants to support that time-intensive work.) One acute observer of network international news — Andrew Heyward, who ran CBS News from 1996 to 2005 — thinks the partnership is a smart move, and an update of an old practice. “It is an outsourced version of the stringer system,” says Heyward, who notes that he has done consulting for NBC. Networks can make sure they have a presence on big stories by sharing video globally — but winning against competitors means distinguishing yourself, now more than ever. “The next battle is to do reporting that stands out,” says Heyward. GlobalPost, then, being exclusive to NBC News, among its competitors, helps provide that differentiation, even as it flies in its Richard Engels to put the NBC face on the big story. The NBC/GP deal, interestingly, was driven by NBC chief digital officer Vivian Schiller, who took on her post two years ago. Expect more such deals, Schiller told me, especially as NBC fills out its topic channel business. “This is a model to push external reach and footprint,” she says. Both Schiller and Verdi long knew Phil Balboni, who built New England Cable News, so let’s note the continuing importance of trusted — and trustworthy — relationships in getting these kinds of deals done. It’s also noteworthy that the digital side of the business brought it to the editorial side, aiming at potential digital/broadcast wins. Too often, chafing between legacy and digital units has prevented such deals at many media companies. It only makes sense that Schiller would use such a third-party content strategy at NBC. Though her experience running digital at The New York Times was more internally focused (the Times remains mostly resistant, if not allergic, to non-Times content), her NPR experience may be instructive. Think about how often you hear other media companies’ reporters on air — an intelligent, free borrowing of content from highly trusted sources. As Schiller builds out that strategy, she can also borrow from the DFM playbook. On a local level, the biggest story in rewiring the content landscape is still being written by Digital First Media. Digital First Media’s Thunderdome, led by digital news pioneer Jim Brady, profoundly embraces the strategy — and the emerging economy — of third-party content. In a nutshell, DFM CEO John Paton’s transformation of Journal Register and MediaNews properties, under the DFM banner, calls for a singular staff focus on local news. Since readers still expect non-local news in their papers and on their websites, the DFM aim is to assemble that non-local stuff from a variety of partners, as cheaply as possible. The growing list of partners shows a profound change in the content landscape, a new ecosystem of value, one that echoes the philosophical underpinnings of the NBC/GlobalPost deal. We can also see the connections between GlobalPost and DFM beyond sharing philosophy; GP is a content supplier to DFM and Jim Brady is a member of GP’s editorial board. A partial list of DFM’s content partners:
While many newspapers have complained about their reliance on AP (and its cost), few have moved to license lots of topic-specific third-party content. While many newspaper chains have begun centralizing print and digital page and channel development, no one else is doing both — the licensing and the centralization — on the scale of DFM’s 40-person Thunderdome unit. For DFM, Thunderdome is wholly aimed at the digital side of the business, but regional print hubs are beginning to do parallel work, beginning at DFM’s Los Angeles News Group. There’s a high level of complexity in the creation of the digital channels, mating big and small (sites and content providers, on several levels) and national and local. Explains top Thunderdome Editor Robyn Tomlin: “On the digital side, we are working with NewsCred to develop channels that will contain both the best/most relevant national content — and they will integrate all relevant local content. “So a health channel has news on the latest health study, the Affordable Care Act, and on local hospital news. Local is always the priority on all channels. This is much harder than it sounds, as it means you have to have the ability to manage content at different levels (national, regional, local) to make it work. NewsCred is helping us architect a solution that allows us to do just that. We will start launching these channels this fall [with health] and will continue to roll out several a month [totaling 18] through next spring.” (For more on NewsCred, see “The Newsonomics of recycling journalism.”) Among other models, DFM uses the same no-money-changes-hand arrangement of NBC and GlobalPost, as bigger DFM sites provide traffic and awareness for smaller sites. In some cases, DFM pays directly pay for content. In still others, it engages in ad revenue share deals. The partner with the bigger ad sales group, or best ad contacts in a sector, sells the client and shares the proceeds. Sometimes, that’s DFM; sometimes, it’s a partner, like The Street. There’s that big-and-little mating playing out again. These cost-of-content economics are a linchpin of the new content business. The paradox is ever clearer. Simply, no one can afford the substantial full-time costs of the old legacy editorial operations, given the great decline in advertising. Yet, voracious readers — especially those now asked to pay for all-access subscriptions — demand more high-quality content. If smaller companies can produce high-quality content at between 40 to 60 percent of what the big guys still have to pay, then the mating of little and big makes profound financial sense. Expect to see lots more of it. We don’t often get a chance to pick our family. In the newsonomics of big and little, we do. Who’s the little brother or sister you’d like to hang out with every day, and feel comfortable introducing to friends — and customers? Who’s the big sib who’s reliable and has your back? Can you pick only a single sibling? GlobalPost’s relationship with NBC is a fairly exclusive one; media partners must decide what they are giving and getting in such exclusive relationships. Family breakups can be wrenching — and costly. Media companies — large and small — must choose carefully. Photo by Tammy Simmons used under a Creative Commons license. |
| Gawker’s trying native advertising in its comments Posted: 29 Aug 2013 11:26 AM PDT Of course, Gawker would probably argue that “comments section” isn’t the right frame for thinking about its all-content-has-status platform Kinja. Alex Kantrowitz in Ad Age:
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| If you use WordPress, you too can have tweetable sentences like in that New York Times SNL story Posted: 29 Aug 2013 09:32 AM PDT You may have noticed a few days ago that The New York Times continued its admirable attempts to innovate in how news site’s article pages should look. In this piece on auditioning for Saturday Night Live, Times staff highlighted a number of quotes from the piece and made them individually tweetable. It looked like this:
(Andrew Beaujon had a good writeup at Poynter.) I thought that was a nifty idea and wanted to see if I could make it work here at Nieman Lab. Turns out I could! You can see the first couple examples if you scroll down a bit in Caroline’s just-posted story on Localore:
Now you can do the same on your WordPress-based site. Most of the work here is done by a year-old WordPress plugin called Tweetable Text, written by Salim Virani. (You can see it in effect on his site.) It does the job, but there were a few things I wanted to change: improving how the highlighted text and hover buttons are displayed; avoiding its use of Twitter’s tweet button code; and allowing the text-to-be-tweeted to be different from the exact text that is highlighted in the story. So I made those and a few other small changes in Salim’s code; you can check out my new version of the WordPress plugin right here. How to use it— Download this file; unpack it, and upload tweetable-text.php to your WordPress plugins directory. Activate the plugin in your WordPress interface. — Make sure you’re using Font Awesome, the awesome icon font, which is required to generate the little Twitter bird at phrase’s end. You can do that by simply adding
to your site’s <head>. (If you don’t want to use Font Awesome, you can either delete the — Then, in any WordPress post, if you want to make a sentence or phrase tweetable, wrap it in [tweetable] and [/tweetable]. So for example, the paragraph pictured above looks like this on the backend:
— If you want the tweet text to be something other than what’s literally between those
— If you want to add hashtags to the tweet, you can also add a
(You can use My instinct is that this is a tool to be used sparingly; littering your stories with calls-to-tweet is likely to have the same impact as throwing 80 social sharing buttons on a page: annoying your readers. But I think I’ll be trying this out a bit — specifically on stories with great quotes that are just begging to be shared. (And by all means, make my code better! Would love to hear how you’re using it or how it could be made better.) |
| AIR’s Localore is putting down roots and trying to build a more networked public media Posted: 29 Aug 2013 07:00 AM PDT Freelancing new ideas in radio is hard. NPR has its own substantial staff to generate ideas and projects, and most individual radio stations lack the resources or infrastructure to support many new ideas. So when the Association for Independents in Radio launched a project called Localore in late 2011 with the goal of helping a vibrant network of independent radio professionals create interactive, multimedia experiences tied to individual locations, it faced a number hurdles. Localore began with $2 million in funding, which helped — but how could it get stations interested in making a long-term investment in their ideas, even after the day the initial funding ended? That day arrived, in February. But remarkably, seven of the 10 projects funded are continuing on in some form or another; an impressive percentage have found alternate, and in some cases permanent, sources of funding. Two, Sonic Trace and Black Gold Boom, are expected to continue via funding from the Independent Television Service; while others are cobbling together a number of smaller grants, from organizations including MacArthur, Knight, McKnight, the Minnesota Legacy Fund, the NEA, PBS, and more. Across the field, 21 full-time staff have been devoted to the continuation of Localore member projects; in both Austin and Chicago, the member stations have fully embraced the Localore projects; KUT launched a new music station in conjunction with the Austin Music Map, and in Chicago, Curious City has been brought fully into WBEZ’s operating budget as well as won further grant money from Knight.In a field where new projects often dry up the moment the money does, that’s a victory. AIR director Sue Schardt says that when she looks at the way Silicon Valley tech accelerators operate, she sees a lot of parallels to the lightweight, innovative, networked structure she’s been trying to create in the world of broadcast. AIR is in the process of evaluating the success of the project, and determining what the next steps — and round of funding — should entail. Schardt says she’s increasingly interested in building a fast and light system of financial support around those projects as the ideas grow beyond the original partner stations. “We could just go and do another Localore, we could go and get another ten stations, or 20 stations, assign producers, and do this work again. There would be plenty of producers interested in doing it,” she said. “The other side of it, that seems more compelling, is to take these successes and lift them up — scale this up in a way that has broader impact.” In the end, Schardt says Localore has come to serve a secondary function as a funding network with grants of diverse sizes, from very small local opportunities to national contests. With over half a million plays and downloads of their streaming media alone, and over $1.2 million of the $2 million given directly to stations for content production, Schardt says the experiment has been a success, and she gives an enormous amount of credit to the individual producers. “Producer-led innovation — it’s not just a simple phrase,” she says. To become a Localore member, each candidate had to offer a combination of enthusiasm for technology, savvy for negotiation and, of course, talent for producing great radio. Ultimately, whether the projects sank or swam depended on how well the individual producers and projects were able to juggle all three of these spheres. The business angle: “A unique architecure”More than anything, Schardt credits the delicate balance of interests in the original contracts between member stations, AIR and the producers for Localore’s success. Right off the bat, she says, stations were eager to access the talent — and funding — that AIR was offering. “It was a beautiful and rare moment where producers are leveraging in the negotiation ,” says Schardt. “We had the money and we had the resources and we had the talent. Who wouldn’t want the deal?” But in order to get it, they had to make a demonstrate serious commitment to the project. “We said, when we were choosing our final picks: You know, this is about transforming your station, this is about transforming your relationship to your local community — are you really, really down with this?” she says. “If you’re not, it’s okay, but you have to sign on the dotted line that says you’re down with it.” In this case, being “down with it” meant providing financial support, managing with an eye towards longevity and sustainability, allowing the producers control over any expansion of the project to other stations, and generally giving producers the control they needed to foster innovation. In return, the stations got total ownership of the content produced. Says Schardt, “We didn’t have editorial control — we divested that to the stations, which is one reason it was able to move so quickly. It was very light in that way.” That lightness enabled the team at AIR to be constantly available to Localore producers for advice on negotiating with management and other issues of leadership. Delaney Hall, whose Austin Music Map lives on in Texas, says she learned early on that encouraging station employees to collaborate on the Localore project was key to align her work with the goals of the station. Jennifer Brandel, of Chicago’s Curious City project, said she learned to promote her work in meetings by using language she knew the station used when talking about strategy and opening the project up as widely as possible. Having producers that understand the importance of these skills is especially important as Localore projects begin to be prototyped for national expansion. While AIR would ideally see all 10 projects continue forward, Schardt says the hand-holding period is at an end. She’s looking to focus resources on those stations, projects, and producers who have honed in on a work flow and structure that is sustainable and productive. The tech angle: “The altar of the coder”At the start, Localore’s relationship with web-interactive-content-production startup Zeega gave the project a heads up in terms of technology. While the producers were meant to think digitally, they were not the technologists themsvles, and in the majority of cases they came to rely on Zeega’s design and editorial process to bring their projects to life. Kara Oehler, Zeega’s editor-in-chief, said working with Localore was integral to her understanding of how a tool for editing interactive productions could work. Oehler, who launched the open editing tool in January, says Localore’s Black and Gold project out of North Dakota is a good example of what a Zeega member could build on their own. (Justin Ellis wrote about Black Gold, which was then called Rough Ride, for the Lab not long ago.) But Oehler says the greatest lesson was that the next stage of the web can be intuitive if you give people tools that are easy to use. “Never let people say, ‘You tell me, you’re the web experts,’” she said. “People know what they want.” Schardt says that finding creative journalists with an awareness of what technologies are available to them is half the battle. The advancements themselves outpace the average newsroom’s awareness and ability, but funding continues to be overwhelmingly aimed at furthering these platforms — while journalists struggle to keep up. When that happens, Schardt says, “You sit at the altar of the coder and say, ‘Oh, please!’ Again, no one’s bad, but things are being done in reverse. There’s so much fuel going to technology, and it’s so far out front of what we really know what to do with it.” For Localore, this turned into a problem when Zeega, so supportive during the grant term, moved to California to focus on building revenue and other projects. With Zeega no longer available to provide support to the member projects they helped build, Schardt says some of the stations are experiencing growing pains: “They’re having to grapple with: They have these properties, how are they going to maintain them?” Even so, some stations have pushed through to interesting methods for growing and nurturing innovation. Andi McDaniel of Twin Cities Public Television said that when she first started working with Ken Eklund, the outside game designer/producer who brought Ed Zed Omega to the station, most of their colleagues had no idea what they were working on. A project with no broadcast element being worked on in a corner of the TV station made no sense to them: “It was like they couldn’t even say the name.” What McDaniel took away from that experience was the importance of constant prototyping. So she came up with the idea of Open Air, a safe space for in-house innovation that is now a permanent fixture at TPT. “Innovation requires illustration,” she says. “Do something in a corner, and then be able to point to it.” Even just a little reprieve from the daily demands of a newsroom can help journalists find the time to master, and maybe even disseminate, new skills. The creative angle: “Value in independent work”Once they were running meetings and talking tech like entrepreneurs straight out of Silicon Valley, however, the successful Localore members still had to blend those skills into the original mission — immersive storytelling and, ultimately, journalism. At the start, Julia Kumari Drapkin, who found a home at KVNF in Colorado, was looking to capitalize on what she thought she knew about audience behavior. When she first flew out to Paonia, Colorado — a place she had never even seen before — to launch iSeeChange, what she wanted to create was crowdsourced environmental reporting, by getting local ranchers to text their observations about changes in weather into a central database. Drapkin soon found that, while the contributions she did get put her weeks ahead of traditional news outlets, few residents of rural Colorado were comfortable with communicating that way. Instead, she found there were much more vibrant conversations on the topic happening on Facebook, and that ultimately the best stories were consistently discovered through face-to-face communication. Even though she was surprised by the information consumption and dissemination behaviors of the people that she met, Drapkin succeeded in building an online, crowdsourced tool for farmers and scientists alike. The Almanac layers qualitative information about the experiences people have on a day-to-day basis (including photos) over quantitative information (time, inches of rainfall, temperature). Curation is minimal — Drapkin highlights the posts she finds most interesting — but she says it’s already become a robust tool at the nexus of science, public media, and the audience.
Schardt says overcoming these obstacles has prepared iSeeChange to be the kind of adaptable, lightweight prototype that could be a success across the country. Whether it’s ranchers in Colorado or CSA farmers in western Massachusetts, Drapkin has built something capable of having an impact that goes beyond a single station. “There’s value in independent work. There’s a creative, outside component that they value,” Schardt says of how the system views freelance radio producers. AIR appears to have had some success capturing that value without squelching it. As the organization continues to figure out how to grow these projects, Schardt says the goal is to continue to be as much of a resource for the Localore member network as possible. A briefing book on what they’ve learned and best practices going forward is in the works, and AIR is weighing a variety of publishing options for disseminating that “sharing resource.” “We’re interested in keeping the porch light on,” she says. |
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