Selasa, 10 September 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Allbritton takes the Acela north, buys Capital New York

Posted: 09 Sep 2013 11:03 AM PDT

Dylan Byers has the news over at Allbritton-owned Politico:

In an ambitious play for the New York market, POLITICO publisher Robert Allbritton has purchased the online news site Capital New York, with plans to make “a substantial investment” in the business and more than quadruple staff.

Capital, which was launched in 2010 by former New York Observer editors Josh Benson and Tom McGeveran, will now be led by POLITICO co-founder and executive editor Jim VandeHei, who will serve as president while remaining in his current role at POLITICO. Benson and McGeveran will remain co-editors.

The acquisition is Allbritton’s first since he reached an agreement to sell his television holdings in July. His goal: to apply the POLITICO business model to New York City and “focus laser-like on New York and its power centers, including the media, city and state politics, culture and business.”

“I have very big ambitions for this publication: to do in New York what we did in Washington with POLITICO,” he wrote in a memo to POLITICO staff late Sunday night. “We are making a substantial investment to sharpen the focus of Capital and vastly expand its reportorial presence.”

Or, as Hamilton Nolan put it, “Or even, hopefully, something better.” It’ll be very interesting to see how this rolls out. Politico is both local (D.C. politics) and national (um, D.C. politics). The Allbrittons’ previous experience with purely local online-born content, TBD, had a buzzy, controversial, and ultimately short life.

Capital is more local than Politico — anecdotally, it’s mostly the occasional media story that reaches a substantial audience outside the tri-state — but could use its location in New York to shift in a more national direction if it wanted. (Gawker, after all, was once much more New York-centric than it is today.) But at first glance, it would seem the unusual characteristics of the successful Politico model — the giant flows of lobbying money circulating around town, the ad success of the print product, the niche possibilities of Politico Pro, the national interest in its subject matter — will make it hard to use the same tricks with Capital. So, new tricks!

Capital’s Josh Benson (no typo relation) and Tom McGeveran write about the deal on their site (the commenters don’t like it, but what would you expect?):

Our upcoming expansion comes courtesy of a deal with Robert Allbritton, who owns POLITICO and has acquired Capital with the intention of establishing and growing it as a free-standing sibling publication in New York.

What the new investment does, for one thing, is to put this publication on a stable financial footing, ensuring our ability to deliver quality local coverage over the long term. It also gives us the wherewithal to be much more ambitious than ever before about our editorial mission, which is to be a primary source of reporting for knowledgeable readers on the workings of the greatest city in the world.

We’ll be announcing a substantial number of additions to the Capital editorial staff in the coming weeks, as well as some changes to the site. We’ll immediately intensify our existing focus on politics and media, building on the excellent work of Dana, Joe, Azi, Reid and Gillian and our regular contributors, and we’ll also be growing our coverage of culture and other areas vital to a publication purporting to cover New York.

How does the future of news look from inside the most recent NSA surveillance story?

Posted: 09 Sep 2013 10:47 AM PDT

Some of the biggest news of last week was the NYT-Guardian-ProPublica collaboration that broke yet another major story on NSA surveillance. Each publication took their own route when it came to explaining why they decided to publish information from these leaked documents.

On Friday, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Source’s Erin Kissane interviewed Jeff Larson and Scott Klein of ProPublica about their experience with reporting and developing the project. Here’s an excerpt from their conversation about data mining, secure communication (no Skype!), teaching nerds to write and the math behind cryptography.

SK: In a way, it's like a foreign reporter who can speak the language in the country. They don't have to rely on anyone else, can delve more deeply, can be much more nimble inside the story. And I have to say, this is not going away. Journalism is going to continue to get big document dumps—and it's not going to be Snowden, this is going to be historically big and important—but whistleblowers know where to come now, and big unstructured CDs full of text are going to be a regular reality in newsrooms everywhere, and we need to know how to deal with it. And some of that is software like Intella, and some of that is having developers in the newsroom who can do something with big unstructured text. This is a huge opportunity.

JL: I would say that as great as Intella or some of the other software out there is, it's still not perfect. It's still very difficult to use and it still takes a painstakingly large amount of time to solve that. I know that folks within the community are working on solving it in a way that not just nerds can use, but that normal reporters can just boot up and just do. Especially for the things that we would have used it for—like the Syria stuff and [the NSA] stuff. Open source stuff that already exists out there, we couldn't use because you can't put it on another server, you can't put it anywhere, you have to have it in a very secure place, airgapped. So that's something that we need to solve.

Storify sold to Livefyre in a merging of social curation tools

Posted: 09 Sep 2013 10:30 AM PDT

storifyA tech startup with roots deeply entrenched in the journalism world is being acquired. Storify, the company whose social curation platform that has helped countless journalists round-up tweets into stories of their own, is being acquired by Livefyre, best known for making the software that powers comment sections on some websites. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The deal brings Storify under the wing of a similarly oriented company: both focus on tools for online publishers and amplifying social engagement by harnessing conversations from around the web. The two companies already have a history; Storify added Livefyre comments to its service in January 2012. In February of this year, Livefyre raised $15 million in new investment, which may be where the resources for this acquisition are coming from.

But Storify as we know it won’t be going anywhere. Storify co-founders Xavier Damman and Burt Herman and the rest of their team will join Livefyre, but Storify itself will remain an independent (and free) tool available on the web, Herman told me Monday. “It made sense from the start that this was a great potential fit,” Herman said. But Storify’s paid products will now also be bundled with services like Livefyre’s commenting platform, liveblogging tools, and social advertising.

Since its launch in 2010, Storify has been a unique company on the journalism landscape. While there have been plenty of new technologies developed to help harness the power of Twitter and Facebook for use in news, Storify represented a set of tools for journalists developed by a journalist — Herman is a former AP correspondent. The company’s growth in recent years has been fueled by the continued growth of Twitter, particularly as a breaking news engine. Many newsrooms and individual journalists have come to rely on Storify as a way to corral tweets, raw video footage, and discussion. In 2011, the company raised $2 million in funding from Khosla Ventures.

burthermanHerman told me he and Damman were not looking to be acquired but said the move will help both companies continue to expand. The acquisition by Livefyre will help expand Storify’s usage, Herman said. Earlier this year, the company announced it was creating Storify VIP, a paid version of the service designed for larger companies that need additional features and customization beyond the free edition. That level of enterprise business is something Livefyre is familiar with; the company counts CBS, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and Condé Nast among their clients.

In the release announcing the deal, Livefyre founder Jordan Kretchmer said the acquisition will unite interfaces for customers who already use both companies’ products. “Now our enterprise users will be able to manage Storify content from the same centralized Livefyre dashboard where they're already managing all of their social and user-generated content,” Kretchmer said in the statement.

Herman said one of their main goals is expanding their users beyond the freemium model. Livefyre already has a team in place to help with that. “We really did recognize, and the market is showing us, who our users are,” he said. “Our users are journalists, brand managers, and agencies. That’s who uses Storify. Those are the people who get it.”

Herman said they’ll now also have the resources to find ways to refine Storify and make it a more seamless experience. He said they want to reduce the steps it takes to collect media and embed a Storify on your site. “The easier and more frictionless you can make this stuff, the more people will realize that social media is not a fad,” he said.

For Herman, the Livefyre deal is the next step in his career as a journalist and entrepreneur. A former Knight Fellow at Stanford, Herman said the process of taking a startup from an idea to reality has been revealing about the world of journalism and the world of technology. “It’s definitely been a roller coaster, with lots of ups and downs along the way. I’d do it all again,” Herman said. “We need to take more chances and try new things in journalism.”

Public-private partnership: Slate and WBUR team up on a podcast, connecting public radio content to a national audience

Posted: 09 Sep 2013 07:27 AM PDT

As a public radio station, Boston’s WBUR is in the business of audio news and storytelling, so the fact that it’s launched a new show about health care issues shouldn’t be surprising. But it isn’t a new radio show — it’s a podcast. And it’s a collaboration with the for-profit media world — in partnership with Slate, home to one of the most successful collection of podcasts outside public radio.

The Checkup is a new weekly podcast hosted by Rachel Zimmerman and Carey Goldberg, the writers behind CommonHealth, WBUR’s three-year-old blog on health care issues and medical research. The show is the next evolution of the blog, where Zimmerman and Goldberg talk with doctors, scientists, and other experts about topics like pregnancy myths, mental health, and problems with sex.

WBUR and Slate are partnering to produce six episodes of the show, with hopes to continue if it gets a good response. It’s an experiment for both organizations: WBUR wants to reach wider audiences on the web, while Slate wants to grow its podcasts by working with partners.

It’s the classic media trade — you give me content, I give you audience — only this time with a public/private twist.

Working with WBUR is the second public media collaboration for Slate, which partnered with New York’s WNYC to shape the site’s Gabfest podcasts into a weekly hour-long radio show. “We know from our guts and our research that there is a lot of overlap between the Slate and public media audiences,” said Andy Bowers, the executive producer for Slate’s podcasts.

slatecheckupSlate creates and distributes 10 podcasts at the moment, covering topics ranging from politics, sports, and culture to women’s issues, technology, and books. Those shows have created a kind of runway to help launch new shows as audiences have become more accustomed to Slate’s brand of shows, Bowers said. While The Checkup will have its own feed available through Slate, the show will also be featured in the site’s daily podcast feed.

Bowers, who comes from a public radio background, said partnering with stations makes sense because they have the expertise and resources when it comes to making a show. “We’ve been actively looking for public radio partners who we might be able to expand podcasting and offer them a national platform,” he said.

Zimmerman and Goldberg put the show together at WBUR, which is produced by editor and engineer George Hicks. The two have backgrounds in newspaper reporting; Zimmerman is a former health and medicine reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and Goldberg was previously Boston bureau chief for The New York Times. CommonHealth in something like its current form came to life in 2010 as one of NPR’s Argo Project blogs, designed to look at health care and health insurance issues.

The idea behind the show, Goldberg told me, was to have the show feel accessible and relatable — to have a format that is conversational and chatty but also backed with reporting and knowledgable experts. “The best compliment we’ve gotten so far is that we’re the Click and Clack of health,” Goldberg said. But the show takes a lot of its cues from the blog, which often looks at health issues around the news and examines them further with the help of researchers and clinicians. “We’re not doctors, so to be able to talk about health we needed the experts to talk about it,” she said.

Zimmerman said the transition into a podcast wasn’t difficult because their stories from CommonHealth are often turned into radio pieces. Zimmerman said the difference now is that they try to find sources who do well in a kind of radio interview environment.

Each episode of The Checkup centers around a theme, but if the show goes forward Zimmerman said they’d like to find a way to work on more newsy issues. One part of the pilot process of the first six episodes will be learning how much of a time commitment the show is and what the work flow looks like, Goldberg said.

The two think the show has a shot of doing well with a wider audience, especially because the blog already sees half of its traffic come from a national audience, Goldberg said. In some ways, it’s the kind of success the Argo Project aspired to — topic-based, locally produced content with the capacity for national reach. Public radio stations are inherently local, and reaching a national audience has typically meant going through NPR, PRI, or APM. But with podcasts, someone like Slate — with a loyal audience for audio already baked in — can step in to be a powerful distributor.

While Bowers didn’t offer specific numbers on podcast downloads or listenership, he said Slate’s audio audience continues to grow. Advertising in the podcasts continues to do well, with some shows having sold out their ad slots through the rest of the year, Bowers said. At the moment, The Checkup does not carry ads, but if the show goes forward they may find ways to monetize it, John Davidow, executive editor of WBUR.org, told me.

Because of that advertiser interest, and the continued growth in listeners, Slate wants to keep producing new shows and partnering to help bring others to life. “I think of podcasting as a way to pilot things in a low-cost way,” Bowers said.

Air time is a limited resource for most public radio stations. Competition for schedule space is fierce and leaves little room for experimentation. It’s a problem confronting NPR as well as it tries to find a new generation of shows and hosts as favorites like Car Talk are phased into retirement.

But even as NPR tries to become more agile in its show development, it’s hard to beat podcasting as a route to Minimum Viable Product. There’s more freedom to figure out what format works, how production should be handled, and whether the show can find a following, Davidow said. Podcasts are also cheap to start: “With a podcast, you’re not going right to hiring staff and creating a show because you think there’s an audience for it,” Davidow said. “You can get in people’s ears before you have to make a commitment.”

Davidow said the station plans to launch several new podcasts and other digital shows this fall, all based on existing blogs and other projects. The Checkup, he said, is a great example of a show that has potential to flourish online and maybe make it on air some day. “A lot of web sites for legacy media, for broadcast legacy media, they reverse that trend: They take what’s on the air and webify it and put it through the process to fit the digital medium,” Davidow said. “In this case, we’re reversing that flow.”

Image by Alan Levine used under a Creative Commons license.
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