Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Instead of shoehorning it in, NowThis News is building video content that fits in where the audience lives
- China’s big move into African media
- “Mobile-first is not enough. Mobile should be all you care about.”
- Anatomy of a media meltdown: Four takeaways from the loss of the Boston Phoenix
| Posted: 16 Sep 2013 12:15 PM PDT
But NowThis has found a new distribution platform that is drawing a big share of its strategic attention: Instagram. The photo-sharing-turned-video-sharing app is one that a number of news orgs have played around with, but few have made the sort of push NowThis has. Editor-in-chief Ed O’Keefe says the shorter style of video it produces for Instagram and Vine is now “the focus of our company.” “It was the right disruptive moment for a mobile and social centric video company to come into existence,” says O’Keefe. “The whole point of founding NowThis News was to meet the disruptive moment with the content that best utilizes these platforms.” To further that point, on Sunday night NowThisNews launched its first interview edited solely for Instagram, an Q&A with Newark mayor and senatorial candidate Cory Booker, and plan to post a new 15-second clip of the interview every night this week. It’s not exactly going to win an investigative Pulitzer, but hey, it’s a new form. Here’s the first clip: Of a staff of 37, 22 NowThis News employees are dedicated to producing content, two of whom focus on Instagram full time, with the rest available to be pulled in. Even between similar platforms like Vine and Instagram, O’Keefe says, the same content is rarely repurposed. Instead, they focus on finding the most efficient way to tell a story in a way that is unique to each app. “It’s a journalistic challenge to think about complex stories and information in such a short amount of time,” says O’Keefe. “It requires more ingenuity, more creativity, more innovation, to not just think about the length of the piece, but how can you tell a meaningful story in such a short amount of time.” To address this challenge, O’Keefe says producers use templates when crafting a 15-second video. A W5, for example, hits all the basics — who, what, where, why, when; for major events, like the Colorado floods or recent shootings in D.C., they’ll pull in images from other Instagram users and present them as a gallery with music. They’ve found that using still photos with title cards and narration is typically more efficient than soundbites, so those slideshow-like posts tend to dominate the day. (NowThis’ Vine videos, restricted to six seconds, tend to be limited to just a host saying a sentence or two to the camera.) They aim to publish about 12 clips a day depending on what breaks, says O’Keefe, although usually they hit somewhere around 8 to 10. But he says it’s not because they can’t do more; it’s about knowing the demand of your audience, which is also why they’ll contract well-known photographers to post a photo a day. “Our only real limitation in terms of our production is that we don’t want to flood the feed,” says O’Keefe. “There’s nothing more annoying than that friend who constantly posts, and every time you go you see nothing but their posts. We could do more — we just choose not to.” That strategy seems to be working well for them. The NowThis News Instagram account has gained more than 29,000 followers since it began publishing videos in July. O’Keefe says they’ve seen spikes of up to 3,000 followers in a single day, what he calls a “startling rate of acquisition.” (NowThis has even more, over 56,000, on Vine, but it’s been on that platform since launch in January.) “We’re definitely finding an appetite for hard news,” he says. “Not just soft, entertainment news — hard news on Instagram.” If O’Keefe is right, it’s a content niche that other news brands on the platform haven’t tapped yet. “You see a lot of repurposed content or behind the scenes photos,” he says. Indeed, a survey of some of the top media companies on Instagram proves he’s right. NBC offers teasers of interviews, MTV has clips of celebrities on the red carpet, and others including Time, Wired, PBS NewsHour and more post mini-promotional videos of the “see more online” variety. A few, including CNN and the Wall Street Journal, use Instagram to issue calls for user engagement; HuffPo uses Instagram video largely to wish celebrities happy birthday. The Washington Post is one of the few that has made a more substantial attempt at putting news on Instagram. Says O’Keefe: “They’ll get the following, but what’s the engagement…if you’re only reaching the people who are already interested in your news brand? What we’re trying to do is actually develop an audience on Instagram, and we really do believe it is as powerful as some of the most successful social platforms that have come about.” The way O’Keefe sees it, there’s a willing audience in people who would never think to turn on a TV to get their news, but refresh their Instagram feed multiple times a day. It’s not that these people aren’t interested in news — it’s that they’re accustomed to the big stories finding them rather than the other way around. NowThis News aims to deliver that news on whatever platform these people will actually receive it. To that end, they’ll soon begin producing longer content for tablet apps to accommodate the “dramatic differences” between how audiences engage on different devices. Think about it: For the same news story, NowThis might now be producing a six-second teaser for Vine; a longer 15-second summary for Instagram; and a longer piece for someone using its iPad app. That’s less platform agnostic than platform specific. Of course, NowThis gets most of the raw material for its content from other sources — stories reported by others that it aggregates, videos posted online, and so on. That helps. But it’s still an impressive commitment to making the content fit the platform. For instance, here’s how NowThis “covered” the news that Voyager I had entered interstellar space a few days ago. For Vine, a six-second blur of letters and images: For Instagram, using the full 15 seconds with a voiceover: And for NowThis News’ website and apps, a luxurious 39 seconds, with talking into the camera and some extra branding: “I was over 12 years at network television,” says O’Keefe, “and I was in digital when Twitter came about. I very distinctly remember the hardened journalists of the television era looking to me and saying, ‘This is ridiculous, I cannot possibly boil down a story of this importance to 140 characters. This is why digital is undermining the future of journalism.’ And six years later, who would deny that Twitter is one of the most powerful platforms for conveying news and information? I’d be hard pressed to find a single journalist who would argue with the power and importance of its role.” If O’Keefe is right, NowThis News is at the forefront of innovation on the next big content delivery platform, but that doesn’t explain how it will make money. NowThis News hosts no ads, offers its apps for free, and is backed by VCs. One thing they do have is content partnerships, large and small, with companies including BuzzFeed, Mashable, The Atlantic, Hulu, Roku, MSN, and AOL. But the next step according to O’Keefe will be toward what he calls narrative social advertising.
O’Keefe couldn’t specify when native content produced by NowThis News might begin to emerge, but it’s definitely on the horizon. And with the recent announcement that ads would soon be popping up on Instagram, it’s safe to say a sea change is ahead for the platform either way. For ads to work — i.e., for them not to chase off users — O’Keefe says the product has to be “authentic and interesting” as well as “totally transparent.” Of course, building so much of NowThis’ audience on platforms controlled by others — Facebook and Twitter, in the case of Instagram and Vince — means that there’ll always be a risk that its monetization strategy could clash with the platform’s. But O’Keefe believes there’s plenty of counterbalancing strength in going where the users are. “The barrier to entry is nonexistent if you create good content, if you post beautiful stunning images. If you take the time to be inventive, creative, and original in the video that you post, people will discover it. Instagram will promote it,” says O’Keefe. “You will find that you have an audience.” |
| China’s big move into African media Posted: 16 Sep 2013 10:37 AM PDT In The Globe and Mail, Geoffrey York has a piece on China’s expansion into African media:
We’ve written a lot in recent years about the business opportunities available to American media for global expansion: The New York Times launching non-English language digital editions and rebranding the International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal’s continued growth overseas, and so on. But the flows can just as easily run in the other direction, in ways that go beyond Carlos Slim lending the Times Co. cash or Al Jazeera America. |
| “Mobile-first is not enough. Mobile should be all you care about.” Posted: 16 Sep 2013 10:24 AM PDT At Digiday, Josh Sternberg asked a number of digital publishing types what “mobile first” meant to them. Good answers from a number of them, but the answer from BuzzFeed’s Jon Steinberg (the headline of this post) stood out. (Plus a Vivian Schiller near-haiku!). Gawker CTO Media Thomas Plunkett:
Even within this small group of forward-thinking individuals, you can start to see the difference between the ones that are thinking mobile first and the ones who are acting mobile first. |
| Anatomy of a media meltdown: Four takeaways from the loss of the Boston Phoenix Posted: 16 Sep 2013 07:02 AM PDT The post-mortem for the Boston Phoenix hosted by the MIT Communications Forum Thursday evening was in turns both spirited and sad. Representing the alt weekly in its heyday were Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Lloyd Schwartz, political columnist and Esquire contributor Charlie Pierce, former writer Anita Diamant, and editor-in-chief at the time of close Carly Carioli.
1. Why did the Phoenix fail when alt weeklies are still doing okay in other cities?Carioli answered this question in short order: competition. The lack of it is one reason you see papers like 7 Days in Burlington, Vermont, thrive while, in New York City, the Village Voice is listing toward bankruptcy. In small towns, alt weeklies can serve as papers of record. In Boston, the Globe and the Herald filled the daily space, DigBoston provided competition as an alt weekly, and online competition was plentiful. That made the battle for advertisers tough. 2. What do we lose when we lose institutions like the Phoenix?The most resounding chorus of the evening was the praise heaped on the quality of the editors at the Phoenix in its heyday. Pierce, Schwartz, and Diamant emphasized the thorough and exacting nature of the editing they each received as young writers.
Diamant went so far as to compare the experience to grad school — nobody makes any money, but everybody learns a lot. Or finishing school:
As Diamant recalled, many writers had to take second jobs to support their writing careers at the Phoenix — a scenario not unfamiliar to young people with aspirations of becoming journalists today. Think, for example, of the many debates over the web’s impact on the market for freelancers. What the panelists seemed to say is that while the sacrifice is the similar — expectation of financial stability — the reward — an educational relationship with a strict editor — has evaporated in the press to create reams and reams of web content. 3. Who stands to gain?One of the more forward looking topics of the evening was a look at what media brands the former Phoenixers saw as having the capacity to move into their former market in Boston. Audience member and PRX employee Rekha Murthy said that when it comes to delivering local news that the audience can really engage with, public radio was the best bet.
At the Globe, there’s the Ideas section, which has featured ex-Phoenix staffers. A former Phoenix employee, Liz Pelly, started a free online publication called The Media, which picks up some of the Phoenix’s underground and music coverage where if left off, as does the website Vanyaland, by former music editor Michael Marotta; other ex-Phoenix writers, like Chris Faraone, are cobbling together freelance careers, though Faraone said as a freelancer he doesn’t have the ability to do the kind of reporting and produce the kind of work he did as a staff member at the Phoenix.
But as interesting as this fragmented new work — what he called the metastasizing of the Phoenix — is, Carioli wasn’t comfortable dubbing it a laudable next step. (For his part, Carioli did a post-Phoenix stint at Boston.com before joining Boston Magazine as executive editor this summer.) “These are people who were getting paychecks from the Phoenix, and now they’re not,” he said. The best part about what The Phoenix offered, he said, was that it, like a daily, was a bundle — good journalism, listings, classifieds, and ads that people would actually read, all in one package. The glossy transformation the paper underwent in 2012, six months before its closing, was an attempt to revitalize that package after what Carioli referred to as the “bodyslam” of 2009. To his mind, the closing of the Phoenix means there’s an opportunity for someone else to fill that bundled gap, but says media brands that could be competitive in that space — like Dig — are not currently sustainable.
4. Whither profitable long-form writing?In the course of the evening, it was Diamant who first seriously raised the question of how to create a sustainable, Phoenix-like environment for the web.
Unfortunately, despite the high talent grade at the table, nobody felt comfortable talking about how someone might go about doing that. Carioli pointed out that, historically, long-form writing has never been thought of as a money maker. It’s not too much of an abstraction to say that Pierce’s career now, in which he combines some long-form writing for Esquire with blogging, a regular political column, pieces for Grantland, and radio jokes, shares some of the bundle-like characteristics of the old model — only without the structure of the Phoenix. A career has to bundle itself these days. There was some attempt to have a robust discussion of the experimentation that is happening around monetizing longform. Moderator Seth Mnookin mentioned Atavist, a company working on tools for better online storytelling, and Byliner, where you can subscribe to magazine-like content; Carioli brought up Kindle Singles; I recalled the recently announced Epic, a website that aims to help writers turn their longform into profitable screenplays. But in a room full of long-time journalists with more than a little out-of-turn shouting, nobody seemed in the least excited by these ideas. For those interested, here’s a full recording of the evening: |
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