Nieman Journalism Lab |
- A new tool for Twitter search out of the Knight Lab portrays trends in a single picture
- The New York Times’ “Tomato Can Blues”: Lovely editorial design, kinda boring ads
- Come have a drink with Nieman Lab — and our friends from Nieman Storyboard!
- Reuters nixes Next: Failed redesigns and the challenge of expanding a digital audience
| A new tool for Twitter search out of the Knight Lab portrays trends in a single picture Posted: 19 Sep 2013 11:55 AM PDT It’s a couple days old by now, but make sure you take a look at TwXplorer, the tool out of Northwestern’s Knight Lab. In addition to showing a list of recent tweets that include your search term, twXplorer displays the most popular words, hashtags, and links in those tweets.
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| The New York Times’ “Tomato Can Blues”: Lovely editorial design, kinda boring ads Posted: 19 Sep 2013 11:50 AM PDT
Yesterday, The New York Times came out with another impressive digital narrative package for a sports story: Tomato Can Blues.. It combines lush illustrations and audio narration and reads like a graphic novel come to life. You might even say it’s sort of like…nah, let’s keep the “S” word out of it as long as we can. But for all its beauty and richness, just like its avalanche-themed forebear, Tomato Can Blues debuted with boring ads. Specifically, a couple of standard banner ads — which appeared last night to be coming from ad networks, no less — looking a little out of place in the otherwise carefully laid out piece.
Snow Fall (yeah, sorry) was dinged for the same problem — the ad-side creativity not matching the edit-side creativity. And if you look at the code for the ad units on Tomato Can Blues, the url in the iframe is http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/multimedia/bundles/projects/2012/AvalancheDeploy/avalanche_ad_leaderboard.html — which, as you might gather from the address, is the exact same ad unit as in Snow Fall. The unimaginative ads also seemed odd given that the Times seemed to have fixed this problem with one of its other recent multimedia sports narrative projects, The Jockey. Throughout that multipart story, you’ll see custom ad units from BMW. As Ad Age wrote at the time:
When I reached out to the Times to see if someone could talk to me about the ad treatment in Tomato Can Blues, the paper declined to offer its staffers for an interview. Spokeswoman Linda Zebian did say over email: “We have a new head of advertising [Meredith Levien] and making sure the ads on these big multimedia projects is on the same level of the editorial is something that is on her agenda.” Oddly, some time between that email and this story’s posting, all the ads on Tomato Can Blues seem to have disappeared, at least on our computers. |
| Come have a drink with Nieman Lab — and our friends from Nieman Storyboard! Posted: 19 Sep 2013 10:40 AM PDT
If you ever thought that long-form narrative journalism and digital technology couldn’t mix, (a) you’re wrong, and (b) we’d like to prove it through beer. It’s time again for our monthly Nieman Lab happy hour here in Cambridge, this Monday at The Field in Central Square. But this month, we’re adding something new to the mix: It’s a joint happy hour with our friends at sister-pub Nieman Storyboard! Just as we at the Lab pay attention to how journalism is changing in the digital age, Paige Williams & Co. at Storyboard track all things narrative — from annotating Sebastian Junger’s “The Storm” to see why it works to lessons from great writers on sustaining long narratives to live chats on literary journalism and beyond. Now, Lab readers should be aware going in that the mix at this happy hour will be a little different from our norm. Expect the cocktail chatter to feature longer and more variegated clauses than usual. The dialogue will be snappier. The people you meet will seem, somehow, better developed as characters. Also, the evening may, upon later reflection, go on about 20 percent longer than it really needed to. As for Storyboard readers, don’t be alarmed if conversation turns to JavaScript libraries or metered paywalls or the question “So what’s your Instagram strategy?” If things get out of hand, we’ll have emergency Moleskines available for you to jot down crowd observations for your great American novel about grit and Jewish mysticism and group theory and computers and ergonomics. (Correction: We will not have Moleskines.) Silly stereotypes aside, Lab readers and Storyboard readers are two of the most wonderful groups of people in the world, and you’ll enjoy hanging out. The full details: Come have a drink with us on Monday, September 23, starting at 6 p.m. or so. We'll be at The Field, which is in Central Square, roughly 8.2 seconds' walk from the Central Square T stop and thus easily accessible to anyone with a Charlie Card. If the weather’s nice, we’ll almost certainly be in the back on the patio. If not, check the side room on the left. First five people to come up to me and repeat the magic phrase — “As touchy as cabaret performers and as stubborn as factory machinists” — get a free beer on me. Photo of peanut butter and jelly sandwich — that’s two great tastes that taste great together! — by Ibán used under a Creative Commons license. |
| Reuters nixes Next: Failed redesigns and the challenge of expanding a digital audience Posted: 19 Sep 2013 07:50 AM PDT
Reuters Next was conceived as a complete overhaul of Reuters.com as well as the back end systems that deliver news and updates from journalists and editors around the globe. In May, the company unveiled a preview version of the new site, a unified design that merged article pages and topic pages, where every story could act as a jumping off point in a constantly updating river of news.
But Reuters Next is done, according to Reuters chief executive Andrew Rashbass. And two of the people responsible for the project, Jim Roberts, executive editor for Reuters Digital (recently of The New York Times), and design director Daniele Codega, are also departing the company. In a memo obtained by The New York Observer, Rashbass said he is canceling the project and repurposing work from Next into the existing web site and other products. Rashbass wrote:
Instead, Rashbass says “I believe the existing suite of Reuters.com sites is a better starting point for where we need to go.”  The same story in the current Reuters.com (left) and in Reuters Next. Where exactly the media division of Thomson Reuters needs to go is the big question. Barb Burg, a spokeswoman for Reuters, told me Wednesday that “at this point, we don’t have anything to say beyond what is in the memo. We’re putting together plans and there will be more to come.” Rashbass, who was chief executive at the Economist Group before joining Reuters in May, was skeptical of Next from the time he arrived, according to BuzzFeed’s Matthew Zeitlin. While the particular internal dynamics of Next’s demise are unique to Reuters, in one sense it’s just the latest iteration of the conflict wire services have felt since the web’s arrival. Pre-web, they had solid B2B businesses, serving as suppliers to the newspapers, television stations, and others who had the direct relationship to consumers. On one hand, the web meant a new set of potential customers. (Indeed, Reuters’ 1995 deal to license some of its stories to Yahoo News was one of the key early moments in the rise of free-to-consumer online news.) But it also meant that it was possible to reach customers directly for the first time. So Bloomberg, which has an enormously lucrative terminal business, also puts much of its news online for free. The Associated Press offers up The Big Story. And Reuters has both its current Reuters.com and what was to be Reuters Next. The thinking is obvious: We have all these reporters and editors (over 2,000 in Reuters’ case), all around the world, and we’re producing all these stories and videos and photos — can’t we figure out a way to get them in front of readers and viewers without a middleman? Ken Doctor wrote about this temptation for Reuters for us back in 2011:
For a wire service — particularly for a business-intense wire like Reuters — a consumer play is also a play to strengthen its core products, as you can see from Rashbass’ memo (emphasis mine):
Rashbass doesn’t seem to think Reuters Next was on the road to accomplishing those goals. From a design perspective, Reuters Next did some interesting things around turning article pages into homepages — which is an interesting idea regardless, but even more so in the context of a wire service whose work readers usually find as an atomized article on someone else’s website. Next’s preview was coupled with the launch of similar iOS products that put stories in a river of news, helping to build a unified brand. And, based on Paul Smalera’s Q&A with Source in May, there was some interesting backend work to unify all Reuters content into a common API. (At BuzzFeed, Zeitlin reports that pre-Next systems were so awful that adding a basic link to a story was “a very complex issue.”)
When I wrote about the new site in May, Codega told me, "It's truly real time, and by its nature it's different types of news in 15 different content types, from articles to slideshows to liveblogs, tweets, and videos." Alex Leo, then head of product for Reuters.com, told me, “We wanted to create an experience for users that would give them the right amount of breadth and knowledge that they need from Reuters.” Reuters Next was only the the most recent step in the company’s push towards becoming a better recognized brand for consumer news; their results have been a mixed bag. In January 2012, they launched Reuters TV, a video initiative in conjunction with YouTube’s channels program, that produced shows and segments featuring Reuters journalists like Felix Salmon, Anthony DeRosa, and Chrystia Freeland. The channel’s still there, but a year later, YouTube dropped its funding of it. In February 2012, the company debuted Social Pulse, a monitoring tool for business-types designed to help track companies and titans of industry across social media. It’s a “Page Not Found” today. Reuters has also lost some key digital news staff: Freeland stepped down from her post as managing director and editor for consumer news for the understandable allure of a Toronto-Ottawa commute; DeRosa is now the editor-in-chief of Circa; Smalera, Reuters Next’s product manager, moved over to The New York Times. In his memo, Rashbass indicates that the teams responsible for the editorial and business aspects of Reuters.com are still being put together. For the time being, the preview version of Reuters Next still exists, but one imagines it’ll soon be relegated to the great media graveyard, resting somewhere near TimesSelect and the ESPN phone. Of course, today The New York Times has built a digital subscription model much more successful than TimesSelect ever was, and many of us live and die by the ESPN video and alerts we get on our phones. In both cases, each company incorporated the lessons from those projects into future strategy. Perhaps Reuters will end up doing the same. |
Reuters’ vision of the news service of the future — or at least the consumer-facing part of that vision — will look a little bit more like the present. Wednesday morning, the company 
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