Sabtu, 12 Oktober 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

On the economics of Curbed

Posted: 11 Oct 2013 09:04 AM PDT

Interesting back and forth around this piece at the Canadian online litmag Hazlitt by Bert Archer. At one level, it’s a common plaint: Online news sites, particularly those on the bloggier end of the spectrum, don’t pay that well. His particular interest is Curbed, the real estate-focused network of sites around the country (and now in Toronto and Vancouver).

So I talked to the editorial director, and she told me what they were offering: $1,500 a month. That included 5-7 stories a day, complete with pictures. Five to seven stories a day, no matter how short, pretty much takes up your day. This means that $1,500 a month has to be at least the lion's share, if not the entirety of your income. That's $18,000 a year.

Archer does add one interesting layer to distinguish it from the median piece of this subgenre: Curbed is quite good. It’d be one thing if low pay = low quality, but if low pay = solid-to-better content, there’s a problem, he believes:

… Curbed, precisely because it's as good as it is, precisely because that takes people who actually know how to write and report, represents something quite dark that may be going on before our eyes. Call it the Cragislisting of journalism.

By which he means the general diminution of value attached to writing and a threat to “all those little bits and pieces of journalism, such as double-sourcing and fact-checking, that ensure the story you tell yourself about the world you live in is one that bears a relationship to the world you actually live in.”

Anyway, probably more interesting is the response from two Curbed types in the comments. Nikki Bayley, who works at an Eater site (Eater is Curbed’s foodie sister):

Just one small but awfully relevant bit of info — that fact-checking, double-sourcing that you wrote about but didn’t quite manage to follow up on yourself. The key thing — in fact the ONLY thing — is that this is gibberish. Sheer hooey. Utter balloon juice. This is a PART TIME gig — and that is what it pays. Frankly if it takes you the best part of a day to source and write six punchy posts then you know what? This was never going to be the job for you. But it works great for me. I get my Eater work done in about 4 hours each day.

And Curbed cofounder Lockhart Steele:

I’m writing these words from our New York City office, where the company employs north of 30 full-time journalists. In addition, Curbed employs full-time editorial staff in cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Austin, TX, and Portland, OR. Those are all full-time jobs with health and dental benefits and a company-matched 401(k) plan. And friendly coworkers. And a strong mission.

Curbed’s continued regional expansion has been financed on the back of growth in the business itself. As the company increases its revenues, we increase the amount we’re spending on journalism, and sometimes, when we’re feeling brave, we’ll look to expand to a new market, as we recently did in Canada. (My mom’s from Vancouver, by the by.) The economics of some markets are such that they’ll never garner large enough traffic to warrant a full-time staffer; in other markets, we’ve started with a journalist on a freelance basis and then transitioned them to full-time when the site’s growth warrants it. If we weren’t able to experiment in this way, I doubt we’d have ever been able to grow beyond New York and employ so many writers in so many cities…

It’d be wild if Curbed’s nefarious plan all along was to undermine journalism from the inside, but I’d suggest we’re doing the opposite: growing it and the opportunities for journalists. That our team does such strong work, as you acknowledge, isn’t some accident or accounting trick. It’s because our writers are great. Hard to believe we’d be able to pull that off if we treated them as serfs.

This Week in Review: Twitter’s TV ramp-up, and a clash over press regulation in the UK

Posted: 11 Oct 2013 08:00 AM PDT

Twitter, TV, and potential pitfalls: A week after Twitter made its IPO filing document public, the company continued to pull in deals tied to the TV industry — this time a partnership with Comcast (which owns NBC Universal) that allows users to watch or record Comcast shows straight from Twitter. As All Things D’s Peter Kafka said, Twitter’s been telling TV executives it can bring them viewers, and now it has a chance to prove it. Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici looked at some other evidence indicating that Twitter users are less likely to cut the cable cord.

Also this week, Nielsen launched its Twitter TV Ratings, an effort to get more precise and consistent measurements of how many people are talking about TV shows on Twitter. Meanwhile, Facebook is adding its own TV deals by the week. This week it expanded its data-sharing program with TV networks to include eight countries. There were pieces looking at the social TV battle from a variety of angles: Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici examined TV as a potential panacea for the money-losing Twitter, and Bloomberg’s Edmund Lee looked at Twitter as a potential panacea for the TV industry. The Atlantic’s Claire Peracchio covered Twitter and Facebook’s battle to take advantage.

Other writers identified a variety of other problems that face Twitter as it prepares to go public. The New York Times looked at the numerous other social media upstarts competing with Twitter, especially using photos and video. GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram and BuzzFeed’s Peter Lauria both tweaked Twitter’s ad strategy — Ingram on its challenges smoothly integrating ads, and Lauria on its over-reliance on ads in the first place.

TechCrunch’s Josh Constine brought up the problem of users who quit Twitter after being overwhelmed by its relentless flow, noting that only about a fifth of its accounts are active. “Twitter is littered with the corpses of accounts that passed away too young or never truly lived,” he wrote.

Twitter has also been acting on a couple of journalism-related fronts. As Constine and All Things D’s Peter Kafka reported, Twitter began testing Event Parrot, an account that sends direct messages of news events to users based on an algorithm built around the feeds they follow. As BuzzFeed’s John Herrman noted, it’s a sign Twitter is building a more assertive version of its service to retain more of its lapsed users. All Things D also reported that Twitter will hire NBC News’ Vivian Schiller as its head of news, a move that drew criticism from tech PR exec Ruth Bazinet for Schiller’s lack of Twitter activity and EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty for the way NBC shut the site down.

Meanwhile, The New York Times Magazine published an excerpt from a forthcoming book by its reporter, Nick Bilton, on the Machiavellian story behind Twitter’s founding and development, with co-founder Jack Dorsey as villain and co-founder Noah Glass as tragic outcast. GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram marveled at how the chaos of Twitter’s early days led to such an indispensable part of the modern media world, and Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici wondered what would have happened if Al Gore had bought Twitter and merged it with Current, which Bilton reported he tried to do.

Press regulation struggle in Britain: Nearly a year after the sweeping Leveson Report was issued calling for stricter government regulation of the press, the British press clashed this week with government officials over just how to enact that regulation. Here’s what happened, in Guardian articles: A government council rejected the press’s regulation plan modifying the royal charter, so members of Parliament worked on their own revision to get a deal through, though the press made clear it would reject a government-revised charter. The government gave the press three days (through today) to get on board.

John Witherow, editor of The Times of London, said a group of top news organizations will work to set up their own self-regulation plan without government approval. Lord Justice Leveson, who directed the inquiry that prompted this debate, tried to stay out of the fray. The Guardian has a great Q & A explainer going into more of the details.

The standoff was accompanied, of course, by plenty of rhetoric on both sides: A coalition of newspapers said imposing a government-determined charter over the industry’s opposition would “fatally undermine freedom of expression,” and in a pair of posts, Fraser Nelson of The Spectator urged the press to take off with self-regulation rather than submit to a government regulator, noting that the press’s rejected plan would have been the strictest press regulations in the West. Longtime regulation advocate Hugh Grant countered that the charter being proposed by the government isn’t nearly as repressive as it’s being made out to be.

One twist in this story related to the Daily Mail, which ran a story last week that accused the father of Labour Party leader Ed Miliband of having been a Marxist who “hated Britain.” Political leaders condemned the piece, and the public disapproved of it, leading Dominic Ponsford of the Press Gazette to wonder if the Mail “fatally weakened” the press’s hand at a critical moment in negotiation over regulation.

The government’s case against revealing surveillance: The new chief of Britain’s MI5 intelligence agency defended his country’s surveillance strategy, claiming that making information about it public “hands the advantage to the terrorists.” He never mentioned Edward Snowden in his remarks, but it was clear that they were aimed at Snowden’s release of files describing the surveillance techniques of the U.S. and U.K. governments.

The statements were promptly ripped by a legion of commentators, including Mike Masnick of Techdirt and Nick Hopkins of The Guardian, as well as editors from around the world who defended The Guardian. Said Masnick: “The point here is that you don’t have to keep the fact that you tap these things a secret if you have sufficient oversight and controls to make sure they’re not abused. But that’s not what anyone did here.” Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger also defended his own paper’s stories, saying that the news of government surveillance can’t be a surprise to terrorists.

Elsewhere in the sprawling surveillance leaks story, Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has broken many of the stories based on Snowden’s files, was interviewed on BBC Newsnight, with the network drawing criticism from Jay Rosen for a weak, faux-adversarial style. Barton Gellman of The Washington Post, who broke many of the surveillance stories on the American side, explained why The Post didn’t withhold the names of the tech companies participating in the U.S. National Security Agency’s PRISM program. And filmmaker Laura Poitras, who also broke the stories, gave an extensive interview to the Italian magazine Mousse.

Newsweek’s Pema Levy profiled blogger Marcy Wheeler, who’s done valuable work parsing the documents released about the NSA. And The Guardian reported that U.S. and U.K. surveillance has targeted the online anonymity network Tor, though the Columbia Journalism Review’s Lauren Kirchner argued that journalists can still trust Tor. A group of researchers from Columbia and MIT filed a public letter to a U.S. government committee arguing that mass surveillance is dangerous to journalism, and Kirchner wrote about how reporters are dealing with sourcing and encryption in a mass surveillance environment.

mugshot-grid

Mugshot extortion and public data: The New York Times brought attention to a story with wide-ranging implications for search and data journalism with its report on mugshot sites that extort people by making them pay to have their photos removed from the site and its very prominent Google search results. Just before the story was released, Google released an algorithm update that bumped those sites down its search results.

Data scientist Hilary Mason noted that what the mugshot sites do is to make already technically public information more accessible, thus rendering it more public. “Data is no longer just private or public, but often exists in an in-between state, where the public-ness of the data is a function of how much work is required to find it,” she wrote. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM questioned the power of Google to determine proper and improper uses of public information, a point echoed by Forbes’ Kashmir Hill.

Roger Kay of Forbes used the story as a jumping-off point to question the legitimacy of search engine optimization as a whole, and the First Amendment Coalition’s Peter Scheer argued that it reinforces The Times’ ability to alter the realities it’s reporting on, through its status and reporting tenacity.

marimow-headshot

Philadelphia Inquirer editor fired: The Philadelphia Inquirer fired its editor, Bill Marimow, this week as part of a dispute between the newspaper’s owners and its top editors. The paper’s publisher, Bob Hall, attributed the firing to “philosophical differences” between himself and Marimow, and Philadelphia magazine reported that the fight between Marimow and Hall was tied to Marimow’s refusal to overhaul the paper’s website in the way Hall wanted, as well as his refusal to fire certain editors.

As The New York Observer’s Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke reported, the conflict was a proxy battle between members of the paper’s fractured group of owners: Two owners sued the company over the firing within two days. Bloomgarden-Smoke also reported that there was deep frustration in the newsroom over the relationship between the Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News, and their shared website, Philly.com. Jim Romenesko reported that Marimow was refusing to acknowledge his firing and that Inquirer and Daily News alumni were calling for a review of the firing. Mathew Ingram of paidContent characterized the struggle as a battle between evolutionary and revolutionary change on the web, Philadelphia magazine’s Joel Mathis criticized Marimow’s slow approach to digital change, as well as the fight over his firing.

Reading roundup: A few stories that might have slipped past during a busy week:

— The Committee to Protect Journalists released a damning report on the Obama administration’s record of surveillance and leak investigations to attempt to thwart journalists’ attempts to gain information about it. The Washington Post published an excerpt on reporters’ attempts to fight back, and The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone put together the best summary of the report. Free Press’ Josh Stearns and The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald castigated the Obama administration for its clampdown, and The Post’s Erik Wemple noted that the White House journalists quoted in the report don’t seem worried about losing access, because they don’t have much in the first place.

— The Financial Times announced it would end its regional editions and publish just one global print edition as part of a shift toward being a digital-centric (and potentially digital-only) publication. Part of that online focus will include “smart aggregation” of content from FT and elsewhere. Patrick Smith of The Media Briefing saw the plan as a model for moving away from a print-centered structure, as did journalist Kevin Anderson.

— Pew Research released a study with some dire findings indicating that millennials simply aren’t following the pattern of news use that previous generations have. Jeff Jarvis proposed that it might not be that young people don’t care about the news as much, but that they’re using it more efficiently.

—Researchers Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler released a report for the New America Foundation that found evidence that politicians do tend to lie less when they know they’re being fact-checked. Both Craig Silverman of Poynter and Molly Ball of The Atlantic gave good summaries of their innovative study and looked at the possibility that organizations like PolitiFact might act as a deterrent to political lying.

— Guardian Australia editor Katharine Viner made the case for her news organization’s digital strategy of embracing openness and eschewing paywalls. Mathew Ingram of paidContent praised her speech and elsewhere argued that The Guardian shouldn’t feel an obligation to put up a paywall. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Dean Starkman, however, argued that The Guardian is in dangerous financial territory without a paywall.

Image of Twitter on TV by Esther Vargas used under a Creative Commons license.

The 3 Key Types of BuzzFeed Lists To Learn Before You Die

Posted: 11 Oct 2013 07:50 AM PDT

“Yeah, I think probably people shy away from 20,” BuzzFeed’s Jack Shepherd told me over the phone. “Twenty feels real weird.”

We were talking about lists, of course. Not listicles — Shepherd says, with some exceptions, listicles are not what BuzzFeed does: “A listicle, to me, is the lowest version of the art form. By lowest I don’t mean bad — sometimes they’re really, really great,” he says. “But a listicle, to me, is something that is literally an arbitrary grouping of things. Ten ghosts. Or 11 Songs We’re Listening to Right Now. Things where there’s no narrative that’s driving it.”

I had called Shepherd to ask him about list length — why some lists have certain numbers of items, and how they get that way. I was hoping there would be a science behind it, a big reveal that explained why some BuzzFeed lists get stretched out to 65 or 84, while others stop shy of 10.

Our curiosity was piqued by a side project that Knight-Mozilla fellow Noah Veltman calls a Listogram, a data analysis of the frequency of BuzzFeed lists by length — or, more precisely, quantity. Consciously or subsconsciously, BuzzFeed list authors tend to cluster their products around certain lengths, Veltman found:

Listogram

Veltman said in an email that his curiosity was piqued when he started to notice an increasing number of irregular list lengths, and fewer round numbers.

“These odd lengths are sort of a new phenomenon. Most listicle makers still tend to stick to the top 5, top 10 format,” he wrote. “But when you see BuzzFeed listicles, they have these arbitrary lengths, and it always raises the question in my mind, why THAT number of items?”

If you read enough BuzzFeed lists, you’ll start to notice some of things Veltman noticed as well. For example, some lists don’t actually contain as many separate points as they say they do. They might have that many gifs or images, but there aren’t actually (for example) “34 Reasons Why Parent Trap Dennis Quaid Is The Hottest Movie DILF Ever.” That list includes:

1. He owns a winery.
5. He’s practically a cowboy.
6. HE’S A HOT COWBOY WHO OWNS HIS OWN WINERY.

The third of which is just an amplification of the previous two, if you want to get technical about it. (The hotness is made clear elsewhere in the list. This is serious business.) Veltman calls this phenomenon listflation. Via Twitter, BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti offered a counterpoint:

Anyway — so what did Veltman learn crunching the data?

Despite the perceived move away from round numbers, the four most repeated list lengths are 10, 15, 21, and 25. (One of these things is not like the others.) But overall, Veltman was surprised by how common it was to write lists over 30.

“I’d have expected lists longer than 15 or 20 to be much rarer, since it seems like a lot to sit through AND it seems like a lot more work for the author,” Veltman wrote. In fact, Shepherd mentioned to a period in 2010 when there was an internal, unofficial competition in the BuzzFeed offices to see who could write the post that exceeded 100 by the most items.

“I think what we found ultimately is the amount of time it takes to compile 200 of something could be better spent actually narrowing it down to 20 and figuring out how to make it a really rich narrative experience,” he says. “The megalist phase of 2010 was an interesting experiment, but one that has mercifully gone by the wayside.”

Brian Abelson, who collaborated with Veltman on the project and is also a Knight-Mozilla fellow, found a slight correlation between list length and how many tweets the list gets — the longer the list, the more tweets.

It’s probably not surprising that there’s as much superstition as there is science at BuzzFeed around what list lengths should be. In addition to an instinctual dislike of the number 20, Shepherd told me, “It’s long been a superstition in the business — for years — that an odd number will do better than an even number.”  So it follows that Veltman also tried to find out whether certain authors invariably favor certain lengths, to see if they had any “pet theories” about what works well and what doesn’t. (Where well = viral, that is.)

“Certain editors get attached to certain numbers. I looked at my top ten viral posts of all time, and three of them have 21,” Shepherd says.

The 9 Most Adorable Paragraphs In The Middle Of This Story

Indeed, there are some common rules that are applied to list length. But first, it’s important to understand that there are different kinds of lists, which I tried to categorize from my conversation with Shepherd. “There’s such a massive variety of experiences you can have with something that is a headline that happens to have a number in front of it,” he said.

First, and most basic, is the listicle. “109 Cats in Sweaters is literally that,” says Shepherd. “There’s nothing more going on there.”

Second is the definitive list — the list that sets out to encompass all of something, like The 50 Cutest Things that Ever Happened. These lists have a strong tendency to go viral — 316,000 Facebook likes on that one so far — but they take a lot of effort.

“I didn’t just go and find 50 cute pictures that I liked. I thought back to my five years of scouring for cute animals on the Internet and the ones that really struck me and stuck with me,” he said. “Compiling that list took a huge amount of time and required having spent a lot of time looking at these things, whereas if you do something that is kind of more simple, you don’t want to put a big round number.”

And finally, there is the framework list — the list that only exists to structure a narrative. Take, for example, 54 Reasons You Should Go To A Dog Surfing Competition Before You Die.

The number 54, “in that case, that’s just a way of organizing this story that I’m telling about this amazing experience I had watching these dogs surf in San Diego,” Shepherd says. “If one of the items is that bulldogs are better surfers, and I have five great bulldog pictures that I’ll group under that number, it sort of doesn’t really matter.”

This is the most important kind of list for BuzzFeed, the one that helped it get past its reputation for creating Internet drivel and begin building a broader audience. This kind of list has the best content, but also the most arbitrary length — there are as many items as it takes for the story to be done.

“The thing that I’ve been saying recently about lists is a list is just a scaffolding for a story. It’s just a way of organizing information,” says Shepherd. “I mean, The Odyssey is 24 chapters. You could call that 24 Chapters About Odysseus. That’s, like, a really great list. Really top notch. Really, really viral. Super viral.” 

That’s heady stuff. But the point is, list length has more to do with what’s in the list than with trying to guess which lengths readers are most likely to click.

7 Paragraphs You Must Read To Finish This Story

Which doesn’t mean the lengths aren’t being manipulated. Lots of editorial thought goes into shortening or lengthening lists according to taste. “But it’s less interesting than numerology,” he says. “It’s more things like, ‘You know what, I looked at this post and I really felt like around 20, I got the point. So you might want to cut it from 31 to 21.’” (Not 20. Remember, 20 feels real weird.)

Lists being too long — or having too much mid-list dead weight — is definitely a concern. “We’ve looked at it in real time, which specific items on a list people were sharing the most, and started cutting out the ones that weren’t getting shares,” Shepherd says. “That was interesting — the idea being that, if there’s a dud in your list, you want to cut it down. But that didn’t in any conclusive way seem to effect the overall sharing of the post.”

Shepherd is also interested in using mobile technology to gather data on at which points in a list readers start scrolling faster. which could correspond with the point at which they got bored. He also likes to look over the shoulders of list readers.

“Something I would love to do — and it’s tough to get editors to do it when they’ve put a lot of time into a post — I would love to split test a bunch of different editorial posts. Let’s say an editor made a post that was 25 Steps to Get Through a Rough Day. I would like to have five versions of that post with different lengths and show readers different versions of that post and see which ones got the most sharing and see if we could get a sense,” he says.

But ultimately — much as one might want analytics to deliver conclusive answers — the results are often fuzzy. “I tried to have a look at some of our writers who have the most viral posts, and there’s actually a pretty wide distribution of numbers,” says Shepherd. People make lists of all different lengths for all different reasons. And why people click on them likely has very little to do with having a natural affinity for the number 12 or refusing to read lists longer than 30.

But thinking about list length does force us to consider the medium more seriously — something that BuzzFeed higher-ups have been trying to get us to do for a while. Ultimately, neither the magic of numbers nor science of numbers explains why people are drawn to lists to begin with — nor does length, on its surface, do much to telegraph what multitudes a list might contain.

“Honestly,” Shepherd told me, “I’ve often made posts where the post didn’t need a number, and then I’ll throw a number into the headline — just because people like that more.”

Photo by Thomas Hawk used via a Creative Commons license.
di