Jumat, 25 Oktober 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab


The newsonomics of David Pogue and the Pujols Effect

Posted: 24 Oct 2013 08:15 AM PDT

Divorces can be such fun, especially media divorces.

This week, David Pogue and The New York Times split after 13 years. Last month, The Wall Street Journal couldn’t renew their vows with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Over the past year, Nate Silver’s bid adieu to the Times and Andrew Sullivan severed his relationship with The Daily Beast, just months before Tina Brown did likewise.

The terms of disendearment are never announced, and everybody wishes everybody luck in their new ventures.

What’s the value of media personality these days, and how is that value changing? There are always personality differences, miscommunications, and feelings of unshared gain (or sacrifice), as in all relationships. These more recent splits, though, may tell us about the new value of personality power in the digital media world — as well as its limits.

The Pogue parting is no big surprise. He’s been in and out of hot water at the Times, as his far-flung business activities posed potential conflict after potential conflict; then-Times public editor Clark Hoyt’s 2009 column on Pogue served only as a public iceberg tip for concerns long simmering in the newsroom. Pogue’s own partial defense — “I am not a reporter, I have never been to journalism school” — certainly didn’t help, as Gawker, among others, ridiculed that stance as disingenuous.

David Pogue is a wonderfully successful personal tech writer, probably more show biz than news biz, and now he’s taking his talents to Yahoo, where, according to CEO Marissa Mayer, he ”will lead a major expansion of consumer tech coverage.” Pogue gets more money and presumably less interference with his ventures, which include TV (PBS Nova specials, CBS Sunday Morning stories), books (Missing Manual book series), and magazines (a Scientific American column. A Broadway composer, you can check him out singing Tom Lehrer-like parody (“I Write the Code”) on YouTube. Pogue’s been multi-platform since before there was multi-platform.

Across town, The Wall Street Journal had developed its own multi-platform success. Since its launch in 2007, AllThingsD has moved comfortably from web to mobile, a top-three go-to site about digital deal-making, and back into the terrestrial world. The annual D conference is prototypical of the new events businesses now being jump-started by big and small publishers alike (“The newsonomics of the new Chattanooga Choo-Choo”).

Let’s consider the business case of star power. It’s morphed some since I first wrote about it three years ago (“The newsonomics of journalistic star power”) because of the changing economics of the business. Then it was institutions like Bloomberg and the National Journal making their moves, poaching higher-end talent like Fareed Zakaria and Howard Fineman.

Why invest in such talent? Certainly, there’s the barker factor. David Pogue, Marissa Mayer believes, will bring new readers into the Yahoo tech tent. More audience is, of course, the goal. But in 2013, audience growth is less valuable than it used to be. With the digital ad flatness that almost everyone other than Google, Facebook, and Twitter are seeing (Yahoo itself was down 7 percent in display ad revenue in Q3), the tie between audience growth and ad return is weakened. These days, the money is in matching audience to ad, as programmatic buying and other ad technologies transform the business. (Marketplace covered this issue well in its Pogue-related coverage; AllThingsD’s revenue plusses and minuses were best covered by Bloomberg’s Ed Lee.)

So how much, financially, is a David Pogue or a Nate Silver worth The New York Times?

The value equation has two parts. First, media can count the direct revenue driven by a contributor’s posts, columns, videos, or event appearances. Then there’s the elusive — but very real — brand-building. Personalities do help build brands.

The bigger the brand, though, the more value the brand may confer on the personality, as compared to the reverse. As we try to disentangle the value of Andrew Sullivan’s pay model from the value of his previous employers, we see that he’s both proving out a new model and showing us the limits of it. Both the Beast and The Atlantic, his previous home, conferred a fair amount of brand authority on him.

It’s an elusive relationship, as hard to achieve in media as marriage: “The sweet spot is the combo where both benefit from and feed off each other,” sums up Justin Smith, the new CEO of Bloomberg Media and former Atlantic Media president.

What we may seeing in the Pogue departure, as well as the AllThingsD split, is a new media company assessment of that brand value, as those companies struggle with lesser, ad-depleted revenue value.

Call it the Pujols Effect. The St. Louis Cardinals, tonight entering Game 2 in their fourth World Series in 10 years, changed up their own personality/brand mix a half-decade ago. They opted to develop new talent from within their farm system rather than signing or re-signing ultra-priced talent. They let their star Albert Pujols go in the last off-season. The Los Angeles Angels (yes, of Anaheim) signed up the 31-year-old for 10 years at a cool quarter of a billion dollars. Short story: He got injured, the Angels tanked, and the Cards, relying on younger, cheaper talent, proved to be one of the top two teams in baseball. Today’s verdict: The Cards are geniuses. (Even if they lost 8-1 at Fenway last night.)

In the Times’ and Journal’s decision making, we can see a media corollary of the Pujols Effect: Refuse to pay what Yahoo or ESPN will pay a Pogue or a Silver, and invest those precious dollars in less sexy development. That investment may include video or analytics at the Times. At the Journal, editor Gerry Baker has talked about hiring 20 new staffers to produce the kind of content AllThingsD staffers have been writing.

At the Journal, News Corp owns all the AllThingsD assets — site name, events business, archives — and that’s not a trivial foundation. At the Times, tech coverage from Silicon Valley to New York has been well staffed up in recent years. They both know they’ll find stiff competition in the overcrowded tech coverage marketplace. (At the same time, such in-depth product-review sites as The Wirecutter make the kind of quick in-and-out coverage that a Pogue or a Mossberg provides less relevant to an increasing share of the tech-buying population.)

For other media, the brand-building may be — or seem — more worth it. Whatever Marissa is paying David is far less than the $1.1 billion she paid (or overpaid) for Tumblr, and the deal can be seen the same way: as part of her efforts to rebuild the tarnished Yahoo brand. You can make similar cases for some of the potential Walt-and-Kara bidders out there: NBCUniversal, Bloomberg, Condé Nast, Cox Enterprises, AOL’s TechCrunch, and The Washington Post Company. Of course, the question is what the buyers are buying: how much of the staff will stay together and who will be picked off by other media, including News Corp itself.

For both the Times and the Journal, the question still hangs in the air: how to complement its traditional, journalistic report with the kind of voice and skills that the Swishers, Mossbergs, and Pogues bring.

The Times, for one, needs as many draws as it can get. While its staff of more than 1,100 produces an impressive report — now rewarded by all those digital-only and all-access subscribers — it needs more ways to satisfy its paying audience. It first licensed “outsiders” when it published the Freakonomics blog in 2007, a franchise that has since moved on. Surprisingly, the Times has signed up few higher-profile outsiders to plump up its products since. Pogue wasn’t exactly an outsider, but he was on the edge.

So one question we’ve got to ask: What is a Timesman in the digital age? Can the Times figure out how to widen its content offering while maintaining its core values? It lost Nate Silver to ESPN. While his parting caused much more concern at the Times — his serious-minded analysis stands apart from the populist and internally unpopular Pogue — there’s a real question of how well the Times can grow beyond its glorious roots, signing up and keeping unorthodox talents.

One such talent is David Carr. Looking, sounding, and often writing little like a traditional Timesman, Carr, like his partner in media intrigue Brian Stelter, has added a fresh voice to coverage. I talked with Carr about this fine line of how much value an institution like the Times confers on its talent and how much that talent confers back on the brand. Carr, who’s covered Hollywood on and off, over the years uses a cinematic metaphor.

I like that people pay attention to what I write, but I never get confused about the fact that if my last name were not New York Times, far fewer would care what I thought.

The affiliation with the Times, the context of it, gives normal humans a kind of superpower. It’s sort of like being Batman in the movies. No matter who wears the outfit — including Ben Affleck — they are Batman. Take away the costume, and they shrink back to life size. In a lot of cases, people pay for the New York Times for its breadth, not any one thing, and it is the Venn diagram intersect between the personal and organizational brand that creates something powerful that readers are willing to pay for.

In other words, know your place, in all senses of that phrase.

That’s a difficult fit for some, those with egos and talents big enough to be Timespeople but willing to understand their place in the hierarchy. That suggests the Times’ ability to find the right fits going forward will continue to be tough.

One company that seems to have figured out the new playbook is ESPN. Over the years, it has poached many of the best newspaper sports columnists, placing them in those boxes on talk show screens, putting their columns up and using them as analysts. The names are impressive, and there are lots of them. If two or three take a hike tomorrow, ESPN’s deep bench strength means the multi-platform pioneer would hardly miss a beat. Replaceability — and that deep bench — will be hallmarks of the successful multi-platform media companies to come.

Photo of David Pogue by Ed Schipul used under a Creative Commons license.

Bumping into the news: New Pew data shows Facebook users find news there, but don’t seek it out

Posted: 24 Oct 2013 07:00 AM PDT

Do people go to Facebook for news? We have an answer: Generally, no.

According to a new study from the Pew Research Center, only 16 percent of Facebook users say getting news is a major reason they use the social network. Only 4 percent say it’s the most important way they get news.

Pew found that about two-thirds of adults in the U.S. use Facebook, and of those, about 30 percent of the total US population consumes news through it. But even among people who count themselves as news consumers on Facebook, the majority say it’s just something they’re exposed to while on the site; 78 percent of those users told Pew they “mostly see news when on Facebook for other reasons.” As one person told Pew: “News on Facebook is just something that happens.”

So can the news be effective when it’s competing with status updates on new babies, photos from last night’s party, or updates from college friends? Maybe. Traffic from Facebook is growing, but Facebook users don’t click news links all the time: “Two-thirds of Facebook news consumers, 64%, say that they at least sometimes click on links to news stories. Still, just 16% do this often,” the report says.

pewfacebookreasonsBut the Pew report does emphasize the fact that Facebook users are young and increasingly mobile, two audience segments the news industry could use some help with. The study says young people (ages 18 to 29) make up 34 percent of Facebook news consumers, versus only 20 percent of Facebook users who don’t consume news there.

Here are five takeaways from the study that might be of interest to media companies.

If you get news on Facebook, you spend more time there.

Spending heavy amounts of time on Facebook means getting exposed to a lot of information: vacation photos, petition links, games, videos, and even news. But Pew found that the users who engage with news on Facebook are likely to spend more time on the site. Two-thirds of those who read news on Facebook come back to the site multiple times a day, as opposed to 29 percent of regular Facebook users. “In addition, about six-in-ten Facebook news consumers (61%) say they check Facebook throughout the day or leave the site open, compared with a quarter (25%) of other Facebook users,” according to the report. (Page 9)

If you like news on Facebook, you really like news on Facebook.

Of the slice of Facebook news users who share news stories often:

They are nearly five times more likely to ever see headlines about the latest stories (55% versus 12% of other Facebook news consumers), seven times as likely to click on links to news stories on Facebook (64% to 9%), six times as likely to "like" or comment on news stories (73% versus 12%) and far more likely to discuss issues in the news with other people on Facebook (39% to 2%). And, more than half, 56%, of those who often post or share news have used Facebook to keep up with a news event as it was happening, roughly twice that of other Facebook news consumers (25%).

Local news does okay.

While entertainment was the most common sort of news seen by users on Facebook, the next runner up was what Pew calls “news about people and events in their own community,” ahead of even sports and national politics. That sounds like local news, right? Maybe. Further down that list of news Facebook readers see most, on the lower end of the spectrum, are local government and politics and local weather and traffic. Pew also found that if you are the type of person who likes to share news on Facebook, you’re more likely to get some kind of local information: 81 percent of people who share news on Facebook are getting community news and events on the site.

Name recognition matters on Facebook. Except when it doesn’t.

Nearly every news organization and many individual journalists have a Likeable presence on Facebook. But Pew’s findings are a little murky on the subject of whether an association with a journalism company or reporter makes a difference in how people interact with the news.

pewfacebookinteractEven if you do fancy yourself a news consumer on Facebook, you’re likely committing to the outlets you’re already familiar with and have some relationship with. Maybe it’s your local paper or TV station, or you follow social feeds from NBC News or CNN elsewhere. Either way, Pew says 72 percent of the Facebook users who like or follow media outlets say the news they find on the site is the same sort of news they see elsewhere. Just 20 percent of Facebook news consumers say they click on a story because its from a news organization they “prefer,” according to Pew. Two-thirds of people who get news on Facebook have it sent their way by Facebook friends rather than by news outlets; only one-third of news consumers on Facebook follow or like news outlets or individual journalists, the report says.

But it’s not quite time to burn the newsroom social media manual. One encouraging sign from the report, if you’re someone who takes the time to follow news outlets or individual journalists on Facebook, you’re more likely to engage with the news, read news, or cite Facebook as a news source:

Those who "like" news organizations, reporters or commentators on Facebook are more likely than other news consumers on the platform to see headlines, click on links, comment, post stories and discuss issues in the news. They also are more enamored of the Facebook news experience overall. The vast majority, 84%, enjoy seeing posts about news mixed in with other kinds of posts.

Basically, if you’re the type of person who actively follows your favorite news sources on Facebook, not only are you going to get more involved in Facebook, but you’re also going to get a lot of your news from those outlets: “When news organizations or individual reporters are "liked" by Facebook users, they tend to play a strong role in their Facebook news diets. Roughly half of those who do follow news organizations or reporters, 48%, say most of the news they get on Facebook comes from these sources rather than friends and family.”

The future is still mobile.

There’s an interesting split in usage between Facebook’s mobile users and desktop users: Desktop-primary users spend more time on the site, but mobile-heavy users visit more times through the day. (It wouldn’t be surprising if the same split was true for news sites in general.) The trend lines favor a mobile future, though: “Over half of Facebook news consumers who are 18-29 years old (56%) and 30-49 years old (53%) mostly access the site though a mobile device, compared with only about a quarter (24%) of Facebook news consumers who are 50 years of age or older.”

A new class of Knight-Mozilla Fellows is ready to interweave code and the news

Posted: 24 Oct 2013 05:00 AM PDT

Knight Foundation and Mozilla have announced a new class of fellows who will take their hacker skills into newsrooms around the US and across the globe.

The new class of five Knight-Mozilla Fellows has just been announced at the Mozilla Festival in London, and their bios include some of the sort of descriptions you might expect: media scholar, activist, interactive developer, code monkey. This third class of fellows will be embedded in top news organizations in the U.S. and abroad and work to connect their code-driven backgrounds to journalistic goals.

The fellows, who are part of the broader Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project, will work inside newsrooms for 10 months, assisting the organization with established projects, building new ones, or performing research. While the original idea for the fellowship was to have coders help shepherd newsrooms into the digital era by extolling the virtues of new technology, the program has become more dynamic, said Dan Sinker, the head of OpenNews. (Here’s Source and the other parts of the growing OpenNews community. Now, being a Knight-Mozilla fellow is increasingly about the code you commit to GitHub and the talks you hold inside your newsroom and to bigger groups at journalism conferences, along with working in individual newsrooms, Sinker said.

Last week, Knight recommitted to the broader OpenNews project, investing $4 million over a three-year period, with funding to support the fellowship and create learning opportunities for coders outside the fellowship program.

brianBrian Jacobs (ProPublica) is a designer and interactive developer. He’s passionate about multi-faceted visual tools that are civic-minded, scientific, journalistic, or otherwise educational, to benefit the people and their habitat. He’s worked in commercial and academic contexts, on GIS projects in West Virginia, web apps in Philadelphia, and towards an urban data processing and visualization platform for the MIT SENSEable City Lab, in Singapore. He’s excited about the future of open data, particularly collaborative and semantic web initiatives that can afford reproducible access to cleaner, more interdisciplinary data. Brian is also intensely interested in bagels, hikes, and sci-fi camp.

gabrielarodriguezGabriela Rodriguez (La Nacion) is an activist and hacker who loves the intersection between media and technology. She grew up in Uruguay and now lives in Portland, OR (USA). She is a software developer with passion for free software and open knowledge. She co-founded the Uruguayan nonprofit DATA that works with open data and transparency in South America.

harloholmesHarlo Holmes (The New York Times) is a media scholar, software programmer, and activist. As research fellow with The Guardian Project, she primarily investigates topics in digital media steganography, metadata, and the standards surrounding technology in the social sciences. She harnesses her multi-faceted background in service of responding to the growing technological needs of human rights workers, journalists, and other do-gooders around the world.

marcosvanettaMarcos Alejandro Vanetta (Texas Tribune) is a biomedical engineer truly passionate about software and technology. He is an experienced web developer and an open source enthusiast. Marcos is an active member of the Hacks/Hackers community in Buenos Aires and the lead developer of Mapa76 (aka Analice.me). You can find him in a Rock & Roll concert or at your closest hackathon.

aureliamoserAurelia Moser (Ushahidi / Internews Kenya) is a data munger and code monkey based in New York City. With a background in library metadata and lab work, she builds visualizations and narratives around data, supported dually by passions for data preservation and open information. Equal part experimenter and educator, she organizes NYC Nodebots meetups and coordinates curricula for Girl Develop It, a non-profit teaching women how to code in low-cost classes. For fun, she runs a radio show based on the semantic web, and digs studying, silent discos, and shoegaze.

Disclosure: Knight Foundation is also a funder of the Nieman Journalism Lab.