Kamis, 03 Oktober 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

When readers are robots: Tracking bogus botnet traffic

Posted: 02 Oct 2013 10:27 AM PDT

“Unique visitors” aren’t always that unique. Sometimes, they’re not even visitors — at least of the human variety. A story in The Wall Street Journal looks at what happens marketers end up buying ad space on websites that turn out to be visited only by robots.

While some scammers create stand-alone operations, others devise sprawling empires. In one case, the White Ops technology uncovered a zombie-populated lifestyle network, with hundreds of connected sites, including bodybuildingfaq.com, financestalk.com, and abctraveling.com. No one at the sites could be reached for comment.

In some scenarios, legitimate websites inadvertently set themselves up for botnet invasions when they hire companies to help boost their traffic. That can involve building audiences through methods such as paid keyword-search advertising with search engines.

White Ops discovered that more than 30% of the visitors to the education portal Education.com were robots. In the past month the site received about four million unique views, according to Quantcast.

A spokesman for Education.com said it was aware of the bot-traffic and that it had likely come from an initiative in the summer to boost its audience numbers. Education.com had bought traffic from a variety of legitimate sources, including search engines, to lure in new subscribers, as well as users “who would perform well for advertisers.”

“We shut down the program,” the spokesman said.

“Journalism hackdays are not traditional tech hackdays”

Posted: 02 Oct 2013 09:12 AM PDT

Antoine Laurent of the Global Editors Network outlines what he’s learned from hosting journalism hackdays, a genre on the rise. As he points out, the sort of things that work well with non-journalism hackdays might not be optimal for when hacks meet hackers over pizza:

The demo/pitch time is the best of hackays and hackathons. But sometimes, focusing on delivering a working prototype will forbid the team to be innovative enough to find and work on the right idea. The demo is not the ultimate objective, and a good idea can always be developed after the event.

The Texas Tribune wants to stream a little stream, invest in live video of Texas politics

Posted: 02 Oct 2013 08:04 AM PDT

The Texas Tribune — the politics-and-policy news org in Austin that’s served as the single strongest model for what a regional news nonprofit can become — is running a Kickstarter campaign to raise $60,000. If they reach that goal, the Trib will buy livestreaming equipment that will let them cover the 2014 statewide races through unfiltered live video. Here’s the pitch; it builds off the Tribune’s success livestreaming the Wendy Davis abortion filibuster this summer:

At this writing, the Tribune’s raised about $14,000 of that $60,000, with 20 days left to go. If you’ve got some extra money in your pocket and want to support an innovative news operation, think about giving. (If it reaches 1,000 total donors of any size, the Knight Foundation will kick in $10,000.)

I emailed with Rodney Gibbs, the Trib’s chief innovation officer, to understand a little more about the project. One noteworthy item that’ll be of interest to other news orgs:

If we hit our goals for the Kickstarter campaign, we will lead a public three-part Google Hangout to walk other news organizations through the steps of establishing their own livestreams. Featuring the Trib folks behind our abortion debate livestream, we’re breaking the series into three parts: technical, editorial, and marketing. Our goal is to demystify the livestreaming process and give news orgs the information and confidence they need to launch their own livestreams, whether they have shoestring budgets, guerrilla operations or large, multi-camera operations. Our goal is to share what we’ve learned and help other folks leverage the power of livestreaming in their communities.

Joshua Benton: I used to write about Texas state government. Are you sure it’s interesting enough to be livestreaming all the time? What sort of stories do you want to be broadcasting?
Rodney Gibbs: We’re not planning to livestream everything; rather, we want the capability to livestream anything. There’s a big difference there. True, many stories we cover don’t merit livestreaming; for those, reporting after the fact is fine. But for many things — breaking news, big political announcements, election night coverage, protest rallies, live events with newsmakers, exclusive interviews, the list goes on — livestreaming is an incredible tool to have.

Here are a few examples of stories we’d livestream right now if we had the hardware on hand:

  • This Thursday, Sen. Wendy Davis, who led last summer’s abortion bill filibuster, is making a big announcement in her hometown of Haltom City, Texas. She’s expected to declare her candidacy for governor. We’re sending reporters and a video camera to the event, but we can’t livestream her announcement on our own. Either we have to piggyback on a television station’s feed, which is technically problematic and delegates editorial control to another organization, or we tape Davis’ announcement and upload it later to YouTube and our site. Neither option is optimal, either for us or our audience.
  • During our Tribune Festival last weekend, we hosted a one-on-one interview between Sen. Ted Cruz and Evan Smith, our editor-in-chief. Hot on the heels of his marathon speech in the U.S. Senate, Cruz spoke about his push to defund Obamacare. We posted Cruz’s interview on YouTube after our event, but carrying it live would have engaged more people with this fast-moving national issue.
  • Also during the fest, Texas First Lady Anita Perry seemed to put some space between herself and her husband, Gov. Rick Perry, by saying abortion “could be a woman’s right, just like it’s a man’s right if he wants to have some kind of procedure.” Her comments surprised the audience in the room and made waves on Twitter, resulting in the governor stating today that his wife misspoke. Imagine if it had been streamed live!

Those are three examples of stories we’d livestream this week, and I could name more. Not every story is ripe for livestreaming, of course, but when the right stories come along, you really wish you had the ability to share it with your audience in realtime.

Benton: Sixty thousand bucks seems like a lot of money. I thought we were all supposed to be able to use our iPhones for this sort of thing. Why do you think it’s worth investing in gear like this?
Gibbs: Yes, you can use your iPhones for streaming, and we have done that several times to augment our reporting. However, just as some have created music videos or feature films with iPhones, the video and audio quality captured over a consumer-grade gadget like that is not broadcast quality. We hold ourselves to high journalistic standards, and that includes the caliber of our video production for all of our reporting.

In addition to satisfying our own standards, many of our partners require professionally made, high-definition content. The Trib freely shares all of our content with any outlet — online, print, and broadcast. Many TV stations, in markets large and small, frequently air our content, often because they don’t have the resources in-house to cover the statewide issues and races that we do. We are, in effect, the capitol bureau for many of these broadcasters. Whether livestreamed or taped in a studio, our video content must meet or exceed those stations’ broadcast standards.

The $60,000 we’re raising all goes toward purchasing hardware to make everything we shoot livestream-enabled. The bulk of money (more than $50,000) goes toward two items: a LiveU “satellite backpack” and a TriCaster switcher. The backpack lets us livestream HD over existing cell networks on the go from anywhere. It’s perfect for breaking news like the filibuster and the protests surrounding it; remote shoots like this week’s Davis announcement; and mobile reporting, such as when our reporters cover candidates on the campaign trail. In short, the backpack enables livestreaming on the fly from anywhere.

The other big ticket item, the TriCaster, lets us edit and stream our live events around the state with the same quality you’d see in a TV studio production. We host more than 60 events each year in town halls and college campuses across Texas. These live hot seats with politicians and policymakers are often the only chance local constituents get to see their elected officials in person and ask them questions face-to-face. More than 10,000 people attend our events each year, but let’s face it — not everyone can take time off work or travel around the state to engage with their elected officials in this way. Livestreaming these events with the TriCaster will allow many more people to virtually attend these events in realtime on their computer or mobile device.

The remainder of the Kickstarter fund goes to purchasing a laptop and accessories, like backup hard drives, cables, and cases. The Tribune is swallowing the extra expenses and the personnel costs associated with adopting and learning new systems.

Benton: What’ll it mean to The Texas Tribune as a news organization if people come to think of it as a place for live online video? Does it make you more like a broadcast outlet?
Gibbs: Actually we’re already a broadcaster. We produce hundreds of hours of video each year that we publish on our own site and on our YouTube channel. We may be best known for our written stories and our data applications, but video is a major component of our output. From breaking news to interviews, live events to short-form documentary, we produce a lot of broadcast journalism. Thanks to the success of the abortion filibuster livestream and the proliferation of mobile video, our users increasingly expect us to livestream everything.

As an online news organization, we see the lines separating various forms of content — writing, podcasts, video, data apps, maps — as fuzzy ones. It’s all content to us. If we expand our ability to stream any story that merits live treatment, it increases our reach and gives our audience more immediate access to the issues and people we cover. If that makes us a bit more like a broadcast outlet, we’ll take it.

AP photo of June 25 Wendy Davis filibuster by Eric Gay.

The Dallas Morning News dismantles its paywall in favor of a bisected reader experience

Posted: 02 Oct 2013 06:41 AM PDT

When The Dallas Morning News debuted a digital subscription plan in 2011, publisher Jim Moroney acknowledged that the strategy had its risks. The Morning News paywall, which arrived shortly before the more talked-about one at The New York Times, would be rigid: no metered access, no deals, no ways to sneak through. The goals were to shore up print readership (by bundling online access with a subscription) and to build a new paying digital audience. In a memo to staff, Moroney predicted there would be naysayers:

We will be vilified by the digital futurists, ridiculed by colleagues in our industry and fitted with a dunce cap by the trade media. In fact, some of the same will be heard in our own hallways. Much like our 40% increase in home delivery pricing in 2009, this strategy goes against the grain. But that's okay. We've been there before…

I want to assure you that our Subscriber Content strategy has been carefully planned and it will be diligently executed. I know that because we are fortunate to have dedicated and talented people working at our company.

Are we certain this strategy will succeed? No. In fact, maybe we will be wearing that dunce cap.

What will we do if the strategy fails? We will get up and try again. As a wise person once said, in times of adversity, the greatest failure of all is the failure to dare to take risks.

When, two days after that memo, we quoted Moroney in an interview saying the move was “a big risk,” he sent another note to staff saying he didn’t remember using those exact words, but noting that plans can be reversed:

I did say that you can always go back to free. Because you can. Yet that's not what we are planning to do. We are planning on making this strategy work. As I said in a note to you last Tuesday, strategies need time to work. We are going to give this strategy lots of time and lots of support.

Two and a half years later, the Morning News is going back to free — with a twist. The hard paywall came down Tuesday at DallasNews.com; all articles are now available to all. Instead of paying for access to news, readers will now be asked to pay for an optional, “premium” online experience:

Consumers can now opt to pay for their news in a premium digital experience environment that includes enhanced design and navigation, limited advertising, and access to unique subscriber benefits. In general, print and digital subscribers will have access to dallasnews.com/premium with their current subscription. For those without a subscription, the premium digital experience subscription costs $2.99 per week.

“Experiments mean you can fail, and we may fail. And if we do, that’s okay,” Moroney told me yesterday. “If we’re not failing, we’re really not experimenting, because experiments mean sometimes you fail.”

You can think of the new approach as a variant of the two-site strategy that’s become popular among a set of large metro newspaper publishers. Here in Boston, you have Boston.com — free, bubbly, buzzy, webby — and BostonGlobe.com — classy, clean, sophisticated, filled with the stories published in the print newspaper, and behind a paywall. Hearst has done something similar in Houston (free Chron.com vs. paid HoustonChronicle.com) and San Francisco (SFGate.com vs. SFChronicle.com).

But that strategy relies on separating the sites both in terms of design and in terms of content. If you want access to every Boston Globe story, you have to pay for BostonGlobe.com. The first crack in that strategy came in August, when the San Francisco Chronicle started putting all its stories on its free-to-all site too. (“The only declaration we can make at this point is our newspapers must continue to experiment, measure the results and continuously iterate the experience,” a Hearst spokesperson told Poynter.)

The Dallas approach takes that further: Instead of a two-site strategy, it’s a two-look strategy. Everything lives on a single website, DallasNews.com; cookies and user accounts determine whether you get the old or new look. (Closest analogue: The politics site Talking Points Memo last month debuted a subtly cleaner, “ad-lite” version of the site for members of its Prime membership program — although it’s worth noting the cleaner design is pitched as one benefit among several, such as the longform stories available only to Prime members.)

“You can park at a sporting event and you can pay a lot more money to park closely than far out,” Moroney said. “You can still see the game from the last seat up in the stadium, but people pay a lot more money to be closer and on the 50-yard line. But the content’s the same — it’s the same game.”

Subscribers get a DallasNews.com where the article pages have fewer ads and more stark black, white, and grey, and where the front page is reduced to a dozen or so photo rectangles. In these pairs of screenshots, the “premium” look is on top, the “free” look on bottom.

dallasnews-frontpage-news

dallasnews-frontpage-old

dallasnews-articlepage-new

dallasnews-articlepage-old

Why the change in strategy? First, the newspaper has come to believe that its remaining print subscribers are highly unlikely to be lured away by digital.

The paper’s chief marketing officer Jason Dyer told Ad Age that its research found “just 5% of the Morning News’ print subscribers would give up their seven-day print editions for complete digital access, even if that digital access was free.” That led to the emphasis on the reading experience — not just the content — being key. Print readers see online as a companion, not a replacement, Moroney told me, and if that’s the case, then the strategy needs to be to make something that appeals directly to a digital-only audience.

The paywall strategy wasn’t showing great, business-shifting success either. The paper wouldn’t say (or tell its own reporter) how many digital-only subscribers it had accumulated under the outgoing model. “We looked up and said, Well, we have a nice digital-only business of sorts, but it’s not the robust business that our print subscription base is,” Moroney said.

“We did not see a continuous growth going on in digital-only subscribers, and where it began to plateau out for us, at least in this juncture, was not what we thought was a robust enough digital-only subscriber base to warrant saying, Okay, great, let’s keep doing this,” he said.

At the moment, the new layout is the main thing that a paying subscriber gets over the general public, but that will grow. Eventually, paying subscribers will also have a subscriber loyalty program that offers benefits like sports tickets and access to events. (Think of the Orange County Register as a model.) Moroney said they’re working with Brierley + Partners, which has helped create rewards programs for Hilton and Bloomingdale’s, on building out the loyalty program. He also said, true to his pro-experimentation form, that they’re not ruling out using a metered-access model down the road; the new strategy, just like the old one, will be tweaked over time. (A sort of soft meter will be used to periodically prompt frequent readers about a possible premium upgrade.)

The Globe-style two-site approach didn’t appeal to the Morning News because of the innate difficulties around launching and maintaining two separate websites. “We were very concerned about creating two different URLs and trying to brand two different URLs and brand them in different ways,” Moroney said. “We were just very concerned that we were just going to confuse the consumer.”

Putting all stories outside of a paywall increases the number of impressions available to sell to advertisers, which may mean an incremental increase in digital ad revenue, Moroney said. But that alone won’t help the paper’s bottom line, which is why Moroney wants the paper to experiment with new types of advertising and new lines of business.

“Will this work? I don’t know,” Moroney said. “But the rest of the industry is trying one thing, and it may work. I hope it does. I hope the metered model works. We said, Let’s just try something else. We’re hardly betting the farm on this.”
di