Kamis, 31 Oktober 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Relive MozFest through notes on data and journalism

Posted: 30 Oct 2013 12:24 PM PDT

The annual gathering of web makers and thinkers that is the Mozilla Festival wrapped up in London last weekend. One of the big additions to this year’s festival was an even larger dose of journalism and open data sessions, featuring a cast of characters likely familiar to Lab readers. (MozFest is also where the new class of Knight-Mozilla Fellows was announced.)

If you did not have a chance to make it to London, you’re in luck: Most of the talks have a collection of notes. Take a look through the schedule to see what interests you. (Select the festival track you’d like via the menu in the top right.) Here’s a few that caught our eye:

On the journalism track, there’s The New York Times’ Aron Pilhofer and Knight Lab’s Miranda Mulligan on incorporating design thinking into storytelling; a group of 2013 Knight-Mozilla fellows on tracking content and engagement; and a discussion about the Times, Guardian, and ProPublica collaborating to examine how the NSA circumvents encryption on the web.

On the data track, you’ll find the Times’ Derek Willis looking for ways to broaden the use of the OpenElections project; Travis Swicegood of The Texas Tribune on creating standards for sharing data; and former Knight-Mozilla fellows Dan Schultz and Mike Tigas on making data more accessible to the broader public.

“We’re still babies at it”: BuzzFeed Video’s strategy relies on identity, emotion, and sharing content as communication

Posted: 30 Oct 2013 11:41 AM PDT

A year ago, Ze Frank — Internet “virologist,” creator of the beloved the show with zefrank, and online video pioneer — was tapped to head BuzzFeed’s video department, based in L.A. Since then, Frank has been striving to create video content with the same impossible-to-ignore qualities that BuzzFeed’s lists have become known for.

With 2.5 million subscribers and around 500 million views, Frank has made some progress, and in a webinar last week, he attempted to describe the elements of social video, both in terms of how to create the content and how to release it into the world.

Over the last year, BuzzFeed Video’s staff has increased from one employee to 32 — Frank said he looks for “soup-to-nuts” video producers who feel comfortable doing a variety of video production tasks. “I was obsessed with not having this crazy division of labor that I think perpetuates the formats of yesterday,” he said, adding that video shouldn’t be seen as a “high-friction product.”

At its base, BuzzFeed Video is doing what we already know news companies also want to do with digital video — harness the combined power of social and mobile. There’s opportunity in the video news space, and it’s a safe bet that BuzzFeed will aim for a piece of it.

“On mobile, the peak video consumption hour is during prime time — which is crazy if you think about that as a competitive landscape,” said Frank. “Online video is competing with the best television programming out there.”

mobile=social

Much of what BuzzFeed is doing with video is merely familiar territory in a new format; a close analysis of why people share media, not in the sense of how large networks function, but in the sense of why an individual makes a single, social decision. Frank summed up the core idea behind social video with this image:

“Captain Picard face-palming is the best way of describing disbelief in something. Not just disbelief, but utter disappointed disbelief,” he said. “This kind of repurposing of media not for consumption but for communication is, I think, the underpinning of this social age.”

In other words, Frank wants to create video content that helps people talk to one another. What goes into making that kind of content? Much as with BuzzFeed’s written content, it breaks down into categories of social role, which Frank thinks of in terms of “share statements.”

For example, if you know somebody is going through a hard time, you might want to share with them a video called “How to Restore Your Faith in Humanity” — that’s emotional content.

If you’re trying to show a friend from New York, in Frank’s words, “I know you, I like you,” you might want to show them, “How to Piss Off Every New Yorker in 36 Seconds” — that’s identity-based content.

And finally, there’s informational content, which is often shared via what Frank calls the humblebrag — you share “Drunk vs. Stoned” to show you know a thing or two about being drunk, stoned, or both.

The content piece, however, is only one element of the larger ecosystem in which we share media. Creators of shareable video must also consider the network, be it YouTube, BuzzFeed.com, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or beyond. Frank said these are more complicated than we think. Only 10 percent of BuzzFeed’s video views come from YouTube subscribers, and only 6 percent come from BuzzFeed itself. Figuring out the nuances of where the rest of the audience is coming from — for example, that Facebook is a better sharing tool for emotional content while Twitter is better for informational content — is essential.

Likewise, how a video shares inside that ecosystem is also affected by its framing, including the thumbnails, titling, and general message around the content, said Frank. For example, Frank said that one of the most shared New York Times articles of 2006 was called “What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage.” “What I love about framing is that it’s very clear who you should be sharing this with,” he said. “There’s a very solid reinforcement that you should be sharing this with husbands, people who have husbands, people in relationships.”

Chunking your audience into smaller groups might seem counterintuitive to video producers used to creating content with mass appeal.

"Most programming, from a media standpoint, from a video standpoint, has been thinking about the audience that you’ve captured in some sort a funnel that's available to you," said Frank. “Then what you would do is program against that funnel by trying to understand the demographics that are there, the interests, and things like that.”

funnel diagram

But if you create video content with “emotional force…strong enough that people will be motivated to share it with others,” your audience becomes “almost unlimited,” he said. That, in a nutshell, is the promise of social video.

Much of BuzzFeed’s video content can still seem off-voice to regular BuzzFeed readers, and it’s certainly still not what the brand is known for. But video provides a major revenue opportunity for all online media companies, especially those already expert in getting eyeballs on their content. At the end of the day, BuzzFeed wants to be the expert in social content, no matter where it lives — on your phone, your tablet, or your desktop — or what shape it comes in.

“I don’t know if we’ve really put the time in, culturally, or as a collection of media businesses, into trying to determine which are the best formats for this kind of communication,” said Frank. “We’re still babies at it.”

Slideshow images by Ze Frank.

ESPN’s digital audience is now mostly mobile

Posted: 30 Oct 2013 08:58 AM PDT

This is a couple days old, but worth noting nonetheless: In September, ESPN saw more unique visitors on mobile devices (47.4 million) than on the desktop version of ESPN.com (46.1 million). Time spent was almost even (44 percent mobile). Also, 36 percent of ESPN’s unique users accessed its digital content only on mobile devices.

(Interestingly, though, video still skewed desktop: 77 percent of clip views were on traditional computers, 16 percent on smartphones and tablets, and 6 percent on connected TVs.)

The push towards mostly mobile continues apace. We’ve gone from news sites having mostly mobile moments (like election night) to mostly mobile days or weekends (as The Guardian and BBC News have recently reported) to now mostly mobile months — which really just mean mostly mobile, period. ESPN is made for mobile in a lot of ways — real time sports updates are useful wherever you are, and attention paid to sports is probably less workday-hours-focused than much other online news — but this same trend will hit your news org sooner or later.
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