Rabu, 13 November 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nothing builds user rage quite like bad mobile usability

Posted: 12 Nov 2013 02:36 PM PST

Erin Kissane, after giving birth to her daughter, spent a lot of time away from “the big-screen Internet,” limited only to the occasional smartphone tap or swipe:

Combine that with a slightly bumpy recovery from surgery and all the sleep deprivation you can expect from life with a newborn, and I’ve had plenty of very recent experience using the web while bleary, impatient, and on a device smaller than my hand.

All her lessons about mobile usability are great, but this one is the truest of the true:

Slow load times make me hate you. If I’ve been staring at my phone for 30 seconds while your site loads bushels of unnecessary files, not only am I going to back out of the site, I’m going to mentally put it on my Google results blacklist. Likewise, if you override my ability to pinch-zoom, use a mobilizer that makes me swipe instead of scrolling, or adds pagination, I will go out of my way to never use your site again.

As Erin puts it: “Mobile-only internet use is only expanding, and this group of users is much too large to ignore. And don’t forget — if you’re sufficiently unkind to a multi-device user stuck on a small screen, you may find they avoid you on the desktop as well.”

Key to revenue success: Matching online content to the right technology platform

Posted: 12 Nov 2013 08:41 AM PST

The news of Vox Media buying the Curbed network of sites broke Sunday night, prompting Reuters’ Felix Salmon to write the fourth in his occasional series on the economics of web publishing. Salmon takes a long look at how scalable technologies can, in the right hands, lead to profitability.

It's almost impossible to overstate the importance of the CMS when it comes to the question of who's going to win the online-publishing wars. As [Henry] Blodget said on Friday, if you're going to make serious money in this business, you need serious scale. If you want serious scale, you have to be able to expand not only organically but also by acquisition. And if you want to be able to scale up through dealmaking, you need to have a technology and sales platform which can support large-scale acquisitions.

Vox Media's platform, called Chorus, fits the bill — it does everything well, from video to real-time storytelling to sophisticated ad integration. AOL, too, has an excellent CMS. In fact, when Jim Bankoff, in an earlier incarnation, acquired Weblogs Inc for AOL, he did so in large part for its CMS, rather than for any of the site brands. But other potential players are seriously hobbled on this front…And if you're a legacy media company of any description — be it in newspapers, or TV, or radio, or even financial-information terminals — then a large part of your CMS is going to be devoted to integrating digital content with your legacy product, and is therefore going to be a little bit clunky and unwieldy if you try to use it for any pure-play digital operation…

The question from Vox Media's point of view, however, is a bit different. There's an enormous number of websites out there which would become significantly more valuable overnight if they simply moved to Vox's sales and publishing platform. So the arbitrage is clear: buy those sites at a relatively low multiple (Curbed Network sold for less than four times revenues), turbocharge them with Chorus, and then reap the benefits of seeing those sites' revenues increased substantially — and being valued at significantly higher multiples than Vox paid in the first place.

What new FAA plans will mean to the future of drone journalism

Posted: 12 Nov 2013 08:25 AM PST

Editor’s note: If you’ve been at a journalism conference over the past year — or stood near the right Midwestern riverbed at the right time— you’ve probably heard about drone journalism. That’s the idea that small unmanned aerial vehicles can be useful as a reporting tool. But the law around the peaceful use of drones — for journalism or any other purpose — is still fuzzy, which led to two j-school drone programs being shut down this summer.

Clarity on the way, though, and in this post — originally published at the University of Nebraska’s Drone Journalism Lab — Lab founder Matt Waite tries to decode what the new rules might look like.

faa-drone-journalism-reportLast week, the Federal Aviation Adminstration released a document called the Integration of Civil Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) in the National Airspace System (NAS) Roadmap. In it, the FAA lays out what it intends to do in the near future when it comes to UAS in the NAS — drones in the sky.

So what does it mean for drone journalism? Based on a quick read, here’s what I see:

  • The vast bulk of the document is about much bigger and more sophisticated aircraft than journalists will need for the vast majority of applications. The document is mostly about big planes with very sophisticated ground stations intermingling with manned aircraft at high altitudes. Most applications of drone journalism don’t require large aircraft flying high.
  • The FAA is aware that journalists want to use drones/UAS/UAVs. Page 7, section 1.2, in a second called Proposed Civil and Commercial Applications, number three in the list is “Communications and broadcast, including news/sporting event coverage.”

    • faa-drone-journalism

  • Journalists should be on the lookout for something called a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) for sUAS, or small unmanned aerial systems. The types of devices and the level of sophistication most available to newsrooms falls under this sUAS category — smaller than 55 pounds and with limited range and altitude. From the document: “The sUAS NPRM is expected to be released in early 2014.”
  • Journalists wishing to use drones will most likely have to record safety data and report it to the FAA. “Data collection will expand when additional agreements are finalized for sharing public UAS data and new rules and associated safety data reporting requirements are implemented for sUAS.”
  • What will the rule-making process for small systems involve? “…the classification of sUAS, certification of sUAS pilots, registration of sUAS, approval of sUAS operations, and sUAS operational limits.” Journalists should be wary of language like “approval of sUAS operations” for issues of prior restraint. The government’s approving or denying specific stories has been routinely found to be barred by the First Amendment. However, content neutral restrictions with a stated safety purpose have withstood court challenge. (Think shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.) Just what “approval of sUAS operations means” will be critical to journalists wishing to use drones.
  • There will be a public comment period for these rules, and journalists and journalism organizations should take part in it. If you or your news organization believes they may one day use a drone to report news, you’re going to want to pay attention to this and get involved. Also, tell your journalism organizations to get involved too. Remember: The FAA said they’ll start the process in early 2014.
  • The sUAS rules will most likely mean drone journalists will not need certificates of authorization (COA) from the FAA. “When the final rule is published and in effect, it will reduce the need for sUAS operators to conduct operations under either a COA or the constraints of an experimental certificate. This will allow operators and the FAA to shift the focus of resources to solutions that will better enable UAS integration.”
  • It will not be a free-for-all under new sUAS rules. “Operations of sUAS under new regulations may have operational, airspace, and performance constraints, but will provide experience for pilots and additional data to inform subsequent rulemaking, standards, and training development for safe and efficient integration of other UAS in the NAS.” Also, this is worth watching: “As integration begins, there will be approved airspace and procedures for sUAS, which will provide a basis for developing plans for increased NAS access as UAS are certified.” That could mean a simple altitude ceiling (say, 400 feet) or it could mean the current system of “forget flying in a city” or something between the two. It’s worth watching when the rules come out.
  • You’ll probably need a license and undergo a background check to fly a drone commercially. “Goal 1: FAA certification requirements for pilots and crew members for sUAS classes (including medical requirements, training standards, etc.) published as part of a sUAS rule by 2014 in accordance with the FMRA [FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012]. Note: These requirements include coordination with other government agencies on security/vetting requirements.”

So the document really just gives hints as to what’s to come for legal drone journalism in the US. But that’s more than we’ve had up to now. In short: Heads up in the New Year.

Photo of a hovering drone by John Mills used under a Creative Commons license.

MinnPost funds reporting through new donor-backed beats

Posted: 12 Nov 2013 07:33 AM PST

MinnPost is trying to make a love connection between beat reporting and funders. The Minnesota-focused nonprofit news site has embarked on a new fundraising plan that directly ties donated dollars to specific beats.

MinnPost has raised over $130,000 for environmental coverage, specifically the Earth Journal blog written by Ron Meador. Now they’ve launched a new blog covering mental health and addiction issues, written by Sarah Williams, with over $110,000 raised so far, according to MinnPost CEO Joel Kramer. They hope to launch another crowdfunded blog in 2014.

minnpostnewIn both cases, the funding comes from individuals, not organizations or advocacy groups, and the donations are spread out over the course of a three-year period. “We’re still raising money for both. We have not yet reached our goal,” Kramer told me. “We have set a goal of $50,000 a year for three years, so $150,000 overall.”

Finding ways to pay for reporting has been part of the nonprofit news game since the beginning. But MinnPost new approach has the benefit of not just bringing in new dollars for reporting, but also opening up the nonprofit to new groups of funders who may not have considered cutting a check in the name of journalism.

“The people who are passionate about journalism will donate. They trust us. They’ve become major donors,” he said. “What we’re trying to do here is reach out to others — major donors who don’t have journalism high on their list.”

Kramer’s staff worked in conjunction with MinnPost’s board of directors to come up with the funded beats strategy. On the editorial side, Kramer said, they identify coverage areas they’d like to add to the site, as well as prospective writers to fit those beats. Kramer and the board then tried to identify possible funders by interest areas. “It’s easy to read annual reports and see who’s giving money to various causes and say, ‘Is there money in that community for those causes, and is it a passionate kind of support?’” he said.

From a business perspective, a funded-beat strategy helps MinnPost get in front of a new collection of people and helps the organization continue to diversify its revenue stream. “The more sources you have, the more protected you are if one of them doesn’t do well,” Kramer said. Most of the donors for Earth Journal are giving $5,000 or $1,000 annually, while the mental health blog has at least one donor giving up to $15,000 a year. It’s one more step towards making the site less dependent on funding from foundation grants, Kramer said: “These two beats together are bringing in about 5 percent of our revenue,” he said. “That may not sound like much, but we need to keep finding other sources.”

MinnPost’s strategy relies on a theory of philanthropic adjacency: You may be a big supporter of the Sierra Club or the Audubon Society but have no interest in funding a nonprofit news site. The proposition changes if that site plans to cover issues that are important to you, like clean water and conservation. It’s a plan that has worked for others, including the Pulitzer Prize-winner InsideClimate News.

David Sassoon, publisher of InsideClimate News, explained the approach to The New York Times in April, saying his pitch to funders is: “If you care about environmental issues, you need to support a robust press that can cover these issues because, well, it's disappearing.”

There may indeed be piles of money out there waiting for journalism nonprofits — money from people with their own pet issues they’d like to see covered. But Kramer says he doesn’t expect MinnPost will chase after new beats just because a generous benefactor may be available. With a small staff and limited resources, MinnPost already has to pick its shots, meaning there are lots of areas that go uncovered. Kramer said the environment and mental health are areas that overlap with much of MinnPost’s current reporting. “We’ll only do beat in the coverage areas we’re excited about,” he said.

But they also want to find the right reporters and give them enough of a runway to establish themselves. Most of the funding goes to pay the writers, who are part-time staffers. The three-year term aims to give the reporters a measure of job security and to let them invest time in building sources and reporting. “We don’t want anyone to get hired, start to do the work, and then a year later say we don’t have the money,” Kramer said. He hopes they’ll be able to bring writers on the funded-beats into MinnPost as full-time staffers in the future.

“Our number one goal is to get more coverage on the site and cover more subjects we think are interesting,” Kramer said. “But the second, institutional goal is to attract more donors and get existing donors to be bigger donors.”
di