Nieman Journalism Lab |
- New digital circ figures for newspapers are…interesting
- What does sustainability look like in nonprofit journalism?
- This Week in Review: The NSA finds another data back door, and Twitter’s visual turn
| New digital circ figures for newspapers are…interesting Posted: 01 Nov 2013 11:12 AM PDT Good piece at Poynter by Andrew Beaujon on the new U.S. newspaper circulation numbers released yesterday and the increasing silliness of digital circ totals.
Sam Kirkland looks more deeply at the USA Today numbers and finds it’s a reporting change, not a real gain. (Meanwhile, USA Today’s circulation revenue fell in the most recent quarter.) The last time AAM released an actual list of the highest circulation papers, in April, the Houston Chronicle had, through some unusual choices, ended up with the second biggest Sunday circulation in the country, despite being only ninth in print Sunday circulation, thanks to the appearance of 539,691 “branded editions print and digital.” AAM wrote a blog post in May explaining that a paying print subscriber at a paywalled newspaper can actually count as two “subscriptions” if publishers provide proof that the subscriber activated their username and password for digital. And there’s no reason to stop at two: “each digital platform,” like an iPhone app, can count as its own sub too. Back in 2010, we told you about the fuzziness of these digital circ numbers, which can be driven by misleading e-edition totals, freebie branded editions being counted as subs, or other numerical futzing. Separately, the Newspaper Association of America turned some heads this year when they suddenly discovered a few billion in unknown newspaper revenue. |
| What does sustainability look like in nonprofit journalism? Posted: 01 Nov 2013 06:57 AM PDT
If you’re a national site like ProPublica, is the metric winning major awards and changing policy through your reporting? If you’re a state-focused site like The Texas Tribune, does success mean increasing traffic and diversifying revenue through events? Or if you’re a local site like Voice of San Diego, is it improving the membership experience of your core audience? A new report this week from the Knight Foundation (disclosure: a funder of Nieman Lab) took a look at the state of play of 18 nonprofit news organizations around the country to find out how they run their business, how they produce their journalism, and how they connect with their communities. Analyzing finances, online traffic, and other audience data, the report found that the overall story is a good one: Revenue is up, business models are being diversified, and audiences are growing. But that success is not without some uncertainty. Even as nonprofit news outlets find new ways of generating revenue, most dedicate less of their staff to business operations and development than the editorial side, according to the report. Similarly, the report found that many organizations are not dedicating enough resources to the kinds of technologies that will help them adapt to further changes in journalism. The conclusion, similar to a study from the Pew Research Center earlier this year, is that plans for long-term sustainability remain elusive. In total, the report is a kind of nonprofit news playbook that offers insights into how 18 organizations of different sizes and scopes are managing operations. But Knight also offers some prescriptions, like establishing partnerships in a community, increasing revenue diversity, refining metrics for success, and expanding into areas beyond content production. This follows up on a discussion Knight and the Pew Research Center held in September on measuring impact, sustainability, and scaling issues. What the report shows, said Michael Maness, Knight’s vice president for journalism and media innovation, is that nonprofit news is largely alive and well. But surviving is not the same as sustainability, Maness told me. “Sustainability and movement are two different things,” he said. “You can see ways to keep the lights on, but that’s not a strategy to get new resources and keep evolving.” The 18 organizations that participated in the study are a familiar list of names: ProPublica, The Texas Tribune, MinnPost, Voice of San Diego, The New Haven Independent, The Lens, and Oakland Local among others. Many of the outlets have received some kind of funding from Knight in the last several years, either in their startup phase or in support of specific projects. “One of the things we were looking at and wanted to see, there is a sense that the [nonprofits] that made it and survived, how can we help them rethink and refine what they’re doing,” said Maness.
Total revenue created by the outlets surveyed by Knight increased by almost 30 percent over the last three years, and the majority recorded a surplus last year. In that time, most of the organizations have also decreased their reliance on foundation funding, dropping from 65 percent of total revenue in 2010 to 50 percent in 2013, by growing earned revenue through advertising, events, and sponsorships. VT Digger, for example, increased its earned revenue to 42 percent in 2012 from 8 percent in 2010 through corporate sponsorships. Others, like the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, are having success with journalism training programs as a form of revenue, generating $176,007 in 2012, up from $53,355 in 2010. But the revenue picture alters slightly depending on the size and scope of the organization. Knight broke down the nonprofits it surveyed into three groups: local, state, and investigative. While reliance on foundations is decreasing, those dollars still make up the majority of revenue for smaller outlets like New Haven Independent, Oakland Local, Wyofile, NJ Spotlight, and Wisconsin Watch. For some organizations, like ProPublica and the Center for Investigative Reporting, more than 60 percent of their revenue comes from individual donors. That difference in size was also evident in the budget and expenditures of the nonprofit outlets. According to Knight, sites with a national focus like ProPublica and CIR have expenditures over $9 million annually, while places like The Rapidian and Oakland local have less than $150,000.
The report found that larger investigative outlets spend more of their budget on the editorial side (65 percent), than the local and state sites (46 percent for state, 57 percent for local). Even as most of the organizations spent the majority of their budgets on editorial, many were shifting resources: The Lens, Voice of San Diego, MinnPost, and Wyofile were among the sites putting more money into marketing and business development. (Interestingly, within this peer group, The Texas Tribune has the smallest share of its budget dedicated to editorial at 38 percent of expenses in 2012, down from 42 percent in 2010.) Though the larger, investigative nonprofits spent the most on technology, it was the state-focused organizations that spent the most on marketing and business development. But those totals are still relatively small compared to spending on the editorial side. While there’s a difference in scale between the larger, investigative outlets and the smaller, local sites, Maness said they share commonalities in the ways they identify audiences, pursue outreach, and meet the needs of that community. More importantly, Maness said all the nonprofits face the challenge of finding ways to experiment with new lines of business and new methods of distribution and engagement. The report found that web traffic, social media engagement, and other outreach like email newsletters is growing, but most of the organizations are searching for better metrics to understand their audience. And with mobile traffic rising, most of the outlets do not have mobile sites or apps to meet the needs of users, according to report. In order to continue their pace of growth, the nonprofits will have to dedicate more resources to technology and the business side, said Mayur Patel, vice president for strategy & assessment for Knight. One reason nonprofits need to move beyond foundation funding is that those dollars often come with strings attached, either for specific reporting or projects. A diversity of funding means more flexibility in budgeting and experimentation, Patel said. Patel said that the way we think about sustainability needs to change. The simplistic view of sustainability is looking solely at finances, rather than whether an organization is meeting its broader goals outside of money. That could be looking at what kind of social impact does your journalism have, and whether you investing in projects that have a lasting connection to a community, he said. Rather than a single plan or business model, Patel said, “I wouldn’t be surprised in the future if we talk about sustainability as the deep understanding of audiences in a way that ties that engagement to new revenue opportunities on a systematic basis.” Image by Taber Andrew Bain used under a Creative Commons license. |
| This Week in Review: The NSA finds another data back door, and Twitter’s visual turn Posted: 01 Nov 2013 06:28 AM PDT Another NSA back door to user data: There were numerous stories this week tied to the U.S. National Security Agency’s surveillance campaign and journalists’ efforts to report on it, the biggest of which was The Washington Post’s report that the NSA has infiltrated a link between Google and Yahoo’s data centers to collect data from millions of their users without the companies’ knowledge.
For the rest of the week, most of the NSA news was coming from Europe, where the agency was reported to be collecting data on 60 million phone calls in Spain, in addition to previous similar reports about France and about the phone calls of dozens of world leaders. U.S. officials claimed they got the French and Spanish records from those countries’ intelligence services, but support in Congress is showing signs of waning, as Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein came out against the NSA’s surveillance program. Sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci wrote that the issue at the core of the NSA story is not the fact that it’s spying on its friends and its own citizens, but that the distinction between insiders and outsiders that it relies on is collapsing. If your institution “relies on outsiders staying outside while you talk in jargon and acronyms with your fellow insiders, it's time to look for a safety net and a harness,” she said. At The Atlantic, Bruce Schneier framed the story in terms of the ongoing struggle over control of the Internet.
Leaks, advocacy, and objectivity: There was plenty happening on the journalism side of the story as well. NSA chief Keith Alexander said that “we ought to come up with a way of stopping” news organizations’ publication of information from the leaked documents. In the U.K., Prime Minister David Cameron gave The Guardian a vague warning that essentially told them to exercise more “social responsibility” with the documents, or else. The Spectator’s Nick Cohen lamented the fact that other newspapers in Britain have attacked The Guardian as well. There were three long, thoughtful pieces on the NSA leaks and journalism this week, all well worth a read: The first was by Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, explaining why his paper is publishing information from the leaks and what its relationship with the British government has been like. The second was by NYU’s Jay Rosen, thinking through the question of why some major investigative stories stir the public and others don’t and concluding that “making knowledge public does not a knowledgeable public make.” The third was an exchange between former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller and Glenn Greenwald, the blogger and journalist who has broken the leak stories for The Guardian. Much of their conversation revolved around the question of whether journalists should report from an openly declared political perspective (as Greenwald argued) or should maintain a professional form of objectivity (as Keller argued). Blogger Andrew Sullivan said we need both styles but argued that Greenwald’s is inherently more honest. Likewise, Mathew Ingram of paidContent didn’t see advocacy and fairness as mutually exclusive. On the other hand, Hamish McKenzie of PandoDaily also saw the need for both, but emphasized the importance of impartiality: “Facts need context, but not immediate spin. We need the boring "impartial" reports as much as we need Glenn Greenwald.”
Twitter goes visual: As it approaches its initial public offering, Twitter made a significant change in its display of users’ tweets, showing pictures and Vine’s short videos in user timelines by default, without a click. As The New York Times noted, the change makes visual ads on Twitter much more prominent, positioning the company to capture more of the mobile ad market. Digiday’s Jack Marshall called the new timeline Twitter’s version of banner ads. Mike Isaac of AllThingsD pointed out that the change has Twitter looking more like Instagram (which is owned by Twitter’s chief rival, Facebook). BuzzFeed’s John Herrman wrote that while Twitter will look more like Instagram, it will become less like Instagram — rowdier and more random, because of the lower threshold for interacting with tweets. The update, Herrman said, will also help Twitter make more sense to a broader set of users: “There's an image, I'm going to like it is a series of events virtually every internet user is conditioned to perform and understand.” Wired’s Mat Honan made a similar point and said it makes it easier to widely share a photo on Twitter than on Facebook. Slate’s Will Oremus celebrated Twitter’s new image-centric orientation, saying it finally gets the primacy of images over text on today’s web. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM compared Twitter’s metamorphosis to the web’s clumsy ad-centered shift from text to visual in its early days and wondered if it would alienate users. Reuters’ Jack Shafer argued that social media platforms like Twitter aren’t too concerned with alienating their users, since those users have largely accepted that they’ll swallow every change in their terms of service in order to keep their access to a free service they’ve come to consider indispensable. “Everyone now knows that the ToS noose is designed to grow tighter and tighter until it turns customers into the service's revenue-producing slaves,” he wrote. Henry’s vision for the Globe: John Henry, the billionaire owner of the world champion Boston Red Sox, finalized his purchase of The Boston Globe late last week, then published a column over the weekend explaining his motivations for buying the Globe and his plans for the paper. “My every intention is to push the kind of boldness and investment that will make the Globe a laboratory for major newspapers across the country,” he wrote. Here at the Lab, Boston journalism professor Dan Kennedy outlined four takeaways from Henry’s column, dinging Henry’s commitment to getting readers to pay for online news but praising his overall focus: “Henry articulates a vision in which journalism comes first — which is another way of saying the customer comes first. Too many newspaper owners have forgotten that.” Om Malik of GigaOM echoed Henry’s case for the importance of local newspapers in the life of a city, while journalism professor Christopher Daly (another Bostonian) wondered how the Globe will cover Henry. Reading roundup: A few other stories that cropped up on the journalism/tech beat this week: — The trials of several of the principal figures in the phone-hacking scandal of News Corp.’s British newspapers (centering around the now-defunct News of the World) began this week, and three former News of the World journalists pleaded guilty. The jury has also heard evidence of numerous allegations in the scandal, including that the paper’s journalists hacked their rivals as a way of scooping the competition. Gawker has a good, quick explainer of the case as a whole. — That phone-hacking scandal was what prompted the British press reforms that were officially passed and signed into law as a royal charter this week, after the rejection of a last-minute court challenge by the nation’s newspapers. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg assured the public, however, that the new regulatory system is entirely voluntary for the press. — The Knight Foundation released a report on nonprofit news organizations’ search for sustainability with extensive data on 18 nonprofits. Poynter’s Rick Edmonds and MediaShift’s Paige Cooperstein both offered apt summaries of the report, and Mathew Ingram of paidContent focused on the importance of diversifying revenue sources. — Author Tim Kreider wrote a column in The New York Times decrying the practice of writing for free online, an argument to which many, including paidContent’s Mathew Ingram, objected. Writer Dan Lewis explored the ins and outs of writing for exposure, and author and journalist Laurie Penny explained the dynamics of writing for print alongside the web. — Finally, The Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim and Jason Linkins did everyone who reads American political journalism a favor with their guide to decoding the byzantine language of anonymous sources in Washington. Even if you’re hardened veteran journalist, it’ll make you a smarter news consumer. Photo of Keith Alexander testifying Oct. 29 (with protesters behind) by AP/Susan Walsh. |
What, exactly, does a healthy nonprofit news site look like? 
Google and Yahoo executives were 
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