Nieman Journalism Lab |
- The newsonomics of Comcast’s deal and our digital wallets
- This Week in Review: What’s at stake in the Comcast deal, and a first look at First Look Media
- How a crime becomes political: Trayvon Martin and the way different media co-create the news
- From Nieman Reports: Independent Chinese news orgs need to up their game in digital
| The newsonomics of Comcast’s deal and our digital wallets Posted: 14 Feb 2014 03:30 PM PST Last month, I’d gotten fed up. My Comcast DVR only held 10 hours of HD programming, and I was tired of being its valet. So I did my research, found out about my old friend Tivo’s new products, and decided to buy one. Tivo was still cool, just as in the days when I owned an early one before passing completely into the Comcastic fold. Then, I saw some note somewhere on the web that Comcast was rolling out high-capacity DVRs in the East. Almost as a lark, before planning to buy my Tivo Roamio, I stopped by the local Comcast office, across from Whole Foods. “I’ve heard about these high-capacity DVRs and I’m wondering when they might be coming to Santa Cruz,” I asked at the counter. After a minute of computer screen-staring time, the helpful rep shocked me with: “We can give you one right now. Just bring in your old box, and we’ll swap it out.” Two weeks ago, I did, and have retired from my valet duties. The Tivo stays on the Amazon “Saved For Later” list. That’s an illustration of the promise and the peril in Comcast’s $45 billion buyout of Time Warner Cable. The promise: a huge company that’s so far done enough to stay ahead. It’s offering (kind of, not much marketing here) bigger DVRs, pushing ahead with all-access Xfinity, and speeding up its broadband. None are state-of-the-art plays compared against numerous smaller competitors. Many, though, are good enough to keep its customers, given the other advantages of its Triple Play (cable, broadband, voice) services. The peril: Now Comcast is playing in a bigger field. It has acquired NBC Universal, and if it swallows Time Warner Cable (pending regulatory approval), having outwitted John Malone and Charter Cable, Comcast is poised to play with the biggest media companies. It would find itself at the top of the cable heap, competing most directly, it would seem, against two other legacy companies that have climbed to the top of the telecom heap: Verizon and AT&T. Going forward, though, its new competitors include Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Netflix, Sirius, and Hulu, among many others. Comcast wants to be a media company, and that puts it into increasingly direct competition with the gnarliest competition it will have ever seen. The Roberts family has been hard-driving and prescient in its building of the giant — and will need to double down on those qualities against its new foes. Let’s look at the landscape. Comcast’s acquisition is the latest sign of legacy consolidation, in this case in cable. Last year saw the biggest consolidation of local broadcast TV in history, as Gannett, Tribune, and Sinclair put themselves on the top of that increasingly troubled industry. Magazines are fairly well rolled up, as are newspapers. That’s what you do in a maturing industry: consolidate to reduce cost and increase bargaining power with suppliers. Check. Where to find growth, though, then becomes the universal question. For Comcast, it’s a recognition that its legacy cable business is slowly endangered. Cord-cutting is a slow-moving reality; broadband is already fairly penetrated. Comcast’s financials are excellent, providing $8.5 billion in free cash flow in 2013. But it believes it must become a media company to find growth. That’s what was behind that big acquisition of NBC Universal last year. It’s testing à la carte deals with HBO. It’s also begun selling and renting movies in addition to offering them through its cable subscription, as Xfinity offers products. Overall, it’s now competing for the new consumer digital wallet, a wallet that was pretty empty five years ago. Think about what’s trying to get into our digital wallets, and having success:
Amazon and Apple are extracting regular dollars from music, movies, and more. That’s just the top of the paid entertainment landscape. Then there’s the new digital pricing of newspapers and magazines throughout the land, through all-access. How much are you paying for digital news and entertainment this month? Any idea? We’re spending more than we used to, and soon we’ll be budgeting those dollars more smartly. Comcast must approach this new reality. It must suit up two plays: defensive and offensive. The defense: protecting of that $100 to $200-plus bill it sends to its 22 million cable subscribers. As we begin to go à la carte, adding those other services, we necessarily view that one-size-fits-all cable bill more skeptically. The offense: taking as big a share of the new money to be made from movies and TV (probably to be followed by music) as the comfort with digital wallet spending becomes more mass. The offense, of course, is the flip side of the defense. It’s in that digital competition (the Time Warner deal is more a broadband play than a cable one, as Om Malik has pointed out) that Comcast will win or lose its future, as “TV” and digital content blend seamlessly over the next decade. Let’s understand where Comcast’s money comes from. Of its cable revenues, at least 82 percent come from consumers, with only 6 percent coming from advertising; the rest is “other.” Get the next-stage consumer proposition right, and Comcast becomes a huge winner. Get it wrong, and it’s a route to decline. How effectively can Comcast compete? Its legacy cable culture and clunky Xfinity experiences say it may have a tough time. Its entrepreneurial drive to remake the company and its cash say it may figure out a way forward. It can reskill itself to compete with fast-moving, smoother, and cooler customer experiences — or it can use cash to buy companies that have figured out parts of the equation. (Why not buy a Pandora or a Roku next?) Clearly, Comcast has its thinking right. It is some combo of access (the pipes) and content that drives the new customer proposition. Now it must execute on that vision. The consumer proposition that drives the Comcast logic here creates a key question for regulators. How fair is the aimed-for dominance? (Comcast would control 37 percent of broadband and 28 percent of cable TV households in the country.) How does such marketplace heft affect such key issues as net neutrality and the current run of buffering issues we’re seeing as we gorge on Netflix and the other services? How much can the new Comcast favor its own products (which in only grew in direct competition to everyone else’s with this deal), and how “legal” is that? Antitrust and regulatory provisions have always struggled to keep up with the mind-bending change in “competition” wrought by digital disruption. Expect this question to be similarly confusing to those doing the regulatin’. (Good Quartz explainer on some of these questions.) For instance, in New York, a key base for Time Warner Cable, Comcast has made a point that it’s in the public interest for area advertisers to get improved advertising services, which it says would be brought about by the merger. That’s a semi-laughable “public good” claim; advertisers in New York City have a glut of digital, paper, and broadcast choices. Further, Google and Facebook have got to be taking lots more ad dollars out of that market via their targeting than cable has — or will. Can Comcast’s scale improve our customer experiences? In what ways — specifically, and when? There’s another key opportunity for regulators: broadband speed and access. The U.S. is 31st in broadband speed. That’s pathetic and sapping economic vitality. (My local Comcast office told me that, some time this year, Santa Cruz broadband would move to 50 Mbps from 25 Mbps this year, which will still rank us well behind the average in Hong Kong, South Korea, and Romania.) Isn’t this the time to mandate state-of-the-art broadband speeds, a further move on the president’s broadband-for-education program announced in the State of the Union? |
| This Week in Review: What’s at stake in the Comcast deal, and a first look at First Look Media Posted: 14 Feb 2014 08:00 AM PST Big cable gets bigger: Comcast, the U.S.’ largest cable company, announced Thursday that it plans to buy the nation’s second-largest cable company, Time Warner Cable, for $45 billion. The deal is subject to the approval of federal regulators, and Comcast is reported to have to shed 3 million of Time Warner’s subscribers to bring the combined company’s market share down to 30 percent in order to appease them. The Week’s Peter Weber said he expects the deal to be stopped by regulators at some point, though many others saw it as likely to go through. So why is Comcast making the move? As The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta and Gizmodo’s Brian Barrett pointed out, the simplest explanation is that increased size gives Comcast more leverage against networks’ rising retransmission and carriage fees, as well as a bigger buffer against the growing share of cord-cutters, especially since the two companies don’t share many markets. Om Malik of Gigaom focused on broadband, noting that it’s the most profitable division of both companies and that Comcast caps its users’ broadband data, but Time Warner doesn’t. Comcast needs to make its case to regulators (and to the public) for allowing the merger, and Recode’s Peter Kafka said it’ll come down to the argument that cable companies don’t compete — they’re confined to specific geographical areas, carved out by local regulators. Comcast is also saying that because of the two companies’ efficiencies of scale and possibility of new product offerings, the deal is somehow both “pro-consumer” and “pro-competition.” Comcast is expected to be able to better negotiate lower retransmission fees for networks with the deal, which might theoretically benefit users, but as Poynter’s Al Tompkins noted, could also really squeeze local TV stations. Comcast also cited competition from Google Fiber as well as online video services like Apple, Netflix, and Hulu as competitive threats justifying the deal, though James McQuivey of Ad Age argued that even with the acquisition, Comcast may not be able to hold off Google and Apple on the online video front. Likewise, The Guardian’s Heidi Moore called it a desperation move that’s “likely to be a short and unhappy marriage.” As Slate’s Matthew Yglesias pointed out, on the consumer side, there really isn’t any cable competition to begin with, so this deal will take us “from zero to two times zero.” But The Los Angeles Times’ Michael Hiltzik and intellectual property scholar Susan Crawford both argued that the lack of competition will continue slow companies’ investment in broadband and fiber-optic infrastructure, which results in cheaper and slower Internet connections than are standard in much of the rest of the world. Said Hiltzik: “Our fat and secure cable monopolies simply don’t feel competitive pressure to provide customers with the fastest speeds at reasonable, affordable rates. When they do get pressured, they respond.” The Guardian’s Dan Gillmor also decried the deal as a competition-suffocating disaster for consumers, and The Verge’s Bryan Bishop also said the deal will further damage ISP competition and end any chance for new blood in the cable market. Business Insider’s Jim Edwards focused on the prospect of broadband data caps, which both companies are keen to impose.
The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple noted The Intercept’s use of the language of “assassination” rather than the government- (and traditional media-) preferred “targeted killing” in its initial National Security Agency story. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick praised First Look for releasing new photos of U.S. intelligence sites into the public domain, but criticized them for claiming excessive copyright protections on their text. Foreign Policy’s Elias Groll looked at The Intercept’s big-picture goal — “tipping the scales of power away from the intelligence community” — and Capital New York’s Johana Bhuiyan talked to First Look’s Eric Bates about its immediate goal of publishing stories based on the Snowden documents. Bates said the organization has no specific timetable for reporting on the documents, while Andrew Sullivan of The Dish was concerned that The Intercept “inherently leverages vital public information — the NSA docs — to help fund and launch a website.” If Greenwald & Co. are truly focused on doing public-interest journalism, Sullivan said, they should release them as quickly as responsibly possible, rather than withholding them to release them in a way that benefits the site financially. Lloyd Grove of The Daily Beast questioned whether First Look can attract top talent with a figure as polarizing as Greenwald as its frontman, though Bates told him that the organization’s ambitions are much broader than something strictly Greenwald-centric. NYU’s Jay Rosen, a First Look adviser, explained how it’s structured to allow numerous personal franchise sites like The Intercept. (He also gave a more in-depth talk on the personal franchise model, which you can listen to here.) Despite his distaste for the label “digital magazines,” Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram said that First Look’s emphasis on targeted niche-based sites is one of his biggest reasons for optimism about the venture.
Carlson also noted that BuzzFeed’s traffic jumped at the same time its viral competitors’ dropped and speculated that it’s because BuzzFeed buys Facebook ads to drive traffic to its native ads, though as Gawker’s Adam Weinstein noted, he quickly walked the quid-pro-quo accusation back. Slate’s Will Oremus argued that it’s highly unlikely that Facebook is jiggering its News Feed algorithm in order to benefit advertisers. Henry Taylor of The Media Briefing explained just how well BuzzFeed’s native ads do on social sites relative to other ad forms and how important they are to BuzzFeed’s strategy. And here at the Lab, Joshua Benton highlighted a discussion of Gawker’s own (apparently rather ineffective) practice of buying Facebook ads to drive traffic to its native ads as well. There’s also the matter of buying ads on Facebook to draw users not to another ad, but to Like a Facebook page, which appears to be a problematic process as well. Science blogger Derek Muller claimed that “click farms” of people Liking hundreds or thousands of Facebook pages to boost follower counts for ad clients, puffing up page audiences with meaningless followers that actually decrease their relative engagement and push them further down News Feeds. Facebook denied that fake Likes are rampant there, though PandoDaily’s James Robinson found some corroborating evidence for Muller’s claim in his own Facebook ad-buying experiment. Slate’s Oremus countered that fake Likes don’t help Facebook and accused writers of being too eager to believe stories of Facebook’s nefarious deeds. From the Times to a nonprofit startup: Bill Keller, who was The New York Times’ executive editor from 2003 to 2011 and has been a columnist for the paper since then, announced he’s leaving the Times for the Marshall Project, a new nonprofit site focusing on the American criminal justice system. The Marshall Project is a project of Neil Barsky, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and hedge fund manager.
There was some criticism about the move: Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan said that as a dyed-in-the-wool old media person, Keller is “almost certainly not the best man to lead an online journalism startup of any sort” and that his jump to a startup from such a cushy traditional media gig is “a great flashing sign that reads, ‘Newspapers are the past.’” Politico’s Dylan Byers detailed the bad blood between Keller and some of the Times’ brass.
Reading roundup: There were quite a few interesting developments and pieces to check out this week. Here are a few: — Reporters Without Borders released its annual World Press Freedom Index, and the U.S. dropped from No. 33 to No. 46. (The U.K. dropped three spots to No. 33.) Free Press’ Josh Stearns sounded the alarm on the U.S.’ falling ranking, though The Washington Post’s Max Fisher said it’s not a significant drop in the long term. The Committee of Protect Journalists looked more closely at the NSA’s pressure on the journalists who report on it. — One of France’s largest newspapers, Libération, announced last weekend that it would become a “social network” and would turn its newsroom into a cultural center, prompting a headline and editorial in protest, a strike, and the resignation of the paper’s editor. Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram urged the paper’s staff to be more open to change and the community it serves. — Mashable reported that Twitter is testing a very Facebook-like profile redesign, to which ReadWrite’s Matt Asay and Wired’s Ryan Tate responded by calling for the two social networks to stop trying to mimic each other. As The Wall Street Journal noted, Twitter’s biggest problem is user indifference, something a Facebookization might be trying to resolve. — A couple of smart pieces about journalism education: Lehigh professor Jeremy Littau on navigating the tension between the journalistic goals of accuracy and truth and the educational model of learning through failure, and Nebraska professor Matt Waite on resolving the “our curriculum is too full” problem by incorporating necessary non-traditional skills (in this case, math) into basic journalism courses. — Finally, a couple of interesting pieces from late last week: Sulia’s Jonathan Glick at Recode on the rise of the platform-meets-publisher (or, as he calls them, “platishers”), and Circa’s David Cohn on rethinking CMSes to prioritize structured data rather than simply narrative. Photo of Comcast remote by MoneyBlogNewz used under a Creative Commons license. |
| How a crime becomes political: Trayvon Martin and the way different media co-create the news Posted: 14 Feb 2014 07:30 AM PST The shooting of Trayvon Martin was one of the biggest stories of 2012. But it didn’t start out that way — it began as just another local crime story, and without a number of key points of amplification along the way, it could have easily remained one. How did the death of a black Florida teen become what the Pew Research Center says was the most covered news story with a racial component in the past five years? Three researchers at the MIT Center for Civic Media published a paper this week that tries to answer that qustion. “The Battle for ‘Trayvon Martin’: Mapping a Media Controversy On- and Offline” tracks how the event was covered immediately after Martin’s death, and over the following days and weeks as the story ascended from local broadcast news to national newspapers and the web. The paper’s authors — Erhardt Graeff, Matt Stempeck, and Ethan Zuckerman — were specifically interested in determining how alternative and participatory media might have influenced the narrative arc of the Trayvon Martin story. The idea for the paper was sparked by a blog post Stempeck wrote in 2012. “This seemed like a good opportunity to look at a different kind of event,” Graeff said: “a crime story that had ballooned into a much larger set of issues.” As the authors put it:
To achieve this goal, the authors relied on a number of distinct datasets. To measure engagement on social platforms, they looked at individual tweets and the hashtags that united them. To monitor TV coverage, they pulled in closed-captioning transcripts. They tracked Google searches for both “Trayvon Martin” and “George Zimmerman,” his killer. In addition to measuring frequency of appearances in print media, they also measured front-page appearances “as a percentage of total physical column-inches on the front page of The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and New York Post.” Looking at the click rates on Bitly links helped them understand the role that race-specific media played in the spread of the story. They also compared those datasets with the growing number of signatures on a Change.org petition that begin circulating on March 8, 2012. But the central tool in executing the project was Media Cloud, a project from Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society that collects and analyzes both mainstream and alternative, digital news streams — its functions include “media definition, crawling, text extraction, word vectoring, and analysis.” Out of the over 27,000 sources Media Cloud draws on, 1,570 were relevant to the timeframe of the research question, February 26 to April 30, 2012. (The research didn’t deal with Zimmerman’s trial or its coverage in the media.) From those, Media Cloud ultimately found 359 sources, with a total of 5,665 stories, that were relevant to the story following Martin’s death. Prior to this research, Media Cloud was used by Harvard’s Yochai Benkler, one of its designers, to track media coverage of the SOPA-PIPA debate and to map that controversy via links throughout the media ecosystem. Benkler found that digital media like Reddit, Techdirt, and AmericanCensorship.org “were the most influential sources in the media ecosystem as ranked by incoming links, overshadowing the impact of traditional media sources.” But as the authors point out, Benkler’s subject matter was inherently Internet-centric; with this paper, they sought to repeat the controversy mapping on a less natively digital subject. The researchers present their findings by breaking the Trayvon Martin story into five acts. The first spans February 26 to March 6, during which time the story did not make it beyond of Florida media. Local TV news covered it, followed in the following days by stories in the Orlando Sentinel and The Miami Herald. “The news story, initially framed as a fight between two people in an area known for occasional violence, stood little chance of attracting significant media attention,” the authors write.  Network of interlinked media during Act II. The second act is where we first meet Benjamin Crump, the civil rights attorney Martin’s family retained, and the publicist Crump hired, Ryan Julison. It was through Julison’s efforts that national news outlets, including Reuters and CBS, got wind of mounting concerns over details in the case — for example, why was Zimmerman carrying a gun? From there, the paper argues, digital platforms like The Huffington Post and the Black Youth Project began to amplify the story, but with the addition of significant misinformation. It’s also in this stage that the circulation of the Change.org petition began to grow exponentially. With 217 signatures its first day, it grew to 2,492 the next day, picking up thousands a day before nearly reaching 13,000 on March 13. The paper also notes that celebrities sharing the petition on Twitter caused a 900 percent spike in traffic between March 12 and 15. The third act, from March 16 to 22, saw the release of the audio file documenting the last few moments before Martin died. That audio provided what the authors call an “actuality” for TV and radio broadcasters to build a story around, which is why mainstream media is the central focus of this phase.  The effect of the 911 tapes on media attention: a general rise across all media channels on March 17, with notable spikes in Media Cloud stories (light blue) and television coverage (green) on March 18. At the same time, protests started popping up in Florida, New York City, and London, providing “actualities” for newspapers, leading to the first national front-page story about Martin on March 22. Then came the peak in Martin coverage in Act IV, from March 23 to April 10. It was during this period that President Obama weighed in with his comment on racial profiling. After that, Graeff says, “We see this kind of open season for political actors trying to use the attention dedicated to this story for political gain.” On the left, activists tried to use Trayvon Martin to advance their gun law legislation.  The network of interlinked media during Act IV. Then, conservative bloggers at sites like Wagist.com sought to push back by searching for evidence of “a troubled youth” in Martin’s social media profiles. This pursuit eventually led to The Miami Herald publishing a story describing an incident in which Martin was suspended for carrying a bag of marijuana. Though conservative bloggers could not prove Martin was a drug dealer, they were successful in getting the mainstream media to address that claim. This led liberal, digital media such as ThinkProgress and Gothamist to complain about the tactic “at the level of metanarrative, covering the coverage of the claim.” Finally, in Act V, the authors argue that pressure from across the media ecosystems led authorities in Florida to take Zimmerman into custody. This once again provided the news hook necessary to spark a mainstream news cycle, with front-page coverage peaking the day after his arrest. Simultaneously, Google searches for “George Zimmerman” reached a high, as those who had managed to ignore the story previously sought context.
“Cable news channels FOX News and MSNBC aired a series of character attacks, while HLN's Nancy Grace weighed in on whether or not Zimmerman cried in his jail cell,” the authors write. The spike in broadcast coverage, it’s important to note, outlasted Google searches, Media Cloud mentions, and newspaper front pages. “Like Hollywood's penchant for sequels to popular film franchises, it's possible that once a story and its characters have been introduced, it's relatively frictionless for TV news programs to return with greater frequency to the story,” write the authors. What can observers of media learn from this story? “We realized that the broadcast media were key to driving attention to this story, which is counter to the popular narrative that we’ve been putting together over the last few years about the networked public sphere,” Graeff says. But at the same time, they learned broadcast and the rest of the mainstream media are highly susceptible to the agenda-setting of digital and alternative media: “We believe the national attention brought to the story through broadcast media allowed groups like the Black Youth Project to amplify stories to their online communities, and informed actors like [Kevin] Cunningham who launched campaigns like the Change.org petition,” the researchers argue. They also believe that digital activists are getting better at manipulating the media, promoting their own agendas and challenging official narratives. Newspapers, in turn, are vulnerable to this type of direction because of their reliance on newsy “actualities” like protests or other events. They also found the extent to which communication on social platforms became a part of the broader media narrative significant — for example, when Howard University students released their “Am I suspicious?” video on YouTube. Write the authors:
Going forward, this study provides an interesting foundation for thinking about how our media are interrelated, and how various facts, anecdotes, and bits of misinformation make their way to the public. “Can we start exploring the data not from identifying these topics of keywords upfront, but asking an algorithm to surface some of those for us?” asks Graeff. “What are some unusual things or clusters of news stories that will allow us to get a sense of news stories that otherwise wouldn’t be seen?” In the future, Graeff says he’d like to be able to better track geography and know where stories are being published and talked about. The team is also interested in using natural language processing to track the spread of quotations from source to source. In addition, “automated coding and sentiment analysis” could be used to better understand how perspectives in the newsroom are molding stories — tools like OpenGender Tracker. Ultimately, the goal is to create a suite of tools that activists, journalists, and academics can learn from. Says Graeff: “A lot of what we show here is that there are better methods for studying the media as a so-called media ecosystem that allow us to really understand how a story goes from barely a blip to a major national/international news event, and how controversies circle around that.” |
| From Nieman Reports: Independent Chinese news orgs need to up their game in digital Posted: 14 Feb 2014 07:00 AM PST Editor’s note: The new issue of our sister publication Nieman Reports is out and online. There’s a lot of great reading in there on a variety of subjects, but the primary focus is on the state of journalism in China, with a number of terrific reports from both Chinese journalists and foreign correspondents posted there. This week, we’ll be sharing excerpts from some of those stories that would be of the most interest to Nieman Lab readers. Here, Hu Shuli, editor-in-chief of Caixin Media and former winner of the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism, writes about what it will take to increase the viability of independent news organizations in China.
The situation in China is different. A couple of years ago, while traditional media outlets in developed countries were suffering through their transitions, many in China's newspaper industry remained quite optimistic about the business outlook, believing that traditional media would remain dominant in the public sphere and continue to grow for at least the next five to six years. However, changes have come much faster than expected. In the face of the rapid growth of Internet access, the market for traditional media has quickly eroded. Most of China's media outlets are now struggling both internally, from inefficient management, and externally, from regulatory controls. In recent years, commercial interests have also affected the industry tremendously; weak self-discipline has facilitated media corruption. This corruption is seen in the unforgivable practice of "rent-seeking" — taking bribes to fabricate stories. The problem is, in China's peculiar political and media environment, where some media companies are government-linked, excessive interference and an absence of supervision coexist, making it easier for people to succumb to temptation, be it commercial or political. Thus, some media firms smear companies that refuse to place ads with them, while others are happy to sell themselves as public relations tools. Such practices are no secret within the industry; some even brag about them. Keep reading at Nieman Reports » |
John Cassidy of The New Yorker was 
Technology development has been reshaping the media industry worldwide. In developed countries like the United States, traditional media companies felt the shock brought on by new technology several years ago. The global financial crisis made their survival even more difficult, but it also forced traditional media in those countries to adapt to — even embrace — change.| You are subscribed to email updates from Nieman Journalism Lab To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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