Nieman Journalism Lab

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• Talking Points Memo defends its new sponsored content
• It looks like another sports team owner is about to buy another newspaper
• This Week in Review: Reasons for optimism about journalism, and how far to take traffic-chasing

Talking Points Memo defends its new sponsored content Posted: 28 Mar 2014 02:16 PM PDT Andrew Sullivan, editor of The Dish, gave a lecture on behalf of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics last night in which he railed against the evils of sponsored content. Sullivan argues that content intended, on any level, to confuse your reader is a breach of trust and that any writing done in service of a product or brand is propaganda. His accusations were fired at a list of publishers that includes but is not limited to BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Romenesko, Time, and, most recently, Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo. Today, Marshall published a defense of his decision to start publishing sponsored content paid for by PhRMA, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. Marshall makes the familiar arguments about his intention to retain independence and to clearly label the sponsored content as such, as well as the necessity of revenue to any news organization. But he also makes an interesting case for a reason why an interest group would want to pay for content beyond ultimately duping his reader: Why are these “Sponsored Messages” attractive to advertisers, particularly our advertisers? Because our advertisers are policy focused and thus tend to have more complex arguments. They’re not just selling soap or peanut butter. There’s only so much of those arguments you can fit into a picture box or a video. They want room to make fuller arguments, lengthier descriptions of who they are and what they do, as you would if you were writing an editorial — in text, going into detail. The opportunity to do that to an audience like TPM’s is of particular value because you’re people who care about policy and you read stuff. That’s an advantage we have as a publication, something that allows us to stay ahead of the curve and the downward ad price pressures that are affecting much of the rest of the publishing industry. See also Henry Farrell’s complaint at Crooked Timber and Marshall’s response in the comments: Just as has long been the case, virtually all our revenue comes from paid advertising, mainly from advertisers from pretty clear industry and political motives. These are the advertisers who want to advertise in political publications. Shoe manufacturers and clothiers are generally not interested. (Entertainment companies, interestingly, are)… Our Polltracker section and app in 2012 was 100% sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, literally the Oil Lobby. That didn't make it a 'sponsored section'. API wanted to associate themselves with the content and run their ads next to it.

It looks like another sports team owner is about to buy another newspaper Posted: 28 Mar 2014 11:23 AM PDT That’s the report from John Vomhof Jr. of the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal: Taylor Corp. and Minnesota Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor is close to a deal to buy the Star Tribune, according to a local report that cites unidentified “people in the know.” Business Take, a daily business newsletter published by Blois Olson of Fluence Media, reports that Taylor “has intensified negotiations recently” and one source suggested that there is already “an agreement in principle.” Currently, Wayzata private equity firm Wayzata Investment Partners is the newspaper’s majority owner. I mention this only because it seems to be an increasing trend, and a reversal in local institutional power: Newspapers — once the most profitable, established force in many American cities — seem to be the subject of increasing interest to the owners of major sports teams. Here in Boston, of course, the Globe is now owned by Red Sox owner John Henry. In my home state of Louisiana, New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson tried (and failed) to buy The Times-Picayune. L.A. Dodgers owner Mark Walter has expressed interest in buying the L.A. Times. I’m sure there are other owners who — sitting on billion-dollar properties and seeing their local daily valued in the tens of millions — have at least thought about flipping over the couch cushions and seeing if they can scrounge up a down payment. It used to be more common the other way around, media companies buying up or starting sports teams — think Tribune with the Cubs, Turner with the Braves, News Corp. with the Dodgers, Disney with the Mighty Ducks. And that still happens sometimes with broadcast companies or diversified media corporations. Consider this paragraph from a 1999 AJR story and think how foreign that world seems today: The Dallas Morning News [buying a small share of the Dallas] Mavericks join a club packed with some of the biggest names in the business. Most notably, the Tribune Co., publisher of the Chicago Tribune, has owned the Chicago Cubs for nearly two decades. The parent company of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette bought a minority share of the Pittsburgh Pirates to help keep the team in town. The Cincinnati Enquirer is linked with the Reds since parent Gannett has a small interest in the team. Ted Turner’s media empire, now a division of Time Warner, owns parts of baseball’s Atlanta Braves, the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks and the National Hockey League’s Atlanta Thrashers. For what it’s worth, the Star Tribune (two Pulitzers last year) has had a better season than the Timberwolves (headed to the lottery and prompting sad videos like this one). Photo of the Timberwolves by Doug Wallick used under a Creative Commons license.

This Week in Review: Reasons for optimism about journalism, and how far to take traffic-chasing Posted: 28 Mar 2014 07:21 AM PDT This week’s essential reads: If  you only have a minute, the most important reads this week are the overview of Pew’s State of the News Media report, Deadspin’s Tim Marchman on the cynicism of the term clickbait, and the Tow Center’s Alexander Howard putting the data journalism discussion in historical context.  Reasons for optimism about the news industry: The Pew Research Journalism Project’s annual smorgasbord of data about the news industry, the State of the News Media report, was released this week, and after several gloomy years, the report had a distinctively optimistic tone this year. The headlining figure, as CNN’s Brian Stelter reported, was Pew’s tally of 5,000 new journalism jobs created at more than 400 digital news startups, in addition to at least $300 million in venture capital into news-related digital media startups in 2013. Pew’s president, Alan Murray, provided several reasons for optimism from the report, including its findings of increasing news consumption on mobile devices and social media, and Pete Cashmore of Mashable praised the growing efforts to make news more accessible and mobile. USA Today’s Rem Rieder also expressed his enthusiasm for journalism’s online growth, though he expressed concern about the future of local journalism. The Knight Foundation’s Eric Newton said student journalists are a big part of the new work that’s being done in local journalism and shouldn’t be left out of studies like this. The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi went deeper into local journalism’s long decline, pointing out that “the biggest investments in digital news have gone toward start-up ventures that target broad and borderless audiences, bypassing community news altogether.” There was plenty of bad news in the report, too, and Digiday’s Lucia Moses gave an overview of some of it: The new revenue is only a sliver of journalism’s total funding, which still remains heavily dependent on advertising. And the 5,000 new jobs are a long way from replacing the jobs that have been lost. Poynter’s Rick Edmonds noted that despite its decline, the newspaper industry still accounts for more than half of the news business’ revenues. RELATED ARTICLE New technology, new money, new newsrooms, old questions: The State of the News Media in 2014 TV news — whether local, cable, or network — earns far less revenue, as Edmonds pointed out. Pew’s numbers were particularly dire for MSNBC, as Erik Wemple of The Washington Post and Dylan Byers of Politico pointed out. The Lab’s Justin Ellis highlighted the year of ownership upheaval in the local TV news industry, as well as the growth of online video. Poynter’s Sam Kirkland noted that that growth isn’t as great as one might expect, though the audience for online news videos is remarkably young. And Patrick Seitz of Investor’s Business Daily detailed the role of Facebook in young people’s news consumption habits. Debating the merits of chasing traffic: The move toward a more nakedly traffic-driven orientation has been in the works in online news for a long time, but the Advance-owned Oregonian in Portland may have taken it to new levels among traditional news organizations. The alt-weekly Willamette Week reported on internal documents at the paper that require Oregonian reporters to post new articles three times a day and post the first comment on any substantial post. Annual bonuses will be based on performance ratings, which will be determined in large part on web metrics. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum decried the move as a brazen institutionalization of the “hamster wheel” mentality that has overtaken journalism, saying it makes it much more difficult for The Oregonian’s reporters to do good, serious work. “The sad thing about Advance's digital forced march is that its executives really think they're getting ahead of the curve. But they're implementing 2008's conventional wisdom in 2014, and they're doing it badly at that,” Chittum wrote. Mathew Ingram of Gigaom agreed that the plan is too pageview-focused and likely to lead to clickbait, but said he liked the focus on engagement, producing lots of regular content, and a variety of posting styles. RELATED ARTICLE At The Oregonian, reporters will be evaluated in part on how much copy they crank out for the web The Lab’s Joshua Benton said he’s not so much concerned about the particulars of The Oregonian’s bet on online traffic as the fact that it’s making a bet in the first place. Any bet, he said, is an encouraging departure from the age-old plan of cutting, retrenching around declining print advertising and circulation, and relying on an aging audience. The New York Times’ David Carr included The Oregonian’s changes as an example of a larger trend toward paying journalists based on the traffic they bring in, a practice that brings a welcome meritocracy to journalistic production but is also alarmingly open to manipulation. Newswhip’s Paul Quigley argued that this trend actually tilts things toward writers’ favor rather than their bosses, because it depends in part on their brands and their networks. Gigaom’s Ingram noted, though, that this obsession will continue as long as advertising (and, by extension, advertisers) are still driving the bus of online revenue. Lucia Moses of Digiday looked at the range of approaches among online news organizations to giving journalists metrics, and Poynter’s Sam Kirkland noted that there are still lines editors won’t cross in search of traffic. Deadspin’s Tim Marchman railed against the cynicism in the ubiquitous term clickbait, saying it presents a moralistic “false binary between stories that serve the public interest and those cynically presented just because people will read them.” Facebook jumps into virtual reality: Facebook made another big-dollar, out-of-left-field purchase this week, buying two-year-old startup Oculus Rift, which makes virtual reality headgear, for $2 billion. Recode’s Kara Swisher reported some details on how the deal came together, and Time’s Lev Grossman wrote a good profile on Oculus’ background and what sets it apart. Virtual reality, of course, wouldn’t seem to be a natural extension of Facebook’s existing platform, so many people have been wondering exactly what the social network has in mind. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg said he plans to start with Oculus’ current ambitions in gaming and then move toward providing a broader range of virtual experiences with friends. Andrew Wallenstein of Variety said, though, that Facebook’s eventually going to end up in the movie business. Several other observers said Zuckerberg doesn’t really know what Facebook’s going to do with Oculus; he’s simply hedging his bets on the technology of the future. Said venture capitalist Fred Wilson: “The next thing was mobile. Mobile is now the last thing. And all of these big tech companies are looking for the next thing to make sure they don't miss it.” Reuters’ Felix Salmon compared Zuckerberg to Warren Buffett, hedging his bets in all kinds of fields against the eventual decline of Facebook as a social media platform. Gigaom founder Om Malik said the interesting realization in all this “billion dollar dart throwing” is that we’re moving toward a glass ceiling for the advertising-based model. Forbes’ Eric Mack argued, meanwhile, that Zuckerberg will have a tough time turning virtual reality into a mainstream technology. Oculus raised its initial $2.4 million through Kickstarter, and its backers there were not exhilarated at the company’s big payday, but outraged, as The Verge’s Adrianne Jeffries reported. Minecraft creator Markus Persson said he would no longer work with Oculus, and Dean Putney of BoingBoing captured the disappointment of people who thought Oculus could be a “next big thing” that was actually powered by the grassroots, rather than corporations. PandoDaily’s James Robinson said virtual reality just became a monopoly, and other new technologies are likely to follow: “An entire generation of hardware innovation is up for grabs right now, and neither Facebook or Google seem about to close their wallets.” Net neutrality and streaming video: The net neutrality debate was stoked again late last week by a pair of posts from two of the players with the biggest stakes in the game. Netflix’s Reed Hastings made the argument for stronger net neutrality, saying that Internet service providers are charging content providers for interconnection (like in the deal Netflix made with Comcast last month) just because they can. AT&T’s Jim Cicconi countered that users’ increasing appetite for streaming video (that is, Netflix) has huge costs for ISPs, and that Netflix wants those costs to be borne by all broadband customers, rather than the ones who are streaming the video through Netflix. Supporters fell in on both sides: BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow called AT&T’s policies “extortion,” and the New America Foundation’s Sarah Morris called for strong net neutrality to police the opaque world of interconnection in which the Netflixes and AT&Ts of the world negotiate. On the other side, StreamingMedia’s Dan Rayburn said Netflix isn’t being straightforward about the situation it’s actually in, and Forbes’ Mark Rogowsky said the net neutrality Netflix is calling for wouldn’t solve its problems. The Verge’s Ben Popper explained Netflix’s deal with Comcast in light of Hastings’ post, and Gigaom’s Janko Roettgers looked at whether Hastings’ tongue-in-cheek proposal that Netflix should become a peer-to-peer network would actually work. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple and Comcast are in talks about a deal that would use an Apple set-top box for streaming TV and allow Apple to bypass online data congestion through an interconnectivity arrangement. There was a lot of skepticism about the story, with Variety’s Andrew Wallenstein, Gigaom’s Janko Roettgers, and StreamingMedia’s Dan Rayburn all throwing cold water on it. Reading roundup: Several other noteworthy stories from this busy week: RELATED ARTICLE The newsonomics of NYT Now — After weeks of hints, The New York Times officially announced two new paid-content options, an $8-a-month app of core Times content called NYT Now and a $45-a-month subscription called Times Premier that includes behind-the-scenes information about the paper. Poynter’s Sam Kirkland has more details on the programs, BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel looked at whether NYT Now will succeed, and Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram offered suggestions for personalizing the Times’ paid content plans. — Turkey’s government sought to ban Twitter late last week, prompting widespread workarounds by Turkish Twitter users as well as a legal challenge filed by Twitter. One Turkish court overturned the ban on Wednesday, while another one rejected Twitter’s complaint. The government also blocked YouTube on Thursday. Some of the best commentary on the subject has been by Turkish digital sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci, who explained why Turkey is blocking Twitter and what Turks are doing about it. — The chatter about Nate Silver’s relaunched data journalism site FiveThirtyEight continued this week, and while much of it come from an ongoing slap-fight between Silver and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, some of it was also quite thought-provoking. The Tow Center’s Alexander Howard gave some historical context to some of the backlash against data journalism, Om Malik gave some advice to Silver on dealing with criticism, the Columbia Journalism Review’s Tanveer Ali called for better understanding of narrative at FiveThirtyEight, and Adam Tinworth offered a defense of data journalism. — The New York Times reported that the Obama administration is proposing an end to the U.S. National Security Agency’s systematic collection of Americans’ bulk phone records, allowing it access to phone companies’ data only with a specific court order. The Volokh Conspiracy’s Stewart Baker compared Obama’s plan to Congress’ proposed overhaul, and The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald examined the tough spot the new plan may put pro-NSA Democrats in. RELATED ARTICLE “To change destiny, journalists need to fundamentally rethink their business” — Finally, tech blogger Ben Thompson wrote a thoughtful post on the well-trod topic of traditional and future business models for news, and the Lab’s Joshua Benton added some of his thoughts on what might be ahead. Photos of Bangkok traffic by Joan Campderrós-i-Canas and Oculus Rift by Sergey Galyonkin used under a Creative Commons license.

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Newspaper Death Watch

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Are New Media Companies in a Race to the Bottom? Posted: 28 Mar 2014 05:01 AM PDT With BuzzFeed and Upworthy reporting eye-popping traffic growth and planning to hire teams of reporters, many people are wondering whether sharing is the new currency of media success. The idea is that if you give readers enough top-ten lists and animated GIFs they’ll do all your marketing for you. You don’t even have to worry about search engine optimization because nothing ever went viral on search. This philosophy has even given birth to a new style of headline writing that’s intended to stimulate sharing (“Why’s This Kid Throwing Coins? The Reason May Or May Not Blow Your Mind, But Something Does Blow Up,” reads one recent Upworthy example). Henry Blodget But maybe sharing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In a recent case study on USA Today, Michael Wolff looks at Business Insider, the hyper-caffeinated new-media brainchild of exiled Wall Street bad boy Henry Blodget. Business Insider is notorious for its fixation on being first and for driving its reporters to exhaustion. It’s a content mill – albeit with higher quality than many of its peers – that churns out large volumes of information in the quest to earn shares on Facebook and Twitter. And it’s generating traffic: 25.4 million unique visitors in January, says Wolff. The problem is that Business Insider has low reader loyalty: Only a small percentage of Business Insider’s traffic actually seeks it out and regards it as a worthy destination and a source with particular brand authority. Most other readers land on a Business Insider article because of search-engine results, or because of an engaging — tabloid-style — headline in a Facebook feed and other social-media promotions, which generate 30% of Business Insider’s traffic. Wolff asserts that this drive-by traffic has little value because readers don’t identify with the brand. Worse is that the drive for big numbers becomes a race to the bottom.  As advertising rates continue to drift lower, publishers must seek ever-higher traffic volumes to stay in the same place. This means resorting to gimmicks like contests, cheesecake photos and celebrity gossip. That attracts poor-quality traffic which has low brand affinity and little value to advertisers. It’s a vicious cycle. Digital Dimes Blodget disagrees. In a response on Business Insider he says that the very problems Wolff cites are actually opportunities. New media companies don’t have legacy businesses to protect and so are free to disrupt mainstream competitors and steal revenue, he says. “We are better at serving digital readers than many traditional news organizations, so we can thrive on these ‘digital dimes,’” writes Blodget. His post displays a photo of what are presumably a group of happy young reporters in the company’s New York offices (Wolff says Business insider has hired 70 full-time journalists at a cost of more than $15 million a year. Do the math). We think Wolff is on to something. Take a look at the chart below from the Pew Research Journalism Project. It depicts traffic to the 26 most popular U.S. news sites over a three-month period. It shows conclusively that visitors who reach a site directly (via a bookmark or typing the address into a browser) stay much longer, read much more and visit more often. Source: Pew Research Journalism Project This isn’t surprising when you think about it. Typing “nyt.com” into a browser is an act of brand affinity, whereas headline-clickers on Facebook don’t really care where the headline comes from. The BuzzFeeds and Upworthys of the world must compete headline by headline. Is that a problem? Attracting readers with gimmicks is nothing new. One of the myths of the news business is that people read newspapers primarily for the news. The reality is that they read for all kinds of reasons. Any veteran of the pre-digital publishing days will tell you that an embarrassingly large number of traditional newspaper readers bought copies for the coupons, Ann Landers, comics, the Jumble and the daily horoscope. But at least in those days readers knew what brand to buy. Today’s audience has more affinity to the content than to the publisher, and aggregators like Flipboard are constantly looking for ways to supersede publishers’ brands with their own. Brand still matters. A click is not the same as a reader.   Related articles Think Upworthy is Just About Sharing Great Stories on Facebook? You’d Be Wrong. The Lesson Small Online Publishers Can Take From Business Insider May Surprise You Why Michael Wolff Is Wrong New cash, new questions for Business Insider Upworthy co-founder at SXSW: ‘This is what media should do’

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Nieman Journalism Lab

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• Revenge porn could be opening up an exception to publishers’ protections online
• Can an algorithm predict which popular content will become viral content?
• The newsonomics of NYT Now

Revenge porn could be opening up an exception to publishers’ protections online Posted: 27 Mar 2014 02:11 PM PDT At Gawker, Michelle Dean has a piece on revenge porn — the awful practice of jilted men (mostly) posting explicit videos and pictures from their exes online — and the legal backlash building against it. There are bills pending in at least 24 states to ban or otherwise limit revenge porn, and a federal bill is coming. RELATED ARTICLE A proposed Florida law targets mugshot sites, but hits journalists’ First Amendment rights RELATED ARTICLE A court case against those skeezy mugshot websites raises First Amendment issues We’ve written before about a similar issue — those skeezy mugshot sites that post pics from public records and then offer to take them down for a price. RELATED ARTICLE David Ardia: Why news orgs can police comments and not get sued To state the obvious, most online publishers are in neither the mugshot extortion business nor the revenge porn game. But even the most legitimate publishers should be watching this space because, in both cases, changing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is one of the ideas being tossed around. Section 230, as this old Nieman Lab video will tell you, is the part of U.S. law that says (in nearly all cases! I am not a lawyer!) that websites aren’t held responsible for what’s posted by their users. If one of your readers falsely calls his neighbor a child molestor in the comments section of your news site, that reader might well be guilty of libel — but your site isn’t. In a very real sense, it’s the law that allows the Internet as we know it to exist; imagine if sites had to preclear all user contributions everywhere, whether on a blogging platform, on Twitter, or elsewhere. As Mary Anne Franks, a University of Miami law professor working on the federal revenge porn bill, tells Gawker: …online entities protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act are provided with a special defense against state criminal laws, but not against federal criminal laws (or federal copyright laws, for that matter). A federal law means that a revenge porn site claiming to merely provide a platform for angry exes to upload sexually explicit images of their former partners will not be able to hide behind Section 230. And as Gawker commenter dontshootme responds: I think the EFF’s concerns [about amending 230] are being under valued here. The likelihood of overreach is very large, in my opinion. Also, it strikes me as being very dangerous to start messing with Section 230. I get that this is a very real problem, I just suggest a knee-jerk reaction by lawmakers (which is what almost always happens with public outcry type stuff) will result in bad law… Maybe it’s just me, but I seem to see a lot of talk about how “bad” section 230 is (not in this article) so when I see issues like this, I get concerned that a law will be created that generates an exception. I believe we should go after the ones who upload. [Revenge porn king] Hunter Moore’s situation is fairly straightforward, but what about sites that link to it? Are they responsible? How about if I linked to it here in the comments, is Gawker responsible? Right now, no. If we weaken 230 then censorship gets easier and easier. Here’s an overview of the issue from the pro-legislation side.

Can an algorithm predict which popular content will become viral content? Posted: 27 Mar 2014 08:39 AM PDT A researcher at Stanford has some new insight into how content — specifically, visual content — becomes massively popular on Facebook, a phenomenon he calls cascade sharing. Justin Cheng wanted to see if it was possible to predict what content would be shared over and over again. With the help of some people at Facebook, they were able to get access to data that showed “which people (nodes) reshared each photograph and at what time.” Cheng and pals use a portion of their data to train a machine learning algorithm to search for features of cascades that make them predictable. These features include the type of image, whether a close-up or outdoors or having a caption and so on; the number of followers the original poster has; the shape of the cascade that forms, whether a simple star graph or more complex structures; and finally how quickly the cascade takes place, its speed. Having trained their algorithm, they used it to see whether it could make predictions about other cascades. They started with images that had been shared only five times, so the question was whether they would eventually be shared more than 10 times. It turns out that this is surprisingly predictable. "For this task, random guessing would obtain a performance of 0.5, while our method achieves surprisingly strong performance: classification accuracy of 0.795," they say. There’s a lot more work to be done in this area of research, but some of Cheng’s findings — for example, content that is shared rapidly is likely to become viral — could be useful in a publishing context.

The newsonomics of NYT Now Posted: 27 Mar 2014 08:10 AM PDT RELATED ARTICLE The newsonomics of The New York Times’ Paywalls 2.0 It’s an ambitious launch. Within it, we can hear many of the digital news buzzwords of the moment: mobile first, curation, paywall, native ads, voice. NYT Now debuts on April 2, side-stepping the foolish superstitions of a day earlier, and about five months after first disclosing its Paywalls 2.0 plans (“The newsonomics of The New York Times’ Paywalls 2.0″). NYT Now’s timing seems right, and in my first testing of it, it offers reasons to believe it’ll get a lot of usage. But big questions loom as the final preparations for launch are made within the Times. The biggest, of course, is how many current non-subscribers will see enough value to pay. There are also questions about how NYT Now fits with the Times’ other native apps and mobile web experiences. RELATED ARTICLE The newsonomics of outrageous confidence The positioning of the app shows the resurgent Times’ confidence, bolstered by the “They like us, they really like us!” success of the Times’ three-year-old digital subscription strategy. In fact, NYT Now can be seen in part as an Empire Strikes Back play: It aims to take readership back from Twitter and Facebook. It is an offensive move from a company — and an industry — that has seemed to be playing defense for so long. “It’s the best Twitter feed I’ve ever seen,” one NYT Now tester told the team building the product, says Cliff Levy, the editor of NYT Now and a well-decorated and well-respected Timesman. That’s part of the idea: Take minutes of news usage back from Twitter and Facebook by offering a somewhat open but still corralled experience. NYT Now aims to take back that usage at the critical early-morning check-in times and later in the day, when data shows even news readers tend to migrate to social and games. How much of the world really wants a lassoing of content, bringing some finiteness to the infinity of news and opinion out there? We know that Twitter faces its own issues of relevance, of user experience, and of how to help its users make sense of the madding digital world; just recently, the company acknowledged loss of minutes and new signups because it’s too complicated for many users. How NYT Now will try to bring simplicity to the complexity is the question. Let’s consider NYT Now in four quick parts: the product, its journalism, its user experience, and its business strategy. The product The product is straightforward. It’s mobile-only and, at launch, iPhone-only. On Android, the Times says, “We’re looking at it.” There’s no tablet or web access. As mobile usage surges past 50 percent in some parts of the day and week for the Times and other news companies, NYT Now aims to exploit the compulsive, near-OCD check-in behavior of 2014 life. The app will be a standard, standalone iPhone app, not part of Apple’s Newsstand, where the Times’ core iOS app lives. Download the app and you get 10 free articles a month — the same way metered access works on the other Times’ digital products. The price is $2 a week or $8 for four weeks. The journalism The journalism is NYT Now’s foundation. Importantly, that journalism is both self-referential (which is what we’d expect  of the proud, sometimes haughty, news standard of the Times) and breaking new ground —  encompassing a wider world beyond the Times. So readers of NYT Now will get 30 to 50 Times stories in a given day, with stories appearing and being replaced throughout the 24-hour cycle. That’s roughly 10 to 15 percent of its total number of articles and blog posts it writes daily. It’s an editor’s product, put together around the clock by an editorial staff of 15 to 20 (in addition to another dozen or so on the business side). Levy is modeling it on the success of New York Today, the blogging-from-the-five-boroughs NYTimes.com section that he developed last spring and which has grown in reader (and publisher) appreciation over time. He and a growing staff have built NYT Now over nine months, starting with the idea of a “need-to-know” mobile product. Think of the content in three parts, each borrowed from New York Today: Briefings: Adapted from the breezier, bloggier world of New York Today, NYT Now’s core personality is in the briefing. Friendly good mornings and good evenings greet readers and then offer a two- to three-paragraph take on “some of the things that caught our attention today.” Last evening’s: “Obama vs. Putin,” “The brothers Murdoch bounce back,” “It’s hard to be that bad,” (about the 76ers), “Rumors of North Korean hair rule may have follicle of truth,” “Pass the butter,” “‘Psych’ ends its eight-year run on USA Network” and “An energy drink cuts the caffeine.” There are no Mr. Putins and Mr. Obamas in the briefings. It’s the Times taking off its tie, and sharing. Expect Morning and Evening Briefings and Lunchtime and Midnight Reads — four segments a day, and each will flow into the relevant U.S. time zone; those of us on the west coast will no longer have to translate from Timesian ET. Top News: A half-dozen or more top Times stories of the moment. Hard news, with ”more news” and top opinion at the bottom of that page. RELATED ARTICLE New York Times Election 2012 iPhone app launches Our Picks: Finally, curation. The Times is acknowledging that there are indeed other worthy news providers out there, and here it picks out the stories it considers the best. Among the top brands noted: Wired, Reuters, Recode, CNBC, USA Today, The Guardian, Forbes — and even Nate Silver’s new post-Times FiveThirtyEight. Levy notes that the Times has been doing a bit of curation here and there, in its Science and Bits sections. And the Times’ Election 2012 iPhone app also pulled in non-Times stories that editors thought were important. But this is nonetheless a major leap. Levy puts it in cosmic terms: “There’s a tremendous collective intelligence in our newsrooms, but it’s only been internally focused” — meaning that journalists read a lot of stuff each day that others write, making judgments about what’s well done. What is great aggregation or curation anyhow but great editing applied to deep knowledge. In Round 1 of Internet news, even the smartest newsrooms bottled up that value. NYT Now intends to harvest and monetize it. The eventual success or failure of NYT Now aside, the Times’ move into curation is long overdue and welcome. It’s about time that native journalistic smarts escaped their own four-walled newsrooms. The big question for a paid curation app: Does it offer enoughi curation to justify paying? The user experience RELATED ARTICLE The newsonomics of the Quartz business launch It’s mobile first. Think Quartz, a mobile-first news leader, with more pictures and white space. It’s a long scroll, and meant for mobile snacking. It’s intuitive. Its three parts are easy to move between. Regular New York Times subscribers will like NYT Now too. With the briefings and curation, in addition to the top news found on the Times’ own regular smartphone app, it may offer a more pleasing morning (and later) experience for subscribers. On the business level, that’s not an issue: Times subscribers get NYT Now access included in their subscription. What I wonder about: How Times subscribers who prefer NYT Now for a quick morning reader will be able to move over to and within the fuller Times smartphone experience. The two experiences are related, but not completely synced up, as I currently understand it. On the core app, I can’t get to the breezy briefings or curation, though I can go as deep in Times content as I want. On NYT Now, I can get those, but then I have only access direct access — and view — of the limited number of Times stories on NYT Now at that moment, coming on and dropping off. (NYT Now-only subscribers will be able to read any and all NYT Now stories any time on the web; a green diamond next to a headline will indicate stories to which they have access). Maybe that won’t be an issue, but on first use, it seems like a disconnect. If I were the Times, I’d be concerned about current subscribers feeling lost in transition. That should be a big point to ponder. As Cliff Levy shared with me, it’s Times subscribers who have disproportionately shown the love for NYT Now’s inspiration, New York Today. That New York Today experience, though, is seamlessly integrated within all the Times’ digital products. What has worked about Paywalls 1.0 at the Times is great simplicity. You pay your money, and you get an all-access pass. All-access is a simple concept sweeping the newspaper, magazine, TV, and movie trades. Moves into product niches need to be tried, but complexity and confusion are the enemies of commercial success. The business strategy The Times’ strategy here is simple: “What would products look like for those willing to pay?” says David Perpich, the general manager of the Times’ New Digital Product Group and business head for NYT Now. The first answer is in, with the success of the full-access product. Now, the niching — Paywalls 2.0 — begins for the Times, and the rest of the news industry, which has followed the Times strongly and quickly into the paywall era. Think of the segmentation as these three E’s: Essential, which is NYT Now; Extensive, to this point the only digital-only plans the Times has offered, and which have signed up 760,000 digital-only subscribers; home delivery subscribers are also considered to be in this segment; Exclusive, the Times’ new “premier plan." RELATED ARTICLE The newsonomics of The New York Times’ Paywalls 2.0 Exclusive, which I first noted in November, has been priced. It's the VIP level of Times subscription: $45 for every four weeks, which provides full-digital access to subscribers, in addition to the status benefits. That's an additional $130 a year (or $10 for each four weeks) on top of the current all-access sub. Home delivery subscribers can also go premium, as of April 2, for the same $10 a week extra. That’s a 28 percent increase on top of a Sunday print/digital sub or digital sub. That pricing parallels the Financial Times, which has pioneered the premium sub model. The FT charges 44 percent more for a “premium” sub than than a “standard” one. What self-respecting FT (or Times, or Wall Street Journal?) reader would be caught dead with a standard-issue subscription? We know that 33 percent of new FT.com subscribers preserve their self-respect by forking over the extra dollars, euros, or pounds for four added features. RELATED ARTICLE The newsonomics of a news company of the future The Times’ premium is for the influential and/or Times lover in the family: Times Insider for behind-the-scenes looks at the news sausage-making, videos of TimesTalks, Times ebooks, extra Times puzzles, and Times Store discounts. That’s the premium stuff. Premium is a nuanced upsell, as its benefits include two sharing features, which can essentially lower the price of shared subscriptions: Family access: The ability to share their Times Premier account with two additional family members. Here, if we do the math, the Times is offering three subs for the prices of one. In its pre-premium, all-access plan, it has offered one additional family sub, or two in total. With a little planning and organization, consumers get a much better deal — and the Times locks in more everyday readers. Gift subscriptions: The ability to give 12 weeks of Times digital access to up to three friends each year. The pricing of the “essential” product, NYT Now, may be tricky. It’s only $2 a week, which gets you through-the-day reports plus a curated sense of what’s big news from elsewhere and the briefings. However, for $3.75 a week, you can get access to four or five times more New York Times content through its smartphone app — and full access to the NYTimes.com on the web. So a side-by-side comparison may give buyers second thoughts. It’s more likely that Times strategy will be to put NYT Now front-and-center as the shiny new must-have thing, believing that comparison shopping won’t be of major consequence. That comparative pricing is one place this strategy could go awry. There are others, and expect the Times to move quickly on its immediate experience. Perpich says user testing was deep, but involved fewer than 100 live users of the finished product. So real market data on usage and payment inclination will be hugely valuable as Times decides whether its research has oriented it correctly. If the three E’s have it, the word to avoid starts with a C: cannibalization, as in NYT Now eating away at the Times’ own full-price digital subscriber base. The Times has examined three years of data on customer usage and interaction to figure not just which products they might pay for, but also the kinds of partial-content Times products that wouldn’t incentivize existing subscribers to downgrade — which would put a dent in that $150 million in new subscription revenue the paywall is pumping out annually. So NYT Now, the first of the three new niche paid products (food and opinion products will roll out this summer), is intended to satisfy, but not satiate, segments of readers. How large might the NYT Now segment be? There is undoubtedly a vast potential audience that could appreciate a Times fast-read view of the world, but it’s a group that may be tough to get to pay. Two bucks a week isn’t much. But at that price, NYT Now isn’t competing against other $2 products. It’s competing against the enormous freely available web. This first niche product is aimed at Americans. While more than 10 percent of the Times’ digital-only subscriptions come from outside the U.S., Perpich says, NYT Now is targeted for Americans across those four continental time zones. My sense: If a low-price, fast-read, original-and-curated product works, it could readily be tailored for Brazilian, Chinese, Indian, and Middle East markets. Finally, NYT Now serves as the Times first home for mobile native ads, which it is calling Paid Posts. The Times may not be a leader here — in native ads, curation, mobile first, and the like — but it is becoming a faster follower.

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Newspaper Death Watch

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Why Billionaires Are Trying to Rescue the Newspaper Industry Posted: 27 Nov 2013 02:47 AM PST Jeff Bezos (right) may be the most prominent rich person to buy into the newspaper industry recently, but he’s not the only one. Billionaires have been opening their checkbooks with astonishing frequency lately to invest in an industry that many people think is dying. Warren Buffett owns more than 60 newspapers and says he’ll buy more. Billionaire Boston Red Sox owner John Henry just ponied up $70 million for the Boston Globe. Serial entrepreneur and multimillionaire Aaron Kushner bought the Orange County Register a year ago and has been plowing money into reporters and circulation. There’s evidence that the strategy is paying off. What do these savvy investors see that others don’t? I think three things. Value. At a basic level they see business opportunity. Henry purchased the Globe for just 6% of what the New York Times Co. paid for the newspaper 20 years ago. Media properties are so beaten down right now that value investors see nowhere to go but up. Newspaper subscribers still have some of the best demographics of any audience. More than half earn more than $50,000 a year and 22% earn six figures or more, according to the Newspaper Association of America (NAA). Although the audience is dwindling, more than 60% of US adults read a newspaper in print or online each week, according to the NAA. There are more ways to monetize that audience than just advertising, and these new investors are the kind of out-of-the-box thinkers who will figure them out. Market Stability. Mainstream media plays a critical watchdog function that greases the wheels of democracy and commerce. Reporters pounding the beat at city hall and scrutinizing the records of regulators keep public officials honest and playing fields level. They also provide valuable intelligence on competition. The press corps at some state capitols has been drawn down so much that some legislators have actually complained they miss the repartee with journalists. That has to alarm anybody who has millions invested in the market. Most rich people don’t care who’s in office as long as they know someone’s keeping an eye on them. And by the way, Bezos, Henry and Buffett  were avid newspaper readers long before they were media tycoons. Trust. The great paradox of the newspaper industry bust is that readership of newspaper content is at an all-time high in the U.S. The problem isn’t the product, it’s the business model. Media democratization has been a great thing, but it’s also created a crisis of trust. We are less and less confident in who to believe. Trusted media brands have a vital role to fulfill in this regard. We trust them to sweat the details and nail down the facts. Misinformation flourishes when everyone is the media, as we saw in the Boston Marathon bombings and Hurricane  Sandy. Mainstream media is expected to be accurate, at least most of the time. That’s why we instinctively turn to them when messages conflict. I don’t want to imply that the actions of these super-rich investors are entirely altruistic, but smart people know a developing crisis when they see it. Trusted media is too important to the functioning of our society to be allowed to just die on the vine. If Jeff Bezos can put up 1% of his net worth to rescue the Post from disaster, he hasn’t sacrificed much. Fumbled Opportunity The newspaper industry has fumbled for a solution to its problems for decades with little to show for it. That’s mainly because the wrong people were in charge. Newspapering has traditionally been a stable, profitable and boring business, characterized by monopoly or duopoly markets, high subscriber loyalty and advertiser lock-in. The people who flourished in that environment where bean counters who knew how to wring costs out of an operation. When the industry entered walked off the cliff in 2006, these people did what they knew best: Hacked away at expenses. But you don’t cost cut your way out of a fundamental shift in your market. Until just a couple of years ago, newspaper still earned 80% of their revenue from advertising, a business that has been in freefall for years. They’ve done a terrible job of diversifying their revenue streams, although some are beginning to turn the corner. The Washington Post is a microcosm of the industry’s troubles. The paper was one of the first to go online in the pre-Web days, but it chose to build a proprietary platform that was quickly rendered obsolete. The Post has failed to come up with a workable way to derive more revenue from readers, as The New York Times has done. Many staffers reportedly sneered at The Politico when it launched in 2007. Today, it’s a must-read on Capitol Hill The Washington Post Co. has diversified its business but failed to invest aggressively in new-media opportunities. The company’s Kaplan education division actually contributes the majority of its revenue and profit, but WaPo has been unable to duplicate that success in other markets. Its most famous misstep was when CEO Donald Graham failed to pursue a 2005 handshake agreement to invest $6 million in a fledgling social network called Facebook. Accel Partners got the deal instead. Had Graham pressed his advantage, the Post’s stake could be worth $7 billion today, wrote Jeff Bercovici in Forbes. But why invest? Newspaper owners have never had incentive to be aggressive. The industry has rewarded caution and conservatism, and that’s a big reason why it’s in such a mess today. The good news about the arrival of wealthy entrepreneurs on the scene is that they have nothing invested in the way things used to be done. People like Jeff Bezos are set to break the rules, and that’s exactly what the industry needs. This article originally appears on Social Media Today.

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