Selasa, 20 Maret 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

State Integrity project builds off a nonprofit news network

Posted: 19 Mar 2012 02:37 PM PDT

When the Center for Public Integrity and Public Radio International sought to create a wide ranging investigation into transparency and corruption at the state level, they knew they were at a disadvantage.

The project, which also brought in the expertise of Global Integrity and funding from the Omidyar Network, among others, was centralized in its inception and direction — but needed to be decentralized in order to work. If you’re running a project meant to look at the risk of government corruption across 50 states you need to be in…50 states.

The State Integrity Investigation officially launched to the public today and offers a kind of corruption risk index for government in each state, complete with a report card grading for areas like legislative accountability, lobbying disclosure, and public access to information. (Surprisingly enough, according to the project, the most transparent and accountable state is…New Jersey. Check how your state fares.) The information underlying these reports all came from journalists, and interestingly, some of it from nonprofit journalism organizations. As a result, the State Integrity project was a kind of network test of the expanding collection of nonprofit journalism sites sprouting around the country.

If you take a look at the list of journalists who collected data for the project you’ll find an impressive roster of experienced reporters, many operating out of organizations like the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, IowaWatch, and the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Reporting, among others. This probably shouldn’t be all too surprising, since CPI and PRI touted their mini-hiring spree when the project was announced last year. Nonprofit investigative startups have had a way of attracting veteran newspaper reporters, who already know their way around the state house.

“Most state publications don’t have the budgets to do this deep reporting in their own state, they don’t have the manpower,” said Randy Barrett, communications director for the Center for Public Integrity. When they set out to staff up for the project they wanted to cast as wide a net as possible to get the best talent for the job. Barrett said it just made sense to tap into the Investigative News Network’s pipeline to find people in particular states. The goals for many of those organizations aligned well with the State Integrity investigation’s; as Barrett told me, “We’re trying to help fill that vacuum in state house reporting and focus a lens on transparency.”

In that way, State Integrity is also helping many of these nonprofit news sites generate additional stories that could draw in readers. While the State Integrity content is not exclusive to the journalists and organizations that participated, it could represent a wealth of new story possibilities for nonprofit sites, which often operate with small staffs. Michael Skoler, vice president of interactive media for PRI, said they worked with the partner journalists and more than a dozen public media stations on how the data from the project could be used in reporting going forward. In the case of the public media stations, each agreed to do at least six stories based off the report, Skoler told me.

“We want to make sure this isn’t just one-shot coverage, that a lot of media organizations are invested in covering the honesty and effectiveness in state government,” Skoler said.

NPR’s audience shrank a hair in 2011, pushing public radio further toward a digital future

Posted: 19 Mar 2012 02:24 PM PDT

Number of weekly listeners to NPR programming

NPR radio content attracted fewer weekly listeners in 2011 than the year before, despite adding new member stations across the country. The data was released today as part of the Pew Research Center’s State of the Media report for 2012.

The drop wasn’t huge — down about 1 percent from 2010, according to NPR’s numbers — but it was the first decline since 2007 and it happened in a year when the number of stations carrying NPR programming increased. About 26.8 million Americans per week listened to NPR programming (newscasts and magazines) on member stations, down from 27.2 million the year before. Those numbers don’t cover public radio programming not produced or distributed by NPR — programs such as This American Life and Marketplace, local shows, or classical music blocks — and, importantly, they don’t include the growing number of Americans who listen to NPR audio online.

“Our view is that radio isn't in decline; public radio is actually expanding.”

The number of stations that carry NPR programming grew about 4.5 percent over that span — from 924 in fall 2010 to 966 in fall 2011. But the increase didn’t do much to grow NPR’s listenership because many were classical stations that carry little NPR programming, said Dana Davis Rehm, NPR’s senior vice president of marketing.

“Our view is that radio isn't in decline; public radio is actually expanding and as [NPR CEO] Gary Knell has said, it is going everywhere,” she emailed. “Our digital audience is exploding.” Rehm said NPR is working with stations to quantify the cumulative streaming audience across the system.

One in eight Americans listened to news/talk/information radio in 2010, close behind the No. 1 genre — country music — but down slightly from 2008 and 2009, according to Arbitron.

When asked why the Pew numbers show a decline, Rehm said it’s “nearly impossible to point to a single factor, but it does appear that there was some softness in news and information in 2011, particularly in those markets measured by PPM.”

Rehm is referring to Portable People Meters, which represent a sea change in the way radio listenership is measured. The small devices, meant to be worn on the hip throughout the day, listen for hidden tones embedded in broadcasts. Arbitron has gradually introduced the meters to the 44 largest U.S. markets over the past few years.

Public broadcasters in some markets saw sizable drops in ratings after the switch to meters. Previously, Arbitron relied on weekly diary entries from participants, placing a lot of importance on the forgetful human mind. As the thinking goes, people tend to exaggerate their own public radio listening in diaries, because, well, it makes them look smarter, but in reality they’re listening to more Delilah than they let on. The People Meters also capture incidental exposure — that is, contemporary soft favorites overheard in the doctor’s office — which hurts the news/talk stations.

Weekly audience for NPR stations

The weekly audience for all NPR stations — that includes non-news and non-NPR programming — rose slightly in 2011, reaching a record 34.3 million last spring, according to Arbitron data provided to me by NPR. That number has risen steadily since 1980, jumping up dramatically in 2000 and again in 2001 and exploding through 2003. That growth is attributed to coverage of Sept. 11 and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

“The bottom line from our perspective is that the most valid measure of performance is audience ratings over time,” Rehm told me. “In that sense, NPR and public radio have done better than commercial radio and remain strong in spite of a small decline in [cumulative audience],” Rehm said.

Still, the data in Pew’s report portends near-term challenges for radio. The State of the Media found 93 percent of survey respondents used terrestrial (AM/FM) radio, up slightly from the year before but down from 96 percent a decade earlier. “There is also evidence in the data that people listen to AM/FM out convenience rather than out of deeper appreciation for the content,” the report says.

Less than a quarter of adults, 22%, said in a 2011 survey by Arbitron that they "love" local AM/FM radio. This is far less than those who reported "loving" other audio devices, including the iPhone (66%), Android smartphone (49%), digital video recorders (48%), iPod (46%), broadband internet (46%) and even satellite radio (39%).

NPR has tried to buttress against disruption from new platforms. Earlier this year, the network announced a deal with Ford to carry its programming on 2012 car models equipped with SYNC technology. “Users can create playlists of stories and programs to listen to later or select from topics and then call them up with simple voice commands,” according to the news release.

Last year, NPR released the Infinite Player to great applause, a Pandora-style app for news that serves as an experiment for the ways NPR will pursue new platforms for audio.

Then again, podcasts never killed the radio star. Less than half of Americans know what a podcast is, and about a quarter of Americans used podcasts in 2011, according to the Pew survey. “The podcast, while still hitting a significant segment of the population, appears to be losing momentum,” the report says.

NPR’s operating budget grew, about 7 percent for 2012, driven in large part by growth in fundraising. (Many of those dollars will go toward NPR’s coverage of the presidential election and the Olympic Games.) NPR’s news staff rolls grew by 9 percent in 2011, to 365 people. The network survived high-profile threats last year to its federal funding, which makes up a small share of its budget.

Embracing the stream: ITV’s new Twitter-inspired news site breaks the day’s news into pieces

Posted: 19 Mar 2012 12:44 PM PDT

British network ITV unveiled a bold new look for its news site Monday — one that favors newness over editorial control, rethinks what a “story” is, and takes inspiration from the Twitter and Facebook streams that increasingly influence how people get their news.

ITV calls the new site, developed with the London firm Made by Many, a “rolling news site,” and it shows: It serves up a seemingly bottomless stream of bite-sized content, newest at the top. Like Twitter, the stream of content automatically expands when you scroll to page bottom. If a new update is posted while you’re reading the page, a note appears at page top to alert you to it, à la “4 new Tweets” on twitter.com.

“We had an opportunity to do something radically different,” says Julian March, who’s in charge of digital media for ITV’s news, sports, and weather coverage. “We wouldn’t possibily be able to compete against all the competitors out there, like CNN, BBC, Sky, all of those guys who have well established products over a decade or more. So we had to do something which had impact, was realizable, was doable by us.”

You might call it the streamification of news design, or an echo back to the reverse-chronological flow of posts that has defined blogs since the late 1990s. News operations born online — think Techcrunch or Engadget — have leaned toward a design language that always highlights the newest work produced by its staff. But newspapers and broadcasters have, broadly speaking, been more invested in making editorial and layout decisions about where stories appear on their front pages. Think of it as the Page 1 meeting that never ends.

The power of the stream

ITV’s new look is a step away from that. Content-wise, ITV is posting mostly quick hits, limited to a couple of paragraphs or shorter. The stream is also populated with headlined Twitter posts from newsmakers or journalists. The result is a somewhat frenetic newsfeed that at times more closely resembles a reporter’s notebook than a traditional story.

That doesn’t mean editorial control disappears. ITV selects a few stories at any given time to be highlighted in the left sidebar. But “story” in this case doesn’t mean 15 inches of narrative — a “story” is closer to the StoryStream model of SB Nation or The Verge, a series of discrete dispatches on the same topic. So if you wanted to know more about an ITV story — say, the Duchess of Cambridge’s first public speaking appearance — click “Kate gives first speech” and you’re taken to a stream of 10 short items about the story, ranging from the initial announcement to an assurance that “Kate’s speech ‘all her own work’” to “Duchess arrives” to video of a speech coach rating her performance. The whole thing’s topped by a link to the full, traditional story ITV did to wrap the event.

ITV also presents news streams by beat — politics, business, money, health, etc. — and by region. Each region serves up a unique sidebar of stories. Visit the site from an iPhone and you’re directed first to the story list, then allowed to view the full stream or dive into a topic.

“Skimming and digging”

The central idea is to deliver customized, dynamically generated content to readers who are doing one of two things when they visit a news website.

“Skimming and digging,” March said. “We think that roughly 80 percent of visits to websites are based on skimming behavior: You go to the news site asking, ‘Tell me what the news is today.’…Digging is where you come to the site and you’ve got a very specific kind of requirement: ‘I want to know what is going on in the Eurozone crisis,’ or ‘I’ve just heard that Fabrice Muamba the footballer has collapsed, how is he doing?’”

With its redesigned site, ITV News is looking to cater first to the skimmers, and then to the diggers.

“You go to the homepage and every time you come back it’s completely different,” March said. “You’re guaranteed to get something different, and the digging can happen subsequently.”

The new aesthetic is a significant departure from the site’s more traditional previous iteration, which looked much like ITV’s current homepage. March wouldn’t provide specific numbers but he says traffic to the site on its first day has been “extremely encouraging,” and that the overall site roll-out was remarkably smooth.

More news sites are experimenting with stream-like design approaches. We wrote in January about Boston.com’s experiments with a stream on one of its hyperlocal sites, and it seems likely we’ll see more Twitter-inspired looks.

But not every news junkie is as thrilled with the change. AnnArbor.com, which launched in 2009 with a stream look, has since brought back more editorial control. And, as evidenced in the comments section of a Guardian story about the redesign, some ITV readers are knocking the design’s simplicity as amateurish and the chunky content as “a list of endlessly repeated guff about the latest bone that an editor wants to gnaw to death.”

But, as Paul Bradshaw passes along, stream-based looks do seem to have the benefit of keeping readers around for much longer — an ongoing problem for news sites and not one for social networks. Bradshaw quotes William Owen of Made By Many as saying “user testing showed hugely long page view times, it's addictive.” (More from the design team here.)

March says the new platform is perfect for reporters who are “absolutely chomping at the bit” to get information out. The way it works: ITV correspondents from two national desks and nine regional desks send original reporting updates to a team of curators who are already aggregating wire copy, tweets, and other stories for the site.

“The guidelines are: Tell us what you know, and tell us now,” March said. “There is already a process of continuous contact between news gatherers, the news desk and curators — but we’ve also got a system which enables and empowers anyone in the newsroom to update the site if need be. We’re not doing this with any more headcount than we had — we’re just realizing more value out of the journalists that we have.”

Passing the nonprofit test: A guide for nonprofit news outlets on how to get 501(c)(3) status

Posted: 19 Mar 2012 11:09 AM PDT

Nonprofit news organizations were supposed to be journalism’s next great hope. Like a rocket shooting from the dying planet of print news, nonprofit outlets were supposed to be able to focus on the tough, gritty investigative reporting newspapers were no longer doing enough of while not being beholden to advertisers.

But the past few months have seen the nonprofit news sector take some big hits. In December, Voice of San Diego had to layoff staff when fundraising totals didn’t hit targets. The came the impending merger of the Bay Citizen with the Center for Investigative Reporting. And then the demise of the Chicago News Cooperative.

But beyond money issues, there’s a structural problem nonprofit outlets are dealing with: getting all-important 501(c)(3) status from the IRS. Many nonprofits (or nonprofits-to-be?) have arrangements with existing entities that allow them to receive donations. But 501(c)(3) status is the key to standing on their own and cementing an operational structure. And at the moment, the IRS appears to have a rising backlog of journalism groups applying for nonprofit status, with waits approaching two years. And the question on many minds is: Why?

Our friends over at the Digital Media Law Project (formerly the Citizen Media Law Project — they’re in the process of rebranding) decided to take a deeper look at this issue; they’re planning on releasing a report in the next few weeks that can serve as a guide for journalism organizations trying to apply for nonprofit status. Reviewing decades of case law around nonprofit news organizations as well as previous IRS rulings, the guide tries to make the complex 501(c)c(3) process less of a mystery.

“It seems to us there’s a lot of confusion about why the IRS is asking certain types of questions, applying certain standards, and reaching certain results,” Jeff Hermes, the project’s director, told me.

While DMLP puts the finishing touches on its report — “Guide to the Internal Revenue Service Decision-Making Process under Section 501(c)(3) for Journalism and Publishing Non-Profit Organizations” — Hermes shared some of the key points with us.

Education, not journalism

The single biggest problem for news organizations seeking 501(c)(3) status, Hermes said, is that they don’t properly identify themselves when applying. Namely, they make the mistake of calling themselves journalism organizations. That’s a problem, because the IRS doesn’t recognize journalism as one of the defined categories eligible for nonprofit status. But what is eligible? Education. And civically oriented news organizations can make a very strong case that what they do qualifies as educational.

The problem is that some journalists, in their applications, are willing to leave that journalism-to-education up to interpretation — as a step for the IRS to take. Wrong: The IRS doesn’t deal in interpretation. “If you have journalism listed as your purpose, the IRS will look at that and say, ‘journalism isn’t on my list of eight categories,’” Hermes said.

(The eight categories? “Religious, Educational, Charitable, Scientific, Literary, Testing for Public Safety, to Foster National or International Amateur Sports Competition, or Prevention of Cruelty to Children or Animals Organizations.”)

Any journalist can make the case that their work is educational in nature, but in this instance it really does have to be spelled out, Hermes said. “The key to passing this side of the test is whether journalism is your purpose or the method by which you’re achieving the educational purpose,” he said. Think journalism as tool for education.

Who’s wearing what hat?

In keeping with the educational standard, potential news nonprofits have to pass a kind of operational test that shows they are structured to educate the public. What does that look like? Hermes said the IRS will look at whether you provide researched, factual information to a specific audience and are not engaging in advocacy. They’ll also want to know how your work is being distributed and whether you are trying to reach a targeted group or mass audience. As an educational entity, journalists fill the role of researchers and experts — the kind of structure the IRS is looking for, Hermes said.

Another note on that advocacy issue: Hermes said the IRS scrutinizes groups for whether they are lobbying for specific political candidates or campaigns. That means no editorial-page-style endorsements of candidates.

About that money

Another point on the organizational issue: How closely does your shop resemble a commercial newsroom? If your publication looks and acts like a newspaper, only with a big “nonprofit” sticker slapped across the masthead, that won’t suffice. Specifically, if your group plans to (or already does) generate revenue through subscriptions or advertising, that’s a red flag that could sink your application, Hermes said. “There’s a common misconception among applicants that it’s okay to earn advertising revenue and other revenue as long as you pay taxes on it,” Hermes said. “That’s not quite right.”

While nonprofit news organizations are allowed to do those activities, income from those areas can’t make up the main source of money for an organization. What the IRS is looking for is whether or not your organization makes money like most nonprofits (memberships and foundation support for instance) instead of like a commercial business.

Ads and subscriptions typically fall under what Hermes calls “unrelated taxable income,” or, taxable dollars made by a tax exempt group. One exception is if your advertising is connected to your work (and is educational itself) and doesn’t just support your operation.

Again, it’s not that more traditional means of money aren’t allowed — it’s that they can’t be the bulk of how you get paid. “The IRS wants to see you try to use traditional nonprofit sources of funding before turning to regular commercial revenue models,” Hermes said. “It will help if you are using commercial revenue models to augment your nonprofit style fundraising or show you tried nonprofit fundraising and failed.”

The business of experts

In looking at the organizations that have been granted 501(c)(3) status, Hermes and his team found that having a specific focus and area of expertise can make a difference. If your news organizations is designed to report on specific issues — say, politics, the environment, health care, or a limited community — that can help. Also, a specific focus, such as investigative reporting or other watchdog work, can help. This ties into the organizational structure (do you have an experienced, expert-like staff?) as well as meeting the overall idea of an educational purpose. “The organizations that are most successful are those involved in investigative journalism and show some institutional expertise in researching particular topics,” Hermes said.

Hermes said they are currently reviewing the final report, as well as talking with foundations that support journalism to they could add further insight to the report. There’s clearly a lot at stake here — even as some nonprofit news shops merge or close, new ones are starting up. In the eyes of many journalists as well as some charitable groups, nonprofit news remains one of the more viable ways of supporting journalism going forward. Hermes said that even with a guide and concrete suggestions in place for news outlets, the 501(c)(3) process will remain byzantine in how it applies to journalism.

“The current structure is very complex in terms of standards the IRS applies — it’s not always intuitive,” he said. “The mixing of consideration of content-related issues — what the content of your publication is — with issues of your business model and where you’re getting revenues give rise to what sometimes look like contradictory results.”

While Hermes didn’t want to speculate on the IRS motives or reasons for the delay, one possibility for what looks like increased scrutiny could be last year’s FCC report on the information needs of communities, which discussed the need for support of nonprofit journalism. The IRS, like most federal agencies, wants to be very careful around setting precedent, Hermes said. “They are sensitive to the fact that ruling on these things can have a dramatic impact on an entire industry,” Hermes said.

(One final note: Nonprofit news organizations struggling these issues — along with waiting to see the full report — might consider reaching out to the Online Media Law Network, a DMLP project that connects online news outlets to attorneys willing to do legal work for them, often at no cost. Helping with 501(c)(3) applications is one of the areas where OMLN can provide help.)

Image by arsheffield used under a Creative Commons license.

News-to-go is here to stay

Posted: 19 Mar 2012 05:00 AM PDT

For anyone who can remember being floored by the mid-1980s Chrysler sedan that warned “your door is ajar” in delightful monotone, it’s still kind of thrilling that Cadillacs come with wifi these days. But for a growing number of Americans, it’s hard to imagine going anywhere without an iPhone in one pocket and an iPad within arm’s reach.

Here it is, as if there was any doubt: The age of mobile.

One in four American adults now has a smartphone, and one in five owns a tablet. And 27 percent of Americans are getting news on mobile devices — increasingly across different platforms. That’s according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, and its annual report on the State of the News Media in 2012, released today.

One takeaway from Pew’s January 2012 survey of more than 3,000 adults is that our increasingly mobile reality brings new opportunities and, yes, more uncertainty for journalism.

Pew finds mobile devices are driving up news consumption, immersing audiences in content and strengthening traditional long-form journalism. But the industry is still following the lead of tech giants when it comes to the ways in which news is becoming more pervasive, which begs arguably the biggest of the big questions that Pew’s buffet of data raises: Who stands to benefit economically from the mobile shift?

“If they want to be everything, news is part of that, and people are spending more time with news.”

“When you look at the revenue side, we see even more that the tech companies are strengthening their hold on the revenue side, on who’s gaining the profits from this era of news,” the project’s deputy director, Amy S. Mitchell, told me. “While there may be some positive side in terms of what consumers are doing, the big technology companies are taking an even bigger piece of the revenue pie.”

Illustrating that point: Last year, five technology giants — not including Apple and Amazon — generated 68 percent of all digital ad revenue. By 2015, Facebook is expected to account for one of every five digital display ads sold. In contrast, print ad revenues were down $2.1 billion, or 9.2 percent, last year. Losses in print outweighed $207 million in online advertising gains by a ratio of 10 to 1.

This dynamic gave Pew researchers an idea that has been floated before: Could a tech giant like Google or Facebook swoop in and “save” a household-name newspaper by buying it? Mitchell says there are signs that “speak to the possibility of that happening,” namely the idea that technology leaders might identify news production as a path to omnipresence in consumers’ lives. But why would a profitable company want to acquire an operation — even one with a legacy brand — that’s in the red?

“The technology giants — the big technology companies — have all taken steps in the last year to kind of be an ‘everything,’” Mitchell says. “To not just be the king of search but to also have social networking, to have a video component, to also have your email as well as your social networking, as well as your news feed. While news may not be the revenue generator that these companies are looking to own, it is a part of how people are spending their day. If they want to be everything, news is part of that, and people are spending more time with news.”

Some of the other interesting tidbits in the report:

• Some rural Native American and Alaska Native populations are adapting straight from print to mobile, skipping right over desktops and laptops. It’s a pattern similar to what’s happening in parts of the developing world.

• Some 133 million Americans — 54 percent of the online U.S. population — are active on Facebook, and they’re spending about seven hours per month on the site. That’s 14 times as long as the average person spent on the most popular news sites. Just nine percent of adults in the United State say they regularly follow Facebook or Twitter links to news stories — despite the social media efforts of news organizations.

• Social media platforms “grew substantially” in 2011, but people are still more likely to use search engines or go directly to a news site than follow links from social media.

• Consumers perceive Twitter as having more news that’s harder to find elsewhere than Facebook. But most of those surveyed say they believe the news they get on Facebook and Twitter is news that they would have seen elsewhere without those sites.

• Print newspapers “stood out for their continued decline, which nearly matched the previous year’s 5 percent drop.” The latest Pew numbers show that total newspaper revenue — that means subscription as well as ad revenue — has dropped 43 percent since 2000. Over the last five years, an average of 15 newspapers (about 1 percent of the industry) has disappeared each year.

• As many as 100 newspapers are expected to put up paywalls (in some form) in the coming months. They would join the roughly 150 dailies that have already shifted to “some kind of digital subscription model,” which means slightly more than one-tenth of surviving U.S. dailies have a paywall or subscription service of some kind.

• More consumers are worried about their online privacy, which creates “conflicting pressure” for news organizations that need revenue to survive while also maintaining their audience’s trust. A separate Pew study found two-thirds of Internet users were uneasy with search engines tracking their activity, but they’re also relying more heavily on the services that such companies provide.

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