Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Seeking an ocean of audience: Honolulu Civil Beat partners with Huffington Post to seek new revenue streams
- A warning from Matt Waite about data journalism and race
- “If you’re not feeling it, don’t write it”: Upworthy’s social success depends on gut-checking “regular people”
- The New York Times adds a meter to mobile apps
- The newsonomics of Spies vs. Spies
| Posted: 20 Jun 2013 12:05 PM PDT When Honolulu Civil Beat launched three years ago, it took some contrarian stands. At a time when many civic-minded journalism startups were filing for nonprofit status, Civil Beat bet on succeeding as a for-profit. When many thought digital advertising would be the key driver of revenue growth, Civil Beat didn’t take ads. And when most news startups were trying to build an audience by giving away their content, Civil Beat was betting on subscriptions — and pricy ones, at that. The news site’s latest move — partnering with The Huffington Post to launch HuffPost Hawaii this fall — is an attempt to balance out some of those bets in a quest for greater revenue diversity. HuffPost is, of course, dedicated to free content with wide reach, and its business is built around the kind of ads that Civil Beat ignores. “Civil Beat is a model with a focus of trying to build something new — not just in how we write stories and deliver them, but how we pay for them,” site general manager Jayson Harper said. “Huffington Post in some sense provides us with a megaphone to give that to a larger population within the state who will hear and see who we are.” Founded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and Randy Ching, Civil Beat focuses on politics, government, and investigations, and it charges a comparatively steep subscription price to read and comment on the site — $20 per month, higher than even The New York Times. That will remain. The two sites will run in parallel; Civil Beat will look and operate essentially the same way it does now, with some HuffPost Hawaii stories running off of its homepage and subscription prices unchanged. HuffPost Hawaii will exist as a separate site creating most of its own content, with Civil Beat stories excerpted there as well. Civil Beat says the two sites will also maintain “separate staffs,” though that applies only to the writer-reporters, since editor Patti Epler and general manager Harper will be in charge of both sites. The partnership is not a comment on Civil Beat’s commitment to subscriptions, Harper said, and the site is not in financial trouble. Still, “the subscription model is a very tough model to create complete financial sustainability,” he said. Unlike Civil Beat, HuffPost Hawaii will have traditional advertising displayed alongside quick takes on Hawaii news and, according to HuffPost’s announcement, content like “slideshows of Hawaii beaches.” Harper said the Civil Beat organization will “absolutely” benefit from that revenue, though a confidentiality agreement barred him from releasing the specifics of how and if that money will be allowed to flow to Civil Beat. “The real reason we’re doing this is because we do see ways to grow revenue and it makes sense for both parties,” Harper said, referring to potential new Civil Beat subscribers, revenue from HuffPost Hawaii ads, and the additional brand awareness that may make their sponsorships more valuable. Civil Beat, which currently operates with six reporters and two editors, will indirectly benefit from the collaboration because it will allow Epler to hire three new reporters for the HuffPost side. “I hope that the Huffington Post staff can be covering things like the governor’s press conference, or, say, a helicopter that goes down in downtown Honolulu — they’ll do that, and our staff won’t have to do that anymore,” Epler said. “That will free up some of our beat writers to do more in-depth things,” like a recent multi-part investigation into oversight of a polluted local waterway. In search of revenue diversityIn Hawaii, as elsewhere, the media business is in flux. Financial troubles forced Honolulu Weekly this month to announce it was publishing its final issue (though its editor has now said she is attempting a revival). Three local TV news stations merged in 2009. The remaining Honolulu daily, the Star-Advertiser, also operates with a partial paywall (the site’s front page, breaking news, and blogs remain free). But there is still some audience loyalty: Ad Age recently reported that Hawaiians are paying attention, with 47 percent of Honolulu adults saying they read a daily newspaper, one of the highest numbers in the country. As his model for diversifying Civil Beat’s revenue, Harper pointed to the Texas Tribune, which is grant-supported but also makes significant money from events and other sponsorships. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison — the Tribune is a nonprofit, and Texas’ population is 19 times the size of Hawaii’s. Still, Harper is working to organize sponsored events and potentially allow for sponsors to claim parts of the Civil Beat site itself. “It’s not the only way to build a sustainable revenue model for online news organizations, but it’s a good start,” he said. Epler and Harper recognize that The Huffington Post’s model is built around traffic and Civil Beat’s is not. But they hope their collaboration with The Huffington Post helps them with those sponsorship efforts, too. “To increase the share in the market of the stories we’re doing has tangible benefits — the more we can talk to our partners and see people talking about those stories, the better," Harper said. For The Huffington Post, the Civil Beat collaboration is more like its international partnerships — which include agreements with Le Monde for its French edition, Gruppo Espresso in Italy, and The Asahi Shimbun in Japan — than its other U.S. city verticals. Those international partnerships excerpt content from those news organizations, whereas verticals like HuffPost Chicago, Detroit, and Miami simply collect content related to those metro areas. In explaining the Huffington Post’s interest in Hawaii, Arianna Huffington cited her relationship with Omidyar and seemed to view the site as a chance to learn from the Hawaiian culture. “As the world's oasis for unplugging and recharging — and the home of the Aloha spirit — Hawaii is an ideal place to explore all these themes and to engage the community,” Huffington said in an email. On Civil Beat itself, reaction to the partnership has been largely, well, civil — minus a few Facebook comments. “Some people were like, ‘This is the end of Civil Beat, nice knowing ya, the Huffington Post is going to take over,’” Epler said. But their model hasn’t changed, she insisted. “I wrote a column maybe two weeks ago saying, we’re not getting eaten by the HuffPost monster. That’s just not what’s happening.” Photo of downtown Honolulu from Diamond Head by John Fowler used under a Creative Commons license.  |
| A warning from Matt Waite about data journalism and race Posted: 20 Jun 2013 11:24 AM PDT “If you're expecting talk-radio and television shout fests to talk about how awesome your statistical validity is, you're an idiot.” Matt Waite has an excellent post on Source today that tells the story of early data journalism in Florida during the 2000 presidential election. He delves into issues of race and identity, and explains how easily journalists with good sense can mix things up — and miss big stories — because of how quickly numbers can obfuscate reality.
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| Posted: 20 Jun 2013 08:00 AM PDT Back in November, the Lab’s own Adrienne LaFrance wrote a number of words about Upworthy, a social packaging and not-quite-news site that has become remarkably successful at making “meaningful content” go viral. She delved into their obsession with testing headlines, their commitment to things that matter, their aggressive pushes across social media, and their commitment to finding stories with emotional resonance. Things have continued to go well for Upworthy — they’re up to 10 million monthly uniques from 7.5. At the Personal Democracy Forum in New York, editorial director Sara Critchfield shared what she sees as Upworthy’s secret sauce for shareability, namely, seeking out content that generates a significant emotional response from both the reader and the writer.  A slide from Critchfield’s PDF presentation. Critchfield emphasized that using emotional input in editorial planning isn’t about making ad hoc decisions, it’s about making space for that data in the workflow, or “making it a bullet point.” Here’s how she explained it: When I spoke with Critchfield after her talk, she underscored the way in which packaging content is Upworthy’s bread and butter (most likely WonderBread and Land o’ Lakes [Sorry, Don Draper]). “If you watch people shop in a grocery store, 95% of the time they are scanning the shelves for the packaging, making the choices on that before they turn the bottle around and look at the nutrition information. People choose their media that way too. So you can have a piece of media with the exact same nutritional value in it with different packaging and the consumer is going to choose the one that appeals to them most,” she said. But before you can package content, you have to create it — or at least, select it from out of the vastness of the Internet. The people who do that are Critchfield’s handpicked team of curators. “Of the things we curate at Upworthy, I think our editorial staff is what we pride ourselves the most on curating. We really focus on regular people. We reject the idea that the media elite or people who have been trained in a certain way somehow have the monopoly on editorial judgment, what matters or should matter. So we focus almost exclusively on hiring non-professionally trained writers,” she says. “To be honest, it’s sometimes difficult for folks who have professional background to come into Upworthy and have success.” In other words, Critchfield builds the element of genuine emotional response into her team by hiring people who were never trained to worry about what’s news, and what isn’t. “I tell my writers, ‘If you’re not feeling it, don’t write it.’,” says Critchfield. “We don’t really force people, we don’t let an editorial calendar dictate what we do. There will be big current events, and if someone on staff feels really passionate about it, then we cover it. And if there aren’t, then we don’t.” The vast majority of Upworthy’s traffic comes from social media sites, where Critchfield says conversation is more valuable to the reader anyway. Some of their biggest hits have been about the economy, bullying and, recently, as displayed in her talk, funding cancer research after a young musician died of pancreatic cancer. Critchfield says she encourages her curators to have huge vision for their posts. If they don’t expect it to get millions of views, then it’s not worth posting. Adam Mordecai is a great example of that kind of intuition, she says. He’s the guy who posted “This Kid Just Died. What He Left Behind is Wondtacular,” the video about cancer that ended up raising tens of thousands of dollars. (The original YouTube video got 433,000 Facebook shares; Upworthy’s got 2.5 million.) Trained journalists are often rubbed the wrong way by the idea of writing headlines like that, or being asked to spend so much time on them. (Critchfield says instead of spending 58 minutes writing a story and 2 minutes on a headline, most journalists would be better served by spending 30 or 40 minutes on their piece and 20 to 30 on their headline. “People look at me and say that’s crazy, I don’t have time, I would never do that,” she says, “and they walk away all sad. That’s happened to me over and over again.”) “I have a broadcast journalist who just came in and said, ‘Sara, I just can’t get over it. Every time I write ‘wanna’ in a headline, I feel like I’m going to hell,’” she says. “You have to match appropriately to the context. You’re competing — people on Facebook are at a party. They’re around friends, they’re trying to define themselves, they’re trying to look at baby pictures. You have to join the party, but be the cooler kid at that party. You’re not going to do it by speaking formally to people who are there to have fun.” Fighting that training can be hard, which is why Critchfield has so carefully assembled team of “normal people.” “In the curation of the staff, I look for heart. What moves this person? There are people on staff — I have an improv comedian, I have a professional poker player, I have someone who works for the Harlem Children’s Zone, I have a person who used to be a software developer,” says Critchfield. “What they’re trained in isn’t as important as the compilation of a group of people with various hearts and passions.” Or at least mostly normal people. Femi Oke was a radio producer when she decided to apply for a job at Upworthy. Oke says she was looking for a side gig that would give her experience with social media when she saw an ad for the job. “In typical Upworthy fashion,” she says, “it wasn’t a normal ad. It was a crazy ad — it was really intriguing.” Oke describes going through an intensive training process at a retreat in Colorado where the curators learned to “speak Upworthy.” At first, she was surprised that the majority of the staff weren’t journalists, but soon the strategy of broadening the audience through diverse hires started to make more sense. But as the site’s popularity grew, Oke says it became increasingly important for curators to embrace traditional media tasks, like fact-checking. “As people started to see them as news, they started doing things news organizations would do,” says Oke. “They have such a fantastic reputation, they don’t want to ruin it.” Since starting at Upworthy, Oke’s been hired to host The Stream, Al-Jazeera’s social media-centric daily online TV show, a concept born out of the Arab Spring. “At the end of each show, we have a teaser for what we’re doing on the next show. It would be a really heavy, intense, stodgy but accurate breakdown of what the next day’s subject is. I walked in and said, if we can’t make it a one-liner where I’m going to watch the show tomorrow, we shouldn’t be writing that,” Oke remembers. “My producers said, ‘Oh my god, she’s crazy.’” So for a show on the 50th anniversary of the African Union, she might say “Happy 50th birthday, African Union! Are you looking good — or do you need a makeover?” “That’s me anyway, but Upworthy made me even more certain that that was the style of broadcast that works for all media. It’s about being inclusive, accepting, and inviting people in.” The one thing Critchfield says brings all the curators together is their competitive spirit and obsession with metrics. All Upworthy curators have direct access to the analytics for their work, and she says they are obsessed with testing different tricks. (How many more people will click this story if there’s a curse word in the headline?) But Critchfield says no post gets published without gut-checking its author to see how committed they are to the larger cause it’s meant to represent. “We’ve really clarified internally that we can’t separate data analytics from human editorial judgment. Working to combine those two together is sometimes difficult,” she says. “What makes a thing viral can have just as much to do with how the person writing the piece up or working with the piece feels about it as it does with big data or listening tools.” Photo by Esty Stein / Personal Democracy Media used under a Creative Commons license.  |
| The New York Times adds a meter to mobile apps Posted: 20 Jun 2013 07:13 AM PDT Since 2011, the Times’ web paywall and app paywall have functioned differently. The website gave nonsubscribers a maximum number of articles per month; its apps set aside a subset of top stories that were free to all, but put everything else beyond reach. The newspaper just announced it would be normalizing that divide, creating a meter for readers of the company’s mobile applications. Starting June 27, nonsubscribers will be able to read three articles per day through the app before being prompted to sign up for a subscription. After that, they’ll still get to browse headlines and article summaries. Videos will remain free inside the app, as Denise Warren, the Times executive vice president of the digital products and services group, previously told the Lab in April. This spring, Times CEO Mark Thompson promised the company would be introducing a new suite of digital products to broaden its base of readers. But the Times’ mobile meter doesn’t come at a new price point. For an app-centric reader, the cheapest option for reading the Times starts at $15 every four weeks, which provides access to NYTimes.com and smartphone apps. The timing may just be a coincidence, but the Times’ soon-to-be sold sibling, The Boston Globe, introduced a new mobile app subscription plan Wednesday which will cost readers $3.99 a month.  |
| The newsonomics of Spies vs. Spies Posted: 20 Jun 2013 07:02 AM PDT So who do you root for in this coming battle, as Google petitions the feds? Are you on the side of Big Brother or Little Brother — and remind me, which is which? It’s a 50-year-update on Mad Magazine’s iconic Spy vs. Spy. The Surveillance State is — at least for this month — in front of the public. The Guardian’s rolling revelations of National Security Agency phone and web spying have again raised the bogeyman of Big Data — not the Big Data that all the airport billboards offer software to tame, but the Big Data that the unseen state can use against us. We’ve always had a love/hate relationship with big technology and disaster, consuming it madly as Hollywood churns out mad entertainments. We like our dystopia delivered hot and consumable within two hours. What we don’t like is the ooky feeling we are being watched, or that we have to make some kind unknowable choice between preventing the next act of terror and preserving basic Constitutional liberties. Americans’ reactions to the stories is predictable. Undifferentiated outrage: “I knew they were watching us.” Outrageous indifference: “What do you expect given the state of the world?” That’s not surprising. Americans and Europeans have had the same problem thinking about the enveloping spider’s web of non-governmental digital knowledge. (See The Onion headline: “Area Man Outraged His Private Information Being Collected By Someone Other Than Advertisers.”) While top global media, including The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, dig into the widening government spying questions, let’s look at the ferment in the issues of commercial surveillance. There’s a lot of it, and it would take several advanced degrees and decoder rings to understand all of it. No, it’s not the same thing as the issues surrounding PRISM. But it will be conflated with national security, and indeed the overlapping social and political questions are profound. Let’s look at some recent developments and some of the diverse players in this unfolding drama and see where publishers do — and could — fit in. The commercial surveillance culture is ubiquitous, perhaps even less hemmed in by government policy than the NSA, and growing greatly day by day. While Google asks the FISA court to allow it to release more detail about the nature of federal data demands, its growing knowledge of us seems to have no bounds. From our daily searches, to the pictures (street to sky) taken of our homes, to the whereabouts relayed by Google Maps, and on and on. It’s not just Google, of course. Facebook, whose users spend an average of seven hours per month online disclosing everything, is challenging Google for king of the data hill. A typical news site might have 30 to 40 cookies — many of them from ad-oriented “third parties” — dropped from it. That explains why those “abandoned” shopping carts, would-be shoe purchases, and fantasy vacation ads now go with us seemingly everywhere we move on the web. It’s another love/hate relationship: We’re enamored of what Google and Facebook and others can do for us, but we’re disquieted by their long reach into our lives. It’s a different flavor of ooky. We are targeted. We are retargeted. Who we are, what we shop for, and what we read is known by untold number of companies out there. Though we are subject to so much invisible, involuntary, and uncompensated crowdsourcing, the outrage is minimal. It’s not that it hasn’t been written about. Among others, The Wall Street Journal has done great work on it, including its multi-prize-winning three-year series on “What They Know.” Jim Spanfeller, now CEO of Spanfeller Media Group and the builder of Forbes.com, related the PRISM NSA disclosures to commercial tracking in a well-noticed column (“At What Price Safety? At What Price Targeted Advertising?”) last week. His point: We’re all essentially ignorant of what’s being collected about us, and how it is being used. As we find out more, we’re not going to be happy. His warning to those in the digital ad ecosystem: Government will ham-handedly regulate tracking of consumer clicks if the industry doesn’t become more “honest and transparent.” Spanfeller outlined for me the current browser “Do Not Track” wars, which saw its latest foray yesterday. Mozilla, parent of Firefox, the third most-popular browser by most measures, said it will move forward with tech that automatically blocks third-party cookies in its browser. Presumably, users will be able to turn back on such cookies, but most will go with the defaults in the browsers they use. The Mozilla move, much contested and long in the works, follows a similar decision by Microsoft with its release of the latest Internet Explorer. Microsoft is using a “pro-privacy” stance as a competitive weapon against Google, advancing both Bing search and IE. Spanfeller notes that Microsoft’s move hasn’t had much effect, at least yet, because “sites aren’t honoring it.” These browser wars are one front, and much decried by forces like the Interactive Ad Bureau, the Digital Ad Alliance, and its “Ad Choices” program — which prefer consumer opt-out. Another front is an attempt at industry consensus through the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C. Observers of that process believe it is winding its way to failure. Finally, also announced yesterday was the just-baked Cookie Clearinghouse, housed at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. The driving notion, to be fleshed out: creating whitelists and blacklists of cookies allowed and blocked. (Good summaries by both Ad Age’s Kate Kaye and ZDNet’s Ed Bott.) Never too far from the action, serial entrepreneur John Taysom was in Palo Alto this week as well. Taysom, a current senior fellow at Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative, is an early digital hothouse pioneer, having led Reuters’ Greenhouse project way back in the mid-’90s. His list of web startups imagined and sold is impressive, and now he’s trying to put all that experience to use around privacy issues. As a student of history, old and modern, his belief is this: “When they invented the Internet, they didn’t add a privacy layer.” “We need a Underwriters Laboratory for our time,” he told me Wednesday. UL served a great purpose at a time (1894) of another tech revolution: electricity. Electricity, like computer tech these days, seemed exciting, but the public was wary. It wasn’t afraid of behind-the-scenes chicanery — it literally was concerned about playing with fire. So UL, as a “global independent safety science company” — a kind of neutral, Switzerland-like enterprise — was set up to assure the public that electrical appliances were indeed tested and safe. Could we do the same with the Internet? He’s now working on a model, colloquially named “Three’s A Crowd,” to reinsert a “translucent” privacy layer in the tech stack. His model is based on a lot of current thinking on how to both better protect individual privacy and actually improve the targeting of messages by business and others. It draws on k-anonymity and Privacy by Design principles, among others. In brief, Taysom’s Harvard project is around creating a modern UL. It would be a central trusted place, or really set of places, that institutions and businesses (and presumably governments) could draw from, but which protect individual identification. He calls it an I.D. DMZ, or demilitarized zone. He makes the point that the whole purpose of data mining is to get to large enough groups of people with similar characteristics — not to find the perfect solution or offer for each individual. “Go up one level above the person,” to a small, but meaningfully sized, crowd. The idea: increase anonymity, giving people the comfort of knowing they are not being individually targeted. Further, the levels of anonymity could differ depending on the kind of information associated with anyone. ”I don’t really mind that much about people knowing my taste in shirts. If it’s about the location of my kids, I want six sigmas” of anonymity, he says. Taysom, who filed a 2007 U.K. patent, now approved, on the idea, is now putting together both his boards of advisors and trustees. Then there are emerging marketplace solutions to privacy. What havoc the digital marketplace hath wrought may be solved by…the digital marketplace. D.C.-based Personal.com is one of the leading players in that emerging group. Yes, this may be the coming personal data economy. Offering personal data lockers starting at $29.99 a year, Personal.com is worth a quick tour. What if you could store all your info in a digital vault, it asks? Among the kinds of “vaults”: passwords, memberships and rewards programs, credit and debit card info, health insurance, and lots more. It’s a consumer play that’s also a business play. The company is now targeting insurance, finance, and education companies and institutions, who would then offer consumers the opportunity to ingest their customer information and keep it in vault and auto-fill features then let consumers re-use such information once it is banked. Think Mint.com, but broader. Importantly, while Personal.com deals potentially with lots of kinds of digital data, its business doesn’t touch on the behavioral clickstream data that is at the heart of the Do Not Track fracas. Do consumer want such a service? Personal.com won’t release any numbers on customers or business partners. Getting early traction may be tough. Embedded in the strategy: a pro-consumer tilt. Personal.com offers an “owner data agreement,” basically certifying that it is the consumer, not Personal.com, that owns the data. It is a tantalizing idea: What if we individually could control our own digital data, setting parameters on who could use what and how? What if we as consumers could monetize our own data? Neither Personal.com nor John Taysom’s project nor the various Do Not Track initiatives envision that kind of individually driven marketplace, and I’ve been told there are a whole bunch of technical reasons why it would be difficult to achieve. Yet, wouldn’t that be the ultimate capitalist, Adam Smith solution to this problem of runaway digital connectedness — a huge exchange that would facilitate the buying and selling of our own data? For publishers, all this stuff is headache-producing. News publishers from Manhattan to Munich complain about all the third-party cookies feeding low-price exchanges, part of the reason their digital ad businesses are struggling. But there is a wide range of divergent opinion about how content-creating publishers will fare in Do Not Track world. They may benefit from diminished competition, but would they be able to adequately target for advertisers? Will Google and Facebook do even better in that world? So, for publishers, these privacy times demand three things:
It’s a position that fits with publishers’ own interests, and first-party data gathering (publisher/reader) makes more intuitive sense to citzen readers. For subscribers — those now being romanced into all-access member/subscribers — the relationship may make even more sense. Such an advocacy position could also help re-establish a local publisher as a commercial hub. News and magazine publishers won’t have to create the technology here — certainly not their strong suits — but they can be early partners as consortia and companies emerge in the marketplace. Photo by Fire Monkey Fire used under a Creative Commons license.  |
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