Rabu, 10 Juli 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

In St. Louis, two news organizations are navigating the tricky path to a merger

Posted: 09 Jul 2013 10:06 AM PDT

Editor’s note: Our friends at J-Lab have a new report out on an interesting subject: how public broadcasters — in radio and television — are trying to fill some of the void created by cutbacks at newspapers. In a number of states, the strategy has been to build new collaborative networks and make a greater investment in doing journalism.

You can read the full report online, but we’ll be pulling out some of the most interesting elements from it here at Nieman Lab over the next few days. Today, we take a look at St. Louis, where two outlets are joining forces to expand their reach.

If all goes as hoped, in coming months St. Louis Public Radio (SLPR) and the St. Louis Beacon will formally merge their two newsrooms. It will be the first time a public radio station with a staff of journalists has combined its operations with another daily-news producing outlet.

This is not an easy thing to do. For one, St. Louis Public Radio is owned by the University of Missouri’s Board of Curators, and top university officials must sign off on the deal. For another, both the Beacon and the station have strong brands, their own sponsors, their own content management systems, their own organizational charts — not to mention their own definitions of news and ways of producing it.

Yet both parties are convinced it is the right thing to do. Their supporters seem to agree. “We know in the first five years there will be a $3 million revenue gap. After five years, we see sustainability,” said Tim Eby, general manager of St. Louis Public Radio. “We already have $2.5 million of that pledged.”

“If we get it right,” said Beacon founding editor Margie Freivogel, “we have the beginning of a blueprint of how to create a vigorous news organization that serves a region and takes advantage of the assets of public media. I think it’s a very important possibility.”

Just as St. Louis is a city that is trying to reinvent itself, so are its media outlets. The Beacon is a $1.4 million operation with a staff of 18 — 14 of whom are reporters. St. Louis Public Radio has 12 people producing news within its $6 million operation.

“I think Tim realized, ‘I need a much stronger news and content engine,’” said Freivogel, a former editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “He could see that he could build that one person or two people at a time. This is an opportunity to bring 18 people into his organization. That brings a lot of strength.” For her part, Freivogel knew the Beacon needed to build more revenue generation into its operations.

In moving from the idea of an alliance, announced last fall, to a full-bore merger, the two organizations commissioned a study of what they were actually doing on their websites. “What we saw was the opportunity was huge,” Freivogel said. Both could improve what they were doing and deliver in-depth coverage of “things no one else is doing very well.” And they could give their news and information broader reach. For one thing, SLPR has the pipes; the Beacon does good reporting but it shows up in text and social media. SLPR’s website is mostly expanded radio stories.

They concluded that nothing short of full integration — one newsroom, one business operation — would allow them to take full advantage of the opportunities. But the process is not without angst. “What do we call ourselves? How do we brand ourselves? Do we lose the Beacon name? That’s scary for us.” Freivogel said. “We’re very proud of what we have done. But we truly want to morph into something new, and we want people to know that it is something new.”

“We know it’s not going to be easy,” Eby acknowledges. “Just understanding the language of what we do compared with what the Beacon does, we have to be very intentional with how we are going to do this.”

Although the two organizations share Washington stories and Beacon reporters do on-air debriefs for SLPR, things got more serious last year when SLPR moved into a new University of Missouri-St. Louis building in Grand Center, the heart of the city’s arts and cultural scene. It was also right next door to the Beacon’s offices at the public television station, Nine Network of Public Media, which also collaborates with the Beacon but is not part of the merger plans.

Then when WWNO public radio in New Orleans announced it was exploring an expanded collaboration with The Lens in summer 2012, Eby said, “Well, if it could happen there, why not here?”

Once SLPR and the Beacon signed the letter of intent in October 2012, they sought help making it happen. They got $40,000 from the Knight Foundation to pay for Rusty and Janet Coats of Coats2Coats to help them sort through content, vision, revenue plans, technical and branding issues, and governance. Working groups of staff members and board members participated. NPR is also working with SLPR to come up with solutions around its content management system. “We may be the guinea pig,” Eby said.

While there will be some cost savings in the merged operations, no layoffs are expected. “The whole objective of this is to have more reporters and editors,” Eby said. “The biggest thing for us is really establishing ourselves as a place to be producing meaningful content on broadcast as well as digital platforms.”

“Don’t expect coverage of crime or the Cardinals,” he said. Instead, they plan a disciplined focus on politics, education, science and technology, health care, the economy, race, and arts and culture.

For now, the parties are walking the plans through the university system, where some officials have expressed interest in adding an academic program around the merged newsrooms. The prospective partners are now “working intensely” on investigating academic opportunities that would align with a merger, Freivogel said. “The biggest thing,” Eby said, “is to make sure we can get this done in a timely fashion” and keep those donors who have stepped up informed of the progress.

Underlying the mechanics of the merger, however, is a different vision for what is news and how to engage the community. Already the Beacon has partnered with community groups that news outlets don’t normally partner with to cover such issues as obesity and the role of arts as a regenerator of community.

“Our job,” Freivogel said, “is to talk about what’s going on. What’s working and what’s not working.”

Photo collage of the Gateway Arch by Steve Eng used under a Creative Commons license.

The fact-checking wars move south

Posted: 09 Jul 2013 09:31 AM PDT

Miss the endless debates in the U.S. last year over the rise of fact-checking sites? Well, move to Australia, where the debates are apparently just starting in earnest. Politifact Australia, the U.S. site’s first international affiliate, launched in May, and newspaper veteran Ian Moore doesn’t much like it:

In essence, sites such as these are not a journalistic enterprise, nor a resource. They are out to cut the lunch of established publishers with cheap grabs. This is as far from real journalism as practised by newspaper masthead publishers as it gets. It is the job of journalists to establish facts and break news, not indulge in needless semantics.

Another fact-checking enterprise is about to be launched by the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation], with $10 million of taxpayers' money. The broadcaster is currently hiring staff for a unit that will check the factual basis of statements by politicians and other public figures, while generating content. Its work seems to be mainly internal, but an ABC spokesperson says the unit will have its own web page.

Now that is a frightening prospect — groupthink not only being accepted by the national broadcaster, but is being made compulsory. It does little to support the contention of independent journalism.

If there is improvement to be made to journalism standards, it won't be achieved by caucusing on interpretation of facts. It would be far better to encourage better use of the journalist's stock-in-trade — words and language. Standards have lapsed in recent years as a result of inattention to the teaching of basic grammar and proper vocabulary in our schools.

Now who will be the Rachel Maddow of Australia?

“News media is getting whiter as the country is getting browner.”

Posted: 09 Jul 2013 09:16 AM PDT

Riva Gold takes a look at recent findings on minority employment in newsrooms for The Atlantic today, and finds that cost-saving measures over the past few years have had the unintended consequence of retarding progress towards greater diversity in journalism.

Gold writes that failing to accurately represent the racial make up of the U.S. will preclude leading news organizations from fully and accurately telling the stories of non-whites in America, who now make up 37 percent of the population.

One piece of this puzzle is layoff policies and union contracts that often rewarded seniority and pushed the most recent hires to leave first. Many journalists of color have the least protected jobs because they’re the least senior employees, says Doris Truong, a Washington Post editor and acting president of Unity, an umbrella group of minority journalist organizations.

At the same time, minorities were disproportionately likely to take buyouts offered as incentives to trim newspaper payrolls, notes Keith Woods, vice president for diversity in news and operations at NPR and former dean of faculty at the Poynter Institute. “When our industry looks as it has over the last 10 years, like it might not survive, people leave — and the most vulnerable people are the ones most inclined to get out because they’ve got families to support, bills to pay,” he says.

Gold says journalists need to make the case for diversity as not just a “nice thing to do,” but an essential part of a newsroom that reports the news well. She also warns that, while online communities like Twitter bring more voices to the forefront, the existence of these platforms should not be allowed to occlude the severity of the issue.

Can’t stop, won’t stop: PRX introduces an app for unending audio storytelling

Posted: 09 Jul 2013 07:40 AM PDT

prxremixPRX is proposing a new model for what a radio station (or a “radio” “station”) can be with a new app that offers up pieces from shows you like, some from a few you may not recognize, and then puts the whole thing on shuffle.

PRX Remix is a curated, unending stream of radio stories, podcasts, interviews, and more material collected from programs like The Moth, WTF with Marc Maron, and Slate’s Gabfests among others. Remix has existed online and as an actual format for terrestrial and satellite radio for some time, but as of today, it’s also all jammed into an app for your iPhone or Android, following the broad shift toward mobile devices as where audio gets consumed.

What PRX Remix does is try to take advantage of the wealth of audio storytelling options the Internet has afforded, said PRX CEO Jake Shapiro. “For the story hungry, there’s pretty much a bottomless appetite for really good stuff,” said Shapiro. But many of those stories don’t always fit perfectly into half-hour or hour-long slots on your local public radio station — and on many stations, many of those those timeslots have been spoken for by the same set of shows for years or decades.

As a technology producer for public media, PRX has helped develop apps for programs like Radiolab and This American Life. As a distributor, they’ve put programs like The Moth and Snap Judgment in front of larger audiences. One reason it’s great time to be a fan of audio storytelling now is the variety, Shapiro said: Traditional players in public media continue to produce new stories and shows, while the Internet has opened up a universe of new independent players.

For a growing number of people, their audio diet is representative of that, with a mix of radio programs and podcasts, news and features. In that scenario, the biggest question becomes what to listen to next. PRX Remix is one answer to that. “It’s a way to bring together what we’ve been learning in building mobile apps for media companies the last couple of years and apply it to something really close to our heart,” Shapiro said.

While the app is rich in stories, it’s short on features — it’s mostly one big play button. Shapiro said that was a conscious choice in building the app. The main goal is to introduce people to new stories, give them ways to remember them, and share them with others. The app’s functionality allows users the ability to skip stories and also keep track of what they’ve listened to. One big benefit for the subway-riding crowd: The app will load up to an hour’s worth of audio for when you find yourself offline.

People on their phones represent a pretty desirable demographic to people in the audio business. As our phones continue to become our replacement for everything, audio works well on mobile is because the devices feel like a companion, Shapiro said. As our devices become more personalized and attuned to our habits, users want an experience that knows what they like but can also expose them to something new.

“The reality is there’s less and less patience for the mediocre or boring or pointless,” said Shapiro. “Part of the value of the Remix app is we’ve done a lot of distilling ahead of time, but included in that are a lot of surprises.”

Serendipity can be a hard quality to replicate. PRX producer Roman Mars oversees remix and selects which stories are fed into the remix app. (You may know him better as the host of the wonderful 99% Invisible, a podcast/radio show about design.) While the pieces are selected by a human, the order and sorting is done at random. Each week, PRX adds more to the mix. Shapiro said future versions of the app could incorporate an algorithm that learns from users’ listening habits.

This is not the first attempt to make a Pandora for public media. In 2011, as an experiment, NPR showed off the first iteration of its Infinite Player, a customizable web app that lets listeners create an endless stream of radio content — although, unlike Remix, its audio is mostly drawn from flagship NPR shows. This spring, NPR began beta testing a mobile-friendly version of the app for iPhone users.

The most significant difference between Remix and the Infinite Player is the audio sources they draw on. Infinite Player, as an NPR project, draws primarily on NPR’s flagship shows; in a runthrough this morning, its first 10 pieces came from Morning Edition (6), Weekend Edition Saturday (1), and NPR’s top-of-the-hour newscasts (3).

The first 10 pieces to show up in a similar runthrough of Remix came from a very different mix of sources: The Memory Palace (a short reflection on the Ben Franklin Death Ray!), The Kitchen Sisters (on the birth of the Frito), Sound Portraits’ The Ground We Lived On (about the journalist Adrian Nicole LeBlanc), a 99% Invisible piece on San Francisco concrete, a piece called Talk to Me About Love on a sibling relationship, a piece from Radio Diaries, one from Snap Judgment, a short documentary piece from the Third Coast International Audio Festival, something called Beep Beep, and a discussion of Fiona Apple’s last album from Sound Opinions. A very different mix.

While PRX Remix is a clear bet on mobile devices, Shapiro said its important to not lose sight of the fact that terrestrial radio still commands a large audience. Even as PRX debuts the app, Remix continues to expand into new public radio stations.

As technology reshapes how radio and audio content is delivered, it’s also changing formats for storytelling, Shaprio said. Something like PRX Remix embraces the value of narrative, feature pieces, and other stories that can wind up “on the margins of the news format,” Shapiro said. “What Remix is establishing is a new format: It’s the story-driven audio journalism format,” he said.
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