Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Charting a locally owned, for-profit future for community news
- Some early insights from the folks at Digg on attempting to replace Google Reader
- With a coming void in Oregon’s news ecosystem, public broadcasting’s trying to build a new kind of state wire
- Do you have what it takes to be The New York Times’ Next Top Documentarian?
- Come have a drink with Nieman Lab today
| Charting a locally owned, for-profit future for community news Posted: 08 Jul 2013 09:55 AM PDT For those of a certain age, perusing the ads posted at The Batavian, the for-profit news site in Batavia, New York, can seem a lot like flipping through the pages of a weekly community newspaper a generation or two ago.
The success of The Batavian matters to the future of local journalism. In my book The Wired City: Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-Newspaper Age, I devote most of my attention to the New Haven Independent, a nonprofit site that subsists on grant money, donations, and sponsorships. At this early stage of online news, nonprofits like the Independent are often able to raise more money more quickly than for-profits. But not every community can support a nonprofit. Thus it is vital for the future of news that entrepreneurs like Owens figure out the for-profit side — which is why I also devote a fair amount of space in The Wired City to what’s going on in Batavia. Owens launched The Batavian in 2008 as a demonstration project for GateHouse Media, where he was the director of digital publishing. When his position was eliminated in early 2009, he asked GateHouse if he could take the fledgling site with him. He was granted his wish. The Batavian is free and covers not just the city of Batavia (population 15,000) but surrounding Genesee County (60,000) as well. It receives about 80,000 unique visitors per month, according to Quantcast. That’s roughly the same as the site’s newspaper competition, The Daily News, also based in Batavia. (Web analytics are imprecise, and Owens says his internal count, provided by Google Analytics, shows about 118,000 uniques per month.) Of course, The Daily, as the locals call it, depends mainly on print distribution. On the other hand, The Batavian covers just one county to The Daily’s three, making Owens’ online reach all the more impressive. The Batavian’s 12-month projected revenues are currently about $180,000 a year — enough to provide Owens and his wife, Billie Owens, the site’s part-time editor, with a comfortable living, and to employ a part-time sales and marketing coordinator. Unlike AOL, with its struggling network of Patch sites, The Batavian is independent, and Owens aims to keep it that way. As the Authentically Local project, of which The Batavian is a part, puts it: “Local doesn’t scale.”  Howard Owens at work in 2009. Photo by Dan Kennedy. If a nonprofit like the New Haven Independent can raise more money than a for-profit (indeed, Independent founder and editor Paul Bass chose the nonprofit route in 2005 because he realized he couldn’t support himself with a for-profit), there are nevertheless certain advantages to for-profit online journalism. Let me outline three of the more obvious. Anyone can start a for-profit news site.The nonprofit route requires approval from the IRS and support from local foundations. In many cases, neither may be forthcoming — and as I recently wrote, the IRS has all but halted approval of 501(c)(3) status for nonprofit news sites, which they depend on so that donors can make tax-free contributions. By contrast, all it takes to launch a for-profit site is talent, experience, and a willingness to work hard. That’s no guarantee of success, but the opportunity is there for all. Local ads enhance the vibrancy of a site.Owens likes to say that advertising is content. The ads at The Batavian give you a good feel for Genesee County — and provide a context for Owens’ coverage of everything from court news to traffic accidents, from school events to development proposals. Advertising and news work together to provide a well-rounded picture of the community. Yet you won’t see ads at a nonprofit site like the Independent, save for a few image-building “sponsorships” from local institutions such as college and hospitals. For-profit sites enjoy the full protection of the First Amendment.Like public radio and television stations, but unlike the vast majority of newspapers, nonprofit news sites are legally prohibited from endorsing candidates for public office. “Editorial endorsements — or the denial of them — are among the most powerful tools that newspapers have for holding political figures to account,” write the media scholar Robert McChesney and the journalist John Nichols in their 2010 book The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again. The Batavian hasn’t actually endorsed any candidates, but at least it’s not legally prohibited from doing so — and Owens takes strong stands on other local issues without having to worry about the federal government swooping in and threatening his livelihood. When I visited Batavia in 2009, I rode along with Owens as he made sales calls and covered stories in Genesee County. It seemed like a hard slog. At one point, as we were driving through the tiny farm town of Stafford, he gestured to a well-manicured golf course. “If you find out that I’ve joined the Stafford Country Club,” he said, “then I’ve been successful.” Two years later, I asked him about the status of his country club aspirations. He laughed. “I’d love to join the Stafford Country Club and have time to enjoy the privileges thereof,” he said, “but we’re probably years away from doing that.” Yet The Batavian keeps growing. Last week the site announced a new real-estate ad partnership. Recently Owens told me he now spends virtually none of his time on ad sales, having offloaded that task to his part-time employee. The Owenses are able to devote the bulk of their time to journalism — something that was not the case when I was researching The Wired City. Owens likes to remind people that we’re at the very beginning of online news as a business, and that what appears not to add up economically today may look quite different a few years from now. As Owens asked in a provocative blog post four years ago: “If it took newspapers more than 100 years to build the business and content models that we all now cherish, why do we expect a fully formed online model to emerge in just 10 years?” Dan Kennedy will be reading from The Wired City at Present Tense Books at 101 Washington Ave. in Batavia this Saturday, July 13, at 11 a.m. Kennedy is an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University and a panelist on Beat the Press, a weekly media program on WGBH-TV Boston. His blog, Media Nation, is online at dankennedy.net.  |
| Some early insights from the folks at Digg on attempting to replace Google Reader Posted: 08 Jul 2013 09:32 AM PDT One week after the demise of Google Reader, Fast Co.Labs’ Chris Dannen and John Paul Titlow interview the guys at Digg about their attempt at an RSS replacement. Their plans for the future of Digg Reader include paid premium features, improved search, and a social network of power users. Along the way, they’re also learning a lot more about how people want to get their news:
To learn more about Digg’s metrics and analysis, check out their blog, which has also tracked the evolution of Digg Reader.  |
| Posted: 08 Jul 2013 09:18 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. First up: the early days of a new kind of news network in Oregon.
For her first several months, Julia Silverman, OPB’s director of content partnerships, has been traversing the state, talking to nearly every daily, weekly, tribal, and college newspaper, television station, and blog. Her goal: persuading some 40 to 50 news outlets to partner in sharing their content with OPB and its media partners while using shared stories themselves. “I really regard this as a startup,” said Morgan Holm, OPB’s senior vice president and chief content officer. With The Oregonian, the big Portland daily, pulling back on its statewide reporting and its daily delivery, and with AP’s state presence diminishing, Holm said a newspaper colleague prodded him: “OPB was the last statewide media and we’d better step up….So I told my boss, we’d better figure out a way to work with newspapers.”  Oregon Public Broadcasting headquarters. (CC/Francis Storr) OPB joined with the Oregon Community Foundation and in 2012 snagged a $300,000 grant from the Knight Foundation’s Community Information Challenge program. The foundation matched that grant, and the infrastructure for a collaborative statewide news network has begun to take shape. “We can’t do this on our own,” said Silverman, who is spearheading the collaborations. “We have only four reporters — three in Portland and one in Bend, Oregon.” OPB is a key player in a well-established news partnership with public radio stations in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. The Northwest News Network provides coverage around the region and includes a state capitol correspondent in Salem. Coverage of environmental and energy issues comes from EarthFix, an OPB-led collaborative funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. OPB must find support to continue it in the future. “We are one of the only media that reaches everywhere — whether you live in Portland or Ontario, which is in a different time zone,” Silverman said. “I was just out in eastern Oregon,” she said. “It was two hours between towns with only sagebrush in between.” She views her mission as not just focusing on the state’s metro papers, but also the smaller newspapers who are not AP members but may have a great story that “doesn’t travel.” Or the AP might not put it on the wire until a couple days after it’s been published. “Some people get it right away and it’s an automatic ‘yes,’” Silverman said. “Some people ask: What’s in it for me?” A lot, if OPB’s plans take hold. Silverman is approaching her task in stages. First is outreach to existing news organizations to persuade them of the benefits of partnering. “Then,” she said, “I will transition to more of a curator/editor.” In that role, she will sift through partner stories and push out 10 to 15 stories a day to form the “core of a thoughtful statewide news report — news of public interest, not the latest meth bust.” That may involve editing, say, a 900-word story into 300 words for space-challenged newspapers. She will also be editing OPB staff content, much of it written for radio, for print publications. The last piece, she said, is to take partner content and turn it into radio spots that can be read on the air. She also hopes to develop a corps of reporters around the state who will get audio training and participate in debriefs. “That’s nice brand promotion for [their] newspapers,” Silverman said. By December, OPB plans to roll out a project website with top news stories from around the state. “We hope it will be a traffic driver to the partner sites as well,” although Silverman concedes the project will have to figure out how to prompt readers to click through on links to partner content. OPB took a cue from Minnesota Public Radio’s Minnesota Today, which curates and aggregates content from public officials, bloggers, and business or industry experts throughout the state, but does not rely on formal media partnerships. OPB began its efforts before paywalls at Oregon newspapers really took off and The Oregonian announced major changes. Now, most of the state’s papers charge customers for digital access, although a majority of the paywalls are metered, giving viewers free access to a certain number of articles before charges apply — “which is good for us,” Silverman said. One chain has a hard paywall, requiring payment to see anything. “They are among the only ones who said ‘no,’” she said. Asked about the pros and cons of partnering, Steve Forrester, editor and publisher of The Daily Astorian near the Pacific Coast, says, “It’s all pro in my book. We’d be foolish not to.” He’s already been collaborating on regular radio programs with his local community radio station. OPB’s efforts occur in a rapidly changing media landscape. The Oregonian announced last month that it would cut home delivery to four days a week and sell only street editions the other three days. It laid off nearly 100 of its 650 employees, including as many as 49 in the newsroom. It also announced the creation of a new company, the Oregonian Media Group, to “expand news and information products” in Oregon and Southwest Washington. Holm sees The Oregonian’s latest moves as another part of the strategy employed by its parent company, Advance Publications, in New Orleans, Cleveland, and elsewhere. “Like many people, I am deeply concerned about the loss of reporting capacity and institutional knowledge that will result from these changes,” he said. “I know OPB can’t singlehandedly fill that gap. But we must continue to meet our public-service obligation through initiatives like this content exchange because it can provide a place for people to find news from all over the state while The Oregonian goes through this period of painful adjustment.” In the meantime, he said, OPB is open to any discussions with The Oregonian about supporting “as much strong, original journalism as possible” around the state. Some of OPB’s prospective partners are enthusiastic about a statewide news network’s ability to break through their isolation. Others express concern that they don’t have a large enough news hole to publish more stories. But Silverman tells them their online space is unlimited and they can add state and regional tabs. “TV stations are a little tricky,” she said “They all want to be the only one in their market.” The biggest pushback, Holm said, is: What is it going to cost me? “I don’t have the answer yet because it all depends on the number of partners.” For now, Holm said, OPB shouldering “a significant commitment.” It is picking up the tab for Publish2′s system of content sharing. It makes it easier to connect various partner content management systems, create feeds for different delivery platforms, and feed content directly into partner systems. Down the road, partners will be asked to pay for the costs of editing and curating. Silverman says it may be as little as $50 a month for a small community paper to a couple hundred dollars for a larger one. “It’s on me to make it valuable enough,” Silverman said, but also “make it clear this is not a moneymaker for OPB.” Holm would like to see OPB develop a local-news presence on TV — but for the moment he’s trying to build a place for shared news about statewide issues. “I think we are seen as a good middle ground. We can highlight; we can curate,” he said. “It’s a little bit like a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.” “People do ask us: Is this a replacement for AP?” Holm said. ‘I say: ‘For the moment, it’s not.’” But he says he can see a future where many state news outlets could do without AP “and not lose any ground,” although they’d need to find a way to get sports coverage. As things move forward, Holm is betting a statewide news network will help a lot of news outlets in the state. “If it doesn’t meet a need,” he said, “we shouldn’t do it.”  |
| Do you have what it takes to be The New York Times’ Next Top Documentarian? Posted: 08 Jul 2013 07:29 AM PDT If you really want to strike a blow for immigration reform, it’s best to do it in a lucha libre mask. That’s the lesson in one of the latest installments of The New York Times’ Op-Docs, the short film series that opens up the Times’ online opinion pages to aspiring documentarians. Since 2011, the Times has invited filmmakers — including people like Alex Gibney, Jessica Yu, and Errol Morris — to make short movies with a point of view. Now they want to open the gate to the program a little wider. This fall, the Times will hold a competition to find new filmmakers. Think “America’s Next Top Op-Doc,” as the Times will partner with the Camden International Film Festival to find the best pitch for a new documentary from a group of finalists. The winner of the competition gets $2,000 towards the cost of their film. But perhaps more importantly for an aspiring filmmaker, the film gets splashed across the Times’ growing venues for video. It’s no coincidence the Times is opening up Op-Docs at the same time the newspaper is pushing new resources into its video efforts, which are one of the four pillars of investment Arthur Sulzberger has laid out for the organization. The Times has brought in a new general manager for video, reshuffled staff to emphasize video development, and in the spring announced that all videos on nytimes.com would be free regardless of subscriber status. Rebecca Howard, general manager for video production at the Times, said Op-Docs videos perform well and have found a dedicated audience. Though she wouldn’t offer specific numbers, Howard said Op-Docs videos are among the top performing videos for the Times. As the Times’ staff continues to build out video programming, they plan to look to sections like Opinion as potential channels. Op-Docs works well as its own series because viewers know what they’re getting into, Howard told me: “One thing that’s so excellent about Op-Docs is it sets user expectations for what to expect when they click on it,” she said. (The same could be said about other budding Times video franchises like Retro Report.) Howard said Op-Docs is a good example of what the Times would like to see its video shows do in the future: have a recognizable brand or identity that can both attract an audience (and advertisers) and travel well onto other platforms. It’s also an example of how individual series could lead to content-specific deals outside of the Times network; Howard said Op-Docs would be a good fit for indie theaters or TV networks that show documentaries. This is not the first time Op-Docs has held a competition to find new filmmakers. In June, Op-Docs and the Sheffield Doc/Fest held their first joint pitch competition, awarding Kris Hoffman $5,000 to create a short film. Contestants will have a five-minute window to pitch — two minutes for their video reel and three minutes to talk. A panel of filmmakers will make the final decision on the winner. “We’ve been around now more than a year and a half — the word is still getting out to the filmmaking community and the public,” said Jason Spingarn-Koff, series producer and curator for Op-Docs. “We’re always on the lookout for talented new voices and interesting and surprising projects.” About 72 films have been shown under the Op-Docs banner. There’ve been animated river rats, reasons not to vote, and lonesome pianos. Spingarn-Koff estimates there are around 20 films in various stages of production right now. While the project has employed a number of well known directors, Spingarn-Koff said one of its goals is to find people who have an eye for nontraditional stories that can work across platforms. “The format can be challenging for people used to making features,” he said. “The short form has been a somewhat neglected form of filmmaking, because there hasn’t been much of a marketplace for it.” But the films also need to be as compelling in the palm of your hand as they are on the big screen. Op-Docs move along the same channels as the rest of the Times videos, meaning a viewer could be finding it on NYTimes.com as they are on in a Times smartphone app or on Hulu. That also extends to the movie theater. This summer, the Times is doing Op-Docs screenings in Los Angeles and San Francisco, showing a collection of the short films along with a discussion with the directors. For newer documentary makers, that’s a remarkable amount of exposure, Spingarn-Koff said. In some cases, that can lead to new projects. Sometimes, in the case of Laura Poitras, who made the Op-Doc “The Program,” it means playing a role in revealing the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program. Rebecca Richman Cohen directed Code of the West, a look at the fight over medical marijuana in Montana, and later made a short feature for Op-Docs to revisit and update the issue. Spingarn-Koff said the Times’ reach helps filmmakers create new connections, but also develop feedback channels on how the audience receives their work. “They reach a really wide audience and an audience that often cares about the projects and the statements that they are making,” Spingarn-Koff said. Op-Docs operates under the Times Opinion Pages, better known as home to the likes of Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, and Maureen Dowd. Andrew Rosenthal, editorial page editor for the Times, said over email he believes Op-Docs are an organic evolution of the op-ed format. The videos bring in not only new perspectives, but also a new audience, he said. One measure of the popularity of Op-Docs, Rosenthal said, is that videos will often wind up in the most-emailed list. Rosenthal said he hopes to continue to expand Op-Docs in the future. “It makes our pages livelier, more interesting and just plain more entertaining,” Rosenthal said.  |
| Come have a drink with Nieman Lab today Posted: 08 Jul 2013 06:24 AM PDT
— The first reports of the UFO incident at Roswell, New Mexico are broadcast (1947). — A group of Canadian Mounties march west for Alberta (1874), pushing Canada’s expansion westward. — Kevin Bacon is born (1958), creating the Bacon Number. — Nieman Lab holds a happy hour for journalists, technologists, business-side types, and anyone else interested in the future of news (2013). Yes, it’s the return of our sometimes monthly, occasionally occasional happy hour for Bostonians and near-Bostonians. You should come have a drink with us on this very lovely Monday, July 8 (today!), at 6 p.m. or so. Along with the usual ol’ Lab staff, you’ll get to meet our Google Journalism Fellows, who are only with us for the summer. We're doing it again at The Field, which is in Central Square, roughly 8.2 seconds' walk from the Central Square T stop and thus easily accessible to anyone with a Charlie Card. First eight people to come up to me and repeat the magic phrase — “Drop this jiggery-pokery and talk straight turkey” — gets a free beer on me.  |
Which is to say there are a lot of ads — more than 140, every single one of them on the home page, a practice that publisher 
In March 2013, 
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