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Rabu, 25 Januari 2012

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 11:00 AM PST

Not many people remember it now, but the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was one of the leading pioneers of the early Internet age. It was the first newspaper on the Prodigy Internet service — one of America Online's two main competitors back in the early 1990s — and within 90 days of launching its Access Atlanta service, it had twice as many online subscribers, 15,000, as any other newspaper in the country. Eight months after launch, Neil McManus wrote in the magazine Digital Media that all other newspapers interested in pursuing a digital strategy should visit Access Atlanta "with notebook in hand."
But that was the apex. Prodigy's membership stopped growing, crushed by the less staid and more freewheeling America Online, and within a year and a half the AJC was forced to end its association with Prodigy, turning to the web later than many other large newspapers. Because the company viewed the digital strategy as a supplement to the print product rather than an eventual replacement, the paper did not see the web as an impetus to change its print-based business model. In short order, the pioneers became also-rans.
Obviously, the Journal-Constitution bet on the wrong horse — and, in this case, the wrong technological platform, since after AOL drove Prodigy and Compuserve out of business, the World Wide Web rendered AOL's proprietary service irrelevant. But it's hard to fault the Journal-Constitution for failing to predict the future correctly. After all, nearly every newspaper failed in that. Even though the AJC guessed wrong on the answers, its management and editorial staff asked a lot of the right questions. And they placed a decent-sized bet on their guess.

At the time of Access Atlanta's launch on Prodigy in March 1994, AJC technology columnist Bill Husted interviewed Internet analyst and provocateur Josh Harris about the newspaper's moves. Harris believed the paper was on the right track, though he sensed (probably correctly) the lack of organizational urgency regarding the venture.
“In about six months, all your key management will be saying, ‘Why didn’t we do this five years ago?’" Harris told Husted. “This project was cigarette change for Cox. I don’t think they believe in their guts, or their wallets, in what they’ve done. In time, they’ll see what a smart move they made.”

“In about six months, all your key management will be saying, 'Why didn't we do this five years ago?'"

Harris was right. Even though partnering with Prodigy was a bad decision, investing serious money in a unique electronic identity was a smart move. In some ways, the Journal-Constitution's digital rise and fall mirrors that of the San Jose Mercury News, which Michael Shapiro wrote about in the November/December issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. The Merc started out on AOL but quickly abandoned it to build its own website, Mercury Center, which quickly became one of the indispensable sites for Silicon Valley — but then crested and cratered along with the rest of the newspaper industry.
The Journal-Constitution had a number of smart people pushing it forward, including director of information services Chris Jennewein, who left Atlanta to perform a similar role at the Mercury-News, and webmaster Chad Dickerson, who is now the CEO of Etsy. The AJC and Cox had enough clout within the news industry for their executives to be able to persuade other papers, including the Los Angeles Times and Newsday, to make similar deals with Prodigy.
And they had enough clout for a Cox executive, Peter Winter, to become the interim CEO of the New Century Network, the industry's abortive 1995 attempt to form a web cartel and control access to their journalism. But the collective was sunk by the inability of all the principals — including Cox, Knight-Ridder, Advance, Tribune, Times Mirror, Gannett, Hearst, The Washington Post Co., and The New York Times Co. — to agree on strategy. The failure of the New Century Network prefigured the web woes that each company would experience in the decade to come.

The idea of digital newspapers had been around for a long time. Going back to the 1970s, decades before Craig Newmark started Craigslist and eroded newspaper dominance in classified advertising, newspaper companies realized that their business models depended on preserving their monopoly on classifieds — and they were afraid that a new competitor could weaken that position through a new technology.

So, in the early 1980s, the Associated Press led a number of newspapers (including the AJC) in an 18-month experiment in digital newspapers hosted on an early version of Compuserve.
But not many people had access to modem-enabled personal computers in those days — Compuserve had around 12,000 subscribers across the country — and the low audience and difficulty of using the cutting-edge technology paradoxically led most of the newsmen to affirm, rather than challenge, the status quo. "They perceived it as less of a threat after having been party to it," said Henry Heilbrunn, an AP executive who led the experiment.
Chris Jennewein was an early advocate for the Journal-Constitution's digital future. In the late 1980s, he started working on audiotex and videotex, two technologies aimed at combatting the informational time lag associated with a daily newspaper.¹ The first was an automated system of phone numbers that would allow users to call for up-to-the-minute stock prices, sports scores, and weather reports. The second was a primitive dialup system that would allow them to check out news archives and the next morning's classified ads.
Beginning in 1990, the AJC dialup service was called "Access Atlanta," and rather than following the phone company's paradigm of per-minute pricing, they charged a flat $6.95 a month for it. (That was the same price that they would charge four years later, when they launched on Prodigy.) In the meantime, flush with cash, the company was in the mood for experimentation. "[It's] a classic skunk-works venture," said Cox executive vice president Jay Smith in 1993. "We put our toe in the water."
The technology was ahead of the consumer base, but that was fine with Cox. "Archives, movie reviews, primitive email, primitive chat, and we had, most interestingly, the business section up early at 9:00 pm the evening before," Jennewein told me. "I think at the height we had 600 subscribers."
In late 1992, the AJC decided to move Access Atlanta from an in-house operation to a third-party service. Cox looked around and even considered purchasing Prodigy, which was number-one at the time, with more subscribers than either Compuserve or AOL. Prodigy also offered the newspaper a far larger cut of subscription revenue than AOL was willing to offer, and far greater flexibility for the paper to create its own branded version of Prodigy's software.

Access Atlanta was a proprietary service on a proprietary service: Subscribers could pay either the standard $6.95 a month, or if they subscribed to Prodigy for $9.95 a month, they could add Access Atlanta service for an additional $4.95 a month. But while the service itself was getting appreciative nods around the news industry, Prodigy's growth was already stalling.
One reason is that, unlike those of America Online, Prodigy's executives wouldn't allow unmoderated bulletin boards, requiring that every user comment be edited before it was published. Another was Prodigy's retail strategy, influenced by its corporate parents, Sears and IBM. Unlike America Online, which targeted computer manufacturers to install AOL software on new computers and flooded mailboxes with a seemingly infinite stream of AOL disks, Prodigy sold its software in stores — and separately branded Access Atlanta software was also sold for people who didn't want to subscribe to Prodigy. Retail was hardwired into Prodigy’s corporate culture. As Fred Lowy, who headed the Access Atlanta team over at Prodigy, explained to me: "The hidden agenda was always to promote IBM and Sears."

“I was thinking, ‘Who are these people who signed up with Prodigy? No one uses Prodigy. Everyone uses the web.’”

As the first paper on Prodigy, the AJC had an incentive to try to get other newspapers to join the service, so that more readers would want to subscribe. Cox moved all the papers it owned over to Prodigy and also worked on persuading selling other newspaper companies to join them. They were successful with Times-Mirror, which owned the Los Angeles Times and Newsday. They had been on the cusp of a deal with America Online, but switched to Prodigy after a successful eleventh-hour pitch by Cox.
Cox, Times-Mirror, and Prodigy soon formed what they called a "newspaper alliance," in which Cox and Times-Mirror would get a cut of the proceeds whenever a new paper signed up with Prodigy. But the partnership was already nearing an end. When Access Atlanta was launched in March 1994, its publisher, David Scott, announced his hopes of obtaining 10,000 subscribers by the end of the first year and 40,000 by the end of the third. It reached the first milestone, announcing its 20,000th subscriber in August of 1995. It awarded twenty free months of service to the lucky 20,000th customer, Seth Ehrlich.
It never reached a third year, though, and Ehrlich never got all twenty months of service. Prodigy had fallen behind Compuserve and AOL by late 1994, and subscriptions had plateaued for both Prodigy and Access Atlanta. Finally, the Journal-Constitution moved Access Atlanta off Prodigy and onto the free World Wide Web in late 1996.²
Before that happened, the newspaper had very little content on the web. The Access Atlanta team was kept separate from the web team, which maintained a barebones placeholder at www.ajc.com that linked to several other websites the newspaper created, like a baseball-focused one called fastball.com. The newspaper also maintained other sites that it didn't link on its front page, including a Southern humor site called yall.com and a sex humor site called brazenhussy.com.

Chad Dickerson was hired out of college in 1995 as a webmaster for all the newspaper's content that was not on Access Atlanta, and he could see that restricting online access to proprietary subscribers was limiting growth. "I had just turned 23," Dickerson told me. "And I was thinking, 'Who are these people who signed up with Prodigy? No one uses Prodigy. Everyone uses the web.' That was what motivated me to get them out of this stranglehold."
At that point, the newspaper started putting its content on accessatlanta.com, but the site was maintained more as a neighborhood and lifestyle portal rather than as a breaking news site. So, in 1998, the newspaper launched AJC.com as its news site, and ever since then, the newspaper has operated both accessatlanta.com and AJC.com.

After spending most of the decade selling subscriptions for its online content, the newspaper offered its web content entirely free. But the newspaper was still so overwhelmingly profitable that the change in online revenue streams hardly made a dent — and hardly mattered. And that was hardly surprising, said AJC.com editorial director Hyde Post. "How many folks are willing to think, 'I'm gonna make a decision that's gonna cost me $100 million on the newspaper side, in the hope that I'll get it back in five years on the other side'?"
"I think the industry could see the future, but were not prepared to take the risks," said Heilbrunn, the former AP and Prodigy executive. "The newspaper industry looks at itself as a local franchise with a local brand, but isn't willing to step out of that particular perception so that it invents Monster.com for employment ads or Zillow for real estate. There were a lot of opportunities for individuals or industry to do these things."

Though the Access Atlanta brand name survives in a website and a free weekly paper, the pioneering Internet service remains nearly forgotten today.

Access Atlanta was a way to re-imagine the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on a new platform, but it could never replace the print newspaper's revenue stream. "Except for the forward-looking groups, it was the old railroad paradigm," said Fred Lowy. "'We're not in the transportation business, we're in the railroad business.'" And that applied all the more to advertising revenue. Dating back to the 1970s, newspapers thought they were in the classified ad business, when they were actually in the much broader business of serving their communities by connecting people with the information, news, products, and services that they wanted. Cox made a few savvy investments in the new world order, such as founding AutoTrader.com. But neither Cox nor its competitors made those types of moves with any kind of urgency.³
Back when Cox was flush enough to afford spending money on a skunkworks, Access Atlanta could be brilliantly innovative. But when it became clear that the market had shifted, the Journal-Constitution was caught on its back heels, and it didn't have the same financial cushion as before to continue to innovate from comfort. And though the Access Atlanta brand name survives in a website and a free weekly published by the AJC, the pioneering Internet service remains nearly forgotten today, so that as of this writing, it does not even have a Wikipedia page.
The Journal-Constitution could not predict the changes in their business that the Internet would bring about; few did. The newspaper industry failed to take advantage of Web 1.0, and a decade later, it failed to take advantage of Web 2.0, standing by as social media redefined how people learned what was happening in their communities and in the world. If large news organizations want to survive the next wave of technological change, they will need to do more than just dip their toe in the water. They will need to dive in.

Notes

Videotex was another of the great technology misses of the decade, though it only failed in America — the technology caught on with teletext services in the UK and elsewhere. But despite a well-funded Knight-Ridder videotex system called Viewtron, which was finally shuttered in 1986 after costing its parent company $50 million, videotex never gained traction in the United States. It required users to have dedicated terminals, which none but the furthest-out of technology futurists were likely to purchase.
In 2003, the Journal-Constitution launched a free weekly paper to compete with Atlanta's main alternative weekly, Creative Loafing. It's also called Access Atlanta, and it's co-branded with the website, which is now a joint venture between the AJC and the WSB radio and television stations.
One company that did succeed is Norway's Schibsted Media Group, a media conglomerate that maintained its dominance in classified advertising by investing heavily in the 1990s. It's the subject of a Harvard Business School case published in 2007.

How Rick Perry helped America discover the Texas Tribune

Posted: 24 Jan 2012 08:00 AM PST

On Aug. 13, 2011, Rick Perry delivered a gift to the Texas Tribune: The governor announced his candidacy for president. Two days later, reporter Jay Root would break the story that Perry had backpedaled on his controversial effort to vaccinate girls against HPV. Root’s story was viewed about 150,000 times in total in 2011 and generated the biggest-ever traffic day for the online startup.
“There’s no question Rick Perry was good for business,” said Trib CEO and editor Evan Smith. “Even if his presidential campaign wasn’t successful these last five months, we were.”

In 2011, the Tribune’s second full year in operation, the website served 5.2 million unique visitors, up from 2.2 million the year before. The plurality of those visitors came from Austin, but out-of-staters in New York and Washington represented the fifth and ninth most represented locales, respectively. The site’s list of most viewed stories for 2011 is chockablock with Perry, Perry, Perry.
The governor has been well known to Texans for the past 11 years, but less so elsewhere. Suddenly, the Tribune’s deep well of local knowledge had found national relevance. Tribune reporters could “explain and demystify him for the rest of the country, including for the national press,” Smith said. And Smith knew his audience at home would not be satisfied by wire copy and good aggregation. “There’s nothing that Texans hate more than non-Texans explaining the world to them. So it made a lot of sense to have our guys on the road.”
Putting their guys on the road — at various times, four reporters (including another following Rep. Ron Paul in New Hampshire), a photographer, and a videographer — was costly. (The Trib’s total staff headcount is 30.) Smith estimated the campaign coverage cost about $5,000 per week, once you add up the cramped Southwest flights, the motel rooms, and the midnight meals. And those expenses were not included in the 2011 budget.
“The fact that we’re a nonprofit doesn’t mean we get a friends-and-family rate,” he said. But it does mean Smith could turn to donors for help. The Tribune raised just under $300,000 specially for Perry coverage, he said. All together the Tribune raised $3.71 million in 2011, almost double the year before, and spent $4.01 million; Smith projects the Tribune will be in the black at the end of 2012. The Tribune posts all of its financials online.
Smith said the Tribune did nothing unusually innovative in their Perry coverage, at least by their standards — just more (“covering the waterfront, flooding the zone, and assorted other journalistic cliches,” he wrote in a New Year’s recap post.) The data journalism team created an interactive Perry tracker, showing where the candidate had been and where he was headed. And a landing page — er, vertical, I guess — called Perrypedia aggregated their own stuff — videos, narrative stories, campaign finance reporting — as well as material from some national sources.
A partnership with The New York Times, now into its second year, paid off too. Dozens of Tribune articles about Perry appeared on nytimes.com and in print; one article made it to A1, above the fold, Smith points out. The Times also prints Tribune articles in its Texas edition twice weekly.
Even though Perry’s campaign is over — and was more or less dead for some time before it became official — Trib traffic is still exceeding expectations. Smith projects January 2012 traffic levels will beat last January’s by 70 percent. “When you have a spike in traffic for a particular purpose, when that purpose dissipates, and you resettle, you resettle at a higher plateau than you did before. And I think that we we’ve certainly seen is that we’re resettling at a higher plateau.”
Photo by Gage Skidmore used under a Creative Commons license.

Sabtu, 21 Januari 2012

It doesn’t take Cupertino to make textbooks interactive

Nieman Journalism Lab

Matthew Battles: It doesn’t take Cupertino to make textbooks interactive

Posted: 20 Jan 2012 11:00 AM PST

Absent the glamour of the black mock turtleneck, Apple’s Thursday event, held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, still came bearing flowers of rhetoric, lovingly transplanted from their native soil in Cupertino’s sunny clime. One such rhetorical staple, the feature checklist, made its appearance about nine minutes in. Usually, the checklist is used to contrast Apple’s latest magical object with the feature set of lesser smartphones or other misbegotten tech tchotchkes; it was more than a little eye-popping to see the same rhetoric of invidious comparison used against the book in full — that gadget which, as senior VP Phil Schiller reminded us, was invented (in its print incarnation) back at the end of the Hundred Years’ War.
As Schiller ticked down the list, for feature after feature — portability, durability, interactivity, searchability, and currency — the book earned a big red X. Curiously, Schiller didn’t let his earlier observation of the antiquity of books undermine his critique on the grounds of their durability; not only the technology of the book, but many actual tomes survive from Gutenberg’s era; and when older formats are taken into account, far older books are still with us. It is comparatively difficult to imagine an iPad of today, much less an app designed to run on one, still in use two hundred, five hundred, a thousand years hence.
In a more focused sense, Apple’s critique of the textbook is valid. But the problem with textbooks isn’t that they’re books per se; it’s that they’re overdetermined, baroque in their complexity and ornamentation.
Modern textbooks are monsters — heavy, unwieldy, battened on siloed content. They’re like ’90s-era computers, loaded with bloatware that blunts their processor speed and complicates their interfaces. Already, today’s textbooks rarely come as paper-only devices, but include (for significant extra licensing fees) websites, online editions, networked assessments, and interactive assignments. For the wired child, these electronic ancillaries solve the portability problem; for the less prosperous or fortunate pupil, the backpack is still very heavy.
The major education publishers have become massively efficient inhalers of content, capturing licenses for images and objects held in museums around the globe, hiring phalanxes of MAs and ABDs to craft mazes of matrices, rubrics, and quizzes, and deploying batteries of sales reps to market-test every page, every image, every checklist. It’s a prosperous model — and as Tim Carmody evocatively documented at Wired yesterday, this prosperity has enabled education publishers to leverage their way into trade publishing and other media. It’s no wonder Apple is taking aim at them.
The iPad is an extraordinary device, but it’s hardly the first avenue multimedia has taken to the classroom. The filmstrips and 16mm movies of my childhood could be engaging experiences too — and they could be time-fillers for addled, overstretched teachers as well. Schiller made a sentimental play to this constituency, opening his presentation with a series of excerpted interviews in which teachers sang the sad litany of challenges they face: cratering budgets, overcrowded classrooms, unprepared, disengaged students. The argument that Apple — founded by dropouts and autodidacts — is fundamentally motivated to change this set of conditions is as ludicrous as the notion that the company could ever hope actually to do any such thing.

The textbooks demonstrated in yesterday’s event were lovely and compelling — and they looked strikingly like current textbooks. Roger Rosner, who heads productivity software for Apple, gave a tour of Life on Earth, a title created in conjunction with E. O. Wilson’s Encyclopedia of Life project; after playing the book’s cinematic introductory sequence, he swiped through pages featuring familiar modalities of intertextual braiding and layering: things like tables, block capitals, and callout boxes, which derive from mid-20th-century rotogravure magazine production — only sprinkled with videos, animations, and interactive images, in Apple-controlled formats, subject to development cycles originating in Cupertino (and routed through Shenzhen). At one point, he dove into a microphotograph of a cell to pop out a rendering of a strand of DNA. The helix shimmered invitingly, but disclosed none of its secrets.
Here’s the thing: Interactivity doesn’t exist. More properly, everything is interactive. We use the catch-all term “interactivity” to brand as novel the qualities exhibited by digital objects striving to be like real-world objects. But chairs, raindrops, sandwiches, and envelopes are also interactive — in their own evolved ways. Books in fact exhibit rich interactive habits, evolved to engage us in peculiar ways (and increasingly, these very features are counted as bugs).
Digital objects, too, evolve their own ways of reaching out to meet us halfway. The spell of the real makes us strive for a specious virtuality, to try fashioning uncanny appendages for objects that live in databases and go to work in networks. Tellingly, it’s at those uncanny intersections where digital objects most strenuously try to emulate objects in the real world — books, shelves, desk blotters, gaming tables — that Apple’s legitimately vaunted design sensibility breaks down. For its part, a pop-up animation of a lipid molecule might be enlightening — or it might merely be twisty and pretty. That’s why I almost want to say that, those heartfelt teacher testimonials at the start of yesterday’s show notwithstanding, it’s not the book Apple is trying to replace — it’s teaching.
Tools exist — they’re getting more powerful everyday — that allow us to treat digital objects as digital objects: to collect and organize them, to fashion stories from them, to turn them into bespoke devices uniquely tuned to unlocking the world’s mysteries. Apple wants to offer us those tools as well. Yesterday’s event also introduced iBooks Author, a free app for building iPad-native textbooks like Life on Earth. But increasingly, such vital aggregates can be engineered in classrooms, hacked together on the fly by teachers and students learning and teaching collaboratively. I’m thinking in particular of Zeega, an open-source toolkit for collecting media and telling stories, which is in the midst of development in association with metaLAB, the research/design group I work with at Harvard — but a host of other such tools exist or are on the way.
We can never count Apple out — the company’s visions have an implacable way of turning into givens — but the future is undoubtedly more complex. There will still be overcrowded classrooms, overworked teachers, and shrinking budgets in an education world animated by Apple. But I prefer to think of teachers and students finding ways to hack knowledge and make their own beautiful stories to envisioning ranks of students spellbound by magical tablets.

Matthew Battles is the author of Library: An Unquiet History and cofounder of HiLobrow. He is a program fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where he works for metaLAB, a research and design group investigating the arts and humanities in a time of networks.

This Week in Review: The SOPA standoff, and Apple takes on textbooks with ebooks

Posted: 20 Jan 2012 08:00 AM PST

The web flexes its political muscle: After a couple of months of growing concern, the online backlash against the anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA reached a rather impressive peak this week. There’s a lot of moving parts to this, so I’ll break it down into three parts: the arguments for and against the bill, the status of the bill, and this week’s protests.
The bills’ opponents have covered a wide variety of arguments over the past few months, but there were still a few more new angles this week in the arguments against SOPA. NYU prof Clay Shirky put the bill in historical context in a 14-minute TED talk, and social-media researcher danah boyd parsed out both the competitive and cultural facets of piracy. At the Harvard Business Review, James Allworth and Maxwell Wessel framed the issue as a struggle between big content companies and smaller innovators. The New York Times asked six contributors for their ideas about viable SOPA alternatives in fighting piracy, and at Slate, Matthew Yglesias argued that piracy actually has some real benefits for society and the entertainment industry.
The most prominent SOPA supporter on the web this week was News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch, who went on a Twitter rant against SOPA opponents and Google in particular, reportedly after seeing a Google TV presentation in which the company said it wouldn’t remove links in search to illegal movie streams. Both j-prof Jeff Jarvis and GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram responded that Murdoch doesn’t understand how the Internet works, with Jarvis arguing that Murdoch isn’t opposed so much to piracy as the entire architecture of the web. At the Guardian, however, Dan Gillmor disagreed with the idea that Murdoch doesn’t get the web, saying that he and other big-media execs know exactly the threat it represents to their longstanding control of media content.
Now for the status of the bill itself: Late last week, SOPA was temporarily weakened and delayed, as its sponsor, Lamar Smith, said he would remove domain-name blocking until the issue has been “studied,” and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said he won’t bring the bill to the House floor until some real consensus about the bill can be found.
That consensus became a bit less likely this week, after the White House came out forcefully against SOPA and PIPA, calling for, as Techdirt described it, a “hard reset” on the bills. The real blow to the bills came after Wednesday’s protests, when dozens of members of Congress announced their opposition and, this morning, both SOPA and PIPA were indefinitely postponed.
But easily the biggest news surrounding SOPA and PIPA this week was the massive protests of it around the web. Hundreds of sites, including such heavyweights as Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla, BoingBoing, and WordPress, blacked out on Wednesday, and other sites such as Google and Wired joined with “censored” versions of their home pages. As I noted above, the protest was extremely successful politically, as some key members of Congress backed off their support of the bill, leading The New York Times to call it a “political coming of age” for the tech industry.
The most prominent of those protesting sites was Wikipedia, which redirected site users to an anti-SOPA action page on Wednesday. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales’ announcement of the protest was met with derision in some corners, with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and PandoDaily’s Paul Carr chastising the global site for doing something so drastic in response to a single national issue. Wales defended the decision by saying that the law will affect web users around the world, and he also got support from writers like Mathew Ingram and the Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal, who argued that Wikipedia and Google’s protests could help take the issue out of the tech community and into the mainstream.
The New York Times’ David Pogue was put off by some aspects of the SOPA outrage and argued that some of the bill’s opposition grew out of a philosophy that was little more than, “Don’t take my free stuff!” And ReadWriteWeb’s Joe Brockmeier was concerned about what happens after the protest is over, when Congress goes back to business as usual and the public remains largely in the dark about what they’re doing. “Even if SOPA goes down in flames, it’s not over. It’s never over,” he wrote.

Apple’s bid to reinvent the textbook: Apple announced yesterday its plans to add educational publishing to the many industries it’s radically disrupted, through its new iBooks and iBooks Author systems. Wired’s Tim Carmody, who’s been consistently producing the sharpest stuff on this subject, has the best summary of what Apple’s rolling out: A better iBooks platform, a program (iBooks Author) allowing authors to design their own iBooks, textbooks in the iBookstore, and a classroom management app called iTunes U.
After news of the announcement was broken earlier this week by Ars Technica, the Lab’s Joshua Benton explained some of the reasons the textbook industry is ripe for disruption and wondered about the new tool’s usability. (Afterward, he listed some of the change’s implications, including for the news industry.) Tim Carmody, meanwhile, gave some historical perspective on Steve Jobs’ approach to education reform.
As Carmody detailed after the announcement, education publishing is a big business for Apple to come crashing into. But The Atlantic’s Megan Garber explained that that isn’t exactly what Apple’s doing here; instead, it’s simply “identifying transformative currents and building the right tools to navigate them.” Still, Reuters’ Jack Shafer asserted that what’s bad for these companies is good for readers like him.
But while Apple talked about reinventing the textbook, several observers didn’t see revolutionary changes around the corner. ReadWriteWeb’s John Paul Titlow noted that Apple is teaming up with big publishers, not killing them, and Paul Carr of PandoDaily argued that iBook Author’s self-made ebooks won’t challenge the professionally produced and marketed ones. All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka did the math to show the publishers should still get plenty of the new revenue streams.
The news still brought plenty of concerns: At CNET, Lindsey Turrentine wondered how many schools will have the funds to afford the hardware for iBooks, and David Carnoy and Scott Stein questioned how open Apple’s new platforms would be. That theme was echoed elsewhere, especially by developer Dan Wineman, who found that through its user agreement, Apple will essentially assert rights to anything produced with its iBooks file format. That level of control gave some, like GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram, pause, but Paul Carr said we shouldn’t be surprised: This is what Apple does, he said, and we all buy its products anyway.

Making ‘truth vigilantes’ mainstream: The outrage late last week over New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane’s column asking whether the paper’s reporters should challenge misleading claims by officials continued to yield thoughtful responses this week. After his column last week voicing his support for journalism’s “truth vigilantes,” j-prof Robert Niles created a site to honor them, pointing out instances in which reporters call out their sources for lying. Salon’s Gene Lyons, meanwhile, said that attitudes like Brisbane’s are a big part of what’s led to the erosion of trust in the Times and the mainstream press.
The two sharpest takes on the issue this week came from The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf and from Columbia Ph.D. student Lucas Graves here at the Lab. Friedersdorf took on journalists’ argument that people should read the news section for unvarnished facts and the opinion section for analysis: That argument doesn’t work, he said, because readers don’t consume a publication as a bundle anymore.
Graves analyzed the issue in light of both the audience’s expectations for news and the growth of the fact-checking movement. He argued for fact-checking to be incorporated into journalists’ everyday work, rather than remaining a specialized form of journalism. Reuters’ Felix Salmon agreed, asserting that “the greatest triumph of the fact-checking movement will come when it puts itself out of work, because journalists are doing its job for it as a matter of course.” At the Lab, Craig Newmark of Craigslist also chimed in, prescribing more rigorous fact-checking efforts as a way for journalists to regain the public’s trust.

Reading roundup: Not a ton of other news developments per se this week, but plenty of good reads nonetheless. Here’s a sample:
— There was one major development on the ongoing News Corp. phone hacking case: The company settled 36 lawsuits by victims, admitting a cover-up of the hacking. Here’s the basic story from Reuters and more in-depth live coverage from the Guardian.
— Rolling Stone published a long, wide-ranging interview with WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange as he awaits his final extradition hearing. Reuters’ Jack Shafer also wrote a thoughtful piece on the long-term journalistic implications of WikiLeaks, focusing particularly on the continued importance of institutions.
— Two interesting pieces of journalism-related research: Slate’s Farhad Manjoo described a Facebook-based study that throws some cold water on the idea of the web as a haven for like-minded echo chambers, and the Lab’s Andrew Phelps wrote about a study that describes and categorizes the significant group people who stumble across news online.
— In a thorough feature, Nick Summers of Newsweek/The Daily Beast laid out the concerns over how big ESPN is getting, and whether that’s good for ESPN itself and sports media in general.
— Finally, for those thinking about how to develop the programmer-journalists of the future, j-prof Matt Waite has a set of thoughts on the topic that functions as a great jumping-off point for more ideas and discussion.

It’s not TV, it’s Reuters TV: Rethinking a news channel for online audiences

Posted: 20 Jan 2012 07:00 AM PST

“We are deliberately not doing television on the web.”
As strategies go, that sounds like a solid start for Reuters TV, which launched this week as a YouTube channel and a new destination on Reuters.com. But what Barclay Palmer, Reuters global executive producer, was getting at is that, while sharing some commonalities with cable and network news, Reuters TV won’t just be CNN, MSNBC, or FOX News recreated for YouTube.
That’s because Reuters TV is an experiment in just what exactly online video news could become. It’s territory still largely uncharted, with the bulk of online news video coming from network and cable news, comprised of show segments and individual reports sliced up in easily digestible bits. (And online news video is, of course, just a tiny fraction of all web video.) For networks, that has meant carrying over much of the classic TV form — shot selection, editing, story length, set design — to the web, whether or not it matches up with the desires of online audiences.
That’s likely one of the reasons YouTube, which is branching out into original programming through partnerships, wanted a friend like Reuters. YouTube offers reach, Reuters offers the global news-gathering operation: Reuters + YouTube = the potential for a next generation news network. When I talked with Palmer, whose TV experience includes The NewsHour on PBS, Anderson Cooper 360, and others, he said Reuters has a chance to create a whole new experience for news video online.
“Reuters has this great tradition of providing smart content to news outlets, but it hadn’t really been in this business,” he said. “There’s a great opportunity to bring Reuters into online programming.”
What they plan to offer on the new channel is a mix of news and analysis on politics, finance, technology and other news from Reuters personalities like Chrystia Freeland, Felix Salmon, and Anthony De Rosa. Along with more interview-driven fare, they’ll also produce shows based around the U.S. presidential election, investigative reporting, and video from journalists in the field. It’s TV-esque — up to a point. There will be people chatting mingled with rich visuals, but the production style will be more casual, with less of a network polish and more of the energy of an upstart, Palmer said.
The advantage for Reuters is that there are few hard and fast rules for what works in original online video when it comes to news. “I think that in television, people are used to an architecture of the way programming works that gives a sense of familiarity and predictability that is comforting,” he said. None of that exists online, and that’s a good thing to Palmer. Take length: There’s a widespread belief that online video must be short in order to keep viewers attention — but Hulu and Netflix have proven people will happily watch something longer than two minutes on the web (yes, it’s entertainment content, but still). Reuters TV shows will be tailored both in shorter clips and in full programs to give viewers options and to make the content more sharable. On the production side, Palmer said, that’s a plus. “The advantage of online programming is you’re not held to 60 minutes or 48 minutes of programming,” he said. “You can end wherever it feels right to end.”
One way TV and online mirror each other is in the emphasis on personalities. Viewers want to feel like they can make a connection and be in contact with journalists, Palmer said, which is one reason YouTube is a useful platform for a news channel. It helps that a chunk of Reuters TV’s talent already have healthy Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr followings. “You need authentic people who are compelling,” he said. “You don’t need a $300 hairdo or a voice you think could be Shakespearian. People have to connect with viewers in a genuine way.”

Reuters has been spending a lot of money in recent years beefing up their news division, and investing money in launching an online TV channel — even one using existing talent — isn’t cheap. Think of it as buying pre-distressed jeans at the Gap: They’re spending money, but they don’t want to look like it. In Reuters’ case, that’s because they want to fit the aesthetics of web video, a look that’s a little rougher around the edges but one that’s inviting to audiences.
Nielsen is reporting that more people are watching video across multiple platforms, from their TVs to laptops, tablets and phones. At the same time, TV manufacturers are increasing the production of Internet-capable sets, and companies like Apple and Google are developing TV offerings not dependent on traditional networks. Meanwhile, Netflix and Hulu are focused on developing original scripted shows (or bringing back old ones — come on!).
Media companies are looking at this and responding, with the New York Times TimesCast series, the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Live, and more. This past week, rumors perked up about the possibility of a Huffington Post streaming news channel. Reuters and the rest of these organizations are chasing the dream: A new market for online news video, bringing in new advertising and reach new audiences, but built in part on the same news-gathering staff already in place. “There is an increased offering of video online from news outlets and we can see a slow, but massive movement of people taking in video news online,” Palmer said.
One question hanging over the collaboration between YouTube and Reuters, is how well YouTube — normally a diversionary network of memes, old music videos, and clips from 1980s TV shows — can work as a news portal. Will it be able to build a persistent audience for news — not just fly-by users who pass through searching for specific clips (like, say, when I’m trying to remember what was the theme from Harcastle & McCormick)? Or will there at least be enough fly-bys to matter? (At posting, the 10 most recent Reuters TV clips on YouTube had a total of 1,265 views. The clip above, from an interview with Russian billionaire/New Jersey Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov, had 7.) Will people deliberately go to YouTube for news? Again, here is where Palmer sees the problem of distinction: If the audience has already changed the way it consumes video, either through delayed watching on DVRs and Tivo, or on-demand video through cable or the Internet, there’s no real measure yet of how a project like this will succeed. If there’s a seismic change coming in video, and Palmer believes there is, Reuters TV is playing the long game. “Cable took years to make money,” Palmer said. “As the distinction between broadcast and cable is eroding, so will the distinction between broadcast, cable and online.”

Jumat, 20 Januari 2012

The day the bookshelf shook

Nieman Journalism Lab

The day the bookshelf shook: Four lessons for news orgs from today’s Apple iBooks announcements

Posted: 19 Jan 2012 08:30 AM PST

Apple’s New York education event — smack in the middle of the book publishing world — has concluded. You can see coverage from The Verge here, but the main takeaways are a new version of iBooks that enables great-looking interactive textbooks; a new Mac app called iBooks Author that promises to make it much easier to assemble and publish ebooks; and a new iTunes U app that makes it easier for universities and schools to create and distribute an entire course’s worth of material, from lecture videos to readings to assignments.
The focus was on education, and Apple faces some significant hurdles in getting their products into actual schools (where textbook and technology purchasing are constricted by forces bureaucratic, fiscal, and otherwise). But in truth much of what Apple announced was squarely aimed at further disruption of the publishing industry — in this case, the book publishing industry, already facing disruption from Amazon and ebooks more broadly.
So what should someone in the news business take away from today’s announcements? Here are four ideas I think are worth keeping in mind.

News organizations: Now’s the time to figure out how to jump on the ebook bandwagon.

As I wrote the other day, ebooks as a platform have been limited by the relatively clunky process for converting a stack of text into an attractive digital product. It’s not impossible, of course — it’s just a pain.
Today’s announcement of iBooks Author promises to make that process a lot easier. (Although just for iBooks, of course — in most cases, of course, you’ll also want to publish to the Kindle.) Particularly for news organizations — which typically have lots of good art to go along with their longer-form content — pulling together an attractive package could now be a matter of minutes instead of hours. (Or, to put it another way, something done routinely in-house instead of farmed out to a contractor.)
How will news organizations react to that newfound ease of publishing? What are the ebooks already lurking inside the heart of the newsroom, just waiting to be unlocked? Is it a compilation of all a newspaper’s restaurant reviews? A popular columnist’s collected works? A compendium of all the paper’s stories about the local high school football team, player profiles and game stories, full of big art? Several years’ worth of gardening columns, filtered to focus on what grows well in the local soil? A local band book/database that includes MP3 samples from each? An expanded version of the 100 Biggest Local Businesses section the biz desk puts out once a year? A detailed guide to the local public schools, aimed at people new to area?
In the print book era, deciding to try one of these ideas would involve estimating the potential audience, deciding whether it’s worth investing the time to design it, guessing at a print run, figuring out how to get it in the hands of local retailers, and a host of other complications. But with ebooks — if publishing those ebooks is uncomplicated, just a few more steps than hitting File -> Save As…, built around common templates — what kinds of value could be unlocked?

“Book” content can be episodic too.

One of the standout new textbooks announced today was E.O. Wilson’s Life on Earth, the Harvard professor’s attempt to rethink the biology textbook. Aside from what wisdom it will bring about the Mesozoic Era, perhaps its most interesting element is that it is being released chapter by chapter. The first two chapters are available for download now; the remaining ones will be available later at an “aggressive” price.
Think of Charles Dickens, whose books were famously serialized and left crowds hanging out at the New York docks for a new chapter to roll in to find out what happened to little Nell.
News organizations have traditionally thought of books — when they’ve thought of them at all — as something to be assembled after the fact. Maybe it’s a 10-part series that gets massaged into paperback form after the newsprint run is over. Or it’s a recap of the local football team’s championship season.
But news orgs are really good at producing episodic information. And if books like Wilson’s begin to train readers that books can start incomplete and fill in over time, the technology’s already there — in iBooks and on the Kindle. (The tech book world is already ahead of the game here; books about programming languages now regularly appear first in “beta,” for instance, and O’Reilly’s Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto is adding chapters over time — in part in response to reader feedback.
Once books stop being only finished, whole things — when they can also be works in progress, works in development — the possibilities for journalists open up. Imagine a book on the health-care reform debate that could be updated with each twist and turn, adding profiles of the players, daily news updates, legislative summaries, and more as the story developed. Imagine if buying a book was less a purchase of a contained story and more a statement of desire — “I’m interested in this subject and I want to have all the important news and analysis about it delivered to me, in the place I’m used to reading.”

“Publishing” is becoming a convergence of technologies and workflows.

As Apple showed off the process of making ebooks with iBooks Author, what stood out for me is how much it draws on all the disparate workflows that you could lump under “publishing.” There was a bit drawn from word processing, a little from layout design, some from presentation-building, a touch of web-page building, and even a little drawn from app development. (The preview-on-an-attached-iPad comes straight from Xcode, the app you use to build iPhone, iPad, and Mac native apps.) And of course, I haven’t even mentioned all the (important, duh) work that happens before iBooks Author gets launched — namely writing and editing.
It’s a mish-mash of styles. It looks, at very first glance, that iBooks Author does a good job of making it all user friendly, but it’s a reminder that “publishing,” as an act and as a field, pulls together a full liberal-arts curriculum’s worth of skills. Those whose abilities cover a wider range of those skills will do well; those who stick to one part of the process had better be really good at it.

Desktops and laptops are out of style.

There’s no reason, technically, why there couldn’t be a version of iBooks for the Mac. (Or the PC, for that matter.) But Apple has stuck to its guns: Reading iBooks is something you do on your iPhone or your iPad, not a desktop or laptop computer. (And today’s presentation went even narrower, focusing squarely on the iPad. For people who think a tablet would duplicate the kind of work they can already do their MacBook, today should help nail home the differentiation.)
I can’t imagine news organizations need any further evidence that reading is going to keep moving from big screens to smaller ones, from stationary to mobile. But judging by a lot of news sites’ abysmal mobile experiences, maybe they do. So here’s one more data point: Apple’s investing big in a creating a new kind of reading experience for a new kind of content, and they’re completely ignoring every desktop and laptop computer in the universe.

The newsonomics of signature content

Posted: 19 Jan 2012 07:00 AM PST

What’s your signature content?
Quick: If somebody buttonholed you in an elevator, a school play, or a bar, and said, “Why should I pay you for that?” — what do you tell them?
Each passing week, it seems we’re further into the age of signature content. That only makes sense: If the death of distance is now old news, if everything is available everywhere at the touch of button or the swipe of a finger, then what makes any news or entertainment brand stand out amid this plague of plenty?

Closed systems — from three or four TV networks to less than a dozen big movie studios to a half-dozen major magazine publishers to geographically dominant newspapers — made signature content less important. Sure, big shows and big names have always driven media to some extent, but now, media without big names or big shows are going to get lost in the ether. Take Hulu’s announcement last week about Hulu Originals. You do have to wonder if Hulu’s fictional 13-episode “Battleground,” about a dysfunctional political campaign, will be bested by the Republican reality show in progress when the show debuts next month. Hulu is also bringing a Morgan Spurlock series for a second run, and probably will feature one other new program. The Hulu announcement joins Netflix’s own foray into signature content. Three years ago, would the thought of Netflix signing up Little Steven to do an original comedy series have crossed anyone’s imagination?
Hulu and Netflix both need to distinguish themselves in the market — not only from each other, but from Comcast, DirecTV, and Time Warner, among others. They need to buy protection as supposed masses consider cutting the cord on packaged services, Roku-ing and Apple-enabling Internet video onto their living-room screens. In movies and TV, we’re quickly morphing from a world of news and entertainment anywhere — get all of these things, somewhat haphazardly (Comcast Xfinity, for instance) on all of our devices — to one in which consumers ask, “What special do you have for me, in addition to my all access? Yes, All-Access, the cool feature of 2011, will quickly graduate from a wow to an expectation.
Why as consumers should we pay $7.99 (down from an initial $9.99) to Hulu Plus, when the same stuff (kinda sorta) is available through Boxee, or Apple TV, or Netflix, if I can find it? Why am I paying $7.99 a month (apparently the magic price of the moment) to Netflix for a catalog of films that is both voluminous and too often lacking what I want? Consumers are going to be asking that question a lot more.
Publishers, distributors, aggregators, and networks all want more money, and they’ve seen — courtesy of tablets and All-Access — that consumers are now more ready to pay for digital content than ever before.
Forget “content wants to be free.” Now content wants a fee. And everyone from Time Inc to The New York Times to the Memphis Commercial Appeal to Hulu’s co-owners (Fox, Disney, and Comcast) see gold. They see another digital revenue stream, in addition to advertising or to cable subscription fees. Yet they are increasingly believing they’ve got to up the ante (and Hulu is raising new funds to buy original programming) to compete and to win those consumer dollars.
News companies — at least one in ten U.S. daily newspapers and many consumer magazines — are rapidly embracing digital circulation revenue and All-Access. Yet results have been quite uneven. That makes sense: Consumers will pay for digital news, feature, and entertainment content, but they don’t want to overpay, and they’ll increasingly be forced to make choices. Buy this; let that go.
Let’s be clear. Paid media is paid media, and the original-programming pushes of the video companies have great meaning for news and magazine companies, global to local. For them, the calculus is similar. News and magazine brands can launch new products, though that’s out-of-their-DNA-tough for many. So they’ve focused primarily on sub-brands, many of which are people. These are the faces of news and magazines; many of these have become hot commodities over the last several years (“The newsonomics of journalistic star power“) as companies try to distinguish themselves — and give readers and viewers a reason to pick them out of the crowd.
How, though, can media companies afford to pay a premium for branded, promotable talent, talent that may open consumers’ pocketbooks? That’s easy: spend less on other content. So we’ve got the rise of user-generated content, obtainable free or cheap, and all kinds of new syndicate action from Demand Media to startup Ebyline (and maybe NewsRight), all trying to make it cheap and easy to get more medium- and higher-quality content more cheaply. What’s old is new again — as a young features editor, I got regular visits from syndicate and wire salesman, ranging from high-quality to the Copley News Service, that sold its stuff by the pound.
Another prominent model no news or magazine company can afford to ignore: The Huffington Post. Back to the early days when Betsy Morgan first teamed up with Arianna, HuffPost has worked this evolving content pyramid. At the top, a few highly paid site faces, many opinionated faces (some paid, most not), and then low-cost aggregation, much of it AP, headlined with the site’s recognizable swagger.
Then, of course, there’s the old standby: staff cutting. We’ve seen lots of staff cutting. In fact, these days, while we see some announcements like Media General’s big Tampa cut, most of the bloodletting is less public, but no less real. If you need to pay more to stars, and ad revenues are still declining, staff cuts of less than premium content (and those that produce it) make economic sense (“The newsonomics of the new news cost pyramid“). It’s the new news math.
These newsonomics of signature content are getting clearer. Netflix is planning to spend 5 percent of its expenses — or $100 million a year — on original, Netflix-defining content. Hulu is spending about a quarter what Netflix’s total, or $500 million in total, on all content licensing this year. We don’t know how much of that is for original content, but observers believe “Battleground” will cost $15-20 million for its 13 episodes. With its other forays, it will probably spend closer to 10 percent of its content budget on original content.
Curiously, many newspaper newsrooms constitute only 10-20 percent of the overall expenses of a daily newspaper company. So we’re starting to see some new, and old, arithmetic play out here.
Simply, Andy Forssell, Hulu’s SVP of content, explained the cost/benefit ratio to Variety: “…having an original scripted series that hasn’t been seen anywhere else yet is considered the best tool for standing out with either advertisers or viewers.”
As usual, we see the bifurcation of the bigger national brands — those with more audience to gain and more money to spend — and local news brands. While many local newspapers have cut to the bone, with too much of the tissue in the form of experienced, name-brand metro and sports columnists cajoled or drummed into “early retirement,” we see increased branding of stars at places like Time, The New York Times, Fox News, and ESPN. The sports network may be the classic business model of our age, and in its anchors and top analysts — many initially lured from daily newspapers — it has shown the way for many years now.
At the Times, consider business editor Larry Ingrassia’s build-up of business columnists, from veterans Gretchen Morgenson and Floyd Norris to new(er)bies Andrew Ross Sorkin, Brian Stelter, David Carr, Ron Lieber, and David Pogue. And the Times more recently picked up James Stewart from archrival Dow Jones.
At Fox News, Roger Ailes has cannily built the most successful cable news operation not on the interchangeable blondes that provide so much fodder for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, but on O’Reilly and Hannity.
At NBC, the news franchise is so built around Brian Williams that his well received newsmagazine “Rock Center with Brian Williams” is synonymous with its host.
At Time Warner’s CNN and Time, we see the building of a worldly franchise on Fareed Zakaria’s clear-eyed, no-nonsense view of our times.
And then there’s the more local and regional press. Newspapers have long believed that it wasn’t any one or a half-dozen names that sold the paper. They’ve believed the news itself was the star, and the daily information report was the brand. That may be still be true of the Times, the Journal, the Financial Times, the Guardian, and a handful of other national/global news organizations — all of which have substantial, multi-hundred newsrooms that produce branded, unique products. It’s less true of regional and local dailies, many of which still present too much commoditized news in national, business, entertainment, and sports coverage, and have bid goodbye to many faces familiar to readers. Those that have retained familiar faces must do what they can to keep them; all need to recruiting more.
Then they may have a good answer to the question, in one form or another, consumers and advertisers will increasingly ask: What’s your signature content?

Kamis, 19 Januari 2012

Why Boston.com got into the sports tickets business

Nieman Journalism Lab

Why Boston.com got into the sports tickets business

Posted: 18 Jan 2012 08:30 AM PST

When BostonGlobe.com was split off from Boston.com last fall, the most obvious new revenue source was the newspaper site’s new paywall. BostonGlobe.com, the new, handsome, straight-laced sibling, got all the attention and the accolades not just because of its design, but also because it promised to bring in new money.
Well, though perhaps to less fanfare, so will Boston.com. With its new distance from the newspaper brand, Boston.com is investing in e-commerce as a money driver, notably with its recently launched Boston.com Tickets, which sells tickets to Boston sporting events, even directly from a game preview story. From reading about Sunday’s Patriots-Ravens game to buying a ticket is now just a click. (Two seats on the 30-yard line, just $595 a piece!) The actual ticket vending is handled by Ace Ticket; Boston.com will get a cut of the sales.
The arrangement might cause moderate-to-intense eyebrow-raising among some journalists, who’d argue that a news site shouldn’t be helping sell tickets to games they cover. A number of other newspaper sites have a similar arrangement — here’s the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel selling Brewers tickets, and here’s the San Francisco Chronicle selling Warriors tickets. But many papers link out to a ticket-vending partner rather than sell them under their own brand.
But what’s interesting about Boston.com’s approach is that it’s enabled in part by the separation of the newspaper brand. Making BostonGlobe.com the primary home for newspaper-style journalism and reporting has left Boston.com to further explore its role as a pageview-hungry website — one that can try out revenue ideas that some newspaper brands might not be okay with, just as it presents a mix of content that wouldn’t be a perfect fit for the more serious BostonGlobe.com.
When I talked to Jeff Moriarty, vice president of digital products for the Globe, he said the bifurcation of the sites has created two new, distinct properties. “Boston.com is more about fun, practical information. Finding a car, finding a home, finding something to do,” he told me. “The Globe is journalism and what is going on in Boston from a journalistic perspective.”
Which is not to say that Boston.com is going to drop its ethics off in a dumpster. Moriarty told me one of the areas they struggled with was the placement and branding of the ticket service. While they didn’t want it to blur the line between commerce and journalism, the goal, he said, was to make it clear to people they could buy tickets they’re reading about. “It’s really about surfacing tickets that are valuable tonight, or the game that you’re looking at,” he said.
Even before the spin-off last fall, Boston.com was a prime example of the idea of news site as information portal, a place where newspaper stories mingled with entertainment listings, local services, and other information. Now Boston.com is doubling down on that idea, not just through the tickets service, but also through their Groupon-esque offering Boston Deals, as well as an integration with Open Table to make restaurant reservations (see page bottom).
Chris Rattey, Boston.com’s director of product development, said creating the ticketing feature was a collaborative effort, not just with Ace, but within the Globe, as the editorial, advertising, and digital side all played a part in developing it. In order to figure out how they could best implement a ticket system, Rattey’s team got access to an API from Ace that allowed them to query different types of data from the ticket broker. That was important, he said, because in order for the system to be valuable to readers, they had to figure out what the most important information to display. Moriarty said they’re still experimenting with the system to see what people respond to, including A/B testing to see what drives clicks to the tickets feature and what actually converts sales.
But that may just be finesse to a certain degree, since selling sports tickets in Boston isn’t exactly tricky. In the last 10 years, the city’s seen a Stanley Cup, a Larry O’Brien trophy, a couple World Series wins, three Super Bowl victories, and a current run at another Lombardi trophy. The obsessive fan base here eats up sports coverage and snaps up tickets as soon as they go on sale. (I’ve seen the lines when Sox tickets go on sale. The word interminable comes to mind.) Coverage of the local teams drives consistent traffic to Boston.com, so it makes sense to add tickets to the site, Moriarty said. Sports is just a part of life, and, naturally, so are tickets. “It’s like the currency of Boston,” Moriarty joked.

Digging deeper into The New York Times’ fact-checking faux pas

Posted: 18 Jan 2012 07:00 AM PST

Once in a while the cultural fault lines in American journalism come into unexpectedly sharp relief. Jon Stewart’s now-legendary star turn on “Crossfire” was one of those moments; the uproar over NPR’s refusal (along with most major news outlets) to call waterboarding torture was another. The New York Times may have added another clash to this canon with public editor Arthur Brisbane’s blog post on fact-checking last week.
For anyone who missed it (or the ensuing analysis, rounded up here) the exchange can be summed up in two lines of dialogue:

Times to Internet: Should we fact-check the things politicians say?
Internet to Times: Are you freakin’ kidding?

That was an actual response, and a popular refrain: More than a dozen comments included some variant of, “This is a joke, right?” Several readers compared the column to an Onion piece. By far the most common reaction, which shows up in scores of comments, was to express dismay at the question or to say it captures the abysmal state of journalism today. A typical example, from “Fed Up” in Brooklyn: “The fact that this is even a question shows us how far mainstream journalism has fallen.”
The stunning unanimity of reader responses was undoubtedly the big story, as the news intelligentsia pointed out right away. It underscores the yawning gulf that separates professional reporters’ and everyday readers’ basic understandings of what journalism is supposed to do. Of the 265 comments logged in the three hours before the Times turned off commenting, exactly two (discounting obvious sarcasm) disagreed with the proposition that reporters should challenge suspect claims made by politicians. (More on the dissenters, below.) Brisbane’s follow-up, suggesting many readers had missed the nuance by assuming the question was just whether the paper should “check facts and print the truth,” seems off base. A few may have made that mistake, but most clearly have in mind what is sometimes called “political fact-checking” — calling out distortions in political speech.
If anything, reading through the comments what’s striking is the robust and stable critical vocabulary readers share for talking about the failings of conventional journalism. More than a dozen take issue with the definition of journalistic objectivity implied by Brisbane’s wondering whether reporting that calls out untruths can also be “objective and fair.” As a reader from Chicago wrote,

I see this formulation as a problem. Objective sometimes isn’t fair. Some of the people reported on are objectively less truthful, less forthcoming, and less believable than others.

False “balance” in the news is a common trope in the comments, which readers refer to both directly (at least eight times) and via now-standard illustrations of “he said/she said” reporting, like the climate-change debate (brought up by five readers) or the parodic headline “Shape of the Earth? Views differ” (mentioned by another nine). Journalism-as-stenography also comes up frequently — at least 20 of the responses make the comparison specifically, while 16 declare that the Times may as well run press releases if it isn’t going to challenge political claims.

The disconnect between reporters and readers, and the paradox at the center of “objective” journalism, comes through most clearly in Brisbane’s rendering of the division of labor between the news and opinion pages. Pointing to a column in which Paul Krugman debunked Mitt Romney’s claim that the President travels the globe “apologizing for America,” Brisbane explains that,

As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news reporters do the same?

To anyone not steeped in the codes and practices of professional journalism, this sounds pretty odd: Testing facts is the province of opinion writers? What happens in the rest of the paper? As JohnInArizona commented,

Mr. Brisbane’s view of the job of op-ed columnist vs that of reporters seems skewed.
It is the job of columnist to present opinion and viewpoint, and to persuade. It is the job of reporters to present facts, as best as they can determine them.
As others have pointed out, uncritically reprinting politicians’ statements is not what a good reporter, or a good newspaper, should be doing. There is no choosing between competing facts — a statement is factual, or is not…

Journalism has a ready response for this line of critique: The truth is not always black and white, and reporters run the risk of “imposing their judgement on what is false and what is true” (Brisbane’s phrase) by weighing in on factual questions more complicated than the shape of the earth. Politicians are expert in misleading without lying, and people may genuinely disagree about what the facts are — based on different notions of what constitutes a presidential apology, for instance.
Even in these cases though, a reporter can add context to help readers assess a claim. Brisbane himself suggests that,

Perhaps the next time Mr. Romney says the President has a habit of apologizing for his country, the reporter should insert a paragraph saying, more or less: “The president has never used the word ‘apologize’ in a speech about U.S. policy or history. Any assertion that he has apologized for U.S. actions rests on a misleading interpretation of the president’s words.”

A few readers responded that the second sentence is superfluous. Several others suggested doing additional reporting around the question, along these lines: “A real reporter might try to find those speeches. A real reporter might request that the Romney campaign provide examples of times where Obama has apologized for America…”
That sort of reporting is exactly what fact-checkers at PolitiFact and the Washington Post did to refute the claim, reconstructing the “apology tour” meme as developed in various Republican documents (Romney’s 2010 book “No Apology,” a Karl Rove op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, a Heritage Foundation report, etc.) and digging into the actual text of Obama’s speeches as well as comparable ones by previous presidents. PolitiFact went so far as to interview several experts on diplomacy and political apologies. Reading the public editor’s letter, though, you’d have no idea that the key example he uses to illustrate his column already has been checked and found wanting.
More to the point, you’d have no clue about what AJR has called the “fact-checking explosion” in American journalism — a movement that is at least a decade old (the short-lived Spinsanity launched in 2001, followed by FactCheck.org in 2003) and now spans dedicated fact-checking groups as well as newspapers, TV networks, radio outlets, and even journalism schools. (Full disclosure: I’m writing a dissertation, and eventually a book, about this movement.) Fact-checking has been very much in the ether lately, with news gurus weighing in on the limits of this kind of journalism, especially during the controversy over PolitiFact’s latest “Lie of the Year” selection.
The fact-checking movement is part of a larger ongoing conversation about journalistic objectivity that began with the news media’s failures in the lead-up to the Iraq war. (See Brent Cunningham’s “Rethinking Objectivity,” Jay Rosen’s “The View from Nowhere,” Michael Massing’s “Now they Tell Us.”) Most fact-checking groups don’t spend a lot of time tweaking their peers in the press, even though the claims they check usually go unchallenged in news accounts. But they don’t have to — their entire project is a critique of mainstream journalism, a self-conscious experiment in “rethinking objectivity.”
That sense of mission — of fact-checking as a kind of reform movement — is unmistakable when fact-checkers get together, as at a New America Foundation conference on the subject last December, and one at CUNY the month before. (Here’s a write-up of the two conferences.) In a report written for the New America meeting, the Post’s original “Fact-Checker” columnist, Michael Dobbs, placed fact-checking in a long tradition of “truth-seeking” journalism that rejects the false balance practiced by political reporters today. (Three reports from that conference will be published over the next month.)
From the precincts of this emerging reformist consensus, Brisbane’s column seemed surprisingly out of touch. Still, the public editor raises questions that haven’t been answered very well in the conversation about fact-checking. It’s easy to declare, as Brook Gladstone did in a 2008 interview with Bill Moyers, that reporters should “Fact check incessantly. Whenever a false assertion is asserted, it has to be corrected in the same paragraph, not in a box of analysis on the side.” (I agree.) But why, exactly, don’t they do that today? Why has fact-checking evolved into a specialized form of journalism relegated to a sidebar or a separate site? Are there any good reasons for it to stay that way?

Answering those questions has to begin with a better understanding of why so many traditional “objective” journalists are wary of the fact-checking upstarts. Michael Schudson, a historian of journalism (and my graduate-school advisor), has written that the “objectivity norm guides journalists to separate facts from values, and report only the facts.” In practice, though, the aversion to values becomes an aversion to evaluation. Hence the traditional rule against “drawing conclusions” (discussed here) in news reports. Brisbane doesn’t flesh out this rationale, but one of his readers captured it perfectly, and is worth quoting at length:

I cannot claim to be a regular reader of the New York Times, and I cannot claim to have ever been to journalism school. Finally, I also cannot claim to know what “the truth” is. I do not understand why so many readers are presenting such unequivocal opinions as commentary here.
If a candidate for US president says something — anything — I would like to know what he or she said. That’s reporting, and that’s “the truth” in reporting: a presentation of the facts, as objectively as possible.
Whether a candidate was coy about something, exaggerating something else, using misleading language, leaving something out of his or her public statements… all of these things are analysis. …
Finally, it is the responsibility of the reader, of the informed citizen, to take all of this in and think for himself or herself, to decide where he or she stands on issues, on phenomena in society. Neither the New York Times nor any other newspaper ought to have the privilege of taking that final step for anyone.

This reads like a more thoughtful version of David Gregory’s infamous response when asked why he doesn’t fact-check his on-air guests: “People can fact-check ‘Meet the Press’ every week on their own terms.” It rests on the concern — elaborated in this Politico post and in a Journal editorial — that fact-checking tends to shade into opinion, glossing over genuine differences in political ideology. The WSJ decried a “journalistic trend that seeks to recast all political debates as matters of lies, misinformation and ‘facts,’ rather than differences of world view or principles.”
The only problem with the “don’t draw conclusions” standard is that reporters draw conclusions all of the time, and now more than ever. The decades-long trend toward more analytical reporting, probably self-evident to any news junkie, has been thoroughly documented by communications scholars (who, following Kevin Barnhurst, sometimes call this “the new long journalism” or the “decline of event-centered reporting.”) Reporters are of course especially comfortable drawing conclusions about political strategy, liberally dispensing their analysis of what a candidate or officeholder hopes to gain from particular “messaging” and whether the strategy is like to work.
So objective journalism applies the ban on drawing conclusion very selectively. What seems to make reporters uncomfortable is not analysis per se but criticism, especially criticism that can be seen as taking sides on a controversial question — which they will avoid even at the risk of profound inconsistency. Here’s Bill Keller’s much-ridiculed rationale (quoted in a Media Decoder post) for refusing to describe waterboarding as torture in the pages of the Times, though the paper had often referred to it that way before the U.S. took up the practice:

When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves.

The result revealed the awkward gap between common sense and journalistic sense. Common sense says, if it was torture then, it’s torture now. Journalistic sense says, this is really controversial! It’s not our job to accuse a sitting president of authorizing an illegal global regime of torture! (Conversely, it was profoundly uncontroversial to apply the label to waterboarding in a country such as China. Journalists could do so unthinkingly.)
This political risk aversion is nothing new. One of the most cited pieces of research on journalism is Gaye Tuchman’s ethnographic look at the “strategic ritual” of objectivity as practiced in a newspaper newsroom in the 1960s. Tuchman stressed the essentially defensive nature of the claim to be objective, and of the reporting routines it produced. Her “newsmen” shied away from criticism of public figures or public policies — or found someone else to voice them — because they were deeply, institutionally afraid of drawing attacks or even lawsuits from the people they reported on. (They used the “news analysis” label to set off reports that were less “objective,” though Tuchman found reporters and editors could not supply a coherent rationale for distinguishing between the two kinds of stories.)
The new, professional fact-checkers are specialized in ways that mitigate (but don’t eliminate) these concerns. They dedicate pages to analyzing even a simple claim, showing all of their work, so that someone who dislikes the result might still agree it was reached fairly. Full-time fact-checkers don’t have to worry about losing “access” to a public figure, because they don’t rely on inside information. (For the same reason, fact-checkers don’t use anonymous sources.) And they obviously — to occasional criticism — make an effort to check politicians from both sides of the aisle.
And still, fact-checkers constantly come in for vehement attacks from political figures and from the reading public. It’d be hard to prove that this is more pronounced than what traditional news outlets weather; my anecdotal sense is that it might be. (They manage this feedback in interesting ways; for instance, neither FactCheck.org nor PolitiFact allow comments on the same page as their fact-checks, though they do often run selections from reader mail.) Without validating the view that “if everybody’s mad at us, we must be doing something right” — a journalistic reflex one also hears from fact-checkers — it has to be acknowledged that this is a deeply polarizing activity. Managing that polarization is part of what fact-checkers have to do in the effort to stay relevant and make a difference in public discourse.
The hope for building fact-checks into everyday news reports is that it would push political reporters to be more thoughtful and reflexive about their own work — to leave out quotable-but-dubious claims, to resist political conflict as the default frame, and in general to avoid the pat formulations that are so ably managed by political actors. But inevitably, all of us will be disappointed, even pissed off, by some of these routine fact-checks — and perhaps all the more so when they’re woven into the story itself.
To take Brisbane’s question seriously and think about how this might be put into practice, we have to consider how reporters will manage the new set of pressures this work will expose them to. And we have to confront the paradox that trying to create a platform for a more fact-based and reasonable public discourse may also, at the same time, promote further fragmentation and politicization of that discourse.

Lucas Graves is a PhD candidate in communications at Columbia University and a research fellow at the Media Policy Initiative of the New America Foundation.

YULI AHMADA

Rabu, 25 Januari 2012

The forgotten history of Access Atlanta

Nieman Journalism Lab

Sabtu, 21 Januari 2012

It doesn’t take Cupertino to make textbooks interactive

Nieman Journalism Lab

Jumat, 20 Januari 2012

The day the bookshelf shook

Nieman Journalism Lab

News organizations: Now’s the time to figure out how to jump on the ebook bandwagon.

“Book” content can be episodic too.

“Publishing” is becoming a convergence of technologies and workflows.

Desktops and laptops are out of style.

Kamis, 19 Januari 2012

Why Boston.com got into the sports tickets business

Nieman Journalism Lab