Sabtu, 07 April 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

This Week in Review: The ethics of online reading’s middlemen, and News Corp.’s latest blow

Posted: 06 Apr 2012 07:00 AM PDT

Are read-it-later programs fair to publishers?: A brief controversy involving the offline reading app Readability brought to light some of the conflicts between publishers and those who present their content this week. It started last Friday, when Andy Faust of AppAdvice noticed that when Readability presents an article that you’ve saved to read later, it gives it to you from its own servers, without any prominent links to the original source. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber picked up the story and called Readability “scumbags” who “steal page views,” later saying his problem with Readability was that it presented its arrangement with publishers in dishonest terms. ReadWriteWeb’s Jon Mitchell chimed in to warn that Readability and other apps like it are walking a fine line between useful tool and unfair middleman.

One of the larger underlying issues to this fight is nature of Readability’s model — as Mitchell explained, it’s free with an optional paid version, and it distributes a portion of the revenues proportionally among the publishers whose articles are saved, but only if they sign up to receive it. Make sense? Good.

Readability responded to this criticism by adding direct links to the original publisher’s site and by reasserting the value of its financial model, particularly the fact that it pays some of the publishers of the content that gets shared on its apps. (This was something that online campaign organizer Clay Johnson also emphasized.) Anil Dash, a Readability adviser, offered a defense of the company, arguing that the tech world drags itself down with pointless inter-company squabbles, and tech pioneer Dave Winer also said the whole thing is being blown out of proportion. Tech writer Ben Brooks countered Dash by saying that the issues surrounding Readability are big ones, particularly what happens to its unclaimed money.

There were a few bigger-picture takes worth checking out on this issue. GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram wondered why publishers don’t take advantage of Readability’s program (or at least design a competitor), and ReadWriteWeb’s Mitchell wrote that while publishers shouldn’t be happy with Readability and Instapaper’s models, the primary onus is on them to give readers what they want: “If publishers want to stem the tide of impressions and money lost to read-later services, their sites need to not suck.” Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson made a similar point, saying that “this whole episode is a good reminder that the problems of the publishing industry haven't gone away just because the world has gone digital. In fact, personal archiving is an example of a way it's gotten worse.”

News Corp. takes another hit: As News Corp.’s phone-hacking scandal shifts toward bribery and, most recently, satellite piracy, Capital New York’s Tom McGeveran explained what this new scandal is and why it may be more damaging than the original one. Meanwhile, the News Corp. empire suffered another blow, as Rupert Murdoch’s son, James, resigned as chairman of BSkyB, the company’s largest broadcasting arm, just six weeks after he did the same thing with its British newspaper division, News International.

Several journalists helped us understand what the move means: NPR’s David Folkenflik highlighted the importance of BSkyB to the Murdoch empire, and the Guardian’s Dan Sabbagh explained that News Corp. is doing everything it can to keep BSkyB immune from its scandals. The BBC’s Robert Peston said James Murdoch’s resignation was voluntary and wasn’t prompted by the upcoming government report on the phone-hacking scandal, and Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff gave the backstory of the politics between Rupert and James Murdoch.

Elsewhere, a group of investors filed a formal call to replace Rupert Murdoch as News Corp. chairman with an independent official, and it appears as though Rupert and James will be called to testify before the hacking scandal inquiry in the next few weeks. In the Guardian, Michael Wolff decried the American media’s apathy toward the scandals, and in an interesting tangential story, the document annotation and sharing site DocumentCloud took down the documents that broke the satellite piracy scandal because of a legal threat.

Philly papers’ startling price drop: Two of America’s iconic newspapers were sold again this week, and for many observers, it was a reminder of how far the industry has fallen. The Philadelphia Media Network, which publishes the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, and their shared website Philly.com, was sold for the fourth time in six years to a small group of investors that includes a few prominent local political figures.

The group had most prominently included former Philadelphia mayor and Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, but he backed off after many people (including inside the papers’ newsrooms) voiced concern about possible political meddling. The Inquirer has the most comprehensive story on the sale, in which the new owners said they don’t want to run the papers, but simply want to preserve them for the community’s benefit. The new owners also voiced to Poynter their commitment to invest more money into the paper, met with employees to try to reassure them, and brought back former editor Bill Marimow, who is known for his commitment to investigative journalism.

What got most people’s attention, though, was the price — $55 million. That’s barely 10 percent of the papers’ 2006 sale price, and the same price they were sold for in 1969. Both media analyst Alan Mutter and Forbes’ Brian Solomon remarked on the massive loss in value and detailed what went wrong.

Darts and laurels in Trayvon Martin coverage: A few notes on the ongoing story of Trayvon Martin’s killing: Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released a report on how traditional media and social media have looked at the story, and it had a few interesting takeaways. First, the story didn’t hit the public consciousness until a couple of weeks after the incident — but when it did, it blew up almost immediately. Second, blogs focused on racial aspects of the story, while Twitter was dominated by outrage at Zimmerman, and cable news and talk radio were focused on gun control and legal issues. And finally, there’s been a great disparity in the amount of coverage among the cable channels — tons on MSNBC, some on CNN, and much less on Fox News.

The New York Times’ David Carr lamented the sorry state of discourse surrounding the story, asking, “What happened to the village common, a place where we all meet with different opinions but the same set of facts? It seems to have gone missing.” The Atlantic’s Elspeth Reeve pushed back against his complaints. Meanwhile, the Columbia Journalism Review published a remarkably comprehensive guide to the best journalism on the case, and critiqued the Orlando Sentinel’s coverage.

Reading roundup: There’s loads and loads of other stuff worth keeping up on this week, so I’ll try to go through it as quickly as possible:

— Less than a year into their relationship, the liberal cable channel Current TV fired former MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann late last week. Here’s Olbermann’s response, the emails that led up to the decision, and David Carr’s explanation of why Olbermann will get hired again by someone.

— A couple of interesting studies, one on the production end and one on the consumption end: The American Society of News Editors released its annual survey of newsroom employment, and Poynter and Alan Mutter put the numbers in context regarding diversity and newsroom contraction, respectively. The other was a Pew study on e-reading, helpfully interpreted by Amy Gahran at CNN and Megan Garber of The Atlantic.

— Two interesting entries in Findings’ series on the future of reading: Wired columnist Clive Thompson, who generated smart responses from Robin Sloan and GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram, and NYU prof Clay Shirky, who also spoke with the Guardian about open journalism last weekend in a video that’s now up in snippets and in full.

— One of the leading groups representing the magazine industry announced guidelines for collecting user data on tablets. Here are the reports on the new standards from The New York Times and Adweek. And the American Journalism Review ran a feature on tablets as the big second chance for news orgs that have blown the transition to digital media.

— A few particularly helpful resources this week: At PBS MediaShift, Josh Stearns has written two parts of a guide to news media collaboration, and Journalism.co.uk has a great how-to on verifying information from social media.

— And two longer pieces to ponder: A Lab article highlighting a new paper identifying 27 computing concepts that could apply to journalism, and an engrossing interview by The Verge of The New York Times’ David Carr. Both are well worth your time this weekend.

Inquirer photo by Kathy Dempsey used under a Creative Commons license.
di

Jumat, 06 April 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

OC Register assigns 70 reporters to cover one baseball game

Posted: 05 Apr 2012 12:30 PM PDT

Usually, when the majority of reporters in a newsroom rallies around coverage of a single story or event — floods the zone, you might say — something really big is breaking. Maybe a mass shooting, a tsunami, or a terrorist attack.

Or, if you happen to work for the Orange County Register, it’s opening day for the Los Angeles Angels — April 6, 2012 — and you’re part of the newspaper’s first official “news mob.”

Ever since the Angels signed star first baseman Albert Pujols and pitcher C.J. Wilson, fans had been going nuts with anticipation for the 2012 season. The growing excitement gave the paper’s Angels editor, Keith Sharon, what he called a “crazy idea.”

“They’ve never been so excited,” Sharon told me. “Given that atmosphere, I wanted to match the intensity and the enthusiasm of the fans somehow. I like flash mobs, I like cash mobs, and what I’ve been telling people is this is an overwhelming choreographed allocation of news resources. I want everybody who sees our website, our print product, our iPad product, our mobile device product to think: ‘They thought of everything. I mean everything.’”

So what exactly does an Angels news mob cover?

A real estate reporter is doing a story about how property values around Angel Stadium have gone up. A business reporter talked to the manufacturer of Angels bobbleheads. A technology reporter interviewed the person who picks the songs and video clips that run during the game. The person who usually covers celebrity gossip filed a story about the 1870s-era baseball cards that are in a Library of Congress collection. One reporter is writing a story about an Angels fan who plans to propose to his girlfriend at the opening-night game.

“We’ll have a photographer lurking around this guy,” Sharon said. “He’s going to unveil a shirt that says ‘she said yes.’ She better say yes!”

Sharon says there’s at least one “controversial” story in the mix. It’s about people who “don’t necessarily like the Angels,” and the staffer who wrote it is (gasp) a Dodgers fan.

Reporters are being encouraged to find stories that aren’t regularly on their beats, to take stylistic risks that normally wouldn’t fly, and generally to get outside of their comfort zones. The message Sharon says he emphasized most: “Break out of what you normally do, and it’s okay to try something that you didn’t think you could before.” There will be stadium food reviews, photos from the best sports bars, and an analysis of the song that plays during the seventh-inning stretch:

As of Thursday morning, Sharon already had 48 Angels-related stories on his desk.

“Once people heard that we were doing this news mob thing, people came out of the woodwork to help,” Sharon said.

That includes the fans. Sharon says they newspaper is amassing a huge database of photos and stories from citizens sharing their memories about the Angels. These photos will be online and scrolled across the bottom of every page of the print newspaper. Of the newspaper’s 100 or so reporters, Sharon says about 70 are involved in the news mob. Their assignment on opening day: omnipresence. “We’ve got someone in the parking lot, reporters in the sports bar, reporters at a memorabilia show where former Angels will be signing autographs, a reporter in the stands, a reporter in the pressbox, a reporter in the radio station, we’ve got a reporter with the guy who’s gonna propose, we’ve got a reporter [standing next to the person] holding the flag in center field,” Sharon said. “We want everyone to see that we are everywhere. Everywhere you look, we’ll be.”

No, they won’t be wearing OC Register T-shirts — branding opportunity missed! — so you’ll have to look for press passes around their necks instead. And if you’re thinking it’s the perfect day to send out that embarrassing press release in Orange County, not so fast. Sharon says there are reporters in place to cover “anything that happens” on beats like crime, city government, courts, and so on.

Fine — but all those resources for opening day? Something that happens, er, every year around this time? Game 1 of 162?

Sharon says the editorial process that led to a baseball-obsessed news mob could be translated to coverage of other events down the road. “We thought about that, and we discussed it many times,” Sharon said. “Just like how the space program gave us Tang, we hope there are these residual benefits. A news mob for the first day of school. We might be able to use the same approach for covering the Oscars next year, or election day next year. Can we translate this kind of reporting to other big events? We think the answer will be yes.”

And in an era where one of metro dailies’ top remaining assets is the sheer size of their newsrooms — shrunken from their peaks, but still larger than the local competition — it might make sense to flex that muscle now and again.

Track the news mob’s action on opening day via the OC Register website, and Sharon’s Twitter account.

Photo of Los Angeles Angels pitcher Hisanori Takahashi by Keith Allison used under a Creative Commons license.

Wait — so how many newspapers have paywalls?

Posted: 05 Apr 2012 10:00 AM PDT

It can be hard to measure something that keeps growing.

Just over two weeks ago, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism reported that there are roughly 150 dailies in the United States that now have some form of digital subscription service. “Dozens more papers are likely to follow in 2012,” the study’s authors wrote.

Fast forward to Wednesday, and here’s the headline attached to an AP story in the Washington Post: “Nearly 300 US newspapers now charging for access on websites, smartphones and tablets.”

I had heard about the Lansing State Journal (Go Green!) announcing its paywall the other day — but did the number of dailies with paywalls really double in a matter of weeks?

It depends on who you ask and how you count.

Most of the papers AP is counting are clients of Press+, which announced in a press release that 323 publications now use its services to “launch paid models.” But those aren’t all newspapers, or in the United States.

“Press+ also does college publications, magazines, trade pubs, things like that,” said Chuck Moozakis, editor-in-chief at News & Tech, which produced the numbers Pew cited. Press+ also works with non-daily newspapers.

Press+ spokeswoman Cindy Rosenthal says that, if you take out the weeklies, magazines, international newspapers, and others, the right number for their platform is around 250 — that’s U.S. dailies who use the company’s platform for digital subscriptions. She couldn’t give an exact figure, and Press+ keeps confidential its list of clients, which makes comparing their count to others’ difficult. But she noted the number continues to grow.

By Moozakis’ count — he updated it just a few days ago — the number of U.S. dailies with digital subscription services is hovering around 160. And the Newspaper Association of America‘s most recent data (from mid-February) finds about 110 daily newspapers in the U.S. have paywalls.

One thing seems clear: The number of newspapers that are putting up paywalls is on the rise. Between newspapers owned by Lee Enterprises Inc., and Gannett, Moozakis estimates about 110 new paywalls in the nearish future.

“Other publishers like McClatchy, which at this point only has one paper with a paywall, you gotta figure they’re going to be jumping on this,” he said. Tribune is the “wild card.” Even the company’s home page has dueling perspectives under the subheads “Old Media is Dead” and “Long Live Old Media.”

Turns out the lesson here is one we keep learning again and again: The news business is changing, and it’s changing fast.

A new framework for innovation in journalism: How a computer scientist would do it

Posted: 05 Apr 2012 09:00 AM PDT

Man reading a newspaper next to man reading news on a Kindle

What if journalism were invented today? How would a computer scientist go about building it, improving it, iterating it?

He might start by mapping out some fundamental questions: What are the project’s values and goals? What consumer needs would it satisfy? How much should be automated, how much human-powered? How could it be designed to be as efficient as possible?

Computer science Ph.D. Nick Diakopoulos has attempted to create a new framework for innovation in journalism. His new white paper, commissioned by CUNY’s Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, does not provide answers so much as a different way to come up with questions.

“News organizations still think too incrementally. … They need to break the form of news — the article as their atomic unit.”

Diakopolous identified 27 computing concepts that could apply to journalism — think natural language processing, machine learning, game engines, virtual reality, information visualization — and pored over thousands of research papers to determine which topics get the most (and least) attention. (There are untapped opportunities in robotics, augmented reality, and motion capture, it turns out.)

He thinks computer science and journalism have a lot in common, actually. They are both fundamentally concerned with information. Acquiring it, storing it, modifying it, presenting it.

“The goal is really about making innovation in journalism more technologically literate and aware,” Diakopolous told me. The obstacles to progress in news organizations are probably cultural — “not having come from a user-centered design culture,” he said, “where design thinking is important or…you really think about people’s needs or values.”

Diakopolous deconstructs the newsgathering process to help identify which parts can be better handled by computers than humans. (Rest assured, humans: “It's unlikely in the near-term that automated systems will fully replace people,” he concludes, “but there are many opportunities for using technology to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of these processes.”)

The most practicable takeaway is Diakopolous’ final exercise, a real-life series of brainstorms he conducted with CUNY students and practitioners. He created a card-based game to encourage rapid and frictionless ideation. In three five-minute rounds, five groups generated 54 ideas. About a quarter of them were not half bad, he said. (Some are listed at the bottom of this post.)

News executives should be hiring scientists. They should be testing the limits of what's practical.

The Tow-Knight Center will distribute this game — free — to j-schools and media companies, said Jeff Jarvis, who runs the center. (You have to request one here.) Diakopolous has proposed bringing the game to this year’s Online News Association conference, and they’re asking for votes.

“I believe that news organizations still think too incrementally,” Jarvis wrote today. “They aren't being disruptive — even revolutionary — enough. They need to break the form of news — the article as their atomic unit — because they can. They need to imagine and experiment with new ways to serve their publics. They need to ask what business they are really in.”

News executives should be hiring scientists, Diakopolous said. They should be conducting all-staff brainstorms. They should be testing the limits of what’s practical and dreaming a little.

“An often-cited statistic from health care research is that it takes 17 years to take a research paper in medicine and have the results of that paper be translated into clinical practice,” Diakopolous told me. “Now I don’t know what the exact number is for computer science. It’s probably less than 17 years, but it might not be that much less. It still takes a long time for the cutting-edge, bleeding-edge ideas that are being published in research to make their way into practice.”

Part of his motivation for doing the research is to bring those two ends of the spectrum closer, to help journalists meet technologists halfway “and maybe bring down that period of transfer.”

The paper is high-concept but short, and everyone who wants to reinvent journalism should read it. (You might have to read it twice. Here’s a PDF version.) Breaking down the problems makes solutions a lot more attainable.

If you’re curious, Diakopolous provided me some of the ideas generated by CUNY students in his brainstorming sessions:

  • Allow witnesses to build crime re-enactments via an avatar system or 3D world
  • Use motion capture of activity recognition to try to recognize micro-expressions or other aspects of body language that might indicate lying
  • Detect the level of agitation within a crowd using activity recognition to give a metric of the "risk" at an event
  • Use machine translation to make information sharing across cultural lines easier, such as to mine public records in foreign countries
  • Use visualization to spur civic engagement by presenting a visual explanation and showing how the user fits in
  • Use a recommender engine to suggest clothing fashions based on people like you or in your neighborhood
  • The gamification of identifying whether an image has been Photoshopped or altered
  • A simulation to convey how a product was made (e.g., was it ethically sourced?)
  • A platform for people to upload photos and videos and let them mix and match their interpretations of a real event
  • A mobile app that alerts volunteers or citizen journalists when an incident or news event takes place near their location

Photo of old and new media by Gregory Gruber used under a Creative Commons license.
di

Kamis, 05 April 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

New high score: How the NYT created its “stupid game”

Posted: 04 Apr 2012 12:30 PM PDT

When Jon Huang was younger he was the type of kid who spent his time making mods for Duke Nukem 3D. So it makes a kind of sense he’s now turned The New York Times into its own kind of shoot ‘em up.

Huang was the multimedia producer behind the game embedded in the Times Magazine cover story on the addictive allure of “stupid games.” A reader stumbling on the story for the first time would see the video game feature at the top of the piece, be compelled to press the enter key, only to find they now have the ability to blast away various bits and elements of the story page itself. And it gets better: Your nondescript little ship can break outside the multimedia box and destroy all of the page, from the most-emailed stories (BOOM goes the DOWD!) to the navigational links and ads, right down to the “Inside NYTimes.com” promo. And, to the secret delight of editors everywhere, you can finally blast away commenters with impunity.

That surprise factor, mixed with the fact that it’s the Times having a little fun, has the Internet (or at least Planet Journalism in the Twitter universe) going bananas.

“I give all the credit to the guys behind Kick Ass. They’re a really excited pair of 18-year-old twins in Sweden,” Huang told me Wednesday. “I love that’s how the Internet works these days.”

Kick Ass is the open source game that made the Times’ interactive possible. It’s essentially a bookmarklet that allows you to wreak havoc on any given site you find yourself on. It was a perfect fit for the the theme of Sam Anderson’s Sunday magazine story, which examines the rise of games like Angry Birds, Plants vs. Zombies, and others that inhibit a world very different from what we might traditionally think of as regular video games.

Huang said they knew they wanted to create a game to go along with the story, specifically something that would surprise people by letting manipulate the story itself. The game is a part of the editorial message of the story. Want to know what it’s like to play a distracting, oddly addictive, and utterly unnecessary game? Try this one, Times reader. Huang said they knew they would have an audience that might not be familiar with the world of Bejeweled, Little Wings, or Words with Friends, so in order to entice them into the story, they’d offer up a game. “This is one of those rare circumstances where we can say we’re going to do something to let readers play the article and explain the journalism in a way,” Huang said.

In the discussions over the game they wanted to also draw inspiration from classic video games like Space Invaders, Tetris, and Breakout. Huang was a fan of the game from the Swedish sensations and began working to adapt its code for the Times. One of the biggest considerations was that they had to give readers instructions on how to play, and didn’t want to destroy the sharing tools and the text of the story itself. Beyond that, it was open ended.

“Originally we thought there would be a very strong push back and people would say this is not The New York Times,” he said. “But there’s been a lot of enthusiasm” — even from advertising, he told me. You would think of all the pixels involved on a web page, the advertising would be the last thing you would want to get rid of, especially in the journalism business. But Huang said the ad staff was on board, telling the multimedia team that if they couldn’t find cooperative clients they’d run house ads.

It would be hard to categorize Huang’s work at the multimedia desk: He’s now worked on interactives for everything from photo galleries of the war in Iraq to Kate Middleton’s dress to the Radiolab audio visualizer. Huang said multimedia features have become an integral part of the storytelling process at the Times, and as a result they’re often working with different departments, from the foreign desk to the dev team, at any given time. What makes all of that work, without stepping on toes or overreaching, Huang said, is the openness to experimentation.

In the case of Anderson’s magazine story, the game will likely be another element to help garner interest in the piece ahead of the Sunday paper. Of course, whether people are actually reading it or just trying to get a new high score while evaporating Google ads is another question. Huang said he expects most people will take the time to read the story, once they finally stop playing the game.

“We didn’t really think about that. Some people probably are just going to play,” he said. “But they may not be in the mood to read anyway.”

Still no cameras allowed, but Supreme Court coverage has changed more than you think

Posted: 04 Apr 2012 10:30 AM PDT

It’s tempting to look at the Supreme Court of the United States as frozen in time.

Cameras are still banned from recording proceedings, audio can’t be live streamed, and don’t even think about live tweeting from inside the courtroom (or across the hall). No question: The court is overdue to enable public access through the tools that have long since become standard in reporting the business of the government to the people. (C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb recently told me that he sees the Supreme Court as the “best example” of an area where improved public access is lagging and sorely needed.)

So in some ways, covering the Supreme Court today is not much different than it has ever been — even though justices did approve same-day publishing of audio from last week’s healthcare arguments due to “extraordinary public interest.”

New Yorker writer and CNN legal correspondent Jeffrey Toobin has covered SCOTUS for decades, and calls the court “unique among American institutions” for how little, from a technological standpoint, it has changed.

“I’m not going to shy away from reporting what I’m seeing, and what I’m seeing is a train wreck.”

“I don’t think it’s changed very much, I really don’t,” Toobin told me. “Because the language is so peculiar and because it’s not live, the audio doesn’t get a lot of play in the mainstream media, but the audio is the only technological change that I can recall other than the fact that people report things faster because you can just put stuff out on the web — but that’s not the court changing, that’s everything else changing.”

Those who cover the court have found plenty of ways to use “everything else” in innovative ways. In addition to a Supreme Court public affairs website that does “an excellent job within the limitations imposed on it,” Toobin points to SCOTUS Blog as a leader.

A specialized site finds a big audience

The site launched 10 years ago, and has covered the healthcare challenge since it was at the appellate level. It got nearly 1 million hits during last week’s oral arguments, according to site manager Kali Borkoski, but SCOTUS Blog started its comprehensive coverage of the challenge long before oral arguments began.

Following a potential case from the moment a petition is filed is part of SCOTUS Blog’s editorial strategy. Publisher Tom Goldstein selects petitions that he thinks have a good chance of being granted, and from there starts publishing stories and key documents — amicus briefs, analyses, transcripts from oral arguments, and so on. (Goldstein personally financed SCOTUS Blog until it scored sponsorship from Bloomberg Law last year, Borkoski says.)

“We try to have a complete database [for the cases and petitions that SCOTUS Blog tracks], which the court doesn’t have,” Borkoski said. “We follow [cases] basically from cradle to grave. Somebody files a petition and we start watching it. It gets granted, we follow it through to when it’s decided.”

Last summer, SCOTUS Blog hosted a symposium to discuss constitutionality questions that the healthcare challenge raised. The blog provides in-depth coverage for readers in the legal community, as well as explainer pieces — under the subhead “Plain English” — for general readers. Data geeks will delight in the blog’s statistics section.

In November, SCOTUS Blog ran its first story in a 10-part series analyzing the key issues in the case. The author, Lyle Denniston, produced SCOTUS Blog’s most heavily trafficked articles during last week’s oral arguments. He has been covering the Supreme Court for a staggering 54 years and has watched a lot change in all those years.

“Probably the most important — vitally important — change to legal journalism is that we are providing the original documents,” Denniston said. “The law can be really very complicated, and yet we do not assume that our readers are incapable of processing mentally the contents of hard, substantive documents. We don’t write about anything unless we give you the original materials.”

Denniston also argues that SCOTUS Blog’s “really expansive coverage and niche journalism” sets it apart in a media landscape that has become increasingly political and “lighthearted.” Here’s how he puts it: “We just don’t pay attention to the theater. We’re not exactly a lonely voice, but we’re a lot lonelier than we used to be.”

The only way allowing cameras in the court would trump the significance of being able to post primary documents online, Denniston says, would be if the audio were live streamed in its entirety or otherwise recorded so that members of the public could watch it in full. Reducing a Supreme Court argument to soundbites, he says, would amount to obfuscation.

But all the primary documents in the world don’t eliminate the need for experts like Denniston and Toobin to distill what’s happening for the general public. Not everyone has the time — let alone the autodidactic impulse — to dive into source documents and attempt to make sense of them. (A spokeswoman in the Supreme Court’s press office said information detailing how many people downloaded or streamed the audio it posted is “not available at this time.”)

If there’s any beat that naturally resists the increasing urgency for immediacy and brevity in contemporary journalism, it’s arguably the Supreme Court beat. It’s a complicated and jargon-rich environment; the court works at its own, measured pace; and making the nuances of a Supreme Court case accessible to a general audience is a challenge even for seasoned reporters.

“It’s very hard to cut the tape,” NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg told me. “Most people, they really don’t understand the role that justices are playing. You would have to listen to a lot of arguments to understand that it’s not often the case, but it’s frequently the case that justices ask very hard quesitons that don’t represent their own point of view. They’re testing their point of view. The argument is not a political debate.”

Nature of the beast

Of course, that doesn’t mean that Supreme Court coverage operates in a political vacuum, especially given the enormous election-year implications of the pending decision on Florida v. United States Department of Health and Human Services (can you believe we have to wait until June?).

Where there is a huge, politically messy case to be covered, reporters who don’t normally cover the court come with it.

“Even the trade press comes in,” Totenberg says. “Okay, so they don’t do a great job. They do an okay job. That’s sort of the nature of the beast. I did eight minutes each night, and eight minutes in the morning. We had an hour-long special on it [for each day of oral arguments]. Anyone who really wanted to hear more extended cuts…we would play a lot of tape. I think you would get a really complete idea as to what happened, but it takes time and devotion to do that. The networks? I think they gave it two minutes.”

The coverage that reverberated most last week can be summed up in just two words: Train wreck.

Just after noon on the second day of oral arguments, Toobin offered this analysis for CNN: “This was a train wreck for the Obama administration. This law looks like it’s going to be struck down. I’m telling you, all of the predictions — including mine — that the justices would not have a problem with this law were wrong.”

“It’s the instantaneous spread of conventional wisdom as it develops about anything.”

The comments caused a predictable firestorm in Washington, but what do they tell us about how Supreme Court coverage has changed over the years? A lot, Denniston says.

“It’s the instantaneous spread of conventional wisdom as it develops about anything,” Denniston said. “Look, for example, at the propagation of the idea that Solicitor General Donald Verrilli did a really bad job of arguing for the government. That went viral instantly, and is now accepted wisdom across the country that Verrilli really blew it. On closer examination, that’s not true. Some parts of the argument substantively could have been sharper, some parts of his argument tended not to be responsive to the court, but he had a really challenging task of doing this over three days of time. A serious observer of the requirements of oral advocacy would say that the easy judgements — the easy conclusions — are not really supportable.”

Others have argued similarly, including Totenberg, who says the “tea leaves are a little ominous” for the Obama administration but that the train wreck comment was too much.

“It was a way overstatement to say it was a train wreck,” she said. “As a reporter, there’s always this line between being cautious and being electric. And I said to somebody, ‘Every scoop I’ve lost in my life, it’s because I was too cautious.’ But that’s balanced by the fact that there are an equal number of times when people went on a limb, and I was right, and I was saved — saved from looking like a complete fool.”

Toobin acknowledges that he “could be wrong,” but says he went on his instincts and that he stands by the Tuesday analysis.

“If it looks like five justices are ready to throw out the central accomplishment of the incumbent president, as it did to me, I think it’s my job as a journalist to tell people that — with the caveat that it’s a prediction and I could be wrong,” Toobin said. “And I’m not going to kid you: Predictive journalism is not my favorite form of journalism, and I try to do it with strained and informed eye, but I’m not going to shy away from reporting what I’m seeing, and what I’m seeing is a train wreck.”

One thing the three can agree on: television is not the ideal medium for Supreme Court coverage, which does its business with spoken and written words. (It should be noted that if cameras were allowed, they might capture gestures or facial expressions that can’t be fully articulated by even the most astute observer.)

“There is nothing inherently pictorial about the Supreme Court, and I suspect there never will be,” Toobin said. “What ultimately matters about the Supreme Court are its decisions, and the decisions are words, and words can be distributed and analyzed.”

The ability to distribute coverage globally would have been unthinkable when Denniston got his start. He remembers the days when proceedings were covered mostly “by congressional reporters who came across the street on decision days and caught up with it as well as they could.”

“Now I can post any time of the day or night,” Denniston said. “I can assure you, when I do, I still hear from people. I guess they’re all insomniacs. I hear from people literally from around the globe. In my newspaper business, in all of those years, I never heard from anybody in Indonesia. It’s a process of ongoing and immediate interaction with your readers. It’s a really, really, very strange phenomenon. I’m having the time of my life.”

Photo of the Supreme Court by Kjetil Ree used under a Creative Commons license.

The newsonomics of the Next Issue magazine future

Posted: 04 Apr 2012 05:23 AM PDT

So what is it? iTunes for magazines? Maybe Hulu for periodicals? How about Piano Media for American titles? Tivo for print?

In the hurly-burly of digital content innovation and monetization, it’s hard to figure out what things are, so we try to find apt comparisons. With the new Next Issue digital newsstand, let’s think Netflix or Pandora or Spotify as the closest cousins. Next Issue, the offspring of five prosperous parents (Time Inc., Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, and News Corp.), launched last night what I think will be a model-changing product for publishers.

In short, the Next Issue kiosk idea is transformative — though we’ll have to see how quickly customers take to its unknown brand.

It offers single-priced, all-you-can-eat access to top-shelf magazines, including Time Inc’s People, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and Time; Conde Nast’s Vanity Fair, Allure, and Conde Nast Traveler; Hearst’s Esquire and Popular Mechanics; and Meredith’s Better Homes and Gardens and Fitness. Thirty-two magazines in total, at launch.

Magazine publishers long eschewed the web as largely detrimental to their business, and they participated on it unevenly and haphazardly. Without the loss of classifieds threat experienced by their newspaper cousins, they could better afford to hold back, though many titles have seen a steady decline in both circulation and advertising revenues.

So when the tablet came along, they sniffed it with great interest. In terms of size, it looked like…a magazine. Sports Illustrated demoed it first and that WonderFactory-wow-of-a-prototype has generated 1.135 million YouTube views in three years. Since then, magazine publishers have moved faster than newspaper publishers to embrace the tablet. Some have told me they expect the tablet to grab a third or more of their print subscriber bases within two to three years. Many have put all-access pay-me-once subscription models into place, making it easy to pay for print and get tablet, too.

They’ve grumbled and growled about Apple’s onerous customer data and revenue sharing, but have moved ahead, in varying degrees with Apple’s Newsstand and other sales outlets. Additionally — and here’s the big difference with the newspaper industry — they pooled their efforts in Next Issue. That company is owned by the five behemoths, and it had difficult birth pangs. At times, it has seemed that Next Issue would become a side attraction (as so many publishing industry consortia become), just dabbling in the Android slice of the tablet market (though the slice is thickening).

Behind the scenes, though, it looks like Next Issue has become a major play of magazine publishers. Though the kiosk at launch only works with Android devices, expect iPads (and then iPhones) to be on board by late summer; Next Issue is about to offer up its product for Apple approval.

Non-Android users can get a sense of the product at Next Issue’s website, though the tablet, of course, is the best way to experience it, as Next Issue CEO Morgan Guenther affirmed yesterday in an interview: “It’s all about touching product.” Guenther, a former TIVO exec, is a West Coast guy, and interestingly Next Issue seems like a bi-coastal play.

Last June, Next Issue released some beta products, all in run-up to this kiosk. “In Silicon Valley, we call it beta. In New York [where most of his owners reside within a few dozen blocks of each other], they call it ‘preview release.’ Business operations are in New York, but it’s the 40-plus product people and engineers in Palo Alto that have worked to create this Next Issue experience.

“It’s all about the USP,” says Guenther. And you can’t have a unique selling proposition, if you don’t have a compelling, ahead-of-the-crowd customer experience. While I’m Android-less, there are a number of reasons to believe that Next Issue may have gotten the new product right, or at least, righter than many of the products or consumer propositions out there.

Let me outline seven things to watch as you take a look at Next Issue:

One way to read: Sign up once — and the new site is offering relatively generous 30-day trials — and you have but one navigation to learn. While the full content from each of the magazines is present, with added video, Next Issue says customers need only learn one way of getting around. If it’s an intuitive design, that’s a huge plus, as news- and feature-hungry readers find ourselves forced to learn the navigation nuances of each of our favorite apps.

One price: Well, almost. Next Issue’s pricing seems simple enough:

  • Buy a single copy ($2.49-$5.99) of a magazine or a single subscription ($1.99-$9.99 a month), and with the latter, access to growing archives that began Jan. 1, 2012.
  • Buy one of two kinds of unlimited passes. For $9.99 a month, you get Unlimited Basic (think cable tiering). For $14.99 a month (or $180 a year), you get Unlimited Premium. At that tier, you get Times Inc’s Entertainment Weekly, People, Time, and Sports Illustrated — plus Conde Nast’s New Yorker.
  • If you’re a print subscriber of an all-access-offering magazine, like Time Inc’s, you can get free access through the Next Issue site (and even if you’ve already “authenticated” through Time’s direct app). That kind of seamlessness is customer-pleasing.

The 32 launch titles are premium, not the low end of these publishers’ collections. Next up: adding more owners’ titles, and then non-owners’ magazines.

Newspapers? Well, maybe some, says Guenther. If so, think large regionals like the L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, or Houston Chronicle, and not a proliferation of small, local paper apps. Not (yet) represented: Next Issue Media owner News Corp.’s The Daily, which as a magazine-like newspaper might fit in well here.

Revenue splits built on “engagement”: So Next Issue, for its work and investment will take a “industry standard” commission, which we can figure is in the 25-40 percent range. While Guenther won’t disclose the formula for divvying up the subscription revenues among publishers, he does say it will be built on “interaction by the consumer.” That sounds similar to what Piano has pioneered in sharing revenues by tracking actual reader usage of content. Consortia often fall apart on revenue sharing issues, so just getting an initial deal done is noteworthy.

New accommodations with Apple: Just as Netflix is newly playing with Apple and ponying up its commission cut, Next Issue looks like it will play along as well. The big reason: Next Issue owners have found, says Guenther, that most of their digital subscribers are new, non-print ones. With cannibalization of the print base less of an issue, paying a rev share to Apple becomes a less emotional cost of doing business.

Get ahead of Flipboard: It’s not a Flipboard-killer, but it’s intended to aggregate before tablet aggregators get the better of the aggregatees, as they’ve done on the web. Flipboard remains a superior browsing experience — cool, comfortable and serendipity-pleasing — and importantly offering a blend of changing content all within one interface. While Next Issue offers a single navigation, it’s not a blended product in the same sense that Flipboard is.

Down the road (how far will be the question), says Guenther, are the additions of search and personalization — and maybe, should the publishers allow it — cross-title topical bundles of health, fashion, or travel products. (Remember Mine magazine?) Should Next Issue continue innovating, combining the best of high-branded bliss with Flipboard fun, it could triumph. Flipboard, for its part, could still find a place in this adjusted ecosystem funneling some new (and younger) readers into Next Issue’s payment system, for a cut of the action.

It’s all a set-up for the print-to-tablet transition: So will a third of print magazine readers prefer the tablet sooner than later, as surveys seem to tell us? Readers love tablet magazine reading. If they transition quickly, and are paying subscribers, then the big business question is advertising.

Tablet ads continues to fetch rates (mainly for national publishers) five times or more greater than web ads. That differential may moderate, but the tablet’s immersive, customer-educating, consumer-grabbing capabilities offer major upside to advertisers and sponsors. It will take a couple to several years to reach some maturity, but the tablet ad ecosystem is developing quickly. Consider that earlier this week, we learned that both Hearst and Conde Nast will start releasing key-to-advertiser metrics on tablet usage, and that the Association of Magazine Media announced its own guidelines. The association goals: “to drive growth of advertising on tablets,” by providing data on:

1. Total consumer paid digital issues

2. The total number of tablet readers per issue

3. The total number of sessions per issue

4. The total time spent per reader per issue

5. The average number of sessions per reader per issue

In another words, just as Next Issue launches, the ad foundation is being thickly laid.

A model and a warning for the newspaper industry: In one sense, newspaper titles are very different than magazines. Other than the U.S.’s three national titles, newspapers are by nature local, appealing only to tiny slices of the national population. Yet in creating a single place to buy subscriptions, or single copies — and then potentially packages of content (“The newsonomics of 100 products a year”) — Next Issue is well ahead of the U.S. newspaper industry. Piano Media, in Slovakia and Slovenia and soon farther west, is testing the newspaper portal notion, with fledgling, if small-scale, success.

AP’s new mobile apps create a better national/local aggregation that its first-generation did, but they don’t lead to digital subs. Press+, with now more than 300 customers, has the capability to create a newspaper kiosk, but has seen little enthusiasm among its customers to do so.

One big question for Next Issue is who will notice it? It’s been a business-to-business brand largely. Consumers know how to buy magazines from magazine sites or from Apple or Amazon, but they don’t know much about Next Issue. That stealth position may be one of the reasons its publisher owners have gone forward with it.

They can hold onto, they think, their current print subscribers, transition them over to all-access over time, and use Next Issue — as it tests out new markets — to find new readers and customers.

So what is Next Issue? It is a Netflix wannabe, in the CEO’s vision. Visit, see a bunch of choices, queue ‘em up, and pay a single price for unlimited usage. It’s not iTunes with individual price points. It’s more like the Pandora or Spotify pay-us-once-and-forget-about-it model. And like all digital-native companies, it will focus as much on harvesting data on its customers and their usage, knowing that intel may be a large part of the company value going forward.

That makes consumer sense. It could make a lot of consumer sense.

Let’s recall the innovative New York Times paywall model. The Times priced digital + Sunday print $60 below digital only. That meant a significant number of new Sunday subscribers (home delivery Sunday subs went up for the first time in five years), but it also meant some number of seven-day print subscribers giving up the print habit for Sunday print + digital.

In the Next Issue case, well-magazine-read consumers may do the math and find the $180 a year premium bundle (all-you-can-read, including archives, of all the magazines in the kiosk), such a good deal that they’ll drop individual magazine subs. My first math shows that if you subscribe to seven or more titles, that price point may be economical, though if you get the Next Issue pass, you’ll be passing up the print editions of the magazines, which publishers are almost throwing in these days, à la NYT.

So we can see the planning in the pricing: preserve print if you can, bring in new digital-only customers, and then upsell those into print for as little as five bucks a year more.

Aggregation. Customer ease. Pricing that psychs out consumers. We see the makings of our new print/digital/print world.
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Rabu, 04 April 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Why the Denver Post is putting more local news on A1

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 01:49 PM PDT

The Denver Post building

Denver Post editor Greg Moore penned a surprising announcement on the front page of the print edition today: “Every day except Sunday, the front page and the first part of Section A generally will be devoted to our metro report, what we call Denver & the West…The second part of the A section will be focused on national and world news.”

That’s a bit unusual for a major metro paper — relegating national headlines to inside pages. I called Moore (a former Nieman advisory board member) for more details.

We had to make some space reductions. Once we realized we had to make some space reductions, we tried to figure out: What’s the smartest way to do it? Our philosophy has long, long been that we really swing out with our local stuff. That’s the unique, unduplicated content that you can only really get from your local newspaper. We felt like our A section, which had the bulk of our space, was really devoted to something that was a little bit secondary to us. And so we just took the opportunity to use that news hole in a more aggressive way to promote and showcase our local coverage.

(As Denver writer Michael Roberts noted, it looks a bit like the late Rocky Mountain News.)

Newspapers have an ever-growing burden to demonstrate their value to readers. What can I get from The Denver Post that I can’t get (free) from The Huffington Post?

The Post’s national content is typically provided by The Associated Press, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Often, these are commodity stories, stories that readers can easily find elsewhere on the web — and, in many cases, stories that readers aren’t seeing for the first time in the morning paper.

“You’re trying to really show people that the reporting that you spend the bulk of your time and money on is really unique, can’t be gotten anyplace else,” Moore told me. “We really want to promote the fact that we are spending an inordinate amount of time and effort trying to promote our local communities, and this demonstrates it better than any words can say.”

The newspaper’s shift comes not long after last September’s announcement that MediaNews, the chain of which The Denver Post is a part, would be coming under the management of Digital First Media, the John Paton-led vehicle for Journal Register Co.’s management team. Digital First’s mantra — repeated here at the Nieman Foundation just last week when Jim Brady was in for a visit — is own your community. (And let the other guys handle the rest.)

Moore would not tell me what or how much was cut from the print edition, but he said it’s “pretty substantial.”

So why no change to the Sunday edition? Readers use the paper differently on Sunday, Moore said. They spend more time with it; they expect something more comprehensive. “Sunday is our signature product…It’s the driver for everything: our reputation, our influence, and our revenue,” he said. “I felt like it was not really something I had to mess with.”

Reaction in Denver has been mostly positive, Moore said. “I’ve also gotten some critical emails from people who think that we’re becoming a small-town newspaper and we’re de-emphasizing our national and foreign news — which, of course, neither is true.”

Photo of the Denver Post building by Alfonso Pierantonio used under a Creative Commons license.

Nonprofit status: A maybe for news orgs, a yes for the NFL

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 11:25 AM PDT

I like football, so I was interested in this piece over at Pro Football Talk that details the salary of National Football League commissioner Roger Goodell. (That’s $11,554,000 — not bad.) But then I was surprised to see that this information came from the NFL’s just-filed Form 990.

Wait — 990? As in, the form nonprofits are required to file once a year?

Yep. At a time when civic-minded news organizations are battling for recognition from the IRS — in some cases waiting more then two years to hear whether they’ll be allowed to be nonprofits — the NFL is a not-for-profit. Filing 990s and everything. (Here’s a link to the NFL on Guidestar. The league describes itself as a “trade association promoting interests of its 32 member clubs.”)

Technically, the NFL isn’t a 501(c)(3) — that allows orgs that “Foster National or International Amateur Sports Competition.” It’s a 501(c)(6), “Business Leagues, Chambers of Commerce, Real Estate Boards, etc.” And NFL teams themselves aren’t tax-exempt. But the NFL proper still managed to rake in $207 million in 2009, a number that’s no doubt grown since then.

I’m sure there are good legal reasons why the NFL is a nonprofit. But this isn’t the Nieman Football Lab. (Interesting take from Brian Frederick here. And this paper by lawyer Andrew Delaney argues the NFL is a “glorified tax shelter.”)

The future-of-journalism point here is that the NFL has found a spot in the vagaries of the tax code — a defined niche in which they can fit. Journalism doesn’t have that kind of a spot, as we’ve explored. I just wish the IRS could find a way to give dozens of small, community-oriented news organizations the same sort of status as one of America’s most successful companies.

Image by Jonathan Moreau used under a Creative Commons license.

DocumentCloud removes email dump after legal threat

Posted: 03 Apr 2012 07:00 AM PDT

When the Australian Financial Review blew open a new front in News Corporation’s ongoing scandals last week, it did so with the help of DocumentCloud.

That’s because the Financial Review’s investigation hinged on 14,400 emails connected to the NDS Group, of which News Corp holds a minority stake, that implicate the tech company in a plan to undercut rivals by hacking their satellite TV software. All those emails? Indexed, annotated, and hosted on DocumentCloud. Or at least they were until recently, when attorneys for NDS asked that the emails be taken down.

On Saturday, NDS — which has confirmed the authenticity of the emails through legal correspondence with The Australian Financial Review  and DocumentCloud — asked that they be removed.

DocumentCloud asked Fairfax Media, publisher of the Financial Review, to indemnify it against any future legal action. Fairfax Media declined to give this assurance.

The emails are already, in Internet fashion, out there, and the Financial Review has already began rehosting some of them in .zip form on its own server.

The legal risk of an intermediary

What’s interesting about this story is it demonstrates the tricky position DocumentCloud can find itself in when acting as an intermediate layer for sensitive information. Just as Amazon opened itself up to legal pressure when it hosted WikiLeaks on its cloud service, DocumentCloud could face potential legal risk for the documents it hosts.

That’s a line DocumentCloud lays this out fairly clearly in its terms of service, which includes language stating users will not use DocumentCloud “to publish or otherwise make public (collectively "publish") documents that you do not have the legal right to distribute publicly” or “to infringe any copyright, trademark, patent, or other proprietary rights of any person.”

When I spoke to Mark Horvit, executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, he said the Australian Financial Review case is only the second take down notice they’ve faced since DocumentCloud became a part of IRE last year and the first time they’ve had to remove information from the site. In the other case, lawyers claimed, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that hosted documents infringed on copyright. In the Australian case, the legal claim centered on the allegation that the documents contained confidential information and potential trade secrets, Horvit said.

Horvit said they followed the same procedure they always do when contacted by an attorney about removing documents, asking the news organization if, first, it can provide justification (legal or otherwise) for posting certain information, and second, if it will indemnify DocumentCloud against any legal action. Horvit said Financial Review and its parent company declined to do both, which meant the emails were taken down.

Distributed document hosting

It’s important to note that, along with its hosted service, DocumentCloud releases its work as open source software. That means any news organization — or anyone else — is free to use DocumentCloud’s code to build its own hosted version, on its own secure server, with many of the same capabilities, Aron Pilhofer, DocumentCloud’s co-founder told me. Pilhofer, who is also interactive news editor at The New York Times, said that provides a little bit of breathing room for news organizations whose lawyers may be wary of exposing newspapers to risk through partnering with a third-party. “Our goal was to protect both our members, but also provide protection for newspapers,” he said.

When I asked Jeff Hermes, director of the Digital Media Law Project, about what protections news outlets and partners such as DocumentCloud have in cases like this, he told me there is some precedent that favors protecting news providers. Over email, Hermes said it’s uncertain if that also includes sites that collaborate with news outlets. (Not to mention that adding Australian law into the mix would complicate things further.)

In the U.S., the Supreme Court held in Bartnicki v. Vopper that the First Amendment protects the republication by a news outlet of illegally-obtained material on a matter of public importance, so long as the news outlet did not itself participate in the illegal activity. (In the Bartnicki case, the material at issue was an illegal recording of a conversation between a labor official and other union members about a strike which was leaked to a media defendant; the media defendant had nothing to do with making the recording.) Ever since Wikileaks burst upon the scene, it has been a matter of debate whether Bartnicki extends to online hosting services.
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Selasa, 03 April 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Starting a journalism nonprofit? Read this guide first

Posted: 02 Apr 2012 06:43 AM PDT

Last month we told you that our friends at the Digital Media Law Project were working on a guide for how nonprofit journalism organizations can increase their odds of getting 501(c)(3) status from the IRS. The good news: It’s now officially released to the public, in interactive guide form. (You can also download a 31-page PDF.)

“Guide to the Internal Revenue Service Decision-Making Process under Section 501(c)(3) for Journalism and Publishing Non-Profit Organizations” is, well, pretty much what the title suggests. It’s a concise, point-by-point look at how the IRS figures out who gets nonprofit status and how journalists can determine whether their organization makes the cut.

What will you find in the guide? Think of it as an SAT prep kit, with a run through of the tests organizations need to pass in order to be considered for 501(c)(3) status, the various authorities (IRS code, Treasury regulations, federal court cases, among others) whose rulings influence the IRS decisions, and a thorough explanation of what it means to have an “educational” purpose in the eyes of the IRS.

When I spoke last month with Jeff Hermes, director of the Digital Media Law Project (née Citizen Media Law Project) and author of the report, he said one of the biggest hurdles to nonprofit news organizations is misunderstanding that journalism itself does not qualify as a purpose for a nonprofit to the IRS. That’s why most journalism nonprofits claim to be educational in nature — but that’s still insufficient, as Hermes writes in the guide:

However, it is not enough that an applicant believes that is is educational in a general sense. Journalism organizations frequently fail to receive exemptions because they either (1) fail to understand the specific legal contours of the educational category, or (2) try to stretch the category to fit their business models rather than design their business models to fit the category.

Hermes writes that nonprofit news providers need to be careful how they partner with commercial news organizations. Partnering can be a great way of distributing content and generating money, but these collaborations can be a red flag to the IRS:

A complicating factor is that journalism non-profits often collaborate with for-profit businesses or work through for-profit channels to achieve their exempt purposes. For example, a non-profit news outlet might distribute its content to a regular commercial broadcaster for dissemination. Such interaction with for-profit businesses will not automatically disqualify a non-profit for exemption, but the non-profit should be careful to keep the line between its operations and those of its partners clear.

How a nonprofit makes its money is very significant in the eyes of the IRS, and any potential nonprofit news outlet would be wise to read the sections of the guide on how traditional revenue models for news can be applied in a nonprofit setting. As Hermes told me in our previous conversation, the IRS wants to see charitable intent — evidence that you’re trying to make money for your operating budget through the channels a nonprofit typically uses. That said, there are

Despite this preference for keeping revenues from advertising and subscription below cost, ‘it has been recognized that it is often necessary for an organization to earn a profit from a business activity in order to carry out its charitable purpose.’ In Pulpit Resource, the Tax Court held that a modest profit made by a religious publisher from subscription fees did not disqualify it for a tax exemption, where the record reflected that the publisher had attempted but failed to raise funds in other ways and donated its profits to charity.

Needless to say, if you’re forming a nonprofit news organization or already in the middle of the 501(c)(3) process, it would be worth the time to read the entire document. If you’re looking for more definitive help navigating the IRS, get in touch with the Online Media Law Network, a project of the DMLP that helps connect online news outlets with legal assistance, including help with 501(c)(3) applications.
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