Sabtu, 05 Mei 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nikki Usher: “Who Needs Newspapers?” It’s fewer people than publishers seem to believe

Posted: 04 May 2012 11:41 AM PDT

In the April/May issue of AJR, academics Paul Steinle and Sara Brown report on their travels to 50 newspapers in 50 states to find out what was happening in newspapers big and small, from The Seattle Times to the 12,000-circulation Daily Republic in Mitchell, S.D. Their article (and full report at whoneedsnewspapers.org) might be the most optimistic future-of-news report we’ve seen so far.

Newspapers are trying to avert economic disaster. And the steps that some are taking show signs of promise — boosts in overall circulation, jumps in digital subscribers. But my concern is that newsrooms are falsely holding on to the belief that their community members will continue to see them as their most important source of information.

This view may be leading newsrooms to false optimism. Consider what we learn from the profiles of some of these newspapers in the report.

“There are no such things as sleepy towns,” says (Grand Junction, Colo.) Daily Sentinel publisher Jay Seaton, “there are only sleepy newspapers.” Citing corruption by city officials in Bell, Calif., a town that didn’t have a newspaper, Seaton vows, “That’s never going to happen here, because we’re watching.” So Bell’s corruption was really the fault of The Los Angeles Times for not doing a better job? Where do we begin with this statement?

Or consider this statement from Andy West, managing editor of Delaware State News (circulation 18,000 weekdays): “We provide information so people can make informed decisions and space every day so people can discuss what’s on their minds.”

And this statement from the Mountain Eagle, a weekly newspaper in Whitesburg, Kentucky (circulation 6,000), referring to their former publishers: “Because Tom and Pat Gish spoke truth to power, their family was ostracized.”

This celebratory conviction of journalists doing God’s work to protect the community appears throughout every portrait of the 50 newspapers profiled. But there’s an underlying, unacknowledged fact: Local news, and in particular local news online, is not something people care about as much as local journalists might hope.

As my colleague Matt Hindman found using comScore data: Local news gets less than half of one percent of all pageviews in a local market. Hindman finds that local news sites attracted 8.3 to 17 pageviews per person per month. People spend about nine minutes a month with local news, he found. Many local news sites are still struggling, beset by problems — long load time, poor design, retention of top developers and multimedia producers — that make it hard to increase engagement in a fragmented news marked.

The Who Needs Newspapers report says the keys to success include community-service-driven reporters and ethically managed reporting. And in each of the 50 profiles, editors wax on about their commitment to covering the important public-service news that keep citizens coming back to the newspaper.

More bad news: This isn’t why people are reading newspapers.

Political scientists and communication scholars have long bemoaned the extent to which people don’t care about civic affairs. (Political scientist John Zaller has proposed a model of citizenship where people only pay attention to news that directly affects them — the so-called Burglar Alarm model of attentiveness.) And, as political scientist Markus Prior has demonstrated, citizens have comparatively little interest in political news and tend to pay more of their attention to entertainment news.

Or take this claim: “Hyperlocal Web sites are blossoming.” In fact, as Hindman found, the traffic of hyperlocal websites is generally so small that it is actually immeasurable by comScore (less than 1 percent of web traffic per market). So sure, these sites may be flourishing, but by what measure?

The report gives perhaps one of the most interesting depictions of how paywalls are being used at newspapers across America. This is important detail, and I encourage anyone interested in paywalls to take a look. But as the authors admit, there is no “single silver bullet” to solve the industry’s problems.

What might work for some newspapers who have developed a paywall in a small community may not work in a big-city metro newspaper — or vice versa. Some newspapers are using a paywall with free headlines and weather and a deeper site that features paid content. The risk is that when people find better ways to access the local weather, they may feel little need to check the local news site at all.

One finding in the report that occurs in many of the state newspapers portrayed is that circulation losses seem to stop — or at least halt, or maybe even receive a boost — when paywalls are erected. But these news organizations are still tapping into the people who still read newspapers; to really understand whether these circulation numbers are here to stay, they must conduct a robust demographic analysis of who, exactly, happens to be buying these new newspapers. Staunching the decline isn’t exactly a business model, either.

Finally, this upbeat report on the importance of journalism and the future of democracy is really is a portrait of 50 newspapers in 50 states. There’s little indication about how and why newspapers were chosen, and no real way to compare newspapers against each other. The background summaries of each newspaper have inconsistent profiles to help us figure out just how much attention and staff news organizations are spending on say, local government affairs versus entertainment reporting, making it difficult to get a true sense of just how committed these news organizations are to doing what they are saying they are doing (see here and here).

The report does offer a celebration of journalism’s “iron core” of reporting. What’s disappointing is that we hear little reflexive questioning of journalism itself. File this one under future-of-news reports that fail to give us a clear look into the future of news.

Nikki Usher is an assistant professor at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs.

This Week in Review: Parliament hits Murdoch hard, and papers’ circulation is up (or down)

Posted: 04 May 2012 07:40 AM PDT

Parliament’s damning News Corp. report: It was a second straight week of big news in News Corp.’s phone hacking case, as a committee of the British Parliament issued its report on the scandal (PDF), in which the major statement was that Rupert Murdoch is “not a fit person” to run an international media empire like News Corp. The report also targeted three News Corp. executives in particular — former Dow Jones head Les Hinton, former News of the World editor (and current New York Daily News editor) Colin Myler, and former News International lawyer Tom Crone — for their roles in the scandal’s cover-up. The three may be forced to apologize to Parliament.

The New York Times and Guardian both offered good overviews of the report, with the Times focusing more on Murdoch and the Guardian on Hinton, Myler, and Crone. Both noted that the strong language about Murdoch was decided along political lines, with liberals voting to put it in and conservatives trying to keep it out. Capital’s Tom McGeveran wrote a helpful explanation of what it means for Parliament to call Murdoch “unfit” (he probably won’t get his broadcast licenses revoked anytime soon), and NPR’s David Folkenflik also had a good breakdown of the situation for American audiences. One of the committee’s members, Tom Watson, offered more of his own thoughts on the scandal, and the Times’ David Carr translated the report for those of us who don’t read Parliament-ese.

News Corp. responded by issuing a defiant public statement, which contrasted a bit with Murdoch’s more contrite internal memo. Other businesspeople and media barons came to Murdoch’s defense, and the British broadcaster BSkyB, of which News Corp. owns a share and recently tried to take over, distanced itself from News Corp. in an effort to hang onto its broadcast license.

There’s other trouble for News Corp., too: A Washington ethics group has called on the FCC to revoke News Corp.’s Fox broadcast licenses in the U.S., and in Britain, opponents of News Corp.’s BSkyB takeover bid said they had been blocked from meeting with the government department in charge of approving the deal. There is some good news for News Corp., though — the second half of the British government’s inquiry into the company may never happen.

As for the toll on News Corp., the Times has a solid big-picture view of the scandal’s impact so far, and Reuters’ Jack Shafer looked at the escape routes Murdoch could take. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum said this report, and Murdoch’s testimony last week, have gone a long way in exposing News Corp.’s culture of corruption: “The glib denials that have served him so well for so many years aren't working anymore—not with all we now know.” And the Guardian’s Henry Porter went further, writing the (probably premature) political obit for Murdoch.

Mixed signals on newspaper circulation: The Audit Bureau of Circulations issued its twice-annual report on newspaper circulation this week — here are its top 25 papers and a database of every daily newspaper in the U.S. Overall, newspapers saw a slight gain in daily circulation, including a 63 percent gain in paid digital circulation, which, as paidContent noted, includes tablet or smartphone apps, paywalled website subscriptions, and other e-editions.

The common narrative drawn from those numbers was that, as Ad Age put it, “digital paywall strategies have helped newspapers counter years of grinding declines in paid-print circulation.” Poynter’s Steve Myers looked at some of the top circulation gainers and saw that many of them had instituted digital pay plans, while very few of the losers had.

Media analyst Alan Mutter pushed back against that conclusion, noting that when you isolate print circulation, almost everyone’s numbers were down, whether they had a paywalled site or not. The circulation increase, it turns out, came from including those digital numbers (and, as Ad Age pointed, possibly counting subscribers twice), not from successfully protecting the print product.

A few newspapers that were highlighted: DCist noted that The Washington Post’s circulation drop was the largest of any of the nation’s top papers, while Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon said the decline wasn’t as bad as it appeared. J-prof Dan Kennedy looked at the numbers for the Boston papers, and the Lab’s Justin Ellis wrote about the story behind the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s increase in circulation and revenue, and its paywall.

Is tech in another bubble?: New York Times tech writer Nick Bilton became the latest to raise the specter of a bubble in the tech industry this week, reporting on the practice of startups being encouraged by their investors not to make money so as to make it easier to come up with ungrounded, outrageously high valuations. Said one Stanford professor he talked to: “This is 1999 all over again, but this time, it's gotten worse…We're back to companies throwing around funny money. The economic values don't add up.”

This started another round of debate over whether we are, in fact, in the midst of another tech bubble. BetaBeat put together a helpful scorecard of who chimed in on which side, and you can read a smart, extended discussion among many of those people at Branch. Tech blogger Dave Winer said the true sign of whether we’re in a bubble is whether the startups being formed are good businesses that make sense and will grow (and answered that, yes, that means we’re in a bubble).

Investor and blogger Chris Dixon argued that the true measures of a bubble are actually quite nuanced, and we’re getting mixed signals in many of them, though he said no good investors engage in the “flipping” practices Bilton described, because it’s not a good business strategy anyway. Tech blogger MG Siegler agreed, calling stories like Bilton’s “a bunch of vague fear mongering.” GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram said it appears as though the inflated valuations are coming in at the small, early seed-money end, which presents less of a danger to the public. Entrepreneur Michael Mace made a similar point, arguing that until those inflated dollar amounts hit public stock offerings, this market won’t look much like the late ’90s bubble.

Twitter tries to further personalize your news: Twitter moved a bit deeper into personalized news this week with the revamp of its Discover feature, which will put a heavier weight in its algorithm on links shared by the people you follow to help you find links you’ll be interested in. (All Things D has a good description of the change.) The Next Web’s Drew Olanoff said the new format gives Twitter’s information some social context, which is a big part of what was missing before.

Mathew Ingram of GigaOM argued that while the update is an improvement, Twitter still needs to build better filters to personalize and make sense of its information, before others do it instead. YouTube’s Hunter Walk pointed out, though, that it’s extremely hard for a single product to guess at what you like, what your friends like, and what the world likes, especially in a linear format like Twitter’s.

Elsewhere in Twitter news, the Lab’s Adrienne LaFrance wrote about journalistic behavior by regular Twitter users, and news execs argued over whether social media is helping or hurting journalism.

Reading roundup: A few other interesting stories, and a couple of thoughtful viewpoints to direct you to this week.

— The FCC voted last Friday to require local TV stations to put their information about political advertising online, starting in the largest markets. Free Press applauded the decision as a victory for transparency, though ProPublica noted they won’t be searchable. Before the vote, Poynter’s Steve Myers pointed out how resistant TV stations have been to reporting on this issue.

— As The Next Web first reported this week, the Washington Post planned to buy the social news site Digg. That report was followed up with reports that the Post was hiring most of Digg’s staff, but not buying the site or its technology, leaving the remaining people there to scramble to figure out the site’s future.

— In an engaging book excerpt in New York magazine, Jeff Himmelman revealed that Watergate hero Bob Woodward’s longtime editor at the Washington Post, Ben Bradlee, had misgivings about some of the details about some of the sources Woodward and Carl Bernstein contacted, including Deep Throat. Woodward disputed the book’s claims, Himmelman defended them, and the Post’s Erik Wemple said he was skeptical of the reports of Bradlee’s doubts, too. Reuters’ Jack Shafer pointed out that this conflict is only about the All the President’s Men story, not the Post’s actual reporting.

— Two great posts of tips for journalists: Poynter’s Craig Silverman with a list of resources on how to verify information on social media, and the Guardian’s advice for journalists of the future.

— Finally, Danish scholar Rasmus Kleis Nielsen wrote an insightful piece for Reuters based on some ongoing research he’s doing on what’s hindering news startups in Europe. He calls it “irrational imitation” of the dominant online model of decades past.

Photo of Murdoch by Pierre Boulle, bubble by zzub nik, and newspaper boxed by Lulu Vision all used under a Creative Commons license.

Announcing the 75th class of Nieman Fellows

Posted: 04 May 2012 06:35 AM PDT

This morning, the Nieman Foundation announced our incoming class of Nieman Fellows, which will be our 75th. (The Nieman Fellowships allow a group of accomplished journalists — half American, half international — to come to Harvard for a year of study on the subjects of their choice.) I’ve gotten to meet many of them, and they look like a great group.

Of particular Labby note: This is the first Nieman class to feature Nieman-Berkman Fellows, who will work jointly with us here at Nieman and with our friends at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. We initially expected to pick one Nieman-Berkman Fellow, but we ended up going with two: Borja Echevarria of El Pais and Laura Amico of Homicide Watch. You’ll be reading more from them and about their work here in the fall.

Here’s the full listing. We’re very excited to see these terrific journalists here in Cambridge in a few months. And if you’re interested in being a part of the 76th class of Nieman Fellows (who’ll arrive in August 2013), it’s not too early to start thinking about your application, even though the first deadlines are still half a year away.

U.S. Nieman Fellows in the class of 2013 and their areas of interest:

David Abel, a staff writer at The Boston Globe, plans to study the evolution of new media, the impact of rising income inequality on the social fabric, and the science as well as the potential effects of climate change.

Laura Norton Amico, editor and founder of Homicide Watch in Washington, D.C., will study criminal justice journalism in the digital age, focusing on best practices, useful tools and new models for crime and courts reporting. She is one of two new Nieman-Berkman Fellows in Journalism Innovation.

Brett Anderson, the restaurant critic and a features writer at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, will study the forces and people fueling the modern American food culture and their impact on the way Americans eat. He will also examine the role food and restaurants play in communities during crisis.

Chris Arnold, national correspondent, National Public Radio, will study the reshaping of the government's role in housing after the collapse of the bubble and how the crash will shape the future of homeownership and the American Dream. Arnold will also examine obstacles to technological innovation in consumer product safety. He is the 2013 Donald W. Reynolds Nieman Fellow in Business Journalism.

Alexandra Garcia, video journalist at The Washington Post, will study how news organizations can create visual experiences that engage users and will explore interactive storytelling forms.

Jeneen Interlandi, a science and health journalist based in New Jersey, will study the history of pharmaceuticals, the cultural forces that have shaped our relationship to medication and the impact that has had on our perceptions of illness and health.

Blair Kamin, architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune, will study architecture, landscape architecture and urban design, seeking to re-examine and revitalize the field of architectural criticism in print and on the Web. Kamin is the 2013 Arts and Culture Nieman Fellow.

Jennifer B. McDonald, an editor at The New York Times Book Review, will study canonical works of literature and philosophy and the historical role of the critic in culture.

Betsy O'Donovan, a freelance writer and editor for The Herald-Sun, Durham, N.C, and other publications, will study entrepreneurial models for community newsrooms, with a particular interest in establishing and protecting the value of original reporting. She is the 2013 Donald W. Reynolds Nieman Fellow in Community Journalism.

Mary Beth Sheridan, a news editor at The Washington Post, plans to study international politics and economics, with a focus on countries struggling to transition from authoritarian to democratic systems, particularly in Latin America.

Jane Spencer, international editor at large for Newsweek and The Daily Beast, will study new digital tools for narrative storytelling, with an emphasis on how emerging technologies can improve news coverage of global women's issues.

Laura Wides-Muñoz, Hispanic affairs writer for The Associated Press, will study the nexus between immigration and economics. She will examine how the global financial crisis affects the integration of immigrants into U.S. society and explore multimedia platforms for presenting the data in new and dynamic ways. She is the Louis Stark Nieman Fellow. The fellowship honors the memory of the New York Times reporter who was a pioneer in the field of labor reporting.

International Nieman Fellows in the class of 2013 and their areas of interest:

Karim Ben Khelifa (Tunisia/Belgium), a photojournalist and founder of Emphas.is, will conduct research on journalist-audience engagement, analyze the behavioral economics linked to crowdfunding and study new business models promoting the diversification of visual storytelling. He is the 2013 Carroll Binder Nieman Fellow. The Binder Fund honors 1916 Harvard graduate Carroll Binder, who expanded the Chicago Daily News Foreign Service, and his son, Carroll "Ted" Binder, a 1943 Harvard graduate.

Katrin Bennhold (Germany), a London-based reporter for the International Herald Tribune, will study the economics of gender and motherhood and explore the remaining barriers and costs of gender equality in the early 21st century. She is the William Montalbano Nieman Fellow. Montalbanowas a 1970 Nieman Fellow and a prize-winning Los Angeles Times reporter who reported from 100 countries during his 38-year career.

Ludovic Blecher (France), executive director and editor-in-chief of Liberation.fr, will study the business models of online media and explore ways to monetize high-value journalism. He is the Robert Waldo Ruhl Nieman Fellow. Ruhl, a 1903 Harvard graduate, was editor and publisher of the Medford Mail-Tribune in Oregon from 1911-1967.

Lee Chong-ae (Korea), senior reporter, Seoul Broadcasting System (SBS), will study journalism related to complex trauma, focusing on people who have experienced the effects of periods of colonialism, war and military-influenced dictatorial administrations followed by rapid economic growth. Her fellowship is sponsored by The Asia Foundation.

Jin Deng (China), senior editor, Southern Weekly, will study how the democratization and fragmentation of information in the social media era will affect China's journalism, society and politics. Her fellowship is supported through Sovereign Bank and the Marco Polo Program of Banco Santander.

Borja Echevarría de la Gándara (Spain), deputy managing editor, El País, will study the structural evolution of newsrooms around the world and how disruptive innovation is altering traditional business and workflow models for news. Using data from both print and Web-based news organizations, he also will try to discern the patterns in successful newsrooms and determine if the practices of digital start-ups can be applied effectively in established newsrooms. Echevarría is one of two new Nieman-Berkman Fellows in Journalism Innovation.

Yaakov Katz (Israel/United States), military reporter, The Jerusalem Post, will study the use of censorship in the digital age to determine whether it is relevant and consistent with democratic values and if it can be applieddifferently, especially in coverage of Israel and the Middle East.

Souad Mekhennet (Germany/Morocco), a reporter and columnist for The New York Times, Der Spiegel and ZDF (German TV), will study how the uprisings in Arab countries in 2011 have influenced the long-term strategies of terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda and how Shariah (Islamic law) deals with human rights, women and democracy. She is the 2013 Barry Bingham Jr. Nieman Fellow. Bingham, a 1956 Harvard graduate, was the editor and publisher of the Courier-Journal and Louisville Times.

Paula Molina (Chile), anchor and editor at Radio Cooperativa, Chile's leading radio news station, will explore the opportunities created by the digital revolution for better development, sharing and distribution of broadcast news content.

Finbarr O’Reilly (Canada/United Kingdom), Africa-based photographer for Reuters, will study psychology to better understand how the human mind and behavior is affected by personal experience, with a focus on trauma and conflict zones. He is the 2013 Ruth Cowan Nash Nieman Fellow. Nash was best known for her work as an Associated Press war correspondent during World War II.

Beauregard Lucian Tromp (South Africa), senior field producer, e-news Africa, will study the practice of countries and global corporations purchasing large tracts of land in Africa to address future food shortages and the impact of that for trade agreements, governments and local communities concerned about possible exploitation under a "new colonialism." His fellowship is supported by the Nieman Society of Southern Africa.

San Truong (Huy Duc) (Vietnam), a freelance journalist based in Ho Chi Minh City, will study public policy, American literature and the history of Vietnam, with a goal of sharpening his work and impact as a political analyst. He is the 2013 Atsuko Chiba Nieman Fellow. The Chiba fellowship honors the memory of Atsuko Chiba, a 1968 Nieman Fellow.
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Jumat, 04 Mei 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

When a stream is just a trickle: Last Great Thing is one item a day, no archives

Posted: 03 May 2012 10:30 AM PDT

Smoking robot at 1939 New York World's Fair

Ever wish you could reduce the fire hose to a stream? The stream to a trickle?

Last Great Thing logoEvery day for a month, the News.me team is asking someone smart or interesting or Internet-famous to share the Last Great Thing he or she saw, a video or an article or whatever, something truly lovable. There are no archives, no permalinks, nothing to read later — which is both maddening and sort of the point.

On Monday, Clay Shirky shared a video; I forgot to grab the link, so you can’t watch it. On Tuesday, Hilary Mason shared this video of a smoking robot at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Yesterday, Khoi Vinh shares an article about “impostor syndrome,” whereby creative types often feel like frauds waiting to be exposed. Today, a Ry Cooder performance from The Old Grey Whistle Test, from Craig Mod. (Ex-Nieman Labber Zach Seward’s up tomorrow.) The site is inspired in part by Robin Sloan’s Fish app, which urges us to love, not just like, and in part by The Listserve, a giant mailing list that accepts one submission per day.

“We criticize Twitter for not having any memories and for failing at being a place where you can find things after they’ve rushed past you,” said Jake Levine, the general manager of News.me. “If we don’t want to be that, then we might want to include an archive, but as soon as we include an archive, we make this less about everyone experiencing this in the moment.”

Last Great Thing is itself a contradiction, a comment on the ephemeral nature of social networks and a study of our info-anxiety.

Levine hacked up the site with designer Justin Van Slembrouck. (They are proud to have made it without help from a developer.) They hope to observe usage patterns that might inform changes to their products (iPad app, iPhone app, and daily newsletter). Levine and Van Slembrouck are technologists, not journalists, and the project forces them to think editorially.

There are no algorithms here. News.me proper (which we’ve covered before) uses algorithms to help surface the most interesting content in users’ social streams.

“People in the same breath will tell us there’s too much stuff and not enough stuff coming through their News.me stream,” Levine told me. “They’re kind of unsatisfied with the volume of content — but they’re feeling overwhelmed. That’s at the core of our challenge over the next six to 12 months.”

Last Great Thing, like Twitter, is ephemeral. Unlike Twitter, it’s slow. Real slow.

Tweet.

Tweet.

“We’re trying to see what’s the minimum presentation that we can do here to make something compelling. We’ve been kind of wrestling with this archive thing. We’ll see how long we can withstand the pressure,” Van Slembrouck said. (Don’t give in, I say.)

“We got an email from one of our friends saying, ‘What the hell? Where’s Clay Shirky’s video? I didn’t have a chance to watch it yesterday, and now it’s gone!’” Levine said. “We’re trying to figure out: Okay, do we solve his quote-unquote problem by adding an archive? Or do we kind of let those anxieties surface a bit more so we can understand them better?”

(By the way, you can kind of cheat by subscribing to the Last Great Thing daily email.)

On World Press Freedom Day, the spread of mobile and publishing technology shifts the playing field

Posted: 03 May 2012 09:40 AM PDT

It’s World Press Freedom Day, when we set aside time to think about journalists around the world who struggle under repressive conditions to report and tell the truth.

With 44 journalists killed so far this year, 2012 is on track to be the deadliest year for journalists since the International Press Institute began tracking such deaths in 1997. (The exact toll depends on how you count. Reporters Without Borders, for example, puts the count at 22. It only includes deaths that are “clearly established” to have been caused because of someone’s activities as a journalist.) Both counts increased by one overnight with the murder of Somali radio reporter Farhan James Abdulle. He’s the fifth journalist to be killed in Somalia this year, which Reporters Without Borders ranks 164th in the world in press freedom.

But while we honor those working journalists who continue to battle their governments, it’s also worth noting how technology is shifting the playing field of press freedom. The boundaries of the press are expanding — and yet working to guarantee press freedom requires the notoriously slippery undertaking of defining what it is that makes someone a journalist. NPR’s Andy Carvin, who famously tweeted (and retweeted) the Arab Spring, is a professional journalist. But what about all of the citizens on the ground — some professional journalists, many not — who helped populate his Twitter feed with information about what was going on?

Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, has given these kinds of questions a lot of thought over the years. In 2005, he founded Global Voices, a network of hundreds of bloggers around the world who work to redress “inequities in media attention by leveraging the power of citizens’ media.”

“It’s really hard to organize a campaign for every blogger who gets in trouble with the law,” Zuckerman told me this week. “In part because often you don’t get arrested for blogging, you get arrested for something else.”

Working on a global scale, and without the formal backing of a news institution, it can become very difficult to determine whether such an arrest was motivated by the person’s journalistic behavior or by some other alleged activity.

Increasingly, there are groups willing to fight for the person being silenced — regardless of whether she’s a professional journalist, and regardless of whether she’s communicating “on paper, by broadcasting, or writing in bytes,” Zuckerman said.

As the power to publish spreads, World Press Freedom Day becomes about more than just “the press” as we’ve traditionally defined it. Zuckerman suggests it’s time to update the way we characterize what we’re trying to protect. Okay, so his alternative might need a bit of marketing polish, but he’s thinking something like “World Digital Public Sphere Freedom Day” or “World Network Public Sphere Freedom Day.”

“This notion of ‘the press’ holds onto this notion that there’s this specialized professional class to inform us about things,” Zuckerman said. “That institution is expanding to the point where the press is really the network public sphere or the digital public sphere. It’s incredibly important that we talk about the ability of journalists to do their jobs safely and without government harassment…But when we think about whether a country has a free press, under my definition, it’s what are the constraints on journalists? What are the constraints on nonofficial journalists [like] bloggers and activists? What are the constraints on the tools people use to discuss the issues of the day?”

Issues of Internet freedom are often framed around information consumption — whether someone in a country can get access to a given website, say. But it’s also about freedom to publish, a capacity that technology continues to spread. “There’s an enormous amount of common ground between the Internet freedom folks and the press freedom folks — and in many cases we’re looking at the same people,” Zuckerman said.

And then there’s mobile. As phones get smarter, the line between Internet users and mobile users blurs. According to the International Telecommunications Union, there were 2 billion people using the Internet at the start of last year. At the same time, there were 5.3 billion mobile phone subscriptions.

“It is absolutely unbelievable how rural a village you can be in, and the only things for sale will be yams, ground nuts, and phone cards,” Zuckerman said. “This is bringing in hundreds of millions of people who were not online previously. It’s a really crazy change, and what I think all of us are sort of predicting is, in the next five years, the distinction between those numbers — are you online or are you on the phone? — it’s just going to disappear. It’s going to be an irrelevant number.”

What’s good from a connectivity standpoint is not always good from a digital freedom standpoint, and this discrepancy goes to how the very structure of the Internet differs from how mobile networks are built.

“The Internet has this incredibly radically decentralized architecture where there are points of potential control, but there are a lot more of them, and it’s often possible to evade that control,” Zuckerman said. “On the mobile phone network, that’s a very different story. They tended to be built with the ability to wiretap and eavesdrop.”

When two Western journalists were killed with rockets in Syria earlier this year, The Telegraph reported that the Syrian military had tracked them down using their cell phone signals. In countries with weak legal systems and strong governments, mobile networks very quickly become a tool for government intelligence, so being an independent reporter “becomes a very difficult thing to do,” Zuckerman said.

It’s part of why groups like Mobile Active set out to educate people about the inherent security risks that mobile networks entail. Its Safer Mobile initiative includes guides and training on text-messaging risks, apps to block wiretappers, secure chat mechanisms, information on satellite phones, tips on how to safely file stories from the field, and more. The bottom line: True anonymity on a mobile network is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible.

“The approach that people are taking right now is just trying to get people to understand these networks much more thoroughly: ‘Here are ways you might be safe or might be unsafe,’” Zuckerman said. “The problem is, we often end up saying, ‘You shouldn’t use that.’ But that’s crazy thing to say because for most people, that’s their main information device.”

Photo by Superstrikertwo used under a Creative Commons license.

The newsonomics of Pricing 101

Posted: 03 May 2012 07:55 AM PDT

When the price of your digital product is zero, that’s about how much you learn about customer pricing. Now, both the pricing and the learning is on the upswing.

The pay-for-digital content revolution is now fully upon us. Five years ago, only the music business had seen much rationalization, with Apple’s iTunes having bulled ahead with its new 99-cent order. Now, movies, TV shows, newspapers, and magazines are all embracing paid digital models, charging for single copies, pay-per-views, and subscriptions. From Hulu Plus to Netflix to Next Issue Media to Ongo to Press+ to The New York Times to Google Play to Amazon to Apple to Microsoft (buying into Nook this week), the move to paid media content is profound. The imperative to charge is clear, especially as legacy news and magazines see their share of the rapidly growing digital advertising pie (with that industry growing another 20 percent this year) actually decline.

Yes, it’s in part a 99-cent new world order as I wrote about last week (“The newsonomics of 99-cent media”), but there are wider lessons — some curiously counterintuitive — to be learned in the publishing world. Let’s call it the newsonomics of Pricing 101. The lessons here, gleaned from many conversations, are not definitive ones. In fact, they’re just pointers — with rich “how to” lessons found deeper in each.

Let’s not make any mistake this week, as the Audit Bureau of Circulation’s new numbers rolled out and confounded most everyone. Those ABC numbers wowed some with their high percentage growth rates. Let’s keep in mind that those growth numbers come on the heels of some of the worst newspaper quarterly reports issued in awhile. Not only is print advertising in a deepening tailspin, but digital advertising growth is stalled. Take all the ABC numbers you want and tell the world “We have astounding reach” — but if the audience can’t be monetized both with advertising and significant new circulation revenues, the numbers will be meaningless.

When it comes to dollars and sense, pricing matters a lot.

Let’s start with this basic principle: People won’t pay you for content if you don’t ask them to. That’s an inside-the-industry joke, but one with too much reality to sustain much laughter. It took the industry a long time to start testing offers and price points, as The Wall Street Journal and Walter Hussman’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette provided lone wolf examples.

The corollary to that principle? If you don’t start to charge consumers — Warren Buffett on newspaper pricing: “You shouldn’t be giving away a product that you’re trying to sell.” — then you can’t learn how consumers respond to pricing. Once you start pricing, you can start learning, and adjust.

We can pick out at least nine emerging data points:

  • 33-45 percent of consumers who pay for digital subscriptions click to buy before they ever run into a paywall. That’s right — a third to a half of buyers just need to be told they will have to pay for continuing access, and they’re sold. As economists note that price is a signal of value, consumers understand the linkage. Assign what seems to be a fair price, and some readers pay up, especially if they are exposed to a “warning” screen, letting them know they’ve used up of critical number of “free” views. Maybe they want to avoid the bumping inconvenience — or maybe they just acknowledge the jig’s up.
  • If print readers are charged something extra for digital access, then non-print subscribers are more likely to buy a digital-only sub. Why pay for digital access is the other guys (the print subscribers) are getting it thrown in for “free”? Typically, Press+ sees a 20-percent-plus increase in signups on sites that charge print subscribers something extra. That extra may be just a third or so of the price digital-only subscribers pay (say, $2.95 instead of $6.95), but it makes a difference. Consequently, Press+ says 80-90 percent of its sites charge print subscribers for digital access. The company now powers 323 sites and thus has more access to collective data than any other news-selling source.
  • You can reverse the river, or at least channel it. The New York Times took a year, but figured it out righter than anyone expected. It bundled its Sunday print paper (still an ad behemoth) with digital, making that package $60 or so a year cheaper than digital alone. The result, of course, is that Sunday Times home delivery is up for first time since 2006. It’s not just NYT or the L.A. Times which have embraced Sunday/digital combos. In Minneapolis, the Star Tribune began a similar push in November. Now, of its 18,000 digital-only subscribers, 28 percent have agreed to an add on the Sunday paper, for just 30 cents a week, says CEO Mike Klingensmith (“A Twin Cities turnaround?”). So we see that consumers may well be more agnostic about platform than we thought. Given them an easy one-click way of buying even musty old print, and they will. Irony: If you hadn’t charged them for digital access, you probably wouldn’t have sold them on print.
  • New products create new markets. 70 percent of The Economist‘s digital subscribers are not former print subscribers, says Paul Rossi, managing director and executive vice president for the Americas. That’s surprising in one sense, but not in another. Newspaper company digital VPs will tell you that they’re surprised to see how little overlap there is between their print audience customer bases and their digital ones. The downside here: Many print customers seem not to value digital access that much. The Star Tribune is finding a low take rate of 3 percent of its Sunday-only print subscribers willing to take its digital-access upsell. One lesson: The building of a new digital-mainly audience won’t be easy and will require new product thinking; it’s not that easy just to port over established customers.
  • The all-access bundle must contain multiple consumer hooks. Sure, readers like to get mobile access as well as desktop and print, and maybe some video. Yet some may especially prize the special events or membership perks they are offered, as the L.A. Times is banking on (and start-ups Texas Tribune, MinnPost, and Global Post have applied outside the paywall model). Some will like the extras, like The Boston Globe telling its new 18,000 digital subscribers, as well as its print ones, that they now get “free” Sunday Supper ebooks (“The newsonomics of 100 products a year”). Sports fanatics or business data lovers will find other niches to value — and ones that make the whole bundle worthwhile. Archives — and the research riches they offer — will prove irresistible to some. In 2012, a bundle may offer a half dozen reasons to buy, casting a wide net, with the hope that at least one shiny lure will reel in the customers. By 2013, expect “dynamic, customized offers,” targeting would-be buyers by their specific interests to be more widely in use.
  • While pageviews may drop 10-15 percent with a paywall, unique visitors remain fairly constant. We see the phenomenon of those who do hit a paywall one month coming back in subsequent months, rather than fleeing forever. “It may be the second, third, or fourth month before someone says, ‘I guess I am a frequent visitor here, and I’ll play,’” says Press+’s Gordon Crovitz.
  • Archives find new life. Archives have lived in a corner of news and magazine websites for a long time. They’ve been used, but not highly used or highly monetized. Now, courtesy of the tablet, and a new way to charge, The Economist is finding that 20 percent of its single copy sales are of past issues. Readers will pay for the old in new wrappers, whether back e-issues, or niched ebooks. The all-access offer can be much wider than cross-platform, or multi-device. It can extend across time, from a century of yesterdays to alerts for tomorrow.
  • News media is probably underpriced. Take the high-end Economist. CEO Andrew Rashbass — speaking to MediaGuardian’s Changing Media Summit 2012, in a recommended video — said that a survey of its subscribers showed that a majority didn’t know how much they were paying for the Economist. When pressed to guess, most over-estimated the price. At the Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune, an early paywall leader in the middle of America, a recent price increase to $8.99 from $7.99 has so far resulted in no material loss of subscribers. At Europe’s Piano Media, early experience in Slovakia and Slovenia is that price isn’t a big factor, says Piano’s David Brauchli. “Payment for news on the web is really more a philosophical mindset rather than economic. People who are opposed to paying will always opposed to paying and those who see the value of paying don’t mind paying no matter what the price is.” That suggests pricing power. It makes sense that publishers, new to the pricing trade, have approached it gingerly. Yet the circulation revenue upside may well be substantial.
  • Bundle or unbundle — what’s the right way? Mainly, we don’t know yet, and the answer may be different for differing audience segments. The Economist started with print being a higher price than a separate digital sub. Then it raised the digital price to match that of print — to assert digital value. It now offers all-access: one price gets you both. Next up: You can buy either print or digital for the same price, but if you want both, you’ll pay more. It’s an evolution of testing, and so far, it’s been an upward one.

Overall, this is a revolution in more than pricing. It’s a revolution in thinking and, really, publisher identity.

The Boston Globe’s Jeff Moriarty sums it up well, as his company aims (as has the Financial Times before it: “The newsonomics of the FT as an internet retailer”) to emulate a little digital-first company called Amazon:

I think overall publishers have to start thinking more like e-commerce companies. More like Amazon. You can’t just throw up a wall or an app and expect it to just sell itself. We’re still building that muscle here at the Globe, and some of our colleagues in the industry are even farther along. We have extensive real-time and daily analytics and are employing multivariate testing to try offers and designs to refine the experience that works best for each type of user.

Photo by Jessica Wilson used under a Creative Commons license.
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Kamis, 03 Mei 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

A social game in Georgia tries to bring residents together across traditional boundaries

Posted: 02 May 2012 11:15 AM PDT

The developers behind Angry Birds said last August that players were averaging about 200 million minutes per day with the game. If that stat has held steady (and at the time Rovio said it was “growing exponentially”), it means that the world has played more than 300,000 years of Angry Birds.

In other words, stretched out linearly, our collective time spent flinging digital birds at pigs would predate the existence of modern humans. If you work in a newsroom, the thought of this level of audience engagement probably makes you swoon.

“The game industry is a $60 billion industry,” the Knight Foundation’s Jessica Goldfin told me. “When you talk about meeting people where they are, well, they’re playing games. Eleven million people play World of Warcraft…So how do you then take these mechanics, these games where people are, and build in some sort of higher social purpose or embed them within a social system?”

I recently caught up with Goldfin and the foundation’s Beverly Blake about a Knight-funded social-impact game called Macon Money, which was aimed at strengthening community ties and bolstering economic revitalization in Macon, Ga. This wasn’t a newsy experiment per se, but its focus on how to engage communities — and exploring new ways to connect them with one another — is in many ways applicable to newsrooms still finding their footing in an ever-changing digital media world.

“The goal was to create the environment where people who otherwise would not have had an opportunity to meet one another, to meet and get to know one another,” Blake told me. “The second goal was to use currency [invented for the game] to suport local businesses.”

So Knight — full disclosure: this site is, like many in journalism, also a Knight Foundation grantee — enlisted the game-design team at Area/Code, which has since become Zynga New York. In all, Knight granted about $700,000 for research and implementation. The result was a community-wide game called Macon Money designed to encourage divergent groups to come together, collaborate, and earn money that they would then spend at local businesses.

Here’s how it worked: Players who signed up would receive half of a Macon Money bond. It was up to them to find the person in their community who received the other half. Then, the newly formed pair could redeem their bond for Macon Money currency, which some local businesses agreed to accept. (A similar experiment — only without the gaming aspect — with local currency played out in Western Massachusetts about five years ago.)

Macon bucks have an undeniably local aesthetic, with former resident Otis Redding’s image gracing the bills. The exchange rate is $1 USD to $1 Macon, and a total of $65,000 Macon Money bonds were issued in $10 – $100 increments. It was free to play, which Goldfin says made some participants dubious at first.

“We started out slow,” she said. “This was a brand new concept for all of us. There was a lot of apprehension about it and people thought, ‘Free money? I can spend it at these businesses? What’s the catch?’”

Over time, though, and with the help of word-of-mouth, traditional media coverage, informational videos, and boots-on-the-ground explanations from the team behind the game, people got “very excited, very involved, very committed to the game.” How the game spread reinforces the importance of multi-platform and multi-channel distribution when it comes to engaging an audience.

While gamification has creeped into the news world in fun and meaningful ways, the lessons for journalists from Macon Money have less to do with how newsrooms can use games in storytelling, and more to do with what games tell us about how people connect with one another and share information.

With its Games for Change initiative, Knight has spent plenty of time and money exploring and attempting to spur innovation in gaming that extends far beyond entertainment for its own sake. Here’s how the Knight Foundation explained how Macon Money fits into this mission earlier this week in a post-mortem about the experiment:

Unlike past foundation support for digital games, these took place in real-time with real people in the real world and they supported ongoing efforts to tackle local issues. There is already an existing body of research about how digital games have the potential to improve learning and influence behavior. But less attention has been paid to the effects of real-world games — i.e., games that are played out in the physical world. Knight wanted to explore which aspects of real-world games were most effective in addressing community issues.

Some of their findings: 78 percent of those who played Macon Money were under 40 years old; 70 percent were women; African Americans were underrepresented among players; most were employed full-time and earned more than $60,000 per year. Relatively few strong ties were formed, but about 15 percent of matched players became Facebook friends.

Blake says the overall results were “very encouraging,” because there was some evidence that the game forged and strengthened community ties: “When people get to know one another, even if it’s just a weak tie, that bodes well. Seventy percent of the people who responded on that note said that they would recognize the person [who had the other half of their bond] and say hello.”

The results were also positive with regard to economic development. About 46 percent of players said Macon Money took them to a local business that was new to them, and 92 percent reported having returned to that business after the game.

So what works — and what doesn’t — when it comes to audience engagement and community building in social-impact gaming? And how might these lessons be applied in newsrooms that want to launch games, or apps, or just generally rethink social engagement?

Goldfin offers what may be both the most obvious and most important point: “It was fun. Games are supposed to be fun. Often times, people are like, ‘We’re going to make a game about the First Amendment!’ or ‘We’re going to make a game about economic revitalization!’ Often the people who do that aren’t game designers.”

That brings us to some of the critical aspects from a development standpoint, like honoring the “value of design” by having the right people work on the right aspects of the project — then recalibrating as needed. For example, Macon Money needed seasoned game designers to build the infrastructure, but it also needed people who knew the Macon community first hand.

“You have to constantly balance, and manage, and negotiate the expertise of all of these elements,” Goldfin said. “Otherwise you won’t have success.”

The team also embraced an open source mentality, including sharing a blueprint for other communities interested in developing something simliar.

The project from the start required rethinking how to define the people that Macon Money aimed to reach, a task that is easily transferrable to “newsrooms that want to engage their constituents,” Goldfin said. When you start reconceptualizing how communities can be grouped, you can innovate cost-effective ways to reach them — whether it’s through games, content sections, events, tweet-ups, or some other channel.

“We usually define audiences or communities by very traditional demographics, but that no longer needs to be the limitation,” she said. “You can define communities through interest, rather than age. It’s the bigger picture. One size doesn’t fit all.”

Yesterday The Boston Globe ended all your tomorrows

Posted: 02 May 2012 10:02 AM PDT

The Boston Globe has killed yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

In an announcement on BostonGlobe.com’s Insiders blog, Charles Mansbach, the Globe’s Page 1 editor, says the paper is doing away with the convention of using those terms in stories. Instead they’ll start using the day on the week. So instead of seeing a Thursday story noting the Red Sox start a series with the Orioles “tomorrow,” it’ll say the series starts “Friday.” This shouldn’t be surprising, but it is a break — and an official one — with decades of practice at many newspapers.

The reason? Times (pun intended) have changed. Mansbach explains:

The reason for the change is that articles are no longer written only for the newspaper. Breaking news is posted immediately on the Globe’s websites; stories are then fleshed out, posted again, then put into the process for the next day’s paper and the next day’s web entries. With all that traffic, a reliance on “yesterday, “today,” and “tomorrow” is an invitation for error.

The Globe’s decision is part of an ongoing discussion inside and outside newsrooms about how to adjust phrasing in news to meet the needs of an evolved news cycle. Like the Globe, a number of papers have changed house style to only use the days of the week, while others use different terminology online and in print.

There is one exception to the new rule: print headlines. “Today” remains the basic unit of news urgency, especially online. “Today” is the equivalent of “now,” as in “you should be reading this because it’s happening within the context of your day.” Mansbach said the we should expect to still see things like “Crucial vote on debt limit today.” As he puts it: “We suspect that “Crucial vote on debt limit Wednesday” would not rivet anyone’s attention.”

[Editor's note: This story originally included this line: "Yesterday and tomorrow are almost meaningless in an era when someone could discover an article through search or social two weeks or eight months after its first published." While that's true, as Noam Cohen points out in the comments, we shouldn't have said it was the reason for the Globe's change. As the Mansbach quote above states, the key issue is that stories are often published on the web and in print on different days — not that an online story can have a theoretically infinite lifespan. Sorry.]
di

Rabu, 02 Mei 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

A Twin Cities turnaround? The Star Tribune carves a path back through growing audience

Posted: 01 May 2012 11:32 AM PDT

In 2009, the Star Tribune found itself on a dubious list: Time’s 10 Most Endangered Newspapers in America. That was the year Minnesota’s largest daily entered into bankruptcy after rounds of cost-cutting couldn’t help the company ease its debt load. It wasn’t particularly unusual to see a newspaper company enter into Chapter 11 in those dark days. But as someone who grew up reading the Star Tribune — I still have the front page from when the Twins won the World Series in ’87 — the thought of my home paper going under was frightening.

The Star Tribune today, four years later, seems to have lifted itself off the endangered list — although, to extend the species metaphor, it still has work to do before its survival becomes a matter of Least Concern. It’s out of bankruptcy; its debt has been reduced from around $500 million to $100 million. And, maybe most importantly, it’s growing its readership in print and through digital and keeping an eye towards growing consumer revenue.

Publisher Michael Klingensmith tells me the paper’s first-quarter revenue was up over the same period last year — a claim not many papers its size have been able to make since the mid-2000s. According to freshly released Audit Bureau of Circulation numbers, Sunday circulation is up about 4 percent in the most recent reporting period, while daily is up around 1 percent. They also saw a jump in single copy sales for Sunday in the second half of 2011, up to 120,000 from 115,000. Since launching digital subscriptions in fall 2011, the Star Tribune now has 18,000 digital subscribers. (The Star Tribune has a meter model that allows 20 free stories a month.) Overall subscription revenue is up 7.5 percent in the first half of this year from a year ago, Klingensmith said.

On the advertising side, Klingensmith would not provide specific data, but he said declines in ad revenue are shrinking: “Total advertising revenue declines have shrunk to the low single digit range in this year, to the order of magnitude that can be offset by increases in consumer revenue.” On top of all that, for two years in a row, the company has been able to cut employees a check as part of the paper’s profit-sharing agreement.

That’s a good story, but there’s a difference between turning the ship around and charting a new course. Klingensmith, a Minnesota native himself, wants to push the paper into new territory by meeting people where they are (or where they read) and by co-mingling the value of print and digital products.

“We’re trying to transform the nature of the subscriber relationship,” he said. “You no longer subscribe to the paper or an app. You subscribe to the Star Tribune brand.”

Bundling and the case for protecting print

The Star Tribune, like so many papers with digital subscriptions, wants to protect its print base from eroding. Seven-day print subscribers get digital access included in their subscription, as do readers who get the paper more than more than 2 days. But Sunday-only? You pay an incremental 99 cents a week to get digital access. So instead of the Frank Rich Discount of The New York Times — using digital subscriptions to push Sunday print — the Star Tribune wants to push readers to pick up more than just the Sunday paper.

“We want to control the subscriber relationship and want people to have a subscription through out system”

In other words, the Star Tribune wants you all-in, across platforms. While some media outlets are content to offer a menu of apps at various price points (the sports app, the entertainment app, the politics app), Klingensmith said he thinks that approach has a limited ceiling for revenue. Rather than break up your audience and allow them to have dissociated relationships with your company, create a product that appeals to various parts of your audience while giving them a door to the rest of your work.

“Pieces that appeal to segments, like entertainment apps or high school sports, if you put enough in a package I think you can charge more for the entire package,” he said. “My back of the envelope math says, so far, that’s the way to go.”

One complicating factor in their digital growth has been the hand-off between Apple’s App Store and the Star Tribune’s own subscriber system. The Star Tribune is not a part of Apple’s Newsstand, so in order for readers to connect their app access to their account they have to work through the Star Tribune’s own authentication system. “It’s not about the 30 percent we’d have to pay Apple. That would be fine,” he said. “We went to a lot of pain and effort to build a system that is customer-centric.”

Though Newsstand can provide visibility and discoverability, that’s not as critical for a local paper like the Star Tribune. Klingensmith said their audience is the within the boundaries of the state of Minnesota and anyone who grew up there, and that audience already knows about the Star Tribune. The more important issue is creating a deeper connection with readers — and, not incidentally, holding onto the valuable data each reader brings with it. “We want to control the subscriber relationship and want people to have a subscription through our system and have those people in our database,” he said.

Changing the Sunday paper

Before he came to the Star Tribune, Klingensmith was at Time Inc. for over 30 years, working at places like Time, Sports Illustrated, and Entertainment Weekly (which he co-founded). So the narrative goes that Klingensmith, with his years in the magazine business, saw the appeal of reader research — surveys and focus groups — and applied it to the daily newspaper. It’s not like audience research was foreign to newspapers — but considering how tight budgets have become at most papers, they haven’t been top priority either. Star Tribune editor Nancy Barnes said it had been at least four years since the paper undertook any significant research, so it was time for some fresh insights from readers. Barnes said they tested readers on everything from the design of the paper to its digital offerings. That work helped influence the redesign of StarTribune.com and changes to the print product, Barnes said.

“You have to have an ongoing dialogue with consumers because things are changing”

It also directed changes to the Sunday paper. If there’s a conventional wisdom in newspapers about Sundays, it goes like this: Sundays are for the takeout pieces, the long features, the narratives, and other elements that don’t fit in the shrunken daily news hole. But that wasn’t what Star Tribune readers had in mind for their paper: “We heard over and over, ‘Features are nice, but we want the hard news,’” Barnes said.

More specifically, readers wanted hard news and investigations on A1, along with a mix of national and international reporting. It wasn’t that readers didn’t enjoy features; rather, their Sunday news diet gave them time to ingest more serious news along with features, and they prefer the news at the top of the meal. Klingensmith said readers believe the front page is the chief indicator of a story’s importance and set a high bar for what is placed there. They adjusted the Sunday edition and now have more news up front, which Klingensmith thinks is one of the reasons single-copy sales increased.

“You have to have an ongoing dialogue with consumers because things are changing,” he said. “It’s important for us to understand where people want to get what sort of news.”

What comes next?

Klingensmith is quick to not take too much credit for the Star Tribune’s turnaround. He came to the paper after it came out of bankruptcy in 2010. While Klingensmith didn’t set the table, he shaped what happened next. (He was named Editor & Publisher’s 2011 Publisher of the Year.) The outlook for the paper is much improved from a few years ago, but both Kilingensmith and Barnes say they have plenty of work to do.

One area of focus is their iPad app, which they say has underperformed since its release last year. Putting aside the issue of authenticating subscriptions, the content on the app itself could be more dynamic and take better advantage of the tablet’s features, Barnes said. They plan — no surprise — to do research on it. “I think there is an appetite for work we are doing on the iPad — I don’t think we’ve nailed the right approach to it yet,” she said.

Klingensmith had his sights set on evening out the revenue picture, bringing the advertising revenue and consumer product revenues into closer balance. That would mean an increase from the consumer side of things, which Klingensmith estimates sits around 43 percent at the moment. He said it wouldn’t be out of the question to raise the price of the paper again. He doesn’t expect they would reduce the number of free stories in their meter, as the Times has, but he won’t rule it out either. “Generally speaking, over time, the print product in particular will have to carry a higher price. For the continuance of the enterprise, consumers are going to have to carry the cost,” he said.

Fortunately, Klingensmith has some perspective. Yes, the Star Tribune is caught up the same uncertainty that all newspapers around the country are facing. But Klingensmith’s happy for the ability to focus. Instead of a stable of magazines, he’s just got one title. Instead of multiple audiences, he’s just got one state-sized market. “We just have one little newspaper to run here, and that simplifies things,” he said.

Image of the Star Tribune building from Matt Green and Star Tribune newspaper box from smcgee used under a Creative Commons license.

You might not be a journalist, but you play one on Twitter

Posted: 01 May 2012 11:05 AM PDT

Though it might only come in 140-character bursts, everyone’s a publisher on Twitter. But how many of those publishers are journalists, or acting like journalists — and how does that affect what kind of information ends up getting passed around?

A study in the works at Indiana University aims to examine the extent to which Twitter users behave like journalists, even if they aren’t journalists in the traditional professional sense. Specifically, researchers Hans Ibold and Emily Metzgar are looking at “politically-oriented” Twitter users, and how they wield information.

“The writing is on the wall that people are turning to social media often, over and above traditional legacy news media,” Ibold told me. “It’s become a go-to source. That’s one of the reasons we wanted to ask: What kinds of journalistic storytelling are some of the more popular tweeters employing? The implication is that Twitter is becoming a news source — but what kind of a news source?”

By the nature of the platform, Twitter users perform functions that were once often limited to professional journalists — they publicly share ideas and information, engage with political issues, and otherwise connect and empower citizens. On the most basic level, this highlights Twitter as a disruptive force in the changing media ecosystem. Even as a relatively small percentage of online adults use Twitter (about 13 percent, according to Pew), people are able to act journalistically without relying on traditional channels to do so.

Metzgar and Ibold opted to find groups of politically oriented Twitter users the same way many people search the site: by using hashtags. With data from the university’s Twitter-analyzing Truthy project, they compared tweets using the conservative #tcot hashtag with those using the liberal #p2. A couple of examples:

Now, Metzgar and Ibold are still in the process of evaluating tweets — 250 so far, but ultimately 2,500 — for journalistic behaviors. For example, do these Twitter users verify the information they’re sharing? Do they simply assert information? Do they affirm preconceived notions? Or do they demonstrate some other special-interest approach?

Former Nieman Foundation curator Bill Kovach and Project for Excellence in Journalism director Tom Rosenstiel developed this evaluation framework — verification, assertion, affirmation, and special-interest —  in their book Blur. (For the purposes of their study, Metzgar and Ibold added a “none of the above” category.)

Researchers are also evaluating tweets for political rhetoric using three categories: attack, acclaim, and rebuttal. Their early findings have yielded some interesting results. Metzgar and Ibold find the most prevalent journalistic mode among their politically-oriented sample is assertion, which Kovach and Rosenstiel characterize as placing the “highest value on immediacy and volume and in so doing tends to become a passive conduit of information.” (Sound familiar, web users?)

“What’s going out on Twitter is truly broadcast with mass media potential.”

We’ve repeatedly seen the ease with which misinformation can spread on Twitter. (See also: Joe Paterno, Fidel Castro, and Nikki Haley.) Of tweets that demonstrated journalism behaviors, researchers found affirmation was also more likely than verification. Looking through the filter of political rhetoric, Twitter users were most likely to attack than rebut or acclaim.

Their preliminary findings also offer some hints as to distinction between partisan groups’ Twitter behaviors. For example, left-leaning Twitter users in their sample group were more likely than their right-wing counterparts to “retweet without any context,” Metzgar said. But overall, she and Ibold found “little difference” between how the two groups use Twitter. Regardless of political orientation, tweets were likely to be “scandal-oriented with emotional charge.” (Again, sound familiar, web users?)

What may be more telling is how both of these highly engaged Twitter groups — in addition to an “overall disregard for verification” — ignored traditional media, and one another. In instances when Twitter users did attempt to provide verification, it often came in the form of a link to an outside source. But rarely was that source a traditional journalistic outlet.

“Based on the small sample examined here, these politically focused conversations are happening without explicit reference to more traditional media outlets,” Metzgar and Ibold wrote in a working draft of the study.

And yet they found that the “echo chamber effect,” even as it excludes traditional media, still follows a familiar dynamic. Whether it’s in the newspaper, on cable TV, or on Twitter, people seek information that reinforces preconceived notions. Here’s how they put it in a draft:

People associate with those with whom they have something in common. Politics is a contentious topic — even among friends, partisanship is a fact of political life in the United States. People who are engaged civically in real life are more likely to be engaged online, too. Although early praise for the Internet suggested access to technology would end inequalities in society, the reality has been that new technologies simply reinforce already existing structures and the political Twittersphere is one place we expect to see the same dynamics repeated.

These findings are beginning to form a “view from 30,000 feet,” Metzgar says, but there are plans to dig much deeper. She wants to be able to analyze tweets right down to policy-based levels. Ibold wants to develop a framework for analyzing how people tweet about emotion, and what effect that has on the way people share.

“What’s going out on Twitter is truly broadcast with mass-media potential,” Metzgar said. “We think there are discussions happening out in the wide open that previously weren’t happening in the wide open, and people who are interested in those discussions can — if they choose to — track those discussions, see where things are headed and even sense tone, sentiment and emotion to get a feel for where the really engaged, activated public stands.”

Image derived from illustration by Matt Hamm used under a Creative Commons license.

A lesson in collaboration: How 15 news orgs worked together to tell a single education story

Posted: 01 May 2012 10:00 AM PDT

Shared bylines are common enough. But what about a story with the names of 15 reporters and more than a dozen news organizations attached to it?

Last month, Education Week, the Education Writers Association, and nonprofit news organization The Hechinger Report jointly produced a lengthy story that had a single byline — Alyson Klein’s — but listed 14 other reporters from 12 additional news organizations as contributors. Check it out:

This article was produced by Education Week, The Hechinger Report, and the Education Writers Association. Additional reporting was contributed by Liz Bowie and Erica Green of the Baltimore Sun, Sarah Karp of Catalyst Chicago, Antoinette Konz of The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Jennifer Brown of The Denver Post, Lori Higgins of the Detroit Free Press, Nancy Mitchell of Education News Colorado, Rachel Cromidas and Philissa Cramer of GothamSchools, Scott Elliott of The Indianapolis Star, Paul Takahashi of the Las Vegas Sun, Leslie Postal of the Orlando Sentinel, Jennifer Jordan of The Providence Journal, and Brian Rosenthal of The Seattle Times.

This is the second such collaboration between Ed Week, EWA, and Hechinger. Education is a beat that’s national — with federal policies and research — but intensely local, with thousands of school boards making decisions at a community level. So the idea is to have local and national reporters join forces to cover a major education story that’s playing out in different areas of the country, and at various levels of government. Ed Week produced an overview story with a national angle, then local partners — who helped feed state-based information for that national story — could reprint all or part of it in their regional publications. In this case, the assignment was to track the local use of $3 billion in federal School Improvement Grant stimulus money.

While Ed Week handled much of the writing and editing, EWA executive director Caroline Hendrie says it made sense for her organization to serve as the link to reporters participating from newsrooms around the country. “We work with reporters and editors across the country — these are our members and they’re already actively engaged with us,” Hendrie told me.

Davin McHenry, web producer and news editor at The Hechinger Report, says he handled project logistics like enforcing deadlines and “making sure the project was on track, getting information out to everyone.”

It may be true, as Hendrie told me, that we as journalists are “better together.” But it’s also true that a project of this scope presents a host of challenges. Here are some of the things Hendrie, McHenry, and Ed Week assistant managing editor Mark Bomster say they learned along the way, and the advice they’d give others who are considering a similar undertaking.

Find likeminded partners

McHenry: Our main thrust up to this point has been collaborating with newspapers, and providing them with content. We’re kind of that midpoint between the Education Writers Association and Ed Week…At the same time, we know how to provide high-level news content that’s accepted by the largest and most stringent news orgazantions.

Hendrie: It was very much a three-way collaboration from the beginning, with the idea that we would work to define clear roles for each of the organizations. That meshed well with our different but somewhat complimentary audiences and activities.

This kind of collaboration won’t work for every story

Bomster: You have to be sure you actually have the will and resources to follow through with it. Then you have to find a subject that will really resonate, and still hold up given such a long reporting and planning cycle…It has to be something that’s sort of a perennial topic, but also at the same time newsworthy, and something that hasn’t been plumbed as deeply as you might think.

Establish clearly defined roles, and cede control

Hendrie: It makes total sense for us to take the lead on the recruitment…Our community is comprised both of the national reporters and editors and local. We have news outlets of every stripe in all media — not just print, not just online, not just radio, not just TV, but all of those things. To the extent that we can pool our resources, we’ll all produce better information for the public.

Bomster: It’s kind of unusual because those of us who are news editors and reporters tend to be such control freaks. We had to cede a certain amount of that control. The way that it really turned out, we each decided we were going to play our positions.

Think big, but start small

McHenry: The first time around, we went out and recruited as many papers as we could in one big fell swoop…We asked them to dedicate a reporter for a week, maybe two weeks, to investigate the topic. I think at our high-water mark, I want to say we had 50 news outlets that had initially signed on. But what we ran into was, a lot of these places, they had eyes bigger than their stomachs and very quickly that number started dwindling. [The fix this time around, McHenry said, was to allow time-strapped news organizations to help with certain stages of the project, without feeling bad about not being able to commit from start to finish.]

Know your limitations

Hendrie: Always be aware of just how overtaxed journalists are today in the modern newsroom. One lesson that we’re learning is always to simplify, and find more streamlined ways to communicate. People are so pressed for time and pulled in so many directions…Put extra time into thinking how you’re messaging.

Realize the potential reward

Bomster: This model puts a big premium on collaborative work. We all maximize our resources, and there’s a lot of leverage you can get out of that with just a couple of organizations who are in tune about coverage philosophy and expertise.

Hendrie: So much of education policy and practice happens at the state and the local level, but there’s huge commonalities and, more and more, the national and federal impact is increasing. So it’s very important that education journalists compare notes, learn from each other, help one another know what’s going on in other communities because there is so much — the overall context varies, certainly, but there are threads running through that are the same everywhere.

Photo by Twix used under a Creative Commons license.
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