Selasa, 05 Juni 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

The commuter’s dilemma, solved: News.me and (now) Instapaper ready stories when you walk out the door

Posted: 04 Jun 2012 10:42 AM PDT

Raise your hand if this scenario sounds familiar: You’re rushing to catch the subway/plane and only moments before boarding do you stop to think about what you’re going to read en route. Suddenly you remember that one great story you saw and wanted to read later. You scramble to launch your favorite reading app only to find you can’t update it in time. The subway/plane door closes, and so does your window of opportunity.

Okay, sure, the commuter’s dilemma falls squarely in the category of first world problems. It’s an annoyance, but an important one given the increasing amount of time we spend with mobile devices and our access-anywhere expectations.

Now two reading apps — News.me a month ago and, as of Saturday, Instapaper — have updated their apps to allow location-based background downloads of new stories. In English: It grabs your newest stories whenever you enter or leave a place. In News.me, you define your home location in the app and whenever you leave those coordinates, it grabs the latest news. Similarly, Instapaper lets you set 10 different locations (home, office, classroom, gym, your favorite bar, etc.) that will trigger updates.

All of this is possible thanks to geofencing, the same idea that pings us when we’re near a restaurant we want to try on Foursquare or shoots us a reminder to pick up laundry detergent when we’re near a market. Geofencing is popular in retail circles because it’s a way of potentially pulling in customers. Instapaper and News.me are putting a new spin on it, an ingenious nod to the old/new reading habit that is being developed. In one way or another, we geofenced our reading in analog ways in the past. You made sure to have a magazine or book with you when you hopped on a plane or subway. Of course, back then, you didn’t have to wait for that latest article from New York to download before you could read it.

Jake Levine, general manager of News.me, told me over email most of the News.me team are subway riders, so they ran into the offline reading problem frequently. Paperboy, the geofencing feature they created, was made by iOS developer Rob Haining, who detailed some of the back-end specifics. Levine said they wanted to adjust the social reading app to the new news routine.

“For some people it starts with waking up, sitting down with a cup of coffee, and flipping through the newspaper. For many, it’s leaving home, commuting via public transportation, and powering up their iPhone,” he said. “Unlike newspapers, which are built for offline consumption, digital applications require some extra effort on the part of the user to work offline.”

These new location-based features are something of a hack. Apple allows a limited number of apps to download content in the background, most notably newspapers and magazines in the Newsstand. Arment writes on the Instapaper blog:

iOS doesn’t yet permit apps like Instapaper to automatically download new content in the background on a regular schedule, but Background Update Locations can get most of the way there for a lot of people. Simply add up to 10 locations that you enter and leave often, and Instapaper will frequently update without manually launching it.

If you own a smartphone, it’s likely you do a fair share of reading on it, which is why news publishers and the universe of reading apps that surround them are trying to find more effective ways of delivering the content you want. Filtration and customization have been big areas of focus, but smarter delivery appears to be the next step.

While these location-based features are designed for readers who find themselves suddenly offline, more granular updating for stories could prove very valuable to all readers. It’s not hard to imagine the possibilities this opens up for mobile devices: top stories in the morning when you leave home, your favorite blogs delivered as you leave for lunch, saved stories updated in time for evening commute. And the best part? It’s all ready when you open the app.

Image by F.C. Photography used under a Creative Commons license.

In Brazil, the nonprofit model for journalism is just being born

Posted: 04 Jun 2012 09:30 AM PDT

In the United States, the nonprofit model for journalism has been around for decades, but in Brazil, it’s a novelty. For three award-winning journalists, it’s a novelty seen as the the only way to reporting on issues and in areas neglected by traditional media organizations. That’s why, in March 2011, Tatiana Merlin, Marina Amaral, and Natalia Viana founded Publica.

Publica (“everything that belongs to the public” in Portuguese) is the first nonprofit investigative journalism center in the world’s fifth largest country. But as it enters its second year of existence, its leaders are more sure than ever than nonprofit models can’t simply be copy-pasted from one continent to another. The team has been inspired by models overseas — particularly the U.K.’s Bureau of Investigative Reporting, which Viana followed closely while she was living in London — but Publica demands invention.

“It works very differently for every country,” Viana said. “You have to be very creative in all aspects.”

Brazil doesn’t have as long a history with a free and aggressive press as some countries; it was governed by a military dictatorship as recently as 1985. Viana said there is investigative reporting that focuses on corruption in the federal government, but that other areas don’t get as much attention. “There’s not a thriving culture of investigating corporations, human rights violations, or social issues,” she told me.

And that’s meant that Publica has chosen to focus on a few key investigative areas where it sees a need for digging that isn’t being done enough elsewhere, areas they consider “essential” for Brazil’s future and the “quality of its democracy,” especially now that the country is on its way of becoming an economic superpower.

  • The World Cup: The concern here isn’t soccer — Brazil’s pretty good at that — but about the enormous infrastructure that is being built to host the event in 2014. “We are interested in reporting on how infrastructure works are affecting people and how people is organizing,” Viana explained.
  • The Amazon rainforest: There’s a controversial series of projects (roads, airports, highways, and 144 dams) in the works for development over the next decade. “Those projects are going to change entirely the landscape of the Amazon, the way it connects to Brazil and the way the country connects to foreing markets,” Viana said.
  • The military dictatorship: Brazil has established a “truth commission” to investigate what really happened between 1964 and 1985, but Viana says it’s a matter Publica’s interested in because, she said, it was never investigated appropriately.

Publica operates with a small team — six people, their roles often interchangeable. Other outlets can republish (and buy) Publica’s stories only, but only if they don’t edit them. “Our focus is always on the public interest,” Viana told me.

Not surprisingly, the most challenging task in these 14 months of operations has been creating a network of funders and partners. Publica didn’t have revenue until early this year, when the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundations made a seed investment. Both groups are giving money for a one-year project Publica pitched to them, hoping that the site will find sustainable revenue streams. Along with that investment and donations, the center is working on a few other ideas:

  • Crowdfunding: Suggesting story ideas to Publica’s audience to see which ones users would be willing to pay to have done.
  • Partnering with non-journalistic NGOs: Working on specific journalistic projects of interest to other groups without reporting capacity (funders won’t get a saying in the outcome of the project).
  • Collaborating with media outlets: Traditional news organizations can help with human resources (reporters for a particular project, for example) or by buying stories produced by Publica.

Publica’s dealt with some doubt from their peers in the news business. “Media executives don’t believe this model of not-for-profit is possible,” Viana said. But Publica’s worked to build a set of partners around the country, starting off with independent bloggers, and now working with a number of larger, traditional outlets like Agora (one of Sao Paulo’s major dailies) and three newspapers from the Amazon region. They’ve also built content partnerships with a number of U.S. and South American news outlets.

Viana doesn’t rule out future collaboration with the largest big media corporations in Brazil: “We want our stories to be spread.”

Slate doubles down on podcasts, courting niche audiences and happy advertisers

Posted: 04 Jun 2012 07:30 AM PDT

Andy Bowers (center) at a live taping of the Political Gabfest at Grinnell College in 2011. Foreground, left to right: John Dickerson, David Plotz, Emily Bazelon

The New York Times started making podcasts way back in 2004, when the form was barely more than a concept and the term itself was new. In December 2011, the Times dropped nearly all of them, saying, in an opaque statement, “there may be other venues and programs that may be more advantageous in connecting with our audience.”

And then Boston Globe editor Marty Baron tweeted: “We dropped podcast years ago. Big time commitment, little gain.”

Are podcasts on the way out?

“We just all laughed at that,” said Andy Bowers, Slate’s executive producer of podcasts. Bowers, a 20-year veteran of NPR, came to Slate in 2003.1 He has created every one of Slate’s 19 podcasts, including four new ones in the last year. Three more are in the planning phase.

Podcast downloads now top 1 million a month, Bowers said, almost double the numbers from 2010. Hundreds of people show up for live tapings of the podcasts and pay for tickets. And they’re apparently a big hit with advertisers, who pay higher rates to advertise in Slate podcasts than any other kind of content.

So the Times announcement was a head-scratcher. “We thought, really? This isn’t working for you?” Bowers said. “Because for us it really is the part of Slate that people are absolutely most engaged with.”

Gabfest, the podcast that started it all

Slate’s first podcast, the weekly Political Gabfest, remains its most popular. That show spawned the Culture Gabfest, in 2008, Slate’s second most popular. Bowers had the idea for the Gabfest almost seven years ago.

“I would listen to our Slate editorial conference calls, where people just love to throw out ideas and debate them and argue about them, and they were really funny and fun and insightful,” Bowers said. (It must have been a sea of counter-intuitive Slate pitches!) “I thought, you know, if I could just capture this in a podcast, I think people would [find it] really interesting. It would be like the discussion the political reporters have at the bar.”

Stephen Colbert is among the Gabfest’s most loyal fans.

Today, about 375 episodes later, Bowers said downloads typically reach five to six figures per episode. What makes it work is not a groundbreaking format but an expertly arranged mix of personalities: editor David Plotz and writers Emily Bazelon and John Dickerson have an infectious rapport. (And they love to do it. To cancel one of these shows, Bowers said, he “would have to pry the microphones out of their cold, dead hands.”)

The Gabfest counts among its fans Stephen Colbert, so loyal a listener he once phoned Plotz to ask why the hell a particular episode was late getting out. (I confirmed this with Colbert.)

Today Slate’s slate of podcasts includes Hang Up and Listen, a sports show; Lexicon Valley, a language show; and Manners for the Digital Age, hosted by Slate’s tech columnist and its advice columnist.

A big hit with listeners was Negotiation Academy, a limited-run podcast that ran for 10 episodes. Jill Barshay and Seth Stevenson offered lessons for negotiating in real-life situations — rent, salary, cars, children. That podcast was more like an audiobook, a nutritionally dense show that covered a single topic. Bowers said he’s developing concepts for similar shows.

Slate podcasts have ballooned not only in number but in length. The Gabfest was originally 15 minutes, the longest Bowers thought listeners could take. But listeners kept writing in and asking for the podcasts to be longer, then longer still. Now most programs are about 45 minutes long.

“Where else on the Internet do people go and seek out something that’s 45 minutes long and listen to it week after week after week, year after year?” Bowers said. “That kind of engagement is pretty extraordinary.”

Advertising appeal

That kind of engagement is what appeals to advertisers, said Slate publisher John Alderman. He would not tell me how much money Slate makes from podcasts but that “it is definitely a profitable part of the business.”

Slate charges a higher ad rate for podcasts than for any of its other content. And Slate podcasts have the highest sell-through rate; that is, Slate sells fills a higher percentage of its ad slots in podcasts than in story pages or videos.

“What we found, and what the advertisers found, is it’s incredibly powerful when the person is speaking to you, whether you’re in the car or making dinner,” Alderman told me. “The conversational tone of podcasts and especially the Slate podcasts make it a truly personal connection.”

The model is not unlike commercial talk radio, or television newscasts of the 1950s. Hosts drop sponsored product mentions into the middle of conversation. They are encouraged to describe their personal experience with the product. Because the ads fit no particular formula, they are hard to tune out.

Listen to how Plotz drops in this ad for GoToMeeting, between topics:

“The podcast is incredibly intimate, people connect with us deeply,” Plotz said in a live taping of the Gabfest last month in New York. “And they connect with Slate because they like spending time with us on the show.”

Plotz tells me he has been stopped “tons of times” by passersby who identify him by the sound of his voice.

Niche audiences

So why didn’t podcasts work for The Boston Globe or The New York Times?

In an email, I asked Baron to explain that tweet:

We had a few podcasts related to the news. Each podcast required a few hours of staff time every day — to review the stories, write the script, record it. While the listeners seemed satisfied and very devoted to the podcast, the numbers weren't big. So, when we had to review how to spend our money, podcasts didn't rise to the top of the priority list. They were close to the bottom. Still, if Slate is now having great success, we'd take a look at it and see [if] there are opportunities for equivalent success here.

The Times and the Globe are general-interest publications with different audiences. General interest may not work so well in podcasting, where listeners have so much choice.

“I think what the Times did is, they made a choice,” Bowers said. “They could have done front-page style or op-ed page style. And they chose front page. And I think that was the wrong choice for podcasting. I think opinion and criticism and personality are important in podcasting, and they chose not to do that. In the political one, they said ‘Mr. Obama’ and ‘Mr. Romney,’ and I think that’s a little too formal for the medium.”

The Times’ two remaining podcasts are Book Review with Sam Tannehaus and Science Times with David Corcoran. Both are highly produced, with music, billboards (introductions that tease upcoming segments of the show), and recorded interviews. Slate’s Gabfests require little editing, Bowers said, making them efficient to produce. It sounds like the host turns on the microphone and starts talking — and that’s pretty much what it is.

Bowers did virtually everything you can do in radio during his time at NPR: London bureau chief, Moscow bureau chief, White House correspondent, media correspondent. He oversaw the innovative collaboration between Slate writers and Day to Day, NPR’s erstwhile midday magazine.

“Coming from radio, where real estate on the air is incredibly valuable — I look at the Internet as a great place to experiment and try things,” he said. And the next frontier for podcasts? The car.

“I have a Ford that has a Bluetooth connection to the phone. I get in the car and I start listening to the podcast, and I get to the store and it pauses. And then I get in and it picks up again,” he said. “It’s even easier than TiVo, because you don’t have to remember to set the timer.”

Photo of Andy Bowers (center) at a 2011 live taping of Political Gabfest courtesy of Grinnell College. Foreground, left to right: John Dickerson, David Plotz, Emily Bazelon.

Notes
  1. An earlier version of this story misstated Bowers’ start date at Slate; in fact, 2005 is the year Slate began podcasting.
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Sabtu, 02 Juni 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Lessons in blogging (and tweeting) from Samuel Pepys

Posted: 01 Jun 2012 11:20 AM PDT

Samuel Pepys was prolific, keeping a constant narrative of his life and the world around him from 1660 to 1669. That’s pretty damn impressive by most standards, especially considering the only reason the man stopped was because he feared he was going blind. Blind. The Pepys diary is historically important not just as a primary document of a rich period of English history, but as an advance of the medium itself. It’s one of the most famous diaries ever.

And thanks to Phil Gyford we have it in blog form. Also, tweet form. Turns out Pepys would have made for a pretty good blogger and a good follow on Twitter (though he does often report on his meals). In 2002, Gyford set out to recreate the Pepys experience by posting the diary daily on Pepysdiary.com, mirroring the writing pattern of Sam himself. And as of yesterday, when the diary had run its course, Pepys signed off for the last time, again.

Gyford’s project wasn’t parody (@Pepys_ebooks!) or an update (Pepys loves Pinterest!). It was a faithful, contextual example of how blogs and tools like Twitter can help us experience history in unthought of ways — a model that’s been repeated numerous times by others in the years since. As several news outlets have tried their hand at re-telling stories from our past through blogs and social media, Gyford provides a good example on how to relive history on the web. He’s also a portrait of endurance: Who among us not named Robert Caro can say we’ve worked on a single writing project for 10 straight years?

I had an online chat with Gyford (who news nerds may know better from his remarkable reformatting of The Guardian), lightly edited below, about Pepys the blogger, Pepys the tweeter, and what he learned over the years.

Justin Ellis: Well first off, congratulations on completing the diary. Is it a relief to be over?
Phil Gyford: Definitely.
Ellis: What was your daily routine like for posting the diary for a decade?
Gyford: No daily routine…I usually prepared a week’s worth of entries at a time. At first it was maybe a couple of hours a week. But more recently, it took between a half and one day a week, so I’d spend most of either Friday or Saturday on it.
Ellis: What do you mean by prepared? Was it just finding the right passage for the right day?
Gyford: No…well, there’s the diary on the website. For that I had to add all the links into the text, and create any new Encyclopedia pages for them to link to. That sometimes involved working out exactly who someone was, or where a place was on a map. And then for Twitter I picked out a few bits and lightly edited them for length so they’d fit.
Ellis: I liked all the context (the Encyclopedia of topics and places, Also On This Day, even weather records from the time) you provide on the website. This may be a stupid question, but why did you want to include that?
Gyford: Because so much of the text either makes no sense without more context, or just loses a lot. Knowing something about the people involved, aside from what Pepys says about them, helps bring it to life and give you another view on what kind of person they were — what they achieved, how they looked (from which we probably make many snap judgements about what kind of person they were…)
Ellis: You probably get asked this all the time, but why did you start the diary?
Gyford: I do :)
Ellis: Sorry!
Gyford: Because I was interested in reading it — because I live in London and was aware of him, but knew little about him. But I knew that I’d never actually read through all the volumes in book form. Too long and daunting. I was reading a lot of blogs at the time, 2002, and it seemed like his diary would be perfect in blog form. I assumed someone must have done it already. Unfortunately they hadn’t, so I felt I should, especially when I found there was a copyright-free version of the text on Project Gutenberg.
Ellis: And then you made the jump to Twitter. Does Pepys translate well into tweets?
Gyford: Yes, I think so. Actually, at first I was thinking I’d just use Twitter to post a link to that day’s diary entry, because a lot of people seem to use Twitter for sharing links. Then I thought I should add a little quote with the link and then I realised I should just make it completely “in character” and be nothing but quotes from the diary as if it was Pepys tweeting. I think it works very well. To be honest, I’m not sure I’d have stuck through all of the diary-as-blog as a reader — I just wouldn’t be interested enough to cope with the length, when there’s so much else to read online. But I like the tweets a lot, how they slip into your daily routine, and give an impression of someone going about their daily business at the same time as everyone you know.

Ellis: So the tweets might fit better with a reader’s attention span?
Gyford: Some readers. I’m not 100 percent, sure but I doubt there’s much crossover between tweet and blog readers when it comes to Pepys. Other readers love the detail of the blog — it’s part of their daily routine of something to read over breakfast or whatever.
Ellis: Twitter does seem to fit the spirit of what he did. In the same way I might tweet about watching a basketball game, Pepys tweets about going out to dinner.
Gyford: Yes. While there’s a certain conceit to it — if Pepys was tweeting he wouldn’t have tweeted all those private events, just as he wouldn’t have posted them on a public blog…but I tried to keep the quotes I used for Twitter to be very in keeping with the medium, so that they weren’t too jarring when part of the flow of normal tweets.

Also, he never broke character as much as someone on Twitter can — he was entirely in the 17th century. He never replied to anyone, posted a link, or anything except post text from the diary.

Ellis: No Foursquare check-in from Pepys.
Gyford: Yes, I think that would have been a bit too odd. Too apart from the text.
Ellis: Was Twitter more difficult in a way? Picking out the right quotes that fit into 140 characters? Also, did you use something to schedule the tweets?
Gyford: The bulk of the work was preparing the diary entries for the website. Preparing the tweets wasn’t that difficult really, and just meant some careful editing to make them fit. I wrote a script that posts the tweets automatically. Also, my hosting provider limits me to only running scripts once per hour. That felt like a hassle at first, but I think it was mainly good for Pepys — it meant I wasn’t tempted to post too many at once, which could become annoying. He just drips in occasionally.
Ellis: Pepys spams your Twitter feed. How did the number of people following the blog and Twitter feed change over time?
Gyford: There was a lot of interest at first — interest bloomed in a few days and I did a few bits of press, so it was a lot more popular more quickly than I expected. But since then, aside from very occasional articles here and there, there’s been little coverage and I think interest has dropped off a bit. It’s been fairly steady for quite a while, but the start was its peak. The number of Twitter followers has been growing steadily since @samuelpepys launched.
Ellis: I’m wondering what your thoughts are about using the Internet to give a better understanding of history. We’ve seen other efforts like this, people doing live blogs or Twitter feeds for things like the U.S. civil war.

Gyford: One aspect is that as we’ve become increasingly used to having the net as a continuous part of our lives — it’s given us new ways to experience the past. Years ago, we might have used the Internet quite a bit, but it was either only at our desks or only on a laptop.

These days we (a) have the ability to be online all the time if we want, and we (b) have more online environments that we use more continuously — Twitter, Facebook, etc. are more ongoing experiences, unlike most websites that are a bit more sporadic. (I guess websites like forums are a bit of an exception to that.) So we’re now able to experience these historical events in a way that we couldn’t before, by using time. Experiencing World War II one tweet at a time might seem quite superficial at first, because there’s so little textual content there, and that’s true. But over time, we experience WWII at the same pace as people who lived it. Obviously, it’s nothing like the same, but it’s also different to just reading a history of the war in a book over the course of a couple of weeks.

The passing of time gives those little drips of events added weight.

Ellis: You spent a lot of time with Pepys’ work now. What do you think about him as a writer or just as a person?
Gyford: As a writer, I don’t know…hard to judge. It’s a diary, rather than something written for publication, and I know nothing about other contemporary writing so can’t judge it in comparison. As a person…very tricky. On the professional level he seems to have been good, competent…he reformed the navy and put in place things that lasted for a long time. As I understand it.

On a personal level…he gets a lot of flak for his philandering. The worst of his philandering justifies the disapproving words — going round kissing and touching up many other women isn’t good husbandly behaviour however you spin it! But I don’t know how much that can be (very partially) explained by changing times — it’s still not okay, but I really have no idea how his contemporaries would judge him. But still, not good, and he knew himself that he was wrong.

One thing I find interesting though is that because of this obviously wrong behaviour any other times he mentions in his diary an attractive woman, then people on Twitter are very disapproving…when even today the world is full of people much more openly “admiring” people of their favoured gender. It’s what we do. And so it’s a shame that him doing it, and then writing about it in his personal diary, is looked on by some as bad behaviour.

Ellis: That’s fascinating. People almost forgetting this is in a personal diary, and that the fact that it’s his diary is the only reason we get that insight. Fooling around with the help is timeless, I guess.
Gyford: Yes, if we see his diary as simply him writing down his thoughts — I wonder how many of his readers’ thoughts are entirely free of these kinds of musings! (Aside from the actual things he did, which are wrong, of course.)
Ellis: Now that you’ve spent all this time writing about Pepys, do you think it gives you a feel for what it was like for him writing back then? I mean, 10 years is a long, long time to be writing one thing.
Gyford: I don’t think so. They’ve been very different activities, physically and mentally. I write my own diary myself, although it’s much more sporadic. I think making yourself write a diary for every day would be the best way to get a feeling for what he felt. The self-analysis, working out what’s important to say, etc.
Ellis: So what do you do now? What’s next?
Gyford: No idea. It’s great!

Photo of Phil Gyford courtesy of Matt Locke. Image of Samuel Pepys from Wikimedia Commons.

The Wall Street Journal “cannot generate enough video streams” to meet advertising demand

Posted: 01 Jun 2012 08:51 AM PDT

The Wall Street Journal announced this morning the launch of a new early-morning show, Asia Today, which will broadcast weekdays at 6:30 a.m. (Eastern), with a focus on business, finance, and breaking news in the region. It’s the second Asia-based initiative that the newspaper has announced this week; Tuesday, the Journal made public plans for a dedicated Indonesia news site.

But aside from a continued push overseas, Asia Today also represents the Journal’s continuing push into video as part of its “WSJ Everywhere” mission. A couple of weeks ago, Raju Narisetti, managing editor for The Wall Street Journal’s Digital Network, told me that despite the newspaper’s big jump into video — more than four hours of live video per day, some 1,500 videos per month, accessible across 18 digital platforms like iPads, iPhones, desktops, YouTube, Apple TV, etc. — there’s still a hunger for more.

“From a business point of view, we cannot generate enough video streams,” he said. “We are sold out. There is no shortage of demand to generate more video views.”

The Journal’s release on Asia Today noted that the video push has created “an 85% growth in video streams since the start of the calendar year for the Wall Street Journal Digital Network and has attracted a range of innovative advertisers across categories.”

Advertisers’ interest in video comes as Americans are spending more time with screens, and increasingly taking those screens with them. Earlier this year, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that nearly one-third of Americans are getting news on mobile devices, and increasingly across different platforms.

For the Journal, that shift represents an opportunity for pervasiveness in a media-saturated world — and video is one of the paths to get there. Narisetti calls portability “the big issue” that the newspaper faces. But the other big issue will be to make sure that a portable advertising experience complements the content that consumers are seeking.

“You have to create your content in such a way that it will travel,” Narisetti said. “But the real challenge is not content — it’s an advertising challenge. That’s where the challenge would be, from an execution standpoint. Conceptually, no matter where you want the Journal, I want to be there. But the question is how do we do it without messing up the ad experience?”

New York Times turns readers into beta testers with Test Drive

Posted: 01 Jun 2012 07:40 AM PDT

Congratulations, New York Times readers: You can now think of yourself as beta testers.

The Times has released a new browser tool that will let readers test experimental features on NYTimes.com in real time. With Test Drive — available as a Chrome extension, a Firefox add-on, or as a simple bookmarklet — readers can test experimental web features the Times doesn’t think are yet ready for the big show.

The experimental features currently in Test Drive include NYT Accessible, which optimizes the site for visually-impaired readers, and TimesInstant, an article search that produces results while you type. Once Test Drive is installed, you can toggle the experimental features on or off at will.

These projects were created by the Times beta620 group and have already been available for testing on their site; Test Drive puts these ideas into on wrapper and lets the Times take them out of a static lab state and into a real world environment. The goal of beta620 is for developers, designers, and others to tinker with ideas that have the potential to enhance the Times online or through apps. (Times HQ is at 620 Eighth Avenue.)

“We love beta620 — it’s been a great experience and a great way to get our innovations in front of the public before they’re fully baked,” Marc Frons, the Times chief information officer told me. “The downside of it was that it was a separate website.”

David Erwin, a software engineer with beta620, said the point of their work was to see how these experiments would play on NYTimes.com. By keeping them on the beta620 site they couldn’t really test that. “The key moment for me was, why not have a framework to actually bring the projects designed for the live site into that everyday experience so they can be used where they belong?” he said.

The web has pushed journalists to be more willing to expose the workings of their reporting — blogging stories in progress, tweeting updates from a scene before filing. But the beta mentality of letting users play with new features before they’re ready to ship has a long history in the technology world.

Of course, the kinds of people who discover and install browser extensions are not a random sample of Times readers as a whole. Frons says they’re okay with that. ‘It’s not like a traditional A/B test where you’re actually just throwing something else up on unsuspecting readers and measuring your clicks,” he said. “I think the quantitative data will be less important here than the qualitative, where people’s comments and our own understanding of how we’re using these tools and experience will be more important than measuring clickthroughs or that sort of thing.”

The Times’ innovation staffers have created several features that have “graduated” into wider usage on NYTimes.com, including the article recommendation engine, Times Skimmer, and the up next box that slides into view at the end of a story. (Some of those were internal Times innovation projects started before beta620 was officially christened last summer.) It wouldn’t be hard to imagine TimesInstant and NYT Accessible joining that group. TimesInstant was inspired by Google Instant and is seen as a means of making searching the Times easier, particularly if you’re not entirely sure of a proper name, place or event. While it doesn’t give you predictive text as Google does, it provides results as you type.

Erwin said NYT Accessible is aimed at making the site more friendly to vision-impaired readers, stripping away some of the elements of a Times story page that can confuse screen-reader technology. So instead of a page with an array of links, the recommendation box or ads, a user would get just the headline, byline, and text of the story along with enlarged photos. (It’s also a vision of a stripped-down, minimalist version of the Times that some designers with perfectly fine vision have clamored for.)

On a broader level, Test Drive is a way for the Times to let readers make a personalized experience on NYTimes.com. As new modules are added, readers will have a customized layer they can turn on and off at will. “At some future date, you may see what looks like an entirely new website on Test Drive and then be able to switch that off and go back to NYTimes Classic, or whatever we’re gonna call it,” Frons said. (For example, check out beta620′s Late Edition, which imagines a NYTimes.com front page that trades link density for scrollability.)

Image by Chris Devers used under a Creative Commons license.

This Week in Review: Facebook’s IPO aftermath, and New Orleans’ cuts stoke the paywall debate

Posted: 01 Jun 2012 07:00 AM PDT

Debating the meaning of Facebook’s IPO flop: Facebook’s fall following its initial public offering two weeks ago continued this week, with shares dropping under $30 (they were initially offered at $38). Several other social media-based companies have seen their stock tank, too, prompting Forbes’ Dee Gill to wonder if Facebook’s IPO has been a reminder that “even a wildly popular product won't save a company that can't make money.”

David Strom of ReadWriteWeb did point out, though, that stock prices soon after tech IPOs haven’t been a very reliable indicator of companies’ prospects for long-term success. The New York Times’ Joe Nocera made a similar point, arguing that Facebook’s IPO flop was fueled by get-rich-quick investors and that long-term investors should be undeterred.

At PandoDaily, Farhad Manjoo made the case that Facebook’s IPO was a valuable corrective to a dangerously overhyped tech market: “Facebook's IPO proves that there isn't an endless supply of bigger suckers. And because bigger suckers are the primary ingredients in bubbles, it now seems likely that the new tech bubble—if there ever was one—is dead, dead, dead.” And The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal made a pretty thorough defense of Facebook’s value as a company, reminding us that it has a still-growing near-monopoly and tremendous potential for making money from its millions of users.

There was still plenty of criticism of Facebook floating around this week, though. The New York Times’ Ross Douthat saw Facebook as a sign of the lack of financial progress brought by the Internet economy, and Facebook’s advertising shortcomings continued to be a point of discussion. Ad Age reported that GM pulled its advertising from Facebook in part because Facebook balked at its proposal to run full-page ads, which, according to media consultant Terry Heaton, illustrated the difference between Madison Avenue’s philosophy of bending the masses to their will and Facebook’s gentler approach. The Huffington Post’s Bianca Bosker also looked at the tension Facebook is facing between its advertisers and users.

Here at the Lab, Dan Kennedy extended the ad problem to journalists, proposing a few ideas for adapting to an online world in which the value of ads continues to shrink. Also on the news front, Buzzfeed’s John Herrman wrote about how coverage on Twitter of the Facebook IPO indicates that Twitter is well ahead of Facebook in covering and developing breaking stories.

Another major note on Facebook to keep an eye on: The New York Times reported that the company is trying again to build a smartphone to release later this year. It’s had several false starts in this area before, but is moving “deeper into the process” this time. Facebook was also reported this week to be buying the facial recognition company Face.com.

The impact of New Orleans’ move away from print: As we moved into the second week of discussion of the New Orleans Times-Picayune’s cutback from daily newspaper production, the conversation began to shift from New Orleans in particular to the future of the newspaper industry as a whole. Poynter’s Steve Myers looked at a couple of the immediate issues — concerns over whether Advance Publications’ other papers (such as the Cleveland Plain Dealer) might make similar cuts, and whether New Orleans readers are likely to follow their paper online.

The New York Times’ David Carr, who broke the story, wrote a kind of elegy for the paper, concluding that while the cutback may make some financial sense, it’s a great loss for a historically corrupt city. “The constancy of a paper,” he wrote, “is a reminder to a city that someone is out there watching.” At the Huffington Post, Harry Shearer thought Carr wasn’t harsh enough in his assessment of Advance’s plans, arguing that breaking readers’ daily newspaper habits is foolish, not economical. Shearer, Myers, and Iowa journalist Dave Schwartz all pointed out that New Orleans has particularly low Internet penetration rates (not to mention high newspaper penetration rates), with Schwartz calling those without web access “casualties in a revolution.”

Mathew Ingram of GigaOM and CUNY prof Jeff Jarvis, on the other hand, both argued that we need to get past our fixation with print journalism, using it when it’s profitable but feeling free to drop it when it’s not. “We have to make print beside the point,” Jarvis wrote. Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News, meanwhile, proposed some ideas at Poynter for resolving the journalism crisis in New Orleans, focusing on philanthropic efforts to improve Internet access, hyperlocal journalism, and accountability journalism. Al Jazeera discussed the future of the newspaper industry in light of New Orleans’ move away from daily with a few luminaries as well.

Cuts, layoffs, and the viability of paywalls: The Times-Picayune isn’t the only paper making these kinds of changes — Postmedia, Canada’s largest newspaper chain, announced this week it would cut the Sunday edition at three of Canada’s largest newspapers, lay off dozens of employees, and consolidate some of its editing operations, and also hinted at cutting back print days for its largest paper, the National Post. Postmedia was also reported to be moving ahead with paywalls at several of its papers.

While Postmedia CEO Paul Godfrey complained in an interview with the Globe & Mail that its ad revenue was being stolen by foreign digital companies (read: Google, AOL, etc.), GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram said the problems for Postmedia and other newspapers run much deeper than cuts and paywalls.

Crain’s Chicago Business also reported that the Chicago Tribune is considering a paywall potentially focusing on niche coverage, and Poynter’s Steve Myers pointed out that the major newspaper companies that aren’t charging for news are quickly becoming the outliers.

The paywall debate got a shot in the arm this week in the aftermath of the Times-Picayune’s cuts, when The Wire creator and former newspaper reporter David Simon asserted at the Columbia Journalism Review that “the whole industry will continue to collapse until everyone swallows hard and goes behind a paywall.” The short post spurred a feisty comment thread as well as several varying responses. A post at the news startup Circa made a distinction between charging for content (OK) and information (much more difficult to do), and Will Bunch made his aforementioned philanthropically driven proposals for New Orleans as a middle way between paywall advocates and detractors.

In addition, former newspaper editor John L. Robinson argued that if young people won’t even pay much for Facebook, they sure won’t pay for a newspaper — and that should worry newspaper publishers. Here at the Lab, Ken Doctor added some practical approaches to the discussion, looking at the effectiveness of different newspapers’ plans to shift from advertiser revenue toward reader revenue.

Breaking down the article: We got a reprise of the occasionally occurring discussion about better ways to do the news article this week, starting with NYU professor Jay Rosen’s complaint that a Reuters article on Facebook’s IPO was too dense for non-investors to understand. That triggered a lengthy Twitter conversation between Rosen, Reuters’ Anthony De Rosa and Felix Salmon, and CUNY professor Jeff Jarvis — Storified by De Rosa — about ways to better incorporate background information into news stories.

Rosen has done plenty of thinking about this problem in the past, and this time, Jarvis expanded the Twitter discussion into a post of his own in which he reconceived the news article as a group of assets (data, background information, leads, etc.) that could be broken down, rearranged, or specialized in by various news organizations, with links as the core element tying them together. “The end result is still an inverted pyramid — a prioritized set of assets that one can stop going through when one feels sated with information. But everyone's pyramid can be different. And what fills those pyramids can come from various sources,” he wrote.

Mathew Ingram of GigaOM echoed the idea, and meanwhile, Technically Philly’s Sean Blanda and blogger Dave Winer both wrote on rethinking the elements of an article — Blanda proposed thinking of the basic unit of journalism as the fact rather than the article, and Winer said we need to do better than Wikipedia when it comes to background information and explainers.

Reading roundup: Lots of little stories and debates popping up at the intersection of news and tech this week. Here’s a few of them:

— WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange lost his appeal to the British Supreme Court against extradition to Sweden on accusations of a pair of 2010 sexual abuse cases. He has two weeks to appeal one of the ruling’s points, but it looks as though he’s headed to Sweden to stand trial. Here’s The Guardian’s and The New York Times’ coverage, and Micah Sifry’s examination of the state of online whistleblowing as WikiLeaks struggles.

— A couple of ebook notes: Amazon settled its dispute with a publisher that pulled its books from the site earlier this year, and meanwhile, two other publishers filed responses to the Department of Justice’s antitrust suit on ebook pricing, and Apple filed its response to a parallel class-action suit.

— Web designer Oliver Reichenstein ripped the ubiquitous “Share” buttons all over news and other sites, while the Lab’s Joshua Benton provided some initial data showing they may be quite helpful for news orgs to prompt sharing of their content on Twitter.

— Cornell prof Tarleton Gillespie wrote an interesting post exploring whether we can trust Twitter’s Trending Topics algorithm, and GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram said it’s not necessarily Twitter’s job to broaden our worldview, but instead our own responsibility.

— Some additional commentary on Warren Buffett’s purchase of dozens of small Media General papers two weeks ago: NYU prof Clay Shirky thinks it’s a bad idea, and Mathew Ingram agrees with him.

— Finally, it’s not shameless self-promotion if it’s actually really good: The Lab ran several fascinating pieces this week that are worth a look — Justin Ellis’ talk with Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, some cool ideas for improving news from MIT Media Lab students courtesy of Andrew Phelps, and the Jonathan Stray’s smart column on broadening our concept of what journalists do. Enjoy.

Flipped Facebook thumb by Johannes Fuchs, 1979 Picayune shot by Josh Sanders, and Canadian paywall (har har) by John Fink all used under a Creative Commons license.
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Jumat, 01 Juni 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Now playing: The New York Times signs on to Hulu to reach a new audience for its long videos

Posted: 31 May 2012 11:30 AM PDT

You can now find videos from The New York Times on Hulu, thanks to a content licensing agreement between the paper and the popular video site.

Video produced for NYTimes.com will now be available alongside episodes of Modern Family, Glee, or old eps of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. More likely, they’ll be in the same neighborhood as documentaries and short news videos. The Times joins a number of news outlets on Hulu, the obvious ones like ABC News, NBC News, and Fox News, but also The Wall Street Journal.

The first Times video on Hulu is “Punched Out: The Life and Death of an N.H.L. Enforcer,” which was produced in conjunction with their three-part series about hockey player Derek Boogaard, who died at age 28 last year. The new Hulu channel will be a destination for Times videos that are more like short documentaries — maybe things like the Last Word series or Op-Docs.

When I spoke to Ann Derry, head of the video department for the Times, she said we can expect to see more videos soon on Hulu. “We’re always looking for ways to raise the visibility of what we do and get a larger audience,” Derry said. Derry told me the Times and Hulu had been in discussions for some time. They chose the Boogaard video both because its length (36 minutes) fit well into Hulu format and because it’s the time of year for the NHL playoffs, meaning there’s a chance to grab the attention of enthused hockey fans.

Derry said Hulu is the right fit for Times videos like “Punched Out,” which Derry estimates took four months to produce in concert with the story on Boogaard. Producer Shayla Harris and videographer Marcus Yam worked on the video as reporter John Branch reported out the story, which details Boogaard’s career as an enforcer and the effect it had on his life.

When the story was published in December 2011, it was accompanied with “Punched Out” in three segments. In moving over to Hulu the video has been repackaged as a single film to better fit the viewing experience on the site. For the Times there are obvious costs and benefits in joining up with Hulu. On Hulu, a viewer may be more likely to seek a lean-back entertainment and watch a video longer than five minutes. But by putting the videos on Hulu, the Times is also sending eyeballs off their property and adding an intermediary who’ll expect a cut of the ad revenue.

Derry said that’s not a big problem. “It’s always been both our journalism and business strategy to have people watching videos on our site and off our site,” she said. Hulu clearly offers the potential for new viewers to stumble onto Times videos who may have never visited NYTimes.com. Derry doesn’t see it as a zero-sum game. She said the new Hulu channel can add more awareness of the Times for viewers. “One doesn’t have to take away from the other,” she said. In the grand scheme of online video, moving to Hulu may not hurt. According to comScore the average online video viewer watched 21.8 hours of video in April, with Google sites (YouTube) making up 7.2 hours and Hulu accounting for 3.8 hours.

The Times’ videos are also available through Hulu Plus, which lets Times video appear on TV sets through devices like like Roku, Xbox and the Nintendo Wii. (Longtime Nieman Lab readers might remember back in 2009, when the Times’ R&D Lab was busy thinking about creative ways to get Times multimedia content into people’s living rooms. Hulu Plus is one route.) The Times still has a ways to go to catch up with The Wall Street Journal here, though, with its dedicated WSJ Live app and its dedicated channel slots on additional devices like Apple TV and Google TV.

This isn’t the first time the Times has syndicated their video content elsewhere, as anyone who’s flown JetBlue can tell you. The Times has a YouTube “edition” for the paper’s videos. They also had the short-lived Discovery Times cable channel. Derry got her start making videos for Discovery Times, and she said working with Hulu could be a return to producing those kind of projects for the Times. The newspaper creates many hours of video, ranging from daily news programming with TimesCast and Business Day to interviews with newsmakers and series like The Last Word. Since Hulu is a home for episodic content, it would make sense for the Times to add their more episodic offerings like Tony Scott and David Carr hamming it up, to their Hulu library. But rather than just dump a big chunk of the paper’s large video catalog on Hulu, Derry said they’re being selective about what content fits there.

The Times will soon have more video on Hulu and Derry hopes they’ll broaden their offerings to produce more longer pieces. “All of a sudden, you’re broadening the options of the things you can do,” she said. For Hulu, just like NYTimes.com, Derry said the main question remains the same: What’s the best format to tell a story?

How important are all those ugly Tweet Buttons to news sites?

Posted: 31 May 2012 10:23 AM PDT

News sites today are pockmarked with sharing buttons, those little “tweet this” or “like that” rectangles attached to seemingly every story these days.

In some ways, it’s not as bad as it used to be, when there were more social networks making a plausible claim on people’s attention. (Digg that!) But even in a world that’s mostly shaken out to Facebook and Twitter — plus maybe Google+ if you’re generous, or LinkedIn if you write about business, or Pinterest if you’re about shopping or food, or…sigh. Well, even in a world that’s mostly shaken out to a few social networks, those buttons are still a less than appealing set of warts on the body hypertext.

That’s the argument advanced by designer Oliver Reichenstein in a blog post (“Sweep the Sleaze”) that got a lot of attention this week:

But do these buttons work? It's hard to say. What we know for sure is that these magic buttons promote their own brands — and that they tend to make you look a little desperate. Not too desperate, just a little bit…

Don't worry. These buttons will vanish. The previous wave of buttons for Delicious and Digg and Co. vanished, Facebook and Twitter and G+ might vanish or they might survive, but the buttons will vanish for sure. Or do you seriously think that in ten years we will still have those buttons on every page? No, right? Why, because you already know as a user that they're not that great. So why not get rid of them now? Because "they're not doing any harm"? Are you sure?

Not surprising, coming from a designer best known in the technology world for building a minimalist writing app.

But do those Like buttons and Tweet Buttons do any good? To get some data on that, we can thank Luigi Montanez, who posted a Ruby script that allows you to see, of the n most recent tweets containing a given URL string, how many of them were generated by a Tweet Button. (More detail here.) Luigi found that there’s substantial variation among different sites.

I downloaded the script and decided to start running it on a variety of news sites to see if I could suss out any patterns. This isn’t hard science, for reasons I’ll get into in a moment, but it’s interesting! Here are the results from 37 news sites, first divided up by type of news site. (I looked at the 1,000 most recent tweets for each, rather than Luigi’s 500.)

The Y axis is the percent of the 1,000 most recent tweets that Twitter says were generated by a Tweet Button. So, 16.3 percent of those tweets to nytimes.com (The New York Times) came from such a button, versus 20.2 percent for wsj.com (The Wall Street Journal).

Two broad observations:

— Tech sites seem to be less reliant on the Tweet Button, as a percentage — as one might expect from sites with a social media-savvy audience. Presumably readers of The Verge are comfortable copying and pasting a URL into Twitter on their own, or tweeting to Verge content by seeing someone else’s reference to it in their feed.

— Sites with a clear ideological profile — Daily Kos on the left (38.8 percent) and Red State on the right (32.1 percent), for instance — are among the heaviest beneficiaries of the Tweet Button. Could that be because their readers are explicitly looking to those sites for links to share on their networks, and the Tweet Button is an easy way to speed up that process? But Fox News seems to be an interesting exception to that observation — only 5.1 percent of its tweets came through the button, versus 27.3 percent for MSNBC.

Most other sites seems to fall into a broad middle, which makes sense. Here’s that same data, but this time ordered by percentage rather than grouped by type of outlet:

All right, let’s all visit Caveat Central — a place of particular interest to any journalism graduate student who’d like to tackle this in a more serious way and get a good AEJMC paper out of it:

— This is just a snapshot of 1,000 tweets’ worth of data, taken around 11:30 a.m. ET today. You’d need a much bigger data set to do any serious analysis. The numbers could be substantially different at a different time of day or day of week, for instance, or at different points in a story’s life cycle. You’d also need to get raw counts over time — “the 1,000 most recent tweets” might cover a span of 15 minutes for some sites and several days for another.

— This script doesn’t measure other Twitter app data — in other words, how many are using the Twitter iPhone app, how many are using news org-branded apps, how many are using TweetDeck, how many are using Twitter’s web interface? Lots of interesting data potential in there. It would also be interesting to correlate the results with each news org’s own Twitter presence; The New York Times’ 5.1 million Twitter followers no doubt make Tweet Button usage seem smaller in comparison. (It’s also worth noting that some sites may have something that looks like a Tweet Button that’s actually registered with Twitter under a different app name; those wouldn’t show up here.)

— Not all Twitter users are created equal, of course. How do the Tweet Button users compare to those using other means to tweet — particularly in the size of their Twitter followings? If Tweet Button users were numerous but had small followings, they might not be as valuable to news organizations as they’d seem at first glance.

— To do this justice, you’d also need to analyze placement of Tweet Buttons on sites. Audience composition isn’t the only reason Tweet Button behavior might change, of course; potentially much bigger is the placement of Tweet Buttons on each site. (Just below the headline? At story’s end? Both?)

But even this quick look would seem to support the idea that killing off Tweet Buttons would, for most news organizations, remove somewhere around 20 percent of their Twitter link mentions. Maybe more, if (as I’d guess, although with no data) that those Tweet Button users are often something like a Tweeter Zero — an originator that enables a story’s later spread through other means. (Here’s where a tool like the Times’ Cascade would be really useful.) Or maybe less, since some percentage of those Tweet Button users would still find other means to tweet without them. Here’s hoping some Ph.D. student runs with this.

The newsonomics of majority reader revenue

Posted: 31 May 2012 07:38 AM PDT

Who would you rather support journalism, advertisers or readers?

It’s a new question, one that made less sense to pose just three years ago. Now, though, with major shifts in the news market, it’s one to think about.

We’re about to move into a period in which reader revenue surpasses advertising revenue as the main support of many news(paper) companies. It’s yet another kind of profound crossover (“The newsonomics of crossover”), demonstrating again how quickly news business models are changing. With readers paying most of the freight comes a new series of profound questions, ones that we should start asking as we try to understand this change.

Unexpectedly, newspapers — of all things — are becoming the leaders in reader-supported media. As the public journalism movement (the enterprising start-ups led by the likes of The Texas Tribune, California Watch, and MinnPost) and public media (née public radio) pioneers move to increase their share of reader funding through voluntary membership (read subscription), newspapers are, almost accidentally, leading the way. The reason is obvious: There are millions of people used to paying for news — and now, courtesy of mobile news proliferation and All-Access plans — their expensive subscriptions are being ported over to the digital world.

How much money are we talking about? Worldwide, according to research I’ve done in my work with Outsell, circulation revenue — worldwide in 2011 — totaled about $30 billion. In the U.S., daily circulation revenue probably adds up to about $9.5 billion.

That’s a large sum, and it’s a key puzzle piece for the future.

Is it true digital revenue? Well, of course not. Does that matter? Where newspapers started bundling advertising — print, with a little digital — in combined buys in the ’90s, now they’re bundling print + digital subscriptions, even as they also sell “digital only” ones. All-access models make for a new indistinguishable blur — are people paying for print, for digital, or for news itself? — and that’s a head-turner.

It shouldn’t be a head-turner just for those of us watching the trade. If you run The Huffington Post, or Slate, or Examiner.com, you’re betting on one big revenue stream — digital advertising — going forward. Though there’s a huge amount of money in digital advertising, more than 70 percent is going to companies with the combinations of great audience reach and mind-boggling targeting ability. So, as Facebook shares tank this week, amid concern of it being able to compete well enough to justify its value in the hypercompetitive and cutthroat ad market, think of the smaller news players, like HuffPo, and their relative digital ad revenue prospects. If they’re competing in the 2015 marketplace with one revenue stream — digital ads — while whatever we call “newspaper companies” can harness two revenue streams, overall reader revenue and advertising, who has the advantage then? (Facile answer: It depends on how quickly legacy newspaper companies get rid of legacy newspaper costs. Witness Digital First Media and recent Newhouse/Postmedia day-cutting moves. In fact, the Postmedia moves with major Canadian properties — drop days, charge for digital access, centralize whatever can be centralized — are prototypical of how this new world fits together.)

That new twist to digital news competition is one I’ll return to soon.

For now, let’s understand this inexorable run toward majority reader revenue.

The trend has been slowly developing over the years, and now has picked up speed, because of two trends.

  • One: Print advertising is in a never-ending tailspin, with the last positive quarter of U.S. ad growth coming back in 2006. U.S. companies have lost about half of their overall revenue, consequently, in last seven years. Globally, news companies have lost at least a third of all revenue, given the ad downturn across developed economies.
  • Two: Digital circulation is now a reality. While it won’t bring back the same scale, or kind, of journalism, it now promises to be a second, major contributor to the evolving business model of news companies, at least print-based legacy ones. As news companies transition over their print readers — either providing print + digital “All-Access” for a single price or adding a small upsell for digital to print subscription — long-time print subscribers are learning they are paying for a news product, not a physical one delivered to their driveway. Yes, it’s still early, but the early evidence is that smartly executed, print subscribers can be brought along, with their paid subscriptions, into the mainly digital age. Getting younger, less habituated-to-print readers to pay remains a major question mark, but it’s not the big one on the minds of legacy newspaper companies right now.

For decades, the rule among newspapers in the U.S. was 80/20. Eighty percent of revenue came from advertising and 20 percent from circulation, with the circulation revenue — heavily home delivery subscriptions in most markets — paying for all those physical costs of getting the ad-heavy product printed and delivered. The great majority of the revenue — and significantly, the 20-35 percent margin profits — came from advertising.

In Europe and the U.K., the traditional model has been less ad-heavy. Figure that 25-40 percent of revenues have been derived from circulation, with great variation by region and market.

In Japan, thanks to both high pricing and enviable Amway-like network of paper deliverers and bill collectors, readers have long contributed the majority of revenues. Japan, though, stands out as the exception. Now the exception is building a new rule.

Take one good Midwestern example: Minnesota’s Star Tribune, fairly typical of once highly profitable, mid-sized metros. Like most of its peer group, it would have derived around one in five dollars from readers for many decades.

Now, according to publisher Mike Klingensmith, the total is up to 43.3 percent; a number that he knew instantaneously when asked. “We will definitely be at 50-percent-plus reader revenue in the next 18-36 months,” he tells me.

It’s not magic; it’s math. We go back to those two principles: fast-declining print ad revenue and new, all-access-inflected digital circulation. “We don’t want to hit the 50 percent too quickly,” Klingensmith adds with a chuckle. That would mean that print ads continue, or deepen, their downward trajectory. As those revenues tumble, of course, their percentage of the revenue contribution declines. That’s a no-brainer.

The other part of the equation, smart reader revenue management, is more interesting.

At this point, publishers have figured out that there are two ways to wring out more reader revenue. Charge print subscribers a little extra for digital reading. Many of the Press+-powered papers, including the Baltimore Sun, charge print readers an increment — in the Sun’s case 99 cents a month extra. That adds a new increment to print circulation revenue and has helped at least stabilize circulation revenues at many of the papers that charge, or in some cases boosted it 1-3 percentage points.

Klingensmith takes a different approach. He increased pricing for all print subscribers by 9 percent in April 2011, at a time when digital access was still free. Then, last fall, he introduced a metered paywall, offering subscribers who take print at least two days a week (Sunday-only subscribers still must pay extra) included free digital access.

The result: a 7.5 percent increase in circulation revenue in the first quarter. That compares to a low-single-digit decrease in ad revenue. The lines on the graph are converging. If you do it right, he says, you can keep your revenues growing. “If you support a 10 percent higher price [overall], you can generate much much more income than selling 10 percent of your subscribers digital access,” says Klingensmith.

What does doing it right mean? On the reader revenue side, it means a bunch of things, including smart pricing (“The newsosnomics of pricing 101″; “The newsonomics of 99-cent pricing”), a state-of-the-art customer database, mobile products (HTML5, app, or both) that provide real value for higher pricing, and substantial enough journalism to make it all work. Of course, containing ad revenue decreases — hold on to as much of print, try to grow digital advertising faster — as much as you can is a vital piece of the puzzle.

The Star Tribune’s math is among the most aggressive, but it’s got plenty of company in the reader revenue march to majority.

Take A.H. Belo, owner of three major papers, The Dallas Morning News, Providence Journal, and Riverside (Calif.) Press-Enterprise. In the first quarter of 2011, circulation contributed 34 percent of combined ad/circulation revenues. (I’ve eliminated “other” revenue from this calculation here and elsewhere to focus in on the ad/circ change.) A year later, circulation now contributes 36.5 percent. That’s a combination of aggressive pricing, similar to the Star Tribune’s, and the ad decline.

Take The New York Times. The company as a whole hasn’t quite crossed over, but remarkably the New York Times Media Group has. A year ago, its first quarter showed 48 percent of revenues derived from readers; now that number is 52 percent. At the New England group, basically The Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, this year’s split is 47 percent circulation revenue, up three points from a year ago.

By way of comparison, Time Inc., a good barometer of the consumer magazine industry, clocks in at 43 percent circulation revenue now, compared to 38 percent three years ago. Magazines, of course, take in far smaller annual payments from readers, but then again their costs are much lower. They are, though, subject to parallel print advertising downdrafts.

The inexorable trend of paywalls only underlines this trend and will speed the process to majority reader revenue. As we move into this age of majority reader revenue, we see a slew of new questions unearthed. For starters:

  • Will majority reader revenue plus some significant level of advertising revenue be enough to sustain high-impact, high-capacity news operations? Here again, it’s that topline revenue number that’s most important.
  • How long will robust reader revenue continue, as readers themselves and their reading products move digital? That’s a major unknown, but it seems like those who have “always” paid may transition nicely. At least, publishers are looking at relatively stable, if not growing, reader revenue, as a key part of the next three-to-five year plan.
  • If this strategy works, where indeed does it leave the HuffPos? Where does it leave those companies like Digital First Media’s Journal Register and the Newhouse properties that have so far eschewed “paywalls”? Might they adopt metered payment for their highest use readers, and how would that play in their respective markets?
  • Does it make any difference to the journalism, or to the journalist/reader relationship? As Dean Baquet, managing editor of The New York Times, suggested to a journalism audience in Berkeley in April, the Times digital circulation program had buoyed Times journalists. They felt a more direct validation of their work because some digital readers were now paying, he said. Is that more widely true? Will journalists feel more closely connected to their readers — and to their public service missions — if readers pay more of the cost of journalism? I suspect, so, especially as news organizations make more and more use of their direct reader interaction and feedback the digital world offers. For those of who grew up with an ad-heavy balance of revenue, though, I don’t think it confused us in whom we served; the diversity of advertisers provided a buffer against influence. Still, it’s fascinating to comtemplate new journalist/reader connections, facilitated by that old-fashioned love potion, money.
  • Will reader revenue more blur the line between the nonprofits and the profit-seeking? Just last week, the Ford Foundation ponied up a million dollars to help The Los Angeles Times cover border and immigration issues, one of an increasing number of foundation grants to the formerly profitable daily press. With reader, and perhaps, foundation supplying a majority of funding, the distinction between for- and nonprofit narrows. How will the L.A. Times be different than KPCC? How will MinnPost and the Star Tribune be viewed?

Photo by Peter Dutton used under a Creative Commons license.
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