Sabtu, 07 Desember 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Yes, the Vikings should have gone for it on 4th down, and a New York Times robot knows why

Posted: 06 Dec 2013 11:58 AM PST

nyt4thdownbotSecond-guessing a play call is one of the great joys of being a football fan. Because you know — sitting there on the couch, never having played a single minute of professional football — you just know that you could run an offense made to score points. And yet, lacking the wisdom your keen football mind would provide, your team is facing the reality of an overtime tie with the Packers.

Fortunately for you, @SuperFan99, The New York Times, of all people, has your back. Meet the 4th Down Bot.

The 4th Down Bot performs realtime analysis of NFL teams’ fourth-down plays and determines if the right call was made. “Right,” in this case, is subjective. Judging by the ball’s location, the distance required for a first down, and the time remaining, the bot examines historical data to figure out whether punting, kicking a field goal, or going for the first down makes the most sense.

Here’s a scenario from the Saints/Seahawks game in Week 13: With 2:14 remaining in the first half, the Saints had 4th and 2 on their own 30-yard line. Coach Sean Payton chose to trust the rocket leg of punter Thomas Morstead and kick it away.

The Bot disagreed and said he should’ve gone for it. Why? Teams that go for it in that situation win about one percent more often than those who punt. Teams that go for it on fourth down in that position get the first 60 percent of the time, according to the Bot’s data, and possessions are valuable!

It should be pointed out that the Saints lost. The Bot does not gloat, but when it disagrees with a call, like the rest of us, it takes to Twitter:

The bot is a collaboration between the Times and Brian Burke of Advanced NFL Stats, who originally built the code behind the bot for a 4th Down Calculator tool on his site. How exactly does it work? Here’s an explanation from Burke and Kevin Quealy, a graphics editor at the Times:

NYT 4th Down Bot uses thousands of N.F.L. plays since 2000 to calculate the average number of points each situation is worth, a measure called expected points. (Expected points and its application to fourth downs is not new. It was created in 1971 by former N.F.L. quarterback Virgil Carter and Robert E. Machol and has been improved and refined in various ways since, notably with the book "The Hidden Game of Football" and David H. Romer’s signature 2002 paper. NYT 4th Down Bot’s model is similar to Mr. Romer's, but has more seasons of data behind it.)

With about 10 minutes left in the fourth quarter, NYT 4th Down Bot switches from maximizing points to maximizing win percentage. Win percentage measures how often teams who punted, attempted a field goal or went for a first down won the game.

But the formula is only part of what makes the bot work. In order for the analysis to work in real time, the Times is pulling in live play-by-play data from SportsDirect. Plugging that into an API of Burke’s historical fourth-down data, the Bot assesses whether the smart money is on punting, kicking a field goal, or going for it. The system is not without its problems. Sometimes the time and yardage scenario is too perplexing for the bot. (As with relationships on Facebook, sometimes the best you can say is: “It’s complicated.”)

The bot will run through the rest of the NFL season, starting weekly with Thursday games (it dinged the Texans for cowardice last night) running through Monday Night Football. At the moment, the system is semi-automated, with a healthy dose of human oversight. Quealy told me they try to verify the down and distance data for plays in order to avoid errors. They don’t want the bot to suggest going for it on 4th and 7 when your team actually gained 20 yards and a first down on the previous play. (That’s easier when there’s only one game on at a time, as there has been since the bot’s debut. Sunday will change that.) When the system is fully automated, it will run analysis and tweet by itself. As for the look of the bot, which progressed from ASCII to 3D, that’s the work of Shan Carter and Jennifer Daniel.

Burke’s statistical model supports an idea known in the academic literature for more than a decade: Coaches keep it conservative. They’re far more likely to punt than the model says they should. Burke, who has contributed writing and analysis to the Times’ sports section for several years, said the data backs up many fans’ instinct that coaches are too often wedded to old conventions. Despite the fact that today’s players are bigger and quicker, and today’s playbook is more expansive, coaches keep it simple. “What I think coaches are doing is overthinking the harm that not converting will bring to their team and undervaluing what a successful conversion can bring,” Burke said.

(For example, Sean Payton, the Saints’ coach, is considered a risk taker in the profession, having made the stunning decision to try a surprise onside kick in the Super Bowl. But the bot thinks even Payton should have gone for it on 23 occasions when he chose to punt so far this season. On average, the bot argues there should be around two fewer punts per team each week than there are.)

Traditionally, Burke’s type of analysis might have been turned into a feature story paired with a set of graphics. That’s usually where someone like Quealy comes in. But Quealy told me they wanted to find a more practical, active use for the analysis. “Something like this seems like a cool idea and something that, like other infographics, we publish and it’s done,” he said.

The Times is trying to strengthen its position in the business of data and analysis. After losing out on the bidding war for Nate Silver this past summer, the paper recently announced it was launching a new in-house startup “at the nexus of data and news.”

Quealy said the 4th Down Bot isn’t part of any formal larger strategy — it’s more of an experiment. Still, the ethos behind it seems to fit with the direction the Times wants to move towards; Quealy said the goal of the Bot is to “make something that is inherently useful.” Burke added, “Information technology has let us do the analytics on your laptop that you used to need a timeshare on a university super computer to do.”

While the output of the 4th Down Bot lives on NYTimes.com, it’s real use could shine through on Twitter, where it can spread quickly along with other social-heavy gameday updates like scores, snark, injury reports, and fantasy updates. Burke said he thinks the bot can catch on because of the intense interest that surrounds the NFL and the abundance of ways to experience games. Having near-instant fourth down analysis fits in well with a world that has become accustomed to NFL RedZone and constantly updated fantasy football stats.

Both Burke and Quealy know the bot is bound to cause a fair amount of debate over its calls. In a way, the 4th Down Bot shares rhetorical DNA with sports radio hosts or columnists who delight in second guessing a coach. Of course, the bot’s relying on data while the other two are often relying on their “gut.” Still, Burke said the thing to keep in mind is that the bot’s analysis is not definitive in any way. “The bot and the model are starting points for analysis,” he said. “It’s not meant to be the final arbiter of coaching decisions.” We’ll see if that line of argument holds up when some Times-reading NFL owner starts hearing about how many times his man on the sideline has screwed up.

Google News pushes into mobile with new redesign

Posted: 06 Dec 2013 11:54 AM PST

For many people, Google News is the page of choice for a quick sweep of the headlines. Today, with an eye towards the increasing number of readers coming to Google News on mobile devices, Google released a new look for the more than 10 year old site.

“Over that time period, consumption patterns have changed. What people expect from news has changed,” says Mayuresh Saoji, product manager for Google News.

cards small

The new web app, which uses the increasingly popular card navigation to chunk information, is focused on enhancing personalization while making the user experience consistent across platforms. For example, “gadgets” which previously existed only on the desktop version, like weather and Editor’s Picks, will now appear on mobile.

That said, while videos are available on the desktop version, for now they won’t be on mobile. “We’re still in two minds about whether to bring that to the smart phone. On the one hand, it is very bandwidth heavy, and if you’re on the go, unless you have headphones, its going to be difficult to watch video, especially in a public place,” Saoji says. “On the other hand, people are consuming news in this fashion.”

In addition, personalization will also be more consistent. While some of the options for users are merely surface level — for example, you can view content in a light or dark background — others have more weight. Users can decide if they want to see more densely packed headlines, or article cards with a more extensive preview of stories. The basic idea is to let readers decide “the amount of information at [their] fingertips,” Saoji says. “It’s all about giving people more choice and control,”

For publishers, Saoji says the app stays much the same, with the goal being to provide a diversity of sources and drive traffic to other news sites.

“We hope that the one side effect of this is that people read more news,” Saoji says.

This Week in Review: Questions on journalists’ handling of NSA files, and the value of viral content

Posted: 06 Dec 2013 08:11 AM PST

Scrutiny for The Guardian over leaks: The stories continue to spill out of Edward Snowden’s documents from the U.S. National Security Agency — we’ve learned in the last two weeks that the NSA has been tracking cellphone locations worldwide, infecting computer networks with malicious software, getting into Internet companies’ data by tapping into the Internet backbone, spying on the porn habits of Muslim “radicalizers,” and trying to expand its power.

The two biggest stories, however, have been about the journalists that have published the stories on the leaks. The first was regarding The Guardian, whose editor, Alan Rusbridger, was called in to testify to a Parliament committee about his paper’s reporting on the leaks. The paper’s staff could be charged with terrorism offenses related to their publication of the leaks.

Rusbridger gave a vigorous defense of The Guardian’s handling of the documents, saying that the paper has only published about 1% of Snowden’s documents and that he doesn’t expect to publish many more. He also detailed the efforts the British government has taken to intimidate the paper, including prior restraint on publication, the forced destruction of the paper’s Snowden data, and calls from lawmakers to prosecute the paper.

Not surprisingly, journalists from Britain and elsewhere rose up in Rusbridger’s defense. Mike Masnick at Techdirt mocked some of the members of Parliament’s questions, including one that asked, “Do you love this country?” Trinity Mirror journalist David Higgerson used that question to warn of the dangers of giving government even more control over the press. The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade marveled at the fact that Rusbridger was even called to testify before Parliament, and from the U.S., Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein and USA Today’s Rem Rieder both expressed alarm that The Guardian is facing scrutiny at a time when the true scrutiny should be on excessive government surveillance and secrecy. Rusbridger also made his own case before the hearing in an interview with The Washington Post.

Monopolizing the Snowden documents?: The second big story revolved around Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian journalist who is launching his own news organization with eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and others. The Rolling Stone’s Janet Reitman wrote a long, rich profile of Greenwald and Snowden, and The Independent profiled his new colleague, Jeremy Scahill. NYU’s Jay Rosen, and adviser to the new organization, talked to The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf about how it will manage reporting with an open perspective as opposed to traditional objectivity.

Greenwald and Omidyar faced several criticisms of their possession of Snowden’s documents. First, Greenwald refuted an accusation by a Wall Street Journal reporter that he failed to properly disclose the nature of his freelance relationship with the CBC. Then came a more substantial critique from Mark Ames at PandoDaily, that Greenwald and Omidyar’s possession of the documents amounts to their privatization by a tech mogul who will be running a for-profit news organization. “Information of national importance, such as which major tech companies colluded with the US government to spy on private citizens, will be published at the discretion of the founder and largest shareholder of one of those companies,” Ames wrote.

In a lengthy response to Ames, Greenwald argued that no one has monopolized the documents and that the way he and the others with access to the documents have handled them has been the best of several options. PandoDaily’s Paul Carr responded back to Greenwald, particularly his accusations about Ames and PandoDaily.

The Berkman Center’s David Weinberger also delved into the debate, concluding that the fact “that the charge that Glenn Greenwald is monopolizing or privatizing the Snowden information is even comprehensible to us is evidence of just how thoroughly the Web is changing our defaults and our concepts.” Also at PandoDaily, David Sirota looked at why The Washington Post’s Barton Gellman has been received better for his reporting on the documents than Greenwald, and blogger Marcy Wheeler examined Bob Woodward’s role in the monopolization debate.

viral-media-cc

How much value does viral content have?: A number of different issues and stories converged into a wide-ranging discussion on the value of viral content over the past week or two. The first was Michael Wolff’s column in USA Today criticizing the traffic-based business model of Business Insider and suggesting that the site’s owner, Henry Blodget, sell before that model collapses. Blodget responded that the overpriced high-end digital ad market actually works in his site’s favor, as more advertisers will gravitate to his low-cost model. Reuters’ Felix Salmon, meanwhile, critiqued Wolff’s numbers as “unreasonably bearish.”

At PandoDaily, Bryan Goldberg also criticized the effectiveness of a business model that relies on viral traffic (especially through social networks like Facebook), arguing that it doesn’t mesh well with the precision of a well-planned advertising campaign. Likewise, Mathew Ingram of Gigaom said chasing after pageviews is a fool’s errand when the value of pageviews continues to drop. “That's not just because there are more and more sites doing it, but because the value of incremental pageviews is sinking inexorably towards zero,” he wrote. (Facebook also released a change to its News Feed that will make it more difficult for viral content to spread as quickly or ubiquitously there.) Blodget also defended Business Insider’s infamous slideshows as a form of native digital storytelling, something PandoDaily’s Hamish McKenzie balked at, though Ingram offered a defense of the humble slideshow.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal’s Farhad Manjoo wrote a profile of Gawker’s Neetzan Zimmerman, who generates an absurd amount of viral traffic there. (Later, Capital New York reported that Zimmerman is getting his own section of the Gawker website.) The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein highlighted several lessons from Manjoo’s piece, noting that it shows that garnering huge traffic via social media isn’t a crapshoot, but a skill that can be mastered. PandoDaily’s McKenzie also drew attention to the “mechanics” of viral content being used by Zimmerman and sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy, calling it “annoying as hell.” At the Columbia Journalism Review, Ann Friedman offered some tips on doing viral content well within a journalistic context.

In addition, several viral stories were revealed to be hoaxes last week, led by a Huffington Post column on poverty and a Thanksgiving airplane note-passing story. There was both hand-wringing and ambivalence over all the falsehood being passed around online. “If there's a great reward, and little downside, to be had in publishing B.S., the Internet's going to get more B.S.,” wrote Slate’s David Weigel, and The Guardian’s Hadley Freeman saw it as indicative of the “immature overexcitement that engulfs some people” online. Vice’s Harry Cheadle urged us all to be a little more skeptical, because the false information online isn’t going away. On the Media’s PJ Vogt, on the other hand, said he’s starting to treat these viral stories as “pieces of culture rather than pieces of reporting.”

katie-couric-yahooYahoo brings Katie Couric aboard: Yahoo announced this week that it’s hiring Katie Couric as its “global anchor” — another big traditional media name jumping to an online-only organization, though not necessarily the poaching maneuver we’ve become used to. Couric, the former anchor at CBS News, has been working as a special correspondent for ABC and has a syndicated daytime talk show (which will continue, at least initially).

Couric told The New York Times her new job hasn’t been fully defined, but will involve shaping Yahoo’s growing news operation and told Capital New York that she and Yahoo would be very flexible with the possibilities of her new position, though they’d bring a broadcast journalism sensibility to the web. All Things D’s Kara Swisher said bringing a broadcast news heavyweight to the web is a flashy but risky move.

The Washington Post’s Andrea Peterson argued that Yahoo is bringing in Couric and former New York Times tech writer David Pogue because it’s looking for established brands with a history of bringing in video audiences around which to anchor advertising, and the Lab’s Ken Doctor saw the move as part of a broad set of experiments with the nature of the newscast on the web.

lara-logan-60-minutes

A leave of absence for Lara Logan: CBS News completed its internal review of 60 Minutes’ faulty October report on Benghazi (for which it offered a terse apology last month), and it resulted in the report’s lead journalist, Lara Logan, and its producer, Max McClellan, taking leaves of absence. The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple denounced the leaves of absence as “worthless” as a punishment, and Mother Jones’ David Corn questioned why 60 Minutes’ executives hung onto the story long after they had reason to believe it was false.

The Christian Science Monitor’s Peter Grier wondered whether Logan was being made a scapegoat for malfeasance higher up 60 Minutes’ editorial ladder, and Mediaite defended Logan, arguing that CBS’ action “sends a message that the idiom ‘What have you done for me lately?’ is not only true, it's become CBS network policy.” In a staff meeting, CBS News chairman Jeff Fager reportedly denied scapegoating Logan. Elsewhere, Newsweek’s Jeff Stein called for more attention to the possible role Logan’s husband, former intelligence agent Joseph Burkett, may have played in connecting her to the story, and the Columbia Journalism Review’s Brendan Nyhan chastised 60 Minutes for its lackadaisical correction efforts.

Reading roundup: A few other stories that have sprung up this week and last:

— The fallout from Bloomberg News’ self-censorship of news about Chinese corruption continues: Chinese authorities conducted unannounced “inspections” of Bloomberg’s Chinese bureaus, and one of Bloomberg’s reporters in the U.K. was barred from attending a press conference with a Chinese leader there, to the disapproval of the British government. The New York Times looked more closely at Bloomberg’s transition as a news organization and its dilemma in China, and meanwhile, a prominent Hong Kong journalist called for Bloomberg CEO Dan Doctoroff to resign his chairmanship of a prominent international press freedom dinner, while American journalists defended him. (Doctoroff ended up chairing the dinner.)

new-york-encyclo-featured

— As The New York Times’ David Carr reported, New York magazine will drop from weekly to bi-weekly print publication next year. Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan called the print cutback “a process of right-sizing,” though The Awl’s Choire Sicha noted that New York still makes a lot of money off of print advertising. Harvard Business Review’s Sarah Green said the reporting on the print cuts shouldn’t characterize them as a failure, but simply an adaptation that’s more good than bad.

— The Beastie Boys fought a parody of their song “Girls” in a viral online ad by the toymaker Goldieblox, igniting a brief but intense debate on the correct application of fair use. Goldieblox filed a lawsuit defending its right to use the song, but took the video down a bit later with a conciliatory letter to the band. In the few days in between, the lines were drawn quickly and sharply. Arguing in favor of Goldieblox’ use of the song: Tech entrepreneur Andy Baio, Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Stanford’s Julie Ahrens, and Gigaom’s Mathew Ingram. Arguing against Goldieblox: The Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum (twice) and Reuters’ Felix Salmon.

— The U.S. Federal Trade Commission held a conference this week on native advertising, urging advertisers and publishers to more clearly mark native advertising as sponsored content and make it less deceptive. Ad Age, Forbes, and the Columbia Journalism Review have more detailed descriptions of the discussion at the conference.

— Longtime New York Observer editor Peter Kaplan died at 59 this week, prompting remembrances of the man and the vanishing style of journalism he represented from many of those who knew him, including Gawker’s Tom Scocca, Observer publisher Jared Kushner, BuzzFeed’s Doree Shafrir, The New Yorker’s Nathan Heller, and The Guardian’s Michael Wolff.

Image of dengue virus by Sanofi Pasteur used under a Creative Commons license.
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Jumat, 06 Desember 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

The newsonomics of Scripps’ TV paywall and the Last Man Standing Theory of local media

Posted: 05 Dec 2013 07:30 AM PST

How much would you pay for online access to Ron Burgundy — or at least the Ron Burgundys of Cincinnati?

In an industry-shaking move, E.W. Scripps’ WCPO.TV — that’s the website of Cincinnati’s ABC affiliate — is putting up a paywall Jan. 1. While it may not quite be the first TV broadcaster in the U.S. with paid digital access, it is the first to announce the move. With another station, a Press+ client, preparing to go paywall before the end of the month, this mini-revolution in local TV news may be starting small, but its ramifications could be profound: Local TV news — itself facing a transitional struggle because of digital disruption — is re-orienting itself for a battle with local newspaper news — and therein will lie lots of drama over the next few years.

It was the news of a TV paywall — a hard paywall at that — that caught a few headlines two weeks ago when the news broke. But that isn’t even the most intriguing thing about the WCPO push. Scripps is investing in content and in engagement in Cincinnati. In total, 30 people are being hired, “the vast majority” of them in editorial, with multimedia producers, community-oriented staff, and digital sales people filling out that number.

How big an investment is that? WCPO, in the 34th largest U.S. market, started out with a newsroom of about 75. Adding more than 20 new people to focus on digital is a substantial increase.

"That incremental staff produces content for the digital platforms, but when a reporter breaks a story exclusively (which is happening almost every day) that information/coverage/story makes its way to on-air, though it might be written or wrapped in a different way, appropriate for that medium," says Adam Symson, Scripps' chief digital office. "Our digital reporters often end up interviewed on set as part of the tell. Bottom line, they aren't producing TV stories because they aren't broadcast journalists, but expansion of coverage as a result of the strategy is absolutely positively impacting the depth and breadth of our on-air product every day."

What’s behind Scripps’ contrarian play, in an age of news cautiousness? “It’s about winning digital,” Symson says. “At the end of the day, there is room for one, two, or maybe three local dominant media brands. Winning the digital consumer will be the price of admission to being one of those winning brands.”

“Winning” is the optimistic spin on that strategy. The flip side to ponder: There just won’t be enough advertising and subscription revenue to sustain any more than one to three significantly sized news staffs in many metro areas. Call this the Last Man Standing Theory of local media. It’s painful to think about, but the last half-decade seems to have born it out year after down year.

What’s the business strategy behind the investment? It’s not just about new subscription revenue. Thinking about the numbers, it can’t be.

As a free TV station — TV wants to be free, right? — WCPO, unlike newspapers, has no legacy base of subscribers who can be upsold to all-access, digital + print subscriptions. Aggressive all-access pricing is what is behind most of the new half billion dollars in circulation revenue we’ve seen in the U.S.; broadcast can only dream about that. While The New York Times has built up a business on 727,000 digital-only subscribers (“The newsonomics of The New York Times’ Paywalls 2.0″), the top regional dailies are topping out under 50,000 for digital-only subscriptions; most newspapers struggle mightily to see five figures.

So what might WCPO, without an existing paying audience, expect?

Let’s say it got 1 percent of its 400,000 monthly unique visitors to pay up. That would amount to about 4,000 paying customers. Let’s say they pay $100 a year, on average. That’s $400,000. Or, let’s say 3 percent, or 12,000 — a highly optimistic number, I’d have to say, given the habits here. That would be $1.2 million. Five percent, or 20,000, would bring in $2 million a year.

Compare that revenue to the $3 million or so in new costs of the WPCO expansion.

Paywall revenue may not be the main play here. Consider two other kinds of revenue the initiative hopes to goose:

  • Digital advertising: Scripps hired 100 digital-only ad reps across the company in 2013, “the vast majority” of them in TV rather than newspapers, and plans to hire more in 2014. (As a a whole, the company now has 229 jobs open.) That’s a big part of the company’s stated $22 million annual investment in digital. At WCPO, the expansion is a lot about better monetizing new digital customers. (It may want to start with making it’s “Advertise with Us” page a tad friendlier.)
  • TV audience: The expanded website and mobile products offer brand promotion for that legacy product on-air. Push up its ratings points some — WCPO is now in second place in the market to WKRC — and TV revenues will increase.

So, the revenue strategy here is three-fold: more digital ads, higher TV ratings, and paywall revenue. We’d have to think this is a long-term strategy; Scripps execs like to talk about the company’s innovative roots and point with pride to the WCPO push as the latest example of it. The WCPO test will likely not pay for itself within 18 to 24 months — but as a long-term investment, it could pay off, especially if the Last Man Standing Theory is true. If Scripps stays the course, and maybe continues to expand WCPO over time — and Gannett continues to chisel away at the city’s remaining daily, The Enquirer — how will the two compare in audience and in digital revenue in, say, 2017?

We can ask versions of that same question in many metro areas. What if broadcast builds digital slowly, and print continues to fade away? Or, to frame it a different way: If you’re a company that owns both newspapers and TV stations, which seems better suited to be a base for the mainly digital age to come? Scripps seems to believe it is TV.

Why? The legacy costs are smaller; while TV production has its own old-world cost structure, it doesn’t compare to the Big Iron costs of presses, plants, and trucks required for print. And while print ad losses have made newspaper revenue growth largely a pipe dream since 2006, broadcast keeps managing to sustain itself. Odd-numbered years (non-election, non-Olympics) are always lower than even-numbered ones, and 2013 is no exception. So even with massive consolidation in the broadcast industry this year (Sinclair buying Allbritton, Tribune buying Local TV, Gannett buying Belo, among others), TV’s prospects are arguably more manageable than print’s.

That realization can be seen in Scripps’ own share price. It’s up 95 percent year over year, largely on the basis of its broadcast fortunes — which now supply the great majority of the company’s profits, though just a little more than half its revenues. That increase is surpassed only by Lee among publicly owned “newspaper” companies.

The Cincinnati Enquirer, which pushed Scripps’ own Cincinnati Post into oblivion in 2007, is, like most Gannett papers, cutting back, not adding to its content creation. August layoffs further reduced its staff, as bureaus were reduced, critics packed up their notebooks, and reporters were laid off. Gannett, like most owners of dailies, is retrenching to maintain profitability, as print advertising loss can only be evened out by increased subscriber pricing and cost cutting.

Dailies, which had come to think of themselves as monopoly dailies, may be the only big print game left in Cincinnati and cities throughout the country. Those cities, though, often sport three to a half-dozen TV news outlets. What if one of those outlets decided to compete — digitally — with the local paper? That’s one of the big questions we’ll see answered as the battle moves forward in Cincinnati. Already, a top broadcaster may lead the local daily in a quarter to a third of the U.S.’ top 50 markets. If broadcasters invest while newspaper companies disinvest, how much and how quickly could those numbers flip?

Check out the latest (October) Nielsen numbers for a sense of the competitive urgency in the Cincinnati market. While Gannett’s Cincinnati.com (which barely whispers the word “Enquirer” on its homepage) pulls in the most unique visitors, at 582,000 to Fox19′s 531,000 and WCPO’s 391,000, the engagement numbers already tell a different story. WCPO averages 13 minutes per visitor per month, more than double Cincinnati.com’s 6 minutes and a little less than twice Fox19′s. In the important engagement metrics, from total minutes to sessions per person to web pages per person, WCPO is a clear leader.

cincinnati-digital-audience-october-2013-wcpo

Now, with a paywall and its attendant marketing only weeks away, how will those numbers change?

Since most of the new editorial staff has already been hired (10 jobs now open), the results of Scripps’ content investment have already borne fruit in traffic. Consequently, it’s hard to know how much more upside the company will gain. Conversely, the nature of WCPO’s hard paywall could drive down engagement. Sure, lots of content — the kind of relatively commoditized breaking news, weather, traffic, and sports that are staples of TV news — will still be free. And yes, WCPO’s Ron Burgundys should still be largely accessible for free. But readers will run into the hard paywall when they try to read the only-on-WCPO stories, the kinds of stories for which Adam Symson’s research shows a hunger. Stories on education, religion, or health — you know, the kinds of stories that newspapers have long been known for. The new staff hired will focus much on that non-traditional TV coverage.

Scripps may be grafting a newspaper model on a digital TV platform. If it is, is that old-fashioned or a brilliant streak of genius? It’s a mind-bending set of media metaphors in search of the digital future.

WCPO is going with a hard paywall rather than a meter. It’s closer to many European “plus” paywall models, especially those popular at tabloid newspapers. Those papers, like local TV news, believe that when offering much of the same news as their competitors, it’s better to keep that stuff free and segregate the proprietary stuff. While the meter is all the rage among U.S. newspapers, 2014 will tell us a lot about the success of these plus models in Europe and, maybe, newly in the U.S. In the meantime, WCPO will see how much the paywall limits the crucial sampling of digital content, key both to maintaining high digital traffic and improving subscription conversion. Scripps uses Digital Paymeter, developed by Synchronex and NewsCycle Solutions (formerly DTI) to power both its TV and newspaper sites; the newspaper sites use a meter, though one that is time-, rather than article-, based.

Think of the WCPO test in part as R&D for the rest of the company.

“Scripps is not a holding company,” says Symson. “It is a consumer products business. You’ve got to get the the product right first.” If it gets that product right — along with the paywall model and the pricing (which is still TBA, but likely below the $9.99/month threshold) — then Scripps can export the model to others of it 19 TV markets. Going into 2014, though, there’s no timetable for doing so.

Soon there will be other local TV experimentation to watch. As Press+ (which this week announced its 500th customer) launches its first local TV metered paywall, we’ll see how that experiment progresses as well. The nuances of metered TV sites will be worth watching for newspaper sites as well. In Press+’s TV model, the video meter is a clock — giving, for instance, 10 minutes of free viewing, before watchers hit warning and pay-up screens. The text-story meter is still article-based, so the TV model is a hybrid.

The WCPO expansion raises many more questions for the news business. Among them:

  • How will the interplay between on-air and digital work with the new staff? Broadcast has struggled with the same issues newspapers have in integrating or separating digital from the traditional product. Similarly, how well will the segmentation of video — given stations’ traditional orientation to block-programmed TV — move forward? It’s been painfully slow at many broadcasters.
  • Where does mobile fit into the picture? Some broadcasters tell me that as much as 60 percent of their traffic is now mobile; that’s well beyond the 35 percent commonly reported by newspaper sites. WCPO is in the newspaper range — 25 to 35 percent — and has readied a new set of apps as well as responsive design. Across the broadcast industry, work is being done at the company level and through industry consortia (“The newsonomics of breakthrough digital TV, from Aereo to Dyle and MundoFox to Google Fiber”), and TV too faces near-infinite opportunities and challenges in mobile.
  • How much of the TV pay experience will be mass and how much niche? WRAL’s TechWire, built in association with paywall provider Cleeng, is approaching its first year of paid experience (“The newsonomics of influentials from D.C. to Singapore to Raleigh”). Constructed around a membership model, the site is growing and retaining its subscribers, and John Conway, general manager of WRAL.com, suggests that the station’s investment, too, is a long-term one. At this point, it’s all about finding ways to put more people into the top end of the audience funnel and improve the conversion rate; that’s the nuts-and-bolts of the pay trade. Raleigh’s WRAL is one of the strongest local broadcasters in the nation, but don’t expect it to put up a full-site paywall any time soon.
  • Is membership an answer here? Adam Symson isn’t yet disclosing details of the WCPO subscription offer, but he uses the term “membership.” That’a a term in wide and diverse usage in the digital sub trade, from WRAL to the Chicago Tribune. What might be part of a local TV membership bundle that could make you buy?

Photo of WCPO van by Travis Estell used under a Creative Commons license.

Where in the world is BuzzFeed? Building foreign news around themes rather than geography

Posted: 05 Dec 2013 07:00 AM PST

When BuzzFeed launched BuzzFeed World, an ambitious foreign news vertical, not everyone thought they were up to the task:

That link, which is broken, is supposed to take you to a story written by Max Seddon, BuzzFeed’s foreign correspondent in the Ukraine.

Seddon was hired by Miriam Elder, who herself spent seven years in Russia before making the move to New York to run BuzzFeed’s world desk. I asked Elder how she would respond to naysayers like Morozov (who, to be fair, has many nays to say).

“If that’s what someone thinks our entire foreign coverage is, that just means they haven’t been looking at what we’ve been producing,” she says. “My approach to this is that there’s room for sarcasm, there’s room for humor, and there’s room for incredibly serious and deeply reported stories as well. You don’t have to choose one over the other.”

Elder wasn’t always sure BuzzFeed’s unique blend of what she calls “the fun side” and serious journalism was for her. But after over a decade as a foreign correspondent, she found herself increasingly concerned about the status of foreign reporting in the broader journalistic landscape.

“Nobody wants to see these foreign desks closing; it was incredibly difficult for me, personally, in Moscow, going to the closing party for the Newsweek bureau or something. It’s not something anybody wants to see, even though they’re technically your competitors,” says Elder.

Enticed by what she describes as the intelligence, creativity, and ambition of the BuzzFeed environment, Elder agreed to move to New York to start building BuzzFeed World.

Building a foreign desk from scratch is no small task — you have to think about issues like ensuring your correspondents’ safety and getting them health insurance in other countries, things BuzzFeed is committing to providing its reporters. Elder says she’s both sought and received advice from industry old-timers who appreciate that someone, at least, has the cash on hand to be sending reporters abroad. Says Elder, “I don’t see it, at this point, of a challenge between traditional versus new; it’s just putting together a desk is not an easy thing.”

Elder embarked on that task by selecting reporters based on which regions BuzzFeed’s editors wanted to cover. She hired Mike Giglio, based in Istanbul, to cover the Syria conflict; Sheera Frenkel to report on the Middle East and northern Africa from Cairo; Max Seddon, currently in the Ukraine, to cover Russia and Rosie Gray to cover foreign policy from D.C.

Elder’s next hire was Lester Feder. But unlike the other correspondents, Feder didn’t have a journalistic focus tied to the region that he lived in; the next step wasn’t filling in a few more of the blank spots on the globe. Feder’s focus is on LGBT issues.

“It wasn’t the sort of thing where he’d show up in Bangkok or Phnom Penh and be like, This is what the gay scene is like here. It was more focusing on legislative initiatives, interesting activist groups you hadn’t heard of, focusing on the role of third-gender issues in these countries,” says Elder. “He just went so deep into it, it was so impressive, and it was a beat we knew we wanted to keep, so we brought him on full staff.”

For BuzzFeed, Feder is based out of D.C.; he takes reporting trips once a month or so. Recently, in addition to reporting on major headlines from Washington, he’s reported stories from Montenegro, Kiev, and Cambodia.

Why build a beat around a theme rather than a geographic region? “The idea behind it is kind of, how can you get people really interested in international news?” says Elder. “It’s something that I think a lot of editors ask themselves quite often. I started thinking, you know, if someone is really interested in LGBT rights in the U.S., they’re probably going to be interested in LGBT rights in Russia, in Uganda, in China. It’s this way to explain the world through a thematic vector.”

Elder started thinking about other interest areas that could entice readers to get more excited about news around the world, and decided on women’s issues as the next subject to tackle from the global perspective. After a search, she settled on Jina Moore, a reporter usually based in Africa — Nairobi, at the moment — to fill the role of roving women’s issues correspondent.

“She’s so impressive, and has so many ideas, everything from incredible reporting ideas to ideas about how to structure news — she thinks really conceptually about these things,” Elder says. “It just ended up being a perfect fit.”

With the hiring of everyone from a news director to a Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter, BuzzFeed has been trying to make it clear that its dedication to journalism is the real thing — but even so, the idea of paying for two reporters to jet around the world chasing stories seems a world away from BuzzFeed’s GIFs-and-cats origins.

“It’s expensive, but it’s not like we say, Okay Lester, get on a plane, fly first class, and stay at the Ritz,” Elder says. “It’s about having low overhead. The lower the overhead, the more money for the travel budget. But that’s one of the advantages — we have the money right now to be able to fund these sorts of things.”

BuzzFeed does, indeed, “have the money” — it raised another $19 million round of venture capital in January, and founder Jonah Peretti reported recently that the site is profitable. But why spend it on traveling reporters with global beats? Elder says that by using hot topic interest areas as a lens through which to view world news, she’s taking advantage of a new behavior that, in some ways, is a direct product of the Internet; she calls it cross border identification.

“If there’s a kid who’s sitting in Russia, and he spends all his time online, he tends to be quite liberal, he listens to this kind of music, he does this, that, or the other — a lot of times he can have more in common with a random kid who’s doing the same thing in Beijing or Oslo or wherever than he does with the guy living down the street from him. The world is being organized in different ways,” Elder says.

In addition, the roving reporters’ topic focus can line up better with the heavily verticalized form BuzzFeed’s content takes. A newspaper’s foreign correspondent might cover a country’s politics one day, its industry the next, and local culture the next. BuzzFeed doesn’t have a newspaper’s instinct to be all-inclusive; it picks its spots, and a thematic focus fits in well with that.

A topic focus can also make it easier to build source relationships with activists, says Elder. “It almost makes it easier to get stories because…the global activist community, government officials, whomever, knows who to reach out to,” she says. “For activists around the world to have that one person they know that they can come to with their stories, their scoops, with whatever efforts they’re working on, it’s helpful to have one person that can draw on this entire global activist community.”

Elder points to Feder’s coverage of the World Congress of Families, a conservative, anti-gay group, as an example of the site’s ability to cover both sides of the issue. “He has really good relationships with them,” Elder says. “They know his coverage tends to focus on the LGBT side.” That said, BuzzFeed hired both Moore and Feder in hopes of tapping into the high levels of enthusiasm and attention that go hand-in-hand with activism.

Recently, BuzzFeed has met with criticism regarding the nature of some of its hiring — and firing — in the editorial department. The company hired Isaac Fitzgerald a few weeks ago as editor of its book section, at which time Fitzgerald shared with the world his stance against publishing negative reviews. “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all,” he told Poynter. Then, Mark “Copyranter” Duffy spoke out about his firing from BuzzFeed, which, he argued, occurred because the typical tone of his posts — “hating is what I do, and have always done,” he writes — conflicted with BuzzFeed’s strict “no haters” policy.

The big picture here is that, from a business perspective, BuzzFeed believes it’s best off if the majority of its content has a positive tone or connects with the perspectives of its audience. “We’re coming from a place where LBGT rights and women’s rights…it’s not like there’s a pro and a con side, really,” Elder says.

Elder would like to hire more issues-based, global reporters — perhaps one focused on global corruption — but for the rest of 2013, she’s focused on hiring a national security reporter in D.C. and a deputy foreign editor to be based out of BuzzFeed’s new bureau in London. (BuzzFeed also has a bureau in Australia, as well as content made in New York for audiences in Paris and Brazil, all of which functions separately from the foreign desk.) After that, she’d like to dispatch correspondents to Latin America and Asia, especially China.

Overall, BuzzFeed’s foreign story mix seems to continue to match the site’s broader combination of “fun” and news. When Ukraine surprised its neighbors by signing an agreement with Russia, thereby backing away from an agreement with the EU, Max Seddon tackled the national reaction in two ways. First, he scanned the Internet for how people were reacting — mostly humorously — online; then, he hit the streets.

“The Internet is infinite,” Elder says. “We can put whatever stories we want up there.”

Image by pink hats, red shoes used under a Creative Commons license.

Freedom of the Press Foundation wants to help build secure communication tools for journalists

Posted: 05 Dec 2013 06:16 AM PST

The Freedom of the Press Foundation launched a crowd-funding campaign to support secure communication tools for journalists this morning. In its first year, the foundation has raised more than $480,000 to support investigative journalism projects “focused on transparency and accountability.”

This new campaign, which will last two months, is aimed at making communication technology more accessible to journalists by open sourcing tools for encryption in newsrooms, including:

— The Tor Project, the organization conducting extensive research and building technology solutions, including the Tor Browser Bundle, used by journalists around the world to anonymize their web browsing habits and physical location. The Tor Project is passionate about bringing technology, training, and greater awareness in digital security for journalists around the world.

— Tails, a ground-breaking operating system that can be started on almost any computer from a DVD or USB stick and never touches your hard drive. Tails provides a platform to solve many surveillance problems by “doing the right thing” out of the box by default—from browsing the web anonymously, to using state-of-the-art cryptographic tools to encrypt files, email, and instant message.

— RedPhone and TextSecure, the encrypted phone and texting apps created by renowned security expert Moxie Marlinspike and his project Open WhisperSystems. Both RedPhone and TextSecure are designed to implement end-to-end encryption, while simultaneously making those advancements as invisible and effortless as possible for the user.

— LEAP Encryption Access Project, a new non-profit founded by long-time experts in the field of communications security, focuses on adapting encryption technology to make it easy to use and widely available. They have created an open source email system that automatically handles key management, decryption, and encryption, along with server software that allows any provider to offer email service that is compatible with the application.
di

Kamis, 05 Desember 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

The Information wants to be $39 a month

Posted: 04 Dec 2013 11:57 AM PST

You might have heard that paying for good reporting and quality journalism is not easy.

Today many pixels were spilled over Jessica Lessin’s new attempt to do just that. This morning, she launched a long-awaited tech news site called The Information, which will be available to subscribers only for the cost of $39 a month or $399 a year. Jokes of all stripes were made about the wisdom of such an enterprise.

Carlson, for his part, went on to write that, though he believes Lessin’s project will most likely end in profit, he himself had no qualms about republishing the work of her reporters and making it freely available to readers via Business Insider. Not everyone found this sentiment charming.

Meanwhile, across the Internet, another fight about journalism, capitalism, and the right to information. Writes The New Inquiry’s Mal Harris:

Which led Awl editor Choire Sicha to respond:

The ensuing debate focused on the ethics of JSTOR, a company that charges for access to scholarly papers, with Harris arguing that putting academic output behind a paywall is inherently unethical (therefore making it unethical for The Awl to accept money from them) and Sicha arguing that it was universities that “enclose” academic work (and therefore not his problem).

Overall, another day in the how-to-pay-for-news debate.
di

Rabu, 04 Desember 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

The Guardian experiments with a robot-generated newspaper with The Long Good Read

Posted: 03 Dec 2013 07:30 AM PST

The Guardian is experimenting in the craft newspaper business and getting some help from robots.

That may sound odd, given that the company prints a daily paper read throughout Britain. A paper staffed by humans. But the company is tinkering with something smaller and more algorithm-driven.

The Guardian has partnered with The Newspaper Club, a company that produces small-run DIY newspapers, to print The Long Good Read, a weekly print product that collects a handful of The Guardian’s best longform stories from the previous seven days. The Newspaper Club runs off a limited number of copies, which are then distributed at another Guardian experiment: a coffee shop in East London. That’s where, on Monday mornings, you’ll find a 24-page tabloid with a simple layout available for free.

On the surface, The Long Good Read has the appeal of being a kind of analog Instapaper for all things Guardian. But the interesting thing is how paper is produced: robots. Okay, algorithms if you want to be technical — algorithms and programs that both select the paper’s stories and lay them out on the page.

Jemima Kiss, head of technology for The Guardian, said The Long Good Read is another attempt at finding ways to give stories new life beyond the day they’re published: “It’s just a way of reusing that content in a more imaginative way and not getting too hung up on the fact it’s a newspaper.”

The Long Good Read began life several years ago as a digital-only experiment from former Guardian developer Dan Catt. The idea was to harvest the paper’s feature pieces and longer stories into a stream of articles best meant for RSS or a read-it-later queue. These were the stories that lent themselves to dedicated reading time, that quiet moment after work or a lazy Saturday morning. That, Kiss said, also fits the description of print: “It’s part of a noble heritage: people wanting something to read when they’re drinking their coffee or tea.”

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Catt built an algorithm that scans The Guardian’s API, stripping away blog posts, multimedia, and other pieces in favor of articles over a certain length. Here’s a good explanation:

We plundered those tools for data and wrote our own little “robot” (a bunch of algorithms) to surface what we hoped would be good, interesting, sometimes funny, sometimes long articles. Just before I throw together a new issue of this paper I can head off to our dashboard that presents me with about 30 “top” articles, about 1% of all articles originally published by the Guardian.

The robot does the legwork, leaving an editor to pick and choose what stories work for the edition before handing the process off to a different robot. In this case, it’s The Newspaper Club’s ARTHR tool, a layout program that lets people feed in content from different sources, either links or individual text and images. Tom Taylor, head of engineering for The Newspaper Club, said they use a semi-automated version of ARTHR for The Long Good Read, which allows an editor to enter story links and lets the program develop the layout on its own.

It’s a human-robot workflow that makes putting together a customized newspaper a quick process. The Long Good Read is sent to the printer on Friday and delivered fresh on Monday, Taylor said. “It becomes possible to make a paper in an hour that you can put in a coffee shop and have 500 copies,” Taylor said.

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The Newspaper Club started four years ago as a kind of bespoke printing business. It’s a story about technology — the ARHTR tool, which simplifies the layout process for people who may not be familiar with Adobe InDesign — but also about the printing itself. The Newspaper Club specializes in smaller runs of newspapers (as few as one to five copies) using digital printing and traditional printing. The key, Taylor says, is bundling together groups of orders to help keep the costs low and allow people to print as few editions as they want. In the beginning, the minimum amount of newspapers they could run was 1,000 copies, but thanks to changes in printing tech and growth in business, that number has slowly slid to 300, to 50, and now as low as a single paper.

“It’s like the miniaturization of the engine, taking it down from a factory-sized thing to inside a car, to a motorbike. It changes what’s possible to do with an engine,” Taylor told me.

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The Newspaper Club is part boutique, part newspaper collaborative, doing work for individuals (newspaper-themed weddings, perhaps?), photographers, or the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Some U.S. newspaper owners have tried to increase their commercial printing business, increasingly by printing their competitor’s papers. But Newspaper Club thinks smaller, and more personal, than the weekly coupon circular and hardware catalog.

“We’re straddling two worlds: the nostalgia for print and those beautiful machines, the rudiments of it all and the slightly more weird media future that is going on,” Taylor said. “It’s not as simple as ‘The Internet will replace print.’ The future is way more complicated than that.”

While technology has upended the traditional newspaper model, Taylor said it’s changed the economics in the favor of letting print lovers experiment with the medium. Things like The Newspaper Club aren’t meant to replace the traditional daily, but instead to see how the form can be customized and personalized, Taylor said. The appetite for reading longer, more in-depth articles exists, as well as the desire to get away from the screens we surround ourselves with, Taylor said. “I have no particular nostalgia for print. But I see it being very useful for certain things,” he said. “It does things you can’t do with a tablet or a screen.”

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At the moment, The Guardian is planning a limited run of The Long Good Read before figuring out whether to continue the project; there’s no contract term between the two companies. Kiss said the paper fit in well with The Guardian’s other experiment, the coffee shop, which was also meant to be a different (real-life) venue for news and conversations. It all fits into The Guardian’s larger mission of open journalism and engaging with the public. “It’s not a new revenue stream — it’s much more experimental than that,” said Kiss. “It’s to see what happens. I think media organizations need to be more lightfooted in what they experiment with.”

For a company that has pushed itself to expand digitally around the globe, a move into print could seem like a backwards move. But print, like other technologies, has its own assortment of benefits and drawbacks, Kiss said. What The Long Good Read does is take some of the features of customization and story curation — attributes we would think of as webby — and push them into print. What’s important is giving people as many options for reading as possible, she said: “It’s not the medium that’s in trouble; it’s the business model.”

Photos from The Newspaper Club used under a Creative Commons license.

Jeff Israely: Redesigns are an ongoing process, not a single launch moment

Posted: 03 Dec 2013 07:15 AM PST

Editor’s Note: Jeff Israely, a former Time magazine foreign correspondent in Europe, has launched a news startup called Worldcrunch. For the past three years, he’s been describing and commenting on the process here at Nieman Lab. Read his past installments here.

I’d been holding off on writing about the redesign of our website until it was all finished. Of course, the first and last lesson of the process is that your redesign won’t ever be done. It’s not just the always-in-beta credo; it’s also the less glamorous bugs and surprise hiccups across infinite browsers, devices, screen sizes — and coming down to the wire, that great idea you must finally put aside. The little compromises destined to be pushed live — but then again…

By now, though, we’re done waiting for it to be done. Call it Worldcrunch 1.9874, damn proud to show it off, with ice creams all around, to our extra-talented crew from Zagreb: designer Dario Krznar, our CTO Ivan Majstorovic, and Garrett Goodman, our now-London-based dude-of-all-trades who coordinated the project.

How could we have waited so long? is the overriding sensation we have, which is also a reminder of all the reasons not to redesign your site. For two years, we were quite satisfied with our face unto the world. The design was clean and smart and adapted to both the quality and quantity of the journalism we were producing. It’s not that we didn’t notice all the new bells, whistles, and more fundamental innovations sprouting around us. But for a lean news startup, a website redesign usually seems like a luxury you can’t afford.

In fact, as with other things, the decision snuck up on us. There had been no ongoing debate between my business partner Irene and me, nor any real pressing demand from readers or investors. The priority over the previous year on the design and development front had been to build for mobile (web and apps), which for us was a major accomplishment in itself.

Indeed, in retrospect, if we had been both wiser and richer, we would have followed Dario’s advice and redesigned the whole damn thing together back then. (More on that below.) But the path is the path, and hindsight is 20/20 on the Internet too.

This latest twist in the path started with me waking up one morning and mumbling in my head: A map, A MAP! I’d been thinking for a while that we needed to do a better job showing how far and wide all of our coverage reached, and let our readers explore in a more fun and interactive way. Creating a map entry-point to our stories, in itself, was going to be a big addition. We talked to Dario, who explained how it could be integrated with our existing site, but also noted (again) that it would be a good opportunity for a full overhaul. Irene and I sat on it for a few days, discussed what it could allow us to do on the editorial and business fronts, weighed the cost and the time required. Then, on a subsequent call with Dario to discuss the map, Irene — who ultimately has the last word on anything that involves writing a check — said the words: “We need a new design.” That was that.

You don’t redesign just for the sake of redesigning. You’re not a car owner tired of your old model and itching for a trade-in. You’re more a taxi driver deciding if it’s time to buy a new cab. Can an upgrade to a minivan help you cash in on airport fares? Do rising fuel prices mean it’s time to ditch the gas guzzler? It is, in other words, a business decision. From the editorial side, we were doing more content in different ways that our old site could no longer adequately accommodate. On the marketing side, we were moving into the paid/premium space and needed to show partners, customers, distributors, and paying customers that we have a big league product.

So with the question of if answered, it was time for the what. One of my favorite expressions to throw around when I’m pretending to be tech savvy is UX: user experience. I learned it fairly early (for me) and understood it rather well (for me). But I still wince a bit when a truly tech savvy person tells me “I use your site.” To an old-school editor, probably to an art director too, it sounds a bit off. The editor imagines that people are reading? Sure — well, sometimes, at least. The art director wonders what people are seeing in the product? But people do plenty of other things on your site: Browse. Click. Scroll. Leave. (Forget.) Rediscover. Re-enter. Browse again. Click. Glance. Look closer. Read. Keep reading. Share. Follow. Leave. Come back. Sign up. Explore. Click. Read. Pay. Share. Stay awhile. Yes, please use us, and use us well!

To try to make that happen, the possibilities were endless and targets were moving. Still, some basic goals seemed pretty clear: We had to think at least as hard about the article page as the homepage; our design had to be responsive to properly shine on all those devices and screen sizes; the site needed an overall new look and feel that felt fresh but not too far from the identity we had worked hard to establish.

I won’t go into detail about the choices we made, but the homepage layout is built around cards. We also wanted to be able to group stories together in dossiers or instant special reports, and have the article page extend below with infinite scroll of additional story cards.

The maps that got all of this started would be a signpost and a central part of the personality and branding of our site, but we’d allow readers to ignore them if they’re not interested. This was perhaps the most ambitious part of the design, and we’re still working to refine and expand what we can do with it. The responsive design extended to the browser for tablets, but we decided against adapting it for phones and apps, as our HTML5 mobile app was barely a year old. This was one of the compromises that we felt we had to make.

In the post-Snow Fall world, the temptation can be to design something that blows people’s minds. The risk, particularly for a small company like ours, is that it can swallow you whole. You start to produce the content to serve the container. Ideally, instead, the design should work in symbiosis with the journalism: Your site must be one you can feed every day with the stories that you’re meant to cover, while still having the elasticity to allow you (and push you!) to do new things and grow.

There’s no doubt that thinking about web design forces you to think harder about web journalism. I saw this BuzzFeed piece a couple of weeks ago, which was another example of how the ABC’s of good journalism and storytelling can find brand new life online. No GIFs, no lists, no kittens, nothing like the investment required for Snow Fall: Instead, it’s a direct but different way to cover a war with great reporting, finely crafted words, and powerful photography.

Still, at the same time I could also see the struggle with this new form, integrating the visual and text into a seamless scrolling narrative. There was the overriding goal of telling the story, but also the need to describe details in the photos that were distinct from the narrative. How does the main text cohabitate with the captions? One set of passages was slightly larger than the other, but sometimes it wasn’t clear what was what. It’s a design challenge. (Could a hover for the captions work? Or a different shade of text?) But there are also potential editorial solutions. (Weave the details from the photos into the main narrative?) Or a bit of both.

We began our redesign with another one of those web startup calls to arms: to make our new website future-proof. That’s a false concept. Finding design solutions that are replicable for different kinds of content means a better experience for the user, and less work for all down the line. But constant tweaks and occasional overhauls are inevitable, as the interaction between web publisher and web user — like the news itself — continues to change every day. Journalists, in other words, must make thinking about UX part of their daily M.O.

Photo by Robyn Lee used under a Creative Commons license.

The New Haven Independent seeks to expand its hyperlocal mission to low-power radio

Posted: 03 Dec 2013 07:00 AM PST

The New Haven Independent, which launched eight years ago amid the first wave of online-only community news sites, may soon expand into radio.

The nonprofit Independent is one of three groups asking the FCC for a low-power FM (LPFM) license in New Haven, Conn. If successful, editor and founder Paul Bass says that "New Haven Independent Radio" could make its debut at 103.5 FM in about a year.

"It would be a fun thing if we get it. I'm told it's very hard," Bass says. "We're by no means talking as if we're going to get this license. We thought it would be worth a shot." He envisions a mix of news from the Independent and La Voz Hispana de Connecticut, the Independent's content partner (and landlord), as well as music, public affairs, and shows produced by local nonprofit organizations. The station would be on the air at least 16 hours a day.

The three New Haven applications are part of the FCC's great LPFM land rush. Legislation signed by President Barack Obama in 2011 eased restrictions on low-power stations, and the FCC is expected to approve about 1,000 applications sometime in 2014. More than 2,800 applications were received by the deadline last month, according to the website Radio World. (Thanks to Aaron Read of Rhode Island Public Radio for tipping me off about the Independent's application.)

According to the Prometheus Radio Project, a longtime advocate of expanded community radio, "the over 800 low-power stations currently on the air are run by nonprofits, colleges, churches and emergency responders." For years, the radio industry and (believe it or not) NPR fought the expansion of LPFM, arguing that new stations would interfere with established broadcast frequencies — a concern that advocates say is unwarranted.

Like all LPFM stations, New Haven Independent Radio's broadcast footprint wouldn't extend much beyond the city limits, although it would stream online as well — which could be significant, Bass says, given predictions that most cars will have streaming Internet radio within a few years.

Inspired by Haverhill

Bass says he got the idea from WHAV Radio in Haverhill, Mass., a nonprofit online community station (it also has a weak AM signal) whose volunteer general manager, Tim Coco, is seeking to expand with an LPFM license of his own. (I wrote about Coco's radio ambitions last summer.) Coco, who runs an advertising agency and is a local politico of some note, is also among a group of residents working to launch a cooperatively owned community news site to be called Haverhill Matters, under the auspices of the Banyan Project.

"I'm happy I provided some inspiration," Coco told me by email. "I believe the more local voices, the better for the community."

Although Bass, if he is successful, may be the first hyperlocal news-site operator to start an independent radio station, the connection between the two media is a natural one. For instance, Howard Owens, publisher of The Batavian, a for-profit site that covers Genesee County in western New York, has partnered since 2009 with WBTA, an AM station with a strong community presence. An even more ambitious project is under way in the heart of the country, as the St. Louis Beacon news site is merging with St. Louis Public Radio.

Donna Halper, a longtime radio consultant and historian who is an associate professor of communication at Lesley University, says a multiplatform presence of the sort Bass envisions is crucial at a time when the audience has become fragmented.

"These days, it's a multimedia world, and even a low-power FM station can get people talking” about your work, she says. "In this kind of environment, the more platforms you are on, the more you have top-of-the-mind awareness."

On the other hand, industry observer Scott Fybush, who writes about radio for his own eponymous website, warns that Bass may not quite realize what he is getting into.

"Twenty-four hours a day of radio is an unforgiving taskmaster," Fybush said in an email. "There are lots of applicants in this LPFM window who have what appear to be noble ideas, but keeping a station going with engaging programming day in and day out isn't easy to do."

Three-way contest

But that's getting ahead of things, because first Bass has to win the three-way contest for the New Haven license. And that is by no means assured. (Bass's application was filed by the Online Journalism Project, the nonprofit entity that acts as the Independent's publisher of record.)

According to documents on file with the FCC, the other two applicants are a Spanish-language organization and a Christian broadcaster called Alma Radio. Even though LPFM is intended to encourage localism, Alma proposes to broadcast nationally syndicated religious programs, including "Focus on the Family," hosted by the controversial evangelical leader James Dobson. Alma Radio's oversight board, according to a "Purposes and Objectives" document it included with its application, is "composed of members who believe and have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ."

Although Bass says his ideas for the station are still evolving, he included a detailed proposal with his FCC application, with such diverse offerings as a morning news program; a daily "La Voz Latino Community Hour"; a collaboration with The Inner-City News, a local African-American publication; community theater; and a two-hour evening program to be called "Joe Ugly Presents Local Hip Hop." (Joe Ugly is the nom de rap of a New Haven music impresario who runs an Internet radio station called Ugly Radio.)

One of the New Haven Independent's funders has already put up $3,000, which paid for legal and engineering services. If Bass wins the license, he estimates it would cost $30,000 to build the station and $60,000 to $70,000 to pay a full-time employee to run it — a substantial amount over the approximately $500,000 a year the Independent now receives in donations, foundation grants, and corporate sponsorships.

The opportunity is clear enough. Done right, it would enable Bass to bring New Haven Independent journalism, with its hyperlocal emphasis on neighborhoods, schools, and city politics, to a new audience — and to entice that audience, in turn, into sampling the Independent.

The danger, of course, is that the radio project would drain resources and attention away from the Independent itself, diluting its mission with a gamble on a new platform that may or may not succeed. Bass's answer to that challenge is simple and direct: "We have to make sure it doesn't."

Dan Kennedy is an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University and a panelist on Beat the Press, a weekly media program on WGBH-TV Boston. His blog, Media Nation, is online at dankennedy.net. His most recent book, The Wired City: Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-Newspaper Age (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), tracks the rise of online community news projects, including the New Haven Independent and The Batavian.

Photo by pyrosapian used under a Creative Commons license.
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Selasa, 03 Desember 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

This new blended reality: Rafat Ali says companies that see data as content are the future of media

Posted: 02 Dec 2013 07:32 PM PST

Don’t miss this insightful post by Skift founder Rafat Ali just because it was published on LinkedIn (where Ali has over 13,000 followers). He highlights a group of companies that he thinks illustrate a new business model, one that turns data and data literacy into a revenue stream. Some examples of media entities already leading in this area, according to Ali, include Bloomberg and FiveThirtyEight.

These companies are also riding a few other intersecting megatrends enabled by digital:

— The blurring of personal and professional lives of users, because of ever-accessible digital devices, pervasive connectivity, and always-on social media mean users want more and more information, when they want it, and in more atomized ways than their predecessors.

— Millennials raised on intuitive, open-web services — media among them — demand more from the business information companies they rely on for their professional lives. If everyone’s coming in as an informed user driven by web-research, how should mediata companies service this generation of users?

— The rise of the prosumer, or to use a more lay term, the rise of fanboy. If everyone’s an expert, what does it do the the potential userbase these companies can build? Mediata companies are rethinking the traditional userbase and casting a wider net, and going beyond industry-defined silos, to build a larger brand.

— The traditional silos in almost all industries are collapsing because of digital –media, tech and finance are best examples of it — and that creates opportunities for new ways to look at industries, and build new digital-native information brands.

— The ubiquity of embed code — YouTube's under-appreciated contribution in making it mainstream — and widgets as a precursor to it means any kind of media, including data and its visualization finally gets unlocked from its proprietary containers, and can freely flow in any kind of environment.

We talked with Ali back in May about how Skift fits into this data-journalism-hybrid model.

A crowdfunded Dutch site goes from concept to reality

Posted: 02 Dec 2013 08:17 AM PST

Back in April, we told you about De Correspondent, a new Dutch news site backed by a remarkable $1.3 million in crowdfunding. Jay Rosen declared it the most interesting startup he’d read about this year:

With the benefit of a few more months’ experience, De Correspondent publisher Ernst-Jan Pfauth wrote up some of what they’ve learned so far. (The total raised eventually reached $1.7 million.)

de-correspondent-logoBy now, we have a staff of 7 full-time and 19 freelance writers, a website that adjusts itself to every reading device, and almost 24.000 subscribers who have a year-long subscription of 80 dollars (60 euros). To put that in perspective: with The Netherlands having only 16,8 million citizens, this would be the equivalent of 450,000 subscribers for an American publication. We have a physical home in the offices of a former Shell laboratory on the shores of the river IJ, in Amsterdam…

Therefore, De Correspondent aims for its authors to report on themes that transcend classic beats: themes like energy, privacy, or the economy of the future, to name a few. This reporting takes place in their own 'gardens' — sections of the site they can call their own, and in which they can build a relationship with readers who choose to 'follow' them. The main goal of this approach is to establish a lasting and meaningful relationship with our readers. Conceived of as 'members' rather than 'subscribers,' readers are asked to contribute their expertise on specific topics. While vigilant about its editorial independence, De Correspondent believes that a unidirectional, one-to-many relationship between a news medium and its readership is wholly of the past, and that active audience involvement is crucial for maintaining a healthy, thriving platform.

Also, this is interesting from a how-to-push-sharing-on-a-paywalled-site perspective:

Apart from promoting some of our articles in Facebook posts, we don't advertise. We think our readers are our best ambassadors; therefore they can share as many of our articles as they want. When they share an article, a notification bar tells their friends and followers: 'This article has been shared with you by …', followed by the member's name. This strategy seems to work for now, since the 'New visitors' and 'New members' graphs show similar patterns. Moreover, we can tell that a lot of new readers sign up right after they've read an article. Our most popular article (203,676 unique visitors) inspired at least 147 readers to sign up right away.
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