Nieman Journalism Lab |
- INNovation fund backs eight projects from news nonprofits with an eye towards sustainability
- “Not white. Not male. Fast”: John Cook addresses what’s happening and who they’re looking for at The Intercept
- What’s the return on investment for news video? Tow looks at strategies in 125 newsrooms across the country
- What are the kinds of legal problems online publishers run into today? Here’s an analysis
- Religious but not Mormon? The church-owned Deseret News considers you a growth market
| INNovation fund backs eight projects from news nonprofits with an eye towards sustainability Posted: 14 Apr 2014 09:01 PM PDT
The winners include Chalkbeat, InvestigateWest, the Food & Environment Reporting Network, the Iowa Center for Public Interest Journalism, Public Herald, San Francisco Public Press, WXXI Public Radio, and Southern California Public Radio. (The full list of winners is below.) According to Kevin Davis, CEO and executive director of INN, the fund received 118 applications. Knight launched the fund with $1 million to support projects over a two year period, with three more rounds of funding. As is the case with most Knight projects, the winners will have to share their work and any code with the public. (This is a good place to note that Knight is also a funder of Nieman Lab.) Davis said the purpose of the fund is to give smaller outlets the ability to experiment with ideas they would not otherwise have the time or resources to pursue. “One of the underlying assumptions here is, no matter how small or large your nonprofit, there isn’t $25,000 or $35,000 lying around for an experiment,” Davis said. Because the funding amounts are relatively modest, the judges were looking for projects that expand on existing work rather than building from scratch. “The organizations we ended up funding clearly have been working on some of these concepts for a while and were looking for an opportunity to experiment and ways to invest,” Davis said.
The Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism will use its $25,000 in funding to launch a weekly radio program and a series of public forums based around the center’s reporting. Covering topics like farm safety, migrant labor, and meth addiction, the Center will create 13 23-minute shows that will air on commercial radio stations. Overall the projects echo some of the ideas and experiments seen elsewhere in the journalism world, like event programming, native advertising, and cross-media collaboration. Seattle-based InvestigateWest plans to use its $15,000 in funding to partner with public radio station KUOW on radio series grounded in the site’s investigative reporting. Jason Alcorn, associate director of InvestigateWest, said the site regularly collaborates with other local news outlets like King 5, The News Tribune, and KUOW. Alcorn said the funding will be used to figure out the right format for the program and to perform some market research. Ideally, the program would combine the investigative work and data-backed analysis of InvestigateWest with the audio-friendly narrative storytelling of KUOW, Alcorn said. The plan is to find underwriting specific to the program, along with individual support from KUOW members and revenue from events tied to the show. “The idea is its revenue positive and self-sustaining going forward, Alcorn said. The Food & Environment Reporting Network will use its $35,000 in funding to launch an series of events called FERN Talks & Eats, that combines live stories about food with dishes prepared by a chef. Tom Laskawy, cofounder and executive director of FERN, said over email: “Our primary hope is that the event is an entertaining and delicious experience attractive to a paying audience as well as to corporate sponsors. The ultimate goal is to repeat and replicate our initial event in different cities and generate an on-going revenue stream.” Southern California Public Radio, which is receiving $35,000 in funding, is developing a native advertising program for its desktop and mobile products. According to their application, they plan to run a pilot program for “native underwriting” over the course of six months. “Usually the focus is on innovation in the newsroom and around the editorial product,” said Alex Schaffert-Callaghan, digital media director for SCPR. “But now the time has come and we have to stop complaining about the lack of new revenue and innovate.” Schaffert-Callaghan said their goal is to create native underwriting that is on par with commercial media companies, but meets the ethical and journalistic standards of public radio. That means crafting a design and messaging that draws clear lines between sponsored underwriting and editorial content. For a project to be successful, it’ll need to have a system in place that makes creating native underwriting an easy process but also has support from the sales team and the newsroom. “We have every incentive to do this well, because anything less would hurt our brand. And frankly, we can’t afford that,” she said. One thing all of the projects share is a focus on growing audience, either for the purpose of raising revenue or simply to attract a larger readership. Davis said the idea of user acquisition, and devising strategies for growing an audience, is a relatively new concept for parts of the news business, and one that’s especially important for nonprofits, many of which have small audiences. “If your mission is to inform the public, you have to experiment with different media and partners to reach those folks,” Davis said. “It’s about informing them where they are, not bringing them to where you are.” Knight Foundation has long been in the business of supporting media, especially the growing sector of nonprofit online news, and its efforts of late in the local space have focused on helping media organizations reach a level of financial stability outside of foundation support. Davis said the winning projects, and those to come in subsequent rounds, need to be able to show they can live on without continued support of grant funding. The point of the the INNovation fund is to move organizations along the chain towards sustainability, not to experiment just for the sake of experimenting. “If the projects themselves don’t have an expectation of breaking even then we have a hard time looking at them as helping sustainability,” Davis said.
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| Posted: 14 Apr 2014 02:13 PM PDT John Cook, editor in chief of The Intercept, responded to a Pando Daily piece that posited the site had suddenly gone silent after its launch in February. Cook writes that the magazine will continue to publish NSA stories, but will otherwise hold back on publishing until they resolve “questions about the site's broader focus, operational strategy, structure, and design.” In a very Denton-esque maneuver, Cook then opened the comments to readers, saying he’d be available all afternoon to answer questions about plans for the digital magazine. Regarding their publishing schedule and content formats, he writes:
On who he’s looking to hire:
On tone:
On coverage:
On user experience and commenting:
On matters of church and state:
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| Posted: 14 Apr 2014 11:08 AM PDT Columbia’s Tow Center has a new report out today on how publishers are actually dealing with video. Many newsrooms have made video a major focus and are pinning their hopes for revenue on the medium. Columbia assistant professor Duy Linh Tu led a cross-country investigation into how newsrooms, broken down into categories of newspapers, digital-native properties, and longform filmmakers, are actually dealing with video content. His team compiled the results into Video Now, a structured interactive website with lots of video features. Here’s a sample of testimony from journalists at The Seattle Times:
The digital investigation focuses on Mashable, NPR, and NowThis News. Here’s Mashable’s Bianca Consunji on metrics for video:
The report wraps with a good set of recommendations. Sports videos and explainers did well across newsrooms, they found, and evergreen video content with a long tail is always helpful. Social video should be about audience not gimmicks, and short videos tend to get the most viewers. Video ads should be better, and newsrooms can’t expect to depend on preroll CPMs entirely. Finally, the report advises that breaking news reporters doing short, mobile clips should be separate from those producing elegant, sophisticated, in-depth video content.  |
| What are the kinds of legal problems online publishers run into today? Here’s an analysis Posted: 14 Apr 2014 08:42 AM PDT
In a new report out today, DMLP’s Jeff Hermes and Andy Sellars look at the 500-plus cases they’ve handled and try to determine some trends in the legal questions they’re being asked — around issues like contract negotiations, corporate law issues, intellectual property, other types of litigation, risk management, and news gathering. Here’s a summary of some of their main findings:
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| Religious but not Mormon? The church-owned Deseret News considers you a growth market Posted: 14 Apr 2014 07:45 AM PDT The Deseret News is owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but you might not detect its Mormon roots from looking at the outlet’s national site — officially came out of beta yesterday — which focuses on the self-proclaimed values of family and faith. Even in its faith section, which includes stories as wide ranging as a preview of a new PBS documentary on the history of the Jews and a piece on the Hindu holiday of Holi, there’s very little explicit coverage of Mormonism. And that’s on purpose, says Deseret News and Deseret Digital Media CEO Clark Gilbert. “The national edition is deliberately targeting values across all faith practices in the country,” he told me. Fifty-six percent of Americans are “Like-Minded Believers, who value faith, family, caring for others, and share a concern for the decline in moral values,” according to an internal Deseret Media Companies study. That’s the audience Deseret News is aiming to capitalize on with its expansion of coverage. Gilbert said Deseret’s coverage, both local and national, is built on six tenets that it says matter to that readership — family, faith, education, care for the poor, values in media, and financial responsibility. “We heard a lot of people saying, ‘We read The New York Times and we watch Sean Hannity, and we hate them both,’” Gilbert said of how Deseret News approached the development of its national content. “They said, ‘We admire the rigor of The New York Times, but we don’t hear any of our values reflected there. Somehow we hear some of our values in Sean Hannity, but it feels angry and polemic. They were mashing together what the market wasn't providing, which was a thoughtful news source that was journalistic and rigorous and accurate but was asking questions that really resonated to things that mattered to their family.” By staying away from an explicit focus on its own religion, Gilbert said Deseret News hopes to create a broad dedicated readership. “This is a huge audience, but the second you go denominational, they fragment,” he said. “Mormons read Mormon content, Catholics read Catholic content, Baptists read Baptist content.” With all the challenges facing locally based news organizations, it’s a natural move to try to find a local beat that can attract national interest. The Boston Globe, for example, plans to launch a site focused on Catholic coverage. And, as Gilbert mentioned to me several times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal have long been read outside of Washington and New York because of their coverage of politics and finance. Gilbert, a former Harvard Business School professor, is known for his work around Christensenian disruption theory; you can see him talking about his work at an event here at the Nieman Foundation last year:
The standalone national site, with its trendy rectangle-heavy design, launched in beta in February and was formally launched Sunday with a ten-part series on the role of the Ten Commandments in modern life. The rollout of the site and the feature was timed for Passover, which starts Monday at sundown, and Holy Week, which culminates with Easter on April 20. The site will feature original content, cross-posted on the Deseret News local site, but it will also feature plenty of aggregated content as well. “It’s almost like The Atlantic Wire or RealClearReligion, but with our brand voice,” Gilbert said. Despite the conservative editorial leanings of the main newspaper, Gilbert said the national site would not take political stances. For instance, Last month, the site published a story on a Pew Research Center study that showed an increase in acceptance of same-sex marriage by black Protestants. Compare that with the front-page editorial the Deseret News ran with the headline “Judicial tyranny” after a federal judge struck down Utah’s ban on same-sex marriage last year. Part of that national move is partnerships. In February, Deseret News partnered with The Atlantic to produce a series, published on both publication’s websites, about the role of fathers in American society. The seemingly unlikely partnership between Deseret News and the Washington-based monthly received a fair amount of press coverage when it was announced, and Gilbert said it was “absolutely the case” that Deseret News will continue to partner with other outlets. He said he was in discussions with two organizations about partnerships, but said nothing was finalized. “We’re a serious news organization and we want to partner with people who want to do great work,” Gilbert said. Photo of an old-fashioned Deseret News delivery cart by Edgar Zuniga Jr. used under a Creative Commons license.  |
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