YULI AHMADA

Rabu, 25 April 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

MinnPost reaches five years of fundraising with MinnRoast

Posted: 24 Apr 2012 01:50 PM PDT

The secret to having a successful nonprofit journalism site? Comedy. Also, a CEO who’s willing to dance. This Friday MinnPost is holding MinnRoast, an event that mixes fundraiser and summer camp talent show.

It’s the fifth straight year for the Minnesota nonprofit news site’s version of the Gridiron Club Dinner. This year, the celebrity will be supplied by Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton, Senator Al Franken, the mayor of St. Paul, two former candidates for governor, the majority leader of the Minnesota State Senate, and local news personalities.

“I’m in the show. This year I’m in three dance numbers,” MinnPost CEO Joel Kramer told me. “I never danced before I got involved in MinnRoast.”

Of course, at one point, Kramer probably didn’t have much experience running a nonprofit news site either, but he seems to be adapting to both well. As funny as MinnRoast is, it’s serious business for MinnPost: Kramer said each year the fundraiser has contributed more to the nonprofit’s bottom line. “Revenue from MinnRoast this year will be in the neighborhood of 10 percent of our overall revenue.” That would be up slightly from 9 percent in 2011, according to MinnPost’s most recent year end report.

MinnPost is often pointed to as a bright spot in the nonprofit journalism landscape (it ended last year in the black), so it’s worth looking at what makes their fundraising efforts work. Events are a big part of that. Like a lot of nonprofit news sites (and increasing number of for-profit outlets), events are part of business for MinnPost, which counts its annual birthday party and book blast among its regular events. This year, they expect more than 900 people will attend. With tickets ranging from $35 to $175 and sponsorships starting at $800, you can figure out how that math adds up.

For nonprofit news sites — and nonprofits in general — it’s all about finding as many ways as possible for people to give you money. In a way, MinnPost is extending the idea of its membership model. If you’re already a donor, you’re likely to check out the show, but MinnPost hopes their audience brings a friend to have a good time. Kramer told me one of the benefits of the show is the sponsors’ use of their tickets to bring people unfamiliar with the site. That introduction can be valuable if it creates an impression, even if it is during a night of silliness. “People go to lots of fundraising events, and unfortunately most of them can be a drag,” Kramer said. “We just put the emphasis on a tremendous amount of fun and minimal amount of time raising money at the event.”

In that way, the event also serves as a tool of community engagement, bringing together readers, journalists, and public officials. MinnPost gets to act as a kind of convener and help generate money for their work. MinnRoast would already be noteworthy because it brings leaders in Minnesota’s political parties together for a night where the talk is less partisan than normal. Kramer said it’s a fairly polarizing time in state and national politics and taking a break from that can be healthy. “I think it’s a good idea to break the tension for people that are fighting with each other or in adversarial relationships to have a night off to have fun and be reminded we’re in the same community,” he said. It’s worth noting that because of the annual show, MinnPost has been criticized for having a seemingly cozy relationship with people in power — or at the least, singing and dancing in silly costumes with them.

MinnRoast will likely continue to grow. They expected only 200 people in the first year and saw 400. This year they’re close to selling out the theater where the event is held, which could mean a bigger venue in the future. More specifically, Kramer said MinnPost needs MinnRoast, as well as the other events the site hosts, to continue to grow as they try to adjust how the site makes money. In 2011, about 21 percent of MinnPost revenue came from foundations, a percentage Kramer knows will change whether MinnPost is proactive in finding new dollars or not. Kramer said one of their goals for 2012 is to increase advertising as well as donations through memberships. “Our goal is to keep building the other sources of revenue,” he said.

Human-assisted reporting, mass intelligence, and mobile mobile mobile: What we learned at ISOJ

Posted: 24 Apr 2012 06:57 AM PDT

After attending a conference like the International Symposium on Online Journalism, it can be hard to pinpoint just one major takeaway. ISOJ features a mix of quantitative academic research, practical insights, and data from media companies like CNN, The Los Angeles Times, The Dallas Morning News, and Google News — all assembled by the ace team of Rosental Alves and Amy Schmitz Weiss.

You can check out our complete liveblog from the event; ISOJ has posted recaps of the symposium’s sessions; and Alf Hermida did his usual stellar job blogging everything in sight. But we also wanted to distill some of what got us thinking.

A future of focused brands

What will newspapers and media companies look like in the future? Richard Gingras of Google News said news outlets will continue to move away from being general-interest publications and become more of a “stable of focused brands.” As alternative news channels like Twitter and Facebook continue to grow, and as more and more people get their information on-the-go, Gingras said news companies spend too much time worrying about their home pages and not enough about their article pages. He said he wouldn’t be surprised if there comes a time when a media company opts not to have a homepage at all. (Gingras’ comments echoed the themes in his TechRaking speech, which we shared on April 12.)

Embrace human-assisted reporting

Ben Welsh, who mans the Data Desk at The Los Angeles Times, is a big proponent of using computing power to make reporters’ lives easier. That includes letting robots do some of the writing. (Here’s an example of the kind of stories that algorithms write for the Times.) He also gave one of the most succinct and passionate calls to action of the conference. You can watch his talk here.

Appeal to “mass intelligence”

The Dallas Morning News is shifting the focus of its reporting to appeal to a “mass intelligence” audience rather than a general one, according to publisher Jim Moroney: “When I say a mass intelligence audience I don’t mean elite,” but instead a readership that wants daily intelligence about the community that fits specific interests. (Moroney credits this Economist article for the term.) The Morning News is trying to differentiate itself in two ways: By shifting its production to fit devices like tablets, and by shifting its reporting with a plan they call “PICA,” which stands for Perspective, Interpretation, Context and Analysis.

Take time to play in the news sandbox

Louis Gump, vice president for CNN Mobile, said the company was slow to launch its iPhone and iPad apps because it wanted to figure out the right way to use its vast collection of video and images. CNN provides widely differentiated experiences; consider how different the iPad app looks from the iPhone app from the mobile site from the desktop site. CNN’s iPad app is among the top 10 free downloaded apps, with more than 19.5 million U.S. users in February 2012. Even with that success, Gump said CNN sees the iPad app and other mobile apps as a “sandbox” to test how the audience responds: “You can’t choose between mobile web and apps — like two wheels on a bike, you need both.”

“Survival is success” in online news startups

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, who coauthored a report on the climate of online news startups in France, Germany, and Italy, found a culture similar to its U.S. equivalent. He said former reporters are trying to address perceived gaps in traditional media coverage but struggling to find and grow niche audiences, let alone generating enough revenue to thrive. For the companies he studied, the majority are not breaking even, and most operate at a loss. (Download the report, which goes deep on nine case studies, here.)

The Carvin Factor

In analyzing the tweets of NPR’s Andy Carvin during the Arab Spring, University of British Columbia professor Alfred Hermida found that Carvin overwhelmingly quoted activists, bloggers, and alternative voices. While almost half of Carvin’s tweets and retweets came from people on the ground, they made up just about a quarter of his sources, with the rest being mainstream media and official institutions. In other words, his tweets served as a major amplifier of lesser-known sources. Hermida questioned how this sourcing structure could have influenced the framing and coverage of the events of the Arab Spring.

Build something beautiful

Creating a tablet app is not just a box for news organizations to check. Many of the panelists at ISOJ talked about resisting the urge to transfer web-based design principles to smartphones and tablets. Pedro Doria, digital platforms editor at O Globo (Brazil), showed us how the paper reintroduced the concept of an “evening edition,” providing an update to tablet readers at the end of the day. It’s rich with videos and photos — that what tablets are good at, Doria said — which keeps people in the app longer, and it features content specially designed for a lean-back evening mode of reading. Since the launch of the p.m. edition, Doria said the average time spent daily in the O Globo iPad app jumped from 26 minutes to a staggering 77 minutes.

Don’t just build something beautiful

ISOJ’s all-star data panel made clear there’s a distinction between art and data that sometimes gets blurred at the expense of user experience. Pretty graphics must provide context and useful information to be journalism. Here’s an example that University of Miami lecturer Alberto Cairo gave of data that’s lovely but ultimately not useful.

Execution is key

It takes more than a killer idea to achieve greatness in the newsroom. As Moroney argued, “culture eats strategy,” and he acknowledged it as an area where his paper still had plenty of room for progress. Moroney said that means filling a newsroom with more Tiggers than Eeyores. That drew laughs and tons of retweets, although some said that wasn’t fair to Eeyore.

Mobile will just keep getting bigger

Okay, so we didn’t need a conference to tell us that. Just today we learned more than half of Facebook’s 901 million monthly active users uses it on a mobile device. The Dallas Morning News will shift more of its development resources to tablets, promising a groundbreaking app within a year. And while News Corp. was criticized for its single-platform strategy with The Daily, William Hurley — whose company helped design the iPad newspaper — said someone had to go first. Last year, The Daily was No. 3 on Apple’s list of top grossing apps, behind Smurfs’ Village and Angry Birds. Before diving into mobile, Hurley said, news organizations should consider their audience’s needs. Start with looking at access logs to see what devices people are most commonly using to visit a website.

There’s a big world out there

Conferences like ISOJ are a good reminder to sometimes-gloomy U.S. journalists that journalism is well, even thriving, in other markets. Globally, journalists face a slew of different challenges — fellow attendees from places like Argentina and the Philippines reminded us that FOIA protections aren’t universal. But it’s also an environment where international news companies with a bit of money to spare are doing interesting things — which means there’ll be interesting lessons for American companies to bring back from abroad.

Selasa, 24 April 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Are you a young dude interested in news? All else equal, this study says you’re a top paywall target

Posted: 23 Apr 2012 11:23 AM PDT

Here’s a biggie: How do you get someone to pay for online news? A new study (PDF here) out of the University of Texas develops a theoretical model to begin answering that question.

The goal of the study, by Iris Chyi and Angela M. Lee, is to clarify the interrelationship among news preference, use, and intent to pay. What emerges, among other things, is a profile of the kind of people most likely to pay for online news: Young males who are — wait for it — interested in the news.

That last part is key, because while younger people are more likely to pay for news online, the study finds, they’re also less likely to be interested in news in the first place.

Another paradox: People say they prefer reading print products, yet online use is growing. In other words, consumers don’t always use what they prefer, and they’re not always willing to spend money on what they use.

That’s an idea that Chyi has been exploring since the 1990s. She sometimes refers to it as “ramen noodle theory,” which we’ve written about before: People might prefer steak over ramen — but when it comes time to reach for their wallets, they opt for ramen more often. Because it’s free and abundant, the “ramen” is perceived as inferior — which reinforces consumers’ preference for “steak.” This could help explain why Chyi found “very weak correlations” between use and intent to pay in her latest study. This is from its abstract:

While media scholars tend to take “media use” as an indicator of popularity or diffusion, media use alone does not fully capture the complexity of online news consumption. For instance, given free online news offerings in most cases, consumers do not always use what they prefer, and most are not willing to pay for what they use. This study identifies three distinct factors — preference, use, and paying intent — each helps explain a specific facet of online news consumption.

Given how many variables play a role in a consumer’s decision to buy online news, the takeaway is a bit more complicated, and that’s kind of the point: Fully understanding online news consumption is about more than just looking at how often people are going online. News organizations must also get dig into what consumer’s want, what they’re willing to buy, then figure out how (and why) these factors overlap.

“The overall picture when we are looking at intention to pay for online news is that we have to consider as many as five predictors,” Chyi told me. “I think that sort of explains why most newspapers have found it’s so difficult to monetize their online content.” From the study:

Specifically, age is a key factor influencing every aspect of online news consumption. Gender, in comparison, only affects paying intent. Paying intent for online news is influenced by five factors (age, gender, news interest, preference, and online news use), with age and news interest being the strongest predictors.

The study was presented Saturday at the International Symposium on Online Journalism. Chyi’s study was based on an online survey of 767 adult respondents in August 2010. While that seems like a really long time ago in Internet years — the first iPad was only five months old — Chyi says her research is current enough to offer a useful picture of a longer-term shift she’s tracked for more than a decade. Though print is declining by just about every metric, Chyi is convinced that there is an “over-optimistic bias toward online news.” At the same time, she acknowledges it’s “very late and very difficult to change the perception that the future is online or online-only.”

It’s not that she’s anti-technology, she says: “I believe that new platforms will be really important for people to access news, but in terms of how to monetize it, I think it’s getting more and more difficult,” says Chyi, who also sees a conflation between print decline and online growth. “Very often we mix the two together and say, ‘Because print is declining, the future must be online.’ But I don’t think that’s the case.”

Whatever the case may be, the theoretical model her study produced might offer the beginnings of a structural map for those who need to find a way to convince audiences that their news products are worth paying for.

Wall Street Journal dives into live, continuous coverage with its new Markets Pulse stream

Posted: 23 Apr 2012 08:37 AM PDT

The Wall Street Journal on Monday unveiled Markets Pulse, a platform for a continuous flow of news — including blog posts, articles, videos, tweets, photos, and other elements — that readers can dip into throughout the day from their computers or from a mobile device. The idea is to provide more choices to readers who are increasingly seeking news on-the-go.

Think of it as a daily liveblog of the markets: At this writing, Markets Pulse been updated 12 times in the past hour. Some of those are simply embeds of WSJ stories, which can be read in full without leaving the stream; others are updates of barely tweet length. (“Dow Down 150: All indexes are down more than 1.2%.”)

“This is just another way for them to access our content,” Raju Narisetti, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal’s Digital Network, told me. “Obviously, a lot of our readers are paid subscribers, so they should be able to get WSJ everywhere, wherever they want it.”

This isn’t the first time the newspaper has experimented with this kind of approach. It created a four-day stream for its Oscar coverage this February, and more recently it streamified its coverage of the presidential election in France. But Markets Pulse is built around an area of coverage rather than a finite event, which means it has the potential to be…neverending.

Creating an open-ended stream for markets coverage makes sense for a few reasons. It’s an area that a lot of Journal readers are already tracking, and one that lends itself to constant updates. “Markets is kind of an ongoing story all day, especially when the U.S. markets are open, and there’s an audience that follows it fairly religiously all the time,” Narisetti said. “Rather than having to go to an article or a video in different, discrete places, this allows them to kind of have one place.” (It’s not for nothing that Bloomberg describes its terminals as a “massive data stream” — it’s a metaphor that works for the flow of a market day. Markets Stream would seem to be a decent candidate to be a second-screen companion to a Bloomberg terminal.)

Markets Pulse also includes an embed of the Journal’s video player right next to the content whenever a live show is on. With the newspaper’s big push in video, particularly live video, having a page that readers can treat as they’d treat CNBC — that is, always on — could help increase the return on that investment.

It also gives reporters a place to put all kinds of information — short updates, tweets, and other elements that don’t always fit in a traditional article. But the news stream approach is about more than creating a centralized hub of information. Streams are also about tailoring the experience to readers’ habits. When British network ITV unveiled its stream-based online redesign last month, ITV digital director Julian March described about the importance of recognizing the “skimming and digging” that people like to do online.

Here’s how he put it:

We think that roughly 80 percent of visits to websites are based on skimming behavior: You go to the news site asking, “Tell me what the news is today.”…Digging is where you come to the site and you've got a very specific kind of requirement: “I want to know what is going on in the Eurozone crisis,” or “I've just heard that Fabrice Muamba the footballer has collapsed, how is he doing?”

The format may also help drive traffic to Wall Street Journal content by fostering a habit of checking for frequent bite-sized updates the same way that people routinely check their email inboxes and Twitter feeds.

News streams also seem to have the advantage of stickiness — meaning readers spend time on streams longer than they do on traditional news sites. (Think of how sticky social streams like Facebook’s newsfeed or Twitter are, especially compared with traditional news sites.)

Narisetti, who started his job at the Journal in February after leaving The Washington Post, says there are more experiments like this one to come: “We’re going to experiment in multiple ways, and this just felt like one of the more interesting and fun ways to do it,” he said. The approach seems consistent with his mentality he described to us back in January: "I'm a big believer in newsrooms being in a permanent beta stage.”

Sabtu, 21 April 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

This Week in Review: Digital journalism’s big Pulitzer win, and ebook concerns shift to Amazon

Posted: 20 Apr 2012 06:58 AM PDT

The Pulitzers and HuffPo’s arrival: The Pulitzer Prizes were awarded this week, accompanied as usual by tears and impromptu speeches in newsrooms around the country (documented well by Jeff Sonderman on Storify). On the meta-level, the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple criticized the awards’ secrecy, but Dean Starkman of the Columbia Journalism Review offered a defense of having such publicly celebrated industry awards in the first place, arguing that during an era when news organizations have become so adept at measuring journalism quantity, the Pulitzers are one of the few barometers left for journalism quality.

As for this year’s awards themselves, the American Journalism Review’s Rem Rieder pointed out that while the Pulitzers are usually dominated by a few heavy hitters, this year brought several feel-good stories. One of those was the Pulitzer won by the Philadelphia Inquirer, the once-great paper that has had an extremely rough last several years and was sold yet again for a bargain-basement price just a few weeks ago. Poynter’s Steve Myers reported on the award’s impact, which one reporter called “a wonderful burst of hope.”

Another remarkable Pulitzer winner was Sara Ganim of the Patriot News of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, who at 24 became one of the youngest Pulitzer winners ever for her reporting on the Penn State sex abuse scandal. Poynter’s Mallary Tenore explained how she took the lead on the story at two different papers. Not all the news was heartwarming, though — there was no prize for editorial writing. Erik Wemple explained why (nothing personal!), but Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan loved the decision, calling editorials “a worthless anachronism in this modern media age.”

But the biggest theme in this year’s Pulitzers was the prominence of online journalism: The online-only Huffington Post and the very online-centric Politico both won prizes, which the Lab’s Adrienne LaFrance called a victory for their fast-paced, aggressive editorial models. Additionally, Twitter played a big role in the tornado coverage that earned Alabama’s Tuscaloosa News a Pulitzer, as Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman detailed.

Of those online-oriented Pulitzers, the Huffington Post’s drew the bulk of the attention. HuffPo’s Michael Calderone and Poynter’s Mallary Tenore both told the story behind HuffPo’s award-winning story, and in an AP story, Ken Doctor called it an arrival of sorts for HuffPo, while VentureBeat’s Jolie O’Dell called it a win for quality blogs everywhere. PaidContent’s Staci Kramer said HuffPo’s win shows the old guard has finally learned that the work, not the medium, is the message. Both GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram and NYU prof Jay Rosen (in Calderone’s article) pointed out that this isn’t as much of a “new media vs. old media” win as people might think; traditional news orgs and digital outfits have been looking more and more alike for quite some time now.

There was also quite a bit of other talk about HuffPo’s model this week, though most of it wasn’t directly related to the Pulitzers. Media blogger Andrew Nusca expressed his frustration with the parade of “awful posts and shameless slideshows” that populates most of HuffPo and its competitors, and the Columbia Journalism Review published an in-depth story on how HuffPo developed its distinctive model and why it works. Meanwhile, the Lab’s Justin Ellis wrote on HuffPo’s refusal to employ false balance when covering climate change and Folio reported on its coming magazine iPad app.

Amazon under fire: A week after the U.S. Justice Department sued Apple and five major book publishers for antitrust violations (paidContent’s Laura Hazard Owen has a good description of what it means for readers), most of the attention shifted to the biggest ebook player not involved in the lawsuit: Amazon. The New York Times reported on a small publisher that has removed its titles from Amazon out of frustration that the retailer’s low prices were undercutting its own booksellers.

CNET’s Greg Sandoval talked to other small publishers who see Amazon as a much bigger threat than Apple, and at the Daily, Timothy Lee urged the U.S. government to change copyright law to allow Amazon’s competitors to convert Kindle books to be compatible with other devices. The New York Times’ David Carr gave the most ominous warning of Amazon’s below-cost ebook pricing’s effect on the publishing industry, saying that with the suit, “Now Amazon has the Justice Department as an ally to rebuild its monopoly and wipe out other players.”

Novelist Charlie Stross went into the economics of Amazon’s ebook strategy, comparing it to big-box retailers that wipe out mom-and-pop stores with their extremely low pricing: “Amazon has the potential to be like that predatory big box retailer on a global scale. And it’s well on the way to doing so in the ebook sector.” Forbes’ Tim Worstall pushed back against Stross’ characterization, arguing that Amazon doesn’t have a monopoly on the ebook market because it’s still extremely easy to put ebooks on a server, achieve some scale and contest Amazon’s dominance.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, for his part, released a letter to shareholders last Friday that asserted that “even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation.” Techcrunch’s John Biggs said this philosophy makes sense in the world of networked information, but Wired’s Tim Carmody said Amazon is really trying to draw a contrast between its own infrastructure-based model and the product-based “gatekeeping” model of its chief competitor, Apple.

Google’s open web warning: A few nuggets regarding Google: In an interview with the Guardian, Google co-founder Sergey Brin warned of “very powerful forces” lining up against the open web around the world, referring both to oppressive governments like China and Iran and to Google’s competitors, like Facebook and Apple. Tech blogger John Gruber noted that Brin seems to be assuming that the open web is “only what Google can index and sell ads against,” and Wired’s Tim Carmody took that point deeper, arguing that Google is part of the continuum of control and closure of the Internet between governments and corporations, not separate from it.

Elsewhere, Ross Douthat of the New York Times used Google’s recently unveiled Project Glass, which would bring all the information of a smartphone in front of our eyes in the form of glasses, as a warning against the possibility of a sort of hyper-surveillance techno-tyranny. Web philosopher Stowe Boyd ripped Douthat’s assertion that Google’s glasses are a reflection of our growing loneliness. (Slate’s Eric Klinenberg wrote a more thorough takedown of the “we’re getting lonelier” hypothesis, targeting Atlantic’s recent article on Facebook.) And late last week, Google’s news products chief, Richard Gingras wrote at the Lab about the questions that will define the future of journalism.

Reading roundup: It’s been a fairly slow week, but there are still a few interesting items to keep an eye on:

— Facebook has begun testing “trending articles” as a way to get more people to use its social news apps, though ReadWriteWeb’s Jon Mitchell said those apps, and the “frictionless sharing” they depend on, aren’t working. Meanwhile, the Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal said it’s time to get past the Facebook mentality of social networking and figure out what’s next for the Internet.

— NYU prof Jay Rosen wrote about a fascinating question that’s been puzzling him for years — Why does the American public trust the press so much less than it used to? — positing a few possible explanations and asking for more ideas. You can also hear Rosen talking about the state of the media and the public in this Radio Open Source podcast.

— Two more intriguing entries on the ongoing series of posts on how people get their news, these from News.me: Digital media researcher danah boyd, who talked about young people’s news consumption, and former New York Times digital chief Martin Nisenholtz, who talked about the Times’ transition into a digital world.

— Finally, the Times’ Brian Stelter wrote a thoughtful piece on the fleeting nature of today’s information environment, and the ephemeral, hyperactive common conversation it gives us.

Live blogging #isoj12: International Symposium on Online Journalism

Posted: 20 Apr 2012 06:57 AM PDT

We’re attending the 13th annual International Symposium on Online Journalism today in Austin, Texas, where journalists, technologists, and academics gather to discuss the evolution of media.

Our team is live blogging (and tweeting ~~#isoj~~ #isoj12 on @NiemanLab) throughout Friday and Saturday. Watch this space.

Jumat, 20 April 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

The newsonomics of risking it all

Posted: 19 Apr 2012 06:17 AM PDT

Alfredo Corchado was used to getting mortal threats.

He received three in Mexico, but now he was in a Laredo bar, north of the border.

You better stop what you’re doing, or you’ll end with a bullet in your head and your body in a vat of acid, he was told. And then we’ll deliver the bones to your family in El Paso.

It was a chilling warning, or at least we’d expect it to put a chill into Corchado. An investigative reporter for the Dallas Morning News (and a former Nieman Fellow), he’s been covering the ravages of drug trafficking for years, much to the concern of his parents living, as the traffickers plainly know, in El Paso. Yet Corchado goes on with his work — as do Adela Navarro Bello of Tijuana’s Zeta news magazine, Jerry Mitchell of the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., and Ramita Navai of the U.K.’s Channel 4. As Navarro Bello explained of her paper’s coverage of the drug trafficking that has consumed at 50,000 Mexican lives, “If we don’t publish this information, we are part of the problem.” (Filmmaker Bernardo Ruiz has captured Zeta’s struggle — including the murder of two of its journalists — with a new movie.)

Each is an investigative reporter who put their lives on the line to reveal stories they think readers must know about. They spoke on the “When the Story Bites Back” panel this weekend, at UC Berkeley, part of the sixth annual Reva and David Logan Investigative Reporting Symposium (live blogging of the conference, here, with a #Logan12 Twitter feed).

That panel and the entire spirited weekend, organized and led by esteemed investigative producer Lowell Bergman, tells us a fair amount about the business of journalism. Though it is not — like most of my work — concerned with the dollars and cents of the business, in its very essence, it describes why the current crazy-quilt economics of the business matters. Funding the journalism business isn’t like funding Sears and Kodak (“The newsonomics of the long good-bye”) or other fading institutions. It’s not even about saving a perhaps-vital American industry, like the auto industry.

It’s about keeping a lifeline of funding open so that our best reporters can do their jobs.

I’ll call it the newsonomics of risking it all because that’s what these reporters do. Many of the other Logan participants and attendees, thankfully, do less life-threatening work. Yet those represented at the conference — from ProPublica, the Washington Post, and New York Times to ABC, NBC, and NPR — are among the cream of the crop of investigative work and produce work with real public interest impact.

As we endlessly debate pay models, whether or not to work with Facebook, how to deal with Apple and Amazon and multi-platform journalism, the Logan Symposium is good tonic — certainly for those of us who attended, but really for all of us who know why this business matters to democracy. Whether and how the economics of the new news business work out isn’t an arcane question; it’s central to our collective future. The value of good, deep reporting is truly priceless.

So what about the state of investigative reporting? Look at the glass as half full and half cloudy.

What emerged from the conference, surprising to some, is that national investigative reporting is keeping its head above water. Both NBC and ABC talked about their expansions in the investigative area, while companies like NPR and Bloomberg have put new resources in as well. Units at the Post, L.A. Times, and New York Times may not be growing much, but seem to be sustaining themselves, for now.

“For now” is an important qualifier, and New York Times managing editor Dean Baquet’s opening interview at Logan, in its over-the-top self-assurance, bothered many of the conference participants with whom I talked. (See my related post about that.)

Washington Post investigative editor Jeff Leen suggested that there were 200 investigative reporters paid by news media in the U.S., which I calculate as one for every 1.5 million Americans. That’s not a ratio that’s going to hold many big institutions — government, business, labor — to account. Maybe that’s why as Logan participant and new-media vet Neil Budde tweeted, “How many times will ‘existential’ be used this weekend? I think count is six so far.”

Importantly, it is largely the largest news media — mainly national and global ones — that continue to put money into investigative work; these are the Digital Dozen companies I identified in my Newsonomics book. For them, as NBC senior executive producer David Corvo put it, investigative work is a “differentiator,” important to distinguishing big news brands from one another in the digital age.

What’s going on regionally is more of a patchwork.

Dozens of people like the Logan family are using their wealth to fund investigative enterprises from coast to coast, most with little fanfare. The Knight Foundation, represented at the conference by its senior advisor and grant-giver extraordinaire Eric Newton, has put $20 million into investigative journalism. With the decline in newspaper budgets, and thus in funding of investigative teams at many regional papers, such private funding has been a lifeline, though there’s a profound sense that significantly less in-depth work is being done at former powerhouse regional papers.

This Logan conference lacked the always-odd spontaneity of a Julian Assange appearance, but it offered intriguing emphases:

Front and center, though not appearing in person was Rupert Murdoch. After screening “Murdoch’s Scandal,” Bergman’s Frontline documentary that aired March 27, “The Murdoch Effect: News At Any Price,” made for a raucous panel. Milly Dowler attorney Mark Lewis told how the phone hacking scandal had consumed his life and spoke of the “commercial despotism of Murdochracy” in the U.K., given the News Corp. CEO’s multi-party, decades-long influence. Big questions: What next, and if and how this tale plays out in the U.S.
“If it’s not on TV, the American public doesn’t know it,” observed Diana Henriques, the New York Times financial investigative reporter. Yes, we may be on the brink of this multi-platform age, where old newspapers like the Times and the Journal do video alongside print, but still — in terms of notice and public action — there’s nothing like the impact of TV documentary.
This is a generational challenge. Journalism has always had its challenges, but never has there been more uncertainty about how one generation can pass along its best practices to the next. Through that foundation funding, a couple of dozen younger journalists and students had their way paid into the conference. Surveying the group on the last day, Robert Rosenthal, executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting and California Watch, summed his baby-boomer generation’s role: “I’m a bridge — we’re all bridges to the future.”

Bridging is, in part, what Lowell Bergman’s program does. UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program is a partner in the new Collaboration Central project, along with PBS MediaShift. With new funding, IRP will soon move into a new permanent office. It provides lots of training and fellowships, bringing along new generations to work alongside people like the Pulitzer Prize-winning Bergman, whose career has spanned from early Ramparts through CBS, The New York Times, and Frontline, and who was played by Al Pacino in the tobacco industry exposé The Insider.

Bergman paid tribute to his one-time CBS colleague Mike Wallace, underscoring Wallace’s storied tenacity. That tenacity, based on Wallace’s fierce journalistic power (highlighted at CBS, in story and video), is what it took a non-journalist to highlight in Berkeley.

Jules Kroll, who led the invention of the modern intelligence and security industry, gave the trade good, pointed advice. Saying he had heard a lot of journalists talking about how beleaguered they are, he noted, “You have a big impact.” His shared his inside view of the power of a good investigation. Colloquial translation: Stop whining and get on with it.

And that’s always good advice. As ProPublica managing editor Steve Engelberg aptly said, “They were whining in 1989, when times were good.” That’s true. There may be more to whine about these days than in 1989, but the power of great public service work, sometimes when lives are on the line, is one of the things that must propel the trade forward.

Photo of Alfredo Corchado by the U.S. embassy in Paraguay used under a Creative Commons license.

Kamis, 19 April 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Who watches the watchmen? The Guardian crowdsources its investigation into online tracking

Posted: 18 Apr 2012 10:46 AM PDT

As Guardian journalists were preparing to launch their new investigative project on cookies and other online tools that track you around the web, they realized they had to figure out just what kind of trackers exist on their own website.

Turns out this isn’t an easy task. “There are so many legacy ones from us that we forgot about — we had to do some research,” said Ian Katz, deputy editor of the Guardian.

Like many news sites, the Guardian has a mix of cookies — some for geotargeting where readers are, some for registering readers on the site, some for advertising, and more. The end result was this illuminating guide that lays itself over a story page and shows what cookies the Guardian uses. That kind of transparency fits with the Guardian’s embrace of what it calls open journalism, but it’s also an incentive for readers to uncover what kind of cookies follow them around the web. As part of their investigation, the Guardian wants readers to help guide their reporting by telling them what cookies they encounter in their day-to-day internet use. Thanks to Mozilla’s Collusion add-on, users will be able to track the trackers and then hand over that data to the Guardian.

“Essentially what we’re saying is, ‘You tell us what cookies you receive over the period you use this tool and we will find out which are the most prevalent cookies,’” Katz said. “We will do the work of finding out what they are and what they do.”

This week the Guardian is publishing Battle for the Internet, a series that looks at the future of the Internet and the players involved, from the private sector to governments, militaries, and activists. Cookies have an new significance because of a regulation passed last year that requires sites based in the U.K. to inform users they are being watched.

Joanna Geary, the digital development editor for the Guardian, said the idea is to go deep on cookies — not just what they do, but the companies behind them, what happens to the information they collect, and how they connect various parts of the web. Geary said the Collusion tool was perfect for this project because it not only tracks the trackers, but it provides a helpful — if not scary — illustration of how cookies work across various sites. “The Guardian being what it is, and being conscious of our commitment to open journalism, it felt like this was the right project to get our readers involved in,” she said. As for the Guardian’s own self-examination, “I think it would be weird if we had undergone any sort of crowdsourcing project without doing it,” she said. “We have the responsibility of telling people what we use on our site ourselves.”

Asking the crowd for help is a regular part of the Guardian’s playbook, and because of that they’ve learned a bit about what works and what doesn’t. Katz said a big part of success in crowdsourcing it the ease of contributing to a given project, whether you are asking someone to look at a document for a few minutes or put a pin on a map. This project could prove a bit more tricky since it requires downloading a browser add-on (that only works on Firefox) and later exporting data to the Guardian.

But just as important as the ease-of-use question is the motivation, Katz said. “You have to tap into an issue people are relatively fired up about,” he said. “You can’t sort of create that sense of urgency unless people already feel it.” Katz said people need to not only feel like they are making a difference — they also have to see their work in action. Katz admits that not all of the Guardian’s crowdsourcing efforts have been as successful as they hoped, saying the responsibility for that lies with the paper “when we have not reflected that work back in an interesting way.”

Katz said the graphics team will work on visualizations from the cookie data to display findings from readers. But the ultimate fate of any further reporting rests in what the audience finds. Instead of reporting out what it sees as problem cookies, the paper is asking readers to show what trackers are a growing part of daily life online. “It’s a genuine sort of combined enterprise, that both sides are bringing something to the party,” he said. “In this case, you bring the data and we’ll do the reporting.”

Image from Danny Sullivan used under a Creative Commons license.

Coloring books and puppets: California Watch unveils a new section just for kids

Posted: 18 Apr 2012 07:03 AM PDT

It’s often said that kids today aren’t interested in the news. Could it be because traditional newsrooms aren’t reporting stories with them in mind?

Most third-graders may not need or want comprehensive coverage of, say, tax reform. But there’s a case to be made for tailoring some important news to a pint-sized audience. That was nonprofit California Watch’s attitude when it included a coloring book in its 2011 series on seismic safety.

Now, California Watch has a whole news section just for children. It’s a place where “you can color, watch videos and learn about issues our reporters cover.” It’s also the latest move in the nonprofit’s longstanding effort to distribute their work through nontraditional channels as a way to reach people who need the information they’re reporting. To meet that goal, California Watch’s strategy incorporates multiple platforms, translating work into different languages, and collaborations with media and community partners to get the word out.

“One of the things that I love about California Watch is we’re focused on actual communities because we have a solution-oriented focus,” the site’s public engagement manager, Ashley Alvarado, told me.

So the California Watch reporting strategy isn’t just about putting the information out there — it’s also about empowering people, grown-ups and kids, to do something about what they’ve learned. The star of the “Ready to Rumble” coloring book, Sunny the dog, makes a return for the Junior Watchdogs section, which features an online version of the original coloring book that kids (or, ahem, Nieman Lab reporters) can color using a digital palette.

There’s also a video puppet show — complete with felt props, knitted finger puppets, music and voiceovers — about clean water issues. The three-minute film explores pollution, and how people affect water quality. (This is truly a team effort: Listen for reporter Lance Williams as the voice of the owl scientist.) Next week, California Watch is debuting the Spanish-language version of the video.

The Junior Watchdogs site features a map called “Where’s Sunny?” that shows all of the places where California Watch has shipped its “Ready to Rumble” coloring book. Most of them went to coastal cities in the United States but at least one batch got as far as New Zealand. Another story in the works for the junior audience is based on a 2010 series about unsafe levels of lead in toys, jewelry, and back-to-school products.

The unusual storytelling approach is only one component. California Watch also has to make sure that people know about its work, and that’s Alvarado’s job. There may be an opportunity to tap into a network of schools at some point, but first she’s going to hit the streets. Alvarado has been putting together community toolkits, which she’ll “hand deliver, person by person” to various areas. Each toolkit will contain:

• A DVD featuring the puppet show and a slideshow (an alternative format for those without Internet access)

• Printed versions of an article or articles applicable to the community

• Worksheets to help answer questions that community members might have about the issue that California Watch reported about in their area, including contact numbers for government agencies

• A primer on working with the media

• A one-page information sheet about California Watch and the Center for Investigative Reporting

In much the same way that government agencies and other institutions provide reporters with press kits to help them understand the issues they have to write about, California Watch is giving informational kits to the community based on what it has reported.

Alvarado will start with 100 kits for her trip to two mobile home parks in Coachella, and will distribute kits that include an article about grim living conditions there. There is also a toolkit designed to serve the Maywood community based on coverage of water quality, and a toolkit for unincorporated communities across the state.

“We’re not just writing about a community for another community,” Alvarado says. “That means nontraditional distribution. That means whether we’re putting a story on a postcard, putting a story in a coloring book, attending community meetings, whatever we have to do to [help people] become their own advocates.”

A contrasting example she gives: The New York Times might produce a brilliantly reported piece of journalism. But what if it’s about people who don’t read the Times? Which news organizations are looking out for their interests?

“I always joke and say we’re so old school we’re new school,” Alvarado says. “We are putting an emphasis on actual human-to-human interaction, which is — for whatever reason — becoming endangered.”

Rabu, 18 April 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Politico Pro, one year in: A premium pricetag, a tight focus, and a business success

Posted: 17 Apr 2012 07:30 AM PDT

Most nights on Capitol Hill, the Senate and House press galleries begin to thin out around dinner time. The deadline rush subsides, and all but a scatter of reporters remain.

It was approaching 11 p.m. on March 7 when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced a deal that cleared the way for voting to begin the next day on 30 amendments tied to a $109 billion transportation bill.

Inside baseball, sure, but it’s news that matters inside the Beltway, and matters to a lot of people. It’s the kind of deal you might want to know about right away if you were a member of Congress or a lobbyist or someone else who has to keep track of policy for a living. But it’s unlikely you would have found out about the deal on TV, or on Twitter or via any major newspaper’s website that night. Even traditional policy publications didn’t have it.

Enter Politico Pro, the pricey premium news service, launched last year with the goal of doing for policy coverage what Politico set out to do for political coverage five years ago.

“I don’t think the policy areas had been covered in a very interesting way before — policy publications can be pretty dry,” Politico Pro editor-in-chief Tim Grieve said. “There are ways to cover this stuff that are pretty damn interesting, which may be the secret to our success.”

On the night of March 7, paid subscribers to Politico Pro got the news about the Senate transportation deal almost immediately. Anyone signed up for the service’s energy coverage would have received this email at 10:41 p.m.:

Sixteen minutes later, Politico Pro published a story about the deal, including a full list of the amendments. Here’s a partial screenshot:

Less than an hour after that, a reporter for Politico’s core site broke the news that President Barack Obama had been personally lobbying Democrats in the Senate, urging them to reject one of the amendments that turned out to be on the list.

In the span of an hour, Politico and Politico Pro — we’ll get to the distinction later — had significantly advanced a major story in a way that would inform the next day’s business on Capitol Hill. For people involved in that business, knowing about these developments before getting to work the next morning would have been key.

“The next morning at 7:18, our competitor has this story: ‘Amendments for the Senate transportation bill are still up in the air,’” Grieve said. “They didn’t even have the story. That happens quite a lot…Do you want to find out something that’s really important in your universe now, or do you want to wait?”

“Now” is increasingly the answer among smartphone toting news consumers. But like many premium niche news services, the nowness that Pro delivers comes with a steep price tag. A year into its life — and as more publishers consider whether a premium-content strategy might make sense for them — Politico Pro’s success is a model worth watching.

You pay for what you get

Politico Pro covers four major policy areas: technology, energy, health care, and transportation. Newest in the mix is the transportation section, which launched on Tuesday. The site plans to add at least one more vertical before the end of 2012. Of Politico’s 217 total employees, more than 150 are on the editorial side, with 45 of them dedicated to Pro. The rest work in sales, technology, and events.

For an individual subscribing to one of Pro’s verticals, pricing starts at $3,295 per year. But most Pro subscribers are part of a group membership, and those start at around $8,000 per year for licensing content from a single vertical to five people. Pro bans subscribers from sharing or forwarding content. Add more employees to an organizational membership and the “price becomes more fluid,” says Miki King, Pro’s executive director of business development.

The subscription strategy has been somewhat fluid, too. Pro didn’t offer group memberships at first, but quickly found that it was a better business strategy. “The vast majority, well over 95 percent, are organizational subscriptions versus individual subscribers,” King says. “The whole idea behind the Pro subscription is we are going so deep in these policy areas that you would only care about it to this degree if this is your job.”

So it’s not surprising that about one-third of Pro subscribers are government workers.

“That ranges from Capitol Hill offices — members of Congress and senators’ offices — to government agencies to state and local municipalities,” King said. “Roughly another third are in the general public policy space — trade associations and those organizations that cover general policy, the think-tank types of organizations, or those who specifically cover energy policy.”

The other third is “everybody else,” King says.

Pro executives won’t publicly share subscription numbers, but just past the one-year mark, King says the figures “very quickly exceeded the expectations of where we thought we would be.” She says the number of subscribers has tripled since February 2011, and renewals “overwhelmingly” surpassed market-based predictions of 85 to 90 percent. As Politico’s Jim VandeHei and John Harris wrote in a staff memo earlier this month:

We set high editorial standards, and we achieved them. We set big goals for Pro’s first-year sales, and we beat them. We set big goals for Pro’s first-year renewal numbers, and we’re beating those, too. Readers want the kind of journalism Pro produces — fast-moving, decisive POLITICO-style journalism applied to the specific policy areas that interest them most. Because of this success, POLITICO has the most reporters working the most important policy areas in Washington — and all our readers benefit from this when we turn to the PRO team to write for our broader audience on energy, health care and technology matters.

While the Politico brand has been built on breaking targeted news, the sense of urgency that guides Pro’s team is mostly about getting meaningful information to people right away — sometimes even before reporters have a full understanding of what a news development means. King says Pro has “no problem whatsoever sending out to our subscribers a two-line email that’s going to give you a piece of breaking news that could impact your day because we’re not waiting for three hours for a reporter to file a story on it.”

“It’s very liberating for reporters, but it’s pretty damn liberating for readers too.”

That also means changing the way Pro’s stories are constructed.

“One of the things I tell reporters every day is: When you get to that point of the story, four or five paragraphs in, and [you write] ‘the move comes amid…’ — stop,” Grieve said. “Anybody who is reading Politico Pro knows what ‘the move comes amid.’ That 300 words of new essential information can be a 300-word story. The traditional approach would be a 1,000-word story, but the second part of that story would be the blah blah blah that everybody already knows…It’s very liberating for reporters, but it’s pretty damn liberating for readers too. No one has time to read stuff they already know. Take your time with the stuff that’s going to grab them by the jacket lapels and say, ‘Whoa, this is new.’”

Pro by phone

For Politico Pro, grabbing readers by the lapels means getting into their inboxes. Because the overwhelming majority of Pro subscribers are in Washington, that means catering to their reliance on BlackBerrys, which are — believe it or not — still ubiquitous on the Hill.

“It’s such a BlackBerry-centric and email-centric world,” VandeHei, Politico’s executive editor and co-founder, told me. “Anything that moves [on Pro] you’re getting pinged to you instantly on your BlackBerry. That option is only available right now to Pro subscribers. We just hear something interesting, and it might be just enough text to fill a BlackBerry screen. That part of the experience is very different than what you’re getting from Politico.” (Although Politico’s main product puts a lot of emphasis on mobile, too.)

Pro’s phone-centric approach means that its subscribers spend “very little time” on the site itself, Grieve says. There’s also no plan to move into text-messaging territory. Instead, subscribers get Pro updates on their BlackBerrys while rushing between hearings, while they’re waiting for a meeting with a Senator, or while they’re otherwise on the go.

“If you have a few hours on the weekend to read a 10,000-word New Yorker story, that’s a really rewarding experience,” Grieve said. “It’s also not what we’re trying to do. If you’re racing around the Hill trying to make progress on the policy area you care about, that’s a really lousy way of getting information.”

Content customized and on-demand

The other way that Pro tries to help readers cut to the chase is by letting them customize their newsfeeds. So in addition to subscribing to basic alerts, briefings, coverage from specific reporters, and other updates in policy areas of interest, readers can tag up to 25 terms that matter to them. That could be the name of a senator, a particular piece of legislation, or just about anything at all, really. Check it out:

“Any time that we write about your member of Congress, your agency, your company, your client, that’s instantly sent in full email text to your BlackBerry,” VandeHei said.

It may sound simple, but VandeHei calls what Politico Pro is doing “arguably the most important business innovation and arguably journalistic innovation” since Politico’s core site launched five years ago.

“The reason I say that is it now gives us two different solid revenue streams, which gives us two different ways to fund really aggressive journalism,” VandeHei said. (Politico won its first Pulitzer Prize yesterday.) While the Pro reporters are grouped in a different area of the building than the other Politico reporters, VandeHei says Pro is ultimately a “descriptive term” and, “at the end of the day, it’s one newsroom.”

Pro’s top editor Grieve also says that he’s hoping to foster more cross-pollination among reporters going forward. Already, there’s overlap. Pro reporters’ bylines are often on the core Politico site, and one Pro reporter recently hit the campaign trail with Mitt Romney when the core Politico team needed a break, Grieve says.

“As we grow Pro, I think you’re going to see much more of that — much more crossing over and blending and people moving around the newsroom in creative and maybe surprising ways,” Grieve says. The other surprise will be what verticals Pro rolls out next. Executives won’t say which areas they’re exploring, but King says there are clues on the core site.

“If you think about the way we have launched Pro products in the past, we’ve always launched around where we have done coverage,” King says. “For a hint on policy areas where we may be able to, over time, lend some insight from a Pro perspective, take a look at policy pages where we’ve covered everything from transportation to finance to defense. Those and more would be potential areas for future verticals.”

The good news for those who can’t afford the pricey premium service — and for those who care about quality journalism in general — is that Pro’s growth directly affects what the core Politico team is able to cover.

“If Pro didn’t exist, if there weren’t a base of readers who were interested in paying for the kind of highly detailed coverage Pro provides, it would be a limitaiton on the way Politico as a whole could cover this stuff — we might have one energy reporter, one technology reporter, one healthcare reporter,” Grieve said. “So when SOPA comes to the fore, when the contraception fight comes to the fore, when gas prices are the thing everyone’s talking about in Washington, there’s kind of an overwhelming force of manpower, expertise, knowledge, and insight that we can bring to bear for Pro readers and regular Politico readers that we just wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. It works from an editorial standpoint and works from a business standpoint. And if it doesn’t do both of those things, then it’s not going to happen.”

Photo of the U.S. Capitol Rotunda by ctj71081 used under a Creative Commons license.

The New York Times’ Well blog gets more vertical with a redesign

Posted: 17 Apr 2012 06:00 AM PDT

What you might call the verticalization of The New York Times continues today with the relaunch of Well, the healthy-living section edited by Tara Parker-Pope. Like DealBook and Bits before it, Well has grown in prominence enough to get its own branded identity and look — one that stands out from the 60-plus other blogs the Times offers. (Compare its look to The Lede, The Caucus, or India Ink, which all use variations of the standard Timesian blog look.)

Well’s new look makes it look more like an independent website than another Times blog that might get linked from the nytimes.com front page now and then. Along with a single top story, the design promotes four editor-selected stories up high, pushes comment-heavy posts in the sidebar (“Well Community”), pushes tools, quizzes, and recipes up high, and lets readers slice Well’s content by subtopics (Body, Mind, Food, Fitness, and so on). Most stories get bigger and bolder art than the old design allowed; text excerpts are shorter, allowing more stories per vertical inch. Twitter and Facebook sharing tools are prominent on each post, even on the front page.

Like Bits and DealBook, Well’s new look and feel is more reminiscent of what we associate with a blog and not a topic section of a newspaper website. As with Bits, The New York Times logo is shrunken to a mere 123 pixels wide, greyed in the upper left corner; the Well logo gets the big, 540-pixel-wide play.

Along with the new look, Well is getting additional resources. Aside from Parker-Pope, Times writer Anahad O’Connor will join Well as a full-time reporter, and the site will still have writing from other Times contributors and staffers Jane Brody and Gretchen Reynolds.

The transformation of Well has been in the works for several months and was first announced by James Follo, the Times chief financial officer, during an earnings call in February, where he said the company’s digital strategy called for expanding “some current content to drive increased engagement levels and additional points of access and create some entirely new homes for content.”

Well, with its inclusive view on health including fitness, medical care, dieting and more, seems like a logical choice for the Times to try to build off their existing work to grow a new audience. It’s a topic area that has the ability to develop a following as well as attract advertisers; it’s been a pageview standout at the Times for years, with Well stories regularly hitting the most-emailed list.

When I spoke with Ian Adelman, director of digital design for the Times, he said it was important for Well to develop its own identity independent of the Times while still being associated with the paper. “That balance between giving room for that specific content to breath, exist, and surface more and maintaining a consistent presentation of the Times a is a little tricky,” Adelman said.

That’s why Well, like Dealbook and Bits, has what you might call “light branding” from the New York Times, and why the navigation bar and other visual cues found on the rest of NYTimes.com are mostly missing. It’s also why there’s more elbow room on the page, on the Well home as well as story pages, giving art, multimedia, or discussion from readers a its own prominence. Adelman said the design is informed by editorial needs and doesn’t follow the templates you find on the rest of the site. For sites like NYTimes.com, those common templates are useful because of the sheer volume of information that moves across their pages each day. But the newer microsites within the Times architecture require more freedom, Adelman said.

“When an entity is contained within the bigger shell of The New York Times, there’s a little less room for things that are unique to that content environment to surface and breath in ways that make sense,” he said.

What’s unique to Well is that the content may be more disconnected to the day-to-day news cycle than Dealbook or Bits, where analysis and essays are intermixed with daily reporting. Well has seasonal recipes, fitness tools, and health quizzes, the type of material that can easily be tied into a news cycle and trends. But it also has stories with a long shelf life that can draw eyeballs over extended periods of time. (A piece on what works when trying to lose weight is guaranteed Googlebait for years to come.) Adelman said they redesigned the site with that in mind. “There are a number of new features that will be added — things that are not so much about news, but about the Well experience and creating a platform for people to get that and stick around longer,” he said.

It’s likely Well is not the last section from NYTimes.com to be turned into its own mini empire. As the Times continues to work on its digital subscription framework, the incentives are stronger than ever to create dedicated audiences who want to keep coming back to a part of the site. The Times has a long history here: It was Abe Rosenthal back in the 1970s who expanded the print paper by adding so-called “soft sections” — Weekend, Sports Monday, Living, Home, and the like — that would appeal to specific niche audiences. That strategy, despite initial misgivings, has made the Times a lot of money over the years. So while building verticals online may be associated more with the Huffington Post, Gawker Media, or Vox Media than with any newspaper, the Times realizes the need to structure appealing containers for specific kinds of content. For the developers and designers at the Times that translates into more experimenting with how the company presents its journalism, Adleman said.

“We’ll continue to evolve how we provide really great experiences for readers and finding new and better ways to incorporate more interesting materials into the story experience,” he said.