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This Week in Review: ‘Native ads’ in Politico’s Playbook, and Greenwald’s news org takes shape Posted: 22 Nov 2013 07:02 AM PST Expansion and questions for Playbook: Capital New York, the politics- and media-heavy news site bought earlier this fall by Politico owner Robert Allbritton, announced it would relaunch after Thanksgiving with a subscription service and a new Capital Playbook daily briefing, which aims to be to New York what Politico’s influential Playbook is to Washington. Politico’s Mike Allen, who writes Playbook, will co-write the new Capital Playbook. The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple said it makes sense to expand Allen’s brand, but wondered if he can be spread too thin. The New York Times is also trying to build on the Playbook model, announcing the launch of its own daily tip sheet of Washington news. As The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone reported, The Times is describing something that will rely more on its reporters’ observations, as opposed to Allen’s aggregation-heavy style. Meanwhile, Wemple highlighted a significant problem with Allen’s Playbook — namely, that he gives his advertisers sympathetic coverage even in non-ad items and tends to ignore negative news about them. Wemple found patterns of fawning coverage of advertisers such as Goldman Sachs, BP, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Andrew Sullivan registered his alarm, writing that Wemple’s piece “reads like a meticulously researched tale of at least the appearance of blatant corruption.” Likewise, Jonathan Chait of New York magazine wrote that the scandal is that Playbook as a whole is so anodyne and establishmentarian that the kind of corruption Wemple described isn’t even necessary. “The behavior Wemple documents would ordinarily amount to a scandal and a likely firing offense, except that it seems to be Allen's essential job description,” he said. And the Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum said Allen is taking Washington access journalism to a new level, adding money to the access that journalists often get in exchange for friendly coverage. A big pickup for Greenwald and Omidyar: The net of personal information and communications swept up by the U.S. National Security Agency, at least as the public is able to see it, continues to widen each week. The Guardian reported that the NSA has access to personal information of U.K. citizens, thanks to a 2007 agreement with British intelligence authorities. Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported that the U.S. Department of Justice is reviewing its criminal cases where evidence was used from its warrantless surveillance program. A group of news organizations backed a lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against the NSA surveillance, filing a brief arguing that such tactics put confidential sources and therefore accountability journalism at risk. Elsewhere, Bob Woodward said he wished Edward Snowden, who leaked these documents, would have come to him, as he would have convinced Snowden to remain anonymous and give him time to present the information “in a coherent way.” His Washington Post colleague Barton Gellman, one of the people Snowden did leak to, fired back at Woodward. There were also a couple of engaging longform pieces published on the NSA leaks — one by Gawker’s Adrian Chen on 1970s NSA whistleblower Perry Fellwock and another by BuzzFeed’s Natasha Vargas-Cooper on David Miranda, the partner of former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald who was detained in the U.K. for possessing Snowden documents. Greenwald’s inchoate news organization with eBay founder Pierre Omidyar gained a high-profile (at least in the meta-journalism world) member when NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen announced he had signed on as a paid adviser who will establish a “learning culture” within the organization and communicate its journalism philosophy to the public. The new organization will offer an opportunity to put the principles he’s been expressing over the past decade to the test, he said. CNET’s Edward Moyer pulled together a summary of everyone else on board at Greenwald/Omidyar venture so far. French media executive Frederic Filloux offered a list of suggestions for the new organization, encouraging it to embrace an endowment funding model, paid online subscriptions, and a niche print product. A paywall holdout jumps on board: Digital First Media, one of the nation’s largest newspaper chains and perhaps its most prominent holdout on online paywalls — although it had inherited some of MediaNews Group’s — announced it would be expanding its digital subscription plan to all of its 75 daily papers. Digital subscriptions “don't transform anything; they tweak. At best, they are a short-term tactic,” said Digital First CEO John Paton. “But it's a tactic that will help us now.” Industry analyst Ken Doctor marveled at how thoroughly and quickly Paton and the newspaper industry have flipped on paywalls, estimating that 41 percent of the U.S.’ daily papers now have online pay plans. Mathew Ingram of Gigaom, a longtime paywall detractor, saw the move as an alarming indicator of the revenue problems of traditional media but applauded Paton for calling a digital subscription plan a short-term solution rather than a monumental development. Another paywall critic, Digital First’s own Steve Buttry, collected some conversation about the decision and stated that while he doesn’t agree with this approach, he has full confidence in overall direction of the company. On the other side, the Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum applauded Paton for “putting pragmatism over ideology” and saw his decision as part of an ongoing vindication of the paywall as a significant part of newspapers’ future, lamenting that newspapers bought into the ideology of free content for so long. “The paywall argument has always been about applying a tourniquet in the short term to give papers time to figure out the inevitable transition to all-digital,” he wrote. Elsewhere in paywalls, Doctor detailed The New York Times’ plans to move its pioneering paywall forward. Reading roundup: Not many big stories this week, but a few smaller ones floating around: — Bloomberg laid off journalists from a variety of departments this week, particularly in its arts and culture coverage. It also let go Mike Forsythe, who co-wrote an article that had reportedly been suppressed for political reasons and who had been suspended last week. Reuters’ Jack Shafer examined the Forsythe case, and his colleague Felix Salmon explained what’s going on behind the larger cuts. Peter Lauria of BuzzFeed looked at the implications for Bloomberg TV. — Snapchat, a mobile messaging service built around ephemeral messages, was reported last week to have turned down a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook, leading to some commentary this week on just how valuable (or not) the company is. The Wall Street Journal’s Farhad Manjoo chastised Silicon Valley for its obsession with youth as an indicator of value or future trends in tech, though Mathew Ingram of Gigaom disputed that argument. BuzzFeed’s Peter Lauria questioned just how widely used Snapchat is. — The New York Times announced a slew of changes in its Washington bureau, including the launch of a daily political tip sheet (mentioned above) and a political data journalism initiative to succeed the now-departed Five Thirty Eight. The New Republic’s Marc Tracy analyzed the news of the data journalism project — the Times sees its main advantage in its strong graphics department — and Henry Farrell of The Monkey Cage welcomed its arrival. — Finally, former newspaper editor John L. Robinson and journalist Kevin Anderson wrote a couple of quick but thoughtful posts on changing news coverage to fit people’s everyday lives rather than officials and organizations.

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• The big trend in indie hyperlocal: Strong women
• “The Only Metric That Matters”: Total Time Reading
• OJR’s not alone: An old Poynter website has become a spamblog too
• Third time’s the charm: Will the new Potluck app be the best commenting section in news?
• The newsonomics of The New York Times’ Paywalls 2.0

The big trend in indie hyperlocal: Strong women Posted: 21 Nov 2013 12:53 PM PST Over at Street Fight, Tom Grubisich hits on a trend I’d noticed but hadn’t been smart enough to write about: the disproportionate representation of women in the leadership of hyperlocal indie media. (Disproportionate to Big Media leadership, I should say — not particularly disproportionate to the actual population.) Of the 12 top revenue-producing community news sites, eight have a female editor-publisher-owner, based primarily on my calculations from the authoritative Michele's List — compiled by journalist and community news researcher Michele McLellan — as well as my own research. There is just one site in the list's top revenue bracket of $501,000-$1 million — St. Louis Beacon — and it is headed by two women: Editor and co-founder Margie Freivogel and General Manager Nicole Holloway… Another number: Six women editors-publishers now sit on the 13-member board of the Local Independent Online News (LION) Publishers, the major association representing "indies”… Crucially, none of these women had to make their case in corporate board rooms, which are overwhelmingly male-dominated. These women just rolled up their entrepreneurial sleeves and went to work. But their success wasn't, and isn't, guaranteed. The odds against the small businesses owner — male or female — being successful are considerably longer than a blackjack player's chances in Las Vegas. So what do women bring to the community news space to produce so many winners?

“The Only Metric That Matters”: Total Time Reading Posted: 21 Nov 2013 11:49 AM PST That’s the claim of this piece by Medium product scientist Pete Davies, which goes into why they prefer to push past vanity metrics that create giant PR-friendly numbers. We've crossed a point at which the availability of data has exceeded what's required for quality metrics. Most data scientists that I meet tell me that they're gathering way more data than they can ever hope to use. And yet, in many cases, they still don't have useful metrics… I think of competing for users' attention as a zero-sum game. Thanks to hardware innovation, there is barely a moment left in the waking day that hasn't been claimed by (in no particular order) books, social networks, TV, and games. It's amazing that we have time for our jobs and families. We measure every user interaction with every post. Most of this is done by periodically recording scroll positions. We pipe this data into our data warehouse, where offline processing aggregates the time spent reading (or our best guess of it): we infer when a reader started reading, when they paused, and when they stopped altogether. The methodology allows us to correct for periods of inactivity (such as having a post open in a different tab, walking the dog, or checking your phone).

OJR’s not alone: An old Poynter website has become a spamblog too Posted: 21 Nov 2013 10:22 AM PST Maybe you saw my two stories this week on the fate of OJR.org, previously the website of the once-essential Online Journalism Review, which was turned into a spamblog by Marcus Lim, CEO of an Australian startup called Oneflare — one that initially fraudulently tried to appear it was still the old OJR, a product of USC Annenberg. (Since those articles, OJR.org has been blanked entirely. Sometimes sunlight really is the best cure!) Well, kudos to Rhonda Roland Shearer at the website iMediaEthics, who found that another old journalism website, PoynterOnline.org, has met the same fate. Except in this case, it’s been a spamblog for years without anyone noticing, with someone named Evgeniy Varlashov apparently to blame. Check out all the details on her post. (PoynterOnline.org was an alternate URL for Poynter’s website for much of the 2000s; they consolidated on Poynter.org around 2008.) Shearer notes that PoynterOnline.org claims to have “won more than 100 awards in the past five years alone.” I’d also note that the language PoynterOnline.org uses to make that claim are straight lifted from Computerworld’s about page. And I’d also note that, unlike OJR.org, PoynterOnline.org is also running Google ads, so there’s likely a small-but-nonzero amount of money being generated off Poynter’s reputation here. People: Don’t let your domains expire. In this case, unlike OJR’s, the decision was likely made on purpose — Poynter switched from PoynterOnline.org to just Poynter.org a few years ago. But particularly when you have a brand to protect embedded in that URL, it’s totally worth the 10 bucks a year to just keep renewing and autoforwarding. If you’re thinking about giving up a domain, ask yourself the question: Will I be okay with this domain becoming a spamblog in a few weeks? If the answer’s no, pay up.

Third time’s the charm: Will the new Potluck app be the best commenting section in news? Posted: 21 Nov 2013 09:53 AM PST To understand what Potluck’s new iOS app will mean, you have to understand where Josh Miller thinks he went wrong with the first two tries. Though the products have different names, Miller says the new app is really his third stab at the same idea — trying to build a platform that can improve the digital engagement and conversation space. The first attempt was Branch, a company he cofounded with Hursh Agrawal and Cemre Güngör, and that was supported financially and otherwise by everyone from Jonah Peretti to Lerer Ventures to the founders of Twitter. “Our original hunch with Branch was, well, people aren’t tweeting and they aren’t blogging, even though they have opinions. Why is that?” But what Branch actually ended up being was a way for publishers to curate digital expert panels. “A lot of people loved it, but the people that loved it were the people who were already used to creating content,” says Miller. It’s been used by everyone from The Atlantic to The New York Times to Al Jazeera, but Miller’s original goal eluded him. While Branch is still active, Miller says they’ve stopped designing new features for it in order to focus on Take Two. “Branch was a dynamic where, if a Branch took off, it was all over the place — Twitter, Mediagazer, Hacker News — everybody knew about it. But if you looked at the number of people that used it everyday and were addicted to it, there was a very small number,” Miller says. “Potluck is the opposite. Potluck, you’ve probably never seen on Twitter, but there’s a significant community of people coming back four to eight times a day.” Potluck, the frequently used analogy goes, was supposed to feel like a dinner party, a place where you could have intimate, interesting conversations with the people you know and people you might like to know. But there was a problem. “We said, ‘This is going to be a great dinner party!’ And nobody showed up. Nobody brought food. It’s like, there’s nothing here,” says Miller. “Our goal with these snacks is that we think there’s a huge demand for a mobile application where you don’t have to wait for anything to load, where the content is easily digestible, where you can very quickly learn about what’s going on in the world while you’re taking a bathroom break or in line at the grocery store.” “Snacks” are what Miller hopes will be the core attraction of the new app, Take Three: news stories condensed into three, swipeable cards. “Most people, when they’re on their phone, which they increasingly are, they really just want these quick hits. They don’t want a thousand words, or even 500 words. That’s what we see the snacks being. You get a title, we’ll give you three slides and then, if you find it interesting enough that you want to read deeper, we’ll link you to a third party that we think does a good job of giving you more information,” says Miller. Although Potluck’s editors will be creating these content snacks in the beginning, Miller says he’d be open to outside publishers — and users — contributing as soon as possible. “We don’t consider ourselves a media company. We don’t want to consider ourselves a publisher,” says Miller. “We just think that’s very important for us to establish content in the community we want early on.” Commenting, the bet goes, will be better if there’s something built in to comment on. What Potluck wants is to be the best commenting platform, the “best content and conversation experience” available in a native iOS app today. For Miller, that meant building an intimacy that the original Branch lacked. “Everybody is going to see the same content. What our editors create is what everybody in the app is going to read. But the conversation thread you see is only going to have your friends, and friends-of-friends,” he says. “It would be like if tomorrow Facebook said, ‘We’re launching a new iOS app and it’s called The News. And in The News, you only post links and articles and you talk to your Facebook friends about the news.’ It’s that, but with a smaller graph.” Miller believes his credentials as a platform builder, plus his experience with Branch, make his team uniquely poised for success in the “fuzzy area” between content creators and tech startups. If media companies are already willing to farm out comments to third parties like Disqus, Miller believes Potluck has an opportunity to become the platform that’s “owning the engagement.” “Most publishers, when they created a native app, not a lot of people downloaded them. So they said, ‘We’ll just create a nice mobile web view, so at least when it’s shared on Twitter and Facebook it will look good.’ That’s them thinking like a media company,” says Miller. “Products-focused companies will always be best at building those products, and content-focused companies are always going to be focused on creating the best content.” As far as media tech companies go, Miller singled out BuzzFeed, Gawker, and (sister company) Medium as well as messaging apps like MessageMe, GroupMe and Kik. But the company that comes closest to swimming in the same waters as the new Potluck app is Circa, which also uses a card metaphor to tell news stories in a mobile context. Says Miller: “We’re similar in the sense that we both don’t want you to have to wait for a URL to load, and we think you need bite-size chunks at a time. In that sense, we’re both on the same page — but we still think content should be shorter.” In other words, Miller believes that the audience looking for news that’s longer than a tweet but shorter than an article is being underserved. “There’s a little pie of people who are interested in reading a New York Times article on the shutdown,” he says. “We think there’s a much, much larger pie that is interested in the government shutdown but doesn’t find any of those articles that approachable.” Ultimately, he wants Potluck to offer just enough information to generate conversation. But can it scale? Miller does have some plans for monetizing Take Three, although he readily admits that most of them are half-baked. Indeed, his suggestion that at some point premium Potluck content — industry-specific news, for example — might only be available to subscribers seems rather unlikely when you remember that we’re ultimately talking about three to five sentences, based on things reported elsewhere. That said, he did point out that, once upon a time, nobody thought people would pay 99 cents for iTunes music files when they could be downloading the same music for free. “The reason people started doing it was, it was the fastest way to do it, it was easy, it was intuitive,” he says. “If Potluck is the quickest, easiest, fastest way to consume content, maybe there’s an opportunity to do something similar to what Apple did.” But clearly, with its focus on content, advertising is the most likely route to revenue for the new app, although Miller says they have no immediate plans to hire a sales team. But Miller’s not interested in banner ads. “You can imagine a world in which the top card is The New York Times with three slides on the government shutdown and the next is GE on why their new jet is going to be amazing,” he says. Although they have no plans to create video content, Miller said he hopes swiping cards, which he claims is “by and large, the most fun, addictive, mobile interaction,” will ultimately generate price points comparable to preroll ads for video content. Says Miller: “I think it would be really interesting to say, ‘Hey Nike, make a snack about your new shoes and why they’re so awesome and we’ll put it in the stack with anyone that follows ESPN.’” Potluck’s core challenge will probably still be getting people to use it. While there are undoubtedly users looking for a more intimate, faster, mobile platform for engagement, the barriers to conversion from Facebook, Twitter, or your social network of choice still seem high. Plus, call me an optimist, but Miller seems to be depending rather heavily on the assumption that New York Times content is too highbrow for most consumers. That said, if neverending Internet chatter is to be believed, comments are something we still haven’t fixed. If Potluck manages to not only solve that problem, but do it in the mobile space, Miller might be on to something. As he says himself, if you don’t think “conversation as the core of content” is the next big thing, just look at how hard Nick Denton is focused on Kinja. “Nobody wants to talk about news on Instagram. Nobody wants to learn about the government shutdown on Snapchat, because that’s where you’re trading selfies with your girlfriend or posting photos of the sunset,” Miler says. “I think the big play for publishers, or a tech company, is to try and become the place where you talk about this stuff. Whether it’s Potluck or Gawker or Curbed or Vox or whatever — or maybe it’s going to Facebook if they do a standalone app, or Twitter — I think there’s going to be a single platform where people talk about this stuff.”

The newsonomics of The New York Times’ Paywalls 2.0 Posted: 21 Nov 2013 07:46 AM PST Listen to Mark Thompson and you hear echoes of early 2011. “We have the theory. We’ve done the research. We’ve done the modeling,” the New York Times Co. CEO told me last week. “Then there’s reality.” TWEET Thompson, as intense and self-assured as many Timespeople often describe, punches at the air to make that last point. The new reality he is outlining will roll into existence in the second quarter of 2014. The Times will furiously break new company (and industry) ground with at least three new Paywalls 2.0 paid digital products and, at some point, a new “premium” tier. TWEET Within the Times building, teams of editorial, business and tech staff are shaping those new products. If it succeeds, the Pied Piper of the paywall revolution — having led the march that more than 40 percent of the U.S. newspaper industry is now following — will be leading a merrier band toward more new revenue. For the Times, the new products are biggest initiative since the January 2011 launch of the metered pay system itself. Their success will determine how much gas there may be in what we can call the revolution of rising reader revenue. The Times leads the industry with 56 percent of its revenue coming from readers — but it needs more. Its three-year-old initiative has been a success, running at a rate of $150 million in new digital reader revenue annually. It has signed up 727,000 digital-only subscribers. It has transitioned its print subscribers to an all-access model — and gotten an astounding number to link their print subscriptions to digital accounts.  But it needs more. Both print and digital advertising revenue are still shrinking, and a turnaround in either over the next two years is more a hope than a certainty. That’s the driver behind Paywalls 2.0. Can it extend the lessons of the first revolution in reader revenue — proving out the theory, research, and modeling that say there really is a consumer appetite for new paid digital news and features products? It’s important to contrast late 2013 with early 2011. Walk the corridors of the Times building and talk to staff today and you’ll sense a budding confidence — a quality I believe is fundamental to the industry’s rebuilding (“The newsonomics of outrageous confidence”). No one has any illusion that the Times’ future is assured, and the recent defections of Brian Stelter, Nate Silver, and David Pogue and others have sent a bit of a chill through the place. But Times staffers know that their finances are a lot less shaky since the tenuous days of the Carlos Slim loan — and that a lot of people value what they do every day. The all-access digital pay strategy has not just brought in cash: It’s served as a statement that millions of readers value the Times enough to pay a fair amount of money for it. It shows people care. I asked Paul Smurl, who led the development of the paid digital business as general manager of core digital products, why the new paid products won’t be introduced until the middle of 2014 when it was clear the all-you-can-eat subscription model had begun to plateau by the middle of 2013. (For that 727,000 total at the end of September, the Times showed just a four-percent increase since the end of June.) Smurl answered in three words: It is complicated. The Times has both a big news business to protect and lots of data to test. In fact, it’s been busy preparing for Paywalls 2.0 for a while now. Smurl says the company has tested “a hundred different products and price points.” Qualitative studies, quantitative studies — and, of course, financial modeling. That modeling is aimed at one goal: maximize Times EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. In other words, don’t just increase revenues: Increase profits. That makes fundamental sense for a company that eked out a $12.9 million net operating gain in the last quarter. In part, that means creating products that generate lots of new customers but don’t significantly cannibalize that new hard-earned customer base. So what’s come out of that process? Three new niche products, to start: Food & dining: Sam Sifton, a former Times restaurant reviewer and national editor, is heading up this project. Expect lots of video and how-tos. This product will grow out of the Times’ well-read Dining section. The big question won’t be interest; it will be what kind of product might the Times create that consumers will value enough to pay for separately. Food and dining is a big, free world, with television content hugely popular. Recipes won’t be enough — nor will thoughtful and entertaining commentary. What might help would be third-party content, a partnership with a food outlet that has affinity with the Times, or functionality that extends the experience. How about some kind of special deal with OpenTable that gives subscribers some kind of preference or deal, for instance? Michael Zimbalist‘s R&D staff demoed “Julia” for me last week. Julia (check out the demo here) is a magical Internet tablet, using gestural and voice interfaces to use tablet-like content and then see ingredients displayed on the countertop. The R&D Lab describes Julia as “an experiment to think about how usage data and sensor data could be tied into a feedback loop between a publisher and its users to improve future offerings.” Julia may not be ready for prime time — or kitchens may not be ready for it — by mid-2014, but it’s the kind of wow that could get people to buy, much as the new Mayday feature on the Kindle Fire HDX is doing. Sometimes you sell the steak, and sometimes you sell the sizzle. What will be the Times’ sizzle here and in the other products? Need to Know: Cliff Levy, a much decorated Times editor, is at work on this smartphone-first (tablet-second, web-third) product. It’s intended as a first briefing on the world: Put down that Facebook and smell the globe. Thompson talks about it setting a news agenda, with an “American voice” and a witty, engaging tone that Levy has surfaced in the Times’ NYC Metro coverage. One big key for this product: aggregation. Ah, aggregation. It sounds so easy, but legacy news companies — and you can’t get more legacy than The New York Times — have had such a hard time of it. BuzzFeed has been all the buzz among European newspaper companies, for instance. “What do you think of BuzzFeed?” is usually one of the first five questions I’m asked by those publishers. They’re fascinated by it. Then I ask: Are you doing any aggregation? “No” is the usual answer. Maybe the Times can crack the code here. After all, it has some of the best editors in the world, and aggregation is in a sense just great editing — with all the web as your raw copy. Opinion: Andy Rosenthal, the Times’ editorial page editor since 2007, heads up this one. We know less about this one, other than it will probably have a tough road to get people paying. Consider it a counterpoint to the Guardian’s Comment is Free. There is so much free opinion on the web, some of it actually good, that this product may have the toughest go of it. How will the Times’ voices rise to must-pay levels? Mark Thompson emphasizes the common threads among these products: “They are all an expression of classic journalism. There’s no dumbing down. Each has its own voice.” And: “Each will express the mother brand.” TWEET That combination of characteristics is a tall order. My bet is that the Times will be fortunate if one of the three new products generates substantial profits. Two would be a big win, and three would tell us that the Times has arrived at a new level of data-mastering strategery. Perhaps as interesting as the three new products will be the as-yet unnamed (and unscheduled) “premium” tier for subscribers. TWEET The Times is figuring out what fits in that tier. Events (TimesTalks and its separate growing conference roster) will be part of it. Its ebook singles business, partnered with Byliner, will likely be part of it. Then there’s the possibility of commercial discount and loyalty programs, plus the other kinds of perks the Chicago Tribune is testing out with Trib Nation “membership.” The idea: Give brand-loyal subscribers more and charge them more. In part, they pay more to get more; in part, they pay because they like the idea of being “premium” or VIP. The Financial Times, adding its well followed Lex column, e-paper access, and letter from the editor to its premium offer, has gotten a whopping 33 percent of new digital subscribers to take “premium.” They pay $2.49 a week more for the privilege. That’s a lot more for about zero in extra cost. Premium or VIP subs are one innovation any self-respecting quality publisher should be thinking about for 2014. What you won’t see as part of “premium” is the word “membership.” The Times has looked at a membership program, and backed away: The relationship just doesn’t feel right to the paper. It may well may be right about that. The Times isn’t our kissing cousin; it’s more like our brainy, sometimes-know-it-all uncle, respected but not exactly cuddly. Membership implies some closeness, and the Times likes — for good reasons and other reasons — to maintain its distance. We may prefer to keep our distance — getting the news, but sometimes disagreeing with its news judgment and editorials — and the Times is more comfortable that way too. As the Times moves toward its ambitious 2Q goals, it does so on a base of quite a bit of learning, an education that’s useful to everyone in the publishing industry now peddling digital content: Take down the fences. “Everyone wants unlimited content,” says Smurl, underlining one of the lessons of Paywalls 1.0. The Times learned that lesson painfully with Times Select, which limited access in confusing ways — but it learned it well. All-access means use on all your digital toys, and all the content. Perhaps that thinking is most useful to the many European publishers who continue to offer freemium products, offering access to some stories for free and charging for others. “Free” has a new partner. “People are settling into a consumer mindset,” Smurl adds. That mean seem like nothing novel now, but consider how much our thinking has changed in four years. It’s not just all-access newspaper subscriptions that affirm the point: Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, Pandora, and more prove out the point across news and entertainment media. People say they will pay — and do. Early on, 40 to 50 percent of Times readers told the company they’d pay a dollar a month or more for good content. Now, Smurl estimates that number would be 60 percent or more. That’s a big confidence booster as the new products are readied. Expect $9.99 or less as a monthly price for the new products. Part of the appeal of the new product is passion or utility, but part of it is also price — less than the cheapest digital subscription of $15 per four weeks, which is what a majority of the Times digital subs take. The Times has digitally linked close to 90 percent of its print subscribers. That’s a hugely important number. It means the Times can have a largely singular view of its whole audience and what it reads and spends. The number stood at about 40 percent before the pay system went into place, and for most newspaper companies, it’s been a struggle to reach 50 percent or more. The lesson: Do everything you can do to build the database; it’s a starting point for the next business models. The rest of the globe may well be the Times’ long-term big opportunity. Ten percent of its digital subs come from outside the U.S., where 95 percent of the world’s population lives. Thirty-five percent of its unique visitors are driven from the wider world, though a smaller share of the pageviews. The Times has abandoned its Portuguese-language planned product in Brazil and its China site is in play with the Chinese government. It is the English-language offering that Mark Thompson says will drive the Times’ business forward. Youth, or maybe slightly lower middle age, will be served, digitally. The average age of the Times print reader: 52. The average of age of the digital reader: 47. TWEET

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Diffing The New York Times on thermal paper Posted: 20 Nov 2013 12:31 PM PST Noah Feehan, a “Maker” at The New York Times R&D Lab, wanted to create a physical artifact that marked all the changes in Times headlines, in real time. So he built Diff, a small device that monitors the internal events stream of The New York Times and prints out a summary each time an active headline is changed. As it runs, it generates a long stream of changes printed on thermal paper: text that was removed from a headline is rendered as inverted, while additions to a headline are underlined… Of course, we were aware of and inspired by the excellent NewsDiffs project, which provides a more complete and persistent summary of changes to entire articles across several different websites. Our objective in making Diff was as much rooted in the notion of "fixing" an evanescent resource in a place and time (as NewsDiffs does) as it was a reaction to the emerging shape of "internet things" whose purpose is to transpose or transform the properties of network space onto physical space, and vice versa. Diff found that headlines get changed roughly every five to seven minutes, unless big news was breaking. Okay, here’s a Nieman Lab hook: We've only just begun exploring the full potential of the data source for this project, which is exciting in its own right: it's basically a near-real-time, highly-detailed stream of every event that our publishing framework sees, from the first words typed into our CMS, to an article's publishing in its own section, to its promotion to the front page. I unplugged Diff after a week or so of printing, and have saved the 300-odd feet of generated text for some future application. Expect to see more stream-processing tools, internet-things and interaction experiments here soon! Feehan’s built a lot of nifty things in his young career, but for me it’ll be hard for him to top Steak Filter, in which he made a video of a steak cooking by sending the video signal through the steak as it cooked. (More cooked = less moisture = degraded signal. Now that’s exploring meatspace.) (This is what eventually happens to the signal.)

“Five Ways the Advertising Industry Is About to Transform” Posted: 20 Nov 2013 10:55 AM PST That’s according to Bob Lord, global CEO of AOL Networks, writing for HBR. All five make sense, but let me highlight two of particular interest to publishers: 1. Automation will take hold. As automated, or programmatic, advertising technologies replace unwieldy manual media planning and buying processes that eat up too much time and overlook critical consumer data, more (human) resources can be directed toward the creative side of the house, and toward engaging and effective advertising that drives commerce, for example, native advertising, sponsorships, take-overs and other strategic initiatives. Automation is a win for web publishers as well. Programmatic advertising does not mean publishers need to put their inventory up to the highest bidder. It simply means they can make it accessible via a technology platform that makes it easier for buyers to access it while still setting premium pricing. Programmatic advertising is about automation, not auctions. Bottom line: sophisticated technologies will serve to complement and enhance the creative talents of humans by freeing up their time that has — to a great degree — been occupied by rote tasks such as completing insertion orders for ad buys. Projections put about 22% of all digital media being automated next year — up from just 4% in 2010. 4. Premium advertising will get more premium. 2014 will be the year when immersive advertising experiences that tie directly to a transaction will begin to flourish on the Web. As automation kicks in and time is given back to agencies and marketers to be more creative, we will see an industry call for more premium opportunities that goes beyond banners and gets much more sophisticated and customizable. Whether it's a new live advertising execution (think Oreos response during the 2013 Super Bowl blackout) or a commerce campaign that drives sales through location based content, digital advertising will be remarkable, unique and experience-based.

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Nieman Journalism Lab

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• The new Chicago magazine is attracting design clients
• The Atlantic Wire gets a new (shorter) name and a new look
• OJR.org: An opportunity to watch a spamblog be built in real time

The new Chicago magazine is attracting design clients Posted: 19 Nov 2013 11:33 AM PST Chicago magazine redesigned its website last month, making all the usual changes, from a new typeface to bigger photos, a cleaner layout, and a responsive mobile page. In a post on the Society for News Design’s blog, Luke Seeman, who headed up the new design, discusses why they changed the look of the site, and the need to have a dialogue with readers about the process. In the interview with Rachel Schallom, a designer with the South Florida Sun Sentinel, Seeman says one surprising result of the new look has been the possibility of doing outside design work. One other bonus is that advertisers have noticed, too. An ad rep this week told me that a potential client would like us to build them a microsite — and pay us accordingly — because they think our new site is nicer than their own. That's the kind of anecdote that makes me — and my bosses — very happy…. If you look at any media page, the components can be filed into two broad categories: 1. Things the reader wants — headline, story, photos; 2. Things we want the reader to want — ads, subscription offers, navigation, links to "related" stories, social-media entreaties. Now, that second category is very noble, and the things therein pay a great number of bills. But 99% of the time it's not what a reader is on a page to do. They're on a page because they clicked on Headline X. They clicked on Headline X because — and only because — they want to read about Headline X. My thinking is, Let's every now and then get out the way and let the reader be. Let's strip away as much of the crap from the page as we can and leave her alone with the story. Radical, huh?

The Atlantic Wire gets a new (shorter) name and a new look Posted: 19 Nov 2013 11:12 AM PST Goodbye The Atlantic Wire; hello, The Wire. In relaunching its breaking news focused aggregator, Atlantic Media decided to take its name off the door in favor of creating an independent, more compact brand. It’s not a case of abandonment, but an attempt to keep in step with the way the news site has tried to operate for the last four years: short and to the point. It’s a new name, a new URL (thewire.com), and a more mobile-friendly look that adapts to almost any screen size. As The Atlantic Wire, the site made its name as a breaking news feed that pointed readers to the day’s top stories and best writing — aggregation with a higher value-add than your typical headline-and-blockquote engine. As The Wire, The Atlantic wants to build a news service that can thrive in the era of social media. As The Wire editor Gabriel Snyder, sees it, the overall goal isn’t changing that much. “I want to make The Wire a place where you can catch up quickly on whats going on in the world,” Snyder said. Social channels have changed the way people discover and consume news, and also changed the process for newsgathering and delivery, Snyder said. “The Wire is founded on this idea that we live in an age where people are media omnivores,” he told me. While The Atlantic name is going away, it’s not difficult to see The Wire in the context of the broader Atlantic Media company. Over the past several years, Atlantic Media has branched further away from its magazine mothership, adding several independent sites to its family, including Quartz and Defense One. The Atlantic Wire was one of the company’s first experiments in spinning off an online brand from the 156-year-old magazine; now the company is employing lessons from expanding portfolio to distinguish The Wire as an entity of its own. As part of the relaunch, The Wire will have a dedicated staff for ad sales. According to the company, the site now averages 6 million monthly unique visitors, with 40 percent of the site’s traffic coming from mobile. Over email, M. Scott Havens, president of The Atlantic, said the site is ready to step out on its own. “It's less about removing The Atlantic from the name and more about establishing The Wire’s independent identity in both form and function,” Havens said. “Over the last four years, The Wire has grown and evolved and has now established itself as a go-to news platform for millions of readers.” The Wire’s new look is responsive to meet the needs of readers on different devices. The homepage is designed to help readers navigate the big need-to-know stories of the day. In place of the usual navigation bar at the top of the page with fixed topics or sections, The Wire features a changing collection of topics that reflect the day’s news. Snyder calls it “story-based navigation.” (It’s sticky, which not everyone likes.) The old Atlantic Wire. The homepage now also offers more slots to showcase top stories, and options to sort stories by what’s trending (using social sharing stats), what’s popular (clicks), or chronological order. Article pages get a refresh as well, with a wider story well, larger fonts, and a healthy dose of links to additional stories on the site. Snyder told me that homepage traffic for the site is growing, but they also wanted to offer more ways to push readers deeper into the site. (It’s also worth noting that the redesign hides comments by default, a larger trend we’ve seen across a lot of site. The last redesign of The Atlantic doesn’t hide comments, but it buries them underneath a giant stack of story promos.) The homepage layout, a grid photos and clever headlines, gives The Wire a look similar to social media friendly sites like Digg. (Or: “Digg, but more confusing?”) Snyder said it’s a design oriented for different types of audiences, from the savvy reader who reads multiple sources each day, to those looking for a one-stop read. “I kind of think of our audience as rings of concentric circles, going from the outer ring of someone who clicks a link and arrives at the site having no idea who we are and what it’s about, down to the inner core, the people who have made it a habit to come to the site every day or multiple times a day,” Snyder said. As a news site, The Wire is mostly a generalist, focusing on stories in politics, business, technology, and culture. The differentiator, Snyder says, is their approach, which prizes concise writing and smart aggregation. That strategy is what set The Wire apart from its parent magazine in the beginning, Havens said. “The Atlantic, in both the magazine and online, primarily provides original analysis and insight, whereas The Wire is a real-time filter of news and information, helping readers absorb the day’s top stories, voices, and opinions — and understand the context, quickly,” he said. You’re not going to find latest-news updates on The Atlantic on a given day. Similarly, you’re not going to find the defined brands of a James Fallows, Ta-Nehisi Coates, or Alexis Madrigal. But over the years the connection between the two sites generated some confusion, both over the relationship between them and the editorial structure. The overlap between the audiences of the two sites is fairly small, Snyder told me. What the two properties share, he said, is the same philosophy on writing, reporting, and editorial integrity. But the audiences are distinct, he said. “Confusion is what were trying to address. It’s not clear from our current branding that The Wire is produced by a separate editorial team,” he said. If there’s one thing Atlantic Media is looking for right now it’s clean and clear lines between its properties. The company wants each title to be ambitious, resourceful, and free to develop its own audience and money-making possibilities. Havens said the best way to do that is to make the brands independent and “free the team from too much bureaucracy, and encourage the group to foster its own culture of innovation.” The media environment hasn’t become any less crowded in the four years since The (Atlantic) Wire was first born. News consumers wield even more power over the way their news is delivered and how they read it. Snyder said the redesigned Wire is meant to not just adapt to readers’ device preferences, but also their news consumption habits. “Everyone has their niche interest, but I think there’s still a hunger for a wider understanding of what’s going on in other people’s niche interests,” Snyder said.

OJR.org: An opportunity to watch a spamblog be built in real time Posted: 19 Nov 2013 09:16 AM PST In case you didn’t see my story posted late in the day yesterday, the Online Journalism Review — a 15-year-old chronicler of the evolution of digital journalism — has been turned into a spamblog. All the details are at the original article, but the basics are these: USC Annenberg, which ran OJR, forgot to renew their domain name. It was grabbed by someone named Marcus Lim, CEO of an Australian startup called Oneflare, who proceeded to turn it into a fake version of the Online Journalism Review — pretending to still be part of USC, stealing dozens or hundreds of copyrighted OJR articles, and generally being a jerk. Why? All to promote its products through better search engine optimization. In the hours since my story went up, there’ve been a few updates. — I received a statement from USC Annenberg about the snafu: USC Annenberg is taking steps to regain control of Online Journalism Review, after the domain of OJR.org was allowed to lapse earlier this month. We're proud of the investment we've made into the news outlet over the years — and of all the work so many talented writers and editors have put into it — and hope to continue ownership of it in the future. — Oneflare, probably rightfully scared of the litigation it would otherwise be asking for, removed the legally dubious material from OJR.org. They removed the OJR archive stories and the USC logos and changed the site name from "Online Journalism Review" to "Online Journal Review," whatever that means. So the site is now solely a spamblog, rather than a spamblog cloaked in an old journalism website. Progress, maybe? — We have some evidence for what price OJR.org went for. The domain was put up for auction at NameJet (“The Premier Aftermarket Domain Name Service”) after it was allowed to lapse. This roundup of domain sales from November 6 reveals the price it went for: $19,100. (Wow.) OJR.org had also been listed in October on a list of high-value expired domains — high value because it had been registered back in 1997, which gives it better Google juice. — Perhaps because it’s hard to step away from a $19,100 purchase, OJR.org continues to evolve as a spamblog. It’s actually a rare opportunity to watch a spamblog be built in real time — normally you only find them after they’ve been doing their dark magic for a while. Along with the original article promoting Oneflare, Lim (or whoever’s running the backend) has added five new articles to give the illusion of a real site. (Something had to take the place of all those old OJR stories, I imagine.) The stories don’t have spammy links yet, but they are artificially backdated (as far back as 2011) to give the illusion of a long-existing website. (They also look like algorithmically altered versions of existing stories — weird synonyms subbed in where they should be, for instance — but I couldn’t find any original versions with a few quick searches.) — There’s one other side benefit to building a spamblog on an old news brand like OJR: OJR content is whitelisted into Google News. So, for instance, one of the new spam articles is about the Garmin Forerunner 610. Search for “garmin” on Google News and look what the third result is: That means the main work to be done now is Google’s. It needs to remove OJR from Google News, and it needs to eliminate the PageRank advantage that the old site built up for the new one. From there, it’s USC’s move on what to do with those remarkable disappeared archives.

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Newspaper Death Watch

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Journalism Rock Stars Seek Greener New-Media Pastures Posted: 19 Nov 2013 10:18 AM PST “There is no longer a defined final destination for talented journalists,” writes Emily Bell in The Guardian. “The New York Times is surprised to find itself a stepping stone.” Bell is writing about the sudden and surprise defections of a number of top Times journalists to other media outlets, often for substantial amounts of money. The Times lost three prominent editorial staffers in one day last week: Brian Stelter (right) quit to go to CNN, Sunday editor Hugo Lindgren is off to places unknown and chief political correspondent Matt Bai will join Yahoo News. Last month, gadget specialist David Pogue left to go to an unnamed Yahoo startup. In an unrelated move, Jay Rosen has also joined an unnamed startup founded by Pierre Omidyar of eBay fame. All of a sudden media is cool again, or at least some media. While traditional publishers continue to struggle with declining revenue, money is flowing into new media companies. Buzzfeed has raised $46 million. AOL is investing in a big overhaul and expansion of Engadget. Snapchat just turned down a $3 billion offer from Facebook, indicating how frothy the social networking market has become. B2B community Spiceworks has raised more than $50 million for its novel media model that uses software and a community as delivery vehicles. Even the Washington Post is expected to get an infusion of cash from its new owner, Jeff Bezos. This is translating into career opportunities for some accomplished journalists whose brands now arguably transcend the publications they work for. Bell suggests that the star-making apparatus of the media world is shifting in their favor. Not long ago a job at The New York Times was considered the ultimate career plum for news journalists, but belt-tightening has hit the Old Gray Lady just as it has everywhere else (although not as hard). With all-digital operations suddenly flush with cash, the appeal of working for publishers whose survival strategy is to wall off content from non-paying visitors is diminishing. In many ways, traditional media companies dug themselves into this hole. In their rush to produce more content and add more advertising inventory, they turned some of their best reporters into rock stars. Thanks to blogs, video podcasts and branded talk shows, journalists now get unprecedented visibility. That makes them prime targets for new media firms who want to trade on their personal brands. Turnover may also be an unplanned consequence of paywalls, which will soon be in place at 41% of US newspapers. The problem with paywalls is that they shut readers out, and readership is what journalists live for. The Times‘ famous Times Select paywall was abandoned six years ago in large part because the paper’s signature columnists complained that their readership had evaporated. The models have improved since then, but no paid-access plan comes without some loss of audience. So while newspapers  erect barriers to readership, new media entities like Buzzfeed figure out novel ways to get people to share their sponsored content. Is it any wonder that ambitious journalists with growing personal brands are seeking opportunities to spread their work to wider audiences instead of hiding it behind credit card forms? Even reporters who don’t have million-eyeball reach may have new ways to monetize their audiences. A startup called Beacon has launched a service that enables journalists to derive revenue from their most loyal fans and share a little bit of the spoils with fellow contributors. Mathew Ingram sums up the model succinctly: Each of the site's journalists (there are currently about 50) has a page where their content lives, and a discussion forum. When someone subscribes to them for $5 a month, Beacon takes a cut — the amount is in flux, but writers keep around 60 percent on average — and then the reader gets access to all of the site's other writers. Some of the proceeds from each subscription also go into a pool that is shared by all of the journalists on the platform. It doesn’t sound like anyone will get rich from this business, but at least there is a direct correlation between work and reward. And we suppose Beacon could be a launchpad for a few new superstar journalists who build their audiences there. Like the crowd funding site Kickstarter, Beacon builds and manages the community. It’s then up to the participants to give the audience something of value. May the best journos win.   Related articles Beyond the paywall: Beacon wants to make it easier for journalists to become like Andrew Sullivan Journalists are on the move in America – and creating a new vitality Beacon, an Online News Startup, Wants to Put a Face on Paywalls Is the New York Times Losing Its Luster? A Slew of High Profile Departures Begs the Question Who’s Left at the New York Times?

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