NiemanLab reporting:
The New York Times Company and German publisher Axel Springer are collectively investing €3 million ($3.7 million) in Blendle, a Dutch news startup where readers pay by the article, Blendle announced Sunday.
Blendle
said it will use the Series A funding to expand to additional European
countries beyond the Netherlands over the next two years. In an email,
Blendle cofounder Alexander Klöpping
wouldn’t elaborate on the company’s expansion plans, saying it “all
depends on in which countries publishers are most excited.”
Klöpping declined to say how much each company was investing, only
that the total was €3 million. Axel Springer, which is making the
investment through its venture arm Axel Springer Digital Ventures, also
wouldn’t say how much it’s investing. The Times didn’t respond to a
request for comment.
Blendle launched publicly
in May, and the site has more than 130,000 registered users. Publishers
set the prices for how much each of their articles cost, and keep 70
percent of the revenue generated from those stories. Blendle takes the
other 30 percent. http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/10/the-new-york-times-co-and-axel-springer-are-investing-e3-million-in-dutch-startup-blendle/
Friday, October 24, 2014
Poynter reporting:
Long-time critics of imprecise unique visitor and page view metrics like me have had reason to cheer in recent months.
Both the Financial Times and Economist have started to offer advertisers the alternative of rates based on time spent rather than raw traffic numbers.
Chartbeat corrected a major flaw in existing measures of time spent, then got its system “accredited” by the influential Media Ratings Council. And Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile has been an effective evangelist in interviews and speeches for a more sophisticated way of looking at the attention of digital audiences.
That’s real progress. But plowing through dozens of articles and
interviewing a few key sources, I have concluded that it is way early to
declare victory and a new day dawning in digital measurement.
Oddly, although we like to think of the digital world as fast-moving
and progressive, there is an established status quo for counting digital
audiences backed by powerful vested interests who remain mostly happy
with the unholy triad of uniques, page views and clickthroughs.
Start with the digital big guys — Facebook, Google, Yahoo, AOL...
Pew reporting:
When it comes to getting news about politics and government, liberals
and conservatives inhabit different worlds. There is little overlap in
the news sources they turn to and trust. And whether discussing politics
online or with friends, they are more likely than others to interact
with like-minded individuals, according to a new Pew Research Center
study.
The project – part of a year-long effort to shed light on political polarization in America
– looks at the ways people get information about government and
politics in three different settings: the news media, social media and
the way people talk about politics with friends and family. In all three
areas, the study finds that those with the most consistent ideological
views on the left and right have information streams that are distinct
from those of individuals with more mixed political views – and very
distinct from each other....
Q: What are the top 3 areas in which newspaper publishers should innovate in the digital space?
...
Well,
I feel the word innovation is misleading in this context. It implies
that newspapers can just focus on a specific thing (like mobile), and
then everything will be fine. We all know it won't.
Real
innovation doesn't work that way. Real innovation is about solving a
problem for a specific group of people in a specific situation.
Nike,
for instance, innovates by inventing shoes, clothes and apps that allow
athletes to run faster, with less injuries, in greater comfort, all of
which can be measured and analyzed to further improve and tweak their
performance.
This is where the challenge is for most newspapers. The traditional
model of a random package of daily news didn't have a target audience.
It was just targeted anyone, in any situation.
So, step one is to
identify your target for innovation. And once you know that, what to
innovate suddenly becomes clear as day because you will know what the
problem is....
This is the challenged that newspapers face. To innovate you first need to know what the question is.
Innovation
is not about mobile, tablets, apps, aggregation, responsive designs,
listicles and many other things. It's about understanding what the
question is, and then innovate to find an answer to that problem.
The
newspaper industry will find that there are a thousand different
questions with an equal amount of answers. It all depends on what you
decide to focus on. https://www.baekdal.com/opinion/news-and-innovation-but-what-is-the-question/?utm_source=Baekdal+List&utm_campaign=b0369ce678-EMAIL-UPDATE&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a820ca719e-b0369ce678-358411673
goodereader reporting:
Many readers cite the price of eBooks as one of the primarily aspects of why they choose to read digitally. A new report by Books and e-Books UK 2014 is
trying to quantify the parallel between cheaper books and reading more.
Their data suggests 26% of consumers who have bought an eBook in the
last year are reading more than they used to, because eBooks cost less
than paperbacks, a figure that rises to 38% of 16 to 24-year-olds.
21% of Brits
have bought a fiction eBook in the past year, the boom does seem to be
plateauing as this marks a slight 1% point growth on 2013. However, this
is a rise from the 15% of Brits claiming they had bought a digital
fiction title in 2012.
Whilst the sales of e-books are still showing healthy growth, there
are signs that this will steady in 2014. Sales of eBooks are estimated
to reach £340 million in 2014 up from £300 million in 2013, marking a
12% rise. However this rise is in stark contrast to the growth seen in
previous years. Sales in 2013 for example were 38% up on 2012, which
stood at £216 million. In contrast, sales of print books are estimated
to stay at £1.4 billion in 2014, the same value as 2013 which would mark
just a 0.4% year on year fall in revenue.
Samuel Gee, Senior Technology and Media Analyst at Mintel said
“Today, 31% of Brits own an e-reader, up from 21% in 2012, but down from
35% in April 2014. Indeed, it seems that the growth of the e-reader has
not caused UK book-lovers to clear their shelves. Over a third (36%) of
UK book buyers buy both e-books and print books and 42% of these say
that they will always buy the cheapest version of the book no matter
which format it is in. Further showing that those who have picked up
their e-readers aren’t leaving printed books altogether, seven in 10
(70%) e-reader owners have bought a paperback in the past year. In
contrast, just 30% of print book buyers have also purchased digitally.
Overall, a third (32%) of Brits have not bought a book in the past year... http://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/do-readers-choose-ebooks-because-they-are-cheaper
The Washington Post will begin offering a weekly print edition
featuring the best national and international news from The Post. The
24-page, color tabloid publication will include local advertising and
Washington Post content printed and distributed by partner newspapers
through a separate subscription as an added benefit to subscribers.
The
weekly publication will complement partners’ daily newspapers with a
selection of The Washington Post’s best journalism, including coverage
of politics, policy, national and world events, lifestyle, and the arts
along with a wide range of commentary.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/wp/2014/10/17/the-washington-post-launches-a-national-weekly-edition/
Advertising Age reporting:
Vintage ads that appeared in The New York Times are getting their own
digital archive that will live on the Times' website. Called Madison in
reference to Madison Avenue, the archive initially includes every print ad from every edition of the Times in the 1960s.
"It invites people to view an important part of our cultural
history," said Alexis Lloyd, creative director at The New York Times
Research and Development Lab, which created Madison.
But the Times is inviting readers to do more than just view the ads.
It's also asking readers to help shape the archive by sifting through
the ads, identifying them and even transcribing their text.
Madison is a close cousin of TimesMachine,
the archive of the paper's editorial content. Visitors to TimesMachine
can not only scroll through digital versions of old print pages, but
also zoom in on articles, photos and captions.
The automated technology underpinning Madison, however, can't
conclusively determine which elements on an archived print page were ads
or what exactly they advertised, according to Ms. Lloyd. So the archive
currently includes all the elements from the paper that Ms. Lloyd and
her team think might be ads. When readers visit Madison, they scroll
through a random selection of pages from '60s-era Times editions. What
the R&D Lab believes are advertisements are highlighted throughout
these pages, and readers are asked to do one of the following as they
scroll:
Find. This involves simply indicating whether a highlighted area is an ad, multiple ads or not advertising at all.
Tag. Readers enter the company that made the ad and its industry.
Transcribe. Dedicated readers transcribe the text of the ads.
The old email newsletter continues its remarkable return to prominence. The latest move: Vox
wants to make explaining the news a little more manageable by telling
you everything you need to know in the comfort of your inbox.
Tomorrow, the site will launch Vox Sentences, its first daily email newsletter, with an aim at delivering both information and utility to readers. As email has become increasingly popular with publishers — not to mention built individual franchises for writers — the race is on to find ways to differentiate what you deliver.
Vox is focusing on delivering only a handful of top stories with a
collection of the best links from around the web. So on any given day,
Vox Sentences will serve up several main topics — say, Ebola, ISIS, and California’s “Yes Means Yes”
law — with context provided by some of the day’s best writing. And, as
the name implies, it’ll be direct — just a bunch of sentences. One thing
that separates Vox’s newsletter from competitors is that it arrives at
the end of the day, not the beginning. Instead of an 8 a.m. briefing,
Vox is offering an 8 p.m. roundup.
...Vox Sentences would seem to share some DNA with BuzzFeed’s upcoming news app,
both want to reach an audience of general news consumers who are
looking for a smarter daily bundle of stories. Yes, a package — not
unlike, say, the evening newspaper, timed for when people are at home
and fiddling around on their phones or tablets. Klein says many of the
stories you’ll find in the newsletter won’t be from Vox: “I don’t care
if it drives traffic back to the site. I care if the people who read it
feel well served by it,” Klein said.
Mediashift reporting:
Last month, Paul Walborsky stepped down after seven years as chief
executive of Gigaom. During that time, the tech site grew enormously in
traffic and revenue as it expanded its business beyond just advertising.
Currently, about 60 percent of Gigaom’s revenues (estimated to be
around $15 million annually) come from research and 25 percent from
events. Advertising accounts for only about 15 percent of total
revenues. Walborsky, who is 48, spoke with PBS MediaShift about the
struggles of running an editorial-based business when competition is
fierce and ad rates continue to slump.
Gabriel Kahn: In media, size matters. How does an operation
like Gigaom, which averages about 6.5 million unique visitors a month,
make a go of it?
Paul Walborsky: Media either has to be huge, at the BuzzFeed level, or small and intimate.
When we started, we looked at each other and said, “We’re never going to
get to a 100 million uniques.” The type of content we write is more
analytical. We can squeeze about 20 million page views a month out of
our audience. If we tried to build an editorial business just based on
advertising we’d never be able to pay our staff. So chasing page views is a dead end? Paul Walborsky: Our whole concept was not to serve
you another page and make you click once more; it was to give you a good
user experience. So by definition we had to have a different business
model. I don’t think about creating page views. I think about creating
long-term relationships with readers. If you have a long-term
relationship, you do different things. You get them to come back. You
serve them well. And you then try to upsell them more products and
services...
...Paul Walborsky: Editorial is the focal point of our
business model. This is where we create credibility. That is what keeps
people coming back. Without our editorial content, without people
writing things everyday that make readers feel smarter, we would not
have a brand. We just choose not to monetize that content directly. We
monetize it in different ways... By this logic, when Gigaom uses space on a page to sell an
ad, it almost represents a failure because the company itself should be
able to find a better use for that same space.
Paul Walborsky: The situation in media is laughable.
When we sell ad units, we are basically selling our reader relationship
to someone who doesn’t care about it. The advertisers are selling a car
or a trip to Vegas. If we could create enough products, we could use
that space ourselves to sell that audience something that is actually
meaningful to them.
That’s what we did with our research. Then other companies began doing the same.
We saw Politico Pro come out, then Business Insider came out with research.... http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2014/10/how-gigaom-built-a-media-business-around-free-content/
NiemanLab reporting:
It was a Thursday in late August and the
Internet was whipping itself into a frenzy. The cable channel FXX was
about to kick off its Every Simpsons Ever marathon, showing all 522 Simpsons episodes back-to-back-to-back.
And in its daily meeting that morning, Time’s audience engagement
team was figuring out how to best take advantage of the moment and
convert interest in the Simpsons into visits to Time’s website. Time, together with sister site Money, published atleastfivedifferentpieces on the Simpsons marathon on that day alone.
...
Time’s editors meet every morning at 9:45 to discuss stories for the
upcoming day. After that meeting, Schweitzer, Ross, and Borchers gather
to discuss the 15 or so stories they plan on promoting heavily and how
they’ll use what Time calls its “external levers of distribution” —
which range from its daily email newsletter and cross-promotions on
other Time Inc. websites to working with the Time Inc. PR department
and, of course, social media — to ensure that their stories are widely
read and shared.
Of the three, Schweitzer is the longest tenured Time employee, having joined the company all
the way back in August 2013, and their roles are emblematic of Time’s
revamped digital strategy. Time had about 50 million unique visitors in
both August and September, more than doubling the roughly 20 million it
attracted the year before.
Their efforts go beyond social as well. The Ebola story
discussed that morning, covering how some people are surviving the
virus, was the top story in Time’s daily email the next morning. Called
The Brief after the central feature of Time’s homepage, the email lists
12 things readers need to know each day, and it has an average open rate
of around 40 percent.
NiemanLab reporting: California Sunday Magazine, which launched conceptually in January and physically earlier this month, was beloved before its first issue was even printed. The magazine, a project of Douglas McGray’s,
is available both in print and online, on tablet and mobile, and aims
to tell beautiful, reported stories about the American West, Latin
America, and Asia.
...California Sunday grew out of McGray’s other project, Pop-Up Magazine,
a popular performance journalism series that’s meant to feel like a
live magazine. What started as a fun project among friends quickly grew,
selling out theaters and drawing big-name performers. The experience
convinced McGray that there was a market in California for locally-grown
media that doesn’t feel East Coast-centric...
...But beyond elegant design and talented writers, what sets California
Sunday apart from the digital magazine crowd is its distribution model.
In its first weekend, the print magazine reached 400,000 Californians at
home as an insert in the Sunday paper. Just like an advertiser would,
the magazine paid the newspapers — the Los Angeles Times, The Sacramento
Bee, and the San Francisco Chronicle — to include the print edition
with Sunday’s delivery... http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/10/california-sunday-magazine-has-a-solution-for-how-to-find-readers-pay-newspapers-for-them/
Best News Website: The Guardian - Guardian News & Media, UK for their now famed coverage of the NSA files.
Best Digital Advertising Campaign: General
Election - Kleine Zeitung of Austria who had a restaurant serve
unwitting customers dishes without even asking what the wanted before
serving them a 'bill' inviting them to vote if they didn't want someone
else to make their choices for them. Click here for more about this campaign.
Best Use of Online Video: How to put
a human on Mars – by the BBC News team, and in particular journalist
Neil Bowdler, whose love of space led him to look a the challenges of
putting a human on Mars. “We got a team of great scientists together -
so good NASA gave them a call” reflects Neil. “And then there was the
whole team at the BBC doing the animations and building this beautiful
web site.” Click here to see this story.
Best Data Visualisation Project: Null
CTRL – Dagbladet. “We had a huge series of articles concerning online
security in Norway,” explained designer Auden Aas, “and we had a lot of
interesting data to showcase so we made an interactive video showcasing
the three most exposed areas of life; at home, at work and in the city.
For each one we populated them with hotspots for things like printers
and servers that were vulnerable so people could learn about it without
having to read technical documents.” Click here for more on this series.
In April 2013, Nieman Lab covered the story of an amazingly successful crowdfunding
campaign run by Dutch startup De Correspondent, prompting New York University
journalism professor Jay Rosen to tweet the link to the piece:
In
April 2013, Nieman Lab covered the story of an amazingly successful
crowdfunding campaign run by Dutch startup De Correspondent, prompting
New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen to tweet the link to
the piece - See more at:
http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/explanatory_news_startup_aims.php#sthash.KvxpkXMC.dpuf
In April 2013, Nieman Lab covered the story of an amazingly successful crowdfunding
campaign run by Dutch startup De Correspondent, prompting New York University
journalism professor Jay Rosen to tweet the link to the piece:
In
April 2013, Nieman Lab covered the story of an amazingly successful
crowdfunding campaign run by Dutch startup De Correspondent, prompting
New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen to tweet the link to
the piece - See more at:
http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/explanatory_news_startup_aims.php#sthash.KvxpkXMC.dpuf
And just like that, De Correspondent—which is based in Amsterdam, and publishes in
Dutch—was on the American (and international) media map. After breaking records by
reaching over 18,000 members and $1.7 million through crowdfunding, the site, which is
dedicated to explanatory journalism rather than breaking news, launched the following
September. During its first year in existence, several English-language media tackled the
language barrier in return for insight into a crowdfunding success greater than the much
discussed case of Matter.
On Tuesday, exactly one year after the launch of De Correspondent , co-founder Ernst-
Jan Pfauth posted his “Lessons from year one of De Correspondent” on Medium and
declared the startup a success. 17,000 new subscribers have signed up since the launch,
while more than half the total crowdfunding group of 18,933 people have renewed their
€60 ($76)/ year subscription. Pfauth wrote that he believes more will follow in the
coming weeks as subscriptions run out.
In his Medium piece and in an interview with CJR, Pfauth attributed the site’s rapid
success in part to its focus on engaging its members and building community around its
work.
http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/explanatory_news_startup_aims.php
On Tuesday, exactly one year after the launch of De Correspondent , co-founder Ernst-Jan Pfauth posted
his “Lessons from year one of De Correspondent” on Medium and declared
the startup a success. 17,000 new subscribers have signed up since the
launch, while more than half the total crowdfunding group of 18,933
people have renewed their €60 ($76)/ year subscription. Pfauth wrote
that he believes more will follow in the coming weeks as subscriptions
run out.
In his Medium piece and in an interview with CJR, Pfauth attributed
the site’s rapid success in part to its focus on engaging its members
and building community around its work.
- See more at: http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/explanatory_news_startup_aims.php#sthash.KvxpkXMC.dpuf
On Tuesday, exactly one year after the launch of De Correspondent , co-founder Ernst-Jan Pfauth posted
his “Lessons from year one of De Correspondent” on Medium and declared
the startup a success. 17,000 new subscribers have signed up since the
launch, while more than half the total crowdfunding group of 18,933
people have renewed their €60 ($76)/ year subscription. Pfauth wrote
that he believes more will follow in the coming weeks as subscriptions
run out.
In his Medium piece and in an interview with CJR, Pfauth attributed
the site’s rapid success in part to its focus on engaging its members
and building community around its work.
- See more at: http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/explanatory_news_startup_aims.php#sthash.KvxpkXMC.dpuf
In
April 2013, Nieman Lab covered the story of an amazingly successful
crowdfunding campaign run by Dutch startup De Correspondent, prompting
New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen to tweet the link to
the piece - See more at:
http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/explanatory_news_startup_aims.php#sthash.KvxpkXMC.dpuf
Poynter reporting:
Nikki Usher had a great Columbia Journalism Review article “Startup site manifestos are press criticism”
where she notes that startup news orgs like PandoDaily, Vox,
FiveThirtyEight and more have gotten into the habit of writing
manifestos (much like the New York Times did when it launched in 1851).
These manifestos are essentially their critique of the press in action.
The implication is that traditional journalism simply
doesn’t offer readers this kind of news in the existing environment—that
it’s not doing enough to give us what we need to know, and these sites
are going to offer an alternative way to give us the public information
that is the perceived obligation of journalism.
gigaom reporting:
....
What the web is doing to journalism, Debrouwere argues, is taking the
things it used to consider its bread and butter and making them
fungible in ways they never were before. That hasn’t just changed the
business model for news or media companies, it has changed the
expectations of their audience in some fundamental ways, ways that go
beyond whether someone reads a news story on the web or in print.
I’m not talking about
digital first or about blogging or about data journalism or the mobile
web or the curation craze. Yes, journalism has evolved and is better for
it. I’m talking beyond that. I’m not even talking about the fact that
everyone is a potential publisher now… beyond even that. I think
journalism is being replaced.
The examples are legion: as Debrouwere notes,
many people used to find new music by reading reviews or coverage in a
newspaper or magazine, and did the same thing for movies and TV shows —
but now they get access to all the music and movies and TV shows they
could want, and all the commentary surrounding them, via services like
Spotify or Netflix, or websites like IMDB and Amazon. So what purpose does the local newspaper or newsmagazine serve?
...
This is an important point: if you’re a media company, your competition
isn’t the product or service that is better than you — and it’s
certainly not the one that you think is doing journalism — it’s the one
that is good enough for your readers or users. In other words, if it
provides a service or information that is useful or valuable to them,
that is all that matters, not whether it fits the objective definition
of something called “journalism.” https://gigaom.com/2014/10/10/journalism-biggest-competitors-are-things-that-dont-even-look-like-journalism/
Forrester reporting: Shopping in the U.K. isn’t what it
used to be. In fact, it’s not even what it was just a year ago. Today,
retailers are finding that more and more consumers are shopping from
their mobile devices rather than their desktops and laptops — a shift
that presents new opportunities for interaction and engagement.
Data from Nielsen shows that the number of shoppers accessing major
retail sites from their Android devices grew by an average of 48% in the
12 months ending June 2014. During that same period, the number of
users visiting the same retail sites from their desktops and laptops
decreased by an average of almost 20%. Of the retailers evaluated,
Groupon experienced the biggest drop in desktop and laptop usage, across
its audience base across these more traditional methods fell by
one-third in the last year.
Today, Groupon’s mobile user base is bigger than its desktop/laptop user
base. While retailer John Lewis also saw a 20% drop in its
desktop/laptop user base, it more than doubled its mobile user base,
which grew 114% year-over-year. Year on Year comparison of desktop & laptop user base vs. Android (June 2014 vs. June 2013) http://www.nielseninsights.eu/articles/mobile-migration-online-shopping-goes-mobile-in-the-u-k
Aftonbladet ska göra ett morgonsänt nyhetsprogram online varje vardag mellan 06 och 09.
Aftonbladet ska göra ett morgonsänt nyhetsprogram online varje vardag mellan 06 och 09.
Dagens Media har tidigare skrivit om Aftonbladets tv-satsning.
Under ledning av Karin Magnusson, Maria Bjaring och Claes Åkesson, ska
Aftonbladet nu direktsända morgon-tv.
Programmet kommer att vara
en mix av de senaste nyheterna, sport, nöje och feature. Delar av
materialet kommer också att finnas tillgängligt på Aftonbladet TV hela
dagen.
Producent för det nya morgonprogrammet är Lotta Folcker,
programchef för Aftonbladet TV, som tidigare varit chef för Nyhetsmorgon
på TV4. http://www.dagensmedia.se/nyheter/dig/article3853982.ece
theguardian reporting:
Telegraph Media Group is this week implementing a radical restructure
of its editorial operation to focus on using digital content as the
backbone of each printed edition of the Daily Telegraph.
In a series of “town hall” meetings with staff Jason Seiken,
Telegraph Media Group editor-in-chief, last week unveiled an
acceleration of his vision to transform the organisation’s print-focused
mindset into a digitally led approach.
Seiken and top TMG executives have “cherry picked” ideas from
newspapers in North America and Europe, most notably Germany’s Die Welt,
to introduce new editorial practices and a new production system.
Several sources said the new production system will have the biggest
impact, with one describing it as a “templatised” system, so that a
relatively small team can produce the newspaper by dropping web content
into pre-designed pages. http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/oct/07/telegraph-overhaul-editorial
Mashable reporting:
When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post just
more than a year ago, expectations of a digital renaissance for the
paper became assumptions. What would one of the most visionary business
minds of the Internet age do with something as stodgy and inflexible as a
newspaper?
The answer, it turns out, is far less exciting than some had hoped.
There have been no grand redesigns or big-name hires — one of its
stars, Ezra Klein, left the paper to start Vox.com. There have been no
plans to immediately end the print edition. Instead, during a recent
visit to WPNYC in a nondescript office on the west side of Manhattan,
the Post gave a look at a relatively unsexy piece of internal software with the distinctly prosaic name PageBuilder.
PageBuilder does what its name implies, allowing journalists to build
pages to feature content. Like Storify on steroids, it is built to pull
in a wide variety of content and craft it into whatever format is
desired — a content management system for the open-source era.
...
Digitally, the Post is competitive. Its August monthly
unique visitors are up more than 50% compared to the same time last year
to just under 40 million, according to comScore. That beats out rivals
like The Los Angeles Times (27.3 million) and the paywalled Wall Street Journal (22.9 million), while gaining on The New York Times (49.9 million).
The growth is encouraging, but the Post is still suffering from the same fate as every other newspaper. Prakash claimed that the company brought in record digital revenue
last year, but that has not been able to keep up with print declines.
The paper's most recent public earnings report since Bezos bought it, in
August 2013, showed an overall dip in revenue and continued losses.
...Innovation has mostly come in the way of new blogs and a breaking news
team. Software developers are now embedded within the newsroom to
connect the tech and editorial sides. That system has yielded a custom storytelling tool, a new blog focused on photography and The Most, which organizes the top stories online by media outlet.
...Dan Gillmor, a professor at the Arizona State University School of
Journalism and Mass Communication, said that the newspaper model is not
fixable. Media companies that survive will need to change into something
almost entirely different.... http://mashable.com/2014/10/05/wapo/
Harvard Busniness Review reporting:
It’s not easy for big companies to innovate. As Steve Blank, Clay
Christensen, and many others have pointed out, once firms reach a
certain size, most of their resources (and investment dollars) are
rightly devoted to executing and defending their existing business
model. Moreover, the skills that are cherished and rewarded for
achieving current results differ from those that aid in discovery and
experimentation, both of which are needed to drive innovation. As a
result, fostering a true culture of innovation in big companies is often
an aspiration rather than a reality.
If this is the case in your company, then it might be worthwhile to
look at the experience of Thomson Reuters, a $12.5B global information
solutions company. The company’s strategy of fueling growth through
acquisitions served it well for many years – but this approach also
reduced the focus on innovation. While many managers were developing new
products and services for their own businesses, they were not
leveraging innovation across the enterprise, and some were relying too
much on acquisitions to drive both innovation and growth.
To reverse this, senior leadership took a number of steps. First they
agreed to shift funding from small, incremental acquisitions to
innovation. In early 2014, they established a “catalyst fund” – a pool
of money that internal innovation teams could use for doing rapid proof
of concept on new ideas. The fund was announced on the company’s
internal website and teams from anywhere in the businesses were invited
to submit their suggestions....
Medium reporting: A talk by Larenellen McCann, given at the Code For America Summit
(Forked by Josh Stearns, with permission. Words in BOLD are my addition or tweaks to her original transcript. A video of her original talk is at the bottom of this post.)
At
the risk of creating a massive existential crisis, I want to start my
talk by asking, “What is community?” Who gets to decide what a community
is? Who’s involved? What skills you need to get in the club?
And for that matter, what’s a “journalism community?” What definition of journalism are we using to describe the “news sector,” the “journalism sector” — all of us, here in this room?
We
need to be able to answer these questions concretely, even though it’s
so easy to refer to them in the abstract because “communities” are
groupings of individual people, and you can’t really serve people if you can’t define who it is that you’re trying to serve.
And if you can’t define who it is that you’re trying to serve, you also can’t identify who you’re not reaching.
This
is something we were thinking a lot about in my fair city, Washington,
DC, earlier this year when we had the opportunity to organize the “DC journalism community” (whatever that is) to participate in a massive cultural festival: a Funk Parade.
Ken Doctor reporting:
...
The core content and paywall strategy of the Times worked — that’s
Paywalls 1.0 — but building on it has been tougher than planned. Today’s
move is significant, but it’s one that should be understood carefully.
How much had the Times invested in the new strategy? While it’s
impossible to parse the differing kinds of resources the newsroom added
over the last three years or so, the amount of them is a number to
behold. In 2011, the Times counted 1,189 newsroom employees. At the end
of 2013, the number was 1,251, up 5.2 percent. Currently, it counts
1,330, up 11.5 percent from 2011. With 100 to be taken out, the 1,230
number would still be 3.4 percent higher than three years ago. It’s
worth highlighting: While the overall number of newspaper editorial
staffers has declined across America (down 20,000 jobs, about 30 percent
of the total, in seven years), the Times has been bolstering its staff.
....
Let’s look at four of the key questions to pop out of today’s move:
Is this a major business reversal?
No, the Times’ revenue is on a familiar path. If you look at the
financials of the first six months of the year, reader revenue is still
growing a bit and advertising is basically flat overall. The big bright
spot is obscured by that big layoff number: a 16 percent increase in Q3
digital revenue, compared to 3.4 percent up in Q2 and 2.2 percent up in
Q1. That’s a big number, and a hopeful one for the future as new
executive vice president for ads Meredith Kopit Levien works through her massive overhaul of the Times ad operation.
Is the poor business performance of the new niche products a surprise?
Not really....
What do we learn about investing in news product?
The stock market — no surprise — loved today’s announcement.
It was an announcement of business discipline. Call it a pivot, as CEOs
like Thompson are wont to, or a sharp unexpected turn when the boulders
in the road look larger than Google Maps told you.
We can figure that the 141 increase in staff in the newsroom over
last 30 months cost about $12.5 million a year. Take out 100 of those
and the Times saves about $9 million a year. That’s a positive financial move.
Look at the wider expense context. Newspaper companies have been
cutting expenses annually in the low- to mid-single digits for almost a
decade now; that’s the only way they can stay profitable since they
largely haven’t grown revenue year-over-year since 2005. Last year, the
Times was down 2.1 percent in overall expenses, pruning in lots
of places while investing in the newsroom and new products. Through the
first six months of 2014, though, it’s been up 4.5 percent.
Given the flattish revenue performance (more on which below), that
number couldn’t hold. The Times’ operating profit for 2013 was $156.1
million, and Thompson’s already said it will be less than that in 2014.
..
What’s the size of the Times’ paying audience?
Consider this. At the end of the last century (1999, to be precise), the Times print paying circulation stood at:
http://www.nielseninsights.eu/articles/mobile-migration-online-shopping-goes-mobile-in-the-u-k
