NYT reporting: Creating news for the current and future media landscape means considering the time scales of our reporting in much more innovative ways. Information should accumulate upon itself; documents should have ways of reacting to new reporting or information; and we should consider the consumption behavior of our users as one that takes place at all cadences, not simply as a daily update. ...he biggest underlying shift in conceiving of the future of news as something more than than a stream of articles is in the implied distinction between ephemeral content and evergreen content. There has always been a mixture of the two types in news reporting: An article will contain a narrative about the event that is currently occurring but also will contain more evergreen information such as background context, key players, etc. But the reliance on the form of the article as the atomic unit of news means that all of that information has essentially been treated as ephemeral. A news organization publishes hundreds of articles a day, then starts all over the next day, recreating any redundant content each time. This approach is deeply shaped by the constraints of print media and seems unnecessary and strange when looked at from a natively digital perspective. Can you imagine if, every time something new happened in Syria, Wikipedia published a new Syria page, and in order to understand the bigger picture, you had to manually sift through hundreds of pages with overlapping information? The idea seems absurd in that context and yet, it is essentially what news publishers do every day. The Particles approach suggests that we need to identify the evergreen, reusable pieces of information at the time of creation, so that they can be reused in new contexts. It means that news organizations are not just creating the “first draft of history”, but are synthesizing the second draft at the same time, becoming a resource for knowledge and civic understanding in new and powerful ways. http://nytlabs.com/blog/2015/10/20/particles/
We’re going to do two things - firstly, to explore how to make it easier for journalists, in their day to day work, to capture structured data about the key movers and shakers in the news; and secondly, build things on top of structured data that allow audiences to explore the news, understand it better, and make as much use of the data as a journalist can. The fact is, we don’t know what the future of journalism is. But if we put concerted effort into this, and be open about it, perhaps we as an industry can find what works.The existing model ofstorylines, a result ofyears of research and partnerships, gives us a head start here. Making narratives out of structured data, and allowing room for different points of view, and links to publicly available evidence, is a key aspect of what we want to achieve. And all of this results in an archive of news which is a living resource of open knowledge for journalists and society at large.
"We were inspired and encouraged by what we saw. All over the world,
independent media outlets are innovating and overcoming obstacles. Globally,
start-ups are demonstrating the drive to take risks for the sake of a good idea.
The challenges facing these outlets—and the innovations employed to tackle
them—broadly fall into four categories: editorial, business, distribution and
security. Operating with agility, media start-ups are finding creative ways to
gather and disseminate information. In India, Gram Vaani uses a mobile phone
social network to connect the rural poor and circumvent legislative prohibitions
on radio broadcasting. In Zimbabwe, The Source survives in the repressive media
climate by focusing on business journalism..." http://gijn.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/files/2015/10/PublishingforPeanuts_Public.pdf?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Publishing%202015-11-17&utm_term=Digiday%20Publishing%20Newsletter
The New York Times in September created an 11-person team, some of which are shared, to focus on messaging and push alerts. It is led by Andrew Phelps, who was formerly the Times’ iOS lead and now has the title of product director of messaging and push. Phelps, who oversees a lot of experiments in this area and works with news editors to push out alerts, sees 2016 as a big year for push.“We used to be standing on a hill and shouting messages at people,” he said. Now, by comparison, he said, “There’s a growing number of users who only engage with us when we send a push.”The push notification has great potential for personalization and, in this way, the Times is joining other publishers in thinking beyond the breaking-news alert to how it can customize notifications to people’s interests. At the Times, personalization can take a couple of forms. One is customizing pushes to people based on reading history. If you read a lot of politics stories on the Times, for example, the Times can be reasonably sure its recent magazine profile of Donald Trump might appeal to you.The Times is also testing pushes based on time of day and language...Once, the push notification sent only the top or breaking stories; that approach seems simplistic and dated now. The Times is well aware that when news breaks, people may see the same headline in multiple places. So along with customizing its pushes, it’s trying to make them stand out by adopting the more informal writing style it created for the Apple Watch. “We’re sort of treating push as a new form of storytelling,” Phelps said.http://digiday.com/publishers/inside-new-york-times-new-push-notifications-team/
Brooks told staff in an email: “I recently shared with you the future priorities for the company and am excited today to tell you more about our plans for the first of these: growing the Sun’s audience. This will mean setting the Sun predominantly free in the digital world from 30 November. By happy coincidence, this is also Cyber Monday, one of the best-performing days of the year for online retail.
Recent months have been filled with experimentation at the Sun. The standalone political site SunNation won plaudits at election time, we increased the number of shareable stories on social media, we entered platform partnerships with Apple News and we will be a major player in Facebook Instant Articles.http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/oct/30/sun-website-to-scrap-paywall
Fortune reporting:
...Facebook’s “Instant Articles” and Twitter’s new Moments feature seem to be accelerating this phenomenon, for better or worse. The whole point of Facebook’s Instant Articles project, in which it has formed partnerships with publishers like the New York Times, is that the content from those publishers exists completely inside Facebook’s mobile app. It’s consumed there, and shared there—there’s no link to an external site because it’s unnecessary... So where is the downside? The risk is that since news consumption occurs entirely inside Facebook, the social network becomes thedefault source of news for large numbers of people, and they eventually stop associating that news with the outlet that actually created it. There’s already some evidence that this is happening... http://fortune.com/2015/10/28/death-of-the-link/
Newsonomics reporting:
...3. Greatly reduce dependency on print as a source of earnings.
Today, Springer can claim that 72 percent of its earnings now comes from digital businesses. In jettisoning newspaper businesses and investing in digital, the earnings sources have seen quick reversal. Just six years ago, only 13 percent of earnings came from digital businesses. Earnings are still a struggle, though, up only 8 million euro 2014 over 2012.
But that in-app purchase model is infinitely preferable, he argues, to that of a hard paywall. We've seen arguments on both sides of this for a while, with the Sun's capitulation in lowering its paywall against Martin Sorrell's 'paywalls are the way to go' argument. So why does Raven believe the freemium model - such as that employed by Espresso with its free articles - is the correct model. Ultimately, he argues, it all comes down to allowing your audience to discover the value in your product and making it a part of their daily habits of their own accord:
"Freemium, in my opinion, is the only way to go. I fundamentally disagree with [The Times' hard paywall]. I think it's insane. You need to be able to get your content out there and people need to be able to sample it. "What we're trying to do is build habit-forming products. The most engaging apps out there are habit forming products."
INMA reporting: “Blocking the ad block users from reading your content is not going to work,” Van Rijn said. “If you have good advertising, non-intrusive and native, then people will stop using ad blockers.”
...The conclusion of the discussion was hard but straightforward. Van Rijn wrapped things up with this: “Ad blockers are here to stay, and we have to make advertising a whole lot better.”
NYT memo:
...We are reimagining the way we build products to reflect the simple truth that
journalism, audience development and revenue are not at odds but entirely
dependent on one another. This includes continuing to expand on the success of the
last year by empowering more cross-functional teams — with news, product,
design, technology, marketing and advertising working shoulder to shoulder — to
create more cohesive and comprehensive products that meet our customers’ needs
across platforms.
● Over the next few years, the battle is going to be won or lost on smartphones. This
continues to be our biggest area of focus in every part of the organization. But longer
term, we have to build a flexible organization that can respond quickly to future
changes in technology and user behavior.... http://www.nytco.com/wp-content/uploads/Our-Path-Forward.pdf
The New York Times has created a new newsroom unit to tackle the types of stories that are going viral on the web.Headed up by Patrick LaForge, the "Express Team" "will cover news that readers are searching for and talking about online, but also push that news forward rather than just repackaging it for clicks," according to a Tuesday afternoon staff memo signed by executive editor Dean Baquet, deputy executive editor Susan Chira, editor for innovation and strategy Kinsey Wilson, and assistant editor Clifford Levy."This new team will quickly and smartly weigh in on the issues and questions that are attracting attention across the day and around the world," they wrote.The move comes as the Times' is becoming ever more aggressive about scaling its digital audience, which is becoming more important to revenue growth...
"Most publishers are getting into native advertising because brands believe well written content that carries their message will cut through the cacophony of digital advertising, and publishers can charge a premium prices, as opposed to traditional display advertising, where excess inventory continues to put downward pressure on CPMs and returns. To compete in this hot space, major publishers are creating content studios staffed with crack design and editorial staff to create truly premium native advertising content.TheNew York Times,Forbes,the Wall Street Journaland broadcaster CNN have all launched content studios."http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/how-can-legacy-publishers-supplement-falling-print-revenues
Politico / Ken Doctor reporting: While newspapers’ financial woes now receive decreasing media attention, 2015 has been worse than 2014 – and no year has shown revenue growth since 2007. These are fragile enterprises, unquestionably in downward spiral, by any metric. Newsroom employment is down to 32,900, and willsoon be halfwhat it was 25 years ago. They are profitable, but for most, only on the basis of continual cost-cutting.
In truth, newspaper companies lost a huge amount of revenue – one-fifth of their pre-recession totals – in one year and then continued to lose. If recession accelerated newspaper ad revenue loss, so did economic recovery, as advertisers switch to digital further picked up steam. One publisher notes that throughout all the change we’ve seen, newspapers have taken a “disproportionate hit.” Unfortunately, that history would probably repeat.
The Post now can claim 90% of the monthly U.S. unique visitors of The New York Times, according to Comscore. Though under owner Jeff Bezos, the Post has become a fairly private company, we can see how it has moved up quickly in the pack of national news providers.In the chart below, note that the Post landed its greatest number of unique visitors ever in June at 54.3 million—about five million fewer than The New York Times, at 59.7 million.Compare that to October, 2013, when Bezos bought the Post. Then, the Post could count only two thirds of the Times’ audience count. Six months earlier, it could claim only 60%. Back then, the roll-up of Tribune Company newspapers usually bested the Post, as sometimes did Hearst’s newspapers.
...4. The Times can count about the same number of payingdaily readers today as it could in 1995.
In those pre-digital days, the Times’ daily circulation stood at 1.5 million. Today, it counts 625,000 daily print payers (home delivery and single copy) and those 1 million digital payers. That’s a little over 1.6 million. That’s another mind-boggling equivalency. With all that has changed, in the news business particularly, roughly the same number of people pay for The New York Times. One takeaway: Even at the peak of financial success — and the ’90s were good for the industry — the Times still relied on only a tiny percentage of Americans. At one point, a million and a half paying readers meant sustaining prosperity. Now, it seems like a shaky lifeline. There’s truth and there’s perception, and a lot to think about..
9. Newsroom investment is a business driver.
Of the Times’ total expense budget, about 20 percent goes to the newsroom. That’s about one-third more than the average U.S. daily, which spends 12.5 percent — or one out of eight dollars — on content creation. It’s no accident that the two regional leaders in digital-only sales, The Boston Globe (with 63,000 digital-only subscribers) and the Star Tribune in Minneapolis (with 58,000 digital-onlies), both spend closer to 20 percent as well. Readers know quality, depth, and breadth when they see it, and they’re willing to pay for it. There’s a lesson in that for the industry.
A little over a year ago, The New York Times’ internal Innovation Report was leaked, offering a candid and troubling look at how one of the world’s greatest journalism brands is lagging digitally. The report highlighted the paper’s shortcomings in everything digital, from culture to talent and workflow. It recommended the creation of audience development, analytics and strategy teams, more collaboration with reader-focused departments on the business side, and digital hiring. Here are five areas where the paper has made progress — and still has work to do.
digiday reporting: ... In short, don’t tell Smith BuzzFeed is fluff: “Our mission’s to do great journalism and tell people about the world,” Smith proclaimed in an interview last year. Out of some 300 editorial staffers, 140 are devoted to news. ...But if the viral perception still sticks, it’s not without reason. BuzzFeed drew 76.7 million multiplatform unique visitors in April, according to comScore. The publisher historically hasn’t broken out its content by vertical to comScore, like other top news sites including CNN, Yahoo and The Huffington Post do. But it started to on a limited basis as of last month, when it began breaking out its Entertainment and Life coverage, which stand at 43.7 million and 20.1 million uniques, respectively. BuzzFeed doesn’t break out its news traffic, suggesting it’s still relatively low. http://digiday.com/publishers/17-percent-buzzfeeds-traffic-goes-news/
41% of people (and 33% of millennials, those aged roughly 18- to 34-years-old) claim to feel overwhelmed by the sheer wealth of choice on the internet, preferring friends’ recommendations on social media rather than searching for content and products themselves.
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This trend has huge implications for both publishers, especially for those relying solely on advertising revenues and trying to build audiences at scale, and advertisers heavily investing in native advertising, looking for a deeper connection with consumers.
The recent push towards branded content has plainly contributed to this sense of content overload too.
However, better curated content, creative distribution strategies supported by smart data that leverage the opportunities offered by media convergence, can stop content overload from hindering the overall value of native advertising.
1. Listen and learn
Knowing your audience is a must for brands as much as it is for publishers. It is therefore important to audit your audience’s conversations comprehensively – social listening can be a particularly effective tool for this. This provides clear insight into people’s content consumption habits, for example, what they are interested in, what formats of content they like, who their influencers are, when and where they read and how they feel about that content.
Millennials consume news and information in strikingly different ways than previous generations, and their paths to discovery are more nuanced and varied than some may have imagined, according to the new study by the Media Insight Project, a collaboration of the American Press Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
How Millennials get news
Percent of Millennials who…
Say keeping up with the news is at least somewhat important to them
85%
Get news daily
69%
Regularly follow five or more "hard news" topics
45%
Usually see diverse opinions through social media
86%
Pay for at least one news-specific service, app, or digital subscription
40%
MEDIA INSIGHT PROJECT
The data also suggest that social networks are exposing Millennials to more news than they were initially seeking. Overall, just 47 percent who use Facebook say that getting news is a main motivation for visiting, but it has become one of the significant activities they engage in once they are there. Fully 88 percent of Millennials get news from Facebook regularly, for instance, and more than half of them do so daily...
TEN MONTHS AGO, the Chicago Tribune simultaneously launched two accounts on Instagram, the photo-sharing social media platform: one showcasing the work of the paper’s staff photographers and another highlighting old photos from the basement archives. In less than a year, thestaff photography accounthas attracted a respectable 4,496 followers. But it isthe vintage account—the brainchild of Robin Daughtridge, the paper’s director of photography—that has been the surprise hit, with nearly 25,000 followers.Daughtridge and photo editor Marianne Mather post up to eight photos a day, little black-and-white flashbacks from the massive archives of the Tribune Tower. Recent photos showmorning commuterson an express bus in 1981,two women at North Avenue Beachin 1960, and alate-career Babe Ruthin his Boston Braves uniform, sitting in the Wrigley Field dugout in 1935...http://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/instagram_chicago_illinois_news.php
re/code reporting:
...The paper finally went ahead with a paywall in 2011 and turned digital subscriptions into a growing business that generated nearly $170 million last year, up 13.5 percent from the year before. (The number of Times digital subscribers, interestingly, is growing at a rate of about 20 percent a year, which suggests the publisher is also counting free-trial members.)
The problem, however, is that despite those gains, the Times’ digital revenues — both circulation and advertising — account for little more than a fifth of the paper’s total sales and won’t in any way come close to making up for its once fat print profits. Even at 1 million paying online readers, that’s a $190 million to $200 million business. Include digital ads in that mix and it’s optimistically a $400 million digital newsroom. Still not enough to make up for print. Print, of course, is still a billion-dollar machine for the Times, but it is, inevitably, an anachronism. The Times’ average weekday print circulation now stands at 625,951, about half the 1.18 million it garnered in 1994 when the paper of record reached its daily print peak. And it’s only getting smaller.http://recode.net/2015/05/03/the-new-york-times-will-soon-hit-1-million-digital-subscribers-but-does-it-matter/
The Buttry Diary reporting: But, as I read the State of the Media 2015 report by the Pew Research Center, I am struck by the growth in mobile advertising, from $416 million (with an m) in 2009 to $19 billion (with a b) in 2014. In five years, that’s an increase of 4,500 percent, and mobile advertising has surpassed print newspaper advertising, which is just under $17 billion.... ...In this year’s report, the lead is: “Call it a mobile majority.” The report focuses heavily on mobile media and notes that 39 of the 50 leading digital news sites get most of their traffic from mobile devices. And the report tells who’s dominating mobile advertising: Facebook, Google, Twitter, Pandora and Apple combine for 64 percent of mobile display advertising. Not a news organization in the group. https://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/whats-the-next-mobile-huge-opportunity-news-media-cant-afford-to-squander/
Through partnerships with companies like Dataminr, Twitter has been informing the mainstream news cycle directly. Twitter has also informed the cycle indirectly by positioning itself as a place to see the news before it’s news, as was the case with the death of Osama Bin Laden.
Periscope has the potential to add live video content to Twitter, which could radically change breaking news. Mainstream sources already rely on Twitter for breaking news, and now they could begin to rely on what The Next Web calls “Next level Twitter.” Next Web reporter Owen Williams watched the aftermath of an explosion in New York City on Periscope:
It’s unprecedented to get this kind of footage seconds after an event occurs, even before first responders arrived. As I watched the drama unfold in New York, streamers were replying to questions about what they could see and were experiencing.
He notes that Periscope removes the friction associated with live video...
The Guardian’s London newsroom was reorganised in January, into four identifiable operational sectors covering the entire range of the newspaper’s activities: the “news desk” manages business, national and international news; “live desk” covers breaking news and live events; “visuals” deals with data projects, infographics and anything with a visual angle, while “audience” works to engage the readers and to manage social activities and interaction with the public – including data analysis. Paper and digital work closely together.
“It’s like launching a 200-year old startup”
“We wanted a vertical structure which could also enable multidisciplinary approaches,” Pilhofer told an audience at this month’s International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy. In a talk, entitled, ‘It’s like launching a 200-year old start-up’ Philhofer said: “The idea of this reorganisation is to deliver every possible journalistic ambition we have.” He described multimedia and interactive projects, such as “Guantanamo Diary” or the motion graphic explanatory guide to Scotland’s independence referendum as examples.
...“To put content on the homepage and pray for the best doesn’t work anymore,” Pilhofer said. Instead the newspaper studies the metrics of how readers move through content, to understand their behavior. Such data has helped the newspaper build a picture about what readers want to read, and what they ignore.
The newspaper uses Ophan, a software which enables journalists to receive information about traffic data for each story published on its site. Pilhofer said that these figures have not meant an endless diet of kitten stories at the paper, instead such data can spark “interesting conversations in your newsroom.”
digiday reporting: The tyranny of the 800-word article must end.
Most newspaper articles fall around 800 words. Oddly enough, that’s the same length of many online news pieces. Delaney, who wrote hundreds of 800-word articles during his 12-plus years at The Wall Street Journal, sees that as a problem, particularly as news goes mobile.
“What people read online, when you look at the data, is shorter stuff that’s focused, creative and social with a really good headline. It doesn’t mean it’s unsubstantial. It just means it’s really clear about what’s interesting and focuses on that. A lot of the 800-word stories have been padded out with the B matter. It’s called B matter because it’s B grade, not A matter, which is the focal point of the story.”
Many journalism practices are antiquated. Like the 800-word article, journalism conventions need updating. Everything from the headline writing process, to using topic-area sections and even reporter beats are relics. Rather than strict beats, for instance, Quartz leans on “obsessions,” a rotating group of focus areas that take deep dives into subjects, such as “the future of finance” and “space business.”
Ken Doctor eporting: In a move meant to blunt escalating European Union action against Google’s marketplace dominance, Google will tomorrow announce a $150 million partnership, to be spent over three years, in support of something called the Digital News Initiative (DNI), I’ve learned through several confidential sources. ...At least seven major European publishers have signed on to the initiative. They includeThe Financial Times, The Guardian, Italy’sLa Stampa, France’sLes Echoes, Germany’sZeit, Spain’sEl Païsand Netherlands’N.R.C. Organizers consider the program an “open” one, so expect more publishers to join as well. It is a distinctly Eurocentric initiative, with no U.S.-based publishers as initial signatories, though the architects of the initiative expect its fruits to be globally useful for new companies.
...1) $150 million Google commitment toward news innovation. That’s, of course, the stream that will catch the most attention. The work will focus on product and platform improvement.
2) A “Product Council,” made up of publishers, will give direction to the initiative.
3) Google will also fund Reuters to widen news research in Europe. Expect to see more Europe-centric news research, à la the kind of analytic insights offered by the Pew Research Center in the U.S.
Given the ubiquity of electronics, it’s not so surprising that children come across media and devices in the home. Still, the researchers note that the children in this study were often very young and that the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) frowns upon television and other media exposure for kids under the age of 2. The AAP saysexcessive media use can contribute to school trouble, attention problems and obesity, according to studies, and that Internet and cell-phone use can be platforms for risky behavior.
The survey results also suggest that parents let their children use media or mobile tech as distraction. For instance, the study showed 73% of surveyed parents let their kids play with mobile devices while they were doing chores around the house. Sixty percent said they let children use them while running errands, 65% to calm their child and 29% to put their kid to sleep. Just 30% of the parents in the survey said they spoke to their pediatrician about media use.http://time.com/3834978/babies-use-devices/
