Category: Media

ISOJ 2012 Notes: Creating mobile content, valuing longer reads, building new audiences and other tidbits

On April 20-21, 2012, the University of Texas-Austin hosted the annual International Symposium on Online Journalism. Here’s some of what I learned, separated by topic:

News Org Content

  • 75% of traffic flow on news sites these days is to story pages (versus home pages).
  • News orgs must innovate at every dimension to be successful today (and not simply hire a “chief innovation officer.”
  • News orgs should empower individual reporters — and all of their abilities, in all of their worlds — to brand content in individual, persistent URLs.
  • Bullets within long-form stories and investigative pieces are your friend.
  • Transparency goes beyond how to produce the news. It also involved getting access to experts and officials and people they would never otherwise get to meet. For example, do Q/As with your experts to provide a chance for people without access to ask questions. (John White, deputy editor for online, Winnipeg Free Press, Canada)

Data Visualization

  • Data is changing the way we tell stories, and changing the definition of who a journalist is (Aron Pilhofer, interactive news editor, The New York Times)
  • A definition of data journalism: “I am not talking here about statistics or numbers in general, because those are nothing new to journalists. When I talk about data, I mean information that can be processed by computers.” Paul Bradshaw (prof in UK)
  • Data stories are a mix of craft and art. News applications should be made for craft. Ask: Who are your users? What are their needs? What can we build to fulfill their needs? (Brian Boyer, news applications editor, Chicago Tribune Media Group)
  • Don’t do the map if it is not useful. Consider this nursing home graphic from the Chicago Tribune. Though the editors had geo-location data, the “fancy” map wasn’t going to be useful to people. (Brian Boyer)
  •  Data art is not useful. You need to tell a story. (Alberto Cairo, lecturer in visual journalism, University of Miami)
  • We have to create presentation layers and exploration layers. Consider the Visual Information-Seeking Mantra: “Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand” — Ben Shneiderman (1996). Give an overview, and THEN let them zoom,  filter and get all those details. You cannot have one of these without the other. (Alberto Cairo)
  • We must embrace complexity. But you have to arrange it in a way that the human brain can understand. (Alberto Cairo)
  • Data is a record for people. To make that record speak to people, you have to make it come to life. When you are bringing it to life, you have to make editorial decisions. Which bits of the data are important? (Alastair Dant, lead interactive technologist at Guardian News & Media, London, UK)

Mobile Content

  • The New Yorker app for the iPad is more popular than the Wired Magazine app because iPad is all about long-form.
  • Mobile tablets have a different audience time than general Web reading (iPad=6pm-11pm versus 7am-5pm for Web pages).
  • 8 trillion SMS sent in 2011. TRILLION!
  • You don’t necessarily need a mobile app. Check website logs to see what people are using and then develop for those devices, platforms.
  • Some imperatives for mobile success: Nurture a first-rate mobile web site; position core apps strategically; select and align dedicated mobile professionals; harmonize experiences across platforms; assume that mobile is different than Web platforms; empower internal mobile editorial champions; secure multi-level executive support; strengthen content delivery systems; use mobile devices IN THE FIELD (so powerful in Libya, in Egypt!); drive other platforms’ success with mobile. (From Louis Gump, vp of CNN Mobile)
  • Premium real-time alerts should be focused on very practical content. (From JV Rufino, head of Inquirer Mobile in the Philippines)
  • Choice is your solution to making money on mobile; give them choice between getting ads or doing a subscription. (From William Hurley, co-founder of Chaotic Moon)
  • We are losing words that have significance and meaning in our search for that mass audience. (From William Hurley). (I think we are losing words also as we write for a 140-character limit)
  • Oh and do you have a refrigerator strategy yet? (Not enough users yet to make the effort perhaps but definitely start thinking about your television strategy.)

Building Audiences/Communities

  • People who identify themselves online are more likely to post and re-post stories, a deeper engaged behavior than commenting; people with pseudonyms more likely to superficially comment.
  • Make opinions of users matter on your website. Really collaborate with communities members, and not just invite them to crowdsource.
  • Journalists must be engaged in social-media realms, must become part of the community (helps build audience for the group).
  • Considering privacy is important; people define privacy according to and reaction to situations they don’t like (J. Richards Stevens of University of Colorado at Boulder)
  • Gulf between the ways that tools appear to work and the ways they actually work; what producers and designers don’t understand is that the interface is the product. (From J. Richards Stevens)
  • Aesthetics and the architecture of the site create psychological effects on the way people feel about the place (and the product/brand). (From J. Richards Stevens)
  • Interfaces have a responsibility to communicate to users the choices in privacy of data etc. (From J. Richards Stevens)
  • Stop thinking that you are smarter than everyone younger than you are. Start building your brand for someone younger than 50. (John White, deputy editor for online, Winnipeg Free Press, Canada)

New Business Models

  • Be innovative and think about partnerships with the unusual such as the Winnipeg Free Press’ News Café, which combines journalism with a Third-Place restaurant. (John White)
  • Create community focal points.
  • Failure in any of these experiments has to be built in. (Ben Ilfeld, founder and COO, Sacramento Press)
  • For innovation, it’s important to know what metrics you want to hit before you scale the idea. Assess success before scaling and expanding (Ben Ilfeld)
  • Sacramento Connect brings together community blogs etc. Build on already established community networks!
  • If you cannot find the knowledge, create a forum to get it.
  • Move beyond advertising
  • Recognize the value in training and in helping to create content and helping others create content.
  • Consider funding via community events
  • Supplying tools isn’t enough to create a successful media outlet. That’d be like having a scalpel and bring told to operate.
  • Start-ups are going to answer the question of monetizing journalism. (Bob Metcalfe) “We will see a million experiments and a few of them are going to work.” (Dan Gillmor)
  • For-profits and non-profits (news orgs) have essentially the same problems. The distinctions between traditional journalism and “other” need to lie in other kinds of characteristics. (Bob Metcalfe)

The following is from a keynote by Jim Moroney, publisher & CEO, Dallas Morning News, and chairman of the board, Newspapers Association of America)

  • There is no one model for news orgs; there are many models. It’s about finding what works for your org.
  • $42.2 billion 2007 to 20.6 billion in 2011 print ad revenue: Only four years for 50% to evaporate.
  • No longer a mass audience. We are publishing for a “mass intelligence audience.” But that’s not the same thing as an elite audience.
  • The value of content is created along two axes: relevance and differentiation. Content that is irrelevant to you has no value to you. If something is not differentiated, it becomes a commodity, and therefore has less value. Every news publication has the who, where, when, what, so the 5Ws are now a commodity.
  • Go deep on certain categories. We cannot be all things to all people.
  • Four trillion ad impressions in marketplace in 2011; more than 1 trillion were from Facebook alone.
  • Online ad revenue growth will not match dollar for dollar your losses in print ad revenue. You have to cross-subsidize your journalism beyond advertising.
  • Audiences are developing two reading zones: the work, laptop, information zone and then the long, leisurely read of the tablet.
  • 42% of tablet news readers regularly read in-depth news articles, another 40% sometimes do this. These people are three times as likely to regularly read in-depth articles as they are to watch news videos, according to a recent Pew study.
  • You can’t charge for commodity content.
  • Build more subject matter expertise in newsroom and through affiliations, particularly universities, to produce and capture deeper content, to tap into that “mass intelligence” audience.
  • We must preserve the scale of the newsroom with this strategy, but also need to develop other sources of revenue that is not advertising.
  • Leverage your brand to create new revenue streams: offer social media, marketing and event-marketing services.

Social Media

  • Social media is about reputation (Dan Gillmor)
  • We pay attention to SEO out of fear: If we build it, will they come? (Carmen Cano, digital managing editor, The Dallas Morning News)
  • In one second there are: 2 new users to LinkedIn, 11 new Twitter accounts, 2200 tweets published, 3500 photos uploaded to Flickr, 8000 comments in Facebook, and almost 15000 status updates to Facebook (Carmen Cano)
  • Pinterest generating more traffic on web sites than other social media (Carmen Cano)
  • SEO –> SMO (Search Engine Optimization to Social Media Optimization) (Carmen Cano)
  • Search, social are all about relationships (words, people, respectively) (Carmen Cano)
  • Visits per visitor most important web metric, not page views. Time on site also can be misleading. (Carmen Cano)
  • Facebook: not for breaking news; it is more about a conversation, simpler/strategic (Carmen Cano)
  • SMO must be part of your SEO (Carmen Cano)
  • Social, search, semantic = relationships, experience, which you cannot optimize (Carmen Cano)
  • The Final-Mile Problem in journalism: getting content in front of the right audience (Chip Cutter, content editor, LinkedIn)
  • Pay attention to what is being shared: among your connections, in your industry, beyond your industry (what’s popular across LinkedIn) (Chip Cutter)
  • Let the community do some of the work for you: such as AccountingToday, which drove engagement by putting a link into one of the active accounting groups and adding a question at the end: “what are the weirdest tax deductions you have ever seen?” (Chip Cutter)
  • Post, engage, post, engage; the cycle never really has to end. Start a credible viral loop. (Chip Cutter)
  • Find the right content passion and obsession audiences. Ask questions and dive into the comments (answering questions, asking additional questions to keep the conversation going forward) (Chip Cutter)
  • Look to the crowd to inform your reporting; try to latch onto a broad topic by tailoring your stories based on what users are sharing. (Chip Cutter)
  • Share so frequently that you’re considered an expert (Chip Cutter)
  • Ensure every story has a high-quality image attached  (Chip Cutter)
  • Write headlines that start conversations; it is no longer about cramming everything in there. You still want keywords, but these need to be about what starts a conversation such as asking a question or posing something in a way that drives a conversation  (Chip Cutter)
  • Build your own social network (Borja Echevarria, deputy editor, El Pais, Spain)
  • You have to accept the loss of control over your news. (Borja Echevarria)
  • Charge for your archive because people love it. (Borja Echevarria)
  •  Social media is how I build hope, inspire change and give back as a journalist (Jen Lee Reeves, interactive director of KOMU-TV and associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism)

Journalism Education

  • There need to be fewer silos in academic. Talk to business schools, to computer science departments.
  • Collaborations outside of academia too!
  • Stop training for jobs that no longer exist (Mark Berkey-Gerard, Rowan University: From journalism students to local news entrepreneurs: A case study of technically media)
  • Provide students with the opportunities to build products and then test the revenue sources around it (Mark Berkey-Gerard)
  • Test new products (Mark Berkey-Gerard)
  • Education right this second is being disrupted, and professors have the same problem journalists have.


 

Capitalism can support good journalism, but it’s time for some back-up plans

This month’s Carnival of Journalism, which is an informal group of bloggers who write about a common journalism topic every month, asks the question: Can good journalists be good capitalists? The question derives from the omnipresent tension of a commercial press operating with a mandate to be socially responsible. As a business-reporter-turned-journalist-academic teaching students who need paying jobs in the profession, I answer a cautious YES (and here, I’m also thinking: “I sure hope so!!”; otherwise I’ve spent a lot of years fervently and naively dedicated to a profession because of its democratic importance).

In this post I suggest that we also need to build significant infrastructure alongside the commercial press to provide contingencies for the dissemination of significant, relevant, balanced, accurate information circulating in our democracy — you know… in the event corporate media owners might somehow lose sight of their commitment to hosting good journalism. The good news is I think we have already begun to formalize some alternative business models.

Good Journalists, Good Capitalists

With fewer resources and fewer journalists, the commitment to socially responsible journalism can fade as the pressure to produce content increases. During one of my newsroom stints, the executive editor called a meeting to discuss pending layoffs, the shrinking news hole, and our media owner’s fiscal difficulties (“yeah, right,” we all mouthed to each other, rolling our eyes, knowing our corporation’s top executives had all just received giant bonuses). “Bulk! Bulk! Bulk!” he barked at us, referring to the “need” for the appearance of more content in the newspaper and on the site, more quickly. People could read briefs and rewritten press releases and have the feeling that they were getting a lot for their money.  What could we do?

We quickly learned the art of the fast 200 words while working on our special projects. We learned to conduct interviews so that we could derive a “quick hit” out of the conversation (usually just a one-sourced piece), and then turning the discussion to what we really wanted to know — the good journalism part. Our fabulous editors managed to juggle schedules so that we rotated on “bulk” while keeping some of us on dedicated projects that were so important for our community. Oh and of course we had our own definition of “bulk” as well. After all, a 50-inch story feels pretty bulky, doesn’t it? Plus 200 words advancing an important public hearing can be just as democratically important as a brief about some new product.

Capitalism does not necessitate poor quality in the pursuit of product quantity. The notion significantly underestimates people’s (consumers’?) ability to appreciate important news (product?). Even those briefs have to be something the “market” (society!) needs and wants — well written, informative, interesting. My audience research suggests the problem with the commercial press right now is not the capitalistic structure, but rather the production quality. People are demanding new kinds of content that allow them to connect (with powerful sources, with each other, with issues) and inform themselves on their terms. People recognize that “bulk” does not equate to good journalism (or a good product, if we want to stick with capitalism-speak).

As I tell my students now, the key to being a good journalist working at a for-profit company is time management, creative interpretations of corporate mandates such as “bulk! bulk! bulk!,” alternative kinds of story formats, agnostic understandings of platform, disciplined efforts around storytelling, and finally, laser focus on the end goal of significant and important democracy-improving work in one’s day-to-day labor.

Alternative Models Needed, Though!

Yet the environment of the professional journalist today is certainly challenging. We need to discover other models for doing good information work that complement the industry but do not rely on profits.

I am in the middle of creating a new syllabus for a press-theory seminar I will be teaching this spring, and one of my segments is on new news business models. In doing some research for it, I’m struck by how much innovation is out there compared to 2006 when I and most of my journalist friends either fled the industry or were laid off because of a decidedly failing business model.

I found real suggestions touching on:

And this is just to name a few. This Mediashift blog post from 2008 is a bit dated right now, but the ideas are still very relevant and possible. In looking at all of this in aggregate at this moment, I find myself feeling a sense of optimism about the future of this profession, capitalists and all.

Gannett ad marks shift in marketing strategy, biz focus – a mistake?

I have never heard a Gannett ad on television before, but today for the first time I listened to my former employer tout its corporate brand — as opposed to any of its sub-brands like USAToday. I had heard about this new marketing strategy, but this was the first I had seen of it (probably because I was stuck this summer in a place without television). I understand that Gannett wants to raise brand awareness, but I’m not sure it’s the best strategy for them right now, in this market.

I doubt people outside the profession of journalism or finance know that Gannett is the largest newspaper chain, operates one of the only national newspapers, or is ranked in the 2011 Fortune 500. (By the way, while you visit this link from CNN, check out Gannett’s 65% increase in annual profits during 2010! Course it’s average annual growth rate for the last decade has been a stunning NEGATIVE 9.2%. Ouch. Still, I’m struck by how much it has recovered in just a few months, and find myself hoping the growth is indicative of a fundamental turnaround for newspapers specifically even as I realize it’s probably just a byproduct of the advertising industry rebound.) And I suspect few know the chain has also been building to its digital-marketing company holdings, positioning itself as an information marketer and not just an information provider.

The ad — which was fairly general in content — is meant merely to make more people aware of Gannett’s name, but I can’t help but wonder if this television ad marks a subtle in shift in mega-marketing for news organizations in general, refocusing on the parent company rather than the local brands.

When I was working for Gannett newspaper (2000-2006), there were rumors the parent company was going to begin packaging its local products under an umbrella USAToday. Thus a newspaper reader in, say, Vermont, would gain access not only to The Gannett property The Burlington Free Press but also the “Nation’s Newspaper,” USAToday. I thought that was a great idea, actually, because it offered clients value add and also represented a chance for struggling local papers (not necessary for the Free Press, of course, which was a cash cow) to gain renewed vigor through its attachment to a successful and well-known product. The marketing plan — if it ever existed at all!! These kinds of rumors were always swirling around the newsroom — did not materialize while I was there.

Then last spring Gannett announced its “It’s all within reach” marketing campaign. From the press release about the strategy:

The new identity will be rolled out across all Gannett properties to create a stronger association between the Gannett corporate brand and its portfolio of properties. All Gannett businesses will identify themselves as Gannett companies.

However, such a shift to the parent company of Gannett is a mistake, I think, at least for the local news organizations. The niche news segment of local and also hyperlocal could be a key market for corporations, whose entrenched community presence tends to offer a significant advantage as an easily identified, familiar information provider for citizens during a time of overwhelming information overload from blogs, aggregators, Twitter and Facebook. To turn away from community-organization branding would be a lost opportunity, in my opinion. Right now is exactly when Gannett might want to re-emphasize its local-local ties via its sub-brands — during the this era of incredible digital noise. Its community properties could be framed as a familiar neighbor who knows everything, rather than as a mere arm of some unknown outsider.

 

Yahoo turmoil – again

I found the Yahoo ruckus interesting. The CEO was fired — just a couple years after she was hired to replace that last guy they let go — for the same reasons. Yahoo, it seems, is having some trouble coming up with a viable plan going forward. Still no plan, as far as I can tell. Poor Yahoo. Just a few years ago the company turned down $33 a share from Microsoft. Today it’s trading at around $13. Oopsie! Interestingly, the CEO had negotiated a deal with Microsoft to turn over its search business. I was curious about that — and here maybe people who know more about the specifics of this situation might weigh in — since I understand that search ad revenue accounts for about half of the total revenues online. Why give up that kind of lucrative stream?

(As a quick aside, I just loved her farewell email to people about the whole thing, stating in a no-nonsense way that she was fired over the phone. Refreshing. Rather than the typical “I’m leaving to spend more time with my family” line.”)