I write about issues going on in transition from traditional print media to on-line digital media in my posting Old media and digital media – part 1. This post is a continuation to it. The situation does not look too good for traditional media. Traditional media has been able to solve it’s challenges with aggregation or pay-wall. The future seems to be quite bad for traditional print media that can’t adapt to changed situation.
Despite two decades of trying, no one has found a way to make traditional news-gathering sufficiently profitable to assure its future survival. Only about a third of Americans under 35 look at a newspaper even once a week, and the percentage declines every year. A large portion of today’s readers of the few remaining good newspapers are much closer to the grave than to high school. Today’s young people skitter around the Internet. Audience taste seems to be changing, with the result that among young people particularly there is a declining appetite for the sort of information packages the great newspapers provided.
What is the future of media? There is an interesting article on future of media written in Finnish on this: Median tulevaisuus ja 13 trendiä – mitä media on vuonna 2030? It shows 13 trends that I have here translated to English, re-arranged, added my comments and links to more information to them. In 2030, the media will look very different than today.
The new gerations no longer want to pay for the media: Since the same information, benefits, entertainment provided free of charge, they are not prepared to pay. Older generations support the traditional media for some time, but they are smaller each year. Media consumption continues to rapidly change, and advertisers will follow suit digital and mobile channels, which will affect the media sales because advertisers no longer need the intermediary role of the media companies to communicate with their customers.
This does not look good for media companies, but situation even worse than that: When media personnel, production and distribution costs are rising every year and so the order than the ad revenue will be reduced year by year, deprivation twist to push media companies to the rest of the best authors, owners become impatient and expected returns are reduced. Companies are moving their marketing investment priorities for the purchased media.Corporate communications professionals continues to grow and the number of suppliers will continue to fall.
Technological developments enhance the above trends: Technology eliminates the barriers to entry to the traditional media sector and at the same time create new sectors. Technological media competition winner takes all because new scalable technology to create competitive advantages. Very many news writing tasks can be automated with near real-time and reliable enough translation technology The media world is undergoing a wholesale shift from manual processes to automated systems that strip out waste and inefficiency (The Future of Programmatic: Automation + Creativity + Scale).
Strong continuous technological change and automation mean that media consumption will continue to change for the next decade at least as strong as the previous ten years, whether we like it or not. Critical journalism makes searching for new alternative ways to do their work and to fund its work.
Media’s direction is sure to bring, and an ever increasing rate - in an increasingly digital, more mobile, more and more tailor-made … The newspapers will be read mostly on mobile devices. Information is obtained much earlier, in an increasingly digital and real-time. A lot has changed now already.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Kara Swisher / Re/code:
Sources: AOL in talks to spin off HuffPost, primarily with Axel Springer, at a valuation over $1B
AOL Has Been in Talks to Spin Off HuffPost as Part of Verizon Acquisition Deal
http://recode.net/2015/05/12/aol-in-talks-to-spin-off-huffpost-as-part-of-acquisition-deal/
According to numerous sources, while it has been negotiating its deal to sell to Verizon, AOL has also been in advanced discussions with a number of parties to spin off its flagship Huffington Post content unit.
The talks have been most serious with Axel Springer, the German media conglomerate, but a number of private equity firms have also expressed interest in the high-profile property. Sources said the Huffington Post has been valued at above $1 billion in this scenario, which would either be a complete sale or, more likely, structured as a joint venture.
Anthony Ha / TechCrunch:
Tim Armstrong says AOL to remain in content business, denies spin-off of Huffington Post, says TechCrunch won’t be sold and will retain editorial independence
http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/12/aol-verizon-tim-armstrong-interview/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alex Kantrowitz / AdAge:
Ad-Tech, not Content, Is King in the Verizon-AOL Deal
http://adage.com/article/media/ad-tech-is-king-verizon-aol/298574/
The deal of the year may be upon us.
Today, Verizon announced it has reached an agreement to buy AOL for $4.4 billion. The move, expected to be completed this summer, is likely to realign the power balance in the ad-tech ecosystem and will be felt in the advertising industry as a whole.
The digital advertising industry (and some might say, the entire advertising industry) is on the fast path to automation. Scores of companies have emerged to help automate different parts of the ad buy — the buying, the selling, the targeting, the attribution, etc. — and AOL owns a piece of tech for just about every step of the way. For a while, everything seemed peachy in the desktop-focused ad-tech world, but then media consumption moved quickly to mobile, where targeting cookies don’t work effectively, and the system essentially broke.
Verizon, acquirer of AOL, owns the key to fixing this problem: concrete mobile data which can be used to tie user identity across devices.
If Verizon’s data integrated into AOL’s ad-tech, it could result in the first ad-tech stack which can target across devices with deep accuracy (Facebook is currently developing one, using its login data). This combination could help ad-tech get its groove back, and should be strong enough to give Google (the market leader) and Facebook (up and coming) a run for their money.
Sad day for Yahoo
A few years ago, AOL and Yahoo were sitting in essentially the same place. Both had plenty of visitors but sold commoditized ad inventory which limited the value of their businesses. From this starting point, Yahoo invested in content, snatching up Tumblr and a number of other companies until going on an ad-tech spending spree with the acquisitions of mobile ad-tech company Flurry and video ad-tech company Brightroll. AOL, meanwhile, went straight for ad-tech, building a full “stack” while paring down its content business. AOL’s strategy, today at least, seems like it was the right one.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook Launches Instant Articles
http://techcrunch.com/video/facebook-launches-instant-articles/518823507/?cps=gravity_1462_6290967631610692861#.b5imzi:9iIT
Facebook never wants you to leave, so it’s swallowing up where you might try to go. A few years back, its News Feed brimmed with links to content hosted elsewhere. News articles, YouTube clips, business websites, ads for ecommerce stores.
But Facebook has decided the world outside its walled garden is full of friction. And friction isn’t The Hacker Way.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook’s Quest To Absorb The Internet
http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/13/all-you-need-is-like/#.b5imzi:NfKN
So it began a quest to eliminate any reason you’d have to stray from its friendly blue box. All content or experiences worth caring about, or at least worth money, are pulled inside so they’re at your fingertips.
Cleaning Up The Messy Internet
The gears started churning in 2007 when Facebook introduced Pages. The team that built the product saw business’ websites as messy, inconsistent silos. Each displayed critical information differently, from what a company did to its contact details. Besides, the party was on Facebook with your friends. Didn’t businesses want to come inside the party rather than be stuck across Main Street?
Pages gave businesses representation within Facebook’s walled garden. They were tidy, all looking almost identical save for a profile picture and some posts. Users knew just where to find what they were looking for. No need to Google. With time, Facebook added cover photos, Timeline, maps, reviews, open hours, messaging channels, and more to help Pages supersede websites.
FACEBOOK LIKE THUMBThe benefit to Facebook was two-fold. Fewer reasons to leave, more reasons to stay. Pages became a huge source of content for Facebook. Legions of community managers around the world spent time crafting status updates, photos, and links to maximize their utility and entertainment value in the stream.
This made Facebook a destination. No need to circle past Nike.com to see its latest shoes, a band’s website for tour dates, or a news outlet for articles. Why traipse around the Internet when the News Feed aggregates the best of it in one endlessly scrollable feed?
The Leaky Stream
The problem was that much of what was shared to News Feed was just previews of and links to the outside Internet. When a user clicked away, they might not come back. So Facebook moved down the stack, from subsuming the authors to subsuming their content.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ken Doctor / Nieman Lab:
Newspaper companies will continue to struggle with digital innovation without better cashflow — Newsonomics: Razor-thin profits are cutting into newspapers’ chances at innovation
Newsonomics: Razor-thin profits are cutting into newspapers’ chances at innovation
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/05/newsonomics-razor-thin-profits-are-cutting-into-newspapers-chances-at-innovation/
It’s taken lots of cuts to keep American newspaper companies even slightly profitable. But without better cashflow, they’ll continue to struggle to build the next version of the industry.
If you want to talk about profits at the U.S.’s top newspaper companies, you don’t need big numbers any more.
Tribune Publishing could count a bare $2.5 million in net income for the first three months of the year. That’s the combined net of eight metro papers, including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Hartford Courant, and four other good-sized dailies. It’s not that these papers’ performance a year ago was that great; it made just $11.7 million in the first quarter of 2014. But a year-over-year drop of 75 percent in net is something you notice.
But this isn’t a Tribune problem — it’s a newspaper industry problem.
Among these large public newspaper companies — 7 of the country’s 10 largest — the total net comes to about $21 million. Those not included — Digital First Media, Advance, and Berkshire Hathaway Media — aren’t talking about any better results. Figure that the top 10 newspaper companies, public and private, took in no more than $50 million in net in the first quarter.
How do we measure that sum? In 2005, a single U.S. newspaper company, Gannett, produced $1.8 billion in net income.
Unfortunately, several of the top 10 companies tell me the second quarter could be worse than the first, itself usually a tepid quarter for the industry. Why? National advertising continues to weaken, preprints face pricing challenges and digital disruption takes an ever bigger bite of ad revenues overall.
This paltry performance drives the landscape we see today. With little in net, these companies have little to invest. They’re still paying off debt, issuing dividends, keeping up with pension obligations, and anticipating print ad results that can’t find a bottom. That makes it tough to invest in new products and to travel with the audience as it moves to mobile. And of course it’s bound to mean even more reductions in workforces, including newsrooms, which are already down by more than 20,000 in less than a decade.
Transformation
Every newspaper chain talks about getting digital faster. The plain truth is, that despite almost two decades of effort, most aren’t close to where they need to be. Even The New York Times can count only 28.2 percent of its ad revenue coming from digital; Tribune Publishing said last week that of its total revenues, 12 percent were digital. All these companies still find themselves more dependent on print than digital, and they haven’t weaned themselves off of it fast enough to absorb the now-brutal print losses.
“We’re early days,” he told me Wednesday. “We’ve built common user interfaces, common e-commerce engines. The databases talk to each other now. We didn’t have those a short time ago.” He’s also playing catchup in digital subscriptions, which suffered from poor tech and decision-making in previous implementations. Today, TPUB can only count 67,000 digital-only subs among its eight metro properties — about the same number as regional digital-only leader, The Boston Globe. Griffin explains that his new digital sub leader has been “visiting with editors and publishers around the country. He’s trying to find the right permutation of the product for each market.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tech and media groups draw battle lines for mobile superiority
Verizon-AOL deal and Facebook’s news tie-up reveal industry shift
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0%2F5242ed5e-fae8-11e4-84f3-00144feab7de.html#axzz3aVGelYu0
Two sharp tremors this week brought home how far the tech, media and communications industries are realigning around mobile.
The first came on Tuesday, when US telecoms company Verizon announced a $4.4bn acquisition of AOL. The online services pioneer is a mixed bag these days, which includes the original internet connectivity business
There has been a spate of similar acquisitions of “adtech” companies as digital advertising has boomed.
A day later, Facebook followed through on a long-anticipated plan to add a mobile news-stand to its list of attractions. Nine media companies — among them the New York Times and NBC News in the US, the Guardian and the BBC in the UK, and Bild and Spiegel Online in Germany — agreed to give the social networking company some of their content to host on its own site.
“There’s no doubt we debated the pros and cons,” says Declan Moore, chief media officer at National Geographic. “This is an interesting new line across the frontier.”
“It’s important to have a presence or you become irrelevant,” says Mr Moore at National Geographic.
“On one level, Apple and Google have won the smartphone wars and they’re now taking laps of honour,”
Central to this is the battle to attract and direct the attention of mobile internet users.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Editor-in-Chief of the Next Web: Adblockers Are Immoral
http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/15/05/17/1426246/editor-in-chief-of-the-next-web-adblockers-are-immoral
Hot on the heels of the recent implementation of Canvas Ads (allowing advertisers to use the full page) Martin Bryant, the Editor-in-Chief of The Next Web, wrote a piece that, ostensibly, calls out mobile carriers in Europe for offering ad blocking as a service. He writes: “Display ads are still an important bread-and-butter income stream. Taking delight in denying publishers that revenue shows either sociopathic tendencies or ignorance of economic realities.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jana Messerschmidt / The Twitter Blog:
Twitter and Google partner to bring more tweets into Google search results, rolling out on mobile in the US today and desktop soon
A new way to discover Tweets
https://blog.twitter.com/2015/a-new-way-to-discover-tweets
Tomi Engdahl says:
How does digital affect Canadian attention spans?
http://advertising.microsoft.com/en/cl/31966/how-does-digital-affect-canadian-attention-spans
“We are moving from a world where computing power was scarce to a place where it now is almost limitless, and where the true scarce commodity is increasingly human attention” – Satya Nadella
The average human attention span in 2000 was 12 seconds, but by 2013 it was only 8 seconds (1 second shorter than a goldfish!).
With news reduced to 140 characters and conversations whittled down to emojis, how is this affecting the way consumers see and interact with their worlds?
Are they doing what people have done for thousands of years – evolve and adapt to new realities?
This innovative new research uses neuro science to understand the changing nature of attention in the context of Canadians’ increasingly digital lives and offers advice to help brands and advertisers better engage connected consumers. The good news? The outlook is better than you may think!
Tomi Engdahl says:
We’re All Using These Emoji Wrong
http://www.wired.com/2015/05/using-emoji-wrong/
Everyone has a go-to emoji.
Turns out I don’t have the first clue what the hell I’m doing. But then, neither do you. We’re all doing emoji wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong. Good thing the folks at Unicode are here to save us.
Dizzy Star is hardly the only emoji everyone is getting wrong. Oh sure, something like your everyday, standard heart or the ubiquitous “Smiling Face With Smiling Eyes” emoji is hard to screw up. Even your grandfather uses those correctly. But what about “Relieved Face,” “Face With No Good Gesture,” or the oft-debated “Person With Folded Hands”? Those aren’t so easy to interpret. That’s why Unicode, the group that has the awesome job of choosing emoji and setting their standards,
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ben Hubbard / New York Times:
Young Saudis increasingly rely on mobile apps and social media to circumvent conservative strictures
— Young Saudis, Bound by Conservative Strictures, Find Freedom on Their Phones — RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Life for many young Saudis is an ecosystem of apps. — Lacking free speech, they debate on Twitter.
Young Saudis, Bound by Conservative Strictures, Find Freedom on Their Phones
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/23/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-youths-cellphone-apps-freedom.html
Life for many young Saudis is an ecosystem of apps.
Lacking free speech, they debate on Twitter. Since they cannot flirt at the mall, they do it on WhatsApp and Snapchat.
Young women who cannot find jobs sell food or jewelry through Instagram. Since they are banned from driving, they get rides from car services like Uber and Careem.
But the scale of today’s social media boom is staggering, with many of the country’s 18 million citizens wielding multiple smartphones and spending hours online each day. Digital has not replaced face-to-face interaction, but it has opened the door to much more direct and robust communication, especially in a society that sharply segregates men and women who are not related.
The spread of mobile technology is driving nothing short of a social revolution in the lives of young people. In this rich but conservative kingdom that bans movie theaters, YouTube and Internet streaming have provided an escape from the censors and a window to the outside world. A young Shariah judge, for example, confided that he had watched all five seasons of “Breaking Bad.”
Saudi Arabia has ideal conditions for a social media boom: speedy Internet, disposable income and a youthful population with few social options. Unlike China and Iran, Saudi Arabia has not blocked sites like Facebook and Twitter, although it occasionally prosecutes those seen as insulting public figures or Islam. The Saudi monarchy appears to have decided that the benefits of social media as an outlet for young people outweigh the risk that it will be used to mobilize political opposition, which it is quick to punish, harshly.
There are economic benefits, too.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Firefox’s Optional Tracking Protection Reduces Load Time For News Sites By 44%
http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/05/25/1149220/firefoxs-optional-tracking-protection-reduces-load-time-for-news-sites-by-44
The duo found that with Tracking Protection enabled, the Alexa top 200 news sites saw a 67.5 percent reduction in the number of HTTP cookies set. Furthermore, performance benefits included a 44 percent median reduction in page load time and 39 percent reduction in data usage.
monica-at-mozilla.blogspot.ca/2015/05/tracking-protection-for-firefox-at-web.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
AnandTech Call for Writers: 2015
by Ryan Smith on May 25, 2015 11:00 AM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9198/anandtech-call-for-writers-2015
The Call for Writers has become something of an annual tradition over here at AnandTech
In the last year of course we were acquired by Purch, which presents us with some additional opportunities we have not had in the past.
Tomi Engdahl says:
This startup may have found the answer for getting people to pay for journalism online
Read more: http://uk.businessinsider.com/blendle-at-digital-media-strategies-2015-3?r=US#ixzz3bHiOki5p
Tomi Engdahl says:
Here’s the good news: banks will be obsolete in 10 years
http://www.sovereignman.com/trends/heres-the-good-news-banks-will-be-obsolete-in-10-years-16688/
Every few centuries or so, an amazing new technology comes along that fundamentally changes human civilization.
There are so many other examples throughout history. The Agricultural Revolution. The Industrial Revolution. The invention of the printing press.
The printing press changed everything.
In Europe, the number of printed books went from millions to literally billions.
Suddenly information became extremely difficult for governments to control. Ideas became unconstrained. Antiquated political regimes were brought down. And intellectual achievement flourished.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why PowerPoint Should Be Banned
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/05/26/2225229/why-powerpoint-should-be-banned
An editorial at the Washington Post argues that Microsoft PowerPoint is being relied upon by too many to do too much, and we should start working to get rid of it. “Its slides are oversimplified, and bullet points omit the complexities of nearly any issue. The slides are designed to skip the learning process, which — when it works — involves dialogue, eye-to-eye contact and discussions.”
PowerPoint should be banned. This PowerPoint presentation explains why.
Make these slides the last ones you ever read.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/05/26/powerpoint-should-be-banned-this-powerpoint-presentation-explains-why/?tid=pm_pop_b
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jack Marshall / Wall Street Journal:
Mobile web traffic adds to desktop, which is not in decline as some reports might suggest
Mobile Isn’t Killing the Desktop Internet
http://blogs.wsj.com/cmo/2015/05/26/mobile-isnt-killing-the-desktop-internet/
People are increasingly accessing online content on mobile devices, but that doesn’t mean the desktop is in decline.
A theory sometimes bandied about the media industry says audiences are deserting desktops and “going mobile” instead. But actually, data from online measurement firms doesn’t seem to support that view, at least at the aggregate market level.
The share of overall consumption coming from mobile devices is growing, but desktop web usage isn’t dropping. In fact, it might be increasing.
“The key thing to remember is that percentages are not zero-sum,” said Tony Haile, CEO of online analytics firm Chartbeat. “You can have mobile growing to 50% of your traffic and desktop traffic remaining healthy.”
That understanding has important implications for media owners and marketers, who often say they’re altering their sites and strategies to cater for their growing mobile audiences. It makes sense to optimize for mobile if that’s a large and growing audience, but mobile isn’t the only game in town. In fact, it seems desktop Internet use is here to stay, for the time being at least.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bob Lefsetz / The Lefsetz Letter:
Lesson for journalists: just because you’re a star don’t think you’re bigger than the enterprise
lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2015/05/27/recode-to-vox/
Katie Benner / Bloomberg View:
After Re/code’s sale, the overlooked subscription business model for news sites looks better than ad-based models — Re/code’s Sale and Life After Advertising — After the tech news site Re/code sold itself to Vox Media, reports in Fortune and the New York Post noted that the deal …
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-05-27/subscriptions-may-work-better-than-advertising-for-digital-news
Tomi Engdahl says:
Benjamin Mullin / Poynter:
Vox works with McClatchy to bring explainers to local readers — There’s a problem in journalism that’s been bothering Melissa Bell for a long time: How can digital storytelling techniques dreamed up in national news organizations find their way to smaller publications with mostly local audiences?
Vox works with McClatchy to bring explainers to local readers
http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/347415/vox-works-with-mcclatchy-to-bring-explainers-to-local-readers/
“I think that when we talk about digital journalism, we’re not seeing a huge amount of success and answers getting down to the local level,” said Bell, the vice president of growth and analytics at Vox Media. “And I really worry about that. I think about that a lot. I think we as an industry should be thinking about how to take some of the solutions that we figure out at the national level and help them get to the local level.”
News organizations like Vox.com have big national audiences that come with the scale and investment to foster digital innovation. But how frequently do those solutions trickle down to smaller properties? Not often enough, says Bell.
At least one major news organization has already taken Bell up on the offer. Starting Thursday, the McClatchy Company’s Washington, D.C. bureau will begin including the card stacks in relevant national and world stories. Those articles, which will feature card stacks embedded using a shortcode, will then be distributed to the company’s local and regional newspapers across the nation.
For McClatchy, the benefits of using the card stacks are twofold, said Julie Moos, director of shared news initiatives at McClatchy DC and Poytner.org‘s former editor. The company, which has lately been rethinking its storytelling strategy and rolling out redesigns, will use the card stacks to add an additional layer of context to its stories. And through conversations with Vox.com about embedding the card stacks, McClatchy is gaining insight into how the digitally native news outlet operates.
“It’s a great opportunity to learn from a company that has been innovating in digital ways that are going to allow us to do things that we couldn’t otherwise do,” Moos said.
“Card stacks and articles are meant to work together, the former providing depth to the latter,” Bell said. “In the end, card stacks made sense as an embeddable tool – they’re there when you need them, at the bottom of an article, or linked from a big picture question.”
There’s also a financial upside to making the cards available for wider use. Vox.com has the capacity to display ads in the card stacks
Vox isn’t the only news organization making distributed content a priority. Late last month, NPR began offering embed codes for its library of 800,000 pieces of audio in the hopes of introducing its content to new audiences. The Guardian, The New York Times and the BBC have long offered API’s that allow others to embed their content. And companies like BuzzFeed and First Look Media have both created publications that make content exclusively for the social Web.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Creating fake research to show gullibility of science journalism is ethically wrong — Is it OK to generate a fake news story to make a point? No — Op-ed: Journalist thinks it’s fine to fool millions in order to make a point. — It may come as a surprise to regular readers, but I like the modern era of science.
Is it OK to generate a fake news story to make a point? No
Op-ed: Journalist thinks it’s fine to fool millions in order to make a point.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/05/is-it-okay-to-generate-a-fake-news-story-to-make-a-point-no/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Quinn Norton / Medium:
Security journalist admits to hypocrisy of enabling tracking visitors, but holds hope for a better Internet through collective pushback and digital literacy
The Hypocrisy of the Internet Journalist
I’m selling you out as hard as I can, and I’m sorry.
https://medium.com/message/the-hypocrisy-of-the-internet-journalist-587d33f6279e
It’s been hard to make a living as a journalist in the 21st century, but it’s gotten easier over the last few years, as we’ve settled on the world’s newest and most lucrative business model: invasive surveillance. News site webpages track you on behalf of dozens of companies: ad firms, social media services, data resellers, analytics firms — we use, and are used by, them all.
I got into it from the internet side, but for marketers who built databases of consumer information, the web was love at first sight. The introduction of the browser cookie was a transcendent moment in data collection. It was like the first time a kid at Hogwarts used their wand. You knew it was big, but how big? All you could say is “This will be bigger than I can imagine now.” — and that’s what I told people.
I had a bright career in front of me. We no longer had to track people by demographic data; we could track everything. I could build your life up individually in the database, I could use everything you did to shape a message that could transcend merely appealing to you. I was at a small horrible company to begin with, but I started getting calls from major corporations, and interest from Madison Avenue firms. And then I snapped. I couldn’t stand what I was about to do to the world.
The thing is: I quit, but no one else did. They continued to weave this great net, and catch everyone in it.
Six months later I was waiting tables in Florida. I was broke, but I didn’t hate myself. Now 20 years and several careers on, I wonder if I should.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alan Rusbridger / Guardian:
Alan Rusbridger reflects on 20 years as editor of the Guardian — ‘Farewell, readers’: Alan Rusbridger on leaving the Guardian after two decades at the helm — After 20 years as editor, Alan Rusbridger is stepping down. Here he reflects on two decades of sweeping change …
‘Farewell, readers’: Alan Rusbridger on leaving the Guardian after two decades at the helm
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/may/29/farewell-readers-alan-rusbridger-on-leaving-the-guardian
After 20 years as editor, Alan Rusbridger is stepping down. Here he reflects on two decades of sweeping change – from broadsheet to Berliner, Aitken to Snowden, and newsprint to pixels – and recalls his fervent wish when he took the job: “Please, please let me not drop the vase”
This, if you’re reading the physical paper – which, of course, you are not – is my last edition as editor. In just over 20 years we have put nearly 7,500 papers “to bed”, as almost no one says nowadays. At some point in the 24-hour, seamlessly rolling digital news cycle, you’ll have a new editor
Since 1821 there have been just 10 editors of the Guardian – or 11 if you count Russell Scott Taylor, the 18-year-old who helped edit for a brief period in the 1840s. The greatest of them, CP Scott, managed 57 years in the hot seat. His son, Ted, drowned on Windermere only three years into his stint. Twenty years is, give or take, about the average.
The paper I joined in 1979 felt in some ways like a family firm, and in a sense, it still is.
And I was very firmly a writer: it never occurred to me that I would ever edit any bit of the Guardian, let alone be let loose on the whole thing. I even left at one point, to take my writing elsewhere. But in late 1988 the Guardian badly needed a Weekend magazine
Stories were told in words and (more recently) pictures – still black and white, the “proper” medium for news 20 years ago. The rhythm of the day built up to one main deadline, around 9.30pm. We knew the cost of paper, ink, printing and distribution, and could flex the price of advertising, and of the newspaper itself.
Twenty years later, we swim in unknown unknowns. We still tell stories in text and pictures, but the words are as likely to be in the form of live blogs as stories. We have learned to use moving pictures as well as stills. We work in audio, interactives, data, graphics and any combination of the above. We distribute our journalism across multiple channels, platforms and devices, including live discussion and debate. We’re on the iWatch; we’re in bed with Facebook; we’re still in the corner shop.
Two thirds of our readership is now outside of the UK: we publish continuously. Virtually all our readers can themselves now be publishers and can connect with one another, and anyone else, as well as us. They contribute to the Guardian in ways that were unimaginable even 15 years ago.
On top of all that, we still produce a newspaper. Or, more precisely, two.
The economic model of what we now do is still in its infancy. Twenty years ago, no one asked a newspaper editor about their business model. Now it’s one of the first questions. And, of course, the Guardian – though extremely financially secure today compared with many periods in its past – is no more immune than any of its rivals to the need to find a sustainable basis for what it does.
Some publishers have decided to erect walls around their digital content and insist on payment. The polar opposites are represented by the Guardian and the Times of London, the latter of which today claims a daily digital audience of around 281,000. In April the Guardian was read by more than 7 million unique browsers a day.
Then came the first Internet Years, during which – under Ian Katz’s leadership – we created a website that didn’t fall into the trap of simply replicating online what we did in print.
Then there was an interlude with the print Format Wars – a response to the bold move by the Independent and Times to switch from broadsheet publishing to tabloid.
The next phase was the Social Web, or Web 2.0, as it was first called. Emily Bell, by then editing our digital output and our resident seer, quickly pronounced this to be as important as the web itself. There was a fork in the road, she warned us: we could fence ourselves off from this social, economic, cultural and publishing revolution, or we could embrace it wholeheartedly. Open or closed? We went for open.
An early experiment was Comment Is Free, launched by Georgina Henry in 2006
We had to devise new rules and conventions. A new breed of journalist – comment moderators – was born in order to handle the avalanche of opinion. We had created a new democracy of expression, which was sometimes uncomfortable, but mostly rich and absorbing, and sometimes even exhilarating.
And, finally, there were the stories
Tomi Engdahl says:
Guardian timeline
A timeline of the Guardian’s history since its foundation in Manchester in 1821
http://www.theguardian.com/gnm-archive/2002/jun/11/1
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why more public media content should be licensed under Creative Commons
http://current.org/2015/05/why-more-public-media-content-should-be-licensed-under-creative-commons/
In February 2015, NPR’s Danny Zwerdling published a four-part investigative series on nurses who had been injured on the job. The series was published on the NPR website and distributed using NPR’s API to member station websites.
NPR does have an API but it stipulates that use is for “personal, non-commercial use, or for noncommercial online use by a nonprofit corporation which is exempt from federal income taxes under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.”
This means Danny’s lengthy investigation could not be published by a for-profit alternative weekly or by a nursing organization. It could not be picked up by a wire service or distributed by a foreign news organization. Danny’s piece has won awards and inspired local stations to localize coverage but did it have the greatest possible impact it could have had online?
I was thinking about Danny’s pieces when I saw that ProPublica encourages anyone to steal its stories, which are published under a Creative Commons license and frequently picked up by other publications.
ProPublica also makes sure it can track the impact of any stories that are distributed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Creative Commons license. This is really important, because it allows ProPublica to keep track of how their stories are being disseminated and include numbers from their republished material in reports that go out to funders and their Boards.
I am not advocating that NPR or member stations release all of their content under a Creative Commons license. This would destroy NPR’s business model, which is currently based, in part, on member stations’ paying dues to broadcast their programming. But for breaking news, which often garner a national audience, and investigative pieces — which are designed to have impact and spur change — doesn’t it make sense for the stories to reach the biggest audience possible?
I say breaking news because member stations are often providing in-depth, well-reported coverage of local, breaking news events that are of interest to national audience — and don’t always receive the audience they should.
For breaking news pieces that attain national significance and for investigative pieces that require a lot of time, capital, and labor, it makes sense to think of the audience beyond public media’s walls online.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alexandra Steigrad / WWD:
Time Inc. to introduce paywalls beginning with Entertainment Weekly, other titles to follow this summer
Time Inc. Rolls Out Paid Content Plan
http://wwd.com/media-news/publishing/time-inc-paid-content-entertainment-weekly-paywall-10137006/
Time Inc. is rolling out a digital paid content strategy beginning with Entertainment Weekly.
According to the New York-based publisher, the goal is to gain greater insight into the digital preferences of its audiences and to grow another stream of revenue.
EW subscribers will still have unlimited access to content on all platforms, but those who are not subscribers will only have free access to a defined number of stories or videos. The company said it will offer a variety of paid options, including a monthly unlimited Web access pass, an all-access bundle to print and digital, newsletters and new fee-based apps.
“Deepening our relationships with digital audiences who value our premium content is of paramount importance to us,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Benjamin Snyder / Fortune:
Shazam partners with HarperCollins, Warner Bros, Time Inc., others to give mobile users interactive multimedia content
Shazam just rolled out this surprising new feature
http://fortune.com/2015/05/28/shazam-visual-recognition/
Way more stuff is about to become “Shazamable”
Shazam, the app known for allowing users to press a button and have their phone detect a song that’s playing, is breaking into a new market. The company announced Thursday a new feature that identifies objects in the real world.
Along with the new update comes a bevy of fresh partnerships. Shazam is working with companies like Disney to offer users new interactive content around physical items. A user can open the Shazam app, click a new camera feature, scan a Shazam icon and open the sometimes-exclusive content related to the visual. There are partnerships with a range of other companies and products, including Target, The Wall Street Journal, Warner Bro., Evian, HarperCollins and Time Inc., parent company of Fortune.
“Visual recognition is what’s next for us, [including] the ability for users to engage with printed packaging, print ads, books, CDs, [and] a whole world of things,”
While the feature potentially unlocks new experiences for the user, the biggest hurdle to clear will be getting users to understand how and when to use it. “Part of this is about user education,”
Shazam, which was founded in 1999, boasts over 100 million active users per month and has diversified its offerings substantially in the last few years. Last year, Shazam added TV recognition.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Concessionist / The Awl:
The Awl’s “Concessionist”: don’t major in journalism, even if you might want to be a journalist some day
I’m Graduating High School and I Want to Be a Journalist but Everyone Says I’m Nuts!
http://www.theawl.com/2015/05/consider-being-a-gunrunner-too-though
Tomi Engdahl says:
Joshua Benton / Nieman Lab:
Wearable users will demand customized experiences which news companies aren’t ready to provide yet — The Apple Watch will expose how little publishers know about their readers
The Apple Watch will expose how little publishers know about their readers
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/05/the-apple-watch-will-expose-how-little-publishers-know-about-their-readers/
Apple’s new wearable may or may not be a big hit. But either way, it’s a harbinger of a new class of truly personal devices whose users will demand customized experiences. News companies aren’t ready to provide them.
The arrival of any new class of devices leads the journalism-inclined to ask: What does it mean for news? And today, at least, the answer is: not much. Only a small share of news consumers will have a smartwatch in the immediate future. The first class of news apps, from all the usual big players, are annoying to launch, clumsy to navigate, and shallow in content.
What the Apple Watch is really good at is notifications — getting your attention. And that’s important. The shift to digital has pushed news from a scheduled activity — a morning newspaper, an evening newscast — to a constant background noise, something you dip into or stumble upon irregularly. The art of usefully interrupting someone with news is turning into one of this century’s key journalistic skills.
And anyone whose memory stretches back more than a few years should hesitate to dismiss the Apple Watch too quickly. When the iPhone debuted in 2007, plenty thought it as a rich geek’s plaything, a niche product for Apple’s fan club.
Even among those who saw the iPhone’s potential, few would have guessed that, in less than a decade, it would become the primary way many people — particularly young people — get news. Or that the iPhone (and other devices modeled on it) would be driving the majority of traffic to many news sites. Or that it would create entirely new interface paradigms for accessing news and other information.
So what’s standing between today and this sort of smartwatch future? There are boring technical answers: faster processors, better networks. But the real hurdle is intelligence. Personalization. Data. Making those judgments — what you’re interested in and in what context — will require huge amounts of user data. These devices will be personalized in every other important way — your messages, your fitness, your heartbeat — and it’s unlikely smartwatch users will stand for a one-size-fits-all package of news.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Telegraph Media Group delivers operating profits of £54.9m
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/11639407/Telegraph-Media-Group-delivers-operating-profits-of-54.9m.html
Telegraph Media Group, the publisher of The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and Telegraph.co.uk, has reported an operating profit before exceptional items of £54.9m for 2014.
This comes after an £8m investment in digital operations.
The Telegraph generated some 72m global unique browsers and 453m global page views to its website in December 2014, up from 61m and 344m in December 2013, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
“The digital audience and revenue has continued to grow strongly, and the range and quality of devices and formats with which customers can engage with the content has been significantly enhanced.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tech More: Kara Swisher Walt Mossberg Vox Media Jim Bankoff
Why Re/code, an 18-month-old tech news startup, really sold to Vox — even though it was generating $12 million
http://www.businessinsider.com/why-recode-sold-to-vox-2015-6#ixzz3bto5x4kX
Last week, Jim Bankoff’s Vox Media acquired an 18-month-old tech publication, Re/code.
Re/code was founded by highly respected tech journalists Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher in early 2014. They had launched the AllThingsD tech news website and related D conferences for News Corp, and they essentially took that business with them.
When starting Re/code, Swisher and Mossberg raised $10 million at a ~$28 million valuation
Most of its revenue was generated from Code, its A-list technology conference, which was the successor to the D conferences. Tickets to Code cost more than $3,000 a piece and the lineup for the last two years has included the CEOs of Uber, Snapchat, Twitter, Salesforce, Netflix, Microsoft, and Dropbox.
Other publications have been quick to call Re/code’s exit a failure. The short-lived startup has been compared to Gigaom, which raised $40 million then suddenly shut down. Pando’s Paul Carr, a former TechCrunch reporter, gloated, “Kara Swisher has lost.”
But if you look under Re/code’s hood and at what’s happening in the digital media landscape, Swisher and Mossberg made a smart decision.
Over the past year, a number of digital publications have armed themselves with a war chest of capital to become the next CNNs, Disneys, and Bloombergs of the world. Vox has raised more than $100 million. BuzzFeed — which turned down a big buyout offer from Disney — has raised nearly as much and discussed going public. Business Insider has raised $56 million and eclipsed The Wall Street Journal in traffic. Vice has raised nearly half a billion dollars and has a show on HBO.
While each of those publications has more than 50 million readers, Re/code’s website only attracted about 2.5 million unique visitors per month.
It’s hard to consider a multi-million-dollar exit with such small readership anything but a win — even if Swisher and Mossberg end up flat.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-recode-sold-to-vox-2015-6#ixzz3btovb69W
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cale Guthrie Weissman / Business Insider:
Sources: nearly all of Medium’s sites are undergoing major upheavals; employees quiet on changes due to NDA
Medium, the publishing platform started by one of Twitter’s cofounders, is gutting some of its most popular sites
http://www.businessinsider.com/medium-budget-cuts-and-restructuring-2015-6?op=1
Two weeks ago, publishing platform Medium — which has become known for tech and culture blogs like Matter, Backchannel, The Nib, and The Message — announced a change in its direction.
Medium now wants to become more of a social network rather than a publishing platform. But this comes at a great cost to its full-time and freelance staff, people familiar with the matter told Business Insider.
“Medium is not a publishing tool,” CEO Ev Williams wrote in the announcement. “It’s a network. A network of ideas that build off each other. And people. And GIFs.”
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/medium-budget-cuts-and-restructuring-2015-6#ixzz3bu9OW3uo
Tomi Engdahl says:
WAN-IFRA:
Global newspaper circulation revenue $92B and advertising revenue $87B in 2014, the first time circulation revenue exceeded ad revenue this century — World Press Trends: Newspaper Revenues Shift To New Sources — A profound shift in the newspaper business model, evolving for years, is finally here.
World Press Trends: Newspaper Revenues Shift To New Sources
http://www.wan-ifra.org/press-releases/2015/06/01/world-press-trends-newspaper-revenues-shift-to-new-sources
A profound shift in the newspaper business model, evolving for years, is finally here.
Global newspaper circulation revenues are larger than newspaper advertising revenues for the first time this century, according to the annual World Press Trends survey released Monday by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA).
“The basic assumption of the news business model — the subsidy that advertisers have long provided to news content — is gone,” said Larry Kilman, Secretary General of WAN-IFRA, who presented the survey at the 67th World Newspaper Congress, 22nd World Editors Forum and 25th World Advertising Forum in Washington, D.C. “We can freely say that audiences have become publishers’ biggest source of revenue.”
Newspapers generated an estimated US$179 billion in circulation and advertising revenue in 2014 — larger than the book publishing, music or film industries. Ninety-two billion dollars came from print and digital circulation, while 87 billion came from advertising, the survey said.
“This is a seismic shift from a strong business-to-business emphasis – publishers to advertisers – to a growing business-to-consumer emphasis, publishers to audiences,” said Mr. Kilman.
Throughout the 20th century, advertising brought up to 80 per cent of revenues in some markets. The ratio varies from market to market: in some European and Asian markets, advertising might bring 40 per cent of revenues.
But the survey showed that newspaper advertising revenues are falling nearly everywhere, while circulation revenues are relatively stable.
“Print used to be one of few traditional marketing channels and often the one that was the most ubiquitous for branding and logical choice for all marketers,” said Mr. Kilman. “This direct relationship of mutual dependence no longer exists. Advertisers nowadays have more than 60 different advertising media channels available to them.”
Though newspapers are now ubiquitous on all media platforms, the measure of their reach and influence continues to be mired in the 20th century, largely relying on print circulation and a variety of separate, non-standardized measures of digital reach.
The Future is Mobile
Eight out of 10 smartphone users check their device within 15 minutes of waking up. It’s a fight for audience’s attention and mobile has it.
– Globally consumers spend an average of almost 2.2 hours per day with mobile (97 minutes) and tablet (37 minutes), which together account for 37 per cent of media time, ahead of television (81 minutes), the desktop (70 minutes), radio (44 minutes), and print (33 minutes), according to the InMobi mobile media consumption report.
– App usage represents about half of mobile engagement, with leading media now seeing 30 per cent or more of their monthly audiences coming exclusively from mobile platforms.
– For the first time, desktop audience numbers are falling. Time spent using smartphones now exceeds web usage on computers in the United States, the United Kingdom and Italy.
Print Circulation Rises in East, Sets in West
Digital Circulation Grows
– Around 2.7 billion people around the world read newspapers in print and more than 770 million on desktop digital platforms. However, there is increasing evidence — from countries with sophisticated and robust metrics — that print and digital combined are increasing audiences for newspapers globally.
– Print circulation increased +6.4 per cent globally in 2014 from a year earlier and shows a five year growth of +16.5 per cent. This is the largely the result of circulation increases in India and elsewhere in Asia; the newspaper business in India is still the healthiest print newspaper industry in the world.
– In mature markets, newspapers are adopting strategies to make more money from fewer subscribers. These include cover price increases and lowering production costs by reducing the frequency of printing. But these practices risks alienating some segments of their readership in exchange for growth in revenues.
– Paid digital circulation increased 56 per cent in 2014 and rose more than 1,420 per cent over the last five years, according to PwC. One in 10 people in a Reuters Institute Digital News Report survey of 10 countries said they now pay for digital content. That ranges from 22 per cent in Brazil to 7 percent in the United Kingdom.
Print Still Pays
– Globally, more than 93 per cent of all newspaper revenues still come from print, and print will continue to be a major source of revenue for many years to come.
– While digital advertising represents a small part of overall newspaper revenue, it continues to grow significantly, increasing 8 per cent in 2014 and 59 per cent over five years, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.
TV Takes Biggest Bite of Advertising but Internet and Mobile Gaining
– Television continues to maintain the largest share of global advertising revenues, with just under 40 per cent, followed by desktop and mobile internet with more than 24 per cent, newspapers with 15 per cent, magazines with 7.3 per cent, outdoor and radio with around 7 per cent, and cinema with half a per cent.
– Print advertising world-wide declined -5.17 per cent in 2014 from a year earlier and declined -17.51 per cent over five years. Since it began in the mid-1990s, Internet advertising (both desktop and mobile) has principally risen at the expense of print.
– Internet adspend overtook total adspend on both newspapers and magazines in 2014. Over the last ten years, Internet advertising has risen from 4 per cent of total global spend to 24 per cent. In the same period, newspapers’ share of global spend has halved from 30 per cent to 15 per cent, while magazines’ has fallen from 13 per cent to 7.3 per cent.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sarah Shaffi / The Bookseller:
US e-book sales drop 6% in 2014 to 223M, down from 240M in 2013 — US e-book sales down 6% in 2014 — E-book sales in the US declined by 6% in 2014 compared to the year before, statistics released by Nielsen show.
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/us-e-book-sales-down-6-2014
Tomi Engdahl says:
Benjamin Mullin / Poynter:
New York Times, Washington Post, and Mozilla launch The Coral Project, an initiative to help form communities of commenters
The Coral Project aims to help commenters become communities
http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/347815/the-coral-project-aims-to-help-commenters-become-communities/
Earlier this year, a group of Washington Post readers decided to meet up because of something they’d read online. They weren’t prompted by a column published at Washingtonpost.com or an article in the pages of the newspaper. Instead, they were driven by a feature sometimes viewed as an afterthought by news organizations, if it’s considered at all: the comments.
the Boodle is one of several groups on the Internet held up as model communities by an ambitious initiative that involves two major American news organizations. The Coral Project, a joint effort from The Washington Post, The New York Times and Mozilla, aims to transform interactive spaces on news sites with $3.89 million in funding from The Knight Foundation.
Since the project was announced last summer, its representatives have quietly been gathering ideas from editors, readers, designers and others. Now, with the project’s team beginning to come together, the finer details are starting to come into focus
For starters, The Coral Project team has determined that they aren’t just working on one product. Rather, they intend to build a series of open-source apps that work in concert to help publishers manage different aspects of their online communities. This approach is intended to give news organizations greater flexibility, allowing them to use the apps that provide the functions they need and eschew the ones they don’t.
The team has also figured out a partial list of problems that they’d like to fix. Chief among them is the fact that publishers spend a lot of time in comments dealing with trolls who turn reasonable conversations into invective-fueled pie fights. They want to build a product that can help flip the script on community management, one that lets publishers devote time to rewarding good commenters rather than policing bad ones.
“I would love to be able to go to a reporter and say, ‘I know you’ve got 10 minutes and 5,000 comments on your story,’” Barber said. “You can go right here and find the contributions from our most thoughtful contributors — spend your time there. Because those people have earned it.”
To do that, the team will likely come up with some system that allows news organizations to manage the reputations of its commenters, establishing a permanent record of sorts that distinguishes between trolls and enlightened readers. What that system looks like is still unclear, but it will probably include some aspects of peer review (think Reddit’s voting system) and evaluation from staffers. As for whether the project will allow for anonymous commenting, Barber says the team will probably build a tool that allows each publisher to answer that question themselves.
The team has also discussed how the apps might manage user-generated content, how to make the software work for different-sized newsrooms, and what aspects from other sites — like those of Quartz, Medium, The Washington Post and The New York Times — The Coral Project might emulate. But everything they produce is supposed to meet a few basic tenets.
“We’re really hoping to set up a virtuous circle of information that brings together the goals and hopes and dreams of publishers and readers and contributors,” Barber said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Christian Caryl / Foreign Policy:
How three Costa Rican reporters upended the nation’s political system through data reporting — The Data Sleuths of San José — How three scrappy Costa Rican reporters used the power of data to bring down a system of sleaze. — The real estate agent was angry.
The Data Sleuths of San José
How three scrappy Costa Rican reporters used the power of data to bring down a system of sleaze.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/05/27/the-data-sleuths-of-san-jose-costa-rica-corruption/
The three journalists who made up La Nación’s investigative unit — Giannina Segnini, Mauricio Herrera, and Rivera — deployed the full arsenal of traditional reporting techniques as they pursued the story. But the sheer magnitude of the financial and political information they unearthed prompted them to rely increasingly on computerized tools to rummage through databases that revealed unexpected connections. While tips from well-informed sources like the disgruntled real estate agent are vital, says Segnini, human sources also have limitations: “You can’t visit 160,000 people,” she notes. “But you can easily interrogate 160,000 records.”
Segnini, who headed La Nación’s investigative unit from 1994 to 2014, started working with data from early on in her career at the paper.
A few years after arriving at La Nación she went to court to obtain access to data on government anti-poverty subsidies — which she then cross-referenced with databases on property ownership, vehicle registration, and salaries. The comparison revealed that some of those getting the subsidies were actually well-off; it turned out that crooked politicians were using the program to dispense patronage.
Thanks to the reams of financial data they’d amassed, the Nación team soon found itself unraveling a well-established system for the collection and distribution of under-the-table payments made by foreign companies in return for lucrative government contracts.
Most dramatically of all, though, the reporters’ work also led the way to another bribery scandal on an even grander scale than the first.
So how did three journalists manage to crack open a cartel of corruption that encompassed many of their country’s most powerful politicians and business tycoons? “One key factor of the success of the team at that moment was the complementary skills of the people who belonged to it,” says Mauricio Herrera. “I think that’s very important for any team. It’s a bad idea to put together a group of people who are cut from the same cloth.” Segnini, with her technological bent, was the nerd in chief, always willing to experiment with a new approach. Rivera was the traditionalist storyteller, an award-winning fiction writer who wasn’t always convinced that computers were the way. Herrera, whose political views lay notably leftward of most of his colleagues at the right-of-center paper, brought a strong interest in ideology and social science.
“The reality is that you can never develop these stories in some sort of ideal environment,” says Herrera. “You have to struggle with colleagues, and the owners of papers. Sometimes it’s the editors who have to deal with these pressures.”
Yet despite her enthusiasm for computer-assisted reporting, Segnini is quick to caution against one-sided reliance on the information that databases provide: “Data is a representation of reality, and it’s not always accurate. Much of the time it’s wrong. So let’s see what reality shows, out in the field.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ricardo Bilton / Digiday:
Former NYT director of audience development Kareem Ahmed introduces NYC.TV, a platform for local video makers, and a discovery tool for viewers — NYC.TV goes local to fix the video discovery problem — Putting a video online is easier than it has ever been, but good luck getting people to watch it.
NYC.TV goes local to fix the video discovery problem
http://digiday.com/publishers/nyc-tv-goes-local-fix-video-discovery-problem/
Putting a video online is easier than it has ever been, but good luck getting people to watch it.
Video creators everywhere are facing the same dilemma: While the Web has made video production almost effortless, discovery still remains one of the biggest problems. This is an issue particularly for small or independent creators, who lack the natural distribution advantages of large established media players.
“If someone wants to watch content created just by people in their city or community, there’s no place for them to go,”
We are providing content for videos that are created in NYC in a way that no one has before.” The company, which is still at just three people, is working on a funding round, as well as putting the final touches on a Kickstarter campaign.
Local media companies are a hard sell these days. The high-profile implosions of local initiatives such as Patch and TBD.com have turned off would-be local media entrepreneurs and investors. But Ahmed said that while NYC.TV is focused on local creators, its output has international appeal, giving NYC.TV an inherently global scope.
“Just publishing a video is not enough to drive audience to it. There needs to be another layer of effort that becomes a part of the process,” said Ahmed. “Even at a company like The Times, audience development is a massive undertaking.”
“A lot of creators put stuff online that just gets lost,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Joshua Benton / Nieman Lab:
Quartz is trying to make its articles stickier on smartphones with a new “Read Full Story” button — Quartz tweaked its site design Sunday, mostly in ways even careful readers are unlikely to notice. But one change stands out on mobile. If you follow a link to an article — say …
Quartz is trying to make its articles stickier on smartphones with a new “Read Full Story” button
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/06/quartz-is-trying-to-make-its-articles-stickier-on-smartphones-with-a-new-read-full-story-button/
Grabbing an idea from The New York Times, the business site is trying something counterintuitive with mobile traffic — adding an extra hurdle that makes it easier to offer readers alternative options.
Quartz tweaked its site design Sunday, mostly in ways even careful readers are unlikely to notice. But one change stands out on mobile. If you follow a link to an article — say, from Twitter or Facebook — and scroll down a bit, you’ll see the story fade out and a button that says “Read Full Story”
If you tap that button, you…read the full story. But if you just keep scrolling instead, you’ll first see an ad:
On the surface, it seems like an odd hurdle to put in front of the reader. She’s already tapped a link to that piece, after all; why assume that she wants to do anything other than read it?
The rise of social distribution has meant the rise of one-off visits — readers who come in the side door and exit right back out to the social platform from whence they came. No matter how good your content, some number of readers are going to abandon your story a few grafs in; why not give them some other options and throw in another ad impression while you’re at it? The bet here is that you’re annoying readers less with that extra tap than you are luring them into another article.
In a way, you can think of this as a natural response to responsive design. On desktop, article pages often have a main article well with one or more sidebars, filled with shiny things to click. On mobile, those shiny things tend to get pushed down below the article text — which, if the article’s lengthy, can be many screenfuls of scrolling away. This Quartz model puts the alternative actions closer to where the reader might see them.
(Note too that this marks the end of infinite scroll on mobile at the site that first popularized it in news circles. Now, after the end of a story, you get a list of headlines to pick from — not the full text of the next story.)
To give credit where it’s due, Zach mentions that the inspiration here is The New York Times, which started doing something similar on its mobile article pages last year for side-door non-logged-in mobile visits.
Such a button could also be useful as a story metric. Are some stories better than others at getting people to tap through to their conclusion? Do certain subjects or certain headline styles — or, god forbid, certain writers — consistently lead people to abandon ship pre-button?
Tomi Engdahl says:
News as a design challenge: New ideas for news’ future from MIT
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/05/news-as-a-design-challenge-new-ideas-for-news-future-from-mit/
Students and Nieman Fellows spent a semester building solutions for audience engagement, better tools to explore data, and new ideas for local media startups.
One of the most interesting parts of the class are the final projects from students, which focus on applying technology to newsgathering and distributing information. This year’s crop of projects included tools to help add more context to the news, new platforms for audience engagement, ideas for media startups, and a tool for exploring data.
Tomi Engdahl says:
oseph Lichterman / Nieman Lab:
How a group of researchers tried to use social media data and algorithms to find breaking news
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/06/how-a-group-of-researchers-tried-to-use-social-media-data-and-algorithms-to-find-breaking-news/
Using geotagged Instagram data, CityBeat tries — often unsuccessfully or belatedly — to find breaking news.
Shortly after 9:30 a.m. on March 12, 2014, two apartment buildings in East Harlem exploded when a water main collapsed into a gas line. Eight people were killed and dozens more were injured.
Journalists rushed to the scene to cover the tragedy, but four newsrooms — The New York Times, BuzzFeed, Gothamist, The New York World — had another tool to help them cover the explosions: CityBeat, a program designed to algorithmically search geotagged social media posts to find news stories in New York City. CityBeat was built by researchers at Cornell and Rutgers and was being tested by the four outlets at the time.
Social media posts about the building collapses appeared on CityBeat, but by the time there were enough posts to register in its algorithm, the news organizations themselves already knew about the explosion and had reporters and photographers on the scene.
CityBeat, the participants said, was most useful in covering planned events — conferences, concerts, events, or even PR stunts
The tool was less effective for covering realtime breaking news stories.
Though the researchers have moved onto other topics, CityBeat is still live. The site was designed to be shown on big screens in newsrooms and has three main components. There’s the Detected Events List, a compilation of events the algorithm has discovered in the past 24 hours using Instagram data. There’s also the Event Window, which shows specific events and their location within New York. The third element is a sidebar showing statistics on the rate of tweets, popular hashtags, and more.
To detect news events occurring around New York, the CityBeat algorithm examines geotagged Instagram data. If it notices a number of photos posted from one location, it’ll create a Candidate Event, which includes all the photos taken from that location that caused the alert. Once a Candidate Event is created, it’s automatically sent to Amazon Mechanical Turk workers to ensure that it’s actually a newsworthy event and not, say, a lot of people posting pictures of themselves visiting the Empire State Building. But this approach was “problematic,” the authors wrote in the paper.
“In many instances Amazon Mechanical Turk workers would get confused by the number of different photos that appeared and would classify actual events as noise,” the study says.
Algorithms and bots have become more commonplace in news as of late. The Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times now use bots to write certain stories; apps such as SmartNews use algorithms to sort through millions of URLs to display stories for its users; and of course there’s Facebook which can alter publishers’ fortunes with a tweak of its News Feed recipe.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Guardian US / Medium:
Guardian’s The Counted uses verified crowdsourced information to create a database of people killed by law enforcement in the US
The Counted: how the Guardian is counting every person killed by US police — with the internet’s help
https://medium.com/@GuardianUS/the-counted-how-the-guardian-is-counting-every-person-killed-by-us-police-with-the-internet-s-e89197266616
“We count everyone because everyone counts.”
The Counted is a project by the Guardian — and our readers — working to count the number of people killed by police and other law enforcement agencies in the United States throughout 2015, to monitor their demographics and to tell the stories of how they died.
The database combines Guardian reporting with verified crowdsourced information to build a more comprehensive record of such fatalities.
We have created the most detailed map of police killings ever published and will be updating the interactive experience as we learn more.
The Counted is the most thorough public accounting for deadly use of force in the US, but it will operate as an imperfect work in progress — and will be logged by Guardian reporters and interactive journalists as frequently and as promptly as possible.
You can download the data
Why is this necessary?
The US government has no comprehensive record of the number of people killed by law enforcement. This lack of basic data has been glaring amid the protests, riots and worldwide debate set in motion by the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014.
The FBI runs a voluntary program through which law enforcement agencies may or may not choose to submit their annual count of “justifiable homicides”, which it defines as “the killing of a felon in the line of duty”.
See it for yourself at http://www.theguardian.com/thecounted.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database#
Tomi Engdahl says:
Vanity Fair used heavy security to protect Caitlyn Jenner’s exclusive
http://mashable.com/2015/06/01/caitlyn-jenner-protected-exclusive/
Who knew the gossipy, overexposed, selfie-taking Kardashians could be so good at keeping a secret?
Vanity Fair unleashed one of the biggest cultural stories of the year on Monday with Caitlyn Jenner’s first public interview and photo shoot. The exclusive captivated the media world with a speed and intensity matched by few other articles.
For Vanity Fair, Jenner and her family, it marks the result of months of negotiations and work, as well as beefed up security to keep the story from leaking. The magazine hired security for the shoot and forced people to give up their cell phones to prevent anything from leaking.
The story and pictures were done on a single computer that was never connected to the Internet, with the assets put on a thumb drive every night and then deleted from the computer. The story was even hand-delivered to the printer.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Erin Griffith / Fortune:
How Facebook quadrupled its video traffic in one year to 4B video streams per day, and is reshaping advertising — How Facebook’s video-traffic explosion is shaking up the advertising world — Cenk Uygur can pinpoint the day he realized that Facebook FB video was going to rewrite his business model.
How Facebook’s video-traffic explosion is shaking up the advertising world
http://fortune.com/2015/06/03/facebook-video-traffic/
Facebook’s video traffic has reached 4 billion daily views, making the social network YouTube’s first real rival in online video—and an even tougher contender in the battle for digital ad dollars.
The video didn’t strike Uygur as anything special—just a typical example of his network’s progressive news commentary. But by lunchtime, it had racked up 7 million Facebook “impressions,” or people who saw it in their Facebook News Feed. By the time he finished eating, it had added another million. He looked again when he arrived at his Los Angeles office: 9 million, total. And after he taped a show: 15 million. A day later, 18 million people had seen it. The day after that? Twenty-three million.
In recent months that kind of “oh, my God” moment has occurred for video creators around the world. News site BuzzFeed’s video views on Facebook grew 80-fold in a year, reaching more than 500 million in April.
Seemingly overnight, video uploading and viewing have exploded on Facebook, where users now watch 4 billion video streams a day, quadruple what they watched a year ago. It’s happening because the social network’s engineers, quietly and with little fanfare, have retooled Facebook’s interface to make video easier than ever to watch and share. In February 2014, only a quarter of all videos posted to Facebook were uploaded directly to the network, while the rest came from YouTube or other video sites, according to analytics company Socialbakers. By a year later, the ratio had flipped: 70% of Facebook’s videos were uploaded directly.
These may sound like minor technical distinctions, but tiny changes make a huge difference when you’ve got 1.4 billion monthly active users.
Americans spend on smartphones, and Facebook drives nearly a quarter of all web traffic. The company’s recent video improvements will likely push those numbers even higher.
Facebook has already proved that it’s a quick study in the ad world. Mobile advertising, a meaningless sliver of its business three years ago, made up 73% of its $3.3 billion in advertising revenue in the first quarter of 2015. It’s the main reason Facebook’s total revenue has roughly tripled over that stretch, and it’s the driver of the network’s current $226 billion market cap and gaudy 40% operating profit margins. Video, especially mobile video, could blow up just as dramatically for Facebook, offering a gateway for advertisers to reach digital consumers in the format that most closely resembles television
Tomi Engdahl says:
Adrian Chen / New York Times:
Former employee on Russia’s government-backed troll farm the Internet Research Agency; wreaking havoc on the Internet and now targeting the US
The Agency
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html?_r=0
From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities.
The Columbian Chemicals hoax was not some simple prank by a bored sadist. It was a highly coordinated disinformation campaign, involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention. The perpetrators didn’t just doctor screenshots from CNN; they also created fully functional clones of the websites of Louisiana TV stations and newspapers. The YouTube video of the man watching TV had been tailor-made for the project. A Wikipedia page was even created for the Columbian Chemicals disaster, which cited the fake YouTube video. As the virtual assault unfolded, it was complemented by text messages to actual residents in St. Mary Parish. It must have taken a team of programmers and content producers to pull off.
And the hoax was just one in a wave of similar attacks during the second half of last year. On Dec. 13, two months after a handful of Ebola cases in the United States touched off a minor media panic, many of the same Twitter accounts used to spread the Columbian Chemicals hoax began to post about an outbreak of Ebola in Atlanta. The campaign followed the same pattern of fake news reports and videos, this time under the hashtag #EbolaInAtlanta, which briefly trended in Atlanta. Again, the attention to detail was remarkable, suggesting a tremendous amount of effort.
On the same day as the Ebola hoax, a totally different group of accounts began spreading a rumor that an unarmed black woman had been shot to death by police.
Who was behind all of this? When I stumbled on it last fall, I had an idea. I was already investigating a shadowy organization in St. Petersburg, Russia, that spreads false information on the Internet. It has gone by a few names, but I will refer to it by its best known: the Internet Research Agency. The agency had become known for employing hundreds of Russians to post pro-Kremlin propaganda online under fake identities, including on Twitter, in order to create the illusion of a massive army of supporters; it has often been called a “troll farm.” The more I investigated this group, the more links I discovered between it and the hoaxes.
Every day at the Internet Research Agency was essentially the same, Savchuk told me. The first thing employees did upon arriving at their desks was to switch on an Internet proxy service, which hid their I.P. addresses from the places they posted; those digital addresses can sometimes be used to reveal the real identity of the poster. Savchuk would be given a list of the opinions she was responsible for promulgating that day. Workers received a constant stream of “technical tasks” — point-by-point exegeses of the themes they were to address, all pegged to the latest news. Ukraine was always a major topic, because of the civil war there between Russian-backed separatists and the Ukrainian Army; Savchuk and her co-workers would post comments that disparaged the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, and highlighted Ukrainian Army atrocities.
As Savchuk and other former employees describe it, the Internet Research Agency had industrialized the art of trolling. Management was obsessed with statistics — page views, number of posts, a blog’s place on LiveJournal’s traffic charts — and team leaders compelled hard work through a system of bonuses and fines. “It was a very strong corporate feeling,” Savchuk says.
Employees were mostly in their 20s but were drawn from a broad cross-section of Russian society. It seemed as if the agency’s task was so large that it would hire almost anyone who responded to the many ads it posted on job boards, no matter how undereducated or politically ignorant they were. Posts teemed with logical and grammatical errors. “They were so stupid,”
Yet the exact point of their work was left unclear to them.
Several Russian media outlets have claimed that the agency is funded by Evgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch restaurateur called “the Kremlin’s chef” in the independent press for his lucrative government contracts and his close relationship with Putin.
Savchuk’s revelations about the agency have fascinated Russia not because they are shocking but because they confirm what everyone has long suspected: The Russian Internet is awash in trolls. “This troll business becomes more popular year by year,” says Platon Mamatov, who says that he ran his own troll farm in the Ural Mountains from 2008 to 2013.
Also, by working every day to spread Kremlin propaganda, the paid trolls have made it impossible for the normal Internet user to separate truth from fiction.
“The point is to spoil it, to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it,”
Russia’s information war might be thought of as the biggest trolling operation in history, and its target is nothing less than the utility of the Internet as a democratic space. In the midst of such a war, the Runet (as the Russian Internet is often called) can be an unpleasant place for anyone caught in the crossfire.
Paid as a Pro-Kremlin Troll: ‘The Hatred Spills over into the Real World’
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-ex-russian-internet-troll-lyudmila-savchuk-a-1036539.html
Lyudmila Savchuk recently went public about her experiences working for a Russian Internet propaganda factory in St. Petersburg. In an interview, she describes how clandestine workers are promoting the Kremlin’s message.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sajith Pai / INMA:
How the blockchain could affect media: micro-payments, programming content, advertising — Beyond bitcoin to the blockchain: What it means for news publishers — Blockchains could cause major disruption in many industries. In media, this means an opportunity for securing micro-payments …
Beyond bitcoin to the blockchain: What it means for news publishers
Read more: http://www.inma.org/blogs/tech-trends/post.cfm/beyond-bitcoin-to-the-blockchain-what-it-means-for-news-publishers#ixzz3c4cfBI68
Tomi Engdahl says:
The quest to save today’s gaming history from being lost forever
Changes in digital distribution, rights management increasingly make preservation tough.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/06/the-quest-to-save-todays-gaming-history-from-being-lost-forever/
“The very nature of digital [history] is that it’s both inherently easy to save and inherently easy to utterly destroy forever.”
Jason Scott knows what he’s talking about when it comes to the preservation of digital software. At the Internet Archive, he’s collected thousands of classic games, pieces of software, and bits of digital ephemera. His sole goal is making those things widely available through the magic of browser-based emulation.
Compared to other types of archaeology, this kind of preservation is still relatively easy for now. While the magnetic and optical disks and ROM cartridges that hold classic games and software will eventually be rendered unusable by time, it’s currently pretty simple to copy their digital bits to a form that can be preserved and emulated well into the future.
But paradoxically, an Atari 2600 cartridge that’s nearly 40 years old is much easier to preserve at this point than many games released in the last decade. Thanks to changes in the way games are being distributed, protected, and played in the Internet era, large parts of what will become tomorrow’s video game history could be lost forever. If we’re not careful, that is.
Throwing away the layers
“I totally get that people look at this and say all of this game history stuff is navel-gazing bullshit… an irrelevant, wasteful, trivial topic,” Scott told Ars. “[But] mankind is poorer when you don’t know your history, all of your history, and the culture is poorer for it.”
And in today’s game industry, being “constantly in the now” often means throwing out masses of current history without a thought. “I use FarmVille often as my go-to example of this because, like it or not, that game is historically significant and will be studied,” gaming historian and Lost Levels creator Frank Cifaldi told Ars. “Keeping an offline game safe is pretty easy, but what do you do for FarmVille, a game that is constantly updated, to the point where Zynga manipulates it server-side?”
These days, it’s not just Facebook games that are having their internal history slowly peeled away.
“An analogy here is maybe to a piece of architecture,” Dyson continued. “When you’re seeking to preserve a historic house, there may be layers, it may have been lived in by many different people. Mount Vernon had been lived in by George Washington’s descendants, so they made a decision to restore it to George Washington’s time and erase this later history. Do you make the same kind of decision with games?”
The death of “accidental ambient archiving”
Such historical restoration may not be easy with many modern titles. When updates are automatically pushed out and applied over the Internet every time you log on to a console or PC to play, those historical layers are erased en masse without a thought. Where patches may have once gone out via FTP sites, where they could be archived and studied, now the process is hidden. That’s more convenient for the players, but it’s the equivalent of a constant digital purge from a historian’s point of view.
“For that convenience [of automatic updating], we lose a lot of what you might call accidental ambient archiving,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Last year, The Sun Sentinel made digital a priority. So how’s it going?
http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/347297/last-year-the-sun-sentinel-made-digital-a-priority-so-hows-it-going/
In October, the South Florida Sun Sentinel unveiled a site redesign, a newspaper redesign and a new plan to cover the news. Called “The New Digital,” the plan was aimed at changing workflow and doing away with old print-based habits held by many of the journalists there. Except for one desk, everyone at the paper would work and produce for the Web.
Almost eight months later, I caught up with some of the staff at the Sun Sentinel to see how “The New Digital” is going.
“Change for many people can be scary, and you think, ‘oh we have this new initiative and it has a name and there are all these changes,’” said Jake Cline, arts and entertainment editor. “Once we started practicing it, it was fairly seamless.”
Here are three things I learned about how it’s going:
1. It takes time to break old habits
2. Fewer meetings means more time to work
3. Readers are getting more
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jordan Crook / TechCrunch:
Instapaper Launches ‘Notes’ To Let Users Annotate Text — Instapaper, the app that lets you save and share online articles, has just launched a new annotation functionality called Notes. — The feature allows users to select a piece of text from an article or other work, and make comments on that text.
Instapaper Launches ‘Notes’ To Let Users Annotate Text
http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/04/instapaper-launches-notes-to-let-users-annotate-text/#.7thvn3:dMjH
The feature allows users to select a piece of text from an article or other work, and make comments on that text. By default, Notes is set to private so no one can see your annotations. If they so choose, users can share their notes through the Twitter’s textshot feature,
Users can also share through other third-party iOS applications, such as Facebook, Evernote and Tumblr, or through a new IFTTT trigger.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Benjamin Mullin / Poynter:
To increase online reach, Reuters will offer free content to web publishers on a metered basis
Reuters to offer free content to Web publishers
http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/350133/reuters-to-offer-free-articles-to-web-publishers/
Reuters announced Tuesday a plan to offer free content — including pictures, video and text — to online publishers en masse for the first time in the news agency’s 160-year history.
The content will be made available through Reuters Media Express on a metered basis, allowing publishers to use an allotted portion of the newswire’s content per month, according to a press release from Reuters.
Reuters’ adoption of a metered content system is reminiscent of several major news organizations — including The New York Times, The Boston Globe and Gannett — which have in recent years have adopted metered paywalls.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Vice IPO: ‘We would be stupid if we didn’t see what the market will pay’
http://uk.businessinsider.com/vice-ceo-shane-smith-on-a-possible-ipo-2015-6?r=US
It sounds like youth-focused media company Vice is edging ever closer to an IPOo
As the laughs from the audience died down, Smith outlined Vice’s options:
1) It can stay “fiercely independent.” But the company has shareholders — WPP, 21st Century Fox, A&E Television Networks, and others — who may want to “dip their beak” and cash out at some point.
2) It can sell. But Smith said nobody would really be in the market to buy the company for the “north of $6-7 billion” he thinks the company is worth.
3) Or it can IPO. That too comes with challenges — “Right now the markets are frothy. No-one has seen a media company go public, with $1 billion revenue, and hockey stick growth [for some time.] We would be stupid if we didn’t see what the market will pay,” Smith said.
Read more: http://uk.businessinsider.com/vice-ceo-shane-smith-on-a-possible-ipo-2015-6?r=US#ixzz3cdrKJs7e
Tomi Engdahl says:
How the FT used wearables to open up the reporting process
https://www.journalism.co.uk/news/how-the-financial-times-experimented-with-wearable-technology-/s2/a565423/
The newspaper’s employment correspondent spent four days being tracked with devices in order to report on a story
Chris Brauer, a professor at Goldsmiths University, has been conducting studies focusing on wearables in the workplace and the correlation this may have with people’s performance and productivity.
But she decided to take her reporting one step further and not only wear them herself, but give readers daily updates on her progress.
“I thought this might give me a chance to find out more about how it actually feels to be an employee wearing all this stuff and whether or not it changes the way you feel about your job, your boss or yourself,” O’Connor told Journalism.co.uk.
The FT’s Wearables at Work Facebook page gathered more than 1,000 likes during the four days of the experiment.
Readers actively engaged in conversation with O’Connor, often leaving comments about how interesting the experiment had been and how it had made them aware of the implications of wearable technology.
“The fact that we told people what we were doing and what we were up to meant lots of people approached me and said ‘oh actually, I know this about something that’s happening here’ or ‘talk to this company that’s doing this sort of thing’ – it was quite helpful in terms of gathering interesting material about the topic,” O’Connor said.
He explained they initially decided to publish the updates via a “week-long, running liveblog”, but decided it was more practical to use Facebook as the primary publishing platform and “bring the content back onto the FT’s site using Storify.”