L.A. Times executive editor Kevin Merida and managing editor Kimi Yoshino told staff that the changes are a “major investment in our digital growth” and “a critical step toward attracting news readers.”

We wanted to talk to Melbourneweaver about the new “meme team” she’ll create within the larger audience group, a growing emphasis on experimentation at the Times, and what she finds funny on the internet.

Her last name, by the way? Melbourneweaver says people often ask about it (I did) and oftentimes assume she’s Australian (she is not). She and her husband both had longish, double surnames before marrying and had been going back and forth on what family name they’d choose. They were still deciding when filling out their marriage license. Her husband typed in his last name, without its hyphen, in the form and they decided to go with that. “In retrospect, I would have cut out a few letters,” she said. “Nix some of the vowels in there. But it’s a fun icebreaker.”

Here’s the conversation with Melbourneweaver edited for length, clarity, and to make it seem like I don’t say “you know” as often as I do.

A year ago, I quit the best job I ever had to start Platformer. Today I wanted to tell you all how it’s going, what I’ve learned, and how I hope the business will evolve in year two. My hope is that this piece offers some texture to ongoing discussions about how the creator economy and traditional journalism intersect, and proves useful both to journalists considering making a move like this and readers who are curious about whether this model can offer a more sustainable path for journalism than the rocky one we’ve been on lately.

I.

Let’s start with the good news. Platformer is, thanks to your support, the best job I’ve ever had. It affords me a good salary, covers my health care, and pays for the various expenses that come with running a small business. I’m hopeful that your continued support will allow me to expand the business soon, in ways I’ll discuss later in this post.

That support has come on the back of growth that surpassed my highest expectations for year one. When I started Platformer with the mailing list I accumulated while writing my previous newsletter, there were around 24,000 of them. Twelve months later, there are 49,604 people subscribed to Platformer’s free list, and they regularly open this newsletter at a rate that far exceeds in the industry average.

How did it grow that quickly? In short, by publishing journalism. The biggest spikes in both free and paid membership over the past year came after I published the best reporting I did this year. Here are some of the stories I’m proud of:

— Platformer was the first to report the details of the email that got Timnit Gebru fired from Google, in a piece later cited in a congressional inquiry.

— I revealed deep tensions within Signal over its plans to incorporate cryptocurrency and new social features into the app, risking a regulatory backlash that could threaten encryption globally.

— I explored how Medium’s latest pivot toward journalism ended in disaster for the talented journalists who worked there.

— I wrote the definitive pieces on what happened at Basecamp after its founders sought to eliminate political discussions in the workplace.

This was the incentive I hoped that this model of journalism would bring to my reporting: readers would encounter my journalism, like it, and pay me to go do more of it.

The result is a job that feels more durable, and sustainable, than any other employment I’ve had. In the past, to lose my job might require only a bad quarter in the ad market, the loss of an ally in upper management, or the takeover of my company by some indifferent telecom company. Today, I can really only lose my job if thousands of people decide independently to “fire” me. As a result, I’ve never felt more empowered to cover the issues I find most meaningful: the fraught, unpredictable collisions between big tech platforms and the world around them.

Anyway, here are some of the lessons I’ve learned in year one.

It’s a hits business. Platformer grows when it’s publishing good journalism — particularly journalism that takes you inside companies in crisis. The rest of the time, the business is largely static. Occasionally, a more analytical post will bring in a range of new signups. So will posts that tackle some new frontier yet to be picked up by traditional publications — this month’s story about Dom Hofmann’s blockchain project Loot was a hit, for example. Generally speaking, though, most columns don’t move the needle. In part that’s because …

Churn is real. Platformer loses 3-4 percent of its paid customers per month. To grow, it has to replace those customers and then find new ones. The good news is that a relatively small percentage of free subscribers ever have to convert to paid subscribers to make this a viable enterprise. But …

I converted a smaller percentage of subscribers to paid than I thought I would. Guidance I had gotten from Substack suggested I might expect 10% or so of my free subscribers to go paid. Given that 24,000 people had been reading me four days a week when I launched — some for three years — I thought that 10% would be a slam dunk. Instead, it was closer to 5%. That number has grown a bit over the past year, but it’s still well under 10.

One thing that did, help, though, was …

A Discord is a superpower that journalists can give themselves. In April I launched Sidechannel along with seven other independent journalists. (Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stopped by for an interview.) The idea was to give free subscribers a reason to upgrade, since their subscription would now come with access to a community of smart, like-minded people, as well as some of the journalists working on their behalf.

Other than the stories I mentioned above, the Discord launch was the single biggest thing I did over the past year to convert paid subscribers. And beyond the business benefit, I’ve been struck at just how useful it is to have a Discord for my publication. I regularly get tips from readers for stories; good-faith pushback on things I’ve written; links I should read; and good tweets for the end of the daily newsletter. And all that has happened despite the fact that I generally feel like I’ve invested too little in Sidechannel to date. (More on that later.)

My readers hate interviews

Over the past year I’ve brought readers news-making interviews with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, Twitch COO Sara Clemens, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri, and WhatsApp chief Will Cathcart, among others. Because I write a publication closely associated with the tech industry, and social networks more specifically, it feels important to regularly ask questions of the people running those networks. What I’ve learned, though, is that almost no one becomes a paid subscriber because they liked an interview. (It’s possible my interviews are bad!)

I’m not giving up on Q&As entirely, but suffice to say: message received.

II.

And speaking of not giving up on Q&As entirely, here are some of the questions you asked me when I put out a call on Twitter and Discord about Platformer year 1.

How difficult (or easy) is it to get access to scoops and sources now that you’re working for yourself and not for an org like The Verge?

It’s been relatively easy. Before I quit, I reached out to all my beat companies to see if they would still take my phone calls if I went independent. To my great relief, they all said yes. And as you can see from the list of the interviews above, executives are still engaging with me — in some cases, more than they did before. (One reason: There were some editor-in-chief type conversations I was never invited to before this year, because I had never been editor-in-chief of a tech publication before.)

Meanwhile, I continue to have a great backchannel with rank-and-file workers via replies to each day’s edition and the Discord server. My WhatsApp and Signal are both still popping off. I always want more and better sources, of course, but generally speaking I feel good about this.

How free do you feel in terms of selecting the stories you want to cover and your take? Do you feel like you need to conform to what your paying audience expects?

Being captured by the audience is probably my greatest fear about running a newsletter over the long term. This is a real problem with trade publications — when you spend every day talking to a handful of companies, those companies come to sound more reasonable to you than they do to an average person. The good news is that Platformer also has plenty of paid subscribers who are outside the orbit of Big Tech: they’re academics, policy makers, consultants, and concerned citizens, and I regularly hear back from them when they think I’ve missed the mark. Also: a good number of rank-and-file workers subscribe specifically because they want to empower journalism and analysis that pushes their companies to do better.

I think my best shot at retaining real independence is to position myself at the uncomfortable center of all of these groups, and embrace the fact that they will push and pull me in various directions continuously.

One thing that has given me hope is that I often see a surge in subscriptions when I write about more unexpected subjects, as with the Loot example above. That tells me readers are hungry for novelty and don’t want me to stay in one lane forever.

How far in advance do you plan your publications? What’s your definition of balance between timeless pieces (e.g. Twitter should copy from Tinder) vs. trending (e.g. release of communities by Twitter)?

It varies widely. The general idea is to do at least one piece of high-quality reported journalism every week, give it away for free to a mass audience, and surround it with paid posts that are more relevant to people working in the industry. On a good Monday morning, I know what that free post is going to be, and I have some ideas for at least a couple of the paid posts. Generally I found this easier during the Trump years, when every single day was a series of infinite branching catastrophes. I’m still working to find a good rhythm now that we are in the ever-slightly-more-relaxed Biden era.

One thing I struggle with is that if I decided to investigate something, it generally has to be something I can wrap up quickly: every minute I spend reporting is a minute I’m not writing, and I write four newsletters a week. That tilts the balance of the newsletter away from original journalism more than I’d like, and it’s clear that original journalism is the thing that people are most excited to support financially. Reconciling those two things is going to be a focus for me in year two.

How’s it been working more autonomously versus for a publication? Pros/cons?

Pros: I feel like I have more control over my destiny. I own an asset that can grow in value over time. And I love working directly on behalf of readers, and interacting with them daily. Most of all, I love getting to experiment — with the Discord server, for example.

Cons: Having to do bookkeeping and accounting — there is so much more paperwork than there used to be. Not having a copyeditor for the daily newsletter — thanks to all of you who point out typos, which I endeavor to fix as quickly as possible. Most of all, in this line of work you can’t really afford to have a bad few months the way you can at a staff job. (Ask me about my 2017!) The business only works when I’m working.

All that said: it’s less lonely than people assume. I am still besieged every day by phone calls and text messages and emails and Twitter DMs and Discord pings and Zoom meetings. Thanks to everyone who has stayed in touch!

With limited time, what efforts do you prioritize for audience growth? What about for retention?

The only way a Substack grows is through tweets. I am like 85% serious when I say this. I have been featured in various Substack leaderboards, newspaper articles, podcasts, radio shows, and blog posts since Platformer began. The only thing that ever moves the needle is some screenshot of a paid blog post getting 500 likes. I wish I had other obvious avenues for growth, but to date it really feels like it’s Twitter or nothing.

As for retention, I’m still figuring that out. Usually when people unsubscribe and send a note, they don’t say they hated the publication. Rather, they’ve decided to spend less on subscriptions for whatever reason; they found they weren’t reading it as often as they assumed; or they changed jobs and it’s less useful to them than it was before. I can’t be unhappy about any of this, not even a little bit. For the most part, I think the only good retention strategy is to keep doing good journalism.

Is Sidechannel living up to expectations? What were some things you thought it’d be that didn’t happen? What has it done that surprised you?

Yes and no. It’s been great to build a small community of Platformer readers and interact with them every day. Better yet, to watch them interacting with each other in friendly, constructive ways. And I was surprised when people I had never interacted with before showed up in my Discord DMs offering me story tips and advice. For these reasons alone, it has been a good project.

That said, I imagined it as a great, ongoing conversation between independent writers — a kind of public newsroom Slack channel — and that hasn’t materialized. There are two main reasons why: one, these writers are truly independent. Everyone is focused on getting their newsletter out, on spinning up a podcast, on a book project, on whatever. And so there hasn’t been the kind of regular interaction that I first envisioned. This issue was compounded by the fact that two of our initial writers — for excellent reasons, by the way — quit their newsletters within a few months of launch.

I’m long on Discord as a component of the Platformer subscription, but I think it would offer more value if it felt like a true water cooler for indie writers, and had more regular programming to bring you all in. This is largely a question of time management, and finding passionate collaborators.

One other thing folks have observed to me: no matter the Discord server, every channel seems to be dominated by the same few loud voices. None of them are breaking the rules, exactly, but they tend to crowd out other people who might otherwise share their opinions. I basically have no idea what to do about this.

Anything you learned in year 1 you’d want to avoid if you had to do it all over again?

I incorporated as an LLC using Stripe Atlas. Stripe Atlas is a truly fantastic product in the sense that you essentially snap your fingers and, for $500, get a fully formed LLC in return. At the same time, I now pay taxes in both California and Delaware, where Platformer is incorporated, and in hindsight I wish I had just set up shop in California where I live.

Any stray observations?

I think the first wave of writers leaving mainstream publications for Substack has mostly crested. I talked to more than a dozen writers at big publications over the past year who were considering going independent; in the end almost none of them did. It can be a deceptively hard business, particularly if you don’t have some of the advantages I did — a large existing mailing list and a well-defined product being the two most helpful.

At the same time, I wish more journalists would explore this route. (And have been heartened by the local journalists who are trying this, backed by various platforms and media companies.) In my conversations, I was struck over and over again at how little journalists value their own work — in large part, I think, because their bosses have taught them to. Having myself worked at media companies that remind you often of just how easily you can be replaced, and scoff at the idea of even a 2% raise, I get it. But for the right reporter and the right product, the economics of independent life can be phenomenal.

One of the best things about being independent is the flexibility to strike deals. All the big media companies take near-total ownership over your work, making it difficult to do things like start a newsletter, sell a podcast, or get a TV deal. The avenues for extending your work as a journalist are increasing all the time, and it’s fantastic to be able to take advantage of them. (One deal I’ve never taken is to put ads on the site, despite getting offers now nearly every week. Thanks to the paid subscribers who made that possible.)

What’s coming in year two?

My first priority is to continue to deliver a high-quality newsletter four days a week that breaks news, captures the moment, and promotes high-quality discussion about important issues.

But there are two things I know would make Platformer better. One is developing a podcast that connects to the themes of the newsletter but delivers it through audio. The other is hiring someone to help me put the newsletter together each day and free up more hours for reporting, thinking, and writing.

By the time I write my “what I learned in year two” post, I will have either done both these things or have a hilarious story about how and why I failed.

We need to put a spotlight on problems in society in order to solve them.

And this is the breakdown of how people responded:

Strongly agree: 27%
Moderately agree: 27%
Slightly agree: 18%

Slightly disagree: 4%
Moderately disagree: 1%
Strongly disagree: 1%

Add those up and you get 72% of people agreeing with the statement to some degree and 6% disagreeing to some degree. Pretty strong support!

Last week, those researchers released their findings, and they got a fair amount of attention. Here’s how The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan summed up this piece of it:

The [journalistic] value drawing the least support is the idea that a good way to make society better is to spotlight its problems. Only about 3 in 10 agree.

Wait a minute: How in the world do you get from 72% agreeing to “only about 3 in 10”?

What about another core journalism value, transparency? Here are two other statements those 2,727 Americans were each asked about:

Transparency is usually the best cure for what’s wrong in the world.

On balance, it’s usually better for the public to know than for things to be kept secret.

For that first statement, 63% of people agreed versus 15% who disagreed to some degree. For the second, 69% agreed against only 9% who disagreed.

And yet the researchers say their work shows transparency is a journalistic value only 44% of Americans support. Huh?

Okay, one more. The researchers consider “giving voice to the less powerful” a core journalism value. So they asked those 2,272 people about this statement:

It’s important to offer a voice to the voiceless.

It was a blowout: 74% of people agreed with the statement, while only 4% disagreed.

So what share of Americans do the researchers say support the journalism value of “giving a voice to the less powerful”? Just half: 50% do, 50% don’t.

What in the world is going on here? Why is a study consistently seeming to reduce the number of Americans who support the values of journalism?

The study in question — which was done by the Media Insight Project, a joint effort of the American Press Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research — contains a lot of interesting data and analysis, some of which I’ll get to later.

But its top-line finding — summarized by a Post headline writer as “Bad news for journalists: The public doesn’t share our values” — is bogus. Or, at a minimum, unsupported by the methodology in use here. There is no reason to believe, based on this data, that Americans have somehow abandoned the basic values of democratic governance, or that we noble journalists are left to fight the lonely fight for accountability.

And whenever we exaggerate the distance between journalists and their readers — a genre of media reporting I call “mistrust porn” — we both exacerbate the problems that do exist and hand a weapon to people who want to attack mainstream journalism.

Besides the Post (and journalism-specific sites like us and CJR), what news outlets picked up this study? Here are a couple: Fox News and RT, neither one a noted friend to fact-based reporting. (RT: “Are journalists betraying their values? No, it’s the public who are wrong, says Washington Post writer.” Fox: “‘It’s the uncivilized, unwashed masses who don’t share our noble values,’ one critic joked in response to Margaret Sullivan.”) Something called Liberty Nation News said the study “confirmed the media’s sinking reputation,” while James O’Keefe tweeted that it proved the news industry “gaslights the people.” (Right before Twitter suspended him.)

This must be parody.

Author laments public mistrust of press & identifies four “core values” of journalists:

Transparency
Factuality
Spotlighting wrongdoing
Giving a voice to the voiceless

Ignores that the press ONLY FOLLOWS THEM WHEN IT HELPS DEMOCRATS https://t.co/W1781SIkfd

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) April 14, 2021

There are two main problems with the claims being made off of this API/AP-NORC study. The first is that the study invents an artificially stringent standard for what it means to “support” a journalism value.

The second is that, while it surveys thousands of civilians to discover their thoughts on various values, it never actually surveys journalists to see how they feel about them. And given the weird standard they’re using, I can assure you lots of journalists would be closer to the general public than whatever platonic form of news righteousness the researchers have in mind.

Let’s start at the beginning. These are the five core journalism values researchers were seeking to measure:

Oversight: This value measures how strongly a person feels there is a need to monitor people in power and know what public officials are doing or saying. The flip side of this value is worry about intrusiveness or this oversight becoming a hindrance, getting in the way, or placing too much importance on insignificant events.

Transparency: This is the idea that transparency is usually the best cure for what’s wrong in the world, and that on balance it’s usually better for things to be public than for things to be kept secret. The inverse is that sometimes the need to keep things secret is more important than the public’s right to know and that most problems can be solved without embarrassing facts being laid out in the open.

Factualism: This value measures whether on balance more facts are always better and facts are the key to knowing what is true. The flip side is that the truth is more than just a matter of adding facts and that this emphasis on factualism can mask bias.

Giving voice to the less powerful: This value measures whether people want to amplify the voices of people who aren’t ordinarily heard and if a society should be judged on how it treats the least fortunate. The inverse instinct is that inequalities will always exist and favoring the least fortunate does not always help them.

Social criticism: This value measures how important people think it is to put a spotlight on a community’s problems in order to solve them. The flip side puts more emphasis on the value of celebrating things that are going right or working well in order to reinforce them and encourage more of them.

How did researchers come up with these core values? They “identified [them] through our own experience,” followed by some brainstorming with a group of journalists. They’re fine — I don’t have a quibble with the values themselves, only how they’re being measured here.

To see how Americans feel about these values, researchers created four statements about each one — 20 in all. For each value, they crafted two statements where agreeing with it indicated that you support the value — that you are pro-transparency, pro-oversight, and so on. The other two statements were worded in such a way that disagreeing with them was the pro-values position.

For example, here are the four statements meant to evaluate people’s support for oversight:

1. The powerful need to be monitored or they will be inclined to abuse their power.

2. It’s important to put some trust in authority figures so they can do their jobs.

3. It’s vital that the public know what government leaders are doing and saying each day.

4. Leaders need to be able to do some things behind closed doors to fulfill their duties.

If you support the value of journalistic oversight, you’re supposed to agree with 1 and 3 and disagree with 2 and 4.

Here are the statements for transparency:

1. On balance, it’s usually better for the public to know than for things to be kept secret.

2. Sometimes the need to keep a secret outweighs the public’s right to know.

3. Transparency is usually the best cure for what’s wrong in the world.

4. Most problems can be addressed without putting embarrassing facts out in the open.

And for giving a voice to the less powerful:

1. A society should be judged by how it treats its least fortunate.

2. Sometimes favoring the least fortunate doesn’t actually help them.

3. It’s important to offer a voice to the voiceless.

4. Inequalities will always exist and you can’t eliminate them.

For these, again, agreeing with 1 and 3 and disagreeing with 2 and 4 are meant to indicate you support the value in question. 2 and 4 are supposed to represent “the antithesis of those values” promoted by 1 and 3.

Do you notice any difference in tone or structure between the questions you’re meant to agree with and the ones you’re not? The affirmative statements — 1 and 3 — tend to be statements of a general civic principle. The powerful need to be monitored. It’s important to offer a voice to the voiceless. It’s vital that the public know what government leaders are doing and saying.

Meanwhile, the negative statements — 2 and 4 — tend to be about limited exceptions to the general civic principles. They’re hardly the “antithesis” of the others. And frankly, they’re the sort of statements that are pretty hard to disagree with if you think about them with any sort of nuance.

I mean, does anyone really think that, no, you should never put any trust into any authority figure, ever? (Only 9% of those surveyed felt that way — the supposed “pro-journalism” position.) Or that no “leaders” should ever be allowed to do anything behind closed doors?

Journalists really do like governmental transparency. But do you know anyone not named Assange who believes the need to keep a secret never outweighs the public’s right to know? I should be able to FOIA the nuclear codes? A list of every woman who’s had an abortion? Every American’s tax returns? If you disagree with “Sometimes the need to keep a secret outweighs the public’s right to know,” you’re saying there should be no secrets, at all, ever.

And how is agreeing that “inequalities will always exist” somehow the “antithesis” of wanting to give voice to the voiceless? “Inequalities will always exist” is, as far as I can tell, a pretty solid lesson to take from 300,000 years of anatomically modern human history. As a factual claim, it doesn’t have anything to do with “Inequalities will always exist…so obviously we shouldn’t even bother to try to fix them,” or “Inequalities will always exist…so would all these poor people please shut the hell up now?”

If you support the journalistic value of factualism, you’re supposed to agree with these two statements:

The more facts people have, the more likely it is they will get to the truth.

For most things, knowing what’s true is a matter of gathering evidence and proof.

Hard to argue with either one, right? They’re basically milquetoast endorsements of rational human thought. And both were overwhelmingly endorsed by those surveyed: 71% agree/7% disagree on the first one, 74% agree/4% disagree on the second.

But you’re also supposed to disagree with these two:

A lot of the time you know enough about something and more facts don’t help.

For a lot of things that matter, facts only get you so far.

I mean, those are also self-evidently true, right?

“No, you can never know enough about anything, you always need more facts — which is why I’ve been googling ‘best microwave oven’ continuously for the past 23 years.”

And if you really think cold, hard facts are all you need in life — that things like emotion, humor, chance, altruism, or love should never distract you from a purely rational response to all of life’s questions — I’m gonna guess you don’t get a lot of second dates, and no, I do not want to read your Substack.

The result of this split of framing is that the “meant-to-agree” statements are easy to agree with — but so are the “meant-to-disagree” statements. And that’s exactly what the data shows: More people agreed than disagreed with all 10 of the affirmative statements. But more people also agreed on 9 of the 10 negative statements.

(I’ll list all the statements and their agree/disagree numbers at the end of this piece.)

Why does that matter? Well, it matters because of the arbitrary standard researchers picked to determine if someone is a “supporter” of a journalism value. To count as a supporter, you must both on average agree with the positive statements and disagree with the negative ones. See the language at the bottom of this chart: “The percent who embrace each value is the percent who on average at least slightly agree with the two affirmative statements and slightly disagree with the two contradictory statements used to measure each value.”

That’s how you get from those seemingly happy numbers I mentioned up top to the seemingly sad ones that follow.

Remember: 12 times as many people agreed with “We need to put a spotlight on problems in society in order to solve them” than disagreed with it. 72% to 6%! And yet some muddled question design and an arbitrary definitional decision turn that into “only about 3 in 10 agree” that “a good way to make society better is to spotlight its problems.”

The report itself fuzzes this up a bit by using different strengths of language when describing what the percentages mean. Sometimes the wording acknowledges that they’re applying a more stringent test of support:

The study finds that not all Americans universally embrace many of the core values that guide journalistic inquiry.

In all, only 11% of Americans unreservedly embrace all five of the journalism principles tested…

Only 11% of Americans fully support all five of the journalism values tested.

But other times, it falls back on just a simple “support” or “endorse,” as did nearly all of the coverage the report got:

Only one of the five core journalism values tested has support of a majority of Americans…

People who most value loyalty and authority are much less likely than others to endorse the idea that there should be a watchdog over those in power.

Fewer endorse the values of oversight, transparency, and social criticism.

C’mon, Josh, you might be saying — you’re being picky. The method they used is probably better at teasing out different attitudes among the people surveyed. And that’s probably true.

The main thrust of the study is using all those answers to cluster survey takers into four groups, based on their responses, and then comparing those groups’ response to various tweaked versions of news stories. The researchers call those clusters The Upholders, The Moralists, The Journalism Supporters, and The Indifferent. While I might not use those names — labeling 20% of the population “The Journalism Supporters” falsely implies the other 80% don’t support journalism — it’s a rich set of data to play with. I thought their cross-measuring of “journalism values” with “moral values” was interesting, and their experimental changing of story structures was informative, if not earth-shattering. And statements that can thin-slice different levels of support can be useful when you’re running a cluster analysis.

The problem comes when you abandon that nuance and just declare people binary supporters/non-supporters of concepts like “transparency.”

Which leads to the other issue here. Remember that Post headline: “Bad news for journalists: The public doesn’t share our values.” But this study doesn’t even try to measure journalists’ values. It pits real-world survey responses against abstract principles — and hey, if there’s a gap between the two, bad news for journalists, right?

I think there’s a real if unconscious hunger for this sort of mistrust porn. You saw it with the post-2016 discourse around “fake news,” which sometimes discounted mistakes made by the press by focusing instead on how irrational and fact-averse some Trump supporters seemed to be. You see it every time someone writes about the decrease in trust in the media since the 1970s — but doesn’t note that “the media” represented a wildly different thing in 1975 than it does today.

(Do you trust “the media”? Is “the media” Walter Cronkite and your straight-arrow local daily newspaper? Or is “the media” a universe that includes both The New York Times and Fox News, NPR and Breitbart, a local daily and a local blogger, earnest investigators and clickbait hucksters? Absolute trust in “the media” in 2021 is logistically impossible, because different parts of “the media” send out contradictory messages every minute of every day.)

Not to mention that, according to Gallup, trust in media actually increased from 32% to 40% between 2016 and 2020, or that trust levels have been just barely below flat for the past 15 years, not rapidly declining. (Trust in the media was actually higher in 2018 than in 2004.)

The traditional journalism business is in a longstanding decline, and there’s a hunger for explanations — and the idea that “the audience is dumb/untrusting/anti-journalism values” might even feel good for a minute. (See, it’s their fault!) And lord knows it can make for a good headline. But it doesn’t help the cause of journalism to make the audience seem more anti-transparency, anti-oversight, or anti-accountability than they actually are.

Update, 4/22/21: In the interest of, well, transparency, API’s Tom Rosenstiel has responded to my criticisms here. I find it unconvincing and am writing a response that I’ll link here when it’s done. But feel free to check out his arguments. Additional update: Here’s my response.

As promised, here are the 20 statements used in the survey and the agree/disagree splits on each. I’ve bolded the response that’s meant to indicate you support the journalism value in question.

Oversight

1. The powerful need to be monitored or they will be inclined to abuse their power. 70% agree, 8% disagree.

2. It’s important to put some trust in authority figures so they can do their jobs. 68% agree, 9% disagree.

3. It’s vital that the public know what government leaders are doing and saying each day. 66% agree, 12% disagree.

4. Leaders need to be able to do some things behind closed doors to fulfill their duties. 50% agree, 27% disagree.

Factualism

1. The more facts people have, the more likely it is they will get to the truth. 71% agree, 7% disagree.

2. A lot of the time you know enough about something and more facts don’t help. 31% agree, 48% disagree. [Note: This was the only statement of the 20 that drew more disagreement than agreement.]

3. For most things, knowing what’s true is a matter of gathering evidence and proof. 74% agree, 4% disagree.

4. For a lot of things that matter, facts only get you so far. 48% agree, 30% disagree.

Giving voice to the less powerful

1. A society should be judged by how it treats its least fortunate. 65% agree, 13% disagree.

2. Sometimes favoring the least fortunate doesn’t actually help them. 52% agree, 26% disagree.

3. It’s important to offer a voice to the voiceless. 74% agree, 4% disagree.

4. Inequalities will always exist and you can’t eliminate them. 56% agree, 23% disagree.

Social criticism

1. We need to put a spotlight on problems in society in order to solve them. 72% agree, 6% disagree.

2. Too much focus on what’s wrong can make things worse. 50% agree, 28% disagree.

3. The way to make a society stronger is through criticizing what’s wrong. 43% agree, 35% disagree.

4. The way to make a society stronger is through celebrating what’s right. 67% agree, 11% disagree.

Transparency

1. On balance, it’s usually better for the public to know than for things to be kept secret. 69% agree, 9% disagree.

2. Sometimes the need to keep a secret outweighs the public’s right to know. 49% agree, 29% disagree.

3. Transparency is usually the best cure for what’s wrong in the world. 63% agree, 15% disagree.

4. Most problems can be addressed without putting embarrassing facts out in the open. 57% agree, 22% disagree.

The Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times today became the first newspapers in the United States to adopt the Scandinavian concept of ombudsman, which has no adequate English equivalent, but which is a sort of public representative.

Barry Bingham, editor and publisher of the newspapers, announced that the ombudsman role was being added to the functions of John Herchenroeder, assistant to the executive editor. Herchenroeder will check all inquiries concerning the accuracy and adequacy of news stories appearing in the newspapers…

“Our papers have always sought to improve their news coverage and their relationship with their readers,” said Bingham “We want all stories to be accurate and complete. There are occasional failures because of misunderstandings, or for any one of a hundred reasons. In all of these instances, John Herchenroeder stands ready to receive inquiries, to seek out the facts, and to move to have corrections carried when they are justified.”

Herchenroeder says that the ombudsman role is an extension of what he has been doing for the last quarter of a century. “I’ve always had an open door and an open telephone line for readers,” he said. “When we miss on something, we always want to know about it. If this doesn’t work, it won’t be for our lack of trying.”

(Spiritually, though, at least some of the credit should go to The New York Times’ A. H. Raskin, who had called for the creation of newspaper ombudsmen — “their own Departments of Internal Criticism” — as a response to the declining number of cities with competing daily papers.)

The idea caught on, and profit-flush monopoly dailies across the country started naming one veteran staffer the point-person for reader complaints, as well as an inside/outside critic of newsroom choices. But when newspaper revenues started to tank, ombudsmen — or public editors, as they’re often now known — were an easy target for budget cuts. (“We pay this guy that much — to complain about us?”) From a peak of about 35, the Organization of News Ombudsmen now lists just six American members, four of them in public media. (And I don’t believe either of the other two would, strictly speaking, count as an ombudsman.)

The decline of this public-facing role has coincided with increased mistrust of “The Media” and increased amplification of reader complaints via social media. The newspaper ombudsman was created as a check on monopoly newspapers’ institutional power; does the role make sense again with that power at an all-time low?

That’s the issue raised in a new paper out today from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. It’s by former Toronto Star public editor Kathy English, who held that role for a remarkable 13 years.

She still sees an important role for the position but argues it must expand to address some very contemporary issues:

When a news organization commits to an independent public editor, it makes a strong statement about its commitment to trustworthy journalism.

Public editors do the work of overseeing accuracy and fairness and other imperatives of ethical journalism. They can correct your mistakes. They are your public promise of accountability and transparency. They will engage with your news audience and create public understanding of the importance of trustworthy journalism in a world polluted by dangerous disinformation. When appropriate, they will defend your journalists from increasingly hostile invective.

But public editors could — and should — also do more. Here, I call on our “journalistic imagination” to envision a greater role for the public editor in holding journalists to account for diverse, inclusive journalism that is aligned with its moral mission for equality in a liberal democracy.

Just as journalism has failed to reflect the publics it seeks to serve — despite more than 50 years of talking about the need for diversity, inclusion and equality — so too has the role of public editor failed to take hold in global journalism over those same five decades.

Is there a solution that could make the public editor role more relevant, and journalistic diversity a greater reality? Can the role of public editor encompass active responsibility for holding news organizations to public account for diversity, inclusion and equity imperatives in both staffing and content?

Indeed. Ombuds and public editors most often — though not exclusively — operated at the story level. (Was this piece fair? Has the paper been ignoring this perspective? Is this neighborhood getting biased coverage?) But the problems of ethical journalism increasingly lie one layer up — in how a newsroom does or does not represent the community it serves.

Stories play out in public. But the management decisions that influence them — hiring and firing, promotion and demotion, what’s taboo and what’s fair game — usually don’t. And increasingly, the people pointing out these structural problems aren’t readers — they’re in the newsroom itself. Here’s Kathy again:

Just as journalism has failed in being diverse and inclusive over the past 50 years, so too, we have seen, has the role of public editor failed to take hold in global journalism over those same five decades. Is there a solution here that could make the public editor more relevant and newsroom diversity and inclusion a greater reality?

Could the role of public editor evolve to encompass active responsibility for holding news organizations to public account for diversity, inclusion and equity imperatives? I say: why not? Accountability to the public is core to the work of public editors, and diversity and inclusion in journalism demand public accountability. Someone must do this accountability work if newsrooms are to ever rectify long-standing failures in creating diverse newsrooms and news coverage. Why not a publics’ editor?

I envision this essential work can be part of a public editor’s remit if the role is mandated to provide strong independence, proactive, robust powers and some measure of executive authority…This publics’ editor would be empowered to question the status quo of journalism and the professional standards that have failed to regard diversity as a core journalistic value.

As agents of public accountability, publics’ editors should criticize news coverage that perpetuates inequality and examine reasons – both on a daily and systemic basis – why this is so. They should stand for accurate and fair coverage of marginalized, under-represented individuals and groups. They should work to create public understanding of why diversity and inclusion in news matters. They could hold newsrooms to account for staff diversity data and share this information with news audiences through ongoing public reports, similar to the accountability work auditor-generals do in holding governments to account.

I think I like it — from public editor to publics’ editor. (Though I feel obliged to note: Ombudsmen have almost always been drawn from the pool of senior journalists in a news organization — which has made them substantially more white and male than even the newsrooms they’re in.)

The idea of a “public” has long been contentious among theorists. But if the Internet has taught us anything, it’s that the concept that any journalism serves a single, unitary “public” is deeply flawed.

I offer here one core recommendation: hire a public editor. Encourage your newsroom to be accountable to its publics, and transparent about its journalism. In this current and concerning crisis of trust in journalism, this necessary reckoning for journalistic equality, this could be an investment as valuable as another beat reporter.

Quite likely, you have given little thought to the potential value of a public editor to serve as an independent intermediary between your journalism and the communities you seek to serve. Or, perhaps you say it’s part of your job to be accountable to your news audience, even though you have little time or inclination to engage with public concerns about your journalism. Perhaps this role once existed and your organization killed it, figuring the social media corps of critics could reliably hold your journalism to public account.

A news organization that creates and commits to an independent public editor makes a strong public statement about its commitment to trustworthy journalism. Public editors do the work of overseeing accuracy and fairness and other imperatives of ethical journalism. They can correct your mistakes. They are your public promise of accountability and transparency. They will engage with your news audience and create public understanding of the importance of trustworthy journalism in a world polluted by disinformation. When appropriate, they will defend your journalists from the increasingly hostile invective.

A strong, proactive public editor can be part of this current reckoning in journalism that is looking increasingly like a required revolution in journalism culture. This public editor can hold your newsroom to account for diverse, inclusive journalism of equality aligned with journalism’s moral mission in a liberal democracy. While that has not been a significant element of the role in the past, it could indeed be a vital part of its future. Your public editor will be accountable to diverse publics — a publics’ editor for the 21st century.

Kathy’s full paper, which includes a lot of reflection and input from other ombudsfolk, is here.

Lauren Gustus, McClatchy regional editor for California, Idaho, and Washington, is trying to make The Bee sustainable by offering readers specialized content that will, hopefully, be habit-forming. The Bee is one of four newsrooms this year that has joined Table Stakes, a project funded by the Knight Foundation and the Lenfest Institute. (Disclosure: Nieman Lab also receives funding from Knight.) Table Stakes challenges newsrooms to diversify revenue and gain digital subscribers.

The Bee aims to do this by borrowing from the realm of software development and experimenting on coverage areas through “sprints.” Sprints are the shorter sections of “scrums,” like in rugby, when the team works together to move the ball down the field in a series of focused bursts. By moving beats around and assigning reporters to focus briefly on new sections of the community for periods of just a few weeks, it aims to test the marketability of the new beat in a trial period.

Gustus explained the mission in a letter to readers earlier this month:

We could fully fund our newsrooms — from salaries and benefits to notepads and pens — if we had 60,000 people supporting us through digital subscriptions. Roughly 15,000 do so today, so we’d need to earn the support of about 45,000 more…

To do what we do, we also need sales support and printing presses and other costs that are not built in here. So the numerical goal of 60,000 digital subscribers is somewhat symbolic. But the underlying goal is very real: to produce quality local journalism so important to you that you’re willing to pay for it. That’s the sustainable way forward for any news organization — for for any company, really: to create a product you feel is worth what you pay for it.

That’s our focus, so much so that we’re now tracking our subscription numbers in real-time in the newsroom.

Reporter Tony Bizjak, along with many others in the newsroom, was concerned that by reallocating already scarce newsroom resources, certain stories wouldn’t be covered. One fear, for instance, was that stories about homelessness might be left out of the community coverage, because homeless people are unlikely to be able to pay for digital subscriptions.

Thankfully, this fear was unfounded; reporters have still been encouraged to cover these stories. “We clearly aren’t going to forget certain groups,” Bizjak said.

Bizjak was assigned a “new housing” beat sprint. The city of Sacramento has seen a troubling inflation of rent prices in recent years. But he didn’t want to leave his old beat of transportation; Sacramento was a city of commuters. So he does both.

“Sprint” implies a level of ferocity that Bizjak feels is misunderstood. All of the reporters at The Bee are already working at their full capacity. To do more simply isn’t feasible. Instead, the sprints represent a particular kind of refocusing, an effort to reach a certain audience in a certain amount of time.

This is all part of Gustus’s plan to find niche audiences who deem The Bee’s coverage valuable enough to pay for.

“We’re also looking hard at what types of stories drive digital-only subscriptions,” Gustus said. “We know the last story someone read before they hit the meter, we know what the first story is that they visited after they hit the meter, and so what do we do with that information?”

The newsroom isn’t as focused on clicks as it once was. “If you’re looking at getting people to stay with you, you’re offering something they see value in,” Gustus said. “You’re offering them stories they want to stay with for longer than 20 seconds.” The focus is on value and how much time a reader spends on the page.

“The essential questions of ‘Who are our readers? What do they want?’ This hasn’t changed,” Bizjak said. The Bee has an older poster up on the wall with a series of boxes to check to ensure story relevancy. The mission checklist is five bullets long. To paraphrase: Will the story speak truth to power? Will the story break news that will make a difference? Will the story inform readers how the story will affect their lives or their loved ones? Will the story tell itself in a new way? Will the story generate a lot of interest?

“The only difference now, I think,” Bizjak said, “Is that that middle bullet [will this story affect the lives of readers?] stands a little taller.”

Gustus hopes that the audience sprints will be able to be translated to McClatchy’s nine other properties in the region. These sprints are still fairly new, and I’ll be checking back in with The Bee later this summer to see how the first quarter went, and how much closer they are to hitting those 60,000 online subscriptions.

These researchers performed two studies, both of which looked at how Twitter users correct one another. For the first study, the team analyzed tweets posted between January 2012 and April 2014 that were sent in reply to a user who had made an incorrect statement about U.S. politics. Researchers focused on how the people who received these tweets, which often pointed out the error and made reference to one of three fact-checking websites, responded.

For the second study, the researchers manually scraped Twitter for tweets posted between October 31, 2015 and February 3, 2016 that contained hyperlink references to Snopes.com. Again, they scrutinized interactions between Twitter users who made inaccurate statements and those who pointed out mistakes. This time, the researchers compared users’ responses based on whether the incorrect statement was related to U.S. politics or another subject.

The findings suggest Twitter users are more likely to accept corrections from friends and individuals who follow them. But they’re less likely to accept corrections to an error related to politics than another topic.

In this paper, a group of high-profile academics from a range of fields offers a strategy for better understanding fake news in order to prevent its distribution and influence. The group briefly outlines what’s known to date about the challenges of stopping fake news and the limitations of fact-checking. The scholars focus on two types of intervention: helping people better recognize fake news when they see it and making structural changes that lower the public’s exposure to false content that mimics legitimate news coverage.

The article is essentially a call to action, urging internet and social media platforms to work with scholars to evaluate the problem and design and test interventions. “There is little research focused on fake news and no comprehensive data-collection system to provide a dynamic understanding of how pervasive systems of fake news provision are evolving,” the authors write. “There are challenges to scientific collaboration from the perspectives of industry and academia. Yet, there is an ethical and social responsibility, transcending market forces, for the platforms to contribute what data they uniquely can to a science of fake news.”

Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism does a lot of research on how technology is changing the way journalists present the news. This white paper from Tow offers important insights on how audiences respond to material presented as a 360-degree video. Archer and Finger teamed up to investigate whether virtual reality can prompt users to feel empathy toward a subject and whether head-mounted or desktop-based VR equipment provides a more interactive experience.

The team uncovered some interesting trends, although it’s worth noting that the vast majority of the people who participated in the study were between the ages of 18 and 34. Some of the main takeaways: Stories presented in the format of a 360-degree video prompted people to report feeling more empathy toward the stories’ subjects compared to stories presented as written text accompanied by screenshots of a video. Also, video stories featuring one protagonist who guides viewers through their VR experience were considered more enjoyable. The researchers found a “negligible difference in perceived levels of interactivity between the head-mounted and desktop-based virtual reality treatments, suggesting head-mounted displays (HMDs) aren’t a deal-breaker.”

“Populism, Journalism, and the Limits of Reflexivity: The case of Donald J. Trump”: From the University of Colorado Boulder, published in Journalism Studies. By Michael McDevitt and Patrick Ferrucci.

Academics and journalists differ in their assessment of the media’s role in Donald Trump’s rise to the American presidency. This paper offers important — and fascinating — insights into how journalists evaluate their work and its shortcomings. “Much is at stake in how journalists make sense of their contribution to Trump’s success,” the authors write.

McDevitt and Ferrucci conducted a textual analysis to compare the discourse of scholars and news media professionals in the days after the 2016 election. They analyzed commentary from 86 academics who contributed to a volume titled US Election Analysis 2016: Media, Voters and the Campaign, produced by Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom. They also examined 212 articles published in top newspapers that discussed the press’ role in the election.

The big takeaway: Reporters and columnists argued that a host of factors contributed to Trump’s success, while academics largely credited the media. “Journalistic discourse generally asserted that Trump’s victory occurred due to media illiteracy in the public; social media propagation of fake news and allowance of filter bubbles; and failure of the press to understand the depth of voter anger. Scholars viewed the rise of Trump as predictable, when considering long-established routines of the press; journalists’ misunderstanding of both the public and populism; and the dire economics of legacy journalism.”

“Quantified Audiences in News Production: A synthesis and research agenda”: From the University of Massachusetts Amherst, published in Digital Journalism. By Rodrigo Zamith.

This paper looks at how newsrooms’ increasing focus on audience analytics and metrics has influenced news production. Zamith examines impacts in five key areas, including news content, media ethics, and newsroom behavior. He suggests we are entering a third wave “toward the rationalization of audience understanding that is both distinct and in some ways a continuation of pushes in the 1930s and 1970s to use scientific methods and technological innovations to better quantify audience preferences and behaviors.”

Zamith also points out numerous questions that scholars have yet to answer. For example: Do journalists who rely heavily on analytics see their audiences as more or less intelligent, participatory, rational, reasonable, or thoughtful? Also, as changes in news consumption make news organizations’ homepages less important, how do metrics affect the way content is presented on chat apps or promoted through social media?

We’ll be watching out for that research.

Behind the headlines was an elegant concept: Ask readers to tell you what they think is important and make editorial decisions around that. Two years later, the media industry watched with equal fascination as OpenFile suspended publication, went through a bitter fight with unpaid freelancers, and eventually shut down its site.

“Canada doesn’t try things twice,” said former OpenFile editor David Topping. When a media company attempts something new and fails, it’s used as an example for why that idea should never be attempted again. Yet the organization produced lots of compelling stories by putting its audience at the center of its work, proving that citizens who are media savvy and engaged in their communities will participate if a path is cleared for them. The part that OpenFile didn’t figure out — and serves as a warning to media startups today — is how to fund reader engagement so that journalists can dedicate more time to reaching larger segments of their community.

Huge value in local knowledge

The idea of opening a file has a certain charm to it. Digital files were supposed to accumulate knowledge as readers added links, comments, photos, videos, and documents about issues in their communities. On good days, that’s exactly how OpenFile worked. Using postal codes as geolocators, readers in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, Halifax, and Ottawa could open files and readers who lived close by could add information. If the file ticked the usual editorial boxes for a good story, an editor would assign the file to a reporter.

Right away, OpenFile found “huge value” in local knowledge the legacy media were missing, said Wilf Dinnick, OpenFile’s founder. Reporters also started off further ahead in their reporting, he said. “We had contacts, direct emails, and a whole bunch of information.”

Once a file was opened, it never closed. Journalists were encouraged to update their stories, make corrections transparently, and even publish stories before they were finished. Lorax B. Horne, a journalist for OpenFile in Halifax, described each story as “a link in the chain that could keep linking forward in time,” eventually building an “archive of local news knowledge that could grow over time.”

These reader-initiated stories disrupt the traditional media model for telling stories. At stage one of the model, a single person opens a file. In OpenFile’s case, this person is usually someone highly engaged in their community, educated, and media-savvy. Once that person opens a file, they have an incentive to share it with others (stage two), including stakeholders who are less engaged but might add their own ideas. OpenFile’s main contribution occurs at the model’s third stage, where a local issue is transformed into a story relevant to a wider audience. The hope is that some of the people in the third stage will then move to the first stage and start the process over again. If each stage works together, “you end up with a really effective model,” Dinnick said.

In traditional journalism practice, a journalist and/or their editor decides what the story will be and then shares it with the wider community, Dinnick said. “Very often, the story that you start with at the beginning of the day looks a lot like the one you end up with in the newsroom.” When that model is flipped on its head, stories that sometimes seem ridiculous reveal themselves as important. “We learned that we shouldn’t dismiss [a story] just because it’s not articulated in a way that we would as journalists,” he said.

Today we're introducing a new feature: Cross-country stories. Now you can read stories from all our markets! pic.twitter.com/SYRcgfxr

— OpenFile.ca (@OpenFile) January 20, 2012

Many OpenFile alumni point to the 204 Beech story as an early sign of success. (Note: The site’s content wasn’t well archived, so all we can link to is stripped-down versions at the Internet Archive.) It began with a 100-year-old cottage on a large lot in The Beach neighborhood on Toronto’s east side. Geoff Teehan, cofounder of digital agency Teehan+Lax and now a product design director at Facebook, had purchased the property a few months before. He planned to demolish the house and build a new one that could accommodate his wife, who had been diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder that required her to use a wheelchair. They were about to apply for a building permit when the neighbors got wind that the property would be destroyed and claimed that the house had historical value and shouldn’t be changed.

Jon Lax, Teehan+Lax’s other namesake cofounder, opened a file on 204 Beech and had the first story in his inbox a week later. OpenFile was “super responsive,” Lax said. “It was reassuring to know that someone was paying attention. Having a third party say ‘this is important enough to talk about’ is pretty important.”

Josh O’Kane, the reporter assigned to the file, ended up covering 204 Beech for most of the summer, culminating in a story that illustrated a wider problem in the city’s heritage department. O’Kane obtained city staff correspondence showing that the department was understaffed, with only a sole employed researcher at the time who could review contested buildings — illustrating Teehan’s point that the heritage department was “in dire need of a makeover.” Because the OpenFile editorial team refused to drop the issue and continued to devote resources to its investigation, O’Kane was able to write a local story that highlighted a citywide problem that transcended the standard Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) debate. “It showed me there is no story too small to keep in contact with people, because you never know if that story has another thread that you could be writing about,” he said.

Lax credits the website’s design and the quick response of editor-in-chief Kathy Vey for his positive experience with OpenFile. Without such a simple process, he doubts he would have known how to suggest a story to a journalist. While he is aware that other news organizations include “suggest a story” forms on their websites, he thinks it would be difficult to find and that it might lead to an unmonitored inbox. Even if the reporter had come to a different conclusion, Lax said he still would have considered the story a success because the system worked as he thought it should.

Craig Silverman, who helped launch OpenFile as its digital journalism director (and who has since gained attention as BuzzFeed’s chief reporter on fake news), remembers the 204 Beech experience as “exhilarating.” It was one of the first times OpenFile saw the full potential of its model: People were coalescing around a geographic area, and the people who lived in the neighborhood wanted to know more and to contribute to the reporting. They also wanted to see the story spread outside of the community, showing that the more people you involve in your journalism, the bigger your network becomes. “We felt like, if a lot of the stories we did were like this, then OpenFile would be a really powerful thing,” Silverman said.

Ron Tite, a creative director and now CEO of ad agency Church+State, was the reader behind another successful story in 2012. At the time, Ron lived near Liberty Village, an up-and-coming neighborhood on Toronto’s west side that was becoming well known for its trendy bars, cafes, and creative residents. The only problem was the abattoir where thousands of pigs came to be slaughtered each day. The stench that wafted from the building on a humid summer’s day was enough to make people nauseous. Ron wondered why the city would promote urban development in a neighborhood that housed something so horrible. So he opened a file.

Tite received a phone call from an OpenFile reporter and heard from Mike Layton, the city council member for his ward, who reiterated the city’s perspective on the abattoir. From the OpenFile story, Tite learned that the slaughterhouse was the only downtown employment opportunity for many of the people who had lived in the neighborhood for decades — long before he and his trendy neighbors had arrived.

Tite found himself sharing the story with his community and explaining the value of the abattoir whenever he heard someone complain about its smell. More importantly, Tite said, the experience “took the blinders off” and gave him a greater appreciation for the place he lived. “I didn’t know anything about the large immigrant population that lived in the area and worked [at the abattoir],” he said. “There was this whole section of the community that I was willing to write off because of a smell.” (The abattoir eventually closed in 2014 and may soon be converted into condos.)

A few other OpenFile stories of note

• Forever21 comes to Ottawa: A reader in Ottawa asked why a storefront in an Ottawa mall had been closed for so long. An OpenFile reporter called the general manager of the mall who told her it was going to become a Forever21 store. OpenFile broke the story before Forever21 had a chance to make its announcement, making it one of the bureau’s most popular stories.

The most-read story from @OpenFileOTT was about Forever 21 coming to the Rideau Centre http://t.co/pWK7HwGC #OpenFile11

— OpenFile.ca (@OpenFile) December 31, 2011

• BikeFile: The city of Toronto released statistics on cyclist deaths in the city, and OpenFile decided to portray the problem nationally using an interactive map. Some cities wouldn’t release their data, so OpenFile asked readers to fill in the gaps in their communities.

CYCLISTS: Really nice tool by OpenFile to find out where the safest and most dangerous spots are on your route. http://t.co/MVWmM0af

— Sustainable Alberta (@yycCommute) July 27, 2012

• The Missing Poppy: OpenFile placed poppies on a map of Toronto to show where soldiers lived before they fought and died in World War I. A reader wrote in to say that her uncle was missing from the map, leading OpenFile to publish a story about a soldier whose life was almost erased from the public ledger.

OpenFile's Poppy File brings home Remembrance Day. Seven war dead lived within one block of my downtown Toronto house. http://t.co/QqaZjVq1

— Robert Benzie (@robertbenzie) November 10, 2011

Problems in the pipeline

J-Source recognized Dinnick as Canadian Newsperson of the Year in 2012 for “engaging citizens with local, public service journalism in an independent environment, without the backing or safety net of working within an established news organization.”

But while OpenFile was celebrating its journalistic successes, the company was still trying to figure out how to make money. OpenFile started with several million dollars in investment from an anonymous angel investor. By Dinnick’s calculations, it cost a newspaper about $1,000 to print a story. He hoped to produce stories for slightly less and sell them back to the newspapers for a profit. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get it off the ground fast enough to keep OpenFile running.

In September 2012, OpenFile suspended publication. Today, it only exists as a homepage and a Twitter account frozen in time.

These are the three key engagement lessons we think can be gleaned from OpenFile’s sudden departure from the Canadian media scene.

OpenFile Takeaway No. 1: Know what you are

Before you can ask for a moment of someone’s time — be they a source, a volunteer, or a colleague — figure out exactly what you want to achieve and build an organization that is powerfully designed to make it happen.

If he could do it again, Dinnick said he would have spent the first few months focusing on how to make the user flow intuitive — before raising any money — and he would have then sold that product to other media companies. “It would be all about utility: getting the OpenFile widget on to as many news websites as possible, and nailing down the user flow to make sure that anybody can suggest a story,” he said. That’s not to say that the editors and journalists weren’t providing value for the company and the community — but producing stories pulled focus away from OpenFile’s true intention, which was to improve community engagement and get those stories into the world as efficiently as possible.

OpenFile Takeaway No. 2: Community engagement is a full-time job

Be realistic about the amount of resources that community engagement requires and measure success based on what you are trying to achieve (see Takeaway No. 1).

The struggle to find a revenue stream pushed OpenFile to focus on clicks to attract ad dollars. At some point, OpenFile started to shift into something different, said Neal Ozano, the site’s Halifax editor. It wanted to be “this community-minded thing,” but it also wanted to be competitive with other media outlets; that meant content needed to be pumped out daily, which didn’t fit the speed at which community-suggested stories evolved. Editors were trying their best to drum up story ideas from the community, but they were also busy assigning stories, editing them, and interacting with readers on social media.

Eventually, it became apparent that it would be impossible to forge strong community connections with only one editor in each city, so OpenFile hired additional editors for each city and a community editor in Toronto responsible for social media outreach. But even with the new hires, Silverman said OpenFile asked too much of its editors and writers.

“I think a lot of news organizations have realized that community engagement is a full-time job,” he said. If you’re going to expect journalists to engage with the community, you have to appreciate that it takes effort and certain skills. Editors need to figure out ways to help journalists do this type of work, perhaps by forming teams that can buttress the amount of work that is required, he said.

It’s also important for editors to be realistic about output, Silverman said. If editors only focus on the number of stories that a journalist produces, they’re ignoring other important indicators, like the amount of engagement that a community has around that journalist’s work. The infrastructure of managing and rewarding community engagement properly is “the big thing” that editors and managers need to think about, he said.

OpenFile Takeaway No. 3: Meet your audience where they are

Identify your audience and go to the places where they hang out, both online and in person. Keep in mind that this takes a lot of time (see Takeaway No. 2), so be thoughtful about how you use your resources.

“We underestimated just how hard it would be to attract new readers and new story ideas. I found that social media and word-of-mouth weren’t nearly enough for what I was trying to do in Toronto, which I hoped they would be,” said Topping, the Toronto editor. It’s not necessarily the case that if you build it, they will come. “There’s a step before they find your publication that you might be incredibly disconnected from,” Topping said. It’s not that people don’t want to help or don’t have enough useful information — but “you have to make an effort to reach them where they are,” Silverman said.

Consequently, the people who were finding OpenFile’s website were only a subset of the audience that editors hoped to reach: mainly the sort of engaged, educated, and media-savvy people who had the time and interest to suggest a story. That made it more likely that OpenFile would receive a certain type of story idea, making it more of an urban issues website than a broader news site that gave underserved communities a platform.

The reader-suggested stories that OpenFile did produce had the ability to “foster an understanding and caring for the places that people live,” Topping said. Done well, those stories also produced empathy and engagement for the journalistic process. But in the end, OpenFile couldn’t maintain the flow of reader-suggested stories that it needed to sustain the site. “For a while [story suggestions] came in, then they sort of petered out,” said Ozano, the Halifax editor. It became easier to run the website like a regular news site and push freelancers to find more stories.

As for journalists who want to integrate community engagement into their work, Silverman’s advice is simple: “Introduce yourself with a sense of openness and humility, and say: You know more than I do. Here’s what I want to try. Here’s how I would love it if you could help. What might you be able to do?” It’s not about throwing up a form and expecting magic to happen, but actually doing the work to get out there in front of people and meet them.

Some of the people we spoke to describe an OpenFile-shaped hole in journalism that has never been filled. Others are more optimistic that new companies like Hearken have stepped in to fill the gap and journalists are becoming more engaged with their audiences on social media and live events. Regardless of its mark on the media landscape, OpenFile shows that communities have untold stories they are eager to share — and that journalists can work with them successfully when they’re given resources to engage with readers in prolonged, sustainable ways.

Our top priority is keeping you connected to the people, places and things you want to be connected to — starting with the people you are friends with on Facebook. That’s why today, we’re announcing an upcoming change to News Feed ranking to help make sure you don’t miss stories from your friends.

We previously made an update that tries to ensure that stories posted directly by the friends you care about, such as photos, videos, status updates or links, will be higher up in News Feed so you are less likely to miss them.

We’ve heard from our community that people are still worried about missing important updates from the friends they care about. For people with many connections this is particularly important, as there are a lot of stories for them to see each day. So we are updating News Feed over the coming weeks so that the things posted by the friends you care about are higher up in your News Feed.

What kind of impact will this have on publishers?

Overall, we anticipate that this update may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for some Pages. The specific impact on your Page’s distribution and other metrics may vary depending on the composition of your audience. For example, if a lot of your referral traffic is the result of people sharing your content and their friends liking and commenting on it, there will be less of an impact than if the majority of your traffic comes directly through Page posts. We encourage Pages to post things that their audience are likely to share with their friends. As always, Pages should refer to our publishing best practices.

In other words, your audience sharing your stories will be more useful than you sharing your stories, no matter how many fans your Facebook page might have.

This is another step in the continued devaluation of large publisher followings on Facebook; the social network has over time reduced the share of your fans who see each of your posts (though they’re happy to take your ad dollars to show them to more!). Add in Instant Articles and the strong preference given to Facebook-native video and you see, once again, the primary hoarder of Internet attention consolidating its position. And various undulations in publisher Facebook traffic — seemingly driven more by algorithmic decisions rather than publisher success or failure — have shown over the past year or two that small tweaks can have big impacts.

Reaction around the news and social-media-marketing worlds was mostly low-key bummed. The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo:

These moves highlight a truth that tends to get lost in commentary about the social network’s influence over the news: At Facebook, informing users about the world will always take a back seat to cute pictures of babies (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Because Facebook does not think of itself primarily as a news company, it seems to want us to stop expecting it to act like one. Whether we should, though, is a more complicated matter.

RIP anyone who relied on Facebook for traffic? https://t.co/EZuNYH1dfY pic.twitter.com/ND73etoOgC

— Owen Williams (@ow) June 29, 2016

Facebook has a new message for publishers: Tamp down your expectations. https://t.co/in02oQTRNM

— Sydney Ember (@melbournecoal) June 29, 2016

Bad news for publishers who don't have dedicated, real audiences, and focus solely on Facebook traffic https://t.co/uJNNwxwyun

— Joshua Topolsky (@joshuatopolsky) June 29, 2016

@joshuatopolsky @nytimesbits good news for actual content creators w/ dedicated fanbases/communities

— Adam Marx (@adammarx13) June 29, 2016

"Facebook is changing its News Feed". The six most anxiety-inducing words in media business right now? https://t.co/EkAa6b04TB

— Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (@rasmus_kleis) June 29, 2016

Dear @facebook – why do you always have to make our jobs harder? https://t.co/NM4Rta20eY #socialgov #gsmchat #smckc

— Kristen (@kwagg) June 29, 2016

@tealtan @lifewinning @yayitsrob beginning of the end

— geminiimatt/'mateo' (@geminiimatt) June 29, 2016

Winter is here https://t.co/KGxJSUPx6l

— Ivan Lajara (@ivanlajara) June 29, 2016

I am a fan of self-fulfilling prophesies pic.twitter.com/JLWtxmfYSn

— Ivan Lajara (@ivanlajara) June 29, 2016

Person to person sharing has always been more valuable than institution-to-person sharing. Solution is: MAKE BETTER CONTENT.

— Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen) June 29, 2016

Like adjectives? Brian Stelter quotes a Facebook official saying the change will be “noticeable” and “significant” but “small” and not “humongous.”

In February, Note to Self launched Infomagical, a week-long series designed to help listeners free themselves from information overload — you know, the inevitable side effect of a life spent glued to your phone.

Note to Self had run a similar project, Bored and Brilliant, in 2015, in which the show partnered with two different apps to let listeners track how much time they spent on their phones. This time around, Zomorodi and John Keefe, WNYC’s head of data news, were interested in interacting with readers via direct texting. Zomorodi had been reading about conversational commerce — the idea that businesses can move beyond apps by texting directly with consumers. “We’re a public radio station, so it’s a little different,” she said. “But we loved the idea of not only being able to talk directly to our listeners, but that they would be able to talk back to us by rating themselves, contributing data, and leaving voicemails.”

Keefe thought back to a 2014 WNYC project, Clock Your Sleep, where the station asked users to keep track of how much and how well they slept. For that project, WNYC built a standalone app. While Keefe didn’t want to build an app for Infomagical — “too arduous” — he did love the app’s ability to push notifications out to listeners.

“The whole trick with the sleep project was to get people to record their previous night’s sleep every day. If you don’t have a reminder, you’re going to blow it off,” Keefe explained. “You could set the app to give you a reminder as you were going to bed, or as you woke up. That kind of persistent reminder turned out to be incredibly useful for people who want to participate in a project like this.” The sleep data that WNYC collected through its app with those push notification reminders turned out to be much more reliable than data collected via the show’s website or via fitness trackers.

So for Infomagical, the team decided to create a texting system, because text reminders can fill the role of push notifications from an app. Keefe’s team, lead by programmer Alan Palazzolo, used a service called Twilio that can program and send texts automatically. To begin, listeners were asked to set information overload goals for themselves and provide their phone numbers on the Note to Self website. They then received followup texts at the phone numbers they’d entered, with some questions about their goals (those answers were used to sort data later). The texts were adjusted for time zone, since “there’s nothing like being asked to join a project at four in the morning.”

Next, the data team worked with Zomorodi to figure out how many text messages (or emails) participants should receive. They ran a test on a few WNYC employees to test timing; while they’d originally planned to send the first text of the day in the late morning, testers said that timing was bad because they were already involved in their days. Instead, the team decided to send the texts earlier in the morning, before they began their work days.

Each morning, listeners received a podcast link. (New Infomagical episodes ran daily from Monday, February 1 to Friday, February 5.) On three days out of the five, they received a midday text asking how things were going. “We figured out how to text back encouraging GIFs to keep you encouraged,” Keefe said. At the end of the day, participants were texted two questions: Whether their level of information overload felt more, less, or the same, and how much progress they were making with their goal (on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being great). On two days out of five, participants were invited to leave a voice message for Note to Self. Those responses were then included in the final episode of the series.

“We were worried about annoying people with texts, but in retrospect, I wish we’d sent them a reminder every single day,” Zomorodi said. “People would say they’d forgotten and we got them back on track. Notifications are annoying if you don’t ask for them, but if this is a week when you decide you want to change something in your life, you want as much help as you can get.”

One way the team avoided irritating people was by making sure that the texts were written in Zomorodi’s voice, the voice of the show, “so it really did feel it was Note to Self reaching out to you, not a company that wants something from you,” Zomorodi explained. Ariana Tobin, the show’s producer, wrote the text for the podcast, newsletter, web copy, and text messages, making the 160 characters available in a text “really feel crafted and kind and gentle, while actually bringing across some information and extracting some information at the same time.”

Radio and texting actually have a lot of parallels, Keefe pointed out. “Who do you text with? You text with your family and your friends, and you don’t get too many bot texts,” he said. (At least for now.) “You’re usually communicating one-on-one with somebody. The funny thing is that people also perceive radio and podcasting as being a one-on-one conversation: ‘Here’s Soterios Johnson doing Morning Edition in my kitchen.’ You don’t think of that as a broadcast, but a companion that, for years, has been one-on-one. That is sort of mirrored in the texting. Yeah, we’re sending this to everyone who’s participating, but the experience is much more of a one-on-one interaction, and when you answer the question, it responds right back to you with some encouragement.”

The one-on-one, personal communication concept was echoed in the voicemail prompts, which invited listeners to say more about the goals they’d chosen for themselves. When they texted back that they were interested, their phones would ring and they’d pick up to hear a recording of Zomorodi thanking them for participating. “There are other shows that set up voice lines, but this was different,” Zamorodi said. “You were literally being called by us and talking back.”

Listeners ended up leaving 1,700 voicemails in that first week. Zomorodi was able to listen to most of them, she said, and excerpts from several hundred of the voicemails were included in the final “results” episode.

“When people leave comments on the website, there’s an expectation that the public is going to see them,” Zomorodi said. “You’re presenting your ideas for public consumption.” The voicemails were, by contrast, if not confessional, much more intimate. “It was like a friend leaving me messages,” she said. “A lot of them would start out by being like, ‘Hey, Manoush, here’s what’s going on in my day.’ At the end, some people would say, ‘Okay, I’ll talk to you again tomorrow.’ I was really moved by it in a way that I had not expected to be.”

On the coding and developer side, the project was “a big lift,” Keefe said. “When we’re talking about 15,000 people we’re talking to during the week, that’s like 300,000, 400,000 texts,” he said. When a company sends that many texts, wireless providers may spam-block its texts. To get around this, WNYC could have applied for a short code “so that the phone companies and all the carriers know you’re not a spammer.” But it takes time to go through the application process for a short code and the codes themselves are expesnive, around $3,000 a quarter, Keefe said.

The texts also had to be queued up. And it costs around half a cent to send a text, which adds up when you’re texting thousands of people three times a day. Ultimately, keeping all of these considerations in mind and in order not to overload its servers, WNYC decided on the 15,000-person cap for the first week.

Since that week ended up running smoothly, and since so much work had gone into it, WNYC decided to run the Infomagical campaign again. In fact, it will run every week, starting again each Monday, “until we feel like we don’t need it anymore,” Zomorodi said. “We’re curious to see if this becomes an underground moment: Like, you’ve got to do an Infomagical week!” When we spoke, several thousand people had already signed up for the new week. And, yes, Zomorodi promised she’ll be listening to all the new voicemails she gets.

“There’s a conversation going on between me and my listeners, but I want to make it as frictionless as possible for them to get their thoughts and worries to us,” she said. “This seems like a great way to do it.”

The paper is meant as both a reality check for local news organizations and as a how-to for dealing with certain realities, namely: “The typical local newspaper gets about five minutes per capita per month in Web user attention, less than a local TV station earns in a single hour. Local newspaper traffic is just a rounding error on the larger Web.” Hindman notes that the “bottom line is that any successful strategy for digital local news requires sites to grow their audience…Audience growth is just as essential for plans that rely on selling subscriptions.” His recommendations including focusing on load times and personalized recommendation engines, as well as practicing A/B testing and optimizing content for social media. “The plight of newspapers is far worse than many journalists and editors realize,” Hindman concludes. Overall, his prescription is to focus on how to build consistent, repeat visitors, the idea of compounding “stickiness”: “Newspapers…need to rethink what they are optimizing for: not raw traffic, but audience growth. Small gains in stickiness can compound enormously over time.”

“Beyond Memorability: Visualization Recognition and Recall”: From Harvard, MIT and the University of Michigan, published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. By Michelle A. Borkin, Zoya Bylinskii, Nam Wook Kim, Constance May Bainbridge, Chelsea S. Yeh, Daniel Borkin, Hanspeter Pfister, and Aude Oliva.

The study provides some useful insights for news data visualization, and it serves as a good reminder that audiences need some help when interpreting visual information. The researchers conduct lab experiments with a variety of real-world graphics, including many from news organizations, and find that titles and text really help viewers interpret visuals and then recall information afterwards. Like them or not, pictograms — when done well — also facilitate recognition and recall. The keys to good data viz, according to the study, are: “having a good and clear presentation, making effective use of text and annotations, drawing a viewer’s attention to the important details, providing effective visual hooks for recall, and guiding the viewer through a visualization using effective composition and visual narrative.”

“Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook”: From Facebook and the University of Michigan, published in Science. By Eytan Bakshy, Solomon Messing, and Lada Adamic.

This paper speaks to the ongoing debate over the power of algorithms and audience “filter bubbles.” It might seem strange for a company to need to study its own algorithm, but it’s a dynamic, complex software system. The researchers find that, although the algorithm does tailor news based on liberal or conservative leanings (and prior behavioral patterns), the filtering problem is minimal: “After [algorithmic] ranking, there is on average slightly less cross-cutting content: conservatives see approximately 5% less cross-cutting content compared to what friends share, while liberals see about 8% less ideologically diverse content.” The study took some heat for its methodological design and approach. See here and here for critiques. But overall, it stood as an important contribution that set the agenda for more discussion of algorithms and impacts.

“Tweeting From Left to Right: Is Online Political Communication More Than an Echo Chamber?”: From New York University, published in Psychological Science. By Pablo Barberá, John T. Jost, Jonathan Nagler, Joshua A. Tucker, and Richard Bonneau.

This big data study joins a conversation about ideological segregation on Twitter that has taken place for several years now (see this column last year.) The sample size is enormous: almost 4 million Twitter users and 150 million tweets. The researchers find that ideological segregation — the proverbial “birds of a feather” phenomenon — is much more visible with explicitly political issues, and that on other national events, left and right often speak with one another. Two important other findings: “With respect to both political and nonpolitical issues, liberals were more likely than conservatives to engage in cross-ideological dissemination,” and “previous work may have overestimated the degree of ideological segregation in social-media usage.”

“Interacting Is Believing: Interactivity, Social Cue, and Perceptions of Journalistic Credibility on Twitter”: From Hope College and Lehigh University, published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. By Mi Rosie Jahng and Jeremy Littau.

This study, which is based on an experiment involving about 150 students, suggests that journalists who engage more with audiences on Twitter increase their perceived credibility. Obviously, the results are limited by the experiment’s sample demographic. But it’s intriguing to contemplate how the very act of replying to the audience itself may bolster the standing of journalists. However, another 2015 study of journalist interactivity on Facebook — by Jayeon Lee of Lehigh, published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication — produced somewhat contradictory findings and finds it can be a “double-edged sword”: In terms of professional dimensions, audience engagement diminished perceptions of journalists and associated news products.

“Changing deliberative norms on news organizations’ Facebook sites”: From the University of Texas at Austin, Purdue University, and the University of Wyoming, published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. By Natalie Jomini Stroud, Joshua M. Scacco, Ashley Muddiman, and Alexander L. Curry.

This study looks at how journalists might promote better, richer, and more reasoned civic discourse about news by playing a stronger role in comment threads. The strength of the research is that it leverages a real-world field study and randomization to pinpoint effects. The researchers found that “reporter involvement was related to lower levels of incivility and greater use of evidence from commenters.” Overall, the study “provides evidence that an individual can affect norms in online comment spaces. And to a goal of promoting deliberative discussion online, this study offers support for a practice that can be enacted — engaging with commenters.” The research is part of the Engaging News Project’s important ongoing investigation of comment threads and the effects of journalistic engagement on civics and democracy.

WNYC Studios, part two: In case you missed it, last week saw big public radio mothership WNYC announce the launch of its new podcast division, called WNYC Studios. The new unit ostensibly serves two purposes: first, to formally house the operations of the station’s existing digitally oriented shows, and second, to carry out the development of future programming with an eye to expanding the station’s digital revenue stream. As WNYC chief content officer Dean Cappello succinctly put it: “This is the way we will become a much, much bigger content company, period.”

You can review the launch details on the New York Times piece on the matter, and you can also check out my initial reactions on the last issue of Hot Pod, where I was particularly hung up by the division’s requirement ambition to raise all dat cash. As I wrote then: “To what extent will WNYC Studios allow the station to raise money outside the traditional nonprofit model? And is this part of a larger narrative that sees WNYC angling to enter a flexible relationship with its public broadcasting responsibilities?” Wow I can’t believe I just quoted myself I need to take a walk around the block now.

Anyway, I was able to get on the phone with Cappello and WNYC president/CEO Laura Walker to ask some questions about the launch. Here are the high-level takeaways:

Why. “This is about having enough heft in the business…We’re not boutique any more,” Cappello said. “The place where the huge growth is happening has to do with mobile and audio…We don’t want to cede that territory to anybody else.” He went on to maintain two things: (1) The formalization of WNYC Studios as an organizational structure is meant to recognize that there’s been an uptake in digital audio, and (2) the development is also, in part, a way to respect the fact that audiences for broadcast programming and audiences for on-demand audio want distinctly separate things. The division, then, can be read a move to better position the station to optimize programming for both platform categories.

But there’s a tension at play, the very same that’s at the heart of a bunch of other content companies that have been compelled to accommodate the Internet. Cappello: “When podcasting hit, there was a moment where Laura [Walker] and I looked at each other and said, ‘We’re producing content. It’s not about producing for platforms.'”

When. I had been curious about the decision-making process and the timeline that went into the division’s creation. Walker mentioned that the idea of doubling down on podcasts — that is, to build out a structure within the station that would facilitate the management and expansion of its on-demand audio assets — was presented during the last strategy meeting involving the station’s board. Cappello offered a more granular timeline of “two or three strategic plans ago,” which probably pegs the presentation to either early 2015 or late 2014.

“We came to ask ourselves a couple of questions,” Walker told me. “What would it mean to take a lead role in building this space? To be a stronger talent magnet? What would it mean to inspire new voices and diversity? And how do we figure out a way to do this in a nimble way that’s both entrepreneurial and funded with philanthropy?” (More on that last part in a bit.)

According to Cappello and Walker, WNYC Studios is largely a formalization of several initiatives that have been taking place over a longer period of time in piece-meal fashion. Consider: the steady launch of new podcast-first projects like Only Human and Death, Sex & Money, the move to self-distribute successful shows like Radiolab and On The Media, the partnership to coproduce and provide ad-sales support for Oakland-based Snap Judgment. The executive-level restructuring back in July was an explicit move to prepare for the new division, and the internally-circulated memo that announced those changes contains, perhaps, the first public sighting of the name “WNYC Studios.”

Anyway, assuming the broad strokes are right, this timeline is super interesting to me. It strikes me as relatively brisk, especially for a public institution — according to a common groan I hear in the industry, any decision-making process around a project of this scale tends to be slow. Furthermore, one could also probably infer the emotional context of the room: November 2014, the earliest possible date that plan could’ve been unveiled to the board, was the month that saw Serial entering the middle chunk of its narrative…and steadily approaching the peak of public obsession. (Coincidentally, November 2014 was also the month when Hot Pod was born.)

Content development. Glancing at the slate of shows announced with the division’s launch, it appears that a big chunk of WNYC Studio’s initial development adopts a model that significantly targets partnerships with media organizations and personalities. The first new show to premiere under the WNYC Studios banner (after the launch announcement, at least) is the long-talked-about New Yorker Radio Hour. Other projects in development include shows with Vice News, author Roxane Gay, and comedian Sara Schaefer. That model, interestingly enough, put WNYC Studios in roughly the same category as Panoply (disclaimer: my day-job employer), which pursues projects of similar vein. Of course, the key difference being that WNYC Studios is rolling off a rich history of successful broadcast-oriented programming.

When talking to Cappello about WNYC Studios’ content development process, an obvious analogy emerged: that of a film production company. However, that analogy turned out to be a lot more literal than initially anticipated. “I think it’s a two-way street,” he said. “We see HBO going into the podcast business, but we should also look at HBO. We should be focusing on making shows that huge chunks of America will entertain themselves with.” He brought up the notion of experimenting with different genres and new formats — noting that WNYC Studios is currently working on a scripted series project — along with the idea of targeting talent from other industries (say, film or television) that haven’t been able to get their projects off the ground: “What if there are ways we could produce them in the audio format?”

Fundraising and revenue sources. According to Walker, the station seeks to raise $15 million fund for WNYC Studios. “Our initial request are going to individuals, philanthropic-oriented individuals, and foundations,” she said. The fundraising process is still very much active and in its early stages as of our conversation last week. These funds will be used to pilot projects and to expand revenue streams: to raise sponsorships, up their membership numbers, and develop robust Kickstarter campaigns. “It’s a mixed model,” Walker said.

Partnerships are also expected to bring in additional resources to the table that will aid in content development, though those resources won’t be included as part of the $15 million fund.

Walker also mentioned that she’s seen interest from the venture capital community. However, she isn’t sure how that could work, given that WNYC is a non-profit, public institution. (Side note: I found this to be crux of WNYC’s biggest issue. It’s a media company currently grappling with the structural transformation afforded by the digital shift, and it clearly has…let’s call it private-industry-oriented ambitions. But its capacity to reorient and accelerate is clearly bounded by its public commitments. These commitments are not just formal, but also cultural; one recalls the slight brouhaha that accompanied Ira Glass’ statements that “public radio is ready for capitalism.” That’s the sound that wind makes when it flows between a rock and a hard place.)

Internal talent development. One hopes that the launch of WNYC Studios means that there’ll be a lot more opportunities for the station’s existing talent — from the newsroom grunts all the way up to the senior producers — to get their shot. Time will tell whether this is the case. In the meantime, the station has been conducting the initial phases of an internal fellowship program that sounds like it would encourage rotations of earlier-stage talent between shows and divisions. This program is currently led by Suzie Lechtenberg, the former executive producer of Freakonomics Radio. If you’re a young WNYC staffer and you’re reading this, hopefully you know this already. If not, you know what to do.

Anyway, you can find out more brochure-level information about WNYC Studios on the division’s new landing page, which appears to have been constructed using Squarespace. (An on-brand move if I’ve ever seen one, given that Squarespace, like Mailchimp and Audible, is synonymous with the podcast format as a result of their generous contributions to the industry’s initial ad market.)

One more thing on WNYC. On diversity. It appears that WNYC has appointed Brenda Williams-Butts, formerly the senior director of community engagement and audience development, as the station’s new VP of recruitment, diversity, and inclusion. She joins the station’s HR team and will aim to up the game in both staff recruitment and program development. I imagine the press release is floating around on the Internet somewhere.

More FT on pods. The Financial Times has been pretty great on covering the business of the emerging podcasting space — a whole lot more than The Wall Street Journal, anyway. That’s probably in no small part due to Shannon Bond, the paper’s U.S. media and marketing correspondent, who follows up on her previous reporting on the space with a pod interview featuring tallest-man-in-the-world and Gimlet cofounder Matt Lieber. You should check out the interview in full on the FT Alphachat podcast here, but here are two things that stood out to me:

• Gimlet generated $2 million in revenue from its first year. For context, it has raised $1.5 million in venture capital so far. From what I understand off the gossip mill, most, if not all, of that revenue is being reinvested into the company to further fuel expansion — as should be the case.
• Some updates on upcoming Gimlet projects: (1) the Adam Davidson-Adam McKay two-way show Awesome Boring, the pilot of which was available to Gimlet members, is now called Secretly Awesome and still aims for release by the end of the year. (2) Lieber also drops some details on the new show they’re working on that’ll essentially be a podcast spotlighting other podcasts that chart in the less-visible echelons of iTunes.

A dent in the (NPR) universe. New data shared by NPR last week gave further shape and form to a trend we’ve all long suspected — that its audiences are getting progressively older and older, and that its overall audience pie is getting smaller and smaller. Current reported out the data and provided a great overview of the situation, and you should definitely check out the piece in full, but here are a couple of details that stood out to me:

• “Morning Edition has seen a 20 percent drop among listeners under 55 since 2010.”
• “Stations are losing listeners 12–44 years of age. NPR projects that by 2020, its stations’ audience of 44-year-olds and younger will be around 30 percent, half that demographic’s audience share in 1985.”
• Digital audiences are growing, but that growth is deemed to be inadequate. Gwynne Villota, a senior research manager at NPR, with a fascinating quote: “At this point, we don’t think that digital listening is making up for the lost broadcast listening.”

It’s a tough situation, to say the very least. Strategically, the organization appears to essentially have three choices:

• As suggested in the Current article’s wider narrative, NPR could opt to fully double down on radio and aggressively push to grow radio listenership. It’s a tough bet, given the increasing digitization of car entertainment systems — and not to mention a society-wide shift to mobile, let alone, uh, digital. (But wait, what the hell are we even talking about here? The report appears to categorize online radio streaming as a separate category from traditional radio. It’s reasonable to assume that at some point in the near future, all linear radio consumption will be streaming-based. I’m probably getting something wrong here. Someone disabuse me of this.)
• To go the opposite direction, take the risk, and double down on digital — either streaming or on-demand. Of course, this is an unlikely outcome, given NPR’s composition in both revenue stream and governing interests.
• To attempt some sort of middle ground — that is, to watch the markets on both ends and split its efforts to grow both pies at agreeable rates.

In other words, NPR stations either have to make a bet on one of the two markets, or they have to make bet on themselves that they’re able to balance the two very different, possibly conflicting distribution categories.

Alternatively, a perfectly valid choice is for NPR to bite the bullet and aim for a niche market: that of the old, radio-loving sophisticate. Not unlike, perhaps, what we think about when we think about New Yorker readers. But that’s super sad so let’s not think about that.

Small is beautiful. Digiday here with a fascinating piece on Goat Rodeo DC, a podcast collective that hopes to go the hyperlocal route by matching smaller, more region-oriented shows with local advertisers. Money quote: “The Goat Rodeo’s pitch to advertisers is built around the idea that podcast listeners, however limited in number, are highly engaged and hence attractive targets for local businesses looking to be a part of the conversation.”

Think of it as a companion piece to Nieman Lab’s earlier report on the Chicago Podcast Collective, which is also cited in the Digiday article.

Dating Ring. Podcasts are the new pickup line, apparently. I’ve heard about folks building out the “Tinder for podcasts,” but really the money’s in flipping it around and making the podcasts for Tinder. Wait, what? Anyway, the Washington Post with a fascinating coda on StartUp Season 2.

Is this your first time reading Hot Pod? You can subscribe to the newsletter here, which mostly features irrelevant exclusive content (mostly different GIFs and stuff about what I had for lunch but whatever that’s the newsletter strategy I’m rolling with).

Okay, that’s a bit too dramatic. But: Do you remember how surprised you were when you heard that Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post?

Bezos bought the Post from the Graham family a little more than two years ago, and when the news traveled across the news world, the anticipation hung in the air: WWJD? Could the Amazon wunderkind do for news publishing what he had done for retail commerce, imagining a whole new business model that could sustain a large-scale enterprise?

Even as the wider legacy news industry keeps its ears to the ground, hoping for turnaround ideas, we’ve heard no earth-shattering announcements out of D.C. But Bezosian clues do tumble out now and then — more frequently of late. There’s the Washington Post national network, now comprising some 300 dailies, in which the Post offers local newspapers’ subscribers free access to the national edition of the Post. Then there’s the long-awaited Prime partnership, by which Amazon’s 40 million or more Prime subscribers can get Post national for free for six months, and only $48 a year thereafter (“Jeff Bezos (finally) pumps up the Post with Prime”).

Now comes what could become another fulcrum of a Post national play: Arc. If Jeff Bezos has provided runway for the rebuilding of the Post franchise, think about Arc as the new control tower, a to-be-licensed platform built to support modern digital publishing.

Arc has been in development for more than three years, soon after Post chief information officer Shailesh Prakash arrived on the job and began rethinking Post publishing. Bezos’ arrival then added fuel for the buildout of what Prakash calls a set of “best-of-breed tools that are aware of each other.” You could call it a platform, or a content management system. Most importantly, it aims to newly answer the question that has long bedeviled legacy publishers: how to get both the old stuff (like text and photos) and the new stuff (like video, audio, and interactives) from conception to the audience without so much hassle.

Arc, then, intends to provide an umbrella of interconnected services. These services — from video to app creation to personalization to analytics — can be seen as modules. Each — increasingly self-built by the Post or partnered — can be bettered over time. Each is engineered to work alongside its Arc cousins. In the Post chart below, Arc covers 15 functions — all things a medium-sized or larger publisher now needs to harness. From the left to right, it moves from creation to audience.

(On the chart, Clavis is the Post’s personalization engine, Darwin its A/B tester.)

As the Post newsroom has made impressive use of Arc, Prakash and a team of about a dozen have been quietly focused on extending it to other publishers. Just this week, Portland’s Pulitzer-winning Willamette Week became Arc’s first launched customer. The weekly pulled the Arc switch with the usual trepidation — but few of the normal tears, it says — and transformed the look and speed of its web and mobile products. In total, it took but two and a half months from the start of talks with the Post to the launch. Willamette Week’s newsroom has seen a much needed change in its workflows.

“To upload images, we’ve gone from three steps to one,” says Lizzy Acker, Willamette Week’s web editor.

I asked Acker how fast the new site loads compared to the old. She said she hadn’t yet done a calculation, but “I do know that Chartbeat showed us as three snails before and now as a walking person,” she laughed.

“We are now a digital-first company as a result of this because of the way their system works,” says Mark Zusman, Willamette Week’s editor and publisher. “It really makes a lot of sense to publish to digital and then go to print. It’s a change in the way everybody operates, on the editorial side and the production side and on the ad-sale side.”

The benefits should be severalfold, he says. The weekly’s journalists can put more time into their journalism and less into process. He expects that the SEO help provided by Arc will increase audience. Unlike earlier highly templated systems, Zusman says Arc’s flexibility impresses staff. “If you look at the site, you’ll see the sophistication. What you can’t see in the backend is the ease of use and the flexibility. If we want to have a completely different look on Monday from Tuesday, we’ve got the tools to do so.”

“The Post has been an absolutely remarkable partner, and all evidence is that they actually deeply care about local, independent journalism. They’re really helping us.” Zusman says he is paying about the same amount for Arc as it had for its previous WeHaa system.

Willamette Week’s early positive experience is echoed by the Post’s first testers, in the college press. Columbia and the University of Maryland have been testing Arc, for free, to work out bugs. Columbia’s Spectator used the sophistication of the platform to good effect, for instance with this piece on the history of sexual assault activism at Columbia.

“The Post partnership drastically changed how our newsroom approached digital storytelling,” says Teddy Amenabar, a Post intern who is also a recent online managing editor at University of Maryland’s Diamondback. The paper’s created a group of web developers focused on coding for Arc called Diamondback Lab.

The Arc idea

Arc focuses on creating a better reader experience. You can check out a few pieces to get the sense of the nuance and fluidity it can bring to multimedia stories: its Katrina Diaspora series, or a Syrian refugee story, or a Post native ad from its Brand Connect business, which also uses Arc.

Jeremy Gilbert, the Post’s digital development director of strategic initiatives, gives credit to The New York Times’ groundbreaking Snow Fall story of 2012. That story opened eyes of how the web could tell stories. The challenge, he says, has been in creating tools to do that as part of a work routine, rather than a great exception — to do it twice a week perhaps, rather than once a month. Consequently, Arc is architected to save time, and use repeat processes — packaged in templates and toolsets — to make presentation assembly easier over time.

Arc, to be clear, is a digital platform. The Post’s integration of it with its Méthode print CMS — while offering promise — is a work in progress. Says Prakash: “This is also an advantage we think we have over the pure-play digital offerings — they simply have no idea of how to integrate with a print operation that still brings in the majority of our revenue. Arc is a bridge to the digital future which is aware of our print legacy. As much as we would rather not, we live the legacy of our print legacy (and systems) everyday at the Post.”

Still, what the Post has built calls to mind the high-profile platforms of the news startup world. Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff has long pointed to its Chorus platform as the secret sauce of his lower-cost, fast-to-market business. Similarly, just-acquired Business Insider cites its Viking platform and Gawker its Kinja platform as central to their growth.

The strategic idea for the Post, and one Prakash believes is sharable: Any company of significance needs to be able to be in charge of its own means of production. Dependence on too many vendors — for video here, analytics there — can stifle any publisher’s progress, believes Prakash. Arc’s argument is that working off one vendor’s well integrated, and constantly updated, platform is a suitable solution. Customers would get all of Arc’s functionality, being able to pick which modules they want, and see functionality improve as it improves for the Post.

Vendorland

Still, licensing the platform moves the Post into Vendorland. Creating and iterating a state-of-the-art platform is tough enough; servicing noisy and high-expectation customers is something else again.

Prakash acknowledges that the many to-dos — deeper documentation, training, finalizing pricing and more — are all in early stages. That buildout is now supported by 10 to 15 of Prakash’s overall complement of 200 engineers, designers, and product managers. A second customer is signed and on the rollout schedule, and the Post is gearing up for more over the next year.

An alt-weekly is one thing; is he ready for a good-sized daily with lots of complexity? “Well, if The New York Times called tomorrow, we wouldn’t be ready,” he says. But the Post is clearly thinking big.

“We’ve done a market sizing,” says Prakash. “I fundamentally believe there is a big gap in the marketplace, and this is a business worth at least $100 million in revenue if done right.”

I’d agree. Publishers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on content management systems over the past two decades, and still largely find themselves behind whatever curve is on the horizon. A better solution — whether the Post’s or someone else’s — should find acceptance among the struggling, transitioning press.

It’s just not traditional media that the Post will target. There’s also all those brands that now consider themselves “publishers.” They’re adapting to native advertising, but they’re also getting used to all that’s required of — or that may be useful to — a publisher in direct contact with an audience. Prakash names the financial industry as one likely target there.

A horse of what color?

As the Post rolled out its national network program to local and regional dailies, some confidentially described it as a Trojan horse. How opaque or transparent the Post’s national programs appear to be may be in the mind of the beholder; it would be silly to expect a Jeff Bezos-led enterprise to be less than super-aggressive in the marketplace. The Post’s many initiatives, including Arc, certainly suggest an army on the move. That army can be a potent gatherer of data; as with the national network deals with publishers, the Post gets access to audience analytics churned out through Arc.

All publishers would be smart to keep that in mind, but it shouldn’t stop them from testing initiatives offered by one of the few well-funded, mold-breaking pioneers in today’s digital publishing. Look across the landscape of the North American (and European) regional press today, and we see a shortage of new ideas, and of investment in new ideas. We do see lots of cost-cutting — but not enough of the moves that can improve the bottom line and improve the products that audiences get.

The Post intends Arc to make money, of course. “We’re not altruistic,” says Prakash. Beyond charging for the service, the Post could add other moneymakers, such as content syndication services, says Matt Monahan, a senior product manager.

While Arc is not now connected to the Post’s ad management system, it’s not far-fetched to see how a networked content platform used at scale could become a foundation for both advertising and reader revenue (a.k.a. paywall) sales. We’d have to consider that a longer-term possibility; it clearly would take a minimum of several years to develop. But if it did, it might both benefit Bezos’ Post and provide a new lower-cost, higher-performing tech foundation for the wider news business. There are a lot of ifs there, but the advent of Arc makes the notion less of a fantasy.

Shailesh Prakash puts his Arc in perspective: “As much of hype and pomp there is about our technology offering, I am happy to go on record to say, this is a ‘stretch’ goal for us…Our strategy is ‘crawl, walk, run.’ I grew up in the tech industry from Sun to Netscape to Microsoft, and I know how hard it is to be a software vendor, and I think we have a shot at it, especially under the the tone that Jeff sets for the company.”

As anyone who follows media knows, the Los Angeles Times publisher’s imagination short-circuited the day after Labor Day, when he was fired by Tribune Publishing CEO Jack Griffin (“Tribune to fire L.A. Times publisher Austin Beutner”). Unfortunately, too many citizens and readers can imagine that day. Today, the Times can only claim a household reach of 7.4 percent in the L.A. designated market area. That’s right: Only one of 14 households take the paper. Yes, the Times’ digital reach is much greater, but that print reach number tells the story of civic decline.

It’s the place of the Times in greater L.A. — the digital, print, and in-person Times — that should drive the Tribune/Times story forward. Don’t be distracted by the sometimes-cartoonish depictions of the drama. We’ve seen all the familiar storylines quickly dusted off: Chicago vs. L.A. Chain vs. local. CEO vs. publisher. Tyrant vs. hero. Billionaire philanthropist vs. corporate chieftains. While each offers elements of truths, they don’t offer the insight we need.

In short, it’s the Austin Beutner model — however flawed anyone thinks its execution was, or would be — that should compel us. It’s what makes this particular tale of newspaper chaos distinguishable from the long list of examples elsewhere. It’s what makes the L.A. Times case consequential to news publishers everywhere, and what makes the coming fight over the Times’ ownership a point of national interest.

The civic argument

Yes, the words “community” and “Los Angeles” haven’t been a perfect duo.

Yet, at the Times, that word — even, in Los Angeles, the place Dorothy Parker (perhaps apocryphally) called “72 suburbs in search of a city” — assumed a central editorial and business role in the short Beutner era.

In his Facebook post upon being fired, Beutner laid out his strategy once again:

I agreed to become the Publisher and CEO of the Times because I believe in Los Angeles and recognize the unique role the Times plays in our community. It is the civic conscience which holds accountable those with power in Los Angeles, helps celebrate what is good in our community, and provides news and information to help us better understand and engage with the world around us…the Los Angeles and California story really does begin here at the Times.

In a matter of months, Beutner mapped a different, involved future for the Times. His own one-hour televised and streamed interview with Gov. Jerry Brown on California’s drought drew the most attention. What drew less was a budding business motive that sprouted from it, a possible topical focus on water. Some new ad money from irrigation and drilling companies literally opened a small but intriguing tap of new revenue.

He intended that Brown forum to be a prototype for a series of Times forums to shine light on community issues, to be accompanied by to-the-point Times’ journalistic coverage.

On a more enduring issue, the Times announced its new education focus with the August-launched Education Matters. The intention: Serve the audiences of parents, educators, and children as distinct ones, and to pivot coverage accordingly. Some detractors may paint it as naive, but read through the announcement and see what you think of this idea to make L.A. Times newly essential to its communities.

Essential: That’s a key word in the strategy. In fact, the Times’ first big newsletter foray is called Essential California, and it has already begun building a list of known readers — the same strategy now being successful plied at best-practice national sites from the New York Times to Quartz.

Being essential served as Beutner’s attempted antidote to the Times’ increasing irrelevance to the wider community. (How much has the Times lost its central importance to a city whose agenda it once, for good and bad, set? Consider that in 1999, it had “more than 1,000 staff members — editors, reporters and photographers,” a daily circulation of more than a million and a Sunday circ of 1.3 million. More here on the 1999/2015 comparison at Kevin Roderick’s L.A. Observed.)

If all of that seems goo-goo nice-making, let’s note that a profit-making motive rode alongside. In the few months the strategy has been in place, it may be able to count just a couple to several new millions of dollars of revenues, if that. The bigger plan, which I outlined in May (“What are they thinking? Austin Beutner’s California turnaround plan”) included new ad sponsorships, native advertising, events income, general and niche reader subscriptions and more, largely again borrowing from the playbook of what we’ve seen nationally. In that column, I noted Beutner’s plan would easily take three to five years to be tested.

Beutner also reached out more widely to L.A.’s majority non-white communities, both in his hires and in his intended products. His new emerging teams at the Times sometimes left him, ironically, the only older white guy in the room.

It’s noteworthy that both Latino communities and African-American politicians have supported him publicly since he was fired; the Times hasn’t always had the greatest relationships with the new L.A.

Word is that even parts of the newsroom were coming along, although it’s hard to how big those parts were — or may be. (Anyone who’s been around this business knows that waiting for whole newsroom buy-in is an impossible proposition.)

All of these initiatives raised eyebrows at Tribune’s Chicago HQ; they weren’t part of Griffin’s own turnaround plan. They were audacious and could only be led by someone with as big an ego as Beutner. Beutner was doubly the man for the job.

Now, maybe Austin Beutner may not be the best guy to lead a rededication of the Times as a muscular player in the journalism and life of the city. Though everyone proclaims him to be “the smartest guy in the room,” he had never been a publisher, or a media guy, before. Some say his inexperience with the basic blocking and tackling demanded of a publisher complicated the change he sought, and that he hadn’t yet figured out how to line up his commercial management ducks in a row. None of that would be surprising, and I’m sure it would be vexing to any involved. At the same time, let’s remember that the Times had seen only one year of this kind of change — though God knows it’s been buffeted by so many changes in management over the years as to turn even an optimistic analyst cynical. Importantly — to the point of the civic strategy — he’s the guy who stepped forward.

What is L.A.’s civic interest worth, to whom?

This question of the Times’ future is still open; expect it to be resolved in weeks rather than months. Businessman/philanthropist — and friend of Austin Beutner — Eli Broad has already tried to buy the Times and its now-sister San Diego Union-Tribune, which was bought by Tribune and put into a single California News Group company four months ago (“Newsonomics: Tribune Publishing wraps its arms around San Diego — and all of Southern California”). In fact, the Tribune board rejected his expression of interest at the same meeting two weeks ago at which Beutner was fired. This week, the 82-year-old Broad is fixated another big project: He’s opening the Broad Museum, a $140 million investment that will house the art collection of Broad and his wife Edye.

Behind the scenes, though, there’s much strategizing. Broad signed his name, along with the 50-plus other L.A. leaders, including two former mayors (though not, conspicuously, the current one) in calling for Tribune to return to local control of the paper. His interest remains, and his pockets are deep, at a net worth of more than $7 billion. In a cash game, Tribune can’t play. But it’s not yet a cash game. The Tribune board rejected Broad’s overture — he didn’t name a number, wanting to see current financials — and last night Tribune issued a statement saying it was “deeply committed to…the communities of Southern California” and called the Times and U-T “a cornerstone of our Company’s portfolio and a key component to our success in the future.”

But that’s likely just a first step in this process. If Broad is willing to consider a bid for all of Tribune’s nine properties, the game will be on.

Two years ago, Broad — then partnered with Beutner — was willing to buy all the Tribune’s papers. Then, you’ll recall, the apparition of Koch Brothers jittered the landscape, and Tribune decided to spin the papers into a separate company rather than sell them.

Given the spirit and possibly letter of the Revlon principle, Tribune’s board must listen to legitimate bids that are in its best interest. Whose best interest? Not the readers’, or the community’s, of course; we haven’t yet found that legal principle in U.S. law. What matters is the financial interest of the Tribune’s shareholders. The largest, at 15 percent, is Oaktree Capital Management, headed by Bruce Karsh, himself a significant L.A. player.

A sale would undoubtedly force change in Tribune management, and likely in its current strategies, but it’s the price — the number — that will matter most if Broad proceeds. Even if he doesn’t, there’s now much stir in L.A. about local ownership, Beutner having shown a new light on what may be possible for a revivified Times. Could Beutner himself be a funder of the deal? He’s got at least some of the money to get a deal done, but may not want to go it alone.

What’s TPUB worth? Less than it was a year ago. Its share price is down by about 60 percent. With a market cap of $285 million and debt, after cash, of about $360 million, it will take less to buy Tribune papers than it did a year ago. We can figure that the new combined Times/U-T may be worth a third to 40 percent of the company.

Tribune, unsurprisingly, has been very quiet, saying publicly that it was “grateful” for the rush of civic concern that’s made itself known over the past week. Then, Thursday, its board issued a “vote of confidence” in Jack Griffin’s plan and Beutner’s successor, new publisher Tim Ryan.

Civic leaders, the L.A. City Council, and L.A. County of Supervisors have all recently run to the barricades to demand local leadership and ownership, plus the restoration of the Beutner order. Meanwhile, Ryan, who came directly from Tribune’s Baltimore Sun, owns the unpleasant task of implementing deep budget cuts that Beutner wouldn’t. By the end of the month, we expect newsroom cuts nearing 10 percent of the 500-strong workforce, in addition to other organizational efficiencies.

While community and civic interest may be the biggest story here, the question will turn out to be: What is L.A.’s civic interest worth, to whom? (And we should note, despite Beutner’s strategic intentions, the city of San Diego — California’s second largest — has become a bit player.)

Newspapers’ public face

Tribune Publishing has assumed the role of the heavy in the so-far largely local drama. National media are working angles, while the Times’ coverage of the intrigue has been fair but meager, and certainly not ahead of the story.

In my early conversations with Jack Griffin, I could hear his intention to make both the journalism and the business better. Now, though, in the pressure-packed, quarterly-earnings-driven world he’s chosen to live in, time isn’t on his side. Unlike Beutner, Griffin didn’t believe he had much time to spend on imagining. Instead, he’s had to deal with financial analysts and investors who care only a little about 2017 and who, in some cases, understand next to nothing about the local newspaper business.

It was a year ago that Griffin took on the near-impossible task of turning around a single-class public newspaper company, in public, on a digital dime. His five-point transformation plan hasn’t yet shown transformative results. While Beutner had plotted out the longer-term vision, beginning to put a team into a place that could achieve it, he refused to play his bosses’ shorter-term, care-about-the-quarterlies game. Further, suffering fools, or company foolishness, is not one of Beutner’s core competencies, and, he does little to disguise it. All that explains why this arranged marriage — put in place by Tribune Publishing board chairman Eddy Hartenstein, the Times’ former publisher who has made himself noticeably scarce since the firing — was fated to fail. That it lasted a year is remarkable, though the increasing financial pressures and corporate organizational changes I’ve noted brought it to a head.

Consequently, the public sees a Tribune — despite Griffin’s best efforts — playing a lot more defense than offense. Beutner is all about offense, and not much of a team player for a team he never really wanted to be on.

Consider the wider context. Consider all the publishers nationwide taking meat cleavers to their 2016 budgets. That’s the context in which Griffin and Tribune must try to move forward. In general, the newspaper business is worse off this year than last year, down maybe two or three points of revenue from 2014, something we know from both public newspaper company financials and many conversations.

How bad is it? Well, newspapers’ trade group, the Newspaper Association of America, still hasn’t published its final 2014 data, now four months late. Just in the last two days, we’ve heard of one of Montreal’s two big dailies dropping daily print, of the New York Daily News considering the Advance model of non-daily printing — and of Advance itself, at New Orleans’ Times-Picayune, cutting another 21 percent of its newsroom, telling us its model isn’t working out quite as well as planned.

At the same time, the big national publishers are investing in technology to gain leverage in advertising sales, in analytics, and in content creation and distribution. This Age of Distribution (“BuzzFeed and The New York Times play Facebook’s ubiquity game”) heavily favors scale, as in national and global. That’s a further blow to regional publishers operating on a shoestring. As the Lab’s Joshua Benton recently summed up the current condition so well: “As giant platforms rise, local news is getting crushed.”

Crushed.

Josh and I are among those who’ve been searching for words to describe the devastation we’re witnessing. I’ve tried to describe it in numbers (“Newsonomics: The halving of America’s daily newsrooms”) and in prose, out of the ongoing Digital First Media debacle (“Newsonomics: When news companies are no longer built to last”). Folks, fellow citizens, this is a news emergency. As our eyes fixate on the Trump circus, we know less and less about our communities every day.

Private, long-term

Language alone would seem to imply that a public news company would operate in the public’s interest. Given the industry’s turmoil, though, we’re seeing nearly the opposite. You might think that a public company would think long-term, but that’s not the way public markets work.

So we get to the word private. A not-very-public-service seeming term, right? We’re used to nonprofit, maybe, signifying a public good, but other than two handfuls of great nonprofit news organizations (think ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity, and the Center for Investigative Reporting nationally, and Texas Tribune, MinnPost, and Voice of San Diego regionally) news nonprofits of scale have filled only a small part of the vacuum created by newspapers’ decline.

One of those nonprofits making a major contribution is L.A.’s KPCC public radio station, which pays a staff of 100 to cover L.A. In his own recent Facebook post, KPCC president Bill Davis said:

The point is that newspaper publishers who don’t meet their revenue and margin targets rarely stay in their positions very long. Newspapers are for-profit, commercial enterprises. I liked Beutner’s championing of local coverage, civic engagement and even membership — probably b/c a lot of it could have been lifted straight out of KPCC’s strategic planning documents. But I also know that the public media model is profoundly different from the commercial model and doesn’t translate well into for-profit structures.

Davis’ point is on the mark, but describes a world that is now vanishing: publicly owned, profitable newspapers that could also do a lot of community good. I think we’ve got to revisit these notions of expected community service and what private now means.

Private. I’ve sometimes made light of the small — but significant — trend of billionaires buying newspapers, calling it Billionaire Bingo. It’s a lottery of sorts. Every billionaire, like every chocolate in Forrest Gump’s box, is different, and you don’t know what you may get. We do know, two years into billionaires trending, that the news readers of Washington (Jeff Bezos’ Post), Boston (John Henry’s Globe) and the Twin Cities (Glen Taylor’s Star Tribune) are better off for the billionaire buying of the local paper. They are the 50/50 men — strong business instincts married with civic interest — and they may be the best current hope on the landscape. At Bloomberg View, Justin Fox explains well why he’s come around to the same point of view.

Which brings us back to the Los Angeles questions, of truths and consequences. At this point, it’s harder to see a better consequence for the readers of the Times under public Tribune control than under private ownership, led by Eli Broad or someone else. We know the former is likely to bring a big newsroom cut and, given all the history of the last eight years, more cuts to follow. That’s the only sure way that Tribune — just like its peers — can promise an even future cashflow to increasingly skeptical investors. We know that the latter — assuming Austin Beutner and his civic strategy return — may create a better future. We also know that without that return, we’re unlikely to see this kind of laboratory in civic-building business transformation tested elsewhere soon. And that would be just another small tragedy in the extended, tragic decline of the American local press.

This morning, he went on a riff on Twitter about the challenges of that transition — and of targeting a new audience while keeping your old one. (Especially if, as is true for both the Times and NPR, the old one is still paying the bills.) Here it is, lightly translated from Twittese (and swapping in one word I suspect he miswrote):

Relevance is the Times’ big problem, not awareness. Plenty of people know about The New York Times. But most of them think we’re not for them.

The Times doesn’t need to spend millions of dollars to shout I EXIST! to the world. Like NPR, the Times has an enviable branding problem. Both brands are beloved, even/mostly by those that don’t engage with them.

Being a beloved brand is a double-edged sword. When people love who you are, they don’t want you to change. If they love you as the Grey Lady, then they have a hard time seeing you nerding out with clever apps. It’s like seeing your grandpa at a nightclub.

I’m going to henceforth refer to our core brand challenge as the “grandpa in a nightclub” problem.

Every single thing we do as an organization should avoid the “nightclub grandpa” effect if we hope to survive the next decade. If you’re happy being and acting like a grandpa, don’t go to a nightclub. Otherwise…well, consciously work towards not being a grandpa.

Looking forward to meeting with @TimesSquareNYC this morning. Related: It's crazy how few people know the square is named after us.

— Max Pfennighaus (@MxPf) August 3, 2015

(The late David Carr used to punctuate his movie-themed videos for the Times with a reminder: “They call it Times Square for a reason.”)

There is much (some?) talk internally about "taking back" Times Square. The question is: is it an efficient way to strengthen the brand?

— Max Pfennighaus (@MxPf) August 3, 2015

"Brandscaping." http://t.co/rToEbhu0yw

— Max Pfennighaus (@MxPf) August 3, 2015

Relevance is the Times' big problem, not awareness.

— Max Pfennighaus (@MxPf) August 3, 2015

Plenty of people know about the @nytimes. But most of them think we're not for them.

— Max Pfennighaus (@MxPf) August 3, 2015

The @nytimes doesn't need to spend millions of dollars to shout I EXIST! To the world.

— Max Pfennighaus (@MxPf) August 3, 2015

@aschweig it's this thing. Don't worry, it's not for you.

— Max Pfennighaus (@MxPf) August 3, 2015

Like @npr, the @nytimes has an envious branding problem. Both brands are beloved, even/mostly by those that don't engage with them.

— Max Pfennighaus (@MxPf) August 3, 2015

Being a beloved brand is a double-edged sword. When people love who you are, they don't want you to change.

— Max Pfennighaus (@MxPf) August 3, 2015

If they love you as the Grey Lady, then they have a hard time seeing you nerding out with clever apps.

— Max Pfennighaus (@MxPf) August 3, 2015

It's like seeing your grandpa at a nightclub.

— Max Pfennighaus (@MxPf) August 3, 2015

I'm going to henceforth refer to our core brand challenge as the "grandpa in a nightclub" problem.

— Max Pfennighaus (@MxPf) August 3, 2015

Every single thing we do as an organization should avoid the "nightclub grandpa" effect if we hope to survive the next decade.

— Max Pfennighaus (@MxPf) August 3, 2015

To be clear, the "nightclub grandpa" problem has two aspects: being in a nightclub and being a grandpa.

— Max Pfennighaus (@MxPf) August 3, 2015

If you're happy being and acting like a grandpa, don't go to a nightclub. Otherwise…well, consciously work towards not being a grandpa.

— Max Pfennighaus (@MxPf) August 3, 2015

Early reaction from digital Times folk was positive.

Of course, in the slow-moving world of academia, a “new” study may not cover particularly “new” ground. This one — by Todd Graham of the University of Groningen and Scott Wright of the University of Melbourne — looks at the comments on 85 articles focusing on the 2009 U.N. Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen on the U.K. version of the The Guardian’s website. So yes, we’re talking about nearly six-year-old comments. But commenting behavior must, in some sense, be eternal, no? Graham and Wright also interviewed journalists who authored some of the selected articles and some of the site’s “supercommenters.”

Broadly speaking, the study looked to identify and qualify the types of debate in the comments, as well as to test conventional wisdom around comment threads. Often tagged as being abusive — the internet maxim “never read the comments” gets tossed around — the study looked to identify just what was going on. That’s because, as the study notes, comment threads could be both an important source of information and a business opportunity for publishers.

To date, research has focused on journalists’ perceptions, and these are not so welcoming. Journalists typically describe comments as being offensive, poor in quality, untrustworthy, and unrepresentative of the public…But are these perceptions an accurate account of what is taking place in comment fields? First, few empirical studies have analyzed how audiences actually behave in comment fields: what is the nature of debate that occurs? Do they constitute a deliberative public sphere? Second, do below the line comments enhance or inhibit the professional practices of journalists as they go about their work? More broadly, are they improving the quality of news products, journalism, and ultimately the public sphere?…

Comment fields allow audiences to discuss news content with each other and with journalists. They also potentially provide opportunities for journalists to reflect on their writing, test arguments in the case of commentary pieces, receive feedback on stories, and can be a source for new leads. More prosaically, comment fields are considered an important source of revenue by building a loyal and engaged community (that might also become a paying member at the Guardian), giving enhanced metadata that can increase advertising revenue, and increasing visibility in search engines by keeping the Web site “hot.”

Why the U.N. Climate Change Summit? Because nothing stirs up debate like global warming:

We chose this topic because climate change is a contentious area of debate that normally provokes significant discussion; it was the biggest news story when the data were collected; it encompassed a range of news fields; and it had a specific time frame so we could capture most, if not all, of the news cycle.

And why The Guardian? The study identified the U.K. paper as a relatively open and experimental newsroom. Moreover, in 2009, The Guardian was beginning to invest in the possibility of “below-the-line” engagement:

…the content analysis was conducted just as the Guardian began to invest resources into comment fields (which in part happened in response to problems during the “Climategate” period), and our analysis predates the introduction of threading, which has allowed users to reply to each other rather than displaying debates chronologically. Articles and blog posts on the Guardian Web site that received at least one comment and were published on the odd days of the conference (including the day before and after — eight days in total) were selected for analysis. After applying these criteria, the sample consisted of eighty-five articles (twenty-four were blog posts), written by forty-seven journalists/commentators containing 3,792 comments/posts.

Without including comments found on Comment is Free pieces, the study found that most of the comments (67 percent overall) were used to debate, or just argue — something the study termed “exchange of claims.” However, of these, nearly 50 percent of all comments (and nearly 70 percent of those that were arguing a point) used reason while writing. On the other end, 20 percent of the comments were claims with no proof offered to back them. Overwhelmingly, comments were on topic (96 percent), and those that asked questions (7 percent) found them answered (11 percent of all comments). While overall, the study found that around 12 percent of comments were abusive, it also saw 6 percent of comments giving praise and recognition to others reaching out.

Is there hope, though, for the dream that comments can be the bridge between readers and journalists? Unlikely: Although 16 percent of the comments were directed at journalists, there were only 12 total responses posted by six Guardian journalists. Moreover, in those 12 comments, journalists didn’t really debate — they asked for more information or thanked the readers for new sources or broken links.

Journalists who were interviewed for the study said they saw comments as a possible story lead and a democratizer. While few admitted to having taken a tip or getting an expert from the comments, many said they’d received significant help finding source material for an existing story. Moreover, there was a belief that despite the ubiquity of social media, getting in touch with both experts and journalists is harder than it used to be. Said one unnamed journalist: “It is harder to make direct contact with people than it used to be. You tend to have to go through press officers. The civil servant will no longer answer the phone; he will put you back to their press office. So, in other words, information is much more tightly controlled than before. The web, and the comments on the bottom of pieces, makes up for some of that.”

With the rise of “the people formally known as the audience,” there was a belief that readers would change journalism through their participation in its production. Is that happening according to this study?

The increased scrutiny was generally considered to have led to stronger, more rigorous working practices:

“Everything that a reporter writes can be — often immediately — verified or checked, externally by the audience. And that is an extraordinary experience for most journalists…everything that I write now, I have to be absolutely bloody certain that I can verify it. And so the story is actually the tip of an iceberg, and below the surface I will have files of tens of megabytes of, of files — you know — the original source document, the press notice, the PA copy, the BBC copy.”

All this leads to a rather rosy picture of comments — at least in comparison to the usual doomsaying. Of course, the commenting environment has changed in many ways from 2009. Social media is far more important as an outlet for story comment and journalist critique than it used to be. And it’s become increasingly common for news sites to shut off their comment sections entirely — or, if not, to farm them out to Facebook.

The paper is also an interesting time capsule of sorts into The Guardian’s earlier days in Internet commentry. Since then, The Guardian has continued to aggressively expand into new ways to engage, bringing new ideas and increased muscle to the debate. This week, assistant editor and audience director for The Guardian U.S. Mary Hamilton announced that she would become The Guardian’s executive editor for audience (and head back to London). Meanwhile, The Guardian continues to employ community moderators and uphold community guidelines, making it one of the less wild comment sections on the internet. Six years on from the original data, it would be interesting to see if the study’s initial observations have remained true.

With last week’s celebration of the tremendous journalism contributions of Ed Fouhy, the award-winning broadcast executive and founder of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, it seemed like a good time to revisit what we already learned — but may have forgotten.

During the heyday of civic journalism, which spanned a decade starting in the early 1990s, the Pew Center funded 120 newsroom projects and rewarded scores more with the James K. Batten Awards. More than 600 civic journalism initiatives were counted and studied by University of Wisconsin researchers, who found a pattern of outcomes. Some 78 percent of the projects studied offered solutions, and more than half included solutions offered by citizens themselves.

I was on the frontlines of this activity. Fouhy hired me in 1994 to be his Pew Center deputy. A couple years later, I took his place at the helm.

I find it striking how many of these efforts foreshadowed what we now call interactive and participatory journalism. Civic journalism began as a way to get political candidates to address the public’s agenda in running for office. News organizations soon adapted its techniques — starting with polls and town hall meetings — to difficult problems in their communities. Later on-ramps involved civic mapping, email, voice mail, cutting-edge video technologies, and eventually, of course, the Internet.

Key hallmarks of these civic journalism initiatives included:

• Building specific ways to involve readers and viewers.
• Deliberately positioning ordinary people as capable of some action.
• Inviting the community to identify solutions.

Consider how some of these efforts played out:

• Taking Back Our Neighborhoods: This seminal initiative, a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Public Service, set the bar high for civic journalism projects. It evolved from the 1993 shooting of two police officers in Charlotte. Determined to address the root cause of crime, The Charlotte Observer partnered with WSOC-TV to synchronize in-depth coverage and give people things they could do reclaim their communities.

  Elements included data analysis, which identified patterns of crime and the most violent neighborhoods to spotlight. A poll asked residents how crime affected them, why crime was happening, and what were possible solutions. Town hall meetings and neighborhood advisory panels in 10 targeted communities contributed very specific lists of neighborhood “needs” that were published with each community’s narrative.

  Outcomes were impressive: Some 700 volunteers stepped up to fulfill the needs on those lists — from opening new recreation centers to making uniforms for a fledgling drill team. Eighteen law firms filed pro bono nuisance suits to close crackhouses. New community centers were built and neighborhoods were cleaned up. Eight years later, crime was still down and the quality of life had improved in eight of the 10 neighborhoods.

• West Virginia After Coal: The Herald-Dispatch in Huntington and West Virginia Public Broadcasting joined forces in 2000-01 to examine one of the state’s biggest issues: Its future without coal.

  The partners developed a groundbreaking database that exposed how virtually none of the $18 million in coal severance taxes distributed to the state’s 55 counties and 234 municipalities were being used for economic development. Instead, the funds paid for such things as dog wardens or postage. The media partners used statewide polls and an interactive town hall involving audience input from 10 different sites via cutting-edge video conferencing technology. By the project’s end, the state was promising more job training and more revenue targeted to economic development.

• Waterfront Renaissance: In 2001, The Herald of Everett, Washington engaged the community in plans to remake its waterfront. It held a town hall meeting on development plans and created online clickable maps with moveable icons to give residents a virtual vote on what should be built along the Snohomish River and Port Gardner Bay. Some 1,200 people participated. The Herald tabulated the results of these maps and submitted their findings to city officials. A prevailing theme was that people wanted any development to give them access to their riverfront. Their wishes were ultimately included in city plans. The project today remains a prime example of how to involve citizens in surrogate “public hearings.”
• Neighbor to Neighbor: In 2002, after the shooting of an unarmed teenager in Cincinnati sparked allegations of police misconduct and major rioting, The Cincinnati Enquirer embarked on an ambitious project. It held solutions-oriented conversations on how to improve race relations in every municipality and neighborhood in the regions — some 145 in all. Each group was asked to answer: What three things can people do to ease racial tensions? What three things would we like to see our community leaders do? How can we make it happen?

  Some 1,838 people participated; 300 people volunteered to host or facilitate the conversations. The project inspired much grassroots volunteerism and efforts among black and whites to interact. The project “started people talking together, going to dinner, meeting in their homes and going to school and churches together,” said then-managing editor Rosemary Goudreau at the time.

There were scores of similar robust projects:

• The Savannah Morning News involved a large citizen task force in discussions and visits to 15 U.S. schools to figure out how to improve local education.
• A 1997 series on alcoholism, “Maine’s Deadliest Drug,” by The Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram led to citizen forming 29 study circles that concluded with an action plan to stem alcohol abuse.
• We the People/Wisconsin, involving the Wisconsin State Journal and the state’s public broadcaster, engaged in some of longest-running efforts to bring citizens face-to-face with candidates running for statewide office.

To be sure, journalism investigations often lead to widespread change. But, to me, so many of today’s journalism success stores seem pallid by comparison to what I saw during the period of civic journalism experimentation.

Simply put: civic journalism worked. Readers and viewers got it. We learned that if you deliberately build in simple ways for people to participate — in community problems or elections — many will engage. Particularly if they feel they have something to contribute to the problem.

Nowadays, this is so much easier than it used to be. All that is needed is the creativity to make it happen.

Audiences don’t appear out of nowhere for journalism of any kind. Audiences are reached, and built, and earned, and sometimes deserved, but they don’t materialize from nothing.

As part of this project, the Guardian U.S. audience team has been working very closely with our reporters, editors, and interactive team right from the start on an integrated approach that puts the audience and the community at the heart of the journalism. The result has been, so far, hundreds of tips and submissions including from the family, friends, and legal teams of some of the people killed, including several killings that had never been reported before. And the count has topped 500.

The Counted is designed as an ongoing project, not a snapshot of a moment in time — it’s designed to be active. In order for us to keep the count up to date, we need help from a wider community.

Listening and taking part

As a global media organization, The Guardian has a great starting point for finding an audience for a project like this, which is also an attempt to hold U.S. police forces to account at a time when police brutality and conduct is under intense scrutiny.

But we know that’s not enough to sustain a community where people take part. We need to build a community around The Counted that is keen to follow this issue longer-term, and who are able to spread the word.

So we’re building a multilayered approach. We want the journalism itself to reach the widest possible audience who are interested. Then we want the people within that who care deeply about this issue to develop a longer-term relationship with the project. We want people who have something important to contribute to be only a few steps away from our reporters (in Kevin Bacon terms) so that information reaches us promptly. We have a tips form, but that’s only part of the equation: A tips form is no good if no one knows where to find it.

Go where people are

Real people use Facebook to keep track of the things that they care about. We wanted to reach people who cared about police killings, not who care about The Guardian, so we knew we couldn’t rely on The Guardian’s existing social media presence. We needed an approach that would help us find and connect with people who care passionately about one issue, and allow us to showcase the depth and breadth of our work in this area — getting that work to the people who care the most, without annoying those who care the least.

So the U.S. audience team, with Kayla Epstein taking the lead on implementation, has built dedicated Twitter and Facebook pages for The Counted, and we’re looking at building communities on other platforms too. Most importantly, these are works in progress: evolving communities that will change over time along with the journalism they’re embedded in.

On Twitter, we’re building along the following ideas:

• It’s built around the rapid propagation of information through loosely connected communities, which lets us rapidly spread callouts via a few individuals with many links to others who share those interests.
• It lets us reach activists, journalists, and prominent individuals who care deeply about the sue of police violence and the reporting of killings.
• It’s fast and staccato, and we can achieve higher volume of output there, giving us more opportunities to share everything we produce.
• It lets us be part of an open conversation about these issues, both as a reference point (people tagging @thecounted in conversations as evidence) and as a participant where we need to.

On Facebook, our approach and our tactics are quite different:

• It’s a much slower platform, driven by conversations that persist over time.
• It needs care in crafting those conversations on our page, because they’re ‘owned’ there, rather than on Twitter where a user’s comments sit only with themselves.
• It has capacity for reach beyond any other platform, especially in the U.S., and most people are comfortable communicating there — including some who communicate there almost exclusively.
• It allows for targeting, so if we’re searching for more details on a specific incident, we can fine-tune our approach.

The nature of Facebook mandates us to moderate: We’re enforcing community guidelines that ask our users to respect each others’ opinions even when they differ greatly, to avoid personal attacks, to be constructive rather than destructive. We can’t and shouldn’t avoid debate on this topic, but we have to be able to avoid abuse and flame wars. Facebook’s tools make this tricky but not impossible to manage, especially at this relatively small scale.

The audience team is stepping in to field contributions, to respond to questions, to do lots of the basic things that any community management team does — and so is the reporting team, answering questions about methodology, about ethics, about which deaths are counted and how. This is a collaborative effort to inform the community, and to help them to feel that if they ask, we’ll answer. That this is not something we’re building to abandon, but an ongoing project that values their involvement. We say thank you when they tip us off.

We’re already starting to see superusers develop — people who direct other people as to the rules of the page, how to keep informed, where to submit suggestions — which is a fantastic early sign of community health. We’re seeing people submit multiple stories through the tips form, too. We know that when it comes time to spread word of a particular incident, we can reach out to these communities to ask for help. We know they’re interested, and we know that collectively they have far more connections than any one of our journalists could have.

Lots of small communities

Each time another person is killed by the police, a new community forms around that death: friends and family of the victims and the officers involved, and perhaps bystanders or witnesses. Beyond those immediately involved, there are readers who have followed a local story in their hometown, and protesters who’ve been gathering in cities around the country demanding justice. For The Counted to work, we need to reach as many of those communities as possible, however large or small, and encourage them to speak with us. And many of those communities contain few people who would think to go to The Guardian.

So my audience team worked closely with the interactive team from the start to design a series of features to help us reach those communities. Here’s a few:

• Each story within the interactive can be linked individually and tweeted from the detail view, so we can easily spread word about specific incidents where our reporters need more information or where details are sketchy.
• There’s an admin backend that allows the audience team to easily pull images sized and formatted for social channels based on any name and on both the total count and monthly counts.
• The backend also generates updated avatars for social feeds, which gives us a very simple way to keep driving engagement. Every time the count updates on the interactive, we can also update our social presence. That gives us a touch point every day with our community, a way to keep The Counted front of mind.
• The interactive team has also produced simple graphics that work both in stories and for social media, containing both the data and the link back to the journalism.
• The data is downloadable, so anyone can work with it to create their own visualization or use it in their own work.

Asking for help

The Counted went live with a form asking for tips and submissions to the project, because there’s a lot we don’t know. There are deaths we don’t yet know about, questionable incidents that don’t make it into local media reports, and inaccuracies within our data. Because so much of the journalism is based purely on police reports, there is often additional information to add. So we have been asking for the community who care about this issue to support us in getting the word out, and to tell us more about what they know.

The response so far has been staggering. Some submissions add details about deaths we had already counted — a photo of Nikki Burtsfield, corrections about David Felix’s name — and others contribute deaths we didn’t know about, like Donald Allen and Edelmiro Hernandez. Our community holds us to account, too, on issues like Mya Hall’s name and gender. We’ve heard from friends and family of people killed, as well as those who’ve seen a story in their local media, or who remember something happening.

We know this is a long project. We need our communities to be happy to contribute and to get the word out, in order to be able to sustain our journalism. The Counted is not just the work of The Guardian. The crowd is helping us count.

Grauso met with Jack O’Brien, Cracked’s editor-in-chief, and Daniel O’Brien, one of the magazine’s lead writers, and though the group discussed a variety of projects, they quickly settled on teaming up for a podcast. There isn’t 100 percent overlap in their coverage — Moviepilot focuses mostly on film and television, and while Cracked does cover pop culture, it’s usually through an idiosyncratic, humorous lens. But both are deeply rooted in geek culture, so Crossing the Streams would cover topics ranging from film to television to comic books, but from an insider’s point of view. “Jack doesn’t necessarily have a movie background, but he has a broad pop culture background,” she said. “I come from movies, but can talk about other areas as well.” Together, they could use their clout and connections to invite Hollywood insiders onto the show. An episode released in March, for instance, featured a panel discussion that included Alonso Duralde of The Wrap and Lucas Shaw of Bloomberg where the four conversed on the history of the Oscars and why the ceremony is currently broken.

Why did Moviepilot choose to team up with Cracked rather than just going it alone? To understand Grauso’s decision, it’s helpful to consider Moviepilot’s history and its relatively recent entry into the U.S. market. It was founded in the mid 2000s when three German entrepreneurs formed a production company. After producing a few movies, they concluded they could better promote their films if they had an online community to market to — thus Moviepilot.de was born. “Then, after a few years, they realized they could only grow so big within the German market,” said Grauso. “German movies are great and popular in Germany, but only in Germany.” So in 2012, the company launched a sister website in the U.S.

In three years, the site’s audience has grown tremendously. It pulls in 35 million unique visitors who generate over 80 million pageviews a month. But given its newness to the U.S. market, it doesn’t yet have strong brand recognition compared to some of its older peers. Cracked, on the other hand, not only has a large audience but has also been around for a decade (and much longer in magazine form); this has allowed it to amass a devout following. “For us it’s a win-win,” she said. “We don’t make money off it, but it’s a form of branding, getting our name out to a new audience. It’s ‘Hey, we’re working with Cracked, you know Cracked!’ It’s about name recognition.”

Moviepilot isn’t the only publication to have realized the benefits of teaming up with a competing outlet to launch a podcast. Because podcasting is a nascent medium with a growing-but-still-latent user base, news organizations and media personalities are finding they can attract a following more quickly if they combine resources and work together to drive listenership. In some cases, this involves informal collaborations, like when comedians sit down for guest interviews on each other’s shows. But other media entities are entering into official partnerships. The New Yorker and and the public radio station WNYC, for example, inked a deal earlier this year to create a one-hour podcast and national radio show.

Perhaps no podcast collaboration is larger than the one rolled out by Slate in February. As I’ve written about previously, Slate has a 10-year history growing a popular podcast network, one that boasts a legion of fervid fans. With shows ranging from Better Call Saul recaps to the Political Gabfest, the online magazine has amassed millions of listeners and secured sponsorships with well-known brand advertisers. But the February announcement that it was rebranding its podcast network under the name Panoply indicated that it has much higher ambitions than simply hosting shows featuring Slate journalists. In addition to its current stable of podcasts, the network has entered partnerships with over a dozen other publications, including The Huffington Post, The New York Times Magazine, Inc., and Popular Science.

Andy Bowers, Panoply’s executive producer who’s been involved with Slate’s podcast network since the very beginning, told me that the magazine realized within the last year that it had spent a decade building the infrastructure and knowledge to maintain a podcast network — and that other publications, many of which have dipped their toes into podcasting but haven’t fully committed, could benefit from that knowledge and support. “Of course they could do it on their own, and some have done it on their own,” said Bowers. “But we figured that the case would be a lot easier to take to their higher ups if they said, ‘We can just go and let Slate do it for us.'”

There are a number of services Panoply offers to its media partners, many of which position it as more of a behind-the-scenes production company, one that handles most of the technical aspects of podcasting while the publications supply the talent. Most of the media partners are based in New York, which allows them to visit the Slate offices and use its recording studio. There are about six full-time staff members on Panoply’s production side, along with a number of freelancers; this core team helps the partners with everything from recording the podcast to editing and mixing it. Moviepilot experienced similar benefits when teaming up with Cracked. “They work with Earwolf Studios,” said Grauso, referring to the podcast network that produces shows for many major comedians. “We go to a studio where we have mics and we can all see each other. There’s an audio engineer listening the whole time who’s adjusting volume, adjusting mics, and then they have an engineer who cuts it all together. It’s pretty high tech, and they handle all of it.”

In addition to its production services, Panoply also handles much of the ad placement for the network. Not only does it have access to the direct response advertisers that are currently found on most podcasts (Audible, Squarespace, Dollar Shave Club), but it has also built inroads with the lucrative brand sponsors that have so far eluded the podcasting medium. “We leave it open for each organization to bring their own ad sales to the podcast if they want,” said Bowers. “Some have taken us up on it, but most are relying on us” to sell ads. In all cases, the media partner has full ownership of the podcast, and Panoply takes a portion of the ad revenue it sells.

Of course, one of the biggest benefits the Panoply network offers is the ability to attract a large audience quickly. As I and others have pointed out, podcast discovery includes a lot more friction than other mediums, often relying heavily on old-fashioned word of mouth. You’re unlikely to see podcasts shared on Facebook with the same frequency as images, text, or video, and it’s generally accepted that the best way to promote a new podcast is to have it plugged on a much more popular podcast. Unsurprisingly, it’s quite common, when you’re listening to a Panoply podcast, to hear a promo for another Panoply podcast. “Think of it as a newsstand,” said Bowers. “If a newsstand only carried one publication, would you be likely to go there? Probably not. But you go to a newsstand looking for one or two things, and there’s a bunch of other things there too, and you’re likely to peruse those things and maybe even buy them.” It’s arising-tide-lifts-all-boats strategy.

Perhaps one reason these publications have been so amenable to collaboration is that podcasting, despite being on the upswing, is still far from mainstream adoption — at least the kind of mainstream adoption enjoyed by its sister medium, radio. It’s easy to team up when there isn’t much money on the table (a recent analysis from FiveThirtyEight found that a third of the top 100 podcasts didn’t even have a single ad). Once it enters the zeitgeist — and many of its proponents think it eventually will — then these partnerships might become more corporatized and structured. For now, though, most of its practitioners are looking to have some fun, and any other benefit — whether it’s increased branding or a little extra money — is a welcome addition. When I spoke to Grauso, she didn’t seem too concerned with whether the Crossing the Streams podcast would ever produce significant revenue.

“If we get to that point, then that’s awesome. But it’s not something we’re really thinking about at the moment.”

In February, the White House announced that every fourth grader in the country will now receive a pass granting them and their families free admission to all the National Parks for a full year.

The White House says the idea is to get kids into safe outdoor spaces, and to make it easier for children to be outside instead of in front of screens. I suspect it also has some substantial additional benefits. Many of those fourth graders — not to mention younger and older siblings, parents, cousins, grandparents, friends, etc. — will eventually:

• Identify as supporters of the National Park Service.
• Feel a sense of satisfaction and loyalty when thinking about their relationship with the National Park Service.
• Value the experience they had in the National Parks and want to share it with their own children.
• Advocate for the future existence of the National Park Service.
• Recognize the National Parks system for the indispensible public resource it is.

The concepts of membership and loyalty have a long history in the fields of social psychology and organizational behavior. In general, this research shows that people who identify with an organization describe themselves to others in terms of the organization. (For example, people who identify with public media are likely to describe themselves as NPR listeners on social networks and on dating websites.)1 And when people identify with an organization, they exhibit higher and longer-term levels of loyalty and are more likely to formalize their identification by becoming members through donations.

Though membership has always been a core part of public media, over the past several years, public radio has been grappling with new questions concerning membership and listener loyalty. The traditional form of building membership and leveraging organizational loyalty — the pledge drive — has declined in effectiveness, and new conversations are beginning about how to recruit and retain members who access content off-air.

The existing membership model for public radio is largely based on a single assumption: that people who want to listen to the kind of high-quality programming that public radio provides will eventually find and then listen to public radio — on the radio, in the car, or on a mobile device. But the assumption that public radio provides a particular type of listening experience may no longer be accurate. As Kevin Roose noted last October, 50 percent of all cars sold in 2015 are connected to the Internet, and 100 percent of cars will be connected by 2025. Though several stations have developed mobile apps, and NPR has developed mobile apps and continues to create experiences for connected cars, several for-profit podcasts and podcast networks — like Gimlet, 538, Midroll, BuzzFeed, and Slate2 — now sound virtually indistinguishable from the NPR aesthetic,3 and will grow alongside other podcasts4 as they become easier to access in the car, which remains the predominant listening place for audio. (44 percent of all audio listening currently takes place there.)

The rise of connected cars will also require new techniques to engage current millennials5 and Generation Y-ers, who are not likely to age into the same listening,6, commuting,7 or donation habits8 as previous generations. Millennials are more likely to give a little amount of money to a lot of organizations,9 though they’re not likely to give large amounts, and may be more likely to invest in a once-off Kickstarter campaign that makes them feel like part of a larger community or cohort than to become a re-occuring donor or sustaining member.10 Like their parents, however, they’re more likely to support or invest in an organization if they feel some connection to the organization, its mission, or the benefits of becoming a member.

These trends demand new ways of thinking about public radio membership and about the relationship people have with their public radio stations. The question is: What, exactly, does it mean to be a member of a public media station? What could it mean? And how could expanding the definition of what it means to be a member — and what that membership itself means — enhance and strengthen both our relationship with public media and public media itself?

My Nieman project

These questions form the basis of my Knight Visiting Nieman Fellowship. While at Harvard, I am planning to create a new model of membership within public media that will complement already-existing forms by offering membership to people who may not be able to donate financially, but would like to donate a skill or their time to their local stations. I suspect this will inculcate a sense of identity and ownership amongst listeners, allowing them to feel more invested in public radio’s content, work, and mission, while also transforming public media stations into public community spaces that continue to fulfill the original mission.

Imagine, for instance, if you could contribute in a meaningful way to your local station — through code or digitizing an archive or suggesting a story idea — and receive, in return, the ability to record a podcast in an empty audio studio? Imagine if public radio stations functioned as Main Streets, as my friend Lily Bui once said, or in the same way that local public libraries do? It would transform the way people could interact — and participate — in the local news process, and would enhance the stories stations put out on air.

Throughout the project, I will be going public too. I am conducting the fellowship as a series of two-week-long sprints and am making all of my progress public. (You can see what the first one looks like here.) I’m structuring the fellowship this way, in part, so that I can talk to people across public media (and across other industries) to› inform what I build or create, and so I can hold myself accountable as the fellowship progresses. I also plan to make all of my research public and all of the software open source, so that anyone can adapt it for any organization.

Over my two months here, I plan to do a number of things:

• User research: I have conducted user research interviews with people who work at stations as well as people who listen to a lot of public media but are not members. I am also planning to conduct a randomized survey on the street to learn what people think of public media membership and membership in general. Results from this data will help inform what to build and how to structure an effective pilot program.
• Case studies: There are many organizations outside of public media that grapple with the same issues around identity, affiliation, accessibility, and membership. I am preparing a number of case studies articulating lessons that public media can learn from other organizations. So far, I have interviews set up with librarians, Code for America, and a food co-op, and plan to schedule more interviews in future cycles with college alumni associations, the Harry Potter fan group Dumbledore’s Army, and The Smithsonian Institution — all of which have thought about affiliation and membership in novel ways.
• Tool kit: With the help of the developer community, I am in the process of creating several pieces of software that will help potential members find stations who would like help with specific programs. I am also in the process of finding homes for these tools after they are launched.
• Recruiting and then tracking stations I have recruited a number of stations from around the country to participate in a yearlong pilot project. At each station, we are identifying a cohort of people who have or will contribute in some meaningful way to the station, and giving those people a year of membership — with all of the benefits that people who contribute financially receive. I will track this cohort of people through interviews and some data, and hope to present it next summer.

My goals for the project are to to see whether people who contribute code, time, or a skill to a station feel more invested in the station’s future — and derive benefit from the experience themselves. I am also excited to get a conversation started within public media about creating opportunities for the public to see and participate in the process of making news, and not just broadcasting our news out to the public.

1. During an internal NPR Hack Day, a team scraped data from OKCupid, the online dating website. They found that almost 40,000 people in a-completely-random-and-possibly-unscientific sampling list NPR in their profiles as an interest. About 11,000 listed This American Life, while fewer than 5,000 listed Fox News and Howard Stern. An example from a profile: “I spend a lot of time thinking about all of the things Melissa Block, Robert Siegel, and Audie Cornish tell me to consider?” Possibly thinking along these lines, WNYC runs speed dating nights. Super smart.
2. In Hot Pod, Nick Quah notes that Slate’s network tripled its listeners last year, to 6 million downloads a month. This is not near NPR’s 80 million downloads a month. But there are over 1 billion iTunes podcast subscriptions a year, according to Apple. So people are clearly listening to other podcasts, even if they’re not part of a larger network.
3. They might “sound” indistinguishable, but for me the essential thing is that there is no other news and information service like public media, that offers such wide coverage and aspires to the highest journalistic standards. The mission of virtually all non-public media is to make money, not matter what disguise it’s dressed up in; the mission of public media is, and should be, something quite different. If you’d like to learn more, I suggest starting with my friend Bill Siemering’s original purposes for NPR, crafted in 1970.
4. Over 40 million people listen to some kind of podcast. Podcast listening is up over 25 percent compared to last year. And people who podcast listen to an average of six podcasts a month, according to Edison Research.
5. Though 91 percent of millennials listen to radio for some portion of their week, they also make up the largest cohort of smartphone owners. Listening is growing on that platform and will likely continue to grow.
6. And even younger generations are likely to be even more mobile-dominant, when it comes to listening habits.
7. Millennials are shunning cars. America’s largest generation is not driving as much as their parents. Between 2001 and 2009, the average number of miles driven by 16 to 34 year olds dropped by 23 percent, and the share of younger people using public transportation increased.
8. “One piece of advice she gives on appealing to younger donors? Don’t even ask them to ‘donate,’ because younger donors want to feel more invested in a cause. Choose a different word, with a different connotation: investment…”It may seem something simple. It’s just semantics: donation vs. investment. But I think to a millennial, who’s grown up in a very different world, one that’s more participatory because of the digital tools that we have, to them they want to feel like they’re making an investment. Not just that they’re investing their capital, but they’re investing emotionally,” Amy Webb says.
9. A survey conducted by the 2012 Millennial Impact Report in 2011 showed that 75 percent of millennials gave, though 58 percent reported that their largest donation was under $100.
10. Sustaining or re-occuring membership is the name of the growth game in public media right now. The push for sustainers has made a big difference over the last decade. I don’t think there’s anyone who thinks sustainers are a bad idea, but there are definitely people, consultants included, who think some stations are implementing it poorly. Signing up sustainers does not mean signing up people and forgetting them — or forgetting people who can give in smaller amounts or in other ways. One consultant told me that some station sites make it difficult for people to give one-time donations, because sustaining membership is so much more valuable. Sustainers outperform other donors on retention and lifetime revenue, because the payments are taken directly from their credit cards on a monthly basis. “Sustained giving must become the default option for membership contributions, at a suggested level of $10 per month, for example,” suggests this Current article. (This article suggests there are hidden maintenance and customer service costs associated with sustainer programs, such as having procedures and staff in place to update expired or cancelled credit cards, additional segmentation of fundraising messages so sustainers are recognized as such, or being caught in the fallout from a massive security breach elsewhere — the 70 million customers of Target in December 2013, for example.)

I want to take two steps back from journalism, to see where it fits in the broader information landscape and try to imagine new things. First is the shift from content to product. A news source is more than the stories it produces; it’s also the process of deciding what to cover, the delivery system, and the user experience. Second, we need to include algorithms. Every time programmers write code to handle information, they are making editorial choices.

Imagine all the wildly different services you could deliver with a building full of writers and developers. It’s a category I’ve started calling editorial products.

In this frame, journalism is just one part of a broader information ecosystem that includes everything from wire services to Wikipedia to search engines. All of these products serve needs for factual information, and they all use some combination of professionals, participants, and software to produce and deliver it to users — the reporter plus the crowd and the algorithm. Here are six editorial products that journalists and others already produce, and six more that they could.

Some editorial products we already have

Record what just happened. This is the classic role of journalism. This is what the city reporter rushes out to cover, what the wire service specializes in, the role that a journalist plays in every breaking story. It’s the fundamental factual basis on which everything else depends. And my sense is we usually have enough of this. I know that people will disagree, saying there is much that is important that is not covered, but I want to distinguish between reporting a story and drawing attention to it. The next time you feel a story is being ignored, try doing a search in Google News. Almost always I find that some mainstream organization has covered it, even if it was never front-page. This is basic and valuable.

Locate pre-existing information. This is a traditional role of researchers and librarians, and now search engines. Even when the product is powered entirely by software, this is most definitely an editorial role, because the creation of an information retrieval algorithm requires careful judgement about what a “good” result is. All search engines are editorial products, as Google’s Matt Cutts has said: “In some sense when people come to Google, that’s exactly what they’re asking for — our editorial judgment. They’re expressed via algorithms.”

Filter the information tsunami. This is the act which produces your trusted information feed, whether that’s Facebook’s News Feed or Politico’s morning emails or Google News. It’s here that we can most productively complain that something “wasn’t covered.” Filtering depends upon aggregation and curation, because no one organization can produce original reporting on everything. Most filtering products also lean heavily on software, because human effort can’t match the scope of a web crawler, nor can a human editor prepare personalized headlines for millions of users. As with search engines, information filtering algorithms are both mathematical and editorial objects, and the best products use clever combinations of machines and people.

Give me background on this topic. This is also about locating pre-existing information, but in a summary or tutorial form. Because there are more complex issues than anyone can follow, most news is going to be about things that you don’t know much about. This has been called the context problem for news, and there have been many experiments in solving it. There are now entire sites devoted to explanatory journalism, such as Vox, but the 800-pound gorilla of getting up to speed is Wikipedia. So far, no other product can match Wikipedia’s scope, cost of production, or authority.

Expose wrongdoing. This is the classic role of investigative journalism, which fits within a whole ecosystem of accountability. Every government transparency initiative and every open data nonprofit aspires to support this goal, but transparency is not enough. Democracy needs people who are committed to exposing corruption, crime, and abuse. Sometimes this requires inside sources and secret documents, but accountability can also be about drawing attention to little-noted facts. But it is always about scandal, what has been called “the journalism of outrage.” This makes it powerless in the face of huge systemic issues without a clear locus of wrongdoing. Investigative journalism is vital, but only one part of the broad intersection between information and power.

Debunk rumors and lies. In this fairly new category, we have products like Politifact, which checks what politicians say, Emergent.info, which tracks the spread of rumors, and the venerable Snopes. It’s a little strange to me that the news media of old weren’t much into debunking, but I guess they thought “publish only true things” was sufficient. Clearly, truth-testing has since become a valuable public service, and journalists have learned to pay more attention.

Some editorial products that don’t exist yet

What can I do about it? More and more, this is the only beat I care to cover. Accurate news is essential to know the world, but reports of what just happened do not tell you what can be done about it, at a personal level. I don’t believe that citizens have become apathetic; I believe we are overwhelmed in the face of large and complex problems where it is hard to know where to start. We already know that stories that include solutions are more engaging. The main problem is one of plausible effectiveness: If you have ten dollars or ten hours to donate, where should you put your resources? Not every problem can be helped by large numbers of small actions — but some can. You could build a whole product around the question of what the reader could do.

A moderated place for difficult discussions. Traditionally, journalism has tried to present an objective truth that would be seen as legitimate by everyone. I’m not convinced that truth always works this way, and I’m sure that no institution today has this sort of argument-settling authority. But I do see a need for unifying narratives. Americans are more polarized than they’ve been in decades, and we fight online about everything from catcalls to tax rates. Perhaps there is a need for a safe place to talk, to know the other, with real human moderators gently tending the discussion and discouraging the trolls. When everyone can talk, the public sphere needs fewer authorities and more moderators. To me, seems a natural role for journalism.

Personalized news that isn’t sort of terrible. It seems obvious that different people need different news (if I do say so myself) and this requires algorithmic recommendation to scale, but the results have often been unimpressive — as anyone who has complained about the Facebook News Feed knows. I’ve spent a lot of time with recommendation algorithms and I’ve come to believe that this is fundamentally a user interface design challenge: How do you tell the computer what you want to see? Optimizing for clicks and likes inevitably degenerates into clickbait and likebait. Other systems require you to choose subjects in advance or people to follow, but none of these is really satisfying, and I still don’t have a “mute” button to tune out Kim Kardashian. I’m holding my breath for an interaction design breakthrough, some elegant way to create the perfect personal channel.

The online town hall. Democracy is supposed to be participatory; voting is not enough, but there is no scalable communication channel between citizens and government. So how does your voice get heard? And how do you hear the voices of other people — and how does a civil servant make sense of any of this deluge? There’s a hard problem here: We don’t have good models for a “conversation” that might include millions of people. I’m imagining something like a cross between Reddit and civic-listening platform PopVox. This too would require thoughtful moderation.

Systematic government coverage. Journalism has long looked for waste and corruption. But how many stories do you read about the Bureau of Land Management? Or the Office of Thrift Supervision, which should have been monitoring the financial industry before the crash? Sometimes it seems like journalists pull their subjects out of a hat. If we’re serious about the notion of an independent check on government, we need to get systematic about it. No one reports department by department, bureau by bureau, with robot reporters scrutinizing every single open data feed. Sound boring? It might be. But maybe that just means current accountability journalism is badly skewed by the demands of entertainment.

Choose-your-own-adventure reporting. Story creation could be interactive. There have been crowdfunding platforms such as Spot.us and Beacon, but nothing that operates on quite the level of granularity and speed envisioned by Jay Rosen’s explainthis.org, where users type in questions for journalists to answer. There are thousands of variations on the idea of having the users direct the reporting, everything from demand-driven production to a quiz after each story that says, “what should we report on next?” The point is to put journalists and users in an interactive loop. Good reporters listen anyway, but I want something stronger, a sort of contract with the audience where they know exactly how to be heard. For example: “Our reporter will investigate the top-voted question each week.”

What’s editorial, anyway?

I’ve used the word “editorial” to sidestep discussion of what “news” or “journalism” is. To ask that question misses the point of what it does. And there has been a strange lack of innovation here. Silicon Valley has never been afraid of wild ideas, but the tech world is allergic to any service which requires a lot of humans to deliver. That doesn’t scale, or so the thinking goes. Meanwhile, the journalism world has evolved and finally embraced software and new story forms. Yet the espoused goals of journalism — the fundamental services that journalists provide — seem virtually unchanged. That’s a pity, because there are so many different, useful things you can do by applying humans plus machines to nonfiction information production. We’ve barely scratched the surface.

Among newspaper execs, new Boston Globe CEO Mike Sheehan imports the experience of his ad career in understanding the magnitude of the generational change before us:

When I (54 and getting older every day) start substituting Apple TV for cable boxes, it’s clear that alternatives to broadcast advertising to reach this audience are a worthy investment. I’ve been a TiVo devotee since it first came out, and my daughter was five when she saw her first television commercial (“What’s that?” she asked). Pretty funny that, at the time, I was CEO of a large advertising agency and had spent my career writing and creative directing television commercials. Getting an advertising message to millennials and younger will mean a new world order in media.

So if the millennial moment isn’t a bubble, how big a moment is it?

Digital ad veteran Dave Morgan, ex of RealMedia and Tacoda and now CEO of TV ad disruptor Simulmedia (“The newsonomics of targeted TV”), puts the battle with broadcast for younger audiences into perspective on the nature of today’s ad spending:

Ad dollars flow two ways.

One, they go where they can generate measured, predictable positive ROI to sales. Thus search, online display, and Facebook ads grow as long as they can deliver incremental return for each incremental dollar, until they run out of cost-effective incremental sales-producing volume. They are direct marketing channels that are invested in as long as they can keep delivering profitably and grow as they can deliver more profitably.

Two, they go where, in bulk, they drive offline sales and brand share of voice at massive scale quickly for marketers in categories like retail, automotive, packaged goods, fast food, movies. Here, every dollar doesn’t have to be incrementally justified, but these categories tend to involve defensive spend. Thus, if one fast-food company stops doing heavy TV, for example, competing brands gain market share. This money stays largely in TV, radio (and magazines and some newspapers) as long as they still have massive, [fast-accumulating] reach and still ring the cash register.

The BuzzFeeds of the world will win ad dollars when they can do one of the above at big scale. If it is the former, they take from online display and search and other direct marketing techniques — direct mail, telesales, etc. If the latter, they can take from TV. However, they won’t take from TV until they can deliver true TV-like scale, and are also competitive on pricing. Currently, video ads on online platforms cost CPMs that are typically 2 or 3× TV prices.

That scale tells us about the staying power of TV. Broadcast TV ranks now second to digital in its share of U.S. ad spend, having dropped into that position within the last year. Still, it commands $40 billion annually. BuzzFeed’s fast-growing annual revenue, for instance, only amounts to about $120 million a year.

David Brown, whose ahead-of-the-curve MXM agency recently won “Content Marketing Agency of the Year,” points to one trend we can see now — and another to come soon.

That video/social/mobile movement, he says, “reflects the new hyper-connected consumer. With the increase in media channels, millennial-focused sites are capitalizing with content rooted in discovery, empowerment, and friends.”

Then there’s the bigger game ahead. “There is also a trickle-up strategy,” he says. “These properties are using digital to build a trusted audience and catapult themselves to larger screens. To the media world, this will flip the way that broadcast content emerges, but to these digital natives, it will just be one more channel.” Hence, the investor interest among Disney, News Corp, Univision, and other broadcasters.

That’s classic disruption, and reminds me of how venture investor Kenny Lerer recently explained to me the why of all the new digital news venture investment. About one in five of Lerer Ventures’ 160 investments involves digital content.

For Lerer, the timing here is obvious. Just as the build-out of cable networks in the 1970s and 1980s demanded loads of new content — to fill the new distribution channels of USA, A&E, Bravo, and so many of others — the build-out of near-ubiquitous, mobile-multiplied digital media makes content creation newly valuable. The pipes have widened again. And now the pipeline to millennials is being filled.

As CNN’s KC Estenson asks: “What is the media that fills the platform?”

It’s harder to divorce the ideas behind the newsroom redo — many of which make some basic sense, and indeed are being used by highly regarded news startups — from Gannett’s own on-again, off-again innovation history. Real questions of corporate authenticity and staying power bedevil any grand pronouncements. Let’s look at this tangled web of newsroom change and try to make sense of it.

Even when Gannett has done good and smart things, its achievements can be obscured by how it operates. An example: Years ago, Gannett emerged as an early leader in newsroom diversity, on its staffs, in management, and in the content of its papers. While Gannett’s peers — Tribune and Knight Ridder, among them — urged and cajoled editors to do better, Gannett enforced its mandates, down to counting the race, ethnicity, and gender of all faces appearing in its papers’ photographs.

It worked, at least to a degree. The papers indeed looked more like the communities they served. But at the same time, this approach to the craft of journalism counted only the most basic of things, enforced through rote counting — a very Gannett approach. Now Gannett — like Advance in its revolutionary capitalist fervor (“Gannett cribs from Advance Publications playbook for struggling newspapers”) — seems intent on a new cookie-cutter approach to change, no matter how well intended.

The list of job descriptions (courtesy Jim Romenesko) now being imposed in five Gannett newsrooms — The Tennessean in Nashville, The Asbury Park Press in New Jersey, The Greenville News in South Carolina, The Pensacola News Journal in Florida, and The Asheville Citizen-Times in North Carolina — are in many ways commonsensical, including content coaches, community engagement editors, and producers. In total, there are 16 job descriptions that are intended to be used company-wide, and to connect with a new set of metrics, including traffic and other digital countables.

Even if the ideas seem a little paint-by-numbers, the internal name for this restructuring project is Picasso. It’s this penchant for grandiose naming that invites disdain. It doesn’t help (as Romenesko pointed out) that Gannett has already announced such “newsroom of the futures” projects over the last decade, from crowdsourcing to “Information Centers.”

In journalism, we don’t buy and sell futures like hogs. At our best, when we make mistakes, journalists own up to them and move on. News companies that blithely ignore their pasts strain their own future believability.

Consider that after a decade or so of huffing and puffing about building the future, one Gannett editor could promote the latest initiative by saying: “Readers are going to notice very quickly that we’re not just shoveling out printed copy up on the website…The biggest change for us is going to be a hugely expanded [team of] digital producers.”

Still shoveling after all these years? After all these great pronouncements of change and digital leadership? How could that possibly be? What does it tell us about the likelihood of this newest newsroom of the future is to work?

Lost in the many shuffles within Gannett in the last month — separating into two companies, buying Cars.com, announcing the new newsrooms — is its next major round of newsroom job cuts.

After years of shrinking, Gannett has decided to get yet another jump on the revenue declines to come. Figuring that print advertising will continue to decline annually in the high single digits — as it has for the last three and is this year — the company is taking about 15 percent out of many, if not all, of its 81 community newsroom budgets now, preparing for 2015 and 2016.

That 15 percent is in dollars, not jobs. So it makes sense for publishers and editors to take out the highest-paid jobs, as many companies have done. Translation: More than 15 percent of editorial and community knowledge is being lost.

It’s easy to paint the laying off/buying out of veterans as simply getting rid of the digitally clueless. There’s some of that, of course, but this is mainly a financial exercise, as is most of the change we see sweeping the American news industry this year. Gannett’s editors (and some are quite good) are left to make sense of their smaller deck of cards and work around the edges of a one-size-fits-all reshuffling to preserve the integrity of their work.

Gannett’s cut is notable because it’s so large — on top of more than a half-decade of cuts — and because it anticipates the scale of a “rightsizing” of these newsrooms for next two years. That’s optimistic, given that the print slide is accelerating in certain ways.

There are several reasons for the downward spiral of local news companies. One, though, is very apparent but seldom acknowledged by publishers: Most news publishers are providing lower quality products year after year and charging more for them.

That’s not Gannett’s announced strategy, but it’s been its de facto one. And unfortunately, it’s not alone. Within the last month, we’ve gotten new numbers on newsroom loss.

By the latest ASNE counting, 20,000 jobs have been lost in U.S. daily newsrooms over the last decade, a drop of over 35 percent. There are 36,700 remaining daily newspaper jobs in the U.S, a drop of 3.2 percent year over year. (By way of comparison, local TV stations employ 27,300, according to recently released annual Bob Papper benchmark survey, down 1.4 percent. In local TV news, as in local newspapers, employment is in a seven-year slide. Add up the number of local broadcast news jobs and those in daily newspapers, and they still don’t equal print newsroom employment of a decade ago.)

Not all jobs are being cut equally. Both Gannett and Advance, among others, have thinned the ranks of both managers and editors generally. As someone who’s both managed a multi-editor-layered metro newsroom and depended on myself for editing of some of my Newsonomics work, I understand how the world has changed. The blogging revolution (remember that?) changed our sense of how many touches copy needed. At the same time, readers notice the epidemic of typos and, more importantly, incomprehensible stories, especially when they are being charged 10 to 50 percent more than they were three years ago. They think they’re paying for a “professional” newspaper or website.

Certainly, we need the engagement people, the audience development people, the multimedia producers and more. But let’s not try to kid anyone — ourselves or the readers — that the old-fashioned institution of the knowing, checking editor is a vital role in the food chain. Knowledge, expertise, judgment: We value all those qualities in editors.

Sure, we can add in coaching — mentoring has always been a key ingredient in the best newsroom cultures. Coaching and editing, though, don’t equate, especially in newsrooms increasingly populated by underpaid, relatively inexperienced younger journalists. Even as we recognize the value of the more amorphous community intelligence, and attempt to add it to the news report, greatly diminishing editorial intelligence is a recipe for disaster — and business failure.

In a whisk of a Gannett second, “managers” and “editors” have been lumped into single category. Relatively late to the game of whacking middle management, a swath of newsroom intelligence has been redefined as “layers” and discarded.

Take the words of two of Gannett’ editors, leading the new newsrooms. Here’s Hollis R. Towns, Asbury Park Press executive editor/vice president news:

We are flattening our management structure to be more nimble, with fewer hierarchical reporting lines and fewer managers. Reporters will be able to post to APP.com directly, cutting layers to give you the news more quickly and efficiently. Reporters will be empowered to roam for news and listen to you in a more self-directed way. The stories they write will be based on what you read and click on.

And Stefanie Murray, The Tennessean’s executive editor: One major goal of the reshuffling is to have more “self-sufficient reporters producing publication-ready copy.”

Less editing can make sense in the digital age. The idea of none, especially in less and less experienced newsrooms, is a silly one. Again, this isn’t craft snobbery: Editing is part of why people pay for newspaper company content over other news.

Gannett papers’ public pitch, inasmuch as there is one, can be summed up in a word: More. There’s neither evidence that readers want more, nor that these diminished staffs can really create more, at least more of any meaningful quality for readers. Yet a third part of this particular reimagining, along with the job cuts and the new job titles, is a greater emphasis on counting. As we’ve seen the hamster wheel put into effect here and there, counting pageviews seems ascendant. That’s ironic, because in 2014, the direct relationship between pageview (or unique visitor) growth and digital advertising growth is becoming increasingly weaker. (Though, to be fair, the quest for clickbait has gone truly global, now including the Chinese government press. Facebook alert: Please label appropriately.)

This set of restructurings, then, is as likely to obscure the fundamental issues of our times as it is to solve them.

“More,” as expressed in Nashville and more widely, isn’t a winning market idea. Further, the reading public — a.k.a. customers — could care less about internal shuffling. They want better products and services, and that’s not what Gannett is announcing.

The lack of product acceptance isn’t an abstract issue for Gannett. The company’s paywall strategy has stumbled, as it has seen double-digit loss of print circulation volume in some markets. Why? It raised prices in double-digits while failing to offer paying readers a reason to stick with their papers. Its introduction of USA Today content in its local papers, a higher quality/lower cost plan, may make good financial sense, but it’s unlikely to sway local readers who buy papers for local news.

How are these new plans going to deal with that big issue? That’s the big commercial question for Gannett: What will these reduced, lesser-experienced staffs offer their communities of sufficient value?

The impact metrics movement offers one way to count value beyond commodity pageviews, to get at this more elusive question of the value of news products and services the business is delivering. In a world that rewards journalistic product by volume, we go back to the divide between Who/What/When/Where journalism and the higher-value How/Why, with the latter clearly more useful to citizen readers as they try to make sense of disconnected facts (“The newsonomics of how and why”).

Ask readers, and many will tell you they want smarter, deeper, and wider — and that they’re willing to pay for it. The best case scenario of our era: The New York Times’ success in signing up both all-access and digital subscribers. We do have a few regional models — more on them in the months to come — that, Times-like, have kept their newsroom staffing and community knowledge capacity high, and invested in the product against the odds. What the smarter publishers are focusing on is that kind of meaningful engagement with their news brands, better serving a smaller stratum of readers willing to pay.

Those relative few, though, pale against the tide of now-standalone newspaper chains trying to cut their ways into the “newsrooms of the future.”

As we look forward to the second half of the year, we already know some of the big stories to watch, and leadership will be key to those. How will the spun-off Tribune and Time Inc. companies do, and how will they be led? As Jeff Bezos’ ownership of The Washington Post reaches the one-year mark, will the revolutionary disruptor announce any shape-shifting moves for the Post — moves which might serve as models for his besieged new brethren? Who will buy the dozens of former MediaNews and Journal Register properties that Digital First Media will be putting on the block?

But let’s focus on the major changes we’re seeing now instead of looking ahead. It’s been a season of positioning, movements less seismic than slowly shifting. It’s a season that is seeing a lot of housecleaning and — barely noticed — the crumbling of some of the newspaper industry’s vestigial structures. Let’s start there, with one announced dissolution, and then check in on three other storylines involving many of the long-established players in the U.S. daily industry.

The wires business recedes farther into the 20th century.

Once there was a flourishing “supplemental” wires business — all those wires that complemented the Associated Press (and, long ago, United Press International). The epoch spoke to the robustness of the news business. Many newspaper companies invested in content, both using it themselves and finding buyers among their newspaper peers. It wasn’t unusual for a half a dozen wires to flow into news desks every day. Back in the ’90s, we counted how much content flowed into the St. Paul Pioneer Press each day and how much of it we used. We printed just 5 percent of what we received.

Retired Scripps Howard News Service editor Peter Copeland neatly recounts a two-decade tale of consolidation and loss.

In the 1990s, McClatchy had a news service that was mostly in the West. They didn’t want to operate it anymore, so Scripps Howard set up a deal to start a Scripps-McClatchy Western Wire run out of the Scripps Howard News Service office. When I took over SHNS, the Western Wire was not doing well, so I folded it into SHNS. In 2006, McClatchy bought Knight Ridder and the old KRT [Knight Ridder Tribune] became MCT, and McClatchy was back in the wire business. LAT-WP [Los Angeles Times-Washington Post] broke up, and LAT went to MCT. WP joined up with Bloomberg. Along the way the Cox News Service disappeared; so did the Hearst News Service, Christian Science Monitor and the Newhouse News Service. Then, SHNS sold out to MCT. Then, McClatchy sold out to Tribune. I didn’t think that Tribune would be the last one standing.

Whew.

Tribune and McClatchy announced that latest move last week, with McClatchy selling its half share.

We know that Tribune — which has long run the business side of the wire but will now take over editorial operations as well – is consolidating the wire in Chicago. Layoffs of the D.C.-based editing staff are in progress, though it’s important to point out that both McClatchy and Tribune will maintain their D.C. reporting bureaus.

We can expect that the Chicago Tribune will leverage its position as a central hub for the current Tribune chain in reorganizing what will become a Tribune wire. Tribune has already said it would meld the operation into the Tribune Content Agency. So what has been a roughly break-even venture will become part of a profit center. Expect new packaged products, something the Chicago Tribune has gained in proficiency in over the past several years.

How will the hundreds of newspaper clients of the wire react? Will the fact that it will soon be more a Tribune company than a quasi-coop (some newspapers contribute content to the wire as well as receive it) make any difference to them?

The move tells us a lot about newspapers and content. The supplemental wires have remained largely print-oriented, and as newspapers have finally gone more local in print and cut newsprint overall, there’s less space for wire copy. In addition, relatively few newspapers have made effective use of this niche-y content — the McClatchy Tribune wire has distinguished itself with strong features across a variety of topics — in their digital products, one of the failures of imagination evidenced over the years. Now new syndicators like NewsCred bring new models of audience-targeting content licensing to the marketplace. Wires fade into the history books.

Gannett is now an advertising company.

Last June, when the largest U.S. newspaper publisher bought Belo TV stations, I said that Gannett had become a TV company. Now, with the latest likely move — buying Cars.com outright from its newspaper partners — we’ll have to adjust that description (“The Newsonomics of selling Cars.com”).

The best new description may be this: Gannett is an advertising company. Of course, it’s always been a major ad seller, but as its newspaper ad revenue has cratered along with the rest of the industry’s — down more 50 percent over the last seven years — the company has looked for new ways to generate replacement profit.

Adding the Belo TV stations to longstanding Gannett Broadcasting made it one of the top four broadcast players in the country. Just yesterday, it bought six more Texas stations to add to its standing. The logic: Broadcast may be maturing, but it’s not gasping for its breath like newspapers are.

The Belo deal meant that Gannett would plan to see two-thirds of its operating income come from broadcast, a dramatic turnaround once for what was once the plumpest of cash newspaper cows.

That broadcast money is mostly advertising, bolstered by a healthy stream of retransmission fees paid by cable and satellite companies — though those fees are increasingly under legal and competitive pressure.

Now if it completes the Cars.com deal, it will add as much as $350 million in additional advertising revenue to its mix. (I expect Gannett will partner with private equity to buy Cars.com, which may complicate the accounting.)

Add it up, and we get to the ad company definition. We can figure that at least 75 percent of Gannett’s revenues will be ad dependent. While that’s better than being an ad-dependent newspaper company, such a reliance could be problematic. Digital disruption is slowly eroding the broadcast ad business. While Cars.com has an enviable No. 2 position in its sector, its new competition will come from all sides, known and unknown. The question for Gannett’s shareholders, and employees: Has the company charted a strategically defensible future, or just bought a few years of time?

As Gannett finalizes its Cars.com buy, exiting the business ownership will be McClatchy, along with Tribune, A.H. Belo, and Graham Holdings. All those companies exited Apartments.com earlier in the year, selling to private equity. Group the three transactions — Cars.com, Apartments.com, and the McT wire dissolution — and we see the partnership culture of an earlier generation fading fast.

New national news networks are forming.

Look back in time 20 years and you’ll find plenty of ideas for creating a reader-accessible site for most newspaper-produced content: a portal for all the news from the country’s 1,350 or so dailies. Start with New Century Network, one such mid-’90s effort that hardly left the gate. Knight Ridder’s Real Cities was a pretender as well. At various times, Yahoo News has aggregated lots of newspaper content.

Still, in 2014, there’s no simple-to-use, single place to go for to tap into newspaper content overall. This year, we see new stirrings.

Expect to see the next upgrade of the Associated Press’ AP Mobile app soon. Since its launch in 2008, it’s been an intriguing product, embracing that broad expansive network notion. AP identified the green fields of mobile early and convinced hundreds of newspapers to contribute to the mobile-only product. AP Mobile gets impressive traffic, but mainly to its own national and global content; local content drives less than 20 percent of its traffic. The key going forward will be the user experience: How do you present many firehoses of reader-relevant national and local daily content in a way that makes sense, especially on a tiny smartphone screen?

Consider, also, the new Washington Post network plan. The idea: Allow newspaper partners to show Washington Post content to their own subscribers. Certainly, it’s small today, and nothing like an all-inclusive network; a half-dozen newspapers — The Dallas Morning News, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, The Toledo Blade, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel — have signed on. The business deal: Affiliates offer up otherwise paywalled Post access (without additional cost), increasing their own reader value propositions. The Post gains more ad inventory. No money changes hands.

Post president Steve Hills tells me that the program will expand rapidly, intending to serve “multiple millions” of the roughly 30 million U.S. newspaper subscriber population. Although Hills says there are no plans to create a single authenticated user experience, we can see how the Post network could grow into such a product – and do so within paid digital circulation strategies. If we expect new Post owner Jeff Bezos to break some traditional business molds at some point, wouldn’t such a networked approach be a logical one? The potential of an integrated iTunes for News experience may be in the back of the Bezos brain.

Then, there’s the newly launched Dutch Blendle model. It’s innovative, and it pushes into the one area that the Netherlands dailies would allow for aggregation: pay per article. Blendle is aiming at other markets, though don’t expect it to land on American shores soon.

The obstacles to creating a state-of-the-art network experience are formidable. How do you avoid cannibalizing reader revenue in an age of individual paywalls? How do you share new revenue, and how do you give readers what they really want? They may be insurmountable. Further, the growth of compelling news content well beyond newspapers is so great that it’s possible a newspaper-only product no longer makes sense. Still, expect the dream to be pursued.

The new News Corp’s colicky infancy

Last week’s News Corp’s financials told us the company hasn’t yet figured out its post-spin-out way forward. The big number: Down 9 percent in its news and information segments, with both ad revenue and reader revenue down. Even with some allowance for currency impacts, the results lag its peers.

While the problems of News Corp can be found on three continents (Australia, U.K., and U.S.), it’s the American face-off with The New York Times that must grate Rupert the most. So far, the Thompson vs. Thomson face-off I described as both companies hired new CEOs has gone in favor of BBC transplant, NYT CEO Mark Thompson. Compare The New York Times’ recent growth (“New numbers from the New York Times”), in both ad and reader revenue, to News Corp and you see one company in modest turnaround, the other still looking for it.

There are a couple of reasons to believe this battle is still in the very early stages.

As it released its problematic numbers, News Corp announced the expected appointment of Will Lewis as CEO of Dow Jones, removing his “interim” title. The early reports on Lewis’s DJ/Wall Street Journal are good ones. The damage done by Lewis’ predecessor as CEO, Lex Fenwick, though, will take at least a few quarters to repair, even as the wider competitive marketplace around Dow Jones moves on rapidly. Lewis’ listening tour is now over, and the painful reconstruction of the company’s Factiva/B2B business has begun.

How painful? News Corp CEO Robert Thomson described the B2B do-over this way on the financials call: “At Dow Jones, where we had obvious difficulties with our business-to-business offering, the team has started to stabilize the institutional revenue and refined our product and pitch.” That’s painfully honest, with a tad of spin. Product and pitch cover the whole business.

Meanwhile, Lewis must get the consumer side of Dow Jones — largely the Journal — reenergized as well, just as energetic turnaround tests are in midstream at News Corp properties in Sydney and London.

The current shakiness of the company is buoyed by two hard realities: Rupert Murdoch and money. Just this year, Rupert bulled through his family succession plan and this week moved forward with a long-planned effort to create a consolidated Europe-dominating Sky TV company through his other company, 21st Century Fox. The man lies in wait for opportunities, showing the doughtiness of a man a third his age. Then, there’s the cash. News Corp’s the best-funded news company on the planet, and that can make the recent Dow Jones chaos and current financial woes mere speed bumps on the long Murdochian road ahead.

By now, it’s common knowledge that most companies producing digital news are approaching — and at times surpassing — the mobile-majority mark. It’s no longer uncommon for smartphone plus tablet to surpass desktop plus laptop in morning, evenings, and weekends.

The audience is way ahead of the money: Only 17 percent of U.S. digital advertising revenue (“The newsonomics of newspapers’ slipping digital revenue”) is now mobile, though the percentage more than doubled in a single year. Too much of the mobile ad money now goes to Google and Facebook, 75 percent or more. So the question: How to create mobile savvy news products that can win good audiences and take in some of what is now the fastest growing ad category? (Mobile ads are growing at a four-year-compounded annual growth rate of 127 percent.)

Let’s take three newish mobile news products — each quite different from one another — to see a few versions of mobile-first thinking look like 2014. Yes, Circa — a hot topic among newsies — is one of them. The two others are News Republic, produced by Bordeaux-founded Mobiles Republic, with editions in seven countries, including the U.S. and U.K. Next Tuesday, Amsterdam-rooted NRC Q debuts its beta mobile business news product. What ideas, business models, and sheer hunches are each of the three bringing to this concept of “mobile first”?

Circa

Let’s start with Circa. Launched in fall 2012, the company has been a hot ticket for those on media tours of the Bay Area. CEO and cofounder Matt Galligan (“Permanently Midwestern at heart, Temporarily San Franciscan for the coffee”) says that the company has had to limit its tours so it can get its work done. It’s not just Americans competing for a peek under the Circa covers; Germans, Japanese, and Scandinavians have all knocked on the doors. Somewhat obsessed with BuzzFeed’s innovation, these outsiders are intensely curious about Circa’s.

What is that innovation? In a word, atomization.

You, dear mobile reader, may not have known you needed a news atomizer, but others do. I asked pioneering news techie Matt McAlister, now general manager of new digital businesses at Guardian News & Media and a Yahoo alum, why he called Circa “brilliant”: “They’ve worked out a model for engaging with information at the fact level,” he says. “The way they’ve applied it makes personalization an amplifier of what they’ve editorialized. The presentation and flow balance what matters and what you want to know nicely. That’s not easy in any environment, and doing it well on a mobile device with fact-level information is a real breakthrough.” (You can check out McAlister’s wider thoughts on atomizing the news, “Making Smaller Things Have Bigger Meanings.”)

The best way to understand Circa is try it. Wednesday’s stories extended from the South Korea ferry tragedy to Ukraine to the company behind Candy Crush tripling of revenues. Each is presented as a series of cards, which the user swipes through. Each features no more than a single paragraph, with some focused on an individual quote, a map, or an image with caption. “Bridges,” below some stories, provide more short Circa-written context. Circa’s editors use a wide variety of top-notch sources to write their paragraphs, and those sources are noted in citations at the very bottom of each story.

Though the content is atomized into paragraphs, David Cohn, founder of Spot.us and Circa’s chief content officer, says the site is, in its arrangement of cards, providing context to the biggest stories of our days and weeks. “People think we are just summarizing,” he says. In fact, each card tries to answer a single question, he says. While Vox uses its own version of a card system for its backgrounders, it aims to answer the “why,” Cohn says, while Circa goes for the “what happened.” The three editorial values of Circa: “concise, thorough, accurate.”

Terminology is tough — not because it’s jargon, but because Circa is thinking hard about the structure of news. Cohn leads a full-time staff of 11, with a couple stationed in Beijing and Cairo, to make its 24/7 posting schedule work. Serial tech entrepreneur Galligan founded the site out of news frustration: “Frankly, I wasn’t being fulfilled.”

“We pioneered this space and now it’s quite hot,” says Galligan, citing NYT Now, Yahoo News Digest, and Inside as three examples of those joining the mobile-majority fray. “We’re not going to roll over. We’re just getting started.”

Business model: Uncooked. It is in the audience-building phase, not yet selling advertising. (I suggested to Galligan that he consider charging significant fees for media visits as a good short-term source of revenue.)

Where is it headed? Circa has raised about $4 million in seed funding, led in part by Lerer Ventures (which I profiled in the recent media issue of Politico Magazine: “1. Destroy the Village. 2. Save the Village. Why Silicon Valley VCs suddenly love the media“). Galligan has been out raising a Series A round, one that could value the company as high as $40 million. He’d like to get media company investment, but wants to keep control of his independent company, understandably fearful that Big Media could smother Circa with its love bounty. As he bolsters Circa’s profile and leadership cred, he’s just hired as president John Maloney, formerly of Tumblr, a company that managed to cash out big time (and remain semi-independent). Internet culture connoisseur, investor/entrepreneur, and Cheezburger.com CEO Ben Huh is a Circa cofounder.

Galligan says he’s keeping options open on whether Circa will remain a consumer-oriented destination or white-label its atomization services to major media — or both. In fact, expect Circa to announce several media partnership deals before the end of the year. The main holdup is the completion of workflow technology that will enable partners to use the same tools that Circa editors themselves use right now. That likelihood opens up all kinds of possibilities. Right now, Circa can only play in a very small sandbox, offering up just what its 11 editors can produce. What could a news organization creating hundreds or thousands of stories a month do with Circa thinking and presentation? Plans are afoot.

Audience: How much of an audience is Circa now serving? The company won’t offer up any numbers yet, but the word is that the audience numbers don’t match up with the high industry interest. iTunes apps store downloaders love it, giving it a 5-star rating. Is it for news junkies who consume a lot of news daily, or for the more casual reader looking to catch up on the news? “It’s both right now,” says Galligan, who says he thinks the site is likelier to go wide. “We’re not going to target the news junkie.”

Voice: Very straightforward — as David Cohn puts it, a reimagined wire service.

NRC Q

Unlike our other two products, NRC Q tumbles out of a big, old newspaper company. NRC Media publishes the well-regarded evening Handelsblad and morning NRC Next. (It’s part of the 2014 explosion of Dutch news innovation, including the pay-per-view model of Blendle and crowdfunded Der Correspondent.)

Een nieuw product, dien je te vieren! @nrcqnl pic.twitter.com/B0heJACjoa

— Martijn Standaart (@MStandaart) April 30, 2014

NRC Q launches in beta Tuesday. It’s a mobile business news app with an attitude. Importantly, it’s about leverage: The NRC newsroom pays about 200 journalists and counts 25 global correspondents. Its business news staff numbers 20. Fifteen-year NRC editor Freek Staps chose the new NRC Q staff, hired about equally from inside and outside the newsroom, which numbers 10 editors. Their task: Take the best of the company’s business news content, mix and match with FT and Bloomberg stories and video, and provide a window on the news of the day to come.

“We’re your guide for the day,” says Staps. He says the app borrows heavily from the lessons of Quartz (“The newsonomics of Quartz, 19 months in”). Its content is structured around repeating features like “Three questions about,” “While you were sleeping,” and “This is what you need to know,” all highly visual and arranged in an endless scroll. Like Quartz, but unlike Circa or News Republic, it also offers a full web product.

“We aim for people who don’t read a newspaper,” says Stap, meaning professionals in their 30s and 40s, who will be asked to pay €15 a month after a sponsored free introductory period ends. It’s not just a niche test, along the Paywalls 2.0 line; if it works, NRC will apply the model back to its dailies, which are still free online.

Business model: Reader revenue and Quartz-like large-unit and native advertising.

Audience: A business-interested, non-newspaper reading audience that is bilingual. NRC-written stories are in Dutch. Bloomberg and FT are in English. The 5:30 a.m. newsletter is NRC Q’s opening daily reach for engagement.

Voice: Playful, along the developing serious/casual style that owes so much to the blogosphere and is now represented from Vox to FiveThirtyEight to Quartz to Business Insider and well beyond.

News Republic

News Republic is a smart, scalable, tech-driven model. No editors, no fuss — just lots of content-ingesting, product-creating apps. Now funded at the $12 million level, with Intel Capital leading its last round, Mobiles Republic launched its first edition in its native France in 2009. France still provides the leading number (about 20 percent) of its 2.6 million monthly uniques, with the U.S., U.K., China, Germany, Italy, and Spain now hosting in-country editions as well. All the news is available in any country; the highlighting of news in each nation varies. It’s smartphone-oriented, with tablet and web TV apps.

CEO Gilles Raymond, now based in San Francisco, heads a staff of 27 globally. He acknowledges that News Republic is a lot like Flipboard — highly visual, lots of sources — but different in that it is only using licensed content; it doesn’t link out. Who might he be competing against, in addition to Flipboard? He names Feedly, the post-Google Reader-resurgent RSS reader, whose model of selection and reader intent is far different. Interestingly, the tablet-oriented news/features readers that were Flipboard’s early competition are no longer independent. LinkedIn is figuring out how best to make use of its Pulse acquisition; Flipboard itself bought Zite from CNN, which decided that modestly cashing out and partnering with Flipboard was its best alternative.

Business model: It’s advertising (Square is a current one) — and device manufacturer payments. Raymond says his 900 news-providing partners receive a 50-50 revenue share of all revenues driven. Building that direct-to-consumer business, though, is hard. Mobile Republic has found an additional source of revenue and traffic: HTC. Raymond says the company powers the first-screen news on HTC handsets in 42 countries. (Those aren’t included in News Republic’s audience figures above.)

Audience: Its users are a broad group. Raymond says about 60 percent customize; the others take what the site’s algorithms supply. 20 to 30 percent of the views are on Top News, with the medium and long feature tales telling.

Voice: There’s not much of one, as is true of algorithmic-driven sites.

What do we make of these three, the others out there, and the many more to come off media company whiteboards? NRC Q is the most straightforward: You’re Dutch. You want business news that makes sense of the world. You want it on your phone. It will work — the only question is one of scale in a nation of 16 million. Can it pay for those 10 new staffers and then become solidly profitable?

Circa and News Republic are longer shots. Each has hunches about readers want general news of the day, but no one’s got a formula that is certain, with the single, big brand smartphone products of The New York Times, the FT, and The Wall Street Journal making the most all-access sense, and cents, right now.

Circa, like much of what’s forming on mobile news web, is made of wet clay, pliable and still uncertain clay, even if the desktop news web continues to dry to no great satisfaction. Circa is a next-gen Newser, which, too, looked at earlier news opportunities and created its own write-from-scratch summaries of the news, with a Hollywood Squares look and a much sassier tone than Circa. Newser survives, though hasn’t seen wide adoption and is much more a creature of the web than the phone.

If you put it into context, Circa becomes an even more curious play as the wave of full-voiced, analytic, explainer sites — The Upshot, Vox, FiveThirtyEight — sweep our attention. Is there a place for a just-the-facts-ma’am site? Should there be? How much value does it add?

Its ideas may be winning, but its overall experience is to this point underwhelming. You marvel at the sheer order, and differing look, of the app, but as you read it, you may wonder how much there is there — if you read lots of news. In some ways, it reminds me of a news Wikipedia, though put together by known journalists, of course, rather than the masses. It injects facts (or are they more like better-dressed factoids?) into the news arena. It’s a great reference to the news, but I’m unclear who will use it regularly as a go-to, find-out-what’s-happening app.

As a Silicon Valley startup, Circa wants to keep its options open on audience and business model. It will have to decide both sooner than later. On audience, it’s hard to see how its small amount of content and lack of voice will attract multitudes of news readers. Maybe voice isn’t even the right word: It’s certainly a resource, with citations well shown, a credible site — but it seems to lack an authority.

Equally, if the app is for news grazers, is the facts-are-good-for-you format likely to win lots of more casual readers? Circa may be in a mushy middle for the moment, still to figure out how to market its high-concept beliefs about news. Even industry watchers who like Circa’s thinking wonder how it can ever scale. They believe it must go white label, licensing its technology to big publishers, or sell itself to someone.

News Republic, on the other hand (like Switzerland-based NewsCron, “your newspapers in one app,” which specializes in European and Latin American publishers) offers a comprehensive set of major news sources, all arrayed in those 13 categories. It’s straightforward — lots of stuff from top publishers in one place — but by its nature lacks a spirit.

Ah, aggregated news: We love the idea of aggregated/curated products. At a Spark unconference gathering in Cambridge a couple of years ago, several of us (CNN’s Meredith Artley and Heidi Moore, now at The Guardian were co-conspirators on a lovely lawn outside Walter Lippmann House) briefly imagined we had it figured out. Take a story like Ukraine. It’s the kind of story that Circa has done a deep dive into, creating dozens of cards, with bridges here and there. The Circa cards, though, are fact cards. What we talked about in Cambridge was a simpler, yet deeper idea: What if you could point to the best three to five stories (changing over time) about the Ukraine crisis — whatever their sources? We wanted some mix of (wo)man and machine to find those five stories, providing an intelligent news reader a good perspective on the issues. We wanted some sense of editorial judgment, of a smart, trustworthy editorial authority.

We’re all aware of the obstacles: imagination, revenue models, and operational issues. But getting the best of news reporting to us on our phones would seem to be a simple concept. Someone will figure it out.

Clearly, getting the context right — whenever that happens, and whoever paves the way — will require some combination of algorithm and human judgment. It will probably align along a 90/10, robot/human equation. That 10 percent, though, will make all the difference. Call it aggregation, curation, good judgment, or whatever you want: I like high-end editing, to resuscitate a term that has been showing more recent signs of appreciation.

Fast innovator Atlantic Media wrote the playbook for Quartz. That playbook almost seemed too fashionable:

✓ Designed for mobile and web-native
✓ A browser app only, not available as iOS or Android native apps
✓ No small-unit banner ads, with native ad “posts” the primary format
✓ Focused on visuals, with big photos and lots of sharable charts
✓ A global focus, in coverage and in audience, from the start

Even the name Quartz seemed a bit avant-garde, its qz.com url a little unorthodox. We knew what a Fortune, a BusinessWeek, a Wall Street Journal, an Economist, a Financial Times meant, both directly through their names and through their long histories. Quartz seemed to be going up not only against all of those, but Bloomberg, Forbes, and Thomson Reuters as well. All those business brands seemed formidable and more greatly staffed in journalists than Quartz.

And yet, before its second birthday, Quartz has found a niche. Let’s look at its newsonomics and how they provide a window into the hot “explainer” movement.

In short, its influence on today’s digital news world derives from three things: Its impressive audience and advertising strategy; its own “obsessive” model of mobile-friendly, explanatory journalism; and the wider sending of Atlantic/Quartz talent off into positions of influence in the next news, and its influence on a wide range of sites that have launched since Quartz’s birth.

Let’s take the talent point.

Justin B. Smith, Atlantic Media’s then-president, was a key shaper of Quartz. Smith is now CEO of Bloomberg Media, with a huge staff, deep pockets, and lots to figure out. His fellow co-conspirator at Atlantic Media and with Quartz, Scott Havens, just joined the soon-to-be-new Time Inc. as senior vice president for digital, after five years at Atlantic. Andrew Perlmutter, an Atlantic strategist at the time of Quartz’s launch, was named executive vice president of Boston Globe Media Partners by new owner and publisher John Henry. Just last week, well-followed Quartz writer Christopher Mims (from his bio: “He believes that the most interesting things about the universe have yet to be discovered, and that technology is the primary driver of cultural change. He is often surprised and delighted by what people will say on record”) took on the WSJ personal tech column job that Farhad Manjoo had vacated in January by leaving for The New York Times. That’s a confluence of influence that speaks to the thinking and execution at Quartz and elsewhere within Atlantic Media.

So, let’s look at the numbers Quartz reports:

• About 4.7 million monthly unique visitors.
• 40 percent of readers are from outside the U.S. The top five countries, in order: U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and India. Given the India audience, Quartz is launching its first non-U.S.-centric site, Quartz India, in June, partnered with scroll.in.
• More than 60 percent of the audience is executive level (according to Bizo), with 90 percent of the U.K. audience at that level.
• 70 percent are male, and with an expected skew to tech, sometimes standalone tech and often tech within a variety of companies.
• 40 percent of its traffic is from mobile, with mobile heaviest on evenings and weekends, as at other news sites. Smartphone usage dominates the early morning, and out-distances tablet usage overall about 4-to-1.
• Fully 70 percent of traffic is driven by social links.
• 70,000 readers have signed up for The Daily Brief newsletter. The newsletter has been an important driver of habit and usage — and registration data.

If the audience is high-demo, its ad sell comes down to a single word that Atlantic Media brandishes well: influentials. From Quartz to The Atlantic to National Journal and Government Executive, its pitch is not based simply on wealth or spending ability, but that its readers as deciders, agenda setters, and idea connectors (“The newsonomics of influentials”).

Quartz is a high-end play, differentiating itself from the more mass-oriented Business Insider and Forbes.com.

The site has already booked 600 percent the revenue for the first half of 2014 as in the same period for 2013, says Jay Lauf, co-president and publisher of Quartz and a veteran of Wired magazine. The site’s native ad strategy fit its time of birth well. It has never run traditional banners — why jump aboard a slowing train? Advertisers include Boeing, Chevron, Cadillac, G.E., and Bank of America; more than 40 percent of advertisers are in financial services.

Lauf says the site is getting an 80 percent ad renewal rate, after first being tagged as the “hot new thing.” In total, Quartz has counted about 45 “blue chip” advertisers. That’s a big number, and shows how much Fortune 500 brands are embracing “share of voice” and native advertising. Quartz aids these content marketers in their creation, ranging from full creation to “light touch” help — a variation of content marketing digital services, a major growth area for all the national and regional publishers investing in capacity to do that work.

A Goldman Sachs look at top innovations of 2013 is the kind of advertising that plays to Quartz’ strength. It’s a major client, and its white paper-like offerings fit the thought-leader vibe of the site overall.

Only 30 percent of Quartz’s ad revenue comes from those native ad posts that caught so much attention when launched (and which The New York Times borrowed from for its new Paid Posts in NYT Now and elsewhere); 70 percent comes from larger-format “Engage” ad units that dominate web pages.

Advertisers pay rates in the range of $60 CPM or higher (cost per thousand impressions). That’s 2-4× what banners will bring in on national sites. Figure that Quartz is on a run rate to produce $8 million-plus in revenue this year.

In addition to native ads, events are becoming a bigger part of the revenue strategy. They’ve long been an Atlantic Media strength, and now that Quartz has developed sufficient audience, it will host seven or more in 2014. Key here are two revenue strategies, attendee registration and sponsorship. “The Next Billion,” its June 2 event in Seattle is priced at $599 (without an advance discount) and is sponsored by Intel. As the news events space heats up, the smartest plays here are extensions both of the journalism a company does and its connections to brands with good “influentials” budgets.

That journalism is framed around the idea of obsessions. “I’m a big reader of magazines, and the magazines I liked best had defining obsessions in what they covered and sometimes over-covered,” says Quartz editor-in-chief and co-president Kevin Delaney. The obsessions framing was at first internal; it now acts as the branding, and in some ways, the taxonomy of the site. On a practical level, it allows a smaller business news staff to cover a wider world, to think and act bigger. Quartz certainly picks its spots, covering some stories, while letting others go. (Even much larger business news organizations, though, do the same thing. Compare Tuesday’s widely-covered Twitter quarterly financials report — Quartz’ provocative angle was “Twitter is now in danger of being crushed by Facebook” — with the paucity of analysis of Time Warner’s.)

The big idea for newsies: Get outside the silo of beats and embed the macro context into anything the site writes. As an editor, Delaney knows that the 15 current (though changing with the news) obsessions — among them, “Indian Elections,” “Future of Finance,” “Ukraine Crisis,” and “New U.S. Economy” — push journalists “to think through what’s most important in the stories, not just process the news.” Not processing the news means avoiding the mushy middle of stories between 500 to 800 words; Quartz’ stories run short or longer.

Quartz’s visual journalism push now seems more commonplace. The site not only uses charts often to tell its stories, it has opensourced its Chartbuilder tool, with wide usage among other media.

Even though the majority of readers don’t use the obsessions taxonomy that much — guess what, they like to scroll — it’s both a guidepost for its staff and a high-profile branding that says prominently that Quartz is a thinking person’s business news site. That staff now numbers 25 full-time journalists, up from 17 at launch.

Delaney got to pick his staff. Stop there: As I talk with news-change people in both legacy and startup operations, that ability to pick a staff is huge. It connects with the overused word “culture”: In hiring, editors like Delaney not only get a chance to find the talents, digital sensibilities, and storytelling chops they want — they get to build their culture through hires. Any newsroom, new or old, has its issues, but a new, well chosen, well paid one can spend so much more time on the work and so much less time on the “change.” For legacy companies, a key question is how to emulate that kind of environment, ASAP. Take a tour of Quartz’ journalists and you can see a wide-range of skills, humor — and potential. Those qualities show, subtly, in Quartz’ stories.

The “obsessions,” of course, are just a foundation. It’s the voice of Quartz — serious, pointed, and yet casual — that gives it a personality. Delaney credits global news editor Gideon Lichfield, who came to Quartz after 16 years at The Economist, with establishing that style. “It’s hard to express,” says Delaney, “but it’s conversational, global, digital, and smart. Treat readers’ time well. Above all, don’t talk down to the readers. And don’t take yourself too seriously.” The effort, that serious casual, borrows much from what we’ve all learned in last 20 years on the news web. Often, it works quite well; less often, you can find yourself midway through a story and wondering why you’re still reading. Throughout, you get the sense that these are journalists grappling for answers on big issues and little, much as their readers are.

Quartz, at its best, zags when the competition zigs. Whether it’s the coverage of the next Netflix (“The track-changes version of Netflix’s vision for the future of TV”), contrarian advice (“Forget about learning to code — to get rich in tech, become an accountant”), or real estate comparisons (“How many houses can you buy elsewhere for the price of one in London?”) — chartified, of course — readers are unlikely to think they’ve seen Quartz’s take on current stories in other places.

We can see Quartz as part of that larger movement toward explainer journalism. What does Delaney think about the explainer wave? As The Wall Street Journal veteran he is (having left as WSJ.com managing editor to start Quartz), he takes a longer view than most: “News organizations — including Quartz — have been explaining what the news means for awhile.”

Yet the Quartz sensibility is now a cousin of everything from the new NYT Now to Circa to Inside.com to Yahoo News Digest, as everyone moves on to the coming majority-mobile opportunity. Explainer journalism, of course, isn’t only about mobile, but the its rediscovery coincides with this new mobile age.

My sense is that this great flowering (and great hype) around explainer journalism will soon be absorbed into the wider changes in how news is created and consumed. Though the names starting sites have drawn disproportionate attention, a kind of within-the-house celebrity journalism, we’re still talking about only dozens or hundreds of journalists hired. Almost all seem focused on an American intelligentsia, albeit an intelligentsia that’s highly attractive to advertisers and in its willingness — given the right proposition — to attend a conference or buy a subscription or become a member.

At this point among the contenders — Atlantic Media’s The Wire, Quartz, Slate, Vox, FiveThirtyEight, and sites that may tumble out of First Look Media, to name just a few — we’re beginning to see a kind of Darwinian competition. Even the intelligentsia only has so much time and will make choices. I loved The Upshot’s spare story and great visualization of “Up Close on Baseball’s Borders”). But FiveThirtyEight’s 773 words and a scatterplot on “Do April Showers Bring May Flowers?” exceeded my wonk quotient; I’d rather see the answer to the latter in one of Larry Kramer’s restyled USA Today graphics.

While social referrals are an essential nutrient for all these newer sites, one important metric to watch over the next 24 months will be how much their direct traffic increases. What Quartz and its competitors are now fighting for is new habitual readers. They want to encourage daily check-in; they want to be on the first screen of our smartphones.

Where does Quartz go from here? It’s got new competition, but its business niche helps distinguish it from the newer explainer sites, as does its 19-month lead in gaining attention. Is it really a business site? Well, yes, but it travels well beyond the edges of business, and, interestingly, does it in ways different from what sites such as Business Insider and Forbes do. Clearly, “business” is a good category to claim, but how you then work its edges will make a lot of difference in how well you can really monetize your audience.

Quartz will need to find continued growth. The events strategy is a key to that. It will bring in about 10 percent of Quartz’ revenue in Quartz Events’ first full year of operation. Overall, Atlantic Media brings in 20 percent of all its revenue from events, so Quartz should have headroom there.

Then there’s that elusive question of reader revenue. Though Quartz’ native ad innovation is impressive, and related events revenue will help, all the new sites find a common question: how to balance their revenue streams over the longer term. Without a legacy print publication that people are used to paying for (like Quartz’s parent/cousin The Atlantic), how do you pry payment out of readers? Slate is the latest to try a new tack there, with its new membership program.

Will Quartz test similar waters? Not soon. “Right now, we embrace the open web, full stop,” says Lauf.

And then there’s the question of where Atlantic Media will next go. The company has hired well, in both executive and journalistic ranks. It ranks “culture” as one of its foundational values, putting it on the top navigation of its site. Owner David Bradley showed the industry how a company born in 1857 could be reshaped into a leading digital/print publisher. Now, he must decide on his next generation of leadership, and how much Atlantic Media will continue to be a serial product launcher (Defense One is the latest, launched a year ago) and how much it’ll become a buyer or a seller.

OK, so I’m going to try a device with these remarks that seems popular these days — a list, or listicle as it’s come to be known. This is more list than listicle. So what follows are 9 reasons to be optimistic about journalism.

1. Let’s start with the basics. We’ve survived. We’re still here.

Real journalists doing real journalism. Not too long ago, people said The New York Times would go bankrupt. It didn’t. A few years back, The Boston Globe was threatened with a shutdown (and a gleeful critic advised me, its editor at the time, to practice saying “Would you like fries with that?”) The Globe survived to do outstanding work.

About 25 years ago, I was at the Los Angeles Times as a senior editor. Ted Turner, founder of CNN, had come to visit — and I was among those invited to a nice lunch. He returned our hospitality with a warning, more accurately a prediction: In 10 years, he said, the Los Angeles Times would be out of business. That would be due, he said, to 24-hour cable news. The L.A. Times has had its struggles, but it’s still very much in business — doing very good work — and its struggles today have had little, if anything, to do with CNN or 24-hour cable news. They’re due to the Internet, which has put pressure on a wide range of industries, not just ours.

So, the point is, we as an industry and a profession are more resilient than people give us credit for. More resilient than even we give ourselves credit for.

2. New owners are bringing needed new capital and a range of disparate ideas, rethinking business models.

Our new owner at the Post, Jeff Bezos, is among them — investing $250 million in cash in the purchase of the Post and investing millions more into initiatives aimed at growth and digital transformation. Red Sox owner John Henry has acquired The Boston Globe and is obviously rethinking its business model. At the Orange County Register, Aaron Kushner is trying a wholly different approach, emphasizing print and betting that a substantial investment in reporting resources will give the industry the jolt it needs. Warren Buffett and his people are bringing their own ideas about local journalism to newspapers in smaller communities. Minnesota billionaire Glen Taylor has offered to buy the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. We’ll see what he has in mind.

You don’t have to believe in any one of these approaches to recognize that we’re in a period of tremendous experimentation with the business models of legacy media organizations. Not all of these will work. My wager is that something will, and then others will follow.

The variety of approaches is a big plus. We now have a living laboratory of business model experimentation. And the good thing is that some of these new owners have long-term perspectives. The payoff on experimentation doesn’t have to be immediate. That’s the case at The Washington Post, where our owner has spoken of giving us “runway” for experimentation. We will try a lot of things, and we’ll have time to see if they work.

3. I just spoke about legacy journalism organizations. As important is the blossoming of new journalistic organizations.

Some of these have been the creations of people who left legacy organizations to create ventures of their own, staffed solely by web-savvy, digital-era journalists. We recently experienced that at the Post with some staffers going off to form their own venture, funded by Vox Media. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have seen similar departures.

Capital is now available for journalism entrepreneurship. It doesn’t make my life any easier when people leave, but overall it is healthy for journalism.

Media pundits have a habit of viewing these spinoffs as a sign of dysfunction in businesses like ours, a sign of the failings of legacy institutions like mine. In fact, these spinoffs are a sign of health in the industry, just as the availability of capital for entrepreneurial spinoffs in Silicon Valley or here in Austin is a sign of health.

Not all of these ventures will succeed — saying you’re the “next big thing” and hiring a bunch of people is the easy part. Nor, by the way, are legacy media organizations ordained to fail. (The Atlantic, an old media organization once known for its magazine, has become a vibrant online venture.)

But the new competition will translate into enormous innovation — and, I might add, a bounty of jobs.

New journalism nonprofits also add to the mix. Some are national in orientation, some regional, some investigative. Wealthy philanthropists are willing to fund them, and they have filled in some of the reporting gaps as traditional organizations have retrenched. Evan Smith and The Texas Tribune have certainly done that here, and I’m not just saying that because he’s about to grill me. [Smith conducted the Q&A after Baron’s speech. —Ed.]

The overall journalism ecosystem is more varied than before. Today’s journalistic organizations have more distinct personalities. They have disparate approaches to informing readers. There is far less uniformity. Our field is more colorful.

We are in an era of journalistic entrepreneurship, and journalists will have to be entrepreneurial — building entirely new companies, working within new entrepreneurial ventures, or behaving as internal entrepreneurs to transform organizations that have stood for decades.

That leads to No. 4:

4. New forms of storytelling have emerged, and they have proved particularly effective at connecting with readers.

They can vary from listicles to data visualization that helps readers process a mass of information as never before. In many instances, the storytelling combines a variety of techniques. New article formats have been developed that ease readers into supporting material, or supplemental material, when they wish to know more. Interactive graphics, videos, and other devices are presented contextually, integrated into stories in appropriate spots. The reader experience is enhanced. Readers are more engaged. And in the end, readers will be more satisfied.

5. The pressures on our industry have forced us to pay keen attention to our customers — readers, viewers, listeners.

We always talked about this. We didn’t always practice it. We often imagined that what we ourselves wanted to do was what our customers wanted from us. At the very least, we said it was good for them.

Maybe it was. But the fact is, customers were not always consuming what we were feeding them. In some instances, we just assumed they were. We assume that print readership equaled readership of our stories. But, if you ever sat in a coffee shop and watched people back then flip through a newspaper, you might have watched in dismay as they flipped right past your story.

Now we can be sure that if our journalism doesn’t connect with readers, viewers, and listeners, someone else will emerge to do it better. There is only one guarantee left in our business, and that is competition. Intense competition.

6. The current conditions in our industry are opening up a vast array of new opportunities.

Every year, I am asked by summer interns about job prospects. And I say that, when you look at media defined broadly, we’re seeing an explosion of opportunities.

Don’t judge job prospects solely by what’s happening at legacy institutions. New career possibilities have opened up, and young people coming into journalism need to see them and embrace them.

By the way, many of those new opportunities do exist within legacy organizations. Their process of digital transformation requires talent with a different set of skills and a more contemporary sensibility about how to connect with readers, viewers, and listeners.

These legacy institutions still need strong traditional reporting and writing skills. But while those skills are necessary, they are not sufficient. New recruits need technical skills — perhaps in coding, perhaps in video. More important, they also need an instinctive, or highly developed, sense of how the public is receiving and processing information today.

This year in The Washington Post newsroom, we are hiring three dozen people, all with the goal of digital transformation. And we are doing exciting things. Lost in all the focus on change is that some of the most transformative developments in media are taking place at some of the industry’s oldest institutions.

7. We are now seeing a whole new generation of journalists enter our field.

This is hugely encouraging.

They come with the skills required, with the right sensibilities. They can think well, write well. They’re bright, they’re energetic, they’re enthusiastic. They love what journalism can do. They understand its vital role in society. And they appreciate that there are new, highly effective ways to tell stories that need to be part of our daily toolbox.

These young journalists are true digital natives. And it shows.

Journalists of a previous generation can learn new digital skills. They can adapt. They can work hard and diligently at telling stories in new ways. And they can be really good at it. But digital is not their native language.

It’s like those who immigrate to this country as an adult. They can speak perfect, even elegant, English. And yet their accents are unlikely to disappear. These new journalists enter the field without an accent that hints of foreignness to the new medium. Their familiarity with the digital idiom is complete and natural.

8. Perhaps most important: Amid all the turmoil in our field, amid the persistent and pervasive anxiety among journalists, we’re doing strong and important work.

We’re continuing to fulfill the journalistic mission.

I’ll talk about papers other than my own and other than the biggest ones. Over the past year or so, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel disclosed a breakdown in the blood-screening system for newborns, causing delays of days or weeks in treating ailments that require immediate attention. The Sacramento Bee reported on a Las Vegas psychiatric hospital that over 5 years discharged 1,500 patients by putting them on Greyhound buses out of Nevada and bound for other states, where they had no housing, no plans for treatment, and, in some cases, knew no one. Some were violent offenders who went on to commit crimes, including one murder. The Boston Globe reported on an abusive system in which the owner of the city’s largest taxi fleet subjected hundreds of drivers to a system of continuous exploitation.

Amid all the anxiety in our field, we should not forget the enormous amount of pioneering and profoundly difficult journalism that is produced.

Now, I want to make clear, to repeat, that I’m not a Pollyanna.

I recently heard the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, describe himself as a “dissatisfied optimist.” That describes me, too.

I fully recognize that we face enormous challenges.

To name just a few:

There are serious, unresolved questions about how investigative reporting will be funded, particularly at the local and state level.

There are too few journalists providing the most basic coverage of state and local government, as well as their congressional delegations, not to mention serving as diligent watchdogs of politicians and policy-makers and the people in the private sector who exercise influence over them. Digging takes time and money and, often, expensive lawyers.

Understanding of world affairs is weakened when American coverage comes from too few media outlets and too few reporters on the ground.

There is no assurance that thoughtful, quality, in-depth journalism — which takes a lot of time — will not give way to gimmicks and click bait that lead only to a lot of social sharing.

The business models are unsettled, and digital ad rates are declining, as our product inventory — page views — keeps growing. In short, we have not found the answer, or answers, and we don’t know for sure if there are conclusive answers to be had anytime soon.

But in our business, pessimism too often seems to prevail.

Today’s experimentation will involve failure. It requires us to try and then try again. People need to realize that. And those of us who are experimenting need not be embarrassed by it.

All of you who are entering the profession, or hope to stay in it, need to be smart about this. Do not look at our field through the wrong end of the telescope. Look into the distance and see the genuine opportunities ahead of us.

And that leads me to my final reason for being optimistic about journalism, No. 9:

9. There is no acceptable alternative to optimism.

We cannot be successful if we are not optimistic, if we do not recognize opportunities and seize on them.

If we are not optimistic, why work to succeed? What use would it be? And if you are not working to succeed, no matter the obstacles, you are not working as you should.

So if we hope for a better future, we must be confident that it is within reach, even if it is not within easy reach. And we must keep trying.

I believe there are, in fact, ample reasons to be optimistic. I’ve cited some of them for you here today. I’m encouraged. I’m excited.

But I also choose to be optimistic because only as an optimist can I envision a route to success. Only through optimism can I have faith that our important journalistic mission will be sustained.

That conviction is what carries me to work every day, and what drives me from one day to the next.

In the closing, and in other cuts at Digital First Media, we see the impact of unending high-single-digit loss in print advertising. The ongoing devastation in print is overwhelming even DFM’s relatively faster pace of digital innovation.

The move also signals the fatigue of majority DFM owner Alden Global Capital — and that it is readying its newspaper properties for sale. They’re not yet on the market, but expect regional auctions of DFM properties (with clusters around the Los Angeles area, the Bay Area, New England, Colorado, Texas, New Mexico and Pennsylvania) — unless Alden can find a single buyer, which is unlikely.

Closing Thunderdome is just part of a major north-of-$100-million cost cutting initiative that is putting the best glow on some tough financials. The reason for the sale: Despite CEO John Paton’s aggressive remaking of the company, Alden’s investments in cheap newspaper company shares (“The Demise of Lean Dean Singleton’s Departure and the Rise of Private Equity”) haven’t worked out the way private equity bets are supposed to.

The current incarnation of Digital First Media was formed on Dec. 31, with the formal merger of large newspaper companies MediaNews and Journal Register; DFM had been managing both since 2011. And while its name might not be as well known as a Tribune or a New York Times Co., Digital First is a big player. Ask how big, and it won’t emphasize the number of dailies that it owns (75), but rather its digital position: “800 multi-platform products reach 67 million Americans each month across 18 states.”

Some of the biggest impacts from this change will be felt in southern California — already facing an uncertain ownership situation at the Los Angeles Times, questions about sustainability at the Orange County Register (soon to be joined by a Los Angeles Register), potential changes further down I-5 (more on that below), and now DFM’s papers facing question marks.

The idea of Thunderdome was to use DFM’s scale to provide its many local properties with a deeper, richer product than they could produce on their own. Thunderdome produced national-ready topical sections on core topics that could also be localized, which some of the bigger DFM properties (San Jose Mercury News, The Denver Post) have done more of than smaller-staffed dailies. Thunderdome only had time to roll out about eight of its topical sections, less than halfway through its original plan. Those — national/world news, health, tech, travel, food, pets, baseball — are in place at DFM’s 75 sites.

That big idea — using a centralized national news desk to create digital content for all properties within a chain — is shared by Gannett, Tribune, and others. Let local do local, the thought goes, and cut headcount costs by centralizing whatever can be centralized. Thunderdome’s intent, though, was to do that with a twist. The team, led by Robyn Tomlin, looked beyond traditional wire sources. Thunderdome’s optimistic mandate (the Thunderdome blog here):

Thunderdome is Digital First Media’s solution to providing content, support and coordination to its network of more than 100 local newsrooms, each with their own distinct communities and stories. Think of it as the wire service local newsrooms wish they had.

Based on the strength of this network, Thunderdome is able to leverage the most-engaging news reports of the day — produced by DFM journalists and through a growing portfolio of media partners — for publication and distribution on all platforms.”

Those media partners have included numerous authoritative, but non-traditional news sources:

Business: The Street, Mashable

Health: Kaiser Health News, U.S. News (rankings and ratings of local doctors, hospitals), WebMD

World: GlobalPost, Worldcrunch

Nation and politics: Stateline (Pew), Center for Public Integrity, Center for Investigative Reporting, ProPublica

Technology: Mashable, Find the Best

Home and garden: BobVila.com

Education: U.S. News (school rankings)

Autos: Find the Best, U.S. News (auto reviews)

Entertainment: HitFix

In its short life, Thunderdome showed promise, with multimedia and data-rich specials, including Firearms in the Family, Decoding the Kennedy Assassination and an interactive March Madness Bracket Advisor. A four-minute best-of video now will serve as an historic marker of Thunderdome, an experiment short-circuited, another case of digital journalism interruptus.

Jim Brady (“What’s Project Thunderdome, you ask? Inside Jim Brady’s new job at Journal Register Company”) has been a prime architect of Project Thunderdome, most recently as editor-in-chief of DFM.

Brady’s own career trajectory tells us a lot about the travails of digital innovation in the newspaper industry. A sports guy who, as an early editor of washingtonpost.com, helped make the Post a clear leader in web news, Brady decamped after a major management shuffle at the Post. He moved over to TBD, the Allbritton D.C. local news startup that aimed to create a new model of TV-partnered, blog-driven, visually strong local news. Its rise seemed meteoric, and so did its fall, as advertising didn’t meet expectations and disagreements between Brady and CEO Robert Allbritton torpedoed the project (“The newsonomics of TBD”). Now, Brady’s bid to once again reshape digital news is on hold.

Thunderdome wasn’t universally received well within the company. Talk to the locals and you heard grumbles. Traffic to the new Thunderdome sections didn’t impress them. They didn’t like national imposition on local news judgment. That grumbling, however right or wrong, isn’t surprising: For 20 years, national news chains have bobbed and weaved through different ideas about national news centralization — first in print and then in digital. Only more recently, as the financial vise has tightened further, has accepting such centralization been seen as an inevitabilty. (Consider Gannett’s recent efforts to print sections of USA Today in some of its local dailies.) If it’s inevitable, the big question is execution: How good a product are you giving the readers, and is it better than what individual papers can do?

With Thunderdome folding, the creation and production of national content will presumably fall back to the papers — though don’t expect new resources to be added back, even though some were cut in the move to Thunderdome.

What will happen to all the new sections and the content partnerships that have powered them? It’s unclear. Thunderdome’s staff, in New York and elsewhere, numbered in the low 50s, and almost all their positions will be eliminated in coming weeks and months. Thunderdome’s attracted some impressive talent over the years (including, for a time, former Nieman Lab staffer Adrienne LaFrance), including data people as well as video, visuals, and page creation staffers. (Both Jim Brady and Robyn Tomlin announced their own departures when the announcement became official.)

Whatever the merits of the new Thunderdome sections — my own sense is that they show a good diversity of content and could have evolved well in their presentation — it’s clear that Thunderdome’s elimination is driven by cost-cutting.

One DFM project, Project Catalyst, has swallowed another, Thunderdome. Catalyst is aimed at taking more than $100 million out of the company’s costs, a number a little greater than Tribune’s much publicized $100 million cut ordered by CEO Peter Liguori last fall. Recent DFM cuts in Philadelphia and the Bay Area, eliminating dozens of jobs across all divisions, are part of that process. Catalyst is led by Steve Rossi, a former Knight Ridder COO, who recently moved into that same position for DFM. Thunderdome’s demise, in least in the short term, helps DFM achieve its Catalyst goals, saving about $5 million a year.

The end of Thunderdome has got to be a bitter pill to swallow for CEO John Paton, who declined to comment to me on its termination. Thunderdome has been a keystone of his argument for faster change in the news industry.

The end of Thunderdome is likely to bring a smile or smirk to some of Paton’s detractors in the industry. Some think he’s too much of a showman, and some question his numbers. Paton loves to tweak his fellow newspaper execs, and we can expect a fair amount of publisher schadenfreude at the latest development. As recently as January, at the Online Publishers Association meeting in Miami, he told his audience this about other newspaper CEOs:

Good morning. It’s a very strange thing for me to be preaching to the converted as I am doing here today. I am used to rooms full of print journalists and newspaper executives searching for any flaw in my pro-digital speech. Many of them usually hoping that the Internet isn’t going to get to their town and they won’t have to change what they do. But perhaps — as the digital leaders of your own companies — you will recognize some of the same issues we face. You will certainly recognize them if you are from an old-line legacy business — newspapers, radio, or television — and your corporate leadership believes they have a digital strategy because they stuck the suffix “.com” behind the brand name. Or created a digital division, put you in charge, and then gave you the equivalent of peanuts to run it.

Undoubtedly, though, Paton’s been right on the need for faster transformation. His early presentations showing newspapers’ disproportionate press-and-trucks cost structure were clear-eyed. His investments in marketing service leader AdTaxi, in video, in blogging, and now in mobile stand out. The many efforts of the company, detailed in the Lab’s Encyclo entry, to break out of the newspaper mold are impressive. He says his company’s operating profit is up 40.8 percent from 2009 to 2012.

Paton parlayed a small hand on a way-down-on-the-food-chain (Journal Register Co.) into a major U.S. digital news company. Readers have seen the major changes wrought at the JRC papers, which Paton had run the longest (since the beginning of 2010), though fewer at the bigger metro-oriented MediaNews papers he later took over. Changing the MediaNews metros has been a tougher nut to crack.

Where DFM goes from here is increasingly unclear. How much can now be invested in digital growth, and how much more cost cutting will its owners require? How soon will papers be put on the market, and how quickly will new owners appear?

One unsettled geography looking for answers to those questions is southern California. In the region stretching from Ventura County, north of L.A., down south to San Diego, live 22 million people. Every one of the metro dailies in the region has seen new ownership in the last seven years; at least four bankruptcies have ruptured a once-vital newspapering region (“The newsonomics of the death and life of California news”). Today, the Los Angeles Times is set to become part of the newly spun-off Tribune Publishing, just as the Aaron Kushner’s Orange County Register moves 50 staffers into the county, publishing a seven-day L.A. Register April 16, after buying and beginning to regionalize the Riverside Press-Enterprise last fall. And don’t forget the Koch Brothers-buying-the-L.A. Times intrigue of last summer.

And if Alden puts DFM’s Los Angeles News Group on the market soon, it may not be the only property for sale.

In San Diego, word on the business street, now rebounding among a number of daily publishers around the country, is that the ownership of the San Diego Union-Tribune, now renamed U-T San Diego, wants out. That’s right: Rumor has it that flamboyant owner Papa Doug Manchester (good David Carr rundown on the “pro-business” Manchester era) wants to sell. His sometimes-CEO John Lynch has been assigned the task of finding a buyer, that rumor says. Lynch has previously talked publicly about wanting to buy more papers.

2014 is sure to bring more churn to the newspaper industry — and it’s looking like southern California could end up being the epicenter of all that change.

NYT Now’s timing seems right, and in my first testing of it, it offers reasons to believe it’ll get a lot of usage. But big questions loom as the final preparations for launch are made within the Times. The biggest, of course, is how many current non-subscribers will see enough value to pay. There are also questions about how NYT Now fits with the Times’ other native apps and mobile web experiences.

The positioning of the app shows the resurgent Times’ confidence, bolstered by the “They like us, they really like us!” success of the Times’ three-year-old digital subscription strategy. In fact, NYT Now can be seen in part as an Empire Strikes Back play: It aims to take readership back from Twitter and Facebook. It is an offensive move from a company — and an industry — that has seemed to be playing defense for so long.

“It’s the best Twitter feed I’ve ever seen,” one NYT Now tester told the team building the product, says Cliff Levy, the editor of NYT Now and a well-decorated and well-respected Timesman. That’s part of the idea: Take minutes of news usage back from Twitter and Facebook by offering a somewhat open but still corralled experience. NYT Now aims to take back that usage at the critical early-morning check-in times and later in the day, when data shows even news readers tend to migrate to social and games. How much of the world really wants a lassoing of content, bringing some finiteness to the infinity of news and opinion out there?

We know that Twitter faces its own issues of relevance, of user experience, and of how to help its users make sense of the madding digital world; just recently, the company acknowledged loss of minutes and new signups because it’s too complicated for many users. How NYT Now will try to bring simplicity to the complexity is the question. Let’s consider NYT Now in four quick parts: the product, its journalism, its user experience, and its business strategy.

The product

The product is straightforward. It’s mobile-only and, at launch, iPhone-only. On Android, the Times says, “We’re looking at it.” There’s no tablet or web access. As mobile usage surges past 50 percent in some parts of the day and week for the Times and other news companies, NYT Now aims to exploit the compulsive, near-OCD check-in behavior of 2014 life.

The app will be a standard, standalone iPhone app, not part of Apple’s Newsstand, where the Times’ core iOS app lives. Download the app and you get 10 free articles a month — the same way metered access works on the other Times’ digital products. The price is $2 a week or $8 for four weeks.

The journalism

The journalism is NYT Now’s foundation. Importantly, that journalism is both self-referential (which is what we’d expect  of the proud, sometimes haughty, news standard of the Times) and breaking new ground —  encompassing a wider world beyond the Times. So readers of NYT Now will get 30 to 50 Times stories in a given day, with stories appearing and being replaced throughout the 24-hour cycle. That’s roughly 10 to 15 percent of its total number of articles and blog posts it writes daily.

It’s an editor’s product, put together around the clock by an editorial staff of 15 to 20 (in addition to another dozen or so on the business side). Levy is modeling it on the success of New York Today, the blogging-from-the-five-boroughs NYTimes.com section that he developed last spring and which has grown in reader (and publisher) appreciation over time. He and a growing staff have built NYT Now over nine months, starting with the idea of a “need-to-know” mobile product. Think of the content in three parts, each borrowed from New York Today:

• Briefings: Adapted from the breezier, bloggier world of New York Today, NYT Now’s core personality is in the briefing. Friendly good mornings and good evenings greet readers and then offer a two- to three-paragraph take on “some of the things that caught our attention today.” Last evening’s: “Obama vs. Putin,” “The brothers Murdoch bounce back,” “It’s hard to be that bad,” (about the 76ers), “Rumors of North Korean hair rule may have follicle of truth,” “Pass the butter,” “‘Psych’ ends its eight-year run on USA Network” and “An energy drink cuts the caffeine.” There are no Mr. Putins and Mr. Obamas in the briefings. It’s the Times taking off its tie, and sharing. Expect Morning and Evening Briefings and Lunchtime and Midnight Reads — four segments a day, and each will flow into the relevant U.S. time zone; those of us on the west coast will no longer have to translate from Timesian ET.
• Top News: A half-dozen or more top Times stories of the moment. Hard news, with “more news” and top opinion at the bottom of that page.
• Our Picks: Finally, curation. The Times is acknowledging that there are indeed other worthy news providers out there, and here it picks out the stories it considers the best. Among the top brands noted: Wired, Reuters, Recode, CNBC, USA Today, The Guardian, Forbes — and even Nate Silver’s new post-Times FiveThirtyEight. Levy notes that the Times has been doing a bit of curation here and there, in its Science and Bits sections. And the Times’ Election 2012 iPhone app also pulled in non-Times stories that editors thought were important. But this is nonetheless a major leap. Levy puts it in cosmic terms: “There’s a tremendous collective intelligence in our newsrooms, but it’s only been internally focused” — meaning that journalists read a lot of stuff each day that others write, making judgments about what’s well done.

What is great aggregation or curation anyhow but great editing applied to deep knowledge. In Round 1 of Internet news, even the smartest newsrooms bottled up that value. NYT Now intends to harvest and monetize it. The eventual success or failure of NYT Now aside, the Times’ move into curation is long overdue and welcome. It’s about time that native journalistic smarts escaped their own four-walled newsrooms. The big question for a paid curation app: Does it offer enoughi curation to justify paying?

The user experience

It’s mobile first. Think Quartz, a mobile-first news leader, with more pictures and white space. It’s a long scroll, and meant for mobile snacking. It’s intuitive. Its three parts are easy to move between.

Regular New York Times subscribers will like NYT Now too. With the briefings and curation, in addition to the top news found on the Times’ own regular smartphone app, it may offer a more pleasing morning (and later) experience for subscribers. On the business level, that’s not an issue: Times subscribers get NYT Now access included in their subscription.

What I wonder about: How Times subscribers who prefer NYT Now for a quick morning reader will be able to move over to and within the fuller Times smartphone experience. The two experiences are related, but not completely synced up, as I currently understand it. On the core app, I can’t get to the breezy briefings or curation, though I can go as deep in Times content as I want. On NYT Now, I can get those, but then I have only access direct access — and view — of the limited number of Times stories on NYT Now at that moment, coming on and dropping off. (NYT Now-only subscribers will be able to read any and all NYT Now stories any time on the web; a green diamond next to a headline will indicate stories to which they have access).

Maybe that won’t be an issue, but on first use, it seems like a disconnect. If I were the Times, I’d be concerned about current subscribers feeling lost in transition. That should be a big point to ponder. As Cliff Levy shared with me, it’s Times subscribers who have disproportionately shown the love for NYT Now’s inspiration, New York Today. That New York Today experience, though, is seamlessly integrated within all the Times’ digital products.

What has worked about Paywalls 1.0 at the Times is great simplicity. You pay your money, and you get an all-access pass. All-access is a simple concept sweeping the newspaper, magazine, TV, and movie trades. Moves into product niches need to be tried, but complexity and confusion are the enemies of commercial success.

The business strategy

The Times’ strategy here is simple: “What would products look like for those willing to pay?” says David Perpich, the general manager of the Times’ New Digital Product Group and business head for NYT Now. The first answer is in, with the success of the full-access product. Now, the niching — Paywalls 2.0 — begins for the Times, and the rest of the news industry, which has followed the Times strongly and quickly into the paywall era.

Think of the segmentation as these three E’s:

• Essential, which is NYT Now;
• Extensive, to this point the only digital-only plans the Times has offered, and which have signed up 760,000 digital-only subscribers; home delivery subscribers are also considered to be in this segment;
• Exclusive, the Times’ new “premier plan.”

Exclusive, which I first noted in November, has been priced. It’s the VIP level of Times subscription: $45 for every four weeks, which provides full-digital access to subscribers, in addition to the status benefits. That’s an additional $130 a year (or $10 for each four weeks) on top of the current all-access sub. Home delivery subscribers can also go premium, as of April 2, for the same $10 a week extra.

That’s a 28 percent increase on top of a Sunday print/digital sub or digital sub. That pricing parallels the Financial Times, which has pioneered the premium sub model. The FT charges 44 percent more for a “premium” sub than than a “standard” one. What self-respecting FT (or Times, or Wall Street Journal?) reader would be caught dead with a standard-issue subscription? We know that 33 percent of new FT.com subscribers preserve their self-respect by forking over the extra dollars, euros, or pounds for four added features.

The Times’ premium is for the influential and/or Times lover in the family: Times Insider for behind-the-scenes looks at the news sausage-making, videos of TimesTalks, Times ebooks, extra Times puzzles, and Times Store discounts. That’s the premium stuff. Premium is a nuanced upsell, as its benefits include two sharing features, which can essentially lower the price of shared subscriptions:

• Family access: The ability to share their Times Premier account with two additional family members. Here, if we do the math, the Times is offering three subs for the prices of one. In its pre-premium, all-access plan, it has offered one additional family sub, or two in total. With a little planning and organization, consumers get a much better deal — and the Times locks in more everyday readers.
• Gift subscriptions: The ability to give 12 weeks of Times digital access to up to three friends each year.

The pricing of the “essential” product, NYT Now, may be tricky. It’s only $2 a week, which gets you through-the-day reports plus a curated sense of what’s big news from elsewhere and the briefings. However, for $3.75 a week, you can get access to four or five times more New York Times content through its smartphone app — and full access to the NYTimes.com on the web. So a side-by-side comparison may give buyers second thoughts. It’s more likely that Times strategy will be to put NYT Now front-and-center as the shiny new must-have thing, believing that comparison shopping won’t be of major consequence.

That comparative pricing is one place this strategy could go awry. There are others, and expect the Times to move quickly on its immediate experience. Perpich says user testing was deep, but involved fewer than 100 live users of the finished product. So real market data on usage and payment inclination will be hugely valuable as Times decides whether its research has oriented it correctly.

If the three E’s have it, the word to avoid starts with a C: cannibalization, as in NYT Now eating away at the Times’ own full-price digital subscriber base. The Times has examined three years of data on customer usage and interaction to figure not just which products they might pay for, but also the kinds of partial-content Times products that wouldn’t incentivize existing subscribers to downgrade — which would put a dent in that $150 million in new subscription revenue the paywall is pumping out annually. So NYT Now, the first of the three new niche paid products (food and opinion products will roll out this summer), is intended to satisfy, but not satiate, segments of readers.

How large might the NYT Now segment be? There is undoubtedly a vast potential audience that could appreciate a Times fast-read view of the world, but it’s a group that may be tough to get to pay. Two bucks a week isn’t much. But at that price, NYT Now isn’t competing against other $2 products. It’s competing against the enormous freely available web.

This first niche product is aimed at Americans. While more than 10 percent of the Times’ digital-only subscriptions come from outside the U.S., Perpich says, NYT Now is targeted for Americans across those four continental time zones. My sense: If a low-price, fast-read, original-and-curated product works, it could readily be tailored for Brazilian, Chinese, Indian, and Middle East markets.

Finally, NYT Now serves as the Times first home for mobile native ads, which it is calling Paid Posts. The Times may not be a leader here — in native ads, curation, mobile first, and the like — but it is becoming a faster follower.

In a memo to the journalism school community, Dean Edward Wasserman gave a number of reasons for the decision. He cites costs and the distance between the Mission District in San Francisco and the school’s base on the Berkeley campus. Wasserman’s third reason, however, was particularly disheartening.

Third, the natural evolution of the site itself is toward being an integrated media operation, and that requires sustained attention to marketing, audience-building, ad sales, miscellaneous revenue-generation, community outreach, special events, partnerships, and 1,001 other publishing activities that are essential to any site’s commercial success.

That’s not really what we do. Those are specialized areas, and the J-School doesn’t have the instructional capacity to teach them to a Berkeley standard of excellence. What’s more, our students wouldn’t have the curricular bandwidth to learn them—not unless we pared back other areas, and redefined our core mission as something other than journalism education.

I have a dog in this fight, as one of the founders of Berkeleyside, an independent, local news site in Berkeley. Our ability to report the news remains at the core of what we do, but without awareness, adaptability, and a modicum of skill in those “specialized areas,” we would have sunk without a trace very quickly. The same equation is true for anyone working at the many new ventures in journalism, even when they are vastly better capitalized than Berkeleyside, whether it’s Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at Recode, Ezra Klein at Project X, or Sarah Lacy at Pando.

What was so encouraging about Mission Local and its equivalents was that they gave j-school students a much better approximation of the real world of journalism today than internships in big newsrooms. It’s a crazy scramble with scarce resources, juggling traditional reporting, video, and social media with hands-on engagement, building community and partnerships, figuring out the place of events, understanding the need for revenue, and so much more.

I don’t expect every j-school graduate to create their own news operation, but I hope some of them eventually do. I’m certain, as well, that the majority of them will need to be familiar with those 1,001 other tasks if they are to thrive in the media world that is being formed today.

The alternative, suggested by “That’s not really what we do,” is to rely on graduates schooled in business or technology to forge the new models that journalism needs. Let the Tim Armstrongs of the world figure it out. I’d rather see the journalists take the lead.

Photo of gathered reporters by Philippe Moreau Chevrolet used under a Creative Commons license.

But maybe the most interesting piece is an idea Schiffman keeps coming back to: For video to be a really significant business for someone like the Post, the key missing ingredient is scale, both in number of videos produced and in number of viewers watching them.

Scale matters both because of the obvious CPM math — More Viewers = More Ad Impressions = More $$$ — and because many potential advertisers won’t bother to engage with a video publisher until the number of eyeballs it can offer reaches critical mass. And individual news organizations, even very good ones like the Post, have trouble producing enough videos and views to matter to advertisers. After hiring more than 30 new journalists to produce video and building a separate video brand, the Post now gets about 5 million video views a month. But as Schiffman says:

Right now, four or five million video starts — even 10, even 20 million monthly video starts is still not enough to make this a vibrant business for premium publishers to do what they need to do to create the type of content in the ecosystem.

So if you need scale, how do you get it? Schiffman throws out a few ideas, but he returns twice to the idea of a video consortium among top publishers:

Perhaps premium publishers, rather than going through very large aggregators, can create consortiums amongst themselves and work together to build aggregate news brands, in the case of The Washington Post and other premium publishers. That’s one idea.

[…]

There’s an opportunity to potentially partner with what might be seen in other industries as a competitor, where other premium publishers along with The Washington Post could band together and create a service that potentially could be very competitive and very valuable to media buyers and advertisers.

In other words, imagine if the Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time Inc., and other top publishers decided to create a new unified, separate brand for all the high-quality video they produce. Videos could appear under that separate umbrella — what Hulu was for the networks whose content fed it — and they could also appear on publishers’ individual websites. So a great Times video could appear on washingtonpost.com and vice versa.

Maybe then you could then syndicate that total package to other, smaller news sites, with an ad rev share. The potential result would be more good video reaching more people, a pathway to much larger scale, and a way to increase time-on-site across all member publishers’ sites.

That’s an interesting idea! There’d be any number of hurdles to deal with — industry egos not least among them. Business ideas that can be pitched as “Hulu for X” or “iTunes for Y” don’t have the best track record. Other companies, like Watchup, are playing in the same territory; the CIR-led I Files tries do something similar in spirit, but limited to investigative reporting and hard news and set up as a YouTube channel rather than as an independent.

But Schiffman is talking about a very real problem: Producing quality video takes investments in staff and time, and getting people to watch the final product hasn’t been as successful as most news brands would like. If you want to improve the return on that investment, you need eyeballs, and it might be time to think of some nontraditional routes there.