The former soccer player’s tweet on March 7 described the wording of the new government policy on immigration as language “not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s.” It triggered attacks by Conservative Members of Parliament, intense national debate, and a crisis at the corporation.

The BBC’s flagship TV soccer review program, Match of the Day, was aired without presenters or contributors over the weekend amid calls for the resignation of its director general, Tim Davie. The BBC gave up on finding substitute presenters after other pundits stood down in solidarity.

Lineker refused to retract his tweet. After weekend talks, BBC management reached a deal, obliging him to observe the corporation’s editorial guidelines while it conducts a social media usage review.

There is no huge influx. We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries. This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?

— Gary Lineker (@GaryLineker) March 7, 2023

Described by some as a “humiliating climbdown,” the deal aimed to help the crisis blow over quickly. But it did not.

Conservative party deputy chairman Lee Anderson claimed that Gary Lineker had proved he was bigger than the BBC itself, creating a precedent for a social media “free for all” for those working for the BBC on non-journalistic contracts.

The crisis has highlighted many unresolved questions about the place of legacy media organizations — largely broadcasters and newspapers — in the fast-changing digital information space. It also raises questions about the role of journalism in the age of social media.

Obsolete definitions

During discussions around Lineker’s social media conduct, media professionals have frequently referred to the distinction between news and current affairs and other BBC output — and the difference between journalists and other contributors. This distinction, once quite rigid, is increasingly blurred.

Some high-achieving BBC staff journalists were offered more lucrative freelance contracts in the 1980s and 1990s by BBC management who did not want to lose them to commercial rivals. This prompted a government inquiry into the nature of the practice.

Meanwhile, growing celebrity culture forced the BBC to offer generous freelance deals to attract top talent. This triggered resentment among staff on more modest salaries and resulted in a wave of public criticism.

Freelance journalists still had to abide by the BBC’s strict guidelines on impartiality, fairness, and accuracy. But other non-staff contributors had more room for maneuvering, depending on their contracts — the wording of which has always been shrouded in secrecy.

This discretionary nature of contractual arrangements has led to confusion and controversy. Many members of the public do not differentiate between a BBC journalist and a commentator, interviewee, pundit, or studio guest. They are all a BBC voice. But, as pointed out by former head of BBC News, James Harding, impartiality is key in maintaining the quality of public discourse and fighting growing polarization.

The former director of BBC policy, Dame Patricia Hodgson, described the threat of such departures from impartiality as “culture wars.” But can this level of adherence to editorial standards be required from all actors, musicians, scientists, or sport pundits appearing on the BBC without thwarting the principle of free speech?

The BBC’s guidelines on social media were updated only two years ago. Now, post-Lineker, they already seem obsolete, and the BBC is reviewing them again. The BBC’s requirement of impartiality from all contributors who are “primarily associated with the BBC” can be challenged — and successfully so — as shown by Lineker.

When criticized by BBC news journalists in September 2022 over earlier controversial political tweets, Lineker was backed by BBC management. One of the journalists was even censured for challenging the presenter and had to apologize.

Journalism in the age of hybrid news

The Lineker crisis, however short-lived, reflects how hard it is for organizations like the BBC to keep up with the world of social media, which has not been kind to journalism, either.

In a media landscape where anyone with an internet connection has access to large audiences and mainstream publishers and broadcasters and their journalists are no longer the gatekeepers of information, the definition of who or what is “doing” journalism has become blurred.

Competition is intense, revenues have fallen heavily, and many news organizations have found it hard to survive. The idea of journalism appears to have been subsumed under the more general efforts of “content creation.” This has put a great deal of pressure on the sharp distinction once created by the BBC between news and current affairs and other content. Anyone can today call themselves a journalist — whether a “citizen journalist” or otherwise.

Meanwhile, people with large social media followings and significant reach, like Lineker, can enjoy the benefits of contract escape clause that do not oblige them to behave like journalists. It seems that journalism has transcended its vocational and institutional identity and is badly in need of a new definition.

It was a reaction to the nihilistic slaughter of the First World War, created by a tiny band of young visionaries in 1922, who rejected the grinding propaganda of the war. Theirs was a vision for a new public space, using the technological boundlessness of broadcasting — that was in itself ignorant of hierarchies and conventional barriers — for good purposes.

One of those pioneers, George Barnes, defined a quality that would become the essence of the BBC — it would be an instrument to “radiate amusement and instruction.” John Reith, the first director and later first director general of the corporation, wanted it to be “the expression of a new and better relationship between man and man.” Equal access to all for information would enable individuals to “be in a position to make up their own minds on many matters of vital moment.”

It was to make everyone’s lives richer, their choices more intelligent, and to make society function more equally and indeed efficiently. In doing so it would help people think of the world as coherent whole, not “merely atomized particles.” The pioneers believed in the capacity of ideas to transform lives and societies.

But the corporation as an institution, a guardian of proprieties, was also forged in the fire of political conflict — the shattering divisiveness, four years after its founding, of the general strike. While 11 million miners fought against a decrease in their pay, the government sought to break the strike and Winston Churchill campaigned to take over the BBC for government influence to crush the miners.

It was at this most precarious moment that the BBC emerged as a “public service.” The BBC — formally founded on October 18, 1922 — told a divided nation what was happening during an acute crisis. And, while later criticized for being too much on the side of the government, it did manage to put representatives of both sides of the case on air.

Most importantly, people came to trust it to tell them as accurately as it could what was happening and, in that sense, to be completely on their side. Impartiality — never perfect and always improvable — was embedded in the project. The BBC would tether everyone to reality (as well as daftness and beauty). The BBC had gone on an expedition whose outcome was unknown to try and hold power to account and be on the side of the public.

The government and the BBC

The history of the BBC is littered with explosive conflicts with the government of the day. It is a sorry (yet glorious) tale of attacks on the BBC for bias, unfairness, and being a pest.

At the beginning of the Second World War, BBC mandarins negotiated an inevitably close relationship with the government, but fought hard to maintain editorial independence within an overall sense of national effort. The BBC made the best of Britain’s shattering defeats of 1940-42 — but never tried to deny them.

After the war, the relationship saw many tests. Famously, during the 1956 Suez invasion the BBC reported the failure of the U.K. and French expedition and was punished by an irate government with a license fee cut.

There was fury over the BBC’s reporting of the Iranian revolution in 1979 and more than 30 years of anguished debate between the government and the BBC over Northern Ireland that culminated in direct censorship — outlawing the direct broadcasting of the voices of “terrorists.”

Governments struggled with something close to civil war in Northern Ireland as it escalated, and the BBC battled locally, nationally and internationally to describe the origins and impetus of the conflict and explain what was happening into a divided community.

Coverage of apartheid in South Africa and the Falklands War further placed the BBC in the government’s firing line. During the Iraq war, BBC claims that Tony Blair’s government had deliberately used misinformation to exaggerate the case for conflict brought down a director general and chairman) after the allegations were rejected by a judicial inquiry. A few years later, BBC reporter David Loyn was condemned as a “traitor” in parliament because he was embedded with the Taliban.

But the BBC handled the threats in a way that kept its independence, assessing and evaluating them but not mostly being cowed. “Without fear or favor” is a dangerous place in the contemporary world — but it keeps us safe.

Even now, 91% of U.K. adults see or hear something on the BBC every week. And contrary to what many believe, 80% of people under 35 young people still consume BBC content. Globally, the BBC attracts 468 million people per week and is the most trusted provider of news by some distance.

Attacks intensifying

As Britain faces a cost of living crisis and a wildly unpopular government, the case for a universal BBC, holding power to account as it has done for so long, and informing while amusing and distracting, has never been stronger. In an age of deliberate misinformation and malcontent, you might expect government to want a trusted, reliable institution such as the BBC to anchor people in reality. However, the political attacks have only intensified in recent years.

Even Margaret Thatcher, who had fierce arguments with the BBC, understood its value at home while projecting soft power to the world. Yet the current ruling Conservative party has slashed the BBC’s funds by 30% over the past 10 years with a license fee settlement agreed before inflation kicked in. These politicians have arguably put the future of the corporation in danger, cheered on by a print media that has set itself in direct competition with a cult-like ideological fervor.

Alarmingly, there appear to be people in the heart of government who really do not believe that they should not be asked difficult questions. Boris Johnson’s government for a while tried the trick often favored by authoritarians of avoiding scrutiny and refusing to appear on BBC programs.

Johnson even reneged on a promise to join other party leaders in being interviewed by Andrew Neill in the run-up to the 2019 election. More recently, business secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg suggested that his interviewer’s line of questioning broke the BBC’s impartiality rules.

The British public trusts broadcast news more than other news media, because the BBC and other public service broadcasters make programs about Britain — imbued with British mores and humor. It also makes programs that become worldwide successes. The U.K. is the world’s second-biggest exporter of TV content, thanks mainly to the BBC.

The government should consider that focusing its energy on endangering the corporation risks betraying the trust that the British public — and so many people around the world — vest in their public broadcaster. A century on, those values that drove the corporation’s founders still resonate. Happy birthday, BBC.

Its international broadcasting operation, the BBC World Service, is only a little younger, established 90 years ago. Delivering news and programs in 40 languages across the continents, it faces similar, significant questions about financing, purpose, and its ability to deliver in a world of increased social media and online news consumption.

Currently the BBC’s international services are mostly funded by British people who pay a television license fee, with a third of the total cost covered by the U.K. government. The BBC claimed that, as of November 2021, the World Service reached a global audience of 364 million people each week.

The role of radio

Radio is still clearly a key means to extend the reach of the World Service and a core part of the BBC’s global news package. It is highly adaptable and reasonably affordable. It also gives people in parts of the world where access to media can be difficult relatively easy access to news. Short-wave radio, the traditional means of broadcasting over very long distances, is also difficult for hostile regimes to block.

Recently, fears that Russia would target Ukraine’s internet infrastructure and erect firewalls to prevent its own citizens’ accessing western media sources, led the BBC to reactivate short-wave radio news services for listeners in both countries. U.K. government funding of £4.1 million supported this.

Current thinking about the World Service has been shaped by a 2010 decision of U.K. prime minister David Cameron’s government to withdraw Foreign and Commonwealth Office funding for BBC international operations from 2014. This seemed to end a 60 years-long era when the BBC was the key subcontractor for British global “soft power” (using cultural resources and information to promote British interests overseas).

The plan was that British TV license-fee payers would fund the World Service, seemingly as an act of international benevolence, free of government ties. However, this seemed unlikely to be sustainable at a time when BBC income was being progressively squeezed.

In 2015, World Service revenues were boosted by a major grant from the U.K.’s Official Development Assistance fund, covering around a third of the World Service’s running costs. One anonymous BBC insider was quoted by The Guardian saying that this would sustain the corporation’s “strong commitment to uphold global democracy through accurate, impartial and independent news.”

Even before the Second World War, the BBC claimed it only broadcast truthful and objective news. Policy makers recognized this as a crucial asset for promoting British interests overseas, and seldom sought to challenge (openly at least) the “editorial independence” of the BBC.

The BBC’s 2016 royal charter further entrenched this thinking, stating that news for overseas audiences should be “firmly based on British values of accuracy, impartiality and fairness.” The idea that a truthful approach to news was a core “British value” that could help promote democracy around the world became part of the BBC’s basic mission statement.

In 2017, the BBC established 17 new foreign-language radio and online services. To maximize possibilities for listening it purchased FM transmitter time in major cities around the world, and deployed internet radio, increasingly accessible to many users via mobile devices. The focus was on Africa and Asia. However, the World Service also strengthened its Arabic and Russian provision to serve those who “sorely need reliable information.”

Fake news factor

The World Service’s rationale has been strengthened by growing concerns about “fake news”: distorted and untrue reports designed to serve the commercial or geopolitical interests of those who manufacture it. The BBC has, in response, further emphasized its historic role as a truthful broadcaster. In its trusted news initiative it has worked with other global media outlets to tackle disinformation, hosting debate and discussion, and sharing intelligence about the most misleading campaigns.

Claims for continued relevance also rest on a drive to bring news to an ever larger audience. The BBC’s stated aim is to reach 500 million people this year, and a billion within another decade. In 2021 the BBC claimed to be on course to realize this goal, reaching a global audience of 489 million. The audience for the World Service accounted for the single largest component of this global figure.

What then should we make of the BBC’s announcement in September 2022 that 400 jobs would have to go at the World Service due to the freezing of the license fee and rapidly rising costs? Radio services in languages including Arabic, Persian, Hindi and Chinese will disappear, and program production for the English-language radio service will be pared down. Certainly, these cuts will reduce the BBC’s impact overseas. But they should also be understood as part of a longstanding and ongoing transition from shortwave radio to web radio.

Similarly, cutting back on World Service non-news programming might not be a major cause for concern. In an age of global streaming services and social media, audiences can receive programs from providers from across the globe. The World Service would find it hard to compete with many of these services. However, the BBC remains in a pre-eminent position to offer trusted news.

By focusing on providing news online, the World Service is putting its resources where it can best promote British soft power and international influence, thereby improving prospects for its own continued existence. However, abandoning radio entirely would be a mistake. As the Russian invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated, radio remains a crucial way to reach audiences who might find their access to trusted news via the internet suddenly cut off.

The research was led by Stephen Barclay of City, University of London, and funded by the Charitable Journalism Project, an initiative to help U.K. newsrooms gain charitable status. The researchers interviewed and conducted focus groups with residents of seven communities around the U.K.

While the report is titled “Local news deserts in the U.K.,” the seven communities examined do, in fact, have some traditional local news sources, but these are seen as inadequate and in many cases have been hollowed out, or merged and centralized.

In Lewisham, London, for instance, “the only traditional newspaper dedicated exclusively to the borough is the Lewisham News Shopper, a free weekly”; another free weekly covers Lewisham as well as other South London boroughs. But “many respondents were unaware that newspapers still existed which covered the borough,” the report’s authors note.

Every community had “a range of applicable local Facebook pages and groups.”

“A lot of it’s trash to be honest, but a lot of it’s very useful,” said one member of a focus group in Lewisham. “A couple of weeks ago there was these fireworks going on for 30 or 40 minutes… I was just kind of wondering what was going on and everyone had the answers.”

One of the admins of Spotted in Trowbridge, a large local Facebook group, said:

“We are quick. We don’t wait for hours on end before checking in and publishing the information sent to us…The people want to be heard and, provided it is done with respect, we allow them to have their voice…Even if it’s not said with complete respect, we allow people to comment as they wish….we have no right to determine if they are right / wrong or otherwise.”

A worker for the National Health Service in Whitby said:

“In the past we have used the Whitby Gazette to publicize changes in our [NHS] services. Like flu vaccine campaigns. We don’t do that now because putting something on Facebook is more effective than putting it in the Gazette.”

Local Facebook groups were also a source of rumors and misinformation. A worker with Citizens Advice Bureau — a U.K. charity that provides free, confidential assistance on all kinds of topics — said:

“We spend a fair amount of time fighting off Facebook rumors. Housing allowance is a good example. We’ll have a client who comes in and says ‘I need to apply for social housing.’ We say ‘You need to go through this process, be on the waiting list, bid for a property’ and they say ‘But if I’d come from Syria and I was a refugee I’d get given a house automatically no questions asked’ and we ask ‘Where did you hear this?’ they say ‘I saw it on a Facebook site.'”

The Facebook groups do not offer investigative reporting. And “respondents were clear that a wide range of local issues and institutions were not getting sufficient coverage,” the report’s authors write. “Where there was coverage, respondents believed that much of it was driven by institutional public affairs teams and press releases, rather than independent reporting.”

They’re … not wrong! “We tend to write the story for them, supply the pictures and caption and suggested headline. That’s the way to get it in,” said one representative of a local charity about how they get coverage in the local paper. “I got to edit the article. I mean actually changing the words. I’ve never had that before.”

A bright spot, sometimes, is the Local Democracy Reporting Service, a BBC initiative that places journalists in regional news organizations:

[In] some cases the coverage of local government was singled out as relatively good compared to the coverage of other institutions and public services. Though respondents (except those who worked in journalism) were not aware of the scheme, the reporting referred to could be traced to the Local Democracy Reporter (LDR) in the area.

“The journalists covering local government have been brilliant in terms of going to council meetings and tweeting stuff.” [Interview, Trowbridge]

LDRs were able to maintain coverage of council meetings in some areas, to varying extents, where this had been cut down due to staff shortages. However, the LDR scheme does not work uniformly well. Northamptonshire has struggled to recruit due to low pay and the rarity of the skillset required, leaving a position vacant for over a year at the time of writing [interview, Corby]. In one community the LDR left to join the local authority as a communications officer.

“You can keep up to date with local politics if you look for it but what’s the point if you can’t do anything?” one interviewee said.

You can read the full report here.

To prove its point, the BBC hired the research company MTM to deprive 80 U.K. households of any BBC content for nine days, including two weekends. That meant abstaining not just from BBC news broadcasts on television and radio, but forecasts from BBC Weather, reality shows like Strictly Come Dancing, the BBC’s content for kids, dramas like Line of Duty, recipes from BBC Food, podcasts like You’re Dead to Me, the BBC News Twitter feed, episodes of Doctor Who on other platforms, random clips of The Graham Norton Show on Instagram, etc.

At the end of the nine days — after initial interviews, keeping media diaries, and giving real-time updates to researchers via WhatsApp — households were instructed to open an envelope during a final interview. Inside was the prorated cost of the license fee for the nine days, which worked out to a little less than £4 (USD $5). Was it worth it?

MTM had assembled 80 households in the U.K. for the study: 30 that said they’d prefer to pay nothing and not get the BBC, 30 that wanted to pay less than the full license fee, and a control group of 20 willing to pay the full license fee. Participants received “No BBC” stickers to put on their TVs, car radios, phones, and other devices and self-reported their media consumption. Out of the 60 households that wanted to pay nothing or pay less, 70% changed their minds and became willing to pay the full license fee or more. Of the 20 in the control group, 19 were still willing to pay the full fee after nine days without the BBC.

The study was designed around the idea that the BBC is taken for granted by many living in the U.K. and that people tend to underestimate how much the BBC is part of their daily routines. From the final report:

The political battle over funding the BBC has only become more pitched in the seven years since the first study was released. Negotiations with the government have forced the corporation to cut costs by as much as 1 billion pounds a year and officials have warned the BBC that the days are numbered for the annual license fee it relies on.  Overall, the BBC’s budget has fallen by 30% since 2010 and the cutbacks aren’t over. The corporation’s current director general, Tim Davie, is expected to announce more “deep cuts” in coming days as the BBC seeks to make up £285 million to meet a government-imposed budget.

The study found that initial attitudes about the license fee were driven primarily by how satisfied people were with BBC television, and that the households with the lowest awareness of the range of BBC services outside TV — including radio and BBC online — were those most likely to want to do away with the fee.

At the end of the study, one participant who’d been against the license fee said, “I’d only thought about the TV side of BBC initially, but I’ve had to use the Sky News app which I really didn’t like. It doesn’t have the same content and just doesn’t seem to have as much.”

“When you look at it, it offers more than what you think. You tend to just think the BBC channels and a bit of Radio but like … there’s a lot more to it. There’s all your websites, and obviously all the learning stuff for the kids,” said another participant. “And I didn’t realize how much I check on the weather and the news, and when you break it down to £3 it’s not that much really.”

Participants found BBC Food and content for children like CBeebies particularly hard to replace:

“The inability to be able to access the ‘reliable recipes’ was a frequent frustration amongst those who cooked meals for themselves or their families, with alternatives sometimes seen as having unclear measurements, obscure ingredients, or lacking a ‘Britishness’ about them.”

“I know that anything I put on the BBC — all of it would be ok. I could leave it on in the room and it would be fine. I maybe couldn’t do that on YouTube, the internet, Netflix. It’s safe for the kids!”

Those who initially said the service was of little or no value to them were more likely to compare the obligatory charge, unfavorably, to paying for opt-in subscription services like Netflix and Disney+. (In 2019, the number of Netflix subscribers in the U.K. surpassed the number of BBC iPlayer accounts.)

“I just think there are so many other options out there now … it’s really expensive and I don’t think people are using mainstream TV as much now,” a participant from an “older family in Scotland” initially told the researchers.

The same household, after they’d gone without the BBC:

“I didn’t think I would miss the radio or the news as much because it’s there elsewhere, but it just doesn’t come up to scratch. Like [name of local commercial alternative] is my local radio station and I should be listening to that but it’s just absolute garbage. It’s not as independent. It’s not as informative … I was quite surprised at how much I missed it [BBC Radio Scotland] … You’re going to get everything you need from that station.”

A member of another of the households that changed their minds said, in the initial interview, “I only probably watch a handful of shows on the channels so I think it’s an absolute con.”

After nine BBC-less days, they’d changed their tune: “I use it a lot more than I thought I actually would … so I do think what you’re paying is a fair amount compared to the likes of Netflix and your Amazons and everything else like that, so yeah … I’m happy to pay.”

Participants also noticed the many advertisements on other radio and television stations: “I listened to Absolute Radio instead,” one participant said. “The downside was the amount of adverts, every two of three songs you get adverts for things you just don’t want.”

Another participant, from York, said, “I think a platform that isn’t riddled with adverts is a big thing that I’ve missed. I realise not just how irritating they are but how repetitive … An advert-free platform is actually really welcome.”

Not everyone changed their minds, of course. About 30% of the participants still wanted to pay less or pay nothing for the BBC.  One household, a young family that pays for Netflix, Disney+, and Prime, explained, “When put in perspective how much I pay for it, realistically I’m paying £3 a week for EastEnders because everything else can be easily substituted.”

Others took issue with the obligatory nature of the license fee, even if they did use their services. “My views haven’t changed,” a single person in Leicester said in the final interview. “I still don’t like the fact that it’s a given that you have to pay and that everyone has to pay the same set amount regardless if you use BBC content.”

You can view the final report here.

Photo of the good boy waiting by a window by Kelly Sikkema used under an Unsplash license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/05/the-bbc-commissions-a-study-to-show-what-life-without-the-bbc-would-be-like/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/01/the-bbc-fights-suggestions-that-it-convert-to-a-subscription-model-the-principle-of-universality-is-absolutely-the-debate-here/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/01/the-bbc-fights-suggestions-that-it-convert-to-a-subscription-model-the-principle-of-universality-is-absolutely-the-debate-here/#respond Tue, 18 Jan 2022 17:26:39 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=199683 The U.K. culture secretary tweeted over the weekend that the license fee model the BBC relies on would end when the current deal expires in 2027. (“It was an interesting way of announcing it,” the BBC’s director-general noted.)

“This licence fee announcement will be the last,” culture secretary Nadine Dorries wrote on Twitter. “Time now to discuss and debate new ways of funding, supporting and selling great British content.”

Though Dorries softened her claim that the license fee — paid by almost all TV-owning households in the U.K. — would definitely be abolished when the current deal expires in 2027, she confirmed the public broadcaster’s funding would be frozen for two years. The BBC said it will will be forced to cut programming due to the shortfall and its director general, Tim Davie, warned that “everything’s on the agenda.”

So what are these “new ways of funding, supporting, and selling” the BBC? What could replace the license fee? Suggestions have ranged from a levy on broadband subscriptions, an annual grant from the government (like the one used to fund Australia’s ABC), introducing more advertising (the BBC currently only allows advertising from outside the U.K.), and creating a special income tax (as seen in Sweden) to … abolishing the BBC altogether.

One of the alternative funding ideas that’s gotten the most attention, though, is the call for the BBC to turn into a subscription service.

“This is the rallying cry of many Conservative MPs who see the enormous popularity of Netflix and wonder why the BBC could not adopt the same model,” The Guardian’s Jim Waterson noted. Dorries herself said the BBC now had to be “forward looking” and adapt so it can “thrive alongside Netflix and Amazon Prime.”

The Guardian is quick to point out one tiny problem with this analogy: “While Netflix offers a single product — an app and website that are easily password-protected — the vast majority of BBC content is still consumed through free-to-air television and radio broadcasts that are impossible to put behind a paywall.”

Beyond the obvious, possibly-intractable technical challenges are existential questions for the world’s largest public broadcaster. Converting the BBC into a subscription-based operation would transform its content and mission, Davie said in an interview with BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday.

“Once you’re trying to serve a subscription base and a commercial agenda — and, believe me, I’ve run commercial businesses — it is a completely different situation, because suddenly you are doing things that are there to make profit and make a return to a specific audience,” he said.

He added, “The principle of universality is absolutely the debate here.”

Davie said that a conversion to a voluntary subscription-based model would mean the BBC “will not do what it does today.” He added, “Do we want a universal public service media organization at the heart of our creative economy, which has served us incredibly well? And if we want that, we have to support a publicly-backed and not a fully commercialized BBC.”

Staggering levels of craven stupidity from a corrupt British government. Defunding the BBC is not only an act of cultural vandalism, it’s a reckless act taking place at a time when other countries staving off anti-democratic forces are looking at new ways to enhance public media https://t.co/FXAAR5EGFw

— emily bell (@emilybell) January 16, 2022

The BBC licence fee pays for me and 164 colleagues to cover the activities of practically every single district and county council in the country. It’s really important that public service journalism has a long-term and independent source of funding

— Noah Vickers (@noahvickers14) January 16, 2022

Perhaps worth remembering what we all get from the BBC licence fee, which costs around 43p a day. pic.twitter.com/yUmWOaDgAw

— Lee Johnson (@LeeJBBC) January 16, 2022

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/01/the-bbc-fights-suggestions-that-it-convert-to-a-subscription-model-the-principle-of-universality-is-absolutely-the-debate-here/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/11/would-enhancing-the-bbcs-fact-checking-strengthen-its-perceived-impartiality/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/11/would-enhancing-the-bbcs-fact-checking-strengthen-its-perceived-impartiality/#respond Mon, 01 Nov 2021 13:10:22 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=197359 From the 1926 General Strike, through the 1956 Suez Canal crisis, to the more recent Brexit debate and the Covid-19 pandemic, how the BBC tries to ensure impartiality in its journalism has always generated fierce debates about its independence. Every director-general since its foundation nearly 100 years ago has had to contend with criticism of perceived BBC bias during high-profile political events and issues.

These days, the BBC also has to navigate new “culture wars” over questions of cultural sensitivity, free speech and censorship. No surprise, then, that the current director-general, Tim Davie, believes impartiality is central to the BBC’s long-term survival. To that end he has announced new plans to strengthen the corporation’s political independence by, for example, enhancing its use of fact-checking and appointing new external impartiality investigators to monitor all BBC content.

In a post-truth world rife with political disinformation, how broadcasters challenge false or misleading information while maintaining high standards of impartiality has become increasingly challenging. This has been exacerbated in the social media age, with routine BBC news reporting and journalists subject to forensic surveillance about their editorial decisions.

Having been commissioned to carry out five BBC impartiality reviews, as well as leading a large-scale research study about how journalistic legitimacy can be enhanced by public service broadcasters, I welcome Davie’s new plans. But, given the struggles the BBC has had with implementing previous commitments to beef up its impartiality credentials, it remains to be seen how far new editorial practices such as more prominently fact-checking claims can inform its journalism.

Political pressure

Despite the public service broadcaster’s independence, it is important to acknowledge the political pressure BBC editors operate under. This is not to say BBC journalists dutifully follow the script of the government of the day. Far from it.

But, to some degree, the political environment must inevitably influence BBC editorial decision making. And, in the febrile political climate, the BBC’s impartiality is under intense political attack. This is just one reason why the appointment of a successor to outgoing political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, is attracting so much attention.

Not long after being appointed secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS), Nadine Dorries claimed the BBC had a “lack of impartiality” and questioned whether it would survive another decade. Meanwhile, the chair of the DCMS parliamentary committee, Julian Knight, said he believed the BBC’s new political editor should be pro-Brexit. This served to reinforce recurrent allegations by Conservative MPs that the public service broadcaster had been biased in its coverage of the U.K.’s relationship with the European Union.

The BBC new impartiality plans have been informed by the recent review of editorial processes governance and culture led by Arts Council chair and BBC board member, Nicholas Serota. It produced a ten-point plan on impartiality, editorial standards and whistleblowing.

A central commitment to safeguarding impartiality in the BBC’s plan is a renewed commitment to fact-checking. But this is not the first renewed commitment towards fact-checking or, indeed, impartiality in recent years.

Writing in defense of its impartiality in the middle of a heated general election campaign in 2019, the BBC’s head of news, Fran Unsworth, claimed that the broadcaster had “ramped up” its Reality Check service to ensure campaign claims were being rigorously checked. Meanwhile, after a 2016 report into the BBC use of statistics there was a recommendation to make Reality Check a permanent fixture in BBC news.

Why fact-checking should be enhanced

And yet, the ongoing research in which I’m involved has found that while the BBC’s Reality Check routinely fact-checks claims on its website, this does not regularly inform wider BBC news output, including the flagship BBC bulletin, the News at Ten. Put simply, fact-checking does exist at the BBC, but it could be ramped up much more and inform BBC journalism more widely.

In 2019, I contributed to an Ofcom study on the Range and Depth of BBC News that examined BBC journalism and its audiences. The study concluded that the BBC “should feel able to challenge controversial viewpoints that have little support or are not backed up by facts, making this clear to viewers, listeners and readers.” It went on to say that, since audiences largely respect BBC journalism, “This should give the BBC confidence to be bolder in its approach.”

In our journalistic legitimacy project that examined television news coverage of the Covid pandemic, we found that — with the exception of Channel 4 News — most broadcasters did not routinely challenge claims made by journalists during a critical moment in the health crisis. And yet our study of news audiences during the pandemic found most respondents favored robust forms of journalistic scrutiny and welcomed more prominent fact-checking and the questioning of dubious or misleading political statements. Contrary to the view of a former senior BBC editor, research suggests enhancing fact-checking in broadcast programming would not undermine trust in journalism.

After all, despite the BBC’s impartiality being under constant attack, it remains one of the most used widely used and trusted information sources in the UK and around the world. While the BBC understandably wants to maintain a trustworthy relationship with its audiences, our research suggests a bolder approach to impartiality would not compromise it.

If the BBC’s new impartiality plans are to work in practice, in my view countering misinformation and using fact-checking must become a more prominent part of its news output.

Stephen Cushion is chair professor at the Cardiff University School of Journalism, Media, and Culture. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Photo by BBC Leeds by Tim Loudon used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/11/would-enhancing-the-bbcs-fact-checking-strengthen-its-perceived-impartiality/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/06/rather-than-privatizing-public-service-media-we-should-be-expanding-it-online/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/06/rather-than-privatizing-public-service-media-we-should-be-expanding-it-online/#respond Thu, 24 Jun 2021 14:50:19 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=194125 The UK government is reported to be pushing ahead with an investigation into privatizing Channel 4, reversing its 2017 decision that the broadcaster was a “precious public asset” that would “continue to be owned by the country.”

Channel 4 was founded in 1982 with a public service remit to create “media content of high quality” that reflects “a culturally diverse society”, to “promote measures intended to secure that people are well-informed and motivated to participate in society in a variety of ways”, and to “support and stimulate well-informed debate”.

In just under four decades, Channel 4 has developed a reputation for its coverage of news and current affairs, introducing flagship programs such as the hour-long Channel 4 News, the documentary program Dispatches), and the debate format After Dark. Together with the BBC, Channel 4 has helped to establish in the UK a strong public service media offering of high-quality news, documentaries, and cultural programming as part of its mix, alongside reality TV, drama, and comedy.

The BBC and Channel 4 are nonprofit media organizations that are editorially independent from governments and private companies and have a public service remit. In the “post-truth era,” in which trust in news is at a premium, this model should not be undermined, but sustained and expanded.

But instead, public service media is under attack. It has been widely reported that Boris Johnson’s government has investigated abolishing the BBC license fee, while in 2020 it announced its intentions to decriminalize license-fee evasion. Meanwhile a campaign to #DefundTheBBC has trended on social media. Research has shown that the BBC’s real, inflation-adjusted public funding has fallen by 30% over the past 10 years. Now the future of Channel 4 as a public broadcaster is in doubt as well.

Unhappy online

For the netCommons research project, a team of researchers I led found that a lot of people have reservations about the business model of many large social-media companies operating online.

In response to our survey of 1,000 internet users, 82.4% expressed concern about YouTube and Facebook’s use of personal data and 78.7% said there are too many advertisements online, rising to 82% when it comes to targeted online adverts, the main business model for some internet giants. A massive majority, 87.6% of respondents, expressed interest in non-monopolistic alternatives to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Google.

That internet users are critical of the corporate practices of online platforms is nothing new. Back in 2009 I conducted a case study of social media that showed that while users place a high value on the services such platforms provide, at the same time they can be very critical of their business practices.

More recently, as part of the research network InnoPSM: Innovation in Public Service Media Policies, led by Alessandro D’Arma and Minna Horowitz, I conducted an exploratory study in 2020 of the future of the internet and public service media, involving 141 media researchers and audience members. This study will be available by the autumn of 2021 as a chapter in a book focused on the idea of a public service internet, published by University of Westminster Press.

Study participants stressed the importance of public service media for providing high-quality news, information, educational programs, and documentaries — vital for democracy and a vibrant public sphere. Research also suggests that citizens across Europe tend to trust public service media — during the Covid-19 pandemic it has represented the most used and one of the most trusted information sources.

Toward a public service internet

Our study participants also envisioned an alternative, advertising-free, non-commercial, not-for-profit internet, with digital archives of public service content available to everyone for an unlimited period from anywhere at any time.

Leading on from this study, myself and Klaus Unterberger, the head of ORF Public Value — a department of the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation focused on studying the media’s public value — led a group of around 50 media researchers and practitioners in an online forum on the future of public service media and the internet. The four-month debate resulted in the Public Service Media and Public Service Internet Manifesto, a collective mission statement for the defense of public service media and the creation of a public service internet, which has been signed by around 500 individuals concerned about the future of the media.

The manifesto demands the safeguarding of the existence, independence, and funding of public service media such as the BBC and Channel 4 as well as the development of a public service internet and the resourcing of public service media to provide online platforms to support this.

It has 10 key principles, ranging from the need for the safeguarding of public service media, to a public service internet supported by sustainable funding mechanisms such as a license fee or the Nordic model of a public service tax. A public service internet would be required to promote equality and diversity and to provide opportunities for public debate, participation and the advancement of social cohesion.

The existence of high-quality media organizations both in broadcasting and online is more critical than ever. There’s a crying need for a news media that serves public, not private, interests. They should be media of the public, by the public, and for the public — media of the public sphere. You can read the manifesto here.

Christian Fuchs is is a professor and director of the Communication and Media Research Institute at the University of Westminster. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Photo of the Channel 4 headquarters at 124 Horseferry Road by John K. Thorne used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/06/rather-than-privatizing-public-service-media-we-should-be-expanding-it-online/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/09/a-new-set-of-threats-to-the-bbc-internal-and-external-challenges-its-role-as-anchor-of-u-k-media/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/09/a-new-set-of-threats-to-the-bbc-internal-and-external-challenges-its-role-as-anchor-of-u-k-media/#respond Mon, 28 Sep 2020 15:12:14 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=186378 Forgive the staff of BBC News if they seem a bit…shaken these days: They have a lot more than virus fears on their minds.

The world’s largest broadcaster, the BBC has remained iconic through the generations — criticized regularly, of course, but nonetheless capturing the trust and attention of Britons like nothing else. But now it’s facing a remarkable array of new private-sector competitors — and public-sector overseers — that all seem to have Auntie Beeb, in various ways, in their sights. And that puts one of the core purposes of a public service broadcaster — serving as a central, trustworthy anchor in a country’s media ecosystem — at a new level of risk.

Some background for Americans

(Anyone whose government spends more than $3 per capita on public media per year should feel free to skip this section. You already know this.)

To explain the role the BBC plays in the U.K. to Americans, I like to show them this chart from the 2019 Digital News Report comparing the U.S. and U.K. media universes. Two things to know: The size of each circle here represents the size of a news outlet’s audience. And the left-right axes here represent the average views of each outlet’s audience.

For the two sets of blue circles, we’re talking about the audience’s political views: left = liberal, middle = centrist, right = conservative. And for the two sets of red circles, we’re talking about how populist the audience is: left = not populist, middle = kinda populist, right = super populist.

Now take a look:

Check out those BBC circles in the U.K. survey data, right smack in the middle. The BBC’s audience is almost exactly split between liberals and conservatives. And it’s almost exactly in the middle for populist attitudes as well; the BBC’s audience is much more populist than The Economist’s or the FT’s, but much less populist than readers of the country’s major tabloids. And look how much bigger the BBC’s audience is than any of its peers. The BBC functions as a heat sink for polarization — converting potentially dangerous energy into something the system can more easily deal with.

(Contrast with the United States data for media polarization. There’s no major news organization as squarely in the middle; major broadcast networks (ABC, CBS) and browser-homepages-your-gramps-never-got-around-to-changing (AOL, Yahoo) come closest. The “elite” mainstream media attracts an audience well left of center, and cable news audiences are sharply divided between left and right.)

This is the role that a good, well-resourced public service broadcaster can play in a democracy: a central hub of trust that is enjoyed (or at least tolerated) by a wide swath of the ideological public. When Pew asked people in eight rich Western European democracies what news organizations they trusted most, the country’s public broadcaster finished No. 1 in seven of the eight. (Sorry, Spain.) America’s public broadcasters, PBS and NPR, also score high on trust, but their audiences are smaller and their reputations more split by ideology than those of their European peers.

As Eiri Elvestad and Angela Phillips put it in 2018 in a review of the literature around public service broadcasters (PSBs), all emphases mine:

It’s not just new competition; it’s new competition that wouldn’t have been possible under the regulations that have governed British broadcasting for decades. It’s not just a conservative government complaining about public media; it’s turning those complaints into appointments that seem to have little respect for the reason the institution exists in the first place. (See also: the appointment of Steve Bannon pal Michael Pack to oversee Voice of America. And Donald Trump’s annual kabuki elimination of public media funding in his budgets; even if the cuts never actually happen, they serve to polarize public media funding into a partisan issue.)

And the real problem is that, once you unleash these forces on the public, there’s no guarantee you can stuff them back in the bottle. The BBC’s existence as that giant heat sink in the middle of British media hasn’t limited the expression of political points of view — it’s enabled it. (Why are British national newspapers so famously diverse in their politics and target markets — from The Guardian on the left to The Telegraph on the right, from the upmarket broadsheets to the populist tabloids? Precisely because the BBC’s centrality and neutrality allows them to be partisan counterpoints. Compare that to the United States, where monopoly local newspapers used to play the role of bland middle-of-the-road outlet in the center of all those charts above.)

Look, I don’t doubt that there are a thousand ways the BBC could improve and needs reform. And I won’t deny that climate deniers and I are unlikely to see eye to eye on much journalistically. But the problem with going after the BBC really isn’t about favoring one political view over another. It’s that a strong trusted public broadcaster plays a huge role in keeping the entire media ecosystem healthy. It provides the central anchor, the shared environment of fact that — as we Americans and lots of other people around the world have found out in recent years — is critical to keeping a democracy from going off the rails. And once it’s gone — or sufficiently kneecapped — it’s awfully hard to bring it back.

Photo of a BBC office in Belfast by K. Mitch Hodge.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/09/a-new-set-of-threats-to-the-bbc-internal-and-external-challenges-its-role-as-anchor-of-u-k-media/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/09/aj-al-jazeeras-social-video-friendly-service-will-now-have-to-register-as-a-foreign-agent-in-the-united-states/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/09/aj-al-jazeeras-social-video-friendly-service-will-now-have-to-register-as-a-foreign-agent-in-the-united-states/#respond Wed, 16 Sep 2020 17:11:33 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=186071 There’s state-supported media, and then there’s state-supported media. And without getting too Potter Stewart on you, you tend to know the difference when you see it.

Virtually every country in the world spends public money on some form of broadcast media — directly or indirectly, through taxes or fees, with editorial control or editorial independence in its journalism. Broadcast technology grew up in parallel with the modern nation-state itself, and the key constraint of the electromagnetic spectrum — someone had to decide which station got to be on which frequency — made radio and television a subject of state influence in ways printed media had not been.

In the United Kingdom — which gave the BBC a legal monopoly over the airwaves in the early decades of both radio and TV — the result is a news service that remains by far the nation’s most trusted. The United States, in contrast, favored commercial broadcasters from the start, only developed national public broadcasting in the 1960s and 1970s, and still provides only a sliver of public funds — but NPR and PBS both rank among the most trusted mainstream news sources for Democrats and Republicans. In countries with lower levels of press freedom, though, it’s common for state-supported media to be state-controlled media, where programming serves as a propaganda channel for the government in power.

On top of that add the rise of international state-supported broadcasting, in which one country’s network is designed to target another country’s audience. These, too, can range from soft-power tools that aspire to journalistic balance to outright propaganda. And your opinion on which is which may not be shared by someone around the world.

For as long as it has been in operation, there has been debate about where Qatar’s Al Jazeera fits on this spectrum. That’s true both within the Middle East — where Qatar’s rivals in particular have considered it a tool to advance its national interests — and in countries like the United States, where it was accused of anti-American bias and attachments to radical Islamist groups, especially during America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Is Al Jazeera closer to something like RT America — which American intelligence considers “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet” — or to something like NHK World, a largely noncontroversial international voice for Japan?

These are often political judgments as much as journalistic ones, and the Trump administration has made a new one: Al Jazeera’s social-friendly digital service AJ+ must now register as a foreign agent in the United States — meaning it is closer to RT America in the federal government’s eyes.

Here’s Dan Friedman, who broke the story for Mother Jones:

The US Justice Department on Monday declared that the Al Jazeera Media Network—the international news organization based in Doha — “is an agent of the Government of Qatar.” The DOJ has ordered the network’s US-based social media division, AJ+, to register as a foreign agent, a step the news outlet says will hobble its journalism.

AJ+ acts “at the direction and control” of Qatar’s rulers, Jay Bratt, chief of the DOJ’s counterintelligence and export control section, wrote in a September 14 letter obtained by Mother Jones. “Despite assertions of editorial independence and freedom of expression, Al Jazeera Media Network and its affiliates are controlled and funded by the Government of Qatar,” Bratt stated.

The designation follows a years-long push by lobbyists hired by the autocratic government of the United Arab Emirates, which has long resented the critical coverage it receives from Al Jazeera. That effort has been led by Akin Gump, a large law firm and a registered foreign agent for the UAE. Its employees, including former House Foreign Relations Chair Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican, amped up their work related to Al Jazeera this year, issuing a lengthy report in July and contacting scores of lawmakers and legislative aides, according to Akin Gump’s federal filings.”

The New York Times’ Marc Tracy and Lara Jakes quote from the letter sent to AJ+:

In a letter dated Monday that was obtained by The New York Times, the Justice Department said that AJ+, a network that primarily produces short videos for social media in English as well as Arabic, French and Spanish, engages in “political activities” on behalf of Qatar’s government and should therefore be subject to the Foreign Agents Registration Act…

“Journalism designed to influence American perceptions of a domestic policy issue or a foreign nation’s activities or its leadership qualifies as ‘political activities’ under the statutory definition,” said the letter, which was signed by Jay I. Bratt, the chief of the Justice Department’s counterintelligence division, “even,” the letter added, “if it views itself as ‘balanced.’”

“Journalism designed to influence American perceptions of a domestic policy issue or a foreign nation’s activities” is a pretty malleable standard. Surely all substantive journalism can “influence” “perceptions” of an “issue.” And the geopolitical context here is rich: UAE has imposed a blockade on Qatar, its regional rival, since 2017 and has made the shutdown of Al Jazeera a condition for lifting it. UAE just agreed to a peace deal with Israel that the Trump administration hopes will improve the president’s foreign policy credentials. Registering international news outlets as foreign agents has been something of a focus of the administration, including its ongoing back-and-forth with China. Friedman:

Bratt’s letter focuses on Al Jazeera’s funding and structure, asserting that the Qatari government “could and may withdraw or limit funding at any time” and stating that the Emir of Qatar controls the network by appointing its board. Al Jazeera says that the same criteria would dictate that other state-funded news organizations, such as the BBC and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, would have to register under FARA. Those outlets are not currently required to register, but the DOJ has required several others — including Russia’s RT and Sputnik, Turkish public broadcaster TRT, and five Chinese media outlets — to do so.

Al Jazeera’s U.S.-specific network didn’t last long, but with AJ+ it found a footing in social video, with 11 million followers on Facebook, 1.1 million on Twitter, 900,000 on YouTube, and 519,000 on Instagram. It describes itself as a “unique digital news and storytelling project promoting human rights and equality, holding power to account, and amplifying the voices of the powerless,” and its audience is in the same young, progressive vein as NowThis.

There are, conservatively, a gazillion ironies behind an emirate monarchy — where homosexual acts can be punished by death and a small native elite rules over hundreds of thousands of foreigners who work in what some describe as slave-like conditions — funding a Facebook-friendly brand for “human rights” and “amplifying the voices of the powerless.” But it’s also true that Al Jazeera journalists have done outstanding work representing views that can sometimes go unheard in other mainstream Western media.

AJ+ staffers said their mission won’t change; critics said the move was appropriate.

In case you're wondering what impact the Trump DOJ's latest partisan outrage is having, we're still hard at work doing what Mr. Dooley said journalism was all about: "Comforting the afflicted, and afflicting the comfortable."

https://t.co/L9yC4KEiLS

— Tony Karon (@TonyKaron) September 16, 2020

President Trump's Department of Justice is requiring my employer, @ajplus, to register as a foreign agent.

They claim "AJ+ acts 'at the direction and control' of Qatar’s rulers."

That's absolutely absurd (THREAD)https://t.co/jIkWoGVSoX

— Yara Elmjouie (@yelmjouie) September 16, 2020

In some professional but still personal news – AJ+ is being forced by the Trump administration to register as a foreign agent, under FARA, after three years of UAE & GOP-led lobbying efforts. This is an attack on the freedom of press.

— Sana Saeed (@SanaSaeed) September 15, 2020

In case anyone still thought @ajplus was an actual news outlet… It's now been ordered by @TheJusticeDept to register as a foreign agent. https://t.co/JwPmTF5vKm

— Dovid Efune (@Efune) September 16, 2020

Another great step by President Trump. Al-Jazeera's propaganda arm @ajplus, which targets English audience with its propaganda carefully manufactured for younger generation, will now have to register itself as a foreign agent. https://t.co/UjuE1vtwjk

— FJ (@Natsecjeff) September 16, 2020

Wow this is huge! UAE is wining DC.https://t.co/TfqKHvUB93

— Dlshad (@dlshadothman) September 16, 2020

The ACLU rips DOJ’s demand for Al Jazeera’s US social media unit to register as a foreign agent for Qatar, calling it “a threat to the freedom of the press.” https://t.co/h79NiIKAOT pic.twitter.com/VpbqbbXqOx

— Dan Friedman (@dfriedman33) September 16, 2020

A Gulf monarchy spending tens of millions of dollars on lobbyists to blackball a media outlet controlled by another Gulf monarchy is one of those heartwarming only-in-Washington moments that makes you want to burn the entire city to the ground https://t.co/hdPeKrhdVv

— Gregg Carlstrom (@glcarlstrom) September 16, 2020

Back when Trump's DOJ forced RT to register as a foreign agent, there was a collective media yawn. A few of us tried to warn that it was a dangerous action, but Russiagate was just too fashionable. No surprise to see AJ+ now being targeted: https://t.co/zWe2DLW5YC pic.twitter.com/3GgHNhaRZf

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) September 15, 2020

2/Al Jazeera registered as a foreign agent – a key demand of the 2017 blockade. For Trump AJ+ is seen as a democratic outlet, so this just functions as a form of censorship of critical media. Along with the F35s, we are beginning to see what the UAEs list of conditions were for

— Marc Owen Jones (@marcowenjones) September 16, 2020

Discrediting @ajplus by forcing them to register as FARA isn’t good news.

AJ+ is a leading alternative voice to US mainstream media and offers a less oriental perspective of the middle east and the Muslim world (regardless of being an AJ affiliate). https://t.co/i1WF2mcCVZ

— محمد جمال اليوسف Mohammad (@ALYOUSEF94) September 16, 2020

About time! Another great step by the United States, ordering Al Jazeera’s @ajplus, which acts at the behest of #Qatar’s rulers, to register as a ‘foreign agent’.https://t.co/eg3qeaFB1q

— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) September 16, 2020

Important context here is that the UAE paid Aiken Gump nearly $2 million to convince lawmakers that Al Jazeera should be registered as a foreign agent.

It worked on a bunch of conservatives, like Cruz, Rubio, Cotton — who pressured the DOJ to do it.

https://t.co/GdH81jhNyR

— Avi Asher-Schapiro (@AASchapiro) September 16, 2020

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/09/aj-al-jazeeras-social-video-friendly-service-will-now-have-to-register-as-a-foreign-agent-in-the-united-states/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/08/we-couldnt-report-on-this-statistic-and-not-take-action-ourselves-bbc-sport-introduces-new-policies-to-combat-hateful-social-media-comments/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/08/we-couldnt-report-on-this-statistic-and-not-take-action-ourselves-bbc-sport-introduces-new-policies-to-combat-hateful-social-media-comments/#respond Fri, 21 Aug 2020 17:28:20 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=185576 BBC Sport has a message for its 8.5 million followers on Twitter. The pinned tweet is part promise, part mission statement.

The BBC exists for all of us, so it should represent all of us.

That means BBC Sport covers a wide range of sports and stories. But, as we do that, our comments sections on social media can often attract hateful messages. We want our platforms to be a respectful place for discussion, constructive criticism, debate and opinion. We know the vast majority of you – our 33 million social media followers – want that too.

So here’s what we’re doing:

• We will block people bringing hate to our comments sections;
• We will report the most serious cases to the relevant authorities;
• We will work to make our accounts kind and respectful places;
• We will keep growing our coverage of women’s sports, and keep covering issues and discussions around equality in sport.

We also want your help.

If you see a reply to BBC Sport posts with an expression of hate on the basis of race, colour, gender, nationality, ethnicity, disability, religion, sexuality, sex, age or class please flag the URL to the post in question by emailing socialmoderation.sport@bbc.co.uk

Hate won’t stop us in our goal of representing all of us. Together we will strive to make our social media accounts a safe space for everyone.

The new rules, which apply across the public broadcaster’s various social media accounts, follow a new survey that showed nearly a third of elite female athletes (“sportswomen”) have been subjected to abuse on social media — double the percent reported in 2015. Racism, misogyny, and death threats were “sadly common,” according to the results.

“Too fat”
“Not really British”
“Hope you die of cancer”

In the biggest women’s sport study ever carried out by @bbcsport, almost a third of athletes said they had received social media abuse.

Full story: https://t.co/FfUboCKXKT pic.twitter.com/tjQ5jCixkR

— BBC Sport (@BBCSport) August 10, 2020

At @bbcsport, we felt we couldn’t report on this statistic and not take action ourselves.

So we have strengthened our stance on tackling hate speech in our social media comments. pic.twitter.com/w11UiQStfg

— BBC Sport (@BBCSport) August 10, 2020

BBC Sport producer Caroline Chapman explained the policy’s genesis to Everything in Moderation, a weekly newsletter from freelance journalist Ben Whitelaw about — you guessed it — moderating content online.

I’ve worked as a producer on the social media team for a couple of years now and while there has always been a certain amount of negativity directed towards certain subjects (mainly women’s sport), we were seeing it more and more across all our platforms and hateful comments were also appearing frequently on any post to do with race, LGBTQ+ and equality issues.

There had been a few occasions where a couple of blue tick accounts on Twitter had rightly called us out for seemingly not taking action on these comments. When the BBC Sport website surveyed over 500 elite British sportswomen, 30% said they had been trolled online. I didn’t feel like we could report on this stat and not do something to try and help the situation, so I approached BBC Sport’s editor with a plan for how we could practically tackle the issue.

BBC Sport has more than 33 million followers across its Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts and Chapman said the section typically sees more than 15,000 comments per day.

That volume can make moderation tricky — especially on Twitter, the platform with “the most negativity,” according to Chapman.

The BBC’s moderation services department have access to our Facebook and Instagram accounts, and will largely hide/delete/block anything which overtly breaks our guidelines. But for technical reasons they can’t moderate Twitter for us, and it’s on this platform that we find the most negativity. Since we introduced our new stance, it has been the job of the daily producer to perform regular moderation checks on Twitter, as well as keeping across our new inbox where users can flag comments themselves. The producers also keep an eye on certain stories on the other platforms – the stories we know are likely to be a target for trolls.

You can read the BBC’s message to “social media trolls” or take a look at the full results of that British sportswomen survey.

 

I’m really proud to say I worked on commissioning and writing this.

It’s long overdue and it’s clear the BBC as a whole has *a lot* of work to do, in so many ways.

But I hope it’s a small step in the right direction for sport, at least. https://t.co/ZiCD6nIXiN

— Caroline Chapman (@caz_chapman) August 10, 2020

Some people are horrible. Did similar work before 2018 World Cup with a post moderation tool on FB/IG. Real fans appreciated it. It’s called an ‘online community’ for a reason. https://t.co/rmhweB4Edv

— Alex Stone (@AlexStone7) August 10, 2020

As well as the insights into social media abuse. This women’s sport report from @BBCSport is a real eye opener – covering pay, media coverage, funding, periods and much more. It’s worth reading in full #WomenInSport https://t.co/UlCqqLYKHu https://t.co/zzC54hImR9 pic.twitter.com/CzUnyjI3Bj

— Emma Ballard (@Medi8Emma) August 10, 2020

We often forget that sports personalities are people too. They have the same vulnerability and emotions as we do. Just because they're in the public eye, doesn't make them immune to hateful comments. Please. Be Kind. And let's enjoy sport with more decorum and respect. https://t.co/KEfuuNlSb3

— Aatif Nawaz (@AatifNawaz) August 10, 2020

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/08/we-couldnt-report-on-this-statistic-and-not-take-action-ourselves-bbc-sport-introduces-new-policies-to-combat-hateful-social-media-comments/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/08/vice-is-bringing-in-a-big-audio-team-to-do-new-kinds-of-podcasts-from-a-daily-news-show-to-a-seasonal-series/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/08/vice-is-bringing-in-a-big-audio-team-to-do-new-kinds-of-podcasts-from-a-daily-news-show-to-a-seasonal-series/#respond Tue, 18 Aug 2020 14:52:48 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=185406 And then there’s Arielle Duhaime-Ross, whose hiring marks a homecoming of sorts. Prior to joining Vox Media to host Reset, she was an environment and climate correspondent on the Vice News Tonight television show. Before that, she was a science reporter at The Verge, so I guess this is kind of a homecoming after another homecoming. Anyway, her departure from Vox Media means that Reset, which originated as an expansion of what Axios regarded as a “multi-million dollar deal” between Vox Media and Stitcher, is coming to an end. But her recruitment by Vice to host its new flagship podcast — which, by the way, comes out of a partnership with iHeartMedia, not Spotify — should be a source of excitement for those who are interested in seeing a further expansion of news podcast products more generally. (Another thing to note: Vice also hired Duhaime-Ross to be an on-air correspondent for its television program, so this shouldn’t just be read as an audio-for-audio talent move.)

But what exactly should we expect from Vice’s beefed up audio team?

Kate Osborn is the person with the answers. We’ve featured Osborn in Hot Pod before, through a Career Spotlight segment that ran back in December, and she’s probably one of the more interesting people you’d meet in this business. A documentarian at heart, her work has spanned a wide number of roles, companies, and media, including stints at The Rachel Maddow Show, WBUR, and HuffPost. She joined Vice Media over a year ago to work on its revamped audio efforts, and today, she holds the title of VP of Audio.

Osborn tells me that the decision to staff up in this manner came out of an intent to expand sustainably. Coming off of the successes of its previous podcast projects, Vice had wanted to do more audio, but it also began to sense that it needed more flexibility in the way it conceptualized and executed on show ideas. “Something that came up a ton was the fact that there were so many great stories we wanted to pursue, but not all of them are meant to be full eight-to-twelve episode seasons,” said Osborn. A flagship platform like the Vice News Reports podcast could be a home to those different show variations, but staffing up on a project-by-project basis, then, wasn’t a feasible way to solve that particular problem, so the decision was made to bring in a sizable team that could be reconfigured in a bunch of different ways to accommodate different kinds of projects.

There were also benefits to hiring all at once, instead of gradually scaling up. “I wanted to bring in a cohort, because I think that’s the best way to have a really intentional work environment for collaboration,” said Osborn. She also purposefully sought to assemble a team with mixed experience levels, hence the layering of people with significant news experiences and people without, long-time freelancers and folks in their first years on the job, and so on. The pandemic made the hiring process a little difficult, as you would expect, but in the end, Osborn felt like she built the team she wanted. “I don’t know how other people feel when they do hiring, but every single person [we’ve hired] is such an incredible force,” she said. “All of these people combined are 10 million times better than me, and that’s really exciting. I don’t want to disappoint them.”

One core value driving Osborn, along with the Vice audio division, is a desire to tell truly “borderless” stories, and many of the podcasts being developed at the moment reflect that sensibility. Beyond Vice News Reports, the division has plans to launch three other podcasts that will originate from the team based here in the U.S. One will be a seasonal show centered on the global climate crisis, which will see the team trying to connect the dots across the experiences of several different countries. Another will adopt an anthological format to tell stories that explore authoritarianism as a philosophical, sociological, and psychological concept, refracting its various facets through different stories that stem from different places. The third show will be an experimental project, as Osborn puts it, with the goal of telling recent or unfolding events primarily through user-generated content.

Projects are also being developed by teams based in other countries. When we spoke, Osborn briefly talked about a podcast that she’s been building with a team in Japan, which will be meant for the “Japanese-understanding” market. That’s how she phrased that effort, and it’s an effective way to illustrate how she thinks about the possibilities of making audio shows on a global level. She sees audiences not as geographically defined, but linguistically defined.

“I encourage us to very much think of things in terms of an ‘English-speaking’ or ‘Japanese-understanding’ audience, because we’re talking about listeners that share language understanding regardless of geographic location,” she said. “In some ways, when we think about the ‘U.S. market’ or the ‘U.K. market,’ it can be pretty arbitrary, and though, yes, there is increasing geofencing practices and things like that, but for the most part, we should understand them to be global audiences.”

Osborn also talked about her broader intent to build longer-term relationships and infrastructure with producers in other countries — whether it’s Mexico, the Philippines, or Singapore — such that we’ll be able to see the creation of audio productions that can be truly run through the point of view of those producers. There remain tricky logistical problems to solve in this ambition, including, but not limited to, monetization. But she suspects that part of the solution would involve interfacing with a given country’s specific audio distribution and monetization system, which is a reflection both of the fact that podcasting isn’t the same everywhere (despite its open nature) and that podcasting is just one type of audio.

That’s the bigger, longer-term picture. For now, here in the States, Vice Media has a new audio team, an upcoming flagship podcast, and fresh intentions. It will be interesting to see what it will bring to the table, and how many new ideas it can inject into the news and documentary podcast genre.

Follow-up to PRX. Quick update on last week’s story on a departing PRX staffer, Palace Shaw, drawing attention to systemic racism at the organization: Two other employees, Eric Dhan and Se’era Spragley Ricks, have written an open letter pushing back against CEO Kerri Hoffman’s internal memo on the matter that was publicly circulated over Medium last week.

They wrote:

The letter from our CEO does not reflect the views of all staff members at PRX. It is not easy to openly disagree with the head of our company, and we write this message with no intention to “burn the house down.” We are dedicated to the values and mission at PRX; we believe in openness, trust, and empathy, and we strive to increase the diversity of voices in public media. We are committed stakeholders who care deeply about the wellbeing of our organization, and we want to do our part to hold our leadership accountable and ensure that PRX can live up to the values that drew us to work here in the first place.

The letter, which also listed named support from 10 other PRX employees and affiliated individuals, also laid out a series of specific next steps that they believe should be taken to ensure necessary changes to the organizations. Those steps include a direct apology to Shaw, the determination and distribution of back pay to employees who have left the organization in part due to structural pay disparities, and increased transparency mechanisms in the recruitment and hiring process for the new director of diversity and inclusion.

You can find the full letter, which was published as a Google Doc, here.

Race, diversity, and the BBC [by Caroline Crampton]. Like many big legacy broadcasters — and many other types of big organizations — the BBC is currently grappling with its legacy and responsibilities on race. The global protests over racial injustice, catalyzed by the murder of George Floyd, have intensified these discussions, certainly, but within the context of the BBC, there have been long-standing efforts, far predating this moment, by campaigners like Lenny Henry, Marcus Ryder, and many others to improve the BBC’s internal culture.

Writers like Afua Hirsch have been highlighting the racial inequality in compensation for journalists and presenters at the BBC for years, freelance and staff producers have worked tirelessly behind the scenes to highlight racism and inequality, and parliamentary committees have also tried repeatedly to hold the corporation to account on everything from inadequate grievance processes to slow progress on promoting more Black people and people of color to senior leadership.

The BBC has acknowledged the problem itself. Back in 2018, the BBC Career Progression and Culture Report admitted that “it’s taking too long to see the change that we expect within our workforce.” It also promised significant change. That report, incidentally, was authored by Tim Davie, then CEO of BBC Studios, who will take over as director general of the entire BBC in September. Yet, despite this admission, staff, contributors, and viewers still feel considerable frustration.

In the last month, two moments that really put the BBC’s problems with race in perspective for me. These aren’t the only events relevant to this topic, by any means, but I think these instances in particular highlight the gap between the corporation’s external statements and its internal actions, and show how much more work there is to be done.

The first moment came on July 22, when the BBC Radio and Music division made the welcome announcement that it was “boosting its commitments to diversity and inclusion” and reallocating £12 million of its existing commissioning budget over the next three years toward “diverse and existing content.” In addition, we were told that later this year would see the launch of something called the BBC Sounds Lab, a new and “more accessible” route to a BBC podcast commission, along with a new commitment to only working with independent production companies that “meet a 20% diversity target in their team.” This all came, I should note, in the wake of BBC Radio signing up to the Equality in Audio Pact pioneered by Broccoli Content’s Renay Richardson.

It was the last element of this that most caught my attention. The BBC has a substantial role to play in the U.K. audio industry as a major commissioner of programs and podcasts from independent production companies. If it does indeed only choose to work with companies that have diverse staffs, that would force a major change in hiring practices in the industry. At the moment, I can only think of a small handful of providers that would meet this requirement. However, when I asked for more detail about how this would be enforced — both back in July and again while writing this piece — I was told that the full details were still being worked out, so nothing has been enacted yet. The same goes for questions of intellectual property and ownership: it’s not yet clear whether there will be any change to the status quo that would allow creators to keep ownership of their own shows even if they are picked up by BBC Sounds.

The second moment I want to consider in relation to this concerns a story on the July 28 edition of “Points West,” the BBC regional news program, which was repeated on the national BBC news channel the following morning. In it, correspondent Fiona Lamdin, who is white, used the N-word when reporting on the abuse hurled during a racially aggravated hit and run attack on K-Dogg, a musician and NHS worker, in Bristol.

Despite the outcry from viewers, the BBC initially defended the decision to include the word in the report, saying in a statement, “We believe we gave adequate warnings that upsetting images and language would be used and we will continue to pursue this story.” It went on to say that the decision to repeat the slur had been made after consultation with the victim’s family, who wanted viewers to understand the severity of the attack.

On August 8, BBC Radio 1Xtra host Sideman (aka David Whitely) published an Instagram video in which he announced that he was resigning from all work for the corporation, including his weekly radio show, with immediate effect. “This is an error in judgment where I can’t just smile with you through the process and act like everything is OK,” he said. “The action and the defense of the action feels like a slap in the face of our community.”

The next day, BBC director general Tony Hall overturned the decision to defend the use of the slur and personally apologized for the report. “The BBC now accepts that we should have taken a different approach at the time of broadcast and we are very sorry for that. We will now be strengthening our guidance on offensive language across our output,” he said. “Every organization should be able to acknowledge when it has made a mistake. We made one here.”

The BBC reportedly received over 18,000 complaints from members of the public about the uncensored use of the slur. For many BBC staff, however, this incident didn’t happen in isolation, and is simply yet another example of how the organization culturally possesses an inadequate understanding of race and racism.

These two instances appear very different on the surface, but the more I’ve been thinking about them, the more they seem to me to be two reflections of the same thing. The attitude that led the BBC to announce a major change to how it will work with suppliers on radio and podcast commissioning without first nailing down its practicalities is the same impulse that requires there to be a major host resignation and 18,000 complaints about the use of a slur before an apology is issued. It’s reactive, not proactive, and regardless of intention it communicates that these matters are not given total priority. And while that is the case, I can’t see that this is the route to lasting institutional change.

Freakonomics Radio expands as a publisher. Freakonomics Radio, the audio program that explores the “hidden side of everything” based on the popular book franchise by the journalist Stephen Dubner and the economist Steven Levitt, launched as a WNYC program back in 2009 and quickly became something of an early archetypal podcast hit. You could perhaps detect some of its DNA in shows like Invisibilia and Hidden Brain, which privilege popular science and social science as fertile land from which stories can be harvested, and these days, you can even thread it out to some extent to Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast work via “Revisionist History” and the expanding Pushkin Industries, which has been hammering down the author-to-podcaster pipeline.

As an entrepreneurial venture, Freakonomics Radio also has the distinction of being a prominent example of a public radio-originated program that eventually broke off to establish itself as an independent publisher. In 2018, the show left WNYC Studios to take up a partnership with Stitcher, though it continues to retain a partnership with WNYC for public radio syndication. That gambit — to break off and split distributional alliances — has inspired similar moves. Just last week, Hidden Brain, the NPR-originated audio program about the “unconscious patterns driving human behavior,” announced that it is following almost the exact same route: it’s spinning out as an independent company, Hidden Brain Media, with a Stitcher partnership in hand, a retained public radio syndication partnership with NPR, and designs for further cross-media expansion.

Later this week will see another step forward for Freakonomics Radio. This Friday, the show will launch a new spin-off called People I (Mostly) Admire, which the official press release regards as Steven Levitt’s solo podcast debut. (As a point of clarification, Stephen Dubner is designated as the sole host of Freakonomics Radio, with Levitt popping up as a recurring guest.) It should be noted that People I (Mostly) Admire is not the first Freakonomics Radio spin-off. That honor goes to No Stupid Questions, hosted by Dubner and the social scientist Angela Duckworth (you might know Duckworth as the author of Grit), which launched back in May.

But the upcoming launch of People I (Mostly) Admire will mark the establishment of a new podcast publishing shingle formed around Freakonomics Radio, which will be called (generically enough) the Freakonomics Radio Network. From the sounds of it, the entity appears to be a bid to go after a more specialized social scientist-to-podcast pipeline, which in my mind probably brings more competition to Pushkin Industries’ turf. There are plans to launch new programming through 2021, with at least one or two more pilot programs to show up in the fall. Ideas in development are said to include a book club and another show built around a “prominent sociologist.”

As a matter of process, I’m told that the network favors a soft-launch approach to piloting shows, dropping a test episode in the flagship Freakonomics Radio feed — which has come to drive millions of downloads — to get a sense of listener appetite. If the feedback is positive, those episode get spun out into full shows, as was the case with No Stupid Questions and the upcoming People I (Mostly) Admire. If not, at the very least listeners were treated to a fun experiment.

Interesting stuff. Seems like Stitcher is really profiting off these public radio branch-offs. Wonder if we’ll see more of this.

In other news…

• The New York Times is officially relaunching the “Modern Love” podcast in the fall. The podcast will now be completely produced by the Times’s audio division — it was previously a co-production with WBUR, and was primarily made by the Boston public radio station — and its new iteration is said to feature a completely new sound.
• RedCircle, a podcast monetization startup we’ve written about before, has launched an “automated ad insertion platform.” Sounds like a programmatic-ish ad exchange.
• Spotify has partnered with C-SPAN to distribute the speeches from both the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention over the platform. Also, Daily Sports playlists.
• For Vulture, I wrote about the Michelle Obama podcast.

On Servant of Pod. In tomorrow’s episode, I talk with ESPN Daily’s Pablo Torre and Eve Troeh about making a daily sports podcast when sports is… you know, super weird right now.

Some background: ESPN Daily first rolled out last October — remember October? Geez — where it was positioned as the sports media giant’s flagship podcast. That framing has always been sorta interesting to me, given that ESPN already had a fairly robust podcast portfolio to begin with, one that’s rich with a mix of popular broadcast repackages and an assortment of more interesting nichier stuff. (Shout-out to the Lowe Post, the Woj Pod, and the amazing 30 for 30 podcast team.) The introduction of ESPN Daily, then, has projects a feel of going after a sense of prestige, or at least the creation of a focal point to concentrate the way people might think about ESPN’s on-demand audio machinations separate from its formidable radio presence.

There’s been some reshuffling with ESPN Daily of late. It originally launched with Mina Kimes behind the mic, but she recently left the production to serve as ESPN’s new NFL analyst, which is said to be her dream job. She was ultimately replaced by Pablo Torre, who was just coming off the cancellation of High Noon, the afternoon sports talk show he hosted with Bomani Jones. (An aside: I was actually a big fan of High Noon, though if I were to be honest, I wasn’t surprised that it got cancelled. There was something about its deliberate, thoughtful nature that didn’t seem like a good structural fit for the broadcast context. A streaming service, perhaps. Maybe a podcast?)

But the production has retained a strong sense of continuity, due in no small part to Eve Troeh, the show’s senior editorial producer and constant variable. She’s shepherded the podcast through its opening innings, the great sports shut-down — which kicked off in earnest shortly after the NBA ceased operations when Jazz player Rudy Gobert tested positive for the coronavirus on March 11 — and now, the erratic high-wire attempt to rebuild the sports world in the shadow of a pandemic.

I had a particularly good time speaking with Torre (whose work I’ve followed for years) and Troeh (whose name I’ve heard tossed around, also, for years), not least because I’m a fairly ardent sports nut. Additionally, it’s always fun for me to talk to a Very Public Asian, of which there simply aren’t enough.

You can find Servant of Pod on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or the great assortment of third-party podcast apps that are hooked up to the open publishing ecosystem. Desktop listening is also recommended. Share, leave a review, and so on.

Photo of Arielle Duhaime-Ross by Marin Driguez.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/08/vice-is-bringing-in-a-big-audio-team-to-do-new-kinds-of-podcasts-from-a-daily-news-show-to-a-seasonal-series/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/08/twitter-will-now-label-state-controlled-media-accounts/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/08/twitter-will-now-label-state-controlled-media-accounts/#respond Fri, 07 Aug 2020 16:43:12 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=185282 Twitter is going to start labeling state-run news organizations as such, it announced on Thursday. It will also explicitly label the accounts of those outlets’ editors-in-chief and their senior staffers, as well as “key government officials, including foreign ministers, institutional entities, ambassadors, official spokespeople, and key diplomatic leaders.”

When it comes to conversations with government and state-affiliated media accounts on Twitter, we’re helping to make the experience more transparent.

We'll now use two distinct profile labels for these types of accounts, so you can easily identify them and their Tweets. (1/2) pic.twitter.com/JW67o422MO

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) August 6, 2020

“State-affiliated media is defined as outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution,” Twitter’s blog post about the change says. “Unlike independent media, state-affiliated media frequently use their news coverage as a means to advance a political agenda. We believe that people have the right to know when a media account is affiliated directly or indirectly with a state actor.”

That means that Russia’s RT and China’s Xinhua News will get the label, while the United Kingdom’s BBC and NPR in the United States will not because they’re publicly funded institutions with editorial independence.

On labeling government officials, Twitter will start with permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: the United States, the United Kingdom, China, France, and Russia. However, it won’t label personal accounts for politicians and high-ranking officials. So @realDonaldTrump, the account the United States president actually tweets from, won’t get the label, but @POTUS will. That’s because “these accounts enjoy widespread name recognition, media attention, and public awareness.”

Last year, Twitter banned state-run news advertising and political advertising on the platform.

Twitter applies labels to state-controlled media like Russia Today (RT) and China’s Xinhua. https://t.co/Y9Mb6cFsNU

— Alistair Coleman (@alistaircoleman) August 6, 2020

On the face of it, Twitter’s not messing about. Any more. https://t.co/GHoHrx7dMV

— Ciara O'Brien (@ciaraobrien) August 6, 2020

This will be interesting to watch how they label the different media outlets in Canada, given the large Federal media fund and the ongoing support for the national broadcaster.
.
Twitter to label state-controlled news accounts https://t.co/i3E7u697Xg

— Don R. Campbell (@DonRCampbell) August 6, 2020

Twitter says it will no longer "amplify" tweets by state-controlled media organisations, by excluding them from its recommendation systems https://t.co/jfjsRH4N9R

— Filip Struhárik (@filip_struharik) August 6, 2020

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/08/twitter-will-now-label-state-controlled-media-accounts/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/05/when-you-leave-a-company-can-you-take-your-podcast-with-you-heres-how-one-team-did-it/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/05/when-you-leave-a-company-can-you-take-your-podcast-with-you-heres-how-one-team-did-it/#respond Tue, 26 May 2020 13:47:40 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=183124 Notes on Rogan/Spotify. Chances are you probably already know the details, but let’s quickly recap so we’re all on the same page.

Last Tuesday, it was announced that Spotify has struck a multi-year licensing agreement with The Joe Rogan Experience, widely understood to be one of the biggest podcasts in the business, that will see the show become exclusive to the Swedish audio streaming platform. The podcast, which previously was not available on the platform, will start appearing on Spotify on September 1, and the exclusivity will kick off at some point later in the year. It will remain free to consume, regardless of whether the listener has a premium subscription or not — they just have to be listening on Spotify.

Some key details to clock. First, the exclusivity will apply to both the audio and video versions of the podcast. This is notable, because video recordings of The Joe Rogan Experience tapings drive significant viewership on YouTube, and it ties in with previous reports about Spotify’s initiative to dip its toes back into the category by focusing on video experiences that primarily complement podcasts. (As opposed to investing in “premium video content,” which was the initial strategy grounding the company’s first video push back in 2016.) I generally think the Spotify vs. YouTube angle is slightly oversold, though I highly recommend checking out Julia Alexander’s excellent piece over at The Verge on what this means for video podcasting on YouTube more broadly.

Second, it’s important to reiterate that the Rogan deal is a licensing agreement, not an acquisition, which means The Joe Rogan Experience retains ownership of the show and full creative control over its output. There’s been some discussion about whether the concept of “full creative control” applies when there’s a possibility Spotify may someday implement its podcast advertising technology, Streaming Ad Insertion (SAI), on the show. Might be awhile before those discussions can be fully borne out; as I reported in the initial news drop last week, the show will maintain its current advertising sales relationship with PMM at this time, and further, it remains to be seen what kind of control publishers distributing over the platform will ultimately have over the SAI-enabled ad experience.

Third, and finally, the Wall Street Journal reported that the deal was worth more than $100 million, in part based on milestone and performance metrics. There’s been some discussion about what motivated Rogan to take the deal, and whether or not it was a smart move for someone who was clearly already making a substantial amount of revenue in his current position, so on and so forth. I don’t particularly care one way or another about these questions, but I suppose I feel compelled to say: the pandemic probably had almost nothing to do with this deal. This kind of thing gets cooked up over a much longer time period. Also: a high level of money guaranteed now probably always looks better than a theoretically higher level of money realized over time, particularly if you’re able to keep as many things the same as possible, which I sense is the case here.

Okay, with all that laid out, let’s think through some things.

First up, a slight correction: when I initially wrote up the news last Tuesday, I characterized The Joe Rogan Experience as being the “last big holdout” for Spotify, as far as the distribution of major third-party podcasts are concerned. This isn’t exactly true, given that Serial is still absent from the platform…though, curiously, you can find S-Town, Serial Productions’ other hit series, up on there. So Serial remains a property to watch, but don’t forget: Serial Productions is said to be in acquisition talks with The New York Times. Possibly relevant: the Rogan deal was announced shortly after This American Life, another industry heavyweight and sister company to Serial Productions, was finally made available on Spotify after a long absence due to a prior streaming exclusivity deal with Pandora.

But Spotify’s addition of The Joe Rogan Experience is arguably significantly more consequential, in part because of the exclusivity, but also because the massive show is unique in its massiveness. You could probably attribute the size to several different factors, including: a general longevity, stemming from an early adoption of the space (it launched back in 2009, and it was one of the few podcasts at the time hosted by someone with exposure in other platforms); its copious publishing volume (with a catalog of over 1400 episodes); its commitment to free speech at all costs that has fueled head-turning controversies (see: past comments that have been condemned as sexist, racist, and/or transphobic as well as the appearances of Alex Jones, the opportunistically vile misinformation-spewing conspiracy theorist); its undeniable currency of political influence, which falls from a politically activated following likely fueled by Rogan’s “I’m just asking questions” radical free speech disposition that feeds into a distinctly modern interpretation of authenticity (Bernie Sanders, Andrew Yang, and Tulsi Gabbard have all appeared on the show, and Rogan’s endorsement of Sanders was significant enough to drive its own cycle of controversy); it has some interesting overlaps with life-hacking media, which is a consistently potent genre (see: mushroom coffee); and Rogan’s genuine talent behind the mic (regardless of the politics, you really can’t deny that consistently holding formidable three-hour-plus interviews is a tremendous skill).

The Joe Rogan Experience is a very specific kind of show that can cultivate supremely sticky followings. Further, it has been constantly described to me as a strong gateway podcast; that is, the kind of show that can bring more listeners into the category. It has also been to said to cut across demographics in vast and unexpected ways. Apologies for using an anecdote instead of actual data (which I can’t find publicly available), but that squares with my own experiences: there are a lot — and I mean a lot — of people in my life whose primary exposure to podcasts is The Joe Rogan Experience, along with This American Life and Radiolab. And they really do run the demographic gamut. It’s frankly wild.

All of which is to underscore: there isn’t any other podcast quite as big, wide-ranging, engaged, and consequential as The Joe Rogan Experience, and this deal shouldn’t be read as anything other than a coup by Spotify. There simply isn’t any other major podcast piece left on the board, I think, not of this scale. I wouldn’t be surprised if the company starts big-game hunting in other territories. (I hear Howard Stern is “open to ideas” regarding his SiriusXM contract, which expires in December.)

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here: the move comes with risks. The biggest thing to watch is how Spotify will respond when — not if — the show runs into another dust-up over speech, particularly as it relates to hate speech and misinformation. It might come in the form of another Alex Jones appearance, it might come in the form of something else entirely. But it will come.

Keep in mind, Spotify has already had some experiences with such dust-ups. Back in the summer of 2018, during a moment that saw a flurry of platforms — including YouTube, Facebook, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher — completely remove content from Alex Jones’ Infowars media operation from their services, Spotify opted to remove only a select number of episodes, citing violations of its Hateful Content policy. The company received pushback for only pulling a few episodes, with critics asking whether Spotify did enough.

Around the same time, Spotify also ran into some trouble on the music side over a new policy around hateful content and conduct. That policy, which was initially expressed in the de-listing — but not removal — of music by R. Kelly and XXXTentacion from the platform, drew pushback from the music industry, with critics characterizing the policy as “ill-defined” and effectively a form of censorship. It would eventually be abandoned. (Here’s a good New York Times write-up about the whole affair.)

It’s interesting to look back and get a sense of how Spotify approached those two incidents. Both episodes suggested a sort of tentativeness and fumbling nature to the company’s management of the controversies. The select removals of Infowars episodes were, at best, a half-measure that wasn’t fully responsive to the moment, while its handling of the music side tussle had the feel of being caught unaware. “While we believe our intentions were good, the language was too vague, we created confusion and concern, and didn’t spend enough time getting input from our own team and key partners before sharing new guidelines,” wrote Spotify CEO Daniel Ek in the June 2018 corporate blog post, when the company initially sought to update the hate content and conduct policy in response to the pushback. “We don’t aim to play judge and jury,” he wrote later in the post.

I reckon that Spotify has developed scar tissue from those experiences, and that it’s made at least some preparations for the next time. Further, I have to believe that it knows what it’s getting itself into — how it’s leaning deeper into questions of judge and jury — by securing a multi-year exclusive licensing deal with The Joe Rogan Experience, in effect directly trying itself and some substantial proportion of its non-music content fortunes on the show. So I’m intensely curious to see how Spotify will respond to that first speech-related dust-up. Not to be over dramatic, but I really do think the response will define Spotify for the years to come. It will have bearing on its identity. Will that take the form of a more involved, substantial, and comprehensive approach to hateful content and conduct? Or will it manifest as a harder lean into hands-off distance and not aiming to play judge and jury?

If I were to be cynical about the whole thing, I’d wager that the approach will be somewhere along the lines of “whatever works to preserve the relationship.” Because I don’t know about you, but I see this as a situation where Spotify needs Rogan more than the other way around. Everything thus far — from the acquisitions of Gimlet Media, Parcast, The Ringer, and Anchor, plus its myriad exclusive programming deals, including the one with the Obamas’ production company, Higher Ground, and whatever else they have in the deal making pipeline — strikes me as the accumulation of mid- to long-term assets. “Win later” moves, in sports GM parlance (sorry). Signing Rogan is a “win now” move, a development meant to immediately accelerate a web of interconnected value-creating effects: attracting more podcast listeners onto the platform, luring more advertisers into considering SAI (even as Rogan maintains his existing podcast ad arrangements), and fueling more interest among podcast talent to cut deals and distribute with them. There will almost certainly be more major Spotify announcements to come over the next few weeks — we’re still yet to hear details about projects from Higher Ground, and you can bet they’re eager to keep the narrative momentum going — but the Rogan deal is one that grounds everything together into corporeality, shifting the theoretical into the real.

Of course, there is always the possibility that the deal might not work as well as Spotify thinks it will. I’ve seen some argumentation that platform exclusivity could very well result in listenership declines, as the increased friction of making some listeners switch over to a non-preferred might be too great to overcome. We’ll see, but I doubt it. As discussed, Rogan’s listenership seems uniquely sticky, and a critical mass will almost certainly move over. It’s already off in some respects, between the considerable jump in stock price following the deal’s announcement and the fact that Spotify has completely dominated the podcast narrative. In any case, the risk-reward balance generally tips in favor of Rogan: he’s that much richer right now, and he could always revert back to the open ecosystem when the deal is over. That is, if it continues to be as strong as it is today, which is an open question.

Is Spotify’s complete dominance over the podcast space a fait accompli? Maybe, I don’t know. It sure does seem like they absolutely have all the pieces to maximize their chances of doing so. But after living through the past few years, I’ve become one of those people who doesn’t really believe in the certainty of an outcome until it actually happens. Regardless of whether they do or not, though, one thing’s for sure: they have radically reshaped the power dynamic of the entire podcast ecosystem.

Transplants. Let’s say you’ve been making a podcast for quite some time now, but as it happens, the podcast doesn’t really belong to you or your fellow co-hosts. Instead, it’s owned by the big ol’ media company you worked for when you first started the show. Now let’s say, for whatever reason, you don’t work for that company any more. Maybe you and your co-hosts left for other jobs. Maybe it just felt like the right time to leave. Maybe that original company got taken over by private equity vultures. Who knows? But you still want to keep making the show in some form or another, because y’all really like doing the thing. Is it possible to recreate the same basic framework of the show — the same hosts, the same subject area, the same broad format, hopefully the same audiences, and then some — in another setting?

This is a line of questioning that’s probably been asked many times before, and it will continue to be asked as long as podcast makers bump up against the limitations of making shows for employers without personally owning a piece of the upside. So I thought it would be interesting to sketch out the experiences of one such team that’s trying to make that transition: the fine folks of Triple Click, a recently launched Maximum Fun video game podcast hosted by Kirk Hamilton, Maddy Myers, and Jason Schreier. All three hosts had worked together at Kotaku, the video game site under what is now known as G/O Media, where the trio once made a podcast called Splitscreen. They’ve since left the company, and  recently launched Triple Click to keep doing a show together.

I traded emails with Hamilton a few weeks ago about the rebuilding process, why they decided to roll with Maximum Fun, and what he thinks are best practices when it comes to transplanting existing listeners over to a new property.

Hot Pod: How did you all make the decision to roll with Maximum Fun?

Kirk Hamilton: We looked at (and pitched to) a number of different podcast networks, and also considered doing a Patreon. A couple networks passed; one promising network ultimately decided against taking on a fully formed outside show; one had terms that weren’t up to our standards. Maddy was the most familiar with Maximum Fun and had a positive impression of them as a listener; I’d always loved My Brother, My Brother and Me, and knew (and admired) Justin McElroy from back when he was writing about video games himself. He seemed happy making shows for MaxFun, and I knew his podcasts were successful, so that gave me a positive impression of the network too.

In the end, we were down to either doing a Patreon or signing up with Maximum Fun. Both options would make our new show listener-supported, but with slightly different models. A Patreon would be clearer-cut and give us a higher percentage of each listener dollar, but we’d have no institutional support and would have to do everything ourselves. I also already have a Patreon for my other podcast (the music show Strong Songs), and while it’s been great for me as a one-man operation, I was a little wary of launching a second Patreon for a show with two other cohosts.

Our first proper meeting with Maximum Fun helped us make up our minds. They were fantastic from the outset — organized, interested, enthusiastic about the possibilities. They clearly wanted to work with us and genuinely cared about helping us make a good show. It just felt right. And while it’s only been a few weeks, it definitely still feels right!

HP: What have you been able to do with Triple Click (and MaxFun) that couldn’t with the older Splitscreen incarnation?

Hamilton: In a lot of ways, our creative mandate is the same as it ever was. We’ve always been a self-contained show — Jason and Maddy both have good recording setups in their apartments, and I mix and edit every episode myself — so we never had to rely on anyone outside our little circle. Historically, that’s afforded us a lot of creative independence. Our former boss at Kotaku, Stephen Totilo, was always great about letting us do whatever we wanted with Splitscreen, and while the folks at Maximum Fun had some helpful feedback and general thoughts on how we might design a new show, they’re very hands-off creatively. So, we still get to do basically whatever we want.

The biggest differences are more in what we don’t have to worry about, and things we won’t have to do. In addition to having total creative control over the show, the three of us own Triple Click, which was never true of Splitscreen. (See, for example, the fact that whoever now controls the Splitscreen feed has been re-running old episodes in the weeks since we left, essentially turning the show into a zombie feed. And hey, they own the show, so that’s their right!)

Because we own Triple Click, we control everything about it. We don’t have to worry about anyone using our old episodes. We also don’t have to worry about some new executive editor or whoever coming in and telling us that, actually, next week’s episode is going to be about some brand or other, because of a company-wide ad sales initiative. Or that we’d wind up in a showdown with management over reading ads for a video game, or some other clear conflict of interest.

To be clear, none of that happened while we were making Splitscreen, but the worry was always there in the backs of our minds. As things at G/O deteriorated toward the end of 2019, that worry grew more and more pronounced. With Triple Click, we’ll always be able to make those decisions — show content, scheduling, fan interaction, ads, etc. — for ourselves. And we’ll always own our work.

Less dramatically, there’s also just the fact that Maximum Fun employs wonderful people who solve problems and handle technical issues, which makes it much easier to have a smoothly running show.

HP: Has it been a challenge to transition existing listeners over to the new show?

Hamilton: Our numbers are comparable to where they were at Splitscreen when we left, though it’s impossible to say how many of those were Splitscreen listeners, and how many are newcomers who found us through word of mouth or via MaxFun network promos. We’ve certainly heard from people who are new to Triple Click and never listened to Splitscreen.

Based on what I’ve seen, no, I wouldn’t say it’s been a challenge. But we were sure to consistently message and promote Triple Click as we announced that we were leaving Splitscreen, and to make sure that listeners had immediate access to the new show when they came and checked it out.

HP: You’re almost wrapping up the first month of the new show. What do you know now that you wish you knew when y’all first started the relaunch?

Hamilton: Some of these are things we did and that I’m glad we did, but I’ll also include a few lessons we learned:

(1) If you’re making a new show for an existing audience, don’t devote too much airtime to talking about how the new show will be different. Just make the new show, and make it good.

(2) It is worth paying lawyers to take care of business stuff — setting up an LLC, writing the operating agreement, filing for the trademark, etc. There’s always a temptation to fake it on that kind of thing, or try to do it yourself. We paid the money and got it done right, and I’ve been really glad for that.

(3) If you’re moving an existing audience to a listener-supported model, be really clear with listeners early on about what that means. Also be flexible, and open to their feedback on it.

(4) Be really clear about who on your team is going to be responsible for what, and do so ahead of time. We did a pretty good job of that from the outset, but there are still new responsibilities that come up, and each one requires one of us to say, basically, “Okay, [Maddy/Jason/Kirk], are you going to be responsible for that?” If you don’t clearly assign responsibilities, things start falling through the cracks alarmingly fast.

HP: What was the listenership like with Splitscreen? What do you expect/hope listenership to be like with TC?

Hamilton: I probably shouldn’t share specific numbers since it’s not our show anymore, but we were in what I assume is the middle? Not as big as the really big gaming podcasts, but healthy. With Triple Click, I’d love for us to be competitive with some of those really big shows. First Maximum Fun, then the world!

That said — and just speaking for myself — my main growth goal right now is to get the show to where it’s a sustainable project where we’re all having fun and are being reasonably compensated for the work we put in. It’ll be a few more months at least until we have a sense of what that looks like, of course. But with most of my recent projects (including Triple Click), I’ve been trying to focus on growth toward sustainability, as opposed to growth for its own sake. I want to make a cool thing for a long time; I don’t want to endlessly chase the horizon. That way lies burnout.

HP: My understanding is gaming podcasts that it’s a pretty big subculture in podcasting. What would you like to see more from the genre?

Hamilton: Gaming podcasts definitely occupy a big niche, and there are some super popular video game podcasts out there. In some ways Triple Click represents what I’d like to see more of: focused discussion, sharper editing, plenty of meaty discussion but a bit more approachable for people who like video games but don’t necessarily live and breathe them.

Also, less of a tendency to chew over every single piece of gaming news, which in the world of games often means drip-feed promotional materials (and marketing-related controversies) for games that won’t be out for months. I’d much rather listen to people talk about games that exist in the world, that I can play and already have my own opinions about. For inspiration, I look to now-defunct shows from the late 2000s and early 2010s like The Brainy Gamer andIdle Thumbs; I know Jason and Maddy have their own influences, too.

It’s been nice to seeWaypoint Radio finding traction in part by directly talking about politics on their show, and taking on the broader culture outside the world of games. I also wish there were more shows likeDev Game Club, where game developers casually hang out and talk about their work. (Another reason I loved and miss Idle Thumbs.) And I’d love to hear more diverse voices on games podcasts, in addition to the seen-it-all, played-it-all 20- and 30-something dudes who currently dominate most aspects of games culture. (I say that, of course, as another Dark Souls-loving dude who’s done his share of dominating the conversation over the last decade.)

I’d also like to see more scripted and story-based podcasts about video games. That’s not something we’re planning to do at Triple Click, at least not at the moment, but with the right team and the appropriate resources, a show like that could be great.

You can find the Triple Click podcast here.

WNYC Studios retires Nancy [by Caroline Crampton]. On Friday, WNYC Studios announced that it would not renew Nancy, the podcast focused on stories and conversations about the queer experience today, beyond its current season. The final episode will drop on June 29, and hosts Tobin Low and Kathy Tu, along with sound designer Jeremy S. Bloom, will be joining the team at Radiolab once the show ends. Three other contributors will not have their contracts renewed beyond June.

In an internal announcement, WNYC chief content officer Andrew Golis explained the move, saying that “The show has had an incredible team behind it and has a loyal core community…Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to maintain or grow the show’s audience, or get it on a path to be sustainable.”

Nancy won WNYC’s podcast accelerator in 2015, and has become highly regarded both as a podcast and as a source of queer representation in the audio industry. It’ll be interesting to see how much of the show’s energy and brand remain evident once its hosts are subsumed into the team of a much larger and longer running show.

BBC’s annual plan [by Caroline Crampton]. Last week, the BBC published its annual plan for 2020/21. This is usually a fairly big moment in the UK media year, since whatever the public broadcasting behemoth does tends to impact other publishers, and the corporation also provides work for many suppliers and freelancers beyond its estimated 22,000 employees.

While it’s true that the relationship between the government and the BBC has improved immeasurably in the last couple of months — outgoing director general Tony Hall has sounded very upbeat in interviews recently — there are still going to be cuts to come as the corporation tries to balance the costs against falling income.

The plan is still worth paying attention to as a record of the BBC’s desired direction of travel, no matter what the next few months bring. The commitment to the BBC Sounds app and on demand audio in general remains central to the effort to win younger audiences back to the corporation’s output, and there are plans to reshape the TV offering for the same reason.

The longstanding commitment that BBC Sounds will start bringing podcasts from third party publishers inside its walled garden — which would be a big change for the British audio industry — is restated in this plan, but there is still no word on how licensing and vetting would be handled for this, nor when it might actually happen.

Audible is reportedly going after podcasts again. At least, according to Bloomberg.

I mean, sure. We’ve been here with the audiobook giant before, back in 2015, when it assembled a team to build “not a podcast” podcast-style Audible Originals that would contribute to the value of a subscription, which resulted in some good shit like West Cork, The Butterfly Effect with Jon Ronson, and Esther Perel’s Where Should We Begin. The company laid off that team in the summer of 2018 after a leadership reshuffle, pivoting to a new “we’re going to strike audiobook-first deals with hot authors” like Michael Lewis — who’s now making an actual podcast with Pushkin Industries — along with an assortment of random other stuff, like stand-up recordings and audio-only performances of theatrical plays. Meanwhile, Perel is now building an extended Esther Perel universe that includes a Spotify exclusive; that original team’s leadership, Eric Nuzum and Jesse Baker, has started their own podcast studio, called Magnificent Noise; and the producer who worked with Ronson on The Butterfly Effect, Lina Misitzis, went on to work on a Pulitzer-prize winning story from This American Life.

So yeah, maybe Audible has figured out what it wants with the category now, beyond throwing a bunch of money at people, and maybe it’s figured out how to adequately work with radio/podcast producers. Maybe.

Show notes. You Must Remember This is back with a new season starting today, and it’s built around the unpublished memoirs of Polly Platt, an unsung hero of Hollywood from the seventies to the nineties. The season will also be a treat for fans of Billions — and Mad Men, I suppose — as Longworth casted Maggie Siff to read Platt’s words. Platt died in 2011.

Also, this is neither here nor there, and I didn’t know why it took this long to get into it, but I’m currently plowing through the archives of the Blank Check pod.

ICYMI. I interviewed Bill Simmons about selling The Ringer to Spotify, the future of pods, and making stuff for a world without sports for Vulture, and that piece dropped last week. Check it out.

Suitcase by Drew Coffman used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/05/when-you-leave-a-company-can-you-take-your-podcast-with-you-heres-how-one-team-did-it/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/05/the-bbcs-5050-project-shows-equal-gender-representation-in-news-coverage-is-achievable-even-in-traditionally-male-areas/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/05/the-bbcs-5050-project-shows-equal-gender-representation-in-news-coverage-is-achievable-even-in-traditionally-male-areas/#respond Thu, 16 May 2019 18:17:16 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=171698 News organizations that want to diversify their editorial output have a number of different ways to do it. On the lame end, they can simply talk about wanting to be more diverse without actually doing anything about it. At the opposite end of the spectrum, they can set a real target and strive to hit it. This worked for Outside Magazine. (Or they can have actual targets couched as “growth goals,” like the Financial Times.)

The BBC has publicly taken the tactic of setting a target. A year ago, the BBC set out to achieve gender equality in its on-air programming, with the goal of at least half the contributors to BBC programs and content being female by April 2019. The effort was already underway at some individual programs, starting with Ros Atkins’ “Outside Source” back in 2016.

Back in 2016, I started the #5050Project to increase women contributors in the news & content we make. It now involves up to 5000 BBC staff & y'day the @bbc published our data, methodology, case studies, audience research & partners organisations.All here: https://t.co/3OcRoCgl2x

— Ros Atkins (@BBCRosAtkins) May 16, 2019

Before we go too much further, let’s get this out of the way up top: The BBC as a whole has not been a model of gender equality. It became clear in 2017 and 2018, when the UK government forced the BBC to be more transparent about its costs, that most male executives at the organization were making much more money than female executives; Carrie Gracie, the BBC’s China editor, resigned upon learning that she was making about 50 percent less than male peers. Despite the bad publicity, the pay issue hasn’t been resolved, and the BBC is now under formal investigation. In some ways, the marketing of the 50:50 Project can be seen as an effort to bolster the BBC’s image after a flood of bad press. But it’s clear that that’s not all or even mostly what it is, because it is working — in part because it’s driven by journalists already working inside the BBC rather than being ordained by management.

This week the BBC released a report on how it’s doing, one year in. The top line:

The BBC announced the 50:50 Challenge in April 2018. The aim was twofold. First, how many English language teams from across news, current affairs and topical programming could sign up to 50:50 [The program was voluntary; by the end of April 2019, 500 teams had signed up.] Second, how many of those teams could reach 50% women contributors in April 2019 in the content they could control?

For teams who have been part of the initiative for 12 months or more, 74% reached 50% female representation in April 2019. A clear majority of the remaining 26% were above 40% female representation.

This is how the challenge works:

We collect data to affect change. Teams self-monitor their content and use the resulting data to set benchmarks and monitor performance against them. The data is gathered as content is produced with the aim of increasing engagement and motivation so it can form part of a team’s regular editorial conversations. Teams then share monthly data with the rest of the BBC in a spirit of positive competition and collaboration.

Measure what you control. We measure only the parts of BBC content that we control. In news, this means we do not count people who are central to the stories that we are covering on any given day. For example, we do not count the Prime Minister when she has given a speech or the only eyewitness to a bomb. Without these people, we cannot tell the stories and we have no control over who they are. But we count everyone else — reporters, analysts, academics, case studies — anyone who is helping us to report and analyze the news. Everyone who does count, counts as one.

Never compromise on quality. The best contributor is always used, regardless of their impact on a team’s 50:50 numbers. Editorial excellence is always the priority. The 50:50 Project aims to help content-makers discover new female and male contributors to reflect the audiences they serve and strengthen the BBC’s journalism and content.

Key learnings from BBC's stunningly successful 50:50 project: no jargon, idiot proof concept, initiated by respected people at heart of organisation, big support from top of org. #5050Project #BBCNews @BBCRosAtkins https://t.co/mAEJ7gdPlv

— Lucy Kueng (@KuengLucy) May 16, 2019

Here are some of the findings and themes from the report:

There were challenges in certain topic areas.

For instance, “Outlets heavily reliant on BBC reporters and correspondents for their content reported that they found it more demanding to reach 50:50 over a month period. (This suggests that the BBC has work to do on equality in hiring.)

Also:

News, current affairs and topical programs fed back that they were finding certain topic areas, such as politics and business, more challenging to reach 50% women representation.

Historically, both sectors have been male heavy. Therefore, the BBC’s regular experts have tended to be men. BBC content-makers identified this early on and have been working together to increase the pool of regular contributors. The political and business units have been instrumental in assisting other BBC teams’ searches for expert women in these areas.

“We’ve had a positive response from political parties who now accept that this is how BBC News operates and have been more imaginative in which spokespeople they put up for interview,” Miranda Holt, the assistant editor of the BBC’s live political programs, said.

Sports was another male-dominated area. Last May, when the sports news team joined the 50:50 challenge, “we were around 85 percent men, 15 percent women when we first looked at our figures so I would never have imagined we would get anywhere near 50:50 within a year,” said Helen Brown, assistant editor for sports TV news. “We’re managing it.” The team is up to 43 percent female contributors. “There is no doubt our output has been improved by taking part in this,” Brown said. “We question our decisions more now, so as a result, we end up with more creative programs that reflect our audience.

Some success in foreign languages.

The original focus of the 50:50 challenge was on English-language programs, but World Service Languages, which broadcasts in more than 40 other languages, ended up participating as well.

For some services, it was felt that cultural differences could make 50:50 a near impossibility…BBC Arabic joined in July 2018 when it had less than 20% female representation. The teams set themselves a target of 30% which they surpassed in August 2018 and maintained ever since. They are now striving for 50% and in April 2019 reached 46% across their output.

BBC Hindi Radio, meanwhile, had 25 percent female contributors in March 2018. “The team introduced a daily huddle to discuss stories from women’s perspectives and how female characters could lead the storytelling,” said Fiona Crack, head of central services for world service languages. “Data led conversations about female engagement on Facebook, with teams and from management also made it clear it was a priority.” In April 19, 51 percent of contributors to Hindi Radio were female.

It applies to music, too.

BBC Scotland Music entered the 50:50 challenge “to see if the methodology could be adapted to content that was not predominantly speech. It was agreed that vocal and instrumental artists as well as composers should be measured, with the three core 50:50 ideas still applying — collect data to affect change, measure what you control and never compromise on quality.” Here’s Sharon Mair, editor of radio, music, and events for BBC Scotland:

The act of physically counting the number of female artists vs. male artists makes it front of mind when you are structuring programs — the essence of 50:50.

Many genres of music, especially going way back, were dominated by male musicians and composers for example classical music, but this can be balanced out across output and that is what we think about every day, to deliver a music experience for our audience that is truly reflective.

Audiences are noticing.

When the BBC surveyed nationally representative audience samples, a third of respondents said that they’d noticed an increase in the number of women they see and hear on BBC programming.

Younger audiences were more likely to welcome this: “The younger age groups, 16-34s in particular, say they were more likely to enjoy content more as a result of a better gender balance.” One in six people over the age of 55, however, “say they watched or listened less as a result of changes in the gender balance.”

The challenge spreads to other organizations.

More than 20 partners worldwide have joined the 50:50 Challenge. The ones willing to be named publicly, to date: 7Digital, ABC News, BFBS, Edelman PR, Falmouth University, the Financial Times, Fortune, Lansons, Lithuanian Radio and Television, National Film School and Television School, RFA, Somethin’ Else, STV, VOA, VRT, Whistledown, Wisebuddah, WNYC, YFM, and YLE.

You can read the full report here.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/05/the-bbcs-5050-project-shows-equal-gender-representation-in-news-coverage-is-achievable-even-in-traditionally-male-areas/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/03/spotify-is-still-hungry-for-podcast-companies-gobbling-up-parcast/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/03/spotify-is-still-hungry-for-podcast-companies-gobbling-up-parcast/#respond Tue, 26 Mar 2019 15:16:43 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=170012 Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 201, published March 26, 2019.

Spotify to acquire Parcast, and a Gimlet union update. There are two Spotify stories worth noting:

(1) Spotify announced this morning that it’s moving to acquire Parcast, the Los Angeles-based company, founded in 2016 by Max Cutler, that trades in a genre-oriented, high-volume portfolio with broad titles like Serial Killers, Cults, and Unsolved Murders. (My dude Jonah Bromwich at The New York Times has described the company’s fare as “pulp nonfiction” whose “lurid storylines play out like snackable television,” which is a fair assessment, I think.) The terms of the deal were not disclosed, and it’s expected to close in the second quarter of this year. This will be Spotify’s third podcast acquisition, having picked up Gimlet and Anchor for a combined $340 million earlier this year, and it presumably eats into what Spotify has described as the $500 million budget it has set aside for acquisitions this year.

Parcast currently has 18 shows on the market, with apparent plans to roll out 20 more this year. The company currently has 20 employees, and its audience is said to be 75 percent female (which is consistent with more general findings about true crime). You should probably take note of this quote from Spotify chief content officer Dawn Ostroff, who joined the company last summer, in the associated press release: “The addition of Parcast to our growing roster of podcast content will advance our goal of becoming the world’s leading audio platform. Crime and mystery podcasts are a top genre for our users and Parcast has had significant success creating hit series while building a loyal and growing fan base. We’re excited to welcome the Parcast team to Spotify and we look forward to supercharging their growth.”

So between Anchor, Gimlet, and Parcast, you could say that Spotify now has a technology platform for third-party podcasts, a production company built on a prestigious brand, and a production company that works in sheer volume. Interesting.

One more thing to note: Parcast was previously associated with Endeavor Audio, the new audio division of the media conglomerate Endeavor. At Endeavor Audio’s launch announcement last September, the Parcast network was said to be delivering 9 million downloads a month. It’s unclear if that’s raw downloads or unique monthlies.

(2) So, as we reported in Thursday’s Insider, Gimlet Media’s management declined to formally recognize the union last Tuesday. The union’s organizing committee took to Twitter yesterday to ramp up public pressure, laying out the situation from their perspective: “Last week, Gimlet effectively declined voluntary recognition. Instead, Gimlet’s lawyer came back with a surprisingly aggressive counter-proposal. The company is trying to unilaterally cut 30 people from our proposed unit. Additionally, @Gimletmedia’s leadership is demanding a revote, but the 30 people who were cut would not be able to vote.”

You can see the full Twitter thread here.

We asked @Gimletmedia for voluntary recognition two weeks ago. Last week, Gimlet effectively declined voluntary recognition. Instead, Gimlet’s lawyer came back with a surprisingly aggressive counter-proposal.

— Gimlet Union (@GimletUnion) March 25, 2019

I’ll be monitoring the situation. In the meantime, some questions to keep in mind: How will broader Spotify management approach the situation? How strong is the coalition that the organizing committee has built among the workers? Also: what’s the argumentation around the aforementioned 30 people?

All right, moving on for now.

Acast’s French expansion [by Caroline Crampton]. The Swedish podcast company, which launched back in April 2014, is officially pushing into France. CEO Ross Adams hinted at the move when I spoke to him back in December, around the time of their $35 million Series C funding round, and said expansion into non-English-language markets was a big part of the strategy for the next two years. Adams, who helped to launch Spotify in the U.K. back in 2008, has brought on another exec from the (also Swedish) music streaming giant to spearhead this expansion: Yann Thébault, former managing director of Continental Europe for Spotify, joins to lead operations there.

“Last year was a tipping point for podcast consumption,” Thébault told me. “Right now in France, there are about 4 million people listening on a monthly basis. It’s not a fully developed market yet, but it’s growing very quickly…there have been a lot of new show launches in the past year.” That data point, by the way, comes from Médiamétrie’s Écoute des Podcasts report from April 2018, which francophones should check out.

France has traditionally had a strong radio sector, which is very much reflected in the podcast output there. “About 85 percent of the market is dominated by [radio] replays, which means that about 15 percent is [podcast] native and growing quickly.” That’s the market segment Acast is banking on — they’re hoping that by entering early, they’ll be the monetization platform of choice once the space has expanded and matured. This approach has certainly worked for them in the U.K., a comparison that Thébault referenced in our discussion too: “I see the French market — I mean, in so far as we can compare market to market — as like the U.K. two years ago.”

One of the biggest trends in original French podcasting, he said, was feminism, and there are also several new and influential women-run podcast production houses in France. We profiled one of them, Louie Media, last summer, and they, along with House of Podcasts, were also recently written up by the Bello Collective. Beyond women and LGBTQ-centred shows like La Poudre, Thébault said that “food,” “crime,” and “social justice” were also content areas rapidly growing in popularity.

Acast France seems to be starting small. The branch just finalized the contract with their third employee, a director of sales, who starts work in April, and Thébault notes that he already has a director of content working on staff. They plan to increase their headcount more rapidly “once we secure our first publisher agreement to sell and monetize their content.” The goal for now, Thébault explained, is to get podcasts on their platform, both from established media houses and independent producers. The aim is to spot “tomorrow’s talents,” he said, with the hope of monetizing these smaller shows once they grow in the future.

Thebault says French advertisers are already fairly well informed as to the benefits of advertising on podcasts — the logic being they’re used to commercial internet radio stations and streaming platforms like Spotify and Deezer. (Whether you buy into this logic is your call.) “In France, the digital audio market represents around 12 million euros,” he said. “That’s not a huge market, but it’s growing very fast.” The strong representation of feminist and women-centric podcasts works well with commercial deals too, with luxury good, fashion, and beauty all interested in that segment of the podcast audience.

A small start for Thébault and Acast France, but they’re betting hard on seeing a similar podcast growth trajectory there as in the U.K. and elsewhere. It’s long been reported that Acast is looking at eventually going public on the Swedish stock market; going into new markets like France (and possibly Germany and Spain next, I’d imagine) is likely a move to lay down a substantial European division which could give them a growth narrative with some runway.

Platform neutral [by Caroline Crampton]. Well, that’s interesting: The BBC has pulled its podcasts from parts of the Google Podcasts ecosystem, meaning that the People’s Programming is no longer accessible via Google Assistant on Google smart speakers and devices. In a blog post published this morning, Kieran Clifton, the BBC’s director of distribution and business development, explained the move thusly:

Last year, Google launched its own podcast app for Android users — they’ve also said they will launch a browser version for computers soon. Google has since begun to direct people who search for a BBC podcast into its own podcast service, rather than BBC Sounds or other third party services, which reduces people’s choice — an approach that the BBC is not comfortable with and has consistently expressed strong concerns about. We asked them to exclude the BBC from this specific feature but they have refused.

This refers to the integration of the Google Podcasts app with Google search and the rest of the Google ecosystem. Since Google’s much-publicized re-entry into podcasting last year, it’s been the case that when you search for a show using Google, you get a “recent episodes” component to your search results with play buttons beside each one that uses the architecture of the Google Podcasts app. As Podnews noted in its early reporting on this story, the BBC is now using robots.txt on its podcast server to prevent Google indexing any episodes published after March 19 in this way. You could read this as a classic publisher-platform dispute: The BBC now considers Google a competing distributor, one that uses its search dominance to push users towards their own podcast product. (I mean, welcome to the internet, I guess?).

For background on this, we should look at the rules that govern how the BBC distributes its content. Clifton references the BBC’s Distribution Policy, which doesn’t address this topic directly but sets out the conditions under which the BBC allows its output to be made available on other companies’ platforms. The broad headings are: prominence, editorial control, branding/attribution, quality, data, free access, and value for money. This policy appears to agree with the BBC’s regulator, Ofcom, the body which scrutinises the BBC’s operations to make sure all is as it should be.

Given that the BBC is funded by the public through the license fee — read my explainer on how that works here — how the corporation creates and distributes content is constantly monitored to make sure that it’s providing value for money while being as accessible and representative a broadcasting service as possible. In light of this public remit, it’s a big deal for the organization to pull a substantial part of its audio output from a platform as huge and widely used as Google.

But just how big a deal is it, though? Smart speakers (and audio distributed via Google Podcasts) are a small segment of the audio market so far, but Google Podcasts is now preinstalled on many Android phones, giving the platform vast theoretical reach. Ofcom will no doubt be looking into this decision in detail, and for what it’s worth, its guidelines do allow for the BBC to stop working with a third-party platform in cases where there is “an objective justification” for doing so. “Objective justification,” of course, is where the rub lies.

Meanwhile, there’s another strand to this: the BBC Sounds strategy. As I’ve covered extensively over the past few months, the BBC’s bespoke audio app — their biggest product launch in a decade — has had a somewhat rocky start since its launch in autumn 2018, with mixed reviews and experiments with show exclusivity that proved unpopular with some listeners. But the BBC has consistently doubled down on the app’s benefits, putting out statements about how “the response to BBC Sounds has been overwhelmingly positive.” Essentially, the BBC seems to believe it’s worth more to try to move podcast listeners into its own app than to reach them on whatever platform they currently use. For what it’s worth, Chris Kimber, a BBC product manager working on BBC Sounds, tweeted that the removal of BBC shows from Google was “unrelated to any exclusivity trial,” which makes sense — this is a more fundamental issue of how the BBC interacts with third parties over its own app.

Just to clear up some inaccuracies in that article: (1) Google are not merely linking out to content (2) licence fee income was 3.8b not 5b (3) Sounds is available outside the UK via web (4) this is unrelated to any exclusivity trial

— Chris Kimber (@chriskimber) March 25, 2019

The part I think is particularly relevant to this matter with Google first emerged in an interview that BBC Sounds launch director Charlotte Lock gave about the negative audience reaction to the Fortunately… with Fi and Jane podcast going temporarily Sounds-exclusive back in January. Lock made the point that when listeners consume BBC audio content through the BBC Sounds app, rather than via RSS feed on a third-party platform, the BBC is able to capture more audience data. She spun this as a positive for listeners, because it enables the BBC to offer better “tailored recommendations,” although at the time I was a bit skeptical that “a corporation wants more data about you” was going to be a strong motivator for listeners to use the app.

This line of argument has now been applied to this Google dispute. The key section:

We also want to make our programmes and services as good as they can possibly be — this means us getting hold of meaningful audience data. This helps us do a number of things; make more types of programmes we know people like, make our services even more personalised and relevant to people using them, and equally importantly, identify gaps in our commissioning to ensure we’re making something for all audiences.

My reading of this situation is therefore as follows: The BBC wants Google to direct listeners straight to BBC Sounds (which has a web version which is accessible internationally; the app is U.K.-only), rather than prioritizing the fact that they can play the shows through Google search or on other Google platforms. Google, unsurprisingly, refused to make this substantial exception to its own business model. As a result, the BBC deployed robots.txt and is now presenting this move as a beneficial one for listeners, who will give the BBC more data by using Sounds instead, thus influencing the long-term direction of BBC audio content. Clifton’s blog even describes the BBC’s actions as having been taken “for the good of listeners.” “For the good of BBC Sounds, internally thought to be good for listeners” might be more accurate.

Unfortunately, I don’t think this reasoning quite stacks up. It’s logical enough for the BBC, which is desperate to make BBC Sounds work after all the resources and effort that’s been poured into it. But I think the benefits are more on its side than on listeners’, who now have fewer outlets where they can access BBC material. The BBC’s gamble is that listeners love their content enough to follow it to the Sounds app, but I’d guess that a reasonable proportion — especially those who do the bulk of their listening on a Google Home for accessibility reasons, say, or through Android Auto while driving — will just switch to other podcasts that are available on their platform of choice.

As a strategy, this would be fine if the BBC was a profit-making private company: You sacrifice some listeners in order to get greater value from the really loyal ones willing to use your app. But the BBC has this obligation to be as open and accessible as possible, and so far I’m not convinced that “we can do better recommendations if everyone uses BBC Sounds” trumps the necessity of distributing their audio as widely as possible — although ultimately that will be for Ofcom to adjudicate. It’s worth remembering, too, that BBC Sounds has been cited by BBC execs as a way of re-engaging younger audiences turning away from BBC radio in favor of other streaming platforms. I’ll await the regulator’s view on that with great interest too, especially since that the corporation’s failure to reach young people was a major part of Ofcom’s latest performance report for the BBC.

This wrangle between the BBC and Google is by no means over, though, and this could all still change. Clifton notes in his post that “we are in discussions with Google to try and resolve the situation and will continue to work with them to try and come to a solution that’s in the best interests of all listeners.” I can’t help feeling that this is just an early skirmish in the chess game: The BBC called a bluff and pulled their shows. Your move, Google.

On accessibility [by Caroline Crampton]. Podcasts and the question of accessibility is a vital, important topic. This recent article by the writer Robert W. Kingett — about how he experiences podcast websites via his screen reader and how poorly many are set up for visually impaired people — really grabbed my attention. I got in touch with Kingett to find out more about his thoughts on accessibility and the podcast industry, and what changes he believes need to be made to improve matters. (This interview has been edited and condensed.)

Hot Pod: What part do podcasts play in your life?

Robert W. Kingett: Podcasts play a huge part in my life now, much more than they did, say, three years ago. Even when I was legally blind (I’m now totally blind), I assumed that podcasts were just on-demand talk shows. I never even considered a podcast could be an audio drama, for example, or an audio-described public domain movie. Podcasts are a level playing field for me and so many other visually impaired people, especially audiobook listeners. There’s even a category of podcasts called spoken editions, where articles from publications like Playboy and Wired are read out loud, which is great, because I don’t have to navigate the website — I just press play. I’d even say I consume more podcasts now than TV and or movies because, well, it’s free entertainment and information. I’ve even started sharing podcasts with my sighted friends, who still don’t get it — like, there’s nothing to look at! Or, they assume, like I did, that all podcasts are talk shows. It’s a work in progress. Still, I’m starting from an equal place when I’m sharing podcasts. Nothing is tacked on as an accessibility tool for the blind later. My sighted friend doesn’t have to hear the special audio description, for example. We’re starting from the same place.

Hot Pod: What are the most common accessibility issues you find as you look for, subscribe to, and listen to shows?

Kingett: The most common accessibility problem I’ve ran into is the lack of accessible podcast apps and websites. It’s completely backwards. The blind and the visually impaired could have access to all this great free audio content and entertainment, but there’s only a handful — actually, less than that — accessible podcast players.

As much as people don’t like Apple, other companies should take accessibility cues from Apple. I get why many listeners hate the Apple application, but for us visually impaired people, it’s one of the few options we have. It works, and it works well. Plus, Apple Podcasts works with Apple TV, which is also accessible. Outside of Apple, though, your choices are extremely limited, especially if you’re on a budget and can’t afford to pay for a podcast application, for example. Android, luckily, has Google Podcasts. Spotify is accessible, mostly, but it’s not user-friendly for people who are seniors who want to know what’s this podcast audio fiction kids are talking about these days. Overcast is extremely accessible but doesn’t come on every device. That’s it. That’s all the free podcast apps we can use with screen readers. All the rest, especially RadioPublic, have extremely bad accessibility. I mean, buttons and links are not even labeled in their apps and that’s really, really, basic stuff.

Websites are a huge problem too. I hear so many advertisements for Squarespace and it saddens me, because Squarespace does not make it easy for people looking to create an accessible website at all. Yet that’s what many podcasters use, and it makes me want to pull my hair out. Squarespace doesn’t have the accessible content management system down at all, so when creators are creating their website and they are inserting a form, for example, creators don’t know that HTML code working behind the scenes isn’t accessible. That’s Squarespace’s fault, though. If you want your podcast website to be accessible, don’t use Squarespace. Period. Don’t embed the RadioPublic player. Period. Use WordPress.com if you want to make an accessible website for free. Don’t use Tumblr, either, whatever you do, because again, in order to make it accessible, you have to do extra things, and that’s something creators shouldn’t have to do.

Along the same lines, I find it’s extremely difficult to subscribe to podcasts. For example, The Bright Sessions has an inaccessible subscribe page. When navigating with a screen reader, it doesn’t say “subscribe with Apple”, or whatever choices. The links are not labeled. The images are not labeled. So I can’t tell visually impaired people “go subscribe with your app of choice here.”

Instead, I’d say use a service like PodLink. I don’t know if these pages look pretty, but they do the work for you. Plus, PodLink is working with me on accessibility consulting, so it will get better soon.

When I do muster up the strength to listen to a talk-show podcast — no offense, but I hate them. They don’t insert chapters into their three-hour long episodes. Apps are supporting chapters now, so I wish more creators took advantage of this.

Hot Pod: How can the podcast industry do better on accessibility?

Kingett: It’s so basic, but it’s the biggest problem. Make sure your websites are accessible to screen readers. Make it wicked easy to find your subscribe links. Provide clear show notes. Also, provide transcripts — not only do transcripts help people who are deaf enjoy your show, but it makes it really easy for reviewers to quote things you’ve said. Also, have accessible press kits. Accessible press pages. You will have blind journalists reviewing your shows someday. Make it as easy for them as possible to do so. Label your images when including them in your .zip file, for example. Be clear about what this high-resolution image is. Again, all of this is basic stuff, but the web and app accessibility is a rarity. Transcripts are getting better, but basic web and app accessibility isn’t catching on. I don’t know why.

Hot Pod: If you could alter how podcasting works, what would you change?

Kingett: Honestly, and maybe this is because I’m such a huge audiobook listener, but podcasts seem to be completely confused on how to market themselves to audiobook listeners. I don’t get it. They are billing themselves as different from audiobooks when, in reality, if they used more audiobook-friendly language, maybe people would try it more, especially older people. It’s free, but still, so many people would rather buy an audiobook because they tell me that a podcast is way too complicated for them to try. But podcast creators and otherwise seem to have no clue how to approach audiobook fans. That’s a huge untapped market.

And, in a way, they are right. This podcast link, for example, will only work in that podcast app, which makes sense to us, but an audiobook listener can download an audiobook on any device they want. Google Podcasts is doing something great with their website. Make it as easy as possible for cross-platform support and it will be easy to share.

Personally, I’d like the industry to take more written prose and turn it into audio. Modern Love [the podcast version of the New York Times column] is great! I wish more Modern Love–type podcasts existed, because, there are tons of people who can’t write scripts, but who can write killer prose.

I’d actually love it if people would sell their podcasts on audio CDs or as one huge audio file. I know this seems counter to what podcasts are, but people still listen to CDs in their DVD players. Have episodes as separate tracks with no advertising. It would be a really easy way to gift people a new kind of audiobook, for example. It may not sell rapidly, and I know it sounds like I’m trying to go backwards, but you could reach a new market that way, especially with commercials taken out. I’d like to see podcasters release seasons as audio CDs with special packaging, higher audio quality, and neat art! This way, I can gift my audiobook buddies something for Christmas!

You can support Robert W. Kingett’s writing on Patreon or visit his website.

Tracking

• Shoutout to all the political and daily news podcast producers out there who worked overtime this weekend. Your contributions will be downloaded.
• Stitcher announced its spring slate last week, which includes a new season of Headlong, LeVar Burton Reads, and Bad With Money, among others. A second season of the company’s podcast collaboration with Marvel, Wolverine: The Lost Trail, is also forthcoming. (First episode here.) Additionally, Stitcher is continuing its Stitcher Premium exclusives pipeline; one upcoming project is The Wokest, from comedian-writer-director Edgar Momplaisir. Full release here.
• From Digiday, reporting on Advertising Week Europe: “Podcast, rather than voice opportunities, sparked the most interest from advertisers at the event…but podcast advertising is still a new enough medium to encourage advertiser investment without much proof of a return on investment.”
• From the U.K.’s Press Gazette: “Regional publishers team up to develop local news podcasts backed by Google money.”
• Over at the Inside Podcasting newsletter, Skye Pillsbury got her hands on a demographic breakdown of Luminary’s upcoming portfolio. On a related note: If you listen closely, you can start hearing Luminary host-read ads on certain podcasts. Keep an ear out.
• Meanwhile, Slate has published a deep, deep dive into The Joe Rogan Experience, courtesy of Justin Peters: “Joe Rogan’s Galaxy Brain: How the former Fear Factor host’s podcast became an essential platform for ‘freethinkers’ who hate the left.”
• On a related note, Westwood One has picked up The Jordan Peterson Podcast.
• Sarah Larson’s latest at The New Yorker: “‘Case Closed,’ Reviewed: Do We Really Want a True-Crime Podcast with Answers?”

Illustration based on the gluttony portion of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting “The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things.” (Though some scholars think it was painted by a Bosch discipulo.)

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/03/spotify-is-still-hungry-for-podcast-companies-gobbling-up-parcast/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/03/the-great-british-brush-off-the-bbc-and-google-are-fighting-over-who-gets-to-control-the-podcast-experience/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/03/the-great-british-brush-off-the-bbc-and-google-are-fighting-over-who-gets-to-control-the-podcast-experience/#respond Tue, 26 Mar 2019 15:16:38 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=170026 The BBC has pulled its podcasts from parts of the Google Podcasts ecosystem, meaning that the People’s Programming is no longer accessible via Google Assistant on Google smart speakers and devices. In a blog post published this morning, Kieran Clifton, the BBC’s director of distribution and business development, explained the move thusly:

Last year, Google launched its own podcast app for Android users — they’ve also said they will launch a browser version for computers soon. Google has since begun to direct people who search for a BBC podcast into its own podcast service, rather than BBC Sounds or other third party services, which reduces people’s choice — an approach that the BBC is not comfortable with and has consistently expressed strong concerns about. We asked them to exclude the BBC from this specific feature but they have refused.

This refers to the integration of the Google Podcasts app with Google search and the rest of the Google ecosystem. Since Google’s much-publicized re-entry into podcasting last year, it’s been the case that when you search for a show using Google, you get a “recent episodes” component to your search results with play buttons beside each one that uses the architecture of the Google Podcasts app. As Podnews noted in its early reporting on this story, the BBC is now using robots.txt on its podcast server to prevent Google indexing any episodes published after March 19 in this way. You could read this as a classic publisher-platform dispute: The BBC now considers Google a competing distributor, one that uses its search dominance to push users towards their own podcast product. (I mean, welcome to the internet, I guess?).

For background on this, we should look at the rules that govern how the BBC distributes its content. Clifton references the BBC’s Distribution Policy, which doesn’t address this topic directly but sets out the conditions under which the BBC allows its output to be made available on other companies’ platforms. The broad headings are: prominence, editorial control, branding/attribution, quality, data, free access, and value for money. This policy appears to agree with the BBC’s regulator, Ofcom, the body which scrutinises the BBC’s operations to make sure all is as it should be.

Given that the BBC is funded by the public through the license fee — read my explainer on how that works here — how the corporation creates and distributes content is constantly monitored to make sure that it’s providing value for money while being as accessible and representative a broadcasting service as possible. In light of this public remit, it’s a big deal for the organization to pull a substantial part of its audio output from a platform as huge and widely used as Google.

But just how big a deal is it, though? Smart speakers (and audio distributed via Google Podcasts) are a small segment of the audio market so far, but Google Podcasts is now preinstalled on many Android phones, giving the platform vast theoretical reach. Ofcom will no doubt be looking into this decision in detail, and for what it’s worth, its guidelines do allow for the BBC to stop working with a third-party platform in cases where there is “an objective justification” for doing so. “Objective justification,” of course, is where the rub lies.

Meanwhile, there’s another strand to this: the BBC Sounds strategy. As I’ve covered extensively over the past few months, the BBC’s bespoke audio app — their biggest product launch in a decade — has had a somewhat rocky start since its launch in autumn 2018, with mixed reviews and experiments with show exclusivity that proved unpopular with some listeners. But the BBC has consistently doubled down on the app’s benefits, putting out statements about how “the response to BBC Sounds has been overwhelmingly positive.” Essentially, the BBC seems to believe it’s worth more to try to move podcast listeners into its own app than to reach them on whatever platform they currently use. For what it’s worth, Chris Kimber, a BBC product manager working on BBC Sounds, tweeted that the removal of BBC shows from Google was “unrelated to any exclusivity trial,” which makes sense — this is a more fundamental issue of how the BBC interacts with third parties over its own app.

Just to clear up some inaccuracies in that article: (1) Google are not merely linking out to content (2) licence fee income was 3.8b not 5b (3) Sounds is available outside the UK via web (4) this is unrelated to any exclusivity trial

— Chris Kimber (@chriskimber) March 25, 2019

The part I think is particularly relevant to this matter with Google first emerged in an interview that BBC Sounds launch director Charlotte Lock gave about the negative audience reaction to the Fortunately… with Fi and Jane podcast going temporarily Sounds-exclusive back in January. Lock made the point that when listeners consume BBC audio content through the BBC Sounds app, rather than via RSS feed on a third-party platform, the BBC is able to capture more audience data. She spun this as a positive for listeners, because it enables the BBC to offer better “tailored recommendations,” although at the time I was a bit skeptical that “a corporation wants more data about you” was going to be a strong motivator for listeners to use the app.

This line of argument has now been applied to this Google dispute. The key section:

We also want to make our programmes and services as good as they can possibly be — this means us getting hold of meaningful audience data. This helps us do a number of things; make more types of programmes we know people like, make our services even more personalised and relevant to people using them, and equally importantly, identify gaps in our commissioning to ensure we’re making something for all audiences.

My reading of this situation is therefore as follows: The BBC wants Google to direct listeners straight to BBC Sounds (which has a web version which is accessible internationally; the app is U.K.-only), rather than prioritizing the fact that they can play the shows through Google search or on other Google platforms. Google, unsurprisingly, refused to make this substantial exception to its own business model. As a result, the BBC deployed robots.txt and is now presenting this move as a beneficial one for listeners, who will give the BBC more data by using Sounds instead, thus influencing the long-term direction of BBC audio content. Clifton’s blog even describes the BBC’s actions as having been taken “for the good of listeners.” “For the good of BBC Sounds, internally thought to be good for listeners” might be more accurate.

Unfortunately, I don’t think this reasoning quite stacks up. It’s logical enough for the BBC, which is desperate to make BBC Sounds work after all the resources and effort that’s been poured into it. But I think the benefits are more on its side than on listeners’, who now have fewer outlets where they can access BBC material. The BBC’s gamble is that listeners love their content enough to follow it to the Sounds app, but I’d guess that a reasonable proportion — especially those who do the bulk of their listening on a Google Home for accessibility reasons, say, or through Android Auto while driving — will just switch to other podcasts that are available on their platform of choice.

As a strategy, this would be fine if the BBC was a profit-making private company: You sacrifice some listeners in order to get greater value from the really loyal ones willing to use your app. But the BBC has this obligation to be as open and accessible as possible, and so far I’m not convinced that “we can do better recommendations if everyone uses BBC Sounds” trumps the necessity of distributing their audio as widely as possible — although ultimately that will be for Ofcom to adjudicate. It’s worth remembering, too, that BBC Sounds has been cited by BBC execs as a way of re-engaging younger audiences turning away from BBC radio in favor of other streaming platforms. I’ll await the regulator’s view on that with great interest too, especially since that the corporation’s failure to reach young people was a major part of Ofcom’s latest performance report for the BBC.

This wrangle between the BBC and Google is by no means over, though, and this could all still change. Clifton notes in his post that “we are in discussions with Google to try and resolve the situation and will continue to work with them to try and come to a solution that’s in the best interests of all listeners.” I can’t help feeling that this is just an early skirmish in the chess game: The BBC called a bluff and pulled their shows. Your move, Google.

This is an excerpt from this week’s Hot Pod; see the entire issue here.

Image based on “Wrestling” by Eadweard J. Muybridge.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/03/the-great-british-brush-off-the-bbc-and-google-are-fighting-over-who-gets-to-control-the-podcast-experience/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/12/newsonomics-18-lessons-for-the-news-business-from-2018/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/12/newsonomics-18-lessons-for-the-news-business-from-2018/#respond Wed, 19 Dec 2018 22:49:30 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=166396 We live in transgressive, new-Orwellian times. Fact has been subverted by forces beyond our imagination, both newly minted and old school. Truth, elusive truth, is now in the mind of the subscriber. Yes, it is subscribers, along with their digital payments, who are transforming what’s working best among news-originating companies today and laying the groundwork for the early 2020s. With 2019 nearly upon us, we can look at the year past and see a tired decade dragging to a close, with few winners, numerous strugglers, and caravans of losers.

Facebook has fallen flatter on its face, The Social Network is in danger of becoming a social disease. Google maintains its primacy, even as its CEO is called to Capitol Hill to explain how the current president’s name somehow appears when “idiot” is typed into its engine.

Greed isn’t just good in the minds of many — it’s the long-term strategy for some who’ve somehow gotten a hold of the only business framed in the First Amendment. Phone companies spend billions on “content” properties and them mark them down (and out) like Kmart bluelight specials. Press gets kicked out of the White House — for asking questions. Even the anachronistic White House Correspondents Dinner can’t break a smile. We require, at a minimum, Mencken, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe to best reflect on these idiocies of the moment, but they’re in short supply.

We also sense in all the ferment — political, social, and journalistic — something else brewing for 2020s, but we can’t yet identify it. So let’s see if we can make a little sense of the year that was.

The reader revenue revolution is real.

There’s a simple reason why we see so many double- and triple-bylined stories in The New York Times these days: lots more journalists. In 2014, the Times was still struggling, losing revenue year over year. Its newsroom numbered 1,100, and buyouts and layoffs remained a feature of its business. Today, the Times tells me, it counts 1,500 staffers in the newsroom — up 36 percent in four years and 15 percent in the last two years. (In 2016, it reached 1,300.)

The Washington Post has had its own impressive ascent — but its newsroom peoplepower is still only about half of the Times’. Today, the Post’s growing newsroom pays 825 people, up 37 percent in two years from 600. When Jeff Bezos took over the Post, the staff had been reduced to about 500.

Both have built enviable digital subscription businesses, the Times at more than 3 million, with more than 4 million in combined digital and print. The Post is far less public about its numbers, but it passed 1.5 million digital subscribers not long ago.

And then there’s the Los Angeles Times, beginning to play catch-up after Patrick Soon-Shiong’s green-lighting of Norm Pearlstine’s hiring binge. It’s tough to put a new number on the L.A. Times, and to figure how many are new positions and how many are replacements for the numerous staffers who have left over the past couple of years. All totaled, including all those work for Times-owned pubs in L.A., the number seems to be about 540. For the Times newsroom, it’s about 480.

It’s no secret that local dailies have enjoyed far less success with digital subscription, for lots of reasons. Now, they’re trying — once again — to create sports niche subs, but they’re unlikely to match the out-of-the-box digital sub success of The Athletic. And as the year ends, the direct-to-reader, ad-free The Correspondent has once again shown us its own contrarian ways, raising $2.5 million in an accelerated crowdfunding campaign to launch a U.S. edition mid-2019.

If Mic was the end-of-year whimper, Verizon’s Oath announcement was the bang.

Verizon declared Tim Armstrong’s whole strategy worthless — taking a $4.6 billion writedown on both its AOL and Yahoo purchases. I couldn’t help but think of the 18-year-old image of AOL founder Steve Case grinning alongside a what-have-I-done Time Inc. CEO Jerry Levin. That was 2000. Nine years later, after Armstrong became AOL’s CEO, which had gotten to his own first payoff (Verizon’s buy of AOL in 2016) from poor bewildered legacy media cluelessly trying to buy a piece of the digital future — which, as usual, was already really part of the digital past by the time the deals closed. Urging his parent Verizon to buy Yahoo in 2017 was just icing on the overcooked digital cake. (Note: I mistakenly conflated Steve Case and Tim Armstrong into one person in an earlier version of this column.)

Oath, even at its height, could only claim second place in the branding malpractice department. Tronc will be hard to ever beat, even as that company has reclaimed Tribune Publishing again. Frankly, many of us are having a hard time letting go on the silly name.

Inside Oath, people have told me they’ve fared unevenly. Often left alone, they could chart their own company’s paths. But the absence of an overall strategy — how to link up these islands of both still-in-play and misfit toys — dogged Verizon’s purchase from day one.

At the end of this decade, the pipes companies — the distributors, including the old phone companies Verizon and AT&T — have survived and had money to spend, however recklessly. That money? It was ours, spent on paying for what’s coming out of the pipes. That massive cash flow, from our Internet-connected wallets and phones, fueled these nonsensical buys. And in the end, that strands even more journalists on uncertain ground.

The reversal of national news fortune looks increasingly complete.

Recall a headline from 2011: “The Huffington Post Passes The New York Times in Traffic.” Of course, “traffic” meant “monthly unique visitors” there, and the years since have finally almost killed that trick; the industry now understands more deeply the fact that digital news reading is about engagement, not the near-infinity of units (and bots, Macedonian or otherwise) that saw a single pageview blow by in the past 30 days.

It’s the legacy news sources — led by the Times, the Post, and CNN — that have both transformed their businesses to digital. At the same time, it’s those news companies which have steadfastly stayed on the biggest political and public affairs story of this generation, the Trump presidency. That’s not a coincidence.

BuzzFeed, Vox Media, and Vice — all still contributing significantly to the national discourse, each quite differently — are all looking for new futures. You can’t name a more high-flying dotcom news CEO than BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti, and he’s talking about being “open to M&A.” NBC has poured $600 million into BuzzFeed and Vox Media collectively. Given the recession-is-coming, batten-down-the-hatches consensus in many C suites, don’t expect any doubling down on that investment.

BuzzFeed is among those now moving more quickly towards…reader revenue. Yes, it’s all but certified conventional wisdom that the top two winners in the digital ad game are impossible to beat, or even take appreciable market share away from. The Google/Facebook duopoly has ended dreams of “overtaking The New York Times” or “winning a generation of Millennials,” as Mic had once proclaimed.

After pivoting from text to video (but not apparently enough towards its readers/viewers/customers), it could only fetch a $5 million say-goodbye payment once a Facebook video deal fell apart. Put the buyer, Bustle Media’s Bryan Goldberg, on your 2019 watchlist. We’ll see what he does with the Mic brand — and with Gawker, slated for relaunch next year. Having bought at firesale prices, can he find new value in this Internet age?

And then there’s HuffPost itself. Reimagined by editor Lydia Polgreen, it now must find itself again, within or without the Oath structure.

A Gannett/Tribune combo may re-appear in 2019.

No laughing, Tronc watchers. The battle that consumed 2016 may find a second act in 2019. With the McClatchy buy of Tribune looking kaput, a new round of mating dances has already begun, I’m told.

Gannett could buy Tribune — or vice versa. A merger would mean consolidation, which would mean lowered costs, which is the name of the game. Gannett is three times larger than Tribune in revenues; Tribune’s balance sheet is even more pristine (thanks to Soon-Shiong’s cash deal for the L.A. Times) than Gannett’s good one.

What could hold it up? Those two nemeses: Gannett CEO Bob Dickey and former Tronc chairman Michael Ferro, who just nixed the McClatchy buy. Dickey has just announced his retirement, and it’s unusual for a company to pull off a big deal with a lame duck in charge.

Then there’s Ferro himself, the big thorn in the last deal. Tribune CEO Justin Dearborn would probably try to keep Ferro away from the deal, especially as it includes talks with Gannett chair John Jeffry Louis, whom Ferro had harsh words for two years ago. But that won’t be easy.

Gannett’s next CEO won’t be one of the usual suspects.

Dickey never recovered from that maladroit failed effort to buy Tribune/Tronc. Even more, though, Gannett’s board now understands — sound familiar? — that it needs to get more digital more quickly.

The company has begun a national search. As Dickey departs, Gannett’s thin bench stands out. The biggest U.S. news company has few if any internal prospects. Sharon Rowland, Dickey’s corporate business head, is seen as the only possible inside candidate — and since she wasn’t named with Dickey’s announcement, her chances to ascend seem less than 50-50.

Don’t expect Alden Global Capital to sell anytime soon.

Remember the spring peak of the Alden fury? In March, it axed a third of its Denver Post staff and set off protests around the city, reigniting (briefly, once again) national recognition of the news desert enlargement.

Civic cries of “sell!” went unheeded, and largely unacknowledged.

I was able to describe in detail the outrageous profits that Alden was able to continue taking out of the Post and all the Digital First Media “properties.” Which answered the question, however dis-satisfyingly: Why would these guys ever sell?

Spin forward to today and the answer, those in and around the company tell me, isn’t much different. In fact, Alden president Heath Freeman has recently noted some interest in buying other chains. His rationale is quite understandable: He’s optimized his cost-cutting enough to keep profits flowing smoothly, pushing only a tenth of his subscribers a year to cancel. He believes he could “optimize” other chains and, to their dying moments, extract higher returns.

At year’s end, Digital First Media is losing its most outspoken editor: Mercury News executive editor Neil Chase departs to head up CALMatters, the three-year-old public policy statewide org modeled on The Texas Tribune. As he leaves, he salutes his Merc staff: “I’m very proud of what we accomplished in my time here,” he told me Tuesday. “We — not just me, the whole team — transformed The Mercury News and East Bay Times into what they need to be right now. We went from being defined by print sensibilities and deadlines and tools and thinking to being a true digital newsroom, focused on building the online readership that’s essential to our survival. And we did it amid budget challenges and staff cuts, delivering important coverage (punctuated by the 2017 Pulitzer Prize) and amazing features and the kinds of stories that have meaningful impact. The people in this newsroom really care, and it shows in the work they do.”

In forum after forum this year, Chase had noted matter-of-factly that he worked for a venal Wall Street investment company that made no bones about its singular interest — maximizing profit. For instance: “I can’t fault them for not investing in community journalism. But if they don’t want to, someone else should…Democracy can’t succeed without a free press.” He said it often, but with a small smile and without seeming angry. And, as he has pointed out, Alden didn’t even care, as long as he managed to keep the profit-producing presses running.

The hedge fund virus of newspaper ownership isn’t confined to North America.

After contributing to the demise of Canada’s major regional dailies, GoldenTree Asset Management took control of 172-year-old Johnston Press in the U.K. last month. Johnston publishes the “i” national newspaper and 200 other titles. As a bondholder, along with two other U.S. hedge funds — Carval Investors and Benefit Street — GoldenTree took the asset when Johnston couldn’t find a buyer in Britain’s beleaguered newspaper market.

That market has gotten so bad, that the BBC is now sharing its license fee proceeds in any effort to revive local news reporting. (Similarly, a new effort to boost the regional press in Canada is gaining traction.)

What’s GoldenTree’s Canadian legacy? Consider the “tawdry fall” of its Postmedia, or how Canada’s competition watchdog decried its job-cutting, title-closing ways.

Clearly, the native English-speaking world is in a heap of journalism trouble. Of course, that’s in part just a symptom of the wider times. Listen in to The New Yorker Radio Hour’s recent depiction of sad Brexit. On it, Rebecca Mead, one of the magazine’s London-based staff, offered this pithy observation: “The difference between Britain and America now is one of depression and psychosis.”

The ownership of American dailies may make less difference to the actual staffing of their newsrooms than we’d like to believe.

It’s now a familiar morality play. We have the venal Heath Freeman of Alden, bête noire to the interests of community journalism and journalists, on the one hand, and the family owners, best symbolized by the McClatchys of Sacramento, on the other.

Indeed, their motives may be worlds apart. And yet as journalists, we have to see the world for what it is. And that lies in strong part in the number of journalists newspaper companies now pay.

In my column this week on McClatchy’s apparent failed effort to buy Tribune Publishing, I noted that the company now pays fewer than 900 journalists, including its Washington bureau and design center staff. One alert reader did the quick math: “That’s an average of just under 30 per paper, which would be astounding.”

It’s good to still maintain a capacity for astonishment.

The deeper truth is that for those owners tied to the strictures of short-term profit (or break-even, in some cases), the pressures to cut newsroom staffing are near-universal. Alden’s DFM and McClatchy, along with the rest of the chains and many other owners, all continue to cut.

That’s doubly structural: The deepening spiral of (a) universal print decline and (b) short-term-oriented ownership that can’t do anything other than manage that decline.

Consequently, moving into 2019, we see two parallel but wildly uneven trends. There’s the Soon-Shiong buy-and-long-term-strategic-reinvestment camp, which is small enough to meet in a large closet. (Soon-Shiong likes talking in 100-year increments.) Then there’s the single driving motive of increasingly chained-up industry: consolidate, consolidate, consolidate. That’s a cost-savings strategy that doesn’t do much for growth. So the newsroom numbers only move in one direction.

The age of NINO is upon us.

Penny Abernathy’s ground-assessing research has given us “news deserts” and now, in her latest report, “ghost newspapers.” Both are highly descriptive. This year, I added NINO to that vocabulary: Newspapers In Name Only.

NINO has become my best reply to the hundreds (thousands?) of times over the years I have been asked the question: Will there be a day when we don’t have print newspapers? The smarter daily publishers still try to maintain a useful and intelligent print product for their remaining subscribers who are (over)paying. But travel the country and see how much those few remaining printed pages are filled with little and old and wire content. You’ll see quickly that, while they are still being printed, they are shadows of what previous generations got from their dailies. They’re newspapers in name only.

An uncountable number of highly motivated, talented journalists are ready to jump back into the fray — if only they can be paid.

Ethereum and blockchain have proved to be a sideshow, at least for now, as journalism faces the 2020s. Civil Media generated tweetstorm upon tweetstorm. And yet amid it all, dozens of journalists, even if paid uncertainly in dollars and coin, put together impressive sites — from the Colorado Sun and Block Club Chicago to Sludge and Popula. All totaled, roughly 100 journalists got some funding to their work through Civil. As the work of all those involved in INN and LION and in projects from Report for America projects continues to prove: If you pay them, they will report.

We’re ready to cast the next Hollywood blockbuster inspired by American journalism.

“Levinsohn represented by Harder! Secret tapes! Someone option the movie rights to this thing!” tweeted Alley CEO Austin Smith, as NPR’s David Folkenflik reported Michael Ferro’s further descent, “Tribune, Tronc And Beyond: A Slur, A Secret Payout And A Looming Sale.”

Maybe it is time, after the perhaps too-inspirational Spotlight and The Post. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet had any inquiries to option the Newsonomics Tronc/Ferro motherlode, but hope springs eternal. [We’d have to work out a revenue split, Ken. —Ed.]

In the midst of Mr. Ferro’s War to keep his company “independent” (still seems like a wrong use of that word), I once suggested that Christian Bale (the Christian Bale of American Hustle that is) play Ferro. Perhaps we need to go more malevolent (Malkovich?) at this point, given the further allegations of sexual harassment and anti-Semitism. Comments are open.

Business (magazines) have moved (far) east.

When Chatchaval Jiaravanon bought Fortune for $150 million in November, it reminded us much of the business news market has moved to Asian buyers. Just four months earlier, Tokyo-based Uzabase paid $75 million or more for Atlantic Media’s Quartz. That followed Nikkei’s surprise purchase of the Financial Times in 2015. That was preceded by what became a tortured sale of Forbes to “Asian tycoons” in 2014, and ended in a 2017 settlement. (And Forbes’ new ownership has raised the big questions — again surfacing on Capitol Hill in the Google hearings last week — about how the Chinese government mandates in press censorship.)

Why the move east? There’s no one reason, of course, but there are several truisms. Economic growth has shifted to Asia, and the rising class of those involved in it (or who would like to be) are great audiences for the business press. In the U.S., the traditional magazine business has flagged more quickly than even Europe. That digital transformation continues to overwhelm that industry. Time Inc. sold to Meredith and sliced up. Then, just this month, Condé Nast got ready to dispatch its CEO Bob Sauerberg. The reason: insufficient progress toward a digital future.

The relatively few magazines that are finding a future are thought-provoking, reader-supported ones.

The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and Wired are among those that are making the digital subscriber transition. Each offers audiences a unique set of voices and reporting. Each, arguably, has risen to our times. It’s the shelter, fashion, travel, and lifestyle magazines — beset by unlimited free digital competition — that suffer, slim, and shutter.

The lesson, again, and again: Unique voices supported by subscribers point a way forward.

Public media seems to be at a familiar crossroads.

Can public media fill the yawning vacuum of local and regional news? That question’s been on the table for almost a decade. Too many of the U.S.’s hundreds of public radio stations still act mostly as pass-throughs for national NPR programming, offering scant original reporting of their own.

Certainly, the largest public radio stations — from WBUR, WNYC, and WAMU to KPCC, KQED, and OPB — have stepped up. But that’s mainly a metro area response. We do see networked improvements, as with the public radio’s Collaborative Journalism Network and Here & Now’s innovative use of regional correspondents. But it’s not nearly enough.

Public radio news directors’ Super Regional events continue to focus on the question, with solutions so far being more piecemeal than nationally strategic.

Into this landscape, as the new head of NPR News, walks Nancy Barnes, previously the respected top editor at the Houston Chronicle and Minneapolis’ Star Tribune. Barnes replaces the #MeToo’d Michael Oreskes (who’s found new work, it seems) after another “interim” year for NPR’s 400 journalists. She brings lots of experience from newspaper companies’ own efforts to harness both the full power of local and national. She will face the familiar and tough-to-change public radio culture, though. With CEO Jarl Mohn now stepping down, more flux is ahead — flux listeners would like to see turned into more local news.

Podcasting — and the newsy podcast — is now mainstream.

Seventy-three million Americans — 26 percent of the population — listen to podcasts at least monthly, according to Edison Research. Also important, podcast listening now matches up demographically with the U.S. population. It’s a great market: Younger women love podcasts.

Just this fall, The Washington Post, having studied the Times’ breakout The Daily success, launched Post Reports.

None of this is brand new, and the Lab’s Nick Quah has covered it in all its fits and starts expertly. What is interesting is that it all seems like prologue.

Smart-speaker penetration approaches 50 percent. The voice age is almost upon us. But there’s at least one rub: News companies aren’t ready for it. Talk to the good folks behind Alexa, Google Home, and Siri, and they’ll point to the lack of news company innovation in the field. Maybe this will change in 2019 — a new distribution pipe with new ad potential.

The news isn’t just the news anymore.

Recall the days of LIFO — last in, first out? That’s how news publishers shoveled their news onto to the web, and then smartphones. In fact, too many still do, relying on cheap-to-present automated mobile phone technology. That’s why you often get the latest non-happening out of the local Planning Commission at the top of your local newspaper feed on your phone.

Check out the Times or the Post these days, though, and it is a different world. Stories of greatest import can sometimes stay atop phone screens for much of the day. And the rank order of stories isn’t based at all chronology — with real breaking news of importance elevated to the top, of course — but again on perceived (and data-measured) reader interest and news value.

The phone particularly — now the origin of two-thirds or more of news reading minutes — hasn’t just changed news presentation. It’s changed news judgment itself. Put another way, and not just by the president’s supporters: Have these “papers” inevitably been politicized?

Regional news cooperation initiatives could be a new future, or just an intriguing interim.

As core daily newspaper reporting has so badly eroded, many smaller niche news operations have surfaced, filling gaps here and there.

In 2018, we saw them tested in several regions. The Democracy Fund backed the North Carolina Local News Lab Fund. In Philly, Lenfest money continues to push together regional reporting projects, through the Philadelphia Solutions Journalism Project.

Meanwhile, Bay Area-based Reveal’s own expanding Local Labs initiative finds novel ways to share both investigative chops and audio storytelling, pushing forward stronger regional media.

“We’ve gotten San Jose and New Orleans off the ground,” Reveal CEO Christa Scharfenberg told me last week. “We’re hiring a collabs manager shortly and will then launch the process to select two more cities. Based on outcomes from these first four cities — and learning from our earlier experiments in NJ, Mississippi, Oklahoma, etc. — the plan is to build a network of labs across the country that does three things: 1) increases the capacity for and volume of local investigative reporting, 2) gives us a pipeline of local investigations to bring up to the national Reveal platform, and 3) provides us with a network to tap into for localization of our national investigations.’

These fledgling efforts show that sum of often-smaller efforts can maximize impact. Are they smart Band-Aids or a wave of the future?

A president without boundaries and an Internet without boundaries have run headlong into each other.

Meanwhile, a press weakened in number but emboldened in spirit increasingly questions those uncertain frontiers — often finding itself ensnared in No-Man’s Land.

If this year has almost seemed too much, let’s recall a little wisdom from Dr. Seuss: “Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.”

2018 cards by Niklas Rimmler used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/12/newsonomics-18-lessons-for-the-news-business-from-2018/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/12/a-year-in-apples-podcast-analytics-have-been-an-evolution-not-a-revolution/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/12/a-year-in-apples-podcast-analytics-have-been-an-evolution-not-a-revolution/#respond Tue, 04 Dec 2018 17:00:01 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=165492 Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 188, published December 4, 2018.

Apple’s analytics: One year later. Seventeen months ago, at its annual developer conference WWDC, Apple announced that it would finally be launching something many in the podcast industry had desired for a long time: better podcast analytics. Or, more accurately, better audience analytics from the historically impartial steward of the podcast ecosystem that’s still believed to facilitate the majority of all podcast listening. (For now, anyway.)

“It may look obscure,” tweeted Gimlet’s Matt Lieber at the time, “But this is the biggest thing to happen to the podcast business since Serial first went nuclear.”

Apple’s new in-episode analytics rolled out that December, six months after the initial announcement. At multiple points during those opening months, I tried to report on how the new data was impacting the podcast business. But those early inquiries were premature and produced nothing particularly useful. A really smart person would later advise me that these things, like culture shifts, take time, and I’d be better off waiting a year.

So. It’s been almost 12 full months. Did Apple’s new analytics fundamentally change anything for publishers and the podcast business? After checking in with over a dozen sources throughout various corners of the podcast ecosystem, there seems to be a general consensus around the answer: No, not really. But it has brought some positives.

Let’s pause and recall why we’re here for a second. The narrative of the podcast business has long been defined by its crude analytics, relative to other digital media channels. Podcast advertising campaigns are still bought and sold on the basis of the download, a rudimentary metric that more effectively conveys whether an episode has been shipped off to a consumer’s listening app rather than whether that consumer actually heard the episode — and therefore the ad. Compared to the broader digital media environment — where audience behavior is measurable to the nanosecond and where close user targeting is table stakes for advertisers — the podcast analytics universe is virtually prehistoric. (Nevermind, of course, the prevalence of ad fraud, the Google–Facebook–Amazon digital advertising oligopoly, and the undermining of user privacy that afflicts the broader modern digital media environment. Modernity remains desired, with all its attendant tumors.)

That prehistoric perception is a precarious problem, because the industry (broadly speaking) covets brand advertising dollars, which promise greater growth (bigger amounts), stability (longer campaigns), and, in theory, power. (Growth + stability = more capacity to impose will, probably?)

Nowadays, brand advertisers are thought to be accustomed to the taste of granular analytics to measure campaign effectiveness, and conventional wisdom argues that they probably won’t fully commit advertising dollars to podcasting unless publishers can provide them similar levels of measurement granularity — or, at the very least, something markedly better than the rudimentary analytics universe they have now.

The premise and promise of Apple Podcasts’ upgraded analytics, therefore, was a straightforward one: It could take the podcast ecosystem a step closer towards an analytics universe that can engender the same kind of advertiser confidence as any other digital media channel — thus increasing the possibility of brand advertisers meaningfully committing more podcasting dollars.

Of course, there were concerns. Some worried the new analytics would reveal podcast consumption to be less engaged than previously thought, or that it would trigger an apocalyptic, CPM-cratering scenario. Others thought the new data’s revelations would cause considerable shakeups or resizing in the podcast industry, as some publishers learned they weren’t as big and healthy as they thought they were. Others still, like Edison’s Tom Webster, posited that Apple’s new podcast analytics could create a feedback loop in which publishers are more motivated to play towards Apple’s platform, thus further narrowing the community’s focus on the finite world of Apple users — what he called “the optimization trap.” Meanwhile, direct-response advertisers, whose dollars have historically helped grown the podcast ecosystem without granular analytics, began expressing concerns about having to compete with brand advertising dollars in the future. (A totally understandable position.)

When the new analytics layer finally rolled out last December, the feature was described as in beta. And what it offered seemed incremental but nonetheless helpful: Publishers could now see aggregate in-episode listening analytics, which meant that they could now know whether anybody made it to that third midroll or the late-game twist in the narrative. Put it another way: The podcast episode, as distributed through Apple Podcasts, was no longer a “black box.” (User data was kept anonymized, true to Apple’s practices.) During those early months, the general response seemed largely hopeful.

As the months rolled on, those initial concerns…didn’t come to pass. Podcast consumption turned out to be as engaged as everyone thought they would be. CPM rates didn’t crater, suggesting that this particular version of the apocalypse isn’t nigh (for now, at least). There were eye-catching shakeups in various corners of the community, but the impacts felt localized, and while the new analytics may have played some direct role in those shifts, they were more likely the results of broader trends. It remains unclear if Webster’s optimization trap ensnared any significant chunk of publishers, but whatever the case, the Apple Podcasts platform continues to be gamed in other ways. Meanwhile, direct-response advertisers are still expressing concerns about having to compete with brand dollars, most recently at the last IAB Podcast Upfronts, according to this Digiday writeup.

But 12 months in, the legacy and impact of Apple’s new analytics is still very much a work in progress: trending positive, but complicated. The data has certainly proved useful, helping some publishers to better understand things like unlistened downloads, ad skipping, and episode retention rates. But based on the exchanges I’ve had, the general feeling seems to be that the data hasn’t fundamentally changed podcasting’s prehistoric perception among advertisers. Many argued that as long as the podcast business remains pegged to the download, trouble is afoot.

This isn’t to say that publishers weren’t able to secure more brand advertisers over the past year. (As many were quick to assure me.) Rather, some sources argue that until measurement actually shifts away from the download, the podcast ecosystem will never structurally unlock brand advertising dollars. One argued the nature of the problem has only worsened over the past year, given the increase in participation from competing platforms — Google, Pandora, iHeart, Spotify, and so on — that could, with their respective user bases and expertise in data and targeting, potentially end up assuming gatekeeper control between brand advertisers and podcast publishers, should any of them gain real traction against Apple.

Some argued that things can only really change if the industry is able to successfully shift its analytics paradigm towards a “true” listening metric — that is, a universe in which publishers can sell advertising based on actual consumption, not episode delivery. And while there is some optimism around NPR’s Remote Audio Data (RAD) initiative (which, I’m told, might finally be widely deployed in the coming months), the prevailing suspicion is the publisher-led shift won’t come quickly enough. “We’re still pretty far from where we need to be,” one podcasting executive told me.

We remain in the universe of downloads, though, and while we’re here: Most people I spoke with believe that the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s podcast measurement standards were a lot more influential over the past year than the new Apple analytics. “IAB V2 created a more even playing field,” National Public Media’s Bryan Moffett told me. “There’s a common definition of a download, and we can all speak the same language.” There continues to be some debate over the nuances of the standards, but the podcast industry appears to have broadly aligned with the IAB on download measurements, so at least that hurdle seems to have been cleared. (Previously, the concern was the lack of apples-to-apples comparison between how different companies counted downloads.)

Still, as mentioned, there were some concrete ways in which Apple’s in-episode analytics have helped publishers. For one thing, the new data allowed teams to better capture, understand, and convey listener engagement, and that contribution shouldn’t be downplayed. “I think the greatest benefit is knowing that the vast majority of people aren’t skipping the ads on our shows — especially when the hosts do a really engaging job with their reads,” said Alyssa Martino, Macmillan’s associate director of podcasts. “It’s hard to connect that specifically to spends, since our shows sell well, but it’s great to have the data now to back up what we’ve known and said anecdotally for years.”

The new data also helped some publishers to build and improve new advertising products. Dave Shaw, the executive producer of podcasts at Politico, told me that they’ve successfully sold postroll ad slots on the Politico Playbook Audio Briefing after being able to show that listeners stick around to the end. Anna Phelan, the editorial program manager at TED, said the new analytics have helped them evaluate some longer ad experiences that they’ve been integrating into WorkLife with Adam Grant. “We didn’t know how listeners would respond to the length or content, but we felt confident enough in the appeal of the content to take the risk,” Phelan said. “The high consumption rates that we saw, with almost no drop-off during the ad break, reassured us that the approach resonates with our audience and gives us permission to continue to develop other formats in this style.”

There is another way in which Apple’s in-episode analytics unambiguously proved useful — as editorial data. Almost every publisher I contacted talked about how they’ve been able to learn about episodes and experiments that worked (and didn’t), and how the data has helped them feel more confident when shifting around resources or making structural adjustments to shows (cutting or expanding publishing schedules, shortening or lengthening episodes).

Those editorial benefits are important, but ultimately, they’re secondary to our advertising concerns here. And on that front, a good deal (though not all) of the sources I spoke with generally want more from Apple. Some expressed frustration over what feels like slow product iteration on the part of Apple’s new analytics dashboard. “I know it’s still supposed to be a beta, but let’s go already!” one executive told me. Several want Apple to make more data available through an API, so publishers can more effectively integrate listening data — which, despite Apple’s dominance, only represent one chunk of a show’s overall audience at the end of the day — into their central measurement dashboards, thus helping them paint better pictures of their audiences for advertisers to peruse.

There is still, it seems, a long way to go. One year after being rolled out, its impacts seem to be somewhat muted — or, at least, nowhere near as revolutionary as many had hoped. As such, there’s a certain sameness between the way this year is ending and the way it began. Maybe these things take longer than a year — or maybe those changes need to take different shapes. In any case, if there is to be some revolution, it isn’t quite here yet.

In the meantime, the podcast industry will continue to grow in the way that it’s always been growing.

BBC podcasting in 2018 [by Caroline Crampton]. I think of the BBC as a huge, old-fashioned ocean liner. The analogy works a few ways. The ship is beautifully made, and it makes going somewhere really worthwhile — but the journey itself can get a bit rough sometimes. Across the sprawling structure, there are so many different teams on different decks doing different things that they don’t always necessarily know what everyone else above and below is doing. It’s big, and as such, it can be a violent force of momentum and inertia. Even after a decision to change course has been made, the ship will travel quite a lot further in the prior direction before it turns.

It’s this last aspect that I’ve been most conscious of in 2018. Until the spring of last year, the corporation’s involvement in podcasting was largely hands-off, with radio shows repackaged for download and a very small number of original podcast-first commissions that were tied closely to existing formats. Then a shift began, with some new shows appearing that attempted to do something different compared to its existing radio output, such as the drama box set Tracks and the pop culture deep dive series Unpopped.

Part of this shift came from an increasing recognition internally that younger U.K. listeners were choosing to go elsewhere for their audio content — to Apple Music and Spotify, and to the feeds of independent podcasts like My Dad Wrote a Porno and The Receipts. The regulator Ofcom ruled this year in its annual report that the BBC must do “more and more quickly” to reach these audiences if the corporation is to keep up its remit as a national public service broadcaster. The ship was turning, slowly.

Then, all of a sudden, everything seemed to speed up. In March, it was announced that the BBC had appointed its first commissioner for podcasts, Jason Phipps. He started work in May, and over the next few months, we saw more evidence of this internal shift towards more original podcasting. I’ve written a lot about it since I started with Hot Pod in September; from the youth-focused Xtrachat showcase feed to this new political podcast from Scotland, there’s been a lot to say.

The biggest moment for the BBC in 2018 was the launch of the BBC Sounds app at the end of  October. It had been in beta since late June, with mixed reviews from those trying to use it and reports of internal confusion over its mission. Was it an attempt to make an alternative podcatcher, which indexed non-BBC podcasts as a way of luring listeners away from their current tech, or a walled garden of purely BBC content, trying to offer a premium content experience like Spotify or Audible? In a move that felt inevitable for those of us who have been observing the BBC for a while now, they did something that looks a bit like both options — sort of. BBC Sounds consists almost entirely of BBC podcasts, radio shows, playlists, and archive material, with a very small number of independent shows in there too (I could find six, let me know if you can see more). I’m unclear of the long-term rationale behind this hybrid model, but execs seem bullish about the numbers so far, which of course they would.

In one sense, BBC Sounds has been a success already, because it’s given the BBC a way to properly talk about podcasting. A consistent message has been rolled out across all stations and programmes: Presenters who never used to refer to online downloads are now routinely saying “if you want to hear more like this, try X podcast on BBC Sounds.” I remain unconvinced that it will be a silver bullet for the younger audience problem, but I do think it could help to convert some radio listeners who have never tried digital audio before into podcast listeners, which can only be a good thing.

The app itself still has a few glaring omissions to my eyes, chief among them a sharing functionality, although I’m sure that’ll be on the way at some point. I still find it difficult to find shows I know must be there, and the algorithmic recommendations are a bit…hit or miss. The same goes for the first slate of original programming. There are some really interesting and innovative ideas in there, such as the spinoff audio dramas for the TV soap Eastenders, the podcast-spoofing scripted horror serial I wrote about last week, and music documentary series Live Lounge Uncovered, which takes a popular radio session slot and goes deeper on it. Then there’s also some other stuff that I’m less convinced is worth the BBC’s time, such as the supposedly youth-orientated daily news podcast Beyond Today (that I’m still skipping in favor of the old-fashioned news bulletins on the radio), the Duvet Days interview show (which sounds a lot like the many, many other interview shows that already exist), and The Disrupters (yet another interview show focused around entrepreneurship that has yet to wow me with either its guests or approach).

Although on the surface it looks as if it’s full steam ahead for the BBC and podcasts, I’m still picking up some internal confusions. There is now a full-time podcast commissioner up at the top in Phipps, but new podcasts are also being made by existing radio stations as well as by journalists in the local and regional divisions. The messaging about where podcasts come from doesn’t always feel cohesive, and I sense the heat of internal politics and wrangling about who is getting the credit for which podcasts, rather than everyone pulling in the same direction under the same structure and focusing on the external competition instead. There are still unanswered questions about analytics, as well — I understand from various sources that producers don’t get very regular updates about how many people are actually listening to their episodes, and those they do get are on a long lag. There’s also no external verification or publication schedule for these numbers, so when an exec chooses to announce a “record month”, we have nothing to benchmark that against.

At the end of the year, it’s still no clearer to me than at the start what the BBC’s responsibilities are to the rest of the U.K. podcast market. Obviously, their entry into original programming puts them into direct competition with shows made by commercial and independent outlets, but it’s even less obvious if there should be any controls on what they can and can’t make in order to prevent their state-funded advantage cutting others out of the market. I also haven’t seen the BBC use its new podcast commissions to make much meaningful headway on the issue of diversity, which was another problem point in the Ofcom annual report. The vast majority of the new shows we’ve had so far are written and/or hosted by existing BBC talent or suppliers, with all of the existing structural problems around pay and inclusion that brings.

In conclusion: The BBC is fully on board with podcasting now, which is not a phrase I thought I’d be writing back in January. This new direction is likely going to have some really positive outcomes, and a few negative ones too if the corporation doesn’t actively guard against them. There’s a lot we still don’t know.

Tracking:

• Serial’s third season was its biggest ever. The season surpassed 50 million downloads after just two months to become the show’s biggest to date — and all three seasons have brought in 420 million downloads collectively. I dug into the numbers for Vulture.
• Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg’s Pushkin Industries has signed an exclusive representation partnership with Cadence13. According to the press release, the deal was brokered by WME, and it seems that the upcoming Michael Lewis podcast, previously developed at Slate, have followed Gladwell and Weisberg to their new company.
• Voxnest, the parent organization of the hosting platform Spreaker, struck up a distribution partnership with Deezer. The move is being pitched as part of the latter’s international efforts, particularly in Latin America.
• ICYMI: Anchor launched an in-platform advertising marketplace called Anchor Sponsorships, finally giving itself a business model. I gave my analysis in last Thursday’s Insider.
• The Verge published a look at the Apple Podcast charts scam story, and there’s an incremental finding in the mix: The tech giant “monitors its international and domestic charts and relies on a combination of humans and software to detect signs of fraud. It bans shows after they’re caught attempting fraud multiple times, Apple confirmed to The Verge.”
• Just a reminder: The Washington Post’s daily news podcast, Post Reports, debuted yesterday.
• If you, like me, have been keeping an eye on the issue of podcasting and platform bans on hate speech, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard’s Cyberlaw Clinic published a nifty memo on content regulation policy for the podcasting community last week.
• On a related note: “Rep. Steve King appeared on podcast frequented by white nationalists.” (CNN)
• Exactly Right, the new podcast imprint cultivated by My Favorite Murder’s Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark in partnership with Stitcher, officially launched last week with four shows in the starting portfolio.
• Meanwhile, iHeartRadio and Funny or Die are co-producing a podcast featuring Ron Burgundy, Will Ferrell’s fictional anchorman from the wildly popular (and meme-generating) 2004 comedy known as, well, Anchorman. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but you know I’d love to find out how much iHeartRadio paid for the project. One assumes it’s quite a bit.
• Fun fact: Love+Radio has a cameo in Steve McQueen and Gillian Flynn’s Widows, which hit movie theaters last month.

Illustration by Leo Natsume used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/12/a-year-in-apples-podcast-analytics-have-been-an-evolution-not-a-revolution/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/11/35-prototypes-one-year-and-lots-learned-the-bbc-puts-its-mobile-storytelling-plan-in-action/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/11/35-prototypes-one-year-and-lots-learned-the-bbc-puts-its-mobile-storytelling-plan-in-action/#respond Wed, 28 Nov 2018 13:44:45 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=165230 Hyperlocal, summaries, perspectives, scrollable video transcript: For the past year, the BBC’s research and development team has been pursuing workable options for mobile storytelling beyond the standard 800-word article. After 35 prototypes (and lots of tapping, swiping, and creating reusable contextual information), the four-person team — including a full-time journalist — has activated at least two new formats in the BBC’s reporting, with more lined up.

We shared the findings from the first round of testing this summer — yes, in an article that was more than 800 words, you can deal with it — focused on providing news for people ages 18 to 26, an underserved group in the BBC’s audience. The BBC isn’t the only media organization looking to move beyond text; a number of outlets are focusing more on product development, with a special track at ONA this year specifically focused on building product skills. Here’s the industry context we highlighted in July:

The Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab, which operated for two years, tested an interactive podcast player, “Smarticles,” an offline news app, and live push notifications. Newsrooms like The Washington Post have been experimenting with AMP stories boosted by Google’s toolkit, similar to Snapchat or Instagram Stories. The BBC has also been working on more exchanges with its audience like in-article chat bots and improved vertical video within the app.

But there hasn’t been a ton of work on personalizing the reporting to best serve each specific reader. In the BBC’s final two experimental rounds, the R&D team focused on 1) tweaking the stories based on each reader’s information needs and 2) breaking down the news into more digestible bits, helping readers grasp the complexity of various current events. They came out with three top choices for each of those quests, but solid journalism itself — not just the fancy formats — was the most effective.

“The clear favorite prototypes were about explaining things better and showing the many different sides to stories. And I’m not sure you need new formats to do this better,” R&D lead producer Tristan Ferne wrote in his testing roundup; I followed up with him in an interview to get more detail. (The rest of the team included UX designer Thomas Mould, creative technologist Mathieu Triay, journalist Zoe Murphy, and user researcher Johanna Kollman.) But scrollable video transcripts and embeds translating a national story to your local context don’t hurt.

The first round produced four successful prototypes out of 12, and two are now in action on the BBC’s site. Expander is an in-text yellow ellipsis after a key term/event/name/etc. that pops out some more information when clicked, and Incremental is an embed segmenting the story with options for the same content via a video clip, short, or long text. Both have been testing online to positive user feedback. And by user, I mean the reader and the journalist plugging it into a story — one reporter tossed an Incremental piece at the bottom of an explainer on the Interpol elections, which Ferne said they hadn’t anticipated journalists doing in the design process. Expander is the backbone of this lovely named “really simple guide to the US mid-term elections.”

Here are Ferne’s top overall lessons from the year-long process (full details here), followed by the specific prototypes tested (successfully and unsuccessfully) in the second and third rounds.

What to remember

1. Adaptation, not personalization: “When we use [the word] personalization people [think about] about ads following them around the internet,” Ferne said. “They’d talk about shopping sites and they felt that that jarred a bit with news, so we just decided to not use the word personalization, instead adapting the stories to you and get away from those preconceptions.” He noted that users were happy to swap personal information like ZIP codes for adjusted news, as long as the designers didn’t project a risk of FOMO.
2. Mobile web, not apps: Since the team aimed to design for Generation Z and lower-income women age 28-45, two groups underserved by the BBC, they focused on designing for mobile web and text-based news instead of storage-needy apps/data plan-eating video.
3. Adapt the context, not the content: They considered experimenting with personalization by changing the way the stories were written, instead of the story selection — “we thought there might be more of a role testing writing in the journalism,” Ferne said — but ended up thinking of personalization as a way to pull in data automatically adapted to the individual user’s location or other characteristics, like with Hyperlocal (detailed below).
4. Reduce, reuse, recycle: At the end of the prototype marathon they expected to have one solidly designed and tested format, but “creating many formats was the way to go — creating quite structured formats so you could create reusable content, so it’s not a load of extra effort for journalists.”

What to try

• Hyperlocal — Imagine reading a few paragraphs about a utility increase or new police policy — and then getting a very clear “what does this mean for me” box adapted (not personalized, of course) to your local area. Depending on the story, it could scale with inserting data broadly, but Ferne raises an interesting point: “The local information is less easily automated, but could there be a role for local journalists in writing these sections for nationwide stories?”



• Summary — Understanding that many readers encountering an article may not have followed the minute details of an issue outlined in several other articles, this prototype tested journalist-written summaries or a timeline punctuated by previous push alerts (reusing work, yay!). They also attempted to adapt based on a user’s reading history, but that bothered users who might have read up on the topic on other websites.



• Headlines — Following the theme of reading comprehension in a jiffy, this prototype offers a few tapping rounds for users to dig in beyond the headline/beyond the first few paragraphs (a BBC standard)/the whole article displayed for each tap. “What if articles started as headlines” — not just clickbait — “and then you could control how much you got?” Ferne wrote.
• Simplify — A play on the Expander prototype from the previous round, Simplify swaps out jargony paragraphs for more basic language that also offers more background/depth.
• Perspectives — User favorite alert: Since the BBC already had clips of different perspectives on an issue for its broadcasts, the R&D team repackaged the clips into an Instagram Story-style (yes, everything is becoming a Story) format where users could select to listen to a victim of knife crime, a gang member, a police chief, and a DJ in the testing example. “They found it made the story feel more objective and less biased than having a single journalist presenting it,” Ferne wrote. Whelp. (This has similar elements as Viewpoints, a successful prototype tested in the first round.)



• Consequences — Similar to an unsuccessful prototype from the first round, this format offered buttons a user could select to read the impact of a particular issue (say “immigration rules to be relaxed for non-EU doctors and nurses”) on the economy, society, government, and infrastructure.

What not (necessarily) to try

Note: these are my nicknames for the prototypes, not the team’s.

• Countdown — Six-stories-in-60-seconds sounded catchy but was actually anxiety-inducing for users who thought they’d have more control over the card-centric prototype but had to sit still and absorb rapidly. “It was deliberately provocative,” Ferne said.



• Gradual context — Inspired by language-learning apps, the team designed a prototype to deliver snippets of an issue each day to reinforce comprehension over time. “People didn’t like us withholding that info from them,” he said. “People were saying if I’m interested in that I’d like to learn about it now.”



• FOMO-inducing personalization — Self-reporting one’s understanding of an issue by asking users to choose between a story for those unfamiliar with the situation or a format for those who had been following the news (on the same story) was too drastic. Ferne said users ended up reading both kinds to make sure they didn’t miss out. The team also experimented with asking testers if they wanted a local/regional/national version of the same story.
• Why why why why why — One trick to solving a problem: Keep asking why, and maybe you’ll get to its true root. Ferne hoped that this format, his personal favorite, would help users truly grasp the geopolitics of North Korea and its frenemies, for example (“Why does North Korea feel threatened? Why does it have no allies? Why is it a communist country? And go back to the Korean War,” Ferne said) but users weren’t enthusiastic about the interface.

Ferne and the other team members have finished these sprints; now it’s time for the industry to take the baton. Why? Keep tapping.

Images from BBC’s writeup and video of the prototyping.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/11/35-prototypes-one-year-and-lots-learned-the-bbc-puts-its-mobile-storytelling-plan-in-action/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/10/how-the-bbc-built-one-of-the-worlds-largest-collaborative-journalism-efforts-focused-entirely-on-local-news/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/10/how-the-bbc-built-one-of-the-worlds-largest-collaborative-journalism-efforts-focused-entirely-on-local-news/#respond Wed, 31 Oct 2018 10:00:22 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=164490 Three large regional news publishing companies in the U.K. executed a coordinated public condemnation in June against what they saw as the British government’s preferential treatment of the south in its handling of a national rail crisis.

Fueled by a sense of outrage over massive train cancellations and delays, the publishers put aside years of historic competition and came together around the #onenorth campaign, simultaneously publishing front page stories and a joint editorial in approximately two dozen papers, shaming the government to heed them and act.

Joined by a handful of hyperlocal news publishers, the #onenorth coverage was picked up by radio and television and spread widely on social media, becoming a graphic display of the kind of power that three erstwhile competitors, Reach plc, Newsquest and Johnston Press, could wield if they buried their hatchets and collaborated.

In the eyes of Jeremy Clifford, the editor-in chief of Johnston Press, the #onenorth campaign is indicative of a greater willingness over the last 18 months among the larger publishing organizations in the U.K. to collaborate “due to the realization that we have more in common than divides us in terms of competing with each other.”

In fact, the climate has changed to such an extent that not only have these privately-funded news organizations found opportunities to work with each other, but they have also seen the benefit of coming together to collaborate with the Goliath in British journalism: the publicly-funded British Broadcasting Company (BBC).

Partnering to save local news

For more than a year now, news organizations ranging in size from tiny hyperlocals to the big three regional publishing companies involved in the #onenorth coverage have been signing up to participate in a massive Local News Partnership (LNP) that leverages the reach and resources of the BBC to shore up the local press and fortify its role in democracy.

The scale of the project is immense, functioning like a wire service for more than 90 news organizations representing 800 news outlets around the country, allowing them to share and use each other’s content. The BBC provides the infrastructure and has promised to spend 8 million pounds a year (that’s around $10 million) in the partnership for the next 11 years. The BBC is a public service broadcaster funded by a yearly license fee that is charged to all U.K. households with a television, rather than being directly underwritten by the government.

One element of the project is called the Local Democracy Reporting Service, which hires and trains local journalists then devotes them exclusively to covering local government and other public service organizations. No fires, no crimes, no courts; these reporters cover mainly community and civic meetings and events. The reporters are hired locally by the partner news organizations but their salaries are funded by the BBC.

There’s also a News Hub, which gives the local and regional news organizations involved in the partnership access to BBC video and audio footage.

“This level of coverage has never been undertaken by any news agency,” said Matthew Barraclough, who oversees the project for the BBC. Thus far the partnership has produced more than 35,000 stories and he anticipates it will grow about 1,000 to 1,500 stories a month.

The impetus for the project, Barraclough says, was the shared realization by the BBC and the News Media Association, the trade body for news publishers in the U.K., that the number of local and regional journalists had been declining by the thousands over the last decade and with them was going the scrutiny of local and regional government.

Getting the project going was a multi-step process, according to Barraclough, who has been working on laying the foundation since 2015. First, he had to solicit and then vet news organizations from around the country to participate, opening the doors to the partnership in May 2017. He said 800 outlets joined on pretty quickly because many of the regional and local newspapers are owned by the three big publishers.

Then, to create the technological infrastructure, they turned to StreamAMG, which was already being used by the BBC to get content to its global partners as part of the BBC World Service. Meanwhile, local video and audio clips produced by the BBC had to be watermarked with its logo and channeled into the project.

Next, they had to organize the hiring of Local Democracy Reporters by the local partner organizations, to cover local government and public institutions. Figuring out where to allocate reporters was complicated due to the conflicting demands and requirements of different areas, he said. In Northern Ireland, for example, politics was a challenge. While impartiality is accepted in journalism on the mainland, in Northern Ireland it’s a harder sell and communities saw a need for two reporters instead of one: a Republican and a Loyalist.

The project pays off

So far 128 reporters have been hired, Barraclough says, and they are already at work covering decisions by local governments involving taxpayers’ money which otherwise may not have been covered.

A number of these reporters have written about their experiences, some of them noting their surprise at how interesting local government coverage can be and how important they felt their work was to the democratic process. Their stories often get picked up and published by news organizations across the country as well as the BBC.

The local community coverage is a welcome resource for editors such as Anna Williams who runs The Ambler Community Newspaper, a co-op hyperlocal publication in Northumberland, in the north of the country. Being part of the partnership gives her access to coverage of meetings that she says she often does not have the resources to cover herself.

“It has been quite straightforward and I’m really pleased to be a part of the scheme,” Williams said of her participation in the LNP. “It’s not really for breaking news, and we would usually write our own articles from our own perspective, but it’s good to get more of a feel for what is going on in Northumberland County Council meetings.”

Williams says she sees even more potential in getting to know about other editors through the partnership.

“I think I’m the only community newspaper involved in this in this area — if there are others, I don’t know about them,” she said. “I suppose that is one aspect which could be developed; who else is using the system?”

For Barraclough, the results have been gratifying. He says he has taken particular pleasure in seeing how frequently content generated by the partnership makes its way to front pages.

He says he hopes to undertake a public value examination of the service in a couple of years to see if it’s justified and possibly look at expanding it. For now, he hopes it will serve as a model of collaboration, if not in its entirety, then in part.

“We’re doing something at scale that people can watch,” said Barraclough. “They can cherry pick the bits that apply to them.”

Clifford, who chairs the joint advisory panel overseeing the partnership, says the LNP has facilitated the kind of collaboration between news organizations that was evidenced in the #onenorth coverage.

“It has also brought the BBC closer to the privately-funded media sector, giving it a better understanding of how we operate, the pressures we have and where it can play a part in helping to support rather than to compete,” he said.

“The wider value is that there is a good, constructive dialogue between the BBC and the wider industry where further opportunities can be explored, and we will use the Local Democracy Reporter scheme as the vehicle for this and to produce a national agenda based on public service reporting,” Clifford said.

Lessons learned

Asked if he had any insight into the collaborative process for other news organizations contemplating collaboration, Clifford shared these:

1. Find the areas where you can work together and build trust so that you can move forward.
2. Acknowledge that your organizations may well compete with each other but identify the areas where you are better collaborating.
3. Explore areas where together you can produce better journalism than if you continued separately.
4. As well as reporting, look at skill sets and strengths your organization has that can be shared.

Clifford says he and the News Media Association will be pushing the BBC for the number of Partnership reporters to grow to 200. And he sees potential for future collaborations down the road.

Tara George is a professor and head of journalism and television/digital media at Montclair State University. She can be reached via email at georgeta@montclair.edu. This piece is being copublished with the Center for Cooperative Media, a grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/10/how-the-bbc-built-one-of-the-worlds-largest-collaborative-journalism-efforts-focused-entirely-on-local-news/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/10/yelling-at-her-family-in-public-in-your-headphones-reality-tv-comes-to-podcasts/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/10/yelling-at-her-family-in-public-in-your-headphones-reality-tv-comes-to-podcasts/#respond Tue, 16 Oct 2018 15:21:09 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=164040 All this comes on top of the executive-level departure that was announced last month in tandem with the news that Panoply was laying off its editorial team: Jacob Weisberg, chairman of the Slate Group, was leaving to form a new audio company with Malcolm Gladwell, taking the audience-driving Revisionist History with them.

That these leadership exits are clustered is certainly eyebrow-raising, but any overtly glum narrative should be checked against the state of site’s actual podcast portfolio. And on that front, things seem to be quite good.

Consider that Slate has just wrapped up a very successful second season of its narrative documentary podcast, Slow Burn. Not only would I argue that it’s the best nonfiction narrative podcast of the year so far — yes, that includes Serial, In The Dark, and Caliphate, and yes, I’m aware it’s almost certainly recency bias — the sophomore season put up significant numbers. (Some of those numbers, apparently, came from White House aides.) I’m told that, as of Monday afternoon, the second season alone has seen 9.8 million downloads, with an expectation of beating 10 million by tomorrow. It was also an effective driver of subscriptions for Slate Plus, the site’s paid membership program, generating thousands of new members with its offerings of bonus content.

It’s worth noting that Gabriel Roth, previously a senior editor and editorial director of Slate Plus, will be taking up Steve Lickteig’s leadership role over the podcast team. Slow Burn was largely born out of the Slate Plus program, and I’m told that Roth was an instrumental part of the show’s development and strategy. He will hold a new title, editorial director of the Slate Podcast Network, and I, for one, am excited to see what else he brings into the mix.

Consider, also, that Slow Burn’s success comes on top of a well-oiled and sprawling show portfolio that most notably includes all of its Gabfest programming, The Gist with Mike Pesca, and Studio 360 (which it doesn’t own, but houses and co-produces in partnership with PRX-PRI).

That portfolio continues to grow: On Tuesday, Slate will launch its own daily news podcast (The Gist notwithstanding) called What Next with former WNYC personality Mary Harris at the mic, and the site also recently absorbed Karina Longworth’s popular history podcast You Must Remember This, previously housed at Panoply.

Again, two seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same time. In this case, you have dramatic shifts at the leadership level, but you also have a product line that appears to be stable, robust, and reaching for new heights. Take from that whatever conclusions you will, but for me, I’m tempted to put a little more weight on the latter.

The only way is pods [by Caroline Crampton]. How real is reality, really, when it’s captured on a microphone, edited extensively, and then bundled with narration before being presented to the listener?

That’s the Big Question prompted by The Brights, a new British podcast launching this week that presents itself as part of a curious sounding genre: “structured reality.” Behind the production is a producer named Sarah Dillistone, who happens to be the brains behind big British reality TV hits The Only Way is Essex and Made in Chelsea, as well as host Lydia Bright, who found fame as a cast member on TOWIE. (That’s the fun acronym for The Only Way Is Essex, by the way, in case that wasn’t clear to you.) The Brights will follow Lydia and her family over the course of 12 weekly episodes, which will supposedly reveal their everyday highs and lows. It kicks off on October 18.

“[Podcasting] just felt like a really exciting space to be telling this sort of story in this genre,” said Dillistone when we spoke over the phone recently. I had reached out to learn about how she is translating her reality television work into the seemingly more modest audio medium.

“When you go into a family house to film a scene, you have set up your cameras, the lights go on, you have to place people in the exact position for the shot, and then they talk about whatever story is going on,” she explained. “With the podcast, we walked in, popped some mics on, and that was it…It just felt so natural. I can just walk out the room, and life continues being recorded, without the pressures of a camera.”

In many ways, the traditional methods for making a storytelling podcast — identifying characters and scenes, collecting a lot of tape, shaping it into the desired narrative, and then recording narration to go around it — are similar to the methods Dillistone said she uses to create her structured reality TV shows. The difference now that she’s working in audio, she emphasized, is how much less of an intervention the process of recording feels. With no cameras or yells of “action” going on, “the environment just doesn’t change,” she said. “I think it’s completely different to the TV that I’ve made.”

The Brights also strikes me as a straightforward commercial proposition. Lydia Bright has nearly a million followers on Instagram — where she does plenty of sponcon — and appears fairly regularly in the tabloid pages. I’m sure that Acast, the podcast platform that hosts and sells ads for the project, won’t be struggling all that hard to find sponsors who want to follow Bright into podcasting as well.

In the accompanying press release, The Brights is strongly pitching itself as the world’s first ever reality podcast. But I don’t think it can stake claim on being the first “reality podcast” per se. After all, CBC’s Sleepover, Gimlet’s The Habitat, and maybe even something like Megan Tan’s Millennial arguably fall along design lines that are somewhat similar to what we generally talk about when we talk about reality television.

Where the podcast is distinct or unusual, perhaps, is in its focus on harvesting the profile of existing reality stars and the transference of the familiar reality TV aesthetic. Rather than Lydia Bright taking the route of other social media stars and building a generic interview podcast or similar to augment her #brand, she’s actually still doing the thing she’s best known for: goofing around and yelling at her family in public, but in your headphones.

The other chart. I spilled quite a bit of ink last week on the Apple Podcast charts, how they seemed more dysfunctional than usual, and how that complicates the way the industry is represented to the eyes of many newcomers. Apologies for quoting myself, but I posed two underlying questions: “What does it mean when the top of the Apple podcast charts, one of the first touchpoints for many newcomers, features more scams than authentic entries? What signal of values does the chart project to those experiencing their first glimpse of the wider podcast universe?”

Versions of these queries very much apply to the Podtrac Industry Publisher ranker, by the way, which is the other major node of industry representation that functions as a first touch for many newcomers — and which still gets cited as an authoritative picture of the “top end” of the podcast industry without much caveat.

As a reminder: Podtrac’s Publisher ranker continues to work with an incomplete sample. Which is to say, its list of Top Ten publishers only includes those who have chosen to participate in the ranking, and a good number of major players still have not. (The case is different for Podtrac’s podcast ranker, which purports to list shows regardless of whether they opt into Podtrac’s system.) I know nobody really clicks through when I link to my older columns — newsletter analytics, baby — but I wrote about those chart limitations two years ago.

Among the notable publishers that still do not participate in Podtrac’s Publisher Ranker: Gimlet Media, the Vox Media Podcast Network, Cadence13, and Stitcher. That’s not to say that they would all show up in the top 10 if they were included, mind you; I’m just making a point about what the ranker is actually telling you, and many of those noteworthy podcast shops remain excluded at this writing.

This should not be taken to mean that Podtrac’s industry ranker isn’t a helpful resource. I’ve come to find it really useful as a snapshot of the several major publishers that have opted into the list, and it’s generated some interesting questions for research: I, for one, am fascinated by why many companies in Podtrac’s top ten seems to cluster around the 5 million unique U.S monthly listeners mark. All I’m saying is that being “the third biggest publisher on the Podtrac” is far from being the “third biggest podcast publisher,” period — which is an interchanging I’ve seen used a fair bit.

In general, I’d counsel being wary of any industry analysis, ~thought leadership~, or self-congratulations using the Podtrac ranker that:

• Doesn’t mention its incomplete sampling;
• Doesn’t take into serious consideration the efficiency ratios of listed publishers — a publisher that needs 600+ shows to reach 5 million unique U.S. monthly listeners has a very different industry position than a publisher that reaches the same audience number with only 5 or 6 shows.

Put some nuance on it, y’know?

Locally sourced [by Caroline Crampton]. Repackaged radio content still makes up a considerable chunk of podcasts. Here in the UK, the BBC in particular does a lot of this — the majority of shows that you can see on its Apple page, for instance, went out as radio broadcasts first. Most of the time, they just get sandwiched with a new intro and outro bits. Occasionally, they slap on some extra material, but typically what you hear on the podcast is what you would have heard on the radio. Until the BBC’s recent shakeup to its podcast commissioning efforts (which I’ve written about in more detail here), this is how the corporation initially projected its influence through podcasting.

That was on my mind when I saw the announcement that BBC English Regions was planning to launch its own showcase podcast feed, called Multi Story. For the uninitiated, English Regions is the segment of the corporation that produces local and regional television, radio, and web content for England, the Isle of Man, and the Channel Islands. (Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have their own operations going on.) I assumed that the feed would be yet another basic radio repackage effort designed to broadly bump up the potential reach of the division’s 43 local radio stations. The project sounded like a budget-friendly way of getting local radio stories out through podcast feeds when individual stations, typically cash-strapped, might not have the time, bandwidth, or resources to produce original podcast content. And you know, I figured that was totally cool.

But when I listened to the opening of “Swallows,” the first episode dropped into the Multi Story feed last Wednesday, I realized that this was something far more than a simple repackage.

Veteran local radio journalist Becca Bryers, who serves as host and producer, had woven hand-picked excerpts of personal stories from various local radio documentaries into a contemplative, act by act structure. It’s vaguely reminiscent of the way a typical episode of This American Life is constructed. The show’s atmosphere feels purely suited to on-demand audio, from the scoring to Bryers interjecting dashes of her personal life experiences. Even more notably, the episode was largely stripped of any local radio promotional effort in favor of a clean, immersive, podcast-first listening experience.

“Local radio gets stories that perhaps some of the networks don’t, almost because they’re not able to, because at a local station you’re coming into contact with people on a really small level all the time,” Bryers told me. The idea of a digital audio project weaving these more lasting, timeless, personal stories together seemed the natural next step to her.

Development for Multi Story began around 18 months ago, when Bryers took that idea of weaving together timeless and personal locally sourced stories to the then English regions commissioner, David Holdsworth. After getting her to make a pilot, he commissioned a ten-episode first series of Multi Story, an out-of-the-box move for a BBC executive heading up a division that had no real track record with podcasting. It’s a stretch play that Bryers is grateful for. “I really appreciate that he took that chance on me,” she said.

Bryers sees Multi Story first and foremost as a chance to make a rgreat podcast rather than necessarily as a direct promotional tool for radio or the local stations that it draws on. “I don’t know if completely the aim is to increase the listenership for the radio stations,” she said. “Obviously you’d hope that it raises awareness of local radio in general…We think of it a bit like the Facebook pages that each of the local stations have. Originally the thinking with those was as a branding strategy for the station, whereas often now we see them as a separate entity, just another service that the local stations offer. Just because you use the Facebook page doesn’t mean you listen to the radio and vice versa.”

She used her contacts in local radio to find “producers who really get podcasting” at each station, who would then populate a farm system feeding her suitable stories. She also did a substantial amount of original reporting, gathering tape for “stories I’ve been working on for a while but haven’t found a place on the station.” With the pieces that had already been broadcast, she worked extensively to “reversion” them in a “podcasty way,” to avoid the sound being that of replayed radio. “That’s not to take away from the original broadcast,” she said. “I think that if you’ve got something that’s two people talking in a studio, there’s ways that you can lift that into a podcast style and put music under it, or give it more pauses, and breathing space.”

The result, I think, is something quite rare — a genuinely fresh piece of audio made partly from cuts of previous broadcasts. Bryers’ personal immersion in podcasting (she counts herself a massive fan of Ira Glass and Radiolab) and determination to do something different have allowed her to break out of the customary “BBC sound,” and hers is a template that others trying to squeeze more out of the BBC’s existing resources could do well to follow. “I’m genuinely passionate about doing this,” Bryers said. “I really hope that it comes across that it’s not just a ‘local radio thinks they should jump on the podcast bandwagon’ thing.”

Speaking of locally oriented media and podcasts…

The national local. Next Monday will see the release of Believed, an investigative series by NPR and Michigan Radio, the state’s network of local public radio stations. The podcast will examine the USA Gymnastics sex abuse scandal, one of the largest serial sexual abuse cases in American’s history. Michigan Radio reporters Kate Wells and Lindsey Smith will host the series. Here’s a great Elle write-up outlining the show.

Here’s something that this NPR-Michigan Radio collaboration is making me think about: this scandal was originally vaulted into the national consciousness by The Indianapolis Star, the Gannett-owned daily news organization in neighboring Indiana. Gannett, of course, also owns the USA Today Network, which recently launched its own nationally oriented podcast platform that intends to use Gannett’s ecosystem of local publishing entities as pipelines for potential investigative projects.

I bring Gannett’s national podcast initiative up to highlight what seems to be a noticeable increase in the trend of local-national podcast production partnerships. For some reason, my gut tells me that this isn’t a particularly new development, but I can’t seem to find very many similarly structured productions going back over the past four years. (In other words, hit me up with examples I totally missed.)

Anyway, here are two other contemporary productions that I see fitting into this mold:

(1) Gladiator, a limited series that debuted yesterday from the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team in collaboration with Wondery on the former NFL player Aaron Hernandez, who was convicted of murder and later took his own life in prison. This project continues Wondery’s strategy of partnering with local news organization to produce feverish, nationally eye-catching podcast programming that can be then packaged off as adaptation IP — see: the Los Angeles Times’ Dirty John, now an upcoming Bravo series starring the great Connie Britton. (Give! Connie! Britton! More! Roles!)

Speaking of which, the LA Times is apparently developing two follow-ups to the aforementioned Dirty John, or so the company announced at the recent NewFronts West event. Here’s some info for those projects, as described by AdWeek:

The first new podcast project, tentatively titled Big Willie, will follow a local street racing veteran and Vietnam veteran, examining his eccentric career and checkered legacy; the second, Room 20, centered on an unidentified car crash victim who has been in a coma for 17 years, will piece together clues about the man’s life.

Note that they are both true crime projects. True crime: if it works for them, it works for you.

(2) Last week also saw the release of Underdog, a new weekly podcast documentary from Texas Monthly and Pineapple Street Media tracking the closing days of the Democratic senatorial campaign of Beto O’Rourke — pronounced Beh-to, not Bey-to, as I learned from the first episode — as we crawl into the midterm elections.

Local-national production partnership aside, here’s why I’m in on this show. As I, armchair political analyst Nick Quah, told Fast Company:

[O’Rourke’s] fight with Ted Cruz is increasingly a stand-in for a bigger struggle about the heart of America… I know [O’Rourke] said otherwise, but he’s probably a viable 2020 [presidential] contender for the Democrats [if he wins]. I’d listen the crap out of a Beto-Cruz podcast.

But also: I remain fascinated by Pineapple Street’s continuing adventures with political media and podcasting. Underdog is a strictly journalistic product co-developed with a widely respected monthly, but Pineapple Street is also the shop that produced With Her, the official Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential election campaign podcast that’s essentially a longform political ad/branded podcast, and Stay Tuned with Preet Bharara, an interview show-slash-ideas platform for the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. There’s some line straddling here, but nonetheless, I’m very interested to see where else the boutique studio will take political podcasts, already a vibrant and saturated genre.

Midterms, everyone: it’s a mere three weeks away.

One last local podcast bite —

Last week also saw the final dispatch of WBEZ’s 16 Shots, which sought to document the Laquan McDonald police shooting trial in semi-real time. The production was the latest in a line of similarly structured efforts by MPR News with 74 Seconds, which followed the Philando Castile police shooting trial, and WHYY with Cosby Unraveled.

Betsy Berger, the station’s director of communications, tells me that they’re considering 16 Shots a success “from a journalistic perspective, as a partnership with the Chicago Tribune and critical acclaim.” She noted that it was promoted heavily on social media and through the station’s email newsletter, and that the project garnered more than 30 media placements. However, they declined to share download numbers.

This week in New York. Did you know that New York Magazine is developing not one but two new podcasts?

• The Intelligencer, the new site that merged together NY Mag’s politics and business-focused Daily Intelligencer and tech-focused Select All sections, is working on something called 2038, which will “explore eight different visions of how we can expect to live in two decades.” It will be hosted by Max Read and David Wallace-Wells, and it drops tomorrow.
• I wrote this up already, but now we have a thread: New York Magazine’s The Cut site is collaborating with Gimlet Media to produce a weekly “what’s happening in the newsroom” podcast, called The Cut on Tuesdays. It’s hosted by Molly Fischer, and the first episode dropped today.

These two projects add to Vulture’s ongoing interview podcast Good One: A Podcast About Jokes, hosted by Jesse David Fox, resulting a New York Magazine podcast portfolio shape that I suppose you can describe as “one-site, one-show.” For now, anyway. This marks the storied media organization’s second wave into on-demand audio; the first came in the form of Panoply partnerships, back when that company was still producing content and generally pursued a strategy of hand-holding non-audio publishers into the medium through Gabfest-style templates. That early wave resulted in the Vulture TV Podcast, New York Magazine’s Sex Lives, and the Grub Street Podcast, all of which are now defunct.

A disclaimer: I contribute to Vulture as a podcast critic, but I have no special insight into these matters. In fact, I didn’t even know these shows were in the oven! Freelancers and contractors, we are an afflicted kind, living in little wells with fleeting views of the sky.

Miscellaneous Bites

• Eric Mennel, the co-creator of Criminal and a senior producer at Gimlet Media who hosted a recent season of Startup, is moving to NPR, where he will join the Embedded team. There, he will serve as a supervising producer tasked with making the podcast a “premiere franchise for serious journalism” whose work will be presented through various platforms.
• The television adaptation of Crooked Media’s Pod Save America debuted on HBO this past week. Much like Texas Monthly’s Underdog podcast, it runs until the midterms, which means it’s a really limited series.
• “Mississippi-based podcast aims to educate, impact local ears.” (AP)

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/10/yelling-at-her-family-in-public-in-your-headphones-reality-tv-comes-to-podcasts/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/12-prototypes-eight-weeks-and-lots-of-tapping-whats-worked-and-hasnt-in-the-bbcs-quest-for-new-storytelling-formats/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/12-prototypes-eight-weeks-and-lots-of-tapping-whats-worked-and-hasnt-in-the-bbcs-quest-for-new-storytelling-formats/#respond Tue, 24 Jul 2018 17:14:56 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=161174 Pardon the irony of reading a more-than-800-word article about finding better story formats than 800-word articles.

You see, while this might be a somewhat effective way for us to communicate with you, lovely Nieman Lab readers, it isn’t the most effective for the breadth of the BBC’s audience. Though journalists might be trained to write in chunks like this, some readers — especially young’ins — need information that comes in a more deliberate format.

As Tristan Ferne, the lead producer for the BBC’s research and development unit, put it in a recent 2,043-word post, “Could we combine existing media to make online news more accessible, engaging and relevant to young people?” (This was just one phase of the team’s year-long quest to test new formats for storytelling; other stages involved ways to help readers comprehend news better, and new methods of personalizing information.)

Some options beyond just publishing several hundred words: A highlight in an article that reveals context when it’s clicked. A video with a scrollable transcript that speeds up or reverses the video, too. A movie-trailer-like intro, drawing readers into the setup of the story. A re-enacted text exchange between a journalist and a source live from the scene.

“With an 800-word article, there is no interaction,” Ferne said. “This audience is spending all their time in Snapchat and Twitter, where there’s constant interaction in the interface. There’s stuff to do with your thumbs: You can swipe, scroll, tap. We found that [users] expected that.”

Many news organizations are looking to move beyond text. The Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab, which operated for two years, tested an interactive podcast player, “Smarticles,” an offline news app, and live push notifications. Newsrooms like The Washington Post have been experimenting with AMP stories boosted by Google’s toolkit, similar to Snapchat or Instagram Stories. The BBC has also been working on more exchanges with its audience like in-article chat bots and improved vertical video within the app.

Ferne and his four-person team — one journalist, one designer, one user researcher, and one developer — spent two months experimenting with 12 prototypes, all intended to move the BBC beyond standard 800-word articles. They used “a bit of guerrilla testing on the streets of London near universities,” and also tested things out on a group of 26 18- to 26-year-olds (that’s Generation Z, by the way). Here’s some of what they learned (and more is here).

What worked

The Expander — This superhero-sounding item is already in use at other outlets, like The Guardian, and Ferne said it’s going to be tested on the BBC’s site starting next month. When readers see a yellow ellipsis after a key term/event/name/etc., they can click on it to pop out some more information. (Two examples in a piece about Catalonia independence: The definition of sedition, and an explainer on the Catalonia region.) The Expander and the next prototype are the only two that can reuse news items, assuming the information is still accurate and relevant.

The Incremental — (Do these all sound like superheroes or is it just me?) The audience favorite, this choose-your-own-adventure style format can indeed reuse content, but requires a heavy editor lift by creating the same content in various forms. The story is segmented with options for a video clip, short-, or long-text route for the next segment, or you can skip the next part entirely. “We think it could be a kind of longform by stealth — a way of engaging people put off by long articles or lots of sidebars and related article links,” Ferne wrote.

Fast Forward — Scrollable. Video. Synchronized. To. The. Transcript. It’s like subtitles, but actually useful for moving around in the video without missing a segment or nudging your thumb juuuuust too far to the right. Skimmable video? Yes please.

Viewpoints — This reminded me of Snapchat’s polls in the Good Luck America series, where, after diving into issues like the removal of Confederate statues, users were prompted to vote on their conclusions. For the BBC’s Viewpoints, users encounter an introduction to a topic followed by short videos of people describing their opinion, either for or against. Then the users are asked to weigh in. Imagine a Tinder-inspired Opinion section 2.0 of a news website, but with less nasty commenting and more putting-a-face-to-an-issue-ing.

What didn’t work

Atmosphere — Setting the stage with background audio when users started reading an article was too distracting for testers. “Young people are trying to navigate a difficult path between information overload and FOMO,” Ferne wrote in the post-mortem, and the addition of audio created sensory overload too.

Consequences — More buttons! This prototype invited uses to select their topical issue of choice, in an attempt at personalization or at least relatability, after reading a shorter article. Tapping on one icon would reveal a bulleted summary with the impact (consequence!) of that news item on, say, the environment; another, the economy, and so on. “People told us they want to know the impact the story has on them. But that’s hard because you don’t know what people do or who they are,” Ferne said. “By breaking it down, they can choose what they care about.” This prototype was better-received than the team had anticipated due to its simplicity in formatting — still pegged to an article — but the team decided not to advance this idea to the next round. “There was nothing fancy about it.”

Drawing In — Imagine the Star Wars opening sequence, but instead of “in a galaxy far, far away,” this prototype introduces the article. Okay, it’s not exactly Star Wars, but the way Ferne describes it conjures that image: “We tried to present a story like the intro to a movie. We started with background sound and blurry visuals and as you scrolled it came into focus and there was a bit of background video, like the scene of the story before the story came in,” he said. It flopped bigger than the Solo spinoff movie: “The idea that we could ease people into the story was wrong,” he said. “People want to know what the story is about before they decide to invest time into it.”

Messages — In a generation already fraught with anxiety, inviting users to watch a reenactment of a WhatsApp conversation between a journalist and their source in a disaster zone wasn’t exactly the biggest hit. “It was authentic and raw and captured people’s imaginations, but it was too distressing,” Ferne admitted.

The R&D team’s year-long hunt for feasible new story formats wraps up in September, though its contributions to the storytelling scene are ongoing. The Expander will begin its pilot next month and further prototypes may be rolled out after further testing, Ferne said. Other BBC teams are continuing work on voice prototypes and chatbots, and of course they have some folks thinking about the ethics of all this journalism technology too.

Now vote: Which format do you think this article should have been in, instead of 1,156 words?

Image from the BBC’s video explaining the prototypes. ]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/12-prototypes-eight-weeks-and-lots-of-tapping-whats-worked-and-hasnt-in-the-bbcs-quest-for-new-storytelling-formats/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/a-journalists-guide-to-the-promises-and-pitfalls-of-reporting-within-open-and-closed-and-semi-open-platforms/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/a-journalists-guide-to-the-promises-and-pitfalls-of-reporting-within-open-and-closed-and-semi-open-platforms/#respond Tue, 10 Jul 2018 15:25:55 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=160384 Media organizations have often struggled to adapt their newsgathering and reporting to the reality of disparate news consumption habits and a public that increasingly favors peer-to-peer messaging platforms and social media networks over more public forums.

There are challenges for all journalists in discovering and verifying stories we don’t “own” or can’t attribute to other known opinion-formers. There are ethical dilemmas, too, in journalists seeking to insert themselves into unfamiliar online communities, either openly or undercover.

But is there more we can — and should — be doing as journalists to move our reporting closer to the communities we seek to serve? Is there still value in news journalists dwelling in social media platforms where participants are routinely attacked before they’re heard and where media manipulation is so dominant? And if so, can and should journalists look a little deeper into this local beat and seek greater insight from digital communities in private, invitation-only networks?

For a period of five weeks as a Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow, I set myself the task of answering three straightforward questions from the perspective of a reporter.

California-based company Spaceship Media has had a good deal of success with several closed Facebook groups and serves as a useful case study. The company’s founders Eve Pearlman and Jeremy Hay support a model of “dialogue journalism” that is a partnership between interested media and the communities they serve. They seek to create a trustworthy, convivial and carefully moderated space for people to share their thoughts and experiences on a given subject. When appropriate and relevant, journalists are invited in to build relationships, seek quotes, and amplify selected stories from the group to a wider public.

Spaceship Media runs a variety of initiatives, including conversations about politics with a select group of Alabama women who voted for Trump and California women who voted for Hillary Clinton; a collaborative discussion about guns (supported by by AL.com); and an ongoing project focused on women called The Many, which has brought together several hundred women from across the country into a moderated Facebook group to discuss political, social and cultural issues in the run-up to November’s U.S. midterm elections.

I was fortunate enough to be invited in to observe the month-long Facebook discussion on guns in April and May of this year. I witnessed a fascinating ongoing conversation between 135 courteous and well-intentioned participants from a variety of backgrounds and points of view. Many of those in the group were moved by the views and perspectives of others and a number of them were keen to keep the conversation going in different ways at the end of the month. As Hay pointed out to me, more than half of the group participants were just listening rather than posting, but everyone had a story and interesting perspective to share. Here are two excerpts, shared publicly with the permission of the two people who published their thoughts to the group in the first place:

John Counts is a reporter for MLive, specializing in police and court stories, based in Michigan. He was both a moderator and reporter in the guns group and has written about the “dizzying amount of words” he and other moderators needed to keep up with. They had to introduce guidelines for members on “stats-dumping,” encourage women to speak up to counter mansplaining, and there was more than the occasional angry exchange to mediate. Moderators could tell which posts submitted to them were likely to generate more heat, Counts said.

Counts, who took on an evening moderation shift to work around his reporting commitments, told me that there were times when the conversation “got a little crazy.” He recounted one particular episode to me when a staunch second amendment rights supporter, who was in an African-American gun club, clashed with a white police officer from Massachusetts over racial profiling, and he had to weigh in to keep the peace. The following post of his received dozens of constructive responses:

Around a dozen journalists were invited into this particular group. Unlike many of the other projects, where Spaceship Media acts as more of an intermediary between the journalists and group participants, this group operated under the expectation that journalists would approach members directly if they had story ideas or wished to pick up on comments, and as a result many news stories flowed from this initiative.

Another Spaceship Media group, The Many, is evenly divided between those identifying as Democratic, Republican, or another affiliation. I was allowed to observe The Many for a week in late June to observe the conversation. Some of the discussion was overtly political and topical. I witnessed a fascinating conversation, for example, between a number of women about the implications of the Justice Kennedy Supreme Court retirement on Roe v. Wade. In another thread, women discussed media coverage of the shooting in the Capital Gazette newsroom in Maryland. Conversations were wide-ranging, however, and included a focus on race, motherhood and childhood summer memories.

This community is already three times larger than the guns group, and requires three moderators, two of whom are full-time. They work eight hour shifts with a one hour overlap. When I spoke to her, Adriana Garcia, a seasoned journalist and currently project manager for The Many, had been awake until 2 a.m. monitoring the conversations in the group. There’s ongoing discussion about “slowing things down,” and what the optimum size for a group like this should be before it becomes too hard to moderate. As Spaceship Media’s Pearlman told me, “we’ve been bugging Facebook about a 9-to-9 limitation for some time now,” as it’s important to be able to switch off.

Garcia said she was fascinated to see how much is posted during the workday, though the group typically does see bursts of activity Sunday and Monday nights. She’s also witnessed some fights, and has had to mute and block a few participants, but the vast majority of participants in The Many have been highly engaged. Some women have forged new friendships from the group, and the open rate for her weekly group newsletter is “very high,” Garcia told me.

The creation and moderation of a closed Facebook group of this kind is no simple feat. Following an initial call-out via media partners, every participant is carefully selected to ensure the group is balanced and equally weighted (on gender, ethnicity, age, location, and points of view). Spaceship Media also conducts its own questionnaires to determine what exactly participants are keen to know about one another. The commitment that the group members make to the project is matched by the efforts of three moderators who, as I observed, were posting on a regular basis to encourage conversation, manage expectations, and help foster a sense of trust between participants and journalists.

It’s clear that many news organizations lack the capacity to run initiatives at this level on their own. But as Hay and Pearlman were quick to tell me, everything they offer is freely available.

“If a news organization wants to invest in a local beat, this is one way of doing it. You put resources into your reporter and give them 10 hours a week to invest in group moderation,” Hay said. “The only question is whether news organizations are serious enough about the endeavor in the first place.”

WhatsApp groups

Proceed with caution: False information in WhatsApp groups is ubiquitous and has horrific real-life consequences. Activists and journalists have taken to creating online fact-checking services in an attempt to stem the flow of misinformation on the chat platform; these include La Silla Vacía in Colombia, the recently wrapped-up Verificado in Mexico, and many other coalitions of academics, journalists, and activists in Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Asia.

Beyond the problem of false information, it’s hard to find WhatsApp groups with noteworthy conversation without a tip and an invitation to begin with. A simple Twitter or Reddit search for groups will turn up some random results. But many groups that are advertised publicly are often of limited interest and/or full (since groups reach capacity at 256 members). One opportunity for journalists on WhatsApp is when users seek to advertise a group invite to those in another closed network, such as a Facebook group. I discovered a handful of interesting groups this way. There’s no introductory vetting process for WhatsApp groups; if you have an invitation link and the group isn’t full you’re in — until and unless a group admin chooses to boot you. This, of course, presents an immediate ethical challenge if the journalist is undercover. Will you reveal yourself as a journalist when you enter the group, or simply lurk and observe? To act incognito will require some editorial justification and a degree of explanation to those group members if and when you choose to make direct contact with any of them.

Beyond trawling through Twitter, Reddit, and Google, or being fortunate enough to find a potentially worthwhile invitation through a closed Facebook group or on a Discord server, or being invited into a group by a friend, colleague, or local club or society, another possible avenue for journalists into important WhatsApp groups is through an NGO. Witness is one such organization that’s worked closely with communities to document human rights abuses through eyewitness video.

“The biggest impediment in this space is trust,” Priscila Neri, a Brazilian journalist and activist who oversees Witness’ work in Latin America, told me.

A large percentage of the footage collected in Brazil today is recorded and disseminated via social media apps and platforms — particularly WhatsApp. Both the paramilitary and police use WhatsApp groups to coordinate their own activity. Local community groups use WhatsApp routinely to alert, update, and share information. The Coletivo Papo Reto is one such group of community-based activists who use mobile phones and social media to document what they encounter in the Complexo do Alemão, a group of 16 favelas in the northern part of Rio de Janeiro. Today, representatives from the favelas participate regularly in carefully controlled WhatsApp groups to verify and share information on local incidents. These are then brought to greater public attention through a public Facebook page and to trusted journalists via Witness for further amplification. The verification process and admissibility of these videos in any legal process remains contentious with authorities in Brazil, but Witness works hard to ensure the videos and the chat history are properly recorded and archived. Journalists may not be able to inhabit the WhatsApp groups themselves, but they can, in partnership with Witness, see and assess valuable first-hand evidence.

This “chain of communication created at a local level can make a big difference, particularly if what’s filmed on WhatsApp is admissible in court,” Neri told me.

How does an independent journalist navigate WhatsApp for newsgathering in India, the messaging platform’s biggest market? WhatsApp has seen phenomenal user growth in India and, as New Delhi-based journalist and political commentator Shivam Vij noted, is as widely used by politicians and activists as it is by members of the public.

“Most Indians are discussing politics via the medium of WhatsApp today,” Vij told me. It’s vital, then, that journalists have a ring-side seat. Vij has been invited into a number of Hindi-language WhatsApp groups through friends and other contacts. One day, someone he knew sent him a single invite link to a WhatsApp group and from there, he was invited to many more. Subjects of those groups range from local politics and elections to food pricing, inflation, cow protection, the role of the army and Islamic militants. Many other groups simply share memes, jokes, and banter at a hyperlocal level. In many of these closed forums, Vij observed highly partisan Hindu nationalism — the perspective of India’s ruling BJP party is particularly dominant (“The BJP are ahead of other parties in matters of technology,” he told me, and “many software engineers support the party.” This screenshot of a collection of Hindu nationalist-supporting WhatsApp groups all switched to the same profile picture on the same day, Vij said, a sign of some central organization.)

During February 2017 state elections in India’s most populous state Uttar Pradesh, Vij saw how political narratives of different kinds played out across Hindu-nationalist WhatsApp groups. BJP activists promote a different agenda at national, state, and local levels, according to Vij, a strategy evident in these group discussions. He recounted a story of an encounter he had with a teenager in a village in Uttar Pradesh, where the boy told him that he used WhatsApp regularly and then showed him an extensive gallery on his Android phone of mostly political images. A meme had been circulating of a woman on a Indian bank note with the phrase “Sonam Gupta is unfaithful.” The boy had an obscene photoshopped version of the same image with a picture of Prime Minister Modi grabbing the woman by her breasts and a message: “Modi has found Sonam Gupta.” This image was being widely distributed through WhatsApp groups at a local level to bolster Modi’s machismo persona — all of India had been searching for the unfaithful woman, but only Modi could have found her.

Vij is mindful of the significant editorial and ethical challenges in journalists writing about what they observe in WhatsApp groups. Much of the extreme right-wing material he sees is unpublishable, and he said he’s conscious of not incidentally performing the function of a surrogate to party political propaganda or assisting in any way in the dissemination of fake narratives. Incorrect information is a significant hazard, but so is party apparatchiks using WhatsApp groups to divert the attention of local supporters and party members away from unfavorable news.

It’s clear that these groups provide journalists with a valuable bird’s-eye view on a community they may otherwise struggle to hear. Alongside the spin and propaganda of certain messages and memes, there are also frank exchanges between party members, activists and local communities and, as Vij has demonstrated, there are ways to write productively about those exchanges. It’s impossible to know whether a meme in any given WhatsApp group originated from a party official or a member of the public. Many of the messages are repeated and shared across groups and few participants are open about their affiliations in their profiles. There are undoubtedly secret groups where invitation links are more protected and conversations less open, but there’s plenty to keep any journalist occupied in other groups if you have the time and energy to sift through the messages. During the May state elections in Karnataka, the BJP was running around 25,000 WhatsApp groups (to the Congress Party’s 10,000), according to Vij. A way into WhatsApp group chats will be critical during the 2019 Indian general election.

Public subreddits

How do you figure out where to even start looking for stories on Reddit? Reddit has millions of monthly active users, with more than half of them based in the U.S. It’s a predominantly open platform, with only a small number of private communities. For the uninitiated, the tens of thousands of active subreddit communities can be a daunting region of the web (for the essentials on what Reddit is and how to use it, see this wiki guide; I also list a few of my preferred subreddit communities at the end of this section). The company recently announced a news tab “for those seeking a home for content that the community surfaces from a group of subreddits that frequently share and engage with the news.” Time will tell if the news tab really provides an easy way into some larger news communities for redditors. However, many of the most interesting stories circulate in a large variety of comment threads, and not always in the most obvious subreddit communities.

Reddit is also home to a few invite-only communities. Private subreddit communities tend to be very small (less than 20 subscribers), and many only exist to help moderators with logistics. There are a few much larger private subreddit communities: For those who boast over 100,000 karma, for example, there’s The Century Club.

It’s also possible to discover other “private members clubs” of potential interest where, as with WhatsApp and closed Facebook groups, journalists would undoubtedly need to make an editorial rationale for going under cover before contacting community moderators. (Here are a few I found simply by searching for “Brexit” and “Trump” on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/The_British/; https://www.reddit.com/r/Mr_Trump/; https://www.reddit.com/r/polandballtalk/; https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughHillHate/.)

The primary purpose of Discord has always been for users “to chat about gaming, anime, and pornography,” not about mainstream political discussion or direct action, said Brian Friedberg, a research analyst at Data & Society who has spent time studying the ebb and flow of chat on Discord servers. The platform is also a great repository of information (witness TheRedPill, for example, which is as active on Discord as it is on Reddit, and regularly shares reading lists). Despite its fundamental use cases, in recent times Discord has become a natural home for the far-right, particularly over the Unite the Right rally in August 2017, as the group Unicorn Riot has documented so effectively. To Friedberg, these Discord users “are essentially constructing fanfictions on a right-wing revolution.”

For those less comfortable about talking in a fully open or public online forum, Discord provides an alternative outlet. Through my daily searches in different servers, I found that many individuals would share links to documents I hadn’t seen on public websites and spoke freely about a number of subjects, from the Trump administration’s attitude to child migrants to Supreme Court judgments and local gubernatorial races. In many ways, the platform hearkens back to those early days of the social web where largely anonymous groups hung out on MySpace, AOL, or Yahoo. Discord “gives you an immediacy of watching an active conversation,” Friedberg said, “and the chance to see the way that ideas are debated and thrown back and forth and how meaning is made in very self-selected ways.”

Many of those who are active on the platform are unwilling to express themselves in the same way outside the walled-garden of a particular server. Here’s what journalists should consider before setting up a Discord profile:

What do you know about the community you’re seeking to find? Do you have an invitation to a server already? Are you looking for a story on a whim or have you gotten a tip from a Redditor, for example?

Are you able and willing to run your account transparently as a journalist and link to your wider digital profile?

If so, how will you protect yourself against possible recriminations when you find someone you’d like to approach? And, if not, how can you justify your anonymity at the outset of your search and what will you do when you want to quote or reach out to a user?

Some gaming enthusiasts I spoke to recommended finding some buddies who could act as digital surrogates to connect journalists with users in noteworthy servers. As with many platforms, it’s possible to join a number of communities and to lurk and observe the chat there without conversing or publishing anything, though some moderators will pose questions and require you to link to your phone number or Reddit profile for verification before allowing you to enter.

It’s also important, as Friedberg pointed out, to jump on a VPN and post occasionally to some servers you’ve joined to avoid being kicked out. All local beats require attention, and this is no exception. An active profile will likely lead to more meaningful connections, to invitations to new groups and servers, and potentially new insight on topical stories too. You need to ask, though, how far you’re willing to dig, and whether your journalism justifies the creation of an alternative but verified profile.

Nextdoor

Nextdoor is an opportunity for journalists to keep an eye on a local beat. Being a newbie in Cambridge for five weeks starting last month, one of the first things I decided was to try and get to know my neighbors via the local social network Nextdoor. The platform launched in the U.S. in 2011 and is used in 86 percent of U.S. neighborhoods, but more recently has expanded into Europe (the Netherlands, U.K., Germany, and France) and is now active in 185,000 neighborhoods globally, with ambitions to move into other parts of the world too. (The platform has had to revise its community guidelines following complaints about racial profiling and discrimination from some members.)

To gain entry to your neighborhood network, you need to use your real name and physical address but don’t need to say much more about yourself if you’re not inclined. Once inside, I quickly found advice about local plumbers, gardeners, the real estate market, updates from Cambridge police, and day-to-day posts from residents looking to buy and sell items. But there were plenty of other things that caught my eye: neighbors talking about local issues, burglaries, and even the occasional political conversation.

The attraction of Nextdoor is that it’s hyperlocal, visible only to those in defined geographical neighborhoods. It provides journalists with a contact book and portal into local feelings and attitudes on a range of subject, and includes feeds from news providers and several thousand public agencies too (police, fire, weather, and so forth). Participants can chat with a neighbor or respond to a news article.

Nextdoor’s moderators, or “leads,” are all local volunteers. They’re provided with training and 24/7 support and decisions on permissible activity and posts are down to them and their interpretation of the community guidelines. Nextdoor permits and encourages “civil and respectful” discussion about local ballots or elections and suggest in their guidelines that members “create a group” within their neighborhood feed “to discuss national or state politics and other non-local campaign topics” — another avenue of opportunity for journalists in any given area to test the waters on a wider subject.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/a-journalists-guide-to-the-promises-and-pitfalls-of-reporting-within-open-and-closed-and-semi-open-platforms/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/05/google-wants-to-do-for-podcasts-on-android-what-apple-did-for-podcasts-on-ios/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/05/google-wants-to-do-for-podcasts-on-android-what-apple-did-for-podcasts-on-ios/#respond Tue, 01 May 2018 14:17:00 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=157821 Googly eyed. You might have already heard about Google’s new strategy around podcast servicing on Android devices — I briefly linked to it last week after my whole spiel on the Apple HomePod — that the search giant announced through the content marketing blog of Pacific Content, the Canadian branded podcast studio. The announcement was broken out into five parts, and if you haven’t read them already, you absolutely should. You can find the first entry here, and then work outward from there.

But if you need a TLDR: Google’s apparent mission statement is “to help double the amount of podcast listening in the world over the next couple years,” and by that they mean to do to the untapped masses of potential podcast-consuming Android users what Apple did to potential podcast-consuming iOS users back in 2015 when it started distributing the stuff through iTunes. Of course, Google will try to do so via the strength of its specific Googlean skill-sets. (Also worth noting: this is separate and apart from the podcast stuff on Google Play Music, which didn’t really seem like it amounted to much?)

FWIW, my gut reaction to the news is about the same as when I heard about Pandora wanting to “double down on podcasts,” which is “cool, cool, let me know how that goes.” Because, really, I could say something like “man, this is (maybe) totally going to change everything!”, but that wouldn’t be particularly useful, and by all means, whether everything changes or not, it’s still worth adhering to Google’s inclusion guidelines to gain whatever listenership will be driven by this initiative.

Anyway, there are a fair few elements to Google’s podcast strategy, but I’ve come to view its heartbeat according to these building blocks:

(1) Capture. The most immediate development is how Google has already begun listing podcast and audio episodes in search results at a level similar to text, video, and images within the Google app on Android devices. This is being referred to as an effort to make podcasts a “first-class citizen” within Google’s search architecture, and it’s also a move that widely expands Google’s presence as the top-of-the-funnel option for all future podcast/audio discovery pathways among potential casual listeners noodling around on their Android devices.

(2) Contain. But here’s the most notable development, IMHO: Podcast consumption and management can now be handled directly on the Android Google app, through a user experience that’s baked into the app environment itself called “Homebase.” Based on the posts, it’s sort of an app within the app, and the significance here is that listeners can theoretically discover, listen, and subscribe to podcasts within the same app experience.

This would presumably reduce the number of steps that many assume are major pain points preventing adoption. Previously, an Android user bumping into, say, Wooden Overcoats for the first time while tumbling down a search rabbit hole would have to figure out which third-party podcast app to download on the Google Play Store — or head over to Spotify, I guess — learn how to use that product, and then start habituating with said third-party app in order to formalize their relationship with the show. By sliding in as the listening layer itself, Google theoretically collapses the distance between the point of discovery and the point of listening. (Speaking of which: pour one out for third-party podcast apps that primarily made a living serving the previously underserved Android market. Godspeed, fellas.)

Interestingly, some of the write-ups around the announcement seem to possess an expectation that the podcast experience will likely be broken out into its own standalone app at some point in the future. I don’t know about whether that’s actually the case, but…isn’t the point to reduce the number of steps to begin with?

(3) Cover. And then there’s all the stuff about connecting and syncing all these podcast consuming experiences between Google’s Android app and the Google Assistant, the company’s Alexa competitor. If you’ve been reading this newsletter for any period of time, you probably know what I’m going to say at this point: I think the potential here should be viewed less as a smart speaker thing and more as a voice-first computing thing, as the Google Assistant is likely going to be spread wide across a wide expanse of interfacing surface areas (cars, smart homes, dog collars, public restrooms, etc.)

I’ll show my bias here and say that the podcasting stuff here is a little less interesting to me than the notion of Google beginning to dabble with realizing a search engine for atomic units of audio experiences on an aurally-represented internet. Sure, we’re talking about podcasts now, but are we really only talking about podcasts with the kind of infrastructure that’s being built here? Come on, are you really going to use all that fire just to heat cans of soup? Get outta here.

A couple of other thoughts specific to podcast stuff:

(1) When I first started outlining this item, I had this whole bit reheating my skepticism about good search functionality being the answer to podcast discovery: I’m just iffy on the notion of a significant discovery pathway into podcasts that runs through subject- or topic-oriented searches.

But then I recalled that search is only part of the picture when it comes to Google these days, which now appears to hang on the twin principles of going “from search to suggest” and being “AI-first” as illustrated in this essay by Andre Saltz, which has been pretty helpful for me to think through these things. I’ve evoked it before in this column.

(2) As a veteran digital media executive recently told me: “There’s one fact of life that has remained constant — that someone is trying to game the system.” That person was talking to me for another story about another situation that I’ll publish next week, but it’s applicable here with whatever the audio SEO framework is going to look like, of course. On a related note, I’m looking forward to “What time is the Super Bowl?”, but for audio.

(3) Related to this idea of “gaming the system” is the heady, navel-gazing, but actually really interesting question of how platforms impact publishers and vice versa. Having a new system from which to extract value always offers new opportunities, but I think it’s an open question whether Google’s moves with search here will actually lead to better outcomes for the existing spread of publishers.

What’s less of an open question is the probability that we’ll see new kinds of publishers playing to the new system that Google’s endeavors here open up. Look, if I were an enterprising young person who wasn’t particularly romantic about the Way Audio Should Be Made, I’d be working hard to game the shit out of the system with new forms of content that’s sticky to its rules. (We already see versions of this enterprising spirit in the Apple Podcast charts with the spread of true crime podcasts.)

(4) Speaking of whether Google’s podcast endeavors will actually lead to better outcomes for existing podcast publishers, I’ve been hearing that the search giant has been in contact with some publishers over the past few months as it builds out its podcast features. Like many other configurations of such interfacing in the past (publishers and Facebook, publishers and Apple News, etc. etc.), I wouldn’t put too much stock in the…proposed symmetry of that relationship.

Alrighty, let’s move along.

Meanwhile, over on iOS. “Apple’s podcasts just topped 50 billion all-time downloads and streams,” reported Fast Company last week, highlighting a milestone for Apple’s long-documented history of intimacy with podcast-land.

In the piece, the benchmark came accompanied by data points that Apple has publicly provided in previous years:

• In 2014, there were 7 billion podcast downloads.
• In 2016, that number jumped to 10.5 billion.
• In 2017, it jumped to 13.7 billion episode downloads and streams, across Podcasts and iTunes.
• In March 2018, Apple Podcasts passed 50 billion all-time episode downloads and streams.

Note that the numbers for 2014, 2016, and 2017 all refer to downloads and streams that took place in that year, while the March 2018 data point refers to all-time numbers — which is to say, downloads and streams that took place since Apple began serving podcasts in 2005. (A pretty straightforward switch in framing, but one that tripped me up the first time I scanned the article. Which reminds me: I should schedule my annual vision exam soon.)

Strung together, these numbers paint a vivid picture of accelerating podcast activity across Apple platforms. But here’s what I find even more interesting: consider just how much of Apple’s all-time podcast download and streaming activity apparently took place between 2014 and now.

Now, we don’t have 2015 numbers, but let’s assume it’s somewhere in the midpoint between the 7 billion in 2014 and 10.5 billion in 2016: say, a conservative 8.5 billion. What we have, then, is a situation where 39.7 billion (7 + 8.5 + 10.5 + 13.7) out of Apple’s all-time 50 billion podcast downloads and streams took place between January 2014 and March 2018.

Which is to say, from these numbers, it seems that almost 80 percent of all podcast downloads and streams on Apple platforms took place over the past four years.

Let’s hold our horses for a hot second, run that statement back, and think this through. Shouts to RadioPublic’s Jake Shapiro for helping me kick up some much-needed caveats:

• These numbers should not be taken to suggest that almost 80 percent of all podcast listening on Apple platforms took place over the past four years. As always, keep in mind that a podcast download is no direct indicator of actual listening; after all, an episode can be delivered but not literally consumed.
• It’s also worth asking, in general, whether we can take Apple’s tracking of all-time podcast downloads and streams to be consistent all the way across time back to 2005 — that is, whether measurement of earlier numbers were processed with the same rigor as measurement of more contemporary numbers — and consider the possibility of earlier activity going untracked. I see no particular reason to suspect inconsistency, but the potential bears keeping in mind nonetheless. One can never be too careful.
• Also, we don’t have much of a clear picture of actual Apple podcast activity for any of the years before 2014.

Even with these caveats in mind, I’m still comfortable with the original takeaway: that a considerable majority of Apple podcast activity took place over the past four years.

What is the significance of this? For one thing, it further solidifies 2014’s status as the crucial pivot point for the podcast ecosystem, resulting from a combination of Apple bundling the Podcast app into iOS by default and the catalyzing awareness-raising effects of Serial as a cultural phenomenon. For another, it gives us a sense of the pivot point’s scale.

Other than that…I dunno. Purely an academic observation, and it’s one I’m squirreling away if I ever get to write the Big Book on Podcasting.

The BBC partners with Acast for international monetization. The deal, announced Tuesday morning, will see the Swedish podcast technology company take the lead on generating revenue off the downloads that BBC podcasts are currently enjoying outside of the UK.

According to the press release, podcast episodes from the BBC are downloaded over 30 million times a month outside the UK. It’s unclear how much of that is within the United States, where podcast advertising is significantly more mature. The podcast portfolio for the big U.K. public service broadcast includes Radio 4’s In Our Time, repackages of the BBC World Service, The Assassination, and the recently released Death in Ice Valley, a true crime collaboration with Norwegian public broadcaster NRK.

The deal doesn’t cover every BBC podcast, however. A spokesperson told me that it only covers “most” of the organization’s English-language podcasts. Some will be excluded for either rights-related or specific editorial reasons. One example: the historical audio fiction epic Tumanbay. In September 2017, the BBC forged a deal with Panoply to bring Tumanbay to American earballs where the latter also serves as a co-producer of the project. That relationship still stands.

The BBC does not monetize its podcasts within the U.K.

On a related note: just a reminder that the BBC recently tapped Jason Phipps, previously head of audio at The Guardian, to be the organization’s podcast commissioner.

This week in #Brands. Squarespace, the ubiquitous podcast advertiser, is launching an extended campaign with Gimlet in the form of an American Idol/Project Greenlight-esque competition, Casting Call, a national talent-seeking endeavor in which the winner gets their own show on Gimlet. The process will be documented as a podcast (what else?) that will be released in September. Judges include Gimlet’s Nazanin Rafsanjani, the great Aminatou Sow, and Squarespace founder/CEO Anthony Casalena. Submissions are open starting today.

A little hokey, but I’ve always thought there should be more things like Radiotopia’s PodQuest and WNYC’s Podcast Accelerator. In any case, shrewd move from Gimlet to take lessons from those initiatives and build a whole revenue engine around it.

On a related note: Should the day come when artificial intelligence becomes self-aware, pray it does not look like a brand.

The latest on WNYC’s inappropriate conduct imbroglio: An investigation by the law firm Proskauer Rose has apparently found “no evidence of systemic discrimination at the organization,” which is…peculiar. Here’s the WNYC News piece on the development, and further observations and analysis can be found in this 22-minute segment on the Brian Lehrer Show. Some of those observations can be found in this Twitter thread by WNYC reporter Ilya Marritz. You can read the actual report here.

WME adds PRX to its podcast client list. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the major talent agency will “work to expand the audio media nonprofit’s business in all areas, including film, television and books.” For the record, WME’s podcast clients include Crooked Media, Panoply Media, Freakonomics Radio’s Stephen Dubner, and Two Up Productions, among others. The agency was also involved in the negotiations around the Dirty John TV adaptations and, given the tentacular fortitude of its clientele reach, will likely continue to be involved in many, many more negotiations to come.

In case you need further context on how a talent agency like WME views the podcast space as a potential pool of assets, let me refer you back to my June 2017 interview with Ben Davis, an agent with the digital department at WME. A pertinent excerpt:

Hot Pod: Where do you think this relationship between talent agencies and the podcast industry is going?

Ben Davis: I think talent agencies will play an increasingly important role in the ecosystem by:

• Helping podcast creators cross IP over into other media (whether that is audiovisual, live or written).
• Pairing creators with the right distribution partners, and negotiating the terms of the relationship.
• Packaging creative elements (i.e. talent and writer) to create turnkey audio productions for distributors.

The space is changing so quickly, though, and my answer would have been different 6 months ago. So really, who knows?

Who knows, indeed. As a reminder, PRX is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based nonprofit that runs the indie podcast collective Radiotopia and provides various podcast support services to teams like The Moth and Night Vale Presents.

Bites

• The New York Times is reportedly considering adapting The Daily and the Modern Love column for television. At the NewFronts presentation yesterday, COO Meredith Kopit Levien said “The Daily has more listeners than the weekday newspaper has ever had.” You sell those ads, people! (AdWeek)
• ICYMI: Freakonomics Radio moves from WNYC Studios to Stitcher. (Press release)
• Slate’s podcast project with its fantastic TV critic Willa Paskin, called Decoder Ring, is now live. (Slate)
• Also live now: TED en Español. (Apple Podcasts)
• The wave of Westworld podcasts is now back upon us. Let it consume you.
• Heads up, antipodal Hot Pod readers: The third Audiocraft Podcast Festival will take place in Sydney in early June. (Media release)
• Reese Witherspoon’s media company Hello Sunshine, not content with adapting a true crime podcast-centric novel for television, has launched an original podcast of its own, which is not a true crime podcast. (EW)

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/05/google-wants-to-do-for-podcasts-on-android-what-apple-did-for-podcasts-on-ios/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/04/phew-weve-apparently-solved-97-of-the-podcast-measurement-problem-everybody-relax/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/04/phew-weve-apparently-solved-97-of-the-podcast-measurement-problem-everybody-relax/#respond Tue, 17 Apr 2018 13:48:32 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=157279

Editor’s note: Hot Pod is a weekly newsletter on the podcasting industry written by Nick Quah; we happily share it with Nieman Lab readers each Tuesday.

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 159, published April 17, 2018.

Quick measurement bite. Been a while since we’ve checked back into what is arguably the most important subject in the podcast business. Let’s fix that, shall we?

“The good news for podcasters and buyers is measurement challenges are 97 percent solved,” Midroll Media CRO Lex Friedman said on a podcast panel at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show last week. “What we can report now is more specific than we could before.” You can find the quote in this Inside Radio writeup on the panel.

Be that as it may, there’s still some work left to be done. I reached out to Friedman for his perspective on what constitutes the remaining 3 percent of the challenges left to be solved, and here’s his response (pardon the customary Midroll spin):

In TV today, advertisers would struggle if NBC used Nielsen ratings, and ABC used Nielsen but with a different methodology, and CBS used some other company’s measurement technology.

Today in podcasting, the measurement problem is solved; the remaining 3 percent is getting everyone standardized. It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while, Midroll loses a show to a competitor. When we sell a show at 450,000 downloads, and the next day the same show and same feed is being sold at 700,000 downloads, that’s a problem.

The IAB’s recommended a 24-hour measurement window, while some folks still advocate for 60 minutes or two hours, and too many vendors continue to sell at 5 minutes, which we universally know is way too liberal a count. That’s unfair and confusing to advertisers, and that’s the piece that needs fixing.

That’s no small 3 percent, in my opinion.

Anyway, if you’re new to the podcast measurement problem, my column from February 2016 — back when a group of public radio stations published a set of guidelines on the best way for podcast companies to measure listenership — still holds up as a solid primer on the topic, if I do say so myself.

Fool’s gold? Something else to note from Inside Radio’s article on the NAB panel: a strong indication, delivered by Triton Digital president of market development John Rosso, that there is increasing demand for programmatic podcast advertising.

Programmatic advertising is a system by which ads are automatically bought and sold through algorithmic processes. In other words, it’s a monetization environment where the facilitation of advertising value exchange is automated away from human interaction. The principal upside that comes with programmatic advertising is efficiency: As an advertiser, you theoretically don’t have to spend a lot of time identifying, contacting, and executing buys, and as a publisher, you theoretically don’t have to spend a lot of time doing those things in the opposite direction. In theory, both sides don’t have to do much more work for a lot more money. But the principal downside is the ensuing experience on listener-side, and all the ramifications that fall from a slide in said experience: Because these transactions are machine-automated, there’s no human consideration governing the aesthetic intentionality of an advertising experience paired with the specific contexts of a given podcast.

Combine this with the core assumptions of what makes podcasting uniquely valuable as a media product — that it engenders deeper experiences of intimacy between creator and listener, that its strength is built on the cultivated simulacra of personal trust between the two parties, that any podcast advertising spot is a heavy act of value extraction from the relationship developed between the two sides — and you have a situation where a digital advertising technology is being considered for a medium to which its value propositions are diametrically opposed.

The underlying problem, put simply: Can you artificially scale up podcasting’s advertising supply without compromising its underlying value proposition? To phrase the problem in another direction: Can you develop a new advertising product that’s able to correspondingly scale up intimacy, trust, and relationship-depth between podcast creator and consumer?

The answer for both things may well be no, and that perhaps the move shouldn’t be to prescribe square pegs for round holes. Or maybe the response we’ll see will sound more like “the way we’re doing things isn’t sustainable, we’re going to have to make more money somehow” with the end result being an identity-collapsing shift in the defining characteristics of this fledgling medium. In which case: Bummer, dude.

Binge-Drop Murphies. Gimlet announced its spring slate last week, and two out of three of them, the audio drama Sandra and the Lynn Levy special The Habitat, will be released in their entirety tomorrow. When asked about the choice to go with the binge-drop, Gimlet president Matt Lieber tells me:

We decided to binge both The Habitat and Sandra because we felt that they were both so engrossing and engaging, so we wanted to give the listener the decision to either power through all the episodes, or sample and consume at their own pace. Sandra is our second scripted fiction series and we know from our first, Homecoming, that a lot of people chose to binge the series after it was out in full. With The Habitat, it’s such a unique and immersive miniseries, and we wanted to give listeners the chance to get lost in the world by listening all at once.

Grab your space suits, fellas.

The beautiful game. The third show in Gimlet’s spring bundle is We Came To Win, the company’s first sports show, which promises to deliver stories on the most memorable soccer matches in history. The press release appears to be playing up the universal angle of the sport: “Soccer is a sport that is about so much more than goals. It’s about continents, countries, characters, and the relationships between them.” (I mean, yeah.)

In an interesting bit of mind-meld, Gimlet’s first foray into sports mirrors WNYC Studios’ own maiden voyage into the world of physical human competition. Sometime this spring, the New York public radio station will roll out its own World Cup-timed narrative podcast, a collaboration with Men in Blazers’ Roger Bennett that will look the U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team’s journey from its triumphant 1994 World cup appearance to its doomed 1998 campaign. (Yikes.)

Public radio genes run deep.

Peabody nominations. The 2017 nominations were announced last week, and interestingly enough, six out of the eight entries in the Radio/Podcast category are either podcast-only or podcast-first. The nominees are: Radiotopia’s Ear Hustle, Minnesota Public Radio’s 74 Seconds, Serial Productions’ S-Town, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University’s Scene on Radio: Seeing White, Gimlet’s Uncivil, and Louisville Public Media/Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting’s “The Pope’s Long Con.

Notes on The Pope’s Long Con. It was an unbelievable story with unthinkable consequences. Produced by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting (KyCIR) and Louisville Public Media, The Pope’s Long Con was the product of a seven-month long investigation into Dan Johnson, a controversial bishop-turned-Kentucky state representative shrouded in corruption, deceit, and an allegation of sexual assault. KyCIR’s feature went live on December 11, bringing Johnson’s story — and the allegations against him — into the spotlight. The impact was explosive, leading to immediate calls for Johnson to resign. He denied the allegations at a press conference. Two days later, Johnson committed suicide.

It was “any journalist’s nightmare,” as KyCIR’s managing editor Brendan McCarthy told CJR in an article about how the newsroom grappled with the aftermath of its reporting. (Which, by the way, you should absolutely read.)

In light of those circumstances, the podcast’s Peabody nomination feels especially well-deserved. It’s also a remarkable achievement for a public radio station relatively new to podcasting. “The Pope’s Long Con was the first heavy-lift podcast Louisville Public Media had undertaken,” Sean Cannon, a senior digital strategist at the organization and creative director of the podcast, tells me. “It didn’t start out as one though…Audio was planned, but it was a secondary concern. Once we realized the scope and gravity of it all, we knew everything had to be built around the podcast.”

When I asked Cannon how he feels about the nomination, he replied:

Given the situation surrounding the story, it’s still a confusing mix of emotions to see The Pope’s Long Con reach the heights it has. That said, we’re all immensely proud of the work we did. It’s necessary to hold our elected officials accountable.

In the context of the podcast industry, it taught me a lesson that can be easy to forget. I was worried the hierarchy of publishers had become too calcified, rendering it almost impossible for anyone below the top rungs to make serious waves — without a thick wallet, anyway. It’s a topic that comes up regularly in Hot Pod.

While the industry will never purely be a meritocracy, The Pope’s Long Con shattered that perception. It served as a reminder of something that gets glossed over when you’re caught up in the business of it all: If you can create compelling audio, that trumps everything else.

Tip of the hat, Louisville.

Crooked Media expands into film. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the media (political activism?) company will be co-producing a new feature documentary on Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke’s bid to unseat Senator Ted Cruz in the upcoming midterm elections. This extends on Crooked Media’s previous adventures in video, which already involve a series of HBO specials to be taped across the country amidst the run-up to midterms.

A quick nod to Pod Save America’s roots as The Ringer’s Keepin’ It 1600 here: Crooked Media will likely crib from the playbook The Ringer built around the recent Andre the Giant HBO documentary, which was executive produced by Ringer CEO Bill Simmons, where the latter project received copious promotion through The Ringer website and podcast network. What’s especially interesting about that whole situation is the way it is essentially a wholesale execution of what I took as the principal ideas from the analyst Ben Thompson’s 2015 post “Grantland and the (Surprising) Future of Publishing.”

I’m not sure if I’d personally watch a Beto O’Rourke doc — the dude has been a particularly vibrant entry into the “blue hope in red country” political media subgenre for a long while now, and I’m tapping out — but Pod Save America listeners most definitely would.

Empire on Blood. My latest for Vulture is a review of the new seven-part Panoply podcast, which I thought was interesting enough as a pulpy doc but deeply frustrating in how the show handles its power and positioning. It’s a weird situation: I really liked host Steve Fishman’s writing, and I really liked the tape gathered, but the two things really shouldn’t have been paired up this way.

The state of true crime podcasts. You know you’re neck-deep in something when you can throw out random words and land close to an actual example of that something: White Wine True Crime, Wine & Crime, Up & Vanished, The Vanished, Real Crime Profile, True Crime Garage, Crimetown, Small Town Murders, and so on. (This is a general observation that goes well beyond true crime pods. Cryptocurrencies: Sumokoin, Dogecoin, PotCoin. Food startups: Plated, Pantry, PlateIQ. Names: Kevin.)

Anyway, I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: True crime is the bloody, bleeding heart of podcasting, a genre that’s proliferating with a velocity so tremendous it could power a dying sun. And in my view, true crime podcasts are also a solid microcosm of the podcast universe as a whole: What happens there, happens everywhere.

When it comes to thinking about true crime podcasts, there are few people whose opinions I trust more than crime author, podcaster, and New Hampshire Public Radio digital director Rebecca Lavoie. As the cohost of the indispensable weekly conversational podcast Crime Writers On… — which began life as Crime Writers On Serial, a companion piece to the breakout 2014 podcast phenomenon — Lavoie consumes and thinks a lot about true crime and true crime podcasts specifically.

I touched base with Lavoie recently to get the latest on what’s been going on in her neck of the woods:

Hot Pod: In your view, how has the true crime podcast genre evolved over the past four years or so?

Rebecca Lavoie: It’s evolved in a few directions — some great, some…not so much.

On the one hand (and most wonderfully), we have journalism and media outlets who would never have touched the true crime genre a few years ago making true crime podcasts based on the tenets of great reporting and production. And when it comes to the “never would have touched it” part, I know what I’m talking about. Long before I was a podcaster, I was the coauthor of several mass-market true crime books while also working on a public radio show. Until Criminal was released and enjoyed some success, public radio and true crime never crossed streams, to an extent where I would literally avoid discussing my true crime reporting at work — it was looked down upon, frankly.

Today, though, that kind of journalistic snobbery is almost non-existent, and podcasts (especially Criminal and Serial) can claim 100 percent responsibility for that. Shows that exist today as a result of this change include Accused from the Cincinnati Enquirer, West Cork from Audible, Breakdown from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, In the Dark from APM reports, and the CBC’s recent series Missing & Murdered. (And yes, even the public radio station where I still work — now on the digital side — is developing a true crime podcast!)

Credit is also due to Serial for the way journalism podcasts are being framed as true crime when they wouldn’t have been in a pre-Serial era. Take Slow Burn from Slate, which is the best podcast I’ve heard in the past year or two. While the Watergate story would have been so easy to frame as a straight political scandal, the angles and prose techniques used in Slow Burn have all the hallmarks of a great true crime narrative — and I’m pretty sure the success of that show was, at least in part, a result of that.

Of course, where you have ambitious, high-quality work, you inevitably have ambitious terrible work, right? It’s true, there are very big and very bad true crime podcasts being produced at an astonishing rate right now, and because they have affiliation with established networks, these shows get a lot of promotion. But as much as I might personally love to hate some of these terrible shows (I’m talking to YOU, Atlanta Monster!) I do see some value in their existence.

I think about it the same way I think about movies: Not every successful big budget blockbuster is a good movie, but ultimately, those films can serve to raise the profile and profitability of the movie industry as a whole, and help audiences discover other, higher-quality content.

Hot Pod: What do you think are the more troubling trends in how true crime podcasts have evolved?

Lavoie: One is what I see as a glut of podcasts that are, quite frankly, building audience by boldly recycling the work of others. Sword & Scale is a much-talked-about example of that, but it’s not even the worst I’ve come across. There was a recent incident in which a listener pointed me to a monetized show in which the host simply read, word for word, articles published in magazines and newspapers — and I can’t help but wonder how pervasive that is. My hope is that at some point, the transcription technologies we’re now seeing emerge can somehow be deployed to scan audio for plagiarism, similar to the way YouTube scans videos for copyright infringement.

But there’s another trend that, for me, is even more troubling. There’s been a recent and massive growth of corporate podcast networks that are building their businesses on what I can only compare to the James Patterson book factory model — basically saying to creators, “Hey, if you think you have a story, partner with us and we’ll help you make, distribute, and monetize your podcast — and we’ll even slap our name on it!”

This, unfortunately, seems to be what’s behind a recent spate of shows that, in the hands of a more caring set of producers, could have (maybe?) been good, but ultimately, the podcasts end up being soulless, flat, “why did they make it at all” experiences.

Why is this the most upsetting trend for me? First, because good journalists are sometimes tied to these factory-made shows, and the podcasts aren’t doing them, or their outlets, or the podcast audience as a whole any favors.

The other part of it is that these networks have a lot of marketing pull with podcast platforms that can make or break shows by featuring them at the top of the apps. These marketing relationships with Apple etc. mean factory networks have a tremendous advantage in getting their shows front and center. But ultimately, many of the true crime podcasts getting pushed on podcast apps are very, very bad, and I can’t imagine a world in which a lot of bad content will end up cultivating a smart and sustainable audience.

Hot Pod: In your opinion, what were the most significant true crime podcasts in recent years?

Lavoie: In the Dark by APM Reports is up there. What I love about that show is that they approached the Jacob Wetterling story with an unusual central question: Why wasn’t this case solved? (Of course, they also caught the incredibly fortunate break of the case actually being solved, but I digress…) Theirs is a FAR more interesting question than, say, “What actually happened to this missing person?” Or “Is this person really guilty?” Of course, In the Dark also had the benefit of access to a talented public media newsroom, and I really enjoyed how they folded data reporting into that story.

I most often tell people that after Serial season one, my favorite true crime podcast of all time is the first season of Accused. Not only do I love that show because it looks at an interesting unsolved case, but I love it because it was made by two women, seasoned newspaper journalists, with no podcasting experience. Amber Hunt is a natural storyteller and did an amazing job injecting a tremendous amount of humanity and badass investigative journalism skills into that story. It’s not perfect, but to me, its imperfections are a big part of what makes it extraordinary.

More recently, I’ve really enjoyed the shows I mentioned above, including West Cork and Missing & Murdered. But when it comes to significance, Slow Burn is the most understated and excellent audio work I’ve heard in a long time. I loved every minute of it. I think that Slate team has raised the bar on telling historical crime stories, and we’re the better for it.

Hot Pod: What do you generally want to see more of from true crime podcasts?

Lavoie: I want to see more new approaches and formal risk-taking, and more integrity, journalistic and otherwise.

One of my favorite podcasts to talk about is Breakdown from the AJC. Bill Rankin is the opposite of a radio reporter — he has a folksy voice and a writing style much more suited to print. But beginning in season one, he’s been very transparent about the challenges he’s faced while making the show. He’s also, as listeners quickly learned, an incredible reporter with incredible values. That show has embraced multiple formats and allowed itself to evolve — and with a couple of exceptions, Bill’s voice and heart have been at the center of it.

I’d also love to see some trends go away, most of all, this idea of podcast host as “Hey, I’m not a podcaster or a journalist or really anyone at all but LET’S DO THIS, GUYS” gung-ho investigator.

Don’t get me wrong, some really good podcasts have started with people without a lot of audio or reporting experience, but they aren’t good because the person making them celebrates sounding like an amateur after making dozens of episodes.

Again, you can find Lavoie on Crime Writers On…, where she is joined every week by: Kevin Flynn, her true crime coauthor (and “former TV reporter husband,” she adds); Toby Ball, a fiction writer; and Lara Bricker, a licensed private investigator and fellow true crime writer. Lavoie also produces a number of other podcast projects, including: …These Are Their Stories: The Law & Order Podcast, HGTV & Me, and Married With Podcast for Stitcher Premium.

On a related note: The New York Times’ Jonah Bromwich wrote a quick piece on the Parcast network, described as “one of several new networks saturating the audio market with podcasts whose lurid storylines play out like snackable television.” The article also contains my successful effort at being quoted in ALL CAPS in the Times.

Bites:

• This year’s Maximum Fun Drive has successfully accrued over 28,000 new and upgrading members. (Twitter) Congrats to the team.
• WBUR is organizing what it’s calling the “first-ever children’s podcast festival” on April 28 and 29. Called “The Mega Awesome Super Huge Wicked Fun Podcast Playdate” — shouts to whoever came up with that — the festival will be held at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, Massachusetts and will feature shows like Eleanor Amplified, Story Pirates, But Why, and Circle Round, among others. (Website)
• “Bloomberg expands TicToc to podcasts, newsletters.” For the uninitiated: TicToc is Bloomberg’s live-streaming video news channel that’s principally distributed over Twitter. On the audio side, the expansion appears to include podcast repackages and a smart-speaker experiment. (Axios)
• American Public Media is leaning on Westwood One to handle advertising for the second season of its hit podcast In The Dark. Interesting choice. The new season drops next week. (AdWeek)
• I’m keeping an eye on this: Death in Ice Valley, an intriguing collaboration between the BBC and Norway’s NRK, debuted yesterday. (BBC)
• Anchor rolls out a feature that helps its users find…a cohost? Yet another indication that the platform is in the business of building a whole new social media experience as opposed to something that directly relates to podcasting. (TechCrunch)
• On The New York Times’ marketing campaign for Caliphate: “The Times got some early buzz for the podcast before its launch; 15,000 people have signed up for a newsletter that will notify them when a new episode is ready, twice as many as expected.” (Digiday)
• “Alexa Is a Revelation for the Blind,” writes Ian Bogost in The Atlantic.

Photo of a tape measure by catd_mitchell used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/04/phew-weve-apparently-solved-97-of-the-podcast-measurement-problem-everybody-relax/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/04/emily-bell-thinks-public-service-media-today-has-its-most-important-role-to-play-since-world-war-ii/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/04/emily-bell-thinks-public-service-media-today-has-its-most-important-role-to-play-since-world-war-ii/#respond Mon, 02 Apr 2018 12:30:02 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=156697 The ability of the media to secure democracy is being challenged by great disruptions: ad funding doesn’t work that well anymore and large, non-transparent platforms are increasingly central in our information flow. Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia, thinks public service media may be about to play its most important role since World War II.

Facebook and Google have taken over not only an increasing share of the attention, but also much of the ad market. This has taken away another large chunk of the revenue that supports journalism, following classified ads in the unbundling of the business model that once made newspapers a thriving business.

The rise of subscription models and paywalls has begun to inject fresh money in some media houses, but those who aren’t subscribing to journalistic media could be left worse off. It’s no longer a matter of picking up a single newspaper copy at a newsstand; a paywalled news industry limits information to those able to make a long-term financial commitment, one that usually involves disclosing your personal data. And that personal data has become a commodity, being used to target everything from advertising to political manipulation.

At this year’s SXSW conference, I met Bell, who before founding the Tow Center, worked for many years as an award-winning journalist, digital pioneer, and later digital editor of The Guardian. She worries that we’re entering a period where the messages we receive are individually adapted, and we no longer have access to the same information.

“In a way, that’s what we think we’ve seen in the 2016 election cycle: Certain people getting certain messages, others getting different ones, and not really knowing where it’s coming from, who’s deploying it, and with no kind of transparency,” she said. “We are being made to feel a particular way by the media we’re consuming, and it is not an organic, cultural phenomenon, but a highly manipulated political phenomenon. Unless you can have free high-quality news, you don’t have an antidote; you really don’t have an antidote.”

More of our conversation, edited slightly for length and clarity, is below.

Anders Hofseth: What happens in a society where media doesn’t work?

Emily Bell: You can just run down the Committee to Protect Journalists’ list of countries where press freedom is at its worst. Places like China, Russia, Turkey…You might have a functional economy, but you don’t have citizens who are engaged in proper self-governance.

I think we assumed that it’s not going to happen to us, and that may be why we’ve been fairly poor stewards of the media ecosystems. We’re at a point now where there’s an enormous amount of disruption to the economics of media. You need a durable, predictable model which continues to deliver that fundamental mission, and it’s become very hard for commercial companies to do that.

One of the things I found hardest as a digital editor to figure out was: Which thing is the change? What’s the body of water that’s moving, and what’s the foam on top of the wave? If you’re on top of the wave, it will be very distracting and make the wave seem bigger than it was. But really, it’s the moving water you have to pay attention to.

The thing that I completely got wrong is that I did think advertising would be much more durable. I don’t think anybody really anticipated the scale or pace at which the ad market would change under Facebook.

Hofseth: Is there no “rebundling” of media for more-or-less useable general journalism?

Bell: No, I don’t think so. I’ve been to a number of countries in the past year, including Norway, Switzerland, South Korea. Every single market seems to be experiencing exactly the same trauma, which is: “You’re not big enough on the Web, you’re just not big enough.” Scale has broken the business model and it isn’t going to come back.

News is hard, it’s not cheap to produce, and it needs to be consistent. And you need certain things for long-horizon stories, teams of people — maybe sometimes even generations of people — to understand them and keep following them. That sustainability has always come out of a mix of the public and the private.

When you think about the institutions that contain that, maybe it’s perfectly sensible when people say post-war profitability in news was a blip. It didn’t make money beforehand and hasn’t made money for a few years. Maybe we had fifty years of it just throwing out cash. Now that’s coming to an end, and we can’t expect those functions to really be profitable.

Hofseth: Maybe because there was a time when news was “good enough” as entertainment for the price…and now you have something which is more interesting.

Bell: I have so many great things on my phone that I would rather be doing than looking at the news.

Hofseth: The two of us would maybe use news as entertainment anyway, because we are sick people.

Bell: Yes, we are entertained — we are sick people who are entertained mainly by the news which makes us very sick! But we are also…

Hofseth: We are marginal.

Bell: Yeah. We are not representative of the general public.

Hofseth: How do you see the role of public service in this?

Bell: Everyone in public service journalism comes to work every day with a mission to inform the citizens of their country, and to try and reach everybody. Even people who can’t pay, even people who don’t necessarily think they need the news, or people who are left out of decision-making because they don’t fit the socio-demographic profile that means they would normally be included.

To me, right now, there is almost nothing more important than having robust public service media available to citizens.

I think public service broadcasters can do anything because they have longevity and security of funding. But they’re not always as imaginative as we need them to be at this particular time.

Existing political systems and public service broadcasters need to be free to imagine the kinds of information ecosystems that they’d want at the nation/state level and then real freedom to experiment with and find new paths to deliver that.

And also to think about themselves oriented in a world where it could well be that large-scale technology platforms — designed, built, operated in America — will be taking over much of what your information ecosystem looks like over the next decade.

Hofseth: Do you think there is a viable long-term financial model for commercial media?

Bell: I think there’s a very viable long-term financial model for commercial media. But I don’t necessarily think that applies directly to journalism.

If you are creating viral native advertising, you might have a future. If you are doing scripted shows or certain types of high-quality video material, you definitely have a commercial future. I mean, look at all the money that’s coming through platforms at the moment to commission scripted shows.

Actually, I think you do see certain general journalism outlets being more sustainable now through reader revenues, and I think that that’s definitely a model for some of them.

We don’t know much about payment mechanisms yet, how they will develop, and what people will pay for. So I don’t think that there is a viable advertising-supported model for free journalism — there just isn’t. It’s not going to happen.

And if it still should happen, it’s not going to happen for some years. Many of the digitally-born sites living within the social ecosystem, they’ve had a terrible time. Much worse than almost anybody else, including legacy media.

Hofseth: Do you think there is a long-term viable model for any kind of general news media that would be read by the broader public?

Bell: Well, it’s always traditionally been supported by advertising. The advertising has gone to Google and Facebook so, unless they want to make it, then, no.

Or — again — this is where public media has a big role. Traditionally, the impact of public media has been much more around who does it reach, what parts of the population are reading it, or viewing it, or listening to it. What are they getting from it? There’s a huge mission for those companies to reach those sections of society with accurate facts that people can make sensible decisions on.

Google and Facebook have hoovered up everything. The ad departments just didn’t see it coming. We missed that trend much more profoundly than we did the editorial trends which we’ve beaten ourselves up about — Oh, we’re not digitizing quickly enough.

What I have not changed my mind about is something which I was really concerned about at The Guardian — which former editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger was also champion of and I think Kath Viner is now a real champion of — is we have to make high-quality news available to everybody. As long as The Guardian can afford to put its best journalism in a place where you don’t have to transact for it, and the more we can persuade people to generate revenue which enables us to do that, the better it is. I just think that that is a huge challenge now.

At the moment, I think public service media has got the most important role to play that it’s had at any point since the end of the second World War.

In America, we’re not quite so alert to the facts of the big wars in Europe. The First World War really caused the formation of the BBC. You were in an incredibly insecure period of global politics that was threatening and dangerous and appalling for most people.

Hofseth: Some commercial companies say that the public service organizations should stick to their original platforms and leave the written Internet to the commercial side of the business.

Bell: First of all, public service media has to really understand why public service media is different from commercial media. In Britain with the BBC, there were times when it really didn’t practice its public service mission in everything it did, it looked much more like an aggressive commercial company.

If you are a public service media company, you really need to be welded to your mission and understand what that means.

But at the same time, I think the commercial companies, who are interested in servicing their shareholders, aren’t necessarily the right people to decide what the correct format for a communications ecosystem that benefits all people is. In fact, they might be the worst people to decide that.

And you have to be very careful. I’m well aware of the arguments that people like Rupert Murdoch and the Daily Mail constructed in the U.K. to undercut the BBC.

Now, that doesn’t mean the BBC should never be reformed. But it should be reformed in a way which is efficient for the population, not in a way that benefits commercial media ahead of public service media.

To say that they should just stick to their traditional platform seems to be willfully ignorant of what’s actually happening in the political ecosystem, when everybody deserves access to high-quality information, and I don’t see commercial media necessarily delivering that consistently enough.

Public service media is there for such an important and vital function, and, if it’s doing its job properly, it’s indispensable.

Hofseth: Why do you think some media companies try to limit the public service?

Bell: Because I think they probably have a misconception that, if you get rid of public service…In the U.K., about a third of all revenues in the media went through the BBC. It’s probably even more now because the advertising market has collapsed.

We used to study this a lot at The Guardian — whether or not the BBC’s website was disadvantaging the web presence of The Guardian. And the truth of it is, actually, that if you have a healthy and thriving mixed media economy, it tends to benefit everybody. A combination of regulation and strong public media is probably why television news in the U.K. is significantly better than television news in the U.S. Generally speaking, a strong and good public service broadcaster with high standards would drag up the standard of the rest of the media.

Anders Hofseth is the acting editor of NRKbeta. This interview was originally published in Norwegian at NRKbeta.

Photo of Emily Bell by Anders Hofseth used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/04/emily-bell-thinks-public-service-media-today-has-its-most-important-role-to-play-since-world-war-ii/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/03/homepages-may-be-dead-but-are-daily-news-podcasts-are-the-new-front-page/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/03/homepages-may-be-dead-but-are-daily-news-podcasts-are-the-new-front-page/#respond Tue, 27 Mar 2018 16:12:51 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=156470

As my buddies at Nieman Lab pointed out, there exists a counter-example: “Slate has experimented successfully with urging listeners to subscribe to Slate Plus within its own podcasts.” However, it’s worth noting that Slate’s strategy there is largely built around additional podcast content for paid members, which isn’t a move that’s all that present in the way public radio stations operate their membership models.

Better counter-examples can be found with the fine folks at Maximum Fun and Radiotopia. The former enjoyed a particularly successful drive last year, which I wrote about. That campaign, which took place over two weeks, led to the conversion of 24,181 new and upgrading members. Which is to say: ways to do it well have been done before.

Ken Freedman’s perspective here highlights, in precise terms, the audience relationship challenge that comes with the shift toward on-demand: as a publisher, you are now in a position where you can build niche programming that’s able to connect with people far beyond your geographic bounds and well within the depth of that niche’s community — but among the notable trade-offs here is a situation where the identity of a show supersedes the identity of the publisher. I’d argue that this likely shifts the psychology of the ask involved in any sort of pledge drive.

Bites.

• New York Media has acquired Splitsider from The Awl Network (RIP). Splitsider has a great “This Week in Comedy Podcasts” column that I frequently skim, and I’m excited to see the feature pop up on Vulture. (Wall Street Journal)
• Art19 now hosts podcasts from the following TV companies: NBC Sports, NBC News, MSNBC, CNBC, NBC Entertainment, Bravo, Oxygen and SYFY.
• Speaking of Bravo: Connie Britton has been cast in Bravo’s TV adaptation of the Los Angeles Times and Wondery’s Dirty John. (Vulture)
• And speaking of Wondery: the Los Angeles-based podcast company has another collaboration with a Tronc-owned newspaper in the pipeline: Felonious Florida, with Broward County-area paper Sun Sentinel.
• First Look Media has a new podcast out to pair with Intercepted: Deconstructed, with the British political journalist Mehdi Hasan.
• Spotify has rolled out a voice-control feature. I’m not quite ready to say “Play God’s Plan” out loud in public, so you can keep it.

Photo by Holger Prothmann used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/03/homepages-may-be-dead-but-are-daily-news-podcasts-are-the-new-front-page/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/03/how-digital-leaders-from-the-bbc-and-al-jazeera-are-planning-for-the-ethics-of-ai/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/03/how-digital-leaders-from-the-bbc-and-al-jazeera-are-planning-for-the-ethics-of-ai/#respond Mon, 19 Mar 2018 13:00:36 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=155961 DOHA, Qatar — If robot reporters are going to deploy from drones in war zones in the future, at what point do we have the conversation about the journalism ethics of all this?

The robots may still be a few years away, but the conversation is happening now (at least about today’s AI technology in newsrooms). At Al Jazeera’s Future of Media Leaders’ Summit earlier this month, a group of experts in areas from media to machine learning discussed how their organizations frame the ethics behind (and in front of!) artificial intelligence.

Can a #drone drop a robot into a war zone to report? Doesn’t take a meal break- but can’t empathise with a story! Relationship between man and machine- our future co workers #FMLSummit @AlJazeera pic.twitter.com/Bs2NLWcoNp

— Morwen Williams (@morwenw) March 5, 2018

Ethical AI was one of several topics explored during the gathering in Qatar, focused on data security, the cloud, and how artificial intelligence can automate and augment journalism. (“Data has become more valuable than oil,” Mohamed Abuagla told the audience in the same presentation as the drone-reporter concept.)

AI has already been seeded into the media industry, from surfacing trends for story production to moderating comments. Robotic combat correspondents may still be a far-fetched idea. But with machine learning strengthening algorithms day by day and hour by hour, AI innovations are occurring at a breakneck pace. Machines are more efficient than humans, sure. But in a human-centric field like journalism, how are newsrooms putting AI ethics into practice?

Ali Shah, the BBC’s head of emerging technology and strategic direction, explained his approach to the moral code of AI in journalism. Yaser Bishr, Al Jazeera Media Network’s executive director of digital, also shared some of his thinking on the future of AI in journalism. Here are some of the takeaways:

Ali Shah, the BBC

In both his keynote speech and subsequent panel participation, Shah walked the audience through the business and user implications of infusing AI into parts of the BBC’s production processes. He continued returning to the question of individual agency. “Every time we’re making a judgment about when to apply [machine learning]…what we’re really doing is making a judgment about human capacity,” he said. “Was it right for me to automate that process? When I’m talking about augmenting someone’s role, what judgment values am I augmenting?”

Shah illustrated how the BBC has used AI to perfect camera angles and cuts when filming, search for quotes in recorded data more speedily, and make recommendations for further viewing when the credits are rolling on the BBC’s online player. (The BBC and Microsoft have also experimented with a voice interface AI.) But he emphasized how those AI tools are intended to automate, augment, and amplify human journalists’ work, not necessarily replace or supersede them. “Machine learning is not going to be the answer to every single problem that we face,” he said.

The BBC is proud to be one of the world’s most trusted news brands, and Shah pointed to the need for balance between trust in the organization and individual agency. “We’re going to have to strike a balance between the utility and the effectiveness and the role it plays in society and in our business,” he said. “What we need to do is constantly recognize [that] our role should be giving a little bit of control back to our audience members.”

He also spoke about the need to educate both the engineers designing the AI and the “masses” who are the intended consumers of it. “Journalists are doing a fantastic job at covering this topic,” he said, but “our job as practitioners is to…break this down to the audience so they have control about how machine learning and AI are used to impact them.” (The BBC has published explainer videos about the technology in the past.) “We have to remember, as media, we are gatekeepers to people’s understanding of the modern world.”

“The use of AI changes our behavior. Decisions are influenced and social norms change/evolve but we must make sure we are consciously aware of the effects of machine learning.”- Ali Shah of @BBC at #FMLSummit #AI

— Al Jazeera PR (@AlJazeera) March 6, 2018

“It’s not about slowing down innovation but about deciding what’s at stake,” Shah said. “Choosing your pace is really important.”

Yaser Bishr, Al Jazeera Media Network

Bishr, who helped bring AJ+ to life and has since used Facebook to pull followers onto Al Jazeera’s new Jetty podcast network, also emphasized the need to tread carefully.

“The speed of evolution we are going through in AI far exceeds anything we’ve done before,” Bishr said, talking about the advancements made in the technology at large. “We’re all for innovation, but I think the discussion about regulating the policy needs to go at the same pace.”

In conversation with Shah, Rainer Kellerhais of Microsoft, and Ahmed Elmagarmid of the Qatar Computing Research Institute, Bishr reiterated the risks of AI algorithms putting people into boxes and cited Microsoft’s exiled Twitter bot as an example of input and output bias. “The risk is not only during the training of the machine, but also during the execution of the machine,” he said.

Dr Yaser Bishr of @ALJazeera: “In the context of generating news and information, there is some degree of bias because the info is gathered by a human so there is that editorial interference” #FMLSummit #journalism #AI

— Al Jazeera PR (@AlJazeera) March 6, 2018

Elmagarmid countered his concern about speed: “Things are in motion but things are continuous,” he said calmly. “We have time to adapt to it. We have time to harness it. I think if we look back to the Industrial Revolution, look back to the steam engine…people are always perceiving new technology as threatening.

“At the end of the day you will have [not just] newsrooms, but much better and more efficient and smarter newsrooms,” Elmagarmid said.

“AI is not the Industrial Revolution,” Bishr said, adding to his earlier comments: “We’re not really in a hurry in using AI right now.”

Image from user Comfreak used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/03/how-digital-leaders-from-the-bbc-and-al-jazeera-are-planning-for-the-ethics-of-ai/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/with-in-article-chat-bots-bbc-is-experimenting-with-new-ways-to-introduce-readers-to-complex-topics/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/with-in-article-chat-bots-bbc-is-experimenting-with-new-ways-to-introduce-readers-to-complex-topics/#respond Fri, 23 Feb 2018 16:07:28 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=154990 Even if they haven’t changed the world in the way some hyped, chatbots have become a compelling way for news organizations to experiment with telling familiar stories in a new format. Some big challenges stand in the way of widespread adoption, though. One is acclimating users to the format; another is winning over reporters.

The BBC News Labs and the BBC Visual Journalism team are trying to solve both issues with a single solution: a custom bot-builder application designed to make it as easy as possible for reporters to build chatbots and insert them into their stories. In a few minutes, a BBC reporter can input the text of an article, define the questions users can click, and publish the bot, which can then be reused and added to any other relevant article. BBC reporters can even repurpose existing Q&A explainers into bot-based conversations.

So, on this story about a typo on State of the “Uniom” tickets, a “Catch me up” module says: “Donald Trump came into office promising to change the face of American politics and transfer power ‘back to the people.’ This BBC chatbot lets you ask: what has President Trump achieved in his first year?” Three potential questions are offered. (How are the President’s approval ratings? How is the economy faring under President Trump? And has the President changed immigration numbers?) Pick one and a chat interface expands with answers. (“He’s one of the most unpopular presidents in the modern era.”) With each answer, one or more new questions pop up as options; the Trump chatbot contains more than a dozen in all.)

Grant Heinrich, the BBC developer leading the organizations bot efforts (and one of the creators of BBC’s previous Brexit Bot) said that most of the bot software currently on the market is a poor fit for journalists’ needs. “Our software is much more designed around the reporter’s workflow than the majority of the software that I’ve seen,” he said. “It’s really designed around the situation of, ‘I’ve got a major deadline coming up, and I’d really like to have a bot in this piece, but I don’t have seven hours to pull one together. How can I adapt material that I’ve already got?'”

For the BBC, bots represent a new way to reach and inform readers who are not deeply engaged in complicated news stories, said Heinrich. One recent bot set out to help users understand how the sharp rise in personal lending might affect them. BBC has also used the tech to help readers catch up on the situation in North Korea and understand the latest flu outbreak. And these bots can all be reused in any piece that reporters think will benefit from deeper background information; the Trump’s-first-year chatbot had run in at least 10 BBC stories.

“These topics, like Brexit, are complicated ones that people often struggle with, and the bots are designed to help demystify them,” said Heinrich. “Readers can be a bit younger, or come into the story midway. They may not know who the important people are, or what the story is. Journalists are much more involved in these stories day-to-day and your average 16 year old won’t be as familiar.”

The BBC News Labs and the BBC Visual Journalism team have tweaked and experimented with various parts of the bot project, such as the placement of the bot module on pages, bot design, and whether the bot modules should appear on pages by default, versus forcing users to click a tab before using them. The teams also want to determine how effective the bots within breaking news stories, or even in coverage of entertainment stories such as the Oscars. Another variation on the current bot modules in development now is a timeline feature, which will let users catch up on key events that lead to the current story they’re reading about. The teams are also exploring ways to track where people stop interacting with a bot — particularly a verbose one covering a complex topic — which will let them ping users down the line if the story changes.

A few lessons have become clear already, however. For one, the BBC has found that every bot tends to attract a small, but highly engaged subset of users who spend a lot of time interacting with the modules. In other words, certain topics that the bots cover might not be relevant to most people, but those who are interested in their topics “will devour anything that explains them,” said Heinrich. “It’s that audience that bots are for.”

Ultimately, Heinrich said that it’s important for news organizations to be realistic about what chatbots can accomplish. “They’re not applicable to every story and there are going to definitely be stories where it’s not worth the effort of building them,” Heinrich said. “But if you have a really complicated, long piece and you want people to grasp the basics very quickly, they’re very good. Our goal isn’t to prove to readers that the chatbot is the wave of the future for every form of journalism.”

Photo of Tomy Chatbot by Latente used under a Creative Commons license.

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