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.”

The network of sites started out as an English-language city guide for Bangkok, but has now expanded across multiple cities in Asia, including Bali, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Singapore, and Yangon, covering entertainment, lifestyle, travel, and general news focused on life in those cities (think the Gothamist model, at least before some of them were adopted by a coalition of public radio institutions.)

Coconuts claims about two million monthly unique visitors on its sites across Asia — when you include on top of that its audience duplicated across the various social media and video platforms it publishes on, that number is around 10 million.

But Coconuts founder Byron Perry now says he’s done with a market that he feels is mired in clickbait and hangs too heavily on Facebook’s algorithms. Earlier in March, Coconuts told its readers that it would instead start focusing on a quality, engaged audience through a paid membership plan, Coco+ ($5 USD per month; an introductory offer of $29.99 for a year). Readers will hit a paywall after 15 stories. From the announcement:

By becoming a paid COCO+ Member, you will be contributing to better Coconuts content, including:
— More originally reported News stories.
— More in-depth and investigative Feature stories.
— More Food & Drink and Lifestyle coverage.
— More Coconuts TV videos.
— More travel stories, published in our new Coco Travel section.
— A better Coconuts iOS and Android app…coming very soon.

Despite all this lofty talk — don’t worry! — we’re never going to stop writing about grannies who do yoga or naked dudes masturbating on unicycles. Telling these nutty stories is part of our DNA, and we believe there is room for both the profane and the profound in our digital pages.

This interview with Perry has been edited lightly for flow and clarity.

Here’s a rundown:

— More layoffs at Oath. Early in the day, Digiday’s Lucia Moses reported that Verizon’s Oath, which includes The Huffington Post, AOL, Yahoo, and some ad tech products, was laying off 560 staffers, around 4 percent of the company’s overall headcount. Those cuts were in addition to the 2,100 Verizon laid off when it acquired Yahoo in June.

— Mashable sells low. Probably the most brutal news of the day came from The Wall Street Journal, which reported that Mashable, a one-time digital media darling, had agreed to sell itself to Ziff Davis to $50 million. For Mashable, that was a significant haircut from its 2016 valuation of $250 million. The low price suggests that, for potential buyers, digital media is an increasingly uncertain bet.

Worth pointing out: Mashable is still a great media startup story, started as a blog by a 19 year old in a small corner of Scotland, that became a cultural thing for a while. That is still a big achievement beyond monetary returns.

— Rafat Ali (@rafat) November 16, 2017

— The Journal also reported that both BuzzFeed and Vice will miss their revenue projections for the year. BuzzFeed will miss its goals by 15 to 20 percent, while Vice’s earnings will come in around lower than its target of $800 million.

Vice & BuzzFeed are massively overvalued. Expect belt-tightening in the months ahead. https://t.co/HBFThREDqg

— Jeff Giesea (@jeffgiesea) November 16, 2017

— And don’t forget: It was just last week that we covered the bad news coming out of the local news space: DNAinfo was shut down entirely, while Spirited Media laid off staff.

There are many takes on what all these stories mean, both for the companies themselves and for digital media overall. One prevailing narrative is that these companies, all of which rely on advertising as the core pillar of their businesses, had simply placed a bad bet on the plans of the big tech companies, particularly Facebook, whose algorithm changes have forced significant shifts in strategy for the companies that rely on it for traffic. These changes come at the same time as Google and Facebook continue to snatch up all the growth in digital ad spending. Frenemies indeed.

Advertising conditions out there are rough for publishers unless you are G +FB …and we are still in positive economic growth. Systemic not cyclical decline https://t.co/AQ4HWFlp8O

— emily bell (@emilybell) November 16, 2017

We are not even in a recession yet. These structural declines are going to look like a freefall when that happens.

— Vijay Ravindran (@vijayravindran) November 17, 2017

always thought the problem with the BuzzFeed model is that serious news (which it has done a lot of) is not core and will be 1st thing overboard

— Ryan Chittum (@ryanchittum) November 16, 2017

Buzzfeed employees: unionize before the cutbacks begin. We’ve seen this movie before. Build yourself a safety net now.
DM me to get in touch with a union organizer. https://t.co/RcVyP5slPj

— Hamilton Nolan (@hamiltonnolan) November 16, 2017

It’s worth point out one media bright spot this week: Axios said on Friday it’s raised $20 million to fund further expansion of its newsroom. The company expects its overall headcount to increase to 150 staffers, up from its current staff of 89. Media companies taking on more venture capital isn’t always a good thing, but we’ll take any good news where we can get it.

But meanwhile, elsewhere in media… https://t.co/g2mJMKqaHr

— Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) November 17, 2017

For much of the winter and spring, Michael Ferro was uncharacteristically quiet. Once he’d defeated Gannett’s hostile takeover attempt of his newly named Tronc, Ferro seemed to cease being the center of the news industry storm. Some applauded; others privately told me they missed his plotting.

Now, he’s back.

In rapid-fire order, since May, Ferro has tried (and failed) to buy the Chicago Sun-Times, purged the L.A. Times’ top editors, dispatched four corporate vice presidents, and then led the post-Labor Day news cycle by buying the New York Daily News Monday night.

Even on the heels of an American summer that seems to have been produced by Jerry Bruckheimer — North Korean nukes targeting the U.S., horrific Hurricane Harvey, Nazi bros parading in American streets — Ferro and his growing Tronc command attention.

Since the sale of the Daily News, much has been written about its robust, storied past. We can all enjoy that bit of nostalgia. But then we — and the paper’s 200 or so newsroom staffers — are compelled to look to the future. What does this buy tell us about the plans, and eventual fate, of America’s third-largest newspaper chain? Let’s explore that with some tabloid-friendly headlines.

Mort to Ferro: Take My Paper, Please!

That’s how a tab might put it. The Zuckerman family looked for buyers on and off for the past couple of years. Unloading a money-losing paper in a receding industry proved tough.

Consider the dynamics of this deal. The announced price: $1. That’s because it needed a monetary amount. In fact, as one financial source noted, the enterprise has “negative value.”

To offset that value, the sellers gave Tronc a 49.5 percent interest in the 25-acre property on which the Daily News printing plant sits. On paper, that’s worth $3.5 million or so, based on previous assessment, according to SEC documents. In baseball terms, that’s like dealing a once-prized player and having to send cash along with him to help pay off the contract. The Zuckerman family wanted out from under the Daily News’ continuing losses and was willing to pay to get out of its ownership.

Though the published details are sketchy, that stake may be worth more if the property is later developed. As Tronc exec Tim Knight put it, “That was certainly an added inducement to this transaction.”

What’s it worth to Tronc — and when? As one man-about-Manhattan put it: “They’re talking about a skyline view, but it’s Jersey City. It’s not Hoboken or Weehawken.”

The View’s Better From Jersey

As several observers have noted, that prized view from the printing plant won almost equal billing with its 2017 Pulitzer Prize (won in partnership with ProPublica) in the announcement. “As part of the transaction, [T]ronc will acquire a 49.9% interest in a joint venture with Zuckerman-related entities that will own the 25-acre parcel of land on which the printing facility is located and which overlooks the Manhattan skyline.” “The property offers spectacular views of lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty,” noted Tronc’s Chicago Tribune.

It’s remarkable how much real estate values drive newspaper transactions these days. It’s not surprising, given that land and buildings provide knowable value as newspapers’ brand value and goodwill have diminished. Remember that when the Tribune Company split into two newspaper and broadcast companies three years ago, the newspaper real estate went to the broadcast side, with a leasing-back of office and production facilities to the papers. That, of course, added costs and removed significant assets — one more step in the sorry financialization and strategic bloodletting of the American press.

Much of that property has now been sold — with no benefit to the newspaper side of the business. Whatever’s left of the real estate would now move onto the Sinclair Broadcast Group, if and when it completes its purchase of Tribune Media’s TV stations. (Just yesterday: “Three office buildings and a 310-unit residential tower are slated for a Tribune Media-owned riverfront site along Chicago Ave., according to plans unveiled today by the joint venture redeveloping the land.”

Red Is The New Black

No matter how Tronc paints it, this baffling buy just adds more short-term pressures on a company that’s got plenty of them. No one’s seen Daily News financials for a while, and none were released this week. Yet, those in the New York know talk about annual Daily News losses in the $10 million-plus range; some put it at $20 million-plus.

It’s unclear how much of that “loss” is operating money and how much is what the Daily News pays into pension funds for its employees. That’s $4 million in annual payments; in addition, it looks like Tronc faces a credit obligation of $18.7 million, which must be resolved within 60 days of its ownership.

That’s a problem for a company as tight on cash flow as Tronc, which along with its peers is seeing double-digit drops in print ads. Tronc was down 18 percent — leading the industry in this dismal category — in the second quarter.

As Ferro sought to buy the Orange County Register, Us Weekly, and the Sun-Times over the past year, the company has touted the “accretive” benefit of the would-be purchases — meaning they would add to Tronc’s earnings. It made no such claim with the Daily News, and given the paper’s financials, it’s easy to see why.

And yet, Tronc CEO Justin Dearborn told the Tribune that he expects the Daily News to be operating in the black by next year.

Cuts Coming

So how will the Daily News change its colors so quickly? As Dearborn told the Tribune, “Tronc sees cost efficiencies and opportunities for revenue growth, including Tronc’s scale, to operate the Daily News less expensively and attract more printing clients to the New Jersey plant acquired as part of the deal.”

Certainly Tronc will find management jobs it can whack, and it can claim efficiencies through newsprint and ink buying at its greater scale. The Daily News already prints numerous regional titles, and perhaps Tronc will find more.

But it seems inconceivable that Tronc can erase the big Daily News deficit without major job cutting, including into that newsroom of about 200.

Expect cuts across the newspaper trade, anyhow. Just yesterday, Gannett CEO Bob Dickey announced a “less than 1%” job cut for the largest U.S. news publisher. That’s 150 or so jobs, and some of them are likely to be in Gannett newsrooms. Inside Gannett, the speculation is that the cuts will fall greatest on the smaller papers.

Add it up, and it’s going to be an anxious fall at the Daily News.

Honk If You Like TRNC

Investors liked the Daily News buy, as well as the firings of four top L.A. Times editors and three corporate executives, two weeks ago. TRNC’s share price is up about 16 percent in the last month. How meaningful is that?

Tronc remains a fairly thinly traded stock, with a daily transaction volume about a tenth of Gannett or The New York Times. Speculation — will Tronc end up being sold sooner than later? — probably drives much of its relative volatility. Further, investors like change — whether it’s big management moves at a big paper like the L.A. Times or an apparently strategic buy in New York — even if they often understand few of the dynamics under it.

Who Will Ride Our Headless Horseman?

With the transaction, Daily News CEO William Holiber leaves the paper. Long-time Daily Newsman and current editor-in-chief Arthur Browne becomes publisher through the end of the year.

That means big changes at the top as Tronc figures out its strategy. Add that to its search for a top editor at the L.A. Times, given its recent purge, and Tronc faces still another test of its seriousness. In L.A., word is that interim Times editor Jim Kirk (late of the just-sold Chicago Sun-Times) has told reporters and editors that while he will help with the search for a permanent editor, he is indeed interested in the job.

Ferro has told associates that he wants the company to be considered in the top ranks of newspaper publishers — “Why can’t we be like the New York Times?” he’s asked — but his L.A. firings sent a chill in the trade. How much of a yes man (or woman) will he hire in L.A. — and now New York?

Ferro clearly craves recognition of his deal-making skills — but if he wants industry esteem, he’s got to focus on the kind of traditional editorial excellence (shown anew by both The New York Times and The Washington Post in this precedent-busting news year) that commands respect, audience, and revenue, pretty much in that order.

New ‘Pharoah’ Atop The Big Apple?

Ask around the industry why Tronc would buy a money-losing tab that’s faces brutal legacy costs and digital competition, and you hear the same answer: ego. You need more than your fingers and toes to count all of his once or current associates who point to Ferro’s Trump-like character — egotistical, occasionally bullying, self-reliant on his own counsel.

That portrait hasn’t changed much over his year-and-a-half presence in the industry. Acrimony serves as his constant companion. His war of words with Gannett as it made him an offer it was certain he couldn’t refuse made new industry legend. His Hollywood-speed split with major Tronc investor Patrick Soon-Shiong, whose investment he used to blunt Gannett, surprised in its vehemence. He’s one tough character. But will he attempt to be a New York player? That may be even more fun to watch than him cozying up to La La Land’s celebrity culture.

Ferro Plays To Win, Scores Trifecta

The trifecta: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. Tronc is now the only regional newspaper company with properties in the three largest metro markets. That seems like an impressive feat — by 20th-century standards.

In fact, at the end of that century, Tribune CEO John Madigan pulled it off. That trifecta strategy served as the centerpiece for Tribune’s $8 billion acquisition of Times Mirror. Times Mirror added L.A. (the Times) and N.Y. (Newsday) to Tribune’s Chicago Tribune. And yet, the national advertising play — then mainly print — hardly paid in significant revenue, those involved at the time have told me.

Today, those national print ads have largely gone digital. And the national digital buys have gone Facebook, Google, and programmatic, enabling better targeting than mere geography can provide.

Tronc says its Daily News buy would give it an audience of about 80 million. Even if it reaches that number (duplication of audience may reduce it), Tronc must prove out the proposition that that’s enough scale in 2017 to earn the digital ad dollars it needs.

Tronc has also said it would gain from this deal with better “content-sharing.” Tronc’s early attempts to “share” have been disdained by the larger newsrooms in the company, as sharing has meant the imposition of videos and informational widgets on their sites. While Gannett has evolved a major content-sharing efficiency — through its use of USA Today as a national news section in dozens of its papers — that process took years, and other content sharing, while promising, is still in its infancy.

A New Spring For Tabloids?

Will Tronc somehow invest in the next revitalization of the Daily News? That seems unlikely, but one could wish for a miracle at 4 New York Plaza. Remarkably, two of the last remaining tabloids — those Front Page successors with a sensibility so unlike the dominant broadsheets — have changed hands in the last two months.

The Chicago Sun-Times’ new owners do promise reinvestment, but we’ll have to see how constrained by money their dreams may be. In Philadelphia, the tabloid Daily News, sister paper to the Inquirer, seeks its own new way forward. (Just this week, its parent Philadelphia Media Network — in the midst of a long overdue modernization of the Philly dailies — announced a paywall that builds on the digital subscription lessons of its peers.

To be sure, plenty on the web itself — from early HuffPost to present-day BuzzFeed — has pixeled up a tabloid-like directness. But there’s something still unique to the newsprint tab as urban voices.

Will they soon be consigned to the Newseum? (And will the Newseum even be there to house them? Where is Al Neuharth when we need him?)

Tronc Digital Transformation: Coming Soon?

Michael Ferro effectively took over Tribune Publishing late in February, 2016. His platform, loud and clear: digital transformation. So much so that he renamed a company that had meant a lot to a lot of people Tronc, for Tribune Online Content. (Nevermind that “online” itself smells of the 1990s, replaced by “digital” as the standard one-word description of our era. Trdc, he probably recognized, was a non-starter.)

Words are the least of it. Performance counts. By that metric, Tronc hasn’t moved the needle ahead of its maligned predecessors.

Take overall digital audience, by two metrics. In March 2016, according to comScore, Tribune Publishing could count 56.9 million unique visitors to its sites. In July of this year, Tronc — with the significant addition of the San Diego Union-Tribune, which the company purchased in May, 2016 — accounted for 54.3 million unique visitors. That’s a 4.5 percent drop, even as many other newspaper companies have seen single-digit increases.

In acquiring the Daily News, it’s bought another enterprise that is treading water with audience growth. In 2015, it counted 25 million unique visitors, a couple years after its launch of a quickly unsuccessful Daily Mail-like Daily News America product. When it was sold this week, it claimed an audience of…25 million. Across town, its arch-rival Post had doubled the number of its digital visitors in the same period, to 49 million.

Consider another metric: time spent. That’s measured in aggregate minutes of readers’ time. It is in that category that we’ve seen the outsized growth — and impact — of The New York Times and The Washington Post.

In that same 17-month time period, through July, Tronc was up 15 percent in total minutes — again with San Diego having been added during that time — while the newspaper category as a whole was up 22 percent according to comScore.

Eyeballs are one thing; money’s more important. Recall that when Tronc trumpeted its new name, it produced that video that won universal ridicule for its clueless buzzwordiness. Now, the Tronc digital guru — Malcolm CasSelle, a friend of Ferro’s — has left the company. While Anne Vasquez, his video compatriot, has been notably quiet within the company for most of 2017, say numerous Tronckites, she has added to her chief digital officer title. Her Twitter bio now reads “Chief Digital Officer, LA Times/tronc, Inc. ” In her new expanded Times-specific role, she replaces Megan Garvey, the deputy managing editor for digital who lost her job in the purge.

But it’s a newer player who now drives Tronc’s digital business. One-time Tribune, one-time Sun-Times publisher Tim Knight formally heads Tronc X, Tronc’s digital division, having arrived in February. (Tronc M stands for its print business.) A more sober executive, Knight must pick through the assorted forays of the past year and evolve a real digital plan. In that role, Tronc will also look to new L.A. Times CEO and publisher Ross Levinsohn, late of Yahoo and Fox Digital, for new strategies.

As they ascend, four top Tronc corporate execs are out. Within the last month, Tim Ryan, president of publishing at Tronc; chief marketing officer Joseph Schiltz; and senior vice president of sales Ken DePaola lost their positions. Just last week, Jim Spanfeller, SVP/ general manager of The Daily Meal Ventures Group, was out as well. Spanfeller had sold his niche websites to Tronc last year; word is that they’ve failed to generate the network traffic promised.

Knight, Levinsohn, Dearborn, and Ferro himself face a big challenge. Despite showing real progress in Tronc digital subscription growth, up year-over-year by 89 percent to 220,000, Tronc X underperformed its peers — down 5 percent in digital revenue.

This is a company-wide digital transformation still waiting to get off the ground.

Rupert & Ferro: A Match Made in Heaven?

Maybe, just maybe — the next generation of tabloid wars could be beginning in New York. Imagine a public pissing match between New York Post owner Rupert Murdoch and the arriviste Ferro? How much fun could that be?

If it’s just a war of words, it could be highly entertaining. If it’s a spending war, Ferro may have found an opponent he can’t best or bully.

The liberal magazine The Nation is experimenting with new ways to get those on the left of both of those groups — the active and the inactive — involved. Late last month, the magazine launched Take Action Now, a weekly newsletter designed to offer readers three ways they can act on the issues and stories they read in the news. In one recent edition, the newsletter offered readers opportunities such as donating to the disability-rights organization ADAPT, whose members protested the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and cuts to Medicaid. It also highlighted the work of #AllofUs, Democracy Spring, the Democratic Socialists of America, which were organizing sit-ins at senators’ offices. Another showed how they can help with organize the “Internet-wide Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality” later this month. Take Action Now also posts advocacy opportunities on its Twitter account.

This Week in Take Action Now: Donate to @NationalADAPT, join a sit-in & get involved in the fight for #netneutrality https://t.co/OFvZOH1lwo

— NationAction (@NationAction) July 4, 2017

For the 152-year-old magazine, born out an extension of the abolitionist movement, Take Action Now is decidedly on brand and in sync wth the magazine’s tradition of pushing a progressive agenda, said Nation editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel. “We’re about ideas, but we’re also about instigating actions. Though I believe our role is to seed ideas for the future, you want a journalism that has impact. It’s news readers can use.”

Take Action Now is an offshoot of The Nation’s Take Action program, which the magazine says has directed hundreds of thousands of readers to sign petitions, write to their representatives, and protest. The new initiative builds on that model, however, by acknowledging that not all its readers will have time to organize a sit-in or participate in protests. That’s why each of the three actions included in each newsletter are selected to fit the criteria of “No Time to Waste?,” “Got Some Time?,” and “Ready to Dig In?,” which vary in terms of how much time they will demand.

“People have busy lives, and we want to be humble about what we’re suggesting,” vanden Heuvel said. “We’re not asking people to give it all up and devote everything. We want people do what they can. And I think people will respect that, no matter what their schedule is.”

For plenty of traditional news organizations, such a approach would likely turn off both reporters and readers. As the mass media becomes further splintered into niche outlets — many of them with a strong ideological point of view — more organizations have started to embrace the notion that news organizations can both report and direct readers to act on issues on consequence. And given the current occupant of the White House, a lot of that energy has been on the left. Mic, for example, recently launched a feature called “Offsite,” which offers readers ways they can take action on certain stories. The tool is designed to hook into sites like Change.org, letting readers, for example, sign petitions directly from related stories. The tool also works with messaging apps like Kik and Facebook Messenger. (HuffPost product head Julia Beizer recently floated the idea of a bringing a similar feature to its site.)

And then there’s Crooked Media, the podcast company launched by a trio of former Obama staffers, which is also designed to be less journalistic and more activist. Hosts of the network’s shows regularly call on listeners to call congressmen or donate to groups like SwingLeft. Tommy Vietor, host of Pod Save the World, said in a recent interview with venture capitalist Hunter Walk that the company has “tried to do a better job of not just talking about what awful thing happened last week, but also helping listeners understand what they can do about it. That last step is what I think distinguished us from even progressive news outlets.”

Vanden Heuvel also says that she hopes that The Nation’s approach to activism will be a differentiator. “As long as we’re honest about our values and root all of this in our journalism, then there will be a natural synergy that readers will respond to,” she said.

Data from the 2017 Reuters Institute Digital News Report can help address this. Contrary to conventional wisdom, our analysis shows that social media use is clearly associated with incidental exposure to additional sources of news that people otherwise wouldn’t use — and with more politically diverse news diets.

This matters because distributed discovery — where people find and access news via third parties, like social media, search engines, and increasingly messaging apps — is becoming a more and more important part of how people use media.

The fear of filter bubbles and the end of incidental exposure

The role social media plays varies by context and by user. For some highly engaged news lovers, it may be seen as an alternative way of accessing news that allow them to sidestep traditional brands, or as a convenient way of accessing news from multiple sources in one place.

Importantly, however, most people do not consume news online in this way. For them, the Internet — and social media in particular — is just as likely to be a means of passing the time, staying in touch with friends and family, or a source of entertainment.

Some scholars have worried that, in media environments that offer unprecedented choice, people uninterested in news will simply consume something else, with the effect of lowering knowledge, civic engagement, and political participation amongst the population as a whole.

Even for those who are interested enough to pay attention to news on social media, self-selection and ever-more responsive algorithmic selection could combine to trap people inside “filter bubbles,” where they only ever see things they like or agree with, from sources they have used in the past. The central fear, as Eli Pariser has put it, is that “news-filtering algorithms narrow what we know.”

This, at least, is the theory. These ideas, however, largely fail to take account of the potential for incidental exposure to news on social media: situations where people come across news while using media for other, non-news-related purposes. In the 20th century, incidental exposure was relatively common, as people purchased newspapers to read the non-news content, or left their televisions on between their favorite programs, and in the process, came across news without actively seeking it out. At the beginning of the 21st century, it was hard to see how this could be replicated online, leading people to conclude that incidental exposure would wane. Even as social media reintroduced this potential — by supplementing people’s active choices (accessing specific websites) with algorithmic filtering automatically offering up a range of content when people accessed a site or app — the concern was that their underlying logic would have a limiting effect on exposure by giving people more of what they already used and less of other things.

Our evidence, however, suggests that the opposite is happening on social media, at least for now. (The algorithms, of course, continually change.)

Incidental exposure to news on social media

To assess whether distributed discovery leads to filter bubbles or more diverse news diets, we focus on social media, the most important and widely used form of off-site discovery and consumption when it comes to news.

Using data from the 2017 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, we divided survey respondents into three non-overlapping groups. One group consists of those who say they intentionally use social media for news. We call them news users. Another group are those who do not use social media at all, the non-users. Importantly, there is large middle group who do use social media, but who in the survey say they do not intentionally use it for news. Those we called the incidentally exposed, because they might come across news while they use social media for other purposes.1

If we compare the number of online news sources used on average in the last week by people within each of these three groups — across the U.K., Germany, and the U.S., three very different media markets — we can see that the incidentally exposed report using more sources of news than people who do not use social media at all. The results are in Figure 1. In the U.S., for example, non-users of social media use on average 1.80 online news sources a week. But this figure rises to 3.29 for those who use social media for purposes other than news, and again to 5.16 for people who intentionally use social media for news. These differences remain statistically significant after controlling for a range of demographic and news attitude variables. (We focus on social media here but have found similar results for other forms of algorithmic filtering like search engines and news aggregators.)

Figure 1. Average number of online news brands used in the last week.

Are social media users exposed to more of the same, or to more diverse content?

More sources does not necessarily mean more diverse. Consuming news from three right-wing sources arguably constitutes a less diverse news diet than from one left-wing and one right-wing source.

But the average number of sources reported in Figure 1 are important to keep in mind. For most ordinary people, incidental exposure to news on social media is associated with a step from using only about one (in the U.K. and Germany) or two (in the U.S.) online news sources per week to an average of about two (in the U.K. and Germany) or three (in the U.S.). When dealing with such low numbers, it is likely that any increase in the number of sources will necessarily lead to more diverse consumption. Using two right-wing sources is arguably more diverse than using only one.

We can go one step further, however, and measure whether social media users — and especially those incidentally exposed to news while using social media for other purposes — do in fact report using more politically diverse sources of news. We do this by assessing the partisan leanings of different news sources and in turn using this measure to calculate the political diversity of people’s news diets.

In each country, we divide news sources into those with a mostly left-leaning audience, and those with a mostly right-leaning audience (with the midpoint the average position on the left-right spectrum amongst the population as a whole).2 When we do this for the 15 most popular news sources in each country, we can visualize it in a manner similar to Figure 2. In the U.S., 43 percent of Huffington Post news users self-identify on the left, compared to just 10 percent on the right, meaning that the news audience for The Huffington Post is to the left of the population as a whole. Conversely, just 9 percent of Fox News online users are left-leaning, and 48 percent are right-leaning. This way, we can use the partisan composition of an outlet’s audience as a proxy for its political leaning.

Figure 2. Online news audience polarization.

Incidental exposure across the left/right divide

With these partisan leanings of individual outlets in mind, we can look at our three groups of social media users (news users, those incidentally exposed to news on social media, and the non-users) and determine the proportion within each group who say they use at least one source from both sides of the political spectrum (i.e. from both sides of the “midpoint within country”). The results are in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Proportion who use both a news source with a left-leaning audience, and a source with a right-leaning audience.

Two things are immediately striking. First, the majority in most countries and in most groups do not use sources from across the political spectrum. But also, second, that both social media news users and those incidentally exposed to news on social media not only (a) consume news from more sources but also (b) have a more politically diverse online news diet than those who do not use social media at all. In the U.S., just 20 percent of those who do not use social media consume news from online brands with left-leaning and right-leaning audiences. Few people, when left to their own devices, opt for a politically diverse news diet. However, the figure rises to 37 percent for those incidentally exposed to news on social media, as they see news links posted by people with different views and different patterns of news consumption. 44 percent of those who use social media for news end up using sources from both the left and the right — more than double the number for non-users. We see the same pattern in both Germany and the U.K. Again, these differences remain significant after we control for other factors.

The future of distributed discovery and filter bubbles

We have focused here on whether social media use leads to narrow filter bubbles or whether algorithmic filtering in its current forms drives greater diversity through distributed discovery. We have shown that social media use is consistently associated with more, and more diverse, news diets, and that the difference is clear even for the incidentally exposed, those who use social media for other purposes and come across news while doing so. Preliminary analysis of other forms of algorithmic filtering like search engines and news aggregators indicate similar results.

These findings underline that the services offered by powerful platform companies like Facebook and Google, despite what critics fear, may in fact currently contribute to more diverse news diets, rather than narrow filter bubbles. Whether they will still do so after the next algorithm update only they know.

1. “Non-users” are those that, when surveyed, said that they do not use any of the most popular 15 social networks in each country for any purpose. “News users” are those that said, in follow up questions, that they think of either Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter as a “useful way of getting news” as opposed to “seeing news when using them for other reasons.” Everyone else was categorized as the “incidentally exposed,” because they use social media, but do not intentionally use it for news.
2. All respondents were asked to place themselves on a symmetrical seven-point scale ranging from “very left-wing” to “very right-wing,” with the data numerically recoded. All respondents were also asked “which online news brands have you used in the last week” from a list of around the 30 most popular in each country. This data was combined to produce an audience ideology score for each online news brand, with the midpoint determined by the average ideology score of the population as a whole.

At 41, she left a 15-year career at The New York Times to become only the second editor of a publication that can seem a bit of a puzzle in 2017. In replacing eponymous founding editor Arianna Huffington, she takes over a big global news organization of 600 that’s won a huge U.S. and international audience over the years. But at 12 years old, it feels like the older, less-hip relative of the BuzzFeeds, Voxes, Business Insiders, and Mics. And it has a bit of a reputation; as John Oliver extolled the craft of journalism last year, he knew his audience would get the jab he threw at The Huffington Post. Clearly, as it has struggled with both its raison d’être and audience growth, the site demanded an update.

Phase One of that updating launches today. The Huffington Post — now renamed HuffPost — gets a new look, which Shan Wang explains in more depth here. It’s a modernization that looks sharper; the scowls of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are more reined in and better packaged. What’s most compelling, though, is what’s to come, and the rebranding/redesign doesn’t tell us much about that thinking.

As I’ve talked with Lydia Polgreen over the last two weeks, it’s that next stage that’s most intriguing. To that extent, this redesign, as necessary as it is, serves mostly as a platform for her vision of journalism.

Many of the news stories about her appointment focused on her individual identity: “Huffington Post welcomes Lydia Polgreen, a queer woman of color, as their new editor-in-chief!” Yet this granddaughter of an Ethiopian farmer seems much more interested in whatever it is that’s so badly dividing the country. She’s all about reaching out, journalistically, and that will make the next iteration of The Huffington Post essential to watch.

In our talks over the last couple of weeks, combined and lightly edited here for clarity, we focused on her evolving editorial vision and that hope to transcend divisions. Is it blue and red? Is it have and have not? Is it something more culturally deep that’s seemingly split the U.S?

A globalist — last year helping lead its Spanish-language edition and setting the stage for more international Times launches — she values the 17 outposts that HuffPost has set up around the world. Her big opportunity: creating more journalistic collaboration between staffs worldwide.

Though long a Top 10 website in traffic, The Huffington Post has slowed down a bit, as we’ve seen the revenge of the legacies, especially the Times and The Washington Post over the last two years. HuffPost ranks seventh in overall audience, having lost more than 30 million monthly unique users over the past two years. It now reaches 89 million a month in the U.S., according to comScore. More than half of its total audience is international, Huffington Post says.

As she re-revs that engine, she’ll do so within the friendly confines of a distinctly un-journalistic owner. Verizon, striving mightily to be a “content company” as competitors like Comcast bulk up, has now made two medium-sized bets. First, it bought AOL/HuffPost two years ago. It hopes to close, finally, on its Yahoo acquisition in June. And it’s brought the two together in an oddly named new division, Oath. On one hand, Verizon does provide deep pockets and an earnest attempt to understand a business it has no legacy in. On the other, in short: It’s not The New York Times, where journalism is in the DNA.

Further, as the Times and the Post, once widely derided as the old dreaded MSM (remember that?) have become much more in-your-face with their reporting and presentation, HuffPost must restate for its readers what it now offers differently than others.

Even as Verizon was buying AOL, the fit of a lefty site — founded in 2005 as an antidote to Fox News, launched after George W. Bush had won re-election — in a telco seemed strange. Now we’re not sure what kind of Oath Verizon is taking or making. Against all that background, Polgreen seems greatly energized by the challenge.

A focus on engagement and loyalty

Mixing tabloid and digital thinking

Analyzing and changing your media diet may never actually be fun, but The Huffington Post is trying to make it at least slightly more so with The Flipside, an interactive matrix that collects the latest headlines on various topics (immigration, Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Russia) from 14 publications and plots them on a grid, from most to least trustworthy and most liberal to most conservative.

Julia Beizer, head of product at The Huffington Post, wrote in a blog post Tuesday:

Today, you can dive into the Russia topic and see a mix of stories about this morning’s attack and the Trump team’s connections to the Russian government. But what’s trending across these sources paint a wildly different picture of what matters on this topic. A Daily Kos story is trending on Comey’s impact on the presidential election, while Breitbart’s trending story is on France’s Marine Le Pen encouraging Putin to partner with the West in the face of terrorist threats. Mainstream media, for its part, trends with a mix of news on the attacks and opinion pieces about Trump and Russia.

“We didn’t want to approach this in a really didactic way — like, ‘Here are five news stories you’re not seeing, liberal user,'” Beizer told me. “If you wanted to take a peek at someone else’s feed, this is what you might see. It’s a spectrum of how people cover these really thorny topics; it’s more of a grazing tool.” (And you don’t have to install anything.) The Huffington Post is linking to The Flipside from its homepage and social channels Tuesday, but eventually, the tool will be incorporated into its stories: It might appear at the bottom of a Huffington Post article to show a spectrum of how other news organizations are covering that same topic. (This is somewhat similar to what BuzzFeed is doing with its “Outside Your Bubble” feature.) There are, conceivably, other outlets for such a tool as well: Last month, at a Facebook Journalism Project hackathon in New York, members of The Huffington Post’s product/tech team collaborated with other publishers to create a Flipside-like product for the Facebook platform, which would allow users to see where a piece of news appears on an ideological spectrum without leaving the News Feed. It was the Hackathon’s winning project.

A few notes on methodology: The headlines on The Flipside are culled from the 14 publications’ Twitter feeds over a period of two hours. The Huffington Post didn’t rank the sources itself on either trustworthiness or ideology. The ideological rankings came from a 2016 Public Opinion Quarterly study that used a combination of machine learning and crowdsourcing to plot sources on a spectrum. And for the trustworthiness ratings, they worked with Snopes to categorize the outlets’ trustworthiness. (I asked Snopes for more information and hadn’t heard back at the time of publishing this post.)

When you play around with the tool, you’ll notice that The Huffington Post is included on the grid — and ranked lower in trustworthiness than outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post. In fact, Snopes gave it the same trustworthiness rating as it gave Fox News.

“Yup. We’re not at the top of the trustworthiness scale,” Beizer said. “But under our new editorial leadership, we are out there every day, trying to earn readers’ trust. That’s why I was really adamant on including ourselves in the scale.”

A study out this week from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University examines how platforms have changed journalism, and while the entire 25,455-word report is worth reading, one particularly interesting section looks at how news outlets are choosing to publish (or not publish) across a variety of platforms.

The report compares how The New York Times, CNN, and The Huffington Post utilized platforms during a week in early February. In that span, each outlet posted to about 10 different platforms. The Times and HuffPo each posted about 1,660 times across the various platforms. CNN, however, published more than 2,800 stories, about 40 percent more than the other two.

The Tow report defines two primary different types of platform-based content: native and networked. Native content includes entities such as Snapchat Discover and Stories, Facebook Instant Articles, or Apple News. These formats live entirely within the walled gardens of the platforms. Networked content, meanwhile, links back to the news organizations’ own sites.

The study examined 14 publishers and found that during the week of Feb. 6, they posted 12,341 pieces of networked content and 11,481 pieces of native content.

“While publishers all need to have a presence across a broad range of platforms, how they distribute their content — and, in particular, the amount they ‘give away’ to platforms in the form of native content — differs considerably,” the study said.

During the week of February 6, two-thirds of The Huffington Post’s distributed content was posted in native formats. That includes 695 stories on Apple News and 305 Facebook posts, which include Instant Articles, Live Video, and other formats. “These native Facebook posts also represent 98 percent of Huffington Post’s total Facebook posts,” the study found.

CNN similarly posted 59 percent of its content natively. That included 1,016 Apple News Articles, 948 tweets, and 278 YouTube videos. The report also noted that “CNN’s concerted effort to reach younger audiences is also evident in its Snapchat Discover channel, on which we saw a shift away from scrollable articles repurposed from cnn.com to more bitesize news cards, and its ongoing commitment to chat app LINE.”

Meanwhile, only 16 percent of the Times’ posts were native. The Times was one of a handful of news organizations that Facebook launched Instant Articles with in 2015, but the paper has since stopped publishing on Instant Articles. During the week that Tow measured the posts, just 19 percent of the Times’ 406 Facebook posts were native to the platform. The paper also posted 74 stories on Apple News.

Unlike The Huffington Post and CNN, the Times is focused on digital subscriptions and its main goal is to drive users back to its own platforms, which explains its reluctance to use native posts.

In a speech at a conference last year, Lydia Polgreen, who was then the editorial director of the Times’ global expansion effort and is now the editor of The Huffington Post, explained how the Times’ approach to platforms is different than other publishers.

Social platforms, especially Facebook, allow us to target our journalism to those most likely to want to pay for it. I believe that we are better off as Facebook’s happy customer than as its outgunned competitor in a David and Goliath fight for advertising dollars.

Yes, Facebook will try mightily to keep news consumers inside its platforms, via features like Instant Articles. Our job is to create experiences that will draw our most loyal users back, again and again, to our own products. So far, we seem to be succeeding at this. We will never be as big or financially successful as Facebook, but I believe we can run a thriving media company that can afford a lavishly funded news operation, as well as return value to our shareholders.

Many of the people the study’s authors — Emily Bell and Taylor Owen — interviewed reiterated that business models often determine how news organizations approach publishing on the platforms:

Jim Brady, founder and CEO of Billy Penn, a Philadelphia mobile news platform, said that when it came to Instant Articles, “I can afford to be a little bit more agnostic about it than someone whose revenue is tied to where the page view lies.” Gabe Dance, former managing editor of the not-for-profit news organization the Marshall Project said their resources were focused on “impact” because that’s what funders care about. And, after an unsuccessful experiment with NPR to host audio natively on the platform, Wright Bryan, senior editor for engagement, walked away wondering, “Does audio really fit a format like Facebook?”

One example of this is that the study showed that publishers’ attitudes toward Instant Articles in particular varied greatly. Outlets such as The Washington Post, Vox, and BuzzFeed News all posted more than 90 percent of their links as Instant Articles during the week of February 6. Meanwhile, Vice, Vice News, and Tronc papers the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times aren’t using Instant Articles at all.

“I think because there’s a continuous debate as to the very question: ‘What do you need to control, and what things do you not,’” Sterling Proffer, head of business strategy and development at Vice, told the study’s authors. “Going all in, solely on the platform to support your entire ecosystem in every way, is a big gamble.”

We have posted full transcripts of the event here, but here’s an overview of some of what was discussed.

Disintermediation, demagoguery, and debility

Bill Kristol, the conservative political analyst and founder of The Weekly Standard, focused his remarks around three themes: disintermediation, demagoguery, and debility.

Social media and the internet have, Kristol said, crippled the media’s traditional role as gatekeepers of information:

The media is a mediating institution. That’s literally the case, and I think importantly the case in democratic politics. Obviously for reasons mostly technological, some of them maybe sociological and others, it’s less that today because of the Internet, social media. Social media is called social media, but when you think about it, it should be called social non-media, because this precisely removes the mediating function and it’s direct. Again, which is in many ways a good thing — but a problematic thing, I think, for politics.

The Trump administration should also encourage people to rethink their views of democracy and the roles various institutions play in the American system, Kristol said:

But in thinking about Trump, we do need to rethink a little bit, I think, our somewhat complacent view of democracy — you know, the more democracy the better, the more education the better, the more participation the better, and everything is moving in the right direction — the arc of history is going in a good way and we don’t have to worry about some of those things that the founding fathers worried about. And it’s amazing to go back and look at the Federalists — look at how many of the papers, especially the papers on the executive but also on the legislative power, are about precisely the threat of demagogues.

Kristol’s final point was that he was dubious of the power of the media. He illustrated his point by highlighting the fact that Republicans’ string of presidential wins in the 1980s came before the creation of Fox News:

When I speak to conservatives, I always remind them: when were the great conservative victories? Reagan in 1980, 1984, Bush 1988. Huge, lopsided victories, three of them in a row. Rush Limbaugh was not yet on talk radio. Fox News didn’t yet exist. The Internet didn’t yet exist. All these things — the conservative media didn’t exist. It really was The New York Times, The Washington Post, and three networks, which were mostly moderate-liberal at least. Nonetheless, that was the heyday of conservative policies. And incidentally, ever since Fox News took over and became such a big deal, Republicans have lost the presidential popular vote in every election but one, 2004.

Pushing up against journalism’s cardinal rules

Katie Kingsbury, managing editor of digital for the Boston Globe, described the day the Globe decided to break down a long-cherished wall between what was seen as opinion, and what was seen as straight news. After the Orlando nightclub shooting, Kingsbury said, she went into work feeling almost numb from the frequency with which mass shootings were happening in the United States. Could the Globe approach yet another tragedy differently?

This is the cover of the @BostonGlobe tomorrow – & they are 100% correct. #filibuster #holdthefloor pic.twitter.com/wO1CicfoWk

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) June 16, 2016

In addition to a front-page editorial, The Globe’s Make It Stop project also involved calls to action for readers, and a takeover of the Globe’s main Twitter account to tweet out names of victims of mass shootings since the ban on assault weapons expired in 2004. Many in the Globe’s newsroom were uncomfortable, Kingsbury recalled:

One of the most amazing things about Make It Stop is that we actually saw progress from it in a rather short time. Two days later, Kelly Ayotte, the senator from New Hampshire who had received the brunt of our texts and emails, changed her vote on an important gun control measure. No, the law did not change — but she changed her vote, and it felt like a huge victory.

But it also wasn’t a victory that everyone celebrated. Some of our colleagues distanced themselves from this project on social media. And a week later, I was asked to be on a panel at the Poynter Institute. I thought I was going to be talking about gun control that day. Instead, I was grilled for almost an hour about why I thought it was okay to do this — why the Globe thought it was okay to cross these lines.

Those were questions that were hard to answer, that day and since. I’ve thought a lot about them. Because you’re taught in Journalism 101 some fundamental tenets: Be accurate; be fair; don’t make yourself the story. By these measures, maybe Make It Stop had crossed some lines, had gone too far. Maybe.

But there are other responsibilities that we as journalists hold dear: Be a voice for the voiceless. Tell essential truths. Hold the powerful accountable.

For the Globe, Kingsbury said, “a group of young people at a nightclub enjoying themselves, being mowed down in cold blood” was a tipping point.

A glass one-tenth full

Nieman curator Ann Marie Lipinski led a conversation with Gerard Baker (editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal), Lydia Polgreen (editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post), and David Leonhardt (op-ed columnist at The New York Times and coauthor of the recent 2020 report). On the table was what journalism can do to regain the public’s trust, the use of the word “lie” and Baker’s continued defense of his cautionary memo against the phrase “majority Muslim country,” how best to cover a Trump administration that has rejected journalistic convention and tradition, over and over in the not yet two weeks since taking office.

“I continue to see the glass as one-tenth full rather than nine-tenths empty,” Baker said about the outlook for journalism. “There are a lot of people who dedicate themselves — it’s not a particularly financially rewarding life — but it’s intellectually and I would argue ultimately emotionally rewarding to pursue quality journalism. I think there are a lot of people out there who do it. And by all means support those people who are doing it — support good-quality journalism, subscribe to good-quality news organizations.”

Polgreen expressed similar optimism, and advocated for greater civic engagement from readers: “I think my hope, and the part that I hope to play, and I think that all of us need to play, is renewing our commitment to civic engagement. I think that we have had a kind of abdication to assumptions about growth and prosperity and that things are just going to get better and that we can outsource the management of our democracy to the professionals and everything’s going to be OK,” she said. “I think that the civic reengagement needs to happen in a much deeper level than just the information layer of it. I think we all need to wake up and realize that this is our country, and it’s our responsibility to go out there and take actions that forge bonds between people.”

For Leonhardt, engagement was the key word. “It’s not simply, “Please pay for what we do and give us money.” It’s, pay for the things that you think are best, and tell us what works and what doesn’t work,” he said. “And that is really what is different about this age: You have your own printing press. And as much as we pretend not to listen to you, and as much as the first reaction you may get from the media is, eh, bugger off. We do listen.”

Ordinary people, extraordinary work

Lolly Bowean, 2017 Nieman Fellow and Chicago Tribune reporter, suggested a path for journalism as a unifying force, through a story about LoQuator Dinkins, a woman on the south side of Chicago.

Now, I need to tell you that when I was growing up, I didn’t see reporters in my neighborhood unless there was something tragic or something violent that happened. So, in my own work, I’ve tried to make sure that I pay attention to communities and neighborhoods and try to highlight people like LoQuator Dinkins, who are doing the best that they can with the resources that they can. You see, when I’m when I write about someone like LoQuator Dinkins, a regular, ordinary, everyday person who is finding the best in themselves, I’m reminded of how great we are as people.

“Every day is a better day for access to information”

Even as journalism is under threat from changing business models and threats from the Trump administration, CNN senior media correspondent Brian Stelter said he is optimistic about the future of news.

Since the election, Stelter said he’s been “flooded by emails” from readers and viewers that say “We are not buying this attempt to delegitimize the press. We need you:”

I think those emails and the ratings and the traffic data all indicate an audience hungry, maybe even starving, for journalism right now. And that is why I reject this talkabout being post-fact, post-truth. People are watching. People are reading Lydia [Polgreen]’s Huffington Post, Katie [Kingsbury]’s Boston Globe — all of them seen huge surges in traffic. We all know about The New York Times and other outlets gaining subscribers as well. Just today, just this afternoon, while we’re sitting here, in my inbox, The Atlantic saying it set an all-time daily audience record on Sunday and then again on Monday. CNN: a million viewers every hour of the day on Sunday, again on Monday. Normally 500,000, 600,000, 700,000 is a good figure. These numbers are through the roof, online and on TV. And partly that’s because of the protests. Partly that’s because the country is hungry for information right now.

Still, Stelter recognized the threats facing the industry, and he noted that platforms such as Facebook and Snapchat, along with the now-constant news cycle have forced journalists to evolve and change the understanding of their jobs:

“Every day is a better day for access to information. And that, I think more than anything else, is a reason for young journalists to be optimistic — not to give up on this profession, as some of them tell me they’re considering, not to fear entering the profession of journalism, just because the president says he’s at war with it, but actually to seize the opportunity. Every day, there are people who for the first time in their lives have access to a smartphone and access to our work, to our stories, to our videos. I know I made the mistake of taking that for granted sometimes. But in this moment, I’m trying to remind myself and all of you, as Bill Kristol was saying in the very beginning, this access information, this ability to reach increasingly the whole world with our content.

Speaking at a Harvard event on journalism in a post-truth era, Baker said he wanted to make sure the phrase was used in proper context. The video below is queued up to when the subject came up, 57:49 in, on a question from Nieman curator Ann Marie Lipinski:

Huffington Post editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen was also on the panel with Baker, and she challenged him on the use of the phrase:

Baker countered that the Journal’s coverage did in fact contain that nuance:

In an email to top editors — first reported by BuzzFeed News — Baker wrote that the phrase was “very loaded.”

“The reason they’ve been chosen is not because they’re majority Muslim but because they’re on the list of countries Obama identified as countries of concern,” he wrote.

He also later explained the decision in a memo to Journal staffers, BuzzFeed reported.

Politico reported that Journal staffers were irked by Baker’s directive, and that there has been ongoing tension inside the Journal over its Trump coverage, which some say hasn’t been aggressive enough.

“There is no editorial justification for his objection,” a Journal source told Politico. “For the EIC of a major American paper to go out of his way to whitewash this is unconscionable.”

The Times announced its international growth initiative, called NYT Global, earlier this year, and it also launched NYT en Español, a Spanish-language site based in Mexico City.

Back circa 2012, in an earlier era of Times global expansionism, the paper had set its sights, in different ways, on China, Brazil, and India — each of which offered huge potential audiences but also significant hurdles, ranging from government censorship to language barriers to low rates of Internet penetration. (The Chinese site was blocked in that country, the Brazilian site never got off the ground, and the Indian vertical was eventually shuttered.)

This time around, though, Canada and Australia offer a common language and relatively well-off populations — not to mention local newspapers facing the same sort of headwinds American papers are. The Times even has some recent strategic history with Canada: Before launching its paywall in the United States in 2011, the Times first launched a test version in Canada. The paper has also held events in Toronto.

And the Times, of course, isn’t the only outlet that’s seen opportunities for growth in Canada and Australia. Both BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post have outposts in Toronto and Sydney, and The Guardian has made Australia one of the pillars of its international growth strategy. And Canada in particular has long been used to the heavy presence of American cultural production, often providing government support for Canadian efforts to counterbalance it.

While these organizations have all been tempted by the promises of new audiences, growth has proven difficult, and it certainly won’t be easy for the Times. The Guardian’s Australian operation lost $14 million AUS ($10.7 million USD) in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2015 — up from $6 million AUS the year before, according to The Australian. As a whole, The Guardian lost £173 million ($228 million USD) before taxes last year as its digital ad sales faltered. In Canada, BuzzFeed closed its Ottawa bureau and cut back on its political coverage.

Politico reported that the Times has begun recruiting journalists to work in its Canadian and Australian newsrooms. Eagle-eyed readers have also noticed an uptick of Times coverage of Australia and Canada of late. The Times has reported on topics such as the rush to legalize marijuana in Canada, the Canadian band The Tragically Hip’s possible final show, the struggles of the Australian publisher Fairfax, and the search for four men who threw crocodiles into an Australian school this week.

Here's the reason for the uptick in smart pieces about Canada within @NYTimes https://t.co/5SLstxCsCQ

— Craig Saila (@saila) August 23, 2016

In the past week, the Grey Lady has done a story on Fairfax's fortunes, crocs in the NT and now this https://t.co/6DriGCgIQD

— Stephen Murray (@smurray38) August 23, 2016

Nothing to do with its research team and recruitment for a newsroom in Australia, I'm sure https://t.co/bCMSnC60To https://t.co/kPXY5qn7bu

— Stephen Murray (@smurray38) August 23, 2016

On Twitter, users, many of them from rival news organizations, welcomed the challenge of the Times’ entrance into their markets and cautioned the Times about the challenges it’ll face.

@InklessPW Did someone forget to tell @nytimes that newspapers in Canada are dying?

— Kayle Clark (@kaclk) August 23, 2016

The @nytimes are coming (to Canada)! The @nytimes are coming! https://t.co/73ocKoOmOL

— Jessica Patterson (@jesspatterson) August 23, 2016

Come on down (under) @nytimes https://t.co/bGuO6h9ZwF

— Marj Lefroy (@mklwords) August 23, 2016

Already excited to imagine NYT in Aussie accent: "In Outback, Signs of a Boomerang Shortage." https://t.co/vlynYjHTrR

— Michael Schaffer (@michaelschaffer) August 23, 2016

@niltiac @politico_media @nytimes Would gladly welcome more diverse media here in the land of Oz.

— donutphilosophy (@donutphilosophy) August 23, 2016

Looking forward to the Australian edition of @nytimes, hope it has lots of good avo toast reviews https://t.co/pzMRZhfFST

— Elizabeth Redman (@elizabethredman) August 23, 2016

Vice has become the latest big American media company to announce a major launch in India, setting up a joint venture with the powerful Times Group, perhaps best known as the publisher of the highest-circulation English-language newspaper in the world, The Times of India. Vice CEO Shane Smith says he’s looking forward to bringing “content to the largest millennial population on earth.” Just as significant, the company will also make original content in India for its worldwide audience, through a new bureau and production hub in Mumbai.

The business case for foreign media companies in India is by now clear: Globally, only the United States contains more people who speak English fluently, and aside from physical geography, there is little to distinguish the wealthiest young Indians in Mumbai or Delhi from their counterparts in London or New York. Many end up at university in the U.S. or U.K. and are into Beyoncé, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Xbox. It makes perfect sense for BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, and now Vice to attempt to tap into the market.

Half of India’s population — 600 million people — is under the age of 25 and as access to the internet improves, the overall audience will grow. A huge number of people — again, we’re talking hundreds of millions — are now connecting to the Internet on increasingly affordable smartphones, and they are demanding content that represents their lives.

But it is worth remembering that despite the hubris around “the largest millennial population on earth,” most Indians are not English speakers. It would take an especially brave, ambitious foreign company to take on the extremely difficult challenge of developing content and platforms in multiple languages. The BBC — aided by its long tenure in India, historic British-Indian ties and deep enough pockets — will soon announce a new digital hub, serving several languages, based in New Delhi. But most non-Indian companies operate only in English, at least for the time being.

The 100 million Indians who do use English still constitute a tempting market, even though it’s only a small fraction of India’s 1.2 billion population. But setting up shop there is far from straightforward. The government is gradually opening the country up to foreign investment in a number of key industries but media is not yet one of them. It is not possible for foreign media companies to operate subsidiaries in India, if the headquarters remain outside the country.

There are two ways around this. One is to set up a separate company, registered and firmly based in India, through which the tasks of hiring, firing, and distribution are controlled locally (even if major decisions are, in practice, taken in New York or London). The BBC, BuzzFeed, The New York Times, and others have gone down this route. It allows for a significant degree of autonomy, which is valuable in different ways to each company, but it’s more difficult to build a brand, hire staff, and develop distribution networks in such a fiercely competitive market.

The other, increasingly popular way is to enter into a partnership with an established Indian media house, removing the hassle of setting up and maintaining an entirely new company. This is what Vice has done with the Times Group, and it’s not alone in using this strategy to acquire an audience and hopefully achieve rapid growth in India.

India’s Internet boom has enabled the growth of several homegrown digital media companies, who are chasing pretty much the same audience as Vice or BuzzFeed. ScoopWhoop is a social entertainment site, now also producing hard-hitting documentaries, that began life as a BuzzFeed clone. It now claims a total mulitplatform audience of around 200 million.

“India is unlike any other market,” says ScoopWhoop founder Sattvik Mishra. “It is complex. We have over 1,600 languages. It’s not easy to understand the pulse of this nation, especially if you aren’t here. So it makes sense for foreign publishers to partner with Indian companies.” Indian companies, in other words, enjoy a significant home advantage that can help their partners from overseas.

The Times Group, one of India’s biggest media houses, has a Global Partners division which makes deals with digital companies from all over the world and promises to help them operate in India more efficiently than they could if they tried to do it alone. It works with, among others, Uber and Airbnb, as well as no fewer than 15 publishers, including The Huffington Post and Business Insider. Puneet Singhvi, chief operating officer at Times Global Partners, is confident that they can help Vice be successful in India.

“We have demonstrated it with other partners, who have all grown 400 to 600 percent within the first year of partnership,” he says. “Times Group understands the Indian audience and the Indian media and advertising landscape better than anyone, and we bring those capabilities to the partnership. Most of their competitors are largely flat over the same time.”

They work with companies who are, on the surface, rivals chasing similar audiences. But for the Times Group, The Huffington Post, and Vice are separate products, each with unique growth potential, and are treated accordingly.

“The publisher portfolio of Times Global Partners is pretty diverse, spanning technology, sports, news, finance, investing, gaming and lifestyle,” says Singhvi. “All partnerships have independent teams that focus on growth. We believe each partner title that we work with is a unique product and has ample headroom for growth within the genre. The addition of Vice will augment the diversity and strength of the portfolio.”

It remains to be seen how successful Vice will be in India. For them, a partnership means a loss of autonomy and presumably, a smaller share of any revenue that’s brought in. The Times Group won’t divulge the precise nature of the joint venture, so it’s hard to get a reading on who gets what. But it is a relatively low-risk way for Vice to begin dealing with an unfamiliar audience. India rarely makes global headlines these days but continues to be a source of the sort of stories that its worldwide diaspora will click on. That’s another market of millions of educated, relatively affluent users that will please advertisers.

Indian publishers, for their part, don’t seem to be worried about the increased competition. “I think it’s great for the ecosystem,” says Mishra. “I genuinely feel there is lack of quality content and with Vice in the picture it may help fill that void…It’s not a winner-takes-it-all market. Time will tell how Vice shapes up in India. A lot of international publishers like BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Mashable, TechCrunch, Gizmodo have entered India but have had little impact. Hopefully, Vice will change that and surprise us.”

That spirit, which has revitalized the Post, is one that Julia Beizer, the Huffington Post’s recently hired product head, wants to build on at her new company. Beizer, former director of mobile product at The Washington Post, jumped over to The Huffington Post in March. She was one of the minds behind Trump Cards, a new embeddable feature that highlights some of the more outlandish remarks by the presumptive Republican nominee. Beizer has also overseen the deployment of The Huffington Post’s homepage redesign, which aggressively integrates video and better highlights content from the 100,000 contributors using The Huffington Post’s platform.

I spoke to Beizer about how she approaches the idea of product, how that’s changed in the age of distributed content, and how she wants to use a product mindset to help readers take action on stories, rather than just read them. Our conversation, edited and condensed for length and clarity, is below.

But some of the most successful homegrown Indian digital startups, while not as well known in the U.S., have enjoyed far more impressive growth than their foreign competitors and are now showing clear signs of becoming mature media companies. India has an estimated 300 million Internet users and, although digital advertising there is relatively low in value, it has plenty of room to grow.

ScoopWhoop: Following the BuzzFeed model

ScoopWhoop appeared at the end of 2013 and at first looked like a clone of BuzzFeed. Everything from the style to the content was very similar to the U.S. company’s early incarnations, before BuzzFeed’s moves towards more serious content. At first, many people even wondered if it was BuzzFeed’s own creation. ScoopWhoop hasn’t gone unnoticed by senior figures at BuzzFeed either.

@kenbensinger my actual fav is http://t.co/ojeKzmgqXy

— Ben Smith (@BuzzFeedBen) April 4, 2014

While BuzzFeed India currently employs 12 people, ScoopWhoop’s staff count stands at 135, all based in a large converted farmhouse on the southwestern outskirts of Delhi, near the international airport. One of its cofounders, 27-year-old Sattvik Mishra, says that ScoopWhoop has a total monthly audience of up to 200 million, including 70 million on its own platform. (The rest are on Facebook or other channels.) The whole thing began as an experiment but quickly became a full-time gig. Mishra’s former employer, an advertising agency in Delhi, is a key investor in ScoopWhoop.

Like BuzzFeed, ScoopWhoop began by producing what Mishra calls “social entertainment,” with which it built a huge audience of young people eager to consume and share the kind of distinctively Indian content that reflects their own lives and experiences. Mishra claims revenues of around $2.5 million in its current fiscal year, largely coming from advertising and branded content. So far, so BuzzFeed.

Two and a half years into its existence, ScoopWhoop is also moving into news, hiring a dozen journalists and building, separately, a team that has begun to produce edgy, Vice-style documentaries about difficult, contemporary Indian subjects. The first one is about militants in Indian-administered Kashmir. By the end of this initial hiring process, there will be at total of around 35 people working on harder news.

Mishra maintains that this does not represent a shift for his company. “The DNA of the company won’t change,” he says. “We are just adding more layers.” There are now verticals for general news, politics, and sports, as well the documentaries, but ScoopWhoop is not abandoning what made it successful in the first place: food and fashion content is also expanding. Mishra is conscious of credibility. “The bread-and-butter will always be entertainment content,” he admits. “But we realised that if wanted to be a media company worth its salt, we had to do news.”

MissMalini: Reaching young women

Malini Agarwal — a dancer, radio DJ, digital strategist, and gossip columnist, among other things — began what was then the MissMalini blog five years ago as a response to what she considered a misleading image of India, one that was popularised by the film Slumdog Millionaire. “I wanted to document what the Indian cool kids were doing,” she says.

Now MissMalini is a digital magazine and media house, based in northern Mumbai, with 25 full-time employees. The office has four separate Internet connections plus a 4G dongle — insurance against India’s occasionally unreliable connectivity. It has a largely young, female audience — 4 million unique monthly users to its main website — that is attracted to its mix of Bollywood gossip, fashion, and lifestyle content. Agarwal is still the face of the brand, ubiquitous and popular on social media, where she is seen and heard at glamorous events all over the world. But behind the smiles, she has built up unrivaled access to the entertainment industry, which gives her site, social channels, and TV show content that is hard to find elsewhere.

MissMalini also generates revenue from branded content, social media consulting, and other sources. Agarwal describes it as a “multiplatform media content-creation company” which brings in $1 million a year; the company is currently seeking up to $6 million in venture funding to help them further scale up and improve the technology that powers their services. It will also help pay for content in languages other than English, or for audiences who look beyond Bollywood.

MissMalini has no plans to do traditional news — although Agarwal doesn’t rule it out — but it will produce more verticals and look at longer-form opinion pieces about subjects its audience cares about.

Apart from the ability to create the content, both fun and serious, that is extremely popular among younger Indian digital audiences, both ScoopWhoop and MissMalini have one major advantage over their foreign competition. “There is the idea of a homegrown brand that everyone can relate to here,” says Agarwal. “There was no Indian young version of, say, Ryan Seacrest or Barbie or Hannah Montana — we had no young brand of that sort, right out of India.”

SWEN: Looking beyond English

“I understand my people,” says Abhishek Gureja, founder of the multilingual information platform SWEN. “I immediately know what they like. Even if it’s a boring article, it’ll relate to more people than anything a foreign firm can produce.” SWEN (read it backwards) is one of a number of Indian startups that are taking advantage of a growing non-English internet audience driven by the smartphone boom, an audience that is interested in news and also verticals such as food and comedy. SWEN mostly offers non-news content, aggregated from partner publications, and will be available in many languages. It does some news, too, and some original material.

There are many elements of running a media business that are more difficult for foreign companies whose decisions are made in London or New York: building long-term relationships with the major players in Bollywood; leveraging local contacts to find suitable locations; navigating red tape and infrastructural issues. ScoopWhoop, MissMalini and SWEN’s founders, CEOs, and staff are firmly based in India. Home advantage is a substantial asset in India and as these companies grow, that advantage might be too great for their foreign competitors.

How newsrooms use analytics, however varies significantly. Some organizations are very good at making sense of numbers. But most are still only beginning to scratch the surface of what analytics can do for newsrooms.

For a new Reuters Institute Report, we have interviewed more than 30 people working across digital startups, newspapers, and broadcasters — people with job titles that were unknown a few years ago, like audience editor, growth editor, audience development editor, or audience engagement editor.

Our research shows that only a few news organizations have developed what we call “editorial analytics” — approaches to analytics that move beyond generic use of off-the-shelf tools and techniques and develop a tailored approach to analytics aligned with the specific editorial priorities and organizational imperatives of a particular news organization.

This is important, because analytics can be about more than having a big screen with numbers that go up and down — and analytics should be about more than short-term optimization of pageviews and unique users based on tweaking of article placement, headlines, and pictures used.

Good analytics require a tailored approach

Editorial analytics differ from more rudimentary and generic approaches in three ways.

• First, editorial analytics are tailored to the specific editorial priorities and organizational imperatives of a given organization. Doing analytics well require knowing what you are trying to do editorially (who are you trying to reach, where, and with what?), and what you need to do organizationally to do this (do you live off advertising? Subscriptions? Donations?)
• Second, editorial analytics are used to inform both short-term day-to-day decisions and longer-term strategic development. Short-term optimization is important in terms of making sure that stories find readers and readers find stories. But analytics can help with more than this, including more effective use of newsroom resources and the development of new editorial products and areas of emphasis.
• Third, editorial analytics continually evolve to keep pace with a changing media environment. For example, on-site measures of homepage traffic are still useful in 2016. But if your analytics does not equip you to understand mobile users and off-site use on social media platforms, you risk flying blind.

Actionable information in large and small newsrooms

What sets best practice approaches to analytics apart is thus not that they have big screens with numbers on them in the newsroom, but that they know how to make sense of numbers and act on those insights.

This is about developing user-friendly interfaces that can help “democratize” data (like The Guardian’s bespoke dashboard Ophan) or about developing clear indicators for what the organization considers success (like Die Welt’s “article score”). It is also about being willing to actually use insights gained from analytics to make editorial decisions, like reorganizing the newsroom at the Financial Times or launching new products at The Economist.

Our research suggests that a small number of English-language news organizations in the U.S. and the U.K. lead the way when it comes to analytics. But market leaders and new startups across Europe are not far behind.

The importance of analytics at small startups like Quartz, De Correspondent, and Ze.tt illustrates that sophisticated use of analytics is not about how many resources a newsroom has, but about how those resources are allocated.

Many legacy organizations with far larger newsrooms use far more primitive analytics than these small startups. Across all markets, including the U.S. and the U.K., most legacy media lag behind best practice and stick to rudimentary and generic forms of analytics.

From resistance to curiosity: Why journalists need to be involved

From our interviews, it seems the general response from journalists to analytics has in most cases shifted from the resistance others have reported in the past to a much greater degree of curiosity and interest.

This is important for two reasons. First, all the best practice examples we examine in the report underline that good analytics is at least as much about organization and culture as it is about tools and technology. For newsrooms to make more data-informed decisions and on that basis more effectively reach their audience, they need to develop a culture of data where rank and file journalists and senior editors — not just the audience team — know how to make sense of numbers and how to act on them.

Second, it’s important because analytics will continue to evolve, and journalists need to be part of this development if we are to develop metrics that effectively underpin editorial priorities.

If journalists do not engage, the development of data, metrics, and analytics will continue to be entirely shaped by advertising, commercial, and technological priorities, with little consideration of editorial priorities.

Editorial analytics: The road ahead

As the most sophisticated audience development editors and data analysts are the first to underline, editorial analytics are not perfect. The data never tells the full story, and even the best approaches still face a range of data-quality and data-access issues. Good analytics is therefore about complementing editorial judgment with analysis of the best available quantitative audience data, not about introducing a tyranny of numbers.

Editorial analytics represent a significant improvement in news organizations’ capacity to understand the media environment in which they operate and an important shift from a time in which newsrooms had far less analytic capability than other parts of their organization.

Most importantly, editorial analytics help journalists reach people. Newsrooms should embrace that, and develop the tools, organization, and culture necessary for better understanding and reaching their audience. Without this, they risk losing out in the ever-more intense competition for attention.

First day of fun-employment! Self-employment, I mean. Gotta find a way to make money.

FiveThirtyEight enters the elections podcast race. Let’s start with an item thematically related to what went down in Iowa last night.

FiveThirtyEight, the data journalism site led by stats dude Nate Silver, officially launched its Elections podcast last Monday. And let me be the first to say: Finally! Predictive modeling for presidential elections is basically the only reason I keep FiveThirtyEight in my bookmarks, though I must say their culture stuff gets a click or two out of me. Anyway, this launch expands the site’s podcast offering to a healthy number of three, with the elections pods joining a sports punditry show called Hot Takedown and a more general show about data and society called What’s The Point. Its launch comes after four weeks of piloting through the What’s The Point feed, where test episodes were delivered to listeners in the form of bonus content. Which is certainly an interesting method of both workshopping a show and cultivating interest in an existing user base.

So here’s the most interesting thing about FiveThirtyEight’s Elections podcast: It’s made up of different kinds of shows. The podcast’s anchor will be a Slate Political Gabfest-style panel show that will be released on Mondays, with additional episodes — which may or may not adopt the panel discussion format — dropping on other days depending on the news cycle and depending on whether the podcast team has something else they want to cover. Some of these non-Monday episodes could be a documentary; some could feature interviews.

This diversification of content was top of mind for Jody Avirgan, the former WNYC producer that the site tapped last year to head up its podcast operations. (Avirgan is also the host of What’s The Point.) “From the beginning, I wanted our election audio coverage to be a bunch of different things. I wanted it to be a home for reported stories, documentaries, etc.,” he told me over the phone. “I think a lot of people are hung up on the idea of ‘a show,’ and that you would have to do the same thing week after week after week just because you have ‘a show.'”

In this view, the podcast feed is structurally utilized in a manner reminiscent to linear TV news or radio broadcast channels, but without the need to plug gaps with filler content or reruns. For Avirgan, it’s a mark of confidence in the pull of the larger media operation, and not a specific show. “Let’s just have a home for the audio content we make, and people will follow us to wherever we create,” Avirgan continued. “I think Grantland has been a good model all along — the way they created one feed, and put all their shows all in one feed. People who like Grantland really like Grantland, and they don’t care where they get it. They just want to get it.”

FiveThirtyEight is not the first to play around with release conventions through a podcast feed. NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, for example, is particularly good with experimentation, consistently using its feed to drop alternate programming like its sporadically-released sports show (The Giant Foam Finger!!) as well as special interviews (J.K. Rowling!!). Another interesting practitioner is the Bill Simmons Podcast Network’s “Channel 33” feed, which essentially serves as an omnibus home for Simmons’ frequent collaborators and former Grantland soldiers to play around with their own shows (The Watch and Sources Say are fabulous, by the way). But I’m a little surprised more podcast creators don’t experiment more with the RSS feed. We’ve seen some interesting, playful uses over among fiction podcasts; for example, the recent fictional podcast hit Limetown occasionally dropped mini-sode checkins to conjure the illusion of “real-time” programming. Maybe I’m just talking out of an armchair, but it doesn’t seem like it would take too much of an effort for an actual campaign trail reporter to experiment by using a feed to sporadically drop 5 minute verbal sketches of scene and space. (See: Audio Twitter.)

Anyway, back to talking about the actual podcast: the Elections podcast’s launch comes up against what appears to be an increasingly crowded field. As I’ve noted recently, it seems like there’s been another election-related pod being launched every other day, with new offerings being rolled by both podcast stalwarts and newcomers (sample list: NPR’s Politics Podcast, The Washington Post’s Presidential, Politico’s Off Message, The Huffington Post’s Candidate Confessional, Futuro Media Group’s In the Thick, The Pollsters, and many others.) I asked Avirgan what he thought about this flood of audio election programming. His response was a dry one: “There’s this perfect storm of people who think that podcasting is an easy money thing, and there’s big news cycle event coming, and so they just put the two things together,” Avirgan said. “I’m sure if this was Brazil and the World Cup was coming up, you’d see a lot of World Cup podcasts.”

But will the abundance of these podcasts prove a hurdle for FiveThirtyEight, whose mass-market raison d’être, for all intents and purposes, is elections-focused data journalism? Avirgan doesn’t think so, citing operational nimbleness, close fidelity to its audience, and a keen awareness of the space as differentiating factors. “There’s a reason our show is on Monday versus other days,” Avirgan notes. “We’re separated [from other podcasts] on the calendar…We’re not going to pull off what the [Slate Political] Gabfest does. We have our own people. We’re going to do what we’re good at.”

You can find FiveThirtyEight’s Election Podcast here.

Podcasts, but for podcasts. Or broadcasts, but for podcasts. Or broadcasts, but for podcasts that are also later distributed as podcasts.

A common refrain among those who are involved in or follow podcasts is that discovery is broken, and its broken-ness is one of the many primary structural impediments that prevents podcasts from growing, maturing, and becoming mainstream, which is arguably what everybody wants. So far, all we really have is iTunes, and even that audience development pipeline is being further corroded by the recent podcast rush that has undoubtedly led to increased competition for real estate on iTunes. It is perhaps inevitable, then, that this unfortunate state of affairs would lead to a situation where we see a bunch of launches involving podcasts dedicated to the curation of high-quality podcasts for the pleasure of mass earballs.

In recent weeks, we saw the birth of Gimlet’s Sampler and Washington public radio station WAMU’s The Big Listen, two shows from different sides of the public/private podcasting divide. They join the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s Podcast Playlist, which was the first high-profile attempt to execute on this particular idea. (Disclaimer: I’ve been a guest on the podcast before.) Playlist was first launched in the summer of 2015 with WNYC’s Sean Rameswaram (who is actually Canadian, by the way) performing sole host and curation duties. Its current iteration features in-house hosts Lindsay Michael and Matt Galloway, presumably because Rameswaram had to go back to his home station to develop whatever secret project he is no doubt developing at this very second.

Let’s take a second to think about the bigger idea at play here. These shows ostensibly exist to perform a specific structural function for their respective audiences, which is to provide guidance through the hyper-abundant, anarchic, and desperately overwhelming offerings of the wider podcast ecosystem whose low barriers to entry and democratic promise, while much lauded, are ultimately counterintuitive to actual consumption.

In my mind, the emergence of these podcasts about podcasts could well be thought of as an echo to what happened with the rise of aggregation among the blogosphere back in the mid-2000s. Wiser folks than I have already written about the structural and developmental similarities between blogs and podcasting, but I’d like to go further here and draw a straight line between these podcasts about podcasts and blog aggregators. The latter plays the very same role as the former: to streamline the reader’s experience of the rest of the Internet’s “Wild West” within the same medium. And though the value-add for the aggregated is the potential of a clickthrough, a retention, and a conversion, there’s an opportunity for the aggregator to leverage any attention gained for its curatorial prowess to further establish power and authority in the space.

But before any of these podcasts about podcasts can become authorities, they must first figure out how to differentiate themselves from each other. The three shows actually do a pretty good job of being compositionally different from one another — Playlist opts to play a bunch of segments straight with bits of set-up here and there, Sampler is much swifter with its clips, and The Big Listen, at least with the one episode that’s out so far, seems to really favor interviews with creators — but all three shows sound strikingly similar. This might be a function, perhaps, of CBC’s and WAMU’s public radio stature, and of Gimlet’s overall public radio roots, even though Sampler host Brittany Luse herself is not of the public radio world. (Luce comes to Gimlet from the very good For Colored Nerds podcast, which sounds nothing like her work on Sampler — which may itself be an expression of the issue at hand.) And all three shows also seem to use the same type of narrative tools (creator interviews, play and response, etc.) within the episode-level to perform the same duties and that, in turn, leads to a relative homogeneity in sound.

Which raises the question: What tools do these podcasts have to differentiate themselves? Seems obvious to say, but aside from basic standards of audio quality (and sometimes, not even that), the differentiation ultimately comes down to a mix between the strength of the curator’s personality — podcasts and radio shows are principally personality-driven, after all — and, well, the curator’s taste, which itself is a function of her or his personality. Which is all to say this: These podcasts should really lean harder into the specificities of its hosts.

Will big money squeeze out independent podcasting? Here’s a quote that’s pertinent to the independent podcasters out in the audience:

I worry about big money pouring into podcasting. Not so much for ourselves — I think we’ve carved out our little space and we’ll be okay. But I worry about people being able to do what we did. “I have a weird idea and I have a $60 USB microphone, and I’m going to just make this thing and maybe someone will listen to it.” I think that is what appealed to me about podcasting from the very start, and I really, really hope that all the money pouring into podcasting won’t bury tiny, weird independent podcasts like that.

That nugget comes from Welcome to Night Vale’s Joseph Fink, who was being interviewed along with cocreator Jeffrey Cranor, on-stage in D.C. last November. The interview recording was published last week as part of the Pop Culture Happy Hour (that’s two mentions in one newsletter, oy!) Blizzard Special, and you should definitely check out the whole conversation.

For context, Fink was expressing concern of how money flowing into the podcasting space may well suppress opportunities for the new, the small, the different, and the weird. First acknowledging that the podcasting space is generally a lot more exciting now than it was five years ago, Fink then highlighted the entry of bigger players with bigger wallets into the podcasting space, like Bill Simmons setting up his own podcast network, GE funding a big weird fiction project in The Message, and WNYC rolling $15 million into a podcast studio.

Again, I highly recommend you check out the whole interview — which touches upon Night Vale’s business model, the team’s favorite podcasts, and more — but for reference, this segment begins at the 31:56 mark.

NPR signs with Triton Digital’s Tap Podcast platform For advertising. More CMS news!

NPR, everybody’s favorite public radio mothership, announced yesterday that it has signed a deal with Triton Digital’s audio advertising platform for podcast monetization and distribution purposes, according to MediaPost. That’s a big get for Triton, who initially announced the launch of platform early last month, so you could probably imagine that this deal has been on the stove for a while.

Okay, real talk for a sec: The past few weeks have seen an uptick of podcast-CMS-related developments from several key players — Acast, Panoply (my former day job employer), Art19, now Triton Digital — many of which are relatively new. What we’re seeing now is some sort of land grab, with each of these players hitting the market in a rush to sign as many podcasts that are still being hosted on LibSyn or SoundCloud — which those podcasts probably chose because, well, those two were probably perceived to be the only options. (And SoundCloud is basically free, so that’s a big plus for them.) At some point, I’ll make a living comparative spreadsheet of who powers who, because most (though not all) of that information is made publicly available by these companies and because that’ll probably make a useful consumer guide for somebody.

Anyway, if you’re one of these podcasts that’s still figuring out your CMS situation, I gotta say: it’s a great and speculative time! Remember to ask questions, shop around, and consult your loved ones.

Nerdist Sports. Jonah Keri, the former ESPN/Grantland sports writer and podcaster, has found a new home for his podcast in Chris Hardwick’s Nerdist Industries, which also happens to be the home of some really amazing podcasts like James Bonding and The Thrilling Adventure Hour. It might not sound like the most obvious of hits, but that’s because Keri’s podcast will serve the flagship show of what will eventually become the network’s new sports vertical — a subject matter that the network has previously never ventured into. According to Keri’s preamble on the first episode of the relaunched show (which features an interview with the notoriously giggly Hardwick himself), he’s going to be fairly involved with whatever comes out of this new vertical — on Twitter, he described his plans as “copious” — even though he’s unsure of the exact details at this point in time.

In related news, Variety reports that Nerdist Industries is greatly expanding its network, and now boasts a total of nearly 50 podcasts. And that’s not even taking its video offerings into consideration. Yikes!

Relevant bits this week:

• Looks like Spotify finally rolled out its podcast and video content feature. In this piece on The Verge, Chris Welch implores: “Spotify, please don’t turn into iTunes.” (The Verge)
• And speaking of Spotify, rumor has it that they’re looking to raise funds again. (The New York Times)
• All the news that’s fit to pod! (Nieman Lab)
• NPR One is now available on CarPlay (Current)
• “Why public radio stations need to claim the podcast space” (Current)
• A little bit on Amazon’s audio push (Bloomberg)

Phew. That was exhausting!

Is this your first time reading Hot Pod? You can subscribe to the newsletter here, which now features exclusive content! More pod news items! Also, stuff about what I had for lunch. Whatever, that’s the newsletter strategy I’m rolling with.

On a gray day in the fall of 2013, a dozen department heads of the Dutch media company NRC huddled together in a room in Amsterdam. (Full disclosure: I was one of them.) Paintings of bygone editors of the esteemed daily NRC Handelsblad decorated the walls. That day, we made the decision to launch a startup within the newsroom in order to help ease the transition to a digital-focused company.

The resulting project, NRC Q, covers business, tech, and careers. NRC Q publishes forward-looking news stories, relies heavily on video and infographics (both created in-house by reporters), and repackages newspaper stories for an online audience (partly by limiting the word count and making the tone more conversational). We intended it to be a testing ground for a new kind of NRC journalism, where we’d address business questions like monetization.

Because we wanted to give the reader an active voice in the reporting process, we looked at data daily. Chartbeat, Google Analytics, and A/B testing were all terms that had been previously gone unheard at our 187-year-old organization. Reporters only knew a story had done well if a colleague patted them on the shoulder, or if they got a letter from a reader.

NRC Q has been a success: Our niche publication in a relatively small market has just shy of a million unique visitors per month, attracts a whole new audience for NRC, and continues to push boundaries in its search for a new kind of journalism. Startup-like platforms out of the newsrooms at, for instance, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Dallas Morning News have seen similar success.

Innovation may be stereotypically associated with starting in a garage, wearing hoodies and eating pizza while pulling all-nighters. We’ve sure had our share of that, humbly starting in the archive room of NRC’s otherwise glass-and-light-filled Amsterdam offices.

But real innovation isn’t about garages. I’ve come to see innovation as an organizational structure issue. How do we produce or repackage journalistic content? Who do we hire? Where are we located? How do we relate to the rest of the newsroom? What processes make it harder for us to innovate? And how should the leaders of legacy papers approach young upstarts within their newsrooms?

As a Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow this past spring, I set out to explore how other news organizations have become more digitally oriented — specifically, how they’ve used startups within the newsroom to enact transformation.

In the course of my research, I visited with America’s largest media brands (The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal), talked with regional bastions of quality journalism (the Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, The Boston Globe), included digital-only publications (BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, This.cm) and the outside view of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and added to all that the expert opinions of professors and thinkers at Harvard Business School.

A lot is still being figured out. Even though we’re drawn to digital, print is still the main source of revenue for many newspapers. Digital subscriptions and ads haven’t yet offset print losses. And reporters can be wary of change.

“Nobody claims it’s an easy transition,” said Anita Elberse, a professor at Harvard Business School who specializes in the digital transformation of media businesses. “But it’s just so much better than managing decline.”

My aim throughout my reporting was to provide a roadmap for other news organizations that might want to host a startup within their walls. Here’s what I learned.

Get organized

First, Latour said, an organization needs to ask what it can do to be best in class in, say, data journalism or visual journalism. It should follow that up with an assessment of what works in the present organization and establish how to reach its goal. There should be a sense of urgency: The group should aim for initial results in less than three months. Speed is of the essence.

Who and where?

There are two groups of people that should not be on the innovative team. One: People whose bosses think it’s time for them to be “rewarded with a project.” Two: The actual leaders in the newsroom, the masthead.

The more interesting the work of the online group gets, the more the masthead will probably want to get involved — and they should, of course, support the startup. But including them on the actual team carries the risk of counter-productiveness, said John Kotter, Konosuke Matsushita professor of leadership, emeritus at the Harvard Business School.

If these leaders really wanted to innovate, Kotter believes, they would have done it already. So he suggests coming up with some lines to deter them in advance, in case they insist: “The demands on you are too high already, you need to put out a paper every day, you have to make sure we meet our quality standards, you’re already responsible for us not losing money…”

David Skok is managing editor for digital at The Boston Globe, which has recently launched two news startups — Crux, “covering all things Catholic,” and Beta Boston, covering tech news in the region.

Skok believes in Clay Christensen’s RPP theory: It’s about resources (people, budgets), processes (workflow, digital-first), and priorities (editorial and managerial). When all of these are in place, the company can more easily adapt to change.

Sree regularly gives talks to newsrooms and reminds them of the U.S. railroad companies that didn’t realize how serious it was that their business model was under pressure from airlines. They assumed they were in the railroad business, when in fact they were in the transportation business — and see where they are now.

Similarly, Sree said, journalists aren’t in the print paper business anymore. They’re in the news, information and data business.

The Huffington Post’s Koda Wang, who oversees the company’s global expansion, urges newspapers to stop thinking of themselves as newspapers: “The idea of a fixed print format is long obsolete.” And so the thinking in the newsroom has to change accordingly.

There are plenty of practical ways to include reluctant colleagues in the process of change: Group meetings, weekly brown-bag lunches for workers from various departments, video presentations. Here are some other ideas:

— Sauer made laminated cards for the Star Tribune that explain what to do online in the event of breaking news. “Newsroom policy,” it says on the top of each card. “No exceptions.”

“Don’t start writing an entire story and come to me in forty minutes to tell me you’ve written thirteen beautiful paragraphs,” Sauer said. “No. Write a minimum of eighty words now, update it constantly, and keep hitting publish each and every time. We need something that gets us in the game.”

— Visibility and repetition help. Ishmael recommends “always over-communicating.” Tailor different messages for different groups: vendors, journalists, the board of directors that needs to sign off on an investment.

— Don’t get frustrated. As Kotter said, “You’ll never win everyone over.” You don’t have to get the entire newsroom behind this industry-changing model. Your goal is 50 per cent plus one.

— Latour takes steps to empower a startup-like feeling at the Journal. He keeps the door to his office open and tries to talk to people in person instead of sending out hundreds of emails. “The party line should be that we don’t know exactly what will work, but we’re taking steps.”

That brings up a question I’ve encountered in many newsrooms: Doesn’t all this innovation hurt our core business?

As a way of countering that question, Latour urged editors-in-chief and other newsroom leaders to maintain a clear message: The quality of our journalism is sacrosanct, “but a lot of our behavior will have to change, newsroom behavior has to change, the ways in which we reach people has to change, our form of storytelling has to change. There is no other way: we have to change.”

Finding room to innovate (and fail)

The Dallas Morning News has experimented with different solutions. It put up a complete paywall — with no meter — in February 2011. That didn’t work, so Moroney took the paywall down.

Now the Morning News is trying a range of other ideas. It offers events like “One-Day University,” where professors give classes to readers. It started a content-marketing agency. And it now owns the craft beer and indie music festival Untapped and the food and wine festival Savor.

The paper also found room to innovate in arts and culture. This year it launched GuideLive, a mobile-friendly site with an infinite scroll of things to see and do in the area.

A team of seven, including an editor, a producer, and a designer, oversaw the GuideLive project. Moroney instructed the group to build the site as if it were a startup, without creating any extra work for the newsroom. All the regular journalistic principles still applied, including the separation of church and state (content and ads). “But they might want to open with Maroon 5 and not with opera, and that’s fine. In the old days, we would just do it all.”

Moroney admitted that initiatives like these have little to do with safeguarding democracy (which he strongly considers to be one of the Morning News’s goals) or even selling papers. The paper can help sell tickets, though: “I have unsold advertising inventory [that I can use to] help put people in seats.”

This, Moroney says, is all about sustaining innovation. His strategy is not to disrupt his own company, but to try and find enough sources of revenue to sustain it.

The Times struggled with that in the creation of the NYT Now app. All of the new content sometimes felt like homework to new readers who didn’t have a history with the brand, said Blake Wilson.

NYT Now saw some successes and some failures. One of its goals was to find a significant new audience. That worked; there are no signs that the app cannibalized the Times’ paid audience, Wilson said. The second goal was to monetize the app by charging $8 per month. That didn’t work so well: The New York Times announced this spring that it would make the app free.

NYT Now uses bullet points and a conversational tone to sum up stories. Those bullet points were a matter of debate in the newsroom. But Wilson said that many mobile readers on news apps simply scroll down to get a glimpse of the headlines, reach the bottom, and scroll back up without ever clicking on a headline. By adding bullet points under headlines, NYT Now provides more information on the display layer.

Sometimes, such changes in tone of voice, character and format trickle into the rest of the paper as well. Bullet points have appeared on the Times’ homepage, and the paper is commissioning more conversationally written “explainers.”

“The audience has given us permission to take what we’re doing further,” Wilson said.

Meanwhile, the Globe kept the audience in mind when it had to reframe the way it thought about delivering a story.

In the old days, the Globe’s goal was to deliver the best print story. All the other media — Facebook posts, Twitter, video, even the Boston.com and BostonGlobe.com websites — were supposed to promote the paper. Print was everything.

The challenge now, Skok said, is just to create a story, in any shape or form, and help it reach its intended audience. Twitter helps publicize that story. So do Facebook, Snapchat, “and, by the way, print as well.” The Globe is not a platform-specific publication anymore — it’s a story-telling machine. In this model, stories can both appear in print and online, and it doesn’t matter which comes first.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune’s website attracts seven million unique visitors per month and is the second most profitable part of the company, after the Sunday paper.

On the day I visited the Star Tribune, Arizona senator Harry Reid announced he wasn’t going to seek re-election. Terry Sauer’s team gave the Harry Reid story the second-best position on the website, right below a story about a fire in the suburbs that caused a death. When he checked Chartbeat, he was surprised to see that the Reid story got more readers than the fire. Contrary to his earlier plans, he kept the story up there.

Usually Sauer is more conservative than his staff, he says; they’re the ones pushing the envelope, and he’s fine with that. He agrees that there should be room on the site for “a three-headed cow in Wisconsin.”

“Cats and lists have actually always been a part of newspaper history,” Sree agreed. “Papers have tried for centuries to lure people in.” And throughout that time, there have been many other changes that were criticized at first, too: Color, new sections, different story formats like interviews.

All of these decisions should be informed by data.

Journalism is the only profession, Sree said, that prides itself on not knowing about its financials. But he thinks journalists should learn everything about their business: How many subscribers do we have, in print and online? What’s our ad revenue? Are we actually still profitable? To that end, many newsrooms are installing Chartbeat and giving reporters access to Google Analytics

Sree proposes that, every day, a journalist should send the entire newsroom an email about the daily numbers and what they actually mean. Which stories performed best, and why? What can we learn from the use of certain kinds of headlines? Did the amount of time spent by readers on a specific story reveal a curiosity gap between the headline and the content actually delivered?

David Skok

On a daily basis, data comes to the rescue. Debates about that headline with a question mark? Provide your colleague with data you’ve gathered from A/B-testing different headlines. Why can’t a story be any longer than 500 words? Because the reader demonstrates he doesn’t have time for it and clicks away. “When arguments get heated and tension arises, we look at the data,” the Globe’s Skok said. “It always helps.”

All of this is, in Skok’s words, the “unsexy” work of making your newsroom a more product-centric and user-centric organization. It may not immediately reward you with a Pulitzer prize, but it might help get your organization better aligned with a more digital time.

“It would be naive not to hold ourselves responsible for our possible demise,” Skok said. “But I don’t feel an air of inevitability about that anymore.”

Freek Staps helped found NRC Q and is the co-managing editor for online at NRC Media in The Netherlands. He completed this work as a 2015 Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow.

Photo by Daria used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/08/want-to-create-a-more-digital-newsroom-find-your-inner-startup/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/08/will-the-huffington-posts-latest-international-foray-build-an-audience-in-australia/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/08/will-the-huffington-posts-latest-international-foray-build-an-audience-in-australia/#respond Mon, 17 Aug 2015 21:36:47 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=113086 The past few years have been positively revolutionary for the Australian news landscape. From a static and highly concentrated media market, dominated by News Corporation, Fairfax, and the ABC, new players have gradually entered the market, and the next new entry lumbering up to the starting blocks is the Australian version of The Huffington Post.

Emerging from founder Arianna Huffington’s earlier forays into political blogging in the mid-2000s, HuffPo has become a major political voice in the United States, and has recently expanded into a number of global markets, with over a dozen localized editions now available. Huffington Post Australia, in partnership with Fairfax Media, launched today.

Does Huffington Post Australia stand a chance of gaining a foothold in the increasingly crowded Australian news and commentary market? The fate of some of the other recent additions to the media mix may provide a useful guide here.

Comprehensive data on site visits collected by Experian Hitwise shows a range of crucial trends. First, with the general shift towards online news consumption, the total number of site visits to the leading news sites has been trending strongly upwards — from an average of just under 6 million visits per week during 2013, leader news.com.au has grown to over 13 million weekly visits since June 2015, for example.

Total visits to selected Australian news and opinion sites, 2013-15. Data courtesy of Experian Marketing Services’ Hitwise. (Click to enlarge.)

Second, while the shape of the market has long remained stable, with news.com.au, the Sydney Morning Herald, and nineMSN (now 9 News) fairly evenly matched, since early 2014 the fortunes of the market leaders have diverged. Having embraced a more populist, tabloid content strategy, news.com.au has established itself as the clear market leader, while the SMH’s growth has merely followed the overall trend, and 9 News has stagnated both before and after its rebranding.

Meanwhile, the entrance of two U.K.-based news organizations into the local market has affected the status quo considerably. The Guardian and the Daily Mail had already been reasonably popular with Australian audiences well before their local spinoffs were announced and launched, but their dedicated domestic coverage has been able to boost their appeal considerably.

Total visits to selected Australian news and opinion sites, 2013-15, with Daily Mail Australia and Guardian Australia highlighted. Data courtesy of Experian Marketing Services’ Hitwise. (Click to enlarge.)

Growth in visits to Daily Mail Australia has been especially pronounced, from a weekly average of just over 2 million in 2013 to nearly 8 million visits per week since June 2015 — well above the average growth trend. The trajectory shows a clear bump in readership since the transition to dedicated Australian content in May 2014, and since the start of 2015, Daily Mail Australia has been clearly established as the third most popular Australian news site.

Even before its Australian launch, in fact, Daily Mail was easily more popular with Australian Internet users than local tabloids Herald-Sun or Daily Telegraph.

Guardian Australia’s progress has been somewhat slower, building from a lower base. Even after its official launch in May 2013, the site struggled to break through the barrier of 1 million visits per week, until the 2013 federal election campaign provided it with the opportunity to establish a stronger profile as a new space for quality political coverage. Since June 2015, the site has averaged some 3.7 million visits per week, and sits comfortably in the top 10 of Australian news sites.

BuzzFeed’s official launch in January 2014 did cause at least a momentary spike in visits, and marks the point at which the site becomes more strongly competitive in the Australian media landscape. Long running neck-and-neck with Guardian Australia and the international edition of Huffington Post, during the remainder of 2014 BuzzFeed Australia gradually pulls ahead of both sites. It is now established as a popular site in Australia, rivaling 9 News, The Age, and ABC News; it has attracted an average of nearly 5 million visits per week since June 2015.

Total visits to selected Australian news and opinion sites, 2013-15, with BuzzFeed and Huffington Post highlighted. Data courtesy of Experian Marketing Services’ Hitwise. (Click to enlarge.)

Ahead of its Australian launch, the international edition of The Huffington Post remains a considerably more niche publication — yet still ranking ahead of more established Australian titles such as The Australian (whose partial paywall may affect visitor numbers, however) or the Canberra Times. Notably, HuffPo’s Australian visitor numbers have been trending downwards over the past year, averaging some 1.7 million visits per week since June 2015.

It will be interesting to see whether the launch of an Australian edition of The Huffington Post can arrest or even reverse this decline. The performance of other recent entrants into the Australian online news and commentary market has clearly shown that such sites can establish themselves as viable and even leading players in the media landscape. However, the greatest successes have been reserved for comparatively populist and tabloid outlets like Daily Mail Australia and BuzzFeed Australia.

By contrast, Guardian Australia’s achievements to date have been more limited. Its parent organization is recognised as a globally leading quality news brand, whose closest Australian equivalents are perhaps the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. However, in spite of its undoubted contributions to Australian political journalism, Guardian Australia has yet to even come close to rivaling the visitor numbers attracted by these Fairfax titles’ sites.

The Huffington Post, in turn, caters to a considerably more narrow audience. By boosting its coverage of Australian politics and current affairs, it should be able to at least maintain the established Australian audience for its international edition, which would leave it placed above titles such as The Australian in total weekly visits.

It seems unlikely, though, that it could catch up again with a site like Guardian Australia — whose numbers it matched one year ago — in the immediate future.

Axel Bruns is a professor of creative industries at Queensland University of Technology. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Photo of the Sydney Opera House roof by See-ming Lee used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/08/will-the-huffington-posts-latest-international-foray-build-an-audience-in-australia/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/07/newsonomics-on-end-games-and-end-times/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/07/newsonomics-on-end-games-and-end-times/#respond Thu, 02 Jul 2015 14:37:57 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=110297 Platish or perish?

With those malaprop-sounding fighting words a year ago, digital entrepreneur Jonathan Glick neatly, if broadly, summed up a question of the moment on Twitter.

We’ve read so many obits for news media over the past 10 years that you’d think we’d be inured to yet another. But the onslaught of off-site distribution initiatives — from Facebook’s soon-to-expand Instant Articles to Apple News to Snapchat Discover, and most recently Twitter Lightning and whatever may next emerge as an offspring of Google News — now offers yet another existential moment. Will anyone go directly to a news or media site or app in 2020? Or are the platforms, now becoming quasi-publishers, all that will matter? (And will anyone come up with something better than “platisher”? And don’t try to make “pubform” happen.)

It’s all got me thinking about end games and end times. We’re in the midst of a new volcanic digital movement and we have little idea what an end looks like. I’ve called this greater movement to off-news site reading the “age of distribution,” but in reality, it’s just a further flowering of distribution, as newer pipes companies — like Facebook and Snapchat — join the restyled ones like Verizon and Comcast in bringing more stuff to their customers. Several publishers have a few years’ experience partnering with Flipboard, and they have some small gains but no tectonic business movement to show for it. The sheer size of the new generation of platforms interested in news gives publishers (and those who like to tell them what to do) both chills and thrills.

Some veteran observers of the distribution game make the point that, though it’s easy to lump all these announcements together, they’re not all created equal.

“They are so different from each other,” says Vivian Schiller, who has headed media units at The New York Times, NPR, NBC, and Twitter, and who now does consulting. “It’s Apple News, though, that could disrupt new organizations’ native apps. You can’t delete the [Apple News] app, and in the demo, it’s a gorgeous experience. We may ask the question, ‘Why do I need a New York Times app?'”

She’s right. Both the potential of the deals and the kind of moneymaking each offers vary, sometimes significantly. Some will offer a curated news mix, while others (like Snapchat) offer it up brand by brand.

Most notable about what most of the new deals offer is the chance for publishers to sell ads contextual to their content off their sites. That’s a potential game-changer, as Frédéric Filloux notes in his Monday Note, “The Redistribution of News.”. While publishers have been able to sell ads off sites, those deals with Flipboard and MSN, among others, haven’t produced big revenue; Apple and Facebook distribution might. For legacy publishers, off-site content deals have been largely focused more on selling digital subscriptions than on advertising — with mixed results.

Hearst’s Troy Young finds this common thread across the deal spectrum: “They feel very similar to us. All of these partners bring our brands closer to readers in mobile environments. All give us tools to tell rich stories. In all cases, monetization follows our content.”

Of course, the big question is what the money will look like when the dust settles. Will this round of changes stop or deepen the struggles of print-based companies? In an age when Taylor Swift acting like Ari Gold can cause a giant like Apple to modify its plans, might all of this distribution form a new business model?

Let’s consider what the new landscape tells us about both end games and end times.

End games

Few has embraced this new news ubiquity (“Newsonomics: BuzzFeed and The New York Times play Facebook’s ubiquity game”) more than Atlantic Media, and few are as bullish as Atlantic’s Michael Finnegan, whose views I recently wrote about in depth (“What are they thinking? Why Atlantic Media floods the zone”). Atlantic Media is in on the ground floor on Facebook’s Instant Articles, one of its initial nine partners, and will be in Apple News as well:

Let’s say we reach 35-40 million people through owned and operated sites today. Five years from now, our brands could be reaching 300-500 million worldwide, but not if we insist that all of them have to interact with us on our terms on our site. Five years from now, if you told me we were reaching a half a billion people with our brands, and you told me only 50 or 100 million were coming directly, that wouldn’t worry me. I’d be confident we’d be able to figure out an amazing business model to pay our journalists.

That’s one possible end game, and fascinating to think about. In that one, the platforms’ rediscovery of news — it drives 20 to 40 percent of a lot of “platform” traffic, given its continuous refreshing; you know, news — creates such a golden age of reading that publishers figure out enough ways to monetize, cut those old tiresome print expenses, and pay lots of journalists.

I put that question — of end games, and of the actual state of off-site metrics and monetization — to a half-dozen of the smartest publishing execs I know. For most, this is the hope: keep their most loyal, paying readers reading through own sites and apps, and expose their news brands to many, many more (younger) readers.

That purely additive result would be ideal, but publishers know it will be far more complex. Few wanted to say anything for attribution, given ongoing negotiations with the distributors.

To the question of how off-site monetization can compare to on-site, the answer was universal. It’s as much art as science at this point. Figure 50/50. Yes, they can do a fair amount of tracking, and of comparison, but the data — and its partialness — limits how much.

How well can they really track a Flipboard deal (now the older fogey of these platform distribution plays) compared to what Facebook, Apple, and Snapchat may offer? How do they look at what Twitter is cooking up, or Google may? As one veteran of numerous deals puts it: “Not perfect, not real time, but enough to know which distributor is performing better in terms of monetization.”

Given that landscape, what’s a benchmark of success? Finnegan believes it is unfair to expect off-site distribution deals to perform at same level as ones on Atlantic Media’s own sites and apps:

I don’t think we hold distributed content revenue deals to the same standard as we do our owned and operated sites. We can offer our clients a much better value proposition on our site, where we can customize, integrate and tailor the experience. Holding distributed content deals to equivalent standard as our sites is an unreasonable expectation because we believe our sites offer advertisers better value propositions.

If a publisher can sell its audience on its own site at a $20 per thousand price, and only gets $12.50 for a thousand readers on another platform, is that a good deal or a bad one? It’s an impossible question, at this point, to answer. Are those $20 readers abandoning a publisher’s site and moving their time spent to Facebook or Apple News? Or do most of the habituated readers, and paying subscribers, stay with a news brand’s own sites and apps, with largely new readers coming in through the new doors? Only tracking of these deals will tell indeed how much cannibalization is actually happening.

Yes, that word — have no doubt, these deals will cannibalize publishers’ direct business. The big question is how much.

That risk gets measured against the potential gain. Go back to Michael Finnegan’s best-case scenario — that tenfold multiplying of audience. He makes the case that “if we could get 20× the audience and only 10 percent of the ability to monetize, that would be something we’d want to look at. “

It’s a math that doesn’t make intuitive sense, but it’s a way of playing that ubiquitous distribution landscape. Here’s where a rational older world approach to metrics throws us off kilter.

As Buzzfeed, Vox, and Vice have taught us, huge digital news audiences can be built on free marketing, a.k.a. free social distribution. This next development of distribution platforms is a logical outgrowth of all that Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest traffic. This distribution, as disturbing and possibly damaging as it may, is, after all, free. The siren call of free: Given free access to would-be readers who can be reached at close to zero incremental cost, how can you not play, in what seems to be an age of ubiquity? So, if Atlantic Media and others can make money from even a small percentage of a huge new audience, the math could work.

Another big question: How stable are these partnerships? Publishers like much of what they’ve heard so far; for instance, Facebook Instant Articles will allow publishers to sell ads alongside their full content on Facebook and keep all the revenue. Critics guffaw and say: “Sure, that’s what they say now. Later, they’ll want a revenue share.” Sure they will. That, though, doesn’t mean worthwhile longer-term terms of partnership won’t be worked out. Remember when Apple said it wanted 30 percent of subscription revenues from its Newsstand. Outrage ensued. Then publishers recalibrated sales costs into the equation of gaining new paying customers, much as they do in the analog world. The same principle might rationally apply here. Facebook — and other distributors — do provide a service to publishers, offering new audience. Build a reasonable, predictable commission into the sales equation, and we could see a new stability and mutual expectation of revenue that could become the cornerstone of new relationships.

Deal points are one thing. Just as big is something more intangible: publishers’ own direct connection with their readers. “At a minimum, we want to ensure we have a direct relationship with our readers/users,” says Kinsey Wilson, executive vice president for product and technology at The New York Times.

Publishers worry about becoming too dependent on these new platforms. In fact, they already are. Most news publishers get far less than half of their traffic coming directly to their sites already. Google drives a quarter to a third of it, and social is fast getting competitive with search. Then there are the thousands of other sites that provide traffic. In the end, publishers’ dependence on platforms might best be mitigated by working with a number of the big distributors. In search traffic, Google has essentially no competition, and publishers thus have had little leverage in negotiating advantageous partnerships. In the new platform wars, can publishers play Apple against Facebook against Snapchat against Twitter?

End times

If history is any guide, we’d have to answer that question “no, they can’t.” The famously splintered news industry has found itself largely incapable of effective collective action in dealing with large, singleminded, highly mobilized Internet companies. They move at the speed of light while publishers dither.

Fears of antitrust collusion charges slow collective action. Then there’s the question: What would we negotiate for? So publishers worldwide end up simply reacting to the offers of Facebook, Apple, and others; few are in on any early discussions on how to make the programs mutually beneficial. Facebook gets credit, from early participants, for its listening abilities, but still, Instant Articles is a Facebook-driven project. Could it be any different?

Down the road from Facebook’s Palo Alto campus, representatives from eight European publishers broke bread with Google managers in Mountain View last week. At that meeting, they moved forward a joint agenda for cooperation, which I detailed a couple of weeks ago (“Newsonomics: Could a small Google tech change mean tens of millions to news publishers?”). Yes, the meetings were jumpstarted by European legal action against Google, but still it’s an attempt to jointly define a news future. Whatever comes out of that Digital News Initiative, all publishers should consider this: Google is now playing catchup to its two most important competitors, Facebook and Apple in news distribution. Google needs to find a new post-Google News strategy; that product now seems so 2006.

“This seems to be a mobile land grab and it will be fascinating to see what Google will do with Android,” Gordon Crovitz suggests. Indeed, Android — with many more users worldwide than Apple’s iOS — will likely deploy a new Android News or Google News not too long after Apple News hits the market. (It currently offers Google Play Newsstand.)

Google isn’t yet talking to publishers about what could now do for news readers and publishers, or vice versa, and I’ve made the point of how absent North American publishers are from the Digital News Initiative talks.

Let’s also acknowledge that in all the talk of these platform distribution deals, it’s only national/global companies — companies like The New York Times, BuzzFeed, National Geographic, NBC, The Atlantic, Bild, Spiegel, The Guardian, and the BBC — that are named. Where is the regional representation? Most Americans and Europeans get much of their news from regional and local newspapers, yet they’re nowhere in the conversation. Here, as in most things digital, the chasm between the national/global players and the regional players grows, with the latter much constrained in meeting the ever-changing demands of digital publishing. For the local daily press — which in the U.S. means all but three dailies — you can’t win in the new platform wars if you don’t play.

Finally, on this topic, let’s ask one more question: Why haven’t publishers become platforms?

One publisher has indeed made a big splash, going the platisher route. The Huffington Post, which claims 100,000 contributors (though some dispute the claim), just set a goal multiplying that number by 10 (“Arianna Huffington’s next million mark”). From its inception, The Huffington Post has served as a platform for others, from top Hollywood stars to those at the bottom of the economic ladder, as well as a source for news.

“We have seen ourselves as a hybrid — both a publisher and a platform — since day one when we were one part news site, one part group blog,” Arianna Huffington told me Wednesday. “Over the years, we’ve expanded both our editorial team and our platform offerings, including growing to 100,000 bloggers, crowdsourcing user-generated content and partnering with hundreds of non-profits, schools, etc. to cross-post their content.”

Few newspapers have built anything like HuffPost’s system, with the Deseret News one notable exception. Many tested ideas and early technologies (I recall our Knight Ridder Digital late 1990s experiment with community site Koz), but the timing was off and the idea has never been broadly revived. To that end, publishers — which could have become much bigger platforms themselves — left the field wide open for the latter-day pipes companies. Further, newspaper companies haven’t robustly supported real universal high-speed internet, as laid out by Barack Obama, like much of the rest of the civilized digital world enjoys. If we did, Facebook couldn’t easily complain — accurately — about the eight-second lag in reading linked news articles, a digital eternity that it says drove the idea for Instant Articles.

Which gets to the end times notion. It’s not about oblivion, but about people and paper. It really is end times for print. Readers continue to abandon newsprint, trading it in for digital. As importantly, publishers’ aggressive pricing policies have increased circulation revenue but keep pushing down print volumes — toward a inevitable and sooner-rather-than-later end. It’s in people though — the journalists who write the news for us — that we see the whole sense of local news reporting slipping away. Just in recent weeks, we’ve seen dozens more newsroom jobs lost, from Denver eastward to Chicago, Greensboro, and Tampa.

After the Apollo acquisition of Digital First Media fell through in May, DFM began a new round of job cutting affecting dozens, plus additional cost-cutting throughout the company. It won’t be alone. Bleak print ad revenues drive these cuts — and 2016 budgeting is coming. It is, in fact, end times for the now more than 21,000 journalists that have lost their jobs in the last decade. Their readers are being hurt too, drop by drop. As the big national/global publishers do their end game theorizing, much of the newspaper business is being left on sidelines, trying to figure out how to maintain profit for 2016, 2017, and maybe 2018, but with little role in the new platform plays.

Overall, this new age of distribution may be a significant historical marker, as long as publishers try to take the future in their own hands and don’t expect Facebook to come up with its own brainstorm to “save” the news industry. As Mark Zuckerberg took questions on Facebook Tuesday, he said all the right things — and showed himself to be as uncertain as publishers on where all this would or could lead. “There’s an important place for news organizations that can deliver smaller bits of news faster and more frequently in pieces,” he wrote. “This won’t replace the longer and more researched work, and I’m not sure anyone has fully nailed this yet.”

“Death on the Pale Horse” (1796) by Benjamin West is at the Detroit Institute of Art.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/07/newsonomics-on-end-games-and-end-times/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/06/newsonomics-10-numbers-that-define-the-news-business-today/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/06/newsonomics-10-numbers-that-define-the-news-business-today/#comments Thu, 25 Jun 2015 14:00:54 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=110180 We’re bombarded by endless numbers every day — some claiming the exalted status of metrics or, even higher, benchmarks. It’s tough for any of us to figure out which — ARPU? TOS? post-click activity? — are meaningful and which will go down in news transformation history as footnotes. For me, making sense of the numbers helps bring a little order to the chaos.

On Wednesday, I spoke to a Media Impact Funders group in Menlo Park, right there on Sand Hill Road, where so much venture money flows into would-be high-flying companies. This funders group, though, represents the journalism grantmakers — the foundations that have searched for and paid for much of the experimentation of the past decade.

In 15 minutes, I shared with them 10 numbers that I think tell us where we’re at today, in yet another uncertain time for the “future of news.” So, here, for your summer beach thinking, are a few numbers that deserve our attention. It’s not an eternal top 10 list; it’s a list of the moment, guaranteed to change. I welcome your additions.

$14 million That’s the monthly digital ad revenue of The New York Times in the first quarter of this year. And, intriguingly, it’s the same number as the monthly digital ad revenue of The Huffington Post, newly part of Verizon. That number is open to a kaleidoscope of interpretations. Is it incredibly low, given the massive reach of both news organizations? Isn’t it interesting that the Times, with its core of 1,300 top-of-the-trade journalists, takes in the same amount of digital ad money that HuffPo does, relying on its army of 100,000 contributors from around the world — a number Arianna says she wants to grow to 1 million, in addition to its own full-time hundreds. What does that tell us about the advertising value of content? Compare that $14 million to Google’s monthly revenue of $5.7 billion and Facebook’s of $1.2 billion, and you can see the world as it now exists. A bonus number: Combined, Google and Facebook take in about 52 percent of all the nation’s digital advertising.

50% Today, most news companies tell me more than half of their digital access comes from mobile devices. That breaks down more than two-to-one smartphones-to-tablets. A recent Gartner series forecasts that by 2018, 50 percent of all web access worldwide would come via mobile. So news is a leading edge for mobile. That’s no surprise: It’s always changing and perfect for on-the-go reading. National and global publishers see this profound shift as the prime issue and opportunity before them; most regional news companies still struggle with mobile. In everything from revenue generation to product design to reader engagement, publishers must reckon with this non-tethered, personalized world.

54,581 The number of “social marketing” jobs currently listed at LinkedIn, from strategist to instructor to intern. That’s about 20,000 more jobs than exist today in U.S. newsrooms. It’s a new world of “earned media.” Forget OPM, Other People’s Money. Think OPT — Other People’s Time. Our billions of shares promote (or relegate) content to its place on the web, and almost all come for free. The big new news brands — BuzzFeed, Vox, Business Insider, Vice, Mic — all rely heavily on this form of earned media. Ask one of their CEOs what they spend on paid media, and most likely the answer will be a big, fat zero.

1:2 Video ad rates still manage to beat text ones, but many legacy publishers still can’t produce enough news video that attracts big-enough audiences at small-enough costs. That puts in perspective Arianna Huffington’s plan to produce one news video for each two written stories. That announcement follows a steady drumbeat of video announcements out of HuffPo: 11 new video series formats; 2.3 billion video views in less than three years on HuffPost Live; more than 30 million views in the first six episodes of The HuffPost Show. HuffPost has also launched what it calls “the first next-generation online video journalism network, Outspeak.” That latest sound of convergence you are hearing: Verizon, with HuffPost as its new face, remaking itself as our friendly video provider. Major subtext here: The pipes companies are now leaping into the world of media in a big way, and that megatrend informs a lot about “news” going forward.

63% Of the $58 billion U.S. digital ad total for this year, almost two-thirds of it will be touched by “programmatic.” Publishers once used it as a term of derision; now they’re trying to get up to speed on programmatic optimization. Star Tribune publisher Mike Klingensmith cites better harnessing of programmatic for his company’s above-average digital ad gains As Sebastian Tomich, The New York Times’ senior vice president for advertising and innovation, told me this week, most newspaper can count their major ad priorities with three finders. Those would be branded content or content marketing, mobile content — and programmatic. It’s tough to imagine any scenario in which ad buyers won’t want the added targeting effectiveness of programmatic — the data-driven matching of audience and product.

75% That’s the share of its traffic that BuzzFeed gets from social. That number informs Jonah Peretti’s decision, joined by others, to jump under the covers with Facebook Instant Articles (“Newsonomics: BuzzFeed and The New York Times play Facebook’s ubiquity game”). Let’s match that number to those of other news media. Digital-first champions, like Salt Lake City’s Deseret Digital Media, drive 30 percent of their traffic from social. Public media leader WBUR can count 33 percent. Quartz, ever innovative points to 60 percent of its traffic coming from social. Most dailies tell me their take runs from 6 to 12 percent. Certainly, legacy brands were able to build large non-social audiences in the early days of the web — but today social is the major route to new, younger audiences.

1.5 million That’s the combined total of The New York Times’ daily paying readers. Remarkably, it’s the same number the Times had 20 years ago, when all of them were paying for newsprint. Now close to 1 million pay for digital-only and about half a million for print daily. (On Sundays, the Times can count close to 2 million paying readers — long live the Sunday paper!). So what do we make of that 1.5 million number? Depends on where you rank on the ottimista/pessimista scale. The Times can cheer that it’s held on to paying daily circ when few other dailies have. Or we could acknowledge that the paying intelligentsia audience for a top national general news source is…roughly one half of one percent of the U.S. population, then and now. It’s funny that back in 1995, with the same number of paying daily readers, everyone deemed the Times a highly successful company. Today, some still lay bets on its survival as an independent entity.

36,000 That’s roughly how many jobs remain in U.S. newsrooms, as we await the new ASNE census in August. We seldom see much reporting of buyouts and layoffs these days, as some publishers concluded that the industry’s problems were only being exacerbated by its reporting on its own staff changes. Now with Jim Romenesko retiring, that uneven news will get even more uneven. Occasionally, bigger newsroom cuts get reported, as with The Denver Post’s cut of 20 a few weeks ago. The dropping of a couple or a half-dozen here or there mostly goes unreported. Post editor Greg Moore summed up the rationale: “It’s basically…getting expenses in line with revenue.” And with no revenue gains year-over-year since 2007, and the only way to maintain profits is cutting jobs, with newsrooms being hard hit. We can only guess at the math: How many fewer stories — online as well as in print — are 20,000 fewer journalists producing? What don’t communities know about themselves that they might have known a decade ago?

0.5% That’s the percentage of its monthly unique visitors that The Boston Globe has been able to sign up for digital-only subscriptions. Among the regional papers, the Globe looks to be the leader, last reporting more than 65,000 digital-only subscribers and about 11 million monthly uniques. Compare that to The New York Times. The Times can count more than 960,000 digital-only subscribers in its U.S. audience, according to comScore’s latest multi-platform survey. Those May numbers show the Times reaching 60 million uniques, for only the second time. At that number, the Times converts 1.5 percent of its unique audience. What this points out: The Times’ highly successful model — shifting its business to rely more on reader revenue — works far less well for the regionals. The Globe’s number is good, but still only a third of the conversion. And most papers’ conversion rates are significantly lower than the Globe’s. We’re still waiting for the Newspaper Association of America’s 2014 full-year numbers. (Last year’s numbers published in April. Now it’s mid-June, and we still don’t have them. NAA says they’re in process, but can’t give a date for publication.) The trajectory of digital circulation revenue reinforces the belief that paywall strategies need a rethink.

44 That’s the number of minutes that Quebec’s La Presse says its readers spend daily with its La Presse+ tablet product (“Newsonomics: La Presse’s bet on tablets and its crossover calculus”). It’s an absolutely stunning number, and seems to suggest that everything we think we know about digital news reading might be wrong. Thankfully, The Star in Toronto will soon test out the strategy in mid-September. Peut-être it’s a Québécois thing — but if it’s not, success will confront news producers again to reimagine themselves.

Photo by Denis Giles used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/06/newsonomics-10-numbers-that-define-the-news-business-today/feed/ 3 https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/05/newsonomics-the-voxrecode-deal-is-a-sign-of-more-consolidation-to-come/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/05/newsonomics-the-voxrecode-deal-is-a-sign-of-more-consolidation-to-come/#respond Thu, 28 May 2015 15:00:27 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=109089 Vox Media’s acquisition of Recode appears to be a relatively small deal. No dollar amount was disclosed; Vox is trading a little of its stock for a highly regarded but underperforming tech-business site. The deal, though, is part of a much larger trend of media consolidation and tells us a lot about today’s largely me-too strategies. Just as Verizon prepares to swallow AOL (which swallowed The Huffington Post), and as Charter finalizes its deal for Time Warner Cable, the table is set for more smaller media properties to seek the umbrellas of larger ones.

Bigness comes and goes over time, but this bout of bigness has been gathering steam across all forms of media, as I wrote when Rupert Murdoch made his play for Time Warner a year ago (“The newsonomics of the new quest for big, big, big”). Now, as the whispers of “content bubble” grow louder, the mating of big and small is accelerating.

Our fish-swallowing-fish narrative grew more intriguing this week when the Recode deal took on Comcastic overtones. As Quartz’s (and formerly Nieman Lab’s) Zach Seward pointed out, Comcast is represented in both ends of the transaction. In fact, Comcast Ventures put venture funding into both a 2009 round and a 2010 Series C round for Vox Media. Comcast’s NBCUniversal News Group, meanwhile, took a minority stake in the new Recode when it left its All Things D/Wall Street Journal home at the end of 2013. It would be a quite logical progression for Comcast to buy Vox, if and when the price is right.

Comcast is just one of today’s collection of whales — one of the pipes companies, or companies formerly known as the pipes companies. Such companies used to just deliver stuff — cable programs, phone service — but now, flush with fat cash flow, they’ve caught the media bug. They’ve convinced themselves that media offers diversification in an age where their core businesses are threatened by cord-cutting and other digital disruptions.

Comcast takes the lead here, having bought its way big into media by completing its NBCUniversal acquisition two years ago. That instantly turned Comcast into a big media player, giving it complete control of the NBC television network and TV production studios; the Universal movie studio; Spanish-language Telemundo; channels like MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo, USA, and E!; and partial ownership of Hulu. It has also greatly expanded its regional sports play, hiring numerous journalists. CEO Brian Roberts has long seen the financial value of owning both distribution and content.

Verizon is the latest arrival. While AOL’s ad tech might be the linchpin of the $4.4 billion deal, lots of media comes along with it, with The Huffington Post only the most recognizable.

That would leave their competitors — AT&T and the soon-to-be No. 2 cable company in the country, Charter/Time Warner Cable — asking themselves the same identity questions. Bet on them getting romanced by media as well. Charter will have to digest TWC first — but key investor John Malone is a guy who knows his way into and out of media (Times backgrounder: “The ‘king of cable’ behind a Charter-Time Warner Cable deal”), so expect it to get into the media action some time soon.

Those four companies now position themselves to be the gatekeepers for both our TV watching and, more importantly over time, our broadband access. They are awash in cheap money, good profits, and flowing cash.

Who else among the country’s biggest media companies might have an interest in news and information businesses? It’s a short list, led by those TV companies that have become TV/digital asset companies. Put Disney, 21st Century Fox, Time Warner, and Tegna (Gannett’s soon-to-be-spun-off broadcast/digital entity) among the possibles.

Hearst, one of the most successful diversified media companies and an investor in 61 digital companies, including BuzzFeed, deserves a place on the list. Time Inc. has the willingness, though its cash is constrained. Then there’s one non-American company that’s rapidly becoming a U.S.-oriented media concern: Axel Springer, already invested in or connected with Business Insider, Politico, and Ozy, among others.

Persistent in the background, there’s our digital ad duopoly of Google and Facebook. Both companies, though, seem to have figured out that they can monetize news content quite well without owning it. So far, Amazon’s content interest seems to be exercised only personally by Jeff Bezos, through his Washington Post acquisition. And don’t forget Yahoo, which could still prove to be a buyer — or a seller.

What would it mean if the top names on that list — companies like Comcast, Charter, Verizon, AT&T, Disney, and Fox — ended up owning many of the entrepreneurial news brands that have captured our attention in the last few years? Is this what the Internet revolution has become?

The answer appears to be yes. The web may have opened unbelievable frontiers of human thought and interaction, but it’s driven by the same business principles as all other enterprise. On the Internet, big not only is best — it increasingly looks even more dominant than it was in analog times. For all sorts of reasons, being No. 1 in a market is disproportionately rewarded.

As revolutionary as the web may be, the business models that support digital media businesses there remain stubbornly twofold: that old standby advertising and, to a lesser degree, subscription payment. In advertising, scale matched with high-investment ad tech drives the $50 billion U.S. digital ad industry and enables 10 companies to reap more than 60 percent of worldwide digital ad revenue. (Google and Facebook take half of that by themselves — and their edge is even greater on mobile.) Our short list of big potential buyers wants in on some of that digital ad money, which is still growing double digits each year.

So against that backdrop, bigs buying littles makes sense. Recode shocked most observers when, at sale, Comscore reported it had just 1.5 million unique visitors — even with the significant NBC broadcast and digital promotion it had received. With the acquisition, Vox Media adds a little more gravitas to its portfolio and gets to extend the Recode events model to its other properties. Maybe Vox’s own network effect will help grow Recode faster; maybe the audience for high-quality tech business news is smaller than many of us thought. Especially when that audience is divided up — including by WSJD, the Journal’s tech site that launched when Recode founders Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher couldn’t come to a new agreement with the Journal. (We can assume some schadenfreude was expressed at Journal HQ as Recode’s business woes became evident.)

The bigger question is whether even Vox Media, with its 53 million unique visitors, is ultimately big enough to win in its marketplace. And as highflying as it is, BuzzFeed must answer the same question — not to mention a spate of smaller sites, from Business Insider to Mashable to Mic to Fusion. (We see a Twitter parlor game already developed as serial entrepreneur Rafat Ali just laid down his prediction; expect more forecasts to follow.)

Prediction: Buzzfeed will own Fusion & TV channel by 2016.

— Rafat Ali (@rafat) May 27, 2015

Those who’ve pumped hundreds of millions in venture capital into these would-be millennial magnets want a highly profitable exit. Most recently, they’ve been anteing up, matching each other’s rounds, all in an effort to build out staff and product and keep audience growth — their primary metric, ahead of revenue or profit — stoked. Perhaps that poker game will keep rollin’ — or maybe we’ll see bluffs called sooner rather than later. You don’t want to be the last one putting money down if the content bubble deflates — and deflation may be more likely than a dramatic burst.

What would deflation mean? Essentially, we’d see the Recode story writ larger, with bigger digital-only operations. Investors would decide that they’ve lost confidence in business-model projections — that promise of profits to roll in one day from those big audiences — and look for a quicker exit. The most likely route: a sale to the biggest fish, likely at prices below what these startups believe they are now worth. It’s good to have lots of cash sitting around when the market turns.

Of course, Vox Media and BuzzFeed could also sell near a top, or what seems to be a top.

Step back from the buying and selling, and take a look at how much these sites’ business strategies have in common. All of them drive huge traffic, adeptly, from social, at a marketing cost close to zero. All increasingly pick up (and seed) traffic from outside the U.S. to spur growth. And each is going intensely vertical. Whether it’s the newly expanded BuzzFeed Life, with food, travel, health, and parents sections, or Vox Media with its topical sites in tech, food, fashion, real estate, sports, and gaming, or The Huffington Post with its myriad sections — all are going vertical.

This is a race to see, in essence, which horizontal(s) can build the most successful verticals first — a race being funded by those venture millions. Why? All these segments define and parcel out audiences that advertisers want. Common sense tells us that not everyone will win at this vertical game — and let’s recall that magazines and newspapers have been playing it for decades in print and are now beginning to make similar moves online. While the vertical strategy has long made sense, it’ll likely produce at least as many losers as winners.

Photo of matryoshka dolls by SamFa used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/05/newsonomics-the-voxrecode-deal-is-a-sign-of-more-consolidation-to-come/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/05/crossing-the-streams-why-competing-publications-are-deciding-to-team-up-on-podcasts/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/05/crossing-the-streams-why-competing-publications-are-deciding-to-team-up-on-podcasts/#respond Wed, 20 May 2015 13:30:22 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=108932 Usually when two corporate entities enter into some kind of partnership, you can be certain a small army of lawyers is involved in the process, each side guaranteeing that no ambiguity exists as to who owes what deliverables and share in costs. Not so with Crossing the Streams, the new pop culture podcast launched earlier this year as a collaboration between film news site Moviepilot and the humor magazine Cracked. Alisha Grauso, Moviepilot’s editor-in-chief, first met the Cracked team when she was attending Stan Lee’s Comikaze Expo in the fall. “Their PR guy reached out and said, ‘Hey, we heard you’re going to be at Comikaze. You have a great site and it overlaps with what we do, and we should talk, because we have ideas for things we could collaborate on.'”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published on SimonOwens.net.

Photo of podcasting set up by Patrick Breitenbach used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/05/crossing-the-streams-why-competing-publications-are-deciding-to-team-up-on-podcasts/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/04/the-atlantic-redesigns-trading-clutter-and-density-for-refinement/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/04/the-atlantic-redesigns-trading-clutter-and-density-for-refinement/#comments Wed, 22 Apr 2015 15:29:37 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=108260 The Atlantic — has any general-interest magazine navigated the print-to-digital transition better? — redesigned its website last night, doing so entirely in-house and without months of public buildup. Here’s TheAtlantic.com editor J.J. Gould:

What if we described TheAtlantic.com as a direct, dynamic, digital extension of our core identity in journalism — as a real-time magazine?

[…]

We created a site that makes a new priority of visual presentation, that offers a cleaner reading experience across digital devices, and that gives us the flexibility we need, both in our articles and on our homepage, to join the speed and urgency of the web with the noise-cutting and impact that have always been central to The Atlantic’s ambitions.

The new homepage is composed of full-width modules each representing either one big story or a constellation of connected stories. We can move these modules up or down the page, allowing us, among other freedoms, alternately to lead with the urgency of our news coverage or the impact of a big feature, according to the needs of the moment.

It also allows us to give full play to the same urgency and impact below the top of the page. As you return to the site, you’ll find different homepage modules in different orders with different kinds of stories in different combinations. What you won’t find, we hope, is the impression of diminishing importance as you scroll down.

(Old-timers will remember that The Atlantic used to publish online under the moniker Atlantic Unbound, a name Gould recycles for the headline on this piece.)

A few thoughts about the new look:

• It is indeed very magazine-y, visually speaking: lots of lovely big photos and nice type (Lyon). Article pages can go big and feature-y (looking a bit like the recent New York Times Magazine redesign) or tighter and more restrained. (Compare what that article looked like yesterday; for an operation that did so much right, the old Atlantic had a lot of clutter and remarkably bad type. Though even the new site still hates curved quotation marks.)

  One downside of all those big photos: They make for a heavy page. The homepage was 8.7 MB for me this morning on desktop and took 5 seconds to fully load on a fast connection — though DOMContentLoaded fired in about 2.

• The increased magazine-ness does make the whole operation feel less newsy. Gould emphasizes how the homepage’s increased modularity will let them be responsive to breaking news, and writes that “an enhanced News section, drawing on and supporting all our topical sections” is coming. But link density continues to be the bête noire of 2015-era web design. On my big iMac, I count only 11 stories linked within the first two screenfuls of the new homepage. Compare the previous version — I count 44. (As Matt Thompson helpfully points out, there’s a more scannable reverse-chron view too.)

  .@sullivanamy @TheAtlantic Totally gorgeous and I like it — but am I alone in feeling like the site has so much less content now?

  — Kathleen Kingsbury (@katiekings) April 22, 2015

  Comments on we-just-redesigned articles are hardly representative, but this one — “It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that the new main page looks like a Table of Contents for the Illiterate” — is getting some Disqus love at the moment. As is: “Single column, vertical scrolling lists of articles with unnecessarily huge images interspersed are an internet cancer. It’s been done a hundred thousand times before, and rarely has it worked.”

  Also, for my taste at least, too many homepage headlines err in the direction of magazine obliqueness. (My fellow Canada nerds may have been able to guess that a story headlined merely “Canada’s Contender” — no dek or tease copy — was a Justin Trudeau profile, but for most I bet it’s as cryptic as “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative.”)

• All that said — while decreased newsiness might not be appealing to news nerds like me, it strikes me as a very reasonable business choice. (See also The Wire.) While The Atlantic’s traffic is still growing, run-of-the-mill online advertising faces as uncertain a future as ever, and a redesign that classes up the joint would fit with a continued push upmarket. (The Atlantic describes its online audience as INFLUENTIAL, CONNECTED, AFFLUENT, and EDUCATED.) The Atlantic is never going to win a scale war with the BuzzFeeds of the world, so doubling down on an appealing core demographic — and looking a little less Huffington Post — makes sense.

  Sponsored content is more omnipresent on the new site than ever, though the ads themselves look less like editorial copy than before. (That’s been an issue before.)

• Finally, one of the pieces about online news design I think about most often is this one by Bob Cohn, now The Atlantic’s president and COO. His argument: In an age of social traffic, a homepage is less about traffic triage — directing lots of direct visitors to the content of their choice — than about presenting an image of your brand. It’s an interesting re-read in the context of this redesign:

  The homepage is the single best way for editors to convey the sensibilities and values of their websites. Everything about the page — the design; the selection of stories and images; the treatment of features and widgets; the language and cadence of the headlines; the typeface; the frequency with which the page is updated; even the ads — is a statement about what matters to the publication. With one glance at the page (literally, a 10-second glance), a reader can get answers to these questions:

  — What’s this site about? News? Analysis? Service? Gossip?

  — What’s the sensibility? Serious? Playful? Quirky? Geeky?

  — What are the subject areas that matter most to its editors? Washington? Wall Street? Hollywood? Silicon Valley?

  For these reasons, the homepage is, as the marketing team would put it, the ultimate brand statement.

  […]

  There’s one thing, though, that the homepage is not much good for: driving traffic. While I don’t have data on this, it’s my sense, anecdotally, that many editors continue to believe that one of the primary goals of the homepage is to guide readers to the articles on the site. I know that’s what I long believed. But the evidence — and here there is data — suggests the homepage is overvalued as a mechanism for generating visits to interior pages.

  Across The Atlantic sites, the fraction of visits that begin on the homepage is surprisingly small. About 13 percent of visits to our flagship TheAtlantic.com start on the homepage. That figure is about 8 percent for The Atlantic Wire and 10 percent for The Atlantic Cities. That means, of course, that roughly 9 in 10 sessions begin on an article page or, much less frequently, a channel or author landing page.

  Cohn wrote that piece back in 2012, and I’m willing to bet that homepage share of visits has dropped further in the meantime. (Here at Nieman Lab, it’s 6 percent.)

  For many modern media sites, the homepage is as much a brand showcase as anything else. The Atlantic’s old one looked like 50 pounds of modules stuffed into an 8-pound sack; it looked low-rent. The new one does a much better job of communicating a brand identity in that 10-second glance — The Atlantic is thoughtful, beautiful, and high-end.

  Sure, that may make The Atlantic seem less newsy to folks like me or those commenters above. But it also seems like a tradeoff that probably makes sense to make.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/04/the-atlantic-redesigns-trading-clutter-and-density-for-refinement/feed/ 3 https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/03/newsonomics-quartz-expands-into-africa-with-a-twofer-strategy/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/03/newsonomics-quartz-expands-into-africa-with-a-twofer-strategy/#respond Thu, 19 Mar 2015 14:00:54 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=107374 Boko Haram. Ebola. Child soldiers. These are the sort of tales of woe that many western readers associate with Africa, home to 1.1 billion, a sixth of the world’s population. Relatively few American or European reporters are based there. As foreign reporting staffs have been cut over the past decade, the situation has largely gotten worse (though bright spots, like GlobalPost’s commitment to the continent and CNN International’s broader coverage of life and business there, should be recognized).

Now Quartz, the often contrarian business news startup, ventures into Africa not just as an area of coverage but as a market. By early summer, Quartz will deploy a staff of five or six, located in Lagos, Nairobi, and Johannesburg to develop Quartz Africa. Editor Yinka Adegoke now finds himself in the midst of hiring. A native of Nigeria, Adegoke is an alum of Reuters and, more recently, Billboard who left the country 24 years ago. He’ll be based in New York for now, but his long commutes to Africa will be frequent.

Quartz Africa joins a growing movement of beyond-national-borders news initiatives, a movement I identified as the global media imperative three years ago (“The newsonomics of the global media imperative”). That movement has only grown, as the U.K.-based press (Guardian, Mail Online) have developed global franchises, and The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have both moved into (and occasionally out of) key markets. BuzzFeed has followed Arianna’s lead, setting up a number of national editions. Spiegel and Die Zeit, two pillars of the German press, increasingly offer English-language stories and products.

Yet almost all of these forays focus on the wealthiest nations. EMEA — Europe, Middle East, Africa — is the old business term used by predominantly North American countries looking at new markets, and the “A” has traditionally gotten short shrift.

Quartz, then, is zagging while others zig. The Atlantic Media-owned company has generated all kinds of buzz in its two-and-a-half years. At its birth, conventional wisdom opined that the business news environment was already overcrowded, with sharp-elbowed behemoths including Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, Dow Jones, and the FT, with CNN Money, Fortune, and Forbes all formidable incumbents as well. With its mobile-forward, native-ad-centered, conversational journalistic style, Quartz innovated a new business model (“The newsonomics of Quartz, 19 months in”) and often finds itself cited for early thinking in the trade. Its influence continues to increase; on Wednesday, its editor-at-large S. Mitra Kalita was announced as managing editor for editorial strategy at the L.A. Times.

This Africa initiative follows another launched last May, with Quartz India. That push informs this strategy and shows more nuance of its business model — and its journalistic sensibility — that a casual reading of the Quartz Africa announcement may miss.

Quartz India, found here for audiences outside the country, started with about 200,000 monthly unique visitors within India. That number has now grown to 500,000. That’s about 5 percent of Quartz’s overall traffic, which surpassed 10 million uniques last fall. As importantly — and right now more importantly for revenue — 10 percent of Quartz’s overall audience, or about 1 million a month, regularly visits Quartz India content.

Both audiences and numbers offer value, but let’s put them in perspective. Quartz pitches itself as a site about global business, offering a fresh, more casual, often chart-driven perspective on stories and events that others cover. For its larger audience, it’s the addition of coverage about Indian business that adds value — and begins to bring in new advertising buys. Likewise, Quartz will add lots of Africa-centric coverage as Adegoke hires up, and that coverage will be read by Quartz’s U.S. and Western readers. Quartz’s bread-and-butter Fortune 500 native-content buying advertisers can buy all of Quartz, or readership by geography. An advertiser like GE, for example, wants the larger Quartz readership, but has already bought Quartz India and is a good prospect for Africa as that audience grows. Auto, infrastructure, financial services, and tech companies populate the key industry ad targets, says Quartz’s publisher and president Jay Lauf.

So consider this a twofer strategy. As Quartz expands its global audience, it can sell that audience to its global advertisers. Secondly, it can develop a longer-term business — and continent-by-continent ad business — as the in-country and in-continent audiences in India and Africa grow. Native advertising, for instance, is a much newer concept in India and Africa than the U.S., so it will take time to develop sales.

Quartz starts with about 100,000 Africa-based readers, most naturally in the most populous countries — South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya, in that order — where its staff will live. The immediate goal: 1 million regular African readers within a year. Both Kenya and Nigeria are among the fastest-growing economies in the world; in the longer term, Nigeria is on its way to becoming the third most populous country on the planet, surpassing the U.S. within 35 years.

Getting those readers will take more than rolling out the brand, of course. In Quartz’s intended editorial sensibility, we see an attempted sea change in in how many U.S. news companies have traditionally covered the developing world. “These readers speak a couple of languages. They’ve probably gone to graduate school,” says Adegoke. “They understand a bigger world.”

“I was in Lagos recently, and they have the Internet. They know about Quartz. They are young, smart people.”

It’s a similar market to the one Quartz has so far cultivated — what it calls “influentials” — half a world away on the East Coast. Lauf says average Quartz readers are in their 40s and, while they can be defined by affluence and education, mindset is as important, he says. “These are people who are excited by change.”

How this audience is spoken to, and with, is also top of mind for Quartz. As you can see in its Africa coverage on political leadership, technology investments, mobile phones, management, and tech innovation, the subject matter goes far beyond the terror-and-strife headlines. As important, they’re often written — as are the pieces from India — from an in-country perspective. This isn’t Forbes’ traditional bread-and-butter of serving up the American dream worldwide; it’s an attempt to meet the world and this millennium’s ever-worldly inhabitants on their own terms, through their own eyes.

In its business model, Quartz uses its own successful playbook, mixing its native and “engagement” ads with a strong events business. Events have been part of larger Atlantic Media’s model — bringing in lots of advertising sponsorship dollars, at good effective cost-per-thousand rates — and they’ll be part of the Africa launch. By mid-summer, Quartz will host one on African innovators, just as it has done with Indian innovators in Bangalore. Its running “The Next Billion” series now takes root in Delhi — its third biggest market after New York and London — and may take root in Africa within a couple of years.

It’s a tough trick that Quartz is trying to master here and, as a reader, I’d say there are some less-than-smooth transitions in its infinite scroll of stories as more global content enters it. The intent, though, makes a lot of sense. As everyone from fast-growing news startups to the most legacy of legacy news companies try to seize the power of global Internet distribution, the play can’t be simple journalistic imperialism, a 21st-century, English-language-dominating replay of the Scramble for Africa that saw the continent divided up by the Europeans at the end of the 19th century. Journalistically, this is about both what is covered and how it’s covered.

Photo of Nairobi skyline by Clara Sanchiz used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/03/newsonomics-quartz-expands-into-africa-with-a-twofer-strategy/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/02/in-the-web-vs-apps-debate-for-online-publishers-apps-are-on-a-run/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/02/in-the-web-vs-apps-debate-for-online-publishers-apps-are-on-a-run/#comments Thu, 26 Feb 2015 19:16:16 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=106769 It’s what qualifies as an age-old debate in the digital media business: Web or native apps? The question isn’t really either/or — for most news outlets, the answer is “both” — but since the iPhone arrived, publishers have debated how much emphasis to put behind publishing on the open web vs. building native app experiences for iOS and Android.

Focus too much on apps and you risk being ignored by the social web. Focus too much on the web and you end up being a lonely webview inside someone’s Facebook News Feed. Focus too much on apps and you risk getting lost on the fifth homescreen of someone’s phone. Focus too much on the web and you lose out on tools like push notifications that can drive attention.

For a number of years (and to broadly generalize), it was traditional publishers that ran to apps — think of all the magazines who poured money into building iPad Newsstand apps, trying to reclaim their old paywalled gardens — and the digital natives who bet on the web and winning on social. Again, it was always more nuanced than that — HuffPo had an app or two — but your Gawkers and BuzzFeeds were broadly betting on the open web and social distribution.

But now things are more complicated. On one hand, Circa debuted a full website today, breaking further out of its app shell. Earlier this month, Flipboard did the same.

On the other hand, Gawker is now building a native app, 12 years into its existence. And BuzzFeed is going app-happy too, releasing a Tinder-for-cute-animals app, preparing a specialized news app, and more. Product VP Chris Johanesen:

We see the App Store as a platform, and it makes sense for us to be experimenting there the same way we experiment on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat etc…

I’m often asked why we believe in apps when many media companies are ditching their apps and focusing on pure-web experiences. Another building block of our DNA is to make the best experience for our readers on whatever platform they are on, whether they are finding us on the web or downloading one of our apps directly.

We’re excited about native apps because we can provide deep experiences that aren’t always possible on the web. Providing rich features like notifications, personalization, home screen widgets, offline access, and wearable features can bring huge enhancements to your experience.

There has been a lot of talk about unbundling in the tech industry. At BuzzFeed we’ve thought a lot about our apps and our audience and have spent a lot of time thinking about what makes the most sense for us…

To some people, BuzzFeed is about reading fun lists, taking quizzes and sharing and discussing them amongst their friends. To others, we are a source for vital news and groundbreaking journalism, or for ways to get more out of your life. And to some, we are a source of hilarious videos they love to binge watch.

As we thought about what the best experience for each of these things would be, it became increasingly apparent that shoehorning all the ways to experience BuzzFeed into one app doesn’t make sense. We don’t see it as “unbundling” as much as focusing. Instead of having one baseline for all types of stories and media we need to build apps that can excel at providing the best experience for each.

We’ll see how this works for BuzzFeed, but I think there are a few things underlying this broader shift:

— A broader victory for app use on phones. comScore data: “The average U.S. smartphone user now spends 88 percent of his or her time when using a mobile phone within an app and just 12 percent using the web browser.” (That’s a gap that is widening over time.) Forrester data: Smartphone owners “use an average of 24 apps per month but spend more than 80 percent of their [in app] time on just five apps.” Of course, some of that time in apps is spent on the web — the links you click on Twitter, for instance — but the broad trend is clear: A small number of homescreen icons are increasingly dominating attention, and Safari and Chrome are losing out.

— A recognition of the power of social platforms. (And by “social platforms,” I really just mean Facebook.) As Bloomberg’s Justin Smith put it this week: “The list is a lot longer than is publicly known of those that have Facebook delivering half to two-thirds of their traffic right now.” Facebook’s rumblings about wanting sites to publish their content straight to the platform has reawakened publishers’ desire for greater control of their own destiny than social distribution allows.

— A shift in business strategy. It’s increasingly clear that banner advertising isn’t going to be big enough for most online publishers to sustain their businesses. And it’s clear that the user-data advantage that Google, Facebook, and maybe a few other giants have over publishers isn’t going away. That’s pushed differentiation and the desire to built an environment where engaged users are more easily sold to premium advertisers.

(You could actually read each of those forces as good reasons for the boom of email newsletters too; email is an open platform that most people still have to spend some time in, and the the act of subscribing to a newsletter creates the same sort of engaged, committed relationship that a good app might.)

There are also two complementary forces at work here: the move to apps, and the move to lots of apps. That’s the unbundling bit Johanesen references. Some BuzzFeed readers want cats; some want news; some want videos about how their generation has totally lived a unique and special experience that can only be understood through 90-second videos. The news people will look down on the cat stuff, and probably vice versa — so you give them separate points of entry.

That’s not always an easy bet, though. The New York Times has been quite successful with a unified paywall model, getting around 900,000 people to buy what amounts to an all-you-can-eat package. But its attempts at siphoning off chunks of Times content — NYT Now and the late NYT Opinion — have had less than stellar uptake.

Who knows if these attempts to cloister off user attention will work — the competition is very fierce, and most of the alternatives don’t have the burden of being, you know, news. (Think games, chat apps, Facebook.) And this shift still leaves out most smaller and local publishers, who don’t have the technical game to build good native experiences. But it’s a logical next salvo in the ongoing battle for mindshare.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/02/in-the-web-vs-apps-debate-for-online-publishers-apps-are-on-a-run/feed/ 1 https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/02/snapchat-stories-heres-how-6-news-orgs-are-thinking-about-the-chat-app/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/02/snapchat-stories-heres-how-6-news-orgs-are-thinking-about-the-chat-app/#comments Mon, 23 Feb 2015 18:05:05 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=106637 When Sam Sheffer, The Verge’s social media editor, launched the site’s Snapchat account at the end of July last year, he meant it to be a small-scale experiment.

“I only promoted it on my personal Twitter account,” Sheffer told me. “I didn’t make it an official thing that it was our account, I just told my followers, ‘Hey guys, I’m going to be doing this thing. Follow if you want to.’”

trying something new for @verge — add us on snapchat ‘therealverge’ :) this should be fun

— Sam Sheffer (@samsheffer) July 30, 2014

But soon the audience started growing; today, The Verge’s snaps each get about 10,000 views. The Verge, like many news organizations that are active on Snapchat, still views it as an experiment, trying out new ways to use the format — from covering live events like the NBA All-Star Game or the Oscars to a regular series where Sheffer has Verge staffers explain what’s on their desks.

Snapchat’s popularity is booming. Last year, it said that its users sent more than 700 million snaps daily; the company is reportedly in a new funding round that would value the company at $19 billion.

Snapchat’s potential for news outlets became more clear last month with the launch of Snapchat Discover, which lets a small number of publishers reach new younger audiences with well-produced stories that are made specifically for the platform and utilize slick graphics and video. No one is releasing hard numbers yet, but the buzz is they’re amazing. (“But from speaking to people at several other news organizations, I can tell you secondhand that the numbers, at least for the initial launch period, were enormous. We’re talking millions of views per day, per publisher.”)

To get a sense of how outlets are thinking about Snapchat, we asked six news organizations — Huffington Post, Fusion, Mashable, NPR, Philly.com, and The Verge — to explain how they approach the platform and how they plan to continue to evolve on Snapchat. News organizations say their Snapchat presence needs to match the tone of their outlet: That’s why Philly.com, the joint web presence of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, is focusing its efforts on covering local events and why every snap NPR sends ends with a staffer signing off by saying their name and “NPR News,” just as its reporters do on the radio. Here’s what the outlets told us, lightly condensed and edited.

Philly.com

Erica Palan, Philly.com social media manager:

When it comes to all social media, I think it’s important to respect the culture of the community that already exists there, so we didn’t want to jump into using Snapchat until we had an idea that worked for our content and for the platform. I’d love to tell you that we had a calculated plan in place for our first foray into snapping, but the honest truth is that we were preparing our site’s coverage of Wing Bowl and it just seemed like a good fit, so we gave it a whirl.

Wing Bowl is an annual chicken-wing-eating contest that gets a ton of local coverage, much of it snark about how it brings out everyone from pre-dawn tailgaters to strippers. It’s loud, messy, boisterous, and completely over the top. In other words, it’s an event begging to be shared.

Smart thoughts on Snapchat + news orgs from @wrightbryan3. We're trying our first @phillydotcom snaps at Wing Bowl: http://t.co/4yoAcCpxa0

— Erica Palan (@errrica) January 28, 2015

Two of our photographers, Colin Kerrigan and Stephanie Aaronson, agreed to snap for us while they also captured the scene for the website’s coverage and shared it on Instagram, Twitter, and more. They took videos and photos throughout the day and updated a continuous story on the site. The result gave viewers a taste of the overall feel of the day.

We’re still very much in the brainstorming phase of how to make it meaningful for us as a news organization. I’d like to see us use Snapchat more as part of an events-coverage strategy. I’m thinking it will fit in during the Made in America music festival or during the Pope’s visit to Philadelphia in September. I’d love to give reporters a chance to use it if they were following a story that would be compellingly told through short snippets of video throughout the day. Will people still be using Snapchat in the same way when the DNC hits Philly in 2016? If so, that might be a great time to use it.

The Verge

Sam Sheffer, The Verge social media manager:

There’s no written guidelines from an editorial perspective. We’re definitely still in the experimental phase. I have written some best practices for Snapchat, but to make it really simple, I just go with my gut and what feels right kind of thing.

For instance, we always give context, so you’re not just going to post something and post a picture. If you’re taking a picture of a person with a gadget in their hand. You have to tell people who that is, what the gadget is, and why they should care. You can contextualize by adding filters also — like the time filter, the geolocation filters, you can also draw on it, so that kind of thing.

if you are still looking for a reason to follow @verge on snapchat… how about a rocket launch? (therealverge) pic.twitter.com/D8j82KB3T9

— Sam Sheffer (@samsheffer) January 21, 2015

One thing I like to do — and lately I haven’t been doing because we’ve just grown too big and I have to do my actual job and not just sit on Snapchat all day — but I really really really enjoy interacting with readers, and by readers I mean fans of The Verge. We get tons of snaps everyday, and a lot of them are personalized responses to snaps we post, and I’m still surprised at how many people use the texting feature. So I get messages, we reply to messages, and I’ll get messages like, “When’s The Vergecast going up?” That type of thing. So I like to be the human connection between the people who follow us on Snapchat and The Verge. Because The Verge, for better or worse, is a hashtag brand, and having a Snapchat account and the way we use it humanizes it. It’s interesting because people snap The Verge and talk to me, because I’m sort of the face of it — but that’s also something we’re trying to get away from. People have come to know that Sam is the face of The Verge, but we try to get as many different faces on there as we can.

NPR

Wright Bryan, NPR social media desk:

At NPR, we think of Snapchat as another place to connect with a young audience looking for news close at hand. Since we started our Snapchat experiment in October 2013, we’ve built up a following of about 6,000 people. The response to what we’re doing has been overwhelmingly positive, with friendly snaps from fans regularly hitting our inbox.

Our approach is low-key and tailored to what people expect from us: expert reporting, a human voice, and an insatiable curiosity about the wider world. The form that we’ve chosen is a “fact of the day” presented by one of our journalists each weekday. It’s easy to produce (we do it all at NPR’s Washington headquarters) and right in line with our mission to create a more informed public.

We’re nprnews on snapchat. We’re posting one fact a day you shouldn’t forget before it disappears! Follow us!

— NPR News (@nprnews) July 21, 2014

The question is, should we do more? Should we be more ambitious? We’re intrigued by Snapchat’s Discover feature; it’s slick! And Snapchat, both the platform and the community, are fun. But it’s been a secondary effort so far and we’ll have to clearly define our goals before deciding to put more time into it.

Fusion

Margarita Noriega, Fusion director of social storytelling:

I might be biased, but I think Fusion is by far the best channel on Snapchat because we are truly offering users news in a way that invites conversation in a genuine way. Snapchat Discover is a perfect extension of the multi-platform and social-first approach Fusion is known for. [Fusion is on Snapchat Discover outside the United States and U.K..] We create original videos and articles every day, 5 times a day, just for Snapchat users, and we’ve been lucky enough to receive overwhelmingly positive responses to our stories (just search Twitter for “Fusion Snapchat”).

We talk about everything from pop culture (the anniversary of Selena’s death), to science (robots and germs) to sports (both kinds of football) to featuring Fusion’s award-winning investigations and interactives. We feature work from Fusion’s best known journalists, including works by Alicia Menendez, Tim Pool, Anna Holmes, and Kevin Roose. We create original work that goes well beyond aggregating the daily news. For example, Vine and Snapchat artist Anne Horel’s original 3-part video series launched last week on Fusion Discover, which was crosspromoted on Vine, Twitter, and Instagram.

Check out my Snapstory Series Part 1 for ThisIsFusion today and next Fridays on Snapchat Discover! Hope you… https://t.co/NtLOGQyIVf

— Anne Horel (@AnneHorel) February 13, 2015

And I believe Fusion is the only Snapchat channel that has a specific expertise in stories from Latin America, where we know Snapchat is especially popular. Our Latin American coverage allows us to shine. Last weekend, we featured an amazing photo essay about tecnobrega, and an animation about the latest rumored drug cartel in Mexico.

What's Tecnobrega? It's everything, is what: http://t.co/tLMP2w1fgW an essay by @jruv you saw first on Snapchat! pic.twitter.com/l4vxBiepkG

— Fusion on Snapchat (@FusionSnaps) February 17, 2015

How does this new project incorporate into the newsroom? The editorial unit looks quite like your typical news desk, except there’s no separation in the work flow between our creative, strategic, and editorial experts. We create original art for stories to invite our audience into a discussion. This includes, at times, creating entirely new artistic designs and media for stories you see first on Fusion Network, or on Fusion.net. We strongly believe Discover opens endless opportunities to reach young, globally sophisticated, and engaged communities who care about what’s going on in the world.

The Huffington Post

Ethan Klapper, The Huffington Post’s global social media editor:

Snapchat provides a great opportunity to connect with millennials. In the past, we’ve posted content that’s popular with the audience: interviews from Comic Con, cute dogs visiting the office, the latest memes as well as interesting guests who visit HuffPost. Our Snapchat strategy was devised with this audience in mind, and we think it helps bolster HuffPost among younger fans.

Come celebrate #NationalMeanGirlsDay with us on Snapchat! (Username: HuffPost) pic.twitter.com/oVRtzTzgIf

— Huffington Post (@HuffingtonPost) October 3, 2014

We’re planning on ramping up our Snapchat activity. We’re going to use Snapchat to cover more live events such as award ceremonies, concerts, and popular TV shows. We also want to use Snapchat to make the news more digestible and accessible for millennials who might not regularly read long-form journalism. It will also be one of the primary platforms for our just-announced weekly video offering, “The HuffPost Show,” and Snapchat will be a cornerstone of its social strategy. We’re really excited about the potential.

Mashable

Dasha Battelle, Mashable visual storyteller:

Mashable took an early interest in Snapchat. We hopped on the ephemeral bandwagon just over a year ago to establish a new channel of communication with our audience. Our goal was to further our understanding of the platform and investigate an emerging avenue for mobile content distribution, as we felt that Snapchat’s strengths lay in its simple, visual communication and raw, real-time experience sharing. While it has been a tricky platform to navigate as a brand (lack of analytics, editing tools, etc.), Snapchat continues to provide our audience with unique access to our content and our culture.

Our Snapchat stories have featured a broad array of subjects. We’ll often cover live events on the platform, or create original narratives that tie-in to editorial themes on our site. Other stories have included product reviews, photo roundups, and news updates. Each story is a compilation of still images and short video clips, so it takes a fair amount of planning to deliver strong visual content and relevant, interesting information; brainstorming and storyboarding go into putting together a successful story. We try to keep in mind that genuine energy and personality go a long way on Snapchat.

We were also excited to see Snapchat launch its latest product development, Discover, earlier this year. We think there’s tremendous opportunity for brands there and look forward to seeing Discover take off.

Photo by Maurizio Pesce used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/02/snapchat-stories-heres-how-6-news-orgs-are-thinking-about-the-chat-app/feed/ 2 https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/02/newsonomics-bill-kellers-marshall-project-finds-its-legs-covering-criminal-justice/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/02/newsonomics-bill-kellers-marshall-project-finds-its-legs-covering-criminal-justice/#respond Thu, 12 Feb 2015 16:19:22 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=106418 The Marshall Project is off to a fast start. Ten thousand people a day now receive its daily summary of the latest news in criminal justice, linking up the best reporting and writing on topics from law enforcement to courts to corrections. It’s already published collaborations with The Washington Post and Slate; a joint project with The Atlantic will be published soon. Its next set of partners is an impressive list: The New York Times, WNYC, Vice, and Stars and Stripes. It’s well funded through this year, and close to halfway there for next year — a good start for $5 million foundation-backed nonprofit startup (“Bill Keller, The Marshall Project, and making single-focus nonprofit news sites work”).

So what do we know about the early progress of one of the highest-profile “single-subject sites,” a phenomenon that won our attention last year, but may have gotten lost in the big buzz of tens of millions of dollars newly moving into BuzzFeed, Vox, Vice, Business Insider, and others. How is former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller making the transition to heading up Marshall?

Still a journalistic infant, The Marshall Project is already finding itself forced to find an identity. It’s outgrowing its early one-word handle — “investigative” — finding that honorable term too limiting and too restrictive in building audience.

Its daily email newsletter push is instructive. Only four years ago, Keller won attention for attacking Arianna Huffington as “queen of aggregation” in a Times column, saying she “has discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your Web site and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come.” Now he heads a website that’s trying to find its place in the digital world and has turned to Opening Statement, a daily compendium of, let’s say, curation that’s really quite useful for people following the broad range of justice news and thought.

“I’ve had an evolving relationship with the whole concept of aggregation,” Keller told me. “We do add a sentence of explanation to each one.” It’s well done, with sections on top stories, commentary, and “N/S/E/W” (aiming to map the U.S. well beyond the Northeast power corridor). It aims to declutter readers’ lives and to drive eyeballs, as do so many of this wave of popular morning email briefings (“The newsonomics of mixing old and new”). Keller’s evolution makes use of a core skill we’ve long expected of editors at the Times and other trustworthy sources: editing and selectivity.

Keller has put together an editorial staff of 21, including reporters, researchers, designers, tech, data, and audience people. That number is worth stopping on: No one else in the nation of 319 million devotes as much single-minded focus to the issue of criminal justice. That tells us a lot about the nature of editorial staffing, and tradition, and about what the digital publishing world — and a bit of financial benevolence — can now create.

“The Prosecutor and the Snitch” launched Marshall into the world, even before its formal debut. Asking the question “Did Texas execute an innocent man?”, the August 2014 piece offered incredible branding for a news startup, occupying a good part of The Washington Post’s front page and a couple of inside ones, while drawing 500,000 views on the Post’s website.

As it partners with news company collaborators, Marshall faces the issue of proving out — to itself, its funders, and the larger world — its impact. If people read Marshall work in lots of places, but not as much on Marshall itself, how can it do that? On its next partnered pieces, the site will embed a tracking pixel (with technology similar to the ProPublica-developed PixelPing), allowing it to tally up the traffic counted on others’ URLs. There’s traffic, and then there’s impact.

“When you review the Pulitzer entries,” says Keller, “the first thing you say: What was the impact? Did the law change? Was someone indicted? Even though you didn’t have that as a professed goal, that’s the first thing you list.” Keller, like many, isn’t yet clear how impact can best be measured, but the wider movement here is noteworthy, with lots of people figuring out workable metrics.

Keller knows criminal justice needs the long view, informed by real reporting and acute analysis. He’s not inclined to chase the crime story du jour, but staying atop the news — in some form — offers one measure of relevance, especially online. Take Wednesday’s timely top story, “Jon Stewart on Criminal Justice.” Offering a quick six Daily Show videos on the subject of crime, it’s entirely of the moment, and offers the kind of smart criminal justice analysis the satirist uniquely offers. (Though Comedy Central’s 15-second Kmart prerolls on each one are a bit off-putting). The Ferguson story happened before Marshall’s launch, and future stories like it will test the startup’s mission: How, and how much, to cover the few criminal justice stories around which TV media swarm?

The site already has grown beyond the initial investigative branding. Offering features, commentary, and news, the site’s development is still in progress. Favoring a reverse-chron long scroll of stories, there’s little attention to hierarchy or importance. At this point, too, the site is usually word-heavy. Excellent words — the quality of the writing, editing, and reporting is what we would expect, given Keller’s leadership — but still, for the most part, words. That’s especially noteworthy in an age that’s seen the phenomenon of Serial and Radiotopia’s Criminal, which The Huffington Post called “the best new radio show in America” debut. Multimedia is knocking down the doors that separated out pre-digital TV, radio, and print. In an ideal world, The Marshall Project will find a way to join in that fun.

Then, again, it’s important to remember that it’s only a few months old.

Neil Barsky recruited Bill Keller to the venture. The Wall Street Journal reporter turned hedge fund manager has committed $2 million to the site’s startup. (He explains his motivations and the Marshall name choice, here.) His contributions make up about a fifth of the annual $5 million budget. Working full time on Marshall, founder and chairman Barsky has brought in other funders, including an enviable list of more than a dozen foundations. Barsky says 2016 funding is almost halfway assured and believes Marshall will test “hybrid” revenue sources — including events, job postings, and ads — after it gets settled and grows an audience. He believes continuing money won’t be a problem — as long as Marshall excels at its mission.

The mission is high-minded:

Our mission is to raise public awareness around issues of criminal justice and the possibility for reform. But while we are nonpartisan, we are not neutral. Our hope is that by bringing transparency to the systemic problems that plague our courts and prisons, we can help stimulate a national conversation about how best to reform our system of crime and punishment.

Those that have been in the business of newspapering know what a leap of journalistic mission that means.

For decades — think Front Page and on — “criminal justice” haven’t been the words you hear in newsrooms. It’s Cops and Courts. The grizzled vet (and now the lesser-paid young hire) visits the cop shop and attends the highest-profile trials, writing the daily news that consumes so many metro sections. But these beats circle around the fact that the U.S. imprisons more of its population than any other country, spending so much and remaining unsure of its effectiveness — a fact that gets relatively little attention in most of the press, whether print, TV, or radio. The words “mass incarceration” are ones now increasingly heard; “It will become a front-burner issue,” says Barsky.

Barsky and Keller see what’s possible and have hired a talented staff to take it on. Timing is everything, and the issue of criminal justice results and costs looks like it is emerging as one of few bipartisan issues in the country. (Good Dave Weigel piece in Bloomberg: “Rand Paul’s Crazy Dream of a Libertarian-Democratic Alliance on Civil Rights Is Actually Happening.”) A full-throated journalism that feeds the search for solutions may find many unexpected forums.

Rising to that occasion won’t be easy. Marshall looks well staffed editorially, but it may need to devote more “business” resources to its partnership/distribution/underwriting infrastructure. The Texas Tribune and the Center for Investigative Reporting offer proven lessons there, but it took them years to build out. The payoff is clear, though. In what seems like overnight journalistically, we’ve got a bevy of top-drawer news outlets from the legacies (the Times, the Journal, the Post, and more) to public media (Frontline, NPR, big metro public radio stations, PBS) to the foundation-fueled artisanal journalism houses (ProPublica, Center for Public Integrity, Center for Investigative Reporting, The Marshall Project, and so on) forming what can truly be called a new ecosystem. We’re seeing critical mass in this hugely important space.

But don’t underestimate how much hard work is involved in making — and maintaining — all those connections. In some ways, it’s easier to run a singular newsroom, with singular resources. Keller has already learned that in his new job: “Partnerships are easy to launch,” he says, “and hard to land.”

Photo of Alcatraz prison cells by Jumilla used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/02/newsonomics-bill-kellers-marshall-project-finds-its-legs-covering-criminal-justice/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/12/in-sweden-traditional-tabloid-rivals-are-taking-their-battle-to-viral-sites/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/12/in-sweden-traditional-tabloid-rivals-are-taking-their-battle-to-viral-sites/#comments Mon, 01 Dec 2014 15:50:03 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=104175 Thomas Mattsson, editor-in-chief of the Swedish tabloid Expressen, set a bold goal for his staff last summer: Develop, build, and launch a viral news site — think the more LOL elements of BuzzFeed — in just two weeks.

The paper met its deadline and in July launched Omtalat, which means “talked about” in Swedish. In short order, Expressen followed up on Omtalat with new viral sites specifically dedicated to sports and animals.

Expressen has a print circulation of 193,100 and its main websites — expressen.se and expressen.tv — are among the most visited news sites in the country, but in an email Mattsson emphasized that he wanted a “more entrepreneurial approach” to look outside the main sites to “create simpler and…quicker sites.”

That’s an impulse that’s spread beyond just Expressen, as there’s been an explosion viral news sites starting in Sweden this year. Expressen is one of two main national evening tabloids in Sweden. Its rival is the larger Aftonbladet, and the two have competed head-to-head for scoops, readers, and advertisers for years — think of the New York Post vs. the Daily News, except on a national scale. And now they battle on the viral front as well, as Aftonbladet’s parent company Schibsted launched its own viral news site, Lajkat (“liked” in Swedish) this summer as well, followed by a viral sports site.

American viral sites like BuzzFeed, Mashable, and The Huffington Post have all opened international outposts. But by bypassing certain foreign markets, these sites have allowed local publishers, like Schibsted and Expressen’s parent Bonnier, to mimic their publishing techniques and business models. Just as viral sites aggregate the rest of the web, the most effective of their ideas are now being aggregated abroad.

“It’s a rather new phenomenon, and I think the reason the traditional media organizations have started them is that they don’t want any competitors in their market,” said Ingela Wadbring, a professor at Mid Sweden University who studies change in the media.

But expanding into new online publishing models has indeed brought new competitors for Aftonbladet and Expressen — namely Newsner, another new viral site in Sweden. But unlike Lajkat or Omtalat, Newsner is run by a digital marketing agency, not a traditional media company.

True to their aims, despite being in a country of just 9.6 million people, the three companies’ sites have managed to attract significant traffic in a short time — particularly on mobile devices. In Sweden, web traffic is measured by the week and ranked on the KIA-Index, a ranking run by an advertising trade group. During the week of Nov. 17, Newsner had 1.2 million unique mobile browsers, Lajkat brought in 829,274 unique mobile browsers, and Omtalat had 803,113.

Swedish news organizations are facing the same challenges as media companies throughout the world: Readers’ habits are changing and advertising in traditional formats continues to decline. Take Aftonbladet, for example. Weekday print circulation fell 17 percent through the first nine months of 2014 compared to the year before, according to Schibsted’s 3rd quarter financial report. And while online revenue grew 11 percent in the quarter, it was outpaced by a 16 percent drop in print advertising revenue.

Media organizations see these viral sites as a potential way to reverse these trends. Though online revenue isn’t replacing what’s being lost in print advertising, these viral sites are low-cost endeavors that are bringing in some cash for their publishers. When Omtalat launched earlier this summer, Expressen’s existing five-person social media staff worked in shifts running the site, but since then, Expressen decided to hire two staffers to focus exclusively on the viral sites, Mattsson said.

Lajkat only has one full-time editorial employee working directly on the site, but on the business side it’s been able to take advantage of Schibsted’s large sales team to feature native ads on the site. Through late October, after about 10 weeks of publishing, Lajkat had brought in about 500,000 Swedish krona ($67,343) in advertising, Ehsan Fadakar, Lajkat’s founder and Aftonbladet’s head of social media, told me.

Fadakar was working on a corporate report for Schibsted when it struck him how the company was struggling to attract younger readers. So when he told Aftonbladet publisher Jan Helin “give me a developer and 48 hours, and I will build a Swedish BuzzFeed,” he was given the opportunity to experiment and build the site, Helin said in a column he wrote for a Schibsted report on the future of media.

“Before it was a question of age — now it has turned to be a question of generations,” Wadbring said. “You can see that there are changes that will continue. People will not change when they get older as they did before. And the newspapers, even if you take it together the print edition and the online edition, you reach one-third of the Swedish population. And we used to reach very much more than that, so everyone is really struggling to even stay on the market.”

Both companies are deliberate about differentiating the sites from the larger news organizations: There’s no Schibsted branding on Lajkat, and though Omtalat’s URL is expressen.se/omtalat, there’s only one small Expressen logo at the bottom of the page.

Lajkat certainly feels very BuzzFeed-y, with lists of texts from parents or the best things about Swedish media personalities, and content that attempt to speak to personal experience, like “14 stadier alla går igenom när man flyttar hemifrån,” or “14 stages everyone goes through when they leave home.” (It’s even been accused of lifting content from other sites, much like BuzzFeed has.)

Omtalat posts more content than Lajkat, and many posts are just embedded videos that are already circulating on the web, like the video Snapchat produced last month announcing its SnapCash payment system. Its animal and sports sites are similar.

Omtalat also offers more serious tech and politics reporting with stories detailing the most recent update to Instagram or the Vox-like “18 questions and answers about politics in Sweden after the election (which you want answers to but do not dare ask).”

Omtalat is part of what Expressen calls its “Lab sites.” It’s here that the company is experimenting with different forms of content and revenue generation. It’s even trying out producing content in other languages. In November, after two weeks of development, it launched German, Turkish, and Norwegian language versions of Omtalat. The sites all look the same, save for the language.

“We have recruited journalists from Norway, Germany, and Turkey living in Sweden and based them among the Expressen staff in Stockholm,” Mattsson said in an email. “We will look for local freelancers as well, since we guess that language and cultural knowledge is important.”

While Expressen and Schibsted battle it out for Swedish youth, rival viral site Newsner has instead found its own audience: 45- to 55-year-olds on Facebook, Johan Rikner, CEO of Newsner’s parent Nyheter365, told me. That doesn’t mean it’s ceding the overseas market, though, as it’s started an English-language version of the site as well.

Newsner has an Upworthy feel to it, with curiosity-gap headlines like such as: “It looks like a normal house. But oh my God! Wait till they turn the lights off. This makes my jaw drop to the ground.”

Rikner said 95 percent of the site’s traffic comes from Facebook, and that while other viral sites have content that appeals only to the younger demographic, while Newsner makes sure to have a broader appeal.

“We have less of those that are more interesting for a younger group. We do more that is more interesting for everyone,” Rikner said. “They have more things about school or something you remember now that you’re 20 from when you were 10, dating things…we haven’t done those that are too focused on the young group.”

The sites often do publish similar stories, many of them videos or memes that are in English. Eighty-six percent of Swedes speak English well enough to have a conversation, according to a 2012 European Union study, so in addition to competing with each other, the Swedish upstart viral sites have to compete with established American sites as well. In the past month, BuzzFeed has had about 1 million unique visitors from Sweden, according to Quantcast.

And now there are even Swedish knockoffs of Omtalat and Lajkat. One such site is ViralKing.se, which Dan Edström, Expressen’s social media manager, called out on Twitter recently.

@danedstrom och även oss. värdelöst beteende.

— Ehsan Fadakar (@ehsanfadakar) October 29, 2014

“Viralking.se copying a recipe for success,” Edström tweeted, according to a Google translation from Swedish. “Code and all wrapped straight from Omtalat. Not OK.”

“And us. Worthless behavior,” replied Lajkat’s Fadakar in Swedish.

And as is true throughout the world of online viral publishers, Swedish sites occasionally fall prey to fake stories racing around the social web. To combat these rumors, the Swedish free daily Metro runs a blog that factchecks and debunks rumors that are circulating on Swedish social media and viral sites.

The blog is called Viralgranskaren, which translates to Viral Eye. Jack Werner, Metro’s social media editor who helped found the blog, told me he thought of the idea last fall after seeing a fake anti-immigration story take off among Swedish Facebook users. The site launched in March.

“Since a story can reach so many people on Facebook it can actually affect their world view,” Werner said. “If that story then is fake, their world view may be falsely or wrongly distorted. We figured this area needed some journalism.”

Photo of a Swedish newsstand from 1949 by Länsmuseet Gävleborg used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/12/in-sweden-traditional-tabloid-rivals-are-taking-their-battle-to-viral-sites/feed/ 1 https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/11/the-newsonomics-of-talking-points-memos-native-advertising-shift/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/11/the-newsonomics-of-talking-points-memos-native-advertising-shift/#comments Thu, 13 Nov 2014 16:06:40 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=103766 Call it addition by subtraction, or deduction over misdirection. The commercial progress of Talking Points Memo is a telling lesson in the maturation of digital native news companies.

TPM was born very much a blog, one of those early political blogs built on single-minded strong opinion and dogged work. Josh Marshall worked solo, building it up from 2000 to 2005. Then he began turning into a site, one with a staff and a business in search of a workable long-term revenue model. Over the last couple of years, he says he’s found it.

Now, as TPM approaches its 15th anniversary, one thing remains consistent: TPM’s brand. Its voice is unabashedly left of center. This week’s headlines include “Why The GOP Is So Flustered By US-Sino Climate Change Deal” and “Seven Times Joni Ernst Showed Her True Wingnut Self.”

What’s morphed is the business — a small, profitable one, with a staff of 13 journalists, including Marshall, and 10 on the business side. TPM reaches about 4 million unique visitors a month, claiming 20 million pageviews and counts 170,000 Twitter followers. It’s a going concern, but like all others, still edgy about where money is going to come from in the next several years.

Unlike many, though, it believes it’s found a route to stability. Its road map includes two increasingly familiar destinations: content marketing and native advertising. Those are disciplines used more by bigger news companies, from The New York Times and The Washington Post to Atlantic Media, Forbes, BuzzFeed, and Slate. How the modest TPM is finding its way offers some smart lessons for smaller national news sites and smart regional ones.

In about one year’s time, Marshall says TPM has built a $1 million-plus business in native advertising. Direct ad sales, he says, are up 54 percent year over year. Like the bigger native players, TPM works the increasingly familiar landscape of Fortune 500 “thought leader” advertising, corporate reputation, and advocacy groups. The company’s SHIFT@TPM studio is the center of the new business.

Take the current PhRMA “sponsorship,” as TPM calls the business. PhRMA is Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, which calls itself “the country’s leading biopharmaceutical researchers and biotechnology companies.” It’s a powerful trade group. Like other such lobbies — including, prominently, energy companies like Chevron and BP, fans of the native approach — it knows the importance of working both the court of public opinion and the halls of Congress. So PhRMA is running an ad, shown below overlaying the homepage, but only to Washington, D.C.-based TPM readers.

The format of the ad is large. TPM calls it a Forum ad, similar in content to the Texas Tribune TribTalk content marketing initiative (“The Texas Tribune launches its new combination op-ed page/sponsored content pitch”).

The PhRMA campaign is one of about 15 that will run on the site this year. About half of those are complex, multi-month runs, with content changed out multiple times. The other half are shorter one-ad runs, often up a week or a month.

It’s the long-running ones that have established the substantial new business, with organizations and companies paying seven figures to participate. Why will these companies pay mid-double digital effective CPM (cost per thousand viewers) rates? TPM cites high engagement. Ads like the PhRMA Forum one drive “25 to 40 percent interaction rates and 15 percent content read rates,” TPM says.

These interests believe they are reaching an influential, if sometimes smaller, crowd (“The newsonomics of influentials“). Each year, TPM asks its readers to complete a detailed online survey to understand both their interests and their demographics. While the demos line up in age with the web overall, and skews male over female (60/40), its education level is sky-high; 50 percent of the readers have advanced college degrees. Unsurprisingly, they’re overwhelmingly Democrats. That D.C. targeting favored by PhRMA this week is bolstered by this number: 23 percent percent of the DC readership says it is involved in “writing policy.” The annual survey might not be scientifically sound, but it’s sufficient for advertisers for a key reason: It rings authentically true to the nature of TPM’s content and mission.

For Marshall, the current business model developed out of two key understandings.

“The epiphany is that we were competing without having any unique factors and advantages of our organization working in our favor. We were competing with The New York Times or Huffington on terrain where scale is all that matters. That’s ridiculous,” says Marshall. “At the same time, we could see the commodification of banner advertising.”

TPM continues to build its system, but already, we can draw a few applications from it:

• Do addition by subtraction. Marshall replaced three direct sales people — who had sold smaller space display — with one, who now sells the content marketing sponsorships. Amanda Hale, vice president for ad and creative solutions, not only sells the campaigns but shepherds them through the creative and design process. To be sure, that process requires labor, but overall, TPM is getting more back from its sales investment. Non-content marketing ads produce about a quarter of the revenue of the natives, but are now all sold programmatically. Further, Marshall says TPM has been able to optimize its programmatic ad pricing, carefully watching the relevant analytics.
• Choose deduction over misdirection. The misdirection is the chasing after the same kind of display advertising that a few big players increasingly dominate. Marshall, like so many others, deduced that simply getting bigger — chasing the top line numbers of unique visitors and pageviews — would never build the business sustainably on the basis of traditional digital display.
• Work the sectors you know. Pitch those who work in your site and social circles. TPM speaks the same policy-oriented language as its target advertisers; many other sites don’t. Similarly, nonprofit local news sites like MinnPost and Voice of San Diego have found kindred spirits with large regional health and education nonprofits.
• Keep the reader engaged on your site. That’s where “native” comes in, in content marketing. Native ads fit into the flow of site’s presentation, even when they are clearly demarcated as ads. That means readers don’t click off — and away from the site — as they click on traditional ads. The ad reading experience ideally is but a short detour from the editorial, and offers a quick cut back to it.
• Disclose clearly, and separate. The division between the editorial and business (including content marketing) operations is clear, as is the labeling on the site of ad “storytelling.”

Is this content marketing business a sure sustainable road forward? Nothing’s certain, given the pace of digital change.

Hale, though, makes the good point that the defensibility of the model is that it’s not “transactional.” In other words, Google and Facebook would find it harder to automate the business; at this point, at least, it requires human interaction. Hale underlines that as she explains the often-long sales and design cycle through TPM’s SHIFT@TPM studio. It may demand patience, and a real understanding of a site’s unique audience, but in defending against the digital ad giants, it offers a smart, actionable way to be on offense. Smaller sites like TPM share this thinking with such sophisticated large sites like the FT, which also increasingly specialize in “strategic” consultative sales.

Marshall makes the point that TPM offers these advertisers a double value. First, it leverages its storytelling expertise on behalf of interests often versed in the art of the press release but not in engaging storytelling. Second, it knows how to tailor ads with TPM’s specific audience in mind.

Increasingly, that means putting a premium on facts and charts. In fact, TPM will unveil two new chart-heavy ad products in February. Consider those TPM content marketing 2.0. The big lesson: Make the formatting easier and more visual.

Marshall makes the point that he didn’t set out to specifically execute a content marketing strategy. That push came after looking at the marketplace. It’s about something all good journalists know, what he calls “high information,” even if the ad information is plainly commercial: “Content marketing is something we fit into this concept. Content marketing is part of high information messaging, and high information ad creation.”

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