The iPhone 12 represents Apple’s first major foray into 5G cellular technologies. Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg was on hand during the event to announce the nationwide launch of the carrier’s sub-6 5G network. Apple says it has designed the iPhone 12 lineup to achieve ideal network performance while balancing battery life. A “smart data mode” uses LTE when your current activity doesn’t demand 5G speeds. Apple says it has tested 5G performance with 100 carriers across 30 countries to ensure a smooth launch.

“So far, we’ve seen amazing real-world speeds, along with improved call quality, battery life, and coverage around the world,” Apple’s marketing says. “This is 5G, iPhone style.”

Apple isn’t the first company to release a 5G phone, of course, but market uptake has been relatively slow. It’s growing, though: In January, 3% of phones sold in the U.S. had 5G; by August, that was up to 14%.

But nothing will do more to increase that share than a 5G iPhone; about half of the phones in Americans’ pockets have Apple logos on the back. 5G devices are projected to make up about 48% of phones in North America by 2025, more than Europe (34%) or worldwide (20%).

What does 5G do? It makes data a lot faster. What does that do for journalism? Last year, I sketched out some of the possibilities.

Things that are possible but suboptimal on middling connections now — say, livestreamed video — should become much more reliable.

Things that are on the edge of possibility now — like decent-quality AR and VR — should become much more mainstream.

And there can just be…more, of everything. An AR experience that today places an object into 3D space might be able to handle an entire roomful of objects tomorrow. One live video stream going to a device might become three or four simultaneous streams, with users able to move seamlessly between them without a stutter or glitch and with less compression required all around.

On the flip side, things that have justified primarily because they improve end-user performance will become less appealing over time. Publishers have adopted Google’s AMP at a large scale because it offers much faster speeds for users on mobile.1 Don’t misinterpret this as blasphemy against the webperf gods — but as data gets faster, the reasons to accept the tradeoff of AMP’s flaws get weaker. (Just as things like web fonts, background video, and larger images are all more acceptable today than they were a decade ago.)

It’s all interesting stuff! But let’s be realistic: The apps that benefit most from 5G won’t be the ones from news publishers. They’ll be the other apps competing for our audiences’ attention: games, entertainment, and other new data-heavy ideas that haven’t been thought of yet.

Think about it: News stories are indeed better on today’s faster 4G connections than they were on 3G a few years ago. But Netflix is a lot better on 4G than on 3G. Call of Duty is a lot better on 4G than on 3G. Houseparty is a lot better on 4G than on 3G. News — text-based news especially, but video news too — just isn’t as well-positioned to take advantage of greater bandwidth as the other icons on our home screens.

1. And, let’s be honest, because Google put its thumb on the scale.

Is he comfortable with that new cloak?

“I don’t know that I’ll ever be comfortable being a personality, because it never occurred to me that the way that I talk and the way that I respond to people, or how I listen, would become something that people would focus on,” Barbaro, the show’s host and managing editor, told me. “It’s been really intriguing to watch people seize on just the way that I am, and in some ways I can’t help being, and decide that they like it, or they don’t like it, or something in between.”

Barbaro is self-effacing about his newfound career and fame, but it’s clear to the millions who have downloaded The Daily that Barbaro has it — a mix of voice, authenticity, knowledge, and likability that no algorithm could produce.

I asked Times executive editor Dean Baquet what most surprised him about The Daily’s success. “I’m most surprised, frankly, that the Times found a voice so easily. Michael was a great political reporter, one of the best. But who knew he could create such a persona that feels so much like the Times?” Baquet credits both Sam Dolnick and Kinsey Wilson, who championed the big audio push when he served as the paper’s chief digital executive, with the achievement.

As the audience for the show reaches new heights — it had 3.8 million unique listeners in August, the Times says — the paper is plotting how to bottle this accidental alchemy. Consider it an admixture of the best of both public radio and the Times itself, operating in a way the storied institution rarely can — as a startup.

“Barbaro’s been here for a long time,” said Dolnick, the assistant masthead editor responsible for the newsroom’s audio initiative. “I think more than anything it’s that nobody here had a legacy in public radio. We didn’t have old habits to unlearn.”

Dolnick says the Times’ transition from print to digital “has been this long process where we had to figure out how to navigate a new world. How to bring a print habit into the digital world — how to leave some behind and bring some along. It’s hard. We’re doing it, but it’s hard. Then you see some of these new digital players come in, and they were just off to the races because they were just able to start without any of the legacy of print.

“Now for once, we get to do that in audio.”

In August of last year, the Times’ fledgling audio team created the twice-weekly, election-oriented The Run-Up.

“That was our early testing ground,” says Samantha Henig, the Times’ editorial director for audio. “Just the fact that we kind of turned that around in a matter of weeks, and decided to just jump in as soon as [executive producer] Lisa [Tobin] started, and to launch something and learn. That gave us confidence to launch a daily show earlier than we maybe otherwise would have.

“Of course, finding Michael, finding what a natural talent he was, and that sort of special sauce that’s his chemistry with his colleagues — people talking like reporters instead of talking like radio personalities.”

Barbaro serves, in effect, as the voice of the Times’ readers — more curious about the why and how than the what and when, seeking the deeper story behind the headline. Barbaro maintains both his and the Times’ journalistic cred, but shortens the distance between it and us. He’s managed to reveal a new kind of Times in ways that have surprised not just him, but hundreds in the Times newsroom as well.

That’s the other big thing about The Daily. This is a New York Times program, and that has made all the difference. The Daily debuted in an already crowded market for newsy podcasts. Sensing the exploding podcast audiences and the video-like ad rates they can fetch, who hasn’t launched a podcast lately?

The Daily, though, builds on a unique foundation: the 1,300-strong Times newsroom. Times readers — including its subscribers, now numbering about 2 million digital and 1 million print — have long depended on the Times’ journalists’ knowledge and expertise. That’s never been more true than in these oddest of American political times. But The Daily applies a layer of nuance atop the words, the photos, and the infographics.

How much do Times journalists have to watch what they say on the show, especially in the context of the paper’s new social media guidelines? (More than a hundred Times journalists have found their way into the recording studio so far.) That will be an ongoing question, but remember: The Daily is a highly edited show, not a live one.

Habit is the key word here, one that’s connected to reminders to subscribe to the Times and to a 30-second midroll ad. While the name The Daily appears prosaic, it’s entirely right: Subscribers who pay the Times hundreds of dollars a year do so in strong part out of the habits they’ve built. The Daily then reinforces that habit, the digital audio equivalent of — what did they call those things they threw on our driveways every day? Ah, newspapers.

“This is the birth of a franchise for us that can live on and on in many different mediums for a long time,” says Dolnick.

The Times now employs 16 full-time staffers in audio, with more positions — including in digital engineering development — to be added into next year.

“I think the next generation of readers, their first touchstone, their most meaningful touchstone with The Times, will be The Daily,” Dolnick says. “That’s a big deal that didn’t exist just a year ago. We’re already reaching a huge number of people. They’re younger, they’re mobile.”

Already being planned: expanding The Daily to a sixth day each week, and This American Life-like extensions of the program.

The audio team, headed by Henig (as the editorial director responsible for “threading together” the Times’ audio’s audience, product, and business) and Tobin (as the executive producer responsible for the show’s production) have formed a partnership that marries public radio knowledge and production chops with Times newsroom intelligence.

“Everyone, all of the producers on the team who are used to working with kind of traditional radio hosts, are so struck by how Michael — because he is a reporter, and because he doesn’t come from radio — he doesn’t actually know what it means to be a host,” Henig says. “He doesn’t fall into some of the traps of a traditional host.”

He still does his own booking of guests on the show, for instance — a job typically left to producers in radio. “I don’t think he realizes that that’s very unusual for a host, because as a reporter, you do your own booking,” Henig says. “You call your sources, and you figure out when you’re gonna talk to them. In the case of The Daily, these are his colleagues, and so he wants to be the one to send an email asking people to talk, and he wants to be the one to send a thank-you note the next morning to say that it was great.”

I spoke with Barbaro about the joys and challenges of doing something wholly new. Here’s our conversation, edited lightly for clarity.

Note: The fall Apple keynote is always focused on hardware; the important software updates in iOS 11 and its Mac/Watch/TV equivalents came at this summer’s WWDC. My writeup of those changes, including some to Apple News, is here.

Apple Watch: The Apple Watch has been effectively repositioned, from a broad-based wrist computing platform to a device designed for fitness and health, with everything else coming along for the ride. So there was no explicit mention of anything news-related in the keynote.

But the major product update here — the addition of a separate cellular connection to the watch — gets us a little bit closer to a future Apple’s been pushing towards. It hasn’t always been smooth, but the company is preparing for a vision of what comes after the iPhone.

Not after, really — we’ll be looking at our phones for a good long while now — but a world in which the phone is a little bit less the center of your digital universe. Compare it to the Jobs-era shift from the Mac as the “digital hub” of our lives — everything plugging in to one central device — to the next, more distributed, each-on-its-own generation that followed it. (Remember when you had to plug in your iPod to your iMac to download MP3s?)

What was once the job of the iPhone is now being distributed, bit by bit, to a constellation of smaller and more personal devices — the Apple Watch on your wrist, the AirPods in your ears, the AR glasses that everyone expects Apple to bring forth in the next few years. And over time, as those each become more powerful and more connected, they’ll make the smartphone a little less central.

So why does that matter to news publishers? It’s another paradigm shift that they don’t seem prepared for. If users’ mobile attention is decreasingly focused on a good-sized screen in their hand, how do news producers get their attention, serve them what they need, and find a way to monetize it?

Some of the people and companies that produce most of our news are still adapting to the World Wide Web, which is more than 20 years old. And more are still adapting (editorially, structurally, financially) to the shift to mobile devices. If today’s phone time gets increasingly spread among [always-connected watches | wireless earbuds whispering push notifications | voice-driven smart speakers | an AR layer on the world via glasses], how does the work of journalism reach audiences?

I’m sure there will be some good answers to that question, and it’s easy to overstate this change. But technology companies have, at some level, accepted that smartphones have become boring. You can get a perfectly good one cheap and most everyone you know has; the annual updates get a little more snooze-worthy each year; it’s clear they’re on the back half of the growth curve. They’re all busy trying to figure out what’s coming next. It’d be worth it for media companies to start thinking about doing the same.

iPhone: It was jarring to see an iPhone introduction fall as flat as the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus reveal did. On one hand, new iPhone! On the other, everyone knew the big show was still to come.

Then the iPhone X (pronounced like 10)…looked a little weird? Leaks had ruined nearly every surprise in the keynote, but I was surprised to see how odd its new odd shape — exaggerated rounded corners and that unusual camera notch — felt. We have decades of rectangular screens to forget — more than a century’s worth if you take it back to movie screens. And it was the demo’s landscape videos that looked the most out of place. It will be interesting to see if and how web designers, app developers, and videographers adjust their work to account for this small-but-significant visual shift.

That said, I have no doubt that, just like killing the headphone jack last year, it’s a change we’ll get used to. For journalists, the improvements to the camera (on both the 8 and the X) are probably the most welcome, and the new lighting modes will make your on-the-scene portraits a bit nicer. AirPower, the wireless charging pad coming next year, could save you a few Lighting cables on the road. And it’s faster, of course. But I’m not sure that it’s something most journalists will be rushing to spend $1,000 on.

Apple TV: It gets a bump to 4K, which will be nice for people with newer TVs. Apple’s doing more to localize content in other countries (I spotted a CBC logo on a slide), and — useful for networks — live news is being added to the main TV app. But Apple TV’s mostly been a dud for publishers and broadcasters, significantly more expensive than its rivals from Roku, Amazon, and Google. The new 4K model starts at $179, which I don’t think will change that equation. (I’m about as devoted an Apple user as you’ll find, but when we got a new TV this summer, it was easy to pick a cheap Roku or Amazon stick over Apple’s alternative. The new Amazon flagship Fire TV will cost half or a third of the price, add an always-on Alexa interface, and match the Apple TV on nearly all features.)

The most noticeable design changes are on the iPad, where the new homepage has some of the modularity that the Times’ ongoing web redesign has. Here’s what the new (top) and previous (bottom) iPad apps looked like this afternoon:

Also noteworthy is what’s under the hood: This is the first version of the app that’s universal for iOS devices, meaning that the same code is at work across the iPad, iPhone, and even the Apple Watch. The Times released the first version of its iPad app in April 2010, just a few months after Apple announced the iPad and shortly before Apple introduced support for universal iPad-iPhone apps. Other news organizations, slower to develop for the iPad, created universal news apps from the beginning. A few months later, the Times started offering access to its iPhone and iPad apps in different subscription tiers, separating the products further.

Very proud to announce the release of an app I’ve spent the past year working on, a completely rewrite in Swift: https://t.co/OZ28wgmYro

— iYrke (@bpekroy) July 25, 2017

Both of these product choices complicated the Times’ efforts to bring its iPad and iPhone apps together, as Matthew Bischoff‏, a former Times iOS developer, noted in a thread here. Bischoff‏ said that app’s release was delayed in part by the Times’ decision to rebuild the app in Swift, Apple’s latest programming language.

6.0 is a rewrite of the app to be written in Swift. Additionally, it unifies the phone and tablet iOS apps into a universal binary.

— Grant Butler (@grantjbutler) July 25, 2017

Creating a universal app for iPhone and iPad should make life a lot easier for the mobile developers at the Times. When the Times experiments with a new feature, for example, developers will be able to code and test it once, rather than do so for multiple devices. This means both faster development and less testing, which should free up developers to push out features more frequently.

There are few features that aren’t enabled yet but underlying technology is almost done :) looking forward to seeing the app grow ;)

— Krzysztof Zabłocki (@merowing_) July 25, 2017

Today we dropped a brand new (universal) @nytimes for iOS, rewritten in Swift, setting the stage for lots to come: https://t.co/8p49TEhNMM

— Alex Rainert ‍ (@arainert) July 26, 2017

new @nytimes iOS app update (that I had nothing to do with) is legit. damn fine work, team.

— ashley riehlin (@asherly) July 26, 2017

Whoever finally fixed scrolling inertia in the new @nytimes iOS app deserves a raise

— Ryan Murphy (@rdmurphy) July 26, 2017

Postscript: they kept my favorite screen in the app: the emoji credits! pic.twitter.com/ic0MHZFuH0

— Matthew Bischoff (@mb) July 25, 2017

HomePod: Apple led its presentation (and picked the name) of the HomePod with music in mind — putting it in a historical line with iTunes and iPods rather than the Amazon Echo. (Its first stated requirement was to “rock the house.”) In the same way the Apple Watch sells fitness as the hook to get a computer strapped on your wrist, HomePod sells music to get a microphone in your home — and for many people, music will be all it gets used for. But it also features the same sort of voice interaction patterns we’ve become familiar with with the Echo and Google Home. That includes some news elements; check out this slide of things you can say to your HomePod — asking for sports results, tuning into NPR, playing podcasts, and “tell me the latest news” are all options:

There was no particular announcement in the keynote about Siri expanding to new classes of apps — though that could easily be something that is announced to developers later in the week or in developer docs just posted. So it’s unclear how open access to these queries will be. (“Hey Siri, ask The New York Times what’s going on in Syria.” “Hey Siri, ask Vox to explain healthcare reform in six minutes.”) But either now or at some point soon, publishers will likely have to decide whether Siri and the HomePod are worth developing for. (Update: The new SiriKit docs say only list-making and note-taking — “Hey Siri, add milk to my shopping list in Things” — are newly supported, so integration with news apps still seems to be theoretical.)

Before investing in building for a platform, publishers like to have an idea how large the addressable market will be. Amazon, the clear leader, doesn’t release sales numbers for its devices (just like the Bezos-owned Washington Post doesn’t tell anyone how many digital subscribers it has, grumble grumble). eMarketer estimates Amazon has 70 percent of the U.S. market, and Morgan Stanley estimated 11 million units sold back in December, pre-holiday rush, the vast majority of them in the United States. Google Home is at a fraction of that.

Amazon has made building Alexa skills quite easy, and its lower price point will likely keep it unthreatened as the market leader (the HomePod will go for $349 when it launches in December). But by putting the HomePod on the Siri platform, developing for it will likely also be able to take advantage of the huge installed base of iPhone and iPad customers. It’s worth watching what sort of access Apple allows developers; if it’s decent, it’s probably worth the time of an engineer or two at most or the largest publishers.

Safari: The new Safari features a couple features of interest to publishers. First, it blocks autoplay videos; Craig Federighi said that Apple will learn over time what sites “shouldn’t” have autoplay — presumably excluding video sites like YouTube. Perhaps more importantly (at least for the adtech world), Safari will do “intelligent tracking prevention,” which seems to be selective blockage of cross-site cookies, the “feature” that lets something you looked at in an online store follow you around the web for days. (Both of these announcements were explicitly made for Macs, but it’s hard to imagine they won’t move to iPhones and iPads at some point.)

Google is heading in a similar direction with Chrome, deciding what ads can and can’t be shown in-browser. Obviously, Google (which makes 90 percent of its revenue from advertising) and Apple (which makes almost none of its) have different incentives influencing their actions — but in both cases, the tech giants who control the leading browsers are using their power to clean up an advertising experience that publishers, adtech, and advertisers haven’t been able to. That raises legitimate antitrust concerns — but it also appears to be a fait accompli at this point. Some news execs are going to see big drops in the monthly play counts, but that’s probably for the best.

iOS 11: In the long run, Apple’s interested in more information workers moving from MacBooks to iPads, but the phone-born iOS hasn’t always worked too well for more significant use. (Try researching a topic across multiple websites and then writing a link-heavy blog post about them on an iPad. Can you do it? Sure. Would you want to? Probably not.)

So iOS 11, announced today and coming out this fall, includes a few updates that’ll be welcomed by, say, reporters in the field. A new multitasking view, based on a rebuilt Dock, looks much more flexible. A better on-screen keyboard should make typing numbers and punctuation easier. A new Files app exposes the file system to users in a way Steve Jobs famously resisted, but which might save you a few hundred “Open In…” dialogues. (This may or may not be linked to Apple’s successful launch of a new file system, which reached macOS today. And the interface can include third-party apps like Dropbox.) Text, images, and other bits of content can now be drag-and-dropped between apps. There’s 3D Touch tab switching in Safari. It’s a package of updates that should make word-based, multi-app work significantly easier.

One other note: Apple is dropping support for 32-bit apps on iOS. It’s unlikely your publisher’s app is 32-bit unless it’s sat ignored for multiple years — actually maybe it’s not that unlikely? you probably have some weird print replica thing from 2012 still in there — but if it is, it’ll stop working this fall.

Apple News: The lil’ distributed-content platform that could, Apple News has been a surprise hit with publishers and audiences alike, with outlets reporting big audiences, especially from push notifications. No big updates made the keynote threshold, but there was an interesting mention in a section about iOS. Siri — which seems to be getting a rebranding from a voice interface to a Google Assistant-style pan-device intelligence system — can now detect what you’re looking at in Safari and suggest news articles about them. The example given was someone searching for travel information about Reykjavík in Safari and then being prompted with Iceland-related news in Apple News.

Some evil genius will figure out the right way to take advantage of this and unleash a new dark science of…Safari-engine optimization?

A couple brief mentions on a slide seem to indicate Apple News videos will now appear in the Today view (which I imagine also means a more prominent treatment for video in the Apple News app) and a new Spotlight tab in the app.

Update: According to promotional materials posted after the keynote ended:

News becomes even more personal, showing top stories that are more relevant to you. Siri learns what’s important to you and suggests stories you might like. And our editors choose a different topic every day for you to explore in a new tab called Spotlight. They also craft a daily selection of the best videos for you to see in Today View.

Plus this image of the Spotlight tab — this is part of what new editor-in-chief Lauren Kern will be working on, presumably:

Note that the current Apple News tab bar goes For You / Favorites / Explore / Search / Saved, so there’s a little bit of swapping going on here.

Miscellaneous: WWDC is about software first and foremost, but there were a few hardware updates. The 9.7″ iPad Pro grew to 10.5″, with smaller bezels; the larger size means keys on the on-screen and Smart Keyboards will be full-sized. MacBooks and iMacs were all updated with faster processors; the iMac also got boosted graphics capacity that should make it more useful for high-end video and VR production, an area where Apple has lagged. The company also announced an upcoming iMac Pro, due in December, which will be even more useful.

Over on the Apple Watch, Apple News is now a native watch app, meaning push notifications can be viewed in a more native and visual environment on the watch. They’ll show up in a new Siri-powered watch face. Still probably only useful to publishers as a prompt to pick up your phone, though.

The iPhone’s camera app now allows a sort of fake long-exposure filter, which at least a few tripod-free photographers will find tempting.

Apple announced new machine learning and augmented reality tools for developers, which sounded impressive and could be of longer-term use to a few publishers.

Finally, despite my hopes, there’s were no desktop Apple News or Podcasts apps announced — a space I’m a little surprised Apple hasn’t moved into yet. (Though the iOS Podcasts app has apparently gotten a redesign — potentially key given that’s by far the most popular places for podcasts to be consumed. And, though we don’t know much about it, a WWDC on Podcasts later this week promises that “iOS 11 upgrades the Apple Podcasts app to support new feed structures for serialized shows” — interesting!)

As part of his introduction to the phone’s capabilities, Jobs opened Safari and pulled up the full desktop version of the Times’ website. “We’re showing you the whole New York Times website,” Jobs said.

But he also noted: “It’s kind of a slow site because it’s got a lot of images.”

Jobs introduced the iPhone as three devices in one: a phone, a widescreen iPod, and an “Internet communications device.”

jonathanhstrauss: – iPhone = widescreen iPod + mobile phone + internet communicator

— Macworld (@macworld) January 9, 2007

Jobs’ presentation that day focused on using Safari as the main way to access the Internet; he even rotated the phone to view the Times’ website in landscape mode. He was initially against the idea of native apps on the phone, pushing web apps as the state of the art. He likely didn’t envision that apps — and browsers within apps — would become the dominant way we access the Internet on mobile devices now.

Re: Internet communicator, that is what the iPhone will be, widescreen web browser

— Brian Fling (@fling) January 9, 2007

Though the iPhone has evolved and grown enormously in power over the past decade, the device Jobs unveiled in 2007 still looks and feels familiar. While the iPhone and the competitors it spawned have changed nearly every aspect of our lives, they’ve had a particular impact on news organizations, which have spent much of the past decade optimizing their coverage for its tiny screens. And, perhaps most important of all, the app-driven model the iPhone brought to dominance meant that social platforms — Facebook above all — became the primary route for audiences to reach news on the devices we carry everywhere.

Most major news organizations now reach most of their audiences on mobile devices. Journalists — and everyday citizens — also have the ability to report live using just the phone in their pocket from nearly anywhere on the planet.

The iPhone enabled the creation of a mobile advertising industry that generated $31.6 billion in 2015, according to Pew. It wasn’t the first smartphone, but it was the first modern one; by 2022, there will be 6.1 billion mobile subscribers, and for many people globally, the smartphone is the only way they access the Internet.

The iPhone forever changed how we consume, produce, and pay for our journalism. “We’re gonna make some history together today,” Jobs said at the start of his big unveil, and it was one of the rare product debuts for which that wasn’t an exaggeration.

Bye bye headphone jack. Hello dongle. Why? "Courage," says Schiller. #AppleEvent pic.twitter.com/wfqB5RGzVV

— Geoffrey A. Fowler (@geoffreyfowler) September 7, 2016

For journalists, however, the iPhone has for years been a full-fledged reporting device — a voice recorder, camera, video camera, and publishing platform, all in one — and the elimination of the headphone jack might force some of them to buy new equipment or change the tools they use. Most external microphones or convertors that allow microphones to work with the iPhone connect through the headphone jack, and the shutter on many selfie sticks is also controlled through via the headphone jack.

“I’m not panicking,” said Neal Augenstein, a reporter with WTOP in Washington, D.C. when we spoke this morning before the Apple event. Augenstein has exclusively used his iPhone to report from the field since 2010.

“You’ll remember that Apple changed from the original charging port to the Lightning port and we all lived. In some cases, it will mean that people will have to buy new equipment, but I’m sure that Apple will be including or offering for sale a convertor which will convert whatever went into the eighth-inch jack into the Lightning jack.” (Indeed, Apple said it would be including one with each iPhone.)

If journalists don’t want to bother with using an adapter to make their old equipment work with the Lightning port, there are already a number devices that allow users to connect a microphone to their iPhone with a Lightning cable, Augenstein said. Without a headphone jack, however, reporters may not be able to monitor their audio as they’re recording. Still, he said most listeners won’t notice a difference between audio recorded with a microphone connected via the analog headphone jack or the Lightning port.

“The sound quality bringing a microphone into the headphone jack versus the digital lightning jack is not a difference that I can hear with my basic ear,” he said.

Perhaps more importantly, however, recording with a microphone connected through the Lightning port means reporters may have trouble recording and charging their phones simultaneously — something that could be a challenge for, say, covering evening meetings or other events. (“Strategic charging remains the biggest challenge for a reporter using the iPhone in the field,” Augenstein said.)

In a post last year, Martin Skaheshaft, a journalism lecturer based in the U.K., reviewed the iRig Pro, a popular Lightning-connected microphone connector. “Sound quality is excellent with a good microphone,” Shakeshaft wrote, but he noted that the Lightning connector is costly and physically bigger than an analog convertor that works with the headphone jack.

On Twitter, some journalists cautioned against buying new equipment or lamented that they’ll no longer be able to just plug their microphone into the headphone port:

#mojo About to buy a mic or rig? May want to think again: iPhone 7 Leak 'Confirms' Apple to Eliminate Headphone Jack https://t.co/bSHdiqCcFh

— Peter Stewart (@TweeterStewart) April 30, 2016

If next iPhone doesn't have 3.5mm headphone port, @rodemics will have to come up with something for their VideoMic Me. #mojo

— Raya Fahreza (@rayafahreza) August 1, 2016

@rayafahreza @rodemics Rode has a i-XLR with lighting cable. I'm sure an adapter will be work or even better a lighting version. All digital

— Erik Naso (@ErikNaso) August 1, 2016

@ErikNaso @rodemics yes those will work, but it won't be as nifty as simply plugging in the mic.

— Raya Fahreza (@rayafahreza) August 1, 2016

It’s safe to say though that most reporters won’t have to change their news gathering practices. If you look at any photo of reporters interviewing a source or working at a press conference you’ll notice that journalists primarily use the built-in microphones on their iPhones to record, and generally the quality of the the iPhone microphone is good enough for journalistic purposes — in particular if you’re not planning on publishing the audio to readers.

“My estimate has been that it’s 92 percent as good speaking into the built-in microphone of the iPhone…as if I were using a digital recorder with a standard $150 handheld broadcast mic.”

In a rare pre-WWDC sit-down interview with the The Verge, Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said that Apple would soon alter its revenue-sharing model for apps. While the well-known 70/30 split will remain, developers who are able to maintain a subscription with a customer longer than a year will see Apple’s cut drop down to 15 percent. The option to sell subscriptions will also be available to all developers instead of just a few kinds of apps. “Now we’re going to open up to all categories,” Schiller says, “and that includes games, which is a huge category.”

The first part of that is the important one for news publishers. When Apple announced it would bring paid subscriptions to iOS in 2011, it was viewed with much excitement by some in the news business, who saw it as a way to transfer the regular circulation revenue they had in the print business to digital. Combined with the release of the iPad a year earlier, it prompted a flowering of efforts, from big media company bets (The Daily, R.I.P.) to one-person startups (The Magazine, R.I.P.). But over time — as those R.I.P.s might suggest — publishers mostly soured on the idea, for a variety of reasons. (Among them: Incomplete data on users; difficulty organically attracting new subscribers or reaching existing ones; being locked inside that awful Newsstand folder on your homescreen.)

Newsstand is gone, but until today, one other complaint was still true: Apple took a 30 percent cut of all subscription revenue — too high a cut for some app publishers to swallow.

Schiller’s announcement means that that cut will only apply for the first year of a subscription; after that, it’ll drop to 15 percent. So if you’re charging $9.99 a month for an iOS subscription, your second-year revenue from a customer will jump 21 percent (from $83.92 to $101.90). And, John Gruber notes, this change is retroactive in one sense: Existing apps with subscribers who’ve been on board a year already will start getting the 85/15 split next week, rather than a year from now.

A couple other interesting details:

• Different price points in different countries are now possible. (So, for instance, The New York Times could charge readers in India less — or more! — than its U.S. readers.)
• You’ll be “able to keep active subscribers at their existing price while increasing the price for new users.”
• Renewal periods can now be every two, three, or six months, in addition to monthly or annually.
• It’s now easier to offer multi-tiered subscriptions within a single app. (Though it’s been possible before; the Times for instance offers both its basic $15/month digital subscription and its upsell Times Insider $25/month subscription in its current app.) Switching from one level to another will be seamless for customers.

One other cautionary point worth noting: You can choose to increase the price of a subscription for an existing customer…but that customer will get a notification of the change and the option to affirmatively accept the increase. If they don’t, their existing subscription ends. So you’ll want to use that option with caution.

Ironically, the part of the new rules least directly tied to publishers might end up as a net negative for them. Subscriptions were previously open only to certain kinds of apps (news, cloud services, dating apps, and audio/video streaming apps like Spotify or Netflix). Now they’ll be available to all apps. The intention is to enable app developers to build more sustainable revenue models for complex apps without having to charge a large price up front. (Think about how your Adobe Creative Suite or Microsoft Office apps are probably paid for on an annual subscription basis today; five years ago, they would have probably been one-time retail-box purchases.)

But that new availability means that many, many more apps will likely start charging for subscriptions — including productivity apps for devices like the iPad Pro, for instance, and lots and lots of games. In that environment, I wonder if consumers will see a news app as “just one more monthly bill” and think of it as more directly in competition with Candy Crush PRO 3.11 for Workgroups or Two Dots Elite: Two More Dots or what have you.

I predict lots of $2.99+ apps will switch to $1/mo subscriptions and it will psychologically seem better to users and will boost sales.

— Mike Rundle (@flyosity) June 8, 2016

But that’s mostly just supposition on my part. Apple has itself tried to shift its revenue story from near-complete reliance on big one-time purchases (a new iPhone!) toward repeated regular payments (Apple Music! iCloud storage!), so it makes sense that it’s leading developers on the same path. News apps have always been a natural match for subscription models (since publishers have to keep making new news every day; a game developer can keep profiting off a mostly unchanging app for a long time). But the subscription party’s about to get a lot more crowded.

The app, released today and only available on iPhone and Apple Watch for now, presents teases to stories in the form of chat bubbles, and then lets users select whether they want to get more information about a topic or move onto the next story. When you choose to go more in depth about a particular story, you’ll get two or three more chat bubbles — sometimes with gifs and charts, too — that let you click to the original story that ran on Quartz or elsewhere on the web. When users have read all the most recent stories, the app will offer quizzes for users to take.

“We had that hunch that it could be an engaging interface,” said Zach Seward, Quartz’s executive editor and VP of product, and a former Nieman Lab staffer. “One thing that’s nice about it is the simplicity. The content type is always messages, and that’s always true whether you’re getting the message inside the app or as a notification.”

Our Apple Watch complication tells you how the market is doing in the form of an emoji. Down more than 1% now, so… pic.twitter.com/Oz72eG9VNM

— Zach Seward (@zseward) February 11, 2016

Quartz launched in 2012 as a mobile-focused site, but at the time it didn’t want to build an app in order to make its stories as easily accessible as possible. “We did not want to create any barrier to either discovering or sharing our content,” Quartz publisher Jay Lauf told me last month. But as the site has grown and specific features such as messaging and notifications have become more powerful and popular in other apps, Quartz decided it wanted to see how it could build out those features in one of its own.

Reaction among news types was generally rapturous:

Omg the @qz app is so neat! It turns news into a conversation and it feels like the future https://t.co/MWcAybiwTS via @thenextweb

— Swabreen Bakr (@ssscorvus) February 11, 2016

congrats to the @qz team on an awesome news app launch! super creative—this morning I talked to it about Yeezys pic.twitter.com/4BjzFrhZDC

— Aaron Edwards (@aaronmedwards) February 11, 2016

The new @QZ app takes @nicknotned's original insight – that news should feel like a convo w/ a smart friend- to its most literal point yet.

— Andrew Golis (@agolis) February 11, 2016

So @qz released a news app and it looks like a complete, path-breaking rethink of all news apps ever. https://t.co/gxwzInDqyQ

— Christopher Mims (@mims) February 11, 2016

How the new @qz app welcomes new users (like a Slack bot). And how it reports the Twitter earnings story. pic.twitter.com/ViaxmaFpPa

— Josh Stearns (@jcstearns) February 11, 2016

Apple has added more nuance to the kinds of alerts apps can send, so as a result, the Quartz app will only make your phone buzz when it sends major breaking news alerts. Other push notifications — updates when new stories are added to the app, or a haiku that’s sent when the markets close — just light up your phone. Users can decide how many or few notifications they want to receive, and they’re written conversationally, much in the style of BuzzFeed’s news app, which was released last year.

That tone fits in with the messaging app feel to Quartz’s app. Throughout the development process, Quartz looked at research on how people interact with text as well as non-news apps, such as the nutrition app Lark and the game Lifeline, which also have conversation-based interfaces, Seward explained in a post introducing the app. The ads in the app are also presented as messages.

The new @qz app is the @ourlark of news interfaces. That's a compliment. pic.twitter.com/8H2xFZFQPg

— stacy-marie ishmael (@s_m_i) February 11, 2016

Chat apps are enormously popular — especially outside the United States — and news organizations have been experimenting with different ways to reach readers there. The BBC is publishing on several different messaging platforms, The New York Times recently began publishing in English and Chinese on WeChat, and Germany’s Bild published soccer news on Facebook Messenger.

All the content in Quartz’s app is written by staffers, but the users’ interactions as they choose to progress their way through the app are controlled by bots, and Seward said the site is looking at ways to integrate more bots into the app and elsewhere.

To the extent there has been a common critique of the messaging interface in the hours since launch, it’s been that Quartz borrowed one element of chat too literally — the time spent waiting for messages to appear.

The @qz interactive fiction news app is adorable but the skeumorphic "the app is typing" pause makes reading it unbearably slow.

— Tim Maly (@doingitwrong) February 11, 2016

The @qz app is… interesting: "want to hear about X?" (Y/N) for lots of stories, via a slow chat interface. Scrolling/swiping is quicker

— Tom Standage (@tomstandage) February 11, 2016

@ravmattu @qz It's just slow. And it's only a pseudo-chat interface; at each step you've got "More" or "Next". Kudos for originality, though

— Tom Standage (@tomstandage) February 11, 2016

Last spring, Seward compared Quartz to an API, explaining in a memo that “we don’t mean publish once and send it everywhere. We mean Quartz can go anywhere our readers are, in whatever form is appropriate.” To that end, Quartz is looking at ways to potentially expand this kind of news presentation on its own future apps or elsewhere on other platforms.

No surprise @qz iOS app has messaging interface. Right there on the qz as API diagram from last year. More bots TK? pic.twitter.com/JOyCSCdEQr

— Trei Brundrett (@clockwerks) February 11, 2016

“Depending on the chat app or platform, the particulars of how it functions will dictate what kind of interaction, if any, you could create, and therefore what kind of content would work best on there,” Seward said. “That’s why it’s still very unformed. I don’t mean to be coy about it. It’s not like tomorrow we’ll have the Quartz integration in such and such app, but it’s still a work in progress. In terms of how we’re thinking about it editorially, it’s fair to say that the same folks working on this are thinking about this broader question.”

I can't think of another disruptive newsroom that has captured our imagination more than @qz h/t @zseward @delaney pic.twitter.com/ie4QrouADI

— David Skok (@dskok) February 11, 2016

Best thing about @qz new iPhone app: a baby step into a coming future where news is a conversation. Think Amazon Echo meets "Her."

— David Ho (@DavidHo) February 11, 2016

New app from @qz is really fun & more creative than anything anyone else is trying in mobile news. Will it work? Who knows. But it's cool.

— Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen) February 11, 2016

But 2015 was the year the platforms took their attention power to its logical next step. Why serve as a channel for publishers to share links when you can push them to publish their content directly on your platform? Facebook’s Instant Articles were the most prominent (and important) example, but we also saw Apple use the iPhone’s success to build its own News platform, and Snapchat use its hold on young people’s attention to get publishers to make custom content for its Discover.

There’s a good reason for platforms to be interested in news: News consumption is a habit, and if people think of your app as a place to get news, they’re likely to return to it more regularly. But the question in 2016 was whether it was a good deal for news organizations. The promise of global reach, faster load times, and a monetization strategy drew nearly every major American news publisher into at least one of these new products. Are they accelerating the decline of their own power to connect directly with audiences? Or are they simply following where attention has shifted and hoping to build sustainable relationships sharecropping on Silicon Valley’s land? We’ll find out a lot more about those questions in 2016.

The rise of adblockers: Talk to any old newspaper hand from the business side and you’ll hear it: Ads were just as important to customers as the news that flowed around them. That city hall investigation could sit nicely next to a department store ad, each reaching distinct but overlapping audiences, each reinforcing the value of the product.

That symbiosis never quite translated online, where publishers’ misaligned incentives and the enigmatic swarm of businesses collectively known as ad tech conspired to make so much of digital advertising annoying. Today’s ads load too slowly, use up too much of your mobile data, jank up your reading experience, and track you in ways you’d rather they not.

In 2015, a rising share of readers decided to install adblockers as a clumsy solution. In September, for the first time, Apple allowed them to be installed on iPhones and iPads, chipping away at the most valuable slice of publishers’ mobile customers. With so many news sites relying almost existentially on advertising revenue, it’s a terrifying thought that those trend lines will continue up in 2016; many American sites could start to see the numbers their European peers do, with upwards of 30 percent of users blocking ads.

Publishers say they want to make their advertising better, which is welcome. But adblockers are ham-fisted tools — their default state is to block both the good ads and the bad ones. Figuring out the right mix of technology, revenue streams, and begging for whitelisting will be high on publishers’ agenda for the new year.

Hints of big changes in TV: As a former newspaper reporter, I was always a little miffed that my line of work got disrupted before our friends in television news. A tangle of factors — the higher production cost of video, the web of relationships between cable companies, networks, and producers — have let TV remain a money-printing machine.

We saw a few things in 2015 that suggested that tangle is unraveling more quickly than before. Networks high- (HBO) and middle-brow (CBS) started selling their content directly to consumers. A new generation of digital media players from Apple, Amazon, and Google shortened the distance between web video and your flatscreen. Cordcutters and cord-nevers — young people who’ve never paid for cable and think of their laptop or phone as their primary screen for video — continue to grow in numbers. (Cable stalwart ESPN has lost 7 percent of its paying subscribers over the past two years.) Even the NFL — the keystone of American paid live television — started talking about selling significant broadcast rights to streaming companies.

There’ll still be plenty of money in TV, of course, but it’s unclear what role news will play in this new world. Local TV news is the result of local TV stations; if our content comes increasingly from Netflix and Amazon rather than NBC or ABC, where does local news fit in? My concern is that the answer is nowhere.

Podcasts in full flower: Serial’s season one ended in 2014, and season two barely caught the end of 2015, but the podcasting renaissance did just fine without its flagship. New startups found new funding and launched new shows; a few public media stalwarts like WNYC bet big on podcasts as a key area of expansion. Perhaps the biggest story was the continued exodus of top talent — often talent frustrated with station politics and hierarchy — from public radio to the newcomers.

The big question for 2016: Will podcast consumption continue to happen in mostly open platforms — places like the iPhone Podcasts app that any content creator can get access to? Or will it shift to individual apps like Acast or Midroll’s Howl that can offer user experience benefits or a more robust business model?

A so-so year for wearables: The Apple Watch came out in 2015, and it quickly became the biggest smartwatch on the market. (Apple doesn’t release figures, but outside estimates are that somewhere around 12 million have been sold.) As someone who’s worn one since launch, I can attest that getting breaking news notifications on your wrist can be a nice little addition to your life, but it’s far from transformative. Perhaps future generations of wearables will make their usefulness more clear, but at this point the energy in wearables in 2016 is all centered on virtual reality headsets, with plenty of news organizations investing in immersive content. I’m bearish on VR for news, but perhaps we’ll see headsets get light enough that they can play a larger role.

A new/old kind of owner: The initial wave of billionaires buying up newspapers a few years back — John Henry in Boston, Jeff Bezos in Washington, Glen Taylor in Minneapolis — doesn’t seem to have inspired many of their peers to do the same. The most notable new newspaper owner in 2015 was Sheldon Adelson, whose secret-then-not-secret purchase of the Las Vegas Review-Journal seemed to augur a new reality: Newspapers are so cheap, and America’s wealthy so rich, that snapping up the local daily for political purposes will be a newly attractive option.

A newspaper owner with political intentions is not a new phenomenon, of course. But after many decades where the big fear was faceless corporate chain ownership, the Adelson buy could be the start of a return to an earlier 20th-century model. Not all billionaires are created equal.

Meanwhile, down in the capital, Bezos’ promise of “runway” for The Washington Post has led that paper to new heights, with engineers integrated into the newsroom, broken traffic records, and a new swagger in its longstanding (though, for the past decade, fairly one-sided) rivalry with The New York Times. Whichever side you’re on, we’re all better off with another strong national and global news source.

Trump breaks the system: Finally, 2015 was the year that Donald Trump’s candidacy seemed to break what we thought were all the rules on how the media and a political campaign can interact. Trump has proven to be a master of social media, using it to connect directly to his base of supporters without relying on TV advertising. He’s shifted the rules of cable TV, becoming such an audience draw that channels are willing to let him call in for appearances they’d expect other candidates to show up for. His many untruths seem impervious to the factchecking infrastructure news organizations have built up, and he’s shoved ideas once considered fringe in mainstream media squarely into the common discourse. He’s a one-man filter bubble.

Journalists have had to figure out their own ways to respond, to reassert their place in informing the public. Their old role as gatekeepers has waned, for good and for ill. What’s the right role for the press, old and new, in that context? The decisions journalists reach on that question in 2016 will go a long way toward determining their position in public life going forward.

That strategy is paying off in terms of recognition — Apple calls the Reuters TV app one of its “essentials” — and uptake.

When Reuters TV was first launched as an iPhone app last February (don’t confuse this with the Reuters TV YouTube channel, by the way, which was launched in 2012 but no longer exists), it had a paywall: $1.99 a month, with limited ads. The app lets users choose how long they have to watch — anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes — and then creates a program of news clips tailored to time and interest. Reuters TV is sleek and well designed; its content changes based on your past viewing activity, and it is a genuinely good way to catch up on the news quickly. (You can even download episodes for offline viewing.)

But a paywall on an unknown video app hindered adoption. “We were best served by loosening that barrier, particularly at an early stage,” Reuters TV managing director Isaac Showman told Digiday last year. Last August, Reuters dropped the paywall on Reuters TV (users can still choose to pay $1.99 a month for an ad-free version). It’s launched the app on iPad, Apple TV, and web — with web app users now accounting for 25 percent of all the app’s active users, even though the web app only launched last month.

In November, Reuters launched Reuters TV for Publishers. “It allows any publisher to come to our website and, free of charge, download a widget that integrates onto their site” and provides a five-minute, curated news program,” Showman told me. “They’re able to put their ads in front of it and they keep 100 percent of the revenue.” The signup process is designed to be quick; publishers customize their fonts and insert ad tags, then get the code for the embeddable widget.

The payoff for Reuters, Showman said, is that more people become familiar with Reuters TV’s brand. The Reuters TV for Publishers app includes links back to Reuters’ website and social sharing buttons, as well as an option for users to enter their phone number to get a download link for the mobile app.

“Sometimes we’re going to reach consumers on our own platforms, and sometimes we’re quite happy for that to be on other people’s platforms,” Showman explained. “If we can contribute to other publishers’ success as a part of that, it’s a win-win for both of us, and something we’re really happy to do.”

Since the offering rolled out in November, “dozens” of publishers have integrated it onto their sites, “with more signing up each day,” Showman said. Reuters wouldn’t give me a full list of participants, but pointed me to an Entrepreneur.com article and to Canada’s Globe and Mail. (If you have an adblocker turned on, you have to turn it off to see Reuters TV’s widget.)

The Globe and Mail added the widget to its main news page on December 9, and plans to roll it out on mobile later this week. “We’re testing reader appetite for five-minute news verticals,” Cynthia Young, The Globe and Mail’s head of audience, told me. “We wanted to see whether our readers like that kind of packaging for news.”

Of the users who view Reuters TV on The Globe and Mail’s site, 20 to 25 percent of them watch the entire five-minute program, according to Young. “We expect to see higher than that on mobile,” she said. (The Globe and Mail audience’s use of adblockers is not particularly high, she noted.) The Globe and Mail — and other Reuters TV for Publishers users — have to go back to Reuters to ask for analytics, though “their turnaround is quick.”

In general, experimenting with products like this is a great way for a publication to “test out content theories,” Young said. “We could produce a similar thing, but Reuters has done the format very well.” Down the line, if The Globe and Mail were to decide to produce its own short news segments — say, with a Canadian emphasis — “we would work with Reuters to look at the product they’re producing and, maybe, figure out some ways that we could license it.”

Reuters has put a lot of work into the technology behind Reuters TV. Each time that Reuters decides to do a news story as a video, it produces three lengths of that story — “small, medium, and large.” The app’s algorithms choose the right video length to deliver to each user based on the amount of time the user wants to watch for and that user’s past preferences. The algorithm also accounts for users’ locations and interests and the judgment of editors. An internal tool lets Reuters analyze each video’s performance to see how it resonates with a small sample group of users before it’s pushed out to a larger group.

The 15-minute program has been the most popular option on Reuters TV’s various apps so far, Showman said, because that’s the default. World news is the most popular coverage category.

So far, Reuters’ new strategy appears to be paying off. Active users tripled between the third and fourth quarters of 2015, though Reuters wouldn’t give me an actual user number.

“The technology that goes into this is state-of-the-art stuff,” Showman said. “We believe other news organizations shouldn’t just leave other platform builders to build, but should be at the forefront of this.”

Those of us who watch the news media business have questions, too. As we head deeper into the annual bloodletting that is news media budgeting for the new year, here are 10 of my top questions that I think we’ll talking about into 2016.

Business Insider has smartly carved a middle niche in what we thought was an oversaturated (Dow Jones, Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, FT, etc.) business news market. Within that market, it can count tens of thousands of fervent, habituated readers. So expect a meter that will aim to capture the top 1 percent or so of BI habitués, with a lower-than-the-Journal price point — maybe $99 a year.

Even more interesting: Who will follow suit? Might BuzzFeed, Vox Media, or Vice test premium subscriptions? And might Quartz, BI’s peer in business news innovation, do some testing of its own next year?

5Can local papers find a way to get digital reader revenue unstuck?

McClatchy CEO Pat Talamantes offered a blizzard of numbers (and found a very engaged financial analyst audience) on the company’s Q3 financial conference call Wednesday. He could cite lots of digital growth in revenue, and minimized the worst — if expected — news. McClatchy lost money — $1.1 million — for the quarter and reported overall revenues down 7 percent. Given the continuing woes of print advertising, that number wasn’t surprising.

McClatchy, though, was also down 2 percent in audience (or circulation) revenues. One culprit, as pointed out by an analyst: a 5.2 percent decline in Sunday print. Talamantes also talked some about digital-only circulation: It’s at 77,000 for all the McClatchy papers, just a little more than Tribune’s total count, and The Boston Globe’s tally as a single paper. Almost all those numbers have stayed stuck during 2015. Into 2016, newspapers have three options: (1) reexamine the product offer; (2) price it up for those who have agreed to pay, and (3) figure out new ways to segment audience and market like hell.

A little McClatchy math: At 77,000 subs, that represents 0.2 percent of the company’s 45 million unique visitors across the country. Compare that to The New York Times, which is at a little less than 2 percent of its uniques, and we see in a nutshell the growing divide between the fortunes of the national and local press.

6Is Berlin the next best test of convergence?

You remember convergence. It seemed crystal clear: The route forward demanded both traditional local print and broadcast skills combined in what we can multimedia, multiplatform publishing. (I guess we’re there. But we don’t hear those words much anymore.)

But then all the American newspaper/broadcast companies, one by one — Belo, Scripps, Media General, Tribune, Gannett — swore off the notion of convergence, and split their newspapers from their TV properties. Once-promising convergence experiments, from Tampa to Phoenix, fell by the wayside.

Now, ever-energetic Axel Springer is testing a major convergence of its own: WeltN24. I’m told the company’s new newsroom will be ready soon, and that 2016 will represent the big test of news convergence, as the staffs of its national quality daily Die Welt and its recent acquisition n24 merge.

7When will IBM declare it’s a media company?

On Wednesday, IBM bought the digital assets of The Weather Company. Wired’s Klint Finley well describes how IBM can use the power of Watson (remember those recent Bob Dylan ads on TV) to change the nature of “weather news.” Watson and its next-gen natural language cognitive computing systems can — and I believe will — change how news itself can be produced and presented. This is a beginning of Big Data, tamed for lots of little news (and other) uses. It also reminds us: Every successful publisher will also soon have to be a data science company to succeed.

8Will the Post become the fourth “national newspaper” in 2016?

This year, Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post strategy crystallized. Those who were hoping he would create a new model for local sustainable, high-quality journalism end the year have been disappointed. While the Post does a creditable job in the D.C. area, Bezos’ strategy is profoundly national — and then, likely, global. His bolstering of national news coverage, largely represented by 2014 investments, has been followed by low-priced subscriptions. Tens of millions of Amazon Prime customers now join Kindle Fire owners as able to get six months free and then pay a few dollars a month. The Post launched a vast national network, working with newspaper partners. The Post is putting more fish (lots of stories) into the Facebook Instant Articles pool than most publishers. The new Post game plan is mass, and building huge audience — and then, like Amazon, monetizing it down the line.

We’ll see the impact of those forays next year. Already, the Post nips at The New York Times’ heels in monthly unique visitors, if not time of engagement (“Is The Washington Post closing in on The New York Times?”). In the meantime, I think we can acknowledge that the U.S. now has four “national newspapers.” The Post looks like it will join the Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today as we look how the most important legacy newspapers make their digital transition. Among those, we’ll watch these two questions: How close does the Journal get to Dow Jones CEO Will Lewis’ 3 million subscriber goal? And: Which new product forays now in testing at the Times will hit the 2016 marketplace?

We’ll also watch one other big national “newspaper” launch. The Boston Globe will soon launch Stat, its ambitious life sciences product. The business aim: build a national/global product that can establish a new profitable business, while continuing to bolster and reinvent the regional Globe.

9How many will follow Advance’s 2012 move to cut days of print publication?

Three years ago, Advance shocked (“The newsonomics of Advance’s advancing strategy and its Achilles’ heel”) its communities and peer publishers by cutting back print production and distribution in New Orleans and Alabama, a strategy it then took to most of its markets. Few of those peers have followed suit, suspecting that breaking the daily print habit would simply speed up the decline of their businesses.

Now, Gannett, the U.S.’s largest newspaper company, is testing one significant market with three-a-day-a-week printed papers. The Salinas Californian has now adopted the strategy, as explained by publisher Paula Goudreau:

According to market analysis, the median age in Salinas is 28.6 years, compared to 35.2 for California and 37.2 nationally. Data show that 44.8 percent of the Salinas population is aged 24 or under, a demographic that prefers to get its information almost exclusively from mobile devices. The Californian’s digital audience has grown across multiple platforms, especially across mobile with mobile page views trending more than double last year’s, up 121 percent.

That’s the audience angle. The advertiser angle points to the same kind of math Advance performed:

For the past couple of years, nearly 90 percent of the print advertising dollars in the Californian have been aimed at Wednesday, Friday and Saturday editions.

Yes, it’s a relatively small — and maybe unusual — market. Print circulation is at about 6,000 daily and 9,000 on the weekend, down from 7,700 and 11,000 just three years ago. So is this a big Gannett test? No, says Gannett spokesperson Amber Allman. “[It’s] not based on a broad strategy,” citing the same local-specific factors as Goudreau. Indeed, I hear Gannett CEO Bob Dickey doesn’t think much of day-cutting overall.

Still, with the economics of local print deteriorating quickly with print advertising’s decline, we may well see more such cutting next year.

10Will we see news particle theory in practice?

I have no doubt we’ll laugh in 2025, when we look back at the current Stone Age of digital news presentation. While we’re beginning to see some semblance of news judgment in the smartphone home pages of the Times, Guardian, and Post, among a few others, most digital pages on both phones and desktop are still fairly flat. They may be doing a better job of telling us the news of the day, or the moment, but they show far too little context and relevant related information. It’s not that editors don’t want to include context; the tools just haven’t been available, despite worthy experiments like Circa.

“The Future of News is Not An Article”, Alexis Lloyd’s post, lays out a much smarter — and likely attainable — future.

“The form and structure of how news is distributed hasn’t been questioned, even though that form was largely developed in response to the constraints of print (and early web) media,” writes the creative director of the New York Times R&D Lab. “Rather than look to large tech platforms to propose the future of news, perhaps there is a great opportunity for news organizations themselves to rethink those assumptions. After all, it is publishers who have the most to gain from innovation around their core products. So what might news look like if we start to rethink the way we conceive of articles?”

Her one-word answer: Particles. “In order to leverage the knowledge that is inside every article published, we need to first encode it in a way that makes it searchable and extractable. This means identifying and annotating the potentially reusable pieces of information within an article as it is being written — bits that we in The New York Times R&D Lab have been calling Particles. This concept builds on ideas that have been discussed under the rubric of the Semantic Web for quite a while, but have not seen universal adoption because of the labor costs involved in doing so. At the Lab, we have been working on approaches to this kind of annotation and tagging that would greatly reduce the burden of work required.”

This notion may seem abstract, or reserved for techies, but it’s not. In fact, if news companies can unlock the deep and wide value of their related content — and relevant archives — their digital products will become greatly more valuable to news readers — and thus able to be priced higher.

Now that millions of people are seeing Instant Articles in their feeds, it seemed like a good time to talk with Michael Reckhow, the product manager for Instant Articles, about early usage patterns, publisher feedback, and international expansion — as well as concerns that publishers who use Instant Articles are giving Facebook too much power. Here’s our conversation, lightly condensed and edited.

Inside the article, we’ve done a bunch of optimization. One of the things we’ve learned as we’ve gone through this process is that speed is not only about the initial load; it’s about everything inside the article. If the top of the article loads really fast, but then you scroll down and an image isn’t loaded, or an ad isn’t loaded, that’s a bad experience. So we’ve worked on optimizing both images and ads.

It’s a particular challenge to make sure that those ads served by the publisher are really fast. So we’ve built optimization to load those ads before they come on screen. We’re now seeing that over 90 percent of the ads that people reach in Instant Articles are loaded in before they come on screen, which is a really great number on mobile. We are working to make sure that we optimize every part of the experience, including ads, to make sure it’s instant, because that’s the promise of what we’re trying to deliver here.

I’d say that, specifically, we’re trying to help publishers reach their audience in a broad way, earn ad revenue through that, and then reach the audience in a more detailed way. If you take a look at The New York Times in Instant Articles, they have not only ads, but they also have, in every article, a signup box for an email list. And they also have a box of related articles from The New York Times. You can see, in one Instant Article today, some of the core elements of what a publisher like The New York Times, that has both an ad and subscription model, is trying to do. We worked with them to make sure that these pieces work — the ads, the email signups, the related articles, and redistribution.

Look at the signatures at the bottom of this new Times document and you can see the impact of a year’s changes. CEO Mark Thompson, now moving into his fourth year at the company, has built his own team, and the 10 signatories inked their futures in what we’ll call the 2020 memo. Editor Dean Baquet, chief revenue officer Meredith Levien, and executive vice president for digital products Kinsey Wilson were among those laying out “Our Path Forward,” first in writing, and now in a series of sessions in the Times building with hundreds of staffers.

“We’ve talked to a dozen groups already,” Thompson told me Wednesday. “And we’ve got another dozen to go.”

As media watcher Jay Rosen tweeted:

I just read the new New York Times strategy memo. (No link available yet.) The best thing about it: the tone of institutional confidence.

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) October 7, 2015

The Times does show a confidence, though a budding one. After an often harrowing decade of challenge and change, the Times can move forward assertively, if perhaps not with a much business swagger — the future is still too uncertain a place for that.

As we get to the 2020 memo’s most important number, let’s recall a big one that has hung in media minds from midsummer on: 1 million. The Times officially hit the 1 million digital subscriber mark in August. On one hand, it’s a breathtaking number: What odds could you have gotten back in 2011, when the Times announced its new paywall to a skeptical world, that it would find a million people to pay only for digital access within four years? On the other, it’s just a start. But either way, it’s a number that demonstrates the Times’ new leadership in the news industry and gives it standing to figure out its next future.

The 2020 memo first generated one big headline: “Times sets goal of doubling digital revenue — to $800 million — by 2020.” Then one factoid circulated widely: 12 percent of Times readers deliver 90 percent of its digital revenue. Which led to Baquet’s point of clarity: “We need to focus on our loyal readers.”

The clear link between the two is in the report: “To get there [doubling of revenue], we must more than double the number of engaged digital readers who are the foundation of both our consumer and advertising revenue models.”

Thompson connects the two this way: “I think what’s happened over the last 12 months is a growing understanding — from data science and machine learning — that time spent is one important measure, and that frequency is a very important attribute and very significant predictor of subscription and retention.”

Let’s delve beneath those headlines to the numbers. Let’s do the math on the Times’ big new strategy and see how the Times’ modeling took them to this plan.

That $800 million is a big number, but it seems smaller in context. Currently, the Times generates something more than $400 million in digital-specific revenue a year. To achieve a doubling, the Times must achieve a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.5% from now to 2020. Importantly, that’s what its digital revenue growth rate must be — not its overall revenue growth, which has been stuck in the neighborhood of zero (“The newsonomics of zero”) for quite a while.

How ambitious is 12.5 percent? Somewhat. The strategy would require the Times to maintain its recent growth rates in both digital advertising and digital subscriptions for the next five years. Consider these recent numbers:

• Digital ad growth rate: In the second quarter, the Times could announce a digital ad growth rate of 14.2 percent. In the first quarter, it came in at 10.7 percent. If 12.5 percent is a new benchmark, then, the first two quarters fall evenly on both sides of it. (We’ll see the 3Q results soon, on Oct. 29.) Look back at 2014 and we see the momentum. Solid digital ad revenue growth began in early 2014, and by the second half of the year, it could show gains of 17 percent in Q3 gain and 19 percent in Q4.
• Digital subscription growth rate: In the second quarter, its digital-only subscription revenue grew 13.8 percent. The first quarter was even better: 14.4 percent. Its 2014 results show similar growth numbers in the teens.

Given that context, we might say that a 12.5 percent benchmark for doubling seems doable. It’s in the ballpark of what now seems possible.

Before we assess what the Times will need to do to make those numbers, let’s look at that second and ultimately more important fact: 12 percent of Times readers deliver 90 percent of its digital revenue.

Stop and take that in.

I began looking at similar numbers last year, and at first I found them astounding. Ask any publisher how well they’re doing in digital, and two numbers immediately tumble out of their mouths: their monthly unique visitors and then monthly pageviews. It’s a business numerically inclined to mass, despite the fact that in the ultimate infinity of news reading on the web, mass matters less and less to most publishers. (Google and Facebook — the new mass media of our day — can successfully work that model.)

My own broad math for newspaper’s digital audience valuation tells a similar tale:

• Reader revenue makes up about about 30 percent of most daily newspapers’ overall revenue. Who contributes that revenue? The huge majority of it comes in from print subscribers. Then there are the all-access (print + digital) subscribers. And then the digital-only subscribers. At most American dailies, that last group makes up only 1 percent or so of their total digital audience; that number is now about 3 percent for The New York Times.
• When we count digital revenue, of course, we count digital ad revenue. There, though, the story is parallel. In my talks with publishers, they tell me that between 40 and 66 percent of all pageviews are generated by just 10 percent of the digital audience. Further, some significant percentage of those heaviest readers are — guess what — also print subscribers.

The takeaway: While the overall digital audience — measured by “unique visitors” who may hit (purposely or otherwise) a measly one page per month — often exceeds the print audience by 20× or 40× or more, it’s only a small part of the audience that meaningfully supports the business and its future. At the Times, that number is 12 percent. Given how few digital-only subscribers local dailies can count, for many of them that number is 10 percent or less.

Of course, then, it makes sense for the Times — and probably everyone else — to focus on the most engaged digital readers. The 2020 memo pledges to do that, but what does it mean?

Mark Thompson ticks off a list of things that heightened attention to new engagement means. Smarter, more personalized presentation to the most engaged. Direct marketing that takes into better account current engagement level. Different kinds of related news presentation that reinforce time spent — and make that time spent worthwhile.

I asked him if it meant moving around resources to back the doubling-of-highly-engaged readers goal. He said he didn’t look at it primarily as a resource quesion. If successful, habituation means pulling the newsroom, the Times’ 50 data scientists, and engineers together around the goal of serving the best customers better. Expect habituation — measured by time spent and frequency, among other measures — to become a major internal metric.

Focusing more on the more engaged won’t mean doing less to find new audiences. The Times has moved strongly, but with more nuance than its reborn rival The Washington Post, to test Apple News, Facebook Instant Articles, and the other new mass distributors. It will continue to do so, but will also emphasize internal top-of-mind attention to better serving the best readers.

As we see the connection between more engaged readers and the $800 million goal, what’s on the short list that Times needs to do over the next four years to get there?

What the Times needs to do: Digital advertising

Let’s look at one benchmark for digital ad growth.

According to PWC, overall digital ad growth will run at a CAGR of 12.1 percent through 2019. If the Times needs 12.5 percent to double then, it needs to keep its share of the digital ad market level.

On the optimistic end, Meredith Levien’s major restructuring of the sales organization and strategy is matching that number. One big bet for 2016 and beyond is T Brand Studio (“What are they thinking? Times aims to double its branded content business”). Branded content remains a growth engine and could bring in 15 to 20 percent of overall digital ad revenue as it scales. Branded content, though, is such a new field, with competitors still entering, that its performance is a tough one to bank on.

Then there’s video. Ad rates remain high, and the Times remains ready to take yet another stab at producing high-enough-quality, low-enough-cost video to win big audiences and serve ’em up to advertisers. Expect a big new push in 2016.

The biggest question mark, as it is for almost everyone: mobile.

The advent of ad blockers on iPhones only puts an exclamation point on the mobile ad opportunity question for now. The nature of ad buying and selling will certainly change greatly over the next four years, in ways that no one can yet forecast well.

Given all those factors — many beyond the control of the Times — we can bet that the Times won’t achieve a steady-as-she-goes 12.5 percent annual growth rate. It could well be higher or lower, and could veer more wildly before — someday? — stabilizing.

What the Times needs to do: Digital subscriptions

“Right now, reader revenue seems more predictable [than digital ad revenue],” says Mark Thompson.

Here, the Times feels like it has already climbed a steep learning curve — and it has.

That 1 million subscriber number provides not just confidence, but also oodles of data. The Times has come to understand much more about the who buys what when and at what price points — and about retention, the secret sauce to the digital sub game.

As it moves forward, consider two factors: volume and pricing. Despite some of us (including me) expecting the Times’ digital subscriber total to plateau more quickly than they have, they’ve kept growing nicely. Over time, the company has tested numerous marketing approaches, just recently offering free digital day passes to anyone buying a print newsstand copy, a technique long used in the U.K.

The Times has already picked much of the higher-paying, low-hanging fruit. Loyalists — sold on the Times brand — will pay full price, and can probably be priced up selectively. As the Times passes 1 million, though, its increases in digital-only subscription volume haven’t been matched by increases in digital-only subscription revenue.

In the chart below, we see the Times’ great progress in volume since the introduction of its paywall. We can still see a steady 20 percent increase in year-over-year volume. (Click to enlarge.)

Comparatively, revenue growth comes in at about two-thirds of volume growth, or 13 percent. That tells us that as the Times continues to grow digital reader revenue, it’s having a tougher time maximizing each subscribers’ spend. That’s not unexpected, and it offers opportunities in product, in pricing, and in removing friction from the sign-up process. All are in progress.

Finally, expect the Times to grow into the global shoes it has laid out for itself. One indication of that global reach is its reporting corps; it can now claim the largest number of full-time international correspondents in its history (75), housed in 30 bureaus.

Already, more than 100,000 digital-only subscribers live outside the U.S. — about 12 to 13 percent of the overall total. Some of those pay a lower price. We can expect major moves in serving and attracting non-U.S. audiences, with pricing to match, beginning next year.

All those moves, based on experience, fuel the Times’ optimism about the future of reader revenue.

So how likely is the Times to meet that $800 million 2020 goal? I think we can give it pretty good odds. In fact, Mark Thompson might be being a little conservative with that the number. That would be smart: A goal to double is simple to grasp and meaningful to the marketplace. And as any experienced CEO knows, it’s much better to underpromise and overdeliver than the alternative.

What will 2020 indeed look like? Where will be on print/digital revenue crossover and the relative decline of print? How much of our reading will we do in Times apps or on platforms elsewhere? Those are a few of the many questions we’ll need to ponder as we think about the big question: Will $800 million in digital revenue in 2020 be enough to support the Times in the journalistic style to which we’ve become accustomed?

My guest today is Jason Kint. Jason is CEO of Digital Content Next, which I confess I liked better under its old name, the Online Publishers Association. It’s the trade organization representing most of the country’s largest online publishers.

I wanted to talk to Jason because this week marks the release of iOS 9 and with it the debut of ad blocking on the iPhone. Ad blockers have existed on desktop for years, of course, but they’ve mostly been a niche interest. On your phone, though, the appeal is obvious — faster loads, lower data use, fewer annoyances. And as I record this, iOS 9 has been out for about 24 hours, and the No. 1, No. 4, and No. 6 paid apps on the App Store are ad blockers.

So publishers are about to see some percentage of their mobile ads…disappear. Will it be a rounding error, or is this the beginning of the end for a certain kind of online advertising, the way popup ads were killed by technology in the early 2000s?

Jason’s been talking to a lot of publishers and he’s convinced it’s a big deal — an 8 or a 9 on a scale of 1 to 10, he says. We talked about how publishers should respond, whether it’s worth trying to block the blockers, and how to keep a focus on your audience’s needs. Here’s our conversation.

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Jason Kint on Twitter
Digital Content Next, formerly the Online Publishers Association
“CEO Explains Why the Online Publishers Association Changed Its Name” (Nov. 3, 2014)
“Back in DC. 48hrs. 7,300 flight miles. 30+ premium publishers, 10 meetings all related to adblocking. Working hard on this issue.”
“Dear ad blocking community, we need to talk” (Sept. 10, 2015)
“Rise of ad blocking threatens German publishers” (May 28, 2015)
“The Rise of Adblocking” (2013)
“A blow for mobile advertising: The next version of Safari will let users block ads on iPhones and iPads” (June 10, 2015)
“How big a deal will adblocking on iPhones and iPads be for publishers?” (June 12, 2015)
“Ad Blockers Shoot to the Top of iPhone App Store Chart After Debut Day” (September 17, 2015)
Auto Image Loading in Netscape
WTF Ad Tech series at Digiday
Napster
Recording Industry Association of America
Pop-up blocking
“Over 300 businesses now whitelisted on AdBlock Plus, 10% pay to play” (February 3, 2015)
Direct marketing
“‘Tracking’ is immaterial to most publishers’ revenue streams. industry myth that it’s necessary.’
What is online behavioral advertising?
Podcasting on Nieman Lab
Native advertising on Nieman Lab
“Publishers arm for war with ad blockers” (February 19, 2015)
Timeline of file sharing
Crystal
“A wave of distributed content is coming — will publishers sink or swim?” (March 24, 2015)
“Facebook’s Instant Articles are live: Either a shrewd mobile move by publishers — or feeding the Borg” (May 13, 2015)
“Content blocking in iOS 9 is going to screw up way more than just ads” (August 28, 2015)
“Separating advertising’s wheat and chaff” (August 12, 2015)

First, of course, there’s the new News app, which takes the place of Newsstand (your news apps are set free, floating free on your home screen). Apple News, installed by default with iOS 9, is a Flipboard-like news reader that lets participating publishers distribute their content directly on Apple devices. Any publisher can sign up to add content, and dozens — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BuzzFeed, the Daily Mail, Vox, Quartz, The Atlantic, and more — are already available.

Beyond News, one of the biggest changes in iOS 9 is revamped search: It now extends inside apps. Swipe right to pull up the Spotlight screen, then search for a term like “Syria” and find related news stories from apps that have enabled the feature. The Spotlight screen will also surface other customized content, including location-based news, and suggests apps based on the time of day that you normally use them — so it might pull up the New York Times app during your commute, for instance.

Related is deep linking, which lets users open search results within an app instead of in a web browser. Here’s how Apple explains that one: “If users have your app installed, the link takes them directly into your app; if they don’t have your app installed, the link opens your website in Safari.”

There are also iPad-specific updates: The iPad running iOS 9 supports split-screen mode and picture-in-picture mode, allowing you to run apps side by side or briefly open one app and then slide it away. These features should work especially well with the new, big iPad Pro that Apple announced last week.

A number of news publishers and news apps have been updated for iOS 9, or are taking the opportunity to explain what their News app strategy will look like. Here are a few changes to look for, and we’ll continue to update this list:

— The Guardian: Search and deep linking are enabled, so you can find Guardian content from the iOS 9 Spotlight screen and access content within the app straight from Safari. Multitasking is enabled, too, allowing The Guardian to be used with another app. (The Guardian also updated its Apple Watch app, but, again, watchOS 2 has been delayed.)

— BuzzFeed: Works with Spotlight search.

— Pocket: Works with Spotlight search, as well as the new “Picture in Picture” feature on iPad, so you can watch a video in Pocket while using other iPad apps.

— Flipboard: Works with Spotlight search.

— Timeline: Results from the app appear in Spotlight. And “annotated text within Timeline will bring up cards with context and detailed information on relevant topics.” The Apple Watch app gets an update too.

— New York magazine is making almost all its stories available on Apple News, and its launch advertiser is Gucci, with ads starting to appear Friday.

A new Apple TV, with an open app platform

“We believe the future of television is apps,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said, and you can understand why the app company would think that. Netflix, HBO Go and Now, Hulu, and others (like on-demand services before them) have trained TV watchers to think of apps as a content source. (Over 60 percent of pay-TV streaming video is consumed on an Apple device, he said.) So the new Apple TV includes a full app store — which means publishers will be able to publish video directly to it.

Apps will be built with the new tvOS, which like watchOS builds on what developers are used to in iOS. (I should note that Apple’s playing catchup to some other platforms here. Basic games like Crossy Road and custom app UIs are already available on devices like the Amazon Fire TV. But the processor power and sophistication and variety of apps are substantially higher here.)

Apple is also pushing Siri’s voice recognition as a search tool, but at launch, it will only search a few content providers (Hulu, HBO, Showtime, Netflix, and its own iTunes). Eddy Cue promised more sources will be added over time, but the phrasing makes me think that’ll be done through business deals rather than opening it up to all apps. That’s a shame, since it’ll likely keep most news publishers out.

Siri was also shown answering basic news and information questions while you watch a show — sports scores and weather. (“How did the Giants do yesterday? What’s the weather in Juneau?”) There was no indication that developers would have access to that sort of in-show interaction, but you can imagine uses for breaking news and other journalistic purposes. But that’s still a ways off.

I’m strange — I actually watch a decent amount of TV news through my Apple TV. Far more than I watch through any other method. I watch Wall Street Journal video through WSJ Live, old news clips through the ABC News app, 60 Minutes segments on CBS News, New York Times and Onion videos through Yahoo Screen, Wired videos through The Stream, highlights and games through WatchESPN and At Bat, and Frontline through PBS. With a 1-year-old at home, I’m up at odd hours, and flipping through news videos helps fill some dead time.

With that context, the new Apple TV — and the platform it will enable — is legit exciting. It will get me to watch a lot more news videos. Given the trouble many publishers have had getting eyeballs to their videos, that’s good news. My question is how unusual my habits are — whether making a very good Netflix/HBO Now/Hulu box and a pretty darned good gaming platform will direct any appreciable attention toward news. (And the related question: whether those positive qualities will be enough to get people buying a $149/$199 box when there are Chromecasts and Rokus and Fire TV Sticks at a third of that price.) Still, if I ran a major media company, this is an area I’d be directing developer resources.

The iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, opening new interface possibilities

How strange is it to have the iPhone — generator of two-thirds of Apple’s revenue — relegated to the final half-hour of a two-hour keynote? Sure, it’s the “S” year, when the outward appearance is left unchanged and many of the upgrades are internal and hard to see. But still!

3D Touch — Apple’s new force-detecting sensors, debuted in the Watch earlier this year — is going to be a UX playground for developers. I can imagine news apps where tapping a headline pulls up the full story, but a quick press-and-hold pulls up a brief news summary, or an options-and-sharing panel, or background or contextual information. The twin pillars of headline-and-story have defined most mobile interactions with news; 3D Touch will push new forms and shapes. People will do great stuff with it, assuming it works well. (I worry a bit about how good a job it’ll do distinguishing between different kinds of presses; my Apple Watch and MacBook Pro are a little less than perfect on that.)

Beyond that, the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus are mostly just more powerful than their predecessors. The camera’s better; the processor is faster. That’ll help lead to even more time we all spend looking at our phones, but that’s more an amplification of existing trends than the start of a new one.

The iPad Pro, soon to be spotted in newsrooms

The iPad — once the driver of publisher dreams — has been in a slow drift downward for a few years: still selling decent numbers, but shrinking a bit each quarter. Plenty of people use their tablets for little more than streaming videos, and for that purpose, there’s no reason to pay Apple’s price premium.

The new iPad Pro, unveiled today, aims to justify that by making the iPad more of a laptop replacement. A larger screen and faster processor allows for easier multitasking and more powerful tools; the new Smart Keyboard aims to make modern information work less of a chore; the Apple Pencil looks like it could be useful for casual note taking. As a result, I suspect the iPad Pro will be appealing to journalists — a higher-polish version of Microsoft’s Surface. (The first piece of content showed off in Phil Schiller’s iPad Pro presentation was an Apple News story from Wired.)

Go @wired! Our story displayed on stage on ipad pro! #AppleEvent http://t.co/FLG2ASfKue @kathleencodes @whyisjake pic.twitter.com/X2ZEDTfBV4

— Hayley Nelson (@hayley_nelson) September 9, 2015

Still, at $799 to $1,079 (plus another $268 for the keyboard and stylus!), I doubt it’ll move units at a significant enough scale to increase tablets’ share of the news audience. It seems like a smart strategy for the iPad to target enterprise customers, but one that probably won’t move publishers’ needles — or stem the shift to smartphones.

The Apple Watch, with faster, more powerful apps

Cook gave a brief update on its newest major product line (though without revealing any sales numbers), while also talking more about watchOS 2, first unveiled a few months ago. The big news with the new OS is allowing native watch apps, which run on the device rather than on the attached iPhone. That should speed up launch times for news apps, which have been rather abysmal. (No one wants to hold their wrist up in Dick Tracy position for 15 seconds while a few headlines load.)

Apple’s Jeff Williams also showed off the new availability third-party “complications” — little info nuggets that appear on the watch face — and highlighted the potential for news companies. (The example given: a CNN headline.) That’ll be good for the few national and global brands that will be able to reach a scale among Apple Watch users worth the bother. For most news organizations, though, active Watch development is still a reasonable skip.

Hey, did you not know we have a podcast? That’s fair — Press Publish debuted back in January 2013 and, like many podcasts, it lost steam after a while. But we’re ready to jump back in! I hope you’ll join us as we interview some of the most interesting people in digital news.

In today’s episode, I interviewed Cory Haik, the executive director of emerging news products at The Washington Post. Cory has been the news-side lead for the Post’s Project Rainbow, its attempt to rethink its strategy for presenting news on mobile. (We wrote about its very interesting new iPhone app last month.) There aren’t that many traditional news publishers who are innovating in mobile apps, but the Post is definitely high on that list.

We talked about the Post’s strategy, the design resources necessary to carry it out, how tablet and smartphone app designs differ, the advantage of being preinstalled on a device, and a lot more. I hope you’ll give it a listen — and that you subscribe to the podcast (here’s the iTunes link) and keep listening.

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Show notes

@coryhaik
“Meet the Post’s mobile leadership, A Q&A with Cory Haik and Julia Beizer” (Oct. 21, 2014)
“Cory Haik named Executive Director for Emerging News Products” (July 21, 2015)
The Washington Post
The Post’s mobile apps
The Project Rainbow-ized version of the Post’s website
Julie Beizer, the Post’s director of mobile product
“The Washington Post’s new iOS app emphasizes bold design to try to reach a national and global audience” (July 9, 2015)
“Washington Post launches twice-daily tablet editions on Amazon Fire app” (Nov. 20, 2014)
“The Washington Post is experimenting with bringing its tablet experience to the web” (May 5, 2015)
“Squirrel!”
“A new app from NowThis wants to reduce the work of finding news to one big red button” (July 29, 2015)
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz
Cognitive load
“2013: The Year ‘the Stream’ Crested” (Alexis Madrigal, Dec. 12, 2013)
“Small podcasters have trouble finding new listeners and monetizing, survey finds” (July 17, 2015)
Rainbow Brite
The Washington Post (the new app) for iPhone
Washington Post Classic for iPhone
The Washington Post Advisory Panel
Shailesh Prakash, Post CTO/CIO
Marty Baron, Post editor
“A mixed bag on apps: What The New York Times learned with NYT Opinion and NYT Now” (Oct. 1, 2014)
“A new NYT Now: All the aggregation you enjoyed before, now for free” (May 11, 2015)
Joey Marburger, the Post’s director of digital products and design
“How involved has Jeff Bezos been at The Washington Post? Here’s one data point” (Feb. 11, 2015)
“Bezos courts Washington Post editors, reporters” (Sept. 4, 2013)
Socialcam
“The Washington Post Becomes Official News Partner of Socialcam for 2012 Summer Olympics Coverage” (July 9, 2012)

Adblocking is coming to the iPhone with iOS 9.

Adblocking — running a piece of software in your web browser that prevents ads on most web pages from loading — has moved from a niche behavior for the nerdy few to something mainstream. A report from 2014 found that adblock usage was up 70 percent year-over-year, with over 140 million people blocking ads worldwide, including 41 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds. You can understand why that would be troubling to the publishers who sell those ads. But until now, adblocking has been limited almost entirely to desktop — mobile browsers haven’t allowed it.

Here’s how the developer documentation puts the new change, coming in iOS 9:

The new Safari release brings Content Blocking Safari Extensions to iOS. Content Blocking gives your extensions a fast and efficient way to block cookies, images, resources, pop-ups, and other content.

Your app extension is responsible for supplying a JSON file to Safari. The JSON consists of an array of rules (triggers and actions) for blocking specified content. Safari converts the JSON to bytecode, which it applies efficiently to all resource loads without leaking information about the user’s browsing back to the app extension.

Xcode includes a Content Blocker App Extension template that contains code to send your JSON file to Safari. Just edit the JSON file in the template to provide your own triggers and actions. The sample JSON file below contains triggers and actions that block images on webkit.org.

What this means is, when iOS 9 launches in the fall, you’ll be able to go to the App Store and download an extension that will block ads on most news sites.

Is there any chance that won’t be incredibly popular? The desktop version of Safari currently allows a variety of custom extensions, and what’s the most popular? Hint: It’s called AdBlock.

For me, the arguments for using ad blockers range from the unconvincing (dude, information wants to be free) to the reasonable (I don’t need dozens of tracking beacons on every webpage) to the downright understandable (poorly built ads slow my browser to a crawl). I don’t use an ad blocker, but I do block all Flash by default for performance reasons, which accomplishes some of the same ends. The best arguments for adblocking are even stronger on mobile than they are on desktop — bandwidth and performance and battery life are all at a premium.

This is worrisome. Publishers already make tiny dollars on mobile, even as their readers have shifted there in huge numbers. To take one example, The New York Times has more than 50 percent of its digital audience on mobile, but generates only 10 percent of its digital advertising revenue there. Most news outlets aren’t even at that low level.

If iOS users — the majority of mobile web users in the U.S., and disproportionately appealing demographically — can suddenly block all your ads with a simple free download, where is the growth going to come from? (By the way, a version of Adblock Plus for Android just came out a couple weeks ago, though it appears to be more limited than what Apple is allowing.)

The folks behind Adblock Plus — a different ad blocker from AdBlock; it’s a confusing space — aren’t sure they like the way Apple’s allowing it, saying it might make certain adblocking methods harder to implement on the desktop version of Safari. But desktop Safari is small potatoes compared to the web browser on every iPhone and every iPad, where it was impossible to write ad blockers before now.

The potential impact of “Content Blocking Safari Extensions” even goes beyond blocked ads. Apple is explicitly allowing the blocking of cookies on a site-by-site basis. For example, you could build an extension that blocked the cookies that allow a newspaper paywall to work. The Yourtown Times allows you 10 stories free a month? It’s probably using a cookie to keep track of that count. Block that cookie and the paywall comes tumbling down — you’re a fresh visitor every time. Imagine being able to download an extension that blocked paywall cookies on the top 50 paid news sites. It wouldn’t even be particularly hard to code; unless Apple chooses to prevent it, someone will do it. News sites would be able to build workarounds — changing cookie IDs regularly, requiring user login from article 1 — but winning that sort of cat-and-mouse game is something publishers are unlikely to be good at.

Why would Apple do this?

An Apple partisan might argue it just wants to give users control of their iPhone experience, and having debuted extensions in the last version of iOS, allowing them to alter web content is a natural next step.

An Apple realist might argue that its great rival Google makes more than 90 percent of its revenue from online advertising — a growing share of that on mobile, and a large share of that on iPhone. Indeed, Google alone makes about half of all global mobile advertising revenue. So anything that cuts back on mobile advertising revenue is primarily hurting its rival. (Google has been less friendly to adblockers than its “open” positioning would suggest.)

An Apple cynic might note that the company on Monday unveiled its new News app, which promises a beautiful reading experience — and a monetization model based on Apple’s iAds. iAds will, one can assume, never be blockable by third-party extensions available in the App Store. Ads that appear at the operating system level — as opposed to in HTML and JavaScript on a web page — have a rather invulnerable position so long as you keep using Apple products. (It’s good to be the platform.)

Maybe I’m exaggerating the potential impact here. (Talk me down!) Maybe people won’t download the free app at the top of the Most Downloaded list that promises to make their websites load more quickly, more beautifully, and using less data. But use of ad blockers has done nothing but rise, particularly among young users, and people are about to be given an easy way to do on the devices they use most. For the many news companies who are counting on mobile advertising for their future business model, I don’t see a way that this change won’t shave off a real slice of mobile advertising revenue.

I’ve spent the past few weeks with a town crier attached to my wrist.

Or at least that’s the best metaphor I can come up with for what wearing an Apple Watch does for (to?) a news-interested consumer. It’s tweaked the modern American condition — constantly fiddling with your smartphone — with a system of thumps and buzzes that grab your attention whenever an app believes it deserves it. It is simultaneously a marvel (a powerful little computer, attached to my arm!) and a bore, a transference of focus from a nice 4.7-inch screen to a tiny 42-millimeter one.

The arrival of any new class of devices leads the journalism-inclined to ask: What does it mean for news? And today, at least, the answer is: not much. Only a small share of news consumers will have a smartwatch in the immediate future. The first class of news apps, from all the usual big players, are annoying to launch, clumsy to navigate, and shallow in content. (For what it’s worth, I think The New York Times’ “one-sentence stories” and NPR One’s focus on audio make them the early leaders.) Reading anything more than a glance on your wrist is surprisingly tiresome; a headline and a sentence are probably all you’ll stand for before just whipping out your phone.

What the Apple Watch is really good at is notifications — getting your attention. And that’s important. The shift to digital has pushed news from a scheduled activity — a morning newspaper, an evening newscast — to a constant background noise, something you dip into or stumble upon irregularly. The art of usefully interrupting someone with news is turning into one of this century’s key journalistic skills.

And anyone whose memory stretches back more than a few years should hesitate to dismiss the Apple Watch too quickly. When the iPhone debuted in 2007, plenty thought it as a rich geek’s plaything, a niche product for Apple’s fan club. There were no apps! Data networks crawled! When Steve Jobs showed off what news would look like on his shiny new slab of glass, he pulled up NYTimes.com in a web browser — headlines illegible, shrunk to the size of atoms — and described a world where reading news on a phone meant a thousand pinches in and out.

Steve Jobs showing off NYTimes.com at the first iPhone keynote, 2007.

(“It’s kind of a slow site, because it’s got a lot of images,” Jobs said at the time — perhaps the first public complaint of a news site loading too slowly on mobile.)

Even among those who saw the iPhone’s potential, few would have guessed that, in less than a decade, it would become the primary way many people — particularly young people — get news. Or that the iPhone (and other devices modeled on it) would be driving the majority of traffic to many news sites. Or that it would create entirely new interface paradigms for accessing news and other information.

So while the Apple Watch seems more interesting than important in 2015, it’s easy to imagine looking back on today five or six years from now and thinking: Why didn’t we pay more attention? (News companies don’t exactly have the best track record of anticipating future change.)

So let’s try to imagine what that future vision of the news experience on a smartwatch might look like — and see what’s standing in the way.

So what’s standing between today and this sort of smartwatch future? There are boring technical answers: faster processors, better networks. But the real hurdle is intelligence. Personalization. Data. Making those judgments — what you’re interested in and in what context — will require huge amounts of user data. These devices will be personalized in every other important way — your messages, your fitness, your heartbeat — and it’s unlikely smartwatch users will stand for a one-size-fits-all package of news.

If that’s the future, who’ll be in the best position to collect and act on all that data? It’s not going to be your local daily newspaper publisher, and it probably won’t be the major national news brands. It’ll be technology companies: the people behind social networks and the devices they run on. That’s not new — it’s an extension of the power shift we’ve already seen on phones — but it’s discouraging for companies that hope to have sustainable businesses around producing news.

Maybe smartwatches will be a fad, our era’s pet rock, and how news plays on them won’t matter. The move from the desktop web to phones has been huge; the move from phones to watches is…of undetermined size at this point. Most likely, the smartwatch will end up ranking in impact somewhere on the spectrum between the iPhone (huge) and Google Glass (laughable) — but where, exactly, is unknowable.

But the problem the watch outlines — that news companies don’t know enough about their readers — is a very real one. It’s a problem for advertisers; it’s a problem for building audience; it’s a problem for customizing information that meets readers’ needs. And that’ll be true no matter what’s on people’s wrists next year.

Any Apple product announcement prompts an outsized response, and the Apple Watch was no exception. Reaction from consumers was typically polarizing; for the news industry, the response was a typical mixture of excitement and fear at the prospect of molding a meaningful experience for users on a whole new platform — not to mention the challenge of creating an even shorter news experience that threatens to “make tweets look like longform.”

Of course, wearables in general and the smartwatch in particular weren’t invented in Cupertino. But the impact of the Apple Watch was such a certainty that, even before Tim Cook had stepped onstage to unveil “Apple’s most personal device ever,” I’d begun to formulate this research project on the effect that new smartwatches would have on content businesses. In the past month, I’ve spoken to many of the people figuring out wearable strategy at publishers including The New York Times, BuzzFeed, the Financial Times, The Washington Post, the BBC, USA Today, and Circa — as well as others outside the news industry whose alternative experience may help point the way for media companies. In this report, I try to cover the potential editorial, product, and commercial implications of the mainstream uptake of wearables broadly and the smartwatch in particular.

Alongside fitness trackers from companies like Jawbone and Fitbit, the smartwatch is projected to be the key wearable product category to grow over the next few years — particularly since Google’s decision to slow development on Google Glass. Compared to a headset, the wristwatch has the advantage of a hundred years of mass market adoption. Even the act of playing with a watch obsessively has a rich history. Here’s Samuel Pepys in 1665:

But, Lord! to see how much of my old folly and childishnesse hangs upon me still that I cannot forbear carrying my watch in my hand in the coach all this afternoon, and seeing what o’clock it is one hundred times; and am apt to think with myself, how could I be so long without one; though I remember since, I had one, and found it a trouble, and resolved to carry one no more about me while I lived.

Pepys’ £14 device, a gift from a scrivener that was “a greater present than I valued it,” might seem a world away from the new generation of smartwatches, which compress smartphone technology into a familiar form factor. But his mixed feelings about a new gadget were notably similar to the reactions some of my interviewees had to their early experiences with smartwatches. At first, the novelty of a new device can elicit strange or jarring experiences, though they can grow to be useful more quickly than you might imagine. Andrew Phelps, senior product manager for iOS at The New York Times (and a former Nieman Lab staffer), described how his first smartwatch experience made his “whole body started vibrating” when he started receiving notifications on multiple devices at once:

The first experience I had was a sort of revulsion, because I always had something competing for my attention. Suddenly I’m in a meeting, and whereas the phone in my pocket is not a distraction, the watch is always just out of view and lighting up and buzzing.

Once you’ve dealt with your personal reaction to having a gadget physically attached to a wrist, you still have to handle how others perceive it. One common social stigma described to me by Joey Marburger, director of digital products and design at The Washington Post, is something I and many others have experienced:

I was one of the first people to get the Pebble smartwatch. My logic was like: I can silence my phone and I’ll tailor notifications that come to my watch. I don’t have to use my phone in a meeting, or pull out my phone and be rude — I’ll just check my watch. What I learned very quickly is I was being more rude, because it looked like I was constantly checking the time.

While checking your phone is still not acceptable in all settings, it still beats the palpable sense of impatience associated with raising your wrist. Checking your smartwatch in company is going to require a new set of social norms to become natural and commonplace.

Confusing what’s essentially a miniaturised smartphone with a conventional timepiece is an awkward behavior partially caused by these early smartwatches’ skeuomorphism, the design tendency to create technologies that mimic analog or real-world products in order to make themselves easier for users to understand. Eventually though, one imagines that, as Apple has done before, the idea of a watch as a reference point for these devices will grow less and less relevant. Before that happens, though, publishers will have to figure out how to make a new category of products work for them and for their readers.

What should push notifications look like?

Since consuming content of any reasonable length on a smartwatch is difficult, the key focus of any wearable content product is likely to be push notifications. Notifications have been growing in usage and prominence since their introduction in iOS3 in 2009. The New York Times’ Andrew Phelps noted how exceptional they are as a medium:

The New York Times reaches about 15 million devices with our breaking news alerts, which is just a crazy number. No communication medium in history has ever allowed us to reach that many people all at the same time, maybe with the exception of television. I mean even if our Twitter account had 15 million followers, only, what, 2 percent of them would see a tweet at any given time. We have this great power in being able to say whatever we want to all of these people at a moment’s notice — and so with that comes a lot of responsibility.

And unlike television — with the exception of something like the Emergency Alert System — a push notification can change what you’re doing at any time. Everyone I spoke to believes the notification to be the primary type of user interaction on smartwatch devices.

On the Apple Watch, there will be two types of notification. One is a Short Look, that comes up when an app has something to tell you, with just a glance at that information. Then, there’s a Long Look, triggered if you leave your wrist up with the notification on, which will display more information associated with the notification. On Android Wear, the notification either sits in the background where you can look at it any time or alerts you and lets you tap on it to expand or swipe for other options.

Making notifications personal

Most news organizations using push notifications on smartphones use them to send breaking news alerts, often undifferentiated by topic or user preferences. Almost everyone that I spoke to said they see the smartwatch as an ultimatum on this model of notifications. The BBC’s Pembrooke described the problem with reference to the BBC News app:

The pitch that [Apple] are making as the top-level proposition is that it’s a much much more personal device. And therefore one of our issues with notifications at the moment for us is that at the moment we don’t have much personalization in notifications. [When] we send a BBC News alert, it goes to everybody — no matter what time of day or night it is, wherever they happen to be, and regardless of whether or not they’re interested in that particular topic or not.

Apple is emphasizing the “personal” aspect of the Apple Watch; executives used the word 19 times in its introductory announcement. This thematic focus has certainly filtered down to publishers, who overwhelmingly cited both personalizing content and using a more personal tone as central to developing successful smartwatch content. Since the Apple Watch is “such a personal device, it makes perfect sense to be pushing more personal alerts,” Phelps says. On wearable products, “personalization is a given,” according to USA Today’s Julian Richards; at The Washington Post, Marburger said “maybe a wearable strategy is personalization overall”; Alex Walters at the Financial Times described personalization as “the most important factor” in a wearable content strategy.

Tailoring content

Many publishers will face both technical and resource challenges in personalizing their content for wearable products. Besides being able to rely on a user’s iPhone or Android phone to build a rich personal profile of users, new smartwatch devices have their own suite of sensors to assist with this process. For the first part of its lifespan, the wearable was defined by its sensors, since Fitbits and Jawbones used them to track your fitness behavior. Despite some of the health-tracking aspirations having been pared back in the Apple Watch, most smartwatches will still have microphones, ambient light sensors, accelerometers, and heart rate monitors. Some have GPS and mobile reception built in, while other rely on the attached phone for that data.

USA Today’s Richards notes that these “devices are packed with sensors, carrying a detailed awareness of users’ lives. They could, for instance, enhance a story on sedentary lifestyles by showing how you, personally, measure up.” Pembrooke sees a path for the BBC that relies more on location data than the biometric awareness of smartwatches:

The more relevant use cases are less around data garnered from a wearable…similar to pulse rate than data you can garner in terms of where someone is — and focusing breaking news or local news alerts based on location rather than that kind of personal data.

Location could be critical, since even though most publishers find that most mobile usage is in the home, it could be that wearables deliver the truly mobile experience we once expected of smartphones. According to investor Taylor Davidson, the opportunity can be thought of by asking: “What parts of our day do we not have a phone in our hands?”

The Apple Watch at launch will have only very restricted hardware access for developers, so it might be that we don’t see news products that take advantages of those sensors for some time. But Kurt Mueller, a developer I spoke to at Concentric Sky — a development company that’s created products for National Geographic and the UN — thinks that Apple will unlock them as the product matures. Just as with the original iPhone, the toolkit will be opened up so that developers can eventually tie news products in with the richer picture they’re getting of their readers. That could mean apps that send you post-workout meal recipes, or that tie into your daily routine — knowing when you’re talking a walk around the block to send you an update on a story you’re interested in, knowing not to push you breaking news alerts when you’re out for a run, or knowing that when you’re sitting down at work, it’s not a great idea to distract you.

Those last examples might be key, since they’re built on a concept of “negative space” in news publishing, which current digital products don’t acknowledge — knowing (and acting on) when not to interact with someone. Alex Markowetz, whose work on smartphone addiction emphasizes the dangers of device addiction in the modern knowledge worker economy, described the issue like this:

The next feature of the phone [should be] a feature that lets me interact with the phone less frequently. The phone that helps me leave the phone alone. Because I’m a knowledge worker, that’s how I make my money — by thinking — and I don’t want to be interrupted.

For publishers already putting personalization front and center via active or passive cues from readers, the reward may be an easier transition to the new model. Circa’s Galligan sees its follow-a-story model (which allows users to select stories they see as important) as a boon for building wearable products that might feature this functionality most prominently: “In our case, the service model, on top of the ability to keep people in touch with the things that they care more about and do so in a way that gets them what they need and then gets out of the way, is a major advantage of ours.”

There are challenges in developing this idea of relevance though. Here’s how Andrew Phelps expressed them to me:

Personalization alone is fraught with problems. When you recommend something to someone using an algorithm and they don’t like that recommendation, you’ve lost them. So now you combine that with the fact that you’re interrupting their day on yet another device and it’s really a minefield.

We also have to tread lightly because nothing is more terrifying than the simplicity with which a user can disable alerts from this provider forever, and that the biggest and best form of retaliation is in the user’s hands.

The right tone

For Noah Chestnut at BuzzFeed News, the notification represents an opportunity to adapt the tone and voice of a publisher: “Notifications are difficult. It’s a new format and it’s a new form that has this sense of immediacy. But also because the most common form of notification is a text message, they can also be silly, they can be light, they can be personal.” Noah cited the impersonality of mainstream breaking news alerts as a drawback for publishers looking to extend their notification strategy to wearables.

The alternative is to make notifications more like the content they coexist with on a platform. Since they sit alongside text messages, their tone could be more social and friendly. Publishers with a more traditional voice will find it more difficult to adapt than publishers like BuzzFeed and Vice who’ve already cultivated this social tone.

However it’s achieved, being relevant, personal, and glanceable are the three key factors in creating appropriate and successful wearable content. As Chestnut described it to me, publishers will have to move beyond “I just receive and consume.”

What will smartwatches look like in a few years?

While even optimistic hardware sales forecasts are fairly muted about the immediate revolutionary potential of wearables, many analysts say they believe the category will attract mainstream interest in coming years. I found that opinion matched, for the most part, within the publishing community. For most organizations, the appetite to embrace wearable technology is more driven by curiosity and branding than by any commercial imperative. The real growth area “still feels like it’s mobile,” says the BBC’s Pembrooke:

At the moment, what this turns into is an arms race for the big publishers to make sure you’ve got your app installed with as many of your loyal users as possible, and I strongly suspect that it is the app on the mobile phone that’ll remain the personalization hub of how you manage your preferences across these devices.

Publishers I interviewed had a mixture of enthusiasm and skepticism for wearable products’ eventual adoption. “Whenever you introduce a new device into people’s lives, the first thing that people do is say, ‘Why would I ever need that? It’ll be a total failure,'” Phelps says. “Cellphones were once ‘for emergencies only’ and definitely not for going on the Internet or reading, and I’m hearing all the same skepticism about the watch…Whenever Apple enters a new device category, people are skeptical and the rollout is a little bumpy — and then it sells like gangbusters. In a couple of years, people will think, ‘I can’t believe we ever didn’t have digital Internet-connected watches on our wrists.'”

Nonetheless, there’s also recognition that Apple’s embrace of a category alone doesn’t guarantee consumer demand. “All sorts of new platforms, devices, and mediums will come in and out of fashion, seem hot but in reality aren’t,” says the Post’s Marburger. “We are paying attention to that, but our job is not to make our readers think that a watch that reads you headlines is the future.”

Matt Galligan at Circa is convinced of the transformative effect Apple can have on the category:

[The Apple Watch] is going to do for wearables what the iPhone did for smartphones and what the iPad did for tablets. We have had these things before, but it won’t be until this moment…that we’ll really see the potential of the space. I think that far too many people are comparing the Apple Watch to any of its predecessors, and that’s no different to someone comparing an iPhone to a BlackBerry and complaining why there’s no physical keyboard. This is going to open up minds, and it’s going to dramatically change a lot of things. There’s a lot left to figure out in the market. We’re not going to understand the full implications for two or three years. But I believe that this thing is going to be huge.

Takeaways

The opportunity for building significant revenue and audience for publishers in wearables in the near term is slight, even if the Apple Watch realizes the potential mobile industry analysts see in it. The advantage to those in the news industry who capitalize on the novelty of the smartwatch platform in its early stages are chiefly focused on the halo effect of being perceived as having ‘cutting edge’ products. There may well also be a small number of commercial native advertising partnerships that could deliver direct revenue as a result.

Early adopters will be relatively few in number, but demographically appealing to publishers.

Smartwatch adoption will be small at first — certainly when compared to the enormous growth in smartphones. But early Apple Watch adopters are likely to be particularly desirable for media companies — young, tech savvy, and with significant disposable income, often combined with an interest in fitness. Publishers that already targeting those wealthier audiences may have an edge.

Wearables are the beginning of a multi-device product mindset.

From a technology perspective, the key shift will be for publishers to consider their iPhone and Android products as deploying onto multiple platforms, with an experience that is linked technically and experientially for users. Phone and watch will be more tightly linked than phone and laptop have been, and much of the user experience will be defined by movement in between devices.

Notifications and content will have to be personal, relevant, and glanceable.

Rather than just moving existing content to a new platform, the key challenge for wearable product creators will be to build and select content on the basis of its relevance to a user, to deliver it in a more personal tone, and to create it so that it can be consumed at a glance. There’s a divide in how users may react to notifications, the defining interaction model of the watch. Some publishers see a content experience that extends from smartwatch to smartphone; others focus on a wearable notification layer than exists without involving an accompanying mobile journey. Particularly in the latter case, the suitability of the content, and its potential to be shared directly from a watch interface are key to developing an effective user experience.

New social norms will develop around giving attention to your wrist.

Will the watch drive more attention to our phones or save us from them? Will regularly looking at your wrist be considered more or less rude than pulling out your phone? How new social norms develop around smartwatches will be key to its long-term adoption. (It’s a hurdle Google Glass couldn’t get past.)

Watches could lead to media consumption in new places.

While smartphones are used more in the home than when news readers are really on the go, the smartwatch’s low friction user experience may represent the chance to reach people when they are between locations — as well as in traditional digital consumption locations like the home and workplace.

Data will be a challenge.

Useful user analytics will be hard or impossible to come by, at least in early versions of these devices. That will make it hard to judge what’s successful or not working about what publishers offer. Qualitative reporting — user panels, focus groups, user testing — will be a necessity for publishers to build a rich picture of users’ wearable experiences.

Widespread adoption is not guaranteed

It will take years for smartwatch adoption to reach significant scale — if it ever does. Apple’s big bet on the device is heartening to those who want to see them succeed. But unlike the iPhone — which promised to reduce your device count by combining your iPod with your cell phone — the Apple Watch proposes the utility of adding an extra device to user’s device profile. Given Apple Watch’s pricing and requirement for a recent accompanying iPhone — and the fact that many consumers are yet to be won over to the smartwatch category’s utility — it could be that Apple Watch, Android Wear, Pebble and others all struggle to find a mainstream foothold.

Jack Riley is head of audience development for The Huffington Post UK and completed this work as a 2015 Visiting Nieman Fellow.

Photo of stacked Moto 360s on table by TechStage used under a Creative Commons license. Photos of Tim Cook announcing Apple Watch and watches on display by AP/Marcio Jose Sanchez. Photo of Moto 360 at Google I/O by AP/Jeff Chiu. Other photos courtesy Apple, Google, and Motorola.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/03/the-next-stage-in-the-battle-for-our-attention-our-wrists/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/12/the-newsonomics-of-the-newly-quantified-gamified-news-reader/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/12/the-newsonomics-of-the-newly-quantified-gamified-news-reader/#respond Thu, 04 Dec 2014 15:53:41 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=104248 What’s in your news diet? Sure, we can name the sites, papers, and stations that pepper us with news through the day and week. But we can’t easily sum up what we’ve read and how much of it, or really get an accurate sense of the balance between serious Times or Guardian fare versus the clickbait du jour.

What if we could know what we’ve read — and tune it — over time? What if we could count and categorize our news consumption, as we try to do with our meals, to become better versions of ourselves?

The Daily Beast, the hard-to-classify six-year-old love child of Barry Diller and Tina Brown, believes it’s time for the measured news diet. Check out the Beast’s mobile products and you know you’re not in website Kansas anymore. Both offer profoundly mobile-first, slimmed-down versions of the Daily Beast website (20 million unique visitors, 75 million pageviews). Pick “article feed” or “full view” on the tablet or just move through the article feed on the phone: You won’t find any of the website navigation — topical pulldowns, columnists, “what we like” — on those smaller screens, just the in-your-face Titling Gothic headline font that’s marked the Beast’s unique, in-your-eyes design. Why the sparer design? “Thoughtful reduction” is a driving point of its mobile redevelopment.

What you will find, in addition to the story roll are some unusual numbers at the top of the mobile screens, as in 51 STORIES, 7 READ, 3 SKIPPED. Touch any of those numbers, and a new screen draws down, with the site’s trademark blood red background. It’s entitled “The Daily Breakdown” and it’s an individual analytics console. The Daily Beast calls it a dashboard. You could also call it the dawn of the quantified news reader.

As a species, we’re going quantified at an astounding rate, able to record our life’s data in ways never before possible. We do it with footsteps, calories, online dates, check-ins, Facebook friends and Twitter followers. Why not news reading? Can we really learn what we’re reading and skipping? Do we want to?

Mike Dyer, co-managing director and chief product officer of the Beast, believes the answer is yes. Beast readers like The Daily Breakdown; since it launched in August on the smartphone (and a month ago on the tablet), the Breakdown now ranks among third or better in customer visits, among the site’s pages. More importantly, Dyer believes he’s found a vital engagement driver, with page consumption per session up 2× to 3× since August, he says. Fully 80 percent of mobile users swipe at least once per session. It’s reflexive and habit-forming.

That affinity shows to be particularly strong with the largest population segment birthed since the Baby Boom shook the planet, those now-well-sought-after millennials (“The newsonomics of the millennials moment”). Fully 54 percent of the Beast’s mobile users are millennials; the group makes up about 39 percent of the overall Internet audience, according to comScore. One secret to serving them that the Beast has jumped on: They expect and like interactivity.

Consequently, the mobile Beasts offer the seemingly Pandora-like innovation of SKIP (yes, in huge letters) on each and every story. Swipe to the left, the word, SKIP appears and then in one fell swoosh is gone, consigned to the SKIP count. Algorithmically, the SKIP is a minus-1, the opposite of a story read. Skip a story, and count the kinds of stories (by topic) you are skipping, and compare your own skips and reads to the crowd within the Beast app within the last hour. You get dynamically generated percentages of the kinds of stories you’re skipping and reading. A read story gets a big red checkmark imposed on it, to remind you what you’ve read and haven’t.

Dyer calls his skipping mechanism the Nudge Engine — nudge as in softly signaling interest.

Is it customization or personalization? Dyer prefers to call it “individuation,” intended to be a lighter touch on personalizing. Skipping stories provides data to the Beast’s content-serving apparatus, but doesn’t currently alter the feed of stories you now get. That’s where the nudge comes in: Red and blue nudge boxes pop up increasingly as readers more actively use the site, offering suggestions to readers. “We may say: ‘You’ve read a lot of politics stories, maybe it’s time for an entertainment story?’ Or, “You’ve read a lot of stories by this writer, do you want to follow him?'” says Dyer. It’s the data readers generate (+1 for reading more than half of a story, -1 for “skipping”) that fuel the kind of individuated nudges readers get. At this point, if readers use both an iPhone and an iPad, the Beast recognizes them as two separate readers, with no cross-platform intelligence gained; it could offer (or require) registration and authentication to provide a smarter cross-platform view, but that would serve as a speed bump in user adoption.

Is the Nudge Engine a new or good idea? It seems to be.

Other big publishers have whiteboarded the words “Pandora for news” and decided against it. They believe it’s just too blunt an instrument. If a reader skips a Bill Cosby story on the Beast, is that because she’s appalled by his behavior, or because she knows a lot about the story but can’t stomach anymore on it at that moment? Does she not want to read about rape, or race, or think too much attention is paid to famous people? There can be a lot of nuance in that simple “skip,” and it’s nuance that won’t be captured on any individual swipe.

That’s why what the Beast has done seems like Pandora’s iconic thumbs up or down but isn’t. “Pandora overplays the value of a thumbs down,” says Dyer. One translation: Journalism isn’t music. Understanding consumer desire in a flow of stories is far more complex than in picking tunes.

Bigger publishers may well consider the nuanced thinking The Daily Beast is bringing to the couple-of-decades-old debate on personalization.

“We have seen a huge uptick in the numbers of people who either want some form of personalisation or are taking steps to personalise their experience,” says Tanya Cordrey, The Guardian’s chief digital officer. “It is now around 20 percent of users on our Guardian apps.” Cordrey is rightly tired of the man vs. machine debate:

It is a topic that already feels slightly jaded as the past few years has seen a constant debate centering around whether algorithms can or will replace journalists. The debate is discussed at the extreme ends of the spectrum with not much in between. The debate, however, will move on in 2015. Clearly there are times when algorithms can work more quickly and more efficiently than humans. But humans are better at handling tone, serendipity, and context. Focusing solely on the tension between human editors and algorithms can also be a dangerous rabbit hole. I believe passionately that success will come with giving much more control to our users. They know best what they want.

The quantified reader idea makes sense to Cordrey: “News organisations will see more users wanting to understand their engagement and interactions with our products. Many of the most passionate users will also want to see more clearly how they contribute to our business models and our social ecosystems. We are currently discussing several experiments in this area.”

At The New York Times, chief information officer Marc Frons continues to test lighter alternatives as well:

I think passive personalization such as recommendation engines and minimally active personalization (reordered navigation, some subject filtering) can be useful to deepen engagement, and perhaps more closely match readers with advertisers and thus command higher CPMs. I also think people are getting “personalized” news from Facebook and to a lesser extent from Twitter, and that social filters will become increasingly important as they are better refined, as they are in apps like Nuzzel.

The trick here is in inferring reader likes and dislikes, as in the Cosby story example. Says Frons: “Subject-based personalization limits serendipity — one of the main pleasures of social feeds in particular and the Internet in general…For content creators, I am not sure that slicing the report up into micro-individuated bundles is ever going to make business or product sense. But a little bit of personalization within a product can go a long way.”

Then there’s the balance of customization and high-end curation, he says:

The challenge for The Times and other large, serious news organizations is to sharpen our focus on what people want to read/watch/interact without giving an inch on what is journalistically important…At The Times, our most loyal readers come to us (as opposed to reaching us through the usual social or search channels) for our news judgment as much as the individual articles. Personalizing the home page, for example, would fracture that shared experience of what is important and newsworthy. But a great recommendation engine that surfaces content you might otherwise have missed can be a powerful asset for publishers hoping to hold their readers’ attention for more than the scant minutes most people spend on any given site.

The Economist works with a similar balance in mind, and a different value proposition: finiteness. Here’s Tom Standage, The Economist’s digital editor:

Our deal with the reader is that they rely on us to be a trusted filter on world events: so we tell them what’s important. That’s rather difficult to square with a system that lets readers decide what they do and don’t want: our readers are in effect saying “I don’t have much time, so tell me what I need to know, even if I don’t think I’m interested in it or don’t realise it’s important.”

So we’re not doing any personalisation at the moment…That said, I think there is some scope for personalisation. Things we are thinking about: a “read this first” feature that looks at past reader behaviour to present what they’re most likely to want to read first, in app or on the web. (Some readers always start with the obituary, or the business pages.) Another area this might be useful is for audio, and in particular in-car audio: a smart playlisting feature, if you like, that plays the stories you probably most want to hear first.

The Daily Breakdown is a good 1.0 product. It’s simple and intuitive. Expect refinements to roll out next year, providing more quantification alternatives (the possibilities are staggering, given the complexity of news flow), undo functionality, and more. The Breakdown is just one of several Beast innovations in mobile. In January, the website’s Read This feature — highlighting five algorithmically picked stories — will debut on mobile as well. In allowing readers to “follow” individual writers, a feature The Guardian added this year as well, the Beast is getting closer to understanding what readers want.

Why offer quantification? The early engagement numbers tell one part of the story. Publishers can quantify for same reason Weight Watchers does: Keep the customers coming back. In the hypercompetition of digital news, what distinguishes one site from another? Certainly, unique stories and above-the-crowd voices, but tools also encourage habit. If you’re sold (or semi-sold) on the Beast, or Slate, or The Washington Post, or WBUR, or Time, might you visit more often to check your running totals? Loyalty and direct traffic become greater issues in the mobile news age, with both more potential and more peril. (Digital veteran Cory Bergman’s recent Mobile Media Memo piece urging publishers to make their mobile front doors more appealing is right on the mark.)

We could get greedy and want such quantifying across news websites, tracking our whole news diet. The Daily Beast’s trick is site-specific, suiting the tech of the moment and, of course, its own business needs. If indeed we want to become quantified readers — do we? — we’d need better collection, aggregation, and sorting. How might that work, and who would do it? Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, and a host of curating/aggregating businesses would love that role. But that’s a question for another day. We’ve long talked about the nature of quality in the digital news landscape. Now we can add new measures of quantity, personal and collective, to that discussion.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/12/the-newsonomics-of-the-newly-quantified-gamified-news-reader/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/10/a-mixed-bag-on-apps-what-the-new-york-times-learned-with-nyt-opinion-and-nyt-now/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/10/a-mixed-bag-on-apps-what-the-new-york-times-learned-with-nyt-opinion-and-nyt-now/#comments Wed, 01 Oct 2014 22:37:05 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=102476 The New York Times’ announcement today that it was cutting 100 positions in its newsroom was coupled with changes to two of its most closely watched experiments, each just a few months old: NYT Now and NYT Opinion. The two apps will meet different fates: NYT Now will live on with a tweaked subscription model, while NYT Opinion will be shut down at month’s end, having been unable to find a substantial paying audience.

The two apps are small parts of the Times’ overall financial picture, which shows a few more positive elements, like a jump in digital advertising revenue. But they were key to the Times’ strategy of creating a fleet of paid apps to target smaller audiences that wouldn’t pay for a full subscription. (Growth in that full-freight number has begun to slow.)

What did the Times learn along the way to today?

NYT Opinion: Not enough audience

NYT Opinion, unveiled in June, was available for $6 every four weeks, offered access to opinions and op-eds in the app and on NYTimes.com, and was aimed at a readership who wants to spend more time with opinion writers. It was the second time the paper had tried to created a premium subscription option based around its opinion content, following the short-lived TimesSelect.

Andy Rosenthal, editorial page editor for the Times, said the app’s audience was loyal, but that it had trouble breaking out a small core. “It wasn’t getting a new group of readers in the same way that Now does,” he said. “The sheer volume of people looking at it wasn’t enough to sustain it.” The app pushed Times writing and columns into new territory and made the opinion staff more innovative, he said. “This is not us saying it didn’t work as a journalistic venture; it did,” Rosenthal said. “It’s just not working as a business.”

Like NYT Now, NYT Opinion also offered choice cuts from writers from around the web, aggregation with a Times stamp of approval. Rosenthal said the curation in the Op-Talk section of the app consistently received good reviews from subscribers — but actual usage data shows people didn’t click on it very often. One feature users did enjoy was the follow function, which let users track the latest work from their favorite writers. So if you wanted to be notified whenever Paul Krugman drops knowledge or Maureen Dowd snarfs a pot candy, NYT Opinion would notify you.

A surprising number of NYT Opinion users subscribed through the website, not the app, so the paper plans to experiment with a digital-only subscription plan for opinion content — a strategy that will also let the Times honor the subscription of existing users of NYT Opinion.

Rosenthal said parts of NYT Opinion will live on in other digital products from the Times. The follow feature, along with the commenting functions on pieces — the first inside a Times iOS app — could be put to use in NYT Now or the flagship Times app, he said. For the opinion team, which has tried to branch out into more interactive work with projects like Op-Docs, Rosenthal said building an app was a valuable experience. “What we discovered is we can do this and do it fast from an editorial standpoint,” he said.

The Times bulked up the opinion staff for launch, with a small team dedicated to the app. Those jobs will no longer exist.

NYT Now: A surprising audience split

NYT Now, which debuted in April, costs $8 every four weeks and gave users access to a subset of the Times’ daily content — about 40 stories a day — in the app and on the Times’ website.

It was initially targeted at a younger, mobile-friendly audience — but it ended up finding a difference audience too. NYT Now editor Clifford Levy said there was an older audience that subscribed to NYT Now just for cheaper access to the Times’ website, versus younger users who were only using the app.

“The challenge that we face is that when one subscription package is basically going after two different audiences, it creates a lot of internal tensions, or tensions in the business model, and that’s what we’re trying to resolve now,” Levy said. “As Arthur and Mark said in their note this morning, we’re untangling those two areas.”

In the memo to Times’ staff today, Sulzberger and Thompson wrote that NYT Now has succeeded in attracting younger readers to the Times, but the “effort to define and market a lower-priced subscription offer on the web and core apps has proven much less successful.”

The Times is planning on introducing a different pricing model for NYT Now now that only includes access to the app, while also offering a website-only option cheaper than current digital-only subscriptions, Levy said. (In the memo, Sulzberger and Thompson wrote that the Times has “already begun to test other, more intuitive lower-priced subscription offers.”)

Still, Levy said the share of NYT Now app users who are under 35 is “much higher than on any other New York Times platform,” and the Times hopes to continue to retain and grow that audience by focusing its marketing for NYT Now on the app as well as introducing new features.

In the past month, NYT Now added buttons to save or share each individual story from the app’s main page without actually opening the article. Those small additions “sharply increased engagement,” Levy said. One of the advantages of iOS 8 for news organizations is increased customization of push alerts, and Levy said NYT Now plans to add more functionality there.

Last month, NYT Now also began an experiment with the Indiana Daily Student, the student newspaper at Indiana University, by including IDS stories in NYT Now for users who log in with an IU email address. Though he wouldn’t go into specifics, Levy said the Times is “pushing forward with other experiments like that.”

The Times’ leaked innovation report emphasized the need for the paper to rethink how it approached mobile. “Instead of running mobile on autopilot, we need to view the platform as an experience that demands its own quality control and creativity,” the report read, and Levy emphasized that NYT Now is a critical component in the Times’ thinking in how it approaches both mobile and new product development.

“We’ve learned a tremendous amount in terms of how to create new products,” Levy said. “We’ve certainly made mistakes on all these products, but we’ve really learned from them.”

The Times, for example, officially launched NYT Cooking as a standalone site and iPad app last month. For now, the site and app are both free to access and in the two weeks since it came out of beta it’s attracted more then 1 million unique visitors, according to the staff memo. But the decision to keep NYT Cooking free, at least for the period after its launch, was influenced by the paper’s experience with NYT Now and NYT Opinion, Levy said.

“We did that in part because we realized that perhaps we went too fast toward monetizing NYT Now and NYT Opinion,” Levy said. “Maybe in the future, a better path is to first do audience development and then do monetization.”

Photo of The New York Times Building by Alexander Torrenegra used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/10/a-mixed-bag-on-apps-what-the-new-york-times-learned-with-nyt-opinion-and-nyt-now/feed/ 4 https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/09/ios-8-how-5-news-orgs-have-updated-their-apps-for-apples-new-operating-system/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/09/ios-8-how-5-news-orgs-have-updated-their-apps-for-apples-new-operating-system/#respond Thu, 18 Sep 2014 01:01:05 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=102069 As iPhone users frantically delete apps and photos from their phones to make space for the iOS 8 update, many news organizations are also taking advantage of Apple’s new mobile operating system to release new or updated apps that take advantage of its new features.

Two of those features prominently in many of the updates: increased functionality in Notification Center, which allows for widgets (a long-time feature on Android) and more interactive push notifications, and Handoff, part of Apple’s new Continuity feature that lets users start an action on one Apple device and finish it on another. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, today released a revamped iPad app that emphasizes those functionalities.

Here’s a partial list of outlets that have already made their apps iOS 8-enhanced and the features that they’ve included.

The Guardian

The Guardian’s newly released iOS 8-compatible app includes Handoff integration to let stories move from device to device. The app’s layout has been tweaked and images are now viewable in fullscreen.

The Guardian also utilizes the new widgets in Notification Center. The default setting in the widget is to show a short list of The Guardian’s top stories, but users are also able to personalize the widget to show the top stories from any of the Guardian’s other verticals — from opinion to tech to soccer. If you choose to personalize the widget, it’ll also include a button that takes you to the top stories in the app. (If you stay with top stories, that button just takes you to more headlines.)

The New York Times

In addition to updating its main Times and NYT Now apps with Handoff, widgets, and interactive notifications, the Times also released a new cooking iPad app that includes more than 16,000 recipes from the Times’ archive. The Times launched its cooking site in beta in May, but it’s being fully rolled out this week with the release of the app and a responsive web version for desktop and other mobile devices that’s also open to all users.

“With the introduction of this product and the anticipated rebrand of our Dining section front to Food later this fall, readers will see even more cooking, restaurant, food and wine & spirits content from The New York Times, delivered in a convenient package across platforms,” Times food editor Sam Sifton said in a press release.

Hey, iPadders, the #NYTCooking app is live for you: http://t.co/gnvt4BQNcM.

— Sam Sifton (@SamSifton) September 17, 2014

The app includes a thorough search feature that lets users search by ingredient as well as by keywords like “easy” or “vegetarian.” It’s multimedia-heavy and includes videos that can teach cooking basics. Users can also curate their own recipe box to save favorite dishes or recipes they’d like to try out.

The app also takes advantage of the widget feature in iOS 8 and will send users a daily Recipe of the Day.

Breaking News

In addition to interactive notifications and a widget in Notification Center, the Breaking News app has added a “nearby” section to the app to show users news that’s happening near wherever their phone is located. The distance is customizable — you can go from a 1 mile radius to a 100-mile radius.

The function builds on a feature that Breaking News released in June that sent users push alerts, called proximity alerts, for news that’s breaking near them. With that feature, users passively received news alerts on events near their location, but in the new version of the app users can actively seek out local news.

ABC News

ABC is taking advantage of the new interactive notifications. A new feature in its iPhone app lets users swipe a push notification from the lock screen to share the alert. The app also added a follow button to notifications to let users get continuing alerts on a certain news topic.

These additions are iterative updates to a larger overhaul ABC News introduced last month. The new app better integrates live video and lets users personalize news alerts to be delivered to an inbox in the app.

The Associated Press

Most of the changes to the iOS 8-version of the AP’s iPhone app are “backend changes that should make the app perform better than ever,” Michael Boord, the AP’s director of mobile products said in a company Q&A. But there are a few minor additions to the app that users will notice, like a Big Stories section on the app’s homepage that has collections of stories on major news events. Buttons to share to social media are also more prominent in the new app.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/09/ios-8-how-5-news-orgs-have-updated-their-apps-for-apples-new-operating-system/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/09/how-the-new-wsj-ipad-app-is-taking-advantage-of-new-features-in-ios-8/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/09/how-the-new-wsj-ipad-app-is-taking-advantage-of-new-features-in-ios-8/#comments Wed, 17 Sep 2014 21:32:42 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=101991 When Apple launched the first iPad in 2010, The Wall Street Journal was one of the first news organizations with a dedicated app on the new tablet. In the four years since, tablets have become mainstream and Apple’s continued to release faster, thinner, and smaller iPads. But the Journal’s app has largely remained the same, with just minor updates and tweaks.

Today, the Journal is releasing a revamped version of its app, with expanded notifications and continuous reading, a feature that allows users to finish stories in Safari or on their iPhone that they started on the app. It’s a simplified and streamlined experience designed to take advantage of new features in Apple’s iOS 8, which is also being released today.

“We wanted to really explore iOS 8 to understand how that software could lead to a better reading experience,” said Edward Roussel, Dow Jones’ head of products. According to Roussel, about 85 percent of the Journal’s total app usage is on iOS devices. Roussel told me the Journal waited to update its app until the release of iOS 8 specifically to take advantage of the new features.

The new mobile operating system was first announced in June, but the Journal’s app gives a glimpse of how news organizations might adapt to the new features of iOS 8 — and how companies are fighting for precious real estate on users’ screens.

In iOS 8, users can add third-party widgets to the “Today” section of their notification center, and the new app includes a Journal widget that puts stories alongside daily appointments and the weather. (Similar widgets are old hat for Android users.) Swiping down in the notification center will now pull up the latest headlines from the Journal, letting users click on a headline to bring them directly to the app to read the full story.

Push notifications are also getting a refresh. Articles attached to push notifications will now include a read-it-later button that will save stories for reading in their iPad or iPhone app. (Stories can also be saved from within the app.)

“Part of our thinking is that increasingly the way in which people are reading things is in bite-sized chunks, so it isn’t one continuous read,” Roussel said. “You’re jumping in and out of your apps. So with the save functionality, whether it comes from a push notification or from having seen a headline of a story, it becomes a very, very important part of the experience.”

Reading in bite-sized chunks also means jumping from device to device, and the Journal app incorporates a new feature Apple is including in iOS 8 called Continuity. When Apple first unveiled iOS 8 in June, it presented Continuity as a way to continue working on a document between your devices, or to answer a phone call from your MacBook Pro. But the Journal is utilizing a function of the feature called Handoff to let users start and finish stories between devices. Roussel said the Journal envisions most people using the feature between the iPhone and iPad apps, but it will also work in Safari on the desktop.

That’s why the Journal is also pushing out an update to its iPhone app today, allowing Handoff and other features to work on iOS 8-enabled iPhones. Roussel said the Journal is waiting to fully remake its iPhone app pending the release of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, which both have larger screens than the current generation of iPhones.

“We all take it for granted that email, for example, works well in the cloud and that you can pick up on your email regardless of device, and whether it’s desktop or iPad or iPhone,” Roussel said. “But what we’re really saying here is that the same thing will apply very, very soon with reading news. That needs to feel like a very natural experience in that you just pick it up wherever you’ve left off on whatever device.”

While the Journal’s phone apps are primarily focused on the latest in breaking news, its current iPad app is heavily focused on replicating the print newspaper on the tablet. The average age of a Journal iPad user is 50, the paper says, and three-quarters of the app’s users use it to read a digital replica of the print newspaper. In redesigning the iPad app, the Journal is trying keep a connection to that audience by ensuring the digital version of the paper remains a central part of the app while also creating functionality for real-time news.

The new app is still stuck in Apple’s Newsstand, which many news organizations lament as the place apps go to to be forgotten, but it presents a less-cluttered homepage that takes visual cues from the Journal’s print front page, including the “What’s News” column and the regular “A-Hed” feature, complete with stipple drawing. It also features a ticker across the top of the page with the latest news and stock prices. If a user is reading an article about General Motors, for example, they’ll see GM’s stock fluctuate in real-time. The new app also has streamlined article pages, trimmed sections, and simplified the navigation bar.

In updating the app, the Journal wanted to draw a better distinction between the print-replica and the updating-app versions. The previous app made it difficult to switch between the versions; now users can jump between them with a single tap. The app now also update the latest news in the background.

Roussel stressed that the new iPad app is just one of the first steps in a redesign across all of the Journal’s digital properties. He said the Journal plans on releasing new Android apps by the end of the year. A new responsive article page was rolled out in some parts of WSJ.com just this week, and the Journal plans to continue to expand its use of the new article page while also introducing a new video page, simplified navigation, and new section pages — including a new homepage.

“What you’ll see, between now and the end of the year, are some significant changes on the website,” Roussel said.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/09/how-the-new-wsj-ipad-app-is-taking-advantage-of-new-features-in-ios-8/feed/ 6 https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/07/a-stormy-set-of-revenue-numbers-for-the-new-york-times-and-the-broader-news-industry/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/07/a-stormy-set-of-revenue-numbers-for-the-new-york-times-and-the-broader-news-industry/#comments Tue, 29 Jul 2014 17:48:48 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=100013 On the call for The New York Times’ first quarter financials in April, executives cautioned that the bright Q1 results — up in overall revenue and in print and digital ad revenue — might not hold. They were right.

CEO Mark Thompson — whose chief mandate is to get first revenue and then profit growing again — had a little momentum going: Two of the last three quarters had shown revenue growth. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was a real outlier in an industry still struggling to grow revenues, as it has since 2007 (“The newsonomics of zero and The New York Times”).

To be sure, the 0.6 percent downturn in revenues is a minor, mostly psychological setback. It does, though, point to a big problem for all dailies — the great decline in print advertising continues to swamp much of the other progress news companies are making in reader revenue and, for some, new digital ad revenue streams.

Compare this Q2 report to Q1, by the numbers:

	Q2 2014	Q1 2014
Overall revenue	-0.6%	2.6%
Print ad revenue	-6.6%	4%
Digital ad revenue	3.4%	2%
Circulation revenue	1.4%	2%
Increase in digital-only subs	32,000	39,000
Net operating income	$16.5 million	$22.1 million

It’s that awful 6.6 percent print decline that’s the Times’ big issue. If the Times, and others, can moderate losses, then they have a fighting chance to transform the business to digital. Without getting closer to zero (or somehow turning positive, as with that surprise 4 percent in Q1), it’s been near-impossible to grow overall.

One other troubling spot for the Times: circulation revenue. It’s up, but a tepid 1.4 percent, a little less than Q1’s 2 percent. That’s doubly concerning. We expected that Q1 would be lower, given that the Times had saturated much of its full-price market, topping out at 799,000 digital-only subs then. The introduction of NYT Now in late March upped hope that a new substantial market of younger, more cost-conscious ($2/week), mobile-oriented buyers would develop. The introduction of Times Premier, at the same time, promised some upsell money for VIP-status-seeking buyers. (It also launched niche NYT Opinion in June, so we’d expect the financial impact from that product to be minor in this quarterly report.)

The Times didn’t release specific NYT Now, NYT Opinion, or Times Premiere numbers. We do know though that the new products accounted for a majority of the new 32,000 digital-only subs. So let’s say they accounted for 20,000 or so new subs. In and of itself, that’s disappointing, a small number — with lots of marketing and promotion — and small new revenue on what are already lower-priced niche products. It would also tell us that Times’ all-access full-price push has really slowed, to 12,000 or so — an expected plateauing.

If the fundamental growth engine for reader revenue is slowing to a crawl, and the new products aren’t pumping out new customers, that points to what will be a growing problem in the quarters ahead. And for the rest of the newspaper industry — trying to figure out what it might be able to learn from from the Times’ reader revenue pushes — the slow pickup on NYT Now will be a cautionary tale.

In the Times’ carefully chosen words, we can see that concern: “We’re encouraged by the reaction of users to the products, especially the high consumer satisfaction levels we’re seeing with the NYT Now app. But, while we expected the portfolio to take time to build, we want to accelerate the rate of growth in subscription sales, so over the coming months, we will refine some of the offers and the way we market the portfolio to accomplish this.”

The impact on profits is clear. The Times eked out $16.5 million for the quarter, down $5.5 million from a quarter earlier.

That said, just about any of those numbers would be welcome at the United States’ largest newspaper company, Gannett.

For the company moving profoundly away from its newspaper base — becoming a TV company — its own Q2 emphasized the same issues the Times is facing.

Gannett’s newspapers were down 3.7 percent year-over-year overall in revenue. Print ads were down 5.1 percent, while circulation revenue went negative, down 0.6 percent. Digital revenues were up 4.3 percent.

Most noteworthy is that same big print ad decline — and the red number in circulation revenue. The paywall revolution was supposed to put newspaper companies on a path to ramping reader revenue growth. But what we are seeing at Gannett (and at other companies) is that the first- and (sometimes) second-year impact of higher-priced all-access subscriptions is waning. Further pricing is constrained by too great a loss in print subscription volume. If that continues — and if regional newspaper companies either don’t produce niche paid products or believe those products won’t resonate with buyers — then the blush of reader revenue growth will have been a short one.

Finally, last week’s Gannett quarterly call prompted a brief brouhaha. That was based on what CEO Gracia Martore said. Or did she? The company’s own USA Today had to run a clarification that it had “mischaracterized” its own CEO words.

To a question from financial analyst Ed Atorino about Gannett’s willingness to get into the market for newspapers (as its done in TV, as a buyer), Martore (transcript for the call is available from Seeking Alpha, here) replied:

Yes, there are newspapers for sale. Look, what this company is focused on, and laser focused on, as I said before is creating additional strong shareholder value. And we are open to any opportunities that will do that. And we’re the Board and I and the management team, continue to look at ways to increase shareholder value as we have successfully done with our superior returns over the last three years. We said last quarter that we were laser focused on Belo and now with the London Broadcasting stations. And as you can see from the results that was precisely the right focus for us to have, but we are an incredibly shareholder-oriented company and we are always evaluating the best ways to continue to meaningfully increase value for both the near and the long-term.

It was that “newspapers for sale” line that got her into trouble. Did it mean Gannett newspapers are for sale? Listening to the audio, I doubt it. I think she meant: Yes, there are sellers of newspapers out there. But it was awkward and confusing. One thing a CEO doesn’t want to do is introduce public uncertainty into the fates of thousands of its employees.

More interesting that what Martore said is what she didn’t. She didn’t take the opportunity to support Gannett’s newspaper investments and their importance to her or the company’s future. Instead, we heard the boilerplate of what any investor-pleasing CEO has to intone: Job one is maximizing shareholder return. That’s fair, of course, but it would be refreshing to hear a news company CEO who is also laser-focused on the readers.

Further translation of the whole episode: Gannett’s newspapers aren’t now on the market. That, though, is more rapidly becoming a “when” rather than an “if” question.

Photo by Sam Chills used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/07/a-stormy-set-of-revenue-numbers-for-the-new-york-times-and-the-broader-news-industry/feed/ 8 https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/06/five-ideas-for-improving-mobile-from-apis-new-report/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/06/five-ideas-for-improving-mobile-from-apis-new-report/#respond Tue, 10 Jun 2014 16:45:12 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=98126 The American Press Institute is out with “Unlocking mobile revenue and audience: New ideas and best practices,” which is part-report, part-sketchbook featuring some of the smartest people who are actively working on mobile products in news organizations around the country. It’s broken into nine parts, which look at mobile advertising, the connection between mobile and social media, how to manage for mobile in the newsroom, and the difference between native apps and mobile browsers.

If you’re interested how to better align the editorial and business sides of your company for mobile audiences you should give the full report a read. Here are five highlights:

Social and mobile work as a team, shifting reading times

According to BuzzFeed’s vice president of growth and data, Dao Nguyen, the link between social and mobile is real. According to the report: “The publisher’s mobile audience is sharing more, reading long-form content for longer periods, growing faster and clicking on native ads more often than its desktop users.” And BuzzFeed’s mobile audience is demonstrating different consumption patterns than desktop readers:

As of early 2014, BuzzFeed gets most of its traffic from mobile devices, Vice President of Growth and Data Dao Nguyen told us. Its peak traffic hour has shifted to the evenings, around 9 p.m., rather than the typical daytime peak of desktop Web traffic.

Making mobile unique

While more news organizations are recognizing the importance of mobile to their future, many still see it as a repository for work that was made with print or desktop screens in mind. Potential solutions for mobile include slicing up stories into smaller units (like Circa or Inside), or finding other ways to take advantage of smaller screens, different interfaces (swiping and tapping), and other parts of the mobile environment. The idea is to capture audiences that might not otherwise read you on mobile:

But as the Boston Globe’s Damon Kiesow pointed out, your highly motivated readers are bound to read content regardless of form. To reach new, larger audiences, you need to make the content an ideal mobile experience. Thus
customizing for mobile is essential for growth.

Publishers need to better use data for mobile advertising

Media companies now have to compete with tech companies like Facebook and Google for digital advertising, who have more far personal data on their users. One way for publishers to gain traction is through better use of targeted data about their mobile audience:

Publishers can send ad networks real-time data about each pageview, such as the Apple or Android device ID, the user’s location, or other common data that will make inventory more valuable when compared with other publishers.

Targeting ads by using the rich data publishers already know about their subscribers could be highly profitable, however technology decisions must be made at the outset on how to collect the data and make it actionable for advertising on the local and national levels.

While better data may help publishers make their ads more effective, the API group says taking advantage of location, providing utility, and better use of a device’s features (like push notifications) could make ads more creative.

Get everyone on the same page

When it comes to mobile, the editorial, technology, and business teams need to be in sync. That allows better planning for mobile from the start: how content is created and executed, how it will be displayed on mobile, and ways it could be potentially monetized. Why is it important to get your ducks in a row? The group pointed out some common problems:

— Isolation of mobile-minded editors into a sort of artisanal, lab-like environment is dangerous because it removes the broader newsroom from mobile priorities and can centralize technology to an unproductive extent.

— On a technology front, outsourcing everything to vendors is a potential trap, as priorities can quickly diverge. In-house development is preferable if resources are available, but vendors can be consulted. (Conversely, over-confidence about in-house resources can slow innovation.)

— Pledging to “focus on mobile” without identifying benchmarks is useless.

— Starting with the similarities between desktop and mobile, as opposed to the differences, is a potential trap.

Pushing a deeper connection with mobile readers

While the overall trends show audiences are going mobile, how can media companies build a better relationship with readers on their devices? The group found two general areas publishers should consider: generating reader engagement and providing better metrics. Personalization, push notifications, and finding a role for user-generated content were among the ideas for better engagement. But measuring how your audience connects with you is equally important, and the group stressed the importance of tracking things like reader loyalty and depth of session.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/06/five-ideas-for-improving-mobile-from-apis-new-report/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-newsonomics-of-quartz-19-months-in/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-newsonomics-of-quartz-19-months-in/#comments Thu, 01 May 2014 14:38:50 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=96692 Quartz, at the tender age of 19 months, can hardly be considered a father to Vox, FiveThirtyEight, and The Upshot. Clearly, though, it’s a major influence. It marked and followed an explanatory way forward way back in September 2012 (“The newsonomics of Quartz’ business launch”), and its model tells us a lot about this widening field.

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s take the talent point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-newsonomics-of-quartz-19-months-in/feed/ 3 https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/03/the-newsonomics-of-nyt-now/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/03/the-newsonomics-of-nyt-now/#comments Thu, 27 Mar 2014 15:10:38 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=95383 It’s an ambitious launch. Within it, we can hear many of the digital news buzzwords of the moment: mobile first, curation, paywall, native ads, voice. NYT Now debuts on April 2, side-stepping the foolish superstitions of a day earlier, and about five months after first disclosing its Paywalls 2.0 plans (“The newsonomics of The New York Times’ Paywalls 2.0”).

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

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

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

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

The product

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

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

The journalism

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

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

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

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

The user experience

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

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

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

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

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

The business strategy

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

Think of the segmentation as these three E’s:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/03/the-newsonomics-of-nyt-now/feed/ 1 https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/03/the-newsonomics-of-schibsteds-vgtv-and-web-native-tv/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/03/the-newsonomics-of-schibsteds-vgtv-and-web-native-tv/#respond Thu, 13 Mar 2014 14:27:57 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=94849 AUSTIN — What’s one of the first principles of building a new digital business?

“Make sure you lose money for at least three years,” VG CEO and editor Torry Pedersen told a London publishing crowd last week. There were some chuckles among the Digital Media Strategies audience, but behind the comment is a deep strategy: Invest. “You can’t have much revenue in infancy,” he told me later that day.

When European media powerhouse Schibsted set its digital business (relatively) free of its print legacy business in 1999, it expected to lose money on digital for two or three years. It did. When Schibsted separated out its mobile business from digital, it expected to plow more money in than it could take out for a few years. Both investments have paid off. Oslo-based Schibsted now can claim good shares of both digital and mobile audiences in its home Nordic countries (Norway and Sweden).

Now it’s adding pages to that same playbook as it tackles digital TV, and that’s what Pedersen had come to London to talk about. Schibsted’s VG or Verdens Gang (“The way of the world”) is Norway’s most-read tabloid daily, though it has suffered print declines along with the rest of the industry. It’s its website, VG.no, that has grown as print has shrunk — VG.no is now Norway’s largest digital news site by far.

VGTV is a product unlike any other I’ve seen come out of a news company. (Its sister tabloid in Sweden is running a parallel venture called AftonbladetTV.) HuffPost Live is the closest in comparison (“The newsonomics of leapfrog news video”), but VGTV has wider aims. It’ss news, sports, fashion, health, movies, music, and lots more. These are all topics covered by newspapers, but VGTV, a product of a legacy newspaper company, looks and feels (at least through Google Translate) like something new. Not broadcast TV, but the beginning of what we might begin to call native TV.

VGTV has been building for a year plus and now has a separate staff of 25 to 30, which is planned to rise to 50 by year’s end. It’s now separate from the mothership, just as digital and mobile once were. Just as both those businesses have been reintegrated into the news business, some day — after it is well established — VGTV is intended to be as well.

Schibsted is still mostly a secret outside Europe, where news media leaders know it well. Mention it to many North American publishers, and you have to spell it. That’s a shame.

The Schibsted model, which I first wrote about in detail in 2012, offers telling lessons for all publishers, large or small, global or local. We can see — in retrospect — how Schibsted protected its home Nordic markets against the inroads of Google, Yahoo, and others better than its peers in the western world. In letting its digital sites compete with its newspapers early on, it enabled online growth, while too many of its peers kept moving the deck chairs inside and out, between integrated (with the print business/newsroom) and separated digital operations. It re-envisioned digital classifieds and then played market leadership cutthroat, reducing Craigslist to an also-ran and becoming a leader in global digital classifieds and related businesses, now owning or partnering with efforts in 29 countries on four continents.

VGTV is a next-generation business investment. It’s aimed at an audience that news properties, offline and even online, often don’t do a good job of reaching: young people. VGTV is a serious and entertaining effort at growing substantial audience among video-centric, tablet-using, smartphone-punching youth.

Norway is one of the most advanced digital markets in the world. Consider its leading adoption curve: 85 percent of Norwegians use the Internet daily, 79 percent have a smartphone, and 52 percent have a tablet.

VGTV is still a tiny speck in the overall TV market: “We are a mosquito,” says Pedersen. “But we are an annoying mosquito.” That may be true in terms of traditional TV watching and TV ad spending, but as we look at the Norwegian streaming market, the competition gets more interesting. VGTV leads the country’s two largest broadcasters, NRK and TV2, in overall audience. Competitive daily Dagbladet, which has also gotten into the web TV business, is the No. 3 player overall.

Almost 12 percent of the population watches streaming TV daily, via one or more of those four players. VGTV can count an average of 183,000 daily watchers. (Norway’s population is a little over 5 million, or roughly the size of Colorado.) VGTV watchers spend an average of 10 minutes a day watching, less than watchers of traditional TV. So: More come in, but they consume smaller bits, as they choose among the numerous choices VGTV offers. Viewing time for VGTV, overall, increased 40 percent year over year, by far the greatest growth among streamers.

What do VGTV watchers watch? It’s a mix of live coverage and programming. Last year, VGTV produced 762 live sessions, and it’s currently running 21 programs a week. Much of the news is from around Norway; while VGTV operates as a separate entity, it’s tightly connected to the VG newsroom, with reporters contributing to the news report.

Recently, VG sent reporter Brynjar Skjærli to Kiev to produce video reports on the popular uprising. The reportage put Skjærli in the thick of Maidan, the square that has been the epicenter of civic revolt. It’s TV, but web-like TV, without the overproduction that can characterize legacy TV coverage. Featured on VGTV, the video also bolstered coverage on VG.no.

Most of its entertainment programs are produced in Norway, though Pedersen makes the point of how much high-quality documentary work is available in global markets at low five-figure costs. Dokumentar now features about two dozen longer-form global documentaries. (Many of them won’t work for viewers outside Norway because of licensing issues.) Also front and center each week: Saturday Night Live, which VGTV has licensed on an exclusive basis. (How well each SNL program does is highly dependent on the week’s special guest; Jonah Hill has been among the most popular.)

There’s a certain Northern wackiness built into the coverage. Take the 30-hour, 2-minute, 44-second “world’s longest interview” VGTV put up last year. (For more on Slow TV, Norwegian-style, check out The Guardian’s coverage of fireplace watching, sweater-knitting observing, and salmon-spawning spying. The ideas may not translate universally, but they may be testable in Minnesota and the Dakotas.)

The World Chess Championships also won huge viewership, with an average of viewing time of 39.4 minutes, as twenty-three-year-old Norwegian Marcus Carlsen was victorious. VGTV’s 10-part English-language documentary on Carlsen has been viewed by 780,000 people.

You get the feeling that much of web TV business can’t be planned. The best of it may be opportunistic. Isn’t that the way newspapers in print long prospered — seeing an opening and moving in?

Philosophically, VGTV doesn’t offer set-time news programming. As it covers news, it continues its coverage as long as it thinks it’s merited. That boundary breaking is significant. It’s a shapeshifting media world. TV from a newspaper company. Text digital news (and more) from a local broadcaster, as I recently wrote about as Scripps’ WCPO-TV added 20 digital news staff members, plunged into in-depth work, and is beginning to give Gannett’s Cincinnati Enquirer a run for the online money.

VGTV and WCPO are flip sides of the same coin. They show us that media is media — in smarter hands. Newspapers don’t need to be held back by the printing press. TV stations can move beyond the constraints of news-at-6 formulas.

Both forays attempt to get in early — before it’s clear how the money in digital news and video may work. It’s easy to lampoon such efforts, or trot out the cliches about the pioneers being the guys with the arrows in their backs.

At SXSW this last week, TV was big (good Zach Seward rundown at Quartz), and as Jimmy Kimmel opined, “The fact of the matter is, the amount of money we make from selling commercials on television, is 100 times as much from what we make from people watching our YouTube videos. And until those things even out somewhat, we’re going to be focused on television.”

Native TV may be a rounding error in Jimmy Kimmel’s financials, but it seems fresh, agile and about to be more impactful, as the toggle between small screen, medium screen, and living room screen becomes less stressful.

At SXSW, one couldn’t help but be reminded by how foundational technology is to the new news business, in all its forms. As the full five-day program underlined that fact, one statistic offered by Torry Pedersen kept returning to me. It amazed everyone I mentioned it to in Austin.

Schibsted, says Pedersen, decided it needed a lot more programmers to build out its products. What did it do? It recently opened its own tech facility in Krakow, Poland — with a staff of 150. That’s only about a two-hour flight away, allowing engineers to be brought into the Schibsted way with visits to Oslo. The common language, of course, is English. The wages: good, but much lower than in Norway.

One hundred fifty. The Washington Post’s Cory Haik (who wrote for the Lab recently about adaptive journalism) and I shared a panel at SXSW’s German Haus, and on it, she said that the Post has about 17 technologists working with her teams in the newsroom. Seventeen is an astounding high number; most newsrooms would only need a single hand to count their devoted-to-editorial tech staff.

Yet Schibsted, true to its all-in strategies, has invested substantially in its Schibsted Tech Polska central facility, in addition to housing numerous technologists at its various properties. Schibsted understands that the foundations of media are now based in engineering and analytics, having multiplied that analytics investment just within the last year (“The newsonomics of Little Data, data scientists and conversion specialists”).

Some of the staff of Schibsted Teck Polska in 2012. Courtesy Schibsted’s John Einar Sandvand.

It was security (Julian Assange and Edward Snowden) and news startups that caught much attention at SXSW this year. Nate Silver and Grantland’s Bill Simmons — both now working for ESPN — interviewed each other on stage. They displayed the swagger of confidence, of being part of something new, shiny, and growing. By contrast, legacy news media were unevenly represented. I didn’t hear of many news companies recruiting techies — the main crowd at SXSW Interactive — to work for them.

It is in this alchemy of confidence and technology that I see a model in Schibsted. It took years for it to build confidence in the “Schibsted way.” Each achievement along its path has bolstered that sense; VGTV’s next-generation reach is a logical extension of that. Here are three takeaways from the Schibsted model:

• Focus on growth, not survival. Survival is a fool’s game, as legacy newspapers playing defense just see themselves more and more depleted with each passing year. TWEET
• Be a pirate, not a guard. Go after other people’s markets, as VGTV aims in the long term for TV/video advertising.
• If you are going to do it, do it at scale. Hiring an analyst or an engineer here or there won’t build the future; hiring 150 in Poland might.

Photo of a Norway Day celebration (in Stockholm) by Andriy Baranskyy used under a Creative Commons license.

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