Juana Summers is struck by “an incredible sense of responsibility.”

She took over one of the host chairs at “All Things Considered” in June 2022 after many years as a political correspondent for NPR. Now almost a year into her new role, she sees herself as a guide to making the news program — and NPR in general — a place where people can feel represented.

Part of that, Summers believes, starts with the audience knowing her.

“I am never setting at the door that I am a Black woman, I am a stepparent, I am a woman who grew up in the Midwest and lived in a low- and middle-income home growing up, and who went to private religious schools,” said Summers, 34. “All of those dynamics are things that inform how I do my journalism, and the degree in which I lean into any part of that varies from story to story.”

Summers is one of the four women of color — three of them Black — who have taken over hosting duties at flagship NPR programs over the past year. Leila Fadel moved to “Morning Edition” in January 2022, joined just over a year later by veteran NPR host Michel Martin. Ayesha Rascoe became the host of “Weekend Edition Sunday” in March 2022. Their roles extend beyond the voices delivering the headlines. Each are editorial leaders with immense influence over what and who is covered.

“It would seem that after NPR top executives and news managers saw its three most popular women of color hosts departed within the last year, they would have pondered seriously about why these stellar female journalists left, with serious determination to make progressive changes at the public network to recruit and retain women of color hosts,” said Sharon Bramlett-Solomon, an associate professor at Arizona State University and an expert on race and gender in broadcast journalism.

Bramlett-Solomon added that leadership at NPR now faces a unique challenge in showing their commitment “to move forward with dramatic and meaningful transformation in programming inclusion and not simply window dressing on the set.”

Whitney Maddox, who was hired for the newly created diversity, equity and inclusion manager role in January 2021, said that in her role, she has especially focused on women of color at NPR: “What’s happening with them? How are they doing? What do they need?”

She has created a monthly space for women of color at the organization to meet and share about their day-to-day experiences and voice what resources they need. Her work also includes consulting to the flagship programs and checking in on their workplace cultures and how people are supported, including how stories are pitched and edited.

Maddox also started Start Talking About Race, or STAR, which is a twice-monthly event open to everyone in the organization. From these conversations, Maddox said she’s already seen an impact.

“This is moving beyond this space into how people are pitching their stories,” Maddox said. “Editors have come back to me and said, ‘A point that somebody made in STAR — I used that when I brought up a point of how we should think differently about how to source this story.’ There is a process, there is time, there is changing people’s hearts and raising their consciousness to understand why this work is important.”

The leadership of Fadel, Martin, Rascoe, and Summers are key parts in acting on conversations surrounding equity. Their roles in the host chairs are a signal of NPR’s commitment to reflecting their audience, Marrapodi said. “Our job is to be public media for the entire public,” he said. “We’re here for everybody. Our job is to hold a mirror up to society. And this is what society looks like.”

Fadel, 41, is acutely aware that her in the host chair is a representation of what society looks — and sounds — like.

“I just never thought it could happen. Clearly women have held host seats at NPR long before me, and people of color have moved up through the organization, but I just never imagined it,” she said. “How could I have imagined this for myself? There was no one who looked like me, who was an Arab woman, who was Muslim, doing this job.”

“I think about that responsibility and I take it very seriously,” Rascoe said. She said she thinks about her late grandmother, a sharecropper from North Carolina, constantly as she works. “I think about her and I think about my whole family, and I never want to make them not proud of me. I never want them to look at what I’m doing and say, ‘What is she out here doing? How is she representing us? We didn’t raise her that way.’”

Even the sound of her voice has been true to Rascoe’s roots: As her executive producer Sarah Lucy Oliver said, “Ayesha sounds like herself. She says she sounds like a Black woman from Durham, North Carolina.”

Oliver described what she calls “NPR voice” — a low register, stripped of any regional dialects, that registers as white and male — as the prevailing sound of NPR. Rascoe, she said, is a disruption to that.

“For decades, listeners have been accustomed to a particular kind of NPR voice. You can run through the dial and figure out when you’ve landed on an NPR member station,” Oliver said.

Hearing a voice like Rascoe’s “is a definite change in direction, and is exactly the kind of voice NPR wants to bring to the air,” Oliver said. “This is part of the real world. People speak differently. People have different regional accents. People use different kinds of colloquialisms. NPR is trying to sound more like the real world now.”

But Rascoe has had to reckon with the way audiences — used to that staid, white, and masculine NPR voice — perceive her. She has received racist listener feedback: coded messaging urging her to “sound professional,” telling Rascoe about how they don’t like her voice.

Rascoe says this is “all just a way of saying, ‘You are Black, and you are a Black woman from the South, and therefore you are stupid.’” When she first arrived at NPR in 2018 from Reuters, where she was a White House correspondent, it was a shock. “I will not try to pretend that it didn’t hurt and that it wasn’t frustrating,” she said.

Though Rascoe said she has received nothing but support from her colleagues and managers, her experience speaks to the dynamic at play in newsrooms nationwide aspiring to evolve, change and grow in being representative in their journalism.

The work of “disrupting the whiteness that journalists of color so often feel in white newsrooms” is hard and real, Bramlett-Solomon said — but doable, especially when there is real, on-the-ground support from management, with actual dollars behind it to show it.

Rascoe is aware of the fact that by simply being on air in such a high-profile way, she is doing that work of not only changing NPR, but changing American audiences’ expectations more broadly on credibility within the news.

“I have a voice that is not a voice that people necessarily expect — but it’s mine…Hopefully, it helps expand their idea of what authority, what professionalism and what intelligence can sound like,” Rascoe said.

Martin, 63, first joined NPR in 2006 to launch “Tell Me More,” an interview-focused show that aired on NPR member stations nationwide from 2007 to 2014. She then became host of “Weekend All Things Considered,” a position she held until joining “Morning Edition” as one of the hosts in March.

After decades in journalism, and many years at NPR specifically, Martin is deliberate and thoughtful in her imagining of the organization’s future and her role in it. As someone with a long history with the organization — one that includes using her voice to help push NPR forward on how it thinks about and covers race — she brings to her new role the ability to hold the past in the present while continuing to look forward. She said she’s constantly thinking not only about her time at NPR, but the ways journalists of color have worked to serve communities throughout history in how she approaches her role today.

“I just want us to keep getting better,” Martin said. “I want us to keep getting better because if you aren’t, then you are not growing. If you are not growing, then you’re dying.”

Martin steps into leadership at the flagship program at a time when the political climate often makes it tough for journalists to report. Martin says she thinks journalists play an especially important role “to help us understand each other’s experiences.” Without helping audiences dig into the nuances of why people believe what they do — and why the political is so personal for so many — journalists aren’t doing the job they are charged with executing.

“Yes, the words are changing and we’re all having to learn to use different language and to recognize different identities that were perhaps not part of our own experiences before. But that’s life. That’s learning. That’s education. That’s the news,” she said.

Martin said she takes inspiration from the way that Spanish-language and Black newspapers have crafted their coverage strategies.

“The origin of these news outlets was not just to talk about the politics that particularly affected these communities, but also to help people understand how to live in the new world that they were in: telling people things like how to register to vote, how to register your kids for school,” Martin said.

It is exactly this kind of work — often dismissed by editors and audiences alike as “unserious” for being service-oriented or because its target audience is those from historically underrepresented backgrounds — that Martin has always prioritized, and sees as essential now more than ever.

“What I want the most is for us to keep moving forward and not lose sight of our mission, which is to serve the public…I want us to keep doing our jobs because I think the country really needs us,” Martin said. “I want us to get more honest and stronger and more clear in how we serve people by helping them understand the world that does not lead them to carry the baggage of waking up and saying, ‘Whose side am I on today?’ That’s not who we are and I think not being that is so important.”

To think about equitable journalism means to consider the weight and totality of experience that exists behind each voice that feels unheard. That’s something that Martin’s “Morning Edition” co-host Fadel thinks a lot about, too. Fadel said she sees a major part of her job as being someone who can actively make and support a “safe space” for a range of voices, opinions, and perspectives in the editorial process.

Being fully present as herself in the host chair is a critical element of that, Fadel said — while also acknowledging that simply sitting in the seat doesn’t mean her newsroom, or any other, is done with the work of thinking holistically about what representation means in journalism.

“Change doesn’t happen because one person sits in a chair,” Fadel said. “It requires action at every level. This is happening at NPR, but of course there is more work to be done. Diversity isn’t just who is in a newsroom, but whose voices are in a story, and there is still a lot of work to be done there. We have a very diverse newsroom, but we need to always make sure it is more than white men whose voices get to talk about what happened.”

Fadel said she thinks all the time about how her own journalism can help change other people’s — and predominantly white listeners’ — perceptions.

“I didn’t see myself and my family in the stories I saw on the news. My father is from Lebanon and I grew up in Saudi Arabia. Talking about people like my family in the news meant only talking about people who were ensconced in conflict. It was all conflict. But there are real people who exist in these places where there is conflict. And they are nuanced and may all experience pain differently and joy differently and have lives outside of the conflict going on around them.”

Sitting in the host chair at “Morning Edition” is a way that she feels she can change this kind of sentiment across journalism, writ large.

“Representation matters,” she said.

Mak says he was laid off from his job as an investigative correspondent when NPR cut its staff by 10% last month. On Tuesday, Mak launched The Counteroffensive, the first Substack dedicated to war correspondence. (Others have featured war correspondence from time to time, a Substack spokesperson noted.)

“The idea first occurred to me just a few weeks ago,” Mak told me. “I think one of the benefits of Substack is that it works right out of the box. I just signed up and started writing.”

I’ll tell you my personal impressions, and let you in on the inside jokes, and give you the behind the scenes scoop on what’s happening in Ukraine…

… the sort of writing I couldn’t do with my straight news reports at NPR. pic.twitter.com/DwHyem1vjb

— Tim Mak (@timkmak) April 25, 2023

Reporting from conflict zones is complicated, resource-intensive, and, yes, incredibly dangerous. News organizations often provide equipment, hostile environment training, special insurance, and other resources to full-time reporters headed to the front lines.

In his appeal to subscribers, Mak outlined some of the costs — body armor, medical kits, rental cars, emergency supplies, a Ukrainian interpreter, etc. — that he’ll now pay for out of his own pocket. He told me he expects his operating costs to be, at a minimum, around $7,000 per month. (Substack has offered Mak “guidance and advice, but no financial resources,” he said.)

“I need 1,000 paid subscribers in order to stop losing money,” Mak wrote to me. “Then more to be a little bit more ambitious than ramen and buses. Then after that I can pay myself.”

Mak, a former U.S. Army combat medic, arrived in Kyiv on the night the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, according to his NPR bio. He has been covering the war since. I asked him what he sees as his biggest challenge, now that he’ll be reporting from the country independently.

“The hardest thing will be discipline, I think. As an independent journalist I’ll be on my own, without an institution to pull me out when I need it,” Mak said. “I’ll need to have the discipline to make wise decisions to keep me and my team safe.”

On Twitter, Mak often shares behind-the-scenes photos and stories from Ukraine. He said he was looking forward to taking a more informal, conversation manner with The Counteroffensive — less AP Style, more “like a letter to a friend.”

And there was the humor: the Ukrainians esp appreciated Angelina Jolie for visiting them during the war… pic.twitter.com/6lXPRAPMqY

— Tim Mak (@timkmak) February 24, 2023

In other dispatches, Mak has been posting various “dogs of war.” (He also reposts “dogs of peace” that folks back home in the U.S. send him.) He’ll continue the tradition in his newsletter with a mascot named Rex.

Today’s dog of war is Rex, our new mascot. “Soldiers call each other ‘Rex’ when they’re impressed with how good you are, or sarcastically when you’ve messed up,” said Ross, my interpreter and reporting partner.

Let’s hope for more Rexes of the former, and less of the latter. pic.twitter.com/vndnsdWoUW

— Tim Mak (@timkmak) April 25, 2023

You can read the first post from The Counteroffensive here.

This doesn’t exactly mean that NPR’s 50 official Twitter accounts — @NPR, @allsongs, @altlatino, @jazznight, @LouderThanARiot, @microface, @morningedition, @nprhelp, @npr_ed, @npralltech, @npraskmeanother, @npratc, @nprbooks, @nprbusiness, @nprchives, @nprclassical, @nprcodeswitch, @nprdesign, @nprembedded, @nprextra, @nprfood, @nprgoatsandsoda, @nprhealth, @nprinterns, @nprinvisibilia, @NPRItsBeenAMin, @nprjobs, @nprlifekit, @nprmusic, @nprone, @nproye, @nprpolitics, @nprscience, @nprshortwave, @nprstations, @nprtechteam, @nprtraining, @nprviz, @nprweekend, @nprwest, @nprworld, @pchh, @planetmoney, @podcastsNPR, @roughly, @sourceoftheweek, @tedradiohour, @throughlinenpr, @UpFirst, @waitwait — are leaving-leaving Twitter, and the company has been careful not to use those words. The accounts — by my count have a combined 17,665,607 followers; NPR’s flagship account alone has 8.8 million — haven’t been deleted. We can keep arguing about whether Twitter actually drives traffic1, but a multi-million-person following is definitely doing something positive for your brand, and it’s taken years to build. NPR CEO John Lansing was careful not to rule out a return:

In a BBC interview posted online Wednesday, Musk suggested he may further change the label to “publicly funded.” His words did not sway NPR’s decision makers. Even if Twitter were to drop the designation altogether, Lansing says the network will not immediately return to the platform.

“At this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter,” he says. “I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again.”

In the meantime, NPR’s accounts have a “two-week grace period” to “revise their social media strategies.” On Thursday, some of the accounts tweeted infographics about non-Twitter places to find them. Others just aren’t tweeting.

pic.twitter.com/OLgOHvTlma

— NPR (@NPR) April 12, 2023

We are turning away from Twitter but not from our audiences and communities. There are plenty of ways to stay connected and keep up with NPR's news, music, and cultural content.
See full statement below: pic.twitter.com/VPDXy7lWw7

— Isabel Lara (@isalara) April 12, 2023

pic.twitter.com/OLgOHvTlma

— NPR (@NPR) April 12, 2023

Some of NPR’s Twitter accounts already hadn’t tweeted in weeks (@AltLatino) or months (@PodcastsNPR, @nprhelp) or years (@MicroFace, @nprchives).

While there’s been plenty of public cheering for NPR’s move, it’s unclear how many other media organizations will follow suit, especially without a fairly direct push. PBS, for instance, hasn’t tweeted since April 8, but its sub-accounts, like @NewsHour, remain active.

1. For Nieman Lab, it definitely does.

NPR has not tweeted since Twitter slapped a “US state-affiliated media” label on its main account on Wednesday, a designation that lumps the news org in with propaganda outlets like Russian broadcaster RT and China’s People’s Daily newspaper. And it doesn’t plan to until the label is removed.

The @NPR account — which has more than 8.8 million followers — has an updated bio: “You can find us every other place you read the news.” The header image now includes the words: “Always free and independent. Always at NPR.org.”

The changes were made on Thursday, NPR spokesperson Isabel Lara confirmed.

“We stopped tweeting from the main @NPR account after they attached that false label to it because each tweet we publish would carry it,” Lara said. “We have paused tweeting from that account until we hear back from Twitter on this. We’ve continued tweeting from other accounts that aren’t mislabeled.”

Abstaining from Twitter is less of a hardship than Twitter owner Elon Musk might like to think. Twitter doesn’t drive much traffic for most news publishers, even though it’s a platform many journalists can’t seem to quit. (And that’s before the “state-affiliated” label downranks your content.)

Also on Thursday, Musk told an NPR reporter that the designation may have been a mistake.

“Well, then we should fix it,” Musk wrote in an email to tech reporter Bobby Allyn, who had pointed out government aid accounts for roughly 1% of NPR’s finances.

Allyn said he “provided Musk publicly available documentation of the network’s finances showing that nearly 40% of its funding comes from corporate sponsorships and 31% from fees for programming paid by local public radio stations.”

Twitter defines “state-affiliated” publishers as ones where the government “exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.”

Until Wednesday, Twitter’s own policy on the “state-affiliated” label specifically noted that “state-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the United States, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy.” Twitter removed the reference to NPR after giving its account the “state-affiliated” label.

Unlike the pilot program that offered single podcast subscriptions, the paid bundle is getting a very soft launch. To start, NPR+ will only be available in the 34 locations where a member station1 is participating in the program. That means listeners with IP addresses that put them in, say, New York City or Boston will only see single show subscriptions available for now, while those living in Orlando or Baltimore or Normal, Illinois can choose the bundled NPR+ option.

A team at NPR developed the NPR+ program and will manage marketing as well as customer service for the bundle. (It’s still not exactly easy to add a paid feed to the most popular podcast app in the U.S.) Member stations, meanwhile, get to keep 100% of the donations.

“We’re reserving our bundle for the benefit of supporting your local member station — that’s really the offer that we’re hoping becomes a resounding success,” said Joel Sucherman, NPR’s vice president for audio platform strategy. “Because, you know, ‘listeners like you’ supporting local member stations, which support NPR — that’s what makes the world go ’round in public radio.”

The podcast bundle has two origin stories. The first starts with die-hard podcast fans asking for bonus content, merch, and other ways to support their favorite show. (“We are a tribe of tote bag people,” Sucherman said at one point.) The other emerged from NPR reading the tea leaves and seeing increased competition and consolidation in the audio space.

“For many of our 50-plus years, our high standard of audio and fact-based journalism was a lane that we had to ourselves in many ways. But over the course of the last five to 10 years, it’s been amazing the number of folks who have jumped into the field and are doing great work — including folks that we never really truly competed against, like The New York Times,” Sucherman said. “What we do differently than The New York Times, or another commercial media company, is realize that we’re in it together.”

An NPR spokesperson said that “tens of thousands” of people subscribed to individual shows as part of the pilot program for NPR+. (Fresh Air and Planet Money were the most popular “singles” offerings.) The pilot phase also confirmed to NPR the importance of bonus content — not just ad-free episodes — in converting listeners into paid subscribers, said Leda Marritz, program manager for the NPR+ podcast subscription service.

“We knew from our technology platform partners that offering bonus content or early access to content is going to move the needle way more than ad-free,” she said. “Having said that, it was very gratifying to see that once we did start doing that, the number of subscribers just immediately started going up.”

If you’re a subscriber to @planetmoney +, you can listen to today’s bonus content – the very first edition of Planet Money Movie Club!

I join @RadioMalone and @VelocityWong to talk ~Brewster’s Millions~

Listen and take a shot every time we say ‘conceit’https://t.co/uo3pasOlM0

— Sam Yellowhorse Kesler (@samkeslr) August 22, 2022

NPR+ bonus content has included extended interviews, listener Q&As, and show-specific tidbits like a Planet Money Movie Club and early access to a chatty episode between Peter Sagal and Emma Choi from Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! and their executive producer Mike Danforth.

“We wanted to differentiate bonus content from the core offering, both for philosophical reasons and editorial reasons,” Marritz, who joined NPR earlier this year from Apple Podcasts, said. “Planet Money is a highly polished, highly produced work of art, right? They can’t do that and a piece of bonus content, too. It would just not be achievable on an ongoing basis.”

Marritz emphasized the technical hurdles involved in linking a subscription to a recurring local donation when different stations use different systems to accept payments, share content, and manage donors. For now, Marritz said, NPR is focused on some of the unsexy stuff that’s nevertheless critical to scaling this project to their coast-to-coast vision.

“This is not ‘get rich quick.’ We’re not expecting stratospheric success right out of the gate,” Marritz said. “This group of 34 stations is basically going to be an informal advisory body for this product. We’re obviously going to be staying very close to them, hearing what’s working, hearing what’s not working, triaging those, and addressing them as much as possible.”

The fact that NPR+ subscriptions will only be available to new recurring donors at first was a sticking point for some stations presumably worried about antagonizing current members while recruiting their next generation of donors. NPR heard “loud and clear” from “many, many stations” that they only wanted to offer NPR+ when the technological infrastructure was in place to offer the bundle to their existing members, too.

In addition to the technical hurdles, there are cultural challenges for NPR+ contend with. Radio, NPR’s legacy platform, has long been on the decline. The pandemic accelerated that trend by disrupting many car commutes, where half of AM/FM listening in the U.S. takes place.

“For some stations, moving into a digital-focused strategy is a shift. Many of them still live in the broadcast world, uh, very firmly,” Marritz said. “There’s just a real variety — you get some for whom this feels like a really comfortable program to opt into, and you get some for whom this feels like a much bigger shift from how they’re operating in the day-to-day.”

What does NPR stand for? pic.twitter.com/tJMEDMzfTo

— nprextra (@NPRextra) October 4, 2022

Asking a national podcast audience to become donors to their local radio stations might seem like a convoluted way to generate subscription revenue. But NPR — for reasons institutional, journalistic, and financial — wants to prioritize local support.

Dues and fees paid by the more than 1,000 NPR member stations are one of NPR’s largest portions of revenue. Currently, member stations are drawing on a donor base that is older and less diverse than America at large. NPR’s own CEO has described the public radio system as “stagnant on new membership” and overly reliant on twice-yearly pledge drives.

Meanwhile, NPR estimates that less than 1% of its 20 million weekly digital users give to their local stations.

“Podcast listeners may or may not be listening to the traditional appeals on the radio,” Sucherman said. “They may not have a favorite radio station — or understand that a public radio station is connected to NPR and connected to the podcasts that NPR creates.”

The NPR+ podcast bundle is just one part of a broader strategy called NPR Network that was approved by the company’s board over the summer. The NPR Network initiative also includes creating a cross-promotional podcast network, launching a digital audio ad exchange, and changing the organization’s bylaws to allow NPR Network to seek individual contributions directly.

With NPR Network, NPR aims to double the number of people who support their local member stations directly and double the total annual revenue in the public radio system by 2030.

“As strong as Marfa, Texas is, that’s how strong NPR is, ultimately,” Sucherman said. “We want to make sure that we have more boots on the ground, more journalists in the field, more regional hubs. How can we think about supporting those in new ways? This is one of those ways.”

1. As of Nov. 1st, participating local member stations are CapRadio – Sacramento, CA; Cincinnati Public Radio / WVXU – Cincinnati, OH; Colorado Public Radio – Denver, CO; Georgia Public Broadcasting – Atlanta, GA; Houston Public Media – Houston, TX; Iowa Public Radio – Des Moines, IA; KALW – San Francisco, CA; KENW – Portales, NM; KNKX – Tacoma, WA; KPBS Public Media – San Diego, CA; KUOW – Seattle, WA; KVCR – San Bernardino, CA; Louisville Public Media – Louisville, KY; North Carolina Public Radio – Chapel Hill, NC; North State Public Radio – Chico, CA; KOSU – Stillwater, OK; Prairie Public Broadcasting – Fargo, ND; South Dakota Public Radio – Vermillion, SD; Texas Public Radio – San Antonio, TX; WABE – Atlanta, GA; WCBU – Peoria, IL; WEKU – Richmond, KY; WFYI – Indianapolis, IN; WGLT – Normal, IL; WJCT Public Media – Jacksonville, FL; WKAR Radio – East Lansing, MI; WLVR – Bethlehem, PA; WMFE – Orlando, FL; WNIN Tri-States Public Media – Evansville, IN; WRKF – Baton Rouge, LA; WSKG Public Radio – Vestal, NY; WUSF Public Media – Tampa, FL; WYPR – Baltimore, MD; and WYSO – Yellow Springs, OH

NPR was founded in 1970 after the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. Its original mission statement reads, in part:

The program would be well-paced, flexible, and a service primarily for a general audience. It would not, however, substitute superficial blandness for genuine diversity of regions, values, and cultural and ethnic minorities, which comprise American society. It would speak with many voices and many dialects. The editorial attitude would be that of inquiry, curiosity, concern for the quality of life, critical problem solving, and life loving. The listener should come to rely upon it as a source of information of consequence, of having listened as having made a difference in his attitude toward his environment and himself … National Public Radio will not regard its audience as a market, or in terms of its disposable income, but as curious, complex individuals who are looking for some understanding, meaning, and joy in the human experience.

That’s different from the NPR we know today, argues Christopher Chávez, the director of the Center for Latina/o and Latin American Studies at the University of Oregon. He’s a scholar of Latin American media who published a 2015 book about how “language, power, and industry practices are reshaping the concept of Hispanic television” and, last year, published The Sound of Exclusion: NPR and the Latinx Public. In his new book, Chávez uses media industry data and 50 interviews with public media workers to argue that NPR’s growth has come at the expense of serving Latinx audiences in the U.S.

“I hope to address how power is enacted in everyday broadcast practices,” Chávez writes in the book’s introduction. “By interrogating industry practices, we might begin to reimagine NPR as a public good that is meant to be accessed by the broader spectrum of the American public, not just the country’s most elite.”

I caught up with Chávez to learn about the challenges in studying NPR from this lens, who he thinks is serving Latinx audiences in audio, and what NPR might need to do to be more relevant to the largest minority group in the country. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Twitter Spaces launched as a mobile-only product for a select number of hosts back in December 2020 — a few months before Clubhouse hit its peak; remember Clubhouse? — and was rolled out widely in May 2021. (Anyone with more than 600 followers can host a Space.)

Eric Zuckerman, head of U.S. news partnerships for Twitter, said he and his team have been talking to newsrooms about using Spaces for the past year. His pitch? Social audio like Twitter Spaces presents “an opportunity for newsrooms and journalists to have an open and authentic conversations with their audiences about what’s happening in the world and about the stories that they’re covering,” he said.

Twitter has long held appeal for journalists looking to connect with audiences and sources. On its best days, the platform is a place where reporters can get story ideas, answer questions, and build trust by showing more of their work and process. Twitter Spaces, Zuckerman says, are another way that journalists can continue the conversation. During a Space, hosts — which can be newsrooms or individuals — invite followers to listen in on an interview, discussion, or panel and even hand them the (virtual) mic to join the conversation.

Recent newsroom-hosted Spaces include NPR’s Steve Inskeep talking about his abbreviated interview with Trump, the Miami Herald going behind the scenes of their months-long investigation into the Surfside condo collapse, and reporters at The Washington Post jumping on to respond to the news Microsoft was acquiring the gamemaker Activision.

.@NPRinskeep’s interview with Donald Trump ended with the former President hanging up.

Steve will discuss this interview with @DomenicoNPR and @MaraLiasson at 1 PM on @TwitterSpaces. https://t.co/uSQDZ4BJxj

— NPR (@NPR) January 12, 2022

Newsrooms have promoted Spaces around anniversaries, too. On January 6, there were plenty to choose from: HuffPost, BuzzFeed News, USA Today, New York Times Opinion, The Daily Beast, Politico, and the Associated Press all held Spaces looking at the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol.

Join @AP journalists @JulioCortez_AP, @MCJalonick, @DavidKlepper and @ctlong1 on Wednesday as they speak with @RADIOEDD to look back at the year since the insurrection at the Capitol. https://t.co/h8Ux3k1JXn

— The Associated Press (@AP) January 4, 2022

Some of the best Spaces I’ve heard have been where reporters share what they know and what they’re still trying to figure out. When the news broke that Facebook planned to change its name, tech journalists Kara Swisher and Casey Newton held a rollicking discussion with a lot of blue-checked names speculating about what the new name might be, and why Facebook might be interested in making the change. The freedom the reporters felt to make some educated guesses — the kind of conjecture that might not make it into print — made it all the more fun.

There’s a fairly thorough primer on using Twitter Spaces but Zuckerman says the first thing he tells newsrooms is to listen to other Spaces and test out the feature on their own. Sarah Feldberg, editor for emerging products and audio at the San Francisco Chronicle, echoed the advice.

“Test. Test. Test,” Feldberg said. “The feature is fairly easy to use, but the functionality seems to be updated regularly, so it’s important to stay on top of how it’s working and make sure your guests know how to join the Space and start speaking.”

The Chronicle has done four Spaces so far: a service-oriented discussion about holiday gifting, one with restaurant critics Soleil Ho and Cesar Hernandez, and two in partnership with their flagship daily news podcast Fifth & Mission.

The Fifth & Mission ones have featured podcast host Cecilia Lei and health reporter Erin Allday interviewing public health experts about Covid-19.

“They’ve been a way to give our community live access to local experts and to talk about pressing issues around the pandemic, like advice for parents of children too young to be vaccinated and concerns around long Covid in breakthrough infections,” Feldberg said. “We recorded the audio from those conversations and edited the highlights into subsequent podcast episodes.”

“We knew it was much more infectious. I have to say that I think the extent of that is jaw-dropping … 5 times more than anything I’ve seen in the prior two years”: Dr. @Bob_Wachter talks the current omicron surge and what to expect in 2022. https://t.co/n1dXkGXB4I

— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle) January 8, 2022

NPR — which has hosted more than 60 Spaces so far — has also been able to use and reuse conversations hosted on Twitter Spaces. Matt Adams, engagement editor at NPR, pointed to a wide-ranging conversation between NPR pop culture critic Eric Deggans, NPR addiction correspondent Brian Mann, Dopesick author Beth Macy, and Dopesick series creator/showrunner Danny Strong that was recorded for listeners who missed the live Space and yielded three digital stories.

An interview with the U.S. Surgeon General — and the live audience questions — were broadcast more widely, too.

“The reporters open the conversation, talk through recent reporting, and update our audience on what they should know. But I think the real special feature to social audio is the social part, opening the mic to the audience to ask questions that can help us figure out topics we haven’t covered yet or get their reactions to how NPR is covering the news,” Adams said. “I’ve worked in online communities for a long time and before you used to send out a survey to get feedback or ask members how we can better provide a service … To me, social audio is an in-real-time survey where we can gain feedback and hopefully reach new audience members.”

Twitter Spaces featuring celebrities and reporters covering the White House and Congress have done especially well for NPR. (The actor Matthew McConaughey had more than 4,000 listeners when he said, about running for political office, “I am not — until I am” in a Twitter Space hosted by NPR.) Once started, the newsroom can boost attendance by tweeting out choice quotes or letting users know they’ll be opening the conversation up for questions soon.

Ultimately, Adams said Twitter Spaces are part of a larger strategy at NPR to think through how a radio company “can reach beyond the airwaves and digital .org page” and “hear from a wide range of guests and sources.”

“We’re starting to wonder, ‘Okay, can this work as a social audio conversation? How can we get more voices on this whether from the audience or our sources?'” he added. “I’d say that it’s becoming part of our strategy just like we produce pieces for on-air.”

I wasn’t the only one who picked up on the change:

“Facebook was, until recently, one of @NPR’s sponsors”. Interesting. When I was on @MorningEdition Monday, I believe they said FB was a sponsor. Wonder what happened, @shannonpareil? Who pulled the plug? FB? Or NPR?

— Yael Eisenstat (@YaelEisenstat) October 29, 2021

Yesterday: We have to let you know that Facebook is one of @NPR’s sponsors before we start this story

Today: We have to let you know that until recently Facebook was one of @NPR‘s sponsors.

If I didn’t need Facebook for my job, I’d now exit…

— Dr Pamela L Gay #BlackLivesMatter (@starstryder) October 29, 2021

every morning i love hearing @NPR disclose that Facebook is a financial sponsor while reporting about how terrible FB is — until today! Apparently, FB is no longer a sponsor

— Danielle Kosecki (@dkos07) October 29, 2021

Oh daaang NPR’s coverage of Facebook went from “we should note Facebook is a financial supporter of NPR” to “until recently, Facebook was a supporter of NPR” this week

— Meryl Williams Clark (@MerylWilliams) October 29, 2021

.@AMartinezLA: Facebook was, *until recently*, an NPR financial supporter.
Me: … pic.twitter.com/HeEZaWAA3G

— Esther CiamMETAchilli (@EstherCinDC) October 29, 2021

So did NPR drop Facebook as a sponsor, as some folks suggested? Did Facebook cancel?

NPR did tweak its note on transparency for Facebook, confirmed spokesperson Isabel Lara. (“I had no idea people pay such close attention to our disclosure language,” she said. ) But the latest Facebook sponsorship campaign wrapped up in November 2020, so the overnight change wasn’t due to a sudden break. NPR just updated the language to reflect Facebook was a former — not current — sponsor.

It’s not the only tweak that NPR listeners will hear, though. Starting today, NPR will also disclose that “Facebook’s parent company, Meta, pays NPR to license NPR content” in its coverage of the company.

NPR provided some extra context on the change. Facebook still pays it for its content to appear in Facebook’s News tab.

FB has licensing agreements with many publishers, including NPR. Through that arrangement, Facebook pays NPR to have a feed of summaries and links to NPR stories appear in Facebook alongside news from other outlets. NPR retains full editorial control of its content and feed.

I asked NPR if it had declined sponsorship from Facebook since the contract ended a year ago, as some were speculating on social media. Lara sent along NPR’s admirably strict guidelines about the sponsorship campaigns they accept.

“Sometimes our sponsorship team … will ask sponsors to tweak their language or turn down specific campaigns that don’t comply with the guidelines — as you can see in that link it is most often because of advocacy issues or if they’re referring to something that’s very much in the news,” Lara said.

In other words, NPR might turn down a specific campaign that violated guidelines, but wouldn’t bar all campaigns from a specific brand. Not that it would tell us which sponsorships were denied: “We also respect client confidentiality, so we wouldn’t be disclosing what campaigns we turn down,” Lara said.

On Wednesday, Chicago Public Media’s board of directors signed off on a “non-binding letter of intent” to pursue the acquisition of the Chicago Sun-Times, the second largest newspaper in circulation in the city after the Chicago Tribune.

If a deal is finalized, it would make the Sun-Times a subsidiary of Chicago Public Media, WBEZ reported, and “create one of the largest local nonprofit news organizations in the nation and be a national model for the future of local journalism.”

While the Sun-Times wouldn’t be the first American newspaper to explore the non-profit route, this may be the first time a public media outlet has offered to help one.

The Chicago Sun-Times could be one of the best-known newspapers to give up the pursuit of profit, under a plan that would see it become a subsidiary of NPR-affiliated Chicago Public Media. https://t.co/y94CQiklRE

— Kevin McDougald (@kevinmcdougald) September 30, 2021

As Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy points out, it’s unclear what the tax status of the Sun-Times would be under this deal. Non-profits aren’t allowed to endorse political candidates, for example, and whether or not those matter is a separate question, but it’s a long-held newspaper tradition that the Sun-Times also participates in. Still, Kennedy was optimistic about the announcement, writing that he hopes “it becomes a model for what might take place elsewhere.”

“Public radio (and/or television) in many markets is in a good position to pick up the slack if the legacy newspaper starts getting squeezed by corporate ownership,” Kennedy told me in an email. “They already have a high profile in the community and have a fundraising apparatus in place.”

So far, financial support for this deal would come from Sun-Times investor Michael Sacks, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Pritzker Traubert Foundation, though how much hasn’t been disclosed. Chicago Public Media CEO Matt Moog said that individual donations would also be a form of revenue in this partnership, which WBEZ already receives as a nonprofit.

WBEZ and the Sun-Times’ joint statement said that both news outlets would operate independently and continue to serve their respective audiences, but that they would “broaden their impact” by sharing each other’s content across their platforms (i.e. WBEZ republishing print stories, the Sun-Times sharing or collaborating on podcasts, co-hosting future community events).

I really hope details of how content sharing and workflows get ironed out soon for both newsrooms’ sake. Each create unique and vital content. The pre-Zell era of Tribune “synergy” was supposed to share content for Trib, WGN, others.
https://t.co/ndxBh1WcLL

— Elliott Ramos (@ChicagoEl) September 30, 2021

Moog and Chicago Sun-Times CEO Nykia Wright both said that there were no plans to reduce or lay off staff in this deal, and it would instead be an opportunity to expand both newsrooms.

Fascinating development out of Chicago (and h/t to ⁦@RobertFeder⁩ on the scoop)
Can’t imagine ⁦@WBEZ⁩ agreeing to absorb future print losses, so wonder if ⁦@Suntimes⁩ might go all digital? https://t.co/Y6lVLhcV55

— Richard Tofel (@dicktofel) September 29, 2021

Should the deal go through, it would be the fourth time the Sun-Times has changed ownership since 2009.

Somewhat similar deals have taken place in other cities. In 2018, WNYC in New York, KPCC in Los Angeles, and WAMU in Washington D.C. acquired digital news sites Gothamist, LAist, and DCist, respectively. In 2019, Colorado Public Radio acquired Denverite.

But acquiring a print newspaper is different, stressed Chris Krewson, executive editor of LION — who struck a note of caution about the deal. “The overhead of the new digital newsrooms tends to be exponentially smaller; this is pretty key, in my mind,” he wrote me in an email. “If you were going to start a nonprofit organization to serve a city or region in the year of our lord 2021, why on Earth would it look anything like a metro daily newspaper?”

The Chicago Sun-Times, post-bankruptcy, was losing $4.5M per year in May 2017.

It later sold to local investors for $1… three years before Covid took roughly a quarter of most newspapers' circulation.

"This isn't a fire sale," though.https://t.co/81dIXsoEd3

— Chris Krewson (@ckrewson) September 30, 2021

“I saw far too little in this announcement about what Chicago needs, news and information-wise, and a whole lot of optimism around what, essentially, has already been sold for the sum total of its obligations,” Krewson said.

As a lifelong Chicagoan who happily grew up in a two newspaper town and now works daily with every news outlet in Chicago, I’d say this is the best damn news that Chicago journalism has had in a long time. Bravo @Suntimes and @WBEZ https://t.co/27lyCo3i8R

— Becky Carroll (@beckycarroll7) September 30, 2021

Hoping this @WBEZ takeover not only helps keep the @Suntimes afloat but also inspires it to continue working on diversity. As others have pointed out, white men still make most of the editorial decisions there while WBEZ has a team that better represents the city it covers. https://t.co/vhzPPRS5wC

— Jennifer Schulze (@NewsJennifer) September 30, 2021

If you have to find things from multiple meetings, repeat the same tedious steps.

But recently, journalists from Michigan Radio, the NPR station in the state, have been using a database they built in-house to better sift through public meetings. The database is called Minutes and it searches, downloads, and transcribes videos of public meetings in a few dozen cities in Michigan. The project is funded by the Google News Initiative’s Innovation Challenge.

Meeting are already public in Michigan because of the Open Meetings Act, but there was no searchable index of meetings from across the state, Dustin Dwyer, a Michigan radio bureau reporter and 2018 Nieman Fellow, said.

Just because information is public doesn’t mean it’s easy to find. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy gets it. And so does @MichiganRadio. We’ve got an exciting new project launching tomorrow that will help you get at what’s in that locked cabinet. Stay tuned! pic.twitter.com/oGBZDwizNc

— dustindwyer (@dustindwyer) March 2, 2021

“It is unbelievably complicated to find out what happens in these meetings, even though all the information is online,” Dwyer said. “We’re trying to make the content of the meetings searchable, so that you don’t have to spend a lot of time scrolling through the agenda finding out when they’re talking about the thing that is important to you. [Instead], you can search for the information and get a meaningful result. It’s overcoming an informational barrier around these meetings.”

The tool is called Minutes. An application code monitors YouTube channels it can pull from, Michigan Radio’s digital tech specialist Brad Gowland explained. When it sees that there’s new videos, it gets the audio of the video, and it transcribes it in 45-second chunks so there’s enough text to transcribe complete sentences. So if a reporter is looking for a certain topic, they can search through the transcripts to find legible sentences about what they’re looking for, and then they can go to YouTube to watch the full video and pull out soundbites.

The database allows reporters to keep tabs on issues across the the state, even in places where there aren’t any Michigan Radio reporters covering them regularly. It’s somewhat inspired by tools like City Scrapers and Documenters, both of which are open-source, collaborative community efforts to make information from and about public meetings in select cities more readily accessible. Minutes doesn’t create an excuse for a newsroom to not cover a city council meeting, Dwyer said, but it helps catch things that might otherwise slip through the cracks. Often, issues become more important for coverage when it’s clear that they exist in multiple places. Minutes helps figure that out.

“I live in Grand Rapids so if something is happening in Grand Rapids, I’m going say it’s kind of important, but I may not know that it’s also happening in other communities on the opposite side of the state that we don’t normally cover,” Dwyer said. “But then there’s people showing up at those meetings every week giving public comments and saying ‘this is important to me.’ If we don’t know that those things are happening in other parts of the state, we may not realize how big or how important something is or how widespread it is. Being able to draw those connections is a big part of what this database is about for our reporters.”

The Minutes database and its transcripts aren’t available to use to the public because they aren’t checked for errors (the program could hear the word “vaccine” and transcribe “Maxine”). It also isn’t a definitive database of every meeting in Michigan because it still takes time to process so many videos and costs money to store those large files. But since the program is already downloading audio from the meetings, it then sends the audio to one of Michigan Radio’s 42 new podcast feeds. That means that anyone can listen to a public meeting in 42 of Michigan’s cities as a podcast. Michigan is a large state with fewer and fewer reporters, Dwyer and Gowland wanted to be able to provide public meetings information to people who are interested in them, but it’s difficult to continue the current model: reporters attending meetings and producing stories about them.

“I see this already available in so many other aspects of local life,” Dwyer said. “If I want to know what the weather is in my city or what the weather was yesterday, I can know that immediately. If I want to know high school prep scores, I can know that immediately. All of these things are already indexed and searchable and if I type it into Google or ask a device I get an immediate, useful result. Why in the heck can’t it be that easy to find out what’s happening within my local government?”

The first major publication to use its prestige as a platform for vintners was the United Kingdom’s Sunday Times, which debuted its wine club in 1973. Laithwaites, an importer founded a few years prior by a husband-wife team, partnered with wine writer Hugh “Life’s been rosé since I put wine on the map” Johnson, who came on as president of the club. Almost 50 years later, the club is still in existence, Johnson is still president, and Laithwaites is still privately owned and responsible for the majority of mail-order wine in the region. (Its brand name is often licensed in the states, too.)

In the United States, clubs were slower to catch on — not for a lack of interest, but because of the complexity of operating a national operation that had to contend with fifty different liquor laws — “52, if you count D.C. and federal,” says Neil Rhodes, CFO of Direct Wines. Today, companies like his facilitate relationships between brands and retailers operating in a given state, allowing a brand to have a national presence without having to deal with local logistics. When The Wall Street Journal launched its club, it partnered with Direct Wines, a move that pushed the company into the forefront for then-novel publication wine clubs in this country. (Forbes and The Washington Post are among the many media brands that tried to convert readers into club subscribers over the past decade.)

When the NPR Wine Club launched in 2017, it, too, collaborated with Direct Wines, along with Wines That Rock, a private labeling company responsible for the Nina Totenblend Lodi Red and the All Grapes Considered Malbec. (It goes on: It’s Vin a Minute Sauvignon Blanc 2019…)

Jane Scott, head of consumer products at NPR, says that the club has seen a significant increase in signups since the pandemic began in March, a boon to the already strong, high-retention subscriber base. “In the alternative revenue streams that support NPR programming, our efforts are always to extend the reach of the brand, deepen the brand connection, and provide a financial surplus that can feed back into the mission,” she says.

Wine clubs are, of course, not the only alternative revenue stream for publishers — there’s affiliate revenue, software as a service, build-your-own cookbooks, podcasts, events, spinoffs, money management, the list goes on — but despite the wide range of potential revenue sources made possible by digital distribution, wine clubs have endured. Still, the opening fo these clubs initially created by a lack of general knowledge and access has been narrowing in recent years. Many of today’s avid wine consumers are less interested in being told what to drink or what’s the best and are more inclined to learn how to choose for themselves. Punny exclusive bottles may be less important than bona fide expertise. The idea of wine buying as a skill to be developed rather than a service to be off-loaded applies at a certain income level that matches up well with the model wine club subscriber.

That’s where Eater is trying to be different. Most wine clubs fall into white or red binary — it’s usually the first question in a sign-up form. But for consumers accustomed to orange wines, pét-nats, and rosé, there’s the Eater Wine Club. The value proposition here is slightly different from that of other offerings on the market in that the expertise comes from the editorial team. While publications like The New York Times take pains to ensure readers that their wine club is not at all affiliated with what’s printed in the paper, Eater takes the opposite approach. “It’s the only wine club out there that’s actually curated by the editorial team itself,” says Jill Dehnert, general manager at Eater. The wine club, which launched in October, evolved out of small, ticketed community events that were once held in the company’s test kitchen. Dehnert says that aligning the club with the local city network, what she calls the brand’s “differentiator,” is essential to making sure that the first consumer product with the Eater name “feels very Eater-y.”

City editors suggest wine clubs and restaurants that would be a good fit, and then Eater partners with sommeliers who personally curate the selections for the month. The somms also supply tasting notes that jibe with the Eater voice, (“a little bit wonky, a little heady, but also super-accessible and fun”), and write a newsletter with things like recipe pairings and favorite local spots. Eater partnered with Mysa, a wine ecommerce site that specializes in natural wine to ensure access to interesting, “restaurant-quality” bottles.

On top of the revenue stream, the club has the added benefit of making the Eater brand more valuable on both a national and local level. By giving a national profile to local restaurants, Eater supports small businesses. By giving a local spin to a national wine club, Eater reinforces its editorial mission and distinguishes itself as a tastemaker in a new way. The brand relies on the personality-driven appeal of, say, the NPR Wine Club, but it’s able to keep things interesting (and outwardly focused) with a rotating cast of curators.

Price varies widely across clubs. The New York Times Wine Club has two tiers, the “Sampler” ($90.00 for 6 bottles) and the “Reserve” ($210.00 for 6 bottles). That excludes shipping ($9.95) and tax. NPR offers 12 bottles for $149.99, plus tax and shipping. The Eater Wine Club ($110 per month for 4 bottles) seems high, but unlike most offerings, that number is all-inclusive. It comes out to about $27/bottle, ten dollars less than the total cost of a New York Times Reserve bottle. This month is the busy season for wine clubs, but in a year like no other, it seems unlikely that subscriptions will lapse once the new year rolls around.

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

Some background for Americans

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

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

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

Now take a look:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://t.co/L9yC4KEiLS

— Tony Karon (@TonyKaron) September 16, 2020

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

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

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

— Yara Elmjouie (@yelmjouie) September 16, 2020

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

— Sana Saeed (@SanaSaeed) September 15, 2020

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

— Dovid Efune (@Efune) September 16, 2020

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

— FJ (@Natsecjeff) September 16, 2020

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

— Dlshad (@dlshadothman) September 16, 2020

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

— Dan Friedman (@dfriedman33) September 16, 2020

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

— Gregg Carlstrom (@glcarlstrom) September 16, 2020

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

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) September 15, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) September 16, 2020

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

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

https://t.co/GdH81jhNyR

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

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/09/aj-al-jazeeras-social-video-friendly-service-will-now-have-to-register-as-a-foreign-agent-in-the-united-states/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/09/npr-adds-localized-news-for-10-cities-to-its-afternoon-podcast-consider-this/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/09/npr-adds-localized-news-for-10-cities-to-its-afternoon-podcast-consider-this/#respond Wed, 16 Sep 2020 13:40:14 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=185966 NPR’s daily podcast Consider This began as Coronavirus Daily, but changed its name and broadened its scope in June as protests against police brutality and racial discrimination competed with the virus for headlines. Now, the shortform afternoon podcast, pitched as a bookend to the morning’s Up First, is morphing again.

Last week, NPR announced Consider This will evolve into the localized news podcast it had been planning to debut earlier this year — before Covid-19 upended the best-laid plans. Now, Consider This listeners in (or near) 10 cities — Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland, Ore. — will hear local updates after the national news show.

NPR sees a blend of national and local news as a public radio signature and it’s made several attempts to recreate the mix on digital and streaming options. Outside of its legacy radio newscasts, listeners can already hear local news on NPR One and smart speaker streams through Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home. (More people than ever are turning to these digital platforms, even as fewer commuters has meant plummeting radio ratings.)

But Consider This is the first time localized content is available via podcast — regardless of platform. Whether you listen to episodes through NPR One, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or Pocket Casts, if you live in one of the 10 participating regions, you will automatically receive about five minutes of local news from a member station after hearing about 15 minutes of national news along with everyone else.

In a press release, NPR called the localization technology “a first not just for public radio but for the podcast industry as a whole.” The solution it found, after wrestling with various technical and editorial challenges, is fairly straightforward.

NPR partnered with AdsWizz, its sponsorship vendor, to deliver the localized editorial content from member stations the same way the vendor serves location-dependent sponsorships and advertising.

“They use geo-targeting technology that allows for one message in one DMA [Nielsen Designated Market Area] and another message in a different DMA. Now we’re using that technology to serve content,” explained Neal Carruth, NPR’s senior director for on-demand programming. “The way it works is that national folks file each afternoon and then all of our local partners file and upload a local segment. That goes onto the ad server system and gets geo-targeted using IP addresses to the right DMA.”

NPR has been working to create an afternoon news podcast with local news since the end of 2019. The pandemic interrupted the planning process but producers soon saw Coronavirus Daily, which became NPR’s fastest-growing podcast ever after its launch in March, as a unique opportunity to launch the new show with a built-in audience.

“I think we were nimble over the last eight months and it ended up being a really good thing to launch the localized part of this knowing exactly how many listeners Consider This had in each of these DMAs,” Carruth said. He noted that information also meant that local partners — the 12 member stations publishing afternoon news updates — are able to sell sponsorship information against the local content with actual audience numbers, instead of forecasts.

Here in Massachusetts, the show has fostered collaboration between two rival public media organizations. Boston’s GBH (formerly known as WGBH) and WBUR are collaborating for the first time in their histories, after years of what has been called “a very civil war.” WBUR’s Paris Alston and GBH’s Arun Rath will alternate hosting duties each week and each host will feature reporters from both stations. The stations meet (virtually, for now) each morning to determine the stories that’ll be included in the afternoon’s segment.

“Boston has always benefited from two outstanding NPR stations in the market, ensuring listeners have access to the trusted quality journalism they have come to expect from public media,” Pam Johnston, general manager of news at GBH, said.“We are excited about collaborating with WBUR, drawing on the strengths of both stations, to bring the local news that matters most to our audiences.” In Los Angeles, KPCC and KCRW will also collaborate to create the local afternoon segment of Consider This.

Other participating stations are WNYC in New York, WHYY in Philadelphia, WAMU in Washington, D.C., WBEZ in Chicago, MPR in Minneapolis/St. Paul, KERA in Dallas/Fort Worth KQED in San Francisco, and OPB in Portland, Ore. NPR is planning to add more participating member stations in 2021.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/09/npr-adds-localized-news-for-10-cities-to-its-afternoon-podcast-consider-this/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/08/radio-listening-has-plummeted-npr-is-reaching-a-bigger-audience-than-ever-what-gives/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/08/radio-listening-has-plummeted-npr-is-reaching-a-bigger-audience-than-ever-what-gives/#respond Wed, 19 Aug 2020 12:30:03 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=185240 Since the pandemic took hold in the United States, NPR’s radio ratings have taken a nosedive. Half of AM/FM listening in the United States takes place in a car, but between reduced (or eliminated) commutes and social distancing, there’s been a steep decline in the drivers that make up public radio’s traditional broadcast audience.

“People who listened to NPR shows on the radio at home before the pandemic by and large still do,” NPR’s own media correspondent, David Folkenflik, reported on July 15. “But many of those who listened on their commute have not rejoined from home. And that threatens to alter the terrain for NPR for years to come.”

Even as its legacy platform’s audience has declined, though, NPR says it is reaching more people than ever. The dip in radio listenership — 22 percent — has coincided with a record number of people turning to NPR on virtually every other platform. More people than ever are reaching NPR through the website, apps, livestreams, and smart speakers (“Alexa, I want to listen to NPR”).

In total, 57 million listen or watch or read NPR content each week, up 10 percent from this time last year. Comparing spring 2019 to spring 2020, here’s where NPR saw its numbers move:

• Unique weekly visitors to NPR.org increased 94 percent
• Smart speaker streams and on-demand audio increased 29 percent
• Live stream listeners increased 39 percent
• NPR app usage grew 22 percent
• NPR One app usage increased 19 percent
• NPR Music, through YouTube, saw its traffic increase by 90 percent

These changes have implications for NPR’s bottom line, which draws on a mix of underwriting, member station fees, government funds, and donations. In 2020, for the first time, NPR will make more money from underwriting on podcasts than from its radio shows.

That’s not to say it’s been untouched by economic pain. The broadcaster, which avoided layoffs by implementing pay cuts and furloughs this summer, projected $12 to $15 million in coronavirus-related ad revenue losses and continues to compete alongside for-profit news outlets for a dwindling pool of advertising dollars.

Some of the changes in NPR’s audience mirror what we’ve seen elsewhere in the news industry — traffic to news sites spiked in the early months of the pandemic — but the pandemic’s long-term effects seem poised to have a unique impact on radio listenership.

NPR’s senior director of audience insights, Lori Kaplan, has said public radio’s audience includes a disproportionate percentage of workers who are able to do their jobs remotely during coronavirus shutdowns — and that these professionals are interested in continuing to work from home even after we’ve left coronavirus in the rearview mirror.

“We’re experiencing a sea change,” Kaplan told Folkenflik. “We’re not going back to the same levels of listening that we’ve experienced in the past on broadcast.”

NPR’s leaders have been reading the tea leaves. They’ve seen the studies showing younger generations overwhelmingly use the internet and their phones (not radios) for audio. In other words, they knew this shift was coming. They just didn’t know it would happen all at once.

“It was so clear people’s behaviors were changing,” said Tamar Charney, who leads NPR’s digital strategy. “You’d look at the demographic trends and young people were not listening to radio like older people.”

Bringing a younger, more diverse audience into the NPR fold means reaching listeners on the platforms they’re already on — whether that’s putting podcasts on Spotify, music on YouTube, or newsy explainers on TikTok. The increased emphasis on digital platforms started long before Covid-19 and has been coming from both directions, Charney said. At the top, executives are putting two and two together from the demographic reports and, bubbling up from the bottom, junior producers and interns want to produce content that their digital-native friends will actually see.

“I think many of us looked at what happened to newspapers and saw the type of thing that could happen when people haven’t changed and technology changes,” Charney said. “We have great journalism content, and it’s about getting it to the people we want to serve on the devices they’re on.”

Maria Godoy, a senior science and health editor and correspondent, is one example of this newly critical effort. Godoy has seen her “News You Can Use” segments reach new audiences — and be repurposed from, originally, a segment on All Things Considered (one of the legacy shows that’s seen its radio ratings collapse) to an episode of the Life Kit Podcast to a video shared on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

Since April, Godoy’s story on safely shopping for groceries has been viewed 3.9 million times on NPR.org, 2.74 million times on Apple News, 446,000 times on Instagram, and 77,000 times on YouTube. The podcast episode was downloaded 176,000 times and drew 600,000 interactions (likes, comments, shares, etc.) on Facebook.

“I recorded it once and was able to use it and get it out there in all these different ways. That felt really good,” Godoy said. “We were able to reach new people who may not be coming to NPR.org or tuning in to radio.”

Godoy said correspondents are encouraged to expand into as many platforms as they feel comfortable doing. Some — like podcasts, which are also audio-first — come easier than others. She’s leaned on colleagues for help creating illustrations for visual platforms like Instagram and, tasked with creating her first video during lockdown, enlisted her 10-year-old son to hold her mic. (“How’s that, Noah?” “Uh…decent.”)

The type of stories that Godoy has seen take off — in addition to the grocery shopping tips, a video she made on safer face masks saw similar engagement on YouTube and Instagram — are framed for a national audience. One of NPR’s greatest challenges remains finding the right mix of national and local news on digital platforms, including the NPR and NPR One apps.

Charney, who lives and works from Michigan, said local news stories like her state’s water crisis have deepened her commitment to ensuring local coverage isn’t left behind as national NPR innovates and launches digital platforms.

“Digital platforms are so damn expensive to create that they’re almost by definition national,” she said. “We’ve been working really hard to think about how we bring station content into packages on a national digital platform. We need to make sure that local coverage is there, because it’s so important to the life that people actually live day to day.”

The coronavirus is another news story where listeners are hungry for up-to-date local information on school board decisions, restrictions on local businesses, the number of ICU beds, confirmed Covid-19 cases, and more.

Charney, whose long career in public radio includes leading Michigan Radio and managing content for NPR One, said that even after 20 years of “mind-boggling change,” this year still feels like the fastest acceleration yet.

“We’re doing a lot of things in a lot of places and I hope we’ve chosen the right places to concentrate because, at the end of the day, we don’t quite know where some of this will shake out,” she said. “The way we are living our lives has changed radically and the way we’re consuming media has changed right along with that radical change.”

Looking at the most recent numbers, Charney is most heartened by the new listenership for NPR’s apps and the Alexa-based stream. (NPR customizes content for Google Assistant and Google Home but 70 percent of smart speaker owners in the United States use Amazon’s Echo products.)

“This is something we’ve been quietly working on in the garage for a while, and to see it finally in the spotlight is really encouraging that we’ve made some of the right bets about the future way audio will be delivered,” Charney said. “I think that’s been a tremendous success story for NPR — that the things we’ve been doing to ensure that our core strength, which is audio, remains strong in the digital environment are paying off.”

Illustration by Irene Rinaldi on Behance.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/08/radio-listening-has-plummeted-npr-is-reaching-a-bigger-audience-than-ever-what-gives/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/08/twitter-will-now-label-state-controlled-media-accounts/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/08/twitter-will-now-label-state-controlled-media-accounts/#respond Fri, 07 Aug 2020 16:43:12 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=185282 Twitter is going to start labeling state-run news organizations as such, it announced on Thursday. It will also explicitly label the accounts of those outlets’ editors-in-chief and their senior staffers, as well as “key government officials, including foreign ministers, institutional entities, ambassadors, official spokespeople, and key diplomatic leaders.”

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

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

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) August 6, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

— Alistair Coleman (@alistaircoleman) August 6, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

— Filip Struhárik (@filip_struharik) August 6, 2020

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/08/twitter-will-now-label-state-controlled-media-accounts/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/04/heres-how-wbur-raised-1-million-in-13-hours-with-a-pledge-drive-rethought-for-pandemic-times/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/04/heres-how-wbur-raised-1-million-in-13-hours-with-a-pledge-drive-rethought-for-pandemic-times/#respond Wed, 15 Apr 2020 15:10:34 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=181867 The coronavirus pandemic and the public’s appetite for local coverage of cases, hospitals, and economic impacts are forcing public radio stations around the country to postpone or transform their spring fundraisers and pledge drives. Still, most stations aren’t in a position to skip revenue-raising efforts entirely, especially with advertising and corporate underwriting facing their own struggles.

WBUR, the Boston NPR affiliate, is one of those stations that’s had to figure out a way to move forward. Here’s what station management decided to do.

Scrap your planned eight-day pledge drive. (But keep the $1 million fundraising goal.)

The station had planned to return to a full eight-day campaign in 2020, after doing a marathon-themed 26.2-hour version for the past few years.

The success of the abbreviated campaign had waned as the novelty did, said Mike Steffon, WBUR’s director of membership and campaign strategy, and the station needed to return to a longer format. (The abbreviated model raised more than $1 million in 2016, but just over $800,000 in 2019.)

Months of planning for the original drive, however, went out the window when the coronavirus closed schools and nonessential businesses in Massachusetts.

Put your new CEO/general manager on air to speak to listeners directly.

Margaret Low — who just took on her role two and a half months ago — leveled with listeners on a morning broadcast and an on-air “letter.”

Hi, this is Margaret Low, the CEO of WBUR. I’ve devoted most of my life to journalism and I can’t think of a story that has been so urgent on a global, national, and local level.

In response to our coverage of COVID-19, we got a note from a listener that captured the need for what we do so beautifully. He wrote: “I can’t tell you what you mean to me, and not just for your ample, valuable, reliable information, but for your courage and steadfastness. I experience each and every one of you as a well known friend.”

His note kind of says it all — we’re shut into our homes for who knows how long, longing for deep reliable reporting, for connection to one another. We’re here for you, and we need you now more than ever too. We need your support to continue the vital work we’re doing. Please give, as generously as you can, at WBUR.org. Thank you for listening, and for your enduring support.

Steffon, who’s been at WBUR for 20 years, couldn’t recall another time when the CEO addressed listeners directly. (Other local news organizations are making similar pleas.) Low said the station has been “hit hard” by a loss in underwriting and anticipates further losses.

“We thought it was important to pull the curtain back,” Low said. “One of the most powerful things about our medium is that it’s very intimate. We wanted to explain the situation we were in and why it felt so urgent right now.”

Launch a pared-down campaign with minimal disruption to newscasts.

The station decided to move the date of its blitz fundraiser up a week after realizing that coronavirus projections showed cases in Massachusetts might peak during their planned campaign. WBUR journalists, working from home or separate studios, were hyper-efficient with their pitch breaks, whittling down the typical 5-minute breaks to spots between 90 seconds and three minutes. Back-and-forths between hosts were traded for a more direct appeal.

“We made quick work of it,” Steffon said.

The final results were encouraging. WBUR hit its seven-figure goal, raising $1,016,794 from 6,963 donors in just 13 hours. (A half-marathon!) This year’s total was 25 percent more than last year’s, with 18 percent more donors contributing.

The most loyal listeners — donors who had given to the station within the last year — were particularly supportive. Steffon said 44 percent of them made an additional gift during the drive.

Move forward with your spring gala, reimagined.

Originally, high-dollar donors to the station were scheduled to gather for a gala dinner in the high-ceilinged John F. Kennedy Library on May 11. Instead, guests will now attend virtually — enjoying the contents of packages sent to them from WBUR containing highball glasses, cocktail ingredients, and local hors d’oeuvres, all “from the comfort and safety” of their homes.

The gala’s new name? “A Night In Together.”

Mary Hull, the station’s director of development, said the station didn’t want to present a “watered-down gala” but an event radically different in tone.

“What felt appropriate two weeks ago may not be appropriate today,” Hull said. “With everything happening around us, we do not see this as a celebration as we have in past years, but more as a moment to bring our community together in support of the essential service we provide.”

The previously announced guests — Michael Barbaro and Lisa Tobin of the New York Times podcast The Daily — will be interviewed by the station’s Washington-based political correspondent, Kimberly Atkins. (Tobin is a former WBUR employee, starting out as a local Morning Edition field producer and eventually shaping the WBUR iLab that launched the station’s first podcasts, Hull noted.)

The shift to a virtual event also allowed the station to confirm additional guests — including late night host Conan O’Brien, a native of nearby Brookline, and NPR’s Scott Simon, who will interview him.

“We see this shift to a virtual event as an opportunity to secure nationally recognized guests since they will not have to travel to participate,” Hull said.

Individual tickets cost $750, and hosting a table runs between $7,500 to $50,000. The station hopes to give table hosts the ability to speak to their guests separately, Hull said.

Get creative.

WBUR has long relied on flower-delivery fundraisers tied to Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day. Delivering fresh flowers for May 10 — Mother’s Day in the United States — is unlikely this year and WBUR will have to rethink the long-standing tradition.

“It’ll force us to be really creative about something that’s been standard practice,” Low said. “It won’t be business as usual.”

Photo of a t-shirt from last year’s marathon-themed WBUR fundraiser by Bearwalk Cinema used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/04/heres-how-wbur-raised-1-million-in-13-hours-with-a-pledge-drive-rethought-for-pandemic-times/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/03/newsonomics-tomorrows-life-or-death-decisions-for-newspapers-are-suddenly-todays-thanks-to-coronavirus/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/03/newsonomics-tomorrows-life-or-death-decisions-for-newspapers-are-suddenly-todays-thanks-to-coronavirus/#respond Tue, 31 Mar 2020 15:27:12 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=181523 As local newspapers’ businesses hit the skids, they’re finding themselves careening right now into a future they’d thought was still several years away.

“We are all going to jump ahead three years,” Mike Orren, chief product officer of The Dallas Morning News, suggested to me last week.

At least. Ask an American newspaper exec a few weeks ago what they thought 2025 would look like, and they’d tell it you it would be much more digital, far less print, and more dependent on reader revenue than advertising. Some of them would have told you they think they had a plan to get there. Others, if they were being candid, would have said they didn’t see the route yet, but they hoped to find one in time.

The COVID-19 crisis has clearly accelerated that timeline — and may have ripped it to shreds altogether, depending on how long the shutdown lasts and how deep the resulting recession gets.

Make no mistake, though: Many of the decisions being made right now and in the next few weeks will be permanent ones. No newspaper that drops print days of publication will ever add them back. Humpty Dumpty won’t put the 20th-century newspaper back together again. There can be no return to status quo ante; the ante was already vanishing.

Will these decisions “save” the local press, as we’re bombarded with stories of systemic, perhaps irreversible failure in North America, the U.K., and Europe? One way or the other, these are now existential decisions that can no longer be avoided or postponed.

Right now, publishers are combing through Friday’s federal bailout legislation, “trying to determine if they qualify, for how much and when the money might be available,” David Chavern, CEO of the News Media Alliance, told me Monday. “That is going to take at least a several more days (if not a bit longer) — and I assume that some of these publishers are holding off personnel actions until they know the answers.”

Gannett, now by far the largest local news chain, has already announced pay cuts and furloughs, in both the U.S. and U.K. But all publishers, big and small, are now considering their options. Those include layoffs, rapidly eliminating several days of print publishing, reducing their ad sales staff, and questioning their need for large central offices as remote work becomes a workable norm.

All of those ideas have been discussed for years. But now they have to make decisions they’d hoped could wait a few more. The decisions they make, and how they can act on them, will tell us a lot about how much of the local press is left — and how much isn’t — come 2021.

That’s an internal view. Of course, local newspapers operate in a broader media world — including local public media, local TV, and local startups. In some larger cities, public radio stations are taking audience (and sometimes talent) from the dailies. Local commercial TV stations are feeling advertising pain too, but they still have more capacity to sustain themselves — and grab future market share. “They’re expanding more in digital and in social,” says TV business expert Bob Papper, who tracks the industry closely. That’s true even after Michael Bloomberg’s one-man subsidy of local TV ran its course.

Then there’s the nascent independent local press, from VTDigger to Berkeleyside, Charlotte Agenda to The Colorado Sun, The Memphian to MinnPost. Many of these green shoots are finding a little more sunlight — but they’ll be the first to tell you that it’s a tough road replacing their town’s flagging ancestral dailies. Meanwhile, amidst the carnage, some schemers and dreamers are strategizing about what they see as the detritus of a daily industry, waiting to be bought out or taken off by a new generation of local news builders. They’re early in that process; that’s a story for another day.

Let’s step back for a moment and consider the larger society in which local news — and all of us — now all operate. The double whammy of virus terror and economic calamity has made real a whole host of underlying issues — from generational equity to the ragged safety net, affordable child care to cramped housing, the entire panoply of inequities baked into our society.

Perhaps this will be merely a short bout of home detention followed by a fast, v-shaped economic recovery. Maybe these issues will dissolve quickly in the public discourse. For tens of millions, though, they will remain ever-present, defining their lives and their possibilities.

How will the local press of the 2020s cover these realities of life on the ground when we return, blinking, into the sunlight? Will journalism at all levels be strong enough to contribute the deep reporting and analysis that that intelligent fixes require? Will a society shocked by American incompetence in the face of an enemy find its future aided by the press it deserves and requires? Or will a nation of emptied-out newsrooms be unable to meet the moment?

As I wrote Friday, the biggest problem in America isn’t (yet, at least) newspapers going under. It’s ghost papers, strip-mined by ownership, disguised as news sources but actually offering very little in the way of local news or community leadership. The press, whatever its form, finds itself in a classic position: Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.

In the shorter term, though, the set of life-or-death questions local newspaper companies face right now is fairly clear.

• Will we keep seven days of print publishing?
• What does it mean to run a mainly reader revenue-driven business?
• How do we find the right people with the right skills to run a digital business?
• How many journalists will our new business reality allow us to pay?
• Will we still expect journalists to report to a central office every day?
• What do “advertising” and “events” look like?
• Should we merge or sell?

So let’s look at each of these more deeply to see what a prematurely arriving 2025 means to readers, journalists, newspaper employees, and publishers.

Nearly every publisher has looked at this question — and nervously stepped back, ever since Advance Local stepped out way ahead of the crowd in 2012. Their compelling fear: Would ending seven-day print be a final breaking point for the habits for decades-long subscribers — the ones now paying $400 to $1,000 a year for home delivery? How many of these customers wouldn’t even transition to a lower price point for some print and more digital? How many would, like so many newspaper subscribers before them, just go away?

McClatchy provided one of the best and most watched dress rehearsals in the trade last year. Last summer, I wrote about how the company began its program of dropping print Saturdays for a single weekend edition — something the Europeans did successfully ages ago. Now McClatchy’s little experiment has become the standard across the entire 30-title chain. And its results are clear.

“The retention from digital Saturdays has been nearly total,” Sara Glines, regional publisher for McClatchy’s Carolina properties, told me Monday:

We lost less than a dozen subscribers in each market, in some markets less than a handful. Digital activation went up immediately. E-edition usage went up on Saturdays. In today’s coronavirus environment, those digital activations have gone a long way in bringing more readers to our digital platforms for breaking news and updates. Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald were our last markets to launch digital Saturdays. Their first digital Saturday was March 21. It went just as smoothly as all other markets.

How well does McClatchy’s Saturday strategy translate to the broader industry? We know the lessons:

• Communication: Talk to readers early and often about why day-cutting is happening.
• Move relevant features and news into other products, digital or print, that make sense to readers. Reconfigure the Sunday paper into more of a week-in-review, stronger-in-features product.
• Set new pricing that customers think is fair.

But those essential-to-execute guidelines only tell us so much. Dropping Saturdays saves publishers some money — but not that much. With as much as half of their ad money evaporated by COVID-19, publishers will need bigger savings — which means cutting more days.

Readers who might easily adjust to the logic of a weekend paper might also think that saying goodbye to Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, all at the same time, is too much. If it’s too much for readers, and they drop their subscriptions entirely, then the local news business spirals downward even more quickly.

If it works, though, it can save a lot of money.

A huge portion of newspapers’ budgets remains tied up in manufacturing: presses, paper, ink, trucks, and all the people who handle them. (These are the often forgotten newspaper employees, the ones who realize their jobs are going away, but nonetheless like the idea of that happening in 2025 more than 2020. Let’s not forget them.)

“There are so many variables,” one veteran of the trade told me:

Most important: Do you outsource printing or not? If you do, then you can usually cut days and save money. If you own your own presses, it’s harder to manage. Pressmen don’t work just two days. What does it do to your distribution network; can they afford to operate just two days a week? Do you have an agreement to print and distribute other papers like The New York Times or USA Today?

That reckoning — to in-source or outsource — has led to much more regionalized printing, like The Columbus Dispatch being printed 175 miles away in Indianapolis. Those longer distances lead to much earlier editorial deadlines, which means missing late news or sports — often resulting in a print product that’s 36 hours behind the news we read on our smartphones. That’s part of this unending spindown of the newspaper industry.

What’s the 2025 business view here? Expect that most surviving dailies will offer as robust a Sunday print product as they can, and digital through the day, through the week. Or maybe it’s Sunday and Wednesday, for midweek print advertising, depending on individual markets. Or maybe the big Sunday paper shifts back to Friday or Saturday to capture more weekend reading and shopping. Done well, a publisher that shifts from seven days to a couple can expect to retain 75 to 90 percent of existing print advertising. But publishers have been properly wary of that ripcord now dangling in their corner office.

We’ve already seen several titles, most prominently the Tampa Bay Times, announced radical day cuts, within this crisis, and we’ll see more. The question is how many more, and how many days will they be cutting? Even in relatively prosperous California, major publishers are planning to drop Saturday print by early next year, knowledgeable sources tell me.

What does it mean to run a mainly reader-revenue-driven business?

The national news brands offer the best-practice playbooks here.

Business intelligence forms the foundation of their business, with an ever-evolving understanding of how to win — and keep — paying subscribers. That intel has then led to newsroom staffing expansion. They’re creating a virtual flywheel of more and better content and services to readers, who then pay for subscriptions and build a new — bigger — business.

For the locally oriented companies, though, that model is daunting. Do they have the will, capital, time, and talent to apply proven lessons?

How do we find the right people with the right skills to run a digital business?

Going digital (doesn’t that sound odd in 2020?) means committing to a business run by people with digital skills, and not enough publishers have truly done that. Time’s now up. As I noted in my start-of-the-decade Epiphanies piece: “The brain drain is real. What’s the biggest problem in the news business? The collapse of ad revenue? Facebook? Dis- and misinformation? Aging print subscribers? Surprisingly, over the last year numerous publishers and CEOs have confided what troubles them most: talent.” That truism makes the accelerated movement to “digital” even tougher.

How many journalists will our new business reality enable us to pay?

Some smaller chain newspapers were already down to the most skeleton of product-producing staffs, pre-COVID-19. We’ll now see tested the question of how low on staffing they can go — just to get a product out. The more important question, though, is: How many people do they need to produce something readers will pay for?

Will we still expect journalists to report to a central office every day?

Having learned that they can produce the news almost entirely remotely (other than printing and distribution), how much will news organizations want to reconfigure their workspaces to generate savings out of reduced office space?

“We’re 100 percent remote,” says Mike Klingensmith, publisher of the Star Tribune. “Nobody is in our office. I don’t know how we are doing it. Everyone may figure out we don’t need an office after all.”

About 20 percent of newspaper employees work in the physical business of print, manufacturing, and distribution. For the rest, this small unthinkable is now thinkable.

What do “advertising” and “events” look like?

Publishers have continued to make and re-make their ad priorities, staffing, and skills as The Duopoly and digital have forever changed the nature of advertising. This crisis — with some portion of that missing advertising likely never to return — will prompt more rethinking. How much inside sales versus how much outside? How much branded? How much direct versus programmatic?

The events business is also a big question mark, as Josh Benton explored last week. O’Reilly Media deciding to end its big event business was shocking. I agree with the sentiments of Rafat Ali, founder of travel B2B leader Skift: “If we ever give in to the idea that face-to-face events will be over, then we should also give up on the idea that people will travel again. We might as well give up on, well, everything.” Rafat-like, and as ever, to the point.

He expresses a global POV; let me add a local one. The future of the local press is in a deep and authentic relationship with its readers and communities. And that means people in close contact, post-coronavirus. Events of all kinds will be a major part of that future for the successful.

Will we have to merge or sell to stay in business?

The Olympics may have been pushed to 2021, but The Consolidation Games is going ahead as scheduled, virus schmirus. In fact, there’s good reason to believe this crisis is accelerating an M&A process that had already been moving fast.

Share prices for publicly traded chains have dropped dramatically, with Gannett floating just below $2 Monday. When GateHouse bought Gannett — just over four months ago! — this was the deal: “$12.06 a share in cash and stock, based on New Media’s Friday closing price, with a promise of $6.25 in cash and 0.5427 of a New Media share for each Gannett share.” From that to two bucks is quite a fall.

Depending on the duration of this crisis, Gannett’s shares are likely to rise eventually. But its big question remains the $1.8 billion in debt — at 11.5 percent interest — that it took on to make the merger work. Will Gannett be able to keep on schedule with those payments — while, you know, actually operating the company — if the ad exodus extends into summer or fall?

It’s not just future earnings that these companies need to worry about it. It’s also collecting on what’s already been sold, on ads that have already run.

“One of biggest issues is cash flow,” one news industry financial veteran told me. “What if all those SMBs [small to midsize businesses] don’t pay for January and February ads? Even if they have cash, they don’t want to cut checks. Even places like Macy’s may just not pay for January inserts.”

(Here we meet one of the great players in any crisis: attorneys. “In this whole mess, expect full employment of lawyers arguing ‘force majeure’ as a reason not to enforce contracts businesses want to get out of,'” that finance source continued. Is a pandemic an Act of God? It’s a legal “gray area.”)

These are more than abstract concerns. Metro publishers have already told me about major advertisers asking for givebacks and “accommodations.”

Some, including me and much wealthier investor Leon Cooperman, have long doubted Gannett’s ability to pay off that five-year loan while continuing to pay a hefty dividend to shareholders and keep enough people in its newsrooms with the cash flow it could expect.

This crisis only makes those doubts grow stronger.

It’s way too early to mention the “D” word — default — though it is being brought up offline.

Now consider the other drama that’s been submerged in the virus crisis. What will become of Alden Global Capital’s essential takeover of Tribune Publishing? It’s likely more “logical” — in terms of profit maximization — than it was before. Sources tell me a merger between Tribune and Alden’s MNG Enterprises is likely to be announced before the June 30 that is so pivotal in Tribune’s future.

One financial source tells me the deal will be a mix of cash and stock: “Tribune is the acquirer. That would leave them with more liquid security, a big beneficiary of all the synergies. Tribune can fit it into their balance sheet, since it has little debt, with no problem.” (At the moment, Tribune debt stands at $37.6 million.)

Tribune has already begun to look more like Alden’s MNG, notorious as the industry’s most aggressive newsroom shrinker. Tribune has been cutting costs, reducing management positions, and searching for efficiencies wherever it can find them. This current crisis only adds impetus to that work.

In that scenario, Tribune properties — in major cities like Chicago, New York, Baltimore, and Orlando — will probably begin to look more like MNG papers The Mercury News and The Denver Post. Newsrooms cut to be the bone. Disinvestment from what Alden has always seen as a largely mythical digital future.

Financially, it’s a strategy that has worked for Alden. Enough older subscribers have accepted its higher pricing, and it’s found just enough buyers of its minimal digital products to keep the profits coming.

While its numbers aren’t as good as what I reported two years ago, its top properties still throw off (or did pre-coronavirus) margins of more than 20 percent. That’s unheard of among nearly all other publishers.

So what will this crisis mean to Alden and its president and chief dealmaker, Heath Freeman? “Heath could use this to run the table,” one observer said.

It’s easy to see why and how that indeed might be possible. Look at what the chain landscape may be by summer. McClatchy, one of the now lonely “independent” chains, will emerge from bankruptcy in four to six months (unless virus-driven delays lengthen the process). At that point, controlling owner Chatham Asset Management will look at its options.

One will be merging with the new Alden+Tribune.

Another, maybe, would be turning to Gannett. That would require a larger financially rejiggering, though, with lender Apollo a key player.

Either way, given the deep declines the industry faced pre-COVID, plus the unknown toll going forward, we could well see this reality: four hedge funds and private equity firms controlling a majority of America’s daily press as 2020 rolls on into darkness.

Chatham, Apollo, Alden, and Fortress Investment Group (which holds a contract to manage Gannett through 2021) may well get to decide amongst themselves how to divvy up the properties that deliver the local news most Americans get.

That’s not the picture Seattle Times owner Frank Blethen has in mind as he has launched his “Save The Free Press Initiative” in December. But it’s a reality we may all soon face.

This extreme moment is forcing publishers’ hands. Undoubtedly, some may look back on the other side of COVID-19 and say: “That worked well. We should have done it earlier.” Others will wish they’d had more time to think about jumping.

If publishers’ can still see any water in the glass at all — it seems to be emptying day by day — they might invoke Rahm Emanuel’s timely advice about the Great Recession at the start of Barack Obama’s presidency: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

This is a crisis. This is serious. And there’s no time left to waste.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/03/newsonomics-tomorrows-life-or-death-decisions-for-newspapers-are-suddenly-todays-thanks-to-coronavirus/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/03/newsonomics-what-was-once-unthinkable-is-quickly-becoming-reality-in-the-destruction-of-local-news/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/03/newsonomics-what-was-once-unthinkable-is-quickly-becoming-reality-in-the-destruction-of-local-news/#respond Sat, 28 Mar 2020 00:10:24 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=181431 As words like “annihilation” and “extinction” enter our news vocabulary — or at least move from debates over the years-away future to the frighteningly contemporary — it’s helpful to start out with the good news. Maybe even an old joke.

What’s black and white and now deemed “essential”?

Newspapers, of course — the communications medium that, along with its media peers, has been formally recognized as a public good by cities and states trying to determine which slices of their economies not to shut down. Factual local reporting is indeed an “essential” in an age of fear and misinformation.

That’s the sliver of silver lining in this time of unprecedented financial stress. Our work, as journalists and as institutions, is being consumed and appreciated.

“We’ve gotten all these great letters that ‘Our respect and admiration for your work has never been higher,” says Star Tribune publisher Mike Klingensmith, whose Minneapolis daily has seen big spikes in readership as well.

“Your reporting during the COVID-19 crisis has been top-drawer and inspired me, finally, to execute the much overdue annual subscription ‘donation’,” one new member wrote Colorado Sun editor Larry Ryckman this week. “Please keep up the good work and know that your reporting is incredibly valuable, not merely during this crisis.”

Colorado Public Radio also feels the love, including this heartfelt tweet:

So true. My auto-donation to @CPRNews came out of bank today & I admit I was tempted to cancel it before next month (husband lost job and our health insurance this week) but after 2-seconds I realized they’re some of my best friends right now and I’m happy to pay that bill https://t.co/AvnVUtghtQ

— KB (@kb80202) March 19, 2020

“Audience feedback and digital use has been tremendous, and the numbers are stunning,” sums up Colorado Public Radio head Stewart Vanderwilt.

A giant story like coronavirus is often when journalists feel most connected to the sense of mission that got them into this line of work. It’s the love — plus a much-appreciated viral bump in audience, subscriptions, and memberships — that is buoying otherwise overwhelmed publishers and newsrooms.

More bittersweet is how one innovative local news exec put it to me: “This may be our last chance to prove how valuable we are.”

CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, the AP, and more are providing the national reporting. They show us, through words and graphics and images, the scale of the tragedy and the many flaws in the federal government’s response to the crisis. But they can’t answer the fundamentally local questions urgent on minds nationwide.

How many people are sick near me? How well equipped is my hospital? Where can and can’t I go? What’s my mayor or my governor doing to help? Who can deliver what? Where can I get tested? And a hundred other perhaps life-or-death decisions as half of Americans nervously face indefinite home detention.

Many of the country’s 20,000-plus journalists have risen to the occasion, working the phones, filing remotely, and venturing out into the invisible threat to get the stories that require the sight or even touch of other humans. All while wondering: How long will I have my job?

That’s the terrible irony of this moment. The amount of time Americans spend with journalists’ work and their willingness to pay for it have both spiked, higher than at any point since Election 2016, maybe before. But the business that has supported these journalists — shakily, on wobbly wheels — now finds the near future almost impossible to navigate.

The question of the hour: How many journalists will still have jobs once the initial virus panic subsides? How much factually reported news — especially local news — will Americans be able to get in the aftermath of this siege?

The answer lies in great part on the people in those quotes above: It is readers and their willingness to support the news who increasingly distinguish the survivors from those facing the end of the road. Advertising, which has been doing a slow disappearing act since 2008, has been cut in half in the space of two weeks. It’s unlikely to come back quickly — the parts that do come back at all.

The problem is the same it’s been for years: The increases in reader revenue are outmatched by the declines in advertising. So this very welcome swell of support from audiences is being swamped by the much larger evaporation of ad revenue. News publishers nationwide are afflicted with existential gut checks — aches that get a little worse with each day’s new dot on the chart of coronavirus cases.

Let’s look first at the cliff-edge effects — which are dramatic — and then plumb the good news of reader engagement and subscription. In an upcoming piece, peering ahead five years or so, I’ll take a look at the big takeaways and likely longer-term impacts of this sudden twist of fate.

A profound advertising crisis

This event isn’t just a black swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s parlance for an unexpected happening that forever alters the course of history. For dailies — in the U.S., in Canada, in the U.K., and really globally — it’s a flock of black swans.

Why? The daily newspaper industry has been on a respirator of its own for more than a decade. Ever since the Great Recession sucked 17 percent of advertising oxygen out of the system in 2008 — then another 27 percent in 2009 — it’s been climbing uphill, its gasps growing more frantic as financial operators consolidate and stripmine what was once a profoundly local industry. All together, American newspapers have lost more than 70 percent of their ad dollars since 2006.

The industry enters this turning-point event with about $1 billion remaining in total annual profits. That’s a fraction of what it was at its height, but it’s still a lot of money — which is why the financial consolidation I’ve chronicled over the last year has continued.

If the massive ad losses we’re now beginning to see remain in place for months, all of that profitability will be gone, and then some. We’ll enter a new stage of loss: The news deserts will become the norm, the oases the rarity.

How bad is it out there? The overall ad business — call it advertising, sponsorship, underwriting — is in depression.

I’ve spoken with more than a dozen well-placed executives in the industry, and the consensus is that, in April, daily publishers will lose between 30 and 50 percent of their total ad revenue. Things are unlikely to improve until we’re past mass sequestration, whenever that is.

“We’re hitting the end of March,” one highly experienced ad exec told me. “We see what’s coming. Big, big misses [of revenue expectations].”

The numbers are necessarily imprecise, and they change daily. March, ironically enough, started surprisingly strong for some publishers. Several noted stable businesses, even a little growth here and there.

Then the virus. April will start off with many fewer bookings and many more cancellations. The second quarter is one big question mark, but publishers also know what a 50 percent drop isn’t even the worst-case scenario. Retailers are closed. Car dealers aren’t selling. Few people are hiring, and who’s brave enough to venture into a new house or apartment to look around?

Then there’s preprints. These Sunday circulars and inserts have remained a robust, high-margin product for many publishers. But many of the big-box stores that paid for them are now closed, including major (if perennially dwindling) retailer Macy’s. Those that remain open, the Targets and Walgreens and grocery stores, wonder what they can advertise; supply chains for both essentials and non-essentials remains uncertain, and people aren’t doing a lot of spontaneous shopping sparked by a deal in an ad.

Is anything holding up okay? The legal ads that newspaper carry of official government actions. Obituaries (darkly enough). And, where they’re legal (and have been allowed to remain open), marijuana dispensaries. (They deliver!)

But the uncertainty is near-universal. “Even those who have something to sell are really concerned about doing it,” one revenue exec told me. “They’re unclear on how to get their message right and not seeming to profiteer.”

Seattle Times president Alan Fisco provides detail:

We have seen deep losses, not surprisingly, in travel, entertainment, restaurant, auto advertising (particularly in our smaller markets, Yakima and Walla Walla).

Our projections show April to be significantly worse than the hit we are taking in March. The annual print declines look to be double what we were experiencing prior to this.

And in spite of significant traffic increases, while we are seeing an increase in programmatic [advertising], it isn’t enough to offset our O&O [self-sold advertising] losses and some of our audience extension product losses (search and social).

(The Seattle Times’ remarkable coverage of the country’s first hotspot was highlighted here.)

Most local dailies have entered this crisis still more dependent on ad revenue than on reader revenue, even though the percentages have moved closer to parity after three years of double-digit print ad decline. They have envied The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post for having achieved business models based primarily on reader revenue.

(Ironically, coronavirus will likely push a lot of local publishers into that elite club — but through cratered ad revenue, not soaring reader revenue.)

The devastation across news media is universal but, inevitably, uneven. All local sources of news — daily newspapers, local digital, public radio stations, local TV stations — are reporting deepening losses.

It’s those most reliant on advertising that are most at risk. As reported earlier here at the Lab, it’s alternative weeklies and other free papers that look to be in the first trench. Significantly, the alt-weekly trade entered this year weaker than it’s ever been; no more than a dozen of them nationwide could be called significantly profitable, sources tell me.

“Eighty percent of our advertisers are restaurants, clubs, performance venues and all that is gone for at least two months,” one alt-weekly publisher told me Thursday, underlining how alt-weeklies’ strength — their connection to a vibrant city life — has turned against them.

Among independent digital sites, many of them members of LION Publishers and/or INN, sponsorship/advertising has indeed taken a hit. But since few depend overwhelmingly on it, the effects are worrisome more than catastrophic.

“Ironically, the nonprofits we’re hearing from with struggles right now are those that have done a lot to diversify their revenue streams,” says Sue Cross, executive director of INN, the Institute for Nonprofit News. These are news organizations that were doing a lot of events — now cancelled and with a less-certain future. Or they had big in-person spring fundraisers now forced to pivot to virtual, but that doesn’t replace substantial sponsorship revenue.

Five years ago, Ted Williams founded Charlotte Agenda, one of the liveliest and most commercially savvy sites on the emerging landscape. CA is taking some fire, but has so far it’s been manageable:

Revenues are down around 25 percent. This decrease consists of the drop-in job postings, event listings, and short-term ad deals. We’re fortunate that over 65 percent of our revenue comes from 12-month sponsorship deals across 28 big brands, most of which are negotiated in late fall.

Public radio, too, which depends more greatly on membership revenue than on advertising (or underwriting, as they call it), is also taking a hit.

“On the revenue side, we could see a negative swing of as much as $2 million in the final quarter, ending June 30,” says Vanderwilt of Colorado Public Radio, which has seen a remarkable surge of online readership and radio listenership. “Thirty to forty percent of our sponsorship is from the categories most immediately impacted by the need for social distancing and actual shutdowns. Arts, entertainment, events, restaurants, clubs — and education. Just about all have cancelled/paused their schedules.”

“We have seen some upticks in unsolicited donations coming in,” says Tim Olson, senior vice president of strategic relationships at KQED, the nation’s biggest regional station. But it too has suffered some sponsor loss and is, for now at least, forgoing another tried-and-true revenue source:

Public media stations, particularly news and information public radio stations, have almost all cancelled their on-air pledge drives in order to continue uninterrupted coverage of COVID-19. On air drives are critical drivers of new donors, and reminder to current donors, so the loss of on-air drives is likely to have an effect.

Local TV stations are also assessing what the spring will look like. Several are forecasting a 20 to 30 percent loss at this point in advertising. While they don’t have reader revenue, their ample retransmission fee contracts provide a big steady source of income.

Even with record consumption of digital news, advertising there is fetching far less than you might think. The reasons are straightforward: Many advertisers specify that they don’t want their products to appear next to a virus-related story — and that’s where most of the traffic is, of course. And with all businesses on temporary hold, demand for advertising is down.

That has led programmatic pricing, several publishers say, to be down about 30 percent. One told me it’s now dropping closer to 50 percent as society closes more doors.

In any event, all legacy local media — newspapers, TV, and public radio — are still much more reliant on their core legacy revenue than on digital dollars. So even increases in digital revenue don’t do much to counter the current big declines elsewhere.

The public’s hunger for local news is proven

That’s a lot of bleakness in advertising. But amid it all, there’s a little sunshine in digital subscriptions — the closest thing to a path forward for local newspapers.

Mike Orren, chief product officer at The Dallas Morning News, ticks off these amazing numbers: “Pageviews are up 90 percent. Users are up 70 percent. New users are up 75 percent. Sessions are up 96 percent. Sessions per user are up 14 percent. Session duration is up 9 percent.” And all that has pumped up digital subs.

Digital subscriptions are way up at the strongest local newspapers, with new weekly signups up 2× to 5× over pre-virus times. That’s thousands of much-needed new customers.

(How well are the two general-news pay leaders, The New York Times and The Washington Post, doing? They won’t say. We’ll find out the Times’ experience at its next earnings report.)

That kind of digital subscription growth is widely reported among medium-to-large local papers that do two things well: (1) fund a newsroom able to cover the local crisis in knowledgable depth; (2) have a system in place that facilitates quick and easy subscription signups.

Many newspapers fail to meet both those criteria, and they’ve seen a flatter growth ramp.

Notably, several publishers say that lots of people aren’t waiting to hit a paywall and run out of free articles for the month — they’re hitting those Subscribe buttons earlier and unprompted. They’re acting on both the value of the journalism and the community service.

One other indication of increased loyalty: fewer subscription cancellations. Churn is down. “We’re adding 50 to 70 subscribers every single day and seeing very little churn,” Tampa Bay Times editor Mark Katches told the Local News Initiative. “Churn is as common as the sunrise, but we’re experiencing the lowest churn rate this month that we’ve seen since we introduced the pay meter about a year ago. We attribute that to high interest in our coverage.”

The New York Times requires a new user’s registration in order to have free access to its coronavirus coverage. But most publishers have just opened their coverage up without any friction.

The Dallas Morning News’ strategy is somewhere nuanced and in between. It requires readers to sign up for a virus newsletter in order to get to unlimited related coverage, but it doesn’t require any more information than an email address. “It’s less friction,” Orren says. The idea has paid dividends: That newsletter now has an astounding 334,000 subscribers.

Some of more ambitious local news startups also report impressive numbers. The 18-month-old Colorado Sun is seeing a spurt.

“We have had nearly 600 new members sign up so far this month,” editor Ryckman told me Wednesday. “We signed up 330 new members in February, so we’re easily on track to double that pace by the end of the month.” The site overall has more than 8,000 paying members, with about 1,400 of those at the premium level. “Our traffic has been regularly 3× a normal day — and has been has high as 10×,” he said.

The Daily Memphian, also about 18 months old, is seeing a response both to its coverage and to appeals from its editor Eric Barnes: “Sub starts have jumped 250 percent in the last 2 weeks. And that’s even though we’ve made all our COVID stories free (and that’s 80 percent or more of what we’re doing).”

Barnes underlines the need to remind readers of the costs of journalism. “But we’ve been very intentional with calls to action in stories and newsletters, along the lines of “Our articles are free — but covering the news is not. Please subscribe.” (Memphian sports columnist Geoff Calkins wrote his own direct appeal to readers, aiming to reach a different kind of reader-relationship connection.)

LION Publishers executive director Chris Krewson reports good uptake among his more aggressive member local news orgs. “Berkeleyside has signed up 267 new members since starting a campaign around the virus a few weeks ago, and also gotten donations from existing members, for a total of $50,000 in new-member revenue. The Berkshire Eagle launched a membership campaign and already has 300 members.”

“Many members are reporting huge increases in traffic — five, even ten times their normal pageviews, and also increases in community support and donations,” says INN’s Cross. “Even very small sites are hosting Facebook groups and seeing thousands join overnight, organizing collaboratives of all media in their towns.”

Pulitzer-winning Portland alt-weekly Willamette Week launched a voluntary membership program back in September. As of week ago, it had signed up 510 members. Seven days later and more than 1,100 new members have signed up. “In addition to the much-needed cash, those [and their comments] are tonic for the soul,” publisher and editor Mark Zusman told me Thursday.

For public radio, this crisis has been more about affirming its valued place in listeners’ and readers’ lives — in greater engagement — than in signing up new members. Over the past five years, most of the top 20 public radio stations have morphed more fully into “public media,” investing heavily in digital local news. Those that did are also reaping the returns.

“As of yesterday, CPR.org had over 2 million uniques and [on its separate site] Denverite 500,000,” says CPR’s Vanderwilt. That’s double and quadruple normal traffic, respectively. “The daily Lookout newsletter subs have grown 36 percent since March 1. We have also started publishing twice a day plus news alerts. Open rate has climbed from 32 percent to 41 percent.”

The public, for now, is eating up the added frequency and opening more of those newsletters. At KQED, pageviews have doubled and time spent on pages is up by a quarter. Overall, the public’s hunger for local news at this time is proven.

At metros, daily visits on digital are up an average of 122 percent as of the third week of March. And the pace is accelerating: “a 35% increase from Week 2 to Week 3 [and] no signs of slowing down as we enter the last week of March,” according to Pete Doucette, now a managing director at FTI Consulting. Doucette played a big part in building The Boston Globe’s digital audience and subscription business. His comprehensive take on digital subscriptions, and how to maximize both volume and pricing at this critical juncture is a must-read for all in the business. (The Local News Initiative at Medill offers an excellent roundup as well. )

These trends, we must underline, are global — both the traffic gains and the revenue losses. Major German publishers like Bild and Spiegel Online “all have huge gains,” according to journalist Ulrike Langer. “But none of these publishers have been able to monetize their huge rise in traffic volume in terms of advertising. Ad volume has sharply declined and most advertisers don’t want to see their ads next to coronavirus news.” Different continent, same issue.

What’s left to be “unthinkable”?

Humans are inherently adaptable. We have the life-affirming (and seemingly planet-destroying) capability of adapting to anything. We will adapt here too, no matter the human nor economic toll. A scale of destruction that would have once been “unthinkable” becomes quite thinkable indeed — then assessable, and then actionable. Those of us who’ve tracked the shrinking of the American press should have learned that lesson already.

We all expected a recession would arrive at some point, even if we thought of it kind of distantly, and we knew it would deal a new blow to the beleaguered newspaper industry. (In fact, I see that I’ve noted that possibility here at least three dozen times over the years — including this 2011 (!) entry, The newsonomics of the next recession.”)

Now that it’s arrived on our doorstep, our language has changed. Less “decline” and “deterioration,” more “annihilation” and “extinction“.

“Extinction” certainly draws a sharp picture, and it will be literally true for some of the press. But that picture may not be the most precise. More journalists gone. More publishers gone. Local news greatly reduced.

That’s all coming. But how do we — and the publics we serve — gauge what’s left?

The cuts at alt-weeklies and city magazines became public first. The earliest reports of cuts and layoffs at daily newspapers have begun to seep out. Expect a lot more of them. “Everyone’s making contingency plans,” one industry insider says. Layoffs, furloughs, salary cuts, four-day weeks — however it’s framed, cuts to staffing are on the way.

The fact that readers’ newfound appreciation of the local press is based on the work of those reporters and those newsrooms should limit the cuts. But they often won’t. And then there are the newspapers that have already been cut so much that they barely have enough people to put out a paper everyday. (And that’s before we see much of the most direct impact coronavirus can have on a news organization: sick journalists and other staffers whose extended absence from work makes everything harder.)

One wild card: the federal bailout, which features loans that can be turned into grants if companies maintain staffing. But it remains unclear if the scale of that help — and how accessible it is to publishers — will be enough to make a big difference.

Several years ago, Penny Abernathy’s mapping of America’s “news deserts” established a universal point of reference for discussions about local news. I’ve suggested that, for all the communities down to one or zero news sources, the bigger problem is the ghost newspapers that now pervade the landscape, stripped to the skeleton.

This crisis, like the declines of the past decade, will probably be less about pure extinction and more about new apparitions. Newspapers gutted in a way previously “unthinkable.” Badly wounded (but still faintly breathing) dinosaurs, if you will.

How do we judge if a newspaper is still “alive”? By most definitions, it’s the appearance of a product, usually in print but now digital, that carries a dignified nameplate, preferably in a familiar German blackletter font.

The financial companies that have and will continue to consolidate the local press — perhaps now at an accelerated pace — know that, and they’ve build a cynical strategy atop it. Keep the nameplate and fill the space between the ads with national wire copy, stories pretending to be “local” (but really from someplace three newspapers away), self-serving columns from mayors and local corporate leaders, and lots of low-cost calendar items.

“Fake news” is a truly odious epithet. But we’re now truly into the faux news era in local news. It’s a thin patina of fraudulent localness, packaged in the wrappings of a century ago, and priced at $600, $700, or $800 a year for seniors who nostalgically (or unknowingly, through the magic of the credit card) continue to pay until the day they don’t.

If we define “life” — or non-extinction — by the mere persistence of an old nameplate, we obscure the damage being done to local communities every single day. As we begin to list out the longer-term impacts of the current catastrophe, put that one higher on the list.

All of this — this March massacre of news revenue — is prologue, of course. We just don’t yet know what it’s prologue to. The 2020 calendar has never looked longer.

As one of the most successful, optimistic, and progressive of today’s publishers told me: “If it’s a couple of months, we’ll make it through. If it’s six months, all bets are off.”

“Pandæmonium” by the English painter John Martin (1841) via Wikimedia Commons.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/03/newsonomics-what-was-once-unthinkable-is-quickly-becoming-reality-in-the-destruction-of-local-news/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/12/what-do-authority-and-curiosity-sound-like-on-the-radio-npr-has-been-expanding-that-palette-from-its-founding/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/12/what-do-authority-and-curiosity-sound-like-on-the-radio-npr-has-been-expanding-that-palette-from-its-founding/#respond Thu, 12 Dec 2019 16:37:26 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=177797 From its beginnings half a century ago, National Public Radio heralded a new approach to the sound of radio in the United States. NPR “would speak with many voices and many dialects,” according to its founding document, “National Public Radio Purposes.” Written in 1970, this blueprint rang with emotional immediacy; NPR would go on the air for the first time a year later, on April 20, 1971.

NPR is often mocked — perhaps most memorably in a series of Saturday Night Live sketches featuring Alec Baldwin — for its staid sound production and its hosts’ carefully modulated vocal quality. But its commitment to including those “many voices” hatched a small sonic revolution on the airwaves.

As a historian of radio, I’ve written about the medium’s unique blend of intimate voices and public address. As the 50th anniversary of public radio draws near, I’m interested in NPR’s contradictory legacy of both sonic innovation and monotony.

One of the first voices to become associated with NPR’s flagship evening news program All Things Considered was Susan Stamberg. Hired in 1971, she became the first woman in U.S. history to co-anchor a national nightly newscast on radio or television.

William Siemering, the network’s first program director and the author of “Purposes,” wanted the voice of the network to communicate curiosity rather than authority. Stamberg, 31 when she was hired, brought youthful exuberance to the job. And in another departure from newscasting’s baritones, with their supposedly neutral Midwestern accents, Stamberg’s voice was “nasal, quizzical, and unashamedly female,” as Lisa Phillips put it. It came, she said, “with a hometown — New York — and an ethnicity — Jewish.”

The decision to stick with young and relatively unproven voices came at a cost, according to Jack Mitchell, the original director of All Things Considered. In his account of NPR’s beginnings, Listener Supported, Mitchell recalled how Siemering has passed on Ford Foundation funding that was tied to hiring the proven and respected newscaster Edward P. Morgan, a white man originally from Walla Walla, Washington.

Instead, NPR stood by the less “authoritative” and more engaging voices of Stamberg and her peers, even if they sometimes sounded “less than professional.” “Masculine, commanding” voices were “exactly how we DON’T want to sound,” Siemering told his staff, as Stamberg later recalled in This Is NPR: The First Forty Years.

Early feedback on Stamberg from station managers around the country wasn’t encouraging, according to Mitchell. She sounded too New York, too Jewish, too off-putting. Siemering hid these negative reviews from Stamberg as she found her own broadcast voice, which would go on to win her many prestigious journalism awards. The network regards her as one of its “founding mothers.”

NPR has continued to speak with many voices that would sound out of place on the air anywhere else. Many, if not most, have been female. As hosts and anchors, correspondents and reporters, women have played a key role in giving NPR its distinctive sound. Nina Totenberg, Linda Wertheimer, and Cokie Roberts brought hard-nosed journalism and an inside-the-Beltway sensibility to the fledgling network in the 1970s. In the process, these white women changed what the news sounded like.

Curating distinctive voices “rich with the rhythms and accents of their regions” was another explicit way in which All Things Considered initially sought to sonically mark its difference from what had come before, according to Stamberg.

By the time Wertheimer took over as an All Things Considered co-anchor in 1989, it was no longer controversial to hear women deliver the news of the day. But on network television, most of the early stints for the first women to anchor daily news programs were short-lived. Barbara Walters lasted two years in the mid-1970s as an ABC Evening News co-anchor. Diane Sawyer co-anchored the CBS Morning News, from 1981 to 1984 and Katie Couric spent five years, starting in 2006, as the sole CBS Evening News anchor.

NPR’s commitment to many voices included those who brought regional, as well as gender, diversity to the airwaves. Occasional commentators Baxter Black, a cowboy poet from Texas; Vertamae Grosvenor, a culinary anthropologist born in the Gullah community of North Carolina; and Kim Williams, a naturalist, checked in during the late 1970s and early 1980s, with field reports from their corners of the country. Andrei Codrescu, a Romanian-American artist living in New Orleans, began to bring his thickly accented English and droll humor to NPR in 1983.

Putting these folks on air seemed to address the network’s vision of speaking in many voices and accents. The intent, Mitchell wrote, was explicitly democratic, to be “representative of the nation. That meant white, black, Hispanic, Asian and as many women as men.”

NPR’s growth led to the opening of foreign bureaus, even as print publications hemorrhaged these expensive positions. International coverage further expanded its vocal range. Some of the women now working as the network’s anchors got their start as foreign correspondents. Doualy Xaykaothao spent years reporting from Asia and Lulu Garcia-Navarro covered Latin America and the Middle East for NPR.

Other women with nonconventional news voices, including Eleanor Beardsley in Paris, Sylvia Poggioli in Rome, and Ofeabia Quist-Arcton in Dakar, are still overseas. Their signature approach to signing off with their name and locale is a sonic pleasure for many NPR fans.

Favorite @NPR pronunciations:

—Ofeibea Quist-Arcton saying “Dah-KARR.”

—Michele Kelemen saying “Wash…ing…ton.”

—Eleanor Beardsley saying “Paris” with that flat “a.”

—Sylvia Poggioli saying “Sylvia Poggioli.” https://t.co/SH4wA4CVlG

— Paul Farhi (@farhip) May 19, 2018

Even so, by the turn of the century, the network faced complaints about its tight control over pronunciation, cadence, and accent, especially for women and people of color. Critics denounced a sense that the voices of NPR’s female journalists sounded “alike in their sober nasal condescension,” as the writer and actor Sarah Vowell put it — hinting at a class-related critique along with a gendered one.

Some of these naysayers contend that NPR’s women have low-pitched voices that sound too much like men, and that NPR voices in general sound more like each other than everyone else. Writer Scott Sherman calls it the “NPR drone.” Even Stamberg said in a 2010 interview that one price of NPR’s success was that listeners weren’t “hearing great voices anymore.”

Another round of criticism, this one aimed primarily at younger women, identified “vocal fry,” a low creaky way of speaking, as an irritating feature of public radio voices. The critique, which comes mostly from men and older folks, suggested that despite what other critics claimed, NPR’s sound was not static but evolving.

NPR’s sonic palette and its range of voices has broadened in recent years, especially through its podcasts and on weekends — when Navarro, who is Latina, and Michel Martin, an African American woman, are two of the network’s main three news anchors. Sam Sanders, a gay African American man, hosts a cultural talk show branded with his own name. Programs like Alt.Latino and Radio Ambulante, which are either in Spanish or in English punctuated with Spanish words, indicate that the network aims to serve new listeners.

As NPR looks forward to the next 50 years, its decisions over whose voices belong on the air will determine how well it lives up to its founding commitment to sound like America. And it is likely that criticism of how those voices sound will continue to reflect dominant attitudes about who gets to speak.

Jason Loviglio is an associate professor of media and communication studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/12/what-do-authority-and-curiosity-sound-like-on-the-radio-npr-has-been-expanding-that-palette-from-its-founding/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/09/radio-ambulantes-audience-is-worldwide-listening-clubs-help-bring-them-together/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/09/radio-ambulantes-audience-is-worldwide-listening-clubs-help-bring-them-together/#respond Mon, 30 Sep 2019 11:51:16 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=175202 The day that The New York Times ended its Spanish-language initiative to build subscribers among Latin American countries, Jorge Caraballo Cordovez posted in a 7,500-plus member Facebook group, mourning the loss of NYT en Español.

“It is a pity to lose projects with which we share the objective of exploring and connecting Latin America through rigorous journalism. The emptiness is going to be felt; we need more media covering our region, our conflicts, our identities,” he wrote, in Spanish. (Many “Nooooos” ensued.)

This was posted in Club de Podcast Radio Ambulante, a virtual group fostering many IRL connections for the audience of the narrative podcast chronicling Latin American life around the world. Caraballo is a growth editor there and one of the administrators of the group. The New York Times ended NYT en Español because it couldn’t figure out how to build an audience loyal enough to convert or otherwise monetize. Radio Ambulante, distributed by NPR and taking a different format and approach than NYT en Español, has built its own loyal following through listener clubs to connect around stories of the Latin American experience. And yes, the team just launched a membership component to see if folks can chip in financially, as well.

1/ Hoy inauguramos un programa de membresías para oyentes de Radio Ambulante. Con el apoyo de ustedes podremos seguir creciendo y contando historias que acercan a Latinoamérica. https://t.co/FHcLGM9s9s

— Radio Ambulante (@radioambulante) September 16, 2019

Listening clubs are like a book club — but for podcast episodes. (The New York Times profiled music-focused listening clubs in London three years ago; NPR has experimented with listening parties for its millennial vertical Generation Listen. And, of course, the social and communal experience of group listening has been part of terrestrial radio since the beginning.) “That [Facebook] group became big and we saw that there was a need to go back to the basics and say ‘we’re talking about the stories — you want to discuss them, this is something you care about, it’s touching you permanently. It’s not just journalism that is informative to you; it’s stories but it’s also creating the opportunity to connect with others,” Caraballo told me. They decided “let’s go back to the first place and do this but offline. We don’t want to have Facebook in between you and other listeners.”

Funded by the News Integrity Initiative, Caraballo and community and memberships coordinator Gaby Brenes started in November to build out the (tame) infrastructure for a remote network of people who want to gather, listen to Radio Ambulante’s work, and discuss it together. They didn’t necessarily need Amazon Web Services or a ton of marketing given their Facebook group’s already substantial size. All they needed, really, was some space and people who wanted to show up, but they gave them some supporting resources (and snacks!) as well.

From February to May, they had hosted 20 pilot club meetups and officially opened up the listening clubs in the summer. (Caraballo and Brenes put together a very helpful guide for anyone to put together a listening club, either a passionate Radio Ambulante listener or someone from another podcast it for themselves, as part of the NII grant.) About 15 to 20 people showed up per club to meet at 6:30 or 7:30 in the evening — the organizers prepare for them to not be on time, though. They’d spend two hours together — getting to know each other, listening to a 30 to 40 minute long episode, discussing the episode with Radio Ambulante-provided guidelines, and then taking a group picture to mark the occasion. And it’s working: In surveys taken at the end of the meet-ups, 91 percent of participants said they felt they are communicating with the club in more powerful and efficient ways than on social media and 84 percent said it’s a conversation that they could not have in other places. (Another fun fact: Nearly 70 percent of the clubs have been organized by women, Brenes said.)

The team’s remote work culture definitely came in handy for this, with its 21-person staff spread across eight cities in Latin America. “It was easier to have someone we trust host the clubs in different cities,” Brenes said, though post-pilot they’ve branched out to include avid listeners as hosts beyond those eight places. (She’s based in Costa Rica.) “We worked with them to find a space that would allow people to feel welcomed and included. We really wanted to privilege conversation and it wasn’t about the luxury of the event.”

The conversation included snacks, as mentioned, but also materials to occupy people instead of their phones during the episode listening. Brenes designed worksheets and illustrations to increase engagement with the content of the episode. The discussion guidelines for moderators were designed for engagement, too: a first set for icebreaking and setting the conversational mood, a second set for exploring specific themes and topics mentioned in the episode, and a third “boomerang” group: “With Radio Ambulante, our audience has the potential to be global,” Brenes said. “We wanted people to be able to connect and bring that situation back to their cities.”

In one club meeting that Caraballo hosted in Colombia, the podcast episode focused on Venezuelan migration to Colombia and Brazil. They began the discussion after listening, and then someone raised her hand and explained she was just like the people in the episode: “She said…‘What you’re describing in the episode is what I’ve lived and what my family has experienced,'” he said. “She started sharing her experience. That completely changes the mood, the direction of the conversation.”

In addition to bridging borders, the clubs help bridge the generational gap in podcast listeners: “Latin America has this super rich tradition of radio journalism. The [generational] gap of adopting podcasts is still there and it’s still large and evident,” Brenes said. So she brought her parents to a meeting to help them get a sense of podcasts beyond that app in your phone.

Now, the listening clubs are out there in the world, both out of the pilot and spanning the globe. Radio Ambulante’s ninth season launched September 10 and Brenes and Caraballo made a push to organize a few more groups. “We had more than 75 organizers sign up to host a club,” Brenes said, noting they now have branches in 19 countries including Uganda, Belarus, and Australia. “It’s fascinating to think they not only listen to the podcast but were able to find five to six more people to have a conversation about it.” But that scale has also been a challenge, trying to sort through requests in the group from people looking for more listeners in their area, Caraballo said.

“We feel very proud and inspired to see that journalism can trigger these conversations. This can happen around cultural products, like movie clubs and book clubs,” he said. “But using journalism to connect people offline and be able to have these meaningful interactions can work very well.”

Image of a listening club in action by Jorge Calle courtesy of Radio Ambulante.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/09/radio-ambulantes-audience-is-worldwide-listening-clubs-help-bring-them-together/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/09/voxs-new-podcast-goes-where-news-podcasts-havent-gone-before-sundays/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/09/voxs-new-podcast-goes-where-news-podcasts-havent-gone-before-sundays/#respond Tue, 17 Sep 2019 14:59:44 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=175063

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

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 226, dated September 17, 2019.

Reset: Vox Media Podcast Network’s Next Big Swing. This has been in the works for a while, but it’s finally coming out soon. On October 15, Vox Media will officially launch Reset, its upcoming technology news podcast that was originally announced back in February as part of what Axios described as a “multi-million dollar deal” expanding the partnership Vox Media struck up Stitcher that originated Today, Explained, the former’s daily news podcast. The podcast falls under the Recode brand, which was rolled up into the larger Vox.com operation earlier this year.

Details, for the discerning: Reset will publish three times a week — Tuesdays, Thursday, and, intriguingly, Sunday — with each episode, dropped in the early mornings, designed to clock in at around 20 minutes. The show will be powered by a production team befitting a robust news operation, though a search for an executive producer is still underway. Hosting duties will be held by Arielle Duhaime-Ross, most recently the climate change correspondent for VICE News Tonight, the weekly documentary cable news magazine program. The appointment marks a return for Duhaime-Ross, who, prior to joining Vice, was science reporter for The Verge. (During her original tenure at Vox Media, she won the 2015 Herb Lampert award for her story on a most radical idea.)

As you would expect, Reset will be tasked with carrying out the goals of Recode 2.0, newly reconstituted with Vox.com’s DNA of policy-minded explanatory journalism. This generally translates to a coverage framework that emphasizes reporting on the spaces in which technology, politics, culture, and society rub up against each other… but frankly, given that we’re living in some approximation of a post-“software eats the world” epoch, that framework pretty much accounts for everything. The recruitment of Duhaime-Ross as host, I’m told, was to some extent informed by a wariness of bringing on a more dyed-in-the-wool tech journalist, and an intent to establish somebody who could communicate issues in the tech world while effectively standing outside of the tech world bubble.

A genetic bond with Today, Explained is to be expected. Liz Kelly Nelson, editorial of Vox.com Podcasts, said that where Today, Explained might cover, say, Brexit from a political perspective, Reset would try to approach the story from how technology would come into it: how social media shapes the process, how some members of parliament use technology to frame their arguments, or, on a larger scale, how some tech companies could get completely screwed up if Britain leaves the EU.

For trivia-related purposes, here are two other random points of connection: firstly, both Arielle Duhaime-Ross and Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram are Canadian, and secondly, Breakmaster Cylinder will also score Reset’s theme song, as it did with Today, Explained. Is anybody running a tally of podcast theme songs by BC? Should some enterprising podcast technology platform just hire BC full-time to crank out music libraries? (I hope so, and probably.)

It’s worth noting that there will be some differences in approach between the weekday and Sunday episodes. The Tuesday and Thursday dispatches are meant to be newsier, perhaps more in line with what you’d expect from a standard daily news podcast execution. The Sunday episodes, meanwhile, are being designed to accommodate more enterprise, agenda-setting reporting — think 60 Minutes, or something of the sort. “Pegging one of our episodes to Sundays would give us more time to produce more vigorously reported stories,” Nelson said. “It puts us in a better position to break news.”

Gotta say, I’m pretty psyched about the show’s plan to go after the Sunday morning slot. It’s always been surprising to me that more publishers haven’t attempted to go after weekend listening. Of course, I’m aware of the conventional arguments levied against programming for the weekend, which appears anchored by the belief that people are busy doing fun weekend things and thus aren’t typically in the mood to listen to podcasts, or whatever. (This is a distant cousin to the strategy of not publishing big swings during the summer, because folks are off doing fun vacation things.) I suspect these assumptions fall from a mindset that primarily views podcast listening as secondary experiences, i.e. “the thing you do when you’re doing other things.”

To which I favor two counter arguments. First, weekends also feature activities conducive to secondary media consumption: working out, driving around, making big meals, miscellaneous busywork like compulsively scrubbing the bathroom walls and/or stacking the week’s receipts, yadda yadda yadda. Secondly, and more importantly, why let audience behavior fully dictate publishing strategy? To some extent, as a maker of things, you’re supposed to be setting trends, and what better opportunity to set trends than the chunk of the week when defined by want-to-dos than need-to-dos?

On this second point, the production team seems aligned. “To us, the weekend is white space,” said Nelson, before evoking comparisons with Sunday magazine inserts, those glossy print products that come bundled with the Sunday edition of newspapers, where the expectation is that readers will spend a good amount of their Sunday morning leisure time to leaf through. “We see it as an opportunity to work hard at helping our listeners create a new habit.”

It’s exciting ground to break, representative of the production’s overall marginally experimental feel. From the outside, Reset feels a little blurry with formal categorizations — of form, sensibility, approach. Not a daily news podcast, though not quite a news magazine. Not quite evergreen, though not necessarily newsy. Not quite of the technology community, not completely separate. I haven’t heard any early cuts, so I can’t speak to the actual feel of the show, but I very much appreciate the not-particularly-straightforward nature of this production. We’ll see how these things play out when the first episode drops next month.

Slate is doubling down on What Next, its daily news podcast. The company hopes to dramatically expand its team in a few directions, including a dedicated politics editor to chart the show’s coverage of Washington and the 2020 presidential election cycle, a special projects team to suss out bigger stories, and a supervising producer to lead what Gabriel Roth, Slate’s editorial director of audio, describes as a “newsroom within the newsroom.”

“The working idea right now is to have a couple of producers churning out the news and a couple of producers looking ahead, but one of the great things about Slate is that everyone does everything here,” host Mary Harris tells me. “As we’ve gotten our two new producers — Danielle Hewitt, who had been producing in DC for Slate, and Mara Silvers, who joined from WNYC — up to speed, the idea is to have producers who can book, edit, and mix. In the next year, we want to do more deep dives…more live events, like the one we’re doing at the Texas Tribune Festival later this month. We also want our producers to be able to work with Slate writers as they report their stories — that way when we interview our favorite folks, those conversations will have more texture.”

What Next will hit the one-year mark next month, on October 17.

At NPR, Pod $$ projected to beat Broad $$. Over at Current, Tyler Falk reports that NPR is expecting its podcast sponsorship revenues to surpass broadcast sponsorship revenues for the first time next year…which, you know, is a pretty big marker.

That projection was given during the NPR membership meeting that took place on September 5. According to Current, NPR CFO Deborah Cowen noted that the organization “has budgeted about $55 million in corporate sponsorship revenues from podcasts in fiscal year 2020” — which is $5 million more than what it’s expecting to bring in this year — while the “broadcast and event sponsorship” revenues are expected to be at $52.7 million next year.

Should those projections pan out, that would mean it took NPR about half a decade to reach this point following the early 2015 launch of Invisibilia, arguably the start of the organization’s modern podcasting era. Which sounds about right, I suppose; after all, nothing about this ecosystem is particularly straightforward.

Meanwhile, in the Granite State… New Hampshire Public Radio has a new president and CEO: Jim Schachter, who joins from WNYC, where he served as the VP of news for the last seven years. Prior to that, he spent 17 years at The New York Times. Schacter replaces Betsy Gardella, who retired in December 2018 after 13 years on the job.

On a related note: I’m told that the first episode of NHPR’s Patient Zero was downloaded over 215,000 times since launching on August 15. The podcast’s premium content-led fundraising campaign, as well, is off to a solid start, with the team seeing crossover donors from the Bear Brook campaign.

At the IAB Podcast Upfronts in SF last week… Wondery came out with two partnership announcements: the first with The Athletic, which involves plans to launch a daily sports news podcast for the latter, and the second with All Things Comedy, an independent digital media studio founded by Bill Burr and Al Madrigal.

The Hottest Take, the new daily audio show from The Ringer (and a Spotify exclusive), is basically everything I want for my morning commute.

What is a private feed worth? [by Caroline Crampton]. There’s a podcasting tech problem that you’ll be well aware of if you’ve ever tried to distribute or listen to a premium podcast feed. Indeed, it’s a problem that gets right to the heart of the medium’s DNA: RSS feeds, and the podcast apps that listeners use to access them, require openness — adding a login or authentication option to a feed to make sure that only paying subscribers can listen to gated content is currently incompatible with having said feed work in your average podcatcher.

Plus, since most podcast apps are directory-based and assume listeners prefer to browse and select from a catalogue UI, the option to manually add an unlisted feed tends to be clunky and off-putting to the less tech savvy. On top of that, there’s always the danger that this unlisted feed gets shared widely and attracts freeloaders, which the podcaster can’t really do much about without disrupting the experience of its paying audience.

Monetizing the connection between podcaster and listener has become increasingly common in the last couple of years, and delivering bonus audio as a reward for regular payment is pretty standard. As a result, more and more third-party solutions to this problem have been coming online, from Supporting Cast to Acast Access to Glow and others, and the proposed PodPass protocol (read my recent write up here) would see a direct fix that allows in-app authentication. Patreon also provides a patron-only feed option for distributing audio to paying supporters only.

A new venture has now joined the flood in this space: Supercast, a subscription podcasting product from the Canadian agency DoubleUp (it’s worked with podcasters Peter Attia and Sam Harris in that capacity already; Attia is also a Supercast investor and early adopter). The offering is very similar to what’s already out there, with the emphasis on providing the podcaster with a private feed for each paying subscriber and a smooth on-boarding process to get their feed into their podcatcher of choice. Supercast also puts emphasis on its analytics, and seeks to provide participating podcasters with plenty of data about what bonus content their paying subscribers engage with as well as preventing so called “feed fraud” when a private feed is shared more widely.

Aidan Hornsby from Supercast gave me a demo of the Supercast dashboard so far before launch, and there certainly seemed to be elements there that would address these issues. The part I’m missing, though, is pricing. Supercast can either integrate with a podcaster’s existing membership platforms (e.g. Memberful or Memberpress) and just provide the feed element, or it can run the whole transaction.

It’s fairly standard on platforms like Patreon for the podcaster to pay for the service via a fee levied per transaction, and I believe that’s how Supercast charges in the latter instance. In the former scenario, though, it charges the podcaster a monthly fee per activated feed. So, if 100 out of 150 paying subscribers choose to access bonus content, you pay each month for 100 feeds.

I discussed with Hornsby the possibility of using Supercast for my own podcast, which I monetize with subscriptions via Memberful, and was told that, for me, it would cost $1.50 per month per activated feed (with a discount offered should I become an early adopter and offer feedback on the platform in return). That would mean that if 150 subscribers activated their feeds, a podcaster would pay $225 per month for this service. (For the record, I declined and have no relationship with this outfit.)

When I queried this fee with Hornsby — it seems like a pretty steep rate to me, when compared with alternatives like Patreon, and easily outstrips what a podcaster needs to pay for other services like main feed hosting and so on — he responded that “we want to make Supercast affordable for podcasters at all levels and are working closely with early adopters during the beta period to gather data finalize the rate and scaling tiers.” He added that the fee would “decrease as the number of subscribers scales…shows with larger audiences pay less per user.”

Curious, I asked for more information about Supercast’s pricing model or tiers, but nothing more specific was forthcoming. It therefore remains unclear to me what the uptake for Supercast will be or how likely it is to grow a substantial user base, since I can’t evaluate its possible revenue stream.

You might have become aware of Supercast’s launch a couple of weeks ago when a Medium post titled “Howard Stern is getting ripped off” appeared, in which Andrew Wilkinson from Tiny Capital (which invests in DoubleUp and Supercast) argued that “the transition from advertising to a subscription model is going to make podcasters billions of dollars and mint a ton of millionaires.” There are a lot of untested assumptions in that piece — including the one that because a lot of people happily listen to an ad on a popular podcast now, they will equally happily convert into paying subscribers in droves. Which, you know, is questionable. More recently, Tim Ferriss’s experience would, at minimum, suggest this is not always the case.

I think it’s safe to say that when a problem has long been prevalent, the solutions aren’t always so straightforward or simple. And particularly when it comes to a still-developing ecosystem like podcasting, it behooves the peddlers of solutions to mount their efforts in the spirit of complementarism, not superiority. The main text on Supercast’s website reads “Enough with the MeUndies ads,” which doesn’t quite suggest a good grasp of why advertising has been important for podcast creators, independent and corporate, for the length of time that the business has been around. A softer touch, along with a softer outlook on the world, is generally recommended.

Open ears, full hearts, can’t lose: WQXR’s new classical music podcast [by Sara Ivry]. In August, I saw the Knights orchestra perform at Tanglewood, the Western Mass music venue that’s also the home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It was an interesting scene: I reckon that, while the average age of the audience was 70, the average age of the musicians was 35, a gulf that made me wonder about the future of classical audiences. Given the obvious implication of the age spread, how will the classical music scene replenish its audiences moving forward?

That’s a question I see at the heart of The Open Ears Project, a new podcast from WQXR and WNYC Studios hosted by Clemency Burton-Hill, the writer, violinist, broadcaster, and producer who also happens to be WQXR’s creative director of music and arts. (She’s also the author of Year of Wonder: Classical Music to Enjoy Day by Day, which came out last year.)

Open Ears is a bite-sized daily audio show that features everyday New Yorkers — as well as not-so-everyday New Yorkers like Alec Baldwin and Wynton Marsalis — waxing romantic, nostalgic, and philosophical about a single, beloved piece of classical music. In many ways, it’s a great companion to another podcast that WQXR recently rolled out: Aria Code, hosted by Rhiannon Giddens.

I got to speak with Burton-Hill recently, who shared the thinking behind the new project.

Hot Pod: How much of The Open Ears Project represents an effort to cultivate new — that is, younger — audiences with a little help from A-list friends?

Clemency Burton-Hill: Everything I do in the classical music sphere is geared to opening it up, talking about it, listening to it. Unless we in the classical world do a better job of making people feel welcome, we are going to lose audiences. In a lot of places, I’m gratified to see diverse and younger audiences, and often institutions are doing absolutely everything they can, but they’re hamstrung by many realities. In the U.S., there’s no public subsidy of the arts.

I wish we could fix it with a podcast. We can take baby steps to say, “This shit’s amazing. Come listen and decide for yourself.”

Hot Pod: How did The Open Ears Project come about?

Burton-Hill: Year of Wonder came out in the U.S. last year, and partly I wrote that because to me classical music is another form of music. For many people that’s not the case. People were approaching me to help them out with classical music, to find a way in. They’d say “I don’t know that I’m listening right. I don’t know if I’m doing it right,” and I wanted to shout from the rooftops, “There is no right!”

There’s obviously a perception that classical music is for an educated elite, and I don’t mean that went to college. I mean, people who are schooled in arcane rituals that surround the art form, that unless you’re in the know, you don’t get to talk about it. Unless you have the technical or musical background, your reaction to it is not valid. That’s problematic; it keeps people out.

I wanted to really show up for that idea that this can be anyone’s music and therefore anyone can talk about it.

Hot Pod: The fear people have about not “getting” classical music reminds me of the fear people have about poetry.

Burton-Hill: Poetry and music are more spiritually aligned than we talk about. They act upon us in ways that we cannot immediately understand. The primary way to respond is emotional — how it makes you feel, and that that feeling helps us through our lives, through grief or heartbreak or whatever it may be. Why are a few words arranged on a page or a few notes able to actually do something to us?

It’s a public service to demystify poetry and music because they can have a real impact on people’s daily lives. I want everyone to have access to that. I’m not saying everyone should love it, but they shouldn’t be shut out.

Hot Pod: Do you get a heads-up about what the guests are going to select?

Burton-Hill: I have no idea what people are going to talk about. You’re not going to get “Beethoven was born wherever.” It’s much more about the human connection. We’re living in times of real disconnect and disharmony. We’re all shooting into our little voids and these sonic love letters that are very short and intimate might help us hear this thing called classical music differently but also hear our fellow humans, as well.

These are exercises in empathy and connection. The episodes are brief and soulful.

Hot Pod: What’s the range of guests on The Open Ears Project?

Burton-Hill: I’ve had waiters, bartenders, a guy who served in the military, taxi drivers, preschool teachers. No one I have approached hasn’t had a story about classical music.

I invited Call Your Girlfriend host Aminatou Sow. We went in cold for the interview and she had me in bits because of the story she told of hearing this Florence Price music on the day she got a cancer diagnosis.

There have been quite a few interviews that have really floored me. Some classical musicians are in the mix — and that was deliberate and important to me; it was giving them the license to talk on a purely emotional level about how something affects them — Eric Jacobsen about his mother and her death. It was incredible to hear mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton talk about how she felt met and received by the Chopin Nocturne, talking about what it was like to be 15 and bisexual and not fitting in.

Hot Pod: How do you imagine people listening?

Burton-Hill: I want this to be a joyful, empathy-inducing warm feeling that’s created in you. Hopefully you can create a daily listening habit that can transform your day. It takes you out of your everyday. It’s also bingeable. You open your ears to it and engage with someone else’s story.

The music might move you, and it might not and that’s also great because it will cultivate your own taste. We play the full track at the end of each episode and you can absolutely immerse yourself in it. If it’s not for you — that’s cool. Come back tomorrow because maybe you’ll love that one.

You can check out The Open Ears Project here.

This issue’s guest contributor is Sara Ivry, a freelance writer, editor and podcaster based in New York City. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Bookforum, Money, Design Observer, and a range of other outlets. Until 2016 she hosted the National Magazine Award-winning podcast Vox Tablet. She’s currently a co-producer on season two of In It from Understood.org.

Release Notes

— Spotify’s Gimlet Media division is apparently getting ready for fiction-focused fall rollout. Three projects, very Hollywood talent-oriented, a couple of returning series. You can find the details in Variety.

— Radiotopia launches Passenger List, its fiction podcast starring Kelly Marie Tran, this week. Here’s my preview piece on the project for Vulture.

— Here’s something you don’t see very often: A bilingual podcast series, presented in both English and German. It’s called Finding Van Gogh, it’s a five-part series, and it’s released by the Städel Museum in Frankfurt. Sarah Omar is the producer.

— The New York Post’s Page Six is launching a podcast this week, and it’s apparently called “We Hear” — separate and distinct, of course, from “We Here For You.”

— All hail Who? Weekly’s Lindsay Weber and Bobby Finger, icons of our time. The Guardian has a great profile on the duo.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/09/voxs-new-podcast-goes-where-news-podcasts-havent-gone-before-sundays/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/05/npr-debuts-a-new-morning-edition-theme-and-the-fact-that-people-care-shows-the-continued-power-of-old-fashioned-non-internet-radio/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/05/npr-debuts-a-new-morning-edition-theme-and-the-fact-that-people-care-shows-the-continued-power-of-old-fashioned-non-internet-radio/#respond Mon, 06 May 2019 14:00:16 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=171336 In an auditory move that no doubt ruined some people’s wake-up alarms this morning, NPR’s Morning Edition changed its theme music for the first time in its 40-year history this morning. The old theme, by public-radio-theme auteur B.J. Leiderman, was perhaps the single most public-radio-y thing on public radio — a few seconds of music that pushed every cultural association you might have with NPR top of mind. Instead of gently rousing you in a ’70s commune smelling of patchouli, the new theme is a little faster, a little more percussive, and significantly more focused on handclaps. Have a listen:

Whoa, the new @MorningEdition theme leaked and it is indeed “warm, fresh, modern and human” pic.twitter.com/vnxxL5iUA9

— Bobby Lord (@mysweetlord) February 9, 2019

J/k, here it is:

The change is being made, of course, for the kids:

The new theme is intended to attract a younger and more diverse audience, while also aligning with the evolution of “Morning Edition” into a newsier program, said Kenya Young, the executive producer.

“I wanted a sound and a mood and a tone and a feel and a vibe all mixed in one,” she said.

I don’t know that there’s anything that sounds particularly “young” or “diverse” about it — but it’s probably the fact of the change rather than its content that matters. To younger potential Morning Edition listeners, the old theme sounds like Dad’s radio show. Stripping away that layer of auditory reference might let a few people listen with fresh ears.

As you’d expect on the Internet, people don’t like change. (Remember when 280 characters in a tweet was the apocalypse?) So some of the reaction is no doubt occasioned by the general strangeness of a new theme more than the theme itself.

I feel personally attacked by this new Morning Edition theme

— jacqui shine (@DearSplenda) May 6, 2019

Hearing that new Morning Edition theme song like… pic.twitter.com/BamuZUaQrJ

— Justin Hendrix (@justinhendrix) May 6, 2019

NPR's 'Morning Edition' debuts its new theme song this morning. I've listened for more than 35 years. So a new song is definitely…different. It doesn't seem so much a song as a composed set of signals of increasing urgency.https://t.co/axgJGX4SFp

— Charles Fishman (@cfishman) May 6, 2019

.@adprock this morning: The new @NPR morning edition song sounds like The Newsroom theme song.

Bring back that jazzy saccharine coffee brewing sweetness of the old song! pic.twitter.com/8wAGaOWvwp

— Dr. Katie Bird (@ArtHouseDirectr) May 6, 2019

I do not approve of the new theme to Morning Edition. It sounds like John Tesh wrote it. pic.twitter.com/VV1eHiIhbS

— dave (@daveamp) May 6, 2019

I tend to come down on the side of The Atlantic’s Rob Meyer — who got his bachelor’s studying classical choral music education, fer cryin’ out loud — in that the new theme seems likely to sound as dated to today as the old theme does to its era.

Very considerate of NPR to use a 2005 iMovie production bed as the new ‘Morning Edition’ theme https://t.co/NrbBbQZEva

— Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) May 5, 2019

The new theme really says: Morning Edition, one of the country’s best daily news programs, is for people who use ‘track package’ to see when the new Putumayo CD is going to show up https://t.co/NrbBbQZEva

— Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) May 5, 2019

The crazy thing is that the theme is so absurdly generic and 2010s-sounding that it will age like an autotuned angry bird

— Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) May 5, 2019

But more significantly, I think the new theme is worth noting as a going-away present to NPR CEO Jarl Mohn, who is leaving the job next month after a five-year stint. He’s apparently been pushing for a new theme song that whole time.

I confess that when Mohn was named to the post in 2014, I was skeptical: first, because his background in commercial radio and TV didn’t immediately seem like a good fit for public radio; second, because he seemed to be more focused on the terrestrial radio side of NPR rather than the digital; and third, because, well, it just felt like it’d been a long time since any NPR CEO had ended his/her term in office with head held high. (He was the eighth CEO in eight years.)

One of Mohn’s signature efforts was to boost NPR’s two flagship news shows, Morning Edition and All Things Considered. He launched a “Spark Project” in which he asked local stations committed to what felt (at least to me at the time) relentless overpromotion of Morning Edition — about 100 promo spots a week.

The thing is, it worked; as he said in 2015:

Ratings for KPPC in Los Angeles are up 30 percent in morning drive. KUT in Austin, Texas, is now No. 1 in the market. Other stations are up as much as 70 percent. In overall ratings, our control group of stations that haven’t gone along with the concept are down 13 percent, while those that went with Spark are up 2 percent. Hey, haters gonna hate.

When his departure was announced in December, audiences for ME and ATC were up “more than 20 percent for listeners over the age of 12 from spring 2014, the last period before Mohn’s appointment took effect, to this past spring, the most recent comparable stretch.” And I haven’t seen any evidence that shoring up the radio side has hurt NPR’s digital efforts, where it very much remains a leader.

Jarl Mohn has been a much better NPR CEO than I'd expected, to be honest. I didn't think it was possible to raise Morning Edition/All Thing Considered ratings that much (and frankly still don't understand how it happened) https://t.co/hRLKclaV1A

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) December 4, 2018

Here’s what I think Mohn saw then. Podcasts and other forms of streaming audio had enormous growth potential, yes. The share of Americans listening to online audio each week went from 36 percent when Mohn took office to 60 percent today. That’s been deeply transformative in people’s homes, where smartphones and smart speakers have relegated a lot of AM/FM radios to the attic crawlspace. (In 2008, 94 percent of people aged 18 to 34 had at least one radio in the house. By 2018, that number was down to 50 percent.)

But the car has remained stubbornly attuned to traditional radio. 81 percent of Americans say they’ve listened to an AM/FM radio in their cars in the past month — versus just 28 percent for online radio and 26 percent for podcasts. (CD players and “owned digital music” — both considered deeply last century by the digerati — are both way ahead of their digital peers.)

Why? Maybe it’s that live radio performs a companionship role in drivetime that podcasts can’t as easily. Maybe it’s that connected-audio systems in cars can still be kinda clunky. Or maybe it’s that radio is still profoundly simple to navigate when in motion — just turn it on! — as opposed to fiddling through a podcast queue or waiting for an app to launch.

In any event, radio has proved sticky, and large amounts of podcast/digital audio listening have proven to be additive to rather than substitutions for the radio dial. In 2017, the audiences for every major form of news media declined significantly year-over-year — except for radio, which was flat.

At a time when digital outlets are trying to build regular consumption habits in their readers, it’s hard to beat the established habit of…listening to the radio while you drive to work. At a time when digital outlets are trying to figure out how best to build a business model that ensures both maximum distribution and significant revenue from your best customers…public radio’s had that figured out for decades.

I know there’s (always) lots to gripe about within NPR or the public radio system more broadly, and Mohn’s leadership has not been controversy-free. People complaining about a new Morning Edition theme is pretty natural.

But I do want to give a tip of the cap to the departing CEO. In a time of digital transformation, it’s very easy for folks like me to see things like “promote the hell out of a morning radio show” as a retrograde commitment to old ways. But he proved to be more right than I could have imagined. Maybe we’ll end up liking the new theme, too.

Illustration based on work by Karolis Strautniekas used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/05/npr-debuts-a-new-morning-edition-theme-and-the-fact-that-people-care-shows-the-continued-power-of-old-fashioned-non-internet-radio/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/04/smart-speakers-are-on-the-rise-will-news-grow-with-it/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/04/smart-speakers-are-on-the-rise-will-news-grow-with-it/#respond Thu, 04 Apr 2019 14:38:45 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=170375

This piece is from our sister publication Nieman Reports.

On midterm election night last year, NPR carried out its usual live coverage, coordinating stories from its reporters and from member stations across the country. Most of the audience followed along via these stations’ broadcast signals.

But those not listening to the radio could get updates, too, by asking Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa for an update on election news from the NPR One app. The response to this request was a short report with the latest news.

“Obviously, there are people that are going to be just glued to election returns,” says Tamar Charney, managing director of personalization and curation at NPR. “But we also know there’s a lot of other people who have a lot of other things going on in their life. They’re dealing with their kids, they’re getting ready for the next day, but they may still want to be able to be plugged in.”

The goal of the Alexa offering was to test two hypotheses: Would listeners find an option like this useful? And could NPR give it to them?

The answer to the second question was yes: A staff worked until about 3 in the morning to make updates available twice an hour.

But as to the first question, whether listeners would find it useful — it’s not clear how many found it at all. NPR won’t say how many people tried listening to the news this way, but, then again, the original commercial radio news broadcast in 1920 didn’t draw a massive audience either. “It was our first time trying this out and it was successful because we developed a workflow and best practices for election night so that we are ready for the volume of listeners we will get in the presidential elections in 2020,” Charney says.1

At least 21 percent of Americans own a voice-activated smart speaker — Amazon’s Echo is the most popular, while Google, Apple and other tech companies make such devices, too. And sales are climbing: In 2017, only 7 percent of Americans owned smart speakers. Meanwhile, radio ownership and social media use are dropping. The speakers and the artificial intelligence that powers them can replace or augment the functions of a radio or phone. By voice, users can ask their smart speaker assistants to play music, find recipes, set timers, or answer basic questions.

Users can also ask for news. And this simple request has the potential to challenge the foundations of radio, turning broadcasts into conversations, changing the stories people hear, and creating individualized streams of information.

Smart assistants have long been a feature on mobile phones, but with smart speakers proliferating in homes and the technology coming pre-installed in cars, voice is pushing to the final corners of consumers’ connected lives, creating new habits and leading users to rethink how they interact with their devices. And news outlets are racing to find a place on the platform. “If [voice] does become an ever more dominant interface, then it will probably have quite profound effects on the way that information and content is consumed,” says Mukul Devichand, executive editor of voice and AI for the BBC.

For many publishers, there’s not much question if voice will grow. The question is whether news will grow with it.

Keep reading at Nieman Reports →

3D composite image of an owl and an Apple HomePod by Emre Zorer and Mehmet Turan used under a Creative Commons license.

1. Disclosure: While reporting this story, I was on the staff of the show “1A,” which is distributed by NPR and produced by member station WAMU. I am now a senior editor at the station.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/04/smart-speakers-are-on-the-rise-will-news-grow-with-it/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/11/consumers-love-smart-speakers-they-dont-love-news-briefings-on-smart-speakers-at-least-not-yet/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/11/consumers-love-smart-speakers-they-dont-love-news-briefings-on-smart-speakers-at-least-not-yet/#respond Thu, 15 Nov 2018 00:01:56 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=165025 Smart speakers like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant are rapidly gaining in popularity, but use of news on the devices is lagging, according to a report released Wednesday night by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Use of the devices for music and weather is still far ahead of news use. And among consumers’ complaints about news briefings: They’re too long.

Luckily, there’s time for news publishers to catch up, finds Nic Newman, a senior research associate at RISJ, who did his research via in-home interviews and focus groups, online surveys, and publisher interviews. (He also tapped Amazon, Apple, and Google for whatever data they were willing to share — which, unsurprisingly, wasn’t a lot; none of the companies would share data on how many devices they’ve sold or discuss trends in how news is consumed on them.) Smart speakers are still devices for early adopters: 14 percent of U.S. adults are now using them, compared to 10 percent of U.K. adults and 5 percent of German adults; Juniper Research predicted last year that they’ll be found in 55 percent of U.S. households by 2022.

Here are some of Newman’s findings:

— News consumption on smart speakers is lower than one might expect. In the U.K., for instance, while 47 percent of smart speaker users said they use the device for news monthly and 21 percent use it daily, only 1 percent said news was the device’s most important function. In the U.S., 38 percent of smart speaker users use the device for news at least monthly and 18 percent at least daily.

— When it comes to which news brands people access on their smart speakers, the default matters a lot: In the U.K., for instance, the default news brand on Google Homes, Amazon Echos, and Apple HomePods is BBC News. In the U.S., there’s a more even split between brands in part because NPR is no longer the default on Alexa. (It is on Apple devices, however.)

Smart speaker news briefings didn’t get much love from users in this research. Here are some of the complaints Newman heard:

— Overlong updates — the typical duration is around five minutes, but many wanted something much shorter.

— They are not updated often enough. News and sports bulletins are sometimes hours or days out of date.

— Some bulletins still use synthesized voices (text to speech), which many find hard to listen to.

— Some updates have low production values or poor audio quality.

— Where bulletins from different providers run together, there is often duplication of stories.

— Some updates have intrusive jingles or adverts.

— There is no opportunity to skip or select stories.

Length in particular was an issue that arose. One American interviewee named Adam said, “When someone asks for an update on something, they are asking for a summary. Don’t give me something that is longer than a minute.” Right now, for instance, when you ask for news on a smart speaker from The New York Times, you get its podcast, The Daily, which is usually at least 15 minutes long.

The news organizations that Newman spoke with were aware of these complaints. The Washington Post, for instance, knows that audiences “appreciate brevity more than breadth.” The New York Times plans to replace its current news briefing — The Daily — with a shorter native briefing, with Dan Sanchez, the Times’ lead for voice, acknowledging that The Daily is “a great narrative deep dive but is not really a way to quickly get informed about what you need to know at the beginning of every day.”

Quibbles aside, users said that the news briefings made them feel more informed. In the U.S., for instance, “56 percent of news update users feel far or slightly more informed.”

— People do use smart speakers to play live radio, which of course can also include news. 19 percent “of all online listening to NPR’s member stations’ live radio streams now comes from smart speakers,” for instance, and NPR hasn’t seen declines on other platforms, Recode’s Rani Molla reported this week.

Podcast use on smart speakers, meanwhile, is still relatively low. One reason for that is that “podcasts are often niche and personal. They don’t always work within a shared space at home.”

“Podcasts are the sort of thing I would listen to on a train,” one focus group participant told Newman.

— People see smart speakers as a way of breaking free from screens. One theme Newman found was

the desire — almost universally expressed — to spend less time with screens. Respondents felt overwhelmed, assaulted by technology and often by news as well. Many spend all day at work on screens or looking at their smartphone. Some resent the way in which the internet can distract and waste time by taking people down “rabbit holes.” Part of the appeal for voice devices is they act differently.

People are starting and ending their days with smart speakers and “in this specific respect, it is the smartphone that is being displaced and that may have profound implications for media owners looking to distribute content,” Newman notes.

— Smart speakers provide yet another occasion for publishers to clash with platforms, and publishers are (rightfully) wary of creating more content specifically for big tech companies. For instance, users like to ask their smart speakers “everyday questions,” but when it comes to news this often doesn’t go smoothly:

As one example, we asked for “the number of people who died in the Grenfell Fire.” Google and Alexa gave slightly different numbers because they drew the result from two different news articles published at different times. One platform (Google) made clear what the source was (the Independent) and also gave the date. But this answer was also a rather complex and longwinded way of getting the number that we were after.

A few weeks later, the answers given to this query had changed. Alexa successfully and precisely returned the officially recognized number (72) — but with no additional information about the source. Google had changed its answer to select a relevant part of a Wikipedia entry that also contained the exact number (72).

News publishers could work with the platforms to create answers to questions like these — but what’s in it for them?

Publishers we interviewed were extremely wary of helping Google (or Amazon) build a huge global “answer engine,” without compensation — and it is difficult to see how advertising or sponsorship could work around such short pieces of content. Instead, one publisher suggested that “news answers” could be developed as premium service (e.g. bundled with Amazon Prime) in conjunction with a number of interested news organizations. Each would be paid in proportion to the number of queries that were considered most relevant and then read out.

— Privacy concerns aren’t (yet) paramount. “It’s not nice to know you’re being listened in on all day, but in the end I don’t give a shit,” one German user said.

The full report is here.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/11/consumers-love-smart-speakers-they-dont-love-news-briefings-on-smart-speakers-at-least-not-yet/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/11/25-newsrooms-have-attempted-to-bridge-divisions-in-person-heres-what-theyve-learned/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/11/25-newsrooms-have-attempted-to-bridge-divisions-in-person-heres-what-theyve-learned/#respond Wed, 14 Nov 2018 14:00:48 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=164980 A bunch of strangers walk into a room, and journalists try to get them to get to know — or at least not hate — each other.

That’s not a joke; it’s the goal of 25 news organizations’ engagement initiatives studied by the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin. The 2016 (and 2018) elections effed up a lot of people and their trust in media, as we all know, and news organizations have been experimenting with ways to improve trust face-to-face and across wrenching divisions.

But…what comes out of those events besides a lot of extroversion and handshake germs? How many gatherings are needed to finally start whittling away at stereotypes? Is convening community members with drastically different views a service or a spectacle used for reporting? Can these meetings possibly change people’s perceptions of “the media” — and each other?

Looking at the examples of bridge-our-differences programming can’t fully answer those questions, but new research by Talia Stroud and Caroline Murray, funded by the News Integrity Initiative, provides a decent landscape of the impacts. (Disclosure: I helped corral some of the examples at Murray’s request.) They’re a creative bunch, from the Evergrey’s Melting Mountains road trip bringing Seattleites to meet rural Oregon residents to 60 Minutes’ Oprah Winfrey roundtable in Michigan to a Chicago photojournalist bringing residents from the city’s booming North Side to meet the folks living at their mirror address on the underinvested South Side and vice versa.

“One reason that ingroups [an exclusive group of people with a common interest/identity] develop animosity toward outgroups [groups that aren’t part of the ingroup] is that they are unfamiliar with members of the outgroup,” Stroud and Murray wrote in their findings. “If you’ve never met anyone from an outgroup, encounters with dehumanizing mischaracterizations of the outgroup are not checked by actual experience. And if most of your interactions with members of the outgroup are negative, it’s unsurprising that you might hold intolerant views. Creating circumstances where people have positive interactions with outgroup members is key.”

True, but easier said than done. Here’s what newsrooms have learned and could keep in mind for planning future events, followed by the list of events in the sample:

• Encourage a receptive and empathetic frame of mind. Stroud and Murray cited previous research that showed that “when people were in an empathetic frame of mind, trying to imagine how the other person feels, narratives were more effective than numbers at encouraging people to feel that they understood where someone with a different point of view was coming from.”
• Make sure outgroup members are seen by ingroupers as representative of that particular outgroup: “If people perceive the outgroup members as atypical, re-fencing can occur whereby people believe: ‘Yes I liked those people, but they are certainly different from the rest of their group.'”
• Use mediated and imagined contact. Mediated means having someone keep the exercise on track, and imagined contact serves the adage of seeing yourself from someone else’s shoes: “This kind of journalism should truly make audience members feel like they are the person in the outgroup, experiencing life as they experience it.”
• But the contact does not have come directly from people of the outgroup — ingroupers speaking sympathetically about the outgroup’s experience can promote tolerance without the outgroup having to be present, Stroud and Murray wrote.
• Keep in mind the novelty and uniqueness of the experience — like the 60 Minutes/Oprah roundtable. Oprah was probably an influential draw for some participants, but 60 Minutes’ follow-up showed that the group stayed in touch regularly over social media and even planned their own outings together.
• Curse you, selection bias: “Those most in need of outgroup contact may be least likely to hear about it or seek it out.”
• It’s about quantity and quality: Contact between in- and outgroup members needs to be substantive and positive to make a difference and counteract previously-held beliefs.

And here are the projects Stroud and Murray examined:

• Guns, an American Conversation organized by Advance Local, Alabama Media Group, Essential Partners, Newseum, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, Spaceship Media, and Time: “The project began during the March for Our Lives protests, during which 21 citizens from across the country joined in D.C. for a weekend workshop on gun violence and gun rights. The participants included survivors from school shootings, police officers, teachers and those who felt like they were often left out of the national conversation on guns.” The conversation continued after in a moderated Facebook group.
• AL.com and Spaceship Media’s Alabama/California Conversation: “A chief goal of the project and other Spaceship Media initiatives is to dispel the negative assumptions people normally have about the ‘other side.’ From December 14, 2016 to January 15, 2017, the women engaged each other in a closed Facebook group.”
• Alaska Public Media’s Community in Unity series: “The events attract representatives from community organizations, government officials, activists, academics, as well as ordinary citizens. Some of the events have been public forums featuring a group of panelists who discuss these big issues as they relate to Alaska…. Participants bounce ideas off of each other and ideally come away with a more nuanced understanding of an issue in their community than they had before.”
• The Bay Area News Group, Southern California News Group, Spaceship Media, and Univision’s Talking Across Borders: “After a month, Tom Bray, the managing editor for content with the Southern California News Group, told the California Newspaper Publishers Association that although consensus was not reached, he felt the project resulted in ‘a passionate, compelling but respectful collection of conversations, coming at a time when chats that end in “thank you” are rare.'”
• Capital Public Radio’s Story Circles: “The radio station purposefully designed each circle to include diverse residents with different backgrounds. Participants were affluent homeowners, developers, affordable housing advocates, or even homeless themselves. To start, the participants sat for a meal together and each person shared a personal story about their experiences with housing….In a post-meeting survey, more than 80 percent of residents said that they felt the event had enhanced their awareness of the issue, increased their empathy for others and inspired them to act on the issue.”
• The Oprah roundtable: “In the fall of 2016, Oprah Winfrey hosted a panel of 14 Michigan voters on CBS News’ 60 Minutes. Seven of the participants voted for Donald Trump and seven did not. The roundtable participants agreed on very little during their first discussion, but when CBS reached out to reconvene the panel after Donald Trump’s first year in office, they discovered that members of the panel had actually kept in touch and had become friends.”
• Colorado Public Radio’s Breaking Bread: “The six participants included three Trump voters, two Clinton supporters and one Green Party voter…. The participants, along with CPR reporters, sat down to dinner to have their discussion. They showcased complex political views that defied stereotypes, such as a liberal’s distaste for Obamacare and a Clinton voter’s support for gun rights…. CPR reporters have followed the two participants from the original conversation on their visit to the mosque, started a series on how to overcome political divisions at work and documented conversations between new pairs.”
• The Dallas Morning News and This American Life’s discussion with Texas hate mail-writers: After the paper endorsed a Democrat for president for the first time since the Roosevelt administration, editor Mike Wilson “invited two readers to come into the newsroom to talk over their differences with him face-to-face. Both were conservative, long-time readers of the paper, but were recently considering giving up their subscriptions. The two readers sat in on an editorial meeting with the paper’s senior staff and although they still worried about how a few pending stories would ultimately be portrayed in the paper, overall they found the meeting surprisingly ordinary and professional. They then talked to Wilson about the main issues they saw with the paper, liked skewed messaging in headlines and lack of diverse story selection.”
• The Evergrey’s urban-rural Melting Mountains: “Following the 2016 presidential election, about 20 residents of Seattle made the 10-hour drive to meet the people of nearby Sherman County. Seattle is part of a largely urban county that voted overwhelming for Hillary Clinton during the election, in contrast to rural Sherman County, where the majority of residents voted for Donald Trump. The Evergrey, a local digital news publication in Seattle, organized a meeting between residents of both counties to talk about their political outlooks and what they hoped to see for the future of the country. The participants sat down for lunch and discussed their political concerns in rotating one-on-one conversations for nearly four hours.”
• Jubilee Media’s Middle Ground series: “In each video, three people on each side of a debate in American society come together to have a productive dialogue. Jubilee Media has them stand, and then the participants are read a statement, such as ‘Sometimes I question my beliefs,’ ‘I am proud to be an American,’ and ‘I was surprised by someone’s response today.’ If a participant agrees with the statement, they are invited to sit down in a nearby circle of seats and voice their thoughts about the statement.”
• KPCC’s Across the Divide: “As a part of KPCC’s live event segment, reporters brought together four Hillary Clinton voters and four Donald Trump voters after the election to discuss their hopes and fears for the future. KPCC said they were inspired to put on the event when they heard from many of their listeners who didn’t have a single friend that voted for a different candidate than them.”
• KQED’s Start the Conversation: “KQED paired up Californians with contrasting outlooks on political or cultural issues to see if they could find common ground. The first segment featured a Trump delegate from LA and a gay man who went to D.C. to protest Donald Trump’s inauguration. … KQED also facilitated conversations between people who already knew each other, such as two teachers in the same high school and a granddaughter and grandfather who disagreed about her job as a journalist.”
• KUOW’s “Ask A…” series: “The Seattle-based radio station selects people who are members of a group in the news and pairs them with other people who don’t typically interact with that group and wish to learn about them. In speed-dating style, each pair has a few minutes to talk, then everyone switches partners. KUOW’s “Ask A…” series has featured Trump voters, Muslims, immigrants, transgender persons, cops and other groups… They found that there were statistically significant increases in participants’ knowledge about and empathy toward the group, even three months after the workshop.”
• NPR’s Divided States: “The show brought together voters from four hotly contested swing states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Ohio. … The series featured stories in several formats, including roundtables after the televised presidential debates where participants shared their reactions to candidate’s rhetoric and policy positions. Although some of the roundtables became heated, participants from each state expressed positivity about being able to talk to one another.”
• Your Vote Ohio by Ohio News Media and the Jefferson Center: “They hosted a series of three events to discuss the candidates’ positions and what Ohioans considered robust and fair election coverage. Each of the discussions had 18 participants, all residents of Akron, Ohio, but diverse in their race, income level, age and political beliefs…. After the election, the initiative shifted its focus to the opioid crisis and renamed itself Your Voice Ohio to reuse the discussion model for issues other than elections.”
• Philadelphia Magazine: Can These People Agree on Anything? ” brought together two Hillary Clinton voters and one Donald Trump voter to see if they could find middle ground on an issue…. One of the participants remarked that ‘Whenever you have an individual interaction, a lot of the bluster, a lot of the generalizations, a lot of the group identifications fall away.'”
• The New York Times’ political podcast The Run Up’s Let’s Talk series: “All three pairs were guided by a set of questions designed by The Village Square, a civic organization that works with social psychologists to encourage open and civil conversations. The list included questions like ‘How do you think our views came to be so different?’, ‘Do you feel ignored or misunderstood as a voter?’ and ‘What do you think we agree on?'”
• The Skimm’s No Excuses dinner parties: “The goal of the program is to encourage its readers to get informed, take action and break out of their bubbles. theSkimm later expanded the program to host dinner parties for strangers to discuss immigration. They brought together 14 women from different cities across the nation, some of whom were undocumented immigrants themselves.”
• Spaceship Media’s The Many constituted “5,000 women across the country with diverse political convictions in a closed Facebook group to share personal stories, political thoughts and policy ideas. The group was moderated by Spaceship Media journalists in order to provide relevant facts and to ensure that the dialogue remained productive and civil. Spaceship Media ran the project up until the November 2018 midterm elections.”
• StoryCorps One Small Step: The interview structure is designed not to be political and to steer away from current events and specific policies. Instead, they are meant to be personal and highlight the experiences and people that have shaped the other person’s worldview. StoryCorps provides guiding questions such as ‘How did your childhood shape your view of the world today?’ and ‘Can you talk about a time you experienced doubt over your beliefs?'”
• Talking Eyes Media’s Bring It to the Table: “Winokur traveled around the country with a table and set it up in shared spaces, such as barbershops and book stores, and tried to engage in deep conversation with people who held different political views than her. … After the documentary, Winokur expanded the Bring It to the Table concept and began creating
  workshops and hosting live events as a part of the Talking Eyes Media team, which includes journalists,
  producers and other media professionals.”
• TEGNA’s An Imperfect Union: A Facebook Watch show which “brings two people with opposing views together to talk and participate in a community service project, such as cleaning up a park or volunteering at a food bank.”
• The Tennessean’s Civility Tennessee: “On the day of President Trump’s State of the Union speech, The Tennessean launched a year-long campaign designed to encourage civic dialogue around challenging and divisive issues. The mission of the series is not only to strengthen trust in local news media, but to satisfy a hunger for these civil discussions.”
• Tonika Johnson’s Folded Map: “She began connecting people from opposite sides of the city so that they could share what living in their two communities was like and have a conversation about the divide, one that is predominantly defined by race. Johnson also had her pairs visit each other’s houses and photographed them standing in front of the opposite residence. For several residents from the North Side, it was their first time ever visiting the South Side.”
• Zeit Online’s Germany Talks: “Over a thousand people were matched with their ideological opposite after answering a series of yes or no questions that addressed contentious topics in Germany, such as the refugee crisis. ZEIT Online provided the pairs with guidelines for how to have a productive and civil conversation and then let them organize their face-to-face meetings independently.”

Read the report in full here.

Screenshot from Oprah’s roundtable aired on 60 Minutes.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/11/25-newsrooms-have-attempted-to-bridge-divisions-in-person-heres-what-theyve-learned/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/08/a-big-shakeup-at-audible-has-left-the-audiobook-giants-podcast-strategy-unclear/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/08/a-big-shakeup-at-audible-has-left-the-audiobook-giants-podcast-strategy-unclear/#respond Tue, 07 Aug 2018 14:26:59 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=161709 Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 172, published August 7, 2018.

Huge shakeups at Audible Originals. I can confirm that the Amazon-owned audiobook giant announced internally last Thursday that it was eliminating a considerable number of roles within its original programming unit. Sources within the company tell me that the role eliminations span a number of different teams within the unit, but most notably, they include nearly the entire group responsible for Audible’s shorter-form podcast-style programming, like the critically acclaimed West Cork, The Butterfly Effect with Jon Ronson, and Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel. That group was previously led by former NPR executive Eric Nuzum and his deputy, the public radio veteran Jesse Baker.

NPR’s Neda Ulaby first reported the development in a newscast on Friday evening. In the spot, Ulaby noted that about a dozen employees were affected and that the changes came “with no warning.”

Yesterday, Nuzum, who held the title of SVP of original content development, circulated an email announcing that he will be leaving the company in the next few weeks. He also noted that he plans to engage in some consulting work in the short-term, before diving into a new venture by the year’s end.

These developments come as Audible reshapes its original programming strategy. A spokesperson for the company tells me: “As you may know, we’ve been evolving our content strategy for Audible Originals (including our theater initiative, narrative storytelling ‘written to the form’ as well as short-form programming). A related restructure of our teams resulted in the elimination of several roles and the transfer of some positions to other parts of the business.”

I briefly wrote about this shift last month, using the release of the author Michael Lewis’ audiobook-only project, The Coming Storm, as the news hook. In the piece, I posited a link between the strategic changes and recent shake-ups at the company’s executive level:

Audible has long been a horizontal curiosity for the podcast industry, given its hiring of former NPR programming VP Eric Nuzum in mid-2015 and subsequent rollout ofthe Audible Originals and “Channels” strategy in mid-2016, which saw the company releasing products that some, like myself, perceived as comparable to and competitive with the kinds of products you’d get from the podcast ecosystem.

This signing of authors like Michael Lewis to audiobook-first deals appears to be a ramping up of an alternate original programming strategy, one that sees Audible leaning more heavily into the preexisting nature of its core relationships with the book publishing industry and the book-buying audience. It might also be a consequence of a reshuffle at the executive decision-making level: in late 2017, the Hollywood Reporter broke news that chief content officer Andrew Gaies and chief revenue officer Will Lopes unexpectedly stepped down resigned from their posts. (Later reporting noted that the resignations happened in the midst of a harassment probe.) The ripple effects of that sudden shift in leadership is probably only hitting us now, and in this form.

So that’s the context. Here’s what I don’t know:

• What happens to all the podcast-style Audible Original programs that are still ongoing? What happens to their future seasons currently in production? And will those properties be given the opportunity to leave for other podcast companies — or will they be integrated into Audible’s new strategy in some form?
• What happens to the dozen or so producers that were affected by the role eliminations?

And then, of course, there’s the question of what this means for Audible. I’ll leave this for next week.

The Alex Jones problem. The past few months have seen a flurry of activity on the subject of internet platforms and their responsibilities around hateful content, harmful material, and the limits of free speech. The issue largely focused on high-volume media-distribution platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, but its scope actually extends much further than that: the e-commerce giant Amazon, as well, has faced scrutiny over some of the products it allows on its platform.

Last week, the ongoing saga reached podcasting shores, and it is there that the story proceeded to reverberate back outwards with significance.

Over the weekend, both Apple Podcasts and the Midroll-owned Stitcher removed podcasts by Infowars, the conspiracy theory-peddling media company led by Alex Jones, from their platforms. (If, for some reason, you are unfamiliar with Jones and Infowars, I highly recommend this profile by Charlie Warzel.)

Stitcher and Apple’s decisions came shortly after Spotify announced they were removing specific episodes from Alex Jones’ podcasts from its platform that were found to be in violation of its Hateful Content policy. At the time, the music streaming service was facing backlash for continuing to distribute the conspiracy theorist’s podcasts after Facebook and YouTube had temporarily suspended some of Jones’ programming for similar content policy violations. Spotify remained under pressure even after the selective removals, with critics continuing to raise questions on whether the platform had done nearly enough.

It’s worth noting that Stitcher was the first major podcast-distributing platform to delist Jones’ shows in their entirety. The company did so on Thursday evening, citing over Twitter that Jones had, on multiple occasions, violated its policies when he published episodes that “harassed or allowed harassment of private individuals and organizations, and that harassment has led listeners of the show to engage in similar harassment and other damaging activity.” Sources within the company told me last week that the decision to completely remove Jones’ programming, as opposed to just focusing on specific offending episodes (as in the case of Spotify), stemmed from its concluding judgment that the podcasts were likely to violate its policies on harassment and abuse in the future. Stitcher’s move attracted a fair bit of media attention, with writeups on Billboard, Engadget, BuzzFeed News, and TechCrunch.

Apple’s removal of Jones’ podcasts took place sometime during Sunday evening. I first noticed the delisting around 6:45 p.m. Pacific, and BuzzFeed News published the first official report on the matter shortly after. In the report, Apple similarly cited policy violations as the grounds for Jones’ removal. As a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News:

Apple does not tolerate hate speech, and we have clear guidelines that creators and developers must follow to ensure we provide a safe environment for all of our users…podcasts that violate these guidelines are removed from our directory making them no longer searchable or available for download or streaming. We believe in representing a wide range of views, so long as people are respectful to those with differing opinions.

Strangely, Apple’s decision only impacted five out of six Infowars podcasts. Real News With David Knight, Infowars’ daily news recap show, remains active on the platform. No explanation was given as to why. The BuzzFeed News report also highlighted the efforts by Sleeping Giants, a social media-based activism group, to lead pressure campaigns to get major internet platforms to cut ties with Jones.

Apple’s decision to delist Jones’ podcasts is noteworthy for its ripple effect within the podcast ecosystem. The Apple Podcasts platform does not actually host podcasts itself, functioning instead as an inventory to which you have to submit your RSS feeds to review for inclusion. Because of Apple Podcasts’ historical scale, infrastructure, and preexisting inventory map, a significant number of other podcast apps, including the public radio coalition-owned Pocket Casts, rely on Apple Podcasts’ inventory to determine their own offerings — sometimes to be efficient in populating their app, other times to lean on a larger authority for content policing. The removal is also noteworthy, obviously, for the fact that Apple Podcasts is believed to still be the most widely used podcast listening app in the market.

And it seems the ripple effect has extended outwards as well. Yesterday, Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify all followed up by completely removing Alex Jones and Infowars programming from their platforms, all citing repeated violations around their hate speech and harassment policies.

As the bans from Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube trickled out on Monday, there emerged some debate about whether the bans were the result of separate processes that were all bound to end up at the same conclusion, or whether this was a situation where these gargantuan platforms were simply waiting for someone else to take the first step. Given the timeline and stutter-step nature of Monday’s Infowars bans, I can’t help but view this as the latter. When it comes to big internet platforms (or any huge organization with massive stakes, really), deeply complicated questions, and moral leadership, stories like these almost always crescendo to a point where everyone arrives at a holding pattern that waits for someone else to take the first step into the muck — and reveals the full ramifications of what happens on the other side.

In this case, the first one in was comparatively smaller Stitcher, and I can’t shake the feeling the company’s actions ended up attracting the right amount of attention and creating a permission structure that made it easier for the others to move in this direction. For what it’s worth, I hope they get the credit for it.

Show notes:

• James Andrew Miller’s oral history podcast with Cadence13, Origins, is returning with three new seasons — or “chapters,” in its parlance — on the horizon: one on college football coach Nick Saban, one on the upcoming season of Saturday Night Live, and one on the legendary HBO show Sex and the City.
• Tenderfoot’s Up and Vanished will kick off its second season on August 20. The podcast has now partnered with Cadence13 for distribution and monetization.
• Radiotopia’s new Showcase series, called The Great God of Depression, dropped in full last Friday. Pagan Kennedy, a coproducer on the project, also published an related op-ed in The New York Times over the weekend.

Existentialism. Last Thursday, Edison Research SVP Tom Webster — one of the principal frontmen for the measurement firm’s Infinite Dial study, which gives the podcast industry its benchmark numbers — published a Medium post titled “Podcasting’s Next Frontier: A Manifesto For Growth.” It is an adaptation of Webster’s keynote from the recent Podcast Movement conference, and it presents a data-supported argument around what he views as the fundamental challenge for the podcast ecosystem…and what, broadly speaking, may be the way through it.

Webster’s argument contains numerous moving parts and side-theses (be sure to clock the bit about music podcasts), and at the risk of oversimplifying his perspective, here’s the main thrust of the piece as I understand it:

(1) Contrary to aspects of its public narrative, podcasting isn’t actually growing that fast. As Webster outlines: “Since we started tracking podcasting in 2006, weekly consumption has gone from essentially zero to 17% of Americans 12+. That’s 0–17, in 13 years, or less than two percentage points per year. Now, it’s grown a bit faster over the past 5 years, but can anyone look at this graph and call podcasting a fast-growing medium? It’s actually one of the slowest-growing media we’ve ever tracked in the Infinite Dial.”

(2) Raising the possibility (or, indeed, probability) that there will soon come a day when its annual reporting will show a flattening or decrease in podcast listening growth, Webster highlights the principal metric that should be the center of our attention: “17% of Americans say they listen to a podcast at least once a week. 64% of Americans say they know the term. That means that about three-quarters of the people who say they know the term ‘podcasting’ are not weekly listeners.” To Webster, this data point suggests that the fundamental problem is as follows: lots of people have heard about podcasting, but they don’t actually know what it is.

(3) That knowledge gap is preventing those potential new listeners from either trying out or buying into the medium. Part of this has to do with simple under-education about some core aspects of the ecosystem — podcasts are generally free, the means to consume them are already pre-baked into your phone, and so on — but a bigger part, Webster gestures, has to do with podcasting ecosystem’s lack of collective messaging that elevates its public identity beyond being a mere technological curiosity. Which is to say: there hasn’t been a push to help podcast programming make sense within the context of the everyday non-podcast consumers, in part by evoking facsimiles of what they already know or channeling the things they are already comfortable with.

For Webster, this conundrum is best expressed through the podcast ecosystem still not having what he calls “The Show”: the one program whose innate draw simplifies, supersedes, or even renders irrelevant the entire narrative around the distribution platform. He writes:

There were once was a time when plenty of people didn’t think they had a Netflix app, didn’t know they needed one, and weren’t sure how to watch it without getting discs emailed in those red envelopes. So what did Netflix do? They didn’t spend a bunch of money on a “Got Netflix?” campaign. They spent a lot of money on Orange is the New Black and House of Cards. What gets people to discover Netflix is curiosity, and what drives curiosity is the show. The killer show.

Technology and gaming enthusiasts can probably broadly equate this argument with the notion of “killer apps” that move new devices and consoles. Same goes as well, I think, with SiriusXM and Howard Stern.

I had originally planned to present a much bigger discussion around Webster’s post, more or less agreeing with the broad strokes of his argument while at the same time looking to do a couple of things: identifying its limits, interrogating its assumptions, expanding the scope of the conversation. Forgive me, but I’m afraid I have to postpone that to next week, both for the reasons of space and because I got caught up digging deep into the Audible and the Alex Jones stories.

In the meantime, I leaned on Tom for this week’s Career Spotlight:

Career Spotlight. Since we have a huge chunk of Tom Webster’s writing to go through, what’s a little more? Let’s go.

Hot Pod: Tell me about your current situation.

Tom Webster: I’m senior vice president of Edison Research, where I’ve been for over 14 years (wow). As one of the few Edisonians who doesn’t work in the main office (I travel a lot, and work from my home in downtown Boston), I’m a bit of a minister without portfolio, I suppose. Our digital audio practice is certainly part of my remit, but my main role is as the “chief explainer” of our research to the outside world. I present our data to clients, to agencies, and at conferences all over the world. Thought leadership is pretty much 100 percent of our marketing strategy, so I try to speak wherever and whenever I can. I’m super fortunate that my wife, Tamsen Webster, is a brilliant idea whisperer; she works with speakers, executives, and companies on finding the thread of their ideas and making them stronger — so I have a free at-home speaking coach ;).

As far as life plans are concerned, I enjoy being involved in consumer insights, and don’t think I’ll ever stray that far from being passionate about the voice of the customer. I’m currently working on my second book, and I think there will be some creative endeavors down the road (another podcast or two, for sure) that will keep me engaged. One of the things that I love about my role at Edison is that I get to touch a lot of different projects, especially on the “diagnosis” and design phases, which means I am constantly trying to solve a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of industries. But Podcasting has certainly been a passion of mine for nearly 15 years, and I really love where the space is right now, and its potential.

Hot Pod: What does your career arc thus far look like?

Webster: Bizarre, in some ways, in its relative stability. Of my 25-ish years of professional life, 20 have been with just two companies, which they tell me is fairly strange. My first real “I actually want to work here and don’t just need a job” job was with a market research company that served the radio industry, where I really cut my teeth (do people actually cut teeth?) as a media researcher. That was an invaluable experience for me — not only in terms of my craft, but also for what it taught me about how to treat and manage people. My bosses in that job, Frank Cody and Brian Stone, hired me for one role, which I sucked at. But their philosophy was to figure out what people actually were good at, then have them do those things—and they let me do that. I was a VP by age 29, and I owe that to Frank and Brian creating a role for me that played to my strengths (which I didn’t even know at the time) instead of berating me for my weaknesses. There are probably 100 things you can be good at in business, and I’m only really good at 4 of them. Frank and Brian built a role for me around those 4 things, and I’ve been in research ever since.

I left that job to co-found a startup in London which wound up burning out after a year and a half or so. When I returned to the states, I decided to go back to school full time, getting my MBA, to fill in some of the gaps I felt I had to at least be passable at if I were going to continue a career in marketing. I got a concentration in consumer insights in 2004, and then joined Edison shorty thereafter. I actually almost joined Edison in 1999 — the president and co-founder, Larry Rosin, was someone whom I’ve respected enormously throughout my career, and the chance to finally work with him and the incredible team he and Joe Lenski built was hard to pass up. As a unit, the Edison team is amazing at the 96 things I suck at, and they’ve both been incredible role models to me for doing things the right way. My wife started her own business two years ago, and more than once we have talked about a difficult business decision, and asked ourselves, “What would Larry do?” That’s always been the right answer.

Hot Pod: Throughout your life, what did a career mean to you?

Webster: I have an uncharacteristically short answer to this: it is very important to me to plant a flag for quality. Both of the two companies I mentioned spending 20 years with were prestige brands in their industries, and to me, a career is standing for something you believe in, being known for that thing, and for that thing to be of value. Edison certainly stands for a thing I believe in, and my career satisfaction stems directly from my modest role in telling that story to the world.

Hot Pod: When you first started out being a human, what did you think you wanted to do?

Webster: I grew up in a very small town in northern Maine, and really didn’t become a “human” in the grown-ass semi-aware sense until I finished college. I was the first in my family to go to college, and I am eternally grateful that my parents sacrificed so much to send me to Tufts, an experience that very nearly blew my mind in terms of the quantity and quality of ideas I was exposed to. After getting my B.A. in English lit, I was well and truly convinced that I wanted to be Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. I went to grad school at Penn State, taught rhetoric and composition to the first-year class (time to abolish “freshmen,” yeah?) and fancied myself an Academic. I fell out of love with the “publish or perish” mindset, however, and figured out pretty quickly that academia wasn’t really my speed. The powerful play goes on — I’ve just found a different way to contribute my verse.

Hot Pod: Could you walk me through a little more about how you see Edison’s role in the world — and, like, the way your job has impacted your relationship to the knowability of things?

Webster: Larry and I talk about this a lot — our unofficial motto is that we’d rather be last and right than first. Period. This doesn’t mean that we are needlessly slow, by the way — as a small company, we are pretty nimble. But it does mean that what drives Larry, what drives me, and what drives all of us at Edison is the creation of new information — to understand something a little better than we did the day before and to go to bed at night knowing we did it as well as it could be done. I’m often asked by journalists and analysts to forecast things — where will we be in the future? What happens next? I resist those inquiries. Edison’s role in the world — in podcasting, in media, in our election research — is to be the most reliable and credible reporter of what *is*, not what will be. In terms of epistemology (top marks for being my only interviewer to ask me that one), I’d describe myself as being from the school of Pyrrho — a true Skeptic. That’s not a cynic, nor a pessimist. Merely one who believes that nothing can be known — not even this. We can only get close. And my belief in Edison’s role in the world is simply that I know we take the greatest pains possible to get as close as we can.

Hot Pod: What are you listening to right now?

Webster: I’ll get in trouble with numerous clients for not mentioning their shows, so this is a bit of a minefield question. I listen to about 20 hours of podcasts a week. I’d say half are music podcasts, which we need more of! I eagerly download and listen multiple times a week to the Anjunadeep Edition, a deep/progressive house music podcast that helps me write. I am a huge sports (and NBA in particular) nut, so I listen to Jalen and Jacoby, The Dan Le Batard Show, pretty much everything The Ringer does, and some NBA specific podcasts like The Lowe Post and The Woj Pod. My news comes from Up First, Planet Money, and Marketplace. I’ve known Mark Ramsey and Jeff Schmidt for years and years, and the collaborations they have done on Psycho, The Exorcist, and now Jaws are what audio should aspire to, IMHO.

Ultimately, I love The Show. I don’t think podcasting has given us The Show yet. It’s gotten close. And it will.

Thanks, Tom.

Miscellaneous bites:

• “The Information has learned that only about 2% of the people with devices that use Amazon’s Alexa intelligent assistant — mostly Amazon’s own Echo line of speakers — have made a purchase with their voices so far in 2018, according to two people briefed on the company’s internal figures.” (The Information) As Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton pointed out over Twitter: “That’s despite survey data suggesting something more like 25%.”
• Breaker, the Y Combinator-accelerated podcast app, rolled out a new feature yesterday called Upstream that aims to help publishers to create and manage a “premium content” structure without having to rely on a non-podcast specific membership platform like Patreon. (Breaker)
• “Apple’s HomePod may have just doubled its share of the U.S. smart speaker market.” (Fast Company)
• “‘The Conservative Movement…Has Become a Racket’: Steve Schmidt Is Starting a Pod Save America for Never Trumpers.” (Vanity Fair)
• “Colleen Scriven’s ‘Lesser Gods’ Podcast in Development as HBO Comedy Series.” (Variety)
• “The Podcast Bros Want to Optimize Your Life.” (The New York Times)
• “Patreon creators scramble as payments are mistakenly flagged as fraud.” (The Verge)

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/08/a-big-shakeup-at-audible-has-left-the-audiobook-giants-podcast-strategy-unclear/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/dog-eared-mp3s-the-podcast-and-book-publishing-industries-are-finding-new-ways-to-cross-pollinate/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/dog-eared-mp3s-the-podcast-and-book-publishing-industries-are-finding-new-ways-to-cross-pollinate/#respond Tue, 17 Jul 2018 12:02:28 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=160820 Audible has long been a horizontal curiosity for the podcast industry, given its hiring of former NPR programming VP Eric Nuzum in mid-2015 and subsequent rollout of the Audible Originals and “Channels” strategy in mid-2016, which saw the company release products that some, like myself, perceived as comparable to and competitive with the kinds of products you’d get from the podcast ecosystem.

This signing of authors like Lewis to audiobook-first deals appears to be a ramping up of an alternate original programming strategy, one that sees Audible leaning more heavily into the preexisting nature of its core relationships with the book publishing industry and the book-buying audience. It might also be a consequence of a reshuffle at the executive decision-making level: In late 2017, the Hollywood Reporter broke the news that chief content officer Andrew Gaies and chief revenue officer Will Lopes had unexpectedly stepped down resigned from their posts. (Later reporting noted that the resignations happened in the midst of a harassment probe.) The ripple effects of that sudden shift in leadership is probably only hitting us now, and in this form. I’ll be tracking the extent to this new product line overlaps with or, indeed, ends up superseding what’s been happening with the Channels stuff.

All of this matters, of course, because all of it is related. I believe the way to think about this is to see all audio content providers — from the conventional podcasts of the open ecosystem to everything on Audible to whatever Anchor will become to Headspace plus whatever subscription-first audio platforms come over the horizon to the entire digital music ecosystem — as fighting from the same cochlear real estate. A few weekends ago, I fell behind on podcast listening due to falling into an utter binge-rabbit hole of the audiobook version of John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood, and I daresay I haven’t been able to catch up to my listen list since.

Part Two: Book-adjacent. So that was a story about a big book publishing entity investing in strictly digital products. Next, we have a story about a book publishing entity investing in a strategy that hits both audio and book publishing in tandem.

I’ve written previously about the experiments happening over at Macmillan, where its new Tor Labs imprint had developed a fiction podcast — called Steal the Stars, written by The Message’s Mac Rogers — that was published through the company’s podcast network and was also simultaneously novelized for traditional distribution. I thought it was a really smart idea, noting that it scratches at the idea that different platforms simply serve different consumer slices that may never really overlap. This style of multi-platform execution expands Steal the Stars across a wider surface area and further deepens its ability to financially benefit from a single core creative enterprise. That’s the working theory, anyway.

Anyway, Macmillan is coming back for more in this mode of production. The publisher is developing a six-part fiction podcast called The Girls based off an upcoming young adult novel: Courtney Summer’s Sadie — which is, interestingly enough, described to be a “Serial-inspired” young adult thriller, at least according to Bustle. I’m told that the podcast is being designed to stand alone, but that those who consume both the podcast and the book will be treated to different perspectives within the same story-line. Expanded universe, Rashomon-kind of stuff, I suppose.

I asked Kathy Doyle, vice president of podcasting at Macmillan, for some specific detail on how the publisher has viewed the performance of Steal the Stars and other experiments within the company that tie the fates of podcasts and books. She wrote back:

We’re definitely leveraging what we learned with Steal the Stars as we produce for The Girls. In fact, Steal the Stars celebrates its one-year anniversary on Aug. 1 and we’re gearing up for another round of marketing and promotion for the series, which continues to get interest from national media, advertisers, and listeners — that’s the beauty of an evergreen audio drama. The series, to date, has had nearly 1.4 million listens and we’re continuing back-list sales efforts for the Steal the Stars books.

Another strong example of our book-podcast synergy is with our Savvy Psychologist podcast, one of the biggest on our QDT network. We released a book, How to Be Yourself, about social anxiety in March authored by that host, Dr. Ellen Hendriksen, and it went into a second printing. When we review sales data, we see that 50% of sales are for the audio edition, when we might typically see a figure of about 10% for a trade book.

The Girls is set to launch on August 1, with the trailer dropping tomorrow. The novel, Sadie, is scheduled to drop on September 4.

For technical context: Steal the Stars was hosted on Megaphone, while Savvy Psychologist is on Libsyn.

Part Three: Podcast-first. Over at The Wall Street Journal, Ellen Gamerman has a great overview up on the podcast-to-book adaptation trend that’s been picking up lately alongside the podcast-to-film-and-television trend. Aside from listing out several notable projects making the jump, there’s a bit in Gamerman’s piece that provides a nice expression of the risk-ratio factor that I believe is a big part of why we’ve been seeing podcasts heating up as a resource for adaptations:While some books have sparked bidding wars between publishers, the titles don’t tend to carry the high stakes of a Hollywood venture. “If you have 100,000 people listening to a podcast — which is a very modest-sized podcast — and half of them buy the book, the publisher would be thrilled,” said Anthony Mattero, a book agent at Creative Artists Agency (though he noted that publishers will also measure sales against the price of the manuscript).

But the article also offers a peek into a shadow looming over this trend. It’s highlighted in this quote:

With niche podcasts on everything from witches to monster trucks, more publishers are seeing opportunity. “The market for weirdness is untapped,” said Kate Napolitano, a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

The question: With more resources, attention — and, perhaps most importantly, stakes — flowing into the podcast ecosystem, will its capacity for weirdness be preserved?

The possible campaign on the horizon: Keep Podcasts Weird.

Related: “How ‘The Adventure Zone’ Went From ‘D&D’ Podcast to Graphic Novel.” (The Hollywood Reporter)

Beantown. Last Thursday, The Boston Globe announced that its famed investigative unit Spotlight is working a limited-run podcast series that will explore the complicated story of Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots player who was convicted of murder in 2015 and later committed suicide in prison.

The podcast, which will play out in eight parts, is scheduled to drop in the fall. It comes out of a collaboration with Wondery, which is extending its strategy of partnering up with newspapers to break their investigative projects out into longform, multipart podcast series broadly situated within the true-crime genre. The prime model for this is, of course, Dirty John, Wondery’s successful collaboration with the Los Angeles Times that’s now also heading to television — in two separate forms, no less — and the company has since rolled out a collaboration with the South Florida newspaper Sun-Sentinel. That project is called Felonious Florida.

The Spotlight podcast is The Boston Globe’s second creative partnership on a Boston-oriented podcast. The other is Season Ticket, a daily sports podcast that the Globe developed in collaboration with WBUR. Given the increasingly strong cluster of podcast operations in the city, I’m expecting more Boston-flavored podcasts on the way.

Frontin’. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is holding its fourth-annual podcast upfronts September 6 in — where else? — New York City. This year’s venue will be at Convene in midtown Manhattan, marking a departure from the Time Inc. building venue of years past. Slate is slated to keynote, and presenters include Midroll, WNYC, iHeartMedia, and NPR, among others. I’ll probably be there.

Here’s the website for details, and here’s my writeup on the upfront back when I attended in 2016, and here’s my column on the notion of upfronts in podcasting in general. Let’s see what changes and what stays the same.

Smart Audio Report snippets. The latest edition of NPR and Edison Research’s smart speaker report drops tomorrow and, as always, they’re staging a webinar to go through the findings of this year’s survey study.

NPM was kind enough to share some early numbers, if you’re interested in that kind of thing:

• “For first adopters, the smart speaker is now the number one way they listen to audio, and 38% of newer, early mainstream users say they purchased the device hoping to reduce screen time.”
• “While first adopters demonstrate more advanced smart speaker use — controlling home security and other household devices — early mainstream users are quickly relying on the technology for a wider range of daily activities — ordering food, making calls, getting traffic reports, researching products and shopping.”
• “News is one of the most in-demand genres of content among all smart speaker owners, and 3-in-5 who plan to buy another smart speaker want to buy it in order to listen to news in more rooms of their home.”

Here’s the one I find particularly notable: “Among all smart speaker owners, the most preferred formats for audio advertisements are skills/features created by a brand, host-read ads on podcasts, product endorsements and sponsor or underwriter announcements during public radio.” Furthermore: “81% of all smart speaker owners like/would be open to skills from brands.”

On a related note: This Medium post by GENInnovate’s Freia Nasher has a lot of really good observations, and some nifty ideas: “Hi Alexa, is the monetisation conversation moot?“

Start your engines. Heads up, all you producers in the crowd: The sixth edition of KCRW’s Radio Race is now open for registration. The 24-hour production challenge will take place from 10 a.m. Pacific August 25 through 10 a.m. Pacific August 26. Shouts to last year’s winner, River Rats from Miami (Wilson Sayre and Chris Barr).

And while we’re on the subject of KCRW: The Organist podcast is now back with its fifth season. Rootin’ for you, Mr. Leland.

S-Town lawsuit. The estate of John B. McLemore, the subject of S-Town, is suing the creators of the Peabody-award winning podcast, arguing that they “exploited details of his private life for financial gain,” the Associated Press reports.

The suit was filed in Bibb County, Alabama by the executor of McLemore’s estate, Craig Cargile. It names Serial Productions, This American Life, Chicago Public Media, and host/producer Brian Reed as defendants, among others. Cargile’s attorney told Al.com that the suit “stems from the state’s Right of Publicity Act, which prevents use of voice, name or other characteristics of a person without their permission.”

In an email response to the AP, S-Town executive producer Julie Snyder noted that she could not comment on the suit but says it lacked “merit.”

You can read the suit over here.

Anti. And now for something completely different.

So, there’s this new podcast app-doohickey that came out last week that really caught my eye. It’s called Wilson FM — a name I will forever associate with a volleyball (I’M SORRY, WILSON) — and the thing is billing itself as a “podcast magazine,” which on most days would be a piece of nomenclature that I’d find vaguely annoying. Except that a podcast magazine is exactly what Wilson FM is, and it’s also one of the more pleasurable player ideas I’ve seen in a long while.

The core mechanic isn’t anything particularly revolutionary, other than the fact that it’s remarkably simple. Every week, the app-magazine-thing serves you a new curated playlist of podcast episodes built around a different theme (most of the time). There’s one about art, there’s another about the Supreme Court, and then there’s a collection that’s really just threading together Lea Thau’s Love Hurts series. In other words, it’s a fancy podcast playlist provider, but putting it that way is a little like saying a magazine is a fancy provider of words. I mean, it is, but also, it isn’t, because something has to be said about how a thing feels in the use of it, and man, Wilson FM feels so…different. And as a result, interesting.

Granted, this just might be a situation where I’m responding extra-positively to a drop of water after weeks of drinking nothing but straight-up seltzer. Which is to say: Every podcast app that I’ve used more or less looks and feels the same despite new feature-concepts — say, a social layer — or an expanded suite of bells and whistles. Which as a matter of collective experience generally brings me to place where it’s a little like waking up every morning and relentlessly commuting in a city you once found interesting: After a certain point, you just stop seeing the world around you in new and renewably invigorating ways.

My positivity might also have something to do with how consumer software technology aesthetics seem to be largely situated within a same, sterile place. My buddy Kyle Chayka, a freelance writer who’s currently working on a book about minimalism, dubbed this aesthetic “AirSpace” in an essay for The Verge back in 2016, and you probably already know what he’s talking about: pastels, curved edges, any sharp sense of personality sandpapered away.

In contrast, Wilson FM is weird. Its visual sensibility evokes the new media section of an art school exhibit (or a moderately-sized modern art museum). Its app icon is a funny little scribble. Its squint-to-see-it font has a counterintuitive charm. All these quirks of expression are tied to the fact that the app is primarily the work of one person: Allan Yu, a New York-based designer who’s done stints at Google X, the search giant’s super secret R&D lab, and Svpply, a now-defunct social shopping site that was acquired by eBay in 2012.

“I’ve always had a soft spot for print design and aesthetics that have a point of view or opinion,” Yu tells me over email. “But I’ve been working in tech for quite some time and am just tired of this A/B-tested, data-proven, metric-driven design.” He continues:

I didn’t want to do that when it came to building something that was my own and close to my heart so the only ethos was Anti. The inspiration is Anti-tech, Anti-convention, Anti-UI/UX Design. I looked at a lot of print stuff that mainly contributed to the organization and focus of these Issue covers. Even the proportion of the cover is print-based and I use two typefaces from one of my favorite type foundry, Milieu Grotesque. I also wanted to elevate podcast aesthetics. I don’t understand why a content form with such richness sonically is watered down visually. In some ways, people do judge books by their covers and I wanted to make the covers better, so you’ll give that episode/podcast a chance.

The playlists on Wilson FM are generally built ad hoc, which Yu believes is the best way to do it. He tries to build them with his friends, and he writes the copy in a way that he feels is natural to the way he speaks. Personal touch, individual voice, all that kind of stuff.

In the physical world, Yu is a design consultant/working mercenary, doing gigs to keep things spinning as he builds out Wilson FM. He tells me that he intends to build Wilson FM out into a business. “We want to do it right and our way, which in context of tech businesses today, it means we want to grow it slow,” he told me. “We’re focusing more in the magazine model as we want to mainly be a voice for podcasts within the podcast community.” In this broader pursuit, he has a business partner, Cameron Koczon, who runs an engineering and design studio in Brooklyn.

That Yu hopes to build Wilson FM into a business — that this wasn’t just a side project or exercise — surprised me a little bit. A big part of me reflexively thinks something this specific and idiosyncratic has a hard ceiling that hovers low (*looks at Hot Pod, shudders*), regardless of what business model gets integrated into the app. But then again, a bigger part of me is in this for the specific and idiosyncratic, and someone’s going to figure out how to make that work and grow, then, hell, this is probably just about how you’d start: simply by being genuinely interesting.

Miscellaneous bites:

• Fans of the popular Australian true-crime podcast Phoebe’s Fall, take note: The team has a new project out now called Wrong Skin. (Apple Podcasts)
• On a related note: “All serious criminal cases deserve podcast-style scrutiny.” (Baltimore Sun op-ed)
• The dynamics and detail sketches in this piece can almost map directly onto podcasting: “The Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one.” (The Verge)
• Apropos of nothing: Sounds like we’re due for a heavy fall season.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/dog-eared-mp3s-the-podcast-and-book-publishing-industries-are-finding-new-ways-to-cross-pollinate/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/the-washington-post-wants-to-figure-out-the-best-places-to-put-ads-in-your-favorite-podcasts/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/the-washington-post-wants-to-figure-out-the-best-places-to-put-ads-in-your-favorite-podcasts/#respond Tue, 10 Jul 2018 13:06:53 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=160480 So I can’t say that I like this. To begin with, the podcast CMS market is fairly crowded already (see: Libsyn, Art19, Megaphone, Simplecast, PRX’s Dovetail, Spreaker, CastPlus, so on and so forth), and many of those solutions already allow for dynamic ad insertion. Furthermore, I generally have reservations about programmatic ads in podcasting (see here for more on that), and my concerns are doubled should the push come from a company that, up until this point, has primarily operated in a display-ad–first digital world.

Eh, maybe I’m not being generous enough here. In any case, there is one potential positive thing that I’m curious: I wonder how this technology will fit into the Post audio team’s various dabblings with smart-speaker programming.

Meanwhile, elsewhere. I filed two interviews for Vulture last week, one pegged to a beginning and the other pegged to an end.

(1) The first looks at You Must Remember This, Karina Longworth’s fantastic podcast on the secret histories of 20th-century Hollywood, which returned last week. This new season explores Hollywood Babylon, the infamous 1959 book by avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger that traded heavily in scandal and questionable gossip on early Hollywood celebrities, but which has since accrued a complicated legacy in which it is often construed as truth. (A timely topic, indeed.) It’s a pretty long interview, and in addition to discussing the season, Longworth was also kind enough to talk a bit about her process.

(2) The second interview was with Madeleine Baran of In The Dark, who spoke with me soon after the concluding episode of its spectacular sophomore season hit the feeds last week. Baran and her team will continue to cover the case of Curtis Flowers when the next development hits, and they’ll soon be in the hunt for their next story after taking a few weeks off.

I also filed the June update to my Best Podcasts of 2018 (So Far) list. You know what? I like this monthly update format. Good stuff, Vulture.

Maximum Fun broadens its horizons. Last month, Jesse Thorn’s Los Angeles-based podcast network rolled out its first foray into scripted programming. The show is called Bubble, an eight-episode scripted comedy series that — and I’m quoting the pitch I got for it, which is pretty succinct and effective — is “sort of a sci-fi/alternate-universe comedy about a group of friends who live in a town protected by a (literal) bubble.” Having listened to a few episodes, I guess you could also call it a cross between Portlandia and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s super zany, is what I’m saying, and if you like Maximum Fun stuff, you’re probably going to like this: It has all the warm, loving, and fun sensibilities that you’ve come to know and love from the network, plus it features a bunch of the MaxFun extended family like Eliza Skinner and the McElroy Brothers.

Anyway, the thing about Bubble that caught my attention was how it presents a case study of a particular challenge that more podcast companies are — and should be — facing: Let’s say you want to push your creative boundaries. How do you think through the business side of that effort? So, in pursuit of that question, I reached out to Maximum Fun’s managing director Bikram Chatterji, and he was kind enough to write at length. I like this interview quite a bit, as he really lays out a good deal of the strategic considerations he deems to be important when breaking a project like this.

• Like all of our shows, we envision Bubble to be paid for primarily by listeners. [Note: For more on Maximum Fun’s audience-supported model, read this column.] Unlike our other shows, it’s a limited-run series, so we’re not asking for ongoing monthly contributions, but listeners can (and have!) made one-time payments at maximumfun.org/bubble.
• We are talking with some folks about advertising as, midway through the run, we have a solid track record of downloads to pique advertisers’ interest.
• The show is especially suited to some other revenue channels — for instance, merchandise. So we’re exploring those as well.

MaxFun has always been different from other networks in that advertising is a secondary revenue source for us. We don’t have anything against ads — they help our creators get rewarded for their work, and we sincerely believe that if done correctly, they provide our listeners with a service. One thing we’ve always insisted on is having the option to forego ads if something doesn’t feel right — because, frankly, as listeners we have experienced ads that feel wrong (two common problems: they are so frequent as to disrupt the listener experience, or they’re so subtle as to blur the line between what is content and what’s an ad). We know that there are a bunch of smart folks working on the challenge of making advertising work in service of listeners, and we’re paying attention to that; practically, though, our approach has been to not make anything we do contingent on getting ad revenue, because it’s easy to see that forcing us into an uncomfortable position.

Hot Pod: What else did you learn through this process?

Chatterji: I think the other piece that is fundamentally different from anything we’ve done before is marketing a limited-run series. We have put a lot of time and energy into this show, and we think it’s wonderful. I was (and am) well aware of other limited-run shows that have high production values but limited long-term impact. I didn’t want that to happen here.

Philosophically, you can probably divide marketing strategies between creating a massive event (often at considerable cost in terms of time and resources) and relying on something more sustained/word-of-mouth based. We tried a hybrid approach — a big bang within our community, who we could reach pretty easily and who we know will be responsive to our messaging, and a longer, slower burn for the wider podcast audience. It’s still something we’re working on, and something that is in progress, but so far it seems to be going okay.

The main other thing that I’ve taken away from this is how — this could be obvious, but I find it gratifying — creative people love working on something really good. At the start of this process, I was a little apprehensive about whether we could bring aboard some of the big names to do this thing that was new to us and that, frankly, did not pay much money (relative to TV, etc.). I think the fact that we were successful attests in part to the great reputation MaxFun and Jesse have built up over the years, but also — and members of the cast have mentioned this at a few of the Q&As we’ve been hosting — that the same hunger for good shows that is out there from our audience exists amongst the creative people we work with as well.

That sounds like more of a creative consideration than a business one, but I think it’s something at the heart of our strategy, long-term: Make something great and the rest of your job becomes a lot easier.

You can find Bubble…well, pretty much anywhere you’d find podcasts, aside from those pesky podcast platforms with a big paywall blocking out the sun.

Career Spotlight. You know I love running these. This week, I interviewed Stitcher’s John Asante, who spoke about moving through what seemed to be a “conventional” trajectory, having worked on radio with live elements, and the podcast industry being a producer’s market.

Hot Pod: Tell me about your current situation — job title, role, life plans, etc.

John Asante: I’m a senior producer for original content at Stitcher, based in Los Angeles. Some of the podcasts I work on are released as free, ad-supported shows (we call these Stitcher Originals), while others are made solely just for our subscription-based service, Stitcher Premium. The shows range from longform interviews to scripted comedies and dramas, to documentaries on a variety of topics. For reference, some of the podcasts I had hand in producing are Heaven’s Gate, Dear Franklin Jones, and Gossip.

In my role, I mainly wear three different hats as I develop new podcasts from pitch to production to launch. On some projects, I’m the lead producer who’s editing scripts with the host, sitting in on interviews and taking notes, and then cutting tape to make the final product. On others, I play more of a project manager role, communicating with all the teams (production, marketing, ad sales, content operations, etc.) and assisting with any tasks to make sure all the deadlines are met in order to launch a new podcast. And while I’m actively producing shows, I’m brainstorming new ideas for podcasts and evaluating pitches from writers and producers who are looking to get their podcast picked up by Stitcher.

I also host and produce an independent podcast called Play It Back. It’s a storytelling show where artists, producers, and music lovers talk about discovering the songs that have changed their lives. It’s a concept I thought about executing for years that I hadn’t heard much of in the podcast space. Full disclosure: I took a hiatus from making new episodes with the move from NYC to LA last year and to rethink the format, but the plan is to get it back up and running sometime this year.

Hot Pod: How did you get to this point?

Asante: I’ll admit that on the surface, my journey has been similar to many fellow podcast producers — I was an intern at NPR after graduating college who then worked his way into a full-time job at the network in 2009. But my career arc differs from some people, as I primarily worked on shows with live elements before diving into podcasting — namely Talk of the Nation and Ask Me Another. And while I was working on those shows and thinking of making a transition into podcasting for narrative-driven shows, I got the feeling that my live-show experience was undervalued in comparison to other producers who cut more radio pieces and longform interviews, like All Things Considered or Morning Edition.

After some frustration with my career trajectory and finding some trouble advancing, I actually left public radio in 2014 to try something completely different: marketing. That’s another long story, but the goal was to keep my radio chops up during the career switch. But after a year and a half away, I really missed producing on a daily basis…and marketing was not for me. The more I listened to podcasts — especially those produced by my radio friends who were moving into the podcast industry — the more I realized that there were a growing number of opportunities to produce podcasts. I realized WNYC was investing more resources into podcasts, and I got a temp position producing There Goes The Neighborhood back in 2016. A few months later, I landed a full-time gig on The Takeaway, mainly producing arts and culture pieces, which I had embraced as my forte at that point. Last year, I moved out to Los Angeles to make moves in the podcast industry. Stitcher’s work and mission felt like the best fit, and I’m glad they believe in my ability to create and develop new podcasts.

Hot Pod: What does a career mean to you, at this point?

Asante: A career means being able to work on a variety of podcasts in different roles. I wanted to make the move from producing one show to developing and producing several, and I’m definitely achieving that at Stitcher. From here, I’d like to take on bigger producer and editor roles, working on scripted projects and narrative shows that tell more stories about people of color and those living in underserved communities. It’s really important to me that these stories are told, even in ways I never imagined.

I also want to be in the position of giving guidance and help producers and editors of color make moves in the podcast space. The same goes for those who don’t have the same career path as those of us who came from the public radio world. There’s certainly room for improvement when it comes to diversity. Our voices need to be heard on both sides of the mic.

And with the amount of connections I’ve been fortunate to make in LA, I’ve definitely thought about starting my own production company one day. I know I’m not the only podcast producer who’s thought about this!

Hot Pod: When you started out, what did you think you wanted to do?

Asante: After toying with the possibility of working my way up the ladder as a TV reporter, and simultaneously falling in love with college radio (then shortly after public radio), I graduated college desperately wanting to become a public radio producer. I was obsessed with NPR’s style of storytelling after interning there and formed an even stronger obsession with radio as a medium.

My initial plan was to line a full-time producing job, then do freelance pieces in my spare time, and use those pieces to apply for a job as a member station reporter 4-5 years later. But after getting a few pieces on the air, I realized it wasn’t the right fit, so I focused more on producing. Then around 2011, a few friends and I started making a podcast of our own. We just wanted a way to make use of our interests and telling stories we weren’t hearing on the news or other programs. While the project lasted less than a hear, it made me realize that podcasting was a low-stakes way to experiment, try out new ideas, and see what’s possible. So my trajectory slowly started to shift toward producing podcasts, though it would take a while before I felt confident enough that I could make a career out of that new vision.

Hot Pod: How do you view the podcast industry, such as it is, at this point in time?

Asante: It’s wild, exciting, and moving incredibly fast. Every day, I’m impressed by the number of well-produced and fascinating podcasts I discover or get recommended, as well as the amount of money going into the industry. And I get legitimately excited when friends ask me for recommendations.

I’m glad there are more players in the field, from small production houses to larger media companies. From my experience, this means it’s a producer’s market. More and more companies want to make higher-quality content, which means having the ability to cut tape, write scripts, and develop an idea is so vital.

Also, podcast discovery still needs to be more developed. So many interesting independent podcasts go under the radar due to a number of factors, and I hope these shows don’t get overlooked for personalities with a bigger following.

Hot Pod: What should I be listening to right now?

Asante: Gossip: As I mentioned before, I was part of the production team on this show, so I’m definitely biased. But this show is unlike anything I’ve ever heard or worked on. It’s a scripted dramatic comedy podcast created by Allison Raskin about three women living in a suburban town who meet up each week to talk about all the crazy rumors spreading through their town. Think Desperate Housewives meets Jane the Virgin.

The Nod: I love Brittany and Eric’s dedication to telling stories about elements of black life that you’ve probably never heard of, or didn’t know how they were created. Their unique way of storytelling is playful and informative that has taught me about entertainers and activists like Josephine Baker, and made me think critically about the cultural impact of movies I’ve seen a dozen times, like Coming To America.

Thanks, John.

Bites:

• Pour one out for Current’s The Pub. The public media trade publication of choice is shuttering its podcast after 113 episodes and 3.5 years. Executive director Julie Drizin announced the move last Friday through a post on the Current website, citing lack of underwriting support as the main reason for the show’s termination. However, Drizin also noted that The Pub’s closing doesn’t necessarily mean that the publication won’t be dabbling podcasts anymore. She leaves open the possibility of future projects, provided they are able to “secure committed funding.”
• Filmspotting: Streaming Video Unit, the Alison Willmore and Matt Singer-led online movie-focused podcast in the Filmspotting family, has concluded its run. The long-running show released its final episode last Tuesday. As a longtime listener, I’m pouring another one out for this one too.
• This is really good: “Using true crime to teach Indigenous history: Reporter Connie Walker on ‘Finding Cleo,'” writes Elon Green for CJR. The CBC podcast wrapped the season last month, and yesterday, host Connie Walker tweeted that the season has now been downloaded over 10.5 million times across its ten episodes.
• James Cridland has a pretty interesting writeup on some RSS feed chicanery that seems to be going on with CastBox.
• What an angle: “Amazon Alexa may be better at selling you things, but Google is more likely to understand you, say ad industry insiders,” via CNBC.
• Tangentially-related, but worth keeping tabs: “Apple Music Just Surpassed Spotify’s U.S. Subscriber Count,” per Digital Music News.

Photo of Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos by AP/J. Scott Applewhite.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/the-washington-post-wants-to-figure-out-the-best-places-to-put-ads-in-your-favorite-podcasts/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/06/a-year-after-trumps-zero-budget-threat-public-broadcasting-is-doing-okay/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/06/a-year-after-trumps-zero-budget-threat-public-broadcasting-is-doing-okay/#respond Thu, 07 Jun 2018 16:03:38 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=159243 It was barely a year ago that PBS and NPR fans were worried about whether American public broadcasting might be about to disappear. President Trump’s initial budget called for eliminating all funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the backbone of the system.

But that budget threat turned out to be just that — CPB got its money. And according to this year’s State of the Media Report update from Pew, American public broadcasting is…actually doing pretty okay.

In public radio, the average weekly broadcast audiences of the top 20 NPR member stations continue to grow — from 8.7 million in 2015 to 11.2 million last year.

NPR’s mobile strategy seems to be working too: It’s seen monthly sessions in the NPR News and NPR One apps (which launched in 2014) spike over the past two years. The NPR News app saw on average more than 14 million sessions a month last year.

Another nugget of good news: Funding for public radio stations is up slightly (at least in 2016, the last year data is available), with increases in both individual gift giving and underwriting. Membership levels at news-oriented stations are also up, if only slightly.

On the TV side, Pew offers less data but did note that the PBS NewsHour grew its audience about 17 percent from 2016 to 2017.

Pew also released an updated state-of-the-union for digital news Wednesday. To no one’s surprise, mobile ad revenue (including on non-news websites) continues to soar, rising from about $46 billion to $61 billion last year. Mobile ad revenue is now double desktop ad revenue in the U.S.

Pew data found that 45 percent of news consumers get their news via mobile device “often,” with another 29 percent doing so “sometimes.” Meanwhile, only 35 percent of news consumers “often” got their news from desktop, 30 percent “sometimes.” That’s intuitive, as mobile is much easier to access on a more frequent basis, on the bus, at lunch, or in the bathroom.

Meanwhile, for the largest digital-native outlets, average monthly unique visitors to their websites actually dropped a bit in 2017 — more evidence of consumer shifts toward distributed content and alternative platforms.

For more detail into the numbers, read the digital news report here and the public broadcasting report here.

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