The fact that these first-day cancellations are more common among annual subscriptions than monthly ones points to another reason for early churn: New subscribers may be using the cancel button as a way to turn off auto-renewal. They don’t want to forget they’ve signed up for the subscription and — 365 days later — accidentally be charged for a full-price subscription.

Another group flagged as high risk for cancellations? Inactive subscribers. These so-called “sleepers” are paying subscribers who haven’t visited the site in the past 30 days.

Piano found that, for the average subscription website, 40% of subscribers are sleepers. The percent of disengaged subscribers was reduced during the early days of the pandemic when news usage skyrocketed but the portion has risen steadily since the early months of 2020.

It makes sense that sleepers churn: They aren’t getting much value from their subscription. Yet they don’t churn right away. In any given month, 90% of sleepers will simply continue to stay inactive. It’s only when they wake up again and come back that their cancellation rates soar, generally accounting for about 30% of active churn.

This makes re-engaging sleepers difficult. How do you bring them back into the fold and “wake them up” without prompting them to cancel?

Piano recommends not shaking sleepers awake for anything less than a major news event or “especially appealing content.” Better yet, the report advises, “engage subscribers before they become inactive, building habits so that they don’t fall asleep in the first place.” (Their 2021 report found that 60% of sleepers nod off during their first two months as subscribers.)

As in previous years, Piano found that social media referrals generate low conversion rates, especially compared to users who arrive directly from a home page. Lavishing attention on just one channel or referral source won’t improve paid conversion numbers, though.

“The number of channels visitors are referred by — across search, social and direct — is a stronger predictor of likelihood to subscribe than the performance of any single channel,” the report found. The pattern holds true post-conversion, too; the more channels readers use to engage with your content, the more loyal they are as subscribers.

Piano, which offers dynamic paywall options that can test the best time or content to convert users into subscribers, found email registration could be an important step along the way. The conversion rate for anonymous visitors is just .22% but jumps to 9.88% for registered users, according to Piano.

You can read the rest of the report here.

With the short-lived metered paywall out of the way, the vast majority of Quartz content will now be free for all. Frequent visitors to QZ.com will be asked to register their email after reading three articles per month. The only content that’ll remain subscriber-only is a handful of premium emails, including the recently-launched Quartz Africa, The Forecast, and the Weekend Brief.

Quartz CEO and co-founder Zach Seward claimed the decision was made after reader surveys showed a majority of Quartz members — there are about 25,000 of them, and an annual subscription costs $100/year — didn’t subscribe for the exclusive access anyway. He believes those members will continue to pay their annual $100 subscription fee because they support the site’s mission.

“Generally our journalism is focused on identifying better, more sustainable forms of capitalism, helping people figure out tricky problems at work, separating viable from unviable solutions to major problems like climate change,” Seward said. “If we actually mean what we say about that mission — and it’s not just a marketing slogan — then it seems clear to us that the best way to achieve it is by making as much of that as freely available to as many people as possible.”

He added, quickly, “That was true, of course, three years ago when we put the paywall up in the first place.”

A lot has happened in the intervening years. The Covid-19 pandemic’s effect on advertising forced Quartz to make large layoffs in early 2020. Later that year, Seward and the staff bought the company from owner Uzabase. (The publicly traded Japanese company had paid $86 million for Quartz in 2018 and sold it back at a substantial loss.) The news items left some wondering whether Quartz, despite “spinning out genuinely innovative features” as a digital media darling, was caught in the “mushy middle,” as Steven Perlberg wrote, of “not quite niche enough to be essential to a small group of readers, but not quite big enough to compete at scale.”

The site still makes most of its revenue through advertising but, going forward, Quartz is not abandoning reader revenue entirely. Seward said Quartz has seen the most success with vertical subscription products like Quartz Japan, and will continue to develop subscriber-only newsletters.

Quartz is dropping its paywall!https://t.co/3dI7b78Dt6

If you love visual, data-heavy stories, here’s some great work you may have missed if you weren’t a @qz member. Now free to access!

— Amanda Shendruk (@AShendruk) April 14, 2022

Quartz is going against the grain by dropping its paywall. Though news orgs like The Atlantic and Slate have dropped paywalls in the past, most have gone back and reinstated them and the general trend in recent years has been toward asking readers to pay for journalism. (The most visible being, of course, the uncommonly successful New York Times.)

But there have been rumblings, recently, that a paywall may not be for everyone. Or, at least, not for every reader. This February, the Austin American-Statesman became one of four Gannett newspapers to experiment with dropping its metered paywall and a handful of news organizations have adopted Sophi, an AI-powered dynamic paywall engineered by folks at The Globe and Mail.

Quartz will celebrate its 10th anniversary this year, not an insignificant achievement in digital media. Seward said the site is focused on staying obsessed with “what’s changing” rather than “reporting on status quo aspects of business.” It prompted me to ask about trying to see around corners, either through one’s reporting or by anticipating shifts in what might work in the business of journalism.

“It’s complicated and takes time to figure out and unravel. It’s hard to do in a single story,” Seward noted. “The quintessential story for Quartz is one where you’re sort of working that out over time — piece by piece.”

It was 15 years (and one false start) later when The New York Times followed suit with its own paywall. As a general-interest paper, the Times’ decision was not considered a slam dunk; there was still a ton of free competition online. But the Times is the Times, and its pitch that you pay for quality has worked magnificently in the decade since.

It was 2013 when The Washington Post launched its paywall. The Post had its own set of questions, with a still-dominant print position in the D.C. area, a huge audience in government, and what had historically been a less national outlook than the Times. But it worked out too — though it’s a question for alternate-universe theorists how it would have done if Jeff Bezos hadn’t bought the place two months later.

The last national newspaper with its articles still flapping free in the wind was USA Today, which made sense given its history and market positioning. Its decades of circulation success always rested on something other than paying readers; instead, it was bulk purchases by hotels and other places with lobbies that fueled the business. While its quality has ebbed and flowed over the years, USA Today’s pitch in a digital environment has always been tougher than what the other nationals could offer.

But today, USA Today has officially joined the paywall party. Here’s publisher Maribel Perez Wadsworth and editor Nicole Carroll:

Much of the content on USA TODAY will still be free. But you’ll find a selection of stories each day marked “subscriber only.” These will be exclusive investigations, sophisticated visual explainers, thought-provoking takes on the news and immersive storytelling.

This is a big change; our digital news has always been free. But USA TODAY was founded on boldness. Your subscription is an investment in quality journalism that’s worth paying for, journalism that strengthens our communities and our nation.

…here’s the bottom line: We are partners in this democracy. Together, we’ll hold the powerful accountable. Together, we’ll look out for the less fortunate, the marginalized. We will lean on each other for solutions that make our lives easier, better. We’ll grow together when we understand perspectives different than our own, when we meet and hear from people outside our social media bubbles.

We are proud to tell the diverse, rich story of the USA, every day. We thank you for supporting this important work.

Gannett, USA Today’s owner, telegraphed this move back in April, with what seemed like a $4.99/month price point — half of the roughly $10/month that’s become standard for local dailies (and much lower than the undiscounted prices for the Times or Journal). But now that price seems to have gone up to $4.99…for the first three months, $9.99 thereafter. You can get the Post for that price (undiscounted), so the value on offer is harder to see. Either way, I’m sure there’ll be plenty of testing around discount offers as Gannett tries to maximize digital circ revenue. For $3/month more, you can get rid of ads on USAToday.com, which are significantly more annoying and aggressive than those of their peer national dailies.

The edge USA Today has here is the hundreds of local newspapers in the Gannett lineup, for which USA Today is an umbrella brand and quasi-wire service. For example, today’s edition of my Gannett hometown daily, The (Lafayette, La.) Daily Advertiser, today includes 8 stories (including briefs) by Advertiser reporters, 14 from AP, 3 from USA Today, and 5 from other Gannett newspapers.

Personally, I would have argued for a tie-up between local and USA Today subs. People’s attachment to their local daily is far stronger than to the paper they used to read at the airport La Quinta, and local digital subs are the single most important factor in Gannett’s future success or failure. Make access to USA Today an incentive for local subscribers — “Subscribe to The Advertiser and get USA Today’s great coverage from across the nation for free!” — and you might be able to reduce churn and make it harder for readers looking to cut their monthly subscription bills. But Gannett sees it differently:

I subscribe to one of Gannett’s local newspapers. Can I access premium content on USA TODAY?

Right now, USA TODAY and local premium content subscriptions are mutually exclusive. However, there is often USA TODAY content within the local digital reading experience. That will not change and could include some of USA TODAY’s premium content.

(A Gannett exec left room in an interview “for Gannett to offer subscriptions that bundle USA Today and a local newspaper” at some future point.)

Without that local tie-in, and with a higher-than-expected price, I’m honestly not sure who the audience for a USA Today digital subscription is. That’s especially true if, as it seems, an awful lot of content will still be in front of the paywall. (“Much content remains unrestricted and accessible across all platforms. Premium content will be clearly marked ‘Subscriber only’ and will include the day’s very best articles, videos and enhanced programming to help you best understand the news guided by USA TODAY reporters and experts.”)

In the print days, USA Today had a very clear value proposition: Your hometown daily is terrible. Or, more likely: You’re not in your hometown and you want to read some national news — not local news from a place that’s not local to you. Online, it had a less distinctive but nonetheless cogent one: We’re free, unlike those other guys. And our vibe isn’t as East-Coast-elite, either. As a paid product, though, it’s now part of a giant content muddle. If you’ve decided you’re willing to pay for online news, why would you pick USA Today over the Post or Times — or over your local daily?

That’s not to denigrate the quality of the journalism being done at Gannett; my (admittedly limited) perception is that the chain has managed to pull off local-national integration better than I’d expected and used its chain-wide scale to increase its journalistic ambitions. It’s just a reflection of the marketplace for online news, which has thus far rewarded (a) premium quality and (b) local connection. USA Today’s offering seems likely, in its current form at least, to fall between those two stools.

Last week, the Times announced Levien as its new CEO, succeeding her boss and mentor Mark Thompson, who retires after one of the most transformative runs of any publishing executive in modern times. The appointment surprised no one who has watched the Times. Soon upon his 2012 appointment, Thompson shook up his own executive corps and hired Levien the next year to review and renew the Times’ traditional ad operation. She came to the Times immediately from Forbes, with crucial early experience gained at entrepreneur David Bradley’s shops, first the Advisory Board and then the Atlantic.

She quickly transformed the Times’ ad operation – in the process, “turning over” 75% of the staff — and pivoted to a branded advertising/high-end storytelling strategy, targeting fewer but larger accounts. That decision anticipated the deepening domination of the Google/Facebook ad duopoly, which has taken most of the old “newspaper” ad dollars. While the Times’ digital advertising strategy has seen self-acknowledged choppy results over the years, it now stands as a vital and sustainable secondary revenue stream to reader payment. In my interview with Levien last Wednesday, below, we talk about the unification theory newly connecting digital reader engagement and the Times’ newer ad business.

Levien became chief revenue officer in 2015. She inherited a model digital subscription business that was successful and still in its early stages. Since then, the Times has been optimizing that system, resulting in its greater turn-the-corner successes of the last few years.

Over that period, Levien and Thompson have seemed to work in lockstep. Her ascension to COO three years ago made her the clear heir apparent.

Over the seven-year run, the team of Thompson and Levien have brought the Times to an enviable business position, which I’ve chronicled in the equivalent of a couple of books at Nieman Lab. In short, let’s consider a few numbers that broadly tell the tale:

60%: Reader revenue now accounts for six of every 10 dollars of the Times’ revenue. That one number tells the story of a transition from a print-centric product that long depended on advertising for 70% of its revenue, and on readers for only 30%.

6 million: The Times can now claim six million subscribers, more than five million of them digital ones, and the remainder high-paying (as much or more than $1,000 a year) print habituées. Of the digital subscriptions, about four million are for news; the Times recently hit 1,104,000 in subscriptions for its Crosswords and Cooking products. The Times is on track to meet its 2025 goal of 10 million total subscriptions, with two million of them expected to be sold outside the U.S.

1,700: That’s the size of the Times newsroom, up 200 from 2013, a crucial change in force that has served the country well through the Trump Era; note all of those multiple-byline stories.

700: That’s the number of people in the product teams. In and itself, it’s an amazing number, one that speaks to the very notion of news product, how to present it, and how to convert readers into subscribers. The journalism is the foundation, but it’s the digital business infrastructure built atop that has propelled this success.

$45: That’s the share price of the New York Times Co. at Friday’s close.  That’s up from a low of $26 within the last year, $4.97 in the depth of the Great Recession, and $10.90 four years ago. Investors believe in the Times story — and future cash flow.

$687 million: That’s the Times’ report on its cash-on-hand, a comforting number in this chaotic moment.

3 million: That’s the audience of The Daily, the Times’ precedent-setting morning podcast, stewarded by Michael Barbaro. Audio was an experiment just three years ago, and one the Times has steadily invested — for both reasons of subscriber conversion and engagement and of advertising, which has remained more resilient even as Covid closures have tanked print placements. In fact, on the same day the Times elevated Levien, it announced the acquisition of Serial and a strategic partnership with the multiple award-winning This American Life. That, combined with its purchase of Audm just four ago, certifies this key strategic focus over the next several years.

All in all, it’s been a stunning comeback for an old American news institution burnished in the modern age by Watergate, but then threatened by possible insolvency in the Great Recession. When the Times announced its paywall in 2011, it was met mainly with guffaws and groans: People paying for news?! Implemented in 2012, that reader revenue system to-be now has shown the only path leading some news companies to a successful and sustainable future.

The Times is joined by more than a dozen transforming well news companies on several continents. Many have diversified, powering up on non-news operations to offset problematic news models. The Times, perhaps alone, has doubled down on the basic business of news delivery, perfecting the productization and monetization of it in better ways than others. The more unique content it produces, the more subscriptions it sells. The more subscriptions it sells, the more it invests in content. It’s a new, highly virtuous, circle, and one needing much broader implementation across the news landscape from the communities across North America to the wider reading globe.

We only know some of the issues that lie ahead for Meredith Levien and the Times. The ad recovery from the Covid nightmare. The possibility that readers will need a break from the intensity of chilling, round-the-clock news alerts. Worldwide economic recession. Protests that have shaken the larger world the Times serves, and its inner workings.

Last week, I talked with Levien about her new role. As CEO, a job she’ll begin in September, she’ll now be in charge of “the company” — finance, human resources, legal, and print production — as well as the business side that she’d led as COO.

Importantly, given the Times’ unusual structure, Levien’s responsibilities do not include the newsroom. At the Times, both the executive editor, Dean Baquet (who, like Thompson, will likely be headed to retirement sooner than later) and the CEO report to publisher A.G. Sulzberger. It’s a structure that has worked well for the Times lately, given a new level of collaboration in a company culture long known for its fierce territoriality.

My interview with Levien, lightly edited and condensed for clarity, is below.

Two people working at The New York Times in similar jobs could be having very different experiences, and that is something we have to fix. This should be a place for the most talented people in journalism and digital product and technology to work, a place they can come and do the best work of their careers. It will be my job as CEO to ensure that that can happen. We’ve got a couple of really big, important searching bodies of work on how we do this more effectively as an employer and how we make the reports more inclusive.

On its own, that may seem like just one more move in the chess game between major news companies and the platforms. But it could also be an indication of a more geologic movement. Will the rest of 2020 bring tectonic shifts in platforms’ power over news — or just a few more small tremors?

The growing ad boycott of Facebook by global marketers is another indication that the shaking may bring more of a jolt this time. So are the state attorneys generals’ actions and the soon-to-come Department of Justice antitrust move.

“It’s time to re-examine all of our relationships with the big platforms,” New York Times COO Meredith Levien told me. “And we’re reexamining them on three axes that are all interrelated, but different with each of the players.”

Levien’s three questions:

• “What role does the company play in helping bring audiences to the Times? Or said more technically, what role do they play in that funnel?”
• “What role does this company play in helping us do the main thing we’re trying to do? Which is scale direct relationships with people and get them to form a habit and ultimately pay.”
• What’s the value equation — “recognizing that these companies get substantial value from our investment in original journalism”?

“All three of those things really matter,” says Levien, who came to the Times in 2013 as head of advertising and moved into the COO job, Mark Thompson’s second-in-command, three years ago. She’s widely considered a prime contender for Thompson’s job whenever the 62-year-old CEO exits.

“At this moment, it doesn’t make sense for us to participate in Apple News anymore.”

This likely won’t be the only adjustment the Times makes in the coming months on its platform relationships. “In the last year, 18 months, we’re thinking really hard about all of our relationships in this context,” she said. “We’re really trying to deeply calibrate how do we cut our own top through that ecosystem in a way that accounts for its reality? That’s really what I’m describing to you. We get a little better with every passing year at how we do that. So that’s why you see us making a change like this.”

In short, the Times audience machine is proving more able to move towards its goal — 10 million subscribers in 2025 — on its own.

“This has been a moment where something like 250 million — somewhere between 250 and 300 million people — used The New York Times at the height of the COVID crisis,” Levien said. “When something like 6 in 10 American adults used The New York Times in March. And that’s a bigger opportunity than we’ve had before to drive relationships with people.

“Ultimately the thing we’re trying to do is play a bigger role in many more people’s lives. And I think with each passing year, we’re getting better and better at doing that ourselves. That doesn’t mean we don’t need distribution partners — we certainly do. That doesn’t mean we don’t need to find the outlets for our content that help us build audience. But I think that the equation for how we evaluate them changes.”

So this isn’t The New York Times cutting off all its platform relationships. But it’s not a minor tremor, either.

The publisher/platform dance

Think of this as the next starting point for negotiation — the sort of negotiation common when players are on a more even playing field, reassessing their mutual value.

But of course this still isn’t close to being an even playing field. The absolute dominance of the big platforms in business life is hard to overestimate. The Times, for instance, will still work closely with Apple on podcasts — considering the increasing value of its flagship franchist The Daily — and via its App Store, where the Times mobile app has proved key to building its strong subscriber engagement times.

Thompson hasn’t been shy about talking about the dangerous dance publishers still feel compelled to do with the huge platforms. Just a year ago, he spoke about why the Times, like The Washington Post, didn’t join in the launch of Apple News+, Apple’s fledgling, magazine-heavy paid offering. He said then that Apple News+ “jumbled different news sources into these superficially attractive mixtures.”

It can be tough to understand the questions in these complex news company/aggregator relationships. In many ways, it comes down to how consumers understand what they’re getting from whom.

Ask people and many will tell you they’re getting news “from their phones.” And they are. But The New York Times — like all other news publishers who see reader revenue as the only route forward — wants them to know they’re getting that news from them. The Times want a direct reader relationship — one that can hopefully be converted to subscription.

Of course, that publisher–aggregator push–pull conflict goes back to the early web. Yahoo News — and debates among publishers about whether and how they should participate in it — dates back more than two decades. (As an executive at Knight Ridder Digital, I recall negotiating a 1999-era aggregation deal with CNET’s Snap news aggregation product and debating the same questions: Who is getting what value here?)

The Times has been holding back what it gives to Apple News for a long time. “We’ve been doing a limited number of stories a day — it went from a lot of stories at the beginning, broadly, to a smaller number,” Levien said. In return, the Times gets to promote its newsletters, subscription offers, and other calls-to-action, and it gets Comscore credit for its audience reading there. Basically, it gets branding and reach — but no direct revenue stream.

Even some of its users may be confused about what Apple News is, exactly. For many, it’s just generic “news on my phone,” a set of notifications or a curation that pops up if they purposely (or accidentally) swipe or touch something. But it reaches a big audience — 125 million users a month as of April, up from 100 million three months earlier. It’s one of several platform news aggregation plays: Google and Facebook compete directly worldwide, and Axel Springer’s Upday competes in Europe. It’s distinct from Apple News+, which is mainly a magazine product plus three strong news players, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and The Toronto Star.

Apple News says the Times is one of the few publishers to opt out of its baseline product.

“The New York Times has only offered Apple News a few stories per day,” Apple spokesperson Fay Sliger said in a statement. “We are committed to providing the more than 125 million people who use Apple News with the most trusted information and will continue to do so through our collaboration with thousands of publishers, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Houston Chronicle, the Miami Herald, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and we will continue to add great new outlets for readers.

“We are also committed to supporting quality journalism through the proven business models of advertising, subscriptions, and commerce.”

How the Times did its calculation

The Times’ decision is all about the power of the direct publisher–journalist–reader relationship — the core of the reader revenue proposition — and the only way forward for news companies these days.

The Times’ move could be highly specific to the Times and not a harbinger of shifts to come. After all, no one else has been able to accomplish what the Times has: 6 million total subscribers, more than triple the number it had at the height of print, and on pace to reach its goal of 10 million in 2025.

The farther it finds itself along that road, the more confidence it has in its own capabilities. And the more readers and subscribers it has, the more data it can analyze to see what works with what sorts of readers. And that analysis proved this to the Times: Apple News was not a net plus.

How did its analysis work? There are two calculations. First is the question of how the Times itself can convert its more of its current readers into subscribers.

“We’re getting increasingly confident in our ability to build and scale direct relationships on our own platforms,” Levien said. “Therefore, we’re very focused on: What does the funnel look like? What does the distribution partner bring to us? We’re just getting sort of clearer and sharper about it. And then as we think about any of these relationships, we’re also asking ourselves: Is this a product that is mostly, or purely, about bringing audience to the Times?”

Second, there’s this intriguing calculation — partly quantitative and, I’d suspect, deeply intuitive as well: Is Apple News (or any platform that want the Times content) a substitute — the dreaded good-enough alternative for busy news readers?

“There are plenty of people in the world that say, “I get my news from the internet.” Which is something that isn’t a news destination,” she said. “We think very hard about if something is likely to be, in whole or in part, a substitutional product. It makes us think hard about value exchange. Are we getting enough in terms of value exchange? And that might be economics, that might be audience sent our way. It might be something that makes it easier for us to drive a direct relationship. That’s the calculator.”

The shift?

Is this indeed part of a wider shift in the relationship of major news providers and Google and Facebook?

Consider the latest datapoint: Google announced Friday a new program to “license” news from publishers, put into perspective well by the Lab’s Joshua Benton. Google and Facebook have been ramping up programs to aid publishers. Some of these programs have real value, in training, in funding, or in a few cases — quite selectively — in actually paying for news articles. To date, regional publishers tell me they’ve heard little to nothing about direct payment for news content. That could change, or the Google program — which noted Germany’s Der Spiegel, Australia’s InQueensland and InDaily, and Brazil’s Diarios Associados in its initial release — may well just focus very selectively in its choice of titles and geography.

It’s no coincidence that these pay programs are ramping up in lockstep with pressures on the platforms mounting across at least three continents. In Australia, in Canada and in Europe, legislators and regulators have raised their voices and leveled new threats. The mantra around the news media world: Pay us.

We could see this coming, even before the added COVID-driven pressures on publishers, as I pointed out in January. And there’s no doubt we’ll see more of it. Given the state of generalized global angst, of populist reaction, and of tech backlash — not to mention the oh-so-convenient target Big Tech offers, Google and Facebook in particular, but also Apple, Amazon, and Twitter — these companies know they have to give in, at least a little.

So they act as any intelligent profit-maximizing corporations would do: calculate how much they can “voluntarily” give in order to stave off more draconian actions, whether regulatory, antitrust, or tax-based.

I asked Levien if the Times’ ability to step away from Apple News was unique, given its digital success and position in the news marketplace. Her answer was circumspect.

“I would say many publishers’ businesses look different, from one another and from ours. So I’m not going to speak for other publishers,” she said. “What I would say though, is I do think that the economics for any publisher should be such that they can support the work, the extensive work of all the original, independent journalists.

“Our investment in journalism is only going up. It will go up this year — even this year, it’s only going up. We are still hiring engineers and data scientists and product managers and product designers, in relatively large number.”

(Indeed, it currently lists 128 U.S.-based job openings, including for 20 editors, 17 in audio, 10 reporters, 7 data analysts, and more than a dozen developers.)

“Even in a year where our ad business is under as much pressure as it is. So, the thing that we are trying to do is going to require constant investment. And at The New York Times, in good times and in harder times, the first dollar goes to the journalism in the investment.”

Many different metrics count in the digital news business — but all of them are built on the foundation of large volumes of high-quality original news reporting and analysis. That’s the key metric: How many journalists and people with associated skill sets in product and audience can a news organization support? And how does each and every platform deal support that — or not?

For many, it represents the unique New York City politician whose presidential flirtations reshuffled our politics for a time. For some, it’s his immense wealth and the places — both philanthropic and political — it flows. Then there’s “the Bloomberg,” the business news terminal that built Michael Bloomberg’s company and fortune, and which remains a cash cow today.

What it didn’t represent until relatively recently was streaming video — an online channel first known as TicToc and then, when the app TikTok annexed the world’s mindshare, rebranded as QuickTake.

QuickTake is Bloomberg Media’s latest product push, and another piece of evidence that the company is a long-term, high-impact news media players — even though it gets relatively little coverage compared to its peers.

As COVID-19’s financial damage deepens, there aren’t many media companies in the position to be able to take advantage of a recession — and invest. Bloomberg Media, headed by CEO Justin B. Smith, is investing in QuickTake, with a staffing up to 100, and big plans for fall.

“Starting in September, we’re actually creating full streaming programming with anchors and shows and new series,” Smith says. “We’re going to be unveiling a whole slate of new programming.”

Smith is known as an innovator, viewed by many of his peers as a transformer. As CEO at Atlantic Media, he assembled and led a team that built a respected and talented company, emerging out of (very) Old World magazines into a diversified B2B and B2C leader — a model operation that owner David Bradley has been selling off piece by piece for several years.

Smith moved to Bloomberg Media in 2013, and I first captured his strategic plans for growth there in 2015. The company includes the various verticals of Bloomberg.com, Bloomberg Businessweek, the recently bought-and-relaunched CityLab, and the expanding QuickTake.

All of that’s powered by what is probably the largest number of journalists working for any single company outside of Japan: 2,700 reporters, editors, and analysts working in 120 bureaus around the world. That’s scale, and it’s produced a big consumer business:

• Bloomberg Media reaches an audience of 90 million per month.
• About 30 percent of its revenue comes from outside the United States.
• Ad revenue contributes about 55 percent of that total revenue, with subscriptions and licensing adding about 20 percent a piece.

Bloomberg is one of the Digital Dozen, a term I first identified in my 2010 book Newsonomics. It’s one of the limited number of enduring, largely global news brands for which the Internet was a true opportunity for expansion, financially, editorially, and in terms of audience. It’s taken most of those news companies more than a decade to transform their businesses for digital — but they’re now seeing the fruits of that effort.

Adaptability has always been key to Smith’s strategies, and it remains so today. In this Q&A, we talk a lot about consumer reader revenue — a business line Bloomberg Media came relatively late to, in 2018

“You need to constantly evolve your business model,” he told me. “I mean, what we’ve been talking about here, basically, is taking a huge global business media company and turning it into a reader-revenue company, and turning it into a company that is playing in the global OTT, full video space. And then the third leg of the stool, is live events piece.”

(Live events are on hold, of course, and we also cover the quick move to virtual events — its challenges and longer-term opportunities.)

Bloomberg is — like the Times, the Post, the Journal, CNN, The Guardian, NPR, and others in the Digital Dozen — a case of the old and the new working here. Targeting well-heeled business news readers with high digital subscription prices…while moving aggressively to lure a younger demographic into business news video, hopefully leading them into long-term Bloomberg customers. One foot on the shakier ground of today, one looking for a step forward.

With advertising’s coronavirus recession, why lean way into a new ad-driven model with QuickTake?

“The answer is that, if there is any part of the advertising ecosystem that you actually want to be leaning into for 2020, 2021, 2022, it’s this demographic on mobile, on social, and in video,” he says. “When things come back, as they will, I think that traditional advertising will probably suffer, and you want to move your business and your model to the place on the media chessboard where the dollars are going to be going” — the TV money that will follow the audience to streaming.

Amid all the model evolution, though, Smith is perhaps stronger than ever before on one key element: It’s people who make the difference. “At the top of every one of my lists, the super ingredient is talent,” he says.

Talent, scale, superior tech, and continuous innovation are the keys to the Bloomberg Media model. In our conversation, lightly edited for clarity, we talk about selling advertising in a Google-Facebook-dominated world, remote work, virtual conferences, paywall lessons, and QuickTake’s future.

The news year so far

The subscription business

Bloombergian scale

QuickTake

Virtual events

Revenue promiscuity

Slate, of course, has seen nearly every trend in digital news come and go over its 24 years online, and it was relatively early to membership as well, having launched the successful Slate Plus six years ago. When it launched, then-editor David Plotz answered the rhetorical question, “So, what is Slate Plus?”

First, let me say what it’s not. It’s not a paywall. Let me say that again: It’s not a paywall! We’re not asking you to pay for stories, and we’re not turning on a meter that stops you 10 stories into the month. Everything that’s free on Slate will remain free for all Slate readers.

Well, starting this week…it’s a paywall. The kind with a meter that stops you 10 — or some other TBD number — stories into the month.

Plotz’s successor’s successor, Jared Hohlt, announced the news in a post late Wednesday afternoon:

Starting today, Slate is trying something new. We will be asking our most loyal readers — those of you who visit the site the most — to help keep making our work possible by joining our membership program, Slate Plus…

Up till now, Slate has provided almost all of its written work for free. But going forward, we think the way we will truly thrive is by continuing to diversify our revenue — by asking readers like you to support us more directly. In the coming months, some of our most engaged visitors will be prompted to join Slate Plus in order to keep reading articles on the site.

Nothing will change for their 60,000 paying members of Slate Plus. And nothing will change for many casual readers who don’t read enough articles to hit the paywall. But those “most loyal readers” will now need to join Slate Plus to have access to unlimited articles (after a free two-week trial).

By gating their written work but leaving podcast availability unchanged, Slate hopes to convert more readers than listeners into Slate Plus members. Audio already accounts for more than half of Slate’s membership revenue, Slate CEO Dan Check said, and they’re now nudging the people enjoying Slate’s written work to contribute too.

In his announcement, Hohlt cites the increasingly tough climate for digital media as one reason for the change. But Hohlt, Check, and product manager Heidi Strom Moon said the timing of the metered paywall, nearly a year in the making, owed more to their realization that they could only fine-tune the paid model so much absent real-life data from users.

That’s why they’re not saying, for now at least, how many articles it will take to bump into the gate. What’s the magic number to maximize both conversions and ad revenue? They’ll see. “We have assumptions, but we want to see what happens with the actual readers,” Check said. “We have industry benchmarks, but we know our people will be different.”

Eventually, they just had to launch the thing, find out what works (or doesn’t), and adjust from there. “We realized we could debate our assumptions endlessly internally, and that we’re better off getting real data from our readers,” Check said.

The site has long appended kickers to their articles that ask readers to “support [Slate’s] independent journalism” through Slate Plus and had previously gated some written content (including some “Dear Prudence” advice). But their experience with Plus was that while bonus podcast episodes were converting audiophiles, readers were not converting at the same rate. “If you want people to join or subscribe, asking them to do it voluntarily is not quite enough,” Check said.

It will be a comparatively loose meter, at least at first. Check said the initial threshold was at least double the industry average of five articles a month. (Podcast pages will not count toward the limit and all coronavirus coverage, Hohlt emphasized, will remain free.) That means only the “most engaged visitors” will be forced to join Slate Plus to continue reading and the total number of people who run into the paywall in this first week is expected to be “very small.” Check likened this first paywall iteration to “dipping a toe in the water” but acknowledged they expect to get all the way in eventually.

Slate joins a long list of digital publications, including Quartz and New York magazine, that have moved from free and open content to some version of a meter. As the list of online publications asking readers to pay up keeps getting longer, however, the appetite for a third or fourth subscription remains unclear for even the most voracious newshound.

This isn’t Slate’s first bite at the paywall apple — even the metered variety. Back in 2015, it put up a paywall for readers outside the United States which limited them to five articles a month unless they signed up for Slate Plus (or a separate deal called Slate Unlimited).

And long before that, Slate was famously one of the first of those newfangled “Web sites” to try to charge for access, all the way back in 1998. The price was $19.95 a year. Observers were skeptical; one Forrester analyst worried Slate neither “has a financial purpose or is a game or pornography,” the only things people paid for online in 1998. They proved correct; the paywall came down after less than a year.

Years later, then-editor Jacob Weisberg said he was glad Slate had “got it out of our system early.”

“I think it was the worst year at Slate,” he added. “The problem was — and this was in 1998 — that we had 20,000 paid subscribers to Slate, right away, paying $20 a year. Which for 1998 was pretty impressive…But that meant the maximum readership for anything was 20,000 people. And it was a tough year for the writers, because they went from having a growing audience and starting to feel like the web was working in terms of reaching to people you wanted to reach to suddenly feeling like you’re writing for a very small group of people.”

Of course, 2020 isn’t 1998. Audiences are much bigger; social media lets stories spread well beyond their small subscriber base; people are far more comfortable paying for things online. (And the financial state of journalism is much worse.)

Check said that sort of hard paywall, with no sampling, can work for business-to-business or niche sites but wasn’t the right choice for a general-interest publication like Slate. They also dismissed a subscription model that tries to get a large sum of money from a small number of people. “This is the model we’ve seen work,” Check said of the meter which, at around $3/month for the first year, is less than what the average digital newspaper subscription costs. “We’re large enough — with 20 million uniques this month — to go broad.” (Slate Plus, billed annually, costs $35 for the first year and $59 per year after that.)

In launching the paywall, Moon said she focused on identifying the right set of analytics to gather the data she’ll need to tweak the paywall model in the weeks and months ahead. Slate will look at the conversion rate, pageview losses, how many people are hitting the paywall, what kind of content they’re hitting it on, and how many visits to the site it tends to take to reach the threshold, among other metrics.

Like many other news organizations, Slate has seen surges in traffic and podcast downloads as the coronavirus pandemic has unfolded in recent weeks. But Slate also reported that the past eight months have all ranked among their top 12 most trafficked months ever and that they’ve seen strong readership across their full range of content: from news analysis (including their excellent court commentary) to human interest and advice to big feature packages like Lines of Code. They’ve also been encouraged by successfully reader-supported projects such as Who Counts?, which has been covering voting, immigration, gerrymandering, and citizenship questions ahead of the 2020 elections.

Check said that Slate’s advertising revenue, as at virtually all publications, has been impacted by coronavirus, including a dip in the hard-hit travel sector. But as a national publication, Slate isn’t reliant on local businesses that might be closed by shelter-in-place orders, and Check said their “broad base” of advertisers in technology and finance haven’t been as affected. Plus, he noted, the direct-to-consumer advertising that podcasts are known for (new Quip toothbrush or Blue Apron meal kit, anyone?) could get a boost from the many newly housebound listeners.

Even with what they’ve described as a rosier-than-many advertising outlook, Slate has clearly seen the need for further shifting its revenue balance away from ads and toward reader-generated revenue.

“We grew our ad business by double digits last year and right now the forecasts are still positive for year-over-year growth,” Check said. “We do think having diversified revenue streams and a greater alliance with our readers is something that would be healthier from a revenue perspective.”

Fortunately, the new tools designed by the Journal’s product and news strategy teams — which include a clickthrough module to quickly catch readers up on political news, redesigned live update presentations for election nights and debates, and Q&A features — have proven adaptable.

When I spoke to Louise Story, the Journal’s chief news strategist and chief product and technology officer, last week, the paper had already launched a version of the new live Q&A tool — it was just for reporters to answer readers’ coronavirus questions, not their political ones.

This week, after a few more head-spinning news cycles, the election catch-up module on the homepage has been converted to coronavirus information. And the live coverage that’s outside the paywall? That’s where you can find highlights and to-the-minute updates like “Walmart sends corporate staff home” or “Police plan to meet Tesla factory management over compliance with coronavirus health order.”

“All of these things are based on the needs of our audience — they’re all reusable,” Story said. “We’re building things that have really neat uses during the election, but that benefit our products broadly too.”

The election-turned-coronavirus news products are just the latest iteration of the Journal’s longstanding strategy to retain existing subscribers and convert occasional readers of The Wall Street Journal into paying members by encouraging regular engagement. Last month, it announced it had passed 2 million paying subscribers, a number only The New York Times can top among American newspapers. But the fact that its paywall is harder than most of its competitors — not to mention its high sticker price for a digital sub, $39/month — means it has to be more creative than its peers in both attracting and converting new readers.

Last spring, the Journal took a deep dive into user behavior and surfaced with data on actions that boost retention and the likelihood a reader will become a paid subscriber. Then they set out to promote those actions to their member base and occasional readers through what they called “Project Habit.” (We published a breakdown of the process by The Wall Street Journal team that led the effort.)

Data clearly shows that the best way to reduce churn is to increase engagement — but the path to driving product use and building loyalty amongst members has not always been as obvious.

Over the past year, a cross-functional group here at the Journal has worked together to identify retention-driving actions and reinvent the way we promote those habits to our member base. We call it Project Habit.

We’ve known for some time that if a member downloads our mobile app or signs up for an email newsletter, they’re more likely to stay with the Journal.

The key engagement metric was active days, the group concluded. So while the news products like the catch-up module and live Q&As were designed to meet reader needs — Story said their research showed readers wanted to be able to get “caught up” on the news quickly and that some appreciated the opportunity to feel “connected and involved” with the Journal’s political coverage — the team also recognized that the tools could drive retention-friendly habits such as returning to the homepage regularly for updates.

Only paying subscribers — members, in Journal parlance — can submit questions, but anyone can tune in to see them answered. The catch-up module and the live coverage pages can also be viewed without running into the Journal’s paywall.

Each tool had to be optimized and recognizable for both subscribers and nonsubscribers, whether they were reading on their phones, desktop, or through the WSJ app, said Kabir Seth, the Journal’s vice president of product strategy and operations. “We were definitely thinking through the experience as we were building it. How does it feel for a nonmember? How does it feel for a member?” he said. “The graphics team is super important, and there’s a lot of editorial input.”

Live coverage is particularly effective at bringing in new audiences of non-subscribers, Story said. The catch-up module, which can be completed without leaving the homepage, has been performing especially well with occasional readers, a.k.a. the non-news junkies who walk among us.

An example of a catch-up module on the WSJ.com homepage.

The Journal tested the catch-up module at a variety of times (morning, midday, even late Friday afternoons) before settling on weekdays at lunchtime, based on engagement patterns and site traffic. They also found, through testing, that an illustration on the first card drew readers into clicking through the catch-up module better than a photo did — which also helps set it apart from other content on the homepage.

“An interesting thing about making a new story format is that it’s not just the product, technology, and design of it. There’s a different type of content. In this case, it’s short snippets of text that you run through,” Story said. “As we innovate with our products and technology, we also have to innovate with our content and our storytelling.”

In designing the news products, the Journal also hopes to benefit from the relative trust it has across the political spectrum.

A Pew study in January found it was one of only three news outlets (along with PBS and the BBC) that both Democrats and Republicans trust more than distrust. An earlier study found that the Journal’s audience is remarkably evenly distributed across the ideological spectrum. (Among conservatives, the Journal’s news reporting benefits from the paper’s hard-right editorial pages.)

“We’ve found that the Journal is in a great place to be a political news source because we’re so highly trusted on the left and the right. It’s a unique position to be in,” Story said. “That’s part of our thinking around the live Q&A and the other things that have to do with being more transparent and open to questions.”

Story said the process for building new news products is ongoing for her and Seth. Research into how readers think about politics and politics in the media is ongoing.

“It’s very iterative,” she said. “We’re already looking for ways to make our election coverage better.”

That was just last week, and they’ve already found ways to adjust.

In Memphis, two newsrooms — each with about three dozen journalists — slug it out, day after day. They both know it’s possible, maybe even likely, that only one will be still standing in a few years.

What’s happening in Tennessee’s second-largest city, given our times of media high anxiety, also takes on the tone of a morality play, a quizzical dot on the landscape of ghost newspapers and deserted communities. Is Memphis an outlier, or is it a sign of what’s to come in the 2020s?

Quietly, The Daily Memphian — an ambitious local news site launched in 2018 — has shaken up the local news landscape in Tennessee’s second largest city.

“I really think that the presence of The Daily Memphian has been a good thing for the market, and it’s been a good thing for our journalists,” says Mark Russell, the executive editor of the incumbent daily newspaper, the Gannett-owned Commercial Appeal. “I think readers are benefiting from it every single day.”

The “newspaper” war even comes some good trash talk. “I think that competing with The DM has been wonderful for Memphis, wonderful for our journalists and theirs,” Russell continues. But…

“Eric Barnes, Andy Cates, and even some of their columnists have said things in the media and said things publicly that have just been, I’ll call them — call it what it is, outright lies. Because they’re describing The Commercial Appeal and our commitment to Memphis and whether we’re controlled by Nashville. And they know it’s a false narrative. And they keep repeating it. They’ve let up a little bit lately, as I’ve called them on it. But I think for almost a full year, that’s all they talked about, how the CA was ‘not committed to Memphis.'”

The Daily Memphian’s very name shows who it aims to compete with. It’s digital only, meaning of course that it publishes news around the clock. The “Daily” part? It calls out to a group of once-loyal print newspaper readers who might be willing to try out a new alternative.

The Commercial Appeal, founded in 1841, went through a decade of cuts that opened the door — and the community’s wallets — for The Daily Memphian. “We launched our online news source as a direct response to the cuts and consolidation that Gannett imposed on our local paper,” says Barnes, the Memphian’s CEO.

Across the United States, there are local newspapers in various rates of decline — some being stripped quickly for parts by hedge fund owners, some fighting fiercely against the tide through smart business strategy and commitment to their communities.

And across the United States, there are hundreds of local news news sites working to find their own niche in the news ecosystem being born.

But it’s still rare to see old and new compete at something that approximates a level playing field. The local daily, no matter how shrunken, nearly always still has a significantly larger newsroom than the biggest local digital startup. That’s one big reason the battle in Memphis is worth watching closely: If current trends continue, it’s a preview of the sort of competition we might see in lots of other American cities in the coming years.

Eric Barnes, 51, is a former president of the Tennessee Press Association who has been on both sides of the newsroom/business wall during his career. He had a hand in launching community papers in Nashville and Knoxville, led weekly papers, and ran the Nashville Ledger business-and-politics paper for 15 years before the Memphian launched.

“Before that, we did city guides and city directories and business directories and coffee table books,” he says. “Our company was based here in Memphis, but we worked around a couple hundred markets around the country. Then I was at a small business magazine up in New York and a reporter in Connecticut. I also host a show here locally on our PBS station, which I’ve done for nine years.”

While the Memphian serves a metro-sized audience, Barnes applies lessons from his experience with smaller community papers. “Being in the Press Association and getting to know a lot of community-level publishers, small-town publishers, was extremely helpful. The way in which they got hit, everybody in the industries got hit. But they often were slower to go to the web because they didn’t have the money, so they didn’t give away as much. I mean, they kept their print alive. They stayed closer to their communities. I think there are a lot of lessons.”

One lesson: “We are a paywall-driven, subscription-based news source,” says Barnes, who believes reader revenue is the absolute key to getting to break-even.

The Daily Memphian has assembled 11,600 subscribers in the 18 months since its launch in September 2018. Those subscribers initially paid $7 a month, a price now increasing. (It’s currently $10.99/month or $99/year.)

That will add up to more than $1 million in annual revenue, and it’s matched by roughly the same amount in advertising. On one hand, $2 million is a lot of revenue. On the other, the Memphian’s current budget is about $5 million.

That’s the story of this one-of-a-kind play in U.S. replacement journalism: It’s about scale. Scale of ambition. Scale of newsroom. And scale of revenue, the elusive elixir of digital news.

A controversial funding runway

The Daily Memphian has so far raised $8.2 million — $6.7 million of that before launch, the rest since. The goal is to get to break-even or better by 2023. “We’re on track,” Barnes says. “I’ve said publicly before that our goal is to get 20,000 to 25,000 people signed up by Year 5 at a [monthly] rate of around $10.”

“I get what The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal are doing,” says Cates, who led the Memphian’s fundraising campaign and chairs its board of directors. “We believe we are a model for how the Fourth Estate can flourish in middle America. We’re in Siberia. We don’t have national funding, Google or Facebook.”

The CEO of RVC Outdoor Destinations, Cates is a prominent civic booster who gets credit for helping bring the NBA’s Grizzlies to Memphis from Vancouver in 2001. Just as people think that metros need sports teams, they need far older civic institutions — newspapers or the digital equivalent. “For a community to be healthy, it must have a healthy newspaper,” Cates told me. “We tried to buy the CA, and thank god we failed.”

That said, The Memphian’s unorthodox and opaque fundraising strategy has been controversial among many both in the bubbling new news landscape and in Memphis. Transparency in funding has become a mantra in the nonprofit news movement, and there the Memphian is lacking.

“Give or take, the original $6.7 million was all raised anonymously, which caused some consternation with journalists and INN [Institute for Nonprofit News],” says Barnes. “I get all that. Even though I carry the CEO title, I have spent most of my life as a journalist one way or another. Locally, there were a lot of questions: Are they going to have bias? Are they going to carry an agenda?”

(At launch, Cates told Poynter that “he hopes that the [anonymity] will avoid the appearance that local high-rollers are treated with deference in Memphian stories.” Keeping the high-rollers anonymous doesn’t typically help with conflict-of-interest worries.)

Barnes says the money was all local and from “many different funders — it wasn’t one funder.” Now, he says, “I don’t ever get asked a question locally” about funders. He says he’s “felt or experienced absolutely zero donor pressure on the newsroom. The board — which is fully public — has high-level, strategic expectations of the operation, including the newsroom. But they’ve not in any way dictated stories that should — or, and this is arguably more important, should not — be written.”

Proudly paywalled

That’s not the only point of some controversy around the Memphian and money. Its paywall, powered by Piano, limits non-subscribers to three stories per month. That’s down from five at launch.

“In the middle of the summer, we started tagging roughly one story a day as subscriber-only, so you have to subscribe to read that,” says Barnes. “That’s done well for us in terms of converting and reinforcing the people that we’re a paid site.” Reducing from five to three stories a month didn’t bring “a huge impact negatively or positively. We’re not quite sure where we go from there. I mean, the business part of me would love to say it was one free or two free, but it’s a balancing act.”

Barnes says the organization plans to test Piano’s new “intelligent paywall” tech going forward. He cites both the Google News Initiative Audience Lab and the Facebook Local Subscription Accelerator as helpful. “They bring doable advice and guiding, best-practice principles. And to both their credit, they are not pushing Google or Facebook to drive traffic or subscriptions.”

Not many local news startups use paywalls — especially nonprofit ones. But for The Memphian, it’s fundamental to its strategy, even as others advocate open access as a civic good.

“We’ve gotten some pushback from some of the other nonprofit news organizations whose mission is free and open content that should be available to everyone. I love that. I mean, I’m an NPR fan. I’m a fan of local PBS, but we just looked at it and said: We don’t want to constantly fundraise. We don’t want to be a drain on the Memphis community, the philanthropic community.”

To counterbalance the paywall, the Memphian is free when accessed in schools and libraries. Those “with limited means” can apply for financial assistance. Some of the Memphian’s journalism also leaks beyond the paywall via local TV and radio partners. “Memphis has a big poverty problem, and we want to figure out how people who can’t afford it can get it,” Barnes says.

But he’s happy to defend charging. “Let’s value the news, let’s charge a fair rate for it. Let’s say our content is worthwhile and try to undo the, what, 15-year disastrous experiment of giving away local and national news for free. People have paid for news for decades, if not ever long. So why wouldn’t we find ways to have people who can afford to pay for it?” Eventually, subscribers are projected to provide about two-thirds of the Memphian’s revenue, with sponsorship and advertising making up the rest.

Are those ad sales motivated by the Memphian’s mission? “Less than 10 percent has been people saying, ‘Hey, we just want to support you to support you.’ We try not to sell that way,” Barnes says. An advertiser’s monthly spend is often in the $500 to $1,000 range. “It’s not terribly expensive to dominate one of our sections or to dominate our business coverage. They have a very strong presence on our email editions or our business coverage or sports coverage.”

So who is in the audience that those advertisers want to reach? The site’s readers do skew a bit older; “it’s traditional newspaper readers who are desperate for a local source, a locally based news publication, paper or not, a news publication,” Barnes says, getting in a few punches at the CA.

The audience also skews toward higher education levels (almost 70 percent have a college degree) and higher income (overindexing at incomes of over $100,000).

That’s in Memphis — the second-poorest large city in America, behind only Detroit. Of the 50 largest U.S. cities, Memphis ranks No. 47 in the share of its residents with at least a bachelor’s degree. And among large U.S. cities, only Detroit and Baltimore have a higher African-American share of its population.

In none of those measures is The Daily Memphian particularly representative of its city, say some critics. At launch, it faced criticism from people like Wendi C. Thomas, a former Nieman Fellow and founder of the local news site MLK50, for having a staff that’s 80 percent white in a city that’s 63 percent black. (The Memphis metro area overall is roughly 50/50 white/black.) They point to a leadership that is overwhelmingly white, and the staff diversity count of 21 percent people of color, 40 percent female. Of its four regular columnists, all are men and three are white.

The Memphian, for its part, is stands by its own record of diversity and of reaching out more widely in its first two years of existence. Its board is majority female and 33 percent African-American. Its new audience development and digital directors are both women; the new head of advertising is African-American; the new executive editor is Latino. “Since launch we’ve gotten more — not less — diverse,” says Barnes.

Beyond that, Barnes says the Memphian has made major inroads in engagement on the news product itself with its diverse communities. “We have two dedicated reporters to north and south Memphis, historically black and under-covered areas. We have a commitment to diverse stories across all reporters and beats. And we have none of the constant crime blotter coverage with the parade of mug shots and shallow, fearful coverage — coverage that has done major damage to black communities nationally. But we do cover policing, criminal justice, justice reform, the local DA, juvenile justice center, a series on the impact of childhood trauma on the brain, and more.”

In the criticism and on the ground, we can see the contentiousness of journalism change. Some may say that it’s one thing to see on-the-surface power imbalances in a decades-old institution that is struggling to adjust to new realities, it’s another to see it in an organization that’s born fresh and new in 2018.

But these are knotty questions. How much should ambitious startups be faulted for finding the early reader revenue from the often-expected sources of more affluent consumers? Further, an important question. How soon should their overall staff makeup resemble their communities covered?

It’s true that Memphis is one of the least digitally connected cities in America. As of 2018, 48 percent of residents have no broadband connection at home — the second highest rate of large U.S. cities, again behind only Detroit.  But of course, we know that, with very few exceptions, digital-only news startups are the only ones to have a chance to find new success in the 2020s. Beyond all the other challenges of reseeding the news deserts, can we rightly expect news startups themselves to deal with broadband neglect? It’s also instructive that the Memphian has already taken early and substantial initiatives, with more planned, to get free access to communities and individuals that can afford to pay for it.

So some paint this picture: anonymous wealthy funders; leadership that doesn’t look much like its community; a digital outlet in a city with limited connectivity; a hard paywall in one of the country’s poorest cities. They say new startups, eventually replacing traditional daily newspapers, are unlikely to be oriented toward a mass audience as what came before.

But it’s far too early to draw that conclusion. The Daily Memphian may be a Rorschach test in what is such a contentious start-up news movement. Critics inside Memphis, and out, can point to numbers they don’t like. The Memphian itself can rightly claim to be doing something that I haven’t seen getting done anywhere else in the country: a high-quality, at-scale, news replacement with a real business model bent on making its way forward with earned revenue.

Much as discussion about its particulars is warranted, and gets the context it deserves, we cannot lose track of that hugely important fact.

The “newspaper” war

While not much has been reported nationally on this competition, big themes emerge for all who care about future of local news in North America and beyond.

First and foremost, The Daily Memphian aims to be a replacement news company — the primary supplier of local news and information for its area.

Metro Memphis has a population of about 1.35 million, a sprawling area that spreads into Arkansas and Mississippi. Roughly half of that population resides in Memphis proper. Unlike the vast majority of hard-working news entrepreneurs planting seedlings in growing news deserts, the Memphian’s model is built on achieving a scale that can try to match the city.

It now pays a newsroom of 34 — the same number of journalists, more or less, remaining at Gannett’s incumbent Commercial Appeal. Another 12 business-side staffers join them. In addition, the Memphian pays more than a dozen regular freelance contributors.

As of December, the newsroom is led day-to-day by Ronnie Ramos, who left a job as executive editor of Gannett’s Indianapolis Star for the Memphian. That move in and of itself tells us lots about the changing momentum in Memphis.

There’s plenty of newspaper DNA in the rest of the Memphian’s staff. (It covers sports, runs restaurant reviews, even runs obituaries — a mix of content much closer to a print daily’s than what you might find at a lot of local nonprofit news sites.) It hired “10 to 15” of its staffers from the Commercial Appeal. And that hiring changed the CA a lot as well.

“We had to go out and get new players for almost every major position,” says CA executive editor Mark Russell. “And we did that and we got better.” The newspaper’s staff is now younger, more digitally savvy, and more diverse — 33 percent people of color now versus 19 percent before the Memphian began hiring people away. (Russell is black; Barnes and Cates are white.)

Memphis’ story is a lot like that of metros from coast to coast. The circulation losses of The Commercial Appeal tell quite a story, underscoring not just a loss of readers but the widening market vacuum that The Daily Memphian is rushing into.

For the third quarter of 2019, The Commercial Appeal reported a Sunday paid circulation of 52,000 and a daily circulation of 29,000. Just three years earlier, those numbers stood at 103,300 Sunday and 67,000 daily. That’s basically half of its paid base of readers gone in three years.

On digital subscriptions, the CA’s numbers have moved in the right direction. It counts 10,063 in that category now, up from 4,045 subscribers three years ago.

The major circulation declines result from changing reader habits, to be sure, but also from Gannett’s cuts to the newsroom and its pricing-over-volume circulation strategy.

By some remembrances, the Commercial Appeal counted about 200 journalists in its newsroom 20 years ago. That’s more than five times the 37 in today’s.

The Daily Memphian’s founders say its birth grew out of the regionalization of the daily press, but the Commercial Appeal disputes the degree of that regionalization. In 2015, Gannett bought the Knoxville and Memphis dailies as part of its Journal Media Group acquisition. Gannett now owns six dailies in the state, with Nashville the largest. Over time, the Tennessee Network developed, a trend we’ve seen all over the country as regional clusters of newspapers looked for headcount reduction and efficiencies.

“You could regionalize backend design — that’s one thing, fine,” Barnes says. “Centralize your accounting. Okay, that’s fine. But you can move [only] so much decision making out of the local markets before it is [no longer] really the Memphis Commercial Appeal.”

Especially since Memphis and Nashville don’t really get along. (For evidence, see this map of NFL fan bases, which shows Memphis’ Shelby County actually has more fans who root for the Dallas Cowboys than for the Tennessee Titans over in Nashville.)

“Everywhere I’ve ever lived, Tennessee, New York, Connecticut, Washington, Oregon, Alaska — I mean, Eastern Washington hates Western Washington, right? I mean, upstate New York and downstate New York are totally different,” Barnes says. “The idea that you can do these sort of regionalized papers…I’ve never lived in a place where that would work.”

Russell’s retort: “It’s a cheap, easy comparison to make when you don’t want to talk about journalism. Let’s talk about journalism. Let’s not talk about this Nashville vs. Memphis thing. It’s kind of a familiar trope though to people here because people in Memphis and people in Nashville don’t like each other.”

Russell wrote his own column in November to respond to the “centralization” charges, “setting the record straight.”

“What I say about that is that the people in Nashville have their hands full making decisions in Nashville,” he says. “And if you think about that logically for a minute, if you’ve worked in a news organization, you know it is hard to control your own organization in your own city, much less one that’s three hours away that you don’t have familiarity with the people, the places, or the issues of the context. So that’s ludicrous on its face that someone in Nashville making decisions here.

“It’s a short trip to the editors, including me, who are in the market, who know this market, who are working hard every day to produce a good report online and in print…Tell me who in Nashville is staying up late like me, reading content and up early reading content. Tell me who in Nashville is out in the community meeting with community leaders and neighborhood leaders every day. No one. They’re not here. They’re in Nashville doing the same thing I’m doing here. And that’s the way it should be.”

Its delightful to hear a bit of trash-talking by head-to-head news competitors. Reminds me of my days in the Twin Cities 20 years ago, when our Saint Paul Pioneer Press took on the larger Star Tribune.

Even with the head-to-head competition, Russell remains evenhanded in his view of the Memphian. “I talk to readers every single day,” he says. “And what I hear from readers is that they see the Memphis being stronger than it’s ever been. And that’s primarily because we now have a competing publication, and they see that the Commercial Appeal has improved since we lost those staffers. They see it every single day. And they see the DM being a really viable, strong news store.

“So you’ve got two heavyweights going at it on important issues. Readers have found the benefits of that: We’re going to have far better coverage of primary topics like government, the environment, demographics, investigative coverage. They’re going to get better coverage overall, and they have been getting it.”

The future

How long will this head-to-head competition last?

One logical question to start with: How soon could the paid readership numbers of the Commercial Appeal and Daily Memphian converge? A legacy business still transitioning from print to digital — and now owned by a megachain with lots of new debt to pay off — is competing with a debt-free, digital-only, deep-pocketed operation bent on growth.

This is no apples-to-apples comparison; there are many moving pieces and radically different cost structures. Then again, there won’t be many more apples-to-apples comparisons in local news going forward. This isn’t the New York Post vs. the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune vs. the Sun-Times, or even the more recent Times-Picayune vs. the New Orleans Advocate — recognizable battles between distinct competitors, but also between fundamentally similar businesses. But digital subscriptions — how many people in your community can you convince to hand over their credit card for digital access to your owrk — can be a common point of comparison.

How much are Memphis news readers reading one or the other or both?

“I don’t know,” the Memphian’s Barnes says. “I know anecdotally that people tell me that they have dropped the CA. I know other people continue to do both, and they do have some good journalists over there. I mean, they have many good journalists over there. I still read them — if not every day, I read them a couple of times a week. I think that’s true of a lot of people.”

(Again with the trash talk.)

One way or the other, given the tight economics of the local news business itself, no one is under any illusion that Memphis’ contrarian news war will last for a long time. “I’m not sure it can,” the CA’s Russell says. “It’s hard to imagine any community our size supporting two full-blown, news organizations. Even when full-blown doesn’t mean what it meant back 10 years ago…it’s hard to imagine that, it really is.”

The Daily Memphian is, like many of its startup brethren, a nonprofit. But it’s a nonprofit with an for-profit attitude, acting as a business-oriented enterprise.

“We are structured as a nonprofit under Memphis Fourth Estate Inc., but we are intensely focused on building a financially sustainable model that relies not on constant fundraising, but on earned revenue through our paywall subscriptions and sponsorships,” says Barnes.

What are his reader revenue takeaways so far? “We launched on September 17, 2018. Our original projection was 4,500 paid for the first year. We hit 4,500 somewhere in October. I mean, it was under full four weeks.” By year’s end, it was close to 6,000; by its first anniversary, it was at 10,000. Churn is relatively low, at about 6 percent annually. Today the Memphian has settled into a monthly net gain of about 300 subscribers. (The site now gets about 1.5 million monthly pageviews.)

The Memphian continues to test both annual and monthly offers, but generally avoided the “$1 for 6 months!!” deep discounting some other sites have used to draw in new subscribers.

The Memphian has clearly tapped into a substantial early paying audience — a cohort of the civically connected who were more than ready for the Memphian. The big question: What do the next cohorts look like? How big will they be, and will they represent a broader slice of Memphis’ population than its well-heeled early audience?

As The Memphian eyes doubling its subscriber base, Barnes knows the strategy will likely get more nuanced. “It’s a pretty high-income, high-educated audience, so, the [price] is not an issue for them. As we get from 11,000 to 22,000, we have to be more price sensitive, I think, with people. It’ll be tricky over the next few years.”

The Daily Memphian is providing a new value proposition to its readers. But in that offer we can see how in-progress the digital experience remains — especially perhaps for older readers. Take the site’s email newsletters. “We push a ton of email,” he says. “It works really well. We get really good open rates. But what we realized with many, many readers — particularly those who are older — they really don’t understand the difference between the email and the website. So they don’t get what’s in what. They’ll tell us, ‘Well, I’m a subscriber. I get your email edition.'”

Those emails are free to all, not part of a paid subscription. “They don’t go to the homepage, they don’t go to the navigation — they just use that email. Which is in some ways great, but creates a massive amount of confusion.”

In its first year of publishing, the Memphian published almost 7,000 stories, ran thousands of staff-shot photos, added nearly 10 weekly podcast series, and held Daily Memphian events almost every week.

It’s all those stories — buttressed by irrational fervor, best-practice business models, and more — that have always made local journalism work, and will someday again.

“It wasn’t local journalism that failed, it was the business behind local journalism,” Barnes says. “It’s a simple fact that gets lost…That’s been a driving issue for us: There is a lot of traditional local stuff that didn’t need to be thrown out the window. It was just that the business model got so wonky, broken. That was really where the problem was.”

Paywall tech company Piano has now introduced a propensity paywall — taking what The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Schibsted, and others are doing internally to nudge the errant site visitor or intrigued newsletter subscriber to pony up and pay up. It’s got the fancy moniker of LT[X], pronounced without the brackets and intended to be thought of as “likelihood to (action).”

Propensity/dynamic/intelligent/other slick-sounding-named paywalls use dozens of signals to measure each visitor’s likelihood of subscribing and determine the prods they need to improve their score. (Piano’s system uses 76 metrics to start.) It could be, for instance, an extra free article or two each month, a newsletter invitation when you’re about to close the page, or a targeted social media ad with special deals. Now publishers don’t have to DIY it, but be aware: It takes Piano two to three weeks to set up each outlet’s paywall based on the signals and past data they need to crunch. Another thing that lasts two or so weeks: the window of time to really snag a new subscriber, according to Piano CEO Trevor Kaufman.

“People’s focus on a site tends to be very intense at given periods of time…90 days from now, your loyal audience will largely be a different group of individuals with maybe 30 to 40 percent overlap,” he said. “We wanted to make our system more adaptable to accommodate that. Having a machine learning framework to say who’s likely to churn, register, and subscribe has been a critical step in us making those experiences more tailored.”

Propensity doesn’t stop at the paywall, though; this is about getting people involved beyond a single subscription and making the most of their lifetime value. How likely is it that a regular subscriber will buy an event ticket? Or sign up for another newsletter?

“Even with subscription websites, the page metrics [tend to be] metrics that have driven short-term value, as opposed to long-term value,” said Michael Silberman, Piano’s SVP of strategy (he was previously at New York Media). “That starts to transform the way you think about operating a media business, from pageview to customer lifetime value.”

That is a sensible, if not earth-shattering, statement. But it helps to have the tools and the metrics to actually put it into action.

Since launching the propensity paywall in June, Piano has witnessed it in action for two clients: one saw a 20 percent increase in its paid conversion rate and the second saw a 75 percent increase in visitors converting to subscribers. Now it’s in place for five clients across eight sites — they decide who goes first based “a lot on client need and potential impact,” Silberman said. In general, Piano services 1,300 publishers like The Economist, Hearst, Business Insider, and TechCrunch, though publishers need to opt into this paywall setup. (Piano wouldn’t share which clients are using it, but that would be useful information to have, considering the range of news organizations and their audiences and varying propensities to subscribe.)

This can be a big help to the digital marketing of digital newspaper subscriptions. I'm glad the Philadelphia Inquirer is about to start using it. https://t.co/CkyUks4ofg via @NiemanLab @phillyinquirer

— Ken Herts (@kenherts) August 6, 2019

Silberman’s team built the machine-learning algorithm that’s the bedrock of the propensity paywall using the random forest technique. They beta-tested with the aforementioned one site for two months to suss out its reaction to live prediction data and also the proper situations to use it. “Do you show the subscription offer plus the offer to register for temporary access? Do you show them just the offer and not register? Another use case might be that different meter height for users depending on their subscription propensity score,” Silberman said.

Each site also can fine-tune its propensity factors: “For a local newspaper website, one of the things we’ve discovered — no surprise — designated market area [DMA] is important. For at least one of them it’s not where the user is in terms of DMA but if the content is from that local DMA,” he said. “Another client knew going in that a lot of their users were converting on the content of one particular author. We added ‘count of articles read by x-author’ as a metric as opposed to generic ‘number of authors read’ in the algorithm.”

When the system is live, Piano scores users in sets of 10 from 0 to 100 to assess the existing propensity distribution, with the biggest group usually in the second or third lowest scoring section. Then the LT[X] paywall kicks in, giving visitors more options and hopefully the publisher more subscriptions.

“Commercial experiences in general are becoming more 1:1,” Kaufman said. “It’s not just the messaging, but the pricing, the purchase experience you have, the products you’re offered — should all be relevant to you.”

“In 2012, the very clear strategy for us was to create as little friction as possible to growth, because you start with an audience of zero. We did not want to create any barrier to either discovering or sharing our content,” Quartz publisher Jay Lauf said in a talk here at the Nieman Foundation in 2016. “So whether it was a paywall or an app that you had to go download and that we hoped you would open, all of those things were barriers to introducing a brand-new media property to a new audience.”

Having no paywall was “part of the original equation: mobile-first and free, embracing the open web,” he told Frederic Filloux. And it worked: Less than a year after launching, it was able to brag about passing The Economist in U.S. audience. Launched with about 20 staffers, it can now claim a newsroom of more than 100.

But times change — and audiences change. In a move that got little attention last week, the much-lauded global business news site announced that for the first time it would be putting all its articles behind a metered paywall. Read more than 10 or so and you’ll get a pitch for the Quartz Membership, which runs $100 a year or $15 a month. (The membership program launched six months ago, but was originally framed as giving paying users access to more content; Quartz’s traditional articles had remained free to all.)

“I think we’re opening the entry point to [membership] through the metered wall,” Lauf told me. “It will help us strategically introduce membership to even more of the Quartz fanbase organically through this metered wall. It dovetails nicely with what membership is.”

As Lauf put it to readers:

In a world often filled with noise over news, we believe our mission is more important than ever. Today we are asking those of you who value this mission help us continue to invest in what you’ve come to love about Quartz. And so today we are making unlimited access to all original reporting by Quartz’s journalists around the world exclusive to members. We’re adding a limit to the number of free articles that non-members can access each month. Quartz email newsletters and apps remain free.

One of the site’s key differentiators at launch was its bespoke advertising platform, with large custom ad units sold to high-end brands like Prada, Credit Suisse, and Infiniti. Quartz has had a lot of success with that approach; along with that 100-plus newsroom, it has nearly 40 staffers in product and more than 60 on the business side.

But broader trends in the ad market pushed it to start also running programmatic advertising a year ago. And like other sites, it’s come to believe reader revenue will need to play a larger part.

The move comes amid some tough traffic numbers for Quartz, according to comScore data. In 2017 and 2018, Quartz’s web traffic averaged right around 11.5 million monthly unique visitors, with a peak in August 2017 of 15.7 million. For the first three months of 2019, though, that dropped to 7.3 million, a 35 percent decline over the same period a year earlier.

Of course, Quartz reaches people on lots of platforms other than its website, like those aforementioned newsletters and apps. But it had only one month with fewer than 10 million uniques between October 2016 and July 2018; in the eight months since then, it’s been below 10 million every month but one.

July 2018 was when Quartz was bought by Japanese business media company Uzabase from Atlantic Media for $86 million. According to a Uzabase presentation to investors, Quartz’s revenue grew from $18.6 million in 2015 to $30 million in 2016, but then decreased to $27.6 million in 2017.

The membership program debuted last November, but it was initially positioned as providing new and additional content to members, not putting Quartz’s main output behind a paywall. (Some articles will continue to be members-only, no matter the number on your article meter.)

The number of free Quartz articles you’ll get varies based on what the site perceives to be your likelihood of becoming a member, among other factors. The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Schibsted, and New York Media each also have paywalls that adjust to target those most likely to convert. (It took me nine articles to hit Quartz’s paywall; a couple friends in different industries and cities had to click between seven and 14 times.)

Membership does still get you more than an unlocked paywall. (Lauf lauded the progress membership has made since its November launch — but declined to share any specific numbers.) Members also get multiformat field guides on things like the cannabis industry, battery technology, and life after cash, which then drive weekly conference calls with reporters; members also get videos of interviews with big business leadership (like Google’s Eric Schmidt, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and IBM’s Ginni Rometty) and in-person events, though those have only been in New York City so far. (Lauf said they plan to expand to Silicon Valley, London, India, and Hong Kong soon.)

“Access to member-exclusive content, which gets closer to an education on how to navigate the global economy, is a core proposition,” he said.

Reader revenue was never a forbidden idea at Quartz; even at its launch, executives told our Ken Doctor that “Politico Pro-like paid products” would be tested “some time in 2013” and that “reader revenue, in some form, will be key in the long term.” Lauf has been talking about the need to get beyond advertising for some time, and paid products were also on the table before Uzabase bought Quartz last summer. But its new owner has its own history with paid products. NewsPicks, which launched in Japan in 2013, is Uzabase’s $15-per-month business news service. It has more than 60,000 paying subscribers out of its audience of 3.3 million registered users, and close to half of NewsPicks’ revenue comes from subscriptions. Video has also been key to NewsPicks’ signup success, Lauf said.

But, as we’ve written about before, the news industry has a semi-decent handle on how to get many people to pay for their primary news source; the digital subscription successes at The New York Times and The Washington Post make that clear. The evidence is less clear about second reads or other outlets who — whatever their quality — aren’t as central to people’s everyday news habits.

This is in no way a knock on Quartz, which has a ton of high-quality reporting but which is not, to my knowledge, anyone's primary news source.

— Evan DeSimone (@Media_Evan) May 10, 2019

Some (more mission-driven, less business-professional-targeting) news organizations see membership as an opportunity to avoid restricting access to its journalism. It’s sometimes an opportunity for people to buy into the mission in a way that says they want to keep the content free for others. Of course, membership is also a term that has been used by other news organizations as a synonym for “subscription” in order to make the transaction seem less transactional. Quartz wants to foster a relationship with members topics as well.

“That sense of community is galvanizing next-gen business professionals under the Quartz banner,” Lauf said. They’re known internally as Quartzians, he says, people who are excited for change. “Some are in the c-suite. It tends to be a slightly younger leadership class who are globally minded and tech savvy. They care about a lot of the big issues like the environment. There’s a Quartz tribe, and up until now there hasn’t really been a way to interact with one another.”

That community can be found most directly in its mobile app, which Quartz revamped in November when it launched membership. (It’s based on NewsPicks; Quartz’s old app, with its unique chat-based interface, was renamed Quartz Brief.)

Here was the pitch from Lauf and editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney:

We’ve believed from day one that our readers collectively know more about this new global economy than we do. So we’ve built the platform for you to see the expert views of other business people, and share your own. You’ll be joined by some of the top thinkers and doers in business, including tech investor Kai-Fu Lee, industry veterans Beth Comstock, Arianna Huffington, and Richard Branson, political scientist Ian Bremmer, and World Bank CEO Kristalina Georgieva. In addition to this hand-selected group of Quartz Pros, our editors will also curate the top news and ideas of the moment for you. Consider it your home for intelligent, nuanced conversation with leaders, subject matter experts, and curious minds like yourself.

It’s still free to participate in the app.

It was Michael Ferro, whom he barely knew, calling in spring 2016, telling him he’d make the medtech billionaire a “partner” in Tribune Publishing — if he agreed to invest $70.5 million (at a high price per share) and if he would commit immediately. Many corporate twists and turns later, Soon-Shiong ended up buying the Los Angeles Times and San Diego Union-Tribune for a cool half-billion dollars — acknowledging that he “overpaid” in order to save what he considers a vital southern California institution from rule by cost-cutters.

All that outlay was just a prelude, though: Soon-Shiong told me (in part one of our three-part series on the new L.A. Times) that he’ll take a further $50 million loss in 2019, the result of his investment in hiring and technology. And that seems just a down payment, given how far the Times still has to go — its 157,000 digital subscribers remain far behind The New York Times’ 3.4 million and The Washington Post’s more than 1.5 million — to beef up for the decade ahead.

Nine months into the Soon-Shiong era, the publishing world has lots of questions about what’s going on at the Times. The biggest: Can Patrick Soon-Shiong do for the Los Angeles Times what Jeff Bezos has done for The Washington Post? One’s the consumer marketing genius of our time, having built Amazon into a reinventor of retail. The other is a successful medtech innovator, at work on curing cancer, making next-gen batteries, and now reforming the news industry. That’s not to mention the solar-powered scooters or alternative polymers — the range of projects he’s involved in wowed a crowd in L.A. just last week, getting him described as a “rockstar” at a regional government event.

Might the new L.A. Times work closely with the new Post — two independent operators who share a lot of the same vision? That seems unlikely. Soon-Shiong had inherited the Post’s fast-syndicating Arc platform, but is now moving to build his own. Its new GrapheneCMS, launched Wednesday at Soon-Shiong’s San Diego Union-Tribune, becomes the company’s first new content management system.

Yesterday we relaunched the website for @sdut, one of California's largest metropolitan daily newspapers. The update includes faster page-load times, a cleaner design and a better mobile experience. Find out more here: https://t.co/FZwQqSIp8w #SanDiegoUnionTribune #CMS pic.twitter.com/alDEov7Olp

— Perfect Sense (@PerfectSenseDig) March 27, 2019

For Soon-Shiong, though, it’s not all about tech. He’s renovated a new Times building, bringing his employees a place “where they can have sun, they can have light, they can have joy in their work.” It’s an unusual mission statement for a newsroom many have considered one of the toughest to manage in the country, but it comes from a deep-pocketed owner who also considers himself the healer-in-chief of an “abused” newsroom. Soon-Shiong’s vision is vast; here, he explains in depth how it all fits together. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The newsroom as temple of knowledge

The Times newsroom as an abused child

Who owns the new IP?

$50 million loss…and counting

That first call from Michael Ferro

California…and beyond

Ken Doctor L.A. Times 2019 series

Read all of Ken Doctor's series on the new L.A. Times:

Newsonomics: Inside the new L.A. Times, a 100-year vision that bets on tech and top-notch journalism

It’s a few years behind its East Coast brethren in New York and Washington. But tens of millions in new investment and ambitious digital plans are showing a path back to its former prominence — and beyond.

March 27, 2019

Newsonomics: Patrick Soon-Shiong on the L.A. Times’ transmedia future, french-fry tweets, and modernizing the “newspaper” business

The billionaire owner on unions (“I think they did the unionize thing out of desperation”), esports (“We must start fighting for the 16-year-olds all the way to the 30-year-olds, because that’s not our demographic”), and hiring the intern.

March 28, 2019

Newsonomics: At the new L.A. Times, Norm Pearlstine is doing a little California dreaming

“With a traditional media company, you can have well-defined lines as long as you’re doing the same thing every day. But when you’re trying to reinvent yourself, if you don’t have an ease of communication with IT and with your business counterparts, it doesn’t work.”

March 29, 2019

That’s my big takeaway from a visit to Patrick Soon-Shiong’s new temple to next-stage journalism. Last summer, he moved his just-purchased L.A. Times (whose lease was expiring) to one of the sprawling L.A.’s least glamorous addresses: 2300 E. Imperial Highway, El Segundo, CA 90245. (Google’s satellite view is revealing.) That move stirred some newsroom complaints early on, though the new address seems to have receded as an issue as Soon-Shiong and editor-in-chief Norm Pearlstine have laid out their fast-paced, if still incremental, visions of a new Times.

The visions are big enough, but they stand out even more dramatically in a newspaper business still cutting its way to the future, looking to mergers and acquisitions as a short-term lifeline in the cash-poor trade. Like The New York Times and The Washington Post, the new L.A. Times wants to tell a contrarian story: Investment in the daily press underlines a deep belief in the power of journalism, optimism that it can make both readers’ lives and their democracy run better amid the gobsmacking rate of political and technological change.

“So my concern was editorial, the newsroom. That was my very, very, very first concern,” Soon-Shiong told me in a two-hour interview. “I knew that that’s where I needed to go as my first and highest priority. My second priority now is the business model, but the business model, sadly — and I don’t mean this to sound in any way arrogant — has to be consistent with this next generation, not with the past generation,” says the 66-year-old Soon-Shiong. He’s put his money behind his ideas, taking a loss of about $50 million this year as he marches the Times forward.

Soon-Shiong has been a man of some mystery in the news trade, his entry having been midwifed clumsily by one-time Tronc chairman Michael Ferro. In our wide-ranging interview — to be published in full here tomorrow — the med-tech billionaire connects many of the missing dots that have characterized coverage of him over the last several years.

The Times’ turnaround from those bad old days (actually quite recent!) of the Tronc/Tribune/Ferro reign is nothing less than remarkable.

The Times’ newsroom had unionized as Tronc’s tragicomic handling of its properties reached a denouement, and Ferro made Soon-Shiong an offer he figured he shouldn’t refuse. Soon-Shiong believes that had Tronc/Tribune kept title to the Times, it would have cut as many as another 100 jobs in the newsroom in short order.

His June 2018 purchase stopped any new cuts in their tracks. Norm Pearlstine, one of America’s top editors whose career had been built at The Wall Street Journal, Time Inc. and Bloomberg, inherited a newsroom of about 440, including part-timers and contractors. That still ranked among the largest in the country; The New York Times counts 1,550, The Washington Post about half that number.

Want a number that symbolizes the Soon-Shiong era? That 440 less than a year ago stands today at 535 newsroom employees.

Many in the business thought that Pearlstine, 76, would play something of a caretaker role — a short opening stint to help orient Soon-Shiong in this business and then stepping aside to pick a younger successor. But Soon-Shiong told me Monday that he’s signed Pearlstine to a new multi-year contract extending his term as executive editor.

“When Norm agreed to come out of retirement and become the executive editor of the Los Angeles Times, we were thrilled,” he said. “He has a long, impeccable track record as a journalist and as a media executive. He is truly enjoying the challenge of guiding the L.A. Times through the transition and positioning the company to succeed. As part of that, he is developing a diverse team of managers and possible successors. We are moving forward in a very positive direction and Norm and I have agreed to a multi-year extension of his term as executive editor. I could not be more pleased.”

How does Pearlstine now look at this almost unique turnaround opportunity? “I’m a little bit torn because I don’t think I’ve ever met an executive who did a turnaround who looked back and said, ‘I went too fast,'” he said. “So the pressure intention is to want to move quickly. But that said, I think we need a pause to just catch our breath and integrate…If you think about [Soon-Shiong’s] ambitions and what the brand lets you do, we need to do additional hiring as we roll out some of these products that we think will induce people to pay for content. What we’ve done over the last eight months has been to fill critical vacancies that had resulted from either layoff, buyouts, or attrition.”

Pearlstine described his Times journey so far in depth in two additional hours of conversations. (We’ll run a transcript of that interviews, like my one with Soon-Shiong, later this week here at Nieman Lab.)

It’s not just the number that matters — it’s also the kind of hires Pearlstine is making, near the top of the newsroom and throughout it. In leadership, he lured away from the East Coast both The New York Times’ Sewell Chan, who heads the news desk and is also responsible for audience engagement, and Slate’s top editor Julia Turner, who is creating the Times’ playbook for upping its arts and entertainment game. In this hiring binge, Pearlstine aims to do both the basic blocking and tackling required to heal an ailing news enterprise and to draw from the new world of digital journalism. His key hires of food critic Bill Addison from Eater and Peter Meehan from Lucky Peach signal an appreciation of journalism that comes from beyond old “newspaper” formulas.

But even that almost 25 percent headcount increase in less than a year marks just the beginning of the Times’ expansion ambitions.

Behold the fifth floor

Among the projects soon to get more attention is on the fifth floor. There, Soon-Shiong says, about 100 new staffers — about 80 of them still to be hired — will operate what he calls a new transmedia operation. The idea — in video, TV, audio, VR, games, and plain old-fashioned social media management — is multiplication.

The strategy: Even as fundamental newsroom resources are being rebuilt, magnify their impact across all the means of distribution and audience engagement that technology now enables. Which will work and which will prove to be experiments to retire? Soon-Shiong is the first to say he’s not sure. (A previous transmedia company he backed, Fourth Wall Studios, closed in 2012.) But while his optimism about applying his Nant medical tech to journalism was sometimes lampooned when he first bought into Tronc three years ago, he’s undaunted in explaining tomorrow’s potential.

Take another number: 157,000. That’s the number of digital subscriptions the L.A. Times has today. It’s roughly doubled over the past two tumultuous Times years. The growth rate is significant, as is the fact that it’s more than any other “local” daily in the U.S. But Soon-Shiong sees it as just the first handhold on a towering mountain. He wants to get to 1 million quickly and has a stretch target of 4 million over the next four years.

That quest for fast scale helps explain the Times’ decision to become a major partner of Apple in this week’s launch of the Apple News Plus subscription package. It’s another step in increasing reader revenue. Both The New York Times and The Washington Post declined to join Apple’s service, it makes more sense for Soon-Shiong’s paper. The L.A. Times wants to do everything it can to get “discovered” by new readers, and it has much less to fear from the cannibalization of existing direct digital subscribers. Says Soon-Shiong of the deal: “Apple News editors will be able to curate current and recent coverage from all of our sections…We are delighted to be one of just two U.S. newspapers selected to participate at launch and to share in the revenue from the premium subscription service, which will help fund our journalism.” (Some content, such as the paper’s archives, won’t be accessible through Apple News Plus.)

As for Soon-Shiong’s stretch goal, New York Times CEO Mark Thompson’s recently setting of a 10 million subscriber total by 2025 is instructive. Thompson had laid out that seemingly impossible number two years ago, but back then, he didn’t put a date on it. Now, having reached 4.3 million total subscribers, no one laughs at the 10 million aspiration anymore. That tells us a lot about the digital news business and all the ground Soon-Shiong’s paper will have to make up quickly.

How far is his paper behind The Washington Post or that other Times? (“You mean The New York Times,” he notes several times in our conversation, as if to emphasize there is another Times back in the national media conversation.) Jeff Bezos faced a similar challenge when he bought the Post six years ago, and the paper’s ascent since then has surprised even the most skeptical about the chances of journalistic rebirth. (Amazingly, when Bezos bought the Post, its newsroom staff was smaller than the L.A. Times’.)

Figure the L.A. Times is 6 to 10 years behind its East Coast models, the “papers” it once called its brethren and would like to again.

As it retools, the L.A. Times faces new competition — including from that other Times. The New York Times is intently focused on California, home to 40 million people. It has more digital subscribers in California than in the state of New York. Its California Today newsletter is its Trojan Horse into the Golden State, competing with the L.A. Times’ “Essential California” newsletter. Even as the L.A. Times works to maintain its claim on food coverage, The New York Times went and hired its first-ever California restaurant critic.

Maybe the meaning of the geographic identifiers in these two “newspaper” brands will be something quite different in the years ahead.

Why the long turnaround?

Why might it take the L.A. Times a half decade or more — and continued reinvestment — to enjoy success similar that of The New York Times or The Washington Post?

While any keen Angeleno will tell you that the Times’ troubles began when the Chandler family sold it (and the rest of Times Mirror) to Tribune Company in 2000, it’s been the past decade that inflicted the most pain to what was once one of the most powerful and influential of American press institutions. Certainly, the Chicagoans who ran Tribune — and often tried to run the Times from Chicago — never quite got it right, but it was the seizure of Tribune by bottom-feeder financier Sam Zell in 2007 that sent it into a deepening tailspin.

Throughout it all — Zell’s reign, his five-year “bankruptcy from hell,” Tribune’s split into newspaper and broadcast companies, new management, and then the company’s second legal seizure by the arriviste Ferro in 2016 — the Times resisted. That resistance was both staunch and at times comical. The L.A. Times newsroom would come to be known, rightly or wrongly, as the toughest room in the country.

Amid the turmoil, the L.A. Times was more a punchline than a setter of the news agenda, even though its newsroom through the years (and still today) has produced among the highest-quality newspaper reporting and writing in the country.

There was the midnight firing of publisher Austin Beutner by then-CEO Jack Griffin — who himself was dispatched just five months later by Ferro. Who can forget the three-month tenure of Lewis D’Vorkin as editor-in-chief, after longtime Timesman Davan Maharaj was axed? Or Maharaj’s secret taping of Ferro, chronicled in David Folkenflik’s watchdog reporting on Tronc excess for NPR and giving us the wonderful headline: “Tribune, Tronc And Beyond: A Slur, A Secret Payout And A Looming Sale“? Or the cameo appearances of serial CEO Ross Levinsohn and his sidekick Mickie Rosen in the farce? It all makes the Times’ breakout true-crime podcast Dirty John seem fairly tame. (Anyone written the Times’ screenplay yet?) Keen industry observer Tom Rosenstiel calls the Times, at the time Soon-Shiong bought it, “the most degraded major metro in the country.”

That environment is just part of what Soon-Shiong inherited when he decided to buy. (Ferro had given him a weekend to decide whether he wanted his hometown paper so much that he’d pay a half a billion dollars for it — not allowing him to do much due diligence. In our interview, Soon-Shiong also tells the story of how he entered into a “partnership” after a first whirlwind weekend courtship.)

Soon-Shiong, Pearlstine, COO Chris Argentieri, and the emerging new order of management also inherited a broken technology stack. As Tribune/Tronc reeled for a decade, it had both centralized its operational systems and technologies — and failed to sufficiently invest in them to keep them up to date.

Argentieri describes what taking back the Times from Tronc/Tribune meant operationally: “Tribune operated with a number of functions shared across the company over the last couple of years — well beyond your typical shared services of finance, IT, HR. More than just the back office — so consumer marketing, circulation, national sales. Really, in Los Angeles at the end of Tribune’s ownership, we were essentially left with the newsroom and local advertising — and virtually everything else, including manufacturing, distribution, was all centralized.”

As Soon-Shiong told me, “With regard to the technology, I found it was non-existent. Not even…to fix. Just non-existent. I worried about the systems to the extent that I was worried: Could I run this paper with these systems that are so archaic?”

So even as the L.A. Times became “independent,” it remained — and still remains, roughly through the end of this year — stuck in part on aging, fatigued systems. Observers who wondered why Soon-Shiong signed a “standstill” agreement in January — allowing Tribune to commit to a merger or sale without his assent — have their answer. It was all that old tech that the Times still needs to publish (until its fast-paced plan to replace it all is complete) that was responsible. Soon-Shiong agreed to the standstill — which should make it possible for Tribune to merge with a McClatchy or otherwise sell itself — and in return got his “transition services agreement” extended until June 2020.

There are still many decisions to be made as the clock runs toward that date. Among them: Will the Times keep or replace Arc, The Washington Post’s fast-emerging new newspaper platform standard? Does it believe that Arc can rise to the occasion and help power Soon-Shiong’s expansive vision for the Times?

Overall, says Argentieri, the Times is “probably 40% there, I would say, through transitioning of services.” The big remaining piece, he says, “is to stand up our own traditional IT infrastructure — so our own HRIS system, our own ERP system, our own infrastructure from a hosting standpoint. All are underway and will happen in 2019.”

Argentieri notes the unique perspective Soon-Shiong brings to the beleaguered newspaper industry. If Jeff Bezos brought the best consumer marketing chops, Soon-Shiong brings his own highly profitable experience.

“Nant [Soon-Shiong’s collection of tech enterprises] brings a pretty deep understanding from a technology standpoint. It’s a little different than how certainly we had looked at things…They look at things from fiber in the ground all the way up through the technology stats. Most, particularly legacy media companies have looked at IT as a major cost center, and put every bit of investment they could make into ‘digital business.’ We’re trying to look at it more holistically, because storage is cheaper, the infrastructure, there’s more things you can do today to have a site and app load faster, and all that leads to better user experience — where we just wouldn’t have focused on moving an infrastructure off servers in a data center in Chicago to somewhere else.”

After the buy and the building, $50 million

All of this transition — in hiring and in technology — comes at a hefty price. Which brings us to the third noteworthy number about the Times: $50 million. That’s the amount Soon-Shiong will have spent on the new Times in his first year of ownership.

How much more investment may be possible? Says Soon-Shiong: “I’m willing to continue to make an investment and collectively, as a collective, to work together” — mindful of the first contract with the News Guild, which unionized the place the week before he took title.

Like most other people of great wealth — Soon-Shiong’s fortune has been reported at over $7 billion — he’s not one to throw money around. Like Bezos, he’ll invest, but “he’s focused on where every dollar goes,” one insider says. As at The Washington Post, good ideas can get funded, but they’re approved by Soon-Shiong on an initiative-by-initiative basis.

How has that tough (and “abused,” as Soon-Shiong puts it) newsroom responded? Conversations with several staffers suggest a wary optimism — about as good as it gets in any newsroom. When the first union contract is concluded, staffers will see raises that mark a clear departure from the experience of their brethren at other dailies, including those still residing within Tribune. Those raises should add up to at least a 10 percent increase over the next three years.

“For staff who are over scale, they would see a 5 percent raise in year 1, 2.5 percent in year 2, 2.5 percent in year 3 under the company’s offer,” says Matt Pearce, a News Guild leader at the Times. “So in other words, pretty much the worst you can do is a guaranteed 10 percent raise across three years. It’s not quite enough to get us to match the pay standards at our East Coast competitors, and doesn’t repair the 10 years the newsroom went without regular raises, but it’s a decent bite out of the apple.”

For those who had been “underpaid,” the impact will be greater. “The company’s last/best/final offer on pay creates a series of pay minimums that would lift up some underpaid staffers fairly dramatically — in some cases, we’re talking raises of 30 percent or more on ratification,” says Pearce.

In addition to wanting a piece of the intellectual property action involved in Soon-Shiong’s multimedia adventures (which Soon-Shiong discusses in our interview), the contract addresses the usual issues: severance, jurisdiction, and seniority. It could be a month or two away from completion.

The guild, representing a workforce still recovering from shellshock, wants to add another clause to the new contract, one on “successorship.” Pearce: “So the contract survives, in the hopefully remote scenario that Patrick decides to sell the paper sometime in the next three years.” Just. In. Case.

Not yet defining the new L.A. Times

If you are reading this hoping to hear the new Times’ leadership clearly outline its strategy for the years ahead — sorry to disappoint you. Ever since Soon-Shiong bought the Times and pledged to rebuild it, people have been wondering about the big strategic questions.

Will the new L.A. Times be more national, expanding still further a fairly robust and re-energized D.C. bureau? More global, seizing the opportunity of the “Asian century” and its spot on the Pacific Rim? More California-centric, seeing a “nation” of 40 million to serve? Or will it be happy to focus on dominating the large and wealthy southern California market?

In other words, what category does the Times fit in now — or will it fit in in a few years? Is it America’s largest local newspaper in the country or its smallest national one?

(In Monday’s keynote, Apple split the difference, calling it “the country’s largest metropolitan newspaper and a rising star.”)

At Apple event .. beautiful theater… pic.twitter.com/xe01tEBNWf

— Dr. Pat Soon-Shiong (@DrPatSoonShiong) March 25, 2019

It’s both and neither at the same time, and that makes classifying it tough. “It’s probably safe to say if we’re trying to get to a million digital subscribers over a number of years, we will start with local. But we’ll have to evolve into California stories that have a global relevance,” Argentieri told me. (Former publisher Austin Beutner hired Argentieri, a magazine veteran, back in 2014, and through all the Tronc turmoil, he somehow managed to keep his head down. He widely receives plaudits for his steady hand.) “I think we’ll reach a point of penetration with people that are, you know, ferociously into local content, and we’ll have to go beyond that in some areas that travel better.”

The reality is that the Times is creating the building blocks that could easily be used across multiple strategies and target audiences. For now at least, instead of worrying about classification, let’s watch what’s in at the new L.A. Times. Its ownership is only nine months old, but Soon-Shiong talks about a 100-year vision — there’ll be plenty of time to classify later.

Ken Doctor L.A. Times 2019 series

Read all of Ken Doctor's series on the new L.A. Times:

Newsonomics: Inside the new L.A. Times, a 100-year vision that bets on tech and top-notch journalism

It’s a few years behind its East Coast brethren in New York and Washington. But tens of millions in new investment and ambitious digital plans are showing a path back to its former prominence — and beyond.

March 27, 2019

Newsonomics: Patrick Soon-Shiong on the L.A. Times’ transmedia future, french-fry tweets, and modernizing the “newspaper” business

The billionaire owner on unions (“I think they did the unionize thing out of desperation”), esports (“We must start fighting for the 16-year-olds all the way to the 30-year-olds, because that’s not our demographic”), and hiring the intern.

March 28, 2019

Newsonomics: At the new L.A. Times, Norm Pearlstine is doing a little California dreaming

“With a traditional media company, you can have well-defined lines as long as you’re doing the same thing every day. But when you’re trying to reinvent yourself, if you don’t have an ease of communication with IT and with your business counterparts, it doesn’t work.”

March 29, 2019

On Wednesday, the International Trade Commission —like numerous judicial or regulatory bodies before it in the Trump era — reversed the tariffs that the Commerce Department had placed on Canadian newsprint.

The unanimous 5-0 decision surprised many, even though the ill-considered tariffs were silly, ignoring the actual way the newsprint trade has long been structured. The whole effort symbolized the times: a private equity company, recently buying into an established industry, looking for a quick buck, and using the politicized trade environment to do it. Even as the tariffs go away, it’s essential to understand that they represent only a small part of the problem that daily newspaper publishers now face. Though that black swan of tariff doom has flown away — an appeal of the decision by NORPAC, which brought the case, is possible, but seems unlikely — other troublesome threats remain aloft.

First, even in terms of the price of newsprint, the elimination of the tariffs provides only partial immediate relief.

Significantly, the recent rise in newsprint pricing of about 30 percent has been driven only partly by the tariffs. In fact, one CEO of a substantial chain told me this week that only a third of the pricing increase could be directly linked to the tariffs. Two-thirds of it, he said, was the “premium pricing” most of the newsprint producers added on to the tariffs. Why? Because they could, tucking in the price increases along with real tariff-induced pass-along pricing. Publishers and newsprint producers long have played a cat-and-mouse game on pricing, with increases, rollbacks, feints, and the like.

Will the as-much-as-two-thirds increase stick or go away? While the Tom-and-Jerry game is nothing new, the terrain on which it now plays out has been transformed. Publishers use maybe a third of the newsprint they used in the year 2000, according to industry analysts. That means the mills themselves, as suppliers to a receding industry, have consolidated. There are fewer owners, fewer mills, and less supply. Consequently, publishers who might have tried to play three suppliers off against each other in days gone by no longer can.

The bigger picture: As the daily printed newspaper era fades rapidly into history, everything about it is getting tougher.

If the tariffs, and related higher pricing, had stuck, publishers were looking at a 10 percent reduction in EBITDA. That was going to be a big hit, and it had already spurred a spate of staff, section, and day cutbacks (as chronicled here). From Tampa, Florida, to Salisbury, North Carolina, to Natchez, Michigan, to Grand Junction, Colorado,, the list was growing.

Now, as the News Media Alliance, which built a coalition of hundreds of organizations to oppose the tariffs, put it on Wednesday: “The tariffs have disrupted the newsprint market, increasing newsprint costs by nearly 30 percent and forcing many newspapers to reduce their print distribution and cut staff. We hope today’s reversal of these newsprint tariffs will restore stability to the market and that publishers will see a full and quick recovery.”

Were it so.

In truth, the print newspaper industry is plummeting southward at a faster and faster rate. Consider, in aggregate and individually, the financial results of the just-reported second-quarter, and see that the tariff relief just removes one boot from the neck of an industry writhing in pain.

These four charts on Q2 overall revenues from four top publicly traded daily newspaper companies display starkly how poorly all the chains are doing in the strongest economy in a decade. For each, I’ve pulled out “same store” revenues, meaning that the impact of acquisitions made or properties sold over the last year are excluded. Not all companies report all the numbers, even in these basic categories. So omissions are noted. Further, what each company includes in each of these categories may differ, usually slightly. Overall, though, these apples-to-apples comparisons are directionally accurate.

Most of the chains find themselves slipping farther and farther from revenue growth. This headline number tells you that digital initiatives simply are not making up for overall print revenue losses.

It’s been about 10 years since these companies grew overall revenue quarter over quarter.

Next, consider their print ad decline.

This is the number that is causing the big overall revenue decline. Print advertising is disappearing rapidly, with huge percentage losses on a base number that has decreased by some 60 percent in 10 years.

Now look at their circulation revenue decline:

Long ago, newspaper companies hoped that digital ad revenues would make up for print ad losses, a phenomenon that never occurred consistently. Over the past couple of years — owing to The New York Times’ innovation in digital subscription and reader revenue — circulation revenue gains were supposed to make up for ad (mainly print ad) losses.

Between 2015 and 2017, a number of daily newspaper chains were able to report positive circulation revenue quarter over quarter. The combination of higher print pricing and the growing digital subscriptions produced that positive number. But now they have hit a wall and gone negative. Volume loss in print circulation is accelerating; digital subscription momentum has been hard to maintain.

One current phenomenon: As publishers cut back on newsprint, cutting sections and pages, they worsened their value proposition with their best and most loyal, high-paying customers: their print subscribers. Even subscribers who were loyal for decades are cancelling.

Make no mistake: All these publishers are growing digital revenues. I can’t break out good comparative numbers because publishers report those revenues in non-standard buckets, making easy comparison impossible. But digital revenues are less and less able to make up for lost print revenues, both ad and subscription.

McClatchy’s Craig Forman sums up the journey against time he and his fellow CEOs are on. The big idea is to reduce the percentage of revenue dependent on the slowly dying revenue stream of print advertising, the slowly dying revenue stream.

Forman said on McClatchy’s earnings call, “Revenues exclusive of print newspaper advertising accounted for 80.4 percent of total revenues in the second quarter of 2018, an increase from 74.7 percent in the second quarter of 2017.”

That number is moving in the right direction at McClatchy and elsewhere, but the dependence on print revenues — both print ads and, less so, print subscribers — clouds the 2020s future.

And so we have expense cuts, which will only deepen in 2019. Newspaper companies have been cutting expenses literally for a decade, and it’s not clear how much more there is to cut.

She was following the Main Street Project, an organization that helps vulnerable communities in Winnipeg, as they handed out food, water and harm reduction supplies to homeless people throughout the downtown core. The 3 a.m. reporting time slot was one she actually had to beat out another reporter for: “I won out! And then I thought: What did I just get myself into?”

She was one of 24 reporters telling stories about Winnipeg over the course of 24 hours focusing on something everyone can relate to — food. Posted online Aug. 16, Food for Thought is a reporting project the Free Press has published outside of its paywall as both an experiment in storytelling and an effort to show their community how a newspaper binds them together. And community members are engaging with it — average reading time on the piece has been 19 minutes.

Free Press editor Paul Samyn was reading The New York Times Magazine in June when he saw its Love City project, which profiled 24 couples in New York City over a 24 hour period. He had been looking for a fun and engaging project for the summer months, which many editors know can be a quiet time for local news. “So I went, well that was kind of cool,” said Samyn. “[If] The New York Times can do it, then clearly the Winnipeg Free Press has to do it too.”

Samyn and his editorial team wanted a topic as engaging as love; they landed on food. But this would be more than sharing recipes or restaurant recommendations. The true focus of this story is community connections, and so the editorial team endeavoured to cover as wide a swath of Winnipeg as possible. “So you get things at a truck stop at the west end of the city; you get at the south end a really intimate story about feeding people at an institution where there are some significant mental challenges,” he said. “We wanted to make sure that we could show to our readership that we are covering the city like no one else.”

Part of the challenge was getting all 24 slots covered without interrupting the normal workflow of the newsroom. The editorial team had identified the target areas it wanted to address and what time reporters would head to the location. Staff — including sports reporters, arts reporters, and editorial managers — were given the opportunity to sign up for spots they wanted — as it turned out, there was no issue filling any of them. “They are creative people,” said Samyn. “I don’t want what we do to ever become routine.” This was a chance for the whole newsroom to do something different.

Among the places the series took readers were a mother’s living room while she breastfed her child; a food centre that creates nourishing meals for free; and a Jewish community center for Shabbat dinner.

May was drawn to the early morning slot because of the challenge of finding a story at what, for most, is an ungodly hour to be awake. “I knew I’d have to report whatever happened within the hour, so I wasn’t sure what kind of story I’d end up with, but I figured not all that many people experience Winnipeg at 3 a.m. anyway.” Her piece chronicled how the Main Street Project hands out food through downtown Winnipeg. “There is a lot of need in the city,” she said. “So if we’re talking about how food brings people together, I knew I didn’t want to overlook the more vulnerable perspective.”

The feature was led in the newsroom by Scott Gibbons, associate editor of enterprise projects, and Wendy Sawatzky, associate editor of digital. They didn’t want to just run 24 stories — they wanted to showcase the visual components and give a sense of the timing that was a key part of the project.

Samyn said they decided not to post the feature behind the paper’s paywall because they saw it as an opportunity to put their best foot forward.

While summer traffic typically takes a dip for most news media websites, engagement has been good with this particular story. According to Samyn, the average time spent reading Food for Thought has been 19 minutes. “I don’t think we’ve ever really seen that level of engagement with anything we’ve done,” he said.

With a municipal election coming in the fall, there may not be time for another project of this scope on the immediate horizon. But Samyn said it has been useful to understand that the newsroom can take on a project of this scope — and the lessons learned will be applied to news coverage in the future.

But the biggest thing to come out of the project is building connections with the community. “I think the important element of this project, and I think the challenge for newspapers, is to demonstrate what our newsroom can do and make the case that no one covers communities like newspapers,” he said.

After May filed her own piece, she took a quick nap and went back to her regular beat. She too had to wait to see what her colleagues had written and what the piece would look like as a whole. “It was fun for me to read all the 24-hour vignettes when the project went up,” she said. “I learned a lot from my colleagues’ reporting, showing all these different pieces of the city, knowing that we all kinda started from scratch with this idea and had to wait and see how it would turn out.”

A new WAN-IFRA report walks through several case studies of news organizations (note: mostly European), that have found some success retaining their paying subscribers, through an elusive combination of consistently offering readers the news experience they want, and tracking relevant metrics to address problem points that might lead them to unsubscribe.

Easier said than done; we hear you. The news organizations represented in the report range from national to local-level outlets, and their paywall and audience growth strategies run the gamut. Many of them have the backing of a significant editorial, tech, analytics, and sales teams. Still, here are several ideas to steal:

“What does a subscription to X really do for me?”

Access to good, walled-off content isn’t necessarily enough to keep subscribers: “It’s about understanding what it is that your customers value and providing more of it. The information is found in your user data; how they behave on your site, what value they extract and how. Are your personalization efforts moving the needle? Are users engaging with your app push notifications? Are they consuming new types of content, and if so how did they discover it?” The benefits of subscription don’t only come in the form of premium stories on a website. It might be a special newsletter or a separate app. It might be access to more functionalities and features for browsing readers. It might be the promise of actually useful personalization.

Several of the publishers interviewed for the WAN-IFRA report are finding that the types of stories that get a lot of readers to sign up as subscribers are then also the types of stories they’re more likely to consume once they’re a subscriber: “What converts and what retains is pretty much the same thing,” Pål Nedregotten, CDO of the Norwegian local media group Amedia, said. “It’s basically about local value. If we provide local value for any given audience segment that we’re targeting, we will most likely have success.”

This, however, is not true for Schibsted-owned Svenska Dagbladet, which has found that “need-to-know material converts (related to how to live your life, understand the world), while nice-to-know (guides, arts, reviews) converts badly but is key for retention.” It’s been pushing cooperation between editorial desks: “For example, a series of articles on the Swedish housing market from the financial point of view (the Business depart- ment) and the psychology angle (the in-depth section within the Arts/Culture department).”

Don’t assume that to attract and engage subscribers, your organization must consistently drop expensive-to-produce investigations (or that that’s the only way to convert readers):

In the fall of 2017, the Swedish news company MittMedia launched comprehensive property sales coverage using this technology and a partnership with Google. For every house sold in all its local markets, the bot identifies an angle (e.g. the most expensive house sold this year in village X), creates a short text, and pulls an image from Google Streetview. In Sweden, names of buyers are a matter of public record, which adds to the value of this content. Not only has this type of content generated several hundreds of new paying subscribers, it’s also the most consumed type of content by existing subscribers.

“Traditionally, we’ve only reacted to churn once it’s happened. It’s of course much more powerful to be able to pre-empt it.”

The German daily Welt has implemented an internal “loyalty score,” which makes it easier for all parts of the organization from editorial to marketing to tech to understand where the organization is losing people. (Die Welt first launched a metered paywall in 2012, but overhauled its model and relaunched under a premium model in 2016. It has 80,000 digital-only subscribers.) According to Welt, half of their customers leave in the first three months, after which the rate of unsubscribing rate drops dramatically.

“We are convinced that the easier it is for people to subscribe and unsubscribe, a bit like on Netflix, the more likely it is that they will come back to us.”

French daily Le Figaro, which launched its paywall in 2015 and now has 88,000 digital-only subscribers, looks at how new visitors to the site behave for six months or even up to a year before ever pushing a tailored subscription offer to them. It’s also rethinking what to do when someone subscribes through an offer, then unsubscribes (then resubscribes, then unsubscribes, and on and on). Le Figaro also asked those subscribing to answer a few questions at the end of its subscription sign-up process, and found that 43 percent of those people didn’t plan to buy a subscription when they came to the website, but ended up signing up due to a specific article — meaning many of these readers wanted to read that one story, and never intended to stay subscribed in the first place.

“There’s a structural change in how the younger generation behave, and it makes how we used to measure churn irrelevant in many cases,” Gilles Corbineau, director of eBusiness and digital subscriptions, said. “We monitor how many subscribers we keep every month, the number of days a subscriber stays with us, and the number of days between two subscriptions. In other words; people subscribe to a promotional offer and cancel several times, but at some point the time lapse between two subscriptions shortens, and they finally stay with us. We’ve seen that after four subscriptions, which are not necessarily back-to-back, they tend to become loyal subscribers.

“Of course, we also need to work on ways to get out of the pure promotional subscription trap,” he added. “We need to test different offers, maybe based on editorial packages, for example during election periods — anything that can drive other reasons to stay than the promo prices period.”

The full report, which costs €250 for non-WAN-IFRA members, is available here.

Facebook and Google have taken over not only an increasing share of the attention, but also much of the ad market. This has taken away another large chunk of the revenue that supports journalism, following classified ads in the unbundling of the business model that once made newspapers a thriving business.

The rise of subscription models and paywalls has begun to inject fresh money in some media houses, but those who aren’t subscribing to journalistic media could be left worse off. It’s no longer a matter of picking up a single newspaper copy at a newsstand; a paywalled news industry limits information to those able to make a long-term financial commitment, one that usually involves disclosing your personal data. And that personal data has become a commodity, being used to target everything from advertising to political manipulation.

At this year’s SXSW conference, I met Bell, who before founding the Tow Center, worked for many years as an award-winning journalist, digital pioneer, and later digital editor of The Guardian. She worries that we’re entering a period where the messages we receive are individually adapted, and we no longer have access to the same information.

“In a way, that’s what we think we’ve seen in the 2016 election cycle: Certain people getting certain messages, others getting different ones, and not really knowing where it’s coming from, who’s deploying it, and with no kind of transparency,” she said. “We are being made to feel a particular way by the media we’re consuming, and it is not an organic, cultural phenomenon, but a highly manipulated political phenomenon. Unless you can have free high-quality news, you don’t have an antidote; you really don’t have an antidote.”

More of our conversation, edited slightly for length and clarity, is below.

For the past couple of years, the Journal — home to one of journalism’s oldest paywalls — has been testing different ways to allow non-subscribers to sample its stories — refining a subscription prediction model that allows it to show different visitors, who have different likelihoods of subscribing, different levels of access to its site.

Non-subscribed visitors to WSJ.com now each receive a propensity score based on more than 60 signals, such as whether the reader is visiting for the first time, the operating system they’re using, the device they’re reading on, what they chose to click on, and their location (plus a whole host of other demographic info it infers from that location). Using machine learning to inform a more flexible paywall takes away guesswork around how many stories, or what kinds of stories, to let readers read for free, and whether readers will respond to hitting paywall by paying for access or simply leaving. (The Journal didn’t share additional details about the score, such as the exact range of numbers it could be. I asked what my personal score was; no luck there, since the scores are anonymized.)

“I think back to maybe eight months ago, when we were looking at all these charts with a lot of different data points. Now we’ve got a model that’s learned to a point where, if I get a person’s score, I pretty much know how likely they will be to subscribe,” Karl Wells, the Journal’s general manager for membership, told me when we spoke last week, with a Journal spokesperson on the call. “What we’ve found is that if we open up the paywall — we call it sampling — to those who have a low propensity to subscribe, then their likelihood to subscribe goes up.” (The Journal’s model looks at a window of two to three weeks.)

The Journal has found that these non-subscribed visitors fall into groups that can be roughly defined as hot, warm, or cold, according to Wells. Those with high scores above a certain threshold — indicating a high likelihood of subscribing — will hit a hard paywall. Those who score lower might get to browse stories for free in one session — and then hit the paywall. Or they may be offered guest passes to the site, in various time increments, in exchange for providing an email address (thus giving the Journal more signals to analyze). The passes are also offered based on a visitor’s score, aimed at people whose scores indicate they could be nudged into subscribing if tantalized with just a little bit more Journal content.

The cost of a subscription doesn’t vary based on a reader’s score. As of the publication of this story, the Journal has been offering $222 for a full year of digital all-access; there’s a student deal at $49 for a year.

“These passes play a role in making our subscription model more predictive,” Wells said, since now the Journal can collect additional data on the person who’s been hopping around the site for a while. “They also still put a value on our content, telling you we’re still a paid-for site, and that you’re being welcomed in as a guest to enjoy 24 hours of access.” A person willing to hand over an email is also more willing to eventually pay for a subscription. Other targeting possibilities open up as more people hand over their emails: the Journal could email a subscriber with a slightly higher propensity score a little more often, or recommend specific newsletters on topics they’ve already shown an interested in. (Passes are the least common of the site experiences a non-subscribed reader might see. They’ve been undergoing some technical upgrades, so if you’re hunting around for one right now you might not see one.)

In addition to guest passes, WSJ.com has publicly tested other ways for non-subscribers to try out its stories. In a feature introduced in August 2016, a Journal reporter who shared a link to a Journal story on social media could unlock that story for readers. The sharing option also used to extend to subscribers who shared a Journal story on social media, though that channel is in flux as the Journal moves completely towards its reader score-driven paywall system.

Wells and the spokesperson didn’t share any specific numbers around conversion rates or how many guest passes had been offered, pointing broadly to the organization’s latest subscriber numbers. The Journal now has 1,389,000 digital subscribers, according to News Corp’s latest earnings report, up from 1.08 million a year ago.

The Journal is hardly the first to use propensity modeling techniques — common in the app world for trying to convert users into paying users — to increase subscriptions. The Financial Times has for years been using reader data to more efficiently target readers with the offers that they are more likely to respond to (Ken Doctor wrote about these efforts for us as far back as 2010, here, here, and here.)

Scandinavian media giant Schibsted developed a prediction model that identifies, based on many signals, readers who are 3× to 5× more likely than average to buy a subscription, and then advertises offers to them differently. (Wells actually presented the Journal’s developments on this front at a paid-content summit hosted this month by Axel Springer in Berlin, at which news organizations like the Journal and Schibsted brands discussed how to improve digital subscription strategies.)

Wall metaphors were once sufficient for news organizations’ paywall strategies. A paywall could be deliberately “leaky” or “porous.” The gates could be fully opened for public emergencies like severe weather events or terrorist attacks. It could be a hard wall you could peek over, but with no gaps in between. That metaphor doesn’t quite work for the Journal anymore.

“If you think about paywalls broadly, there have been metered, freemium, and hard paywalls. Metered considers people who will want to read more than, say, five stories. Freemium assumes, this and not that is the type of content people will pay for. This is what we’ve tried to move on from,” Wells said when I tried to ask about whether certain types of articles were always more likely to get a reader to pay, and what other specific holes there were for WSJ.com. “Our model now is to flip that and start with the reader. The content you see is the output of the paywall, rather than an input.”

A previous version of this article stated that the Journal had done away with a previous exception allowing any Journal subscriber or journalist sharing a Journal story on social media to unlock the stories for non-subscribers who click through. A Journal spokesperson has clarified that because tests are ongoing in this area, the site experience may still vary for people with different propensity scores.

What’s at the top of PSS’s to-do list?

It’s been a week of almost eerie quiet in L.A., as the reality of new owner Patrick Soon-Shiong sinks in. The Guild’s elected its local leadership and the L.A. Times newsroom sees that it barely dodged the bullet of major Tronc reorganization.

Tronc announced Tuesday that it would concentrate all page makeup and design in Chicago, following the centralization models now becoming standard among chains, with GateHouse the national leader in that movement. That will be mean the elimination of more local jobs.

In addition, as reported by Chicago media critic Robert Feder, Tronc’s Tim Knight emphasized a salary review: “Over the next six weeks, while positions are being determined in line with our plan, we expect each local newsroom to review base compensation; where appropriate each newsroom will make pay increases reflecting either change in responsibility and/or adjusting to market.”

Why might that review be happening now? Count two big reasons: the reorganization and coming job cuts — and the unprecedentedly successful unionization of the L.A. Times in January. Tronc’s message to anyone thinking of leading a unionization charge at its other papers: “All pay changes for staffers not governed by collective bargaining will go into effect on April 1.”

While journalists in Baltimore, Chicago, Hartford, New York, and Orlando await the changes, in L.A., sources report “a palpable optimism.” And esteemed former Times publisher Tom Johnson weighed in with his hope on Facebook. (“My sense is that far better days may be ahead. I so hope so.”)

Who can blame them, after 20 years of Chicago-based rule and a decade of mismanagement and wavering strategies?

But no one has any idea what the new owner of the Times will do — most likely including the owner himself.

The brilliant biotech billionaire is but a novice in publishing. Consequently, who he hires to lead the business and the newsroom will tell us much about how much of that optimism may be maintained. Feelers to potential new editors have begun, as trusted Soon-Shiong advisers begin to explore the field, sources tell me.

In one sense, the Times can take a deep breath. Soon-Shiong’s deal with Tronc includes 18 months of shared transition services, I’m told. That would include the continuation of the Arc platform, licensed from The Washington Post. The paper launched it in late January.

If Shiong isn’t obsessed with quarterly financial returns, he can continue to reassure Times employees of a considered — and funded — transformation ahead. Will he offer the same kind of “runway” to the Times that Jeff Bezos offered his wary Washington Post troops five years ago? His initial letter set a good tone, but when will he pay an in-person visit?

Will he offer further reassuring steps, like embracing the paper’s Washington bureau? That team now looks like it could become part of the new Times, when it and its sibling the San Diego Union-Tribune, formally split from Tronc in either late March or early April.

Times seller Michael Ferro had been actively planning to close that bureau. Tronc had been in talks with both Axios and another significant D.C. news player, wanting to syndicate content and cut costs. That Axios/Tronc deal is no longer in the works, and it’s unlikely Ferro will find a high-profile partner.

It’s Ferro’s follow-on steps after the sale that Soon-Shiong may want to watch closely.

For instance, Tronc still owns, we believe, LA.com. And Ferro has recently talked about providing his newly rehabilitated Tribune Interactive CEO Ross Levinsohn with “hundreds” of content creators to make his new, if still hazy, syndication play real.

Could Ferro become a competitor to the L.A. Times?

Takeaway: It’s almost time to place your bets in the game of Billionaire Bingo, a diversion I first mentioned five years ago. Will L.A. get a Bezos, Taylor, or Henry, or an Adelson? Or some other new breed entirely?

Is it just the L.A. Times that’s in journalistic turmoil, or is it all of California?

While the Times hogged all the attention, the state’s other big publisher — Digital First Media — should be getting more national attention. Alden Global Capital, DFM’s owner, continues to cut to a number, a profit number, which it’s been able to maintain even as the newspaper business absorbed a brutal 2017.

In southern California, its eleven titles (including some meaningful and once-proud local papers like the Long Beach Press-Telegram and the Orange County Register) now will pay about 250 journalists, down from about 380 only last year.

In the Bay Area, the once nationally prominent Mercury News is — almost unbelievably — down to 41 in the newsroom. Another 65 are counted as “East Bay” employees, given DFM’s super-clustering of newsrooms. That means its Bay Area News Group has concentrated editing and design in one location, and lots of regional reporting is “shared.”

The net result: “That leaves BANG with no K-12 reporter, no higher education reporter, no health reporter, and no one covering Santa Clara County government. It also significantly limits coverage at San Jose’s City Hall and entirely eliminates coverage in some of the region’s smaller neighboring cities, including Sunnyvale, Cupertino, Campbell and San Jose’s Rose Garden, Almaden, Cambrian and Willow Glen neighborhoods.” You know, Cupertino, an incorporated city of 58,000, hometown of a little concern called Apple.

Takeaway: The Times drama has provided good copy, but the destruction of the Mercury News deserves a moment of attention, if not a moment of silence. The L.A. Times newsroom still houses more than 400 journalists — about 10 times the Merc, amazingly. As recently as 10 years ago, it was the Merc that paid about 400, while the Times, at its height, paid 1,100.

Not that long ago, the San Jose paper proclaimed itself “The Newspaper of Silicon Valley.” Silicon Valley has done quite well, becoming the global economic engine and driving great regional affluence. But the economically fecund region has become — in less than a decade — a news desert.

Is it California, or is it the whole West Coast?

Advance Publications’ Oregonian, the largest daily in Oregon, just reduced its staff by 11, bringing it to 80. “It’s with a very heavy heart that I bring you this news,” said Oregonian editor Mark Katches. “Today, the positions of 11 of our colleagues in the newsroom are being eliminated.” These cuts follow ones in 2015 and in 2013, when The Oregonian flipped its switch on less-than-daily full edition print publishing.

Katches, who served as a top editor for the nationally respected, Bay Area-based Center for Investigative Reporting before taking the Oregonian job in 2014, has managed to preserve a watchdog role for the paper, amid the cuts. Seven journalists make up the investigative team; three data visualization specialists support those projects. Projects include ones focusing on eldercare abuse and bad policing.

Two hours south of Portland, Oregon’s largest family-owned daily recently gave up the fight for independence. The Baker family, owners of the well-regarded-over-the-years Eugene Register-Guard, succumbed to a GateHouse offer. The family bought the paper — still a 46,000-circulation daily — in 1927, and I had the misfortune to compete against it when I launched a local alternative weekly in 1975. Its once-dominant local impact has dwindled along with its staff, but its passing marks another turning point for West Coast journalism.

Takeaway: National media still focuses on the big, odd stories like the L.A. Times, but the desolation of the local press continues to worsen across the country each month.

Kudos to ProPublica. I interviewed ProPublica president Dick Tofel in Miami at last week’s Digital Content Next conference, and he noted both ProPublica’s total of 85 national staffers and the 14 it employs at its recently launched Illinois state project. Most tellingly: the title of its just-published annual report: 2017: The Next Frontier Is Local.

Are those vultures circling Boston?

Casual observers tell me it looks to them like Alden, DFM’s owner, is tiring of the business, as it cuts deeply in California and sees seasoned executives like Denver Post publisher Mac Tully and editor Greg Moore leave, fed up.

Au contraire! On Wednesday, DFM more than doubled GateHouse’s offer for the bankrupt Boston Herald, bidding $11.9 million for the property. Sources say the sum surprised GateHouse, which hadn’t even expected DFM to enter the bidding. Second, it believes DFM is overpaying, having far outbid both GateHouse and Revolution Capital Group, the third bidder.

But DFM’s math is different. The company may spend $12 million — a bankruptcy court needs to certify the decision on Friday — but “then again, when they chop half the staff later this year that ought to make some money,” says one source deeply familiar with DFM’s strategies.

Additionally, while DFM has sold several properties in recent years — including the New Haven Register, Salt Lake Tribune, and Berkshire Eagle — it continues to work the market. “DFM has been bidding for everything, from Pueblo to Boston, from Austin to West Palm,” says the insider. “Can DFM suck three years out of everything it can buy? Of course,” he concludes.

Dan Kennedy, deeply knowledgeable on the Northeast news landscape, nails the likely result of the DFM win.

Takeaway: This is vulture capitalism, pure and simple — the textbook practice of buying distressed and dying assets, squeezing them, believing that remaining “meat on the bone” will pay off. The result, often, is bankruptcy and closure. That’s the Alden long-term milking “strategy”: After extracting years of high profits, turn out the lights, or sell the remnants to whoever may want them.

Is The Washington Post really profitable?

Post publisher Fred Ryan laughed Wednesday when I pointed out the considerable skepticism I’ve heard since the Post announced its second year of profit success — with precious little other data — last month. He points to both its digital subscription growth and greater ad selling engagement as the key reasons. While Ryan won’t divulge numbers, the contours of the Post’s march toward profitability can be estimated.

The Post has reached the 1 million digital subscription mark, and that generates about $100 million a year in revenue, almost all of it new in the last several years. You can do the math: about $100 per digital subscriber per year, achieved even with Kindle, Apple News, and Prime discounting and over-the-digital transom subs for the full-price payers. (By comparison, The New York Times, with twice the number of digital news subscribers, averages $125 per sub.)

Then there’s the Post’s more than tripling of digital audience in four years. That hasn’t quite led to a tripling of programmatic ad revenue, but it’s more than doubled — add another $100 million or so a year.

Takeaway: Jeff Bezos’ annual investment in tech and newsroom staff — now up to about 775 — has meant an investment of about $40 million a year. Yet, the reinvestment seems to be paying off. Just Tuesday, the Post announced an expansion of its international news efforts — new bureaus, new staff. That’s a part — a long-term part — of the Post’s tilt toward digital subscription emphasis, ready to harvest payers from the audience it’s quickly grown.

As with The New York Times, and with players as diverse as Business Insider, HuffPost, and BuzzFeed, it’s global that aims to provide small but growing streams of new readers and new payers. Top of the list for both the Post and Times: Canada. It’s well educated, (mostly) English-speaking — and suffering from sprawling news deserts coast to coast, as its major chain Postmedia (the DFM of Canada) continues to retrench.

Is The New York Times a radio station?

The Times and American Public Media announced Tuesday that the paper’s podcast The Daily will now be a broadcast radio show too. The news further certifies The Daily as a phenomenon. Host Michael Barbaro and his expanding stellar crew just celebrated their one-year anniversary, with the Times announcing huge audience numbers.
Now, American Public Media and the Times can pair Marketplace with The Daily in a one-hour, five-day-a-week syndication package.

Expect that many stations in the top 25 markets will carry the new joint hour. The Times gets big branding benefit, of course, but also compensation in the form of some combination of licensing fees and/or advertising extensions.

Takeaway: The podcast revolution has stunned us in its intensity, claiming hours per month of media time, and redefining audio and radio. It may seem confusing to see a podcast morphing into a broadcast radio program. But others have pioneered that shift — especially, recently, NPR.

You may have heard the more recent crossovers. They include Planet Money, How I Built This, Hidden Brain, and It’s Been A Minute with Sam Sanders. NPR launched each as podcasts and transformed them into radio shows for weekend programming — often replacing dear, departed shows like Car Talk.

Critically, podcasts have literally broken the public radio clock. That clock — invisible to us as listeners — has long been as confining as limited number of newspaper or magazine pages or a 30-minute TV newscast. Podcasts, of course, know no such limits. As low-cost, testable concepts of topic and of talent, they’ve introduced many new voices and faces in the world of news and newsiness.

Finally, it’s a case of innovation supporting innovation. “It’s Been a Minute is an interesting case study as it piloted on [the NPR mobile app] NPR One, where we got tons of data and feedback that helped us perfect the concept,” NPR’s Isabel Lara tells me. “Then it became a podcast in June 2017 and ultimately a radio show in October of 2017.” It’s now on 155 stations.

How do you find scale after leaving The New York Times and NPR?

Kinsey Wilson’s found a way: Today, he becomes president of WordPress.com, which now powers more than 29 million websites, even if it sometimes doesn’t get the attention of the bigger platforms.

Fifteen years after its founding, the big question is where does WordPress go now? (Beyond launching a new, truly multimedia interface this summer.)

Founder Matt Mullenweg believes he’s found the right partner to chart that path. “He’s one of the few people on the planet who has built a CMS,” he told me Tuesday. “Many cite him as one of the best people they’ve ever worked for.”

It’s that combo of strategic publishing chops and the ability to create productive teams that has propelled Wilson through careers at USA Today, NPR, and The New York Times.

Wilson talks about the challenge ahead in both big and small terms — about maintaining the open web in a time when massive platforms seemed to have absorbed all the air, for instance.

It’s no surprise that he is also intrigued by the potential of WordPress to help solve the problems of growing news deserts. “WordPress powers a lot of local news sites and it creates an opening to address a crisis that is frankly a pretty alarming one in journalism,” he told me.

As he begins work next month, Wilson will start his WordPress tenure the same way all WordPressers — there are 680 of them — do. He’ll do customer service as a “happiness engineer.” Call in with an issue and you’ll have a 1-in-200 chance of getting the former top NPR and New York Times exec on the line.

Takeaway: Hundreds and thousands of journalists have reorganized themselves, as buyouts and layoffs have decimated daily ranks. I’ve been struck by the lack of powerful yet simple-to-use platforms to support them and their work. Perhaps a changemaker like Wilson can help solve that problem and harness the tools of the time in the nick of time.

What was that thing called digital display?

We’ve talked about it here at the Lab for years: Google and Facebook have eaten almost all worldwide digital ad growth. They’ve left maybe 10 percent of that growth — table scraps — for news and all other ad-supported media. That’s not news, but the reckoning it has prompted is. Finally, publishers are now acknowledging that the first big digital revenue stream — digital display — is going, going gone, just like the print business that’s ebbing away even more quickly.

The Reuters Institute’s recent survey of publishers — mainly in Europe, but with some U.S. representation — emphasizes that point, below.

Fully 62 percent now say “it will become less important over time.” Just 16 percent (and who are they, exactly?) say more important.

Takeaway: Commercial revenue isn’t going away, but digital display — optimized by Google and Facebook — is for news publishers. That’s why the smartest publishers have profoundly move their commercial staffs to the pursuits of branded content, marketing services, video, audio and events — all areas outside the direct line of The Duopoly death ray.

Was poking fun at the Post’s slogan shortsighted?

Yes, it is a dark time. How Democracies Die is getting its just due, including this worthy Fresh Air interview and a recent Fareed Zakaria tout. In the book, historians Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt give us the long view from Mussolini to Hitler to Hugo Chavez to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, telling us how elected leaders who may squeak into office can quickly consolidate power. Among the many parallels they note: attacks on news media.

Takeaway: I was among those who poked a little fun at The Washington Post when it unfurled its “Democracy Dies in Darkness” slogan a year ago. (Slate greeted the news with “15 Metal Albums Whose Titles Are Less Dark Than The Washington Post’s New Motto.”) And yet it seems more realistic as we absorb the shocks of the year that was.

What should I do with the Times?

For a moment, I thought I’d somehow bought the L.A. Times. As I talked with Frank Sesno on CNN’s Reliable Sources Sunday, the chyron below popped on the monitor.

Alas, it will soon be Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong’s challenge, not mine.

Takeaway: Fake news is everywhere.

As Year One of this presidency turns to Year Two, should we keep this thought top of mind?

Where would the state of our republic be absent The New York Times’ and The Washington Post’s incisive reporting? Together, the two employ only about 2,000 journalists, with far fewer than that assigned to national politics and policy, but the impact of these two great journalistic institutions — institutions willing to stand up to state power — has been proven anew.

Takeaway: Don’t dither about which you should subscribe to. Subscribe to both.

There’s never a shortage of fascinating scholarship in the digital news/social media space. This year, we’re spotlighting 10 of the most compelling academic articles and reports published in 2017, which delve into meaty topics such as venture-backed startups, artificial intelligence, personal branding, and the spread of disinformation. We conferred with a small group of scholars to pick the ones we think you’ll want to know about — and remember, this is just a sample. A big thank you to everybody who contributed suggestions on Twitter.

“Paying for Online News: A comparative analysis of six countries”: From the University of Oxford, published in Digital Journalism. By Richard Fletcher and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen.

This study offers both good news and bad news for publishers struggling to figure out pay models. The researchers used data collected via surveys in six countries, including the United States, to gauge who’s paying for news and who’s willing to pay in the future. The good news: Of those who are not paying for online news now, younger Americans are more willing to pay in the future, possibly because they often already pay for other forms of digital media. The bad news: No more than 2 percent of people surveyed in any country said they are “very likely” to pay for news in the future.

“News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2017”: From the Pew Research Center. By Elisa Shearer and Jeffrey Gottfried.

Throughout the year, the Pew Research Center releases survey-based reports examining journalism and news organizations. This report offers important insights into the role social media plays in distributing and accessing news. Some key takeaways: Almost 70 percent of U.S. adults reported getting news via social media. Meanwhile, a growing number of older adults, people of color, and adults without bachelor’s degrees said they turn to social media sites for news. Minority adults are much more likely than white adults to get news from social media — 74 percent reported doing so in 2017, up from 64 percent in 2016. Interestingly, only 5 percent of adults who go to Snapchat for news also often get news from newspapers.

“Venture-Backed News Startups and the Field of Journalism: Challenges, changes, and consistencies”: From George Washington University, published in Digital Journalism. By Nikki Usher.

How do venture-backed news startups compare themselves to traditional media outlets? This article examines 18 startups, including BuzzFeed, GeekWire, and Vox, to understand how this burgeoning area of digital media is changing journalism’s landscape. Usher interviewed top executives, founders, and others to learn how and why these companies formed as well as details about their editorial visions, technological visions, and plans for making money. The study also explores the rise of algorithms in predicting user behavior, the creation of scalable products, and new roles for journalists within an organization where reporters and technical staff are equals.

“Technology Firms Shape Political Communication: The Work of Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, and Google With Campaigns During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Cycle”: From the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and The University of Utah, published in Political Communication. By Daniel Kreiss and Shannon C. McGregor.

This article offers a behind-the-scenes look at how Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter collaborated with political campaigns during the 2016 U.S. election season. The paper focuses on their role at the Democratic National Convention in 2016 and in providing extensive consulting services to candidates, including Donald Trump, over the course of the campaign. The researchers found that these technology firms “are increasingly the locus of political knowledge and expertise” in digital and data campaigning. Meanwhile, representatives from each firm said “the growth of their work in electoral politics was driven by the desire for direct revenues from their services and products, for candidates to give their services and platforms greater public visibility, and to establish relationships with legislators.”

“When Reporters Get Hands-On With Robo-Writing: Professionals consider automated journalism’s capabilities and consequences”: From LMU Munich and the University of Zurich, published in Digital Journalism. By Neil Thurman, Konstantin Dörr, and Jessica Kunert.

Media innovators continue to find new ways to integrate artificial intelligence into the newsroom, moving well past using crime stats and structured data from athletic games to generate news reports. While plenty of journalists have weighed in on the trend, most don’t have direct experience using the technology. For this study, researchers conducted workshops with a small group of journalists to show them how to use software to create data-driven news content. After getting hands-on experience, journalists were asked about the potentials and limitations of the technology.

Unsurprisingly, journalists had lots of criticisms — for example, there was concern that automation would make verifying information less likely. Some journalists did see benefits, including time savings and reductions in human error. For several, though, “the experience of creating news items this way was difficult, irritating, and did not utilize their innate abilities.”

“Artificial Intelligence: Practice and Implications for Journalism”: From the Brown Institute for Media Innovation and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School. By Mark Hansen, Meritxell Roca-Sales, Jon Keegan, and George King.

What problems do journalists and technologists uncover when they brainstorm about AI in newsrooms? This report summarizes a three-hour, wide-ranging discussion between journalists and technologists who gathered last summer for an event organized by Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism and the Brown Institute for Media Innovation. Among the important takeaways: A knowledge and communication gap between the technologists who create AI and journalists who use it could “lead to journalistic malpractice.” News outlets need to provide audiences with clear explanations for how AI is used to research and report stories. Also, there needs to be “a concerted and continued effort to fight hidden bias in AI, often unacknowledged but always present, since tools are programmed by humans.”

“Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election”: From the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. By Rob Faris, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, Ethan Zuckerman, and Yochai Benkler.

In this report, researchers examine the composition and behavior of media on the right and left to explain how Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton received differing coverage. The report covers a lot of ground in 142 pages, chock-full of bar charts, network maps, and other data visualizations. It even includes a case study on coverage of the Clinton Foundation. The researchers found that while mainstream media gave mostly negative coverage to both presidential candidates, Trump clearly dominated coverage and was given the opportunity to shape the election agenda.

According to the report, far-right media “succeeded in pushing the Clinton Foundation to the front of the public agenda precisely at the moment when Clinton would have been anticipated to (and indeed did) receive her biggest bounce in the polls: immediately after the Democratic convention.” Researchers also found that while fake news was a problem, it played a relatively small role in the 2016 presidential election. “Disinformation and propaganda from dedicated partisan sites on both sides of the political divide played a much greater role in the election,” the researchers wrote.

“Identity lost? The personal impact of brand journalism”: From The University of Utah and Temple University, published in Journalism. By Avery E. Holton and Logan Molyneux.

Newsrooms urge journalists to use social media to promote their work, interact with sources, and build their professional brands. How does that affect what journalists do on Twitter and Facebook when they’re off the clock? This study is one of several published in 2017 that look at how social media impacts journalists’ identities. This one is important because it lays the groundwork for the others. The authors interviewed 41 reporters and editors at U.S. newspapers to explore the challenges they face in integrating their personal and professional identities on social media. They found that reporters “feel pressure to stake a claim on their beat, develop a presence as an expert in their profession and area of coverage, and act as a representative of the news organization at all times. This leaves little room for aspects of personal identity such as family, faith, or friendship to be shared online.”

“How the news media activate public expression and influence national agendas”: From Harvard University, Florida State University, and MIT, published in Science. By Gary King, Benjamin Schneer, and Ariel White.

Journalism really does contribute to the democratic process and this study provides quantitative evidence. In an experiment involving 48 mostly small media organizations, researchers demonstrated that reporting on a certain policy topic prompts members of the public to take a stand and express their views on the topic more often than they would have if a news article had not been published. Researchers looked at website pageviews and social media posts to gauge impact. Their experiment, according to the researchers, “increased discussion in each broad policy area by ~62.7% (relative to a day’s volume), accounting for 13,166 additional posts over the treatment week.”

“Digital News Report 2017”: From the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. By Nic Newman, Richard Fletcher, Antonis Kalogeropoulos, David A. L. Levy, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen.

This latest annual report from the Reuters Institute offers a global look at digital news consumption based on a survey of more than 70,000 people in 36 countries, including the United States. There are lots of great insights to glean from this 136-page report, which examines such issues as news avoidance, access, distrust, polarization, and sharing. It may (or may not) be surprising that the U.S. ranked 7th highest in the area of news avoidance behind Greece, Turkey, Poland, Croatia, Chile, and Malaysia. Thirty-eight percent of Americans reported avoiding the news “often” or “sometimes.”

Worldwide, the amount of sharing and commenting on news via social media has fallen or stayed about the same the past two years. The U.S., which saw small increases in both habits, is an exception. Another interesting takeaway: Some countries are much more likely to pay for news. In Norway, 15 percent of people surveyed said they made ongoing payments for digital news in the last year, compared to 8 percent in the U.S., 6 percent in Japan, 4 percent in Canada, 3 percent in the United Kingdom and 2 percent in the Czech Republic.

Duopoly: Google and Facebook dominate the field of digital advertising — which is now the largest category of ad spending, surpassing TV in North America and the U.K. Google and Facebook have been taking almost 90 percent of all the digital ad growth in the market in the U.S. The remaining 10 percent or so is supposed to help support news media, as well as all other businesses dependent on advertising.

The immense damage done to news media by the duopoly is only collateral damage, but it’s immense damage nonetheless. It doesn’t matter if you are smartly diabolical in your intent, or a useful idiot, or even out to make a better world.

Consumer revenue: Inflated by the Trump bump, consumer (read: reader) revenue came out of the shadows in 2017.

Readers now supply The New York Times Times with 62 cents of every dollar it earns. Print advertising has become only the fourth-largest category of Times revenue. Subscription surges have been seen everywhere from the Times and Washington Post to The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Minnpost, and the big regional local-news-supplying public radio stations.

As the meltdown in digital news media (see below) has surfaced, reader revenue and reader-related revenue (from events, e-commerce, and more) becomes utterly necessary. News organizations like CNN, Business Insider, and The Athletic reflect that reality in their decisions to ask readers for direct payment.

Roll-up: This was the year that long-time family newspaper companies said “uncle.” Gatehouse bought the Morris and Calkins companies, among other smaller companies, bringing its total of dailies to more than 140 — or more than a tenth of the remaining daily newspaper industry. In fact, Gatehouse, Gannett, and Digital First Media now own a quarter of those 1,350 or so dailies. In magazines, the Big Four is shrinking to the Big Three as Meredith swallows the larger Time Inc.

With digital disruption a primary force, the quest for scale reigns in almost all media enterprise. Fewer companies are deciding what we will — or won’t — get. And it’s worth noting that even the acquirers — Gatehouse and Meredith, for instance — are running negative in the year-over-year revenues in their core print businesses. Roll-up is more an exercise in profit-squeezing and cost-cutting than it is a strategy to build bigger, better products for customers.

Second paper: Just this week, Gatehouse scooped up the remains of the bankrupt Boston Herald for a scant $5 million. That once-independent voice will form part of Gatehouse’s megacluster business strategy and likely be reduced as a second daily Boston voice.

In the last year, a civic group of investors saved, for now, The Chicago Sun-Times as an independent voice. In the Twin Cities, we have to wonder how long owner Digital First Media will keep the Saint Paul Pioneer Press (one of my alma maters) alive; it’s already seen its staff sliced by more three-quarters to 50.

With formerly monopoly dailies seeking survival, it’s no surprise that “second papers” are becoming a vestige of another time. But it’s worth marking.

Viscera: This headline made my insides hurt: “LA Weekly staff ‘eviscerated’ by layoffs, says editor.”

2017 was a year of reckoning for some of the alternative weeklies. The Village Voice stopped print. The Houston Press abruptly closed. And, yes, L.A. Weekly’s staff was eviscerated, amid the fast pruning of much secondary print media in greater L.A.

Daily newspaper layoffs and buyouts have become almost too numerous and routine to report on. (Besides, how many people are actually following the demise of the local press?)

I regularly get emails from distraught staffers. Last week brought one saying another 10 journalists had been laid off at The Denver Post, bringing the staff to 90 at the single remaining daily in the country’s 19th-largest metro area. ASNE no longer conducts an annual census of jobs lost, but I’d guess there are no more than 24,000 daily journalists working their beats at print dailies — a cut of 33,000 since 1990, when the country had 80 million fewer people (and we thought we had resolved forever the Russian threat, as the Berlin and other Cold War walls crumbled).

It’s hard to say who’s essential to the newspaper enterprises these days. Alden Global Capital (well-described in “How many Palm Beach mansions does a Wall Street tycoon need?”) has made cutting an art form. It has laid off numerous editors and publishers, as well as hundreds of reporters, but this year, it outdid itself: As CEO Steve Rossi retired, it declined to fill his position, opting for a (presumably lower-priced) COO “reporting to the board.”

Cross-ownership: Nothing’s surprising about the Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of decades-long regulations except its alacrity. Deregulation advocates — led by both newspaper industry and TV industry trade groups — have advocated for the dropping of rules against media ownership concentration. Even they, though, have been surprised by FCC chair Ajit Pai’s supposed casting-off of media ownership shackles — with net neutrality overthrow just one more major “side” issue for publishers.

The media cross-ownership rules — which have prevented dailies from owning major local TV stations, and vice versa — pose the biggest question. In a world of already advanced roll-up on the TV side as well as in newspapers, who will actually merge local properties, and how quickly? We see right-leaning interests lining up, but precious few individuals or groups that appear to have the wider public, and democratic, interest in mind and heart.

2018 is the year to watch as strategists assess “value” and “combination” anew. The “new convergence” — a smart combination of local text and video, TV and print — is certainly possible, but unproven. As likely: a disharmonic convergence against the public interest.

CasualFans: That’s a Tony Haile construct, one known among the news industry’s growing roster of audience development executives. In September, I asked, “Is that all there is to reader payment?” Would more than two or three percent of digital audiences ever pay for news content?

Haile, the founder of industry standard Chartbeat and now entrepreneur behind Scroll, aims at the next 10 percent, a group he identifies as “casualfans.” “It’s taken from cable TV bundling language where Superfans and Casualfans are pretty common usage,” he said.

As advertising craters, we’ll be looking to Scroll, LaterPay, and Jim McKelvey’s Invisibly to see if there’s a new cohort of people who will pay for news.

I’ve long liked Voice of San Diego’s construct. The intent of its membership program is to moving The Informed (all its readers) to The Involved (those who receive email newsletters, comment on the site, or attend events) to The Invested (those who buy memberships).

Listen: Kicking off with The New York Times’ The Daily, it was a big year for the newsy podcast. We’ll see what the regionals, including Gannett and McClatchy, produce from their own fledgling investments in audio.

Useful idiots: We weren’t so sophisticated in years past in cataloging our types of idiots. Yet this term — used by the Russians well back into Soviet times — is a phenomenon unexpectedly reborn in 2017. We don’t yet know how many of these useful idiots —
people who blunder into furthering foreign aims through their own stupidity, avarice, or gullibility — Robert Mueller’s team will identify, beyond the Flynns, Manaforts and Papadopouloses.

As Facebook, Google, and Twitter executives got hauled before Congress, they had to acknowledge their own complicity with the Russians, however clumsy and unintentional. Said Sheryl Sandberg: “It’s not just that we apologize. We’re angry, we’re upset. But what we really owe the American people is determination” to do a better job of preventing foreign meddling.

While these executives have been off doing other things — digital world domination for the most part — nefarious evildoers (to borrow a term from another era) eagerly exploited the systems they had built.

Fake: Now an epithet that Trump tosses at news he doesn’t like, “fake” is related to the odious “alternative facts” (though that now seems so early 2017). We can add alt, or alternative, to the list of spoiled language: Once signifying pleasant choice or another view, it’s become a battleground word, its usage more ascendant among neo-Nazis than the old “alternative press.”

Our “fake!” affliction doesn’t just hurt Americans. As the Times recently pointed out, “Meet the strongmen who’ve started blaming ‘fake news’ Too.” Such linguistic nonsense has real-world impact, not just on our discourse but on lives of those opposing authoritarianism around the world. In Myanmar, the government called its genocide against the Rohingya “fake news.”

Trust: The antidote, right? We can take some solace in the assertive, aggressive reporting led by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN. While many trust movements, commercial and nonprofit, have taken flight, it is the big, old brands whose names themselves stand for trustworthiness among tens of millions of readers.

It seems like an eon ago that Times executive editor Dean Baquet talked to me about using the word “lie” in print, but it was only October 2016. As USA Today pointed out in its statement of horror: “Trump apparently is going for some sort of record for lying while in office. As of mid-November, he had made 1,628 misleading or false statements in 298 days in office. That’s 5.5 false claims per day, according to a count kept by The Washington Post’s fact-checkers.”

Another word: “Mistake.” As Carl Bernstein observed last week on CNN’s Reliable Sources, “Journalists make mistakes.” But serial mistakes by CNN, ABC, MSNBC, and CBS, well-cataloged by The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, provide fuel to the arsonists who would just as soon set fire to the news media as we know it.

Meltdown: Talking Points Memo publisher and editor Josh Marshall made his point in mid-November: “There’s a digital media crash. But no one will say it.” He called attention to the suffering businesses of digital ad–dependent “startup” news media. In the age of duopoly, there simply aren’t enough digital ad dollars to support what’s been built.

Advertisers are shifting their strategies as well. Take this week’s news about giant Unilever: It’s cutting its digital ad spend by about 30 percent as it better figures out its return ad investment. Reliance on digital advertising alone won’t work.

Arc: Throughout this turbulent year, The Washington Post has moved forward with the licensing of its next-generation content management system/digital platform. The Boston Globe and Tronc’s chain of properties will deploy Arc in 2018. We’ll see how much difference it can make in helping these publishers more effectively grasp new digital opportunity. With no real competitors, it could become an industry standard.

Truth. At year’s end, we may not realize quite how much we’ve been battered by nonstop news cycles, stalked by push notifications. It can be hard to stop and absorb a particularly insightful piece of writing or reporting before something else replaces it in our consciousness.

Still, Slate’s legal correspondent Dahlia Lithwick’s piece from earlier this month has stuck with me. Asking “Is it too late for Robert Mueller to save us?” she wrote:

In weeks like this one, when it seems the Mueller investigation is quite literally the only authority and sanity we can look to, it’s hard to tell whether the net losses outweigh the wins, or whether the massive national game of deconstruction and deflection and deception is even the littlest bit disrupted by news that the special counsel is closing in on a legal conclusion. Maybe it’s really too late in the slide toward authoritarianism for any major legal outcome to change the game. We crave nonpartisan and serious authority figures like Mueller because we believe they can guide us through. But having seen this White House shatter norms around the free press, civility, international diplomacy, and truth-telling, it almost defies belief that the line in the sand, the stopping point, is Mueller…

At this moment when all options remain open, we should accept the possibility that Mueller may come to represent the highest and most binding expression of law and order in America. We also must acknowledge the reality that the highest and most binding expression of law and order in America might not matter enough, to enough people, to bring the Trump train to a stop.

Lithwick correctly identifies the weakness of so many checks and balances we thought were in place. Yet she underplays the role of the national news media. Our top journalists, with brave and smart leadership, have managed to stay focused on the stories of the year, and their work still drives much of the national conversation.

We don’t know which way these teeter-totters between the rule of law and those who would trample over it will go. Which way will the American seesaw move? How strong, and smart, will its news media be in applying fair and accurate pressure?

Photo of vertical stack of newspapers by J E Smith used under a Creative Commons license.

It was five years ago this week that Mark Thompson took on the top job at The New York Times Company. It was an enterprise still wobbling from the effects of the Great Recession, its new paywall only a year old. The Huffington Post was trumpeting that it had surpassed the Times in digital traffic — a recognition of Google’s market power and of Facebook’s emergence.

The Times was a shrinking enterprise. It had shed revenues, profits, staff, and share price. It had also shed its previous CEO, Janet Robinson. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger’s pick of Thompson to replace her surprised many; despite having led the BBC’s ongoing transition to the increasingly digital world, Thompson had no publishing management experience. And he was a Brit, plucked out of London to head America’s flagship newspaper company.

Half a decade later, the Times is on surer footing, thanks in large part to its execution of Thompson’s mantra: subscriber-first. Most newspaper companies have now embraced revenue from readers (rather than advertisers) as a priority, but the Times is the global leader in that quest, with more than 2 million digital news subscribers. Still, the finish line for that transition is still some distance away.

Heading into 2018, Thompson can at least take a deep breath or two. After years of turning the Times’ business on its advertising/circulation head, he can now point to two words that have eluded its industry for a decade: revenue growth.

Year-to-date through September, the Times has managed to grow revenues 6.8 percent. Each of its three quarters has seen growth, at 5.1 percent, 9.2 percent and 6.1 percent. Repeating that feat in the fourth quarter may be more problematic, the company says, but even so, the Times will look back on 2017 as a turning point. It may not have built out a new business model for the 21st-century press, but it, along with the Financial Times, has served as the leading engineers. Consider these data points:

• Print advertising — which used to make up 75 to 80 percent of all Times revenue — now accounts for only 17 percent of its total. Within the next year or two, he told me, it will likely be the Times’ fourth-largest revenue contributor, behind print subscription, digital subscription, and digital advertising.
• The Times counts 2.1 million digital-only news subscribers, still growing post-Trump-bump at about 100,000 a quarter. Compare that to the Times’ still-strong (though declining at about 3 percent a year) Sunday print sales of 1.1 million, and we see a curious ratio. Digital payers now outnumber print payers about 2 to 1.
• Reader revenue — both print and digital — now makes up 62 percent of all Times revenue, as compared to about 44 percent when Thompson took the job in 2012. That crossover number serves as its most important one. As print advertising continues its epochal decline — even the Times was down 20 percent in print ad revenue in the third quarter, in the general neighborhood of many other newspaper chains — nearly everyone in the news publishing business is turning back to readers as their likeliest source of future funding. But the Times (along with other advanced nationals like the FT, The Wall Street Journal, and probably the privately held Washington Post) is among the few publishers who now see more revenue from readers than advertisers. Meanwhile, much of the daily press can’t imagine achieving overall revenue growth, because its reliance on print advertising counterbalances whatever success it may have in the digital transition.

Thompson and other Times executives don’t want to disclose much about their own future modeling. But one thing we know: The company can envision a future without print.

As Thompson told me last week, the Times “may well be facing a future where you should set printed revenue at zero, because it will not be a profitable exercise to make it.”

In five years, Thompson has reshaped the Times’ executive leadership. In early 2017, he elevated Meredith Levien to COO, with both revenue and product responsibilities now centralized. Early next year, Thompson will replace the Times’ retiring longtime CFO, Jim Follo. That will offer Thompson another opportunity to reshape a top job, perhaps looking for both dealmaking and digital business skills.

Of course, all that the Times has accomplished financially owes enormously to its newsroom. That journalistic bedrock — its value unexpectedly enhanced in this weirdest of modern American times — has served as the foundation for all the digital smarts of marketing, messaging, presentation, and distribution that now build upon it.

As Thompson told me last week in an interview in his Times office, he believes that overall press economics may soon grow even more unkind. “I think over the next five years it’s possible the competitive landscape will actually get in some ways more attractive for The New York Times, because I’m afraid I see a lot of casualties over the next few years because of the economics of the industry,” he says. “And, actually, I think for a period we could enjoy — well, we won’t be alone in this — but the survivors could enjoy a kind of last-men-and-women-standing sort of benefit for a bit.”

Thompson and I covered a wide range of topics in our conversation. Is 10 million subscribers a real goal? What about the Times’ global expansion? In a time of legacy bundles, skinny bundles, and no bundles at all, what’s he thinking about how the Times might rebundle itself for fun and profit?

Our conversation is condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

But the idea that you need a new generation of media for younger generations of consumers, I’m not even sure that’s true. And what’s intriguing is we literally — I’m pointing at a place that’s literally about 50 feet away, The Daily [the podcast which draws a strong audience of millennials] is a room two doors down. It’s kind of a dungeon.

That was the room for a period where the Snowden laptop was. That’s sacred ground.

The Sunday paper and the future of print

Creating new bundles of joy

The promise of Wirecutter

Thompson vs. Thomson

With the seemingly sudden sense that there have got to be ways other than a full-bore subscription for readers to help pay the freighted costs of producing news, 2018 will bring multiple bold new efforts to revive the news business.

Now you can add a new venture, Invisibly, to that list. But its ambitions are far bigger than just micropayments — or just the news business.

Jim McKelvey, the cofounder of Square, spearheads and funds Invisibly. He’s spent almost a year and a half talking to media brands big and small, entertainment and news. And he’s talking about a venture he says could generate a billion dollars a month in new revenue largely for those companies. Already, I’m told, “hundreds” of titles, including newspapers, magazines, and other media, have signed up to test Invisibly, which joins joins Scroll, LaterPay, and Blendle in offering newer payment models for content.

While Invisibly’s website launched a month ago, it has been the news industry’s best-kept secret, morphing over time from “The McKelvey Project” or just “McKelvey” in publisher shorthand. Despite a well-received presentation at the SNPA/Inland conference in September and innumerable talks between Invisibly staff (now numbering 15) and media executives, public word of Invisibly hadn’t leaked.

The company still won’t speak publicly, but in more than a dozen interviews, I’ve been able to piece together some visibility into this innovative model.

Yes, Invisibly is a micropayments company in some ways, but it believes that a newer kind of advertising engagement will generate most of its revenue. McKelvey — who along with cofounding the mold-breaking mobile payment company is also board member of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis — makes a pitch that is more complex and more cerebral.

He’s talked about “building a new business-model stack” for media industries. That’s makes supreme sense to those in the tech industry and remains a bit of a head-scratcher to many of those in traditional publishing.

In fact, in Invisibly’s stealth launch — with a product that will begin testing soon into the new year — we can see a clash of civilizations. There are the old newspaper and magazine companies, long grasping onto a binary subscribe/don’t subscribe model, even in the decade-long shift to digital paywalls. Then, there’s Silicon Valley’s blow-it-up, rethink-it-from-the-bottom-up approach to business disruption and business building.

McKelvey, 52, has found what all technology companies have found in pitching the press and wider media: It’s agonizingly slow going, no matter how good a deal you may be offering. This super-confident Renaissance man can seem like a character out of HBO’s “Silicon Valley” to publishers, talking about his self-made net worth, his boundary-breaking background, and his mode of travel (“private jet” and “self-driving car” come up, publishers say). He’s a self-made man in a hurry to develop Big Ideas. In taking on the media business conundrum in the digital age, he’s acting on his LinkedIn tagline: “I enjoy solving problems in almost any area.”

With Invisibly, his focus has turned to creating a new way forward for high-quality news and entertainment. In presentations, he can decry the world of mediocre content — news and entertainment — that shows signs of winning against higher-quality, more expensive-to-produce content. The solution, he believes, is finally finding new ways to support high-quality digital content creation.

As he presents what can seem like a blizzard of ideas, he has managed to impress executives enough to get some signed up for a test.

One such publisher spoke for several others with whom I talked — almost all of whom wanted to remain anonymous — with this assessment of the project: “Honestly, I’m not that invested in knowledge about what he’s doing. I’ve seen the pitch and most everyone says the same thing: ‘He’s a bit arrogant. He’s been very successful.’ It costs nothing to say ‘sure, go ahead,’ and if it works, we’ll most likely be in.'”

In his relentlessness — and, importantly, in his ideas — McKelvey has managed to convince dozens of top-drawer names to test Invisibly. Those names, according to company communications, include: McClatchy, Gatehouse, The Dallas Morning News, Hearst Newspapers, The Atlantic, The Motley Fool, and Warner Brothers.

How would Invisibly work?

So what is this “new business model stack”?

To put it simply, Invisibly attempts to move publishers beyond that subscribe/don’t subscribe model. As with the concepts of Scroll and LaterPay, Invisibly acts on this principle: Something like 2 percent of a digital audience will buy an all-access subscription, but there’s another group will pay for high-quality content in other ways. The trick in reaching them: offer more choices.

So Invisibly will offer essentially two kinds of choices to non-subscribing visitors to paywalled sites.

If a publisher wants to offer access beyond its set number of free stories a month (one of the most common metered models), it can offer payment per article, day passes, or week passes.

Or the publisher can pop up an Invisibly-served video ad. Watch the ad or answer a few questions, and you get access to the site for a set amount of time. How much? That’s TBD.

In both cases, a user’s current status is tracked through an invisible digital wallet that records how much she’s spent on content and how many ad engagements she’s had. Here’s how the company describes it:

A digital wallet will accompany visitors as they navigate content across the internet. As the visitor happens upon participating sites, the digital wallet will invisibly keep a ledger of earnings from brand engagements and expenditures from content. At the optimal time, the system will prompt visitors to sign up and improve their experience, by giving them a choice of watching or avoiding ads. If a visitor wants to avoid ads, they can add payment (i.e. a credit card) that can process all of their content and subscription purchases in one bill.

A specific revenue promise is a big part of why early testers have signed up. Invisibly promises, by contract, that those who have already signed up will keep all the micropayment and ad revenue, in perpetuity. Some time before launch, Invisibly will begin to take its own revenue share (“over 20%”) for companies that aren’t launch partners. That ability to keep revenue — and the ability to opt out of Invisibly some time before launch without apparent penalty — has built Invisibly’s list of partners.

Invisibly brags on its site that it has “verbal commitments from US digital content publishers representing 73% of the industry and we are actively transitioning these to signed contracts.”

While micropayments will be a key feature of the Invisibility partnership for news publishers with paywalls, that may end up being a small part of the initiative. Consider that much of the news web is still free, from CNN and NPR to BuzzFeed, Vox, Vice, and thousands of other sites. In fact, while preserving higher quality news sources is a key McKelvey goal, it’s the big entertainment companies, like a Disney or a Warner, that would be much bigger parts of the Invisibly network. In that regard, Invisibly could mount an alternative to paying Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon for some video content.

For those seeking new ways to satisfy advertisers, McKelvey says he’s figured out a new way to do that.

In a video on his site, he makes his pitch: “The advertiser experience in our system is going to be unlike anything you’ve seen before…The ad load is going to decrease by orders of magnitude, replaced with fewer, better engagements…Instead of interrupting users, you can engage them…For 20 years, the world has treated online advertising like it was print or television. But the web is a two-way medium, so let your customers talk back. Let them engage. But you can only do this with their permission. Which is what we’re going to get you. Once you have someone agreeing to engage with your brand, you can truly communicate your message. And it’s a lot more fun.”

Fun, and lucrative. Publishers could receive ad rates an “order of magnitude — three to four-figure CPMs” — greater than current, run-of-the-mill advertising, goes the pitch.

McKelvey eschews the world of interrupting bothersome ads — the same bugaboo recognized by Tony Haile’s Scroll, though addressed quite differently. McKelvey intends to make a new kind of peace between advertisers and consumers.

In this worldview, it’s not advertising per se that’s the problem — it’s the way digital advertising has worked. McKelvey has enlisted WPP, the multinational ad giant, as a partner as Invisibly starts up. In addition, its website includes such “supporters” as the Omnicon Group, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Procter & Gamble.

Can he offer a kind of advertising that consumers will more willingly engage in — watching a video, answering a few questions, identifying their buying wants — rather than being blitzed with intrusive pitches for things they aren’t remotely interested in?

It’s not just the ad presentation that Invisibly hopes will distinguish it. McKelvey tells publishers that part of his secret sauce lies in harnessing the power of ad tech. His pledge to media companies: I’ll make it work for you.

Invisibly says it uses the ad-targeting intelligence of the web to help media better target consumers. In presentations, McKelvey has acknowledged that such targeting can seem “creepy,” but explains it’s already the world that we — consumers and media executives — live in. Better to apply that intelligence to supporting high-quality content than not.

Consequently, Invisibly wants to use such targeting to perfect both advertising offers and micropayment offers, based on its knowledge of individual, browser-driven behavior. If consumers find themselves in the market for a new truck, or for more information about family health, Invisibly would, in theory, would take that knowledge and offer them a more relevant digital experience.

That approach isn’t a new one. In fact, as I’ve covered the serial reader revenue innovations of the Financial Times, McKelvey’s model sounds a lot like that of the FT. “Propensity modeling” is the term for it — understanding the likelihood of how a consumer is likely to respond, or not, to a subscription offer. Or to a newsletter offer, or to the opportunity to answer a Google Survey question. It’s a value exchange: money or attention paid in exchange for content.

In one grand way, then, it seems like Invisibly is taking the FT’s long-developed strategy and trying to apply it widescreen on the web. The promised land: divining enough of user identity, via ad tagging, to tell the publisher enough about the non-paying visitor (which, for most, is nearly all of them) so that Invisibly can serve the right offer (micropayment, subscription, newsletter, ad) in real time to each individual browser-known user.

While media companies are willing to test, how much will they trust in this would-be ubiquitous system? They like the idea of potential new revenues, but have some fundamental questions.

If they believe that reader revenue really has become the lifeline of the serious news business, then does offering would-be payers preroll ads get in the way of that path forward? Faced with a choice of paying something — an article fee, a timed pass, or a subscription — or simply watching an ad, will the great majority of would-be payers simply opt to watch? That’s one concern I’ve heard. Says one publisher who has declined the deal: “In short, our impression was that this is basically an ad network dressed up as a savior for news sites.”

Further, McKelvey’s reliance on user behavior signals a question about the other big digital currency: data. While each media partner would presumably have access to all its own related data, Invisibly would be building one of the biggest human-behavior data banks extant if it achieves its ambitions to sign up thousands of well-trafficked sites. What value might that provide, and to whom when?

And no matter how good these ideas are, how will they translate with actual publisher implementations? McKelvey and his team will undoubtedly try to make the publisher implementation as easy as possible, but what new kinds of frictions, new interruptions in reading, might follow as Invisibly actually gets put on sites?

What will the readers think?

Then, there’s the big — and at this point unanswerable — question of consumer acceptance and adoption.

A reader/consumer’s “wallet” will fill up silently in the background — invisibly, you might say — depending how much value his attention to commerce is affording advertisers. Consumers won’t see these wallets, or how much content these value holders will offer them. Why? In showing actual value gained, consumers will try to “game” the system.

If, though, there’s enough currency in those wallets, presto, magico, they’re granted additional access to content without paying for it in cash. At first hearing, that seems like a semi-transparent transaction — will users be okay with that?

And how much do readers really want to actively engage with ads, anyway? McKelvey would probably be the first to tell you that’s unpredictable. That’s why I understand Invisibly could continue its testing of consumer behavior for as long as a year.

Certainly, readers might respond better to better ads, but the practicality of that targeting raises dozens of questions about execution — and consumer adoption. Will the ads, questions, or micropayment asks that Invisibly will pop up seem logical to consumers? Or will they seem like new frictions in the process of consuming news or entertainment?

Consumers won’t have to sign up for or sign into Invisibly, as they’ll have to do with Scroll. That’s where the invisibility of Invisibly derives. Background targeting — that mastery of ad tech to benefit media companies — identifies them. The system “fingerprints unique individuals, irrespective of properties. Each user carries enriched 1st party data based on consumption, context, behavior and user profile,” says Invisibly’s site. “Creepy,” or just the way we are now?

If consumers do sign up with Invisibly — and they’ll be offered the chance to sign up through small linked Invisibly logos on media sites — that signup will provide Invisibly more targeting knowledge. And that would increase the value of that signup to advertisers, and thus cash to content producers.

The company itself

So where does Invisibly the company fit in here?

McKelvey has painted it as a self-funded, mission-driven company, one aimed at recovering lost value for media brands in the age of digital platform disruption and distortion.

It’s a for-profit company, 51 percent owned by a trust, and that trust is controlled by McKelvey. It’s a setup intended to keep the company independent, he’s told media executives. It couldn’t, he says, under that structure be subject to takeover (presumably hostile) from a Murdoch, Zuckerberg, McAdam, or Page.

Jim McKelvey’s company is something of a black box to media executives. But they’re intrigued.

“To be honest, we do not know enough about the tech integration to know how it will work. At this time, we are signed up for the test and will participate,” Grant Moise, The Dallas Morning News’ general manager, told me. He added:

What I can share with you is what I like about Jim McKelvey’s approach. He is being bold enough to know that the digital display advertising model is broken. CPMs are eroding due to the multiple challenges associated with digital display advertising at its core (viewability, bot fraud, etc.). The approach of devising a new model where the publisher, the advertiser, and the consumer all benefit from a strong user experience is sorely missing in the digital age.

While most publishers (including us) have shifted from a digital advertising focus to a digital subscription focus, I am glad to see that someone is trying to challenge the thinking that these have to be mutually exclusive.

The investigation went largely unnoticed until 2016, when the same real estate company was implicated in the collapse of a bank. The ex-chief of staff and the company, named in the Apache story from 2013, demanded €350,000 in damages from Apache.

The company’s charges, however, caused an outpouring of support for Apache. Experts in media law roundly condemned the court case. A crowdfunding campaign and a benefit concert — organized by a standup comedian, Wouter Deprez, with the help of Apache and the concert hall Roma — raised €121,000, enough to cover court costs.

“The cost of the lawyers alone would have ruined us,” Karl van den Broeck, Apache’s editor-in-chief, told me. “The case brought with it a wave of sympathy for us, and actually made us stronger.”

Apache was founded in 2009 by several journalists laid off from other Belgian news outlets (its early backers included Georges Timmerman, Tom Cochez, Bram Souffreau and Jan Vangrinsven). The organization was established partly in response to an imbalance of media ownership in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking region of Belgium. The site has since grown to a modest staff of nine, seven of whom are reporters, with additional freelance support. (The name Apache does not refer directly to the Native American tribe, but rather to the 19th-century Parisian subculture — though that subculture’s name did refer, problematically, to the tribe. It’s pronounced ah-PAHSH, not uh-PATCH-ee.)

“The Flemish media landscape is very strongly concentrated in the hands of two to three media groups, who in turn are controlled by one or two families,” van den Broeck told me. “That is a very high concentration of power in the hands of individuals who have other commercial activities. So journalism sometimes clashes with the interests of the owners.”

Indeed, in a 2016 report, the Flemish media regulator noted that “the 7 most important paying Flemish newspapers have since [2013] been published by only two publishers, De Persgroep and Mediahuis.”

Apache is paywalled and operates under a co-op model — the organization is owned by its staff and its readers — “because we see it as the best way to guarantee our independence,” van den Broeck said. Each share in Apache costs €50, and shareholders are required to buy at least three shares initially. As of this October, Apache has just over 1,000 shareholders, raising just short of €500,000 to date. Shareholders can elect members to Apache’s board of directors, although shareholders only get one vote regardless of the number of shares they own. In this way, shareholders do hold some influence on the general management of Apache, but the editorial operations remain independent, van den Broeck emphasized.

“The cooperative does not influence the editors of Apache,” he said. “There is consultation between the board of directors and the editors, but that does not go to the level of articles. In that sense we are a protected environment for journalists.”

Apache also sells subscriptions to its site, distinct from shares, although shareholders do receive a one-year subscription. A basic subscription costs €80 a year, readers can also choose to subscribe for €120 a year to support Apache. The site now has around 3,500 subscribers. Apache maintains a porous paywall, which allows only paid subscribers to read most articles, though it regularly makes articles available for free and lets non-subscribers read individual articles through links shared by other subscribers (a feature used by subscription-driven outlets like Silicon Valley’s The Information and Dutch outlet De Correspondent).

“Maybe it is a purist attitude we have, but we believe that being funded by your readers is the best guarantee for independence. Using advertisements, subsidies or patronage has the risk of running into conflicts of interest,” Van den Broeck said. “We do not use advertisements and we only use government subsidies for specific projects, not to finance our day-to-day operations.”

At the moment, Apache still operates at a loss: “We are a startup. Our business plan is on schedule, but we still need to grow to become break-even,” van den Broeck admitted. The site hopes to have around 10,000 subscribers by early 2019. For now, it is financed through a combination of the funds it raises by selling shares and subscriptions in addition to some loans and government project subsidies.

Since 2009, Apache has frequently landed scoops with national repercussions. Its articles were helped expose the Belgian side of the French “Kazachgate” scandal where French politicians colluded with Kazakh businessmen during a corruption case. Their coverage included exposing a fake news site from Kazakhstan that was targeting Belgians around the time of the scandal. Another recent scoop showed how health insurance funds sold patient records to pharma companies.

“During the last few years, several parliamentary inquiries were launched in Belgium, and several of those have been directly caused by articles in Apache,” van den Broeck said, pointing out that whenever the site breaks news, it sees its subscriber numbers go up. “You need to conquer each subscriber individually, but whenever a dossier receives wider attention, we see more subscribers sign up.”

The court case against Apache from the real estate company that for damages was in particular a boon for subscriptions.

“We doubled our subscribers during that period, we went from 1,500 to 3,000,” van den Broeck told me. That same year, Apache had also increased the price of a subscription from €39 to €80 per year, but “we did not lose any subscribers; we actually doubled the number.”

Van den Broeck is hopeful that Apache’s co-op structure and reliance on subscriptions rather than advertising will continue to shield it in what he sees as a world that needs investigative journalism more than ever.

“Thanks to world leaders like Donald Trump there is more oxygen for investigative journalism. In times of fake news people look for something to hold onto, and they increasingly find that in quality journalism,” he said. “I think investigative journalism in Belgium is getting stronger again. Publishers are realizing that further cuts to newsrooms do not make sense. The only thing standing between a newspaper and whatever is appearing on social media is precisely old-fashioned, good journalism that has been made according to the rules of the trade.”

In August, Medium started letting a select group of users — mainly people who’d frequently published content on Medium in the past — put their content behind a paywall. Around the same time, it rolled out a $5/month subscription program that would give paying members access to this paywalled content. Writers are based on engagement, and in the first couple of months of the program, some have reported what seems like surprisingly easy money — making a couple hundred dollars, for instance, on posts that they’d written a long time ago and decided to paywall.

Starting today, we’ll see what the pay is like when anybody can paywall a Medium post. Medium announced on Tuesday that its program for writers is now open to everyone.

When you join the program, you will have the option to publish your story to Medium members only (who pay $5/month) and get paid based on engagement. Your story will still be distributed to your followers, discoverable through search, the Medium home page, and our apps. (Note: We have recently switched our paywall from “no access” to a “metered” one, meaning non-members will still be able to read a limited amount of locked stories each month.) You can lock and unlock any post at any time, and you don’t have to be a paying member to participate. You can learn more about these updates here.

There are some minor content guidelines that you have to follow (no spam-y articles, no requests for donations/claps, etc.) The company also attempts to ban offensive content, though it remains to be seen how strictly this will be enforced and how much appetite Medium has for policing it. (The last one in this list! Yikes!)

The following are not eligible for inclusion as member-only content — posts or accounts that:

— Advocate or promote intolerance or prejudice against individuals or groups, including the use of scientific or pseudo-scientific claims to pathologize, dehumanize, or disempower others
— Gratuitously use profanity or excessively graphic language and images for the purposes of shock or incitement
— Glorify, celebrate, downplay, or trivialize violence, suffering, abuse, or deaths
— Exist mainly to target, shame, intimidate or harass identified, identifiable or anonymous people
— Dox someone, including by exposing personal information or aggregating of public information
— Review businesses or products in an inflammatory or abusive manner
— Consist of unsubstantiated, unverified, or misleading claims and reporting

Now, on to the stuff you’re really interested in. How much are people going to get paid? A few folks who got to participate in the pilot have tweeted about what they received.

5 days later: first payment estimate puts it at about 33¢ a . Honestly a lot better than I was expecting for a post I wrote on BART. pic.twitter.com/3mrhxZdSws

— Buster (@buster) August 31, 2017

pic.twitter.com/AcWogJI0er

— (@hunterwalk) September 27, 2017

I put a few of my old articles behind the paywall on @Medium. Today, found out they earned me hundreds of $. If this keeps up for 2 more weeks, will be most I've ever been paid per article. Membership # must be big (cc: @daveyalba, @cwarzel, @laurahazardowen, @caleweissman).

— Sunil Rajaraman (@subes01) September 28, 2017

Lazy blogging. Just screenshot a Slack message about the type of publishers I think will thrive on Medium. pic.twitter.com/u1B0X9XFZr

— Coach Tony (@tonystubblebine) October 2, 2017

The amounts were a lot larger than I would have thought. (I am still looking for a woman who’s tweeted about making $$$ on Medium, by the way.) Two things here. First, I’d been under the impression that Medium was seeding the pool of money out of which writers are paid. CEO Ev Williams seemed to suggest this when I interviewed him at the end of August:

Like any marketplace, we are going to seed it first. Usually, you need to seed supply before you have enough demand, so there’s something for people to come to. In the beginning stages, we’re not limiting the payouts to subscribers. We are investing more than the current amount of subscriber revenue to seed the market.

A Medium spokeswoman insisted to me, however, that all of the money that writers in Medium’s partner program are making is coming from member contributions only. In an email, she told me the following:

— 100% of the money that goes to writers and publishers in the Medium Partner Program comes from members’ monthly $5. Through the Partner Program, eligible content creators can publish stories directly behind our membership paywall to earn money based on the depth of engagement from members.

— For the month of September (the first full month since we expanded the MPP), 83 percent of partners who published at least one member-only story earned money — the average amount earned was $93.65 over the course of the month. The most a single author received for September was $2,279.12, and the most a single publication earned was $1,466.68. The most a single story earned was $1,599.83.

— In addition to the Partner Program, we acquire content that we think members will enjoy, working directly with those writers and publications. This includes some of the more high-profile writers publishing behind the membership paywall, as well as the leading publishers curating ad-free selections for members. This is the “seed” of additional funds that Ev was referring to.

Second thing: To be making these amounts of money, the successful posts have to be achieving a fair amount of visibility within the platform, and it’s not entirely clear how that happens.

Whether or not Medium is throwing in, a likely consequence of today’s announcement is that author payments are going to get much smaller; nothing has happened to increase the number of paying Medium members, so their money will have to be spread farther. (Yeah, Medium’s doing various things to entice them — including a news publisher partner program that I’ll write more about later this week — but it’s nothing that’ll move the needle that much in the short term.) Medium wouldn’t tell me how many paying members it has, though a spokeswoman said “early signs indicate that content is converting readers.” At the ONA conference in Washington, DC, last week, Note to Self host Manoush Zomorodi, as part of a keynote with Williams, asked the audience how many people are paying Medium members; a few hands went up.

“Whoever is paying for things, ultimately, is the one most benefiting from them,” Williams said in the same keynote, a line I’ve been puzzling over since.

En agosto, Medium permitió que un selecto grupo de usuarios frecuentes pusiera su contenido detrás de un muro de pago o paywall. Más o menos al mismo tiempo, lanzó un programa de suscripción de US$5 al mes que daría acceso a ese contenido pago. En las primeras semanas de la iniciativa, algunos autores informaron que fue sorprendentemente fácil ganar dinero: se embolsaron unos doscientos dólares, por ejemplo, en publicaciones que habían escrito hacía mucho tiempo y decidieron poner tras el muro de pago.

El martes pasado, Medium anunció que su programa para autores quedaba abierto para todos. A partir de ahora, cualquiera puede cobrar por su contenido.

Cuando te unes al programa, tienes la opción de publicar tu historia solo para miembros de Medium (que pagan US$5 por mes) y recibir un pago en base al compromiso de tu audiencia. Tu historia seguirá siendo distribuida a tus seguidores, será visible en los buscadores, en la página de inicio de Medium y en nuestras aplicaciones. (Nota: hemos cambiado nuestro paywall de “sin acceso” a uno “medido”, lo que significa que los no miembros todavía podrán leer una cantidad limitada de historias). Puedes bloquear y desbloquear cualquier publicación en cualquier momento y no tienes que ser un miembro que paga para participar. Puedes obtener más información sobre estas novedades aquí.

Hay algunas pautas de contenido que debes seguir (no subir artículos de spam ni solicitudes de dinero, etc.). La compañía también intenta prohibir el contenido ofensivo, aunque queda por ver qué tan estricto será en su cumplimiento y cuántas ganas tiene Medium de vigilarlo (¡es el último de la lista!).

No pueden incluirse contenidos que:

— Aboguen o promuevan la intolerancia o los prejuicios contra individuos o grupos, incluido el uso de afirmaciones científicas o pseudocientíficas para patologizar, deshumanizar o desempoderar a los demás.
— Usen gratuitamente palabras o imágenes obscenas o imágenes excesivamente gráficas con el propósito de conmocionar o incitar.
— Glorifiquen, celebren, resten importancia o trivialicen la violencia, el sufrimiento, el abuso o las muertes.
— Existan principalmente para atacar, avergonzar, intimidar u hostigar a personas identificadas, identificables o anónimas.
— Exponer información personal de un tercero.
— Critiquen empresas o productos de una manera inflamatoria o abusiva.
— Consistan en declaraciones y denuncias sin fundamento, no verificadas o engañosas.

Ahora, a lo que realmente nos interesa. ¿Cuánto dinero vas a recibir? Algunas personas que participaron en la prueba piloto twittearon al respecto.

5 days later: first payment estimate puts it at about 33¢ a . Honestly a lot better than I was expecting for a post I wrote on BART. pic.twitter.com/3mrhxZdSws

— Buster (@buster) August 31, 2017

pic.twitter.com/AcWogJI0er

— ‍ (@hunterwalk) September 27, 2017

I put a few of my old articles behind the paywall on @Medium. Today, found out they earned me hundreds of $. If this keeps up for 2 more weeks, will be most I've ever been paid per article. Membership # must be big (cc: @daveyalba, @cwarzel, @laurahazardowen, @caleweissman).

— Sunil Rajaraman (@subes01) September 28, 2017

Lazy blogging. Just screenshot a Slack message about the type of publishers I think will thrive on Medium. pic.twitter.com/u1B0X9XFZr

— Coach Tony (@tonystubblebine) October 2, 2017

Las sumas fueron mucho más grandes de lo que esperaba. Dos cosas: primero, tuve la impresión de que Medium estaba “sembrando” el fondo de dinero del salía la paga para los autores. El CEO Ev Williams pareció sugerir esto cuando lo entrevisté a fines de agosto:

Al igual que cualquier mercado, vamos a sembrar primero. Por lo general, necesitas abastecerte de semillas antes de tener suficiente demanda. En las etapas iniciales, no estamos limitando los pagos a los suscriptores. Estamos invirtiendo más que la cantidad actual de ingresos de suscriptores para sembrar el mercado.

Sin embargo, una portavoz de Medium insistió en que todo el dinero que están ganando los autores del programa de socios de Medium proviene únicamente de las contribuciones de los miembros. En un correo electrónico, me dijo lo siguiente:

— El 100 por ciento del dinero que se destina a autores y editores del Programa de socios de Medium proviene de los US$5 mensuales de los miembros. A través del Programa de socios, los creadores de contenido elegibles pueden publicar historias directamente detrás de nuestro muro de pago para ganar dinero en función de la profundidad del compromiso de los miembros.

— Para el mes de septiembre (el primer mes completo desde que expandimos el Programa), el 83 por ciento de los socios que publicaron al menos una historia ganó dinero: el monto promedio ganado fue de US$93.65. El máximo que un solo autor recibió en septiembre fue de US$2.279.12, y la publicación que más ganó recibió US$1.466.68. Lo que más ganó una sola historia fue US$1.599.83.

— Además del Programa de socios, adquirimos contenido que creemos que disfrutarán los miembros, trabajando directamente con esos autores y publicaciones. Esto incluye a algunos autores de alto perfil que publican detrás del muro de pago, así como a los principales editores que curan las selecciones libres de anuncios para los miembros. Esta es la “semilla” de fondos adicionales a los que Ev se refería.

Segundo: para ganar esas cantidades de dinero, las publicaciones exitosas deben lograr una gran visibilidad dentro de la plataforma. Y no está del todo claro cómo ocurre.

Como sea, una posible consecuencia del anuncio es que los pagos al autor van a ser mucho más pequeños; nada se ha hecho para aumentar la cantidad de miembros de Medium dispuestos a pagar, por lo que su dinero tendrá que distribuirse más. (Sí, Medium está haciendo algunas cosas para atraerlos, incluyendo un programa para productores de noticias, pero no se trata de nada que pueda mover la aguja en el corto plazo). Medium no me dijó cuántos miembros que pagan tiene, aunque la portavoz dijo que “los primeros signos indican que el contenido está llevando a los lectores a pagar”. En la conferencia de ONA en Washington la semana pasada, Manoush Zomorodi preguntó a la audiencia cuántas personas eran miembros pagos de Medium. Algunas levantaron la mano.

“Quien esté pagando es, en última instancia, quien más se beneficia de ellos”, dijo Williams; algo que me ha dejado sorprendida.

That’s the premise on which Alex Clark has been building his journalism revenue startup PressPatron. It’s his attempt to bridge the paywalls and subscriptions of audience-supported journalism to encourage readers to pay what they want for news on a particular website. PressPatron started with Clark’s master’s thesis research in 2014 and is now crossing the Pacific from New Zealand to launch in the United States this fall.

PressPatron operates as the back-end platform for different publishers to support crowdfunding on their sites. Readers are prompted to make either a one-time or a monthly, recurring donation to the news organization through a small “powered by PressPatron” info box that pops up on their screen. The process can be completed without leaving the site. It includes a picture of the organization’s publisher and a message from the publisher to the reader. The goal is to have PressPatron integrated across a number of sites, so that audiences can recognize its name and take comfort in the familiarity.

Clark sees this as an opportunity to bridge the gap between declining advertising revenues and paywalls with low success rates.

“Ads don’t bring in anywhere near enough revenue. With paywalls, the conversion rate is super, super low and creates antagonism with readers,” he said. “We’re trying to encourage publishers to take down those barriers, to be able to reach a larger audience and have a higher revenue per user.”

The journalism market in Australia and New Zealand hasn’t always been keen on reader support and nonprofit news. Australian journalism academic Alexandra Wake wrote about the plight of one nonprofit news venture down under for Nieman Lab in 2014: The Global Mail had been operating on a pledge of $15 million over five years from one philanthropist, who turned away about two years in when his stock took a dive. In a post earlier this year on The Conversation, Wake noted that little had changed about the notion of paying for news in Australia:

Australia is considered a tough market for newspaper owners who are already fighting a difficult battle to keep paying readers and advertisers.

The latest Reuters Digital News Report declared that Australian publishers had ‘struggled to increase the number of digital subscribers beyond loyal users’ and that just 10 [percent] of Australians paid for news online. More specifically the report points to rising digital subscriptions for The Herald Sun and The Australian, while Fairfax publications the SMH and The Age, faced a small downturn after earlier increases.

Newspaper advertising dollars are also increasingly difficult to find. It’s not just because of competition from new foreign players in the Australian market, such as The Guardian and The Daily Mail.

Search engines like Google and Bing are taking massive amounts of advertising dollars away from the local mastheads. Last year PricewaterhouseCoopers predicted the newspaper advertising market in Australia will continue to drop sharply, that by 2020, advertising revenue will have more than halved in a decade.

Though the news industry across the globe has been faced with hardships, Clark hopes that PressPatron can slide into the market at an opportune time: when readers are more willing to pay for news, and media organizations are more willing to try new things.

In February PressPatron officially went live on the sites of New Zealand publishers like the independent news and current events website Newsroom and cultural commentary hub The Spinoff. Australian publishers introduced PressPatron to their sites in mid-August. The initial results seem promising.

Clark has done market research, though it’s limited. In 2014 he surveyed 416 people:

Within the survey, 1.4% of respondents said they’d definitely make a voluntary monthly contribution to their favorite news site or blogger, with an average amount of $11. A further 11.1% of respondents said they would probably contribute.

By comparison, only 0.24% of survey respondents said they would definitely subscribe to a news website that was locked behind content restrictions such as a paywall. A further 2.6% said they would probably subscribe.

In practice, however, things have been different, perhaps in part because in the last three years readers have become more comfortable with the idea of paying for journalism. So far, the average one-time contribution for PressPatron is 46.90 New Zealand dollars ($34.30) and the average monthly contribution is NZ$11.40. Supporters opt for monthly donations 60 percent of the time, but 37 percent of one-time donors give more than NZ$50, Clark said. In a feedback survey, supporters also noted that they appreciated the tool’s subtlety and convenience for donating to quality journalism without having to jump through hoops.

PressPatron is retaining 97 percent of supporters in its New Zealand markets so far. Clark noted that its conversion rate of the unique audiences across all publisher websites is 0.5 percent after only two months. It takes one to two years for the average paywall in the industry to reach that percentage, he said.

“There were more people willing to make these monthly donations than to pay for sites locked up [behind paywalls] which was a pretty cool finding,” he added.

PressPatron’s own funding comes out of a percentage of the donations as fees, though the company also raised funding from angel investors and institutions in New Zealand last year.

“It’s nice seeing the amount of goodwill and generosity that exists out there for journalism,” Clark said. “Contrary to popular belief, people do value journalism and care about it a lot.”

“We had huge pits in our stomach. We’d worked really, really hard and built up a very good reputation and a very loyal readership. It was a major step into the unknown,” he said.

Senter, the publisher of the Post, and his publisher emeritus Dan Blom had attempted other avenues for funding the news organization in its first seven years of existence. They started out with ads, supplemented by a donation drive, but it wasn’t enough to live off of. The team also tried to expand its coverage areas in the hopes of drawing more local advertisers, but that flopped about half a year in.

“We had tried everything else, but the reasons for why everything else isn’t working are very clear,” Senter said.

After the paywall went up, subscriptions actually started rolling in. Within three or four days, the number of subscribers to the Shawnee Mission Post surpassed the number of donors in its most recent campaign. In three months, the Post hit the threshold of 1,000 subscribers — which Senter had set as a goal for the paywall’s first year.

“It’s been a very validating few months. You feel like the community is behind you and wants you to be doing what you’re doing,” he said.

A Prairie Village, Kansas native, Senter met his wife Julia Westhoff in college and returned to the area to raise their family. The local coverage from larger news organizations (Prairie Village is just outside of Kansas City, Kansas) that he had grown up with had faded away, but Senter was confident that the audience was still there. He launched the Prairie Village Post in June 2010 as a side gig, gaining an audience as he reported about local government meetings and the mayoral race with more nuance than the metropolitan or regional news folks did, he said. “There was nobody covering Prairie Village city council meetings anymore,” he said. “All these things were going under the radar.”

Four years later, Blom had joined the team and the Post had evolved from covering just the city of Prairie Village to almost all local happenings under the umbrella of the Shawnee Mission School District (hence the renaming). The site was generating enough advertising revenue that Senter could quit his day job. By 2015, though, Blom and Senter were looking for other financial options to reach sustainability. “We were wringing every ad dollar we could out of this site,” Senter said. “We were going to have to get some revenue streams from readers at some point. We were obviously very nervous about that because it’s not the norm.”

In fact, subscriptions have risen at national news organizations after the presidential election in the so-called Trump Bump, while more local organizations haven’t seen the same effects. Studies have shown, though, that younger generations might be more willing to pay for news — a hypothesis that Senter was willing to try out.

The Shawnee Mission Post introduced an annual donation campaign in fall 2015 and netted $15,000 from just under 300 donors, Senter explained. Last year the campaign had about 350 contributors pitch in a total of $18,000. However, the site had between 50,000 and 60,000 regular unique visitors a month, with a core readership of 15,000 to 20,000 returning readers.

“[The donation campaign] grew nowhere close to…a game-changing thing on the revenue front,” Senter said. But it at least showed that some readers were willing to pay. “We always knew that we really were going to have some sort of major revenue from readers to make this work. We resigned ourselves to putting up a paywall.”

Here came the pit in Senter’s stomach. The paywall, instituted in April by Pigeon Paywall allows readers to view three stories for free, and the homepage is always free. After that, they are asked to pay $5.95 a month or $64.95 a year, which also includes a daily email newsletter.

Senter sought comfort in this analysis of streamlined local news business models by Stratechery’s Ben Thompson, in which he argues that the newspaper style of journalism includes top-heavy infrastructure that relates to producing a print product. Subscriptions, he said, may not save newspapers as a business model but could still preserve local news content with a leaner approach. (We’ve also discussed the sustainability of the local newspaper model here at Nieman Lab.)

Thompson’s analysis was music to Senter’s ears. “It was the most perfect reflection of what we had experienced and the forces that led us to make that decision,” he said.

The Shawnee Mission Post currently has Senter as publisher, Blom as publisher emeritus, and Westhoff as the sales director, in addition to a few stringers each covering a town in the school district. Senter brought on a few other employees when the team tried to expand to covering the Blue Valley school district in a secondary site (which folded after about six months because of a lack of interest from local advertisers). But this small team is bringing news to readers who made more than 1.5 million site visits in 2016 alone. For context, the Shawnee Mission School District has the third-largest enrollment of students across the state of Kansas and is part of a county with more than half a million residents, according to Ballotpedia.

“We have a seven-year track record. Our audience knew what they would be missing if we weren’t there,” Senter said. “There really isn’t anybody else who’s consistently covering the institutions that we’re covering the way that we do and with the reliable frequency that we do.”

Senter believes that flipping the paywall switch has also incentivized the Post to do more accountability journalism and less fun clicks. “New restaurant openings had always been our number-one driver before the paywall went up,” he said. “That meant we would be pretty happy to publish four to five things a day that were ‘man drives into wet cement’ and ‘a new Mexican restaurant has opened.’ It’s good for entertainment online, but it doesn’t really affect people’s lives in the way that tax dollars are being spent.”

Subscriptions actually started popping up after the Post publishes articles about local government institutions rather than restaurants, Senter found. So the team responded by refocusing its coverage on civic life and tax dollars. Advertising still makes up more than half of the Shawnee Mission Post’s revenue sources, but Senter said it’s on pace to have at least 35 percent of revenue from subscriptions this year. The ultimate goal is to have two-thirds of revenue come from readers and the remaining third from advertisers.

Now, instead of being a “nervous wreck” the way he was at the launch of the paywall, Senter describes himself as an “evangelical” for having the audience as the primary revenue source.

“Nobody goes into journalism because they want to cater to advertisers and deliver them as many eyeballs as possible,” Senter said. “There’s this norm in place that you don’t pay for news, and especially not for some dinky little local news…But if you show people that you are able to provide info they’re not able to find anywhere else, it makes it an attractive business to own and operate. The [quality of the] journalism is a whole lot better as well.”

Those three words — a request as old as the web — now drive the strongest strategy of our news era: reader revenue.

Today, The New York Times announces and starts to rollout the most significant redesign in its digital history. That redesign, 18 months in the arduous making, won’t turn heads or surprise many eyes, but its underlying thinking aims to empower the Times newsroom to deliver more timely, more nuanced, and more dramatic products to its readers — and thus for the Times to get more readers to pay for more of them. With this move and others, the Times aims to provide more and more reasons for readers to log in and get a constantly improving product offering as they move from phone to desktop to tablet to audio-on-demand and, eventually, to the new TV. Though the changes may not be flashy, they represent a significant change in strategy.

The Times calls the new system Vi — pronounced “vie”, not “six.” (Times watchers will note that an earlier redesign team was called NYT5.)

“People are inundated, surrounded with information 18 hours a day, and we understand that they get it from a variety of sources. So the question is: How do we, at any given moment across the day, across the globe, present the report in the most meaningful and easily accessible way that we can?” says Kinsey Wilson, the Times’ editor for innovation and strategy and executive vice president for product and technology. “That shift from platform to reader is what I would say is emphatically the pivot that we are making here.”

2015 and 2016 were all about platform for major news publishers — social discovery, distributed content, feeding Facebook — and this return to reader-centricity happens even as Facebook finally plans more publisher-friendly, subscription-supporting features. For the most part, the money in digital news is in attracting and retaining paying subscribers. Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other platforms can acquaint readers with top news brands, but it’s the on-site, on-browser, on-app experience that’s got to seal the deal.

“This year is the year for us to deliver on both our journalistic and our business ambitions,” Wilson says. “We not only have to create what we feel is one of the finest news reports in the world, but we have to deliver an experience that is the equal of the journalism.” That experience is based on product and service. It’s not the stream of news, as impressively as it has gushed this year; it’s how usable, convenient, and accessible publishers can now make it. Make no mistake, every slide from Mary Meeker, comScore and more confirm how much news reading has become a multidevice adventure. One goal here then is to make that journey more seamless.

“We know from our research that multi-platform/device subscribers retain better,” says Wilson. “A key differentiator is that readers who read broadly across a variety of subjects are more likely to subscribe and retain.”

He says the Times has overhauled its end-to-end digital publishing system “with the goal of being able to move with much greater speed, to do a better job at serving our audience, to create a systematic experience across all platforms…It lays the foundation for a much more rapid system of iterative development.”

That process includes moving the Times from running six platforms to a singular, responsive publishing system. “If I want to adjust a feature on the site today,” says Wilson, “I’ve gotta touch six different stacks of code to do that. What we’re moving to is pretty much a single stack.”

Ironically, the work, led by Wilson’s teams, should make life easier for the new product teams to be redeveloped as just-promoted COO Meredith Kopit Levien assumes responsibility for them, and Wilson leaves his position.

Readers will notice some changes — on the desktop NYTimes.com, on the mobile app’s display, in slow-moving personalization — over time, but Wilson says that only 10 to 20 percent of the impact of what’s possible will be seen soon by readers: “This is really just a huge investment in the next couple of years of product development.”

Let’s consider how this all fits into the Times’ subscriber-first strategy — which parallels similar strategies now being pursued by big players on both sides of the Atlantic. Take, for instance, Schibsted’s major second-generation platform initiative. In offering a bevy of tailored reader benefits (touts to stories of personal, contextual usage), “we will have 100 percent logged in users,” Terje Seljeseth, Schibsted’s chief product officer, told me last month. Quid pro quo: sign up, sign in, and get more — or stay anonymous and get less.

Within the last year, Schibsted’s popular daily VG has seen a 27 percent increase in digital subscriptions, and the company intends its technology to glue those payers and entice more of them into the fold.

Of course, The Washington Post’s Arc platform both meets and anticipates next-generation publishing technology needs as well and can claim partial responsibility for the Post surpassing 500,000 digital-only subscribers this year. News Corp — its technology strategy now led, in part, by two former New York Times executives, Marc Frons and Rajiv Pant — likewise looks to how its technology will build on reader loyalty and payment on three continents. News Corp’s Wall Street Journal can count 1.2 million digital-only subscribers.

All these companies emphasize the greater value of getting readers logged in. Their newsletter strategies have served as the newest weapon in that offensive, with the Times noting it has 13 million subscriptions to 50 email newsletters. As I’ve dug into both the Times and Post newsletter strategies, the new value of a registered, signed-in reader has become clear. It leads to greater engagement, increases conversion to subscription, and will power efforts toward that holy grail of personalization. While the Times won’t say how many registered readers it now counts, those millions — gained by subscription, by newsletter signup and more — are the ones this redesign most wants to please. Engage ’em. Log ’em in. Engage ’em some more. Get them to subscribe. It’s the new virtuous circle.

So, what will Times’ readers notice most, and where?

The Times believes that desktop readers will see the most change. In the screenshot below, you see a representation of what some desktop readers will see beginning today.

Clearly, the new desktop design borrows from the Times’ highly successful mobile products. I was glad to greet that arrival last year here at the Lab and would love to do the same with the new desktop one — but I can’t. The Times is acting on the research-driven understanding that “our home screen effectively communicated the news of the day, but was not as effective in communicating the full breadth of content offered by The Times,” says Paul Werdel, product lead on the home screen redesign and replatforming. It’s clearly more visual, and its top-right real estate resembles the top of the phone product: Morning Briefing, “The Daily” podcast, and New York Today, replacing the large current Opinion block. (The demotion of Opinion might seem odd at this political moment, but maybe the Times’ research backs up that decision.) “Latest” — breaking news — is now emphasized.

But overall it lacks the vitality and the informality that the Times mobile product embraces, still seeming more like an artifact of the 20th century than its in-our-pocket cousin. Perhaps it will evolve over time, or perhaps — as we’ve almost proven in 20 years — no one’s yet figured out how to translate the serendipity of print (and phone) to the deadweight computer.

The phone products will benefit from the redesign, too, of course. Wilson believes the greatest difference will be seen on the Times’ apps. Its two iOS apps — for iPhone and iPad — now will exist on a common codebase. “You’ll see only subtle design changes, at first, but you should see enhanced performance — and what we really get is the ability to publish web pages into it that are beautiful and fluid and include the vast majority of the features that we’ve been developing into our story pages, but have always had difficulty getting into our apps because we had to rebuild them in our apps.”

App users have come to become more and more meaningful for the Times — and for their peer competitors. In May, the Times’ iOS and Android apps represented 27 percent of its daily active user and generated 37 percent of its overall pageviews.

As of today, the Times will have released the new mobile browser version of the redesign to about a quarter of its users, with the new app iterations deploying soon.

Perhaps no potential impact of this redesign may be as important as “personalization” — a term some in the news business complain has now lost all meaning, given both its immense possibility and vagueness. For the Times, personalization so far has meant mostly a little geolocation — tailoring newsletter and other delivery by continent and more.

Since at least the introduction of My Yahoo (which required active selection of user preferences) two decades ago, personalization’s been a fraught word in the news business. Remember the debates about “one to many” and “many to one” and “one to one”? They’re still in the air, but the technology — and the analysis of reader data — has clearly matured. Personalization — a harder or softer tailoring to signed-in readers’ preferences — is now much more doable. And it will be part of what the Times, along with those other advanced tech players in global news, will test out this year. But their caution remains.

“We have to be very careful that people don’t feel that we’re any way limiting or restricting or filtering the news report,” Wilson says. “One of the things Times readers value most is the serendipity of the Times. What they get from the Times, and the knowledge that what they see, other people are seeing, and that the judgment of Times editors is being fully applied to things. So we’re not gonna mess with that.”

Quite true — that’s part of the brand promise of the big publishers who have generated hundreds of thousands of paying digital readers.

Still, we all want a little more of what we like most. So the pages we get — over time — will reflect that, a game of percentages that I believe will be imperceptible but agreeable to most of us.

As the new desktop NYTimes.com rolls out to 1 percent of the audience today, this redesign also marks a major departure in how the Times debuts its technology changes.

“Last year, we were still very much in the waterfall mode, where design had a high degree of control over how the redesigns were being executed — things were finished to within a pixel of their lives, and the redesign was pushed out the door to pretty much 100% of the audience,” says Wilson. Today, as that desktop audience tests out the new tech, the Times believes it can adjust to needed changes on the fly. “You get it in front of people, see how they react, get their feedback. We will notify people that they are in the test, and we’ll give them the ability to flip back to the current site. It’s the best way to do development and understand what’s really working for the audience and what’s not, rather than doing endless research and testing and trying to survey people and get stuff in front of them.”

There are a half billion other reasons for avoiding flip-the-switch changes. Says Wilson: “We now are running a $500 million digital business, and you don’t want to be making big, disruptive changes without understanding the economic consequences.”