Twitter was taking up too much of journalists’ time, the Times said. It was also driving harassment and abuse, and bad tweets harm the reputation of the paper and of its staffers. The company also made it clear that Twitter is truly optional, and that using it isn’t a job requirement.

There must be an Elon Musk in the water because this week, The Guardian released new social media guidelines for its own staffers.

The guidelines are “based on extensive input from journalists and commercial staff across [Guardian News Media], in the UK, US and Australia,” the Guardian said. Here are a few key parts:

Social media is optional — really.

GNM does not require you to tweet or post on any social media platform. Most staff can do their jobs extremely well using social media either occasionally, such as to share Guardian and Observer stories; for monitoring (‘listen-only’ mode); newsgathering/finding sources; or not at all. You are not expected to have a presence or a following on social media.

Employees aren’t exactly forbidden from expressing political opinions. But…

The Guardian and the Observer are renowned for fair and accurate reporting, and being trusted matters. Editorial colleagues — particularly those working in news — should remain especially mindful of blurring fact and opinion when using social media. Be aware that expressing partisan, party-political or strong opinions on social media can damage the Guardian’s reputation for fair and fact-based reporting, and your own reputation as a journalist. The same applies to likes and retweets.

Reporters with large followings need to be especially careful about this, the memo notes:

Your behaviour, more than most, will reflect on GNM and may have a disproportionate impact on those you engage with on social platforms. Think carefully before you quote-tweet.

Don’t use social media to fight with or criticize colleagues or the company.

We strongly discourage the use of social media to air any form of internal disputes with colleagues or contributors, or with GNM. This is a serious matter.

Also, subtweets about colleagues are “never acceptable.”

Guardian reporters should generally not break news on Twitter

Remember, as a journalist your job is to break news for GNM, on GNM’s platform, not on social media. Only tweet breaking news if the news editor is happy for you to do that, rather than report it for the website.

Just because Twitter says it’s a story doesn’t mean it is.

It’s worth keeping in mind that just because a story is generating interest on social media, or a handful of people have tweeted about it, that does not necessarily mean it has news value and needs to be reported or circulated further on social media.

Delete your tweets! Expense Tweetdelete!

We strongly encourage staff to regularly delete historical tweets and other social posts. We recommend using the Tweetdelete service to do this. The cost of this can be expensed.

The Guardian also “plans to create a new role in the managing editor’s office that includes responsibility for social media, so that GNM journalists and editors have somebody to talk to for expert advice and support, including on abuse or harassment when needed.”

In those early days, there was this huge fear — I think there still is — around the reduction of diversity in Australian media. It produced a groundswell of support in giving. And then once this model had proven itself to be viable, the team in London started investing in hiring experts. They had researchers, loyalty marketers, customer experience and retention experts, put their results into it, but most importantly, connected this contributions program closely with the newsroom and with editorial through a membership editor, which meant that the journalism continued to be the focus that drove conversion. So although there are still lots of lumps and bumps all the way with the tech, the need, the timing, the messaging, and the product were well-aligned, and the newsroom really supported it so that it drove success.

By the time I left, which was five years after launching the program, it was delivering more than 50% of the revenue from less than 2% of the total monthly audience. So I think that means there’s still plenty of room for growth.

The Guardian — through its U.S.-based philanthropic arm theguardian.org — raised $9 million between April 2020 and April 2021. Rachel White, who has been president of theguardian.org since its founding in 2016, said every single project was renewed.

New multi-year reporting projects were funded and launched, too. Humanity United, which has funded reporting on modern day slavery and labor exploitation with a pair of two-year $800,000 grants, expanded its support in 2021 with a $1.5 million grant for a series on human rights around the world. (White says this has made The Guardian the only global news organization with a dedicated human rights reporting team.) In another example, Open Society Foundations, which has funded reporting on gender inequality in the U.S. at The Guardian in the past, reupped its contributions to fund work on climate justice and the intersection of inequality and Covid-19. Other grants have boosted the climate journalism that The Guardian has led the way on in recent years and made a U.S. voting rights project possible.

With bleak-and-getting-bleaker advertising figures, we’ve seen a number of new newsrooms choose to go the nonprofit route and look to fund their journalism through individual contributions and direct support from foundations and other charitable organizations.

Philanthropy at The Guardian is a little less straightforward. The news organization, owned by Scott Trust Limited, is not a nonprofit like, say, The Salt Lake Tribune or The Marshall Project or Mountain State Spotlight. (If I hit “Contribute” after reading a Guardian article, the donation isn’t tax-deductible, for example.)

Instead, in 2016, The Guardian formed an independent, U.S.-based charitable organization specifically to find financial support for its journalism. It’s part of a growing trend of U.S. newspapers seeking philanthropic support; the same year, The New York Times launched its own philanthropic arm and, in 2019, hired Sharon Chan, who’d formerly raised money to support education journalism at the Seattle Times, as its first VP of Philanthropy. A recently announced Times journalism initiative, Headway, is supported by philanthropic dollars.

White, who joined from New America Foundation, says her role was “experimental” at the outset. Two existing grants — from the Gates and Rockefeller foundations — had caught the attention of newsroom leadership who wondered, was there more where that came from?

“For a place like The Guardian, we wouldn’t and shouldn’t be seeking the same kind of funding that nonprofit newsrooms split because we have lots of different revenue streams that support the news organization,” White said. “We really needed to define why and how we would seek philanthropic support.”

The “how” was relatively straightforward; setting up a 501(c)(3) made it easier for more nonprofits to contribute. The “why,” White says, has been driven entirely by the newsroom.

“We’re fierce — and always will be — about editorial independence,” she said. “Every one of the ideas that we take to philanthropy comes first from senior editors at The Guardian. They tell us what they’re interested in and they we see if there’s an opportunity for us to find support for it.”

The Guardian goes farther than most to be transparent about who is funding its journalism. Every project funded through theguardian.org has a prominently placed badge noting the institution(s) that made the work possible. A gene editing documentary was funded by the U.K.-based Wellcome Trust, for example, while articles in a series on the threats facing public lands in the United States and Canada discloses its support from the Society of Environmental Journalists. The full list of more than 40 grant-supported projects appears on theguardian.org.

“We always want to make sure this information is not hard to find for our readers,” White said. “I think we set the standard on it, to be honest.”

White is quick to point out that philanthropy is not the primary way The Guardian supports its journalism. Annual revenue for The Guardian was £223.5 million (USD $308 million) in 2020, including digital-driven revenue — now making up 56% of all revenue — at £125.9 million. In contrast, theguardian.org has reliably contributed between $5.1 million and $5.4 million per year.

But newsroom budgets are tight and after one glorious year of not losing money, The Guardian reported “significant financial challenges” in 2020 amid the pandemic. The philanthropic arm focuses on reporting projects that might be difficult to justify funding while facing budget shortfalls.

“The instinct is that there are topics that are really important to us, from an editorial standpoint, that require longer durations of reporting or could benefit from a dedicated editorial team or extra data journalism,” White said.

Unlike other news organizations that may prefer unearmarked funds, White says The Guardian seeks out subject-specific funding. Broad topics — environmental justice or biodiversity or global development — lend themselves particularly well to this approach. White says their breadth gives editors “more latitude” and appeals to foundations driven to “tackle the big problems and big challenges.” White says she had wondered earlier in her tenure if philanthropy supporting the arts would want to fund, for example, journalism about music, but has found more of an appetite for “more serious” topics.

(When newsroom budgets shrink, arts and culture coverage often appears on the chopping block early. Given the critical role that reviews, features, and other journalism play in creating audiences for new work in theatre, literature, and other artistic endeavors, why don’t we see more organizations funding arts-and-culture journalism?)

The organizations and individuals that White works with are, unsurprisingly, very interested in the impact of the journalism they fund. The Guardian has developed a suite of tools and procedures to try and measure who their journalism is reaching — and what effect it has.

“Foundations have a really specific way of thinking about the world,” White said. “Their boards want to know, if they paid to do something, could you tell if it worked?”

As more news organizations, including The Guardian, appeal to readers for contributions, impact work is increasingly being deployed beyond philanthropic efforts.

“You hear about the role of impact and this obligation or desire on the part of news organizations to be talking about impact more and more,” White noted. “It gets to the heart of, ‘Why do we do the reporting?’ and ‘What do readers get out of this?’ It’s part of a virtuous circle of feeling that, ‘Right, this matters and it did something.'”

Answering those questions at theguardian.org includes leaning on a proprietary metrics tool at The Guardian (alongside more widely-used tools like Google Analytics) and an impact tracker — described as, basically, an interactive spreadsheet developed by the Center for Investigative Reporting — that allows journalists to contribute items like a call from the U.N. for more information about their reporting or a pending bill written in response to an article’s findings. The Guardian also measures impact by tracking backlinks on sites from government agencies or NGOs and using a social listening tool called Pulsar.

“Pulsar allows us to get gain a better sense of where the journalism is traveling in social media, whether we reached unexpected audiences and whether we reach an audience that we hoped to reach,” White said. “We can see a lot more than just the episodic experience of noticing that [for example] Greta Thunberg retweets our stuff. We can see the kind of stuff that everyone sees and gets excited about, but this allows us to better understand our spheres of influence.”

Looking ahead, White says the newsroom is looking at finding funding for topics like “the future of the American worker” and “the long tail of inequality and poverty” post-pandemic.

“This part of the world will start to feel better. Lots of us will be immunized. The world will want to move on. The Global South, meanwhile, will suffer for a very long time,” she said. “People will get tired of that story, but we will stay with that story and we will continue to seek philanthropic funding to stay with that story.”

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked White — who has been working to secure philanthropic support for journalism for nearly six years now — what has surprised her most in her role.

“I really did believe in 2016 — the first time it felt like the world was collapsing— that everyone would immediately see the role of journalism and philanthropy would rise triumphantly to the challenge and that there would be this outpouring of support. While the market has expanded and this commitment to the idea of supporting journalism has grown, it certainly hasn’t grown at the pace of the crisis for journalism,” White said. She said she sees “many glimmers of hope,” including undertakings like the American Journalism Project and Report for America but that philanthropy would have to “massively scale” to meet even 20% of the budgetary need.

“I just continue to hope that the philanthropic market will expand to meet the needs of news organizations, because they’re substantial,” White added. “I don’t think the philanthropic sector is quite there yet.”

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

Some background for Americans

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

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

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

Now take a look:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/09/a-new-set-of-threats-to-the-bbc-internal-and-external-challenges-its-role-as-anchor-of-u-k-media/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/08/it-continues-to-be-very-good-to-be-the-new-york-times/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/08/it-continues-to-be-very-good-to-be-the-new-york-times/#respond Wed, 05 Aug 2020 15:38:25 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=185196 Last year, I outlined what I considered to be the four major milestones a newspaper must eventually reach for its transition to a truly digital company to be successful. They are:

• Making more revenue from digital sources than from print.
• Making more revenue from readers than from advertising.
• Achieving net revenue growth, with digital dollars rising more quickly than print dollars are falling.
• Having more digital subscribers than print subscribers.

This morning, The New York Times became the first American newspaper I’m aware of to reach all four. (I only know of one international newspaper, the Financial Times, that beat them to the title. The Guardian would also be there if it had a true paywall rather than remaining free to all online.)

The Times today reported Q2 2020 results and, for the first time, a majority of its revenue came from digital: $185.5 million, versus $175.4 million from print. It had already reached the other targets — more reader revenue than ad revenue, more digital subs than print subs, and net revenue growth — in recent years.

(A brief self-pat on the back: In February 2019, I wrote that, “given the trendlines in print and digital, it won’t be too long until it hits that 50 percent tipping point — I’d guess Q2 2020.” If you put money down on that prediction, I’ll be happy to take a cut of your winnings.)

The Times also hit yet another strong quarterly subscriptions number, adding a record 669,000 new digital subs in Q2. In 2016, the Times set a seemingly ambitious target of having 10 million digital subscribers by 2025. If it keeps adding new subscribers at this quarter’s pace, it would hit that number by early 2022, three years ahead of schedule.

(Another brief aside: Remember when some people thought the Times’ digital subscription success was just attributable to a one-time “Trump bump” tied to the shock of his election? Well, the Times added 583,000 digital subscriptions in all of 2016; it added more than that in just the past quarter. When Trump took office, the Times reported having 1.853 million total digital subscriptions; today it has 5.7 million.)

All of this is, as usual, great news for the Times and a reminder of the yawning gap between it and America’s local newspapers. Gannett — the nation’s largest newspaper chain by far, with more than 250 U.S. daily local newspapers, USA Today, and another 140 local news brands in the U.K. — has about 863,000 digital subscribers in total. The New York Times adds that many digital subs roughly every four months.

And while the rest of the American newspaper business struggles to match the Times’ subscription success, it’s unfortunately likely to share in the Times’ advertising pain. By far the worst number in today’s report was the utter collapse of ad revenue in the second quarter, driven by COVID-related shutdowns and the economic downturn.

Ad dollars were down an astonishing 43.9 percent in Q2; that included drops of 31.9 percent in digital and 55 percent in print. Given that most newspaper companies are more print-reliant than the Times — meaning greater relative exposure to the “55 percent” in that equation versus the “31.9 percent” — other newspaper earning reports are likely to be U-G-L-Y ugly. The 40-plus percent drop in advertising I estimated from McClatchy’s bankruptcy numbers may well prove to be too conservative. (Gannett and Lee Enterprises will announce its Q2 earnings tomorrow; Tribune Publishing will do so later today.)

Back to the Times. It will likely recover some, maybe even most, of those advertising losses in whatever future quarter American life returns to some semblance of normalcy. But the longterm decline in advertising dollars will continue. The digital subscription engine the Times has built will continue to protect it, though. The magic of a NaaS business — news as a service — is that the marginal cost of each additional subscriber is minimal. Having 10 million subscribers doesn’t cost the Times twice as much as having 5 million subscribers. That potential for up-cycling profits will buoy the business for years to come.

Right now, the Times has $756.7 million in cash on hand — up almost 10 percent so far in 2020 — and has no outstanding debt. Its recent acquisitions have been smallish in size; it paid just $8.6 million for the audio company Audm in March, and its recent purchase of Serial Productions cost about $25 million. It has the capacity to think at larger scales now.

(For context, all of Gannett is currently valued at just $212 million; the Times could buy Gannett three times over and still have cash on hand. Note: The Times should not buy Gannett, three times or one time.)

All of that is why I argued what I did in my open letter to incoming Times Co. CEO Meredith Kopit Levien, who assumes the role in a little over four weeks. The gap between the Times and the rest of American newspapering has exploded, and every trend line suggests it will only keep growing. If the Times cares about journalism beyond its walls, I hope it starts treating the health of the broader ecosystem as a key part of its mission going forward.

Fish-eye photo of The New York Times building by Torrenegra used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/08/it-continues-to-be-very-good-to-be-the-new-york-times/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/05/sick-of-coronavirus-news-the-boston-globe-is-running-a-serialized-novella-with-a-strong-boston-accent/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/05/sick-of-coronavirus-news-the-boston-globe-is-running-a-serialized-novella-with-a-strong-boston-accent/#respond Mon, 04 May 2020 13:46:31 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=182461 An enigmatic card shark.
An ex-con looking for the score of a lifetime.
A priceless haul of stolen art.
A professor who uncovers a secret that could change the world.
And a mystery as old as the country itself…
A mystery that someone’s willing to kill for.

If that sounds like a mashup of “Rounders,” “Ocean’s Eleven,” “The DaVinci Code,” and “National Treasure: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Heist,” you’re not too far off. But that’s the log line for a series The Boston Globe began running Sunday: a serialized novella called “The Mechanic.”

The author is Ben Mezrich, best known for his nonfiction books on gambling and for having written the book that became the basis for “The Social Network.” (When I looked at his Twitter account this morning, the “Who to Follow” recommendations included both Winklevii.) He is also, importantly for these purposes, a Bostonian.

The Globe has published the first four chapters as of this morning; the remaining 18 will spool out over the next two weeks. It’s getting front-page treatment; it’s a great opportunity for any corrupt Boston pol to say, correctly, “That story on the front page of the Globe? Never happened.”

Serialized fiction has a long and storied history on newsprint. It was common in the 19th and early 20th century; more recently, it’s been a tool someone remembers to use every few years to get people hooked into a daily habit — an increasingly important factor after the shift from daily print to whenever digital.

In 1999, a 29-part novel by Roy Peter Clark ran in what were then The New York Times’ regional papers. (“The adventures of a St. Petersburg, Fla.-based investigative reporter on the trail of a doomsday cult with cataclysmic plans for the turn of the century.”) In 2007, The Washington Post ran a reporter-penned thriller called “Jezebel’s Tomb.” (“It features a journalist who investigates a bombing and tries to track down a mysterious 2,000-year-old document that may hold a dangerous secret.”) The Guardian serialized a Chris Ware graphic novella in 2014. The New York Times regularly ran serial fiction in the late 2000s, including works by Michael Chabon, Patricia Cornwell, and John Banville.

But those appeared in somewhat more normal times; the thinking here is that, when the world’s on fire, people could use a taut narrative to get lost in. As the paper put it: “The Globe’s commitment to covering the coronavirus pandemic continues unabated, as today’s paper and website make plain, but we thought a bit of a diversion might also be welcome.”

Enjoyed the first two installments of The Mechanic,’ by Ben Mezrich https://t.co/Ke3YOx5MGJ Thanks @BostonGlobe ! It’s great to read something other than CV19.

— johnnycrossfit (@johnnycrossfit) May 4, 2020

I’m a little obsessed with @benmezrich’s writing, so it’s pretty cool to have him partnering with the Globe for his latest project. https://t.co/aw0rYPauWn pic.twitter.com/hR1THxIluD

— Dan McGowan (@DanMcGowan) May 3, 2020

Today the Boston Globe, in an effort to offer "a bit of a diversion" for readers consumed by Trump's hourly fumbling, constant lying, and utter incompetence, begins a serialized fictional mystery by Ben Mezrich: "The Mechanic." https://t.co/C9cdJHiTEZ

— Harland Gundlefinger (@Gundlefinger16) May 3, 2020

The serialized new novel, The Mechanic, by @benmezrich will be published in the @BostonGlobe, chapter by chapter starting this Sunday for two weeks. Read along with this fun Boston mystery – stolen art, card sharks, ex-cons, and more. #themechanic https://t.co/ZCHGM7YLSv

— Linda Pizzuti Henry (@Linda_Pizzuti) May 2, 2020

Photo of Boston’s Zakim Bridge by Robbie Shade used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/05/sick-of-coronavirus-news-the-boston-globe-is-running-a-serialized-novella-with-a-strong-boston-accent/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/04/lost-on-the-frontlines-wants-to-memorialize-and-count-the-health-care-workers-whove-died-from-coronavirus/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/04/lost-on-the-frontlines-wants-to-memorialize-and-count-the-health-care-workers-whove-died-from-coronavirus/#respond Thu, 16 Apr 2020 16:51:09 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=181995 Last week, The Guardian’s story about Frank Gabrin, the first emergency room doctor to die from coronavirus in the United States, pointed out a chilling fact: We don’t know how many frontline workers are dying from the virus, or the rate at which we’re losing them.

On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that, among health care workers, there have been 9,282 confirmed cases and 27 deaths as of April 9. But Kaiser Health News, USA Today, and even the CDC itself have all said that number is a major undercount because of the way testing varies in each state.

And while those numbers are bound to rise and be disputed, it won’t change the fact that those people are more than a statistic; they lost their lives in trying to save others. That’s why The Guardian partnered with Kaiser Health News to keep track of those health care professionals and pay homage to them.

The Lost on the Frontlines project, launched Wednesday, is a series of profiles of deceased frontline workers, like J. Ronald Verrier, a surgeon in the Bronx, or Daisy Doranila, a nurse in Kearny, New Jersey.

“Lost on the Frontline”aims to document the lives of health care workers in the U.S. who die from #COVID19. These are some of the first cases. KHN/@GuardianUS #LostOnFrontline

: @mmbaily/@alastairgee/ @By_CJewett/@daniellerenwick/@SarahVarney4
: https://t.co/PFh5H8y0XF pic.twitter.com/s6GL7oWsnB

— Kaiser Health News (@KHNews) April 15, 2020

Jane Spencer, deputy editor and head of strategy for The Guardian (and a former Nieman Fellow), said that part of the effort will be crowdsourced. They’ll ask people to fill out a Google Form with the information about the deceased and a reporter will get in touch to report out what happened. This method serves two purposes: as a digital memorial of the people who were lost and to identify larger trends in health care across the country. Reporters will also exhaust traditional reporting methods to find as many cases as possible.

Nurse Vianna Thompson, 52, spent two night shifts caring for a fellow Veterans Affairs health care worker who was dying from COVID-19. Two weeks later, she too was lying in a hospital intensive care unit, with a co-worker holding her hand as she died.

: https://t.co/PFh5H8y0XF pic.twitter.com/nJKl1DB1vd

— Kaiser Health News (@KHNews) April 16, 2020

Nurse Divina “Debbie” Accad had cared for veterans for over 25 years and was set to retire in April. But after contracting the novel coronavirus, she spent her final 11 days on a ventilator — and didn’t survive past March. #LostOnTheFrontline

: https://t.co/PFh5H8PBPd pic.twitter.com/l0SNnrOWMb

— Kaiser Health News (@KHNews) April 15, 2020

Jeff Baumbach, 57, was a seasoned nurse of 28 years when the novel coronavirus began to circulate in California. Jeff tested positive for COVID-19 and he died on March 31. His daughter Kaila said, “I thought he was invincible." #LostOnTheFrontline

: https://t.co/PFh5H8y0XF pic.twitter.com/IJ1OF9PCi2

— Kaiser Health News (@KHNews) April 15, 2020

“We were moved by the extraordinary sacrifices frontline health care workers are making to keep the rest of us safe in the pandemic and deeply troubled by the reports of the lack of protective gear available in hospitals and in other health care settings,” Spencer said. “So we wanted to find a way to tell the story about the additional burden faced by health care workers, and we thought that creating a nationwide database would allow us to identify patterns and how the pandemic impacts health care workers and shed light on both the workings and failings of the U.S. health care system in this crisis.”

For now, the project is available on both The Guardian’s and Kaiser Health News’ sites, but it will eventually be developed into its own site as a comprehensive interactive. Spencer said one of the eventual goals is to be able to determine their own count of how many health care professionals died due to the virus. Such a database doesn’t exist for the public yet. (It’s one of a number efforts by news organizations to assemble their own databases on important coronavirus issues.)

“We’re using a very inclusive approach to the data set,” Spencer said. “In addition to doctors and nurses and the people we think of as frontline health care workers, we also want to include hospital cleaners and home health aides and nursing home workers. This data set is the first of its kind in its comprehensiveness, and it’s not tracked anywhere else.”

I'm proud to be working with @By_CJewett, @SarahVarney4 of @khnews and our partner @guardian to honor U.S. health care workers who have died fighting the #covid19 pandemic. https://t.co/n7ok20xXsE If you know of anyone who has died, please let us know: https://t.co/mCNSYw1Lny

— mmbaily (@mmbaily) April 15, 2020

On April 1, Medscape launched its own initiative to track health professional deaths during the pandemic. There are already 10 pages worth of names.

Spencer said that the stories from the project will be available to local news outlets to republish for free. They’ll also link out to local stories and translate select stories for ethnic media outlets.

Lost on the Frontlines was partly inspired by a previous Guardian project, The Counted, a national database that tracked the number of people killed by police officers in the United States. Spencer said The Guardian reached out to Kaiser Health News to collaborate and pulled the project together in a little over a week.

Over the last few weeks we’ve written about the coronavirus web traffic boom (and its burst). But John Hilkirk, senior enterprise editor at Kaiser Health News, said that interest in these types of aftereffects stories has been consistent among their audiences.

“The concern about frontline health care workers has just been incredible,” Hillkirk said. “Despite the fact that the story has gone on, there’s a lot of outrage and a lot of concern about lack of personal protective equipment, and then just the tragic nature. It’s such a dramatic and sad story. I don’t think people are losing interest in it.”

Illustration by Lydia Zuraw/Kaiser Health News.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/04/lost-on-the-frontlines-wants-to-memorialize-and-count-the-health-care-workers-whove-died-from-coronavirus/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/02/news-organizations-just-want-to-get-readers-hooked-whether-their-habits-news-podcasts-or-puzzles/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/02/news-organizations-just-want-to-get-readers-hooked-whether-their-habits-news-podcasts-or-puzzles/#respond Fri, 14 Feb 2020 19:57:47 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=180100 Newspapers once relied on their readers’ daily habit: starting the morning with a cup of coffee and a rifle through the print paper. Those days are going or gone for most, but publishers know that their future success will come down, at least in part, to how well they’re able to form new habits in readers.

(Think, for example, of the past few years’ success in email newsletters and email podcasts — each of which, like a print paper, arrives at a set time and a set frequency. Publishers dearly hope that listening to The Daily or reading Essential California becomes as regular a part of your day as brushing your teeth.)

A new report from the digital publishing firm Twipe examines how, exactly, publishers are building news products, running tests, and pushing notifications with that goal in mind.

Publishers are finding that a key metric for starting or stopping a subscription is the number of active days a reader has engaged with the publisher’s products, it says, especially in the early “onboarding” weeks of the reader’s subscription. That lines up well with research last year from Northwestern’s Medill Local News Initiative, which looked at granular audience data from three major metro dailies. Their conclusion? The frequency with which a reader comes back to the newspaper’s website “is the single biggest predictor of retaining subscribers — more than the number of stories read or the time spent reading them.”

Raising that early active days number is in part a matter of onboarding and marketing — making sure that readers know what’s available to them, both in terms of site services and the daily flow of content, at the right pace and at the right time. But it also includes adapting the core product — adding elements like daily puzzles, “finishable news” packages, and fixed-frequency notifications to create habits, drive engagement, and retain subscribers.

Twipe’s report features case studies from The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Norway’s Schibsted, and more. At The Telegraph, which worked with Twipe on its “Project Habit” initiative, an initial analysis led the team to push for faster homepage load times and a service to send audio summaries and news links to commuters through WhatsApp. According to the report, The Telegraph found reducing loading time from 9 to 5.5 seconds led to a 49 percent increase in subscriber conversion from those who visit the homepage. The WhatsApp service proved successful too; users who regularly listened on WhatsApp were 12 times more likely to become paid subscribers.

Like other outlets in the report, The Guardian puts a special emphasis on onboarding, having found that the more features a new subscriber uses, the lower their risk of withdrawing their financial support. These features include an edition-based format of daily news but also crosswords and other puzzles, which may help explain its just-released app.

A team at The Wall Street Journal wrote in detail for us last year about their efforts to increase habit formation among readers. Their internal data showed that playing a puzzle had a more dramatic impact on reader retention than other actions the team had been promoting to new subscribers, such as downloading the Journal’s app or subscribing to an email newsletter. The Journal, whose most common trial offer is $12 for 12 weeks, has since focused its version of “Project Habit” on demonstrating value to readers and encouraging them to explore their full range of products — including those puzzles — within those first three months.

Eva Roa, senior manager of news product analytics for the New York Times, said the best advice she could give other publishers was to run as many tests as possible on what kind of engagement affects behavior — such as stopping or starting a subscription — that contributes to the bottom line. In an earnings call last week, Times Co. CEO Mark Thompson said something similar, declaring that giving digital teams the autonomy to “continually optimize” by having “parallel tests running in the background” was the “single biggest reason” behind their recent success with digital subscribers.

The Times’ popular Crosswords product encourages readers to play every day through various “streak” features and shares successes on their Wordplay Twitter account. Twipe reported that Norway’s Schibsted is also experimenting with gamification by applying “streaks” to news content so that some readers receive stats that include how many days in a row they’ve read the news and how much time they’ve spent reading articles, with a comparison over time. (The results of that experiment weren’t included in the report, sadly.)

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/02/news-organizations-just-want-to-get-readers-hooked-whether-their-habits-news-podcasts-or-puzzles/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/01/newsonomics-here-are-20-epiphanies-for-the-news-business-of-the-2020s/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/01/newsonomics-here-are-20-epiphanies-for-the-news-business-of-the-2020s/#respond Fri, 24 Jan 2020 12:38:32 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=179284 It is the best of times for The New York Times — and likely the worst of times for all the local newspapers with Times (or Gazette or Sun or Telegram or Journal) in their nameplates across the land.

When I spoke at state newspaper conferences five or ten years ago, people would say: “It’ll come back. It’s cyclical.” No one tells me that anymore. The old business is plainly rotting away, even as I find myself still documenting the scavengers who turn detritus into gold.

The surviving — growing, even — national news business is now profoundly and proudly digital. All the wonders of the medium — extraordinary storytelling interactives and multimedia, unprecedented reader-journalist connection, infinitely searchable knowledge, manifold reader revenue — illuminate those companies’ business as much as digital disruption has darkened the wider news landscape.

What is this world we’ve created? That’s the big-picture view I’m aiming to offer here today.

Those of us who care about journalism were happy to see the 2010s go. We want a better decade ahead for a burning world, a frayed America, and a news business that many of us still believe should be at the root of solving those other crises.

I call what follows below my epiphanies — honed over time in conversations around the world, with everyone from seen-it-all execs to young reporters asking how things came to be the way they are in this business. These are principles that help me make sense of the booming, buzzing confusion that can appear to envelop us. Think of it as an update to my book Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get, now a decade old.

Here I’ve distilled all my own concerns and my understandings. I’ve taken a big-picture, multiyear view, knowing that like it or not, we’re defining a new decade. You’ll see my optimism here — both as a longtime observer and as a later-stage entrepreneur trying to build out a new model for local news. (I wrote about that back in October.) I do believe that we can make the 2020s, if not quite the Soaring ’20s, something better than what we just went through. But I balance my optimism with my journalism-embued realism. In many ways, 2020 stands at the intersection of optimism and realism — a space that’s shrinking.

So much has gone off the rails in the news industry (and in the wider society) over the past decade. Amid all the fin-de-la-décennie thinking, I think Michiko Kakutani best described the country’s 10-year experience: “the indigenous American berserk,” a borrowing from Phillip Roth.

So much of what happened can be attributed to (if not too easily dismissed as) “unintended consequences.” Oops, we didn’t mean to turn over the 2016 election to Putin. Gosh, we didn’t mean to alter life on earth forever — we just really wanted that truck. We just wanted to connect up the whole world through the Internet — we didn’t mean to destroy the institutions that sort through the facts and fictions of civic life.

As billions have disappeared from the U.S. newspaper industry, the words “collateral damage” served to explain the revolution that led digital to become the leading medium for advertising. That damage is now reaching its endgame.

The Terrible Tens almost precisely match the period I’ve been writing here at Nieman Lab. In that time, I’ve written enough to fill several more books — 934,800 words before this piece. Almost a million words somehow accepted by our loyal readers, who still, remarkably, laugh and tell me: “Keep writing long.”

Let’s then start the 2020s off right. With one eye on the last decade and another on the one to come, let me put forward 20 understandings of where we are and how we build from here.

That felt like huge news — but what if it really only represents the beginning of a greater rollup? Last month, I sketched out how five of the largest chains could become two this year.

And yet there are even worse potential outcomes for those of us who care about a vibrant, independent press. What if a Sinclair, bent on regional domination and with a political agenda, were to buy a rollup, and keep rolling?

In a way, GateHouse’s builder Mike Reed has done a lot of the heavy lifting already. From a financial point of view, the CEO of New Gannett has already done a lot of rationalization. GateHouse bought up a motley collection of newspaper properties, many out of long-time family ownership, and brought some standard operating principles and efficiencies to them. We can ask whether his big gamble of borrowing $1.8 billion (at 11.5 percent interest) from Apollo Global Management will prove out over the next few years. Or we can think of that megamerger as just prologue.

After all, the same logic that drove the GateHouse/Gannett deal pervades the near-uniform thinking of executives at all of the chains. Job No. 1: Find large cost savings to maintain profitability in light of revenue declines, in the high single digits per year, that show no sign of stopping. And the easiest way to do that is merging. A merger can massively — if only once — cut out a lot of HQ and other “redundant” costs.

It buys some time. And newspaper operators are craving more time. “Ugly” is the simple description of the 2020 newspaper business offered to me by one high-ranking news executive. Revenue declines aren’t improving, so the logic remains. The only questions are: How much consolidation will there be, and how soon will it happen?

Heath Freeman, head of journalistic antihero Alden Global Capital, has already begun to answer that question. The hedge-fund barbarians aren’t just inside Tribune Publishing’s gates — they’re settled in around the corporate conference table. Alden’s cost-cutting influence drives the first drama of the year: Can Chicago Tribune employees fend off the bloodletting long enough to find a new buyer for their newspaper before it’s too late? They know that, despite a national upswell in public support for the gutted Denver Post in 2018, Alden was able to remain above the fray and stick to its oblivious-to-the-public-interest position.

Meanwhile, McClatchy is trying to thread a needle of financial reorganization. Then there’s Lee, operator of 46 largely smaller dailies. All of them are subject (and object) of the same financial logic.

While financing remains tough to get, at any price, there remains an undeniable financial propulsion to bring many more titles under fewer operations.

There’s no law preventing one company from owning half of the American daily press. And no law prevents a political player like a Sinclair — known for its noxious enforcement of company politics at its local broadcast properties — from buying or tomorrow’s MergedCo — or orchestrating the rollup itself.

After a decade where we’ve seen the rotten fruit of political fact-bending, what could be more effective than simply buying up the remaining sources of local news and shading or shilling their coverage? Purple states, beware! Further, the price would be relatively cheap: Only a couple billion dollars could buy a substantial swatch of the U.S.’s local press.

Alden is a virus in the newspaper industry.

It sometimes seems like we’ll run out of epithets — “the Thanos of the newspaper business,” “the face of bloodless strip-mining of American newspapers and their communities,” “industry vulture,” “the newspaper industry’s comic-book villain” — for Alden Global Capital. Then someone helps us out.

“Alden is a virus in the newspaper industry,” one very well-connected (and quite even-keeled) industry executive told me dispassionately. “It just destroys the story we try to tell of the great local journalism we need to preserve.”

Think about the big picture. The industry is flailing; behind closed doors, it’s throwing a Hail Mary, trying to win an antitrust exemption from Congress. It argues that in the public interest, it should be allowed to negotiate together (rather than as individual companies) with the platforms. It wants the big payoff they’ve dreamed of since the turn of the century: billions in licensing from Google, Facebook, and Co.

It pines for and makes comparison to the kinds of licensing revenue that both TV broadcasters and music publishers have been able to snag. But thus far, that’s been a heavy lift in terms of negotiation or public policy. But Alden adds more weight, letting governments or platforms say: “Wait, you want us to help them?”

Which leads to…

Can a duopoly licensing deal be the “retrans” savior of the local news business?

In 1992, local TV companies were in a bind. Cable and satellite companies had to pay the ESPNs and CNNs of the world to air their programming. But local TV stations — available for free on the public airwaves — got nothing for having their signal distributed to cable customers.

But that year, federal legislation allowed local TV stations to demand compensation from cable and satellite systems — retransmission fees. Essentially, distributors paid stations for the right to their programming, including local news — despite the fact that anyone with an antenna could get their signal for free.

What started out as a small supplemental revenue stream now amounts to about 40 percent of all local TV station revenue, according to Bob Papper, the TV industry’s keen observer and data/trend collector through his annual RTDNA survey. “Retrans money is skyrocketing, and that should continue until it levels off in 2023-24.” This year, it will likely add up to $12 billion or more.

Advertising revenue has been fairly flat for local TV companies (setting aside for a moment the two-year cycle in which election years pump them full of political cash). Digital revenue hasn’t been much better, accounting for only six or seven percent of station income, Papper says — way less than newspaper companies earn.

And yet these local TV businesses are stable, profitable, and facing nothing like what’s happened to newspaper newsrooms. Papper notes the wide variance across stations in the depth and breadth of their news products. While many still stick with the tried-and-tired formulas, his surveys of station managers list “investigative reporting” as their No. 1 priority. When it’s funded, it’s a differentiator in crowded TV markets.

It’s that retrans money that makes all the difference.

Clearly, the news industry is a major supplier of high-engagement material to the platforms — a supply that helps energizes their dominant ad businesses. While both Google and Facebook have deployed a motley fleet of news industry-supporting initiatives, they’ve steadfastly refused any large-scale “licensing” arrangements.

If there’s increased public pressures on the platforms as the society’s digital high turns part-bummer, and if the political environment were to change (a President Elizabeth Warren, for example), it’s not hard to imagine the tech giants ponying up a billion here or there for democracy-serving news, right? (Both Google and Apple count more than $100 billion in cash reserves, net of debt, with Facebook holding more than $50 billion.)

Google, when asked over the years why it doesn’t pay license fees, talks about the complexity of the news market, among other objections. Expect a new argument: You want us to pay an Alden, or a Fortress Investment Group?

The financialization of the press may indeed makes the daily newspaper “public service” argument more difficult to make. While still true — though now wildly uneven in its actual daily delivery — it might be an artifact of a bygone age. The question may turn from “Will platforms finally pay license fees?” to “Who can make a good argument that they deserve them?”

The first metric that matters is content capacity.

In our digital world, just about everything can be counted. So many numbers adding up to so few results for so many.

Look forward and we can see that content capacity is and will be among the biggest differentiators between the winners and losers of the news wars. In fact, I’d call it a gating factor. Publishers who can offer up a sufficient volume of unique, differentiated content can win, assuming they’ve figured out ways for their business to benefit from it.

People aren’t the problem, no matter what the headcount-chopping Aldens of the world have preached. People — the right journalists and the right digital-savvy business people — are the solution.

In models as diverse as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Athletic, The Information, the Star Tribune, and The Boston Globe, we see this truism play out.

Certainly, having more skilled journalists better serves the public’s news needs. But the logic here is fundamentally a business one. In businesses increasingly dependent on reader revenue, content capacity drives the value proposition itself.

Rather than reducing headcount — and thus spinning the downward spiral more swiftly — increasing headcount can lead to a magic word: growth.

The news business will only rebound when it seeks growth.

Across America’s widening expanse of news deserts, we don’t hear many whispers of that word, growth. The conversation among owners and executives is pretty consistent: Where do we cut? How do we hold on?

That’s meant more M&A. More cutting print days. More cutting of business operations. More cutting of newsrooms. All in an effort to preserve a diminishing business — whether the underlying mission is to maintain even a semblance of a news mission or just to milk the remaining profits of an obsolescent industry.

Of course, local news publishers poke at new revenue streams to try to make up for print ad revenues that will likely drop in the high single digits for the fourth year in a row. But the digital ad wars have been lost to Google and Facebook. Marketing services, a revenue stream pursued with much optimism a few years ago, has proven to be a tough, low-margin business. Digital subscription sales are stalled around the country, not least because of all that cutting’s impact on the product. Most see no path to a real “replacement” revenue stream. (Maybe CBD-infused newsprint?)

Cutting ain’t working. Decline feeds decline.

Only an orientation toward growth — with strategies that grab the future optimistically and are funded appropriately — can awaken us from this nightmare. Replace “replacement” strategies with growth strategies and these businesses look different.

Happily, we do have growth models to look at. Take, most essentially to the current republic, our two leading “newspapers.”

Today, The New York Times pays 1,700 journalists. That’s almost twice as many as a decade ago. The Washington Post pays 850, up from 580 when Jeff Bezos bought it in 2013.

The result: More unique, high-quality content has driven both publishers to new heights of subscription success, the Times how with three times as many paying customers as it had at its print apex. Readers have rewarded the investment, and those rewards have in turn allowed further investment.

It’s a flywheel of growth — recognizable to anyone who’s ever built a business, large or small. What it requires is a long-term view and patience. And, of course, capital in some form — which shouldn’t be a problem in a rich country awash in cash. But what it also demands is a belief in the mission of the business, an in-part seemingly irrational belief that the future of the news business can, and must, be robust.

Some big numbers tell the big story.

• We may have underestimated the dominance of the New Gannett. According to Dirks, Van Essen, Murray & April, the leading newspaper broker, the new Gannett now owns:
  • 20.4 percent of all U.S. daily newspapers
  • 26.3 percent of all U.S. daily print circulation
  • 24.8 percent of all U.S. Sunday print circulation

  So in rough terms, it controls a quarter of our daily press. The chart below, produced by the brokerage, compares the megamerger to the industry’s previous big deals on the basis of percentage of newspapers owned and percentage of circulation controlled. It should send a chill down every American spine.



• There are probably fewer than 20,000 journalists working in U.S. daily newspaper newsrooms. There’s not even a semi-official tally anymore, but that’s a good extrapolation from years past, given all the cutting since. That compares to 56,900 in 1990 — when the country had 77 million fewer people than today.
• The daily press still depends on the print newspaper for 70 percent or more of its revenue. That’s after 20 years of “digital transition.”
• The daily newspaper industry today takes in more than $30 billion less per year than it did at its height.
• $1 trillion: The market value reached by Alphabet (Google) last week.

The brain drain is real.

What’s the biggest problem in the news business? The collapse of ad revenue? Facebook? Dis- and misinformation? Aging print subscribers?

Surprisingly, over the last year numerous publishers and CEOs have confided what troubles them most: talent.

It’s hard enough to take on all the issues of business and social disruption with a staff that can meet the challenge. Increasingly, though, it’s hard for news companies to attract and retain the talent they need, especially in the business, product, and technology areas that will determine their very survival.

Who wants to work in an industry on its deathbed? Especially in an already tight job market.

What do the people who could make a difference in the future of news want? Fair compensation, for sure, and local news companies often pay below-market wages, on the TV side as much as in newspapers. Perhaps more important, they want a sense of a positive future — one their bosses believe in and act on every day. That’s a commodity scarcer than money in this business.

No industry has a future without a pipeline of vital, young, diverse talent eager to shape the future. And that’s especially true in the live-or-die arts of digital business. As the just-released Reuters Institute for Journalism 2020 trends report notes, “Lack of diversity may also be a factor in bringing new talent into the industry. Publishers have very low confidence that they can attract and retain talent in technology (24%) and data science (24%) as well as product management (39%). There was more confidence in editorial areas (76%).”

At the same time, we’ll be watching the flow of experienced talent as it moves around the industry. As Atlantic Media continues to grow and morph under the Emerson Collective, a number of its top alumni are moving into new positions elsewhere. Longtime Atlantic president Bob Cohn now takes over as president of The Economist — an early digital subscription leader, the storied “newspaper” now seeks growth. Meanwhile, Kevin Delaney, co-founder of Atlantic Media’s innovative Quartz, has taken on a so-far-unannounced big project at The New York Times’ Opinion section, where the appetite for impact has grown appreciably.

Finally, as The Guardian ended the decade with happy reader revenue success, Annette Thomas becomes CEO. Thomas has earned accolades for her innovative work in science publishing. These three, plus numerous others moving into new jobs as 2020 begins, can now bring their decades of digital experience to the job of getting news right in the ’20s.

Print is a growing sore spot; expect more daycutting.

Just for a moment, forget the thinned-out newsrooms and consider a fundamental truth: The physical distribution system that long supported the daily business is falling apart.

The paperboys and papergirls of mid-20th-century America have faded into Norman Rockwell canvases. As Amazon’s distribution machine and Uber and Lyft suck up available delivery people across the country, publishers say it’s increasingly hard to find paper throwers. (And why not? Paper-throwing sounds like a sport from another age.)

Why not just throw in with the logistics geniuses of the day, and partner with them to deliver the papers? The newspaper industry has indeed had talks with Amazon, buyer of 30,000 last-mile delivery trucks over the past two years. We’ll probably see some local efforts to converge delivery. But think about who still gets that package of increasingly day-old news delivered to their doorstep? Seniors — who want the paper bright and early, complicating delivery partnerships.

Not to mention that, with print subscribers declining in the high single digits every year, deliverers now need to cover a wider geography to deliver the same number of papers — and that problem will only get worse.

To add an almost comic complication to the challenge of dead-tree delivery: California’s AB5 just went into effect. Its admirable aim is to bring fairer benefits to those in the gig economy. But its many unintended consequences are now cascading throughout the state — spelling millions more in costs to daily publishers while wreaking havoc among freelancers.

Is seven-day home delivery now a luxury good? Or just a profit-squeezing artifact? Either way, it’s become clear that publishers’ years of price increases for seven-day aren’t sustainable. One of my trusty correspondents reported this last week that he’s now paying $900 a year for the Gannett-owned Louisville Courier-Journal. There are Alden-owned papers charging more than $600 a year for ghost titles, produced by a bare handful — sometimes two — journalists.

As print subscriptions have declined, publishers have continued to price up. That’s death-spiral pricing, with a clear end in sight and boatloads of money to be made on the way out the door.

Earlier this year, I wrote about “the end of seven-day print” and how publishers have been modeling and noodling its timeline. There’s been lots of trimming around the edges, mainly at smaller papers; McClatchy’s decision to fully end Saturday print is a harbinger of what’s to come. The company planned the end of Saturdays meticulously, with a keen eye toward customer communication, and proved to both itself and the industry that it can be done.

(Let’s allow time here for a brief chuckle by European publishers who have been successfully publishing “weekend” papers for decades.)

But cutting Saturday alone doesn’t save you a lot of money. Those twin pressures — on one hand, needing ever-larger cost savings, on the other, the collapsing distribution system — mean we’ll see more ambitious and adventurous cutting in the year to come. They’ll do while swallowing the existential fear one CEO shared: “They are scared to death this will end the habit.”

How big a deal is all this — the declining mechanics of print distribution? Very big.

Consider that The New York Times — the most successfully transitioned of newspaper companies — still only earns only 43 percent of its revenue from digital. Most regional dailies still rely on print for 75 to 90 percent of their overall revenue. If the physical distribution system starts failing faster, how much of that print-based revenue — circulation and advertising — can be converted to digital?

At a national level, the direct connection between readers and journalists has never been stronger.

Listen to the commercial breaks of The New York Times’ breakaway hit The Daily. A lot of them aren’t commercial spots, but what we used to call house ads in the print business. Maggie Haberman talking about Times’ reporting in the era of press vilification; Rukmini Callimachi sharing the danger and cost of reporting from terror-stricken parts of the world.

These ads aren’t about making the newsroom feel better — they work. The Times now has more than three times the total paying customers than it did at the height of print, with 3.9 million digital news subscribers paying the Times. Why? The journalists and the journalism.

In the halcyon days of print, advertising drove 75 percent of the Times’ revenue, a number that often hit 80 percent for local dailies. Now the digital world has forced — but also enabled — the Times to forge a very direct connection between its journalists and readers. Readers understand much more clearly that they are paying for high-quality news and analysis. They value expertise and increasingly get to know these journalists individually, whether through podcasts or other digital extensions.

Journalists believe more than ever that they are working for the reader, with the Times the trustworthy intermediary. The new more direct relationship between reader and journalist fosters growth. And the same is true similarly for The Washington Post, The Athletic, and The Information, in different forms.

If the local news world had followed suit, we’d say that the age of digital disruption has been a boon for journalism overall. Clearly, it hasn’t. This lesson is a guidepost for the decade ahead.

Advertising remains a vital — but secondary — source of revenue for news publishers.

The war’s over; the platforms won. With Google and Facebook maintaining a 60 percent share of the digital ad market (and 70 percent of local digital ads), publishers no longer expect to grab a bigger slice of the pie. The drama drawing the most attention: How much will Amazon eat into The Duopoly, as Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise summed up “the five trends that threaten the Google/Facebook duopoly” at AdAge.

Contrary to some of the conventional wisdom of the moment, that doesn’t mean advertising is no longer a part of publishers’ diversified revenue streams. Yes, reader revenue is clearly the driver for successful publishers of the ’20s, but advertising — best when sold and presented in ways that don’t compete directly with the platforms — will be in the passenger seat.

The evolving formula of the early ’20s is a mix of 65 to 70 percent reader revenue, 20 to 30 percent in advertising, and then an “other” that includes things like events. While this model may be more diversified, it’s not made of discrete parts. The better publishers get at profiling their reader-revenue-paying customers, with increasingly better-used first-party data, the better they can help advertisers sell. At this point, it’s a wobbly virtuous circle of money and data, and the successful publishers will find ways to round it.

A local news-less 2030 America is a fright beyond comprehension.

The word of the moment in almost every conversation about local news is “nonprofit.” At so many conferences and un-conferences about the news emergency, the notion that there’s a commercial answer to rebuilding the local business seems almost out of bounds.

What created this anti-profit sensibility? Acknowledging the power of the duopoly, to be sure. But that’s not the only rationale. For generations, many journalists considered themselves proudly unaware or uncaring about the business. Now the ascendance of Google and Facebook has given too many permission to eschew advertising as a significant, if secondary, support of reporting.

Secondly, the industry’s Heath Freemans and Michael Ferros, among too many others, have stained a local news business that was once both proudly profitable and mission-driven. Profiteering is now associated by many with local news.

Nonprofit news, too, though requires capital — just like any kind of growing service or product. Somebody has to actually pay journalists. So those advocating nonprofit news as the new future have turned to philanthropy. They look to foundations, national and local, to finance this vision. Nationally, more than $40 million has now flowed into the American Journalism Project, headed by Elizabeth Green and John Thornton. Most of that’s come from national foundations. The AJP announced its first grants in December, a down payment on what it envisions as a fund of up to $1 billion.

Now we’ll see if AJP can significantly move the needle on what is plainly needed: replacement journalism. As it tries to catalyze a movement, it hopes to multiply the philanthropic response to the news crisis. It’s a hope we can share. AJP’s pitch is straightforward: Communities should support news the same way they support public goods like the ballet and the opera, things that in many cities plainly couldn’t sustain themselves as creatures of the market.

That’s a worthy thought, but with two big issues attached.

One: There’s not much of a tradition of such support. Newspapers made so much money for so many years that they were the ones who started foundations, not the ones asking them for money. Relatively few communities’ foundations are oriented in that direction — and foundations don’t change direction or priorities speedily.

Two: Scale. So much local news coverage has been lost that it would take substantial and ongoing philanthropy to even begin to resupply community news. There’s not a lot of evidence yet of a readiness to do that.

To be sure, hundreds of dedicated journalists have build smaller operations in cities across the country. LION Publishers and the Institute for Nonprofit News are looking for new and better ways to support and nurture them. But the old world is disappearing far faster than a new one is being created.

Ace industry researchers Elizabeth Hansen and Jesse Holcomb recently laid out their thinking, which should serve as a reality check for all who care about the next decade of local news.

Yet even with a game-changing funding renaissance in local news (which would require the significant participation of community foundations), it probably won’t be fast enough or big enough to refill the bucket as local newspaper talent and jobs continue to drain away. There may not be enough philanthropic capital, even on the sidelines, to support the scope and depth of local news-gathering that our democracy requires.

But it was the concluding paragraph of their Nieman Lab prediction that really best summed up this epiphany looking ahead to the end of this decade.

A New(s) Deal for the 21st century: If all forms of philanthropic support for local news are truly not enough, we predict that by the end of 2030, we’ll be seeing large-scale policy changes to publicly support more sources of local news. It may not seem like we’re that close on this one, but trust us, it could happen.

I know Hansen and Holcomb are trying to spark a note of optimism, but their realistic reading of the landscape should strike terror: A local news-less 2030 America is a fright beyond comprehension. Imagine this struggling country 10 years from now if the news vacuum has become the new normal and our communities are democratically impoverished.

My own view: All good journalism is good. Support it by philanthropy, advertising, events, reader revenue, or by winning lottery ticket. Given the peril, we all need to look more widely for support, not more narrowly.

The free press needs to be a better advocate of free peoples in the 21st century.

The Wall Street Journal has long proclaimed itself the paper of free people and free markets. That formulation has made a lot of sense over time in the face of state-run economies of various flavors. But it’s insufficient to meet the demands of today.

Free peoples — those able to speak, write, assemble, vote, and retain some dignity of privacy — make up an uneasy minority of the world’s population. Now the twin dangers of growing strongman despotism and tech-based surveillance societies threaten us all.

Most recently, The New York Times’ investigative report on facial recognition painted a deeply disturbing dystopian portrait. The piece came on the heels of many beginning to describe China’s “surveillance state,” an ominous system intend to enable lifelong tracking and rewarding of state-approved citizen behavior.

We’re moving from a decade of cookies gone wild to what until recently seemed to be Orwellian fiction.

Combine the tech with the spreading rash of authoritarianism afflicting the globe. From Russia to Hungary to Turkey to Brazil to the Philippines to, yes, our current White House, the 2010s produced strongmen who we thought had been relegated to the history books.

Who best to represent free people in the coverage of would-be despots and in the tech-driven threats to several centuries of hard-earned Western rights? A free and strong press.

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” Czech novelist Milan Kundera memorably told us in his 1980 book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. (John Updike’s masterful review of it is here).

Memory. Our job as journalists is to remember. To connect yesterday to today to tomorrow.

Like the climate crisis, the threat of a surveillance society registers only haphazardly among the American populace, even as California’s government and others begin to take it on.

We’ve seen the beginnings of a backlash against tech run amok, with Facebook’s role in the 2016 election a seeming turning point. But here we are again, as Emily Bell points out, going into another election with the same issues — and huge questions that go well beyond the social behemoth.

If news companies are, at their base, advocates for the public good, news companies must lead in securing a free society in the face of technological adventurism. Media needs to get beyond its self-interest — ah, first-party data! — and focus on the bigger picture.

Who better to take that stand than those who’ve long advocated free peoples and free thinking? Who better to do that — and perhaps be rewarded for it in reader support — than mission-oriented news media?

The press’ business revival is part and parcel of its advocacy for the people it serves.

Australia is burning, and Murdoch’s newsprint provided the kindling.

For years, Australian press watchers have pointed to the dangerous slanting of environmental news by much of the nation’s press. A majority of that press is controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s empire. And those papers, joined too often by other media, have long skewed the facts of climate change. The result is a society ill-prepared for the nightmare that’s befallen it.

While this month has seen more complaints about Murdoch publications’ coverage, they’re in line with what that coverage has looked like for years. Now even scion James Murdoch has spoken out, as have some of Murdoch’s employees, seeing the heartbreaking, country-changing toll the fires have taken on Australia.

History will record Rupert Murdoch’s three-continent toll on Western civilization. The Foxification of U.S. news, Brexit support, and Australia’s inferno serve as only three of the major impacts Murdoch’s press power has had around the world. It is a press power weaponized and then turned on the very societies it is supposed to serve.

And don’t let the whirl of events let you forget the odious phone hacking scandal. “The BBC reported last year that the Murdoch titles had paid out an astonishing £400m in damages and calculated that the total bill for the two companies could eventually reach £1bn,” former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger reminded us this week in discussing the British press’ tawdry history with the royals.

Disney, for one, has recognized the toxicity of Murdoch’s remaining brand. Fox Corporation now owns the Fox broadcast network, Fox News, and 28 local Fox television stations, among other media assets. But “Fox” is no longer part of Twentieth Century Fox, the storied studio, and related assets that Disney bought from Murdoch last year. Now it’s only out of sync when it comes to time: 20th Century Studios. (Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton offered up a wonderful history of the Fox brand in the U.S., beginning with a third of a Brooklyn nickleodeon 115 years ago, on Twitter.)

The Murdoch empire has generated plenty of good entertainment outside of its own brands — witness the Emmy-winning “Succession” and last month’s Bombshell. But we haven’t yet come to grips with how his publications’ fact-slanting has literally changed the faces of free societies.

Expertise rises to the top.

The end of the print era is killing off the generalist. Every daily newsroom has its legend of the reporter who could cover anything. Wake him up from a drunken stupor, point him (almost always him) out the door, and you’d get your story.

Great stories there sometimes were, but the legend exceeded the truth: Too much news reporting was a mile wide and an inch deep.

Flash forward to today: Ruthless digital disruption — of both reading and advertising — means that inch-deep stories have less and less value. (Remember back at the start of the last decade, the content farms — Demand Media, Contently, Associated Content — that were going to revolutionize journalism?)

If commodity journalism and sheer volume are out, one the most refreshing trends into the 2020s is single-subject journalism. It needs a better name, but the results have been profound. In topic after topic, the focus on expertise — in reporting, writing and increasingly presentation and storytelling — have produced their own revolution.

In health, we see Kaiser Health News excelling and expanding. In education, Chalkbeat (with its new five-year plan) and the Hechinger Report drill into the real issues of the field. They’re now being joined by the university/college-focused OpenCampus.org, seeking to bring the same level of experienced, knowledgeable journalism to the often-cloistered academy.

The Marshall Project squarely meets the many mushrooming questions around criminal justice in our society. InsideClimate News is growing to try to meet the interest, and panic, around a warming earth. More-than-single-subject-oriented ProPublica’s investigations, often done with partners, have done what great work is supposed to do: set and reset agendas. There are many more, including at the regional and state level, led by The Texas Tribune and CALmatters.

All together, they may add up to fewer than a thousand journalists at this point. But their impact is great, and I believe it will become greater as awareness and distribution increase.

As Google and Facebook have won the ad wars, pageview-thirsty commodity journalism has largely (and thankfully) met its demise. Now we’ll see how much the market — not just those foundations — will support real expertise in reporting.

Free media has better tech skills than state media.

While Iran’s state media was spending days denying any possibility its military had shot down the Ukranian airliner, The New York Times found the likely truth early on. It assembled its own small group of experts. It used the best tech available. And it could report (under an increasingly common four-person byline) that an Iranian missile had in fact likely done the deed.

It wasn’t about suspicions, guesses, or bombast. It was about finding a truth in plain sight — given the human and technological resources to do it.

At first, Iranians believed their own media, as NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly reported from Tehran, that the downing was U.S. propaganda. But then, amazingly and overnight, Iranian citizens responded to the American-driven truth. They piled into the streets, seeing the mistake and its coverup for what it was: another sign that their government, without its own checks and balances, couldn’t be trusted.

Watch what privately owned newspapers do.

By necessity, we pay a lot of attention to the industry’s M&A mating games. These largely involve the dwindling number of publicly owned newspaper companies, which struggle both with operating realities and the need to convince shareholders to hang on through short-term earnings and dividends. They’re the biggest players, the most riddled by financialization, and the ones who have to report numbers publicly.

But given today’s realities, the stock market really isn’t the place for newspaper companies to be. Only long-term, strategic, capital-backed, and for the most part private or family-controlled businesses can make it successfully to 2030.

In the middle part of the 2010s, those papers got more focus. John Henry with The Boston Globe. The Taylor family with the Star Tribune. Frank Blethen, fighting the long fight in Seattle. And then they were joined by Patrick Soon-Shiong with the L.A. Times and San Diego Union-Tribune.

For the most part, we don’t hear much news out of these enterprises. They don’t have to report to markets quarterly, and they’ve taken more of a no-drama-Obama approach to the tough business. They are also, not incidentally, the leaders in digital subscription among local dailies. They remain important to watch.

Just as importantly, consider two newspaper chains that keep their heads down: Hearst and Advance. In the early 2010s, Advance made lots of news by cutting print days at its papers in New Orleans, Portland, Cleveland, and elsewhere. It will likely soon get a fresher look: Long-time Advance Local CEO Randy Siegel announced last week that he’s stepping down. No successor has yet been named.

Hearst also remains intriguing. A very private company — and one now that now generates less than 10 percent of its revenue from newspapers — its very name bespeaks a long commitment. But the top two executives of what now is a profoundly diversified media company both grew outside of the news trade. Will it stand pat in its markets? Will it look for acquisitions? (The old GateHouse was its nemesis outbidding Hearst for the Austin and Palm Beach papers in 2018, but the Gannett deal should keep it out of the buying game for a while.) With antitrust enforcement apparently on the wane, will it try to build a cluster in the Bay Area around its San Francisco Chronicle? Or complete a Texas big-city triangle by adding The Dallas Morning News to its Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News?

Bankruptcy is nothing new in the newspaper industry.

McClatchy’s pension-led financial crisis in November surprised many. The words “potential bankruptcy” tend to focus the mind.

But consider this: By one close observer’s account, more than 20 daily newspaper companies have visited the bankruptcy courts since the Great Recession a decade ago.

Ironically, two of the ones that emerged became acquisitive consolidators. Today’s MNG Enterprises, driven by Alden’s in-court and out-of-court strategy, in fact declared bankruptcy twice in its various corporate iterations. GateHouse, re-birthed by Fortress Investment Group in 2013, was able to restructure debt totalling $1.4 billion — double what McClatchy now owes — and has gone to become the biggest newspaper company in the land, even able to buy the better-known Gannett name in the process.

So if McClatchy does indeed go into a pre-pack bankruptcy, the news won’t be that filing. It’ll be what the company does — as a business and journalistically — afterward.

We have to find a way to keep trillion-dollar stories in the public eye.

Through a year full of remarkable stories, perhaps the most remarkable was one that’s gotten little continuing attention.

In December, The Washington Post published “At War With The Truth.” It took the paper three years to pry loose the trove of documents through Freedom of Information requests. It is remarkable reporting, and one that put a price tag on our ignorance.

Here’s the lede: “A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”

The eerie parallels to the Pentagon Papers — a previous generation’s documentation of enormous waste, financial and human — were obvious. And yet it seems to have caused only small ripples in public discourse.

Politicians drive the daily news cycle, wielding wedge attacks on those — disabled, immigrant, poor — already falling through the now-purposely cut safety net. They say they do this in the name of saving taxpayer dollars. And yet this literal waste of $1 trillion pops in and out of the news in a politician’s second. This isn’t a question of politics; it’s a question of the public purse, and performing that watchdog role is our birthright as journalists.

As we reform and rebuild the journalism of the 2020s, we need to use the digital and moral tools of the day to hold power accountable and keep big stories alive over time. So far, we’ve barely touched the surface in connecting the latest happening to its deep historical context, making readers realize how a story connects to a larger issue or narrative, in ways both intuitive and knowledge-building.

I have confidence we’ll figure out how to do that in the 2020s.

“Mediatech” may be the new “convergence.”

There’s a new word taking hold out there: “mediatech”.

That’s how German behemoth Axel Springer is rebranding itself. CEO Mathias Dopfner and his team have rigorously pursued a transition away from print for more than a decade. “Mediatech” tells us both what they’ve learned and where they are going. In August, Dopfner’s new partner KKR bought out a minority interest in the company, taking it private and preparing it to be a bigger player this decade.

Springer, like its sometime partner Schibsted, will be one the big survivors in the brutal media game. Both have learned that modern journalism is now driven by both journalists and by technology. It’s the melding of the two — in audience definition, targeting, and service, and in product creation and delivery — that will determine the winners ahead.

Springer’s question for the ’20s: How much will the company keep investing in journalism itself, as it also pursues other digital business byways? Dopfner laid out the strategy, in friendly but direct sparring with Mark Zuckerberg, here.

Ah, life remains better in Perugia!

Travel coincidentally brought me to the doorstep of the most you-gotta-go-there journalism conference a couple of years ago. The name says most of it: the Perugia International Journalism Festival. Not a conference, or even an un- one, but a festival, inviting, of course, allusions to Nero fiddling. The truffled pasta and the views can’t be beat. The Sagrantino was magnificent.

The conference’s agenda and its exhibitor halls said it all. Walk into the main hall and Google and Facebook offered dueling expanses, with many enthusiastic company-clad representatives touting their latest and greatest. And half the agenda seemed to be, in apparently unintentional self-parody, sessions on how to work with…Facebook and Google. It’s the very best setting for platformitis.

In the time since, we’ve seen an even greater proliferation of news-aiding initiatives out of both companies. The new Reuters Institute study corroborates my own reporting, among publishers, of how that work is going and how it’s seen:

Google’s higher score [in the Institute’s own surveying] reflects the large number of publishers in our survey who are current or past recipients of Google’s innovation funds (DNI or GNI), and who collaborate with the company on various news-related products. Facebook’s lower score may reflect historic distrust from publishers after a series of changes of product strategy which left some publishers financially exposed.

The overall sense from our survey, however, is that publishers do not want hand-outs from platforms but would prefer a level playing field where they can compete fairly and get proper compensation for the value their content brings.

Short of that business-changing historic payout — see above — it’s unlikely that platform aid to publishers will itself significantly alter any of the trendlines in place.

There’s no natural ceiling to digital subscriptions.

Imagine if Reed Hastings has gone with advice of management consultants in the early 2000s, who might have “sized” the market for “on-demand” video and likely found it negligible. Netflix, nurtured on red envelopes, instead created a whole new category of customer demand — and willingness to pay.

As the company has grown, analysts have consistently undershot its growth potential, in the U.S. and globally. The company that was once asked “Will people really subscribe to on-demand movies?” reported on Tuesday that it now counts 167.1 million subscribers, and added 8.8 million in Q4 2019.

Upstart Disney (two words that don’t seem to pair) has already had its Disney+ app downloaded 40 million times. Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Apple TV+, CBS All Access, Peacock, and more are all opening wallets.

What’s instructive to the future of the news business here? There’s no natural ceiling to digital subscription, though media reporters love to ask me that question. Create a value proposition that works and consumers will pay. Obviously, national and global scale — what the Internet provides — are hugely helpful. It is though the product proposition that drives payment.

For a moment, consider all the digital subscription success stories in news: The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Athletic, The Boston Globe, the Star Tribune, and more. What if this is just prologue? Could better products — with more and more useful content, priced, sliced, and diced smartly — reproduce some of the scale success of streaming?

In a word, yes. And that’s our best hope for the decade ahead. Into the 2020s, bravely!

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/01/newsonomics-here-are-20-epiphanies-for-the-news-business-of-the-2020s/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/01/on-women-in-top-jobs-the-financial-times-continues-to-be-an-unexpected-leader/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/01/on-women-in-top-jobs-the-financial-times-continues-to-be-an-unexpected-leader/#respond Thu, 23 Jan 2020 15:36:06 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=179385 Gender representation at the very top of the journalism pyramid has been deeply unequal since…forever.

At The New York Times, the CEO, the publisher, the top editor, and the No. 2 editor are all men. Only one woman has been the top editor in the paper’s history, and that did not end well. The three leading candidates rumored to be battling to be the next top editor? All men.

Still, one female top editor in 169 years is somehow a better record than The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post, which have never had a woman in charge of the newsroom. At the Post today, the top editor and two of the three managing editors are men, as is the publisher/CEO. (Katherine Graham left active management all the way back in 1991.) At the Journal, the top editor, the No. 2 editor, and the publisher/CEO — all dudes.

So it’s been really interesting to see substantial progress on this front across the pond in the U.K. Okay, not in all U.K. media, but in two places in particular: The Guardian and the Financial Times.

The Guardian has women throughout top management. Its editor-in-chief is Katharine Viner; two of her three competitors for the job five years ago were women too. It just named Annette Thomas as its new CEO. While I’m sure women who work there would have legitimate complaints, it nonetheless stands out among its peers.

But you might expect the liberal Guardian to be an outlier, given its editorial values. Less expected would be the FT, which after all covers the still-extremely-male world of global business. Not to mention that it was bought four years ago by the Japanese publisher Nikkei, and Japanese business culture is even more male than those of the U.S. or U.K. (Three-quarters of Japanese companies have zero female senior executives.)

Still, the FT has done perhaps the most persistent work over the past few years to bring women in — into management and into its audience. (Our Laura Hazard Owen has written about the audience efforts a couple of times.)

Last week, Roula Khalaf officially took over as top editor, the first woman to hold the position in 131 years. Of its 11 top leaders, five are now women. In 2016, women made up 34 percent of its global management group; now that’s 45 percent. The FT requires that the shortlists for all job openings be 50/50 male/female “to ensure inclusive recruitment practices.” 51 percent of the paper’s managers are women.

The reason I’m bringing this all up is that Khalaf just announced that Janine Gibson, the former Guardian and BuzzFeed editor, has been named the FT’s head of digital platforms and projects. She also promoted Renée Kaplan to head of digital editorial development. Terrific choices both, and only the latest sign of the progress that’s been made in promoting women at the FT.

Again, the FT’s not perfect, and it still has a ways to go on issues including its gender pay gap. But it’s worth highlighting here precisely because it’s not the first newspaper you’d expect to be leading the way on gender representation. They’ve shown that, if an organization puts its mind to it, it can get a lot closer to equal representation in a short period of time. And that it’s the FT — one of the very smartest news publishers when it comes to digital innovation and revenue — should be a sign that it’s a good move for the business as well.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/01/on-women-in-top-jobs-the-financial-times-continues-to-be-an-unexpected-leader/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/01/the-new-ceo-overseeing-the-guardian-has-a-ph-d-in-cell-biology-and-neuroscience/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/01/the-new-ceo-overseeing-the-guardian-has-a-ph-d-in-cell-biology-and-neuroscience/#respond Tue, 14 Jan 2020 17:09:16 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=179090 The Guardian has a new business-side leader: Annette Thomas, a veteran of the academic publishing world, will assume the role of CEO of Guardian Media Group in March.

When she does, she may well be the only head of a major media company to also have a Ph.D. in cell biology and neuroscience.

Thomas might seem to lack experience in the traditional news business, but she’s been highly successful in scientific publishing, which has seen its own share of digital transformation in the past two decades. After grad school, she began as an editor at the journal Nature and stayed at its parent company, MacMillan Publishing, in various roles for 23 years, the last nine of them as CEO, overseeing its merger with Springer Nature. (Macmillan Publishing also included more consumer-facing publications, notably Scientific American.) Most recently, she was chief executive of Web of Science Group, “a data, analytics, and software business focused on research and higher education” that is part of Clarivate Analytics. She serves on the boards of Yale and Cambridge University Press.

Per The Guardian:

Neil Berkett, the chair of the GMG board, which made the appointment, said Thomas was well-equipped to deal with the challenges ahead. He said: “Our journalism has had a stellar 12 months, and remains world class. Even so, it’s clear that we’ll continue to face big headwinds in the global media sector in 2020 and beyond.”

“Her track record is exceptional — she has consistently delivered sustainable growth through deep engagement with end-users, championing innovative new business models with more open access to content and data, and building diverse and inclusive management teams.”

Her role was previously filled by David Pemsel, who announced last year he was leaving to become CEO of the English Premier League. (He ended up resigning from that role before he ever started after sexual harassment claims surfaced from his time at The Guardian.) At Guardian Media Group, he was making £706,000 a year ($917,492); today’s announcement doesn’t disclose Thomas’ salary.

Thomas joins The Guardian during an optimistic time for the news organization, which broke even for the first time in years in 2018 and credited its success to its online traffic and reader donations. Over the summer, GMG announced that 56 percent of its total revenue comes from digital. (More about The Guardian’s digital success here.)

Thomas’ appointment means that both the editorial and business sides of The Guardian are led by women. (Katharine Viner became editor in 2015.) And Thomas, who is of African-American and German descent, has now reached a level of power that few women of color have in the news business.

If you’re looking to learn more about Thomas, here’s an interview she did while CEO of Macmillan in 2011, and here are two talks she gave in 2018 while at Clarivate, the second on “The Future of Research Information: Open, Connected, Seamless.”

You can find the full announcement here.

I am delighted to share the news that I am joining a brand I have long admired as Chief Executive – the Guardian Media Group. https://t.co/QAzRpPqQxJ

— Annette Thomas (@AnnetteKThomas1) January 14, 2020

This is the new CEO of @guardian: Annette Thomas, meet one more female #media leader in Britain. https://t.co/6dLrwzz36b

— Alexandra Borchardt (@AlexaBorchardt) January 14, 2020

It feels almost silly to mention it, given how accomplished, experienced and impressive they are.

But to see the first ever woman editor of the Guardian in 2015, now joined by a black woman as the chief executive is quite something. https://t.co/i3d2WkkeUa

— Matthew Ryder (@rydermc) January 14, 2020

New Guardian Media Group CEO Annette Thomas is… a scientist with a doctoral degree and a past as a journal editor. Well whaddayaknow? (Oh, also a 25-year track record in global publishing and data analytics businesses.) Good luck! https://t.co/o2f2EQnX3Y

— Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (@rasmus_kleis) January 14, 2020

Really applaud this move – Guardian appoints neuroscientist Annette Thomas as CEO: ‘A champion of innovative business models’ https://t.co/e6LkYLB3Zf via @thedrum

— jason leavy (@jasonpleavy) January 14, 2020

An exciting appointment for a variety of reasons–chief among them Annette Thomas's background as an academic scientist & deep background in scholarly publishing, fr asst journal editor to innovative leader (MacMillan, Digital Science founder, Clarivate). https://t.co/kAfS7hMxez

— Karin Wulf (@kawulf) January 14, 2020

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/01/the-new-ceo-overseeing-the-guardian-has-a-ph-d-in-cell-biology-and-neuroscience/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/12/inspired-by-the-daily-dozens-of-daily-news-podcasts-are-punching-above-their-weight-worldwide/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/12/inspired-by-the-daily-dozens-of-daily-news-podcasts-are-punching-above-their-weight-worldwide/#respond Tue, 03 Dec 2019 13:56:28 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=177405 More than 15 years after the term was first coined, podcasting has become one of the hottest topics in media. Our Reuters Institute Digital News Report shows that podcasting is now a worldwide phenomenon: Across 38 countries surveyed, 36 percent said they had listened to a podcast at least once a month, and about 15 percent said they listen to a news podcast. Edison Research estimates that around 90 million people listen to podcasts each month in the United States — a number that’s doubled since 2015. In the U.K., podcast usage is up 40 percent in the past year, driven by a younger generation looking for information, entertainment, and distraction.

There’s been much written about podcasts in general — but less about news podcasts and the creative and commercial opportunities for publishers. That’s the focus of my new research (with Nathan Gallo), using podcast production data from five markets (U.K., U.S., Australia, France, and Sweden) along with interviews with around 30 leading publishers and broadcasters.

Daily news podcasts on the rise

One striking finding: the impressive performance of daily news podcasts, most of which have only launched in the past 18 months. The segment leader, The New York Times’ The Daily, has an audience of around 2 million people a day and appears at the top of Podtrac’s October podcast ranking, just ahead of NPR’s rival Up First. “We are thrilled to have 25 minutes a day with people that we didn’t have before,” says Erik Borenstein, director of audio at The New York Times (and a former Knight-Nieman Visiting Fellow). “We really think of The Daily as the new front page.”

Meanwhile, data from The Economist shows that The Intelligence, which is less than a year old, reaches 1.5 million people each month, with the average listener downloading three to four episodes each week. These are substantial audiences, even if they are not yet on a par with the most popular radio news shows in the U.S.

In the U.K., numbers are smaller but still substantial. In less than a year, The Guardian has built a bigger audience for its Today in Focus podcast than it has for its print newspaper. “It’s hundreds of thousands every day,” says The Guardian’s head of audio Christian Bennett, who notes that the podcast attracts a younger audience and features an 80 percent completion rate.

Our research found 60 different native news podcasts across our five countries (excluding daily catch-up radio shows), with many publishers telling us they were inspired by the success of The Daily. Le Parisien and Les Echos in France (Code Source and La Story respectively), Aftonbladet Daily in Sweden, The Guardian’s Today in Focus, and Schwartz Media’s 7am in Australia all follow a similar “one big story” format aimed at morning commuters. Other podcasts take a different approach with a wider mix of stories, such as Post Reports from The Washington Post and The Leader from the Evening Standard, both aimed at the early evening.

Publishers are making significant investments in news podcasts, hoping to attract younger audiences, build audience habits, and bring in additional revenue. Publishers say that blue-chip advertisers are now showing strong interest in podcasts, changing the economics. “There has been so much demand for sponsorship that it more than pays for itself,” said Tom Standage, who helped make the case for The Economist’s daily news podcast. “The big change is commercial, which is that we had advertisers who started to come to us last year and say, ‘We are only going to buy two kinds of ad next year, print and podcast. What have you got?'” But this optimism is not reflected in European markets like France or Sweden, where audiences are smaller and the ad market is not yet fully developed.

Production and editorial strategies

The New York Times employs around 15 dedicated people on The Daily. The Guardian employs 10 for Today in Focus and The Economist eight. At the other end of the scale, Schwartz Media, Le Parisien, and Les Echos each produce their daily podcasts with four or five — a more typical number for smaller publications starting out. The skillset tends to include one or two hosts, an executive producer, one or two producers, and a sound engineer/sound designer.

But news podcasts aren’t all about deep dives into a single story. Our research identified three sub-categories of daily news podcasts:

• Microbulletins, between 1 and 5 minutes, aimed at voice devices and new platforms like Spotify Drive (example: BBC Minute)
• News roundups, between 6 and 15 minutes (example: NPR’s Up First)
• Deep dives, between 15 and 30 minutes (example: The Daily)

Our report finds publishers from print or digital-born backgrounds focusing more on deep dives, playing to their strengths in analysis and explanation. By contrast, many broadcasters have focused on producing micro-bulletins and redistributing existing radio news programs as podcasts. Where they have commissioned digital-born podcasts, they’ve often been aimed at younger and more diverse audiences that they find hard to reach through linear channels.

Other opportunities for publishers

Outside daily news podcasts, we found publishers pursuing unscripted talk and interview formats. A number of the most successful are personality-led, such as The Ezra Klein Show (Vox) and Giles Coren Has No Idea (The Times of London). These are often relatively cheap to produce and reuse existing newsroom talent. By contrast, radio broadcasters have looked to leverage their skills in documentaries and audio production by creating one-off series. All the main broadcasters of the countries studied have invested in serialized podcasts. These include Death In Ice Valley — a true-crime podcast produced by the BBC and Norway’s NRK — and Russia If You’re Listening, a landmark series from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation about the Mueller Report and Russian interference in democracies.

News podcasts in the wider ecosystem

News podcasts make up only a small share of all podcasts — 6 percent, as Apple categorizes the 770,000 in its catalog — but the general appeal and stickiness of news content mean that the category outperforms other types of content in terms of consumption. News makes up 21 percent of the most popular episodes in the United States’ Apple Podcasts charts, according to the analytics company Chartable. It’s a similar picture in other countries, with 34 percent of the top podcast episodes in France categorized, as well as 18 percent in Sweden and Australia and 16 pertcent in the U.K. Across all genres, the number of new podcasts is growing at a rate of more than 200,000 a year, though that growth has started to slow a little.

Future prospects

New platforms are shaking up the podcast market, bringing new ideas and extra investment. Apple still accounts for the majority of podcast use, but music services are helping to popularise content, with Spotify doubling its market share in the past year. A number of podcast-specific paid content providers are commissioning original content and offering significant sums for the production of exclusive content. This opens up new opportunities for publishers around comedy, sport, lifestyle, and high-quality narrative series. In the United States, new platforms like Luminary and Stitcher Premium are trying to build a new business model based on premium subscriptions, while in Europe, we’re seeing the emergence of new services like Majelan and Sybel in France, or Podimo in Denmark. All these actors have the ambition to become a “Netflix of podcasting” as they invest in original audio content and try to bring podcasting to a wider public.

But the growing influence of tech companies and other intermediaries is bringing familiar challenges. Many publishers fear they are helping platforms build profitable businesses on the back of their content. Others worry they could lose their direct relationship with audiences, including first-party data, as platforms take the credit for content. Public broadcasters in particular are trying to develop their own destinations for audio content, and a number have started to publish first to their own platforms or are withholding content from third parties altogether.

Most publishers feel there’s still significant room for growth, with new voice-driven interfaces making it easier to access on-demand audio in the home and on the move. But the scale of the opportunity remains unclear, with revenue still relatively modest and increasing competition from platforms and independent producers. Podcasting is attracting younger audiences, but predominantly from the better-educated “latte-drinking” classes. Reaching more mainstream audiences will require a broader range of content and audio formats, better interfaces, and improved distribution. These changes are likely to take some time.

Nic Newman is a senior research associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/12/inspired-by-the-daily-dozens-of-daily-news-podcasts-are-punching-above-their-weight-worldwide/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/10/finishable-news-worked-for-the-guardian-on-ipad-for-8-years-will-it-draw-new-subscribers-on-phones/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/10/finishable-news-worked-for-the-guardian-on-ipad-for-8-years-will-it-draw-new-subscribers-on-phones/#respond Thu, 24 Oct 2019 14:12:01 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=176146 When it comes to paid content options, The Guardian has to work with one big, self-imposed limitation: The news itself must remain free. The company has never wanted to add a paywall to its news; instead, it’s looked to readers for recurring and one-off donations, and launched an ad-free “premium” digital subscription product last year. This is working: In May, The Guardian announced that it’s become profitable “for the first time in recent history.” It now makes the majority of its revenue from digital sources, it makes more revenue from readers than advertising, and its digital revenue is rising faster than its print revenue is falling.

This is all pretty remarkable, and now that it’s reversed a decline and is making money, The Guardian is getting more ambitious: aiming to reach 2 million paying supporters within the next three years. That’s up from 365,000 recurring contributors and members today, and 190,000 digital subscriptions across various premium app offerings.

The company hopes the new app it launched last week, Guardian Daily, will help it reach that goal. Guardian Daily offers a single, contained, finishable collection of stories per day. (Put it on newsprint and you might want to call it something crazy like a “daily newspaper.”) It works across iOS and Android, taking the place of the paper’s previous iPad-only app. And unlike The Guardian’s main mobile app — which is a pretty traditional mobile news app of the sort you’re familiar with — it’s available only to paying digital subscribers. (That other app, called simply The Guardian, has a premium tier that includes crosswords, offline reading, and no ads — but the basic version is free to all.) A subscription to the new app, which comes with premium access in the main Guardian app, is £5.99 per month for the first three months, then £11.99 ($15.47) per month or £99 ($127.69) per year.

As the announcement put it:

…the new Daily has been redesigned across mobile and tablet for both iOS and Android to create a news app that goes beyond a digital newspaper with thoughtful design, easy navigation, and improved user experience. It brings an enhanced reading experience without distractions or interruptions.

Available as part of the Guardian digital subscription, the Daily offers a new way to experience Guardian journalism on digital devices — delivering a crafted edition of the Guardian’s best journalism every day. Each edition is compiled by editors and gives readers time and space to enjoy the most significant news and opinion of the day. With clear navigation through the Guardian’s sections, the Daily allows readers the chance to read each edition entirely or simply swipe through stories and supplements from the Guardian and the Observer.

When the Guardian team set out six months ago to build the Daily app, they had a product they were working from: The Guardian Digital Edition iPad app, which launched all the way back in 2011 when Apple Newsstand was first introduced. For the next eight years, that iPad app existed as a distinct paid product — £9.99 per month at first, though the price later dropped.

“The users of the iPad edition were not a massively big group of people in the grand scheme of things,” said Juliette Laborie, The Guardian’s director of digital reader reviews. “But they were very loyal and a lot of them have been with us for quite a long time. The iPad experience was different from the mobile one — very much an at-home experience and [it was] contained, which was something they really appreciated.”

Still, it was a limited audience. “This app was from the early days when [publishers thought] tablets would solve print media’s problems,” said executive creative director Alex Breuer. It would not be wise to “preserve that facsimile kind of experience,” and for two years the team had been thinking about how its apps could “best convey the structure of our journalism as a digital entity and evolve beyond the sense of us as a printed newspaper.” Part of that meant changing how people navigated through the mobile content — moving away from “navigation listing every single section” and focusing instead on “the pillars” of news, opinion, sports, culture, and lifestyle, both on the website and in apps.

The team did want to preserve one facet of the iPad app — the fact that it was a contained, finite daily edition. The Guardian’s Daily app pushes out content once a day, at 3 a.m. London time. The content that’s selected for it is largely the same as the content that goes into the print paper, said David Blishen, group product manager. A slider above each section moves along based on how much you’ve read, giving you a clear sense of when you’ll be done. And when you’re done — as with a print newspaper — you’re done. (If you want more, you can always switch back to the other Guardian app, which is constantly updated.)

The Guardian is far from the only newspaper to see the appeal of a finite, edition-based experience in a mobile app; the strategy seems to be particularly popular in the U.K. The Times of London has for several years updated its app only at three set times per daily. The London daily annoyingly named the i launched a new editions-based app this week. In the U.S., The Post and Courier in South Carolina follows an editions approach on its homepage. Finite digital editions aim to combine elements of print, email newsletters, and digital replica editions while also offering a more clear alternative to the never-ending streams of news found on social media or in news alerts.

Next up for Guardian Daily: more territories, and a different strategy for selecting the content that will go into those apps. “We don’t have a print newspaper in Australia or America,” said Chris Moran, editor of strategic projects — so it isn’t optimal for an app in those countries to just include content from the daily U.K. print paper. Instead, Moran said, the team has been working on a different metric that will help it decide the content that can go into those apps.

“I’m often asked if there is a metric that measures quality,” said Moran. “There are two good answers to that: One, probably not, because numbers are really bad at that, and two, no, that’s what editorial exists for. But the more I thought about it, we’re employing brilliant digital editors who spend basically every minute every day thinking about what digital content is the best at any given moment — they’re editing the homepage and making all of these decisions about whether an article is top of the site or halfway down — and then we’re basically throwing it away. But if we could store it all together across a day or a week, we get a list of what we thought the most important stories were,” giving them numerical scores.

“Once we’ve got those numbers, we’re leveraging a goldmine of editorial signal,” Moran said. “This allows us to have an automated curation system that genuinely reflects the human editorial decisions being made very single day.” The Guardian is calling this metric a “promotion benchmark,” and it will be used to determine which content goes into the U.S. and Australian apps, which are set to launch in 2020.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/10/finishable-news-worked-for-the-guardian-on-ipad-for-8-years-will-it-draw-new-subscribers-on-phones/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/09/aiming-for-its-next-million-supporters-the-guardian-launches-a-major-affinity-campaign/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/09/aiming-for-its-next-million-supporters-the-guardian-launches-a-major-affinity-campaign/#respond Mon, 23 Sep 2019 16:05:40 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=175182 On the heels of The New York Times’ “The Truth is Worth It” summer campaign, The Guardian has launched a marketing push under the banner of “Hope is power.” Both news organizations are now awash in subscriber/member contributions to keep their operations afloat and can now, apparently, be the advertisers themselves instead of the advertisees.

Though now majorly supported by readers, The Guardian knows it needs to spend money to earn more reader revenue. It’s the Guardian’s first major ad campaign since 2011, in the year of its first operating profit since 1998, as Josh Benton outlined here in May:

We’ve been writing here for a long time about the difficult transition newspapers are making (or not making) to digital. If you had to define a few key financial landmarks papers need to hit along the way, you might pick these three taken from Ken Doctor pieces early this decade:

• Making a majority of your revenue from digital sources.
• Making a majority of your revenue from readers rather than advertising.
• Achieving the minor miracle of net growth, with digital dollars rising more quickly than print dollars are falling.

Each of these would be the sort of accomplishment that justifies an officewide party, and The Guardian can now say it’s hit all three — only a few years removed from a seven-year stretch where it lost £227 million, or well over $300 million in Yankee bucks.

The main video ad in the campaign draws on this sense of hopelessness-turned-impact, in a clip that may both depress and then worry you about the bugs near your window:

Campaign, a UK media/marketing industry outlet (which is looking for its own members) had the story Monday. The commercial will air during The Great British Bake Off and news programs and of course is soon to be plastered on subway stations and social media. No financial details of the campaign’s cost were shared.

“It’s not an awareness campaign; we’re calling it an affinity campaign to inspire support and [reinforce] what The Guardian stands for today. It’s very much a collective message about standing with our readers,” marketing director Sonia Sudhakar told Campaign.

With frequent polite asks and no offers of swag, The Guardian brought in 800,000 members in a year and a half of new energy focused on its reader revenue initiative. Financial supporters now number more than one million and The Guardian is aiming for another million by 2022. (The New York Times, at 3.8 million digital subscriptions, has outlined a goal of 10 million subscriptions by 2025.)

(Hey, local outlets: Last month the Membership Puzzle Project published research on the pursuit of subscribers via paid acquisition, if you want to get more clarity on what spending money to make money on the local scale could look like.)

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/09/aiming-for-its-next-million-supporters-the-guardian-launches-a-major-affinity-campaign/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/08/the-new-york-times-and-the-guardian-are-celebrating-good-digital-revenue-news-today/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/08/the-new-york-times-and-the-guardian-are-celebrating-good-digital-revenue-news-today/#respond Wed, 07 Aug 2019 16:41:55 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=174174 Good news from big newspapers: The New York Times now has 3.78 million digital subscribers, the company said in its second-quarter earnings report released Wednesday, while The Guardian confirmed that it broke even in 2018 for the first time in years and also broke out its international digital revenue for the first time.

Noteworthy bits from the Times’ earnings:

— The Times inched closer to being a majority-digital company. Paid digital-only subscriptions totaled 3.78 million as of June 30, 2019. About three million of those subscriptions were to the news product; the remainder were to the standalone Cooking and Crosswords products. There was $112.6 million in digital subscription revenue, up 14 percent over this time last year. The Times now counts 4.7 million total print + digital subscriptions.

— Digital advertising revenue was $58 million for the quarter, or 48.1 percent of the company’s total advertising revenue.

— Revenue from the Times’ “other” category, which includes affiliate revenue from The Wirecutter, licensing, referrals, and so on, was $45 million, up 30 percent from this time last year. In the release, Times CEO Mark Thompson noted that the Times’ weekly news show The Weekly, which launched on FX and Hulu in June, “was the largest driver of the 30 percent growth in other revenue in the quarter.”

— Operating profit decreased a bit, which Thompson ascribed to “continued investment into growing our subscription business.”

Meanwhile, over at The Guardian:

— A bunch of this was preliminarily announced in May, but The Guardian’s parent company confirmed that it broke even for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2019. Digital now makes up 56 percent of The Guardian’s total revenue; 80 percent of advertising revenue is digital.

— The Guardian, which has no paywall, now has 655,000 regular paying supporters, and received an additional 300,000 one-off contributions over the past year.

— For the first time, the company broke out details about its digital business in the U.S. and Australia: “Revenue from advertising and reader contributions at the online-only Guardian US and Guardian Australia operations grew to £30.8M in the last financial year, equivalent to 14 percent of Guardian Media Group’s global revenues.”

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/08/the-new-york-times-and-the-guardian-are-celebrating-good-digital-revenue-news-today/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/05/from-climate-change-to-climate-emergency-crisis-or-breakdown-the-guardian-is-changing-the-environmental-language-it-uses/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/05/from-climate-change-to-climate-emergency-crisis-or-breakdown-the-guardian-is-changing-the-environmental-language-it-uses/#respond Fri, 17 May 2019 14:42:35 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=171910 Human-caused climate change is arguably the largest crisis facing the world’s population of more than 7 billion, but news organizations have struggled to cover it adequately. “Newsroom managers have failed to see the climate crisis as fundamental, all-encompassing, and worthy of attention from every journalist on their payrolls,” Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope wrote in an article, “The media are complacent while the world burns,”. That was co-published last month in The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review ahead of a conference on how news organizations can reframe their climate change coverage. Mainstream U.S. publications, in particular, have often failed to highlight the issue.

The Guardian has been ahead of other outlets in the attention it pays to climate change, especially in its daily reporting — it includes CO2 levels in its weather reports, for instance, and it partnered with The Nation and CJR on that conference. On Friday, The Guardian announced that it’s also changing the language it uses to describe what is happening to the environment:

Instead of “climate change” the preferred terms are “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown” and “global heating” is favored over “global warming,” although the original terms are not banned…

“We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue,” said the editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner. “The phrase ‘climate change,’ for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity”…

Other terms that have been updated, including the use of “wildlife” rather than “biodiversity,” “fish populations” instead of “fish stocks” and “climate science denier” rather than “climate skeptic.” In September, the BBC accepted it gets coverage of climate change “wrong too often” and told staff: “You do not need a ‘denier’ to balance the debate.”

+BREAKING+

The Guardian's editor has just issued this new guidance to all staff on language to use when writing about climate change and the environment… pic.twitter.com/yylPXJzdbc

— Leo Hickman (@LeoHickman) May 17, 2019

Wording around climate really does matter, and though The Guardian’s changes are technically small, they may help reinforce the importance of climate reporting in the minds of both readers and newsroom staff.

This is so smart, important, and accurate. Call things what they are. https://t.co/KQQxduUDEC

— laura olin (@lauraolin) May 17, 2019

Good for the @guardian for thinking about the best language to use when reporting on climate change and other environmental crises. I strongly agree with their new use of "climate science denier" instead of "climate denier." https://t.co/5QlIjLzUpZ

— John Upton (@johnupton) May 17, 2019

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/05/from-climate-change-to-climate-emergency-crisis-or-breakdown-the-guardian-is-changing-the-environmental-language-it-uses/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/05/want-to-see-what-one-digital-future-for-newspapers-looks-like-look-at-the-guardian-which-isnt-losing-money-anymore/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/05/want-to-see-what-one-digital-future-for-newspapers-looks-like-look-at-the-guardian-which-isnt-losing-money-anymore/#respond Wed, 01 May 2019 16:12:45 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=171213 The Guardian is a weird newspaper.

Most newspapers don’t have nearly two-thirds of their readers coming from outside the country they’re based in.

Most newspapers don’t start in one city and then move to another one.

Most newspapers aren’t owned by a trust that mandates they promote “liberal journalism both in Britain and elsewhere.”

And most newspapers don’t lose money year after year after year. Sure, some papers are run by rich men more interested in influence than profit, and some families have chosen to rank civic duty above the bottom line. But in the main, when revenues decline at a newspaper, costs get cut — cut to the point that whatever profit level the owner seeks gets met. Most newspapers that consistently lose money die.

And yet The Guardian is, here again, an especially noteworthy exception. It’s the sort of institution of which Wikipedia can note “The Guardian has been consistently loss-making” and there’s not even a ^{[citation needed]}. The BBC calls it “a culture in which constant, vast losses of the kind most private sector companies would not and could not tolerate had become culturally accepted.” (Perhaps a tinge of meanness from the state-funded broadcaster there?) Whether it was other media holdings within the same group or unrelated investments by the Scott Trust, The Guardian has long relied on someone else’s profits to bring it to break-even.

Until now! The Guardian announced this morning that, in its most recently concluded fiscal year, it…made money? “For the first time in recent history”?

Guardian News & Media recorded an £800,000 operating profit for the 2018-19 financial year — compared with a £57m loss three years previously — ensuring the business is existing on a sustainable basis following the culmination of a turnaround programme put in place following years of substantial losses.

(Perhaps it took running a series titled “Broken Capitalism” for The Guardian to get its finances in order.)

More detailed numbers about the paper’s first operating profit since 1998 are here, and here’s editor-in-chief Katherine Viner taking a well-deserved victory lap:

Today, we have announced that the Guardian has successfully completed its three-year turnaround strategy — we have hit our goal of breaking even, and made a small operating profit on our path to sustainability. This means that the money we make from advertisers combined with what we receive in the generous support from you, our readers, has this year covered the cost of producing the journalism that informs and inspires millions of people around the world. Our unique ownership model means we are not controlled by a billionaire owner, or a group of shareholders demanding financial returns — any profits made, and all financial contributions from readers, are reinvested directly into our journalism.

The Guardian has made a small operating profit! It's been a brilliant team effort and it's mostly thanks to Guardian readers — we are out of danger and the new business model is working https://t.co/Ru0bHXs4rj

— Katharine Viner (@KathViner) May 1, 2019

Just in time for Brexit too! (Sorry.)

We’ve been writing here for a long time about the difficult transition newspapers are making (or not making) to digital. If you had to define a few key financial landmarks papers need to hit along the way, you might pick these three taken from Ken Doctor pieces early this decade:

• Making a majority of your revenue from digital sources.
• Making a majority of your revenue from readers rather than advertising.
• Achieving the minor miracle of net growth, with digital dollars rising more quickly than print dollars are falling.

Each of these would be the sort of accomplishment that justifies an officewide party, and The Guardian can now say it’s hit all three — only a few years removed from a seven-year stretch where it lost £227 million, or well over $300 million in Yankee bucks.

Make your money in digital, not print.

Guardian digital traffic is rising; monthly pageviews are up 70 percent since 2016, some of which is I’m sure the result of the twin shocks of Trump and Brexit. (The Trump Bump and the Brexit…Jump? Pump?) But publishers know well that audience doesn’t always translate to revenue.

Today, 55 percent of Guardian revenue comes from digital sources, a real feat of transition. It’s a bar very few major newspapers have met; the Financial Times is the only one that comes to mind. (The New York Times is getting close, with more than 40 percent of its revenue coming from digital, and it’ll probably hit the majority mark next year.) The Guardian saw growth in both digital advertising and digital subscriptions, a combo many papers have missed recently.

Perhaps the most amazing number of all: Only 8 percent of Guardian revenue now comes from print advertising — which for literal centuries was the bedrock of the newspaper business model.

Becoming majority digital means you can think of print the way you probably should in 2019: a high-end product, still appealing to a very loyal set of subscribers, that is fundamentally a reshaping of digital output — not the other way around. There’s still money in print, but it can’t be your guiding light anymore.

Make your money from readers, not advertisers.

Speaking of subscriptions! The other papers in The Guardian’s weight class — The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Times of London — have all built their revenue strategies around selling digital subscriptions. Their content is valuable, the argument goes, and their readers have money — put up a paywall and watch the money roll in.

That’s been a very good strategy for those papers (less so for smaller ones), but The Guardian has always had a complication: It doesn’t want a paywall. That Scott Trust mission to spread liberalism far and wide doesn’t work as well if your content isn’t accessible to the huddled masses. The New York Times makes a certain amount of sense as an elite, mass-luxury product; The Guardian doesn’t. (That’s despite the fact that New York Times and Guardian readers are fairly interchangeable in a lot of ways.)

So without a paywall, The Guardian has bet on voluntary payments, a membership strategy. And it’s worked! It’s a two-pronged strategy:

Make a digital subscription product for your superfans to buy. The Guardian’s mobile apps are free for all to use. But there’s a (relatively minor in features) upgrade available called Premium — no ads, better offline reading, daily crosswords, some interface differences — that’s available for $6.99 a month. I’d wager that many of the people who buy that subscription are doing so at least as much to support the general mission of The Guardian as to get some crossword puzzles. The Guardian’s now sold 190,000 of these premium subscriptions.

Ask for money, often. If you’ve read a Guardian article on the web, you’ve probably seen a box like this underneath the story’s kicker:

If you’re finally guilted into clicking, the default option you’re shown is a repeating monthly contribution. (For me at least, it suggests $15 a month, $180 a year. You can get a New York Times or Washington Post digital subscription for less than that.) But you also have the option to switch to a one-time gift. In the past year, more than 300,000 people gave one-off contributions — but more importantly, 365,000 are now on an automatic recurring plan.

The repeating revenue is obviously critical to a company that, you know, keeps making new journalism every day, but the one-off contributions are a nice twist on reader revenue that most other newspapers can’t offer. Think about it: If you just think The Washington Post is swell and you want to support their work, how can you just give it $50 other than buying a subscription?

The New York Times is one of the few other newspapers that have figured this out. It lets you “sponsor a student subscription” to the Times to “inspire the future generation of readers.” That’s a heart-tugging pitch for a certain kind of monied Times reader, and it lets the Times do things like say “you should give us $2,000 now” with a straight face.

Of course, giving a digital subscription to a kid costs the Times exactly $0. (Heck, it’s lead generation for eventual paying readers!) But they’ve gotten 30,000 readers to sponsor more than 3 million student subscriptions — which generates something in the neighborhood $10 million for the Times. Just for asking, really.

Make more money than you did before.

That may seem a comically straightforward target for a business, but it’s been impossible for most newspaper companies over the past decade. It’s been all about cutting to profit, not growing to profit. (To take one example from the United States: The McClatchy chain generated $2.26 billion in revenue in 2007. Last year, with mostly the same newspapers, that was down to $807 million.)

But annual revenues are now going up at The Guardian: up 3 percent year over year, to be precise, at £227 million.

The overall financial picture of The Guardian has improved in largest part by cutting costs, which are down 20 percent over the past three years. That, unfortunately, has meant eliminating jobs for journalists on multiple occasions. But that 3 percent increase in revenue is an extremely welcome sign that growth may be the path forward, not just endless layoffs and buyouts.

Remember: The Guardian is a weird newspaper. Not all of its strategies could be easily replicated elsewhere. Most newspapers don’t regularly produce much news of interest outside its immediate area, much less around the globe. The Guardian’s strong identification with a point of view makes it easier for readers to feel a connection to their work than it would for a traditional metro daily. And hey, I think we can all agree it’s nice to have a billion-dollar trust fund.

But there are some lessons I think can inform useful strategies elsewhere.

• Have an identity. Be seen as fighting for something, even if in your case it might be your community’s interests instead of a political philosophy. The bland voicelessness of traditional American print newspapers is uniquely disadvantageous online, where the surfeit of free alternatives means a reader’s attachment to you has to go much deeper than it used to.
• Remember that people’s financial relationship with a publication isn’t purely transactional. “You write stories I want to read, I give you money” is one way to view the paid-reader relationship. But so are “I like what you stand for, I give you money,” “I want others to be able to read your stories, I give you money,” and “I want to be the sort of person who supports you, I give you money.” With a functionally infinite supply of free news available, the relationship your reader has to you has to be a lot more like the one public radio listeners have with their favorite station. They’re not buying access; they’re supporting a cause.
• Just ask. While the travails of the news industry is depressingly old news to most Nieman Lab readers, many, many, many people are still in the dark. A Pew study in March found that 71 percent of Americans believe that “their local news outlets are doing very or somewhat well financially.” (Not unrelated: Only 14 percent have paid for or given money to local news of any kind — print, digital, public radio pledge drive, anything — in the past year.) Your readers need to know that they need to support you, and that’s a task that requires much more sophisticated communication than a paywall that suddenly shows up one morning.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/05/want-to-see-what-one-digital-future-for-newspapers-looks-like-look-at-the-guardian-which-isnt-losing-money-anymore/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/02/how-tribune-publishing-the-guardian-and-slate-tackled-reader-revenue-by-valuing-their-journalism-more/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/02/how-tribune-publishing-the-guardian-and-slate-tackled-reader-revenue-by-valuing-their-journalism-more/#respond Wed, 20 Feb 2019 18:57:32 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=168747 Reader revenue, reader revenue, reader revenue. It’s much easier said than done, but these two case studies from Tribune Publishing, the Guardian, and Slate prove that it’s possible.

In a report from Digital Content Next and the Lenfest Institute, Matt Skibinski and Rande Price outline the for-profit and nonprofit approaches to increasing readers’ contributions, a key focus of the industry in a world where Google eats 37 percent of digital advertising, Facebook takes 22 percent, and Amazon continues to grow at 8.8 percent. The New York Times, the shining star example, makes about 40 percent of its revenue from digital, with a strong subscription backbone.

Lenfest’s previous data shows that publishers can push the top engaged five to 10 percent of their audiences to become paying subscribers — but again, that doesn’t mean that everyone is. Tribune Publishing eased up on its advertising-driven pageview focus and tightened its meter from 15 articles per month (how 2012!) to three over the past few years; tested price increases on longtime subscribers; and developed a digital marketing team dedicated to increasing digital subscribers:

As Tribune rolled out digital subscription models to its other properties including The Orlando Sentinel and The SunSentinel in 2013, and the Chicago Tribune in 2015 — it initially continued this conservative approach, with meter limits generally at 10 or more articles per month. The company’s results in its early years of charging for access were modest. Yet over the past several years, Tribune has seen a renaissance in its digital subscription program. After reaching less than 50,000 digital subscribers across all of its non-California properties in 2015, over the next three years the company’s digital subscription revenue started growing steadily. Tribune reported 89 percent year-over-year revenue growth in the first three quarters of 2018 totaling 227,000 digital subscribers according to its latest publicly-available financial report…

The company lowered its meter limits again in August of 2018, reducing the meter limit from five articles per month to three. Once again, their “meter stop rate” — the percent of users stopped by a meter limit — rose to 2.6 percent, bringing them from median performance to about the 70th percentile among publishers on this metric. Tribune saw no decline in their conversion rate for users who were stopped, and as a result their digital subscription starts increased 104 percent when compared with numbers from Q1 of the same year. ([Tribune senior vice president of digital marketing Mark] Campbell noted that a comparison to Q2 results was not available due to his team’s aggressive A/B testing during that time in preparation for the meter limit change.) Put simply, the company more than doubled its monthly subscription yield per unique visitor…

Campbell said Tribune’s team was emboldened by other publishers such as The Boston Globe, that have been aggressive in raising subscription rates for customers over time with significant success. “For us,” he said, “that would be the high-end price point. After you have gone through an introductory period, and then six months at $1.99 per week, and then six months with $3.99 per week.” This strategy has led Tribune to increase its rate per subscriber by 33 percent year over year.

The Guardian and Slate both emphasized the mission of their journalism and appealed to readers’ desire to support its quality. (We noted in November 2017 how The Guardian revamped its ask and got rid of swag to raise more reader revenue than ad dollars.)

Both companies began to pursue similar strategies, albeit starting from different places. In 2014, Slate launched its membership product, Slate Plus, with a set of features that [Slate’s director of product development David] Stern described as “mostly transactional in nature,” such as additional members-only content. “We surveyed people and the major reason they were signing up was to support the company,” he said. “But there was a non-trivial amount of people who subscribed for some benefit.” The product generated 7,000 memberships in the first year, which, while not insubstantial, paled in comparison to the size of Slate’s massive audience. According to The Lenfest Institute’s benchmarks, that membership rate — about .05 percent of Slate’s unique visitors at the time — falls at the median level. However, over time, as publishers build their membership bases, the top performers typically can convert 5-10 percent of their unique visitors into paying members. As such, Slate believed that their membership program had more potential.

The Guardian and Slate both tested members-only podcasts and behind-the-scenes initiatives to learn what their readers would pay for. Slate’s Slow Burn podcast, which revisits political scandals past, mixed a free version with mission-driven promos of its members-only Slow Burn episodes. (Slate is now building Supporting Cast, inspired by Slate Plus’s success, to help podcast publishers set up membership programs.)

The free version of Slow Burn generated 1.5 million downloads per episode, and the podcast as a whole drove 6,000 memberships in 2018…The key to success for both Slate and The Guardian has been exactly this kind of balance. Both organizations told versions of the same story: one in which readers are becoming members for a mix of valuable benefits like extra content and a broader desire to support the publication’s mission and journalism.

Journalism like The Guardian’s Cambridge Analytica reporting and Slate’s Trump administration coverage drove spikes in membership, too — particular if the organization made a special point to ask for that support.

The Guardian generated 340,000 members and supporters giving on a monthly basis and more than 350,000 giving one-time contributions (plus more than 230,000 subscribers to their digital or print editions) in the past twelve months. Interestingly, [The Guardian’s communications director Brendan] O’Grady noted that more than 50 percent of the company’s one-off contributions, which typically coincide with the publication breaking big stories, come from North America. In all, over the past three years more than one million people have given some form of financial support to the Guardian — including one-off contributions, rolling memberships and subscriptions.

Similarly, Slate has seen a flurry of membership sign-ups that it attributes to readers’ appreciation of its tough and skeptical coverage of the Trump administration. “We saw a big bump around the election—a much bigger bump than we had previously seen around an election or inauguration,” Stern said. In the three-month period covering the 2016 election and President Trump’s inauguration, Slate sold nearly 13,000 memberships, 3x the number of the three months prior. “That was entirely because readers wanted to support Slate.”

The full report is available here.

Photo of the best way money is made by TheDigitalWay used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/02/how-tribune-publishing-the-guardian-and-slate-tackled-reader-revenue-by-valuing-their-journalism-more/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/09/the-guardian-is-getting-into-the-daily-news-podcast-game-heres-what-it-learned-the-last-time-it-tried/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/09/the-guardian-is-getting-into-the-daily-news-podcast-game-heres-what-it-learned-the-last-time-it-tried/#respond Tue, 18 Sep 2018 15:43:24 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=163255 Last week, The Guardian announced it was joining the cluster of publications currently developing a flagship daily news and current affairs podcast. It will be hosted by Anushka Asthana, a former senior political correspondent on TV for Sky News and The Guardian’s current political editor. (Asthana is actually one half of a job share for the role with colleague Heather Stewart, which was a groundbreaking arrangement for Westminster political reporting when it began in 2016).

The daily news podcast is scheduled to launch before the end of the year, and it will be monetised by Acast, which had previously worked with The Guardian on the latter’s Football Weekly and Politics Weekly shows. Bose will serve as its first sponsor, and I’m told that the launch sponsorship slots for the show in the U.K. have already been sold out.

Leo Hornak, formerly of the BBC (and who you might remember as the producer behind This American Life’s “Abdi and The Golden Ticket“), serves as executive producer overseeing a team of six journalists. Hornak wasn’t able to share any details at this point when I reached out. He did, however, offer a broader view closer to launch date, so we’ll probably revisit the story then.

In the meantime, some brief thoughts and a dash of historical context from my end. The challenge for any show like this is a big one: how to get into major subjects deeply (the announcement says the aim is to “take listeners behind the headlines”) while also maintaining a wide enough topic range for the podcast to be fully current and informative, all in a tight 20- to 30-minute package and on a daily release schedule. News consumers can already get basic headlines and recaps pretty easily from the news segments on commercial radio and social media feeds; if it’s to get them to put on their headphones and download a podcast, the upcoming daily news product needs to offer something more.

I would argue the daily news podcast terrain in the U.K. presents an additional challenge, given the BBC’s unparalleled reached and fairly unassailable reputation as an unbiased source of news. That’s on top of the fact that podcast awareness here lags behind the U.S. According to RAJAR, the official body that measures radio audiences in the U.K., 11 percent of U.K. adults listened to a podcast in the first quarter of 2018, whereas this year’s Infinite Dial report put monthly podcast listening in the U.S. at 26 percent.

On the flipside, there are two things that could potentially work in the Guardian’s favor. First, the newspaper has a distinctively liberal and left-leaning outlook, which could give its daily news podcast a way of attracting listeners who are keen on exploring the news more deeply but are frustrated by the way BBC has covered divisive issues like Brexit. (The success of single-issue podcasts in this space like Remainiacs and Agitpod certainly suggests there is a market for an unapologetically left-wing take on such matters.) If Asthana is permitted to put her personality and views into the show, that will go a long way to differentiating it from the sterile, characterless style enforced by the BBC’s impartiality rules, too.

Second, podcast listenership in the U.K. is highest among younger people, who are also far less likely to listen to live radio or watch traditional televised news broadcasts. They are the growth market for a show like this, and it shouldn’t be afraid of tailoring its content and style to them.

It should be acknowledged that this isn’t the first time The Guardian has produced a daily news podcast. That honour goes to a show first called Newsdesk, later renamed Guardian Daily, which ran from March 2006 to July 2010 (here’s the first ever episode and the entire archive). Interestingly, this fact was first left off the press release about the new daily show and only subsequently added, presumably after host Jon Dennis reminded people of the original podcast’s existence on Twitter.

I spoke to Dennis on the phone to find out a bit more about how Newsdesk came into being in 2006. At the time, he was deputy news editor for Guardian Unlimited, as the publication’s website was then known (it had a separate staff from the print newspaper). The site’s first foray into podcasts involved the comedian Ricky Gervais when, in the latter part of 2005, the site hosted The Ricky Gervais Show. According to Dennis, the editor Alan Rusbridger, further encouraged by his daughter, eventually proposed The Guardian make its own podcasts in house. Dennis auditioned to host the first of these projects, which was to be a daily news show.

“I got the gig, and I was really just tasked with developing it on my own,” he said. “They found me a desk — there was no studio, it was in the process of being built in a stock cupboard or something — and I had to figure out what The Guardian’s daily news podcast might sound like. No other papers that we were aware of were doing anything like that.”

The format ended up being about 20 minutes, involving Dennis having “conversations with The Guardian’s reporters and writers about things that The Guardian had published.” He also interviewed guests who were in the news. He and his producer saw the purpose of Newsdesk/Guardian Daily as adding value to the publication’s other output and bringing in new readers. “If you didn’t read The Guardian or know anything about it, you should be able to listen to that podcast and get an idea of the stories we thought were important,” he said. “We certainly tried to reflect The Guardian’s values.”

Talking to Dennis, I had the impression that he was pretty much left alone to figure out the proto-daily news podcast. It ended up garnering around 26,000 listeners each day — which, for a mid-2000s British podcast, is pretty strong. But the ad sales team at The Guardian was unable to find an effective way to make money off the show, and Dennis found himself hampered by various technological hurdles. There would occasionally be breaking news developments that instantly rendered Newsdesk/Guardian Daily moot, as he wouldn’t be able to derive enough resources to re-record an emergency podcast or respond in any adequate way.

Without any marketing budget and with a poor internet presence, the podcast struggled to grow, although the existing listeners remained loyal. By 2010, Dennis said, “the enthusiasm internally at The Guardian had gone for it. They were convinced that there was something wrong with it. They tried various things, and it didn’t really feel like there was much left of me in it really by the time it finished.” Guardian Daily received a surprise stay of execution while it covered the aftermath of 2010’s inconclusive general election, but was eventually put to pasture in July of that year.

Dennis is surprised that it took so long for The Guardian to resurrect the idea of a daily podcast, especially given the direction podcasting has taken since 2010. “They bloody well should be doing a daily news podcast,” he said. “That’s why they brought it back — it’s absolutely the obvious thing that The Guardian should be doing.” He also suggested that a desire to follow in the footsteps of The New York Times’ The Daily could be behind the new launch, but stressed that it absolutely made sense for The Guardian as a news organization to put news at the heart of their podcasting operation, too.

While I’m sure that Hornak and his team will be wanting to start afresh with their new project, I think it’s fair to say that Dennis’ efforts back in 2006 had blazed a fair bit of trail for them. Yes, the production quality for Newsdesk/Guardian Daily wasn’t always top notch, and a few more narratively-reported segments wouldn’t have gone amiss. But the seeds for an informative, fast-moving show with a distinctive viewpoint that drew on The Guardian staff’s expertise was planted then and there.

This is an excerpt from this week’s Hot Pod newsletter, which you can see in full here.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/09/the-guardian-is-getting-into-the-daily-news-podcast-game-heres-what-it-learned-the-last-time-it-tried/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/54-newsrooms-9-countries-and-9-core-ideas-heres-what-two-researchers-found-in-a-yearlong-quest-for-journalism-innovation/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/54-newsrooms-9-countries-and-9-core-ideas-heres-what-two-researchers-found-in-a-yearlong-quest-for-journalism-innovation/#respond Wed, 11 Jul 2018 13:13:56 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=160012 Many news organizations are working intensely on sharpening their own profiles and identities, challenging the dogma of neutrality and fleeing away from the catch-all omnibus news ideal for several reasons. The need for a clear media identity grows when online news content is spread in small, unidentifiable bites across the Internet. Also, in order to make people relate to and identity with you, you must show them what you stand for. Show them who you are, and from which perspective — geographically, socio-demographically, or politically — you view the world. Prime examples of news media working with their identities in this targeted way are the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen (The Class Struggle), the regional online news site Voice of San Diego and The Evergrey in Seattle.

2. From omnibus to niche

Niche media’s ability to create relevance for users — and to mobilize both interest and willingness to pay — is far greater than the ability of the omnibus media. And apart from a very few media with global reach (e.g. The Guardian, BBC, CNN), all news media can be considered niche operations. However, many broad-reaching legacy media hesitate to openly show and communicate which niche audience they seek to engage. Maybe because the democratic value of niche media is somewhat controversial: creating strong bonds among a homogenous audience instead of bridging different communities. Nonetheless, targeted niche media like the Seattle-based tech site GeekWire, Berlin-based youth site Ze.tt and the intellectual daily Information in Copenhagen show that is possible to create both quality journalism of high public value and cater to targeted audiences at the same time.

3. From flock to club

Gathering people around the news media, in clearly defined communities — clubs — is a strategy gaining momentum on both sides of the Atlantic. This implies transforming what were formerly known as subscribers, users, or readers into members, that must either register or pay to join the inner circles of the crowd around the news media. Spanish El Diario and French Mediapart have put membership models at the heart of their identities and their journalistic operations. Many American media companies — from legacy players like The New York Times and the Gannett group to online startups organized in the News Revenue Hub — follow the same path.

4. From ink to sweat

Many media companies are pursuing new ways to create physical journalism in the form of public meetings, festivals, events, and stage plays. Live and engaging. And yes, they consider it journalism. French daily Le Monde has made physical live events an important way to engage with citizens and to generate new revenue. The same strategy is used by The Texas Tribune, which carries out a variety of small and big events yearround. Danish startup Zetland regularly sets up journalistic shows around the prominent theaters in Copenhagen.

5. From speaking to listening

The legacy media business often has the character of a walled fortress more than of an open and accessible house. But both in the U.S. and Europe, news organizations are increasingly opening up — physically and mentally — in order to be more accessible to the citizens they serve. More than anything, this means listening to citizens and creating more transparency in editorial matters. This can be done through direct personal dialogue, through physical presence in communities, or through the systematic use of small and big data. The listening solutions developed by Chicago-based Hearken are now used by public radio and TV stations in the U.S. The regional German newspaper Braunschweiger Zeitung, which brands itself Bürgerzeitung — the newspaper of the citizens — listens through extensive use of physical meetings in local communities and by each day dedicating editorial resources and columns in the paper to cover questions asked by readers.

6. From arm’s length to cooperation

In order to maintain independence and neutrality, modern journalism has kept its distance, holding everyone outside the newsroom at arm’s length: citizens, interest groups, public institutions, private corporations, decision makers. However, this pattern is clearly changing. More and more newsrooms are involving citizens directly throughout the journalistic process: from ideation to research to delivery of independent content to the subsequent debate of published stories. The Dutch online site De Correspondent, German Correctiv, and ProPublica in New York are prime examples of organizations that have refined this co-creation process — without giving up editorial gatekeeping. They have all also pioneered cooperation with grassroots, NGOs, and public institutions — as well as with other media companies — as a way to create a both substantially deeper and more engaging journalism.

7. From own to other platforms

It weakens business opportunities of the news media and their journalistic control when they put their content on social media. That seems to be the common consensus in the news industry. Using social media is a double-edged sword, but handled in the right way — maybe more as a way to cooperate than distribute — social network technologies have big potential to enhance and deepen engagement, while at the same time creating stronger journalism. David Fahrenthold’s Twitter-based research on Donald Trump’s charitable giving, earning him and The Washington Post a Pulitzer Prize, is the golden example. The Wall Street Journal’s use of Snapchat Discover to cover the lives of Americans hit by the opioid crisis in the U.S. is another.

8. From problem to solution

Even the most hardcore investigative journalists have discovered they gain greater impact if they add a solution-oriented level to their work. Constructive journalism simply creates more engagement among readers, users, viewers. They read more, they are more likely to share content, and they express more interest in knowing more about the issue when the piece has a constructive angle. The Danish public broadcaster DR has refined this type of journalism over several years, thus improving ratings and reach of its TV news. In the U.S., the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting integrates a solution-oriented element in many of its investigative projects — even arranging solution summits for the stakeholders around some of the problems its deep-digging journalists have uncovered.

9. From observers to activists

Several news outlets — established as well as new ones — are testing whether they can create a new relevance to their readers, users, and viewers through activist campaigns or journalistic advocacy. This move is particularly controversial for many journalists — and clearly not a strategy suitable for all types of media operations. However, a campaign-oriented approach to journalism has successfully been used as a way to engage and create action among citizens for European news media such as The Guardian, Gazeta Wyborcza in Poland, and the Danish regional newspaper Fyens Stiftstidende.

Our book describes and analyzes all these examples and many, many more, in depth and detail. If there’s a common denominator for the 50-plus news organizations we’ve met and studied — apart, of course, from striving to connect with citizens in new ways — it’s their focus on innovation and experiments.

All the new digital publishers we’ve met seem founded on the courage and ambition of radical innovation. But also, in the legacy media institutions we visited, there seems to be a new understanding of the need for dramatic change and open-ended experiments.

This is why we find no reason to preach one particular model of journalism for the future. All the experiments and ideas unfolding in the current media landscape on both sides of the Atlantic indicate that there will be dozens, if not hundreds, of different models, all of which carry a hope for journalism in the future.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/54-newsrooms-9-countries-and-9-core-ideas-heres-what-two-researchers-found-in-a-yearlong-quest-for-journalism-innovation/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/what-the-guardian-has-learned-trying-to-build-a-more-intelligent-story-format-one-that-knows-what-you-know/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/what-the-guardian-has-learned-trying-to-build-a-more-intelligent-story-format-one-that-knows-what-you-know/#respond Tue, 27 Feb 2018 18:23:43 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=155094 Over the past several months, the Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab has introduced a new format that we have been working on: the Smarticle. We’ve now run three Smarticle experiments, and learned a lot about how readers like the format and what topics work well in it. Most significantly, we learned that there’s an appetite for this story format: Through a combination of written feedback from users and analytics, we learned that people enjoyed consuming news in this way, and they were comfortable only receiving elements of the story that were new to them.

First, a quick description for those unfamiliar with the project: the Smarticle is a story format designed for mobile that aims to meet readers where they are in their knowledge of a developing story by only presenting them with the elements that are most useful to them. It works like this:

• A story is broken down into its core elements, which are displayed as a series of blocks.
• When a reader first visits the page, the blocks contain only the most fundamental story details up to that point.
• As the reader returns, an algorithm determines what should appear for each user. For these first three experiments, the algorithm took into account what someone had read on their last visit, as well as the importance of each new story development.
• Users who read the story on a Chrome browser have the option to subscribe to notifications, which are sent when there is a critical mass of updates or a major development in the story.

By running repeated experiments, we’re looking to learn how we can help readers follow an evolving story, using an article format that aims to keep them informed while also respecting their time. The format also tests how comfortable readers are consuming news that isn’t written or presented as a traditional article. While we will keep adjusting and testing the format beyond these three experiments, we wanted to report on what we’ve learned so far.

A few views of the Smarticle coverage of the Republican tax bill.

Since our initial post, we’ve run Smarticles on three different topics: The first on Trump’s dispute with a Gold Star widow, the second on the sexual harassment scandal surrounding Roy Moore, then the Republican candidate for senate in the run-up to a special election in Alabama, and the third on the passage of the Republican tax bill.

These three stories shared some core characteristics that we felt made them apt candidates for experimenting with in the Smarticle format. Here are a few:

• Stories that develop over time. First and foremost, they were stories that we expected would include significant developments over at least a few days. We decided the ideal time for experimenting was three days — long enough to gain a good number of readers, but short enough so that our small team (an editor, a reporter, a designer/engineer and a product manager) could reasonably incorporate all the important updates. So we chose stories that were likely to keep going for at least that long.
• Topics covered by The Guardian. Our experiments also relied on The Guardian’s coverage, so we needed to be reasonably sure the Guardian US newsroom would be covering the chosen topic. (We also drew content from social media and other sources as well as Guardian stories) The stories we chose seemed to have momentum, and we consulted with the news desk to see if the coverage would continue before launching a Smarticle.
• Stories with a clear arc. The stories also developed in an incremental nature that suited the format well. While there were competing narratives within the topic, each story followed a distinct arc punctuated by key events, such as statements from core figures or votes in Congress.
• Stories with repeated context. Finally, each article written on these topics contained a paragraph or two of context that was repeated in each piece. In the Smarticle, reporters only have to write it once and readers who are already aware of it do not need to re-read it.

Each test ran for about three days. The Lab wrote and edited the story elements, largely drawing from Guardian US coverage, while also including other outlets’ stories as well as social media posts.

Smarticles ran alongside Guardian US coverage of the same topic, with links to the Smarticles were included within those Guardian articles offering an experimental version designed for mobile.

Although Smarticles are designed for mobile, they’re available on any web browser, on any device. The full experience is optimized for users of Chrome browsers on Android devices, who were additionally able to sign up for notifications, which we sent to subscribers to alert them to major updates in the story.

The response

As with all lab experiments, we sent out a survey to our alert subscribers after each test. These surveys give us a chance to learn a great deal from the thoughtful feedback from users. The questions we ask are meant to gauge how interesting and useful these new formats are to those who use them, and include questions about specific elements of the format (a design feature, or type of content, for example), as well as open-ended fields to invite reactions to aspects we have not thought to ask about. Pairing the feedback from these survey responses with engagement data from our analytics suite allows us to get the full picture of insights about how each Smarticle was used and received by readers.

Part of the Smarticle on the sexual harassment scandal involving Roy Moore.

The data from the three Smarticle tests consistently indicates a strong affinity for this story format, and perhaps even a need for it. Many readers who responded to the survey say they found the format a more useful way to follow stories than through reading multiple articles, and the majority of survey respondents also said they would like to follow other stories in this format.

More on survey results

About 15–25 percent of people who received the survey responded with feedback. On average, 92 percent of survey respondents told us they found Smarticles as useful or more useful than following the same topic by reading articles. Each topic that we covered in the Smarticle format ran in parallel to Guardian coverage of the same story, ensuring an obvious comparison. We worked with the Guardian US production team to include links directly to the experimental Smarticle format below the headline of most Guardian articles on the topic. These survey results indicated that readers were comfortable following the topic in this one-page format, where they would usually read a series of articles on the topic, each on its own page.

Among survey respondents who provided feedback on the Roy Moore and Republican Tax Bill Smarticles, 69 percent said they would like to follow other stories in this format; another indicator of the appetite that readers had for the format. (We had not asked this question in the survey for the first Smarticle, on Trump’s response to a Gold Star widow.)

Beyond that, an average of 63 percent of survey respondents were satisfied with what they found on the page each time they returned to the Smarticle. This was an important indicator that most users were comfortable with the layout and page design, and were also happy with both the amount of information and the quality of story updates that were shown to them on each visit.

An average of 77 percent of respondents said that only seeing what was new to them was useful. Readers who experienced the feature were comfortable with the idea that elements of the story they had already seen would disappear, which should save them time.

Readers also left comments in response to an open-ended question (“Anything else you would like to tell us about this experiment?”) that indicated their interest in this format. “So far I like the format — it’s nice to see only the new information and not what you’ve already read,” one reader wrote. “I like the new feature because it bundles together many articles on a topic, making it possible to explore from many angles,” another said in the comments.

People also stated they would like to see Smarticles on different topics, “Would like to try it again, especially with something I was very interested in.”

A few more reactions:

Great idea. Keep innovating with clarity and imagination !

If you can implement this well, then I would become a contributing supporter. This is the kind of innovation that we need to filter through an ever changing/evolving news cycle!

Limitations of the experiments

For all the positive feedback we received, which we appreciate as validation of the premise of Smarticles, the experiments we’ve conducted have had some known limitations.

For example, users only had one way to discover the Smarticles: through links on Guardian articles about the topic. Since people normally don’t revisit articles, this meant that one of the easiest ways for users to return to the Smarticle was through the notifications we sent. Since only Chrome users on Android devices or desktop were able to sign up for notifications, there was a built-in limit to the number of users who were able to experience all of that feature.

We also had conversations about the best way to handle chronology in the presentation of updates. Generally, Smarticle content is laid out in chronological order, with the oldest information at the top. Users who come into a story, then, will find the latest update buried at the bottom. We received some user feedback from our first two experiments that this felt counterintuitive, so we addressed this by ensuring that users who came in from a notification saw the update tied to the notification first at the top of the page.

Audience size

The size of the audience for each of our experiments tended to directly correlate to the readership on the Guardian site. Overall, the audience for the set of Smarticles ranged from about 1,200 readers to nearly 12,000. A smaller set of those readers visiting on Chrome browsers were eligible to sign-up for notifications, which ended up being between about 4 percent and 11 percent of readers who had the option to subscribe.

Here are some more detailed notes on the audience size for each experiment:

Pageviews:

• Trump-Gold Star: 13,013
• Roy Moore: 2,773
• Republican Tax Bill: 8,243

Users:

• Trump-Gold Star: 11,295
• Roy Moore: 1,214
• Republican Tax Bill: 6,685

Notification signups:

• Trump-Gold Star: 178 (3.5 percent of eligible Chrome users)
• Roy Moore: 120 (11 percent of eligible Chrome users)
• Republican Tax Bill: 160 (4 percent of eligible Chrome users)

Moving forward…

While we’ve learned a great deal from the experimentation we’ve done so far, there is still a lot to explore. Now that we’ve established readers are comfortable with elements of the story disappearing based on whether or not they’ve been seen, the main question that we are exploring next is: When is the right time to resurface information reader’s have already read, if at all?

To examine this, we will be collecting and analyzing a number of signals from readers of the next Smarticles, to try to determine at what point they may need reminding of, or simply want access to, certain elements of the story. Deciding what elements to resurface through the algorithm and when to bring them back will be a major focus of our future experiments.

It will work roughly like this:

1. Each element of the story is assigned a rank relative to its overall importance to the story.
2. The algorithm will take into account the assigned rank of each story detail along with elements of the user’s behavior, such as the time since their last visit, how long they viewed each detail, and the number of details that have been published.
3. A combination of these factors will decide what elements readers will see each time they return to the page.

We’re excited to learn how readers respond to this and we’ll keep you posted. Stay tuned!

Mazin Sidahmed is a reporter and associate editor at the Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab.

This story is copublished from the Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab, a small multidisciplinary team housed within The Guardian’s New York newsroom set up to explore storytelling and the delivery of news on small screens. It (full disclosure: like Nieman Lab) is supported by the Knight Foundation.

Photo by Jan Faborsky used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/what-the-guardian-has-learned-trying-to-build-a-more-intelligent-story-format-one-that-knows-what-you-know/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/the-guardians-new-podcast-player-for-the-web-tries-to-make-listening-a-little-more-interactive-but-not-interruptive/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/the-guardians-new-podcast-player-for-the-web-tries-to-make-listening-a-little-more-interactive-but-not-interruptive/#respond Thu, 15 Feb 2018 15:23:38 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=154567 Sometimes, the podcast isn’t enough. Or to put it differently, it’s so good you want to find out even more.

While binging on the S-Town podcast last year, the first thing I did after one episode was search the Internet for more about the central character John McLemore, in hopes of finding a picture of the hedge maze via the GPS coordinates McLemore started giving out. (If you haven’t listened to S-Town and plan to, don’t do this.)

So did the Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab team — an impulse that they guessed many podcast listeners shared. The Lab’s latest mobile experiment is an attempt to address some of the small inconveniences and limitations of the podcast listening experience as it stands today. It’s a podcast player designed for the mobile web, which is being tested first with a new Guardian podcast called Strange Bird, hosted by data editor Mona Chalabi. (The Mobile Innovation Lab and Nieman Lab both receive Knight Foundation funding. You can check out their product process on that Lab’s Medium page, or find Nieman Lab’s coverage of their past experiments here.

Any listener can access the player through any browser on Apple or Android, though Android users get the added option of turning on push alerts timed to different parts of the audio as the podcast plays on. It’s like podcast show notes, but in real time, and with phone notifications that point you to links and graphics at relevant points in the story. Chrome users can also sign up to get alerts when a new episode is available, without subscribing within a dedicated listening app.

“We had a lot of debates about the purity of audio, and the power a good audio story has. We’re trying to play around with the idea: If it weren’t just audio, what could it be? How can we seamlessly deliver additional media assets?” Sarah Schmalbach, the senior product manager at the Lab, said. “We’re not building an entire experience around them, but adding them where they’re relevant, and taking into account that some people also like to keep the visual or other elements a mystery. We wanted to figure out how to blend a couple of different formats together, with audio as the anchor.”

“We’re seeing so many organizations take interest or invest money in podcasts as a source of gaining new audiences, but those aren’t necessarily integrated into the rest of their output,” Sasha Koren, the Mobile Lab’s editor, said. “Maybe they’re available through a basic web player, but you can’t follow or interact with them in any other way, or you can only access them on a podcast app which takes you off platform.”

Have you ever listened to a podcast episode centered around a visual, heard the host mention the website where some of the images in question live, and then never actually followed up with those extra steps to see the extra stuff? For the wonkier among you, have you ever listened to charts getting cited and papers getting quoted, and wanted to check out the data for yourself? The Mobile Lab’s web player experiment addresses some of these use cases for more regular podcast users. It also attempts to both simplify and enhance the podcast listening process for beginners — especially Android users — who are faced with a range of paid and free listening apps, of varying quality.

Strange Bird’s premise is that it will use data to open up difficult issues that are actually common, but insufficiently discussed, making it a useful test case for the Mobile Lab’s web player. The Mobile Lab team worked off of the show script to look for possibilities where added material made sense — where there were characters whose photos listeners might be interested in seeing or data graphics Chalabi created that might be incorporated, Koren said. Its pilot episode is on miscarriage, and will feature chats from Mona herself, links to other stories, and illustrations. The podcast will also be available all the other places where podcasts are found, but the web player audio will include a little introduction about the added features.

“What we’ve created is a sort of augmented traditional podcast,” Alastair Coote, the Mobile Lab’s developer, said. “You can listen to it the way you would a normal podcast, you can engage with the extra bit if you want to.” The web podcast player is a proof-of-concept for the Lab, which is winding down its two-year grant period, but other publishers with resources may want to build on ideas around better podcast listening experiences without a dedicated app (choose your-own-adventure interactive podcasts, perhaps, Coote and Schmalbach suggest).

Some technical roadblocks remain — for instance, if you get an alert that a new podcast episode is posted, and want to tap to download that episode in the background over wifi for future listening offline, you can’t. (Coote outlined a few of these challenges in his own writeup of the podcast player concept from last summer.)

Both platforms and news organizations have experimented with various efforts to give listeners interactivity on top of audio. The investigative reporting show Reveal has offered users the option of texting with the show at given points when it has document excerpts, images, or data to show listeners. The New York Times now offers its morning show The Daily within its app, and listeners can tap around to other stories as the audio continues to play. Last month Spotify announced it would roll out a feature in the app called Spotlight that would show listeners “contextual visual elements, such as photos, video and text, that appear as users move through each episode,” first with partners like BuzzFeed News and Gimlet Media.

Verrry interested to see this new podcast + visuals thing Spotify announced, particularly @BuzzFeedNews and @cheddar use. Despite launch press I can't find any sign of it in the iOS app. https://t.co/OC0lnGX64O

— Sasha Koren (@SashaK) January 23, 2018

The Mobile Lab’s idea is, as always, to get others in the industry thinking about prototypes they’ve built: “We’d love to see more people experimenting with this stuff,” Schmalbach said.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/the-guardians-new-podcast-player-for-the-web-tries-to-make-listening-a-little-more-interactive-but-not-interruptive/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/want-to-write-for-publish-org-every-step-of-the-process-from-pitching-to-edits-to-payment-will-be-open/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/want-to-write-for-publish-org-every-step-of-the-process-from-pitching-to-edits-to-payment-will-be-open/#respond Mon, 04 Dec 2017 14:56:57 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=150831 If you want to write for the new collaborative, public journalism site Publish.org, you should be open to showing your work.

The Publish.org platform, which had been testing its backend and workflow with a smaller group of writers in closed beta over the past few months, opened up last week to all contributors — people who want to write, people who want to donate, people who want to review other people’s works-in-progress, or all of the above.

How well the model will work ultimately depends on how active its contributors are willing to be, and the platform offers several avenues of participating. Anyone can register and write a piece, and then await public feedback from other Publish.org members (hello, Medium). The bulk of the work that appears on the site, however, will be through its public commissioning process, according to Publish.org editor Sarah Hartley. (Hartley, formerly of the Guardian, oversees project applications at Google’s DNI fund.)

Two calls for pitches are currently open — one on the future of the European Union and another, more open-ended one on democracy — and the stories pitched for each topic are also visible to the public. Also visible will be every step of the editorial process, including whether a pitch has been reviewed, whether it’s been commissioned, what deadline was proposed, and even how much the writer is getting paid for the piece, a fee that writers actually determine for themselves. Editors also promise to respond to all pitches within two weeks with a definitive answer. An editorial board can offer additional guidance and also more broadly directs the coverage of Publish.org.

“We want to make sure that writers know where they’re at in the process, and know what they’re going to get out of it,” Hartley said. “There’s no need to wonder, ‘Did the desk read that proposal? Did they like it? Did they hate it? Has somebody else stolen it?'”

The drafts remain public even when the piece is finalized. During the editing process, Publish.org members can view edits and respond to a template of questions about whether a filed draft fulfilled the basic requirements. Final stories are also available under a Creative Commons license.

Publish.org isn’t looking for day-to-day political stories or breaking news, Hartley said, and sees itself as a place for “in-depth, longform journalism with a global outlook.” Its topic categories are a bit cerebral: ethics, democracy, solutions, culture, geography, and science.

The Publish.org idea itself has been brewing for a long time; I first spoke to Hartley nearly two years ago, when bits of the project began appearing on social media, and the core team was still trying to clarify what exactly the platform would be, to raise money to build it, and to formalize the organization as a community interest company in the U.K., where it’ll be based. (The founders had clearly also managed to grab a pretty good domain name.) It ended up raising €160,667 through grants and reader donations, which has gone to software development and operational costs, and hopes to raise €300,000 in 2018. It hopes to keep the core team small and dedicate the bulk of its revenue to paying writers. Sustainability won’t come anytime soon, CEO Matt McAlister acknowledged, but he’s set a three-year goal for Publish.org to get to €1 million in annual revenue (€333,000 from a robust membership program, €333,000 from foundations, and another €333,000 from generated revenue, like sponsorships for specific channels (no display advertising, though). The team has also considered other uses for its platform, such as letting other publications outsource their freelance commissions — including the editing and payment process — to Publish.org.

If some of this sounds a little familiar, it’s because Publish.org is a direct descendant of Contributoria, a collaborative and crowdfunded publishing platform supported by The Guardian that ran for 18 months before it shut down in August 2015. In fact, its core team of Hartley, McAlister, CTO Dan Catt, and design director Dean Vipond were part of the group of people who first met at The Guardian and later worked together on Contributoria. It wanted to be an open place for the public to vet, vote, and fund ideas journalists put forth and for journalists to work together on those stories, often on topics undercovered by other established news outlets. Some traces of Contributoria — writers setting their own fees, for instance — carried over into Publish.org.

“That was one of the things we learned from our past work: that there are tons of people out there who want to be part of the journalism process, but traditional media outlets are very opaque, they’ve got their own systems, which are effective, but very controlled,” McAlister said. “So in creating this more open environment, we thought, we wanted to make it quite easy for people to contribute, and keep it a low barrier to entry.” (Jimmy Wales’ WikiTribune is playing a similar space.)

To build its initial stable of writers, the site has been reaching out to mostly professional freelancers already familiar with the pitching and editing process, but it plans to work with non-journalists and hopes to “discover new talent” and be “as open as possible to independent writers.” It’ll also open to editorial partnerships to help disseminate its articles more widely. It’s bringing on board a guest editor, for instance, from the anti-Brexit popup newspaper The New European, and might cross-publish pieces with that publication.

“Our big premise is, we’re trying to be an open news desk for the internet,” McAlister said. “At the end of the day, we’re just trying to fuel a healthier, more open ecosystem of journalism. And whether that happens on Publish.org, or whether people experience Publish.org directly or not, at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter.”

Publish.org currently has around 1,000 members registered for the platform, a significant number of whom were part of the original Contributoria user base. It’s trying to entice new donors to become “founding members” who will be permanently acknowledged somewhere on the site. It’ll remain free to participate on Publish.org at the basic levels available now, but paying members might get additional benefits in the future as the platform develops.

“That’s something we’re going to work out. Where you draw lines is fuzzy, and we want to keep it that way actually,” McAlister said. “But we’re a nonprofit for open journalism, and we want this to feel like it’s publicly owned.”

The platform is open to the world to try out, but the backend is still being built out. It just started testing “feature image uploading.” Its contributors want to embed content. They want more flexibility on layout and graphics. Publish.org’s peer-review workflow is also a work-in-progress. At the moment, the community feedback is limited to a simple set of yes-or-no questions about drafts writers file, but some writers have asked for more.

“Some of the writers actually wanted us to give harder questions for the community to answer so that they could get really proper, in-depth real feedback on their work. I found that really encouraging,” McAlister said. “It’s going to be a little bit tricky to balance, because on the one hand you want to make it really easy for people to engage with it, and if you ask people to contribute by deeply thinking through a writer’s work, that’s setting a much higher bar to entry. We’re trying to create this inviting environment for people to participate in the journalism process. So we need to figure out how to make both those things come together.”

Photo of map of Europe by Charles Clegg used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/want-to-write-for-publish-org-every-step-of-the-process-from-pitching-to-edits-to-payment-will-be-open/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/11/asking-members-to-support-its-journalism-no-prizes-no-swag-the-guardian-raises-more-reader-revenue-than-ad-dollars/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/11/asking-members-to-support-its-journalism-no-prizes-no-swag-the-guardian-raises-more-reader-revenue-than-ad-dollars/#respond Fri, 17 Nov 2017 14:00:53 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=150198 Instead of using tote bags, tickets to live events, or other swag, The Guardian‘s membership program has grown to 800,000 supporters a year and a half after doubling down on its membership initiative. The key? A shift from a commercially focused plea to an emotional, service-based request, the two women leading the effort said.

“Our appeal is very much an appeal from The Guardian,” Amanda Michel, deputy executive editor of membership and senior product manager for acquisitions and data technology, said. “It doesn’t speak to the section they’re in. It doesn’t speak to what they read. It speaks to the heart of the Guardian’s moment.”

Financial difficulties struck The Guardian, the London-based, trust-owned international news organization, in recent years, with the print-to-digital advertising downturn that wracked news industries around the world. It had also taken on an ambitious plan to expand internationally following its coverage of Edward Snowden’s NSA files and subsequent Pulitzer in 2014. That ambition didn’t quite follow through — Buzzfeed reported in June that “the thirst for global expansion was so strong, in fact, that the Guardian’s former US CEO says he was pressured to make unattainable business projections to fuel the growth.” Those figures included $15.5 million in revenue from April 2015-16 amid more than $15 million in operating losses with a revenue target of $32.2 million for 2016-2017. Faced with the heat of digital advertising and ad-blocking software, the Guardian focused on shaking things up.

The organization offers subscriptions and, as of this past summer, a philanthropic arm as well, but turned to membership in 2014 to draw readers further in and bolster its grassroots support rather than instituting a paywall. Former Guardian Media Group CEO Andrew Miller explained the mindset at the time:

“Will it be a wall between the reader and the content? No, it won’t be. It’ll be adding more value for people who want to get more involved in the Guardian, who feel passionate about the Guardian.

We recognize we have to get more direct-to-consumer revenue over time, and the way we will do that is through membership-type propositions, but it’s going to be much more than a paywall. A paywall is to me an inverse loyalty scheme, where the more you consume the more you pay, which doesn’t seem to work.”

In January 2016, The Guardian re-emphasized the potential of the membership program while embarking on cutting spree of 20 percent, about 50 million pounds, from its budget over three years. The “enhanced membership offer” aims to double reader revenues, according to a Guardian press release detailing the cost-cutting breakdown. Around this time, “a small cross-functional team made up of editorial, commercial, UX and engineers began to reimagine what the membership scheme could be when rooted in the Guardian’s journalism,” Michel said. She and membership executive editor Natalie Hanman transitioned within their Guardian roles to focus on membership. (Michel had joined the Guardian in 2011 as open editor, bringing her experience from ProPublica and Huffington Post with skills in community engagement, and Hanman was editor at the Guardian’s opinion site.) Twelve thousand members had already signed up, but the membership system largely centered on in-person events — not exactly encouraging anyone outside of London to become a member.

“It was in April last year that Amanda and I did the first experiment basically using a carrot, not a stick, to support the Guardian’s journalism,” Hanman said, explaining that the Panama Papers investigation was the first test of some of those ideas. “We were really drawing the link between time and effort and skill we put into that investigation, working with these organizations around the world and asking people if you value this, please contribute toward this.”

By the end of 2016, reader revenues — that’s memberships, subscriptions, newsstand sales, and one-time contributions — comprised more of the Guardian’s revenue than advertising dollars did.

Last month, editor-in-chief Katharine Viner announced that financial support from readers had officially surpassed advertising revenue, noting that 500,000 individuals contributed monthly to the Guardian as members and print/digital subscribers and another 300,000 one-time donations have added to the organization’s coffers.

“We are encouraged and cheered by the hundreds of thousands of you who are supporting our journalism. In the last year alone, the number of readers who support us regularly has more than doubled, and we now receive more income from our readers than we do from advertisers. This is a significant step,” Viner wrote.

In its infancy, the membership program had invited readers to become “friends” for free while paying for events, “partners” for £15 (US $19.79) per month with discounts to ticketed events, and “patrons” for £60, with the aforementioned discounts and access to Guardian newsroom events. Now, however, readers can join as “supporters” for £5 per month with ticket access, “partners” for £15 per month that includes tickets to Guardian Live events or Guardian-published books and a welcome gift, or “patrons” or £60 per month with the other benefits plus access to “exclusive, behind-the-scenes” events. But Michel and Hamnan credit the events for catalyzing change and restoring energy to the membership drive.

Because readers outside of London didn’t have much incentive to attend Guardian events at the newsroom in the city and the Guardian was making this international thrust, it didn’t make sense to push that as central to the journalism organization’s pitch when readers and reporters, editors, and designers could interact in more multidimensional ways. The pair revamped both the ask and the offerings — moving from 12,000 members in the beginning of 2016 to, today, 300,000.

A surprising number of readers also didn’t understand the financial struggles plaguing print journalistic organizations of all sizes, Hanman and Michel said. By placing an appeal on the Panama Papers articles in April 2016, “we were really drawing that link between time and effort and skill we put into that investigation, working with these organizations around the world, and asking people if you value this please contribute toward this,” Natalie said.

The request at the foot of Guardian articles today:

“Our marketing colleagues…are used to using one line [pitches] to advertise membership,” with a focus on pithiness and wit, Hanman said. “The longer appeal resonates with people more. We need to explain to people why we are pursuing this approach. Even as journalists used to writing snappy headlines, we need to take a bit more time here.”

Aside from intricate investigations like the Panama and the more recent Paradise Papers revelations, the Guardian’s membership spiked following coverage on the environment, Brexit, and the U.K. election. Some members even double-dipped and made more donations as new reporting emerged.

“Quite a few readers had already supported the Guardian, and they wanted to give again,” Michel said. “A pretty significant percentage of them were educators. This was a way for them to ensure that the public could be well informed on a topic that they felt should be in the public domain.”

Members’ responses to topics validate time and attention spent by the editorial staff to the stories on that beat. The reader feedback creates a looped “work-and-learn approach” while also validating Guardian coverage, Michel said. But this work requires feeding the beast in a different way: “We want to keep growing our base but making sure the 800,000 supporters we have feel valued,” Hanman said. “If they want to have a close relationship with us, we develop it.”

Engagement with Guardian members includes a weekly newsletter to supporters, a weekly “behind the scenes” story production series, a Q&A with a columnist, and even a podcast based on supporters’ calls and questions. Hanman and Michel said the next goal is not based on reaching another metric milestone, but on delving further into reader relationships.

“The last year has really been a foundational year,” Michel said. “It’s about creating a network of colleagues across the Guardian to develop essentially a shared experience and expertise. Now that we have the foundation we can start becoming more creative.

“We’ve moved away from the traditional transactional model to a more emotional one that’s rooted in our journalism,” she added.

Image of the US Guardian membership certificate by Mona Chalabi used with permission of the Guardian.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/11/asking-members-to-support-its-journalism-no-prizes-no-swag-the-guardian-raises-more-reader-revenue-than-ad-dollars/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/10/how-medium-is-attracting-premium-publishers-to-its-partner-program-hint-money-up-front/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/10/how-medium-is-attracting-premium-publishers-to-its-partner-program-hint-money-up-front/#respond Fri, 27 Oct 2017 14:30:12 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=149423 Would you pay, online, for something that you already have access to free online?

Medium hopes that the answer is yes. Last month, the site started running, behind its $5/month paywall, “curated content” from a couple dozen publishers. Some (the Financial Times, The New York Times, The Economist) have paywalls of their own. Many others (The Atlantic, Forbes, New York) do not.

Publishers that either don’t have paywalls or have metered paywalls cite curation and an ad-free experience as a reason they agree to put some content behind Medium’s paywall (which is now also metered, allowing non-paying users to read 3 paid stories for free each month). “Even though the content may be free on our site, Medium is providing a level of curation to their subscribers that provides value-add,” said Camilla Cho, New York Media’s executive director of business development and strategy. “That merits a fee for certain types of subscribers.” So far, New York is putting longer-form content from the magazine, Vulture, and The Cut behind the paywall, “after discussing what kind of content Medium believed would resonate well with their subscribers.”

“We see this as an opportunity to engage prospective subscribers and lighter readers, and to get our brand and content in front of them more,” said Rebecca Grossman-Cohen, The New York Times’ VP of audience and platforms. The Times has one or two stories a day in the Medium paywall program; right now, Medium’s editors are choosing what Times content appears. “We’re interested to see what resonates with their readers over time,” Grossman-Cohen said. “So far, it seems to be pretty typical of any news audience these days, so — politics. But we also see strength in tech, culture, science. We’re interested in working with Medium’s editors more closely over time on their selections.”

In addition to curation and a nice reading experience, though, Medium’s news program partners get another benefit: money. Each deal is structured slightly differently depending on the publisher, how much content that publisher is putting in, and whether that content is paywalled on the publisher’s site, said Basil Enan, Medium’s vice president for content partnerships. But “at its core, our message to publishers is that this is an opportunity for them to create a new source of subscription revenue, off-platform.” For the most part, publishers get a flat fee per article on Medium “to guarantee that this is worth their time from day one.” (In the case of one publisher I spoke to, who is not quoted in this piece and who didn’t end up participating, the rate was $200 per piece.) This payment model is in contrast to the one that Medium is using for its regular partner program, which lets anyone put content behind a paywall: Those writers earn money based on how much people engage with (clap for) their posts.

If Enan’s name — or this model of content partnerships — looks familiar, it’s because he was previously cofounder and CEO of Discors, a news app startup we wrote about a couple times. Discors was initially a context-around-the-news play, but when it relaunched this spring, it looked a lot like what Medium’s doing: a $5/month subscription that gave you access to a limited selection of content from premium publishers, including The New York Times, the Financial Times, and The Economist. That version of Discors didn’t last very long, shutting down in June, but Enan joined Medium in July, and many of those Discors partners are now in Medium’s program.

The amount of content on Medium varies by publisher. The Financial Times posted 16 stories between October 1 and 24. In the same period, The New York Times had 23 stories; The Atlantic, 16; Fast Company, 16; Foreign Policy, 16; Forbes, 15; The Cut, 13; Popular Science, 12; Vulture, 12; Rolling Stone, 12; The Guardian, 11; Bloomberg, 10 (in just two days); MIT Technology Review, 7; Project Syndicate, 7; The Intercept, 6; The Economist, 5; Inc., 5; Billboard, 3; Boat Magazine, 3; CNN Opinion, 3; New York, 3; and The Hollywood Reporter, 1 .

“In many cases, you’d make more on a piece if we didn’t give you a guaranteed rate,” Enan said. “But, to get everybody set up, it was easier to say, okay, if you’re doing 100 pieces a month, here’s what that revenue will look like, and let’s just revisit that when we see how it’s performing. The membership as a whole really only started a few months before we started doing these deals with publishers, and the idea was really to guarantee them some visibility into what they’d make per month, in return for their investment of time and resources. Over time, we’ll shift them to actually prove out. We’re very close to being able to show them that it’s in their best interest to not take a guaranteed deal, and to instead publish in the same way as our writers are publishing in our partner program. There is the unlimited upside of what a publisher could make on an individual piece, versus having X hundred dollars per piece guaranteed up front.”

For now, publishers like the Times are basically getting free money for letting a Medium editor pick one of its pieces to post every weekday or so. Or, as Grossman-Cohen put it, “Medium has derisked it for us by providing financial value while creating opportunities for us to establish direct relationships with readers.” Each Times Medium story links back to a Times subscription offer (meanwhile, in Medium’s partner program for regular writers, soliciting subscriptions is not allowed), and the Times can also communicate directly with readers through Medium.

The publishers that I spoke to said it was too early to draw any conclusions about the platform. “So far, the results are showing decent ratios of exposure to engagement,” Grossman-Cohen said, stressing that the Times hadn’t entered the deal expecting volume.

“Every publisher has at least one person, if not a massive team of people, who are managing their social media accounts, and I think for many, at least historically, Medium hasn’t been a huge priority there,” Enan said. “I think we’re seeing that shift to: ‘Okay, my read numbers aren’t going to be huge. But there’s a huge revenue opportunity here.'” Especially as long as Medium just keeps paying them.

Photos of coins by J J used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/10/how-medium-is-attracting-premium-publishers-to-its-partner-program-hint-money-up-front/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/08/could-the-guardians-quest-for-philanthropic-support-squeeze-out-other-news-nonprofits/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/08/could-the-guardians-quest-for-philanthropic-support-squeeze-out-other-news-nonprofits/#respond Mon, 28 Aug 2017 17:11:36 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=147086 The Guardian, wounded by the downturn in the advertising market, is hoping that big donors can help pick up the slack.

On Monday, The Guardian formally announced the creation of theguardian.org, a U.S.-based philanthropic arm formed to raise money from individuals and organizations (including think tanks and corporate foundations) looking to fund journalism on particular issues. Since its quiet launch last year, the organization has raised $1 million from the likes of Pierre Omidyar’s Humanity United, the Skoll Foundation, and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation to fund reporting on topics including modern-day slavery and climate change. The Guardian says it’s secured $6 million “in multi-year funding commitments,” which it hopes will support coverage of topics that would go underreported otherwise.

Are we a few years away from every journalism organization setting up a nonprofit? https://t.co/6abYDoTCZg h/t @Cingib

— Caroline Preston (@cpreston) August 28, 2017

It’s only been three years since The Guardian, spurred by its blockbuster coverage of the Edward Snowden revelations and resulting Pulitzer Prize, embarked on a global push meant to raise its profile, particularly in the U.S. The reality has been far less rosy: The Guardian, which has been a perennial money loser, has instead been forced to slash its U.S. staff and embark on a set of cost-cutting measures that have put a damper on its growth plans.

There is, however, some good news on the paid membership front. In its earnings report in July, The Guardian said that membership sales and more than 190,000 one-off contributions helped increase its overall revenue by 2.4 percent to £214.5 million ($257 million) for the year ending April 2. Foundation grant revenue increased by 65 percent year-over-year, to £3.8 million, but is still a small part of the Guardian’s overall revenue.

The Guardian’s move comes just a month after Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective acquired a majority stake in The Atlantic. These moves could presage similar actions by other news organizations down the line. But there could also be downsides to the shift. Ruth McCambridge, editor of the Nonprofit Quarterly, has called the mixing of journalism and strategic philanthropy “scary.” Gizmodo Media Group CEO Raju Narisetti wondered if The Guardian, a publication still comparatively flush with cash from the Scott Trust, is really the most effective publication for donors to fund. What’s good for The Guardian could end up being not so good for smaller organizations competing for the same dollars.

Big foundations will want to fund big name-brand media (Non Profits) while small/local/regional media non-profits still struggle for funding https://t.co/yNd7YF1flv

— Raju Narisetti (@raju) August 28, 2017

Like them but so many better alternatives for donors: @guardian Sets Up a Nonprofit to Support Its US Journalism https://t.co/EEo4LFJ2K8

— Raju Narisetti (@raju) August 28, 2017

You're right. It's going to take from the little guys, while buying the big guys more time. The foundations, meantime, will love the attn. https://t.co/D30lujPTiF

— Kyle Pope (@kylepope) August 28, 2017

Looking for more coming down the pike – for-profit newspapers carving out nonprofits to fund reporting. Part of a new hybrid biz model https://t.co/DD2wxRcAdw

— Kyle Pope (@kylepope) August 28, 2017

When journalism literally becomes a charity case the fourth estate is under real threat. https://t.co/uhAOvQzL2u

— Neil Thackray (@neilthackray) August 28, 2017

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/08/could-the-guardians-quest-for-philanthropic-support-squeeze-out-other-news-nonprofits/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/08/conheca-o-projeto-do-guardian-para-expandir-seu-suporte-filantropico/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/08/conheca-o-projeto-do-guardian-para-expandir-seu-suporte-filantropico/#respond Mon, 28 Aug 2017 17:10:27 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=148294 Ferido pela desaceleração no mercado de publicidade, o Guardian espera que grandes doadores possam ajudar a aumentar o ritmo.

Na 2ª feira (28.ago.2017), o Guardian anunciou formalmente a criação do theguardian.org, um braço filantrópico com base nos EUA formado para arrecadar dinheiro de indivíduos e organizações que buscam financiar certos tópicos específicos do jornalismo (incluindo “think tanks” –instituição dedicada a produzir e difundir conhecimentos e estratégias sobre assuntos vitais– e fundações corporativas). Desde o seu silencioso lançamento no ano passado, a organização arrecadou US$ 1 milhão, decorrente das curtidas da Humanity United, de Pierre Omidyar, da Fundação Skoll, e da Fundação Conrad N. Hilton para financiar relatórios sobre temas como a escravidão nos dias atuais e mudanças climáticas. O Guardian disse que garantiu US$ 6 milhões “em comprometimento de financiamentos por vários anos”, o que se espera que apoie a cobertura de tópicos que não seriam reportados de outra maneira.

Are we a few years away from every journalism organization setting up a nonprofit? https://t.co/6abYDoTCZg h/t @Cingib

— Caroline Preston (@cpreston) August 28, 2017

Passaram-se apenas 3 anos desde que o Guardian, motivado por sua cobertura de sucesso das revelações de Edward Snowden e que resultou em um Pulitzer, embarcou em uma busca global para aumentar seu status, particularmente nos EUA. Mas a realidade tem sido menos cor-de-rosa: O Guardian, que tem sido um gastador de dinheiro perene, tem sido forçado a fazer demissões em sua equipe norte-americana e embarcar em uma série de cortes de gastos que prejudicaram seus planos de crescimento.

No entanto, há boas notícias na parte de assinaturas pagas. Em seu relatório de receita de julho, o Guardian disse que as vendas de assinaturas e mais de 190 mil contribuições únicas ajudaram a aumentar sua receita geral em 2,4%, para £ 214,5 milhões (US$ 257 milhões), para o ano fiscal terminando em 2 de abril. A receita decorrente de bolsas de financiamento aumentou 65% em relação ano ano anterior, para £ 3,8 milhões, mas ainda é uma pequena parte do retorno geral do jornal.

A ação do Guardian ocorre apenas um mês depois que o coletivo Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson adquiriu uma participação majoritária de The Atlantic. Esses movimentos poderiam ser um presságio para ações similares por parte de outros veículos de notícias. Mas também podem haver lados negativos na troca. Ruth McCambridge, editora do Nonprofit Quartely, disse que a mistura de jornalismo e estratégia filantrópica era “assustadora”. O CEO do Grupo Midiático Gizmodo, Raju Narisetti, perguntou-se se o Guardian, que é um veículo com 1 considerável fluxo de caixa do Scott Trust, é realmente a publicação mais efetiva para que doadores financiem. O que é bom para o Guardian pode acabar não sendo tão bom assim para veículos menores que competem pelo mesmo dólar.

Big foundations will want to fund big name-brand media (Non Profits) while small/local/regional media non-profits still struggle for funding https://t.co/yNd7YF1flv

— Raju Narisetti (@raju) August 28, 2017

Like them but so many better alternatives for donors: @guardian Sets Up a Nonprofit to Support Its US Journalism https://t.co/EEo4LFJ2K8

— Raju Narisetti (@raju) August 28, 2017

You're right. It's going to take from the little guys, while buying the big guys more time. The foundations, meantime, will love the attn. https://t.co/D30lujPTiF

— Kyle Pope (@kylepope) August 28, 2017

Looking for more coming down the pike – for-profit newspapers carving out nonprofits to fund reporting. Part of a new hybrid biz model https://t.co/DD2wxRcAdw

— Kyle Pope (@kylepope) August 28, 2017

When journalism literally becomes a charity case the fourth estate is under real threat. https://t.co/uhAOvQzL2u

— Neil Thackray (@neilthackray) August 28, 2017

The Portuguese version of this story was first published in Poder360. Translation by Renata Gomes.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/08/conheca-o-projeto-do-guardian-para-expandir-seu-suporte-filantropico/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/07/how-do-we-build-a-better-recommendation-experience-for-mobile-news-readers/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/07/how-do-we-build-a-better-recommendation-experience-for-mobile-news-readers/#comments Tue, 11 Jul 2017 16:07:13 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=144996 For subway commuters, it’s a common enough situation: you get on the train, pull out of the station and…ugh, you’re offline. On your phone: yesterday’s tweets, maybe a news app loaded up with old stories, a newsletter with links you can’t open.

Although many news apps now enable offline reading, they don’t ensure that the things we have access to offline are relevant to us as individual readers. I can get content offline from a news app on my morning train ride, but when I pull out of the station, I have no guarantee that what it will have served me will be relevant to my interests, in a format I like, or something I can reasonably read in the the time I have left in my commute.

At the Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab, we think there is space to push past what currently exists for offline reading, particularly where it intersects with the burgeoning area of content recommendations. To do this, we’ve looked at what exists for each type of experience and tried to identify the gaps and opportunities.

What’s out there now for offline news apps

There are a few ways to get news offline currently: through the apps offered by news organizations, and through other apps that provide a way to access previously stored links from across the internet.

So far there seem to be two models for how offline news reading is offered:

• The first: Download all the stories from a given news app at once, without preference given to what they are and how much time you have.
• Second: Have a separate app that holds all the stories you have collected to read from across the web.

Many major news apps, as a form of efficiency, download and cache some or all of the app’s stories when the app is connected to wifi or cell signal. While not specifically a feature intended with the goal of making offline reading easier, some nonetheless have this function. You get the full sense of what the news organization considers important that day, akin to what they put on their home screen, even if you only read a fraction of what you’ve downloaded.

The other method, popular through apps like Pocket or Evernote, is to have the user do the work upfront by saving, or “pocketing,” links from across the web as they see those that interest them, and then pulling them up for offline reading later. Creating the link collection is incumbent on the user, and doesn’t enable further discovery of the “Hey, you saw this, we think you might also be interested in this” variety. With apps like Pocket, what you saved is what you get.

One interesting product we saw was News.me, which unfortunately shut down in 2013. It contained an iOS app feature called Paper Boy, which incorporated elements of your commute into your reading experience. When a user left a location they had designated in the app as their home, a reading package, pulled from what that users’ contacts were reading on Twitter, would be downloaded to their phone.

We were fascinated with this product for the ways it made use of mobile location data and also sought to address the issue of timing: Paper Boy was attempting to send readers a package of information they wanted, before they remembered they would want it.

For now, it seems that what’s out there are good initial options for the most basic prompt: “I want to read offline.” But when the prompt is adapted to “I want to read news that is relevant to me while offline,” it’s clear that the available options fall short, and that without significant upfront investment of time (in the form of finding content yourself and saving it), there is no solid guarantee of having relevant content available for offline reading.

What’s the state of content recommendations right now

Right now, while some news organizations are working on content recommendations, standalone services that include recommendations are trying to do that work of surfacing similar or relevant content for users in a few ways, according to what can be known about them.

• First: Content recommendations can come from your social graph — your contacts and friends lists — which an app can ask for access to.
• Second: Some apps offer the option to subscribe to topics during onboarding, or to follow a topic or author within stories you are already reading, so they can send future content based on those categories.

Content recommendations might come from an app, such as Nuzzel, that asks for access to your contacts or friends list to show you things you might like to read based on what they’re reading. Or recommendations might come from allowing the user to create playlists of content, as on the podcast app Stitcher, then sending them content popular with users who selected similar content.

In another method, a user can follow a series or an author, and receive a notification the next time the person or series followed is published. This feature is available in The Guardian’s apps. Other news sites have been lightly experimenting with content recommendations for years: The New York Times’ “Recommended for You” section, available on desktop and mobile web, shows logged-in users a selection of articles they have not read. The Times has also announced a new initiative to surface relevant, personalized news to each user.

Content recommendations also factor into a growing conversation about developments in artificial intelligence and its potential role in the newsroom. The discussion has addressed how AI and machine learning can be used to, for example, automate financial market stories or make comment moderation more efficient, as this post by Erica Anderson, partnerships manager at Google News Lab, lays out. Another exciting potential use for AI: better content recommendations requiring less explicit upfront work from the user.

But what’s missing from these content recommendation methods now is that they don’t live up to the promise of giving readers content clearly keyed to their interests. A product based largely on a user’s manual preferences as they have indicated them is interesting, but limited. What if the user could access a set of recommendations, each of which would be relevant, through doing nothing more than simply consuming news as they would normally, allowing a recommendation engine to begin to “learn” more about the user?

While using my social graph provides a good look at the types of topics my network is interested in, it can fail to understand the nuances of my personal interests. For example, the fact that I follow friends who tweet about sports doesn’t give my preferred news organization any signal that, while I enjoy basketball stories, I don’t enjoy baseball in quite the same way. My reading history — lots of more basketball stories versus few baseball stories — might provide just that level of information. Similarly, while the ability to receive stories based on playlists I have custom created will ideally give me additional selections that reflect my interests, the results won’t appear without a significant initial investment in setting up my preferences.

Further, elements that news organizations could actively track and recommended against could help produce a better selection. Yahoo News Digest, another recently shuttered product that offered a package of stories (the content was not personalized), asked a user when they want to receive the briefing. Instead of asking “When do you want this,” what if Yahoo asked, “When do you want this and how much time do you have to read it?” Reading time then becomes another element of the recommendation. Using various signals from their mobile phone, we might be able to gauge how much content a user would prefer and add that to what we know about them.

We think there’s space for innovation here, especially when applied to a specific use case

The integration of content recommendations and offline reading would be particularly useful when you think about the original use case of commuting. While they do a good job of keeping content you’ve bookmarked in one place, none of the most popular offline reading apps, like Pocket or Newsify, have created a flexible, optimal offline news-reading package for individual users, nor do they include elements of personalization gained from the variety of signals from people’s mobile devices.

And on mobile, the benefits of this merger become even more clear. By integrating elements of personalization, gleaned from a user’s reading history, as well as location, and timing the delivery to when they might need the offline package ready, we think there’s an opportunity to make offline reading more lively, relevant, accessible, and transparent to users, as well as a more complete experience.

What we’re thinking about now

We’re in the midst of building an experimental product that explores some these opportunities, and are now thinking a lot about how we will measure engagement. For this product to be successful, we need to understand the correct signals that tell us which types of articles a user would like to see more of.

In addition, we’re also looking at the problems that have plagued personalized products before: How do we get users to sign in, and how can we best be transparent about what data we are gathering? How do we give people personalized content without also making them feel they might be missing out on other news? What can we do to put users in control of what they are seeing without feeling overburdened by the need to constantly maintain their settings?

We’ll have more news about this experiment and a way for you to sign up soon.

Madeline Welsh, a former Google News Lab Fellow at Nieman Lab, is associate editor of the Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab. This piece originally ran on Medium.

Photo of a Buenos Aires subway by Hernán Piñera used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/07/how-do-we-build-a-better-recommendation-experience-for-mobile-news-readers/feed/ 3 https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/06/class-is-still-a-taboo-topic-in-the-u-s-the-guardians-ambitious-new-rural-reporting-projects-are-tackling-it/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/06/class-is-still-a-taboo-topic-in-the-u-s-the-guardians-ambitious-new-rural-reporting-projects-are-tackling-it/#respond Mon, 26 Jun 2017 12:00:13 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=144088 These things are facts: As local newspapers die out, most American journalism jobs left are increasingly concentrated on the coasts, where major publications are headquartered. Internet publishing jobs, in particular, are largely the province of coastal elites. And if you live in a rural area, you are probably not reading many articles by journalists with the same background as you.

“I don’t want us to appear condescending — ever — toward journalists across the country,” said Jessica Reed, The Guardian’s U.S. features editor. “Copublishing and collaborating with local newsrooms across the country is one way not to take them for granted — one way to do things right, basically.”

Reed is leading an ambitious new Guardian project: Inequality and Opportunity in America. The series, which is being funded through the end of the summer by the Rockefeller Foundation (as part of a larger $150,000 grant), has three components. The Guardian is collaborating with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project (a journalism nonprofit founded in 2012 by Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of the bestselling Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America), to publish writers from rural areas across the U.S. in collaborations with local newsrooms; this part of the project also includes the development of a database of editors across the country who’d be interested in partnering. The Guardian has hired its first Rust Belt correspondent, Drew Philp. And a new column, Outclassed — written by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project’s executive editor Alissa Quart and neuroscientist Maia Szalavitz — takes on that topic that Americans are uncomfortable talking about: class.

“Parts of the country resent us so-called media elites not just for economic reasons, but because they feel we dominate the discourse, dominate who gets a share not only of the financial spoils but the national narrative,” said Quart, a former Nieman Fellow. “This is another way to try to break that down. We want to support people who actually live in these places reporting on their own states, about inequality, and then we want to bring them to traditional elite audiences.”

In all of the coverage of the aftermath of Trump’s election, “working class” is often synonymous with “white working class.” It’s a trap that Reed is trying very hard to avoid. “I was recently reading about how there are three million female cashiers in the U.S. — a lot of them non-white,” she said. “An awful lot of their jobs are threatened by automation. A lot of those women can’t make ends meet, and they’re caught in the two-or-three gigs economy. As for miners, a group we are reading about a lot since they are being used rightly or wrongly as shorthand for ‘Trump voters’ [most Trump voters were not working class] well…there are 80,000 of them by contrast. This really brings home, to me, how journalists who want to cover class should do it with a sense of scale.”

The Guardian’s coverage does include stories about miners and by rural white journalists like the fifth-generation Kansan Sarah Smarsh, who grew up poor on a farm. (“I find the ‘rural v urban’ narrative as misleading as ‘red v blue,'” she wrote for a piece in The Guardian in April.) It’s also covered black cannabis entrepreneurs and Vietnamese nail artists in the South. Some upcoming stories will focus on inequality between rural and urban Native American tribes.

Part of the database project includes outreach to black-owned Southern newspapers, and Quart is seeking more of these papers as copublishing partners. “These papers have also been struggling, and their fortunes have not been examined as much as a lot of the local, usually quite conservative papers in the Midwest,” Quart said. (While all of media is struggling, “the pressure on black-owned media has been even more acute,” The New York Times noted last year.)

“Our coverage of class should not and will not be solely about white workers,” Reed said. “It’s something I always have in the back of my mind.”

Discussion of inequality is “my bread and butter as a Guardian journalist,” Reed said. “The Guardian in the U.K., people I was working with in Australia — that’s all we do, basically, we write about inequality a lot! You can write about inequality as an American journalist — journalists in this country are really good at talking about the notion of privilege when it comes to race, when it comes to being disabled, and so on, but I don’t often see the word ‘class’ associated with the notion of privilege in articles. It’s something I’m interested in exploring, and it’s what Alissa is doing in her column.” (Recent columns covered the ways in which air rage is linked to visible class status and the differences between the cultural elite and the corporate elite.)

At Quart’s urging, Reed described her own economic background. “I’m immensely privileged in that I’m a white able-bodied woman working in journalism,” she began. “But I’m also very lucky to be a journalist. I’m from a very low-income background. I was so lucky to be studying in France, so I had a scholarship and zero student debt. But the flip side of it is that I have to pay for my mother’s apartment, because she has such a low income. I still have a little bit of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to class issues — which is probably why I work at The Guardian — but that simply means I identify personally, I guess, with a lot of the coverage we’re doing.”

One of the key things that the Rockefeller funding helps The Guardian do is pay these rural freelance writers, with some funding also coming from EHRP (which is itself funded by Open Society Foundations and JPB Foundation, among others). Writers are being paid by the word — “a very decent amount,” Quart said — and expenses are covered. “You have to walk the walk,” Reed said. “If you’re talking about hiring people who are struggling to make ends meet, as is sometimes the case, you need to pay them well.”

Reed is hoping to find ways to extend it — and that’s one reason why she hopes that editors across the country will be in touch about collaborations and co-publishing. “I don’t want this to be a fad,” she said. “I want this way of commissioning to be the way my desk is going to commission pieces most of the time.”

Feature illustration by Rosie Roberts used with The Guardian’s permission.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/06/class-is-still-a-taboo-topic-in-the-u-s-the-guardians-ambitious-new-rural-reporting-projects-are-tackling-it/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/05/facebook-will-let-publishers-convert-instant-articles-to-google-amp-and-apple-news-formats/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/05/facebook-will-let-publishers-convert-instant-articles-to-google-amp-and-apple-news-formats/#comments Thu, 25 May 2017 16:08:00 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=142679 Facebook said Thursday that it’s making it easier for publishers to export stories formatted for Instant Articles to Google’s AMP and Apple News as well. The announcement comes as Facebook continues to try to woo publishers to the Instant Articles format; many have cooled on it, citing business pressures and technical restraints.

Facebook’s software development kit now lets publishers export stories to the AMP format, Facebook partner engineering director Piyush Mangalick wrote in Facebook’s announcement. Support for Apple News will “be available in the coming weeks.”

“The updated SDK transforms the markup publishers use to create Instant Articles to generate the code needed to build these other formats, removing what we’ve heard can be a resource-heavy step in publishing on multiple platforms,” Mangalick wrote. “With an easy way to get from one markup format to another, publishers can then plug-and-play the markup in their content management systems or third party publishing tools.”

Lots of hype surrounded Facebook’s 2015 release of Instant Articles. The format launched with nine partners, including The New York Times and The Guardian. But the format seems to have fallen out of favor as outlets struggled to monetize stories there and also as Facebook itself began to prioritize video.

The Guardian and the Times are just two of the many publishers that have since pulled out of the Instant Articles program. The Times reportedly left Instant Articles last fall after it found that links to stories on the Times’ own site were better to monetize and made readers more likely to subscribe.

The Guardian pulled out of both Instant Articles and Apple News. A Guardian spokesperson told Digiday:

Our primary objective is to bring audiences to the trusted environment of the Guardian to support building deeper relationships with our readers, and growing membership and contributions to fund our world-class journalism.

The Verge reported last month that publishers’ business models were “an afterthought” for Facebook as it developed the Instant Articles format:

Though the format would have important financial consequences for the companies who used it, generating revenue for publishers was not a primary goal in its development. “The team is legitimately motivated by making great articles,” [Instant Articles designer Mike] Matas told me in 2015. One former employee familiar with the matter said media companies’ business models had initially been all but an afterthought. “The idea that these products could meaningfully impact the revenue of the news industry just didn’t really come up,” the former employee said. “I don’t know that anyone [at Facebook] took that piece all that seriously.”

Facebook now says it is taking news organizations’ concerns seriously. This update to the SDK came as a result of “meaningful conversations with publishers as part of the Facebook Journalism Project to better serve the needs of news publishers and readers on Facebook,” Mangalick wrote.

Facing scrutiny for its role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook launched the Facebook Journalism Project in January to try to improve its relationship with news outlets. In April, Facebook added two new features to Instant Articles — allowing readers to sign up for emails from publishers and also like their Facebook pages — that were inspired by feedback from the project.

News outlets still rely on Facebook. On Wednesday, Reuters reported that Facebook is working with BuzzFeed, Vox, and other publishers to produce original video content that will include ad breaks.

For their part, Google and Apple are also looking for ways to leverage their news platforms. Google has made AMP stories show up more prominently in search results.

Apple, with its latest iteration of iOS, enabled push notifications in Apple News. And Apple News has hired New York magazine executive editor Lauren Kern for the newly created position of editor-in-chief, Politico reported Thursday.

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