Ranges have to include a minimum and maximum — employers can’t say something like “$15/hour and up.” So some — cough, New York Post, cough — are finding wiggle room with useless ranges like “$15/hour to $125,000.” Some CNN positions included pay ranges of nearly $100,000.

We went searching through the job boards to find what media companies, both those based in New York City and those that have offices or some positions there, are paying — and whether they’re adhering to the, um, spirit of the law. (By the way, is it fair to expect companies to be complying already? Yes, they’ve had months to prepare and the rule was already delayed once.)

This list is up-to-date as of Friday, November 4 at 11:00 AM.

ABC

Examples:

• Producer (consumer investigative) – GMA, ABC News: $99,400–$136,730
• Digital editor, hard news – ABC News: $75,200–$103,400

AP

New York City–based jobs did not include salary information as of Friday, November 4 at 11:00 AM.

The Atlantic

The Atlantic appears to be providing salary ranges for all positions, including those with the option of working remote. Examples:

• Senior photo editor: “Salary Minimum: $100,000, Salary Maximum: $120,000.”
• Staff writer, The Daily: “Salary Minimum: $60,000, Salary Maximum: $70,000.”
• Product manager: “Salary Minimum: $60,000, Salary Maximum: $130,000.”

Axios

Axios is providing salary ranges for jobs listed under its “NYC Office,” even if they are remote. Salary information is not given for jobs based out of other offices. Examples:

• Associated director, integrated marketing: “On target earnings for this role is in the range of $90,000-$110,000 and is dependent on numerous factors, including but not limited to location, work experience, and skills.”
• Senior software engineer (backend): “Base salary ranges for this role are listed below and are dependent on numerous factors, including but not limited to location, work experience, and skills. This range does not include other compensation benefits.
  L6: $160k – $210k
  L5: $160k – $200k
  L4: $130k – $190k”

Bloomberg

Examples:

• Newsletter producer (contract): “35 – 45 USD Hourly”
• News automation content engineer: $105,000–160,000
• Senior video producer: $110,000–$115,000

Bustle Digital Group

Examples:

• Deputy features director: $85,000–$105,000
• Writer and director, branded video: $72,500–$78,000
• Entertainment editor, Nylon: $63,500–$70,000

BuzzFeed

• News editor, BuzzFeed News: “Salary band: $72,500-$87,000”
• Business analyst, BuzzFeed News: “Salary band: $73,000-$82,000”
• Features editor, Complex: $83,000–$100,000

CBS News

Examples:

• Editor: $110,000-$120,000
• Senior editor, CBSNews.com: $100,000–$109,000

CNN

Examples:

• Producer, Snapchat, CNN Digital Video: “In compliance with local law, we are disclosing the compensation, or a range thereof, for roles that will be performed in New York City. Actual salaries will vary and may be above or below the range based on various factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of Warner Bros. Discovery’s total compensation package for employees. Pay Range: $85,540.00 – $158,860.00 salary per year.”
• Senior section editor, social: “In compliance with local law, we are disclosing the compensation, or a range thereof, for roles that will be performed in New York City. Actual salaries will vary and may be above or below the range based on various factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of Warner Bros. Discovery’s total compensation package for employees. Pay Range: $113,890.00 – $211,510.00 salary per year.”

Chalkbeat

Example:

• People operations assistant: $50,000–$60,000

The City

Examples:

• Investigations editor: $140,000–$150,000
• Associate director of development, individual giving: $110,000–$120,000

Condé Nast

Examples:

• Executive director, brand marketing, Vanity Fair: $145,000–$180,000
• SEO writer and producer, Glamour: $60,000–$78,000
• Executive editor, news, Wired: $170,000–$225,000

The Daily Beast

Example:

• Entertainment critic: $90,000–$100,000

FT

Examples:

• Associate editor: $95,000–$110,000
• Reporter, FundFire: $65,000–$72,000

Dotdash Meredith

Examples:

• Methodology writer, beauty: “This is a contract role at 40 hours per week and would be hybrid. The rate for this position is $27/hour.”
• General manager, Verywell Health: $146,000–$219,000

First Look Media

Examples:

• Designer: “Compensation (NYC Only): Full Time salary range between 65K – 75K”
• Senior analyst, Topic streaming service: “Compensation (NYC Only): Full Time salary range between 90K – 100K”

Forbes

Forbes appears to be posting salary ranges for all jobs. Examples:

• Senior editor, newsletters: “The annual base salary range for this role is: $115,000 – $140,000.”
• Breaking news politics reporter: “This is a contract position with potential for full time employment…Hourly Rate Range: $28.85 – $28.85.”

Fortune

Example:

• VP, newsletters: $175,000–$200,000.

G/O Media

Examples:

• Staff writer, Quartz: “This is a position covered under the collective bargaining agreement with the WGA-East which establishes the minimum salary for this position at $62,000. This position is set at a range of $62,000 to $68,000.”
• Editorial director, New York, NY: “The salary for this position ranges from $300,000.00 to $350,000.00.”

The Guardian

Examples:

• Deputy editor, race and equity: $180,000–$190,000
• Reporter, fossil fuels and climate: $88,000–$100,000

The Information

New York City–based jobs did not include salary information as of Friday, November 4 at 11:00 AM.

Insider Inc.

Examples:

• Business features editor: $150,000–$220,000
• Politics correspondent: $100,000–$140,000

NBC

Examples:

• Reporter, Select: $75,000–$125,000
• Updates editor, Select: $75,000–$90,000

New York Post

• Decider digital project manager: “$50,000–$145,000”
• SEO manager: $50,000- $145,000
• Deputy photo editor, Sunday (Tues–Sat): “$50,000- $145,000”
• Sports digital reporter/producer: “$15/hour – $125,000”
• Tech reporter: “$50,000- $145,000”
• Politics reporter: “$15/hour – $125,000”

New York Times

The Times is providing base pay salary ranges, including for jobs that can be done remotely. Examples:

• Senior designer: $76,500–$105,000
• Reporting fellowship: $76,168.04
• Legal affairs correspondent in Washington, D.C.: $115,506.56–$170,000.00
• Director, story and audience analytics: $152,000–$185,000.00
• Senior art director, games: $140,000–$165,000
• Supervising editor, style, Wirecutter, in New York, NY or remote: $92,650–$109,000

Penske Media Corporation

Examples:

• Associate director, paid social: $100,000–$110,000
• Vibe music editor: $75,000–$85,000
• Rolling Stone photo coordinator: $52,000–$62,000

Puck

New York City–based jobs did not include salary information as of Friday, Nov. 4 at 11:00 AM ET.

Reuters

Examples:

• Product manager – video: $122,500–$227,500
• Reader revenue analytics: $60,200–$111,800

Slate

Examples:

• News editor: “The annual base pay range for this job is between $82,000 and $100,000.”
• Podcast host – ICYMI: “The annual base pay range for this job is between $100,000 and $115,000.”

Substack

New York City–based jobs did not include salary information as of Friday, Nov. 4 at 11:00 AM ET.

Time

Examples:

• Manager of product design: $85,000–$125,000
• Newsletter operations manager: $75,000–$105,000

Vice

Examples:

• Editor, shopping and reviews: “New York/California: 64,000 – 75,000 USD. Outside New York/California: 54,000 – 64,000 USD”
• Associate writer, affiliate: “New York/California: 55,000 – 60,000 USD”
• VP, audio: “New York/California: 190,000 – 230,000 USD”

Vox Media

Vox is providing salary ranges for all positions, including for jobs that can be done remotely. Examples:

• NowThis director of analytics: “The minimum and maximum salary for this position is $125,000.”
• Cities manager, Eater (temporary while manager is on maternity leave): “The annual base pay range for this job is $77,000 to $108,000.”

Wall Street Journal

Examples:

• Executive producer, news podcasts: $50,000 to $180,000
• Audio reporter, The Journal podcast: $40,000 to $160,000
• Reporter, careers and workplace: $50,000 to $180,000

Washington Post

Examples:

• Sales sector director: $200,500–$334,100
• Graphic designer: $59,167.16–$125,600

WNYC

Examples:

• Major gifts officer: $82,000-$100,000.
• Housing reporter, WNYC/Gothamist: $84,413-$86,000.

Before the passage of SB1421, California had some of the strictest laws in the United States to shield police officers’ privacy, according to Capital Public Radio, and police misconduct records were deemed “off-limits”.

Six news outlets — Bay Area News Group, Capital Public Radio, the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley, KPCC/LAist, KQED, and the Los Angeles Times — got together to request those documents, forming the California Reporting Project. Now, 40 news outlets are part of the initiative.

They sent public records requests to more than 700 agencies across the state, from police departments and sheriffs’ offices to prisons, schools, and welfare agencies that have police presence on site. if you’ve ever submitted a records request to a government agency, you know it’s not easy or straightforward to extract information from documents, if you can even get them at all.

But to sort through the more than 100,000 records they’ve gotten back since 2018, Lisa Pickoff-White, KQED’s only data reporter and the data lead on the California Reporting Project, enlisted the help of data science students from UC Berkeley to help organize the data.

The Data Science Discovery Program was founded in 2015 and is part of Berkeley’s Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society. Every semester, the program pairs around 200 students with companies and organizations that have data science–related projects they need help completing. Students spend six to 12 hours a week working on their assignments, for which they receive course credit.

The students have worked with media companies on editorial and operational projects, including the San Francisco Chronicle’s air quality map and the Wall Street Journal’s effort to analyze its source and topic diversity using natural processing language. When newsrooms, especially local ones, are strapped for engineering resources, the Berkeley students fill a gap to help journalists complete more ambitious projects.

“It’s a really natural fit. [We want] students to get a deep understanding of the context of the data analysis that they’re doing, and to consider human context and the implications of the insights and conclusions they’re making,” Data Science Discovery program manager Arlo Malmberg said. “All the things we emphasize in the data science program are at the core of what journalists do as well, in bringing forward the context of a problem in a story for readers, and in providing analysis of the causes of those issues.”

Pickoff-White co-selected four students to work with the California Reporting Project to build a police misconduct database from the records received. They all had particular interests in policing because of various connections in their personal lives. Usually in their data science courses, she said, they work individually on assignments and applications, but they were excited to work as a team on something tangible.

“The purpose of the project really resonated with me,” Pruthvi Innamuri, a sophomore computer science major who worked on the project, said. “During 2020, with a lot of police misconduct happening, I noticed a lot of communities feeling severely hurt and oppressed. I wanted to be able to use my computer science background to work on a project that’s able to better inform people in some way regarding this issue.”

Innamuri and his classmates built programs to recognize basic information from the police records, like names, locations, and case numbers. That made it easier to group files together and organize data for the journalists to analyze.

Some of the stories that have come out of the data from the records include a Mercury News story about how Richmond has more police dog bites than other cities and how Bakersfield police officers broke 45 bones in 31 people in the span of four years. The database isn’t complete yet and the students’ work helps make future data collection easier.

“I don’t know if we’d be able to do this without them,” Pickoff-White said. “None of these newsrooms would be able to automate this work on their own.”

Based on a full-text analysis of 763,887 Wall Street Journal articles published from 1984 to 2017, the authors find that news coverage of particular topics, like signs of a looming recession, predicts 25% of average fluctuations in stock market returns.

The data represent “among the most extensive text corpora of business news studied in the economics literature to date,” the authors write, adding that their approach is “motivated by the view that news text is a mirror of the state of the economy.”

Stock markets operate like any other market. Prices are determined by supply and demand. For individual companies, large price swings can happen for intuitive, obvious reasons. If company executives are caught in a scandal, investors devalue that company’s stock and sell it off. When demand drops, so does price.

But, outside of major news affecting an individual company or even an entire industry, “trying to understand what’s going on in the economy at any given time is a really central problem for our field, and having good measurements of that is really valuable,” says Yale University doctoral student Leland Bybee, one of the paper’s authors along with professors Bryan Kelly at Yale, Asaf Manela at Washington University in St. Louis and Dacheng Xiu at the University of Chicago.

Imagine being asked to predict overall S&P 500 gains and losses over time. Your only information to make those guesses comes from Wall Street Journal articles. Also, you are a computer, so you can read decades of news stories in seconds.

Editors and reporters at news outlets often decide what topics to cover based on the interests of their core readers. Many of the Journal’s core readers are investors or people generally interested in economic affairs. Founded in 1889, the Journal is regarded as a major paper of record for national financial news.

Journal reporters also have sources — economists, analysts, business owners, workers — who provide on-the-ground, real-time insights on what’s happening in the U.S. economy. In short, reporters have access to information their readers want to know.

That information is conveyed through written news.

The authors organized the Journal articles by topic, then predicted what aggregate S&P 500 returns would look like based on those topics the Journal was covering. Coverage of economic events that might affect market returns, like recessions, fluctuate over time. When the economy is doing well, fewer stories use the word “recession.” An uptick in recession-related stories would, for example, lead their model to predict lower overall S&P 500 returns.

Each day, the 505 publicly traded firms that make up the S&P index gain or lose value, or stay roughly the same. For their 23-year sample of news articles, the authors compared their predictions of monthly S&P 500 returns with actual S&P monthly returns. Across all months in their sample, predictions based on the Journal articles amount to one-quarter of the actual returns, on average.

That makes Journal coverage a stronger indicator and potential short-term predictor of market performance than even certain federal macroeconomic data, according to the authors.

Simply put, “a big part of why the market goes up or down is captured by things being discussed in the Wall Street Journal,” Bybee says. He adds that the quality of the paper’s results is directly related to the quality of the journalism underlying the data.

“In order to get this really good measure of the state of the economy, it needs to be the case that journalists find the information that matters,” he says.

The authors identified 180 topic areas across the Journal articles, excluding non-economics topics, like sports, leisure, and the arts. This particular number of topics seemed to hit the right note. Consider the topic of executive pay. The authors found an analytical model with only 50 topics captured articles unrelated to executive pay, such as the drop in flights after terrorist events. The model with 180 topics, “achieves a successful separation of distinct subjects,” they write.

The topics reveal patterns of news judgment decisions by Journal editors and reporters. Recession and health insurance are intensely covered during certain periods, and covered relatively rarely during other periods. Stories about health insurance, for example, peaked around President Bill Clinton’s September 1993 speech to Congress on overhauling the nation’s health care system. Health insurance news coverage also spiked around the Affordable Care Act debate from 2008 to 2010, and Republican rhetoric about repealing Obamacare during the 2016 presidential race.

The “elections” topic, by contrast, shows a regular, seasonal pattern, with coverage ramping up and spiking during presidential races. Likewise, stories on “earnings forecasts” jump prior to company earnings announcements and conference calls with analysts, which happen more or less regularly, roughly every three months.

News attention is also a strong predictor of other important macroeconomic measures, the authors find. The Journal publishing more or fewer stories about a recession, for example, strongly predicts industrial production and employment outcomes, “more so than pretty much any other quantitative measure out there,” Bybee says. Same for stories about global oil markets, though those are not as strong a predictor of production and employment as recession-related articles. Increases in stories related to small businesses are linked to less overall market volatility.

The dataset the authors created based on Journal article text is the most comprehensive of its kind. If a body of data explains a portion of stock market volatility, that data could be used to predict future volatility. “The maturity of a science is often gauged by its success in predicting important phenomena,” UCLA applied finance professor emeritus Richard Roll wrote in a 1988 paper, titled “R²,” in The Journal of Finance.

Roll wrote that paper when computational power was a fraction of what it is today and the concept of accessing information on the internet was nonexistent for most people. Still, he tracked mentions of 96 large firms in Journal articles and the Dow Jones news wire from 1982 to 1986. Roll looked at dates those firms weren’t mentioned in the news and added that data to a larger predictive model incorporating firm size, industry and other factors. The news — or lack of it — didn’t help explain market volatility in Roll’s model.

Manela, one of the current paper’s authors, co-wrote a paper in 2017 based on a text analysis of Journal news over a longer period, from 1889 to 2009. Those authors found that news about economic volatility, “predicts high future returns in normal times and rises just before transitions into economic disasters.” But, that database incorporated only abstracts of front-page articles.

“This is one of the first attempts to really quantify the data in the way that we’ve done,” Bybee says. A real-time model incorporating past and current Journal articles, as well as stories from other financial news outlets, TV, radio, social media and alternative news “would be the Holy Grail,” he adds.

The tension between the two is longstanding but the dispute became unprecedentedly public in 2020. Nearly 300 news staffers criticized their editorial counterparts’ “lack of fact-checking and transparency” in a note to the publisher. They pointed, in particular, to an op-ed by Vice President Mike Pence (“There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave'” in June), cherry-picked statistics and “misinformation” in  “The Myth of Systemic Racism,” and “basic factual inaccuracies about taxes” in “Congress Is Coming for Your IRA,” among other examples. The opinion section responded publicly, in “a note to readers,” claiming the newsroom’s frustration was an example of “progressive cancel culture.” The public back-and-forth was described as part of an “ongoing civil war” playing out at multiple news organizations controlled — as The Wall Street Journal is — by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

It was more than bickering. The news staffers said the opinion department’s “apparent disregard for evidence undermine[s] our readers’ trust and our ability to gain credibility with sources” and noted false and misleading claims have risked the safety of journalists at home and abroad. The news staffers’ very first proposal? Making the differences “between reporting and Opinion” at The Wall Journal unmistakably clear, especially to those reading the Journal online.

Enter: The Wall Street Journal News Literacy Initiative. The campaign — produced in partnership with the nonprofit News Literacy Project — puts the words of editor in chief Matthew Murray and editorial page editor Paul A. Gigot side by side and highlights how the Journal labels news and opinion pieces online. (That goldish brown appears to be the opinion color; The Washington Post has adopted a similar hue to label its editorial pieces, too.)

By underlining the bright line between its news and opinion sections, the Journal is seeking to protect one of its most valuable assets: its position as one of the few news sources both sides of the aisle tend to agree on. Pew found last year that the Journal is one of just three news organization trusted more than distrusted by both Republicans and Democrats; the other two are PBS and the BBC.

Suzi Watford, the chief marketing officer at The Wall Street Journal, said the campaign is also a reflection of the fact that the Journal’s business is “increasingly digital.” Of 3.22 million subscriptions — up 19% from 2019 — 2.46 million are digital-only, according to quarterly results released last week. (Watford said the news organization saw new subscribers and a surge of engagement from existing readers amid the market madness of GameStop. “It’s Journal gold, isn’t it?”)

The difference between news and opinion is fairly apparent in print — you’re holding one section or the other — but Watford says their reader research indicates that new readers may be less likely to appreciate the difference.

“We’re very conscious of those new audiences and wanting to make sure they understand what makes the Wall Street Journal and what the differences between news and opinion are — and more generally, why you can trust our news so much,” Watford said.

Watford said they’ll continue to test new ways of displaying — and differentiating — opinion content, particularly for readers “coming in sideways” via links on social media. They’re thinking about giving areas, such as ethical standards, their own microsite in the future.

“You’re not necessarily coming to the homepage where everything is clearly delineated in terms of sections,” Watford pointed out. “That’s always been there and it was very much translated through print. We’ll continue to test, get feedback, and improve upon that.”

We tend to reach for our smartphones or another Google-enabled device now, of course, but that impulse to marshal evidence as we discuss and debate with our loved ones lives on. And it’s one of the reasons The Wall Street Journal designed and debuted Talk2020, an experimental tool that allows readers to search a database of thousands of transcripts to see what the presidential candidates have said about an issue.

Through extensive focus groups conducted last summer, the Journal found that readers wanted to be able to quickly locate quotes and facts about a candidate’s record — and not just for their own edification.

“One of the things we know about our audience is they’re frequently working to get support for points that they would like to make to folks in their lives,” senior program manager Tania Feliz said. “This tool allows them to find specific information and to share it.”

Users can filter by issue, date, candidate, or keyword. A coworker who cares deeply about Palestine? A father-in-law who heard that Biden was going to ban fracking? A friend who wants to know if Trump really said he wanted to slow down coronavirus testing? (“See?!”)

The transcripts are pulled from campaign speeches, media appearances, debates, and more. (The Journal added Kamala Harris and Mike Pence to the list after their debate made it clear just how much interest there was in the candidates vying to be one heartbeat away from the presidency.)

We’ve now added Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, to our #WSJTalk2020 tool. Search what they’ve said on coronavirus, health care, the economy, social issues and more https://t.co/X5DaZPBf15

— Becky Bowers (@beckybowers) October 7, 2020

Becky Bowers, a D.C.-based strategy editor for the Journal, explained that Talk2020 began as an internal tool used by reporters and editors who work in the Washington bureau. With Dow Jones’s Factiva as a backbone, Talk2020 began as a searchable database of President Trump’s speeches custom-built for D.C. correspondents — one that they’ve been using to frame and inform their own journalism since 2019.

Feliz, along with product director Tyler Chance, helped transform the internal tool into a product useful for readers. “We had the data. What we didn’t have was the product,” Bowers said. “How can we take what we have and reframe it in a way that meets audience needs, looking at their habits and need to break through the noise?”

Chance emphasized that Talk2020 users seemed to appreciate getting the “raw materials” and “primary documents” from a trusted news source. He said that, in particular, readers liked to “catch up” on what was said during debates — even if they had tuned out for the actual broadcast.

The Journal identified that “catch up” need before. In March, the Journal’s chief news strategist and chief product and technology officer Louise Story explained it was behind one of the tools designed for political coverage and elections that got repurposed for pandemic coverage. (Bloomberg Media has since implemented a similar feature for mobile web users — called “All Caught Up” — that allows readers to swipe through article summaries to quickly catch up on major news stories. Bloomberg’s version uses artificial intelligence technology, rather than the Journal’s editors, to select and summarize the news.)

Launched as a prominent homepage feature, Story said the early response to the Journal’s “catch up module” indicated that the users visiting wsj.com directly were not the “main audience” looking for new summaries; instead, they were the ones more likely to be reading all — or, at least, many — full articles.

No matter, said Story. (A wonderful aptronym for a journalist, no?) She says the Wall Street Journal is confident in their user research and plans to retool the way they deliver the catch-up module to find the right segment of their audience.

The project is overseen by Dory Carr-Harris, the Journal’s Young Audiences editor (a new position as of the end of April) and Louise Story, the paper’s news strategist and CTO. It has a team of six reporters, many of whom joined the Journal in the past year — Deborah Acosta, Tyler Blint-Welsh, Alvin Chang, Alex Janin, J.J. McCorvey, and Allison Pohle. All of them were introduced on Noted’s Instagram account this week. Here, for instance, is a post introducing Blint-Welsh:

What Noted is not is a separate, cheaper Wall Street Journal gateway product (RIP, NYT Now). Noted is behind the Journal’s dynamic paywall, which offers non-subscribed visitors access to a certain number of free stories based on their propensity to subscribe. It’s included with a Wall Street Journal subscription, of course; Story also pointed out that more than 200 colleges and universities offer site licenses to all of the Journal’s products, thus including Noted. Each monthly issue will have a “cover story that is free to anyone.” A number of Noted stories will also pull out highlights and different parts of other Journal stories, and those stories will also be free. But it’s not some kind of “WSJ Junior” gateway product. “We’re not trying to migrate people,” Story said. “We’re not trying, over time, to move people from one product to another product. It’s all in our same product.”

In addition to those core reporters, Noted will use some freelance contributors, as well as other Journal reporters. But one of its main sources for feedback and story ideas will be Noted Advisers a group of more than 7,000 young readers who will be invited to preview content, give feedback, and join Q&As with Noted staff. The main community group will be hosted on LinkedIn. Over the last week, many of the Advisers announced their participation in the program in coordinated posts on Twitter and LinkedIn.

congrats Annie!! i’m an adviser too, and so excited to work with you!

— madison (@_mvett) June 29, 2020

YOU ARE AMAZING

— elissa (@elissatreu) June 26, 2020

Congratulations

— Marisel Salazar (@MariselSalazar) June 25, 2020

STEPHEN THIS IS AMAZING IM SO HAPPY FOR YOU MAN CONGRATS!!! @WSJ @noted_wsj Y’all are getting an absolute stud!!!

— Sid Rajiv (@sidrajiv) June 25, 2020

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/06/the-wall-street-journal-aims-for-a-younger-audience-with-noted-an-instagram-heavy-news-and-culture-magazine/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/05/newsonomics-how-will-the-pandemic-panic-reshape-the-local-news-industry/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/05/newsonomics-how-will-the-pandemic-panic-reshape-the-local-news-industry/#respond Wed, 06 May 2020 17:08:59 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=182555 McClatchy’s bankruptcy is barreling to a conclusion. Tribune’s quietly trimming its board to prepare for a merger. Google and Facebook face unprecedented calls to pay up on at least three continents. And all the while — wait for it — Alden Global Capital’s Heath Freeman is joining the fray, demanding money.

The COVID-19 crisis both threatens and promises to reshuffle business and societal thinking about the role of local news in the 2020s. Call it pandemic panic. The crisis has clearly accelerated the known drivers of industry change worldwide. That could well lead to more consolidation of newspapers and more hedge fund and private equity control.

This earth-trembling change has also raised some new possibilities. What if the platforms finally do give in to decade-long pressures to pay publishers for news? What if governments, in one of the many ways being discussed, actually funneled funding to pay journalists to do local journalism? What if new and more public-spirited buyers/owners emerged, buying up papers that only bottom-feeding financial buyers have seen fit to acquire?

Keep those big-picture possibilities in mind as we first delve back into the important (but by now a little mundane) world of daily newspaper M&A.

But there are those 20 undisclosed parties crunching McClatchy’s numbers. They may well include some names familiar to those who have followed the Consolidation Games of the last year and a half.

Conventional wisdom holds that the New Gannett can’t play. After all, it’s already burdened by the $1.8 billion in debt it took on to put together its GateHouse merger in November. But what about its lender, Apollo Global Management? Insiders have told me that Apollo has been talking with Gannett CEO Mike Reed about a structuring of their five-year deal, given the immense and immediate impact of the coronavirus crisis on cash flow.

Could Apollo — which strategized a newspaper industry rollup back in 2015 when it almost bought Digital First Media — decide that a 2020s version would make financial sense? For the financial companies — Apollo, Chatham, Alden Global Capital, Gannett manager Fortress Investment Group — it’s all about the numbers.

One critical question for them: How do you value McClatchy’s cash flow over the next few years at a time when projections even six months out are deeply uncertain? Industry consultant FTI is now forecasting that 1 in 5 pre-COVID ad dollars might not come back to newspaper companies once this pandemic nightmare concludes. (Though annual ad revenue declines not much smaller than that have become numbingly common at newspaper companies in recent years.)

Another question: How much in the way of corporate overhead and general centralization synergies could be wrung by merging McClatchy into the new Gannett? Such a move would create a behemoth newspaper company (to the extent newspaper companies can be behemoths anymore), controlling about a third of U.S. daily print circulation in more than 160 cities. If the numbers add up, could Apollo end up owing that giant?

Given the many steps that would take and all the vagaries of future cash flow, most financial observers consider that unlikely — at least in the short term.

Quietly, the Alden/Tribune merger moves forward

And then there’s Alden. As we’ve reported, Alden is on a trajectory to takeover/merge with Tribune Publishing this year. Our most recent datapoint:

Tucked inside the company’s April 8 notice of its annual meeting — which of course will be virtual — is this:

Nominees for Director: The Board of Directors has nominated the six individuals listed below for election as directors at the Annual Meeting. All nominees are currently serving as directors of the Company. Ms. [Dana Goldsmith] Needleman and Mr. [Christopher] Minnetian were both appointed to the Board of Directors pursuant to the Cooperation Agreement dated as of December 1, 2019 by and among the Company, Alden Global Opportunities Master Fund, L.P. and Alden Global Value Recovery Master Fund, L.P. (the “Cooperation Agreement”).

It sounds like the usual corporate filing-speak. 

But what’s omitted is the big story. The board currently has eight members, but it’s only nominating six.

David Dreier, who served as the board’s chairman until Alden’s rapid insertion into the company’s affairs six months ago, isn’t being re-nominated. Neither is Eddy Hartenstein, also a former board chair and long-serving board member, as well as former publisher and CEO of the Los Angeles Times Media Group. Both of them received criticism for their acquiescence to Michael Ferro’s Tronckist regime, but both have also been considered relative Tribune Publishing stalwarts, advocates of local journalism.

After Alden bought up Tribune stock late last year, one of its demands was that Tribune grow its board from six to eight members by adding the Alden-affiliated Minnetian and Needleman. Now it’s dropping back to six, with the two Alden picks sticking around.

The arithmetic is clear. Alden’s Heath Freeman — already exerting great influence at Tribune, which dispatched CEO Tim Knight and pushed forward with significant job cuts pre-COVID — is lining up the company for a merger with his own MNG Enterprises. Observers expect that the soon-to-be-reduced Tribune board will move to “explore the best use of its assets.” Then, most likely, would come the appointment of an “independent” board group (without the would-be-conflicted Alden 2), who would then lead a sales process. The likeliest result: a merger, in some form, between Tribune Publishing and Alden’s MNG Enterprises.

(The NewsGuild, which represents newsroom staff at the Chicago Tribune and several other Tribune Publishing papers, is promising a fight. This week, it announced a proxy fight aimed at getting the two Alden directors off the board, questioning whether “their interests are aligned with those of Tribune Publishing.”)

What might that increasingly likely deal mean for a possible further merger with McClatchy?

In its bankruptcy filings, McClatchy has acknowledged what I’ve reported over the past couple of years: multiple failed efforts to merge with Tribune. If Alden wasn’t circling around Chicago, those who know the companies well believe a Tribune/McClatchy combination would make a lot of sense. Both focus on larger metro markets, as opposed to the smaller towns at the core of Gannett. They’ve had similar editorial philosophies and business strategies over time.

The thinking now is that an Alden/Tribune tie-up would foreclose a merger with a post-bankrupt McClatchy. Maybe that’s true — maybe Chatham, if and when it becomes McClatchy’s controlling owner, will just operate it for a while.

Or maybe not. Too much is up the air here. But watch the timing.

An Alden/Tribune merger would likely be announced sometime after it slims its board — its annual meeting is May 21 — and goes through that “exploration” and “process.” That might mean a merger announcement in June or July — the same time when we expect McClatchy to emerge from bankruptcy.

Someone’s taking away chairs

My expectation requires a new metaphor. The Consolidation Games are adding a new event, musical chairs. The industry’s music has slowed, its cash flow down to an adagio. The number of chairs for CEOs decreases by the month, as mergers take what had been independent newspaper chains — most with long histories of civic mission — and turn them into tradable financial assets harvested for short-term gain.

Not long ago — like, last October — a list of the major American newspaper chains would have included Gannett, GateHouse, MediaNews (MNG), Tribune, McClatchy, Berkshire Hathaway Media, and Lee.

GateHouse bought Gannett and then took its name; Berkshire Hathaway loaned Lee the money to buy it out of the business. Depending on what happens with MNG, McClatchy, and Tribune, that list of 7 companies could be down to 4 or even 3 by year’s end. Collectively, the companies who remain would control well over 50% of daily circulation in the country.

Only one survivor, Lee, would still be controlled by “newspaper people,” and most of its papers are smaller; it has only four papers that sell more than 50,000 copies on weekdays (Buffalo, St. Louis, Omaha, and Richmond).

Of course it’s possible that new players might see this as the perfect time to enter the business. The price to buy a newspaper company has never been lower! Recession risk would scare away all but the deeply pocketed, deeply ambitious, and perhaps deeply political would-be acquirers away. It’s the Buffetts of the world who can afford to take a long-term view in such rough times — though even Buffett decries the current uncertainty and says he isn’t buying anything. (He wouldn’t be buying newspapers, anyway.)

So let’s consider one deeply pocketed, deeply political media player that I first mentioned as a possible newspaper industry entrant in January: Sinclair Broadcast Group.

“They’ve studied it,” says one source familiar with those conversations. “They believe that major cities will be served by a strong local news company — outputting to both video and text/print — and they believe that buying local newspapers is one way to get there.”

There are some clear hurdles, including the still-on-the-books rules against owning dominant newspaper and broadcast outlets in the same metro. But just three weeks ago, Sinclair was among those petitioning the Supreme Court to review an appeals court decision that had reinstated those rules after an FCC attempt at deregulation. There’s a good chance the court could relax those rules. Sinclair is based in Baltimore; it could be interested in The Baltimore Sun, should it break loose from Tribune or a Tribune/Alden merger. It could be interested in a lot of newspapers: Sinclair currently owns or operates 191 television stations in 89 markets.

Or will platform “licensing” revenue save the day?

Google and Facebook hire some of the best legal talent in the western world, and they’ve been able to swat away, delay, and skirmish interminably with the forces that demand they pay up for their use of news content. For more than two decades, newspaper companies around the world have wanted platforms to pay a license fee — like the ones the music industry and local TV stations get, say — for the snippets of news content they publish. They’ve been largely unsuccessful.

As the Google/Facebook duopoly has come to dominate the digital advertising business, and as the ad revenues of news publishers have fallen off a cliff, the intermittent cries have grown. Now, they’re joining in unison. Will they be able to pry loose big new revenue streams now?

I wouldn’t bet against the platforms — it’s usually not a winning bet — but there’s no doubt that executives in Mountain View and Sunnyvale know they now have a bigger problem on their hands.

In the last month alone, Australia and France have demanded payment. Canada is getting a full-court press for help from its publishers, including imposing new pressure on the platforms. “An urgent message to the Government of Canada from the publishers of Canada’s major newspapers” went out across the nation on Saturday, Canada’s big weekend newspaper day.

Most notably, U.S. publishers are also working — more quietly, but more aggressively — to get what they believe has long been due them. They’ve appreciated what largesse has been provided by both Google and Facebook in their multi-hundred-million-dollar journalism support programs, and they’ve recognized the many earnest people inside those companies who aim to offer local news a lifeline. But no one believes those grants are — or promise to be — the game-changer that society and their businesses require.

“This could be the year,” says one executive involved in the U.S. movement. “The stars may have aligned.”

Among those stars: The platforms have achieved something few others have: bipartisan questioning of their activities. Both Republican and Democratic politicians love to rail against Big Tech, whether they’re citing the 2016 election, misinformation in general, company efforts against misinformation, growing privacy concerns, monopolistic behavior, or the platforms’ impact on the system that long provided Americans local news.

More people have looked into the Black Mirror and haven’t liked what they’ve seen. Techlash 2020 — still powerful despite (or perhaps because) it’s the platforms who will likely weather the coronavirus downturn best — could result in a new stream of revenue to news publishers.

As I wrote in January, the payment issues of who, how, when, and where are gnarly ones. The platform can fairly cite that gnarliness. They also like to cite the humorous algo blindness they like to claim (“How would we ever figure out how to fairly attribute value to news producers?”) while they dodge, weave, and aim to make separate deals with the largest national/global news producers. Separating out the Timeses, Posts, Journals, and Guardians from the larger, bedraggled news herd is an classic divide-and-conquer strategy that’s long been one facet of the game. (Note Facebook’s payments to publishers for its News Tab — individual deals primarily targeting the top of the industry.)

Then, of course, there’s the irony that it’s the very financialization of the industry — the hedge funds and PE firms who stand to benefit directly from any aid to newspaper companies — may be the platforms’ best argument for opposing payments for content.

Alden president Heath Freeman’s recent “Dear Colleagues” letter, circulated by new New York Times media columnist Ben Smith, offers the perfect foil. “Fund vulture journalism?” the platforms can cry. “They’re worse than us!”

Indeed, look at the blowback big corporate players have faced if it comes out that they’ve taken bailout money. While this sort of platform payout wouldn’t quite be characterized as “bailout money,” the optics are less favorable for a news industry that is — at least in the U.S., and Canada — dominated by financial players.

We’re in this pandemic moment in which COVID-19 fears have unexpectedly revalued the sort of experienced, balanced reporting a good local news outlet can provide. And yet we’re stuck talking about the interaction of a few hedge funds, focused on little else beyond profit, and a few tech companies with unprecedented dominance.

Then there’s this to ponder: If Google and Facebook finally began paying for the supply chain of news — something akin to the retransmission-fee revenue stream that revolutionized the local TV business model — what would be the new value of these news companies? Pouring hundreds of millions, if not billions, into their revenue streams would have a real and significant effect. It could offset the profound loss of advertising and semi-stabilize companies that haven’t felt stable since 2007 or so. If that happened, how much more market-valuable would newspaper titles and newspaper companies become?

Factor that into your crystal ball and the “multiples” that newspaper companies might be “worth” produce a few new swirls of possibility. If cash flow were no longer projected to decline inexorably — if they were at least stable —would these old “newspaper” assets, their blackletter flags mostly digitized, become more valued businesses?

That is a big “if.” But it’s one more plausible than a year ago.

Finally, the will-platforms-pay-up question has at least two big implications. First, the money guys — the would-be buyers and consolidators like Alden, Apollo, or Chatham. Heath Freeman’s letter shows he sees the potential for major value creation if the platforms can be pushed to a deal. How does even the possibility of a big platform settlement figure into the immediate questions of consolidation — the ones that’ll be answered within just a few months?

Second, what about all the next-gen thinking in the local-news-revival world? Major foundations, the American Journalism Project, news entrepreneur Steve Waldman, and others advocate a reordering of local news. Among the prevailing ideas is one that Waldman has dubbed “replanting”: buying out and replacing the financially driven owners of the daily press, through something like a “deconsolidation fund.” A couple of billion could do that, and that’s not completely impossible money to ponder. The perhaps bigger question: Where does the money come from to operate a resurgent local news operation — and hopefully to make it grow?

That platform “retransmission” money could be part of a big new idea. By itself, platform money would be meaningful. But combine it with some of the newer proposals now being advanced and an updated financial business model may be possible for the local press of the 2020s.

Part of that is government, government-funneled, or government-incentivized funding. Most immediately, there’s the federal COVID-related bailout money. Some mostly smaller newspapers have been able to take advantage of that short-term loan-turned-to-grant aid; bigger ones are too big or too debt-encumbered to make use of them. Gannett’s Mike Reed has told employees the company benefits from federal programs that allow the postponing of both FICA and pension plan payments; he’s estimated as much as $150 million in delayable bills, according to Gannett sources.

There’s a push to expand coronavirus-related government ad programs, directed toward local newspapers. There are also several proposals to use the tax system to incentivize publishers, investors, and/or consumers to provide more money to pay journalists.

The big national responses, led by the News Media Alliance, could break something loose. It’s asking Congress to give it an anti-trust exemption so its members can negotiate as one with the platforms, as well as pushing forward on multiple industry aid programs.

And in some communities facing financialized ownership, journalists and their supporters aim to separate out once-robust titles from the hedge fund herd. They look to cities like Minneapolis, Seattle, L.A., Charleston, Philadelphia, and Boston for inspiration, hoping to find civic-minded wealthy people to revive a paper. The Save Our Sun movement is trying in Baltimore; it joins other recent efforts in Chicago and Sacramento. All of these efforts have now been made more complicated, at least in the short-term, by COVID-driven uncertainty.

Depending on how you look at it, this virus has changed everything — radically changed what 2020 will look like for local news — or simply accelerated the industry down the path it was pointed toward before all this. Wealthy saviors, platform complaints, nonprofit dreams, hedge fund nightmares — those themes have all been with us for quite some time.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/05/newsonomics-how-will-the-pandemic-panic-reshape-the-local-news-industry/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/04/the-bloomberg-way-appears-to-have-gone-astray-when-it-killed-an-investigation-into-chinas-richest-man/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/04/the-bloomberg-way-appears-to-have-gone-astray-when-it-killed-an-investigation-into-chinas-richest-man/#respond Tue, 14 Apr 2020 16:13:32 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=181968 In the introduction to the 2014 edition of The Bloomberg Way — the combination style guide, reporting bible, and (to its detractors) cult manual for the news operations of Bloomberg — then–editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler describes how Michael Bloomberg convinced him to join the company in 1989.

Bloomberg the company was, at that point, a highly successful data and information business for traders, but Bloomberg the man was interested in getting into journalism, a field in which he had no particular experience. Winkler was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal when he got the call: “Hi, it’s Bloomberg. I need some advice. What would it take to get into the news business?” Winkler had a question of his own:

Mike Bloomberg surprised me when I parried his initial query about what it would take to get into the news business with another question: “All right,” I said. “You have just published a story that says the chairman — and I mean chairman — of your biggest customer has taken $5 million from the corporate till.

He is with his secretary at a Rio de Janeiro resort, and the secretary’s spurned boyfriend calls to tip you off. You get an independent verification that the story is true. Then the phone rings. The customer’s public-relations person says, ‘Kill the story or we will return all the terminals we currently rent from you.'”

“What would you do?” I asked.

“Go with the story,” Mike said. “Our lawyers will love the fees you generate.”

That was the deciding moment.

Fast-forward to today: An NPR investigation details what Winkler and Bloomberg did when that theoretical scenario edged into reality. They didn’t go with the story — they killed it.

Six years ago, Bloomberg News killed an investigation into the wealth of Communist Party elites in China, fearful of repercussions by the Chinese government. The company successfully silenced the reporters involved…

In 2012, [Beijing correspondent Mike] Forsythe was part of a Bloomberg team behind an award-winning investigation into the accumulation of wealth by China’s ruling classes.

The Chinese ambassador warned Bloomberg executives against publishing the investigation. But Bloomberg News published the story anyway. Afterward, Forsythe received what he and his wife, author and journalist Leta Hong] Fincher considered death threats relayed through other journalists. He and Fincher moved their family to Hong Kong, believing it to be safer.

Even so, the reporting team pursued the next chapter, focusing on Chinese leaders’ ties to the country’s richest man, Wang Jianlin. Among those in the reporters’ sights: the family of new Chinese President Xi Jinping. The story gained steam throughout 2013.

In emails sent back to Bloomberg’s journalists in China seen by Fincher, senior news editors in New York City expressed excitement.

And then: radio silence from headquarters. That story never ran.

The demise of that investigation — which Winkler publicly claimed “was not ready for publication” — has been a matter of dispute in the years since.

The fear of angering a rising China with tough reporting or criticism has become a theme of the last decade of high-end American journalism. In 2012, The New York Times had its news — including its new Chinese-language website — blocked in China for reporting on the wealth accumulated by the family of prime minister Wen Jiabao.

More recently, China expelled three Wall Street Journal reporters in February over an unflattering headline on a Journal op-ed. After a Trump administration response, the country announced last month it would expel additional reporters from the Times, the Journal, and The Washington Post. Like technology companies, news organizations have to negotiate the ethical questions that come with engaging with a country at profound odds with democratic ideals.

In most of the publicly known cases — and “publicly known” is an important clause there — news companies do not appear to have acted in direct violation of their values. But Folkenflik’s reporting makes it clear the Bloomberg Way did not guide the actions of Bloomberg’s editors on this China story:

Finally, in late October 2013, Bloomberg’s famously intense founding editor-in-chief, Matthew Winkler, weighed in, via a private conference call. In attendance: senior news executives in New York and the China-based investigative team. NPR has obtained audio of Winkler’s remarks on the call.

“It is for sure going to, you know, invite the Communist Party to, you know, completely shut us down and kick us out of the country,” Winkler said. “So, I just don’t see that as a story that is justified.”

He expressed great apprehension because of the potential consequences of publishing another investigation. In this case, it was one that would itemize the links between top Chinese Communist Party leaders and the country’s wealthiest man.

Winkler returned to those fears repeatedly. “The inference is going to be interpreted by the government there as we are judging them,” Winkler said. “And they will probably kick us out of the country. They’ll probably shut us down, is my guess”…

“There’s a way to use the information you have in such a way that enables us to report, but not kill ourselves in the process and wipe out everything we’ve tried to build there,” he told the reporting team. Bloomberg News and Winkler declined to comment for this story.

The approach extended to Michael Bloomberg, the recent presidential candidate, himself:

“If a country gives you the license to do something with certain restrictions, you have two choices,” Bloomberg told his staff [at a company town hall meeting]. “You either accept the license and do it that way, or you don’t do business there.”

Bloomberg also referred to unnamed “bad apples” in the newsroom.

At a time when most news outlets have been weakened, both financially and as civic institutions, we rely increasingly on the remaining news giants — the big companies that can afford to take a financial hit or pay its lawyers to fight the good fight — to stand up for the right things. A privately held company owned by a man worth $60 billion — more than Wang Jianlin! — is the definition of a company that can afford to take a hit. It appears Bloomberg News and its management fell short here.

A few other excerpts from The Bloomberg Way, for anyone who needs them:

Follow the money. Explaining the role of money in all its forms — from capital flows to executive compensation to the cost of an acquisition to election spending — reveals the meaning of news.

[…]

We avoid conflicts of interest — actual, potential or perceived — political, financial or personal.

[…]

We are often in the difficult position of covering the customers of Bloomberg LP. We do not allow commercial considerations to shade our news judgment because that would undermine our integrity and reputation.

[…]

Bloomberg News does not allow external parties or the commercial interests of Bloomberg LP to dictate our reporting. Altering a story because it may embarrass a company or individual would create the perception that we yield to outside pressure, and that would cost us our integrity.

[…]

Our mission at Bloomberg News requires us to be…

Honest enough to admit our mistakes as soon as we discover them and
diligent enough to correct them.

Thoughtful enough to understand that the sum of us is greater than
our parts.

Humble enough to know we can always do better.

Photo of Wang Jianlin, the billionaire subject of Bloomberg’s killed investigation, at the 2009 World Economic Forum used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/04/the-bloomberg-way-appears-to-have-gone-astray-when-it-killed-an-investigation-into-chinas-richest-man/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/03/just-catch-me-up-quick-how-the-wall-street-journal-is-trying-to-reach-non-news-junkies/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/03/just-catch-me-up-quick-how-the-wall-street-journal-is-trying-to-reach-non-news-junkies/#respond Tue, 24 Mar 2020 16:26:42 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=180842 The Wall Street Journal spent months designing, testing, and perfecting a slate of tools and news products around what was sure to be the year’s biggest story: the 2020 elections. Then…coronavirus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/03/just-catch-me-up-quick-how-the-wall-street-journal-is-trying-to-reach-non-news-junkies/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/2019/10/the-washington-post-now-offers-20-weeks-of-paid-parental-leave-heres-what-other-u-s-news-orgs-provide/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/10/the-washington-post-now-offers-20-weeks-of-paid-parental-leave-heres-what-other-u-s-news-orgs-provide/#respond Fri, 18 Oct 2019 15:33:33 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=176017 The Washington Post is making its paid parental leave policy much more generous: It will expand it from four paid weeks to 20 as of January 1, 2020, for all new parents, whether or not they gave birth.

The Washington Post just changed it’s parental leave policy: Now each parent gets 20 weeks — five months — of PAID leave. Yet another reason the Post is such a great place to work…

— Ashley Parker (@AshleyRParker) October 17, 2019

.@washingtonpost just announced 20 weeks paid parental leave. That's 5 months. ANY parent is eligible for after the birth or adoption. Prior to this it was 4 paid weeks, and you had to work at the company a year before qualifying. Not anymore! (a thread)

— Libby Casey (@libcasey) October 17, 2019

The Post’s new policy matches The Wall Street Journal’s, which has been in effect since 2017. (What’s the situation at your news org? Tweet at me, my DMs are open.) Bloomberg’s policy is the most generous we could find, at 26 weeks, but it varies wildly, as you’ll see below.

Mandatory credit: The @WSJ policy for 20 weeks of paid parental leave implemented in 2017.

Seriously—Congrats to the Wapo newsroom! It's an important improvement in benefits for new moms and new dads … and new babies, and raises the standard for other media companies to match. https://t.co/FWbPjrXOPS

— Michael C. Bender (@MichaelCBender) October 17, 2019

The New York Times offers 16 weeks of paid parental leave for mothers who give birth vaginally, 18 weeks for mothers who give birth via C-section, and 10 weeks for non-birth parents. The Boston Globe offers 10 weeks to all new parents.

The Post’s policy does not apply to parents who are currently on parental leave right now — although a Post PR person said that if a parent is on leave as of January 1, 2020, their leave can be extended.

man i should've waited to have my kid next year https://t.co/qCRlkS1PuR

— pumpkin spice liz bruenig (@ebruenig) October 17, 2019

We’re collecting other news organizations’ parental leave policies and will update this post as we get them. (My DMs are open and you won’t be identified.)1 Here’s what we’ve got so far:

Advance: Birth mothers can use short-term disability for 6 fully paid weeks; nothing for fathers/non-birth parents.

The Atlantic: 12 paid weeks for all new parents.

Bloomberg: 26 paid weeks for primary caregivers (“24 weeks of fully paid parental leave, plus 10 transition days (one day off per week for 10 consecutive weeks) immediately following an employee’s return to work”)

Cox Media Group: 8 weeks paid maternity leave, 2 weeks paid paternity leave

The Daily Beast: 16 weeks for primary caregivers

The Dodo: 8 paid weeks for “primary” care providers, 4 weeks for secondary

Fast Company: 12 paid weeks for all new parents

The FT: 20 paid weeks for moms and up to 6 paid weeks for dads (globally; policies may be more generous in UK)

Gannett: 6 weeks of paid leave for any parent (“within the first 12 months following the birth, adoption, surrogacy or foster care placement of an employee’s child)”); birth mothers get an additional 6 weeks of paid short-term disability for vaginal births and 8 weeks for C-sections.

Gimlet: 6 months paid parental leave. (Gimlet is owned by Spotify.)

(The former) Gizmodo Media Group: 12 paid weeks for all new parents

The Intercept: Four months for all new parents

McClatchy: Zero. Employees can use saved sick time, birth moms can take short-term disability at 60 percent of pay.

Minneapolis Star Tribune: 8 weeks parental leave at 50 percent of pay.

NBC/MSNBC: 16 paid weeks for primary caregiver (may take up to an additional 10 weeks unpaid), 2 paid weeks for secondary caregiver (may take up to an additional 24 weeks unpaid)

NPR:

NPR offered four weeks until 2018, when it was doubled to eight. Should have had my kids later!

— Elise Hu (@elisewho) October 18, 2019

Slate: 8 paid weeks for all new parents

Talking Points Memo: 10 paid weeks for all new parents

Texas Tribune: 8 weeks paid family leave, and up to 16 weeks of job protection for those who take unpaid time; employees can use up all of their PTO to get 4 additional weeks of paid parental leave.

Tribune Publishing: Zero. Birth moms can use short-term disability.

Vox Media: 16 paid weeks for all new parents

Photo of Saskia, two weeks old, by Margus Kulden used under a Creative Commons license.

1. U.S. parental leave laws are often a confusing mishmash of straight paid time off, short term disability at reduced or full pay, state-mandated leave in a handful of states, and so on. A company that offers four pay weeks of paid leave may also, for instance, offer 8 additional weeks of short-term disability at full or partial pay, bringing an employee’s total parental leave to twelve weeks. We’ve tried to be as specific as possible here and welcome clarifications if you have them. In addition, leave may not be offered to all employees of a company and may differ depending on how long you’ve worked there, and union and non-union employees in the same companies may have different policies. Yes, non-U.S. readers, it’s crazy, we know.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/10/the-washington-post-now-offers-20-weeks-of-paid-parental-leave-heres-what-other-u-s-news-orgs-provide/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/08/how-the-wall-street-journal-is-building-an-incubator-into-its-newsroom-with-new-departments-and-plenty-of-hires/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/08/how-the-wall-street-journal-is-building-an-incubator-into-its-newsroom-with-new-departments-and-plenty-of-hires/#respond Mon, 12 Aug 2019 16:51:48 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=173901 Ready, aim, innovate: The Wall Street Journal has assembled the leaders of its new departments, spearheading initiatives with an additional three dozen or so staffers. They’ll focus on attracting new generations of readers, engaging subscribers, analyzing audience data, and other broad innovation moves.

After announcing a batch of new and expanded departments in March, Journal leadership is in the midst of turning its plans into action. Louise Story, the director of newsroom strategy, led the squad in putting together the vision.

(You may remember her from her work over 11 years and a certain innovation report at The New York Times, and/or from her blip of a time as a potential managing editor at the Los Angeles Times caught in the Lewis D’Vorkin crossfire.)

“If you want to move on something, it’s good to have people whose job specifically it is to do that. We have had people who have ongoing efforts around new audiences, such as professional women, but it hasn’t been a full-time job for anyone” — yet, Story said. “Think of [the interactions between the new teams] as an incubator in the middle of newsroom helping us change and progress.”

A round of changes

The revamp of the Journal’s strategy coincides with a changing of the guard and new extensions of Journal content into other environments. Editor-in-chief Matt Murray, a longtime Journal reporter and editor, replaced Gerard Baker 13 months ago. (Baker reportedly wasn’t a favorite among Journal journalists, some of whom questioned his editorial choices in Trump coverage. Someone in the newsroom tells me now the “mood, generally, is very good. I think most of us trust and respect Matt.”) In 2016, under Baker, the Journal offered all staff buyouts and restructured the print sections thanks to eternally disappointing print ad revenue. The Journal also laid off some staffers in 2017, though it’s still unclear how many.

This month, the Journal announced a deal with Bloomberg to put Dow Jones content on the terminal, and the outlet is also a launch partner for Apple News+ (a spot The Washington Post and The New York Times declined to focus on its own subscription efforts). The Journal said it would “be hiring around 50 additional newsroom staffers” to meet the needs of Apple’s premium offering.

(An update on the Great Digital Subscriber Race among the major national newspapers: The Journal currently has 1,818,000 digital subs, up from 1.5 million in January, and 2,617,000 subs total, including print. The New York Times has 2,988,000 people paying for digital access to its news product — 3,780,000 if you add in its cooking and crosswords products. The Washington Post, which does not share numbers as frequently, had more than 1.5 million digital subs in December. Want a broader set of data points? See the charts in this piece about the Los Angeles Times’ 170,000 digital subscribers.)

“There’s a lot of change at the Journal right now and it’s all rooted in us wanting to increase the impact of our journalism to share our reporting with more people,” Story said. (And to build the Journal into a habit for potential subscribers.)

New strategic targets

Nearly all news organizations are recognizing the need to expand their offerings and become more relatable to more people — so more people, um, are more likely to give them more money if they ask for it. The Journal’s rising departments are a strong signal of exactly where and how the 130-year-old news outlet is seeing the next lifetime. It involves journalism as a public good, a refrain commonly recited in nonprofit news circles like at the American Journalism Project but a little surprising at a financial news-focused broadsheet.

Story described one effort as such: “The new audiences group is going to focus on an initiative around professional women [and] financial literacy which is providing information about money to be helpful to people, even people who may or may not subscribe but really providing information as a public good.”

The organization is trying to reconfigure its systems by building this hub of innovation infused in the newsroom. Here are the departments, with some elaborations drawn from the March memo.

Young Audiences

This team will expand “on the success our colleagues in Membership have had in growing our college subscriber audience.” Teen-driven Rookie Magazine’s Lauren Redding and Ethar El-Katatney of AJ+ are leading it. A job description for a young audiences editor teased a new outlet for this group’s work:

The Wall Street Journal seeks a New York-based editor to oversee a multi-disciplinary team that will be creating a digital magazine meant to appeal to the growing base of readers in their 20s who already subscribe to the Journal, as well as other younger people who are looking to connect with meaningful journalism.

The magazine is digital-focused and will include journalism in all mediums — including text, graphics and video — but some of its work will also run in the newspaper periodically. The online magazine will feature content originated by this team, content curated from around the Journal as well as content created with direct participation from journalists around the Journal’s newsroom. Though it’s aimed at the Journal’s up-and-coming audience, the content will be conceived of broadly to recognize the diversity of interests and tastes of the large audience it will serve.

The digital magazine is a major project originating from the Journal’s strategy department, which is an incubator for new technologies, audience growth, community and news innovation. The department includes the full range of journalistic talent that makes the Journal one of the leading news organizations in the world — writers, video journalists, graphics designers, editors, product managers, engineers, designers, data scientists, artificial intelligence experts and more — in a lively, collaborative project to discover new offerings of journalistic value. The editorial director of the digital magazine will be a close collaborator with other leaders in the strategy department, as well as leaders of the broader newsroom.

There aren’t many times a major publication starts a new content initiative of this aspiration, and this role offers the right candidate the chance to envision something new along with a fresh team with expertise in writing, editing, video, graphics, design, product and engineering. Also within this team is a new initiative to solicit journalism submissions from people in their 20s. We are open to extensions in newsletters and welcome ideas of how to create a community of young people connecting over thoughtful content.

A Journal spokesperson clarified that it will be a media-agnostic content-creating team. But perhaps it’s not the content format but the kind of content that should be kept in mind:

I get this is the opinion page, but it is also the kind of thing that makes people under 40 not feel bad about not subscribing to a newspaper. pic.twitter.com/bGfzEoQM9o

— Damon Kiesow (@dkiesow) July 27, 2019

New Audiences

A job listing for a product designer describes the role on the New Audience team as “work[ing] with cross-disciplinary teams to create new products and content for young people or for other new audiences.” A job posting for the group’s editor said it “will be an important voice in figuring out steps for the Journal as it seeks to become more relevant to women and diverse groups, and as we seek for more of our coverage to be more known by these groups.” The listing looked for “someone with a lens on women: What are they obsessed with right now? And how do they find their content?”

Ebony Reed, recently of the Reynolds Journalism Institute and the AP, has taken the reins. (Her responsibilities include focusing on the financial literacy project for professional women, “future initiatives for minority groups,” and keeping track of the diversity of people quoted and displayed in stories and photographs.)

Awesome first day @WSJ. So excited to be here as New Audiences Chief and working with smart, amazing colleagues in newsroom strategy. The energy is amazing! @louisestory @fpmarconi @laurentredding @etharkamal

— Ebony Reed (@EbonyReed) July 22, 2019

Membership Engagement

This group has three teams: one focused on SEO, another on newsletters and other content formats, and the third diving into the recently revamped comments system. (Remember, they’re conversations with audience voice reporters now, not comments with moderators.) This spring, the Journal tested a calendar for readers to get notified on analyst expectations. Edward Hyatt joined the Journal from News UK as the new SEO editor.

Newsroom Innovation

This group grows out of the Journal newsroom’s submissions to its Idea Portal, which is “a place anyone in the newsroom can submit an idea and also see which ideas are taken up and why. The ideas are evaluated by a committee that is open to the newsroom.” The portal, besides having a fun name reminiscent of brain travel, is a way to get all staff engaged with innovation. “If you want to help turn a big ship, and the Journal is a big place, it’s important to have transparency and to let everyone see what’s going on so they can row in the same direction,” Story said. According to the March memo, the team will have a high representation of product designers and engineers. Story and Murray are still hiring for an innovation chief, but John Schimmel is back at the Journal as the director of engineering for newsroom innovation after two years in The New York Times’ new products group. (The Times is hiring for entrepreneurs-in-residence, if you’re curious about their product guidelines.) BBC News Lab product developer Pietro Passarelli is also joining the team.

Data Solutions

This one aims to “go to the next level in audience data analytics.” (Talk about brain travel.) Ross Fadely is now the Journal’s data sciences chief, coming from a professional education company helping people transition into data science-related roles, with a Ph.D. in astrophysics. Story gave an idea of one potential metric the Journal could use: “If someone was trying to see whether a headline, photo, or choice of a story topic were good, it would be important to not just look at pageviews. You’d put pageviews in the numerator and put impressions of the story in the denominator, so that impressions would be the number of people who had the chance to open it and pageviews would be the number of people who did open.”

The final department involved here is the existing R&D branch, which is getting an expansion. It’s led by Francesco Marconi and is adding Alyssa Zeisler, Erin Riglin, and Eric Bolton. They’ll focus on machine learning and we’ve shared some of the team’s lessons already, such as on deepfakes and algorithmic reporting. (Reminder: The Post is launching a three-to-six-person lab for computational political journalism this fall.) “The R&D team is now the legacy team,” Story said. It was established one year ago, but hey, we can let the 130-year-old paper have it.

While the leadership is mostly filled out, the Journal is still hiring for its dozens of practitioners and many of the initiatives will be in full swing by the middle of the fall. “All of the ways we’re evaluating success have to do with our focus on our audience and being useful and relevant to our audience with our reporting and journalism,” Story said.

They’re not the only ones trying to build out a data science and audience engagement powerhouse in order to get to subscriber dollars first. While local newspapers are competing what our Ken Doctor has called the 2019 Consolidation Games, the big national dailies are all going full-throttle in the Great Digital Subscriber Race.

Image of chicks in an incubator by Michael Newman used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/08/how-the-wall-street-journal-is-building-an-incubator-into-its-newsroom-with-new-departments-and-plenty-of-hires/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/08/newsonomics-the-perils-and-promises-of-new-gannett/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/08/newsonomics-the-perils-and-promises-of-new-gannett/#respond Fri, 09 Aug 2019 14:08:16 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=174253 This story was updated Friday afternoon with the news that Alden Global has taken a stake in the new Gannett.

There’s the megamerger, and then there are the numbers: $1.8 billion, 11.5 percent interest, 5 years, $300 million, 18 percent…and many more.

Investors, industry observers and wags have picked through the pieces of the Gatehouse/Gannett megamerger this week, and obsessed over those numbers. All to the question: Will this deal work?

That’s the financial/operational question here, easier to prophesize than the democratic one: What will be the impact in the hundreds of communities that are used to having one major (if flagging) daily serve their basic news and information needs?

The two — financial success and journalistic capacity — should tie together, of course. How they do is one of the great mysteries of this merger. How much money exactly will be saved, and what exactly will it be spent on?

That’s where these big numbers drive the conversation, occupying all the oxygen in the room, and obviously caused great palpitations on Wall Street.

Gannett’s and Gatehouse’s (ticker symbol NEWM) share prices both stabilized somewhat on Thursday, after the latter took a 30-percent-plus dive after the merger announcement. Both companies’ shareholders — and the same top institutional shareholders own lots of both companies — continue to reckon with the reality of the deal.

That led to some apparently premature alarm that the deal would go quickly south, but it had appeared through this week that the investors who bought in as the price took a dive supported the deal and wouldn’t oppose seeing it completed. Among the big players: Leon Cooperman, chair of Omega Advisors, continues to increase his NEWM stake, as others have sold.

On Friday morning, though, this drama took a new turn.

The dealmakers face a new — though known — fear: Alden Global president Heath Freeman. On Friday morning, Alden, through its MNG Enterprises newspaper chain, filed with the SEC, announcing a 9.4 percent stake in NEWM. The stated reason for its large purchase: “The Reporting Persons are evaluating the terms of the Merger Agreement and believe that the consummation of the Merger may not be in the best interest of the Issuer’s shareholders.”

What might Alden — which saw its hostile bid for Gannett defeated in the spring — now do?

The filing hints at loose threat: “Accordingly, the Reporting Persons reserve the right to take certain actions with respect to the Merger including, but not limited to, undertaking to vote against or campaign against the Merger and to propose or suggest strategic alternatives other than the Merger.”

What’s Alden’s real play here? It’s likely more than the spurned Heath Freeman spitting in the soup of the megamerger.

Will he come back with a new all-cash offer, if this deal continues to be met with skepticism from investors, who drove down NEWM stock by more than 10 percent again on Friday? Is he just trying to force the hand of Softbank, the parent of NEWM manager Fortress, to invest, raising the share price, and profiting Alden in the short term? Does he sense that if this megamerger goes through, his MNG Enterprises will be left lonely on the sidelines of the Consolidation Games dance hall, unable to find a suitor?

Softbank may indeed be entering the fray and supporting the deal, word on the street says. Expect numerous other moves in this chess game, which could go for months. Remember, shareholders won’t vote on the deal until late in the year, pending regulatory approval, so the jockeying could well intensify.

Meanwhile, NEWM CEO Mike Reed will be doing everything he can to save the deal. Five days after the deal was announced, a consensus has evolved: He could have done a better job to sell the story of the business synergies of the deal — and to justify the huge, high-priced debt burden the megamergered New Gannett would take on.

The question, then again, of the moment: Is this the best future for these companies?

“Look, it’s the best deal we could get,” one insider told me this week. And that, in a nutshell, sums it up. This current deal is far from ideal for either company, or its shareholders, or its employees, or its readers. And for Gannett, it’s better than being captured by Freeman.

For Gatehouse, it’s the best available alternative as the company has hit a strategic wall, its $1.1 billion-fueled acquisition-heavy strategy and good dividend no longer wowing investors. Fortress Investment Group, the money and strategy behind Gatehouse’s gargantuan growth, saw its next opportunity. It seized it — and now the private equity company will continue to manage the big merged company for the next two years, through CEO Mike Reed, its key employee (more details on that arrangement below).

As the newsprint dust settles, let’s take a quick look at the numbers and a couple of other points that now populate the industry conversation.

The Numbers

$1.792 billion: That’s the immediate financing in this deal. Led by Apollo Global Management, consider this huge sum of money a “bridge loan,” say those involved in the deal. As a bridge, it’s a costly one, set at 11.5 percent interest. Significantly, there’s no penalty for paying off the five-year note early refinancing it.

That’s a key part of the financial logic here. Apollo supplies the massive financing of this deal at 3.5 times or so the companies’ earnings; that’s a deal that doesn’t come cheap, so 11.5 percent is the best rate Gatehouse could get to get the deal done now. One reason that bigger Gannett isn’t the acquirer: it didn’t have the juice to get the financing.

That means that for the next couple of years, the New Gannett will be driven to pay off as much of that debt as possible. If it can get the debt down to two times earnings, then it can refinance at a more palatable interest rate of 8 percent or less. (That’s what McClatchy is paying in its latest refinancing.)  That would save the company millions in annual costs.

Apollo is is no stranger to the newspaper industry, and is described by those who know it as the keenest follower of the trade. While in its 2015 failed bid to buy Digital First Media, it intended to launch an aggressive digital-first strategy, its role here is simpler: financier. With its senior position in the deal, it could come to own the New Gannett if it defaults. For now, though, it will just rake in short-term dollars.

The other link to remember: Apollo and Fortress Investment Group.

“Remember, lots of banks were in on the reviewing deal,” says one significant holder of Gannett shares. “And no one would finance it.  It took Apollo and that high rate to get the deal done.”

Another said, “Without Fortress and its influence on Wall Street with the money it spreads around, this deal wouldn’t have worked.”

That’s pivotal to understand in this megamerger and to remember as we contemplate a McClatchy/Tribune merger or others. It’s really tough to get financing for an industry in such structural decline.

$300 million: That’s the annual cost savings synergy number that CEO Mike Reed is aiming for, as he announced $275–300 million as a target. Subtract $100 million or so the first year, due to lots of severance costs in reducing business side headcount and buying out of duplicative vendor contracts. Reed has emphasized that the $300 million is “only” 7.5 percent of the combined companies’ expenses, a lesser percentage than other merged companies’ executives have claimed.

That’s the big key to this deal: massive savings in combining two big companies, which then buys time for the digital transition solutions.

The savings, most observers believe, are real. The question is where do these savings go? Think Let’s Make a Deal’s three doors:

• Debt repayment. A must, of course, with that added incentive of getting the principal down for a cost-saving refi.
• Dividend: New Media Investment knows it needs its dividend to keep shareholders happy.
• Reinvestment in the business.

For a company whose revenue is only about 25 percent digital, the massive heavy lifting of “digital transformation” lies ahead. Witness the expense of those who are farther along nationally, led by the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. Major reinvestment in both technology and talent have led the way. The new Gannett is much closer to the beginning of the digital transformation process than the end. That’s expensive.

So, the big question: With the major savings, especially after the first year (given the cost of getting those savings), how much money will go to each door? There’s already tension between the two companies on that question, as the deal proceeds with regulators, with Reed more focused on debt reduction and old Gannett on transition, say sources.

And the bigger question behind that: What’s the New Gannett’s theory of the case? What will the largest local news company need to do and be to be successful in the 2020s? Neither Gannett nor Gatehouse has offered any big vision of what that is, or could be, even fueled by new money. We know Heath Freeman’s theory: Local newspaper companies are a lost cause, so milk them ‘til the cows are dry.  What is the New Gannett’s theory?

Is there a plan to broadly embrace cutting of print days, as much of the industry models that idea? Is the combined digital marketing services business of New Gannett its primary commercial strategy? Can it make a bigger revenue stream out of Gatehouse’s industry-leading events business? Will the USA Today Network find stronger legs — in both digital ad revenue and shared national and investigative reporting — as Gatehouse properties are added to it?

We’ve heard no grand pronouncement about reinventing local news in the 2020s. If, say, The New York Times or Washington Post were the party bringing these two companies together and offering a grand turnaround future, we’d see a story that would capture imagination.  This story, one of economy, mainly registers shrugs.

18.5 percent: That’s how much print advertising was down, year over year, in this week’s announced second-quarter financial reporting at Gannett, with overall revenues down 9.9 percent. That number multiplies the difficulty of the math of this deal. If revenue were at least flattish, CEO Mike Reed could allocate those savings more easily through the three doors.  But it’s not.

The Monopoly board on which this strategy is being executed is shrinking as the game is played.  (Even Gatehouse, usually the best performer on a same-store basis the last couple of years was down 15.3 percent in print ads and 6.9 percent overall in the second quarter. McClatchy followed the same trend on Thursday, down 18.7 percent in print ads and 12.6 percent overall.)

In a deal that is all about cash flow, the merger partners face the fact that, on an operating basis, too much cash is flowing … backward.

263: That’s the total number of current daily operations now reported by the combined companies, but expect that number to change in 2020. First, the companies have to see what they must do to win the Department of Justice antitrust division’s approval of the deal. They’ve hired attorneys with DOJ experience to expedite the process and don’t expect big issues, given that they don’t own titles that go head-to-head in the same market. The antitrusters could take a wider view of regional price domination, but aren’t unexpected to.

At least for appearance’s sake, Gannett and Gatehouse might offer to sell some properties in areas that may seem monopolistic.

There’s one more good reason for the new Gannett to sell some properties: Cash, to repay that Apollo loan. The new Gannett will focus heavily on areas where it has great geographic domination — Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin. After those, look for possible sales of properties that stand alone in their areas and may be prized by other publishers, who can themselves “cluster” newspapers together. That’s one arena in which the 2019 Consolidation Games may play on.

One thing Mike Reed will certainly do: Sell some of the surviving real estate sitting under Gannett properties. That, too, will bring quick cash.

Beyond the intriguing numbers, here are a few more questions:

Why the two-company structure? Observers of the Seussian corporate structure outlined in the merger announcement wonder why it’s being constructed that way. A set-up for further acquisitions, perhaps?

The reality is simpler. The new Gannett’s new corporate structure looks strikingly similar to New Media Investment Group/Gatehouse’s current one, and for a good reason: Fortress Investment Group, which bred the big Gatehouse, remains in the driver’s seat of the new Gannett. It’s no accident that NEWM shareholders retain 50.5 percent of the new company’s shares, with Gannett getting the minority 49.5 percent. That enables Fortress to maintain control of the board and the company.

Fortress, which brought Gatehouse through bankruptcy and assembled pools of acquisition capital in a market hungry to sell, gets to stay in charge of the new Gannett through 2021. Fortress, now owned by Japanese conglomerate Softbank, negotiated through last weekend to get its due in this deal.

Back in 2013, Fortress began taking hold of Gatehouse Media, out of bankruptcy. Its management contract to run the new company through CEO Mike Reed, a Fortress employee who became its Grand Acquisitor, enabled it to run the table, spending more than a billion dollars buying dailies and weeklies from usually long-time newspaper owners, many of them families, increasingly desperate to get out of the business.

Then, Fortress, seeing the business run into a wall within the last 18 months, and unlikely to find new money to make smaller acquisitions, smelled money in the chaos of Gannett. Though it only owns 1.1 percent of Gatehouse, through this deal, it protects its position quite well.

In documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Fortress’s continuing role is clarified. Essentially, the new Gannett, like the old Gatehouse, operates under the parent company — operated by Fortress, with Mike Reed, the new combined company’s CEO, still an employee of Fortress through the end of 2021.

“It’s extraordinarily odd,” said one significant investor in the company, speaking of the CEO of a public company being employed by a PE firm.

Fortress took in $21.8 million for its management of Gatehouse in 2018, and stands to make a similar sum for 2019. The merger agreement adjusts Fortress’s role and finally ends it in December 2021. We can see some of the financial/contractual adjustments in the filing, but it doesn’t provide a complete picture.

We can estimate that Fortress will earn at least its $20 million annually, if not more, for the next two years. In exchange for ending the agreement, Fortress gets 4,205,607 shares of the new Gannett stock, sellable at the end of 2021. Further, it is granted options to buy 3,163,264 shares of new Gannett stock. (“These options will have an exercise price of $15.50 and become exercisable upon the first trading day immediately following the first 20 consecutive trading day period in which the closing price of the Company Common Stock [on its principal U.S. national securities exchange] is at or above $20 per share [subject to adjustment], and also upon a change in control and certain other extraordinary events.”)

“Let no one ever say that you can’t make money in the newspaper business,” one industry veteran observed this week.

And, yes, this reality: It is a private equity company that will manage — through newspaper veteran executive Mike Reed — one-sixth of the U.S.’s daily newspapers for the next two years.

How much smaller will the New Gannett be in a year? By the end of 2020, it will be likely be significantly smaller. Consider that about $75 million could be paid out in severance funds, as headcount — the big cuttable cost center of newspaper companies — gets reduced.

As we’ve noted, most of those cuts will focus on the business and production part of the enterprise. Two corporate headquarters become one at Gannett’s McLean, Virginia, location. Every division and process will be under scrutiny as surviving managers aim to cut $300 million. Fewer printing presses, fewer middle managers, elimination of redundant technologies.

Speculation has begun, of course, about who and what will survive in this process. Some think that Gannett, even though it was acquired, may exert more staying power than one might expect.

Undoubtedly, it’s going to be complex. Gannett has invested multiples of millions more than Gatehouse over the years in systems of every kind, from content management to ad serving to subscriptions management — and has more middle managers supporting them, though those ranks have seen lots of cutting in recent years. Already, some key Gatehouse managers are rankled at the perception they may lose out.

The top two executives in this new company will set the tone for all the coming cuts, and CEO Mike Reed is no stranger to efficiency management. He’s got a new partner, Paul Bascobert. Gannett named Bascobert its new CEO at the same time it made the merger announcement. The company had been courting him for awhile, and Reed agreed to take him as a #2 as the deal solidified. Alison Engel, Gannett’s CFO, will move to that job at the merged company.

Bascobert isn’t the household name that Gannett had hinted at in the long months of its search after CEO Bob Dickey announced his retirement in December. But former associates describe him as a solid, experienced executive. At Dow Jones, one of his key positions was streamlining the company, and that talent will come in handy as the next year is consumed by the most judicious cutting the company can accomplish.

Second, he’s got experience in one key area of company growth: digital marketing services. Both companies have touted their services (LocaliQ for Gannett and Upcurve and ThriveHive for Gatehouse) as routes to a turnaround future. Bascobert led Yodle, an early market services independent that competed with ReachLocal and was later bought by Gannett.

Putting together those marketing services businesses will be complex but it’s clearly in Bascobert’s comfort zone.

The big name missing from the merger announcement: Kirk Davis. CEO of Gatehouse Media and the clear #2 to Reed, Davis is his boss’ long-time business partner. Many read the absence of his name in merger announcement as a sign he’s out, though that may be premature.

Gannett’s headquarters in McLean, Virginia, by Patrickneal, used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/08/newsonomics-the-perils-and-promises-of-new-gannett/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/newsonomics-the-new-york-times-puts-personalization-front-and-center-just-for-you/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/newsonomics-the-new-york-times-puts-personalization-front-and-center-just-for-you/#respond Fri, 28 Jun 2019 15:47:50 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=173098 Remember The Daily Me? Not just the startup that came and went trying to provide a personalized product — I mean that original dream/nightmare of the golden news site that gives the reader what she wants, first voiced ages ago by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte. In the archives of news dreams lost and buried, it owns a special place.

Now, a few decades after that vision of digital personalization, The New York Times is out with a fresh, modern test of it.

It’s called “For You.” For some users, it popped up — prominently, by design — at the center of a new one-row nav at the bottom of the Times’ iPhone app homepage in mid-June. (The Times, like many companies, rolls out design changes to all users over time.) It sits between Top Stories, which remains the default view at launch, and Sections.

While the Times has been experimenting with limited forms of personalization for years, it’s that prominence in the interface that makes this a turning point.

“This is the most prominent surfacing of active personalization in the experience,” Matt Ericson, a Times assistant managing editor, who worked on this project, said.

No surprise: The goal here is more and deeper engagement. And of course the Times will be closely monitoring how subscribers and non-subscribers use For You, seeking datapoints to suss out “propensity to buy,” the holy grail of our reader revenue age.

“This is not a completely new feature, but the update that we have made is that we are now trying to make it a little more front and center, make it easier for readers to find their way to the stuff that they’re most interested in a and make it easier for them to get into the stories that matter most to them,” says Mollie Vandor, a Times product director, who came to the company in February after a half dozen years with Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

We’re all hearing a fair amount of nonsense about AI, ML, and the like. It’s not that these technologies won’t have a profound effect on the news business, but that they are simply tools in the hands of journalists and those that support them. It’s a great boon for the Times to use such tech to do something that seems quite simple: Show us more of the stuff that we say we’re interested in.

The Times launched the similar “Your Feed” last year, with a small and apparently confusing page-like symbol at the top right of the app. The Times gauged enough experience with that usage — by interpreting data and with qualitative focus groups — to take this step of providing prime real estate to For You.

This is one fundamental lesson of this relaunch: It’s not just about providing a function, utility, or service for the reader. It must be crystal clear what that service does for…me. For You is an attempted antidote for overload, one way to break through the noise of any app or a reader’s own busy days, to make it brain-dead simple to access a truly useful new tool.

A new reader habit can lead to increasing engagement, and more engagement means both better subscription sales and retention. Several years ago, the Times was the first news company I spoke with that had discovered that a reader’s devotion to two or more distinct news topics was a big boost to sales and retention. Hook ’em with one topic, okay, but two or more can help seal the deal. The now-1,600-strong Times newsroom publishes about 250 stories a day. While the phone is a wondrous interface for creating user habits, it’s lousy at displaying breadth. Consider For You one effort to widen the reader’s awareness of stories that would otherwise seem hidden — and maybe get that Trump-news-only reader to check out Smarter Living, or the Book Review devotee to spend more time in Opinion.

The major national/global news publishers have worked around the edges of personalization for a while. Each can bring more firepower to personalization than they have thus far. But all are mindful to maintain the tradition of making top editors’ judgment what leads the news presentation. Most are wary of the dreaded filter bubble and enabling readers to simply re-enforce — and not challenge — their own worldviews. (Ten years ago, the Times’ own Nicholas Kristof weighed in with a warning about that.)

As we move further into the fully digital news era, we’re learning that the combination of experienced news judgment and smarter technology will be as much as art as science.

“How do we get personalization to amplify our news judgment?” asks Ericson, a newspaper veteran and a valuable tweener between the newsroom and engineers. “There’s a fair number of signals that we have around from the newsroom in terms of curating a particular pool of stories. How can we make sure that the right one gets in front of you?”

As the biggest publishers experiment, they take different tacks.

The Wall Street Journal, with its My WSJ feature on mobile takes an approach different from the Times. It’s all about passive personalization; the Journal delivers to readers a “recommended” list of stories derived from their viewing history, without any explicit effort on their part.

Importantly for the Times, For You is all about active personalization. You get, more or less, what you affirmatively choose to get. The Times provides me with stories on topics that I have chosen to follow over the years when given the opportunity in various “Recommended” modules.

When I hit the For You star, it populated with a range of Mueller Investigation, Pop Culture, and Climate Change stories. Apparently, it has a better memory of my past choices than I do. (It’s no joke when we say we’ve downloaded our memories to our devices.)

I can’t pick out which topics in my feed I’d like to delve deeper into, newsletter-like; instead I scroll through a variety of stories from across my topics in an order that seems mostly driven by a sense of timeliness. A screen or two down, a carousel of “Saved for Later” stories reminds you of stories you saved but forgot about. Changing the topics you follow takes only a simple trip to settings.

Note that these really are “topics” — not “sections,” which provide the architecture of story placement in the rest of the app. A climate change story may appear in business or theater as well as in Climate and Environment. Options include The Future of Work, Obituary of the Day, Global Migration, Only in New York, and Bitcoin & Blockchain. (Oh, and Animals — “We thought you could use a break,” the app offers.)

“That story and that particular topic might span multiple newsroom desks,” Vandor says, “but the idea is that if you want to follow everything about climate change for example, you’re going to want to see our best stuff from across a variety of different desks, rather than just focusing in one particular desk.”

All of this is managed with lots of under-the-hood metadata. “Part of this is actually powered by the fact that we have actually a pretty good strong history of tagging our stories not just by where they appeared in the paper, but also what is the story about, who’s mentioned, and so forth, so that helps power it,” says Ericson.

For You then, doesn’t offer a bunch of touts for people like you. It’s you, gleaned from your stated preferences. (Don’t like what you see? Change your preferences!)

At this point, readers can choose from several dozen topics, a motley group. (Why, among columnists, do Dowd, Manjoo, and Krugman get topics, but not Gail Collins or David Leonhardt? Why ‘What to Stream’ but not Watching, or New York City Arts but not Broadway Critics’ Picks?)

I’ve liked the ability to follow specific journalists, as The Guardian used to allow and the Journal does currently, but publishers have told me the return on such an offering has been underwhelming. So only a few of the Times’ top reporters and columnists can be chosen. Given how the breakaway success of The Daily podcast has helped create a small galaxy of new Times personalities, there’s clearly more opportunity to allow readers to follow the voices they are getting used to.

For You is an iOS product only at this point, pending further testing. There’s no browser or Android analog.

We’re at the beginning of this personalization test. The Times, while innovative, can sometimes take a long time to build and improve new products; we’ll see over the next year whether this turns into a real hit or just another experiment. For now, this is an experiment that poses as many (good) questions as it answers.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/newsonomics-the-new-york-times-puts-personalization-front-and-center-just-for-you/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/01/in-2018-push-alerts-featured-less-yelling-and-more-thinking/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/01/in-2018-push-alerts-featured-less-yelling-and-more-thinking/#respond Fri, 04 Jan 2019 14:56:42 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=167301 More push alerts, less breaking news, less emoji: An analysis of 30 publishers’ mobile notifications shows that the infrastructure of alerts has stayed the same but newsroom managers are thinking differently about how to use them.

In a follow-up study to a 2017 review, Columbia Journalism Review’s Pete Brown collected 1,510 mobile push alerts from 30 news apps over two weeks in June and July 2018, mirroring the previous procedure. 284 alerts alone came from President Trump’s family separation policy and border chaos in 2018, so Brown looked at those again in a case study.

“This case study further confirms the ongoing shift away from using push purely for breaking news, a movement we had already observed last year. Notifications categorized as ‘analysis,’ ‘general,’ and ‘first-hand accounts’ comprised over a quarter of all alerts during the family separation controversy,” Brown wrote in his analysis.

The weekly average for push alerts overall increased 16 percent from last year to 26 per app. Overall, the Wall Street Journal had the most apps in the test period due to new alert category options beyond breaking news, followed by CNN, The New York Times, and the Washington Post Classic app, with Mic, the Star-Tribune, and the BBC sending the fewest. Here’s the percent change between the years for each publisher:

In an unrelenting year of news, some news app users (a group that grew worldwide in 2017) saw seven alerts just about the family separation policy in one day with CNN, Brown recorded. That’s a lot! But publishers also shifted the experience so the alerts are filled with more text, more conversational, using more adjectives, and pushing more analysis pieces instead of breaking news showering down users’ phone screens during their commute or school pickup.

Maybe 2017’s findings or just the overall thrashing of the news cycle caused alert managers to take another look at what they’re flowing to people’s phones. Brown’s interviewees described a “growing consensus that push should not be viewed solely as a platform for breaking news, but also as a means for promoting the newsroom’s strongest journalism and building brand loyalty around exclusive stories, resulting in a broader range of content being surfaced via the platform.”

Layoffs also shuffled push alert strategies: “The most prolific alerter from last year’s study, CNN MoneyStream, sent zero alerts during this recent data collection period.” Digiday has reported that MoneyStream faced layoffs in CNNMoney’s transition to CNN Business and became essentially an automatic feed. But Mic, before its November firesale, went from 33 alerts sent on average per week to just two. The team had experimented with alerts presenting news in full — so users didn’t need to tap through for the whole story.

“We found that roughly 50 percent of users actually used the app in the traditional way, opening it from the home screen. Our explanation was that for many iOS users, Long Press or 3D Touch is still a novel and even undiscovered behavior,” said Marcus Moretti, Mic’s vice president of product.

Notifications make someone with a news app on their phone more likely to actually open the app, as a 2016 study found, where 58 percent of study participants said they opened a news app from the notification. A Pew study also from 2016 similarly notes “only about half of those who ever get them click through to the full story or search for more information.”

Those habits have led news outlets to present alerts with additional context 55 percent of the time, Brown found in 2017. The average length of alerts in the 2018 study grew by 11 percent, increasing from 101.9 characters to 113.4. But part of the challenge in CJR’s 2017 study was determining success for an alert besides mere open rate:

“This really surprised me, and it came up again. I’d ask people in every interview what they consider a successful push alert,” Brown told my colleague Laura Hazard Owen in 2017. “They’d say, ‘What I consider a successful push alert might not be what my boss considers a successful push alert.’ … The whole notion of creating content just for the lockscreen feels a little bit, to me, like creating content for Apple or Google or the mobile operating system.”

For more from app managers’ interviews with Brown and details from the case study, here’s the full report.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/01/in-2018-push-alerts-featured-less-yelling-and-more-thinking/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/12/get-rid-of-the-content-no-one-reads-offer-surprises-and-candy-and-other-tricks-for-retaining-subscribers/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/12/get-rid-of-the-content-no-one-reads-offer-surprises-and-candy-and-other-tricks-for-retaining-subscribers/#respond Wed, 05 Dec 2018 15:13:58 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=165474 If news organizations want to attract and retain subscribers, they need to look to psychology…and nudge, nudge, and nudge again: That’s one big takeaway from a recent summit on engagement. And here’s another idea: What if you simply got rid of content that readers don’t read?

INMA’s November Consumer Engagement Summit (led by 2016 Nieman Fellow Grzegorz Piechota, currently INMA’s researcher-in-residence) looked at how newsrooms can move people from readers to subscribers to lifetime customers; that summit was summarized in a recently released INMA report. Here are some key bits and recommendations.

— News organizations say engagement is important, but they don’t always allocate resources that way. INMA says “consumer engagement is the most important factor in consumer revenue success,” but when it ran a survey of 60 companies ahead of the engagement summit, it found that 59 percent of them spent less on engagement than on consumer acquisition. The Financial Times is an outlier here, spending three times more on engagement than on acquisition, and INMA says “best practice [is] heading towards investing between three to 10 times [as much on] engagement [as on] acquisition.”

— Pick an engagement metric and stick with it. The Financial Times, for instance, defines engagement as “recency + frequency + volume.” The Wall Street Journal focuses on monthly active users. The Telegraph in London focuses on total subscriptions. Lenfest’s Matt Skibinski defines engagement simply as “when your readers find your content, products, and brand valuable enough that they are willing to pay for it.”

— Figure out how to build habits, says Charles Duhigg, New York Times columnist and senior editor and author of bestsellers like The Power of Habit. Duhigg:

In our industry, we should look at what rewards readers are giving themselves. When you study analytics on readers or customers, what kind of content are they looking at? What are they doing with the website that isn’t captured in your model? What rewards do they give each other?…

The New York Times, for instance, has a model where we look for people visiting at least twice a week and looking at three different topics. Once they do that, we know it is someone primed to get them into a subscription. They are developing a habit on their own and shopping for rewards.”

Duhigg talked about the power of emotion in building habits. Hate-reading is habit-forming; is there something more positive that can replace it?

‘If we look at the last two years, the amount of anger in the news has boosted our traffic,’ Duhigg said, referencing coverage of U.S. President Donald Trump. ‘It is the most high-arousal emotion on earth and nobody expects they are going to enjoy it. The trouble is the kind of arousal we most dislike when we can anticipate it is anger — the emotion news usually causes. If you say to somebody “Would you like to be angry?” they will universally say no. Then they read something on Twitter that makes them outraged, they will share it and read it again and again. We have to find other emotional rewards to deliver something sustainable.”

News media’s historic emphasis on selling their products with an ‘eat your vegetables’ mentality — expecting people to buy because reading the news is ‘what’s good for you’ — lacks this emotional reward. Said Duhigg: ‘For the health of the nation and the world, the vegetables are important. I am not saying we shouldn’t do vegetables. But for the financial health of our organizations, the rewards are candy. If we’re not taking the vegetables and dipping them in caramel, we’re making some hard choices.’

The Wall Street Journal, for instance, measures “active days” — the number of days a reader engages with content. Its “Habit Project” focuses on “16 different engagement opportunities” that make subscribers stay on the site longer.

— Nudge, nudge, nudge. When Canada’s Globe and Mail began emailing subscribers with the highest propensity to churn, it reduced churn by 140 percent. Emailing subscribers who hadn’t logged in for 30 days reduced churn by 27 percent.

— What if you just…got rid of the content that nobody reads? The USA Today Network ran an internal campaign designed around this concept: “Stop doing things readers don’t want.” It built a tool called Pressbox to show its journalists how their stories are doing based not just on pageviews but on “volume, engage time, and loyalty (return frequency).”

By examining the ‘bottom half’ of content that wasn’t performing well, they were able to determine that only six percent of the audience was reading that content.

‘We could eliminate half of our journalism and our traffic really wouldn’t change — if we replaced it with nothing,’ said [Josh Awtry, senior director for news strategy at USA Today Network]. ‘What if we replaced that with content readers really wanted? We knew early on we didn’t just want it to be about pageviews…We are publishing 2.7 percent less monthly while the article pageviews have gone up.”

The UK’s Times Newspapers, meanwhile, decided to get rid of content that simply duplicated what was already available from the BBC, which 98 percent of Times readers already use on a weekly basis. “We effectively retired from breaking news,” said Times managing editor Chris Duncan. “Our readers didn’t really value it. So why compete on something our customers didn’t value?”

— People like surprises. The Atlantic tries to find random little rewards for subscribers, said Emilie Harkin, the company’s senior director for customer marketing and growth. Two examples: Sending a reader a baby present, and recreating a digital version of a special Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. newsstand print issue for digital subscribers.

— $9.99 > $14.99. At least in the experience of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which tested three follow-up rate offers after a $0.99/month sale. Here’s what they found:

— Retention rate for the $9.99 rate was 41 percent higher than the $14.99 price.
— Lifetime value was highest for the $14.99 price.
— The $19.99 offer had almost no difference in retention to $14.99.

The team also tested quarterly billing versus monthly billing. The one-year retention rate for quarterly billing was 28 percent higher than the monthly billing group — 39.4 percent retention for quarterly versus 30.7 percent monthly.

Another example of little things helping: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution improved retention by setting up a campaign to get subscribers set up for auto-pay. Forty-five percent of its subscribers had still been receiving print bills.

The full report is available to INMA members here.

Photo by Amy Shamblen on Unsplash.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/12/get-rid-of-the-content-no-one-reads-offer-surprises-and-candy-and-other-tricks-for-retaining-subscribers/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/11/so-some-people-will-pay-for-a-subscription-to-a-news-site-how-about-two-three/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/11/so-some-people-will-pay-for-a-subscription-to-a-news-site-how-about-two-three/#respond Tue, 13 Nov 2018 18:06:40 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=164939 The path forward for premium media is seemingly clear: Put up a paywall.

Digital advertising is a duopoly-dominated mess; any print or broadcast cross-subsidy you might have is declining at one speed or another. Your loyal core digital readers may be only a tiny fraction of that big “monthly uniques” number you put into press releases — but some of them are willing to pay for what you do. Reader revenue is relatively reliable, month to month or year to year, and it’s at the center of media company plans for 2019 and beyond.

But how many paywalls will people really pay to click past? It’s worked for The New York Times; it’s worked for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. But does it work for local newspapers? Metro dailies? Weekly or monthly magazines? Digital native sites?

The data thus far isn’t super encouraging, and that’s the world that New York magazine and Quartz walk into with their just-announced paywalls. New York’s was announced yesterday:

New York Media is now joining other publishing companies or individual publications that have recently added paywalls, including Bloomberg Media, The Atlantic and the Condé Nast magazines Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Wired.

Subscriptions for the New York Media sites will cost $5 a month or $50 annually. For $70 a year, the company will include a subscription to New York magazine, the onetime weekly that started publishing every other week in 2014.

The pay model, which will allow readers a number of stories free before shutting off access, will go into effect the last week of November, according to the company, which would not specify a date for the change.

Quartz, the business news outlet recently purchased by Japan’s Uzabase, made its move this morning:

The Quartz membership is an education in the global economy that’s written to equip you to make more informed decisions at work, in your investments, and in life. Each week, we take you outside of the news cycle to provide analysis, context, and insider insight about one of the players or phenomena that’s upending global markets and rewriting the rules of business. You can read the first installment on our race toward a cashless future (and who wins and loses in it) today. The exclusive new content published every day is designed to deepen the expertise of leaders, and help those aspiring to leadership get ahead in their careers without stepping out of them. Membership — which costs $14.99 per month, or $99.99 for the first year as a special limited-time founding offer — also brings you the ability to engage directly with Quartz’s journalists via conference calls, and join events with other members.

Even news omnivores won’t pay for everything

Both New York and Quartz have been real standouts in terms of digital strategy. New York has made content verticals work far better than most legacy media companies and built an agile editorial voice that really works for the web; Quartz has been a leader in mobile-first thinking, platform-specific strategy, and new interfaces for content discovery and consumption. Between the two, I’ve probably read 100 of their stories in the past month. They’re really good!

But are they $50 a year good? Or $100 a year good? To go alongside $120 a year for The Atlantic, $90 a year for The New Yorker, $420 a year for Bloomberg, $60 a year for Slate, $50 a year for Medium, debitum ad infinitum?

To be fair, these paid products offer substantially different value propositions, mixing content, membership, and experience. Quartz is keeping its main output free to read and making an interesting education-and-networking play that makes sense for a business site; New York is building a paywall that can flex open or closed depending on a reader’s predicted propensity to pay; The Atlantic is mostly offering a premium experience while leaving the main site open; The New Yorker and Bloomberg offer relatively traditional meters allowing a set number of articles a month.

But only 16 percent of Americans say they are willing to pay for any online news. If someone’s first digital subscription is to the Times or the Post — how many are willing to pay for a second, or a third, or a fourth news site? Especially if that second or third site costs as much or more than their favorite national daily?

To frame it another way: There’s a segment of the population that can grudgingly be convinced to pay for a news site, out of some mix of consumer reward, civic duty, and peer pressure. But that second or third subscription requires a level of devotion that can be hard to sustain in a digital environment where the links come at you from every direction.

Are you Netflix or Seeso?

Or allow me a metaphor: Netflix and Amazon have convinced many millions of people to pay for streaming video. But how many of those people think: That’s not enough, I need more? If The New York Times is Netflix and The Washington Post is Amazon (of course) — are these premium national publishers Seeso? Filmstruck? DramaFever?

One complicating factor is that the line between magazines and daily news used to be much more clearly drawn. What you got from a print subscription to The New Yorker or The Atlantic was distinctly different from what you got from the local daily — in timeframe, in editorial approach, in format. But premium magazines’ expansion online has typically been in a newsier direction. Real-time reactions to Mueller news; breaking news from Capitol Hill; columnizing off the latest outrage — these are things can now appear at any of a dozen quality domain names. Wired does great writing about technology, of course — but is it so distinct from what other sites offer that its value remains as clear as it used to be? The Atlantic had a lot of scoops in the last election cycle — but is breaking campaign news something it’s really going to be better at than the Post?

On one hand, it’s unfair to lump this class of premium paid products together — each will succeed or fail on its own merits, both editorial and strategic. A business publication like Quartz will likely have an easier time of it than a more general-interest outlet like New York. But I think it is a fair question to wonder how far down the Paywall Solution can filter through the editorial ecosystem. Local newspapers have already hit this roadblock: While the Times, Post, and Journal build subscriber bases in the millions, most metro dailies have struggled to go far into the five figures. Only two non-national papers — the Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe — have more than 100,000 paying digital subscribers. Aggregation theory holds that, in a frictionless marketplace, the Internet tends to aggregate power in the hands of a few large players. That’s benefited Google and Facebook — and, on another scale, the Times and the Post. What about everyone else?

I mused about this idea on Twitter yesterday, and here are some the responses I got — keeping in mind that people who follow me on Twitter are necessarily Very Unusual News Consumers:

I’m sorry to hear about this. I read New York Mag at work; I adore The Atlantic. I already pay for WaPo. I don’t want to pay for every site I frequent online

— Lebanexican (@Lebanexican) November 12, 2018

This. There’s only so much I feel comfortable paying for services that are not essential like food/clothing/shelter is.

I news, but if I have to choose between my utility bill and the six subscriptions/recurring donations to news orgs I currently have…

— Wendi C. Thomas (@wendi_c_thomas) November 13, 2018

I think about this quite a bit from a consumer perspective. I do NYT but not WaPo, New Yorker but not Wired/Atlantic. ESPN but not The Athletic. If I let it, I could be nickel and dimed to death with subscriptions.

— Dan_Rowinski (@Dan_Rowinski) November 12, 2018

Especially if they all cover the same things/people/topics. There's a lot more value that can be unlocked when outlets selling subscriptions offer something truly unique & different. That's how the subscription model bring a host of new voices to the fore (IMO).

— Terrell Johnson (@terrellwrites) November 12, 2018

Icksnay on the aywall-pay. Will simply read other content sources — sorry NYM.

— Al Poochini (@alpoochini) November 13, 2018

I get to read ten articles a month on various news sites. Sometimes only one or two articles per month before I'm shut down. I'm not going to pay for news, but it does mean I don't get to check the primary source when I'm reading commentary about something.

— Missus Bennet (@poornerves) November 12, 2018

You can't subscribe to everything. I appreciate @NewYorker's version. There are occasional "must read" stories there that someone I follow links but not enough for me to replace one of my newspaper subscriptions when choosing what to buy.

— Jane (@Poeia) November 12, 2018

Or….it makes it harder for everyday people to discover the great words from the honkers of our time, I wouldn’t have read Ta-Nehisi Coates “Reperations” essay of a paywall had stopped me, or much Ta Nehisi at ALL. Pros and cons, happy to see some people getting some pay for wrk

— Elliott Troy (@AngloGyptian) November 12, 2018

Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, NYT, Economist, New Yorker, The Athletic, Spotify. I like Slate and NY Mag and VF but at a certain point it's enough. Rather go without than pay for more

— Daniel O (@DanOfromNYC) November 12, 2018

exactly. for me it just means i don't read the stories. they should just use ads to pay the bills. or i just reset my browser if I really feel like reading it

— The Count (@Alan87374847) November 12, 2018

Hmmm… I read a ton of content from all of these sources. But I only have subscriptions to @newyorker and @TheAtlantic. I have just been helping myself to free NYMag copy, just because I could. I fully expect to pay up now!

— Chris Daly (@profdaly) November 12, 2018

I'm happy to pay for WaPo and 7 other newspapers (not including the NYT) as well as The Atlantic and The New Yorker. I want to support the sites I rely upon. But I realize I may not be typical.

— Jeri Dansky (@JeriDansky) November 13, 2018

Illustration by Louis Richard used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/11/so-some-people-will-pay-for-a-subscription-to-a-news-site-how-about-two-three/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/10/heres-how-much-americans-trust-38-major-news-organizations-hint-not-all-that-much/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/10/heres-how-much-americans-trust-38-major-news-organizations-hint-not-all-that-much/#respond Fri, 05 Oct 2018 16:30:02 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=163759 Surveys about “media trust” suffer from a definitional problem. “Do you trust the media?” is a meaningful question only if we know what “the media” is. Is it The New York Times and CNN? Fox News and Breitbart? Occupy Democrats and your uncle’s memes on Facebook?

In Gallup’s data on that question — which asks about “the mass media, such as newspapers, TV, and radio” — 72 percent of Americans trusted the media in 1976, post-Watergate. By 2016, that was down to 32 percent. But the media in 1976 was your local daily, Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, and Harry Reasoner. “The media” is something fundamentally different now, and a decline in trust is a rational reaction to that, even in an environment less polarized than our own.

All this is to say that I find trust questions about specific news organizations a bit more useful, since you know with much greater confidence what the person being queried has in mind. And we have a new data set looking at just that, from Simmons Research.

Simmons surveyed 2,009 Americans in August asking them whether or not they trusted 38 different news organizations. Here are the results:

A few things pop out here. The bottom six — Breitbart, DailyKos, Palmer Report, Occupy Democrats, InfoWars, and in last place, Daily Caller — are all explicitly partisan sites without a pre-Internet legacy brand to fall back on. (Three liberal, three conservative.) I’d argue there are important distinctions to be made between them — InfoWars’ status as our nation’s leading lizard-people conspiracy den makes it stand out — but the average American seems to lump them together as untrustworthy.

At the top sits The Wall Street Journal, whose combination of respected news pages and conservative editorial pages seem to be a magic formula for generating trust across the ideological spectrum. (When Pew Research did a similar exercise in 2014, the Journal was the only publisher to be more trusted than untrusted in all ideological subgroups.) Then come the major networks, then the national newspapers, then wire services. A few surprises, to me: Forbes and The Washington Times ranking as highly as they did, and Mother Jones and Slate ranking as poorly as they did.

Fox News finished roughly in the middle, behind all the other cable and network news operations, but still with 44.7 percent saying they trust it. (In completely unrelated news, Donald Trump got 46.1 percent of the vote in 2016.) Fox finished tied with The Economist.

“The Doubters”

Simmons highlights one depressing finding: 13 percent of Americans said they found none of these news outlets trustworthy. Simmons terms this group “the Doubters.” (Passing up the equally applicable “the LOL Nothing Matters.”)

This group of info-nihilists is less likely to vote than the median American, but Simmons nonetheless estimates they made up about 6 million of the 129 million who cast votes in 2016. And they were much more likely to support Trump (62.2 percent) than Hillary Clinton (27.8 percent).

(This is my math, not Simmons’, but if those percentages are right, the Doubters netted out to contribute a 1.464 million vote margin for Trump. That’s about 1.13 percent of all votes cast. Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by 0.22, 0.72, and 0.76 percent, respectively.)

Who are these Doubters? Simmons asked these questions in the context of a larger consumer survey, so they have some interesting detail. Doubters are:

Much less likely [than the average American] to be a Democrat, much more likely to not identify with any political party at all, but just as likely to be Republican as anyone else

More likely to have married at some point, but also more likely to be widowed/divorced

Much less likely to be well educated

Less affluent

Less likely to be politically knowledgeable

Less likely to spend their time on social media, and less likely to spend time online in general

Somewhat less likely to consume any media, including television, radio, newspapers, and magazines

What are the consumption behaviors that Doubters are particularly into? They’re significantly more likely to read Soap Opera Digest, FamilyFun, Seventeen, TV Guide, InStyle, and…Playboy. (The issue of trust in centerfolds goes unexplored in this study.) They watch We TV, TLC, and “Married at First Sight.” They drive Chevys, have cell service through MetroPCS, and eat at Bob Evans.

At the same time, though, “Doubters were very much like the rest of the country demographically, in terms of age, gender, race, ethnicity, and religion.”

Debates about media trust often end up debating a list of things news organizations could do in order to regain it. (Greater transparency! Events in the community! Solutions journalism! Um, blockchain!) But this data suggests that, at least for a small but significant share of the American public, the mistrust goes far, far deeper than a better corrections policy or hiring an ombudsman. It’s a deep-seated, core belief.

Photo by thefriendlyuser used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/10/heres-how-much-americans-trust-38-major-news-organizations-hint-not-all-that-much/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/09/newsonomics-what-the-anonymous-new-york-times-op-ed-shows-us-about-the-press-now/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/09/newsonomics-what-the-anonymous-new-york-times-op-ed-shows-us-about-the-press-now/#respond Mon, 10 Sep 2018 14:12:10 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=162944 In 1954, at the moment history tells us that Sen. Joe McCarthy’s witch hunt had already lost some of its power, he still held a 35 percent approval rating among Americans, down only 10 points from four years earlier.

Twenty years later, after the Senate Watergate Committee opened its hearings and news accounts had pilloried Richard Nixon, he still held a 44 percent approval rating. Even about a year later, as he awaited his getaway helicopter, a quarter of Americans thought highly of him.

Now, 45 years later, the 45th president finds himself seemingly cornered by criminal convictions of his associates, the most unflattering of tell-all portraits, and one of his own anonymously belittling him in the pages of The New York Times, Trump tests the bottom of 40th percentile in recent polls.

This history matters, as we try to put into perspective the week’s escalation in the unprecedented war between a presidency and the press. As the Financial Times put it in a headline Friday, “Media challenges Trump for control of the news cycle.”

Is that what’s going on? Is that our takeaway in this collision of this president, the press and polls?

That’s where the historical evidence offers a lesson. We won’t likely be able to pinpoint turning points for quite awhile. Historians tell us that large parts of the American populace long maintained their support of those we now see as historically disgraced. Polling often seems to show a false sense of stability — steady, steady and steady…until it’s not, as Nate Silver has pointed out.

Historian and former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham provided that perspective in an All Things Considered interview a couple of weeks ago.

“Thirty percent of the country is going to be with the incumbent I think no matter what. If they carry him out in handcuffs, 30 percent of the country is going to say it was a witch hunt; it was a frame-up,” Meacham said. “The thing to watch is, where is the 60, 65 percent of the country that is not part of a die-hard base for this particular person?”

Do we see movement in that group, as the rat-a-tat of criminal conviction, indictment, and an ever-aggressive press continues to make a difference?

The most recent polls show some, albeit uncertain, approval/disapproval movement. To Meacham’s point, though, the majorities lining up in opposition to a Manafort pardon, to a Sessions ousting, and to a termination of the Mueller investigation seem to be slightly growing.

What is the press’s role in this epic drama?

It is, at its best, the strong and steady hand at keeping the public informed. No surprise, it is the twin Watergate-tested news institutions of The New York Times and The Washington Post that continue to lead that informing.

The “senior official in the Trump administration” didn’t choose The Wall Street Journal or Fox News. The Journal certainly would have been authoritative enough, but, even after a decade of Rupert Murdoch ownership, it’s still not remotely close to competing with The New York Times in national authority.

In choosing The New York Times to distribute the anonymous op-ed, “I am part of the resistance inside the Trump administration,” the Republican writer reaffirmed what we’ve only seen reinforced in the last two years: The Times still stands for credible, accountable, agenda-setting news reporting and analysis. The right-wing pseudo press may decry it, but, day after day, they follow it. They remain reactive.

The dozens of interviewees who provided The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward their insider’s view of this White House could have said no to 11 p.m. requests for interviews. But enough of them didn’t. Why? As Alicia Shepard put it: “Because he doesn’t make things up.” Decades of Woodward books and of Washington Post journalism — for most, the two are indistinguishable — still demand attention and command belief in stubborn facts.

Take this Gary Tuchman CNN piece, interviewing diners at the Dew Drop Inn in Mobile, as they observe the public disparagement of their hometown boy Jeff Sessions by the president. The 2:37 video is immediately classic, but tune in at 1:00 and see Tuchman as local Mark Dodson is asked about Trump’s disparaging of Sessions and of southerners.

“It’s upsetting and very discouraging that in fact he would do that, if in fact, he did that, if you believe it,” says Dodson, after Tuchman notes Trump’s “stupid Southerner” comment, as reported in Woodward’s book.

Tuchman asks, “So, do you believe the book?”

“I’m not sure. In Washington, what can you believe?”

Tuchman wouldn’t let him off the hook.

“Who would you believe more, a guy like Bob Woodward or the president of the United States?”

Hesitantly, Dodson answers, “If I were honest about it, I’d probably believe Mr. Woodward.”

If you listen to Times op-ed editor James Dao’s explanation on The Daily, it’s so straightforward as to make the question of publication a non-question. The Times depends on confidential, anonymous-but-known-to-be authoritative sources, to bring us the news, facts and analysis. In this case, the Times editors applied the same kind of thinking editors do every day. Newsworthy? Verified? Contributes to public understanding? Check, check, check. (The Times answered reader questions about the op-ed here.)

Those who say the op-ed offers “nothing new” miss a point. It is the very corroboration here (as On the Media’s Bob Garfield pointed out) that increases its import.

Is the op-ed writer a hero or a coward, or both? What message was trying to be sent; what was received? Shouldn’t the writer go public? All great questions, but not for the Times to decide. This is the reality of “We report, you decide” journalism.

The polls will go up, and the polls will come down. It’s the steadiness and steeliness of the American press that can lead us out of this morass. That requires, of course, a robust business under the press.

So how good is this op-ed for the Times’ business? The op-ed is approaching 20 million pageviews, but that astounding number still represents spit in an ocean.

Almost a decade ago, the Times began to forswear page-spinning goals in favor of reader revenue. The Times has consistently, amid many challenges of digital disruption, maintained that reader-first strategy. Now that service is recompensed in the most direct and enduring way: By having readers pay for the journalism itself.

Today, Times readers — 3.8 million subscribers, digital and print — contribute about 63 percent of all Times revenues. Will the op-ed help the Times’ business? Yes, but in the medium and longer term — this isn’t the old days of selling single copies off a blockbuster story or series.

It’s not just high-ranking Republicans who still recognize the primacy of The New York Times in the nation’s life, it’s the readers.

How does the Times measure that effect?

Number one, it bolsters the most important goal of the Times: retention of all those subscribers, pre- and post-Trump Bump. Number two, it will help, sale by sale, in acquisition.

We can call it brand-building. When The New York Times authentically fills its mandates as a national leading news source, it burnishes its brand. And brand equals long-term value, both to readers and for advertisers.

The Times isn’t alone here. Both the Post and CNN can claim similar service and benefit. Then, there’s been a host of reader-first (some increasingly digital subscription-focused) news companies playing significant roles. Those include The Atlantic, NBC, BuzzFeed, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Vox, NPR, Mother Jones, and New York Magazine. It is in the diversity of digital age-enhanced national press that we see the value of wider news reporting and analysis of it.

They’ve led the way, even as we see the results of the decade-long diminishment of newspaper chains’ DC bureaus. Once, those operations often broke national stories; in recent months, only the McClatchy DC bureau’s Trump coverage seems immediately memorable. Still, the Boston Globe-led effort to defend the press against the President’s “enemy of the people” statements — one signed onto by more than 400 dailies — managed some reassurance of local newspapers’ backbone at this unprecedented time.

We don’t do journalism to win popularity contests. We do the work before history has done its adjudication. That’s why we call it the first draft of history.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/09/newsonomics-what-the-anonymous-new-york-times-op-ed-shows-us-about-the-press-now/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/08/how-the-wall-street-journal-is-revamping-its-newsletters-and-trying-to-add-some-whimsy/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/08/how-the-wall-street-journal-is-revamping-its-newsletters-and-trying-to-add-some-whimsy/#respond Wed, 08 Aug 2018 16:00:55 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=161562 The Wall Street Journal is not exactly known for its sense of whimsy — but that’s what the folks revamping its newsletter system are aiming for.

When Cory Schouten and Annemarie Dooling (formerly of CJR/Indianapolis Business Journal and Vox Media, respectively) joined the Journal’s newsletter team earlier this year, they embarked on the journey of whittling down the paper’s 126 newsletters. Some were automated but didn’t generate many clicks; others had a little more voice, but a pretty dry voice nonetheless.

That whittling has led to what are now around 40 streamlined, audience-driven emails. They can now feature market information updating in real time (even after a newsletter is sent), and coaxing non-payers toward a subscription is core to their mission and design. (This process began under product designer Cory Etzkorn three years ago and accelerated through a migration to the Campaign Monitor platform since last fall.)

“When we walked into it, they’d been added [one by one] over many years,” Etzkorn said. “One year a Life and Arts newsletter would get added, then Sports would get added, but a different team or person would lead the design or strategy. Over a decade, we had a portfolio of close to 50 newsletters that looked totally different. They didn’t all have the Wall Street Journal logo. Some were just autogenerated lists of links, others were more thoughtful. Some were really good. Some weren’t so good.”

He spearheaded the design team’s build of a modular newsletter structure as the decision was made not to re-license their previous email newsletter vendor. (They wouldn’t name names.) Dooling, who built newsletters at Racked and later Vox Media from the ground up (she shared her lessons learned here), came onboard as the product lead two months ago, while Schouten has been shaping the newsroom’s perspective on newsletters for the past five months as senior editor.

“Because newsletters were an afterthought when I got here, there wasn’t really a system for what we were doing with these numbers — they were all being thrown at editors, engineers, everyone,” Dooling said. “I would look at the list and figure out: If these people aren’t clicking what are they doing with newsletter and what can we give them?”

The Journal, like other publications of its venerable stature, has been trying to find its way in the journalism world today — it slipped behind The New York Times and The Washington Post on scoops and Pulitzers under a rocky five years with a now-exited editor-in-chief. But the organization has also beefed up its digital strategy department and been experimenting with personalization, bendy paywalls, and now newsletters (they ditched blogs). Here are some of the ways they’ve tried to breathe new life into their emails.

The Journal thinks (and tests) a lot about the prospective subscriber and getting them across their flexible paywall, which changes how a visitor to the site encounters the paywall based on their individual propensity score. My colleague Shan Wang described the framework earlier this year:

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

“If we’re thinking about the newsletter that is for members only, what does the landing page look like? What’s the signup form? Does the whole experience feel premium? Does it feel like something special you get as a member?” Dooling said. To win over prospective subscribers, “it’s not enough to give them a cheaper version. It’s more about how can we show you the content we have for you in the best way possible without making it less of an experience.”

That also means measuring different newsletters differently; premium newsletters might focus more on open rate while free ones worry more about clickthroughs, for example. “Each newsletter ultimately has a role and a responsibility,” Schouten said.

Case study: The 10-Point newsletter

Flagged to readers as “a personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal,” this newsletter is curated by the editor-in-chief in the style of the Journal’s (print) front-page What’s News column. Close media observers might remember that the Journal’s previous editor-in-chief, Gerard Baker, left the lead role in June, transitioning to editor-at-large, a weekend columnist, and host of a Journal-themed show at Fox Business Network. His successor, Matt Murray, quickly stepped in.

In two weeks, Dooling, Schouten, Etzkorn, and the rest of the newsletter brigade rebuilt the flagship newsletter. They broke up the blocks of text into 10 numbered points — stopping it from getting truncated in Gmail — and aimed for a briefer, more streamlined style so readers could better scan. (Plus, the 10th point, “Today’s Question and Answer,” shares the responses of readers to the previous day’s prompt.)

After the revamped version debuted, the team asked readers to share their thoughts and ran the “hundreds of responses” through IBM’s Watson, Schouten said; the prevailing sentiment: “joy.”

“The idea of a morning newsletter relaunching and generating joy is really exciting feedback to read,” he said.

Tomorrow’s newsletter

Next on the trio’s list is taming the email lists of the legacy organization to maintain sender integrity (as few Promotions filters as possible!) and running the ideas like the series nudge and real-time modules through more tests over the next few months. Dooling also wants to take a step back and look at the user experience more broadly.

“The newsletter itself in your inbox is simply not enough,” she said. “What is it like to speak to the editor if you reply? What do you want to do with the information? What is the action involved when you get this newsletter?”

“We’re trying to innovate on a platform that hasn’t really innovated in a long time,” Etzkorn said.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/08/how-the-wall-street-journal-is-revamping-its-newsletters-and-trying-to-add-some-whimsy/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/2018/05/europes-general-data-protection-regulation-is-coming-may-25-how-have-news-publishers-prepared/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/05/europes-general-data-protection-regulation-is-coming-may-25-how-have-news-publishers-prepared/#respond Thu, 03 May 2018 15:26:09 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=157756 The maximum penalty for breaking Europe’s coming General Data Protection Regulation laws — a massive revamp of the EU’s data privacy requirements, with a worldwide impact — is the higher of the following two options: €20 million, or 4 percent of a company’s worldwide annual revenue.

Do the math: That would mean fines of more than €3.6 billion for Google’s parent company Alphabet, €5.9 billion for Amazon, and €1.3 billion for Facebook. (A law that states “the processing of personal data should be designed to serve mankind” in its introduction isn’t kidding around. You can read the full text here.)

GDPR will take effect May 25, and it will apply most directly to companies based in the 28 member states of the European Union and the three additional countries in the European Single Market. But they’re also written to cover European users of companies not based in Europe (so yes, that means you, U.S.-based website with any audience at all coming to you from inside Europe).

And wherever you are, if you’ve ever signed up for a publisher’s newsletter and gotten a spate of “please confirm again that you really want this newsletter now” and “please see how our privacy policies have changed” emails lately, GDPR is why (some organizations may have collected your information in not-necessarily-GDPR-compliant ways in the past, so you’ll need to give your informed consent this time around).

Digital news organizations collect and store the personal information of readers, and they have contracts with vendors who do the same — so they’ll need to follow the new rules, too, or face the same potential financial punishment. At the gravest level, for instance, a hypothetical GDPR violation by The New York Times might result in a fine of more than €56 million, far more than the amount it’s investing in growing its digital audience and revenue from outside the U.S.

“You have a golden necklace as a user, and I’m allowed to borrow that necklace”

The complexity of the new rules — all 260 pages (in English) and 99 articles of them — has spawned an entire new industry of GDPR consultants. But boiled down into (oversimplified) buckets that relevant to news organizations, GDPR asks organizations to:

• Obtain consent from users before collecting information that could identify them, which could include non-identifying data points that taken together might identify a real person (think location, IP address);
• Present easy-to-find-and-understand explanations for what collected data is being used to do (we retain your email, because you subscribed to us so we could send you our newsletter); and
• Be able to provide clear information to users about what information is being collected, and be able to delete that information at a user’s request.

Threaded throughout GDPR are principles of data minimization (processing the least amount of data necessary to complete a task) and accountability (companies need to report any data breach, including the nature and scope of the breach, within 72 hours of discovering it).

If fairly and evenly enforced, applied in good faith (no GDPR trolls following the blueprint of patent trolls), and interpreted in a way that isn’t just businesses hiring lawyers to find loopholes to maintain the status quo, GDPR seems, well, reasonable!

“You have a golden necklace as a user, and I’m allowed to borrow that necklace, and I’m allowed to use it for a party. But then you’re then allowed to ask me what I’m using the necklace for, and where I’m going with it. When are you going to wear it, and why do you need it for so long?” Han-Menno Depeweg, digital director of NRC Handelsblad, a national subscription daily newspaper in the Netherlands, told me when I tossed a bunch of my own metaphors at him. “If you use that as a comparison to data from the user, then you have a feeling of what the law might mean.”

Still, publishers have granular questions over interpreting parts of the law and around how rigorously the EU will enforce these rules come May. (In GDPR’s crosshairs are advertising giants like Google and Facebook, as well as the adtech industry.) There’s also a less covered, but also consequential ePrivacy law in the works in the EU which will work alongside GDPR, but which hasn’t been finalized yet, with EU member states and relevant interest groups tussling over how the two sets of regulations would interact. (A German magazine trade group argued earlier this year that what it requires would cripple the publications’ ability to make money on digital ads.)

“It’s a lot of homework to be done, because they hadn’t done any of it”

Many of the news organizations I reached out to, both in Europe and in the U.S., declined to speak on the record, citing fears around whether they were interpreting the law correctly and anticipating a few first legal battles that might give more guidance on enforcement. News organizations who were more open about their delicately tuned approaches to targeting different types of readers were hesitant when I asked about the steps they were taking to become GDPR compliant. (The Wall Street Journal pointed me to a set of previously published comments from Dow Jones Media Group publisher Almar Latour, and said that regarding changes that will be visible to Journal readers, “we are still working out the specifics and can’t yet speak publicly on it.” The New York Times declined to comment. The Guardian declined to comment. Many more organizations, after a few brief email exchanges, eventually ghosted.)

For these publishers, a massive amount of compliance work is happening behind the scenes that won’t be discernible to the public come May 25.

“Right now, it’s quite a huge effort internally,” Ingvild Næss, Schibsted Media Group’s chief privacy officer, told me. Schibsted is the parent company of several news organizations in Sweden, which is a European Union member, as well as in Norway, which is not an EU member but is part of the single market. Schibsted is also a more-than-7,000-employee media giant with a global presence, though its primary editorial products are newspapers in Sweden and Norway. “That is of course because now we are not only looking forward and doing what we need to do going forward on May 25, but it’s also been necessary to clean up our older stuff to make sure that lives up to GDPR standards as well.”

Næss said Schibsted’s work falls into three main categories: legal and compliance, product and UX, and everything that needs to be done relating to the tech stack.

“We definitely have dedicated projects ongoing. We have a central privacy product team, we have a central privacy engineering team, and so forth. On all these dimensions, we see that GDPR will now require us to work differently,” she said. “We are moving away from just relying on traditional, needlessly long privacy policies written by lawyers. This will be up to your clever UX people to figure out the most efficient ways to communicate with end users; it’s not lawyers who are the best people to do that. The communication around user data must be in the flow of the product itself. It cannot be hidden somewhere, at the bottom of a page.”

Schibsted is playing with new elements for its sites, such as a simple animated figure that will explain to users about how their data will be used. The company currently has a single login system (called SpID) across all its properties, where users of any of its services can manage preferences in a centralized place, from notifications to newsletter subscriptions.

“Going forward, what we will see is our users will be able to have dashboard control centers where it’ll be possible to see information about what data we have on them, with options to ask for deletion, to ask us to take out data, to control the way we use data,” Næss said.

GDPR (and ePrivacy, when passed) will have impacts continent-wide, but some countries have already been operating under similar laws. The Netherlands, for instance, has a Personal Data Protection Act in place (it will be replaced by GDPR come May 25) which is similar in spirit to many of GDPR’s specifications, such as requiring quick turnaround when an organization discovers a data breach.

“In the Netherlands, there’s already a law, so for us it’s a fine-tuning of what’s already in place. One of the things we’re working on is that we need to use clearer language. Our privacy policies need to be plain language, which is doable, but it’s more work,” Depeweg of NRC Handelsblad said. “So we need to get privacy statements 100 percent compliant, we need to run data security checks, we need to work on data minimization, we need to get everyone training. It’s a 100 percent effort by the whole company, and we have to get it from the person at the front desk to the person in IT — everybody has to understand what this law entails.”

64 percent of newsroom leaders recently surveyed by the Reuters Institute said they were “confident” their company was ready for GDPR. But a full third are on shakier ground: 17 percent said they were not confident, 15 percent said they weren’t sure, and 4 percent said they didn’t know what GDPR was (oops).

“If somebody is telling you they’re 100 percent GDPR-ready already, I just don’t know if that can be true. Everybody is working toward this deadline — at least every company I know,” Oliver von Wersch, CEO and founder of a digital media consultancy, whose work on GDPR compliance came up in a few conversations I had with publishers. “The sheer mass of things to be done before May 25 is significant and is taking up a lot of resources inside the company.”

von Wersch said his three-person team also works with media companies on problems around platform strategy and monetization, but because of the May 25 deadline, about 80 percent of the projects they’re working on with his European clients are GDPR related. (You can witness the general frenzy in the posting activity of all the GDPR groups that have mushroomed on Facebook.)

“You need lawyers, data security people, IT people for figuring out where you’re storing the personal data of your readers, which system it’s going into, how you’re going to handle backups. A normal news website will have processes around their user registration, content management, business intelligence, analytics, and you have to be able to describe these,” he said. “It’s not that this is killing publishers, it’s just that it’s a lot of homework to be done, because they hadn’t done any of it.”

You know that feeling when, you’ve had a busy week, so instead of putting away your clothes, you leave them all over the place, and when you’re late to your doctor’s appointment at the end of the week, you can’t find your wallet or keys, which are probably buried somewhere under a week’s worth of pants? Except, the messy clothes = disorganized data collection practices and the bloat of various trackers on a news site; and the wallet and keys = what you need the reader data for and where and how all that’s being collected. When a news organization loads an ad on its site for audiences, it might not be aware what else is loading, including, say, tracking pixels advertisers use to verify the impressions they’re getting on that ad — these practices can get identifiable information about people into the hands of dozens, even hundreds of other companies.

GiveMeSport, for instance, ran an analysis of its site and found as many as 500 companies who were processing its readers’ personal data, likely in ways not compliant with GDPR, the sports publisher said at a Digiday summit in London on Tuesday. It didn’t even recognize most of them. Finding out details leads to this weird dance: X company asks Y vendor if they are GDPR compliant, but Y vendor has a contract with Z vendor, so needs to know if Z vendor is compliant before it can confirm with X company.

“This is the hot potato. From our side, we’ve done technical due diligence with all our key suppliers, and we’ve gone into real detail as to how they use data,” Anthony Hitchings, digital advertising operations director at the Financial Times, said at an Advertising Week Europe event in March (the FT declined my interview request). “One bit of due diligence took us over a year. Another vendor, we went down the path of trying to understand what they did. We started to understand they were capturing IP details in full, which then meant they could build a complete browsing picture of user on the web, then we went, this is not a partner we’re comfortable dealing with.”

“Nobody knows exactly”

Going through contracts with each individual vendor is time-consuming, though von Wersch said the assumption from many publishers has been that as long as they’re on track in negotiating with all their vendors, even if not every one of them is settled by May 25, they’ll still be OK. Some Dutch lawmakers have expressed leniency from the first few months the law is enacted, Depeweg said, with a focus on educating companies not fully compliant rather than jumping to fines (except in blatant cases of violation). The French data protection authority CNIL also suggested they would give a grace period.

“One uncertainty is what the local data security authorities, who are in charge of monitoring the fulfillment of GDPR, will do after May 25. Will they look at the big picture, will they focus on the transparency element, will they look at supplier contracts?” von Wersch said. “Nobody knows exactly, so we’re driving in a tunnel, and you don’t know how long this tunnel is, what comes out at the end. Will they see some things as more important than others? That’s also different in different European countries: We Germans, for example, like to look at contracts. I’ve heard U.K. authorities may be looking closely at privacy policies.”

Publishers will take different approaches to obtaining consent from readers for different products, and making sure readers know what they’re consenting to and what they will or won’t get if they opt out.

Some of Schibsted’s offerings, like personalized Swedish news app Omni, Næss said, won’t work as they should if they can’t collect reader data.

“Here there are a lot of questions remaining still on the user experience of someone who is opting out,” she said. “With the product range we have, we are amongst the ones that argue we do have some particular services where we see it doesn’t really make sense to offer it for users not willing to share data. For such services, the main thing is that a user understands what kind of service it is, and how data are used to show you content that you may be interested in. If you have that information from the start, you can make an informed choice whether to use the service or not.” (“As a starting point,” users who opt out of everything will still see ads when they visit Schibsted properties, but will just get non-targeted ads, either contextual or totally random.)

What about outlets that use reader data strategically to target offers? Publishers have talked about adding a popup on pages asking for some of their information, in exchange for reading a story, according to Dow Jones Media Group publisher Latour, who spoke to Adweek.

“In many ways, publishers are in a very unique position in which under the new rules — and the rules are fairly clear — publishers are going to need to have narrow, specific consent for any purposes that they’re leveraging data,” said Jason Kint, CEO of a trade association of digital publishers, Digital Content Next. “Any companies that don’t have a direct relationship with their users, and in particular that don’t have a direct, trusted relationship with users, are going to be in a difficult position.”

“There are elements of the regulation that make certain publishers uncomfortable, the ones that are either are overly dependent on adtech, third-party behavioral tracking,” he added. “There’re nuances to whether or not they need to get consent for things that, in many ways, even the user doesn’t want to have to deal with. When a user visits a website, the idea of having to get notifications for things like just personalizing the page for them is kind of outside consumer expectations, whereas tracking somebody across the entire web, most users would have a significant issue with.”

“Google the controller”

There’s one big elephant in the room that needs addressing. Google’s take on GDPR is that it’s asking publishers who use its ad products to obtain consent from users of that site running the ads, saying that Google will be “co-controller” of the data that’s collected — a strategy the Wall Street Journal first reported back in March. (A “controller” is the company responsible for how personal data is processed and used; a “processor” under GDPR processes data as instructed by the controller, and still has legal obligations under GDPR. Google, for instance, classifies Google Analytics as a “processor.”)

“We don’t want to stand between publishers and their users,” Carlo D’Asaro Biondo, president of partnerships at Google for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, told the Journal in a statement. “That’s why we are asking our partners to get consent for the way they use our services on their sites.”

“We have always asked publishers to get consent for the use of our ad tech on their sites, and now we’re simply updating that requirement in line with the GDPR,” a spokesperson told the UK’s Press Gazette. Google pointed to tools it’s offering publishers to help with consent-gathering.

But a plan communicated fully to publishers two short months before the May 25 deadline, when Google had several years, hasn’t inspired confidence that this is a GDPR compliance strategy executed in good faith. On the other hand, it’s going to be tough for publishers to turn down Google’s proposal and risk losing access to all that ad revenue.

Publishing trade groups like Digital Content Next have shouted at Google about it, most recently with a fiery open letter last week representing about 4,000 publishers worldwide.

“If you show up, like, six weeks before GDPR comes into place with a completely different understanding of the law, this is far too short a timeframe for publishers to implement anything in the direction that’s required,” von Wersch said. “In the Google approach, you would need to actively provide consent by the user, and it takes time to collect the consent from your userbase. You need not weeks, but months, maybe years.” (DCN’s Kint had an even more succinct response: Hell no.)

Well, now we’re counting down to May 25 not with weeks, but with days. Good luck, everybody.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/05/europes-general-data-protection-regulation-is-coming-may-25-how-have-news-publishers-prepared/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/after-years-of-testing-the-wall-street-journal-has-built-a-paywall-that-bends-to-the-individual-reader/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/after-years-of-testing-the-wall-street-journal-has-built-a-paywall-that-bends-to-the-individual-reader/#respond Thu, 22 Feb 2018 18:49:22 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=154694 The Wall Street Journal thinks it might know your reading habits — and your potential spending habits — better than you know them yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Platform 9 3/4 at King’s Cross station. Photo by Johan Larsson used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/after-years-of-testing-the-wall-street-journal-has-built-a-paywall-that-bends-to-the-individual-reader/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/with-my-wsj-the-wall-street-journal-makes-a-personalized-content-feed-central-to-its-app/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/with-my-wsj-the-wall-street-journal-makes-a-personalized-content-feed-central-to-its-app/#respond Mon, 11 Dec 2017 15:02:38 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=151567 When you think about the apps you most commonly use on your phone, a lot of them have one thing in common: They need you to be any good. Facebook, Spotify, your email and calendar apps — none of them are really of any use without your login.

“Take you out of these apps and they become useless,” said Phil Izzo, the deputy chief news editor at The Wall Street Journal. And so when, in recent months, the Journal began redesigning its mobile app, personalization was one of the most important considerations. The ultimate result, released in an iOS 11 update last month, was My WSJ, a feed that’s the second panel after the homescreen and that uses AI to offer a customized list of stories based on users’ previous reading habits.

“We wanted to see how we can thread general app trends into the Journal’s app,” said Jordan Sudy, the Journal’s iOS product director. “People are used to scrolling feeds; the dwell time in the feed has gotten longer — we see people spending a long time in the feed now, relative to what they used to do. People are also getting more and more accustomed to AI recommendations, and we’re seeing that the core Journal reader is interested in AI-generated content, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of what the newsroom is giving them.”

The AI is a big part of the strategy: The Journal really wanted this to be passive personalization. “We were trying to avoid, as much as possible, some Apple News–type screen where you have to select your topics before you jump in,” said Izzo. “Any time you try to get people to set things up, it’s a barrier.”

“This is not the whole Flipboard model where you have to click through five screens [to get your customized feed],” said Sudy. “We don’t have to ask you anything. We just know, by virtue of you being a Journal reader, what you’d like to read and what you should read. You don’t have to tell us anything.” Journal parent company Dow Jones has for months been undertaking the process of tagging content across all of its brands and using those tags to create links between stories; it’s the technology that powers the “Related Stories” feature on desktop, for instance. But this was the first time that the personalization had been brought into the app.

When a user opens the Journal’s app, the first thing they see is the News feed, which looks the same for everyone and is curated by editorial. The My WSJ feed, meanwhile, is populated entirely through AI and doesn’t include human curation. “We wanted you to know very quickly that [News] is what editors are recommending, and [My WSJ] is recommended based on your habits,” said Sudy.

One of the questions that the team had was whether the addition of the My WSJ feed would cannibalize or enhance the presence of the human-curated News feed. Would readers simply swipe past News to get to the stuff aimed directly at them? Though My WSJ has only been around since November 1, data so far seems to suggest that it’s been an enhancement. “It’s not cannibalizing anything. It’s been completely additive,” said Izzo. “There aren’t fewer people going to other sections. They’re just going to this section in addition. We’re seeing increased pageviews.”

The app is the only place where the Journal offers a customized feed. There’s no “recommended for you” section on desktop, at least not yet, though the team is working on tracking logged-in users across web and app, so that the My WSJ feed in the app will ultimately be able to serve up content based on things users had read on the web. The Journal’s app attracts “the corest of core readers,” Izzo pointed out, who are already interested in going to sections and landing pages, whereas a lot of web traffic comes sideways from search, so maintaining a personalized feed for them would be more difficult. “The app is that playground where we can try things that somebody coming in from social wouldn’t be interested in,” he said. (The New York Times, meanwhile, is taking a different approach, doing more subtle personalization on desktop.)

In addition to the passive personalization offered in My WSJ, the team is looking cautiously at some forms of active personalization, though Sudy remains wary of making users do too much work. Users can now follow individual Journal journalists and receive notifications when they publish new stories; with the relaunch of the paper’s Markets Data Center, the team plans to let users get alerts on news about individual companies, as well.

One big challenge for news companies is how granular they can or should get with push notifications. Are there any plans to send out push alerts to readers when new stories come up that they, specifically, might be interested in?

“We have not yet done automatic push alerts based on reading behavior, and we’d tread very lightly with that,” said Izzo, who is wary of overloading readers. Still, he and Sudy said it wouldn’t be a difficult feature to build. “We could probably make it happen pretty easily. We’ll think about that.”

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/with-my-wsj-the-wall-street-journal-makes-a-personalized-content-feed-central-to-its-app/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-new-york-times-has-halved-its-free-monthly-articles-to-5-its-most-significant-paywall-change-since-2012/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-new-york-times-has-halved-its-free-monthly-articles-to-5-its-most-significant-paywall-change-since-2012/#comments Fri, 01 Dec 2017 16:34:38 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=151162 The great paywall tightening of 2017 continues. The New York Times said Friday that it will cut the number of free articles available to “most” non-subscribers each month from 10 to five, Bloomberg reported. The change is the most significant one the Times has made to its pay model since 2012, when it cut the number of monthly free articles from 20 to 10. (According to Bloomberg, “The Times may eventually offer a different number of free articles to non-subscribers based on how they arrive or their reading habits.”)

For the Times, the move is an effort to capitalize on what’s been a revitalizing moment for journalism. The “Trump bump” surge in subscribers that news organizations saw after last year’s election has proven to be more than a temporary phenomenon, both broadly and at the Times itself: The Times saw its digital subscriber count surge to nearly 2.5 million in the third quarter of 2017, a 59 percent increase over the previous year. Roughly 154,000 of those digital-only subscribers came last quarter alone. By tightening its paywall further, the Times is tweaking the knobs to convince more subscribers to pay up.

The Times joins many other large news organizations that have also made major tweaks to their paid models this year. In February, The Wall Street Journal stopped offering Google visitors free access to paywalled stories, ending a years-long capitulation to Google’s “first-click free” policy (Google ended that policy in October). The Washington Post has experimented with throwing new hurdles at non-subscribers, too, such as requiring them to submit their email addresses, and will soon stop free access for university-based readers. The Boston Globe cut its free articles from five every 45 days to just two..

The new paywall restrictions come as the digital advertising environment continues to darken for most companies not named Google and Facebook, which have snatched up most of the growth in digital ad spending. Seeing the writing on the wall, news organizations are increasingly looking to their readers to help make up for the losses on the ad side. (Wired, for example, said this week that it will introduce a metered paywall next year.)

Pretty remarkable https://t.co/aQSgZ866Qf pic.twitter.com/CROjnEqcSu

— David Uberti (@DavidUberti) December 1, 2017

This may help explain why news organizations, including the Times, aren’t letting the potential traffic declines from tighter paywalls dissuade them from making it harder for readers to access their content for free: Any ad revenue declines that result from fewer pageviews are likely to pale in comparison to the revenue gains from new subscribers. It’s hard to argue that it’s not an experiment worth conducting.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/the-new-york-times-has-halved-its-free-monthly-articles-to-5-its-most-significant-paywall-change-since-2012/feed/ 7 https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/11/newsonomics-the-new-york-times-mark-thompson-on-regulating-facebook-global-ambition-and-when-to-stop-the-presses-forever/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/11/newsonomics-the-new-york-times-mark-thompson-on-regulating-facebook-global-ambition-and-when-to-stop-the-presses-forever/#comments Mon, 13 Nov 2017 16:24:07 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=150205 Five years is a long time, especially in the media business.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our conversation is condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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

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

The Sunday paper and the future of print

Doctor: It seems like the next stage of the global initiative is very much focused on English-speaking countries.

Thompson: They’re simultaneous. These are simultaneous gestures. One of which is, essentially, try hard to go for low-hanging fruit, frankly — which makes it sound like this is easy. It’s not easy. But look hard at your most obvious customer, the English-language reader.

Doctor: So it’s the same language and it’s essentially the product as it is. What are you learning, as you go in Australia, Canada, the U.K., perhaps, about how much different content do you have to offer? Or is it mainly different presentation?

Thompson: Firstly, we’re probably about nine months in our Canada/Australia/U.K. thinking and experimentation. Each market is different. We don’t think there’s a package.

Doctor: And you said you’re doing pricing experiments in Canada more, right?

Thompson: I would say, essentially, we’re now testing pricing, principally, through offers. Testing price, continuously, everywhere.

Doctor: And more higher price or more lower price?

Thompson: Typically, higher price is in the context of can we encourage you to pay for a higher price bundle which might include other things like crossword and cooking, for example.

Creating new bundles of joy

Doctor: Let’s talk about bundles a little. Your first paid numbers on Cooking were pretty good. You just launched in July and had 23,000 subscriptions. With Cooking, you’re providing that free to subscribers. With Crosswords [at 26,000 new subscriptions in the last quarter, 332,000 in total], some subscribers have to pay 50 percent of the price for it. Why the difference in those two strategies as you build the bundling strategy? Do you have that figured out yet?

Thompson: The thing I’m most hungry for is for us to create pieces which the company’s revenue departments can play with in combination. I don’t really have a particular thesis about which piece should cost more…It seems to me that many of our competitors have essentially got one thing to price.

Doctor: That’s the nature of the whole industry, right? So you want more pieces, and Cooking gives you a new piece. You’ve got Watching. A health product has been talked about. What’s going to speed up the Times product pipeline?

Thompson: We’ve literally just appointed Alex MacCullum as the head of new products here, and my answer is Alex is going to do that. She’s one of our best executives. She was the brains behind Cooking, with Sam Sifton. When I arrived five years ago, I said — a very obvious question — what about verticals? What about cooking? I happen to be quite a cook.

Doctor: What’s your best dish?

Thompson: Italian.

Doctor: The best Italian dish?

Thompson: Risotto, I suppose. So, I said, what about cooking? “We tried that and it didn’t work.”

Doctor: You heard that on a few things.

Thompson: Yes. Well, let’s be fair. This is what life’s like. You know, actually, most successes are based on going back and trying something that looked like a failure.

Doctor: But why not charge subscribers for Cooking? How do you decide that?

Thompson: I don’t want to say much more than the way I think about what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to add value to the experience of a subscriber. Sometimes we’re going to use that as a way of retaining a subscriber. Sometimes we’re going to say, why don’t we give this to existing subscribers, but ask new subscribers to pay more for it? The key thing is to have the pieces. You can’t juggle without a number of different balls.

Doctor: So how many pieces do you want Alex to have, say, by the beginning of 2019. More pieces?

Thompson: More pieces, yeah.

Doctor: Two more pieces?

Thompson: I don’t know. It won’t be 10.

Doctor: Fewer than 10?

Thompson: Yeah.

Doctor: More than one?

Thompson: Probably more than one, yeah.

Doctor: You’re doing analysis behind it to say it’s better for us to charge individually for it or to bundle it. Or are you guessing?

Thompson: The truth is it’s a combination of the two. I think judgment actually plays a big part in this. I think my job is just to try and encourage the entire organization to build things of value beyond the news experience. Some of which we may use within the main news app, some which may be standalone. Things could migrate between the two.

The promise of Wirecutter

Doctor: What about the Times’ integration of e-commerce? David Perpich [the Times executive who took charge of the Wirecutter business earlier this year] is building that business, and I know you’ve been careful with how e-commerce is offered on the main Times website and connected to stories. You’ll have features like buying the right headphones at the right time, off some news. What kind of legs does e-commerce have, perhaps as part of the bundles you’re thinking about

Thompson: I think the affiliate-fees revenue stream out of Wirecutter is, potentially, highly extensible. I don’t think you’re going to see buy buttons littering, flashing all over the place. But is it extensible? Definitely. Is it possible there are resources or tools or archival content which could ultimately be behind a paywall either as a standalone or in a Times model? Yeah. Potentially yes.

We think Wirecutter has got immense potential in terms of building on different categories as a standalone. We’ve demonstrated, I think, very well that Wirecutter can be used for content which fits very nicely on the Times. The basis of that acquisition is that Wirecutter is worth more to us than it would be worth to someone else, because we could do more with it.

Doctor: Archival would be a Consumer Reports model?

Thompson: Yeah. It’s complicated. It’s not obvious what the value of archival is. In some ways, I think one of the very, very clever things about Wirecutter is if all you want is to know what you should buy now, that’s the first sentence you read. “Most people should buy X” — there’s a buy button. You’re done. So, if you want a five-second interaction with Wirecutter, to mutual advantage, that’s fine. If you want to see the workings. They got the workings. To me, that’s something, again, that’s something for us to explore and learn but we’re very, very pleased with the company.

There’s a couple of very interesting things about the company. First is the newsroom. They’re passionately enthusiastic about our buying the company. So, not just, you know, acquiescing: “Oh, if you must.” They were very, very excited about it. We’ve licensed Wirecutter content in the past. There was real admiration inside the Times newsroom for the journalistic standards of Wirecutter and the authenticity. It’s been a marriage made in heaven. It’s been good.

Thompson vs. Thomson

Doctor: Last question. You and Robert Thomson [the CEO of rival News Corp, appointed to that job a few months after Thompson joined the Times] both ascended at a similar of time.

Thompson: No P. He hasn’t got a P in his name.

Doctor: I know. Is that the only difference?

Thompson: I come from the aristocratic branch of the family. [laughing]

Doctor: How do you assess that competition? The Journal had taken dead aim at the Times just before you got here.

Thompson: Oh, that’s a slightly different thing there. I’ve known Robert for years. When he was running The Times [of London] and I was running the BBC and even before that. I’m a big fan of Robert’s.

Doctor: How often do you talk? Is there a secret Brit club here?

Thompson: I probably see him three or four times a year. Something like that. I’m a fan. A frightening number of people at News Corp say they worked for me. Like [Journal editor-in-chief] Gerry Baker — he once claimed he worked for me. Certainly, I knew him when he was probably 24 and I was some gray age like 27. The Wall Street Journal continues to compete with the Times for some categories of advertising. Sometimes we maybe do a better job, sometimes they do. It’s not obvious to me that we’re competing for subscribers. They have a thesis for a very tight paywall.

Doctor: It works for them, they say. It seems to work at the Times of London.

Thompson: I think the Times [of London] got stuck in that 200,000 [range for subscribers]. I don’t know — they need more scale to get that to really work. But I think they’re very serious about it, and they’ve thought about it, you know, and good luck to them. If the plan was The Wall Street Journal was going to transition into being a fully featured general-interest news organization, able to compete against a very broad spectrum of genre, I don’t see that.

Doctor: It’s really stepped back from that.

Thompson: I don’t see that happening. They have lots of good journalists. Some of them they’ve been kind enough to train and develop for us and we’re thankful.

But no, I want to say more broadly, The Wall Street Journal looks like less of a direct competitor than Rupert Murdoch seemed to think they were going to be a few years ago. The Washington Post is revived and is more of a competitor. You know, we want competition. No harm in that. But it’s our relationship with the digital platforms — when we think about the critical relationships, it’s going to be how all of us deal with them.

Doctor: Robert’s been the most outspoken of the two Thom[p]sons, right?

Thompson: Yeah. He keeps on telling me I ought to thank him for that, but I said I was going to hide behind the rock and see how he gets on.

Doctor: Both on “the duopoly” and first-click-free, he’s gone after them publicly.

Thompson: We think we have a good relationship with Google. We’ve been very frank with Google. We’re not grandstanding about it, but we took a similar view to News Corp about the fact that Google could do a better job in helping us with our subscription businesses. And they have, I think, listened and have been pretty responsive. You can debate whether the public campaign was necessary or not.

Doctor: It’s a good cop/bad cop thing, too. That’s what Mathias [Dopfner, CEO of Axel Springer and long-time Google antagonist] does in Germany right? I mean, Axel Springer goes out there and beats the drum. Then, the Google Digital News Initiative comes out of it and other stuff. So it makes some sense. You can’t say Google’s reeling, but they are nervous. They are very nervous given the populism on both sides of the Atlantic, which could be very threatening to them.

Thompson: But also, sooner or later, obviously, fundamental questions about regulation emerge. If you essentially have the power of a utility, sooner or later, politicians are going to say, “Well, we know about utilities. We know about the market risks for utilities.” In many countries, including my own, the phone companies went through a process of being confronted with this, the idea of a period of recalibration of regulation, very much like the story in the 1980’s and 90’s.

Doctor: Do you think we’re coming back to that? You can’t come back to that in this political atmosphere.

Thompson: And to be quite clear, we know from the story of regulation, it normally arrives several decades after — I mean, the Federal Trade Commission arrived 40 or 50 years after the malpractice of the railroads in the 1850s and 1860s. It’s a fool’s errand.

Doctor: So you’re forecasting regulation of Google and Facebook in the 2040s.

Thompson: I can’t tell you what’s going to happen, but I think in both cases, to be fair, I take their leaders at their word. They don’t actually want to be antisocial in their behavior. And when antisocial behavior is pointed out to them — Facebook essentially being paid to target anti-Semites and things like that — they’re aghast. So, there’s some feeling, even in the companies, that things can’t go on quite as they have been in recent years. So let’s see where we get to.

Photo of Mark Thompson, left, and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. at the ring the bell ceremony at the opening of Euronex quotations in Paris, Oct. 15, 2013, by AP/Remy de la Mauviniere.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/11/newsonomics-the-new-york-times-mark-thompson-on-regulating-facebook-global-ambition-and-when-to-stop-the-presses-forever/feed/ 1 https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/10/google-ends-its-first-click-free-policy-as-it-looks-please-publishers-with-new-subscription-tools/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/10/google-ends-its-first-click-free-policy-as-it-looks-please-publishers-with-new-subscription-tools/#respond Mon, 02 Oct 2017 14:20:14 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=148564 It was a loophole that lasted for years. To get around news outlets with a hard paywall, readers could Google the articles they wanted to read, and access at least three otherwise-paywalled stories that way — a Google mandate known as “first click free.” Publishers like The Wall Street Journal, which ended that opening for readers in February, saw a 44 percent decline in traffic from Google.

Google officially ended its first-click-free policy on Monday, now allowing subscription-based publishers to determine of their own free will how many articles to show readers before lowering the paywall. (Google suggests you allow 10 articles.) From a blog post by Google’s VP for news, Richard Gingras:

We will end our First Click Free policy in favor of a Flexible Sampling model where publishers will decide how many, if any, free articles they want to provide to potential subscribers based on their own business strategies. This move is informed by our own research, publisher feedback, and months-long experiments with the New York Times and the Financial Times, both of which operate successful subscription services.

“Try before you buy” underlines what many publishers already know — they need to provide some form of free sampling to be successful on the internet. If it’s too little, then fewer users will click on links to that content or share it, which could have an effect on brand discovery and subsequently may affect traffic over time.

“The tests that we’ve done with them have been around looking at what it would mean to change the meter within Google — or as it was known, first-click-free. Basically, we were looking at what it would mean for user behavior and subscription conversion, if we were to change the meter to lower counts,” Rebecca Grossman-Cohen, the Times’ VP for audience and platforms, said. “We’re in frequent testing mode, so we’ll constantly be testing. There’s no plan for a particular number or even a change yet, necessarily. This gives us more room to test the right number.” (So it’s possible, for instance, that one person in a test group might get a different number of stories to access for free before hitting a paywall than a person in a different test group.)

This coming change had been reported over the past couple months, as Google ran tests with The New York Times and the Financial Times. Google also announced a coming suite of tools for publishers to facilitate smoother subscription signups. (Facebook’s working on something similar.) From Google:

As a first step we’re taking advantage of our existing identity and payment technologies to help people subscribe on a publication’s website with a single click, and then seamlessly access that content anywhere — whether it’s on that publisher site or mobile app, or on Google Newsstand, Google Search or Google News.

And since news products and subscription models vary widely, we’re collaborating with publishers around the world on how to build a subscription mechanism that can meet the needs of a diverse array of approaches — to the benefit of the news industry and consumers alike.

We’re also exploring how Google’s machine learning capabilities can help publishers recognize potential subscribers and present the right offer to the right audience at the right time.

Google has shared some high-level concepts with publishers like the Times, Grossman-Cohen said. No revenue-sharing has been discussed. The Financial Times didn’t make anyone available for an interview for this story; Google says it’s working on honing these products with a number of other major publishers around the world.

Photo of Google by brionv used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/10/google-ends-its-first-click-free-policy-as-it-looks-please-publishers-with-new-subscription-tools/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/09/facebooks-about-to-launch-its-news-subscriptions-initiative-the-new-york-times-is-reportedly-sitting-out-the-washington-post-is-in/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2017/09/facebooks-about-to-launch-its-news-subscriptions-initiative-the-new-york-times-is-reportedly-sitting-out-the-washington-post-is-in/#respond Thu, 28 Sep 2017 16:53:29 +0000 http://www.niemanlab.org/?p=148520 Facebook is trying to climb out of a maelstrom of bad PR.

It’s turning over several thousand Russia-linked political posts to Congressional investigators. The president is now unhappy with the platform: Facebook has “always been anti-Trump,” Donald Trump whined on Twitter on Wednesday. (Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a response that Facebook is doing it right, because both sides are angry at it, OK?!)

Amid all that, the social media giant is about to launch its new subscriptions initiative, after Zuckerberg himself confirmed last month that Facebook would start testing it with a “small group of U.S. and European publishers.” The program will allow readers to subscribe to these news organizations directly through Facebook — Facebook won’t be taking a cut — and is reportedly launching sometime this week, according to analyst Ken Doctor.

Who are these participating publishers? Many prominent news outlets have already pulled their work from Facebook’s much-touted Instant Articles. The New York Times, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal owner News Corp are reportedly instead in talks with Facebook’s partner-in-duopoly Google to improve targeting of their subscription services. From Doctor’s reporting in The Street:

Among those not participating in this first phase of the program: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, I’ve learned. All three continue to talk with Facebook, urging more flexibility in Facebook’s approach — while taking their wish list to Facebook’s now archenemy, Alphabet Inc.’s Google, asking that platform to use its artificial intelligence in better targeting and converting subscription prospects. Those three global publishing giants are among the digital subscription leaders, making their absence from the program high-profile.

The other notable test partners will reportedly be The Washington Post, The Economist, and news outlets from two U.S. newspaper chains, Tronc and Hearst. The test of the news subscriptions program will include around two dozen different outlets, “about 90 percent of them newspapers”:

…the Washington Post will be the biggest name in the program at launch. Long an all-in participant in Facebook’s underlying Instant Articles program, the Post continues to zag when some of its nation/global peers zig. Its experimentation has paid off. This week, it passed the million mark in digital-only subscriptions, still half the Times’ digital news subscription total, but the fastest growth rate in the business.

In addition, The Economist and two big U.S. newspaper chains have said, “Count me in,” as the program launches. In total, Facebook will be able to point to a roster of about two dozen titles, about 90% of them newspapers. Most are U.S.-based, but German publishers are among the European representatives, I’ve learned from multiple sources.

…as the Facebook subscriptions product launches, the San Diego Union-Tribune will be joined by both Tronc’s flagship Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun in the test.

Publishers were hesitant to join the initiative, Doctor writes, because the new program won’t be offering much better data than was already available through the standard Instant Articles program, and because Facebook was adamant about sticking to a 10-articles-for-free paywall model:

Facebook wouldn’t budge on one key deal point, and that proved a deal-breaker for some publishers. Those publishers participating in subscriptions must offer readers 10 free monthly articles before the paywall can lower. That sounds reasonable. Yet industry stats show that even in a paywall of five — half of Facebook’s 10 — only 3% to 5% of readers will hit the wall in a given month. If they don’t hit the wall, they’re not going to buy a subscription. Instead, publishers — including the big ones not participating in this launch — want “flexible sampling.” In short, they want to decide how many freebies to offer, and maybe to adjust that number on the fly — as some are now doing on their own sites.

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