The daily is part of an argentine media conglomerate, S.A. La Nación, with participation in U.S. media. In March, 2012, one of its subsidiaries – US Hispanic Media Inc.- became the controlling shareholder of Impremedia, the major hispanic news and information company in the U.S.

With a circulation of XXXX, La Nación also has a growing audience on the web: its site attracts 7,6 million unique visitors every month. Those numbers have been cause and effect of a series of projects carried by the organization in order to strengthen its digital presence.  Its comprehensive strategy relies on the use of new technologies to attract readers (and interact with them) and to improve their reporting.

Innovative approaches

In 2007, lanacion.com became Argentina’s first news organization allowing comments on their stories. Two years later, the newspaper developed a system to rate its readers based on their participation. As a result, the registered users get “medals” (gold, silver and bronze) according to variables such as the average of daily comments and positive votes per comment.

The use of social media tools was another  way to foster the interaction with its audiences. In 2009, the newspaper started encouraging its reporters and editors to use  platforms like Twitter;  now, it has more than 30 official channels on that social network and 160 journalists tweeting (with a combined audience of 500,000 followers). The news reporting also includes a network of 54 blogs, covering topics like gay issues, tango and crime.

Content, not only distribution, has been improved by technology at La Nación. In 2010, the newspaper started a project on data visualization led by reporters with little knowledge of programming but with a great in learning about it. Journalists, graphic designers and computer scientists worked together to understand how the tools work and how they could be use for reporting. After long sessions  of workshops and online courses (after office hours), the team started with its first project: an report on Argentina’s Subsidies System for Transportation.

The investigation discovered that the subsidies (gas and cash) grew dramatically (up to $34 billion) during the past ten years, and it revealed the 20 companies that received more money from this system. The series of articles was published in La Nación’s printed version and on its website, where it is possible to access a visualization of the data.

Getting the data posed the biggest challenge, since Argentina doesn’t have a law that allows citizens access public documents, like Freedom of Information Act in the U.S. All the information used in this investigation had to be converted from PDF’s documents to CSV and Excel files and didn’t stop when the articles were published. The data has been updated every month and it is free (and downloadable) for the anyone who wants it.

Make data available is another goal of La Nacion. In march 2012, the newspaper launched an open data platform which makes official documents accessible and ready to be “reused” by the audience of lanacion.com.

Founded as La Nación Argentina in 1870, the newspaper changed its name to the actual one in 1945.

The flagship product of media giant Prisa, it has successfully transitioned from its print-culture to a digital-driven one, by getting rid off one tradition: old newsrooms pace. Now, immediacy defines the mindset of their team: web first.  Print will follow.

In February 2012, the paper’s website unveiled a new design and dropped  the “.com” from its website’s name, to erase any differentiation between platforms. Each section was redesigned according to its readers needs, and all of them are expected to break news -as they happen- on the paper’s digital platforms (web, mobile phones, tablets). The printed edition is set to be a compilation of the best stories covered the day before.

The not-so visible change was a more profound one. El País stopped producing only news and it started producing news and technology.  Editors, reporters and developers created a new Content Management System that could’ve respond efficiently to the particular needs of the newsroom and to the constant challenges imposed by new technologies, as well.  The newsroom also developed Eskup, a social network envisioned to interact with El País readers, which is integrated with the CMS and the new platform (also created by the team of reporters and programmers) of the newspaper.

People were integrated, too. The newsroom opened its doors to web developers and online journalists, who now work with reporters traditionally isolated from the digital operations. In the midst of this revolution, many things (workflows, office spaces,tools ) changed, but one. El País made sure to implement these transformations without compromising the best  values and practices of traditional journalism, which characterized the newspaper’s praised work.

Such praise now comes from much more places around the world, thanks to the Internet.  That is why El País, a leading news organization in Spain, is now positioning itself as “the global newspaper in Spanish.” The newspaper is aiming at audiences anywhere outside Spain but specially in Latin America. To broaden the coverage of that region, a bureau in México City opened this year. The team there manages the website during the nigh time in Spain, in order to secure a 24/7 operation.

El País was the first national newspaper that appeared after the end of the 36-year dictatorship of  Francisco Franco, where  there was no press freedom. The daily’s first issue was published 5 months after Franco’s death, and the newspaper became an instant hit. Soon, El País became the leader newspaper in that european country.

With an online version since 1996, O Globo has rapidly expanded its presence on various digital platforms. In 2008, it became the first news organization in Latin America to make available its content on Kindle (Amazon’s e-book reader); and in 2012, it launched O Globo a Mais, an evening edition exclusively designed for its iPad app.

The transition strategy has been successful. O Globo’s website has more than 2,3 million registered subscribers and 350,000 unique visitors every day; and thanks to the evening edition for iPad, the average time readers spend consuming its content has tripled.

Funded in 1925, the newspaper is the flagship product of Infoglobo. The group edits two more papers, one of them (Extra) has the highest circulation in the South American country.

It was founded in 1998, as an independent alternative to traditional media outlets, then perceived as highly partisan or corrupt. The original idea was it to be a printed newspaper, but its founders -Carlos Dada and Jorge Siman- didn’t have enough money to run an expensive operation like producing and distributing a daily paper.

What Dada and Siman did have was experience working with Internet, so they decided to launch a website while they could afford to print El Faro. It was a risky idea because in 1998, only 2% of El Salvador’s population had access to the Internet.  It was risky, too, because back then most of the newspapers websites were just a mere copy of the printed edition. So, why would you want to produce original content for the Internet? It was more a matter of principles than of  business (although the founders wanted El Faro to be self-sustainable.)

El Faro (The Beacon) started to shed light over issues constantly overlooked by mainstream media. However, the business model didn’t take off from there. During 5 years, El Faro relied on unpaid staff and on Journalism students who wanted to learn from Dada, a well respected reporter in El Salvador.

During that period of time, Dada and Siman agreed not to accept funds from NGO’s. El Faro didn’t want to depend solely on one source of funding because other media outlets that did so, were not able to continue working after the foundations drew the support. Finally, the website accepted – and still does – money from aid agencies, (like the Open Society Foundations) but only to develop specific projects (elections coverage, e.g.)

El Faro is not profitable but it attracts advertisers. The challenge is big because they cannot compete with newspapers that give advertisers free web ads when they buy ads on the printed edition. However, according to Dada, up to 50% of the website expenses is covered with advertising money.  That revenue stream has helped hiring reporters, editors and photographers. In 2012, the newsroom is formed by 20 members.

The main focus of this news organization is investigative reporting, but also shows how much you can do with very few resources.

The site was founded in February 2011, after Universidad Rafael Landívar asked a group of journalists to create an online news organization that would contribute to the construction of a “solid and vigorous democracy, with ethics and social justice.”

According to its website, Plaza Pública focuses on analysis, investigative reporting and debate. Its main topics are human rights, politics and economy.

Two thirds of its funding come from the university and the rest from non-governmental  organizations like Open Society Foundations, Hivos, and Friedrich Ebert Stiftung.

The magazine is recognized -and has been repeatedly awarded- for its investigative reporting, news analysis and opinion, which draw one million readers every month.  That audience started to grow in 2007, when Semana launched its dot-com version, which it is now the second most visited website in the country.

Besides offering access to all the content published on paper every week, Semana.com does cover breaking news everyday, but it tries to do so bringing an in-depth approach (adding context and  perspective) into the coverage.

However, the multimedia specials are what have made the website stand out from its competitors and in the region. The magazine was one of the first media organizations in Colombia and in Latin America to use interactive maps, animated infographics and video. Semana.com regularly uses this tools to tell stories about traffic and public transportation, to recap a Presidential Debate, or to visualize how and  to where the paramilitary forces are moving out.

Mozilla grew out of software and telecom company Netscape, which was founded by Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen in 1994 and was originally called the Mosaic Communications Corporation. In 1998, Mozilla was launched as an open, global network for the collaborative creation of free software. They opened up the source code for Netscape in the same year.

Today, Mozilla is comprised of the Mozilla Corporation, which handles revenue creating products like the popular web browser Firefox, and the Mozilla Foundation, which supports the organization’s non-profit policy endeavors aimed at encouraging the growth of a free and open Internet.

The Mozilla Corporation split off from the Foundation in 2005. It relies on eight senior managers and four person board of directors for management. It released a browser called Phoenix in 2002, which would later be renamed Firebird. It was permanently renamed Firefox in 2006. As of 2012, Firefox made up 20% of the web browser market share. The current CEO of the company is Gary Kovacs, who oversees a staff of more than six hundred. The Mozilla Foundation is managed by a separate, six-person board of directors, and was originally launched in 2003 via funding from Mitch Kapor and AOL.

Mozilla reported a 33% increase in revenue in 2011, up from $123 million to $163. A significant portion of that revenue comes from Google, which pays royalties to Mozilla in order to be the browser’s default search engine. Mozilla’s stated goal is to one day allow the Foundation to control the corporation in its entirety. The foundation is also supported by dozens of small, non-profit community partners around the world.

In 2014, Mozilla announced a partnership with The New York Times and The Washington Post to create tools to improve online commenting systems. The program was funded by a $3.89 million grant from the Knight Foundation.

Founded in 1967, CPB is the main funding source for more than 1,000 public radio and television stations. Its funding supports well-known PBS, NPR, and PRI shows, including PBS NewsHour, Frontline, All Things Considered, and Marketplace.

CPB is also a funding source for future-of-journalism experiments and collaborative projects, like NPR’s Project Argo, which received $2 million from CPB, and Localore, a series of local multimedia projects that received $1.25 million from CPB. NPR’s Code Switch and a number of multi-station Local Journalism Centers have also been funded by CPB.

Founded in summer 2011 by John Tayman, Byliner has billed itself as a way for long-form journalism to get the attention it deserves. It typically publishes stories longer than typical magazine pieces but shorter than books.

Its publishing arm, Byliner Originals, inked a deal with the New York Times to publish a dozen e-books from its content in 2013, and has also partnered with New York Magazine to publish New York Magazine’s Most Popular.

In 2014, Byliner told its contributors it was struggling financially and was looking to sell.

The Byliner site organizes other works of long-form journalism by author and includes the headlines, source, and first 300 words of the articles it links to, though it has been scrutinized for allowing readers to largely bypass the ads around the original articles.

Beck founded Mercury Radio Arts in 2002, out of which grew his eponymous and extremely popular radio program on American politics. In 2010, Beck’s company launched The Blaze, a news and opinion website run by four people that received nearly 2 million unique views in its first days.

About a year later, Glenn Beck TV was launched, on September 12, 2011, about two and a half months after Beck departed Fox News. In June of 2012, Beck rebranded all of these media properties under the name The Blaze, after the website which, by that time, was approaching 9 million unique views a month and employed 17 full time staffers. In total, Beck employs over 100 people.

As of 2013, The Blaze reported revenue between $25 and $100 million. In February of that year, Beck launched a campaign asking listeners to ask their local cable and satellite providers to pick up The Blaze web channel, which has been distributed via the Dish Network since 2012. At least three other networks followed suit.

Although Beck has frequently stated his preference for the independence afforded him by relying on subscription fees rather than outside investors, in 2013 TechCruch reported that Beck was seeking to fundraise $40 million for the expansion of certain international programs, among other projects. The Blaze brand has recently also come to include a digital and print magazine, a series of e-books and an online marketplace for the promotion of small businesses.

Their aim is to facilitate the production of cross-national, investigative reporting by forming teams of two or more member reporters. The ICIJ is a project of the Center for Public Integrity.

It was founded in 1997 with the aim of bolstering available resources for reporters around the world who wanted to pursue stories beyond their own countries on topics including, “polluting industries, transnational crime networks, rogue states, and the actions of powerful figures in business and government.” The ICIJ partners with publishers to distribute the work of its members, which has been published in over a dozen different languages.

The ICIJ currently employs a staff of four; Gerard Ryle is its director. It’s advisory board includes many esteemed journalists including Bill Kovach and Rosental Alves. It is a nonprofit organization that receives funding from a number of philanthropic institutions.

It was cofounded in 2006 by Ellen S. Miller, a longtime government employee and “advocate for disclosure of campaign finances,” and Michael Klein, a former securities lawyer who donated $3.5 million to the initial project.

In addition to making small and mid range grants to organizations and projects dedicated to uncovering connections between politics and money and liberating government data, Sunlight also creates its own tools for transparency via its team of technologists at Sunlight Labs, and produces original reporting.

Miller, who serves as the executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, also founded the Center for Responsive Politics and Public Campaign. Sunlight also started a small social network and organizing arm, the Sunlight Network.

The Foundation is governed by a six-person board of directors, and its advisors include Jimmy Wales, Yochai Benkler and Lawrence Lessig. It is funded by donation, and all of their donors — from corporations to individuals to philanthropic institutions — are made public, along with the size of their gift. Sunlight has reported over 800 million requests for their data, and says their original reporting has led to significant alterations to congressional proceedings.

IRE is home to organizations and reporting projects like the National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting (NICAR), the IRE Resource Center, and DocumentCloud. The organization also presents the annual IRE Awards, which recognizes the best investigative work in print, online, or broadcast.

IRE was founded in 1975 by an informal gathering of journalists in Reston, Va., who came together to share their tips and resources on investigative reporting. A year later in 1976 IRE held its first conference in Indianapolis, attracting 300 journalists. The organization was founded with the help of a grant from the Lilly Endowment.

In 1976 one of IRE’s founding members, Don Bolles of The Arizona Republic, was killed by a car bomb in Phoenix while investigating a story on organized crime. Fellow journalists and IRE members joined together to finish reporting Bolles story, producing what would become “The Arizona Project.”

NICAR was founded in 1989 as companion program to IRE for the purpose of helping journalists find and use electronic information in reporting. Since its inception, NICAR has maintained a large collection of government data for use by newsrooms. Both IRE and NICAR provide regular training programs, workshops, annual conferences and other resources for journalists.

In 2011 DocumentCloud, the the set of tools that allows journalists to host documents and make them searchable to the public, became a part of IRE as the project’s original funding from the Knight Foundation was set to expire.

For its focus on presenting news the way readers want it on their phones—in short chunks, added to as a story changes—Circa has been hailed as an example of the “post-article” news world. Its minimalist design breaks stories up into pieces easily viewable on a phone screen. Users can follow stories of interest and receive updates as new facts, statistics, or images are added. Circa relies heavily on aggregation while using editors to string together the content.

The app was founded by Cheezburger Network’s Ben Huh and launched in October 2012. It released an updated focused on breaking news a year later.

By June 2013, the company employed 14 people producing 40 to 60 stories every day.

The IRS designated The Lens a 501(c)(3) non profit organization in December 2012, after a protracted delay. Prior to that, The Lens was fiscally sponsored by the Center for Public Integrity. A member of the Investigative News Network, The Lens is now funded through grants and donations, including support from the Greater New Orleans Development Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and the Knight Foundation. The Lens is a two-time winner of the Knight Community Information Challenge. In 2012, its revenue was about $700,000 and it had a full-time staff of 11. It made layoffs because of drops in revenue in 2014.

In September 2011 The Lens launched the Charter School Reporting Corps, which is aimed at covering New Orleans’ sprawling charter school system. Made up of over a dozen freelance reporters and one charter schools editor, the corps dispatches a reporter to each of the 45 school board meetings that currently run over 60 charter schools in the area.

The Lens relaunched its website in February 2013 using Project Largo, a long-form blogging platform that INN developed from NPR’s Project Argo.

Mail Online grew rapidly into one of the most-visited news websites by 2007, when its editors began chasing traffic by posting aggregated news stories, and prioritizing large photo spreads with long headlines to bolster visits. It had reached 154 million unique visitors by late 2013.

Founded in 1896 as a women’s newspaper, the Daily Mail also publishes editions in Scotland and Ireland, and launched The Mail on Sunday in 1982. It opened a New York office to house its online staff in 2011, and much of the Mail Online’s success online has been a result of its growing American audience, which now accounts for a third of all traffic.

In January 2012, the Daily Mail launched an India-specific edition of its website, Mail Online India. That month, MailOnline surpassed The New York Times to become the most popular newspaper website in the world, with over 50 million monthly unique visitors.

Bloomberg Businessweek began facing financial uncertainty in the late 2000s as advertising revenues dropped and circulation declined. By 2009 advertising revenues for print had fallen to $60 million from $110 million in 2006. The company reduced staff through several rounds of layoffs, and was losing more than $60 million a year at the time of sale. It was reported to be losing $30 million per year in 2014.

In an effort to find generate new revenues the company introduced Business Exchange, an information and social sharing network, spending an estimated $16 million to launch the site in 2008.

After the purchase in 2009, Bloomberg began merging Businessweek into its larger organization. The magazine reduced its staff by 100 and was brought into the larger Bloomberg News operation. Businessweek writers and editors were also given a copy of “The Bloomberg Way,” the company’s infamous style guide. Josh Tyrangiel, a former deputy managing editor of Time magazine, was hired as the new editor of Businessweek, replacing Stephen Adler, who resigned shortly after the sale to Bloomberg.

With the name change came a print redesign that increased the number of articles and editorial pages. The design introduced new color-coded sections for topics like global economics, technology, and politics and policy among others. In 2012 the Bloomberg Businessweek was awarded the National Magazine Award for General Excellence among general-interest magazines. In 2014, Bloomberg announced that it planned to build a company-wide design shift around Businessweek’s design.

Following the print redesign the magazine relaunched its website in 2012, adding in more photos and data, with a design that mirrored the print edition in its color scheme and use of fonts.

Starting in 2011 BusinessWeek began launching subscription-based apps for iOS devices, beginning with an iPad app that offers full magazine articles, bookmarking features, and markets information on companies mentioned in stories. The company followed up with a similar iPhone app in 2012. As of April 2012 the magazine reported 100,000 iPad subscribers.

In March of 2012, Eli Pariser — formerly of MoveOn.org — and Peter Koechly — formerly of The Onion — teamed up to create a concept they hoped would be both socially significant and wildly popular. By doing extensive testing of a headline’s popularity before promoting it on Facebook or Twitter, Upworthy experienced significant early growth. Around the one year mark, they had about 10 million unique monthly views. By July of 2013, they had surpassed 30 million, making it one of the fastest growing digital media companies in history. It was also among the most popular sites on Facebook. Upworthy’s traffic began to slip in early 2014.

Upworthy’s launch was funded by Chris Hughes, formerly of Facebook, current owner of The New Republic. They later announced that they had been afforded $4 million from angel funders. In 2013, it announced an $8 million round of funding and plans to double its staff — by 2014, it had a staff of 50 — and expand into new verticals. Later that year, it announced the launch of a global health and poverty section funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Its primary initial source of earned revenue was by charging nonprofits for directing potential donors toward them. Long term, however, Upworthy plans to be funded entirely by ad revenue, and is pursuing sponsored content deals with a variety of brands. It launched its first native advertising campaign in 2014 and later that year reported that its native advertising was far outpacing its editorial content in traffic, attention, and shares.

Upworthy began content partnerships with ProPublica, Human Rights Watch, and Climate Nexus in 2014.

The viral popularity of the content Upworthy aggregates and repackages can be compared to BuzzFeed‘s popularity and growth, but with an added mission for social justice. Causes that Upworthy has attempted to promote include gay rights, cancer research, veteran’s issues and education. Like BuzzFeed, Upworthy has been criticized for formulaic headlines in an attempt to manufacture viral content, as well as its heavy reliance on Facebook for traffic, though it has also been praised for its viral success.

In 2014, Upworthy publicly released to code to track its internally developed audience engagement metric, attention minutes.

In 1914, while World War I raged in Europe, two American journalists, Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann, printed the first edition of their weekly political magazine, The New Republic. It was backed by a wealthy American heiress and her husband. From its earliest days, the magazine was meant to be an exploration of American liberalism, a role it has played continuously since its first printing, despite manifold changes to the magazine’s structure, operation, management and format.

Throughout much of recent history, the magazine was owned by Martin Peretz, a Harvard lecturer, who bought it in 1974 for $380,000. Over the decades, the magazine’s reputation as a prestigious and intellectual, if sometimes politically controversial, publication continued to grow. With Leon Wieseltier at the helm, the magazine added a substantial book review in 1980.

The New Republic’s print edition claims a modest circulation of around 42,000. They publicize that their median reader, “is 51, with a household income of nearly $100,000 and over half have graduate degrees.” The magazine was widely understood to rely on the generosity of wealthy donors.

In the early 90s, the magazine suffered a scandal when it was discovered that multiple staff writers had plagiarized quotes and fabricated facts in their writing. In 2007, Peretz sold the magazine to CanWest Global Communications, but then, along with a group of investors, bought it back in 2009. In 2012, Chris Hughes, one of Facebook’s founding members, used his earnings to buy the magazine and launch a digital reinvention of the publication, of which he is now publisher and editor-in-chief. Hughes first removed and then slowly reinstituted a paywall over the magazine’s digital content, and claimed, at its launch, that he planned for it to be profitable within two years. It launched a vertical dedicated to domestic politics and policy called Q.E.D. in 2014.

Today, the magazine is based out of Washington, DC, with a staff of over 50, including 32 remote contributing editors. Franklin Foer is the magazine’s editor, and Leon Wieseltier continues to act as literary editor. The magazine holds regular events and draws some ad revenue, and continues to circulate a bimonthly print edition.

BuzzFeed was founded in 2006 by Jonah Peretti, a co-founder of the Huffington Post. Originally the site was designed to seek out the links people shared with one another on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and other networks, and most often these items appear in lists containing videos, animated GIFs, or static images in a format meant to encourage sharing. As of 2014, it was the second-most-shared publisher on Facebook and one of the top 10 most visited news and information sites in the U.S. as of 2014. In mid-2014, it had 120 million monthly unique visitors, with about 75% of that traffic coming from social media and half from mobile devices.

By January 2013 the site announced it had reached more than 40 million monthly unique users and had raised an additional $19.3 million in funding. Disney reportedly attempted to buy BuzzFeed in 2014, and later that year, the site took a $50 million investment from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which valued the company at a reported $850 million.

In 2011, BuzzFeed shifted direction with the hiring of Ben Smith as the site’s first editor-in-chief. The former Politico reporter was tasked with building out a news operation, hiring reporters, and building sections. The idea, as Smith wrote at the time, was turn build BuzzFeed into “the first true social news organization.”

Shortly after Smith’s hire BuzzFeed raised $15.5 million and began hiring new reporters from places like Gizmodo, Rolling Stone, Popular Mechanics, and The Village Voice among others. Technology and politics were the first news sections to be launched in 2012. While Smith led the reporting in the politics section, with the presidential election BuzzFeed began adding more staff to cover the race, including Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings to cover the Obama campaign. BuzzFeed eventually opened up a Washington, D.C. bureau in the summer of 2012. It also opened an investigative unit and launched BuzzFeed World in 2013, hiring several Middle East-based foreign correspondents and an Australian editor that year. The following year, it announced plans to open a bureau in Berlin and eventually in Tokyo, Mexico City, and Mumbai. The site began gaining attention as a home of serious journalism as well as fluffier viral content.

Upon its investment from Andreessen Horowitz in 2014, BuzzFeed announced a major expansion that included new content units, an in-house technology incubator, and increased funding for its film division, BuzzFeed Motion Pictures. With the expansion, it split its main editorial operation into BuzzFeed News, a lifestyle division called BuzzFeed Life, and an experimental social media-oriented division called Buzz.

By 2013, it reported that it was profitable and had a staff of more than 300.

The site would also add sections for sports, women, and nostalgia, often poaching talent from online and traditional news outlets, including former L.A. Times editors to oversee an entertainment section. In 2013, it was reported to be planning to expand overseas using crowdsourced translation from English language learners.

BuzzFeed also began investing in video with the hiring of Ze Frank to develop a web video studio in Los Angeles in the fall of 2012. By late 2013, it had a video staff of 32. The company also partnered with The New York Times to produce videos during the Democratic and Republican party conventions in 2012.

BuzzFeed runs a partner network of sites to which it sends traffic via links in exchange for tracking information about the traffic from those publishers. It shut down its existing network in 2014 to build a new network around video.

In 2014, BuzzFeed began partnering with the anonymous secret-sharing app Whisper edited by former Gawker writer Neetzan Zimmerman, allowing it access to Whisper’s content for articles. Initially, BuzzFeed devoted 15 writers to searching Whisper for material.

The site has been accused of unethically aggregating others’ content and failing to verify some of the information it publishes. Between its immense popularity and often substantial reporting as well as its breezy and formulaic style, BuzzFeed has been seen as both an encouraging and disheartening sign of journalism’s future. It has deleted thousands of its old posts without notice, saying they weren’t up to its editorial standards and were made before the company considered itself a journalistic one.

Sponsored Content

BuzzFeed’s relies on an advertising strategy that eschews the banner ads in favor of what they call sponsored content. The site partners with companies like GE, Jet Blue, or Virgin Mobile, and designs a post that resembles the types of image heavy lists found elsewhere on BuzzFeed. The company has a division that buys ads directing traffic to such sponsored content.

The company has a creative team, separate from BuzzFeed’s editorial staff, which works directly with advertisers to write the posts. While the content is similar to other BuzzFeed posts, the theme of the post typically relates to the advertiser’s area of business or brand. In March 2012, BuzzFeed President Jon Steinberg said BuzzFeed ad buys come in between $50,000 and $200,000.

In September of 2012 BuzzFeed acquired Kingfish Labs, a company that complies Facebook data, to help drive traffic to sponsored content.

But BuzzFeed’s push into sponsored content, sometimes called branded content or native advertising, has been criticized.

The paper originated as the Santa Ana Daily Register in 1905, changing names twice more before becoming the Orange County Register in 1985. It is a part of parent company Freedom Communications, which declared bankruptcy in 2009. The Register is now owned by Aaron Kushner’s 2100 Trust, which bought the company in 2012.

After years of declining staff numbers and a shrinking print product, Kushner has invested aggressively in the paper, hiring 175 newsroom employees and opening a Washington bureau and three new daily papers. Within a year, its owners reported they had invested $10 million to $15 million in investments. In January 2014, however, the Register laid off 32 staffers, including its four top editors. After the layoffs, the Register had about 370 employees, compared to about 200 before Kushner’s arrival. Later that year, the paper announced a round of buyouts across the company meant to cut 100 jobs.

He also launched a daily newspaper in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Register, in April 2014, as well as a set of community weeklies. Kushner said the new paper would be built around free-market principles. The Register launched with a news staff of about 40. In June 2014, the Long Beach Register, which had launched the previous year, was folded into the L.A. paper.

In April 2013, the Register instituted a hard paywall, with a price of $1 per day for digital, print, or both. The paywall includes time-based digital access, so Sunday subscribers get access to digital content only on Sundays.

Kushner is betting heavily on this strategy of targeting core readers—a bold move, given that most papers have embraced metered paywalls that allow for more casual reading. By adding pages and re-emphasizing the print product, it’s been called the anti-Advance strategy.

Kushner bought the Riverside Press-Enterprise in November 2013, though questions were raised about whether Kushner’s company, Freedom Communications, was financially solvent to run the paper after the purchase.

The Register began a content-sharing partnership with the nonprofit news organization Voice of OC in 2014.

It was founded by Andrew Sullivan in 2000, and he touts it as one of the first political blogs. Although Sullivan is British, his focus is largely on American politics, along with the occasional post on the arts, culture and society. He was previously the editor of The New Republic magazine.

In 2006, The Dish drew revenue for the first time through a partnership with Time.com, and then, later, with The Atlantic. In 2011, Sullivan moved the blog yet again, this time to the Daily Beast, a move which allowed the blog’s coverage to expand from daily posts to a 24/7 news cycle.

Today, The Dish is best known for Sullivan’s announcement in early 2013 that he would be leaving leaving the Daily Beast in favor of starting an independent, subscription based site. The metered paywall was designed by a company called Tinypass. Sullivan regularly discusses his circulation and earnings figures; as of November 2013 the site was $800,000 towards a stated goal of earning $900,000 in its first year.

Sullivan has also experimented with changing the number of articles available to non-subscribers, offering a monthly, rather than annual, subscription, and selling advertising to the version of the site for non-subscribers. He also launched a monthly online magazine called Deep Dish for subscribers only in late 2013. As of 2014, the site drew 781,000 monthly visitors and had 29,000 subscribers, with a staff of 10.

The beta version of Medium debuted in August 2012, and its most striking feature is its simplicity. It purposely elides plug-ins and sidebars, and as Williams’ introductory note states, “there is nothing to set up or customize.” With ample white space, a curated home page of the best — not the most recent — content, and a built-in pre-publish collaboration tool, the goal of Medium is to reinvent how prose is composed and experienced online. Observers have questioned the purpose of Medium, debating whether it’s intended to be similar to a curated magazine, a more open blogging platform or something in between. Williams has described Medium as both a platform for individuals to publish and a publisher itself.

The Medium team is composed of alumni from past Obvious ventures, including Twitter, Odeo, and Blogger. It has mostly been self-funded, but raised its first outside capital – $25 million – in 2014. On occasion, its editorial team commissions posts and pays authors for contributing, and they also accept pitches from experienced journalists for investigative pieces. It has been criticized by some writers for its pay-per-click policy. In 2013, Medium opened access to everyone.

Medium bought the science journalism startup Matter in 2013 and relaunched it in 2014 as an online magazine. It hired tech writer Steven Levy from Wired in 2014. It also planned to launch a music magazine later that year.

Obvious has also partnered with Branch, a content-sharing venture designed by Josh Miller, Cemre Güngöre, and Hursh Agrawal that came out of beta in August 2012. Originally called Roundtable, Branch aims to incubate “high quality public discourse” by allowing users to “host” discussions that they can invite their friends to join. Branch is also behind Potluck, a link-sharing platform. Both were bought by Facebook in 2014.

The site is based in New York and has a newsroom staff of around 25 reporters, editors and developers. In building the publication from scratch, Atlantic Media poached notable talent from similarly oriented titles, beginning with editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney, who came from The Wall Street Journal. Other staff members came from publications like The Economist, Bloomberg, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and Reuters.

Quartz was imagined as a free digital publication with a strong focus on reaching readers on mobile devices. As a result Quartz’s site was designed as a mobile-first reading experience. Quartz developers used responsive design to build a site that has the look and functionality of an app, but adapts to the screen size a user prefers, from mobile phones to desktop browsers. As the site’s editors write on their About Us page, “Call us a website or, if you like, a web app: Quartz combines the benefits of the free and open Web with the elegance of an application.”

In April of 2013 Quartz updated its website with a more minimalist site design and simpler navigation, while also adding new features for offline reading. It redesigned the site again, this time adding a homepage, in August 2014.

Another remarkable aspect of Quartz design is that it eschews the normal news layout of multiple headlines and in favor of a presenting readers with one lead story displayed in full.

In July 2013 the site reported reaching 5 million monthly users, 2 million in the U.S. As of 2014, about 40 percent of the site’s traffic came from mobile and 70 percent came from social links. The Atlantic’s goal, as of 2013, was for the site to be profitable by 2015. Quartz launched an India-specific site in 2014.

With a relatively small staff and ambitions for global business coverage, Quartz created an editorial strategy that revolves around the concept of “obsessions” as the organizing principal for reporting rather than beats. The obsessions at launch ranged from generalist to more specific, including areas like “China’s slowdown,” “Euro crunch,” “startups,” and “the mobile web.” That structure, according to Quartz Global News Editor Gideon Lichfield, allows the organization to follow larger phenomenons in the business world and adapt to changes more quickly.

Quartz is an advertising-supported site, launching with four companies — Boeing, Chevron, Cadillac, and Credit Suisse — and expanding to 15 by May 2013. Though the site employs display advertising, Quartz also sells so-called “sponsored content,” an ad format that presents messaging from companies in a design similar to editorial content. Aside from advertising, the site generates revenue through its events division, Quartz Live, which is similar to the The Atlantic’s events program. Events were expected to provide 10 percent of Quartz’s revenue in the program’s first year.

Founded in October 2009, it first started as the Twitter account of a fictional character (Pájaro Político or Political Bird) curating content from international news organizations, breaking news, publishing scoops and even doing interviews in 140 characters. Pájaro Político was the first Mexican media outlet that conducted a live interview via Twitter.

“We defined our approach as ‘social-first’. We wanted to create a community,”  says Daniel Eilemberg, one of the site’s founders. Since it started, Pájaro Político used humor and  a very conversational tone to engaged with its followers in a very active interaction.  As a result, the audience following grew rapidly.

One year later, in November 2010, Animal Político was born as a web-only media organization. Four investors with experience in the publishing industry decided to fund the all-digital project, modeling it after sites like Politico and The Huffington Post.

Eilemberg and his business partners had work experience with political coverage. They were behind Poder (Power, in English), a successful magazine devoted to cover heads of State, bankers, presidential candidates, and tycoons. The publication had 7 editions (México, Colombia, Venezuela, Perú, Chile and one for the hispanic market in the U.S.) when it was sold in 2008, just before the economic crisis erupted.

Therefore, the investors backing Animal Político took their time to decide when was a good moment (business-wise) to launch the project. Now, the site is 18 months-old and for the first time it is close to breaking even. Ad revenue is growing and Animal Político is planning to diversify the ways to make money. On the editorial side, they are planning to try syndication of their content and organizing events around the topics the site covers.

On the editorial side, the outcome has been very positive so far. In May 2012, two months after the presidential election in México, the site drew 1.167.000 unique visitors. That’s high season for a site like Animal Político, but its editors hope the readership keeps growing after a new president gets elected.

Animal Político is owned by Elephant Publishing LLC and Printed Matter LLC, both companies based in the U.S. Its newsroom is located in Mexico City.

The site contained MSNBC TV content until MSNBC relaunched its own MSNBC.com site in 2013. NBC relaunched NBCNews.com in 2014 with an emphasis on original digital video.

Previously, msnbc.com was corporately separate from the cable channel MSNBC, though it was launched along with MSNBC in 1996. While the cable channel has been owned by NBCUniversal since 2005, msnbc.com remained a 50/50 partnership between NBC and Microsoft. In mid-2012, NBC was reported to be buying Microsoft’s half of msnbc.com, with the site being rebranded as NBCNews.com.

Msnbc.com was the third-largest news site on the web by unique visitors as of April 2011. It had long been recognized as one of the web’s most innovative news sites, winning numerous online journalism awards. During the early 2000s, the site found success even as the cable channel struggled. It turned a profit for the first time in 2004.

During that time, the site experimented with a comprehensive classified section and a personalized news aggregator and was one of the web’s largest news video providers.

In the latter part of the decade, msnbc.com made several acquisitions of web-based news startups. In 2007, it bought the Seattle-based Newsvine, a social news website.

From 2009 to 2013, msnbc.com and NBCNews owned EveryBlock, a site that collected and sorted local news data in more than a dozen U.S. cities. Msnbc.com bought EveryBlock in 2009, and NBC shut it down in 2013. After its acquisition, EveryBlock added local discussion boards, a partnership with the community fix-it site SeeClickFix, and a mobile version. It underwent a major redesign in 2011 to emphasize community conversation alongside local data.

Later in 2009, msnbc.com also took over management of the @BreakingNews Twitter feed, which had 1.4 million followers at the time. In January 2010, the site bought breakingnews.com, announcing plans for a “multi-platform, integrated effort” involving the new site and Twitter feed. Since the acquisitions, a team within msnbc.com has been developing the site’s breaking news strategy, experimenting in particular with crowdsourced curation. In 2012, BreakingNews released an app that produced breaking news tickers on TV screens.

Foreign Policy, based in Washington, D.C., prints seven issues per year and offers digital subscriptions at the same price. The magazine employs a staff of 30.

In early 2009, the magazine relaunched its website to serve as a daily complement to the print product. The site is home to Passport, its editors blog, as well as a stable of opinion bloggers. The site design and analysis-heavy reporting is not unlike that of its sister publication, Slate.

Foreign Policy was among the first magazines to repackage its stories in the form of paid ebooks. In September 2010, it compiled a series of reporter dispatches from Afghanistan into a title on Amazon’s Kindle store for $2.99. In January 2011, the editors compiled a year of reporting into an ebook about the Arab revolution for $4.99.

Foreign Policy has a free iPhone app called FP Wide Angle, which features weekly photo essays.

Minneapolis-based PRI partners with stations to produce news/talk programs including The Takeaway, Studio 360, and The World. It distributes such programs as the BBC World Service to some 800 stations. In June 2011, it reported 50 employees and $24 million in annual revenue. It also distributed This American Life for 17 years until 2014.

PRI, originally called American Public Radio, was founded in 1983 as a cooperative of stations aiming to compete with NPR. PRI was bought by WBGH, a former American Public Radio affiliate, in July 2012.

In the early 2000s, MPR withdrew its programming from PRI’s distribution and formed a competitor, American Public Media, to distribute A Prairie Home Companion and Marketplace.

In April 2008, PRI and co-producer WNYC debuted The Takeaway, a morning news/talk program designed to compete with NPR’s Morning Edition. The show’s creators intended to “break out from the medium’s conventionally packaged sound” and created a website that emphasizes listener engagement. The Takeaway shares editorial resources with the BBC, The New York Times, and WGBH.

In March 2011, PRI and the Center for Public Integrity announced plans to build a 50-state corruption risk index, with plans to hire an investigative reporter in each state.

PRI has a free iPhone app that offers live and in-demand access to audio segments and full programs.

The fact-checking process of PRI’s show This American Life came under scrutiny after it was forced to retract a popular episode on abuses in Chinese factories producing Apple products when it discovered that significant portions of story were fabricated. Its retraction episode was, however, its most downloaded episode ever at the time.

The network airs original news and entertainment programming with a heavy emphasis on viewer participation, including Vanguard, a documentary series produced by young journalists. It was described as “MTV without the music” at its launch in August 2005.

Current’s distribution has grown to include cable and satellite providers that reach 60 million American households, as well as providers in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Italy.

Until a format change in 2009, Current aired short features called “pods,” many of them created by viewers and voted up by users of current.com. After Gore and co-founder Joel Hyatt reportedly tried and failed to sell the company, Current underwent an overhaul, laying off 80 staff members, canceling some programs, and introducing traditional 30- to 60-minute time slots.

In April 2011, after severing his contract with MSNBC, Keith Olbermann announced he would take his news and opinion program, Countdown, to Current TV. Olbermann was named the network’s chief news officer. He was fired in March 2012.

Cable giant Comcast Corp., which owns MSNBC, also owns a 10 percent stake of Current’s parent company, Current Media.

The Workshop conducts multimedia investigative reporting projects in partnership with major news outlets, such as msnbc.com, Frontline, and the McClatchy newspapers.

It was created in 2008 by Charles Lewis, who also founded the Center for Public Integrity.

Video: Lewis, on founding the Investigative Reporting Workshop