One shift at Wired that was already underway when Nelson arrived was changes to the newsroom seating chart. Digital and print editorial teams are no longer siloed, but sit together, and all are overseen by Dadich as editor-in-chief. In addition, some of the bigger names on the print masthead — Mark Robinson, Adam Rogers — have been tapped to work on digital projects.

“We put the people that do the web production of the magazine and some of the front-end design together with the art people from the magazine, for example,” says Nelson. “They stopped having their daily meetings at the same time, so they could go to each other’s meetings.”

But as personnel issues have started to resolve, merging print and digital content has been trickier. Like all publications making this transition, Wired has to deal with scheduling incompatibility of a print magazine that’s published once a month and a website that publishes new stories every day.

Recently, certain writers have found new ways to work around these disparities. For example, senior staff writer Mat Honan (who just left Wired to run BuzzFeed’s San Francisco bureau) was among the first at Wired to experiment with publishing early reporting online, and then producing a cleaned-up version of the same story to be published in print later on.

“It’s a lot of hard work to juggle both, and to move at two very different paces,” he says. “I think we could do a better job with figuring out who is doing what and when, so people don’t get crushed with concurrent print and web deadlines. Calendaring remains very hard.”

Honan says that while he considers himself equally part of the web and print teams, editors still tend to think of themselves as having more of a distinction in terms of medium. For Nelson, that’s one of the few remaining distinctions she’d like to see erased.

Tagging content will allow Nelson’s team to collect data on what users have and haven’t read, and what content they seek out. Incorporating this behavioral information into the backend of the new site will make it easier to build an experience that caters to readers’ individual needs. Nelson is especially interested in finding ways to segment readers on a more granular level than existing categories allow for. “I think there are a lot more buckets than the social user, the searcher, the loyal fan,” she says.

Design-wise, the Wired team is taking inspiration from across and beyond the media industry. Nelson says her team looked at Fast Company as well as non-journalistic sites like Google and Pinterest as potential models. Wired considers The Verge a top competitor in terms of rate of production, traffic, and video content, but Nelson says they’re not huge fans of the Vox Media site’s square-heavy, multicolored design. For a taste of what a sleek, reimagined Wired might look like, check out their “Space. Time. Dimension.” package, guest edited by Interstellar director Christopher Nolan. Readers can now sign up to beta test the redesigned website.

The new @Wired design looks nice: http://t.co/YviTsMUFfu pic.twitter.com/eebhuJqX8n

— Harrison Weber (@HarrisonWeber) December 11, 2014

The bubble and beyond

Nelson, her team, and everyone at Wired have a lot of work ahead of them before the magazine’s digital brand catches up with the competition out in Silicon Valley. After all, what some consider a tech journalism bubble — Pando, Recode, BuzzFeed San Francisco, Vice’s Motherboard, Medium’s Backchannel, The Information, etc. — has been swelling for a while now, and Wired has some catching up to do.

It’s unclear whether that will happen under Condé. The Awl published a story earlier this month in which the editors reported that Scott Dadich, the editor-in-chief, might be trying to buy the magazine.

It would require many millions of dollars, obviously, but that’s nothing for a few venture capitalists in these Golden Days of the Content Bubble, especially for the Valley’s longstanding Magazine of Record. (How would it make money for its investors? The Wired conference business has never been as glittering as All Things D or The Atlantic‘s, but that could always change. And the Wired Store is just one of its infinite #branding opportunities.) The fifty-million-dollarish question: Would Condé let it go?

For her part, Nelson says headquarters has been relatively helpful when it comes to Wired trying new things, like a different email vendor or content management system. “I’m very much into the test-and-learn — let’s try different things and see what we get out of them,” she says. “And I think, for the most part, corporate has been really supportive of that.”

But there’s no doubt that for someone managing a media tech team — in which the name of the game is rapid iteration and competitors like Vox have what seem like endless technical resources — reporting to a century-old magazine publishing company could be frustrating. Whatever the future of Wired’s ownership, Nelson has her work cut out for her.

Hilton was just promoted to her current role this September, a position which makes her responsible for, among many other things, developing a set of newsroom standards for BuzzFeed’s ever growing staff. In addition to talking about that, we touched on hiring strategy, diversity, how you know when a new project isn’t working, international expansion, and more.

Our sister publication, Nieman Reports, has the highlights reel in text; for true devotees, the full audio of the interview is below.

The Chronicle, a Hearst paper, launched a membership program a few months ago aimed at retaining subscribers and reducing churn. The program is free to both digital and print subscribers. All interested parties have to do is go to the Chronicle’s subscriber website — not to be confused with the non-paywalled but Chronicle-owned and operated SFGate.com — click the Membership tab and start signing up for perks.

Lots of newspapers have experimented with paid premium content and membership as a revenue strategy, but the Chronicle’s program is free with any subscription package. Though some events on offer might involve a small fee, the program’s end goal isn’t to make money, but to repair the relationship between the newspaper and its audience.

Publisher Jeff Johnson says that, over time, newspaper subscribers have increasingly been asked to carry more of the financial burden of circulation, paying more for an increasingly thin product.

“Historically, most of our connection with our readers has been the bill we send them,” he says. “We’re trying to create a face-to-face experience.”

For Chronicle subscribers, that means around five events a week plus other perks. Members have the opportunity to do wine tastings with the Chronicle food critic, go to museums with the Chronicle art critic, tour downtown with a Chronicle urban design critic, join a book club with the Chronicle’s book critic, attend public forums with the editorial page writers, and more. Newsroom tours, with the opportunity to sit in on editorial meetings, are especially popular.

“We even included an event where we brought our subscribers to the production facility,” says vice president of circulation Michael Cohen. “You wouldn’t think anyone would want to go to the distribution center.”

While these journalist-hosted events are novel, the Chronicle’s membership website suggests much of the programming on offer is more typical loyalty rewards fare — tickets to sports games, advance movie screenings, access to conventions, and musical performances. Newspaper analyst and Lab contributor Ken Doctor says these tactics have been used in the past by newspaper publishers to build relationships with readers.

“They say, ‘You’re special!’ But what they are doing is, in part, collecting a bunch of things they did before,” Doctor says. He believes a more targeted program would be more effective. For example, the Chicago Tribune has an events arm called Trib Nation in which digitalPLUS subscribers get discounted tickets, which is quite similar to the San Francisco Chronicle’s program. But the Tribune also offers Printer’s Row, a premium books vertical that offers literary events to a niche audience inside its general readership; this is the kind of segmentation that the Chronicle’s program lacks, Doctor says.

But while the program may be a bit unfocused and unoriginal, early feedback suggests it’s working — 80 percent of those surveyed said membership made them more likely to renew, according to Chronicle vice president of marketing Erin Skidmore.

Surprisingly, the membership program is also popular with newsroom employees. “They come to me and say, I want to do something, what can I do?” Skidmore says. Though Chronicle journalists, like journalists everywhere, are busy both with reporting and writing as well as the increasing pressure to engage with readers digitally, Skidmore says staff have been widely appreciative of the value of meeting readers in person.

“If you do enough events, and you have enough touch points and enough members participate, what’s the value of that?” asks Johnson. “The value should be they have a stronger affinity to the Chronicle and are going to stay with you longer than what your historical patterns have been.”

The Chronicle’s membership program is not just about getting subscribers to renew — it’s about engendering brand loyalty in the audience in hopes they’ll continue to renew for years down the line. Considering that three quarters of newspaper subscribers are 45 or older, it would make sense for the Chronicle to use the program to target younger readers. But Johnson says, for now, they’re not tracking demographic information or trying to grow the subscriber base.

“We didn’t come up with it to be an acquisition tool, not that it doesn’t have an impact on acquisition. We view it, at least at this point, as a retention tool,” he says.

The Chronicle is not the first Hearst newspaper to experiment with membership. The Houston Chronicle, which also has a two-site strategy, launched its Star Access program about two years ago. The rules are slightly more complicated for Star Access; subscribers who want Star Access need to pay at least $2.50 a week. Originally, the program was conceived to move customers up the payment ladder, but vice president of consumer sales Michael Gorman says the paper had to scale back from that goal.

“We saw modest success, but we also saw we were limiting our ability to attract digital users, because a percentage of our subscriber base fell below that $2.50 subscription,” he says. “We were not doing as well as we would have liked moving them up the scale.”

So in March the paper switched to a two-tiered system in which all subscribers are also members, but premium members who pay more than $2.50 are “Insiders.” Gorman is still working out what some of the premium benefits for Insiders will be; for now they get “white glove customer service,” and access to ticket giveaways and contests that regular members don’t get. For example, Insiders received discounted tickets to an event called Houston Chronicle Culinary Stars, celebrating food writer Allison Cook’s 100 best restaurants in Houston.

But while Gorman says offering these interactive experiences might help reduce churn, it’s not what he believes drives readers to pay for the program. “We see people under that $2.50 mark who just get the Sunday paper, they have a high level of interest in coupons and ads,” he says. “To make available to them retailer benefits so they can see real household savings based on being an Insider — that’s where this will be a real home run for us.”

Another paper, The Day in New London, Connecticut, has also tried a membership program that’s free with a subscription. Called Passport, members get classic perks like entry into contests, event access, discount tickets, and even the occasional cruise giveaway. Michael Moses, The Day’s director of marketing and digital strategy, says event tickets and gift cards are easily the most popular membership benefits among readers. “There’s nothing innovative about it,” he says. “What folks want is still the same thing they’ve always wanted.”

But there is something innovative about what The Day gets from the program, and it goes beyond consumer loyalty. Since 2011, the paper has been growing a database of user info that now contains over 220,000 households across southeastern Connecticut. Moses says they use “72 different behavior profile categories” to break down their audience, which can be segmented even further into groups of current members, former members, and even recently lapsed members.

“Every bit of information that’s entered by a member — what [events] they participate in, what stories they read, what their shopping behaviors are — all that goes into our database,” Moses says.

The Day has been able to use that data to target acquisition campaigns with great accuracy — for example, digital only campaigns aimed at 25 to 35 year olds who are registered users and therefore more likely to bump up to subscribers. This strategy has given the paper a retention rate of around 70 percent, according to Moses, with new four-day subscriptions increasing by 12 percent year over year, Sunday subscriptions by 10 percent, and digital-only subscriptions growing by 20 percent.

This is the kind of small-data segmenting that Ken Doctor says the San Francisco Chronicle should be doing with their new program, but isn’t.

“Okay, what we want is retention. Then what we should be asking is, what’s the profile of the person who is going to cancel?” he says. “We’ve had X number of cancellations over the last year. Tell me, analytics department — if you have one — what’s the profile of this person? And what is likely to stop them from canceling? What are their stated and what are their real reasons for canceling? Then, you would design a program based on the likely answers to that question.”

But the Chronicle has gone about their membership program in the opposite direction, creating experiences for a general readership and hoping they like it enough to keep subscribing. It’s a very different approach from the Houston paper, which seems to have settled on a retro approach of offering savings in exchange for incrementally more expensive subscriptions. It remains to be seen which value exchange will be more profitable. And even if the San Francisco Chronicle sees more renewals as a result of the membership program, that’s only a small chip in the much larger problems of an aging subscriber base and waning interest in newspapers among younger generations. (The paper has taken some steps towards attracting a younger audience, for example the Love Local festival which was held in November.)

There’s something genuine about the strategy of wanting to connect with readers; making users feel valued and listened to could be an effective way to retain their affinity. But, after years of declining returns for newspaper subscribers, the attempt to repair that relationship with wine tastings and ticket giveaways might be too little too late.

“They like the word membership, they know it implies a deeper relationship,” says Doctor. “But they have not figured out what that relationship is.”

So the TNR staffers quit because they don't like the internet?

— Steve Kovach (@stevekovach) December 5, 2014

While asking whether the Internet helps or hurts journalism is about as useful as asking if technology is good or bad, the Pew Research Internet Project does have a study out today that comes down pretty clearly on one side.

The survey of 1,066 internet users shows that 87% of online adults say the internet and cell phones have improved their ability to learn new things, including 53% who say it has improved this “a lot.” Internet users under age 50, those in higher income households, and those with higher educational attainment are especially likely to say the internet and cell phones help them “a lot” when it comes to learning new things.

Asked if they enjoy having so much information at their fingertips or if they feel overloaded, 72% of internet users report they like having so much information, while just 26% say they feel overloaded.

[…]

News: Substantial majorities also feel better informed about national news (75%), international news (74%), and pop culture (72%) because of these tools.

Not only do individual Americans feel more personally informed because of the Internet, but a majority also believe that society at large is better informed. Interestingly, survey respondents generally felt that the Internet improved their knowledge of distant topics — pop stars and international news — more than it increased their understanding of things like local news or civic issues. 60 percent of those surveyed said they felt better informed about local news after the Internet, while 74 percent and 75 percent felt mobile phones and the Internet made them better informed about international and national news, respectively.

Media news tends to focus on the national narrative — BuzzFeed versus The New York Times versus whoever’s spending millions of dollars to build a huge new website this week. But despite efforts of programs like the Knight Foundation’s Community Information Challenge, the tougher nut to crack for the Internet seems to be disseminating information on a more granular level.

Clippy (real name: Clippit) was an innovation for Microsoft; the idea that a piece of software could predict what you were working on based on what you typed was startlingly new to the average consumer. But Clippy was also annoying — very annoying. He popped up all the time, unbidden, and was both rarely helpful and hard to get rid of. Over time, Clippy became a meme synonymous with obnoxious, digital interruptions.

The backlash against the chirpy, distracting animation was widespread and eviscerating. Clippy was killed in 2001; Microsoft actually launched an anti-Clippy campaign to market Office XP in 2002. In 2010, Time named Clippy to a “50 Worst Inventions” list. The backlash against the animated algorithm was so intense, in fact, that it inspired its own backlash; in 2012, developers at Smore built a Javascript Clippy so that the bouncy paperclip could live on in perpetuity.

Clippy made sense in theory, but in practice, the office assistant made users feel intruded upon. Today, the typical consumer is more accustomed to the feeling of being watched by technology. We know that Google reads our email to predict flight times, and we know Facebook tracks our searches to sell to advertisers. But just because customers have come to expect it doesn’t mean they like it. The question for tech companies is a tricky one — just how far into their personal and professional lives will users allow software to go?

That question is one that Evernote, the note-taking-turned-workspace app, has been struggling with lately. Earlier this fall, Evernote released Context, a new product that aims to seamlessly integrate the research process into a user’s workflow. As you type a note, Evernote not only searches for and provides relevant material from your own and colleague’s work, but also from third-party news organizations.

“Think of the note area in Evernote like a big search box,” says Andrew Sinkov, Evernote’s vice president of marketing. “If you write one sentence and that one sentence contains the word Evernote, we may surface an article about Evernote. But if you write two paragraphs and now you’re talking about some specific feature like Evernote Web Clipper, now we have a lot more information to go on catered to the specific search that you happen to be doing. If TechCrunch has written an article about our Safari Web Clipper in the last few months, we will surface that.”

To build Context, Evernote needed a way to match what a user was working on with relevant content. To do that, they hired a team of augmented intelligence researchers, who created an algorithm that is constantly trying to match keywords from what users are typing to related terms in outside material.

To get this material, Evernote had to locate willing media partners who would give the company access to some or all of the news organization’s archives. Their first partner was The Wall Street Journal, which makes the the most recent 90 days of its archives available and searchable via Context. Next month Dow Jones will add in its Factiva databases. In the future, the program could also surface videos and images in addition to text articles.

The partnership makes sense for Evernote because the majority of its users are “information workers” — small business owners, entrepreneurs — with an interest in reading business journalism. The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, gets access to elite users — only Evernote Premium and Business members get Context — and the chance to expand brand recognition outside of the traditional newspaper subscriber base.

“What we’re predominantly focused on is giving our existing subscribers a better experience,” says Edward Roussel, head of product for Dow Jones. “Point number two, we’re looking to recruit new subscribers.”

The Journal launched a loyalty in September called WSJ+. Perks of premium membership include subscriptions to things like Evernote Business, one reason the partnership makes sense for the paper. The other reason is growth, especially international growth.

Only a quarter of Evernote’s users — 100 million people have signed up for or downloaded the app — are in North America. The rest are mostly in Asia, especially China, and South America. For the Journal, that means Evernote is a platform for continuing to extend their brand globally, something Roussel told Digiday he’s explicitly working to accomplish via partnerships with companies like Evernote.

Evernote is also interested in its foreign customers: The most recent addition to the list of Context media partners — which currently includes TechCrunch, Fast Company, Inc., Pando Daily, Crunchbase, and LinkedIn — is the Nikkei, an English-language Japanese business newspaper. (The Nikkei is part of the large media company Nikkei, which invested in Evernote to the tune of $20 million.) As Evernote’s presence in Japan grows, the platform could become an inroad for the Journal to build a stronger presence there as well. For example, though for now Evernote only surfaces English-language Wall Street Journal content, down the line Japanese users could be served local, Japanese-language Wall Street Journal content.

“Evernote is very strong in Japan, we’re strong in Japan — we have a large number of readers and a strong subscription base. It’s the kind of experiment that we’re interested in, other things that we can do that are specific to a particular demographic,” says Roussel.

For publishers, Context is a unique, if niche, way to get their content in front of engaged, professional eyeballs. What Evernote hopes to offer those users attached to those eyeballs is a productive, predictive way to work the likes of which they’ve never experienced before.

The problem is not all Evernote Premium and Evernote Business users who have experienced Context see it as a feature.

Not sure about this new Evernote stuff. Why would I want these generic results? And they can't be turned off? pic.twitter.com/a2XdXH22or

— Federico Viticci (@viticci) October 31, 2014

@viticci damn. Context is the stupidest thing @evernote has done in years.

— Rui Carmo (@rcarmo) October 31, 2014

@viticci Actually, this stuff is a real reason that will keep me from buying Evernote Business again.

— Lukas (@Blubser) October 31, 2014

The discomfort with and dislike of Context was so great at launch, in fact, that users soon started sharing methods for disabling it.

The negative reaction to Context springs from two places. The first is that the stories’ square-tiled appearance in the sidebar makes them resemble ads, which makes Premium users especially feel like their private workspace is being encroached on.

@viticci Thank goodness it can be disabled, but disheartening that @evernote chooses to spend time on this sort of thing. Ads in my notes?
— Jeff Donnici (@jdonnici) November 2, 2014

@viticci I hate this new feature – feels like advertising inside my private documents. Feels wrong. @evernotehelps are you listening?
— Samuel Jay (@RealSamuelJay) November 2, 2014

Sinkov says the assumption by Context users that recommended links were ads surprised the people who built the product. “Context sits at the very bottom of your note. It’s not at the side, it’s not at the top, there aren’t any popups, it’s not flashing,” he says. “What is that reaction? Why do you so viscerally hate a rectangle that shows up beneath your note at a distance from your cursor that is pretty significant?”

Despite the effort that went into designing a product that wouldn’t annoy or disrupt users, that apparently doesn’t change the fact that when some users see a logo in the margins of their screen, they read it as an ad. Both the Journal and Evernote said that no money exchanged hands in forming the Context partnership, but that fact may not be enough in the face of engrained assumptions about how websites treat their readers.

“Unfortunately, ads take so many forms these days there’s no way to design a space that could not be perceived as an ad,” says Sinkov. “That’s the challenge we have.”

But Evernote Context has another challenge beyond repairing a spammy-looking interface. Though Sinkov says the third-party publishers have no access to Evernote data, that’s not necessarily clear to the user. The idea that Evernote has access to the content of all notes, both personal and professional, and is using that data to power an algorithm without asking the user to opt-in is, to some, worrisome. The fear that those notes — which could contain, for example, proprietary business information — are somehow being made available to unknown journalistic entities could be seen as downright disturbing.

@viticci I want out of the whole algorithm, to be honest.

— Nate Boateng (@nateboateng) October 31, 2014

Sinkov says Evernote is aware of these concerns, and is working to address them with users. “We have these three laws of data protection that we take very seriously, about privacy and data ownership and data portability,” he says. For example, though it would be theoretically very useful for Evernote to use the content of notes to learn more about the demographics of its user base — where they work, how old they are, where they live — they don’t.

Going forward, Sinkov says Evernote needs to do a better job of publicizing the steps the company takes to protect users. He believes that if people better understood how Context works — that the data flows only one way and that there’s no money involved — they would be more open to the benefits of the product. Without that information being made explicit, users often assume the worst of tech companies; with recent headlines in mind, it’s not hard to see why.

“We’ve been beaten down in some ways by expectations that ‘the company is going to sell my data, and I’m not going to know about it, and it’s going to be bad.’ That’s why these unfortunate reactions happen,” Sinkov says.

There are, of course, Evernote users who enjoy using Context, which makes sense. The idea of having links to background information made available automatically as I write sounds convenient and useful — no more opening a new tab and searching for the CEO’s name or the source’s appropriate title or the date of the original launch. Frictionless delivery of the facts I need to do my work without having to ask for it sounds, to me, like the future. But it takes a significant amount of private information to power tools like that, and it’s often unclear which companies are reliable enough to be trusted with that information. As our digital world becomes increasingly circumscribed by the machines that watch us as we work and play, we will be faced with more frequent decisions about who and what else we want to see in those spaces.

“The algorithms we have running are intended to do one thing. If there’s a fatigue that says ‘I don’t want algorithms,’ that’s unfortunate,” Sinkov says. “There are good algorithms, and there are less good algorithms. If we wanted to stay in a world where it’s literally your head to your fingers to a keyboard to a screen, we’re there. That’s already the world we live in. What’s next?”

The report finds that, broadly, the majority of these partnerships are born out of economic necessity, and that, despite their increasing prevalence, they can be difficult to manage successfully. Interestingly, the authors say that many of these collaborations are easier to execute in legacy media — namely print and broadcast — than digitally, because of technological barriers such as incompatible content management systems.

Also of interest is the observation that few of the partnerships are financial in nature. For the most part, the goal is to work more efficiently, reach a broader audience, and tell a better story, rather than for one side or the other to increase revenue. For example, the Texas Front-Page Exchange has been sharing content gratis for five years now. From the report:

What stood in the way of this sort of cooperation for decades was industry prosperity, big newsroom budgets and a tradition whose definition of quality began with running only the work of your own staff along with wire stories.

But particularly after papers scaled back any statewide circulation ambitions as hard times set in, there came to be very little competition for audience among the five.

Other editors share Mong’s view that the cooperation, while not central to editorial strategy, is a distinct plus. Nancy Barnes came to the Chronicle in October 2013 after years at the Star Tribune of Minneapolis and began as a skeptic. “I was surprised—giving away all that content for free? But in fact these are all very distinct markets. The exchange helps us avoid redundant effort. It seems a very innovative solution.”

“People have more fun when they can be vulnerable and open,” [Paul] Ford explained to me in an email. Especially when they “aren’t bracing themselves for a bunch of shrieking assholes to violently weigh in on every possible thing in order to score more virtual rage points.” The appeal of a tighter content ecosystem is clear when any public tweet might be singled out by an internet terror machine like Gamergate.

Though the quieter environments can be a more productive place to talk, the flip side of that is they’re inherently more exclusive; Ello, for example, is still invite-only.

'Ello, the exclusive, invite-only social network everybody is using'

— Ben Walsh (@BenDWalsh) September 26, 2014

@shaneferro Exclusively for everyone

— Ben Walsh (@BenDWalsh) September 26, 2014

With its retro-trendy, whitespace-heavy design, Ello has been popular among designers, artists, photographers, filmmakers, and other professionals whose brands are heavy on visuals. But as the network has grown, so has the diversity among subgroups. Journalism professor Jay Rosen, for example, has been blogging on the platform with regularity.

But the first journalistic subgroup for whom Ello really hit home is finance journalists — at least a little ironic, given the site’s origins. Earlier this fall, journalists like Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal started jokingly referring to the growing community of business writers on the site as “Finance Ello.”

Weisenthal only joined Bloomberg recently from Business Insider, and was briefly without a platform to publish on between jobs. For a high-metabolism reporter, that can be a frustrating situation to be in, one which open platforms like Ello provide an interim solution for.

Since jobs day (which is like a monthly election day for finance media) Weisenthal has been actively encouraging other business writers on Twitter to join the new platform, offering invitations, promoting the work of other journalists, and even pushing people to follow the Bloomberg News account.

Holding @TheStalwart responsible for this finance twitter ello invasion.

— stacy-marie ishmael (@s_m_i) November 10, 2014

In fact, as of late November, he’s actively hiring someone to run Bloomberg’s Ello (and Twitter and Facebook) accounts:

And just in case you missed it earlier, I'm looking for someone to do Finance Ello and Finance Twitter full time. https://t.co/0KGEcFzOaR

— Joseph Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) November 25, 2014

Through his efforts, uptake has sharply increased. Finance journalists who have migrated to Ello include other Bloomberg employees, Wall Street Journal correspondents, Business Insider writers, Financial Times reporters, Economist bloggers and more. There, they write notes with charts about breaking finance news, share links to published stories and comment on each other’s analysis.

The conversation has moved. pic.twitter.com/B15xlT04u2

— Joseph Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) November 23, 2014

In an email, Wiesenthal told me he considers Finance Ello 80 percent serious and 20 percent joke. “The joke part is that it’s kind of a novelty to post in a totally new place that at first blush doesn’t offer *that* many advantages over what exists,” he says.

Indeed, there’s little extraordinary about Ello. It’s unlikely to become the next huge traffic driving platform, or change how most journalists do business. But it’s interesting to observe how people in the profession gather online and use new digital tools to communicate about their work.

For one thing, Ello lacks the character limits of Twitter, which makes it an ideal home for blogpost-length writing without the barrier of having to actually start your own blog — not unlike Medium’s pitch to writers.

.@modeledbehavior joins Ello. Huge coup for effort to turn Ello into Finance Twitter's blogging platform. https://t.co/doN6bgbxFr

— Joseph Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) November 14, 2014

With a baked-in community of users and relatively functional comment threads, Ello makes sense as a place to gather for thoughtful conversation.

“You can do a post the length of a tweet. Or you can do something longer,” says Weisenthal. “And then it’s very easy to see a conversation grouped around one post, rather than a sprawling thread that can be difficult to track.”

Semi-private — or semi-private feeling — spaces like Ello tend to allow for more candid conversation than hugely popular social sites, which is part of their draw. Reporters see the platform as a safe space to test out new theories. For example, Business Insider reporter Shane Ferro wrote a somewhat personal Ello post about transitioning from a job in legacy media to a job at a startup and the cultural differences in those two environments.

@caleweissman @nwquah @ceodonovan The thing about Ello is it's still small enough that I know exactly who my followers are

— Shane (@shaneferro) November 26, 2014

“It’s nice to have a space that feels a little bit quieter, and which lends itself to longer thoughts,” says Weisenthal. “I love Twitter, but it can be a shouty place, and Finance Twitter tends to be less shouty than, say, Politics Twitter. So the peace and quiet of Ello is nice.”

Another benefit of Ello over other platforms is the ease with which graphics can be included in posts, according to Weisenthal. “Finance and econ talk is often greatly helped by the ability to include tables and charts within the discussion, which Ello does naturally,” he says. On Twitter, images take up precious character space; on Ello, that’s not a problem.

Love this. Ello is perfect for finance/econ community. Big charts. RT @TheStalwart: .@joshzumbrun is now Elloing. https://t.co/2ph6ILB09E

— Billy Griffin (@billygriffin22) November 14, 2014

Matthew Boes covers the Federal Reserve for Bloomberg; he’s been taking considerable advantage of Ello’s graphically-inclined interface. (His embrace of Ello is likely not unrelated to his boss’s — Weisenthal’s — enthusiasm.)

Ello doesn’t function seamlessly for everyone. Designer Jeffrey van der Goot wrote on Medium about the ways in which the site’s weighting of design over function prevent it from being widely usable. In a post on The Toast called “You’re Not Stupid; Ello is Badly Designed,” Elena Palmer details the frustration of trying to discover and talk to friends on the platform.

The difficulties of using Ello for fast and efficient communication are not lost on the members of Finance Ello. Bloomberg’s Matt Levine wrote a post on Ello about what he thinks the site is good for — talking to people, rather than linking to external publisher content. But in a reply, user Lew Burton expressed his frustration with the site.

“I like Ello, but it kinda feels like my old bike where the kickstart never worked and I would miss the early ferry,” he writes. “I find that the flow is awkward, I want to be alerted to conversations being updated, and don’t get that here.”

Despite the initial splash of Ello’s release, it doesn’t feel like the mainstream conversation has moved there. The company hasn’t released numbers on active users, but early analysis suggests that only a small fraction of Ello’s comparatively small user base posts regularly on the site.

But it’s possible that for niche communities like Finance Ello, the platform’s clunkiness and small user base is more feature than bug. After all, that’s what lends the site its air of privacy: As with so many things, if it were easier to use or more popular, it wouldn’t be as fun.

Cale Weissman, a reporter for Business Insider Intelligence, agrees that Ello’s alternative, artisanal aesthetic could be part of the draw. Recall the 20 percent of Finance Ello that’s a joke — maybe part of it is the irony of a bunch of reporters who obsess over markets and jobs rates and stock indexes electing somewhat arbitrarily to descend on a design-forward social media platform that has rejected the primary way social networks make money.

Whether you see the humor in that or not, the really funny thing is that Finance Ello might actually be taking off. “I think if anyone actually knew what it took to get people to move platforms en masse they’d be really rich,” Weisenthal says. “Still seems like kind of a mystery to me.”

Since Matt Taibbi’s departure, we’ve been working with the team he hired to consider various options for launching a project without him. After multiple explorations, we’ve decided not to pursue the project. Unfortunately, this means that the team Matt hired will be let go.

The announcement follows weeks of seeming instability at the company. New York Magazine’s Andrew Rice broke the news last month that Taibbi, who had been brought on to run the magazine, would be leaving the project. The team at First Look’s The Intercept followed up with a detailed explanation of the management and culture clashes that led up to his departure. Shortly thereafter, Glenn Greenwald announced that editor-in-chief John Cook was leaving The Intercept and returning to Gawker Media.

In the wake of Taibbi’s departure, the remaining staff of Racket, presumably under the leadership of Racket executive editor Alex Pareene launched a new project that fit in well with what was to have been the magazine’s satirical tone and penchant for pranks. RacketTeen, a somewhat inscrutable Tumblr account, poked fun at everything from Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to media insiders to parents.

For sale: website. Never launched

— Racket Teen (@RacketTeen) November 25, 2014

The announcement, which leaves the entire staff of Racket without jobs, was met with consternation and general upset by those in the media who had hoped RacketTeen was the sign of more cutting-edge commentary to come. Some also expressed concerns for how the staff had been treated by First Look.

I miss Racket Teen

— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) November 25, 2014

I want Pierre Omidyar to pay reparations for all the @mtaibbi @pareene @elspethreeve @edithzimmerman stories we didn’t get to read in 2014.

— daveweigel (@daveweigel) November 25, 2014

Laid-off Racket staff don't even get names. http://t.co/xFFfDzO2L2

— Scott Klein (@kleinmatic) November 25, 2014

What’s next for the staff of Racket, and for First Look, remains to be seen.

Could the @Awl network fold in @RacketTeen? I don’t even care if you do Racket

— Tim Carmody (@tcarmody) November 25, 2014

Fusion is just pulling up the party bus to the First Look offices now

— Bill Wasik (@billwasik) November 25, 2014

Maybe on Thanksgiving Pierre will pardon one member of @RacketTeen

— Natasha VC (@natashavc) November 25, 2014

I reached out to Racket staff members for comment, but so far haven’t heard anything back.

thank you everyone who is gchatting me rn but the entire @RacketTeen staff has to go get drunk now

— Elle Reeve (@elspethreeve) November 25, 2014

Amid the wry jokes, though, it’s important to remember that Pierre Omidyar, First Look’s founder, promised $250 million to the project last year. The organization is often cited on the list of new media projects that are cause for optimism about the state of the industry. With plenty of funds and talent on hand, there’s considerable confusion over what is causing First Look to falter.

The people at the Racket are some of the most talented people in media. To not figure out how to make it work is totally baffling.

— Philip Bump (@pbump) November 25, 2014

One of the things that I have always respected about the FT and always will respect about the FT is we pride ourselves on having really strong editorial judgement. One of our old taglines is “Without fear and without favor.” We are going to give you an unvarnished look at what we think is important today, and we are going to help you make good decisions. I really want that ethos to inform how we present the news at BuzzFeed.  

There’s always this tension — you see it now in newsrooms, where people are like, I’m really worried if we only focus on data and analytics, we’re only going to write things about what people say they want to read rather than what they actually should be doing. The “should” is seen as worthy — it’s seen as the public service journalism versus are they really just going to look at pictures of Kim Kardashian?

I think that’s a false dichotomy. I think good editors understand how to present compelling mixtures of the worthy and the funny and the fascinating. If you’re good, the worthy is also funny and fascinating and you want to read it. It’s on us to be able to deliver that, and I think we will.

Berkeleyside sees around 160,000 unique visitors a month — impressive, considering there are only around 116,000 people living in Berkeley. The site has a staff of five, including the three founders (some of whom have second jobs), plus reporter Emilie Raguso and advertising director Wendy Cohen. In addition, Berkeleyside employs a rotating cast of around a dozen freelancers who help support their coverage of food, local artists, municipal policy, politics, and culture. Revenue for 2013 was around $218,000, and the team is projecting revenues for this year at around $350,000 — no small feat for a small team covering a small city.

One thing that’s helped Berkeleyside grow its audience is strategic partnerships with other organizations, including KQED and The San Francisco Chronicle. In exchange for helping regional newsrooms fill coverage gaps they can no longer afford to report on themselves, Berkeleyside grows its impact. With KQED, for example, staffers get a chance to go on air and promote the site.

Being responsive to and involved in that community — BerkeleysNide and all — is important to the site’s sustainability. Their third revenue arm for Berkeleyside after advertising and events is a relatively new membership program where, in exchange for small donations, readers get perks like free event tickets and access to parties.

“We feel like, membership, we could go very far with that. We don’t do a good job asking members to donate,” says Dinkelspiel.

If Berkeleyside wants to pay for a site redesign (which would cost “several thousands of dollars”) or expand their coverage area (a considerable undertaking) or pay themselves a living wage (which they haven’t done yet), the next step is to see is whether they can convert lower-tier forms of engagement, like comments and event attendance, into the dollars that they need.

“There’s no formula, that’s a sure thing,” says Dinkelspiel. “We’re a very successful site in many ways, but we’re still not there yet.”

Sources confirmed that Taibbi has been absent from the office for several weeks, only returning on one brief occasion to address the staff. Although those hired have been reassured that the project would continue on during the unspecified term of Taibbi’s absence, the the launch date for Racket — which Taibbi indicated in September would be coming “in a month” — now appears to have been pushed off.

“We have a target date but I wouldn’t make a launch date public,” said Temple, who is based in San Francisco, when reached by phone this morning. “I don’t comment about internal matters and I don’t comment on personnel matters….I mean we’re a private company, so why would we…no.”

I had the chance to sit down with both Taibbi and Racket staffer Alex Pareene to talk about Racket earlier this month in New York. We talked about launch strategy, which they were developing in hopes of a soft launch this month followed by a fuller launch in winter. Taibbi and Pareene described a publication in the spirit of Spy, The eXile, and National Lampoon; they also praised The Daily Show and ClickHole. The digital magazine would include longform writing and short videos, but also pranks, inside jokes, and stunts. The pair envisioned their team as a group of renegades, shaking a fist both at the rich and powerful and at other media companies as well.

But when I followed up with Racket later to clarify details regarding their plans and the management of First Look, I couldn’t get any response from either Taibbi or Pareene. Eventually, when I stressed that I was eager to write a story prior to their launch, I heard from Gordon Hurd, a newly hired managing editor at First Look. By phone, Hurd said Taibbi was unavailable, and in a later email he wrote:

The initial launch date has been moved and we are rethinking strategy, as you mentioned. If you can continue to hold off, we’d appreciate it. Once things are better set, we can update you on the facts for sure.

Rice’s reporting confirms suspicion that plans for Racket’s launch have run into trouble. Pando Daily’s Paul Carr wrote a series of tweets about First Look rumors — including the possible departure of Eric Bates — saying he had contacted Taibbi, who denied that he was struggling to cooperate with management.

Taibbi told me there was absolutely no disagreement between him and the management of first look. I would publish the emails but…

— Paul Carr (@paulcarr) October 28, 2014

…the champion of transparency and openness insisted we stay off the record.

— Paul Carr (@paulcarr) October 28, 2014

Taibbi just confirmed that he won't give me permission to publish our email correspondence. Openness! Transparency!

— Paul Carr (@paulcarr) October 28, 2014

The launch of The Intercept, First Look’s first digital magazine, was also less than smooth. After some initial stories, the blog stopped publishing. Editor-in-chief John Cook ultimately addressed these concerns after Carr wrote an article for Pando questioning what had happened. Cook said the purpose of the hold was to focus on resolving “questions about the site’s broader focus, operational strategy, structure, and design.” NYU professor Jay Rosen, who stepped down as an advisor of First Look earlier this month, was surprised by Taibbi’s departure.

Matt Taibbi has taken a leave from First Look Media, according to @NYMag. http://t.co/p0yULQZctz Not clear what this is about.

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) October 28, 2014

I reached out to Alex Pareene for comment on Racket’s future and have not heard back. Perhaps the missing Taibbi will be found and asked for further explication tonight; he’s scheduled to appear at a fundraiser this evening in New York.

geeks gonna geek #SNDMakes pic.twitter.com/9mHsAmQJlq

— Ryan D Ghost, BOO (@sixfoot6) October 17, 2014

#SNDMakes Boston participants came from both legacy media companies — including the Globe, ESPN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times — and new media outfits like Vox Media and Slate. These attendees, around 40 in all, split into six teams, each of which would produce a prototype for a news product by the end of the weekend. The idea was to organize teams based on variation in backgrounds, in hopes that not only would a viable product be conceived, but also that participants would be exposed to skills and expertise they might not encounter regularly in the workplace.

“Within the context of the organization, #SNDMakes is one way we contribute to the industry by providing a vehicle to facilitate discussions about real problems all news organizations face,” says facilitator and SND digital director Kyle Ellis. “If you go back to our earliest days, SND was actually talking about convergence before that was a word people used. So, for us, #SNDMakes represents the desire to promote innovation and thought leadership, which are values we’ve always stood for.”

Each iteration of #SNDMakes is designed to help participants answer a question. This time, the question was “How might we improve the content creation process for news?” Taking that as inspiration, each team brainstormed a narrower query, one that would hopefully be answered by their end product.

Very early brainstorming taking shape at #sndmakes! pic.twitter.com/9Pd4lgDwb2

— Kyle Ellis (@KyleEllis) October 17, 2014

Though not every team followed through on their initial plan and each team ended up at different points of functionality, the questions and themes of the event are worth documenting. And so, without further ado, let’s take a look at what each team came up with.

Caterone

Meet the teams at #sndmakes! Team 1: @risatrix, @steyblind, @sixfoot6, @elainanatario, @rreibstein, @MikeACase

— Kyle Ellis (@KyleEllis) October 17, 2014

Team 1’s project took up the question of how to guide a reader’s path through a website. “On sites like Vox.com, you often find that authors manually insert links at the end of an article that end up competing with the more impersonal metric or topic-oriented next-click modules below,” says team member and Vox developer Ryan Gantz. Instead of content recommendation based on most shared or most read, Team 1 asked, why not recommendations based on the reader’s personal interests, or an author they like? These could be algorithmically generated or executed by a person, as long as they target the user.

Gawker already uses a system something like this — when you read a story by an author, a left sidebar offers other headlines recommended by that author.

To build out their concept, Team 1 used Vox as a model (two of its members were Vox employees, and Vox was the best-represented company at #SNDMakes, but they said this didn’t influence their decision). For the prototype, they experimented with a variety of possibilities for what recommendation generators could be — an individual, a content theme, a brand, or a team. The design was inspired by Yo.

Team1 at #SNDMakes: How might we encourage publishers to be better curators of next click? Chaperones w/ personality. pic.twitter.com/4u7KEUdyLG

— Ryan D Ghost, BOO (@sixfoot6) October 19, 2014

There are also multiple navigation modes in consideration. One metaphor the team built around was the DJ. “After reading an article or watching a video, a user chooses a DJ that suits the mood or authority they seek in a next read, rather than a topic or headline,” says Gantz. Another mode of consumption the team thought about was the newsletter or daily brief. For example, Ezra Klein fans who don’t want to read all of Vox could flip through Ezra’s 10 recommended stories on an Ezra Klein playlist screen.

Writes Lisa Williams, who participated in and kept notes on #SNDMakes: “This reminds me of those little handwritten shelf tags in independent bookstores, written by staffers recommending a particular book.”

The idea is interesting both from an editorial perspective, in terms of serving readers the content they want, and from a business perspective, in that it could, if successful, increase time-on-site, an increasingly important metric for advertisers.

Pre-Post

Team 2 at #SNDMakes: @whichlight, @natronic, @dheerja, @FinkTweets, @christhorman

— Kyle Ellis (@KyleEllis) October 17, 2014

Team 2 wanted to tackle the problem of why content creators often make design decisions that might work for their own site, but don’t look as good or work as well when viewed natively on social media platforms. Facebook and Twitter offer services where users can paste a link and see how it will look when posted, but the Pre-Post team wanted to centralize those features for multiple social platforms in one place.

“For example, a Vox.com editor would create a story in their CMS with a headline, images, etc. that would look great on the Vox homepage, but may be over the character limit or missing an image on Facebook/Twitter. Checking their content on every single platform after publishing is simply a lot to ask of individual content creators, especially when they’re focused on timeliness of content,” says ESPN’s Dheerja Kaur, who product managed the Pre-Post team.

Hacking w/ #SNDMakes team 2. We're creating solutions for editors to visualize their content on social media. pic.twitter.com/PVOgkAwh0n

— dheerja (@dheerja) October 18, 2014

A special blend of skills made Pre-Post come together smoothly. For example, team member Kawandeep Virdee brought data parsing skills from his job at Embedly to the table that allowed Pre-Post to be more universally functional. Virdee says the team is working to make the product available as a standalone tool for anyone to use.

“PrePost is ideal for integration directly into a CMS,” says Kaur, “but it’s also great for independent creators to check on their content to figure out why it might not be performing as well on certain platforms.”

Team2 at #SNDMakes: preview how any story URL will look across social services to encourage copy, crops, optimization pic.twitter.com/zX7yEJQu2M

— Ryan D Ghost, BOO (@sixfoot6) October 19, 2014

Legit

Team 3 at #SNDMakes: @stevechiagozie, @dharris, @steveclancy, @lisawilliams, @theresourceress, @putneydm, @seandillingham

— Kyle Ellis (@KyleEllis) October 17, 2014

Featuring teammates from Vox, Slate, INN, Upstatement, KPCC, and beyond, Team 3 wanted to tackle a hot-button issue around content creation — verification. Their project, Legit, looks at how fact-checking processes can be fused more seamlessly into a journalist’s workflow.

“Early in our process, Sean Dillingham pointed out that when there’s breaking news people turn to social media because it’s fast and they care more about the speed of the news than the legitimacy,” writes team member and Slate staffer Doug Harris in an email. “At the same time, professional news organizations can seem to be slow because we must care about the legitimacy of news.”

The goal of Legit is to help reporters keep track of tweets as they verify them, whether via geolocation or traditional reporting. Journalists can search tweets around a theme — for example, tweets that mentioned @BarackObama and include the hashtag #EPA — and give them a thumbs up or thumbs down. (You can demo that process here.)

Team3 at #SNDMakes – Legit is a tool for journalists to identify and verify sources on Twitter across followed topics pic.twitter.com/toDXeRkj8l

— Ryan D Ghost, BOO (@sixfoot6) October 19, 2014

The Legit team has other ideas about the process of fact-checking. Could a bot be used to raise awareness of hoaxes by tweeting at people who retweet false information? Could users become part of the process? And what about platforms beyond Twitter, like Reddit or Instagram? Harris writes that, down the line, a comment box could provide reporters with a place to explain why they approved or rejected a tweet.

Anglr

Team 4 at #SNDMakes: @jmfbrooks, @cj_ballard, @gcstaublin, @MichaelWorkman, @alishalisha, @IntrusionSignal, @jaredNova

— Kyle Ellis (@KyleEllis) October 17, 2014

Team 4’s project is focused on helping journalists quickly and efficiently find a perspective on a breaking news story that competitor outlets might not have thought of yet. (My name suggestion, Take Machine, came too late, after the name Anglr had been decided upon, alas.)

“The question we tackled was how might we help journalists bring a unique perspective on a story to reach the target audience?,” says team member and Hacks/Hackers executive director Jeanne Brooks. “Enter Anglr, a search tool for journalists that helps you quickly identify a unique perspective to your story. You can search keywords to see the top stories on Google News, social ranking of each result based on Twitter and Facebook shares, and related keywords.”

Team 4 at #SNDMakes : a search tool for journalists looking for fresh angles on their story… "Anglr" pic.twitter.com/nXOm40n3HA

— Christopher Ballard (@cj_ballard) October 19, 2014

Lots of companies, including Twitter and Facebook, are thinking about ways to visualize what’s trending. Anglr would be a tool that does that, but with a very specific user in mind — a blogger or journalist under pressure to produce a lot of content quickly. “As we iterated on the idea, we identified a number of pain points for journalists. We felt the social data as part of the search was important because frequently editors and reporters need to make decisions not just on the story angle but on the story template as well,” says Brooks. “We thought if they were able to quickly see where information was spreading across social on their topic, they could use that to inform story format and distribution.”

Brooks says the idea was intriguing enough that participants plan to keep working on finessing it.

@gcstaublin @cj_ballard @MichaelWorkman @IntrusionSignal @jaredNova @jmfbrooks can we get Anglr up on github.io? would love to keep fiddling

— Alisha Ramos (@alishalisha) October 20, 2014

Hmpgr

Team 5 at #SNDMakes: @mclaughlin, Rob Martinez, @t1to98, @SquirrelSheryl, @kaeti, @kamal_ay, @chrismchaines

— Kyle Ellis (@KyleEllis) October 17, 2014

After some deliberating, Team 5 decided to tackle homepage optimization. Hmpgr is supposed to allow producers more flexibility when it comes to things like story hierarchy, image size, and headline placement. The idea, teammates told me, was to give designers back some of the control they had in the days of print.

.@kamal_ay working out user flows at #sndmakes this morning. #nerdherd #team5 pic.twitter.com/nkxlbtMDpJ

— Sheryl Sulistiawan (@SquirrelSheryl) October 18, 2014

“Usability is not a core tenant for most CMSes,” says participant Kamal Grey of ESPN. “I thought it was an isolated issue, but it seemed as though a lot of my peers face the same issues with their respective editorial tools. While there are a number of third-party tools in the market, there still seemed to be a large opportunity to improve the user experience for content creators and develop tools that make their jobs easier.”

hmpgr: get a handle on your homepage. https://t.co/vXmawXlFMd #sndmakes pic.twitter.com/ZuhfTyTPiN

— Kaeti (@kaeti) October 19, 2014

The team prototyped the idea using The Verge’s homepage as a model. The challenges they ran into in conceptualizing the project are common ones: Would it be responsive? Would it work with different CMSes? They also asked more philosophical questions: What does a homepage mean, and who should have control over it? Throughout the process, Team 5 was concerned with questions of context, and how a homepage should be organized to best serve the audience.

Reactions to Hmpgr were very positive, though the idea does seem best optimized to a rectangle-based web. The team managed to get a sleek demo up and running; documentation of their brainstorming and building process are available on GitHub.

Attenborough

Team 6 at #SNDMakes: @jmm, @aschweig, @ramoved, @komickiller, @durple, @ej_baker

— Kyle Ellis (@KyleEllis) October 17, 2014

Finally we come to Team 6, which concerned itself with improving — if the name didn’t make it clear — the audio content experience. Specifically, the team was interested in thinking about how listening to a podcast or audio story could be more visually stimulating.

“Audio is extremely hard to make pretty.” @komickiller on our visually-skimming-audio idea & multimedia annotations for listening. #SNDMakes

— miranda mulligan (@jmm) October 19, 2014

“For example, wouldn’t it be great if you could see the photo while listening to an NPR Fresh Air personality who was describing that photo?” writes participant and Knight Lab executive director Miranda Mulligan. “In our prototype, we tried to answer: How might we more seamlessly show citations or annotations mentioned in an audio story. Attenborough tries satisfies that need by reducing the friction of connecting audio moments to web content.”

The Attenborough user would be able to access photos, contextual links, or videos via mobile or desktop browser while in-audio, listening left undisrupted. Via the audio visualization, listeners are supposed to easily be able to tell how far along they are in a story and navigate the experience.

Team6: Attenborough: a system to annotate audio w/ notes & media, offer richer browser playback experience #SNDMakes pic.twitter.com/lS36QbYfgg

— Ryan D Ghost, BOO (@sixfoot6) October 19, 2014

There are some specific, technical challenges to what Attenborough wants to accomplish. MP3s are dumb vessels, and the information inside them is hard to access, which could make creating a generalizable product hard. “We looked at the work being done by PopUp Archive, HyperAud.io, Popcorn and Kettlecorn, and a few other projects that are all chipping a way similar-ish questions in different ways…And, well, we learned that there is still a lot of work left to be done,” writes Mulligan. Next steps after resolving those issues would be for the team to dive into how Attenborough would operate from the content creator’s perspective.

SNDMakes was more designathon than hackathon, meaning there’s less pressure for these ideas to become workable products or salable companies any time soon. Though some might have life after Boston, the idea of the event was to help spark new ideas in the minds of those who work on news design everyday.

“As SND’s digital director, it’s really important to me to provide opportunities for SND members and non-members alike to come together, talk about the problems we’re facing in digital journalism, and then build solutions that we can share within our individual news organizations as the industry as a whole,” says Ellis. “SND aims to be a facilitator of important industry discussion, and now what you’re seeing with #SNDMakes is how we’re doing that for digital journalism.

“I’ve extended my commute 15 minutes so I can read on the train,” Chestnut says. “The context matters so much. On the train, when I’m reading, I have to read — it’s gross and crowded and smelly. At work, I’ve tried reading, but I don’t pay attention.”

Soon, Chestnut will have help with all that research. BuzzFeed is announcing today that it’s hired Stacy-Marie Ishmael from the Financial Times to lead the editorial side of the BuzzFeed News app, which we wrote about when the hiring process began earlier this year.

“What’s going to make this work is that we’ll figure it out together,” says Chestnut. “She’s the one who will be directly responsible for managing the editors and writers. I’ll be responsible for developers, designers, analytics, marketing.” (Ishmael wasn’t able to talk with us for this story because she’s still an employee at the FT.)

Chestnut came to BuzzFeed after a stint running the now dead TNR Labs, where he was responsible for audience development and helped create new New Republic products including Q.E.D. and the World Cup blog. Prior to that he worked for a consulting firm in D.C. where he focused on social media campaigns. In his words: “A lot of ‘How do you get sponsored content read?'”

Ishmael is currently vice president of communities at the FT. She was one of the creators of the now-defunct FT Tilt and the early financial blog FT Alphaville. She also worked as a product manager at Percolate, where, funnily enough, she once interviewed Noah Chestnut for a job.

“I was super impressed with her,” he says. “We talked about Reddit for like an hour.”

Prior to all of that, Ishmael was a finance reporter, which means she has experience on both the editorial and product side of a newsroom.

“She sort of embodies what we hope is the strength that we’ll bring to this space,” says BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith. “She’s a real journalist who’s been in the fulcrum of some of the biggest stories in the world at a great news organization. She’s also a person who comes from the Internet and has thought deeply about and worked on product. Along with that sort of experience and intelligence, she has the leadership ability that this job requires.”

Smith says he expects Ishmael will hire somewhere around seven or eight journalists to work on the app, some of whom will be internationally located in order to allow for 24/7 coverage. In addition, reporters already working for BuzzFeed News will contribute to the app’s editorial content — part of Ishmael’s job will be to integrate those two teams and develop an efficient workflow.

With that goal in mind, both the product and editorial teams working on the new app will sit together in the newsroom, which Chestnut says is a first for developers and designers at BuzzFeed. Chestnut has been working with BuzzFeed’s regular mobile developers on fleshing out a prototype of the app, and says new hires to the tech team who are especially interested in working in news will be considered for permanent placement on his team.

“The people who are interested in news from a developer and design perspective but haven’t lived in news, we want them to feel what it’s like to be in a newsroom,” he says. “Not just watch it, but be in it for a few months. It’s a different environment — the cadence, the timing.”

This proximity will help as the product staffers work on developing things like breaking news templates. Smith says through efforts like the BuzzFeed News Twitter account, he’s come to understand the importance of having open lines of communication even for standalone teams. “It’s very important that these people are sitting next to each other,” he says. “An editor saying, Wait! Don’t go with that! Figuring out how to integrate that judgment into the app is going to be important.”

While Ishmael will have a “big voice in product” when she starts, Chestnut has begun to flesh out a minimum viable product for the app. He says he uses apps like Yahoo News Digest, Circa, and NYT Now everyday, as well as Facebook Paper (they make “a lot of weird choices that I love,” he says). Chestnut is an especially big fan of Google Now, which he says he uses all the time on Android, where it’s a baked-in personalized news service, but less frequently on iOS, where it’s based in a standalone app. In both cases, Google uses information like search data and your email contents to predict the user’s information needs.

“It’s taken less than two months for Google to have a sense of what I should be reading,” he says. “It’s not perfect, but there are moments of pure delight.”

He’s also looked at chat apps like Kik and Line, which are especially applicable if you’re interested, as he is, in dark social. Sharing behavior in email or private message is different than on the big networks. “It’s private, it’s intentional — it’s more intimate,” Chestnut says.

BuzzFeed has Facebook and Pinterest down, but they’re also interested in learning more about private sharing behavior and what kind of information people like to have directly delivered to them. That’s why, for example, it makes sense that the app is launching as a newsletter. Other news organizations, like the BBC, are already experimenting with delivering news natively on chat app platforms, so it might make sense to think about what features those services offer when building a news product. Though Chestnut says he’s not sure whether the app will involve messaging, he says he’s been thinking a lot about how people connect via stories.

“I don’t think news is just something you discuss after work,” he says. “News can be incredibly personal.”

Still, it’s not exactly a struggling crowd they’re targeting. Here’s how it describes its audience to potential advertisers:

They are the readers who live in and around the state’s metro centers, especially in neighborhoods populated by residents who over-index on basic demographic attributes (household income, education levels, and spending on domestic travel), as well as characteristics that suggest out-sized cultural influence. For example, they are 50% more likely to read Wired, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and the Sunday New York Times than average residents of the LA, SF and Sacramento DMAs. They’re roughly 75% more likely to own a MacBook Pro and drive a hybrid car. They’re almost 100% more likely to spend at least $3,000 per year traveling overseas. Professionally they are developers, designers, writers, entrepreneurs, do-gooders, artists, and media producers.

Because of their considerable circulation at launch, McGray says, they were able to go after national advertisers like Lexus and Nest. Because they have an in-house creative studio available to build campaigns for these brands, they’re also able to charge premium prices. Those advertisers, in turn, mean the magazine can pay for reported features that a smaller publication couldn’t afford.

“There are some things about print that are really good as a business. There are some things that are really tough,” says McGray. “The money you have to spend to build circulation and acquire subscribers to the point where you have a kind of circulation where you can talk to national advertisers…we’ve cut out that part of the print business.”

The other piece of the revenue pie for California Sunday is memberships, which are offered in tiers. If you want a copy of the print magazine but don’t live in the delivery zone, you can pay $99.98 a year to become a Superfan, which gets you the print magazine, access to apps and a “limited-edition mystery object designed by California Sunday creative director Leo Jung.” There’s also a $1,299.99 a year option for Patrons, limited to 25, who get reserved Pop-Up Magazine tickets, and a $39.99 a year option for Fans who just want digital access. (Without a subscription, you’ll be subject to the tyranny of a metered paywall.) There’s also an option to fund a project — for between $.99 and $9.99 a month, you can support coverage of education, environment, health, or “inequality and opportunity.”

Though the launch is big in terms of audience, on the production side McGray is scaling up more gradually. The magazine has fewer than 15 full-time staffers, and for now the actual writing will be done entirely by freelancers. Similarly, in the beginning, issues will be released monthly, though McGray says frequency will increase down the line. It’s an interesting strategy that balances a splashy launch — lots of readers and big advertisers — with a cautious plan for scaling that focuses on sustainability and longevity.

“We call it the California Sunday Magazine. You don’t name something that if you expected to do something cool for two years and run out of money, or find it’s not sustainable,” he says. “It’s going to be an institution. It’s going to be around for a long time, make a contribution, be part of civic life.”

The first season will be 12 episodes long — they think.

“For us, that it’s a podcast is so liberating,” says Koenig. “We can tell it as long as we need to tell it, and we don’t have to worry about it.”

The Serial team is hoping this suspense will be addictive and help to turn This American Life listeners into Serial fans as well. In addition to airing the first episode during This American Life’s usual time slot, Serial will be reaching out to its audience via Facebook, Twitter, and email newsletter, plus the occasional on-air shoutout from TAL host Ira Glass.

Serial worked with an outside contractor to build its new website, where they’ll be posting features like an interactive timeline, documents related to the story, photos of the characters, and maps, as well as a blog with additional information. For now, there’s no Serial app, which everyone agreed was too expensive for what is still, essentially, an experiment.

Serial arrives after a year in which This American Life left longtime distributor PRI to become more independent and to partner with PRX, which, according to operations and production manager Emily Condon, “distributes This American Life to radio stations, and handles TAL’s download sales through iTunes and TAL’s apps” but has no relationship with Serial.

A new podcast seems like a natural expansion for This American Life, which is itself of course already one of the most popular podcasts in the world. “The listeners have been really great about supporting a lot of the things we’ve tried to do over the years, whether it’s live shows or the TV show or special events,” says Snyder. Indeed, Serial topped Apple podcast downloads before episode one was even out:

The top podcasts list is looking pretty nice! @serial @ThisAmerLife @waitwait @Radiolab @freakonomics @podcaststartup pic.twitter.com/W9uNOVEoqO

— Rich Orris (@rorris) September 29, 2014

What’s more, some think we’re in the midst of a podcast renaissance. Here’s an excerpt from a recent Fast Company story by Rebecca Greenfield called “The (Surprisingly Profitable) Rise of Podcast Networks”:

The StartUp guys aren’t alone in thinking there’s “massive” money to be made in podcasting of this ilk. In the last six months, three podcast networks have popped up, from established public radio players: Infinite Guest from American Public Media, SoundWorks from PRI, and Radiotopia from PRX. Meanwhile WNYC has added more podcasts to its roster of shows, which includes the beloved, and very popular, Radiolab. This American Life, the radio show, is now spawning a podcast called Serial. Online print media has also gotten the message: Slate has doubled its podcast output in the last two years.

So everyone’s listening to podcasts these days, and This American Life is riding that wave — right? Not exactly. For many, podcasting is still very much an undiscovered niche.

“I went to my cousin’s wedding last weekend, and I will definitely let you know the aunts and uncles in my family are not super familiar with podcasting,” says Snyder. “That became a little discouraging after a while. But as a result of that, we have now put together a very short video tutorial with Ira and his 85-year-old neighbor and fellow dog park colleague Mary. Mary is an avid podcast listener because her eyesight isn’t great and she needs something to do on all her doctor’s visits — she really had podcasting down. So Ira and Mary explain in their video how to listen to a podcast.” [Update: A correction via email from Ira Glass: “My neighbor Mary is 86. Turns 87 on Oct 18.”]

Though an ever-growing number of people (of all ages) are tuning into podcasts, the reality is that the audiences are still nearly always smaller than what a show like This American Life can reach on terrestrial radio. Though podcasts have been around for a while, the behavior isn’t as mainstream as it may feel to converts — though Snyder did point out that the technology is getting more usable, and that even car companies are installing podcasting software into dashboards now.

“It will be interesting, once we start podcasting more, if the audience feels different than the audience we have for This American Life right now,” Snyder says. “I’m not sure — it will certainly be much smaller.”

(Podcast audiences are actually a little hard to measure. It’s possible to know how many listeners are on-site and on SoundCloud, but other apps like iTunes don’t make that information available, and tracking server-side downloads is still tricky, according to Condon, who says the team is working on ways to refine available metrics.)

At Fast Company, Greenfield argues that, as podcast audiences grow, so do the potential profits for podcasters:

Podcast ads are unique. Unlike advertising on almost any other medium, people like the interruption, mid-program, to learn about Squarespace and Stamps.com. Often, hosts read the ads in the tone and style of the show…

“People really pay attention to the ads,” Slate’s podcasting guru Andy Bowers says. That’s partly because they have to: The hosts are often right in your ear, and there’s no quick way to change the station, like on a radio.

While Koenig and Snyder disagree with the idea that listeners enjoy being interrupted, some of that logic does apply. Serial’s launch is being sponsored by MailChimp, a frequent podcast advertiser; other ad slots are available in 15-second segments at the beginning and end of the show. Koenig will voice the post-roll ads, “the way Ira Glass does at the end of TAL,” Condon says. The hope is that Serial will become self-sustaining via advertising and, later on, listener donations — but for now they rely on This American Life’s budget. (All Serial staffers, including new hire Dana Chivvis, are employees of WBEZ Chicago Public Media, as are all This American Life employees.)

So, though podcasting may again be on the rise, Serial’s not in it for the money, at least not right now. But being a podcast rather than a radio show has definite perks. For one, the format is more flexible — the podcast makes it easier to do a show that’s based on a season, which can be a struggle for local programmers to work around.

“The benefit of podcasting, obviously, is there’s a lot of administrative overhead you don’t have to deal with,” says Snyder. “You can do it with a smaller budget and a smaller staff.”

The task fell to senior editor for data news John Keefe and his Data News Team. Keefe is himself a New York City parent, familiar with the confusing and poorly communicated hurdles that need jumping for kids to get through the system — even seemingly straightforward tasks like picking a middle school to attend can be overwhelming.

“My daughter is in middle school this year, and we had to apply for middle schools for her last year,” Keefe says. “I’m a busy parent. My wife and I both work, we’re raising our kids, and all of this information missed us. This is an important process — we’re talking about your kids’ education — and there are things I never knew last year that I’m learning now.”

There are a lot of steps to choosing a middle school for your kids in New York — and to getting them accepted. There are fairs and open houses; you have to keep up to date on which forms and test scores need to be sent where. This process gets underway in October, and WNYC wanted to make sure the new Schoolbook was up and running in time to help parents. In addition, meeting that deadline would help bring a new, information-hungry audience to WNYC’s education coverage.

“You can build it, but will they come? We knew from other traffic that people were checking it here and there,” says Keefe. “We decided that we could build this whole beautiful thing, but it wasn’t going to be seen unless we really developed something around these decision points.”

The Data News team is committed to growing significant audience for Schoolbook, which is why the station is partnering with the New York Daily News, WNBC, and WNJU Telemundo. The site’s email signup and search function will both be embedded as widgets on these partner sites. The search function will also be translated into Spanish and Chinese (emails will be available in Spanish, too) in hopes of serving the widest audience possible.

Wanting to have all of that ready in time for the October open houses meant the Schoolbook team was suddenly under a tight deadline — one that, considering the other pressures of the newsroom, they weren’t sure they could meet. “We figured out that, to pull it off, the only way was to work seven days straight without interruption,” says Keefe. Data News team member Noah Veltman suggested the team take a trip to Bermuda to get the work done. While that was a bit of a reach, there was a grain of sense in it: Startup employees are known for operating on a project-by-project basis, working for long hours back to back to push big projects out — the ethos behind hackathons. Could that environment be productive for a small team inside a larger, legacy public media organization? Keefe decided to find out.

For a week, four of five WNYC Data News team members — Veltman, Keefe, Louise Ma, and Jenny Ye — sequestered themselves in a house in the town of Callicoon, NY to build the new Schoolbook. (Callicoon is in the Catskills and has a population of of 3,057. Veltman calls it “the Bermuda of the Delaware River Basin.) “For seven days, we worked shoulder to shoulder, and then somebody had to figure out who was making dinner,” Keefe says.

With no meetings and commutes limited to a walk up and down stairs, team members say they were able to accomplish a month’s worth of work on their trip. They also found the new environment more suited for coding in pairs, a setup that will ideally follow them back to Manhattan.

“Pair programming is a concept where you work on something side-by-side together — looking at one project and solving the code problem together,” says Keefe. “It can seem inefficient, because you have two people working on the same project, but it’s a great way to learn and collaborate.”

Of course, team retreats might not be affordable for the majority of newsrooms working with small teams, but it’s an interesting model for incorporating news sprints into an otherwise hectic work environment. Keefe says he’s eager to try the retreat model for project management again, possibly on smaller, individual projects, maybe even including some contribution from editorial.

The Schoolbook project, however, focused on design and development. The team had some wireframe sketches and a sense of who they were designing for prepared before leaving New York. “It wasn’t mobile-friendly, and it wasn’t necessarily parent-friendly,” says Keefe. “When you looked at the data, it was really complete, but maybe it was too complete. It had every little data point. It was very transparent, but it was also a little bit overwhelming.”

So they undertook to make the data presentation more straightforward, foregrounding the figures that mattered to parents — attendance, enrollment, class size, racial breakdown — and putting them in context with city averages. The new system, which launches on Monday, will also make it easier to understand where the numbers are coming from, with links to the PDFs of the original forms. The site will also features the ability to search by address, so parents can more easily figure out which schools are near their homes. Here’s a draft of what that will look like:

But making the information more readable wasn’t going far enough, Keefe’s team decided. They wanted to reach parents directly and provide a reminder about responsibilities and deadlines. They thought about using text messages, but ultimately decided the complexity of the school selection process warranted something more in-depth and opted for an email newsletter. When parents sign up, they’ll enter the grades of their kids and their address, which WNYC uses to send them targeted information. Here’s another draft:

“For example, I’m District 6,” says Keefe. “The email I get about the middle school fairs will have the date, time, and address for my middle school fair for my district.” Having access to information about students’ age will also make it possible to ping parents in advance of future deadlines — for example, springtime elementary school selection if they indicated they have a younger child.

To an extent, the Schoolbook project sounds more like work the city government should be doing than a job for a newsroom — but filling the information gap for New York residents is a part of the Data News team’s DNA. “The first map that made it big for us was the hurricane evacuation map, which was built with city data but was better than what the city had,” says Keefe. That kind of service, focusing on solving problems for readers, could be an especially good fit for public media as it moves beyond radio.

“We’re here in the community. We’re listener-supported. If the community feels good about us, maybe that’s good for the station,” Keefe says. “We watch traffic, for sure. But if it has an impact with a longer tail, that’s pretty great.”

Circa is in an interesting position. On the one hand, they’re industry darlings — partially credited with popularizing the card, they are almost always on the short list when people ask about innovative mobile news apps. It has major Silicon Valley cred. In 2013, Apple listed it among their best apps, and its App Store user rating is a respectable four and a half stars. When international news execs come to the United States to see what’s happening here, Circa is on their mind.

At the same time, it’s unclear how much actual use it’s getting. Circa has been unwilling to release user numbers ever since launch. As of this morning, it ranked 71st among the free news apps on the App Store, behind apps for the Philadelphia ABC affiliate and Long Island’s News 12. While the concepts are interesting, whether Circa can build the wide user base they’re looking for is unclear.

“We built it for us. We built it for people who were on the go, and needing to be informed,” says Circa CEO Matt Galligan. “What it’s become is much more broad than that.”

Circa allows users to “follow” a story — to be notified with small updates as they come in — but Galligan says defining that new behavior for users has been a challenge. In addition, some users followed “well over a thousand stories,” which made notifications messy.

“The way we had previously presented these updates was a list of stories that happened to have updates. We would show you a list of stories that contained mentions of something you followed,” Galligan says. “We saw an opportunity to streamline and break it down into a solitary feed. Instead of having to dip into every story, you have one feed to look through.”

That single feed is called Wire. (Galligan says the team felt the product was different enough from The Atlantic’s now deceased The Wire — and presumably the song, the TV show, and the band — to warrant the similar name.) Circa keeps track of what topics you’re interested in, what stories you follow, and what you have and haven’t read and provides granular updates accordingly. For example, I follow the story “U.S. launches first airstrikes against Islamic State in Syria” and got an update at 9:43 a.m. today about reported airstrikes in a town called Ayn Al-Arab near the Turkish border.

“All we have to do is drop one new update,” says Galligan. “Any other traditional publication would have to write a prerequisite amount of words.”

The new version of Circa also has a feature called Daily Brief, a headline rundown that users can customize and set to reload at a certain time. Galligan says the idea was inspired by the daily presidential brief and not, as I would have suspected, by Quartz’s popular Daily Brief email newsletter.

“The idea that we know what you’ve read and know what you haven’t is truly the ultimate personalization,” says Galligan. Indeed, that the user can control what stories they see in the stream and which they get via notification is useful. Galligan says personalized push notifications (notifications that users asked for) draw more traffic to a story than generalized ones (notifications that everyone gets automatically). Other new features like search make it even easier to locate and follow the stories you want to stay up to date on.

Josh Stearns, who’s written about Circa in the past, has been beta testing the new version. “The app makes it easy to skim across topics and then drill down into stories and follow a few threads within Circa or on to other people’s sites,” he says. “In that way, it reminds me a bit of many of the newsletters I like, or the new Quartz homepage.” Circa allows users to both skim general news headlines and get constant updates on stories they’re following, which Stearns says could appeal to both news junkies and average news consumers.

With the new app launched, the next mission for Circa is a revamp of its CMS, which is highly customized but has operated in roughly the same way for two years. The app is known for its use of cards to make reading easier and granular news updates more intuitive, but that approach may not define Circa forever. “We may not stick with the cards. There are some interesting things we’re thinking about that would move us beyond cards, that would retain the atomized approach,” Galligan says.

What’s in store for Circa’s CMS is especially important as they move towards building a business plan for the app. Galligan says they’re in talks — “active discussions with news organizations that would be complementary to our brand and to our audience” — about what their system could provide to other media companies. (Whether that would mean content partnerships or software licensing, Galligan wouldn’t say.)

Circa brought on former Tumblr president John Maloney to help develop their business in April. Galligan says that, in addition to experiments with the technology, that plan will definitely involve advertising — a development that’s especially interesting because, to achieve success, Circa’s active user numbers will need to impress.

“It’s not that the numbers aren’t good, it’s just a matter of neither of those things matter to us yet,” says Galligan. “Sometime, over the next six to nine months, those numbers will start to come out.”

TV Everywhere has begun to make simulcasting available from a variety of networks and channels — according to Adobe’s state-of-the-industry report (via The New York Times), viewership has grown 246 percent in the last year. Companies have started experimenting with what’s possible in terms of bringing broadcast TV content to smartphones and tablets. For example, NBC notably broke traffic records with its Olympics coverage last fall, which was pushed out live on mobile. WatchESPN has also been remarkably popular.

But over the summer, CNN has rolled out a product meant to go above and beyond what competitors offer when it comes to live, mobile TV news. Of its competitors, CNN’s Alex Wellen says, “They’re usually one app, for one show on one network that’s probably pre-baked and planned for and needs to be synchronized. So I think it’s a different proposition altogether.”

The proposition he’s referring to is CNNgo, which originally launched as CNNx in April. Available on iPad or desktop, CNNgo can be accessed by TV Everywhere subscribers who can remember their cable login and password.1 The new name — CNNgo mirrors the successful HBO GO as well as CNN’s new slogan, “Go There” — will bring with it a week of no-authentication-needed streaming that includes bonus content from Anthony Bourdain, Mike Rowe, and Lisa Ling. CNN is hoping the combination of exclusive on-demand content and an authentication-free experience will seduce users into testing — and falling for — the product.

“CNNx is all about control, whether it’s controlling what you watch or when you watch, how much depth you get around a particular segment, how you share it, how you personalize it — it really was about control,” says Wellen, vice president of product, strategy, and operations. “The control in the past had always been inside the control room. The director decided what segments came up. Our goal was to put the consumer inside the control room. When we knew it, you knew it.”

When you open up CNNgo, it starts playing whatever’s currently on CNN. Along the bottom, you’ll see a few choice, curated links from social media — photos, tweets — selected by a CNNgo standalone editorial team.

But the real feature is a sidebar that allows users to both look ahead at the day’s rundown as well as scroll back and watch already aired content from the last 24 hours. So, if you’re not interested in watching Wolf Blitzer talk about climate change at 1 p.m., you can go back and watch Obama’s comments on ISIS from 10 a.m. while you wait for a segment on the IDF to air around 1:45. Thus is the traditional, top-down, linear model for broadcast TV tweaked into a digital approach that allows users to choose what they watch — at least within the world of already-aired CNN content.

CNNgo squares nicely with the network’s “always on” public image. The difference between an app like this and other second screen and TV Everywhere apps, according to Wellen, is the ability (or ambition) to handle breaking news.

“If there’s breaking news, first, pictures come in. We can deliver that in the app. You can see those first pictures, as opposed to waiting for it to come on the screen,” he says. “In most other scenarios, if something happens unexpected, the app falls apart. This app actually thrives when there’s breaking news, which is exactly what CNN is.”

As far as what kind of audience CNNgo has brought in thus far, Wellen would only say that it’s “early days” for the product.2 But TV Everywhere viewership continues to climb for CNN, with August breaking all previous records. More impressive is the average time spent per user — a somewhat astounding (and almost TV-like) 47 minutes on the iPad and 104 minutes on desktop.

That kind of time investment is, of course, music to the ears of advertisers. Video content is already a solid proposition for marketers, but CNNgo offers something more — data about individual users and the exact segments they do and don’t want to watch. Someday, information on what content viewers click on and what content they choose to ignore might even inform coverage.

“Should the focus be on engagement…whether they’re staying in this experience longer, how many segments they’re watching? That could inform some of our programming,” says Wellen. “The segments that are performing better, where we lose people in a particular story, that could inform a lot of what we do across all platforms.”

CNNx launched initially on iPad because the device fit both the “lean in” and “lean back” experience, Wellen says. The move to desktop was mostly aimed at getting more viewers interested. For now, the iPhone screen is a little small for all of CNNgo’s functionality, but someday CNNgo will be the standard face of CNN across platforms.

“The reality is people want to time shift and get context and share TV wherever they are. It will be, I think, critical for us to put that in the palm of your hand, which is your phone,” says Wellen. “I would say that what we’re doing with this product is really setting the future architecture for CNN.”

1. This login tutorial from Fox gives you a sense of the difficulties the average cable TV viewer faces when it comes to authentication.
2. Measuring digital TV audience, especially on mobile, is notoriously murky. Writes Deborah Potter of TV News Lab in an email: “I’m afraid to say that no one really has reliable numbers on TV viewership on mobile devices. Nielsen says they’ll begin to measure that this fall but it’s not clear they’ll be able to do it effectively right off the bat. ComScore says it can track ads on mobile but I wouldn’t call that an audience measurement. Individual programs (especially major sports events) have put out live stream numbers based on authenticated log-ins through TV Everywhere systems and other video technology systems like Ooyala have their own measurements but again, that doesn’t cover all viewership.”