aggregation – Nieman Lab

I have come to bury Knewz, not to praise it

Joshua Benton — Wed, 14 Jul 2021 16:00:22 +0000

Knewz is dead, and shame on anyone who bought even a sliver of the hype. It’s standard marketing practice to pump up your new product — revolutionary! transformative! — but Knewz set a new bar for empty boasts backed by product nonsense.

For those of you blessedly unfamiliar, this terribly titled site was a dull knewz, er, news aggregator from Knewz, um, News Corp, first teased in 2019 and launched 18 months ago. What was its angle? Here’s the press release from its launch, reduced and rendered as PR blank verse, the poetry of bad ideas.

The thing is, News Corp knows how to get “more leverage in its relationship with Google and other platforms.” It’s the oldest publisher m.o.: Gain enough power through your editorial page and news slant to convince politicians it’s easier to do your bidding than to cross you. Hey, it just worked out great in Australia! (Said News Corp CEO Robert Thomson: “Particular thanks are certainly due to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s Rod Sims and his able team, along with the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, who have stood firm for their country and for journalism.”)

“News will be transformed by Knewz”

Eighteen months later, I think we know how this one turned out.

Look, if you want to make a mediocre conservative news aggregator, make a mediocre conservative news aggregator! If you want to make OnlyFans and teachers behaving badly your core beats, fine! But don’t cloak it in fairy tales about fighting the platforms and helping the little guy and battling clickbait and bias.

In the comments, please leave your own take on what Dow Jones CEO Robert Thomson is saying here. Is “nous” used here in the “term from classical philosophy for the faculty of the human mind necessary for understanding what is true or real” sense? Is it the French nous, meaning “we”? If, presumably, it’s the former: British pronunciation or American? Is “nous” supposed to rhyme with “Knewz”/”news” or “house“? Or has Knewz been pronounced “nowss” all this time? Thomson is Australian, if that helps.

Newsonomics: Nikkei’s Tsuneo Kita: “Without the FT, it wouldn’t have been possible for us to transform ourselves as we have”

Ken Doctor — Fri, 08 Nov 2019 15:15:45 +0000

Four years ago, the Japanese financial news giant Nikkei sent shocked the global media world with a surprise announcement: It had bought the storied Financial Times for $1.3 billion. “Billion” was a pricetag few thought they would see in news media sales again. As I parsed that buy at the time, one question stood out most: Why would anyone pay what seemed like a 35× multiple for the FT?

Certainly, the FT was a leader, maybe the leader, within the mostly bedraggled pack of newspapers moving through the industry’s titanic disruptions. But it was still mid-transition. Revenue growth was still a major challenge, and as a result profits were slim. So, what did Nikkei see that made it outbid its peers, including the innovative European giant Axel Springer?

Tsuneo Kita saw the future. And he made a big, bold bet.

A giant in Japanese media and longtime executive at Nikkei — its chairman since 2015 — Kita gave me a rare interview on a recent trip to the United States. In our hour-long conversation, conducted through an interpreter in San Francisco, the affable and accessible Kita spoke about that big buy and what it has meant to the transformation of Nikkei itself. We cover partnerships, culture, the technological imperative, and Japan’s unique digital disruption trajectory in the interview, which has been edited for length and clarity.

This should be read as a companion to yesterday’s interview with FT CEO John Ridding, in which we get his view of what the new ownership has meant to his company and talk about its remarkable, industry-leading success in digital transformation.

Ken Doctor: First, a question on the sale. Most people in the industry believed that, on a financial basis, you overpaid for the FT. How do you look at it?

Tsuneo Kita: I am able to say that this acquisition is a successful one. There are many, many ways you can evaluate your company. You’ve got tangible assets, you’ve got intangible assets. The intangible part of the Financial Times is invaluable for Nikkei. Nikkei has changed since we acquired the FT. Without the FT, it wouldn’t have been possible for us to transform ourselves as we have.

Even before we acquired the FT, Nikkei had been pursuing the strategy of globalization. The addition of the FT is actually promoting that strategy in a big way. It’s a big step.

Doctor: My sense of the strategy, from afar, is that the FT really allowed you to be a global player, while Nikkei itself was more focused on Asian markets. But I don’t know if that’s right.

Kita: Yes. If you look at the Japanese market, it is quite clear that the market is actually shrinking because of the population decline [Some estimates forecast that Japan’s current population of 127 million will drop below 100 million by 2049. In fact, new government programs now aim to attract immigrants to make up for the lower native birth rate.] So, in order to grow, we had to go to overseas. And since we are based in Asia, Asia is our No. 1 priority. In order to do that, we have set up editorial headquarters in Bangkok and commercial headquarters in Singapore.

Doctor: Are you then trying to take the Nikkei brand beyond Asia, or really focusing mainly on Asia with the Nikkei brand?

Kita: Of course, the first step is always Asia and then the next step is probably the U.S. Japan, especially, has very strong ties with United States in terms of the economy, business, financial markets. So maybe we started with Asia, but we’ll go to the United States.

Doctor: You now have two big brands, Nikkei and FT, and I know you’re doing some things together. Are there strategic decisions to be made of when you use the Nikkei brand and when you use the FT brand? Do you use them together? Are you still working through those issues?

Kita: One of the most important principles that we have is that the FT and Nikkei respect each other’s editorial independence. That’s of utmost importance in a partnership. So the FT is pursuing their own globalization strategy. Nikkei is pursuing our own. The way we report the news is different between us. The FT has its own view and Nikkei has its own view. If we have two different views, then that will make us able to offer more diversified views to our respective readers. Sometimes, we collaborate with each other. Sometimes, we’re competing with each other.

Doctor: In the Asian business market, many of your peers see the same opportunity. Bloomberg’s making a major push there. Rupert Murdoch likes to do that too every once in a while, and numerous other companies are as well. Who do you see as your strongest competitors in Asia in the next five years?

Kita: We don’t necessarily see any media companies as particularly rivals to us. I mean, we have our own growth strategy. You mentioned Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, but we don’t see them as necessarily a direct threat to us. We have our own strategy and that’s most important to us. Japanese media, most of them are still focused on the Japanese domestic market. So in that sense, they are not really competitive with us in Asia. But again, we are only pursuing our own strategy.

Doctor: Does that strategy include paid digital subscriptions outside Japan? I know you’re closing in on 700,000 digital subscriptions for Nikkei, and I think that’s almost all in Japan. Are you looking at selling significant number of digital subscriptions outside Japan?

Kita: I’m not quite sure if you’re familiar with this, but we have our English-language publication called Nikkei Asian Review. It’s digital-based now — the main source of delivery is just digital now. And it is actually a paid model. So we are doing this paid subscription model in Japan in Japanese, but we’re sort of doing the same overseas in English with the Nikkei Asian Review. It is taking some time, but from the beginning I’ve been saying that it’s going to be a 10-year project. Whatever time it takes, we are going to grow it.

Doctor: Where do you want to be at the end of 10 years?

Kita: The ultimate goal is to make the Nikkei Asian Review the primary source for Asian business information. Probably we start with Asian readership first, but again, in New York and in U.S. overall. I mean, people in the financial industry in general are interested in Asian information as well. So we are going to make this a global publication. It was launched in 2013, so in 10 years, it’s 2023.

Doctor: It’s hard, as we know, for North American and European publishers to understand Japanese publishing because of the language barrier. So we look for comparisons. Is the Nikkei Asian Review kind of like The Economist, for instance, for Asia? How can we compare so that western readers would have a sense of what you’re trying to do?

Kita: We started this publication, Nikkei Asian Review as a weekly magazine. Now again, it is really digitally centralized and digitally operated. So in that sense, it is exactly the same as the Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal. The content we are reporting is all about Asian business. So that’s the difference. But the business model is the same as the FT and WSJ.

Doctor: It’s the same?

Kita: Yes. You remember Carlos Ghosn, the former CEO of Nissan? When he was detained, we were the one to interview him first. So we wrote about it in English on the Asian Review. And that was cited by and carried out by the Reuterses or the Bloombergs. So it’s the same as any other publications — if you have a scoop and then we deliver it online, then we’re going to improve our awareness in the overseas market.

But we’re focusing on Asian tech news, I should say, as well as any news on the China. So that’s our main focus and we’re going to report all this news in English with the Nikkei Asian Review.

Doctor: Here we are in Silicon Valley, or on the edge of Silicon Valley. How much coverage does Nikkei do of Silicon Valley here?

Kita: We have an office in Palo Alto. And the office has five reporters, including for business-oriented publications called the Nikkei BP, Nikkei Business. And on top of that, we have one guy for our commercial operations, business development.

Doctor: And I heard also that you have just started a new program at Columbia University?

Kita: Yes. We’ve been speaking to Steve Coll [dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism] for two reasons. One is to send Nikkei reporters to Columbia to study data journalism. The other is a type of scholarship program for Asian journalists who are going to studying in the Columbia Journalism School.

And from time to time, we have conferences in Tokyo, inviting professors and faculty from the Columbia Journalism School. The audience are Japanese college students to help to promote what journalism means, how important it is.

Nikkei’s place in journalism and in an anxious world

Doctor: Let’s change tracks. This is a difficult point in the world, in politics, in democracy. And the press’s role in democracy and all the places that have been democratic is a major issue, including in our own country here at the moment. It’s clear to me that although Nikkei is under-covered as a company, that you are one of the most important news companies in the world.

And I know that your belief in transparent journalism, and in providing information to people is at your core. My question is: How dangerous a situation do you think we are in with the attacks on the press and the press’ business problems? There are so many pressures on the press today. Do you see this as a major issue?

Kita: The media industry has been under pressure for a quite long time. It’s always been a battle, to speak, with authority, with the real power. So in that sense, it doesn’t change much. Yes, that’s getting difficult, but that makes me believe that the battle is worthwhile fighting. That makes us all the more important in the society.

You mentioned the business problems — that’s the same in Japan as well. I mean, we are facing similar challenges in Japan to what you are facing in the United States. Precisely because of that, we need to maintain and improve our business operations so that we can provide free and independent journalism. And in our case, it is digitalization so that we can make ourself stronger. And that will be the basis of our free and independent journalism.

Doctor: I wrote in my book, Newsonomics, in 2010 that by 2020 there would be about a dozen legacy companies in the world who will make it through from print to digital. And I did not include Nikkei in that list at the time. But I would now, in there with The New York Times, The Washington Post, News Corp, Axel Springer, and a few others.

I’m interested in what you want. What do you want the audience at Nieman Lab to know about Nikkei? About the business purpose, the social purpose, and where it stands with journalism. It’s a big question.

Kita: I would summarize it in a few ways. We are business media, and we would like to contribute to the growth of the world economy through our media activities. Our corporate creed says that it’s through fair and impartial reporting that we contribute to the peaceful and democratic growth of the economy. That’s our corporate decree. So this is our mission.

The second point is: We are going to be tech-driven media. We will deliver our quality content information through digital. And we’re going to expand our areas of reporting by using digital technologies in a globalized way. So those are our main missions. That’s the way I would like to see Nikkei in the world.

Doctor: That’s ambitious. In terms of technology and being tech-driven, we’ve seen major changes in technology in the news business. I’m wondering on a 1 to 10 scale, with one being a little and 10 being a lot, where the chairman of Nikkei believes we’re at, in terms of technology driving journalism.

Kita: It’s an interesting question, but there is no goal in terms of digitalization in our industry. Things that we never anticipate could happen. It’s a constant change. Sometimes we do well, sometimes we do worse. But we need to keep updated with the latest technologies all the time.

That’s the constant challenge that we are facing. And that’s the constant effort we’re making. That is the reason why we have an office in Silicon Valley. Not just journalists, but business development people, to get to know and acquire the technologies that we can use to make our reporting better, more helpful to our readers, and to grow our business as well. And we are doing this alongside the FT.

Lessons from the FT buy

Doctor: The FT has been a technology leader in the press for almost two decades. I’m wondering what kinds of things, in the four years since the buy, you would point to as: “We were able to take these lessons from the FT”?

Kita: There are things that we learned from the FT. But there are things, at the same time, that we can share with the FT. The FT is ahead of us in terms of audience engagement, in terms of how we develop the subscription base by using all the data that we acquire from the existing subscribers. So that’s a big thing that we’ve learned from the FT.

At the same time, probably in the field of AI, we are ahead of them. We are doing research and developing AI in Tokyo. So, this is something that we will be able to share with the FT.

Doctor: I understand there is more mixing, more embedding both ways. How much interplay is there between the two organizations in terms of staff working with staff?

Kita: One example is we’ve got a gentleman from the FT in the first year of our partnership who really helped us to create our new website, a high-performance website. [It’s a progressive web app.]That’s one good example. In total, probably, we have more than 100 people going back and forth.

Doctor: How do they go back and forth? Is it a week here and there as joint projects? Is it business, editorial?

Kita: We have a variety of formats. Let’s speak one by one. In the newsroom, we’ve got, for example, the Nikkei Asian Review, which has a couple of FT editors all the time. I mean, people rotate, but at the moment, I think we have two or three FT editors working for the Nikkei Asian Review in Tokyo. On the commercial side, sometimes it’s a shorter trip, sometimes it’s three months. In some cases it’s a year or two years that we have people from FT, we have people going from Nikkei to FT. There’s a variety of formats.

It is increasing. And the collaboration becomes more like business as usual. So when I went to New York just the other day, an FT staffer told me that his particular project is done through collaboration between Nikkei and FT. I didn’t know that. On-the-ground collaboration, on-the-ground communication, on-the-ground exchange are all getting to be more like business as usual.

Doctor: I did a keynote at the FT News Summit in New York this spring, and I was able to talk to a number of FT staffers. They are quite happy with your ownership. One of them told me he had a list of 40 companies that could have bought the FT when [former owner] Pearson was selling it. And the journalists weren’t enthusiastic about most of those names. They were unclear, when you bought it, what was going to happen. But they are very pleased by the cooperation and the openness. And you know, it’s not easy to please journalists anywhere.[/conr]

Japan and culture

Doctor: I know we only have a few minutes left. Let’s talk about culture. Many people will say Japan’s very different than U.S. — the cultural barrier, the language barrier. John Ridding told me he had a different take on that. John said that one of the funny things is that it turned out that FT and Nikkei shared a culture.

You clearly knew the value of the FT to Nikkei, the hidden value in the FT. Did you understand that cultural fit?

Kita: I started my career as a financial markets journalist, so the FT has always been in my sights. The FT’s corporate position: Without fear, without favor. That is really the same as our corporate creed. And when I became the president in 2008, I thought about globalization. And when you think about that, the FT is our most preferable partner.

It’s been quite a long time since we started really studying the FT, long before we acquired it. So when they joined Nikkei Group, I didn’t really have a sense of surprise.

Doctor: I’ve been fortunate enough to cover business change in news around the globe, and the trends are really similar all over the world, but the trajectory is very different.

And it seems, when I look at it from outside and knowing too little about the Japanese market, that the Japanese press, while it’s felt digital disruption, is more insulated from that disruption than the press in North America and Europe.

Kita: Yes, one of the biggest difference between Japan and the U.S. and the European media markets is the distribution system for the print. Print, yes. Print’s still very strong.

Doctor: 2.4 million circulation for you. And Yomiuri is at 8 million.

Kita: In total, it’s about 40 million [newspapers sold], just below 40 million. It is decreasing every year. We can’t stop that trend, but still, it’s just under 40 million. Thanks to the home delivery system, all the agencies, delivery agents.

Doctor: So you have had more time to adjust?

Kita: I don’t think we at Nikkei can be complacent about that. Because our readers are business people — they are very digital. They are data-oriented. Their digital literacy is very, very high. So we have to meet their demands, and we have to be prepared for that. In our case, Nikkei’s case, we don’t have much time.

Doctor: As I report on the changes in the news industry, I hear about Google and Facebook everywhere around the world. But also in Japan, I hear so much about the strength of Yahoo Japan. And Yahoo Japan as kind of a unique aggregator which pays millions of dollars to major press companies in Japan. And I’m wondering whether you think that situation will hold or may change in the next several years.

Kita: Actually, Nikkei doesn’t provide news to Yahoo Japan. We don’t do that because we think it’s unnecessary. Never did it.

Doctor: So all the popular papers do, but not Nikkei?

Kita: Yes, that’s correct.

Doctor: Good decision.

Kita: That’s our uniqueness.

All the other major newspapers did provide content to Yahoo Japan, because they didn’t have enough resources, didn’t have enough capability to deliver their own content through their own platform. We did have it. But Asahi [Shimbun, another major daily with 6.4 million circulation] is building up its own platform. They are probably doing the same [as Nikkei, going more direct to readers.]

So I think I’m not quite sure how long Yahoo Japan can maintain their dominant position that they have now. We’ve got many other news aggregation sites coming up in the Japanese market as well, and I’m not quite sure how far Yahoo Japan can be as strong as they are now.

Doctor: I know you’re coming here from New York. What was the purpose of this trip? Are you hoping to raise the profile of Nikkei and the FT in the U.S.? Is that part of this journey?

Kita: Yes. I was in New York actually earlier this week. I’ve made myself go to FT’s offices in London and New York regularly. I go to London almost twice a year. I go to FT New York once a year to talk to staff. That’s part of my job. So there’s no special purpose of me visiting New York this time.

Actually, we had quite good and constructive discussions on how FT is expanding its presence in the United States market. Ever since we bought the Financial Times, I’ve been saying that the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity, so to speak, for the FT lies in the United States. So that’s the topic of the conversation I had in New York.

The reason why I came here in San Francisco is to meet you so that I can help improve the FT’s presence and awareness of Nikkei in San Francisco.

Photo of Nikkei chairman Tsuneo Kita at a Tokyo press conference for its acquisition of the FT, July 24, 2015, by AP/Eugene Hoshiko.

Newsonomics: How the Financial Times is building mini-brands within the global FT

Ken Doctor — Thu, 07 Nov 2019 19:33:01 +0000

John Ridding is comfortable in his new office. This year he moved the Financial Times back to its previous (1959-1989) Bracken House digs, after it had been refurbished for the needs of the modern FT.

As he approaches his 14th year as FT CEO, he’s also grown comfortable that the bet he made in 2015 — engineering a sale to Japanese business news giant Nikkei — was the right one. His new boss, Nikkei chairman Tsuneo Kita, thinks so too. (You can read an interview with him tomorrow here at Nieman Lab.)

The FT’s business is profitably enough for now, and more importantly, its key metrics are moving in the right direction. The prime driver of that is its success selling digital subscriptions — going from 517,000 four years ago to 840,000 today. That’s more digital subscribers than the FT ever had print subscribers.

As at nearly every newspaper around the world, print advertising and print subscriptions at the FT have long both been shrinking, but digital subscriptions have made up that gap and then some — leading to actual year-over-year growth. In 2012, advertising drove 50 percent of all FT revenue; now it’s at about 35 percent. (Make no mistake: Advertising remains a vital driver of substantial revenue for news companies. But for the ones who’ve gone furthest in the transition to digital, it’s become a secondary one.) “Other” revenue — mostly driven by conferences and events — now makes up nearly 10 percent of the FT’s revenue, double what it was a few years ago.

In our interview, Ridding emphasized how the FT’s ever-deepening customer knowledge drives how it builds its products and its business. He’s got an enviable audience to serve, to be sure: FT readers spend an average of $5,000 a year just on clothes and $6,500 on jewelry. Average net worth? £1.3 million. Average income? £206,000, or $266,000 at the current Brexit-depressed rate. Still, publishers still have to work hard to convince them to part with their money.

The FT’s customer understanding has driven it to focus investment on serving particular segments of its readership better than its competitors. To do that, it’s focused on engagement, as many do these days, but with its own formula.

The key is something called RFV. That stands for recency, frequency, and volume, a measure of a reader’s habit and loyalty with the FT. More specifically, it’s made up of three variables: time since last visit (recency), number of visits in the last 90 days (frequency), and amount of counted content read in the past 90 days (volume). An algorithm uses those variables to score engagement. “We’ve seen double-digit growth in engaged subscribers for the last three years,” the company says.

And what those readers want, the FT believes, is tailored content — much of it delivered by newsletter.

“Over the course of 2019, we refined our approach to newsletter strategy,” says Renée Kaplan, the FT’s head of audience and new content. “We have a more focused strategy to deliver and derive the most value possible from our newsletters as editorial products.”

Many publishers use newsletters as fishing lures, drawing readers into their pond, then hoping to convert then to subscribers. The FT uses them first and foremost to better serve current subscribers.

Kaplan sums up the FT’s strategy simply: “Number one, subscriber engagement. Number two, revenue. Much of our business’s monetization is through engagement, and the retention and LTV benefits that accrue to growing RFV and premium content consumption.”

There’s ongoing change in the newsletter portfolio. The FT has dropped or merged four newsletters and created new ones. This year, the FT has launched Tech Scroll Asia (leveraging the Nikkei connection) and the four-day-a-week Trade Secrets, responding to all the volatility in world commerce.

At this point, 26 percent of FT subscribers have signed up for a newsletter, and that number is “our primary growth target,” Kaplan says. Consequently, the company continues to work through internal dynamics to reduce friction in the signup process and increase subscriber awareness of the offerings.

In our talk, John Ridding — an FT lifer, having joined the company 32 years ago as international news desk journalist — talks about those business priorities and the broader news landscape — disrupted as much by Trump and Brexit as by Google and Facebook. He’s concerned about the widening polarization he sees and he believes that provides the FT a wider opening. And the U.S. market — already bigger than the U.K. for the FT — is his prime target.

“I think our opportunity there is to be an independent voice, a balanced voice, and a global voice at a time when a lot of media is becoming more domestically focused,” he said. “Certainly, that’s the feedback we’ve had from readers and research.” (For some, that will echo a certain uneasiness with The New York Times’ presentation of its stories in the Trump age.)

In this interview, edited for clarity, Ridding both shares some of the FT’s playbook and makes an analogy involving the movie Meet the Fockers.

Ken Doctor: Let me start with a journalistic question: What has surprised you most from the Nikkei acquisition? You pulled off the sale extremely well. If there were an award for M&A work in our field, you’d get it.

John Ridding: I will never forget the day of the deal, the final meeting of the board, which had to make the decision that day. The adrenaline — I don’t think I’ve ever had anything like it.

It’s been almost four years since the deal was concluded. I would categorize those four years as formidable and highly successful, and they’ve seen strong cooperation between us and Nikkei, and strong momentum. There’s been no editorial interference — they’ve been totally true to their word. And as you said, acquisitions are hard. I remember when I was a companies reporter in this building many moons ago and I was covering M&A — frankly, most acquisitions don’t go very well.

I think the key to that success is shared culture. Which sounds odd because when we did the deal, a lot of people in interviews or just in general said: “God, this must be really difficult, a Japanese owner on a different side of the planet.” But actually, I think the cultures in key respect are very strongly aligned.

Basically, these guys all come from a journalistic background, and they really believe in the value and importance of quality journalism, in reader revenues and transformation. So in a sense, culturally, they would do it the same way. Whenever we go out there, we obviously have board meetings, management meetings — but then generally we go out for a drink and dinner and talk about the news. That’s kind of what journalists and people in the news media like to do. So, I think that’s key.

Along with that is a long-term view, because they are a private company. By virtue of being privately owned, they can take and do take a long-term view, which in this horribly disrupted media environment is a huge asset.

Doctor: That was a huge key to what you were looking for in this deal, right? Even this year, we saw [Axel Springer CEO] Mathias Döpfner do his deal with KKR, to take a big minority stake in his company — and significantly take it private. As I’ve covered the destruction of American newspapering, that’s one of the truths: It’s nearly impossible to transition a public company, given the financial realities. It is one of the epiphanies of our time that news companies cannot be subject to quarterly reports.

Ridding: Yeah, you’re right. I’d forgotten about the Springer parallel, but I think that’s absolutely true.

And it doesn’t go away. It’s not like there’s a short phase of disruption. This is the new normal. It’s permanent.

For example, we needed a new digital platform and they were fully behind it from the get-go. We needed that kind of confidence and certainty to get on with it, because you can’t just chop and change.

Doctor: You’ve got more subscribers in the U.S. than in the U.K., and that surprises people, but it probably shouldn’t. The U.S.’s population is almost five times larger. Do you think there’s still room to grow here?

Ridding: Nikkei rightly felt that we can be bigger and should be bigger in the U.S. For our U.S. team, having an owner that wants to grow in strategic markets is practically inspiring. And it’s important because there’s an opportunity for us in the States. In the past, we’ve tried to build there, but you need a sustained, long- term view.

You can throw marketing money short-term at America, and it’ll wash out in churn quickly, but if you have a long-term commitment to building a quality audience — Kita-san’s favorite expression is “quality growth.” It’s all about sustainable, revenue-engaged growth, and they’re enabling us to do that.

Doctor: In the U.S., how would you describe your plan? How specifically is the Nikkei ownership helping you do things here in terms of that strategy that you couldn’t do before?

Ridding: There’s a number of things.

One is a confident focus on differentiation. We’re not going to plant 20 or 30 reporters outside the White House. Our view is what makes the FT different and special is that global coverage, and it’s that independent voice at a time where media is, as you know better than anyone, increasingly polarized. In the U.S., obviously, that’s been a big theme, though it’s not just the U.S.

So I think our opportunity there is to be an independent voice, a balanced voice, and a global voice at a time when a lot of media is becoming more domestically focused. Certainly, that’s the feedback we’ve had from readers and research.

Doctor: It’s interesting, because the one thing that Trump times have meant is that the Times, the Post, and the Journal — each a little differently — have become part of our polarized times. Is that an opportunity for you?

Ridding: Totally. Absolutely. I don’t comment specifically on other publications. Clearly, the media landscape in the U.S., and certainly in Britain, along with society to a certain extent is more polarized. It’s a kind of chicken and egg — I think they reinforce each other. But our view is to stay balanced.

Obviously, our editorial pages will have a clear opinion, but it doesn’t get into our news pages. I think that’s quite a significant differentiator, the balanced, independent, non-polarized, non-polarizing news and analysis.

Actually, we’ve just done an exercise where all of the senior management for the FT has interviewed subscriber. Obviously, we do lots of research and we look at the data analytics, but a deep conversation with a subscriber is a wonderful thing. It’s been a common response, on the news pages: “We get the news. It’s accurate, it’s authoritative, it’s reliable and we get to make up our minds. You don’t tell us what to think in the news pages.” And I think it’s a sad state of affairs, really, where that’s become such an important differentiator and advantage. That’s what one should expect from these media channels.

Doctor: In those conversations and research, are you hearing more of that than you used to?

Ridding: It’s coming through clearly, because I think it’s being seen as more of a differentiating factor. I think it’s always been the case, but it’s made us — it’s become more special, and people appreciate it more because it is more, sadly, rare.

Doctor: So if you’re going to do that, and you’re not going to put all your reporters at the White House, what’s that differentiation look like and how much more resource can you bring to it?

Ridding: Well, we have added some reporting resources, we’ve added marketing resources. We’ve also, to answer the other element of your question, added specific new verticals or specialist areas of coverage. We think that must-have specialist information is incredibly powerful in building loyal readers.

There’s a couple of examples. One is Moral Money, which Gillian Tett [currently chair of the editorial board and editor-at-large for the U.S.] devised and launched. It’s really about how investment is becoming more socially aware, and it’s about broader stakeholders, not just shareholders, is a big theme. You probably saw that the Business Roundtable recently changed their motif. It’s not just about the shareholders — it’s more broadly about stakeholders.

So Moral Money is a newsletter around that. We have events and conferences based in the U.S., and that’s growing very rapidly. In terms of what we do with Nikkei, another good example is something called Tech Scroll Asia, which is a co-branded FT/Nikkei publication — we’ll have events and conferences around it. And it’s pretty exciting, because what it’s doing is basically bringing the story of Asia technology, which is pretty dynamic, to the world and particularly to the U.S. I think the world has got used to thinking that all tech and all innovation comes from the Valley. It doesn’t. I think it’s a really interesting new service.

We have really good tech reporting resources in Asia. Nikkei has wonderful coverage on technology. So to have a co-branded product with content from both, which then has events and forums, I think is a very real expression of our capabilities and strategy. So that was launched this year, so was Moral Money. We’ve got plans for more of these ventures and services.

Doctor: So the playbook is high-quality content, differentiated content, a very clear sense of the audience, the events/conferences component — all, really, a reader-revenue-plus model.

What do you call these vertical products?

Ridding: What we call them is a good question, because technically, they’re known as newsletters, but actually they’re much more than that: mini-brands and mini-franchises, with premium exclusive information. Another great example is Due Diligence, which was in some respects the one that got us really excited about this. Due Diligence is about M&A, but it’s much more than M&A, and it’s got all the support services around it.

The point is they have personality. They have character. They’re engaging, and they have really inside stuff. So, they’re more than newsletters. They are mini-brands that have events and forums around them — but the newsletter is almost the spearhead. And there’s a very nice system that develops with the newspaper and online. Sitting above these is the global FT. You have readers who then want to drill deeper into specialist areas and become very loyal followers of these.

I think what’s interesting in the U.S. is that we’re finding that people are coming to these newsletters and then moving up into the broader world of FT.

Doctor: How many newsletters do you have?

Ridding: I suppose all together we’ve got a couple of dozen of them, but in a sense, the new wave of these really strategically significant drivers, I guess there’s half a dozen to 10 that we have already got planned. We’ve already got plans to add two new ones, one from the U.S. again next year and one global. They are all global.

Doctor: I understand one of them’s around trade, right? [That newsletter, Trade Secrets, has launched since our conversation.]

Ridding: All of the old certainties around trade and the old institutions are up in the air.

There’s one other point I wanted just to make in terms of this cooperation with Nikkei. We knew they were long-term, and we knew they believed in quality journalism. What we hadn’t really experienced because we hadn’t — before the acquisition happened — was just frankly how quickly and decisively they can move.

And that was one of my very beginning questions when I talked to Kita-san, because obviously there’s this, I think unfair, stereotype or perception that Japanese business moves slowly on the basis of consensus. But our experience actually has been that Nikkei can and does move quickly — also on the basis of consensus, because there’s consensus around the goals and trust.

The way I explain this and think about this is: One of my favorite movies is Meet the Fockers. Robert de Niro’s character has this wonderful concept of the circle of trust. If you’re inside that circle of trust and you share the same strategy and vision, you can make decisions pretty quickly.

And I’ve seen this with the new headquarters that I’m standing in now. I saw it in the acquisition itself. They knew very quickly to make that commitment. We’ve seen it in M&A. We’ve made a series of deals — they haven’t been mega deals, they’ve been smart, focused deals. Longitude, the research business; Alpha Grid, the content marketing business; The Next Web. And frankly, we’ve had a rigorous process — obviously, you do your homework and due diligence — but ultimately Nikkei was pretty clear and pretty decisive. And frankly, given the world we’re in and the need for speed, that’s a huge advantage.

Doctor: The trust idea is really what underlies success or not in the longer term. In the short term, you can get away with a lot of stuff, but…

Ridding: Exactly.

Doctor: I’ve long cited the FT for its groundbreaking paywall, for its emphasis on reader revenue, and for being way ahead of the curve in the application of technology. What are the most important metrics you are looking at now?

Ridding: We got through the million-subscribers milestone a year ahead of schedule in March. And the number of engaged readers, which is key, has also grown very strongly.

Obviously, advertising has its ups and downs. It’s a fickle friend. But the core reader revenue engine has just — it’s grown double digits in revenue terms and reader terms every year since the acquisition. And profits have more than doubled since the acquisition, because I think both Nikkei and the FT feel that the industry is so volatile and precarious, you have to have that financial strength to deliver the mission.

Doctor: That’s the whole thing about the digital business, right? Digital businesses become much more profitable once you get to a certain point — and, arguably, you’ve gotten there first. I can see The New York Times is definitely getting there. It’s got a different strategy, focused more on bundling — parenting and cooking and crosswords. With [New York Times CEO] Mark Thompson’s plan, the Times could have six or seven verticals by 2025, though he’ll be retired. As the engine works better and better, you become more profitable.

Ridding: And you also can build a virtuous circle to engage readers. The more you understand them, the better a job you do of product development. Good journalism is always going to be more than a science. It has to have heart and emotion and, frankly, editorial judgment and instinct. But boy, that science and the data really helps frame things and guide you in the right direction.

Doctor: Tom Betts, the FT’s data guru, has made a huge difference. I see his picture now third or fourth in your management lineup. It’s not an accident.

Ridding: Data analytics have transformed the place in a really enjoyable way. Data can be dry — or it can bring product and journalism and everything to life. And it’s the latter with us, and it’s been fantastic.

Photo of John Ridding at the FT Summer Party June 30, 2016 by the Financial Times used under a Creative Commons license.

Newsonomics: Four years in to their surprise marriage, what has the FT done for Nikkei, and vice versa?

Ken Doctor — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 18:24:05 +0000

On July 23, 2015, the Financial Times and Nikkei — the leading business newspapers in the U.K. and Japan — shocked the news business worldwide with its own acquisition breaking news. On that date, the two companies announced a tie-up that no one had seen coming.

The early conventional wisdom was that Nikkei had way overpaid (roughly $1.3 billion) for the prestigious but modestly earning FT — and that the new marriage would suffer through some major cultural headaches.

But today, four years later, both Nikkei and FT seem remarkably…happy. This corporate mix, both CEOs say, is working out even better than hoped. And word from inside the FT newsroom is one of satisfaction. Editorial integrity has been maintained. The new owners, replacing a struggling Pearson, have demonstrated a willingness to make targeted new investments in the newsroom and in product development.

“Basically, these [Nikkei] guys all come from a journalistic background, and they really believe in the value and importance of quality journalism, in reader revenues and transformation,” FT CEO John Ridding tells me. “So in a sense, culturally, they would do it the same way.”

I recently had the opportunity to speak with both Ridding and Nikkei chairman Tsuneo Kita, who doesn’t often give interviews. Over the next two days, we’ll publish excerpts of those conversations here at Nieman Lab.

It’s a check-in on a M&A deal that’s all about long-term strategy — not the sort of shorter-term, cost-cutting-driven deals we’ve seen in the United States, most notably in the pending combination of Gannett and GateHouse Media.

That deal will end up having roughly the same price tag as Nikkei/FT. But the differences between the two show the different fortunes facing the local and national/global newspaper businesses. The biggest players still face challenges, of course. (The New York Times reported a 6.7 percent drop in ad revenue this morning, for instance, tarnishing its latest good digital subscription news.) But by and large, they have the digital talent, experience, data capabilities, and products to let them enter the new decade with confidence. For local press, the questions are growing rapidly existential.

The Financial Times has seized global opportunities from its London base. We’ve been writing about it as a global leader in data-driven reader revenue for the past decade. I still recall when then-FT managing director Rob Grimshaw told me years ago that his emerging goal was to become “Amazon of newspapering.” In many areas, we can trace how the FT’s customer-centric and data-driven strategies have acted on that impulse. We can also see how much of the publishing world has come to accept such strategy as fundamental to their own futures. (The FT was the first major publisher to launch a metered paywall, all the way back in 2007 — four years before The New York Times followed suit, followed by much of the rest of the industry.)

That’s one reason everyone in news publishing should watch the FT. Whether your company can afford a fleet of data analysts or only one, or a small fleet, it’s the transformational thinking here that demands attention.

John Ridding has long been more measured in his public ambitions than the more expansive Mark Thompson, the New York Times CEO who publicly announced a 10 million subscriber goal three years ago. (It’s on pace to hit it by 2025.)

Nonetheless, Ridding’s company reached a true milestone in the spring, joining the small 1 Million Subscribers Club — 80 percent of them in digital.

Likewise, Nikkei is a major global player, focused primarily on Asia overall and increasingly driven by the same kinds of customer-centric and data-driven strategies.

While little understood in the U.S. or Europe, Nikkei is dominant in Japanese business journalism and now aims to be the business and tech news leader in Asia. Just this year, it’s bought stakes in startups in Singapore and India. As a Tokyo-based company, it deals both with Japan’s own population decline and difficult economy, and the wider digital disruption trends suffered by all the world’s press.

As New York City-based Jacob Margolies, who has long represented the Japanese daily Yomiuri Shimbun in the U.S., puts it: “All trends in Japan are in the same direction — except slower.” To put that in perspective, consider that Yomiuri — the world’s biggest newspaper with a daily circulation of 8.9 million — could count 10 million not long ago. It’s a decline, but still from a high, high start.

Long-time business journalism veteran Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of The Wall Street Journal and co-founder of NewsGuard, puts Nikkei in perspective. “Nikkei does world-class journalism, but differs from The Wall Street Journal in its good fortune to operate in a country with a culture of deep engagement with news,” he says. “Nikkei’s circulation in print is much larger than that of any U.S. news publisher, even though the population of Japan is well under half the population of the U.S. When Nikkei launched its digital subscription program several years ago, it was a quick success, at digital subscription prices that were the highest in the world.”

Overall, the Nikkei purchase of the FT stands out as strength buying strength, and an aim to make the combination more than the sum of its parts. These are two of the very few news brands that we can be confident will survive and likely prosper well into the 2020s. We can’t say that with much certainty about many other publishers. As Tsuneo Kita put it in 2016, Nikkei will judge the success of the deal over the next 10 to 20 years — not the next 3 or 4 quarters.

Take a look at a few of the top-line numbers at these two significant (if not discussed enough) global news players.

	2015	2019
Total subscribers
FT	737,056	1,022,191
Nikkei	3,134,517	3,031,657
Digital subscribers
FT	517,754	841,313
Nikkei	363,492	723,808
Newsroom headcount
FT	550	550
Nikkei	1,452	1,439

Most noteworthy here is the explosive growth of (expensive) digital subscriptions. The FT, given its global opportunity, has managed significant overall growth, with digital subscriptions now far outpacing its print numbers at their peak. (It sold 504,000 copies a day back in 2001.) Nikkei has largely offset its print losses, doubling its digital subscriber rolls in four years. Both companies have retained their sizable and experienced teams of journalists, considering them the lifeblood of their businesses.

Notably, the FT has begun to find the profitability bonus that should await publishers that become more fully digital. (After all, the marginal cost of 1,000 new print subscribers is real, in terms of paper, printing, and distribution. The marginal cost of 1,000 new digital subscribers is negligible.) In 2018, the FT made a profit of £25 million, up only £500,000 on 2017 — but double what it made in 2016.

In both of the interviews we’ll publish this week, there’s a strong emphasis on technology as a business driver and as a force multiplier. The FT is plainly farther along in most of these areas, but as Nikkei’s Kita told me, as a point of pride, “Probably in the field of AI, we are ahead of them [the FT]. We are doing research and developing AI in Tokyo. So, this is something that we will be able to share with FT.”

Photo of Nikkei newspapers at a kiosk in Yokohama by AP/Shuji Kajiyama.

“Glory and honor”: How professional identity shapes the way journalists do their work

Mark Coddington — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 16:25:37 +0000

Editor’s note: For nearly five years, Mark Coddington was a weekly presence here at Nieman Lab, writing the This Week in Review column on Fridays. He went off to grad school, became a journalism professor doing important work, and has now published his first book: Aggregating the News: Secondhand Knowledge and the Erosion of Journalistic Authority. I’m pleased to have him back on these pages writing about some of the book’s most important takeaways.

I’ve never met an editor who was as eager as Jennifer was to show me one of her organization’s worst stories.

Jennifer (not her real name) was the senior editor of VidNews, my pseudonym for a news organization that, at the time of my visit in 2015, was largely producing short, aggregated videos on daily news events using brief third-party video clips, motion graphics, and original narration.

Jennifer was trying to demonstrate to me how much VidNews had grown by showing me a hastily produced video from 2013, about a baby accidentally flushed down a toilet in China. She pulled up the video on a desktop computer and breathlessly talked me through it, pausing every few seconds to annotate it disparagingly. The video was a haphazard mashup of lengthy excerpts from American local TV news stations and English-language Chinese publications, devoid of context. The source material served as a “backdoor way to show someone else’s pictures,” in Jennifer’s words, and the video cribbed from its sources so extensively as to render them superfluous.

Jennifer turned to me after the video ended. “We would never do anything like that again,” she said. “Ever. One, there’s no glory or honor in it. But two, it’s not a legally viable business strategy.” There was nothing specifically illegal about it, though it skirted the edges of what’s considered fair use of copyrighted material.

I was intrigued, though, by the invocation of “glory or honor.” We might not think of glory and honor as important elements in understanding news aggregation. Aggregation — the work of assembling and repackaging news from content that has already been published — is routine desk work, recycling the material of other journalists to fulfill a company’s economic goals that might feel distant and exploitative. Where, one might wonder, is the glory and honor in that, whether it’s done well or poorly?

But in my research on news aggregation for my book, Aggregating the News: Secondhand Knowledge and the Erosion of Journalistic Authority (Columbia University Press), I found that the professional status encoded in this idea of “glory and honor” is central to who aggregators are and how they do their work — precisely because it’s in such short supply. Without that sense of identity, work tended to become rote, cynicism ruled, and burnout was high. In organizations that cultivated it, aggregators produced stronger work and showed more satisfaction. But the importance of professional identity isn’t limited to aggregators. In an era in which trust in news is fractured and employment is precarious, we need to look more closely at the ways that journalists’ sense of their own professional value — or lack thereof — influences the work they do and the environment in which they do it.

What makes journalists feel like journalists

The notion of professionalism has for decades been central for scholars seeking to understand the role journalists play in society and why they do what they do. As the sociologist Max Weber conceived of it, professionalism is about controlling knowledge and converting it into authority. Journalists lack many of the classic traits of a profession — they aren’t licensed (in America), they have no required education, and the primary skills they claim aren’t exclusive. But their social utility hinges on their ability to produce a certain kind of knowledge — timely, understandable explanation of important public events — and have that knowledge taken to be authoritative.

Since journalists don’t check many of the traditional professional boxes, scholars have often examined professionalism’s significance to journalism by determining the ways journalists think of themselves as — and seek to become — professionals. This approach puts professional identity at the forefront of what it means to practice journalism. Journalists have a very strong sense of this identity; they conceive of themselves as being oriented around a high calling of public service. They believe this gives their work great social value, and they fight fiercely to maintain their autonomy over it.

This professional identity holds a lot of value for journalists. In the absence of formal enforcement, it provides a central motivation for upholding ethical norms and standards. It reinforces a sense of community that helps sustain journalists’ commitment and strengthens their standing when interacting with other social groups, like politicians. And, most relevant to news aggregators, journalists’ image of themselves as savvy and noble (if unruly) guardians of democracy helps them cope with the increasingly routine, constrained nature of their work.

Professional identity comes from several places — socialization through journalism school and news organizations, discussion about journalism on Twitter and in publications like this one, and ideological values of the idealized roles journalism should play in society. But what I found in my research on news aggregators is that a primary wellspring of professional identity is the work of journalism itself — and when that work becomes more monotonous and less reliable as a source of knowledge, journalists’ identity is fractured with it.

Monotony and marginalization

I interviewed more than 80 aggregators and their editors in 2015 and 2016 and observed journalists doing aggregation in five news organizations. Most were under 30, and almost all of them spent their days at a desk, processing a torrent of information from TweetDeck, Slack, and various browser tabs at a bewildering pace to keep up with the demands of continuous publication. One told me that at the end of the workday: “You just walk away like a zombie, because you’re just focused, straight-on.”

That intense informational stimulation often produces more of a sense of monotony than a rush, in part because aggregators are working with other people’s information, not their own. Editors recognize this, and they see its effects in high turnover and low morale. Many of them adjust for it by building in on-location reporting assignments to function in part as “breaks” from aggregation. “If that was your full-time job, then I think you’d get real bored,” said one journalist who alternated shifts of reporting and aggregation. “I’d feel like I wasn’t using enough skills, almost.”

The work of aggregation is defined by a relentless pace and a juxtaposition between the constant activity and immobility of what one scholar calls “screenwork.” It tends to be exhausting, but without many of the psychic rewards of reporting — visiting new places, talking to people, observing important events, finding out things that no journalist has found out before.

This stultifying work fed a sense of inferiority that was compounded by the way aggregators knew they were viewed within their profession, and sometimes, within their own organization. Aggregation has long been derided in the news industry as cheap and ethically dubious and only marginally considered journalism, if at all. While many organizations have worked to ensure that all of their journalists feel their work is valued, that root sense of marginality continues to seep through in the way aggregators are talked to by their colleagues and the way they perceive themselves.

Consider one journalist’s contrast of the way his good aggregated and reported work was talked about in his organization:

“You’re going to get kudos for a really well-reported, smart, and well-read story. For a story that does really, really well [in drawing traffic] that you just aggregated, the most you’ll maybe get, if it’s really getting a lot of attention, is like, ‘Ha ha, hey, that story is doing really well.'”

That journalist didn’t resent the condescension toward aggregation; he shared it too. “Nobody graduates from journalism school and wants to do aggregation,” he told me. Even if he did aggregation well, it simply wasn’t fully “real” journalism, in his mind or in those of his colleagues.

Reporting and journalistic identity

So what did they consider real journalism? The answer, both to many aggregators and to the broader journalistic profession, is reporting. For decades, journalists have elevated reporting as journalism’s purest and most crucial form of work, a central part of their professional identity. “Good Old Fashioned Shoe Leather Reporting is the one god an American journalist can officially pray to,” media critic Jay Rosen observed in 2015. “There can never be enough of it. Only good derives from it. Anything that eclipses it is bad. Anything that eludes it is suspect. Anything that permits more of it is holy.”

Many of the aggregators in this study seemed to believe this, too — even as it relegated them to the margins of their own profession. “You look at people who are reporting from the ground in Syria or are doing really in-depth stories about Detroit or something, and you think, ‘Wow, that’s real journalism,'” said the editor of one social news site.

Sentiments such as this evoked two main reasons that reporting has such a hold on journalists’ professional identity — and that aggregation is such a weak foundation for that identity. This editor’s statement evokes a powerful cultural myth of the intrepid reporter risking his or her safety in far-off locales. But it also expresses a wistfulness for a type of knowledge based on direct observation rather than reading others’ reports and the authority that comes with that knowledge. In journalists’ minds, reporting allows them to know and tell stories that no one has told before, something that’s central to their sense of their own social value. Aggregation deprives journalists of this sense of professional confidence. The result, especially when combined with the monotony of the work itself, is a mixture of boredom, inferiority, and even shame in some cases — a cocktail that can poison efforts to improve aggregation as a practice.

The inferiority cycle

That’s not to say aggregation is doomed to apathetic decay. Many of the aggregators I observed and talked to believed their work had substantial value, did that work the best they could, and had strong opinions about what they considered the responsible and irresponsible ways of doing it. But because of their lack of cachet within the profession and the lack of professional infrastructure built up around their work — how many j-school classes in aggregation have you heard of? — the norms they espoused had little ability to serve as a foundation for authority and professional status.

The aggregation I observed and heard about seemed stuck in a stagnant cycle. The monotonous and derivative work fed a professional ennui, and coupled with the disdain for that work in the news industry, formed a weak professional identity that led aggregators to see the avenues to fulfillment and status lying elsewhere. This, in turn, led people out of aggregation work, so that they never invested enough in it to see its standards and status improved. Which, of course, will leave it ensconced as derivative, second-class work, as the cycle continues.

This cycle is broken when news organizations make an effort to invest more value in the work and the people doing it — give it recognition, talk together about how to make it better, make it a path through which journalists can gain status in the newsroom and the profession. That starts with recognizing the importance of professional identity and its inherent connection to the work journalists do. Especially as the forms of work journalists do multiply and evolve, it’s important to consider the “glory and honor” we attach (or don’t attach) to that work, and how that esteem might influence the future of the practice itself.

Photo of a newspaper jigsaw puzzle being assembled by Liza under a Creative Commons license.

Newsonomics: For the newspaper industry’s next feat, can it get Donald Trump to give it antitrust protection?

Ken Doctor — Mon, 17 Jul 2017 17:04:33 +0000

Sounds like a John Oliver segment, doesn’t it? As we all know from checking our favorite news apps, the line between satire and news has all but vanished anyhow.

Last week, in the friendly confines of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, the News Media Alliance initiative to gain an antitrust exemption lit many fuses. Media Alliance CEO David Chavern (see my Q&A with him here) made a singular point: The news(paper) needs legal protection so it can collectively negotiate with Google and Facebook, the dominant duopoly of this digital age. In his op-ed, “How antitrust undermines press freedom,” Chavern called on Congress to provide a safe haven — essentially an exemption — from antitrust law so that the Department of Justice wouldn’t charge the daily newspaper group with illegal activity.

The proposal has reignited a panoply of pleas, broadsides, two-decade-old arguments, and even a reasoned analysis or two. In that Alliance proposal, we see elements of truth, seeming political chutzpah, and an announcement that made it easy to categorize the daily newspaper owners as brothers from another (analog) age. The Alliance’s campaign for “safe harbor” fails to match the existential urgency of The Washington Post’s “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” but the two express a similar fear.

The headlines based on the proposal were confusing. They inflate the real, audience-driving business that Google and Facebook actually produce. At the same time, they conflate that “distribution” power with the biggest money issue of our time: their dominating and growing share of digital advertising.

The underlying issue here is one that’s hovered in the background of the jaw-dropping decline of the American (and North American and European) newspaper industries. The daily newspaper industry is pulling in $30 billion a year less than it did a decade ago. The profits of Google and Facebook now ring in at more than $30 billion a year. It’s a breathtaking turnaround.

That’s why this topic — the three-part relationship among The Platforms, news companies, and us — bears a deeper dive. Consider it a roadside guide to the latest Google/Facebook/publisher wars.

“The future of news gathering and, yes, democracy depends on the outcome of this fight.”

Let’s hope not. It would be pure folly to expect this Congress and this president to save the newspaper industry.

Sacramento Bee executive editor Joyce Terhaar wrote the stirring sentence above and column Thursday, and her spirit is encouraging, especially as her parent company McClatchy again tries to retool itself for digital success.

But daily newspapers can little afford to place their futures in the hands of others — especially a group of politicians who have done so little to defend the role of a free press as the president attacks it.

The News Media Alliance — made up of 2000 members, but largely a restyled, renamed-in-2016 daily newspaper trade association — would indeed love an antitrust exemption. But its main goal is a greater public hearing of the roles of the press and the platforms in a free society. If the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights and the House Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Law both hold hearings on the proposal this fall, that would be a big win.

The idea: shine a light on the dominating business power of Google and Facebook (and maybe Apple and Amazon?) on the news industry and more widely. That would be a big win. And it would supply the bigger stick news publishers could use as they nibble on the various carrots of partnership already underway and in discussion with all the big platform players.

2) Pick your percentage of pain.

The numbers flying in this debate each tell bits of the story. The Alliance cites the stat that “71 percent of the $19.6 billion spent [on digital advertising] in the first quarter of this year” went to Google and Facebook. And, yes, in fact, their share of overall digital advertising — which is now the largest category of advertising in the country, surpassing TV — is growing.

Last year, Jason Kint of Digital Content Next (a trade association for premium digital news publishers) made pointed out that in the third quarter of 2016, only one percent of the dollar growth in digital advertising went to companies other than Facebook and Google. That number totaled 10 percent for all of 2016. Even then, though, it meant that everyone else selling advertising could divvy up $1.4 billion, while Google and Facebook together got $11.4 billion of the ad growth.

As one observer of the landscape suggested to me this week, “Just wait until Google and Facebook hit 101 percent of the growth.” Given the trend lines, that seems like a real possibility — and would only reaffirm the Duopoly labeling.

3) I don’t like those percentages. Give me smaller ones.

In a survey of its members, Kint’s Digital Content Next found that, on average, top publishers attributed 14 percent of their digital revenue to money earned through the platforms.

“My takeaway on it was that it meant that there wasn’t enough economic influence coming from these companies to be driving [publishers’] decisions,” Kint said. “They need to get more money, especially if their content is going to live on those platforms.”

4) How serious is platformitis?

Remember the epidemic? It seemed to begin sometime in 2015 and spread aggressively into 2016. Platforms — the reader-sucking black holes of the time — seemed unstoppable.

The fear at the time was that everyone would spend their time on platforms, and news websites might as well give up and just post their content where the eyeballs seemed stuck.

It was a silly idea then, and it’s sillier now. One big reason is reader revenue. It’s dawned on almost everyone in the legacy newspaper industry that their hope of getting to worthwhile digital future must be focused on digital and all-access (digital + print) reader subscription. That’s the bedrock on which the national/global (New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and, over the longer term, Washington Post) business strategies find footing. But it’s also where the smarter regional dailies, from Boston to Minneapolis to Dallas to Seattle, now base their new business models.

That thinking, then, has led each of them, to value, extend, and protect their own direct relationships with their customers, for whom we have revived the old-fashioned name (after demoting “users”) “subscribers.” You can’t cede a paying relationship to a platform. Job One in audience and subscriber development: build and nurture on-site, in-app relationships with paying customers, who provide (or soon will) more than half the revenue for your news business.

Consequently, all those companies — and many more (Hearst, among others, have more recently got the religion) — have all aimed to turn platformitis into a manageable, chronic condition, rather than an acute malady.

The tremendous audience reach of Facebook and Google is something to be managed adroitly, but not something that will drive the success of their fundamental revenue strategies. Each company has done its own arithmetic, but most have come up with something not too far away from Digital Content Next’s 14 percent.

The takeaway, which we now see in a wider application among many media companies: move resources from serving platform distribution — which can be labor-heavy — to more worthy revenue-generating work like newsletter creation or podcast development.

As publishers have self-treated themselves for platformitis, we’ve seen a spectrum of approaches. The Washington Post — due to its ubiquity-seeking strategy — still makes itself all-in on Facebook and more deeply involved with Apple News, for instance. The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, with harder paywalls, parse their platform involvements ever more carefully. The New York Times balances subscriber conversion and with growing overall reach.

Those are the best practices strategies drawn from the best-resourced companies. Many of the regional publishers — those represented by the Media Alliance — look up and seem bewildered at the platform landscape and at how to work it. The big papers won’t argue with the notion that the Google and Facebook have effectively formed a digital ad duopoly, but they are more focused on their own businesses. And, privately, they would urge their fellow members of the (regional) press to do the same.

5) Is this about the news consumer — or the newspaper industry?

When I interviewed the Alliance’s Chavern last week, I was surprised to learn that the trade association didn’t include other big news providers like BuzzFeed or Vox or broadcasters in its complaint. It narrowly equated “news” — and the threat to news-creating businesses posed by Google and Facebook’s market domination — with newspapers.

On the face of it, of course, that opened up the move to ridicule and cluelessness — Mathew Ingram took good advantage — but the issue is deeper. Whatever damage the duopoly’s domination does, it does to consumers of news — and to all the producers of news. That includes the broadcasters and the digital natives.

By pitching this initiative as a newspaper industry–supporting plan, the Alliance considerably reduces its real argument that the American news consumer and citizen is being hurt.

Within the collection of 1,350 or so daily newspapers, 90 percent of them are owned by chains. Three chains own a quarter of all the dailies, and two of three are owned or managed by profit-maximizing private equity companies. A significant minority possess the combination of reinvestment capital, will, and the strategic smarts to make a way forward.

6) Is the glass half-full or 15/16ths empty?

Oddly, the daily newspaper industry appeared to be at odds with itself within a day or so of the Media Alliance announcement.

Rusty Coats, executive director of the Local Media Consortium (LMC), decried the move as clueless protectionism, arguing that David Chavern didn’t really speak for the industry and that the Media Alliance board members seemed not to understand that their own companies were already partnering with Google and Facebook.

For those lost in the initials, LMC is made up of lots of local media companies, including many of the same daily newspaper companies that are in the Media Alliance. It’s a digital ad optimization company, using tech (including partnerships with Google) to maximize rate on the often unsold non-premium inventory local media sites have.

In 2016, LMC drove total revenue of “more than $110 million” in revenue to its 1,600 individual publications, Coats told me this week.

Divide $110 million up among the hundreds of titles LMC represents, and it’s a drop in the bucket of the $20 billion-or-so daily newspaper industry. Coats and his comrades have worked their territory hard, and smartly, but their NMA elders probably look at the big picture of decline and see the LMC return as a large rounding error in the scheme of things.

7) Is Google really “annoyed” with the Media Alliance move?

Boo-hoo.

“Annoyed” is an interesting choice of words, here, as reported by CNN’s Dylan Byers. But what adjectives could we better apply to the feelings about the wholesale destruction of the American local newspaper landscape — even if it is collateral, rather than intentional, damage? Horrible, heartsick, nauseous, scared.

Anyhow, while it may seem possible to personify a Google or Facebook, that’s not reality. One news exec told me this week: “We deal with 11 different parts of Google, and they’re just starting to get their act together in terms of coordination.”

Within these many platform/news company relationships, plenty of earnest people from platforms do their best at finding some common ground. But overall, it’s the failure of the companies as companies to come to grips with the major collateral damage they’ve done. Just as they take on their moonshot initiatives, they also need to be strong partners in a local transformational news reboot.

8) What do they want?

David Chavern can tick off the four or five things newspaper companies would want if they could together negotiate with (against?) Google and Facebook. It’s a familiar list: Better data. Better newspaper branding on platform-based content. Help with getting more digital subscribers. And then there’s “revenue share” — two simple words that cover 20 years of pain.

I asked Chavern to further define what he means by revenue share.

“Any ad revenue attached to the expression of our content. We’re always going to talk about how that is split, right?” he said. “If it is valuable to be them, we have every right to ask that it be valued.” Though Chavern is new to the industry, having come to his job from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce about two years ago, he picks up on the perpetually inchoate thoughts extant in the newspaper industry for two decades.

Certainly, Google, in snippetizing news articles, derives value from them. Certainly, Facebook, in linking to endless news, has benefited greatly.

For their part, the platforms say they are just doing what the law allows — making “fair use” of the content — and they note, when pushed on the topic, that “news” just doesn’t monetize that well. Google would say news represents only 5 to 7 percent of queries and that the relative value of those queries is low compared to shoppable searches.

For almost two decades, the biggest newspaper companies have talked about contesting platforms’ “fair use.” They’ve never litigated the point — though we’ve seen aggressive action on that topic and others, episodically, from the European Union.

Yet that question of content value really serves as the core of the Media Alliance’s argument here. It’s not wrong: Clearly, Google, Facebook, and others derive huge value from news content. Its currency drives usage; the usage drives habit. The habit is monetized in manifold ways. But can we put a number on it? I’ve asked various Googlers that question over the years and always gotten the answer “No, too many variables.”

We could take a moment to savor the irony that the company that invented the hyper-monetization of the algorithm says it can’t figure out how to assess news content value. The larger point is: There’s a value, and it’s a big one.

Publishers know they can’t effectively negotiate individually. It’s by no means certain that they have enough weight to negotiate even collectively, should Trump and Congress somehow grant their wish.

Though Jason Kint doesn’t see much likelihood that the News Alliance initiative will work, he agrees that it surfaces the basic issue of dominance.

“If you’re not getting the fair value for those snippets or whatever it is, then you should be able to walk away from that deal. You shouldn’t have to do business with Google and Facebook or any company in order to survive, and it’s been proven that there’s no way to run a digital news business without allowing Google search to crawl your site. And it’s very difficult to even run a subscription business under ‘first click free,'” he said.

“And I would argue that it’s hard to drive a future news business without participating and working closely with Facebook…You can’t not have a good relationship with those two companies from a business relationship perspective.” That’s why we hear so little public criticism of platforms by publishers. “You end up with guys like me that are conveniently the only ones that can actually be the squeaky wheel,” Kint said.

Fear, indeed, is one good marker of market domination.

9) Do Facebook and Google have a corporate or moral obligation to do the right thing?

With initiatives like the Europe-centric Digital News Initiative, Google has opened its wallet a bit, and as importantly actually listened to publishers. But nothing it’s done is particularly transformational, or necessarily help assure the survival of an industry going down the tubes.

10) Could Facebook sell subscriptions for publishers?

The News Media Alliance says it wants platform help in selling subscriptions. This is an area that Facebook has said it’s working on.

Here’s Stratechery’s Ben Thompson, who dissected the Alliance push on that question:

In fact, this is the single most ridiculous part of this proposal: one of the issues Chavern wishes to collectively bargain with Facebook and Google about is ‘better support for subscription models.’ In other words, Chavern wishes to bring in Facebook and Google as an aggregator in the one market — subscriptions — where newspapers actually have a viable business model.

It’s easy to envision how this could play out: Google and Facebook set up subscription offerings for publishers, eventually create the bundle of the future, and, by virtue of owning the consumer, skim off most of the profits, leaving publishers desperately pursuing page views to get their minuscule share of revenue. Sound familiar?

Reader revenue offers the only plausible major route out of the current doldrums. It makes some sense that local publishers want to do anything they can to emulate the digital subscription success of the New York Times, FT, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.

These local publishers salivate at the millions of eyeballs Facebook can turn their way, with the hope that even a tiny percentage of the people behind those eyeballs will morph into paying subscribers. But, as Thompson underlines, the last thing publishers should want to do is insert Facebook or any other platform into a paying relationship with a reader.

Everything we know about the successful digital reader pay models is based on relationships. A news brand’s trusted relationship with readers has spurred the remarkable subscription surge we’ve seen in the last year.

Can Facebook, or other platforms, figure out a way to help publishers cement paying subscribing relationships with readers? They can provide more data, but at this point, it’s at best piecemeal. Any solution that insert Facebook or another platform into the relationship between publisher and reader is one to approach with great wariness.

11) It’s just subscriptions. It’s the essence of Facebook that’s the problem.

Digital Content Next’s Kint laid it out succinctly.

“In terms of what’s really important to media properties, it’s the ownership of the data and the relationship, the economics of the deal, and the brand presence. All three of those things are the antithesis of how Facebook has maximized its business to date,” he said.

“They squeeze out the brand and distribute it as the article at the content level, so that they can kind of commoditize value. They own all the data; they don’t give any of that data. And they want as little friction as possible to maximize the audience in advertising, inventory, and data. They hate subscription relationships. So the things that are being asked [by publishers] are completely at odds with [Facebook’s] current strategy.”

The relationship alignment with Google and Apple offers more nuance.

As Google rightly perceived Facebook as the largest threat to its advertising business, it innovated AMP, a way to greatly speed up delivery of mobile pages on the open web. That’s been a boon for news publishers, some of whom report more than double-digit traffic increases given faster page loading. On the other hand, Google’s “first click free” policy, in which it mandates that even hard-walled subscription sites offer one or more free pageview to Google search visitors, has been a sticking point. The Wall Street Journal pulled out of First Click Free earlier this year.

Apple annoys publishers with its generous-to-Apple revenue split on subscriptions sold through iTunes, and by sharing little reader data. But publishers like the fact that Apple doesn’t compete with them in ad sales.

12) There’s antitrust…and then there’s antitrust.

While the newspaper industry seeks an “antitrust exemption” so it can take on Google and Facebook, antitrust itself continues to bedevil media owners.

Current law generally forbids one company from owning two dailies in the same market. Just this month in Chicago, Tronc was prevented from offering a winning bid for the Sun-Times because it already owns the Chicago Tribune. That action followed a similar Tronc DOJ shut-out last year, as the department’s antitrust division blocked it from buying the Orange County Register.

The newspaper and broadcast industries joined forces quickly last fall, in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory, to call for the Federal Communications Commission to end its stringent cross-ownership rules. Those FCC rules largely prohibit joint ownership of a major TV station and a major daily in the same market.

What does “market domination” mean in the age of Trump and digital replacements for analog news companies?

“On both [the two dailies in one market antitrust rule and cross-ownership], we think they are illogical and antiquated at this point,” Mike Klingensmith, the chair of the Alliance board and publisher of the Star Tribune, told me this week. “This initiative on the duopoly helps bring this conversation forward.”

“What’s the connection?” I asked.

“If you can let two companies control 70 percent of the digital advertising [in the country as a whole], how can you not allow two newspapers to control 15 percent of the ad spend in a metro?”

For two decades, we’ve seen the remnants of 20th-century analog regulation look silly when they’re applied to digitally disrupted 21st-century media. The resulting gap has been wide enough to drive a near-infinite caravan of digital ad riches through. Those mastering one neat trick — Google with search and Facebook with social — have been able to hire up the best legal talent and largely flick away legal challenge.

Lost in the swirl of antitrust talk is a recognition of the societal value of a robust local and national news business. That’s what really is at stake here, but it’s an issue that, at this point, the politicians, regulators, and marketplace have not begun to solve.

13) If they call it “Google News” and a “Facebook News Feed,” does that mean it’s news?

Facebook’s complicity in a debacle of election ignorance and misinformation shouldn’t be forgotten. Mark Zuckerberg, and Facebook, wanted it both ways: To become the center of their users’ lives — and to pretend that the hours per month being exposed to questionable “news” really made no difference to anyone. Even as one of Google’s Digital News Initiative grants goes to AI-created “journalism,” Google and Facebook haven’t come to grips with the basic truth that neither is a news company.

They are distributors of news who could do a world of good by no longer pretending to be news suppliers. They’re both in a position to draw a sharp line for their users. They can remind those users that real news is created by real journalists — and urge their support, without getting in the way and the revenue stream.

14) Can a one-time monopoly call out a duopoly?

Monopolistic dailies once ruled the American cities, setting high ad rates for everyone from department stores to grocers to those placing (paid!) classifieds ads for houses, cars and apartments.

These now down-on-their-heels dailies now yell “duopoly!” to Congress.

Is that fair? Probably not, but it’s just one of the many accidents of history we see piled up alongside the road. How we got to the pile-up may be compelling to historians, but the job before us all now is cleaning it up.

Photo of boxing gloves by Bernardo R used under a Creative Commons license.

You can now get a few additional features on Nuzzel for $100 a year

Joseph Lichterman — Fri, 26 May 2017 15:34:44 +0000

Nuzzel — the tweet-link-aggregation app that a certain kind of information consumer finds useful as an alternative to staring with horror into Twitter’s gaping maw all day — is now happy to take your money. This week, the company launched Nuzzel Pro, a subscription service costing $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year, that offers additional features.

Right now, those features are a little thin — eliminating advertising (which the mobile app doesn’t currently have, but which is coming), allowing users to filter stories by keyword, and enabling a dark mode. Jonathan Abrams, Nuzzel’s founder and CEO, said additional Pro features would be added soon.

Nuzzel’s core capabilities will remain free. Users connect their Twitter and Facebook accounts to Nuzzel and can follow the stories that the people they follow are sharing most. Nuzzel also lets users subscribe to or create their own newsletters or feeds of stories. Nuzzel also launched a Facebook Messenger bot in April.

Abrams said Nuzzel decided to launch the Pro tier in response to users who had requested additional functionality and also because many users said they’d be willing to pay for the app. Abrams said Nuzzel has been reluctant to add some features in the past because it wasn’t sure whether most of its users would actually use them, but he said that adding a paid tier allows Nuzzel to create functionality that are aimed at a smaller subset of users.

“At this point, it’s really a test to see what the interest level is,” Abrams said. “There are some people who have said, ‘I love Nuzzel so much, I would pay for it,’ even without us adding anything. People say that — is it true, and how many? Then, on the flip side, there are people who just don’t pay stuff and they will never ever ever pay. In between, if we’re going to add some new features that people are really excited about, what’s the response to that? A lot of those things you don’t know until you start experimenting.”

With an endless stream of breaking political news, Abrams said Nuzzel has gotten requests from users to be able to block stories about politics. (Quartz this week, also due to the overwhelming amount of Trump-related news, introduced a feature in its app that lets users take a 24-hour respite from all stories regarding the president.)

The new filtering feature lets users eliminate stories with selected words in the headline. So, for instance, if you add a filter for “Trump,” you won’t see any stories with the president’s name in the headline in your Nuzzel feed or the digest newsletters, and you won’t receive any push alerts with Trump stories either.

Abrams said Nuzzel has also received requests to let users filter out specific publishers or Twitter accounts, and those features might be added to future versions of Nuzzel Pro.

Earlier this year, Nuzzel added advertising for the first time, in its email newsletters. Abrams said it’s planning to introduce ads to its other platforms as well.

The company has reportedly raised more than $5 million from an array of investors, and Abrams said the addition of advertising and the introduction of the subscription model are Nuzzel’s first attempts to monetize its users.

Abrams said Nuzzel set the price of the premium tier based on what other similar apps are charging. Still, he emphasized that Nuzzel Pro was still an experiment in may respects and open to change. (We are big Nuzzel users and fans here at Nieman Lab, but a quick office poll didn’t find anyone planning to pony up.)

“If you look at other things that people pay for — like Pocket or Buffer, other popular services that have premiums or upgrades — the price is usually five or ten bucks [a month],” he said. “Not many people are charging a buck or 100 bucks a month. We thought we’re adding a lot of value…we thought that it’s a useful service, and we think that Nuzzel users tend to be business influencers, these are people a lot of them are likely able to afford something like that. But it is just an early sort of test for us. Obviously, we’ll see what happens and what we hear from people.”

News aggregator Upday, a sort of Apple News counterpart for Android, expands into 16 countries

Shan Wang — Fri, 28 Apr 2017 13:59:01 +0000

What happens if you preinstall a news app on millions of new Samsung phones in Europe, in the way that Apple “gifted” U2’s 2014 album to unsuspecting iTunes users?

It appears so far that people have responded much better to that offering than iPhone users did to the much-maligned U2 giveaway. News aggregator app Upday, an Axel Springer brainchild on which the company has placed big hopes for European ubiquity, comes already installed on new Samsung — and only Samsung — smartphones in Germany, France, Poland, and the U.K. The app boasts more than 8 million unique monthly users, according to Upday editor-in-chief and chief product officer Jan-Eric Peters, thanks in large part to that exclusive arrangement with Samsung.

The app will now also be preinstalled on Samsung’s new S8 phones, which become available on Friday in Europe, and expand into 12 additional countries, broadening its Android-only domain.

Upday has been in four countries since it launched March of last year, and the deal with Samsung, which despite being responsible for a certain variety of spontaneously combusting phones is the dominant smartphone maker in Europe, has given it an immediate and apparently attentive audience who spend more than five minutes per day on average browsing the app. (Just swipe left from your new Samsung phone homescreen, and it’s right there.)

The app itself has two components: a top news section maintained by journalists who select top stories and which news organizations to link out to, and a personalized section determined by an algorithm the Upday team built that serves up stories based on a user’s reading history. Upday positions itself as a platform through which any publisher can distribute stories — an Apple News counterpart for Android that is up against the likes of Google Newsstand and Flipboard — and sees itself as a more open alternative that just takes various publishers’ RSS feeds, then rewards them with respectable mobile traffic and ad views.

About 3,000 publishers’ feeds, vetted by a “content quality team” for technical criteria such as whether pages are mobile-optimized, will be available through Upday with the expansion. Peters has also been negotiating with other publishers who have hard paywalls, to get some of their stories into Upday as well. Sweden’s Svenska Dagbladet has already been integrated so that Upday users won’t be hitting the metered paywall. Newsweek Polska is in process of integrating a separate RSS feed. An Italian paywalled daily will be added sometime in May.

Peters would not disclose on the record what percentage of users who automatically got the app on their phones continued to use it on a regular basis, nor did he share the terms of the deal with Samsung. But from the outside, there appears to be continued investment and confidence. Upday doubled its editorial staff to 50 journalists, spread throughout eight cities (Berlin, London, Paris, Warsaw, Milan, Madrid, Amsterdam, and Stockholm) who can deal with the various languages spoken across Europe (Upday itself doesn’t do any translation). It has 40 additional staff among developers, sales, and management.

“I can only say, why does Samsung want to have us on their phones? It’s not for a business benefit; it’s that they want to have the best possible news service on their phones, to have people keep buying their smartphones,” Peters said. “Instead of trying to start that themselves, they have a partnership with a publishing house.”

Upday editorial staffers put together collections compiling different news organizations’ pieces — for instance, around major events like the French election — but otherwise don’t intend to produce original reporting. “We won’t publish our own stories. We want to be a platform — and specifically, a publisher’s platform,” Peters said. “We don’t force publishers into a closed system, like Apple News, or Facebook’s Instant Articles.”

Readers click into around 5 to 10 percent of articles to read the full story on the publishers’ page, Peters told me, and Upday has sent more than 3 million visits to publishers based on metrics from the four initial countries Upday launched in. Peters also said that most of the “quality media” from the app’s main countries are starting to see between 3 to 5 percent of their total mobile traffic coming from Upday, with the occasional publisher getting up to 20 percent of its mobile traffic from Upday. Peters wouldn’t specify which publishers were getting the highest referrals, but said generally that it was the well known brands “who have their base in the digital world.” He did mention HuffPost and Business Insider (which is owned by Axel Springer) as publishers that were getting good traffic from Upday.

(I emailed a bunch of other large news organizations I knew were on the platform, including The New York Times, but haven’t heard back from any of them.)

Upday itself is not yet a profitable venture but clearly has quite a bit of runway is planning to generate revenue entirely through advertising. Ads will appear within the Upday stream, and Upday will take 100 percent of the revenue. “We have to prove this works, but we are optimistic,” Peters said.

I wondered aloud whether, in the long run, this bet on Samsung phones would lead to a cap on Upday’s growth — Samsung phone sales were weaker in Western Europe at the end of last year, according to Gartner, and analysts predict this fall’s iPhones to be blockbusters.

“When I’ve talked to publishers or editors-in-chief, and I must have had hundreds of visits to publishers, I’d say 99 percent of them have iPhones only. They’ve never even see Upday on a phone,” Peters said. “This is so different from the real world. Samsung users are additional to the iOS users the media industry usually concentrates on.”

The reach extends beyond an auto-install on smartphones. Upday sends relevant wellness, fitness, and health stories to a dedicated section of the Samsung phone’s health app. Samsung also makes fridges with connected monitors on the doors, and an Upday stream is integrated into those fridges in five countries in Europe. Yes, your fancy Samsung fridge will read you Upday headlines as you put away groceries. (In the U.S., those fridges play NPR news.)

“People usually renew their phones every two to three years. There are lots of people with S6 phones without Upday, but when they upgrade to an S8 or S7, they will get Upday,” Peters said, adding that one goal was to surpass the BBC News app in Europe. “This guarantees more growth. The market is for now definitely big enough for us.”

Contraponto do Apple News para Android se espalha por 16 países da Europa

Shan Wang — Fri, 28 Apr 2017 13:52:13 +0000

O que aconteceria se você pré-instalasse 1 aplicativo de notícias em milhares de novos celulares Samsung na Europa, do mesmo jeito que a Apple “presenteou” com 1 álbum do U2 os usuários do iTunes em 2014?

Parece que, até agora, as pessoas responderam melhor à primeira oferta do que os usuários do iPhone ao tão maldito brinde do U2. O agregador de notícias Upday, uma criação da Axel Springer na qual a empresa coloca grandes esperanças de se tornar presente em toda a Europa, vem instalado em novos smartphones da Samsung –e apenas Samsung–em Alemanha, França, Polônia e Reino Unido. O app ostenta mais de 8 milhões de visitantes únicos por mês, de acordo com o editor-chefe e chefe de produto do Upday Jan-Eric Peters, em grande parte por causa do acordo exclusivo com a Samsung.

O aplicativo vem pré-instalado nos novos celulares Samsung S8, que foram lançados no dia 21 de abril na Europa, e se expande para 12 novos países, aumentando o alcance apenas para aparelhos Android.

O Upday estava funcionando apenas em 4 países desde seu lançamento em março do ano passado, e o acordo com a Samsung –que, apesar de ser responsável por 1 modelo de celular que entra em combustão espontânea, é a maior produtora de smartphones na Europa– deu-lhe uma imediata e aparentemente atenta audiência que gasta em média mais de 5 minutos por dia no aplicativo. (Apenas deslize o dedo para a esquerda no seu novo Samsung, e o app está lá).

O aplicativo tem 2 componentes: uma seção mantida por jornalistas que selecionam as notícias mais importantes e quais publicações aparecerão, e uma seção personalizada, determinada por um algoritmo que entrega conteúdo de acordo com o histórico de leitura do usuário. O Upday se posiciona como uma plataforma pela qual qualquer produtor de conteúdo pode distribuir histórias –1 contraponto para Android ao Apple News que está disputando com o Google Newsstand e o Flipboard–, e se vê como uma alternativa mais aberta que pega vários feeds de editores e os premia com uma maior quantidade de tráfego móvel e visualizações de publicidade.

Cerca de 3.000 feeds de organizações de notícias serão examinadas por uma equipe de controle de qualidade de conteúdo por critérios técnicos, como se as páginas são otimizadas para uso móvel e disponibilizadas pelo Upday com a nova expansão. Peters também esteve negociando com outros veículos que possuem restrições para o uso de conteúdo gratuito para que algumas de suas histórias também estejam no aplicativo. Svenska Dagbladet, da Suécia, foi integrado de tal forma que os usuários do Upday não atingirão o limite máximo de leituras gratuitas. O Newsweek Polska está em processo de integrar 1 feed separado. Será adicionado em maio 1 veículo pago italiano.

Peters não revela qual a porcentagem de usuários que continua usando o app após a compra do Samsung, e nem quais os termos do acordo com a empresa coreana. Mas pelo lado de fora aparenta-se haver 1 contínuo investimento e confiança. O Upday dobrou sua equipe editorial para 50 jornalistas espalhados por 8 cidades (Berlin, Londres, Paris, Varsóvia, Milão, Madri, Amsterdam e Estocolmo), capazes de lidar com diversas línguas faladas pela Europa (o software do Upday não faz traduções). Além disso, tem cerca de 40 outros membros nas equipes de desenvolvimento, vendas e administração

“Eu apenas posso perguntar: por que Samsung nos quer em seus celulares? Não é um benefício para seu negócio, mas sim que eles querem ter a melhor possibilidade de serviço de notícias em seus telefones, para que as pessoas continuem a comprar os smartphones“, disse Peters. “Ao invés de tentar começar algo eles próprios, eles começam uma parceria com uma organização de notícias“.

A equipe editorial do Upday compila coleções de histórias de diferentes organizações de notícias –por exemplo, sobre grandes eventos como as eleições na França– mas não buscam publicar seu próprio material original. “Não vamos publicar nossas próprias histórias. Queremos ser uma plataforma –e especificamente, uma plataforma dos publicadores“, disse Peters. “Não forçamos publicações para dentro de um sistema fechado, como o Apple News, ou o Instant Articles do Facebook“.

Peters me disse que leitores clicam em cerca de 5 a 10% dos artigos para ler a história completa nas páginas dos veículos, e que o Upday direcionou mais de 3 milhões de visitas a publicações baseadas nas estatísticas dos 4 países onde o aplicativo foi lançado inicialmente. Peters também disse que a maioria da “mídia de qualidade” dos principais países onde o aplicativo está disponível está começando a ver de 3% a 5% do tráfego móvel vindo do Upday, com o número passando de 20% ocasionalmente. Peter não quis especificar quais publicações ganham as maiores movimentações, mas disse que geralmente são as marcas conhecidas “que tem a maior base no mundo digital“. Ele, no entanto, mencionou HuffPost e Business Insider (pertencente à Axel Springer) como publicações que ganham maior tráfego do Upday.

(Eu enviei e-mails às grandes organizações de notícias que eu sabia estar usando a plataforma, incluindo o The New York Times, mas não obtive resposta).

O Upday ainda não é 1 empreendimento rentável, mas possui claramente um caminho a ser percorrido, e está planejando gerar rentabilidade inteiramente por publicidade. Anúncios aparecerão no sistema, e o Upday receberá 100% do retorno financeiro. “Ainda temos que provar que isto funciona, mas estamos otimistas“, disse Peters.

Eu me perguntei se, a longo prazo, a aposta nos celulares Samsung levará a 1 impedimento no crescimento do Upday –a venda de telefones Android foi fraca na Europa Oriental no fim do ano passado, segundo a Gartner, e analistas prevêem que IPhones serão mais populares.

“Quando eu estive conversando com publicações e editores-chefes, e devo ter visitado centenas de publicações, diria que 99% deles tinham iPhones. Eles nunca tinham visto o Upday em 1 celular“, disse Peters. “Isto é muito diferente do mundo real. Usuários de Samsung são adicionais aos de iOS em que a indústria midiática geralmente se concentra.”

O alcance vai além da sua auto-instalação em smartphones. O Upday envia histórias relevantes sobre bem-estar, forma física e saúde para 1 espaço dedicado a isso em app da Samsung. A empresa também produz geladeiras com monitores conectados às portas, e, em 5 países na Europa, o app se integra a estes eletrodomésticos. Sim, a sua geladeira chique da Samsung exibirá manchetes do Upday enquanto você guarda suas compras. (Nos Estados Unidos, as geladeiras lêem notícias da NPR).

“As pessoas geralmente renovam seus celulares a cada 2 ou 3 anos. Existe muita gente com o telefone S6 sem o Upday, mas que quando realizar o upgrade para o S8 ou S7, o ganharão“, disse Peters. Ele afirmou que 1 dos objetivos era o de ultrapassar o aplicativo da BBC News na Europa. “Isso garante mais crescimento. O mercado é agora definitivamente grande o suficiente para nós“.

Translation by Poder360.

Newsonomics: Lydia Polgreen’s ambitious HuffPost remake aims for “solidarity” among readers

Ken Doctor — Tue, 25 Apr 2017 04:01:52 +0000

Make no mistake: Lydia Polgreen understands she has her work cut out for her. Named The Huffington Post’s editor-in-chief in December, Polgreen brings to the job an enviable reputation as a journalist, as a colleague, and as someone who cares passionately about the issues of our time.

At 41, she left a 15-year career at The New York Times to become only the second editor of a publication that can seem a bit of a puzzle in 2017. In replacing eponymous founding editor Arianna Huffington, she takes over a big global news organization of 600 that’s won a huge U.S. and international audience over the years. But at 12 years old, it feels like the older, less-hip relative of the BuzzFeeds, Voxes, Business Insiders, and Mics. And it has a bit of a reputation; as John Oliver extolled the craft of journalism last year, he knew his audience would get the jab he threw at The Huffington Post. Clearly, as it has struggled with both its raison d’être and audience growth, the site demanded an update.

Phase One of that updating launches today. The Huffington Post — now renamed HuffPost — gets a new look, which Shan Wang explains in more depth here. It’s a modernization that looks sharper; the scowls of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are more reined in and better packaged. What’s most compelling, though, is what’s to come, and the rebranding/redesign doesn’t tell us much about that thinking.

As I’ve talked with Lydia Polgreen over the last two weeks, it’s that next stage that’s most intriguing. To that extent, this redesign, as necessary as it is, serves mostly as a platform for her vision of journalism.

Many of the news stories about her appointment focused on her individual identity: “Huffington Post welcomes Lydia Polgreen, a queer woman of color, as their new editor-in-chief!” Yet this granddaughter of an Ethiopian farmer seems much more interested in whatever it is that’s so badly dividing the country. She’s all about reaching out, journalistically, and that will make the next iteration of The Huffington Post essential to watch.

In our talks over the last couple of weeks, combined and lightly edited here for clarity, we focused on her evolving editorial vision and that hope to transcend divisions. Is it blue and red? Is it have and have not? Is it something more culturally deep that’s seemingly split the U.S?

A globalist — last year helping lead its Spanish-language edition and setting the stage for more international Times launches — she values the 17 outposts that HuffPost has set up around the world. Her big opportunity: creating more journalistic collaboration between staffs worldwide.

Though long a Top 10 website in traffic, The Huffington Post has slowed down a bit, as we’ve seen the revenge of the legacies, especially the Times and The Washington Post over the last two years. HuffPost ranks seventh in overall audience, having lost more than 30 million monthly unique users over the past two years. It now reaches 89 million a month in the U.S., according to comScore. More than half of its total audience is international, Huffington Post says.

As she re-revs that engine, she’ll do so within the friendly confines of a distinctly un-journalistic owner. Verizon, striving mightily to be a “content company” as competitors like Comcast bulk up, has now made two medium-sized bets. First, it bought AOL/HuffPost two years ago. It hopes to close, finally, on its Yahoo acquisition in June. And it’s brought the two together in an oddly named new division, Oath. On one hand, Verizon does provide deep pockets and an earnest attempt to understand a business it has no legacy in. On the other, in short: It’s not The New York Times, where journalism is in the DNA.

Further, as the Times and the Post, once widely derided as the old dreaded MSM (remember that?) have become much more in-your-face with their reporting and presentation, HuffPost must restate for its readers what it now offers differently than others.

Even as Verizon was buying AOL, the fit of a lefty site — founded in 2005 as an antidote to Fox News, launched after George W. Bush had won re-election — in a telco seemed strange. Now we’re not sure what kind of Oath Verizon is taking or making. Against all that background, Polgreen seems greatly energized by the challenge.

Ken Doctor: The new site looks different. Is there any content change we should know about?

Lydia Polgreen: Right now, it’s presentation and redesign, but as we announced about a month ago, we’re in the middle of recruiting an entirely new leadership team. So stay tuned for some pretty significant new hires and content changes as well.

Doctor: In a sense, then, this is giving you a new platform upon which you’re building the next Huffington Post, right?

Polgreen: Exactly.

Doctor: So what do you like most about what this platform can do for you in building that new Huffington Post?

Polgreen: It really delivers on our goal, which is to be the most compelling news destination in the world, to be telling stories in a way that captures the drama, the emotion, but also the humor, the outrage, the sense of the “Oh my God, I can’t believe this is happening” that seems to encapsulate the Trump era. So I feel like this way of being able to display stories and send them out across all platforms is going to really deliver on that sense of edge that we’re looking for.

Doctor: I’m thinking about our friend John Oliver, who in the pre-Polgreen era memorably called the site “Arianna Huffington’s Blockquote Junction and Book Excerpt Clearinghouse.” What would you hope John Oliver would say when he looked at the new design?

Polgreen: I hope that’d he’d find inspiration for his show. I hope that he’d find really compelling and interesting angles on the news that would inspire him to put together really funny and insightful segments for his show.

Doctor: We’ve got this weird time in our American life. There has been a predictability, I think — real or imagined — about what people can expect from The Huffington Post. Even progressives may say, “I may not learn as much as I want, because its predictable.” Is this partly an attempt to shake that up and to say, “You’re going to get some different kind of stuff from us”?

Polgreen: Oh, absolutely. I would disagree that we’re predictable — I think that we always have something surprising and fun and interesting, and we cover a whole range of different things.

But I talk quite a bit about how I feel that we’re living in this profoundly non-ideological moment, where the old sort of categories of red and blue feel inadequate to capture the polarization. We’re really living in a time of haves and have-nots. Or have-some and have-nots. If you think of left-right as being an x-axis, I’m much more interested in what’s going on in the haves-to-have-nots y-axis.

Doctor: I don’t know what kind of data you have, but The Huffington Post, I’d think, is a blue state read. Is that right?

Polgreen: I think what you’ll find is that it really varies. We certainly have a strong progressive audience for our political coverage. I think that audiences for some of our other verticals, like around parenting or around entertainment and lifestyle, is ideologically much more mixed.

Doctor: Tell me more about your have/have-nots world view.

Polgreen: So on that y-axis, up here you’ve got the Times, Wall Street Journal, the FT — you’ve got a bunch of really great quality players, right? Who are charging consumers money directly to have access to their great content.

What’s happening to these organizations though — we always thought that the big risk in journalism was that our content would be overly influenced by advertisers. And that was going to be fundamentally corrupting. There’s another risk that I think many of us, including myself, did not anticipate, which is that as you focus on reader revenue, you start to think and build your product for…

Doctor: For an elite?

Polgreen: A reader who’s going to pay, right? And so in lots of ways, large and small, you start to speak to a narrower and narrower audience. Now, the Times still has a huge audience, right? But they send signals — all of these organizations send signals, right? Wall Street Journal: “Mansion.” “FT: How To Spend It.” Right?

Doctor: Hey, let me ask you a question on this. Go back 20 years. Pre-digital essentially. These were all paid publications then too. The Times now has 3 million paid subscribers, roughly twice what it had in print at its height, around 1.5 million. Were the journalists back then writing for a small group of people too?

Polgreen: I think that they were…but, I think that part of the old model was mass. It was still those 1.5 million people, but you needed to appeal to a broad spectrum. And you also were dealing with a country that was much less unequal, right? The spread of people who would be in the category of paying $175, or however much it was, for a subscription for The New York Times was much less broad.

So now go down to the other end of the y-axis, right. You have a mix of players, right? There’s free digital — and that varies widely in quality, right? And then you have the stuff you get by paying for cable, because almost everybody pays for cable. So you get CNN, you get Fox, you get MSNBC. And you also have talk radio. So this is the media ecosystem for the have-nots, right?

Doctor: Well, and the haves.

Polgreen: And the haves, yeah. Right, everybody’s here. Talk radio maybe not so much.

So I see us as playing down here in this space and having a really really important role to play in increasing the quality. The thing that we are replacing that was down here, that kind of no longer exists, is the tabloid.

Doctor: Ah, the tabloid. I saw you were talking about Mike Royko, the great sometimes-tabloid columnist in Chicago. I think that’s really interesting.

But I want to go back — I want to go to that point in a minute. There’s another line. This is like four-dimensional chess, right? We can only see part of it: the cultural line. So you talked about the Obama voters who became Trump voters. Do we have any idea how many people there are, and who they are?

Polgreen: I want to say it was like 12 percent. It was enough to flip the election, I know that.

What I believe is that the people who are in this bucket down here, it’s not that they can’t afford to pay $175 a year, right? Because they’re paying for cable every month, right? Which is a lot more than $175 a year.

It’s not that most of them can’t afford to pay for The New York Times. Of course, they can — it’s not that much money. They’re paying for cable because cable isn’t just news right? It’s sports, it’s entertainment, it’s a whole bunch of things. It’s probably how they get their Internet. So they get this other bundle of stuff, right? Now, they are also probably listening to talk radio. Maybe if they’re super right wing, maybe they read Breitbart. But these are people who are, I would call them, passive consumers of news.

Doctor: I’m having problems understanding how Huffington Post approaches that those kinds of readers.

Polgreen: Did you read de Tocqueville in college? So de Tocqueville talks about how what makes American democracy possible is this idea of ever-expanding opportunity and optimism, right? And the fact that our optimism is built on the premise that you could in one generation go from — take my story. My mother was born a daughter of a coffee farmer in Ethiopia. One generation and here I am running this big news organization, right?

So mobility is a crucial factor in our identity. I believe that sort of fundamental optimism of American identity is running out of gas. And that we are facing a time in which there is a level of inequality and a lack of opportunity and a kind of immobility. That fundamentally shifts our national character. And I think that those white people that you’re talking about are essentially finding themselves in the same circumstance that large numbers of people who have never really enjoyed any kind of privilege have found themselves in for a very long time.

So I think about solidarity. Right? So what is a journalism that enables us to find a sense of solidarity.

Doctor: Solidarity meaning?

Polgreen: Meaning that if I’m a poor, rural, white person, I am actually more dependent on the government than an urban, black person who lives in public housing, right?

Doctor: How do you do that?

Polgreen: Is there a way? Maybe it’s sociological storytelling. Maybe it’s a kind of journalism that enables people who see this — because they’ve been manipulated by talk radio, by Fox News, by Breitbart — as a zero-sum game. Solidarity is such a sort of kumbaya, old-fashioned word, but it keeps coming up again.

A focus on engagement and loyalty

Doctor: Do you know how your demographics run now ? I looked at this a while back, but I haven’t looked at it recently. I would expect BuzzFeed, for instance, would have a higher percentage of millennials than Huffington Post. While very strong among millennials, you would be a little more spread out with older generations too — is that true?

Polgreen: That’s certainly true. I think because we have been around since 2005, we’ve got a very strong Gen X audience. For a long time, we had our post-50 vertical and we think we have a very strong Baby Boomer audience. We have a really big audience, so we tend to attract a lot of folks from different generations.

Doctor: What about audience growth? Huffington Post had tremendous growth and at one point was putting out press releases saying “we are bigger than The New York Times” in terms of digital audience. And clearly the Times, partly to your credit, the Times and the Post have had an amazing run in the last two years. Huffington Post has been, when I looked at the numbers, essentially flat in terms of audience. Now, flat’s not bad, because it’s a big audience. Is this rebranding a bid to restart the growth engine of digital audience?

Polgreen: Well, I think that the conversation about the metrics that matter has really shifted over the last couple of years. When I worked for The New York Times, we were super focused on engagement. There was a brief period when everyone after the Innovation Report where everyone was fretting about our traffic being cannibalized by people who were smarter at racking up pageviews. Look, pageviews are important, having a big audience is great, and it’s important in and of itself. But I think that as the business model’s evolved, news organizations are taking a hard look at what analytics and metrics are telling them — what analytics are telling them and what metrics really matter.

So I think for me it’s less about the gross size of the audience and really focusing on getting people to be more loyal and engaged, and to deepen their relationship with us. Part of the goal of this redesign is to really try and get people to be more engaged, so it’s not just one splash — you’ve got a few different splash stories and it’s more visual.

Mixing tabloid and digital thinking

Doctor: So let me take apart a couple of those things. I like the look of the design. So first of all, it is now HuffPost rather than Huffington Post, right?

Polgreen: I think that in a way, it’s really just going with what our audience is. Our audience has always called us “HuffPost.” It’s shorter, and I think it works better for our international audiences. But I think it also signals that we’re changing, and we’re moving forward and this is a new era. So we’re keeping much of the spirit, but updating and refreshing.

Doctor: So is that in part a reflection that Arianna has left and that Huffington, the whole name, doesn’t need to be there — that it has become its own brand with her gone?

Polgreen: Well, I think that Arianna herself would say that Huffington Post even when she was here transcended her own identity. I think she herself called it HuffPost most of the time.

Doctor: Are you moving away more from a newspaper/print metaphor to more of a purely digital metaphor?

Polgreen: I think that when Arianna started HuffPost, there was a kind of tongue-in-cheek nature to sort of aping the style of a traditional news organization. I think we’re both in some ways trying to move into the digital future while also kind of holding onto, through this kind of tabloid-like typeface, hold onto that what I think really expresses the DNA of the past.

In this new iteration, we wanted to really lean into that big headline splash style and also reflect the future of where we’re headed by incorporating sort of little hints of digital culture with the slashes that you see on either side of the new logo.

And then there’s also the fact that the splash is our most important billboard, much like a tabloid’s front page would be a billboard and now will automatically travel with the story anywhere it goes. It becomes an almost meme-like artifact that could travel across the Internet and hopefully have the chance to go viral. We’re known for our clever headlines and photo pairing.

Doctor: I like the splash, which now travels with a given URL across social media. Where did it come from?

Polgreen: Well, the splash has always been kind of our central defining thing, right? HuffPost is unique in the digital publishing world in the sense that most of our competitors are really distributed plays, and they don’t get very much and probably don’t even really try to get very much homepage traffic. Some like Quartz famously didn’t even really have a homepage.

So because we started before the age of distribution, we’ve retained some of that ability to — and, in fact, it’s even been increasing slightly — to draw people directly to our platform. I think one of the big draws is that splash. In a moment, you can get a snapshot of our take on whatever the big story is of the moment, and that feels very core to our DNA.

It’s not just “here’s what the news is,” it’s “here’s the news with a dollop of humor, a dollop of outrage, a dollop of emotion.” That feels so core to our storytelling, so we wanted to make that something that could travel with it anywhere. The splash just becomes the automatic default image when you share something.

Doctor: And it provides a continuum between the destination publishing and the platforms.

Polgreen: Exactly, and I think that for us, again we really deeply value the fact that we remain a destination for news. There really aren’t other purely digital news organizations that can say that, so this is a way of kind of having our cake and eating it too.

Photo of Polgreen by Damon Dahlen of The Huffington Post.

The New York Times is still searching for the best mix of stories to curate on its homepage

Shan Wang — Tue, 22 Mar 2016 18:13:24 +0000

In September 2014, a new module was born on the NYTimes.com homepage. Watching, as it was called, was a Twitter-like stream of stories from within the Times as well as material from elsewhere around the web — including individual Tweets, photos, and even YouTube videos.

Then suddenly this year, the name disappeared, though the stream itself remained. A few weeks ago, the Times launched a new and different product called Watching, a standalone TV and movie recommendations site.

Though it’s currently nameless, the module formerly known as Watching still occupies a prominent space on the Times homepage — without scrolling, bottom third of the desktop screen. What the stream offers to the weekday homepage audience, though, is evolving. It’s featuring noticeably less aggregation as of late. It’s silent on weekends. Is the Times opting to feature less from outside sources, and offer more from within the Times, particularly from the Express Team, which formed last fall to “cover news that readers are searching for and talking about online”?

“I just want to be perfectly clear: We very much value the curation of outside sources, which we currently have in a few different places,” Times assistant masthead editor Clifford Levy, who serves as the lead on NYT Now, told me. “But we are just trying to figure out the right balance between New York Times stories and outside sources; how to offer smart, meaningful curation to our readers.”

Levy works with members of the Express Team, NYT Now staff, and others on the news desk to find that sweet spot and to figure out where aggregation fits in, not just as it applies to the homepage module, but also elsewhere on the NYTimes.com site and in its mobile apps. Often there are pieces from the Express Team, lighter stories from other desks, and occasionally information about running news stories, he said.

I'd use NYT Now more if it included the Watching feed from the @nytimes homepage. Feels like a nice feature without a home.

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) March 3, 2015

“Dean [Baquet] has been pushing a culture of innovation, and he really wants the newsroom to embrace that spirit of innovation, to try out changing the mix of the module, to look at traffic from that, how readers are responding to changes, whether we should put stuff from certain sections in the module, whether those stories go in the module or in other places, where they fit in on mobile. All those questions are still out,” Levy said.

A quick analysis of what’s been posted to the module in the past few months (since early December) illustrates how Times-centric it’s become. Of the past 932 links posted, 765 — over 80 percent — have been to Times content. (Other news outlets linked to at least occasionally: The Associated Press with 29, Reuters and the BBC with 7 each, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, and The Guardian with 5 each, and The Washington Post with 4.) Rather than a curated set of interesting links from around the web, it’s mostly become a distinct homepage window into some subset of all the stories the Times produces daily.

In its earliest days, “Watching” received about 40 percent negative feedback, then deputy executive editor Ian Fisher (now head of investigations) told Politico. Six months in, links to non-Times stories were performing better than links to Times stories, and readers were returning to the Times site though they clicked stories that took them away, according to Politico’s update from last April.

Levy didn’t share specific numbers with me, but said the stream continues to do well in terms of getting readers to click on stories featured within it: “The module does well. We’ve really had no negative feedback. I do look at how individual items do but try not to spend too much time comparing one piece to another.”

NYTimes.com divides roughly into three columns (from left to right, A, B, and C). Opinion pieces live at the top of the third column, and the bottom corner of that column gets understandably less engagement from readers than the lefthand side of the homepage. The team, for instance, is playing with using more visual elements on featured pieces.

“The lefthand side is the newsiest — to some extent we’ve habituated our readers to that. I don’t think you could put a module of this size on the lefthand side of the page,” Levy said. “We have experimented with putting the module in different places, but the thing of the homepage, as you know, is that it’s crowded real estate, and needs to consider the newsroom’s needs, the opinion section’s needs, the video department’s needs, and of course advertising, which is very important. There are a lot of interests, a lot of stakeholders.”

Is there any specific direction for what will happen to the former Watching module, and any sense of whether it might get its own section within the NYT Now or even the main Times apps?

“The only direction I can assure you of is that we believe in outside curation. We do it in a way that’s helpful to readers, and we know the newsroom can do a good job at it,” Levy said. “To some extent, that’s a seismic shift. Three years ago even, it’s not something we would ever do.”

Techmeme at 10: Lessons from a decade in the aggregation business

Justin Ellis — Mon, 14 Sep 2015 17:22:01 +0000

Techmeme celebrated its tenth birthday on September 12, and founder Gabe Rivera took the occasion to look back at how the site works and how it has stayed independent. If you’re a media or tech reporter, you’re no stranger to Techmeme and its sibling, Mediagazer, as a source of stories as well as traffic.

Techmeme debuted in 2005 at a time of rising media hysteria over the power of aggregators. I remember conversations in my old newsroom over whether Memeorandum (Techmeme’s politics-focused predecessor) was a net good or evil, and what it might mean for local news.

Now the landscape is more than a little different, as the outright aggregators have been challenged by social media. But the impact on Techmeme has not been as severe as you might think, Rivera writes:

Like all media sites, Techmeme’s real competition comes from whatever is best at diverting attention that it might otherwise draw. So foremost among Techmeme’s ‘competitors’ are Twitter, Facebook, blogs that function as news aggregators, and, in fact, media of all forms (not to mention sunshine, children, and puppies). A person who is content to gather technology news through what friends share on Facebook, or by scanning thousands of tweets each day, may be less likely to rely on Techmeme.

On the other hand, because this competition exists, those that do rely on Techmeme happen to be the most demanding and informed readers, the ones who know they can’t stay current on actionable news by merely consuming social media feeds. So while competition may curtail Techmeme’s readership somewhat, it has the effect of making our average reader more valuable.

In recent years, Techmeme has decreased its reliance on algorithms and has hired news editors (who aren’t afraid to rewrite headlines). That’s interesting timing, considering that some publishers are finding more uses for automation in the newsroom.

But that combination of man and machine is also what has made Techmeme stand out. M.G. Siegler writes:

The recognition that the two sides, humans and algorithms, can work in concert is perhaps the key power driving Techmeme. The site has a ‘voice’ as a result. What’s left off is just as important as what’s added.

In reflecting on Techmeme’s 10 years, Rivera said one of the site’s original goals was to uncover new sources for news and original voices. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson thinks that’s one area where Techmeme could still improve:

I can get the “big breaking news” anywhere and don’t value Techmeme for that. But I understand that others do and frankly Techmeme can and should do whatever they think makes for the best site for the largest audience. But I do miss the time when solo bloggers made up most of the links. Those kind of voices are still out there and there really isn’t a great way to find them unless they are software engineers whose links show up on Hacker News.

Techmeme’s birthday brought no shortage of congratulations and well wishes, along with the requisite snark.

“Reflecting on Ten Years of Techmeme” (rewrote the headline for you @gaberivera) http://t.co/5YQZ9qR3eF

— megan quinn (@msquinn) September 11, 2015

Notorious #content thief @gaberivera celebrates 10 years of plunder with over on #linkedin http://t.co/YUy2MFysbQ

— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) September 11, 2015

One of my heroes: Ten Years Later, This Is How Techmeme Has Avoided Click-Bait, Auto-Play Ads, And More https://t.co/lP9tIIx9Gg

— Rafat Ali (@rafat) September 12, 2015

Congrats @gaberivera on 10 years of Techmeme. May you rewrite headlines and F5 your way into our hearts for 10 more. https://t.co/DpNIWZZjFm

— Sean Percival (@Percival) September 12, 2015

Congrats to @gaberivera on ten years of building an indispensable site. Still think the Leaderboard is bullshit tho. https://t.co/kpaHGaWcYu

— Tom Krazit (@tomkrazit) September 11, 2015

How Upworthy is using data to move beyond clickbait and curation

Joseph Lichterman — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 19:00:34 +0000

The jokes in Upworthy writer Eric March’s piece “5 incredibly delicious chain restaurants you should never, ever eat at and 1 you should but can’t” are unrelenting.

Even though fast food is terrible for us, March writes that offerings such as the Chick-fil-A original chicken sandwich are better than “The pyramids. The Magna Carta. The Apollo missions. PlayStation 4. This season of ‘The Bachelorette.'”

And though the food is tasty, March argues that many of these same companies treat their workers poorly or advocate against policies that would help them, saying that the companies “pretend to be our friends, but in reality, they’re talking behind our backs about how we have a weird-shaped face or whatever.”

On and on they go. There are more than 65 jokes throughout the 5,000-word story, Amy O’Leary, Upworthy’s editorial director, told me. And that was intentional.

Upworthy has been shifting away from its origins as a master of Facebook-maximizing aggregated clickbait to begin producing more original articles and videos. O’Leary joined Upworthy from The New York Times in February to lead the transition.

Today, the company is releasing a report outlining its data-centric approach to storytelling while also highlighting original pieces — such as March’s fast food take — that Upworthy says epitomize its new strategy.

Using the user data it’s collected, Upworthy found that elements like humor and a story structure that built in suspense would draw in readers and keep them on the page and better engaged. Since it was published on June 25, March’s story has received more than 2 million unique visitors.

“If I were to tell you, ‘Hey, I’ve got a 5,000-word piece on fast-food workers’ wages,’ very few people would be excited about that,” O’Leary said. “But I can tell you that if you frame the story as one that we’re going to talk about all the delicious fast food that you love, and it’s okay that you love it. Some of it is pretty damn tasty. And we’re going to talk about that in a way that’s welcoming, and open and understands the ethical dilemma involved in enjoying your chicken sandwich — then I think we’re reaching deeper into people, because the approach is one of openness and not judgment.”

Here's a fun & hard-hitting piece on which fast-food chains are naughty and which are nice. https://t.co/tNpOHA3IcX @eriqmarch

— Steven Greenhouse (@greenhousenyt) July 6, 2015

Data, O’Leary said, is now at the heart of everything Upworthy does editorially. Staffers are working to understand things such as how emotions impact how users consume stories, what motivates people to take action around content they find meaningful, and what is the best way to structure stories to take advantage of different platforms. The information Upworthy utilizes is “a little bit secret-sauce,” O’Leary said, but generally she noted that Upworthy is looking for “positive quality signals from our audience.”

In February 2014, Upworthy said it was introducing a new metric, called “attention minutes,” as the primary way to measure how its stories were doing. Time spent, O’Leary said, is still one of the critical metrics Upworthy uses to measure its content, but she said it’s part of a larger mix of information to get a three-dimensional view of user behavior.

“There’s a moment when someone is deciding to commit to reading your story,” O’Leary said. “I think it’s a very interesting narrative moment. It’s not just, ‘on average, do people spend 30 seconds or 90 seconds on this piece,’ but you can really try to understand while people are deciding if they’re going to stick with you — what are you doing in terms of the storytelling to make the case that this is going to fulfill their expectations, enlighten them in some way, or provide what they’re looking for.”

With the fast-food story, for instance, Upworthy could tell the story was successful even before it took off socially because it was able to see that early readers were engaging with the piece and reading through to the end.

O’Leary holds a weekly meeting with Upworthy’s editorial team where they go through the metrics of every story Upworthy publishes to get a sense of why a story or video performed well or not. For pieces that didn’t do so well, Upworthy tries to parse the data to understand how it could better engage readers.

“On some of our less successful pieces, we can do the post mortem and see where we lost people — here’s where they were drifting away,” Upworthy CEO and cofounder Eli Pariser told me. “To me, that’s just a new way to solve a very old problem, which is, you’re telling a story around a campfire and someone goes to the other campfire because they’re bored.”

Losing readers has become something of a problem for Upworthy; its traffic has plummeted since reaching a peak of 88 million unique visitors in November 2013, according to Quantcast data. By January 2014, Upworthy had fallen to 49 million unique visitors, and it has continued to see a decrease in visitors. In June, according to Quantcast, Upworthy had 19.8 million unique visitors.

That drop has been attributed to Facebook tweaking its News Feed algorithm to de-emphasize the curiosity-gap style of headline. In March, Upworthy cofounder Peter Koechley apologized for the clickbait headlines that the company became known for. “We unleashed a monster. Sorry for that,” Koechley said in a speech at The Guardian’s Changing Media Summit.

Despite its trouble with Facebook and its shift away from clickbait headlines, distributed platforms — in particular Facebook — are still key drivers for Upworthy. The site, Pariser said, is more interested in creating high-quality pieces than in gaming the algorithm.

“The danger is, algorithmic changes are sort of like weather,” he told me. “You can either start a cargo cult where you try to deconstruct what’s causing the weather, or you can say, I’m just going to focus on getting up and producing really great work that you can tell measurably is great…and trust that platforms will see those signals as well.”

Even with Upworthy’s shift to producing its own content, aggregation — or curation, its preferred term — is still part of the site’s editorial strategy. Upworthy works with outside producers to license their work to run on Upworthy and its social media platforms. “We’re interested in bringing the best stories we can to our audience,” Pariser said, comparing the strategy to Netflix’s dual approach with original series and its collection of existing movies and TV shows.

Upworthy doesn’t have a set target for the share of original content, but O’Leary said she aims to have “a healthy mix” of each type of content as she continues to transition the staff’s focus.

Among the first things O’Leary did when joining the site was eliminate the title “curator.” Editorial staffers were given new titles as “writers,” and there have been a flurry of staffing changes as some people were let go and others were hired to fit into Upworthy’s new direction. There are about 30 people now on Upworthy’s editorial staff.

While much of the change has happened in editorial, it’s also applying the lessons it’s learning to its business operations, which focus on native advertisements that mirror the site’s do-good editorial tone. Upworthy launched its branded content operation in April 2014, and last year it brought in $10 million through working with companies such as Unilever and Starbucks.

“There’s certainly cases when those insights and learnings are helpful to our business team in terms of working on content collaborations with partners,” O’Leary said. “We’re constantly learning new things, and we’ve not only put that into our own work, but into service of the business as well.”

On the editorial side, though, Upworthy plans to continue experimenting with new story formats. Last month, 73 percent of Upworthy’s traffic came from phones and tablets, Pariser said, and O’Leary added that nobody has really figured out yet what works best on mobile.

“We don’t know what that lasting format will be,” O’Leary said, adding that Upworthy, with its socially conscious mission-driven focus, is only starting to try out new “intriguing and experimental formats.”

“We’re right at the beginning of this transition, and I hope you’ll keep an eye on us to see what happens next,” O’Leary said. “No pun on the old headlines! I just realized that was a terrible old Upworthy headline pun that I did not even mean.”

Newsonomics: On end games and end times

Ken Doctor — Thu, 02 Jul 2015 14:37:57 +0000

Platish or perish?

With those malaprop-sounding fighting words a year ago, digital entrepreneur Jonathan Glick neatly, if broadly, summed up a question of the moment on Twitter.

We’ve read so many obits for news media over the past 10 years that you’d think we’d be inured to yet another. But the onslaught of off-site distribution initiatives — from Facebook’s soon-to-expand Instant Articles to Apple News to Snapchat Discover, and most recently Twitter Lightning and whatever may next emerge as an offspring of Google News — now offers yet another existential moment. Will anyone go directly to a news or media site or app in 2020? Or are the platforms, now becoming quasi-publishers, all that will matter? (And will anyone come up with something better than “platisher”? And don’t try to make “pubform” happen.)

It’s all got me thinking about end games and end times. We’re in the midst of a new volcanic digital movement and we have little idea what an end looks like. I’ve called this greater movement to off-news site reading the “age of distribution,” but in reality, it’s just a further flowering of distribution, as newer pipes companies — like Facebook and Snapchat — join the restyled ones like Verizon and Comcast in bringing more stuff to their customers. Several publishers have a few years’ experience partnering with Flipboard, and they have some small gains but no tectonic business movement to show for it. The sheer size of the new generation of platforms interested in news gives publishers (and those who like to tell them what to do) both chills and thrills.

Some veteran observers of the distribution game make the point that, though it’s easy to lump all these announcements together, they’re not all created equal.

“They are so different from each other,” says Vivian Schiller, who has headed media units at The New York Times, NPR, NBC, and Twitter, and who now does consulting. “It’s Apple News, though, that could disrupt new organizations’ native apps. You can’t delete the [Apple News] app, and in the demo, it’s a gorgeous experience. We may ask the question, ‘Why do I need a New York Times app?'”

She’s right. Both the potential of the deals and the kind of moneymaking each offers vary, sometimes significantly. Some will offer a curated news mix, while others (like Snapchat) offer it up brand by brand.

Most notable about what most of the new deals offer is the chance for publishers to sell ads contextual to their content off their sites. That’s a potential game-changer, as Frédéric Filloux notes in his Monday Note, “The Redistribution of News.”. While publishers have been able to sell ads off sites, those deals with Flipboard and MSN, among others, haven’t produced big revenue; Apple and Facebook distribution might. For legacy publishers, off-site content deals have been largely focused more on selling digital subscriptions than on advertising — with mixed results.

Hearst’s Troy Young finds this common thread across the deal spectrum: “They feel very similar to us. All of these partners bring our brands closer to readers in mobile environments. All give us tools to tell rich stories. In all cases, monetization follows our content.”

Of course, the big question is what the money will look like when the dust settles. Will this round of changes stop or deepen the struggles of print-based companies? In an age when Taylor Swift acting like Ari Gold can cause a giant like Apple to modify its plans, might all of this distribution form a new business model?

Let’s consider what the new landscape tells us about both end games and end times.

End games

Few has embraced this new news ubiquity (“Newsonomics: BuzzFeed and The New York Times play Facebook’s ubiquity game”) more than Atlantic Media, and few are as bullish as Atlantic’s Michael Finnegan, whose views I recently wrote about in depth (“What are they thinking? Why Atlantic Media floods the zone”). Atlantic Media is in on the ground floor on Facebook’s Instant Articles, one of its initial nine partners, and will be in Apple News as well:

Let’s say we reach 35-40 million people through owned and operated sites today. Five years from now, our brands could be reaching 300-500 million worldwide, but not if we insist that all of them have to interact with us on our terms on our site. Five years from now, if you told me we were reaching a half a billion people with our brands, and you told me only 50 or 100 million were coming directly, that wouldn’t worry me. I’d be confident we’d be able to figure out an amazing business model to pay our journalists.

That’s one possible end game, and fascinating to think about. In that one, the platforms’ rediscovery of news — it drives 20 to 40 percent of a lot of “platform” traffic, given its continuous refreshing; you know, news — creates such a golden age of reading that publishers figure out enough ways to monetize, cut those old tiresome print expenses, and pay lots of journalists.

I put that question — of end games, and of the actual state of off-site metrics and monetization — to a half-dozen of the smartest publishing execs I know. For most, this is the hope: keep their most loyal, paying readers reading through own sites and apps, and expose their news brands to many, many more (younger) readers.

That purely additive result would be ideal, but publishers know it will be far more complex. Few wanted to say anything for attribution, given ongoing negotiations with the distributors.

To the question of how off-site monetization can compare to on-site, the answer was universal. It’s as much art as science at this point. Figure 50/50. Yes, they can do a fair amount of tracking, and of comparison, but the data — and its partialness — limits how much.

How well can they really track a Flipboard deal (now the older fogey of these platform distribution plays) compared to what Facebook, Apple, and Snapchat may offer? How do they look at what Twitter is cooking up, or Google may? As one veteran of numerous deals puts it: “Not perfect, not real time, but enough to know which distributor is performing better in terms of monetization.”

Given that landscape, what’s a benchmark of success? Finnegan believes it is unfair to expect off-site distribution deals to perform at same level as ones on Atlantic Media’s own sites and apps:

I don’t think we hold distributed content revenue deals to the same standard as we do our owned and operated sites. We can offer our clients a much better value proposition on our site, where we can customize, integrate and tailor the experience. Holding distributed content deals to equivalent standard as our sites is an unreasonable expectation because we believe our sites offer advertisers better value propositions.

If a publisher can sell its audience on its own site at a $20 per thousand price, and only gets $12.50 for a thousand readers on another platform, is that a good deal or a bad one? It’s an impossible question, at this point, to answer. Are those $20 readers abandoning a publisher’s site and moving their time spent to Facebook or Apple News? Or do most of the habituated readers, and paying subscribers, stay with a news brand’s own sites and apps, with largely new readers coming in through the new doors? Only tracking of these deals will tell indeed how much cannibalization is actually happening.

Yes, that word — have no doubt, these deals will cannibalize publishers’ direct business. The big question is how much.

That risk gets measured against the potential gain. Go back to Michael Finnegan’s best-case scenario — that tenfold multiplying of audience. He makes the case that “if we could get 20× the audience and only 10 percent of the ability to monetize, that would be something we’d want to look at. “

It’s a math that doesn’t make intuitive sense, but it’s a way of playing that ubiquitous distribution landscape. Here’s where a rational older world approach to metrics throws us off kilter.

As Buzzfeed, Vox, and Vice have taught us, huge digital news audiences can be built on free marketing, a.k.a. free social distribution. This next development of distribution platforms is a logical outgrowth of all that Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest traffic. This distribution, as disturbing and possibly damaging as it may, is, after all, free. The siren call of free: Given free access to would-be readers who can be reached at close to zero incremental cost, how can you not play, in what seems to be an age of ubiquity? So, if Atlantic Media and others can make money from even a small percentage of a huge new audience, the math could work.

Another big question: How stable are these partnerships? Publishers like much of what they’ve heard so far; for instance, Facebook Instant Articles will allow publishers to sell ads alongside their full content on Facebook and keep all the revenue. Critics guffaw and say: “Sure, that’s what they say now. Later, they’ll want a revenue share.” Sure they will. That, though, doesn’t mean worthwhile longer-term terms of partnership won’t be worked out. Remember when Apple said it wanted 30 percent of subscription revenues from its Newsstand. Outrage ensued. Then publishers recalibrated sales costs into the equation of gaining new paying customers, much as they do in the analog world. The same principle might rationally apply here. Facebook — and other distributors — do provide a service to publishers, offering new audience. Build a reasonable, predictable commission into the sales equation, and we could see a new stability and mutual expectation of revenue that could become the cornerstone of new relationships.

Deal points are one thing. Just as big is something more intangible: publishers’ own direct connection with their readers. “At a minimum, we want to ensure we have a direct relationship with our readers/users,” says Kinsey Wilson, executive vice president for product and technology at The New York Times.

Publishers worry about becoming too dependent on these new platforms. In fact, they already are. Most news publishers get far less than half of their traffic coming directly to their sites already. Google drives a quarter to a third of it, and social is fast getting competitive with search. Then there are the thousands of other sites that provide traffic. In the end, publishers’ dependence on platforms might best be mitigated by working with a number of the big distributors. In search traffic, Google has essentially no competition, and publishers thus have had little leverage in negotiating advantageous partnerships. In the new platform wars, can publishers play Apple against Facebook against Snapchat against Twitter?

End times

If history is any guide, we’d have to answer that question “no, they can’t.” The famously splintered news industry has found itself largely incapable of effective collective action in dealing with large, singleminded, highly mobilized Internet companies. They move at the speed of light while publishers dither.

Fears of antitrust collusion charges slow collective action. Then there’s the question: What would we negotiate for? So publishers worldwide end up simply reacting to the offers of Facebook, Apple, and others; few are in on any early discussions on how to make the programs mutually beneficial. Facebook gets credit, from early participants, for its listening abilities, but still, Instant Articles is a Facebook-driven project. Could it be any different?

Down the road from Facebook’s Palo Alto campus, representatives from eight European publishers broke bread with Google managers in Mountain View last week. At that meeting, they moved forward a joint agenda for cooperation, which I detailed a couple of weeks ago (“Newsonomics: Could a small Google tech change mean tens of millions to news publishers?”). Yes, the meetings were jumpstarted by European legal action against Google, but still it’s an attempt to jointly define a news future. Whatever comes out of that Digital News Initiative, all publishers should consider this: Google is now playing catchup to its two most important competitors, Facebook and Apple in news distribution. Google needs to find a new post-Google News strategy; that product now seems so 2006.

“This seems to be a mobile land grab and it will be fascinating to see what Google will do with Android,” Gordon Crovitz suggests. Indeed, Android — with many more users worldwide than Apple’s iOS — will likely deploy a new Android News or Google News not too long after Apple News hits the market. (It currently offers Google Play Newsstand.)

Google isn’t yet talking to publishers about what could now do for news readers and publishers, or vice versa, and I’ve made the point of how absent North American publishers are from the Digital News Initiative talks.

Let’s also acknowledge that in all the talk of these platform distribution deals, it’s only national/global companies — companies like The New York Times, BuzzFeed, National Geographic, NBC, The Atlantic, Bild, Spiegel, The Guardian, and the BBC — that are named. Where is the regional representation? Most Americans and Europeans get much of their news from regional and local newspapers, yet they’re nowhere in the conversation. Here, as in most things digital, the chasm between the national/global players and the regional players grows, with the latter much constrained in meeting the ever-changing demands of digital publishing. For the local daily press — which in the U.S. means all but three dailies — you can’t win in the new platform wars if you don’t play.

Finally, on this topic, let’s ask one more question: Why haven’t publishers become platforms?

One publisher has indeed made a big splash, going the platisher route. The Huffington Post, which claims 100,000 contributors (though some dispute the claim), just set a goal multiplying that number by 10 (“Arianna Huffington’s next million mark”). From its inception, The Huffington Post has served as a platform for others, from top Hollywood stars to those at the bottom of the economic ladder, as well as a source for news.

“We have seen ourselves as a hybrid — both a publisher and a platform — since day one when we were one part news site, one part group blog,” Arianna Huffington told me Wednesday. “Over the years, we’ve expanded both our editorial team and our platform offerings, including growing to 100,000 bloggers, crowdsourcing user-generated content and partnering with hundreds of non-profits, schools, etc. to cross-post their content.”

Few newspapers have built anything like HuffPost’s system, with the Deseret News one notable exception. Many tested ideas and early technologies (I recall our Knight Ridder Digital late 1990s experiment with community site Koz), but the timing was off and the idea has never been broadly revived. To that end, publishers — which could have become much bigger platforms themselves — left the field wide open for the latter-day pipes companies. Further, newspaper companies haven’t robustly supported real universal high-speed internet, as laid out by Barack Obama, like much of the rest of the civilized digital world enjoys. If we did, Facebook couldn’t easily complain — accurately — about the eight-second lag in reading linked news articles, a digital eternity that it says drove the idea for Instant Articles.

Which gets to the end times notion. It’s not about oblivion, but about people and paper. It really is end times for print. Readers continue to abandon newsprint, trading it in for digital. As importantly, publishers’ aggressive pricing policies have increased circulation revenue but keep pushing down print volumes — toward a inevitable and sooner-rather-than-later end. It’s in people though — the journalists who write the news for us — that we see the whole sense of local news reporting slipping away. Just in recent weeks, we’ve seen dozens more newsroom jobs lost, from Denver eastward to Chicago, Greensboro, and Tampa.

After the Apollo acquisition of Digital First Media fell through in May, DFM began a new round of job cutting affecting dozens, plus additional cost-cutting throughout the company. It won’t be alone. Bleak print ad revenues drive these cuts — and 2016 budgeting is coming. It is, in fact, end times for the now more than 21,000 journalists that have lost their jobs in the last decade. Their readers are being hurt too, drop by drop. As the big national/global publishers do their end game theorizing, much of the newspaper business is being left on sidelines, trying to figure out how to maintain profit for 2016, 2017, and maybe 2018, but with little role in the new platform plays.

Overall, this new age of distribution may be a significant historical marker, as long as publishers try to take the future in their own hands and don’t expect Facebook to come up with its own brainstorm to “save” the news industry. As Mark Zuckerberg took questions on Facebook Tuesday, he said all the right things — and showed himself to be as uncertain as publishers on where all this would or could lead. “There’s an important place for news organizations that can deliver smaller bits of news faster and more frequently in pieces,” he wrote. “This won’t replace the longer and more researched work, and I’m not sure anyone has fully nailed this yet.”

“Death on the Pale Horse” (1796) by Benjamin West is at the Detroit Institute of Art.

Newsonomics: Could a small Google tech change mean tens of millions to news publishers?

Ken Doctor — Thu, 18 Jun 2015 14:44:53 +0000

The late April news was impressive and divisive: Google would spend €150 million on a new Digital News Initiative (DNI) partnership with European news publishers (“Google to launch $150 million partnership with publishers”). The amount of money caught the eye, even if it was a tiny fraction of Google’s $14.4 billion profit in 2014. Still, to newspaper publishers now counting every dime, it appeared to be a significant pot of funds. What kind of initiatives might be included in such a “partnership”? Given all the damage, most of it collateral, done to the news industry by digital disruption over many years, was there anything that could be done now to reverse the seemingly permanent spiral downward?

We now have a sense of what’s on the horizon — and how significant an impact may be possible. Next week, the eight founding DNI publishers — the Financial Times, The Guardian, Italy’s La Stampa, France’s Les Echoes, Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine and Zeit, Spain’s El País and the Netherlands’ NRC — will meet for a couple of days with top Googlers on its Mountain View campus to form the agenda of partnership.

The Guardian led the development of DNI, and departing Guardian CEO Andrew Miller made it clear what’s atop his wish list when we talked about a month ago: bettering advertising monetization. “Newsonomics: The Guardian is trying to swing Google’s pendulum back to publishers”). That prospect should probably be Job No. 1 for the initiative; all else pales beyond the money question for publishers worldwide.

“What could I do to affect this number?” says David Gehring, pointing to newspapers’ ad revenues. “There is lots of press on advertisers complaining about being able to target quality audience at scale. What we need is demand-side targeting that does that.” Gehring finds himself uniquely situated in this partnership. A veteran of almost four years with Google in international partnerships, he has been advising The Guardian on partnerships since last fall. Consequently, he carries an almost unique portfolio — someone working in the interests of publishers, but with deep and wide knowledge of how Google actually works.

Gehring recognizes the organizational complexity of Google. Like any big company, its parts often align uneasily; people understandably want to get their own work done. So, with that knowledge, he believes that tinkering with Google’s plumbing could make a big difference in publishers’ moneymaking.

How might it work?

The proposition is simple: News publishers want to match their higher-quality news origination with higher advertising rates. That’s the “premium” term you hear slung around the industry — “premium” meaning original and trustworthy, as opposed to aggregated, lightly “curated,” or pirated. When publishers sell direct to advertisers, they sell “premium” and get rates from $8 to $50 per one thousand ad impressions (or CPM), with national/global news companies at the highest end. When they sell “programmatic” advertising, though, there’s no such thing as “premium.” Programmatic — the huge, overarching shift in ad buying — algorithmically matches available ad inventory with audiences (by age, gender, geography, and more). But it doesn’t distinguish between original content producers and the legions of repurposers out there. Top publishers may get a buck or two CPM for programmatic advertising — the same as anyone else.

Programmatic, along with digital video, is the fastest growing digital ad format today. Fully 63 percent of digital display ads will be purchased programmatically this year, according to one estimate. That’s almost $15 billion worth in the U.S., with retail, consumer packaged goods, financial, and telecom leading the way. Another way to think about programmatic: It’s hard to think of much advertising buying that won’t be soon influenced by it. Any buyer of advertising will want the best data available to improve its targeting of audience and to measure the efficiency of its performance.

So, to Dave Gehring’s point: What could Google do to allow advertisers to distinguish the audiences they can buy, to differentiate between premium and non-premium brands?

One answer looks deceptively simple at this point.

How Google could advantage real news — fairly

Google maintains a news index of more than 60,000 news publishers worldwide. Google essentially acts as certifier, vetting news sources as legitimate ones, and then including them in the index. Among the attributes required, from its directions to those who want to apply: “1) Sites included in Google News should offer timely reporting on matters that are important or interesting to our audience. 2) Original reporting and honest attribution are longstanding journalistic values. If your site publishes aggregated content, you will need to separate it from your original work, or restrict our access to those aggregated articles via your robots.txt file.” (Good Frédéric Filloux Monday Note explainer here.)

What if Google provided a persistent tag to be associated with any article originating with one of those 60,000 publishers? Those include thousands of legacy newspaper and magazine brands, but also the digital news startups that emphasize original content creation as well. As programmatic trading systems matched targetable content with advertisers, that apparatus could differentiate “premium” from “non-premium” audiences. Further, such premium content could still be found by category, like tech, sports, or health, increasing its value. Importantly, such tags wouldn’t only accompany articles in Google News itself, but on all news found throughout Google, including web search.

No new technology would be needed to make the addition; its cost of implementation miniscule.

What might it yield?

The arithmetic could be compelling. Gehring estimates that publishers worldwide now take in about $480 million a year in programmatic advertising. It’s hard to estimate how much the ad tag change could boost ad rates. We can put some arithmetic to them, though. As Gehring notes, a 25 percent increase in rate could have a big impact. That would amount to $120 million. The stakes, of course, would grow markedly if the theory proves out. If ad buyers really do want the “signal” of premium content via tagging, it’s foreseeable that programmatic could grow from $1 CPM to $2.

Gehring is reluctant to forecast, but my own numbers would show an additional $500 million in global programmatic income — again, if the program is successful.

How much of a difference might that make? At the beginning of the year, I calculated that the U.S. newspaper industry alone would need an additional $1.4 billion in revenue per year to escape its eight-year stretch of non-growth (“Newsonomics: How deep is the newspaper industry’s money hole?”) A boost in programmatic income would go a long way in meeting that number.

Further, that’s not money Google would need to pay news companies. It’s money advertisers pay publishers so that they can better reach the audiences they want.

Numerous big publishers have built “private exchanges” over the past couple of years. These enable continued direct selling to advertisers, but add in programmatic features, allowing more efficient targeting for big advertisers at slightly reduced prices. The notion of a bigger, or collective, private exchange built on a new Google news tag system may also then make sense. Pangaea’s recent entry into the marketplace marks this kind of movement and could be expanded.

This notion, in part, is one of reclaiming the publishers’ old friend: scarcity. Yes, ad inventory may be close to infinite on the web, but the high-quality premium audience is — somewhat — limited and can be priced, and sold, accordingly.

Why is Google doing this now?

It’s true, but facile, to note the convergence of Google’s numerous problems with European publishers and legal systems and the announcement of the Digital News Initiative. The great upswell of opposition to Google’s incredible European reach indeed pushed Google to a bargaining table. That’s not the only force at work here, though.

Consider the dogfight among giants in which Google is now engaged. While it used to drive as much as a third, more or less, of many news companies’ traffic, its share is in decline. Facebook is killing it, in social referrals, as Twitter and LinkedIn pile on. While Google News has always been a so-so player in news referral, Google web search long had the biggest bark; now it’s just one of several key “partners” of news companies. It needs to reestablish its primacy. Part of that may lie in better cooperation with publishers — in the form of other plumbing, like news tools, but also in data, video, and mobile. Further, Google must continue to better its own reader experience, so it can compete better; when Facebook told the world it wanted to host news content to create a better user experience for its users, it meant it.

Just since the start of the year, Google’s news competition has grown greatly, with the announcements of Facebook Instant Articles, Snapchat Discover, and Apple News. In this new world of distribution, publishers provide full content as never before, intending to reap the ad results. Google has hosted full Associated Press content, under terms of an earlier deal — is it game to do what its competitors are doing and become more of a destination for full news reading? And if so, on what terms?

As Google execs meet with those European publishers in California, a logical question also arises: Given that the same issues affect all news publishers, why is it only one continent’s publishers at the table?

What do publishers need and want?

Some in the industry privately labeled the Digital News Initiative publishers traitors for collaborating with Google. Given the pain of disruption, that’s understandable, but also fairly useless as a response. European legal actions have raised good questions, but they won’t get the news industry reborn for the digital age. There’s a fairly unintended good cop/bad cop act taking the stage: Google nemesis Axel Springer can play the tough guy, and fellow European publishers can press Google to live up to the kind of publisher-friendly, news-loving, democracy-supporting firm many within the company say it wants to be.

So now words must turn to deeds. In addition to the big tagging idea, what else might Google do?

The list here would be a what’s-what of the biggest challenges and opportunities confronting publishers today:

Mobile: With mobile now at more than 50 percent of usage, publishers are struggling with ad formats on the smartphone. How can the Android champion help there?

Video: Publishers see ad riches in digital video, but they struggle with its costs and presentation. Further, Google’s YouTube isn’t the greatest environment for news video. The company could find ways to align interests. Take what it announced today, its new YouTube News Service, powered by Storyful. YouTube is a great service, but its sheer disorderliness has drained its full potential. YouTube have moved forward with channels in part to address the chaos. Now, the YouTube News Service takes that gangly world of user-generated news video, from Middle East actions to exploding volcanoes, and makes a little order of it. Storyful, smartly bought for $25 million by News Corp in 2013, will showcase five to 15 videos each day, each vetted for authenticity, the core of the Storyful proposition. That attention to editorial quality, as well as quantity, should be a wider Google goal.
Reader revenue: Whatever publishers can do to increase digital ad revenue looms large. But it’s reader revenue that’s been the star of recent years. Paywalls have worked — terrifically at the biggest publications, somewhat for the regionals. As most publishers tighten the number of free articles available to non-subscribers, what could Google do to help publishers grow this essential revenue source?

For one, Google might be able to do some integration with publishers to personalize search results for their digital subscribers. Secondly, Google might make more flexible its longstanding “First Click Free” policy. That policy, seemingly an anachronism at this point, mandates that publishers using paywalls extend five free articles per device to Google users before hitting a paywall — despite any other restrictions publishers may otherwise use. “FCF” made some elemental sense when it rolled out in 2008, aimed at bettering user experience so that they wouldn’t bump their noses on harder paywalls. Now, though, Google could look at simply labeling paywalled content, as it already does for “mobile-optimized” sites. Here, the world has gotten more complicated as social traffic has mounted in importance compared to search. Publishers can exercise great (and increasingly nuanced) control over social access. It makes sense, in 2015, for Google to figure out how to loosen its reins, allowing publishers to run their own business strategies without interference.

How much value does Google get from news? How much value do newspaper companies get from Google, mostly in the form of traffic? We could use many calculations to get there, based on an array of assumptions, but let’s not go there now.

As intriguing as those value assumptions might be, I think they shouldn’t be the focus of the negotiation. It’s 2015, and there’s so much digital disruption water under the bridge, with more floodwaters on the way. Reparations aren’t the point. The point — for all those who value the role of a free and vibrant press in democracy — is how the increasingly digital world can fairly aid those creating original news content. I don’t really care whether Google might step up to the plate here — with the ad tagging idea, or something else — out of benevolence, or out of fear of further European legal action, or in order to to better compete with Facebook and Apple. What counts is to get beyond all the babble of the last decade — and to find ways forward.

Photo of an illuminated Google logo at the industrial fair Hannover Messe in Hanover, Germany, April 17, 2007, by AP/Jens Meyer.

A new NYT Now: All the aggregation you enjoyed before, now for free

Justin Ellis — Mon, 11 May 2015 18:49:22 +0000

The latest version of NYT Now, The New York Times’ aggregation-fueled smartphone app, is out today and, for the first time, it’s free to all users.

Though rumored and discussed for some time, it’s still a significant shift for the company, which originally launched the app as a cheaper alternative to a full Times subscription, specifically focused on younger, more smartphone-centric readers. At $8 a month, it was about half the price of the cheapest digital subscription to the Times.

But even that price was too high to attract a substantial paying audience. The Times captured a reported 20,000 subscribers, and a majority of NYT Now users were full Times subscriptions who had the app thrown in as a benefit. And so Paywalls 2.0 shifts to NYT Now 2.0.

Inside the company, the app was seen as a creative and technological success, if not a financial one. In a January memo to staff, Times executive editor Dean Baquet wrote:

We have made clear that NYT Now was not a financial breakthrough. But it has been a tremendous journalistic success, showing up on almost every ranking of best new apps. We learned many significant lessons from building NYT Now. We realized we could be more visual, and talk to readers in a different, less formal way, and still be The New York Times. We are exploring how we can make NYT Now a financial success.

That exploration has turned it into a ad-supported model that could let the app — which has been consistently well reviewed — reach a broader audience of phone-heavy readers. Some of those might eventually graduate up to the full Times experience, but there’ll be ads to serve to those who don’t.

NYT Now 2.0 collapses its first two tabs — a selection of Times stories and a curated assemblage of stories from elsewhere — into one stream, with the Times stories on top. (Who’s getting link love from the Times? This morning the app featured Vanity Fair, Quartz, BuzzFeed, Jezebel, Slate, Pacific Standard, Rolling Stone, and Deadline, among others.)

NYT Now's secret weapon: amazing editors. Story selection (from the NYT + across the web) is smart & surprising. Best "blog" in the world.

— Robin Sloan (@robinsloan) May 11, 2015

The app previously allowed only 10 free stories a month to non-subscribers; now users will be able to read 10 selected Times stories at any given time and 20 or 30 stories over a 24-hour period, Times spokeswoman Linda Zebian said.

@AntDeRosa Old app was 10 free articles a month. @NYTNOW 2.0: all NYT articles free, all the time.

— Clifford Levy (@cliffordlevy) May 11, 2015

The stories themselves are still basically unchanged, what you’d see in a smartphone mobile browser or the Times’ full app. The app now lets readers know how many new stories have been added at launch, and the bullet-point-centric morning and evening news roundups now come with optional push notifications when they’re ready.

As the Times marches closer to 1 million digital subscribers, the company has spent the last few years trying to find ways to diversify its paid offerings. NYT Now, along with the short-lived NYT Opinion app, were supposed to be the next phase in generating more revenue from readers. But slow subscriber pickup pushed a switch in models, including a greater reliance on brand advertising. As app team leader Cliff Levy put it to Ken Doctor last fall:

…we realized that perhaps we went too fast toward monetizing NYT Now and NYT Opinion. Maybe in the future, a better path is to first do audience development and then do monetization.

When NYT Now debuted, one concern was that existing Times subscribers would find the app was “enough Times for them” and downgrade from a full print or digital subscription to eight bucks a month. Making the app completely free would seem to be an even greater potential risk.

@cliffordlevy @AntDeRosa I feel conflicted about this. Paying for NYTNow eased my guilt about not paying for news most of the time.

— Kaleigh Rogers (@KaleighRogers) May 11, 2015

My favorite news app, @NYTnow, is becoming free. Was happy to pay for it but I guess that wasn't enough. http://t.co/7X3qwDyTlh

— Stuart A. Thompson (@stuartathompson) April 15, 2015

Newsonomics: Bill Keller’s Marshall Project finds its legs covering criminal justice

Ken Doctor — Thu, 12 Feb 2015 16:19:22 +0000

The Marshall Project is off to a fast start. Ten thousand people a day now receive its daily summary of the latest news in criminal justice, linking up the best reporting and writing on topics from law enforcement to courts to corrections. It’s already published collaborations with The Washington Post and Slate; a joint project with The Atlantic will be published soon. Its next set of partners is an impressive list: The New York Times, WNYC, Vice, and Stars and Stripes. It’s well funded through this year, and close to halfway there for next year — a good start for $5 million foundation-backed nonprofit startup (“Bill Keller, The Marshall Project, and making single-focus nonprofit news sites work”).

So what do we know about the early progress of one of the highest-profile “single-subject sites,” a phenomenon that won our attention last year, but may have gotten lost in the big buzz of tens of millions of dollars newly moving into BuzzFeed, Vox, Vice, Business Insider, and others. How is former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller making the transition to heading up Marshall?

Still a journalistic infant, The Marshall Project is already finding itself forced to find an identity. It’s outgrowing its early one-word handle — “investigative” — finding that honorable term too limiting and too restrictive in building audience.

Its daily email newsletter push is instructive. Only four years ago, Keller won attention for attacking Arianna Huffington as “queen of aggregation” in a Times column, saying she “has discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your Web site and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come.” Now he heads a website that’s trying to find its place in the digital world and has turned to Opening Statement, a daily compendium of, let’s say, curation that’s really quite useful for people following the broad range of justice news and thought.

“I’ve had an evolving relationship with the whole concept of aggregation,” Keller told me. “We do add a sentence of explanation to each one.” It’s well done, with sections on top stories, commentary, and “N/S/E/W” (aiming to map the U.S. well beyond the Northeast power corridor). It aims to declutter readers’ lives and to drive eyeballs, as do so many of this wave of popular morning email briefings (“The newsonomics of mixing old and new”). Keller’s evolution makes use of a core skill we’ve long expected of editors at the Times and other trustworthy sources: editing and selectivity.

Keller has put together an editorial staff of 21, including reporters, researchers, designers, tech, data, and audience people. That number is worth stopping on: No one else in the nation of 319 million devotes as much single-minded focus to the issue of criminal justice. That tells us a lot about the nature of editorial staffing, and tradition, and about what the digital publishing world — and a bit of financial benevolence — can now create.

“The Prosecutor and the Snitch” launched Marshall into the world, even before its formal debut. Asking the question “Did Texas execute an innocent man?”, the August 2014 piece offered incredible branding for a news startup, occupying a good part of The Washington Post’s front page and a couple of inside ones, while drawing 500,000 views on the Post’s website.

As it partners with news company collaborators, Marshall faces the issue of proving out — to itself, its funders, and the larger world — its impact. If people read Marshall work in lots of places, but not as much on Marshall itself, how can it do that? On its next partnered pieces, the site will embed a tracking pixel (with technology similar to the ProPublica-developed PixelPing), allowing it to tally up the traffic counted on others’ URLs. There’s traffic, and then there’s impact.

“When you review the Pulitzer entries,” says Keller, “the first thing you say: What was the impact? Did the law change? Was someone indicted? Even though you didn’t have that as a professed goal, that’s the first thing you list.” Keller, like many, isn’t yet clear how impact can best be measured, but the wider movement here is noteworthy, with lots of people figuring out workable metrics.

Keller knows criminal justice needs the long view, informed by real reporting and acute analysis. He’s not inclined to chase the crime story du jour, but staying atop the news — in some form — offers one measure of relevance, especially online. Take Wednesday’s timely top story, “Jon Stewart on Criminal Justice.” Offering a quick six Daily Show videos on the subject of crime, it’s entirely of the moment, and offers the kind of smart criminal justice analysis the satirist uniquely offers. (Though Comedy Central’s 15-second Kmart prerolls on each one are a bit off-putting). The Ferguson story happened before Marshall’s launch, and future stories like it will test the startup’s mission: How, and how much, to cover the few criminal justice stories around which TV media swarm?

The site already has grown beyond the initial investigative branding. Offering features, commentary, and news, the site’s development is still in progress. Favoring a reverse-chron long scroll of stories, there’s little attention to hierarchy or importance. At this point, too, the site is usually word-heavy. Excellent words — the quality of the writing, editing, and reporting is what we would expect, given Keller’s leadership — but still, for the most part, words. That’s especially noteworthy in an age that’s seen the phenomenon of Serial and Radiotopia’s Criminal, which The Huffington Post called “the best new radio show in America” debut. Multimedia is knocking down the doors that separated out pre-digital TV, radio, and print. In an ideal world, The Marshall Project will find a way to join in that fun.

Then, again, it’s important to remember that it’s only a few months old.

Neil Barsky recruited Bill Keller to the venture. The Wall Street Journal reporter turned hedge fund manager has committed $2 million to the site’s startup. (He explains his motivations and the Marshall name choice, here.) His contributions make up about a fifth of the annual $5 million budget. Working full time on Marshall, founder and chairman Barsky has brought in other funders, including an enviable list of more than a dozen foundations. Barsky says 2016 funding is almost halfway assured and believes Marshall will test “hybrid” revenue sources — including events, job postings, and ads — after it gets settled and grows an audience. He believes continuing money won’t be a problem — as long as Marshall excels at its mission.

The mission is high-minded:

Our mission is to raise public awareness around issues of criminal justice and the possibility for reform. But while we are nonpartisan, we are not neutral. Our hope is that by bringing transparency to the systemic problems that plague our courts and prisons, we can help stimulate a national conversation about how best to reform our system of crime and punishment.

Those that have been in the business of newspapering know what a leap of journalistic mission that means.

For decades — think Front Page and on — “criminal justice” haven’t been the words you hear in newsrooms. It’s Cops and Courts. The grizzled vet (and now the lesser-paid young hire) visits the cop shop and attends the highest-profile trials, writing the daily news that consumes so many metro sections. But these beats circle around the fact that the U.S. imprisons more of its population than any other country, spending so much and remaining unsure of its effectiveness — a fact that gets relatively little attention in most of the press, whether print, TV, or radio. The words “mass incarceration” are ones now increasingly heard; “It will become a front-burner issue,” says Barsky.

Barsky and Keller see what’s possible and have hired a talented staff to take it on. Timing is everything, and the issue of criminal justice results and costs looks like it is emerging as one of few bipartisan issues in the country. (Good Dave Weigel piece in Bloomberg: “Rand Paul’s Crazy Dream of a Libertarian-Democratic Alliance on Civil Rights Is Actually Happening.”) A full-throated journalism that feeds the search for solutions may find many unexpected forums.

Rising to that occasion won’t be easy. Marshall looks well staffed editorially, but it may need to devote more “business” resources to its partnership/distribution/underwriting infrastructure. The Texas Tribune and the Center for Investigative Reporting offer proven lessons there, but it took them years to build out. The payoff is clear, though. In what seems like overnight journalistically, we’ve got a bevy of top-drawer news outlets from the legacies (the Times, the Journal, the Post, and more) to public media (Frontline, NPR, big metro public radio stations, PBS) to the foundation-fueled artisanal journalism houses (ProPublica, Center for Public Integrity, Center for Investigative Reporting, The Marshall Project, and so on) forming what can truly be called a new ecosystem. We’re seeing critical mass in this hugely important space.

But don’t underestimate how much hard work is involved in making — and maintaining — all those connections. In some ways, it’s easier to run a singular newsroom, with singular resources. Keller has already learned that in his new job: “Partnerships are easy to launch,” he says, “and hard to land.”

Photo of Alcatraz prison cells by Jumilla used under a Creative Commons license.

With aggregation and translation, Russia’s free-press-in-exile site Meduza is reaching English readers

Lydia Tomkiw — Fri, 06 Feb 2015 19:35:17 +0000

At a moment when the world’s attention has again turned towards Eastern Europe, a new media outlet is using a mixture of translation and aggregation to bring news from Russia to an English-speaking audience. The English-language edition of Latvia-based Meduza went live on Monday, describing itself as Russia’s free press in exile.

The Meduza story begins with a different popular Russian news site, Lenta.ru. (Some in the west may have heard of it when the Society of News Design named it the World’s Best Designed Website in 2013.) In March 2014, the site’s billionaire owner fired Galina Timchenko from her position as chief editor; Lenta.ru had published an article with a link to an interview with a Ukrainian nationalist that was deemed to be “extremist” content by Roskomnadzor, Russia’s media regulator, and her replacement was the editor of a pro-Kremlin site. Dozens of Lenta.ru staffers resigned in protest of the move.

Galina Timchenko in 2013. Photo by AP/Afisha-Rambler-SUP.

Timchenko and some of her former Lenta.ru colleagues set up shop in Riga — where they could remain independent — and launched the Russian-language news site Meduza in October 2014. Meduza publishes original stories and also aggregates news from around the Russian-language web, adding its own context and highlighting details that help readers gain a fuller picture of a story. By last month, the site had reached 2 million unique visitors a month.

A few months after Meduza’s launch, the team decided to begin producing English-language content on Russia and the region after noticing a demand for high quality news and translation. “We figured that we have the expertise and the training to really to get the right stories out there,” said English-side editor Konstantin Benyumov.

Meduza’s English site is targeting Russia watchers and non-Russian speakers who are interested in events in the region by providing what Benyumov describes as “unbiased and objective information.” Currently, the English-language side is about 15 to 20 percent of the work that Meduza does daily.

A few days after its English launch, Benyumov reported that Russian viewers were the number one visitors to the site, while viewers from the U.S. came in a close second, followed by viewers from Ukraine, the U.K., and Germany. With a cold launch and no promotional budget, the English side attracted 65,000 pageviews and 40,000 unique viewers in its first four days, with over 1,000 followers on both Facebook and Twitter.

Benyumov works closely with U.S.-based producer and main translator Kevin Rothrock. Rothrock holds a master’s degree in Soviet history and has been blogging about Russia and closely following its media space since 2010; he is project editor of Global Voices’ RuNet Echo, which is all about translating the Russian Internet. Rothrock now gets up at 4 a.m. his time to talk with the team in Riga and begin translating and “tailoring” news. He scans Meduza’s Russian site as well as newswires (including TASS and Interfax) and newspapers throughout the country and region, as well as documents from the Parliament and other bodies including the Russian Orthodox Church, while deciding which four to five shorter pieces to aggregate, translate, and tailor to an English-language audience.

“Over 90 percent of what’s on the site right now was translated by me,” Rothrock said. Meduza also uses freelance translators as needed.

The most Meduza reproduces from aggregated sources is a few sentences or a paragraph with a link back to the original Russian source, Rothrock said. Meduza has the ability to add information that journalists working in Russia may not include or deem too sensitive, and added background and context can make them more understandable to readers outside of Russia and the region.

“What’s the value added of translating the gist of something from a Kremlin news service?” Rothrock asked. “But then in the bullet points and in the way we pull the quotes in the featured block quotes, there the idea is to draw the readers’ attention to something you wouldn’t get in the newswire story.”

Sometimes that means adjusting language: In one recent piece, for example, Rothrock decided to refer to “internal passports” as “internal documents,” because “for most people reading the story in English, the concept of an internal passport doesn’t translate.”

Meduza’s long-form pieces, written by regular correspondents based in Russia, average around 4,000 words and take Rothrock several hours over the course of a week to fully translate. While Meduza covers serious political and economic news with headlines on the homepage — including its second most-read piece so far, “A city caught in a vice,” focusing on the Ukrainian town of Debaltseve — it’s also striving to highlight Russian culture and the lighter side of Russian media. Two of the most popular posts during its first week were the top-read quiz “Does Russia ban it or allow it?” and a post with wintry photos of the Russian town were the Oscar-nominated movie Leviathan was filmed.

Both Benyumov and Rothrock say they’re in the dark concerning Meduza’s financial standing because the site does not disclose its backers. Both say that the current political climate inside Russia could be part of this decision. But despite the current press atmosphere in Russia that gave birth to Meduza, Benyumov insists the site isn’t interested in taking a political stance.

“We are not [the] opposition,” Benyumov said. “Meduza was never meant to be opposed to anything. We are strictly pro-common sense. Unfortunately, it’s no longer possible to maintain that in Russia anymore, and this is why we had to leave…We are not there to smear Putin or criticize the Kremlin unnecessarily. We just want to make sure that when there is an objective need for such criticism, we are able to provide it, because we feel that this is our job as journalists.”

Photo of globe by rogiro used under a Creative Commons license.

The newsonomics of mixing old and new

Ken Doctor — Thu, 05 Feb 2015 15:00:08 +0000

Each morning, 135,000 people get Wall Street Journal editor Gerry Baker’s The 10 Point, his one-year-old touts email on the best of the Journal that day. Around the same hour, 600,000 people get The Daily Beast’s Cheat Sheet, up from just 182,000 a year ago. About 110,000 get Quartz’s The Brief and 83,000 get the millennials-centric Mic Check.

Newsletters and briefings are flying across the globe, growing exponentially. They fill our email inboxes and flash across our smartphones; even when the screen is locked, notifications push right through the blank screen into our enervated consciousness.

Such free newsletters spur lots of direct traffic back to the news sites — and they help build loyalty, that elusive habit of news fidelity, in an era awash in news promiscuity. Publishers tell me they drive the most important readers back to the site, bolster new sponsorships and represent one of the easiest, cheapest ways to goose valuable traffic. Mic’s news director Jared Keller points out a near-universal truth: “Visitors referred from the newsletter spend more time on the site and visit more pages per session than the average reader who may come in from, say, Google or Facebook.”

Quite an invention, right? The funny thing about these newsletters is that they mimic a medium or three you may well have heard of — the daily newspaper, the top-of-the-hour radio news report, and the evening TV news.

“We are rediscovering that the daily rhythm is meaningful to people,” says Gideon Lichfield, a senior editor at Quartz. “When there is so much coming at people all the time on the Internet, people like something that comes at a particular time at a predictable length.”

Exactly. It’s kind of funny that editors are rediscovering the value of editions, of predictability, of habit, here in 2015. The digital age, we’ve been told variously and intensely, is a revolution unlike any seen in any generation of publishing, perhaps since Gutenberg’s. As we’ve all lived through it, as publishers, journalists, and readers, that’s hard to contest. But at the same time, so much that is new is old. What’s increasingly clear is that the task of those producing the news is to make sense of what’s really new — immediacy, multimedia, mobile access points, and more — and what’s bedrock old. Then they must mix and match the two smartly. It’s not an easy recipe; there are no cookbooks.

Let’s think about the old and the new in media. The new newsletter binge is a small part of the reconnection of circadian rhythm to the circuits of possibility all the new technologies offer. It’s as if the web has created a kind of content jet lag for a lot of people, and new remedies are just being trotted out, twenty years in. We can name a number of them:

Building boundaries in native advertising

The Condé Nast flap in which the company pledged, Reagan-like, to take down edit/ad wall is one of the newfangled ideas that paralyzes too many people. It’s no surprise that marketers would like better “access to editors”; they’ve long craved it and will take all the access they can get. In the old world, less honorable newspapers and magazines made the “ADVERTISING SECTION” label as tiny as possible, or used the same fonts as they did for news. In digital native advertising, the possibilities for blurring are much greater, and more alluring, given the revenue travails of news companies.

Nothing, though has really changed. The smart companies will give editorial access — to help with commercial storytelling — to brands, at a fair price, and insure that the same people who write and edit directly for the readers don’t do the same for advertisers. Even Jonah Peretti, the avatar of the new at BuzzFeed, groks the old perfectly well. BuzzFeed’s policy: “Completely separate. We have our in house creative services and branded video teams making content for brand customers and our BuzzFeed editorial team. The two are physically separated by a wall and there’s no overlap.”

E-commerce

Where are the lines in what a publisher should sell directly to its readers, and how does that selling mix with its editorial? As publishers seek third streams of revenue to bolster faltering ads and circulation, they eye e-commerce. It’s new and shiny again. There’s the Thrillists of the era, Ben Lerer’s “leading men’s digital lifestyle brand,” in which the separation of edit and ads is razor-thin and shamelessly so. Is that a new media threat to shopping securely? No — this new digital thing is just an updated version of cable’s QVC, founded in 1986.

Regulation

Remember that word? It’s a dirty one in some quarters, so anathema that anything “digital” seems to own its own libertarian-like rights. In the old world, the FCC did an uneven job of promoting the diversity that federal law mandated in broadcasting, but it had its impact, enabling somewhat more voices. As Comcast and Time Warner have eaten the competition in cable, becoming semi-monopolies in most of the country, and Google and Facebook have become a developing duopoly in digital advertising, regulators and politicians feared to touch the regulation rail in American politicians. Why? Smart, well-funded lobbying, for one — but secondly the sense that the new of the digital world is just different than the old of the analog world.

Well, it is and it isn’t. Consider this data from Ars Technica: “Though a majority of Americans can purchase broadband of at least 100Mbps, [FCC chairman Tom] Wheeler has focused on the lack of competition at higher Internet speeds. While 75 percent of American homes have at least two options for wired broadband of 4Mbps/1Mbps, only 25 percent have a choice of at least two providers at the 25Mbps/3Mbps threshold.”

So the issues in the new world are different than the old. It’s not like regulating Ma Bell or Con Edison, where generally you either have service or you don’t. In this world, it’s the kind of service we have — and what we pay for it. Though Wheeler is saying his plans to regulate broadband as a utility won’t include pricing, the issue is vital. Americans pay twice or more as much as Europeans and some East Asians and get half or less the speed of access. Here we have an age-old industrial problem — market-dominating bigness — first tackled a century ago by Teddy Roosevelt. Even though the digital economy may seem like something completely different, what’s old is new, and in 2015, it looks like we may be beginning to understand the appropriate regulation of market dominance.

Paywalls 2.0 products

Ah, the struggle. Will digital readers ever pay for something other than a whole subscription to a whole publication? (Remembering that five years ago, the conventional wisdom was that readers wouldn’t pay, in any form, for digital news.) The New York Times’ commercial struggles with NYT Now have been quite public, but an old model — the paper newsletter, turned digital — is going well for Politico Pro, as I wrote about last week.

We could go on and on. The Podcast 2.0 revolution, with shows like CIR’s innovative Reveal, offers lots of hosts doing lots of endorsements for companies like Squarespace and Stamps.com. Brand new? Crossing lines? Think back to Paul Harvey on old-time radio. Subscription sales? In the old days, we used to give out free toasters to new newspaper subscribers in St. Paul. Today, The Times of London (and soon others) package a free year of Spotify with digital subs. Everyone has always loved — and loves — a bargain. Is there a movie revolution? No, we’ve always loved movies, but Netflix came along and managed to figure out how to use tech to feed our ardor.

We could go further on, but let’s not. Suffice it to say, it isn’t the majestic algorithms of the day that change everything. It’s our understanding of fairly unchanging human habit that comes first — with the new algorithms then smartly applied.

Essential, here: What’s old can be new, but only if we understand what kind of new overlap the times require.

If that morning news briefing habit is unquenchable, then, the form of it has changed profoundly so quickly. We feel it, and we see it in newspaper circulation stats. Quartz’s Gideon Lichfield can put his finger on even more specific data, owing to a study Quartz conducted about top corporate execs.

60 percent of executives are most focused on news in the morning, particularly upon waking.
60 percent of executives read an email newsletter as one of their first three news sources they check daily — more than twice as high as news apps.
61 percent of executives primarily use mobile devices to consume news; only 5 percent report reading a newspaper or turning on the TV first.

Maybe that’s an early adopter habit. At a minimum, it’s one of huge importance to a business publication. Twelve times as many corporate execs turn to their phone than either a newspaper or morning TV to get their news briefing. Although only about half of Quartz’s overall traffic is mobile, about 65 percent open their briefings on smartphones and tablets.

The study data here fine-tunes the execution. Of Quartz’s 110,000 subscribers, about 50 percent of subscribers are senior executives. Every publisher should know their own readers’ habits.

Quartz (“The newsonomics of Quartz, 19 months in”) has figured out it needs to sweat the bigger data and the smaller touches. It figured out that its signup required too many steps, so it upgraded (free tips here) its subscription flows and added a note about signing up to the bottom of many articles. Small things make big differences: Signups doubled, and it can claim at open rate — how many subscribers actually open the email or notification of 40 to 50 percent, compared to an industry average of 23 percent.

Understanding isn’t only about studies. It’s now driven best by the modern marriage of old habit and new testing. Analytics (“The newsonomics of ‘Little Data,’ data scientists, and conversion specialists”) provides the link.

The Financial Times, long a leader in testing editor and marketer hunches with data, proved out the link with its launch of the standalone FT Weekend app last July. The FT sensed, of course, that weekend reading tended more to culture and lifestyle than the daily business drill — but the data told it how profound that difference was. Importantly, much of it was consumed not only on weekends, but also on tablets and smartphones. Data told it about the importance of giving readers the weekend content on the platforms they wanted (good quick Q&A with Lisa MacLeod, head of operations for FT.com, at WAN-IFRA). Further, it was the FT’s paying subscribers — those core paying customers to whom all publishers should pay top priority — that particularly embraced the move.

All of that led to the development of the old-is-new paid FT Weekend mobile app. That’s connecting old habit with the best of new tech and timely delivery. Old subscribers — and new ones — have responded well.

Photo of old and new buildings in downtown Chicago by Serge used under a Creative Commons license.

How Philly’s Billy Penn is building a local news audience from scratch

Joseph Lichterman — Wed, 17 Dec 2014 15:00:00 +0000

After leaving TBD, Brady joined Digital First, which was then the Journal Register Company, to launch Project Thunderdome, a national network for Digital First’s community and local newspapers. With the memory of TBD lingering, Brady wanted another opportunity to try and redefine local news. Unfortunately, things didn’t go so well the second time around either. As a result of what Ken Doctor called “fatigue of majority DFM owner Alden Global Capital,” Thunderdome was shuttered last spring.

For his third stab at reinventing local news, Brady decided to go at it alone, kicking in about $500,000 of his own money, enough to fund the project for 18 months. In addition to a four-person editorial staff, Billy Penn has hired part-time designers and developers — including one who is finishing his studies at Temple University. “We have to wait until Chris [Montgomery] gets done with his exams,” to finish some projects, Brady said.

With so many news organizations already writing competing versions of the same stories, Billy Penn figures it can best serve its audience by linking out heavily and focusing original coverage on more unique approaches to the news. “Does it make sense for us to build another silo for Philadelphia?” asks Krewson. “Is what’s really needed in this city more content?”

To cut through that cacophony of news coverage, Krewson and his team are developing a voice for the site that’s punchy and direct. As it continues to tweak its editorial voice Billy Penn has tried some kitschy things, like live-tweeting a gubernatorial debate in emoji, a weekly Spotify playlist that chooses songs to summarize the week in news, or a bracket to determine the Ultimate Philly Thing. It’s similarly still figuring out things like how much swearing is appropriate on the site, in its newsletter, and on social.

“That’s where you can really see where growth is because it’s hard to see it when you have a day when you have a burst and get 20,000 page views, because that’s not real, but neither is Thanksgiving Day when you have 800,” Brady said. “That’s not real either. The hard part is what constitutes a day at this early stage that is really reflective of what your traffic is, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Understanding what its readers care about about is critical for Billy Penn as it strives to create groups around news topics and build an events business that caters to those groups. Billy Penn wants to facilitate discussions and engagement around the news both online and in person. In an ideal world, Brady envisions one day being able to reserve the back room of a bar on short notice to convene discussions on news topics as they’re developing.

“We want to see if we can move events a little more at the pace of news. Rather than drop them on a schedule and just wait for them to happen, let’s try to have them as news is breaking,” he said.

Already in discussions with potential event partners, Brady hopes to ramp up the schedule starting this spring. Events are a proven strategy for news organizations, and Brady hasn’t hesitated to ask other outlets for advice. He says he’s planning on going to Austin next month to attend a Texas Tribune event and to see what’s been successful for the five-year-old nonprofit.

In terms of online engagement, Billy Penn plans to add an “Action Bar” modeled after a similar feature on the Christian Science Monitor’s site. The Action Bar will help users figure out how to get involved with an issue by directing them to advocacy groups, scheduled protests, or petitions on all sides of an issue.

Brady is hopeful that by endearing itself to the city’s younger residents, Billy Penn will succeed where others have failed. Still, many in the city are skeptical that Billy Penn will be any different than many of the other high profile news startups that have failed in an attempt to fill some of the gaps by Philly’s two major papers, the Inquirer and the Daily News, which have floundered digitally and have changed owners multiple times in recent years.

But Billy Penn also wants to manage expectations. It’s started slowly, launching first with its newsletter and social media accounts before bringing a minimally viable site online in October. Brady, Krewson, and the rest of the staff emphasized that much of what Billy Penn is doing is experimental, saying that it takes time to build something from scratch. But Brady welcomes the attention.

“There are going to be another round of stories in six months saying when the hell is this thing going to make any money…if you’re going to be written about people feel like they need to circle back and make sure you’re doing what you said you’re going to do,” Brady said. “So I suspect if we don’t, the same people who are probably a little annoyed we’re getting stories written about us now will love those.”

Photo of the William Penn statue atop Philadelphia City Hall by Jason used under a Creative Commons License.

The fight to get Google to pay for news continues in Europe

Catherine Stupp — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 15:39:58 +0000

BERLIN — The European Union’s new commissioner for digital affairs didn’t waste any time. Days before starting the job at the end of October, Günther Oettinger (his official title is commissioner for digital economy and society) announced plans to reform European copyright law in 2015. That could mean introducing a levy on search engines when they show results for European companies, he said — a contested issue that’s been pushed by large news media companies from across Europe in recent months.

Oettinger has announced few details of his plans for copyright reform. But in an interview with the German daily newspaper Handelsblatt, he made it clear that he wants to tackle Google’s profits from listing European companies in search results. “If Google takes intellectual property from the EU and works with that, then the EU can protect that property and demand Google pay for that,” he said.

Copyright laws nicknamed “Google taxes” have been passed in a few European countries over the past few years. That name is deceptive — the laws don’t call for an actual tax since any fee Google is made to pay will go to publishers, not governments — but they have left Google at the center of legal battles driven by major publishers. Spain passed a law at the end of October that charges search engines to pay a copyright collection agency for including snippets from and links to news websites. In 2013, France’s government settled news publishers’ demands for copyright reform by striking a deal with Google: For a flat rate of €60 million (invested into a fund for digital publishing), the company was allowed to continue listing news articles in search results.

Günther Oettinger. Photo by Jacques Grießmayer/CC.

Oettinger has said that a proposal for EU copyright reform should be ready at some point next year. So far, what’s known of his plan has drawn comparison with the German law known as the ancillary copyright law for press publishers. Oettinger, who is German, spoke about his plans for the European law in a closed session of the German Bundestag at the beginning of November.

In Germany, the new ancillary copyright law for press publishers has had a rough start. The law went into effect last August and, while some details still need to be ironed out in court, the controversial heart of it — whether search engines will pay money to publishers — has an uncertain future. Google has refused to pay fees to publish snippets from news sites, and instead asked German publishers last year to opt in if they want to be included in Google News search results, waiving their right to cash in on the use of their content according to the new law. To avoid paying the collection agency, VG Media, which represents the publishers that chose not to opt in, Google stopped showing snippets from their news articles on Oct. 23. Shortly after that, the publishers in VG Media gave Google a license to restore snippets to their search results — for free. Berlin-based Axel Springer, one of Europe’s largest publishers, announced on Nov. 5 that it had caved to Google’s pressure after traffic to its websites from Google dropped by 40 percent and from Google News by 80 percent when snippets were left out of search results.

Germany’s law addressing how much of news articles can be distributed on the Internet — and if the limit allowed without charge should be links, snippets, or quotes — sparked debate here over whether news websites need a law specific to the online media. Axel Springer, some other large German publishers and two of the industry’s largest lobby groups, the Federation of German Newspaper Publishers (BDZV) and the Association of German Magazine Publishers (VDZ) say the law fills a gap in Internet copyright regulations.

“An ancillary copyright law for press publishers is something that’s actually become necessary with digitization, also in EU copyright law. Record companies, broadcasters, and other industries have had that on the EU level for a long time,” said Christoph Fiedler, VDZ’s director of European and media policy. Critics have argued that copyright law for online news can’t be compared to other industries like film or music, where there are generally more rights holders involved in producing an individual work.

Advocates of Germany’s digital copyright law argue that charging search engines for distributing content from news websites, combined with advertising and subscriptions, is a sustainable model for financing journalism. Christoph Keese, vice president of Axel Springer and the most vocal supporter of the German copyright reform, says foundations, sponsors, and political support for journalism are models that limit publishers’ independence. “Axel Springer and the publishers that agree with us see media that’s financed by readers and advertisers as ideal and worth striving for. When revenue from readers and from ads goes down, then you have to try other revenue models. Licensing is an obvious approach,” said Keese.

Critics of the new national copyright laws have said Europe’s struggling news publishing industry is looking to Google to keep itself afloat. But Axel Springer, the most prominent backer of the German law, has remained profitable as it expands digitally. Axel Springer’s quarterly report released at the beginning of November shows the company’s profit growth slowing, with 52 percent of its revenue now comes from digital.

Among the publishers who opted to be included in Google’s search results were two of the country’s most widely distributed daily newspapers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which are not represented by VG Media. A number of other large news publishers in Germany, including Axel Springer, Burda, and Funke Mediengruppe, remain part of VG Media.

The divide between supporters and opponents of the German copyright law positions newer, smaller news websites against large traditional newspaper publishers. Perlentaucher, a website that aggregates cultural news from other media sources, is one of the supporters of the campaign Initiative Against the Ancillary Copyright Law for Press Publishers (IGEL). Perlentaucher editor Thierry Chervel says many German newspapers have resisted transitioning to digital, with most larger papers still only putting a small part of their content online:

In the United States, it might still be possible for online-only media to be profitable because the American public is so big and there are a lot of people speaking one language. And internationally English is a lingua franca. In German-speaking countries, online media can hardly be made profitable, and we’re not even talking about the smaller countries in Europe.

Instead, he argues, there needs to be more public media and foundation-financed journalism. “We need to be thinking about that and not about levying information,” said Chervel.

While the parameters of new European copyright reform are being worked out in Brussels, details of the existing German law remain unclear. According to the law, when publishers receive payment from search engines, journalists are also supposed to be paid “appropriately.” Those exact rates still need to be agreed upon. The German freelance journalists’ union Freischreiber, another supporter of the opposition IGEL campaign, has criticized VG Media for what they say is a lack of transparency about the amounts journalists might be paid from the license revenue. “Copyright holders who write for newspapers and magazines are obligated to be part of this, but it’s not formulated anywhere how rights owners will be involved — neither in the law nor in the tariffs described by VG Media — with what percentages, what fees. That’s barely a consideration. It’s just a statement of intent,” said Henry Steinhau, a member of Freischreiber’s executive board who deals with copyright issues.

Talks over European copyright reform are still at the very beginning, according to Christoph Keese. “We’ll definitely help shape the debate,” Keese said. Axel Springer filed one of the 18 complaints (as of February) in an antitrust case against what they see as Google’s dominance in the European market. The case has run parallel to the new copyright legislation introduced around Europe. Google has over a 90 percent market share of search engines there, compared to a share of about 68 percent in the United States. (And last Thursday, the European Parliament approved approved a motion suggesting breaking up Google, saying the European Commission should “consider proposals with the aim of unbundling search engines from other commercial services.” Oettinger said he would oppose such a move.)

Angela Mills Wade, director of the European Publishers Council (of which Axel Springer, News Corp, and other large European publishers are members), is critical of Google for showing online news content in search results without paying publishers. Europe’s ongoing antitrust investigations of Google are publishers’ best chance for staving off that use without charge, according to Mills Wade. “Suing Google all over the world for copyright infringement is an expensive business with very uncertain outcomes. The only recourse is to go through competition policy and to file complaints against abuse of their dominant position,” she said.

Photo of flags in front of the Berlaymont, home of the European Commission, by T P used under a Creative Commons license.

Catherine Stupp is a freelance journalist based in Berlin.

The newsonomics of the Sun-Times national/local network play

Ken Doctor — Tue, 28 Oct 2014 15:06:53 +0000

Coming, officially today, to your hometown: A templatized, national/local, ready-to-go network of 70 news sites and apps that aim to make use of all the au courant digital news business knowledge of the day. It’s called the Sun-Times Network, and it’s the latest attempt to try to do local news at a national scale. It’s turnkey. The big question: who exactly will open the door?

These new metro-wide sites have been loosed in the Android and iOS app stores, at least one for each of the 50 states, and covering the top 50 metro areas. The goal: to build a fast-scaling national ad network on a hybrid national/local model.

Intriguingly, the initiative takes flight out of a struggling, we’re-number-two newspaper company. The Sun-Times Network pops out of Wrapports, since late 2011 the owner of the Chicago Sun-Times. Yes, the same Sun-Times that won some national ink last year by laying off its photographers and made news last week with the reports that it would soon sell its extensive collection of more than three dozen suburban newspapers to its long-time rival, the Chicago Tribune. And it is born out of the criticized low-cost local news startup Aggrego.

It’s easy to write this off as a Hail Mary from a flailing newspaper company — and it’s possible that will end up being its epitaph. But it is its application of today’s digital business ideas — and its CEO — that compels at least some attention.

Sun-Times Network CEO Tim Landon knows network, scale, the ad game, national/local, and lots more, given his many years of stewardship (and scars from) Classified Ventures. Its products Cars.com and CareerBuilder became two of the newspaper industry’s relative few Internet successes. When Gannett spent $1.8 billion for the 73 percent of Cars.com that it didn’t already own, the company’s four other investor owners did well cashing out at a hefty gain (“The newsonomics of selling Cars.com”), after years of profits that partially offset the declines of the overall newspaper business. Now, Landon, a 22-year Tribune Company veteran (through 2008, when the Sam Zell bus hit Tribune Tower), sees a local media-centric model that he thinks could scale.

The Sun-Times Network model is based, in part, on Caribbean experimentation — an unusual digital export from that part of the Americas. Check out LoopJamaica.com, one of a string of test Caribbean sites that led to the new U.S. network. Why the Caribbean? Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien, the chairman and founder of Caribbean mobile provider Digicel (“Denis O’Brien, Ireland’s version of Mexico’s Carlos Slim, sells mobile to the masses”) embraced this network model and became a major funder of it as Wrapports’ minority partner. Those sites continue to operate. A test site in Dublin — which Landon says quickly gained 90,000 visitors — isn’t still up, but may be revived, he says, along with other implementations in Europe in 2015.

(You might spot the Irish connection in some launch day bugs; at this writing, the Boston Sun-Times site was prominently pushing the tiny Irish weeklies The Sligo Champion and The Kerryman, along with this headline: “xxxxx xxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx – Independent.ie.” Don’t expect a lot of Pulitzer entries here.)

The idea here is a fairly simple one. Launch all the sites, and then use local media player partners — a mobile provider, a TV or radio station, a chain of weeklies, a monthly magazine — to grow awareness and traffic in markets. No partners will be announced until at least November. The partner profile: A company that knows it should be in the digital game, but isn’t yet in, and doesn’t want to invest in the work of getting in itself. Sun-Times Network provides all the tech, most of the content, and the advertising. Just add local marketing and, ideally, some local content, and partners share 50-50 in the national ad revenue; a less-than $10,000 startup fee is also part of the deal. At best, a local provider will provide “five to 10 original pieces of content a day,” Landon told me Tuesday. Further, local providers can use the existing sites or private-label the product — using its own URL, but leveraging the same tech and business model.

It’s a non-exclusive model, at least for now. Landon attributes that both to an “open” philosophy (think open source and Guardian Open) and to the need to build scale. The more participants, in theory, the faster the network grows. And grow it must: Figure this network needs to hit a mark of 10 million unique visitors a month by a year from now, and then build from there. While nichier audience analytics will flow through the system, as audience grows, this is a mass play. Volume counts, and volume may be difficult to build and to keep. After all, Yahoo — a volume champion, with lots of bells and whistles attached to its massive scale — still fails to grow ad revenue sufficiently after all these years.

To be sure, the Sun-Times Network isn’t being built on the Yahoo model. It’s a distinct creature of 2014. Let’s tick off those characteristics:

Low cost. This national network bases itself on about $14 million in investment. At launch, 30 staffers make up Aggrego — 15 in tech, the other 15 journalists.
Platform-centric. The power here is in a centralized content and ad management system, responsive and analytics-centered.
Mobile first. Go where the audience is going.
Socially savvy. “The future is social,” says Landon, borrowing pages of the BuzzFeed/Vox/Vice playbook, which leverage the great and growing power of Facebook (David Carr: “Facebook offers life raft, but publishers are wary”) and Twitter much more than old search engine optimization tricks of the trade.
Aggregation ascendant. The network says its journalists will both “curate” and aggregate; we’ll see how much distinction they bring to those overlapping terms.

It’s the infinite linkability of the web that makes the Sun-Times Network at all possible. Such sites as its Atlanta one fills its national (news, sports, entertainment) channels and local ones with links, links, and more links. After all, the original name of this effort was Aggrego, and that Wrapports site is still up. Aggrego, as in uber-aggregation. Aggregation makes this all possible.

Now supplanted by the Sun-Times Network brand, Aggrego is already onto its second life, giving its name to the network’s platform. First envisioned as a hyperlocal network, based on the same set of digital innovations that now fuel the metro launch, it built out its first tests in the greater Chicago area. About 40 Sun-Times hyperlocal sites use the Aggrego tech, each attached to the Sun-Times suburban newspapers, like this one in Vernon Hills. Those suburban products fit under the Wrapports umbrella, but on a separate tube from the group of 70 nationwide metro sites announced today. Same tech, similar idea, different scale. Importantly, if last week’s report that Tribune Publishing is close to finalizing a deal to buy the Sun-Times regional properties is true, these Chicago-based sites could be packaged off with those print properties, leaving Wrapports to focus on both its struggling core paper and the growth it hopes to wring out of the Sun-Times Network.

“We’ve flipped the model,” says Landon. Take the original ideas out of suburban Chicago and embrace first the major metro areas of the country — and then the world. The simple reason, as everyone has learned (including, painfully and publicly, Tim Armstrong): There’s very little money in hyperlocal news. The flip means not only going going from hyperlocal to metro. It also means trying to leverage the shrinking (but still valuable) assets of Sun-Times journalism more widely. So Richard Roeper, the heir to Roger Ebert’s film role, is more than a Chicago Sun-Times or a wire/syndicate asset. His work can play these 70 sites and more, as can national-quality sports and other cultural coverage.

Can this network find a small place — “We’re not trying to take out the AJC [Atlanta Journal Constitution]” in Atlanta, for instance, Landon notes — in the hypercompetitive metro markets?

The odds of major success seem long.

Let’s ask three questions at this point:

Are these sites just too generic to break through the noise of the web, and the clutter of the smartphone screen? Is there enough different about the site, with its thin foundation of original, national-ranking Sun-Times content? Is there simply enough Sun-Times or original (national and/or local — content to create an identity for these sites?

To this point, I asked Landon if he thought it was worth investing money to buy high-profile personality content to better brand the foray. His answer: “If I can take $10,000 a month, am I better off putting two or three kids against and creating lots of content? Am I better off hiring a known political writer that is controversial? Am I better off doing Facebook advertising? That’s the way you have to think about it.”
Will the advertising revenue be sufficient? Remember, this is a low-cost operation, with no direct sales staff of its own to start. That means it is wholly reliant on programmatic network advertising, fetching $1 to $3 CPM (cost-per-thousand) rates for display ads. If and as it gets a significant news video business going — in competition with everyone else — those rates would be higher.
Our third question is the most brain-boggling. Why would it take a struggling, No. 2 paper in Chicago to figure out regional aggregation across the country? From Topix to Outside.in and numerous others, the idea of using tech to aggregate local stories is one that’s been tested by quite a few non-newspaper companies. Any local media company — a newspaper or a TV station, among other suspects — could do that same thing.

The biggest issue has been mindset. Local “papers” still think they’re in the original content business, despite the fact that as decades-long distributors of “aggregated” wire and syndicate content, they’ve always been aggregators. In 2009, when Hearst’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer collapsed from being a full-fledged local news source, it relied on aggregation for its new digital-only life. Much more recently, The New York Times bet on aggregation with the curated NYT Now, recently moving its briefings onto the main-site mothership. It’s not hard, but it requires a mindset change for news media, who we must unfortunately note can be pathologically slow to change. Simple idea: Do both. Leverage the strength and uniqueness of the original content, and provide the breadth of the web, well chosen.

The Sun-Times Network also borrows from the the new digital news websites this simple notion: Launch before you’re fully ready. On the web today, says Landon, you’ve just got to say, “Put it out there. Let’s go.”

Photo of “Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii” by Nam June Paik (1995) by Adam Fagen used under a Creative Commons license.

The newsonomics of new cutbacks at The New York Times

Ken Doctor — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 21:21:14 +0000

It looks like New York Times Co. CEO Mark Thompson got a little ahead of himself. Call it premature exuberance.

The Times had built major internal confidence, riding a wave of paywall-induced exhilaration, and eagerly moved on to what it had believed would be icing on the reader-revenue cake. I called it Paywalls 2.0 (“The newsonomics of The New York Times’ Paywalls 2.0”). The Times has tried to combine four magical words, squishing them together in ways no one had yet: Digital. Niche. Mobile. Paid. It’s the paid, of course, that’s the toughest part.

In that alchemy, the Times relied on deep research whose forecasts have proven close to the mark, as the Times has climbed to about 870,000 paying digital-only readers and reaped pricing rewards by combining print-plus-digital all-access subs. But the number of those who loved the Times enough to pay hundreds of dollars a year for it showed inevitable signs of peaking. The Times “little data” research projected a smaller but significant market of those would pay — if at lower dollar amounts — for different entry points into Times content.

Those forecasts haven’t come true, and in their wake, we see the substantial cut of 100 newsroom positions announced today, and a change in its niche apps strategy.

The core content and paywall strategy of the Times worked — that’s Paywalls 1.0 — but building on it has been tougher than planned. Today’s move is significant, but it’s one that should be understood carefully.

How much had the Times invested in the new strategy? While it’s impossible to parse the differing kinds of resources the newsroom added over the last three years or so, the amount of them is a number to behold. In 2011, the Times counted 1,189 newsroom employees. At the end of 2013, the number was 1,251, up 5.2 percent. Currently, it counts 1,330, up 11.5 percent from 2011. With 100 to be taken out, the 1,230 number would still be 3.4 percent higher than three years ago. It’s worth highlighting: While the overall number of newspaper editorial staffers has declined across America (down 20,000 jobs, about 30 percent of the total, in seven years), the Times has been bolstering its staff.

Those who volunteer for a buyout will receive a relatively generous three weeks of severance for each year worked. Of course, the Times will be semi-selective: “We reserve the right to say no to people who request a buyout but whose jobs and talents are critical to our mission,” notes executive editor Dean Baquet. One major question here is what the newsroom will look like when the dust settles.

Figure it this way: The Times’ newsroom needs to do two fundamental things well. First, it needs to maintain its gold-standard journalism capacity. That’s the very core of its business.

Second, it must transform its storytelling, becoming more intuitively digital, every day. Much of the newsroom increase was driven by the second priority. And, of course, the difficulty of changing newsroom culture, capability, and collaboration drove the well publicized Times innovation report leaked in the spring. Let’s recall that Arthur Gregg Sulzberger (good Capital profile), the publisher’s son, was a leader on that report and then assumed the title of senior editor for strategy in July to tackle the deep issues it presented. Now, amid the cutbacks, how will the work of culture change move forward, and how will relevant resources be affected?

Look at the Times’ newsroom numbers, even after these cuts, and it still stands apart. The content question for its immediate future: How much new content — and product — creation can be justified by business reality? That’s where Thompson’s new Times got a little ahead of itself.

Let’s look at four of the key questions to pop out of today’s move:

Is this a major business reversal?

No, the Times’ revenue is on a familiar path. If you look at the financials of the first six months of the year, reader revenue is still growing a bit and advertising is basically flat overall. The big bright spot is obscured by that big layoff number: a 16 percent increase in Q3 digital revenue, compared to 3.4 percent up in Q2 and 2.2 percent up in Q1. That’s a big number, and a hopeful one for the future as new executive vice president for ads Meredith Kopit Levien works through her massive overhaul of the Times ad operation.

Is the poor business performance of the new niche products a surprise?

Not really. When I wrote about the launch of NYT Now in April (“The newsonomics of NYT Now”), I suggested that a good baseball hitting average was the goal: “My bet is that the Times will be fortunate if one of the three new products generates substantial profits. Two would be a big win, and three would tell us that the Times has arrived at a new level of data-mastering strategery.”

So we’re clearly well short of masterful strategy, but it’s early in the Paywalls 2.0 game. Here’s what we know about the first set of these Paywalls 2.0 entries:

The NYT Opinion app is being terminated by month’s end, after being launched all the way back in…June. At $1.50 a week, it didn’t find a separate, significant audience.
The $2-a-week NYT Now app is staying in place — smartphone-only, as it has been — for now, though it is underperforming.
The NYT Cooking app is staying free — it was launched in beta with the intention of charging for it — and the Times, citing audience growth, is apparently seeing it mainly as a digital ad vehicle. In fact, the digital ad growth potential — that 16 percent number — must be balanced carefully against restricted-to-pay products going forward.
Then, there’s Times Premier, the VIP sub, which the Times is retooling. The Premier offer has seemed like a mishmash of stuff, and apparently that’s been greeted with lukewarm customer reception as well.

In the spring, I noted that there were clear stumbling blocks to success. There were navigation issues and questions about the daily adoption of a product that was kinda like (but not the same as) the full Times mobile product.

Comparative pricing is one issue, as I noted then: “The pricing of the ‘essential’ product, NYT Now, may be tricky. It’s only $2 a week, which gets you through-the-day reports plus a curated sense of what’s big news from elsewhere and the briefings. However, for $3.75 a week, you can get access to four or five times more New York Times content through its smartphone app — and full access to the NYTimes.com on the web. So a side-by-side comparison may give buyers second thoughts…The biggest, of course, is how many current non-subscribers will see enough value to pay…How large might the NYT Now segment be? There is undoubtedly a vast potential audience that could appreciate a Times fast-read view of the world, but it’s a group that may be tough to get to pay. Two bucks a week isn’t much. But at that price, NYT Now isn’t competing against other $2 products. It’s competing against the enormous freely available web.”

What do we learn about investing in news product?

The stock market — no surprise — loved today’s announcement. It was an announcement of business discipline. Call it a pivot, as CEOs like Thompson are wont to, or a sharp unexpected turn when the boulders in the road look larger than Google Maps told you.

We can figure that the 141 increase in staff in the newsroom over last 30 months cost about $12.5 million a year. Take out 100 of those and the Times saves about $9 million a year. That’s a positive financial move. Look at the wider expense context. Newspaper companies have been cutting expenses annually in the low- to mid-single digits for almost a decade now; that’s the only way they can stay profitable since they largely haven’t grown revenue year-over-year since 2005. Last year, the Times was down 2.1 percent in overall expenses, pruning in lots of places while investing in the newsroom and new products. Through the first six months of 2014, though, it’s been up 4.5 percent. Given the flattish revenue performance (more on which below), that number couldn’t hold. The Times’ operating profit for 2013 was $156.1 million, and Thompson’s already said it will be less than that in 2014.

To be clear, today’s cut is newsroom-centered. Says the Times: “A smaller number on the business side [will be cut] through a combination of buyouts and layoffs.”

The Times operates on relatively slim margins and without deep pockets, even though they’re a bit deeper than they were five years ago. Up I-95 in Boston, John Henry is investing millions in the new Globe. South of it, in D.C., Jeff Bezos is doing the same at the Post. Both see these as long-term investments, without a lot of prospect of short-term payoff. The Times simply can’t afford to do that.

So this “pivot” comes quickly — only a few months after the new niche products were introduced in the spring. Financial pressure is real, and so is a management culture that is seemingly tortured by transitions. (Witness the messes around the firings of former publisher Janet Robinson and former editor Jill Abramson.) It’s not a confidence-builder, internally or externally, to hire up quickly and then buyout/layoff quickly; after all, that’s the industry’s big complaint with Aaron Kushner’s Orange County Register roller coaster.

The Times’ lurch is a cautionary note for anyone experiencing premature exuberance about the digital future of the news business. All kinds of good things are emerging: new revenue from smarter digital ad strategies (native, content marketing, digital services, event sponsorships) and some readers will pay for digital access. But these are still uncertain flashes of light on the horizon. They’re real — but how big are they, and how sustainable?

What’s the size of the Times’ paying audience?

[Note: This section has been revised for greater clarity.]

Consider this. At the end of the last century (1999, to be precise), the Times print paying circulation stood at 1,097,200 daily and 1,682,200 on Sunday. Today, we see 1,217,201 paying Sunday print readers, 680,905 paying daily (Monday-Friday) print readers, and those 870,000 digital-only subscribers.

Let’s compare some numbers, then. Adding today’s Sunday print to digital-only, we now get 2.08 million paying readers — or a little more than 300,000 more than the 1999 high-water mark, which was that Sunday print number. Adding today’s daily print to digital only, we get 1.55 million paying readers, or close to the top print circulation (Sunday’s) of 1999.

We can take a couple of points from these comparisons. The Times has more paying readers today than in 1999. That’s a signal accomplishment. And the number of people who will pay for the Times is relatively stable, across 15 years and a whirlwind of world, generational, and news-reading change. Even though the Times can count more than 30 million U.S. monthly unique visitors and 40 million worldwide, its number of paying readers hasn’t changed a great deal. The plus side of that: There’s apparently a sizable group of people who value news content enough to pay for it, in digital or print form. The minus: That group is relatively small, and apparently not too changeable over a more than a decade. Each publisher must decide how best to find, satisfy and price that audience.

The Times — through its core digital-only/all-access offerings — has succeeded in transitioning over many people into the paid digital world, and that’s a milestone; no one would have believed four years ago that it would have more digital-only Times subscribers than print by 2014. While the Times has so far stumbled out of the Paywalls 2.0 gate, its almost four years of success at working that transition is still a newsworthy one, and a model to further parse.

Photo of The New York Times Building lobby by dnkbdotcom used under a Creative Commons license.

Through The Wire: What happened with The Atlantic’s experiment in aggregation?

Justin Ellis — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 16:24:33 +0000

Almost a year ago The Wire dropped an important signifier from its name. The decision to drop the “Atlantic” was about letting the news and entertainment aggregator live on its own outside the parent company. Along with that came a new design and new URL, all emphasizing the point that The Wire was a brand on its own, comparable with other Atlantic Media independents.

“Confusion is what we’re trying to address. It’s not clear from our current branding that The Wire is produced by a separate editorial team,” Gabriel Snyder, the site’s editor told me in November. M. Scott Havens, president of The Atlantic, said something similar: “It’s less about removing The Atlantic from the name and more about establishing The Wire’s independent identity in both form and function.”

Today, both Snyder and Havens are gone from Atlantic Media, and, sometime in the next few weeks, The Wire will join them. After four years, The Atlantic is pulling the site back into the family, absorbing The Wire’s staffers into TheAtlantic.com. In a memo announcing the change, Atlantic co-presidents James Bennet and Bob Cohn praised The Wire for its reporting, use of social media, and loyal readership. Despite that, The Wire didn’t add up as an experiment in finding new revenue, Bennet and Cohn wrote in the memo first published on Gawker:

It’s possible The Wire was a victim in a broader shift in the media business away from large aggregators to niche sites and personalized, socially driven streams of news. Rather than go to a site that covers everything, readers can fine tune their Twitter feed or seek out sites that cover cricket or politics very well. In the same week The Wire got reabsorbed by The Atlantic, Reuters shut down Counterparties, the business and finance aggregator first launched by Felix Salmon and Ryan McCarthy.

At the same time, larger, traditional media companies like The New York Times and the Financial Times have developed in-house aggregators as a tool for subscribers.

It’s likely The Atlantic is trying to capture some of that magic for the flagship brand. Bennet told me they plan to integrate what The Wire did into the workflow and design of TheAtlantic.com. “We don’t want to lose the energy and the speed of The Wire,” he said.

They also don’t want to lose the audience, and that’s where grafting The Wire onto The Atlantic could prove tricky. The people looking for the latest writing from Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Fallows, or ex-Nieman Labber Megan Garber may not be the same audience looking for recaps on what trend John Oliver destroyed this week.

But Snyder thinks the audiences are not that far apart. People will continue to be inundated by news, and as technology changes there will always be a need for people to collect the most important information for readers, he said. It’s why he’ll continue to see The Wire as a success even after it’s shuttered. “From watching the reaction on Twitter, the worst part of this will be watching a really great site and really great group of people become fodder for other people’s media trend pieces,” he said.

Watching what happens: The New York Times is making a front-page bet on real-time aggregation

Justin Ellis — Tue, 23 Sep 2014 13:15:20 +0000

The rhythms of the homepage of NYTimes.com are by now familiar, even a little predictable. The core of its layout has been steady for almost a decade; regular readers have come to know how stories flow in and out of slots, mixing the day’s top news, timely features enjoying their minute in the sun, nods to the opinion section, and a breaking story or two. While the page might have live updates — say, if the fate of Scottish independence hangs in the balance — few would confuse it with the frenetic pace of a newsy Twitter stream.

The Times wants to play with that familiar rhythm with “Watching,” a significant new feature on the homepage that aggregates breaking news updates from the Times and across the web 24 hours a day.

Think of Watching as a cross between a constantly updating wire feed and an in-house Twitter stream of stories Times staffers are keeping an eye on. For those of us who spend more than a little time living our lives in 140 characters, that may seem redundant or odd. But for a very large subset of Times readers — the ones who still rely on homepages more than social media to stay on top of news — Watching will offer a carefully filtered window into rest of the world of news, all with the NYT stamp of approval.

The cascading feed of news, multimedia, and tweets has the effect of not only bringing the web — and competitors’ headlines — into the Times, but also adding a new rhythm to the paper’s online reporting. Times editor at large Marcus Mabry said stories from the paper tend to fall into two units: breaking alerts and finished stories. The paper is trying to find ways to more effectively deliver stories that are still developing, said Mabry, who is working on the project along with reporter Jennifer Preston.

Mabry and Preston work in concert with editors and reporters across multiple desks at the Times to find developing stories. That’s why the daily mix in Watching cuts across subject areas; you’ll find updates on New York Fashion Week alongside tweets about airstrikes in Syria targeted at ISIL.

“I think it’s a huge service to offer readers the best of the rest. We feel our web experience on The New York Times homepage is second to none,” Mabry said. “At the same time, it is not all the information you need as a well informed reader today. To pretend that is silly.”

It’s a new twist on All the News That’s Fit to Print: Our reporting plus our curation of the rest of the news you need to know. The paper wants to spin up more experiments and products following the now famous innovation report. In calling on the paper to take charge of its digital future, that document did not mince words in outlining the mistakes and oversights from the Times. While the paper can still meet its own standards for reporting, the Times could be less precious about the ways it delivers information to readers, Mabry said.

“We were living in this old-world vision where you thought the only thing worth putting on your website was your own stuff,” he said.

Watching builds a new space on NYTimes.com for the kinds of hectic, constantly updating, breaking news reporting that people have become used to on social media, said Preston. “There was a speed in between the finished article and the breaking news alert for many years, which was The Lede blog,” Preston said. But The Lede met its end this summer in the Times great blog cull of 2014.

This is not the Times’ first attempt at introducing aggregation into the paper’s homepage. Back in 2008, they launched Times Extra, a short-lived experiment that fed automated headlines from other sites onto homepage widgets.

Watching is a spiritual descendant to Times Extra, but built for a world where Twitter streams, not RSS feeds, are the rising tool for assembling need from many sources. The tool was developed by assistant managing editor Ian Fisher and Tyson Evans, the former digital editor recently moved over into newsroom strategy.

In recent years the Times has found more ways to increase aggregation in and around NYTimes.com. On Bits, reporters use Scuttlebot to provide annotated links to tech stories from around the web. This year, the paper also debuted What We’re Reading, a collection of recommended stories from Times journalists specifically for subscribers.

Arguably the Times’ biggest bet on compiling and packaging stories has been the NYT Now app, which focuses on delivering readers a precisely targeted bundle of news, including a section dedicated to other news organizations’ stories. But that’s a separate app — Watching gets a slice of the Times’ most prime real estate, the homepage on both mobile and desktop, a sign that the paper has high hopes for the feature. That’s a bet on aggregation, as well as the staying power of the homepage as a destination for readers. The Times, like many publications, has seen the share of its traffic going to its homepage traffic shrink, with only a third of readers actually visiting the page, according to the innovation report. “What we hope this will do is give readers a reason to come to our homepage more often and stay there,” Mabry said.

Photo of a woman with binoculars by Chase Elliott Clark used under a Creative Commons license.

The newsonomics of the Piano/Press+ merger, creating the world’s largest paywall tech company

Ken Doctor — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 00:00:03 +0000

How fast has the paywall revolution swept the daily newspaper world?

This adoption of charging for digital access took flight as the New York Times pioneered its general news pay model in 2011, and the rest is history: half of U.S. dailies and as many as 20 percent of European dailies have moved in that direction, with Latin America and parts of Asia joining the parade. Today’s announcement of the merger of Press+ and Piano Media further ratifies the paywall notion — and yet marks an early consolidation in a still-toddling marketplace. Smaller European-centric Piano Media has bought U.S.-centric Press+, creating by far the largest paywall tech company. That’s a double sign: showing the necessity of paywalls to the future of news business models — and the fact that there’s not a huge amount of money to be made in supplying this technology to the world’s press. Further, we can see how fast some things change, and the many ways the legacy press takes so long to innovate, even when presented with winning models.

It’s also worth noting this is also a global play, one more indication that news is going global as a business. We can see that in Huffington Post’s and Buzzfeed’s global forays, just as we can News Corp’s wide reach and the efforts of The New York Times, the FT, and BBC to build truly global news businesses. This new merged company will operate on at least four continents.

In the transaction, the money behind Piano Media buys Press+, with central European venture fund 3TS Capital as majority owner. The new company retains the Piano name, with the Press+ moniker still attached to that product. But we can expect further branding changes as the combined operations are sorted out.

The price is close to the approximately $45 million that printer RR Donnelley paid for Press+ three years ago. Donnelley, seeking to both diversify its Big Iron operations and get Wall Street to believe its modernization story, didn’t do much integration of Press+ with its other products, though it has enjoyed some benefit from cross-selling. Consequently, the company began searching for a new owner last November, when I first reported it was back on the market.

Some observers may dismiss the long sales process, and relatively low price, as the mating of two unprofitable companies. But that interpretation needs far more nuance. Both of these companies are young, and have had to invest a lot just to get into — and ahead of — the game against a half dozen or so smaller players. Both are in the red, but not by a lot, and efficiencies gained by the merger should help on the road to profitability.

In addition, though the paywall adoption rate is incredibly fast, especially for a newspaper industry that moves notoriously slowly, the revenue going to paywall providers is small and won’t ramp up wildly over time. Paywall tech isn’t a hockey stick investment; it’s a slow growing stream of partnered revenue, at least with current business models.

Combined revenue for the new company is in the range of $25-30 million annually with Press+ contributing more than 80 percent. The total initial workforce will be about 65, 40 on the Press+ side and 25 on Piano’s.

Press+ co-founders Gordon Crovitz’s and Steve Brill’s close involvement with the business will likely end by the close of the year. The two deserve credit for advocating a reader revenue strategy when most of the industry was oblivious to it, despite the early success of the metered model at the Financial Times. They launched the company as Journalism Online in 2009, later adopting the Press+ name associated with its first product. They’ve built out the company and have done quite well themselves financially, both in the Donnelley sale and the prove-out payments earned as the company hit its number-of-client milestones.

In one fell swoop the new company will dominate its field through sheer reach, though they face innovative competitors, each with its own niche. That list includes TinyPass, Cleeng, MediaPass, and Zuora, which counts some of the largest publishers like the FT, Guardian, News Corp and Australia’s Fairfax Media among its clients.

The new Piano can count 645 total paywalls, 570 driven by Press+ and 75 by Piano Media. Press+ has somewhat saturated the U.S. market, as almost all the newspaper chains are now spoken for, with smaller dailies the likely growth area. Among their customers are numerous chains like McClatchy, Digital First Media, Gatehouse, Morris, and Canada’s Postmedia. Piano’s number of publishers is close, at 27, but it powers 75 websites. Outside the U.S., Press+ hasn’t gotten much traction; its non-North American clients number less than 10 percent of its total. Meanwhile, Piano Media has begun to outgrow its early label as a Slovakian company powering “national” paywalls mainly in that central/eastern European region.

The new Piano also announced today that experienced newspaper executive Kelly Leach, would take over as new CEO. The 11-year veteran of Dow Jones acknowledges that paywall-nascent Europe is the first priority for the new company (“The newsonomics of paywalls all over the world.”). She’ll remain in London, where she has escaped the worst wrath of Dow Jones’ Lex Fenwick years, now leaving her job as managing director for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa and publisher of The Wall Street Journal’s European edition. Tomas Bella, who had served as Piano’s founding CEO, left the company in the spring.

Consolidation will provide the new company numerous benefits:

Cost consolidation is likely. Piano’s 25 employees are largely based in lower-cost central Europe, while Press+ employees are largely in New York City. As decisions are made on how to combine technologies, efficiencies will be found that should reduce total expenses.
One company can work sales in both Europe and U.S., as well as the rest of the world. The market will see a certain clarity in the “how” of paywalls — if the new company can satisfy the many paywall-related demands of publishers.
The new Piano will have access to more data on actual paywall performance, pricing and marketing results than any other supplier. Both companies have increasingly found themselves becoming paywall implementation advisors to publishers. They’ve begun to make sense of what’s actually happened in the digital subscription marketplace, and that may end up being the most important value proposition going forward.

As much as consolidation will help, the company will face one major headwind. Publishers’ near-religious conversion to “paid content” (remember that fading term, and that now-retired, Rafat Ali-pioneered website) is happening so quickly that the major publishers now consider digital reader revenue absolutely core to their future business model. If reader revenue overall — some combination of print-only, digital-only, and all-access — becomes not only pivotal, but the majority source of revenue, then publishers often lean toward building, rather than buying a paywall.

Recall how The New York Times was derided for the year it took to build out its paywall system? That year required both extensive consumer modeling and the development of new payment technologies that connected to larger customer databases. That kind of architecture costs lots of money, and, of course, time. Press+ and Piano Media have both successfully made the case to hundreds of publishers that they are better off licensing technology, with improvements that can be iterated centrally, instead of building, operating, and improving their own systems. That’s a powerful argument, but one rejected by companies like Gannett, Tribune, and The Washington Post. The contrarian notion: If digital reader revenue is so important, and so tied to print reader revenue, and evolving knowledge of reader habits, then much better to own the entire system.

The future of the business will rise or fall on analytics. One way or the other, connecting digital customer data to print customer data is becoming essential to customer relationship management. “Customers are asking for the building of a single customer views,” affirms Matt Lindsay, head of econometrics firm Mather Consulting, which works with more than 400 newspapers.

Put it together, and the build/buy choice is a matter of pride, strategy, and economics. Those companies that can invest — and staff appropriately — can make a good argument. Many others haven’t been be able to justify their own investment yet.

Consequently, the new Piano Media faces that longer-term challenge.

The company is acutely aware of it, and has more recently invested resources in better, deeper integration with publishers’ own customer databases, winning praise from such clients as German publisher DuMont Schauberg.

“Our key reason for picking Piano was having variable instead of fixed costs as long as the entire market is still figuring out what potential online premium products really have – and it is working well,” says Patrick Woelke, managing director of DuMont Net, the digital arm of M. DuMont Schauberg. “Also, we got a lot of expertise via Piano. We attached Piano to our subscriber/CRM tool, so we can handle online-print-subscriptions, cross-selling and up-selling.”

Ultimately, Piano has to stack the buy/build proposition more strongly in its favor by upping its game, and the combined company should have a better chance of achieving that. Further, it must continue to build out its customer service and tech integration capabilities; some customers cite slowness in both areas.

Alongside that question are the basic business models. Publishers don’t like to pay a revenue share on each paying reader (just as they don’t like paying an ongoing revenue share to participate in Apple’s Newsstand), and they also don’t like paying ongoing fees. If the expanded Piano Media is to grow to profitability and provide ramping pay services to publishers, then publishers and Piano will have to find workable sweet spots for pricing. For most U.S. publishers, the all-access subscription has turned out to be a greater revenue source than digital-only offerings. There, Press+ takes about 25 cents per print subscriber per month to provide “authentication” services, a significantly smaller take than the 20 percent revenue share of what customers pay for digital-only subscriptions — which the company thought would be stronger when it first launched.

It’s a tough business given the individual vendor demands by publishers, and the need to both improve and scale technology to meet the challenges of paywall times.

Both companies talk a good game — and partially deliver. Clearly, analytics and the application of market-customized best practice consulting lies ahead of Piano as its largest opportunity. As a paywall tech leader Piano sits atop the heap of so much reader pricing and usage data, it will offer to tame that Big Data into knowable little data, on which publishers can optimize their businesses. “Customer group segmentation,” is what Pekka Maki, managing partner of 3TS and deal-maker behind the merger, called it when I talked to him about the deal last week. He believes Piano’s timing is good, as many publishers begin to move away from the world of installed software to buying more cloud-based services.

New CEO Leach outlines her sales pitch, based on the benchmarking/best practices argument: “If you are getting started in the paid space, you don’t have to start at square one. You can leapfrog over trial and error.”

At this juncture, though, both Piano and Press+ have just scratched the surface of that knowledge. All of that technology work will require investment for the next several years, even as the increased engineering work is located in the lower-cost eastern Europe. Maki says that the investors — Vienna-based 3TS Capital Partners, with junior partners aws Gründerfonds (Austria), Neulogy Ventures (Slovakia), and North Base Media (USA) — put in new investment capital in addition to the cash for the Press+ acquisition. Will it have the capital to truly meet the opportunity of a paid content world? It’s a balancing act for the company, which Maki says will “sell or IPO in five years, plus or minus.”

Finally, there’s the unique issue of Piano’s #1 target market: Europe.

As Valerie Arnould, deputy editor-in-chief of WAN-IFRA, notes, “We are still at the start of reader revenue trends.” Or, to put it another way: Europe is just different.

While paywalls have more room to grow, the main model adopted by publishers in Europe is “freemium.” That means that some articles (usually wire+) are free and much of the staff-written content is behind a hard paywall, with little or no metered sampling allowed. Why do European publishers take a different strategic path from their American cousins, most of whom have embraced the meter? In my talks with them, I hear much concern about the potential for lost digital advertising and about readers evading the cookies paywall systems set. Further, the editorial cultures of many of the still family-owned European press are stronger than they are in the U.S. There’s the sense that readers should pay for proprietary staff content, even if evolving metrics tell us that metered sampling produces far better reader revenue results. How much of a revenue difference are we seeing in Europe?

“If you go for freemium, you are reaping only about 10 percent of your potential paid content revenues,” says Gregor Waller, a Hamburg-based consultant highly knowledgeable about the business model changes of the press there.

Given those challenges, Waller believes that companies like Piano and Press+ are “transition-technology-providers — thus only interesting for publishers who want to test the waters or who have underestimated the technological challenge for an owned paywall-system….If paywall-tech companies want to survive, I would suggest they concentrate on the small to medium size publishers; reduce the paywall-cost to a flat fee (not related to paid content revenues) and actively sell data/marketing-know-how which those publishers will never be able both to attract and pay.”

Photo of a Lego wall by mkorsakov used under a Creative Commons license.

The newsonomics of the Washington Post and New York Times network wars

Ken Doctor — Thu, 04 Sep 2014 18:54:08 +0000

Call it the newspaper network wars.

The Washington Post’s Newspaper Partner Program has grown from a March-planted seedling into a full-grown fall oak. The initiative now includes more than 120 daily newspapers in the U.S., and could connect with more than 200,000 digital newspaper subscribers or more by the middle of next year. Meanwhile, The New York Times is newly working with newspaper partners, launching its own products. USA Today, too, is now pitching a news partner program across the country.

What’s going on here? Why in 2014 are we seeing both new digital and print partner programs being offered up by three of America’s national newspaper brands? We can chalk it up to two things. Most prominently, the Jeff Bezos era at the Washington Post is fully taking hold. Secondly, publishers —these national ones and the early-adopting regional ones — are getting smarter at working around the edges, figuring out how to add on the smaller things that readers will pay for in this renewed age of reader revenue.

Let’s start with the Post. On Tuesday, Jeff Bezos announced Fred Ryan as the paper’s new publisher. If we had expected that Graham family member Katharine Weymouth might exit about a year after Bezos’ purchase, we were right. The choice of Ryan himself was a well-kept secret, and it is his “Politico” background that most stood out in the buzz around the announcement. It is that reference that tantalizes here. Politico is Example A in how to disrupt legacy media. Though Ryan is as much a TV guy as a publisher, having run Allbritton Communications broadcast property group until its sale in August 2013, he served as a co-founder and CEO of fast-charging (Allbritton-owned) Politico until last month. Birthed under the nose of the then-majestic Washington Post in 2007, Politico offers part of a playbook for a re imagination of The Washington Post in the digital age.

Little Politico, starting from zero, created a trusted well-known political “vertical” product almost overnight, stealing away the sizzle of politics from a strong Post that appeared to be slumbering. Politico fired on all its digital business engines, magnifying media mentions from cable TV to social media, seeming far bigger than its original size. In the following years, it’s been a fast innovator, adding an events business to its repertoire and then figuring out a way to increase its editorial staff by becoming a B2B Internet-turbocharged digital newsletter company, serving seven sectors with high-priced Politico Pro (“The newsonomics of influentials.”). Last fall, the company bought Capital New York, and it is endeavoring to apply Politico business logic to the property in media-saturated New York City.

Politico’s financials are private, so it’s tough to separate its real achievements from its slew of innovative models and ample self-promotion. Yet, this looks like a case of a disruptor being hired to run a legacy operation, and — hopefully — bring some of that thinking, and mojo, to it.

Ryan inherits an operation that has already changed a great deal since Bezos took control last October and promised a “runway” to a beleaguered staff. On the editorial side, we’ve seen an investment of middle to high single digit millions in the newsroom. On a digital level, that’s really about giving editor Marty Baron the resources to expand content capacity, as he detailed in this January blog post. On the business end, the highest profile adventure has been the establishment of the Newspaper Partner Program, led by Post President Steve Hills, the long-standing Post exec in charge of all business operations.

Combine the two initiatives — a reinforced newsroom and a program for greater reach — and you can see the driving strategy that Ryan himself outlined for staff when introduced on Tuesday: “We want the Post to be the most widely read news organization in the world.” The “we,” importantly, includes Jeff Bezos.

That’s quite a proclamation — and it goes a long way to describe both the new partner program and the reason why this looks like the beginning of new head-to-head competition with The New York Times. Observers of history will recall that in their post-Watergate glory, the Times and the Post made polar strategic decisions. The Times staked its claim to a national, and global, audience, and first built out the printing capacity and other resources to deliver on that. The Post went super-regional, focusing on the affluent D.C. Metro area — and thoroughly dominated it in print and then digitally (in audience). The Post published a printed national weekly edition for a while, and later saw its non-D.C. web traffic grow greatly, though organically. Its business, though, has long been focused on its geographic area.

Now, it’s clearly throwing down the gauntlet to what has been a paywall-resurgent Times. Backed by Bezos’ money and his philosophy to build a long-term business, with short-term profit a smaller concern (just ask long-standing — some would say long-suffering — Amazon shareholders, who welcomed the company’s CFO stepping down on Wednesday), the Post can be expected to contest the Times on a number of battlefields — and ones of its own choosing. It’s asymmetrical warfare, with divergent tactics that may seem like a hodgepodge now but will take shape and form over time.

The Newspaper Partner Program lays out that groundwork. Its notion is simple for local publishers: If your regional daily has a paywall (which most now do), you can offer your subscribers additional access to Washington Post content, at no extra fee. No money changes hands between the Post and local publishers. Publishers give their readers more content at no extra cost. That’s the easy-to-get value proposition for subscribers.

The value proposition for publishers: An ability to better satisfy paying customers. That should result in the ability to both increase prices annually and to reduce subscription cancellation, or churn.

The value proposition for the Post: Building the Post brand and reach — and gaining access to the email addresses of tens of thousands of customers. Jeff Bezos knows “customers.” If you are a subscriber to the Toledo Blade, Minneapolis Star Tribune or Dallas Morning News, for instance, you must “authenticate” your subscription with The Washington Post. Once you do, you become a known, and trackable, customer of both the Post and the local paper. While the program’s first priority is simply building reach, the Post will be able to monetize all those new readers via digital advertising. Down the road, we can expect the exploitation of e-commerce opportunities, likely connected to Amazon, which the Post apparently experimented with in August. Regional publishers aren’t worried about Post incursions into their audiences; the deal seems like a fair balance to them — for now.

Among the other companies that have signed on: Digital First Media, Scripps Newspapers, Calkins Newspapers and Tribune’s Orlando Sun-Sentinel. This week, the program went global. Tokyo-based Yomiuri, the world’s largest newspaper with its circulation of about 10 million, agreed to become a partner. For now, it only includes Yomiuri’s 30,000 circulation English language edition, but the deal makes a competitive statement.

At the Star Tribune, 14,000 subscribers have signed up, or 6.8 percent of the 205,000 subscribers eligible for the opt-in. The Morning News has signed up 4,300 people, or about 1.5 percent of its subscription base. Early take-up on the Post deal runs from 1-2 percent to as much as 4-5 percent of subscribers. Let’s look forward and figure that 3 percent of the participating newspapers’ subscribers sign up for the program by mid-2015.

Consider the math. With a subscription base of seven million among the regional partners so far, 3 percent would mean 210,000 or so Post-authenticated readers. That would represent the acquisition of lots of reader-customers, at a very low cost. We can also expect both the overall subscription base to grow over time as new partners are added and more readers opt-in as they get repeated notices about the product.

Even further below the public radar are print network programs moving into place in several markets. These programs are growing from local publisher innovation, starting with the Toronto Star. Five years ago, Star publisher John Cruickshank looked deeply into reader research and came up with a back-to-the-future contrarian idea: Paid, niche newsprint. You can read more on Cruickshank’s thinking and odyssey here at the Lab: “The anatomy of the Toronto Star’s C$10 million niche print business.” In short: the Star approached the New York Times Syndicate with the wild notion of selling a new product to his Sunday readers — a weekly New York Times section focused on international news and books. He’s now selling that product to 70,000 Sunday subscribers, or a little less than a quarter of the Star’s Sunday circulation. The Star’s total annual reader revenue for the Times paid print product, and two other niche print products: More than C$10MM annually. (One Canadian dollar now equals 92 U.S. cents).

Jim Moroney, Dallas Morning News publisher and CEO, sees a similar opportunity. He plans to start selling the special Times section to his Sunday subscribers this fall, after completing talks with the Times. After a four-week sampling period The Morning News will charge $1.99 a week for the section, sharing revenue, as does the Toronto Star, with the Times. The Times is calling the program its Opt-In Model. Expect more dailies to talk to the Times about the program as well, as the company decides how and how much to expand the model in the U.S.

Moroney, the fastest newspaper diversifier in the West (or East), won’t stop there. He’ll separately offer his readers a second paid print supplement — that of The Washington Post. When Moroney first heard of the free, digital add-on Post partner program, he said he’d sign on — but wanted a paid print offer as well. The Post’s Steve Hills agreed, and that supplement — focused on national and political news — will likewise debut in this fall, priced at 99 cents a week, with reader revenue split between the parties. While the Post was at first reluctant to create and offer the 16-24 page tab, it agreed and is now in the process of extending the print deal to other newspapers. Why the reluctance? “Our big play is digital,” emphasizes Hills. He wants a clear distinction between the free digital access program and paid Sunday print supplement as completely separate deals, with the latter producing cash and better relationships with partners.

So if the Times begins providing these new supplements in both Toronto and Dallas, does it find itself in a new network business? Yes — kind of. The weekly print supplement business is an old one, but it’s been a product offered outside the U.S., in Latin America, Europe and elsewhere, with more than two dozen higher-quality publishers participating. In that program, publishers pay a fee to the Times — and don’t charge their readers anything extra for the package. Given Cruickshank’s moxie at the Toronto Star, a new version of that idea — and a business — has been born and the Times must decide how to proceed with it.

For the Times, that’s going to be a decision on how a print initiative fits with its own all-digital push. It’s not clear how the Times, which drives more than 10 percent of its 831,000 digital-only subscriptions from outside the U.S., wants to play the digital/print subscription/supplement game.

After disappointing 2Q financials and underwhelming sales of NYT Now and other new paid niche products, the Times in this late summer is in the midst of a strategic re-think. One new competitor it best consider is the resurgent Washington Post, which will seek ways to outflank the Times wherever it can.

Finally, there’s one more player — the third of America’s national news suppliers, if we consider The Wall Street Journal as the nation’s business newspaper rather than a general news company.

USA Today Publisher Larry Kramer has been out on the hustings pitching his own print weekly supplement lately. Gannett’s “Butterfly” program has been a key part of its local paper paywall/overall cost reduction strategy, as USA Today puts a condensed edition into many of Gannett’s dailies. Now, even as USA Today proceeds with painful layoffs, Kramer is aiming to turn that work into a profit center. He is negotiating with several companies to include USA Today in their pages as well. The business model includes fees and potential revenue sharing on advertising sales. Though the fledgling program is print only at this point, Kramer says new digital syndication plans are developing.

Star Tribune Publisher Mike Klingensmith buys the USA Today rationale: “I think the USAT move is very smart. Research has consistently told us that including more national and international news makes our product seem more valuable and more important, and interest in those areas, for our readers, is nearly equal to local news.”

That’s just one of the curious things about this spate of newspaper networks: They are as print-based as digital. Even The Washington Post digital access program really works because so many print subscribers – who have been upgraded (“opted in” in many cases) – will value the Post content. It is still the 30 million or so print newspaper subscribers in the U.S. that provide about 30 percent of all newspaper revenue. Even if the whole world slowly trends towards digital, these programs can be highly valuable, intended to reward both readers and the local publishers by harnessing one tried-and-true thing: Higher-quality journalism.

Photo of Washington Post building signage by niawag used under a Creative Commons license.

Yet another new site for The Washington Post, this time aimed at aggregation

Caroline O'Donovan — Tue, 02 Sep 2014 19:43:35 +0000

Thanks in part to the recent Bezosian cash infusion, things have been busy over at The Washington Post.

In less than 6 months, the Post has launched @WaPoThing, @TheStoryline and @GetThereWP

— Noah Chestnut (@noahchestnut) August 26, 2014

Today, another new website joins the ranks of these ventures. The Post’s The Most will feature links to “most read” and “most shared” stories from around a dozen websites, including The Post’s.

On The Most, you’ll find the stories other readers are clicking on. Popular reads from The Washington Post will be there, as will trending articles from partners like Time and The Atlantic, regional news hubs like The Denver Post and The Houston Chronicle, broadcasters like New York Public Radio and digital publications like Slate and The Dodo. […]

We have agreements with newsrooms that are providing us with RSS feeds of their most popular, most read or most shared stories. Every newsroom defines these lists a little differently. Here at The Post, our “Most Read” headline lists display the stories getting the most traffic in the past two hours.

Each of the member sites displays three to five headlines in a banner at a given time. The site will be run by Katie Parker, deputy director of digital projects, who came up with the idea.

The Most is a sponsored product, in this case by Hyundai (or more specifically, “by the 3,000 Mile Test Drive featuring the all-new Sonata.”) Since the content is selected by each publisher’s individual algorithm, there’s limited human curation, which most likely makes The Most an inexpensive venture for the Post. It’s also a convenient way for them to expand on existing partnerships and continue the quest for national audience that began in March with free digital subscriptions for local newspaper subscribers.

The idea of a website you can visit to see popular links that doesn’t have the static of Facebook or Twitter certainly has appeal. But it remains to be seen if there’s a significant audience for an aggregator that includes more regional content from partners like the Toledo Blade and Tampa Bay Times. But Greg Barber, digital news projects director at the Post, isn’t worried. He writes in an email:

Geography isn’t the differentiator that it used to be. As the AP has demonstrated for many years, and Reddit, Gawker and Buzzfeed have shown in recent times, stories that start out with local angles can have appeal to readers anywhere. We hope that The Most can drive discovery for readers, and that the value readers see in a single place that pulls together the web’s popular stories brings them back for more.

Other big news at the Post today — Katharine Weymouth steps down from her role as publisher. She’s been replaced by Fred J. Ryan Jr., who expressed optimism about growing news consumption and the Post’s ability to lead the charge in a newsroom address earlier today.

Ryan says local and national coverage shouldn't be mutually exclusive

— ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) September 2, 2014

Jeff Israely: Entertain or inform? Save readers’ time or spend it?

Jeff Israely — Tue, 17 Jun 2014 15:00:47 +0000

As much as I’ve resisted the word, to understand what we are faced with, we really do have to call it content. Videos, Vines, photos, Instagrams, data viz, Storifies — the craft of storytelling deconstructed forever and ever. At the same time, all that content coming in so many forms must also be distributed on multiplying platforms. We not only want good content — we want shareable content. Is that Facebook-friendly? Mobile-ready? The medium is the message at 145 m.p.h. on a curvy highway — and this convertible has no seat belts.

Still, as editor of a lean (global) news site, my first job each day is to make the kind of calm choices that editors have always made: which story, what mix of topics, the tone, getting it right, making it sing. But it’s also a dizzying question of choosing between all the many emerging forms of content. We must weigh what is the best mix to keep the site interesting, dynamic, useful — what stories are best done this way or that way. And costs are always part of the equation.

Often the starting point is deciding what not to do. How far do you stray from what makes you special? What are the risks of getting distracted by creating other content? By chasing clicks? Or that new supposed holy grail of audience engagement?

The by-now old new media axiom to “do what you do best and aggregate the rest” is a good starting point. But aggregate what…and how? The best of it really shouldn’t be called aggregation but rather smart analysis — dot-connecting of a story or stories that others have reported and written. But much of aggregation (even that posing as analysis) is junk. Web pages upon web pages that are sneakily derivative, badly sourced, thoughtless, or just plain copied and pasted — mindlessly embedded.

In a Nieman Lab piece in February, Cory Haik described an experiment that her digital team at the Washington Post did with Snapchat and Super Bowl ads. Neither the Snapchat experiment itself, nor the choice to consider the ads worthy of coverage, shocked me per se. Instead there was this prelude: “Like many news sites, we’d posted all the night’s ads ahead of the game…and those had done well for us traffic-wise.”

It’s well understood that there’s no traffic like cheap traffic, even if in this case everyone does the exact same thing, and it adds nothing either to the Internet as a whole or to the role of the individual news organization. In some twisted way, it is new media’s inside-out version of every old-school newspaper sending its own reporter to cover the same game. Cheaper to produce, sure, but there are other costs.

Today’s limited resources and continued attachment to eyeballs means that such a page of a dozen embedded videos is a foregone conclusion, but it is also worth asking whether The Washington Post is imagining a future where it does not feel obliged to post all the Super Bowl ads on its website every single year? (Unless they were to get paid for it! But that’s another story.)

For better or worse, Worldcrunch in its current form is spared this particular dilemma, since we’re never going to match bigger players on the same aggregated content. Nonetheless, with the same access to all that is findable online, we have similar choices to make all the time about how to deploy our limited crew.

Beyond our particular shortcut to covering the world (translating top journalism), we also have the possibility to do all sorts of content. The twentysomethings on our team have a range of talents that is really quite staggering. Julie can translate political stories and art pieces from Italian and Spanish. She is also our de facto social media editor who knows how to talk to Twitter and find cute animals on the Internet. Bertrand is our de facto photo editor, but can also translate from French and read German. He is both our best proofreader and best Photoshopper, and has done this, which is really the Internet at its best.

So how do we decide what Bertrand and Julie do each day? Well, yes, they do a bit of everything. But they do more of some things than others, according to some amorphous idea that we have about what Worldcrunch is and can become.

I have half a big idea forming about the creation of content. Leaving both economics and editorializing aside, we can divide content along two intersecting axes that divide its intended aims: Axis 1: the aim of entertaining or informing; Axis 2: the aim of saving or sucking the end user’s time.

Any single piece of content is plotted somewhere on this graph: a 900-word reported article, a political cartoon, a Ken Burns miniseries, a bullet-point explainer, a BuzzFeed quiz. Ideally, all available tools are used to produce the right mix to inform and entertain, respecting the user’s time and attention, to serve the goals of the various news organizations — responding to both the public interest and the public’s interests.

Personally, as a digital information consumer, I would want a smart 1,500-word article on Picketty’s findings (I’m not going to read the book!) and to select the three best Super Bowl ads (though if you give me more, I might watch them all, and resent you for it).

Whether your target is people’s advertising-driving eyeballs or their credit card numbers, any news outfit cannot forget that keeping people clicking or “engaged” (time sucked?) is actually not enough. You have to get them to come back — to count on you.

This leads us back to that horoscope. It’s a real thing — the work of a popular new Italian astrologer who is building a devoted readership in print and online. Both Julie and Bertrand think translating it into English each week is about the worst idea I’ve come up with, like, ever. I guess it’s just a question of taste, probably of age, and of the right mix for our site — and the right use of our limited time.

My fellow editor and Gen-Xer Liz has my back. Neither one of us is following the stars, but we’re drawn to the idea because it reminds us of something we once knew in the newspaper world. Yes, that continuum does exist. Newspapers have always been filled with plenty of content that is not journalism — crosswords (the original thinking-person’s time-suck!), advice columns, TV listings — that fit in with the broader mix of reliable voices and regular habits.

One fundamental question for the news industry is: What content — both old and new — should it fight to own, and what should it just let go?

In my little corner here at Worldcrunch, I’m going to bet on an Italian astrologer to help draw in some new universally-minded readers. It’s a once-a-week habit, a quick read tucked away where people from all over the world can find it, follow it, share it, skip it. Also, unlike so much of the other unverified information circulating on the Internet, there is no risk of someone mistaking it for news coverage. It’s always a good sign when you can give something a name: It ain’t just content, my friends — that’s a horoscope.

Photo of newspaper horoscope by Morgan used under a Creative Commons license.