“A guy who kills his wife and children and sometimes kills himself is the most common type of mass killing,” said James Fox, a professor of criminology, law, and public policy at Northeastern University who worked on the database. But “although it is relatively easy to acquire information about the most high profile cases given the amount of press coverage, press briefings by law enforcement, and sometimes even reports from ad hoc investigations, most mass killings receive rather little coverage.”

The newly public Mass Killings Database is one of the most comprehensive datasets assembled on the topic. It tracks all U.S. homicides since 2006 where four or more people — not including the offender – were killed. Each incident has dozens of data fields including location and detailed information about the offender (name, age, race, sex, and any previous criminal record), victims (including cause of death and relationship to the assailant), and weapon (including, if applicable, gun type, model, manufacturer, and caliber). The collaborative project has been underway since 2018 and revives an earlier iteration of the database launched by USA Today in 2012.

The architects of the dataset — including Fox and Josh Hoffner, director of U.S. news at the Associated Press — say they hope journalists will use the information to find local angles, add context to important stories, and spot trends. As one example, Hoffner noted that AP journalists used the database after 11 people were murdered at a Virginia Beach government building in 2019.

“We were able to look at the data and identify the frequency of workplace mass killings from the data and tell a more complete story of workplace violence,” Hoffner said. “The data told us that there had been 11 such mass killings since 2006. We hope that type of coverage will repeat itself time and time again by journalists around the U.S. because of the project.”

The dataset is continually updated. (The last update was less than 14 hours before this article published.) That means reporters can get real-time insight into the trend lines of mass killings. 

“During the Uvalde breaking news coverage, we were able to immediately add context to the urgent story to say: This was the 14th mass killing at a school since the 1990s and 12th mass killing overall this year,” Hoffner said. “Reporters can now do the same on their stories and break them down in various ways.”

A team of data scientists, reporters, and researchers worked to create the dataset. They began with the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR), which Fox described as having “a rather high error rate” when it comes to mass killings. (The entire state of Florida is missing from the dataset as well as major incidents like the Sutherland Springs church shooting.) In addition, the SHR relies on police records that often list victims injured alongside ones who ultimately died in a single file.

On the other hand, Fox noted the FBI reports proved helpful for identifying cases that did not attract news coverage, including family massacres and gang and drug-related incidents.

The team sought to corroborate each data point with multiple sources and filled in the blanks in the SHR files with extensive searches using internet search engines, Lexis-Nexis, and Newspapers.com. Researchers also regularly contacted AP reporters on the ground for information in their notebooks or to ask them to access relevant court files. 

“There are also lots of mass killings (domestic incidents in isolated regions for example) that don’t garner much attention,” Hoffner said. “Those cases require us to do more digging to obtain the relevant data.”

In the days and months following a mass killing, more information becomes publicly available and, ultimately, reflected in the database. Fox said he believes the AP-USA Today-Northeastern database is the only one to include court and sentencing data.

There are other databases that track mass shootings — including ones compiled by The Violence Project and Mother Jones — but the Mass Killings Database includes deaths from the 20% of mass killings that do not involve a firearm.

“Those who are killed with a knife, a blunt object, strangulation, a vehicle ramming, or fire are just as dead,” Fox said. “And even though they do not invoke the debate over gun control, these crimes matter no less just because a gun wasn’t involved.”

Reynolds is the sports editor at the Evansville Courier & Press in Indiana. He and his team of four reporters cover mostly high school and college sports. Gobert’s diagnosis and the rapid shutdown of most organized sports in North America that followed have created a situation with few precedents for Reynolds and other sports editors.

“I’ve been doing this for 22 years, and the only thing that compares to this is 9/11, and that doesn’t even come close” in the level of disruption, Reynolds said. (You can read about the effect 9/11 had on sports here.)

In Evansville and across much of Indiana, high school basketball is king. So when it was announced that the state tournament would be played without any fans this past weekend, the impact would be felt far beyond the players and their families. “People coming into town would be spending money at the local restaurants, on concessions, or even on gas tank fill ups,” Reynolds told me late last week. “A lot of these small towns and smaller schools might lose a part of their annual revenue from whatever happens this weekend.”

In the end, what happened this weekend was nothing — because soon after we spoke, the entire tournament was postponed amid the shutdown of hundreds of Indiana schools.

The novel coronavirus has been found in at least 131 countries since its initial discovery in Wuhan, China three months ago. As we’ve been writing, an already fragile news industry has been tilted on its axis, as journalists around the world try to cover the unprecedented pandemic while protecting themselves from infection. News organizations big and small have asked journalists to work from home.

For Shemar Woods, the director of digital for sports at The Philadelphia Inquirer, no “how to work from home effectively” articles could have prepared him for working remotely while three of his reporters covered the Sixers game the night the NBA announced its postponement. The Sixers had played Gobert’s Jazz five days earlier.

“I don’t think anybody could [have been] prepared,” Woods said. “We don’t have a guidebook on how to cover sports when sports aren’t being played.”

Now that nearly every sports league has either canceled or indefinitely postponed its upcoming schedule, sports journalists will need to get creative. That’s true from a giant like ESPN — which suddenly has a lot of empty slots on its broadcast schedule — down to a place like Evansville.

There are certainly still stories to be produced about all these cancellations and their effects on communities. But the de-scheduling of a highly scheduled beat can also open up new possibilities. In Philadelphia, for instance, Woods said that without his reporters traveling for games, they have more time to explore the idea of starting a podcast. They have more time now to dive into stories they can’t find time for during a regular season.

“The biggest story for me is the guy who was dependent on the Sixers game tonight who won’t be able to work — how does that affect him, and how does that impact his family?” he said. “So we’re going to be on the ground. We’re going to go to the bowling alley. We’re going to go check out sports bars as well.”

Of course, there are plenty of other stories that need covering in a time of unprecedented shutdowns across American cities. Woods said one of his sports reporters has been loaned to the news team to help cover the pandemic; Reynolds said his reporters will likely do the same in his newsroom in the coming weeks.

Across the Atlantic, Damian Dowd has a particular challenge. He’s the editor of a weekly hyperlocal newspaper called the Inishowen Independent in the northwestern corner of Northern Ireland. The paper focuses heavily on local sports and the Gaelic Games, all of which have been suspended.

Dowd’s 64-page weekly is usually about 20 percent sports coverage, so now he has a dozen or more pages to fill. He said some of them will now have stories on helpful alternatives that families can take up to be outdoors and exercise while practicing social distance.

Other outlets, like USA Today’s fan-centered sports website For the Win, will lean more aggressively into covering what’s left in professional sports — most obviously the NFL’s free agency period that kicks into gear this week, editor Nate Scott said. Of his staff of nine full-time writers, he met with his NFL reporters on Friday and told them they’d have “more resources than usual” this time of year to explore story ideas they might have been sitting on.

Michael Giarrusso is global sports editor for the Associated Press, which provides journalism to a wide range of outlets — from small newspapers to ESPN, from print to broadcast and around the world. The spree of cancellations last week was an editing challenge at times: “We had several occasions where I had to say that we have to stop filing so many separate stories and find a way to wrap this up for readers and customers in a way that’s digestible because there’s almost too much,” he said.

Giarrusso noted that newspapers used to printing box scores and other agate will likely just have to do without with no results to report. AP sports reporters will be expected to work on evergreen or longform stories — but AP customers will still rely on them for some stories.

“The uncertainty around this event and how the league and the teams will come back from the leagues and the teams will come back does create a lot of question and a lot of demand from readers,” he said. “If we find smart ways to be able to answer them, despite not having the regular access that we’re used to, then sports journalism will be doing a great service to those readers.”

The sportspocalypse hasn’t just put news organizations and their full-time staffers into a tailspin. Among the most vulnerable are freelancers, who depend more squarely on the stories individual games produce. Multimedia producer Anthoney Stephens produces content for some of the major sports leagues, meaning coronavirus killed off his entire salary.

Friends, most know Im a freelance sports producer. Corona indefinitely ended the season for 3 clients I depend on to generate my ENTIRE yearly salary . With no options I ask for your help until I can find work, anything helps. Thank you. @anthoney-stephens (venmo)

— Prez (@prez10points) March 13, 2020

“If your timing is absolutely awful, like mine, the next contract that was going to pay for the rent for the next eight months was starting next month,” he said. “With leagues shutting down, potentially until next year, this will probably be one of those years where there’s an asterisk in sports history.”

Sports will eventually come back (one hopes!). But whenever they do, some editors and publishers will have gotten used to a less sports-heavy mix of content, in particular one that puts less emphasis on game stories. That could have longer-term impacts on strategy and coverage.

“I’m worried about freelancers,” For The Win’s Scott said. “Journalists can get used to the status quo and see how they survive without weekly or game-to-game coverage.”

When I asked editors what coronavirus might mean for sports journalism in the longer term, they all expressed concern about its impact on access to teams and athletes. As reports of the virus began to spread, many teams began to reduce reporters’ ability to enter locker rooms. They worry that when sports resume, that might become normal.

“We’re not going to have the very regular access that we’re used to,” Giarrusso said. “That access, I hope, is only temporarily being taken away. Reporters are going to need to be more thoughtful and aggressive and smart about using other ways to get information. And the best reporters have been doing that for decades. They don’t rely on the podium to get their questions answered.”

Australia’s news landscape, and the ability of citizens to access quality journalism, has been dealt a major blow by the announcement the Australian Associated Press is closing, with the loss of 180 journalism jobs.

Although AAP reporters and editors are generally not household names, the wire service has provided the backbone of news content for the country since 1935, ensuring every paper (and therefore every citizen) has had access to solid reliable reports on matters of national significance. All news outlets have relied on AAP’s network of local and international journalists to provide stories from areas where their own correspondents couldn’t go, from the courts to parliament and everywhere in between.

Despite a shrinking number of journalists in recent years and a rapid decrease in funding subscriptions, AAP continued to stand by its mission to provide news without political partisanship or bias. Speed was essential for the agency, but accuracy was even more important.

But AAP has struggled in recent years as newspapers and radio and television stations have sought to cut costs and started sourcing content for free from the internet, thanks to global publishing platforms, such as Google. When AAP shut down its New Zealand newswire in 2018, it said subscribers were under pressure and asking for lower fees.

Media mergers, such as that of Nine and Fairfax, have also been bad for AAP, as companies consolidated their subscriptions. Sky News also gave up its AAP subscription to use News Limited in 2018. The mantra within AAP had long been, if a major shareholder sneezes, the wire agency catches a cold.

In the opening to the book, On the Wire: The Story of Australian Associated Press, published in 2010 to commemorate the AAP’s 75th anniversary, John Coomber wrote about the value of the wire service:

AAP news has no political axe to grind, nor advertisers to please. News value is paramount, and successive boards, chief executives and editors have guarded its independence and reporting integrity above all else.

Because it supplies news and information to virtually every sector of the Australian media industry, AAP can’t afford to do otherwise. Unsupported by advertising or government handout, it has only its good name to trade on.

So much has changed in the news industry since AAP was formed by Keith Murdoch in 1935. Back then, it took a staff of only 12 people, with bureaus in London and New York, to bring overseas news into Australia. But even in its earliest days, as an amalgamation of two agencies, the Australian Press Association and the Sun Herald Cable Service, it was set up to save money.

With the cost of cables, which were charged by the word, the pooling of resources was significant at the time. The AAP journalists were therefore required to create concise Australian-focused reports for local papers.

World War II was an unlikely boost to AAP, as senior journalists from Australian papers were seconded to war zones as AAP special representatives. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Ray Maley, later Prime Minister Robert Menzies’ press secretary, was sent to Singapore. His story of the first clash between Australian and Japanese troops was widely used in newspapers in Britain and the US, as well as Australia. Winston Turner, “our man in Batavia” (now Jakarta), was one of the last AAP journalists to get out of the region, escaping the invading Japanese by the narrowest of margins.

Australian Associated Press journalists look on as bureau chief Paul Osbourne (C) holds his head after being that AAP will be closing on June 26th at Parliament House in Canberra #saveaap # pic.twitter.com/YWxe3j6eap

— Mick Tsikas (@AAPMick) March 3, 2020

AAP’s glory days weren’t just confined to the past. It has published numerous, award-winning stories in recent years, such as Lisa Martin’s report on Peter Dutton’s au pair scandal. Long-time readers of Fairfax newspapers might remember the federal budget in 2017 when AAP filled the pages of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age because Fairfax reporters had gone on strike. The copy written by Fairfax’s skeleton staff was sloppy, while AAP’s stories shone with the agency’s emphasis on accuracy.

AAP photographers, too, have captured moments of Australian history, such as Lukas Coch’s Walkley Award-winning picture of Linda Burney in blue high heels in the air celebrating the passage of the marriage equality law in 2017. Coch also took the famous photo of then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard in the arms of an AFP officer when she lost a shoe while exiting a Canberra restaurant surrounded by protesters.

One of the saddest parts of the closure of AAP is the loss of fantastic training opportunities for young reporters starting out in journalism. AAP has produced some big names in journalism, including Kerry O’Brien, the PNG correspondent in the 1960s, and SMH editor Lisa Davies and Joe Hildebrand, who both started as AAP cadets.

AAP has solidly taken in four or five cadets each year for the past decade, and in recent years, a small group of editorial assistants. Over 12 months, the AAP cadets have been taught to write fast and accurately while also learning shorthand, video skills, ethics and media law. During the global financial crisis in the 2000s, AAP took four cadets, while The Age took on none and the Herald Sun only two.

As news of the AAP’s closure spreads across the country, it will be seen as yet another blow to public interest journalism in Australia. Australia needs more sources of news, not fewer. The loss of AAP should be mourned not just by news men and women across the country, but by every single person who cares about democracy and the valuable work journalists do in keeping the public informed and the powerful to account.

“A bomb could have dropped and nobody outside of that city would have known about it,” said McAdam, whose 152-year-old paper is the only daily in its county.

But now a new initiative from the AP is allowing the state’s newsrooms to better share their stories with one another directly — without someone in an AP bureau having to be serve as an intermediate step. With the tool, called StoryShare, more than two dozen newsrooms in New York state can now republish each other’s stories and photos and bring in out-of-town coverage that’s closer to home for their readers.

The AP first announced StoryShare, which has been funded by the Google News Initiative, back in June. Since a pilot program launched last month, 25 outlets have shared around 200 stories. Newsrooms can upload their stories to the StoryShare site (listing restrictions like an embargo time if necessary) and find others they might want to run.

Per AP: “Stories have ranged from accountability journalism that revealed how New York’s top government transparency official was hired in darkness to policy-driven reporting, like the impact of new state laws for farm workers, to a takeout on the proposed doubling of the tax on beer to help fund public education, and human interest pieces, such as the role of Otsego County in the filming of a new World War II-era movie.”

For McAdam, StoryShare came in handy a few weeks ago where the Standard’s coverage areas overlapped with the Auburn Citizen.

“On most days of the week, I’m competing with them,” McAdam said. “On that particular day, a [state assembly] candidate had told the Auburn Citizen that he was running, but he hadn’t contacted us yet. I was out of people, so we ran their story. It was great — it saved me resources from chasing down something.”

And the giving goes both ways: Cortland Standard stories have run in the Oneonta Daily Star, the Adirondack Daily Enterprise, the Glens Falls Post-Star, and back in the Auburn Citizen.

Noreen Gillespie, the AP’s deputy managing editor for U.S. news, said the idea came from talking to AP members who said they were just emailing their stories back and forth to each other. That gave the AP the idea to facilitate the collaboration between newsrooms.

“Overall, we really just wanted to see if this platform, which is a mix of human capability and technology, could increase the availability of state news,” We believe that if we can help publications provide a higher quality of state news, that’s something that can help them build audience.”

Gillespie said that one of the encouraging developments through the StoryShare tool has been spot collaborations. When New York Governor Andrew Cuomo delivered his budget address, seven stories uploaded to the StoryShare platform on seven different topics stemming from the budget.

Last month, the Adirondack Daily Enterprise explained to its readers in an editorial about how the StoryShare tool benefits newsrooms and readers:

For instance, we ran on page A1 last week a story the Albany Times Union had broken, and then shared, about how the state’s new open government director was hired in secret, declined to be interviewed, and had a track record in her former state job of letting her agency keep documents secret and refusing newspapers’ disclosure requests. That’s just one of at least seven articles we’ve run so far through this service.

Meanwhile, stories we have shared include an earthquake, a beer tax proposal, an icy 46er trek, Saranac Lake’s Ice Palace, Lake Placid Olympic venue upgrades and e-sports at Paul Smith’s College. We know at least some of those have been picked up by other members.

It gives every newsroom in New York more high-quality options on what to present to their audience, beyond what their own staffs produce. It lets us offer you in-depth reporting on a topic that we can’t spare a reporter for, but some newsroom somewhere can.

Formalized sharing between same-state newsrooms are not new. Nearly 11 years ago, we wrote about the Ohio News Organization, a collaboration of that state’s biggest newspapers to share their stories directly among themselves. At the time, a major motivation was to figure out a way to leave the Associated Press, which many papers were criticizing in the depths of the Great Recession for charging too much for its member services. Sharing stories with one another, the Ohio newspapers reasoned, might make it possible to drop AP and its state wire.

“If The Akron Beacon Journal writes a story out of Akron, the AP would pick up that story and would do what it does with it and send it out on the wire,” said Ron Royhab, then executive editor of The Toledo Blade, told us back then. “So why not get it directly from The Akron Beacon Journal?” But now, instead of an AP workaround, direct sharing between newsrooms is an AP initiative.

Since StoryShare is still new, the AP is only working with New York members, at no extra cost to them. But it’s already sparked interest from other states and brought up the idea of topic-based collaborations.

“Our real goal is to understand what facilitates good sharing and build that into whatever we design in the future,” Gillespie said.

“The AP has long been a content provider but we also want to be a provider of capability,” Noreen Gillespie, the AP’s deputy managing editor for U.S. news, told me.

The setup, known as the Local News Sharing Network, involves almost two dozen local publishers in New York state, including the Adirondack Daily Enterprise, the Albany-based Times Union, Fordham University’s WFUV radio station, and the WRNN TV station in New Rochelle. Several New York members had approached the AP and complained that there wasn’t enough state news available, especially at the capital. So they had started sharing their reporting amongst themselves.

“We’ve heard about these private networks springing up all over the country. Sometimes they can be around a topic or a state or just one publication talking to another about their coverage gaps and trying to find ways to work together to fill those coverage gaps,” Gillespie said. “As the industry has changed with consolidated ownership and changes in resources at individual publications, there’s really been a trend more towards sharing. When we had this conversation… we started thinking about what could we do to fix this?”

Indeed, those informal systems started at least a decade ago, with the Ohio News Organization (acronym-ized in the best way as OHNO), Florida capital coverage, and other arrangements designed to share content and cut down on redundant reporting. There’s even a list of them from January 2009 — by the AP. The other main benefit was to end a costly deal with the AP itself as chronicled in the early days of the Lab:

The Blade has gotten notice in the past year for being one of the eight founding members of the Ohio News Organization, a collaborative in which the state’s major papers freely share their stories (and now their photos and graphics) with one another. All the Ohio papers have seen major cutbacks in recent years — The Blade’s newsroom staff is about half the size it was five years ago — and their willingness to beat swords into plowshares has been a model for other cooperatives around the country among papers with declining resources….

“The newspaper industry created you, you have an obligation to help us through this crisis now, and instead you continuously raise our rates and charge us for pictures,” [then-Blade editor Roy Rayhab described the papers’ issue with the AP in 2009.]

The AP attempted a content sharing tool then, but it was stymied by editors’ slow tech adaptation and an unclear system:

As part of a six-month pilot project, the wire service was going to begin distributing content from four top nonprofit news outlets: ProPublica, Center for Public Integrity, Center for Investigative Reporting, and the Investigative Reporting Workshop. It looked like a win all around: Newspapers could run in-depth content from well respected outlets, and nonprofits could broaden their audience….

However, there’s no alert system to notify editors when something new has been added. Nonprofits’ stories are not distributed over the AP’s main wire services, as a major AP investigation would.

“It’s very hard to find this material,” [then-executive director of the Center for Public Integrity Bill] Buzenberg told me. “The consequence is it’s not getting used.” ..

“It’s a little bit of chicken and egg with the technology right now,” she said. “Most papers are still in that transition. Over the course of 2010, we’re working with a lot of newspapers and their CMS vendors to to enable them technically, and train them to use web interfaces to get the third-party content.”

Journalism’s familiarity with tech is a bit different these days (both in using it for the work and using checks from it to fund the work), as is the state of collaboration in the industry.

“We’re living in an age of journalism where people want to help each other and are prioritizing collaboration over competition. We want to seize on that in a way that ensures no matter who is in the newsroom there’s still a mechanism for them to use this,” Gillespie said.

The tool is still in the development phase, but more than $200,000 from Google will allow the AP to hire a relationship manager to onboard and coordinate the publishers. The agreement also tasks the AP with producing a document for other collaboratives to learn from their experiences. If all goes according to schedule, the New York pilot publishers will be able to start using the tool in January, with the goal of eventually scaling to all 50 states.

“We do some news sharing right now and we’ve done it for decades. What we’re trying to learn in this space is with new dynamics in place how can we create a model that’s a little bit easier to work with and … be sure that news can be shared with the environment sooner,” she said.

This project follows the spring’s news of a McClatchy-hosted, Google-funded effort to build creative local news sites from scratch, though it is not officially part of the Google News Initiative’s Local Experiments Project, unlike the McClatchy project. Mandy Jenkins is leading that endeavor.

But no, Gillespie said, Google Docs are not required for this network.

Poynter’s Daniel Funke reported Friday that Snopes has pulled out of the third-party debunking squad Facebook enlisted in 2016. The Associated Press is not currently fact-checking for it either (but apparently hasn’t fully quit), TechCrunch reported.

Snopes, the 25-year-old fact-checking site, said Facebook’s system was too manual — not automated enough — for the 16-person organization. “With a manual system and a closed system — it’s impossible to keep on top of that stuff,” Snopes’ VP of operations Vinny Green told Poynter. “It doesn’t seem like we’re striving to make third-party fact checking more practical for publishers — it seems like we’re striving to make it easier for Facebook. At some point, we need to put our foot down and say, ‘No. You need to build an API.'”

(Snopes has its own leadership troubles, which it counts as another reason to focus more fully on its own fact-check work rather than the Facebook partnership.)

My colleague Laura Hazard Owen explained how the fact-checking dashboard operated in 2016:

Because the group of third-party fact-checkers is small at launch, and as part of its effort to focus on the highest-impact “worst of the worst,” Facebook is doing some sorting before the reported stories go to the fact-checkers. Its algorithm will look at whether a large number of people are reporting a particular article, whether or not the article is going viral, and whether the article has a high rate of shares. Facebook has also already had a system in place, for about a year, that uses signals around content (such as how people are responding to it in comments) to determine whether that content is a hoax.

Last year, Facebook explained a little more about how the process works:

• We use technology to identify potentially false stories. For example, when people on Facebook submit feedback about a story being false or comment on an article expressing disbelief, these are signals that a story should be reviewed. In the US, we can also use machine learning based on past articles that fact-checkers have reviewed. And recently we gave fact-checkers the option to proactively identify stories to rate.
• Fact-checkers provide a rating and reference article.Independent third-party fact-checkers review the stories, rate their accuracy and write an article explaining the facts behind their rating.
• We demote links rated false and provide more context on Facebook. If a story is rated false, we reduce its distribution in News Feed. (See more on how News Feed ranking works.) We let people who try to share the story know there’s more reporting on the subject, and we notify people who shared it earlier. We also show the fact-checker’s reference article in Related Articles immediately below the story in News Feed.

The dream team in 2016 began with Snopes, PolitiFact, Factcheck.org, ABC, and the AP, and now has 34 members in countries around the world. But recent skirmishes emerged between partisan news outlets ThinkProgress and The (no longer) Weekly Standard, highlighting some issues with the platform’s approach. An AP spokesperson told TechCrunch that they “fully expect to be doing fact check work for Facebook in 2019” but that the company is still in talks with Facebook about what that looks like. PolitiFact and AFP confirmed they are staying on, and a Facebook spokesperson said they’re confident in their approach and plan to expand the fact-checking partnership with more members and languages this year.

The partnership was extremely costly for our organization, and money can't fix all the concerns we brought up. There was not an amount of $ that Facebook could have offered that fixed some of the concerns we brought up. The terms were not suitable, we needed to announce it.

— Vinny @ Snopes (@vinnysgreen) February 1, 2019

Some of the fact-checking partners are happy with the way the program has turned out, though it hit bumps rolling out just after the 2016 election. (The fact-checkers are paid — Snopes received $100,000 from Facebook in 2017 for the work; France’s Libération got $100,000 in 2017 and $245,000 in 2018.) But you’d think if Facebook really wanted to make a dent, they’d attack misinformation by publishers, not by individual posts (misinformation travels faster than factchecks, etc.) Laura brought that up in 2016:

The key issue and possible pain point, which isn’t addressed in the changes Facebook outlined Thursday, is that reporting happens on a per-post level, rather than on the publisher level. Since Facebook is focusing specifically on “clear hoaxes spread by spammers” here, it seems as if it would be more efficient to simply block known hoax news sites like The Denver Guardian. But that seems to be more of a blanket approach than Facebook is willing to take at this point, and it would likely open the company up to a great deal of backlash.

At any rate, opinions are divided about how effective the program has actually been.

In my opinion, the fact checking partnerships were always PR, because it’s the kind of well-understood, visible intervention that journalists can see and cover.

The really effective product changes are often invisible and only seem tangentially related (fake account detection).

— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) February 1, 2019

Yes, the partnership was launched as part of a PR strategy. I heard a senior FB official flippantly say as much in private. And that's why it began in December 2016 (one month after the US Presidential elections) and not in April 2016 (one month before the Filipino ones).

— Alexios (@Mantzarlis) February 2, 2019

At the Algorithms, Automation, and News conference in Munich this week, some of journalism’s biggest brainiacs shared their research on everything from bot behavior to showing your work when it’s automated to reporting through the Internet of Things. Many of academics’ relevant papers will be published in a forthcoming issue of Digital Journalism. (Full list of presenters, panelists, and papers here.)

Algorithmic accountability — reverse-engineering and reporting on the algorithms across our lives, from Facebook to Airbnb to targeted job listings — is a hot topic in journalism, but this conference focused more on the silver linings: how automation and algorithms could bolster newsrooms full of human journalists.

Here are some of the top tweets from the Munich mind-gathering:

The Associated Press’ director of information management Stuart Myles walked attendees through the AP’s process for making automation in news more transparent (hint: it includes automating transparency):

“How Can We Make Algorithmic News More Transparent?”

A proposed framework, presented at #AlgorithmicNews https://t.co/nECCr9JmOjhttps://t.co/nZTWGK26Z9

— Stuart Myles (@smyles) May 22, 2018

So @smyles from AP is suggesting four levels of algorithmic transparency:
• disclosure
• justification
• explanation
• reproduction (or reproducibility)#AutomatedNews

— Axel Bruns (@snurb_dot_info) May 22, 2018

@HannaZoon, @jorgealveslino describing how they built “Charlotte”―an interview bot, that can conduct simple interviews with people, using journalist-defined questions and automatic follow-up questions.#AutomatedNewshttps://t.co/Qbot5NZsle@ifkw_lmu

— Neil Thurman (@neilthurman) May 22, 2018

Low-volume news users liked @abcnews‘s bots because they presented good news in a conversational, irreverent style, says @hfordsa – the bots humanised journalism, as it were. Which doesn’t reflect well on the language of standard mainstream journalism, really… #AutomatedNews

— Axel Bruns (@snurb_dot_info) May 22, 2018

The younger, more female & less educated users of @abcaustralia‘s newsbot liked its personal nature, how “news is presented in a fun, non-intimidating way.” So say@hfordsa & @dhutchman at https://t.co/Qbot5Oh3JO#AutomatedNews pic.twitter.com/CZHWQRyKoM

— Neil Thurman (@neilthurman) May 22, 2018

#Ethnographymatters! @hfordsa & @dhutchman presenting their research on #publicservicemedia and #chatbots: bots are seen as non-pretentious, positive, and helpful. It’s not the automation, it’s the journalistic tone which matters. #AutomatedNews pic.twitter.com/Pm5Ew7Gu9I

— Stefanie Sirén-Heikel (@MsSiren) May 22, 2018

Korea Press Foundation’s News Trust project coded 1000 news articles on various quality criteria & found, by their criteria, quality increased with length but only up to 1900 words.#AutomatedNewshttps://t.co/Qbot5NZsle@nettong@ifkw_lmu pic.twitter.com/mnlxhyXkcW

— Neil Thurman (@neilthurman) May 22, 2018

.@BerWeiss & @vicariSensor’s comparison between traditional journalistic storytelling and “sensortelling”, i.e. reporting that uses sensors embedded in the world and connected to the internet.#AutomatedNewshttps://t.co/Qbot5NZsle@ifkw_lmu pic.twitter.com/NgrWFcajEb

— Neil Thurman (@neilthurman) May 23, 2018

We aren’t there yet, but progress has been made on news automation or content planning @raufercon Study in 5 Swedish newsrooms showed that data processing and personalization are the most used digital features. ConclusionsDigital ecosystem#AutomatedNews pic.twitter.com/83mMl0ngGP

— Juan-Carlos Molleda (@GlobalPRMolleda) May 22, 2018

Good questions for future research on automated journalism raised by @AljoshaKarim at #AutomatedNews conference here in Munich. pic.twitter.com/yiaQMaIcwp

— Seth C. Lewis (@SethCLewis) May 22, 2018

The 2016 presidential election wasn’t polling’s shining moment, with many post-mortems pointing to opinion polls misleading election forecasters and underestimating now-President Trump’s support. It didn’t help that some polls were tied to news organizations that don’t really have the resources anymore to support this work — at least doing this work well. There’s no perfect poll aside from (maybe) the ballot itself, but the polling system — both conducted by the media and reported on in the media — has faced critics since long before November 8, 2016.

These issues contributed to the Associated Press’ and Fox News’ departure from the Election Day polling data shared by the major networks last year. But now the wire service has built a new-and-hopefully-improved election data-gathering system made up of comprehensive surveys and online polling. It tested the new approach in several 2017 state elections; for 2018, both Fox News and The Washington Post have signed up to receive AP’s results from at least some states on Election Day.

(Note that the “old” exit polls aren’t necessarily going away; ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN have each committed to them through 2020, according to Edison Research, which operates those polls. But Politico described the old consortium, known as the National Election Pool, as being “on life support” a few months back.)

The AP worked with NORC at the University of Chicago to develop this approach, “aimed at evolving the traditional, in-person exit poll” to harness early and absentee voters and dig into the reasoning behind the voters’ picks.

The AP will survey more than 85,000 voters for this year’s midterm elections, compared to the 19,400 interviews with voters in the exit polls four years ago.

The test of this method in the New Jersey, Virginia, and Alabama elections was “promising”:

Instead of stationing in-person interviewers outside of polling places, NORC conducted telephone interviews for AP and Fox News with a random sample of registered voters in New Jersey and Virginia in the Nov. 7 general election and in Alabama for the U.S. Senate special election on Dec. 12. In each state, NORC also interviewed a much larger non-probability sample via the internet, and used sophisticated statistical techniques to combine the two surveys. All interviews — about 4,000 in each state — were conducted beginning 96 hours before Election Day until the polls closed in each state.

At poll close, the new survey approach estimated that Democrat Ralph Northam would win the Virginia governor’s race by a 52-46 margin. His final margin was 54-45. The New Jersey survey estimated at poll close that Democrat Phil Murphy would win that state’s governor’s race 57-38. His actual margin was 56-42. And in Alabama, the survey estimated at poll close that Democrat Doug Jones would win 50-47, while his actual margin was 50-48.

We’ll see how November 6, 2018 goes.

Articles from the AP got around 34.7 million engagements across Facebook in July, and 31.3 million engagements in June, according to analysis by NewsWhip, based on its syndication metrics tool developed with the AP (the AP is an investor in NewsWhip). (For this survey, engagement was defined as likes, reactions, comments, and shares. An AP article was defined as any English-language text story with more than 60 percent AP content.)

The Daily Mail, which topped NewsWhip’s rankings of publishers on Facebook in July, saw 27.1 million engagements. HuffPost, the top NewsWhip publisher on Facebook in June, saw 29.6 million engagements. NewsWhip’s engagement numbers for its top publishers rankings include engagement on syndicated AP stories: For instance, Fox News gets “a substantial amount of engagement” on Facebook from AP stories it runs, according to AP global news manager Mark Davies, and it was a NewsWhip top 10 Facebook publisher in July.

Other findings from Davies’s writeup for NewsWhip about the survey:

The team at NewsWhip’s Dublin HQ analyzed the interactions on over 1.2 million articles identified as AP copy in both June and July…

To benchmark the results, we also used NewsWhip Analytics to examine the most engaged authors on a number of AP member websites sites that credit AP directly. The results show the Associated Press byline regularly ranking in the Top 5 most-engaged authors on those sites.

Looking at NewsWhip’s breakdown of the top 200 AP stories each month, U.S. politics played a key role. Political debate and partisan viewpoints are driving a high number of comments, shares and reactions across mainstream, right and left-leaning sites. High-profile court cases, celebrity news and classic ‘odd’ stories also performed strongly, with some stories delivering over 150,000 engagements for individual sites.

This mirrors results from AP’s own Facebook page, where political stories and content with a strong emotional ‘trigger’ continue to drive the highest engagement.

“The engagement customers are getting around agency content is something we haven’t been able to measure in the past. Our stories went out in a great big firehose,” Davies said. “We have our own consumer-facing website and mobile app, but we don’t use analytics perhaps the way a normal publisher would — to optimize for clicks and concurrents. We’re looking at making sure our approaches work well for our customers and not just on our own site.”

Similar percentages of Democrats and Republicans said they get news multiple times a day, actively seek out news, get news on social media, pay for news, and get news from local sources regularly, the study found.

72 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of Republicans said they get news more than one time a day. 75 percent of people in both parties get news on social media. 58 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Republicans say they pay for news. One-quarter of Democrats and 21 percent of those in the GOP said they routinely access local news sources.

Additionally, members of both parties access news via mobile devices, computers, and TV similarly. 86 percent of Democrats and 84 percent of Republicans said they get news from cell phones. 66 percent of Democrats and 65 percent of Republicans access news on computers. When it comes to getting news from TV, 85 percent of Republicans and 84 percent of Democrats

Democrats and Republicans also follow national politics, local politics, and news from their neighborhoods or towns at similar rates.

Still, the study notes, that “it is independents who stand out from partisans of either stripe, particularly for being less likely to follow news closely or engage in other ways with news.” For instance, 61 percent of independents said they get news multiple times a day, compared to 72 percent for Democrats and 71 percent from Republicans.

Differences between Democrats and Republicans start to emerge, however, when asked about trust and accuracy in news as well as the specific national outlets where they get news. (Spoiler: Many more Republicans watch Fox News.)

31 percent of Democrats said news from the media is very accurate, compared to just 9 percent of independents and 8 percent of Republicans. 30 percent of Democrats said they “trust information a lot” from the news, with only 12 percent of independents and 8 percent of Republicans saying the same.

Among those who pay for news, 73 percent of Democrats said the sources they pay for are “very or extremely” reliable. 53 percent of Republicans who pay for news said the same.

Democrats were also more likely to say that the news sources they pay for are a “very good value” and were also more likely to be willing to pay for news they now get for free.

The full report is available here.

“Government agencies, businesses and other organizations alike all communicate in the language of data and statistics,” the AP said. “To cover them, journalists must become conversant in that language as well.”

Here are a few of the AP’s data journalism recommendations:

— Get the data in searchable form, if you can. “In a records request for data, be sure to ask for data in an ‘electronic, machine-readable’ format that can be interpreted by standard spreadsheet or database software. The alternative, which is the default for many agencies, is to provide records in paper form or as scans of paper pages, which present an obstacle to analysis.”

— Scraping data should be a “last resort.”

Some website operators sanction this practice, and others oppose it. A website with policies limiting or prohibiting scraping often will include them in its terms of service or in a “robots.txt” file, and reporters should take these into account when considering whether to scrape.

Scraping a website can cause its servers to work unusually hard, and in extreme cases, scraping can cause a website to stop working altogether and treat the attempt as a hostile attack. Therefore, follow these precautions:
— Scraping should be seen as a last resort. First try to acquire the desired data by requesting it directly.
— Limit the rate at which the scraper software requests pages in order to avoid causing undue strain on the website’s servers.
— Wherever feasible, identify yourself to the site’s maintainers by adding your contact information to the scraper’s requests via the HTTP headers.

— Make sure someone else can reproduce your findings. “If at all possible, an editor or another reporter should attempt to reproduce the results of the analysis and confirm all findings before publication.”

— Let your readers see the source data, too.

Where possible, provide the source data for download along with the story or visualization. When distributing data consider the following guidelines:
— The data should be distributed in a machine-readable, widely useable format, such as a spreadsheet.
— The data should be accompanied by thorough documentation that explains data provenance, transformations and alterations, any caveats with the data analysis and a data dictionary.

The updated stylebook also includes entries on fake news, among other things; if you have questions for its editor, you can ask them in a 2:30 p.m. ET Twitter chat with the hashtag #APStyleChat.

From the AP:

View multiple feeds of content — from global to local — and monitor the vetting process in real-time through the notes and tags and that we apply to each asset (such as “authenticated” or “debunked”). All photos and videos are delivered in a digital-friendly format giving you the ability to seamlessly integrate UGC into your stories through embed codes.

In the realm of offering other news organizations user-generated content, AP is later to the game; services like Storyful, a dominant clearinghouse of sorts for viral social video, already operate successfully in a similar space. With Social Newswire, however, the AP is showing its work, when it comes to how exactly its staffers are finding and handling user-generated material. Eric Carvin, AP Social Media Editor, said:

I think we’re offering something unique. At AP, finding, authenticating and getting permission for high-impact eyewitness media has been core to our newsgathering for years. We have expertise that’s deep and wide — we maintain high standards around this work, and we have people all over the world, close to where news is happening, who can bring their skills to bear. Through this new service, we’re offering a window into that process as it unfolds, sharing information in real time about what we’re chasing and where we are in the verification and rights-clearance process. And SAM’s technology allows users to bring that content into a publishing workflow that’s simple and optimized for digital output.

The tool will be available to organizations at an additional cost.

The AP estimates that the automated stories have freed up 20 percent of the time its journalists spent on earnings reports as well as allowed it to cover additional companies that it didn’t have the capacity to report on before. The newswire has since started automating some of its minor league baseball coverage, and it told me last year that it has plans to expand its usage of algorithms in the newsroom.

“Through automation, AP is providing customers with 12 times the corporate earnings stories as before (to over 3,700), including for a lot of very small companies that never received much attention,” Lisa Gibbs, AP’s global business editor, said in a report the AP released Wednesday.

The AP’s report — written by AP strategy and development manager Francesco Marconi and AP research fellow Alex Siegman, along with help from multiple AI systems — details some of the wire’s efforts toward automating its reporting while also sharing best practices and explaining the technology that’s involved, including machine learning, natural language processing, and more.

The report additionally identifies three particular areas of note that newsrooms should pay attention to as they consider introducing augmented journalism: unchecked algorithms, workflow disruption, and the widening gap in skills needed among human reporters to produce this type of reporting.

To highlight the challenges of using algorithmic journalism, the report constructed a situation where a team of reporters covering oil drilling and deforestation used AI to analyze satellite images to find areas impacted by drilling and deforestation:

Our hypothetical team begins by feeding their AI system a series of satellite images that they know represent deforestation via oil drilling, as well as a series of satellite images that they know do not represent deforestation via oil drilling. Using this training data, the machine should be able to view a novel satellite image and determine whether the land depicted is ultimately of any interest to the journalists.

The system reviews the training data and outputs a list of four locations the machine says are definitely representative of rapid deforestation caused by nearby drilling activity. But later, when the team actually visits each location in pursuit of the story, they find that the deforestation was not caused by drilling. In one case, there was a fire; in another, a timber company was responsible.

It appears that when reviewing the training data, the system taught itself to determine whether an area with rapid deforestation was near a mountainous area — because every image the journalists used as training data had mountains in the photos. Oil drilling wasn’t taken into consideration. Had the team known how their system was learning, they could have avoided such a mistake.

Algorithms are created by humans, and journalists need to be aware of their biases and cognizant that they can make mistakes. “We need to treat numbers with the same kind of care that we would treat facts in a story,” Dan Keyserling, head of communications at Jigsaw, the technology incubator within Google’s parent company Alphabet. “They need to be checked, they need to be qualified and their context needs to be understood.”

That means the automation systems need maintenance and upkeep, which could change the workflow and processes of editors within the newsroom:

Story templates were built for the automated output by experienced AP editors. Special data feeds were designed by a third-party provider to feed the templates. Continuing maintenance is required on these components as basic company information changes quarter to quarter, and although the stories are generated and sent directly out on the AP wires without human intervention, the journalists have to watch for any errors and correct them.

Automation also changes the type of work journalists do. For instance, when it comes to the AP’s corporate earnings stories, Gibbs, the global business editor, explained that reporters are now pursuing different types of reporting.

“With the freed-up time, AP journalists are able to engage with more user-generated content, develop multimedia reports, pursue investigative work and focus on more complex stories,” Gibbs said.

Still, in order to use this type of automated reporting, newsrooms must employ data scientists, technologists, and others who are able to implement and maintain the algorithms. “We’ve put a lot of effort into putting more journalists who have programming skills in the newsrooms,” said New York Times chief technical officer Nick Rockwell.

The report emphasizes that communication and collaboration are critical, especially while keeping a news organization’s journalistic mission front and center. The report outlined how it views the role data scientists play:

Data scientists are individuals with the technical capabilities to implement the artificial intelligence systems necessary to augment journalism. They are principally scientists, but they have an understanding as to what makes a good story and what makes good journalism, and they know how to communicate well with journalists.

“It’s important to bring science into newsrooms because the standards of good science — transparency and reproducibility — fit right at home in journalism,” said Larry Fenn, a trained mathematician working as a journalist in AP’s data team.

The full AP study is available here.

By late 2015, the AP was covering more than 4,000 earnings report stories per quarter, up from about 400 before it began using algorithmically written stories. The study’s authors — Stanford professor Elizabeth Blankespoor, University of Washington professor Ed deHaan, and Stanford PhD student Christina Zhu — found that 57 percent of those companies received no coverage from the AP before the automation started in October 2014.

Companies that were newly covered by automated reporting saw their trading volume increase by about 38 percent, the study found. However, the researchers saw that “abnormal trading volume increases nearly monotonically for several quarters after automated articles begin, suggesting that it takes time for the articles to impact investor attention and/or trading behavior.”

“After the articles are published, we see an increase in trading volume that persists three to four days after the story comes out,” deHaan told the AP.

The report also found that the companies receiving coverage had improved liquidity because “increased trading volume potentially creates a deeper market, and lower information processing costs can result in less information asymmetry, less price protection, and greater willingness to trade.”

Beyond earnings reports, the AP is also working on further automating its reporting processes. This year it began algorithmically covering minor league baseball games by converting data from box scores into traditional stories.

“With minor league baseball, we never had any stories and didn’t cover it with humans,” Jim Kennedy, the AP’s senior vice president for strategy and enterprise development told me this fall. “Now we’re covering it without humans and creating stories that we didn’t have before. That’s been a real breakthrough. Based on that success, we wanted to see what else could we do in automation.”

Kennedy said the AP has a goal — that’s “more aspirational than real” — to automate 80 percent of its content production by 2020. (A spokeswoman also later acknowledged this was probably unrealistic.) The news agency wants to use machine learning to help reporters produce multiple versions of stories for different mediums or for specific clients.

“Let’s say a newspaper or website is subscription-based and, in its research, it’s identified five personas that are its typical subscribers,” Kennedy said. “If we perfect this, we could design output for those five personas and drive some or all of our output through those five personas.”

“It’s a manual labor nightmare,” Jim Kennedy, the AP’s senior vice president for strategy and enterprise development, told me in his New York office. Collectively, AP journalists spend about 800 hours a week converting print stories to broadcast format.

As a result, the AP is experimenting with machine learning in an attempt to automate some of those processes. The news agency wants to free up capacity for journalists while also increasing its output as it looks to provide new types of coverage to its clients to try and grow its business.

By 2020, the AP, Kennedy said, would like to automate 80 percent of its content production, though he admits that specific goal is “more aspirational than real.”

“Can we address that and start to shave time off of it so that person can do more? That same person who is sitting there churning out all that crap can take his iPad, go down to the locker room and capture video if he or she is not sitting there doing eight versions of the text story,” Kennedy said. “There is real benefit to be realized by doing this.”

(After this story was published, an AP spokeswoman emailed to say that, despite what Kennedy said, 80 percent is “not a goal but a reference to the need to manage increasing volumes of additional content that are expected in the future.”)

Over the past several months, as part of its work with Matter Ventures, a cross-sectional team of five AP staffers has been working on developing a framework to automate the process of converting print stories to broadcast format.

The team built a prototype that just identifies elements in print stories that need to be altered for broadcast. (Stories are shorter, sentences are more concise, attribution comes at the beginning of a sentence, numbers are rounded, and more.) Though the tool can identify those items, AP strategy and development manager Francesco Marconi, who worked on the project, cautioned that the news agency has yet to conduct real trials on the tool or run quality control tests.

To move forward with the project, the AP will have to partner with an outside company that specializes in machine learning. To start, it would focus on one specific sport and use archival versions of print and broadcast stories to develop an algorithm that could actually automate the versioning.

“There are a set amount of rules that our journalists know that they use to turn a print story into a broadcast story,” said AP strategy and development manager Francesco Marconi, who worked on the project. “That transition is not always clean. What machine learning can help us to is that essentially there is algorithm that compares a print story with the same story in a different version. For example, for broadcast, it identifies how a human would make those changes. Of course, the machine will be first guided by these set of rules but to get to a version that our editorial department is happy with we need to do that type of work of really teaching the machine the nuances.”

Last year, the AP created a five-year strategic plan to outline its company-wide goals through 2020. Last week, the news agency’s leadership met to begin to decide what it will prioritize in 2017 as it works toward those 2020 goals. Kennedy said there are seven initiatives under consideration for funding next year, including this effort around automation. Customer engagement and user generated content are some of the other areas that the AP is focused on, but Kennedy said he’s hopeful the agency will continue to fund the work around automation, which began in earnest in 2014.

That year, working with the company Automated Insights, the AP began automating some corporate earnings stories. The news agency now produces about 4,000 corporate earnings stories each quarter — ten times more than when it just had reporters writing stories. This year, it also started working with Automated Insights to cover minor league baseball games by turning data from box scores into text stories. The AP has also invested in the company.

“With minor league baseball, we never had any stories and didn’t cover it with humans,” Kennedy said. “Now we’re covering it without humans and creating stories that we didn’t have before. That’s been a real breakthrough. Based on that success, we wanted to see what else could we do in automation.”

Kennedy said he expects the process of working with an outside firm to develop the automated print-to-broadcast to take about six months. The prototype they’ve currently developed is pretty basic, and for the project to be successful, the broadcast stories will need to be good enough that they won’t need to be edited by human editors before they go out onto the wire.

“It might not take that long to do the simple task of turning a print story into a broadcast story — we’re thinking that’s pretty easy — but still, you have to teach it all the different kind of outputs that you might encounter sport-by-sport,” Kennedy said. “If you read all 4,000 of those corporate earnings stories, you’d see they’re pretty similar. Such and such beat expectations or didn’t beat expectations. That’s the lede of every single story. That’s not going to be the case as we do human-composed stories that we want to change into human-voiced stories.”

To reach its goal of having 80 percent of its coverage be automated by the end of the decade, the AP is looking at other types of automation beyond the print-to-broadcast versioning. For instance, it thinks it could ultimately use machine learning to adapt stories for different devices — from wearables to voice-activated speakers in the car or home.

Another use of automation would be to customize coverage for different clients or audiences. AP sportswriters already produce stories with “hometown ledes” for fans of both teams in a game. Reporters also use a different style when writing for a domestic or international audience. These are aspects that could be automated. Additionally, the AP thinks it could potentially use machine learning to write its stories in different voices for specific clients.

“Let’s say a newspaper or website is subscription based and, in its research, it’s identified five personas that are their typical subscribers,” Kennedy said. “We could literally, if we perfect this, design output for those five personas and drive some or all of our output through those five personas.”

The AP, Kennedy said, sees this type of versioning as a key element to its future. The wire service used to produce different distinct versions of stories — for morning and afternoon newspapers, for instance. But with the emergence of the Internet and the constant news cycle, the AP abandoned many of those practices in favor of “real-time versioning” and regularly updated stories.

“By creating one version of that realtime news report, we were also contributing to its commoditization,” Kennedy said. “All of our customers had moved to a single competitive space, which is now defined by the mobile-desktop space, but principally mobile.”

As newspapers continue to face economic challenges, Kennedy admitted that “new revenue is going to be slow to materialize and grow.”

There have been stories for years about newspapers ditching the AP, but the news agency is hopeful that new product offerings — including the automation efforts — will entice papers and other clients to use the service.

For example, when it comes to user-generated content, the AP worked with SAMDesk, a social media CMS in which it has invested, to create a tool that combines the AP wire with SAMDesk’s feed of user-generated content that it has authenticated or is attempting to authenticate. It initially created this tool for internal use, but it thinks it could also license it to clients.

“We’ve got big chunks falling out because newspapers continue to slide downhill, broadcasters are consolidating — and that will continue — and then native digital will be looking at these same solutions we’re looking at,” Kennedy said. “How do we stay relevant in all of that and how do we create value that could turn traditional customers around to want to buy more?”

“It’s not an exaggeration to say that New York, in addition to being our home, is the global capital of news media. To be in both places really strengthens Matter’s mission and brand,” said Nick Rockwell, CTO of The New York Times, who was key in extending the relationship between the company and Matter.

Matter SF ∞ NYC. We’re expanding @mattervc to NYC…and bringing SF with us. https://t.co/KZPLUwGwWg #matternyc pic.twitter.com/AuGY0pqPtc

— Corey Ford (@coreyford) March 7, 2016

“I’m super excited to have The New York Times come on board,” said Corey Ford, Matter managing partner. “They represent the type of mission our entrepreneurs want to achieve in the long run.” The Times is the latest in a long list of media partners backing Matter, including the Knight Foundation, PRX, KQED, The Associated Press, McClatchy, A.H. Belo, Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc., and tronc.

The seven New York startups revealed in the NYC class are:

Ballstar, a social database for worldwide basketball stats for league management.

Gol Labs, a platform to bring global soccer coverage to emerging economies.

Menagerie, a personalized marketplace-style online wedding planning experience.

Scout, an online community intersecting tech, economics and morality.

Stella, an intelligent production management tool for filmmakers.

This., a social network of smartly curated single links that can only be sent once a day.

Treepress, a website that allows users to discover, license, and distribute any form of theatre from musicals to plays.

The San Francisco six include:

CLEO, an AI agent that manages smartphone photo libraries to curate meaningful albums for its users.

Common, a messaging service offering real time text translations.

Discors, an independent news app ran by journalists rather than a larger media corporation.

Itavio, an app to help parents manage their children’s mobile game spending, fighting against out of control in-app-purchases.

Kira Kira, an online platform to teach design, architecture, and engineering to girls of Generation Z.

Thankroll empowers creatives by providing them with crowdfunding-style income from their fanbases.

The 13 were selected out of 687 applicants and were allowed to choose whether they wanted to work from NYC or San Francisco.The startups participate in a five-month intensive program, present entrepreneurial ventures at monthly design reviews, and, at the culmination of the program, pitch to an audience at a final Demo Day.

“We are huge believers in our own process,” says Ford. “Matter is a prototype and always will be, and will always evolve with our entrepreneurs from each cycle and just get better and better.”

PANDA (“PANDA A News Data Application,” not to be confused with the Python data analysis library) was a 2011 Knight News Challenge winner. At its core is a data warehouse appliance that gives local news outlets a centralized place to maintain, organize, and analyze data sets, including huge ones like voter registration rolls. (Disclosure: Nieman Lab is also supported by Knight, though not through a News Challenge grant.)

Reporters can upload their own data sets or search existing data and documents. Interested developers can help tweak the code and make use of PANDA’s API to customize the application to their newsrooms’ needs. The tool was designed with local newsrooms in mind, with features like fuzzy search and language translations, led by a group of people who were working in local newsrooms themselves.

Here’s the thing: None of the people from the PANDA project work in local newsrooms anymore. But team members estimate that at least dozens of newsrooms or more use it, and not just in the U.S. — some as superusers who’ve even built additional features, and others on a much smaller scale, with a few interested reporters uploading data every once in a while. Yet more newsrooms have it installed, but haven’t gotten farther than that.

PANDA formally debuted at the 2012 NICAR conference, in partnership with Investigative Reporters & Editors. Brian Boyer, then on the news apps team at the Chicago Tribune and now editor of the NPR Visuals team; Joe Germuska, another Tribune developer and now at Northwestern University’s Knight Lab; and Ryan Pitts, then senior editor managing web development at the Spokane Spokesman-Review and now at Knight-Mozilla’s OpenNews, put together the News Challenge proposal. (The Tribune’s intranet for databases inspired PANDA.)

“Plenty of folks use it a lot, and I’m far from ready to call it dead,” Boyer said. “Now we just need to figure out what the next step is. It’s just dumb luck that every single one of us went somewhere where PANDA doesn’t necessarily make sense!”

PANDA could find a new partner and hand off the torch, Boyer suggested. Someone at IRE could look after it and offer it as a benefit for members, so the tool would shift to having a central maintainer. A single organization could host it for many. Or PANDA’s original team could pursue another grant to hire a developer to help debug and build new features.

“It’s a little tricky to figure out what to do with it because the overall adoption was uneven, with some places using it a lot, some places installing it and then forgetting, and some never getting over the hurdle in the first place,” Christopher Groskopf, PANDA’s main original developer, said. (Groskopf was a news applications developer at the Chicago Tribune but is now a reporter at Quartz.) “There hasn’t been one single plan forward that has really emerged. Like a lot of open source projects, ours kind of runs by momentum and rough consensus, and without that single bolt-of-lightning idea about how things should be done, things are more in limbo.

Germuska and Pitts were both at this year’s NICAR conference in Denver, and Germuska convened a lunch for PANDA users to talk about how they’re using the tool and discuss its future. The call was aimed at serious users, but people who were just curious also showed up (including me).

Matt Kiefer first heard about PANDA when it won the News Challenge in 2011, but didn’t work in a newsroom where it made sense for him to install the tool until a couple of months ago, when he started as a data editor at the nonprofit investigative outlet the Chicago Reporter. The editorial team is small — a dozen or so — and juggles plenty of data sets.

“To keep the data sane, to keep the system manageable even in a small newsroom, you need some kind of system with some kind of standard,” Kiefer said. He found PANDA setup simple (“The documentation was very straightforward — I got out of a meeting with my boss late afternoon and had it deployed before I left for the day”). There are still kinks to work out, but he’s hoping his newsroom will be able to use PANDA’s API features to simplify workflow.

“PANDA is a good solution as a data warehouse,” Kiefer said. “Before data’s served its ultimate purpose, whether piped into graphics or mapping software or something else, it can be on file in an organized way for fact-checking. PANDA is where our data could live between research and getting reported.”

The Associated Press got PANDA up and running about a year ago and has been able to adjust it to the newsroom’s needs, including getting to the point of having single sign-ons for newsroom staff, AP data journalist Serdar Tumgoren told me. PANDA allowed developers to shut down some buggy old Ruby on Rails–based news apps, and it allows reporters who work with a lot of data to deal with a functional data warehouse directly. The AP is using it to store huge amounts of voter registration data. Automation editor Justin Myers feeds regularly released data, like labor and economics statistics, into PANDA on schedule.

“We were looking for a way for reporters to get and share data internally, and PANDA fits that bill in a lot of ways,” Tumgoren said. “I’m very happy with a lot of the features. Many of the reporters really seem to love it and use it to do a lot of their research.”

Tumgoren would love a more complex management system that would allow power users working on investigative stories to restrict access to data and documents. But he acknowledges that PANDA, by design, is a “bazaar of open materials” geared at “making information more discoverable.”

By all accounts, PANDA’s creators have made themselves as available as possible for feedback and requests, despite being no longer officially involved. (There’s also a semi-active Google group.)

“Open source software have ebbs and flows, and they get regular life because people decide it’s worth it,” Tumgoren said. “I appreciate what the team has been doing. They don’t talk about an end, but rather convene folks to see how we can keep this going, as long as people are using it.”

“One of the oldest rules of open source software is that it works when it scratches people’s itches, and then people are motivated to fix it where it falls short,” Germuska said. “This is not something that’s part of our everyday. But if there are people who don’t know how to start but are motivated to install it, we want to help them.”

With the funding, The Associated Press will add additional data journalists to its team and increase its distribution of data sets that include localized information to thousands of news organizations. This expansion will lead to more collaborative projects with newsrooms across the country. The Associated Press will also establish and distribute data journalism best practices as an addendum to the 2017 Associated Press Stylebook, focusing on style, ethics and standards. Additionally, it will create an online portal where customers can download market-specific information.

In 2014, for example, the AP published an investigative story on flood insurance rate hikes nationwide. That story was distributed with an interactive map and sidebars for each of the 50 states, and data for 18,000 communities across the country. The data meant that “local reporters could really dig in deep and write their own stories about their town or city, regardless of size,” national investigative editor Rick Pienciak said at the time.

Another example was investigation of commute times in America, with an interactive map.

This sort of national/local collaboration is something Knight’s been increasingly interested in supporting. Last month, for instance, Knight gave ProPublica $2.2 million to, among other things, increase the nonprofit’s work with local outlets on data projects. You can view Knight’s recent grant to the California Civic Data Coalition through the same lens — using the data skills of a national or regional group to provide useful data to local outlets that may lack that capacity.

The AP previously won a Knight grant to build a data journalism tool. (Full disclosure: Knight also helps fund Nieman Lab.)

Patterson’s task is becoming increasingly common in newsrooms. Journalists at ProPublica, Forbes, The New York Times, Oregon Public Broadcasting, Yahoo, and others are using algorithms to help them tell stories about business and sports as well as education, inequality, public safety, and more. For most organizations, automating parts of reporting and publishing efforts is a way to both reduce reporters’ workloads and to take advantage of new data resources. In the process, automation is raising new questions about what it means to encode news judgment in algorithms, how to customize stories to target specific audiences without making ethical missteps, and how to communicate these new efforts to audiences.

Automation is also opening up new opportunities for journalists to do what they do best: tell stories that matter. With new tools for discovering and understanding massive amounts of information, journalists and publishers alike are finding new ways to identify and report important, very human tales embedded in big data.

Keep reading at Nieman Reports →

Twenty-two different projects will receive a total of $3.2 million in funding from the Knight Foundation and partners like the Democracy Fund, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Rita Allen Foundation. (Disclosure: Knight is also a funder of Nieman Lab, though not through the News Challenge.)

As Knight described it when they introduced the latest contest: “For this challenge, we want to discover ideas and projects that better inform and inspire voters, as well as make the election process more fun and accessible for individuals.”

Ten of the projects in this round of the News Challenge will receive between $200,000 and $525,000. The twelve remaining projects will receive $35,000 each as part of the Knight Prototype Fund, which provides seed investment to budding ideas in media, information, or technology.

“The winning projects offer the opportunity to advance journalism innovation, while helping to ensure voters have the information they need to make decisions at the polls and become more involved and engaged in the issues that affect their communities,” Jennifer Preston, Knight’s vice president for journalism, said in a news release.

There are plenty of media companies in the mix of projects, including The Des Moines Register, the Associated Press, WNYC, the Orlando Sentinel, and more. Several plan to use funding from Knight to help shape coverage of the 2016 elections or to move forward projects on improving voter turnout and participation.

While the AP wants to develop a better system for exit polling, the Register is focused on a project that would use “a series of public events and initiatives that use social media to draw millennial attention to issues and candidates.”

Sally Buzbee, Washington D.C. bureau chief for the AP, is overseeing the polling project. With more people voting early, exit polling has become less effective, she said over email. But people’s changing technology habits are also a factor:

Voters are getting harder to reach because more people choose to carry only a cell phone or decline to answer calls from pollsters. Innovation is required to ensure our work continues to be accurate and complete into the future. It’s worth noting that these rapid changes in Americans’ behavior are affecting all of polling: Pollsters have already turned to surveys conducted online as possible ways to bridge the gap, and we see online panels as a starting point for our experiments.

Others News Challenge winners are extensions of existing work being done by media companies.

Last year, journalists from the Los Angeles Times, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and Stanford’s Computational Journalism Lab joined forces to create the California Civic Data Coalition. The early goal was to create apps that make it easier for journalists to make sense of data like campaign finance reports. The coalition is receiving $250,000 in the News Challenge to continuing building open source tools to make campaign data more accessible.

Last year, Ben Welsh, a database producer at the Times, told the Lab it made more sense for the organizations to combine resources to fight a shared problem rather than spend time competing:

“We want to compete on who can do the better deep dive, who can ask the smarter question, who can be more aggressive about getting the story. We don’t want to compete on who can unzip and link together 76 crappy database tables,” Welsh said then.

Today, Welsh said the Knight money will be used to “bring on a full-time developer who will team with participating newsrooms and Stanford students to lead the project through Election Day 2016,” as well as a series of code sprints.

Knight has already announced that the next round of the News Challenge will begin this fall and will focus on data.

Here’s the full list of winners for the Knight News Challenge on elections, including 12 projects receiving funding through the Prototype Fund.

2016 Political Ad Tracker

Award: $200,000
Organization: Internet Archive
Project leads: Roger Macdonald, Tracey Jaquith
Twitter: @internetarchive, @r_macdonald, @tracey_pooh,

Voters are exposed to large amounts of campaign advertising, especially in key swing states. Though these ads are designed to influence and sway votes, little information is provided about their background and accuracy. To hold candidates accountable and bring more transparency to the voting process, the Internet Archive, with the world’s largest open archive of TV news, will create a public library of TV news and political ads from key 2016 primary election regions. The library will be paired with nonpartisan fact-checking and other analysis from PolitiFact, the University of Pennsylvania’s FactCheck.org, The Center for Public Integrity and others. Ads will be tracked along with facts about their accuracy, source, frequency and context. These widely distributed library resources will provide voters with trustworthy information and encourage greater participation in the political process.

Campaign Hound

Award: $150,000
Organization: Reese News Lab, University of North Carolina
Project leads: John Clark and Sara Peach
Twitter: @johnclark, @sarapeach

Few citizens have direct contact with their candidates and elected officials. As such, the media and other sources are what keep them informed about politicians both on the campaign trail and once they are in office. To give citizens more information and help journalists improve their political coverage, the Reese News Lab will create a searchable archive of campaign speech transcripts that provides users with customized keyword alerts. It will use crowdsourcing and computer natural language processing to gather recordings of speeches and generate transcripts, enabling subscribers to search for exact words spoken by politicians. Users can also monitor political speeches remotely, providing easy access. In addition, it will alert subscribers when custom keywords are spoken on the campaign trail. The archive will be piloted in North Carolina.

California Civic Data Coalition

Award: $250,000
Organization: California Civic Data Coalition, a partnership of Investigative Reporters and Editors, Stanford University, The Center for Investigative Reporting, and The Los Angeles Times
Project leads: Ben Welsh, Cheryl Phillips, Aaron Williams, Jennifer LaFleur
Twitter: @palewire, @cephillips, @aboutaaron, @j_la28

Campaign finance data in statehouses across America is hard to organize, access and understand. Making it easier to find and use this raw, machine-readable data can help to hold politicians accountable and enable deeper analysis of the influence of money in politics. The California Civic Data Coalition will engage data journalists from The Los Angeles Times, Stanford University, the San Francisco Chronicle and The Center for Investigative Reporting to lead an open-source effort to refine this raw data into an easy-to-use product. The work will serve as a model for other states and join an ongoing effort to consolidate money-in-politics data from statehouses across America.

Civic Engagement Toolkit for Local Election Officials

Award: $400,000
Organization: Center for Technology and Civic Life
Project leads: Whitney May, Tiana Epps-Johnson, Whitney Quesenbery
Twitter: @HelloCTCL, @tianaej, @whitneymaybe, @civicdesign, @whitneyq

Local governments produce information that is important to voters. However, there are few communications avenues for people to access this information and engage with their local governments to help shape policy and decision-making. To tackle this issue, the Center for Technology and Civic Life will develop a civic engagement toolkit, designed in concert with local election officials. The kit will include a set of tools for election offices such as an election website template, visual icons and illustrations, resource allocation calculators, and other tools. It will help local officials identify how to best use communication tools, and measure the reach and impact of the information they are sharing.

Informed Voting From Start to Finish

Award: $200,000
Organization: e.thePeople
Project leads: Seth Flaxman, Kathryn Peters, Whitney Quesenbery and Alex Quinn
Twitter: @etppl, @civicdesign, @whitneyq, @sethflaxman, @katyetc, @turbovote

Lack of information about the voting process, candidates and issues, especially in local elections, can limit voter participation and prevent people from making informed choices at the polls. Informed Voting From Start to Finish will combine the voter services and timely reminders of TurboVote with local guides from e.thePeople, to provide comprehensive voting support, including registration assistance, election reminders, poll locators, explanations of contests and ballot questions, and candidate information.

Inside the 990 Treasure Trove

Award: $525,000
Organization: The Center for Responsive Politics in partnership with GuideStar
Project leads: Robert Maguire
Twitter: @RobertMaguire_

The Center for Responsive Politics wants to help journalists and the public better understand who is funding campaigns and the sources of so-called “dark money,” the funds that certain nonprofits can spend to back candidates and issues without having to reveal where the donations are coming from. In fact, the amount of dark money in campaigns has grown exponentially — from $6 million in 2004 to $309 million in 2012, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The center has developed a system for tracking and processing information on these donations from difficult-to-access IRS 990 forms, and matching this information with Federal Elections Commission data. With new funding, the center will partner with GuideStar to retrieve greater volumes of this information more quickly and comprehensively, and create a database that any journalist can access.

Revive My Vote

Award: $230,000
Organization: Marshall-Wythe Law Foundation
Project leads: Mark Listes and Rebecca Green
Twitter: @ReviveMyVote

Virginians with felony convictions face real obstacles in restoring their right to vote. Those who have already applied to restore voting rights face a severe backlog of applications. In addition, reaching out to those who have not yet applied is very difficult since Virginia maintains no comprehensive contact list of eligible citizens. Revive My Vote seeks to address both obstacles. To reduce the backlog, the group will organize and train local law students to remotely process these applications, speeding the process. In addition, the project will create a digital platform where successful applicants will inspire prospective applicants with success stories and information about rights restoration will be disseminated.

Sharp Insight

Award: $250,000
Organization: Youth Outreach Adolescent Community Awareness Program
Project lead: Duerward Beale
Twitter: @YOACAPphilly

While barbershops have long been trusted spaces in the African-American community, this project seeks to build on that stature by recruiting barbers as voting advocates. The Youth Outreach Adolescent Community Awareness Program and its partners will recruit Philadelphia barbers, educate them on rights restoration and other voting issues, and ask them to help disseminate voting information. The program will provide barbers with incentives for getting their male customers to take surveys, read nonpartisan election information and continually discuss the importance of civic participation. The barbers who enroll will have their names listed on a radio partner’s website, with a special radio promotion going to the shop that disseminates the most information.

The Next Generation Beyond Exit Polls

Award: $250,000
Organization: The Associated Press
Project lead: Sally Buzbee, David Pace, Emily Swanson
Twitter: @AP, @AP_Politics, @SallyBuzbee, @EL_Swan, @dhpace

For years, the media, academics and the public have relied almost exclusively on exit polls to explain voter behavior and declare winners on national election nights. But with the growing number of early voters — and well-publicized recent errors in candidate estimates — many have questioned their accuracy. The Associated Press, in partnership with two national polling firms, is looking to develop less expensive methods to more accurately measure voter views. Two recent experiments have used online, probability-based panels to gauge voter sentiments in real time. The AP is looking to publicize the results, refine its methods and ultimately share new tools with other newsrooms.

Vote-by-Smartphone

Award: $325,000
Organization: Long Distance Voter
Project lead: Debra Cleaver
Twitter: @debracleaver, @absenteeballots

Long Distance Voter wants to increase voter turnout by making it possible to sign up for an absentee ballot using smartphones. According to the Pew Charitable Trusts, more than 25 percent of all ballots were cast by mail in 2014. Three states, Oregon, Washington and Colorado, have transitioned to a standard vote-by-mail system, with all three experiencing higher turnout and lower election administration costs. Voters in other states currently need to print and mail their forms in order to submit absentee ballots, which is difficult for many in an increasingly digital age. Long Distance Voter will use DocuSign’s electronic signature technology to enable citizens to complete, sign and mail their absentee ballots directly from their smartphones.

Prototype Fund winners

Judge Your Judges by WNYC (Project leads: Kat Aaron, @kataaron, and John Keefe, @WNYC, @jkeefe; New York): Enabling people to make more knowledgeable decisions about judicial elections through a tool that will provide key information, insights and context about candidates, their views and the court system.

Lenses by NYC Media Lab (Project leads: Amy Chen, Justin Hendrix, Kareem Amin, R. Luke DuBois, and Mark Hansen, @nycmedialab; New York): Enabling journalists and other storytellers to transform and visualize data to build interactive election stories through an open-source, mobile-friendly tool.

OpenJudiciary.org by Free Law Project (Project leads: Michael Lissner, @mlissner, and Brian Carver, @brianwc; Berkeley, Calif.): Helping to make judicial elections more transparent by creating online profiles of judges that show campaign contributions, judicial opinions and biographies.

Prompt Data Query by Center for Responsive Politics (Project lead: Sarah Bryner, @aksarahb; Washington, D.C.): Bringing more transparency and accountability to elections, through an automated, interactive tool that will give users access to real-time campaign finance data.

Silent Targeting, Loud Democracy by University of Wisconsin (Project lead: Young Mie Kim, @DiMAP_UW; Madison, Wis.): Promoting transparency in elections by prototyping an investigative service that tracks political ads that use online microtargeting to reveal how political action committees, parties and candidates target individual voters based on their personal information.

Tabs on Tallahassee by the Orlando Sentinel (Project leads: Charles Minshew, @CharlesMinshew, and Andrew Gibson, @AndrewGibson27; Orlando, Fla.): Fostering government transparency by creating a searchable database of the voting records of Florida lawmakers for newsrooms across the state.

Up for Debate Ohio! by the Jefferson Center (Project lead: Kyle Bozentko, @JeffersonCtr; Akron, Ohio): Increasing political knowledge in Ohio through community deliberation, online engagement and the media to provide citizens the opportunity to discuss issues and campaigns thoughtfully and civilly.

Voter’s Edge by MapLight (Project lead: Michael Canning, @votersedge; Berkeley, Calif.): Providing in-depth voter information that is easily accessible, neutral and factual on one platform; the mobile-optimized guide provides voter information on federal, state and local elections, including endorsements, candidate biographies, ballot measure summaries, top funder lists, videos, news, and more.

Accessible Voting for Everyone by University of Florida (Project lead: Juan Gilbert, @DrJuanGilbert, @FloridaEngineer; Gainesville, Fla.): Making voting easy and accessible to all through an open source electronic voting system that allows citizens, including those with disabilities, to cast ballots by actions such as tapping a touchscreen or speaking into a microphone.

Erase the Line by D.C. Board of Elections (Project lead: Margarita Mikhaylova, @dcboee; Washington, D.C): Helping election officials improve the voting process by creating a digital platform that will document wait-time information at polling places across the nation.

Rhode Island Civic Fellowship by Rhode Island Secretary of State (Project lead: Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea, @RISecState; Providence, R.I.): Encouraging more millennials to vote through a statewide civic fellowship program designed to inspire, recruit and train them to get involved in shaping voting and elections in their communities.

The Iowa Electorate by The Des Moines Register (Project lead: Amalie Nash, @AmalieNash; Des Moines, Iowa): Engaging young voters in the Iowa caucuses by sponsoring a series of public events and initiatives that use social media to draw millennial attention to issues and candidates.

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.

In 2001, while interning at the Associated Press bureau in Rome, Samantha Gross started working as a guide, giving walking tours of the Vatican, meandering through St. Peter’s Basilica with visitors, telling them stories about the artworks around them. Over the next 10 years, Gross bounced among AP postings from Tallahassee to New York City, covering courts, city hall, politics, crime, and more. But she never lost her taste for tours.

“Probably my favorite part of the [AP] job was getting to enter into the lives of so many people whom I wouldn’t have met otherwise and hear them tell their stories,” says Gross. That piece of her job, though, was the part that her readers never really got to experience. “I never felt that I was able to fully convey that to the people who would then read the stories. They were always missing out on some piece of that experience. Why couldn’t we share the best of our jobs with them?”

So last year, Gross founded StoryTour, a live, experiential magazine comprised of guided stories that take place in New York City. In one recent story, “The Land of the Slow Food Startups,” the tour guide took the audience to an old Pfizer building deep in South Williamsburg to meet the entrepreneurs behind the burgeoning slow food businesses there. “Our nonfiction story tours are like an equivalent of walking into the pages of a narrative feature in a magazine,” Gross explains. Whereas in a feature, the journalist might describe the row of tall silver machines lining the walls of the Kelvin Natural Slush Co. or the building’s bricked-up windows, in a StoryTour the audience sees all that for themselves. Once inside, they watch as the journalist interviews the staff of Dinner Lab, a pop-up dinner club, and they eat pasta made by Sfoglini, an artisanal pasta company.

The piece is more than a walking tour, according to Gross; it’s journalism that uses many of the same narrative techniques any magazine feature might. “The StoryTour begins with a narrative focusing on the seismic shifts many work-obsessed New Yorkers have faced in the wake of the economic downturn, and the ways that many people began re-examining their priorities and finding the motivation to start something new,” Gross says. Zack Silverman, founder of Kelvin Natural Slush, left behind a promising legal career to start his business. The audience hears him speak about the ups and downs of leaving a stable job to start something new and risky. They can even ask questions. “It’s not just seeing a list of places or hearing interesting facts or tasting interesting food,” Gross says. “It’s really an experience that’s guided by narrative and story.”

Gross fondly recalls her experience as a tour guide in Rome. “It was thrilling to look directly into the eyes of my audience and see them react as I told them stories,” she says. “Having experienced that allowed me to envision how StoryTour could work, and how exciting it could be.”

Keep reading at Nieman Reports »

“Once the Internet got in the car — and the car is half of where all listening is — it was going to dramatically change not only the way people listened to audio, but the way it was created, organized and delivered,” said John MacLeod, the founder and CEO of Rivet Radio, a news radio startup.

Launched in 2013, Rivet creates and curates news both by creating its own segments and by using material from partners, including the Associated Press and American Public Media. Rivet’s business model is twofold: It reaches users directly through platforms such as its iOS and Android apps, which allow listeners to set their preferences and creates news playlists based on their interests and locations. It also uses its APIs for others to license its products, such as a partnership with the conference call company InterCall to play Rivet News Radio while users are on hold.

Rivet last fall also announced a partnership with Jaguar Land Rover, and Rivet News Radio comes preinstalled on the entertainment systems of all new Jaguar Land Rover vehicles.

“The car is clearly the biggest target for us,” said MacLeod, a former executive at the navigation company Navteq, which was bought by Nokia in 2007.

Thirty-five percent of Americans have used their smart phones to stream online radio to their cars, according to a survey from Edison Research conducted earlier this year. That’s up from 6 percent in 2010. The figures are even higher among younger listeners: 59 percent of those aged 12 to 24 have streamed audio through their phones in their cars.

But 53 percent of survey respondents said they still listen to traditional AM/FM “most of the time” in their primary car, versus 9 percent for online radio — indicating there’s still a lot of potential growth for streaming even though its listenership has grown in recent years.

The connected car space is becoming increasingly crowded, with both Google and Apple striking deals with automakers to have their mobile operating systems work in vehicles.

Based in Chicago, Rivet Radio has a newsroom of 20 or so staffers working from 4 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily — though MacLeod said the company plans to begin updating its news around the clock to appeal to a global audience. They create several hours of original programming each day, while also recording wire stories and repackaging partners’ pieces.

“With companies like the AP…we work with their original text news and whatever audio they produce,” MacLeod said. “And then we produce finished news and we create all of the data associated with that news to optimize distribution.”

To date, Rivet has raised $3.6 million in convertible debt. This week the company said it has raised $1.9 million since last summer, when Rivet — then known as HearHere — announced a $1.7 million investment from the Associated Press, A.H. Belo (parent company of The Dallas Morning News), and others. Its goal now is to raise $10 million in Series A equity.

MacLeod wouldn’t specify how many people listen through the app, but Rivet says it has about 500,000 listeners per month across all its platforms, with the vast majority of them coming through Rivet’s business-to-business options, like the InterCall deal. Eighty percent of Rivet’s business is now enterprise, MacLeod estimated, though he said the company believes its larger growth opportunity is in the consumer market. Rivet sells ads in its app, though MacLeod said the company plans to introduce a premium ad-free version next year that will charge listeners a monthly fee. The company is also looking at other ways to license its existing content.

“We believe that the consumer opportunity is much bigger, but it’s going to take much longer,” MacLeod said.

One of the aspects that attracted the AP to Rivet was the level of personalization that the app affords users and the on-demand nature of the app. “Everybody’s services in the past were created to enable someone to produce a program or produce a newspaper in one all encompassing package,” said James M. Kennedy, the AP’s senior vice president of strategy and enterprise development. “Now you have the opportunity to provide more atomic services where the individual stories can be used and lined up in an on-demand playlist.”

The key to that level of personalization and platform agnosticism is the amount of metadata attached to each segment, MacLeod said. Regardless of the platform, Rivet produces its spots to ensure they’re listenable no matter if you’re listening on hold waiting for a conference call to start or through your cell phone. The staffers who create Rivet’s original segments or adapt content from elsewhere add in tags that highlight key subjects in the story, the host or reporter, where it took place, and more.

“We have created metadata around the news,” MacLeod said. Not so much to manage the content and production, but to optimize the distribution through different apps and different channels. The data that we add, we’re doing it with the thought of how does this improve either the distribution or the experience of the listener.”

Using that information and geolocation data from the user, Rivet is able to target content based on location also. It has a deal with Accuweather in the U.S. and CustomWeather internationally to provide weather forecasts in various cities.

Rivet also wants to expand into local news. So far, it only offers local content in Chicago, but the goal is to expand into other cities, MacLeod said. With A.H. Belo as one of Rivet’s investors, it expects to expand its local offerings to Dallas by the end of 2015, said A.H. Belo CEO Jim Moroney. He said Rivet will have access to everything the Morning News produces and he expects the paper will have three or four people curating and preparing content for the app.

“I think there is an opportunity to provide a more personalized news experience for an individual who is still spending a lot of time in his or her car,” Moroney told me.

Later this year, Rivet plans to offer an option for users to manually follow local news and weather if they don’t want to turn on their location services or if they want to follow news from another city.

While Rivet is looking to expand the type of content it offers, it’s also focused on expanding where it can be listened. In April, it released its Enterprise API, a free ad-supported stream of stories aimed at businesses to use for conference calls and such.

“We’re really focusing on the platform aspect of the business,” MacLeod said.

The car, however, remains Rivet’s ultimate goal as it looks to expand its in-vehicle footprint beyond its current deal with Jaguar Land Rover. “We’d like to be in every car in the world,” MacLeod said.

In a deal intended to be soon announced, Tribune Publishing will buy UT San Diego (the former San Diego Union Tribune) for about $80 million — and the assumption of growing pension obligations, recently upped to more than $100 million, I’ve learned through several confidential sources. Though, imminent, it is still possible that a final hiccup would delay a signed deal, as has previously happened in these negotiations.

Tribune Publishing refused comment on the transaction, saying only “it doesn’t comment on rumor or speculation.” Calls to the UT San Diego were not returned.

After closing, it is likely that the Los Angeles Times will operate the San Diego business, similar to what Tribune has done in Baltimore and Chicago. In those cities, the Sun and Tribune run the company’s local publishing acquisitions.

The sale – which I first outlined (“Tribune in final bidding for UT San Diego”) two months ago — will conclude an on-again, off-again auction. The sales process first started by developer and UT San Diego owner Doug Manchester last summer, has involved three sparring parties, the other two local.

The price compares to the $110 million that Manchester paid in 2011 to Platinum Equity — which had itself bought the company in a bottom-of-the-recession fire sale for about $35 million in 2009 from its longtime owner, the Copley family.

The buy would add the region’s No. 3 paper by print circulation to the Los Angeles Times, which despite many cutbacks over the years still dominates the print news scene in greater L.A. The Times can still claim a print circulation of 628,910 daily and 944,795 Sunday; U-T San Diego claims 268,038 on Sunday and 183,456 daily. (The Orange County Register counts itself barely ahead of U-T San Diego, at 302,802 Sunday and 192,567 daily. All counts are from the Alliance for Audited Media.) Of course, it’s the massive (but uneven) digital footprint of both the Times and the U-T that will matter most going forward.

And this big consolidation likely won’t be the last in the region. The Register, under new publisher Rich Mirman, still finds itself in the midst of financial triage, after the failed reign (“The newsonomics of The Orange County Register’s swerves all over the freeway”) of owner Aaron Kushner and executive Eric Spitz. As Mirman rationalizes both its ownership and operating plans, the Register is itself likely to be put up for sale, along with the Riverside Press-Enterprise that it bought only 18 months ago. Then there’s the hodgepodge of Los Angeles News Group (LANG) properties, about to be purchased by Apollo Global Management as it soon finalizes its acquisition of Digital First Media.

I’ve long written about the inevitability of a Southern California rollup, as newspaper company woes deepen and cost-cutting through consolidation becomes a key weapon to hold on to any profitability in the transition from print to digital. The duo of Tribune Publishing CEO Jack Griffin and Austin Beutner, the outside-the-newspaper-box publisher he appointed (“The newsonomics of life after newspapers go solo — and new intrigue in L.A.”) only last August, believe in consolidation.

Beutner believes that a consolidation of southern California newspaper properties is a financial necessity. Given the print ad downdraft — which is deepening, both at the Times specifically and generally elsewhere — every efficiency must be found. Though one can question how much efficiency remains to be squeezed through actual ownership consolidation — in recent years, many newspapers have found similar efficiencies through partnerships and contracting out — that’s Beutner’s belief. TPUB CEO Jack Griffin has already acted on that same principle, buying regional newspapers surrounding Tribune’s Baltimore Sun and Chicago Tribune in the first months of his leadership.

Make no mistake though: Southern California, with a population approaching 20 million, is Tribune Publishing’s big play. That’s a size that would rank it as the U.S.’s third-largest state, or about the same as greater New York City. Putting together the Times and the U-T — which only puts the further squeeze on the already pressed properties in Orange County and LANG — would give Tribune a kind of market power no single publisher can point to in New York.

That’s the simple proposition at work in this deal. The complexity behind it may be even more telling. Consider:

• What will it mean for San Diego’s citizens, readers, and advertisers — making up California’s second-largest city, the 17th largest in the country — to be served more and more by a single company? It’s hard to consider any print-based company a monopoly these days, but the outsized power of one company editorially should be the subject of concern and debate. U-T editor Jeff Light has done an admirable job of holding together a newsroom and a product under challenging owners, budgets, and policies over five years.

  Further, San Diego’s civic community has never liked the shadow thrown on it by bigger Los Angeles. What will local mean as the Tribune/Times takes control of the property? We can expect that the U-T will maintain the brand – and that the Times will then consolidate all business and editorial efficiencies possible.

  Tribune outlasted two San Diego-based would-be buyers. Radio exec and sometime Manchester associate John Lynch, whose duties were diminished more than a year ago, has worked since last summer to put together a deal. He told me his last period of negotiating “exclusivity” ended 10 days ago. Lynch had been working to cajole various monied partners to buy out Manchester for awhile.

  Businessman and philanthropist Malin Burnham had worked tirelessly to put together a civic nonprofit. He aimed at running a daily operation deeply tied to community, but couldn’t raise sufficient money to convince Doug Manchester to keep the paper locally owned. Burnham’s group wanted a keep-it-in-San Diego discount; it made its final offer to Manchester on Monday morning.

• What will it mean for Tribune Publishing? Just Wednesday, TPUB released its Q1 numbers, and they were meager. Meager as in $3 million in net profit — a margin of just 0.6 percent — for the quarter, as overall revenues dropped 4.9 percent. TPUB, with its eight metro papers, ranks among the top four U.S. newspaper companies by size. That close-to-the-bone financial performance displays how dicey the newspaper business has gotten these days. On Wednesday, TPUB share prices dropped another 2.4 percent to $16. That’s down 36 percent from its initial share price, as Tribune’s publishing operations split off from its broadcast and digital assets last August.

  Even with U-T San Diego’s profitability, investors are bound to look askance at a ninth metro newspaper asset. Griffin’s five-point turnaround plan, which he discussed on the first-quarter call (here via Seeking Alpha), makes good sense. The question for him, as for the heads of all publicly owned, market-sensitive newspaper companies, is: Will they be given enough time and money to make digital transformation strategies successful?

• What will it mean for innovation in product and business model for U.S. and global newspapers generally? It is way too early to assess Austin Beutner’s tenure in L.A., after a scant nine months. But in that time, Beutner has aggressively begun to change the community and executive profiles of the Times. He’s shaken it up, gone younger and more digitally savvy than previous publishers. He believes that community better offers a route forward to rebuilding local news organizations in the digital age we’re moving into. He knows reinvestment in product — the kind of reinvestment we’ve lately seen under private owners at The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and the Star Tribune — is needed, though where the resources may come from is a big, open question.

  In short, Beutner, who comes from a private equity background rather than a publishing one, could be part of a new wave of modern media thinking much needed by regional press worldwide. The joker in the deck: How might this sale lead to a down-the-road Beutner-led private buyout of the Times/U-T business?

• What do the UT’s pension obligations tell us about an often-unspoken drag on legacy news company transformation? Tribune Publishing found itself on the brink of an agreement with Doug Manchester two months ago (after a near try last summer), but the deal hung up because to pensions.

  An annual PWC pension fund audit slowed the deal. Pension obligations swelled from about $50 million to about $111 million. While those obligations don’t represent money immediately owed, they present more of an issue for a public company’s books than for a private one. Why did the obligations grow? Two reasons: lackluster investment results and the faster-growing longevity of pensioners.

  In its final offer, TPUB has been able to reduce its cash price, down about $10 million from its pre-audit March offer, in part because of the greater pension obligations.

  In many newspaper sales, pension obligations contribute to the difficulty of valuation and sale — and then, of course, make operating budgets more challenging as print advertising continues its deep slide.

In the end, we come back to a truism about Doug Manchester’s three-and-a-half year ownership of the U-T. Ink doesn’t flow through Manchester’s veins; real estate does, and the Fairmont hotel he is building in Austin appears to trump the UT for his enthusiasm. After taking off much of six weeks to cruise around the Bahamas and other locales after his March deal was delayed, associates say Manchester returned newly prepared to make a sale.

• Finally, there’s the political angle. “Papa Doug” Manchester and his associate John Lynch define themselves by their conservatism, an important strand of San Diego culture.

  Beutner’s L.A. Times, though, is proving itself out to be a liberal force in L.A., and he would presumably bring that perspective to San Diego. The days of by-the-old-book, down-the-middle objective journalism are clearly numbered overall, with Southern California now a prime case history in the reinvention of the local news business.

In fact, three of those four stories were originally published in Esquire — a testament to its legacy, as Halberstam wrote, as “the most exciting magazine in the country.” Another was the late Richard Ben Cramer’s 1986 profile of Ted Williams, in which Cramer managed to secure unique access to the reclusive Red Sox great.

Together, the two Esquire stories paint remarkable portraits of two of baseball’s all-time best players and fiercest rivals. So this month, when the Red Sox and Yankees prepared to meet for the first time this season, Esquire republished both stories together on Esquire Classics, a new website from Esquire that resurfaces some of the magazine’s best archival material with modern introductions and fresh artwork.

The standalone website launched in late March, with a twist: The full text of each story published on Esquire Classics is also sent out in a weekly email — the latest evidence that people’s inboxes are gaining appeal as a publishing platform.

Introducing @EsquireClassics: The essential Esquire, from 1933 to now. pic.twitter.com/lf4Iu9mqAO

— Esquire Classics (@EsquireClassics) March 27, 2015

The stories are meant to relate to anniversaries or other events in the news. There was an August 1968 article on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. that coincided with the anniversary of his death on April 4. It also republished a 1968 profile of Elvis timed to the debut of The Elvis Experience in Las Vegas.

“We’re continuing our experiments with seeing what kinds of great archival stories people want to read and what formats seem to be most popular,” senior features editor Tyler Cabot, who leads Esquire Labs and is also a former Nieman fellow, told me in an email.

With a roster of contributors dating back to 1933 that includes Talese, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nora Ephron, and dozens of other notable writers, Esquire is well-suited to resurface stories from its archive.

Esquire, of course, isn’t the only legacy publication that’s taking advantage of archival material once accessible only via bound volumes or microfiche. Earlier this month, the Associated Press republished its original coverage of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination 150 years ago. (They buried the lede!)

April 1865: AP reporter waits until 10th paragraph of dispatch before elliptically confirming Abraham Lincoln is dead http://t.co/GVZ7x6AxhS

— Jon Swaine (@jonswaine) April 13, 2015

Gawker Media’s Deadspin has The Stacks, which republishes classic sports journalism originally published elsewhere. For its 125th anniversary last year, The Wall Street Journal published more than 300 archival articles. The New York Times runs a Twitter account, NYT Archives, that resurfaces archival content from the Times. It also runs First Glimpses, a series that examines the first time famous people or concepts appeared in the paper.

1944: The NYT discovers pizza http://t.co/OWOCBs0ABc pic.twitter.com/egrlLmo7go

— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 14, 2015

In the Times’ innovation report last year, its authors wrote that it needed to do a better job taking advantage its massive archives: “We can be both a daily newsletter and a library — offering news every day, as well as providing context, relevance and timeless works of journalism.”

Esquire has long mined its archives for material. For its 80th anniversary in 2013, the magazine partnered with Byliner to publish anthologies of some of its best stories. For its 75th anniversary, five years earlier, it published a list of its seven best stories and published many of them online in full. In 2009, it created a short-running podcast that featured old Esquire stories read aloud. And last fall, in honor of the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, it republished “The Falling Man,” Tom Junod’s 2003 story on a famous photo from 9/11. It suggested readers pay $2.99 for the story, with proceeds benefitting charity. (Though that story and another paywalled piece — a story by Chris Jones on astronaut Scott Kelly spending a year in space that was originally published last December — are now both available for free on Esquire Classics.)

Esquire Classics was built and is being edited by Aleszu Bajak, who teaches journalism at Northeastern University’s Media Innovation Program and previously partnered with Esquire as part of Story Lab, a course that reimagines how Esquire features are presented digitally.

Esquire also plans to use Esquire Classics to promote future stories. In its latest print issue, Esquire published the beginning of a story that it plans to print in full in its August issue, but in an email to subscribers, Esquire editor David Granger said the full piece would be posted on Esquire Classics. (Granger wrote that the article would be up last week, though it still has yet to be published.) [Update 4/27: The story was published this afternoon]

Esquire has done little to promote the launch of Esquire Classics aside from targeted emails like Granger’s and a handful of social media posts. As of this writing, it has 205 followers on Twitter and 43 Facebook likes.

Introducing @EsquireClassics http://t.co/p7XvgpEcWD pic.twitter.com/TJPk19fPh5

— Esquire Magazine (@Esquiremag) April 2, 2015

Cabot also wouldn’t go into specifics about the site or discuss Esquire’s plans for it, but there’s an archive section on the site promoting the Esquire Cover to Cover Archive featuring “Every issue. Every story. From 1933 to Forever” that it says is “coming soon.” And as of now, the site is free and there aren’t any ads running on it.

So while it remains to be seen how exactly Esquire will grow Esquire Classics, it’s likely we’ll see more pre-web publications take advantage of their archives as they continue to look for new ways to engage readers and draw traffic online.

While previous Matter classes have mostly been made up of relatively unknown entrepreneurs looking to build media-related products, some names among the new class will be familiar to Nieman Lab readers. Setrakian, for example, is the founder of News Deeply, the single-subject news network that creates content around timely, specific stories as they develop, such as Ebola Deeply or Syria Deeply. Setrakian hopes to focus on continuing to grow the News Deeply project and brand. “We’re here to solidify the proposition, to take the single-subject news model that we’ve come to be known for and turn it into a successful, scalable media startup,” she says.

Brandel is another familiar face in new media to join Matter. Brandel initially had success with her AIR-funded Localore project, Curious City, which allows the audience to contribute and vote on questions, which journalists then answer via their reporting and a variety of media packages. (Full disclosure: I worked on a few stories with Curious City when I worked at WBEZ in 2012.) With continued funding from AIR, Brandel has grown the project into a fledgling national network known as Curious Nation. Brandel plans to spend her time at Matter exploring the possibility of growing beyond public media, and of making the project sustainable.

Welcome, @JnnBrndl, @typwrtr, & @coreyhaines of @Curious_Nation! More about #matter4: http://t.co/QrPwdq0FMZ pic.twitter.com/ZgapKELtXn

— Matter. (@mattervc) February 18, 2015

“It’s clear there’s a desire to do this kind of work within public radio. What I’m not clear on is if public radio can sustain a business around this model,” she says. “I still need to figure out how I’m going to pay myself.”

Matter’s new class will also include some up-and-coming media entrepreneurs. Arjun Mohan and his cofounders lived in San Francisco hostels for six weeks while trying to jumpstart their company, Eureka King. The idea: to connect smaller publishers with young, innovative technology companies interested in reaching a niche audience to advertise their goods. “We thought it would be cool if we could connect the right publishers and communities with the right products coming out of the maker movement,” Mohan says. After a stint at the Plug and Play startup camp, Eureka King was brought into Matter.

The Matter accelerator is known for human-centered design strategy and rapid wireframing of ideas. A big part of this process is doing interviews with potential users, so that founders can get a sense of what the market need actually is. For the Eureka King team, this system has already led to important discoveries. For example, Mohan spoke with the founders of Quitbit, a lighter that helps users reduce their smoking habit, about whether or not the company would, theoretically, be interested in being connected to publishers. What he found was that, because Google charges premium prices for advertising around keywords that deal with things like weight loss, car insurance, and smoking cessation, the idea of advertising online was cost-prohibitive for Quitbit. The interview helped Mohan isolate a problem in the interaction between consumer technology startups and their customer base, which Eureka King can now focus on trying to solve.

Welcome, @arjunmo, @buildanything, @dmitristweets, & @BlakeAConway of @EKplugin! More at http://t.co/QrPwdq0FMZ pic.twitter.com/HuNMzeed6e

— Matter. (@mattervc) February 18, 2015

Both Setrakian and Brandel said that the core tenants of Matter’s startup philosophy were already part of their companies before coming to San Francisco, which made the accelerator a natural fit for each of them. At News Deeply, for example, working quickly and gathering feedback have been part of the ethos from the beginning. “I was rapid prototyping and I didn’t realize it,” says Setrakian. “I was drawing the concept of Syria Deeply in my notebook and showing it to diplomats, analysts, and journalists. I was basically testing the proposition with our target audience.”

Welcome, @Lara and @AzeoFables of @newsdeeply! Read more about the 6 companies that Matter. http://t.co/QrPwdq0FMZ pic.twitter.com/8IUiTfw0t7

— Matter. (@mattervc) February 18, 2015

For Brandel, the match makes sense because so much of human-centered design starts with something she’s familiar with: reporting. “As a reporter, this is stuff I’m used to doing. I’m comfortable randomly cold-calling people and asking them questions,” she says. “The philosophy and model of Curious City is really human-centered design applied to journalism.”

While the basic principles behind Matter’s program have been the same all along, the increased participation of news industry partners will be somewhat new to this class. Matter’s three original partners are joined by three newspaper companies and the Associated Press in what Matter’s Corey Ford hopes will create a two-way street between the entrepreneurs and the broader news business.

Matter’s media partners will participate in events like this month’s bootcamp as well as in monthly design reviews with the startups. The idea is to inject these legacy companies with some startup culture while providing the entrepreneurs with possible collaborators.

Though most of the startups and media partners won’t have direct contact until their first design review on Thursday, the relationship has already begun to pay off in both directions. Mohan says that as a tech entrepreneur, he doesn’t know many journalists. Already, being a part of Matter has put him in touch with perspectives he wouldn’t have otherwise considered. For example, while Eureka King is concerned with using content to connect cool new products to an appropriate audience, publishers who hear the idea instinctively question how much revenue they’d actually get from such a deal.

“They were very interested in the different monetization channels currently being used in the market, and the relationship between what offers the maximum value to the user as oppose to what can give the largest financial gains to the publisher,” says Mohan. “They wanted to see how our position fits in the matrix.”

In exchange for this practical wisdom, publishers get the chance to look at the news business in a new light. Chris Williams is a digital strategist for The Dallas Morning News who recently joined the paper after over a decade in the gaming industry. He says the paper’s new relationship with Matter is an opportunity to rethink how they structure and deliver information.

“What I’ve seen in most throughout multiple newspapers is that the journalistic focus isn’t on what content would be most wanted, but on what we think people need to know,” he says. “What’s interesting about Matter and about what it could do for our company in general is that we could gear a lot more of our focus towards what people are really trying to digest.”

After some internal restructuring, Williams says the DMN is looking forward to a year focused on digital design and building apps. He intends to send teams from across departments — including product, business, technology, sales, and the newsroom — to Matter regularly to get some perspective on these projects.

At the AP, senior vice president for strategy Jim Kennedy agrees that a big perk of the Matter partnership is the excuse to help individuals throughout the organization mix and mingle. “I’ve had occasion, in the week since we’ve been back, to be involved with meetings with the people who went on the trip, and you can already see the different perspective that they’re bringing to things,” he says. In addition to sending various AP employees to absorb Matter’s culture, Kennedy is also interested in bringing some of its principles in house. Housing Matter affiliates has been a successful strategy at KQED, something Kennedy says the AP could one day try to emulate.

Part of the Matter process is that the startups are constantly pivoting. There’s no expectation that entrepreneurs will leave working on the same problem that they came in with — which makes it hard to say what the ultimate contribution of this new class to the news industry as a whole will be.

Ford says that Matter’s focus is on the success of the companies it incubates, but he’s hopeful about the potential for matchmaking.

“The hope would be that if each side recognized a win-win, that they could begin working together right away,” he says. That concept is very important to understanding Matter’s ethos: While other Bay Area startup accelerators are about finding the next Snapchat and raising huge amounts of venture funding, Matter is more about taking good ideas for media and seeing if there’s a way to make them sustainable, if not profitable. Brandel says this differentiation is part of what drew her to the program.

“At other accelerators it’s: Hit a home run or you’re dead to us,” she says. “Matter is trying to find this middle ground, being things that are mission-oriented, and something that can actually scale.”

Today, Politico, which he cofounded in 2007, has taken that newsletter metaphor and inflated it into one of the most successful digital news startups in the U.S., now employing 244 journalists and 431 people in total. At the start of 2015, Politico is at a turning point, as cofounders VandeHei (now CEO) and John Harris (now editor-in-chief) focus on company growth and increasingly turn over the daily operating reins to others — prompting organizational change and some turmoil.

Politico now goes both global and local, extending its influence and its model as far as Berlin and Warsaw and as close as Tallahassee. This spring, Politico Europe will launch, a 50/50 partnership with German media powerhouse Axel Springer. And fresh off last week’s announcement of Politico hiring ace Miami Herald political columnist Marc Caputo, Politico Florida is poised to take off — soon to be joined by other state-focused Politicos. Politico has even named a executive vice president for expansion — a title I haven’t seen anywhere elsewhere in the news business. (Danielle Jones took on that post in October.)

Politico Europe is a noteworthy effort on several levels; the state-focused Politicos may be more surprising. Politico’s launch eight years ago was met, predictably, with great skepticism within the news industry. A “government vertical”? Daily newspaper’s websites saw little value in political news; we heard that advertisers wanted health, tech, sports, and other areas of more passionate interest — not tired, old boring government news, the kind newspapers had long stuffed into their metro sections out of a sense of public service and reflex. Starting with a little tab newspaper circulating among a valuable group of politicos around D.C.’s influentials, Politico turned conventional wisdom on its ear, reinventing “politics” and “policy” and beginning to grow.

Then last year, the company — owned and continually invested in by Robert Allbritton, a scion of the family that once owned the Washington Star, who sold off his broadcast TV assets in 2013 for $985 million — ventured beyond Washington. It bought Capital New York, a four-year-old government- and media-oriented start-up, finding kindred editorial partners and a new place to apply the unique Politico business model. (Full disclosure: In addition to my work here at Nieman Lab, I’ve recently started a new column for Capital New York. My interest in Politico and its model, though, is a longstanding one, including a 2013 Lab post, “The newsonomics of influentials, from D.C. to Singapore to Raleigh.”)

What’s are the ideas fueling the expansion? “The most important meta-takeaway is this: There’s a big block of influential high-end readers who want to read high-end, nonpartisan political and policy content, and there’s a good chunk who will pay a significant amount. If you deliver the goods, there’s a market there, for ads and for subscriptions, and we’re now plunging into events,” says VandeHei, who talks about building a durable company, “deeper into Washington, broader into the states and globally” — and one that can last 25 years.

Can you apply the Politico model to New York? It’s not the country’s political nerve center, but it’s the center of so much else, so maybe evolving ads/premium subscriptions/events there could work. But Florida — or perhaps Illinois or Texas or California? In the nation’s capitols, statehouse coverage has seen major cutbacks, with dailies cutting staff and expenses. We’ve seen dedicated local journalists try to fill the vacuum, though in too few places. The Texas Tribune, MinnPost, and the Center for Investigative Reporting (in California) have gotten some notice for their statehouse investments, and there are smaller outfits that have gotten less attention, but deserve recognition, including Maryland Reporter, NJ Spotlight, WyoFile, and the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting. Collectively, these sites have replaced some of what newspapers cut.

In fact, the biggest news in this kind of coverage slipped out in December. The Associated Press, newly reenergized as CEO Gary Pruitt has righted its finances, announced building out statehouse coverage as a major priority. In all, AP has hired 13 statehouse reporters over the past year; some are jobs that had been vacant, some new positions. In addition, AP says it will add about “40 additional contract reporters to cover legislative sessions” this year, in addition to its regular staff. That’s significant — and welcome — firepower, but it won’t compete in consumer product terms with Politico’s undertaking.

Why? Politico’s model is a smart one, and one I’ve urged daily newspaper companies to consider (to little success). It’s a three-headed revenue model, and the important part is Politico Pro. While, at birth, Politico immediately mined advocacy advertising, and still does well it, it soon figured out it is categorizable influentials that could prime the pumps of each of the three revenue streams — with Pro at the center of the business and responsible for driving its spurt of editorial hiring.

The diversification of Politico’s revenue breakdown is the envy of many news companies: roughly 40 percent Politico Pro subscriptions, roughly 50 percent advertising, and about 8 percent events.

What exactly is the Pro model, and why does the company believe in may be extendable to Sacramento, Austin, Springfield, and Frankfurt?

In 2011, Politico launched three Pro products, in health, tech, and energy (“Politico Pro grows to 1,000 subscribing orgs, moves into print”). At last count, it offers 14, a model that it’s adapting in New York. The Pro products are aimed at insiders: people in the topical fields who want to know the more important details immediately, with as much context for potential decision-making as possible. Individuals can pay four or five figures per year for the actionable intel, but customers are more likely to be companies buying licenses to allow a certain number of their staffers to have access. In short: Figure out who’s got the checkbook and will open it for what kind of content. Here, too, the pricing model is no invention; it sits atop LexisNexis-like practices long used in the B2B marketplace.

Though only four years old, Pro drives four out of every 10 dollars earned, and VandeHei says Politico hopes to get Pro to 50 percent of revenues in the near future. That’s hugely important in the digital news business: Reader support is far more durable than the vagaries of digital advertising. In addition, Politico is seeing a 95-plus percent renewal rate for Pro. Finally, Pro connects to the growing events business and offers advertisers proof of reader engagement.

How big and fast will the Politico advance into states be? VandeHei says his team will finish figuring that out in the next couple of weeks. Expect a number of launches this year, with staff numbering in the handfuls in the big ones. The initial hiring of Marc Caputo in Florida is instructive; he’ll be doing a Florida Playbook, a descendant of Mike Allen’s Politico Playbook that initially defined the site’s aggressiveness and immediacy.

The biggest question for Politico in the states is how big a staff and business each state can support? What are the sectors in each that will pay for dedicated Pro coverage? That’ll be tested this year. If it finds success, we’ll once again have to ask the question of the U.S.’s major metros: Why haven’t they built anything similar of their own?

If the state-level opportunity is hard to figure out, the European opportunity is less so. The European Union is about 66 percent greater than the U.S. population, at 500 million. It’s a big potential market for Politico’s model — if it it can be transplanted into MittelEurope. Europe’s press — in political, business and general news — is massive, and struggles with all the same business issues as we do in North America. Politico’s play centers around crossing boundaries; the EU by its very nature is a boundary crosser. With bureaus in Brussels, Paris, and Berlin, Politico Europe will try to connect dots that others haven’t, weaving together politics and policy and explaining their implications.

That’s a tall order for a news startup moving into a place where American digital imperialism is something felt, not liked. Politico isn’t Google or Facebook — two prime targets of European scrutiny — but it is another case of Americans believing they have a superior digital formula.

VandeHei and Harris see that challenge. In part to counter it, Politico signed on to a 50/50 partnership with German media powerhouse Axel Springer, which itself has been exiting print assets (“The newsonomics of the German press’ tipping year”) and diversifying. Just this morning, Springer announced that it was leading a new $25 million funding round for Business Insider’s expansion; Jeff Bezos is also part of that investment group.

Springer provides Politico with a card of introduction in Europe as it sets up shop. Smartly, the new joint venture bought the weekly European Voice (circulation 16,000), providing both a beachhead for operations and a platform for growth — “it’s a campus newspaper for insiders,” as VandeHei puts it, the campus being the rich one of European governance.

Politico Europe will launch — in English — with a staff of about 30 in the second quarter; a German language site is likely next up. Expect it to grow to 60 to 70 before too long, under what we may call the Politico Doctrine, or use of “overwhelming force. Better reporters, more reporters, so we can dominate an area,” as VandeHei said in Europe in December.

It’s a $10 million joint venture. These are two strong companies, but 50/50 ventures often end in tears, and this one will be closely watched on both sides of the Atlantic — and a big test of how extendable the Politico Pro B2B model is beyond the District of Columbia.

Back in the American capital, it will be curious to see how the newest Politico evolves as it grows and Harris and VandeHei move away from the day-to-day. A year and a half ago, VandeHei and Harris hired Susan Glasser to head its “new long-form journalism and opinion divisions.” Glasser, a Washington Post veteran, had won numerous national magazine awards at Foreign Policy, transforming a tired title. Flash forward: Glasser has now become editor-in-chief of Politico overall, named to the job in September. Already, Politico’s magazine strives to match the best of the East Coast’s thought-leader journals, and a hiring spree (the most recent one here) is changing the kinds of pieces Politico produces. It’s seen great staff turnover, with as many as 40 staffers leaving, in addition to the hiring, predictable given both its growth and new leadership. (Erik Wemple details the organizational angst, both before and after Glasser’s appointment, in the Post: “Politico editor Susan Glasser: We’re in a ‘period of growth and rising ambition.”) Politico now finds itself in the fierce hunt for top-end journalistic talent, both losing and gaining staff as the bidding increases. There’s also a union organizing effort underway.

The new Politico is certainly open to criticism — but readers and critics alike find a much different product to critique today than even two years ago. For some, it’s been too “inside the Beltway.” Others disparage it for covering the horse race of politics better than the substance of governing. Some peg it to the left; others to the right. Whatever the truths of these observations, in its sheer breadth, the new Politico now emerges to do more of more kinds of things.

Isn’t that what the news business, startup and legacy, should be about? Last week, I wrote about the newspaper industry’s “money hole,” attributing it to too much samethink and too little step-out-from-the-crowd innovation — innovation in this case including adapting others’ good ideas, not necessarily inventing whole new ones. That’s what Politico has done, from its newsletter model to its Pro pricing. As VandeHei acknowledges: “We didn’t invent anything here.”

In our recovering economy, companies that have a sense of (and confidence in) the future express that by investing in innovation. We’ve seen a few of those investments — but mainly by venture capitalists intending to cash out well short of Politico’s 25-year timeframe. Politico’s expansion shouldn’t be a rarity, but in 2015, it is.

News outlets are scrambling to cover the latest developments in the Ebola outbreak with reporting that can provide background on the spread — and any potential risks — of the disease. It’s a balancing act, made more difficult by the worry and fear that surrounds the potentially deadly virus. When Fox News’ Shepard Smith is telling viewers “do not listen to the hysterical voices on the radio and the television or read the fear-provoking words online,” it’s possible there’s a misinformation problem.

That’s why Lara Setrakian launched Ebola Deeply, the latest entry in her pop-up news business, designed to collect the most recent news and provide context in the coverage of the disease. “There’s a lot of reporting, but the space could use coherence, and that’s what we hope to provide,” said Setrakian, founder of parent News Deeply. “We’re not really here to replace anything — we’re here to support the ecosystem.”

This is the second site in the Deeply family, following Syria Deeply, launched in 2012 to deliver news focused entirely on the conflict within the country. The idea behind the Deeply franchise is explanation through simplification — cut out the clutter of a general news site and the noise and repetition of social media to find the best resources on an issue. That single-topic focus also comes with a kind of built-in expiration as the sites are only meant to last as long as a story or subject remains relevant. “We’re ready to retire the site when the crisis is over, and that’s a good thing,” Setrakian said. “We need dedicated coverage of flashpoints, if they are six months or six years.”

Ebola Deeply follows the blueprint (and design) of Syria Deeply through a mix of aggregation and original reporting, with analysis from experts and locals. The site also has a handful of media partners like the Associated Press, which is sharing wire stories with Ebola Deeply. Similar to Syria Deeply, Setrakian said they want to build an audience for the new site through social media as well as content distribution agreements. For example, Syria Deeply provided a news feed of stories for ABC News and the Christian Science Monitor.

The team behind Ebola Deeply includes foreign correspondents with experience covering Africa, data scientists, and software developers. Most important, says Setrakian, the site is using a handful of journalists in affected countries, including Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia. It’s similar to the network of local writers who reported for Syria Deeply, but Setrakian said they’re making sure contributors stay up to date on the latest safety precautions.

Jon Gosier, the founder of information analysis company D8A, is collaborating with Setrakian on Ebola Deeply to help increase access to information in and outside of Africa. The founder of Appfrica and a former director of Swift River at Ushahidi, Gosier said over email his biggest goal is making sure reliable public health information reaches people.

“For me the equation is simple, misinformation is causing hysteria in Western nations and hysteria leads to mistakes (as was recently the case in Texas), which in some cases leads to the loss of life. In Africa fear, mistrust, and misunderstandings are leading to a similar outcome (with much greater consequence),” he said.

Gosier is also a former Knight News Challenge winner for his work on projects like Abayima, which aimed to make it easier to share information through simple modifications to feature phones. As part of Ebola Deeply, they plan to set up a mobile network to deliver news on Ebola and other public health information to people in West Africa. Gosier told me he envisions the network working both ways; people on the ground will also be able to share first-hand updates on the response to the disease. That way, the site has the potential to have an affect on the real world on top of being a single-focus news provider, he said.

According to the World Health Organization, more than 4,400 people have died from Ebola worldwide. The disease has been largely concentrated in West Africa, though cases have been reported in Europe and now the United States. As cases pop up around the globe, it increases the need for clear and concise information, Setrakian said. “Someone has to offer coherence amid the noise,” she said. “Are we the only ones that can do it? No. But we feel it’s needed.”

Browsing Ebola Deeply gives users a glance at the latest stories being reported on the virus, a map showing the spread of reported cases around the world, and a series of background pieces on everything from the history of Ebola to the science behind treatment. Similar to the coverage of Syria, Setrakian said reporting on Ebola can lead to distortions and hype in the face of facts or analysis. “Just because there’s a lot of reporting doesn’t mean it’s easy to digest,” she said.

Setrakian financed the launch of the site through revenue News Deeply has raised by developing white-label sites for places like the World Economic Forum and the Global Ocean Commission. Syria Deeply was sponsored by foundation funding and digital design services.

Bringing the Ebola site online in time to cover the spread of the disease meant putting plans for Arctic Deeply, a site focusing on climate change and the melting ice caps, on the back burner. But Setrakian says they have several events and workshop discussions on climate issues planned for this fall that will help segue into a planned launch of Arctic Deeply next year.

In theory, Ebola Deeply could be rolled up and closed for business by the time its Arctic counterpart launches. But that will depend on how health officials around the world contain and treat the disease, which the WHO recently predicted could reach 10,000 new cases per week by December.

When the lifespan of your news site is tied to the news cycle, you have to be prepared for both the short and long game. A good example? Syria Deeply is now almost two years old. But Setrakian, who researched single-serving news sites at Columbia’s Tow Center, said topic-sites are a way for media company to think strategically about their coverage and how they serve the needs of the audience.

“By allowing for things to live for six months or four months — or a hurricane season — and allowing for pop-up news pages to exist and retire, it opens up a whole new realm of what we can do,” she said.

Two of those features prominently in many of the updates: increased functionality in Notification Center, which allows for widgets (a long-time feature on Android) and more interactive push notifications, and Handoff, part of Apple’s new Continuity feature that lets users start an action on one Apple device and finish it on another. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, today released a revamped iPad app that emphasizes those functionalities.

Here’s a partial list of outlets that have already made their apps iOS 8-enhanced and the features that they’ve included.

The Guardian

The Guardian’s newly released iOS 8-compatible app includes Handoff integration to let stories move from device to device. The app’s layout has been tweaked and images are now viewable in fullscreen.

The Guardian also utilizes the new widgets in Notification Center. The default setting in the widget is to show a short list of The Guardian’s top stories, but users are also able to personalize the widget to show the top stories from any of the Guardian’s other verticals — from opinion to tech to soccer. If you choose to personalize the widget, it’ll also include a button that takes you to the top stories in the app. (If you stay with top stories, that button just takes you to more headlines.)

The New York Times

In addition to updating its main Times and NYT Now apps with Handoff, widgets, and interactive notifications, the Times also released a new cooking iPad app that includes more than 16,000 recipes from the Times’ archive. The Times launched its cooking site in beta in May, but it’s being fully rolled out this week with the release of the app and a responsive web version for desktop and other mobile devices that’s also open to all users.

“With the introduction of this product and the anticipated rebrand of our Dining section front to Food later this fall, readers will see even more cooking, restaurant, food and wine & spirits content from The New York Times, delivered in a convenient package across platforms,” Times food editor Sam Sifton said in a press release.

Hey, iPadders, the #NYTCooking app is live for you: http://t.co/gnvt4BQNcM.

— Sam Sifton (@SamSifton) September 17, 2014

The app includes a thorough search feature that lets users search by ingredient as well as by keywords like “easy” or “vegetarian.” It’s multimedia-heavy and includes videos that can teach cooking basics. Users can also curate their own recipe box to save favorite dishes or recipes they’d like to try out.

The app also takes advantage of the widget feature in iOS 8 and will send users a daily Recipe of the Day.

Breaking News

In addition to interactive notifications and a widget in Notification Center, the Breaking News app has added a “nearby” section to the app to show users news that’s happening near wherever their phone is located. The distance is customizable — you can go from a 1 mile radius to a 100-mile radius.

The function builds on a feature that Breaking News released in June that sent users push alerts, called proximity alerts, for news that’s breaking near them. With that feature, users passively received news alerts on events near their location, but in the new version of the app users can actively seek out local news.

ABC News

ABC is taking advantage of the new interactive notifications. A new feature in its iPhone app lets users swipe a push notification from the lock screen to share the alert. The app also added a follow button to notifications to let users get continuing alerts on a certain news topic.

These additions are iterative updates to a larger overhaul ABC News introduced last month. The new app better integrates live video and lets users personalize news alerts to be delivered to an inbox in the app.

The Associated Press

Most of the changes to the iOS 8-version of the AP’s iPhone app are “backend changes that should make the app perform better than ever,” Michael Boord, the AP’s director of mobile products said in a company Q&A. But there are a few minor additions to the app that users will notice, like a Big Stories section on the app’s homepage that has collections of stories on major news events. Buttons to share to social media are also more prominent in the new app.

But the Journal has more than 80 institutional Twitter accounts, and only the main Journal Twitter brands, like @WSJ or @WSJD, are run manually by the editors. The rest are mostly automated, a feed of headlines.

NPR is only the latest news organization to find that tweets written by humans generally see better engagement than regurgitated headlines. But many news organizations struggle with the return-on-investment question — is the extra engagement worth the extra effort?

We asked seven large news outlets — ABC News, the Associated Press, CNN, NBC News, The New York Times, USA Today, and the Journal — to share how they deal with the human-vs.-bot divide. These are obviously large outlets with significant resources, so what works for them isn’t guaranteed to work for smaller shops. But here’s what they told us, very lightly edited.

Associated Press

Eric Carvin, AP social media editor:

By most measures — including clicks, retweets, favorites, and responses — handwritten tweets outperform autotweets. But there are some not-insignificant areas where autotweets win: speed, reliability, and lesser time invested by staff. We aim to have a balance of the two that gives us the benefits of both; it allows us to be both timely and engaging, while still being able to spend time on additional newsroom priorities.

USA Today

Mary Nahorniak, USA Today social media editor:

The Wall Street Journal

Allison Lichter, Wall Street Journal social media editor

ABC News

Micah Grimes, ABC News social media editor: