Strengthening communities and strengthening journalism

When I started as the executive editor of two Gannett newspapers in Wisconsin, I said that my strategy was about building a community platform, and I think that Jim Brady, founder of Billy Penn, a mobile, Millennially-focused news site in Philadelphia, has explained why he and I are bullish on this kind of strategy. The former editor-in-chief of Digital First Media and former executive editor of washingtonpost.com explained the thinking behind Billy Penn in an interview with StreetFight:

From our conversations with younger news consumers, it’s clear to me that there’s a hearty appetite for a news operation that uses traditional reporting as a springboard to strengthen communities. Not one that necessarily promotes a particular agenda, but one that connects people who are interested in similar topics or issues and tries to drive solutions to those problems rather than just stopping at reporting.

My experience has been that it is not just Millennials who are hungry for engagement, community and solutions. Yes, our communities want traditional reporting, but they want us to go beyond simply pointing out problems. They are also looking for us to help them identify and evaluate solutions. It is not a paternalistic strategy that aims to tell our communities what to do, but works to engage them in a process to help bring more people together to address issues.

I’ll give you a couple of examples. At one of my papers, we recently tackled the growing local drug problem with a solutions-oriented series. A story about a local nurse who ended up abusing drugs has been shared on Facebook 476 times, which is huge for us. The series had such an impact that we had people emailing us, asking to be put in touch with the community groups taking part in our series so they could ask to help. A local radio station owner is collaborating with us to address the problem. We touched a nerve, and the community responded. And they want more from us than simple reporting. As Jim says, our readers want us to help provide a springboard for solutions.

Another issue that we are facing in the communities that we cover in northeastern Wisconsin is the so-called skills gap. Our employers have more job openings than qualified workers. In Sheboygan County Wisconsin, we have 4.0 percent unemployment (September 2014), which is within spitting distance of the 3.6 percent it was in October 2006 before the recession. The local economic development corporation recently had a campaign to try to lure young people visiting home for Thanksgiving back to the area, complete with a list of entry-level positions with starting salaries above $30,000. Our employers are concerned about the coming demographic cliff as Baby Boomers retire. One local employer told me that over the next five years, they could lose up to 35 percent of their workforce to retirement. So employers are supporting internships and apprenticeships as well as training for their workers to get the workers they need.

Traditionally, we would have written a few stories, possibly a week-long series, to address this issue. But this is a huge problem, so we’ve dedicated nine months to a major campaign. And we’re looking to do non-traditional things such as crowd-fund scholarships and hold jobs fairs. Our local businesses, including major multi-national companies headquartered here, have embraced our months-long workforce development campaign called State of Opportunity. We’re working to let people in our communities know about incredible job opportunities, and we’re thinking about ways to reach beyond the state.

As Jim says, we don’t have a political agenda, we simply want to help our communities help themselves. This is exciting stuff. It’s not your father’s local newspaper, but rather something new, exciting and vital.

Fall in love with the story, not the storytelling technique

It is great to see a new era of digital storytelling innovation and experimentation, and it isn’t just one form of storytelling but several.

  • Social media has become an important way to engage audiences around content, and social tools also give reporters an excellent way to report stories in real-time.
  • Data journalism has expanded dramatically over the last decade. We have data APIs, data visualisations and new forms of data-driven interactives. At the same time, data journalism has become more accessible with tools like Google Spreadsheets and Fusion Tables, Datawrapper and Tableau Public, just to name a few.
  • New forms of video journalism mixed with animation and data visualisations, what the BBC has called visual journalism. One of my favourite examples of this kind of journalism was the New Yorks series of animated data stories around the 2012 London Olympics, such as this one comparing Usain Bolt to other runners.
  • Of course, we also have a lot of experimentation in new styles of long-form journalism, with the New York Times’ Snowfall spawning a huge range of experimentation and excitement amongst journalists.

The biggest challenge for most media organisations is to choose the right technique for the story. Large organisations are deploying all of these techniques, but even large organisations need to prioritise their resources. For smaller newsrooms, the demands of digital often seem overwhelming and prioritisation is essential, especially as they work heard with smaller staffs to feed the goat.

To prioritise, news organisations need key members of editorial management who can choose the right technique for the story. Social media can be used to engage readers around most stories, but not all stories arise out of the conversations audiences are having. Long-form journalism only works for certain kinds of stories, and for news organisations to invest the amount of time and resource to do these, they also need to know that the story will resonate with audiences.

For me this all comes down to something that John Waters recently said on NPR as he was promoting a new book about a cross-country hitchhiking adventure he took. He said:

If I never make another movie, I’m fine. I’ll write another book, I’ll do another spoken tour, you know. I have many ways to tell stories that I like equally the same.

Fall in the love with the story not the storytelling technique. The best thing you can do for the story you love is to tell it in the way it was meant to be told. That will give the best chance that it will be read, viewed, shared, discussed and interacted with by audiences.

Interrogating journalism: Asking how audiences are informed in the 21st Century

As journalists, we know how important it is to ask the right question in an interview. As we try to grapple with the disruptive forces that have been eroding the audience for print journalism, asking the right questions has never been more important. The questions, and the way that we frame the challenges that our industry faces, will determine whether many of our news organisations will survive. I was reminded of this when reading an incredibly insightful post by George Brock, a friend and the Head of Journalism at City University London. George took the recent report on innovation that the New York Times carried out and framed the challenge as much more fundamental than the authors of the report did.

The overwhelming impression given by the young guns of the NYT is that they don’t want to ask any question which might pose existential questions for their own institution. How do people learn about the world now? How does information really move and why? How do we use these flows to tell people what we think they should know? Does “journalism” have a role in this?

George is spot on. The questions have to be this probing.

Most legacy organisations understand that they need to change, to innovate, to do things that they currently aren’t do. However, what the New York Times report points to is that it is very difficult for traditional news organisations to get away from what they have traditionally done. Culture is fundamental to The Times, and it binds its staff together. However, culture can also bind news organisations to their past. The Times’ report talks about how dominant Page 1 thinking still is.

I have seen so many reports over the years that start down the innovation road, but they somehow get stuck in the gravity well of their own massive sense of the value of what they currently do and often how they currently do it. They cannot reach escape velocity to explore the new frontiers of how people are being informed in the 21st Century.

As Clay Christensen says, the jobs that our audiences need doing don’t change, but how they do those jobs does. What jobs are our audiences trying to get done, and how do we compete in doing those jobs?

George is asking an important question. Journalism has played a key role in informing people, but is journalism as we have practiced it the way that most people are now informed? If the question is no, what is the future for news organisations?

Rebuilding journalism through building a community platform

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Last year, as my job search started to lead back to newspapers and back to community journalism, I started to think about the challenge and how I might meet it. When I wrote that blog post, I got a bit of pushback on Twitter about how stretched local newsrooms are. I knew that then, and now, I live that challenge. I wrote then:

After years of declining readership and revenues that have led to savage cuts, to say that local journalists are stretched thin is an understatement. They are stretched to breaking point.

Newspapers need to fight for new audiences and new revenue, and they must do that without new resources. As I said in my blog post last year:

When the cuts started, the talk was about ‘doing more with less’. It was about finding efficiencies and cutting out the duplication of effort, but after years of cuts, newsrooms now find themselves able to do less with much less. Editors have had to become a lot more creative on how they work with the staff they have left, with other resources if they are in a group, and with their communities.

When I landed in my new job as executive editor of two newspapers in Wisconsin, I had to prioritise what I would do, and to be honest, I didn’t think I would really be able to start my community platform strategy for months, possibly not until the autumn. But then my communities surprised me. Many people I met said they wanted more from the newspaper. I was honest with them and told them that they wanted the same thing I wanted, a vibrant newspaper. To achieve that, I told them I would need their help, and I was concrete on how they could help.

Since I started marrying social media and journalism way back in 2000, I have continually been surprised by how people and communities engage when you give them a specific thing to do. My communities have really responded, especially the schools.

As a new editor and very much new to my communities, I have made a point to meet leaders in my communities. As I met school leaders, they were very enthusiastic about the partnership that I wanted to create with them. I wanted to give students an opportunity to be heard in the newspaper, and I also wanted to give school leaders the opportunity to take their message directly to readers beyond a quote in a story. Yes, our reporters would report and write stories to put these contributions from students, teachers and school leaders in context, but we also had room to give people in our communities space to share their expertise and opinions.

I have to admit that the stars really aligned on this project. The head of a charter school in Sheboygan suggested that we do something about technology in education, due to a switchover from iPads to Chromebooks at high schools. My reporters were already working on a number of stories about new technology initiatives in local schools, and I had already arranged to visit some high school journalism and creative writing classes. This came together much faster than I had anticipated.

Across both of the newspapers, school administrators, college presidents, teachers, college faculty and students have contributed some 30 articles. What the students have written has exceeded all of my expectations – articulate, passionate and authentic. For instance, the social media editor of the high school news site at Sheboygan North wrote about how she tried to give up social media for Lent. We had another article in which students voiced their opinions about having their mobile phones seized by teachers. From the local charter high school, we had two passionate pieces arguing the pros and cons of technology in education.

More than that, my education reporters uncovered leads for future stories during the process, and I’m working hard to free up time for them to manage these partnerships directly.

This has been such a positive start that we’re now exploring other ways that we can partner with the community. Sheboygan is a real foodie city, with lots of local food traditions plus some stunning high end restaurants in downtown Sheboygan and at the resorts in Kohler. We’ll be launching a digital food hub with a blog and video series in the summer. We are also looking to launch a Community Champions discussion series in which we will give passionate advocates of our communities space to discuss how we help them achieve their full potential.

As I said when I started, I wanted our newspapers to be at the centre of the conversations in our communities, and with the momentum building around our community platform, we’re well on our way.

Journalism: Mining niches to support the mission

Jay Rosen ties together some of the trends happening right now in digital journalism, such as the launch of deep dive digital news sites. These sites are heading 180 degrees in the opposite direction of the generalist bundles like the newspaper and news channels.

When people entirely new to it ask me what’s the best way to get going in journalism — if you are starting as an outsider, with no credentials or experience — I always give the same advice, and I know other people give this advice too. It’s obvious enough. Start a niche news service on a subject some people care a lot about.

Niches can definitely be a winning strategy. In many ways, niche sites focused on revenue rich verticals have been working for much of the past decade – tech, sports, food, fashion. I think there are opportunities for traditional news organisations to build these types of verticals into a revenue stream rich enough to create a new form of support for public service journalism. This is part of my current strategy, looking for these verticals.

However, I want to add a caveat to Jay’s post, or amplify a caveat in his post. He writes:

These are a few of the simple virtues and basic lessons that a good niche blogger acquires by building a service from scratch. You don’t need permission to do it. Initial investment: less than $1000 for design, hosting. It’s a free country, a free press. And at first, you will probably be doing it for free.

I used to think that the radically lower cost of digital media would help traditional news organisations and indeed individual journalists outrun disruption. I was wrong. Cutting costs was part of the disruption not a strategy to survive it. The lower costs mean that there are lower barriers to entry to new competitors. To create a sustainable business in digital media, you don’t simply need to be cheap. You don’t simply need to grow your audience quickly. You also need to know from day one what your revenue strategy will be. If you don’t want to be doing your journalism for free forever, you need both an editorial plan and a business plan.

Digital disruption: Bigger audiences but lower revenues

This is the paradox of journalism in the digital age: Journalism organisations reach more people than was ever possible in the analogue age, but those larger audiences have not translated into higher revenues. Some of this has been almost constant pressure of digital ad revenues since the beginning of the financial crisis, driven by an oversupply of ad space. Digital media offer a dizzying array of choices for consumers and advertisers.

From the standpoint of journalism, like all industries facing the Innovator’s Dilemma, we scoffed at scrappy upstarts but not only editorial ones but more importantly commercial competitors for ad revenue that we didn’t even see as being in our business.

For an interesting view of this, take a look at this piece from The Conversation in Australia, a site that publishes comment on current issues by academics in Oz and the UK. Franco Papandrea writes:

The industry clearly underestimated the threat posed by the development of online competition. Although several newspapers moved early to establish an online presence, the initiatives were largely pursued to complement traditional activities rather than strategic actions to reposition their operations and bolster their competitiveness in the rapidly changing environment.

More recently, once the magnitude of the threat became evident, newspapers have scrambled to restructure in an effort to contain its impact. Their efforts so far have been concentrated in two broad areas: restructuring of publishing operations to re-align production costs with lower revenues; and seeking to convert their online readerships to earnings.

The increasing range of news and advertising services accessible on the internet is changing the relative comparative advantages of established media. The adjustment process is having a significant impact on established structures. The impact on newspapers has had both positive and negative implications.

He says we shouldn’t write off the incumbents, and he’s right. But in an age of disruption, incumbents strengths can quickly become their Achille’s heel as the market shifts.

Too much ‘I’, too little team thinking at legacy media for innovation?

It’s not news that digital technology is driving rapidly changing consumer behaviour, and while it took some time for that shift to affect the economics of the media, the disruption is now in full swing. While the metered paywall has given a number of legacy media companies breathing room, to use the bump in reader revenue as a base to build on rather than a temporary reprieve from the dust heap of history will take focused, innovative thinking.

I’ve been involved in journalism innovation since 1996, when I took my first job as an internet news editor. I’ve held pioneering positions at major news organisations such as the BBC and The Guardian. Both of those organisations can be innovative in ways that have proven difficult for other media organisations because they aren’t purely commercial. How do other news organisations keep pace with their audience and just as importantly create new revenue opportunities?

Charles Warner, part of the Forbes network teaches Media Management Program at The New School, was recently asked how to drive innovation at an “old-line media company, and he thinks it is down to the individualistic culture at legacy media organisations.

Finally, success in legacy media companies (newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio) is driven by individual success – stardom – not by collaborative team success. The internecine, hand-to-hand combat inside legacy media companies is about who gets the credit for a hit or success, not about innovation or team success.

I’ve seen this first hand, and I used to say to colleagues, “Our real competition isn’t down the hall but across town” at one of the other newspapers, broadcasters or now one of the digital news and media startups.

This isn’t unique to media companies. Office politics is pretty universal. One of the benefits of having done consulting both inside and outside the media industry is that I have realised that positive corporate culture is rare and needs a lot of work. In media, you’ve got a lot of creative people, and journalism is populated with professional sceptics who question everything, including management’s latest change strategy.

However, that doesn’t excuse just how frankly, effed up the culture is at a lot of news and media companies. In the past, when owning a media company was a licence to mint money, we could afford these poisonous, dysfunctional cultures. We can’t anymore, and besides, it’s a lot more satisfying to succeed as a team than fight amongst ourselves on the decks of sinking ships.

Advertising innovation is key to digital transformation at news organisations

When I heard that Canada’s La Presse had spent three years and $40m building its iPad app, my jaw dropped. It is one of the most expensive content development projects I have heard of, and my personal view is that such exorbitant development costs don’t make sense in the digital era. Of course, then I heard that La Presse wasn’t charging for its app or for the content, and I really couldn’t believe that this was a sane strategy.

I was not alone. Steve Faguy, a freelance journalist in Montreal, had much the same thoughts. However, Faguy landed an interview with Guy Crevier, the publisher of La Presse, about the project, and Crevier says that there is a method to their madness, a method which will very soon be tested.

Crevier says that he is very sceptical about the success of paid content strategies and believes that only a few large US and European papers with a vast offering of exclusive content, especially business content, will make paid content strategies work. Faguy quotes Crevier as comparing digital paid content to cancer treatments that merely delay the inevitable. This has led many newspapers to cut staff, which leads to a downward spiral of lower quality and lower readership.

Crevier also puts the $40m development costs in context:

“How much do you think it would cost me tomorrow morning to replace La Presse’s printing presses? It would cost me between $150 million and $200 million. And when I build a plant to print La Presse, I’m limited to 250,000 to 300,000 (copies) maximum. What does this money bring in future obligations? It brings me expenses of $100 million a year in paper, ink, trucks.”

Ok, that’s all fair enough for $40m is far cheaper than $300m. But how will the app generate enough revenue to pay for a staff of 200-plus journalists if the app and content are both free? The answer is premium ads. The app was designed to include special ad slots that La Presse hope they will be able to charge $16,000 for. In Faguy’s original critique of La Presse’s strategy, he highlighted a Radio Canada report that points out that this is much higher than other digital advertising in the Canadian market, and that the app doesn’t use standard digital ad formats so advertisers will need to do custom work to advertise in the app.

Raju Narisetti, Senior Vice President and Deputy Head of Strategy for the new News Corp, sounded a sceptical note on Twitter.

It is a bet-the-farm strategy, and one that requires that the app be a runaway success. I have to applaud La Presse in putting some thought and innovative effort into their future ad strategy. But will the audience be big enough and engagement be high enough to entice advertisers to pay the premium? We will have to see, but it will be a fascinating experiment.

La Presse’s experiment is just one of many now being run by different organisations, and this innovation, whether it is Buzzfeed’s native advertising play or Quartz’s novel in-stream advertising, is not only a good thing but an essential thing for the industry. Frédéric Filloux has an in-depth look at Quartz’s business/advertising model: it’s novel approach is bolstered by being in The Atlantic stable of print and digital publications, but the site has been able to attract very high value advertising. Filloux writes:

A year ago, the site started with four brands: Chevron, Boeing, Credit Suisse and Cadillac. Today, Quartz has more twenty advertisers from the same league. Unlike other multi-page websites, its one-scroll structure not only proposes a single format, but also re-creates scarcity.

The limited number of ad slots may create a cap for growth, but as he points out, Quartz is powering towards its break-even point ahead of schedule.

I’m a journalist, and I am thrilled to see a level of commercial innovation that we haven’t seen since the late 90s. I don’t think it will address all of the issues that journalism faces in the attention economy, but at least we’re starting to fight the good fight.

FT’s digital shift attempts to answer question: What does a newspaper do in the digital age?

The Financial Times has just announced a major shift that will see it move to single global print edition, deadlines driven by peak web viewing times and print stories that focus on context and added value of major stories of the day, according to The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade.

Roy said it appeared “to be the penultimate step towards becoming a digital-only publication”, and he quoted FT editor Lionel Barber as saying in a memo to staff:

The 1970s-style newspaper publishing process – making incremental changes to multiple editions through the night is dead. In future, our print product will derive from the web offering – not vice versa.

And Barber added:

journalists will publish stories to meet peak viewing times on the web rather than old print deadlines.

That doesn’t mean that the newspaper will be neglected or de-emphasised. Instead, it is a simple recognition that the format has to change to meet the needs of readers in a digital era. The paper will create pages that add context and value by helping make sense of “the most important issues of the day”.

Most newspaper organisations have not had the confidence to rethink print. They have focused their efforts on transforming digitally while doing little to change the print model. One leader, Clark Gilbert, president and CEO of Deseret News Publishing Co and Deseret Digital Media in the US, has been the leading proponent of a dual transformation that sees major changes at the ‘legacy’ print and broadcasting business as well as the creation of a new ‘disruptive’ digital business.

Between 2007 and 2010, the Deseret News saw their display advertising drop by 30 percent and their classified ad revenue collapse by 70 percent. Gilbert changes after joining the company in 2009 have stopped the death spiral. Digital revenue has grown by an average of 44 percent since 2010, but more than that, he grew print circulation, growing weekday circulation from 69,519 in 2011 to 91,638 in 2012 and Sunday circulation from 93,658 to 176,096, according to the Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project. On Sundays, the company has begun to print a national edition.

This print transformation has been almost entirely overlooked by the industry. The newspaper industry in the US has lost $40bn in revenue since 2007, but it hasn’t rethought newspapers, says US journalism revolutionary Clark Gilbert. At the International Symposium of Online Journalism in Austin in April, he said:

In a post-disruptive world, why would anyone pick up a paper at all? There are answers for that, but if an organisation is not asking that question, there is no future for that organisation.

This question of the place of a newspaper in a digital world needs to be asked and answered by more industry leaders. To answer this question, Gilbert follows the advice of his former Harvard Business School colleague, Clayton Christensen, author of the Innovator’s Dilemma. In the Innovator’s Dilemma, Christensen says that people have jobs that they want to do, and those jobs remain constant. What changes is how people do those jobs.

Like the FT, Gilbert believes that the newspaper of the future will have much more context and perspective. This isn’t opinion as much as it is analysis, content that makes sense of and explains events and information. This is content that relies on expertise and insight and moves the newspaper up the value chain; it will still be fresh the next morning after people know the breaking news from broadcast, digital and social media.

Print needs to change, and it is great to see that visionary leaders in the industry have the confidence to meet this challenge.

NPR head of apps: Mobile media doesn’t mean on the move anymore

In the UK, nearly half of the population uses a smartphone – that’s 60 percent of all mobile phone users – according to data from eMarketer. In the US, two-thirds of mobile users access the internet on their phones, according to a recent Pew poll, and mobile has nearly doubled the amount of time spent online. Across large parts of Africa and South Asia, the mobile phone is the only way that many people access the internet, according to research from browser maker Opera.

Research in the US from comScore and Jumptap showed that while mobile has doubled time spent online, in the sport and general news categories, 62 percent of time is still on desktop or laptop computers with 31 percent on tablet and only 7 percent on mobile. Josh Benton at Nieman Lab said:

The high desktop/laptop number makes sense — an awful lot of online news is consumed by deskbound office workers — but the tablet share has to be disappointing to all the news execs who bet the iPad would revive their business models.

This is why some news leaders, such as Digital First Media’s Steve Buttry, have long been arguing for a mobile first strategy. In 2009, Buttry said:

News organizations are belatedly, reluctantly and often awkwardly pursuing “web-first” strategies. As we fight these web battles, I am increasingly coming to believe that “web first” is what the military would call fighting the last war. News organizations need a mobile-first strategy.

The digital world never stops moving, and Steve, who I count as a friend, is right. We need to keep pace with the rapid shift in consumer preference.

IJNet has a great overview of a talk that NPR news app editor Brian Boyer gave about ‘mobile first’ at a recent Hacks/Hackers events in Buenos Aires.

Since the iPhone, people expect the internet to just work on their mobile devices, and Boyer believes that it is his job to make sure that their apps work for their audience. That makes sense, but catering to mobile users isn’t just about user experience, although that it is important.

Mobile first is more than making sure your content fits the smaller screen of a smartphone, but just as importantly, the strategy is more than being mobile, being on the move. As Jessica Weiss pointed out in IJNet:

According to Business Insider, 77 percent of people in the U.S. use mobile phones while lying in bed, 70 percent while watching TV, 65 percent while waiting and 41 percent in the bathroom.

Boyer said that mobile news is about filling the “cracks in the day”, the “in between moments” people have. That might be “before they go to work, while they are commuting or ‘in bed after children are asleep”.

A number of sites are now seeing an evening mini-spike in traffic as people take their tablets to bed. How are we serving those consumers? How many news organisations are developing evening tablet editions for these consumers? Would this be an attractive edition that would add subscribers to a bundled print-digital paid content strategy? How can news organisations use mobile notifications more effectively? There is a lot of opportunity here, and news organisations need to be prepared to move quickly with this rapidly changing market.