Yearly Archives: 2014

05.15.14
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To serve your audience, stop feeding the goat

To transform, local news operations will have to fundamentally rethink what they do and what they stop doing. We know that we have to attract new audiences, deliver new services and find new ways to earn revenue to support this transformation. However, it is easy to feel like we’re drowning on a daily basis feeding the beast, or as the authors of a report from the Reporters’ Lab at Duke University put it, feeding the goat.

Nieman Lab summarised the report that looked at why local news operations weren’t innovating. The report found that local newsrooms felt that they had little time or resources “to try experimental reporting methods — especially data journalism”.

How to find time to innovate?

The local newsrooms that have made smart use of digital tools have leaders who are willing to make difficult trade-offs in their coverage. They prioritize stories that reveal the meaning and implications of the news over an overwhelming focus on chasing incremental developments. They also think of the work they can do with digital tools as ways to tell untold stories — not “bells and whistles.”

Amen. As my friend Adam Tinworth said in response to my recent post about building a community platform, it’s not about doing more with less but actually doing different things.

I am finding time to innovate because I am building partnerships with local institutions to add context and depth to our coverage. We aren’t just aggregating content, but more importantly, we are aggregating authentic voices in our communities. We are thinking about coverage thematically rather than focusing on incremental stories and engaging our communities in that coverage. Thematic series allow us to weave a deeper narrative that builds loyal audiences.

We will build this loyalty through a mix of technology and real engagement that goes far beyond simply sharing our stories through social media. The community platform strategy is about building a deeper relationship with our communities. We’ve taken the first step, and over the coming months, we will be doing much more not just at the two papers where I’m executive editor but at the 10 papers in the Gannett Wisconsin network.

In the coming months, I want to accelerate the changes I’m making, but to do that, I will have to think hard about what we stop doing. We simply do not have the resources to cover everything that we have in the past in the way that we did it in the past. We will cover how the local council is buying properties and selling them to developers who will add more apartments downtown for young professionals. However, I will do that in part by engaging young professionals to write, rather than simply having my staff write more stories.

Doing new things feels exciting, but the less exciting, more risky and yet absolutely essential thing I have to decide is what we stop doing. I don’t want to simply cut back, but to free up resources to do new things, I have to figure out what we stop doing. So far, the audience is responding to what we’re adding rather than noticing the things that we have scaled back on. Long may it continue, and I think it will because what we are doing feels like it has more impact, more depth so people are focusing on that rather than what we’re no doing anymore. I am also using technology to smartly import local events calendars from public institutions and then automatically reverse publishing into print with as little production as possible. More on that later.

I’ve got a meeting with my two news editors coming up where we talk about what we stop doing, what we can outsource to machines and what we do to partner with our communities.

I don’t have all of the answers. If you’re an editor, what are you deciding to stop doing? And just as importantly, what is that allowing you to do that you couldn’t before? I’d love to hear your ideas.

04.29.14
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Rebuilding journalism through building a community platform

Shebpressteched

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.

03.27.14
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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.

03.20.14
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Paid content, data and knowing your audience

I remember back in the day a number of news websites, the New York Times and the Washington Post included, added registration to their sites. It was long before commenting was common, but the strategy was all about capturing some information, some data, to know more about their audiences.

The Financial Times understands this, which is one of the reasons that it is killing it, and the FT’s CEO John Ridding explains to Poynter how their paid content strategy has helped them capture more data and how that data is helping them deliver more to their audiences.

I don’t think we really understood the power of the data and the audience understanding that came with the subscription model. We’ve been able to build a system of understanding our readers.

They do now, and it is allowing them to add new features that adds value for their readers. If you add value for readers, then they understand the value of paying for content. For traditional media, as my friend Steve Yelvington says, we need to find new ways to add value, and data from subscription services is a powerful way to do that.

03.17.14
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Russian journalism students, the FSB and a warm First Amendment welcome

The First Amendent at the Manitowoc Herald-Times-Reporter
I’ve left some of the details purposefully vague for reasons that I hope are obvious.

A couple of years ago, I was in Russia working with a newspaper for the Media Development Investment Fund. While there, the publisher of the newspaper asked me to speak to her daughter’s university journalism class. I love talking to students about journalism so I quickly said yes.

A few hours before I was supposed to speak, the publisher took a phone call. Russians have this singular ability to express displeasure without needing words: “Rrooohhh, wwrrrooohhh, wwrrooohhh,” was all I heard her say in her husky alto.

She got off the phone and had a quick chat with my Russian colleague, who then turned to me and said, “The FSB has noticed you are here.” The FSB is the Russian Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB. The students had been talking about me on vKontakte, one of Russia’s most popular social networks, and the FSB had noticed and called the dean of the journalism school. My colleague continued, “They say, ‘Who is this Guardian guy? Why you no tell us?'”

My colleague tried to calm me and told me not to worry. “Don’t worry. Last time Danish guy only detained for two days,” she said. I wasn’t comforted. I didn’t really care about being detained, well much, but it was Suw’s mother’s 70th birthday party the following Sunday, the day after I was due home, and I was more worried about missing that than the FSB, which I was pretty sure wouldn’t really care that much about me. However, in an abundance of caution, I let Suw know what was happening, and told her to put the American embassy in Moscow on speed dial.

The publisher made a phone call to someone she thought had connections to the FSB, someone who could smooth things over. It must have worked because a few hours later, I was at the university speaking to a packed room of students in the international journalism programme.

I gave the presentation that I had intended to give about the changing world of journalism and the opportunities open for young journalists, and then I opened up the floor to questions. A few questions in, one student asked, “If you had to choose between writing a story critical of the government and going to jail, which would you choose?”

I quickly scanned the room, with the tune “One of these things does not belong” going through my head. Was there an FSB agent lurking somewhere in the shadows? No one jumped out, literally or figuratively, but I still took a moment to carefully think over what I was about to say. I replied that, thankfully, I had never had to make that decision, and that in fact, in Britain, if you didn’t criticise the government, you would be pilloried by your peers.

Things went pretty smoothly after that, but near the end, one of the students asked, “Would you care to comment on the press situation in Russia?” I looked at my colleague before responding, “No,” with a bit of a laugh. The room, fortunately, laughed with me. The student persisted, and I relented. I collected my thoughts, and then I said, “I am an American, who has worked in the US and the UK. For the past seven years, I’ve worked mostly in the UK. I miss the First Amendment every single day.”

Which is to say that the press enjoys incredible freedom in Britain, but the First Amendment provides another level of protection, both for the press and freedom of speech. (Of course, there are the issues of the insane libel and privacy laws in the UK, but that’s not nearly as pithy.) The First Amendment not only grants journalists in the US freedoms, but it also gives us a sense of responsibility about those freedoms. I sometimes got the sense in the UK that some journalists couldn’t tell the difference between freedom of the press and a libertine press, a press devoid of any sense of principle or moral purpose. The tabloids and the mid-market Mail have an electric monk morality, being able to hold two entirely contradictory moral positions simultaneously. They wring their hands about the moral degradation of the country while simultaneously, in an act of total self-denial, basing their businesses largely on selling soft porn. I am sure tabloid hacks will call me a puritanical American, but the tabloids love to point out hypocrisy unless it involves their own activities.

As I said a few weeks back, I have come back to the US to take up an executive editor position overseeing a couple of newspapers. The picture above is from the stairs leading up to the newsroom of the Herald-Times-Reporter in Manitowoc Wisconsin, one of my two newspapers. When I saw the First Amendment written on the wall, it was a great welcome, back to the US and back into a newsroom.

02.13.14
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Gannett puts a digital guy in charge of a newsroom, me

A little more a than a year ago, I was doing data journalism and consulting for Czech TV, and Kvapilová Pavlína, the head of online at the time, said to me incredulously, “Why aren’t you in a newsroom?” It was a good question. For the last four years, I’ve had a great time working with news organisations all over the world to seize the opportunities of digital media, but I missed working in a newsroom.

I won’t miss it any longer. Today, I started my new job as the regional executive editor overseeing two Gannett-owned newspapers in Wisconsin.

I met with journalists at one of the papers, and the first question that most of them asked was why someone with my background would come to Sheboygan and Manitowoc, Wisconsin, to work with their newspapers. The decision was a mix of professional and personal reasons that I’ll be explaining over the next few days, but the key professional reason was that to get the opportunities I really want – the opportunities to drive not just digital innovation but also the editorial direction of a news organisation – I needed experience managing newsrooms.

Last October, Rick Edmonds of Poynter asked “How many top newspaper editors are from digital backgrounds? Still darn few”. Jim Brady of Digital First Media gave this explanation:

It’s more than being slow. It remains hard to find people who understand digital and who have run newsrooms.

This isn’t a criticism of Jim, who I count as a friend, but it is difficult to deny that this is one of those brilliant professional Catch-22s. You don’t have the experience so you can’t get the experience. The industry has rarely promoted newsroom leaders from the digital side. Over the past five years, I have seen more broadcast and print editors take over online leadership roles than I have digital editors take over multi-platform roles. In effect, we have had a digital ceiling. That might change for the next generation of digital leaders, but or mid-career digital journalists like myself, that’s been the reality.

I’ve been a digital journalist since 1996, and I’ve held ground-breaking positions for the BBC and The Guardian. I’ve helped launch innovative multi-platform programmes for the BBC, and Suw and I were part of the launch team for India’s Firstpost. However, up until today, I hadn’t run a newsroom. Now, I’ll be running two. Lowell Johnson, the GM for the two newsrooms, and Mike Knuth, the Executive Editor of the Green Bay Press Gazette and former executive editor and GM of the two papers, deserve a lot of credit in seeing an opportunity to bring me on board and convincing me that this was the right next step in my career.

I was inspired to make this move by friends such Brett Spencer at the BBC and Alison Gow with Trinity Mirror, who came from digital backgrounds but took on overall leadership roles in their respective media. It’s opened up great new opportunities for them, and I am thrilled by the opportunity that is before me.

After years of writing about how I think local editors should engage with their communities and about rethinking the role of the newspaper in the 21st Century, I finally get to put my ideas, and myself, to the test. I have long been hungry for this challenge.

Back to Rick Edmonds at Poynter, he wrote, “With the ice broken, I would look for Gannett, Advance and Digital First to add to that cadre as top editorial jobs come open. And I am eager to see what changes this first generation of digitally tilting editors can produce.”

Watch this space. This job will definitely keep me busy, but I’ll be writing here and elsewhere about I navigate this new phase of my career. It’s going to be a wild ride sometimes, but damn it’s going to be a lot of fun.

02.06.14
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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.

01.27.14
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Big news stories: A threat or opportunity for paid content strategies?

January was a very stormy month here in the UK. We live just outside of London, and it has been quite soggy with our local park being flooded to some extent for much of the past month. People were swept out to sea as they tried to snap photos of the fierce waves. Photos and videos flooded news websites and the social web. People love weather stories, but as we saw during the storms, they rely less on traditional media to tell and share those stories.

David Higgerson, the digital publishing director for the regional websites within Trinity Mirror, is right when he catalogues the hyper-competitive environment that local journalism, especially, but journalism in general faces in a world where cameras are everywhere and distribution via social media is lightning fast and engaging.

But imagine, just for a moment, if we’d had paywalls around our sites – be they full, pay-or-sod-off paywalls or pay-as-you-go model. What do you think would have happened? Would people, up to their ankles in water and without power be digging out their debit cards to log on via their mobiles? Would worried relatives elsewhere in the country link your website to their Paypal account to keep up to speed with your live blog?

No, of course they wouldn’t. They’d have gone to Twitter, where police forces share information by the minutes. Followed new pages on Facebook, where the Environment Agency was actively driving users when appearing on broadcast media. They could have searched Google and found any one of the traditional national newspaper brands now hoovering up any agency copy they can find. Or checked out the BBC, which is superb at cross promotion. Or discovered hyperlocal sites run for passion or for money … and never again thought twice about us.

David is right, and paywalls are not the easy solutions that most journalists dream of as much as we might wish it were so. David closes by saying, “We have the potential to create great content, we just need to find the revenue model.” That is it in a nutshell. To quote advice given to a friend about his journalism start-up: “You know you can create value. But can you capture it?”

While local newspapers have much greater competition for attention and audiences, their real challenge has been competition for revenue. At the moment, we have two business models that have had some success: High volume predominantly ad supported, and a mix of ad and reader revenue. National or formerly national newspapers with international strategies, (think The Daily Mail and The Guardian), are pursuing an advertising-based business model based on scaling their audiences aggressively. But the pure scale model really isn’t an option for local journalism. Digital advertising operates and delivers meaningful returns with millions, probably tens or hundreds of millions of uniques. Most local sites on their own don’t operate at that scale. Some groups are looking at network plays amongst their sites, like Advance’s MLive network in Michigan in the US (disclaimer, I worked for MLive in another lifetime between 1997 and 1998). However, that isn’t an option for all local groups.

That means either reader revenue or alternate revenue streams, and the latter are showing some promised. Some local news groups are trialling digital services businesses, and it was one bright area for local media in the US last year. The Dallas Morning News has bought a number of digital ad and marketing companies to help it build meaningful digital revenue. (Notable as well is that they dropped their paywall recently.) A Newspaper Association of America report showed last year showed a 91 percent increase in marketing service revenue. It’s good to see that kind of growth somewhere in the business.

Paid content models used to be a binary choice, hence the name paywall. However, paid content strategies have evolved, and I don’t simply mean moving to the metered model as opposed to the hard paywall strategies. Modern paid content strategies have grown more nimble, more flexible. During big stories like storms, news groups like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have opened up their sites. This can be a great marketing opportunity to highlight the richness of your content, even in this new media environment. Paid content strategies also should provide publishers with a richer stream of data so that they can deliver better experiences and better products both for audiences and for advertisers.

David is spot on about being clear-headed about the competitive challenges, and he is also right that the real test now is finding the revenue model for local journalism. For the revenue to come, the products will have to change as well. If we’re not competitive with social media or more to the point working with social media to provide audiences with the best verified content, then we need to step up our game. Ever the optimist, I’d like to think that there is an opportunity for local news organisations to curate and verify this local information. To me, this is about smartly staying at the centre of a new local information and conversation eco-system. The bottom line is that whether it is storms or other breaking news, we have to compete for audiences. If we can do that, I think we’ll remain relevant to audiences and advertisers.

01.24.14
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Strategy is not just for Christmas

I’ve spent a lot of my time over the last decade helping businesses to put together strategies for the use of social media, both internally for collaboration and externally for community building and marketing. I know that for some companies, my strategy was a document that they continued to refer to for literally years after we put it together. (I caught up with one ex-client three years after I delivered his strategy, and he said he and his team will still referring to it and still found it useful!)

But many strategy documents come with built-in obsolescence. If you’re not very careful, social media strategies can age fast, because of the rapidity of change within social media. But it’s not just the tools that change, it’s the demographics. Facebook is ageing, Twitter getting younger, and the 55+ demographic is growing faster online than any other. Your target audience could be shift platforms whilst you’re busy implementing a strategy that’s now out of date, and how would you know?

That being the case, I was very interested to stumble on Thomas Martin’s blog post about “agile strategy development”, in which he calls for the Agile methodology to be applied to company strategies.

Similar to software development, the complexity of strategy development is increasing. Globalisation, faster innovation cycles, stronger competition are only some of the factors that make it harder and harder to devise stable, long-lived and eventually successful strategies. Agile strategic planning addresses this by keeping the strategy fluid.

[…]

Agile strategy development shares the following characteristics with agile software development:

•  Continuous monitoring of the external environment during the Analyze activity.
•  Regular review and – as required – updating of strategic objectives and plans during the Define and Plan activities.
•  Frequent feedback from Execution on the effectiveness of the implementation.

Although Martin suggests that such an approach requires “less external input” from consultants, I’d argue that what it requires is actually a longer-term relationship with a good consultant who has a familiarity with your business but also enough distance to help you see the bigger picture.

I succeed as a consultant because I can see a company’s problems from a very different vantage point to them, not only because of my own deep experience with social media, but also because I’ve worked with so many companies that I can see common errors in thinking and execution that would otherwise be missed.

To get the best result from social media you need an informed strategy, a regular review process, and dependable advice that both ensures that you are on track whilst also bringing in a fresh perspective and valuable expertise. An agile approach to strategy makes a lot of sense to me, and it’s something companies should seriously consider. If you’re going to spend time and money on strategic thinking, it’s essential that you keep that strategy fresh, relevant and up-to-date.