Monthly Archives: June 2019

06.24.19
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Quartz to kill its chatbot-inspired mobile app

Graffiti of a sad robot with his head hanging down
20150225 02 Sad Robot, by David Wilson, from Flickr, Some Rights Reserved

Top of today’s newsletter: Quartz is killing its Brief app, which emulated a chatbot but was really driven by editors giving you the impression of personalisation. The emoji-filled app, allowed users to get a quick taster before deciding whether you wanted to skip the story, get a chatbot-style summary or the full story from the source – often the BBC, Reuters, the New York Times or other outlets.

I profiled the app in my Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism report – Beyond the Article, Frontiers of Editorial and Commercial Innovation – on innovation and product management in 2017. Quartz originally launched with a responsive site and was very focused on serving mobile audiences while not having a mobile app. This was after the first wave of apps when a lot of news organisations launched apps but quickly found that they lost the attention wars to social media or other apps.

Quartz had decided to join the second wave of apps after realising that they wanted to get onto the lock screen of mobile users as notification use exploded. The app was really a Marmite one – people either loved it or hated it. I liked its earlier, more playful iterations. I often used an example of one of the chatbot lines as the way to write creative, audience catching push notifications. The notification was about a pop-sci story about how female Orcas that had just passed out of calving age. Quartz’s writers teased you in with the line: Menopausal sharks are bad ass. Click! Click! Click!

The Digiday story tried to read the tea leaves on why they killed the app. Was it the loss of editor Adam Pasick to the New York Times? Quartz says no. Was it the fact that the Japanese company that bought Quartz has its own news app, NewsPicks? Probably, but more than likely, it had a cult following. These days in digital media, unless you operate at a certain niche scale, small cult-ish devotion isn’t enough.

In the end, I think this probably sums up the apps death:

“Some people loved it!” one former employee said. “Just not hundreds of thousands of people.”

Quartz is shutting down its Quartz Brief mobile app July 1, by Max Willens, Digiday

To be perfectly honest, I used to get pulled in by the notifications. Then they became a little more pedestrian, and I turned them off when I was on holiday. And I never felt compelled to turn them back on, and then I can’t remember the last time I opened the app.

A couple of other notable items in the newsletter today:

And please help me sort through all of the British PM race and Trump noise right now by sending me media news of note. Drop them to me at @kevglobal on Twitter.

06.20.19
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Pivot to paid driving pivot to CRM for media companies and start-ups

Fork in the road Gypsy lane to the left, Brobury Lane to the right. by Jonathan Billinger, Wikimedia Commons, Some Rights Reserved

I had to do some digging into the stories that my network was sharing today to find this gem about Pico, one of a number of media services providers that are pivoting to provide customer relationship management (CRM) services. It may be at the bottom of the list of headlines in my newsletter today, but it tops my list in terms of personal interest.

The profile of Pico by Nieman Lab got my attention because it is connected to the conversion funnel work that I’m doing in my day job. Beginning in 2017 as I was doing more and more consulting work with media companies in Europe and Asia, I realised how important conversion funnels were as more companies shifted to paid strategies. If I had studied marketing rather than journalism, conversion funnels would be old hat, but they were something that I stumbled upon as my work with audience engagement shifted to audience development and flowed naturally to conversion to paying customers.

Back to Pico. The company started out as a micro-payments provider called PennyPass. Micro-payments (think iTunes for news – garf!) didn’t really convert many readers to subscribers, but founders Jason Bade and Nick Chen realised that that they had collected a lot of leads during the pilot.

What publishers really needed was a funnel to some sort of reader revenue, and we had been too prescriptive about that type of reader revenue.

Pico wants to inject CRM smarts into news sites hungry for reader relationships, by Christine Schmidt, Nieman Lab

Now, they are building propensity to subscribe models as well as handling a lot of other “customer-relations stuff”. They connect Mailchimp or another email service and a payment service like Stripe and link the data flowing through the site and these other platforms.

But Pico isn’t the only company making this pivot. GroundSource, which started as an SMS-based engagement platform; Steady, which grew out of KrautReporter in Berlin; and the News Revenue Hub are all shifting to this space.

Pico just landed a $4.5m funding round that includes money from Stripe and Bloomberg Beta so they have some runway to find the right model.

I would say for the public service broadcaster that I work for, we’re looking for something that integrates more effectively with other software services that we’re currently using to allow us to segment more effectively, especially when it comes to knowing who is a member and who isn’t when it comes to the users of our digital services. We believe that would be transformative for our business.

Fascinating stuff, and if you see a story that you think I should share with my readers, let me know @kevglobal on Twitter.

06.18.19
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A deep dive into Schibsted’s plan for $115m in reader revenue by 2020

Departure hall at Bergen Railway Station, Norway. Neon sign with logo of newspaper Bergens Tidende.
Departure hall at Bergen Railway Station, Norway. Neon sign with logo of newspaper Bergens Tidende, by Wolfmann, Wikimedia Commons, Some Rights Reserved

The top story in the newsletter today is a look at Scandi media giant Schibsted’s march to 1 bn NOK ($115m) of reader revenue by next year.

You need to read this piece because it challenges conventional wisdom and explains some of the thinking behind Schibsted’s nuanced and data-informed strategy. Their strategy has changed over time and is flexible enough to make allowances for the audiences and positioning of their different properties.

In terms of how their reader revenue strategy has evolved, it started simply by trying to grow their paying audiences when it launched in 2017, and then as they built the customer base, they pivoted to customer retention. And now, they are focused on “pricing, packaging, user experience and additional products, all the while keeping a steady hand on churn”.

What is really impressive is how adaptable and flexible their thinking is. They eschew the one-size-fits-all model that can be the reflexive response by some large groups. In that model, they run the same playbook everywhere. One gets the impression that this is to control costs because they don’t have the resources for multiple strategies tailored for different products.

For Schibsted, they have different models for their high volume tabloids – VG and Aftonbladet. Those properties remain mostly ad-supported. The reader revenue component is mainly to do with premium content. But for a local title, Bergens Tidende, up to 70% of the content is behind the paywall.

But they are also adding information into their model about stories that converted users to subscribers in the past. Very smart and well worth your time.

06.17.19
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How news organisations are succeeding with reader-first digital transformation

Transformation, by Cornelia Kopp, from Flickr, Some Rights Reserved

Since 1996, in some way, I’ve been focused on digital transformation at media companies, initially as a front-line journalist but since 2005 either as an internal or external consultant in a wide range of roles. Topping my media newsletter today is the summary of a talk by Greg Piechota and George Brook about digital transformation at media organisations. They see successful digital transformation efforts not so much as being good at managing various products but rather by serving various customers.

There are a lot of great quotes in this summary, but Greg started by re-framing the issues around the pivot to paid as:

The reinvention is actually much bigger than just the change of a business model. It’s like the transformation of journalism from a mass market, industrial product to journalism as a service.

The digital transformation of newsrooms to become reader first, by Shelley Seale, International News Media Association

He walked through the model at The Guardian where the product hadn’t changed as much as the way that they captured value from various classes of users. “What they manage are not different products, but different sets of customers. Some customers want to contribute to support the mission. Some people want to pay for a certain user experience [mobile app, e-reader, etc],” Greg said.

I think his framing of how to become reader focused also made sense in terms of selling journalism as a process rather than as a product. By looking as journalism as a service to be sold instead of a product, then companies could re-orient around their “impact on the customer”, he said.

This dove-tailed nicely into a discussion with George Brock, former managing editor at the Times in London, about the role that trust played in this reader-focused, service-oriented model of journalism. Rather than summarise the entire post, I’ll highlight this cultural challenge that George highlighted in terms of making this shift to a reader-first orientation. “I think the bigger problem is that the kind of things we’re talking about involve, across both the commercial and the editorial departments, shifts of power,” he said. Indeed, and I would add that it also involves shifts within the editorial department. This is a great summary of a webinar to digest, and I’m really interested in INMA’s broader Readers First Initiative.

If you’ve got a story that you think should be in the newsletter, let me know @kevglobal on Twitter.

06.14.19
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Twitch: Publishers hop onto gaming channels for audience and insights into commenting

Final Intel Extreme Masters World Best Gamers League Of Legends – Campus Party Brasil, by Camila Cunha/indicefoto, Wikimedia

TGIF! In my newsletter today, one of the featured stories was a piece in Digiday about how and why publishers are experimenting with Twitch. Gaming is one of those hugely popular pursuits that seems to sit just outside the mainstream while also being solidly mainstream in terms of numbers and adoption.

Twitch is something that as a non-gamer punches into my feed every once and while just in terms of its size and its popularity. One of the best ways to understand Twitch for a media professional is that it’s a platform for live streaming eSports. Its stats are phenomenal, as one would expect from a platform that taps into the Attention Economy equivalent of a highly addictive drug that operates at the intersection of gaming and video.

  • More than 15 m people watch Twitch daily, according to stats from April 2019.
  • More than 404 hours of content have been streamed in the past year.
  • “The most popular streamer, Ninja, earns at least $100,000 per month from Twitch alone.”
  • It currently ranks as the 26th most popular website in the world and the 13th most popular in the US.
  • Amazon bought Twitch in 2014 for a cool $970m, and its current value is $3.79 bn.
    Source: 99Firms.com

Digiday’s Kerry Flynn looked at why publishers are flocking to Twitch and their strategy on the platform. For eSports or gaming publishers, the move makes perfect sense. BuzzFeed Multiplayer, the digital publisher’s gaming channel, has some of its content available only to paying subscribers. The engagement for the content has some pretty staggering statistics, especially when you look at the amount of time that people are spending with the content. “One of Multiplayer’s most engaged streams was gameplay of ‘The Sims 4‘ and garnered more than 35,000 unique live views with more than 3,800 viewers watching for the entire three-hour stream and more than 4,300 viewers watching at once, according to the publisher.” Eeep.

But for publishers not working in the gaming space, the work is more experimental in nature. I recently watched a bit of the Washington Post’s video of one of their reporters playing a video game and interviewing Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, who also is one of the 25 members of his party running for president. It was a bit surreal for me, but I understand the Jedi mind trick of it. You get gamers to engage with political issues while a young-ish candidate plays video games. I would have to be well rested to talk about tax policy and play a video game.

But apart from tapping into this huge flood of attention, publishers are finding the comments on Twitch can be good. The Washington Post said that they found viewers asking some great questions about the Mueller report. It makes me think about whether there is a way regional publishers and broadcasters like the one I work can tap into this or if it’s just a place for national publishers who can get guests with a national profile. Lots of questions.

Well, this week is a wrap, almost. Hello to the new subscribers to the newsletter this week. If you aren’t a subscriber, you can get 10 media stories from around the world in your inbox week daily with very brief context by going to my Nuzzel profile and signing up. And if you spot a good story, let me know on Twitter, @kevglobal.

06.13.19
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Helping your newsroom fall in love with spreadsheets

Closeup of Excel Spreadsheet template to track printouts, by Texas State Library and Archives Commission, from Wikimedia

Topping my media newsletter today is a piece about how the digital transformation team at the New York Times helped their teams embrace (maybe love is too strong a word) spreadsheets.

It’s timely because it came on a day that I was helping my colleagues in public broadcasting learn how to do data journalism. Top tip from my webinar yesterday: Use Google to find spreadsheets with the data you want by adding filetype:xls (or xlsx) to your search.

Former New York Times digital editor Aron Pilhofer once told me that he could teach any journalist 80 percent of everything they would need to know about data journalism in a day. I’d agree with that, and if you can unlock the magic of pivot tables, you’ll feel like Harry Potter. It’s just magic.

But if you’re a journalist and the actual ease of use doesn’t win you over, Lindsey Rogers Cook with the Times makes this argument:

While journalists once were fond of joking that they got into the field because of an aversion to math, numbers now comprise the foundation for beats as wide ranging as education, the stock market, the Census and criminal justice. More data is released than ever before — there are nearly 250,000 datasets on data.gov alone — and increasingly, government, politicians and companies try to twist those numbers to back their own agendas.

How We Helped Our Reporters Learn to Love Spreadsheets, Lindsey Rogers Cook, Times Open

As with the training that I do with data journalism, they use Google Sheets. It’s approachable and the interface is simple while having most of the features that Excel does. Moreover, I’ve found that when working with journalists from multiple organisations that if I use Google Sheets, I can be assured that we’re all working on the same version of the software, unlike Excel. I also find Google Sheets much less daunting than the open-source versions of spreadsheet software.

At the Times, the class meets for two hours each more for three weeks. They work on projects that are directly to their work, and they also train the reporters’ editors.

I have found the most successful data journalism courses that I’ve done actually bring together people from reporting, design and even coding or development.

I’ll let you read the rest of the post, but one key thing I’ll highlight, the Times has actually released their data journalism course materials to the world on Google Docs. Wow. That’s impressive and useful.

If you have a story you think I should include in my daily media newsletter, let me know on Twitter, @kevglobal.

06.12.19
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How The Economist is using data-driven interactive Stories to grow its Instagram following

Topping my media newsletter today is a story from my friends at Journalism.co.uk on how The Economist is using interactive data Stories on Instagram to grow their following on the social media platform.

Financial publications such as The Economist and The Financial Times have long understood the power of data visualisation to engage social media audiences. This tweet by the FT in 2015 – an animation of a graphic showing the erosion of middle class income in the US – was its most popular that year.

And my friend Mark Jones with the World Economic Forum told me that by simply including a chart or a graph in a social media share that it performed 400 percent better than a simple link share.

I see this more of an evolution of a trend and a new data point that emphasises something that we already now, but it is definitely something to emulate if you are already working with data visualisation.

Thanks again to my subscribers, and if you have a story that you think should be included in the newsletter, share it with me on Twitter @kevglobal.

06.07.19
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How BBC Good Food is using voice search analytics to develop its Amazon Alexa skill

Unboxing my Amazon Echo. An Amazon Echo and its accessories.
My new Amazon Echo unpacked, by Brewbooks, Wikimedia Commons

Today, the newsletter featured a story about how BBC Good Food, one of the several magazines published under the BBC brand, gathered voice data to develop its Amazon Alexa skill.

I think that Marcela Kunova on journalism.co.uk makes a good point in writing about the process: Smart speakers are still an evolving space and that user behaviour and the technology itself is still a moving target.

I’d go one step further. I think that voice interfaces are still in their infancy. I swear a lot at Alexa and Siri, and the voice eco-system is still in its infancy. At the public broadcasting group that I work at, we have already had issues with getting our work to audiences on smart speakers. Reaching audiences on Alexa is mediated through NPR, our national network, and TuneIn, one of the several audio discovery services. TuneIn’s process for managing our stream has been opaque and very informal for such a critical distribution service.

At the moment BBC Good Food is using what data it can get. The report mentioned that of the 90 m searches done through its website, “only a few hundred users who access the content through Alexa skill.”

But they are using some of the same statistics that they use for web search to guide the development of the Alexa skill: “volume of use, volume of completion, drop-off rate etc,” according to Hannah Williams, head of digital content at BBC Good Food.

Apart from how they analytics that they are using, the other thing I found interesting in their process is how they are trying to get information about anonymous users of their digital services by pushing users to other digital content through their skill.

Williams said that people looking to develop an Alexa skill shouldn’t focus on creating a perfect product because one doesn’t exist yet. She said its more important to invest in analytics to improve the product as user tastes and engagement with smart speakers change.

Most read this week

In the past week, here are the stories that subscribers to my newsletter have been reading the most:

Have a great weekend, and if you have a good media business story, especially from outside the US and Europe, please send it along to @kevglobal on Twitter.

06.06.19
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Podcasting: Lessons from an award-winning pod about pot

Cannabis Station, Denver, Colorado, a medical marijuana store. The sign says, "Fill Up on Diesel $30 ⅛'s."
Cannabis Station, Denver, Colorado, by Jeffrey Beall, from Flickr, Some Rights Reserved

Readers of the newsletter will know that podcast audiences and advertising are growing, well at least in the US, where podcasts can break up the long drives Americans take (and I say that as one). In today’s media business newsletter, the top story is a pithy Q&A about some lessons from a podcast on the pot industry in Massachusetts.

Pot content is not necessarily new, especially as more liberal marijuana laws have swept across the US. The Denver Post had a marijuana critic for a while and a vertical focused on the subject called The Cannabist. (Sadly, the critic and a video show were victims of the well-covered cuts at the newspapers. Indie newspaper Westword said that journalist Jake Browne was to be “replaced by bots.”)

The podcast, Mass Marijuana, “a show about the growing pains in the newly legal cannabis industry in the state of Massachusetts.” Mass is a clever pun both in terms of legal marijuana use coming to the masses and also Mass being an abbreviation and nickname for Massachusetts.

Unlike a lot of professionally produced podcasts that have grown out of public radio in the US, this one is produced by a local TV station in the Boston area. Lead producer Dalton Main said:

As cannabis became legal, we were covering stories constantly. My job was to take the interviews and stories created every day and weave them into a larger overarching narrative. I got to read between the lines and connect the dots of the daily news pieces. It was very fun.

Mass Marijuana: What Broadcasters Can Learn About Podcasting from An Award-Winning Show About Cannabis, by Seth Resler, Jacobs Media

The two lessons that stood out for me were, one obvious one, that they tapped into an identifiable, and I would argue a well-known niche. A niche focus is important, if not critical, in several digital media formats whether that is a podcast, newsletter or blog. Number two, they tapped into a wealth of coverage that they are were already doing. And three, they also mined their own archives.

Keep those suggestions coming to me on Twitter, @kevglobal. As the newsletter grows subscribers, sharing international media stories with me and others will make it even better.

06.05.19
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Newsletters: How to launch a successful one

Man Reading Newspaper, by Mike Prince, from Flickr, Some Rights Reserved

This is going to a very meta post because I’m writing about a post from another newsletter about newsletters from the writer of another newsletter.

A couple of days ago, I spotted this very good newsletter from Poytner about journalism tools, and today, Ren LaForme offers up praise for a morning newsletter that he gets from Buffalo, New York, a place where he hasn’t lived more than a decade ago.

It’s both informative and interesting. It’s packed with voice — from individual reporters on the top stories and freelancer Brian Meyer on the roundups, with the occasional edition from Max Kalnitz (a fellow Spectrum student newspaper alumnus) — without losing its institutional authority

In praise of the morning newsletter, by Ren LaForme, Poynter

It’s a great summary of what makes a great newsletter, and being a newsletter about journalism tools, he also links off to a brilliant post by solo businessman Paul Jarvis about newsletters, which are critical to his business. Reading Paul’s post makes me wonder if newsletters are the new blogs – a personal publishing vehicle that helps a person build a professional profile.

Paul has a lot of pithy advice about newsletters, and it’s really useful. He lists three styles of newsletters that are successful, although I’ve seen others list more. For Paul, most successful newsletters are either long-form writing, the roundup (which is my newsletter) or news.

To be successful, he says that you first need to remember that you have to write, and I’ll say that I started doing my newsletter more intentionally to get me back in the habit of writing. I was offering up too many excuses and letting my perfectionism get the best of me. I felt like I needed something weighty to say to write, and slowly over time, the barrier to what was substantial enough to write became greater. Writing a quick summary of my newsletter, lowered that barrier, and it got me back in the habit of writing. The momentum now feels self-sustaining.

I also like this formulation that Paul has about the magic of newsletters:

Newsletters are interesting because they’re the only form of communication where 1:1 and 1:many exist in the same place.

My newsletter approach, by Paul Jarvis

As he says, writing a newsletter needs a cadence. I’m quite surprised that I have been doing this thing almost daily now since last autumn. I have had to flex how I do this as my work schedule changes, but I’ve been able to commit to it more as I got into it more and got more subscribers.

Paul has a great list for how to start your own newsletter. I’ll highlight just point number two:

Where do those people who should be on your newsletter currently spend their time? Who do they currently read? Who has these people as part of their audience already?

All in all, if newsletters are part of your work or are on your agenda, then you’ll want to bookmark Paul’s write-up of his approach.

Right, I better get back to prepping for my newsletter launch at work next week. Thanks for reading, and if you have a story that you think should be in my international media and journalism business letter, please drop me a link on Twitter, @kevglobal.