Reportr.net » Newspapers

It is not about whether the Washington Post is innovating too fast

Alfred Hermida — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:21:55 +0000

In a column, Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton asked if the newspaper was innovating too fast.

Pexton noted how “hardly a week goes by without the Web site or newspaper launching some feature, or a venture to attract more revenue, or a blog, or a social media innovation.”

He later added, “I’m wondering, and readers are too, whether there’s just a bit too much innovation, too fast.”

In response, the Post’s Managing Editor commented, “I actually wish it were true that we have too much innovation at the Post.”

The crux of the issue here is not whether the Post should innovate, or about the pace of innovation. It is about the approach to innovation.

Given the fast evolving media space, news outlets have to experiment and explore different tools and services to reach, connect and engage with audiences.

The technologies people use to get the news are changing, how they use these technologies is changing and the institutional structures to support the news are changing.

Pexton notes that some readers find the pace of innovation “exhausting”. The problem for the Post, and for newspapers in general, is that the product is changing.

As a mass media product, the newspaper was designed to bring together a bundle of news, information, commentary and entertainment with broad appeal to a wide audience.

Online, that product is unbundled – both content and audiences are fragmented. This requires a different approach to innovation as editors and developers have to consider the wants and needs of diverse audiences, who have different needs at different times on different devices.

Some features will be aimed at a broad audience, but some innovations will be aimed at specific fragments of the audience. For example, the @mentionmachine cited by Pexton is likely to have greater appeal for political junkies than a general Post reader. And that is just fine.

The challenge for news organisations is taking a strategic approach to innovation. There is a risk of becoming enamoured with the latest shiny bit of technology or adopting a platform such as blogging without thinking through the why and how.

For example, when a British newspaper introduced blogs in the mid-2010s, it asked for a show of hands to decide who in the newsroom wanted a blog. A few months later, the newspaper realised that just letting any journalist blog wasn’t a good idea.

A good starting point for developing a new feature or introducing a new tool is Forrester’s POST framework, which provides a framework to consider the audience, the objectives and strategy to decide on the appropriate use of technology.

Innovation should be driven by the journalism and serve the journalism. We should not argue about too much or too little innovation, but instead discuss what makes for good or bad innovation.

Print PDF

How journalists are rethinking their relationship with the audience

Alfred Hermida — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 14:34:05 +0000

Here is a brief write-up of some of the main points from my talk at the Screen Futures conference in Australia on the promise and practice of participatory journalism.

The talk was based on findings in my co-authored book, Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers, into how journalists are thinking about their relationship with the people formerly known as the audience.

Comments on stories have become a familiar feature on news websites. But the idea of leaving a space for readers to “have their say” is hundreds of years old.

Early newspapers in eighteenth-century England left blank spaces where readers could add their observations, complete with spelling mistakes, erroneous facts and inane comments, before passing it on to friends or family.

These early experiments in audience contributions were phased out, as newspapers became professional products authored by journalists. Participation became more formal and rigid through channels such as letters to the editor.

Hundreds of years later, spaces for readers to add their thoughts have re-emerged on news websites as one of a myriad of ways for the audience to participate and interact with the news.

For our book, we wanted to find out how far journalists were opening up the news process to the public at a time when digital technologies are creating opportunities for new forms of media participation, production and distribution on an unprecedented scale.

In our journey through newsrooms at more than a dozen newspapers in 10 Western liberal democracies, we found mixed feelings. There was apprehension, confusion, fear and hope, among journalists who are experiencing facing a rapid and radical shift in their traditional power to oversee the flow of information.

Our research found that three approaches in the newsroom. Some took what we call a conventional stance, seeing journalism as a practice to be defended. The priority for these “conventional journalists” was to preserve traditional boundaries between professionals and readers. An American editor insisted that “what we have to offer as our brand is a newspaper and a site that can be trusted.”

On the other side of the spectrum were journalists who were more open to a dialogue with readers. These “dialogical journalists” shared a belief that the newsroom had to be more open to working with the audience. For one American editor, a more open and collaborative form of journalism was a way “to repair the relationship, to regain people’s trust.”

Mostly, journalists didn’t neatly fall into the camp of traditionalists or evangelists. Instead, they expressed reservations about users as participants in the news, while at the same time acknowledging the potential value of a more active audience. It is hardly surprising most people in the newsroom are “ambivalent journalists”, trying to figure out their role at a time of rapid change to long-held rules, norms and values.

Journalists are used to owning the news, in the most basic sense that they decide what and how to report. Yet at the same time, journalism has always been expected to provide a way for voices from outside the media to be heard.

These tensions are being played out every day in newsrooms across the world. Journalists are torn encouraging readers to be more active in the media, while simultaneously defending the core of the news production process.

While participatory journalism is often celebrated for its potential for a more open media, the reality is more humbling dramatic. The audience has few opportunities to influence what makes the news and how it is reported. Instead readers are involved at the start of the news process by sending in tips, photos or videos, and once a story is published by offering their take on the news.

Journalists see the audience as “active recipients” of the news. Citizens are expected to act when news happens, by taking a photo or emailing in a news tip, and then react by commenting. The crucial and central processes of deciding what news is and how to cover and present it remains almost entirely under the journalist’s control.

The way newsrooms have adopted participatory journalism continues to change and evolve as they try to meld a culture of openness and collaboration with an editorial model of hierarchy and control.

For the most part, so far, journalists have sought to find ways to maintain their professional status, rather than redefine what it means to be a journalist.

As one editor in Canada expressed it, “journalism remains journalism, and it’s not going to change its fundamentals.”

Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers by Jane B. Singer, Alfred Hermida, David Domingo, Ari Heinonen, Steve Paulussen, Thorsten Quandt, Zvi Reich, Marina Vujnovic, is published by Wiley-Blackwell.

Print PDF

Newspaper paywalls post on Huffington Post

Alfred Hermida — Mon, 30 May 2011 14:48:22 +0000

There were two significant developments in the media in Canada last week.

The Huffington Post crossed the 49th parallel to set up Huff Post Canada and one of the largest newspaper groups, the PostMedia Network, dipped its toes into paywalls.

In my first post for the HuffPo, I discuss the metered model being tried out by PostMedia at two of its newspapers.

In the post, I take issue with the philosophy of charging readers for the news:

However, there is a more fundamental issue at play. People have never really paid for the news. By news, I mean the political infighting in city halls or the violence in faraway foreign places — the news that is important and matters but can be challenging to make relevant to a broad audience.

Readers were paying for the sport results, the lifestyle section, diversions like the crossword and horoscopes. The cost of producing “the daily miracle” as Canadian playwright David Sherman put it was largely borne by advertising sales. The subsidy model worked when mass media was the dominant model for distributing the news. The business of newspapers was delivering large audiences to advertisers, and they were pretty good at it.

I hope the post adds to the discussion on funding models. Head over to the Huff Post to read the full post and add your thoughts.

Print PDF

MediaCooler aims to be media marketplace for Canada

Alfred Hermida — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 22:33:52 +0000

An interesting project that seeks to help journalists and editors connect with each other has just launched in Canada.

MediaCooler.com is the brainchild of my friend, Alison Yesilcimen. I’ve been following the development of the service since September last year. I’ve had long conversations with Alison about it, providing feedback and trying out the alpha site.

MediaCooler aims to be a marketplace for media. In an e-mail, Alison said that she “always felt strongly there had to be a better way for professionals to market their work”.

The problem she is trying to solve is helping freelancers sell and syndicate their work, while streamlining the invoice and collection process.

After following the development of the project, it is great to see it come to fruition. I wish Alison and her team all the best with this endeavour.

Print PDF

Participatory journalism presentation at ISOJ 2011

Alfred Hermida — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 21:48:37 +0000

Since I was on the last research panel at ISOJ, I was not able to blog about the strong papers by my fellow presenters. Fortunately, the ISOJ student team wrote a short wrap up.

But I wanted to share the slides and text of my paper presentation for those who weren’t about to make the conference. The paper is also available as PDF.

The Active Recipient

Thank you. It is a pleasure to take part in the symposium for another year.

This paper forms part of an international project to study adoption of participatory journalism. It draws on data from our forthcoming book, Participatory Journalism.

Calls for the public to participate in some shape or form in journalism have become almost standard on news websites. But research has shown that journalists are reluctant to allow audiences any kind of agency.

As it is late in the day, I wanted to play a video from Mitchell and Webb that offers a satirical take on how journalists have adopted participatory journalism.

That’s the literature review done.

This study draws on the perspectives of Walter Lippmann and John Dewey on the role of the media to frame how professional journalists view participatory journalism.

For Lippmann, modern society had become too complex for the public to understand. The function of the journalist, then, was to “evaluate the policies of government and present well-informed conclusions about these key debates to the public.”

Dewey argued that the public was capable of rational thought and decision-making. The role of journalism, then, was is to engage and educate the public in the key policy issues, enabling them to participate in the democratic discourse.

Arguable Lippmann’s view of journalism is the dominant kind.

Early newspapers – such as Public Occurences, left a blank page for readers to add their news and comments.

But as newspapers became more professional products, editorial content became authored by professionals – the journalists.

In terms of participatory journalism, we wanted to find out if:

journalists see themselves as an elite group who should evaluate and present analysis to a spectator public, or
journalists believe they should provide ways for citizens to interact and participate in the news in a meaningful fashion

For the study we did semi-structured interviews with more than 60 news professionals drawn from about two dozen leading national newspapers. The interviews were based on a common list of questions and conducted in 2007 and 2008 by a team of researchers. The subjects drawn from 10 countries: Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

While participatory tools have evolved since the fieldwork was conducted, it remains important to consider how journalists view and frame the audience.

We broke down the journalistic process into five stages of news production as we wanted to investigate to what extent audiences had the ability to contribute and influence the making of the news.

The access/observation stage was the primary way for users to contribute: submitting text or audio-visual material – Particular interest in photos and video of breaking news.

By and large, journalists were extending established newsgathering practices to the web, seeing the user as a source of material that journalists were unable to provide themselves.

The journalists we interviewed placed greater value on soliciting audience contributions on specific stories or issues, rather than on unsolicited story ideas.

There were no options at the selection/filtering stage where what is news is decided.

We found a reluctance of editors to give users any agency over the news. None of the newspapers offered any meaningful opportunities to influence what makes the news.

There were some opportunities for users to write the news at the processing/editing stage but within clearly prescribed formats.

Citizen stories were selected and edited by journalists for publication on the website. There tended to be found more in lifestyle areas than hard news.

A handful of newspapers in Croatia, France, Spain, the UK and the USA provided a hosted space for users to create and publish their own content. These spaces for unfiltered and unedited material were kept separate from the content produced by professional journalists.

At the distribution stage, most newspaper websites created user-driven story rankings based on the most-read or most-emailed stories. And we found editors were grappling with the growth of social networks as mechanisms for the distribution of stories.

But the hierarchy of stories on a homepage was firmly in the hands of editors. They expressed concerns about balancing the perceived need to maintain control over the hierarchy and distribution of news, while at the same time allowing users greater agency.

Editors were most comfortable with opening up the final stage, interpretation. The most common mechanism for interpretation was comments on stories.

Despite widespread adoption among newspapers, our interviewees expressed mixed feelings about the worth of some of the material posted.

Some were concerned over the quality of the comments submitted by readers.

But a small number of editors talk of these spaces for interpretation as ways of accomplishing deliberative ideals.

These saw comments and other spaces for interpretation as an extension of the traditional role of the newspaper in sparking a national conversation.

One editor even spoke of the potential to create a platform that is “an expression of democracy, and in my view is bringing forward society.”

Our study suggests that journalists see audiences as what we call “active recipients” of news – somewhere between passive receivers and active creators of content.

Users are expected to act when news happens and react when it is reported and published.

As “active recipients”, audiences are framed

As idea generators and observers of newsworthy events at the start of the journalistic process
Then in an interpretive role as commentators who reflect upon the material that has been produced.

We suggest that the way participatory journalism has been adopted and implemented falls somewhere between Lippmann’s and Dewey’s view of the media.

There are few indications journalism is becoming itself a more democratic process itself.

But newspapers were providing greater opportunities for audiences to engage in the public discourse.

Indeed, some journalists are intrigued by the possibilities of participatory journalism to enable more voices to be heard, and perhaps even fulfill deliberative ideals in a democratic society.

Thank you.

(Index photo by Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, University of Texas at Austin).

Print PDF

Lessons on how to engage with audiences

Alfred Hermida — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 19:31:08 +0000

Jim Brady, former editor of TBD.com and WashingtonPost.com, set the tone for a professional panel on engaging the audience at #ISOJ by saying they were going to stick to time and leave plenty of time for questions.

First up was Espen Egil Hansen, editor-in-chief of VG Multimedia, Norway. He started by stating that he tells his journalists to spend a minimum of 10% of time interacting and engaging with readers.

Three-quarters of Norwegians visited the site in February, with 87% coming to the homepage, compared to only 4% from Google.

VG’s approach has been to figure out how we can help the readers help each other.

Hansen highlighted how last year during the travel disruption caused by the Icelandic volcano, a developer created a quick and dirty site to help people help each other get home.

In return, readers sent in stories and pictures about their journey home.

VG also has a tool that lets a select group of readers correct typos. 5,000 readers applied to correct typos and 400 were selected to fix typos on the site. 17,000 typos were reported last year, said Hansen.

Another example cited by Hansen was the paper’s response to the disaster in Japan. VG set up a paper with a live feed of Japanese TV, but also updates from journalists and from readers.

He also showed how during the swine flu, VG created a wiki site inviting users to let others know where they could get a flu shoot.

Hansen said the paper had progressed from a monologue to dialogue. But today, there is another viral layer which taps into social media.

He said VG wanted to be something in the middle between traditional journalism and social media.

Washington Post’s approach to Twitter

Amanda Zamora, social media and engagement editor, The Washington Post, described her job as taking the “earmuff off this sleeping giant.”

She talked about how reporters are using social platforms such as Twitter as a newsgathering tool.

“We’ve learnt a lot from Twitter,” she said, for example by using the hashtag to actively frame the conversation.

She outlined the approach as call, response, reward.

The sign of success is if you issue a call, you get a response, said Zamora, not the number of followers. People who take part are rewarded by bring that content back into the Washpost site.

The paper uses Google forms as a way for people to send in what they know on specific stories, for example on power outages in DC.

One of the ways the Post is experimenting is using Intersect, which can blend accounts from both journalists and readers. This is how, Zamora said, the paper is aiming to transform the social conversations we collect into a narrative.

New York Times and social media

Jennifer Preston spoke of her experience as the former social media editor from The New York Times.

She sees value in Twitter as a tool for reporting, but also for real-time publishing and curating.

But it can also involve users in the creative process, helping to engage with community, she said.

Preston shares how it was a very big step for the Times, which has many layers of editing, to put content from journalists and users in real-time.

One example she cited was Nicholas Kristof’s posts to Facebook covering the uprisings in the Middle East.

Preston showed some ways in which the Times was trying out new ways of engaging with readers. One example she showed was A Moment in Time, asking people to take a photo at a specific time and date.

When the Times did this last year, it was inundated with photos. But rather than wait for the paper to publish the photos, readers also shared their photos on Flickr.

Facebook, said Preston, provides an enormous opportunity to seed communities. She showed the Civil War Facebook page from the Times.

Lessons from TBD

Jim Brady rounded off the session by sharing his experiences at TBD.

He said that users need to be involved in journalism, not just allowed to upload pet photos. Engagement has to be a two-way street.

He said TBD used Twitter and Facebook to gather news, not just disseminate news. His staff also used Fourquare to find people in a specific location.

When it came to sending out news links, TBD encouraged staff to have a very conversational tone on Twitter.

By January 2011, TBD had 1.5 million unique visitors. “We were pretty confident the model was working editorially,” said Brady.

He urged people not to see TBD as a failure, saying it was on the right track before the owners abandoned the original vision behind the site.

Print PDF

How newspapers in Norway are transitioning to digital

Alfred Hermida — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 15:47:08 +0000

Eivind Thomsen from Norway outlined how the Schibsted Media Group had shifted its financial base from print to digital at the ISOJ.

Newspapers are popular in Norway, with the average user reading 1.3 newspapers a day. But this is declining, from 1.6 newspapers in 2009.

Thomsen said part of the reason for this was virtually universal broadband and mobile penetration, plus the growth of social networking – 64% of Norwegians on Facebook

But, he added, Norway faces declining circulation of all newspapers after circulation peaked at the end of the century.

As part of its strategy, Schibsted has seized the classified space online, and not just in Norway, rather than let a new entrant such as Craigslist own this area.

Online now accounts for 30% of Schibsted revenue, compared to 3% in 2002. Online display advertising on newspaper sites only brings in 6% of revenue.

Thomsen said Schibsted was succeeding in transition from a print revenue base to being a digital player, and was doing so more successfully compared to media in other countries.

In common with other speakers, Thomsen also highlighted the importance of mobile platforms such as iPhones and iPads.

His advice for the ISOJ: understand how your audience wants and gets the news, experiment, multiple revenue streams rather than relying one business model.

Print PDF

Lessons on newspaper paywalls from Mexico

Alfred Hermida — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 15:29:32 +0000

In the session on paywalls at the ISOJ, Jorge Meléndez, vice president for new media, Grupo Reforma (Mexico), explained how the newspapers have had paywalls since 2002.

The newspaper sites were free for the first two years. But they realised there was a very small online advertising market so the group just did it. Part of this involved an active strategy to convert newspaper subscribers online.

The impact of the paywall was a 35% drop in traffic. But Meléndez said they stopped minor circulation declines.

Access to all of the the news sites is free for newspaper subscribers. The prince for an online subscription is 80% of a newspaper subscription, as a way of encouraging readers to take the newspaper.

Meléndez explained there is some free content, such as the main page and emailed links.

The group provides apps for free, at least for now, said Meléndez. It has an “aggressive” app strategy, with dozens of apps for different topics.

Meléndez said broadsheet circulation is holding steady and tabloids have grown by 5% over last 8 years. Advertising and classifieds have also grown.

The group has 300,000 newspaper subscribers for all papers. 50,000 are only online subscribers. In terms of traffic, the sites have six million unique visitors, with an average of eight pages per user.

Meléndez said they learnt that people do not read instructions. Online, people just expect to click. So use action verbs and clear instructions, with as few words as possible, he urged.

The reasons behind the success of paywalls is local content, argued Meléndez. And the sites have more local content than in the newspaper. “Local is very important for us,” he said.

But when it came to today, he said the situation with paywalls was more difficult than in 2002. People are used to free, there is more competition and newspaper metrics are “so bad.”

Print PDF

Canadians don’t want to pay for the news online

Alfred Hermida — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 16:30:46 +0000

In the week the New York Times introduced digital subscriptions, a Canadian study shows that consumers just don’t want to pay for the news.

An online survey of 1,682 adults, conducted by the Canadian Media Research Consortium (CMRC )and Vision Critical, showed that Canadians are overwhelmingly opposed to fees for content.

It found that 92% of Canadians who get news online say they would find another free site if their favourite news site started charging for content.

The findings suggest that news as an online commodity has little monetary value in the eyes of the consumer. What is less clear is whether people would pay for the service and convenience of having the news packaged in emerging delivery mechanisms, such as an iPhone/iPad app.

Among the other key findings:

81% say they definitely will not pay to continue reading their favourite online news site.
Up to 30% indicate they would definitely or probably pay, if there were no other choice.
Charges are most acceptable for breaking news (28%) or hard news (22%). 19% indicate they would pay for international news and 16% would purchase feature and analytical news.

Perhaps not surprising, most news consumers (82%) were happy to accept advertising alongside content, if it meant the news was free

Canadians, though, are more willing to pay for music, games, movies, e- books and even ringtones online than they are to pay for news. But it is only a minority: 26% cent already pay for music; 19% pay for games; 9% for movies; 8% for e-books and 12% for ringtones.

I am part of the research team behind the study, which is the first in a series of reports that looks into the changing news consumption habits of Canadians.

The full report is available as a PDF download.

Print PDF

Twitter’s different news agenda from mainstream media and blogs

Alfred Hermida — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 16:47:56 +0000

The different news agendas of the US mainstream media, blogs and Twitter are one of revelations of the annual State of the Media report for 2011 from Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The report found that the news agenda of blogs closely followed the mainstream media, with both agreeing on nine of the top 10 stories of the year, including the economy, the midterm elections, the health care debate and the war in Afghanistan.

But a different picture emerged when it looked at the links to news-related subjects in the media and blogs compared to on Twitter.

The news links shared on Twitter were fundamentally different, with none of the top five mainstream or blog topics subjects making the list of five top stories on Twitter.

Instead, the top four stories shared on Twitter were about technology giants – Apple, Google, Twitter and Facebook.

The news agenda on Twitter was also more global. Four of the top 10 subjects had an international focus, including the war in Afghanistan, the Haiti earthquake, the European economy, the elections in the UK and WikiLeaks.

The report suggests:

The dominance of technology topics on Twitter also suggests that the platform has a different function than the mainstream press or even blogs. At least for now, users employ Twitter in part as a consumer affairs forum, to publicize, share and critique new gadgets and advances.

It also remarked that while some blogs may be the equivalent of an online version of a cable or radio talk show, this was rarely seen on Twitter.

Pew acknowledges that Twitter and other social media technologies are still very young, so “all this may evolve in the years ahead”, especially given the trend towards the use of social media to share and receive the news.

Print PDF