New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is far from the first journalist to bemoan the state of the industry. He may, however, be one of the few doing something about it.
Kristof, whose writing often covers humanitarian issues, has been a kind of internet pioneer in recent years: starting a blog, On the Ground, and maintaining tremendously popular Facebook (333 thousand “likes”) and Twitter (1.2 million followers) accounts.
On Jan. 26, Kristof sat down with Mashable founder and CEO Pete Cashmore at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss the newspaper industry, social media, and new opportunities for publishing.
In spite of the recent success of the Times‘ paywall, Kristof suggested that mainstream journalism continues to face significant challenges. “We’re desperate for a new business model,” Kristof said. “Our old business model is broken. We’re groping for something new.”
“Facebook + Journalists,” an extension for the social networking site that offers professional profiles for working writers, launched in September of last year. Already the company is heralding its success. “The average journalist has seen a 320% increase in subscribers since November 2011,” said the company in a report released Jan. 25.
While these gains are based on a relatively small sample size (just 25 journalists) and short span of time, the influence of Facebook on the media world is undisputed. With more than 800 million active users, Facebook has become one of the main drivers to major news sites. According to a May 9 report by PEW Research, The Huffington Post draws eight percent of its traffic from Facebook. The New York Times draws a slightly smaller, but not insignificant, six percent of its traffic from Facebook.
Beyond driving traffic, Facebook is being employed to share news and information in new and innovative ways:
HYPERLOCAL REPORTING — In March, the publisher and editor of the Rockville Monthly, a website that covered news for a community of 61,000 in Rockville, Md., decided to move all content and reporting to their dedicated Facebook page. The move increased readership from 24,000 web hits per month to more than 100,000 post views per month.
DISASTER RELIEF — In May, residents of Joplin, Mo., used Facebook as an information hub after a category five tornado decimated the town. The site, which allowed members of the local and national community to share news, photographs, and relief information. Today, more than 171,000 people “Like” the “Joplin, MO Tornado Recovery” page. A similar page was set up for a tornado that ripped through Minneapolis that same month.
Whether directed through the “Facebook + Journalists” program or appearing organically, social networking shows clear potential for journalists, publications, and brands hoping to increase connectivity and exposure. As John A. Quelch and Katherine E. Jocz point out in their forthcoming book All Business Is Local, “In the past couple of years, Addidas found that messages delivered through social media achieved a five times higher return than those delivered through television, attracting two million fans to a Facebook page.”
Fans like these hold real value for brands. According to Vitrue, a Social Page Evaluator, Coca-Cola’s Facebook page, with 5.5 million likes, is worth $4.6 million annually; Skittles’s page, with 4.4 million likes, is worth $7.7 million annually; and Starbucks’ Facebook page, with 8 million likes, is worth $20.8 million annually. Increasingly, Facebook pages are becoming high-value real estate.
How do you maintain this value? For news organizations, Facebook suggests providing commentary on current events and offering analysis of global issues: two things NewsCred is uniquely equipped to deliver.
Residents of Joplin, Mo., used Facebook to coordinate relief efforts after a EF5 tornado ripped through town on May 22. Photo by Meagan Wooley/Flickr Creative Commons
The New York Times launched DeepDive on Jan. 13, hoping to attract a new breed of readers and bridge the gap between the homepage and the hundreds of other articles it publishes each day.
DeepDive, a newest product of the Times’ development team beta620, offers a separate interface that allows its users to read related articles based on a particular date or topic. The goal, according to the DeepDive website, is to enable users to follow story arcs and identify topics they wish to follow.
At launch, DeepDive filters content using the Times’ existing framework of topical tagging. The sample root article on DeepDive site “Yemeni President’s Loyalists Blamed in Deaths of Protesters,” for example, is tagged “Middle East and North Africa Unrest (2010- )” and “Demonstrations, Protests, and Riots.” In the future, however, Times’ developers hope to expand to semantic, editorial, and social tagging as well.
At NewsCred, however, we take philosophy of DeepDive a step further. Every day, our API filters and customizes news articles by topic, location, language, source, and date. Along with the resources of our world-class editorial team, NewsCred uses proprietary semantic and NLP technology to curate 215,000 full-text articles from 751 sources (and growing), across 50 countries, in 8 languages, organized into 20 categories and 47,000 topics. That’s a deep dive even Steve Zissou, the protagonist of Wes Anderson’s film The Life Aquatic, would be jealous of.
According to a Jan. 23 report by the Pew Research Center, ownership of tablet and e-book reader devices rose from 19 to 28 percent between mid-December and mid-January.
Whereas college educated Americans with household incomes over $75,000 made up a majority of tablet and e-book reader owners in 2010; today, the market is expanding, with growth seen across every demographic group, including gender, age, race/ethnicity, education, and household income. Particular growth was evident among 18 to 29-year-old Americans, whose ownership of these devices grew significantly (10 to 24 percent for tablets and 7 to 18 percent for e-book readers).
The market for tablets and e-reader devices has shifted significantly in the last 12 months. 2011 saw the decline of Borders, the nation’s second-largest book retailer, as well as the introduction of a number of new devices to the marketplace from Apple (iPad 2), Amazon (Kindle Touch, Touch 3G, and Fire), and Barnes & Noble (Nook SimpleTouch and Tablet). While sales figures for these devices haven’t been as strong as retailers hoped, the trend toward an increasingly mobile media environment bodes well for publications and advertisers equipped to reach a population that is doing a greater and greater proportion of its reading on the go.
In a YouTube video posted last Wednesday, New York magazine Assistant Editor Eliot Glazer took on the city’s obsession with news.
“I read that in Time Out.”
“Gothamist.”
“New York mag.”
“Yes, I read that in New York mag.”
“On Gawker.”
“I read it in the Times…Magazine.”
“You read the Post? Not ironically?”
Bouncing around Facebook and Twitter, the video has already garnered 2.3 million hits, 8,300 likes, and 4,700 comments.
While aimed at New York City, Glazer’s satire of the news obsessed is by no means limited to those who take up residence in the five boroughs. Last spring, Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, writers of the Portland, Ore.-based show Portlandia(Fridays 10/9C on IFC) took up a similar conversation.
Carrie Brownstein: Hey did you guys read that thing in The New Yorker last month about how golf is an analogy for marriage?
Fred Armisen: I did. I did read that. Did you read that thing in McSweeney’s? It was comparing CD tracks and album tracks. Did you read that?
Carrie Brownstein: Yeah. Did you read that thing in Mother Jones about eco chairs and eco ways to sit?
In the skit, Brownstein and Arimsen Ping Pong between publications large and small – Spin, Pace, Dwell, The New York Times, The New York Observer, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Boing Boing, ThePortland Mercury, The Seattle Weekly, The Harvard Lampoon, MAD magazine, and The Boston Globe – until the conversation devolves into a chorus of “Did you read? Did you read? Did you read?”
While Glazer, Brownstein, and Armisen flirt with hyperbole, in a fractured news environment, their sentiment is familiar. Keeping tabs on the world is no longer about tuning in to the evening news. Instead, maintaining a diet free of high fructose content requires readers to paraglide from print to glossy, from the iPad to the iPhone, from Tumblr to Twitter to YouTube – all the while maintaining a discerning eye.
Fortunately, for engaged readers and publications who hope to capture their attention, the way that content is curated, packaged, and delivered is going through a phase of rapid transformation. Using tools like the NewsCred SmartPress, accessing the world’s best journalism in real-time looks less and less like the insanity (i.e. a full-contact sport) that Brownstein and Armisen lampoon. That’s good for journalism, less so for comedy.
Not long after Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid postponed the vote on PIPA early Friday, Representative Lamar Smith, sponsor of SOPA, pulled his bill as well.
Wikipedia, one of the leaders in the drive to oppose the bill, issued a public thank you this week. “More than 162 million people saw our message asking if you could imagine a world without free knowledge,” said the statement. “You said no. You shut down Congress’s switchboards. You melted their servers. From all around the world your messages dominated social media and the news. Millions of people have spoken in defense of a free and open Internet. to the 162 million who saw their message.”
For many, including Internet New York University Professor Clay Shirky, the struggle to maintain web freedom is far from over. “PIPA and SOPA are not oddities, they are not anomalies, they are not events. They are the next turn of this particular screw, which has been going on 20 years now,” Shirky said in a recent TED Talk. The greater challenge, Shirky said, is being ready for the next round of the fight. “Time Warner has called,” Shirky said, “and they want us back on the couch, just consuming – not producing, not sharing – and we should say no.”
It’s nearly impossible to see a majority of the 20,000 products launched at the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), even in the space of four days. Inside the 1.86 million sq. ft. Las Vegas Convention Center, very cool toys – including thumping car speakers, cables, and a plethora of accessories – were only half the fun. This show, attended by 153,000 enthusiasts between Jan. 10-13, was about how people connect and interact with content they want through the devices they love.
Among exhibitors, there continued to be a big push in the 3D TV space as most of the major manufacturers gave out newfangled 3D glasses. This was both spectacular and nauseating for attendees still recovering from parties the previous night. Smart TVs, connected devices (Roku, Boxee, and TiVo) and the multitude of applications were all aimed at delivering content to users wherever they wanted to use it, which in most cases means across multiple devices. The question is, “How do you provide a compelling experience to the consumers that are accessing content through multiple devices?” There is a big focus on the dual-screen experience and providing relevant, contextual content on the second screen that syncs with what you are viewing on the first.
With the tablet market exploding, consumer electronics manufacturers and app developers are clamoring for ways to create a dynamic experience for their users. Companies like Social TV are coming out of the woodwork looking to enhance the viewing experience by creating community around video content. With premium articles – including film and television reviews – from 750 of the world’s leading publications, NewsCred can help both established and emerging players in this space deliver a great experience tailored to the viewing habits of their customers. At the end of the day it’s about providing the right content at the right time – and since we’re talking about CES, through the right device. –Scott Lehr, Strategy, Business Development & Operations
Torsten de Riese, Managing Director of NewsCred, explains what an API is and why you need one. Prior to joining NewsCred, Torsten led business development at The Guardian and was instrumental in the development of their Open Platform.
We’ve read a lot of 2011 end-of-year lists and quite a few more predictions to kick off the new year. To keep things simple, we decided to boil it all down to 3 Big Trends that you need to stay on top of in 2012:
1. Leverage syndication to get content in more places across more platforms and devices.
Without a doubt, 2012 will be the year that digital news publishers finally start taking syndication seriously. Not only do publishers need a smart, efficient way to filter, organize and manage all the content they create each day, but they also need a way to meticulously and securely track who has access (and licenses) to their content, when and where. A deep-dive analysis – understanding how people are consuming, sharing and distributing your content – is hugely valuable in understanding your consumers and finding new ways to monetize content.
As ReadWriteWeb noted in a recent article, Mashable is already starting to do this. NewsRight, a news registry launched just a few days ago, is also approaching licensing and policing content seriously. And at NewsCred (yes, us!) – clients such as Forbes, ABC Radio (and soon Conde Nast) are already successfully using our API to manage their entire syndication processes.
2. Re-imagine the possibilities of the digital news experience – no matter what the platform.
The opportunities for digital news on mobile devices and tablets exploded this year with apps like Flipboard and Pulse. Yes, we agree that new devices offer new opportunities. But from our perspective, the opportunity really lies in curating and delivering amazing news experiences – no matter what the platform or device. Whether it’s mobile, tablet or TV (keep tabs on Apple moving into this area in 2012), quality content is key. And by quality, we mean both the quality of the journalism and the design/delivery of the story itself.
Recently stumbled upon this short (but sweet!) video of Shafqat from Startup Alley NY last year. Take a look to hear how NewsCred is disrupting the newswire industry and reinventing the traditional AP model:
Commentary, analysis earn you fans, says Facebook
Written by Claire
“Facebook + Journalists,” an extension for the social networking site that offers professional profiles for working writers, launched in September of last year. Already the company is heralding its success. “The average journalist has seen a 320% increase in subscribers since November 2011,” said the company in a report released Jan. 25.
While these gains are based on a relatively small sample size (just 25 journalists) and short span of time, the influence of Facebook on the media world is undisputed. With more than 800 million active users, Facebook has become one of the main drivers to major news sites. According to a May 9 report by PEW Research, The Huffington Post draws eight percent of its traffic from Facebook. The New York Times draws a slightly smaller, but not insignificant, six percent of its traffic from Facebook.
Beyond driving traffic, Facebook is being employed to share news and information in new and innovative ways:
Whether directed through the “Facebook + Journalists” program or appearing organically, social networking shows clear potential for journalists, publications, and brands hoping to increase connectivity and exposure. As John A. Quelch and Katherine E. Jocz point out in their forthcoming book All Business Is Local, “In the past couple of years, Addidas found that messages delivered through social media achieved a five times higher return than those delivered through television, attracting two million fans to a Facebook page.”
Fans like these hold real value for brands. According to Vitrue, a Social Page Evaluator, Coca-Cola’s Facebook page, with 5.5 million likes, is worth $4.6 million annually; Skittles’s page, with 4.4 million likes, is worth $7.7 million annually; and Starbucks’ Facebook page, with 8 million likes, is worth $20.8 million annually. Increasingly, Facebook pages are becoming high-value real estate.
How do you maintain this value? For news organizations, Facebook suggests providing commentary on current events and offering analysis of global issues: two things NewsCred is uniquely equipped to deliver.
Residents of Joplin, Mo., used Facebook to coordinate relief efforts after a EF5 tornado ripped through town on May 22. Photo by Meagan Wooley/Flickr Creative Commons
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