Tag Archives: New York Times

#wef11: Publishers share paywall strategies and lessons learnt

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“Don’t be afraid” – this was just one of many messages given by a panel of publishers at the World Editors Forum today, who shared their experiences of erecting “paywalls” or what came to be termed by the panel as “leaky walls”.

The panel featured three news outlets which have all established paid-content systems in their own ways, although the general approach appeared to be the same, leave holes in the “paywall”.

Dirk Nolde, managing editor of Berliner Morgenpost Online in Germany spoke first, outlining the site’s paid-content model which is free for print subscribers, or 4.90 euros a month. Only some content is placed behind the wall, including local news and sports, which are charged on different models, such as by day or month etc. “Make the assets paid”, he said.

The site also offers a “first-click-free”, such as via Google or social media, which works three times a day. ” We are trying to be leaky with the paywall,” he added.

The results so far is that we have 11,000 digital subscribers which includes print subscribers who can register for free. We thought it would be horrifying but we were wrong, visits went up.

According to his statistics in December 2009, the year in which the “paywall” was set up, visits stood at 2.4 million. In September 2010 this had risen to 3.3 million and last month, in September 2011 it was at 5.1 million.

It didn’t really hurt us, we were able to tell the readers and our users there’s quality behind this paywall.

But he said the site is looking to move to a more metered model.

We will give away more stuff, use a softer approach. It is about being able to accommodate users with the fact we think you should pay for content. That’s our mission.

Fellow panel member, Matus Kostolny, editor-in-chief of SME in Slovakia, discussed how they joined up to the Piano project, a group paywall used by nine news outlets in Slovakia.

The project was set up by Piano Media. I spoke to chief executive of Piano Media Tomas Bella after the panel to find out where the company is going in the near future.

Tomas Bella, Piano Media by journalismnews

The paywall was erected in May this year. On SME it costs 2.90 euros a month or 29 euros a year and, just like Berliner Morgenpost Online, is free to print subscribers. Also similarly only some content is behind “the wall”, such as opinion and political news, the wall is removed for big stories and SME is also considering a more metered wall.

But he added that is is important to remember that “behind stories are real human beings doing real jobs that are worth paying for”.

Public opinion is one of the things we want to influence and we believe it’s so important people pay for it, but if we don’t pursuade enough people then we’ll lose our inflence. We are thinking of different ways to change the structure of paid content and still think that in the end the journalism is worth to pay for and we will pursuade our readers to do it.

Revenue for the first month across all nine sites was 40,000 euros, “which was successful story for our market”, he added.

We were afraid we would lose readers but in the end we didn’t lose anybody, there is an increase of five per cent in unique viitors. We were afraid we would lose readers in locked sections but not losing them so much.

Later he added that one of the biggest lessons is not to be afraid to experiment.

The final speaker was assistant managing editor of digital content at the New York Times, Jim Roberts, who shared some interesting details on the Times’ model, which we reported on here. He told the conference the Times’ pay model is “based on number of principles”.

We try to strike a very delicate balance betwee keeping as open as possible to news junkies, but also really wanted to instill a sense of value for our loyalists who continue to consume quality journalism.

We wanted our regular users to pay. They came to our site and still do, frequently. We felt they understood the sense of value and they would want to pay for it as many of them had done for their print subscription.

Concluding the panel the speakers were asked to share their main lessons. Dirk Nolde gave three which nicely rounded off the session:

  • Communication, communication, communication  – you have to tell users what you are doing
  • This is no supermarket. We’re not selling everything, they don’t have to pay for everything. You have to give things away to accomodate readers.
  • Produce online content that’s really worthy of being paid for. That convinces readers and makes them say “wow that was good”.

#ONA11: Essential lessons from the Online News Association conference

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The Online News Association’s annual conference and awards took place in Boston at the end of last week.

Here is a round-up of the must-read blog posts which will help you sort though the noise of an event that saw 21,000 tweets sent by around 1,200 journalists.

A two-part post by university lecturer Sue Newhook on the top 10 tech trends is one to read and bookmark. It has links to handy tools and news of developing technologies. Part two of the post is here.

There is also a must-read Storify created by Craig Kanalley, an editor at the Huffington Post, with 13 key takeaways told in 13 tweets.

The 10,000 Words blogs has a series of posts, including on how to find and create an awesome web apps team and be a rockstar data developer, on verifying images and information from social media and this guide explaining how to create visual interactives In news time.

One session heard how ESPN and the New York Times build a second screen for readers, which has been documented on the 10,000 Words blog. The post explains the concept of a second screen:

The second screen is literally what it sounds like — the screen readers look at in addition to the TV. This could be an iPad, a laptop or a phone.

According to [Patrick Stiegman of ESPN] stats about Internet consumers, 85 million Americans consume both TV and the web simultaneously. This provides a huge opportunity for news organisations to serve fans in real time, alongside live events.

One particularly interesting area for UK news sites to consider is how the New York Times, which doesn’t control the first screen, competes with eyes for the second screen.

The post explains how Brian Hamman and Tyson Evans of the New York Times  have observed and outlined the cycle for event coverage online:

1.    Event cycle: What’s happening, how much can I get about the event before it happens?

2.    Analysis cycle: When event is started, what does it all mean

3.    Conversation cycle: What are other people and my social circle saying and how can I chime in?
To accomodate for all three cycles of these major events, the best project to point at is The New York Times’ Oscars coverage, which was a dashboard built with three streams.

And the post explains how you can do it all for free:

If you don’t have a team of developers to spend three months building these tools (as Evans and Hammans spent on the Oscars site), there are free tools you can use to achieve the same thing:

  1. Cover it live widget for the realtime analysis
  2. Free Twitter and Facebook widgets for the conversation elements.
  • If you were unable to take a trip to the US to attend #ONA11, you can learn about key developments in journalism at news:rewired – connected journalism, which takes place in London on 6 October.

New York Times: No Justice for Anna Politkovskaya

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Image by openDemocracy on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

Yesterday’s New York Times editorial was devoted to the case of murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Politkovskaya, who became known for her fearless investigative reporting of social issues in Russia and human rights abuses in Chechnya, was killed in her apartment building in 2006.

Five years on, no one has been convicted of her murder.

From the New York Times editorial:

At the time of her murder, Vladimir Putin, who is now the prime minister but was the president then, dismissed her journalism as “insignificant” and said that nobody “currently in office” could possibly have organized a crime that, he said, was committed “to create a wave of anti-Russian feeling.” To many Russians, that sounded like orders from the top that police or judges or prosecutors should take care not to accuse anyone in power.

Read the full article

Read Journalism.co.uk’s coverage of the case

 

Nieman: The New York Times and the kitchen table of the future

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The New York Times’ top-floor Research and Development Lab has released a demo video of its latest innovation: a kitchen table. No ordinary kitchen table obviously, it uses Microsoft’s Surface technology to produce a tabletop news consumption experience that departs from the paper’s normal design and layout and has strong social features built in.

See the full demo video below, courtesy of Nieman Journalism Lab, which has a fuller write-up on the table and the New York Times R&D Lab, and transcript of the demo.

New York Times R&D Lab: The kitchen table of the Future from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

‘I heard the mechanic click. I knew this is not good’: Joao Silva’s speech

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The New York Times blog today published in full a speech given by photojournalist Joao Silva at the Bronx Documentary Center earlier this month. Silva was severely injured after stepping on a landmine in Afghanistan last year.

Silva lost both legs below the knee, with months of recovery ahead of him at the Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington. Just last month his work returned to the front pages, with an image accompanying a story about the closure of the very medical centre in which he was staying.

In his speech, published in full here, Silva describes that moment in October last year when “everything changed”.

I heard the mechanic click. I knew: this is not good. And I found myself lying face-down on the ground, engulfed in a cloud of dust, with the very clear knowledge that this has just happened and this is not good. I could see my legs were gone, and everybody around me was dazed. I was like: “Guys, I need help here.” And they turned around and saw me on the ground. They immediately sprang into action. I got dragged out of the kill zone, for safety reasons, to a patch of ground a few yards away.

Immediately, there were medics working on me. I picked up a camera, shot a few frames. The frames weren’t very good, quite frankly, but I was trying to record. I knew it wasn’t good, but I felt alive. Adrenaline kicked in. I was compos mentis; I was on top of things. So, I made some pictures. I dropped the camera, then I moved to Plan B, which was to pick up the satellite phone. I called my wife, Vivian, and told her: “My legs are gone, but I think I’m going to live.”

Silva also used his speech to offer advice to young photojournalists keen to enter the field. And the key is perseverance, he said.

It’s not an easy industry. It’s highly competitive. Every year there are literally thousands of young kids coming on the stage, a lot of them so talented. For freelancers, it’s a juggle every day. There’s only so much money going around. There’s only so many publications that will employ people. Even though demand for knowledge and content has grown, the market has shrunk. It’s really sad, but it’s a reality.

As for Silva’s own journey, he said it is likely to be another year before he is “fully functional”, but added that the ultimate goal is to get back to work.

Without a doubt, life is strange. Everything has changed. But I hope to pick up from where I left off, to a certain extent. In the meantime, I just take a little more courage and a little more perseverance — and quite frankly, take as many drugs as I can.

The Economist’s Twitter followers click links, Al Jazeera’s retweet, study finds

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A new study has looked at how six news sites’ Twitter followers engage and react to tweets. Twitter content publishing platform SocialFlow has assessed the Twitter audiences of Al-Jazeera English, BBC News, CNN, the Economist, Fox News and the New York Times.

The study is based on bit.ly and Twitter data from more than 20 million tweets posted by the seven million users who follow these accounts on Twitter.

It has revealed some interesting facts:

  • Engagement can be read in clicks. The Economist has a highly active and engaged audience in terms of both clicks per tweet and retweets per tweet, suggesting a high level of alignment between content posted and attention users are willing to provide.
  • Audiences differ in their willingness to consume and share information on Twitter. Al-Jazeera’s audience is the most active in terms of publishing and retweeting content on Twitter, while the Fox News audience generates substantially more clicks from its audience.
  • A large number of followers doesn’t necessarily translate into action. Despite being the largest account, the New York Times garners the fewest clicks per tweet when audience size is normalised and earns many fewer retweets when compared to accounts that are much smaller.
  • Timing and topical interest matter when seeking attention. By arranging audience tweets into topic maps, we were able to visualise the flow of attention between topics of interest, across the different audiences.

It is worth being aware that this is what SocialFlow does: it offers solutions to businesses wanting to maximise the effectiveness of their tweets by timing them to get the most reaction.

Click throughs

One of the points the study draws out is that where the Economist’s highly engaged Twitter audience clicks on links to the associated news article, Al Jazeera’s audience behaves differently. The study finds Al Jazeera English has the most retweets per tweet but followers are not necessarily clicking links – an all important goal for web publishers.

The takeaway for publishers is one of topics, network and timing, as the report states.

Knowing when an addressable audience is available and what topics they’d like to engage in is key to earning their attention.

The study also points out that a Twitter audience is measurable and this should be analysed and used “to inform content development strategies and marketing planning”.

While clicks bring immediate returns, retweets and other forms of audience participation raise trust and brand awareness, both imperatives for maintaining sustained growth. A high number of followers is not indicative of an engaged audience; a high click-through rate doesn’t necessarily yield other engagement metrics such as retweets and new followers.

By paying attention to long established demographics, collective audience behavior and the mercurial and fickle moment-to-moment signals, we step away from conjectures, generalisations, and assumptions, and leverage the audience itself in determining how best to interact.

SocialFlow has also created a Twitter visualisation looking at engagement with @AJEnglish. Topics have been mapped using over the period of an hour. The larger the topic node, the more it was discussed on Twitter during that hour. Click on the visualisation to download SocialFlow’s diagram as a PDF and explore it.

The full report is at this link…

Andy Rutledge: What works and what doesn’t in news site design

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US-based designer Andy Rutledge has written an excellent post on what works and what doesn’t when it comes to news site design and navigation. It is a must read for anyone remotely interested in how to present news on desktops and mobile.

You need to click though to this post in order to see all his comments when he describes what is wrong with the New York Times site. Here are a few points he makes after considering a number of digital news contributions.

  • Headlines should describe, inform, and be powerful. They should be the workhorse of the publication.
  • There is no ‘edition’. All news is global. All news is local. ‘Global Edition’ and ‘Local Edition‘, etc… are non sequiturs. Navigation and filters should be rational and easy to use.
  • There is no ‘most popular’ news. There is news and there is opinion and they are mutually exclusive. Popularity of stories is something not contextual to news sites, but to social media sites.
  • News is not social media. If it is, it fails to be news.
  • Those whose news reporting is of low quality avoid the marketplace and instead concentrate on the mob/opinion arena.

Rutledge goes on to make a case for charging for content saying “quality news is valuable” and “must therefore have a cost”. He then questions journalistic content.

Regarding content strategy and mechanism, today’s ‘news’ is rife with irrelevancies and distractions. Part of this is due to the news industry’s abandonment of actual journalism, but much of it is due to thoughtless promotional strategy and pathetic pandering. I suggest that digital news acquire a responsible and more usable approach. For instance:

  • ‘Featured’ sections are irrelevant, opinion-shaping editorial promotion; not news.
  • Headlines matter and can be scanned; intro text does not and compromises scanning.
  • Author, source, and date/time are important.
  • Opinion or Op Eds are distinct from news.
  • Article ratings or ‘likes’ are irrelevant in the context of news.
  • Comments are not contextual to news, but to social media
  • Media types (video, gallery, audio) are not sections. These are simply common components of each story.

The full post is at this link

Hat tip: The Next Web

Forbes: Times and NY Times paywall figures compared

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Forbes reports on encouraging subscriber stats for the New York Times, the second set of figures released since it went behind a porous paywall in March.

Since then, the paper has amassed some 224,000 digital-only subscribers. Another 57,000 subscribe to replica editions delivered on e-readers like the Kindle and the Nook. On top of that, there are the 100,000 people getting e-subscriptions sponsored by Lincoln.

Jeff Bercovici goes on to compare the NY Times with the Times.

The Times of London launched its own, very different pay model about nine months before the [New York] Times. (Briefly: the Times [of London] has an impermeable paywall, while the New York Times uses a metered system that allows non-subscribers 20 free pageviews a month.) It only recently hit the 100,000 mark. The Times of London is smaller, but not all that much so: it has a weekday circulation of about 500,000 and a Sunday circulation of 1.2 million, versus 900,000 and 1.3 million for the [New York] Times.

Importantly, the [New York] Times managed to add a new leg to its business without significantly cannibalising its existing web audience. [The site] averaged 33 million unique visitors per month in the second quarter, in line with its average for the preceding 11 months, said CEO Janet Robinson on a call with analysts.

Forbes’ full post goes on to explain the challenges facing the New York Times.

Essential reading on how Google+ is shaping up

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Much has been written about Google+over the past few days as it continues to grow at a record-breaking pace. Here are a few links from around the web on how Google+ is shaping up, plus this post on tips, tricks and tools for journalists using the social network.

What shape is Google+ taking?

The Guardian is reporting Google+ is approaching 20m users just three weeks since it launched as a rival to Facebook.

But “Google’s social juggernaut is beginning to show signs that it’s losing steam”, according to this post on Mashable.

In the Guardian article Paul Allen, the founder of Ancestry.com, said his calculations suggest Google+ is gathering 750,000 new users per day.

Allen explains his methods: “I don’t have access to log files or to a massive consumer panel. I’m simply measuring how many Google+ users there are of various randomly selected surnames every day. Last week I increased the sample of surnames that I query from 100 to 1,000.

Over a four-day period, the 100-surname sample showed a Google+ growth rate of 28.4 per cent. The 1,000 surname sample showed a growth rate of 28.5 per cent. [That’s] statistically insignificant.

Mashable has a post looking at the key findings of a report by Experian Hitwise, which includes that 57 per cent of Google+ users are male.

Google+ is dominated by young adults. Its biggest age group for the four weeks ending July 14 was the 25-34 age bracket, which accounted for 38.37 per cent of all visits. The week before, the entire 18-34 age bracket made up just 38.11 per cent of total visitors.

Read Write Web has been taking a look whether Google+ is causing Twitter and Facebook useage to decline and, though the research methods are not scientific, the hunch is that Plus is having an impact on the use of its rivals.

That is a view seemingly shared by LinkedIn CEO Weiner. He thinks Google+ has changed the social landscape but there’s not much room left, according to a post on the New York Times.

Looking at the broad social landscape, Weiner said LinkedIn was for professionals, Facebook for family and friends, and Twitter for broadcasting short thoughts and information.

He noted that these three networks coexisting made for an “understandable landscape”, but when Google+ gets added to the mix, people have less time and will have to start making choices about where to spend that time.

“All of a sudden, you say ‘where am I going to spend that next minute or hour of my discretionary time?’ and at some point, you don’t have any more time to make choices,” Weiner said.

[He added] Google+ could follow Twitter in attracting celebrities and other well-known figures to help it become a more competitive service.

Some celebrities have already joined, and a couple are among the most followed people on Google+.

The Telegraph has been looking at who has the most followers. Many are Google bosses, plus there is blogger Robert Scoble and actress Felicia Day.

Over on the Next Web there are some thoughts on what Google+ means for your social media policy. The post states G+ is a gamechanger.

It’s all about the circles. Google+ actively encourages you to have ‘work’ and ‘friends’ as your circles. It’s a mindset shift. If you think about the user experience, Facebook is about sharing with friends and family. LinkedIn is about professional connections. Twitter allows you to choose for yourself what it’s about (see Getting past the Oprah Barrier for more about this). The Google+ user experience is all about the networks.

The Google+ experience is all about creating sub-networks of your life (circles) and populating those appropriately.

This means that users will gravitate towards having complicated, overlapping circles and the Google+ stream is a mix of personal and professional connections. This also means that the Google+ share box becomes a place where it is much easier to inadvertently share inappropriate content than perhaps the LinkedIn share box. From a policy perspective, that’s a whole lot of scary.

If you are a journalist and not yet on Google+ and would like an invite, fill in this form and I will attempt to invite you.

NY Times: Scribd to pay news sites for content accessed via app

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News organisations will be paid when users access their content via Float, a new app launched by social publishing site Scribd, the New York Times reports.

Float, which is now an iPhone app and will also be available for Android and iPad, is a personalised reader that allows users to turn their selection of news feeds into a magazine-like format, similar to Zite, Flipboard and Pulse.

But unlike the other three apps, Float (or rather Scribd) will share its revenue with the news organisations featured.

The New York Times article explains that Scribd will make money from advertising and subscriptions.

Scribd didn’t make it clear how much money publishers would have to share with it and how much subscribers would have to pay.

“This is the time for someone to try it, and if we get it working, then it will be phenomenal for the industry,” said Trip Adler, Scribd’s chief executive.

Scribd has talked with a number of publishers, and some have already agreed to make their material available, he said. But he declined to name any companies.

[Adler] voiced confidence in news and Scribd’s ability to make money from it. Consumers want a one-stop shop for news, not a service with a couple of nice features, he said in taking a thinly veiled dig at his company’s rivals.

The New York Times post is at this link