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Au Revoir Ampp3d | Digital by Default
” Other people will write blogposts that better sum up the influence Ampp3d etc had on digital journalism in the UK – I am not qualified to do that. I will just say thank you for the inspiration, for demonstrating there was an audience for data journalism beyond the broadsheets and for the ever entertaining social media channels”
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“Every newspaper chain talks about getting digital faster. The plain truth is, that despite almost two decades of effort, most aren’t close to where they need to be. Even The New York Times can count only 28.2 percent of its ad revenue coming from digital”
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Mobile journalism kit advice from RTÉ’s Glen Mulcahy | Media news
Recommended reading for great hints. Glenn is the master.
tags: mojo phone mobile journalism
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“Instead of thinking about the constraints of mobile – of the things you can’t do because the screen is smaller and there’s no keyboard – we should rather think of the PC as having the basic, cut-down, limited version of the internet, because it only has the web. It’s the mobile that has the whole internet.”
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“Before we built qz.com, we built the Quartz API. (On day one, someone had already started playing with it.) Today the API’s primary customer remains qz.com, but it could go in all sorts of directions. Our philosophy has always been to put as little friction as possible between us and our readers, and our API is an advantage in living up to that ideal.”
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Anticipating Digital Disruption
“In order to thrive in this time of exponential change and rapid digital disruption, it is imperative to actively scan far outside of your industry looking for new ways to disrupt yourself, before others do it for you.”
Category: Journalism
Interesting reads (weekly)
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Twitter and What Might Have Been | stratechery
This analysis of Twitter’s shift from developer darling to standalone creator is a fascinating read. I remember the blog post alluded to in this article, and the shockwaves it caused about Twitter’s supposed retreat from openness, dev culture and the open web.
Of course, Twitter has never pretended to be a charity; it employs people, and they need paying. It has offices, shareholders, expense accounts – it’s a company that exists to make money and grow. The Meerkats and Datasifts, that build businesses on someone else’s data, are always gong to be at risk. “Twitter’s story in many respects makes me think of Google: both companies started out benefiting greatly from openness and the power of both connecting users to what they were interested in and opening up powerful APIs to developers. The monetization model is even similar: note the AdSense reference above. Over time, though, Google has pulled more and more of its utility onto its own pages (and the revenue balance in the company has followed), just as Twitter focused on its own apps, and now Google is even starting to eat its best customers like travel websites and insurance agents (members-only), just like Twitter ate Datasift.” -
A professional’s guide to choosing the right video apps | RJI
What is says on the tin.
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How To Survive The Looming Tech Bubble: Ignore The Gurus | Observer
“what we have here are ignorant people (Vaynerchuk, Brogan, Kawasaki, and friends) telling big brands and agencies to dump their money into unproven platforms, or platforms with really shady metrics that they can totally fudge and claim their successful to journalists who don’t really know better. A tech blog may know to call out Vaynerchuk’s portfolio company, MeerKat, for spamming Twitter in order to grow their service, but other publications like AdAge won’t. And guess which one of those publications the brands and advertisers are reading? So the money continues to flow from the agencies and brands and that leads to VCs continuing to prop up these companies”OUCH
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Why Flickr dropped the ‘e’ and started a trend | Marketing Magazine
I had no idea it was based on such an everyday annoyance as an unavailable name. Now, Flicker would just look weird. “We wanted Flicker, but the guy who had it wouldn’t sell,” says co-Founder Caterina Fake. “So I suggested to the team, ‘Let’s remove this “e” thing.’ They all said, ‘That’s too weird,’ but I finally ground everyone down. Then of course, it became THE thing and everyone started removing vowels right and left.””
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The New York Times’ long view on wearables – World News Publishing Focus by WAN-IFRA
Where next? I like Google Glass and it’s been useful for our journalism, but the problem was it was made by developers, and really it’s a fashion accessory for most people. So, we’re expected to fit around the device, not vice versa. This piece on where wearables are headed is worth a read. “We’re at an interesting point with these devices that feel analogue but have a subtle digital participation. We are used to watches being so simple that making them into tiny phones on your wrist may prove interesting to some but will create a split between those designing for aesthetics and those designing for function.
When you get ready in the morning it seems natural to use voice. I don’t often talk to my computer because it has a rich set of interfaces but you could imagine a talking mirror, a piece of furniture that would work. With wearables we are in a weird place because they are a mix of analogue things and digital devices so do I use a crown or do I talk and tap? Apple has done both with Siri and double touch but they have also included the scroll wheel from 20 years ago.”
Interesting reads (weekly)
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Research paper by Matthew Hindman into the regional news business in the US. Fascinating, frustrating and familiar… “Hindman’s research finds that although national news websites have robust traffic, traditional local newspapers are severely behind in adopting the technology and digital content practices needed to retain and grow audiences. No business model – advertising, paywalls, or nonprofit funding – can succeed long-term without continuous digital audience growth. Hindman suggests a variety of proven techniques for newspapers to implement, including faster page load time, improved user experience, personalized content recommendation, social media optimization, and A/B testing.
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Columbia’s Journalism School didn’t need to issue a report on Rolling | The New Republic
‘If your mother says she loves you, check it out’… Or not, in the case of Rolling Stone. So much has been written about the Rape on Campus ‘story’ but this is one of the most considered reads around what it says about Journalism and what happens when the scramble for a Good Story overtakes fundamental training. “The Story Too Good To Check happens at the intersection of journalism’s two imperatives: Be truthful, and be interesting. This doesn’t provide a lot of room to operate—almost everything that’s true is boring and almost everything that’s interesting is false. There’s an asymmetry in the profession, however; journalists are expected to be truthful, but they are rewarded for being interesting. It is into that asymmetry that “A Rape On Campus” fell. “
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9:16 Tips & Tricks — 1st Vertical Film Festival
Vertical video isn’t going away although I could do with the shaky ‘LOOK AT MAH PERISCOPE OF THE OFFICE!” dying down, like, yesterday, this is a good set of how-tos for getting it right.
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How Casey Neistat is Reinventing Filmmaking with Daily Vlogs on YouTube | Fstoppers
Casey Neistat responding to a question about why he’s using YouTube to make video blog posts (yeah, I can’t say vlog and keep a straight face): “I have premiered movies at Cannes Film Festival, the Sundance Festival and written, directed, edited and starred in my very own HBO TV series. I was awarded the Rockefeller Grant for Film Making and I am a lifetime member of the Sundance Institute. Creating a new movie every 24 hours and releasing that movie to an audience of hundreds of thousands of people is an evolution in filmmaking. Our job as creative’s is to further define any medium and also define a new cliché and not to adhere to generations past. To suggest that this is anything but film making is to highlight some preconceived falsehood of what film making is.”
Interesting reads (weekly)
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Facebook hosting doesn’t change things, the world already changed — Remains of the Day
This… “…media ad experiences are awful. I wonder sometimes if folks at media companies ever try clicking their own links from within social media like Twitter or Facebook, just to experience what a damn travesty of a user experience it is. Pop-ups that hide the content and that can’t be scrolled in an in-app browser so you effectively can’t ever close them to read the article. Hideous banner ads all over the page.”
Interesting reads (weekly)
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NPR Appoints The AP’s Michael Oreskes As News Chief : The Two-Way : NPR
I’d agree with this, and also add apathy into the mix – not only how do you hold people’s attention, but how to do you get them to care enough to engage in the first place? For a mercifully brief moment the Upworthy headline was seen as the way forward – now I think it has to be about knowing the conversation well enough, and presenting your content in a way that has the audience’s needs at the forefront of the presentation “The scarcest resource in journalism right now is attention span,” Oreskes said. “We used to live in a world of journalism governed by the laws of physics. Time and space were our key constraints: space in a newspaper, time on the air.”
But that has changed, he said. “The really controlling force in the world right now [is] how long you can keep your audience, your followers, consuming the journalism you’re creating. They have just so many other places to go, so many things pulling on them and so many demands on their time that our goal is to create journalism that holds them.”
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New York Times Shifts Resources to Mobile | Media – Advertising Age
Clff Levy, editor of NYT Now, on the restructuring towards mobile of the wider company: “the whole company is shifting resources toward mobile at every part of the company. [Times Publisher] Arthur Sulzberger and Mark Thompson and [Times Executive Editor] Dean Baquet are really, really focused on mobile right now. Every division in the company is looking at how they can shift more resources to mobile. In the newsroom we’re certainly doing that. There’s been a lot of discussion about how we can free up resources, what can we do less of in order to move more people to mobile.”
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NYT deploys journos to interact with readers on other platforms
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Bruni himself started responding to comments about the story posted to the Times’ Facebook page, and the conversation lasted throughout the weekend. But on Monday, he ventured away from the confines of the Times’ page and toward that of conservative media personality Laura Ingraham.
The Times’ audience-development team had been monitoring the story’s social media performance and was alerted that Ingraham’s page had posted the piece. Recognizing her as an influencer, the social media team deployed Bruni to her page, where he answered the question Ingraham posed in her Facebook post about the story.
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Interesting reads (weekly)
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Snapchat stories: Here’s how 6 news orgs are thinking about the chat app » Nieman Journalism Lab
Does what it says on the tin. I like the opportunities presented by Snapchat – I particularly like the idea of going back to that more intimate connection with an audience – it feels to me like the early days of journalism brands were using social media, and really sharing and connecting with the people in their niche (be that interest or geographic).
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Why BuzzFeed is the Most Important News Organization in the World | stratechery by Ben Thompson
The headline is ridiculous and doesn’t really reflect the article, which is an excellent consideration of how internet media are adapting to audience needs, and shaping them, while making money. I also think the storied NYT page 1 meeting disappearing is of precisely zero interest to its readers, and of vast interest to the mainstream media. Which is probably symptomatic of the whole MSM problem – we’re the most self-absorbed industry around. “Perhaps the single most powerful implication of an organization operating with Internet assumptions is that iteration – and its associated learning – is doable in a way that just wan’t possible with print. BuzzFeed as an organization has been figuring out what works online for over eight years now, and while “The Dress” may have been unusual in its scale, its existence was no accident. What’s especially exciting about BuzzFeed, though, is how it uses that knowledge to make money. The company sells its ability to grok – and shape – what works on social to brands; what they don’t do is sell ads directly2 (in a narrow sense BuzzFeed almost certainly lost money spinning up servers and paying for bandwidth to deliver “The Dress”). The most obvious benefit of this strategy is that, contrary to popular opinion, and contrary to its many imitators, BuzzFeed does not do clickbait. “
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“Having increased the size of its staff (in addition to the recruitment of Wilson, Guido Fawkes also has a parliamentary sketch writer, Simon Carr, who joined in October 2013) the site – which has tabs for politics, media, environment and technology stories – generally runs around 15 stories every working day. This is up from seven or eight a couple of years ago. Guido Fawkes claims to attract between 120,000 and 250,000 unique browsers a day. It aims to have something up by 8.30am each morning and then a new post every 45 minutes after that. The site has peaks in traffic at around 9am, 11am, 5pm and 8pm. Alongside Twitter – the main Guido Fawkes account has 144,000 followers – the site’s main source of traffic is its newsletter emails. Staines says that around 70 per cent of Guido Fawkes’ income now comes from advertising”
Interesting reads (weekly)
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A Teenager’s View on Social Media — Backchannel — Medium
“While it hasn’t reached the popularity of the other networks, Yik Yak is a powerful contender that people actually use. Often I see people post about the fight for anonymity with other applications such as Secret. I can tell you that I do not know a single person in my network who uses that application. People reference Yaks all the time with each other or send screenshots, I have yet to ever hear of a hot post on Secret that everyone’s talking about.”
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Inside the NY Times’ audience development strategy – Digiday
“At other news organizations, SEO has taken a back seat as readers increasingly come to the news from social media networks; some outlets optimize completely for social sharing. Search remains an important traffic source for the Times, though, although MacCallum felt it had been neglected. To that end, she has designated 15 copy editors and Web producers as “SEO ambassadors” who understand how to use keywords for search to work with their peers.”
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“BuzzFeed is easy to bash; a fast-rising rocket ship is a visible target. And they do produce some pretty silly content. But when you discuss the future of journalism, BuzzFeed always seems to show up at that intersection between crazy and smart where genius so often lies. What’s actually crazy is seeing most everyone try to copy BuzzFeed’s voice and play catchup to its trendy listicle format at one point or another—from old media, including the Times, to new media like Digiday, to opportunistic startups like Playbuzz.”
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VG chief technology and product officer: The need for product management in media
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This leads me to think and manage the product differently to the way my new colleagues in media approach it. Here, most managers are primarily concerned with managing the content, and only the content, as the content is considered to be the product. They have left little or no concern to the way it’s consumed or distributed or how it fosters engagement and co-creation.
Now these worlds converge. Product managers have to become great content managers; and content managers have to become better product managers. In order to do so, we first have to be aware of the traditional disconnects – so that we can understand each other before joining forces.
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Talking innovation, skills and the future with journalism students
After decades of not going to Sheffield, 2014 was the year I found myself there on several occasions – incidentally, what a fine city it is, once you manage to negotiate the frankly rubbish rail links that run from west to east.
My most recent trip was at the invitation of Sheffield University journalism professor Peter Cole, who asked me to give a guest lecture on how the industry is changing, in my opinion, and what it means for students. Specifically, the brief was to give an insight into my innovation role, what skills I looked for when recruiting, the digital transformation of the newsroom and my own experience, along with new ways to tell stories.
Here’s what I talked about, some of it is taken verbatim from my notes, some paraphrased for shortness but the gist is the same:
Past behaviours inform future ones
Many titles in the regional press have been working in online spaces for a long time, in digital terms. Way back in the sepia-tinted days of 2008 there was innovative, experimental work being done around live content, social media and the use of digital tools. It wasn’t perhaps the most structured approach but it did mean there was a lot of trying, learning and success (and some failing, but that was ok too).
In the years since then, the onslaught of unchecked code being shoehorned into a CMS (whether it could handle it or not) has calmed somewhat, but I think that digital Goldrush was important. It helped us understand how the new world worked, what audiences wanted from it, where mainstream media could fit into it, and the possibilities of building things that told stories in new ways. It also helped us understand that not everything would work, and those failures should be learned from. Regional newsrooms are inventive, partly because of their historic need to be that way. I think it can make us braver about pushing into new digital territories in the future.
Innovations team work
I don’t post much of what the innovations team does, partly because I do struggle to find time/connectivity to post a lot, partly because, y’know, confidentiality, and partly because I don’t want people confusing my personal views and the views and opinions of my employer. But I should do because I’m really proud of what 2014 brought, in terms of innovation.
We worked with drones (Side edit: Here’s a 2015 prediction: We’ll see arrests and calls for tighter legislation around drones. I was talking to an Establishment Source recently and it is a definite Hot Button as far as law-botherers are concerned) and turned longform storytelling into a commercial opportunity; we went live in the Manchester Evening News newsroom; and the Google Glass project we’re running has turned me from something of a skeptic into an advocate for the role of wearables in journalism. Next in the pipeline is more video work, and tapping into the Internet of Things to foster culture change and audience engagement.
What I find most interesting about the innovations team work, however, is that it’s much more successful when we involve others. Whether it’s teaming up with external third parties, or combining with skills from the data unit or social media colleagues, the end result is richer for collaboration. Journalism is as much about human networks as it ever was.
Newsroom skills
When I started job hunting you needed an NCTJ qualification, perseverance and a degree of luck to break into journalism. These days, I guess the skills I’d expect to see used by a journalist would be a daunting list, and probably considered unreasonable to those whose newsroom experience ended somewhere in the mid-90s (looking at you, Hold the Front Page commentators). However, these are skills you use a lot. Some of them you’ll call on every day, without thinking, and your job would be much, much more difficult without them.
And to students who think it sounds like too much is being required, I’d ask them to imagine trying to acquire these skills when you’re already working in a newsroom – bringing in stories, covering meetings, building contacts. And then trying to learn advanced Tweetdeck, or Excel spreadsheet wrangling. Learn it before you have to learn it, would be my advice, because learning on the job is hard. I know, because I had to do it.
There’s no ‘one size fits all’ journalist skill set any more. If you want to be a court reporter or a city editor, you’ll need to know Law and the pillar NCTJ skills or similar. But you will also need to be a skilled mobile journalist, adept in using a smartphone to shoot video, take photos, record audio, live tweet, and/or live stream.
As our audience becomes more device-orientated, we need to be there with them, providing the news – and our analytics show us that social platforms and live content are what brings us large audiences who are loyal and who share what we do.
So these are some of the skills and knowledge I look for if I’m interviewing candidates: An awareness and ability of and in audience engagement/social media; mobile and live journalism; multimedia; interactives; data visualisation; analytics; Search Engine Optimisation.
If you’re a senior journalist with an NCTJ or equivalent qualification, who wants to specialise in hard news reporting, you also need to demonstrate social media skills, multimedia abilities – video, audio, photos, for example – mobile journalism skills such as live tweeting or liveblogging breaking news and real-time events, data journalism, FOI familiarity, SEO knowledge. Knowledge of digital tools such as Storify, timeline and mapping software, basic coding knowledge, detailed knowledge of social search and verification processes will give you an edge.
If you wanted to specialise in data journalism, the ability to use tools such as Excel, data visualisation tools and ability to source and extract data is essential, but I’d say you also need social media skills (not least because there are a lot of data experts on social who are very generous with their knowledge) to source and promote your work. Then there’s SEO knowledge, plus enough coding knowledge to be able to articulate to a developer what you want to achieve.
Social media writer or editor roles obviously need excellence across social platforms in terms of use, understanding of language and tone, copyright, sourcing and seeking UGC, ability to live tweet or run social Q&As, understanding and application of social analytics tools, SEO knowledge and an understanding of marketing analytics that reveal habits and patterns of users, such as what platform and what device, at what time.
Audience engagement roles are vital in today’s newsrooms. We rely on the ability to use analytics such as Omniture, Chartbeat, and social metrics such as Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics, to gauge what matters to audiences and apply journalistic knowledge to developing and shaping content. Understanding the spikes that exist through the day – from the 6.30am traffic, travel and headlines, to the evening social conversation and long reads can be the difference between snaring readers and keeping them, and missing them completely.
These skills apply across all departments in editorial – not just news – and anyone preparing for an interview these days had also be up-to-speed on their IPSO, copyright laws, defamation and contempt in comments, and rights-of-use of UGC on social platforms, because they will probably crop up in any interview.
Like I said, it’s a long list but when you’re up against perhaps 200 applications, showing use of social and live journalism, data journalism, mobile journalism, and some awareness of SEO/analytics could be the edge you need.
The future
Journalists have learned a lot, quickly, in recent years about new way to tell stories and reach audiences. We’ve also learned what our audiences expect from us, because they tell us – very publicly across social media when we let them down. Social media skills are essential – it’s a publishing platform, a breaking news tool and a conversation engine, and expertise in this field can lead to an accelerated career path, just as it has allowed to growth of new business opportunities and media publishers.
There’s a lot said about the diminishing of the regional press, and it’s true some titles have disappeared, some have gone weekly or become purely digital, and probably all newsrooms have smaller staff numbers, than when I started 20 years ago. That said, I once worked at daily titles where the opinion column had its own journalist, who did nothing but that every day – I couldn’t then, and still can’t, imagine a working day so stultifying dull.
While traditional roles have reduced, new ones have been created and with them new opportunities. The route of reporter, specialist, news desk or subs desk, and then perhaps management is only one way to progress now – the newsroom conference table looks nothing like it used to- some don’t have conference tables at all.
In six short years, the newsroom as I knew it has changed out of all recognition, both culturally and physically. I suspect in six years time it will look different again.
Interesting reads (weekly)
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When to quit your journalism job » Pressthink
“When the sales people are happy to sell what the newsroom is happy to make, there you have a well-run editorial company. So measure your own newsroom’s misery by its distance from that (ideal) state”
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“In practically every industry that I look at, I see a major disruption happening. I know the world will be very different 15 to 20 years from now. The vast majority of companies who are presently the leaders in their industries will likely not even exist. That is because industry executives either are not aware of the changes that are coming, are reluctant to invest the type of money that is be required for them to reinvent themselves, or are protecting legacy businesses. Most are focused on short-term performance.”
Interesting reads (weekly)
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“The digital disruption to news delivery has also posed questions about the need for impartiality in the digital age. With the internet providing so many varied opinions and views on an issue, and social media favouring strongly held opinions, is there still room for the objective reporting method?”
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Rolling Stone didn’t just fail readers — it failed Jackie, too – Vox
The Rolling Stone article on campus rape failed to protect the woman at the heart of the story by ignoring basic journalism, says Vox. I’m pretty sure such a piece would not have got past any of my old news editors when I was a reporter. “None of those things mean Jackie is lying. But it makes it all the more important to ask for proof. If you are going to expose a traumatized 20-year-old to the judgment of the entire world with a story that many people don’t want to believe is true, you owe it to everyone — to your readers, but especially to her — to make sure it is unimpeachable. It’s not just damage control for your publication or your personal reputation. It’s to protect the person who trusted you.”
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A collection of tools and resources for journalists from 2014 | Media news
Headlines and Deadlines 