Life beyond print: Newspaper journalists' digital appetite
America's newspaper journalists are eager to compete in the digital world and want their newsrooms to speed up the transition from print to digital, according to this study of almost 3,800 journalists at 79 newspapers.
Teens Know What They Want from Online News: Do You?
Learn what kind of news Web site would attract and interest teenagers - and many other people, too - in this joint study by the Media Management Center and the Newspaper Association of America Foundation.
How To Become 'Easy to Use' Online
Easy to use Web sites distinguish themselves by delivering the amount and complexity of information their users want without overloading them. The key to offering the right amount of information is understanding the target audience.
TechScout: Live Video on the Web - A crazy world that needs to be watched
(Annette Moser-Wellman)
If you are The Jonas Brothers, how do you keep in contact with your fan base in a fast, efficient way without the risk of losing your life? How about a live video web broadcast? The band came on Justin.tv soon after the site launched and they got over 80,000 views in an hour. The site crashed. When The Jonas Brothers came back six months later, they got a little over a million views in an hour and the site stayed up. So goes the popularity of live video.
Evan Solomon from Justin.tv talked to me about the popularity of live video and how it's changing the marketplace on the web.
You may remember a guy called Justin Kan. His idea was to broadcast his life by posting live videos about himself. The phenomena became known as life casting and it created a viral tidal wave in 2006. Since that time, streaming live video has taken on a bigger and - not surprisingly - more commercial role. The big players in addition to Justin.tv include Ustream and LiveStream. Justin.tv now has something like 35 to 40 million unique viewers in the last 30 days and has scaled so quickly that they have 250 of their own servers and can handle over a million concurrent views.
From gaming to business, from science shows to the expected social scene, live video may be the next generation communication vehicle. Frankly, surfing these sites is a crazy experience. The video streams span the highs and lows of human creativity - kind of like YouTube on steroids. But why is the appeal of live video that much different than posting a YouTube video?
"If you think of YouTube as your DVR, no matter what point in time you start watching it, you're going to have the same experience," says Solomon. "But being live offers interactivity. YouTube might have comments, but they are not the same as when the broadcaster and the audience can respond in real-time. Overwhelmingly, people come back for the social relationships and connections they make in a live video experience."
It may be a crazy world, but one worth watching. It is significant that businesses are experimenting and participating in deeper ways in live video. The interactivity allowed creates moments for learning that wouldn't necessarily be available in a product like a WebEx that primarily relies on PowerPoints and blind chat. Microsoft recently launched a program that was a late night talk show style event. Twice a week for five weeks, they hosted a series of guests using computers in a different way to promote a laptop campaign. While they used a standard TV format for the show, Microsoft was able to engage the viewers. They took questions from their live audience and also allowed people to call in via Skype and participate in the discussion.
Solomon reports that one of the reasons corporate sponsors love the live video experience is the quality of engagement in the medium. "Our average session is a little over nine minutes on the site," he says. "Across 40 million viewers that's pretty valuable from an advertiser's point of view. Brands are just now figuring out new ways to optimize that audience."
Adidas recently featured Derrick Rose of the Chicago Bulls. He conducted a live video interview on Justin.tv answering questions about the season and his life. East Bay was the retail partner and they embedded the video on their site. The average viewing time was over 30 minutes per viewer.
"In the world of online content, 30 minutes of engagement is just crazy." says Solomon.
This TechScout article is part of a series of Moser-Wellman interviews commissioned by the Media Management Center to explore opportunities and insights at the intersection of technology and the news media. Click here to view other articles in the TechScout series.
What do you think? Please share your thoughts, experiences and reactions by clicking on the comment button below.
Information noise is everywhere. From comments about what's for dinner on Facebook to Twitter expletives about lost luggage, irrelevant messages are beginning to make advertisements seem interesting again. And as your network grows and shares, the noise becomes even louder. My sixteen- year-old who has been addicted to Facebook for two years is now complaining, "Facebook is filled with stuff I don't care about!"
Look forward to new tools that will help to solve the noise problem and keep the genuine connectivity we originally loved about the Web 2.0 movement. In my last blog, I told you about Scoopler, which uses algorithms to screen out Twitter noise and can divine news trends. Social networks are now cropping up that take a different tack on promoting and preserving the best of our peer-to-peer communication.
I spoke with one of the founders of rrripple, Heather Hiles. rrripple is a media sharing site that says it is committed to 100% signal, 0% noise. What they mean is that, as a social network, you'll be able to share and get what you want with none of what you don't - not even any advertising.
rrripple allows you to create sub-groups within your network. These groups are secure, and you can share video, photos and other documents as appropriate to each group. The user has control over who sees what.
"I have about 30 groups on my rrripple account and they range from my spouse to my whole family to the executive team," Hiles explains. "I can share and direct my content to the people that I want to see it and that I want to have the ability to upload and download and share with me."
Hiles says that, as a beta, rrripple's virality coefficient is about 0.5. This represents the rate of viral sharing, and a 1.2 to 1.4 coefficient is the goal for a social network. Hiles says rrripple's early success is due to the highly relevant nature of the content - it gets shared more. Moreover, when people feel their content is secure, they share it even more frequently.
"The profile of the employee today is really evolving into more of a freelance person," says Hiles. "They are blending the personal with the political and the professional. Our belief has been if we get this right for the individual who's maybe an amateur photographer, wants to share photography, have a little show or have a portfolio on-line, we'll have designed the right platform for newly emerging needs."
I recently tried to set up a group that would allow for file sharing between 18 professionals. Because I didn't want to pay, I deselected Basecamp. Because I needed to share files, I deselected the free wiki sites. And since this was a professional group I checked LinkedIn, but they offered no functionality to share and store files with a private group. So I landed on Google Groups and got it all set up. Because I don't store contacts in Gmail and didn't want to export my Outlook address book, I had to enter the addresses manually. (You can see where this is going.) Once I sent the invitations, half were invalid because Google only allows those with Gmail addresses to utilize the private group function.
Clearly there is a lot of opportunity to improve the ways in which we collaborate online. With rrripple's unique user interface that uses drag and drop technology, they may become one of the next winners. But we can be sure that social networking is here to stay. Those who can most closely facilitate the best of human interaction will steal our hearts and minds.
This TechScout article is part of a series of Moser-Wellman interviews commissioned by the Media Management Center to explore opportunities and insights at the intersection of technology and the news media. Click here to view other articles in the TechScout series.
What do you think? Please share your thoughts, experiences and reactions by clicking on the comment button below.
TechScout: Separating news from fiction - Technologies that are blocking noise and even predicting the future
(Annette Moser-Wellman)
There are a myriad of search engines trying to unseat Google. At the same time, there are a handful of search engines that are trying to grab the white space that Google is missing. One of these complementary players is Scoopler.com. Scoopler is focusing on organizing all the real-time content on the web and making it searchable. What do they mean by real-time? I talked with their Founder Dilan Jayawardane to figure it out.
How are you different from your everyday search engine?
We are indexing content from Twitter, Flickr and Digg, and making it discoverable. We look for trending topics. We are creating a system that is able to detect any newsworthy event that happens out there and build a custom portal so that people can find all the relevant information in one place.
Who is your target audience?
At the moment it's news junkies - people who use Twitter a lot and people who are interested in conversation that goes on Twitter following a news event. We are expanding to those who interact in real-time with a news event live on TV. Increasingly, people are watching television with a laptop and want to interact on Scoopler in real-time.
We get about 2,000 uniques a day, but it fluctuates depending on what's going on in the stratosphere. For example, when Michael Jackson died, our traffic went over the roof and the Iran election is a great example because we had all these photos and people tweeting from Iran and all over the world. We can get massive amounts of traffic, and then it plateaus when there isn't anything exciting going on.
I would imagine that news organizations are interested in Scoopler.
We've been talking to several big media companies and they are very interested in exploring how to make their web content more attractive to their audiences. We can provide sanitized Twitter feeds that screen out the noise and retain the real feedback to the news.
How did you come up with the idea?
I had a lot of Twitter followers and it was hard to keep up with the important content because there was so much noise. I was wondering why there wasn't a service that looks for more interesting content on Twitter and highlights it. And then news started breaking out on Twitter. For example, one of the earliest cases was when NASA found ice on Mars and a scientist tweeted it from inside the lab. I thought there was some real potential to sift out the best news content.
Search results have been largely linked to relevancy calculated by page rank. We sensed there was a huge opportunity to improve that by using activity rank in addition to page rank - that is how active a given link is on the web at any given moment. With activity rank, the moment a page goes up and people start sharing it, we can assess how important that link is. If an article is interesting, it gets shared on Twitter and Digg very, very quickly within five to ten minutes, and we use a very time-sensitive algorithm. If 15 people share that link within a short period of time, it shoots to the top of our search results. It's a new approach to search itself.
Are other search engines focusing on Twitter feeds?
Oh yes. One Riot, Topsy and others. They use purely the number of times a link has been retweeted as their ranking method and how reliable a given user is. But they are competing right against Google in that when you search for something, the layout, the results you get, are very similar to Google results.
Research shows real-time intent - 20% of the time people want to know what's going on right now on a given topic. Let's use the Michael Jackson example again. If you searched for Michael Jackson, you probably aren't interested in the Wikipedia article. You're interested in what just happened. We decided to focus on the live content only - a perfect niche. At Scoopler, our aim is not to become a replacement for Google. Like, we love Google.
This TechScout article is part of a series of Moser-Wellman interviews commissioned by the Media Management Center to explore opportunities and insights at the intersection of technology and the news media. Click here to view other articles in the TechScout series.
What do you think? Please share your thoughts, experiences and reactions by clicking on the comment button below.
TechScout: Reclaiming the Cash - A way toward monetizing publishing content?
(Annette Moser-Wellman)
Many believe the demise of the newspaper business model began with the decision to give content away on the Internet. Why buy the paper, the magazine, the newsletter when you can get the same thing online for free? Increasingly, innovators are trying to reverse consumer expectation that content should be free and find fresh ways to create revenue through micro-payment, subscription and more. Is it possible to reclaim at least some of the cash?
The industry is closely watching the efforts of the start-up Journalism Online. Still in prelaunch phase, Journalism Online is a reader revenue platform that allows publishers the ability to experiment with different ways to charge for online content. Targeted toward anyone who publishes original content online through any electronic devise, the Journalism Online platform is designed to collect revenue from multiple forms of online content.
In my conversation with Steven Brill, one of the Founders of Journalism Online, I asked him about the inception of the idea and their vision for the future.
What does success look like for you? Is it the number of publishers you sign on?
Well, no. We already have letters of intent from publishers representing about 1200 newspapers, magazines and online sites around the world. So that's good. But I guess you can measure success a bunch of ways. One way goes back to the root of why I got involved in this; to create a sustainable business model for independent journalism. If I woke up in three years and saw there were lots of publishers that had a business model based on people valuing content and paying something for it and wanted to hire journalists to produce it, that would be one measure.
Journalism Online is obviously a business and that's a second measure. We get a 20% share of all the revenue we create to build our technology, service customers, and market the publications. In one sense, it wouldn't kill me if another competitor came in and did this more effectively. At least I would have won the first battle that got me into this in the first place - giving journalists an environment in which they can actually make a living. Obviously, I prefer to win both battles.
How does Journalism Online work?
Our tools allow the publisher to select from 16 different 'dials' or criteria to determine the most effective way to charge for their content. Whether it's letting people have 20 to 30 free visits, the first three paragraphs of an article, or huge discounts if they are a print subscriber before they charge, we offer a variety of mechanisms to allow publishers to set the price and the terms. Their customers use a common password to click and buy any and all content across thousands of websites. The publishers get market intelligence about what kinds of offers are working and what kinds of offers aren't working. For example, is a monthly subscription more effective than a day pass or a micro-payment?
If I'm a publisher and I have unique content, don't I take a risk by putting it behind a pay wall? Can't I make more advertising revenue from it if it's free?
It's a myth that this is an either-or proposition - that you can't get both advertising revenue and revenue from readers. You're still going to get people to the site and make advertising revenue. The only page views you're going to lose are perhaps the 10% of the people that you're going to charge. And if all of the 10% say 'no', which they are not, then you would lose 10% of your page views. If most of them say 'yes', you'll actually end up with more ad revenue because you can charge a higher cpm for people who pay to read content than those who don't. That's the way it's always worked in print newspapers and magazines.
When you start charging for content two things happen. First, online circulation revenue gets created and second, print revenue goes up. The thing that's driving print revenue down is everybody realizing they can go get whatever is on the newsstand for free. And every publication that has started charging for some of their online content has seen their print circulation staying the same or go up.
So you're expecting consumers to change their behavior and to pay for good content online?
No. Not everything online is free. Your ring tones aren't free. Books aren't free. Steve Jobs has done a pretty good job of changing expectation of free when it comes to music. You're right in that there is an expectation that most news online is free, but that is changing. But that expectation can change if you turn our dials gradually - and don't just drop a so-called pay wall. To get one form of revenue publishers don't have to sacrifice another. They always had both revenue streams in print. It's only all the idiots who decided to give away everything for free online who created the myth that it's an either-or proposition.
This TechScout article is part of a series of Moser-Wellman interviews commissioned by the Media Management Center to explore opportunities and insights at the intersection of technology and the news media. Click here to view other articles in the TechScout series.
What do you think? Please share your thoughts, experiences and reactions by clicking on the comment button below.
TechScout: Vocalo.org - More than just a radio station
(Annette Moser-Wellman)
The advent of social media promised exposure to more people and diverse ideas. We'd learn from each other's differences and might even grow smarter in the process. But one could argue that social networks have had exactly the opposite effect. It appears that narrower and narrower groups of people talk to each other about similar topics and that the hope for rich dialogue and cross-pollination is more elusive than ever in the digital space.
Chicago Public Radio has made a bold effort to address this trend by creating a form of hybrid media to spawn rich dialogue with wide audiences. Research showed WBEZ's territory covered a large non-white, underserved population. How could new media serve as a lever to encourage participation and involve African-American and Latino communities? Vocalo.org is a Chicago Public Radio enterprise - a radio broadcast channel in Northwest Indiana designed to target a different demographic mix and expand dialogue at the same time.
Vocalo.org is more than just a radio station. It's also a social media, content-sharing website that takes the best user-generated content and curates it as the broadcast. "We have on-air hosts just like traditional public radio," says Wendy Turner, General Manager of Vocalo.org. "But the content is all talk-based speech ranging from stories of personal experience to parodies, commentaries and opinion. We curate the content and expand exposure. We take conversations already happening on the ground and transfer them to mass media."
Similar to YouTube, Vocalo.org is driven by user generated content. But more importantly, Vocalo.org spreads audio uploads across the sound waves and directs people to the web to comment and continue the discussion.
The Vocalo.org format is an experiment blending social media with all the assets of mass media by allowing users to upload their own content and share it with a wider, more diverse audience. From a region that spans the inner city of Chicago to rural farms of Northwest Indiana, Vocalo.org gives people a greater voice in conversations ranging from economics to health to education.
Turner notes the hallmark of the service is exemplified in a recent conversation on the air and via the website about gun control. She says, "A police officer from the South Side of Chicago and a hunter from Northwest Indiana were having a civil, interesting dialogue that went beyond the cliche of what you'd expect a gun control conversation to be. By contrast, you can imagine that sort of niche conversation on the web as being very insular. Vocalo.org allows for a valuable conversation to be brought out and shared with a wider community and illustrates the power of the hybrid media."
Vocalo.org is only three years old and Turner admits it is growing at a slower rate than they would like. Yet even with 5,000 listeners - compared to WBEZ's 500,000, Turner believes that Vocalo.org represents an important part of the future of media for Chicago Public Radio. It seeks to answer the news industries' concerns about multiple sources for unique content. When people can get content they love directly from other outlets like NPR, it will be important for the local radio station to secure its value proposition. From local television to local newspapers, again the 'hyperlocal' clarion call can be heard. The unique ability for radio to broadly share audio feeds puts Vocalo.org squarely in the battle for that local consumer. Turner says it this way: "Our mission is to be very, very present in the local community and reflective of the concerns of all the people in that local community."
This TechScout article is part of a series of Moser-Wellman interviews commissioned by the Media Management Center to explore opportunities and insights at the intersection of technology and the news media. Click here to view other articles in the TechScout series.
What do you think? Please share your thoughts, experiences and reactions by clicking on the comment button below.
TechScout: An Uncommon Partnership: How an investigative journalism site garners a wider audience
(Annette Moser-Wellman)
In this blog, we've introduced some new models for on-line news. Perhaps one of the most visible advancements has been the plethora of investigative journalism sites growing on the Web. Since this expensive news function has been eviscerated from traditional news media budgets, Internet news sites have flourished. Largely funded by philanthropy, investigative reporting has been enjoying a comeback.
Some sites, such as voiceofsandiego.org and San Francisco's public-press.org, seek to bring hard core news stories to their local communities. Largely funded by individual and institutional philanthropy, their mission is to illuminate issues of local importance. These sites are fighting it out on the battlefield of the Web, casting for eyeballs wherever they can find them.
Another model is being created by an organization called ProPublica. Rather than an individual city focus, ProPublica produces investigative journalism in the public interest that is national in scope. They create in-depth stories that highlight concerns such as the Treasury Department bailout. They produce data-rich analyses of the Obama administrations' stimulus package. But what makes the site unique is that these stories don't just live on their site, they are also shared and distributed by popular media. ProPublica partners with larger outlets like the LA Times and the New York Times. Even Slate and Salon co-produce and distribute their content.
"We are in business to make change. We value our stories for the fact that they have impact." Richard Tofel, General Manager of ProPublica, said of the partnership approach to investigative journalism. "I think there is no question that if you want to change the government of California tomorrow, change something in California tomorrow, the Los Angeles Times is still the number one place through which to do that." By partnering with what some may call competitive outlets, ProPublica garners a larger audience for their stories. "Partnering gets you much greater prominence," Tofel explained.
ProPublica is funded by a foundation established by Herbert and Marion Sandler, who have a passion for investigative journalism. "They saw the decline in the amount or resources being devoted to investigative journalism and thought it was a problem for a democratic society," Tofel said.Through a relationship with Paul Steiger, then the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal and now Editor-in-Chief of ProPublica, the Sandlers sought to hire experienced talent in the industry and pay them market salaries.
Tofel believes this talent base is in part what allows ProPublica to put out major stories on an exclusive basis with partners. "Our ability to place these stories with partners is a real market test that is pretty unusual in the philanthropic world. These publications don't need to take these stores, right? They will only take these stories if they are up to their standards," he said.
While ProPublica has been funded by large institutional philanthropy, they are now turning attention to how to raise other funding. Tofel is confident that the market for investigative journalism will continue to drive interest and will be of value.
ProPublica recently co-published a story with the New York Times Magazine that exposed the tragic events at Memorial Medical Center in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Tofel believes gaining exposure for these types of important reporting advances the long term goals of ProPublica and journalism. According to Tofel, "Great stories have real impact. People still read them. People pay attention to them. Things change because of them."
This TechScout article is part of a series of Moser-Wellman interviews commissioned by the Media Management Center to explore opportunities and insights at the intersection of technology and the news media. Click here to view other articles in the TechScout series.
What do you think? Please share your thoughts, experiences and reactions by clicking on the comment button below.
Evan Solomon from Justin.tv talked to me about the popularity of live video and how it's changing the marketplace on the web.
I spoke with one of the founders of 
There are a myriad of search engines trying to unseat Google. At the same time, there are a handful of search engines that are trying to grab the white space that Google is missing. One of these complementary players is 
In my conversation with Steven Brill, one of the Founders of Journalism Online, I asked him about the inception of the idea and their vision for the future.
Vocalo.org is more than just a radio station. It's also a social media, content-sharing website that takes the best user-generated content and curates it as the broadcast. "We have on-air hosts just like traditional public radio," says 
"We are in business to make change. We value our stories for the fact that they have impact." 