We will not be updating the website on a daily basis with feature stories, and we are suspending publication of our daily and weekly newsletters, as well as the weekly MediaShift Podcast. The EducationShift and MetricShift verticals and newsletters will not continue. Most of our staff has been let go.

This was not an easy decision for me, but it was a necessary one. Running an independent online publication is incredibly rewarding but also very stressful and time-consuming. It is time for me to step away from this work to clear my head and consider what might come next. I have nothing in mind but am open to new adventures in media or beyond.

I want to thank all the amazing people who have worked for MediaShift over the years, all our funders and sponsors, and most of all the MediaShift community of people who have made our events, newsletters, podcast and everything else such a big success.

FAQ

What comes next for the MediaShift site, newsletters and podcast?

I have talked to numerous media companies, associations and journalism schools about buying these and keeping them up and running in the months ahead. I am hopeful that this will happen so the site can continue and serve the media industry.

Is this another example of the failure of a pivot to something, the power of the duopoly, or some other trend killing online publications?

Not at all. The only trend here is that it is hard work running an independent online publication. I think we figured it out, but this was more about my own personal burnout than any trends.

What happens to the site and its archives?

The site will continue to be live with the archives intact, and I expect there will be occasional posts related to our online panels, trainings or other initiatives. But regular stories and roundups are suspended for now.

What was the secret to MediaShift’s success and survival all these years?

Frankly what kept us going was collaboration and always thinking about new ways to serve our audience. We definitely diversified revenue streams to include advertising on our site, newsletters and social media feeds; events such as J-School Hackathons and Platforms + Publishers private roundtables; DigitalEd online trainings, sponsored panels and our new Peer-to-Peer Network; and our MediaShift Studio producing editorial work for outside companies, startups and publishers. Keeping a sharp focus on training, how-to’s, case studies and guides made sure we weren’t yet another publication chasing the news cycle.

What will MediaShift focus on going forward?

We will continue to run a series of sponsored online panels, including “How to Get Better Engagement Metrics” on April 18, and “Loyalty & Revenue: The New User Metrics” on May 2. Follow the links to sign up!

We also recently launched our new DigitalEd Peer-to-Peer Network, with peer group trainings for publishers. If you’re interested in joining one of the groups, be sure to apply here.

MediaShift also has a Studio that has worked with associations such as the NAB, non-profits such as Philanthropy University and others to produce editorial and even podcasts.

If you’re interested in any of these programs, or have ideas about what might come next, be sure to get in touch with me at mark [at] mediashift [dot] org.

Farewell for now!

Mark Glaser is publisher and founder of MediaShift. He is an award-winning writer and accidental entrepreneur, who has taken MediaShift from a one-person blog to a growing media company with events such as private roundtables between platforms + publishers, and weekend hackathons; the weekly MediaShift Podcast; and digital trainings. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit.

The post MediaShift to Change Focus to Trainings, Events, Studio appeared first on MediaShift.

Advertising technology supplies millions of ad impressions and targeting tools, but they leave the fundamental goals of an advertising campaign, notably success, to the advertiser. Is there anyone who truly cares about a small business advertiser, the primary client of local newspapers and magazines, at the scale of Facebook or Google?

Any small publisher who survives on direct advertising sales has to consider the weaknesses in the model of their Silicon Valley competitors if they intend to continue to rely on an ad sales model. We hear every day that the “duopoly” is dominating in digital advertising revenue. This is true, but Google and Facebook are definitely not invincible, and recently eMarketer predicted their market share would drop this year.

Small, niche publishers, like hyper-local news, regional magazines, and trade journals, have powerful advantages which cannot be replicated at scale, and they should use them.

Motivations for Advertisers

Before outlining these advantages, we need to ask ourselves something more fundamental which will highlight why they are so powerful.

Why do advertisers advertise? It’s obvious: to generate business.

Now, let’s take a more sincere and empathetic approach. Think of yourself as the business owner.

Businesses are created for a lot of different reasons. For some people, it’s a potential path to freedom or independence. Some love what they do and want to try and make money with it. For others, like the owner of a local franchise, it’s a way to make a living. These people all have something in common: they need the phone to ring, emails to stack up in the inbox, or people to walk in the door. Without it, they don’t have much of a business.

But they’re just average people with a lot of other things on their mind. When it comes to “marketing” they’re often clueless, apathetic, or too bogged down by their daily routine to even think about it. And when they have thought about it, they’re generally skeptical about anyone who promises to do it for them. If getting people in the door reliably (and profitably) was so easy, they’d be on a beach somewhere instead of talking to you.

Success in direct ad sales begins with the understanding of why customers spend money on advertising: they want to gain recognition and attract customers.

So the question for anyone trying to sell an ad is, “how can I help this person gain more recognition and hopefully, more business?”

The question is not, as many people think, “how can I get this person to buy an ad?”

When you approach an ad sales discussion from the perspective of helping someone achieve what they actually want, the conversation flows in a much more productive and positive direction than, “here’s my media kit, are you interested in supporting us?”

Importantly, the way you think of advertising also changes. It becomes your duty to make sure that whatever you’re offering is working. If not, sales and renewals are going to dry up. After all, you’re really selling your assistance in helping your customer meet a goal — not ads.

10 Advantages for Small Publishers

These are the 10 advantages that small publishers have over the big tech companies. They are outlined more fully in a new book available at Broadstreet.

1. You Have Community Support and Affinity

One of our customers, and one of the many innovative voices in the Local Independent Online News Publishers (LION) group, Jay Senter of Shawnee Mission Post told us this: “People really value the fact that we’re providing reliable coverage of their communities. And they recognize that all of our sponsors are local, too. So when someone signs up for an ad or sponsorship package with us, they’re attracted not just to the price for the exposure, but to the ability to be associated with a well-regarded local brand.”

When you walk into an ad sales appointment, you are recognized as a bullhorn to a town that’s listening. You are starting from first base while everyone else waits in the on-deck circle.

Sources of advertiser dissatisfaction with paid search and other local marketing services. Source: LSA-Thrive Analytics, January 2015

2. You’ve Got a Direct Relationship

Wendy Cohen of Berkeleyside gave her personal insight into the true value of someone selling local advertising: “A direct salesperson makes the process seamless, works on the client’s behalf and is the person who provides trust and comfort to what can be a daunting experience, particularly for a small business person.“

As a local publisher, it’s your duty to understand and help fulfill the client’s needs. Start the sales conversation by asking the potential customer what it is they would hope to promote or achieve.

Listen closely and take notes. You might find it beneficial to develop a proposal that outlines how you can help your prospect reach their goals and define what success would look like.

3. You Have Flexibility When It Comes to What You Offer

Our current idea of “digital advertising” is a standard box ad or leaderboards — in other words, banner ads sized at 300×250 and 728×90. Yes, you should support those sizes, but you should also be thinking about what you can offer beyond that.

What do you, as the publisher or salesperson, think would actually get your readers’ attention and aid your client? As an autonomous and independent publisher, you have the ability to offer whatever you want to and call it “advertising.” In other words, don’t let the IAB strictly define what you can and can’t sell.

A benefit of changing and innovating, when it comes to your offerings, is that different products work well in different use cases. On top of that, someone who passed on an old offering months ago might be interested in trying a new offering. Old leads and prospects don’t have to be forgotten if you’ve always got something new to show.

A section sponsorship, displaying only one advertiser at a time visible on Nooga.com

4. Sponsorship Models

In 2017, the most common question among our customers was “how can I set up section sponsoring?”

Many small publishers have their sites broken out into different sections which just happen map to different segments of their potential advertiser base. For example, Food and Dining, Arts and Entertainment, Events, Crime and Arrests, Schools, Kids, etc.

Many publishers don’t know this, but they can easily give an advertiser “ownership” of a section of their site, meaning that all ads — sidebar, leaderboard, in-story and others — are from the same advertiser on every page load. The brand impact is undeniable.

Some advertisers (attorneys and high-end real estate agents, for example) love this sort of thing. At even $2000 per month, a few clients over the course of a year would likely pay off the campaign and generate real return on investment.

And no, Facebook, Google or ad networks could never offer that.

5. You Can Write Sponsored Content Like Nobody Else Can

If you truly take time to talk with a business owner and understand what they’re hoping to communicate, sponsored content is also an excellent option for informing and engaging the community.

Very few publishers will take the time to write in-depth content on an advertiser’s behalf. Many publishers will simple say “send us your content and a check, and we’ll run it.”

Owners love reading about and sharing stories about their business, especially when someone else wrote it. It’s an effective tool in working with an advertiser who might not be interested in traditional display advertising.

6. Your Pricing Can Be Flexible and Understandable

The current mode of pricing internet advertising is cost-per-thousand ad impressions, or “CPM.” It’s not complicated, but it’s not straightforward either. If you ever have to explain how the pricing works to a potential customer more than once, you’re wasting time and probably losing your chance to work with them.

A flat rate of $x per month is more understandable. It also isn’t reliant on your site traffic or the social media networks that control it, like CPM.

With a flat pricing model, there aren’t any other questions apart from “where would my ad appear?” which is covered next.

7. You Can Guarantee Positioning

Most of a small publisher’s competitors can’t promise when or where a client’s ad will appear on the site. For a small business owner, that sounds like trickery.

Small publishers, by contrast, can guarantee that a campaign will always appear in some position with some level of frequency. Many local advertisers will actually refresh a page and look for their ad once it goes live.

An automated, sophisticated newsletter for Homepage Media Group advertising setup with daily rotation and stat reporting.

8. You Can Put Your Customers in Inboxes Around Your Community

The newsletter may be the most underrated tool in a small publisher’s toolbox. It can be used to reliably drive traffic, unlike social media, and it can also be used as valuable advertising space.

Many advertisers love being present in a newsletter, especially when they’re readers of the newsletter themselves. The tangible feel of a newsletter and limited ad space creates a perceived potency that some are attracted to.

9. You’re Transparent

Ad-tech’s biggest problem, currently, is rooted in fraud and issues of transparency. It’s difficult for advertisers to understand whether they effectively targeted their intended audience, whether their campaign truly performed well, or if their ad was even seen by a human.

Here are a few recent headlines:

CNBC: Businesses Could Lose $16.4 Billion to Advertising Fraud in 2017
CNBC: Online ad fraud is a ‘widespread’ problem, Google and other big ad platforms admit
AdExchanger: Google Offers Refunds For Fraud, But Only On Its Own Terms

The straightforward approach and style of guaranteed positioning and flat pricing makes for a more transparent and understandable value proposition.

10. You Can Deliver Better Performance and Value

In two years of studying value-oriented digital advertising, Broadstreet has noticed that smaller publishers tend to yield higher engagement rates for ad campaigns than larger publishers. When good placement and a large, dynamic or informational creative is used, the engagement rates increase even more.

High clickthrough and engagement rates are important. That means that given a set number of impressions, you can deliver more impact than an ad network can. So even if your publication isn’t one of “scale,” if you deliver three to five times higher performance than an ad network, you have the effect of delivering three to five times more impressions that you actually do.

Conclusion

To win in any competitive process, you have to stand out and differentiate your ability. The outlined advantages are a simple but effective guide for achieving that. Remember them when asking yourself these questions prior to a sales meeting:

What can I do to show my prospect that I am legitimately interested in helping them?

Once they choose to work with me, how can I guarantee that choice was a good one?

How can I ensure that this experience was so positive, end to end, that they’ll work with me again in the future — and possibly even recommend me to someone else?

Basically, spin Google’s philosophy: “focus on the advertiser and all else will follow.”

Kenny Katzgrau is the founder of Broadstreet, an ad-serving company that focuses on small and niche news and magazine customers. Broadstreet is a long-running supporter of LION and the Center for Cooperative Media in New Jersey. He recently published a book titled “Ten Advantages: How Magazine and Hyperlocal News Publishers Will Win In the Era of Google and Facebook.”

The post 10 Advantages That Small Publishers Have Over Tech Giants in Selling Ads appeared first on MediaShift.

Why is it so unlikely that the next big innovation in journalism will come from Europe? What are the barriers that curb innovative capacity? In this article, I document specific challenges and common pitfalls that I gleaned from researching news startups in Germany.*

1. Founders underestimate tasks and workload.

Starting a company in journalism means far greater and more diverse work than being a freelance journalist. Founders who assume that owning a business opens up new freedom for journalistic work clearly underestimate the effort involved. Administration, marketing, audience development, technology management, revenue model development – activities formerly undertaken by publishing houses – are now the responsibility of the founders. One entrepreneur interviewed in the study – a former journalist – complained: “Please give us…publishing staff! Now we learned what publishers do and how they give us journalists the support we need.” Many of these non-journalistic activities are necessary even if rapid growth, high profits or a profitable “exit” from the company are not the main objectives of their founders.

2. Founders get caught up in role conflicts.

As soon as the editor-in-chief of a startup – as in one of my cases – sells advertising space at the same time, those in charge find themselves in a paradoxical dual role in which journalistic and economic activities are sometimes conducted in parallel. The problem becomes even more acute in those startups where there is no spatial division between departments in physically separated offices because cooperation is mostly organized virtually. Founders set out with good intentions and consider possible role conflicts. The greater the financial pressure, however, the more difficult it is for them to remain true to their own standards: for example, when they are forced to choose between “accepting a large corporate publishing project or running into personal bankruptcy,” as one entrepreneur I talked to accurately puts it.

Founders often don’t raise enough money for news startups. Photo by the_burtons / Getty Images

3. Founders withdraw from journalism.

Journalistic and economic perspectives come into conflict, especially when new streams of revenue are generated in startups. Because some newcomers in Germany seem to be guided by the “glory days” of journalism, they try to transfer the existing business model of print publishers into digital environments. In what follows, they face the same challenges as established media. To uncover new sources of revenue, startups in Germany are testing community models, licensing and commissioning, e-commerce, consulting services, and training. These are not disruptive business model innovations that might have been expected for ventures in other online sectors.

In addition, some of the new revenue streams are only loosely related to journalism. Why, however, should journalism be produced in a company at all, if profits are achieved in new business areas? Such a mindset carries the risk that founders – in a segment pivot – gradually eliminate the labor-intensive and costly production of journalism.

4. Founders do not think from a user’s perspective.

New journalistic startups in Germany are primarily started from a “creator’s perspective” that aims to transfer certain professional standards into digital media. Founders largely conceptualize their businesses from the viewpoint of a journalist. The interests, problems, and needs of potential users, on the other hand, often play only a minor role. However, if users are systematically taken as a starting point, products and revenue models can be developed to suit individual niches and sub-markets. A problem-centered and user-oriented approach at the same time enables founders to permanently question their products and if necessary, to react to a changing market environment.

This approach has become even more relevant in digital and much more volatile environments: Media management is necessarily becoming a practice of experimentation. One of the entrepreneurs interviewed stated: “You can’t ignore the reader these days…This will rarely work immediately or if it does, then only for a short period. Therefore, always try to stay in touch [with your users].”

5. Startups are under-financed.

Even if there is a lack of viable business models in journalism, starting up is very cheap to begin with. “You don’t need much. All you need is a computer, an internet connection, and a WordPress system,” says one founder. However, the much lower barriers to initiating a media product in the digital world can lead to false incentives. Founders in journalism underestimate the cost drivers in day-to-day business: the difficult acquisition of users and paying customers, continuous observation and communication via an increasing number of new channels such as Facebook, Snapchat, etc. and, above all, the production of high-quality content. This is why startups in German journalism are heavily underfunded.

Subsequently, atypical working relationships arise in some places: Key activities that were previously carried out in the editorial department are now performed by employees who are engaged on a temporary, sometimes voluntary, case-by-case basis. This fundamental dependency on unpaid assistance can contribute to a paradoxical phenomenon: While startups try to counteract the decline of traditional journalism, they actually continue the familiar cost-saving tendencies of established publishing houses and – as an unintended effect – thus even perpetuate this decline.

Entrepreneurs sometimes go down the same path as legacy media in cutting journalism jobs. Photo by jayk7 / Getty Images

6. Teams are too homogeneous.

The teams behind journalism startups are currently too homogeneous. However, innovative teams should be formed to bring together personalities with different backgrounds and complementary expertise. They can tackle the emerging challenges more skillfully and flexibly. Business people could help to raise awareness of the commercial tasks involved in setting up media companies. Programmers and developers could help keep pace with the latest technological solutions, which are now becoming outdated at breakneck speed.

One founder interviewed in the study said: “I don’t really need any journalists. I don’t want to do [the business] with journalists.” Having outsiders in a team can also help to carry over mindsets and practices from other domains that initiate new ways of thinking and novel solutions in journalism.

7. Founders lack relevant contacts and relationships.

Even if complementary skills come together in a startup, founders cannot solve all challenges on their own. From day one, they need support from employees to carry them through the startup phase as well as through later development stages. However, due to the underfunding outlined above, these supporters can rarely be employed on a permanent basis.

The founders in daily journalistic business – as shown above – depend on freelance authors and journalists who work for them, in some cases free of charge. Support from the outside is also needed in design, technology, marketing, sales, legal and tax matters. News startups differ from traditional publishing houses in that they have a network-like, post-industrial form of organization in which numerous activities are disintegrated, i.e. detached from the company and outsourced to a network of partners. The social capital of the founders, their relationships and connections form the basis of this disintegration. If social capital is missing, a journalistic startup is hard to maintain and establish in Germany – no matter how sound the original approach may be.

Conclusion

The objective of my research was to raise awareness of the causes of failure for news startups, help entrepreneurs avoid common mistakes, and help industry experts and investors to realistically estimate the potentials and possibilities of journalistic startups. If the typical flaws gathered here are avoided in the future, we might see news innovation more frequently in Europe.

*Method of the study: I examined 15 ventures from Germany using empirical case study research. I included companies that started independently of established media organizations – i.e. no spin-offs or new business units of traditional publishers or broadcasters – and focused primarily on the production of journalistic content, not its dissemination or distribution.

Christopher Buschow is a postdoctoral research assistant at the Department of Journalism and Communication Research (IJK), Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media (Germany). His research and teaching are focused on Entrepreneurship in Media Industries. You can follow him on Twitter @chrias.

The post 7 Reasons Why News Startups Fail appeared first on MediaShift.

But just dropping in a suite of more modern equipment won’t fix the problem in itself. Going fully digital means adapting to a different kind of news ecosystem, characterized by faster-changing, more ambiguous conditions in the operating environment, along with a higher degree of interdependence between editorial and the business than was true of the analog newsroom. The technology infrastructure needed for such an ecosystem has to reflect those circumstances and be a product of adaptability and collaborative work between the IT department and working journalists from the start.

That’s the conclusion that Australian Associated Press (AAP) came to when it decided it needed new software to run all of its editorial operations several years ago. It wasn’t just a matter of upgrading the main news production platform and legacy editorial systems that had turned into technology bottlenecks, taking up valuable time and energy in the newsroom. AAP wanted a forward-looking system that would allow news content to be described and packaged with structured data formats for improved content discovery and distribution. At the same time, the system also needed to be Lego-like in its capacity for additional system features or even new third-party services to be snapped on and off.

When AAP approached us at Sourcefabric in 2014, we had similar ideas for a new kind of open-source, flexible publishing platform, but they had not yet been encoded into a working system. The newsroom software we called Superdesk was still only a prototype. Forming a co-development partnership with a news agency like AAP represented an opportunity to “capture the journalistic DNA of a living, breathing specimen,” as our founder Sava Tatic put it at the time. The task of the 22 months that followed was to build a real-world implementation of Superdesk at AAP, with coders and engineers sitting next to reporters and editors in the newsroom.

The AAP product team in a technical meeting.

Why was that important? Vince Ryan, the lead project manager from Sourcefabric who was on site in Sydney, said it is often the case that a developer doesn’t “get” what a journalist wants to achieve by looking at only a JIRA ticket [describing a project feature or bug]. “JIRA tickets often miss essential information because the person writing the ticket leaves out what she thinks is obvious. What is obvious to a journalist is not obvious to a developer, and vice versa,” he said.

Key Lessons Learned

Having said that, we are fortunate to have several former journalists at Sourcefabric who are also conversant in software involved in the ongoing development of Superdesk.

Here are some key lessons learned from those who led the implementation at AAP.

1. Get editors and writers on board early — and keep them engaged.

“In a good project, the journalists would be involved and feel ownership from the start,” Ryan said. Before the project even launched, AAP undertook a major effort to interview people across the newsroom and in bureaux to gather requirements and feature requests. Then, a project scoping team from Sourcefabric went to AAP headquarters in Sydney to see how the newsroom worked. They held conversations with a range of people from the IT department, both developers and strategic IT planners, as well as reporters and editors. Focusing on the editorial staff’s user experience, project managers elicited feedback about what the journalists did and didn’t like about the current system. “Workflows are best defined by their users, not managers,” Ryan said. The Sourcefabric team also documented how people actually worked in the newsroom, with photos, videos and process descriptions.

All of this information went into the backlog of the project which was run according to the Agile method of software development. Agile specifies the features and functions to be built, and then iterates and refines those working items over a series of two-week development sprints. “During development I frequently had journalists come and see what we were doing and I invited their comments and input. I was in the newsroom, so it was easy to do at any time,” Ryan said.

The first lines of AAP-specific code were written in mid-2014. The Superdesk system was fully built and implemented by the middle of 2016. This was the third and final stage when the involvement of newsroom staff paid off. As the system was rolled out, journalists who had been appointed as super users helped their colleagues with the new technology. “They were leaned on heavily during the early days,” Brook Thomas, Chief Technology Officer & Operations Director of AAP, said.

The proverbial curtain comes down on a successful rollout of Superdesk at AAP HQ late 2016.

2. Get the business involved.

From our discussions with other news agencies, we’ve often heard that selling a project like this to management is not just a matter of getting budget approval, but also of framing it in terms of a business case. Those looking for a rosier picture to paint for those holding the purse strings may want to note an interesting phenomenon that has occurred at AAP: “business areas outside the newsroom are now seeking access to Superdesk,” in the words of Thomas. Why? Because it delivers an overview of the daily news agenda that translates into potential new business opportunities

In the case of one AAP business division that provides sub-editing services to other news outlets, staff can now use the system’s newsroom overview to see the stories that are in progress, who is working on them and find out when they likely to be done, making it easier to plan the process of selecting stories from the wire service and sub-editing them for onward distribution.

In another example, the PR and communications division benefits from knowing what events are upcoming and how they will be covered. And in general, both sides of a news agency benefit from greater transparency around news production. “Salespeople tend to perform better when they have a working knowledge of what it is that they are selling,” Vince Ryan said.

3. Cultivate a new mindset for digital.

A digital newsroom is not just a new set of technologies; it’s also a different way of working with content. Thomas observed that “we’ve seen our journalists adapt to web and digital concepts that were previously not a consideration with the old platform”. One of the reasons we chose the NewsML-G2 specification as the main structured data format for Superdesk is that news that was once relegated to the archive can now be re-used, packaged and distributed in novel ways. Stories can also be told with more context and rich multimedia assets.

Going forward, AAP is looking to develop a digital-native content platform based on Superdesk’s APIs that offers the full range of its news production to customers. The idea is to not only consolidate several disparate web products into a single suite, but also to reduce the friction that AAP’s customers have long experienced when trying to access and navigate to content. For some customers, they might simply opt to access content via an API, which AAP has been unable to offer comprehensively in the past.

Finally, the biggest takeaway may be that going digital means embracing the idea of newsroom systems being a permanent work in progress. As the last few years have demonstrated, the online news landscape is one of continually shifting sands. Advertising-based models can only be one part of any holistic revenue strategy, for instance, and publishers also have to be ready to embrace the emergence of even unlikely-seeming distribution platforms like Snapchat both technologically and philosophically.

News outlets have to look for common cause and areas of shared benefit with others in their ecosystem (which is also an argument in favor of open-source software). This applies both to the external view, namely with other news organizations which were previously considered either to be customers or competitors, but which may now fall into multiple categories of customer, collaborator and/or content partner. This cooperative lens is also needed internally, to overcome the “digital divide” that has often separated the tech department of a news organization and its journalists in the past. When journalists and coders sit next to each other in the newsroom, they will be able to build tools made for a shared digital future.

Anna Rohleder is a journalist who has worked in the tech industry in both Europe as well as the US. She has been involved in research and communications for companies including Gartner, SAP, Opera and Sourcefabric. As a journalist, she has written for the International Journalists’ Network, Forbes, Businessworld and LEO Weekly, among others.

The post How to Build a Digital Newsroom with Developers and Journalists Working Together appeared first on MediaShift.

Digital realities

Streaming video services were ubiquitous. Hulu is aggressively competing with the biggest players, Amazon and Netflix, for new work. Filmmakers are looking for alternatives to the take-it-or-leave-it Netflix-style contract, and especially looking to hold on to some back-end rights. They would also like some data on performance, which may be even harder to get.

Even with all the new streaming money flowing into the environment, it’s not easier to make a living as a documentary filmmaker. The conclusions of a 2016 Center for Media & Social Impact report are still valid today. As filmmakers Doug Blush, Tom Hardy, Alexandria Bombach, and Bradley Beesley testified, it’s still about renting your equipment out, taking odd jobs, working for hire and maybe teaching in order to fund your passion.

But others are working on changing the ecosystem. Jax Deluca from the National Endowment for the Arts highlighted takeaways from an ongoing, field-wide strategic planning process. Along with film-specific opportunities (think state and local tax incentives) and building representative institutions (the International Documentary Association now has an advocacy staff person), panelists reminded filmmakers to pay attention to larger policy issues, such as net neutrality. Meanwhile, at Google’s diversity summit, Full Color Future, FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn pointedly criticized the FCC’s lack of concern for consumers, and asked creators as well as small businesses and activists to make their voices heard on net neutrality.

Still from “People’s Republic of Desire” by Eric Jordan

Sophisticated visual design is becoming essential to documentary filmmaking, whether for transitions, infographics, animations that whisk through exposition, or emphasis. If you had any doubt about its central importance, look at Hao Wu’s “People’s Republic of Desire,” which describes the intense world of internet-famous celebrities’ streaming showrooms in China (on public TV next year). Another important one for visual design is “Take Your Pills,” a Netflix doc by Alison Klayman on the many faces of Adderall culture in a society addicted to speed, efficiency and individualism. One side effect: Filmmakers have never expected to need much quantitative savvy, but with the rise of data visualization, it’s becoming clearer how important that skillset has become.

Virtual reality

VR got its own large display room, with a few spectacular items, including a music video on steroids, “Beethoven’s 5th,” and a magnificent, alarming visit to Greenland’s rapidly melting glaciers, “Greenland Melting.” But many of the documentary VR exhibits were passive-viewing 360 video, VR’s low-hanging fruit. My fave of that kind was a short “VR for Good” project (funded by Oculus, which matches non-profits with filmmakers) from the U.K. on testicular cancer awareness, Ryan Hartsell’s “The Evolution of Testicles.” It deftly used the form to surprise you, make you laugh, and hammer home the message with humor. You get to go up high in an air balloon shaped like a giant pair of testicles. Very, um, ballsy.

Generally, though, it was often hard to parse why the subject matter and narrative wouldn’t work as well if made as a 2D documentary. “Sun Ladies,” for instance, was an absorbing visit to a military unit of Yazidi women fighting ISIS, and could have been a recruiting video; but the VR wasn’t necessary to the telling.

The Dining Room by Rone

Lester Francois’ “Rone,” about an Australian street artist who paints highly crafted female portraits one- and two-stories high on decaying, about-to-be-demolished buildings, did build an environment (with the gaming software Unity) appropriate to the subject matter. His subject not only makes environmental art, but makes it in places that often are then torn down. Viewers could browse in a virtual art gallery in VR, watch a 360 film about the artist, take VR tours of Melbourne street art, and conduct at-will explorations of Rone’s environmental installations. Motherboard used the same format (and also the Unity platform) for a “museum-like” experience of endangered wildlife in the Brazilian Pantanal wetland region, “Living with Jaguars.”

But no matter what, the limitations are still stark. The equipment is clumsy, access is minimal (perhaps 300 people at a festival), and smart-phone/Cardboard viewing lowers the quality. Makers of course are endlessly hopeful that technological wizardry is around the corner that will be more accessible.

Perils of AI

I think the oddest moment I had in the festival was while watching “More Human than Human,” by Tommy Pallotta and Femke Wolting. It’s about the way AI (artificial intelligence) is all around us and getting big enough to be downright creepy. (Or worse than that: at SXSW Elon Musk went out of his way to warn people to be very afraid.) In the doc, an engineer is demonstrating the speech capacities of the robot he programmed, “Sophie.” To do so, he hits on her…and she winks. Really. I’m still waiting for the robots’ #MeToo moment.

Despite the challenges, SXSW showcased how the documentary form has become an important element of media ecology. Far beyond the “pivot to video” in journalism, documentary is a thriving line for streaming media services, a way of pushing brands, a genre to attract investment to cutting edge media – and of course, as always, a way of calling public attention to important public issues.

This article draws upon research and writing for an article on the SXSW festival in Documentary magazine.

Patricia Aufderheide is University Professor in the School of Communication at American University and the founder of the Center for Media & Social Impact there. She is the author of, among other books, “Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction.” (Oxford).

The post The Stark Reality for Documentary Makers at SXSW appeared first on MediaShift.

“Our plan was to take our skills as national journalists and apply them in our own backyard,” said Raja, the editor and publisher. “Let’s test the waters to see what type of appetite there is for in-depth magazine or alt-weekly-style reporting. The experiment we’re going to run is whether there’s even an audience for this thing before we then start running experiments about revenue and sustainability.”

The results of the editorial experiment were clear: Readers wanted more content and asked how they could donate. Raja and Groskopf put their reporting on hold last fall so they could focus on the revenue experiment. They held a series of business strategy retreats at their house. Raja sought out journalists who had worked at hyper-local digital startups, and business and community leaders with experience navigating the philanthropic landscape in Tyler. Those conversations gave Raja and Groskopf clarity on their direction.

“Pretty much instantly, we decided [The Tyler Loop] is going to be non-profit, not just because it plays more to our personal strengths, but also I want to challenge the city of Tyler, where we live, to show that East Texas can and will support a publication like this,” Raja said. “I want that story to then resonate nationally.”

Across the country, digital journalism startups with a hyper-local, regional or statewide focus face many of the same questions as The Tyler Loop: Is non-profit or for-profit the best fit? Within these categories, what type of classifications and arrangements are common? What revenue streams are available?

A growing number of people who lead news outlets and organizations supporting local journalism have thought deeply about these questions. Their firsthand experience and advice are instructive for anyone thinking of starting a news operation from scratch or reinventing an existing publication.

Make full-size for an interactive map of journalistic outlets and info about their business approaches (map by Elia Powers)

“It’s a Tax Status, Not a Business Model”

Matt DeRienzo is commonly the first call for journalists looking to launch a digital news outlet. As executive director of Local Independent Online News Publishers (LION), a national organization that supports local journalism entrepreneurs, DeRienzo often fields questions about the pros and cons of choosing for-profit or non-profit status.

He first likes to make one thing clear: “It’s a tax status, not a business model.”

For-profits pay taxes on their net income, while 501(c)(3) non-profits are tax-exempt. A 501(c)(3) organization’s activities must be directed toward its exempt purpose and serve a public interest rather than the private interest of an owner, a shareholder or other organization. This means individuals associated with non-profits cannot share in any net revenue produced.

Being a non-profit does not relieve the pressure to build sustainable revenue sources to support organization activities. It does, however, relieve pressure to satisfy owner or investor expectations for profit that may impact journalistic and operational decisions.

That message was consistent among those who advise journalists starting news operations.

“The truth is that either [for-profit or non-profit] amounts to running a small business,” said Sue Cross, executive director and CEO of the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN).

Stefanie Murray, director of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, works with many hyper-local newsrooms in New Jersey. She said there is often a perception among for-profit journalists that “if I could just be non-profit it would be easier, but once they start getting into the weeds, they realize it’s not easier by any stretch.

“Being nonprofit in many ways is the same as being for-profit in that you have to build a business model and you have to figure out where your revenue is going to come from,” Murray said. “What we tell people is that it really depends on your community and what you think you can build there.”

“Choose a Path That Fits Your Vision and Your Skills”

Three journalists began building Berkeleyside, a news outlet covering Berkeley, California, and the East Bay, nearly a decade ago. Like Raja and Groskopf at The Tyler Loop, the Berkelyside co-founders saw a gap in local news coverage, spent six months writing news stories as a side project and focused on building a sustainable business model once it became clear that they had a sizable audience.

Unlike The Tyler Loop, Berkeleyside went the for-profit route. Co-founder Lance Knobel said he was confident that Berkeleyside could become a sustainable business. He liked the idea of “being totally in control of our own destiny” rather than having to consult with a board of directors as a non-profit. And he had concerns about finding sustainable foundation support.

“We knew what we were doing as a for-profit business as opposed to the non-profit world,” Knobel said. “Grant writing and developing a relationship with foundations weren’t things that any of us knew how to do or were eager to do.”

Knobel’s advice for journalists facing a similar decision: “Choose a path that fits your vision and your skills. Not every journalist is good at the other stuff and you need to have an honest assessment of what you are good at and what you want to devote your time to.”

Becoming a for-profit can be the path of least resistance. “We see a lot of the news organizations we work with go the for-profit route immediately because it’s so much easier for them to get started,” Murray said. “They can incorporate as a business and essentially start doing their work.”

DeRienzo, the LION executive director, said the decision often hinges on the long-term goals of the team launching a publication.

“If they really do think they have an entrepreneurial opportunity that they can make money from, you want for-profit and the freedom that comes with that,” DeRienzo said.

Knobel and his co-founders saw an early opportunity with local advertisers eager for a place to reach online audiences.

Jay Allred, publisher of the Richland Source, a news outlet covering North Central Ohio, found a similar opening to help small businesses reach local readers. Both he and the publication’s founder had experience working at for-profits. “That’s all we knew,” Allred said. “We understood that better and looked at [the Richland Source] as a for-profit from the beginning.”

Another important consideration is how long a publication’s founders plan to stay involved. Cross, the INN executive director and CEO, said entrepreneurs who “want to start something to re-sell are most likely to go with the for-profit model.”

Added DeRienzo: “If you really have a vision for something that may outlive you, then the nonprofit model might serve you better. There’s not huge profits to be made at this, and so you can earn a decent living but you aren’t necessarily going to flip it and sell it to somebody. If you build a nonprofit with a board of directors who cares about it, that could be something that could be around beyond you if you build it right.”

Yet another factor is who will be selling the news outlet’s vision to potential funders.

“If you get more excited about making a pitch to donors than you do selling advertising or services, the nonprofit route might be better for you,” DeRienzo said.

That was true for Raja, whose experiences in non-profit journalism before launching The Tyler Loop — reporting for Mother Jones and helping to launch The Bay Citizen — taught her what it takes to make a pitch to potential supporters.

“Getting them to invest in you and take you seriously, all of that feels very familiar to me as an editor and as a reporter,” Raja said. “It felt like I know how to talk to my readers and I know how to sell my story to the readers. That translates to me into I know how to sell a story to potential funders.”

Emily Dech in the Richland Source newsroom. (Image courtesy Jay Allred)

Added Allred: “If I’m coming out of a newsroom I’m a trained storyteller. I understand how to craft a narrative, and so much of grant writing is telling a story.”

Yet it’s too simplistic to say that founders with a journalism background most often prefer to start as non-profits and those with a business background as for-profits.

“I’ve seen very strong business-oriented people become non-profits,” INN’s Cross said. “Sometimes they are most clear-minded that this is not a viable commercial business if you are producing public-service news.”

What’s the “Core Mission”?

News outlets that have a public-service mission and primarily do original reporting often prefer to be non-profits.

“Many commercial news organizations have a public-service component, but it’s not their core mission, it’s part of their mission,” Cross said. “Non-profits tend to start with [a mission] and figure out how to make enough money to support it.”

John Bebow of Bridge Magazine

Bridge Magazine, an Ann Arbor-based news outlet with newsrooms in Lansing and Detroit, has a civic-oriented mission that’s common among non-profits. Phil Power, the founder and chairman of The Center for Michigan, a 501(c)(3) organization that publishes Bridge, previously owned community newspapers in Michigan and the Upper Midwest. John Bebow, the center’s president and CEO, spent the vast majority of his career working at for-profit newspapers in the Midwest. Both came to the same conclusion about how to support statewide news coverage.

“Non-profit is really the answer to public-service journalism,” Bebow said. “I think the for-profit model is irrevocably broken.”

For-profit newspapers have de-emphasized time-consuming and resource-intensive investigative journalism and public affairs coverage. Some of the newer digital-only for-profits are attempting to fill that gap.

One way for-profits can signal their public-service mission is by becoming a Benefit Corporation, which Berkeleyside describes as “a type of for-profit corporate entity that includes positive impact on society, workers, the community and the environment.” Knobel, Berkeleyside’s co-founder, said the decision to become a certified “B Corp” was a no-brainer because the publication is driven by a civic mission.

DeRienzo said the vast majority of LION members are mission-driven for-profits, making the B Corp designation a potentially good fit.

“[Our members] are doing public-service accountability journalism and in exchange for that they aren’t expecting a 25 percent profit margin to go to some shareholder,” DeRienzo said. “They don’t have that money –they’re bootstrapping this. All they are trying to do is make an OK living doing journalism in their community. When they get profits beyond their budget, they hire another reporter. It’s almost like a nonprofit model.”

Finding Funders Who “Understand the Value of Local News”

Both for-profits and non-profits often rely on early individual investments. Berkeleyside secured funding from an angel investor who still maintains a stake in the corporation (its three co-founders plus an early employee control the majority of voting shares).

Bridge got a major early boost from The Center for Michigan’s founder and chairman, whose family continues to provide significant annual support. Bebow recognizes his good fortune.

“If you have an angel funder it certainly helps you initially,” he said. “In Michigan we are also blessed with a very healthy and generous foundation community.”

That’s an important asset for non-profits, which typically reach out to foundations for early financial support. “If you have a local community foundation that’s willing to put up seed funding for the first two years of your operation, that’s a great incentive to consider the non-profit model,” DeRienzo said.

But securing foundation support can be difficult. National foundations rarely give operational funding to local outlets. Murray, the Center for Cooperative Media director, said in New Jersey there aren’t many foundations that support local news. But she is optimistic that will change.

“I think we’re going to start to see a sea change over the next two to three years that we will see more local, place-based family and community foundations that will support more media outlets through creative ways,” Murray said.

Allred said if the Richland Source launched now as opposed to five years ago, he would give serious consideration to going the non-profit route. “There’s so much more awareness now of what a vibrant local news ecosystem means to a community,” he said. “In 2013 you had to make that case. Now people at the local foundation level understand the value of local news.”

Added DeRienzo: “There is potential for more place-based foundation support of journalism. Those foundations recognize that local journalism is key to fulfilling their other charitable goals.”

Steve Beatty, a LION consultant and former publisher and chief executive officer of The Lens, a New Orleans-based non-profit outlet, said foundation funding is always precarious for non-profits with an investigative bent.

“Local foundations usually are led by people in the local power structure, and people in the local power structure are the ones who get written about by a watchdog organization,” Beatty said. “Eventually you’re going to burn all of your foundation contacts one way or another.”

That’s less of an issue for small donors and members — key revenue sources for local news outlets. Non-profit news outlets, in particular, have benefitted from News Match, a campaign to encourage individual donations to newsrooms.

Sensing increased fundraising opportunities in their communities, some for-profits have switched — or considered a move — to non-profit status. “That has happened in some cases where for-profits have converted into non-profits because the community has stepped up and said we want to make sure you continue and we are going to provide some funding,” Cross said.

“The Lines Are Blurred”

But converting may not be necessary for news outlets to achieve their financial objectives. DeRienzo said many for-profits in recent years are “pushing heavily into non-profit-like endeavors” such as voluntary paid memberships.

Berkeleyside, for instance, has roughly 1,200 paid members who give at least $5 a month. It has also raised $850,000 through a direct public offering that allows readers to become investors. Knobel said that while the direct public offering requires a larger individual investment and may not be viable in every community, the membership model is replicable.

Non-profits are also tapping into “for-profit-type revenue streams,” DeRienzo said. This includes advertising, events and services.

“Increasingly, the lines are blurred in terms of activities,” DeRienzo said. “People assume that non-profit is more restrictive than it actually is in terms of revenue streams.”

Added Cross: “There aren’t a whole lot of firm barriers to revenue streams for non-profits.”

A non-profit can obtain only limited revenue from activities that are unrelated to its exempt function, such as advertising appearing on the organization’s website and the sale of merchandise. Taxes must be paid on any such income. And according to IRS guidelines, 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organizations can’t “attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities and it may not participate in any campaign activity for or against political candidates.”

Non-profits can start raising money before they are recognized as tax-exempt by the IRS. One arrangement is fiscal sponsorship, in which a non-profit organization serves as the “home” for the news outlet, helping in ways such as administering charitable contributions and providing financial oversight.

“Fiscal sponsorship is increasingly common,” Cross said. “It’s a really efficient way for businesses to get started in a non-profit model.”

Cross and DeRienzo said they are increasingly hearing interest in hybrid models in which a for-profit entity owns a non-profit, or vise versa. But these remain rare in the news industry.

“It’s new, so most organizations if they are small, I encourage them not to do that,” Cross said. “With all the structures and requirements, it’s like having two business models, which increases the workload.”

Added DeRienzo: “I think most people are exploring the hybrid model not for the question of what do we do with profits but more the question of how do we have the freedom of a for-profit while being able to accept grant money or tax-exempt donations. It’s more about the money coming in than the money going out.”

Another option available to for-profits in some states is becoming a low-profit limited liability company (L3C), which makes it easier for socially oriented business to receive funding from charitable organizations and private investors.

The number of options for entrepreneurs is growing. Knobel’s advice: “I wouldn’t get too caught up in ‘Am I a Mac or a PC…’ There’s no single right solution. The burgeoning of non-profit news sites is a fantastic thing. I think the burgeoning of for-profit news sites is a fantastic thing. We need all of them.”

Elia Powers, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of journalism and new media at Towson University. He writes regularly about news literacy, audience engagement and nonprofit journalism.

The post How Digital News Startups Choose Between For-Profit and Non-Profit Status appeared first on MediaShift.

For decades, “broadcast” was a one-way medium. With the adoption of social media and mobile technologies, however, that’s all changed. Making local news a participatory and relevant experience for viewers and listeners is now top of mind for local TV and radio stations across the country.

Many broadcasters are bringing in the audience into the equation – whether it’s giving them a say in the content, through polls, live Q-and-A or picking the next musical superstar, the audience is now part of the content strategy.

Going Live on Social

Newsrooms continue to experiment with Facebook Live, two years into its launch. Because Facebook puts an emphasis on inserting Facebook Live broadcasts into consumers’ news feeds while the broadcast is actually live, it’s a smart way for newsrooms to utilize the platform for breaking news content.

Meteorologists, in particular, have flocked to Facebook Live as a way to deliver breaking weather information.

“Before Facebook Live, our goal would be to post a still image or possibly a radar animation of the storm and the warning,” said Chikage Windler, the chief meteorologist at KEYE, a Sinclair-owned station in Austin. “Now, we can go live on Facebook for 30 seconds, 30 minutes or however long we need.”

A recent #ChiksChats on Facebook

In addition to breaking weather situations, Windler uses Facebook Live for nightly #ChiksChats (here’s a recent one), where she delivers the forecast and answers questions for the Facebook audience. She admits it’s a time commitment, adding an extra hour or so to her day, but she believes the connections she’s building are worth it.

Radio newsrooms are also seeing the benefits of Facebook Live with broadcasts like interactive game shows and behind-the-scenes access.

NPR hosted “Head to Head,” a series of headline-writing competitions where NPR editors went up against the Facebook audience to see whose headline reigned supreme. The last edition of the show in March 2017 produced more than 75,000 views and 200 engagements. The show took advantage of crowdsourcing – about a third of the time, the story on npr.org ended up featuring a headline from the crowd.

Also, Fresh 102.7 FM in New York, WNEW-FM, gives its Facebook audience the chance to see behind-the-scenes as its on-air personalities interview some of the biggest pop musicians in the world. The radio station, which is owned by CBS, has aired interviews of Lady Gaga, Michael Buble, Ed Sheeran and James Bay on Facebook Live. The Buble broadcast generated nearly 182,000 views, more than 4,000 reactions and 300 shares.

Non-Traditional Newscasts

Tribune Broadcasting, which owns or operates 42 stations in the United States, is using social media in a different way for morning TV news – leveraging data to figure out what people are, and will be, talking about.

Tribune has partnered with Dose, a digital media agency that specializes in analytics and sharable content, to create “Morning Dose.” The show features content that Dose has determined will connect with audiences on TV and social, based on data analytics, and will be part of that day’s social conversations. Beyond top stories and weather, “Morning Dose” features segments like “What’s Brewing,” “Bubbling Up” and “Most Ignored Story of the Day.” Personalities from Dose also make appearances on the show.

“Morning Dose” launched in June on Tribune stations in Dallas, Houston, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Miami and Portland. It also airs on Facebook Live.

Digitally Driven Competitions

TEGNA, a broadcasting company that owns or operates 46 local stations across the country, is also experimenting with more original programming as part of a new content transformation strategy.

Contestants send in one-minute videos in the “Sing Like a Star” competition.

“Sing Like a Star” is the third original show the company has produced, and it premiered in 33 TEGNA markets in September. The show marries a traditional television broadcast with digital participation from the contestants and audience. The idea for the show was sparked by the amount of digital activity tied to singing performance short clips like James Corden’s “Carpool Karaoke.” Hopeful contestants can download the Starmaker app, upload a one-minute audition and try to get votes through the app. The broadcast itself is 30 minutes each weekend, and the segments are tailored to also appease the crowd watching via mobile or social.

“What we did, because it’s a 30-minute show, is we made all of the singing performances right at one minute long,“ said Ted Eccles, the executive producer of “Sing Like a Star.” “They really hit that sweet spot for sharable content and digital viewing. Traditionally when you get a singing competition, somebody is singing a whole song or most of the song – even ‘Idol’ and ‘The Voice’ would do two- to three-minute versions of the song. We’ve found about a minute is the optimum amount of content that people like to watch on a smaller device.”

The show has received about 1,000 auditions in its first two weeks, with about 500,000 views of those auditions and 300,000 votes cast in the Starmaker app.

“Sing Like a Star” is airing on the weekends in those 33 TEGNA markets, and Eccles said they’re pleased so far with the ratings.

Dual-Screen Experiences

Another place for newsroom innovation is dual-screen experiences – turning television viewers into active participants in the broadcast while using their smartphones, tablets or computers.

TEGNA is currently partnering with Megaphone TV to use its platform for viewer participation during local news and sports broadcasts. For example, KUSA in Denver has used this technology to allow viewers to have a vote on which local topics are covered in newscasts. In addition, WFAA in Dallas regularly allows viewers of sporting events to participate in polls and quizzes through the station’s app or website.

WJLA, a Sinclair-owned station in Washington, DC, has also had success using Megaphone and similar platforms for real-time polling and audience engagement during newscasts.

“We try to incorporate viewer interactivity in every newscast,” said Simon Landau, the executive producer of digital media at WJLA. “Whether it’s showcasing social media commentary around a trending topic, photos sent in by our audience or asking a poll question, we try to engage our viewers in every show.”

Landau said the station typically focuses on breaking news, talkers and polarizing issues for audience engagement opportunities, but they’ve also seen success with big “national days,” like National Cat Day or National Pizza Day, when it comes to viewers wanting to be a part of the content.

Three-Screen Experiences

TEGNA is also focusing on the concept of three-screen experiences. According to Frank Mungeam, TEGNA’s vice president of digital content, they’re taking a more holistic approach to storytelling – where the story will ultimately be the combination of experiences the audience has with that content on television, digital and social.

“We’re looking to take a page out of the movie industry with the concept of the trailer and the movie,” Mungeam said. “In older days of broadcast, folks would say, ‘You can’t give it away. You have to save the good stuff for 5 p.m.’ What we think of with effective trailers – think “Game of Thrones” or “Star Wars” – is there anyone who saw the trailer and thought, ‘That’s all I need of that’? The trailer is content itself, and these experiences, over time on these platforms, build interest in the overall broadcast story. Our three-screen strategy is how to use those three platforms for what they do best. For social, focusing on sharable, interactive and engaging content. For digital, it’s the deep dive, the more, the extra. For broadcast, it’s great, narrative storytelling.”

Mungeam said the ultimate goal is for these experiences from one story to last for multiple days on multiple platforms – instead of airing one time on a television newscast. This strategy gives consumers a greater chance to see content, and keeps the community thinking and talking about important issues in the news.

Crowdsourcing Content

Speaking of using content on multiple platforms, StormPins, an app that originally launched as a way for Graham Media stations to collect storm photos and videos from users, has been expanded to include all kinds of user-generated content.

Using an app, viewers can drop an interactive pin on a map and attach up to 10 seconds of video or a picture – and then communicate and engage with other viewers in that area. Viewer submissions are often used on air.

Viewers send in weather photos, which KSAT runs on air. (Photo courtesy KSAT)

“When there is a weather event, we definitely get a lot of storm pictures,” said Scott Shiotani, the director of new media at KSAT, the ABC affiliate in San Antonio. “Outside of a storm event, pets would be the biggest category, followed by sunsets and landscape pictures.”

KSAT also collects rodeo pictures, high school football pictures and other user-generated content. Viewers can also get real-time, crowdsourced traffic information from the app.

From user-generated content to picking the stories that will be reported, the audience has more opportunities than ever to engage with broadcast news. As more stations, both TV and radio, begin to change content strategies, this will only continue to expand the audience’s role as participants in the programming – no matter the platform.

Note: This is a sponsored post from NAB Pilot to promote its Innovation Stories section. Read more about how broadcasters are innovating here.

Dale Blasingame is a senior lecturer in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. He teaches digital journalism courses, including classes covering the fundamentals of digital media, web design and publishing, digital media entrepreneurship and social media analytics. Prior to teaching, Blasingame spent nine years as a TV news producer and won two regional Emmy Awards.

The post How Broadcasters Are Making Two-Way Experiences with Interactive Content appeared first on MediaShift.

Questions of ethics and transparency are growing among journalists and scholars, as media companies increasingly experiment with the power of VR and augmented reality (AR.) Both technological advances allow users to interact personally with news reports via the creation of virtual scenes viewed through headsets.

Now that misinformation is increasingly a problem for the media industry, the challenge for VR journalism is to prevent dishonest organizations and individuals from producing fake VR work and passing it off as real. Meanwhile, the high cost of creating immersive journalism is cause for concern among some media ethicists.

Is VR a Fad or the Future?

“Immersive journalism,” which brings AR or VR to journalism, was symbolically born on a chilly day in January 2012 at the Sundance Film Festival when documentary journalist Nonny de la Peña presented Hunger in Los Angeles, about the lack of food in some Los Angeles neighborhoods. Reporters described audiences there as “visibly affected.” Simply by putting on a headset, viewers could leave behind a snowy day in Park City and be transported to a warm day at a food bank in downtown L.A.

At that point, the term “VR journalism” was only used by technologists and a small circle of tech journalists pioneering efforts in the field. That August, the small startup Oculus Rift launched a Kickstarter campaign that raised $2.5 million to develop its second prototype VR headset. Two years later, Facebook bought Oculus for $2 billion. By early 2016, immersive reporting was showing up in newsrooms across the United States, including The New York Times, CNN, USA Today, The Guardian, AP.

And some projections suggest that VR could have staying power. According to UK-based consulting company CCS Insight, the global VR market will be worth over $9 billion by 2021. Goldman Sachs projects that  the combined global economic impact of VR and augmented reality (AR) will grow to $80 billion by 2025 (up from $2.5 billion in 2016).

The Ethics of VR

James Pallot, VR storytelling pioneer and co-founder of the Emblematic Group with de la Peña, faced an ethical dilemma.

In 2017, Emblematic had worked with PBS’ Frontline to create a climate change story called Greenland Melting, about the Greenland Ice Cap. The report used a hologram of the scientist Eric Rignot (professor of Earth system science at the University of California, Irvine, and a scientist at NASA) to narrate the story.

“To make the hologram, we had to bring [Rignot] to our lab in L.A.,” Pallot said in an email interview. “But we had to debate: should we wear normal clothes for the interview, since he was in L.A.? Or should he dress up in his cold-weather gear, so it would look more ‘realistic’ when you see him standing on the ice?” They ended up dressing Rignot in a light jacket.

“It may sound like a trivial question but it goes to the heart of the matter. VR has an incredible power to make you feel like you are actually ‘present’ in a different place, and you must be careful not to exploit that illusion, to let the viewer know what is real and what isn’t, and what was the process to create this illusion,” Pallot added.

In 2016, philosophy professors Michael Madary and Thomas Metzinger published a paper titled Real Virtuality: A Code of Ethical Conduct. This paper pointed out that VR is a “powerful form of both mental and behavioral manipulation” that could be tricky, “especially when commercial, political, religious, or governmental interests are behind the creation and maintenance of the virtual worlds.”

“We need more research into the psychological effects of immersive experiences, especially for children,” Madary told me. “We should inform consumers that we do not yet understand the effects of long-term immersion,” such as “whether VR can have an influence on their behavior after leaving the virtual world.”

VR can be a journalistic tool that allows consumers to transcend time and space. The Displaced, for example, is a VR documentary from 2015 produced by The New York Times Magazine. It depicts the lives of three young children refugee in Syria, Ukraine and South Sudan and allows viewers to feel like they’re present with the children. Or On the Brink of Famine, a 2016 documentary from PBS Frontline and The Brown Institute for Media Innovation, about a village in South Sudan dealing with a hunger crisis.

Douglas Rushkoff, shown here the 2013 SXSW Festival, believes VR and journalism are incompatible. (Photo by Waytao Shing/Getty Images for SXSW)

But Douglas Rushkoff, media theorist and an outspoken critic of Silicon Valley, argues that those types of VR documentaries do not qualify as journalism at all. “I think immersive media has a really limited purpose, certainly in terms of journalism and informing people. I guess you can make people feel certain ways by immersing them in certain kinds of worlds. But in most of these experiences you are just watching people who can’t see you, so in some ways it exacerbates the sense of power that privileged people can feel over less privileged people.”

VR and Fake News

One of the most troubling threats from the incursion of VR into journalism is the possibility that  fake news organizations and trolls might start producing VR fake news.

Increasingly, media theorists such as the interdisciplinary scientist Jaron Lanier and the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, Ethan Zuckerman, are calling for VR journalists to create a code of ethics.

Tom Kent — president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a U.S. government-funded broadcasting organization — was one of the first journalists who talked about the ethical challenges of VR reporting. In a 2015 Medium post, he opened the debate on ethics in VR and journalism, with a focus on fake news, long before the 2016 presidential election.

“In a few years, it may well be that virtual reality will begin to simulate news events using images of newsmakers that will be indistinguishable from the actual people,” Kent told me recently. For example, “a VR recreation of a scene involving Putin or Obama, maybe so accurate you can’t tell whether that’s the real Putin, or the real Obama, or whether they were virtually recreated.”

“People who do VR journalism need to have an ethical code, and they need to publish that code, and they need to explain their ethics,” added Kent. For example, viewers need to know if the action on the VR piece is scripted or not and whether the dialogue was captured from a real setting or scripted.

VR Can’t Support Itself Financially

A 2017 report by the Reuters Institute, VR for News: The New Reality?, delves into the cost of VR journalism. Productions are still expensive, resulting in a lack of quality content, which in turn negatively affects the potential for ad revenue, the report said.

Another study by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University found that “The cost of highly produced VR work would seem to have implications for viable business models in the short term. If the best cost comparison is with high-end TV or console game production, it is likely that currently producers and commissioners will need to produce high-end journalistic VR without an expectation of direct cost recovery from audiences or advertisers.”

Rushkoff considers VR to be nothing more than advertising, and says it cannot be part of quality journalism. “Once journalism changed from something that people purchase in order to be informed to something that advertisers pay for in order to get people’s attention,” Rushkoff said, “then all the technologies that have been deployed for journalism have way more to do with helping advertisers to spread their message than informing people.”

The real hope for VR journalism is that newsrooms could create experiences based on reality and with the same ethics of photojournalism: photos aren’t manipulated, and photographers only show what they see. In order to do so, VR journalism has to become financially independent. If it must rely solely on sponsorship from big companies to survive, Rushkoff might be proven correct.

Angelo Paura is an Italian journalist based in New York, working with Il Sole 24 Ore Usa. He writes for major Italian magazines. He studied immersive journalism for a Masters in social journalism at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is focused mostly on digital cultures, new media, technology and politics. He loves empty spaces, walks on the slackline, mezcal and drawing monsters. Reach him at angelo.paura@ilsole24ore.us or @angelopaura.

The post The Ethical Challenges of Immersive Journalism appeared first on MediaShift.

His update was not entirely surprising; the words “journalism” and “job security” rarely go together these days. Newsroom employment at the nation’s daily newspapers is down 40 percent compared to a decade ago, and an additional drop of about 30 percent is projected by 2024. That’s a lot of former reporters looking for work. But as a former science and health reporter, I also pity those who are still at their desks — especially the general assignment reporters and others now increasingly tasked with covering this specialized beat.

The fact is, there is more science to cover than ever before but fewer full-time, dedicated science reporters to cover those stories. That’s why some organizations, including SciLine, the one I lead, are working to build bridges between journalists and scientists. And it’s why, more than ever, academic scientists and other experts need to step up to the plate and share their knowledge with reporters and the public, and keep the flame of factual evidence alive.

Changing Newsrooms

In its heyday back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, reporting on health and science was a well-supported calling. Dozens of newspapers had dedicated weekly science sections, and many of the reporters writing for them had master’s or even doctorate degrees in the disciplines they covered. Today the vast majority of those dedicated sections have disappeared, and the corps of specialist staff reporters who filled their pages has shrunk considerably. That means when science news breaks, as it does nearly every day, it is increasingly covered by generalists—many of them freelancers paid pennies per word—scrambling to cover the gamut of discovery, from colliding neutron stars to gene editing to cybersecurity.

Of course, you don’t have to be a full-time health, science, or environment reporter to do a good job covering these topics. But journalists accustomed to covering local news or politics are less likely to ask such science-critical questions as, “Did the sample size adequately power the experiment?” “Was the design double-blind?” and “Did the results achieve statistical significance?”

They also don’t have relationships with trusted scientific experts upon whom they can call, on deadline, to make sure they have the details right or for historical context (“Is this really an important ‘first,’ as advertised?”). And unlike their predecessors, they often have not just one but three or four deadlines per day. Who has time for fact checking?

Science in the Post-Truth Era

This journalistic trend comes at a precarious time for science and for trust in factual truths generally. The past year has seen a disturbing increase in the willingness of not only lobbyists and columnists but even government officials to impugn and undermine well-documented scientific evidence. At the same time, thanks to the internet, it has never been easier to generate and propagate obfuscating or even flat-out false information.

So what is a general assignment reporter to do when her editor points to a press release from a respectable research university claiming (as one recently did) that blueberries can help fight cervical cancer, or when a competing news organization throws up a headline (as recently occurred) that the recent cloning of monkeys is “paving the way to human cloning”? How should a reporter covering a local water board meeting assess a passing mention that tiny amounts of lead are leaching from older pipes? For that matter, how should a national political reporter approach a presidential tweet suggesting that the recent cold snap undermines evidence of global warming? Are these stories even worth reporting? And if so, how to get them just right?

From SciLine.org

These are the kinds of questions that I and my colleagues respond to every day at SciLine, a philanthropically funded, free “matching service” that makes scientific experts available to U.S. journalists on deadline or as needed. Hosted by the non-profit American Association for the Advancement of Science, SciLine was created to address the problem of there being more news than ever in the domains of science, health, and the environment, but fewer reporters with the time or resources to cover these increasingly complex beats well. In conjunction with programs sponsored by other non-profits, like the Poynter Institute and the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting, which among other activities train general assignment reporters how to think more scientifically, SciLine is part of a resurgent recognition in journalism of the importance of anchoring even the most politically divisive stories with methodically derived evidence, whenever possible.

Sharing Scholarship

None of these services could be provided, of course, without an invaluable but currently hobbled resource: scientists at the nation’s universities and research centers. Invaluable, because this is a community of extremely knowledgeable individuals dedicated to understanding how the world works, many of whom are excellent communicators and virtually all of whom wish that the public and influential decision makers would take better advantage of what they’ve learned. But hobbled, because there is little in the way of rewards for them when they take time out from their research and teaching to share their knowledge and insights by speaking to—or helping to train—the media. There is also a dearth of funding and support to help scientists themselves improve their communication skills, so they can explain their research findings in media-friendly terms and, equally important, convey the joy and beauty of discovery and the value of evidence-based decision making.

A handful of universities have begun to incorporate public engagement in their criteria for academic advancement. But many more need to recognize their public responsibility not just to allow — not even just to encourage — but to actually help train a large and diverse swath of their science faculty to enthusiastically share their expertise with the media and the public.

The days of scientists hunched over their lab benches or isolated in their field research and hoping the public will fund them but leave them alone are over. With support from their academic institutions, and with help from organizations dedicated to building bridges between them and journalists, scientists can and must help keep truth on an even keel at a time when ideology and opinion are so ascendant in the news.

Rick Weiss, a former Washington Post science reporter, is director of SciLine.

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Cultura Colectiva, headquartered in Mexico City, first launched its Spanish language site in 2013. The site covers arts, culture and lifestyle from a millennial Latinx perspective. In December, the company opened an office in New York City, where staffers will lead marketing initiatives and publish Cultura Colectiva +, also known as CC+, the company’s English-language site.

Sarah Vander Wal

But Cultura Colectiva didn’t always have plans to launch the sister site. In 2017, as an experiment, Cultura Colectiva’s Editor-in-Chief created an informal Facebook page where she would post the site’s stories in English to see if she could garner interest from an American audience. Soon there were 2.5 million people following the page, and it was receiving higher engagement than the Spanish-language Facebook page, according to Sarah Vander Wal, Cultura Colectiva’s Head of Brands.

“The market sought us out instead of us trying to position ourselves in the market,” Vander Wal explained.

We spoke to Vander Wal to learn more about what gave Cultura Colectiva the confidence to launch the new English site in the current market, and to see what advice she has for other digital publishers.

Use data to drive decision-making.

The key to Cultura Colectiva’s success, according to Vander Wal, is data. In fact, the company sees itself as a data company first and a media site second. That’s what distinguishes it among the cluster of digital media sites that exist right now, she said.

Cultura Colectiva developed specially-designed software that can help predict how viral a story will be. The software uses artificial intelligence to determine what a story’s headline should be and can also spit out a word cloud of related terms that should be incorporated into the story – all information that staffers use to make editorial decisions.

Without data, those editorial decisions, such as SEO keywords, headlines and more, are subject to human error, Vander Wal said.

“When it’s really data-driven, it’s a very different story – you get surprises,” she said. “Data will say where you really have to go.”

The Cultura Colectiva lobby. Photo courtesy Cultura Colectiva.

Know your audience and create content specifically for them.

The other benefit to using data is that it allows Cultura Colectiva to get to know its audience intimately. And that allows editors and writers to create content that they know its readers will enjoy.

“Use data to understand where your audience is and let that data drive your decisions,” Vander Wal said.

For example, CC+ doesn’t just translate Cultura Colectiva articles into English and repackage them. Instead, writers are creating entirely new stories for an audience that is predominantly based in the U.S. Though there is some overlap with stories that have universal appeal, the two sites do have distinct audiences.

She also noted that the Hispanic market in the U.S. is growing at a fast pace, meaning that there will be a larger audience for CC+ to reach.

“The voice needs to be created specifically for them for it to really resonate,” Vander Wal said.

Produce quality content.

Vander Wal said Cultura Colectiva’s levels of engagement have not decreased despite Facebook’s recent algorithm changes that will deprioritize posts from publishers on the News Feed. That’s because both sites produce quality content, she said.

Cultura Colectiva’s specially-designed software can also analyze sentiment, for example, of Facebook comments from readers. Emotion is what makes readers want to share a story, and when writers and editors understand why readers share a story, they can create more content to tap into those emotions, Vander Wal said.

“At the end of the day, emotion is what moves the needle in terms of engagement,” she said.

Have a distinct brand.

Vander Wal’s advice to other digital media publishers is that having a distinct brand – or voice – is critical to success, she said.

“It’s very important if you’re going to come into a very crowded field to have a voice,” she said. “No one needs another aggregator of media content. You need to have a unique voice because at the end of the day, that’s what a user seeks out.”

Bianca Fortis is the associate editor of MediaShift, a founding member of the Transborder Media storytelling collective and a social media consultant. Follow her on Twitter @biancafortis.

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