A version of this piece appeared at J-Source.

The New York Times and Washington Post are two of the world’s most influential newspapers. Every day, they battle over sources and jostle for a better story. So it’s extraordinary that the two rivals have teamed up to create software to run comment sections.

The alliance began in 2013, at a news industry conference where Aron Pilhofer, the Times’ interactive news editor, and Cory Haik, the Post’s executive director of emerging news products, bumped into each other. The two shared troubles their papers were experiencing with comment sections and decided to work together to fix them.

That conversation would grow into the Coral Project, a collaboration between the two journalism giants, and later Mozilla with its open-source software know-how. The New York-based project aims to use this software to improve comment sections.

In 2015, Andrew Losowsky, a journalist, became the project’s lead. He says, “It came down to everyone seeing the problem, and the problem being too big for any one organization to solve.”

But why keep them at all? Comment sections can give a voice to the voiceless and hold institutions and individuals accountable. They can help journalists write better stories. But now – because of abuse by commenters, the dominance of social media, and the cost of hiring moderators – ­­many high-profile news outlets such as the Toronto Star and Vice are shuttering their comment sections.The future of comments is uncertain. But clues as to what the future might look like can be found both in the ways news organizations use comments today, and in how comments have been used in journalism’s history. 

Useful, useless or just plain ugly?

Before comment sections, there were letters to the editor. Both give readers a chance to share their knowledge and opinions, a journalism norm hundreds of years in the making.

Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, a journalism professor at Cardiff University, wrote Journalists and the Public in 2007, a book about the history of letters to the editor. In it, she identifies two functions of letters to the editor: “Debates over specific issues in the paper on journalism ethics and … engagement in broader public debates.” Modern comment sections also perform these functions.

Letters from the public have been published in papers since the 1600s. They have had a section of the paper devoted just to them since 1851, when the New York Times pioneered the practice.

After hundreds of years, letters and comments from readers are probably here to stay. The question now is whether online comment sections will be the main way readers share their ideas.

Jake Batsell, a journalism professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, says that comment sections are a great way to facilitate the changing relationship between journalists and readers. He explored the issue in his 2015 book Engaged Journalism: Connecting with Digitally Empowered News Audiences.

In this evolving relationship, readers can question a news outlet’s ethical decisions. They can debate each other. And readers with specialized knowledge can add value to an article.

“Journalists need insights from their audience,” Batsell says. “They don’t know everything.”

Audience members can also point journalists toward story ideas. A 2011 study in the Newspaper Research Journal, an American publication run by journalism professors across the country, found that 22 percent of U.S. journalists sometimes got a story idea from comment sections.

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And from a business angle, loyal commenters are more likely to buy a subscription.

As compelling as these reasons are, there are serious problems with comments. For one, comments can get ugly.

A 2015 study in the Howard Journal of Communications, published by Howard University in Washington D.C., found that commenters are quick to polarize even neutral topics. One-quarter of all articles that do not deal with race have at least one race-based comment.

Another problem is that many comment sections are underused. For example, Bloomberg Business ditched its comment section partially because “less than one percent of the overall audience” was commenting.

Even if the comment section isn’t often used, it’s still expensive to run. News outlets are businesses, no matter how civic-minded they are. For comment sections to survive, they must help pay the bills – or at least not add to them.

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Moving forward

The post Will Comment Sections Fade Away, Or Be Revived By New Technologies? appeared first on MediaShift.

By the time John Kerry raised the U.S. flag over the U.S. embassy in Havana in August 2015, I had decided to assign my Spring 2016 capstone journalism class with developing a Spanish-language, startup news site for Cuba — a community that has no recent experience in producing and distributing objective news or First Amendment-like protection that supports freedom of the press. Students would work collaboratively to report and produce stories across media, using text, video, audio, photography and social media to target Cuban Millennials.

This would be no small order in a country where only 5 percent of the 11 million-person population has Internet access and one of the most common ways of distributing non-state-produced news and information is by loading up and passing around USB drives.

The Obstacles

Three of the nine students in the class were of Cuban descent (the rest of the students were of Dominican, Puerto Rican, Brazilian, Italian and Lebanese backgrounds). My hope was that they would lead the way in connecting to family and friends using smartphones or emails, which the Cuban government has increasingly allowed. In addition, four students had participated in the school’s South Florida News Service, which provides content for The Miami Herald, and one student wrote for a digital Spanish-language soccer startup, so I knew I had strong and resourceful reporters.

The first big challenge to the project came from inside the classroom. Aliana Zamorano expressed the class’s skepticism (all student comments were provided specifically for use in this article). “Leaving the class on the first day, I was extremely frustrated. I felt that the project was impossible, feeding unbiased, truthful news about Cuba to Cubans from our little classroom in a Miami college was a joke. If my grandfather could not speak to his sister who lives in Cuba about anything but the well-being of her children over the phone once a month, how was I going to be able to get real information and ask relevant questions to the people of Cuba and not scare them off?”

Karen Noa, like Zamorano, also has relatives in Cuba, but she couldn’t get her family, including a cousin who is a professor at the University of Havana, to talk to her about day-to-day life, revealing their fear of reprisals.

The inability of the Cuban students to get ideas from their own families spread doubt about the feasibility of producing the news site. The students’ Whatsapp chat group, created to work on the project outside the classroom, became a hub of confusion. Momentarily floundering, the students wanted to write stories about Cubans who had immigrated to and lived in Miami.

I was surprised the students had not tried reaching out to Cuban Millennials using social media and pushed them to employ multiple platforms. Guest speaker Jorge Duany, director of the Cuban Research Institute at FIU, further supported that idea when he spoke about young Cubans setting up blogs and expressing political dissent, in spite of the Cuban government’s control of media.

The Breakthrough

credit: Arthur Guisasola

Arthur Guisasola, the class’s soccer reporter, had tried connecting with Cubans through Airbnb, which does a brisk business on the island, but got no response. He had a eureka moment while searching Reddit for soccer news. “It hit me. There definitely has to be a Cuba subreddit … I wrote a post on the Cuba subreddit asking if anyone would like to talk to me.”  Several hours later, he received a message from a 23-year-old university student.

The two started communicating though it often took up to a week for Guisasola to receive a reply. (Internet is limited in Cuba to hotels or one of the government sponsored wifi hotspots. User costs run $3.50 to $4 an hour. The mean salary in Cuba is $20 a month.) But the exchanges provided a glimpse into Cuban Millennials. “(It) helped me to understand what the Cuban population was looking for news-wise.”

“Everything changed after that,” Noa said.

The Stories

With insight into their target audience, the students brainstormed in class and on Whatsapp, generating story ideas. They also came up with the name Diarioforcuba, which combined Spanish and English and reflected the class’s multiculturalism.

Knowing that Cubans are spoon fed their government’s version of the Cuban revolution and the rise of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary socialist state, Noa decided to provide young Cubans a different perspective. She created a timeline (Cuba y Estados Unidos, un cronograma) that included Castro’s rise to power and alliance with the old Soviet Union; a chronology of Cuban immigration to the U.S., including the freedom flights and Mariel boatlift; the Cuban Missile Crisis; the U.S. embargo; and the ongoing rapprochement between the two nations.

Students reported on business, culture and sports. Nicole Montero investigated foreign banks and the future of credit cards in Cuba (Operaciones bancarias en Cuba). Patricia Gonzalez explored the rise of  “cuentapropistas,” Cuban capitalists. She reported on how a math teacher earning $20 a month created a cottage industry producing and selling bikinis on the streets of Havana  (El capitalismo se trata un oportunidad). Christian Portilla wrote about a Cuban artist who helps support his family by exhibiting his work at Miami’s Art Basel, and Guisasola reported on Cuban ex-pats playing amateur soccer in Miami. Sources were not easy to come by. Montero interviewed 22 people in Miami before she connected with a source for her story.

Image courtesy of Patricia Gonzalez

All the articles were written and revised in English. Guisasola supervised their translation into Spanish (English translations are available through Google). The students set up Twitter (@diarioforcuba) and Facebook accounts to create communities and distribute content.

While the students worked on their articles, commercial flights between the two countries were restored, and President Obama announced that he would visit Cuba at the end of March — the first president to do so in more than 80 years. The confluence of the contact with the Cuban student and the quickening of the momentum of change between the U.S. and Cuba gave the students a greater sense of the timeliness of the project and the role it might play, however small, in the future of independent journalism in Cuba.

Mixed Optimism

A synchronistic event about halfway through the semester tempered the class’s growing excitement. Tracey Eaton, a colleague teaching at Flagler College in St. Augustine who had set up the Dallas Morning News’s news bureau in Havana in the early 1990s, messaged me saying he would be covering President Obama’s trip to Cuba with Lester Holt’s NBC team and could stop by my class on his way home. I had been trying to arrange a Skype interview with him all semester.

The class with Tracey Eaton (center). (Credit: Karen Noa)

Fresh from Havana, Eaton expressed hope for the future of relations with Cuba (he passed around Cuban Cohiba cigars as a symbolic gesture of the growing ties between the two countries), but he also cautioned against a quick transformation by describing some of the difficulties he had in directing a bureau in Cuba under the watchful eye of the regime. Videos he showed of Cuban activists who had been fighting for greater freedoms and who are now leaving Cuba for Miami emphasized that major change, including freedom of speech and press, was unlikely in Cuba anytime soon.

Myriam Marquez, editor of El Nuevo Herald in Miami, echoed similar comments in student Amanda Rabines’ video, “La luche por la libertad de expresion” (the struggle for freedom of expression). She cautioned that even if Internet access is expanded, Cubans will be wary of speaking freely and exposing their thoughts on social media.

As a follow-up to all the remarkable events that occurred during the semester, I asked the students to try to get comments from Cubans about whether they believed that change is coming to Cuba. I also encouraged the students to develop a non-traditional approach to the assignment. They responded with “Que Piensan los Cubanos?” (What Cubans think?) — a multimedia presentation, combining a string of tweets and voiceovers with a mixed bag of comments from multiple sources.

The Future of DiarioforCuba

Barely a few weeks after launching the project, Diarioforcuba received comments from Cubans on its Facebook page, and The Miami Herald expressed interest in using student content in their new InCuba, Today blog.  As rapprochement between Cuba and the U.S. and the possibility of a freer Cuba are evolving stories, students in my summer and fall media classes will go into phase two of diarioforcuba: engaging and informing Cuban Millennials. To be continued …

Allan Richards is associate professor at Florida International University’s School of Communication and Journalism. He oversees the school’s language skills program. Richards developed the current computerized language skills testing program with a grant from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation and the Writing Center with a grant from the Scripps Howard Foundation. Richards began his career as a music journalist in New York.

The post FIU Students Produce Independent News Site for Cuban Millennials appeared first on MediaShift.

I talked with four professors who teach magazine-related courses about what they’ve been doing to keep their students’ training up to speed with the professional world. 

Wherefore Tablets?

Dusty tablets are apparently taking up space in at least a few classrooms around the country.

Magazines’ tech innovation has been a major motivator for new course requirements and content. One of the changes is a move away from tablet publishing — which was introduced within only the last six or seven years.

Ed Madison, assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon, was among the first instructors to guide students through the creation of an all-digital magazine, then using the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. Now, though, his students are exploring other publishing models.

“Adobe is making some shifts in how they offer that software, and there are some other opportunities out there that are platform or device agnostic,” Madison says. “HTML5 allows for some of that interactivity without having to have it on a touchscreen device.”

Inman’s students are at work now on Urban Plains.

At the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Drake University, students of assistant professor Jeff Inman have also stopped publishing their tablet magazine and instead focused on their Urban Plains website, after taking a hard look at the numbers.

“It was no longer an area where we saw the industry taking an interest. Most [magazines] are pulling back on that,” Inman says.

His students’ audience was on the web, too, not on tablets.

“We were getting infinitely more page views and impressions [from] our website, and we had longer engagement on the website and a much lower bounce rate than we did on our tablet [edition],” Inman says. “Our biggest tablet got maybe 2,000 or 3,000 downloads. Our last website had about 90,000 views in six weeks.”

Going back to publishing a student-created print magazine wasn’t appealing from an audience or teaching standpoint, either.

“We flirted with the idea of trying to do print again. When it came down to it, it seemed antithetical to what we were trying to accomplish. It just got in the way, plus it costs so much more money than running the website,” Inman says.

The thousands of dollars that might have been spent on printing were instead put toward supporting students’ travel for reporting more in-depth stories.

In addition to device-agnostic web publishing, social media have become an increasingly important part of magazine students’ experiences.

“In recent years we began to emphasize social media more (as something new magazine staff members must be able to contribute to),” says Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin, associate professor of journalism at Columbia College Chicago, in an email interview.

Madison’s students are working on using social media for more than distribution, too.

“We’re experimenting with audience engagement at the conception of the story,” he says. “Instead of, ‘OK, we’ve assembled this article or issue, and here it is, world,’ we’re saying, ‘Hey, engage with us while we’re in the process of ideation. Which story should we pursue? Engage with us through with social media as we’re crafting a story.’”

Conversations about social media include more than skills for using them. Students need to discuss what social media mean for the future of magazines and journalism more broadly.

“When I ask students what they’re reading, they’re not reading that many magazines … They’re getting their content on social,” says Aileen Gallagher, assistant professor of magazine journalism in the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. “We talk a lot about how you can create the things that make a magazine a magazine — voice, editorial perspective, all that stuff. How does that exist in a world controlled by social media? They’re really wrestling with these questions, too.”

At Drake, Inman’s students are also now required to study video production.

“They have to know how to shoot and edit … but they also have to know how to be in front of the camera, with an emphasis on the how-to presentation or on walking and talking — the main formats our people are getting into,” Inman says.

Students who come into magazine courses today and mainly consider themselves writers are likely to find themselves stretched to explore other media.

Not Just a Magazine Writer

Technology and business are intertwined throughout journalism, and students aspiring to magazine careers are also having to learn more about the realities of the industry — how it makes money, and how professionals need to be true team players.

In addition to Drake’s new video class requirement for magazine majors, students are also required to take a mandatory class in digital media strategy and a one-credit class called “Business for Journalists.” Inman says the latter focuses on basic business concepts that journalism students might not otherwise encounter in college.

“For the first two or three years, maybe they’ll be making coffee, but after that, they’ll be looking at spreadsheets and managing budgets,” Inman says. “We’re addressing that need and making them not scared of it.”

Gallagher also emphasizes business discussions in her courses. She says her students today are more “savvy” about the business challenges facing the industry than when she joined the Syracuse faculty in 2010. She’s using a new assignment that requires students to do an audit of a magazine brand that includes an in-depth look at its digital and social media presence; a SWOT analysis; and recommendations for how the magazine can increase audience, revenue and traffic.

“When they go to work, I hope they’ll have good ideas for their own editors because they’ll be thinking about the business of editorial,” she says. “I tell them the worst thing that can happen is to be left out of the conversation.”

Students need to know how to have conversations about all of the aspects of magazine production, too, not just business issues. Requiring students to collaborate more deeply and broadly on class projects is another growing emphasis among these instructors.

At Drake, a merged journalism capstone course now requires students from across all media types to work together to create content for the student website.

“It’s fun to see traditional print kids running cameras at an event or video kids getting thrown into social media, thinking about the differences between social video and video for a news station,” Inman says. “Finding that crossover moment is exciting. Hopefully, as we get more people through our changed curriculum, we’ll find more of those moments.”

Madison wants his students to learn from magazine projects how to work with others’ different media expertise.

“We had some students whose expertise would be photojournalism, another in design, another in writing. But when they came into this class, the expectation is not that they’re going to leave skilled in all these areas, but that they’re going to know how to engage,” he says. “How do you talk with a designer? What’s the language you need to share to be able to create a better story?”

Madison’s current project with his students, which uses multiple media to tell stories about the Pacific Northwest.

Digital Skills for Digital Jobs

Unfortunately, even with updated knowledge and skills, getting a job in the magazine industry can still be a challenge for new journalism grads.

“There are simply fewer positions at many magazines than there were in the past, and several have ceased publication. Internships and jobs are harder to come by,” Bloyd-Peshkin says.

When students do get hired at magazines, they aren’t usually doing print.

“A great majority of our students go to New York, and they work for major publishers, but on the digital side,” Gallagher says. Some of her students have landed at digital-only publishers, like Mashable, Business Insider and BuzzFeed. “It’s no longer the dream to work at a print magazine. The goal has shifted. They want to go where they read.”

Inman has seen similar trends in the hiring of his program’s grads.

“A lot of these pseudo-magazine websites that are in need of content creators are turning to our majors because they know how to tell a good story, and a good story that’s native to digital,” he says.

Yet students headed to these digitally focused jobs may be stunned when they arrive by what Inman calls “the volume problem”: the speed and quantity of digital work new hires are expected to produce — five or more stories each day. That volume is tough, if not impossible, to simulate in slower-paced college courses.

“Doing this website allows us the opportunity to up the volume, in theory. We have an expectation of a healthy amount of content to get them used to this faster pace of posting daily and promoting daily — but I still can’t get to that five stories a day,” Inman says.

One way Gallagher has addressed this problem is an aggregation assignment where students do a class live blog of an event (this year, the Oscars), with a focus on adding context and story to the moment-by-moment coverage. This kind of aggregation might be a typical entry-level task for a new digital staffer. Gallagher made this assignment address multiple skills by using Slack for a virtual editorial meeting and Tumblr to publish the class’s work.

But even as Gallagher and other magazine instructors come up with creative new teaching strategies and work to share key knowledge with their students, some skills will always be important.

“I’m still teaching copy editing,” Gallagher says. “No one needs to worry about that.”

Susan Currie Sivek, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Linfield College. She teaches media theory, writing and editing, and does research on magazines, social media and political communication.

The post Teaching Magazine Students More than Magazines appeared first on MediaShift.

Video has probably featured more and more in your Facebook feed recently, whether live or recorded. Facebook says there are about 4 billion views of videos on the site each day, and media companies especially have  been experimenting with using new live video options.

Magazines aren’t new to video. They’ve been publishing videos on their websites and video channels for quite a while now. The Magazine Media 360 audience data show growth of about 14 percent in magazine video viewers from 2014 to 2015. Video has been a successful way for many magazines to increase their audiences. But the challenge du jour is maximizing the unique opportunities of Facebook video, including its new live and 360-degree capabilities.

National Geographic

National Geographic is among the magazine publishers that have been especially successful with Facebook video. While lots of their videos have received hundreds of thousands of views, some have been watched many millions of times.

Rajiv Mody, vice president of social media for National Geographic Partners, says video plays to the organization’s strengths.

“Video has been a great format for us. When you think about National Geographic, we really push the envelope when it comes to visual storytelling,” Mody says.

The organization started focusing more intently on video last October, Mody said. The most successful videos have focused on topics you’d associate with National Geographic, too — like animals, space and the environment.

One of the top-performing videos focuses on Manitoba’s Narcisse Snake Dens, home to the largest gathering of snakes in the world. Mody says while the video topic is intriguing, the headline for the post was critical to its success, too: “If You’re Scared of Snakes, Don’t Watch This.”

“It was very enticing. Everybody wants to watch it immediately,” Mody says. “We find that being smart about how you frame the content, and writing engaging headlines — those are enormously important.”

Click the image to watch the video.

With 17 million views (and counting), the snake video also connects clearly to National Geographic’s usual topics and audience.

“These are things that remain true to who we are, and that remain true to the community that’s on our Facebook page itself. We’re focused on areas they are engaged with and interact with,” Mody says.

While trying to focus on its audience’s interests, National Geographic has also successfully brought its audience new video forms. Several 360-degree videos are top performers with millions of views. The 360-degree videos, Mody says, have especially brought “tremendous exposure.”

Click the image to watch the video.

The next area for experimentation, Mody says, will be live video. National Geographic has tried out livestreaming on Periscope, but not yet on Facebook.

“Our explorers are out in the field, and we’ve done work with live video there,” Mody says. “[We have] amazing reach all over the globe, and what live video could really do to help bring that presence to people — that’s directionally where we’re going.”

Hearst Magazines

Like National Geographic, Hearst magazines have also dedicated more energy to video in the last year.

“We’ve been doing a lot of experimenting,” says Brian Madden, vice president of audience for Hearst Magazines Digital Media. “We’ve seen video views on Facebook explode, with about 200 million total views across all of our brands. This time last year, we probably had 20 to 25 million video views. It’s been a huge change.”

Some of the videos posted by Hearst magazine are unique to Facebook, but the organization has a dedicated video team that works with editorial staff to tailor content and style for a variety of video platforms, Madden says. For example, a beauty video might appear as a time-lapse version for Facebook, with a longer version on YouTube and a vertically oriented version on Snapchat.

“We’re creating so many videos that keeping track of what’s working and what’s not, and iterating and trying new things, has been challenging, but it’s a great opportunity,” Madden says.

Click the image to watch the video.

Hearst has already been trying out live video on Facebook. Madden explains that the Facebook audience is much more engaged with the live video than with recorded videos. Maybe two to five percent of the viewers will like, comment on, or share a recorded video, Madden says, but 10 to 15 percent do so for a live video. (It’s not just Hearst; Facebook says viewers comment over 10 times more often on live video than on recorded video.)

“It’s taking Facebook to another level. We can connect to our audience in a much deeper way,” he says. “People are connected in the moment with our brand, something I think Facebook is very capable of creating.”

Click the image to watch video.

While food, beauty, celebrities, and other lifestyle topics have all performed well for Hearst, not just any idea works for live video. Live videos, Madden says, should be based on “what creates a moment. … What’s something you’d want to be live? How do you create something that people will feel it’s important to see live, versus something they can watch in a recording?”

Creating those compelling moments with magazines’ content and brands is a new challenge for editorial staff.

“Our editors are so passionate about their brands and about their audiences that being able to interact with them at that moment and level is an exciting thing for them. They’ve embraced it,” Madden says.

Susan Currie Sivek, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Linfield College. She teaches media theory, writing, and editing, and does research on magazines, social media, and political communication.

The post How NatGeo, Hearst Created Moments With Facebook Video appeared first on MediaShift.

But it’s a misguided line of thinking — and it’s one that journalism educators in particular should avoid. Rather than always insisting that our students adopt the detached voice of objectivity, we should be encouraging smart exploration of the first person.

Today’s Voice is Relatable

For one, the marketplace demands it. Today’s journalism increasingly blends the personal with reported analysis of culture and politics. Look at Vox, Slate, the Serial podcast and the success of writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coates was fired from three journalism jobs early in his career. But he has become one of America’s most respected writers and cultural critics, winning a coveted MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant last year. He didn’t get there by trying to follow the rules of the legacy media outlets that canned him. He succeeded by channeling his own voice, deftly weaving personal experience with history and traditional reporting.

Even at conservative news outlets, reporters often maintain a social media presence that demands a little personality along with the story headlines. This push to create a personal brand can be stressful for even seasoned journalists, so we need to help students navigate how, when and what to reveal when they’re writing about themselves.

Yet journalism educators are often so consumed with teaching the latest tech skills — video editing, data visualization, smartphone photography, Storify, etc. — that they fail to revisit the ways they teach writing. We need to acknowledge that multimedia isn’t just about learning coding basics and web analytics; it includes a changing news voice that’s transparent and relatable. It’s no longer sufficient to teach Twitter headlines and video editing if we’re just packaging those items with inverted pyramid breaking news stories and newspaper-style features.

Memoir may be an old form, but there’s nothing the Internet loves more than the personal essay. And first-person essays are the perfect vehicle for teaching students how to deftly deploy the “I.” Opportunities to write short memoirs in the forgiving atmosphere of the classroom prepare future journalists for jobs that demand style and personality alongside accuracy and speed.

Immediate Gains

Here’s the best part: Students actually like writing memoirs. Nothing makes students want to write well quite like asking them to write about themselves. They’ll care about a memoir assignment — perhaps more than any other they’ve been tasked with in college. I’ve received drafts that exceed the suggested word count by three- and four-fold. For students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, writing about a meaningful episode in their lives is also an opportunity to build confidence in the value of their experiences and insights.

Photo by Helga Weber and used here with a Creative Commons license.

Furthermore, all those things — the clichéd writing, the insipid observations, the empty lives — that critics like Yardley fear about young people’s writing are mostly untrue. Sure, there’s the potential for self-centered essays better left in the therapist’s office. But those are the exceptions. If you teach at a diverse university with low-income and first-generation college students, you’ll find that your young writers have plenty of life experiences worth documenting. Mine have written about body image issues, grief, bullying and depression.

How to Avoid the Dreaded Confessional

The key to success, of course, is clear guidance. Students need examples of good, concise writing, like the wonderful New York Times Lives essays and Modern Love columns. There are countless worthy book-length memoirs and first-person magazine pieces, of course. But brief pieces like these from the Times help students identify a precise incident, rather than leaving them attempting to summarize their entire lives.

Instructors also need to be explicit about what might seem obvious to us, such as the fact that good first-person writing is ultimately about the reader, even if the subject is putatively oneself. You’ll need to discuss pacing, structure, control, the difference between memoir and biography, and how ruthlessly trimming verbal excesses can be even more important than lush detail.

It’s also imperative that students read each other’s work. There are time-honored advantages to critiquing drafts, such as learning from classmates’ successes and mistakes, and letting students reinforce their own knowledge and that of their peers by participating in the role of teacher. But social pressure is the most important aspect of sharing drafts. Students simply write better for each other than for their professor; the peer audience is a powerful motivator. And when they’re writing about themselves, the pressure to perform is especially high.

So don’t fear the memoir. Make it a standard assignment instead. If we do our jobs, students will write personal essays that do what the best memoirs do: focus on the self as a means to identify with what’s universal in the human experience. In my classes (syllabus), memoirs built camaraderie and trust, breaking down social and cultural barriers between very different students. Rather than functioning as an egocentric exercise, writing personal stories allowed students to empathize with others. And that’s a crucial trait for any good journalist.

Vanessa Gregory is an assistant professor of journalism in the Meek School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi and a recipient of a Literary Arts Fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Commission. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The American Prospect and The New York Times.

The post Why Students Should Write Memoirs appeared first on MediaShift.

The Pew Research Center released a report in January on crowdfunded journalism at Kickstarter, detailing how donations have powered a wide array of journalistic projects in different media. The report’s authors analyzed 658 journalism projects that reached or exceeded their funding targets from 2009 to 2015.

Although website projects brought in the most cash on Kickstarter (29 percent of the journalism category’s total contributions), magazine projects were the most prolific, accounting for 20 percent of all funded journalism projects.

Many people are pessimistic about print media, and yet the creators of these magazine projects rallied donors to raise just over $1 million. Somehow, crowdfunding and magazines seem to be a great match. I talked with two successful magazine founders and Kickstarter about what makes this combination work.

Power of the Personal Network

If your friends crowdfunded projects, apparently you should, too. Both magazine creators I interviewed were inspired and informed by watching friends crowdfund projects.

“We never really doubted we were going to try to do crowdfunding. It was just how would we get the campaign together, what would be the right target amount. It was reassuring to see a combination of projects we’d really admired doing good things on Kickstarter, and to see our friends with successful Kickstarter campaigns,” said Evan Walker-Wells, a co-founder of Scalawag, a magazine about Southern politics and culture.

Scalawag Kickstarter video from Scalawag on Vimeo.

Scalawag’s Kickstarter effort ended in April 2015 after raising over $31,000 from 374 backers, far exceeding its initial goal of $20,000. The magazine just released its fourth issue.

Similarly, George Quraishi, co-founder and editor of Howler Magazine, had watched a friend’s magazine succeed on Kickstarter, and decided to try it for a new soccer magazine concept.

“We didn’t really have any expectations, more like hopes,” Quraishi said. Howler, which has now published nine issues, raised $69,001 from 1,441 backers in its 2012 campaign — also going beyond its target of $50,000.

While Scalawag and Howler both raised tens of thousands of dollars, most magazine projects on Kickstarter are smaller in scale. The Pew report shows that the median amount raised by magazine projects was about $3,500, contributed by a median of 55 backers. But even that sum can be enough to launch a new magazine.

Team Efforts Find Success

In addition to having successful role models for their crowdfunding efforts, Walker-Wells and Quraishi both had another trait in common with the other Kickstarter-funded magazine projects: the support of a group. According to Pew, 29 percent of the magazine projects were proposed by groups of individuals. Involving a group means drawing on everyone’s social connections to publicize the project.

The Scalawag team was “six of us, all in our 20s … We didn’t have access to massive capital. We were trying to do a print magazine, with online publishing as well. We don’t have incredibly long credit histories or a business model that is dying for massive angel investors,” Walker-Wells said.

But six people’s contacts can build a powerful network.

“We did some old-school things and contacted news outlets around the South, and that was much less successful than the emails we wrote to our friends,” he said. “It was really word of mouth, spreading it beyond networks we knew.”

Howler’s fall/winter 2015 issue.

Howler’s co-founders had previously worked at magazines. Having friends involved in the industry may have helped a bit, too.

“We could spread the word among people of interest. We didn’t ask people to write about [Howler], but just from knowing them, we got a couple of pieces of publicity out of that,” Quraishi said. “After the first issue, we got a nice writeup in New York [Magazine], the New York Times, the Guardian, The Economist … and Sports Illustrated did something in their year-end issue. To an extent, our previous professional experience contributed to that.”

Passion for the Project

Getting donors to contribute to a magazine project also means the magazine has to connect with them on a deeper level. Magazines on narrowly defined topics seem like great candidates for crowdfunding because they are created by people who are part of a specific community and who share their passions, needs and interests.

For Howler, that meant providing a new perspective on soccer that wasn’t available in other American sports media — which must have appealed to serious fans, since the magazine today has nearly 3,000 subscribers.

“We were offering soccer fans something that I don’t think anyone else had offered them,” Quraishi said. “Even if you were a subscriber to an English soccer magazine, you were receiving an English soccer experience. It’s our larger mission to contextualize that for an American audience.”

Walker-Wells found a motivated audience that wanted a deeper perspective on another topic: life in the American South. Scalawag’s subscribers have doubled in less than a year, with about 600 now signed up for four issues each year.

“We had issues with the way the South was often ridiculed in national media, and a sense that there wasn’t a place for folks in the South to talk about the important work happening here,” he said.

Participating as a backer for crowdfunded projects, is “like a statement of your values, about you joining a community,” Walker-Wells said. Magazines offer that community in ways other media don’t. “It’s easy to feel disconnected when you’re scrolling through your feed on Facebook.”

Being able to define and reach a specific community is a strength of magazine projects when it comes to crowdfunding, says Maris Kreizman, Kickstarter’s publishing and journalism outreach lead. And there are more magazine projects than those categorized as “journalism” and analyzed in the Pew report. Kreizman points out that many other magazine-style projects are included in Kickstarter’s “publishing” category as “periodicals.” Forty percent of those projects met their crowdfunding goals, she says.

“There are plenty of niche publications that do really well on Kickstarter because there’s a direct line to the community they are targeting. … That’s the magic and power of the Internet, being able to find people who have interests [that] align,” Kreizman said. “[The group] may be very small, but you can find them because they’re online. For every Kickstarter creator, we hope that they already have a solid community behind them. The magazines that do the best will have a small community, at least.”

Clarity about writers’ compensation is another common thread among recently funded projects.

“In the past year or so, another trend I’ve been seeing is that successful projects have a real transparency around paying writers,” Kreizman said. “We’re beginning to appreciate that writing for exposure is not enough.”

Scalawag’s first three issues.

Tangible, Defined Product

Crowdfunded magazine projects usually have another advantage, from the potential donor’s perspective: There’s a tangible reward for contributing.

“Single issues are rewards, as well as subscriptions. There’s something very clear and concise that a backer will be getting,” Kreizman said. “Of course, they also offer tote bags and other merch-y kinds of things. … In terms of forms of journalism, magazines are one that people are accustomed to paying for, as opposed to a website.”

Quraishi points out that those tangible magazines have an appeal beyond the information and entertainment they offer.

“These objects say something about who they are. They like to have them displayed on their bookshelves. You can be a soccer fan, you can wear a jersey or scarf for your favorite team, but there’s not a lot of stuff that a discerning person would want to have around your house,” he said. “For people who care about design, who want really nice things, we want to give them something that really feels worth it, a physical product and a tangible experience that says, ‘I’m a thinking soccer fan.’”

While magazine projects may be natural fits for crowdfunding, it’s worth noting that journalism as a whole generally interests potential donors much less than other kinds of projects. In fact, journalism ranks next to last for project success rate among all Kickstarter categories, with only 22 percent succeeding, according to the Pew report.

Crowdfunding isn’t yet poised to save journalism more broadly, but as the Pew report demonstrates, it’s a growing source of support — and magazines might especially benefit from that trend.

Susan Currie Sivek, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Linfield College. She teaches media theory, writing, and editing, and does research on magazines, social media, and political communication.

The post How Magazines Hit the Crowdfunding Jackpot on Kickstarter appeared first on MediaShift.

Click the image for the full series

“Redefining Engagement” is a special 11-part series on the progress, promise and potential challenges of community engagement in journalism. The series, produced by the Agora Journalism Center, will be published in serial this month by MediaShift. Click here for the full series.

The Experience Engagement un-conference in Portland, Oregon had hardly kicked off when the news rolled in: Yet another mass shooting in the U.S., this time at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, just three hours to the south. Ten dead. More wounded. A community left in shock and grief.

As the news cycle unfolded, the whole media spectacle felt painfully familiar. Television crews searched for someone — anyone — to put on camera to share an account of the violence, newspaper reporters began compiling detailed dossiers on the shooter for their weekend editions, and journalists from all over the state and the country parachuted into a blue-collar logging town in rural Oregon for what would likely be the first and last time of their careers. “Somehow this has become routine,” President Obama said later that day. “The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine. The conversation in the aftermath of it. We’ve become numb to this.”

At our gathering that morning, the news arrived during a workshop on “restorative narrative,” an emerging genre that splits from journalism’s “if it bleeds it leads” orthodoxy and instead focuses on stories of long-term recovery and resilience. As the details poured in from Roseburg, our conversation turned practical.

“If we were a traditional newsroom, we would immediately kick into all of the routines that we normally follow,” said Mike Fancher, former executive editor of The Seattle Times. “We know this story, we know the sources, and we know the political framing, so we’d go out and cover it in the same way we’ve always done.”

Mike Fancher, former executive editor of The Seattle Times, takes the mic during a group session at Experience Engagement. Photo by Emmalee McDonald.

President Obama and Fancher are right, of course. Whether the news event is a mass shooting or a Congressional budget battle or a local school board meeting, media coverage is shaped by standard operating procedures that have become entrenched in newsroom culture. These routines have been taught as gospel at journalism schools and repeated day after day by working journalists for decades, often without a second thought.

But that seems to be changing. With the public’s trust in media reaching record lows and traditional business models failing, it no longer seems like heresy to question whether we might need to revisit our core assumptions about journalistic practice. Is the main purpose of journalism to filter daily events through a prism of conflict and tragedy? If not, what does the field’s future look like? Is it “objective”? Activist? Is it heavily mediated, with the journalist as a gatekeeper? Or is it instead participatory, with the journalist as a convener of community conversation?

These are the kind of questions that kept coming up at Experience Engagement, and they are the questions that frame this series. But on Oct. 1, in those raw moments after Umpqua Community College became the site of America’s latest tragedy, the workshop participants landed on a simpler question, one that seems so central to the intersection of journalism and civic life. University of Oregon Professor Nicole Dahmen perhaps said it best: “How do we cover these stories,” she asked the group, “in a way that makes a difference?”

The case for restorative narrative

We’ve all heard the horror stories. From the Sandy Hook shootings to the Boston Marathon bombings, journalists have earned a reputation for covering tragedies like primetime television spectacles, often with terrible consequences. But these high-profile blunders don’t tell the whole story. In fact, for every #CNNfail, there are dozens of instances when news reporters do their jobs admirably, double-checking the facts, confirming the accuracy of their sources and providing credible, useful information to the public. And there are just as many examples of journalists uncovering powerful human stories that help readers somehow make sense of the senselessness. The Pulitzer Prizes that follow are ample proof.

Crisis journalism can still improve, of course, and it’s worthwhile to discuss how reporters might operate differently in the immediate aftermath of tragedy. But it’s also important to consider what happens next, when the national journalists fly back to their home cities, the local reporters return to their regular beats, and the front-page headlines move on to some other news event. In most cases, the coverage ends — and the people whose suffering filled our airwaves and our news pages are left behind, forgotten by the journalists who showed up on the worst day of their lives and asked for an interview.

The value of restorative narrative in engaged journalism is its role in serving long-term community needs. For communities that have experienced tragedy, restorative narratives offer an account of their story that emphasizes strength and perseverance rather than bleak despair. And for outside communities looking in, restorative narratives speak to universal truths about recovery and resilience — truths that tend to resonate with people’s own lived experiences.

Mallary Tenore, executive director of Images and Voices of Hope (IVOH), thinks communities benefit when journalism is less sensational and more empathetic. On the morning of the Roseburg shootings, Tenore explained to workshop participants that news consumers need (and want) reprieves from the media’s wall-to-wall coverage of war, conflict, corruption and crime. “We’re not saying, ‘Don’t cover the trauma or the tragedy,’” Tenore said. “We’re saying the story doesn’t end there. In many ways, it’s just beginning.”

Mallary Tenore, executive director of Images and Voices of Hope, leads a workshop on restorative narrative at Experience Engagement. Photo by Emmalee McDonald.

Although IVOH only coined the term “restorative narrative” in 2013, it’s hardly some foreign beast suddenly being thrust onto unsuspecting newsrooms. Odds are you’ve probably read a restorative narrative in your favorite newspaper or magazine, and it’s probably the story you continue to bring up in conversation weeks, months, even years later. I can think of plenty of my own examples, like Skip Hollandsworth’s award-winning magazine story “Still Life,” which returns to the home of John McClarmock decades after most other journalists had disappeared. In 1973, McClarmock became a national celebrity when a devastating football injury left him permanently paralyzed and fighting for his life, but after a few weeks of media buzz, reporters stopped knocking on his door, flowers stopped arriving in the mail, and eventually friends even stopped visiting his bedside.

In “Still Life,” Hollandsworth shares the story of the 35 years that followed, weaving a powerful account of a mother’s enduring love and a family’s daily triumphs in the face of tragedy. Like all the best restorative narratives, Hollandsworth’s story doesn’t sidestep the painful details, but it doesn’t dwell on them either. From the account of McClarmock’s first weeks in hospital to the scene where the mother prays to outlive her son by one day so that he’ll never have to be alone in the world, the theme of Hollandsworth’s story is strength and recovery. And the effect is goosebumps.

Perhaps that’s the reason why “Still Life” remains a fixture on J-school reading lists and in magazine feature writing anthologies — and why restorative narratives keep appearing in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and other top publications. These stories connect with people’s lives in meaningful ways, which, research suggests, is a big reason for their popularity. A recent study found that stories eliciting an emotional reaction are the most likely to be shared on social media, and those that spark a positive emotional reaction (such as awe or inspiration) rather than a negative one (like fear or anger) are even more likely to go viral.

“In many ways, these stories are offering people a sense of hope,” Tenore said. “We think restorative narratives can mobilize people in ways that traditional doom-and-gloom stories really can’t.”

New routines for a new journalism

Of course, the cynical response to restorative narrative is that reporters simply don’t have time for it amid the demands of preparing stories for the daily newspaper, posting blog posts to the website and responding to readers on social media. And maybe the cynics are right. Existing newsroom routines already stretch journalists in a dozen directions, so it makes sense that restorative narrative might feel to them like an idyllic pipe dream.

But here’s the thing: Routines have changed before, and there are signs that they’re beginning to change again, even if only inch by inch. For example, in the turbulence created by journalism’s digital revolution, a host of major metropolitan newspapers switched to three- or four-day home delivery schedules, and online newcomers like Vice found success by serving up long-form storytelling with more depth and context than the breaking news reports provided by daily journalism.

Meanwhile, on television, John Oliver broke away from “The Daily Show” in 2013 to launch “Last Week Tonight,” a weekly satirical news program that attracted millions of viewers in its first season. The late New York Times media critic David Carr had predicted that the show’s weekly format would “never work,” but Oliver has shown that with the right combination of depth and flair, even television can produce “slow news” that moves the needle.

For restorative narrative and other forms of engaged reporting to take off, journalism will need to embrace routines that slow down the news cycle and give reporters an opportunity to look beyond the next morning’s headline. Meanwhile, journalists will also need to develop new strategies for identifying resilience stories in their communities — and for earning the trust to tell them candidly. In the next part of this series, I’ll outline a simple but powerful first step in that direction: deep listening.

“Redefining Engagement” is a special 11-part series on the progress, promise and potential challenges of community engagement in journalism. The series, produced by the Agora Journalism Center, will be published in serial this month by MediaShift. Click here for the full series.

Ben DeJarnette is a contributing writer for the University of Oregon School of Journalism & Communication’s Agora Journalism Center, the gathering place for innovation in communication and civic engagement. On Oct. 1-4, the Agora Journalism Center and Journalism That Matters partnered to host Experience Engagement, a four-day participatory “un-conference” in Portland, Oregon.

The post How Restorative Narratives Can Engage Communities After Tragedies appeared first on MediaShift.

WordRates, the first tier of the project, will provide a Yelp-esque database of user-submitted ratings of editors, publications and boilerplate contracts, along with contact information for editors. The second part of the project, PitchLab, is modeled after the book publishing industry. It will employ mentors to workshop pitches with journalists and help shop them around to multiple publications in order to get the best rate and contract.

For freelancers frustrated with stagnant rates and the lack of transparency in the publishing industry, WordRates and PitchLabs are exciting opportunities to level the playing field (which we previously covered in a guest post published in Fast Company). To get more detail, we chatted with Carney about the history of the project, freelancers’ bad pitching habits and how editors are responding to WordRates and PitchLab so far.

Q & A

What has changed about the project since its initial conception?

Scott Carney: The idea is pretty similar to what I’ve always had. We were always going to have Yelp-for-editors built, and we were always going to pair people up with mentors — people who have been freelancing for a long time, usually very established folks, to sort of become literary agents for magazine writers.

We figured — instead of pitching directly to a magazine — you’d pitch us, and we’d have one of our people pitch it to eight magazines at once, and try to get the best possible deal. It’d likely be someone who writes for the New Yorker or New York Times Magazine regularly.

The idea is that even if we charge a commission, we’re going to be able to get more money and better terms. It’s the same model that works for book publishing. There’s no real difference to it, except that our mentors are not professional agents; they’re journalists.
Why would a magazine want to get a pitch from a mentor rather than the journalist?

Photo by Heinrich Böll Stiftung and used here with Creative Commons license.

Carney: Two reasons. One is that we’re basically going through a slush pile. We’ll have a bunch of pitches that we’ll look over, and we’ll be representing the best ones from that. You’ll have a higher quality just because of that process.

But also, if we have a great idea, and the only way for the magazine to get that idea is to go through us, they don’t really have that much of a choice.
And what’s the commission going to be for people who sign up for PitchLab?

Carney: Fifteen percent. That’s industry standard.

I recently pitched two different sites the same topic. One of them definitely wanted it, and the other asked for more information. I ended up not giving them more information because I went to the first site. They changed their mind sometime before I submitted it, and by then it was no longer timely and the other site didn’t want it anymore. Is this the type of thing PitchLab could help prevent?

Carney: That’s the whole point. I wrote a blog post on market pitching versus silo pitching, and the thing is that our stories go bad. Your pitches can go bad because of timeliness.

If you’re only pitching one person at a time, you’re effectively putting yourself in the worst possible negotiating position. By the time you’ve gotten the green light, your pitch is often eight times more stale than it used to be. Then you’re really stuck if you only have one offer. But if you have two offers on the table, now you have power.

Screenshot courtesy of Wordrates.com

Screenshot courtesy of Wordrates.com

I think editors still think that people pitch one publication or site at a time.

Carney: A lot of them even prefer that. They’ll tell you that they only accept ideas that are one at a time. But unless they have a contract with you saying that, then what they’re doing is very anti-competitive. It might even be illegal, because basically what they’re saying is they need exclusivity and you’re not going to get anything back for it. It’s a very bad practice.

Say somebody keeps sending crappy pitches to PitchLab. Are they going to be getting feedback? What is that process going to look like?

Carney: I don’t have a direct answer for that, but it’s not a service where anyone can just submit crap, and we’re going to edit it and make it awesome.

We’re looking for the diamonds in the rough. I assume that we’re going to be very selective, and most people’s pitches that get sent in are going to be rejected, just because there’s a volume of ideas out there, and we’re only going to represent the ones that we think we can turn into big money.
So if somebody sends a pitch that isn’t that great, are they going to know that it isn’t getting sent on to editors? Are they going to get any feedback?

Yeah. When someone submits their idea, they’re going to get an automatic message saying that it’s under review. The mentors will have a list of pitches in a database, and they can approve a story and take it on and represent it, they can pass on it, they can delete it in the database. When it gets rejected, a writer will get a letter saying, “Sorry, we can’t represent it.” And if it gets accepted then they’ll work with that person.
When you first started sharing rates through a Google Doc there was a big backlash from editors, correct?

There was some sabotage on the Google Doc where people erased things, but then I just locked it.

One editor did contact me and said, “It’s not cool that you’re posting our rate,” but I’ve also had editors write me and say, “We can’t wait for WordRates and PitchLab, particularly PitchLab, to come out.” And I’ve also had magazine editors add their own magazines to the rate list, so it’s sort of a variety of reactions.

So it’s not like you’re pissing off all the editors, just a select few.

Carney: The thing is that we’re not against editors at all. Editors are great. They make your work better. But we are very strongly against the business practices that make it impossible for freelancers to make a living, and that ultimately sits with the people who manage those publications.

But I think some people are happy to get paid less than $2/word, especially for websites.
Could be, but here’s the thing: Writers often think that their work isn’t worth anything — they don’t know how to value their work.

Carney: If they’re working for a company that’s valued at $100 million — and they pay their writers less than half a percent of their revenues — you’re getting screwed, even if you feel personally that it’s an okay rate. When I write for Wired and I get $2.50 a word, or whatever my rate is right now, if they sell one single page advertisement to go with the story — one page of advertising is worth $140,000 at Wired. My story may be 10 pages. They do not give me a million dollars.

What about websites?

Carney: Websites should be paying a lot more. You have to look at the revenue their web traffic generates and what their actual business model is based on. If you look at the book publishing industry — I’ve written two books, and I just got my third book contract — they give you about 10 percent as a royalty of the book sales, 10 percent of the gross.

If any of these magazines paid you 10 percent percent of their gross, we would be getting a standard rate of $20/word [Editor’s note: You can check out Carney’s calculations here]. Websites I’m sure would be paying at least a dollar a word, more than likely three or four dollars a word if you were making 10 percent of the gross.

The thing is that writers just don’t fight it, and we think we’re valueless.

If someone wasn’t a backer and is just finding out about the project, is there a way they can get involved?

Carney: Once the site goes live then people can sign up for a free account and start rating editors and doing all the stuff the site was built for. They can submit pitches, and we’ll review them at our launch.

Is there anything else about this project people should know about?

Carney: I think that people really need to understand that writers’ work is valuable, and that fighting for the value of your work is not against your interests.

PitchLab may be the way this will happen, but even if nobody uses PitchLab, I hope people take the message from this project that you’re supposed to argue for every contract that you get — then I’ll have won. Because we need to put pressure on magazines and realize that writing is a business. It’s not some art form where it’s not tied to your own survival.

This post originally appeared on Contently.

An investigative journalist at heart, Yael writes about world-changing tech startups, online privacy, and cutting-edge fitness research. She covers controversies and movements with nuance and depth.

The post Can WordRates, PitchLab Flip the Script for Freelancers vs. Publishers? appeared first on MediaShift.

Image courtesy of Global.Gender.Current and published under Creative Commons license.

Those troubling numbers will probably surprise you. The magazine industry is not the first field that comes to mind when we think of workplace gender inequality. But Jillian Goodman, an editor at Fast Company, has decided to take matters into her own hands. With the help of a cast of female writers and editors, Goodman is creating Mary, a general interest magazine that will only use female contributors and editors.

Goodman took to Kickstarter to raise $20,000 for the project. The campaign has already reached its funding goal, but will still be live for another week in case more people want to contribute.

I spoke to Goodman to find out more about what inspired her to build Mary, why women’s magazines need more investigative reporting, and the best piece of advice she has for all reporters.

Q&A

How did you start your career in writing and editing?

I interned at and then was hired by New York Magazine as an online producer for their Vulture blog, and then I started as an editor at Fast Company in August of 2012.

What inspired you to create a publication made by women?

The more time you spend in the industry, the more you see the way that men and women are treated differently. However, it has less to do with overt instances of discrimination and more to do with the issue of systemic biases coming into play. The more time I’ve spent in the professional world and the older I’ve gotten, the more feminist I feel, and the more I find myself drawn to the things that women have to say.

Plus, the magazines that I like to read are primarily general interest magazines. You can get a wide variety of different types of stories and read different writing styles, but it’s discouraging when you see that the majority of the people writing those stories are male.

Of course, I don’t think male editors think that men are better writers than women. There aren’t overt biases. You just share a certain set of experiences with people who are like you in different ways. So when you’re a woman coming up against mostly male editors, you don’t have a ton of shared interests.

Would you call Mary a feminist publication?

Without a doubt it is a feminist project, in that it is interested in what women have to say. What I want to do with Mary is publish the same kinds of stories that you would find in the New Yorker. We want the same breadth of offerings. It’s just that all women are doing it.

Magazine mockup by Donica Ida, background artwork by Clara Maria Pope.

Did you have any personal experiences in your career that led you to want to create Mary?

I’ve had the notion that I’ve wanted to create my own project for a long time. It’s fun and these are the parts of the job as an editor that I really like — working with writers and assembling the whole project.

In that same interview with Cosmo you mention that men’s magazines publish more investigative journalism than women’s publications. Why do you think that’s the case?

That’s kind of just the way that men’s magazines developed. A lot of these magazines have DNA that goes back to a time when men actually did think that women weren’t as smart and couldn’t handle investigative journalism. Of course, both men’s and women’s magazines have come a long way since then. Someone who works for Elle or Cosmo doesn’t feel hamstrung by that publication’s history. They don’t think that they need to write to the old idea of femininity. However, the way the publications developed, the models for men’s and women’s magazines are different.

Why do you think it’s important for women to write hard-hitting pieces? They could just as arguably be written by men, couldn’t they?

I want this to be a feminine project. Sure, there are a lot of male, feminist writers out there. But that’s just not what I’m interested in for this.

What was your experience like using Kickstarter?

I attempted to fundraise privately first. I’m a very shy person, so the idea of making a project public before it was finished made me nervous. But building the project on Kickstarter was very helpful. It forced me to answer a lot of questions about Mary. It made it more real. I had to create a roster of writers so people could understand what the project was going to be. And the reception was wonderful when it went live.

I’m pleased with the number of donors and that we’re fully funded, but now I wish that we’d asked for more money. Paying people is really important to me, and I would like to pay my writers more. I hope people will continue to donate, so I can do more right by the fantastic writers who agreed to do this for me.

Is there going to be more than one edition of Mary?

I honestly don’t know. Right now I’m focusing on short timeframes. My mission is just to close out this Kickstarter.

What kind of advice would you give to women who want to write investigative journalism and in general?

From an editor’s point of view, remember that a rejection of your idea is not a rejection of you. Just keep pitching people. Keep doing it. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t pay attention to feedback. But a rejection is not a reason to stop pitching.

The Mary website will go live soon. For now, maryreview.com will link you back to the magazine’s Kickstarter. Make sure to keep checking the page for updates.

The original version of this piece appeared on Contently. You can sign up for Contently’s newsletter here.

Jillian Richardson is a writer and humorist. She has written for The Content Strategist, The Freelancer, Shutterstock, The Maude, Styleite, BarkPost, and OpenView Venture Capital. You can reach her at jrichardson256@gmail.com and see her writing portfolio at jillianrichardson.contently.com.

The post Women Are Grossly Underrepresented in Journalism. This Startup Mag Wants to Change That appeared first on MediaShift.

But, at the same time, just because the mobile platform has emerged as the frontrunner in the race to capture audience engagement doesn’t mean legacy platforms are to be discounted.

“As the digital space grows and grows and expands and multiplies, these old legacy platforms are still around,” Amy Mitchell, director of journalism research at the Pew Research Center, told PBS MediaShift. “As a new one [platform] emerges, it’s not replacing the older ones. The older ones are still important to maintain.”

Mobile Attraction v. Desktop Attention

Screenshot courtesy of the Pew Research Center.

Based on an analysis of data from comScore, the latest State of the Media report found that 39 of the top 50 news websites get more traffic to their sites and associated applications from mobile devices than desktop computers. However, the report also found that for half of these sites, desktop visitors tend to spend more time per visit than mobile users. These news sites included legacy news outlets, digital-only organizations and international news brands.

When looking at the figures for NBC Digital, for example, which currently ranks as the third most visited digital news site after Yahoo-ABC News Network and the CNN Network, the average visit per desktop visit was 5.1 minutes — whereas an average mobile visit lasted 2.6 minutes.

“Certainly, those mobile numbers are pretty striking,” Mitchell said when discussing the momentum around the platform. “The challenge on there too is the time side.”

Yet the growth of mobile, despite telling figures, also reveals some nuances into where its presence is most felt. The report noted that among the top 50 digital native news sites, nine of them actually received more desktop traffic than mobile traffic. This is a greater proportion of sites gaining more desktop traffic when compared with the top 50 news sites overall. In other words, as the latest Mediatwits podcast pointed out, “being digitally native doesn’t necessarily translate to more mobile traffic.”

Television, Newspapers, Podcasting and the Social Space

Screenshot courtesy of the Pew Research Center.

Like the surge in mobile consumption, the report’s findings on television news engagement reveals subtleties. Prime time viewership for the three major cable news channels — Fox News Channel, CNN and MSNBC — decreased by eight percent in 2014, and revenue growth for these news channels largely remains at a standstill.

Local news and network news, on the other hand, fared better. Local television had small gains in both audience and revenue growth compared to last year. Network news — which refers to the three major broadcast television networks that feature both morning and evening programming, ABC, CBS and NBC — also saw audience growth for the second straight year. The online presence of these network channels also remain top news sites.

Meanwhile, newspaper circulation fell by about three percent from 2013 to 2014. Pew’s report also pointed out, “Despite widespread talk of a shift to digital, most newspaper readership continues to be in print.”

If there is one definitive positive growth in media this year, it just might be in the realm of podcasting. The success of Serial, of course, has burgeoned podcasting’s reputation, but Pew’s data shows the media has been growing consistently over the past two years. And when comparing the percentage of Americans who listened to podcasts in 2008 versus January 2015, that figure nearly doubled, from nine percent to 17 percent.

“Advances in technology — in particular, the rapid growth in use of smartphones and mobile devices in addition to the increased ease of in-car listening — have contributed to the uptick of interest in podcasts,” the report explained.

The influence of social media, although not directly analyzed in this report, also harbored in the background of its findings. Pew previously found that about half of American adults who use the Internet report getting news about politics and the government solely from Facebook — which, given that news feeds are influenced by algorithms and the views of Facebook friends, might translate into polarized media consumption.

As for the overall reaction to the 2015 State of the Media findings? “I think if i were gong to sum up the sentiment, it’s really about the challenge, the extraordinary challenge that face news providers today,” Mitchell, the director of journalism research at the Pew Research Center, told PBS MediaShift.

The full report is available online.

For a discussion of the State of the News Media report, check out a recent Mediatwits podcast discussion:

Sonia Paul is a freelance journalist based in India, and is the editorial assistant at PBS MediaShift. She is on Twitter @sonipaul.

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