The return of bundling and the indirect value of ‘serious’ journalism

Sep 152012
 

In the past, I’ve argued that serious journalism isn’t becoming less profitable, so much as being exposed as having never profitable in the first place. In doing so, I’ve leaned on Clay Shirky who argued the same in 2009:

Journalism written for that fraction of the population that follows the news closely has always been subsidized. For the last century, newspaper journalism had direct subsidy from advertisement and cross-subsidy from sports fans and coupon clippers who never really cared about the city council or the coup in Madagascar. The packages containing news have been so bundled and cross-funded that we’ve never really known precisely the size of the audience for actual civic-minded reporting, or how much direct fees from that audience would amount to. We do know, however, that the rough answers are “Small” and “Not much,”

Today I want to put forward an argument that he and I are wrong. I’m not sure I believe this, but I think recent trends in media make it necessary to consider. Back in February I laid out what I think of as the best argument against Shirky’s:

In my mind, the best retort to Shirky’s point that the news was always subsidized is to argue that papers like NYT gain an indirect benefit with their credible reporting. Sure, when readers got the paper they looked at sports and lighter stuff, but they chose to buy such a premier paper in the first place in part to associate themselves with the seriousness of the brand.

These days, I see evidence in favor of this rebuttal everywhere I look.

(Quick note: There’s a lack of clarity around what actually should count as serious and not, as I discuss here. That’s not what I’m interested in now. For the purposes of this post, by ‘serious’ I just mean in terms of reader perceptions.)

There’s been a lot already written about ‘unbundling’ in media, meaning that the unit of media that we buy/consume has narrowed. We don’t subscribe to one paper; we sample articles from many sources via Twitter, Facebook, RSS, etc. Likewise, with geography less of a factor, we saw from the early days of the blogosphere on a strong move towards niche coverage. Blogs and websites could dive into a particular domain and cover it better than general journalists could ever dream.

The problem, then, was that the international reporter no longer got subsidized by the style columnist. In an age of declining media profitability, why would anyone bother to pay someone to cover Africa? The trend was toward narrow and deep, and better to go narrow in the niches that lots of readers really cared about.

Except this theory just does not do a good job of describing today’s landscape. It can’t explain why The Huffington Post would spend money hiring NYT reporters to do investigative reporting. Or why Buzzfeed would poach Ben Smith. Why worry about having a respected financial reporter at Business Insider rather than just being a slideshow shop heavy on aggregation? Even Gawker is taking pageview pressure off its stable of writers by hiring Daily What’s founder to go gung-ho after pageviews. None of these, to me, square with the basic logic of unbundling. What’s going on here?

I don’t get no respect!

The media economics answer here is CPMs, the rate at which advertisers pay media properties per eyeball. Some eyeballs are more valuable than others. That’s why advertisers will pay more to advertise next to content targeted at “the global business elite” than it will  for, well, almost anything else.

That alone isn’t at odds with the unbundling thesis. Niche business sites could collect those limited eyeballs at higher rates, while other sites could rack up the pageviews at a lower rate.

But what I see in the various re-bundling efforts above is a possible confirmation of the indirect value of serious journalism. Because the dirty little secret is that the ‘serious’ wealthy, educated person picking up the New York Times is still more likely to read about the best coffee in Manhattan than about the politics of Libya. But they wouldn’t pick up the paper if that Libya content weren’t there. Because they pride themselves on being a very serious person.

Translated to the online world, some readers who garner high CPMs based on income or other factors love the same click crack that everyone else does. But they’re more likely to read it at a ‘respectable’ outlet that also employs Ben Smith or Joe Weisenthal.

All of this is just a very long-winded way of saying that brand matters. And that ‘serious’ or civic-minded journalism may have some business value. It’s just indirect.

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What if an article knew your assumptions and adjusted based on them?

Aug 192012
 

One critical role for journalism is to challenge readers’ assumptions about how the world works, as well as to expose them to new values different than their own. At least sometimes.

Other times, readers legitimately simply want to get information, but what information counts as relevant will depend on one’s assumptions. That’s the point I tried to experiment with a few weeks back when I wrote a “Choose Your Own Adventure” about when Mitt Romney left Bain Capital.

The idea was that some people seemed to care quite a bit about the timing of his departure, others not at all. And which camp you ought to fall into depended on how you answer several separate questions. How do you feel about outsourcing? About private equity’s value? About management, ownership, and responsibility.

These are tough questions, and good journalism can help readers to make up their minds. But by structuring my piece in that way I hoped to make readers at least think through the logic behind the question at hand. Lots of anti-Romney folks will simply want to find in the Bain departure date a damning controversy. They should be made aware that taking that view commits them to certain other views.

I’m grateful to Brendan Nyhan for mentioning my piece in a post at Columbia Journalism Review, and hope the idea of assumptions and values will be raised more frequently when thinking about media design.

Consider, for instance, how the information needs of a utilitiarian and a libertarian (principled not pragmatic) differ. Say we’re discussing taxes. The utilitarian cares only about outcomes; how does this change human welfare through the distribution of wealth, its impact on growth, etc. The libertarian, depending on his or her strain, has to consider arguments about property rights and possibly about the impact on personal liberty from whatever the taxes get spent on.

Yes, utilitarians should be exposed to libertarian value arguments now and again, and vice versa. But realistically not every article is a chance to rethink core moral principles, nor should it be.

So an article about taxation that contains arguments about welfare and liberty could be altered to display the most relevant information first (or only) if the medium knew the readers’ assumptions. This happens informally as writers write for their audiences, but that’s a blunt measure.

Imagine if a site simply surveyed me on my values and then altered its content to provide me the information that was most relevant for me to reach policy conclusions based on them. It might sound kind of out there, but it wouldn’t be that hard to do in a day and age where we know so much about readers through social authentication.

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How Much Journalism is Worth Saving?

Aug 192012
 
NYT homepage

Back in early 2010, shortly after launching this blog, I put pen to paper on some of the core ideas guiding my views on the future of news. Here’s one of them that I still believe is crucial and often ignored:

1) When I talk about how we will finance news/journalism I’m interested in only a very small subset of all journalism which I’d refer to as that which provides core civic knowledge.  In other words, the information that we feel is vital to a functioning democracy.*  By this measure, most of what we see in the newspapers is not an issue.  Go through a newspaper sometime and look.  We’re not talking about how to fund the sports section, the travel section, the style section, that article on some writer’s quest for the perfect espresso.  That is beyond the scope of what we, as a society, need to ensure exists going forward.

You can read the full post here.

Today, for the fun of it – yes, this is what I do for fun on a Sunday – I browsed the NYT homepage starting at the top and counted 25 headlines to see how many seemed to fit (based on headline alone, for time’s sake) my definition of civic journalism. I ended up with 12 out of 24, with one not classifiable based on headline (it was a Dowd column so we can be fairly sure it could go.)

That 12 included one story not civic  per se, but a breaking news story about an earthquake that seemed worth counting based on the idea of essential national news. You can count the top stories yourself and see what you come up with, though my screenshot below doesn’t capture all 25.

My point here is that most journalism isn’t worth saving, from a democratic perspective. Now, we might want to save it for other reasons. I’m a writer, so I’d like to have a job. I work for a startup that’s betting on the reinvention of media as a business. But whether writers have jobs and investors can get a decent return off of a content business are separate from the question of protecting capital J Journalism.

As for how to preserve that core civic journalism, I don’t have the perfect answer. (I lean toward a nonprofit model like ProPublica, and am additionally hopeful that universities will shoulder a lot of the burden.) But a lot of the discussions about how to save journalism – and about what new media experiments are worthwhile and not – become much clearer once you realize you’re really only trying to preserve a subset of existing media.

One thing that bugs me, perhaps because I work for a new media business, is that new entrants are often judged for the quality of their content without much attention to that of the incumbents. Business Insider gets panned for its slideshows or HuffPo for its celebrity gossip without any mention of the fact that the majority of traditional journalism served no civic purpose, but just existed as entertaining content.

That roughly 50% of the top stories in America’s top newspaper makes this clear. Now, I love the NYT and I’d rather read their non-essential stuff more than the non-essential stuff at various other outlets. But wanting to read a J-school grad reporting on New York’s nightlife lawyer isn’t in and of itself better than reading a Gawker writer mocking this that or the other.

The next time you have a conversation about saving journalism, or about the quality of a new media entrant, remember: the segment of media worth saving for the sake of democracy is only a very small slice of what has traditionally gone under the banner of journalism.

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On government and copyright

Jul 072012
 

Another day, another misguided view on intellectual property. Via Tim Lee at Ars Technica, here’s a quote from a representative from Ron+Rand Paul’s Campaign for Liberty:

“We think the public domain is a terrific part of the Internet,” he told us. Rather, he said, the group was worried that “Internet collectivists” would use the phrase “public domain” as “code for getting the government more involved” in copyright issues.

The group is pushing back against the idea that, “what is considered to be in the public domain should be greatly expanded.”

First, copyright exists because of government, full stop. There is no copyright infringement in the state of nature. Second, to expand what is considered in the public domain means lessening the interference of government, by shortening copyright terms.

This would seem to be an area where libertarians and liberals could agree (in fact, it mostly is). It’s terribly depressing to see the Paul’s finding a way to oppose this.

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Jonah Lehrer and the cult of rewriting

Jun 302012
 

One of the key things to understand in the debate over the future of journalism is that people who paid to write will tend to favor systems that continue to pay a lot of people to write. And that may or may not be best for the public.

This was front and center in my mind the past couple weeks since the Jonah Lehrer non-scandal over his supposed “self-plagiarism”, a term that’s been appropriately panned. If you haven’t followed the story, here’s one link. Basically, he used stuff from his books and from other articles for new articles. Like this passage:

Here’s a simple arithmetic question: “A bat and ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?”

The vast majority of people respond quickly and confidently, insisting the ball costs 10 cents. This answer is both incredibly obvious and utterly wrong. (The correct answer is five cents for the ball and $1.05 for the bat.) What’s most impressive is that education doesn’t really help; more than 50% of students at Harvard, Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology routinely give the incorrect answer.

That’s from – gasp – both his New Yorker blog and a WSJ column. Now, I get why the publications are upset and I’m not saying he did nothing wrong. If you agree to certain terms of employment – to produce original content – then you have to deliver on those terms. To the extent that he violated them, it’s appropriate for an employer to be upset. Fine.

But those are really stupid terms of employment. Put another way, why is it a good use of someone’s time? Particularly someone as talented as Jonah Lehrer, one of the best in the world at taking scientific topics and making them simple and fun enough for popular consumption. It’s not. If he thinks he got it right the first time, it’s a waste to rewrite it.

So how to get around this from a business perspective? Well, the WSJ doesn’t own the idea, nor does it own Lehrer’s familiarity with that idea. It only owns the particular expression of the idea in words. The simplest way to get around this would be for Lehrer to reappropriate his writing minimally – block quote-style – from the WSJ under fair use and for The New Yorker to get off its high horse and be ok with this. Another would be to move toward some sort of licensing model in which Lehrer licenses his writing to any publication that wants to publish it.

Whatever the ultimate fix is, you’re likely to hear writers wail against it. That’s because writers prefer there to be a lot of writing jobs available. They might not like rewriting press releases, but they don’t want you to just read the press releases because that means fewer paid jobs for writers. But what’s good for writers isn’t always good for journalism.

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Lying liars and filter failure

Jun 302012
 

There’s no such thing as information overload; only filter failure. That’s the wonderful Clay Shirky maxim. Now we can add to that the maxim: There’s no such thing as a Misinformation problem; only filter failure and attribute it to ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Ok, he didn’t quite say that. But it was close. This is from an awesome Atlantic piece by Alexis Madrigal on Schmidt’s incurable techno-optimism:

“All of us grew up with an assumption that what we were seeing on television, especially in legitimate news, was edited and properly vetted. That’s no longer the case. Furthermore, you can anticipate very powerful forces will attempt to do misinformation campaigns to you for one business objective or another,” he said. “It will be worth it to them to spend millions of dollars to spend millions of dollars to create fake websites and so forth to convince you that something that is really bad for you is really good for you. Because they have a business interest to do so and the Internet allows that.”

Gosh, that sounds bleak! What possible way could we solve this problem? “We have to rank against it,” Schmidt said, that is to say, Google should notice disinformation and rank it lower than good information.

That might seem hopeless if you’re just thinking of it in the context of a search engine. Even if Google ranks something low it can still spread like wildfire on social media. But rankings can extend beyond search.

That’s what’s so cool about experiments like Dan Schultz’s Truth Goggles project. Once you have some ranking or some statement of authority, you can build it into the experience at any level of the tech stack that you want. If the New York Times knows the article your friend is sharing w/ you is crap, that does you no good if their statement saying as much is on your site and you never go there. But if NYT is your trusted source, they could be your browser (or at least a plugin) and have a bright bar up top of everything you read with a credibility ranking.

Of course, these are ridiculously hard problems at every step of the way. But I kinda love Schmidt’s optimism.

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Workaholics and redistribution: Some people like working more than others

Apr 302012
 

Via Reihan Salam, here’s a bit from Greg Mankiw:

one reason that people differ in their incomes is that some people care more about having a high income than others…

Bryan [Caplan] goes on to suggest that to the extent this is true, it weakens the case for income redistribution.

He is absolutely right.  Most of the literature on optimal taxation and redistribution, following Mirrlees, assumes homogeneous preferences.  But Matthew Weinzierl has a recent paper on preference heterogeneity, which shows “ to the extent that variation in income is due to preference differences rather than productivity differences, the optimal extent of redistribution is lower, and the neglect of preference heterogeneity biases the results of conventional optimal tax analyses in favor of redistribution of income.”

Sure, but what about the flip side? Call it the striver phenomenon. Preferences for working aren’t homogeneous either. To the extent that some people get more utility out of working at a given task than others that should recommend relatively more redistribution, no?

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Algorithms writing news stories? How unambitious

Apr 282012
 

Are algorithms the future of news writing? Wired had an interesting article on that topic last week, focusing on a company called Narrative Science that is already doing it. Here’s the excerpt Wired provides from a Narrative Science story:

Friona fell 10-8 to Boys Ranch in five innings on Monday at Friona despite racking up seven hits and eight runs. Friona was led by a flawless day at the dish by Hunter Sundre, who went 2-2 against Boys Ranch pitching. Sundre singled in the third inning and tripled in the fourth inning … Friona piled up the steals, swiping eight bags in all …

I know as a writer I’m expected to either cower in fear or boast that no algorithm can ever spin prose like mine. But I had a totally different reaction. At the point where algorithms are handling the news, why are we still using news stories?

The news story is, from an informational perspective, pretty unsophisticated. It’s a block of text, a headline, some tags. There’s barely any structure or metadata.

But for an algorithm to be able to report the news it would seem that you pretty much have to impose this kind of structure on the information, and it’s clear from Wired that that’s what Narrative Science does:

Narrative Science’s writing engine requires several steps. First, it must amass high-quality data. That’s why finance and sports are such natural subjects…

…So Narrative Science’s engineers program a set of rules that govern each subject, be it corporate earnings or a sporting event. But how to turn that analysis into prose? The company has hired a team of “meta-writers,” trained journalists who have built a set of templates. They work with the engineers to coach the computers to identify various “angles” from the data…

…Then comes the structure. Most news stories, particularly about subjects like sports or finance, hew to a pretty predictable formula, and so it’s a relatively simple matter for the meta-writers to create a framework for the articles. To construct sentences, the algorithms use vocabulary compiled by the meta-writers.

My question is this: Why, when you’ve imposed all this structure on the information do you package it in such a “dumb” format? Yeah, I get that people are accustomed to reading news articles, and if you experiment with some new information format you risk users not understanding or embracing it.

But is there any reason to think that the news story is the ideal way to take in information? Yes, humans like narrative. But they’ll get that in magazine journalism. The basic news item – who won a game, what happened to a stock – doesn’t need to be digested as a story.

That’s why we have headlines, that’s why we use bullet points and bold stuff.

As Google’s Richard Gingras recently said:

“Do we not deserve to rethink the architecture of what a ‘story’ is, the form of presentation and narrative to meet the needs of people who are consuming, not just by articles?”

If you have an algorithm smart enough to parse events happening in the world and translate it into structured data you ought to be dreaming a little bigger about how to present it to your audience. The upside down pyramid format worked when turning news into data would have been another step. Now that’s already done as a necessity of algorithmic news.

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Como se dice… bias?

Apr 212012
 

One of the coolest paper abstracts I’ve read, via MR, presented without comment:

Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue? It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases. Four experiments show that the framing effect disappears when choices are presented in a foreign tongue. Whereas people were risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses when choices were presented in their native tongue, they were not influenced by this framing manipulation in a foreign language. Two additional experiments show that using a foreign language reduces loss aversion, increasing the acceptance of both hypothetical and real bets with positive expected value. We propose that these effects arise because a foreign language provides greater cognitive and emotional distance than a native tongue does.

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Where’s the 400 word version of NYT’s Walmart bribery story?

Apr 212012
 

It’s been just a couple months since the media world debated whether Forbes writer Kashmir Hill went overboard in her curation of an NYT story on Target’s predictive analytics. Basically, Hill slapped a way better headline on the piece, pulled in a bunch of quotes, added some of her own prose, and got a ton of traffic.

Oh, and her piece was much shorter.

What did NYT learn? Apparently nothing. They have an awesome long form piece up today about Walmart’s consistent record of bribery in Mexico. It’s a damning piece executed to perfection. It’s also really, really long.

So why doesn’t NYT have a 400 word version published alongside it?

I love longform journalism, but even if every other reader did too, we all tend to read longform stuff about the issues we care most about. This is an important news item that falls outside of my core interests, and I want to know the basics. No doubt there are a lot of other readers who feel the same way.

In my case I read about 60% and skimmed the rest, but plenty of other readers are going to end up on the HuffPo version that captures the story in a few hundred words.

Why doesn’t the NYT beat them to the punch? The longform narrative obsessives and those with deep interest in Mexico, corruption, corporate citizenship, etc. will still read the long version.

But to not offer the bite size option is to cede an opportunity. You’ve already done all the hard reporting. Take even just a few minutes to think about the product.

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