Guide #5: Introduction to Podcasting, by Erkki Mervaala.

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About author: Erkki Mervaala is a former Program Manager and Digital Media Specialist for Media Development Investment Fund. He is also a member of the award-winning Finnish climate journalist collective Hyvän sään aikana and works as the managing editor for the climate news website of the same name. Mervaala has worked as a Central Europe foreign correspondent for several Finnish magazines and newspapers. He has also worked as a screenwriter for Yellow Film & TV, web developer and UI/UX designer. He has been a podcaster since 2008.

You can contact him via e-mail.

The Knight News Challenge has been supporting news media innovation since 2007, funding more than a hundred projects to the tune of $37 million. Some of its winners have developed into successful businesses (though not necessarily doing what they originally planned), while others have sunk without a trace.

The report looks at 28 projects such as FrontlineSMS, iWitness, and Zeega and picks out important lessons that contribute to successful media innovation.

Target users with “a need you can feel”

Successful projects scale because they have identified a core audience and proven need, whereas others fail “because they developed a tool without first identifying target users”.

Get the interface right

“An intuitive user interface is vital for attracting and retaining users.” But don’t underestimate the time and expense involved in developing what appears to be a simple design.

Successful projects may appeal to a different audience than first imagined…

Tools developed to help media outlets with tasks such as visualising data have struggled to get traction in the newsroom but have found success in other industries. “Small budgets in journalism and a lack of technical understanding among journalists can inhibit adoption.”

…Anticipate resistance to innovation

Successful startups realise that their innovation may cause disruption and meet institutional resistance. Successful innovators anticipate resistance and plan ahead for it, for example by identifying a wider potential audience beyond the initial target.

Identify staffing needs early

Many startups rely on a mix of full-time paid staff and a community of users and evangelists to develop and promote services and tools. Identify which parts of your project need paid, full-time staff and those that can be carried out by volunteers, and allocate resources accordingly. The contribution of unpaid supporters can be undermined by insufficient core staffing.

News start-ups covering specific niches such as technology or politics are finding the most commercial success in using events, and general interest news groups are using events build audience and increase audience loyalty, which has also had a positive impact on revenue. In fact, some news groups have even regretted not pursuing events as a possible revenue stream, which was part of a larger lack of business focus at launch, Batsell said.

“A lot of news start-ups tend to come from very idealistic roots, from journalists who haven’t had much business training, and they feel like if they go out and do great watchdog journalist that it will pay for itself,” he said, adding, “That is not always the case.”

His research on events, which has been released in a peer-reviewed paper and will be included in an upcoming book, explores how to decide whether an events strategy is right for you and how to develop that strategy.

In a presentation (see at the end of the article) at the International Symposium of Online Journalism in April, Batsell summarised the best practices he identified in 100 interviews with more than 20 news organisations during his research.

• Designate an event planner.
• Seek out sponsors to make money.
• Networking is a key attraction for attendees.
• Build support in the newsroom.
• Provide memorable experiences.
• Don’t expect a “golden goose”, a huge revenue generator, “but with an authentic approach, events can produce revenue and audience goodwill – preferably both.”

Evaluate the opportunity costs

“I think there is an opportunity in just about any market to put together some kind of event that is going to be meaningful to your community, to assemble your community in a way that only you can as a media outlet,” Batsell said.

Almost every community has key business or cultural groups that can form the basis of an event, and asking the right questions will help you evaluate the opportunity:

• Are there leading business communities in your area, such as agricultural, technology, transportation or the media, that you could create an event to serve?
• Could you provide these groups an opportunity network?
• Do you already have special sections covering these business areas?
• Does your community have key cultural dates during the year that you could create an event around?

Identifying the most promising business or cultural group or demographic will help you identify sponsorship opportunities and estimate potential income.

To be successful with events, Batsell suggests appointing a person who is responsible for the events business.   He said:

Ideally, if you have a director of events, that is great, but not everybody can afford that. If you’re a newsroom who has a social media manager or community relationships manager, that might be a place to go where someone can handle that on part-time basis.

In some instances, a journalist or journalists will be involved, to host and/or cover the event, and Batsell says that key in determining whether or not to pursue and events strategy is to determine the opportunity costs of the staff involved. The opportunity cost is the value of the best opportunity that you have to forego to carry out your event. In other words, does the value, both commercially and editorially, of hosting an event outweigh the staff time spent doing existing responsibilities or another activity?

Build sponsorships

While some event strategies are focused more on building audience numbers, loyalty or both, most events are developed with a specific commercial goal. To be successful commercially with events, sponsorships are essential because the bulk of revenue from events is generated by sponsorships, not ticket sales.

It is essential to identify clear sponsorship opportunities early, at the project evaluation stage. If you can’t locate enough sponsors, or if sponsors aren’t willing to pay enough to help you earn meaningful revenue from the event, you might want to either change the type of event or drop it entirely.

Batsell says that is why it is essential to have a member of staff whose job, either part-time or full-time, it is to develop the events.  He said:

You have to have a point person coordinating these events and seeking sponsorship for these events because that is really where these events make their money. It’s not through ticket sales. It’s through finding a good corporate sponsor who wants to put themselves in front of a demographically desirable audience that a news start-up can assemble.

Build newsroom support

After analysing your market and weighing the opportunity costs, Batsell found that news leaders need to make sure that they solicit the support of journalists and editors. He said:

There are still many journalists who were trained that journalism and business were separate entities that should never be mixed. Of journalists that I encountered at these events, some were very comfortable, more or less serving as emcees at these events and intertwining it with their journalism. Others were not so much. They saw it as a marketing exercise, and that is not what they signed up for when they went to journalism school.

If I were a news manager of newsroom where there were some sceptics, what I would point out to these journalists. “Hey, if this can generate more revenue that can save more jobs and pay for more journalism, aren’t we all for that?” I think some managers are better than others at communicating that goal and underscoring to your staff that being ambassadors for your brand and reaching out to your audience in person is part of the job these days. There may be some resistance to that in the DNA of journalists but you gotta get past that because it can help feed the journalism.

Successful examples

Batsell found the most financially successful examples were those news organisations or news start-ups that targeted a commercially desirable demographic and gave them opportunities to network.

Geekwire

In Seattle, he looked at Geekwire, a site that covers the tech start-up community. In 2012, they held nine events which made up 40 percent of their total revenue, boasting a 20 percent profit margin. The events include their tech start-up awards, which provide not only sponsorship but also a chance to generate coverage for the site. Other events are just for fun and act to bring their audience together socially, such as a ping pong tournament. The events are “designed to bring the local tech community together like no one else does”.

Geekwire was profitable during their first full year, but they fell just short of profitability in 2012. Co-founder Todd Bishop told Batsell the shortfall was partly due to costs they inherited from an event they took over from another organisation, which highlights some of the challenges of events. “Events are not a panacea,” Batsell said.

Texas Tribune

Texas Tribune is a non-profit news organisation in Texas that provides coverage of state government. They have a number of events including a regular series called Trib Live, in which Texas Tribune editors and journalists interview newsmakers in front of a live audience. In addition to streaming the video on the Texas Tribune site, it is also streamed on Facebook.

It is paid for by a small number of corporate sponsors. Batsell said:

It’s free to the public, but it often produces news content. Newsmakers say newsworthy things, and the insiders feel like they have to be there. There are 200 to 250 lobbyists with legislative staff at 730 in the morning at the Austin Club, all there convened by the Texas Tribune.

The Texas Tribune makes about 20 percent of its total revenue through events. As a non-profit, the Texas Tribune has a number of sources of revenue and financial support, including foundation support, member contributions and sponsorship. Last year, their revenues were higher than their costs.

Mount Pleasant Sun

The Sun is a newspaper in Mount Pleasant Michigan, and they held an Art Walk event in conjunction with the local arts council. They set up a satellite newsroom at the event and had staff working there for half the day over several days during the event. They didn’t have corporate sponsors, but they did have a special tabloid advertising section in conjunction with the event.

Batsell said events like this were difficult to analyse in terms of success. While it was good for the community, the commercial outcome was more difficult to assess, and Batsell said that in cases like this, being clear about the opportunity costs were key in helping news organisations decide whether this was the best use of their resources.

WBEZ radio Chicago

WBEZ is a public radio station in Chicago. Public broadcasting in the US is supported through a mix of listener contributions, corporate sponsorships and some public funding. Like most public radio stations in the US, WBEZ broadcasts a mix of news, discussion programmes, music and cultural programmes. They have an eclectic range of events, which they believe appeals to their listener members such as themed movie nights or Chicago chef competitions. WBEZ says that the goal of their events is to create a memorable experience that people associate with WBEZ.

While it was again difficult to quantify the success of these events, WBEZ did have some indication that events were playing a part in maintaining their member support. Over the past five years, the number of contributing members had gone down, but the amount of contribution per member had risen. Public radio stations solicit contributions and new members on-air in what they call pledge drives, and they have been able to reduce the number of pledge drive days by 30 percent despite the lower number of members. “Events are a piece of that, but it’s not the only part,” Batsell said.

While success might be difficult to quantify in every instance, Batsell believes that events can be a key alternative revenue stream for news organisations. He said, “I think that every news organisation needs to explore because the opportunities are there.”

Here is the presentation that Batsell gave at the International Symposium on Online Journalism:

Building the right kind of sensibility means building the right kind of brand that resonates. In a crowded media sector these days, the white space to create anything unique is non-existent, or at best narrow, which is why content-based startups take a longer time to gestate and build up.

Hiring and building a team present peculiar challenges for a media startup compared to any other kind of software or consumer product startup. Cultural fit becomes the driving criteria above almost any other criteria, particularly at the early stage.

Having been a student of media and media startups all my life — and now a year into building my second — I’ve learned a bunch of lessons along the way on building the right kind of teams in lean content-driven environments.

Different stages in a company require different strategies, and for this article I am focusing on the early stage, where the focus is on building editorial, product and distribution. Call it my year-one guide to hiring in a media startup.

General culture and companywide skills:

• Bringing negative energy into the company is not worth any kind of talent. This is true for co-founders, employees and even investors. Because in a daily ideas driven startup, the flow of energy back and forth matters a lot more, any negative people in the company suck up all available energy in the company. This may sound esoteric and hard to quantify, but if you’ve done this long enough, you know this matters.
• The product in a media startup changes every day, unlike any other product startup. The front entrance of your flagship product changes many times a day, and the people you hire need to understand the manic-ness that goes into doing this day in, day out.
• Product thinking: Typically media startups have been stuck in “post thinking,” as in a blog post, a story post, etc. In a multi-platform environment, product-led thinking that continually tweaks to keep the brand fresh in digital becomes the driving force. Iterate, test and build; a thinking in mainstream consumer startups, has to come to media startups as well. Hire people who get it.
• Visual and multi-platform thinking: Anyone you hire — from editor to developer to social media manager to sales to business development — has to understand the visual nature of media these days, especially in a social media-driven, multi-platform world. This is easier said than done, but people with varied and non-traditional career paths tend to get this the most.
• Living in a Google Analytics stream: Or in other words, data thinking. These days, data skills for anyone you hire across any function in the company — from editorial intern to social media manager to founders — is not an optional skill. That’s true for any startup, but for media startups that live and die in Google Analytics (and most use that at early stage, because it is free), it means making sure everyone in the company understands it, uses it, and makes decisions that are informed from it. Baking it in at the hiring stage will ensure you make it pervasive across the company as it scales.

Editorial team:

• The 4 S’s of Content: be Smart, Sharp,Surgical and Strategic. With a small team in the beginning, can the editorial talent you hire be nimble enough to understand this, and execute against it?
• Because part of the talent you will hire will likely have come from existing old-school media companies, one of the things you are looking for is how much can they unlearn what they’ve learned before. Especially if the editorial product and the voice you are trying to create is something the industry has not seen before.
• This is my personal favourite: No journalism circle jerk or moralising media people. Get the basics of reporting right, keep the future of journalism prognosticators out.
• Related to above: Avoid scenesters, above all else. Media tends to attract a lot of those because it comes with the high profile of a byline and public presence. These days with the amplification of social, people love the idea of working in high profile places and would do anything to flatter you. It will take some trial and error, but you’ll learn the necessary skill of avoiding these people.
• Curation thinking: This is another critical hiring and company culture parameter. No media startup can survive doing just original content, it has to be a mix, of original, of curated or aggregated, of licensed if that is an option. It means hiring people who have the ability to mix content types, and not be moral about it. You’ll be surprised at how many journalists look down upon curation. In a small team, curation thinking also means learning to do a lot more with lot less.

Developers:

• This is hard in the best of times, and for media startups that may not seemingly be solving rocket science tech problems, your options of how and what to attract developers with are lower. In most cases media startups are about execution, and that requires a slightly different kind of developer than a software or product company would need.
• Look to the pool of journalists turned developers, or dual majors in journalism and computer science, of which there is an increasing pool. They generally tend to get ignored by other high-profile consumer startups, and present an attractive pool to target for hiring.
• This is especially true if you are trying to create media-derived data products, and there are a lot of cross-dependencies that somebody with the media background would understand better than a regular developer.
• Developers with media background tend to understand presentation of data and information in right formats.

Cross functional agile product manager:

• Agile development, a methodology that came out of the software world, is increasingly being implemented across other parts of companies as well, especially as a buzzword by marketers. For a media startup, agile would translate into building quick, fast and dirty, with few resources, whether it is edit, business, sales, and of course tech development. That means a cross-functional product manager who is almost a junior COO, working with founders to keep everything running and launching on time, amidst the requisite amount of chaos.

Content marketing & partnerships:

• The social media editor is dead, the engagement manager has arrived. Call it whatever you want, beyond the buzzwords it means marketing your content is a full time function, and is multivariate, multi-service and multi-platform. The skills required then becomes a lot more complex than just someone who tweets and “engages” with community. It is a mix of being natively good at social, ability to focus on various social networks in different ways that those platforms require, in different formats of media. It means seeding various sites, forums and platforms beyond social; it also means part traditional business development functions of maintaining and seeding existing content partnerships.

Sales:

• The first sales hire at any media startup is a crucial and scary step. Hiring someone who can just sell banner and boxes, even if lots of them, won’t cut it. The first sales hire has to be strategic enough to think big picture, understand what the nascent brand stands for, and be on top of emerging trends in content market, native advertising and digital branding. And as digital has enabled the rise of early adopters, fanboys and prosumers across various industries, a sales hire should typically have both B2B and B2C experience to understand how companies market to various constituencies in different ways.

Caveat:

This is an early stage template. Beyond year two and beyond seed stage, the hiring guidelines and skill sets needed will evolve as product, business and strategy evolves — even if philosophies and operating principles stay rooted in founders vision.

(I have used the words “news”, “media” and “content” interchangeably here, to cast a wider net. Don’t get tripped up in the semantics of the words, larger lessons apply to any kind of content-driven startup.)

This article originally appeared on LinkedIn, and it has been republished here with the kind permission of the author. 

It has proven to be a powerful and flexible platform for news organisations attracting major publishers including the New York Times, CNN, Forbes, Reuters and the Wall Street Journal.

WordPress has a host of features, and if a feature isn’t part of its core functionality, there are literally thousands of plug-ins that can deliver the editorial features you require. The challenge isn’t finding a plug-in or theme to suit your needs but finding the right ones amongst the thousands of choices. To help speed the search for the plug-ins you require, we’ll look at a few key ones that are frequently used by news outletswhich use WordPress.

Define your editorial needs first

When choosing a CMS, the first thing you will want to do before even thinking about which CMS to use is to outline your editorial requirements. You might be able to do everything you want, but it is important that your editorial strategy drives your technical choices rather than thinking about the technology first.

Armed with your editorial requirements, you can then look for plug-ins that deliver these features. While you can have several plug-ins, don’t get carried away. Too many plug-ins can slow down the performance of your site, and you will want to make sure that the plug-ins work well together. That’s a key thing to ask your developer or development contractor to evaluate.

Useful plug-ins for news organisations

EditFlow – WordPress began as a blogging, a personal publishing, platform, and what works for an individual or a small group focused on self-publishing doesn’t meet the needs of an editorial organisation that has a workflow and a process to ensure that what is published meets its editorial standards.

EditFlow is an excellent plug-in that adds many elements of a traditional editorial workflow to WordPress. It adds custom article statuses such as pitch, pending review and subbed that allow you to track where stories are in the editorial process. It adds editorial comments so that journalists and editors working on stories can leave feedback and questions on a story, and the system can email journalists or copy editors when the status of a story changes.

It also adds an editorial calendar to give editors the ability to plan what content is going to be published to the site and when, and also to add to your future planning. You can also see upcoming stories in a story budget view to take to planning meetings. It’s an excellent, almost essential, addition to WordPress for news organisations.

Liveblog – The liveblog format has become a popular way for news organisations to cover rolling news events live on their sites. The format is not only popular with news businesses, but is also popular with audiences. When an earthquake and tsunami devastated parts of Japan while half a world away the events of the Arab Spring were reshaping Middle Eastern governments, Al Jazeera English was at one point running four live blogs, and it accounted for a quarter of the traffic to the site. Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has developed a Liveblog plugin that delivers a lot of functionality such as the ability to easily update the article as well as auto-refresh of the article for your audience so they always have the most up-to-date content.

Co-authors plus – Another plug-in from the developers of EditFlow is Co-Authors plus. Blogging software didn’t anticipate that articles could be written by more than one person or that you might have guest contributors who aren’t on staff. Co-authors plus allows you to have multiple authors for a story and it also allows you to create guest contributors without having to create a user account for a contributor who might only write one article.

Category order – Categories can be an easy way to add site navigation to a WordPress site, but originally, categories were only ordered alphabetically on simple blogging sites. The category order plug-in allows you to easily reorder categories simply by dragging and dropping them.

Google Analytics for WordPress – Knowing your audience is key to sustaining your news organisation. It will sharpen your editorial focus and allow you to more effectively market yourself to advertisers. Google Analytics is just one tool to measure your audience and learn more about them. This plug-in allows you to easily add Google Analytics to your site.

That’s just the start. There are plugins to manage advertising, sudden bursts of traffic and the security of your site. For those of you using WordPress, what plug-ins have you found most useful? Were there any plug-ins that you used, but looking back you wish you hadn’t?

Other resources:

• Using WordPress as a news website v2 by Einar Thorsen
• Eight More WordPress Plugins For Newsrooms by Lauren Rabaino at 10,000 Words
• WordPress.org users can now turn any post into a liveblog with Automattic’s new plugin by Harrison Weber at The Next Web
• Useful WordPress plugins for journalists and news websites by Matt C. A. Smith

Go to almost any online journalism conference and you’ll hear CMS war stories. Several years ago, Martin Stabe, an interactive producer at the Financial Times, wrote about some of these CMS horror stories, saying:

Gripes about the clunkiness of content management systems are almost universal among online journalists. At one conference I attended a few months ago, several editors compared how long it took to post just one simple story to their websites. One had counted 62 clicks to complete this most basic publishing process.

It’s important that your CMS is flexible both for technical staff and editorial staff – and you’ll definitely want to make sure that it doesn’t take 62 clicks of the mouse just to publish content online.

Here are some tips of what to do and what to avoid collected from news organisations that have lived through it.

Journalists have to be involved in the process

A CMS is a critical element to your future digital success. Dave Lee, a technology reporter for the BBC, looked at the issues surrounding CMS development a few years ago, and he wrote:

A bad CMS hurts. It means people cut corners. It means more time is given to fart-arsing about with HTML code than writing good editorial. It means time that should be spent refining headlines, opening pars and article structure is instead spent wrestling with ‘quirks’ that slowly sap away at a reporter’s motivation to do the job right.

When you’re doing any technical project, one key element is requirements’ gathering. For a CMS, you’ll have to think about what you want to deliver to your audiences and how you will deliver it. One key element in that process is how your journalists and editors will use the system.

It might seem odd to journalists and editors to want to be involved in developing the digital production method because, in the past, journalism and the production process were largely separate. Journalists wrote stories and handed them off to sub-editors and page designers. At broadcasters, the production system was focused on writing scripts and producing radio and TV stories.

However, in digital news production, journalism and production processes become more tightly integrated, and the workflow and process has to work for journalists and other editorial staff. This is true regardless of what stage you are at in the digital transition. In the early phase of the digital transition, newsrooms often have a single journalist transferring text from print stories or broadcast scripts into an online CMS. With a single journalist, you want the process to be as efficient as possible.

As your digital business grows, the process gets more integrated. Instead of a single journalist, many newsrooms eventually move to a system in which journalists directly write their stories for digital and print or broadcast platforms. Making sure that journalists are able to do their jobs most efficiently is crucial.

The industry is full of horror stories of journalists being left out of the process.

Stabe flagged up a fascinating collection of academic research, Making News Online, edited by Chris Paterson and David Domingo.

Domingo researched four online newsrooms in Catalonia in Spain. Martin highlighted the struggles journalists had with their CMS.

Reporters usually did not have the chance to participate in technological decisions and one of the strongest internal social conflicts in the newsrooms arose because of the frustrations with the technical features of the tools they used … CMS design did not always fit the needs of journalists, and discouraged them from routines that would have sufficed in other material conditions.

In other cases, they complained that technical routines were too cumbersome and time consuming, working against their wish for immediacy. This led to a relationship of distrust between the journalists and the CMS staff.

And Martin fears that this is feeding resistance from print staff to embracing digital media. He wrote:

I suspect badly-designed CMS backends engender resistance to the online medium among print journalists by leading them to assume that all this digital stuff must be frightfully complicated.

The key thing is to make sure that your CMS and the tools that your editors and journalists use on a daily basis meet their needs. To do that, editorial staff have to be involved.

Journalists must engage with the process

However, bad CMSs are often not a simple issue of journalists being left out of the process. Senior management need to make sure that journalists and technical staff or contractors work together effectively. This may take some effort, and to be honest, very few editorial organisations work effectively across editorial and technical departments. The handful that do have achieved this over years of effort.

Dave Lee looked at the frustrations and  problems surrounding CMSs, and he flagged up a number of issues including communication and collaboration, or lack thereof. Lee quotes a developer, John, who said they had invited the more than 200 users of their CMS to test new features. John said:

Almost nobody bothered – and when we thought it’s fine (because of no requests to fix something) and turned the old version off there was this shitstorm about some minor things not working properly (which could have been fixed in couple of days).

Small improvements could make journalists’ life much easier but if they don’t want to participate they shouldn’t expect much either.

This is a key management issue in the digital transition, and senior management need to make sure that editorial and technical staff communicate effectively and work together well. This is not something that happens without close attention and effort on the part of management, editorial and technical staff.

CMS solutions are increasingly modular

Content-management systems do not need to do everything, and often if you try to make them do too much, that is when the project becomes a mess including going over budget, not working as well as you’d like and leading to a complicated process that journalists hate. At the most basic level, web services can add services without having to modify your core CMS, such as social media curation service Storify or liveblogging tool Scribblelive.

However other services can also deliver key elements of your digital content strategy such as search. Newscoop is an open-source CMS focused on news organisations, and they have added support for the Solr open-source search. [Sourcefabric was spun out of the Centre for Advanced Media – Prague, a project of the Media Development Investment Fund. Knowledge Bridge is a project of MDIF.] The Solr search platform is used by major organisations including Nasa, the White House and The Guardian. Search is a key element in helping your audience find the content they want, and by integrating proven technology such as Solr, Newscoop is supporting organisations like Georgian independent news organisation Netgazeti to deliver a better search experience that will grow as Netgazeti grows, according to Sourcefabric’s Adam Thomas. [Netgazeti is one of the online components of Georgian newspaper Batumelebi, an MDIF client.]

Adopt existing systems rather create new ones

When news organisations look at their requirements for a CMS, frequently they come to believe that their requirements are so unique that they need a bespoke system. This is rarely a good solution especially for small, independent news organisations with small technical development budgets. More news organisations are taking existing systems and adapting them to their needs.

The School of Journalism and Media Studies and the Computer Science Department at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, created NiKA by extending the Drupal open-source CMS to make it easier for journalists to publish their own material as well as allowing members of the public to easily send in eyewitness information and tips via SMS and IM.

Harry Dugmore, a professor at the School of Journalism and Media Studies, told PBS MediaShift:

NiKa sorts SMSs and incorporates them directly into the newspaper’s system, automating what had previously been a manual process. The SMS pages let local citizens share their opinions, and see their words in print.

However, even relying on an existing CMS didn’t eliminate all of the technical complexity of the project. In another article about the NiKA project on PBS MediaShift, Dugmore said, “ the software, although open source and free, does need good tech skills to install.” And Michael Salzwedel, the online editor of the NiKA media partner the Grocott Mail, said that the goal was to simplify the requirements in setting up the system so that publishers could easily publish to print, the web and mobile.

This kind of integration is a difficult task, but as more news organisations bring together their digital and print or broadcast workflow, there will be new lessons both about the technology, workflow and organisation that will help you.

What are the lessons you have learned as you chose your CMS to publish to the web and mobile? What worked? What didn’t? What will you do differently the next time you have to change your CMS? Let us know in the comments.

Some news groups are reselling investigative pieces on eBooks, on mobile phones and print on demand. Photo credit: by Edvvc, from Flickr, Some Rights Reserved

With revenues under pressure and resources short for most independent news organisations, there is a widespread fear that in-depth, investigative journalism will suffer.

However, news outlets, entrepreneurs and journalists are displaying dedication and creativity in developing new economic models to support investigative journalism. Different models are taking advantage of unique opportunities and addressing the specific challenges that exist in different markets around the world.

French investigative site asks readers to pay

In the past, investigative journalism was just one part of a larger journalistic package, but in the digital era, we are seeing stand-alone investigative journalism organisations appearing. In France, a groundbreaking site, Mediapart, has found journalistic and even some commercial success with its subscription model.

The digital-only news organisation has just capped its first five years with the resignation and arrest of the country’s budget minister, Jerome Cahuzac, due to one its investigations, and questions raised over the fundraising of former president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Cahuzac had earned the nickname of “Mr Tough” for his campaigns to cut government spending and fight tax evasion, but he was forced to resign after Mediapart uncovered secret offshore accounts. Cahuzac vehemently denied the accusations and filed two libel suits against Mediapart, but four months later, he finally admitted that for two decades he has hidden hundreds of thousands of Euros in an UBS account in Switzerland. Not long after, the site reported that Jean-Marie Le Pen, the former head of France’s far-right party, Front National, had also held a secret Swiss bank account. Le Pen admitted that the account existed but lashed out at Mediapart journalists, calling them “KGBists”, according to RFI. The investigations have put pressure on both the right and the left in France’s political establishment and helped challenge some of Mediapart’s critics who liken hard-hitting investigative journalism to vigilantism.

The site relies on subscriptions and it has 65,000 subscribers to support its 31 journalists and 14 other staff, according to an article in French newspaper Le Temps. The site carries no advertising and relies entirely on a €9 monthly subscription. Mediapart editor and co-founder Edwy Plenel described the site’s situation as successful but fragile, saying he would feel more comfortable with 100,000 subscribers. The success is even more notable as there is a relatively low level of interest in investigative journalism in France.

Syndication and partners

Mediapart’s success has inspired Spanish journalists to launch their own investigative news site, InfoLibre, and the two sites have created a partnership. Partnerships and syndication are another way that investigative news groups are working to achieve sustainability.

Investigative journalism organisations such as ProPublica and the Texas Tribune in the US have entered partnerships to help publish their investigative work. The Texas Tribune was launched in 2009 to help fill what its founders saw as a gap in investigative coverage of state politics. When the site launched, 90 percent of its funding came from foundations and major donors, but now that figure is down to 40 percent, according to the Columbia Journalism Review. In 2012, the non-profit news organisation, now with an editorial staff of 17 and 15 tech, business development and administrative staff, turned a small profit, earning money from memberships, events, corporate sponsorship and advertising. It also used some of its start-up funding to buy the Texas Weekly, a subscription-only online political newsletter, another source of revenue. It is now launching a niche newsletter focused on water issues called Flow, and this could be just the first of several email newsletters focused on niche policy areas.

The site has always worked to build its impact by partnering with 27 newspapers and 11 television stations across the state. It also has a successful, ongoing relationship with the New York Times to help the national newspaper provide coverage of Texas state politics.

Partnerships can also help editorial organisations develop entirely new content areas. Slovak news weekly Týždeň wanted to build on its reputation for high-quality visual journalism that it had established in print, and took its unique style and expanded it online as part of its paid content strategy. The site has also partnered with the Slovak national broadcaster to produce a weekly live discussion programme. Partnerships can both increase impact and provide revenue, and may lead to a virtuous circle.

E-books: Developing a new market

A number of news organisations both in advanced and rapidly developing internet economies have been experimenting with packaging their longer (now frequently referred to as long-form) journalism in e-book formats – a relatively low-cost method of earning more revenue from existing content.

Amazon developed a specific format for shorter fiction and non-fiction pieces, including long newspaper or magazine articles, for its popular line of e-readers, called Kindle Singles. Several large magazines and news businesses such as The Atlantic, Vanity Fair and The Guardian, which launched Guardian Shorts, showcase their investigative journalism in this way. The Guardian launched the new effort with a Kindle Single version of its coverage of the recent phone-hacking scandal.

Long-form journalism on e-readers is also opening new opportunities for non-traditional publishers, such as the foundation-supported ProPublica investigative journalism group in the US. They have found success in selling their long investigations and it gave them a valuable outlet that didn’t rely on syndication via other news organisations or their website. Although a ProPublica piece on Pakistan and the Mumbai bombings was available free on its website, the piece, which sold for 99 US cents, reached number two in the top 10 Kindle Singles bestsellers, according to Harvard’s Nieman Lab.

News organisations pursuing this strategy have found that consumers often want the opportunity to subscribe to an investigative news service rather than buy individual pieces. While the opportunity to buy only the pieces they are interested in seems an appealing proposition for readers, news organisations such as the Toronto Star found that they sold only 100 to 300 downloads at CA$4.99. Sandy MacLeod, vice-president of consumer marketing at the Toronto Star, told Eric Mark Do of the Canadian Journalism Project that even to reach that level, it took “an intense amount of marketing”. With such marketing overheads, it’s difficult to see how the project would generate meaningful revenue.

To address the issue, the Star decided to adopt a subscription-focused model. Now for CA$4.33 plus tax, readers are emailed a link to the most recent piece, and they have full access to the back catalogue of dispatches. Non-subscribers can still buy individual pieces for CA$2.99. MacLeod’s goal is to sign up 10,000 subscribers by the summer.

mBooks and print-on-demand

The trend of repackaging and selling long-form journalism in e-book format is not limited to advanced internet economies. In South Africa, long-form non-fiction publisher Mampoer Shorts launched last year. The project publishes 10,000- to 15,000-word pieces on most major digital platforms including iOS and Android, the Kindle and Kobo e-readers, PCs and Macs, as well as for print out. Authors earn 30 percent of the $2.99 price of the books, and for its 70 percent of the takings, Mampoer Shorts handles traditional and digital publishing roles, according to South African website, Books Live. The project, launched by well-known figures in South African media, hope to sell 5,000 downloads of each piece.

“Paywalls are going up everywhere – people are becoming accustomed to buying quality content online, and I absolutely believe that the only way to create quality journalism is to get people to pay for it,” publisher and academic Anton Harber said at a launch event.

However, it’s important not to think just of tablets and e-readers, which are often scarce in developing digital markets. Creative entrepreneurs are using mobile phones and mobile social networks such as Mxit to distribute fiction and non-fiction. The popular African social network distributed the first mBook in 2009, and it has since distributed novellas targeting its young audience.

It’s important to think about mobile platforms as potential distribution channels, especially with the rise of phablets – large screen smartphones that are as much tablets as phones. In many markets, consumers will forego having a computer or a tablet and buy large-screen smartphones such as the Samsung Galaxy Note.

While we often think of technology in digital terms, new technology has also revolutionised print media. You only have to think of the desktop publishing revolution that began in the 1980s to realise the changes digital technology has brought to print media. Mampoer Shorts are also distributed by South African print-on-demand pioneers, Paperight. Rather than build out a network of print-on-demand facilities, Paperight leverages the almost ubiquitous copy shops in South Africa.

While South Africa has a number of digital readers, the company can reach even more people in print via the copy shops. At a conference earlier this year, Paperight founder and CEO Arthur Attwell described the digital divide in South Africa, in which he also saw an opportunity:

I come from Cape Town, South Africa, and my background’s in educational publishing and e-book production. South Africa is like two different countries: about 2 million wealthy people who support the publishing industry (excluding schools publishing, where the state is the largest client by far), and about 48 million people who could never afford an e-reader, don’t have credit cards to buy things online, or can’t afford to physically travel to a bookstore. So to make it possible for most people to read books, we need to totally rethink how we sell books.

Using the internet, computers and printers available in most South African copy shops, he saw an opportunity to sell text books, literature and even long-form journalism such as Mampoer Shorts to the millions of South Africans without e-readers.

US tech and media consultant Alan Mutter highlights the rise of Google and the collapse of US newspaper advertising

In the early phase of any media transition, we rely on what we know and try to adapt the thinking of the current medium to the new media. In the early days of television news, broadcasts were often little more than a radio newsreader sitting in front of a camera. It took time for us to understand how TV was different and how best to use this new visual medium.

The changes in thinking needed to effectively adapt to a new medium are not just editorial but also commercial. Alan Mutter, who has worked in newspapers and in digital media start-ups, has succinctly summarised the changes that digital media has brought to advertising as a matter of the traditional media model of ‘reach’ versus the targeted digital model of ‘each’.

Pre-digital advertising relied on reaching as many people as possible, while not being as concerned with targeting specific audiences or consumers. To the extent that it was possible to reach specific consumers, it was done with special sections in newspapers or magazine content. Digital advertising allows much greater targeting, and Google’s commercial breakthrough was to deliver ads based on what people are searching for. The logic goes that if someone is looking for a holiday flight then they might also be looking for a hotel or rental car. Print media were woefully late in grasping this key difference in advertising strategies. While Mutter is discussing the US market, the changes in digital advertising are universal and relevant to any market. In fact, in some markets in the early stages of the digital transition, his insights are in some ways even more relevant and could help news businesses to avoid the strategic blunders made by the US newspaper industry.

As we’ve discussed a number of times here on Knowledge Bridge, one of the biggest challenges in the digital transition is that news organisations face a new class of competitors for digital ad revenue, and one of the biggest mistakes that newspapers, in particular, made is that they continued to view their competition as other newspapers or other news media, instead of appreciating the competitive threat posed by new digital competitors such as search engines and social networks. Looking at more than a decade of data, Mutter lays out the dire consequences of this miscalculation:

 In less than a dozen years, this upstart start-up built a $46 billion advertising business that was twice as large last year as the combined print and digital ad sales of all of the 1,382 daily newspapers in the land.

He produced a graph, looking at newspaper print and digital ad revenue versus Google’s ad revenue. In dramatic terms, the graph shows how US print advertising has utterly collapsed since its peak in 2005, while Google’s advertising revenue was 15 times greater than all US newspapers digital ad revenue in 2012, Mutter says, based on figures from the Newspaper Association of America.

Mutter accuses the newspaper industry of a lack of imagination and says that it simply tried to apply the traditional advertising model to digital, while completely failing to understand that a different advertising model based on harnessing user data to deliver highly relevant, targeted and efficient ads was dominant in digital. Mutter says:

Newspapers (along with magazines, billboards and broadcasters) represent the traditional but inefficient “reach” model of advertising, which depends on spreading a commercial message to as large an audience as possible in hopes of connecting with qualified customers who happen at the moment to be receptive to it.  Google, on the other hand, represents the highly efficient “each” model of advertising, which lets marketers put customized commercial messages next to only the results of searches containing specific keywords they have selected to target their ads. The Google system not only enables marketers to target exactly the right prospect at the right moment but also makes it remarkably easy to monitor response rates and, thus, measure an ad’s return on investment in real time.

The key question for publishers and media executives is how to respond to this competitive threat. Mutter gives some advice.

• Know your audience. Invest in technology that allows you not just to know how many unique visitors you have on your site but also as much as possible about what they are reading, who they are and what are their interests.
• Invest in ad targeting technology. Companies such as Crowd Science provide ad targeting services that will help you deliver much more relevant, and therefore, better performing advertising.
• Use specialist or niche content to sell ads relevant to that content. It isn’t a digital innovation that if you have a food section that you sell ads for restaurants, grocers or other food-related businesses. If you have a fashion section, again, you’ll want to make sure that your clothing and other fashion-related clients know about the opportunity to reach interested members of your audience.

Understanding this key shift from ‘reach’ to ‘each’ advertising will help you develop strategies that more effectively compete against new digital competitors as you seek to grow your digital advertising revenue. The game has changed, and you need to grasp these changes if you want to win.

In digital publishing, let your audience guide your daily schedule rather than the printing presses. Photo credit: By Waferboard from Flickr

In newspapers, the daily rhythm is dictated by the press, and in the early stages of the digital transition many newspapers still stick to this schedule to the point where they often publish their stories online at times that reflect when they went to press rather than when their audiences are most likely to read them. However, that is starting to change as newspapers adopt strategies such as dayparting, to make sure that they publish content on a schedule that matches the traffic patterns on their websites.

In the not-so-distant past, even advanced newspapers would publish their stories online all at once, often very early in the morning when audiences, particularly local audiences, were thin. However, beginning a few years ago, they realised that the stories would get far more traffic if they were published to match the ebb and flow of their digital audiences rather than the daily schedule of the presses.

In a recent memo to staff of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network, managing editor Raju Narisetti encouraged staff to continue their efforts to publish more content when their audience was visiting the site, rather than later in the day after print deadlines when traffic was starting to trail off. In February 2013, Narisetti was promoted from his position as managing editor of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network to become the senior vice president and deputy head of strategy for the new News Corp, the print division of News Corp that will be spun out of the corporation later this year. In the memo, he explained to staff:

The green line in the chart below is when readers come to us looking for the terrific journalism WSJ promises them, as measured in the % of daily readers who come, each hour.

The blue line was when we were publishing our stories, by the hour, in 2011-12.

The red line shows how all of you moved the needle significantly in recent months to get more of your great journalism to your audiences when more of them were looking for it on our site.

Journalism website Nieman Lab referred to this as dayparting, the concept of breaking up the day into parts and delivering different kinds of content during different parts of the day. It will be a familiar concept to broadcasters. Radio and TV stations have long broken up the day into parts with specific types of programming. In radio, you have “drivetime” to cater to commuters, and in TV, the concept of primetime is well understood. However, the idea is only now being applied to websites.

The early stages of implementing such a strategy is simply: analyse your traffic patterns and make sure that your digital publishing schedule corresponds to when your digital audience is greatest. But that’s just the first step. Dayparting is not just about the volume but also the type of content matching the type of viewer. Morning television news shows, daytime, primetime and late night TV content have all been developed for the type of audience that schedulers believe are greatest at that time of the day. Similarly, a handful of news websites are starting to analyse not only the traffic spikes but also content consumption patterns of their audiences. To start your analysis, look at the traffic peaks during your day:

• What sections are people viewing? Is it news content, features or opinion pieces?
• When are people most likely to comment or share content via social media?
• How are your audiences viewing your site? When does mobile access spike? When are most people looking at your site via a desktop or laptop computer?
• When are they most likely to view multimedia?

Once you find this out, you can start to consider your digital publishing strategy. One news group I worked with had a wealth of statistics on the behaviour of their audience and found that people often read longer pieces and pieces where they could comment during their lunch break. Armed with this knowledge, you might want to consider publishing pieces designed to spur debate and discussion to coincide with the middle of the day.

Many websites see a spike in news reading when people get up, when they arrive at work and right before they go home from work. Also, if people check your website right before they go home, you might consider providing them with information they will need for their journey home. Is traffic a problem for your community? Maybe you should create a sponsored traffic feature for the morning and evening commutes?

In markets where tablets are on the rise, such as India, they are also seeing a late evening tablet mini-spike when people check the news, often from bed, on their tablets.

Again, we come back to the idea of the need to dive deeply into your analytics and data. Television and radio stations have traditionally had to rely on external measurement companies, but the beauty of online publishing is that you have access to a gold mine of data that can help you decide on your dayparting strategy. It’s a brilliantly obvious strategy when you think about it, but one that is still very nascent even amongst advanced digital publishers.

The other positive aspect of dayparting is that it is low-cost and applicable regardless the size of the news organisation. It can deliver benefits to the Wall Street Journal and also to local news websites, and adopting it can help deliver a competitive advantage as you fight for readers’ and viewers’ time and attention.

The key challenge facing media in the developing world, especially print media, is to decide how to respond to this digital transition. There are two key questions, the answers to which will help create a successful response.

• Are classifieds or their close relation directories important to your business today?
• What unique strengths can your organization use to compete online?

The answers to these two questions should guide media companies in markets where the transition from print to digital classifieds is underway.

Media companies around the world have used the power of their printing capabilities and their audience reach to build print classifieds into a key revenue stream for their news business.   In some media houses, classified revenue contributes a substantial portion of topline revenues but, more importantly, bottom line profits. These profits have been essential in supporting the public service mission of journalism. For instance, when an import/export firm in Hong Kong pays the South China Morning Post to place a recruitment ad for an accountant, they are in part subsidising the cost of the paper’s newsroom.  When this type of cross-subsidy is substantial, a news media house must think carefully about how to respond to the inevitable pressure that online classified competitors bring.  How these classified-oriented media houses respond will be in part a function of how they answer the second question about their competitive strengths.

Media houses that do not have a traditional classified business may think that they don’t have a problem because they have no classifieds revenue to lose. But they still need to develop income from their online activities, and building a digital media business is not easy. Most successful digital media strategies include revenue from multiple sources, some from advertising, some from paid content, some from syndication, perhaps some from online classifieds. Zenith Optimedia, a global advertising research firm forecasts the global online classified market to grow to over $14 billion by 2015.  So, problem? No.  Opportunity? Perhaps.  How your media house responds to the online classified opportunity will also reflect the answers to the second question.

Honestly evaluate your competitive strengths

When answering question two, two phrases stand out – “unique strengths” and “compete”.   The classified business is a simple business.  People have things to sell to other people who want to buy them or, in the case of a company who needs to hire staff, companies have jobs to offer to people who want new jobs.  It is an exchange.

There are two types of classifieds markets that have been shown to work well: high volume markets where a lot of people have a lot of things to exchange, and niche markets selling items that are otherwise hard to find. Classifieds sections for jobs, cars, apartments or used PCs tend to be high volume markets, with a large audience of buyers attracting a large audience of sellers, which in turn attracts more people looking to buy. Such markets, once established, become self-perpetuating.

To evaluate your opportunity, you need to candidly evaluate your company’s strengths in an online classified competition:

• Existing Business – Does your company operate a classifieds marketplace offline?  Have you built a successful exchange for goods and services offline that you can build upon to compete online?
• Audience – Can you provide more potential buyers to the online classified site than the online competition?  Do you have the media reach that allows your company to build an audience of potential buyers at a lower cost than another competitor?
• Sales – Can you provide more potential sellers to the online classified site?  Does your company have a unique ability to sell advertisers into the online classified site?
• Technology – Does your company have unique understanding of how online classified buyers and sellers use technology that will allow your company to build the best “product”?  Perhaps most of the online classified competitors in your market are focused on building websites, when most buyers and sellers rely on their mobile phones?
• Reputation/Brand – Does your company have a strong reputation or a unique brand in the market?  Will buyers and sellers be more likely to trust your company with their exchange than they might a new online only company?
• Unique Knowledge – Is there something unique about your market that gives you unique understanding about how buyers buy and sellers sell their products? The internet has not only forced a transition from traditional media to digital media; it has also created new specialty markets for buyers and sellers that never existed before. Fivrr.com, a specialty site where people exchange small jobs online for five US dollars, has become one of the most successful new classified sites in the last few years.  According to Alexa, Fivrr today is one of the top 500 sites in the world and among the top two hundred sites in countries as diverse as Sri Lanka (#47) and Australia (#62).

Survey the competitive landscape

How to deploy these strengths will be a function of the competitive environment.   In many markets, online classifieds competitors rely on technology as their main strength.  They build a single online site that can be easily expanded to any region or category of goods, for example,  Avito in Russia and Quikr in India.  Other competitors will focus on a particular category, like recruitment, real estate, or automobiles and build a national online site for that category, such as  PropertyGuru in Malaysia and Rabota.ua in Ukraine.  Usually both approaches will exist in a market at the same time.

Another question to consider is whether your market’s size or location provides some insulation from national online classified competitors.  Most classifieds markets are about building the largest exchange of buyers and sellers, and online classifieds are no different. This means that national competitors often focus on metropolitan regions with large populations and easy access to the internet.

This leaves opportunities to create niche local or specialized classified marketplaces.  These opportunities are often found in smaller markets with high internet penetration or, in a non-geographic strategy, very focused interest groups may also develop an online classified site.   One example of a successful specialty classified site is the BandMix.com which, with its partner site ReelMix.com, focuses on the special needs of musical bands or film crews recruiting for talent.

When you are assessing the market, you must be clear that there is an opportunity there to be exploited. If the market is already too competitive or your organization’s strengths do not match the requirements of the market, then this may not be the best opportunity for your company.

Choosing a strategy

After evaluating the online classified competitors and determining whether your organization has unique strengths needed to succeed in the market, you will need to develop a strategy.  There are four types of strategy, each of which build on an understanding of your company’s unique strengths and the competitive environment.

• Traffic Sponsorship.  In this strategy, the media company creates a partnership with a leading online classified site to provide traffic, to build the number of buyers and sellers on their exchange.  This strategy is the least risky.  Media companies pursuing this strategy often face multiple, well-established online classified competitors.  In this case, the partnership offers the online classified competitor access to the traffic of the company’s news site. The online classified site almost always pays some base fee for the traffic and then perhaps a bonus if the traffic levels reach pre-set goals. MalaysiaKini’s relationship with the PropertyGuru is a good example of this type of strategy.
• Sales and Marketing Partnership with Online Classified Sites.  In this strategy, the company’s partnership expands to include not just traffic.  This partnership builds on the media house’s sales and marketing capabilities to promote the online classified partner and to sell advertisers into the online classified site.  Similar to Traffic Sponsorships, media companies choosing this strategy face strong online classified competition.  But, in addition to online traffic, they also bring strong sales and marketing skills.  The New York Times chose this approach when it partnered with Monster, the global online recruitment classified company.
• Build Your Own Online Classified Site.  In this strategy, the company elects to choose its own technology to create an independent online classified site.  The technology chosen can either be built or bought from a specialty online classified software company, like FlyNax or MarketGrabber.  But the company’s ability to choose or build and then maintain its own classified software creates a significant new level of risk.  This approach assumes that online competition is still limited or that the company has unique strengths in technology, sales and marketing or some unique market understanding will result in a successful online classified launch.  AltaPress in Barnaul, Altai, Russia pursues this strategy with their online site KP22.ru, an online classified companion site to their successful print classified newspaper Kupi Prodai.
• Build a Network for Your Online Classified Site.  In this strategy, several traditional media companies or a media holding company which owns several traditional media creates their own online classified site.  This is the most risky strategy involving both the risk in the choice and maintenance of a technology platform as well as the risk created by linking multiple different media companies, each with different strengths and goals for the online classified site.  The choice of this strategy often reflects a rapidly changing market where media companies have a significant stake in the traditional print classified industry.  They have strong traditional classified brands, well-trained sales and marketing teams and a good foundation in technology. By pooling these strengths, they believe that they can create the necessary scale to successfully compete with larger national online classified companies.

Each strategy includes a number of different ways to capture potential online classified opportunities, but every media company will need to customize and adapt the strategy to their unique strengths and market situation.  As new strengths are built and the competition reacts to shifts in the market, you should review and evolve your ongoing classified strategy to stay ahead of the game.

Classifieds is perhaps the oldest form of advertising.  Although technology has changed the dynamics of the equation, the equation remains the same.  Almost every community has their version of a classified “site”, whether it is on their mobile device, on their PC, in print or on a real bulletin board in a local café.  The goal is to bring people together to create value for all, a mission not too dissimilar from the goals of any media company.