Tackable aims to become the social network for user-generated news

Facebook and Twitter may be a great way to organize revolutions, but as we saw during the last few weeks of checking #Egypt and #Jan25 hashtags, following them on Twitter can mean a frustrating hunt through lots of chaff to find a few grains of wheat. We knew exactly where the epicenter was, but we had no GPS-based way to zero in on those Twitter users who were actually on the scene.

“The traditional social network just doesn’t work when it comes to news,” says Luke Stangel, cofounder and chief marketing officer at Tackable, a Palo Alto-based startup tackling this problem by building a standalone social network that “organizes media on a map.”

Tackable’s current shape is an iPhone app-based social network focused on geotagged news photos and captions. The system will eventually include text, audio, and video, and of course an Android app is on the way. The Tackable vision is that when breaking news happens, you’ll be able to use the app to zero in on the location on the map, and see whether network members have posted photo, video and comments, without needing to have a previous relationship with those people.

“You don’t really care what a dentist in Baltimore thinks about Egypt,” Stangel said. “What you really want to do is talk to a protester who is there on the ground. So what we do is we break the social network and we replace it with something else. We put it on the map. So if you’re interested in Egypt, you simply pull the map over to Egypt and you can see all the media that’s coming out of the country, from people who are there on the ground.”

Click here to continue reading this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

The shakeup at MediaNews: Why it could be the leadup to a massive newspaper consolidation

Back in the early 1990s, Dean Singleton predicted that ultimately there would be just three newspaper companies left standing, and he intended his MediaNews Group to be one of them.

It was an audacious prediction, because at the time, after a decade of wheeling, dealing and sometimes ruthless management, MediaNews Group still consisted of just a dozen newspapers, and the company’s board meetings, as he was fond of saying, “could be held in the front seat of a pickup truck.” But Singleton often repeated his prediction of industry consolidation, and it was the driver behind MediaNews’s growth into the sixth largest newspaper company (in terms of circulation) over the past 15 years. Today MediaNews has 54 daily newspapers with a total of 2.4 million weekday circulation. (On its own site, MediaNews claims to be the “second largest media company,” but that’s a double stretch: Its properties are nearly all newspaper entities, and, by my count, Gannett, Tribune, News Corp., McClatchy and Advance have more daily paid print circulation — and are certainly all bigger media companies than MediaNews.)

Read the rest of this post here at Nieman Journalism Lab.

The year 2010 in review

Inspired by my friend Richard Floyd's ruminations about his 2010 blogifications, here's a rundown on how News after Newspapers was read this year.

To the extent Google Analytics tells a real story — there are many visits by folks clearly searching for something else who stick around for just two or three microseconds — visitors in 2010 came from 108 countries (missing: Central Asia, Central Africa, Bolivia, Greenland and a few Central American countries), and all 50 states. There were 11,532 visits in total, 14,584 pageviews, and 8,478 individual visitors. On average, you spent 57 seconds on site, which is not enough to read the average post, so obviously, a lot of you bailed out early. On the other hand, most of my posts here were just trailers for the full posts over at NiemanLab, where the average post got at least 1,000 hits.

I managed to put up 20 posts this year versus 75 in 2009 and 66 in 2008 (and I started in September of 2008), so it's been a slow year. Nevertheless, overall traffic this year was down just about 5 percent from the year before.

What you liked, based on pageviews:

1. iPad strategies for publishers — I must admit, I still don't have one — an iPad that is.  But I've played with one, and I think so far the strategies outlined in that post are looking valid. (See also that post's precursor, with the same thoughts somewhat less polished.)
2. Groupon's revenue pace — I predicted a $350 million annual pace back in April. That seemed pretty preposterous at the time (they only came out of beta about a year before), but the actual result, astoundingly, seems to be closer to $1 billion.
3. Are newspapers doomed? — This is a 2008 post that continues to get traction. The answer, if you don't want to peek, is yes.
4. Out on a limb again: Predictions for 2010 — You can check on how those prognostications turned out here. I had more hits than misses, overall.
5. A roundup of media predictions for 2010 — This is a beat that NiemanLab has taken over in spades, with an all-star series of 2011 predictions posted during December, including my own.

Happy New Year to all!

Predictions 2011: More digital convergence, AP Clearinghouse, more trailblazing from John Paton's JRC

Continuing an annual tradition here at NaN, here are my prognostications for 2011 (posted also at Nieman Journalism Lab). See also my earlier post with predictions for 2020.

Digital convergence: News, mobile, tablets, social couponing, location-based services, RFID tags, gaming. My geezer head spins just thinking about all this, but look: All these things will not stay in separate silos. Why do you think AOL invested $50 million or more launching Patch in 500 markets, without a business model that makes sense to anyone? What’s coming down the pike is new intersections between all of these digital developments, and somehow, news is always in the picture because it’s at the top of people’s lists of content needs, right after email and search. There are business opportunities in tying all of these things together, so there are opportunities for news enterprises to be part of the action. Some attempts to find synergies will work, and some won’t.

But imagine for a moment: personalized news delivered to me on my tablet or smartphone, tailored to my demographics, preferences, and location; coupon offers and input from my social network, delivered on the same basis; the ability to interact with RFID tags on merchandise (and on just about anything else); more and more ability not only to view ads but to do transactions on tablets and phones — all of these delivered in a entertaining interfaces with gaming features (if I like games) or not (if I don’t). In other words: news delivered to me as part of a total environment aware of my location, my friends, my interests and preferences, essentially in a completely new online medium — not a web composed of sites I can browse at my leisure, but a medium delivered via a device or devices that understand me and understand what I want to know, including the news, information and commercial offers that are right for me. All of this is way too much to expect in 2011, but as a prediction, I think we’ll start to see some of the elements begin to come together, especially on the iPad.

The Associated Press clearinghouse for news. Lots of questions here: Will be it nonprofit or for-profit? Who will put up the money? Who will be in charge of it? What will it actually do? It will probably take all year to get the operation organized and launched, but I’m going to stick with the listing of opportunities I outlined when news of the clearinghouse broke. I continue to believe that the clearinghouse concept has the potential to transform the way that news content is generated, distributed and consumed. (Disclosure: I’m working on a project with the University of Missouri to explore potential business models enabled by news clearinghouses.)

How I made out with my 2010 predictions

Time to look back on my predictions for 2010, posted December 17, 2009. Here are the full texts of the predictions, with outcomes, as near as ascertainable at this point. (Posted also at Nieman Journalism Lab)

Newspaper ad revenue

PREDICTION: At least technically, the recession is over, with GDP growth measured at 2.8 percent in Q3 of 2009 and widely forecast in Q4 to exceed that rate. But newspaper revenue has not followed suit, dropping 28 percent in Q3. McClatchy and the New York Times Company (which both came in at about that level in Q3) hinted last week that Q4 would be better, in the negative low-to-mid 20 percent range. This is not unexpected — in the last few recessions with actual GDP contraction (1990-91 and 2001), newspaper revenue remained in negative territory for at least two quarters after the GDP returned to growth. But the newspaper dip has been bigger each time, and the current slide started (without precedent) a year and a half before the recession did, with a cumulative revenue loss of nearly 50 percent. Newspaper revenue has never grown by much more than 10 percent (year over year) in any one quarter, so no real recovery is likely. This is a permanently downsized industry. My call for revenue by quarter (including online revenue) during 2010 is: -11%, -10%, -6%, -2%.

REALITY: CLOSE, ONE CIGAR. Actuals for Q1, 2, and 3: -9.70%, -5.55%, – 5.39%. And Q4, while not a winner, will probably be “better” than Q3 (that is, another quarter of “moderating declines” in news chain boardroom-speak). So, a win on the trendline, and pretty close on the numbers.

Newspaper online revenue

PREDICTION: Newspaper online revenue will be the only bright spot, breaking even in Q1 and ramping up to 15% growth by Q4.

REALITY: CLOSE, ONE CIGAR. Actuals for Q1, 2, and 3: +4.90%, +13.90%, and +10.7%. Since Q1 beat my prediction and was the first positive result in eight quarters, I’d say that’s a win, and pretty close on the ramp-up, so far. Q4 might hit that 15%.

What will journalism look like 10 years from now?

Over at NiemanLab, there has a been a litany of predictions for journalism for 2011; my own should be in the works over there.

But at Quora, where I'm a member, somebody asked, "What will journalism look like 10 years from now?" This is a good question, because year-to-year changes don't always reflect the long-term trends. Here's the answer I posted:

There are those who say that only trained professionals can practice journalism, but as a practical matter, journalism will continue to be practiced by a range of people with professionals at one end and amateurs at the other, publishing via a range of channels with large commercial and non-profit news organizations at one end and individual bloggers at the other.

Some of these will have paid access, some will be free; some will be on paper, some on websites, some on apps, some on other channels, and many on some combination of these distribution methods. Journalism will be fully platform-independent. But although platforms and cost are not directly relevant to how journalism will be practiced, they do affect how journalists may earn a living. So lets look at ways the work of journalists across the spectrum may change over the next ten years:

More freelancers: Individual journalists will have enhanced ability to earn a living by selling directly to news consumers, which will better enable them to operate outside of traditional news organizations and sell their content in multiple ways including syndication, curated channels, individually branded channels.

The pros and cons of charging for news

Robb Crocker, a mid-career grad student in communications at Rutgers, did an email interview with me about the pros and cons of charging readers for news content. He posted the interview on his blog, here's the Q and A portion.


Q. In your opinion, what are the pros and cons of charging readers for online news?

A. On the pro side: it helps put in the minds of readers the idea that this content has some value; that there is a cost to producing it. And of course, in theory it creates a revenue stream for the publisher. Against this, on the con side, are these arguments:

(a)  Before online distribution, news in most media was free: radio, TV, and even newspapers — the subscription price or newsstand cost of a newspaper is really a convenience fee readers were willing to pay for their own personal copy. Historically, at least until the 1980s, it was a kind of freemium model: you were likely to find a newspaper to read sometime in the course of your day: at the barbershop, on a bus, in a waiting room, at the lunch counter, etc., and the pass-along readership factor was quite high. So if the prior news media never established value and a willingness of consumers to pay for news as distinct from convenience, then doing so for online news will be very difficult.

(b)  Except for a handful of publications with high-value content, like WSJ, FT, possibly NYT and various more topical niche publishers, it will be very difficult to implement a paid model in which the loss of ad revenue from lower page views is offset by the subscription income. Small local publications will simply not be able to implement pay systems by looking at the models that work for the high-value and niche publishers. 

(c)  Content has become atomized. The typical reader assembles a stream of online news not from a single source but from multiple sources, and will be unwilling to return to a single-source model.  

AP’s “ASCAP for news” — new ecosystem, new revenue streams, new enterprise opportunities

In a speech on Monday, Associated Press CEO Tom Curley announced that the AP would soon set up  “an independent rights clearinghouse for news publishers to manage the distribution and use of their content beyond their own Web properties.” (Speech text in PDF link)

The entity, to be designed with input from multiple stakeholders including AP and the Newspaper Association of America, will be established sometime in 2011. It will be a business-to-business clearinghouse, not involving transactions with consumers. Through the clearinghouse, originators of news content (ranging from local bloggers on up; this is not limited to AP members) will be able to distribute their content for digital publication by others, and receive back royalties of revenue shares according to protocols yet to be determined. The clearinghouse will be facilitate a rapid, realtime means of negotiating rights for such content sharing, resulting in a large increase in the potential market for any particular piece of content.

As an illustration: a newspaper (or a broadcaster, or a local blogger) could release a piece of content (a story, a photo, a video) with tags indicating what it is about, who owns it, how and where it may be used, and how the content originator is to be paid. The content, distributed through any available channel, is picked up by another publisher, aggregator, or personalized news service and used in accordance with the attached rights and payments protocols. The clearinghouse monitors usage and payment obligations throughout the network of participating content originators and publishers, and settles transactions among them.

The plan Curley described is very similar to what I proposed in a post here in July, in which I asked, “What if news content owners and creators adopted a variation on the long-established ASCAP-BMI performance rights organization system as a model by which they could collect payment for some of their content when it is distributed outside the boundaries of their own publications and websites?”

Curley framed the opportunity in very similar language: “With the new rights clearinghouse initiative, we are hoping to give news publishers more tools to pursue an audience and capture value beyond the boundaries of their own digital publications.”

NAA switches webstat vendors — results look better but miss the shift to mobile

When last we checked on the Newspaper Association of America's webstats (and other data) back in April, the monthly website usage information that the nation's daily newspaper organization was publishing came from Nielsen Online, and it wasn't all that pretty.

The NAA tried to put the best spin on the data, but as we pointed out at the time, time spent at newspaper sites was in the doldrums and getting gradually worse, with three of the seven shortest attention spans measured by Nielsen occuring in the first quarter of 2010: 34:10 minutes in January, 31:39 minutes in February, and 32:21 minutes in March. For context, consider that at the time, also according to Nielsen, the average Facebook user was spending nearly seven hours on the social networking site.

It looks like NAA was not happy with those first quarter web stats. It published April data from Nielsen but offered no further updates for four months. At that point, I inquired whether NAA had decided to stop publishing the data, and was informed by Jeff Sigmund, Director of Communications, that "a new methodology" was in the works.

The new methodology turns out be be Comscore. Last Thursday, NAA posted Comscore data for September, and simultaneously wiped all the old Nielsen data off its site. The reason for the switch is clear: Comscore's results are more favorable to newspapers than Nielsen's in several categories, as trumpeted in an NAA press release.

The ASCAP example: How news organizations could liberate content, skip negotiations, and still get paid

Jason Fry suggested in a post here last week that current paywall thinking might be just a temporary stop along the way to adoption of “paytags — bits of code that accompany individual articles or features, and that allow them to be paid for.” But how? As Fry recognizes, “between wallet friction and the penny gap, the mechanics of paytags make paywalls and single-site meters look like comparatively simple problems to solve.”
I suggested a possible framework for a solution during a couple of sessions at the conference “From Blueprint to Building: Making the Market for Digital Information,” which took place at the University of Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Institute June 23-25. Basically, my “what-if” consisted of two questions:

1. What if news content owners and creators adopted a variation on the long-established ASCAP-BMI performance rights organization system as a model by which they could collect payment for some of their content when it is distributed outside the boundaries of their own publications and websites?
2. And, taking it a step further, what if they used a variant of Google’s simple, clever, and incredibly successful text advertising auction system to establish sales-optimizing pricing for such content?

Read the rest at NiemanLab.