Fresh useful insights for people advancing quality, innovative and sustainable journalism
You might have heard: Nearly 9 in 10 Twitter users say they use Twitter for news
But did you know: Twitter has a big influence on news organizations, but it only drives 1.5% of traffic for the typical news organization (Nieman Lab)
According to a new analysis from Parse.ly, Twitter may not be as important as news organizations think it is. Taking data from its 200 client websites over two weeks in January, Parse.ly analyzed how much traffic and revenue Twitter drives, finding that for a typical news organization, Twitter only drove 1.5 percent of traffic. Those publishers saw an average of 8 tweets per post, 3 clicks per tweet, and 0.7 retweets for each original tweet. Parse.ly says that the key to success on Twitter and other social media platforms is figuring out what your audience “finds interesting and make sure that you are creating content that reflects this.”
+ Noted: The Huffington Post launched a 24-hour “pop-up” Snapchat Discover channel called Recharge to focus on importance of sleep (Digiday); GateHouse Media will buy the Central Penn Business Journal (Penn Live); NPR is considering changing its formula for dues and fees from member stations (Current); Media reporter Ravi Somaiya is leaving the New York Times to join Vice on HBO (Poynter); The Coral Project is shifting its focus from eight projects to just three, which include products focused on trusting, asking and talking (Coral Project)
Sometimes you need to get creative about gathering data for a story (Digiday)
Reporting on last month’s shutdown of the Washington, D.C., metro, the Bloomberg graphics team created a map of surge pricing on Uber. But because Uber only shares that information with users when they request a ride, the graphics reporters had to manually request dozens of rides and take notes on how prices changed. Graphics reporter David Ingold says: “It was a low-tech and primitive way of getting data. But the reader doesn’t care, they just care about getting the stories.”
Driven by micropayments, Winnipeg Free Press expects about $100,000 in digital revenue this year (Nieman Lab)
The Winnipeg Free Press is experimenting with a micropayment model, and almost a year in, readers who pay by the article are paying an average of $2 per month. About 4,300 readers have paid to read at least one story, which cost 27 cents (about 21 cents USD) each. With its new micropayment model, the newspaper expects to generate $100,000 ($77,840 USD) in digital revenue this year. According to its parent company’s Q4 earnings report, the Free Press is expected to bring in $500,000 ($390,786 USD) from digital payments in 2016, with a fifth of that coming from micropayments.
+ How Dutch publisher De Correspondent is trying to make its staff more diverse: When two jobs became open, it was decided that those positions would be available exclusively to candidates who came from non-Western backgrounds (WAN-IFRA)
The communication tool isn’t the problem, it’s how your organization chooses to use it (Medium)
Whether your team chooses to use Slack, Hipchat or another tool for communication, Pickcrew’s Jory MacKay writes that those tools can only be successful if expectations are set correctly from the start. MacKay writes: “If you hit your thumb with a hammer, you’re not going to go back to using a rock, are you? You’re just going to learn how to use that hammer in a way that won’t cause you bodily harm. In the end, Slack, HipChat, or whatever your poison, are all just a reflection of the way you choose to communicate. All these apps do is take your habits and company culture and amplify them.”
Digital-only organizations are searching for successful revenue models, just like legacy organizations (Nieman Lab)
Digital-only organizations are facing some of the same problems as legacy organizations, Ken Doctor writes. Digital-only publications are still trying to find sustainable business models, but it’s not really a “cratering” of the digital news business. Doctor writes: “[What we’re seeing is] a significant recalibration. If people expect these companies to have figured out how to replace the legacy news companies and navigate this new world, they’ve got to think again. There is no secret sauce in news publishing.”
+ BuzzFeed’s reported revenue shortfall is alarming, but it doesn’t necessarily signal a “doomsday scenario” for digital media: A $250 million annual revenue target is an ambitious one for a young media company, Vivian Schiller says, but the hype surrounding BuzzFeed became so large that it was inevitable that it would fall short at some point (Poynter)
+ Facebook and other big platforms need high-quality content from publishers: “While many are eager to hand over the full value of these [younger] audiences and revenue models to Facebook, the reality is that Facebook needs professional content to sustain user engagement and fill our NewsFeed with (quality) Live content. It seems unlikely that over the long-term, Facebook and other digital distributors will operate in a way that does not allow quality content producers to flourish” (Medium)
‘Facebook’s Messenger bots are the slowest way to use the Internet’ (The Verge)
Facebook’s new Messenger bots were highly anticipated, but The Verge’s Nick Statt writes that the bot’s interactions aren’t as instantaneous as we would expect them to be. When talking to a bot, users can even see bouncing dots that indicate that the bot is “typing.” Facebook’s own M bot relies on a combination of artificial intelligence and human interaction, so sometimes a real person may be on the other end. But Statt writes that this slowness could be a problem: “Any amount of delay could be designed to let the platform get up to speed with how users plan on making use of these assistants and whether they can withstand a swell of demand.”
+ The trends driving the popularity of chat bots: People are becoming increasingly reluctant to install apps, and people also want to interact in personal ways with brands and businesses (VentureBeat)
The post Need to Know: April 14, 2016 appeared first on American Press Institute.
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