Articles by: "Ron Miller—Independent Technology Journalist"

Why The Financial Times is going all-in on tech coverage

October 11, 2018 Ron Miller—Independent Technology Journalist

The Financial Times has announced plans to expand its tech coverage, acknowledging the growing influence of technology across all sectors. The move is part of a broader trend in recent years in which media outlets including The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, and CNN have dedicated increasing resources to this area.

Perhaps it’s because of the famous maxim that every company is a software company now. Whether it’s manufacturing, automotive, insurance or pharmaceuticals, it’s become impossible to separate the tech innovation from a specific sector. Publications are increasingly addressing that fact by offering increased tech coverage.

What’s more, the traditional tech sector itself has changed dramatically over the last decade. Instead of a handful of dominant companies like Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and IBM, we have a new generation of tech powerhouses including companies like Netflix, Salesforce, and Amazon – not to mention a whole universe of startups trying their best to out-innovate the bigger players.

Adding A Tech Desk

In response to this, the FT, which had been organized into four broad coverage desks (Companies, Markets, World News, UK/National News), decided to build a dedicated desk specifically for tech. Prior to adding this specialized group, tech tended to fall under Companies in the FT organizational structure. This resulted in coverage of the larger players in the sector. Smaller tech startups tended to fall by the wayside and readers were hungry for more comprehensive information, Malcolm Moore, the new Technology News Editor told DCN.

The FT decided to form a dedicated group of reporters exploring every aspect of tech from startups all the way up to the largest vendors. They wanted to cover the bigger picture as well, including policy, regulation, and innovation. Internally, the idea of building a desk dedicated to technology began to take shape.

“We thought wouldn’t it be a good idea to have a dedicated tech desk on top of the existing ones, a fifth desk, to give us a more holistic approach to it all. This would let us cover early companies a bit more, we can cover innovation a bit more, and we can cover this [broader] intersection of business with the with the tech industry,” Moore explained.

Giving Readers What They Want

Moore said a big part of the FT’s value for readers is providing them with insight they won’t get anywhere else. And, as technology has grown increasingly critical to investors, the audience indicated that they wanted more information to help them understand this pivotal industry better. “We collect a lot of data from our readers. We also survey them a lot. What came back to us time and time again is that they wanted more technology coverage,” he said.

FT editor Lionel Barber pointed out that publication has had broad tech coverage for 20 years with teams in Silicon Valley, Washington, Brussels, and across Asia. However, this is the first time the company put all that coverage together under a single banner. It’s in recognition of the growing importance of this coverage area for readers. “Technology permeates all areas of our lives and impacts global economies, markets and societies. The creation of this new team reflects the importance of this topic to our readers,” Barber said in a statement.

Putting It All Together

The new group began to come together over the last six months, although Moore says his bosses have been thinking about this even longer. Moore, who had covered tech in Asia for the last eight years, was tasked with leading the effort. Though the new section went live on October 1st, he says the tech desk is still a work in progress.

With a new area, they also have to figure out how where the coverage falls. That requires communication between reporters and editors, and they are still learning how to bring different kinds of expertise together. “We have tech reporters and amazing sector specialists. As tech spills over into the different sectors, we can link specialists outside of tech with our tech reporters,” he explained.

It will take time to learn where to define the coverage and nail down exactly how many people will be needed to staff the FT’s tech desk. Moore wants to build a team made up of experienced journalists, combined with young and hungry reporters working on the ground, as well people with deep technical understanding of the underlying technologies. “It’s an ongoing process,” he says, but like other media outlets, the FT recognizes tech matters to readers and like any smart business, they are making sure they give them what they want.

For Hearst’s Kate Lewis, data fuels strategy but the audience is in the driver’s seat

August 23, 2018 Ron Miller—Independent Technology Journalist

Reading Kate Lewis’s list of responsibilities as Chief Content Officer of Hearst Magazines boggles the mind. She oversees content strategy, which includes managing all of the company’s editors-in-chief and digital directors in the U.S., while working with its international network to coordinate global content.

Keep in mind that Hearst is a sprawling global publishing empire with 300 print editions and 240 digital brands. Lewis in charge of the 25 print and 25 digital publications in the U.S. The former has an audience of 89 million, the latter 108 million.

Kate Lewis, Chief Content Officer of Hearst Magazines

As though that weren’t enough for any single human, she also works closely with the product and technology teams, consumer marketing, and the division’s branded content unit, HearstMade – just in case she has some spare time.

Lewis is in constant motion. One thing is clear, to monitor this network of brands, she has become keenly aware of the value of data, which drives strategy across both print and digital. It also provides her with critical insights into the audience’s needs, desires, and expectations.

It’s all about that audience

Given her broad purview, Lewis has developed a core guiding philosophy (and great communications skills), which allows her to maintain a consistent approach while also considering each publication’s unique audience.

“Our approach is driven by our audience. What do they want from us, brand-by-brand, on every platform where we deliver content. We create and design content differently depending on the platform. And, of course, print is a huge platform for us. It’s where this all started! So, the thinking first will always be: ‘What does the audience want from us in this encounter?’ And yes, that is always evolving,” she explained.

As an example of that evolution, she points out that when she started at Hearst, they were very focused on Facebook to drive traffic. Now, they think about it as a way to get video views, among other things. “This kind of persistent change is something that feels digital in nature, but I think will be meaningful in the print world,” she said.

Digging the data

Back in the days before digital, it was hard to know much about your audience beyond subscriber numbers and some basic demographics. However, Lewis points out that today, print publications have access to the same data as the digital properties so that both can take advantage of it.

That means arming editors with as much information as possible. Hearst has a dedicated data operation called Hearst Data Studios, which feeds data across the brands. “This comes down to the efforts of our Hearst Data Studio, as well as an openness to sharing the data, the insights we have across our many, many brands.”

Beyond that, Lewis said that employees need transparency about how she is using the data internally to measure success or failure. “Sharing and being honest about wins and fails will be key. And truly defining, clearly, what a win and a loss is. My feeling is that content can rise from access to data, collaborative editors, and clear goals. We have established all the above amongst the digital team and I hope to add to what’s already being done on print.”

The future is now

Lewis believes that the biggest challenge on the content side of things remains distribution. And, she says that it’s getting harder to know your audience when it comes from many different sources. “People still hunger for content, big and small, but our direct connection to them has been somewhat obfuscated. It can be challenging to get in their face these days whether because of the decreasing number of newsstands or the increasing presence of social media. Our audience is huge but comes to us in many ways, not necessarily directly,” she said.

One way that media companies have tried to keep their audience front and center is through newsletters. Lewis acknowledges newsletters provide a kind of direct connection. However, she worries that consumer inboxes are becoming overloaded, which may sever that direct link. She sees chat as one way to fill the gap. “Chat is pervasive from grandmas to 10-year-olds,” she said. She also sees voice-driven media like Alexa and Siri also coming into play once they mature.

Ultimately, though, Lewis feels that everything boils down to audience engagement. It’s up to brands to figure out how best to keep the audience coming back as technology continually changes the way consumers interact with content creators. “Brands evolve based on generations and trends and the measure of good, and as the caretakers of the brands we’ll push them to be relevant and worth engaging with.”

Once bitten: Comparing Apple and Facebook’s privacy policies

June 14, 2018 Ron Miller—Independent Technology Journalist

These days, it’s hard to trust any tech company with your personal data. Between hacking, leaks, misuse, and unfettered tracking, you can’t blame consumers for being more than a little wary. Sure, companies use our information for lots of reasons. However, when you compare two tech giants – Facebook and Apple – there are distinct differences in their approaches to collecting and using personal information. And the distinction says a lot about building a business model based on devouring data.

Their diverging approaches could be written off to business model differences. Facebook sells access to a massive data set to serve up ads to granular groups of people that meet advertising objectives. Apple’s goal is to sell hardware and use data to customize your experience. While plenty of people don’t trust either company, it is interesting and illuminating to contrast the two systems.

Right on Cue

Eddie Cue set out to do just that when he was interviewed by Dylan Byers on stage at South by Southwest in March. He sees a big difference between how his company approaches privacy and those from other companies like Facebook and Google because of what he sees as the fundamental difference in how they make money.

“We’re not collecting a ton of information about you, where you are, what you do, etc.. We are really not interested in it in most cases. When we do, we keep the minimal amount that we need in order to do exactly what we tell you we are going to do with it. We don’t make our money off of advertising,” Cue said in March.

Message Delivered

In a Fortune commentary from Alex Salkever that came out after news surfaced that Facebook had been scraping call and text history from users on Android phones, Salkever saw clear differences. And this was just one of many data privacy issues Facebook has faced this year. Salkever wrote:

Apple emphasized user privacy long before its rivals did. The company built end-to-end encryption into iMessage and FaceTime from their inception. Apple also makes it exceptionally easy to encrypt your entire hard drive; in fact, this is a core feature of the Mac laptop operating system. And Apple Pay is designed in way that really enhances privacy—by not storing actual credit card information on users’ phones or computers and instead using one-way encryption for payments.

Ben Goodman, vice president of Global strategy at identity management firm, ForgeRock sees Facebook as more like television network than a hardware company. He believes that this accounts for the differences in the way they approach privacy.

Getting Personal

“There is a misconception that Facebook is selling our personal data. In reality, Facebook is collecting data to enable high levels of personalization and targeting in advertising. When you view their data privacy through those lenses, it is easy to understand why Apple prioritizes privacy by not having personal information leaving the device; meanwhile, Facebook wants users to be comfortable with sharing as much personal data as possible,” Goodman said.

When Apple has run into problems it’s mostly when there is information being stored off-device as in the infamous iCloud celebrity hacks.

Certainly Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged in his prepared statement before the U .S . Congress earlier this year that his company needed to be more careful with user data on the platform. ‘But it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy,” he told Congress in April.

Privacy Please

That’s not to say that Apple doesn’t get questioned about its approach to privacy even as it tells people how much better it is. Cue’s boss Tim Cook was more than happy to dance on Facebook ‘s misfortune when its privacy woes surfaced earlier this year. Cook said that what differentiated them from the others (besides what Cue had articulated at SxSW) was encryption, not allowing sensitive data to leave the device, and collecting less information than everyone else.

But when Apple released the iPhone X last year and with it brought 3D face recognition to the device, it did raise privacy concerns, especially since that was being shared with some third-party apps on-device. (How do you think you can make that personalized animated poop emoji?)

Then, at the most recent WWDC keynote, Apple introduced in-browser Safari tools to block Facebook tracking. Apple software executive Craig Federighi pointed out that Facebook Like buttons and comment fields on a web page can be used to track you whether you click on them or not. Starting in the next version of Safari, you can choose whether you want to allow that or not from a warning box that pops up whenever these entities are on a page you are viewing.

Just this week, the company updated its App Store guidelines in a move a Bloomberg report suggests could be directed at a Facebook book app called Onavo Protect. “The iPhone maker’s updated App Store Review Guidelines ban applications that “collect information about which other apps are installed on a user’s device for the purposes of analytics or advertising/ marketing.” This could give Apple grounds to remove the Onavo app, although the software is still available despite the rules kicking in last week,” according to the Bloomberg report.

Governing Privacy

Of course, GDPR is forcing everyone’s hand to at least some extent as the EU implements a new set of regulations designed to put the user in control of his or her own data. Other countries including the U.S. might not be far behind.

As Cue pointed out, attitudes have shifted about privacy, but Apple feels it was ahead of the curve. “If you look over the last 10 years, when we started talking about privacy and security and all these things, they weren’t top of mind, and in a way most people were [thinking] ‘Who cares?’ It wasn’t that important, but now people realize the importance of it and what the ramifications of it are,” he said.

And as consumers see how some companies have been misusing their data, they are beginning to compare the privacy records of the biggest tech players. And perhaps they are seeing that while none has a perfect record, they may not all be equally bad either. As consumers decide who to trust, who to do business with, and who to block, companies will need to do more than comply with regulation. They’ll need to develop a strategic approach to data, and business, that respects consumers’ privacy expectations.

Innovation | Revenue

Why Jarrod Dicker is betting on the blockchain to save publishing

April 25, 2018 Ron Miller—Independent Technology Journalist

To many, it would seem that Jarrod Dicker had a dream job running the innovation team at The Washington Post. He led one of the most experimental journalism shops in the country with the backing of Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. While Dicker recognized his good fortune, he also saw room for something more – something you might not even find at one of the most progressive publications around. He saw a hole that needed to be filled and that maybe the blockchain would be the right fit.

That’s why last February, Dicker quit his job at the Post to become the CEO of Po .et, a publishing blockchain startup. It was a company offering a publishing model so fresh and compelling, Dicker simply couldn’t resist.

The attraction? A chance to create a way out of the revenue box the publishing industry is in.

Dicker had been working on building a new ad model at the Washington Post, but he recognized that approach would only get him so far. “What we were doing at Post was first step toward building new vision of the media industry,” he said. However, he knew it was going to be very hard for one publisher to change the revenue model for an entire industry.

Like many, he questioned whether it was possible to survive long-term with the current advertising model, particularly in a world of poor advertising experiences, where consumers increasingly opted to use ad blockers. Dicker thought that there had to be a better way – and that might just be the blockchain.

Poet’s Perspective

The blockchain may seem like a strange savior, but Dicker suggests we consider the full utility of an immutable, irrefutable record. If you could prove ownership and perhaps even truthfulness beyond a shadow of a doubt, maybe you could shift from the ad model to one where revenue comes directly from content consumers.

He says that Po.et is working today as a technology layer where creators can place ideas and, using programming hooks, build licensing and revenue models on the platform. “If someone created content, they can create proof of work and attribution and manage permissions all on the platform. Then they can share a public key and anyone can use it, or if it has value they can charge to unlock it,” he said.

The company started with a set of open source tools that publishers and individuals can tap into to build applications that take advantage of the platform. “If you are a publisher and your content goes through Po.et., you can define when and how to share your content based on rules and permissions. If the permissions rules are broken, there are indicators to warn you, and that brings smarter and more efficient ownership to this space,” he said. It also frees the content owner from using ads because the value is based on the content itself, rather than on an ad model.

Po.et’s revenue

The promise of this approach is a sophisticated licensing mechanism that takes something like Creative Commons and allows content owners not just the ability to apply their license/sharing method of choice, but also a mechanism to enforce it. This enables Po.et to act as a marketplace where you can attach a license to your content that requires people to pay a fee to use it. Then the platform will handle the transaction for you based on the rules and permissions you have applied.

The whole idea is egalitarian in a sense. It puts the revenue power in the hands of the content owner or publishers. However, as we have seen in the last couple of years, that which is open and free is also subject to gross manipulation by people or nation states with an agenda. What’s to stop people from gaming the market?

Dicker sees the marketplace itself as the defense against such abuse. As such, he wants to avoid having some sort of formalized policing method. “Policing the platform is going against what’s happening with a decentralized [system] and blockchain. If people have to stake tokens, dollars and reputation, there is more value with this incentive,” he said. He believes this buy-in and the nature of the blockchain itself will help prevent any abuse of the platform. “That’s the beauty of the blockchain. Everything is on the ledger and everyone can see whatever is happening,” he said.

He still plans to find ways to keep the marketplace from getting polluted. “There will be ways to sift out content if marketplace isn’t sifting it out. But what we are working towards is something that can be leveraged by all and used by all, and that’s the core ethos of what we are trying to do.”

Poets on the blockchain

In fact, Po.et was so invested in the blockchain multi-owner vision they did a $10 million Initial Coin Offering or ICO to sell tokens and raise money for their project. The idea behind the ICO was to get buy-in from a group of investors committed to the idea of building a decentralized marketplace for content owners and a more discoverable network not beholden to larger networks like Facebook or ad models.

Dicker says that people bought these tokens, not as an investment vehicle as you might think, but because they believe in the company. “Even though there is a token, it can’t be bought and sold. They hold that token because they believe in the mission,” he said. Dicker believes that kind of buy-in will help reinforce the underlying structure of the platform and make it more difficult for people to try and find ways to work around it.

“Everyone who has an idea should be able to control that idea. How do we make it simple to store that content and assign a set of permissions that define who can see it and who can’t.” Whether such at vision can thrive, even with the best of intentions remains to be seen. But Dicker sees a better way for the publishing industry on an open platform where the owner controls how the content gets shared and monetized – and where advertising no longer forms the primary basis of the revenue model.

Innovation | Video

Executive editor Jay Yarow breaks down CNBC’s formula for digital growth

December 21, 2017 Ron Miller—Independent Technology Journalist

When your employer is first and foremost in the television business, and your job is to manage the company’s entire digital presence, you’ve got your work cut out for you. That’s precisely what Jay Yarow, CNBC’s SVP and Executive Editor, Digital faces on a daily basis. He is responsible for everything that appears online outside of what is being broadcast. That means CNBC.com, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn – everything.

Yarow says that the objective of the brand is tracking everything related to business, finance, and investing. “We are aiming to be the most trusted brand when it comes to everything money.”

And his approach seems to be working: In September 2017, CNBC Digital reached the number three position in the Business/Finance News category for the first time ever and delivered a record 49.2 million unique visitors in September, which was up 74% year-over year. CNBC Digital also saw impressive growth in mobile with a record high of 30 million mobile unique visitors in September, up 105% year-over-year. And so far this year, traffic from social platforms to CNBC.com has grown 83%.

Keeping it simple

When he came on board in February 2016, Yarow’s goal was to keep a good thing going and expand upon and improve what he could. “They had a great digital brand in place [when I got here]. It was growing before I got here. I helped to accelerate that growth. They have been doing digital for years. I tried to come in and add some extra,” he explained.

Sometimes, the seemingly small things make a big difference. For example, when you read a CNBC story and you see the bulleted data points summarizing the story at the top of the page, that’s something that Yarow added. “From my perspective, it’s super valuable. Investors or business leaders tend to be busy and don’t have time to absorb a lot of information,” he said. This way, readers can quickly get the gist of a news story on the way to a meeting when they might not have time to read the whole thing.

He also recognizes the importance of social media in reaching his busy audience. “I’m fortunate in that I really enjoy doing these things. It’s not like it’s a chore to check Instagram and check Twitter or Facebook or CNBC.com. These are all things I would do either way and I get to influence that.”

Keeping it real

Yarow says his primary focus is putting together a strong news team that breaks a lot of stories. As he joked, “We are first and foremost a media company. We never have to pivot to video.”

Above all, his focus is on producing high quality journalism. Then, he asks if “the journalism we are producing being rewarded with an appropriately large audience.” As he points out, it is important to be able to support the production of this journalism so reaching a significant audience and monetizing them is essential. “When you are building something, you have to make sure there is a business there,” he said. To that end, Yarow stays in sync with the business side to ensure that whatever he is doing has their support.

Media people

And, with so many media properties struggling and announcing layoffs, CNBC has been a marked positive contrast. It’s been growing and adding reporters like Chrissy Farr and Alex Sherman as well as a slew of new reporters to its tech coverage team in the last year. When it comes to different social channels like Instagram and YouTube, Yarow says he tries to hire good people and empower them to do good work. “We have great leaders we trust and empower them to run the different channels. My goal is to have nothing to do.”

“We have really focused on news and making sure we are breaking news. We built out our tech section and made it a strong team. And we are always systematically assessing business news and where we can get stronger,” Yarow explained.

One of the great advantages of being part of CNBC is that we have a lot of great platforms. I see a lot of different tech pieces being built and see what produces the best results.” He added, “We focus primarily on journalism and building a technology platform and tech stack.” And while the company is growing fast, he emphasizes that they are doing so it in a responsible way. “We are not saying, ‘Here is a $100M. Set it on fire and see what happens to our traffic’.”

Innovation | Revenue | Video

Behind the YouTube video strategy at The Washington Post, Fusion, and The Atlantic

November 9, 2017 Ron Miller—Independent Technology Journalist

Video has become an increasingly important delivery medium for media brands. Given the investment, it might seem like they’d want to keep this video traffic firmly on their own sites. However, as with other types of content, most publishers have developed a distribution strategy for multiple platforms. Because YouTube offers such an efficient way for viewers to find, view, and share video content, it has become a de facto video distribution channel for many media outlets.

Undoubtedly, YouTube has become a primary video viewing destination for internet viewers. And media companies need to go where the viewers are. This is true regardless of platform – desktop, mobile, or OTT. It makes little sense to make a significant investment in video exclusively for your site if the video audience is off watching somewhere else.

So, it follows that companies investing in video content are giving YouTube a hard look. Of course, as with every content distribution decision, there are always trade-offs. However, many believe that reaching the sizable YouTube audience is worth the effort. While he described the evolution of their YouTube strategy as “a work in progress,” Jigar Mehta, SVP, head of video at Fusion Media Group believes it is well worth the effort. Topping the list of priorities is making Fusion’s video more discoverable on what he describes as “the second largest search engine in the world.”

Establishing a YouTube strategy

Each company will need to develop a YouTube strategy that suits its resources and objectives. However, some may want to follow the Washington Post’s lead. They think of YouTube as a distinct content delivery channel that attracts viewers who might not normally visit their website. That provides an opportunity to introduce your brand to an entirely new audience, an exciting prospect for any content producer.

“YouTube is a space with a great deal of audience and revenue potential that we have only begun to tap into. We see it as the primary place to build a diverse audience that will think of The Washington Post as video-first and engage with our visual journalism,” Nadine Ajaka senior producer for video platforms at The Washington Post explained.

She said that they have separate strategies for how they approach video on the Post’s website and what they deliver on YouTube. “The difference between what we choose to publish on washingtonpost.com and what we publish to YouTube is that for YouTube it must stand alone. On the site, there are times when video will lead the story, but often we are plugging in and embedding clips and social video that are meant to add to what has been written,” Ajaka said.

Although they share the Post’s desire to build an audience that might not frequent their site, Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg executive producer for The Atlantic says her company has taken a different approach. YouTube is central to their video distribution strategy.

“We recently switched to YouTube as our primary video hosting service. Now, we host all our videos on YouTube and integrate the player throughout TheAtlantic.com. This decision was motivated by a desire to build audience beyond our owned and operated platform. YouTube’s subscriber features, search functionality and recommendation algorithm all help us do that,” she said.

Long form anyone?

While audience development seems to be the be a primary driver behind using YouTube, it also offers a place to hone and deliver longer form content. This is because people see it as a destination where they can stay for a while and watch – if the content is compelling enough.

“YouTube emphasizes watch time over clicks and encourages viewers to watch with the sound turned on. We’ve seen amazing engagement. A recent 15-minute documentary has earned an average watch time of eight minutes,” The Atlantic’s Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg said.

Mehta pointed out that this emphasis on watch time correlates with better performance for Fusion’s long form content on YouTube. He said that they approach YouTube as a specific content destination (and not a competing channel for their own sites). As such, they specifically optimize their videos for the platform.

Ajaka from the Post emphasizes that you have to really present video people want to see on YouTube, or you won’t build a subscriber base for your channel. “With YouTube, there’s a real opportunity to hone your video inventory and create a coherent body of work. For some news publishers, video can be a churning out of quick-turn clips. Luckily, we have editors and video journalists who are continually working on long-form reported visual stories, that tell a cohesive story. These are perfect for YouTube as a platform,” she explained.

Monetizing content

YouTube offers more than delivery tools and audience engagement. It also provides a means for monetization, which is certainly welcome given that producing quality video can be expensive.

In fact, Mehta finds that YouTube offers better monetization options than Facebook or Twitter and he is optimistic about YouTube’s long-term roadmap. “We are currently utilizing AdSense on YouTube which is their programmatic option. YouTube also has other products including YouTube Red and YouTube TV that as they become more mature will be interesting options as well,” he said.

Ajaka said the Post is talking to YouTube about direct-selling of their ads, but it hasn’t yet come to pass.

At The Atlantic, Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg said that they are “primarily focused on direct sold sponsorships and pre-roll, both on our domain and off. Our main challenge month over month is keeping up with the demand,” (which is a good problem to have).

As with any external platform, there are going to be trade-offs, but YouTube offers companies a way to distribute video that puts it in front of an engaged audience with a good search engine and monetization tools. “Our YouTube audience is seeking video first and foremost, and will have an easier time surfacing our videos than someone searching the site,” Ajaka said. That seems like a compelling reason for any media brand to build a YouTube presence.

Innovation

How Slate, Vox, and The Washington Post are trying to turn Apple News readers into paying customers

October 11, 2017 Ron Miller—Independent Technology Journalist

There is little dispute about the popularity of the Apple iPhone. Since the it debuted in 2007, the company has sold more than a billion units. Last quarter alone Apple sold more than 41 million iPhones worldwide. Most of those phones are running Apple News, the news app that has been a standard component since Apple released iOS 9 in 2015.Ap

Simply because of the sheer number of iPhones running Apple News, it’s something that publishers need to pay attention to. After all, you don’t want to ignore a source that could give you access to hundreds of millions of potential of readers. But like so many things related to Apple (or any of the big tech platforms), understanding that potential and tapping into it are two different things.

Apple has some deals in place to monetize the content inside the Apple News app, and according to Advertising Age, could allow some publishers to use their own ad technology to sell ads in the way they prefer. Some media companies are benefiting from exposure that has led to increased subscriptions, but the platform remains a challenge to publishers as they work to understand how it works.

Measuring success

When you have a user base that large, you want to understand how to take advantage of it, and reap the benefits it could provide for your publication. Chris Schieffer, Slate’s senior mobile product manager, says it certainly gives his publication access to readers who might not see Slate articles in other sources.

“The traffic numbers are meaningful to us but we’ve been looking at this as an investment. It’s not a pure traffic play. The more folks that see us in News, the more folks we can introduce to Slate Plus (our membership product), and the more folks that may come over to our homepage or download our iOS app to check out our podcast,” Schieffer explained.

Dave Merrell, who is lead product manager at The Washington Post, believes that the key to Apple News is similar to working with any platform. It involves a tight integration of newsroom, product, engineering, design, and analytics.

“Apple News traffic and subscriptions didn’t just fall into our lap. We recognized the opportunity of a news platform built directly into iOS and made Apple News an integral part of our editorial processes immediately. We spent a lot of time studying the Apple News audience and their habits, and our editors watch Apple News analytics every day in order to ensure that audience is getting our best journalism,” Merrell said.

Driving revenue

The challenge of every publication using Apple News is turning that traffic into revenue. For publications that are using the subscription model, the goal is turning the casual reader who found you on Apple News into a paying customer. Making that leap isn’t easy, but it is the objective.

Slate plans to try and take advantage of the tools Apple has provided to draw in subscribers. “We’re excited about introducing our Apple News users to Slate Plus by implementing subscriptions next year. There’s still more to be done on the backfill revenue front but we have seen a small uptick as Apple has introduced additional backfill partners. We feel like the real opportunity though is through subscriptions with the ability to pay through your Apple ID. That’s a good experience for users and publishers,” Schieffer said.

The Washington Post has also been seeing a significant rise in subscriptions. “[We have] had a subscription offer in Apple News since the launch of iOS 10, and we have been pleasantly surprised by this audience’s propensity to subscribe. After only a year, Apple News is a thriving subscription channel for us,” Merrell said.

Making it better

While companies are trying to work with Apple to make Apple News work better for them, publishers would like to see more transparency. In particular, Vox’s engagement editor Blair Hickman would like publishers to have more control. “With Apple, as on many other platforms, there is a certain lack of control that publishers give up. We see views spike when Apple chooses to feature Vox. Over the year, we’ve built a presence on the app that has let us start to organically drive views. But it would be great, as with most platforms, to be able to drive that relationship with the audience a bit more,” Hickman said.

The Post’s Merrell would like to see more personalization. “Apple knows so much about me based on my phone usage. So, I would love to see more personalization that doesn’t require a big upfront investment from the user. I also think there is a great opportunity to incorporate Siri recommendations directly into the Apple News platform – and there is a great opportunity the other way as well, with News surfacing in more areas of the iOS and MacOS ecosystem,” he said.

Nobody can deny the potential of a captive audience that’s already addicted to the iPhone. However, media outlets and publishers are really still feeling their way to understand how to best use the platform. Schieffer sums it up when he says, “I think the value of all distribution platforms, not just Apple News, has taken a little while to shake out. It’s a big leap for publishers to start sending large portions of traffic without the immediate promise of equal revenue or more subscriptions. But I think the investment is beginning to pay off and that’s exciting.”

Innovation

A great local news story: the growth of Spirited Media

September 28, 2017 Ron Miller—Independent Technology Journalist

When Spirited Media launched Billy Penn in 2014, the online publication had a broader mission than simply covering local news in the City of Brotherly Love. Co-founders Jim and Joan Brady wanted to do no less than rejuvenate local journalism itself by building a new business model that made local news coverage relevant to a younger audience, who saw traditional print media as old and stodgy.

It was a tall order by any measure. Brady and his intrepid team had just five people to cover Philadelphia—a huge city. They knew they needed to pick their coverage battles and find ways to engage with their target demographic to make their stories resonate with them.

Brady, a 20-year veteran of the news business, had witnessed the decline of local media first hand and knew it was time for a new approach. It was clear the old ways weren’t working. Local papers were either shuttered or had severely cut back coverage, and citizen journalism had not filled the gaps as many had hoped a decade ago. Without local news, there was a news gap that left uninformed citizens in its wake. And, as Brady knew all too well, a local news vacuum also left room for corrupt politicians to operate unimpeded without the white-hot journalism spotlight shining on them.

Brady understood that Spirited Media couldn’t fix all that ailed local journalism, but they were going to try to deliver news in a new way that would attract audiences and revenue. Today it consists of three local publications with Pittsburgh and Denver joining Philadelphia (in May of 2016 and this March, respectively).

Building new models

When Brady and his team prepared to launch Billy Penn, they knew that the under-35 crowd wanted to get their news digitally – and they wanted news with a voice. “We decided the site wouldn’t have a dry unemotional voice. The site had to reflect energy,” Brady said.

What’s more, they’ve found that their audience wants to go beyond the news and get involved to help shape the direction of their communities. “We have a fair number of stories about things in the community you can get involved with and how to connect with issues you care about,” he said.

Instead of trying to be a publication that delivers all the news from sports to art to politics, they decided to focus on a smaller set of stories that Brady and team believe their readers care about. Then, to create that larger scope, they plug into a broader system of sites. “There is a whole little solar system of smaller sites biting off pieces of everything the big papers once did – art, sports, education, city hall. You have a lot of journalists covering a lot of interesting things in Philly,” he said.

Getting readers together

While the Spirited Media approach still uses an ad model, it concentrates on mobile ads, not display ads, which Brady says don’t really work for digital news. Even more importantly, Spirited wants to be more than another publication pumping out posts with ads to support the mission. It wants to get its readers involved.

That requires putting readers together with the people behind the stories, whether the reporters themselves or the subjects, and having an advertiser sponsor the event. Brady says they learned the hard way that a panel on a stage wasn’t what people wanted. Instead, they host smaller, more intimate gatherings. As Brady said, if you put a bunch of interesting people in a room with food and drink, interesting conversations tend to happen. A happy byproduct is that advertisers can buy a package that includes ads and event sponsorship, which means additional revenue.

Spirited Media is also planning its own take on the membership model, which is slated to kick off in October. Readers who become members will have special access to the publication’s events, which will include meeting interesting people from the community and accessing places they might not typically get into like a tour of the Steeler’s locker room in Pittsburgh or a VIP City Hall tour in Philadelphia.

The Spirited Media approach appears to be working as the company has grown its team to 26 and expanded to two additional cities. Brady notes that the company earns just 40% of its diversified revenue from ads. And as for that younger demographic target, all three publications have more than 40% audience in the under 35 age group – with Billy Penn hitting 45% in that demographic. For ages 44 and younger, it’s more than 65% with Billy Penn’s audience comprising 71% in the 44 and younger age group.

It’s still early days for Spirited Media. However, it has developed a fresh take on the local model that publications of all types can learn from. And that is certainly good news.

Advertising | Innovation

How thinking like a tech company has transformed innovation at The Washington Post

August 10, 2017 Ron Miller—Independent Technology Journalist

When you think of The Washington Post, you probably think newspapers, not software company. But the reality is that the company operates a lot more like the latter. Under the influence of owner Jeff Bezos, The Post has been trying innovative approaches to everything it does and is experimenting with new ways of doing business.

That includes running an ad tech startup inside the company, one whose job is to use The Post as a sandbox of sorts to come up with new ways to deliver ads and then market the technology they produce to other publications. It’s not the kind of project you expect to find inside a publication like The Post, but it’s one of the qualities that attracted VP of commercial product and innovation, Jarrod Dicker several years ago.

Dicker says he originally reached out to The Post in 2015 about a job because he was seeing the continuous trend of media companies’ reliance on third-party companies for things core to the business, such as ad technology.

Seeing RED

After he came on board, Dicker helped form the RED team, which stands for research, experimentation and development. The group, which consists of software developers and product managers, began to look at the ways the company did ad tech.

As with any attempt to change the way you do business, Dicker ran into the “that’s just the way the industry works” attitude. His idea was to look at it fresh. What if you didn’t have any preconceived notions about how ad tech was supposed to work, how would you build it from scratch?

What he knew for sure was that users didn’t like the way ads were being delivered to them. So the first thing he decided to do was focus on improving the user experience. When consumers ignored ads—or worse, blocked them—Dicker recognized that the approach the industry had been taking needed to change if publishing was going to survive and thrive moving forward.

Thinking Like a Startup

“My pitch to The Post early on was—and it was me coming in as an individual contributor at the time—how do we take a startup mentality and really think about our focus as a media company and figure out how to differentiate ourselves,” he said. The problem as he saw it was that most media companies were focusing so much on building the content side of the business, they were forgetting about innovating on the revenue side.

So, he said they took the approach: “What if we actually applied an effort to build products that we think would be perfect for user experience, knowing how our consumers engage on The Washington Post and apply those to what we know brands and marketers want.” And that may just have been the key that unlocked the strategy. Dicker and the team he helped form wanted to create products that worked for marketers and brands as well as users who were fed up with online ads.

Getting talent to come in and work on ad tech proved to be a challenge at first precisely because it had such a bad reputation. “People didn’t want to work on ad problems because of the association with fraud, blocking and bad user experience. And the people who could apply [for these positions] and make the change didn’t want to be a part of it. They assumed that things couldn’t change or be better,” he said.

Those were precisely the people Dicker wanted however. Solving these issues requires people who could look at ad tech problems with fresh eyes. One of the problems they found was related to ad load time, so speed became a priority. The result was a product called Zeus that has the fastest ad load times in the industry, faster even than Google, according to Dicker.

Revenue Revisited

The RED team developed Zeus and other ad tech products at the Post including PostPulse, FlexPlay, Re –Engage, Fuse, InContext, and Post Cards, and then began licensing them to other media companies, such as the Los Angeles Times, Toronto Globe and Mail, and Chicago Tribune. He found that providing a way to potentially improve ad technology across the industry, while producing another revenue source, was a happy side effect.

Dicker isn’t under any illusions that the tools his team has created are going to supplant the content/ad/subscription revenue model. However, he does see it as a viable additional form of revenue for the company, and he finds it exciting that his team is helping the core business grow and thrive.

“We now also have a Software as a Service model where the Washington Post is no longer solely reliant on advertising or subscriptions. We are actually becoming the technology vendor for other publications.” And that not only helps them diversify revenue, but has created an internal culture of innovation, which should help drive long-term success.

Innovation | Perspectives

Axios and The New York Times explore new business models

June 15, 2017 Ron Miller—Independent Technology Journalist

The New York Times and Axios couldn’t be more different. The former is a venerable print newspaper founded in 1851 and finds itself in the midst of a digital transformation. The latter was born digital, launching online just last year.

While it breaks more than its fair share of news, The Times is well known for its detailed deep-dives on a variety of subjects from politics and business to cooking, sports, and book reviews. Axios, on the other hand, is the very essence of brevity concentrating on business, politics, and tech. Their stories quickly deliver the basics and let you move on with your busy life . (Though recently it has also branched out into media and science reporting.)

Yet for all these seeming differences, the two publications may have more in common than not. When it comes down to it, both want to earn consumers’ trust and loyalty by delivering quality journalism every day. And both are working on new models for delivering the news in a profitable digital package, however that manifests itself.

At this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City, Mark Thompson CEO of the Times and Mike Allen , co –founder and executive editor at Axios appeared onstage in separate interviews, and what they had to say offered a fascinating window into the changing face of the journalism business.

Short and Satisfying

Every journalist learns the ABCs – accuracy, brevity, clarity. Axios takes this seriously but, according to Allen, their focus starts with the brevity. “Traditional newspapers served their purpose in their day, but as we got busier, it was harder to make time to read,” he said. “The idea of Axios is how can we efficiently use your time and catch you up quickly.”

Discussing The Times’ transformation into a more digitally-centric property, Thompson admitted that mistakes were made along the way. But he feels confident that they have a much stronger digital offering today. He explained that in the 70s and 80s, the newspaper expanded into multiple different sections including lifestyles, food, fashion, and people came to think of The Times brand as representing much more than news and opinion.

However, he said “I think one of the missteps in a way was in digital—that the Times got typecast again to be just being about news, where in fact it’s about culture, travel, food and so on and so forth. We’re trying to [return to] the idea of a media provider who can help you with many aspects of your life, as well as giving you the best journalism in the world and a range of opinion,” he said.

A Trusted Source

Regardless of whether you are succinct or verbose, stick to the news or offer broader insights, you need to earn readers’ trust to take a share of their valuable time. And, as we move into an era of social media sharing and an ever-growing number of news sources competing for attention, earning and maintaining trust is increasingly difficult.

Allen points out that in previous generations there were a limited number of news sources, (including The New York Times). In those days, people tended to believe what these sources proffered as news. However, with ever proliferating “news” sources, increasingly disintermediated from the source itself through social media distribution, figuring out what’s true and what’s not has become challenging.

“Now, people – very understandably – don’t know what to believe, whom to trust.” So at Axios, he said “we hope to be a safe place where you can come. And it doesn’t matter where you are on the [political] spectrum, you are going to be able to very quickly see what reality is.”

Thompson sees delivering quality journalism as the natural path to building a loyal audience. Even though some readers may disagree with the message on a given day, the objective is to maintain The New York Times reputation as a trusted source.

“Being true to ourselves and our mission is the best way to build loyalty [with] our subscribers over time. And we have a passionate relationship with our subscribers. Even when they threaten to leave, evidence suggests they are back very soon,” Thompson said.

Building the Strategy

Regardless of the age of these two publications, they are working very hard to create digital products with long-term viability. As Thompson points out, a successful digital strategy needs to be an integration of content strategy and audience engagement.

“In a way, if you can get your audience engagement right, the actual business of turning an engaged audience into money is a very downstream, and in some ways, less difficult, less critical task,” he said. “The real task is getting people’s passionate engagement with the brand, with the content, and caring about you enough that they are willing to pay.”

Allen says that means avoiding what they call the ‘crap trap.’ “The crap trap is: If you’re just going for clicks, just going for a mass audience, you get pushed down. We are very focused on reaching people who are serious news consumers. These people who to know about something because they are curious and it helps them in their business and professions. That’s what we think about when we post something. We want to make sure it’s worthy of your time,” Allen explained.

Both of these publications are fighting for the same thing: trust, time, and attention. While their approaches may differ, their goals—and many of their underlying tenants—are remarkably similar.

Innovation | Revenue

Email newsletters connect with core audiences

April 27, 2017 Ron Miller—Independent Technology Journalist

In a time when the email channel is becoming increasingly clogged, you would think email newsletters would take a back seat to other forms of audience interaction. But just the opposite seems to be happening as media outlets see the newsletter as a way to communicate directly with their core audiences. Email newsletters are popular and proliferating.

Perhaps this trend is being driven by the success of newsletters like The Daily Skimm, an email-only news briefing delivered every morning with a colloquial tone that treats the news with a sense of humor and gives you what you need to know in an entertaining fashion. Regardless, every major media outlet seems to offer a variety of newsletters. These are often segmented into subjects like finance, politics and sports, full of links and information, and designed to provide the core audience with details tuned specifically for them.

A little something for everyone

Newsletters remain popular because they deliver value to both the audience and the producer. The audience gets the information they want delivered straight to their in-boxes, often tailored to their specific interests.

The publisher gets something valuable as well. While interacting with people who clearly like your media outlet and the content you produce, you also get to own the information about your readers, says digital strategist, Jacqueline Boltik.

“For newsletter producers, having an email newsletter is smart because it’s the only way to really own your audience online. Ultimately Facebook owns your Facebook fans, Twitter owns your Twitter followers. Building your digital base anywhere other than email is like building a house on rented land,” she said.

She says beyond owning your audience data, there are many other reasons to offer a newsletter. These include driving traffic, monetization, and the ability to leverage your email data to strengthen your digital strategy on other channels.

Building connections to your audience

While the data certainly has value, a newsletter is much more than simply a data collection exercise. It’s also about building a strong connection between your audience and your publication, and in some cases to your journalists or other content creators.

“The best newsletters feel personal. Even though email is one to many, it feels one to one. In general, the more you can make your newsletter feel like it’s from a person while still fitting in with your brand, the better your newsletter will be received by readers,” Boltik said.

Quartz publishes a newsletter called the Daily Brief that it sees as a key way to interact directly with some of its most avid readers. “For audience engagement, it’s immensely valuable. Daily Brief subscribers are among Quartz’s most fervent and dedicated readers, and they’re also what advertisers consider to be a “premium” audience. About half are senior leaders at their companies,” Mia Mabanta, Quartz’s executive director of product and brand marketing explained.

Beyond that, Andrew Golis, general manager of Vox Media’s news brand says that newsletters provide a way to understand the news from a trusted source in a world where social media is bombarding us with stories. “We’re all more and more overwhelmed. As consumers, newsletters allow us to connect to a curator and analyst we trust. We get a finishable wrap-up of what’s important to pay attention to and why.”

The value proposition

You would think that driving traffic back to the site would be another primary goal, but publications don’t necessarily see it that way. Email newsletters build and maintain brand loyalty with core audiences—which is valuable in the long term. If they drive traffic, that’s a bonus, but it’s often not the objective.

In fact, Quartz includes links to other sites besides their own says Mabanta. “We explicitly don’t use the email as a way to drive traffic back to our site. It’s meant to be a self-contained experience. The user can click through if she wants to dive deeper, but she doesn’t have to. And oftentimes that link doesn’t lead her to QZ.com,” Mabanta said.

Vox’s Golis feels the same way. “We don’t approach newsletters as traffic drivers. Instead, they are distributed media experiences valuable in and of themselves. We love them because they give our loyal audiences a way to establish a permanent relationship with Vox. They also give our journalists the opportunity to build that connection and a set of stories and insights with a consistent community over time,” he said.

A valuable proposition

That engaged core audience also draws in sponsors and advertisers, who are willing to pay a premium to get the attention of a known quantity, and because you own your email data, you should have a good sense of who that audience is. “Better leveraging email data is a significant opportunity for many companies and as combining data sources becomes more flexible, digital advertising is going to become much more efficient and effective,” Boltik explained.

You can get those sponsors or premium advertisers on board to directly monetize your newsletters. Or you can simply use them as a way to stay connected with your most ardent readers. Whatever the strategy, newsletters remain a valuable way to understand and interact directly with your core audience. And that, in the era of distributed content, is a valuable connection indeed.

Perspectives

A numbers game: Audience and measurement dominate publishers’ social distribution strategy

March 16, 2017 Ron Miller—Independent Technology Journalist

Today’s myriad content delivery channels and platforms pose formidable challenges in terms of content strategy. Building an audience and understanding the value of that audience tops the list of issues for many publishers. That’s where social strategy and audience development come into play.

Audience development and social strategy teams vary in size and composition. However, almost uniformly, they are charged with attracting an audience via social media. Sometimes that means simply building brand awareness. However, most of the time, the goal is to attract audiences to content on a website or in an app—regardless of where the consumer may have discovered the content in the first place.

But even trying to figure out exactly where and how to publicize content has become tricky with so many social media channels to choose from. Media outlets work hard to keep up with the latest ones, while leveraging their limited resources efficiently. It’s often a balancing act, and it’s not always easy to figure out where your audience is going next.

Team Building

When it comes to audience development teams, managers aren’t necessarily looking for someone who has a big presence on social media. Instead, they are looking for a broader set of skills that fits in with the overall objectives of the particular media outlet. That means understanding the content and what will get people to engage with it.

Raju Narisetti, CEO of Univision’s Gizmodo Media Group sees the audience builder’s job in fairly basic terms. It is essential that they “Have a keen sense of our brands’ sensibility that can then be translated and reflected in that site’s social presence, understanding of how to engage and grow audiences, and a willingness to try new approaches.”

Ryan Kellet, director of audience for the Washington Post social media team, says he generally doesn’t care how overtly active someone may be on social media. He’s not looking for the person with the most followers. “For the audience development team within the newsroom, I only hire journalists, not marketers. If you are a marketer, that’s not what I’m looking for,” he said.

Finding the Audience

The teams work differently across outlets, but (unsurprisingly) the job is generally focused on driving traffic to the content and building brand awareness. The real trick is deciding how to divide up the work across the team and where to publicize the content for the best results.

Helen Havlak, who is engagement editor at The Verge, where she oversees audience growth and distribution strategy, says her social media team uses an on-call system. The editor on call is responsible for reviewing every article before it goes out, checking the headline, the image and even the URL, making sure it’s all putting the article in the best social media light. When not on call, the other editors check analytics, plan social coverage for future events, create Snapchat or Instagram stories and run engagement experiments. Havlak says this keeps everyone involved. And, because the job always varies, it also keeps anyone from getting bored doing just one thing.

The other issue is trying to decide how to allocate people to new social media platforms as they emerge. Narisetti says that at Gizmodo Media they have to make sure a new platform is right for them before even trying it, and they don’t jump at every new shiny thing that comes along. “There isn’t an inherent, defensible first-mover advantage of jumping feet-first onto a new platform when existing ones are still ripe for mining.” He says it comes down mostly to how to best allocate a limited set of resources.

A Numbers Game

Of course, the advantage of using social media platforms to build audience is precisely that you can measure the impact of your work. But even that isn’t always as simple as it sounds.

The Washington Post’s Kellet believes that what you’re measuring is specific to each platform. “We try to be as smart as we can. If you start doing platform comparing at the same time, you can get an apples-to-oranges situation. What does a view mean in the context of a particular platform? You want to be careful when comparing across platforms,” he said.

The Verge team looks at metrics differently. “When comparing across channels, we boil everything down to a “content view” so we can easily look at Facebook Instant Article views, Flipboard flips, Instagram Story views, newsletter opens, etc. in one place. However, because that doesn’t account for the relative ‘value’ of different channels, we also look at engagement metrics like time on page and minutes watched,” Havlak explained.

Narisetti says for him, it’s pretty simple. It’s about “growing engaged social audiences [and] bringing audiences back to our own platform.”

These teams work with content creators, and ideally the individuals who make up the team have a deep sense of the content, allowing them to distribute it appropriately across platforms. Gone are the days, where you threw out some content and hoped for the best. Media outlets have very clear strategies for building audience and dedicated teams to help them achieve their goals.