Media trying to innovate

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/27/business/media/ezra-klein-joining-vox-media-as-web-journalism-asserts-itself.html

Mr. Klein is not running away from something, he is going toward something else. Vox is a digitally native business, a technology company that produces media, as opposed to a media company that uses technology. Everything at Vox, from the way it covers subjects, the journalists it hires and the content management systems on which it produces news, is optimized for the current age.

“We are just at the beginning of how journalism should be done on the web,” Mr. Klein said. “We really wanted to build something from the ground up that helps people understand the news better. We are not just trying to scale Wonkblog, we want to improve the technology of news, and Vox has a vision of how to solve some of that.”

In making the switch, Mr. Klein is part of a movement of big-name journalists who are migrating from newspaper companies to digital start-ups.

At the same time, independent news sites like Business Insider, BuzzFeed and Vox have all received abundant new funding.

With high broadband penetration, the web has become a fully realized consumer medium where pages load in a flash and video plays without stuttering. With those pipes now built, we are in a time very similar to the early 1980s, when big cities were finally wired for cable. What followed was an explosion of new channels, many of which have become big businesses today.

The same holds true for digital. Organizations like BuzzFeed, Gawker, The Huffington Post, Vice and Vox, which have huge traffic but are still relatively small in terms of profit, will eventually mature into the legacy media of tomorrow.

More and more, it’s becoming apparent that digital publishing is its own thing, not an additional platform for established news companies. They can buy their way into it, but their historical advantages are often offset by legacy costs and bureaucracy.

In digital media, technology is not a wingman, it is The Man.

It’s worth remembering that Vox got its hands on The Verge because the people working at Engadget, a tech site owned by AOL, grew tired of trying to publish through the big, slow blob of a huge corporation.

... said Jim Bankoff, chief executive of Vox. “Many of these people, including Ezra, have a vision of creating something remarkable. There is a better way of doing things and we like to think that we are using technology in service of creativity, journalism and storytelling.”

“Digital journalism is as different from print and TV journalism as print and TV are from each other,” Mr. Blodget said by telephone from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “Few people expect great print news organizations to also win in TV. Similarly, few should expect great TV or print organizations to win in digital. The news-gathering, storytelling and distribution approaches are just very different.”

Great digital journalists consume and produce content at the same time, constantly publishing what they are reading and hearing. And by leaving mainstream companies, journalists are often able to get their own hands on the button to publish, which is exciting and gratifying. “If William Randolph Hearst and Bill Paley were alive today, they would think they were in heaven,” suggested Sir Michael Moritz, chairman of Sequoia Capital.

The reason that Vice, Vox, Gawker Media’s sites and other players stick out is that they use their digital tools to make remarkable, unexpected content that people flock to.

... creating a digital media company takes years. (And $25 million, give or take.)

With the price for web advertising dropping by the second and new competitors coming out of the screen at a very high rate, it would seem like a terrible time to jump in. But what we are witnessing now is not the formation of a bubble, it is the emergence of a lasting commercial market, a game that has winners and losers, yet is hardly zero sum.

https://medium.com/thoughts-on-journalism/724a7ef5e111

The world needs a new way of publishing and distributing longform journalism. We’re still stuck in the era in which the default mindset is that the “bundle” is the best way to share good stories with other people. Magazines, newspapers, homepages, blogs — these concepts make less sense than ever. Today, stories come to us in an ever diversifying number of ways: through email, Twitter, Facebook, community sites, newsletters, chat apps.

The answer, I think, is that publishers need to shift their emphasis to individual story units. The stories themselves must become platforms. Once the story is realized as the central force for reader attention, you can build an experience around it. That experience might include ads, but it might also include software applications, shopping opportunities, financial transactions, and donations.

My idea is that each story should be published on a HTML5 “card” that has two sides. On the front side of that card would be the story itself, with no bells and whistles. It would just be headline, byline, text, and perhaps a large image. That stripped-back experience would encourage uninterrupted reading, which I think is an undervalued quality.

Recently, we’ve all been going crazy Snow Falling the crap out of everything while forgetting that the best reading experience is one that lets you get lost in a narrative; one that induces a state of flow. If you don’t believe that an uninterrupted, plain-text reading environment is optimal, I suggest you pick up a book.

However, as a reader, I love extra context when I get to the end of a story. If I’ve been moved by a piece of journalism, I’ll often look up the Wikipedia entry for the story’s subject or the chief protagonist. I’ll go to YouTube to see footage of the event in question. I’ll look for other work by the same author, and perhaps even buy one of her books. I might even listen to a podcast interview with the author to find out what she was thinking while she wrote the story. And sometimes, moved by the protagonist’s plight, I’ll donate money to the cause. All this stuff could live on the back side of the story card.

This back side of the card would be the platform part of the product, and it would lend itself to money-making in several ways.

A publisher might also choose to open the back side of the card to third-party developers who might build relevant widgets or apps.

What we’d be left with is a publishing technology that respects the primacy of the narrative while fully taking advantage of the distributive advantages and rich media potential of the web.

https://medium.com/p/958f4e7691f5

I come out of the dual streams of newspapers and blogs, the first with editing that’s focused on clarity and space, the latter with no editing at all.

“Longform,” two years ago, described two different things: Meticulously crafted magazine articles that had been slapped onto the internet, sometimes weeks after they ran, often made almost unreadable by aggressive pagination and indifferent design; and long, often scarcely edited articles into which a writer had written more for love than for scant pay, and which an online outlet rarely had the resources to edit. Indeed, some of them were long only because they hadn’t been edited.

Our goal has been to take the best of the first tradition, and to apply it in the new medium. That means paying freelance writers better than digital outlets are often able to afford and encouraging our staff to stretch out. It means employing a pair of experienced editors whose sole aim is making those stories better. We also saw an opportunity to discard all the elements of the magazine tradition that have prevented so much great journalism from reaching most of the people who would love it: The long wait for there to be space in the feature well; the worries that a given issue had the right “mix”; the space constraints dictated by a shortage or sudden glut of advertising; and the traditional order of operations that regularly meant that a piece that took two months to report and write wouldn’t appear for six.

Online, each story is at best its own magazine, sent out to find its own temporary audience.

#media