COMM271:

CURT CHANDLER: Philip Meyer was a real pioneer in the movement to bring computers to journalism. He also stayed in the industry long enough to see personal computers become a real threat to the platform he grew up with—newspapers. As you can see from the American Journalism Review reading, he spent a lot of time thinking about news, news audiences, and how people get information. He wrote a book called The Vanishing Newspaper in 2004, and he updated it in 2009. Like the American Journalism Review reading, he did a pretty good job of seeing into the future.

The book The Vanishing Newspaper focuses on how people consume the news. The whole thing is fascinating. But one page in particular jumps out and grabs my attention. It contains a simple chart, this chart, that tracks newspaper readership by generation. If you think about each of these generations and the media options they had, the decline of newspaper readership begins to seem pretty logical. Let's look at it by generation.

When the Greatest Generation reached adulthood, they read newspapers. They didn't really have many other choices. The Hard Times generation had alternatives—radio, newsreels. Newsreels were film news reports that were played along with coming attractions before the featured film at movie theaters. The Boomer generation still had lots of newspaper options. When I went to school in Chicago, in the '70s, each day I could choose between four local daily newspapers and two or three weeklies.

But the big change for the Boomers, my generation, was TV news. Each night, the family would gather around the dinner table, and Walter Cronkite would be on the TV to tell us what happened each day. When I started teaching at Penn State a decade ago, one of the big attractions was broadband Internet access, unlimited access. All a student had to do was find a Wi-Fi hotspot, and they could see content from around the world. Back home, their parents still had dial-up modems and were searching in the bushes each morning to see where the newspaper landed that day.

My students thought that their parents were crazy to put up with this kind of antiquated news delivery. Of course, you're sitting here now thinking, Wi-Fi hotspot? How quaint. Because all you have to do is pull a smartphone out of your pocket, and you have instant access to information. In today's world, vinyl is cool, but everyone is really listening to Pandora or Spotify. Print is retro, but who wants to wait until tomorrow for today's news?

So here's what Meyer figured out. Quote, As the years go by, each generation keeps roughly the same reading habit that it had established by the time it reached voting age, end quote. If you're a traditionally-aged college student, your source of information when you reached voting age was your smartphone, and it's still your platform of choice. Of course nothing is an absolute. But in general, once a generation chooses a more modern platform, they rarely move backwards. People watching TV did not return to newspapers. People reading on the web did not return to TV.

In the long run, you can see what this is doing to newspaper readership and what it's done to radio listenership, and what it will someday do to broadcast television, and someday mobile, too. Obviously, the key for journalists is to learn tools that can be used across platforms and not to invest all their talent in reporting on just one platform.

Back to that American Journalism Review reading—there are three things that I'd like you to remember. First, researchers began identifying the emergence of niche audiences in America right after World War II. Soldiers came back from the war, they were working shorter shifts, they had disposable income, and they began to find hobbies. Suddenly, there were magazines for woodworking, car repair, home repair, hunting, fishing, even baking. So these niche markets have been there a long time. The fragmentation of audience has been there a long time too. The emergence of the internet and digital media has just provided a more efficient way to reach those fragmented audiences.

The common denominator, Meyer says, is the value of quality reporting. People value their time. They go back to information sources that consistently meet their needs. And these loyal audiences are valuable. Advertisers like them because they are predictable. Once marketers and advertisers know who is in the audience, they can efficiently match them to products and services, which brings greater value to the advertiser and, potentially, more revenue to the information provider.

Meyer has a pretty good track record in his predictions. In 2008, he predicted that newspapers would stop printing seven days a week. And we're seeing that now in Harrisburg, Detroit, New Orleans, Cleveland, where newspapers publish midweek for grocery ads, and on Thursday or Friday for entertainment ads, and on Sunday, the largest audience of the week, which attracts advertisers.

Meyer also predicted something that has become a major challenge for news organizations: that platforms are fragmented even within niche audiences. Modern news organizations have audiences on multiple platforms—legacy platforms like broadcast and print; social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat; and digital platforms like websites and mobile apps—each of these audiences getting information at different speeds.

We call this news velocity. And they're moving between platforms, consuming parts of a story on social media, moving to traditional TV, maybe even finishing the story with content pushed to them on a phone. Visualizing where the audience is begins the challenge. Reaching them with the information they want when they want it is what keeps news directors awake at night. And Meyer predicted this with stunning accuracy a decade ago.

Something Meyer did not anticipate was a digital information explosion so huge that audiences now find it difficult to differentiate between information and news. People find information on social media, in messages from their friends, and sometimes even on news sites. But many people don't think about the source or whether they're seeing the best information. So the biggest change for journalists, since the introduction of the smartphone, isn't technical. It's mental. We have to engage our audiences. We have to let them know we're here, that we're covering the news, and we have to show them why our news is better than other information they're finding online.

That's how we get the loyal audience, the valuable loyal audience that Meyer describes. A key element of this engagement process is for journalists to package the news in a way that works best for the audience. Let's look at how that plays out across different platforms at The New York Times. By the way, here's a quick reminder that, if you have a psu.edu access ID, you have New York Times Digital Access from anywhere you are through the Newspaper Student Readership portal.

Before we start looking at the Times, let's think a little about types of readers and types of stories. First, there are basically two kinds of readers: time-starved readers and information-starved readers. Research clearly shows that, most of the time, people are time-starved readers. They're looking at the news while they're waiting for a bus, or an email, or a phone call.

But on certain issues, readers can also be information-starved. Sports fans want to know what's happening with their favorite team, everything that's happening with their favorite team. Reporters and editors have to anticipate this kind of audience need. They have to make information quickly digestible for time-starved readers, and they have to provide the deep dive for information-starved readers.

Second, there are two types of stories: event-based stories and enterprise stories. Event coverage is about things that are about to happen, are happening now, or just happened. Enterprise stories take a broader look at issues or trends. Think of event coverage as reacting to the news and enterprise coverage as being designed to drive conversation about the news.

Events can be scheduled, like a concert, or a surprise, like a shooting at a concert. Enterprise stories can be pegged to the news—this is called a news hook—but they're about placing that event in context, not just covering the event itself. So a story about a traffic accident is about that event. A story about why an intersection is plagued by traffic accidents, that's enterprise.

Which is more common, event coverage or enterprise? To get the answer, think about what you see on television or read online. The answer is event coverage by a long shot. For smaller news organizations, coverage may be almost entirely event-based. That's because the staff is so small. They barely have time to react to what's happening, much less do enterprise stories. They're struggling just to keep up with the news.

At larger operations, editors will ask reporters to take a longer look at issues that are important to the community. One of the reasons that The New York Times, the Washington Post, and BuzzFeed stand out is because they try to do a lot of enterprise reporting. The majority of their coverage is still event-based, but the event to enterprise ratio is a lot higher than at local newspapers or TV.

Keep in mind, the reason you see a lot more event coverage than enterprise coverage is that enterprise reporting is expensive. One of the reasons it's expensive is because it costs time and money to produce a story. But the other reason it's expensive is the decision to work on an enterprise story means that there are fewer resources to respond to events. So enterprise news is an investment, and news organizations are looking for a return on this investment.

One of the metrics they use is viewership. If you spend more time to report a story, you hope more people will see it. But it's a little more complex than that because that viewership may not happen all at once. In a typical event story, there's a lot of interest during and immediately after the event. That interest can fade quickly. If a traffic accident is blocking your way to school or work, you are intensely interested in that event. But as soon as the accident is cleared up, who cares? That's the nature of a typical news coverage. If you put that on a graph, it would be just a blip, maybe even a big blip, but generally, interest fades quickly.

For an enterprise story that places an issue in context—in this case, why do there always seem to be accidents at this place?—you want to create a story that people will keep reading, that you'll be able to refer to every time an accident happens there. So if you graph this kind of story, it may not have a big spike like a fatal accident story, but will have readership for a while, especially if you can keep referring back to the story.

If you graph this enterprise story, it would have a long slope and last for a while. It would look sort of like the tail on a mouse. So we say this kind of story has a long tail. And since more resources are required to produce an enterprise story, it should have a long tail.

But that's not to say that all enterprise stories pay for themselves directly. That's because part of the return on your investment in reporting an enterprise story is its value as a marketing tool, to establish that the news organization is committed to producing quality content that is important to its audience. Perception matters. In the next video, we're going to take a look at how news gets published across platforms using The New York Times as an example.

CURT CHANDLER: Let's look at The New York Times. There are six stories on the front page. There's an index to nine more stories inside the paper. And there's a big Cartier ad to help pay for it all. In this case, the centerpiece is an enterprise story, a story originated by The New York Times with hopes of driving discussion on the topic. The immigration story is event-based. It isn't in the centerpiece position, because the editors assume that many of their readers already know about the story because they've encountered it on other platforms—social media, television, and on The New York Times website.

The way this printed page is designed has a purpose: to create hierarchy, to help readers find the most important and the most interesting news. The power of print is in this kind of design, which allows editors to feature stories on every page that readers may not be looking for. But once a reader sees the story, they're enticed to learn more. We call this type of discovered story a serendipitous read. It is the one thing that print consistently does better than TV or online.

That doesn't mean that TV and online aren't trying to become more serendipitous. For example, TV tries to offer viewers other alternatives by running a scrolling feed of stories at the bottom of the screen while they're reporting a story. And we'll take a look at what The New York Times is doing trying to create a serendipitous read in digital. The serendipitous read is the biggest advantage that print has. For a lot of other things, the advantage is online.

Let's compare the storytelling toolkits that we have in print and online. In print, the toolkit includes text, still photos, and design. Online, we have text, but we also have hyperlinks. Those are links to other stories. These hyperlinks provide a way to embed background information or to be transparent about where information comes from.

In print, we have still photos. But running every picture in color can be a challenge. They're usually color on the fronts, but not necessarily inside. And running every picture big enough to see the detail can be a challenge. Online, we can run photo galleries, every picture can be in color, and every picture can be as big as your screen.

In print, we can have amazing sophisticated infographics. Online we can link them to databases and make them interactive. Then we have the rest of the toolkit online that print can only dream about—audio and video. Print is also limited by physical space. Newsprint is the least expensive way to put pictures and type on paper, but there's still a limit to how much can be printed and how much can be carried around and how much it costs to create.

Now that we've seen the front page of The New York Times, we can see how material is organized and enhanced as it moves online. And first, I need to make an important distinction. The New York Times publishes virtually all of its content online before it appears in print. I showed you the print page first because that is the original New York Times product.

But I want to be clear. The print version is no longer the primary focus of the newsroom at The Times. This is a culture change that has taken decades to achieve at The Times. And we'll talk more about it in another module. For now, just remember that when we look at this digital version of The Times, we're seeing material that may be printed tomorrow or Sunday, but lives online now because that's when there's the audience to see it. This is an example of news velocity across different platforms, which we talked about in the first module.

Let's start with the home page of The New York Times website. It's a responsive design, which means it's optimized for the device you're using to view it. It works on a 5K desktop monitor and looks logical on a smartphone screen too. Here's the same content on an iPad app, and here's how it appeared on the same day on a smartphone, complete with a now famously wrong prediction of the outcome of the presidential race.

If you grab the edge of a browser window while viewing thenewyorktimes.com website, and drag left to make the site narrower, you'll see that the website will strongly resemble the iPad app as it gets narrower, then will look like the iPhone app as it reaches the narrowest view. That's called making a site responsive. Please note that all four versions—print, iPad, iPhone app, and website—have a centerpiece story. The editors are creating hierarchy to help viewers identify the most important and the most interesting content. This is an essential ingredient of homepages no matter what platform you're on.

Here's what The Times is trying to accomplish with its digital products. First, they're trying to attract exactly the audience that Philip Meyer described in the American Journalism Review article, an audience that is consistent and loyal. The web metric that we use to indicate loyalty is called stickiness.

This metric rates a visit to the site by how long the viewer read an article or viewed a video, and then whether that viewer clicked to view something else. That indicates that they like and value the content on the site. Using browser cookies, site registration, and subscription information, The New York Times can present advertisers with a pretty clear picture of who their audience is and how they behave.

Second, The New York Times is trying to provide multiple entry points. These are enticements to sample new pieces of content. Remember the nine references at the lower left corner of the front page for print: entry points. The home page of the website contains dozens of entry points, including links to most viewed and most emailed stories plus recommendations based on the viewer's browser history.

Fortunately, for those of us studying the evolution of digital journalism at The New York Times, we don't have to depend entirely on our direct observation. The Times has been tracking efforts in innovation through a series of reports published in 2014, 2015, and 2017. In the 2014 report, The Times described an innovation process that is remarkably similar to the strategy used by Silicon Valley startups. This process is called the Lean Startup method.

We'll be discussing Lean Startup theory throughout this class because the methodology is used by media companies both as a storytelling tool and as an innovation driver. In general, the Lean Startup process consists of creating a minimum viable product, getting that product into the hands of potential users, then listening to their feedback and quickly adapting the product in response to their feedback.

Here's how this best practice in experimenting is described in the 2014 Innovation Report. Quote, A digital experiment should be released quickly and refined through a cycle of continuous improvement, measuring performance, studying results, shuttering losers, and building on winners, end quote.

So the bottom line here is that The New York Times says that innovation is dependent on making mistakes and learning from them. In the next module, we look at how innovators other than The New York Times have learned from their mistakes, including some epic disasters. To finish this module, I'd like to show you that The New York Times has come a long way since the clumsy but funny "iPhone—the Musical" video made by David Pogue.

So let's look at an example of sophisticated, modern, digital storytelling produced by Alexander Garcia and The Times video team. Their task was to cover a notable Olympic victory by a Brazilian athlete from one of Rio de Janeiro's notorious slums. The challenge was that NBC held all the rights to video coverage of the Olympic competition. So The Times would have to find a way to incorporate still photos of the actual competition without breaking up the flow of the video story. As you'll see, it worked out pretty well.