News Leadership 3.0
May 15, 2012
By Julia Scott
Tim Collie stumbled upon a universal truth while building his news startup, Content Creators. “Most people don’t like their website.” The design is bad, or they don’t know how to upload videos. The content stagnates, and the site becomes a calling card appended with excuses.
Imagine then, that you get a cold call from Collie, 51.
“We’re story tellers,” his pitch goes. “We’ve looked at your website. We believe we can help provide you with content and videos.”
Talk about full service. Content Creators offers ghostwriting, editing, website design, photography, video, social media, and any other kind of content creation you can think of. Folks who design websites don’t typically follow up by providing content and keeping the thing bug-free.
Content Creators does. In fact, it is rare that they are hired to create a website and not contribute the content.
It’s one reason why the start up, barely three years old, makes enough to pay out of state college tuition for Collie’s two sons.
“We are willing to work with people who have basic skills,” he said. Not that he and his two partners, photographer and videographer Andrew Innerarity and business manager Jodie Knofsky, have left their day jobs. Collie edits the political news website Newsmax.com.
Content Creators is based in South Florida and covers three counties, Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade. Instead of having a main office, Collie and his partners work from home and on the road. “We’re kind of virtual,” he said. “We can move anywhere.”
Eighty percent of the work is done by Collie and his two partners. The rest is contractors. Expenses are minimal. Gas money eats up a chunk of change. Indemnity insurance is another big ticket at a few hundred bucks a month.
Revenue streams are packed into each contract, which may cover a particular project or include monthly services. Individual videos run roughly $1,000 a minute. Monthly contracts range from $6,000-$10,000. Website creation costs between $5,000 and $10,000.
Bootstrapping means the marketing budget is non-existent. Marketing is not a skill inherent to Collie or his partners, and hiring a marketing professional is not financially appealing. So Collie does it himself.
“Our marketing is very primitive,” he said. “I literally printed out a list of non profits in South Florida and started cold calling. There wasn’t a methodical market research.”
When he gets busy marketing falls by the wayside, which leads to dead periods during which he restarts his cold calling. Many gigs are word of mouth referrals or through informal talks Collie gives on social media and storytelling.
If Collie had to point to one failure, it would be running a business. He got into an entrepreneurial mindset at KDMC’s News Entrepreneur Boot Camp in May 2009, but struggles with cash flow. Tracking down bills is not a strong point. (Disclosure: I attended Boot Camp with Collie.)
“I think journalists should stick to being journalists, but find a business mind who likes journalism who can do the business,” he said.
Another tip Collie and his crew picked up early on is being involved in selecting subjects to be on camera. The person a client wants on screen may not be a great speaker, or particularly polished.
A perk to hiring Content Creators is that the firm works in two languages other than English, including Haitian Creole, and Spanish. Portuguese is next on the list.
Clients also get top access. It’s not uncommon for Collie’s cell phone to buzz with a plea to provide video coverage in a few hours.
Just as important, perhaps, as full service is the company’s focus on non-profits. Content Creators retains a journalistic sense of purpose to their work, an approach that dovetails with the non-commercial mission statements of its clients.
Content Creators covers many of the same subjects Collie dealt with as a foreign war correspondent for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the The Tampa Tribune: Islam and women, drug use, sex trafficking, human genetics, senior issues, HIV.
The videos are powerful stuff. One meshes five women’s voices to tell how each triumphed over dismal circumstances. Another juxtaposes one man’s vision of a drug high with the life-threatening reality.
It’s a kind of journalism that nods to the reality of our industry, where entrepreneurial news veterans can practice their craft and still get paid.
Julia Scott is the founder of the money-saving blog BargainBabe.com.
The News Leadership 3.0 blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
By Michele McLellan, 05/15/12 at 4:35 am
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May 10, 2012
By Amy Gahran
Next week the Knight Digital Media Center at USC is partnering with the City University of New York to offer a two-day workshop on mobile strategies and opportunities for ethnic and community media organizations in the New York City area.
One of our instructors, Arturo Duran of Digital First Media, will be explaining how mobile can enhance the business model and community engagement efforts of these news outlets. Here’s a preview of his advice…
Arturo Duran is the Chief Innovation Officer for Digital First Media—a spinoff from Journal Register Co. which last year took over operations management for all MediaNews Group and JRC newspapers. He also was a 2010-11 fellow in the Knight-McCormick Leadership Institute at KDMC. In the upcoming workshop, he’ll discuss the business considerations and opportunities for community and ethnic news outlets that embrace mobile.
Duran has considerable experience on this front. He was part of the team that created AOL Latino in U.S., and also served as CEO of Intermedia Digital (the largest Spanish-language newspaper company in the U.S.). He’s also led digital and mobile initiatives for small and large news outlets, and has even experimented with early augmented reality efforts.
Most ethnic and community news outlets are fairly small and local, but some (such as Little India magazine and China Daily) are quite large—spanning several states, or the nation, or the globe. Outlets from all points alone this spectrum will be represented among the workshop’s participants. What should they keep in mind about mobile?
“We need to stop thinking of what we—people in the media business—want, and listen to what our users are doing,” said Duran. He noted that in the U.S., African Americans, Hispanics, and other ethnic groups tend to be especially advanced in their use of mobile devices.
For instance, recent Nielsen Co. research found that U.S. Hispanics are 28% more likely to own a smartphone than non-Hispanic whites, and they also consume more mobile data than all ethnic groups. U.S. Hispanics also are three times more likely than non-Hispanic whites to have internet access via a mobile device, but not have internet at home. And their average mobile bill is 8% higher than the overall U.S. average.
Similarly, as of last summer Nielsen found that 33% of all African Americans own a smartphone, significantly higher than the national average. Also, 44% of all new mobile phone purchased by African Americans were smartphones—and among younger people in this group, that was over 50%.
And least year research from Rebtel (an internet telephony provider) showed that tablet computers are especially popular in several immigrant communities in the U.S.
“Ethic communities are more advanced not just in terms of how they use text messaging and smartphone apps, but also the mobile web,” said Duran. “For many ethnic groups, their mobile devices are the primary way they access the web. Since they’re using that platform, we should be giving them news and information that suits the platform they use. That makes what we offer more valuable, because it’s easier for them to find and use.”
What emerging business opportunities can mobile yield for ethnic and community news sites?
“Mobile delivers better data about your users, which helps you become even more relevant to them,” said Duran. “First of all, analytics for your mobile traffic can deliver more accurate info on where your users are. You also learn more about who they are. Unlike computers, a mobile device tends to be used by only one person. The more relevant you can be, the more engaging you can be—and so can your advertisers. Advertisers pay more to reach more engaged audiences.”
Mobile-optimized advertising is the natural place to start when looking to earn revenue from mobile offerings, said Duran. This includes ads that run on a mobile-optimized website or app, which can be served directly by the news venue or from a digital ad network. In fact, some ad networks offer tools to make it easy for news venues to create ad-supported apps.
“Using an ad network will help you get some initial information about your mobile audience,” Duran said. “They’ll give your statistics on your clickthroughs, engagement, etc. So you know what your mobile audience is doing. They can’t give you as much data as you’ll probably get from measuring your regular website traffic, but that’s still a lot of very useful information.”
And then: “Once you gain more experience with mobile and get more data about your mobile users, you can actually start segmenting your mobile audience and creating more tailored offerings that can be sold directly,” said Duran. “So if you’re already serving a niche market like a specific ethnic community, you might have even more of an edge in the mobile market.”
Duran recommends offering options in all mobile channels—from text alerts and mobile-optimized e-mail to the mobile web and apps. But strategy and moderation are crucial.
“You don’t want to overuse these tools. Especially with texts and e-mail,” he said. “You want to drive people from text or e-mail alerts to your mobile site. So don’t sent them lots of alerts; send them a few and show them where to click to learn more on their phone.”
The News Leadership 3.0 blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
May 02, 2012
By Amy Gahran
Is engaging underserved communities part of your mission? Increasingly you’ll need to reach them via mobile media. A new white paper from the ZeroDivide Foundation explains how can you do this well—and how can funders support mobile community media efforts…
Last week the ZeroDivide Foundation published a white paper I co-authored: Funding Mobile Strategies for Social Impact. The aim of this paper was to educate foundations and other funders about the ways that mobile technology can help people in underserved communities. It also advised funders on ways to help grantees seize mobile opportunities that can help fulfill their community mission.
Most of these grantees are nonprofit and community organizations which focus on traditional service delivery (health, education, employment, etc.). But some of them are—and more could be—community media. Also, funders might be in a position to support special projects run by, or in collaboration with, community media.
Here are a few highlights to consider:
1. Mobile is hugely popular with key demographics within traditionally underserved communities.
Cell phones are already a primary tool for how many people get online and access all sorts of news, information, services, and entertainment. This is especially likely in communities and demographics that are “underserved”—poor or otherwise marginalized by language, geography, educational, or cultural barriers.
About a year ago research by the Pew Internet and American Life project found that 25% of smartphone owners mostly go online using their cell phone, even though many have other access options (such as a computer) available to them. These “cell mostly” internet users are disproportionately young (42% are age 18-29), black or Latino (38%) and low income (40% come from households with an annual income of $30,000 or less). Also, 33% went no further than high school in education.
When Pew revisited U.S. digital divide issues this February, they found that smartphone ownership had increased markedly across all key demographics for “cell mostly” internet access—although Latinos and African Americans already showed disproporrtionately high rates of smartphone ownership for a few years previously.
Most of these demographics also doubled—or more—their ownership of tablets (from the new Kindle Fire to the iPad) in the most recent holiday buying season.
2. Text messaging is especially ubiquitous and popular—and underutilized.
In the U.S., 72% of adult cell phone users send and receive text messages, and the rate is higher for teenagers. Most people use text messaging for strictly interpersonal communication. However, texting also can be used to transmit news, alerts, or reminders—or to provide interactivity or customized services.
Text messaging is the most ubiquitous of mobile channels—it works on almost every cell phone. Around the globe (and especially in the developing world) this has made texting a vital tool for delivering services and information.
But in the U.S., the way wireless carriers here bill for text messaging (charging both the sender and recipients for each message) plus the U.S. requirement to use a common shortcode for virtually any text messaging other than interpersonal communication makes it relatively costly and complex to add a texting component to programs.
Community members also often hesitate to sign up for services delivered via texting—they have real concerns about spam and privacy. And such programs typically require substantial outreach and education to encourage adoption.
Still, texting is such a potentially powerful communication channel that it’s important to push past these obstacles, especially to reach underserved communities or demographics.
The ZeroDivide paper explains how programs such as Mobile Voices in South Los Angeles, and the transit info service NextBus (available in several cities), use text messaging and other mobile media channels to deliver services and information—and also to empower underserved communities by giving them more of a voice online.
Funders can help nonprofits and community media overcome obstacles to using texting in their offerings by helping to cover the cost to develop, deploy, promote and support texting services. They also can lease shortcodes which then could be shared among their grantees or partners at low/no cost, and educate grantees about texting opportunities.
3. Build powerful partnerships.
Mobile almost never stands alone. It tends to work best as part of the overall experience of a service—and for underserved communities and demographics, relevant media and information are vital services.
Similarly, mobile offerings often represent a prime opportunity to bring together partners—funders, nonprofits, institutions (schools, etc.), media outlets, government, community leaders, and more. This can deepen ties and foster further collaboration of all kinds to aid and empower communities.
For instance, the national Text4Baby campaign (aimed at supporting maternal and infant health) worked with the wireless carrier association CTIA to convince all North American carriers to deliver all of the program’s text messages (over 20 million so far) completely free of charge to both the sender and recipient.
Of course, Text4Baby is a well funded national campaign with sponsors like Johnson & Johnson and the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, so they were able to wrangle a special deal.
However, at a recent conference on nonprofit technology, CTIA vice president David Diggs told me that the Text4Baby arrangement is a pilot test of a lower-cost texting service (rather like an 800 number for texting) that carriers plan to make available to nonprofits.
Consequently, now might be an opportune time for funders, community media, nonprofits, and their partners and constituencies might lobby the CTIA to roll out this service sooner rather than later. Also, carriers could experiment more now with similar pilot tests involving a variety of types of media, service providers, programs, and constituencies.
...This paper covers much, much more. As a cofounder of the nonprofit community site OaklandLocal.com, I tried hard to make it relevant to community media as well as funders and service organizations. You can download the paper, and you might want to pass it along to your current and prospective funders and partners.
The News Leadership 3.0 blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
The Knight Digital Media Center at USC is a partnership with the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. The Center is funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
By Amy Gahran, 05/02/12 at 9:04 am
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April 24, 2012
By Amy Gahran
Take out your cell phone, look at it and count to nine. That’s just slightly less time than it takes the average web page to load on a mobile web browser over a U.S. wireless carrier’s data network. It feels painfully slow. And unfortunately, the widespread rollout of carriers’ faster “4G” networks probably won’t help that situation much.
Which means that if your news or community site isn’t optimized to load very quickly on cell phone web browsers, and be easy and fast for mobile users to navigate, you’re facing a major and growing disadvantage to building your digital audience and business…
For lots of reasons, a mobile-optimized website should form the core of any news or community site’s mobile presence. Even NPR recommends that in order to grow their mobile audience, news sites should focus resources on the mobile web, rather than on building platform-specific mobile apps.
Last week Olga Kharif of Bloomberg reported that “twice as many mobile-phone users abandon a website for reasons such as sluggishness than their desktop counterparts.”
The Bloomberg article was focused mostly on e-commerce sites, which lose sales when mobile users get frustrated and leave. However, the same principle can apply to any type of website.
According to Kharif, the typical webpage currently takes 9.2 seconds to load on a mobile browser over a U.S. carrier’s data network. (Wifi load times are usually faster, but carrier networks are far more ubiquitous than wifi connections.) Also, “Almost half of mobile users are unlikely to return to a website at all if they had trouble accessing it from their phone.”
Kharif reported on new efforts by Google, Microsoft, Akamai Technologies, and other major internet companies to improve mobile web browsers, offer new mobile performance optimization tools for website owners, and to change how some basic internet technologies function.
Google’s goal is to make the overall mobile web experience twice as fast as it is today.
...OK, take out your cell phone again, look at it, and count to four-and-a-half. That’s better—but compared to the desktop experience it still feels a bit long to wait for a webpage to load.
Why is the mobile web so slow? Sometimes it’s a combination of where the mobile user is and how strong or congested the carriers’ network is in that location. But the servers where websites resides, browser technology, and other internet software also play a role in slowing down the mobile web experience, despite faster carrier networks. All of this is beyond the control of web publishers.
But Kharif notes: “Often it’s because the webpage wasn’t designed to load quickly on a wireless device.”
That’s where news and community site owners can take action to turn mobile media to their advantage.
Where’s your mobile site?
Many news and community sites lack a simple mobile-optimized layout. Instead, they display a miniature version of the full website in the mobile browser—which then requires more time and effort to pinch, zoom, and scroll merely to see what’s on the page.
For instance, the Bay Citizen (a nonprofit, well-staffed local news site in the San Francisco Bay Area that has attracted millions of dollars in funding) apparently lacks a mobile-optimized version. Try loading BayCitizen.org in your phone’s web browser and see what happens. (Note: On Apr. 25 The Bay Citizen tweeted: “We’re working on a mobile site as we speak!” Stay tuned.)
For contrast, try loading MinnPost.com (a smaller nonprofit news site) in your phone’s browser. That’s how a mobile-optimized site can look and perform. See the difference?
I’ve heard some smaller digital news publishers say they don’t offer a mobile-optimized layout for revenue reasons: the ads they run on their full site won’t display well or at all in a single-column layout on a small touchscreen.
Meanwhile, I’ve noticed that the mobile versions of mainstream daily news sites often offer few ads, and these are generally supplied through mobile ad networks—which typically provide relatively lower quality, less relevant ads and less revenue per ad. This, combined with a “shovelware” approach to the mobile web (which replicates the worst digital missteps of the news business from the 1990s), signals to users and advertisers alike that the mobile site is a less-valued, lower-priority product.
That’s just plain bad for business.
However, since mobile devices are fast becoming the most common way for people to access the internet in the U.S., failing to figure out how to place and sell relevant mobile-optimized ads because you believe this might undercut the ads on your desktop site seems shortsighted, to say the least.
So far, many news publishers have developed mobile apps which deliver ads as well as content. Since apps store many design elements on the phone, they have to download relatively less data each time they’re used compared to a mobile webpage. So news venue apps often perform faster and display ads and content more uniformly and reliably than the mobile web.
...Which is really nice—except that apps don’t always support inbound links that people encounter on search engines, around the web, in social media, or in e-mails or text messages. Plus you need to build and maintain separate versions of your app for each mobile platform (Apple’s iOS, Android, etc.). And finally users must download, install, and remember to launch your app. (According to research by Localytics, over 75% of mobile apps don’t get used more than 10 times.)
So until typical U.S. mobile web pageload times improve substantially, the best strategy to grow your digital audience and build your business is to offer a mobile-optimized version of your website. Today.
How to make your site mobile-friendly and fast
This can be accomplished by offering a separate mobile layout (“theme”) that gets served when a mobile visitor is detected by your server—you can use cookies to give individuals the option to display the full site on return visits if they prefer.
Or, if you’re building a new site or doing a total site redesign, you might adopt more advanced web design strategies—notably responsive web design, which reflows and changes dynamically to best suit the type of device a user happens to have, from a large computer monitor to a tiny mobile web browser.
Smaller and newer sites often have an advantage on this front—their websites typically rely on newer content management system technology that makes it easier to deploy mobile themes and responsive design.
Regardless of how you deploy your mobile web presence, if your site is ad supported it’s crucial to learn about, and to educate your advertisers about, mobile advertising. The Mobile Marketing Association has compiled detailed, useful mobile advertising guidelines.
Eventually mobile web speeds will catch up with the desktop web experience—but when? Lelah Manz, chief strategist for e-commerce at Akamai, told Bloomberg this could happen by 2014.
That might be true for the average e-commerce site focused on direct sales, since they have the strongest motivation to optimize. But for content-focused sites, including news and community sites, I’ll bet mobile users will still be waiting, and waiting, and waiting, for a while past that.
Which means that publishers who start taking their mobile web performance seriously right now have a window of opportunity to gain a competitive advantage not only with the fastest-growing part of the digital audience, but also with advertisers.
The News Leadership 3.0 blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
The Knight Digital Media Center at USC is a partnership with the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. The Center is funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
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