Digital News in a Distributed EnvironmentColumbia Journalism School, June 21, 2016

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Platforms and Publishers: A Snapshot

Emily Bell, Pri Bengani, Pete Brown, Alex Gonçalves, Nushin Rashidian, Claire Wardle

Tow Center for Digital Journalism

June 21, 2016

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Agenda for Today

Background to the research

Key findings from interviews with publishers

Key findings from interviews with platforms

Content analysis: who is posting what, where

Conclusion and questions

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How we got here

Tow Center work has always focused on journalism and the social web

January Snapchat launches DiscoverApril Google announces Digital News InitiativeMay Facebook launches Instant Articles

2015 June Launch of Google News LabSeptember Launch of Apple NewsOctober Twitter launches ‘Moments’October Google announces Accelerated Mobile Pages

February Google/Twitter launch AMPMarch Facebook Algorithm tweaked to favor live

videos2016 April Messenger bots introduced, including CNN

April Facebook Live launched for allJune Instagram’s feed becomes algorithmically

drivenJune Snapchat Discover stories appear in ‘Updates’

feed June Snapchat rebrands Discover

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Today we’re announcing a two year research project

1. Policy exchange forums2. Workshops3. Focus groups4. White papers

Launching Fall 2016

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Initial Research Findings

1. One roundtable attended by fifteen social media and audience editors.

2. Interviews with more than forty journalists and executives at news organizations.

3. Interviews with eight platform executives from five companies.

4. Content analysis of nine publishers and their output on twelve platforms.

5. Analysis of the AMP carousel based on Google Trends keywords.

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Key Findings

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Newsrooms are posting ever more journalism directly to platforms, but with little idea of the ultimate rewards.

Platforms influence much more than distribution, e.g. format, story selection.

Publisher strategies for platforms are dictated by business models and no one solution works for all.

Publisher relationships with platforms are not all equal. Non-commercial but important civic issues unaddressed.

Some platforms are now publishers, by design or default.#towpnp

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Newsroom Manager, Print Publisher

Some publishers are focused on the opportunities

“Platforms have given us way more creative freedom than we have in the past to tell a story. We're creating new forms of storytelling.”

Newsroom Manager, Local Publisher

“Our influence in the world has more impact because of the reach we’re able to get on these platforms.”

“They are publishers, they control the audience in many ways. They’re the gateway to the audience and they determine what they will allow and what they won’t. It’s their world. I see them as a partner, but we call them a frenemy...and I don’t even know if that’s totally accurate.”

Digital Manager, National Print Publisher

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“We are collateral damage in the war between platforms. They're fighting with each other …they will promise certain things to some, they’ll give [a publisher] a chance to play, but not to others.” Newsroom Manager, Local Publisher

But some publishers feel powerless

“I think the New York Times and the Washington Post did a disservice for a lot of us by jumping into bed with Facebook on Instant Articles so quickly without really scrutinizing [the deal]. It really ends up hurting us in the long haul.”

Some publishers worry that the industry is hurting itself

Newsroom Manager, Local Publisher

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“It’s incredibly cut throat right now, and Snapchat plays it very close to their chest in terms of if they let you onto their platform. It’s like the Hunger Games, because you fight to get on it and you fight to stay on it.”

Manager, Digital Native Publisher

Some worry it’s getting brutal

Key findings from interviews with publishers

1. Business models are driving platform strategies

2. Conflicting opinions exist at the local level too

3. Branding on platforms is a key concern for all publishers4. Lack of consistent data and metrics is a major challenge for all publishers

5. Publishers are worried about who owns the audience

6. Some appetite for industry collaboration

1.Business models are driving platform strategies

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“Everything that I’m doing with my social teams around the world is all about creating a CNN news habit. And I don’t care how or where that habit happens, and I don’t care where you’re a user. It can be on Snapchat and you’re coming back to us three times a week, or it can be on Facebook Messenger and you’re engaging with our content eight times a week. I care that you have a CNN news habit. And that makes us relevant going forward in the world of disrupted distribution.”

Samantha Barry, CNN

For many publishers reliant on advertising, it’s an all-in strategy

“It is still important to get people back to the site. We’re looking at distribution platforms as a space where we can build a new relationship with readers and engage with our current readers. There is an understanding that we need to meet the audience where the audience lives, and when that audience is an 18-34 year old audience, we understand that there are new habits… and this is really about educating a new audience about what value the Wall Street Journal brings.” Carla Zanoni, Wall Street Journal

For publishers with a subscription model, it’s about getting people back to the site

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n=2,046

AppleNews

Facebook(posts)

Facebook(native)

Instagram LINE Li.st(List App)

Messenger SnapchatStories

SnapchatDiscover

Twitter Vine YouTube

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n=1,050

2. Conflicting opinions exist at the local level too

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“The algorithms, because they favor scale and reach they're naturally going to favor national and international stories, and so local journalism gets de-prioritized. I think we do run the risk of selecting winners in this game.”

Some local publishers feel particularly left out

Newsroom Manager, Local Publisher

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“I would love to be in a place where we are thinking about engaging an audience via Snapchat Story or Facebook Instant Articles. But right now, we are just not there yet.”

Some local publishers are bogged down in legacy issues

Digital Manager, Local Publisher

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“Our very small local sites will close, but they will retain their social presence and they’ll be able to publish their Instant Articles. Actually, we think that that will probably generate more audience for them and probably better commercial than having an actual website. So we completely drank the Facebook Kool-Aid.”

Other local newsrooms see platforms as a route to survival

Digital Manager, Local Publisher

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3. Branding on platforms is a key concern for all publishers

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Platforms offer brands the chance to reinvent

themselves for new audiences.

"If we’re out here for branding but nobody even recognizes it, then that’s a problem, because if our brand is related to the Snapchat brand then maybe it’s not worth it.”

But for some platforms, design obscures news brands

Digital Manager, National Print Publisher

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“Instead of competing for the top spots on the homepage, what [reporters are] saying is: ‘When is my story going to go on the main Facebook page?’ It’s really competitive. It’s a bit like the old days of getting the splash.”

It matters for individual journalist brands too

Digital Manager, Local Publisher

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4. Lack of consistent data and metrics is a major challenge for all publishers

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“Now you have to collect data from another source and be able to compare it to your site data. That’s not apples to apples because it’s measuring different things and different situations. It’s just another strain on your organization.”

Different metrics make comparisons very difficult

Digital Native Publisher

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“Facebook needs to give us access to [data] so we can better understand what the trade-offs are that we’re making.”

Lack of data hinders strategy and product development for publishers

“We just don’t have as rich of a story on Facebook as we do on our own site. We can’t connect the dots on time spent or reader engagement with an Instant Article as well as we can with articles on our site.”

Senior Manager, Print Publisher

Senior Manager, Print Publisher

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“There’s so much mystery to it that we have to stay so vigilant trying to get early reads on how the algorithm is treating everything that we’re pushing out. We get better at decoding it but they keep changing it.”

Platforms are unpredictable

Senior Manager, Print Publisher

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5. Publishers are worried about who owns the audience

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“It all comes back to who owns the relationship with the user, is it Facebook or [us]? That informs everything in terms of what the advertising team can present, what are the different little conversion hooks that marketing and product can get in there. It all comes down who controls that relationship and that data.”

Digital Manager, Print Publisher

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Who ‘owns’ the audience?

“We think of our readers as the customers that we want to serve with great news, great experience.” Michael Reckhow, Facebook, November 2015

6. Some appetite for industry collaboration

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"We as an industry are not proactively working together to set down equitable terms. There is strength in numbers and understanding what each other is going through.”

“Publishers have more leverage than they think.”Senior Editor, Digital Native Publisher

Newsroom Manager, Local Newsroom

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Some interviewees called for more industry collaboration

Creative opportunity vastly expanded.

For most publishers, a better experience for users.

Platform teams and initiatives viewed positively.

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Lack of transparency around the algorithms.

Surrendering control for no net financial benefit (yet).

Serving multiple platforms is very resource intensive.

Key findings from interviews with platforms

“As someone pointed out, there was Craigslist before, then it was Google, now it’s Facebook. It will be Snapchat next. The world is evolving and people are getting their news in different ways and as a complement to the way they’ve always got their news. We didn’t set out to do this. I wish we could all say we had a strategic vision. Instead it was, ‘Huh, people like news, let’s give them more news.”

Platform representative

1. The two mentalities and cultures are very different

2. Frustration at the way platforms are discussed in the media 3. All struggling with how to scale their partnerships

4. Platforms want to collaborate with the news industry to find solutions

5. No two platforms are the same

6. Frustration that publishers haven’t done more to innovate

1. The two mentalities and cultures are very different

“The news industry hasn’t caught up with the fact that we’re no longer in an era of editor choice, it’s user first. It’s all about news personalization.”

Platform representative

Interviewees at platform companies talked about having a culture of innovation and that there was less fear of failure compared with newsrooms.

Platform representative

2. Frustration at the way platforms are discussed in the media

“The media are looking for the moonshot. The want every platform change to be the solution.”

“How can we get the benefit of the doubt?”Platform representative

3. All struggling with how to scale their partnerships

“We want to give tools to people so that they can do things for themselves as opposed to us doing it for them.”

“So, it’s my big bug-bear, right? If you want to ring us, who do you ring? So the emphasis is how do you deliver an ‘always on’ product support to a range of publishers well beyond the people you can actually actively hand hold?”

Platform representative

Platform representative

“It’s more about finding a path together…we need to use the opportunities when we are in the same room to show that there is more of a possibility for us to be productive together.”

Platform representative

4. Platforms want to collaborate with the news industry to find solutions

Platform representative

5. No two platforms are the same

“No two platforms are the same yet we are placed in the same ‘social media’ bucket. Researchers differentiate between network news and cable news, newspapers versus online news. We are all just labeled ‘social media’ .“

During interviews, platforms would compare themselves to one another, explaining the number of years since their launch, their different philosophies around the networked vs. native models, and their different levels of reliance on algorithms.

Who is posting what, where

Which publishers are on what platforms

Over one week, the news organizations we sampled published on average 1,178 posts across 7 platforms

603 posts7 platforms

2,046 posts8 platforms

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AppleNews

Facebook Instagram LINE Li.st(List App)

MessengerSnapchatStories

SnapchatDiscover

Twitter VineYouTube

#towpnpKey: Platforms

856

2,046

1,651

898

932

732

603

1,050

1,854

Posts

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(Apple News, Facebook [native], Instagram,

Snapchat)

(Facebook links, Line, Li.st, Messenger, Twitter, Vine,

YouTube)

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n=2,046

AppleNews

Facebook(posts)

Facebook(native)

Instagram LINE Li.st(List App)

Messenger SnapchatStories

SnapchatDiscover

Twitter Vine YouTube

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n=1,050

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n=603

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n=1,854

356 355

275258

250 246

212 209

188

Key: Content Types

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Pilot Study (US only): Orlando shootings• June 12, 2016• Data gathered at 45 minutes past

every hour• 28 Carousels containing relevant

stories (12 for “Florida”; 16 for “Orlando”)

• 244 relevant stories in these carousels

• 38 different publishers had stories in carousels

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Rank Publisher

Appearances in Carousel

Av. position in carousel

1 NBC News 19 4.42 USA Today 11 6.32 Time 11 6.04 NY Daily

News10 4.7

5 Yahoo 9 3.25 RT 9 6.45 ABC News 9 6.18 BBC 8 3.18 Slate 8 6.8

Rank

Publisher

Appearances in Carousel

Av. position in carousel

10 CNN 7 3.911 CBS News 6 4.711 New York

Times6 2.3

13 Al Jazeera 5 8.013 Huffingto

n Post5 6.6

13 The Hill 5 8.416 Relay

Media4 3.3

16 People 4 8.0

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Conclusions

The rise of the role of platforms in journalism mean social teams are increasingly making key strategic and editorial decisions.

As with ‘legacy to Web 1.0’ twenty years ago, there is no uniformity about how publishers approach this.

But in some newsrooms it is still under resourced, or seen as suspicious and peripheral.

Some non-commercial but important civic issues unaddressed

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Archive

Public record at risk.

The daily archive of news stories is increasingly contained on social platforms where deletion and ‘link rot’ are common.

Platforms such as Snapchat are designed to erase material once posted for 24 hours.

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Ethics & Standards

Standards for native advertising unclear.

Transparency of distribution process and algorithms needed.

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Transparency is needed from publishers too

No transparency over nature of financial relationships.

Who is being paid for what?

By incentivising publishers to use certain tools and create journalism in certain formats, platforms are changing dynamics inside newsrooms.

Landscape review published later in the year

Four policy exchange forums around key questions over the next twelve months

Content analysis expanded to include local publishers and to track changes

Algorithmic analysis continued

Focus groups carried out over the next 6-9 months

Next Steps#towpnp

Any questions?

Thank You

Please email towcenter@columbia.edu with any feedback or suggestions

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