LONDON — The past few months have been full of change at The Economist. In January, Zanny Minton Beddoes was appointed the magazine’s new editor after her predecessor, John Micklethwait, left for Bloomberg. In November, The Economist launched Espresso, a daily news digest delivered via email or a dedicated app, which has been downloaded more than 600,000 times. And it’s been reported that the magazine is looking at expanding into China and India to reach new readers. The Financial Times reported that The Economist’s paid circulation fell last year for the first time in at least 15 years — but the magazine’sdigital and print circulation is still 1.5 million, a 64 percent increase over the past decade.
More than ever, newsrooms are leveraging the power of data. From newsgathering to creative storytelling, data is changing how story leads are generated and how content is distributed and consumed. Experts from leading online outlets discussed the intersection of data and journalism from all angles, covering the most important technology and methodologies shaping how newsrooms analyze and visualize data.
As the world of nonprofit news matures, the good news is that more news organizations are creating ways to increase their revenue and expand their audience. The bad news: They’re still heavily reliant on grants and philanthropy — leaving outlets at the whim of a few foundations or wealthy individuals.
A new report released this morning from the Knight Foundation found that the revenue produced by the nonprofit news outlets it examined increased by 73 percent on average between 2013 and 2011. They’re also diversifying the way they make money; Knight found that of the organizations they surveyed, 23 percent of revenue came through earned income for the average site in 2013, up from 18 percent in 2011.
Social media has become a news reader for many users. Users are using everything from Whatsapp to Twitter’s new Periscope app to gather news and stay informed about the world. According to data aggregated by eMarketer, Facebook still holds the most allure as a social news source, especially among millennials.
Facebook wants to be the new World Wide Web, and news orgs are apparently on board
It’s an idea that’s been discussed around the news business for years: an iTunes for news. Might readers be willing to pay for news by the article, throughmicropayments, much as music listeners began buying individual songs through Apple’s marketplace?
Amid saturation media coverage of the coming UK general election, corporate control of big news organisations goes unquestioned. Yet if the public could vote on that, they’d change it.
So far, any analysis of the role of the media in the forthcoming UK election has focused overwhelmingly on the leaders’ debates and on the ‘horse-
Editor’s Note: Jeff Israely, a former Time magazine foreign correspondent in Europe, is the cofounder of a news startup called Worldcrunch in Paris. For the past five years, he’s been describing and commenting on the startup process here at Nieman Lab. Read his past installments here.
Like many journalism startups to emerge in recent years, the World Politics Review got its start because the kind of reporting its founder was interested in didn’t really exist at most traditional media outlets. “I was trying to publish op-eds in various newspapers,” Hampton Stephens told me in a phone interview. “And I was struck that there weren’t many outlets for the kind of analytical writing about international affairs I wanted to do.”
Intellectually, we all knew that the Internet was so big as to be virtually infinite. But it’s hard to know what to do with that squishy concept.
Then BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti outlined his all-in approach in front of a couple thousand nerds at SXSW Interactive last week. He was both surrendering to and embracing that infinity. Or, put a different way, he embraced ubiquity as a business model. If the universe speaks to you, then answer back.
How Does the Speed of Mobile Technology Change the Ways We Receive Real-Time News
With Twitter breaking content and stories, often empowering the crowd to set the agenda, and Facebook becoming the dominant distribution platform for media, print is dying and the second screen is increasingly replacing the first. Mobile devices, social feeds and algorithms are redefining the production, distribution and consumption of news. What happens then when journalism and algorithms collide? Panelists discussed how stories get crafted and seen in an interconnected world and what can we learn from them.
This valuable story in The New York Times would appear to indicate the platformization of news has reached a new level:
In recent months, Facebook has been quietly holding talks with at least half a dozen media companies about hosting their content inside Facebook rather than making users tap a link to go to an external site.
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