Posts about “Journalism”

Some classmates of mine at Penn recently finished a class on Pricing Strategies in the Marketing Department taught by Professor Z. John Zhang who studies such things and they’ve written a paper named “From Print to Portal: Pricing Strategies in the Online News Realm.”

They’ve kindly given me permission to post it online and share it so go ahead and check it out here. (PDF Link) They give a history of the topic and discuss what many companies are doing now. In the conclusion they suggest that news sites should adopt hybrid subscription models.

The paper is a good qualitative treatment of the subject and a fresh take from some people not personally invested in the subject. This was a final paper for the class, and from what I know, none of the five team members have ties to or have worked in the industry.

A Mixed Bundling Pricing Model for News Websites

Abstract: This paper outlines a method for finding revenue maximizing mixed bundling prices for news websites. This can help better understand paid content strategies for online news content. Drawing on work in the field of bundling information goods, I apply a two-parameter model of consumer preferences to web site traffic data and a roughly estimated willingness-to-pay curve. We can then calculate revenues for different price points and find the optimal one for any given site. This method is applied to a sample of ten sites. At revenue maximizing prices, the majority of paid revenue for these sites comes from the sale of individual articles, rather than subscriptions. Site traffic showing highly loyal consumers is found to correlate with higher subscription prices. This model suggests that while it is possible for overall revenue to be higher with a paid content plan, total traffic will certainly fall.

It can be found online here in PDF form.

I’m mostly happy with the way it turned out, though there were a lot of compromises and broad assumptions needed to bring it to a finished product. There’s so much interesting material in this field, I wish I could spend a few more years studying it. I guess that’s what graduate school would be, if I ever decide to attend.

Special thanks go out to Aleks Jakulin for supporting and encouraging me in this work.

I’ve so far refrained from commenting on the Rupert Murdoch de-indexing comment and ensuing brouhaha. But Google’s recent policy change throws everything into the air.

Whether you like or dislike him, it’s time to stand up and recognize that Murdoch’s threat to pull News Corp sites from Google’s index has worked brilliantly.

Publisher unrest and the threat of a Bing deal and serious search engine competition on site indexing have pushed Google into a major concession. Google’s change to its First Click Free guideline is a bigger deal than many people realize. What appears to be a simple change in degree is actually a change in kind.

Google has now said that its okay with sites showing different content to its crawler than to a human following a search results link. There is no longer a guarantee that what shows on a search results page will actually be on the destination page. The Google search user experience will suffer slightly and publishers will now find it much easier to run a pay site.

A Little Background on First Click Free

I’ve seen First Click Free described by some bloggers as a Google “program” or “service”. It’s neither. It’s more accurate to call it a guideline or policy. Google has always taken a strict stance against “cloaking”, or showing different content to its crawler than to a human visitor. What First Click Free said to publishers of paysites was in effect that they had three options. (1) Opt out of indexing at all. (2) Let the crawler index all content, but direct a human reader to a sign-up page, and risk the wrath of Google, which could include de-indexing or ranking penalties. (3) Implement First Click Free, and check all incoming requests to see if they’re the Googlebot or have a Google referrer and show them the content for free. (This is what WSJ.com implemented)

Now with “First Five Clicks Free”, Google has given sites permission to not show a user the same content as the Googlebot sees after their fifth click.

First Click Free Created the Leaky Paywall

I had never understood the complaints about search engines “stealing” content that emanated from the top of News Corp. If anything, search engines were providing free advertising and new visitors to convert to paying subscribers. Pulling their sites from Google’s index wouldn’t hurt Google, and it wouldn’t help the site either. I thought that the Journal was allowing visitors from Google past the paywall voluntarily to increase traffic. Now its clear that the Journal was choosing between maintaining the loophole and violating Google’s rule against cloaking and risking losing Google derived traffic. In that context, the ire directed at Google makes much more sense.

Editors and staff at the WSJ are well aware of both the power of Google to drive traffic and visitors to the site, and the degree to which people were using it to circumvent their paywall. Every morning, an email report goes out to editors and staff detailing what search keywords were driving traffic to the site and what stories and trends are hot online. During my internship, compiling and writing this email report was one of my responsibilities. Visitors searching for the exact headlines of Journal stories often ranked among the top sources of Google referrer traffic.

That Google has so clearly and quickly reacted, means that some negotiating power is returning to the big publishers. Five free clicks per day is still probably too many to make them happy, though. But the more search share Bing gains, the more leverage publishers will have.

Predictions for the Future

I predict that we will soon see a future where major publishers will let search engines see and index the full text of a story, but show just a teaser and a “Purchase” button to users. In fact, paywalled sites could try it now, if they feel like playing chicken with Google. Would they actually follow through and penalize a sites ranking or de-index it? Especially for a site like the WSJ.com, it’s plausible that doing so would noticeably hurt the quality of web and news search results. If Bing doesn’t penalize a site for doing so, will their results look better in comparison?

By explicitly ignoring Google’s guidelines, publishers would throw the ball back into Google’s court to see how they’ll respond. “First Five Clicks” is a sign that Google may cave on this. My advice to Rupert Murdoch would be to patch that hole in the WSJ.com paywall (give away maybe one free click per day) and see what Google does.

Despite all the recent talk and speculation over whether content web sites should adopt a pay for access model, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the underlying economic theories behind any such move. Few new papers on the economics of digital information goods have been published since the late ’90s.

Many of those papers remain surprisingly relevant today and anyone interested in the field would do well to go back and read them. I’ve been doing just that recently in preparation for my senior economics thesis.

One particularly good paper was written in 1999 by John Chung-I Chuang and Marvin A. Sirbu, two professors of Engineering and Public Policy. The paper, “Optimal Bundling Strategy for Digital Information Goods: Network Delivery of Articles and Subscriptions”, provides many interesting insights into recent discussions of the topic. In it, the authors come up with an optimal pricing model for access to academic journals online. Their method applies just as easily to news articles and websites.

Results

The first conclusion of the paper is that the optimal strategy is always to offer both site wide subscriptions AND a micropayments plan for sales of individual articles. This pricing strategy will (with reasonable assumptions) always be more profitable than solely offering one or the other.

A second indirect point is that visitor loyalty will determine not only how many visitors can be converted into paying visitors, but also what proportion of revenue will come from subscriptions versus individual sales. The more loyal visitors are, the greater the fraction of revenue that will come from subscriptions.

Sidenote: This paper assumes that the publisher is acting as a monopolist. The publisher’s offerings must be sufficiently differentiated from competitor’s products that consumers will not switch, and any switching that does occur is not taken into account. If switching does occur, then the assumption is that a competitor offers a similar mix of products. Thus, the proportion of subscription versus individual sales revenue does not change.

Theory

The theoretical underpinnings of this paper are in bundling theory. In bundling, we examine the problem of a publisher offering multiple goods (articles). A consumer places some value on each article. If the price of the article is below the value they place on it then they will purchase it. Likewise, for some bundle of articles, if the value the consumer places on the sum of their individual valuations is less than the price of the bundle, they will purchase it.

Over a subscription period where a publisher produces N-articles, then there are 2^N different sub-bundles to sell. These sub-bundles could include content grouped by category, author or any other distinguishing feature. However, it is extremely computationally difficult as N gets large. To simplify things, only the entire bundle, and sales of individual articles are considered.

Customer Preferences

In addition to these two conclusions, the paper also illustrates how little hard data is available in this field with which to do research. Their model describes the preferences of consumers as a distribution on two factors. Willingness-to-pay and percentage of articles valued. Their willingness-to-pay for their most valued article and the percentage of articles with non-zero value. Without hard data on the actual value readers place on articles in journals or on news websites, the study assumes a uniform distribution. Data on percentage of articles with non-zero value comes from a study by researchers King and Griffiths showing the distribution of the number of articles read in a Journal.

A good analogue to this survey data for content websites would be to use traffic data on visitor loyalty. How many pageviews per unique visitor does a site have? What’s the distribution of this statistic? Nielsen Online has begun to put together a new statistic for newspaper websites, session per user per month.

Pricing Strategy

Based on the data for academic journal readers, the authors calculate that the optimal price for a subscription should be approximately 10 times greater than that of an individual article. With this pricing strategy, the content producer’s revenue stream is well balanced with 56% from sale of individual articles and 44% from that of subscriptions.

Some publishers have started to speculate that their best hope of monetization may be with their most loyal visitors and not with ever higher traffic numbers. Still, much is up in the air.

A recent BCG survey begins the task of gathering the necessary data to make intelligent decisions about whether or not to charge for news. Still plenty more to do though.

More Data Needed

To apply a model similar to Chuang and Sirbu’s to news websites two datasets are required. One, is the survey or experimental data needed to find the distribution of consumers’ willingness-to-pay for a specific article. The other is a data set on visitor loyalty. If anyone knows of an existing data set for either of these, please let me know. I’m also in the process of gathering these data sets. If you want to share analytics from your news website to help my research, please let me know too.

I’ll be summarizing a few more of the papers and studies in the field and looking at other theoretical pricing models for digital content.

The two sites that are constantly cited as success stories for paid online subscriptions are the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. What do these subscription systems have in common, other than a large base of paying users?

Both are stupidly easy to circumvent.

For WSJ.com, simply copy the headline of the paywalled article you want to read into Google and hit search. It’ll pop up as the first one and by following a search engine link, you skip over the paywall. For ft.com, once you’ve hit your limit, just clear your cookie from the site and keep on reading.

But despite how easy it is to get free access, lots of people pay anyways. They’re paying for the convenience of not having to use these work arounds. Where else are people willing to pay for convenience? Look at the proliferation of paid iPhone apps. Many (especially Twitter apps) just provide a nicer interface. Convenient.

When creating a premium product, make it more conveient and easier to use than the free one.

What would make a site more convenient? Alternately, what irritates you about a website currently that you might pay to avoid?

Since my post on price discrimination for newspapers has drawn some attention, a few people have responded with the argument that news online must inevitably be free because firms maximize profit by setting price equal to marginal cost.

And since the marginal cost of distributing one more unit of news through the internet is essentially zero, news should be free.

In my last post I looked almost exclusively at the demand side of the equation. This time I’ll look at the supply side a little bit.

Marginal cost pricing is not a trivial objection to charging for online news, and I used to be firmly in the “information wants to be free” camp. But something clearly seems wrong about that. Information is so valuable I just can’t imagine that it could all be free.

1. Infrastructure Costs

Marginal cost isn’t quite zero. Most estimates say that Google is losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year running YouTube. The IT infrastructure to run a complex or high traffic site costs a lot of money.

2. Pricing Power

Profit maximization only makes price equal marginal cost if firm’s don’t have pricing power. (i.e. they are in perfect competition). And while a lot of news content might be in perfect competition, most people still have strong preferences about which publications they do and do not like. By widening the gap in perceived quality and value, publications can make it easier and easier for themselves to charge for content.

3. Measuring the Wrong Thing

Most significantly, number of pageviews isn’t the right quantity to consider. The right quantity should be some abstract measure of how many pageviews can be attracted to the site. What’s the difference?

For most goods economists look at, the company can produce and sell identical copies and as long as they keep reducing the price, people will keep buying more to more and more people. With news articles, that’s not true. No matter how cheap an article about something someone don’t care about is, they won’t buy it. And no matter how cheap a second copy of a news article someone has already read is, they won’t buy it.

When someone makes the argument that the marginal cost of digital content is zero, they are thinking of the marginal cost of one more person reading the content, one more pageview of a website, or one more copy of a single piece of content being distributed.

But that’s not at all the supply side decision being made by media companies. A media company will decide how large a staff to hire, and that in turn will determine how much content is produced each day. Cost has labor as an input, and the marginal cost curve is the standard J-shaped curve.

In turn, the more content produced and the better that content is, the larger an audience can be attracted that will want to view it. The first pageview is easy to get, the millionth or the ten millionth is much harder and more expensive to get.

Instead of looking at the price of distributing one more copy of an article, we look at the price of creating content that will attract one more pageview. (Either more content, or better content — so that either more people will read, or the same people will read more)

All of a sudden marginal cost isn’t zero. But what significance does this have?

Marginal cost above zero means there’s hope for paid content online! Since content has value to consumers AND the cost of supplying content is not zero, the equilibrium price of content need not be zero either!

It also means that content companies need to lose their single-minded focus on expanding audience. To make money from paid content, growing an audience can’t come at the expense of the ability to price the product.

I’ve been kicking this last idea around in my head for quite a while and I’m still not sure that I’m thinking about it the right way. It’s certainly not as rigorous as it could be, and I haven’t tried to draw up some mock numbers with it to see if modelling things this way will work. In the fall, I’ll be starting to research this topic more rigorously for my senior thesis.

I’m finally done with a week of long hours and hard work in, of all places, Bowling Green, Kentucky. I was regularly working past 3am but I think it definitely paid off.

DJNF Multimedia Project

The core of the program was reporting and producing a full multimedia package. We divided into two teams of four and went out into the city to find and create a compelling story. This kind of project is a first for me as all the multimedia I had done before was spot news done with super quick turn around for the next day. Having the time to go in depth and produce a full story is much more satisfying.

The project my team made was about female tattoo artists breaking into the industry. The other team produced a piece on refugees and immigrants settling in Bowling Green. (Here’s where I wish I had had more time. Our site leans heavily on javascript and jQuery for navigation and I didn’t finish making the site cross browser compatible. It degrades very badly in IE. It only works perfectly in Firefox. And I couldn’t figure out blocking for XHR requests. If I find more time this summer, I might try and figure out those issues and turn the layout into a general purpose template for multimedia stories)

Besides the new skills I learned and the new people I met, I had a revelation about how people learn journalism. I’ve always thought that the best way to learn journalism was through hands on experience, but….

Through the whole project there was a strong tension for all of us between doing what we were already good at and doing what we wanted to learn. I spent most of my time on web design even though I wanted to learn photo. Our best photographer spent most of her time on photo despite wanting to learn video. And of course this is kind of natural because people gravitate towards what they’re good at. And there’s almost a duty to your interview subjects to do a good job.

But it also means that once you start going down a particular skill path you are committed and it becomes hard to branch out into learning new things.

Now that I’ve been to one workshop, I’d like to go to one where we have explicit permission to do a bad job so that we’re not afraid to experiment and take on roles that are new to us.

There’s been quite a debate between free and paid content but it’s in quite a sorry state. On one side (mostly old school reporters and newspaper execs) people think that publishers need to charge people for content, block everyone else out, and sue the pants of Google for profiting off indexing stories. On the other side (mostly techies and copyleftists) are free content idealists harping on the line that “information wants to be free.”

But both sides are equally wrong, or at least misguided. Pretty much every company in the world has different products at different prices, why do journalists think they should have just one?

What you really need to do to monetize content is to take a page from the airlines and freemium web services and every other company with a product ever and learn how to price discriminate. Not only will you make much more money doing it, you will produce much better quality journalism as well.

Offer your basic and commodity content for free. Then create high value premium content and charge readers a monthly fee for it. [1]

Alan Mutter has some good ideas for types of premium content you can create. Here’s the economics that underlies it.

The Demand Curve

We have a standard downward sloping demand curve [2] with each point on the curve indicates how much value a consumer is getting from the product. Now if a site gives away all their content, the only revenue they get is from advertising, and the consumers who get the most value from the content pick up a nice chunk of consumer surplus.

Point D represents the smallest amount of value a reader gets from your site. This is likely in the micropayment range, likely just a few cents, but the quantity consumed is also huge. It doesn’t make sense to mess around with micropayments, because the site can monetize their traffic with advertising revenue. For simplicity’s sake we’ll say marginal advertising revenue is constant for any quantity. [3] While you could try charging with micropayments, it likely wouldn’t work. The mental cost of deciding whether or not to pay and then paying is a hefty tax on the process. (I’d argue that trying to charge anything less than $10 at a time or so becomes counterproductive, but the smoother the payment process is the lower this amount can go)

How can you increase revenue? By capturing consumer surplus.

Price Discrimination with Advertising

We would like to set several different price points at A, B, and C to charge people different amounts based on where they are on the curve. Businessmen and politicians and news junkies get much more value from a news site than casual readers do, but how can we charge them a higher amount than everyone else? Airlines are the classic example. They do it with such a pricing schemes that make sure that you almost certainly did not pay the same amount for your ticket as your seatmate. [4] To do it for a news site, you’ll want to create varied products such that the product offered at price point A appeals to all the readers left of point A. Each of the points A, B, and C need to be different slices of unique premium content that readers will pay different amounts for.

A few more points to consider

• Judging Value — You need to be able to accurately judge the value of all your content and spend a good amount of time researching and calculating what the proper price points are. I suspect for high quality business news, sites could get away with subscriptions costing upwards of a hundred dollars per year. Things like high end wine or restaurant reviews also don’t make much sense as free content. If someone is spending a hundred dollars a bottle, they’ll pay for a review backed by a renowned brand name.
• Subscriber value versus site traffic — For any given piece of content, you have a dilemma. You can put it in the premium content pile and restrict access to it, or you can put it up for free. Each piece of content that goes into the free pile increases your reach and traffic, but slightly erodes the value your premium subscribers get and makes them more likely to switch. This is a delicate balance. One way around it might be to delay the speed at which non-subscribers can access content. So that masterful investigative piece might be subscriber only for the first week, after which its open for anyone to read. The kind of high quality, high traffic pieces you want to grow traffic will be the exact same pieces of content you want as premium content to get people to pay.
• Archives are terrible premium content — A lot of newspapers have their full archives online behind a paywall. Sometimes a very expensive paywall where per article access can cost close to $10. What audience is this supposed to attract? People who place enough value on old news articles (lawyers, academics, other reporters, students writing papers etc.) to pay for them, likely all have access to LexisNexis subscriptions already and won’t pay. And the average reader won’t care enough to pay for an article they stumble across. It seems like they’ve made a terrible subscriber value/traffic trade-off here.
• What am I buying? — Transparency and convenience are important. With your premium content make it explicitly clear what types of content and privileges a subscriber will get. Any uncertainty here means fewer paying customers.
• Piracy will be an issue — Remember that when digital content has a price, piracy is going to be a problem. Look at the troubles the movie and music industries are having. You’ll have to be willing to vigorously defend your copyright against sites which spring up and paraphrase all your premium content.

Notes

[1] DO NOT just repackage your current content as free content. It’s almost certainly not good enough. Thinking hard about what sorts of content readers will pay for, you’ll produce better content too.
[2] Different pieces of content have different value to different consumers. Together they form a downward sloping demand curve. A few consumers are willing to pay a lot for content, but this amount drops off quickly. On the right side of the graph, by decreasing the price towards zero, the quantity consumed can be expanded almost to infinity.
[3] In truth, marginal revenue from advertising is probably downward sloping as well, but the market for that is so much more inelastic than that for traffic that it doesn’t matter. That line should also extend all the way to the left.
[4] Nearly every economics textbook has an example about the price of airline seats to explain price discrimination. For them point A are the business travelers that need comfy seats and need to buy them at the last minute. Because the value they get from travel is much higher than average they are willing to pay much more. Point B might be the families on vacation, they’re willing to book well in advance but they might want their tickets refundable in case things change. But they’re also price conscious. If the ticket costs as much as at point A, they’ll just stay home instead. Point C would be the budget travelers and backpackers, who are willing to fly standby on whatever plane has a few empty seats. In the end they all get the same service, transportation from one point to another, but by varying the conditions and terms of each ticket, the airline is able to make much more money.

Looks like this post has gotten a bit of attention. If you found it interesting, you might also enjoy my earlier post 9 ways that newspapers can make money that aren’t advertising.

I’ve also given a brief talk on this topic at the Information Valet conference hosted by the University of Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Institute. Martin Langeveld did a great write up of it for the Nieman Lab, making some of my points better than I did myself. A video is here.

Watch us live at 2pm as Greg Linch, Joey Baker and I discuss innovation in online student news.

Okay, replaced the live stream with a saved version of the session. Hope I didn’t embarrass myself too badly. Watch after the jump.

Keep reading…

My entry in the Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists blog ring for January. The topic asks:
Do you think it will be the “old” news organizations that achieve the radical transformation they need, or is it more wise (as a journalist) to invest your time in a “new” news startup?

I want to think about this question from the perspective of an investor considering buying a newspaper and implementing a drastic turn-around plan. Or perhaps, with the same money that investor could go off and finance some people to start a competitor. What should they do?

What value do you get out of buying an existing operation?

• A trusted brand name
• Established base of readers and visitors
• A newsroom of talented journalists
• Equipment, computers, office space, etc.
• Content archive

What downside is there to buying an existing operation?

• Piles of debt
• Institutional inertia
• High operating costs

What value do you get from starting fresh?

• Innovative attitudes not burdened by “the way things have always been done”
• Online only focus from the beginning
• Low operating costs

And what downside is there?

• Need to invest in new equipment and software
• Need to build traffic and viewers
• Brand name non-existent

Keep reading…

Big news! At long last, the DP has launched it’s first public web site on Drupal at http://34st.com for our weekly arts and entertainment magazine, 34th Street. We’ve been working on developing an alternative to College Publisher since I started my term as Web Editor-in-Chief at The Daily Pennsylvanian in January. After months of waffling and pressure we decided to move ahead with development and committed to launching a new website. And finally, we’re here.

Theming with Zen

Last time, I wrote about the data structure underlying our website running on Drupal and promised that I would write again about theming.

The Drupal theming layer is quite powerful, but can also quickly become incredibly complex. It also depends on module developers to play nicely and make all their code easily themable. It also requires a designer to learn how to work with Drupal and all it’s eccentricities.

Drupal themes depend on layers of overrides and hooks. Drupal core provides a default layout, which can then be modified by modules, then the template engine, then the theme and finally an optional subtheme. At each layer the previous output can be modified or overridden. That way, if someone were designing a set of themes or wanted to present options for a user to customize the site’s look and feel it could degrade gracefully.

Since we weren’t worrying about any of those things, we did nearly everything in the top-most sub-theme layer.

Luckily for us the Zen starter theme makes much of this easier.

To develop our theme, we were lucky enough to have a great starting point in the amazing Zen starter template and it’s great documentation. We made a Zen subtheme as a folder within Zen with their Starter Kit.

Note: One big mistake I made when we started working on our subtheme was naming it “34st”. As it turns out, many of the theme override functions require you to name them THEMENAME_functionname. Unfortunately, PHP variables can’t start with numbers so after some frustration and griping I had to rename the subtheme.

node-type.tpl.php

Content Templates provides a view of all available variables and example values.

Many places advise themers to use the Content Templates module to theme different content types. With Zen however, I found it much easier to just create files in the sub-template directory with certain naming conventions. For our article content type, a file named node-article.tpl.php themes it. For an issue, node-issue.tpl.php contains the theme. Since these files are theming a node, it’s possible to see all the variables in the array by simply doing a <?php print_r($node); ?> in a human-readable format. Content Templates, however can do the same thing, and with a much nicer interface.

For the most part, after finding all the appropriate variables, we simply plopped them into the appropriate places in the template. But, within these template files, we still have complete access to PHP and the entire Drupal API. Which of course means that I get lazy.

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<?php 
//Covering all the different numbers of bylines
if (($node->field_byline[0]['view'] != '') && ($node->field_byline[1]['view'] == '')): ?>
<div class="article-byline">
	<div class="author-teaser-name-nodelink">By <?php print $node->field_byline[0]['view'] ?></div>
</div>
<?php elseif (($node->field_byline[0]['view'] != '') && ($node->field_byline[1]['view'] != '') && ($node->field_byline[2]['view'] == '')): ?>
<div class="article-byline">
	<div class="author-teaser-name-nodelink">By <?php print $node->field_byline[0]['view'] . ' and ' . $node->field_byline[1]['view']; ?></div>
</div>
<?php elseif (($node->field_byline[0]['view'] != '') && ($node->field_byline[1]['view'] != '') && ($node->field_byline[2]['view'] != '')): ?>
<div class="article-byline">
	<div class="author-teaser-name-nodelink">By <?php 
	$numauthors = count($node->field_byline);
	print $node->field_byline[0]['view'];
	for ($i=0;$i<$numauthors-1;$i++) {
		print ', ' . $node->field_byline[$i]['view']; 
	}
	print ' and ' . $node->field_byline[$numauthors-1]['view'];
	?>
	</div>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>

That’s my code for handling all the different possibilities for multiple authors on a single article. For more elegant code, this should be higher up in the templating than the .tpl.php file, but it’s much easier this way.

Teaser versus Full views

For each field, one chooses how it will be displayed in the teaser, and in the full node.

For each field in a content type, you can choose two ways of displaying it. The Teaser is used when the node is being viewed on the front page, or in a section listing, and Full is the whole article is being read. Pretty self-explanatory. But it does mean that in each .tpl.php file you have to theme both. Here’s a sample.

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<?php 
if (($teaser) && (!$page)): 
	/*
	 * This case governs how articles show up in section page views, in the nodereferrer on authors,
	 * and everywhere else an article teaser (not on the front) is shown.
	 *
	 */
elseif (($page) && (!$teaser)):
	/*
	 * This case is for displaying the whole article on its own page.
	 *
	 */
endif; ?>

We also get other fun template variables like $is_front so we can do things like so.

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elseif ((($teaser) && (!$page) && ($is_front)) || (($page) && ($teaser))):
	/*
	 * This first case is for articles that are on the front page or in the sidebar.
	 * articles in the current issue. The second half of the OR only happens when node_view is
	 * manually called like node_view($node_object,$page=TRUE,$teaser=TRUE);
	 *
	 */

For reference, here’s the three different views of a single article.

if ((($teaser) && (!$page) && ($is_front)) || (($page) && ($teaser))):

if (($teaser) && (!$page)):

if (($page) && (!$teaser)):

Importing Data

We received our archives from College Publisher as a set of CSV files. My next post will address how we imported those archives.

What did you think of this post? Got more questions about our Drupal install? Leave a comment. The new website is 34th Street Magazine, poke around and leave us some feedback!

How we did it in Drupal, Part 2 of X

1. How we did it in Drupal, Pt. 1 of X – The Data Structure
2. How we did it in Drupal, Pt. 2 of X – Theming with Zen

Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard just coined a new term, ““Holovaty’s Law”, that I really like. Well, I believe he coined it because Google turns up no results for “Holovaty’s Law”.

The post linked as Holovaty’s Law, by the way, is a classic. If you haven’t read it and you’re interested in news and journalism at all, you need to.

Let me take the concept and run a little further with it. And thanks to Benton, the law already has it’s first corollary!

Theorem: Holovaty’s (First) Law of Online News

Adding structure to information makes it more valuable

1st Corollary

Adding structure to comments generates interesting data

Thoughts? Refinements? Other corollaries?

It seems like there’s a dearth of math geeks interested in journalism. Searches for “law of online news”, “fundamental theorem of online news”, “fundamental theorem of online journalism”, and “law of online journalism” all turn up nothing.

I wrote before about the new 34th Street Magazine website being in Alpha.

This is the first post of a series on what we did to Drupal to make it behave the way we want it to, how we implemented different features and to ask for feedback and advice on how to do future features.

To start out understanding Drupal, it’s important to understand that Drupal was designed and the developer’s focus is largely on creating flexible websites for communities, NOT for publishing or blogging. For instance, there isn’t a natural distinction between readers and administrators among the user roles. (Adding content is at node/add/* not admin/*) A lot of the work involved in setting up a site on Drupal is to work around the default values and settings and make it behave the way you want to.

Part of the joy of using Wordpress is that it’s defined for a very specific purpose and all the development work that goes into it is designed to make it easier to blog. With Wordpress, it takes very little work to go from a default install to writing your first post.

That’s not true for Drupal. No one would use Drupal with only its core functionality and the default settings. But with a little work, it becomes much, much more powerful and better suited for publishing a news website than Wordpress.

The problem I’m still struggling with now is how to import data into Drupal’s database. The database structure is quite complex compared to our current site, or a Wordpress site, but luckily the Content Construction Kit abstracts all of that when the site is being built. And that’s the topic of today’s post.

Nodes, Users and Custom Content Types!

Everything in our system is a node. Stories. Slideshows. Sections. Authors. Issues.

Content types

The CCK module lets us define all the different information each node needs and tie authors to articles and articles to sections and issues with node reference fields. Each content type is themed separately with a different template and the different ways that piece of content can be viewed are defined by a set of boolean PHP variables.

Our site uses the following CCK content types.

Article submission

At the database level

Creating a new field

When creating fields and content types, this is all you see. Pick data types and title them. For the most part, the rest of the process is completely opaque. To learn more about the database structure of CCK, there’s documentation in greater detail here.

There are several tables that store data for CCK fields.

• node – This table stores the unique nid of the node, and what type it is.
• node_revisions – This table stores the body content of the node, as well as data about which user created it, when it was revised and what’s in the teaser.
• content_type_[type] – If a content type has fields that are only used by that content type, this table contains the values of that field.
• content_field_[field] – Contains the values of that field.

Theming

A lot of the heavy lifting in Drupal is done at the theming layer. Luckily Zen makes it all much easier. That’s what I’ll be writing about next time. Some of the other upcoming posts will address how we handle images (Imagecache and CCK), how we theme our newsletters and how we handle multimedia.

What did you think of this post? Got more questions about our Drupal install? Leave a comment. The new website is at http://beta.34st.com, poke around and leave us some feedback!

How we did it in Drupal, Part 1 of X

1. How we did it in Drupal, Pt. 1 of X – The Data Structure
2. How we did it in Drupal, Pt. 2 of X – Theming with Zen

In the course of developing Drupal for the DP, we’ve been fortunate that we’ve had to write very little (themeing layer excepted) from scratch. Chalk it up to to the strength and robustness of the Drupal community that nearly every function we wanted, there was a module for.

One module that I did have to write from scratch was to replicate a function from College Publisher. After copy and pasting a story into CP’s interface, there was a button run all that doubled the line breaks, among other things.

Drupal wraps text separated by two line breaks with <p> tags and uses the <br /> tag to in-between text separated by one line break. By default, text copied out of InCopy only has one line break between paragraphs.

When Sean Blanda posted about the Temple News moving to Wordpress, this was one of the 6 problems he laid out as having.

Keep reading…

Exciting news on the CMS front.

34th Street Alpha

As some may know, The Daily Pennsylvanian web staff and I have been working on using Drupal to run our website and as a replacement for College Publisher on and off since the spring. The first part of that process is now nearly done and we have a nearly complete website for our magazine 34th Street!

We made the decision to go ahead and develop and launch a site in Drupal a few weeks ago and since then have been in a somewhat hectic mode scrambling to get all the launch features ready. A great deal of thanks goes to the folks who made the New York Observer site happen and wrote up how they did it.

Now it’s on to testing and training the other editors on how to use the system and looking for places to make the site work better, and make publishing easier. We also have to write a complete set of documentation for future and current editors on how to use the system, how to modify it, how to deal with Drupal upgrades and what to do in case things go wrong.

Keep reading…

Since College Publisher doesn’t give its clients access to their own databases or the web server, to do many things (like adding any new feature) requires working around it on auxiliary servers they provide running LAMP.

One feature that CP desperately needs is the ability to create a block of related stories.

So I struggled with the problem a little bit and created a little script to let totally non-tech savvy editors create a block of code to paste in.

You can see a demo of it here.

Related links generator

The source code is here. To run it, your server must allow fopen to open url’s.

Source

This is the first time I’ve released the code of anything I’ve written, so give me some feedback!

The dream jobs for today’s journalists are largely the same as they have always been. The rule was, and still is, the larger the circulation and the more often they publish the better.

As long as this is the case, that’s where all the young talent will go. Unfortunately, right now those are the worst possible places for them to end up.

An awkward transition

In my last post, I wrote recommended some ideas for new revenue to fill the chasm between declining print and rising online ad revenue.

Now I worry that even with as much innovation as they can muster the valiant struggle to save the medium and the famous mastheads will be a fight that is inevitably lost, and the old media dinosaurs will just die by ice age instead of asteroid.

Maybe it would just be best to let them die quickly.

Death of a paper

I link to Mark Potts a lot, but he is amazingly incisive. He’s written a speculative piece about what will happen in the aftermath of a major metro daily’s bankruptcy.

What will happen is the other news sources will have to step up and be more entrepreneurial. The bloggers and TV news and the alt weekly will all have to do more original reporting. New startups will spring up, run by the laid off staffers to focus on local news. Most importantly, it will give everyone a sense of entrepreneurial drive that a slowly dying organizing can never have.

To fill the gap for readers and advertisers left by a newspaper dying a whole new media ecosystem of content producers and distributors will spring up.

That’s where young journalists should be. We should be at startups, innovating and experimenting and taking stupid risks. Doing exactly the kinds of things a risk averse newspaper bleeding to death and busy slashing jobs won’t do.

So the biggest challenge facing young journalists is our own mindset prizing the old media over new.

The business model is still the elephant model in the room, as Ryan Sholin writes.

All the new media in the world won’t save the media, if they can’t figure out how to make money off of it. Will advertising be enough? At the very least there’s a deep chasm to cross, according to some analysis Mark Potts did.

And so since social networks and Web 2.0 companies can serve up page views far cheaper than media companies, it’s time to look at some alternate business models.

1. Merchandising


CNN already does it. Web comics do it. Randall Munroe writer of xkcd and his roommate make a living purely off of merchandising, according to his New York Times profile. xkcd attracts a huge audience but runs no advertising. So sell some t-shirts and sweatshirts with a masthead or a logo on it. Or with headlines. Or let people custom order t-shirts with photos from the paper on it. Or framed copies of stories about them or that they were quoted in. Okay, lots of papers do sell photos, but they’re mostly impossible to find unless you’re specifically looking for them so most readers never find it. There should at least be a link by every photo that runs. The Harvard Crimson does this.

2. Consulting

Among journalists’ skills is the ability to ferret out and synthesize a lot of information and then package it succinctly. Hey, that sounds like exactly the skills needed for a corporate report or to do background research on a new business proposal. Beyond that, they are supposed to be experts in the fields they cover. So let companies or individuals hire journalists as consultants to provide advice or do research for an hourly rate. a HIGH hourly rate.

3. Briefings

Similar to number two, journalists are supposed to be good at presenting a lot of information in an easy to digest format. How then, did they give up the ENTIRE market analysis field. GigaOm is getting into it with a briefing on cloud computing priced at $250 a copy. So is paidContent.org with reports on Social Media and Online Gaming in China for $399. Look at MarketResearch.com. They have reports (information) on a huge range of topics that people are buying at prices from several hundred dollars, to several thousand! Think about all the extra information that’s routinely gathered in the course of reporting a big story. While it’s cut to make the final piece easier to read for a mass audience, there’s also an audience that will pay for a much more in depth look.

Every local newspaper should have a “How to open a retail franchise in X” with information on the retail climate, traffic patterns and other local knowledge. There should be an “Area private schools: where to send your kid”. And more. Compile that information, make it easy to digest, and sell it. But of course, if you’re going to charge it better be damn good.

4. Sell Timeliness

For some people timeliness of information is absolutely crucial. Think professional investors, politicians, corporate executives.
So set up a system to let them see any news that is being broken first. Even just a few hours. Let’s say some news organization got a scoop that Steve Jobs’ cancer is returning. That information would be priceless to someone investing in Apple stock. Or if a strike is brewing at XYZ company, or congressman is taking bribes. There are all sorts of information where getting it even a tiny margin sooner than others is invaluable. Or just to brag to friends. Of course, this only works if the newspaper is regularly breaking news.

5. Deeper sponsorships

There are certain kinds of stories that happen regularly. Crime statistics. Holiday shopping numbers. Weather. So sell advertising tied into it. “This crime report brought to you by Mace” “This consumer spending report brought to you by Target”.

6. Get serious about local communities

Don’t just sponsor events, organize them. Conferences for local businesses. Food tastings from local restaurants. Reading in the park with local authors. Meet local sports stars. Reunion concert for musical acts that got their start locally. Movie screenings. Class action lawsuits. Debates and townhall meetings. Then sell sponsorships and tickets.

GigaOm is a great example of this again. They sponsor three conferences in the area they cover to which tickets are quite expensive. But they are good, well produced events that not only generate a ton of buzz for them, but serve an important function in the community. The Wall Street Journal is getting into it too with their All Things D conference.

7. Get serious about your online community


Look at how Ars Technica does it. They have an amazing online community that has thrived for years and produced millions of posts. The participants on their forums discuss every topic, related to their articles and not. They have classifieds, technical talk, sex, all sorts of random things. People consider the Ars forums their HOME on the internet. That’s because it’s community moderated and idiots get thrown out. Those interested in building online communities would do well to look to the online forums that have been around for so long as a good model. With as much good will as they have from their community, Ars can sell subscriptions giving things that cost Ars NOTHING. Like adding “et Subscriptor” to the end of a profile name. Or posting privileges in a private forum. Or the ability to post in html. People are paying $50 for status symbols in the community.

8. Pay what you will model

Like Radiohead famously did for their album In Rainbows. “Sell” your subscriptions for online (or Mobile or Kindle or heck, even print) for however much customers decide they want to pay.

9. Remember customer service

Who are your customers? Advertisers. What service are you providing to them? Reaching their customers. Selling more display ads isn’t always the best way of doing that. If you can help your advertisers succeed you will too.

Some of these may be infeasible, or even unethical so tear em apart and come up with better ones.

Bryan Murley over at Innovation in College Media has posted a few pieces on the launch of Campus Daily Guide by mtvU, the same company that hosts many college newspapers on their College Media Network/College Publisher system. Inside Higher Ed did a write up too, that is fairly definitive.

I’ve responded to a few of the points that Murley made in comments on his blog, but I thought I’d do a longer take.

Let’s look at who the Campus Daily Guide’s will really compete with. CDG has local event listings, upcoming performers and sporting events, movie times, a local restaurant directory and links to things like an academic calendar and Rate My Professors.

Where do college students go to find these things now?

Very, very, few will turn to their campus newspaper website, because with the possible exception of the restaurant directory, none of these things are provided on a campus newspapers website.

Where do we go for these things?

Facebook
Upcoming.org
Yelp
Live Nation
OpenTable.com
outside

(these are true for me at least, leave where you go in the comments)

Last I checked, none of these places have links to content on college newspapers websites the way Campus Daily Guide does.

So we should all be hoping that the Campus Daily Guides take off. It’ll drive at least that much more student traffic to college paper sites that desperately need it.

Wow. When I stopped watching the Pistons Sixers game, I was confident the Sixers were out. But not so.

Reading the post game coverage from my two “local” newspapers, the Free Press and the Inquirer I noticed one quote in both stories that seemed uncannily similar, but also totally different.

Both from Andre Iguodala, (great addition to my Fantasy team by the way) and both about sleeping.

Here’s the Inquirer’s version

“I don’t know if Detroit relaxed at that point,” said Andre Iguodala, who had 16 points, nine rebounds and eight assists but shot just 4 for 15. “That is Detroit: They tend to lull you to sleep, and we kept fighting.”

And the Free Press’s

But the Pistons already have given Philadelphia something it may not have had before Sunday. Confidence. A bit of entitlement. When asked about coming back on the playoff-savvy Pistons, forward Andre Iguodala said, “That’s Detroit. They tend to go to sleep at times.”

Doesn’t sound like a guy intimidated to me.

See, similar enough that they’re likely the same quote, but enough words are different that….what on earth were the writers thinking?

Language Log has written about this before, in reference to a Rasheed Wallace quote gone awry.

John Harris of Politico and Mark Halperin, TIME’s Senior Political Analyst, are giving a session on political reporting and the 2008 elections.

Mark Halperin went to Harvard, but didn’t work for The Crimson. Still became a journalist though.

From Jackie Calmes:

“Obama’s a prickly guy and the press all know that and I think it’s reflected in his coverage some.”

And on Clinton.

In ‘93 and ‘94 when her healthcare plan she began to take all criticism of it personally, and ever since then has never really recovered from that.

Josh Benton from the Dallas Morning News just gave a presentation on “Web Tools, Blogging and Multimedia Reporting.” What he really did was give a wake up call to an audience of journalism students, or rather (old men) who are very stuck in the ways and nostalgia of print journalism.

I’m glad to say my friend here, a dead tree and typewriter reporter if there ever was one, has experienced what he calls a total conversion, and offered to come learn and shoot video. The rest of the audience seemed similarly woken.

Josh Benton from the Dallas Morning News “The people who are drawn to newspapers are the very conservative people (small c) who love the smell of newsprint in the morning.”

Journalism is like the priesthood in that it attracts more conservative people, and so over time, filtering it like that, the profession becomes more and more conservative.

“Ivy League newspaper protectionism”

It’s very easy to develop the newspaper habit because it’s free and easily available and has no competition. Once you leave school, this all changes.

I’m heading to Harvard today for the 2008 Georges Conference, hosted by Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. Strangely, I can’t find any information about the conference online at the Nieman Foundation’s website, and searching for it only brings up this site from last year’s “fourth annual” conference. Here’s the schedule for this year’s conference.

I’ll keep updating as the day goes on.

This seems to be quite the weekend for conferences though. NextNewsroom is happening in South Carolina. I’ve been following it, vaguely live, here on Innovation in College Media. Meanwhile, part of the dailypennsylvanian.com team is headed to Yale for the Yale Daily News’s first ever Web Conference. We’re the only College Publisher hosted site going, and hopefully they can come back having picked the brains of the people at the Cornell Daily Sun and Columbia Spectator, both of whom use Drupal.

It looks like the Spectator has built their site making writers into a CCK node type, while the Cornell Daily Sun is using Drupal’s default user management, with whoever enters the article into the CMS listed as the author. This fits more in with this very ambitious proposal to manage story workflow and assigning online.

Fun stuff.

Courtesy of Major League Baseball.

This article from The Cincinatti Enquirer about limitations that Major League Baseball is putting on credentialed press caught my eye.

But this year came important differences: photo galleries could no longer include more than seven pictures. Web sites are limited to no more than two minutes of audio or video from any game and that content can stay up for no more than seven consecutive days.

Of lesser concern to the sports editors, Cherwa said, is a provision limiting bloggers to posting less frequently than once per half-inning.

Similarly, the NCAA has also put in restrictions on how often reporters can post live to their blogs during games.

Let’s think about this, under these conditions why on earth would you even bother credentialing yourself? I’ve had friends post photo galleries of games onto Facebook with more than seven pictures or two minutes of video, and of course that stays up longer than seven consecutive days.

I understand that live blogging and instant updates can infringe on a leagues deal for exclusivity with a particular media outlet, but the internet changes all of that. Any body with a ticket and a cell phone can be live blogging a game, press credential or no press credential.

Or a laptop with wireless internet access. Or say, a laptop and a video camera. Or even, a laptop, a video camera, and an acccount (free) with ustream.tv then I can stream the game live! Or perhaps I have a Nokia N95 and I can stream live video with just my cell phone!

What are they going to do? Ban laptops and cameras and cell phones from sporting events?

At this point, I assume the perks to being credentialed press, especially for photographers and videographers (court side, field side access) outweigh these restrictions, but for how long?

For live bloggers and sports writers, what benefit does being credentialed give them at all? Access to players for interviews perhaps? Or being able to attend the post game press conference? How long will those perks outweigh the restrictions?

Student Government elections time here at Penn. The Daily Pennsylvanian web team has put together this guide for all of you on who the candidates for each position are, along with their candidate statement. Plus, put a face and voice to each name with video candidate statements.