This monthly newsletter is focused on sharing cutting edge stories, trends, topics, and social media posts with unique perspectives and new ideas that have the potential to translate to opportunities for news and magazine publishers. Stories and posts we share might cover topics as wide-ranging as Web3, podcasts, startups and technology, online advertising, and more. Click the links below to access current and past editions. I hope you enjoy and please let me know what you’re seeing out there that you see as up and coming for the news industry. Drop me a line at rebecca@newsmediaalliance.org.

Rebecca Frank, VP, Research & Insights, News/Media Alliance

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Current Issue:

June 2023 – This month, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about one particular essay about the “creator economy.” To those of us working in “old media,” the idea of a single person, armed with a brain, a laptop, and the ability to distribute to the whole internet has long been positioned as “the future.” But in this insightful piece, Renée DiResta examines how the conditions of our current era – technological and reader attention-based – have led so many individual creators to become what DiResta calls “propagandists.” The piece is worth reading for anyone who believes in the value of fact-based news, and also the business model that supports it. Keep reading.

Past Issues:

May 2023 

April 2023

March 2023

February 2023

January 2023

November 2022

October 2022

September 2022

August 2022

July 2022

June 2022

May 2022

April 2022

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The post Expanding the View appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

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It is not a stretch to say that programmatic advertising and the broader suite of advertising technology (or ad tech) has harmed publishers in multiple ways. Whether due to the system’s monopolization by the largest tech platforms, the ability for bad actors to manipulate the system for profit,  or unscrupulous vendors playing on advertisers’ fears, it seems wherever you look, you can find evidence of the adverse impact of ad tech companies’ actions on publishers. A new report out in January gives us hope, however, that things may be looking up.

In 2020, the UK’s Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA), working with PwC, published a landmark study tracking ad tech spend, the findings of which were very disturbing to publishers. Among the findings was an “unknown delta” of 15 percent of advertising spend that could not be attributed to either the buyers or sellers in the ad tech value exchange. The fact that publishers were only receiving 51 percent of advertiser spend was also cause for alarm. As we wrote at the time, “This study should act as a clarion call to publishers, advertisers and the ad tech community that the system as it stands does not work as it should.”

At least to some extent, that call has been heard and we hope to see the improvements continue.

In addition, last month the two organizations reported “positive and welcome improvements” in the second round of the study, conducted in 2022.

They found, among other increased benefits:

• “Improvements in data access successfully halved the time required to conduct the study to nine months (vs. 18 months for the 2020 study).
• Greater standardisation of data quality improved the ad impression match rate to 58% (vs. 12% in 2020) and the unattributable ad spend (AKA the unknown delta) was reduced to 3% (vs. 15% in 2020).
• The proportion of advertiser spend reaching publishers has risen by 8%.”

However, there are still many places where the deck remains stacked against publishers. As AdExchanger reported, “PwC itself has room to grow as an auditor” to better understand and audit more transactions. And publishers still take less than two-thirds of advertising dollars spent, with companies that are not involved in content creation taking a large share of the advertising placed against it.

While the report’s findings are welcome and positive, all parties have a responsibility to continue to advocate – voting with their voices and their dollars – for a stronger system for ad-supported news and content.

The post A Spot of Good Ad Tech News for Publishers appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

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This survey has ended – thank you for your participation!

We are evaluating our news and magazine audience and advertising research reports and would like your feedback!

To better meet your needs and continue to provide relevant data and trends about news and magazine media, we want to take the best of the News Advertising Panorama and Magazine Media Factbook and expand on those elements. But we need your help to make sure we’re providing you what you need most!

Please click the link below to share your thoughts. The survey should take you no more than ten minutes to complete.

Your input is extremely valuable and we thank you very much for your assistance in this important exercise!

Note: This survey is for Alliance members only who use the News Advertising Panorama and/or the Magazine Media Factbook.

Please email Alliance VP, Research & Insights Rebecca Frank at rebecca@newsmediaalliance.org if you have any questions about this survey or our research reports.

The post Alliance Members: We’d Like Your Input! Audience & Advertising Research Needs appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

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From 2021 to 2022, ransomware attacks by hackers increased 13 percent, according to the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), an increase larger than the previous five years combined. In 2014, Google researchers reported that “21 of the top-25 news organizations in the world have been targeted by hackers” (largely by state actors), a number that has almost certainly increased in the past eight years.

While large corporate and government hacks tend to generate the most attention, smaller organizations are at risk as well. In June 2022, a local, independently-owned publisher (who requested to remain anonymous) found its servers had been hacked and held ransom.

The publisher learned at 3:00 am local time that a hacker had broken in to one of their systems, looked at what files were accessible, and then locked the system, leaving a ransom note. The publisher found the ransom note when they accessed the system while attempting to solve a different print production issue. By 4:00 am local time, the publishers had notified their insurance provider, retained a lawyer and contacted the FBI.

With their legal and insurance team in place, the publisher began its response on two tracks. The first step was to contact the hacker directly. Since paying ransoms is technically illegal, their insurer had to get approval for any payments, and they were advised to set a ceiling for what they would pay and to not respond to the hacker right away, so that they might extend the timeline. On a parallel track, their internal teams were working to rebuild systems and find backups, to determine whether they would need the ransomed information at all.

It took approximately two weeks, but the publisher determined an estimate of the value of what was lost and made the hacker a counter-offer at an insurer-approved amount. When it was rejected, the publisher chose to walk away from what was lost, confident they had made the best decision without paying the original ransom amount. This was reinforced as the publisher learned that decryption keys, the information that hackers typically offer in return for their payment, don’t always work, and there is the risk of data loss even for those who pay off the hackers.

Overall, the publisher sees this as a success for three reasons:

1.)  They had a plan: They previously had a conversation on this topic with another publisher in their region, which had led them to set up a process in the event of a hack.

2.)  As part of that plan, they had cyber insurance that specifically covered ransomware attacks and a provider that could advise them on what to do, which included installing monitoring software throughout the organization’s computers and making changes to information security, such as requiring more complicated passwords.

3.)  Because they had a plan, they were able to take a step back and proceed “like it was 1975,” as the publisher said, until all their systems were back up and running safely. Any work that could be done offline, was done offline.

Additionally, the publisher also learned that some of their internal processes, while not to blame for the attack, impacted how they were able to respond to it. For instance, the publisher stored some archives in physical servers that were then locked by the hacker, rather than utilizing cloud storage, which is controlled by a third-party that can provide necessary access. Additionally, the publisher’s regular data backup schedule meant that the hacker’s malware reached their internal servers more quickly than it might have otherwise. The publisher is now reconsidering how frequently to back up their data.

The publisher said that hacks of this nature are “a criminal enterprise that works because it’s done in silence.” They believe in talking candidly about what they learned and how other organizations can prepare in advance for the possibility of a ransomware attack.

The publisher offered three pieces of advice for companies thinking about their risk:

1.)  Do not assume your company is too small for hackers to pay attention to.

2.)  Make a plan – Know how to contact your lawyer, insurance provider, and law enforcement, so you can determine what to do at each stage of the process.

3.)  Consider whether your IT policies increase your vulnerability to being hacked and work to resolve them in advance.

No company is immune to the threat of ransom attacks, but as this experience shows, forward-thinking organizations can take smart steps to mitigate their effects and continue with minimal interruptions.

The post This Publisher was Victim of a Ransomware Attack: How They Minimized the Impact and 3 Lessons You Can Apply appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

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With the rise of digital platforms as a major distribution channel for news, concerns about “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers” – a phenomenon that occurs when platforms’ algorithms only serve readers content that they already agree with – have arisen. As more and more news consumers get information online, the scholarly community has worked to investigate the impact of this shift and the degree to which it perpetuates partisan viewpoints due to the lack of visibility of alternative perspectives. A study published in the journal Science Advances in 2022 added new data to the field and suggests that unlike TV, online news is not a major driver of partisan news consumption.

The cross-disciplinary study, conducted by researchers in the fields of communications, computer science and economics, set out to understand where TV news consumption fits into the question of American news consumption and partisanship. As the report explains, “What is missing from this debate is a broader view of partisan audience segregation that includes the Internet but recognizes that the modal American experience of news cannot be adequately described or explained based on online behavior alone.” With 64 percent of Americans saying they get their news from TV sometimes or often in 2021, according to the Pew Research Center, this inclusion is vital.

At the highest level, the finding suggests that concerns about partisan news consumption should focus on TV rather than online sources. The researchers declare that “while only a minority of TV viewers are part of a partisan-segregated news audience, this minority is far larger and far more internally consistent than what has been found in the online media environment.”

Four key data points underline this finding:

• About 17 percent of Americans are partisan-segregated via TV—roughly four times as many as are partisan-segregated via online news consumption.
• TV news consumers are several times more likely to maintain their partisan news diets month-over-month.
• TV viewers’ news diets are far more concentrated on preferred sources, while even partisan online news audience members tend to consume from a variety of sources.
• Partisan cable news audiences are growing even as the whole TV news audience is shrinking.

New Paper”Quantifying Partisan News Diets in Web and TV Audiences” in @ScienceAdvances with Dan Muise @homahmrd Baird Howland @markusmobius @duncanjwatts: if you are concerned about partisan-segregation, you should be focused on TV, not online https://t.co/9rXUFR3O5a 1/7 pic.twitter.com/NG4yjih2Mt

— David Rothschild (@DavMicRot) July 13, 2022

Publishers working in non-TV media should pay close attention to these findings. As online news consumption continues to grow, people who get their news there will likely continue to get information from across the ideological spectrum. Companies that invest in gathering and producing unbiased news are continuing to meet their responsibility to the American public.

Though many detractors of the legacy news industry attack its supposed “partisanship,” these findings suggest that high-quality news, when consumed online, provides a more balanced view of major issues. The results also suggest that the digital platforms through which most Americans find their news should promote quality journalism sources further. Online news distribution, so often algorithmically managed, could be used to fight partisan segregation, if the online platforms would use their power to promote real, unbiased news sources.

The post Study Suggests Online News Not a Major Contributor to Partisan News Consumption appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

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Building the technology that underpins the online advertising ecosystem is a lucrative business. The two largest online advertising companies, Alphabet and Meta (parent companies of Google and Facebook, respectively) are also some of the most valuable companies that have ever existed. But many other companies have found success in the ad tech market, earning money by inserting themselves into advertising transactions that once took place between only advertisers and publishers. However, three recent developments suggest that ad tech – which already has many known flaws – may be negatively impacting publishers even more than previously understood.

The black box of ad technology, particularly “brand safety” tech, has long been suspected to cause harm by needlessly scaring advertisers away from supporting news with their ad buys. We now have even more insight into the harm caused to advertisers and publishers by these unscrupulous middlemen, supporting our previous call for advertisers to walk away from this system.

The first notable finding centers on the fees siphoned away from publishers. Research conducted by Adalytics found that the fees taken by the “supply chain” range from 22-45 percent, with an average of 35 percent of ad dollars taken from publishers. In some extreme cases, demand-side and supply-side platforms (DSPs and SSPs) take 98 percent of an advertiser’s spend, leaving a mere two percent for publishers. The study also highlights how in the complex, auction-based system, some SSPs deliberately take a loss on some bids, “juicing their overall win rate.” Publishers are trapped in a system controlled by companies with few motives beyond winning, so that they can continue to take their cut on sales.

Even ad tech companies that claim to be looking out for advertisers and publishers do not seem to be acting honestly. “Brand safety” companies prey on advertisers’ concerns about where their ads will run, providing little benefit to brands while cutting off publishers from revenue that could be reinvested into newsgathering and distribution by encouraging keyword blocking. A joint statement from the News Media Alliance and Digital Content Next in 2020 explained:

Fact-based, reliable journalism supports the online ecosystem by providing readers with invaluable information and advertisers with high-quality content and access to these readers. Keyword blocking threatens this symbiotic relationship at the worst possible time.

This threat made it more difficult for news organizations to report on Covid-19 and the January 6 riots, and will make it more difficult in the face of hostilities in Ukraine.

Beyond harming news publishers, many brand safety tools don’t even do what they promise. On March 8, The Wall Street Journal reported that Gannett inadvertently reported inaccurate information about the location of ad placements to its advertisers. In a fully programmatic and machine-led marketplace, no individual advertiser can see every live ad, and reporting is vital for their tracking. However, Gannett’s error – which was widely agreed to not be malicious or fraudulent – highlights another flaw in the system. “Brand safety” companies sell tools and earn money from advertisers and publishers on the promise of avoiding just this type of mistake through careful monitoring and reporting. However, the brand safety trackers failed to flag this issue for months. As Matt Rogerson, head of public policy at Guardian Media Group tweeted:

Question from a dummy: if Gannett was doing this in error, what’s to stop far end of web sites from feeding the same data into the ecosystem? Similarly, if the ecosystem not catching these errors re Gannett, how can we believe they are catching them for bad actors?

— Matt Rogerson (@MattRogerson) March 10, 2022

Implicit in his question was why these companies should earn millions of dollars.

The brand safety companies – while not doing what they claim to – have found new ways to drain value from publishers. A March 10 report in Morning Brew details an additional form of abuse – ad tech companies scraping publisher data and selling contextual advertising segments based on it without permission. Contextual advertising – where the content of the story matters more than the reader’s data profile – is seen as one potential way for publishers to earn back some control in the marketplace with the disappearance of audience-based cookies. This scraping is, according to the trade groups quoted by Morning Brew, “not only a violation of publisher terms and conditions, but also the potential infringement of basic intellectual property rights.” Publishers seemingly can’t win, even with their own assets.

The harm that ad tech companies cause to publishers is now clearer than ever. They take away publishers’ ability to earn enough on advertisements to support the expensive, important work of gathering and sharing real news, waste their dollars with fraud and sell useless “safety” tools that don’t make things safer. And in an age when disinformation is rampant online and information warfare is fueling actual war in Ukraine, choosing to support real news outlets directly and advertising alongside high-quality news can literally save lives.

The post Ad Tech: It’s Worse Than We Thought appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

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Steve Jobs was famous for announcing “one more thing” toward the end of his Apple product announcements. Typically, that “one more thing” was a new device that would reshape consumers’ expectations of what technology could do for them. (Sometimes that one thing was a price point – how much would the future cost?) In more recent years, the tone of Apple’s presentations has shifted, as the company’s focus has moved away from new devices to services and features designed to keep users happy. But the June 2021 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote speech, which introduced the company’s iOS 15, did feature one more thing that should have many news organizations paying attention.

The iOS announcement highlighted how the upcoming operating system can integrate into users’ lives in a post-pandemic world and continued Apple’s theme of supporting user privacy. As SVP of engineering Craig Federighi said, “We don’t think you should have to make a tradeoff between great features and privacy. We believe you deserve both.” Much of the pre-announcement conversation focused on App Transparency Tracking (ATT), which provides individual users with the ability to opt out of having their app behavior tracked and shared with advertisers. The feature is seen as a particular challenge to Facebook, which earns the bulk of its massive revenues from advertising (due to its ability to provide advertisers with valuable metrics about app behavior). Following its release in February, one study found that “U.S. users choose to opt out of tracking 96 percent of the time” when prompted. Many news organizations, rightly concerned about Facebook’s power in the advertising market, saw ATT as an attack on the platforms’ dominance. The hope was that advertisers would shift budgets away from Facebook (and to channels that used their own first-party data, such as news publications and apps) once it lost some power to target and track users.

However, the iOS 15 announcement featured “one more thing” that has some in the news industry concerned: an update called Mail Privacy Protection. As CNN described, “The email app on Apple devices will now hide users’ IP addresses and their location, so companies sending emails can’t link that information to users’ other online activity. Additionally, senders can’t see if or when users open their email.” Specifically, Mail Privacy Protection will not allow email senders to track the pixel that is used to determine open rates. Email senders – including news organizations – will lose the powerful engagement metrics on how many of their promotions, offers, and importantly, newsletters, are being opened.

In his analysis of the announcement, Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton points out this change is substantial – “This is Apple Mail, the dominant platform for email in the U.S. and elsewhere. According to the most recent market-share numbers from Litmus, for May 2021, 93.5% of all email opens on mobile come in Apple Mail on iPhones or iPads. On desktop, Apple Mail on Mac in responsible for 58.4% of all email opens.” Benton’s piece reviews the ongoing conversation about the changes and points out, “Open rates will now officially be useless,” and that small publishers, especially individual newsletters, have the most to lose. In a tweet, Matt Taylor of the Financial Times points out that the change will “hurt small pubs the most,” and that “for those with no audience it might stop them from ever succeeding.”

Platformer writer Casey Newton – who rounded up multiple tech and news industry responses to the announcement – agreed with Benton’s conclusion that without the ability to track email opens, publishers will “adjust, somehow.” In Newton’s newsletter, he shared that he wasn’t “sure that people doing email-based journalism have all that much to worry about from the shift.” He cites independent newsletter publisher Alex Kantrowitz, whose ad-supported newsletter “was sold out for the first half of the year, thanks to a premium audience he identified not by pixel-based tracking but by a good old-fashioned reader survey.” As Renee Cassard, chief research officer at the media conglomerate Omnicom pointed out to Digiday, “The marketplace has sort of realized that there are limits to behavioral data.” Beyond straightforward behavior tracking, publishers can leverage research and data-generation tools to understand not only what their readers have done, but who they are and what they want. This data would be of high value for internal product development as well as advertiser needs.

Kantrowitz’s perspective may be the most helpful for news publishers that send newsletters and are concerned about the changes. But as with any alternative, it is not practical to view it as a magic bullet solution to preserving long-term relationships – in fact, a simple open rate calculation was never an indication of that, either. It has just been the key metric by which advertisers value newsletter placements (until now). The point is that there are many ways to build relationships with readers, and as the industry shifts toward a more consumer-needs driven model, newsletters should be seen as tools for promoting engagement and building habitual, loyal, paying readers; not viewed solely for their potential to attract advertisers. Eventually, there will be a new “open rate.” But as these indicators evolve, continuing to meet readers where they are and provide high-value products will best position your organization for success.

The post Apple’s Latest Privacy Announcement Will Impact a Key Tool in News Publishers’ Audience Engagement Toolbox: Email Newsletters appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

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Most journalists see their profession as one that can do good in the world. They profess that their role is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” while movies like “Spotlight” and “All the President’s Men” portray them tirelessly pushing to bring the truth to light. But these portraits don’t fully reflect today’s reality: There is an increasing distrust in “mainstream” journalism in the U.S. and abroad. The Media Insight Project recently investigated Americans’ perceptions of the core values that underlie journalistic inquiry and found that they are not “universally embraced,” which may be one of the reasons that distrust in the media seems intractable.

In the study, the Media Insight Project – a collaboration between the American Press Institute (a News Media Alliance foundation affiliate) and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research – tested the public’s attitudes on five core values of journalism: care versus harm, fairness versus cheating, loyalty versus betrayal, authority versus subversion, and purity versus degradation.

The findings are stark – only “11 percent unreservedly embrace all five of the journalism principles tested and these people tend to be politically liberal.” Of the five values, a majority of respondents (67 percent) support only one: “the idea that more facts get us closer to the truth.” A mere 29 percent agree that “a good way to make society better is to spotlight its problems.”

The research was based on Moral Foundations Theory, which examines how different people, regardless of their demographic qualities or political views, respond to different moral values. Researchers grouped study participants into four clusters, and only one of those had a partisan bent. The other three clusters were mixed, with the key determining factor being how much they agreed with different journalism tenets.

Despite these somewhat discouraging findings, The Media Insight Project pointed out that journalists can use the findings from the study to frame their work to engender more trust among readers. When researchers revised the headlines and lead sentences of stories to more heavily focus on certain moral values, readers from all four clusters liked and trusted the revised stories more than the originals.

While thinking about audiences in this new way may be difficult for journalism organizations, it may benefit them beyond increasing trust. The researchers looked at how to ask respondents for financial support for journalism organizations, and as with the core values, moral leanings also played a large part. Messages highlighting journalists’ watchdog role may resonate strongly with journalists themselves, but they may not be the most successful in terms of reaching the broadest group of supporters. Unsurprisingly, messages that highlight specific moral values resonate best with groups of people who prioritize those values – people who prioritize care responded best to messages about journalism caring for the vulnerable, for example. Organizations should test their subscription appeals similarly to the framing experiment to determine how best to grow their subscriber base.

Generating trust among readers in – and support in the community for – journalism is one of the most important tasks the news industry faces. However, using this research, news organizations can effectively begin to plan for the future. The first step is to commit to understanding readers better (e.g., What do they believe? What moral values do they hold?) Once journalists have that information, they can use it to shape how they do their work. Whether organizations want to grow their subscription business, recommit to their audience post-pandemic, or reach the next generation of readers, understanding their audiences’ moral leanings and how to frame them will give good journalism a solid footing for the new age.

The post Study: Reframing Article Headlines, Messages Around Reader Values Can Help Build Trust appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

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The American Press Institute (API) recently conducted a survey of news organizations, asking them about their subscriber retention activities. Within the API survey, over 300 News Media Alliance member publications were represented. Looking only at Alliance member responses, it is heartening to see that many retention tactics have already been adopted. Over 80 percent of Alliance members report they engage in various retention tactics, such as tracking why people cancel or lapse subscriptions, sending email surveys to subscribers, and more.

Read more (Member login required).

The post Survey Reveals Alliance News Publishers Adopting Subscriber Retention Strategies appeared first on News/Media Alliance.