Guests: Aram Zucker-Scharff, The Washington Post

“For the first time, we actually have the potential to create a real shift that benefits our users, our business, and our society, and that’s a win, win, win.” – Aram Zucker-Scharff on the shift to contextual-based targeting

Ad tech, Privacy and Performance, oh my! News publishers working to adapt to a privacy-first digital landscape before the inevitable end of the third-party cookie can easily become overwhelmed and may not even know where to start.

What does the shift towards privacy mean for news publishers and how they approach ad targeting? Is decreased reliance on third-party tracking a good thing for the industry? What are Core Web Vitals and why should news publishers care? How does my news site’s performance tie in to reader trust? What are things publishers can do right now to improve site performance? What is W3C and how can publishers take advantage to get their voices heard?

These questions and more will be discussed on this episode of News Take. News Media Alliance President & CEO David Chavern had an energizing conversation with Aram Zucker-Scharff, Engineering Lead for Privacy & Security Compliance at The Washington Post, that got in-the-weeds about the kitchen sink of ad tech topics, including site monetization; improving privacy and the user experience; optimizing site performance using Core Web Vitals; and more.

This episode was so full of interesting facts and actionable insights, we didn’t want it to end. The nuggets of wisdom will come faster than you can write them down, so it’s a good thing this conversation was recorded and you can re-watch it to your heart’s content!

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Speaker bio

Aram Zucker-Scharff is the Engineering Lead for Privacy & Security Compliance at The Washington Post, where he works with publishers to maximize site performance and revenue. He has also worked on The Post’s Ad Tech R&D and Big Data teams. Aram has developed open-source tools for publishers and consulted on content strategy and digital newsroom workflows. He was one of Folio Magazine’s 15 under 30 in the magazine media industry.

Related reading

“Why The Ad Industry Should Care About Core Web Vitals – And The Impact For Publishers Who Ignore The Dreaded ‘Layout Shift’” (AdExchanger) – by Amanda Hicks, director of product for The Washington Post’s Research, Experimentation & Development (RED) team.

Watch the next episode: Leveraging Products to Connect with Your Audience

Watch the previous episode: Local News: Understanding What Readers Want and How to Deliver it to Them

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Send your suggestions for future News Take guests to Alliance VP, Research & Insights Rebecca Frank at rebecca@newsmediaalliance.org.

News Take Production Team:

Host and Executive Producer: Rebecca Frank, VP, Research & Insights, News/Media Alliance

Production Support, Editing & Distribution:

Georgi-Ann Clarke, Social Media & Content Manager, News/Media Alliance
Rachel Fox, Manager, Membership & Events, News/Media Alliance
Lindsey Loving, Director, Communications, News/Media Alliance

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The post News Take Episode 102: Tech Trends: What Publishers Need to Know appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

Guests: Jim Bernard, Star Tribune and Mike Orren, The Dallas Morning News

Is there such a thing as a typical reader or subscriber? What role does the e-Paper play in the transition to digital (and why did our speakers initially despise the product)? Do new storytelling formats such as podcasts and social media present viable business models, and how can news publishers successfully venture into this space? What are news publishers getting right on the tech side, and where do they still need to improve?

In this episode of News Take, News Media Alliance President & CEO David Chavern sits down with Jim Bernard, Senior Vice President for Digital at the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune and Mike Orren, Chief Product Officer at The Dallas Morning News for a candid conversation about the challenges and opportunities that arise from understanding your readers and subscribers and how to give them what they want (and when, where and how they want it) – all while prioritizing revenue (because at the end of the day, newspapers need to sell subscriptions). From the differences between print and digital subscribers and their desires, preferences, and behaviors, to why the e-Edition is a valuable product, to approaches to experimenting with new forms of storytelling (including audio and video), to their most exciting plans for 2022, Orren and Bernard draw from their leadership experience to offer insights on navigating the constantly changing news consumption landscape.

Listen now or download the audio file to listen offline:

Don’t forget to subscribe to the News Take podcast by clicking “Follow” and selecting your preferred podcasting platform, or click on your preferred platform: Spotify, Apple, Google.

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Speaker bios

Mike Orren is the Chief Product Officer at The Dallas Morning News, leading the teams responsible for all digital products, marketing, business intelligence, and digital audience. Prior to that, he was President at Belo Business Intelligence, where he leads marketing, analytics, product development, strategy and sales infrastructure for A.H. Belo Corporation, publisher of The Dallas Morning News. He founded Pegasus News, the largest single-market digital news pure-play in the US in 2005, eventually selling it to a publicly-traded broadcast company. Mike has served in senior roles at American Lawyer Media and D Magazine (where he launched the first city magazine website). His work has been recognized with awards from Editor & Publisher, The Dallas Press Club, the North Carolina Press Association and The Dallas Business Journal. Mike is a graduate of Duke University.

Jim Bernard is Star Tribune’s senior vice president for digital with responsibility for the company’s portfolio of digital properties and operations, including StarTribune.com – the state’s most-visited website with 7 million unique visitors each month. He also oversees dozens of other digital products, including Star Tribune mobile apps, print “replica” edition, CityPages.com and 19 Minnesota high school sports websites. Jim joined Star Tribune in 2010 from Dow Jones MarketWatch and prior to MarketWatch, he held a series of executive positions with Dow Jones. Jim earned his MBA from the University of Minnesota and a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Iowa.

Watch the next episode: Tech Trends: What Publishers Need to Know

View all episodes

Send us your suggestions

Send your suggestions for future News Take guests to Alliance VP, Research & Insights Rebecca Frank at rebecca@newsmediaalliance.org.

News Take Production Team:

Host and Executive Producer: Rebecca Frank, VP, Research & Insights, News/Media Alliance

Production Support, Editing & Distribution:

Georgi-Ann Clarke, Social Media & Content Manager, News/Media Alliance
Rachel Fox, Manager, Membership & Events, News/Media Alliance
Lindsey Loving, Director, Communications, News/Media Alliance

Audio & Video Engineer: Current Media Group

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The post News Take Episode 101: Local News: Understanding What Readers Want and How to Deliver it to Them 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.

What brought you to the news media industry and API?

I knew I wanted to be a journalist since I was in high school. I went to the University of Missouri to get my bachelor’s degree, and after I graduated, I started working for small local newsrooms in Virginia and South Carolina covering crime, government, health and environment. In 2008, when my newsroom and others were facing layoffs, I decided to expand my knowledge of digital journalism. I found Patch.com and started working there as a reporter/editor with various roles in management and training. I learned a lot about digital journalism, analytics and training, which were the skills that API needed when it was starting Metrics for News. There was something really appealing to me about building something from scratch.

What is Metrics for News and how is it different from other analytics platforms?

Metrics for News is software we created in 2014 when publishers started asking us how their editors could make more empirical decisions about what to cover and how. At first, we looked to their Google Analytics, but that wasn’t enough. It didn’t answer the key questions publishers ask themselves all the time, such as which beats drive engagement, how a given author can improve or how to attract more subscribers. So, we decided to create Metrics for News to help publishers better understand their audience and deepen their engagement, grow their subscribers, write better stories, etc.

Our platform is different from any other metrics app; it is a content strategy tool where publishers can analyze hundreds and thousands of stories over time to learn the qualities that drive engagement, as well as identify new trends that could benefit audience and subscriber growth.

In 2018, we went through a massive redesign. We talked to newsrooms to get their feedback and decided to change our original platform to something more user friendly that would help anyone in a newsroom, and not only the people who were already familiar with analytics. We wanted Metrics for News to better assist newsrooms as a whole, including reporters working to grow their skills in audience development and analytics.

What are you working on to help Metrics for News’ members?

I think the biggest project that I keep working on is helping publishers better understand their audiences and their needs through analytics. I’m working with API to make sure publishers are getting answers to the key questions and information they need. Day-to-day, our team is talking to newsrooms, training them on how to use this strategic data, and continuing to evolve our product to better support our partner newsrooms and the communities they serve.

What do you consider to be the biggest challenge facing the news media industry in 2019?

There are lots of challenges: the audience’s perspective about misinformation and disinformation is one of the biggest issues. We have folks at API who work on that challenge specifically. Another issue is the path to sustainability for local newsrooms. Our efforts in Metrics for News are one way to support newsrooms trying to better identify what drives people to subscribe as they move away from advertising models alone and toward ones heavily supported by reader revenue.

What is the most promising opportunity for news publishers in 2019?

I think it’s still an exciting time to be a journalist. I think one of the biggest opportunities for publishers this year is to keep getting better at understanding and listening to their audiences to learn how what they are producing is helping their audiences live their lives, connect them to their communities and satisfy their needs.

What are you most excited about in your role at API for the rest of this year?

I’m excited to keep working here. The people at API are all very smart and passionate about journalism, which makes it fun. I am also excited to keep improving the future of Metrics for News and spreading it across more newsrooms to help them improve their business.

The post 6 Answers with Liz Worthington, Director of Content Strategy at American Press Institute appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

Developing a deeper understanding of who the news audience is, what they need, and what’s important to them can only help the news industry. Rich data about audience behavior, demographics and attitudes can inform stories that will bring readers in and keep them engaged, as well as help advertisers understand why news media are still a powerful channel to reach their customers. The Alliance has been gathering data about news audiences for years, most recently in our News Advertising Panorama.

In a recent study published in Columbia Journalism Review, James G. Robinson, adjunct professor and research fellow at Columbia University’s School of Journalism and Director, Global Analytics for The New York Times, investigated how journalists themselves imagine the audiences for their work; specifically, whether their mental image has changed with the rise of reader demographic and behavior tracking technology. As Robinson puts it, “This paper asks whether the new tools of the digital age have indeed influenced the ‘audience in the mind’s eye.’”

The goal of the study was to investigate “the extent to which beat journalists have taken advantage of this ability to better know their readers, and thus construct more accurate mental models of their audiences.” Some of the most interesting findings from the study – and recommendations for news organizations to consider – are detailed below.

Findings

Robinson’s study acknowledges that reaching the largest possible audience should not always be the objective for reporters with their stories. Particularly with focused beats, as the study points out, “often, [the goal] is to reach the right people.” While it can be difficult to keep this goal in mind, many news organizations have seen success by prioritizing in-depth coverage of a niche topic. If readers trust a news organization to tell a story correctly, they will likely return for that coverage, and more.

Robinson looked at how journalists have traditionally perceived their audiences, then detailed a case study of interviews of reporters on the education beat in New York City to compare how the process of creating mental images of an audience has changed based on new technology. What he found was surprising: “Little seems to have changed since the print era.”

Why has so little has changed about this piece of a journalist’s job, when so much else has transformed in the same time? One insight the study puts forward is that “analytics tools focus almost exclusively on user behavior, rather than intent; revealing little about the emotional underpinnings of engagement that inform the imagined response.” This is vital for news organizations to keep in mind: understanding what your analytics tools can and cannot measure is key in ensuring they are used appropriately. No analytics tool can paint a full picture of a reader’s wants and needs – other research techniques, such as reader surveys and focus groups, can enrich any dataset. On the Alliance webinar, “Getting the Best Data for Your Organization,” Head of Audience Development Solutions at Parse.ly, Kelsey Arendt, and Director, Consumer Revenue Optimization at Tribune Publishing Company, Brian Howell, shared examples of how newsrooms can effectively use data. Brian shared how Tribune uses data particularly when pricing subscription renewals, and how they have been able to use a subscriber’s data to pinpoint the right renewal price.

The study’s conclusions feature some key questions and one broad recommendation for newsrooms:

1. We are starting to see a change in the landscape: as business models shift from advertising to subscriptions, newsroom analytics are starting to move beyond raw pageview counts to more advanced user segmentation. Why not build out user segments for particular lines of reporting as well?

2. Reporters sometimes feel that audience thinking is not their job, deferring to the expertise of editors and audience specialists. But as we have seen, reporters (especially those on a beat) have significant autonomy over many journalistic decisions — from choosing what to cover to actually crafting the story. Why not empower (or even expect) them to bring actual audience knowledge to bear on these choices, rather than imagined assumptions based on the conventions of the past?

3. The major recommendation of the report focuses on improving the diversity of reporters and newsrooms. Both in the past and today, many reporters imagine their audiences to largely comprise people similar to themselves. As Robinson explains, “If perceived audiences are largely based on one’s peers, colleagues, and social circle, encouraging newsroom diversity is critical in order to broaden that circle of trusted voices to include people outside the industry’s most common demographic groups.”

Changing how reporters perceive their audiences is only one part of the process. Ensuring that multiple voices are heard, and multiple audiences are served by news requires expanding who creates news.

The post Study: Changes in Journalists’ Perception of their Audience with Advances in Demographic, Behavior Tracking Technology appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

Monday afternoon the WSJ reported that Facebook is building a tool to help users subscribe to news publications directly within the mobile app. This was happy news after recent news of Safari and Google’s Chrome entering the ad-blocking game.

The new feature is expected at the end of 2017. Little is known about the product so far. Poynter pointed out this new feature was similar to Apple News, allowing publishers to sell subscriptions in app.

Overall, this sounds like an encouraging move by Facebook, but by now we’ve learned to take their overtures about helping the news industry with a grain of salt. According to initial reports, this new feature will only be available on content posted through Instant Articles. Other discussions have mentioned a metered, micro-payment model. We’re interested to see what develops and how altruistic the feature is.

“We’re working with partners to understand their business and explore ways we can help them drive more value from Facebook. We are taking the time to deeply understand their different goals and needs,” Facebook said in a statement.

Currently Facebook reaps 90 percent of its revenue from advertising. Between Facebook and Google, they are expected to receive more than 60 percent of digital ad spend this year, according to eMarketer. This makes subscriptions vital to maintaining quality news.

Having Facebook encourage people pay for news would be groundbreaking and I hope that’s exactly what happens, but in the meantime, count me as skeptical.

The post Facebook Helping Publishers? We’ll see. appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

As the news media business goes digital, a fundamental question has arisen from the ubiquitous capturing of data enabled by digital distribution platforms: where and when do the costs of data capture outweigh the benefits? There are costs from capturing the data in the form of large websites and slower page load times, which have been found to alter customer behavior in ways that lower the revenue of the publisher. There are additional costs from capturing data in the loss of privacy a customer experiences from being tracked. What are the benefits and costs of this lost privacy?

To answer this question, it is interesting to compare the news media industries in the United States and Europe. Consumers in the United States, and companies that operate in this country, have far less concern about lost personal privacy than their peers in Europe. Americans seem to accept that data capture occurs and that companies use information on their demographics and behaviors for a variety of purposes. There are Americans that actively try to thwart data collection attempts, but they represent a very small share of the market. Americans appear to trust companies with their data to a far greater degree than they do government.

Europeans are much more concerned about personal privacy and data capture by corporations than Americans. As has been widely reported, the EU has forced Google and other companies to honor an individual’s “right to be forgotten.” Europeans appear to trust their governments with their data, but take a wary eye toward private sector data capture. In response, sensitivity about using information they collect on their customers is one of the most significant differences between European news media companies and their American counterparts. Does the reluctance to use customer data to optimize their business hinder European companies? The answer, at least in one respect, seems to be yes.

According to the 2015 Word Press Trends report, from 2011 to 2015 news media companies in Europe lost 21.3 percent of their print circulation, while in the United States, over the same five year period, the loss has been 8.7 percent. There are several factors that affect these numbers, including the greater reliance on single copy sales in Europe. But a significant factor has been the more rapid adoption of customer analytics to segment and target customers for pricing actions, retention efforts and bundle offers. American companies are rapidly adopting customer analytics, supported by data on their visitors’ online behaviors, to acquire digital subscribers. This use of customer data by publishers has arguably saved millions of newspaper subscribers that otherwise would no longer be customers had they adopted European standards of data usage.

The use of consumer data by companies is fundamentally driven by the profit motive, and consumers accept their personal data will be used by companies to offer them products and services directly or to help other companies advertise to them. This social contract has worked well, providing vast consumer benefits in the form of thousands of products and services available at little or no cost. Excluding breaches of financial data such as credit card numbers, damages from a company’s use of personal data have been difficult to prove in court. Economists could argue that consumers may be harmed by the reduction in value of their personal information due to the widespread availability of those data, and the lack of legal damages does not mean there are no costs to consumers from the use of their personal data.

Consumers have learned that some advertising is annoying, that information sharing may lead to more spam email, or that they may be more likely to suffer identity theft. The growing prevalence of digital advertising technology has led to greater adoption of ad blockers and information-protecting counter measures, trends that could threaten the information-in-exchange-for-services relationship that exists between consumers and companies such as Google, Twitter and Facebook. These trends may also threaten the content-in-exchange-for-advertising-impressions relationship publishers have with their digital readers.

It appears that a cost of the loss of privacy may be a loss of trust. If the actions of a few bad actors cause consumers to be more guarded with their personal data, the result may be fewer “free” products and services, less access to digital content and a lack of data for companies to use for business optimization. Given the experience of Europe, it suggests we are better off using these data but using them wisely.

The post Tradeoffs between personal data privacy and customer analytics. appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

The Local Media Consortium—a group of “leading local media companies”—addresses these ad blocking-related concerns in NAA’s recent webinar “Mitigating the Impact of Ad Blocking.” Drawing from the Consortium’s recent white paper, “Ad Blocking: Navigating New Challenges,” Ray Faust, vice president of national and emerging media sales at the Star Tribune, explains that the prominence of ad blockers has risen dramatically in the past few years, although the software has been available for the last decade.

When it comes to using ad blockers, Faust says that some users are driven by privacy concerns, worried about the specific information ads are gathering about them and their behaviors. He also cites data usage consumption and a slower or unsatisfactory user experience as reasons for why users may opt to block ads.

But ad blocking doesn’t just make unwanted advertisements disappear. By impacting publishers’ advertising revenue, it could threaten the presence of the high-quality content that publishers have to offer their audiences. Advertising represents $350 billion of the U.S. gross domestic product and consumers depend on it to assist them in making $9 trillion worth of annual spending decisions, according to Ad Age.  As an industry, advertising contributes to the stability and quality of news content and to the economy itself. Ad blocking could greatly affect these totals.

So ad blocking must overwhelmingly affect advertisers’ revenues, right? Well, not exactly. Tom Sly, vice president of digital revenue at The E.W. Scripps Company explains that the impact of ad blocking is felt primarily by the news industry as local advertisers aren’t paying for ads that are never seen or “served.” However, it is important to note that if local advertisers’ ad content isn’t being seen, it could affect them directly if their message isn’t delivered. But the news industry is definitely paying the price.

Beyond taking away revenue, ad blockers and their varying software can disable site analytic tools or maintain a “whitelist” database—a situation where publishers pay so that ad blockers recognize their site and allow their ads to be served—among other things. While some media organizations have chosen to “block the blockers,” Sly advises that this “thermonuclear war” option isn’t wise as a long-term solution, as new code can constantly be written to override the shutout. Instead, the Local Media Consortium recommends engaging in a value and currency discussion with options to pay for content.

In light of all this, Sly recommends that publishers shift to a different point of view: news organizations should look at their site through a user’s eyes and not from a revenue gaining perspective to see what works best, such as site loading times and ease of navigation.  Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, publishers should remember how important and valuable their content is when making decisions on how to address ad blocking users.

The post Webinar Recap: Mitigating the Impact of Ad Blocking appeared first on News/Media Alliance.