VIENNA — When a massive earthquake rocked Haiti on January 12, there was only one foreign correspondent — a writer for the Associated Press — in the country to cover the disaster. In the following days, media from around the world parachuted in, relying heavily on NGOs for sources and context.

Two weeks later, most media had left. But there was still an audience around the globe, particularly in the United States, hearing stories and getting information because a handful of NGO workers, many of them former journalists, were still tweeting and blogging about what was happening on the ground.

This anecdote, recounted by Kimberly Abbott of the International Crisis Group, was the first we heard today at the Milton Wolf Seminar on the changing role of NGOs and media. The opening panel, “NGOs as Newsmakers in a Social Media Networking Environment,” laid out great questions to start people thinking about how the Internet, social media tools, and the mainstream media’s shrinking capacity are reshaping relationships between NGOs and journalists. There are pitfalls the panelists agreed, but the potential is exciting. Keep reading »

Last week, Jim Barnett raised a question about nonprofit journalism: What makes it legit? How do we know if a nonprofit news outlet shares the ideals and culture of traditional journalism, and how can we make sure we don’t get fooled by advocacy groups disguised as objective journalists?

It’s a difficult question — the Internet makes publishing wide open to everyone — and at the end of his post, Barnett lays out a list of what he thinks we should use as a starting point when deciding what is and isn’t a legit nonprofit news outlet. He lists various IRS and accounting standards, a number of vague measures of professionalism, and what I’d consider an unfair standard, whether an organization is credentialed by federal or state government.

This is one place where Barnett and I disagree. Before coming to the Lab, I used to edit a nonprofit news site, The Washington Independent, where for two years I dealt with the reality of who gets considered “legit.” If you’re not, you lose out on the privileges given to traditional media outlets. Take Congressional press passes: The Washington Independent was denied admittance to both the daily and periodicals galleries because the site was not chiefly supported by subscriptions or advertising. (Our support came from donors and foundation grants.) Keep reading »

Even on the web, sometimes actions really do speak louder than words.

The technology site Ars Technica has a tech-savvy group of readers, of which about 40 percent have installed ad-blocking software in their web browsers. That’s a plugin that allows you to avoid seeing most ads on a site. The financial consequence for Ars is “devastating”, editor-in-chief Ken Fisher explained in a post. Ars sells ads based on impressions, not clickthroughs — which means it takes a big financial hit because of browsing habits of its users.

On Friday evening, Ars tried an experiment: Readers running ad blockers got a blank page instead of the story they intended to read. The move was a technical success, but caused an uproar (and confusion) among users. In hindsight, Fisher told me, the site’s experiment in retribution was the “wrong approach,” causing confusion among many readers.

“What we weren’t expecting is so many people were blocking ads and didn’t even know it,” he said. “It left a lot of people very confused. They started digging around, wasting an hour trying to fix their broken computer.” There was nothing on the site to explain to readers why content had been blocked. Keep reading »

The Washington Post caused a bit of a stir yesterday when it announced a $1.99-a-year iPhone app. The choice was interesting both because it offered time-limited access to content and because of the low price point — at a time when other newspaper execs are apparently debating prices more than 100 times greater. As our friend Mac Slocum put it: “$1.99 for 12 months of Washington Post content — is that *too* reasonable?”

This morning I spoke with Goli Sheikholeslami, the vice president and general manager of digital operations for The Washington Post/ She said that the Post isn’t thinking about the $1.99 a year as a moneymaker in itself.

“It’s not really so much about this from the point of view of a large revenue stream, but trying to gauge how our readers react to paying for content,” she explained. “It really provides us with a platform for experimentation.”

Keep reading »

In October, The Huffington Post launched a new section with an unusual goal: turning an audience of passive readers into activists for good causes. The section’s underlying business model is novel, too: All of its content is outsourced to an outside company, a for-profit firm that has nonprofits for clients.

In exchange for that content, HuffPo shares the advertising and sponsorship revenue the section generates with the outside company, Causecast. And Causecast gets a platform to promote its services and the nonprofits it chooses to highlight, some of which are its partner organizations.

The arrangement emerges at the same time news organizations are struggling to make display advertising alone a viable business model. The HuffPo-Causecast arrangement, in conjunction with ads, could be an example of the kind of hybrid solution publishers are struggling to find. However, by blurring the line between advertising and content, it also raises questions about conflicts of interest and editorial responsibility. Keep reading »

Ever wonder how a site like Talking Points Memo can run AP content without an official relationship with the wire service?

The answer is a site called Mochila, a syndication platform launched back in 2006. About 1,200 websites use the platform, creating a combined audience of 200 million monthly page views for the syndicated content, which comes from the AP, Reuters, AFP, US News and World Report, Investor’s Business Daily, and others.

The appeal for a site like TPM is simple: It gets to run content from places like the AP and Reuters without having to pay expensive subscription fees. And by allowing Mochila to place ads alongside the content, sites can actually take a 30 percent cut in any ad revenue they bring in. The content producer takes another 30 percent and Mochila takes 40 percent. (Here’s an example of a Mochila syndicated story on TPM.)

So why would this be of interest to content producers? Mochila’s CEO Benjamin Chen says he can provide something a news organization going it alone can’t: scale. Keep reading »

Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has just released a new study on news consumption habits across platforms.

The big takeaway: Americans want their news portable (33% of cell phone users now access news on their devices), personalized (28% of internet users have customized home pages) and participatory (37% of Internet users have contributed to a news story or shared it in some way).

Project director Tom Rosenstiel told me the findings have serious implications for online news business models: “The data suggest that the notion of a primary news source is almost obsolete. People graze. I think it’s increasingly clear that conventional popups and display advertising aren’t going to work.”

The 51-page report is packed with fascinating findings. But here are five that struck me as particularly interesting (emphasis mine):

1. Just because you love to scan headlines on your cell phone, that doesn’t mean you don’t also love ink on your fingers:

While [mobile news consumers] are no more likely than other adults to say they follow the news “all or most of the time,” they utilize a greater number of news platforms. More than half of the on-the-go news consumers (55%) use at least 4 different news platforms on a typlical day. They are 50% more likely than other adults to read the print version of a national newspaper (23% of on-the-go v. 15% all other adults). The only news platform they are less likely than other adults to use on a typical day is their local television news, and this difference is only slight.

Keep reading »

Michelle Leder likes to joke that she is the first journalist to have been fired by email. In 1998, her editor at the Poughkeepsie Journal shot her a note to say that her job on the business desk would not be waiting for her when she returned from abroad.

Since then, she’s been a pioneer in other trends in journalism — and her outlook on the field has stayed equally dry. In 2003 she launched what has become a popular investment site, Footnoted.org. She runs posts on nuggets of interesting information pulled from the fine print of securities filings for valuable investor news. This month Morningstar purchased the site for an undisclosed sum. Leder will continue to run the editorial side and contribute content. Morningstar will sell subscriptions to her premium content (some content will remain free). And the site’s staff is already starting to grow post-acquisition; Bloomberg’s Theo Francis just announced he’s joining the staff.

The investment research firm sees value in her investigative work, particularly Leder’s ability to find useful, “actionable” information. “I think there’s been a discussion about whether information has been commoditized or not,” Morningstar’s Kunal Kapoor told me. “Some news may have been, but that’s just half the story.” Keep reading »

This summer the Associated Press made a surprise announcement at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in Baltimore. As part of a six-month pilot project, the wire service was going to begin distributing content from four top nonprofit news outlets: ProPublica, Center for Public Integrity, Center for Investigative Reporting, and the Investigative Reporting Workshop. It looked like a win all around: Newspapers could run in-depth content from well respected outlets, and nonprofits could broaden their audience.

“This pathbreaking agreement will make an enormous difference in helping us reach the largest possible audience and maximizing the impact of our work,” Robert Rosenthal, the Center for Investigative Reporting’s executive director, said in a statement at the time. “We are deeply appreciative of AP’s commitment to public interest journalism.”

So how did AP’s experiment go? In conversations with some of the nonprofit participants and the AP, it appears that AP members have used little if any nonprofit content.

“We wish it had gone better,” Bill Buzenberg, executive director of Center for Public Integrity, told me. “They announced it with great fanfare at the IRE conference. They haven’t done the technical backup work to really make it work…They haven’t made it a priority.” Keep reading »

It’s been speculated that as newspapers’ decline leaves a void in watchdog journalism, nonprofit groups would come along to fill it at least part of it in. But not all those groups are going to share a newspaper’s approach to journalism.

Last fall, the conservative Goldwater Institute hired a former newspaper reporter to “expose government corruption and abuse.” Now, at least two other conservative organizations — Americans for Prosperity, the libertarian organization backing the Tea Party movement, and the Yankee Institute, a free market think tank in Connecticut — are both advertising jobs for investigative reporters who can find examples of, as the Yankee Institute calls it, “questionable government spending” or, as Americans for Prosperity puts it, “wasteful government spending.”

The language in both ads has a lot in common with the words newspapers use in their (increasingly infrequent) hiring ads: Keep reading »