{"id":4,"date":"2018-06-03T23:46:40","date_gmt":"2018-06-03T23:46:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.harvard.edu\/workingpaper\/?p=4"},"modified":"2018-06-03T20:35:17","modified_gmt":"2018-06-04T00:35:17","slug":"tech-for-journalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/workingpaper\/2018\/06\/03\/tech-for-journalism\/","title":{"rendered":"What Could Tech Actually Do for Journalism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, along with my colleague <a href=\"https:\/\/cyber.harvard.edu\/people\/ymacpherson\">Yvonne<\/a>, I gave a talk at the Berkman Klein Center fellows hour (which is actually two hours, don&#8217;t ask) summarizing how newspapers made money, how born-digital news organizations do today, and getting the group to help brainstorm about how to fund a BBC Media Action project. \u00a0That led to more conversation about\u00a0what tech companies could do if they really wanted to help journalism. \u00a0Not surprisingly, I focused on how they could make the business model even a touch more durable.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-7 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.harvard.edu\/workingpaper\/files\/2018\/06\/Screen-Shot-2018-06-03-at-7.37.02-PM-300x178.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"401\" height=\"238\" srcset=\"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/workingpaper\/files\/2018\/06\/Screen-Shot-2018-06-03-at-7.37.02-PM-300x178.png 300w, https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/workingpaper\/files\/2018\/06\/Screen-Shot-2018-06-03-at-7.37.02-PM-768x456.png 768w, https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/workingpaper\/files\/2018\/06\/Screen-Shot-2018-06-03-at-7.37.02-PM-1024x608.png 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 401px) 100vw, 401px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>A few of these, below:<\/p>\n<div>\n<ul>\n<li>Selling news just as we do any other good\/service\n<ul>\n<li>As digital news organizations are increasingly focused on a single vertical, interest-based advertising might be able to help them grow audience, which can then be monetized <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cjr.org\/tow_center_reports\/guide-to-audience-revenue-and-engagement.php#what-is-audience-revenue\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">directly<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.google.com\/presentation\/d\/1yGb2Z-wm3ZjdfmWCRhpwigo-uYy534NmVBtCQQdCRq4\/edit#slide=id.g3b185df22c_0_306\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">indirectly<\/a><\/li>\n<li>My <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.google.com\/document\/d\/14KFKeCmjFmjr74IGFGsSJ9oabiS1SP-SOa64jG7D8VQ\/edit?usp=sharing\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">currently-running experiment<\/a> is testing ROI on using targeted advertising to grow newsletter subscribers, who will then be solicited for donations<\/li>\n<li>Tech companies are great at optimizing advertising for returns; great at matching people who want something with people who make\/sell\/write about\/have it&#8230; So what if we ran these kind of experiments at scale?\n<ul>\n<li>What if there was an advertising product for publishers to hawk <i>themselves<\/i>\u00a0to grow their audiences?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Measuring what people <i>actually learned<\/i>\u00a0from the news they consumed\n<ul>\n<li>Using a combination of analytics, survey delivery tools, the science of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dropbox.com\/s\/btujbe9o52zk6xn\/Measuring%20Political%20Knowledge.docx?dl=0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">public knowledge testing<\/a>, and the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.betterevaluation.org\/en\/evaluation-options\/propensity_scores\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">propensity score matching<\/a> technique, we can <i>measure how much people learned about a topic, not just if they clicked on a story<\/i><\/li>\n<li>My previous work at both Northwestern and <a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/156778664#t=242s\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">USC<\/a> shows this is actually possible &#8212; it&#8217;s just too labor intensive for most news organizations&#8230;\n<ul>\n<li>That sounds like a job for software!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Further, once we have a metric, we can optimize against it&#8230; this is again something that tech companies have unique skills because the testing and optimization can happen at Web scale<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Building productivity tools to let journalists be journalists, not technologists\n<ul>\n<li>Huge amounts of the total costs borne by news organizations are either paying technologists or large inefficiencies in under skilled employees trying to work with technology<\/li>\n<li>Many run on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ap.org\/enps\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tools<\/a> developed way before the Internet was a part of everyday life, for which digital output is an afterthought<\/li>\n<li>Many born-digital organizations run on G-Suite (SaaS)&#8230; And others have already proven that newsroom <a href=\"https:\/\/www.arcpublishing.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">workflow tools can be a business<\/a> unto themselves<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, along with my colleague Yvonne, I gave a talk at the Berkman Klein Center fellows hour (which is actually two hours, don&#8217;t ask) summarizing how newspapers made money, how born-digital news organizations do today, and getting the group to help brainstorm about how to fund a BBC Media Action project. \u00a0That led to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9596,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[231535,231660,678],"class_list":["post-4","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-big-tech","tag-business-models","tag-ideas"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/workingpaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/workingpaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/workingpaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/workingpaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9596"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/workingpaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/workingpaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/workingpaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions\/10"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/workingpaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/workingpaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/workingpaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}