by Jacqueline Koch | Jul 20, 2016 |
Perspectives from the 2016 Digital Publisher’s Tour
As the co-organizer of VDZ Akademie’s 2016 Digital Publisher’s Tour, together with Seattle-based innovation journalist, Ulrike Langer, we had the amazing opportunity to meet with a wide range of companies in the “digital publishing” space. What do all of these organizations—ranging from industry stalwarts like The New York Times and the Associated Press to upstarts like Chicago’s Rivet Radio and New York City-based The Daily Beast— have in common? A deep commitment to the craft of storytelling and a passion for embracing the change that new audiences and emerging platforms demand.
Marching to your own drum
Conversations with a variety of publishers, but in particular the Daily Beast, underlined for us how important is it for storytellers to have a distinct point of view and a clearly identifiable voice. At Atavist, we learned how a company can fund long-form narrative storytelling without relying on advertising. This allows writers to create content on their own terms without relying on page views.
One of the other themes that emerged for us – particularly after a conversation with the visionary Jim Kennedy, Senior Vice Vresident, Strategy and Enterprise Development at The Associated Press: the importance of recognizing the realities that the future holds and then adjusting what you are doing today. According to Kennedy, the AP has realized that now is the time to start angling towards the future rather than clinging to old ways of finding, writing and packaging and distributing the news.
To this end, AP is contributing news feeds to IBM’s Watson as a data source, which in turn is combined with other data to create new offerings across segments. The AP believes that digital voice interfaces are going to be a key to how information is accessed and consumed. Working with partners like Rivet Radio, AP is now converting news feeds from text to audio.
For many of the German-based tour participants, the Amazon Echo or “Alexa,” whom they met for the first time at the Knight Lab at Northwestern University, was a revelation. Echo is a voice-enabled wireless speaker that is capable of voice interaction, music playback, making to-do lists, setting alarms, streaming podcasts, playing audiobooks, and providing weather, traffic and other real time information. It was evident that this new technology creates powerful new opportunities, while at the same time, requires that content publishers develop new approaches for thinking about content.
When virtual worlds collide
Many of the tour participants also had the opportunity to go face-to-face with virtual reality content and headsets at Framestore’s VR Studio. One of the highlights was experiencing a VR movie created by the Framestore team for HBO’s Game of Thrones.
It was another clear demonstration of how virtual reality is pushing the boundaries of storytelling for content producers across the spectrum and how it provides an incredible opportunity to drive unprecedented engagement.
Music to our ears
Tour participants particularly appreciated being the first live-studio audience for Rivet News Radio’s daily news podcast. The visit cast a bright light on how an organization is advancing new business models for audio-based content including a platform that delivers a cost-effective and efficient way to produce, digitally distribute and monetize branded audio content. Rivet also offers a solution that provides businesses with informative, curated playlists of bite-sized news and information, tailored for a business environment and proven to keep callers on-hold longer.
As the week-long tour progressed, it became increasingly apparent that today, storytellers have many powerful tools at their disposal, whether their medium is the written word, audio or video.
Go deeper with some of the Digital Publisher’s Tour companies
The tour offered a unique and exclusive opportunity for first-hand experience and an insider’s view of technology and media companies at the forefront of innovation and trends.
What follows is a four-part series that aims to provide a glimpse of some of the many innovative and groundbreaking developments taking place at the companies tour participants visited.
First up is Powering passionate storytelling at The Atavist magazine which describes how a group of journalists in Brooklyn, NY is pioneering a new version of long-form storytelling without the constraints of having to be profitable. How are they doing this? Via a self-publishing platform for rich interactive long-form journalism which is available to content creators via a monthly subscription.
Boost! Collective is a strategic messaging and story-driven communications firm that helps clients discover, write and tell powerful stories that drive engagement.
by Jacqueline Koch | Jul 12, 2016 |
By Janinne Brunyee
Why Design Think
ing. Most media companies today understand and have started the process of transforming for the digital age. Gone are the old business models that delivered audiences and revenue for many generations. In their place there is still much uncertainty as new technologies create new opportunities and new audiences require products and models that may not yet have been invented.
Amongst all this uncertainty, one thing is clear: to succeed, media organizations have to excel at innovation. Innovation must become a core competency along with an appetite for experimentation and quick failure followed by more experimentation.
One place media organizations can look to as they turn their employees into innovators, is Stanford University’s Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design – also known as the d.school – where the focus is on “creating innovators rather than any particular innovation,” and the art of Design Thinking is best learned by doing.
Design Thinking is at the core of the work of the d.school and can be thought of as a methodology for innovation that combines creative and analytical approaches and requires collaboration across disciplines.
According to the d.school’s website, the focus is on creating’ spectacularly transformative learning experiences’ and along the way, students develop a process for producing creative solutions to even the most complex challenges they tackle.
Design Thinking: Empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test
The principles of design thinking appear deceptively intuitive. What is radical about this approach to human-centric innovation is how each of the steps has been conceptualized.
Empathize: Design Thinking is grounded on a deep understanding of the people you are trying to serve. It requires careful observation of people within their contexts to uncover disconnects between what people say and what they do which is where great insights can often be found. Design thinkers also engage with people in deep and meaningful ways through loosely structured conversations. And of course, they listen and watch.
In many cases, the best solutions are the ones that address the needs of the ‘extreme user.’ During a recent visit to the d.school by participants of the 2016 FIPP/VDZ Innovators’ Tour, Astrid Maier, a journalist and Knight Fellow, described the example of carry-on luggage which was initially designed to meet the unique needs of airline pilots but which today is used by virtually every traveler.
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by Jacqueline Koch | Jun 22, 2016 |
By Christopher Ross
Publishers have always known that quality, original content is the undisputed king for engaging and maintaining a relationship with readers. It’s a fact that’s been a cornerstone of the publishing industry for decades.
But what if a reader wants to dive deeper, to explore beyond the featured content and know more about the props in the story or the pictures, or even more about the surrounding scenery? What if the reader wanted to purchase elements found in the narrative? Welcome to the world of shoppable content, where a reader can enjoy content, while seamlessly creating a personal shopping list.
Shoppable ads
Shoppable ads are one manifestation of how the online retail experience is being advanced by technology. A key element to the technology its ability to eliminate barriers so a reader can move about a site without unnecessary new tabs or excessive extra actions. Even for the digitally savvy consumer, the movement between multiple platforms presents real barriers to shopping for items in the content. It is right to assume consumers care little about platforms but to stay engaged, must be able to move seamlessly across them. In a recent Guardian article, titled Rise of shoppable content will change the face of advertising, Simon Hathaway stated “technology is resetting [our] expectations of retail and transforming shopping behaviour. We are getting used to being able to click on a product image and go into the buying process. Soon, we’ll expect to be able to buy any image we click on – and be frustrated if we can’t.”
Shoppable content
The challenge to create a seamless shoppable content solution between platforms is especially problematic on mobile devices where consumers are increasingly leaning but the technology is less accommodating. One such solution comes from Zumobi, a Seattle based tech firm that aggregates a client’s multiple sites into a single mobile destination. Zumobi transforms a brand’s content from multiple sources, such as social media channels, video platforms, product information and content management systems, into a dynamic “flipboard like” mobile destination, dubbed a microzone. It enables shoppable content where readers can purchase items found in the microzone.
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by Jacqueline Koch | Jun 14, 2016 |
By Jacqueline Koch
“We’re hacking into the audio and visual systems of your brain,” director Chris Milk and co-founder of virtual reality company, Vrse said to The New York Times just over a year ago regarding virtual reality projects. “A major part of journalism is painting people a picture of what it was like to actually be there. With this, the audience actually feels like they are there.”
In the year that followed, it became increasingly clear that VR is pushing its way beyond the realm of sci-fi and gaming and into the mainstream. A few VR highlights over the last 12 months also indicate that Milk’s take on the relationship between VR and journalism, while complex, is crystalising. Immediately after introducing Sundance audiences to the Millions March in NYC, a VR journalism broadcast venture between directors Chris Milk, Spike Jonze and Vice News, Milk marched onto Davos to debut Clouds Over Sidra. The groundbreaking collaboration with the UN used VR to highlight the life of a Syrian girl in a refugee camp.
Fast forward to November. An unassuming cardboard box—Google Cardboard—lands on 1.3 million US doorsteps in tandem with the Sunday New York Times. More recently, dispatches from the 2016 Sundance Film Festival describe the ‘boom’ in virtual reality, augmented reality and immersive films that include an extensive line-up of documentaries.
For the researchers, scientists, investors and engineers who have spent decades attempting to push VR across the finish line, this may look like the victory lap. On the sidelines, there are those cheering and eager to seize the storytelling opportunities this technology brings. Yet among them there are many—particularly from the newsroom—that are grappling with the implications of an emerging and highly elastic platform transforming to an established platform.
Merging the Newsroom onto the VR Superhighway
There is a balance to be struck between the unparalleled potential of a highly compelling storytelling format and the practicalities and many implications that arise from a platform that spans diverse genres. At the same time, it’s time to lead, follow or get out of the way, according to Robert Hernandez, of the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. In his 2016 media forecast published in the Neiman Lab, the Harvard-based media innovation report, he asks, ‘Do news orgs get in early and risk the tech not working out? Or should they wait and let others define VR journalism and risk being left behind, again?’ His answer: Both.
The question then is, how? While journalists and media organisations are eager to get behind the wheel, there is broad consensus that there are no rules of the road. Taking practicalities and logistics into account, VR demands innovation, expertise, bigger budgets, flexibility and longer production lead time. The price of admission is going down, and Hernandez, echoed by others in the industry, cites 360-degree video as ‘the low-hanging fruit of VR’. Partnering with universities leading the charge and tapping into fresh student talent also may serve as a practical and efficient onramp to the VR track.
The New York Times has committed strategy and resources to make VR a viable journalistic tool. Their earnings released on February 4, showed net income of $52 million for the fourth quarter—a 48 percent increase over the same period in 2014—may point to efforts paying off.
‘We believe that our strategic approach—to rapidly build out new high value propositions for marketers in branded content, mobile, video and VR—is paying off,’ said Mark Thompson, the company’s chief executive said in an earnings call with investors.
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by Jacqueline Koch | Jun 9, 2016 |
By Steven Wise
TechCrunch Disrupt is the preeminent forum for startups that crave visibility with investors, potential partners, the technology press, and anyone who wants to be in the know about what’s hot in technology. The event is held three times per year: in NY in the spring, in San Francisco in the fall, and in Europe toward the end of the year. The most anticipated component of the event is the Startup Battlefield, where companies get to make a six-minute pitch then answer six minutes of questions from a panel of judges.
Tech Crunch Disrupt NY 2016 took place last month and didn’t disappoint. As usual, the startups that got the coveted Battlefield slots represented a wide variety of categories. Several related to health and wellness (like WaterO, next generation water purifier and ArtVeoli, a hardware start-up using algae and microfluidics to produce oxygen and freshen indoor air). Others related to the Internet of Things (IoT), like Lumenus, which integrates electronics and LEDs into smart-clothing, and Spinn, an internet-connected centrifugal coffee maker. We’ll take a closer look at some of the hot new companies worth checking out.
New ways to create and manage content
TimeLooper promises “immersive time travel technology [that] enables tourists to experience destinations at key moment
s in history through VR videos on smartphones.” While visiting popular tourist destinations, consumers download the TimeLooper app to their smartphones, which they place into an inexpensive holder, similar to Google Cardboard.
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TimeLooper content partners will create short augmented reality (AR) films that recreate an historic event that you can watch in the place that it happened. For example, look around at the 1666 Great Fire of London while visiting Tower Bridge Museum or watch the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall as you stand at the site in Germany.
TimeLooper envisions a freemium content model where some AR videos will be available for free while many others will cost a few dollars, which they split with the tourist destination operators. They also plan to generate revenue from native advertising (imagine a Coke billboard in the Berlin Wall video).
Laugh.ly was one of the “wild card” startups presenting at Disrupt, meaning they were selected by a vote of the conference audience and TechCrunch editorial staff. Essentially, they want to be the Pandora app of comedy. Laugh.ly already has over 400 comedians onboard whose material will be distributed through the app. Consumers can enjoy playlists based on artist or themes (e.g., jokes about in-laws) and can share playlists or specific jokes with friends. The app creators made a point of explaining this is not just a comedy content play. Their vision is to expand to other forms of spoken word entertainment and they’re building proprietary technology for indexing and searching content in audio files. The app is available to consumers at no cost but those willing to pay $7.99 for a monthly subscription can enjoy the service ad free and can download content.
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Botify Is designed to help digital marketer control how Google understands their websites. They claim that Google’s search bots ignore 35 per cent to 55 per cent of web pages across various commerce verticals like travel and classifieds. Webmasters at beta customers including Expedia, eBay, Airbnb, and Time Inc., have all used the Botify tools to analyse which pages are not getting crawled by Google, so that they can redesign their site structure to improve coverage.
Botify reports sites have been averaging a 35 per cent improvement in Google indexing within the first 6 months of use. This Paris-based startup completed a $7.2 million series A funding round and will offer the tool through a SaaS subscription model.
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