by Jacqueline Koch | Aug 3, 2016 |
By Janinne Brunyee
“The lying started at 7:27 a.m. and did not stop until after dark. Even for Donald Trump, Monday, Aug. 1, was a banner day for bullshit.” So starts a recent article by Olivia Nuzzi, who covers politics for The Daily Beast.
In today’s highly competitive news environment, how is it that The Daily Beast is growing 25 percent each year to reach more than 20 million readers per month? According to editor-in-chief, John Avlon, while there are a number of factors driving this growth, one of the most important is the publication’s unique voice—as is evidenced by the opening line of the Trump story.
A unique voice at the Daily Beast
“We focus on dictators, dissidents and terrorists,” he said. “Our job is to make important stories interesting and entertaining as well as educational. To do this, we have to be willing to call BS.” According to Avlon, the site’s voice is characterized by short sentences, short paragraphs and vigorous English. “We rely heavily on Hemingway as a style guide,” he said.
Launched in 2006, The Daily Beast takes its name from a fictional newspaper in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop. Avlon, best known as a television journalist with a long list of credits including The Daily Show, CNN, MSNBC and Real Time with Bill Maher, took over as editor-in-chief from Tina Brown in 2013. Brown was a former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.
With a focus on original reporting and breaking news, The Daily Beast has been able to avoid the commodity news carried by many competitors and create differentiated stories. “Competitors have content farms that create partisan news,” he said. “We carry columns across the opinion spectrum and avoid commodity news from wire services.” With his trademark bluntness, Avlon stated that commodity news kills a news publication because voice is critical.
Hiring writers who are already known on cable news is another important part of The Daily Beast’s strategy. Avlon is himself a regular contributor to CNN. “We get television coverage because our writers are known entities on cable,” he said. At the same time, the publication looks to cable news commentators as a talent pool. Each of The Daily Beast’s writers also pays careful attention to developing their own brands.
According to Avlon, while many partisan news sites are seeing declines, The Daily Beast continues to prosper. “Our competitors have had a rough period but we are growing with a lean team of 100 people,” he said.
“We have built a great team and we are hard to poach from. Our journalists have a sense of mission and that’s why we have a high-morale, high-metabolism newsroom,” he said.
According to Avlon, his team is not solely measured on traffic markers. Instead, the focus is on identifying and creating the stories that readers love.
“We have to be nimble. We are a pirate ship fighting a guerilla war,” he said. “But we understand that quality content creates a quality audience.”
The Daily Beast is not only a breaking news site. There is an increasing focus on the lifestyle sector. According to Avlon, the publication understands that people have a variety of interests. “You can appeal to different sides of their personality to create a site that is less siloed,” he said.
The business of news at The Daily Beast
The Daily Beast’s main revenue stream is content marketing which allows it to bring quality content to its quality audience and help advertisers avoid adblockers. “We have found that quality branded content will do well. It involves a shift in thinking about what advertising is.” According to Avlon, his team takes the business side very seriously. “We all need to think entrepreneurially. If we don’t there are major threats,” he said.
“Our business is a mix between science and jazz. We are reactive to the news cycle but we use data to anticipate what readers are interested in,” he said. The Daily Beast team aims to be transparent about data so that everyone in the newsroom understands what is working and what isn’t. Avlon is quick to point out, however, that his team cannot rely solely on algorithms. “If you use algorithms only, you will lose your differentiation. You will end up with celebrity gossip, sex scandals and will miss out on the real meat,” he said.
Embracing social platforms
The Daily Beast is amongst the many publications including The Washington Post, Slate, and Gawker who are embracing Facebook Instant Articles. “Facebook is a major player in content distribution and can be an enormously powerful way to get some of our branded or sponsored content out,” he said.
The team has also been aggressive with Facebook Live to create intimacy with reporters. Earlier this year, The Daily Beast launched two new original live series on Facebook. “Cheat Sheet” features Avlon and other editors breaking down the top stories of the day and answering questions from the Facebook audience. “Drink Cart” features author and cocktail expert Noah Rothbaum talking with a Daily Beast editor about the latest culture news over drinks.
Keep them hooked right to the end
“With his mouth full of fast-food poultry and his hands gripping a knife and fork, for a blissful few moments, Donald Trump told no lies at all.” So ends Olivia Nuzzi’s article 15 Hours of Donald Trump’s Lies. A great reminder for all storytellers to find their voice, create unique content and stay committed to the last period.
The Daily Beast is one of the companies that participants of the 2016 VDZ Akademie Digital Publisher’s Tour visited in New York City this June. The Tour was co-organized by Boost! Collective.
This is the second in a series of pieces we are writing about the storytellers we met on the tour. Read the first piece Powering passionate storytelling at The Atavist Magazine
Boost! Collective is a strategic messaging and story-driven communications firm. We help clients discover, write and tell powerful stories which drive engagement.
by Jacqueline Koch | Aug 1, 2016 |
By Jacqueline Koch
Artificial intelligence (AI) is expanding into an array of unexpected applications, looming ever larger on the horizon of our tech-powered future. It’s increasingly dominating media headlines as well. Take the recent news of AlphaGo. This is the AI “mind” that defeated one of the best players of Go, considered perhaps one of the most complex games developed by humans.
In China, more than 280 million people watched the game live, marvelling at a machine’s strategic mastery over man. However, not all AI developments are winners. On the flip side of AlphaGo’s triumph, was Tay, the chatbot released by Microsoft that was trained to respond like a millennial. In short time, its vulnerabilities were exposed and Tay, mimicking users, transformed into a racist, xenophobic, misogynistic chatterbox.
Whoops.
Nonetheless, AI is rapidly on the rise with mind-boggling potential, from fighting cancer and creating original art to seeing for the blind. And AI is advancing in tandem with a precipitous shift on the web, which is moving more and more from text to images.
Each day, two billion photos are shared online, keeping pace with the surge toward visually driven apps such as Snapchat and Instagram. Bringing AI together with a glut of photos has driven image recognition technology into high gear, yielding great gains for retailers, advertisers and consumers, but most importantly, publishers.
The ABCs of AI
Images. Images. Images. They are the foundational building blocks buttressing AI development of ever more powerful image recognition technology, and it’s near relative, face recognition technology. A recent issue of Wired offered the 30,000-foot view by taking a deep dive into machine learning, the foundation of AI. This approach, which relies on “training” a computer rather than coding, is now far more powerful thanks to “deep neural networks.”
These are massively distributed computational systems that mimic the multilayered connections of neurons in the brain. As a simple example, to train a computer to recognise a photo of an elephant, developers “show” it thousands of photos, including many with elephants. The more images, the better the computer learns. Take this process to its next logical steps, and billions of images down the road, behold the birth of image recognition technology.
Image recognition technology has moved rapidly ahead. Today, it can correctly analyse objects, faces, places, colours, logos and more. This also means that any company with access to large collections of photos wields a new knowledge gathering superpower: data mining. It’s a competitive edge, leapfrogging previous information gathering and marketing research tactics, and with the capacity to drill down to a granular level of user insights, image recognition technology is predicted to be a $30 billion market by 2020.
AI-empowered fashionistas
In the retail space, Macy’s set the pace in 2014 with the launch of an iOS app allowing shoppers to upload a photo, find an equivalent product on Macys.com and purchase it immediately. The result: instant gratification for shoppers and a doubling of mobile sales in fiscal 2015 for Macy’s.
Google, not surprisingly, moved in quickly with the Google Photos app, which hit 100 million users in its first five months. It allows users to store, organise, catalogue and search their images. However, just as there’s no such thing as a free lunch, there is a lucrative strategy behind Google’s free cloud-based app. Google has effectively deployed armies of users, who are rebelling and reorganising their images, to provide a vast dataset. This allows Google to hone and re-hone algorithms and thereby dramatically improve visual searches and expand services.
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by Jacqueline Koch | Jul 20, 2016 |
By Janinne Brunyee
As the publishing industry continues to face the impact of the unstoppable digital transformation, one organization has found a formula for success that allows them to pursue their passion for long-form narrative content.
Brooklyn-based Atavist is in fact two companies in one. The first is The Atavist Magazine, an eight-time finalist for the National Magazine Awards and the first digital-only magazine to win for feature writing. The second is the Atavist self-publishing platform. This enables creative individuals and organizations to produce beautiful and shareable stories, attract new audiences and build business around their work—all without knowing a line of code.
Together with Nicholas Thompson, a Senior Editor at The New Yorker and Jefferson Rabb, Atavist’s CTO, co-founder Evan Ratliff put his experience at National Geographic, Wired Magazine and The New Yorker to work to sketch out a new approach to long-form narrative content that is based on an innovative take on design and storytelling. The result: The Atavist Magazine.
Design + Storytelling
“Each story is a creation of its own and is meant to be an experience. We have pioneered this form of long-form content where each story includes video, GIFs and big imagery.”
The magazine covers topics of general interest ranging from “Zombie King”, Emily Matchar’s exploration of author William Seabrook who introduced the zombie cadaver—the walking dead—to the American imagination before sinking into obscurity to “Whatsoever Things Are True”, the result of Matthew Shaer’s ten-month long investigation into the aftermath of a crime that happened 39 years ago in Chicago.
The team publishes one story each month, attracting between 10,000 and 20,000 readers. “We are known for long stories that are hard to do and that is why we have won awards and have been nominated for Emmys for our video-based work,” Ratliff said.
Advertising free zone
The magazine does not carry advertising and according to Ratliff, this is the reason that their stories enjoy higher than average reader engagement. “If you tell an engaging story, people will read it on their phones and their laptops. Everything does not have to be shorter and faster,” he said.
“We have stories pitched to us or we will go and find them. Either way, we spend months with the writer to make sure they can get inside the story.” Ratliff says sometimes there are stories that the team just wants to do – especially international stories. “It is a very purpose-driven organization. Even so, we have to lure our readers in and our stories have to feel like movies,” he said.
Earlier this year, The Atavist Magazine carried a serialized story about an international drug dealer which was the result of two years of investigation. Penned by Ratliff with help from Aurora Almendral and Natalie Lampert, “The Mastermind” chronicles the story of Paul Calder Le Roux, an international crime kingpin turned government informant who was apprehended in Liberia in 2012 after a six-year investigation by DEA agents. “The Mastermind” was released shortly after Le Roux’s dramatic appearance in a Minneapolis courtroom on March 2, 2016.
“This time, we released this story in serialized form with one installment released each week.” Ratliff says it took a week to produce each installment. “We are much more akin to a production company in some ways—but we meet a monthly deadline,” he said.
A self-publishing platform for long-form narrative content
What makes this magazine possible without having to turn a profit is the income generated by the Atavist self-publishing content platform.
Ratliff said that the impetus for creating a publishing platform was born out of the absence of commercially available solutions capable of producing the kind of rich experience the team wanted to deliver. “When we launched, there wasn’t software that would allow us to do the type of design we wanted to do. So, we built a CMS and started selling it to others.”
In essence, the Atavist platform allows someone who is not a designer to create something that looks professionally designed. This includes easily adding multimedia to projects by dragging and dropping blocks of video, sound, slideshows, charts, maps and Instagram and Soundcloud embeds to really show the whole story.
Today, a number of organizations are using the platform for a variety of reasons. United Airlines, for example is using it to build and publish Hemispheres, the online version of their inflight magazine. Stanford University’s Engineering school is using it to create a magazine-like version of their prospectus.
“Our clients are often at the intersection of journalism and activism,” said Ratliff. Most clients are using it for long-form content, whether that is for corporate reports or journalism.
Revenue model for long-form narrative content
As far as the business model is concerned, The Atavist Magazine is available via a subscription. A metered paywall allows readers to access three stories for free before a subscription is needed to gain more content. “We option a lot of our stories for movies, which provides another revenue stream,” said Ratliff.
And finally, there is the software platform that provides the main funding for the magazine. The Atavist self-publishing platform offers a variety of paid subscription options ranging from $8 a month, for small users, to $250 per month for larger organizations.
The idea of a self-funding magazine supplemented by its own publishing software is one innovative way that publishers can support their passions for narrative journalism while not being reliant on traditional ad revenues to succeed.
Atavist is one of the companies that participants of the 2016 VDZ Akademie Digital Publisher’s Tour visited in New York City this June. The Tour was co-organized by Boost! Collective.
Boost! Collective is a strategic messaging and story-driven communications firm. We help clients discover, write and tell powerful stories which drive engagement.
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 | 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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