What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism

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Columbia Journalism School | Tow Center for Digital Journalismits costs. 13 Catchy headlines, such as “Lady Gaga Goes Pantless in Paris” (fromAOL site StyleList.com) are important to entice readers from search. 14 Similarly,an article headlined “Benadryl for Dogs” should cost $15, because its revenuepotential is around $26. 15 “We are heavily invested in analytics as this is the wayto empower our editors and journalists,” Neel Chopdekar, vice president at AOLMedia, said in an interview shortly before “The AOL Way” was made public. Hecalls this “bionic journalism—the best of man and machine.”Paying freelancers by performance is not as unusual a practice as paying editorialstaff that way. About.com, the general information website founded in 1995and now owned by the New York Times, pays its expert writers, or “guides,” byperformance. 16 USA Today announced in early April that it is considering payingbonuses to writers based on page views. 17Digital companies, which lean heavily on part-time contributors or unpaidcommenters, are constantly on the lookout for cheap labor. And mainstreamnews companies have long offered psychic, rather than financial, rewards to itsreporters and editors.Forbes’ DVorkin is experimenting with pay schemes for blogging “contributors,”whom Forbes compensates with a flat monthly fee. On top of that, Forbespays a bonus if a writer reaches a certain target of unique visitors. (DVorkin declinedto give details about pay at Forbes, but he did say that at True/Slant—theWeb company he owned before coming to Forbes—contributors would typicallyearn about $200 per month, and some would get twice that much, countingtheir bonuses. A “few” earned several thousand dollars a month.) DVorkin saidhe’d like to add more metrics to the calculations—for example, Twitter followersor repeat visitors.“In the newsroom, we are trying to develop different currencies to value success,“ says CNNMoney.com’s Peacock. Journalists typically feel rewarded whentheir stories run on the front of a print publication, or lead the evening news.“We are trying to develop different kinds of ‘front page’ experiences for thejournalists,” Peacock says. But the new standards, such as the number of pageviews or comments, are often beyond an editor’s control and are just as likely tobe determined by readers, aggregators or bloggers.Managing Digital: Audience, Data and Dollars 123
The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital JournalismDigital executives also must constantly decide when to deploy staff to workon new or experimental products that don’t meet the new productivity tests.Tumblr, the social media microblogging platform, gets billions of monthly pageviews overall, but its value to most media companies is still negligible. Somejournalists are fascinated with what it might become in terms of driving trafficor buzz—and their employers let them spend time with the platform, if only tobe sure they don’t miss out on something that might turn into the next Twitter.For example, GQ has a Tumblr site with just 12,000 followers—a tiny fraction ofthe print magazine’s monthly circulation of 800,000. GQ’s senior editor, DevinGordon, says “Tumblr is a side project, but I care a lot about it.” He and aneditorial assistant limit themselves to no more than two hours per week postingTumblr content.Managers of digital operations must also deal with journalists who are able toestablish a following on the basis of their own talents rather than the prestige orreach of the news organization. Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish was responsiblefor 1 million monthly unique visitors, or about 20 percent of the traffic, at theAtlantic’s site. But it was Sullivan’s audience, not the Atlantic’s; the blogger ownedthe brand equity. So when he moved to The Daily Beast in April 2011, he tookhis unique users with him. This phenomenon isn’t entirely new, of course. Columnistslike Walter Winchell would change employers in the glory days of the1920s tabloid wars. 18 But in digital journalism, audiences can follow stars withgreat ease, and conceivably journalists with big individual followings could beginto keep, and try to make money from, data about their readers, rather than leavingthat to their employers.DVorkin says he is changing the way he judges the quality of a reporter. “Itused to be a question of how they develop their sources. Now it’s how they developtheir sources and their audience.” He expects Forbes journalists not just tocover news, but to be “maestros” of comments and of followers. And they have tobe recruiters. “When we used to hire a reporter, we’d say, ‘Show me some clips.’Now I say, ‘Who is in your orbit? Who are your sources? Who do you know?Who can you convince to contribute?’ ”124
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