ending expert coaches to help you with a transformative project. With a new grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, API has resources to send experts to help you plan and execute a key initiative. We can work with you to understand and sharpen your goals and then identify a coach from within the industry who can advise and teach you new skills to help meet them. Coaches may make an in-person visit or advise from afar, depending on a newsroom’s needs. Contact Amy if you have a specific, discrete challenge in your organization where short-term outside guidance could help.
Connecting and empowering the “changemakers” in news organizations. API’s Changemaker Network links up innovators with others who have similar jobs in newsrooms across the country. We are creating a peer network that enables API and the members themselves to support the learning and effectiveness of people working on analytics, internal training, newsletters and podcasting. The network touches more than 60 people in more than 30 newsrooms since we started in early 2017, and it will keep growing. Contact Amy if you have an interest in joining a group.
Newspapers big and small across the country are facing an opportunity — news consumers are increasingly open to paying for some of the news they rely on.
API is helping publishers seize that opportunity and grow their reader revenue.
“Paying for news: Why people subscribe and what it says about the future of journalism” describes who subscribes to news. Based on in-depth formative interviews with news consumers in three cities and a nationally representative survey, the study finds that slightly more than half of all U.S. adults subscribe to a news outlet.
“The 3 types of news subscribers: Why they pay and how to convert them” uses human-centered design to empathize with users and uncover the values and motivations underlying their habits. Most significant of the findings: We identified three news subscriber “archetypes,” each with distinctly different mindsets.
More research and resources on reader revenue are coming early in 2018, including a partnership with more than a dozen companies that will yield a study of thousands of people who recently subscribed to a local newspaper, giving insights to publishers so they can acquire more paid subscriptions.
Our new director of reader revenue, Gwen Vargo, also leads a working group of news publishers who share information and lean on API’s expertise and resources to support their efforts to grow their reader revenue. If you want to get involved with that effort in 2018, let Gwen know.
When the research and listening phase of this work is complete, we will be building a comprehensive set of tools and resources to help publishers grow reader revenue.
API worked with 18 additional newsrooms this year to transform their regular web analytics into journalism insights. Our Metrics for News program combines custom analytics software and personal consulting from API’s team to help a newsroom better match its content choices to its audience needs.
The program provides unique ways of measuring “engagement” though indexes that blend many other metrics together into a single score. It also lets you track the journalism characteristics of all your content, so you can use data to learn how to cover stories differently and improve your beats. Some 70 news operations have used the program in recent years.
Contact Liz Worthington, our director of content strategy, to learn how to get involved.
In an audience-centered news organization, quality journalism is the basis of the relationship with that audience. API continues to invest in helping journalists sustain and improve the most-valuable form: accountability journalism.
That includes a range of work from fact-checking to investigations to deep explainers — all of which are profoundly needed and appreciated by audiences. Analytics data tells us this accountability work is the most engaging content a local news organization produces, and is often the driver of subscriptions and loyalty.
Jane Elizabeth, director of our accountability journalism program, helped hundreds of news organizations study this type of work. Many began new or deeper commitments to accountability in 2017. She participated in 30 conferences, workshops and training sessions this year, reaching an estimated 2,000 people, and thousands more through livestreams, reports and shared documents.
She also produced guides and resources to help you get started or go deeper with fact-checking and accountability reporting, including materials and tutorials in Better News.
We described the road ahead for fact-checking in “The Future of Fact-Checking: Moving ahead in political accountability journalism” — a paper drawn from conversations at our summit of about 70 journalists, academics and researchers. It was one of the first events to closely examine the role of the media and political fact-checking in the historic 2016 election and set a path for the future.
Our online fact-checking course now has nearly 2,700 enrolled and is a self-directed way to learn both the basics and advanced aspects of this form of journalism. The free, 10-chapter course will be enhanced in 2018.
You can join the more than 7,000 others who subscribe to our weekly newsletter “The Week in Fact-Checking,” a collaboration with the International Fact-Checkers Network. It highlights tips and current events that are shaping fact-checking and politics. We’ll be refreshing the newsletter in 2018 as well.
Our fact-checking guidelines for newsrooms that want to improve or launch a fact-checking project have been used by 45 newsrooms around the country. Contact Jane to get a copy of the guidelines, which will be particularly useful during the 2018 midterm elections.
And if you’d like more help with taking your accountability journalism and fact-checking to the next level in 2018, please ask Jane about our new Accountability Toolkit, a tailored plan for your newsroom that includes six simple steps for improving engagement and trust in your best journalism.
So much else happened this year at API. We continued to work on the challenge of improving diversity of news coverage and staffing, and we have new ideas and research coming early in 2018 about that. We are also advancing new ideas about transparency and building trust with readers.
We collaborated with 27 other news-innovation organizations and associations, knowing that we all fight the good fight and can do it best if we work together. And we personally met thousands of you at conferences like ONA, SPJ, JAWS, ASNE/APME, SRCCON:WORK and many more.
Our research showed you how to reinvent the social media team and ways to design newsroom workspaces for digital innovation. We gave more nuance to how partisanship relates to trust in the press and how people decide what to trust on social media. We showed how commercial and nonprofit newsrooms can work together to benefit and change journalism.
You can sign up for API’s Need to Know newsletter to stay in the loop on all our work and the other best insights we curate each day for news innovators.
Here’s to making 2018 a great year for you and your news organization. We hope API can play a part in that.Bali again? You bet! Pretty sure we are not the first (and definitely not the last) who can't get over with the charm of Bali. There is just some magic about this island that mesmerizes us whenever we are here.
Elly and Way Kiat have chosen Sanctus Villa for their wedding. It's a new villa to us and one exciting thing about new shooting place is that - we are free to run our creativity, sprinkle some 'pixie dust' for yet another masterpiece.
Here's a glimpse of the celebration.
Enjoy! Congrats to the lovebirds and we're so gonna miss Bali!Marlins Man is officially a free agent.
Miami lawyer Laurence Leavy acknowledged to ESPN Wednesday night that he couldn't come to terms with the Miami Marlins and will not be paying for tickets for the team's games for the first time in 25 years.
The only Marlins games he says he plans to attend are the Yankees-Marlins series at Yankee Stadium. He also says he's considering keeping the orange jersey he wears but taking the Marlins logo off of it. He said he'll also consider wearing the jersey of another interested team that would be more appreciative of him.
"Four teams reached out to me already and said that I could become, like, the Tigers man or other teams, and they would be happy to sell me tickets on TV view for three years paid in advance with a substantial discount," said Leavy, who has become the most famous fan in sports by sitting at prime sporting events in some of the best seats. He is sitting in a great seat for an average of 285 sporting events a year, he estimates.
Leavy presented the Marlins with an offer, as well as signed checks that they could cash, on Dec. 27, as first reported this week by local Florida radio personality Andy Slater. Leavy's offer was $200,000 for three years of four Diamond Club seats behind home plate, figuring a 10 percent discount for the Marlins' lack of stars and a 10 percent discount for paying everything up front.
Leavy said he paid $250 per ticket per game last year for his best seats. The Marlins came back asking for $260 for those seats over three years for what Leavy said was "a worse product with all the All-Stars gone."
The team no longer has Giancarlo Stanton, who was traded to the Yankees, Christian Yelich, who was shipped off to the Brewers, Dee Gordon, who is on the Mariners, and Marcell Ozuna, who is with the Cardinals.
After an awkward face-to-face with new team owner Derek Jeter at Jeter's first town hall, the two never had another conversation. Leavy said Marlins representatives came to his office to discuss a deal but, according to Leavy, wound up only insulting him