What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism

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Columbia Journalism School | Tow Center for Digital JournalismChapter 9Managing Digital: Audience, Data and DollarsAlthough all digital news organizations live in a brutally competitive environment,some companies do much better than others because their managersrespond more deftly to opportunities.Arianna Huffington is in that category, and the Huffington Post’s growth inaudience 1 and influence 2 is an example of a sustained idea and management attention.The venture capitalist Eric Hippeau was an early investor and was CEOof the site for several years, until its sale to AOL in February 2011. He was struckby the conviction of the founders—Huffington and Ken Lerer, a corporate communicationsexecutive turned venture capitalist—that much of U.S. society hadlost trust in authority and in journalism. When Huffington Post launched in2005, blogs were resonating with consumers. “They didn’t have to go throughgatekeepers—journalists,” Hippeau said. “Blogs could democratize news.” Logicallyflowing from this idea was a focus on encouraging reader commentary, andHuffPost hired people to help ensure that the conversation would be democraticand open. 3 “It is expensive to moderate,” Hippeau said. “We have 25 full-timein-house moderators.”What HuffPost’s founders didn’t know at the beginning was how rapidly socialmedia were going to grow. After all, in 2005, YouTube was just getting started andFacebook was still confined to colleges and universities. But HuffPost’s managementquickly realized that the social media trend fit with their original convictions.“As the audience embraced social media, we followed, ” said Hippeau. Andthat attention to engaging readers—who now contribute 4 million comments amonth on the site—led them to spend more on technology and less on content.Huffington Post also developed an ability to respond quickly to the data that itwas getting on traffic and usage—something that is a crucial component of successin digital journalism. Indeed, data analysis has moved from being a requiredskill in media companies’ finance departments to being an essential part of therésumé for editors, writers and designers.Managing Digital: Audience, Data and Dollars 119
The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital JournalismAt CNNMoney.com, “Everyone on the staff has access to page-view and trafficdata,” says Executive Editor Christopher Peacock. The staff gets daily emailslisting the top 50 stories by section as well as by the entire site. And, he says, “Wehave real-time metrics. We have a proprietary system to tell us how engaging ourheadlines and home page are.”LIN Media, with its 32 local TV broadcast stations, has an integrated content-managementsystem that distributes content (and allocates costs) across allits markets and platforms. Its daily report on the previous day’s metrics is sentaround to business and editorial departments each morning. “Sometimes thisreport affects broadcast TV decisions as well,” says Robb Richter, senior vicepresident for new media. “It’s like having a great focus group all day long.”Forbes Chief Product Officer Lewis DVorkin writes a blog about the company’sevolving business practices, often noting the integration of previously independentdepartments, functions and platforms at the company. DVorkin seesthis integration as essential to Forbes’ digital growth. “The Web and social mediaturned everything upside down. Knowledgeable content creators, audiencemembers and marketers, too, now possess tools to independently produce anddistribute text.” 4 Expanding readership, once the job of circulation experts, isnow done by business and editorial employees who develop “audience growthstrategies,” which shape coverage. When they decide which topics (say, collegetuition) are likely to attract more readers, or different readers, that affects the recruitmentof bloggers, and the efforts of staff and contributors to find followersand fans.Forbes also encourages its largest advertisers to contribute content directlyto the magazine and the site as part of their advertising buy. The companies aregiven tools to publish content—text, video and photos—on their own pageon the site. This might startle journalists who expect strict separation betweenthe editorial and business sides, but DVorkin sees this effort as a logical way tobring in advertisers who know they can create digital content elsewhere, throughwebsites and email. Labeling the material as coming from advertisers helps inoculatethe company from violating the church-state divide, DVorkin says, addingthat Forbes’ approach allows marketers not to be confined in the “ghetto”of freelance-written advertorial. The advertisers’ material is not edited by Forbes120
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