Month: October 2021

O’Neill’s job, Newsbreak CEO Jeff Zheng said in a press release, will be to “deliver informative and timely local information to our audiences, particularly in areas of the country where local newsrooms have closed and a new generation of trusted writers and journalists are needed to fill those voids.” 

She will also be taking over an endeavor where little is set in stone. While Newsbreak’s creator program has nearly 3,000 participants spread out across almost all 50 states, with its most successful creators generating as much as $10,000 per month in revenue, “almost everything related to our current creator program is now in review or actively being revised,” O’Neill said in an email.

In theory, a successful creator program at Newsbreak would rely on and validate playbooks that other media platforms have already written. After years of licensing existing content from studios, Netflix’s brand and business are defined largely by its original shows and movies; several of the world’s most popular social platforms, from TikTok to Snapchat to Pinterest, have invested vast sums to support and directly compensate people that create content for their platforms.

A sustainable program could also help solve one of the journalism world’s thorniest challenges. As local news has struggled to adapt to digital, local news has simply vanished from many communities, with neither the news nor the reporting talent to bring it back. Recently, many companies have tried to bolster reporting ranks by enticing non-professional journalists to cover their local communities; indeed, O’Neill was working at a startup called Nillium focused on that very task before she joined Newsbreak.

“More and more journalists are striking out on their own and we want to provide an opportunity for them (and for subject-matter experts) to find their footing on NewsBreak,” O’Neill wrote. “We are increasingly appealing to local reporters who want to cover their communities but don’t necessarily have followings large enough to be successful on other platforms.”

But Newsbreak’s fitful effort to get an original content program in gear highlights the challenges of trying to get news out of untrained writers. Its efforts have also put the local news publishers that provide most of Newsbreak’s content on edge, in some cases strengthening their conviction that, as a partner, Newsbreak ought to be kept at arm’s length. 

“Keep my traffic internal and build my own content — that’s the natural progression for these aggregator systems,” said Dominick Miserandino, the North American CEO of AniView and the former CEO of Inquisitr. “We’ve evolved through this before. And every time this system works, publishers get screwed.”

Rapidly changing priorities

In the fall of 2020, Newsbreak’s original content aspirations got off to a buzzy start among freelancers, thanks to an offer that few other platforms or outlets could top: Guaranteed minimum payments of $1,000 per month for those who qualified. 

At the time, Newsbreak was asking for content that might complement the hard news it was aggregating from other outlets, and it had no problems taking content that had already been published elsewhere, a boon to writers who had been trying to eke out income using other platforms including Medium. Many quickly uploaded dozens of pieces that had already been published elsewhere on the internet. 

That quickly changed. By the spring of 2021, Newsbreak wanted news from writers’ local communities instead, which it would rate using a ten-point scale, called a CV score, with higher-rated content getting surfaced more and its writers getting paid more. The CV score took several things into account, including how localized, differentiated and well-written the content was.

Before long, Newsbreak changed again, discarding the scoring system and asking for local features built using original reporting, which it would either accept or reject.

This kind of iteration and experimentation has become a way of life in Silicon Valley, but it frustrated many program participants, who said they had trouble figuring out what to expect.

“What you get paid depends on what they want,” said Stacey Doud, a freelance journalist who joined Newsbreak’s creator program in 2020. “Over the years, I’ve learned what the newspaper editors in my town want. But with Newsbreak, next month they might say, ‘We expect this [instead].’” 

A harder deal

Newsbreak also made it harder for writers to monetize their content. By early summer, Newsbreak had begun taking away minimum revenue guarantees in favor of a system where creators were compensated based on how many views their content got. 

At first, writers and video creators had guaranteed minimum payments for every article or video that Newsbreak accepted, with the ability to generate more depending on how many people saw a given piece of content.

That extra money was determined using a variable system that depends on a number of factors, including whether the audience read the story in Newsbreak’s app or on the web. Today, the minimum payments are gone for writers, though some video creators still get guaranteed payments.

New creators need to provide free labor before they can start getting paid too. Today, a writer must acquire a minimum of 100 followers on Newsbreak’s platform and publish a minimum of 10 stories before they can start making money.

Each article requires significant work. Per guidelines that Newsbreak laid out this spring, articles must be 250 words (though Newsbreak recommends they run more than 600), made up of original reporting rather than aggregation, and feature either original images or images that are freely available to use. 

Contributors have no way to pitch articles ahead of time, meaning they must complete stories and submit them for review. There are no kill fees. Creators looking for guidance about what kinds of content to produce can use a tool in Newsbreak’s creator dashboard which recommends stories that it thinks will do well on the platform. O’Neill said Newsbreak is hiring more people with editorial backgrounds, which “potentially opens the door to new types of infrastructure,” but would not provide further details.

The shift to performance-focused compensation has had a mixed response among Newsbreak creators so far. Those producing in-demand content in large markets see a glass half-full: Jon Barr, who makes video content about life in New York City, said his overall compensation went down when Newsbreak eliminated monthly minimum payments, but he sees upside because views of his content have been climbing as the year has gone on, and he is bullish on his long-term prospects. 

By comparison, Doud, who mostly covers the suburbs of the Dallas metropolitan area, sees less promise. After Newsbreak stopped offering minimum payments, Doud said she went from earning around $300 per month from Newsbreak to a small fraction of that; in August, a month when she filed four stories, each running close to 1,000 words and containing original photographs, Doud said she earned less than $6.

O’Neill said those kinds of drops were not the norm among program participants. But a pageview-based compensation model could present significant challenges for any creator who isn’t located in or near a sufficiently large market. A feature Doud wrote recently about the first Black man to serve as a police officer in Grand Prairie, TX, which accumulated 15,000 pageviews, generated $10, Doud said.

Unwelcome competition

Today, Newsbreak’s original content creators generate a “small, but meaningful percentage” of its overall impressions, and one that is growing fast. 

The local news publishers that provide the majority of those impressions are watching the development of Newsbreak’s creator program warily. For most local news publishers, Newsbreak regularly provides its the third-largest source of referral traffic, in some cases, delivering more referrals than the fourth, fifth, and sixth-biggest sources combined. 

Many are loath to give that up, though they also say they expected a program like this one to eventually start eating into those referrals. 

“It seems like this natural life cycle,” said an executive at one local news publisher that publishes content on Newsbreak, who asked not to be identified while discussing a sensitive business partnership. “You can only be a renter of content for so long. Plus, we’re [local publishers] all throwing paywalls up.” 

Natural life cycle or not, that same source said it was “pretty surprising” when they realized that a former reporter at one of their papers was now producing stories for Newsbreak. “I thought, ‘They must be really doubling down on this.’” 

A cactus in a desert?

How suitable a replacement a creator program might be for local news, even in its currently diminished state, is unclear. In the abstract, Newsbreak’s local focus and distribution muscle provide an excellent starting point for lots of experiments in local news, especially in places where there isn’t any local news to consume.  

“This could be a solution for news deserts,” said Chris Krewson, the executive director of LION Pubs, a group that supports small, digital local news operations. 

Among LION Pubs members, Krewson said, Newsbreak is a divisive topic of conversation. Because many LIONs are quite small, the amount of revenue that Newsbreak sends their way is significant. 

But the kinds of stories Newsbreak’s algorithm favors gives Krewson, and his organization’s members, pause. 

“I don’t love an algorithm that heavily weighs ‘if it bleeds, it leads’-type stories,” Krewson said, noting that some of his members have told him they’re considering investing in more local crime coverage, simply because Newsbreak’s algorithm tends to favor it.

Creators have detected those preferences too. Bebe Nicholson, who stopped writing for Newsbreak in September, said she noticed that true crime pieces she submitted to the platform performed much better than the kinds of stories that Newsbreak’s reps told her to produce, such as recaps of community board meetings. She stopped writing for Newsbreak after the platform took away her minimum revenue guarantees.

“If they reward more garbage, I’d almost rather not see news deserts filled with news landfill,” Krewson said.  

According to a LinkedIn survey of nearly 3,000 full-time workers in the U.S., about one quarter of employees have safety concerns about their commute, with an equal number saying they are much less willing to commute than they were before the coronavirus crisis. Thirteen percent of workers say they don’t have access to transportation that feels safe.

Safety isn’t the only factor. Nearly 40% said working from home during the pandemic had a positive effect on their mental health because they didn’t have the anxiety and pressure associated with a daily commute. 

Then, of course, there’s the widely reported impact reduced commuting has on the environment and the global climate crisis. The share of individuals who spent time traveling on a given day during the pandemic dropped by 17%, while those who did travel did so for a shorter duration, according to a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics study this past summer.

Indeed, the daily commute has emerged as a major factor in workplace flexibility as businesses begin to open back up. 

“After agency employees no longer had to commute to the office, they gained valuable time back in their days. But what they lost was the clear distinction between work and home life,” said Sasha Martens, founder and president of the New York talent recruitment firm Sasha The Mensch. 

With increased expectations to be “always on” via video calls and with email inboxes and Slack channels that are always humming, employees are looking to companies to better define boundaries around when the workday is actually over, Martens said. That, of course, encompasses the commute. “Given that many agencies are now projecting returning to the office further out in 2022, this is something employers will have to address in order to attract and retain talent,” she added.

“Eliminating commutes gives employees more time to spend with their families, get in the right headspace to prepare for the day, and get a head start on calls, emails and work that needs immediate attention,” said Lisa Walker, workforce futurist at Boston-based software company Fuze. 

Employers have learned through the pandemic that employees can be just as productive working from home and on their own schedules. With that in mind, companies must continue to be flexible about employees and teleworking — or else, she warned. “Companies that take a rigid approach to try to bring employees back into offices, and try to turn the clock back to 2019, will lose talent,” she said.

This summer, a global study of nearly 9,000 workers by Fuze found, in fact, that 75% believe flex work is the future of a post-pandemic world. Mental health concerns around commuting are certainly a part of that, Walker pointed out. And yet, too many employers discount commuting as a factor in employee well-being. 

“It is such a shame that certain employers look ahead to the end of the pandemic as the opportunity to force employees back into long commutes and rigid office schedules,” she said. “People are not burned out from working from home — they are burned out by the pandemic.”

Walker believes the majority of people who are given a choice will never want to return to the daily grind of a commute, as they have seen what getting those two hours back in their day means for their overall quality of life. And yet, many will happily put up with a commute on those days they choose to go in — just so it’s not a daily necessity.

Fuze’s leadership has explicitly stated that no employee must return to the office full-time, and yet it acknowledges that many employees will choose to spend some time there. “A small minority of employees, like myself, have moved outside of a commutable distance, so when we do go in, it will be on a more limited basis to cut down on the stress of commuting long distances,” said Walker. “But I am still excited to get down to Boston once a month.” 

The desire of employees to cut back on, if not completely eliminate, their commutes has given rise to concepts like Daybase, a provider of workspaces, launched this year, that bills itself as a third option between the workplace and the home office. 

Founded by former WeWork executives, Daybase’s model for the hybrid workplace is centered around professional-grade, on-demand work locations built close to commuters’ homes, presenting a solution to issues around commuting, working from home and the ongoing reluctance to return to a 9-to-5 office life. 

“People are not as concerned about whether their company is doing what’s right in terms of [Covid-19] protocols — most are concerned about what other humans around them, during their commute and in the workplace, have done, and being around unvaccinated coworkers and potentially bringing [the delta variant] home to their children,” said Daybase’s CEO Joel Steinhaus, formerly the head of strategic initiatives at WeWork. 

Citing a study from the National Association for Business Economics, Daybase pointed out that just 11% of businesses plan to return to their pre-pandemic work arrangements. 

As the daily commute increasingly looks like a thing of the past, more workers will seek out solutions for, as Steinhaus puts it, “the new way we live and work.”

Quotes of the week

“They’re savvy evaluators, and these groups will continue to reward companies that align with their values and punish those that don’t.”

—Chelsea MacDonald, senior vp of operations at Ada, a Toronto-based CX firm, speaking on how Gen-Z is handling the generational workforce divide.

“Our tool allows for every business to personalize the experience, to pick the rules that say, ‘this is what safety and access mean for me — if you meet these rules, you can come in.’”

—Ashley John Heather, co-founder and president/COO of health compliancy platform Cleared4, who has been developing software and marketing solutions for more than 25 years.

“Cyber criminals have been taking advantage of this abrupt shift to remote work and exploiting the security gaps caused by the transition.” 

— Dotdash’s CTO Nabil Ahmad in a presentation during the Digiday Publishing Summit on the growing cyber threat to publishers, newsrooms and their remote employees.

By the numbers

• 47% of 1,000 remote workers surveyed in the U.S. say they have anxiety as a result of hybrid setups, where some colleagues are returning to the office while others elect to remain working remotely.
  [Source of data: Breeze report.]
• Only 42% of 1,000 U.K. employees who work from home do so from a home office, while 21% work from the kitchen or dining room, 19% from their lounge and 17% their bedroom.
  [Source of data: Fellowes Brands’ The Importance of Workspace Satisfaction report.]
• 81% of 2,200 people who travelled regularly for work before the pandemic, are more concerned about the delta variant than non-business travelers.
  [Source of data: Morning Consult survey.]

What else we’ve covered

• On Oct. 6, Alyson Shontell will become Fortune’s next editor in chief, succeeding Clifton Leaf, who stepped down after four years at the helm. Shontell will be the first woman to lead the business publication in its 92-year history. Digiday media reporter Sara Guaglione has a Q&A with the new EIC.
• The countdown to the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26 ) — arguably the most significant meeting of world leaders to discuss climate change since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015 — is underway, and Guaglione reports publishers want to capitalize on that attention with a boost in coverage leading up to the major summit.

• Now that the U.S.’s Federal Trade Commission has vowed to get tough on enforcement against mobile health apps with an old rule governing the privacy and security of health data, some legal and privacy experts, reports Digiday’s privacy, data and platforms reporter Kate Kaye, are siding with tech businesses, saying it’s a convoluted approach that already is causing confusion.

This newsletter is edited by Jessica Davies, managing editor, Future of Work.

Key details:

• Hispanic Heritage Month, which began on Sept. 15 and runs through Oct. 15, is a key time for increased ad revenue and for new advertisers to work with Spanish-language publishers.
• However, publishers and ad agencies both lament the slow progress of brands’ ad spend in this area and recognition of the importance and opportunity of reaching Hispanic people in the U.S. year-round.
• Spanish-language publishers that reach U.S. Hispanic audiences do not produce much special content around Hispanic Heritage Month because celebrating and recognizing the contributions from this community are what they do daily, they said.

The Hispanic audience

There were 62 million Hispanic people in the U.S. in 2020, representing nearly 20% of the country’s population, according to estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau. However, Hispanic people are severely underrepresented in the media and entertainment industry. In 2019, about 8% of staff in newspapers and publishing were Hispanic, according to a study conducted by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. That lack of representation is evident at most of the media companies in Digiday’s breakdown of publishers’ diversity reports. 

At the same time, Hispanic buying power has grown substantially over the last 30 years, from $213 billion in 1990 to $1.9 trillion in 2020, and accounted for 11% of U.S. buying power in 2020, according to the latest annual Multicultural Economy report from University of Georgia’s Selig Center for Economic Growth.

Only an uptick in ad revenue for Hispanic Heritage Month

Impremedia’s publications receive a “noticeable” uptick in ad spend around Hispanic Heritage Month, “but not crazy. It’s not 2x from the previous month,” said company CEO Iván Adaime. Impremedia publishes two of the oldest Spanish-language dailies in the U.S. — El Diario in New York and La Opinión in Los Angeles. The company does “not disclose details about specific advertisers,” he noted, declining to provide further details. 

Adaime divided Impremedia’s advertisers into three categories: 

1. The brands that come to Impremedia for the first time during Hispanic Heritage Month with a small ad deal, and then continue to spend with them and become long-term partners (the “ideal situation,” Adaime said)
2. The brands that come to Impremedia only around Hispanic Heritage Month
3. The brands that invest year-round and do not put much additional investment into content around Hispanic Heritage Month

Impremedia has a small number of clients in the first category and a larger share of clients that come during Hispanic Heritage Month. The third category of clients are the ones that “pay the bills,” Adaime said. “It’s really hard to be a publisher these days and harder to be a Hispanic publisher because there are less advertising dollars and CPMs are lower than they are in the general market,” Adaime said.

People en Español is faring better. The Meredith-owned title saw a 33% increase in overall ad revenue from brands around Hispanic Heritage Month. The magazine signed deals with brands including The Home Depot, Nick Jr, Old Navy, Revlon Hair, AARP and Amazon Music, according to Monique Manso, publisher at People en Español. The increased ad revenue is coming from advertisers making longer-term, annual commitments, she said.

Advertisers are also putting in requests with People en Español around Hispanic Heritage Month content much earlier than in the past, Manso said. Typically, there would be a two- to three-month lead time, but starting last year and continuing this year, that became an eight- to 10-month lead time, she said. PeopleenEspanol.com reached 1.8 million total unique visitors in August 2021, according to Comscore data.

Meanwhile, Hearst Magazines put together an editorial initiative called “The Power of Us” that spans six English-language publications. Launched on Sept. 30 (halfway through Hispanic Heritage Month), the program marked the first time Hearst has teamed up across multiple brands for a larger project tied to Hispanic Heritage Month. However, Hearst’s “The Power of Us” is not sponsored.

‘The change is slow’

Some advertisers are spending more with Hispanic audiences this month, according to the two ad agency executives Digiday spoke with. “Since 2020 more brands are taking a stand around cultural moments, like Hispanic Heritage Month,” said Karina Dobarro, vp and managing director of multicultural brand strategy at Horizon Media. 

Brands new to this space are especially contributing to the increase in ad spend this year, Dobarro said. It has become more of an intentional effort to reach the Hispanic audience too.

While many brands previously were reaching this demographic through mass-media efforts, those marketers “are now reconsidering their media and marketing plan to make sure they are inclusive,” after reassessing their media strategies and practices over the last year, Dobarro said. She has noticed brands in finance and QSR categories especially are entering the space.

And brands that are not yet fully engaging with the Hispanic community can use the occasion of Hispanic Heritage Month to build a relationship with that community, said Jonatan Zinger, svp of insights at M8, a Dentsu digital ad agency.

“The change is slow. It takes time… it is going in a good direction, but it’s not where it should be if you think about how big the population is and their spending power,” Adaime said. 

“It’s growing, but slower than we would like it to grow. But as long as we continue to see growth year over year and brands acknowledge the need to connect with the consumer, it’s a positive story,” said Dobarro, echoing Adaime.

Video seems to be especially attracting advertisers to this space according to both Dobarro and Zinger. That coincides with an increase in ad-supported videos aimed at Hispanic viewers.

For example, digital media company Canela Media launched a free, ad-supported streaming TV network for U.S. Hispanic audiences in May 2020, and Spanish-language TV network Univision followed suit with its ad-supported streamer PrendeTV in May 2021. In August 2021, Spanish-language YouTube videos in the U.S. generated more than 15.9 billion views, a 30% increase since 2018, according to Tubular Labs. 

However, advertisers risk “looking opportunistic and inauthentic” if they only parachute in to reach Hispanic people in the U.S. once a year, Zinger said.

Hispanic people, especially younger ones, can easily recognize when advertisers are only thinking about them during Hispanic Heritage Month, said People en Español’s Manso. “If you are only looking to talk to them during this month and not talking to them all year long to build that loyalty, it’s a real miss. This is the new majority. This is not a niche market,” she said.

So what will it take for advertisers to be more inclusive of this audience throughout the year?

Dobarro said it’s all about making a “business case” for Hispanic consumers and showing that they are driving growth in “most categories.” Attention around Hispanic Heritage Month tends to be part of DE&I efforts from companies’ corporate levels, rather than a marketing inclusive effort, she said. To change that, agencies like Horizon Media conduct multicultural assessments that analyze audiences and creative, for example, to show brands the benefits of building an inclusive marketing strategy, according to Dobarro.

“Hispanic Heritage Month is not National Donut Day,” Zinger added wryly.

‘Hispanic Heritage Month every month’

Considering that advertisers do not move money en masse to Spanish-language publishers for Hispanic Heritage Month, it seems somewhat sensical that these publishers do not invest a ton of extra effort in celebrating the month in their editorial content. Most of the Spanish-language publishers that Digiday spoke with said they do not produce much special coverage around Hispanic Heritage Month, because they talk to the Hispanic population all year long.

Hispanic Heritage Month was created “to acknowledge and celebrate Hispanics, but for us we don’t need to remind our Hispanic readers that they are Hispanic or need to celebrate their heritage,” said Adaime. Having said that, Impremedia’s publications are acknowledging Hispanic Heritage Month. El Diario has a tab on its homepage called “Mes de la Herencia Hispana” for stories around the event. La Opinión also has a dedicated hub with related stories.

For its part, People en Español has published some articles around the cultural moment, such as a round-up of Hispanic Heritage Month celebrations around the country, a spotlight on a Target collection and a shopping guide dedicated to Latin fashion brands. It also is hosting its annual “Festival” event on Oct. 15, the last day of Hispanic Heritage Month. It will be virtual this year, due to the pandemic. 

“For us, it’s Hispanic Heritage Month every month,” said Manso. “We are about shining a spotlight on everything coming out of the U.S. Hispanic community… It’s not a specific editorial effort for us because we do this constantly.”