Month: March 2022

Quartz tests regional newsletter pricing

After initially taking a global approach to subscriptions — asking people to pay $100 a year to access more of Quartz’s international coverage, including from its Quartz Africa vertical — the publisher found that “there was more price sensitivity and people reading Quartz Africa really just wanted to read Quartz Africa,” said Quartz editor-in-chief Katherine Bell.

Quartz didn’t have regional pricing for its membership, so the team decided to launch a separate membership for those readers, at a lower price point. Quartz Africa costs $60 a month.

The new Quartz Africa membership will give readers exclusive access to Quartz Africa content and a new Quartz Africa Member Brief. (Its Quartz Africa Weekly newsletter will remain free and the over 90,000 readers signed up to that newsletter will get four free editions of the Quartz Africa Member Brief to hopefully persuade them to subscribe to the Quartz Africa membership).

Quartz Africa is the company’s second geographically-focused subscription product, after Quartz Japan. But unlike Quartz Africa, the Quartz Japan newsletter is mainly a translated version of the Quartz Daily Brief and focused on global news rather than the innovation and tech developing in the region. Quartz Japan has 4,400 members. Bell said they are looking at opportunities for a paid product in India.

The Quartz Africa newsletter is created by a four-person team. Editor Ciku Kimeria is based between Nairobi, Kenya and Dakar, Senegal, two reporters are based in Lagos, Nigeria and Nairobi and a climate reporter is working out of Cairo, Egypt. The vertical also relies on a “large group” of freelancers, Bell said.

CNN looks to the Middle East

CNN is in the early stages of developing an English-language newsletter for a global audience around news in the Middle East. The audience development team is currently testing the name, tone, content and prototype. The goal is to debut the newsletter this year, said Alan Segal, vp of audience development and analytics for CNN Digital.

“In the U.S. we have many products… but we had to bolster our international product suite, by building out the portfolio of [newsletter] products,” he said.

The upcoming newsletter is inspired by CNN’s “Meanwhile in China” newsletter. The “Meanwhile In…” franchise has two newsletters; the China one launched in June 2021 based out of Hong Kong and the America one in August 2019. (The one focused on the U.S. is intended for an international audience, by taking the time to describe nuances like “what right and left are in U.S. politics and what a Republican vs Democrat is,” Segal said).

CNN also has a “5 Things” newsletter in Spanish that compiles the five biggest stories of the day, and breaking news briefings in Spanish and in Arabic (the latter launched last year). Rather than translations of U.S. breaking news alerts, the Spanish and Arabic teams publish news natively in those languages and also on different breaking news based on the region and the audience. “Something that might impact the U.S. audience — say, a wildfire — might not be as interesting to an Arabic audience, for example,” Segal said.

CNN did not provide audience data on its newsletters by publishing time. Segal acknowledged that its “strongest” newsletter products are in the U.S., and that there are challenges to capturing an audience abroad. “The speed that you gather that audience isn’t always the same. In the newsletter business, it’s one thing to build it, and another to get people aware of it and acquire for it… They have to go hand in hand, and they don’t always develop at the same time,” he said.

The Post shifts its WorldView

The Washington Post has a different approach. Instead of spinning off international editions of existing newsletters or launching new ones, it uses its flagship English-language global newsletter, “Today’s WorldView,” to focus on a major news moment. Last week, for example, it focused on the war in Ukraine for an international audience. The newsletter goes out at midnight in the U.S. – timed to hit Europe in the morning and Asia in the afternoon, a spokesperson said. They declined to share how many sign-ups in total to Today’s WorldView.

New York Times international readers drive subscription growth

The New York Times has taken an opposite approach to the Post by rolling out a roster of region-specific newsletters. In total, the Times has over 80 newsletters and email briefings, with dedicated daily briefings for Asia-Pacific and Europe combining reporting from its overseas bureaus with curated reading recommendations, Adam Pasick, editorial director of newsletters at The New York Times, said in an email. The Times also has weekly newsletters with news, features, opinion and local recommendations for Australia and Canada, and Spanish-language and Chinese-language newsletters. “On Soccer with Rory Smith” covers the sport for European and international fans, and “The Interpreter” provides news analysis through an international lens, co-written by London-based former human rights lawyer Amanda Taub, Pasick said. The Times did not provide a number for how many region-specific newsletters it has by press time.

Last year, the Times hit 1 million digital news subscriptions from readers outside the U.S., according to Pasick. He attributed achieving this milestone, in part, to readers turning to newsletters like “The Morning Briefing: Europe Edition,” which has over 1 million readers, for example. The Times also launched a Russia-Ukraine War Briefing on Feb. 22, available to read for free for people registered to the Times site.

“We’ve had a consistent strategy to drive greater subscriber growth, and a curious, primarily English-speaking international reader is a critical part of that strategy,” Pasick said.

Sometimes this includes reposting the misinformation and decoding what about it makes it false:

@nowthis

Journalism 101: Not everything you see on social media is what it seems—that’s especially important as we watch Putin’s war on Ukraine

♬ original sound – nowthis

@washingtonpost

No matter how devastating, enlightening or enraging a post is, wait to share it. Assume everything is suspect until you confirm its authenticity. #euphoria #medialiteracy

♬ original sound – We are a newspaper.

But other times, the strategy for getting more engagement and views on factual information is a bit more involved. First, let’s get into why TikTok has a unique impact on the dissemination of disinformation.

The TikTok problem

TikTok has become a habitual app for many young, mobile-first audiences, and the Ukraine-Russia conflict is the first time that many of those users are being exposed to first-hand accounts and surveillance footage of warfare as it unfolds. Because of the constant flow of coverage, it also makes it particularly difficult for those audiences to stay up-to-date with the latest information or to take the time to assess whether or not the footage they’re seeing is true or accurate. 

Christiaan Triebert works on the visual investigations team at The New York Times, which is responsible for verifying videos and images of different world events that are uploaded to the internet, particularly social media. He was one of the first members of the team, which was formed in 2017 and before that, he worked at Bellingcat, a company that focused entirely on social video verification. 

Having spent nearly a decade learning how to spot fake videos and images online, Triebert said that misinformation is “rife in every conflict or situation” but the unique differentiator this time around has been the rapid dissemination of false videos and images on TikTok. 

“Misinformation on TikTok is a whole different beast than on Twitter,” said Triebert. “It’s almost striking sometimes how [quickly] videos make the rounds on TikTok.” 

Videos on TikTok can get millions of views in a matter of hours or days, but unlike Twitter, commenting on TikToks to dispute false claims or say it’s a fake video is more difficult because you can’t include images or videos proving your point, Triebert said. What’s more, initial posts go viral with faulty information and attract a lot of attention, but the subsequent posts debunking the original video are often, by comparison, significantly less eye-grabbing than a video of a missile hitting an apartment complex, he added. 

Solution #1: Avoiding viral videos altogether

Some publishers are choosing not to post viral videos altogether, whether they are first posted by other TikTok users or by wire services. 

Vice World News has decided not to publish any user-generated content from the platform, such as videos posted by people in Ukraine or Russia, as a precaution because the verification process takes such a long time. 

“We made a decision, given the pace at which this was moving, that we would tell those human stories through our journalists, rather than sourcing information from social media. And I think, frankly, at this moment in time and given the nature of this conflict, it’s a pretty dangerous place to be playing around,” said Katie Drummond, svp of global news at Vice News. 

The Washington Post’s Dave Jorgenson, who produces and leads content for the publisher’s TikTok, said his team posted one video from the Reuters wire service on the page and it ended up performing worse (it received 63,000 views) than the original scripted sketch content and on-the-ground reporting that WaPo’s content strategy has been rooted in (which tends to garner upwards of 500,000 – 1 million views per video).

“A lot of people are posting things from [wire services] and I’m sure that that particular clip has been posted already. TikTok’s algorithm doesn’t really favor that either so we want to make sure that we’re not doubling up too much on things,” Jorgenson said.

Solution #2: Combating misinformation face-to-face

News publishers have an added challenge of not just disputing this misinformation, but doing so in a way that gets as much traction as the original posts themselves. 

Some of the publishers are producing videos on TikTok that seek their audiences’ involvement in an effort to identify and address any potential misinformation.

WaPo’s Jorgenson put out a call to action on TikTok that asked people for questions in the comment section that he and his team responded to over the course of the next several days with answers sourced from Washington Post reporting. 

@washingtonpost

Have a question? Ask below! #ukraine #russia #invasion

♬ original sound – We are a newspaper.

The Vice World News account hosted a TikTok Live conversation between senior news reporter Sophia Smith Galer and correspondent Matthew Cassel, who has been creating much of Vice’s on-the-ground coverage. In that, Smith Galer asked Cassel a lot of the questions that they were being asked in the comment sections of their posts.  

Drummond said that her team is also trying to turn its journalists and correspondents into recurring hosts on the page in order to familiarize their audiences with their expertise on the subject.

“Having Matt Cassel or Ben Solomon as someone that our audience recognize and trust, and that person is taking them to go see something; I think that that’s something Vice has always done really well and so we’re really just thinking about how we translate that for this audience,” said Drummond. 

Jorgenson, who is typically the face of the WaPo TikTok page along with his two colleagues Carmella Boykin and Chris Vazquez, has begun working with WaPo’s correspondents who are on the ground in Ukraine by having them film themselves unpack major events.

“There’s certainly value to people seeing our face on the platform, whether it’s mine or Carmella or Chris, or now these reporters that we have on the ground in Ukraine. I think that people now when they start to recognize [them] it’s reassuring and it’s coming from a verified source,” Jorgenson said.  

NowThis has been using its U.S.-based editorial staff to emulate a similar strategy, including using its senior political correspondent Serena Marshall to be the face of its NowThisPolitics account. Additionally, on both the politics and main NowThis page, voiceovers from its staff are used to explain some of the viral content and what the latest news means as the war unfolds. 

On TikTok, users “want to connect, they want to feel like they’re being spoken to, and that’s a real opportunity for us in a way that we can diffuse more complicated topics, or share information in a way that feels relatable and conversational to the audience,” according to Samara Mackereth, executive editor of social video at NowThis.

Solution #3: Keeping high verification standards

Last week, Triebert posted a thread on Twitter that laid out an example of a viral video of a supposed attack by Russia on Ukraine and explained the process of verifying its legitimacy.

The video, which first went viral on Sunday, Feb. 27, depicts an explosion off the side of a road in what is supposedly Ukraine. But ultimately Oleksandr Skichko, the governor of Cherkasy Oblast, Ukraine (where the video was found to have originated through geolocation), denied the video was real. 

“We don’t put a lot of stake in [what government officials say] because we’re looking for visual proof. Whether or not officials are telling the truth, we don’t really care. We just want to corroborate with other visuals,” said Triebert.

Through the process of visual corroboration, his team wasn’t able to definitively say whether or not it was an attack by Russia, but they could determine that it actually happened on Thursday, Feb. 24 (the start of the Russian invasion), thanks to local media reports that day, and occurred around the same time as other attacks, making it very likely that this explosion of an ammunition center was Russia’s doing. 

Not all verification processes are as tedious as the example above. Triebert said sometimes a video or picture can be proven fake within 10-30 seconds by doing a simple reverse Google search.

But for harder projects, it can take up to 10 hours before determining its legitimacy. In that case, “You have to balance it with how important the news value [would] be of this video if you’re going to spend more than an hour on it,” he said.