Pivot to video 2.0, Reddit’s rise, and what comes after pageviews: Our notes from ONA 2024

[Nieman Lab] The Weekly Wrap: September 27, 2024 Pivot to video 2.0, Reddit’s rise, and what comes after pageviews: Our notes from ONA 2024 Last week, six of us attended the Online News Association’s 2024 conference in Atlanta. We wrote up two full panels — one on [The National Trust for Local News]( one on [Google Discover and Chartbeat’s newest traffic stats]( — but lots of interesting stuff remained in our notes. Here’s some of it; [click through for more](. The rise of Reddit? Although Reddit still accounts for a relatively small fraction of overall referrals for most newsrooms, newsrooms have noticed a surge in traffic from the social site in recent months, and it was mentioned frequently both in panels and in side discussions. Chartbeat’s 700 U.S. news publisher clients [have seen]( an 88% increase in pageviews from Reddit since January 2023, though the numbers are still relatively small on the whole. (Chartbeat counted, for instance, a little over 30 million Reddit pageviews in August 2024; pageviews from Facebook have declined massively but still totaled around 500 million in August.) Many credit the bump to Google Search giving Reddit posts new prominence. One newsroom mentioned they’re regularly running what are essentially liveblogs in subreddits around specific news events; they may link back to their coverage on their own sites (rules about this vary based on the subreddit). Reddit’s VP of business development, [Jonathan Flesher]( was a keynote speaker, and its news partnerships lead, [Gabriel Sands]( moderated a panel; the vibe across these was very much that Reddit is “the only platform still working with publishers as partners,” and that sentiment was echoed by some attendees. But also, this is something that publishers have heard from other platforms before! — Laura Hazard Owen Beyond pageviews Newsrooms are hungry for new ideas and benchmarks around reach, especially in nonprofit news, where newsroom leaders need to show funders something that can be measured. I’ll admit we’ve been somewhat skeptical internally about newsrooms inventing new measurements for readership. (Not that any floated so far are as dubious as the, uh, [creativity shown by Ozy in counting reach]( The process of tallying views and engagement metrics across myriad partnerships and social platforms is complicated, tedious, and resource-intensive. I’ve heard — from both sides — that forcing the issue can put a strain on partnerships and collaborations. But in the age of “meeting the reader where they are,” mission-driven news orgs say they’re looking beyond the pageview and rethinking how to measure reach and audience. There may be room for industry-wide conversations here. — Sarah Scire “Not you, Big Tech” Before we landed in Atlanta, the Nieman Lab team discussed a [warning from conference organizers]( that coffee would not be provided due to exorbitant hotel catering fees. (“The cost for catering coffee at ONA24 would be $120/gallon + taxes and fees of $44.66/gallon.”) We found this particularly interesting given the [plethora of sponsor logos]( that accompanied each official conference email, many of which were the logos of tech companies; surely they could sponsor a pot or twenty of coffee? The tech companies made themselves known throughout the conference, from the usual tables staffed by friendly representatives to a Microsoft lounge that, at the least, offered a place to escape the bustle (and was conveniently positioned from another lounge that supplied coffee). But they were also heavily represented in the conference programming itself. AI was omnipresent, as were the companies developing AI tools. Perplexity, which recently [announced]( a revenue-sharing agreement with publishers but has also been [accused of plagiarism]( sponsored a trivia night and sent a representative to a panel about (what else?) using Perplexity for research. In the opening session on the second day of the conference, Reddit’s VP business development explained Reddit to a roomful of journalists. Representatives from Microsoft sprinkled themselves through panels, and Canva sponsored sessions on data visualizations. Taboola had a panel all to itself. In one panel, an editor from a local newsroom mentioned “Big Tech” before catching herself. “Not you, Big Tech,” she said to the Microsoft representative a couple seats down, who chuckled good-naturedly. — Neel Dhanesha [Keep reading]( for the rest of our notes from the conference, plus a few of the best social media posts about it. — Laura Hazard Owen From the week [Pivot to video 2.0, Reddit’s rise, and what comes after pageviews: Our notes from ONA 2024]( In the age of “meeting the reader where they are,” mission-driven news orgs say they’re looking beyond the pageview — plus other lessons from ONA 2024. By Nieman Lab Staff. [The National Trust for Local News keeps buying local newspapers. Here’s what they’ve learned.]( “What we’re trying to solve for is not necessarily a business model problem. We’re trying to solve for an ownership incentive problem.” By Sarah Scire. [What would Project 2025 do for (or to) journalism?]( From defunding NPR and PBS to kicking reporters out of the White House, it’s an array of conservative priorities and Trumpian retreads. By Joshua Benton. [Google Discover is sending U.S. news publishers much more traffic. (Social? Still falling.)]( Traffic from Google Discover now exceeds traffic from Google Search for some publishers, but what works there is a bit of a guessing game. By Laura Hazard Owen. [With help from Denmark’s Zetland, Finland will get a member-supported news outlet in 2025]( “It feels more like a partner and a support than Zetland coming to the Finnish market.” By Hanaa' Tameez. [A courts reporter wrote about a few trials. Then an AI decided he was actually the culprit.]( For one German reporter, the statistical underpinnings of a large language model meant his many bylines were wrongly warped into a lengthy rap sheet. By Simon Thorne. Highlights from elsewhere The Verge / Elizabeth Lopatto [X blocks links to hacked JD Vance dossier and suspends journalist who published it →]( “Twitter, before it was bought by Elon Musk, had a policy regarding hacked materials — but the page is [no longer available](. A [pre-Musk version of the policy]( dated 2019, stated that posting or linking to hacked content is prohibited. Under this policy, [links to a story by The New York Post about Hunter Biden]( the current president’s son, were banned. But in October 2020, [Twitter changed its policy]( to say that it would no longer block hacked materials, after an outcry about how the company had handled the Post story. ‘Straight blocking of URLs was wrong, and we updated our policy and enforcement to fix,’ wrote [then-CEO Jack Dorsey]( Vanity Fair / Lachlan Cartwright [Where does the Olivia Nuzzi–RFK Jr. fallout end? →]( “Staffers say they have dozens of questions over the matter: When and how did Vox find out? And was there a strategy by New York management to try and contain or even conceal the story? There are other questions unlikely to be answered by a third-party review. Who tipped off Haskell? How did the story leak to [Oliver] Darcy? Who was shopping it to other outlets? Were dark arts by parties looking to damage Nuzzi’s reputation involved?” Press Gazette / Charlotte Tobitt [How publisher are using SMS texting to reach new readers →]( “SMS is a really vital communication tool to those users and because it operates without an internet connection, it can be a really important way to keep people safe and keep them informed. Whereas email newsletters would not be able to do that. The general website, social, would not be able to do that.” Wired / Marah Eakin [Soon after the deadly Hezbollah pager explosions, this AI-generated fictional podcast went up →]( “Caloroga Shark’s other founder, Mark Francis, says that when he read about the explosions in Lebanon, he started to have questions about how they were executed. ‘It had the spirit of a really intriguing story,’ Francis says, ‘so I put the idea into Claude, which spat out an outline of a story.’ The team then quickly wrote a script and ‘put it back into the AI for even more massaging.’ Once the script was at a good place, Caloroga Shark fed it into Audiosonic and ElevenLabs for narration, created some podcast art with Ideogram, and used ChatGPT and Claude to create the episode descriptions.” Bloomberg / Alan Wong [An editor in Hong Kong was jailed for 21 months in the first media sedition case since the city returned to Chinese rule →]( “The city’s District Court on Thursday announced the sentencing of Chung Pui-kuen and Patrick Lam, top editors at the now-shuttered Stand News. They were found guilty last month of taking part in a ‘conspiracy to publish and reproduce seditious publications’ for posting articles the court found to have seditious intentions…Chung’s punishment was close to the offense’s maximum penalty of two years in jail, while Lam received a term that allowed him to be freed immediately.” The New York Times / Benjamin Mullin [Coming up next on CNN: A paywall →]( “In early October, CNN will begin experimenting with charging some readers for digital access as part of a bid to shore up its business as cable television erodes industrywide…The subscription wall is one of the first major business initiatives from Mark Thompson, CNN’s chairman and chief executive, who joined the network nearly a year ago.” Digiday / Kayleigh Barber [Business Insider switched from a freemium model to a “smart paywall that uses machine learning” and says it worked →]( “By the end of the testing period, which spanned December to April, Friedman said that 60% of new conversions happened on ‘non-premium’ stories, meaning stories that never would have been paywalled in the previous model.” ESPN / Mark Fainaru-Wada [Mississippi Today reporter Anna Wolfe won a Pulitzer for a Brett Favre scandal story. Now she could face jail. →]( “I am getting punished for something that I had no control over. I think most people can see that. I can’t even start to describe what a travesty that is. That sucks, because it wasn’t the reporting.” Washington Post / Ben Strauss [How to cover the worst MLB team ever without going (too) insane →]( “The team’s march to infamy has offered the reporting and broadcasting corps who follow the White Sox the task of documenting once-in-a-lifetime misery. That work has become historic in its own right.” [Nieman Lab]( | [View email in browser]( | [Unsubscribe]( You are receiving this daily newsletter because you signed up for for it at www.niemanlab.org. Nieman Journalism Lab · Harvard University · 1 Francis Ave. · Cambridge, MA 02138 · USA