[Written by Echo, Cheryl, Karen]
British multimedia journalist Tom Grundy is working industriously to establish his non-profit journalism startup Hong Kong Free Press. He spends most of his free time building the website while pursuing a master degree in Hong Kong University. From the interface design to content production, Grundy does every part hands-on, and is expecting excitedly to see the eventual launch of his website in June.
The mission of Hong Kong Free Press, in Grundy’s view, is “to unite critical voices and provide quality analysis and credible reporting on local and national affairs”. He thinks nowadays Hong Kong’s English media lack plurality and tend to consider more the owners’ business interest in the Mainland China. “There is a missing voice in Hong Kong,” he said.
Being non-profit, Hong Kong Free Press cannot accept investment hence is able to remain detached from investors’ pressure and provide an independent platform for different voices. However, to keep the website operating, Grundy still has to find other sources of capital. He decides to try advertising, donation and crowd funding to see whether they can work out.
“The media industry is in such trouble that more people expect news free,” Grundy said. Subscription and circulation of traditional media is declining in this digital age, with so much free news available online. Journalists are trying hard to find a way out. They strive for sustainable business models in which they can both earn profits and fulfill the role of protecting public interest.
New media is deemed as a possible solution.
An increasing number of journalists are throwing themselves into the burgeoning digital industry, starting their own ventures that fully leverage Internet technologies, just like Grundy.
The News Lens, a Chinese language journalistic website, was initiated in Taiwan in 2013 and expanded to Hong Kong in December, 2014. It was founded by Joey Chung, former General Manager of Sario Mario in China, and Mario Yang, former Digital Editor of Business Weekly. They aim to establish an online platform that delivers facts, important stories and offers diversified standpoints.
Earning Revenues from Advertising
Different from Hong Kong Free Press, The News Lens is a commercial journalistic enterprise that can receive investment and sell shares. Marcus Brauchli, former Executive Editor of the Washington Post, and Saša Vučinić, former CEO of the Media Development Investment Fund, became its board members and advisors in this way.
So far, The News Lens has still been in deficit. “We’re trying to narrow the gap. Although our profit is increasing, the cost rockets as well,” said Alvin Au, Editor of The News Lens’s Hong Kong office. “It’s really difficult to be profitable when you are doing journalism.”
The News Lens’s revenues come from advertising. Its Hong Kong office cooperates with local advertising agencies to deal with the advertisements on the website, including banners and pop-up ads. Apart from this, the News Lens also produces “sponsored content”.
Sponsored content, generally understood as content that takes the same form as a publisher’s original content, is favored by advertisers due to its better readability and quality than direct advertisements. It usually offers useful or entertaining information so as to positively influence audience’s perception of the sponsor brand. It is more of brand advertising, aiming to generate publicity and manufacturer-consumer intimacy.
The News Lens has been producing such content, including a series of features about air pollution and about gap year. The former is sponsored by Panasonic, a Japanese multinational electronics corporation who is advertising its new air purifiers; and the latter is sponsored by American airline company United Airlines.
“Every piece of sponsored content is labeled conspicuously with sponsor’s name,” Au said, in explanation of whether such kind of advertisements will make audience confuse “promotion” with “facts”.
Producing sponsored content appears to be a popular approach for journalism startups to attract advertising.
Coconuts Media, a local city website network that covers urban areas in Asia, is adopting the same approach.
“We just started to do our first piece of sponsored content in Hong Kong,” said Crystal Wilde, Managing Editor of Coconuts Hong Kong. “It’s a case of making more relationships with brands.”
Coconuts also marks such content as “sponsored”. Even if they are in an event for which they need to put their partners’ logos or materials on the website, they will add a note like “We are media partners” at the bottom of the article.
“We are always transparent about that,” Wilde said.
But she also agrees if Coconuts does too much sponsored content, it may start to affect the website’s credibility in some readers’ eyes.
“I think it’s about finding the balance between always making sure you identify the sponsored content as ‘sponsored content’ and also making sure that the vast majority of what we do is original reporting,” Wilde said.
Shanghaiist, supported by Gothamist LLC, the most visited network of city blogs, is a China-themed English blog with more than 1.1 million unique visitors monthly. It also tries to attract advertisers through offering sponsored content. Besides, they are providing services such as advertisement design to advertisers.
“We may do eight sponsored posts per week among the 80 to 90 posts on average,” said Katie Nelson, News Manager of
Shanghaiist. “And we often mark them as sponsored.”
Unlike Wilde, Nelson said she is not worried whether the sponsored content would harm their credibility.
“Most of our sponsored stories are ads, and it is explicitly stated that they are ads,” Nelson said. “We’ve never been paid to write something favorable for someone or something and try to publish it as a news story.”
Reaching Audience Through Social Media
One essential factor that makes a website appealing to advertisers is the considerable unique visitors it can draw. For this reason, journalistic entrepreneurs spare no efforts to reach as wide audience as possible.
In the era of computerized social networking, the most effective channel seems to be social media, among which Facebook serves as a leading platform for website promotion.
“Shanghaiist before Facebook came around did not have a huge readership,” Nelson said. “But by the time it got on Facebook, it’s so much easier. I think Facebook is the number one way where most of our traffic comes through.”
Being a website based in Shanghai where Facebook is blocked, it is interesting to see that most audience of Shanghaiist visit from Facebook. Yet still it is reasonable.
“Shanghaiist is an English website for expats and foreigners; everyone has VPN,” Nelson explained.
The News Lens employs social media to attract readers as well. Au said more than half of their readers come from Facebook. Now they have four million unique visitors every month.
Besides Facebook, many other social media such as Twitter also contribute traffic. Coconuts integrates various social networking services to broaden their readership.
“The majority of our traffic, like 70 percent or 80 percent, comes through Facebook,” Wilde said. “We also use Twitter and Wigga a lot. Instagram is used to arouse the awareness of the public rather than bring people to our site.”
Copyright Concern over Content Production
Coconuts’s four-year experience proves that its traffic is directly proportional to the number of daily posts. But as a small news startup with only two fulltime editors in the Hong Kong office, it is not capable of producing much original content. It mainly translates or rewrites news from social media, government press releases, local print media and international news organizations, then gives credit by naming and linking back to original sources.
“It’s more beneficial from hits’ point of view to turn out as much news as possible,” Wilde said, “even if it’s short and even if it’s not original reporting to get the hits to the site.”
Coconuts Hong Kong has agreements with Apple Daily, a local Chinese-language newspaper, and AFP for the use of their photos, yet it directly rewrites text information from other media outlets for its articles without asking for permission beforehand.
Byron Perry, founder of Coconuts, does not consider the approach a problem because the material is in the public domain. And if Coconuts rewrites it or otherwise adapts it, the final article becomes Coconuts’s own copyright property.
The News Lens and Shanghaiist share the same opinion. Au said it is unrealistic to expect the mere two fulltime editors of The News Lens Hong Kong to do field reporting all day long while updating as much content on the website as possible. Nelson said this kind of “news aggregation” is acceptable when you give links back.
According to the Copyright Ordinance of Hong Kong, a news story can be claimed as copyright because it involves professionals’ efforts of collecting and organizing information. Duplication of articles from another media outlet without permission is in breach of the ordinance. But it does not explain whether it is illegal to translate or rewrite news stories from others’ articles for commercial use without permission.
National Copyright Administration of China recently regulated that online media should ask for permission and pay for the works they repost from other media outlets apart from citing the sources. But it does not mention what online media should do if they use information from other media outlets and rewrite it in their own ways.
Several influential news media in China including Southern Weekly and Caixin have filed a joint proposal of protecting original sources and respecting copyrights in April. They wrote that besides linking back and giving credit, commercial organizations should ask for permission before using their works online.
However, these journalism startups deny their position as a “content farm”. They said their unique rewriting styles differentiate them from other news websites.
Coconuts usually adopts a funny and sarcastic tone in terms of rewriting news. “We always try to make any article we rewrite as original as possible,” said Wilde, “Sometimes we’ll take source article and completely turn around to focus on a different angle of it which we think is funny or we can find a different aspect.”
When coconuts reported Hong Kong Chief Executive C.Y. Leung’s Chinese New Year speech which hoped Hongkongers behaving gentle and mild like sheep in the Year of Sheep, the editor quoted the government’s press release and wrote “There you go Hongkongers. Be more like sheep and we’ll all get along just fine! Then again, a wolf would say that.”
Shanghaiist often integrates interesting quotes from three or four websites to “put a fresh spin” in their articles.
The News Lens picks up important news submerged by loads of information to raise readers’ awareness. It incorporates diversified angles and standpoints on the same issue from different media’s reports, making its articles comprehensive and balanced.
“We don’t resist interviewing sources and writing our own stories,” said Au, “but we want to produce quality content with different angles when we don’t have enough staff in the office.”
Although original content accounts for a small proportion in these startups’ posts, they said they are trying to increase its weight through other channels.
Coconuts works in a shift system, which means Wilde and the associate editor Laurel Chor rewrites news alternatively when the other one is out collecting materials for Coconuts’s original video station the Coconuts TV, or dealing with freelancers’ stories and reviews on the website.
The News Lens develops a section named Voices, which invites writers to express their opinions on various topics such as politics, arts, culture, education and publishes them on the website. The section follows the model of the Huffington Post, a well-known news aggregator and blog in the U.S..
These startups also rely on interns who have extensive understanding of the area they cover and time to interview sources and take pictures for on-the-ground reporting.
Elements Important to Journalism Startups
For these journalists who do not excel in business and programming, establishing and running journalism startups bring sundry challenges.
When The News Lens first came to Hong Kong, Au was struggling for finding a place with cheap rent and comfortable working area. Last winter, he visited almost all offices to let in Hong Kong’s old industrial zones and came home exhausted every night. He said although The News Lens Taiwan has been relatively established, expanding business to Hong Kong is still difficult. “We need to be careful about our cost,” Au said, “You may ask why we chose this co-working space instead of an independent office. Because everything is pre-prepared for us here and once we move in, we can work immediately.”
Besides cost control, Au added quality content is vital for a successful media startup. He said the editorial team has to guarantee the news stories and analyses are in accordance with the website’s editorial values. “If you post something against your principles on your website, the netizens will instantly find it out,” he said.
Both Shanghaiist and Coconuts said a specific niche is indispensable in setting a news website aside from others. Nelson also mentioned “consistency”, for Shanghaiist needs to consistently push out story after story to grab audience’s attention. While Wilde believed it is important to gain credibility through original reporting.
As journalism startups are sustained not only by journalism but also by business, Tom Grundy’s remarks may well summarize the other major concern of these entrepreneurial journalists: “The big conundrum which is facing every media organization is, in a culture where news is free, how do you make a living or profit.”
Source: http://www.thenewslens.com
My Own Journalism 