Re:filtered #3: From Volume to ‘Lifetime Civic Value’

Hi to round three of this newsletter experiment.

This is a monthly look at what has shaped the internet and media and spotlights emerging ways of thinking about civic media.

It should take about 15 minutes to read.

A quick note: If you work in dissident media and have been in touch with me over the past months, please check my email address and let me know if it was boehlerp (at) proton.me. If so, that wasn't me. I've been impersonated to gain access to you. It's an infuriating reminder of how fickle online identities are.

In March, I've met a ton of people who have given me hope that a more purposeful media ecosystem is in the making.

One of them was Luca Sofri, the editor of Il Post, the Italian digital media organization. He spoke at Salotto in Brooklyn about the venture's (profitable) business model.

Their recipe for success, he said, was an (at first unintentional) strategy of “complicity” between the newsroom and the audience (aka community) to improve Italian media: shared aspirations of greater transparency and clarity and less of the archaic obfuscation and formalism so prevalent in the country's legacy organizations. Someone in the room described the value proposition as “a model of Italianness to aspire to.”

Asked about his thoughts on the ethics of journalism schools churning out journalists with limited job prospects in the current media environment, he said that he too would not want to work at the country's largest media organizations, because there's too much legacy to untangle. “Do something that doesn't already exist, and create human relationships.” I loved that relational definition of media. We're often too defined by formats and status.

In many conversations this month, the “scale vs. value” debate has been a recurring theme, and it's not one that's looking at a distant future. “The media industry needs to adapt to the post-scale reality it now finds itself in,” Simon Owens writes, echoing many others' thoughts.

More on this: a great webinar on “Getting Off the Traffic Treadmill” on April 10, register here (h/t Rebooting), a good NYT read on profitable new models, and this excellent slide deck by Doug Shapiro.

This key challenge is one that I hope will be discussed at the gathering of audience researchers that I know some subscribers of this newsletter will attend later this month:

How to deal with the end of simple platform amplification and adjust the compelling (but treacherous) success narratives it has offered over the last fifteen years for public media organizations.

These great institutions are essentially stuck with outdated research methods that suited the bygone broadcasting era, leaders and funders who expect growth in digital metrics in frameworks from the broadcasting era (Exhibit A: weekly reach), and newsroom managers that have found comfort and legitimacy in narratives of relevance defined by these metrics for far too long. The temptation now lies in finding a way to somehow make all this fit into a new reality when so much of it just needs to be discarded.

This has led to an overabundance of confusion around success metrics, exacerbated by the fragmentation of platforms. Yet, all these data points aren't sufficiently insightful in a fragmented internet space to reflect the true visibility and influence of a media venture.

So what can be done? Lots of interesting benchmarking is happening right now, and in the works that will provide greater clarity. But most I've seen won't solve the underlying challenge: how to measure the social impact of non-profit media when it doesn't, can't, or shouldn't monetize.

The reality is that most media, especially civic media globally, will not be able to sufficiently monetize for years to come or ever, even if they are relevant, useful, and meaningful to communities over time.

Institutional donors or subsidy schemes will be needed for a long time. Can they measure success effectively without setting the media organizations they support up for failure with outdated success measures?

Here's an idea from listening to panels of commercial media experts from both U.S. and European commercial publications at the Audiencers' Festival two weeks ago in New York (slides):

Let's say you run a non-profit newsroom. You don't or can't monetize directly, but you need to demonstrate impact to funders who support your venture. You can't measure reach and engagement in the same way you have in years past because of how the ecosystem has changed.

I propose focusing on the relationship audience members have with you, and their propensity to take civic actions that are beneficial to the public good. Let's call it lifetime civic value, denoting the surplus value of civic engagement that news consumption has generated.

The commercial models around customer lifetime value (e.g., the Financial Times, Der Spiegel) have matured greatly and been used in manifold ways to capture that relationship.

Here's how it works for commercial media:

1. Calculate the average revenue per account (ARPA): Determine the total revenue for a given period and divide it by the number of users in that period.
2. Determine the user lifespan: Calculate the average time a user continues to use your service. Typically, one would estimate this by dividing 1 by the churn rate.
3. Calculate the lifetime value (LTV): Multiply the ARPA by the average user lifespan. This will give you the LTV.

It gets tricky for non-profit media when there's no user revenue in step one. Here are two creative ways of using the same logic to develop a relationship that leads to users taking action:

1. In monetary scenarios, The Guardian's model of voluntary subscriptions could be used with a (tracked) call to action to donate to select external community services, as a reverse form of affiliate marketing that tracks the effectiveness of driving people to support causes that improve the common good, or as calls-to-action that then measure the effective donations.
2. In non-monetary scenarios, the same could be done by measuring the number of times readers/viewers/listeners followed a prompt to take a certain action that serves the public, e.g., encouraging others to subscribe, contributing to a crowdsourced project, or expressing their views.

Civic engagement is so broad that it's hard to define. In such a case, it could be defined for individual purposes and then benchmarked as the propensity to take a certain action:

1. Calculate the average civic actions per account (ACAPA): Determine the total number of specified actions taken for a given period and divide it by the number of users in that period.
2. Determine the user lifespan: calculate the average time a user continues to use your service.
3. Calculate the lifetime value (LTV): Multiply the ACAPA by the average user lifespan. This will give you the LTV.

The result is a non-monetary derivative metric that could be tracked and benchmarked against. They would get a much clearer sense of the relevance and trustworthiness of the media organizations they support because resonance is derived from audience engagement, not algorithmic distribution optimization. Funders can still measure impact along the funnel and use additional individual data points for validation and storytelling.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this! Let me know at mail@pboehler.net or on Signal.

I'm sure someone else must have thought of this before. I'd just like to claim the acronym “ALPACA,” which could stand for “average lifetime participation and civic actions.”

What I love about lifetime civic value is that it commits a civic media organization to operate in an audience-centric way, and to a theory of change of civic progress and social solidarity in its calls to action.

This also further erodes the harmful View from Nowhere pedestal. Reading recommendation: The View from Somewhere. Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity, by Lewis Raven Wallace.

If that's all too abstract for your taste, here's a good GIJN write-up on the ongoing debate about measuring media impact.

The other insight from the Audiencers' Festival was that so many really thoughtful experts are working on the tactics of iterative optimization (and it's working, see The Atlantic).

The folks I met were mostly not in senior leadership teams, but they really should be. There just aren't enough executives from an audience or product background to speed up this transformative (and painful) evolution of media. In 2024, we need more audience-centric leadership and less optimization of legacy bets.

Amid the recent turmoil at NBC, one executive's quote captured the dilemma. He argued that there were only three types of leaders who ran news organizations: journalists, politicians, and businesspeople. It doesn't have to be this way, see NPR.

What if:

I meant to write about ephemeral chat systems for newsrooms to advance security, but I came across an idea that's way better on Ben Werdmuller's always excellent blog: Wordpress VIP for the fediverse.

a way for organizations to safely build a presence on the fediverse while preserving their brand, keeping their employees safe, and measuring their engagement.

Fediverse VIP is a managed service that allows any brand to create individual fediverse profiles for its employees and shared ones for its publications, on its own domain, using its own brand styles, with abuse prevention and individual safety features, and with full analytics reporting.

That's just really smart. So next month, back to Convene. If you have thoughts, other tools, a better idea, or a suggestion, hit respond.

Great Reads

These reads made me smarter. 

Internet Reads

There are three emerging major internet freedom themes that I'll write more about in the coming months:

1. Federation and social network control,
2. App store regulation and access (Thank you, E.U., for the baby steps.),
3. safety, decentralization, propaganda capture of AI;

Bloomberg Tech Daily: Not everyone even uses the term “open source” to mean the same things, which can be confusing or even deceptive. Ask Elon Musk.

New York Times: In Taiwan, the government is racing to do what no country or even company has been able to: build an alternative to Starlink.

Taylor Lorenz / Washington Post: The nature of virality has shifted radically over the past decade as the internet has fractured into uncounted disparate algorithms, platforms, and niche communities.

How to Fix the Internet: I am enjoying this interview series by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, latest episode about Clearview AI.

Rest of the World: Mass protests used to offer a degree of safety in numbers. Facial recognition technology changes that equation.

RecordedFuture: Domestic violent extremists in the United States are increasingly doxing public and private sectors , publishing their personally identifiable information.

WIRED: An analysis of the top 10,000 websites revealed widespread data sharing, allowing journalists to expose visitors to Jeffrey Epstein's island. But on the flipside, regimes can abuse this easily accessible data, and media organizations should consider safe consumption more important than, say, scroll-depth data.

On this, the latest annual U.S. Intelligence Threat Assessment report includes a section about digital authoritarianism and transnational repression worth reading (full text, p.31).

Tor Project: WebTunnel is a new censorship-resistant pluggable transport designed to mimic encrypted web traffic.

Internet shutdown watch (h/t AccessNow): In Gaza, people struggle to connect and get information: “Without the internet everything stops.” Russia didn't block YouTube and Telegram during Putin's farcical pseudo-vote.

Gatekeeper Reads

formerly “Platform Reads” (h/t E.U.)

The Verge: Nilay Patel on why websites have a future and why platforms, not people, prefer individuals to brands.

The one Crowdtangle obit you should really read, by its creator, Brendon Silverman:

“Because of Article 40.12 [of the E.U.'s Digital Services Act] that I’m increasingly optimistic that the real long-term legacy of CrowdTangle will end up being to help inspire a permanent set of regulations that make real-time access to public data a legal requirement and an ongoing part of how we manage the internet responsibly & collaboratively.”

New_Public: “Zuckerberg appeared to be learning from China-based WeChat and TikTok in enshrining networked individuals rather than a network of communities as the rubric for platform society”—media theorist Nathan Schneider on platform feudalism.

The New Yorker on platform content moderation: “The structure of the Internet, of all social media, is to argue about politics. And I think that is baked into it, and I don’t think you can ever fix it.”

Financial Times: Pavel Durov, the Telegram CEO, has only hired 50 employees for an app with 900 million monthly users. Go figure. Please don't use its new peer-to-peer login system.

Rest of the World: ByteDance has shut down LetsChat, an app that aspired to challenge WhatsApp and Telegram in Nigeria.

The Verge: AI search tools like Perplexity are getting better, but they don’t yet fully understand (and disrupt) how we use traditional search engines.

Nieman Lab: Google wants to redirect search traffic from AI-generated spam blogs to legit websites.

TechCrunch: Artifact, my go-to AI-powered news app, is not shutting down as planned. “It takes a lot less to run it than we had imagined.” Lesson: Define the Minimum Lovable Product.

UPDATE: hours after this went out, Artifact did in fact shut down, acquired by Yahoo.

Slate: A media architecture created to give us more and more and more of what we thought we wanted turns out to give us less and less.

Arxiv: Existing methods for alleviating racial bias in language models can exacerbate the discrepancy between covert and overt stereotypes by teaching language models to superficially conceal the racism that they maintain on a deeper level. 

Media Reads

Press Gazette: The narrow range of most British journalists’ backgrounds means it takes “a seismic event” for journalists to take an interest in problems that are for many people everyday realities. A must-read indictment of a broken system by Gary Younge.

Washington Post: Afghanistan's Taliban-run government is fostering a thriving community of YouTube influencers, issuing licenses.

The Exile Media Podcast is a series in which outlets share their efforts to keep information available even in the most repressive environments.

People vs Algorithms: CNN is the original ambient media: doctor’s offices, gyms, elevators, and airports. Maybe that's the core value proposition?

Isabel Hummel/A curious eye on Europe: A new Dutch study on news avoidance, that helpfully reframes it as “conscious news use”.

Katharina Köth/LinkedIn: great slide deck on how simple persona workshops risk overly simplifying audience traits and how to find opportunity in more multifaceted research on networked identities. (h/t Isabel Hummel)

Substack: The most-subscribed or read newsletters are now searchable by country, e.g., here's Ukraine.

Simon Owens on the disruption of news wires (or generic content): It's hard to justify an AP subscription when all your media competitors are just a click away.

Aaron Ross Powell on AI's threat to creators:

If artists and writers complaining about AI don’t tackle that question head on—don’t give an account of why their creativity mustn’t be automated, but everyone else’s creativity is fair game—if they instead just assume the obviousness of a difference, then the rest of us can rightly ask them why they’re so callously and selfishly hurting bakers by purchasing factory produced bread.

and some great SXSW presentations:

1. AI News That's Fit to Print, by Zach Seward, the new editorial director of AI initiatives at The New York Times.
2. Death of the Follower & the Future of Creativity on the Web, by Patreon CEO Jack Conte. (h/t Alan Soon)
3. Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet, by Chris Dixon with Andreessen Horowitz.

Inspiring in Media

Meet Kelsey Russell: She narrates newspaper reports on TikTok because she loves to read them.

“I realized when I read the news on print, I actually had time to process what was going on,” she tells NPR. “And when I would read the same article on my phone, I would find my body [was] overwhelmed.”

There is a gap between the news experience the next generation wants and what they're currently being provided, says the much discussed Next Gen News report (pdf). It suggests an “ideal news experience”:

Kelsey Russell's videos now reach more people than the actual printed articles do. Media organizations now send her their print editions, hoping she'll read them for them on TikTok.

I'll sadly miss the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. I plan to be in DC mid-month. Let me know if you're there and want to meet for coffee to commiserate about also not being in Perugia.

Next month, I'll be speaking at the All Things in Moderation conference on technical and editorial strategies to create kind spaces online. Tickets are $50, but I can share two free tickets with readers of this newsletter. It's a fantastic gathering, and I'm very excited to get to be part of it. Thank you, Ness.

I'll likely be at ONA24 in Atlanta and at the Global Gathering in Estoril, Portugal. If you're going, let me know. If you want to co-pitch any panels, let me know. It may sound arcane, but I would love to talk about designing newsroom org charts, and, of course, lifetime civic value.

Thanks for reading this far. I hope I've managed to give you some hope. If you want to catch up, here are some free meeting slots. You can also always reach me on the various Slacks and Discords, and on Signal.

See you next month.