Cory Bergman

"Beautiful and ‘well designed’ are not synonymous. Too many app designers are tasked only with making..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 17:39:48 -0400

“Beautiful and ‘well designed’ are not synonymous. Too many app designers are tasked only with making beautiful veneers. They’re really decorators, not designers. Building a great product requires consistency—between goals, product mechanics, interface, and aesthetics.”

- Bobby Goodlatte, writing in Medium about app design.

This is a concept video by a creative agency on the possible...

Thu, 16 May 2013 17:21:00 -0400

This is a concept video by a creative agency on the possible future of Google Glass. It’s a great example of how mobile (broadly defined) and data will change how people shop, navigate and discover — the underpinnings of our local economies. It also illustrates how media companies must move beyond content to utility, leveraging data to anticipate and fulfill user needs wherever they are.

"‘Antifragile’ is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in..."

Fri, 10 May 2013 17:42:04 -0400

“‘Antifragile’ is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish.”

- From the book Antifragile, which certainly applies to the uncertain media and technology space we’re living in today.

Downtown #Seattle (at Waterfront Park)

Fri, 10 May 2013 16:16:00 -0400

Downtown #Seattle (at Waterfront Park)

Why media companies should embrace 'stupid ideas'

Thu, 09 May 2013 22:01:36 -0400

When I first heard of the video app Vine, I wondered what would’ve happened if someone who worked at a media company had pitched the same idea internally. After all, it only records six seconds of video?

Even outside a media company, the idea wasn’t embraced by everyone. “What a stupid idea,” thought entrepreneur Dustin Curtis when he saw an early glimpse of Vine last year. “I couldn’t see it ever succeeding.” Vine is currently ranked as the #1 social networking app on iTunes.

Curtis said he also saw a prototype of an “app for browsing catalogs,” which he also deemed as a stupid idea. That one became Pinterest.

“For some reason, my first reaction to their earliest attempts wasn’t to give them the benefit of the doubt – it was to immediately find problems and then dismiss their ideas,” Curtis explains in a wonderfully honest blog post.

For people who work at media companies, does that sound familiar? I don’t even want to fathom how many breakthrough ideas have been shot down in newsroom meetings, brainstorm sessions and executive boardrooms. I’m sure I’m responsible for shooting down a few myself, confusing my experience doing things the old way as a magical ability to predict the future.

“I have found that return and ridicule are highly correlated over the years,” writes VC Fred Wilson. “We have made more money on things that were highly ridiculed than on any other cohort. When I see people laughing at ideas and companies we have backed, I smile. It means we are going to make a lot of money on that investment.”

These crazy ideas tend to be the most disruptive, as we’ve read in Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma. “The next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a toy,” explains entrepreneur and investor Chris Dixon, referring to Christensen’s theory. Executives who hear a pitch for a new idea react instinctively from their view of the business: the more disruptive the idea, the harsher the reaction.

“There still is a blind and bold arrogance,” said a recently-departed newspaper ad executive writing anonymously in Digiday. “By their very own design, [newspapers] are built for an extremely top-down decision-making process and [are] tremendously inefficient for today’s marketplace from all facets.”

Not just inefficient, but it’s how media companies inadvertently kill great ideas. We must keep our arrogance in check, suppress our experience and listen openly to crazy-sounding ideas. And not only that, but empower others in the organization to act on new ideas with the most minimum of approvals. Let’s reduce the friction and turn “stupid ideas” into prototypes and the best into new businesses.

How Breaking News keeps news junkies current in a crisis - The Verge

Mon, 06 May 2013 14:15:00 -0400

How Breaking News keeps news junkies current in a crisis - The Verge:

Lots of people follow @breakingnews on Twitter — the account and the breakingnews.com website and mobile apps have become indispensable resources for news junkies who need to stay up-to-the-minute on the biggest news of the moment.

Another #Seattle #sunset

Sun, 05 May 2013 14:25:00 -0400

Another #Seattle #sunset

Shift to mobile is tripping up news metrics

Fri, 03 May 2013 14:42:00 -0400

We all know mobile is growing at an unprecedented rate, but most news organizations are struggling to measure it. For many newsrooms, that data is buried in desktop-centric analytics services, not tagged appropriately (if at all) or owned by third-party providers. The end result is a mobile blind spot, making it difficult react to new demands and opportunities in a critical time in the business.

Even worse, however, is when the data is misleading. For example, Buzzfeed recently reported that its network has experienced a precipitous drop in search referrals. However, as both SearchEngineLand and Digiday explain, the effect is largely due to something called “Dark Google” — an increasing number of searches are private, which appear as direct traffic. The two biggest sources of private searches: iOS 6 devices and some versions of Firefox.

“This misappropriation of traffic is already an issue, and it’s only going to get worse as people upgrade browsers and switch away from desktop to mobile search on iOS devices,” said Stephen Pitts, SEO director at Rosetta in the Digiday story. “Already a lot of search traffic is being misappropriated as direct.”

So it’s not that search is in decline, but it’s shifting to mobile.

Apps are another source of dark data. Most analytics services do not measure app referrals, counting them as direct or unknown. There are a couple key exceptions: both Facebook and Twitter use their own intermediate URLs — m.facebook.com and t.co — to ensure their app referrals appear. But many other apps do not, further inflating the direct number.

There’s also confusion around the difference between apps and the mobile web. The Guardian recently posted a story quoting a Nielsen report that Facebook was suffering a decline in visits. But the Nielsen report measured the web only — desktop and mobile — but not mobile apps. When you fold the mobile apps number into the mobile web, the overall mobile growth more than outpaces the desktop decline. In fact, Facebook just reported it has 189 million users who only log in via mobile devices.

Again, not a decline, but a shift to mobile.

For the news industry, these misconceptions are dangerous. Journalists are already underestimating the wholesale shift to mobile — especially apps, which make up 80% of time spent on mobile. By not knowing the true data — or ignoring the data that matters — newsrooms are out of position to capitalize on one of the greatest consumer shifts in modern history.

What to do? First, ensure you’re measuring how users consume content on both the mobile web and mobile apps. Look at the numbers that matter: monthly and daily active users (MAUs and DAUs), for example, are much better success metrics than downloads. Also, examine how consumption patterns differ by device, dayparts and web vs. apps. Then hold newsroom-wide training sessions that show journalists how to access this data, explaining the difference between metrics. Finally, emphasize the importance of mobile metrics over the desktop, drawing a link between mobile success and your digital future.

Smith Tower in #Seattle against dramatic #clouds (at Seattle...

Thu, 02 May 2013 14:50:00 -0400

Smith Tower in #Seattle against dramatic #clouds (at Seattle Ferry Terminal)

Here's how Breaking News reported truth during the Boston Marathon bombings - GeekWire

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 14:13:00 -0400

Here's how Breaking News reported truth during the Boston Marathon bombings - GeekWire:

By now, you’ve probably read, watched or heard content relating to how several media entities reported false information for days after the Boston Marathon bombings. Seattle-based Breaking News, however, did what some failed to do: They reported only facts.

A mobile reality check: A chart illustrating newspapers’...

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 16:49:00 -0400

A mobile reality check: A chart illustrating newspapers’ slow contraction has been making the rounds, and I decided to hack in some mobile perspective (red above). After all, it’s more important to focus on the present and the future than the past.

The red line represents current and predicted mobile ad sales across the board, as forecast by eMarketer. This year, mobile advertising has already surpassed all newspapers’ digital ad sales (of which mobile ad sales is a very small portion). Google and Facebook, taken together, make up just short of 70% of the mobile sales number this year. Add Pandora, Twitter and Apple, and that’s 80% for just five companies.

There’s a big misconception that there’s no money in mobile advertising. In four years, eMarketer predicts mobile ads will make up just short of 45% of all digital ad spending. Clearly a very big opportunity.

It’s time to stop looking back and start looking forward. Invest in mobile like your media business depends on it. Because it does.

How paywalls give local TV stations a mobile advantage

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 14:06:00 -0400

How paywalls give local TV stations a mobile advantage:

I feel bad for beating up on the Sacramento Bee, but it’s good mobile lesson for all of us.

Why journalists are now responsible for the business

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 20:15:39 -0400

Earlier this week, a thread on Branch asked journalists what they’d like to see at this year’s Online News Association’s conference, the biggest annual meeting of digital journalists. Many of the responses focused on making things, which is a refreshing new addition for an industry that traditionally just focused on telling stories. But very few of the responses mentioned business innovation and user data, even as the industry’s survival hinges on it.

No more blaming the business side for our industry’s failures. Journalists are now responsible for revenue, too. Let me explain.

In the very near future, most news will be consumed on mobile. Most purchasing decisions will be made via mobile, too. As I recently wrote on Poynter, mobile will disrupt journalism like the Internet did a decade ago.

It all hinges on data. The more you know about a user — her history, physical location, likes, search terms, etc. — the better you can personalize her mobile experience and target meaningful advertising. Facebook is arguably a much better news experience than any news app — “We want to give everyone in the world the best personalized newspaper in the world,” Zuckerberg said last month — and perhaps that’s why people spend 11X more time on Facebook’s app than all news apps combined. On the advertising side, all that data adds up to ad targeting that news organizations can’t match.

“The key factor for Facebook here is to capture as much data as possible on Facebook users’ mobile habits,” writes Ewan Spence in Forbes. “That’s why Facebook is involved in mobile, and that’s why they need to keep pace with the ecosystems [Google and Apple] that are capturing all that mobile data.”

So it’s not about simply extending our news experiences into mobile, but leveraging mobile to capture data that we can use to make better user experiences and compete for advertising dollars. The challenge is convincing users to give you their data. And that’s where journalists, who increasingly are the same people who make things at news organizations, come into the picture.

We have to make mobile products that get better with data. Products that solve a problem in such an obvious way, users are willing to tell us about themselves. This is not a responsive design or “just another news app.” With the exception of a small handful of news organizations, paywalls are just a partial patch: they generate data, but barely influence the experience and don’t come close to enabling mobile ad targeting widely available on Google, Facebook and Twitter.

If I may suggest, the next time journalists get together at a big event, let’s throw out the stuff we always talk about and focus on the pressing business and product challenges of mobile and data. It may not be popular, but it’s our survival.

When it’s sunny, Seattle is the most beautiful city on the...

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 00:55:32 -0400

When it’s sunny, Seattle is the most beautiful city on the planet. (at Seward Park)

"I’ve believed now for a while — we should stop looking at competition. We should stop worrying about..."

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 17:46:01 -0500

“I’ve believed now for a while — we should stop looking at competition. We should stop worrying about The New York Times or The Guardian or the FT or Bloomburg or Reuters, because in this day and age audiences can be very, very promiscuous because of technology. What I’m really competing for, at the end of the day, is the one single non-renewable thing my readers have, which is their time. So if I can grab 5, 10, 15 more minutes of it, I think I can win this battle and not worry about where they might have spent that time.”

- WSJ’s Raju Narisetti, one of the smartest guys in the digital news space.

4 easy ways to start thinking 'mobile first'

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 15:21:00 -0500

Last month I made the case that mobile will disrupt journalism like the Internet did a decade ago. Many of you have asked, “Now what?” Here are a few suggestions to start shifting your mindset to mobile.

1. Force yourself to live mobile at home

If your readers are shifting to phones and tablets, so should you. As a journalist, I’d always start my day with a computer on my lap. My default state was content creation, not consumption. But a few months ago, I forced myself to shift to a mobile consumption mindset in the morning, reaching for my phone instead. At night, I gravitate toward a tablet.

I read and answer email, catch up on industry news, fire off a few tweets and occasionally buy something, too. It’s deeply educational. A few experiences are great, most are not. I often find myself waiting, pinching, swiping my way around, instead of getting what I want and getting things done. The only way to really understand the frustration — and by extension the opportunity — is to experience it yourself.

“Pay particular attention to things that chafe you,” explains startup guru Paul Graham on his blog. “The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It’s to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.”

2. Become a student of the mobile space

While you’re discovering really bad mobile experiences — and hopefully beginning to think how to make them better — you should also explore the leading-edge of new mobile products and the trends that drive them.

Here are some recommendations for publications and social resources to keep abreast of the mobile product world, especially in context of news and information:

Techmeme is always a great overview with a growing mobile presence. Ignore all the techy device news (even I’m confused by all the different devices and operating systems) and look for mobile trends, new products and big partnerships.
Appnewser is a good source, and Poynter, NiemanLab and Journalism.co.uk’s are beefing up their mobile coverage. On the sales and marketing front, I like Mobile Marketer and Digiday. For second screen coverage, there’s Lost Remote.
@mashablemobile, @atdmobile, @readwritemobile, @tnwmobile, @gigaommobile should get you started with tech blogs.
For research, watch Flurry’s blog, Comscore and Pew Internet.
The Mobile Journalism group on Facebook, started by Will Sullivan. (Apply to join only if you work in the news business).

If you see anything else I should add, just ping me on Twitter (@corybe).

3. Play with promising new mobile products

As you read about the mobile space — and occasionally check the top charts on Apple and Google’s app stores — you’ll discover new mobile experiences to try. Don’t just limit yourself to news, but keep an eye out for promising utilities, social networks and even information gaming, too.

Give these new products an honest try. See if they naturally become part of your routine. Do they solve any of your frustrations? Do they make something easier, more efficient, more fun? Why or why not?

Over time, you’ll begin to see if your own predictions match up with the rest of the market (i.e. chart positions and ratings). You’ll start to build some product intuition that will help you identify and pursue your own mobile ideas.

4. Start looking at the data

Once you become more astute as a mobile-first consumer, you should begin to wonder how people are using (or not using) your newsroom’s mobile experiences.

Ask your analytics guru for insight (or better yet, access). How do people interact inside your mobile experiences? Phone vs. tablet? Web vs. app? What types of stories are most popular? Does that vary with time of day? By device? What do users share the most? Do they read articles or bail out after a quick scroll? Etc.

Unlike the desktop, mobile is driven by context. People look for different kinds of information — and consume it differently — depending on what they’re doing and where they are. Often times, we lack this data, but we shouldn’t take our eyes off the user.

As outgoing Groupon CEO Andrew Mason explained, “My biggest regrets are the moments that I let a lack of data override my intuition on what’s best for our customers.”

When you start learning these habits — and build up your intuition — you can better tailor your own coverage to fulfill user needs. Share your findings with the newsroom, and encourage others to provide their feedback and insights.

When I wondered openly about how to get journalists excited about mobile media, AP’s Ted Anthony tweeted to me, “Make it about people, not platforms.” I couldn’t agree more.

We have a long ways to go, but this is a good starting point.

(Full disclosure: I’m GM of Breaking News, a mobile-first startup owned by NBC News. Keep an eye on our @breaking Twitter account for upcoming news on how we’re approaching mobile.)

"We talk about ‘mobile first’ in 2012, but we want to be ‘mobile best’ in..."

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 14:45:13 -0500

“We talk about ‘mobile first’ in 2012, but we want to be ‘mobile best’ in 2013. We want to create some mobile experiences that simply can’t be done on the desktop.”

- Facebook VP Dan Rose speaking at All Things D’s conference.

5 reasons mobile will disrupt journalism like the Internet did a decade ago

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 14:43:24 -0500

5 reasons mobile will disrupt journalism like the Internet did a decade ago:

Thanks everyone for such a great response to this story. Also, check out the chat archive at the bottom.

Why Facebook's stunning mobile numbers should get news organizations' attention

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 17:22:00 -0500

(Updated) Facebook is now a mobile company, not just in culture, but in audience. During its Q4 earnings announcement, Facebook said its mobile active users surpassed the desktop for the first time in its history — 680 million users (+57% YOY) out of 1.06 billion overall.

But perhaps the most surprising data point is the skyrocketing number of mobile-only users. “In only a year, just under 100 million more people starting using Facebook only on mobile, never touching desktop,” explained The Verge reporter Tim Carmody.

This should startle journalists for a couple reasons.

First, Facebook’s mobile footprint eclipses every news organization on the planet, and a huge population of users are growing accustomed to consuming mobile news on Facebook. It accounts for 23% of all time spent with mobile apps, according to Comscore in December. That beats every news organization’s app combined by a long shot. A study by Flurry in November found that the news category only accounts for 2% of total time spent on apps. Social apps accounted for 26%.

Twitter is also forming mobile habits around real-time news consumption, and the sky is the limit if it can solve the discovery problem. By creating platforms tailored to mobile — not just extended to mobile — these social giants are grabbing a huge share of attention, limiting the mobile opportunity for news organizations. And as we learned from the shift from newspapers to the Internet, catching up is very difficult.

Second, Facebook’s numbers hint that there’s a shift among a growing audience from desktop-centric behavior to mobile first. By extension, desktop consumption will decline. Google is already seeing it: four straight months of a decline in desktop search (Google expects mobile traffic to surpass desktop later this year.). While both Google and Facebook are monetizing this mobile shift — they dominate a large majority of all mobile ad dollars spent — news organizations are not.

At least yet. And simply shifting display ads to mobile is not the answer.

That’s why I’ve been pounding the drum for news organizations to throw ourselves at mobile, tripling the investment and shifting our newsroom cultures to “mobile first.” (See my earlier post, “Why mobile will disrupt journalism like the Internet did a decade ago.”) After all, the mobile revolution isn’t coming; it’s already here.

(Full disclosure: I’m GM of Breaking News, a mobile-first startup owned by NBC News. Here’s our approach to mobile.)

Measuring a news story's impact

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 19:02:00 -0500

I watched the live stream of the Media Impact Forum today — an event held at Stanford — which highlighted how innovative companies are measuring the “social impact” of their work. I couldn’t help but think about how the same approach could be adapted to journalism.

“You put [the story] out there, but does anyone care?” asked Neal Baer, best known for his role as producer and writer of ER. A doctor himself, Baer integrated valuable medical information in the show. But he asked, “How do you go from inspiration to action?” How do you know that it actually made a difference?

Baer has been thinking about this since his ER days when he participated in a groundbreaking study (.pdf) that measured whether ER viewers took action after watching a show. In fact, one in seven regular ER viewers contacted a medical professional about something they saw on the show. That’s an incredible impact for a TV drama.

Journalists intuitively know that their best stories make a difference. NYT’s David Bornstein, who founded the “Solutions Journalism Network,” says he often asks journalists what story they’re most proud of. “And almost always it was a story they wrote that had a positive social impact,” he explained at the Media Impact Forum.

But social impact is difficult to measure and often anecdotal in nature. If we were able to measure a story’s impact in real numbers, we’d redefine engagement from questionable metrics like time spent and social sharing to something much more concrete: action. Then we’d be able to optimize stories around impact, covering and showcasing stories that make the biggest difference in our communities.

Perhaps the same model could be applied to native advertising, too.

So, how would we measure something like this? We’re starting to see some amazing innovation in the startup space. For example, NexLeaf.org uses mobile phones as networked measurement devices, crunching real-time data to draw scientific conclusions on the impact of non-profit projects. Neighborland encourages neighbors to take on community causes, gain support and take action — which Neighborland tracks on a list of accomplishments. VolunteerMatch has calculated its “social value” by determining how much money non-profits save by using the service to find volunteers (over $600 million a year.) And ImpactStory provides a way for companies to showcase their impact metrics in real time.

There still isn’t a trusted set of “impact metrics” for journalism, but as I’ve written before, I believe newsrooms must help create that connection by including action paths from current storytelling. If we enable consumers to take action directly from stories — when they care the most — then we’re increasingly able to measure a given story’s impact.

Such a connection often frightens journalists who feel that adding points of action to a story feels like advocacy. But MIT Civic Media Lab’s Ethan Zuckerman calls such a defense an “allusion of objectivity,” arguing that news organizations have a social responsibility to help citizens become active participants. If we take change seriously, “we need to accept that participatory media is more than participating in making media,” he said at a recent conference. “Could we find ways to get people excited that they wouldn’t just get informed but join a movement and take action?”

I couldn’t agree more, and I believe there are ways to provide measurable paths of action that protect objectivity. Together with mobile, it’s nothing less than the next frontier of journalism.