Cory Bergman

Verifying AI in your global security stack

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Decisions have real-world consequences in global security. Lives can be on the line, and teams are under considerable pressure to make the right call. As it becomes harder to know what’s true, your credibility matters more than ever.

AI is rapidly improving, but it still makes mistakes. Striking a balance is a moving target. How much should you use AI for security tasks? How do you know if it’s producing the right answer? How much effort should you invest to validate it?

These are hard questions for global security professionals who work in time-sensitive situations. At a recent Factal workshop, “A practical guide to verifying AI,” I walked through a framework that balances risk and judgment. The higher the risk, the more you should verify. The more judgment is required, the more a human needs to own the decision.

(If you missed the workshop, security professionals can request a link to the video.)

Verifying AI in a chat conversation is relatively straightforward. You see each response as it happens, and mistakes are easier to catch. Agents are different. They combine steps and complete tasks in a single workflow, and mistakes are often hidden behind the scenes. One mistake in the chain cascades all the way through.

The same applies to your security stack. An error in one tool can disrupt the rest. For example, an incorrectly geolocated incident can trigger unnecessary response plans and send the wrong mass notifications. The more automated the stack, the more the errors propagate, the harder it is to backtrack to what went wrong.

As security stacks and platforms become more automated, there’s also the risk that security teams start acting more like approvers than reviewers. It’s much easier to just accept the AI’s output without double-checking it first. Researchers at Wharton call this behavior “cognitive surrender.” Others call it a meat proxy.

As AI moves from answering questions to taking actions, verification has to expand beyond what a human does to something the system also provides. Here are three key areas:

1. Get the inputs right

AI is only as accurate as the data you feed it. Since errors at the beginning of a decision chain have disproportionate consequences down the line, pay special attention to your inputs. What data is supporting your most critical decisions?

Constrain your AI to high-quality, well-cited source material whenever you can. It significantly increases accuracy and makes the output easier to check.

For example, at Factal we built a new AI discovery product called Explorer. We constrained the inputs to Factal verified data only – no social media posts and no AI-written content – with every detail cited back to its original source. In our testing with risk events, it outperforms AI chatbots in both accuracy and speed.

2. Put friction around consequential actions

As vendors add more automation, security teams should establish protocols about when to use AI and what steps they should take to verify it. These protocols should align with the settings and checkpoints in your security stack.

For example, your stack should let you decide when mass notifications fire automatically and what approvals are required. Sometimes a little friction can help reduce consequential errors without significantly slowing a response.

3. Make every action traceable

Automation is increasing faster than visibility. Security teams should be able to see what the system knew, what it decided, what it did and who approved it. When something goes wrong, you should be able to inspect a log of errors, changes and corrections. Vendors are often hesitant to admit mistakes or provide corrections, but mission-critical tools need this level of transparency.

Much of the AI race has focused on speed, productivity and how much more we can automate. But in global security, the most important measure is making the right call from accurate information. As AI takes on more consequential work, accuracy can’t be treated as a feature. It has to be the foundation.

AI and the anxiety of endless ideas

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I’m constantly churning on ideas. The ones I don’t have time to process during the day have a habit of resurfacing late at night. My notebooks are jammed with random fragments, sketches and musings.

These days I find myself jotting down fewer ideas and tossing more to AI. I enjoy the brainstorming buddy, and I spin up prototypes on the fly. AI loves to riff, and who am I to resist.

But AI makes ideas seem more plausible than they really are. What was just a sketch in my notebook appears to be much more tangible, backed by reasoning, designs and code. It feels like it should work. Florian Blaschke calls it plausibility overload.

While they begin with such optimism, the vast majority end like a jam session that can’t find a song. I have a pile of unfinished ideas littering my computer and taunting my waking hours. My notebooks, by comparison, look sane.

It’s hard to finish ideas, but it’s easier than ever to start them. AI makes divergence nearly free while convergence remains hard. “Which may explain why proximity to people with proven judgment suddenly feels more valuable again,” Blaschke writes.

For most of my life, ideas felt scarce enough to save. Now they’re so abundant, I need to get better at throwing them away.

The disruptive product has to leave the building

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Tibo Sottiaux runs the Codex team at OpenAI, and he previously worked at Google DeepMind. He posted quite the comment on X about his former employer’s head start with generative AI:

I was part of that team. Basically ChatGPT one year before it came out.… Google was too nervous to release it, and DeepMind was blocked from shipping products that could disrupt Google. I think about this a lot.

— Tibo Sottiaux, on X

This is classic Innovator’s Dilemma territory, and it explains why startups are nearly always the disruptors. It’s not that legacy companies don’t have disruptive ideas — they’re just blocked from shipping them.

It certainly maps to my own experience. I was once a believer in “intrapreneurs” and “internal startups,” but I have since concluded they’re akin to beating your head against a wall. The disruptive product has to leave the building. If you’re an entrepreneur inside a big company, maybe you should, too.

Learning from AI that doesn't work

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve talked with a lot of people who experiment with AI, get poor results and conclude that it’s not good enough. Deeply skeptical, they keep AI at arm’s length and resist learning how to work with it.

AI still gets a lot of things wrong, but the better mindset is to hold yourself accountable for the result. Treat errors as data points, not verdicts. Did I provide enough information for the model to succeed? Is this the right approach? What else can I try?

Sometimes the model really can’t do it, and that’s worth knowing. But somebody has to own the output. If you always blame AI for bad results, you’ll never adapt your way of working and find out what the technology can do.

An untold part of the Breaking News story

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A big motivation for relaunching this blog is to knit together my work over the years so AI can find it. Writing up the projects page, I paused on the Breaking News entry. There’s a part of that story I never published.

Breaking News was a free consumer product inside NBC News. A few months before NBC shut us down, we discovered that companies would pay serious money to subscribe to it.

It started when a large Fortune 500 company invited us in, out of the blue, to show us how they relied on Breaking News to protect their employees. We quickly fielded a user survey and dug into our analytics. We realized we had a big opportunity on our hands, and we showed the data to NBC.

They were unmoved. We were going to sell software subscriptions? Not only was B2B SaaS entirely foreign to them, so were content subscriptions at the time. If we couldn’t make money selling online video ads, why was Breaking News in business?

In November 2016, NBC made its second $200 million investment in BuzzFeed, a buzzy advertising business. A month later, they shut us down.

In retrospect, I’m happy with the outcome. That Fortune 500 company became our first customer at Factal, now a thriving B2B SaaS company with journalism at its core. And we call the shots.

Every big company has a shape it recognizes as a business. They don’t reject good ideas. They reject small ones, and every good idea starts small.

Restarting the old personal blog

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Over the years, I’ve published on just about every blog platform known to mankind. When I first launched Lost Remote, blog platforms didn’t exist.

Similarly, this new personal blog lacks a CMS, and I’m updating it directly from Claude Code (mostly from my phone). Once a Tumblr custom site, it’s now hosted on GitHub with Astro on the front end. Claude did a great job porting over my old Tumblr posts, preserving the URL structure to keep them from breaking in search. It also brought over my old Medium posts.

It feels good to get it all under my own roof (well, GitHub’s roof) rather than having it fragmented across dying platforms.

While AI is handling the code and polish, the words and photos are still mine. Now let’s see if I can keep this updated.

AI is catching up to intel analysts. But here’s what it still can’t do.

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell told a story that grabbed my attention. In a fireside chat at the Silicon Valley Security Group’s (SVSG) Create conference last week, he explained how an unnamed AI startup was beginning to produce strategic intelligence on par with expert CIA analysis. He had tested it himself with questions about Iran.

“I have no doubt that AI can do the kind of quality analysis that the best analysts at CIA did,” he said. “I think it’s right around the corner.”

But Morell was quick to add a caveat.

“I think it’s going to be a long time before it gets adopted because there’s a level of trust you have to have,” he said. “If you’re going to trust the answer, if you’re going to walk into the Oval Office, you have to know where the answer came from.”

That gap between capability and trust came up again and again across several days of conversations. At the Analyst Roundtable in San Francisco earlier in the week, some analysts agreed that junior roles will face the most pressure, while senior analysts will evolve into AI orchestrators and validators, ensuring the right questions are being asked and the quality of intelligence remains high.

Listening across both rooms, it became clear that several analysis tasks require more of a human touch than others. These skills will be increasingly assisted and enhanced by AI, but for the immediate future, are unlikely to be replaced by it.

1. Critical decision-making

As we’ve seen with enterprise AI, what the technology can do and putting it to work in practice are two different journeys. This is especially the case with the high-stakes decisions that are common in crisis. Trust is foundational, and it’s built through accountability, a reliable track record and the soft skills that AI can’t shortcut.

Or as one CSO put it bluntly: “We can’t be wrong.”

In another SVSG fireside chat, I spoke with Matt Abrahams, a popular strategic communicator, author and lecturer at Stanford. He explained how relationships and in-person communication skills are more important than ever as AI advances. Without it, even the smartest intelligence won’t land with the decision-makers who need it most. (I recommend his podcast, “Think Fast, Talk Smart,” for some great practical advice.)

2. Real-time verification

AI needs trusted data to produce quality results. For slower-moving strategic intelligence, it can draw on a deep corpus of information. For fast-moving events, data is scarce and it’s increasingly altered or generated by AI on social media. When you ask an AI if it’s real, the answer is a coin flip.

Verifying an event in real time is one of the hardest human-led jobs in intelligence, and for an industry that “can’t be wrong,” it’s only getting harder. Every layer of automation built on top of unverified data inherits and amplifies its mistakes. That’s the gap our team at Factal was built to close.

3. Violent threat assessment

Some threats of violence are straightforward, but others are puzzles embedded in sub-cultures. A grievance may escalate through violent slang, memes and coded references spanning fringe groups, emerging platforms and the dark corners of the internet. These references are deeply nuanced, fragmented and always changing with the times.

Several trust and safety leaders speaking at SVSG explained how internet culture knowledge and a “Spidey sense” are highly valuable skills. While AI assists in research, it struggles with piecing together changing human behaviors and differentiating legitimate threats from humor and fandom.

4. Benchmarking

As one Analyst Roundtable panelist explained, “Your AI won’t know how other companies are responding to the same crisis.” This remains the domain of human conversations: the Signal groups, Factal chats, OSAC channels and old-fashioned phone calls. Security, privacy and trust are paramount, and benchmarking is often driven by relationships built over the years. It’s safe to say it will be a long time before crisis benchmarking is outsourced to AI agents calling each other.

5. Real-world access and experience

If a model can’t see it, it doesn’t know it exists. There’s no substitute for an on-the-ground team – better yet, a local one – with first-person experience and the tribal knowledge that comes from actually being there. That’s especially true in parts of the world with a thin digital footprint.

The same goes for what happens inside an organization. Hallway conversations, side comments after a meeting, the context a colleague gives you over coffee — none of it shows up in meeting notes, email or internal documentation. It’s some of the most useful information an analyst has, and it’s invisible to any AI that wasn’t in the room.

As AI begins to absorb some parts of analysis roles, it’s also making others more valuable than ever: judgment under uncertainty, real-world experience, verification and trust built through relationships. They’re the foundation everything else gets built on. Someone still has to walk into the CEO’s office and stand behind the answer.

Building trust and protecting people in the age of AI and disinformation

Sun, 13 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

As we say at Factal, facts save lives. From severe weather and wildfires to shootings and regional conflicts, it’s critical that first responders, security professionals and anyone in harm’s way have access to fast, accurate information.

But the quality of real-time information is deteriorating. Social media is becoming increasingly polluted with noise, misinformation and AI-generated deception. Real-time events are being distorted to fit agendas, spread propaganda or sow doubt. With generative AI, creating convincing disinformation at scale has never been easier. And to top it all off, news organizations are cutting the reporting staff needed to combat misinformation as they struggle to stay afloat.

This is one the greatest challenges of our time. If you don’t know what’s real in real time, how can you make the right decisions to protect people, guard reputations and avoid disruptions? How can companies stay competitive and NGOs save lives?

As the co-founder and product leader at Factal and previously the co-founder of Breaking News (full bio), I’ve spent over a decade building companies and products designed to help people and organizations navigate real-time information with speed, precision and trust. I author white papers and speak at conferences about three key topics, each with a practical approach that aims to provide solutions rather than just talk about the problem:

Real time verification of crisis events and breaking news
Countering the threat of disinformation
Benefit and risks of generative AI in risk intelligence (paper)

As a longtime award-winning journalist and technology product leader, I believe in a hybrid approach. In the face of these growing challenges, we must leverage both the strengths of AI and the irreplaceable value of human expertise. As AI advances and the threat landscape evolves, we must develop new skills on the fly.

If you’re looking for a speaker or someone to interview, please feel free to contact me via Factal or personally.

Local TV’s unusual opportunity to inject facts into filter bubbles

Sun, 27 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Photo by Tim Mossholder on UpSplash

Filter bubbles are the greatest enemy of facts in the US. Once just a safe harbor of like-minded opinions, some filter bubbles have become alternative universes. If you only watch Fox News primetime and hang out in “Trump’s Army” Facebook group, you’re isolated amid alternative facts, conspiracy theories and misinformation.

These filter bubbles have become more impervious over time, cementing opinions and stretching the divide. NYTimes, CNN and Politifact can double their fact-checking, but it can’t penetrate the Fox News bubble. It doesn’t fall on deaf ears — it can’t access those eyes and ears in the first place.

But there is one large segment of the media ecosystem that spans the political divide: local TV news. While in a slow decline, local TV news outpaces newspapers, cable TV and network TV in both total audience and trust. On the digital side, local TV news has a thriving footprint, especially if you consider its outsized Facebook presence.

Taken together, local TV has the largest, most diverse news audience in the US. People of all political persuasions watch at scale, and that puts local TV newsrooms in a unique position to inject facts into filter bubbles. With the integrity of the election hanging in the balance — and COVID back on the rise – the timing couldn’t be more important.

Some efforts are underway. Tegna’s “Verify” combines fact-checking segments with journalism training initiatives. Hearst’s “Commitment 2020” provides fact-checking across all 50 states in partnership with FactCheck.org. And there are a few others, but so much more can be done.

Local TV newsrooms have a long history of careful “both sides” coverage, but facts don’t have two sides. Mail-in ballots are safe and secure. Masks save lives. Systemic racism plagues our country. Climate change is real.

With the election upon us, local TV has a tremendous opportunity to accelerate its efforts to educate Americans and inject facts into filter bubbles. Not just as a franchise, but as an all-out blitz, spanning both news coverage and promos.

Journalists outside local TV can help, too, by celebrating these efforts outside the niche industry recognition they’ve received. Local TV can be more impactful than a thousand CNNs, and the opportunity to make a difference in these critical days is too great to ignore.

(I’ve worked in local, network and cable TV news. Now I’m co-founder ofFactal, a breaking news verification company.)

Why news organizations should drop (or rebrand) online opinion columns

Wed, 15 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Stock photo from Pexels

The world has changed. Let’s count the ways.

Opinions already permeate the internet, and there is no barrier to entry to publish one yourself. Smart opinions are curated on platforms like Medium and Substack covering just about any subject and perspective you can imagine. You can directly follow the people you trust.
As news organizations shrink or disappear altogether, news coverage is on a decline, leaving “news deserts” in the US and abroad. Given today’s events, we need more local reporting and news analysis wherever we can get it. We also need more fact-checking and investigations. There’s enough mis- and disinformation out there to keep thousands of journalists busy.
Most readers struggle with distinguishing between news and opinion — especially when they’re both housed under the same brand. If the logo and URL is NYTimes.com, it’s the New York Times. In the battle against mis- and disinformation, this perception problem is deeply damaging to the same brands that news organizations are fighting to uphold. Just ask average news consumers about a newspaper endorsing a candidate — especially a candidate they don’t support. Try to explain “the firewall” as they blame the news organization’s biased ways.
When users can’t distinguish news from opinion, running opinion under a news brand destroys trust for news coverage. Trust (and revenue) are a news organization’s most precious resources.
Online news and opinion articles are mostly discovered à****la carte. They’re shared one-by-one on social media or by email, often cherrypicked to prove a particular point. There’s no collective balance, because content consumption is fractured.
Many readers just scan the headline and immediately react according to their own beliefs, skipping over any depth and nuance explained in the opinion piece itself. Opinion pieces have become fuel, not education.
Political operatives use opinion sections to “place” disinformation or to sow doubt around basic facts, gaining a widespread audience under a respected brand. Here’s exhibit A. This is the exact monster that news organizations should be aligned at fighting.
As we’ve seen at the New York Times, internal debates over opinion columns are tearing at newsroom morale. Employees are already overwhelmed, stressed and should be focused on covering the extraordinary events of 2020.
Some news analysis stories are miscategorized as opinion, especially in “controversial” topics like voter suppression, climate change and COVID. These stories are written by journalists and supported with ample evidence, but labeled as opinion out of caution — or because the writer happens to work in the opinion department. But when facts are miscategorized as opinion, it gives rise to doubt.

And what do news organizations gain by having opinion sections?

30-

(Updated with #9 on Nov. 22, 2020)

Factal’s verified COVID-19 coverage is free for NGOs and fact-checkers

Sat, 14 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT

World Central Kitchen at work at the Port of Oakland. Photo: WCK

Factal has been covering the coronavirus outbreak since our first report on Dec. 30th, publishing thousands of verified updates spanning dozens of countries. We’re offering free access to our breaking news platform to both NGOs as well as fact-checkers working on the COVID-19 outbreak.

World Central Kitchen is one of more than 30 non-profits relying on Factal’s coverage for no charge, a program we started last fall. Soon after California officials announced the Grand Princess cruise ship would dock in Oakland, volunteers descended on the port and geared up to prepare thousands of meals for quarantined passengers.

“We are experts at rapidly setting up kitchens and establishing safe logistics processes to get food to where it needs to go,” explained World Central Kitchen’s CEO Nate Mook. “Whether in the middle of a hurricane in The Bahamas, cholera outbreak in Mozambique, after an earthquake in Puerto Rico, or in this case, a viral epidemic.”

Food preparation at the Port of Oakland. Photo: WCK

Beyond new COVID-19 cases, Factal has been covering travel restrictions, quarantines, business and school closures, local health care responses and supply chain impacts.

“[Factal] has been an incredible resource during this response,” said Dr. Nicolette Louissaint of HealthCare Ready, a nonprofit focused on sustaining health care supply chains during the outbreak. “Their dedication to providing accurate information — and quickly — has elevated our emergency response capacity.”

Another Factal member, DirectRelief has quickly shifted from sending N95 masks from the Australian wildfires to “areas where health workers are at extreme risk of exposure” of the virus, said DirectRelief’s Tony Morain.

Meanwhile, fact-checkers are contending with an “infodemic” of misinformation, and Factal has teamed up with Poynter’s International Fact Checking Network (IFCN) to provide free access to its members.

“[IFCN] has initiated the largest ever collaboration among fact-checkers to address the misinformation around the novel coronavirus,” explains Baybars Orsek, director of the network. “So far more than 100 fact-checkers have published almost a thousand fact checks working around the clock.”

Factal is a news-technology company founded on a public service mission to protect people from imminent harm and help those in immediate need. We combine AI technology with a 24/7 newsroom of experienced journalists to provide real-time verified coverage that cuts through the noise. If you work at an NGO or fact-checking organization and would like free access, please email me at cory@factal.com.

We also publish major COVID-19 breaking news to our Twitter account.

Finding new markets for journalism with the 20% use case

Sun, 10 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Photo from the Lupa app

The NPR podcast Radio Ambulante may be the most popular Spanish-language news podcast in the world, fueled in part by listening clubs in 19 countries. After doing some research, producers made a key discovery about how some listeners were_using_ the podcast.

“When we started doing audience surveys at Radio Ambulante, we discovered something interesting: 20% of our listeners were using our stories to learn Spanish,” explained Executive Producer Daniel Alarcón. “So we started asking ourselves what we could do to better serve them.”

Last week Radio Ambulante, in a partnership with JiveWorld, launched a subscription app called Lupa to help people “learn Spanish as it’s really spoken.” Lupa provides real-time transcription and translation of the podcast’s stories at varying playback speeds with all kinds of innovative vocabulary features to help people improve their Spanish.

If you’ve taken a language class before, you know there’s a big difference between understanding your teacher — or that automated voice — and understanding real people in different regions speaking normally. As a “narrative podcast that tells uniquely Latin American stories” with a wide-range of interviews, Radio Ambulante may be the best way to learn Spanish.

Screenshots from the Lupa app.

When journalists think of new business, we mostly think of ways to increase distribution and drive subscriptions to what we already do.

But Radio Ambulante wasn’t looking to create paid subscriptions for their free podcasts or add a layer of premium content. Instead, they identified a new opportunity from how 20% of their listeners are using the podcasts.

“I mean, we knew there would be some people listening to Radio Ambulante for that reason, but, you know, 1 out of 5 is quite a high number,” Alarcón said in an NPR interview this weekend. “And, of course, you discover a portion of your audience like that, it’s so significant.”

They met that user need by combining technology with journalism to provide a unique service, and it broke them into a new market.

Lupa is an iOS app (free to $10/month) that’s categorized in the App Store as an education app, not a news app, pitting it against competitors like Duolingo (free to $10/month) and Rosetta Stone (as high as $16/month but varies.) This market is not only aimed at individual learners, but also educators, who use these products in their classrooms.

In consumers’ minds, they’re not paying for a news subscription—who would pay $10/month for a weekly podcast?!— they’re paying to learn Spanish.

That 20% use case may end up driving their entire business.

I **had seen that 20% number before.**When we conducted a user survey at Breaking News —the real-time verification company inside NBC News — we discovered that 20% of our audience used our free website and app to help them at work. It did something for them.

It was a hidden enterprise use case buried in our free consumer product. It turns out, organizations relied on Breaking News’ fast, verified coverage to help protect global employees, anticipate operational disruptions and identify emerging risks. They manually integrated it into their workflows and trusted it to make mission-critical decisions during active shootings, wildfires, hurricanes and global unrest.

But our parent company had doubts we could convert that 20% to a paid service –– after all, were were already giving it away for free, and advertisers weren’t buying it. So NBC News shut us down.

Several months later, we launched a company called Factal.

Similar to Radio Ambulante, we couldn’t just charge for access to our content. That would keep us firmly rooted in the highly-competitive, low-revenue news market.

We needed to break into new markets by making a product that enabled organizations — big companies with massive global footprints and increasingly automated systems — to make the best decisions as fast and productive as possible when faced with unexpected news events.

As I wrote last year, I called it “journalism as a technology service,” a product-focused approach to solving user problems, which is very different than meeting the needs of readers and viewers.

Let’s take a large retailer, for example. They employ security analysts to monitor social media using a variety of tools and methods to detect the first possible word of breaking news — like a shooting — that may impact their global employees. If it’s deemed a risk, they notify the store immediately to take precautionary measures.

That may be easy if you have 10 stores, but what about 10,000?

As social media became more noisy and plagued with mis- and disinformation, this process has become time-consuming and inefficient. With Factal, that retailer — or any other large global corporation — can upload thousands of locations into our platform. Then as our newsroom verifies, geolocates and publishes breaking news, the retailer is notified whenever a news event occurs in close proximity to any store. Instantly.

It saves time and money. Frequently, it saves lives.

Photo by Team Rubicon responding to Hurricane Dorian.

One year after our 24/7 launch, Factal’s business is thriving as a “software as a service” company for global corporations with journalism at its core. Our product competes in the physical security market, not the news market. Consistent with our mission as a news organization, we also provide our full service for free for humanitarian aid and disaster response NGOs to help protect their staff and expedite their response to people in need.

By broadening journalism beyond stories to services like Factal and Lupa––and watching for those 20% use cases––I believe more news organizations can break into new markets and discover new engines of growth.

Not only does it sustain journalism. It elevates it.

(Cory Bergman is co-founder atFactaland the former GM of Breaking News. His first real job was a working in a Spanish-language TV newsroom in California, and it wasverydifferent than taking all those Spanish classes.)

Introducing Factal, a new startup from the founders of Breaking News

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

In our dangerous and disorienting world, facts save lives

When BreakingNews.com and the Breaking News app were shut down at the end of 2016, we were inundated with email urging us to bring it back as a new company.

There were many personal stories from Breaking News users who were caught in global tragedies — terror attacks, devastating wildfires and mass shootings — relying on our unique real-time coverage to avoid danger. These incredible stories motivated us to create a new startup.

But first, we needed a business model. Amid those personal stories were dozens of messages from corporations — a who’s who of brand names — that relied on Breaking News to help protect their people and assets around the world.

“I’m devastated,” wrote one. “It’s proven invaluable to us,” read another. “There’s a huge market for the service you provide,” explained a third.

For the last year and half, we’ve been working with many of these corporations to create a new company.

Based in Seattle and London, Factal gives companies the facts they need in real time to protect people, avoid disruptions and drive automation when the unexpected happens. We have funding in the bank, customers ready to go and we’re hiring for a late September launch.

From wildfires and floods to shootings and explosions, global incidents pose an immediate risk to company employees, customers and facilities nearby. But the spread of mis- and disinformation is complicating efforts for companies to make sense of what’s really happening. Bad information that surfaces during a crisis — even for a few minutes — slows response times, diverts resources and amplifies risk. At the same time, global incidents are growing in scope, scale and complexity.

Factal converts unverified incident information into trusted, verified data, enabling companies to identify highest-risk incidents and respond faster and more effectively.

In short, facts save lives.

By combining experienced journalists with machine learning, Factal verifies and geolocates global incidents with unprecedented speed and accuracy for a variety of use cases — both human and algorithmic. For example, you don’t want your self-driving car driving you into a wildfire. While there are dozens of new global initiatives to fight mis- and disinformation in politics and elections, Factal is focused on fact-checking incidents in real time.

While we borrow from our eight-year experience at Breaking News — which was widely respected as the leader in real-time verification and public safety alerting — Factal is a new company with new technology that’s focused on the enterprise space with a subscription product. Factal has been in private beta for over a year, quietly testing with more than two dozen Fortune 500 companies. We’ve been overwhelmed by the positive response.

Although Factal is initially focused on the corporate market, we’re also exploring a consumer product in the months to come. Stay tuned!

After all, we founded Factal on a public service mission to protect people from harm around the world. Trust is core to Factal. We’re not just a technology company; we are a journalism company. We hold ourselves to high ethical standards — from honesty and transparency to privacy and civil liberties — and we’re working hard to gain your trust.

Our founding team has decades of experience working at the nexus of journalism and technology. Former MSNBC Interactive President Charlie Tillinghast, who chartered Breaking News as an internal startup, is Factal’s CEO. Breaking News co-founders Cory Bergman and Ben Tesch head up Factal’s product and technology teams respectively. Jillian Stampher (Seattle) and David Wyllie (London) head up Factal’s newsroom with help from Breaking News co-founder Thomas Brew.

We can’t wait to launch later this summer. If you’re a company interested in taking Factal for a test spin, head on over to our home page and click “request a demo.” If you’re interested in working with us (we’re hiring!) — or just want to say hi — drop us a note at hello@factal.com.

Suicidal reporter drones

Sun, 05 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Harper knew they wouldn’t be there much longer. The veteran of several Middle East conflicts, she knew the arc of media attention was nearing its usual conclusion. It was only a matter of weeks before New York pulled her out, along with all the other journalists holed up in the safe zone. The country and its millions of starving residents would fall off the world’s radar.

A wispy blonde in her early-thirties with a terrible case of “can’t relax” disease, Harper thrived on crisis. This latest conflict was particularly acute: the government had cut off internet access, silencing social media, and disinformation efforts were growing more sophisticated, originating from all parties — including the White House.

As she repeatedly reminded her New York bosses, “The only way to know what’s really happening is to be here.”

But after a month on the story, the security situation deteriorated. Journalists were no longer targeted for kidnapping, but gunned down in loosely-coordinated attacks. The last assassination was captured on live video in broad daylight, triggering an order from their New York newsrooms to lay low and stay put.

Now she was stuck inside the safe zone with coalition military trainers, a few international observers and a dozen other remaining journalists. Located on the outskirts of the desert city, it barely looked safe: several residential compounds surrounded by a makeshift wall, barbed wire and barricades. Most of the windows were boarded over, muting the orange-red sunset and muffling the frequent crackle of gunfire.

Locked away from the story, Harper felt trapped. She thought about her younger years, when she would’ve laughed off New York’s orders and just covered the news. But this place — this fear — felt much different.

“What you working on?” she asked Matt, her photographer. He was sitting on the floor, back against the wall, taking inventory of electronic motors, tiny cameras and a mess of propellers, all spread out in piles on top of a bath towel.

“Trying to fix the drone.”

When Matt got bored, he tinkered. About five years younger than Harper and sporting a dark beard, he was a drone geek. Back in his hometown of Seattle, he was on a league racing team renowned for its ability to accidentally destroy its own drones in spectacular fashion before they crossed the finish line. Since the races usually took place in parking garages after dark, Matt had spent many late-night hours canvasing the concrete for little plastic and metal parts.

His team became known as the Suicide Girls. The name stuck.

By destroying dozens of drones, Matt became particularly good at rebuilding them, experimenting with new creations along the way. He had packed a few drone kits with him on this assignment, and he occasionally sent one up for a few aerial shots while they were covering a story on the outside.

But the sand was merciless, gumming up the motors and propellers with frustrating precision. Matt tried everything to keep those tiny grains of sand at bay, but like those cement columns in the parking garage, they appeared out of nowhere.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Matt sighed. He pulled a small propeller off a motor, inspecting it for sand. “We can’t send one over the wall.”

“Why not?” Harper asked.

“Because they made it abundantly clear that they’ll shoot it out of the sky. Don’t you remember that drone that was disguised to look like a bomb? That someone flew into the safe zone? Scared the shit out of the sentries. Sending one up inside the compound would be suicide.”

“Like your Suicide Girls.”

“Funny.”

“But… what if we_could_ use drones to cover stories on the outside?” Now Harper had that gleam in her eye that Matt had come to know and dread — an idea that gains traction so quickly in her own mind, it subsumes everything and everyone around it.

“Because it would get us kicked out of here. Besides, we already have aerial shots of the city and a couple car bomb sites.”

“I’m not talking just about aerials, but ground-level shots, too.” She stood up and started pacing the room. “What if we could interview people with a drone? Like over at the market? How would that work?”

“Ok, I’ll humor you,” he said with a resigned look on his face. “Assuming we could launch one from here — which we can’t — we‘d need a lot more range. What’s the market, five miles from here? It’s not just how far it can fly, but how far it can communicate with the controller. We’d need even more transmission range if we’re taking the drone down low. And then there’s the audio. Drones are too loud to capture any usable sound. We’d also have to figure out a way to pipe your voice into the drone itself, so you could talk with people. That’s all.”

“Right!” she exclaimed. “The market is a great test run. How do we do this?”

“Well, we don’t.”

“Maybe not with your drones, but aren’t there newer drones we can buy? Then you can make some tweaks?”

Whenever she used a form of the word “tweak,” Matt would instinctively roll his eyes. But he knew the only way to close out this Harper idea cycle was to promise to investigate. “I can do some checking,” he said reluctantly. “I know someone who’s plugged into all the latest models.”

“Great!” Satisfied for now, Harper wandered off, a slight skip in her step.

It’s such a ridiculous idea, Matt thought, but the best ideas often are. As promised, he fired off an email to a friend at a drone company and called it a night.

A week later, their courier delivered a black hard case with Matt’s name on it. After the security team at the gate scanned it, he brought it inside and cracked it open, Harper hovering over him.

“Whoa, this drone hasn’t even hit the market yet,” he said. “I’m pretty sure it will violate our gift policy.”

His friend at the drone company — the top manufacturer in the business — turned out to be thrilled at the prospect of supplying drones to war reporters in the thick of the latest Middle East conflict. So he comped Matt an upcoming model, complete with spare parts.

“What gift policy?” Harper deadpanned.

“Uh huh,” Matt nodded.

But he starting feeling his geek juices flowing. This new drone was incredibly small and light. It could fly long distances and operate in extreme temperatures. It was equipped with noise-canceling microphones, 360-degree low-light cameras and every kind of collision-avoidance feature imaginable. Even he couldn’t crash one of these things.

It took him a couple hours to whip up a prototype, just for fun.

“It looks a little like a flying IED,” Harper said, looking bewildered at the cell phone strapped to the top the drone. “Can we add a few wires sticking out of it, just for effect?”

“That’s how you would interview people. You’d call that phone and we’d put you on speaker before the drone takes off.” He tipped the drone to show their news organization’s logo taped to the underbelly. “Nice touch, huh?”

He picked up the controller, his phone nestled inside, and fired it up. The dark grey drone lifted about three feet off the ground, hovering in place, perfectly still. It was remarkably quiet, like a bedroom fan.

“This is small and quiet enough to sneak over the wall at night, no problem.” Harper said. “But we’ll need to tape over those lights.”

“Right,” Matt said, easing the drone back on the ground and shutting it off. “Wait? You really want to do this?”

Harper walked over to the drone, picked it up and peeled off the logo. “Oh, we’re doing it, alright.”

They were both up at 4 a.m. The prototype drone was charged. The phone was dialed up. Harper was giddy with excitement. Matt was stressed but — as he would admit to himself — in a good way, like a new photographer about to fly in a TV helicopter for the first time.

Harper knew exactly where to launch the drone: a small dark balcony on the northwest edge of their building, mostly obscured from the sentries’ line of sight. Matt was seated a few feet away in the hallway, goggles fixed to his face, controller in his hands.

“What’s with the get-up?” Harper asked.

“Once a racer, always a racer,” Matt said. “I can’t fly these things without wearing my goggles.”

“Or with them, apparently.”

“You’re hilarious. Alright, you ready?”

Harper held the drone out the window, angling it outward like Matt had shown her. “Yep!”

Matt took a deep breath, and fired it up. The propellers immediately began to spin, buffeting Harper’s hair and tugging on her arm.

“Ok, let it go!”

She watched as the drone disappeared into the dimly-lit neighborhood, charging over the back wall between two palm trees. Matt had punched it, hitting 60 MPH in a matter of seconds.

“This 360 camera is insane,” he gasped. “It really feels like I’m flying.”

Moments later, he was already hovering over rooftops well outside the safe zone, rotating his head side to side and leaning his body forward to look for an inconspicuous landing site. Their plan was to stage the drone nearby, then head over to the market at the break of dawn.

“Ah, this is a good spot.” Less than 3 minutes after takeoff, he gently landed the drone on top of a tall, narrow building a half-mile away. “Touchdown!”

“The first drone correspondent!” she announced, throwing her arms in the air. “Let’s call her Reporter One.”

At the first hint of a spectacular yellow-orange sunrise, Reporter One was flying low and fast toward one of the busiest open-air markets in the city. Known for its eclectic selection and the occasional mass shooting, the market used to be a common stop for journalists looking for interviews with “real people” — the shoppers and shopkeepers who helped personalize stories and gave reporters a better feel for the conflict and its impact.

Now it was less crowded and too dangerous to approach on the ground.

Reporter One made good time, cruising 50 feet above the market as the first vendors set up their wares. Harper watched the drone’s camera on a tablet, scanning for a suitable interview subject. “It’s too high to see anyone,” she said. “Let’s take it down to ground level.”

The drone eased down into the street, hovering a few feet off the ground. From five miles away, Matt kept a close eye on the transmission signal. “We’re still solid,” he said, tapping a button. “And now we’re recording.”

“See those children over there?” Harper said. Matt swung around. “Let’s see if we can talk with them.”

Reporter One slowly glided by a middle-aged man setting up tables of bread, arriving in front of a young boy and girl playing nearby. Harper prepared to ask her first question — her Arabic was pretty good — when both kids looked up, paused for a second to process the bizarre creature floating in front of them, and let out a double piercing scream.

Harper tried to calm them down by talking over the phone, but the drone’s squawking voice just terrified them even more. Matt backed up and elevated a few feet to give the kids some breathing room.

Suddenly there was a deafening boom. Matt whipped his head to the side just in time to see the bread vendor fire a second shotgun blast straight into his goggles, right between the eyes.

Everything went black.

Matt flinched so hard, he hit his head on the hallway wall. He tore off his goggles. “Holy shit, that guy shot me out of the air!” He tapped furiously on the tablet. “And… we’ve lost signal. I think Reporter One is… dead.”

“Hmmm,” Harper pulled at her hair. “I guess everyone’s a bit jumpy about drones in this part of the world. We’re going to need to soften her up.”

“You do realize I just got shot in the face,” Matt exclaimed, nursing the bump on the side of his head.

“I’ll nominate you for a virtual Emmy Award.”

“That’s too kind of you.” He cracked open a beer. “I just watched the video again. I think I’m going to have a very real case of PTSD.”

“Next time you’ll know not to flinch.”

He sighed.

“We need to make it look a little less… terrifying,” Harper said, deep in thought. “You know those robots they use in hospitals? The ones doctors use to talk with their patients remotely, with screens for faces?”

“Wait, you want to try this again?”

“Let’s put a screen on the front, so people can see me. Then we could dress it up a bit. Make Reporter Two look like a little human.” Harper was standing up again, bouncing around, her new idea gaining traction. “You know, just a few tweaks here and there.”

Matt rolled his eyes and downed his beer.

“And this time, it’s not a practice run,” she said. “We go on a real story. Somewhere nobody can go. Somewhere big.”

Two more weeks went by, and they were still holed up in the compound. The security situation was getting worse: a few days ago, a car bomb took out a checkpoint a hundred yards from the safe zone. Outside the city, fighting had intensified in surrounding towns and villages, cutting off refugee escape routes and blocking humanitarian supply lines.

Despite Harper’s persistent attempts to generate stories from the inside, the military was increasingly tight-lipped and New York was shifting priorities. Their time was running out. The country and its millions of starving residents were already falling off the radar.

Matt’s drone friend sent over two hard cases this time. The manufacturer had dedicated a product team to react quickly to Matt’s feedback, delivering custom parts — sand-resistant motors, a mountable flip-up screen and a signal-boosting antenna — and instructions on how to hack them together. They whitelisted him into a beta version of their app, which interfaced with the controller and unlocked experimental features.

While Matt geeked on the modifications, Harper was hard at work on the ascetic. With the new screen making up the drone’s face, mounted at the top, she commissioned a seamstress to make a bright yellow drone jacket with the letters P-R-E-S-S sewn on the front. Underneath the drone, she affixed three feet of thin netting, and she topped it off with two floppy ears.

“It looks like a flying Pokemon,” Matt said as they watched it hover inside their make-shift shop. The netting swirled under the props, bridging the gap between the drone and the ground. “Wearing a dress.”

“It’s so silly, no one will mistake it as military. Or a flying IED. It has personality,” Harper beamed.

“It will also have your face on it, Harper Pikachu.”

She snapped a selfie with the drone. “Introducing Reporter Two, the latest in cyborg journalism. Now let’s go find a story.”

The story came to them. Twenty miles to the east, a team of humanitarian workers had managed to sneak into a besieged town, delivering aid to hundreds of women and children inside. Then the fighting intensified, their escape route slammed shut and they lost communication. It was unclear if they were hiding, captured or killed.

This would have merited barely a blip in the U.S. news cycle, but there was a twist. Embedded on the mostly European team was a young American musician with a soaring social media following. His ubiquitous Snaps went silent hours ago, and his fans were worked up into a frenzy. New York called Harper to see if she could wrangle a comment out of the military brass.

“We might be able to do more than that,” she said, hanging up the phone. “Matt, what’s the new range on Reporter Two?”

“Um, why?”

She explained the story, and they looked at a map. The day before, Matt had installed the booster antenna on the roof, nestled among their satellite dishes. According to the manufacturer, the antenna extended the transmission range by as many as 15 miles.

“But that doesn’t account for the curvature of the earth,” Matt said. “We’ll want to get low, which means the signal will be blocked by the horizon at that distance. What’s the elevation of this town?”

“It’s in the foothills above us,” she said. “But it doesn’t give the elevation.”

“That could work, but we may not be able to fly at the surface. There’s also a battery life issue.” Matt did some rough math in his head. “With the additional weight and drag, max speed is going to be around 70 MPH, not counting any wind. Optimistically that puts us around 35 minutes flight time just to travel down and back, and the battery maxes out at 50 minutes.”

“We can chop the dress to reduce the drag,” Harper said.

“That will help a little, but this could be another one-way mission…”

“Another _suicide_mission,” she whispered, holding her finger over her lips, glancing over at Reporter Two.

“Well, that’s my specialty.”

Harper was pacing again. “Assuming we can transmit out of there, what if we piped the live stream to New York?”

“So our bosses can watch someone shoot us out of the sky? They’d shut us down for good.”

She walked over the drone and put her hands over its little yellow ears. “Shhh! Have you no faith? She’s going to get the story of a lifetime.”

Reporter Two tore across the desert floor at dawn, angled aggressively to the east. Her ears were pinned back, her dress shortened to a skirt. Matt sat in the hallway, a pillow behind his head, feeling himself sail over the surface, one hundred feet up. So far, the transmission signal held strong.

“Nearly there,” he said. “Where should we go?” He steered around a tank and some menacing-looking pickup trucks, keeping his distance.

Harper watched on the tablet as the first buildings materialized on the horizon, bathed in bright morning sun. “Wherever there are people. Unarmed people.”

Matt hit the record button and opened up the live stream to New York, beaming the video over their rooftop satellite. Harper dialed up intake on her spare phone and popped it on speaker.

“See us?” she asked New York.

“What the…?” said an incredulous voice on the other end of the line. “This is live? You guys flying in a chopper or something?”

“Or something. I take that as a yes,” Harper said.

“Well, whatever it is, we’re rolling on you.”

A minute later, Reporter Two was sailing over munition-riddled homes and rubble-filled squares. It was like a hurricane of ball bearings and fire had blown through town, devastating everything in its path.

“Oh my god,” said the guy on the phone. “I’m going to loop in the producer.”

“The streets are empty,” Matt said. “Maybe we’re too late.”

Harper’s face was glued to the tablet, pinch-zooming every few seconds. “Keep looking. Try to find the center of town.”

Matt took it up to 300 feet, flying in a large circle. In the upper-right corner of his goggles, he noticed the battery flight time drop to 20 minutes. Refocusing his eyes, he spotted a cluster of several buildings that looked largely intact, and he pushed the controls forward and down.

“There!” Harper exclaimed, and Reporter Two was already on approach, dropping down to intercept what appeared to be a family walking outside. “Remember, nice and easy.”

Harper double-checked that she was framed up on the tablet’s camera, which was mirroring her face on the drone’s screen, 20 miles away. As Reporter Two approached — still above the family’s heads — she cheerfully greeted them in Arabic, “Good morning! I hope you are well.”

The woman and two children stopped in their tracks. Confused, they looked around them, unable to see anyone nearby. Then a little girl looked up.

“Hello little girl!” Reporter Two said. “How are you?”

She grabbed her mom’s hand. Matt and Harper held their breath as the woman looked up and locked eyes with them, her face etched with fear. The girl looked back at Reporter Two. “I’m fine,” she said politely.

Her older brother stepped forward. “Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m a American reporter looking to help some missing people. They came yesterday with food. Do you know where they are?”

The mom was still silent, staring at Reporter Two hovering a few feet away. The drone’s ears were laying to one side, see-through skirt flapping in the wind. Matt felt his face begin to sweat.

“I do,” said the boy in English. “Follow me.”

Before his mom could stop him, he was off and running with Reporter Two on his heels, a few feet above him. As the boy darted between buildings and down narrow alleys, Matt kicked into racing mode, carving around tight corners and dodging debris, the collision avoidance systems hard at work.

“Don’t lose him!” Harper yelled at Matt, realizing that Reporter Two just yelled the same thing. The boy seemed to slow down, then he ducked into a dark passageway and knocked on a door. A few moments later, it swung open, and he motioned Reporter Two to follow him inside.

Matt gingerly angled the drone down and through the door, trying to adjust his eyes to the low light. Suddenly the transmission signal fell off a cliff and the video in his goggles turned to snow.

“Aw shit,” he said, trying to reverse the drone out, but the controller had gone dead in his hands.

“What’s happening?” Harper asked.

Alarms chirped and flashed in his goggles. “We lost contact.”

“Hey guys, we lost your signal,” said the guy on the phone.

“No shit, New York,” Harper snapped.

They just sat there, convinced the mission was lost. Reporter Two must have collapsed inside, the last whisper of transmission signal extinguished by the surrounding walls.

Then Matt saw the screen flicker. Then flash. The signal edged up slightly, and the video snapped back. The drone was higher now, back in the light, hovering outside the door.

“It backed itself out. We’re back!” Matt exclaimed.

“Reporter Two is sentient!” Harper shouted.

“We see you now,” said the emotionless voice from New York.

But the boy was gone, and the door was closed. Matt saw the battery timer slip to 12 minutes. “We’re running out of time,” he said. “Any ideas?”

“Anyone in there?” Harper said loudly into her tablet, first in English, then in Arabic. ”Can you come outside? We’d love to try to help you.”

She started to pace, holding the tablet in front of her, pleading for someone to come outside. The timer dropped to 10 minutes and turned red.

Suddenly the door cracked open. The boy walked out and pointed up, and several others slowly followed, squinting in the sunlight and trying to make sense of the ridiculous yellow Pokemon contraption flying above them.

“Hi! I’m Harper. I’m an American journalist,” Reporter Two blurted.

“Um, hello…?” said one of the people below.

“Oh my god,” said the voice on the phone from New York. “That’s him.”

For a glorious 15 minutes, Reporter Two was carrying a live event for the ages. When New York saw the missing musician, they streamed the video everywhere, from old media to new media. Like a true professional, Reporter Two crept in closer, framing him tight, asking all the right questions. The musician said they we’re hiding, but OK, and he thanked his many fans for their concern. He nearly cried.

Then 5 minutes longer than expected, Reporter Two began to wobble and whimper, struggling to stay in the air. She tried to hold it together, but spun awkwardly, folded over and fell out of the sky, landing with a gentle thud on her side in the sand.

“WE LOST YOU!” screamed the guy over the phone.

Matt slowly took off his goggles, muted the alarms and took a deep breath.

“That was all she had left,” Harper said. “And it was the story of a lifetime.”

The military was watching the live stream, too, and they moved fast to extract the missing team, launching a special forces rescue within the hour. As soon as the team safely returned, the commanding officer — absolutely livid the drone operation put lives at risk and originated from inside his walls — had Harper and Matt escorted out of the compound, under guard, and driven directly to the airport to board a military flight home.

As the C-130 taxied out to the runway, Harper’s phone buzzed. It was a text from one of her sources back in the safe zone. “We also picked up your drone. Maybe you’ll get it back some day.”

“Reporter Two made it back alive!” Matt exclaimed. “It wasn’t a suicide mission, after all.”

“She’s not out of the woods yet,” Harper said with a wry smile. “They’re probably waterboarding her right now.”

Back in their New York newsroom, they were heroes. The story set all-time audience records, and as few of the staff noted, it also ushered in a new era of newsgathering. Harper and Matt were asked it they’d create more Reporter Two units for a few of the new organization’s bureaus. Instead, they accepted an offer from a particularly proud drone company to head up a new team to revolutionize reporting around the world.

The military never returned Reporter Two. But a few months later, Reporter Three was born, fashioned after her predecessor, with those same floppy ears. But this one had a new capability: she could take care of herself.

Thanks to a solar-powered, fast-charging base — complete with booster antenna — Reporter Three could land, juice up automatically and take off again from just about any rooftop in the world. She could communicate with other Reporter Three drones nearby to collaborate on coverage and boost their range. She was also packed full of image-recognition AI so she knew what to look for — and what to avoid.

It didn’t take long for drone reporters to become journalism’s first responders, beaming back live VR-ready video from the far corners of the globe. From the safety of your living room, you could slip on your goggles and teleport there, joining Reporter Three in places that were too dangerous and remote for her human predecessors to cover.

And Harper and Matt made sure she always—well, almost always — made it back alive.

(I’m a longtime journalist, product guy and geek. This is my first foray into fictional writing, just for fun. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend. You can reach me at corybergman\at\gmail.com, @corybe on Twitter or corybergman on Snapchat.)

The 8 great innovations of Breaking News

Tue, 24 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Now that Breaking News belongs to the ages — our modest operation was shut down by NBC at the end of the year — I thought I’d share our largest innovations in a single list, linking the original blog posts and news stories about them. To date there is no real alternative, not just for Breaking News, but for nearly all of these innovations so far:

Virtual real-time coverage

Breaking News was the first and only news organization to adopt a virtual model of coverage: instead of sending reporters to cover breaking stories in person, we “teleported” into stories by observing and comparing what eyewitnesses, officials and _all_reporters were posting on social media.

Like the reporters on scene, we used news judgment to identify new facts and provide context, sourcing every detail back to the originator. We looked for early consensus in reporting from trusted sources — everyone covering the story — and similarities among eyewitnesses. We watched video and looked at photos. We used our own experience covering thousands of breaking stories as a guide to avoid common sources of misinformation. We wrote “editor’s notes” providing guidance on early unconfirmed details, providing transparency into how we operate.

While many newsrooms inject social media curation into their own coverage, Breaking News was the first to rely on virtual coverage exclusively, institutionalizing this approach across a 24/7/365 editorial team and distributing our coverage across web, app and social channels. Our mission focused on impact: To make the world smarter and safer by connecting individuals with the information they urgently needed to know.

It turns out, virtual coverage is fast and incredibly accurate. Breaking News’ track record was well-known in the industry, breaking the biggest stories ahead of other English-language news organizations (i.e. the Paris attacks and the Brussels airport bombing) while avoiding bad information. We even timed it: notifications from the Breaking News app were 14 minutes ahead of the next-fastest news app, on average.

We were also known for the stories we didn’t publish. A seminal moment was the Boston bombing: despite four news organizations reporting an early arrest — which turned out to be bogus — editor Stephanie Clary did not report it. She became our top editor and helped write the book on making virtual coverage work around the clock.

Breaking News’ coverage was trusted at the highest levels. From the White House situation room to the Pentagon and the UN — not to mention nearly every major newsroom, from CNN and the NY Times to the AP — Breaking News was monitored on a daily basis. Corporations relied on us to ensure the safety of their employees. For some users, Breaking News helped them navigate through some of the worst tragedies in recent history.

And we did it with an editorial staff of just 9 full-time and 2 part-time employees.

Linking straight to the source

It’s one thing to distribute your own reporting, but quite another to point to other news organizations that got the story first and reported it best. Instead of writing stories, we linked the best ones. We were fiercely independent, not favoring any brand over another.

It started with Michael Van Poppel and @breakingnews on Twitter. When we took over the account in late 2009, we doubled down on his approach to link everything else. As we rolled out BreakingNews.com and the Breaking News app, we carried over the same philosophy. We were the first and only news source to exclusively and directly link everyone else.

Over the years, we linked thousands of news organizations around the world, sending millions of referrals every month. In 2011 we created the first Twitter news tipping community which grew to more than 500 participating news organizations. It popularized the #breaking hashtag (sorry about that) and convinced over 100 local newsrooms to start using Twitter.

The result was a diversity of coverage that no single newsroom could match. Together with our blunt, straightforward style of writing, we were praised by Breitbart and NPR fans alike for our unbiased, just-the-facts approach to the news. “The best app I have, honest to god, is the Breaking News app,” Senator John McCain told reporters one day. Several people (as did Time Magazine years ago), likened Breaking News to Walter Cronkite.

We even made a funny video about it.

Users visited us relentlessly — some as many as 100 times a day. Our loyalty numbers were off the map when compared to other news apps and sites. When we announced our closure, we received thousands of email and social messages. Some said it felt like they were losing a family member.

In a world where the news media is struggling for credibility and yearning for user loyalty, Breaking News accomplished the seemingly-impossible task of being trusted on both sides of the political aisle in one of the most contentious times in recent history.

3. Breaking news that matters to you personally

With the exception of the biggest stories, breaking news means something different to everyone. For decades journalists have debated what qualifies as breaking news — the “threshold” that triggers it — but in reality each one of us defines it differently based on our location, interests, backgrounds and relationships.

This was a fundamental realization for Ben Tesch, Tom Brew and me in our earliest whiteboard sessions in 2010. Why are small groups of journalists working for large news organizations blasting out the same breaking stories to hundreds of millions of very different people? (We made a funny video about this, too.) How could we tap into the long tail of breaking news and make it matter to each of us?

It was not an easy problem to solve in real time — breaking news by nature is unexpected and isn’t “trending” until later — and it required a combination of technology, community and an editorial staff, all working in tandem. With our updated app launch in 2013, Breaking News not only delivered the big stories, but enabled you to personalize your own breaking news with deeply granular notifications. By following any of over 100,000 topics and stories — and sharing your location — you were alerted the instant there was breaking news that mattered to you. You could also “mute” topics you didn’t want to see, like spoilers from the Olympics.

The end result was a balance between what you needed to know and what you wanted to know, all delivered in real time. It was all part of our mantra to focus on “time saved” for users rather than driving “time spent” for ourselves: give users just the information they urgently need, as quickly as possible, and point them to the original source.

4.Knowing what’s going on nearby

Suddenly you hear lots of sirens and see a big column of smoke. By nature of your proximity, you urgently want to know what’s happening. The closer it is to you, the more visceral it feels. You’ll find out what’s happening eventually — by fumbling around on social media, waiting for a local news report or talking with a neighbor — but there’s an information gap that often lasts 30 minutes or more.

At Breaking News, we were working hard to close that information gap to a few minutes — even seconds.

We started with “proximity alerts” in 2014, a new kind of notification that alerted people when 1) a big story breaks near their location and 2) we believe it will impact them in some way. We sent hundreds of proximity alerts every month for active shootings, major fires, escaped convicts, suspect standoffs, transportation disruptions, etc., all around the world.

As many people told us, when you received a proximity alert, it was magical. It was also a tremendous public safety service, and several people credited it with helping save lives. In my case, I received a proximity alert about an active shooting across the street from my kids’ school. (To date, this product doesn’t exist at any other news organization or technology platform.)

Soon after proximity alerts, we launched a “nearby” feed, showing breaking news that’s happening near your location. From earthquakes (which appeared seconds after USGS published data about them) to local news tweets and our own updates, it was the closest anyone has come to closing the nearby information gap. Then we launched…

5. News tips by proximity

It started with a last-minute experiment in the Apple Watch, and a few months later, it ended up winning the top technology innovation award in journalism in 2016.

We called it “nearby tipping.” Similar to Waze, if you saw news breaking nearby, you’d tap a button — like fire, police activity, power outage, flooding, etc. — and your anonymous tip would appear both to people near your location as well as to our editors. For users, it helped close the information gap. For editors, it made Breaking News even faster, giving us a starting point on a map to search for a breaking story.

Like on July 14th, 2016, when we saw two “lots of sirens” tips shared in rapid succession from Nice, France. On the map, the tips were posted from opposite ends of the Promenade des Anglais. That was enough of a signal for our editorial team to search social media around the Promenade, make sense of what was happening and break the Nice terror attack story worldwide — even ahead of French news organizations.

We created an ingenious reputation system for people who sent us tips, and we integrated it into our signal detection tool, Launchpad, combining tips with social signals. We were working on several new features at the time of our shutdown. Until then, we had received tips from over 100 countries in places like Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia and Ukraine.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about tipping was a single person, anywhere in the globe, could reach our editorial team in seconds with just a couple taps. In Sri Lanka, for example, a “flooding” tip enabled us to post a photo and draw global attention to a disaster in the making, before any significant coverage around the world.

6. Fully structured data

Thanks to Ben Tesch and his team of 9 developers and designers, Breaking News was architected from the ground up around data. In other newsrooms, data is secondary, but at Breaking News, ensuring that an update is properly structured— tagged with topics, locations and other classifying data — was just as important as the information in the update itself.

Before any update was published, editors ensured that it was properly structured following our own extensive style guide on tagging. Our editorial meetings were often dedicated to discussing the intricacies of topic taxonomies and hierarchies — most of which we created ourselves — and how our team can consistently structure stories around the clock.

In fact, I believe we were the first news organization to send a correction for a metadata error.

That’s because data powered Breaking News. The site and apps were built entirely on top of our API, just like Twitter. (We were the first news organization to accomplish this feat). All of our push notifications sprang from how we classified each update. Our early work on bots and voice was leaps and bounds ahead of other news organizations because we could answer questions like, “What just happened in Seattle?” or “What’s the latest news about driverless cars?” with succinct answers.

It wasn’t sexy. But it was largely the reason that no competing service — including Google Alerts — was able to do what Breaking News did.

7. System to convert noise to signal

This is the most difficult innovation for many people in news and technology to understand. That’s because we weren’t really a news company. Or a technology company. We were hybrid of both.

We created a self-improving system that converted noise to signal. It was a set of automated and manual processes blending technology, community and editors together.

The platform, Velocity, ingested what it thought was news — through our own signal detection tool and community tips — and made a first pass at structuring the data. Then our editors took over, filling in the gaps and making news judgment decisions that no magic algorithm can perform. It was all designed to minimize friction and publish as quickly as possible.

Velocity by itself does little, disappointing engineers who believe that relying on human editors is a failure. Editorially, we didn’t win any awards for our coverage because short-form virtual coverage is deemed inferior to sweeping, on-the-ground reporting. But when we brought it all together, we were able to cover breaking news faster and more accurately than any single news organization in the world — often with_just one person_ on duty at a time. Making it all work together as an interdependent system, and relentlessly improving on it, was the secret sauce.

8.Startup inside a newsroom

In Breaking News’ early days at Msnbc Interactive, the joint venture between Microsoft and NBC News, it became quickly apparent that our virtual coverage approach to the news was fundamentally different — even at odds with a traditional newsroom. Our boss, Charlie Tillinghast, handed us the book “The Lean Startup,” kicked us out of the office and let us operate independently as an internal startup.

From editorial to product, we made our own decisions — even building our first platform on Google AppEngine (while working at a Microsoft joint venture, which we thought was hilarious.) We declared ourselves “mobile first”, changing all our product priorities and metrics to focus on mobile when the industry was still fixated on the desktop. We moved fast, broke a few things and enjoyed every minute of it.

It was the first instance, in our knowledge, of a truly independent startup operating inside of another news organization. For those who work in the business, you know how extraordinary it is to operate this way inside a large media company — especially when both are covering breaking news.

When NBC News took over MSNBC Interactive, we embedded our editorial staff in NBC newsrooms, but we continued to operate independently. To their credit, NBC never interfered with our coverage, even as we linked traditionally competitive sources during big stories, like election night.

There are many advantages and — as we learned — disadvantages to operating as an internal startup. I won’t begin to tackle them here. But I wish more newsrooms invested in their most entrepreneurial staff to tackle big problems outside the organizations’ “core” businesses and comfort zones. I wish more foundations would fund news startups led by experienced entrepreneurs. I wish more VCs would invest in the news rather than just complain about it.

Now more than ever, we need dreamers and wave-makers in the news industry. We need to make even bigger bets that blend the best technology, community and editors together to solve “impossible” problems. We hope that Breaking News, in some way, helps pave the way for bigger and better inventions that make the world smarter and safer for all of us.

(The Breaking News staff is looking for work and our next big challenge.Here’s how you can contact us.)

Amazing stories from Breaking News users

Thu, 29 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

People fleeing the Nice, Paris attack. Photo by GA Morrow.

(Updated) As the Breaking News shutdown date approaches, we’ve been inundated with thousands of shocked and supportive messages from loyal users of all political persuasions and many nationalities around the globe. Some are even in mourning, writing “I cry every day,” “Breaking News is an old friend” and “It feels like I’m losing a family member.”

But given our unique focus on public safety over the years, there are a few email messages that stand out the most. I’ve made them anonymous and excerpted the most relevant sections:

“I was in Nice, France on July 14th. With thousands of others, I ran for my life — not knowing what I was running from…. Some people and I hid my room in my hostel, desperately trying to figure out what has happened and if they were outside — hunting…. I stumbled on your website, which finally gave us a clue what’s going on outside. You were the first to report. Having a clue about the situation, as messy as it might be, gave us a lot. We knew there is nobody in the streets, looking for game…. You cannot imagine how deep that breath was, when we couldn’t find information of any further hostile activity.
So I wanted to thank you. You helped me a great deal that night.”

“My mother is a professor who teaches at the American University in Kabul, Afghanistan. Your report’s notifications when the University was attacked informed me almost instantaneously. I cannot describe how important the time factor was to me that day, but your reports cued my family and I to make contact or to at least try to reach my mother. In a crisis, being removed from the situation without having knowledge of the current situation in real time can be debilitating. For me, your services prevented that. I was able to contact my mother who survived and was physically unharmed, but really needed to hear a familiar voice during a tense, emotional situation. I attribute the comfort I was able to pass to her that day directly to your services. For that, I thank you.”

“I’m a service member recently back from a 1 yr deployment. My wife is an avid BN subscriber/follower. Before she’s even out of bed in the morning, she often nudges me awake to read me one of your alerts. During our year apart, I found she was ahead of my intelligence apparatus in the combat zone. She regularly sent BN alerts to me which I forwarded to my intel troops — and we were ALWAYS in front of the news & intel cycles. Now that I’m back, we use BN to monitor my team mates still in combat, and to identify news closer to home that could impact or threaten our family. In short, BN is the best and certainly fastest news source I’ve ever had access to…. Perhaps without knowing, you provided a service to American and coalition troops. My family and I can’t thank you enough.”

“Breaking News had its first of many messages about the bombs going off at a New Jersey running event. This was within minutes of the explosion. I was seated with local [federal agency] officers, and they did not receive any indication of the attack for another 20 minutes. When they did, they did not have the picture of the trash can that had contained the device, which Breaking News did…. The [officers] downloaded your app the same day.”

“I was in the airport with thousand of people in Istanbul Turkey at 15th July, when there was a military [coup] attempt. We were extreme scared with knowing nothing happening outside. Thank to the breaking news app, it made it possible for us to know the situation. At the end, we left the airport after 40 hours. Thank you a lot for being with us for those hard 2400 minutes.”

“I am writing to inform you that I credit your app with saving my sister’s life….Last November, my sister traveled to Paris for the weekend…. [She] and her friends were just heading out now to grab a bite to eat…. I received a Breaking News alert to the effect that gunshots were reported at a restaurant in Paris. My heart sank. I feverishly googled “shooting in Paris” and every version I could think thereof. Nothing. I turned on the TV and scanned all the news stations. Again, nothing…. I relayed the message to her about the alleged shooting and urged her to please wait a few minutes to verify she was safe before going to dinner…. I watched from a painful distance the horrors that took place in Paris, knowing my sister was trapped in an apartment just a stone’s throw away from many of the most deadly scenes that night. If I did not receive the Breaking News alert, there is no telling where my sister would’ve been when the city of Paris realized that a tragedy was unfolding.”

We’ve also received many messages from major companies, government agencies and news organizations who said they relied on Breaking News to improve their security, fact-checking and real-time reporting. We thank everyone who has dropped us a note at feedback@breakingnews.com. We’re honored to have helped so many over the years.

In the meantime, our team is looking for work, so please feel free to contact us directly with any opportunities or words of support.

Hire the best in mobile and social media

Mon, 12 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

This is breaking news we hoped we’d never have to report. Our parent company, NBC News, decided to shut down the Breaking News service at the end of the year. BreakingNews.com and the Breaking News app stopped providing updates and alerts on Dec. 31.

We thank everyone for your many notes of support.

Breaking News invented a new way to discover, fact-check and deliver relevant breaking stories faster than any other single newsroom in the world — with a staff of just 22 people. Our team is now looking for work, and we’ve listed all our names below. But first, a little background.

Our team is divided between product and editorial with lots of overlap. With the exception of me, everyone either writes code or writes news on a daily basis. This is a multi-talented team that knows how to get things done and loves to experiment.

Our product folks have invented so many things, I’ve lost track: nearby tipping (which won the Online News Association’s top technology award this year), nearby news, deeply personalized notifications, topic muting and proximity alerts. They’ve built a watch app, Slack bot, Messenger bot, Alexa skill… they even built a social media signal detection platform.

Our editors are not only experts in mobile and notifications, but in social media discovery and publishing. They’re adept at tagging and geolocation, adding a treasure trove of metadata behind the scenes that powers our real-time personalization. They’re FAST (duh) with rock solid news judgment — a nose for sniffing out misinformation on social media — and surprisingly low key for the high-pressure work that we do.

Here’s the list:

Editors (8):

Dave Wyllie (London)

Grace Banks (London)

Jillian Stampher (Seattle)

Jimmy Lovaas (Seattle)

Rebecca Bratek (NYC)

Shelley Ng (NYC)

Stephanie Clary (Seattle) (leads editorial)

Tricia McDermott (NYC) (leads NY/London)

Part-time editors (2):

Andrew Villegas

Imana Gunawan (Seattle)

Android developers (3):

Gaston Sweeten (Seattle)

Sufei Zhao (NYC)

Zoya Ali (Seattle)

iOS developers (3):

Christopher Matsumoto (LA)

Corwin Light-Williams (Seattle)

John Jacecko (LA)

Web and app design + web front-end (1):

Martin McClellan (Seattle)

Web front/back-end and platform (2):

Andy Boyle (Chicago)

Ryan Nagle (Chicago)

Co-founders (2):

Ben Tesch (Seattle) (architect+leads product)

Cory Bergman (Seattle) (GM)

Please hit the “recommend” button below and share this post far and wide. Thank you for your consideration.

How ‘video first’ platforms will turn newsgathering on its head

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Breaking News team at work in Seattle.

For decades newsrooms have reacted the same way to the first word of breaking news: they send crews to cover it. But what happens when there are 5, 10 or even 20 videos of a story — some of them live — that already exist on the platforms before the crews get out the door? Not as an isolated incident, but a daily — even hourly — occurrence?

Today platform video supports traditional newsgathering, but tomorrow it will be the central driver of breaking news coverage, redistributed both on the platforms and off. The real-time newsgathering model will be inverted, with many traditional resources discovering, making sense and packaging the torrent of user video from around the world.

If you think there’s a lot of user news video on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and Twitter/Periscope right now, it’s about to grow much faster. There are 3 drivers fueling this second wave of platform video:

1. Platforms becoming “video first”

Snapchat (or more precisely, Snap) was the first platform to call itself a camera company. “We believe that reinventing the camera will present our greatest opportunity to improve the way people live and communicate,” said Snap Chief Strategy Officer Imran Khan in September.

Less than two months later, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company is shifting to put “video first across our apps,” making the camera the default experience to shoot and share video. While Facebook tests a new camera interface and a dedicated video tab, Instagram just rolled out live video, continuing its transformation from a photo app to a video app.

Instagram’s new live video feature takes just a swipe and a tap to get underway.

Video is the most natural and engaging way to observe and share the world around us — we don’t see in photos and text. As the largest platforms shift to a video-first experience, user behavior will follow, generating a surge in videos created, shared and consumed across the board.

2. Reducing camera friction

When most media organizations think about the platforms’ surge into video, we often think about consumption. But the platforms are also focused on video capture, which may turn out to be the most disruptive development.

Historically it hasn’t been easy to post and share a video online. Remember wiring up your webcam to YouTube? Then smartphones made it easy to record a video, but you still had to upload it somewhere.

Now “camera friction” has fallen dramatically: just open up Snapchat and tap, and you’re rolling. The default experience is the camera, and there’s no need to upload it anywhere. Snap’s new Spectacles reduce camera friction even further. Explains David Pierce in WIRED:

In the week I’ve had Spectacles, I’ve shared dramatically more on Snapchat than I ever have before. It becomes unconscious, almost: you just see something cool, and tap the button to save it to the log. Not only does having these unobtrusive glasses make it possible to get new kinds of shots, it makes it easier to capture the ones I’d want anyway.

Early reviews of Snap’s Spectacles are very positive.

Live video is another friction reducer. There’s no need to explicitly share it after you capture it. People can join the live stream in progress, and when it’s over, it automatically transforms into an on-demand clip. Soon, people won’t be “going live” per se, but just capturing video in the easiest way possible.

Beyond Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, the other platforms are hard at work reducing camera friction. Twitter has integrated Periscope, YouTube is rolling out live functionality and chat apps are pushing into video, too.

When the platforms make it ridiculously easy for 1+ billion daily users to capture video, the landscape will change abruptly. It’s already beginning to happen, and the sheer volume and geographic density of platform video is stunning. Increasingly here at Breaking News, it’s an oddity to discover a breaking story or unexpected event that does not have video already — live or otherwise — from surprising places around the globe.

3. More connected cameras in more places

Cameras in phones, cameras in sunglasses, cameras in homes and cameras in drones. The explosion in cameras means more eyes in more places. Take just drones, for example. As drones expand from just professional use to personal use with lower prices and better battery life, a growing array of lightweight cameras will be flying among us, always rolling.

The new Hover Camera drones.

While new cameras are platform-ready, existing cameras are becoming connected. Video APIs from Facebook, YouTube and Periscope enable “dumb” cameras to pipe right into the platforms — even video switchers, too.

On top of that, connection speeds are improving both in developed urban areas and far-flung places, and Facebook is committed to accelerating the process. “Fundamentally the mobile networks are getting to the point that a large-enough audience is having a good (video) experience around the world,” Zuckerberg said in November’s earnings call.

All these factors combine to create a second, exponentially-larger wave of platform video — the videofication of everything. It’s not that users will flock to cover a story, they’ll just be there already, cameras rolling.

Newsgathering’s new reality

It won’t be a question of _if_there’s video of something that just happened, but how many. Not just for big stories, but smaller stories, too.

As we’ve seen with stories like the Dallas shooting and the Turkey attempted coup, these aren’t your average “behind the police tape” videos. They’re often in the center of the action, unpredictable and visceral. They put the viewer inside of the story as it happens.

Facebook Live’s map of active streams during the Turkey attempted coup

In this world, newsgathering inverts: the immediate focus isn’t sending crews out the door, but discovering, vetting, clearing and producing user video — the best video of what’s happening — that already exists. There will be so much compelling material, it will cripple some newsrooms and create new organizations born to capitalize on it.

Today the process is somewhat sloppy but straightforward. See a good video? Try to message the originator and get permission to use it. Most of the time, it will be free. Or pay Storyful to do it for you. Or both.

As platform video becomes ubiquitous — and “core” to the success of a video-centric news organization — this process will become more complicated, competitive and costly, raising all kinds of questions:

How does a newsroom reorganizeto capitalize on the upcoming surge of platform video? Just keep up? How does it split its newsgathering resources between traditional and platform? What capabilities — people, technology, data and relationships — should it have internally to compete?
If platform video is core, how much does a newsroom outsource news detection and video discovery to a service? If competitors rely on the same service, what impact will that have on pricing, exclusivity, diversity and operating risk?
What’s the role of licensing? Only for the best clips? What if services secure a license for video faster than media companies can license it themselves? If everything is licensed, how much will this cost? As platform video plays a larger role, how will users react?
How will the platforms react? Is it all free promotion? Will they put limits on use? Build licensing into the platform? Will they create their own next-generation version of cable news by bringing together the best live events into a cohesive experience? At what point is this competitive?
How do newsrooms **handle the coming onslaught in live streams?**To see what’s happening? To use in their own reporting?****What constitutes fair use? How would you even license a live stream in the first place? Where do newsrooms draw the line — in real time — on what’s objectionable vs. newsworthy in a live stream? How much video should news organizations stream back onto the platforms?

These are just a few big questions facing news organizations as platform video kicks into overdrive. Traditional crews are still important for making sense of what happened, telling the story and live shots in newscasts, but the process of newsgathering for unexpected events is changing forever.

(I spent years working on TV assignment desks. Now I work atBreaking News, a NBC News company that discovers and makes sense of breaking news — including video — in early stages. I’m @corybe on Twitter.)

How the news media can work to regain the trust of America

Thu, 10 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Photo by Justin Lane/EPA

You may not buy into the argument that the news media failed in our coverage of the election, but one thing is certain: news organizations are suffering a credibility crisis. Several pre-election surveys have detailed deep mistrust in the media across all political persuasions — at record low numbers — and the election-night polling debacle is only going to make things worse.

The vast majority of Americans don’t trust the media, so why would they believe — or take to heart — the media’s reporting?

It doesn’t matter if journalists__believe we’re trustworthy; it’s what news consumers think. It also doesn’t matter who we blame for the problem — Facebook, clickbait sites, Trump, Twitter, news consumers themselves — but what we’re going to do to fix it. It’s time to do something before it’s too late.

So how do we regain the trust of America consumers? If we were to apply this thinking to another industry, like banking, how have banks worked to re-establish trust after the housing crisis? Or if we were apply it to a relationship, how would you rebuild the trust of a long-lost friend?

1. Be more open and transparent

After the banking crisis, transparency was #1 on the to-do list for a bank to rebuild customer confidence, according to a Gallup Business Journal report. What journalists and media executives deem as transparent, however, typically doesn’t go very far. After all, we’re an extremely competitive, defensive bunch, and admitting failure can be a career move.

But when 74% of Americans believe journalists “tend of favor one side” (Pew), we need to get more creative and challenge ourselves to be more open with our audience. We should reveal why we make the decisions we make and where we get our information. We should loudly apologize when we get it wrong and explain what we’re doing to get it right next time.

U.S. Bank CEO Richard Davis at a 2014 Red Cross event. Photo by Andy King.

“U.S. Bank is a great example,” explains Gallup’s Douglas Berlon back in summer of 2008. “The president and chief executive, Richard Davis, basically opened up his financials to be more transparent.”

What’s the equivalent of open financials in the journalism world? This is not your standard “behind the scenes” reporting or a walled-off ombudsman: we need to have an honest dialogue with our community and a willingness to share our values and previously-private information (within legal limits, of course). We need to push ourselves outside our comfort zones and institutionalize transparency in our culture and our daily work.

2. Really help solve people’s problems

Way back in 1973, KCRA in Sacramento started one of the first consumer-advocacy units in local media. “Call 3” was not a flashy “problem solvers” outfit, but a serious effort to help people — often older folks — who called their volunteer phone bank. They solved nearly 70% of the cases they received — not just the ones that made it on TV, but the many thousands that did not.

KCRA in Sacramento several years ago

KCRA has been a ratings juggernaut as far back as I can remember — I worked there for a few years in the mid 90s — and the station’s out-sized role in the community over the years cemented a sense of loyalty that pays dividends to this day.

Today most consumer-advocacy efforts in news are starved for resources and designed to drive ratings and clicks. Even Call 3 appears to be out of business after a 40+ year run. But imagine taking Call 3’s founding philosophy to heart, applying some technology and helping solve problems for people at scale. Not just consumer problems, but public safety (like Breaking News’ proximity alerts) and civic problems (like SeeClickFix).

Solving problems is just the first step; we also need to measure the impact. For example, SeeClickFix says it has solved 2,563,800 issues in hundreds of communities. The more we put real numbers and faces behind the problems we solve — without taking too much credit — the more credible we become.

3. Connect with rural America

This election taught us that there’s a gaping disconnect between rural America and the urban centers where most media companies call home. Many in rural areas — often lower income — feel like they haven’t been given a voice in coverage and the national conversation.

“My suggestion from flyover country,” writes Pamela Colloff, executive editor of Texas Monthly in a tweet. “Don’t send reporters here on anthropology trips. Live here. Be deeply-rooted.”

Photo by Politico’s Scott Goldsmith in a June story about Trump’s rural rise.

There are real economic reasons why newsrooms have downsized in rural areas and centralized around larger urban areas — both at the national and local level. “The not-so-slow death of local news is clearly starting to affect our larger understanding of the US,” wrote Jason Abbruzzese in Mashable.

But there are ways to begin to tackle this problem without breaking the bank. For starters, it’s easier than ever to distribute a workforce, from flexible employment arrangements to collaborative tools like Slack. News organizations can share more resources, and national news brands can tone down some their New Yorkness in products and marketing campaigns. On the local level, newsrooms can reduce crime-and-fire coverage — often the only times reporters visit smaller communities in their markets — in favor of more relevant stories that reflect the rural way of life.

We also need to diversify our own social filter bubbles. “Any journalist critical of the Facebook filter bubble they saw Trump voters caught in needs to look closely at the Twitter filter bubble where they spend a lot of their work day,” writes Joshua Benton in NiemanLab.

If we’re thinking like a business — which we are — then rural America isn’t a cost, but an important investment in our future.

4. Restore communities around news

Years ago my wife and I created a neighborhood news blog, My Ballard, that unexpectedly turned into a thriving community and won an Online Journalism Award. People felt such a part of it, they associated themselves with the blog, even calling each other by their account names in real life.

Similar to many news sites, the encroachment of social media changed the dynamic. People still connect with the brand through My Ballard’s large social presence, but it’s _not part of them_as much__anymore.

When people feel like a part of the news, they trust it more. So how do we restore communities in the age of social media, when comments and forums are more difficult than ever to manage? There are promising efforts like Civil, but I’m most excited by the idea of making movements.

Let me share an example. Two former newspaper reporters in Seattle, John Cook and Todd Bishop, launched a site called Geekwire in 2011. At first it looked like another tech blog, but it soon grew into something much bigger.

Beyond filling an information need, Geekwire was created for reason: “For reasons astounding to me, the Pacific Northwest can still be perceived as the homelier sister to Silicon Valley,” explained investor Jonathan Sposato in a blog post announcing the launch.

Sposato had articulated a deep-seated frustration among Seattleites: that the rest of the country — especially California and New York — doesn’t give Seattle any respect. That point of view provided the fuel, and Geekwire nailed the timing, launching just as the city exploded in population and Beast Mode put Seattle sports on the map.

Not a boring news event. A scene from the Geekwire Bash.

While the site’s frequent scoops created a loyal audience both in Seattle and the rest of the nation, Geekwire’s steady clip of highly-entertaining, packed-out events has accelerated its growth. Thousands of new Seattle residents — nearly all working in tech — have found a way to make friends and get the plugged into existing Seattle tech scene. Together, it became a movement, and Geekwire has expanded beyond tech into space, science and sports, bringing its brand of fun along for the ride. I now visit Geekwire for my news more than any other Seattle site.

Movements spring out of a cultural change and are fueled by an infectious and positive point of view. They connect people together, and it makes them feel like they’re part of something bigger. Movements don’t have to encompass an entire news brand; they can become the new verticals, tied to changes in our communities and even expiring when the time is right.

5. Integrate giving into news coverage

Many national and local media organizations play a role in raising money, collecting food and distributing clothing to needy people in our communities. However, these efforts tend to happen infrequently, often tied to terrible tragedies or the holiday season.

Americans give journalists poor marks for caring about the communities they serve. Back in 2011 — the last year I could find this question in a survey — only 26% of Americans said they believe journalists care about the people they report on (Pew). I imagine that number is even lower today.

Building trust starts by lending a hand, not just for promotional purposes, but to really help. So imagine what could happen if giving is integrated in news coverage — not twice a year, but dozens or hundreds of times a year.

We’ve been experimenting with giving in the Breaking News app.

For example, let’s say there’s a local story about a family who lost everything in an apartment fire. What if there was a direct, trusted way people can help linked directly from the story itself? Promoted on social media while the story is still in the news, when people care the most? Then what if you check in on that family — or the charity that helped them — several weeks later to see the impact of those gifts?

Not only does it raise exponentially more money for people who need it, but suddenly the tone of coverage is helpful, not exploitative. Journalists care in a very tangible way, and people begin to credit news organizations with the impact we make in our communities.

Conclusion

But you say, you haven’t really mentioned quality. In order to rebuild trust, don’t we need to make higher-quality journalism?

You’re exactly right. Quality is being more open and transparent. Solving problems for people. Giving a voice to the voiceless in rural America. Fostering communities around the news. And giving more to those in need.

To regain our credibility and establish trust, we need make journalism a public _service_more than ever. News has become a distribution game — pushing stories to people — but we also need to invest more time and money in helping and engaging with the communities we serve. This isn’t a warm-and-fuzzy suggestion, it’s a business reality, and technology provides new opportunities for us to scale our impact like never before.

(These are just a few ideas and examples. Have more? Send me a tweet at@corybe, and please share this post with your journalism friends. I work atBreaking News, which is a NBC News company, and my opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of my employer.)

Lessons from my mom on how to give

Mon, 13 Jun 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Merilee Bergman (1942–2015)

(Written on the day of my mom’s death, one year ago today.)

So much of my mom’s legacy is she taught me how to give.

She gave everything away.

When I packed her things today, all that really remained is a ring, watch and a well-worn bible. In her younger years she was a nurse. As she aged, she traveled and donated her time and money to the poor.

Giving is a sacrifice, but done joyfully. I wasn’t enjoying it at all taking her to emergency rooms, surgeries and cancer treatments.

Now, I miss those times. She had so many things going wrong, that’s when we spent our quality time together.

Alzheimer’s struck early, chewing away her short-term memory. At first, I was frustrated at her. Why wasn’t she trying harder to remember? Then as she faded closer to black, I tried everything to fight it.

As I learned, unlike cancer — which she beat twice — you can’t fight Alzheimer’s disease. It’s an accelerating decline that eats you alive. Alzheimer’s is the only disease among the top 10 causes of death in America that cannot be prevented, cured or even slowed.

There were only two things she remembered until the end: how to breath and the sound of my voice.

I’ll never know for sure, but I think I’m the only thing she remembered.

She taught me how to give.

We live in selfish, distracted times. It’s not that we’re jerks; we’re just busy. Busy working. Busy with the kids. Busy checking our devices. We’re programmed to capitalize on each moment and fill every gap.

I don’t know how much time I wasted with her checking my phone.

Giving isn’t just cutting a $100 check to a favorite charity. It’s sacrificing our most valuable resource: our time, sometimes in the most difficult of circumstances.

I’ve met some incredible people over the last few months: hardworking caregivers with incredible patience, loving smiles and the touch of angels. They barely knew my mom, but they were there for her. They’re not on Twitter. BuzzFeed doesn’t write about them. But collectively they’re changing the world more than any startup on the planet.

We can all begin to give in small intervals. Instead of angling in front of an old couple on the elevator, smile and step aside. Instead of edging out that car in the Starbucks drive-thru, let them go with a friendly wave. Instead of nervously checking our phones, give your friends and family your full attention.

I’m still learning, too.

It grows from there. Visit that person you know you need to see. Look for opportunities to volunteer, not just because your friends are doing it — or you get credit — but because it’s the right thing to do. Invest your time finding the most effective ways to give your money to help people who really need it. And spend more quality time with your family.

Giving isn’t designed to be convenient or cool. It shouldn’t make a great Tweet, Facebook post or Instagram photo. In the end — which comes faster than we think — those things don’t really matter. What matters is how we’ve given, selflessly and joyfully.

(Please consider giving to the fight against Alzheimer’s.My recommendation.)

Let’s make the future of media again

Thu, 14 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The band Chvrches plays at F8

I’ve been to a dozen NABs. You know, TV’s biggest annual conference in Las Vegas. I loved to walk the endless halls and lose myself in new technology.

But I’m not going to NAB this week. I went to Facebook’s F8 instead.

I could go to NAB to find a $30,000 TV camera with a few more features. Or a $150,000 live truck with better gas mileage.

Or I could go to F8 and witness the world’s largest, most innovative media company show us the future of mobile, video and VR. A media company that’s a technology company, too. Like the old days of TV.

Ok, I’m not a Facebook fanboy; I’m a realist. Look at what’s happening. Look at what’s in front of you. Look where the audience is shifting in droves.

Facebook VP of product Chris Cox at F8

“Our early adopters are super excited they don’t need these anymore,” Facebook’s Chris Cox says, pointing to an image of a live truck. He was introducing Live API, a way for any internet-connected camera to stream straight to Facebook.

Yes, live trucks are still needed, but think about the bigger picture for a minute. As much it may hurt to realize…

He’s right. Everyone’s phone is a live truck, a mobile studio that’s jacked into the largest content discovery platform on the planet.

Just three months after launching Facebook Live to all users, Mark Zuckerberg decided to go big, realizing in a February meeting that the company should make Live a top priority. A BuzzFeed story on Live tells us what happens next, quoting Facebook Media’s product lead Fidjij Simo:

The original Live team was composed of only a dozen or so people. But the vision laid out for the product at that February meeting would require more than 100 engineers to build. “The meeting was on a Thursday, and on Monday, [Facebook Media engineering lead Maher] Saba and I were standing in front of 150 engineers,” said Simo.

From 12 engineers to 150 in less than a week. That’s the new pace of the media business.

The sooner we as an industry admit that Facebook and Google and Apple and Snapchat are running the tables on media innovation — mobile and video innovation — the sooner we’ll do something about it. The sooner we’ll take exponentially bigger, patient bets to solve real problems. The sooner we’ll embrace failure instead of saying we do, only to lay off the very teams who fail trying to invent our future. The sooner we’ll invest to recruit the best developers, designers and product leads, empowering them to break the “rules” and accomplish things we never imagined.

Facebook has just a few mobile designers. Here are two of them, Cat Audi and George Kedenburg III at F8

Yes, let’s work with the platforms, but it’s time to realize that tech and product are core to us, too. That R&D isn’t a 5% cost but a 15% investment in our livelihood. That the all-stars at our companies are wave-makers who don’t care about the next quarter but care deeply about five years from now.

Let’s not blame everyone else, but take a hard look at ourselves.

Until then, we’ll just be sitting around waiting for the next cool thing to piggyback on, the next launch partnership, the next distribution deal. It will be with technology we didn’t build, data we can’t see, experiences we don’t control, money we’re leaving behind.

It’s the future we’re not making.

Media friends, don’t let uncertainty slow you down. Now is the time to accelerate our efforts, tackle harder problems, take bigger bets, make bigger waves. Now’s the time to band together.

Let’s make the future of media again. You with me?

#makethefuture

—

(Ok, here comes the full disclosure: I work at the coolest startup at a media company,Breaking News, and NBC has been fantastic. We’re solving a big hairy problem while also making great things on Facebook’s platform. And we’re having a blast. But I worry about our industry…)

This was first published in the Mobile Media Memo newsletter. Sign up free.

Reinventing news for the Watch

Tue, 14 Apr 2015 00:00:00 GMT

The Apple Watch is not just a smaller screen with shorter content. The best Watch apps are connected to the world around you. You can discover when it’s about to rain, find the nearest public transit, call an Uber and open the door to your hotel room.

After a few days of wearing the Watch, NY Times’ Farhad Manjoo said it’s “like a natural extension of my body — a direct link, in a way that I’ve never felt before, from the digital world to my brain.” That sensation is amplified when the Watch is contextually aware of things around you.

That awareness can also apply to news. Remember the last time you heard lots of sirens, saw a large column of smoke or felt the ground shake. Depending on the event, you either experienced a mild curiosity or a burning need to know what’s happening nearby.

Over the past year we worked hard at Breaking News to be the first app to meet that need, both on your phone and now on your wrist.

Like a Breaking News Sensor

Humans are wired to want to know what’s causing commotion near us. The closer we are to a big story that just happened, the more urgently we want to know about it. In many cases, you may not even know something is happening in the first place.

Our new Apple Watch app is much like a sensor for breaking news. If a major story breaks nearby — like a mass shooting, building collapse, train derailment, etc. — you’ll receive a “proximity alert” on your Watch moments later. If it’s a smaller story, you can quickly tap into the app to see what’s happening with a glance.

Earlier this week, we sent a proximity alert to Goldsboro, NC after a shooting on a community college campus.

Technically, your Watch can’t detect news around you, but it certainly acts and feels like a sensor on your wrist. We’re now publishing several hundred updates a day in real time — mostly Tweets from our tipping partners around the world — that are only visible if you’re near the story in question, even when you’re traveling.

The faster you find out what’s happening, the more likely you can avoid disruption, minimize anxiety and alert other people who need to know.

An Innovative Way to Tip

The world is a big place, and sometimes Breaking News doesn’t know what just happened near you. So we created an experimental feature that makes it easy to tip us with a story from the Watch — without telling us the story.

A view of test pings coming into the Breaking News publishing platform.

Just a single tap of our tip button pings our editors with the town closest to your location. (It’s entirely anonymous even to us.) Then we check social media and news sources in the area. If we find any news, we’ll publish it to users who are nearby.

Rising Above Notification Overkill

In the first version of Apple Watch, every notification you receive in the phone version of an app will also appear on your Watch.

“We are about to experience a hyperdrive acceleration of notifications, propelling us to a crisis situation,” explains Steven Levy. “[But] done right, notifications are a wonderful Feed of Feeds, weeding out the stuff you really need to see from all the usual chaff in the stream.”

The Breaking News Watch app is decidedly simple. And incredibly fast.

Fortunately, people who use the Breaking News app already have unprecedented control of their notifications. Out of the gate, Breaking News sends fewer, faster alerts than other news apps, and everything we publish is tailored for quick glances. You can follow any of 45,000 topics and stories (i.e. Tesla, cybersecurity or Manhattan) and receive an alert the moment news breaks in one of your interests.

Whenever Apple offers more granular control of Watch notifications, we’ll provide even more flexibility between devices.

Just Version One

Like Manjoo at the NY Times, we’re taking the long view. The Watch has a steep learning curve and needs lots of improvements, but the potential is enormous. This is just version one, and we’re all learning at the same time.

One thing’s for sure: the best Watch apps will go beyond abbreviated versions of existing iPhone and iPad apps. They’ll be contextual experiences that connect with the world around you in simple, powerful ways.

(See also: At the Speed of Right)

At the speed of right

Fri, 30 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMT

We set a rather audacious goal at Breaking News to solve a hard problem, and it’s best explained with an example.

Let’s say you just traveled to a foreign country and checked into your hotel. Moments later, a loud explosion shakes the building. You look out the window and see a column of smoke of few blocks away. Was it an accident? Or an attack of some kind?

File photo of a helicopter crash in London, January 16, 2013. AP Photo / Victor Jimenez

You have an intense need to know what happened. The longer you have to wait without good information, the higher your anxiety level — and the potential risk surrounding you.

This is information lag: the delay between something important happening and you learning about it. The more important it is to you, the more urgently you need to know.

Our goal is to collapse that delay as close to zero as possible, enabling you to make smarter, safer decisions in real time, wherever you are.

Approaching Perfect Knowledge

The more connected the world becomes, the more we can chip away at information lag. The fastest sources of information are social media and a growing army of sensors and live video streams.

“We’re heading towards a world of perfect knowledge,” explains Peter Diamandis, Chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE. “Soon you’ll be able to know anything you want, anytime, anywhere.”

Breaking News’ Stephanie Clary monitors the world.

Implicit in the idea of perfect knowledge is reliability. If the information is wrong or misleading, it creates more harm than the delay itself. Our challenge is to operate at the speed of right, achieving both in parallel.

This may be counter-intuitive for some journalists who believe speed and right are mutually exclusive. While we have a ways to go, we’ve made great progress with innovations like proximity alerts, nearby news, editor’s notes and our unique approach to live video. And we have several more to come.

The Value of Knowing Faster

The faster you find out about a breaking story that’s uniquely important to you, the more utility you derive from it. If you’re a stock trader, that’s an obvious statement. But it also applies to news on a wider scale.

I remember when we were testing proximity alerts in the Breaking News app last year, and I received a notification about a shooting on Seattle Pacific University’s campus, about three miles away from my location.

That brick building on the right is the daycare. Photo by KCPQ’s David Rose.

It took a moment to register, but I realized that my two kids were attending daycare right across the street from campus. I instinctively called my wife, and she called the daycare.

She was the first parent to call. The officer manager calmly told her the building was in lockdown and police officers were stationed outside. Everything was under control.

It didn’t take long for the daycare’s phone to jam with dozens of anxious parents dialing over and over. The gunman shot three people on campus before he was caught, and TV stations were now in wall-to-wall coverage. Stretchers were lined up outside the daycare.

But we knew our kids were safe.

Finding You When it Matters Most

In the new mobile world, push — relevant content that comes to you — is gaining traction over pull. I was oblivious about the shooting until I received a proximity alert in the form of a push notification, reducing the information lag on a story that was extremely important to me.

By receiving that alert, I had a higher expectation that the story was real. It’s not the same as scanning a social media post. Push elevates urgency, especially when it’s targeted to you. That’s why we have an editorial team working around the clock, vetting stories in real time.

Sending the same thing to everyone is easy, but pushing exactly what people want and need — even if they didn’t specifically tell you — is a challenge when you’re operating at the speed of right. But the end result is powerful and potentially life-saving. It’s not just-another-news-app with a nice design, but an indispensable information lifeline.

Come Help Us at Breaking News

From editorial to technology, we architected our entire company around being the fastest, most reliable source of breaking news on the planet. Our obsession with information utility — reducing information lag so people can make smarter, safer decisions — is a different approach than other news startups. We focus on time saved, not time spent.

Breaking News’ Jillian Stampher snaps a photo of the view from our Seattle HQ.

That’s why we continue to grow a highly influential and deeply loyal audience. We’re also expanding our team. Breaking News is looking for smart product and editorial talent who love to move fast, challenge convention and share our unique obsession. If you’re interested in learning more, please drop me a note over Twitter or email me at cory [dot] bergman [at] breakingnews.com.

(Breaking Newsis a standalone startup owned by NBCUniversal with offices in Seattle, New York and London. We make our own editorial and product decisions with the backing of a big media company. There’s no other startup like us, and we hope to hear from you.)

Apps fuel journalism's second disruption

Wed, 16 Jul 2014 00:00:00 GMT

(Updated 7/29) - Whenever I talk to journalists about the mobile shift, they’re quick to defend the web over mobile apps. After all, the web is what the news industry knows best after years of playing digital catch up.

This bias has played out in product development. Many news organizations (even some new startups) have opted to invest more resources into responsive web design over creating and marketing compelling apps. In large part, that’s because good, differentiated apps are much more expensive to build, market and maintain. In the world of limited resources, what we know gets the attention.

But with each new study on mobile consumption, it’s becoming clearer that apps are not only winning, but dominating the field at the expense of the web. Sure, the desktop web is now in decline, but a new report by Comscore goes as far as saying the mobile web is flattening in share.

From October 2013 to May of this year – just 7 months time – mobile apps grew from 41% to 51% share of all time spent with digital media. Over the same time period, the mobile web remained flat at 9%, according to Comscore. Apps are driving the overwhelming majority of digital media growth.

Comscore broke it down by a few properties. For Gannett, for example, the split is nearly even: smartphone users spend 54% of their time on a Gannett website compared to 46% in a Gannett app. For The Weather Channel, users spend only 13% of their time on Weather.com compared to 87% in the app. And just 6% of Facebook users’ time is spent on Facebook.com on their phones.

The trend is echoed in a global study by Reuters Institute. Researchers found that 47% of smartphone users say they primarily use apps for news – an increase of 6% over 2013. By contrast, 38% of users say they prefer the browser for news, down 4% over the same year.

News organizations with languishing apps are quick to point out that their website substantially outperforms their app. Not to mention, they expain, mobile revenue is non-existent. But that’s a self-fulfilling strategic mistake: resource allocation decisions should be based on where consumers are going, not where they’ve been. The less you invest in apps, the more poorly they perform. And history has taught us, where consumers go, the money will follow. It’s already happening – fast.

Waiting until the dust settles may prove to be fatal. While app use explodes, “the average number of apps owners used had barely risen over the past two years, from 23.2 in Q4 2011 to 26.8 in Q4 2013,” explained eMarketer, citing Nielsen data. Loyalties are forming, and it’s becoming even more difficult than ever to crack into the app business this late in the game.

Adding fuel to the fire, Facebook and other social apps continue to gain share and solidy their own loyal user bases as de facto destinations for news. At the same time, people are visiting home pages less, coming in social side doors. If you don’t have a solid app, you’re handing over the front door on the fastest growing distribution platform to someone else. Those who own the front doors can gather user data and by extension monetize at scale. (Sound familiar?)

Even Buzzfeed, which helped write the book on social discovery and referrals, understands the destination value of apps. On any given day, its app is neck-and-neck with CNN in the App Store (a big investment), and the app’s tremendous growth helped Buzzfeed vault over NYTimes in total visitors several months ago.

But that’s just the beginning. According to a job posting, Buzzfeed is assembling a “crack team to imagine a build a new kind of news app,” in addition to its current mobile team. While everyone talks about Buzzfeed’s social exploits, the startup is doubling down on mobile apps.

For those news organizations investing heavily in apps, the benefits are starting to become clear. Once you start growing a loyal app audience, users consume and share content much more frequently – in many cases, exponentially more than web users. Users are more comfortable sharing data with apps that adapt to their needs, laying the groundwork for targeted advertising and a sustainable business.

If you’re good at apps, you’ve built a strong foundation to extend to new platforms that don’t run on browsers. At Breaking News, for example, our apps work seamlessly with wearables with minimal work (see an example on Android Wear). As Apple, Android and Amazon push into living rooms, video apps naturally extend to TV sets with strong ties to mobile devices. In a similar fashion, digital displays in cars all run on apps, not browsers.

A year and a half ago, I urged newsrooms to aggressively invest in mobile to avoid – even profit – from the second disruption. Now the disruption is here, and while the mobile web is still important, apps are leading the growth curve on mobile and beyond. News organizations have to fight a battle on both fronts, realizing that good apps require a tremendously larger and more patient investment than a mobile-friendly site. Similar to the first disruption, those who don’t invest enough will be left behind.

(Updated 7/29 to include the Reuters Institute study and Buzzfeed job posting.)

How to make breaking news matter again

Thu, 19 Jun 2014 00:00:00 GMT

If you ask your friends and neighbors about the state of journalism these days, they’ll inevitably start complaining about breaking news.

You’ll hear about the endless “breaking” coverage of the missing plane and mindless Justin Bieber alerts. How local TV news breathlessly rushes from one “breaking” crime story to the next. They’ll explain that breaking news is just an annoying marketing tactic designed to attract their attention. “That’s not breaking news!” is a common refrain.

They’re right: breaking news is broken, and it’s only getting worse.

Tourists snap a selfie as demonstrators burn a trash container during a May Day rally in Barcelona, Spain (Manu Fernandez / AP)

There are two reasons why. First, as the world becomes more connected, the volume of breaking news and other real-time information has grown dramatically. Even your friends are sending you breaking news.

But the way breaking news is distributed hasn’t changed much in 50 years. Sure, you can get it in different places — social media and mobile phones — but it’s still broadcast to everyone without considering whether the story itself is uniquely important to you. Everyone is treated the same and spammed with the same news, regardless of how different we are.

Second, the battle for your attention has intensified to new heights. “We live in a perpetual state of emergency interrupt,” says Google X’s Astro Teller. “Human attention is the most precious commodity,” and everyone wants a slice of it. Red “breaking news” banners seem like they’re a permanent fixture along the bottom of your TV set, and push notifications rattle your phone with the most trivial of news.

We even made a video about it:

▶ That’s not Breaking News!

But it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s time to take back our attention and make breaking news matter again.

Asking the right question

When you ask journalists about the breaking news problem, we’ll often debate whether a given story is big enough to merit the “breaking news” label. But the better question is whether the story is important enough to _each individual_who will receive it.

For example, if a big story happens near you, it’s certainly “breaking news” to you but not necessarily #breaking to your Twitter followers who spend their time in different places. If there’s a big acquisition in your industry, you’d consider it “breaking news,” but your neighbors don’t need to know. If you’re saving up to buy a Tesla and the car company just announced a new model… and so on.

There’s a long tail of breaking news stories that matter to each of us in different ways. If we can anticipate what’s uniquely important to you, breaking news will matter more than ever. It will become a utility, not a promotional vehicle. It will respect your individual attention, and you’ll invite the interruption.

Not any easy problem to solve

Anticipating the breaking news that matters to an individual in real time is a unique challenge. Sometimes the most relevant breaking stories are unexpected. Just because something is trending among your social media friends doesn’t mean it’s breaking news to you. And sometimes the most viral breaking news is blown out of proportion — or worse, a hoax.

Breaking News’ Stephanie Clary keeps a close eye on several screens.

At the startup Breaking News, solving this unique problem is our obsession. When we began over four years ago, we began boiling down the ocean of breaking news into a single stream. We since added the ability to get push notifications for any of nearly 40,000 topics and ongoing stories — and mute anything you don’t want to see. And now, we’re taking another big step toward solving the breaking news problem: geolocation.

When news breaks near you

It stands to reason that the closer you are to a significant story that just happened, the more likely you’ll want to know about it. With breaking news stories, these events have a high likelihood of impacting you directly, or at the very least, that people around you will be talking about it.

A week ago, we launched a powerful new feature that’s a first for a mobile app: when a big story breaks near your physical location, we’ll send you a push alert with the news. We call it a “proximity alert,” and it’s now live in the Breaking News iOS app (Android coming soon.)

While it’s a simple feature, there is a lot of complexity behind the scenes. A proximity alert only triggers 1) when there’s a significant story breaking at a location 2) you’re inside the story’s “impact zone.”

For example, we sent three proximity alerts as tornadoes ravaged Nebraska this week. One alert was sent at 4:52 PM ET to Stanton County, which includes the town of Pilger, warning of a tornado on the ground. Minutes later, most of the town was destroyed.

Weather is one of the most obvious applications of proximity alerts, but there are many other stories with a public safety component. For example, we sent a proximity alert to San Leandro, California after police issued a “shelter in place” warning as they searched for a suspect. We also tested the alerts with two school shootings, a wildfire evacuation, a train fire with evacuations and a mandatory boil water order.

The impact of a nearby story can also entail an intense curiosity and traffic disruptions. When a building exploded in East Harlem, New York, we sent a proximity alert to our beta testers in New York City moments after we verified the first reports on Twitter. We could’ve sent the alert only to people in the neighborhood (East Harlem) or the borough (Manhattan), but we estimated that the large column of smoke and transportation interruptions would impact New York City as a whole.

This is why algorithms have proven problematic in the past. To solve the problem, we’ve combined experienced editorial judgment with technology in real-time. Our lightning-fast platform narrows down the geography, then our editors make judgment calls on the fly to select the appropriate geographic boundary. The impact zone varies with both the story and the unique qualities of the geography around it. It works internationally, too, and it will follow you as you travel.

For example, we sent this proximity alert last week to the Iwate Prefecture in Japan moments after a earthquake there. If you were traveling and felt the shaking, the alert would come as a relief: it was a modest quake in a region with a history of dangerous temblors. We also sent an alert to the country of Thailand when the military announced the nation’s curfew had been lifted. For travelers, proximity alerts are a welcome companion.

The near future

In the battle for your attention, many news sites will do just about anything to get you to click and maximize your “time spent.” For us at Breaking News, this seems backwards. We’d rather maximize your utility by bringing you the important information you need to know right away.

We call it “time saved.” You have better things to do with your time.

Imagine a world where your devices learn what’s important to you, and you “just know” whenever you need to know about breaking news. No hype, no fluff, no begging for you to click or watch. Just the facts you need without the distraction. It’s effortless and instant. It saves you time, keeps you safe and helps you make smarter decisions when it matters most.

That’s our vision of a new world of Breaking News, and we’d love to hear what you think.

(Contact us here, and you can download ournew iOS app here.)

Why mobile first is not 'meaningless'

Thu, 27 Feb 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Speaking at the Mobile World Congress, Financial Times’ CTO John O’Donovan said the term mobile first has become meaningless. “Focusing too much on one thing can lead to being obsessed with the things mobile can do” instead of seeing the bigger picture, he warned. The FT uses a “universal publishing” approach.

Similarly, others have argued that the best, most holistic strategy is “platform appropriate,” optimizing for each screen. “Who are we to say what screen is first?” said Meredith Artley, managing editor of CNN Digital.

From a consumer standpoint, they’re right. We should be doing everything. But for the vast majority of newsrooms with limited resources and tightly-bound cultures, mobile first is a rallying cry to aggressively turn the Titanic before it’s too late.

In news, culture is everything. Over a decade ago, the industry saw the internet as just another distribution channel – another screen – instead of a disruptive new way of doing business. Without the urgency, changes were made too slowly, too tentatively, and the rest is history.

If it’s just another thing, you won’t change fast enough.

Today, Facebook, Google and Twitter are dominating the mobile news and information space by making it their top priority – accelerating cultural changes, making bold new bets ($9 billion!?) and generating real revenue – while news organizations argue over which screen is more appropriate.

“We come to mobile like this is just another platform, we’ve seen radio go to television, we’ve seen print go to Web,” explains Michael Zimbalist, SVP of ad products and R&D at NY Times. “I would sort of challenge everyone to think of mobile as a platform shift of a different order, because we’ve never seen a platform shift that’s invaded people’s lives in such a profound way.”

Mobile first isn’t about abandoning the desktop, it’s about accelerating culture change to adapt to the fastest shift in consumer behavior in the history of journalism. It doesn’t matter what you believe, it matters what you can do. Mobile first is an urgent call to rethink our priorities, invest in new capabilities, relentlessly experiment and redefine success metrics to succeed in a radically new marketplace.

If “mobile first” forces news organizations to focus too much on mobile, so be it. Because the alternative is a second wave of disruption and decline.

Let’s make mobile push notifications smarter

Thu, 23 Jan 2014 00:00:00 GMT

It seems that every app has push notifications these days. New apps are adding them. Older apps are doing more of them.

When Justin Bieber was arrested, even the iHeartRadio app sent a breaking news alert. CNN’s app sent three of them. When Nelson Mandela died, Twitter’s app sent a push, and ESPN Sportscenter’s app sent several of its own. All these news alerts join a growing chorus of push notifications from games, utilities and just about every other app out there.

Some are valuable. A growing number are spam.

It’s easy to explain why push notifications are all the rage: they’re incredibly effective at driving mobile engagement.

“It’s hard to over-hype the power of mobile push notifications,” explains entrepreneur Ariel Seidman in a blog post. “For the first time in human history you can tap almost two billion people on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey! Pay attention to this!’”

But when you’re getting tapped on your shoulder for something you don’t want, you become annoyed. Even outraged. A quick search on Twitter illustrates a growing push-back against push notifications.

View tweet

“Push notifications are somebody knocking at your door saying, ‘Look at this!” Seidman says, which helps explain why users react more emotionally than receiving an unwanted email. Even useful push alerts become annoying at high volume, and the frequency is escalating.

View tweet

We’ve been experimenting with push notifications for several years at Breaking News, monitoring how people respond across a wide variety of stories. We’ve learned that the best solution is to empower people to get the push notifications they want, reserving universal push notifications for truly big stories. That’s why we created custom push alerts for any topic, warning people in advance how many alerts they can expect.

When the Bieber story broke, we were tempted to push the button to blast it out to everyone. After all, it would drive phenomenal engagement. But we couldn’t imagine tapping people on their shoulders to tell them that Justin Bieber had been arrested. Only a small segment of our audience wants to get pinged with Bieber news, and they can easily set their own Bieber alerts in the Breaking News app.

That’s just one way to make notifications more meaningful. What if we can anticipate what users want before they explicitly say they want it? Can we anticipate who wants a Bieber alert? And when they want it? As notifications get smarter, users will pay more attention to them.

In the meantime, a backlash is brewing. If the barrage continues, users will instinctively opt out of push notifications before they have a chance to see if they’re useful. And that will be bad for everyone.

(Breaking News is a standalone startup owned by NBC News Digital.)

There's no choice between web and apps

Wed, 22 Jan 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Journalists like to talk about mobile web vs. apps like it’s a cage match. Which is better? Where should we place our bets? Which will win?

The answer is both. Prioritize both.

News organizations like to hope that the web will win. That’s because the web is familiar, and apps are extremely costly.

But the cruel truth is apps are dominating the mobile web in time spent by a 85% to 15% margin (Comscore). Apps are even projected to eclipse the desktop web by the end of the year (Comscore). And news apps are under-performing as a category, growing a third as fast as the average app (Flurry).

Oh, so people don’t like news apps, right?

No. It’s because most news apps are built for pennies, and they suck when compared to snazzy aggregators like Flipboard and social experiences like Facebook. The lack of investment is a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Well, maybe news orgs should just focus on the web, because Flipboard and Facebook send us traffic, and that should be our mobile strategy?

No. If you punt on apps, you’ve just disrupted yourself. Remember the argument about Google back in the day? That it became the entry point of the web and monetized on top of everyone else’s content? Apps are the mobile entry point.

But HTML 5 will come on strong and take market share from apps, right?

That’s not how it’s trending right now, and besides, are you willing to bet your news organization’s future on that assumption?

Let’s stop making excuses as an industry. Poynter should stop writing about it. We should stop asking the question in journalism conferences.

It’s no more web “vs.” apps. It’s both.

Why the nice city of Seattle adores trash-talking Richard Sherman

Mon, 20 Jan 2014 00:00:00 GMT

I was introduced to “Seattle nice” when I moved here from California (gasp!) in the late 90s. I was driving downtown, and the Range Rover in front of me stopped cold in the middle of the street to ask a parking enforcement officer a question.

I honked. Several times.

The officer promptly marched right up to my car, and I preemptively asked, “What did I do wrong?”

She proclaimed, “You’re NOT BEING NICE!”

So why is a city so obsessed with being nice in love with Seahawks trash-talker Richard Sherman? Even as much – or more – than one of the nicest quarterbacks on the planet, Russell Wilson?

Let’s start with Seattle’s dismal sports history. Only one of our pro sports teams has ever won a national championship: the Seattle Sonics, which were stolen away to Oklahoma. The Mariners set league records in 2001, only to succumb to the Yankees in the playoffs. The Seahawks made it to the Super Bowl once in 2006, but were overcome by the Steelers and the refs.

This history becomes only more painful when the national media piled on the disrespect. When the Hawks first went to the Super Bowl, one analyst cracked that Seattle is in “southeastern Alaska.“ The national media coverage focused entirely on the Steelers – I remember vividly, because I covered the Super Bowl for KING TV – and the tradition continued for years to come.

Microsoft is mocked. Amazon is in “Silicon Valley.” The Gates Foundation, which is saving millions of lives, gets less press than Twitter.

For Richard Sherman, it got under his skin. “I think we’ll enter next season as we did this season: As a bunch of nobodies, a bunch of no-name players,” Richard Sherman said a year ago. “I think we’re gonna end up being one of those teams that, once again, flies under the radar because we’re in Seattle.”

But as the season began, Seattle started to get respect. Sherman’s trash-talking on national TV – challenging the East Coast in his own bizarre way to give us the respect we deserve – seemingly began to work. Sure, the Seahawks are an incredible team this year, but we’ve seen incredible teams in our city before. This time was different, and Sherman was at the megaphone.

That’s why Seattle loves it when Sherman loses it. The city enjoys being the underdog, but not an outcast. And now everyone can hear us.

Mobile is eating the desktop already

Wed, 18 Dec 2013 00:00:00 GMT

One of the things I keep hearing in media circles is that mobile is purely additive and doesn’t come at the expense of the core digital business. However, two new reports illustrate how mobile is eating the desktop in both traffic and revenue, fueling a new disruption for media companies that have yet to figure out how to monetize their mobile audiences.

The first report is a year-end traffic analysis by Nielsen. It reveals that all of the top 10 web brands in the US experienced declines in PC web visits: Google is down 6%, Yahoo dropped 9% and Facebook fell 16% — all in a single year.

These declines have more implications than just the numbers themselves: they’re sources of referrals for media companies. As the referrals shift more mobile — for example, 78% of Facebook’s visits are now mobile — the fewer social and search referrals will be sent to the desktop. The effect will only accelerate desktop’s decline.

Why does this matter if overall traffic is soaring, thanks to the mobile explosion? That’s where the second report comes into play. Mobile ad revenue is expected to finish the year with 120% growth, compared to just 1.69% for the desktop, finds eMarketer. Next year, the desktop is virtually flat, slumping into a decline in 2015 and beyond. By 2017, mobile ad revenue is forecast to surpass the desktop altogether.

“Mobile advertising continues to grow faster than expected, largely at the expense of desktop ad spending, which is flattening or declining more rapidly than previous predicted,” explains eMarketer, which keeps revising its forecasts to try to keep up with mobile’s astonishing growth.

For media companies that monetize mobile audiences at a fraction of the desktop — often with CPMs in the pennies — this is an immediate threat. As both advertisers and audiences shift away from the desktop simultaneously, overall ad revenue will decline. There is a boatload of mobile ad revenue, but it’s headed to companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter that can deliver on a high ROI with smartly-targeted ads.

This is why media companies must ramp up mobile investment more than ever, beefing up product teams that span content, UX, data and revenue — pivoting their cultures to adapt to the mobile-first reality. Video and sponsorships show particular promise, according to the eMarketer report, in addition to the skyrocketing growth of native advertising.

In the end, being platform-appropriate is not enough when you’re about to get clobbered by the biggest platform of them all. And if you need a little motivation, just start tracking your desktop decline.

(I work at Breaking News, a mobile-first company owned by NBC News).

Reinventing Breaking News around you

Mon, 04 Nov 2013 00:00:00 GMT

waves from a typhoon in china / Reuters

Breaking news used to be a term reserved for stories that were unequivocally a big deal. That’s because there were only a few huge news outlets, and everyone paid attention to them. Think about 9/11: on that day, the Associated Press wire issued two rare “flash” alerts, one when each tower fell.

Now it seems like just about everything is breaking news. It’s everywhere, amplified by social media and the proliferation of new digital media outlets that have sprung up in the past decade. “Breaking news used to be ‘news of transcendent importance.’ Now it’s a joke,” wrote Slate’s David Weigel. Or as Wikipedia put it, “The term ‘breaking news’ has become trite.”

It’s not just professional journalists who seem to be posting more breaking news in more places: a growing army of “accidental journalists” is discovering their own #breakingnews, both large and small, urgent and otherwise.

For a company that’s literally named Breaking News, we’re intimately familiar with the growing frustration and confusion over what constitutes breaking news. We have one of the most active instant feedback loops in journalism: the Twitter account @breakingnews and its 6 million followers. We receive immediate and vocal reactions to just about anything we post. One of the most common responses is:

When we examined our Twitter feedback over time, we discovered that this complaint is widely distributed. Sure, a small handful of stories get more criticism than others, but the vast majority of complaints about what constitutes “breaking news” are scattered along a wide range of stories and topics. Someone will invariably think that it’s not worth classifying the latest from Amanda Bynes’ legal troubles as “breaking news.” Others will excitedly retweet anything about her.

That’s because the root problem with breaking news is that it assumes everyone is the same. The same breaking news is blasted everywhere — all screaming for your attention — a one-way, broadcast model of journalism grafted onto a new era of social media and mobile phones. But with the exception of truly big stories, breaking news means something different to everyone. We are no longer “the audience.” Each one of us is unique.

So we’ve decided to do something about it, and we’ve rebuilt Breaking News from the ground up — around you.

Your own Breaking News service

The backbone of Breaking News is our team of trusted and caffeinated journalists. As we’ve done for three years now, we quickly discover breaking stories across thousands of original sources, sifting out unconfirmed reports and duplicate stories. During the LAX shooting, for example, we avoided incorrect reports while publishing lightning-fast updates.

With the new Breaking News — relaunching today as a new iOS app and on BreakingNews.com (with Android coming soon) — we’re not taking journalists out of the equation, but we’re adding you into it. While we’re discovering and vetting stories in real time, you control what you want to see. Since breaking news by definition thrives on the unexpected, we’ve taken an entirely novel approach to personalization.

When you open the app, you get all the news instantly — no setup necessary. If you see something you don’t think should be breaking news, you can quickly mute the topic. Don’t think anything about Miley Cyrus is a breaking story? Just tap the mute button:

I’ve muted Miley Cyrus in my Breaking News app

And you’ll no longer see any news about Miley. Muting also comes in handy for long-running, emotionally-taxing stories and TV spoilers (i.e. mute the Oscars to avoid hearing the results.) You can always bring back these stories if you wish, and if something truly big happens, we’ll alert you anyway.

We’ve also added custom alerts, which is the most addictive part of the new Breaking News app. Tap the alarm icon to get a push notification whenever there’s a breaking development about a topic, spanning people (i.e. Elon Musk) and cities (San Francisco) to large companies (Google) and ongoing stories. For example, I’ve alerted “football.”

Push alert on my phone after alerting “football.”

Each alert is a standalone update, not a promotion to drive you into the app. Just glance at it and you’re caught up. And unlike Google Alerts, we’ll send you a push alert the moment something significant happens, not a big list of stories that mentioned the topic over the last few hours.

You can now set up your own Breaking News service on the fly. After all, why should you keep checking an app or a website for an update on something that matters to you? Shouldn’t it just tell you the moment it happens and send you on your way?

‘Whoa!’ and the metrics of surprise

We’ve never been a fan of a “like” button next to a breaking news story. Do you really “like” that earthquake? Social popularity — be it likes or retweets — is a poor metric for breaking news. For example, one of the most retweeted stories from @breakingnews last year was about the record-setting song “Gangnam Style,” which many argued was not breaking news.

Our theory is that when it comes to breaking stories, surprise is a better metric than popularity. Since Breaking News is fast, people are discovering stories for the first time. The more unexpected, the more surprising.

So as an experiment, we’ve added one more feature in the new Breaking News. To the right of each headline, you’ll find something that we’re calling the “whoa!” button. If a story surprises you, express that shock or awe by hitting “whoa!” Then, you can also see how many other people find the story surprising, and you can choose to share the story with your friends. Those numbers power the “whoa!” section at the bottom of the Breaking News feed, showcasing the most surprising stories over the last few hours.

An example of one of the more surprising stories

We’re looking forward to seeing how this new metric of surprise compares with existing metrics of social popularity. We’ll also be tracking which stories and topics are muted and alerted the most, all in real time. We’ll share what we learn in the weeks and months to come.

Out with the globe, in with the new

With the new Breaking News, we’ve rolled out a fresh look with larger images and a more engaging design that’s optimized for mobile. But one of the most obvious changes is our new logo.

Our new logo followed by the old Breaking News

Gone is the red globe — which has always looked like it was ripped from a “breaking news” banner on TV. We’ve introduced a new logo that exemplifies Breaking News’ transformation into a personal mobile service. We’ve replaced the “screaming red” with an orange-red color, and our logo design has taken inspiration from an image of a pin on a map — it’s news that’s targeted to you, wherever you are.

Of course, our social accounts will keep cranking out the broadcast-style updates, but the new Breaking News app and site provide a refreshing way to discover the stories that matter to you in the moment they happen. We are just getting started, and please don’t hesitate to tell us what you’d like to see.

Before you go, watch our launch video. It’ll “smarten you up.”

“I say whoa.”

When you post a story on social, it goes mobile

Mon, 19 Aug 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The vast majority of Facebook and Twitter users are accessing their feeds on mobile devices, according to surprising new numbers. Facebook revealed that 78% of its daily active users in the US are visiting via mobile devices. For Twitter, 76% of its US users will visit the service on mobile this year, according to new estimates from eMarketer.

And here’s a mind-boggling stat: if you calculate how much time people spend reading stories inside Facebook’s app – in the browser that opens when you tap a story – Facebook has become the most popular browser across iOS and Android devices. That’s right, more than Safari and Chrome.

With mobile dominating social, I’m still surprised at how much desktop content is showing up in my feeds. Everything we share on Facebook and Twitter should be optimized for a mobile experience – primarily for phones – because that’s how most people are reading or watching it.

In fact, Facebook even suggests redefining how we measure success. “A lot of people focus on monthly active users or even registered users to demonstrate their size and scale. We think this is becoming on old way of looking at the media world,” Facebook said in a statement. The new metric that matters? Daily active users on mobile.

What media companies can learn from Facebook's unbelievable mobile growth

Wed, 24 Jul 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Just last summer, Mark Zuckerberg was hammered with questions about mobile monetization – which was zero – and he promised to improve Facebook’s crappy mobile app. Then the company’s IPO fell flat. Fast forward to this summer, and Facebook’s new mobile numbers should make your head spin:

- 41% of total ad revenue is mobile, up 30% from last quarter. - 70% of monthly active users visit via mobile, up 51% year-over-year. - 19% of monthly active users are mobile ONLY (219 million of ‘em). - Oh, and Facebook has more than 1 million active advertisers.

The first number alone is astounding (that comes out to $656 million), and Facebook’s stock is skyrocketing. How did Facebook engineer such a rapid mobile turnaround, and what can media companies learn from it?

For starters, I’ll quote author David Burkus: “Innovation isn’t an idea problem, it’s a recognition problem.“ At first, you have to believe. Zuckerberg recognized that his company’s future hinged on mobile, and he followed it up with aggressive action. Here’s what he did, according to stories in Fortune and Fast Company as well as posts on Facebook’s engineering page:

- Announced to staff that Facebook’s top priority is becoming a mobile company. - Reorganized the company to embed mobile engineers in all product teams, making every product head responsible for mobile. - Turned off Facebook.com internally for a week, forcing staff to use mobile apps. - Abandoned Facebook’s hybrid apps and rebuilt them from scratch as native apps (a risky decision with an IPO around the corner.) - Created a recruiting program to identify mobile engineering talent, and hired aggressively across the company. - Offered mobile-skills training programs for hundreds of engineers. - Required new mobile releases every 4-8 weeks. - Encouraged employees to trade in iPhones for Android devices to better represent what the majority of Facebook mobile users have. - Acquired Instagram for $1 billion (another risky decision before an IPO). - Repeatedly asks employees, “What’s that look like on mobile?”

Facebook soon went from “mobile first” to what Zuckerberg now calls “mobile best,” and the results speak for themselves. Mobile is not an addition, but a transformation driven by action in the face of risk and uncertainty. “You have to change the tasks at the very core” supported by resources to change an organization’s culture, explains David Skok, who co-authored a report with Harvard’s Clayton Christensen on media disruption.

Facebook is more than just a mobile case study; it should be a wake-up call for media companies and news organizations. Facebook’s mobile presence is greater than every media company’s mobile footprint combined. Zuckerberg says his goal is to make it the best personalized newspaper on the planet, and with 819 million mobile monthly active users and 1 million advertisers, he’s off to a good start.

What really is the 'most important measure' of a journalist's work?

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The most important measure of a journalist’s work is* impact*, right? Isn’t that’s why we became journalists in the first place? It certainly wasn’t for the money.

But this new survey discovered that journalists believe unique users is the overwhelming measure of success. Page views, social followers and sharing followed as other important metrics.

Sure, we can’t measure impact. At least yet. That’s why we fall back on the longstanding media metrics of reach and frequency, which drive our business. But if we’re truly making a difference – and we can take credit for it – then wouldn’t reach and frequency follow? Couldn’t impact metrics extend to native advertising, too?

Let’s work on this as an industry. In order to measure impact, we have to make it. Let’s enable our audience to take action from our stories and gather data around it. Mobile is a unique opportunity to make this happen. Let’s stop guessing if we make a difference.

PS. Congrats to ImpactStory for landing a $250K grant from the Sloan Foundation. We need more efforts like these.

Why media companies should embrace 'stupid ideas'

Fri, 10 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Shift to mobile is tripping up news metrics

Fri, 03 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Why journalists are now responsible for the business

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

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.

4 easy ways to start thinking 'mobile first'

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT

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.)

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

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT

(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

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Why mobile will disrupt journalism like the Internet did a decade ago

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been on my mobile soapbox lately, urging news organizations to adopt a “mobile first” mindset. Meanwhile, Business Insider’s Henry Blodget says the smarter strategy is “mobile, too.”

“The reality is that we live in a multi-screen world, not a ‘mobile world’ that operates parallel to a ‘desktop world,’” he writes. “For some services, such as news and information, the laptop/desktop screen is still by far the most dominant screen. So abandoning that screen, or designing for another screen first, just doesn’t make sense.”

Blodget’s view is matched by many in the journalism industry, but it misses the larger point. This isn’t about design and distribution as much as it is about disruption.

Rewind to 1996 when newspapers enjoyed fat profit margins, and two startups made their debut on the early Internet. One company all but destroyed newspapers’ biggest revenue driver, and the other ended up generating more advertising revenue — most of it local — than the entire newspaper business combined.

Both Craigslist and Google created new business models enabled by the technology and scale of the Internet. In the same way, mobile is enabling new business models and use cases. Just like the mid to late 1990s, we’re at the leading edge of the ensuing disruption.

Two big drivers of mobile disruption are geolocation and digital payments. Taken together, they have the capability to disrupt local advertising all over again. The right technology with the right execution will be able to drive nearby consumers into local businesses and anonymously track their actual purchases at scale, closing the loop like never before. No more guessing about ad effectiveness. For local media organizations, that has the potential to destroy your business.

According to eMarketer, Google ended last year with a 56% share of ALL mobile advertising dollars in the US. Earlier in the year, it announced it was taking a “mobile first” approach to product development. Last summer Facebook also revealed a shift to a mobile first strategy. When Marissa Mayer took over the reins at Yahoo, she proclaimed the same thing, gobbling up mobile startups to expedite innovation.

Meanwhile, there’s a new onslaught of “mobile first” and “mobile only” startups spanning communication, news, advertising and services. One of the most notable, Square, is well on its way to reinventing how businesses accept payments. It’s now valued at $3.25 billion.

I don’t know about you, but a “mobile, too” approach worries me when the technology world is investing so deeply in mobile first innovation. Despite experiments with paid content, advertising remains the core source of revenue for journalism — and mobile ad rates are a fraction of the desktop. Media companies are barely a blip on that eMarketer mobile advertising chart.

This isn’t just a threat to ad dollars, but attention, too. Facebook’s mobile footprint is mind-boggling, and Twitter (which began as a mobile company) is making great strides, as well. Just those two organizations alone have changed the landscape of mobile news and information.

Is all this sounding familiar?

This means two things for news organizations. First, now is the time to invest like never before. There’s a narrow window of opportunity to invent — or invest and acquire — disruptive mobile technologies and business models that could eventually sustain, grow or even multiply your revenue. Whatever your company has done in the past, triple it.

Second, a “mobile first” mindset should be adopted organization wide. This doesn’t mean you ignore the desktop, but you prioritize mobile over it – you make mobile the default everything – from setting performance goals to creating new products. Cultural shifts don’t happen overnight, and the clock is ticking. Soon mobile will become the primary way people get their news, and desktop consumption will inevitably drop over time.

“In the next 12–18 months, many news organizations will cross the 50 percent threshold where more users are visiting on phones and tablets than on desktop computers and laptops,” explains Fiona Spruill, editor of emerging platforms at The New York Times. “The numbers speak for themselves.”

At Google, it’s already happening. Desktop searches are now in a steady decline, and the company expects mobile searches will surpass desktop this year.

Imagine being able to rewind to the 1990s and help your news organization make key strategic decisions — and create new habits — that would have helped the business thrive on the Internet. That’s the opportunity we have today with mobile.

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

6 reasons why most journalists are underestimating the mobile revolution

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Most newsrooms know that mobile is growing fast. Everyone can see mobile usage (phones and tablets) creeping up on their desktop numbers. For example, The Guardian recently said mobile visits hit 35%, outpacing desktop at certain hours of the day. A growing handful of media brands – including where I work at Breaking News – have watched mobile soar over desktop in audience. And we’ve all seen the stories about the unprecedented growth of tablets, the fastest-growing product in the history of consumer electronics.

Soon, mobile will be the primary way people get their news.

If that’s really the case, then why isn’t mobile dominating journalists’ discussions on Twitter? Packing sessions at journalism conferences? Sitting at the top of “most popular” story lists on journalism blogs?

I have a few theories:

1. Social media is all the rage

Journalists (including me) love to talk about social media on social media. Just look at all the hubbub around Instagram’s new terms of service over the last few days. Anything social is an extremely popular subject in journalism circles: Twitter techniques, Facebook referrals and Reddit AMAs are grabbing much more mindshare than mobile news experiments, MAU growth (monthly active users) and app store rankings+SEO, arguably among the most important metrics for a news organization outside of revenue.

In fact, Harvard Business Review just went as far to say that media companies are largely wasting their time with social media metrics.

Don’t get me wrong: social media is very important – it’s an increasingly critical referral source, newsgathering tool and marketing vehicle – but it’s a subset of a larger mobile revolution that’s fully underway. And let’s not forget that social platforms are not directly monetizable and compete for audience attention and ad dollars. Growing our own mobile experiences should be the top priority.

2. Social is easy, mobile is not (yet)

I worked in local TV over a decade ago, struggling to convince reporters to adopt the web. Fast-forward to today, and even the most old-school reporters have Twitter accounts. What gives? Social media is easy and convenient for anyone to participate, and metrics like “followers” and “likes” are something most journalists – who battle for reach – immediately grasp. It’s also easy for newsrooms to experiment with social media without much technical effort, especially when drawing on many (mostly free) plug-and-play social tools.

Mobile, however, is hard, and the barrier to experiment is high. App development is downright difficult, requiring longer development cycles, talented designers and engineers – and deeper budgets. “Good mobile developers are hard to find, expensive to hire and demanding to keep,” explains Andrew Locke, who heads up devices for NBC News. New platforms keep emerging, demanding more development attention. And while many hope that HTML5 will be the savior, apps are becoming engrained in the behavior of millions of device users.

This doesn’t mean you need to learn how to code (I can’t). But it means you should strive to learn as much as you can about consumer behavior, mobile design and best practices across news, gaming and utilities. Become a student and soak up as much as you can.

**3. Not just a new form factor, mobile is fundamentally new **

Back in the newspaper days, websites were primarily regarded as a new distribution channel to extend print reporting to the digital world. However, as newspapers learned, the web is a fundamentally new medium with its own use cases (i.e. search) and business models (i.e. CPC auctions).

Similarly, mobile is not just another form factor, but a completely new medium, from content to monetization. It’s a fundamentally different mindset focused on solving problems in a new context. We can’t just shorten content and shovel it onto phones. Or create a responsive design and say we have a mobile strategy. Or create snazzy retina-loving photos in a tablet app and charge people for it.

“We need to rethink media around informing you in new ways,“ explains Jeff Jarvis, who calls mobile a “personal bubble” with an unprecedented ability to know what a user wants. “Advertising? I’m not sure what advertising is,” he adds.

In many ways, mobile is a reset. “By far the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has,” says Y Combinator’s Paul Graham in a must-read startup manual. What problems should news organizations solve on mobile?

4. Journalists don’t have the data we need

In just about every newsroom on the planet, desktop data comes first and mobile numbers are few and far between. Perhaps you’ll see a couple tidbits about the mobile web, but what’s happening beyond a simple visit? How do downloads correlate with retention? Which dayparts are most popular? How do people interact inside your mobile experiences? Phone vs. tablet? Web vs. app? Do they read articles or bail out after a quick scroll? When and how do they share? What are the most cost-effective marketing tactics to attract loyal users?

We need to conduct more mobile-only research projects and track mobile-only user behavior. We need to put mobile data at the top of our analytics reports. We need to compare ourselves competitively on mobile numbers over desktop.

After all, if journalists can’t see how users are consuming or ignoring our mobile content, then we can’t – and won’t – adapt to the new world.

5. Invest more in mobile and set bold goals

With a few exceptions, newsrooms are under-investing in mobile. If mobile is truly a new frontier, it demands the resources to succeed.

“When the Web was new, many of us went online with creativity and energy,” says Regina McCombs, who teaches mobile at Poynter. “Now, faced with even bigger potential and pitfalls for developing – or losing – our audience, most of us are getting by with as little investment as we can. That’s scary.”

At Breaking News – a quickly-growing mobile startup owned by NBC – we’ve been fortunate enough to have the resources and the freedom to drive mobile innovation. In turn, we’ve focused on creating a mobile-first culture with bold goals that virtually ignore the desktop. We hold ourselves accountable for mobile, and by extension, that’s our team’s priority. From product brainstorming to coverage to success metrics, mobile is the default everything.

As mobile startups pop up everywhere, not investing is not an option. They have the freedom to disrupt. Do you?

6. Mobile can be more of a threat than an opportunity

With the explosion of devices, mobile traffic has been viewed as a bonus, adding to desktop audiences to grow overall reach. If it’s all incremental, why worry about it? But that’s increasingly not the case.

“From board meeting to board meeting, we are seeing a similar pattern. Web is flattish. But mobile is growing like a weed,” explains Fred Wilson, a VC and principal of Union Square Ventures. “There is a significant shift going on this year, much more significant than we saw last year, from web to mobile.“

As audiences shift to mobile, advertising revenue – mobile CPMs are a fraction of desktop web – will drop by extension, at least in the short term. Recently, I attended a meeting of venture capitalists who agreed that they won’t invest in any mobile startup based solely on mobile advertising for the next two years. That’s why there’s an urgency to experiment with new monetization models against new approaches to news like never before.

Journalists are a deadline-driven bunch. We need to recognize that the* desktop cliff is right around the corner.*

I don’t have all the answers, but I challenge journalists everywhere to talk less about social media and more about mobile. Immerse yourself in devices. Become a student of the industry. If you’re not getting the data you need in your newsroom, pressure your analytics folks to give it to you. Cozy up to your mobile developers and designers and brainstorm – and try – new ideas. Attend training sessions, like Poynter’s upcoming “mobile first” class. Pressure journalism conferences to add more mobile sessions.

If we don’t, history is due to repeat itself. Nothing less than the future of journalism depends on it.

(Adapted from my presentation to MIT’s Future of Journalism event).

How giving helps us matter

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

If there’s any advice that’s repeated the most when you’re young, it has to be the simple phrase, “Life is short.“ At that stage in your life, it’s a ridiculous statement, since life is just beginning. Even when you’re in your 30s and 40s, it makes intuitive sense – you can respect it – but it lacks the bite to have any real application.

We’re often told that the best response to “life is short” is to “enjoy the journey.” Again, this makes intuitive sense, but becomes more problematic in practice. Like a TV ticker that never ends, our brains are spinning on problems – and thinking ahead to things that need to be done – even during rare relaxing moments. We’re experts at keeping busy, and when we happen to find a couple minutes of downtime, we whip out our phones and distract ourselves. Hours race by like tweets, drowned by an endless to-do list. Suddenly we realize ten years have gone by, and time is only accelerating.

I’ve found the only anecdote is two weeks vacation taken at once (which I never take) or a deep sleep. Carving out meaningful time with the kids – and putting down the phone when we do (other than snapping the occasional Instagram pic) – certainly is a big step in the right direction.

However, I think there’s another big piece of this. “I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter,” writes Tim Kreider in “The Busy Trap,” an insightful look at America’s fascination with keeping insanely busy. Oprah puts it another way, “Everybody wants to know that they matter.”

Yes, I just quoted Oprah, but I think these are remarkable statements. If you believe what you’re doing really matters – and by extension, that you matter – then it adds purpose to the journey. That helps focus your tasks, reducing points of distraction. It also reduces the likelihood that we’ll all look back years later and question how we invested our precious time during our best and brightest years.

This doesn’t mean you have to find your “true calling in life,” as that’s often illusive and a bit of a Hollywood fantasy, if you ask me. But I have a theory: the act of helping others – by giving time, expertise or money – helps us matter more, especially when we give in concert with a community. When we see the results of our gifts, we feel we’ve made an imprint on the world.

The trick is finding the time to give, and that is the paradox. Like carving out time for the kids, you need to fight off the distractions and find the time. Once you get rolling, it will come naturally.

How 'economies of proximity' help fuel hyperlocal

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 00:00:00 GMT

My wife Kate Bergman and I co-founded a network of Seattle neighborhood news sites in late 2007 called Next Door Media. Today, the 10 sites along with our regional guide bring in 230,000 unduplicated unique users a month with a combined social media following of nearly 40,000 fans and followers – at a much lower cost per audience than the Patch model.

One of our key learnings from creating the network – which I presented at the Online News Association conference last week – is something I call “economies of proximity.“ It’s a different spin on economies of scale. WalMart is the classic example of scale: as it grew, it was able to negotiate lower per-unit pricing from suppliers and achieve cost efficiencies in distribution.

For Next Door Media, we’ve noticed cost efficiencies in proximity. All of our sites are right next door to each other in the North Seattle region, and neighborhoods aren’t mutually-exclusive. You live in one, shop in another and commute through yet another. When something big or particularly interesting happens in a nearby neighborhood, you want to hear about it. Your geographic sphere of interest flexes beyond your neighborhood and your zip code.

So we share coverage, marketing and advertising across the sites in flexible, proximity-driven combinations. A story that happens on the border of one neighborhood is also posted on other neighborhood site. A regional story is posted across all ten. That reduces the cost of coverage by amortizing the effort of creating a story across multiple nearby sites.

Hence, economies of proximity.

We also share story tips, and nearby editors help each other during breaking news and vacations. They also retweet each other, and occasionally cross-promote on Facebook (which helps explain why Next Door Media has one of the largest combined social media following for any Seattle media organization.) All the sites prominently cross-link each other across the top in order of proximity – as well as cross-link the most interesting stories – which consistently drives more network traffic than Google or even our relationship with the Seattle Times.

The economies of proximity continue on the sales front. Many of our advertisers buy more than one site at a time, reducing the cost of sales. After all, businesses attract customers at varying levels of geographic reach. A neighborhood coffee hangout may have a half-mile reach, but a furniture store may attract customers five miles away. Our advertising clients can buy custom geographies by buying different combinations of sites, targeting their customers exactly where they live and work. And larger, citywide advertisers are increasingly attracted to our network because of its overall reach.

At the end of the day, proximity reduces costs and opens the door to larger sales opportunities. If the network were to grow to a new geography – another “cluster” of next door sites with a regional guide site – we’d also begin to experience economies of scale, especially in product development. But that’s another discussion for another time.

Remembering 9/11, a decade later

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I spent a month at Ground Zero covering the aftermath of the attacks. I arrived from Seattle on the night of September 13th — called up by NBC News to help reinforce coverage in New York — so I missed the peak of the tragedy. Day after day, night after night, I watched from my live shot position (above) as crews worked tirelessly among the rubble, hoping above hope to find life inside the twisted metal. The rubble smoldered for weeks, permeating the air with a metallic-smelling, dusty smoke that I’ll never forget.

One memory sticks with me the most: late one night, a few dozen workers marched proudly toward Ground Zero, holding the American flag up high. Out of reach of our cameras on a darkened street, they were headed toward another grueling 12 hour shift, some singing patriotic songs as they walked. They were among the many heroes of 9/11, not only on that tragic day, but during the weeks and months that followed.

Welcome to my personal blog

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I started a blog called LostRemote.com 12 years ago – one of the first on the web – and it’s taken me this long to create a personal space where I can freely write about random (and they’re random) things that cross my mind.

This will be a strange fusion of stuff: I’m a journalist MBA who dreams in disruptive ideas and tries to scrape together enough time to create as many as I can. Occasionally, it works.

I’m employed by msnbc.com, but as I feel compelled to say, everything I write here is strictly personal. Thanks for stopping by.