Mobile forms of communication are not going away anytime soon.

So Lee Little’s “Mobile landscape for publishers” presentation at the New England Newspaper and Press Association winter convention explored the benefits that mobile forms of publication have in reaching a growing audience, and how to help achieve those benefits.

The presentation, held Friday, Feb. 24, at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf hotel, encouraged the audience of a dozen people to consider mobile applications and their special features as the main medium for their publishing. Little, founder and chief executive officer of Bar-Z Mobile De-velopment of Austin, Texas, has experienced the benefits of going mobile.

“Local newspapers are best served (by) mobile” Little said. “It’s where the audience is.”

Little said 81 percent of Americans have smartphones, with the common user checking his or her phone every six and a half minutes on average. Ninety percent of the time users spend on a mobile device is spent using mobile applications.

Because a majority of users get their news on screens, it is necessary to publish quality content. A good general screen appearance and proper marketing and monetizing is also crucial to that content’s success. To properly achieve that, Little suggests using two critical forms of mobile publication:

• Responsive design websites — websites designed to fit the screen of the device. Com-pared to a regular mobile website, responsive design websites automatically switch to accom-modate for the resolution, image size and scripting abilities of the device, allowing for a better user experience.
• Native apps — mobile applications developed for a particular platform or device, such as iPhones. A user downloads the application from an app store on his or her device, and the ap-plication’s software compatibility provides for fast performance and high reliability.

Native apps, although more expensive to develop, are the best, Little said.

Little took the audience through several examples of apps created to cater to unique audiences. Those specialty apps are mostly city or community portal apps, on which readers can download and learn about the food, travel and leisure options of a specific locale. Many portal apps in-clude secondary sections for sponsors of the application to advertise their content.

“Including sponsors in community portals is a great way of keeping them from developing their own app,” Little said.

To increase the frequency of audience engagement on such apps, features such as coupon of-fers, social media-sharing capabilities and interactive polls can be used.

Little said the most effective tools are iBeacons paired with push notifications.

iBeacons are small devices placed in local areas such as shopping malls or other public venues in a community. When the GPS tracking in a mobile device comes within range of an iBeacon, it triggers content to appear on the device, commonly in the form of push notifications that engage with a mobile user.

It is beneficial to keep the content provided in those push notifications relevant to the user. Keeping the subscriber from becoming irritated or disengaged with the content being presented is crucial, Little said. That means updating the content regularly.

“If you have consumers using mobile, they don’t want to look at the same content all day,” Little said.

When using mobile tools to reach new audiences, evaluating the progress of those interactions is key. Little advised taking a trial-and-error approach to mobile publishing as the best way to extend a publishing brand.

The most important thing is improving on prior models of content presentation, Little said.

“You have to look at what you have and ask what is a natural way to go about relaying that,” he said. “You look at version 1.0, version 2.0, and then version 3.0.”

‘If you have consumers using mobile, they don’t want to look at the same content all day.’

—Lee Little, Founder, chief executive officer,
Bar-Z Mobile Development, Austin, Texas

Al Getler, former publisher of The Burlington (Vt.) Free Press, shows  during a convention session Friday morning, Feb. 24, how to position a smartphone in shooting Facebook Live video.

Al Getler brought a friend to the session he organized for the New England Newspaper and Press Association’s winter convention.

Facebook was the figurative friend Getler, former publisher of The Burlington (Vt.) Free Press, brought to the two-part session, attended by more than 60 people Friday, Feb. 24.

In the first part of the session on “Facebook, newspapers and journalism,” Getler introduced the speaker, Peter Elkins-Williams, leader of Facebook’s news partnerships. Elkins-Williams discussed the Facebook Journalism Project and its efforts to create better ties with the news industry.

In the second part of the session, Getler discussed how Facebook Live, a feature that allows users to stream video footage instantly on Facebook, can help make news coverage more efficient and interesting.

Getler’s presentation aimed at educating journalists who work mainly in print about the benefits of using social media to promote news stories and receive instant feedback.

“Facebook is your friend,” Getler said. “That is my belief, and hopefully that will be yours too.”

Getler said that if journalists want people to read their work, they need to go where people are: social media.

Getler said that by posting stories on Facebook and paying the platform to boost those stories, journalists can expose users to their publication in hopes that those users will continue to follow the publication on different platforms.

“A little boost goes a long way,” Getler said. “If you pay a bit of money for Facebook to drive your story, it can instantaneously get 80,000 likes.”

Posting Facebook Live videos can help print journalists compete with broadcast reporters without the need for heavy production equipment, bulky microphones, or multiple team members. Journalists can share “breaking news, explainers, and sports highlights” with the touch of a button on their personal phones, Getler said.

Facebook Live also offers instant analytics and metrics that can be helpful for journalists to gauge the reactions and questions an audience might have.

“You know how many shares, likes (a story attracts) … the story performance all in live time versus waiting two weeks for the numbers to come out on how many newspapers were bought,” Getler said.

Those instant analytics can be helpful for journalists to answer questions the audience might have about a story, to think of alternative facts to investigate while still at the scene, and to know how to delve deeper into a story, based on comments made immediately about your Facebook Live video.

While speaking during the session, Getler was simultaneously filming a Facebook Live video of his presentation.

He urged the audience to “take a risk in the industry,” and gave them several tips for shooting videos. The tips included cupping a hand over the microphone for sound clarity, buying a tripod to prevent “wiggly” footage, editing clips via iMovie, and experimenting with technology to become more confident in using tech tools.

“I do believe in technology a great deal,” Getler said. “We need to get over thinking that ‘risking nothing is genius’.”

‘Facebook is your friend. That is my belief, and hopefully that will be yours too.’

—Al Getler, Former publisher,
Burlington (Vt.) Free Press

With this mounted smartphone, Getler shoots a Facebook Live video of his presentation.

The disruption of the newspaper industry began with the advent of the internet as a consumer technology in the 1990s. In the decades since, online news aggregators, digital advertising and social media giants have chipped away at the business model of news. But that process is not inevitable nor irreversible, according to Thales Teixeira, a professor in the marketing unit at Harvard Business School.

There is a recipe for disrupting markets, and newspapers can put that to use for themselves too, Teixeira explained in his keynote speech Friday, Feb. 24, at the New England Newspaper and Press Association’s winter convention in the Boston Long Wharf Marriott hotel.

In his speech, entitled “Responding to digital disruption,” Teixeira revealed the key to disruption, which he learned from studying startups. He calls it “decoupling.”

The traditional consumer process is like a linked chain. Consumers evaluate the different options available for some product, pick one, purchase it and use it. Teixeira likes to say the events in that chain are coupled, or bound together. Disrupters work by decoupling the chain.

Twenty years ago, a reader would buy The New York Times and receive a bundle of products — news stories, classified advertisements, restaurant reviews and more. Today, those services have been decoupled by various disrupters. Google has become a source for news stories. Craigslist provides easy access to classified ads. Yelp handles restaurant reviews.

A similar process occurred in broadcast news. Traditionally, viewers watched news shows and sat through the commercials that generated revenue for those programs. Now, viewers can use TiVo or DVR to bypass the ads, or they can turn to Netflix to stream video. The old business model for broadcast television has been decoupled.

Teixeira said disrupters are successful because they find the weak link in the coupled consumer chain and decouple it. Those companies find ways to create new value, such as WhatsApp, which provides free text messaging across borders, or to reduce hassle, such as Fresh Direct, which delivers groceries to a customer’s door.

Consumers prefer anything that can reduce monetary, time or effort costs, Teixeira said.

Incumbents in any industry can recognize that and try to prevent disruption in two ways: recoupling or rebalancing. Recoupling, which refers to maintaining the traditional consumer chain, often involves forcing contracts on customers to keep them committed to a service or lobbying the government to outlaw a separation of activities.

Teixeira recommends rebalancing instead.

Rather than waiting for the purchasing stage at the end of the consumer chain, rebalancing involves companies monetizing as many stages in the chain as they can.

Teixeira used an analogy to explain: “If you are at the beginning of a pipeline and don’t capture value until the end, then a disrupter can drill a hole in the middle and get all the oil.”

He pointed to Best Buy as an example of rebalancing at its best. Realizing that many customers were testing out products in store but then buying them online from Amazon, the company decided to find another revenue stream. It recognized that it was creating value for suppliers such as Samsung by showcasing their products in-store, so Best Buy turned to those suppliers and began charging them a display fee.

The New York Times is doing that in some ways, Teixeira said. When the newspaper realized it was creating more value for online readers than it was for online advertisers, it switched from an advertisement-based revenue model to a subscription-based one. It put up a paywall to charge readers for the value of its content. It is also trying to create additional value through new apps, blogs, crossword puzzles and more.

Local newspapers, which have been hit by disruption in the industry, can also learn from disrupters.

“Local newspapers have as their best monopoly community news,” Teixeira said.

They need to harness that monopoly to create value. Local newspapers can facilitate conversation between people and local officials about what the town wants and needs, Teixeira said.

“People will pay to have that conversation,” he said.

The key to a successful business model is recognizing the value you bring to a customer, Teixeira said.

“If you disappear from the map tomorrow, who would most miss you? Use the answer to figure out who will pay for your services,” he said.

‘If you disappear from the map tomorrow, who would most miss you? Use the answer to figure out who will pay for your services.’

—Thales Teixeira

‘We believe more than anything that your journalism is the founding point for a healthy news ecosystem. We take our role seriously … We get that social media and Facebook, in particular, has become an increasingly important part of the business and traffic.’

—Peter Elkins-Williams
Head of news partnerships, Facebook

After an election cycle in which Facebook received considerable backlash for providing a platform for fake news, Facebook recognizes its role in the media landscape and is taking active steps to engage with journalists, according to Peter Elkins-Williams, leader of the company’s news partnerships.

The company launched the Facebook Journalism Project in January to broaden and deepen its ties with the news industry, Elkins-Williams said Friday, Feb. 24, in a session entitled “Facebook, Newspapers and Journalism” at the New England Newspaper and Press Association’s winter convention.

Through the project, Facebook plans to collaborate with news organizations to develop new products, provide training and tools for reporters to mine its site for information and events, and combat the spread of fake news by improving users’ news literacy.

“We believe more than anything that your journalism is the founding point for a healthy news ecosystem,” Elkins-Williams told an audience of more than 60 journalists and students at the Boston Long Wharf Marriott hotel. “We take our role seriously … We get that social media and Facebook, in particular, has become an increasingly important part of the business and traffic.”

Facebook is one of the world’s largest distributors of information, with millions of stories passing through the site each day, according to The New York Times. Now, the social media giant is creating online videos and resource guides to help journalists harness that power in their reporting.

The company recently acquired CrowdTangle — a tool to identify stories and measure their social-media performance — and decided to make it available free for publishers. More than 500 newspapers have begun using the service, Elkins-Williams said.

Facebook has also created a fake news reporting tool that allows users to flag posts with dubious information. Once third-party fact-checkers from various news organizations have confirmed that the story is fake, it will be labeled as such and users will be warned when they go to share it.

“We’re excited about that first step, but there’s more to be done,” Elkins-Williams said. “We’re going to keep working on the product as long as it takes, but we think it’s starting to show results.”

He also offered general tips on ways journalists can optimize Facebook for their work. He recommended focusing on video as a way to engage the 500 million people who watch video on Facebook daily. The popularity of videos has risen steeply in recent years and is expected to continue, especially with the success of Facebook Live, he said.

Elkins-Williams tried to allay fears that a rigged algorithm for Facebook’s News Feed was promoting content from some news sources over others. It is only built on relevance to the individual viewer, with the goal of informing, entertaining and showing authentic communication, he said.

“There are no tricks and games to really game that system. What does best (in the News Feed) is what’s authentic to your paper and community,” he said.

Facebook is also thinking about how to help newspapers monetize their content on social media. While it is still early in the process, the company is looking into improved advertising and display options for Instant Articles, as well as the incorporation of ads to videos and Facebook Live.

The company plans to continue exploring options to create a mutually beneficial partnership with journalists, Elkins-Williams said.

“It’s time to deepen and broaden our relationship,” he said.

Facebook seeks a stronger alliance with news outfits, and is offering new products, training, tools, and steps to stop fake news, one of its executives told a convention audience.

With new threats to the First Amendment, journalism’s role is more important than ever, Margaret Sullivan, media columnist for The Washington Post, told those attending the seventh annual New England First Amendment Coalition awards luncheon Friday, Feb. 24, in Boston.

After accepting the Stephen Hamblett First Amendment Award — given to someone who has promoted, defended or advocated for the First Amendment throughout his or her career — Sullivan advocated for a relentless pursuit of the truth and a dogged defense of news organizations that promote it.

“Just as the First Amendment protects us, we must return the framers’ great favor and protect it,” Sullivan said. “We do that by insisting on the truth, seeking it relentlessly and standing up for those who provide it.”

A sense of urgency to fight against potential threats to the First Amendment from President Donald Trump and his administration permeated the awards luncheon, held at the Boston Long Wharf Marriott hotel during the New England Newspaper and Press Association’s 2017 winter convention.

NEFAC hosts the event to honor those who have advocated for the First Amendment and freedom of information. This year the coalition also honored the Sun Journal of Lewiston, Maine, and Donna Green, an open government advocate in New Hampshire.

Each of the award recipients expressed a fear for the future of the free press, mentioning new obstacles standing in the way of the public’s right to know at local, state and federal levels.

Sullivan detailed threats posed by Trump. He has blacklisted news organizations, including the Washington Post, deemed unflattering stories to be fake news, called reporters scum, and asserted that the press is the enemy of the people, she said.

“President Trump shows no understanding of the role of the press in our democracy,” Sullivan said. “I’ve lost some sleep over it, worried about the very survival of American democracy when one of its foundations, a free press, is already under attack.”

That’s why it is more important than ever to seek the truth and protect those who do, she said.

As a sign of hope, Sullivan pointed to a Washington Post report into national security adviser Michael Flynn’s interactions with Russian officials. The story led to Flynn’s resignation, illustrating the power of honest journalism.

Judith Meyer, the Sun Journal’s executive editor, who accepted the Michael Donoghue Freedom of Information Award on behalf of the newspaper, told a similar story of hope resulting from solid daily reporting.

In April 2016, a Sun Journal reporter went to county court to access files for a manslaughter case the paper had been following. The reporter was told that the case file didn’t exist. Confused by that, editors reached out to the court for clarification and discovered that the state’s judicial branch had made a quiet, internal decision to seal all dismissed criminal case files after 30 days.

Recognizing that as a violation of public record laws, the Sun Journal launched a campaign against the policy. After six weeks, dozens of phone calls, and more than 100 emails, they were victorious. The court ended the policy.

“The fact that the courts were able to do this without anyone knowing is frightening,” Meyer said.

But the case also offers hope for reporters willing to fight for the truth.

“Know when you’re right, and when you’re right, do not crumble,” Meyer said.

Green, a member of Right to Know New Hampshire, advocated for persistence as well. She needed it during a long battle with Timberlane Regional School District and SAU 55 over an interpretation of public records law that allowed officials to refuse to distribute records in electronic format even if they already existed as such.

Green was awarded the Antonia Orfield Citizenship Award for challenging that interpretation and winning her case in state Supreme Court.

“I worry about the future,” she said. “It seems a culture of the ends justifying the means is taking hold.”

But the dogged work of reporters is a reason to hope, she said to the audience of more than 250 people, which included journalists, lawyers, students and others.

“I won one important case. You fight every day,” she said