UC Berkeley Recent Work

Title Keeping Tabs

Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8z2844w6

Author Lekach, Sasha J

Publication Date 2016-06-21

License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 4.0

eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California

Sasha Lekach UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism New Media Master’s Project Keeping Tabs May 10, 2016

Keeping Tabs

Overview

Cool things are happening on the Internet and you are missing out. Why? These cutting-edge digital projects -- interactive, immersive, or multimedia features -- aren’t collected in one place. They are all over: government agency websites, company webpages, 360-degree videos and scattered throughout different sections on media publications’ websites.

Keeping Tabs is a newsletter that eliminates the fragmented nature of the web. I’m bringing a handcrafted, personal experience straight to inboxes with my voice, thoughts, choices, selections. This isn’t just a link dump. It’s curated. I’ve done the legwork and found these bigger projects in the sea of online content.

There are tons of options for finding aggregating content. “Best of” and trending news newsletters abound and are having a resurgence. But most of these sites and newsletters primarily focus on writing and reporting -- which is still really important -- but I’m highlighting design, web packaging and new digital technologies that move the standard webpage and present information in a new and innovative way.

I’m getting back to basics with idea that medium is the message. That through scrolling, clicking through images or plugging in your own school district a reader will engage more with the content, pay attention and hopefully stick around to understand the story or information.

How We Got Here

Keeping Tabs is a weekly email newsletter highlighting one to five recent multimedia websites or projects online with a common theme, format or topic. I collect and curate interactive content and share it in a short, digestible way through links, providing my analysis and my familiarity and expertise with new technologies and advances in online presentation.

Here’s what my first newsletter back in October looked like. I was calling my project “Sasha’s Selections” and using Wix to create a template:

I then moved over to Mailchimp and started playing around with different designs and templates. Here was my first Mailchimp newsletter that went out in December. Notice the intro paragraph, image heavy design (which was sending most of my emails straight to spam folders), two-column layout and issue name, data and icon at the top:

Coming up with a name for my newsletter was a major challenge and hurdle. It was hard to design, promote and talk about my project without a name. Finally in February my unnamed newsletter project was dubbed “Keeping Tabs.” This seemed fitting since most of my colleagues deep in digital media are constantly dealing with an overflow of tabs on their laptops and mobile browsers with saved stories and unread articles to eventually look through.

One of my Trello lists, with my list of name ideas over the months:

Once I had a name, the design of the newsletter started to change around this stronger identity. By the end of February, I decided to move the big blocks of text in the newsletter to the bottom of the page and keep things simple and graphic up top -- hopefully to draw people in. A suggestion from my colleagues and advisors led to a moving image GIF showing one of the websites I was highlighting prominently featured at the top. I also kept the page to one column instead of the split page I had been making in previous issues.

Here’s what the redesigned newsletter looked like back in February (top). It has since changed in small ways (I now have a bulleted list; see middle image from April) and

will continue to get massaged, but for now I like the simplicity of the layout. The most recent May issue has my new logo on top:

The GIFs at the top of the newsletter have become a key way for my newsletter to standout from others, and it makes it much more dynamic -- which seems appropriate for the content I’m covering.

Here’s a recent GIF example:

I also have a web presence with a website I’m building out and social media pages on Facebook and Twitter to also disseminate, share, store and promote the material I put together for the newsletter.

The target audience for Keeping Tabs is journalists -- especially those in interactive, data visualization and visual departments. Other creative types, including news nerds, graphic designers, design and web junkies, media and communication folks, storytellers, advertisement designers, and any curious people will also benefit from subscribing. This grouping falls under “creative” and is part of a so-called “creative class.”

Newsletters are a crowded field, both those with content entirely inside the emails (like Lenny Letter or theSkimm) or links and news roundups (Vox Sentences, The Ann Friedman Weekly, “Links I would gchat you if we were friends” from Washington Post writer Caitlin Dewey, The Week, USA Today). Many of these newsletters have loyal followers and a similar demographic I’m targeting.

Both Lenny Letter and theSkimm are intended to keep readers within the email (there are links, but the main meat of their newsletters can be read within email). Lenny Letter in under a year since launching has more than 400,000 subscribers who actually open the bi-weekly emails (the newsletter has a 65 percent open rate). TheSkimm, although a daily news-oriented rundown, has 3.5 million subscribers and just launched a paid app and calendar service (called Skimm Ahead).

I checked in with a few editors of daily newsletters to get a sense of the world. At Vox, Dylan Matthews is one of the editors for the daily evening newsletter Vox Sentences. When the newsletter started, the team decided mornings were too crowded. They’ve had success with their end-of-day news round-up format. Matthews said they put the newsletter out through Google Sheets and collect and store links and stories through Google’s cloud-based services. As to the benefits of making a newsletter, he said writing and putting together the news overview "makes you a better and more situationally aware writer."

Talking to The Quickkie editor Chris Miles, he had similar takeaways from his first year running a daily newsletter. He recommended using Crowdtangle to find, collect and aggregate top news and links from social media. He called Reddit a “place to uncover diamonds in the rough.” I’ve been reluctant to use that particular social platform since I’m not a native user, but it drives huge readership.

Like Vox, Miles said The Quickkie, which was in beta until September 2015, uses a lot of free services through Google to organize and save links and stories. He said he’s going through a lot of content on his phone so he tries to keep his method of saving and collecting simple.

As to newsletter engagement, Miles said with their quick news product they’ve found 75-80 percent of email opens happen before 10 a.m. So they try to send out the letter between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. to maximize readership. Like Keeping Tabs, the newsletter’s next steps are getting ads and setting up media partnerships.

Keeping Tabs is not a daily newsletter and not covering breaking news, but offers information that can be viewed and clicked at any point after the email is sent. The email intends for the audience to link out to the different sites and projects highlighted in each issue. My competitors are more link-oriented newsletters and weekly (instead of daily) publications.

Keeping Tabs is unique in finding and organizing interactive projects that are haphazardly found around the web and putting them in one place. There is no one place to find interactive, multimedia projects -- it’s all housed on disparate news websites or hidden in roundups of top stories (many of which are long narrative pieces with no interactivity.) I’m focusing on formatting, layout and digital techniques that often are kept behind the scenes, while content-focused journalism or writing is highlighted.

An Ion Interactive study found (for content marketing) that interactive material was 93 percent effective at educating buyers and 88 percent effective at differentiating brands. That’s compared to 55 percent efficacy for static sites. There’s a demand to see something different online.

Reading and viewing behavior online is fickle. Readers spend an average 15 seconds on a webpage and don’t read much of what’s on a page. So these interactive, scrolling, coming-at-you projects are grabbing people’s attention and even if they don’t read a piece they can easily play around on a site. There’s a stickiness to the work I’m connecting people to, and a pull to play and see what these sites do that look so different from “traditional” webpages.

Back in 2013 the number one story on the New York Times website was a quiz. This was a simple interactive site created by the NYT that was personalized and took the findings of a bigger study and made it something everyone could be a part of. And it spread like crazy. That was more than two years ago and interactives have only gotten better since then.

Thesis research from a Rochester Institute of Technology grad student found by examining interactive material from the New York Times and the Washington Post that rich content, in the form of maps, data visualizations and other digital tools, are becoming a bigger portion of online news content, whether standalone or part of a text piece.

My Workflow

Several important learning curves in this project revolved around building and putting out a product. To do that I first had to collect content. I built out Twitter lists, signed up for countless newsletters, set up Google alerts for “multimedia feature,” “interactive news,” and “immersive news” and figured out a way to save links I’d stumble upon while on my own online channels. Saving the information and

organizing it was crucial. I saved links through Delicious (a link saver) which I then pushed onto my Trello (a project organizer) through If This Then That (which connects different programs). Once on Trello I moved the links to different topics or categories that I set up on my Trello editorial calendar:

Once I had amassed a strong collection of links and pages I was able to start putting out a weekly letter using Mailchimp, which has been another program I’ve learned to use (Mailchimp is a program for newsletter and email marketing) and maximize its built-in features (such as social media integration, email address collecting and metrics analysis).

As part of my newsletter design process, I’ve set up Quicktime screen capture to create a GIF of a featured web project in action and put that video through Adobe Premiere to speed up and edit and then create a GIF on Giphy, which integrates smoothly with Mailchimp.

Once I settled on the name “Keeping Tabs” it fit in well to include the tab organizer OneTab, so at the end of every email I’ve been linking to a page that lists all the links in that issue.

Early Growth Highlights

The Keeping Tabs newsletter is still in development, but as I continue iterating, creating a website, a logo and more, I’ve grown the newsletter subscribers to nearly

80. This beta period has included little marketing and campaign effort and no social media advertising or sponsored posts. I have put out 16 issues (and counting) since December 2015 through Mailchimp with a 43.9 percent open rate and a 9 percent click rate.

My Inspiration/The Backstory

With a background in local news reporting in the Bay Area and as a multimedia grad student at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, I’ve been exposed, examined and researched online news packages as part of my typical media diet and to understand my industry better. I have a sense of the advances and history of interactive content online.

I’ve worked in newsrooms at the San Francisco Chronicle and Chicago Tribune where discussions about richer, interactive content constantly come up to stay relevant online. I have been on teams and discussed and worked with people who create these immersive experiences.

Keeping Tabs first came together in October 2015 as my master’s project at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism in the multimedia/new media department.

After more than a year of looking at “online news packages” I found that these examples and sites we were emulating in our own multimedia work were hard to organize or find. For each pitch our professors would ask us to show examples of previous work for inspiration. Certain projects would come up again and again. Snow

Fall by the New York Times seemed like our guiding light -- but I looked at all the examples we had been shown and it amassed to a vast amount of different ways of presenting stories and news. One professor showed us an interactive Honda video ad online and I realized there was more crossover from other professions than you’d think.

This timeline (itself an interactive element) from the MIT Open Documentary Lab tracks the history of interactives online, starting in 2008. My professors Richard Koci Hernandez and Jeremy Rue in their new book, “The Principles of Multimedia Journalism,” start interactive news history even earlier -- in the late 1990s when outlets like the New York Times, The Chicago Tribune and San Jose Mercury News and others were experimenting with online multimedia features for bigger stories. Here are some precursors to today’s multimedia news package or project. Keep in mind these came out when news organizations had minimal web presences and most information was not consumed or even available on a news outlet’s website, if they had one:

● Dark Alliance - 1996, San Jose Mercury News ● Bosnia, Uncertain Paths to Peace - 1996, New York Times ● Black Hawk Down - 1997, Philly Online

Some early key online projects, according to the Open Doc Lab include more immersive projects such as National Film Board of Canada’s Bear 71 in 2012 or the NYT’s One in 8 Million in 2009.

MIT Open Doc Lab describes Snow Fall as “ushering in a new kind of web aesthetic known as ‘scrollytelling.’” Since the 2012 project, scrolling through a story has become the norm when viewing an online piece and more common than clicking through to new slides or pages. The post-Snow Fall world brought us classics, such as The Guardian’s interactive documentary feature, “Firestorm;” another interactive doc, “Hollow;” “NSA Files: Decoded” also from The Guardian; the Kickstarter-backed “Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt” from the radio world at NPR; the National Film Board of Canada is prolific in making immersive web projects beyond video, especially with their 2014 “Seven Digital Deadly Sins” package; and the New York Times 2015 VR experiment with home-delivered Google Cardboard VR viewers with the story “The Displaced.” The list of multimedia and digital news package classics is constantly growing and in the past four years it’s impressive to see what has come out from different news organizations -- including many legacy publications.

I’m glossing over a lot of online and technological history between, say, the Merc’s early digital pieces and Snow Fall and onto today -- there were innovations with CD-ROMs, faster Internet speeds, Flash technology for higher quality displays and effects and new photo and video capabilities that are still constantly improving (think of VR, wearables and 360-degree videos). The jump to mobile technology with smartphones in the 2000s adds another layer of improvements and innovation in digital storytelling.

Another reason we need something like Keeping Tabs is that there’s no real way to describe or understand these digital interactive pieces. They don’t have a flashy name or categorization -- some places like the New York Times call them “interactives” while most news organizations call their bigger interactive pieces “special projects.” Others call them “features” or “visualizations.” My professors, Hernandez and Rue, talk about this very problem:

The term "news package" is still not very common in the Web industry. Mindy McAdams, a journalism professor at the University of Florida, wrote the seminal 2005 book, Flash Journalism: How to Create Multimedia News Packages, which was among the first to formalize news packages and the notions of unifying multimedia into cohesive story packages. We felt the term "news package" better described the types of stories we wanted to classify than more generic terms like "interactives" or "features." These news packages -- formerly called "spreads" in newspaper parlance -- are feature stories, which typically go more in-depth on a topic; think the Sunday edition of your local paper. They tend to consist of multiple different pieces of media in order to express multifaceted stories through an organized layout, such as video paired with text, or an interactive graphic... With the advent of the Web, suddenly journalists are awash with a multitude of new mediums and dimensions to organize and tell stories: video, photos, graphics, data charts, and others. Even technologies that break out of the confines of the screen, like location tracking or real-time interaction from the audience, may need to be considered when designing a story package.

Keeping Tabs is a way to organize these separate ideas of what we are seeing more and more online.

Takeaways

I’ve taken away a range of things from this project. First and foremost was project management. I took advantage of Trello to organize links I found, articles about

marketing and web design, to make to-do lists and it puts everything associated with this project in one place. Without it I would have wasted so much time searching through email or bookmarked pages.

Another new tool that I’ve learned from is Mailchimp. Aside from learning how to set up and design a template, create email campaigns and send out a mass email, the analytics tools have been invaluable. It clearly lays out how people are interacting with your content and gives good comparisons to previous weeks and sets averages to help you see if you’ve fallen behind or exceeded expectations.

Mailchimp has also let me peek into who is at least opening my emails once they are in their inboxes. This has shown me that people still look at email and are more likely to at least click my newsletters (for all I know they are opening and then immediately deleting, but I don’t mind!) than they are to “like” a post on social media or follow a social page. I’ve also seen how difficult it is to get people to subscribe to something. It’s a quick step and a simple form to fill out, but they are more likely to subscribe and look at my emails if I add people’s email addresses myself. People won’t take the extra step of typing in their information.

Another big learning moment has come from building my own website. Instead of using Squarespace or WordPress like I initially thought I would, I decided to tackle it on my own with the help of a Jekyll template. But really it’s been up to me to construct the site to how I want it to look. I’ve learned web design takes a lot of investigating, problem solving and logical thinking. It’s so satisfying when something works and I have so much more pride, respect and ownership for my site.

I have collected hundreds of links since October and only shared about 75 or so of those in newsletters. From this collection I’ve noticed several trends. First, adding a map is the most common interactive element. TV station websites tend to do this the most. Crime, power outages, and other public health issue data (STD rates!) are turned into maps constantly. I have dozens of maps that claim to be interactive, but are mostly just clickable through a Google Maps interface. I’ve also seen timelines inserted into stories to make them “interactive” but are plugged in after the article. Another popular

interactive tool is a 360-degree video. Now that YouTube has an embeddable player this is becoming a much more common way to have a viewer move through content.

Geographically, I’ve noticed the U.K., Australia and Canada are more likely to experiment with interactive elements for their daily web stories. Many local sites from these countries push out multimedia stories even if they are simple add-ons.

Bigger news outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, ProPublica and the Wall Street Journal have more polished special projects on a fairly consistent basis. Many other sites build interactive projects but more often as one-offs (Mashable, BBC, Forbes, Eater, ABC, Al Jazeera and many others).

Finally, I’ve learned the value of strong content. Even if a story is visually enticing it still has to tell something interesting, new, important, influential or surprising. Multimedia packages can’t just have fancy scrolling and color changes and fading words if the content or story is weak.

This same concept applies to my newsletters and other posts I’m putting out. I’ve seen how much of a struggle it is to write up a letter if I don’t have much background information or I haven’t really explored the sites I’m featuring. No matter how you package something it’s what inside that counts -- that is, and will always, stay true.

Moving Forward

I will connect with more key influencers in different fields. Journalists, designers, web developers with strong social media presences who mention or link out to my newsletter and will help me collect more of their followers.

I have budgeted for an initial social media ad campaign to expose more people on Facebook and Twitter to my website, social pages and hopefully make it easy enough for them to subscribe to the newsletter.

I will also connect my newsletter product with the people and teams and companies creating the content I’m highlighting. For example, if I showcase an NPR visualization, I will connect and share with the NPR viz team and set up a natural partnership.

After permeating my immediate network I will have that group pass along and forward my newsletters to outside connections so that my following grows naturally. Subscribe today!

Keeping Tabs: Sources

Books

Hernandez, Richard Koci, and Jeremy Rue. The Principles of Multimedia Journalism: Packaging Digital News. New York and London: Routledge, 2016. Print.

Academic Papers

Olivo, Maria. "Visualizing the News: An Analysis of a Year in Interactive News from The New York Times and The Washington Post." Rochester Institute of Technology. 20 November 2015. .

Interviews

DeVigal, Andrew. Personal interview. 26 October 2015. Hernandez, Richard Koci. Personal interview. 17 November 2015. Matthews, Dylan. (Vox Sentences). Personal interview. 14 April 2016. Miles, Chris. (The Quickkie). Personal interview. 26 February 2016.

Websites

Bilton, Ricardo. How Ozy leans on The New York Times and Wired to build its newsletter subscriptions. Digiday, 17 February 2016. .

Cairo, Alberto. The island of knowledge and the shoreline of wonder: Using data visualization to prompt exploration. Nieman Lab, 9 March 2016. .

Carpenter, Julia. Lena Dunham’s ‘Lenny Letter’ and the rise of the experimental e-mail. Washington Post, 29 September 2015.

Ellis, Justin. How The Skimm’s passionate readership helped its newsletter grow to 1.5 million subscribers. Nieman Lab, 18 August 2015. .

Fisher, Tyler. Do Visual Stories Make People Care? NPR Visuals, 19 November 2015. .

Green-Barber, Lindsay. How to maximize the success of your news interactive. Reveal, 1 December 2015. .

Haile, Tony. What You Think You Know About the Web Is Wrong. Time, 9 March 2014. .

Interactive Content Marketing. Ion Interactive. .

Owen, Laura Hazard. Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter has grown to 400,000 subscribers with a 65 percent open rate. Nieman Lab, 2 March 2016. .

Sacha, Bob. I Watched 78 Multimedia Stories by Visual Journalists. What I Learned Will Shock You Vantage/Medium, 13 February 2016. … .

Shields, Mike. Email Newsletter Startup theSkimm Rolls Out Paid Subscription Product. WSJ, 19 April 2016. .

Soskey, Ginny. "They Said Email Was Dying": How BuzzFeed Revived the Email Newsletter. Hubspot, 6 February 2016. .

Weekman, Kelsey. A different newsletter every week. .

Other

Cohn, David - UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism Li, Dolly - UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism McCartney, Allison - UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism Mutter, Alan - UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism Rue, Jeremy - UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism