A seismic shift is underway, fusing together traditional publishing with previously unrelated fields: video, filmmaking, virtual reality, podcasting, and big data. Innovation and new technologies are impacting every aspect of our lives and propelling media industry toward a new frontier. We are offering a unique and exclusive opportunity for first hand experience and an insider’s view of technology and media companies at the forefront of innovation and trends.
The upcoming Digital Publishers’ Tour of the VDZ Academy, June 12-17, 2016 is a week-long discovery of New York City and Chicago’s new media, entrepreneurs, startups, media labs, and thought leaders.
NEW YORK & CHICAGO
JUNE 12-17, 2016
NEW YORK
The Core of Innovation
New York City, the largest US media market, is undergoing a rapid economic transformation. This is where legacy media and tech companies infuse each other with innovative ideas for the digital future. A surge of venture capital investments and alluring tax breaks has created fertile ground for a vibrant startup culture, attracting large tech companies fueling tech job growth.
ABOUT:
Atavist is a media and software company that builds story-telling software that enables authors to compose, design, publish, and sell digital publications for mobile applications, the web, and e-readers. Authors can drag content straight from their computer and assemble blocks of video, sound, images, and interactive charts; upload a cover image and choose a visual theme, own domain, and logo; publish their stories, reports, books, and magazines where they want and make them free and shareable, or sell them online; and use Google Analytics integration. The Atavist is a long-form magazine and e-singles publication offered by the company. Atavist was founded in 2009 and launched in 2011.
MEET UP WITH:
We will be meeting with founder and CEO, Evan Ratliff. Despite being a journalist and writer, Ratliff is best known for conducting an experiment by “vanishing”. No one knew his physical whereabouts. Wired offered a $5000 reward for anyone who could find him. During the experiment, he was still "on the grid" and communicating with his followers on Twitter.
RELEVANCY:
Publishers can learn from this startup how to develop intuitively useable and versatile platforms for publishing stories - including repurposed content from their own archives.
ABOUT:
Contently is a technology company that helps brands create great content at scale. The company provides enterprise companies with smart technology, content marketing expertise, and vetted creative talent – journalists, photographers, designers, videographers, and all things in-between. Contently was recently named one of Inc Magazine’s 100 fastest-growing private companies, and received an ASJA award for investigative reporting.
MEET UP WITH:
We will be meeting with Sam Slaughter, VP of Content who describes himself as a writer, editor and dog owner who does not surf. Sam is also chairman of The Contently Foundation, Inc. which was formed for the purpose of inspiring, educating and supporting professional and aspiring journalists, and providing them with the financial resources necessary to produce and distribute stories of impact.
RELEVANCY:
Content Marketing offers chances for publishers to develop new verticals. But they are not the only players on this potentially lucrative market and should pay attention not to slip behind. Tech companies such as Contently are already successful brokers between authors and brands.
ABOUT:
Fast Forward Labs helps organizations accelerate their data science and machine intelligence capabilities. Every quarter the company profiles a different near future technology, producing a report on its development and a prototype demonstrating its application. Paired with advising services, reports and prototypes enable customers to make the most of the recently possible. FFL advices clients in a wide range of industries including insurance, publishing, finance, media, and government on data product development, technology, and culture.
WHO YOU WILL MEET WITH:
We will be meeting with Kathryn Hume, director of sales and marketing, and hopefully, CEO and founder Hillary Mason. Kathryn is also a visiting professor at Calgary University where she teaches classes in law and technology.
RELEVANCY:
Algorithms are taking over the business world. They are making standard work routines more efficient. From the newsroom to the marketing department - when resources are getting thinner media companies should position their staff where they will have the most productive value. And leave the rest to the algorithms.
ABOUT:
IBM started its global network of Watson centers with an HQ in New York and branches in New York and around the worl) in 2014. The centers provide opportunities for cloud-based cognitive computing based on IBM’s super computer Watson. It made a splash in 2011 for winning against human champions of the TV game show Jeopardy! IBM hopes to tap the Silicon Alley startup community by opening the headquarters' doors to area developers and entrepreneurs, hosting industry workshops, seminars and networking opportunities. It also provides a business incubator offering the technology, tools and talent to create and launch new products and businesses based on Watson's cloud-delivered cognitive intelligence.
MEET UP WITH:
N.N.
RELEVANCY:
Big data and cloud data services such as algorithmic language processing and data analytics are increasingly influencing how media content is being produced, distributed and analyzed. This is an opportunity to meet with experts and executives of a leading company in a cutting edge technology field.
ABOUT:
Informerly is making it easier to stay up to date on global media, retail, finance and tech news. They combine technology with an editorial approach to scour the internet for the latest industry news. They respect your inbox and will work tirelessly to make sure every link they send matters to you. Great design, highly personizable. Informerly grew out of Ehip News, a publishing property focused on global startups, technology, and culture.
MEET UP WITH:
We will be meeting with co-founder, Ranjan Roy, a 2013 Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism fellow.
RELEVANCY:
Newsletters are experiencing an astonishing revival. But many publishers could be even more successful with their newsletter mailings if they implented intelligent filters and better options for personalization.
ABOUT:
The Interactive Department of the New York Times is where a lot of groundbreaking innovation in storytelling happens - from “Snowfall” the mother of all “scrollytelling” (parallax storytelling) to new data-based stories like “Should I Rent or Buy?” (personalizing the real estate market) and new editorial products like quizzes. (The news app “How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk” was the NYT’s most visited story in 2013).
MEET UP WITH:
We will be meeting with Marc Lavallee, Head of Interactive News. Prior to joining The Times in 2011, he developed news apps, content management systems and other Web site features at NPR, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and National Journal. We will also be meeting with graphics editor Gregor Aisch, who previously worked as a freelancer for the German newspaper Die Zeit and Deutsche Welle.
RELEVANCY:
The future of journalism lies - not exclusively but increasingly - in non-linear and interactive presentations that are intuitively accessed and shared by Millenials. The New York Times shows in manyfold examples that you don’t have to be a digital pure player to generate successful digital forms. Legacy media can do it too!
ABOUT:
The T-Brand Studio is a branded content studio in The New York Times Advertising Department where a creative community of people with advertising and journalism backgrounds, in separation from the newsroom, produce “native advertising”. The studio has more than 30 full-time staffers and the jobs range from business development to video production. The most memorable example to date is probably a Paid Post from Netflix in June 2014. It was titled "Women Inmates: Why the Male Model Doesn't Work" and aligned with themes in the Netflix series "Orange Is the New Black." It featured an article, a three-part mini documentary, audio interviews and animated infographics and lead to significant audience engagement.
MEET UP WITH:
We will be meeting with Adam Aston, Editorial Director of T Brand Studio.
RELEVANCY:
The T-Brand Studio proves that “paid for” and “professional” are not mutually exclusive. While not exactly a pioneer of native advertising, the NYT has mastered this vertical with verve - without click baiting or spoofing the audience. Publishers can learn a lot from this role model.
ABOUT:
The Brown Institute for Media Innovation is a cooperative project between Columbia University’s School of Journalism in New York and Stanford University’s School of Engineering in Palo Alto, California. Or, as Mark Hansen, Director of the New York branch says: “It’s about mingling technology and story in novel ways.” The Brown Institute was created in 2013 and is financed by a $ 38 million grant from the late Helen Gurley Brown who was editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine for 32 years. The institute provides so called “magic grants” for research and development for innovation at the intersection of the fields of journalism and technology. In partnership with Stanford’s engineering program, it encourages grantees to explore how technology can change the way media is created, distributed, or consumed.
MEET UP WITH:
Mark Hansen, Director, New York branch
RELEVANCY:
Combining the engineering prowess of Stanford students with the journalistic know-how of Columbia students is an exciting experiment to foster innovation in the news industry. From interactive personal drone tour guide to visualizing famine through virtual reality storytelling - what comes out of Brown is at the forefront of innovative digital journalism.
ABOUT:
The Coral Project (CP) creates open-source tools and resources which are freely available for publishers of all sizes to build better communities around their journalism. It also collects, supports and shares practices, tools, and studies to improve communities on the web. The Coral Project is a collaboration between the Mozilla Foundation, The New York Times and The Washington Post, and is funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The ideas guiding it are coming from readers, contributors, journalists, community managers, researchers, and developers. The CP is building a flexible core system and a series of plugins, all connected through APIs. Publishers — or anyone, really — can choose to use everything the CP deploys or pick and choose plugins that fit specific needs.
MEET UP WITH:
Marc Lavallee, Coral Project team + N.N.
RELEVANCY:
The Coral Project has been outstanding in listening to the needs of its users through nearly two years of discussions with publishers about their challenges in managing UGC. The results of our discussion will go back to the CP team and will likely influence upcoming product decisions.
ABOUT:
The Daily Beast is a news website founded in 2008 by former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor Tina Brown. It primarily aggregates content from across the web but increasingly also publishes original stories, its own book series (Beast Books), and a magazine about politics, business, innovation, entertainment, books, art, and women. It was one of the initial partners of the publisher program of the social reading app Zite. It’s versatile editor-in-chief John Avlon is also a CNN political analyst and as well as an editor of the anthology Deadline Artists: America's Greatest Newspaper Columns. What sets the Daily Beast apart is last but not least its cutting edge and well communicated design for original content that aims to please readers and advertisers alike.
MEET UP WITH:
John Avlon, Co-Managing Director and Editor-In-Chief
RELEVANCY:
The Daily Beast is a beast on the social web. With almost 2 million Facebook fans and typically 750,000 to 1 million interactions per month on the platform, it must be doing something right. One of the reasons is complete transparency towards its readers.
ABOUT:
The NYC Media Lab connects companies seeking to advance digital media technologies with New York City’s universities to drive R&D and innovation. Launched by the New York City Economic Development Corporation, NYU and Columbia University, NYC Media Lab is a public-private partnership encompassing the universities of NYC and corporate members such as Hearst Corporation, ESPN, Major League Baseball Advanced Media, Bloomberg, News Corp, NBCUniversal, Viacom and Verizon. The Lab’s interests range across disciplines from data science to design to engineering, and its programs include seed R&D projects with member companies as well as The Combine, which encourages digital media startup formation and technology commercialization on the City’s campuses.
MEET UP WITH:
We will be meeting with Executive Director Justin Hendrix. Before joining NYC Media Lab in 2012 as Director of Membership, Hendrix was Vice President, Business Development & Innovation for The Economist Group in the Americas, where he directed the Group's innovation process, including prototyping, testing, and commercializing new digital media business concepts.
RELEVANCY:
The Media Lab shows how cooperation between academia and the media industry as well as between commercial and non-commercial media outlets foster innovation and “thinking out of the box”.
CHICAGO
An Innovation Boomtown
While many Fortune 500 companies are based in the self-proclaimed “Second City,” Chicago is increasingly acknowledged as a growing innovation boomtown. “Chicago’s innovation ecosystem is growing exponentially,” states Jeff Malehorn, president and CEO of World Business Chicago, in Entrepreneur web magazine. A flourishing startup environment—an average of 273 launched each year— and a tech savvy market has established Chicago as a leading city in new technology and entrepreneurship.
ABOUT:
Hearken is a an audience-driven framework and white-label platform enabling content creators to partner with the public during the reporting process, resulting in relevant and high performing content. It helps media outlets cultivate, validate and measure audience interest in stories before they're reported.
MEET UP WITH:
We will be meeting with Co-founder and CEO Jennifer Brandel who also founded and previously produced Curious City.
RELEVANCY:
The first iteration of a product isn’t necessarily what the market needs. The team of Curious City learned how to evolve and now, instead of syndicating good content through audience engagement, syndicates the software that enables other media outlets to produce good content through audience engagement themselves.
ABOUT "THE BRAIN SCOOP":
"The Brain Scoop" is a YouTube series produced by author Emily Graslie and her editor and cameraman Brandon Brungard. The young YouTube star Graslie was originally hired by the museum to explain its workings to the public in a month-long series of videos. That was in 2013 and she was 24 years old at the time. But she has since moved up to be the museum’s “Chief Curiosity Officer” with a lot of artistic freedom to follow her passion for science and use her talent for explaining seemingly stale matter in a fresh way. "The Brain Scoop" has 140,000 subscribers, many of them young girls, which is a remarkable success story for a video series not about pop stars, fashion or beauty tips but about "Adventures in Taxidermy, Biology and Natural History” (so the subtitle of the show).
MEET UP WITH:
Emily Graslie, Chief Curiosity Officer
RELEVANCY:
Museums, just like news publishers are grappling for attention. In an era of burgeoning distraction, of competition for people's time and money, this becomes ever more difficult. And like museums, publishers are experts in storytelling. And they have find new approaches that appeal to younger audiences - those who don’t necessarily go to museums or read magazines.
ABOUT:
The Northwestern University Knight Lab is a team of technologists and journalists working at advancing news media innovation through exploration and experimentation. It is joint initiative of the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. Northwestern’s Collaborative Innovation in Journalism class serves as a testing ground for new ideas. Interdisciplinary student teams (primarily composed of computer science and journalism majors) spend 10 weeks developing projects that have the potential to impact news gathering and distribution or, more broadly, media in general. These projects range from tools to help reporters use U.S. Census data to a publishers’ toolbox containing timelines and story maps as well as tools for audio integration and Twitter search and other well designed, free and easy to use digital solutions.
MEET UP WITH:
Owen Youngman, Knight Professor of Digital Media Strategy, Medill / Northwestern
Joe Germuska, Executive Director, Knight Lab
RELEVANCY:
The lab's projects range from professionally developed tools and products used by newsrooms around the world to experimental prototypes that push the boundaries of media technology. Insights gained here are not only theoretically relevant but can be deployed or tested in the newsroom immediately.
ABOUT:
WBEZ is a public radio station offering public broadcasting feeds, local program schedule, events, listener requests and audio archives. It is one of the most innovative radio stations in the nation. It is recently probably best known for its audience engagement project Curious City - an experiment in news gathering that harnesses the power of the crowd and technology in the service of better journalism. By turning to the community at the start of the editorial process, Curious City opens a new space for the public to ask questions and get answers. Journalists and editors guide the process throughout, so the finished products meet high standards of craft, expertise and accessibility. which lets the public decide which stories the reports should research and produce.
MEET UP WITH:
We will be meeting with editor Shawn Allee. His own radio work landed him on NPR’s On The Media, All Things Considered, This American Life, Marketplace and other public radio outlets. He hold numerous awards from the Illinois Associated Press, the Society of Environmental Journalists, the Illinois News Broadcasters Association and the Radio Television Digital News Association.
RELEVANCY:
Audience engagement is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it binds a lot of resources in order hold up standards. On the other hand engagaged users visit, like and share web pages more often than disenfranchised users. Many publisher have not yet fully realized the potential of successful audience engagement beyond traditional comment sections. WBEZ shows how to do it.
PRICING & REGISTRATION
Pre-Agenda rate:
(valid till February 26, 2016)
The cost of the trip per participating person is
€ 4.999 plus VAT for VDZ members,
€ 5.999 plus VAT for non-members
Early Bird rate:
(valid between February 27 and April 29, 2016)
The cost of the trip per participating person is
€ 5.999 plus VAT for VDZ members,
€ 6.999 plus VAT for non-members
Regular rate:
(valid after April 29, 2016)
The cost of the trip per participating person is
€ 6.999 plus VAT for VDZ members,
€ 7.999 plus VAT for non-members
CONTACT:
Anett Breitsprecher
VDZ Akademie GmbH
Haus der Presse
Markgrafenstraße 15
10969 Berlin
Telefon: 030.72 62 98 – 158
Telefax: 030.72 62 98 – 114
E-Mail: a.breitsprecher@vdz-akademie.de
TERMS & CONDITIONS
Pricing includes:
- Domestic flight from New York to Chicago (economy class, taxes and fees included)
- Transportation on site (private tour bus and/or public transportation)
- Tour guide
- baggage, health and travel cancellation insurance (the latter is only valid for the domestic flight from New York to Chicago)
- Organisation of all company visits
The number of participants is limited to 25 persons, in cases of overbooking, participants will be added in the order of the date their registration was received; registrations from VDZ members will be given priority. An invoice will be sent separately once the application is received. A refund for non-commencement of the journey cannot be guaranteed.
VDZ Akademie GmbH reserves the right to cancel the trip if there is an insufficient number of registrations. If the trip has to be cancelled or postponed due to force majeure, which includes orders issued by authorities, wars, other unrest, plane hijackings, terrorist attacks, fires, floods, natural disasters, power outages, accidents, storm, strikes, lockouts or other industrial actions, a refund cannot be guaranteed.
ABOUT VDZ
VDZ, the Association of German Magazine Publishers, is the interest group of the German magazine industry. As an umbrella organization for three professional associations (special interest magazines, general interest magazines and denominational press) and five federal state associations, VDZ represents about 80 per cent of the market with 450 members and more than 3000 magazines. As a service association VDZ offers a broad spectrum of consulting and information on all matters of the publishing business (advertising, distribution, digital media, legal issues, business administration, environment and paper). As a trade association VDZ ensures the protection and consideration of the publishers’ interests on a national and European level. And as an employers’ organization and on behalf of its members VDZ also holds wage negotiations with editors’ organizations. Furthermore, with its “VDZ Akademie” VDZ contributes to the industry’s education and training. More information online on: www.vdz.de, www.pz-online.de, www.deutsche-fachpresse.de, www.editorial.media, www.vdz-akademie.de, www.publishers-summit.de