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- Should you offer your print newspaper subscription for free?
- Things that were Not Invented Here are OK. Really.
- Small town classifieds: San Angelo
- Wall Street Journal reports: the AP is hurting newspapers
- Why Cost Per Click ads are unfair to publishers
- 2008 to be the worst year for newspaper advertising? Surprise!
- Deck chairs
- Knowledge is worth money, information is not
- Aggregators vs Producers: Introducing findingDulcinea, Mahalo, and others to come
- New York Times introduces their own social network: TimesPeople
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- Ben A says: In all fairness, I also don’t know enough about... ( more )
- Ben A says: Maybe I’m just daft, but why in the world would... ( more )
- Matt Hanson says: Good writing. Keep up the good work. I just added... ( more )
- Curt M. says: Will people pay for content on the internet? Maybe,... ( more )
- Curt M. says: This is a very good post. Lots to ponder here.... ( more )
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The Wall Street Journal renewal policy
My co-worker, Kim Larsen, canceled her Wall Street Journal subscription a few months ago.
You would think that signing up to get the paper again would be a pretty simple process, right?
When she called today to reactivate her subscription, the service department at the Journal told her that reactivating her old online subscription for another year would cost $119.
Signing up for a new online subscription on their web page costs $79.
“It makes me want to get tell them to take a flying friggin leap,” Kim told me, “How ridiculous is that? Thanks, I’d love to fill out all this information again.”
In this particular case, they’re going to get a new subscriber anyway. But I think that getting a new subscriber is far more valuable than getting a new reader, and newspapers ought to be doing what they can to make it a painless process.
Especially since Kim is trying to sign up for the online subscription. Every operator on their phones should be pushing that option with deep discounts—the marginal cost for one more online subscriber is, roughly, $0.
So that’s $79 of profit for the Journal. Don’t discourage that.
Why the New York Times “wins the Internet,” and three things you can do to catch up
This morning Bob Stepno’s Other Journalism Blog pointed me to a giant QnA type piece with the New York Times‘ Design Director Khoi Vinh.
Given my basic interest in design (both for print and the internet), and my complete admiration with the New York Times website, I dove right in.
While most of his answers are more vague than I’d like, it’s 100% clear to me that Vinh’s understanding of internet design vs print design is one of the big reasons that the New York Times web site is so far ahead of other papers.
If you read carefully, Vinh offers several good takeaways for other newspapers:
[ read more >> ]
Seattle papers see print growth - what does this mean?
Editor and Publisher reports that my two local papers, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Seattle Times, under a joint operating agreement (JOA) both saw increases in their paper circulation numbers this year.
Assuming that the recent death of the King County Journal is not wholly to blame for the jumping numbers, this is good news because it indicates two important things:
- People, at least in Seattle, are still interested in reading the news
- People like to be subscribers, not just readers
But it’s bad news for another reason entirely:
- Newspaper brass could use this as an excuse to stick their head in the sand and continue to ignore the internet
The print daily as it currently exists is almost certainly dead in the water. Rising circulation numbers indicates an interest to read the news, not an affinity for the method of delivery.
How can newspapers, books, and magazines thrive in the internet age?
When William Randolph Hearst bought his second newspaper in 1895—The New York Morning Journal—he also shelled out big salaries to poach excellent talent like Stephen Crane and Richard F. Outcault. He knew then what is still true today: good content is worth good money.
The problem is that nobody’s paying for it anymore.
Eat Sleep Publish is a blog dedicated to exploring and understanding the challenges (and no doubt opportunities) facing newspapers, books, and magazines as they strive to understand the new medium and find ways to support themselves in the digital age.
Almost every newspaper now offers its content online for free, relying on dwindling subscription and print ad revenues to underwrite the salaries in the newsroom. Even though online ad spending is on the rise, the format of the internet doesn’t provide the same revenue opportunities for publishers that print media have supplied for decades.
Dear newspapers: Please innovate while you still have money
When you look at how many layoffs are happening in newsrooms around the country, and you listen to so many people in the news industry talking about how screwed newspapers are, it’s easy to think that newspapers are hemorrhaging money left and right.
That is not the case. Take, for example, this snippet from a recent article in Fortune magazine:
So far this year, News Corp (NWS, Fortune 500). shares are down 25% against a 6% decline in the S&P 500, although it’s probably unfair to hang that entirely on newspapers, which accounted for just 17% of the company’s US$15.7 billion in revenues in the six months ended December 31, and 12% of its operating profits of US$2.5 billion. Operating margins for what the company calls its newspaper and information division were 11% during the six months, better than many rivals but down from 14% in the year-earlier period.
Yep, the newspaper division of News Corp has an 11% profit margin.
Subscribers vs Readers
Scarborough Research recently released its 2008 study of newspaper audience ratings. You can find a downloadable PDF copy here, if that floats your boat.
It’s really stunning to look at the difference between the print readership and online readership at most of the newspapers in this report. Up top here I’ve posted the numbers for the New York Times, arguably the paper with the biggest web presence of any news organization.
Their numbers are completely unrepresentative of the industry at large - it may be only 10% of their market, but 1.5 million readers is nothing to scoff at. It’s virtually half their print readership. I think this is because the NYT has done such a good job of positioning themselves online as the destination for national news in the US.
Here are a some numbers from a few other newspapers:
Robert Niles to Newspapers: Don’t bring a plastic fork to a gunfight
Robert Niles teaches at USC and is the editor of Online Journalism Review. The OJR is a fantastic resource for anyone who is interested in the nature and trajectory of journalism.
Niles has a history as a web editor, reporter, and editorial writer at several newspapers including the Los Angeles Times and the Denver Rocky Mountain News.
I had a chance to ask him a few questions about personal branding and about existing newspaper comment policies. Here’s what he had to say:
Jason Preston: In your post, you talk about the stunning lack of emphasis on newspaper authors. Do you see the internet (and blogging in particular) changing the way journalism is branded in the next five or ten years? Will people read Ebert, Pogue, and Mossberg, or will they read the Sun-Times, the NYT, and the WSJ?
Robert Niles: Many readers got the Chicago Sun-Times, then Tribune, for Mike Royko. I know a few people who would have dumped the LA Times by now if it weren’t for Steve Lopez. Jim Murray sold a lot of paper for the LAT back in his day, and many liberals bought the NY Times’ now-defunct “Times Select” subscription online just to get Paul Krugman.
Using local coverage to keep readers
In the 2008 throwaway Jack Black comedy Be Kind Rewind, a local VHS rental store tries to save itself from bankruptcy and eviction by remaking classic movies with a cast and crew of neighborhood faces.
While the movie itself is mediocre, it’s one hell of an allegory for the news industry.
A recent case study (pdf) conducted by Digital Edge chronicles the ways in which the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Manchester Union Leader, the Fort Myers News-Press and Morris Communications have all dealt with the uprise of citizen journalism on their turf.
Five things all newspaper editors should know about blogging
Just to give you an idea of where I’m coming from, I have been blogging in some form or another since 2001.
I’ve been working for the Parnassus Group over the past couple of years, where I am currently the New Media Manager. We run several different blogs, help companies with blogger engagement, and put on the Blog Business Summit and Web Community Forum conferences.
Many if not most newspapers have already started blogging on their own, and those blogs are often written by excellent reporters who do in fact know a thing or two about the internet.
While I think that journoblogs really occupy their own subcategory of blogging as a whole (and therefore have their own rules and etiquette), if I were any of those reporters, these are the five things I’d want my editor to know:
What is blogging?
The term “blogging” has become so loose and generalized that it hardly carries much meaning anymore. “Blog” means everything from i09 to Perez Hilton to Silicon Alley Insider to Robert Scoble to The Lede to the Huffington Post to what I do at the Blog Business Summit.
Clearly, this space needs some definition.
The problem is rooted in the fact that a blog has always been a medium that can be used for a whole variety of things rather than a product, the same way that paper is just paper unless you put something on it. And yet we’ve always treated blogging like a product.
Do you blog?
Why yes I do. Do you paper?
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