July 2008

According to the New York Times, a survey from the Pew Research Center shows that American newspapers are systematically cutting national and foreign news and focusing more on “hyper-local” sections and web sites:

Three-fifths of the papers reported having less space for news over all, as newspapers try to save money by shifting to smaller pages and printing fewer of them. The only area cut nearly as often as foreign news was national news, which declined at 57 percent of the papers.

I’ve written before in defense of hyper-local journalism, but I do think there are some caveats to keep in mind. You can’t just cut resources and expect the downward spiral to flatten out as a result.

Local is good, but it’s not a one-hit-wonder. It will not carry you to success on its own.

This past Sunday the New York Times wrote a long business profile on Si Newhouse, the 80-year-old head of Condé Nast.

One thing I want to draw attention to is Newhouse’s (successful) attitude towards money in business:

Even so, spending money to make money, and focusing on premium products to attract readers and advertisers, has clearly worked for more than a decade, though its margins are thin compared with those of its competitors. Condé executives say it generates close to $5 billion in revenue, has operating margins of around 10 percent and profits of about half that.

Critics will quickly point out that Condé’s margins are “thin compared with those of its competitors.”

That’s true, and it will remain true as long as magazines are in a stable market. Because most magazines are niche-oriented and their content is less time sensitive, they haven’t yet suffered the same way that newspapers have.

When the market does begin to shift, the Condé Nast strategy is going to work a lot better than that of their competitors.

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I’ve written before about how reader engagement is the key to making money because it lets you charge more for ads.

I’ve also, in the past, called current newspaper community efforts “lip service.”

That’s not true of all newspapers. But it’s true for a lot of them, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the comments.

Newspapers are scared sh*%less of their readers. Often comments are not put on the same page as an article - this is idiotic. It introduces barriers to interaction and it makes it harder to refer back to an article for intelligent discussion. If you grow the community right then the comments are going to be as good or better than the original piece and you’re going to want them on the same page.

Even those places where comments are allowed, they’re also accompanied by byzantine warning and legalese, or even things like “If you don’t want to register and put your name on your comments, then we don’t want you commenting here” (paraphrased, of course).

Newspapers should start putting their money where their mouth is, and own the community space. They should make a sincere effort to cross the pontificate/blank stare border with their readers, and step one is actively moderating and engaging in the comments.

If you’re ready to take the steps to grow a community, I’d suggest reading Patrick Thornton’s post, It’s all about the community, stupid.

Ryan Thornburg, who teaches online journalism at the University of North Carolina’s school of journalism, recently conducted a survey of online journalists in North Carolina newspapers. The goal? To see how their thinking matched up with traditional journalistic concepts.

Surprisingly, the results show an overwhelming resistance to new technologies, community management, and web usability.

This is especially interesting after hearing Edward Roussel talk about how important it is for newspapers to find and hire people who can work a story through multiple media formats.

The online department in any newspaper ought to be growing right now. The people you hire need to be enthusiastic about the internet and the opportunities it presents.

They need to be willing to try new things. They need to be well paid, because you are competing with the tech sector for their employment. They need to be early adopters, not luddites. They need to inspire the rest of your staff to be excited about what can be done online.

Working at a newspaper right now is hard work, but over the next five or ten years those who stick with it will find it very rewarding. Newspapers are in startup territory now. Take risks. Invest. Invent.

Who’s in your newsroom?

The changing environment in which news is consumed is beginning to force real changes on the way that news is produced.

As with any established industry, now is the time where traditions can hurt the most, because they can prevent people from re-examining why they became traditions in the first place. If those reasons have changed—and I believe for newsroom and editorial organization they have—then it is time to change the traditions as well.

I recently finished reading the June 2008 AP report, titled A New Model for News, which concludes, in part:

The critical difference in today’s news environment is that technology can undo the tidy packages that news providers produce. News gets split apart into atomic pieces for today’s digital consumption — headlines, 25-word summaries, stand-alone photos, podcasts and video clips — all of which can be easily e-mailed, searched and shared beyond the confines of their original packaging

The report goes on to profile the recent behind-the-scenes changes that have happened at The Telegraph, a UK media company that over the past year has become the third most-visisted national newspaper web site in Britain, with over 17 million unique visitors per month.
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Simon Owens, who writes at another future-of-the-media site called Bloggasm, recently interviewed Mary Nesbitt, who is the managing director at the Readership Institute at Northwestern University.

The Readership Institute recently conducted a study (warning, PDF!) where they surveyed, essentially, reader engagement for newspapers.

Simon’s key takeaway is that newspaper readership is not really growing with online offerings.

I think the statistics in this report, like all statistics, can be misleading. It’s far more reliable to simply count numbers - for any given paper, compare your print subscriber base to your unique URLs; that will tell you which audience is larger.

If a newspaper’s print audience is larger than its web audience, that newspaper is behind. It’s time to start using the paper product as a marketing tool for your online property.

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Since the internet is proving to be a major disruptive force to the business model of newspapers, I think it’s important for newspapers to keep an eye on the various projects and innovations that are happening around publishing on a smaller scale.

One of those projects is Printcasting, a service from The Bakersfield Californian that will let people easily repurpose RSS feeds into template-based PDF newsletters, which generate ad revenue that trickles back to everyone involved in the process.

Dan Pacheco has worked in journalism for 14 years at the Washington Post, Knight Ridder Tribune, and most recently The Bakersfield Californian, where he is the project lead for their Printcasting project. He kindly agreed to answer a few questions about Printcasting via e-mail, and here are his responses:

Jason: Printcasting offers a way for publishers and content providers to make money from their writing. How does this work?

The basic idea around revenue for Printcasting is that anyone who contributes to the success of a publication shares in the revenues. Everyone from the publisher who starts and maintains the publication, to the individual bloggers whose content appears in it, to the Printcasting network that makes it all possible, would get a cut.

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I was talking with my dad yesterday about the music industry, and how it is trying to fight the fundamental economics of the internet (easy reproduction and distribution) rather than adapt to it.

Here’s another way of looking at it. If you live in a desert and sell water, you’re going to do a pretty good business. People need water, and they can’t get it anywhere else (except one or two other water salespeople), so you’re set.

Then one day a lake magically appears and a river flows through town, and the water is pure, drinkable, and plentiful. Suddenly you don’t have much of a business anymore. Who’s going to pay you for water when they can get plenty from the river or the lake?

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I’ve been going through the older essays of Clay Shirky after reading through Here Comes Everybody, and at one point he boils down the economics of publishing (or, content creation) to very simple terms.

Here it is:

The economics of content creation are in fact fairly simple. The two critical questions are “Does the support come from the reader, or from an advertiser, patron, or the creator?” and “Is the support mandatory or voluntary?”

The internet adds no new possibilities. Instead, it simply shifts both answers strongly to the right. It makes all user-supported schemes harder, and all subsidized schemes easier. It likewise makes collecting fees harder, and soliciting donations easier. And these effects are multiplicative. The internet makes collecting mandatory user fees much harder, and makes voluntarily subsidy much easier.

From Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content, which is well worth a read.