Link Journalism

I don’t read MediaShift often enough.

Yesterday’s post about self-defeating newsroom mentality is an absolute must read. It points out, more eloquently than I could, how important it is to foster the right attitude in a newsroom.

In a stable industry, there are often good reasons to pay a lot of attention to seniority and experience. “I’ve seen it before,” is a really reliable metric.

The problem with that metric is that it goes right out the window when you have a shift in your business, like the one that is currently happening, with such monumental consequences.

Right now, a system designed to suppress new ideas will kill you. But you don’t need to hear it from me. Go read the interview.

In last weekend’s New York Times business section there was a special note about their financial tables:

It looks like they’re finally taking Scott Karp’s advice seriously and cutting back on the useless print expenses. I’m sure other papers will follow.

The New York Times reported yesterday on the continuing downward trend in newspaper advertising:

Over all, ad revenue fell almost 8 percent last year. This year, it is running about 12 percent below that dismal performance, and company reports issued last week suggested a 14 percent to 15 percent decline in May.

To me, and I think to most people, this is anything but surprising.

The Times article blames the slow economy for the lower-than-usual growth in online ad sales:

Online ad revenue for newspapers grew 20 percent to 30 percent annually for most of this decade. Most analysts think the industry will return to that growth rate when the economy picks up again, but for now, it is closer to 15 percent. The Internet still accounts for less than 10 percent of newspaper ad revenue.

This is probably true, but I think newspapers also need to work on killing the CPC model of online advertising, since it is completely unfair to publishers.

Another succulent item from Romenesko today (incidentally, if you open Firefox and type “romenesko” into the browser bar—and nothing else—it loads the right page): The Bing Blog from Fortune calls out the newspaper-haters:

So let’s take a breath and just agree: newspapers aren’t any deader right now than any other coughing, wheezing business in this lousy environment. Lehman (LEH) is losing nearly $3 billion dollars this quarter. Nobody talks about investment banking being dead. Broadcast television just racked up more than $9.2 billion in its upfront sales season, in spite of analysts’ predictions that this year would be its last. And not one social network is really making a go of it yet.

For now he’s right. The premiums that newspapers get from selling ads in the physical format still outweigh the costs of printing and delivering it.

But that won’t last forever. I alluded to my solution in my last post, I think it will be some eventual form of electronic paper that can eliminate all those pesky costs from the print + delivery equation.

It’s an amusing and probably good-for-your-perspective read. There’s a lot of “all old media is dead!” ringing around the industry right now, but I think it’s both a bit premature and a bit shortsighted.

Over the years, newspapers have changed what kind of printing press they use. That’s just happening more publicly this time.

Perhaps because of some collective media groupthink, the internet is often seen as the deathknell for magazines and newspapers and news media of all kinds.

That’s bull. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Jon Friedman at MarketWatch wrote a column about it as a follow up to a presentation he made at the annual meeting of City and Regional Magazines in Mississippi:

There is no excuse for magazine editors and publishers to be uneasy about the Internet. They talk as if it’s some strange, exotic instrument that nobody quite understands.

And then he goes on to present eight excellent guidelines for finding success with your web site. I’ll let him share the details of each point in his own post, but here’s the fly-by:

1. Have an attitude
2. Make it easy to read
3. Stress interactivity
4. Entertain
5. Maintain an identity
6. Live in real time
7. Be true
8. Experiment

Of course a lot of this advice makes a lot more sense for magazines than it does for a large portion of newspaper reporting (some news, for example, should definitely be presented sans attitude). But as far as understanding what works on the web? It’s a damn good list.

I would add two of my own:

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I recently wrote an e-mail to Seth Godin asking him about his opinion of journalism. I was reading his book, The Dip, which more or less advises all journalists to jump ship:

If you work at a big city newspaper, you can see that there’s no light at the end of that career-choice tunnel. Circulation is dropping, and it’s going to drop ever faster. most papers have little chance of replacing their traditional business with an online alternative.

You can see his response on his blog here, where he introduces a great question that all newspapers should be asking themselves: what are you defending?

If you’re clinging to a paper product, you are facing a dead end. If you’re spending time and resources trying to defend the practice of printing and delivering, instead of discovering new ways to deliver and monetize your content, you are wasting your time.

Especially because what you’re really defending is the printer, not your own business.

If this all sounds interesting to you, don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed to follow the conversation.

Emily Gould, formerly of Gawker, has a piece in the New York Times Magazine this week about her experience with making her personal life very public online.

I think that her particular line of blogging (making fun of pseudo-celebrities) lends itself a little more to the kind of problem that she created for herself more than most journoblogging.

But as blogging tugs journalism into more personal arenas, and as more journalists become bloggers, I think this is a good topic to be aware of.

Poynter’s Biz Blog today highlights an award given to a Spokane paper for being smart on the internet. Specifically, for taking a page from the freemium book and offering a free service with chances to go premium for a little extra ca$h:

And the winner is: The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, for an ingenious variation on local search, a business directory that includes an informative free listing and lots of opportunities for upsells.

The twist at Spokane’s BizFinderNW.com, is to offer a listing with address, store hours, a map and a photo for free. Businesses can amplify on the listing or buy a display position if they wish. Like most local search ventures, there is room for user comments, though no news content per se.

I think freemium (or maybe cheapmium) is going to be the basis of a lot of newspaper business going forward. In fact, my thoughts on subscriptions are basically finding ways to bundle premium offerings to make the package more sellable.