A newspaper journalist offers practical online advice to her colleagues

My name is Gina Chen. I’ve been a newspaper journalist for 20 years, and I’m worried — but excited — about the future of the industry I love.

Gina Chen is really no different than the thousands of journalists in newsrooms around the country, trying to make sense of where the news business is heading. Except this: She's doing something to help her colleagues along.

Save The Media, Chen's recently-launched blog, exists, as she puts it, as a "kick in the pants":

I got into this business with the typical idealism. I wanted to be a voice for those who had none. I wanted to expose the wrongs in society. I wanted to make a difference. And in my small way, I have.

But like a close relative who sometimes needs a kick in the pants, journalism needs to get its head together, I think.  New media is here, and you need to use it.

I’m worried because so many journalists I know are  stubbornly digging their heels in and refusing to change quickly enough with the times. Yes, it would be nice if this were still the 1960s, and people had nowhere else to get their news except the mainstream press. Wake up. Those days are gone.

Each of the posts so far is direct and full of valuable information on a specific topic. Take the current post, on Search Engine Optimization for journalists:

First, what is SEO? In the very simplest terms, it’s using words in your post and headline that will help search engines find your content. So it’s back to “thinking like Google” as I explained in my post about picking your blog name. You need to use words that will let Google and other search engines — which are computers, not humans — understand what your post is about.

Why does it matter? One of your goals as a journalistic blogger is that people will find your post on a given topic. So when they type a search into Google, you want your blog to be among the first few sites that come up. (The first few sites are the ones that most people will go to.)

She then outlines 10 specific steps any writer, copy-editor or producer can take to increase readership to their stories, simply by changing their approach to headlines.

This kind of simple, actionable advice is what Save The Media is all about. As Martin Langeveld, who first noted Chen's blog on his own excellent News After Newspapers, says, it's well worth putting into your feed reader.

The story so far: I actually want the news business to succeed

So here's how these things go. You write 85+ posts over the course of a handful of months. Some of them are are considered, thoughtful pieces, many with even a modicum of original reporting. Others are appreciative notes and links to discussions elsewhere.

A few are smartassed screeds, one of which takes apart some recent (I'll still say it) idiocy by Paul Mulshine in the Wall Street Journal.

Guess which post got linked from Romenesko and unleashed what I like to call a robust discussion in the comments?

So, just a quick reminder. This isn't a blog that takes any joy from the current condition of the U.S. newspaper business. I spent 12 years of my life inside it and would probably still be cheerfully toiling away on change from within had that buyout offer not been so timely and irresistible.

Here are some ideas I've floated over the past few months in these very pixels that might benefit from further discussion:

• A proposal for a network ad model


• A proposal for creating a "sales and deals" beat


• A proposal to rethink the local news product mix for a major metro


• A discussion of how my old organization made decent money creating local, long-form video


• Five simple, cheap ideas to increase engagement with local audiences for news organizations


• Four ideas to help fix the classified problem


• My soapbox: journalists need to become better curators of their beats

Pros vs. Pajamas: The trope that will not die.

The zombie lives, this time in an op-ed in the WSJ from the Newark Star-Ledger's Paul Mulshine, who conflates the shout of "Copy!" and the pounding of six-part carbons with some golden age of "real" journalism that the modern internetses are killing:

When my colleague at the Newark Star-Ledger John Farmer started off in journalism more than five decades ago, things were very different. After covering a political event, he'd hop on the campaign bus, pull out a typewriter, and start banging out copy. As the bus would pull into a town, he'd ball up a finished page and toss it out the window. There a runner would scoop it up and rush it off to a telegraph station where it would be blasted back to the home office.

At the time, reporters thought this method was high-tech. Now, thanks to the Internet, a writer can file a story instantly from anywhere. It's incredibly convenient, but that same technology is killing old-fashioned newspapers. Some tell us that that's a good thing. I disagree and believe that the public will miss us once we're gone.

Why are newspapers disappearing? Those damned bloggers in their pajamas:

The problem is that printing a hard copy of a publication packed with solid, interesting reporting isn't a guarantee of economic success in the age of instant news. Blogger Glenn Reynolds of "Instapundit" fame seems to be pleased at this. In his book, "An Army of Davids," Mr. Reynolds heralds an era in which "[m]illions of Americans who were in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff."

No, they can't. Millions of American can't even pronounce "pundit," or spell it for that matter. On the Internet and on the other form of "alternative media," talk radio, a disliked pundit has roughly a 50-50 chance of being derided as a "pundint," if my eyes and ears are any indication.

The type of person who can't even keep track of the number of times the letter "N" appears in a two-syllable word is not the type of person who is going to offer great insight into complex issues.

I agree with this: It sucks that journalists are losing jobs and that newspapers are failing. But the marketplace of ideas is not a zero-sum game. And just because the author seems to have run across an inordinate number of people who are unable to pronounce the word "pundit" that's no reason to dismiss the whole of the blogosphere, as he does.

And it's a sham argument anyway. I'd bet that a sizable percentage of any newspaper's readership is equally idea- and spelling-challenged. The leaders of the social media movement are no more average members of the rabble than are the ink-stained wretches Munshine beatifies here. Reporters, pundits, thought-leaders -- whether in print or pixels -- become who they are because of the value of their skills and ideas, not the medium they choose to disseminate them.

The bigger question is this: who will do the reporting, and who will pay for it? If newspaper companies get smart about business models and stop trying to prop up the old institutions of ink and paper, there's a very good chance that they will survive. But they will survive in a world where Reynolds and others have an equal share of the voice, assuming the quality of what they're saying is high enough to warrant attention.

The Sun and Post leap forward with sharing agreement, fall back with print-centric focus

I thought the Washington Post and The Baltimore Sun made a brilliant move today, announcing that, beginning on January 1, the two newsrooms would start sharing news and sports coverage. The stated goal is to eliminate overlap and to create efficiencies. The real goal is to forge ahead boldly to help save the business.

But then I saw this, and I realized the terrible truth of exactly what business it is that they're still trying to save:

Robert McCartney, assistant managing editor for metropolitan news at The Washington Post, said the two newspapers will be able to publish each other's stories online, but only after the story has appeared in print in the originating newspaper.

I confirmed this directly. There will be no sharing of online content until it is first - say it with me - published in the paper.

If this were, say, 1997 and print was booming and the online division comprised just some geeks in the basement, I could almost understand this logic. But I thought we'd settled this question: Digital is the future, not an afterthought. And where will The Sun and The Post publish all this shared content anyway? News hole is shrinking rapidly. Why not make the first and most comprehensive point of sharing online?

Imagine this: a regional online powerhouse that not only would bring in huge audience numbers, but for the first time just might be big enough to start eclipsing withering print revenues. Smart regional buys for national advertisers and targeted local ads sold against the combined reporting of the two largest newsrooms in the Mid-Atlantic just might sell well, even in this recessed economy.

That won't happen just yet, because The Sun and The Post have chosen to focus on the papers first. Here's hoping they soon turn their attentions to building something even greater online.

The reports of print's death may not be exaggerated

Designer Jason Santa Maria takes a look at the current state of print publishing and decides:

1. Print just might be in its death throes


2. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

Here's his conclusion:

The medium of print will not die, but its spot atop the mountain of mainstream content distribution is in its final days. This could bring about a rebirth of design innovation online. We can help bring about change and find new ways to connect with audiences. This is an exciting time to be a designer, assuming we can all hang onto our jobs long enough to see what happens.

The post itself is a nice Cliff's Notes to the Resolved: Print May Not Be Dead, But It Certainly Has A Nasty Wet Cough And A Certain Yellow Tinge Around The Eyes crowd. But the comments are even more interesting as Jason and his readers offer the kinds of astute observations about print and digital that it took newspapers 12 years to make.

We're not going to save the business with bigger banner ads

I need to create a new TextExpander macro that simply says Martin Langeveld has a great post..." God knows I type that enough.

The latest is actually a 1-2 punch, presenting practical advice for the sales team and the newsroom at newspaper companies.

He gets off to a very good start:

1. Lead with the DotCom brand. Publishers: take out your wallet and check your business card. And have a look at the cards your salespeople hand out. What's more prominent: the name of your newspaper, or the name of your web site (if it's even listed on there)? If the biggest element on the card is not your online brand, confiscate all the cards and replace them. Do the same thing with all other printed or online sales materials, rate cards, media kits, whatever. In other words, make sure your graphic message is: we are first and foremost an online news and marketing organization.

This got me thinking about an idea I'd been pitching at my old company earlier this year: A variation on the network model.

For 10-12 years, most local news markets have grown audience and revenue the same way. Flagship news brands benefitted from the rising tide of internet adoption in all markets, the growth of available and cheap broadband, and, somewhat, by a growing focus of newspapers' former print-only newsrooms on digital media.

In recent years, some markets have embarked on audience diversifcation and growth efforts through the launch of niche sites. These sites are adding to audience and revenue, but are growing slowly and all are based on the traditional strategy of building comprehensive content-focused sites with a newspaper's own staff and freelancers.

But consider, at least, the network model.

The network model recognizes that the internet is an interconnected space where, in any given audience niche, there exists already rich content, widely dispersed, yet very little smart aggregation and monetization of that content. In my city, Baltimore, for instance, there are more than 270 individual community organizations, most with web sites that are rich in the kind of hyper-local content newspapers wish they we could create and gather. Under the old model, we'd try to replicate that content. Under the new network model, we'd recognize those individual sites - each with a small but passionate audience - as part of a larger potential advertising and content network.

Now imagine that niche - neighborhoods - combined with local moms, and soccer dads, and music fans and book nuts and weight watchers and job seekers and shoppers and church-goers and pet owners and barflies. Imagine all of the little slices of interest in our local markets reassembled into one audience pie.

That's a business.

Because if we can tag their sites with our ad code, we can help them sell their audience. Newspaper companies - still the dominant local online brand in most markets (though not for long if they're not careful) can raise their effective reach in their local markets without creating one piece of content or one line of code. And the individual sites? Each month they get a check in the mail. Everybody wins.

This is not untested. Glam Media serves as an example of what you can do when you stop trying to build all your content and "capture" the audience and instead work to leverage the audience that is already there. Last year, Glam overtook iVillage in audience and revenue by embracing the network and finding sites that were already producing content that women in their target wanted and encouraging those sites to join the Glam network.

The chart below (originally from Glam, via Jeff Jarvis)  is instructive. The yellow/brown circles represent owned and operated web sites. The purple are independent blogs and web sites that neither iVillage or Glam own. Notice how few of the circles on the Glam side of the chart are yellow.



The Glam model is to spend a whole lot less time building O&O sites, and more time building the network. And it pays off. Last year, Glam earned as much as 70% of its revenue through the network, not through its O&O sites.

To me, that's a smart way to build both audience and revenue - leverage the content and the efforts of independent sites through the power of the network. That’s one way newspapers can begin to grow their online revenue beyond the existing banners and clicks model.

Re-engineering the wall between church and state

Chris Brogan, the well-known social media strategist and evangelist has a post today about what some of us would call journalistic ethics.

On December 2, Chris wrote a sponsored post on his Dad-o-Matic blog about K-Mart. K-Mart gave him a $500 gift card to go on a shopping spree and write about it. He took his kids. They bought some clothes and toys for a Christmas charity. He wrote it up, with prominent disclosure, talking about how K-Mart isn't the wartime-in-Beirut hellhole you thought it was. End of story.

Are you twitching yet?

Because some people were. They questioned whether this foray into "advertorial" by Chris called his entire body of work into question. A Forrester analyst in a Twitter post called Brogan a "bought" blogger. Another Tweet, from Ben Kunz, said "Nothing wrong w bloggers making $ from ads. But writing Puffery for Pay clearly diminishes @chrisbrogan 's voice."

To those of you sitting in the newsroom, this probably seems like a waste of breath. "Of course any paid writing is advertorial, pure and simple."

But what happens when the advertorial is written by your star reporter and not some kid in the marketing department? Because that's the equivalent here. Brogan is a star of the emerging social media movement. He's written tens of thousands of words, spoken at dozens of conferences, influenced untold numbers of people. Does this one post (or, if he decided, dozens of sponsored posts?) undermine his credibility?

I say no, it doesn't. The wall between editorial and advertising exists for a good reason, but there are many ways to honor it. The traditional newspaper model is just one.

The key is disclosure. As a reader, I know before I read a word, that Brogan has been paid. I can then filter at will. If I think that the money exchange is unseemly, I can move on. If I stay, I have a crucial fact available to help me evaluate what I'm reading.

But this is all a very long introduction to the real reason why I'm typing this post on a Sunday morning rather than doing all the other things I need to finish before the sun smacks the horizon: Chris Brogan's explanation. Anyone who cares about communication, journalism and business models for such should take a few minutes today and read his thoughtful debriefing on the matter:

There’s a whole stripe of people out there who argue that the sponsored post corrodes my editorial integrity, and that I’m not unbiased if I do something with sponsorships, etc. I want to address that, because it really hits to the core of the story, in my mind. Simply, they’re saying that one cannot be editorial-minded and manage a paid sponsorship. (Which, if you think about it, you’re saying that humans can’t separate their perspectives appropriately.) I have a few points with regards to this.

1. Newspapers and magazines are dying. If you’re not reading Newspaper Death Watch and Paid Content and BuzzMachine, then you’re missing some of the most riveting and depressing news of our generation.


2. Those models all work on advertising-to-pay-for-editorial and editorial-to-keep-eyeballs-to-support-advertising. In fact, all previous media works that way. TV, radio, etc. Lost isn’t on TV because it’s cool. It’s because people can advertise against it.


3. Those models are dying because advertising and marketing have lost their impact in those spaces.


4. Since the early 90s, people have hoped to figure out how the web will fix this.


5. I have some opinions on this.

I’m not a journalist. But I am a publisher. I am a reporter. I am a media maker. And here’s the difference: as a publisher, I have all the jobs of the newspaper. I am both the editorial staff and also the business side of the house. In this piece by Barbara Gibson of IABC, Barb Gibson says in her comment to me: “One more note in answer to your points above: while magazines do indeed do advertorials, they’re usually not written and bylined by their star journalists.”

That’s the crux right there of what has people hackles raised, I venture. In larger operations, there’s a bag man to take the advertising money and leave the journalists pure. I’ll get back to that point, because there is a line still, and that line must be respected. That hasn’t changed, and won’t change. But because there are many of us who are the publisher, the writer, the researcher, the customer service department, and the public relations staff, you’re going to have to seek a slightly different way to manifest that distinction.

There's much more at Chris's site.

What happened when the money dried up

I've been passing around an odd little YouTube clip of a 2005 Christmas gift from Sam Zell. It shows an animated statue that features a recording of Sam extolling the virtures of an economy that's throwing off cheap cash left and right, And then, there's a song:



"We're awash with cash to spend!"

It would just be that - an oddity - until you read a piece in the New York Times which notes that the newspaper industry over the past few years followed the same bubble of cheap money that drove the housing bubble.

And, like all bubbles, eventually it pops:

The bankruptcy filing of the Tribune Company on Monday is just the latest, largest evidence that the American newspaper industry is suffering the hangover from an immense buying spree in 2006 and 2007 at what turned out to be the worst possible time for the buyers, just as the business was about to enter a drastic decline.

Newspapers would be in trouble either way. The steady leak of advertising and readers from print to the Web has become a widening torrent in this recession year. Most newspapers remain profitable, but the margins are dropping fast, with the industry losing about 15 percent of its ad revenue this year.

But the companies in the weakest condition are there largely because they borrowed a lot of money to buy papers, often at inflated prices, and the biggest of those deals were struck in 2006 and early 2007.

The full story is here.

Can an InfoValet guide us to a business model?

[caption id="attachment_652" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Photo by Hushed Lavinia"][/caption]

Martin Langeveld reports on a conference focused on the notion of an "InfoValet." It sounds like attendees at the conference spent a lot of time thinking of ways to describe what they're onto, but I'd put it this way, from a consumer perspective:

A universal logon system whereby users "pay" for access to information with (secure) information about themselves, rather than with dollars.

Langeveld says, "While a system like this will not necessarily save newspaper publishers (because, for one thing, it will take some time to gain traction), it has the potential to help save journalism by enabling online news publishing at a different scale. While the New York Times could be an InfoValet network member, so can a blogger or micro-local news site, and each can benefit proportionately to their traffic and content value to advertisers and consumers."

Interesting idea, though any attempt to build a new ecosystem from scratch is going to meet with a certain amount of stubborn resistance. Perhaps the recent announcements by Google and Facebook, opening their logon systems to other sites, might provide some readymade structure for the InfoValet idea.

Winner, Most Prescient Post of 2008: Mark Potts

It was just shy of one year ago today when Mark Potts swam against the Zellebratory news of the sale of Tribune, in a post entitled "Here Come The Death Eaters," in which he typed these words:

Put that all together, and 2008 may be the year that the Death Eaters start coming for some of the biggest names in the business: Big chains or papers that are overextended financially and find themselves undermined by the gathering storm of problems. Wall Street and bankers aren't going to put up with that, and executive heads—not to mention those of a lot of unfortunate rank and file employees—will roll. Watch for still more consolidation and, um, innovative financing that will further roil the industry.

Just look at the tumult that accompanied Sam Zell's closing of his deal to buy Tribune Co. this week. The bankers were squeezing the deal right up to the last minute. Even Zell called it "the transaction from hell." And Zell's going to have to pedal—and peddle—as fast as he can to keep the company afloat financially. It's not just the Chicago Cubs that are going to be sold by Tribune. Look for a fire sale of real estate and newspapers (Los Angeles Times, anyone? Anyone?) as Zell strips the company for cash. And at this holiday time, say a prayer for the poor Tribune employees, who could be left holding the bag—through their retirement plan, which now owns the company through Zell's creative accounting—if things turn sour. Memo to Tribune employees: Get. The. Hell. Out.

(Emphasis mine.)

And so it begins

[caption id="attachment_642" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Photo by William Couch. 1/31/2008"][/caption]

Both the Wall Street Journal and New York Times are reporting tonight that the Tribune company has hired an investment bank and a law firm for a potential bankruptcy filing as early as this week. This is definitely a long way down the road from a year ago when the arrival of Sam Zell was seen as a bold move toward the reinvention of a once-great newspaper brand.

Now?

Here's the New York Times take:

Tribune has hired bankruptcy advisers as the ailing newspaper company seeks to stave off a potential bankruptcy filing, people briefed on the matter said.

The newspaper, which was taken private last year by billionaire investor Samuel Zell, has hired the investment bank Lazard and the law firm Sidley Austin, these people said. Tribune has been hobbled by debt related to that sale last year, which has been compounded by the growing drought of advertising for newspapers.

The Wall Street Journal puts the Tribune distress in perspective:

The appointments underscore the deepening distress for Tribune and other publishers. Newspaper businesses are being battered by dwindling advertising sales and carrying debt loads that are unmanageable in current market conditions. People in the industry expect some papers will need to seek bankruptcy protection or fold in coming months.

Tribune has been on wobbly footing since last December, when real-estate mogul Sam Zell led a debt-backed deal to take the company private. Tribune so far has stayed ahead of its $12 billion in borrowings with the help of asset sales, but now dwindling profits are tightening the noose. The company's cash flow may not be enough to cover nearly $1 billion in interest payments this year, and Tribune owes a $512 million debt payment in June.

Based on the state of declining revenues at the company and its lenders' likely unwillingness to allow Tribune to simply sell off assets to make its payments (as it did with the sale of Newsday in 2008), bankruptcy looks increasingly inevitable. These actions seem to imply that the question may be called sooner than the mid-2009 period I had seen mentioned previously.

Langeveld: What it means to transform to a digital enterprise

I keep coming back to this: if the people, through their behavior, keep telling newspapers that they don't want the paper part of the paper anymore AND the paper part of the paper is enormously expensive to create and distribute, then why doesn't some market take a leap and try going all digital?

Yes, there will be financial downsides at first, but especially in the many markets with only one daily newspaper, this risk may be minimized by the fact that local and national advertisers still need to reach that market, and the audience that newspaper organizations gather remains uniquely strong when measured against other mass media television and radio.

Martin Langeveld, former newspaper publisher and VP and current hive-whacking mediablogger, recently took a look at the numbers behind such a leap. The short version: newspapers won't get rich in the short term, but they just might survive.

This week, Langeveld digs deeper into what it would take for one market to make the leap, and introduces us to a publisher in Cedar Rapids (who will be familiar to readers of this blog) who just may be laying the groundwork for his own leap forward.

The strategy sounds simple: Transform the business from its manufacturing roots into a digital enterprise. I proposed a version of it in my second-ever post, back in September: "To have even a chance of survival, the mindset of the industry needs to become: We are in the business of publishing information content continuously on our web sites; every 24 hours (for now, and this may ultimately change to once or twice weekly) we gather some of that information into a printed product and distribute it, but our business is focused on and driven by our online operations." And I've explained it again more recently when I explored the economics of a daily that morphs into a web-first weekly or twice-weekly, and previously as part of my Six Theses, and elsewhere. I'm not alone on this. "Digital is first" is at the top of Steve Outing's list of suggestions for the industry as well; others have hammered away at it; it should simply be on everyone's list...

Can any of this be even discussed in an organization demoralized by waves of layoffs and cutbacks? It won't be easy, obviously, but it has to be done. A newspaper organization that chooses not to adopt, embrace and fully implement a strategy of becoming a digital enterprise will remain a manufacturing enterprise with a product that fewer people want or need, every day. Perhaps it will be remembered one day by a nice brass plaque on the historic printing plant.

Langeveld doesn't yet get the attention of some of the usual suspects (Jarvis, Yelvington, Mutter, Potts, Rosen - all big thinkers worthy of your feed reader), but he should. He combines an insider's experience with a sharp, analytical mind, and adds a willingness to consider the radical notion that there may yet be a future in the news business.

Jason Calacanis: The 120% Solution

Jason Calacanis suggests a solution to the ills that are plaguing us at the moment. And it's not necessarily what you expect:

Work 20% harder.

It was our collective sloth, consumption and sense of entitlement that
got us into this mess, and the only thing that will get us out of will
be lots of hard work.

If you’ve got a good job, you should bust your butt to make your
company as successful and profitable as possible.  That way, salaries
can increase, jobs can be created and your products and services
become so world class, the phrase “Made in America” will come to mean
something other than “not worth buying.”

If you’re working at a government job, you should be putting in extra
hours to reduce government spending. Come in this weekend and make the
government more efficient. (Yes, I just told a government worker to
come in on Saturday.)

If you’ve got credit card debt, pay it down if you can.

If you’ve got a mortgage, pay it off if you can.

If you work in the service industry, try to work 20% faster and come
up with ideas to make your team more efficient.

Like all great ideas, it's over-simplified and a little flawed in the details if you poke at it, but it's still brilliantly direct, and easy to remember: whatever you're doing, kick it up a notch.

Our grandparents and great-grandparents got this. They all sacrificed so that we could get fat and happy. Now it's time to start thinking of the kids of 2050, and what kind of country they're going to inherit, based on our work ethic now.

Take a few moments and read it. As is the case with all good advice, it's both memorable and attainable.

Alan Mutter's incredible shrinking newspaper

Yesterday, Alan Mutter promised a detailing of just what newspapers might do when things turn really sour in Q1 of 2009. Today, he delivers. But the list - at least at the beginning -  sounds awfully familiar already:

The list of potential expense reductions includes squeezing staffing, shuttering bureaus, carving out layers of middle management, telescoping multiple sections of the paper into one, tightening newshole, scrapping syndicated features and wire serevices, axing op-ed pages and book sections and eliminating classified ads on certain days of the week....

Another alternative will be to ask employees to accept voluntary pay cuts, to agree to work longer hours, and to ease manning requirements and other work rules. Bonuses may be reduced or eliminated for the fortunate few who still would have qualified for them.

He then walks through the increasingly extreme cuts papers could and, in many cases, will make, ending with this cheery thought:

This will last as long as the newspapers continue to generate operating profits. But it is highly unlikely in this environment that any creditor would provide additional cash to prop up a money-losing newspaper.

In other words, a newspaper that cannot sell enough advertising or cut enough expenses to sustain profitable operations is not likley to make it to the other side of 2009.

Is it time for a newspaper dead pool?

“If you applied for this job, you may already be a winner.”

Jobs in journalism are becoming rarer with each passing day. But at Scott Karp's Publish2.com, there's a great job for the taking. All you have to do is win their contest.

It’s a job with Publish2, a start-up focused on helping journalism thrive in the digital age. We already employ two incredibly talented journalists, Tammi Marcoullier and Josh Korr, and we want to expand our team.

But since we can only hire one journalist, we’re going to promote all entries to news organizations and media companies that are looking for journalists who are focused on the future and who want to help journalism evolve.

To enter the contest, you can submit a video, a slide show, or a written statement (or all three) about why you believe you are the future of journalism.

“I am the future of journalism because…”

If you're interested, you can enter here.

Shopping for readers: a proposal for local news

As she often does, Amy Gahran got me thinking today, this time about the average-at-best job local news organizations do covering consumer news. She asks whether news orgs could focus on shopping year-round, and not just on Black Friday, to do a better job of offering utility to readers.

The short answer: yes. The long answer, though, needs to also address the nagging question of why newspapers aren't doing this already.

Ultimately, I think the problem is how we define what journalism is. And under currently-accepted definitions, helping shoppers find deals isn't up there with Comforting the Afflicted and Afflicting the Comfortable. The irony is - especially in our current economy - data-driven consumer reporting could be of incredible value to local communities.

To figure why this is - why What's On Sale is relegated to the commercial side of the house - let's step back for a second and look at what newspaper do cover.

Is this journalism?

I think we’d all agree that covering the intricacies of local government counts as journalism. Certainly tallying the numbers and types of crimes – whether through narrative journalism or in a database – is journalism as well. Grading a movie? Tracking baseball stats? Charting the financial performance of local companies? All journalism.

But what about sales and deals? What if news organizations reported on that? Where are the best shoe sales? Which grocery chain has the cheapest milk? Which stores have the worst parking lots or the shortest check-out times? Is this journalism?

And what about auto mechanics? Who can you trust? Who specializes in Mini Cooper repair? What’s the going rate for an oil change? Is this journalism?

These examples may not read like dream assignments, even for someone fresh out of J-school. But they could very well be exactly the information that people in our market are looking for, but can’t find. Anywhere.

So, if it is journalism, why not do it?

So the question is simple, but provocative: if it’s just as difficult to report on the machinations of a complex government bureaucracy as it is to scope out the best deals this week at Big Box Mall (both can’t be effectively automated and both require reporting) why do news organizations choose to do one and not the other? And are we sure that readers would agree with that choice?

I'd argue that if newspapers want to grow readership and revenue, they to do both. They need to think even more broadly about what they mean when they talk about “reporting.” And they need to think of new and more useful ways to deliver that information that gets to the user when she wants it and needs it. This flips the existing reporting hierarchy upside-down:

Imagine a team of reporters whose job it is to cover consumer spending – arguably one of the most important drivers of our local economies and something all of our readers spend many hours doing – from the point-of-view of the consumer. And not in the traditional way, through columns and slice-of-life narratives, but with real-world data that will make it easier for people in our markets to live their lives. How surprising and welcome would that be?

And imagine a structure that would allow for data to come from multiple sources - reporting shoe-leather, data-feeds from participating retailers, reports submitted by readers - and distributed at the moment of greatest need: when a reader is at the mall, in the supermarket or in the car.

For a significant portion of the local audience, this is exactly the kind of high-utility, relevant information they need and that a large, organized newsroom is uniquely qualified to provide.

If only we’d agree that it’s journalism.

Who's doing this well? Any examples of any US newspapers marshalling significant forces against retail data reporting?

The revenue slide gets steeper

Alan Mutter was paying attention when The NAA tried to quietly dump its latest revenue numbers on the afternoon before Thanksgiving. And what he saw was grim, including continued falloff in all categories, and the second quarter in a row of declining interactive numbers.

The performance in the third quarter was affected only partially by the worldwide financial panic that froze the credit markets in mid-September, throttling the already waning demand for hiring, auto sales and home purchases.

The outlook for the final period of the year is worse, when the three classified verticals are likely to experience the full impact of the economic meltdown.

So it looks like I'll need to update this chart I created at the end of Q2, showing constant-dollar print revenue at newspapers dropping below 1982 levels. When I made that estimate in September, I said 2008 print revenue would hit $36 billion, a number that needs to come down by at least a half billion (applying 2007 Q4 decline percentages, clearly an optimistic projection), if not a whole lot more.

Jarvis offers a year of good ideas, summarized in one post

Yesterday, 140 characters at a time, I hacked into Sam Zell and his far-ranging interview with Portfolio as signifying a man who is 1. very good at identifying the newspaper industry's problems but (and this extends to his key advisor Lee Abrams) 2. woefully inept at articulating real responses to the crisis (other than to cut costs, which is necessary, and to add visual flash to the papers, which may or may not help), simply because as non-participants in where news is going (digital), he and Lee can't begin to imagine its future.

On the flip side of that coin is Jeff Jarvis, who has been taking flak of late for being a supposed journalism hater, but who, in my opinion, has been a steady source of ideas over the years - mostly solid, a few shaky - for where we might try to steer this battleship.

A few days back, he gathered many of those ideas into one post. It's step-by-step instructions on one (informed) guy's recipe for saving the business:

Note well that none of this is new. The essential functions of journalism - reporting, watching, sharing, answering, explaining - and its verities - factualness, completeness, fairness, timeliness, relevance - are eternal, but the means of performing them are multiplying magnificently. That is why I so enjoy teaching journalism, because we need no longer pick a medium and its tools for a career but can select them every time we need to tell a story - and because journalism is no longer about preservation (it never should have been) but is instead about change and growth.

Could journalism die? Yes, but I have faith and optimism that it will survive, evolve, and grow. I believe there will be a growing market demand for journalism; I know there is a growing need.

Journalism doesn't need THINK PIECES!! It needs solid thinking. Like this.

A cry from the heartland: "Don't let newspapers die"

Thanks to Journalism Iconoclast (Pat Thornton), I just found the "Don't Let Newspapers Die" Facebook "cause" page.

My first thought, especially after reading point #3 ("Newspapers are cool!") was that this was a big fat furry sock-puppet created by the NAA. But instead, it appears to be a genuine effort from an Indiana mom. Who loves newspapers and thinks they're cool. And hopes you'll buy a copy to help save a journalist's job.

I love journalism (as much as anyone can be said to "love" a craft or a skill or, even, a calling). Journalists are underpaid and undervalued by a society that often forgets that they help keep this Democracy thing moving.

But I'm not so sure I feel the same way about newspapers.

For several hundred years, newspapers were the most efficient way to transmit news and information. Cheap. Fast. Disposable. In many ways, the newspaper was the internet long before the httprotocol came along. It was a printed database, filtered for our needs by trusted agents (AKA editors) who did their best to assemble in the daily pages what we needed to know. Or at least what they thought we needed to know.

But do we need newspapers anymore - in paper form? I think the jury's still out.

If you're surer of the answer, you should check out their Facebook page and join the 10,000+ members of the group.

Print less to save the paper and the business

This is just about the most challenging and possibly true sentence I've read in weeks:

Two fat newspapers each week and a robust web platform will have more impact than five or six skinny papers and a site that’s not foremost in the newsroom’s mind.

Martin Langeveld, who blogs at News After Newspapers, makes the case that local newspapers are on the road to ruin if they continue to publish every day in print. His recommendation: Print two big papers weekly, on Thursday and Saturday. Profits do shrink under his new model, but at the end of five years, he says they're much more robust than they would have been following the existing 7-day model to its slow death.

I do hope he posts his spreadsheets, though, so we can all poke and prod at the assumptions.

People like Langeveld are reinventing an industry, idea by idea.

Read the entire proposal here.

Let's put the government in charge of journalism!

Writing in The Mediashift Idea Lab on pbs.org, David Sasaki wins the award for the longest argument yet in favor of government funding of the failing journalism business.

I try not to get into outright arguments here, but this seems to me to be a really, really bad idea. You can't micro-manage every single industry with bailouts and new taxes to support them. If US automakers, for instance, can't build cars that people want, then they should contract, combine or even, in the most extreme outcome, disappear. We won't have any shortage of vehicles, as better-run companies slip in to fill the void. That's cold, true, but that's also the marketplace in action.

Same goes for journalism. If newspapers have created the perfect storm of outdated content and revenue models at the very moment when user consumption patterns are changing radically, then that's a bright neon sign that it's time to change. Not that it's time to find a deep-pocketed government benefactor to allow things to operate as they always have.

But don't tell that to David Sasaki. He's thinking about the National Journalism Foundation, funded by the federal government. Which, as we all know, is really you and me:

The National Journalism Foundation would essentially serve as a re-invented Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Annual funding should increase from $200 million to $3 billion. (One percent of the total cost of the Iraq War; four percent of the federal bank bailout.) Similar to the NSF, the National Journalism Foundation would regularly award grants to individuals, organizations, and institutions that propose projects which serve to better inform the American public about their communities, government, nation, and the rest of the world. PBS and NPR would, of course, continue to receive funding, but other organizations and projects like EveryBlock and FiveThirtyEight.com, which provide important information to the public but don't attract advertising revenue, would also be considered for funding.

As described, it sounds sort of enticing. Let's fund the the cool startups. Let's tax those "telecommunications giants" (who will, no doubt, totally absorb these new taxes out of the kindness of their bleeding hearts) and give the money away to a super-sized Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Yes, let's. And Popsicles for everyone.

Or, publishers could look down the long-barrel of changing realities and change in ways that will allow them to continue in the business of informing people while still making a profit. But they surely won't do that if the Gravy Train is about to pull into town, just like GM won't change if it's guaranteed a future through taxpayer bailouts.

And what's really the worst thing about this? Live for 5-10 years under such a system, and the bulk of the press will be dependent on the government for funding, essentially defanging an already gap-toothed watchdog.

Sorry, I'm not buying it. Journalism is currently screwed, but that's a good thing. It's finally forcing some real change. Let's not screw that up by taking away the only incentive they have to change: fear.

There is great hope for journalism in people like David Cohn

Recent posts have been especially dark on my part. Which isn't entirely representative. I believe that journalism - especially that journalism practiced by the organizations that today publish daily metro papers - is essential, and can have a very bright future if we stop thinking about the last 150 years and focus on maybe just the next 10.

And let the smart people lead.

For instance, people like David Cohn, creator of Spot.us.

I am writing this post physically exhausted but emotionally charged. I feel like a lion. As if I could talk down the curmudgeonist of curmudgeons. Not because I know the answer(s) - but because if we can't even talk those people down, then we might as well just crawl into a whole and give up. F- that! We are moving forward with or without them.

The answers are out there in every startup (journalism focused or otherwise), community, blog, micro-blogging, micro-financing and CMS on the web. The internet is ours for the taking if we only reach out and grab it with as many hands as possible.

Breathe deeply. This stuff is good for what ails you.

$50 to the first API participant to out this newspaper exec.

I will send a fresh $50 bill to the first participant of the API Newspaper Crisis summit to out this guy or gal:

One participant expressed the lone view that the crisis was cyclical, not structural, and that hefty cost-cutting is all that is required to tide companies over until there is recovery.

Seriously. We need to know who's forgotten to sip from the clue bottle for the past five years. This isn't checkbook-journalism. It's public service journalism, with a reward.

This is what's killing the news business: piracy!

[caption id="attachment_521" align="alignnone" width="424" caption="Fully-licensed stock photo, arrrrrrrrr!"][/caption]

The AP is again trying to blame bloggers for bringing about the downfall of the news business. In an article yesterday, AP reports the findings of a recent study by Attributor Corp. which claims that 1.5 times more people read pirated articles than legitimate articles, housed at their originating organization, or at a fully-licensed AP site.

But it's not all gloom and doom. Attributor sees a Step Three: Profit! lining in that cloud:

However, the problem, flagged by copyright cop Attributor Corp., could turn into a golden opportunity if media companies figure out a way to mine advertising revenue from the traffic flocking to their pirated stories posted on blogs and other sites.

Attributor, which makes software that trolls the Internet for copyright violations, estimates the average Web publisher could collect more than $150,000 in additional revenue by selling ads alongside its unlicensed material.

It's an unscientific estimate, based on an assumption that advertisers would pay $1 for every 1,000 pages of unauthorized material viewed on Web sites that aren't owned by the copyright owners.

If anything, Attributor believes its calculations understate the opportunity for fleeced publishers. The Redwood City-based company already is working with a few media companies that could generate more than $1 million in annual advertising by enforcing their online copyrights, said Rich Pearson, Attributor's vice president of marketing.

The problem, aside from still not understanding the benefit of having thousands of blogs pointing to your content? The excerpt above counts as piracy for the benefit of the study.

Attributor's study, conducted from Sept. 12 through Oct. 12, reviewed 30 billion Web pages hosting copies of stories from more than 100 major Web sites. None of the sites belonged to Attributor's current customers. After excluding all properly licensed content, Attributor then discarded any page that copied less than 50 percent or fewer than 125 words of a copyrighted story.

Oops. Just upped the word count again.

If Attributor - and the AP - wanted to find actual piracy, they should look for whole-article lifting. That happens every day, and should be attacked and stopped.

But focusing only on the actual pirates wouldn't get them to the big shocking number they want, to make their wrong-headed point, now would it?

Drain, circled?

Alan Mutter, The Newsosaur, returns with another smack-in-the-face post this morning, which analyzes the numbers from 12 newspaper companies and notes, with some horror, how much faster profits are falling than revenues.

The average profitability of newspapers tumbled 18½ times faster than sales fell in the third quarter of this year, according to an analysis of a dozen companies that segment their financial statements in sufficient detail to isolate the performance of their newspaper divisions.

In a three-month period when advertising and circulation sales among the 12 publishers dropped by an average of 10.3% from the prior year’s level, the average operating profits of the group in the third quarter plunged by a staggering 198.3%.

What I appreciate about Mutter's posts is how he 1) does original reporting and 2) often bases that reporting on numbers.

Numbers may prompt emotion, but they're not emotional themselves. They tell an ugly story, but there's little doubt that the story is true.

For at least a year, if not longer, it's been clear to anyone who would look at the numbers that the old cliche is especially true now: Newspapers can't simply cut their way to profit. There needs to be a reset of the business, a fresh look at the business model and the cost structure.

There will be more cuts, but if they're not strategic cuts, executed as part of a rebuilding process, the blood will be wasted and, like Tribune's payday loans to itself, merely forestall the inevitable.

But if the business (or just one brave paper) doesn't heed the warnings of such events as the recent CUNY summit on business models or (one would hope) this week's API summit, then the circling of the drain is only going to accelerate once the advertising money starts drying up in Q1.

Dispatches from behind the locked doors of the API Summit

Mark Potts brings news of a rogue liveblog that made it through the virtual razor-ribbon today at the super-secret API newspaper crisis summit in Reston.

Big ups to Chuck Peters, CEO of The Gazette Company in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for 1. knowing how to use Twitter and coveritlive.com to get the news out fast attempt to bring more participants into the room, even if only virtually and 2. having the guts to do it, at the risk of the rolled eyes and possibly hostile glares of his CEO co-summiteers.

Chuck Peters:  Just cutting costs is most likely "incorrect action", without reengineering to meet key consumer needs.

Chuck Peters:  Do you agree with Steve Yelvington that we have "painted ourselves into a corner" by following our success, like GM?   Check out http://www.yelvington.com/node/501

Peters kept the news conversation flowing for several hours, eventually fielding questions and suggestions from participants on the liveblog and on Twitter. It ultimately became impossible for one person to both participate in the conference and field all the questions and suggestions flowing through his liveblog. Too bad the room wasn't filled with others such as Yelvington, Potts, Jarvis and others to bring some perspective and other voices.

But for now, Chuck Peters, your colleagues and friends salute you. And congratulations for making it out alive!

UPDATE: What kind of coverage can you expect to get when 50 newspaper CEOs gather in one place to discuss the future of desperately struggling industry? Apparently, once you get past one brave soul with laptop and an EVDO card and some media-bloggers outside of the mainstream media, not much. Run a Google search for "American Press Institute" and, as of this writing at least, there's nothing. Search the Romenesko blog - the industry gossip and tip sheet - and there's nothing, not even a link to Chuck Peters's liveblog.

What's wrong with the U.S. newspaper industry? In this case, a stunning lack of curiosity, it would seem.

UPDATE 2: Made a few edits based on Chuck Peters's comments below. I still think what he did today was great, but if he chooses to not call it strictly reporting, I'll abide by that.

Quiet day in Zero Percent Idle land

I spent my day on Twitter today, arguing about Jeff Jarvis (Me: generally pro) and learning about the Higher Ed Web space, where I'll be focusing my daily efforts, starting tomorrow, in my new position with Johns Hopkins University.

I will still blog here as well, though things might continue to be a bit quiet for a few days as I get my bearings at my new office on the waterfront in Fells Point. Unless you count my time in the World Trade Center (Baltimore!) at The Inner Harbor (and, on balance, I don't), I've never worked in an area that was actually interesting and loaded with good places to eat and with a real, non-chain coffee shop within a few minutes of my desk. So this should be fun.

Until I get back, look for me in 140-character chunks, on Twitter.

The newspaper biz pokes a thumb in the eyes of those trying to help

One of the most tireless supporters of fixing the news business is Jeff Jarvis. But today, you can practically hear the frustration and resignation in his voice as he describes the API's closed-door conference:

What they should be doing is asking for help, ideas, perspectives, models, worldviews, and suggestions from outside their industry.

Instead, they will be “a facilitated discussion of concrete steps the industry can take to reverse its declines in revenue, profit and shareholder value.”

If they haven’t figured out those steps by now, I’d say getting them into a room together isn’t going to do it.

If you've lost Jarvis, you just may have lost the war.

Saving newspapers from the scrap heap: a plan

So the American Press Institute has declared a national emergency, grabbed the newspaper industry by the lapels and summoned its leaders to a hotel ballroom the API campus in Reston Virginia.

The API Summit on Saving an Industry in Crisis happens on November 13th. Here's what they're saying about it:

The summit conference will be a discussion on the theory, practice and application of techniques of corporate renewal. Facilitating the discussion will be James B. Shein, Ph.D., a former turnaround CEO for several companies and currently clinical professor of management and strategy at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Prof. Shein will lay out for us:

• The predictable path to decline that our industry is taking


• How to determine where an organization is on that path


• Strategies for reversing the decline.

All discussion will be on a non-attribution basis. At the end of the day, participants will have a greater understanding of available tools for engineering the renewal of our industry, and a shared vision of the way forward.

Lauren Rich Fine of paidcontent.org, recently made the intriguing point that, until newspapers start forcing advertisers to take a hard look at interactive, the industry will remain locked in the same 10-20% range for interactive revenue as a slice of the whole pie. She suggests killing the print edition, as painful as it will be, to be the bitter but necessary medicine that will start the healing.

I wonder, though, if there isn't a bridge to that future that allows for a hybrid print-online model that would be worth discussing at the API summit. So, with all the hubris I can muster, herewith is my straw man for the publishers in Reston later this week.

1. Combine all your staffs. If you have an interactive team, a community newspaper team, an online entertainment product team, a TV interactive team and a print newsroom, put 'em all together. You're going to need a multi-disciplined content team for the plan I'm proposing.

2. Pour out a 40 for your beloved daily broadsheet. Here's your new product mix:

• Daily free tabloid, limited to 48-60 pages. (Editorial/Ad mix 50/50 or 45/6555) It's not time to give up on print. The readers you have aren't ready and lots of your advertisers aren't ready. By printing a Monday-Friday news tab, you continue to serve their immediate needs, while keeping a significant piece of the print revenue pump flowing. Assuming you do a good job of it, and you actually pick up readers through a combination of smart editorial focus and zero-friction for pickup through the free price-tag, you could very well get into the kind of scarcity-pricing that is common in television and radio. When demand from advertisers increases, you don't add pages; you raise the prices on the ad spaces you have.


• Weekly Magazine, paid, 100 pages or more. (Editorial/Ad mix 60/40) This is where you publish your best print work. Think of this as a Newsweek for your local market. It's the publication that doesn't get recycled at the end of the day; it sticks around for a week (or longer). For years have been telling daily newspaper publishers that they don't have time to read a paper every day, that they felt guilty dumping so many unread papers. This solves that, providing the insight and perspective that only a major newsroom can, at a print frequency more attuned to the needs of modern readers. (Big question to be solved: how to carry inserts, a huge part of weekend revenue. Should this be a standard magazine size, poly-bagged, or would a stitched, tabloid-sized publication work? Need to balance the revenue needs with the shelf-life objectives for the publication.)


• Significantly enhanced digital presence. A 24/7 digital newsroom is a given. Everybody who is in your newsroom - with the possible exception of the page designers - works for digital first. This is where you will meet the promise to your local market of being the preeminent local news organization, reporting news and data in whatever digital form your market needs it, including enhanced phone delivery, consumer-searchable databases, open APIs into your reporting and datastream, and an aggressive program of outreach to the rest of the local web in your market. And, yes, web sites. Not just one uber-site (though that's welcome), but also a family of niche-focused thin sites that meet the unique needs and desires of your markets. These thin sites, built around events databases and social media tools, can be run by a single reporter-blogger who's passionate about a topic that ma

Even writing this, I can think of a dozen arguments for why this is not the perfect answer. Good. Because these aren't times for perfection. These are times for experimentation. The readership trend and the revenue trend are both heading in the same direction. They'll eventually hit zero if we do nothing. But with the right attitude and a little bit of risky behavior, I believe both of those trends can improve.

Why people had to have a paper today, and what does that tell us about a business model?

[caption id="attachment_452" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Photo by Adam Fagan"][/caption]

I'm hearing and reading a lot today from people, largely inside the newspaper business, who say today's coast-to-coast sellout of newspapers proves that people really do respect the power of the newspaper and that the public maintains an emotional connection with the paper that lives just below the surface, ready to be reborn with the right stimulus.

I think that overreaches. I do, however, believe we were shown some key facts today that just might serve as guideposts for newspapers looking to pump some life back into the print edition. Here's what I believe we saw:

If you have created something people want...

And if it better suits their purposes in paper form than in electronic form...

Then they will buy your paper.

Notice there's nothing in there about emotional connections or even journalism. The people buying papers today had an emotional connection with Barack Obama, not the paper. They used the paper as a permanent, undeniable record of the moment. Look how many people you can find in flickr posing with the paper, in the mirror image of a hostage photo taken to prove the captive was still alive on a particular day. The paper better serves this purpose than a print-out of a web page. It's more real, it's cheap, and it is easily portable through time.

Of course, we all joked that this solves the newspaper industry's business model crisis: simply have Barack Obama win the election every single day from now until the end of time. Funny. But we need to ask how we can fulfill the logical flowchart above in smaller ways on a daily basis.

We spend so much time thinking about how to make digital better than print, but if we're going to keep print alive or even turn it around, we need to ask ourselves in what ways can print be a better delivery vehicle than digital? Are there ways in which the daily paper can better suit some readers' need than digital can? And, if so, is that how we are focusing our newspaper efforts?

What do you think?

Newspapers are *gasp* selling out today

[caption id="attachment_436" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="New Yorkers queue to buy newspapers, 11/05/2008. Photo by Jeremy Zilar."][/caption]

Barack Obama may have ushered in the future, but one of his coattails has a distinct must of the past: heavy print newspaper sales.

Brian Stelter of the New York Times tweets: "I'm hearing that we're printing another 50,000 papers this afternoon for the P.M. rush."

A friend in the DC area tells me papers are sold out, but then cautions "Today may be one of the few days left this century where a lot of people cared about having a newspaper"

But, as Steve Outing says, on Twitter, "Lots of print newspaper copies sold today. Great short-term boost, but souvenir sales won't save the industry. What's next could be sad."

Take the windfall when you can, of course, but don't think this is anything but a souvenir grab.

Update: Steve Outing reports the San Francisco Chronicle is selling "commemorative" issues at a hefty markup. Also The Sun's Gus Sentementes tweets that The Washington Post and Atlanta Journal-Constitution are also running afternoon reprints/editions.

Update 2: If you'd rather just print your own, there's a good collection here, chosen from a design perspective. And, as always, The Newseum has a comprehensive collection of front pages as well, though their flash module on the home page can't be linked, so knock yourself out.

Update 3: Lots of good stuff on flickr. Who knew newspapers were the new sexy?

One more: Khoi Vinh has (of course) a nice shot and story about the reaction inside the New York Times to word that people were lining up for copies of the print edition: "People working on that floor hadn’t noticed yet that the line was forming, and when they realized its purpose, a feeling of delight swept over the newsroom like the friendliest wildfire I’d ever seen. Reporters, editors, photographers, everyone started clapping, hooting and hollering that people still find the newspaper valuable enough to wait dozens of people deep in line for their chance to buy a copy."

RIP banners, hello video

Do you miss the Camel Cigarettes advertising card just below the anchor's head on the evening news? How about long-form testimonial ads for hair tonic in your newspaper? Mitch Miller-style singalong jingles on the radio?

No? Then don't wring your hands too much over the latest report from Borrell Associates (previewed by Terry Heaton, and available now from the Borrell site) which essentially begins to carve the headstone for traditional online banner advertising. Banners were great as a transitional medium - something to help advertisers and consumers alike get their heads around the notion of digital advertising - but they've never been a good idea in the long run. Endlessly looping enticements to punch a monkey aren't going to wind up in the Advertising Hall of Fame. Or rather, if they do, they'll be there in the same ironic sense that reprints of Ronald Reagan hyping Chesterfield Cigarettes are - as a head-shaking reminder of how wrong we went.

But do read the Borrell report when it's available. And note this: Streaming A/V - AKA video advertising. Borrell projects it to be up, in huge numbers. 37% locally, and 138% nationally. And, given the higher rate such ads command, this is promising news indeed for a business in which print advertising continues to grope around desperately for its fainting-couch. The numbers are still small in comparison, but they're the ones that are moving quickly in the right direction.



One recommendation to capitalize on this change: hire a video shooter/editor. At The Sun, this hire, which we made in 2007, paid for itself many times over with the production of local, long- and short-form video advertising. Immediately. And, from all indications, this category continues to grow dramatically. Local "newspapers" are best poised to capture this growth in demand for streaming A/V, but only if they can work with their advertisers to turn this pent-up demand into production.

Don't mourn the passing of banners. Celebrate the arrival of the next wave of smarter, more engaging local and national online advertising. And get out there and sell.

Crowdsourcing just got real

Today is election day in the U.S. And, for social media, it's a signal day as well as people across the country report their votes by text, by video, by photo and by tweet.

The effort that strikes me as the most valuable is TwitterVoteReport.com, which is attempting to be a real-time report on conditions at polling places across the country. Here's hoping their servers can handle it.

12:18 pm UPDATE: The site's been down for some time now, so, despite a valiant effort, perhaps it's premature to call this the first great crowdsource project - at least as a live report. From what I can tell, though, data collection continues so, once the server issues get fixed, this will still hold as a useful piece of the historic record.

5:01 pm UPDATE: What's worse? That I had a HOWLER of a typo on this page all day (actually, it's worse than a typo - I just misspelled a word I know well (crowdsourcing spelled as croudsourcing, ugh) for some reason)? Or that nobody noticed? Or cared? Anyway, at least Twittervotereport.com is back up and working well.

Thinking of the journalist as a DJ instead of a curator.

[caption id="attachment_388" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Photo by Thomas Hawk"][/caption]

Jeff Jarvis points to what may be a better analogy for the role of a modern journalist: A nightclub DJ.

Previously, I'd suggested journalists need to become a curator, but I agree that the messier, noisier role of a nightclub spinner is closer to what journalists do as they run toward constant deadlines, and serves as a less fussy example than curator. Elevator speech: changed.

The original article, in French, translates to something like this (thanks to my daughter Anna for helping Google with some of the idioms):

The job of the press is redefined by new technologies and new relationships with readers, listeners and viewers. The new journalist acts as a filter, a "packageur" of information produced by multiple sources and heterogeneous sources (other media, agencies, experts, witnesses, fans).

Information is no longer a product, it became a process, it is no longer an object it is a service and the media become facilitators. (This does not mean that the report or the investigation died, it simply means that this activity, extremely expensive, can no longer be their only activity. Exclusive content is a loss leader, a product for "the reputation...")

The whole article is here.

New Business Models for News: Rebuilding the Newsroom

[caption id="attachment_383" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Photo by John Smock, CUNY"][/caption]

At the CUNY summit last week, I was assigned to the group that looked at rethinking our newsrooms to meet the current financial imperatives. Or, as someone wryly named us, "the cost-cutting group."

But, as Chris O'Brien, one of the thought-leaders in that group, notes in his excellent distillation of the day's themes and discussions, it was less about the wild slashing that's going on now in newsrooms large and small, and more about rebuilding a newsroom suited to the needs and challenges of 2008 and beyond.

We took the approach of essentially creating a new news organization from the ground up. But the other way to look at this question is to ask: How would you make a current newsroom more efficient? After leaving the discussion, a number of things occurred to me that should be explored:

1. Use templates for the print paper. Spend less money on designing the paper every day and use that money elsewhere. Newspapers have been trying to design their way out of their problems for years, and it hasn't worked. I don't think this something print readers think about. They want substance and content, not more pictures.

2. Cull circulation. Most newspapers are underwriting a chunk of their circulation to fight churn. What if you stopped spending so much money trying to sign up new subscribers? That costs a lot of money. This would require a change in ad rates. But I think it might save costs in the long run.

3. Reduce editors. I love editors, but it seems a lot of content, especially shorter stories, could be posted directly the Web. Many newspapers now let reporters post to blogs without editing. Why not the main site?

4. Newsroom salaries. I'm not sure yet how I feel about this, but it would seem that how we pay people needs to be rethought. Some online news sites pay employees by traffic they generate. That's ruthless, but still, I wonder if that might work for some online jobs at newspapers?

There's much more, here at Chris's Next Newsroom project.

We still talk about circulation because circulation still counts

In a letter posted to Romenesko (no comments allowed, otherwise I'd just post this there), Matt Baldwin of MediaNews Group wonders why there's so much focus on reporting declining reporting newspaper circulation instead of celebrating the much more robust overall audience, including online, which has been exploding with growth in recent years.

He's right, to a point. We do tend to dwell on the audited newspaper circulation numbers when they are reported twice yearly. But we do it largely because those are numbers that can directly affect a news organization's ability to grow revenue. If circulation is up, newspapers traditionally have been able to charge more for ads. If it's down, as it has been consistently in recent years, it adds to the revenue crisis by devaluing the printed product.

I'm a cheerleader for interactive, probably to a fault. After 12 years building the business, that's my bias. But as much as online growth matters, print circulation matters just as much at the moment. Yes, digital audience is growing and digital revenues will carry news organizations forward, but due to the competitive environment online, there's currently not nearly enough online income to make up for the shortfall on the print side.

So circ. matters, and I think it's right to pay attention to the numbers.

But I'm puzzled by this piece of Baldwin's argument:

Judging a newspaper by the number of copies in the market makes no more sense than counting the number of television sets to evaluate a TV station. To paraphrase a recent United States President, "It's the audience, stupid!"

Counting distributed copies strikes me as the best - if not only - way to judge the effectiveness of the printed paper in reaching an audience. It's not at all like counting TV sets; that analog would be counting newsstands or newspaper trucks. Counting circulation counts consumption of the print product. Whether a paper is paid or free, it's essentially valueless until someone picks it up and reads it.

Newspaper companies have finally been reaching new people in new ways in the past decade, people who are establishing habits that may not include the printed newspaper at all. Interactive continues to be a substantial success and a growth engine in most markets. I get as frustrated as Matt Baldwin does that the stories about circulation declines - often written by print newsrooms - neglect to mention the enormous upside opportunities. But it's far too soon to ignore print circulation - and its associated revenue - unless we're ready to make the leap to an all-digital future.

And that's a post for another day.

“Newspapers? Newspapers? Nah, doesn't ring a bell.”

This is one of those non-scientific polls that, nonetheless, is going to jam a shiv in the heart of anyone hoping there's as much love for the printed paper among "the people" as there is within a lot of newsrooms.

Lifehacker.com asked the question this morning: Will you miss newspapers when they're gone?

120 replies - and counting - later, the overwhelming answer: Not much.

From the outside, the answer seems obvious

Mark Andreessen - Netscape and Ning founder, Facebook board member and investor in live-video site Qik - interviewed on Portfolio.com, looks at the current newspaper revenue and circulation crisis and sees... opportunity:

If you were running the New York Times, what would you do?
Shut off the print edition right now. You’ve got to play offense. You’ve got to do what Intel did in ’85 when it was getting killed by the Japanese in memory chips, which was its dominant business. And it famously killed the business—shut it off and focused on its much smaller business, microprocessors, because that was going to be the market of the future. And the minute Intel got out of playing defense and into playing offense, its future was secure. The newspaper companies have to do exactly the same thing.

The financial markets have discounted forward to the terminal conclusion for newspapers, which is basically bankruptcy. So at this point, if you’re one of these major newspapers and you shut off the printing press, your stock price would probably go up, despite the fact that you would lose 90 percent of your revenue. Then you play offense. And guess what? You’re an internet company.

The past 12 years had nothing but bad news for print circulation

As industry observers such as Alan Mutter and Mark Potts try to sort out the meaning of the latest newspaper circulation numbers, and what they mean in context of the past 10-15 years, I thought it would be instructive to look at the numbers from ABC for one market, my local market newspaper, The Baltimore Sun.

The Sun is typical of a mid-metro market newspaper in that even with the recent news, it remains the dominant media source for news, information and advertising in its market, but it has seen its position slip greatly over the years. When that slippage is reported in 6-month increments of a certain percentage, year-over-year, it's hard to understand exactly how bad the story is. But, over time, the numbers are bracing.

The oldest reports currently available from ABC are from 1996, so that will be the base year.



In 1996, the Baltimore DMA had 906,100 occupied households. In the September, 1996 Audit Report, The Sun reports an average of 320,986 daily papers and 483,971 Sunday papers. In pure penetration numbers, that represents 35% for the daily and 58% for the Sunday. For every household in the Baltimore DMA, slightly more than one in three was touched by a daily Sun and a bit more than half of the households took a Sunday Sun.

Fast-forward to this week. Using population figures from the March 2008 Publisher's Statement (not reported yet for September), there are 1,018,455 occupied households in the Baltimore DMA. In the September, 2008 figures reported by The Sun to ABC, the daily average for the paper was 218,923 and 350,640 on Sunday. By these numbers, daily household penetration had slipped to 21% and Sunday household penetration was at 39%.

Keeping in mind that the overall number of households in the Baltimore DMA grew 12% from 1996-2008, during this same period household penetration of the paper in the market dropped 40% on average on weekdays, and 33% on Sundays. While the Baltimore market added 112,355 households in that period, The Sun ended the period distributing 102,000 fewer papers on a typical weekday and 133,000 fewer papers on a typical Sunday.

Of course, in the same period, The Sun's online audience went from nothing to more than three million visitors a month, from zero page views (The Sun's web operation launched in September 1996) to more than 37 million a month in 2008. So it can be argued - credibly - that The Sun's readership actually increased during the 12 years beginning in 1996.

But as robust as the online revenue stream is at The Sun and at similar metro news operations in other markets, the vast majority of revenue is still pegged to print. And when you look at the numbers across the past 12 years, it's clear that local newspapers would be in a business-model crisis even without over-leveraged corporate owners or the current shaky economy.

Every indicator available to us says that print is not now and will not be the powerhouse driver of revenue it's been historically. You can't have your influence drop by 33-40% in 12 years and continue as if nothing's changed. Slicing dollars and people off the cost structure isn't enough. Newspapers need to start over, with a business model that acknowledges that the print cash cow has run dry and the digital future is still exchanging dollars for pennies as the audience and advertising moves.

Efforts like Jeff Jarvis's recent summit on New Business Models for News and the News Innovation web site are good starts, but it's time that we start treating this like the crisis it is.