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.

New Business Models for News: The opening salvo

I've been remiss in posting this. Here's Jeff Jarvis last week kicking off the New Business Models for News conference. This is part one of two. You'll find the second part linked at the end of part one.



This conversation could not have come at a more critical time. Circ. is down. Revenue is down. Staffing is down. If there is going to be journalism in the future, it's time to change the model now.

Helping local businesses to grow: A follow-up to the New Business Models for News summit

Thanks to the New Business Models for News summit organized by Jeff Jarvis at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, I have a spiral notebook full of ideas flagged for followup, which I plan to address on this blog.

This morning, a quick one, courtesy of data from Eric Stein of Google.

As we wrestle with the inevitable and undeniably secular disappearance of classified revenue from newspapers and, by extension, their web sites, the obvious question is "How do I replace those dollars?"

The answer for a lot of us has been local - helping local businesses to grow. And, according to Stein, that potential for growth is just beginning.

By federal estimates, there are 23 million small businesses in the U.S. Of that number, 6-7 million have one or more employees; the rest are sole-proprieterships.

And yet, most of them - in fact the vast majority - have yet to create a web site to promote their businesses. We can't help them drive traffic. Google can't help them drive traffic. In the digital world, they don't exist.

So what are local newspapers doing to help? As the largest single sales and marketing organizations in our markets, what can we do to reach out to the millions of going concerns that need to reach the massive and targetable audience we have?

Who's doing a good job out there of helping local businesses to reach their audiences? Who's using the pricing advantage of digital media to show local businesses that they can prosper and even grow in a down market?

What are we doing to help local businesses in our markets?

Newspaper circulation: Now can we call this a crisis?

This is not exactly a surprise, but it's disappointing nonetheless.

Circulation is down, again, across the board at U.S. newspapers. According to the latest figures released this morning from the Audit Bureau of Circulation, overall daily circulation for the period ending September, 2008 was down 4.6%, and Sunday was down 4.8%

And these numbers were compiled before the financial panic of 2008. That will be taken into account in the numbers reported in March, 2009.

It's time for creativity. Which major metro will transition to free distribution first? Who will convert to all-electronic? In any other business, this steady drumbeat of decline every six months would surely lead to a change in the gameplan that did more than redesign the packaging. Hint: A crisis gives you the cover to make bold moves, and this certainly qualifies as a crisis.

Finding the next business model for news

The theme of CUNY's "New Business Models for News" summit didn't emerge contextually throughout the day. It was staring everyone in the face from the multiple monitors spread throughout the newsroom taken over by about 125 industry thinkers and leaders yesterday. It was this:

"Do what you do best. Link to the rest"

Linking in this case could be the literal A HREF hyperlink, but was often also about thinking about new ways to focus on the core and find ways to either jettison non-core (leaving it to others to pick it up) or find links through outsourcing, freelancing and mobilizing armies of bloggers and citizen journalists.

Jeff Jarvis, the chief provocateur for the day and organizer of the summit, set the tone early. "There won't be any silver bullets today," he cautioned. "If there were, we'd have already used them."

The goal of the day was to provide an opportunity to start an intentional and ongoing conversation about how to rethink the business model for news gathering and reporting, largely at daily newspapers, but also in television and in national niche media. How do you take a business that is built on the scarcity model - there's only one or two newspapers per town, allowing for the growth of eight- and nine-digit annual revenue streams - and rethink it for an age of information-ubiquity?

I won't even attempt a blow-by-blow of the day when so much of it is available for watching and reading on the News Innovation web site. Also check out the contemporaneous Twitter stream. But here are some random highlights that jump out from my notes:

Edward Roussel of The Telegraph: If you're a newspaper company, your technology sucks. Outsource it!

Dave Morgan, formerly of Tacoda: It's time for newspapers to face reality. It's a market problem, a business model problem and a cost problem. "Prepare for disassembly." Newspapers, he said, need to disaggregate and start thinking about reporting, distribution, ad sales and direct marketing, printing and digital as different businesses and treath them accordingly.

Morgan on leveraging the existing structure: Newspapers have the best marketing and sales organizations in their markets. They could become strong local ad agencies if they're untethered. Printing is either an area of opportunity - if newspaper do a whole lot more of it - or an albatross, that they should outsource.

Morgan on Digital: Making digital a sidecar to the newspapers is killing digital. Only divided (as businesses) can newspapers and digital endure.



Michael Rosenblum, Rosenblum TV: Both in the larger session and in the break-out, Rosenbloom hammered at the notion that it was absolute folly for newspapers to hire any journalists who were not absolutely adept at the full suite of digital reporting skills, including photography and videography.

Adam Davidson, NPR and creator of the excellent Planet Money: Respect people's intelligence.

Samir Arora, Glam: News organizations need to be curators of content. The network has more value to the consumer than the brand.

Upendra Shardanand, Daylife. Before long, everyone will be a news publisher. How can you offer the best navigation of the world beyond your own content? News organizations need to do a better job of curating the world around their content.

Jay Rosen, NYU: There is a wealth of information available that your connected and interested users would be happy to share with you to make your product better. Publications that get to this point start their days with inboxes full of great ideas. How to make this happen? 1. Be two-way in your approach to reporting. Invite contributions. 2. Be clear that you need people to help you and that you will use their contributions.

More to come on the topic and goals of the day, but it was an excellent first step. Thanks to CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and, of course, Jeff Jarvis.

Budget cuts hurting? Here are some free ideas to improve your news organization

The current topic at the Carnival of Journalism is:

What are small, incremental steps one can make to fuel change in their media organization?

(Yes, we’d all like to swing in our newsroom, lay some boot heels on chests, hoist the black flag and change everything by the end of business on Monday — but the reality is, that ain’t happening unless you have a couple buckets of cash to buy a paper of your choice and a rusty saber.) So what are some realistic, real-world examples of free (or cheap) ways you can help fuel change at your newsroom.

Spend 15 minutes with the links on this page. You'll get at least one idea you can use today.

And if I can talk my way into this party, here are some additional ideas I'd throw on the table:

1. Get to know local bloggers. Email them. Introduce yourself. Grab a coffee with. Link to them. You'll find they have a good pulse on the community. It may be a different pulse than yours, but that's a good thing. Be generous with your links to them, and you may find your organization with deeper tiest to the community.


2. Get in front of community groups. You and your reporters should be hanging with the Rotarians and the Community Organizers if you want to make a stronger connection with your local market. They're just as plugged-in as the bloggers, but may not be blathering on about it on their blog. This is also a great jumping-off point for efforts to create a more-focused Citizen Journalism effort. What if you gave a Flip Mino (customized with your logo and message) to a neighborhood organization or school in exchange for a promise of weekly upates?


3. Encourage corrections. At the end of your postings/articles, ask a question: Did we get it right? Include a link to a form to add corrections, clarifications, and suggestions for further reporting. Great ideas and deeper connections follow.


4. Encourage your reporters to think like curators. I've beat this particular drum previously, so I'll keep it short here. But you've got a roomful of subject-matter experts; having them just report is wasting more than half their brains.


5. Link. If you don't link, you're a dead-end.

Tweets of hope at daily newspapers

The revolution isn't always heralded by sweeping redesigns. Sometimes, it's just an unexpected bit of polite conversation. Like this:

Imagine that. A major metro newspaper thanking a small blog for a link. It's overcoat weather in hell, apparently.

And look at the second tweet: friendly, sensible advice! Why, if the newspaper could do this, maybe the story wouldn't be as dire next week when the September circulation figures are released.

I kid, but I think this stuff is great.

I'm seeing a lot more of this lately, as the people inside of large media organizations smash against the walls of expectation and intertia to create little surprises like The Sun's civil discourse, or Chicago Tribune's @coloneltribune character/feed on Twitter.



From what I hear, these aren't being slavishly tracked for ROI, but treated as little experiments in connecting with readers in news ways. Good.

Why the AP will change or die

Here's a shocker: An Associated Press editor thinks it's a bad idea for local news organizations to withdraw from the AP.

Really?

In an awfully one-sided report on E&P, AP's Kathleen Carroll says that going through with the move will burden local news organizations and their web teams, who will be unable to replace the service, not just in print, but in its multimedia offerings as well. "We are moving an ocean of content," she says.

That's great, but that doesn't address the chief complaint against the AP: that they charge their members (a lot) for the privilege of giving away their locally-unique content in exchange for access to commodity national and world news now available through other channels.

The Associated Press is a collective - owned by the member organizations (read: newspapers) that exists to facilitate the sharing of news across the borders of cities and countries. So far, so good. If it didn't exist, bloggers would probably be agitating for something like it.

But the problem is two-fold:

1. It was created at a time where its greatest benefit was carriage. Getting a news story or photo from halfway around the world was nothing short of a miracle. In 1849, when it was formed. Today, in the age of instant communication on the internet, the AP's primary function has been rendered moot.

2. It unfairly treats original reporting by (mainly) newspaper companies as a commodity, laundering stories wholesale so that they can be picked up by competing media outlets (television, radio, local and national internet competitors) easily and with a clean conscience. This means that a story that a local paper may invest a week of time reporting can be re-reported with no effort - and no attribution - by the local tv station.

And, for this privilege, the current contracts have the newspapers paying dearly.

In a time when local newspapers are struggling to convince their markets that they're valuable, the fact that the entire front page is leading the noon broadcast on Action News doesn't help make the case.

Ultimately, there is a crying need for news organizations to share content. I think, though, that moves like Tribune's to withdraw from the collective will become much more common in the coming months, as news organizations rethink the value of the AP in reaching the goal of better and more efficient news coverage. Also, bolder moves, such as those described by Scott Karp in his discussion of the link economy, may emerge as viable - and much less expensive - alternatives.

No matter what, the AP as we've known it, will not live to see 2010.

Newspapers: Unlock the vaults to readership and revenue

Go to a lot of online news sites and search the archive, and you'll soon hit a pay wall. If you want to dig into the history of a city, the richest repository of that information usually wants you to pay for the privilege, with one shining exception - The New York Times - which opened up vast swaths of its archive to free browsing.

For years, the argument that was floated against making news archives free was that newspapers had too much revenue at stake. People would surely pay a few dollars for access to articles they wanted. Once that was put to rest (the numbers, relative to even just the current online revenue at most papers are small), we moved on to another argument: It's too expensive to store all those articles.

Upon some poking and prodding, though, the expense turned out to be not the archiving of the articles and photos - after all, storage is as close to free as it's ever been, and getting cheaper every day - but backing them up. The expensive hosting providers many news organizations use for their reliability and speed also charge usurious bandwidth rates for backup. And when you're backing up years of data every single day, that does, in fact, get expensive.

So why not this: Don't back it up. Or, just back it up monthly or quarterly. Having a 99.9% chance of an article from 2003 being available is infinitely better than not having it available at all, which is the case now when many newspapers simply throw away old articles after a few weeks.

Anyway, TechDirt (via Journerdism) has an interesting look at what opening up the archives has meant for the New York Times. There's not a lot of new data here, but the conclusion is still valid: newspaper archives are a readership (and, if you're doing your job right, revenue) goldmine.

Thieves steal printed newspapers to keep story from being published, forget completely about the internet

This is right up there with video of liquor store thieves falling through drop-ceilings.

Apparently some person or persons wanted to "stop the presses" on a story about a college homecoming queen who had been outed as a former pole-dancer. So they stole 3,500 copies of the student newspaper that reported the story.

The story you can read here. Online. Even though there are no more papers.

Police did not say whether their chief suspects are fusty, old-school reporters and editors who believe a story does not count until it's ink on paper.

If your site can't handle inbound Drudge traffic, are you really in the news business when it matters?

Seriously. If your calendar says 2008 or later, and you're a metro-market news site, and you can't handle a wave of traffic from Drudge or Digg or Slashdot or any of the popular linkfarms, you should rethink your server budget.

(Yeah. I know. I should be so lucky.)

UPDATE: I questioned posting this, because I thought it bordered on unfair. But now two hours later, the same article on tampabay.com is still being linked by Drudge and is still making their server swoon. Unsolicited advice: make it a static page for now.

UPDATE 2: As of 12:15 pm, the site appears to be stabilized. Glad they're back.

Just because you have a tool, doesn't mean you have to always use it

I like what two Liverpool newspapers are doing: geotagging certain news stories and plotting them on a map.

But I like what they're not doing even better: tagging every single story.

“We don’t use them for everything; there would be no point in geotagging Liverpool town hall for every council story, for example. But for location-specific articles they work really well.

I don't know how many times I've heard the "everything would be geotagged to City Hall" argument against location metadata. Well, there you have it: just don't tag those stories.

If the location metadata adds to the story, use it. If it adds unnecessary complexity, don't

The map is here, though it seemed to be struggling with load when I checked last.

J-school wants geeks, will pay

J-schools are far from blameless for the lagging state of modern journalism, but at least Medill is doing something about it. Through an ad in the free version of Twitterific, I just saw that the school is actively recruiting programmers to apply for scholarships:

Medill believes that journalism is a key foundation for a functioning democracy and that in the 21st century, programmer/developers are enormously important to the future of journalism. So we have partnered with the Knight Foundation to create this scholarship program for people with strong technology skills who are interested in pursuing a journalism master's degree at Medill.

"The skills and insights that technology developers have are increasingly important to the analysis, delivery and accessibility of information needed in a democracy," said Rich Gordon, who teaches interactive journalism at Medill. "At the same time, the journalistic skills learned at a place like Medill can yield important ideas for applying technology in ways citizens will find relevant and engaging."

These are full scholarships to an expensive and prestigious journalism school and are the result of a partnership between Medill and the Knight Foundation. If you're a coder - or know one - this is definitely worth checking out.

If you had a working Wayback Machine, what would you tell yourself in 1998?

Pat Thornton, who blogs as The Journalism Iconoclast, posted a fun thought-puzzle the other day: If you could jump into the time machine and go back ten years, what would you tell yourself in 1998 about journalism, and where it's headed.

Here's my list, which is in no way complete. What's on yours?

--



I love time machines. I’m assuming I can take supporting documentation back with me to make the case.

The more obvious things are, well, obvious (Go live sooner. Link out liberally. Refer to the web from the paper. Put email addresses next to bylines. Don’t waste years thinking about paid content and registration). What follows are the tweaks I wish I could go back and make.

1. Save everything. Stop throwing away stories after two weeks. You’re burning history. And take a screen shot of the site every day. You’ll be glad you did.

2. Find geeks who love news. Pay them well. Ask them to start thinking about how to make all that saved data accessible and findable.

3. Establish a $50 fine for anyone in your organization that uses the phrase “capture eyeballs.” The web is not television. Though, you’ll be surprised to hear, it becomes a very efficient delivery device for video. Full-screen video. Does that make you think of possibilities? It should.

4. Don’t listen to the Big Iron guys in IT when they argue the relative merits of Sybase and Oracle. Ignore them, and don’t spend a penny on these programs. Instead, insist on free My SQL as your database.

5. Stop thinking about articles. Think data. Break articles into chunks of data.

6. Read Dave Winer. Pay close attention. He’s a bit of a nut, but if it’s 1998, almost everything he’s saying is right.

7. Digitize and curate your photo library. It’s a local treasure and worth tons of traffic. (This tip valid in 2008, as well)

8. In fact, open up the entire library for free searching. (”Preach The Long Tail” years before it’s written.)

9. Establish another $50 fine for the term “lock in.” The web is open and slippery. And that’s a good thing that will benefit you in the long run.

10. Teach your reporters to blog. Use Romenesko as the gateway drug.

11. Insist that each story created by the newsroom have attached meta-data, including topic keywords and location. Let the guys from #2 use it in amazing and surprising ways.

12. Repeat after me: “Publishing online counts as publishing. You don’t have to save it for the paper.”

13. You’ve incubated the web group separate from the newsroom to allow a culture and a business to emerge. Good. But now you need to start planning to merge into one news operation that publishes for multiple platforms. Don’t wait much longer for this.

14. Google these names at least weekly in the next few years: Craig Newmark, Jimmy Wales, Nick Denton, Jason Calacanis, Mark Cuban, Kevin Rose. Whatever they’re up to, pay attention, don’t scoff, and borrow liberally.

15. Talk to your users. Add bulletin boards. Attach comments to stories. Participate. That “connection” you’ve always wanted with your readers? The one you pay focus group leaders thousands of dollars to fake? It’s yours for the asking, and it’s free.

(SunSpot.net grab actually from 1997. See what I mean about saving your screenshots? I stopped before 1998, and the actual Wayback Machine has broken images on most of the pages.)

--

Got a better list? Go to Journalism Iconoclast and add to the discussion.

Great news: Tampa hates the Tribune redesign

On Monday, The Tampa Tribune joined the list of redesigned US newspapers. But Tampa, under editor Janet Coats, went farther with the rethinking than most, putting all the news and sports into one main news section on most weekdays.

Soon after the papers hit the street, though, the backlash began. Here's Coats, from their web site tonight:

On Monday, we asked you to tell us what you think about the Tribune's redesign, Boy did you take us up on that invitation.

In brief: a lot of people hated it. They called. They emailed. And they canceled. 300 cancellations and thousands of complaints.

So, why is this great news? Despite the fact that this made for a miserable week for everyone from the publisher down to the page designers, the passion that readers and subscribers demonstrated proved the strong connection between a paper and its readers.

The silver-lining here is the anger and outrage that readers displayed when they felt management at The Tribune had gone too far in tinkering with their paper. Their paper.

As long as readers still feel that proprietary sense of ownership, there's still hope for newspapers.

Given the newspaper industry assumption that each paper is shared by two or more readers, I wonder why nobody on the redesign team thought that shoving all the news and sports into one section might cause problems in a lot of subscribing households.

But the good thing is that in just four days, Tampa redesigned the redesign, and will be delivering the next iteration to readers tomorrow. They listened, they learned, they adjusted. Now it's back to the readers for their reaction.

The sky? Not falling.

Terry Heaton is also thinking about online advertising.

That’s a pretty healthy-looking chart, and I agree with the analysts who don’t believe that online advertising will crash and burn as a result of what’s happening in the financial markets. Advertising didn’t end during the great depression; in fact, creativity and innovation flourished, and that’s where we need to be today.

Boom. Bust. Boom.

I displayed the little totem pictured to the left in my office for the past 7-8 years as a constant reminder to myself and anyone who came to visit of how things aren't always what they seem. Flush times could simply be masking bad ideas and stupid money. Tough times can present opportunities to think different(ly).

The only constant is that, in the words of Don Ameche's character in the David Mamet movie, "things change."

Right now, we're all living through a big change. In a downturn, money dries up. People spend less. Businesses advertise less. News organizations struggle to cover their markets on less revenue.

But even in the current tough scenario, online looks to grow in the coming years. We'll see if the predictions hold, but recent prognostications by some key analysts, while ratcheting their projections downward, still hold out hope for mild improvement in digital ad revenues.

The problem is, of course, that these are just projections. You have to look only as far as last December to see how far ad projections can be off when conditions on the ground change.

But if we don't invest our efforts and our dollars where the growth is, we might as well pack up and go home.

Holovaty to jazz up Google? (He says no.)

According to Valleywag, journo-tech whiz Adrian Holovaty of Everyblock.org and all-around likable oracle may be headed to Google, presumably to do some non-evil journalistic data stuff.

Google wants to buy Holovaty's startup, we hear. Holovaty says that he's had no conversations with Google, but did have lunch with a friend at Google's campus last week, which he stresses was "a social matter." The effort to buy his venture — there's no "deal," Holovaty tells us — has hit some kind of unusual hitch. It's not clear what the holdup is.

This bears watching.

Edit to add: In the comments, Adrian points again to the Valleywag article where he "sets the record straight." He says he was on the Google campus for a social visit. Valleywag quotes him, then goes on to talk about some "hitch" in the deal that Holovaty says doesn't exist.

I'm going to err on the side of trusting Holovaty and call the Valleywag piece out for the unsourced bit of wishful thinking that it appears to be, until I see something more concrete.

(Original Holovaty photo by J.D. Lasica here)

The Daily Beast: Not perfect, but at least it knows it's on the web

Tina Brown's new venture launched yesterday, making this an impossibly late-to-the-party comment in today's feverish blog cycle, but I really like this about The Daily Beast:



It links. The Beast links, prominently.

That such a thing is noteworthy here at the tail end of 2008 is a sad commentary, but I'm going to be glass-half-full guy and celebrate it.

Gazing into NAA's 2009 crystal ball and seeing very different things

As he is wont to do, Alan Mutter, The Newsosaur, just rained on what little parade the Newspaper Association of America has to offer right now: A projection of revenue falloff of "only" 5.5% for 2008.

Mutter presents a credible anecdotal argument that any such projections are made of air, given the current swoon of the U.S. economy.

Fortunately, he didn't take a peek back at the NAA's 2008 projections, made back in December 2008. If he did, he'd be in an even worse mood:

Newspaper Association of America Business Analyst Jim Conaghan expects advertising revenue to decline only 1.2 percent in 2008, compared to 7 percent this year. That is to say that online revenue growth, which he predicts at 22 percent, will not quite cover continued losses of revenue from classifieds.

2008 Prediction: 1.2% down
2008 Actual: 11.5% down
2009 Prediction: 5.5% down
2009 Actual: Stay tuned, and buckle up

I'm still bullish on newspaper companies figuring out ways to grow the business in 2009, but the last place I'd look for reliable predictive data is the NAA.

Reports of Citizen Journalism's demise are, I hope, premature as well

The knock against Citizen Journalism all along has been this:

1. It's created by untrained professionals amateurs


2. It has no inherent credibility, until proven


3. It is not edited

We just had a whopper to, unfortunately, add credence to all three, with CNN's iReport site carrying a report that Steve Jobs had been hospitalized after a massive heart attack. Apple's stock took a brief dive once the report was posted.

But I'm going to be a contrarian here and say the greater blame goes to CNN.

If you are CNN, the most widely-known news brand in the world, and you create a system that allows anyone to post anything as news, you must anticipate that eventually, you'll get pranks. And worse.

Given that certainty, to not monitor such reports is nothing but a dereliction of journalistic duty.

There is much that Citizen Journalism can do to help to further the cause of all journalism, but CNN's "set it and forget it" approach will only serve to harm the cause.

It will be interesting to see how CNN reacts to this.

(Edited to fix a bit of sloppy writing in the ordered-list above. Thanks @ShawnKing on Twitter for pointing out what happens when unedited copy is rushed to publcation!)

:-/

Greenslade: Don't blame newsrooms for the decline in readership

The Guardian's Roy Greenslade often can be counted on for an interesting and accurate take on the state of journalism.

Just not today.

Today, in a stunning and sweeping mea non culpa, Greenslade, a journalism professor and former reporter and editor, looks at the shrinking audience for newspapers and echoes The Washington Post's Paul Farhi in a clear and ringing voice: "Don't blame us!"

There cannot be any doubt that journalists themselves - the reporters, sub-editors, photographers, feature writers, columnists, page designers - cannot be held responsible for either the financial woes of the industry nor for the public turning its back on the "products" that contain their work.

In case that's not clear enough, here it is more succinctly, in his own words: "It isn't our fault."

Greenslade correctly points out many of the other factors that come into play - including the general economic turmoil, bad management and changing media-consumption habits - but for him to say that the content itself has no part - no part at all - in the decline strikes me as ludicrous, and a marker for how deluded some still are.

Any other business with declining market share since The Eisenhower Administration would at least consider that the product might be part of the problem.

Otherwise, you're just blaming your audience for being too stupid to appreciate all you've done for them.

UPDATE: Steve Yelvington, as usual, has a thoughtful and reasoned take on this topic:

The deck is stacked against the newspaper, but newsrooms are not powerless victims in the grip of some irreversible cosmic force. There is still high demand for effective local mass advertising solutions. Newspapers can be that solution -- in fact, they could be the last mass medium standing.

But you can't do it with a 20 percent market penetration, and that's what you'll have if you continue producing a 1968 newspaper in 2008.

This "news" on NBC site is nothing but a cheap trick

Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I saw this on nbc.com:



...and I can't help thinking that the ad on the right - made up to look like a news update, right down to the "updated 8 min. ago," is horribly wrong. Is NBC so hard up for money that it'll allow its site to carry deceptive ads dressed up as fake news?

(Edit to add: ten minutes later and I can't get the ad to show up again, so maybe it just slipped through the cracks and someone at NBC killed it. That position seems to be filled with a lot of remnant advertising.)

The check is not in the mail

You know the old saying:

When you owe the bank $1,000 - and can't pay - you have a problem.

When you owe the bank $486 million - and can't pay - the bank has a problem.

This week, The Star Tribune told its lenders that they have a problem.