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.

Can an InfoValet guide us to a business model?

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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.

“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.

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.

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.

New Business Models for News: Rebuilding the Newsroom

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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.

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?