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.

Most-read, or most-reviled?

William Lobdell, who previously wrote a trenchant and sadly accurate critique of the state of papers in general and the LA Times in particular, has looked at the "Most popular" feature at local web sites and decided the list of stories indicates that there's no future for news online.

I think he needs to take a deep breath and consider what's really bugging him. Is it that people don't care about news? Or is it that they don't care about what he thinks is the right news?

For 12 years I studied the logs of what people were reading locally (at baltimoresun.com), and for the most part, the results are heartening.

People want exactly what local news organizations are set up to best provide for them: local news and sports. There will be the occasional outlier about Britney or Clay or some heinous and gruesome murder in another state, but most of what rises to the top of daily, monthly and yearly readership patterns is the bread-and-butter journalism that most newspeople say they care most about.

So why's William upset

The top-viewed stories don't reflect the work of 600-plus journalists busting their asses around the world.

He's right. A dispatch from South Africa or Tibet in the local paper's web site isn't exactly going to drive big numbers. But report on a local crime spree or a controversial piece of local legislation and you can almost hear the page-view counters clicking loudly.

This is a good thing. Local readers want local news primarily. They certainly expect their local news web site to have all the national and world news, in case they need it, but that's not why readers go to latimes.com or baltimoresun.com. They're there for the news that matters most to them locally. CNN.com and wsj.com are just a click away and do it better anyway. But the one thing they can't do well - the one thing local newspapers still have, for now - is local news.

It's not that the readers don't appreciate the efforts of the newsroom. It's just that they appreciate the efforts a whole lot more when what makes it into print is locally relevant, unique and useful.

Did news media fail us at a critical moment?

Two clear thinkers about journalism reach a similar conclusion: at best, the mainstream media contributed little to the understanding of the current economic situation. At worst, they repeated the uncritical reporting of the so-called "March to War" in 2002-2003 and added to the panic state.

Here's Howard Owens:

What you rarely found or heard was any serious questioning of whether the crisis was anywhere near the proportion George W. Bush said it was, or if the bailout was really necessary, or if the bailout would work, or if, maybe, the bailout might make things actually worse.

...

It could be argued that the American people, who pressured representatives to reject the bailout, saw through the clamor and clouds, but if you spend time reading comments on newspaper web sites, angry constituents reacted more viscerally than logically.  If you support the reform, you should be concerned that the lack of depth in news coverage also failed to clearly communicate why the bailout was necessary and wise.

And here's Jeff Jarvis:

I’m reminded of Bob Garfield’s chaos scenario for advertising, in which he argued that the old media world would crumble before the new media world was ready for marketers and advertising dollars would fall into the crevice between. That is what is happening with our political and financial and industrial and journalistic leadership. The old is crumbling fast — and angry voters yesterday helped push it over the cliff. But what now?