The Pew Research Center’s annual State of the Media Report paints a dismal picture of the condition of mainstream media – in particular broadcast and magazines – but Slate’s Matthew Yglesias says the report looks at the wrong things. Which side are you on?

There’s no question that Pew’s annual media audit and survey of 2,000 consumers is about as depressing as any of the 10 annual reports that the nonprofit media watchdog has completed. Among the lowlights:

• Nearly a third of U.S. adults have stopped using a news outlet because it no longer met their needs.
• That’s not surprising when you consider that low-cost sports, weather and traffic information now account for 40% of the content produced on the average local newscast.
• The population of full-time professional newsroom employees fell below 40,000 for the first time since 1978. It’s down nearly 30% from its 1989 high.
• In an election year, the declines in coverage were particularly evident. Live broadcast reports fell from from 33% of the news hole in 2007 to 23% in 2012. And 2007 was not an election year. Commentary and opinion, which are cheap to produce, now make up 63% of  news airtime on cable channels, while straight news reporting comprises only 37%.
• An examination of 48 recent evening and morning newscasts found that 20 led with a weather-related story. Weather coverage is cheap.
• Only about a quarter of statements in the media about the character and records of the presidential candidates originated with journalists, while twice that many came from political partisans. The report runs down a list of informational websites that political parties and advocacy groups have set up to influence media, but some are now actually becoming the media. Pew notes several examples of major news magazines that have carried partisan reports as part of their branded news stream.
• In that vein, Pew notes a 2008 analysis of Census Bureau data by Robert McChesney and John Nichols that found that the ratio of public relations workers to journalists tripled from 1.2-to-1 in 1980 to 3.6-to-1 in 2008. That gap has likely grown since then.
• In summary, “News organizations are less equipped to question what is coming to them or to uncover the stories themselves, and interest groups are better equipped and have more technological tools than ever,” Pew states.
• Incredibly (to us, at least), the public is mostly unaware that the news media is struggling. Only 39% of the 2,000 consumers surveyed said they have much awareness of the industry’s problems.

Newspapers actually come off pretty well in this year’s report. Thanks to paywalls, which are in place or in the works at one-third of U.S. newspapers, circulation held steady year-to-year. The New York Times said its circulation revenue now exceeds advertising revenue for the first time.

Warren Buffett (source: Wikipedia)

However, the long-term trends are still negative. Newspapers lose $16 in print ad revenue for every $1 in digital ad revenue gained, and that figure is up from $10-to-$1 in 2011. Equally ominous is that Facebook and Google are doing a better job of figuring out how to target digital advertising locally, which threatens one of the few pockets of revenue strength newspapers have left.

Because the long-term outlook is so bad, newspapers have become an attractive investment vehicle. Pew notes that value investor Warren Buffett has been snapping them up at a rapid clip because they are so cheap. The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News were bought for $55 million last year, which is 1/10 of the price they commanded in 2006.

Out of Mind

Perhaps the most surprising finding is the low public awareness of the news industry’s crisis, and that’s where Yglesias’ analysis on Slate is most interesting. “American news media has never been in better shape,” he states at the outset, using the Cypriot economic crisis as proof. We’re not sure the media itself is in great shape, but readers are doing fine.

Yglesias cites a “bounty” of online resources that provide context, analysis and even an interactive calculator that lets visitors try out different ideas for solving the island nation’s financial problems. It’s easier than ever to produce news using public sources and simple publishing tools, and the Internet makes boundless background information available in seconds.

Assessing the state of media by looking only at the health of traditional outlets creates “a blinkered outlook that confuses the interests of producers with those of consumers,” he writes. “[T]oday’s readers have access to far more high-quality coverage than they have time to read.”

The finding that only four in 10 Americans are even aware of the media’s struggles can be interpreted in several ways. The pessimistic view is that Americans are basically dumb, lazy and happy with the partisan screaming matches that characterize a lot of broadcast news.

A more positive view is that Americans have already moved on to using other sources and haven’t noticed the loss of their once-trusted brands. It’s impossible to know without further research, but we have to acknowledge Yglesias’s point that the decline of mainstream media certainly hasn’t resulted in a dearth of information.

No Expiration

One important point the Slate business writer makes is that news no longer carries an expiration date. Traditional media assumed that news would be consumed within a few hours or days. Archival or background information was tedious to find, so readers were mainly limited to whatever the newspaper or broadcast provided within its limited space.

Now everything is part of a grand, searchable archive, which permits people to go as deep as they want whenever they want. Those who don’t have the time to come up to speed on the banking crisis in Cyprus can put off learning about it until later. Then they can go to a resource like Wikipedia’s coverage and spend hours digging into background for more than 40 sources cited there.

We prefer the glass-half-full perspective. While the loss of the media’s watchdog function is troubling, the power of having timeless access to resources we didn’t even know existed is energizing. The challenge is to find ways to fund the valuable services that media has provided in the past so that the information that doesn’t attract search engines and sponsorship dollars still has a platform.

Related articles

• State of the media: The cracks are still widening, but some light is also getting in
• The News Business Is Awful; People Want News
• 5 Key Takeaways from Pew’s State of the News Media 2013
• ‘Glory days’ of journalism? No, yes, no and yes.
• Mediatwits #72: Sad State of the News Media; Reuters’ Social Editor Indicted
• The Glory Days of American Journalism
• 31% of Americans Have Abandoned News Outlets Due to Perceived Decline in Quality

Here’s a news item we didn’t expect to see. Borrell Associates now predicts that U.S. newspaper revenue will rise in 2013, although only by a scant .5%. If the prediction holds true, it would be the industry’s first revenue increase since 2006.

Borrell’s optimistic newspaper forecast defies conventional wisdom. The research and consulting firm has no particular incentive to bolster the print newspaper business, but it has been forecasting a turnaround for a couple of years. CEO Gordon Borrell said he expects most of the revenue growth to accrue to small newspapers, which have been the most resilient segment of the business during its historic decline. Large dailies will continue to see the annual 4% to 6% declines that have been the norm for the last few years.

The turnaround is shaky, though. Pre-print ads, which typically bring in about 20% of all advertising revenue, could decline as the result of a sweetheart deal between the U.S. Postal Service and a large direct-mail company. The Newspaper Association of America’s howls of protest about the contract have so far fallen on deaf ears.

Borrell is also putting a lot of faith in local online advertising, which it predicts will grow 30% next year. Given that online ad growth at newspapers has been in the single digits annually for the last four years, that seems a stretch. You can hear all of Gordon Borrell’s comments in this recorded webcast.

There’s also good news in magazine land. The Magazine Publishers Association surveyed its members and found a 57% jump  in the number of brands advertising on all magazine media platforms since 2010. That includes tablet, online and print advertising.  The MPA also said magazine apps are some of the highest-grossing titles in the areas of lifestyle, health & fitness and news in the iTunes store.

Publishers apparently are a pretty upbeat bunch. A new study by Michael Jenner of the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism finds that two-thirds of newspaper publishers are optimistic about the future, and only 4% are pessimistic. Jenner said the research is based on 450 in-depth interviews with senior publishing executives. They’re moving ahead aggressively on digital platforms, but 60% “do not envision a time in the future when their individual publications will no longer issue print versions of the news.” We admire their optimism, but that’s just nuts.

The Numbers from Nola

Ken Doctor has no illusions about the future. “We all realize that, at some point, daily print will go away,” he writes at the top of this financial analysis of the New Orleans Times-Picayune‘s frequency cuts. Doctor understands the economics of the news publishing business as few people do (his Newsonomics site is a must-read), and this analysis is a useful insight into the revenue and expense models of metro dailies.

Doctor estimates, for example, that circulation brings in about 30% of total revenue at the Times-Picayune and that the four daily editions that are being eliminated contribute between 25% and 30% of print ad revenues. The net result of the paper’s cutback from seven to three issues per week is about an 11% advantage in profitability, he estimates. That’s good, but there are big risks. One is that the T-P is bucking the trend of deriving more revenue from readers and actually doubling down on advertising as a strategy. In effect, it’s doing more of what got newspapers into trouble in the first place.

Meanwhile, the competitive news environment in the Big Easy has made the paper a tempting target for everything from a startup called The Lens to the Baton Rouge Advocate. “Simply, the T-P’s slimming has opened up a floodgate of competition,” Doctor writes. “That makes the distinctive value proposition of the T-P harder and harder to get paying readers to accept.”

That isn’t stopping owner Advance Publications from methodically duplicating the frequency-reduction strategy across its portfolio. The limited success of that strategy in Detroit, where the Free Press and Detroit News made similar frequency cuts nearly four years ago, isn’t necessarily a reliable guide. The Detroit media market is a lot less competitive than New Orleans’, and the strategy hasn’t stopped the steady drumbeat of circulation declines and layoffs.

Incidentally, Nola residents haven’t taken the T-P cutbacks lying down. Grassroots efforts to reverse Advance’s decision testify to the unsinkable spirit of that unique region.

Update, 10/17/12: A survey by Cribb, Greene reports that newspaper publishers are increasingly confident about the future. More than 40% said their local markets are improving, up from 14% in 2011. The percentage who expect profitability to improve this year rose to 52% from 39%, and those who expect advertising revenue to be higher in 2013 grew by a similar margin. Asked if they would buy a newspaper business in the current economic climate, about half said “no.” However, 69% responded “yes” or “maybe” when asked if they would recommend the newspaper business as a career for their children.

Ever heard of James Macpherson? If you’re a veteran journalist, you probably have, although you might know him better as “that asshole who fired his entire reporting staff and outsourced local coverage of Pasadena, Calif. to India.”

We got a note from Macpherson the other day pointing out that recent trends would indicate that he was a trailblazer, not a nut.

In spite of the clobbering in the media I took for the idea then — and in spite of the Journatic debacle now –  the truth remains that some form of editorial outsourcing IS coming to newsrooms near you, and probably soon…Newsroom outsourcing is inevitable. The idea is so powerful it should be explored and discussed, not simply rebuked.

Macpherson also pointed us to a couple of his own blog entries on the subject: “The Outsourcing of Hyperlocal Journalism Is Inevitable” and “And Now, A Penny for My Thoughts.” They’re both worth reading. As we pointed out recently, the price of journalism is being readjusted to a new equilibrium point, and ideas like outsourcing local city council coverage to writers in Manila aren’t nearly as far-fetched as they once seemed.

It’s a Business

A lot of debate about the future of journalism has been tinged with emotion, which is understandable given how many jobs have been lost. The harsh reality, though, is that the vast majority of journalism is practiced by profit-making organizations. These companies are struggling with seismic shifts that have changed their business model forever. Advertising costs are in long-term decline, reader switching costs are zero, barriers to competitive entry have vanished and mass media are being displaced by specialized media. Any organization that hopes to survive in such a market needs to do things differently.

The approach to outsourcing that Macpherson outlines in this post is rational and workable in many scenarios: Offshore whatever can be offshored and have the people on the scene focus on capturing the action. Keep expertise local and farm out the rest.

If you’ve ever worked in a newsroom, you know there’s a lot of work that doesn’t require people to leave the office. Copy editing is a desk job. So is obituary writing. Editors fill holes on print pages by rewriting wire copy. Sports editors rarely go into a locker room and city editors don’t cover school board meetings. They’ve done all that stuff and graduated to jobs where they supervise others.

Some of this stuff is easy to outsource, and a lot of it already has been dispatched to interns or specialty shops like Legacy.com. The tough part is deconstructing jobs where experience is an asset, like the sports editor. Those jobs should stay intact on these shores, although some of the routine work may be able to be done elsewhere.

Get Me Rewrite

Journalism has traditionally been a vertically integrated craft. The reporter who covers the city council meeting is also expected to write the story, even if that person can’t compose a coherent paragraph. We’ve all known people who were great fact-finders or interviewers but who couldn’t write. Rewrite editors were an early tool to compensate for that. Now technology is taking deconstruction to a new level.

Anyone with a smart phone and an Internet connection can now be a live streaming news source. People on the scene can embellish or correct a published account, even if they don’t work for the news organization. Aggregating, summarizing and commenting upon published reports is the essence of what most bloggers do. In many cases, being on the scene isn’t nearly as important as it used to be.

Outsourcing is not an all-or-nothing proposition, but a process of optimizing for value. Move routine work to the lowest-cost source and invest in stuff that makes a difference. Businesses have done this with manufacturing, payroll, facilities maintenance, information technology and the many other tasks for years.

But what about quality? That’s the most common objection to outsourcing in general, but we think markets are pretty good at figuring that out. Journalists aren’t the ultimate arbiters of quality; their readers are. If you believe that the public no longer has an interest in quality journalism, then outsourcing is a pretty depressing prospect. However, we don’t think the public is that stupid.

Macpherson is right: These ideas should be developed and not dismissed as lunacy simply because they break with tradition. If someone can put out a journal at lower cost that its audience values and that someone will pay to support, then the market will make it own decisions.

Stuff we’ve bookmarked recently.

Warren Buffett Buying Newspapers by the Bushel

Warren Buffett
(New York Times photo)

The world’s ultimate value investor – Warren Buffett – has apparently decided that there’s untapped value in newspapers. His Berkshire Hathaway has just purchased 63 of them along with a 3% stake in Lee Enterprises, and Buffett says he plans to buy more. Newspaper lovers should applaud Buffett’s interest. A self-described newspaper “addict,” he believes in an intensely local editorial focus and a sustainable business model. His interest in the newspaper industry could be a boost for paywalls. “The original instinct of newspapers was to offer free in digital form what they were charging for in print. This is an unsustainable model and certain of our papers are already making progress in moving to something that makes more sense,” he wrote in a letter to publishers.

The New York Times traveled to Buffalo to check out The Buffalo News, which Buffett has owned since 1977. It found a profitable operation that has scaled down intelligently over the years through buyouts rather than layoffs. Buffett has little personal involvement in daily operations, but his philosophy of investing in local coverage and skimping on overhead is evident everywhere. Media Audit says The Buffalo News has the second highest audience penetration of any newspaper in the country. Part of this could be because the Rust Belt population of the area is older than the typical demographic, but it’s still remarkable that more than 70% of Buffalo households have read the paper within the last month.

If anyone can figure out how to make a newspaper profitable, it’s Warren Buffett. He built an estimated net worth of $44 billion by buying distressed businesses at the bottom. His interest in this industry would indicate that there are better days ahead.

US Newspaper Ad Revenue Continues Sickening Plunge; Online Growth All But Halted

First-quarter 2012 total expenditures totaled $5.18 billion, down 6.86% from $5.56 billion a year earlier. Online revenues grew by just 1% to $816 million, which was the smallest for any quarter since 2009 and not nearly enough to offset the 8.2% drop in print revenues, to $4.36 billion. The Newspaper Association of America previously revealed that print revenues (in absolute dollars) fell by half between 2005 and 2011. And there is no end in sight.

Oregon Publisher Puts Happy Face on Frequency Cut

“There are a lot of new things to like about today’s Observer,” writes Kari Borgen, publisher of the Observer of Union and Wallowa counties in Oregon. Borgen goes on to celebrate the Observer‘s new design, added features and bonus puzzles, among other goodies. What she fails to dwell upon is the fact that the issue that “seems bigger and feels heavier to you today” is that way because frequency has been cut from five days to three. The Observer eliminated Tuesday and Thursday editions and now publishes only on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. No one has yet gotten around to updating the About page with this information.

Tribune Co. Edges Closer to Bankruptcy Exit

Details of the legal wrangling between stakeholders, negotiations with the FCC and the likelihood of judicial approval of a restructuring plan will leave your eyes crossed, but the bottom line is that the company’s three-year stay in Hotel Chapter 11 may finally be nearing a conclusion. There’s still regulatory and legal wrangling to be resolved, including a petition to transfer Tribune Co.’s broadcast licenses to a group of banks and hedge funds that will own the company. There’s also a challenge from a group of junior bondholders who are challenging the restructuring plan and who might sue 35,000 former Tribune Co. shareholders to recover more than $2 billion in claims.

Whatever happens, the likely outcome is that Tribune Co. will be carved up and sold off piecemeal by the banks and hedge funds that assume ownership. The real value of the company is in its portfolio of 23 TV stations and some other equity investments. The newspaper business is barely a rounding error on the balance sheet. The story in the Tribune notes, “Before the Zell deal, Tribune Co. entertained offers topping $2 billion for the Los Angeles Times alone, but today, according to a recent valuation analysis by Tribune adviser Lazard Freres & Co. the entire publishing group of eight newspapers, including the Times and Tribune, is worth about $623 million.”

By the way, the Chicago Tribune is considering a novel approach to paywalls. Instead of charging for access beyond a certain number of articles per month, the paper would charge for bonus content, as ESPN does. The tactic has worked well for sports addicts, but observers question whether it can succeed in local news. It hasn’t done so anywhere yet.

Blowing Up the Article

The always-provocative Mathew Ingram writes about why we need to reconsider the concept of the article in publishing. This traditional approach to packaging information is rooted in the limitations of printed media where hyperlinking was impossible. Now, however, we have the ability to deliver only what’s new and link to the rest.  Jeff Jarvis has been beating this drum for some time and in a post entitled “News articles as assets and paths,” he suggests that articles will devolve into component parts that can be mixed and matched according to need.  Why reinvent the wheel with hundreds of words of background every time we update a story? Simply provide the new information and link to the rest. Jarvis has even suggested that new kinds of media organizations could emerge that specialize in different kinds of assets, such as news, multimedia or background. An example of the latter is Wikipedia, which is a great source of background information for many timely events. Reddit is building this model with its Ask Me Anything forum, which has become a coveted destination for book authors. Basically, Reddit is becoming a specialist in Q&A assets.

Media Consolidation: The Infographic

Everyone is doing infographics these days, and we’ve never seen a bandwagon we couldn’t hop on. This one was actually created by Frugal Dad last November, but it popped up on Business Insider last week. Some of the information is out of date. For example, GE no longer owns NBC, so the sixth company is now Comcast. And Time Warner got rid of AOL. But the main point still holds: Media consolidation has reached a pinnacle, with only six corporations controlling 90% of media in America. And 250 million bloggers and Twitter users controlling the rest.

Source: Frugal dad

Bloomberg News is one of the few news operations that’s flourishing, and Knowledge@Wharton provides a glimpse of the editorial strategy that fuels its remarkable engine. Founded by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 1982, the financially oriented global information network today produces more than 5,000 stories per day from 146 news bureaus in 72 countries. Its TV network reaches 310 million people and it is in the middle of turning around BusinessWeek, which it bought from McGraw-Hill for $1 in 2009.

Underlying the unique Bloomberg style is a 376-page style manual written by editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler (right). The most recent edition is the first that Bloomberg has made public (buy it on Amazon), and Wharton writes that it is a marvel of clarity and consistency. Some people might cringe at the manual’s many hard-and-fast guidelines, but consistency is a virtue when serving a time-pressed audience like equity traders. An excerpt:

Bloomberg stories should fulfill “The Five Fs” — that is, they must be First, Factual, Fastest, Final and take Future events into account. No story is complete if it doesn’t include “Five Easy Pieces” — information about the markets, the economy, government, politics and companies. The ideal lead is four paragraphs long and should always include a theme, a quotation, details and a nut paragraph that explains what is at stake. “Bloomberg News stories have a structure as immutable as the rules that govern sonnets and symphonies,” Winkler writes.

Whether you agree or not with Bloomberg’s style, there are tips in this article that could benefit any writer:

• Prefer short words to long ones
• Prefer specific terms to abstract one;
• Write the headline first;
• Avoid adverbs that are loaded with assertions, such as “lavishly” compensated or “stunningly” successful.

In many ways Bloomberg is the antithesis of The Wall Street Journal, which has long taken pride in the flourish it brings to its writing, and in particular its clever choice of adverbs. But we suppose both models can co-exist. The point is to have a distinctive style and stick to it.

The Knowledge@Wharton piece also explains Bloomberg’s controversial policy against the use of the word “but.” You’ll have to read to the end of the piece to understand that one, though.

Investors Pledge to Revive Philly Newspapers

There’s good news in Philadelphia, where a group of six investors has agreed to buy the Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News and Philly.com from a investment firm that has owned the news operations for the past two years. The investors, led by South Jersey businessmen Lewis Katz and George E. Norcross III, say they’re excited about growing the franchise, are committed to retaining current management and will not interfere in editorial affairs.

The bad news is that the group paid only $55 million for the media properties. That’s a little more than one-tenth the price that Brian P. Tierney paid when he acquired the properties from McClatchy for $515 million in 2006. Outsell analyst Ken Doctor is quoted in the story saying that the 90% valuation decline isn’t unusual. Most newspapers have lost that much value over the past decade.

The investors are talking a good game, at least. Katz, who was an investigative journalist at one point, said they’re investing in the community as well as in the business. “Cynicism or no, we put a lot of our money in this,” he said. “There was [sic] a lot safer places at my age to put money than in a news organization. You know what? This is my way of coming home.”

Rethinking the Paywall

Although fewer than a quarter of the U.S.’s 1,350 newspapers have built paywalls, the number of publishers who are experimenting with metered access is rising. Bulldog Reporter says more than 300 papers have adopted paywalls so far and the industry is hoping that their early success could be the harbinger of a turnaround. Nearly 20,000 people have signed up to pay $1.99 a week for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the report says, and Gannett plans to expand paywalls from six test markets to all 80 of its small-market newspapers by the end of the year. That move, combined with circulation pricing increases, could add $100 million in annual profit, says the report, citing a company statement.

Writing on GigaOm, Mathew Ingram suggests another approach: Instead of putting up barriers to keep people from reading your content, how about building incentives to attract them instead? Ingram calls it the “velvet rope” strategy: Find creative ways to reward readers for getting involved with your product and they will respond by giving you money for special features and events. “Would you rather have a relationship with an outlet that is always asking you for money, or with one that sees you as a partner and gives you membership benefits that sometimes involve having you pay for things?” Ingram asks. It’s a good point, but Ingram’s post is a bit short on ideas about how to monetize this kumbaya. His argument seems to take it on faith that loyal readers will support a publisher they believe in. Unfortunately, there aren’t many examples of that approach working. Even NPR has to take government money to stay afloat.

Miscellany

Forbes has posted a heat map showing the most influential news outlets in the country and where they’re influential. The map uses data provided by URL-shortening service bit.ly to overlay geographic data on information about content that is shared most often. Darker states signify places where content is shared more actively and presumably read more often. You can also drill down and see which stories generate the most activity. Not surprisingly, newspaper influence  tends to be localized while broadcast networks have national reach. The map at right shows where Fox News is most popular. Incidentally, if you’ve ever wondered how bit.ly makes money, it’s by selling data just like this.

Last week we reported on the sudden shutdown of the Laurel (Miss.) Leader-Call. Thanks to comments from some alert readers, we’ve learned that Laurel won’t be newspaperless for long. Emmerich Newspapers says it will start a thrice-weekly newspaper to replace the Leader-Call and that the first edition will publish this Sunday. What’s more, Emmerich says it has hired the defunct newspaper’s entire staff and will probably throw in free donuts on Fridays. Emmerich publishes 25 community newspapers, primarily in Mississippi, and is very well-liked in Laurel these days.

We got an e-mail from a startup called Zypages that has an interesting twist on classified advertising. The service creates websites from flyers and product sheets uploaded by advertisers, using a cell phone number as the URL. “Most small contractors and service providers do not have web sites – but they all have mobile phones,” explained CEO Raymond Kasbarian in an e-mail. “Over 50% of the printed classified ads in our weekly newspapers out here list a phone but not a web site. By using the number listed in the classified add, a customer can get valuable information before calling.” Go to the website and click the “Examples” button to see how it works.

Editor & Publisher asked readers to nominate news organizations that are doing innovative things to diversify their businesses and find new revenue streams, and the list of 10 Newspapers That Do It Right 2012 shows that creative thinking is alive and well at mainstream publishers, although mostly at smaller ones.

The mini-case studies are a grab bag of ideas, ranging from novel circulation promotions to radical new lines of business, but they all have one thing in common: They leverage the newspaper’s unique position as a trusted companion within a geographic area.

Some papers have found ways to innovate within their traditional business, like the Carrollton, GA Times-Georgian, which scrapped its advertising rate card in favor of a time-based package that gives advertisers a variety of positions and sizes. It’s a smart idea that recognizes that advertisers are the least-qualified people to dictate where and when an ad should run.

Others are diversifying outside of the advertising dependence that has been the crack cocaine of the newspaper industry. The Altoona Mirror in Pennsylvania launched an events business that hosts thematic gatherings around things like cooking and outdoor recreation. The new line of business is a natural extension of the newspaper’s traditional role as community gathering spot, but also requires a change of philosophy. “We’re not selling a product called ‘a newspaper’ but manufacturing a product called ‘audience,’” said General manager Ray Eckenrode. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

Several organizations have completely merged their print and online operations, which surprised us because we assumed most newsrooms had done that a long time ago. Still, the reorganizations have cut production times and improved staff morale as journalists have bought into the idea of platform independence. It’s hard to believe that at some newspapers copy is still thrown over the wall between Web and print instead of created from scratch for an online audience.

A couple of entries even highlighted efforts by newspapers to push into the broadcast market. Manitoba’s Winnipeg Free Press, which is one of the largest papers to be recognized, took advantage of cutbacks in election coverage by local TV stations to set up a live webcast at a coffee house and analyze election results throughout the evening. Considering the dismal quality of most local TV news operations after years of cutbacks, this seems like low-hanging fruit.

E&P also lists 11 honorable mentions for a total of 21 stories of innovation. The package is nicely edited and there’s an accompanying photo gallery. It would be nice if there were hyperlinks to some of the featured examples, but we supposed E&P has still got some learning to do.

Money from Content

We recently reported on a little-noticed milestone in the New York Times Co.’s fourth-quarter earnings: Revenue from digital sources surpassed editorial operating costs, making it theoretically possible for the Gray Lady to get out of print entirely without affecting its editorial quality.

Now the Financial Times may be about to turn another corner. Content sales are about to eclipse advertising revenue. CEO John Ridding sprang this news on an FT conference in London earlier this month. The secret is mobility. By reaching paying audiences on phones and tablets around the globe, the FT is able to greatly increase its reach at almost no marginal cost. More important is that it now knows something about those people.

“The real power is in data,” Ridding said. “We’re moving from the dark ages where people would walk into a newsagents and we wouldn’t know them but now we know pretty much everything about them.” Contrast that thinking to a recent Pew report that found that few newspapers are using targeted advertising to reach online readers based upon their interests. But the FT is a business paper, after all.

Of course, the crossover is also influenced by the ongoing precipitous declines in print advertising. US newspaper ad revenues fell 7.3% year-over-year in 2011 to $23.94 billion, according to the Newspaper Association of America. We doubt the FT’s UK and European markets fared much better. Like the success stories spotlighted in Editor & Publisher, the FT is finding ways to escape the burning house before it’s too late. Incidentally, 60% of publishing leaders polled in one informal survey said they expect print publishers to be digital-only by 2020.

We’ve posted several positive items about the local Patch operation in our community, a one-person news bureau that has become our favorite – and most timely – source of information about local events. So we feel it’s also important to share the news that AOL’s Patch operation, a constellation of more than 800 hyperlocal news sites, looks like a train wreck.

Business Inside says Patch has generated only about $8 million in revenue in 2011 on an investment of more than $160 million. InvestorPlace says revenues were closer to $20 million, but that Patch still lost $150 million on the year. Some investors are calling for the head of Tim Armstrong (right) the former Google executive who took the helm at AOL nearly three years ago. Armstrong conceived of Patch in 2007 and funded the first two years of its operations before assuming the top job at AOL in 2009 and buying Patch outright. Since then he’s embarked upon an aggressive expansion program to place hyperlocal news bureaus in as many US locations as possible. He’s also spent lavishly on the acquisitions of Huffington Post and TechCrunch. At this point, critics are calling the strategy a bust.

The problem with Patch is that the hyperlocal revenue model doesn’t work nearly as well as the hyperlocal news model. According to Business Inside, Patch sells advertising through a network of mostly outsourced telesales representatives. It’s clear that these sales people don’t have their tentacles into the local communities that are the core of Patch’s model. The advertising on our own local outlet is mostly a mix of display ads from big national brands (presumably sold at remainder prices), Google AdSense and a smattering of classifieds. With that kind of revenue base, it’s not surprising Patch is losing a fortune.

As we’ve argued before, the hyperlocal model needs to work from both the content and revenue perspectives. Patch has clearly succeeded in hiring editors who are closely tied in to their communities, but it isn’t doing that on the sales side. This is a tough problem to solve. Small businesses aren’t big advertisers to begin with, and the cost of deploying dedicated sales reps to 800 local communities would be far higher than the centralized telesales model. On the other hand, the centralized model isn’t exactly killing it.

We hope Patch figures it out, because it’s inventing some creative new ways to report the news. We continue to like the business model of Sacramento Press, which positions itself as an integrated marketing partner rather than an advertising outlet. Addiction to advertising revenue is one of the reasons newspapers are in so much trouble in the first place. In its current iteration, Patch appears to be making the same mistakes.

Miscellany

As if reporters don’t like to gripe enough, there’s a new website where they can do it anonymously in public. It’s called Dash30Dash.org, and it was started by a former newspaper reporter who wants “to give reporters, editors and others a chance to post comments about their jobs and their ever-changing profession.” So far, it looks like the commentaries are mostly limited to contributions from the site’s creator, but it’s still early. The writing is lively and pointed, so check it out.

An Australian philanthropist and Internet entrepreneur has pledged more than $15 million to fund a new, nonprofit media venture called The Global Mail. Graeme Wood says he has only one goal in mind: “produce public-interest journalism.”

Wood, whose personal fortune is estimated at $337 million, was apparently taken with the example of ProPublica in the U.S. That nonprofit investigative venture was also started with a large grant from a single donor but has been successfully diversifying its support base and now employs 34 editorial staff members. Wood’s commitment to support The Global Mail for at least five years resulted from a dinner party conversation with former Australian Broadcast Corp. journalist Monica Attard, who is now the site’s editor-in-chief. That’s pretty good sales efficiency in our book.

News coverage of a fatal single-car crash that occurred early on Thanksgiving Day in our home town of Framingham, MA spotlights the tradeoffs between traditional news reporting and the less constrained world of the real-time Internet. Look at the distinctions between them and tell us what you think.

The first report of the crash came from Framingham Patch, the one-person news bureau that covers the town for AOL’s Patch network. It reported  Thursday morning that a vehicle had struck a utility pole and tree at about 3:30 a.m. and that an occupant may have been killed. The news of the fatality wasn’t confirmed, but was speculation based upon police scanner requests for a medical examiner and accident reconstruction team.

It was nearly a full day before Patch published a more complete account of the accident, republished here unedited and in its entirety. The latest version is here.

Junior Koga Killed in Franklin St. Crash; Wife Pregnant

Members of the Framingham Brazilian community were discussing the death of Junior Koga on WSRO radio in Portuguese, on Twitter and even on Framingham Patch Thanksgiving day.

Friends say Junior Koga is man who crashed into a pole and then slammed into a tree killing himself on Franklin Street, early Thanksgiving morning around 3:10 a.m.

Framingham Police and other authorities have not returned calls or emails about the fatal crash. No official identification of the driver has been released.

At the scene, Thanksgiving morning Framingham Police requested, on the scanner, for the Massachusetts State Police reconstruction team, the Middlesex District Attorney’s office and the medical examiner.

Friends say Koga’s wife is pregnant. Koga, according to friends is a Brazilian national from Santa Catarina, a state in South Brazil. One friend said his wife is due to give birth in a couple of weeks. Koga is employed as a mechanic and lives in Framingham, according to friends. He is in his 30s.

Thiago Prado commented on Framingham Patch Thursday “very very sad news – Junior we gonna miss you.”

Nayara Martins, who tweeted the Framingham Patch video of the accident, also tweeted “Hate to see once again another life cut short so quickly because of driving drunk. When are people going to learn?! <|3 #RIPJunior”

Friends tell Framingham Patch Koga “came back from a night club, was brought to his home and got into his own car to go out again.”

Friends said they suspect alcohol may have been involved.

Police are still investigating, and have not released any information on the fatal crash, including an identification.

The crash happened just after the Mt. Wayte Shopping Center at 384 Franklin St.

At the scene, Framingham Police blocked off the road. The Framingham Fire department placed a sheet over the car lodged into the tree and then added a second sheet to block the scene, while awaiting the State Police reconstruction team, which was coming from another Thanksgiving fatality in Freetown.

A neighbor near the crash, who didn’t wish to be identified, said the driver was partially ejected from the car. “It is a nasty scene,” he said.

Nearly 10 hours after the Framingham Patch report appeared, the local Metrowest Daily News reported its version of the story, again reprinted here in its entirety.

Framingham man dies in car crash

A 31-year-old Framingham man died early Thanksgiving morning after crashing into a telephone pole and then a tree on Franklin Street, police said today.

Ricardo Junior, of 67 Georgetown Drive, was the only person involved in the one-vehicle crash, which happened at about 3:10 a.m. yesterday, police said.

“It looks like he was killed on impact,” Deputy Police Chief Craig Davis said.

Davis said alcohol may have been a factor, as police found several Heineken beer bottles in the vehicle Junior was driving. Some of the bottles were full, and others were broken, he said.

“The initial indication is the cause is excessive speed,” Davis said. “There was an excessive amount of damage to the car.”

Junior crashed in the 300-block of Franklin Street, near Newton Place, Davis said.

We were struck by several contrasts between the coverage by these two outlets and the questions they raise about the conventional rules of sourcing in this tweet-saturated times. The spelling, formatting and grammatical mistakes aside, it’s unlikely that the Patch story would have ever made it past the desk of an editor at a metro daily.  Among the factual holes are:

• The identity of the victim is unconfirmed and an age and address aren’t supplied.
• Most of the details about the crash and the victim are sourced to unidentified friends.
• Details about the reported pregnancy of the victim’s wife are sketchy and unconfirmed.
• The police would neither confirm nor comment upon any of the facts in the story.
• Perhaps most importantly, allegations that the driver was drunk are raised by unidentified “friends” but never confirmed.

In fact, the Patch story got an important fact wrong: the victim’s real name was Ricardo Junior, not Junior Koga. Other than that, though, Patch provided more information and better context than the official account published by the local newspaper. And it did so nearly 10 hours earlier.

Among the unique details in the Patch story are a photo, news that the victim’s wife is pregnant (unconfirmed, but likely, given the photo on Junior’s Facebook page), the location of his home town in Brazil and comments by friends who knew him.

On the role of alcohol in the crash, Patch provides context about the incident that the official account lacks. The report that Junior was driven home from a night club by friends would indicate that he was probably seriously intoxicated when he got in his car. It also raises questions about his judgment and responsibility, given that his wife is due to deliver a child shortly. However, that information is sourced to unidentified “friends.”

Community Service or Slipshod Reporting?

So the Patch account is better than that of the local newspaper, but its use of unconfirmed and anonymously sourced information would make it unfit to publish  under the traditional rules of news journalism. But should those rules apply any more?

The Metrowest Daily News’ sole source in its coverage is the local police department, which is standard practice in these cases. Patch had no access to those official channels and so had to piece together its story from unidentified friends, talk radio accounts and Twitter chatter. Anonymous sourcing permitted Patch to beat the local daily by many hours and to add details that would never appear in the police log. In the hours since its account appeared, other people have confirmed the victim’s identity and added a few details via comments.

Anonymous sourcing is dangerous, though. While the events would indicate that Junior was drunk (high-speed, single-vehicle crash in the early morning hours on the eve of a holiday), there was no official confirmation of that fact. Driver impairment is an important issue not only because of the victim’s reputation but also for legal reasons. What if Junior was sober and responding to a friend’s call for help when he hit a police cruiser parked with its lights off? The town could be liable for damages.

Standard journalistic practice is to confirm a story through official channels before publishing, but standard practice assumes archival permanency. Online, our mistakes are quickly corrected. For example, in the time since we began writing this entry, Patch has already corrected the victim’s name. The Patch editors sacrificed absolutely accuracy for speed and  the interests of residents who wanted details as quickly as possible. In the process, it made one major mistake and an inference that could have legal ramifications.

Patch’s sourcing style is increasingly typical of online-only news operations. Is it making the proper tradeoffs or sacrificing accuracy for expediency? Post your comments here.

The post below was submitted to us by Scott Talkov, Editor-in-Chief of ThingsToDoInlandEmpire.com, a guide to entertainment, events and discounts in southern California. If you want to see an impressive example of what people can do with a free copy of WordPress and free Facebook and Twitter accounts, check out this site. 

The claims and statistics cited in this article are the author’s, and we don’t vouch for their validity. 

The local blog ThingsToDoInlandEmpire.com, focusing on arts, entertainment and events in southern California, recently surpassed well-established print media outlets in Riverside and San Bernardino on several well-known metrics.

The site now averages twice the traffic of the region’s most widely distributed weekly print publication and four times the traffic of the region’s most widely distributed monthly magazine, both of which cover the same arts and entertainment focus, According to third party traffic verification firm Quantcast. Those estimates are mirroredby well-known Internet ratings website Alexa.com.

The website also counts more Facebook likes than the region’s largest weekly or monthly print publications, as well as one of the region’s largest daily publications.

The site began with an idea from Adina Hemley, a non-profit director in the Inland Empire. “My fiance and I would search the Internet for fun events every weekend, and then it occurred to me, ‘I know I’m not the only looking for things to do in the Inland Empire,’” said Hemley.

Scott Talkov, a 30-year-old lawyer in Riverside and self-described techie, started the website with Hemley in early 2011 to aggregate their research on the hottest places to go in the Inland Empire. Since then, traffic has doubled every three months.

By working together with more than 20 authors, the site collects data and perspectives from dozens of cities throughout the inland Southern California region known as the Inland Empire. The region counts over four-million people and witnessed the fastest growth over the past decade among the nation’s top 25 metropolitan areas.

“While the economy and print media may be down, people are still having fun, they’re just turning to new sources to find out what to do,” said Kris Daams, a former newspaper reporter and author on the site.

Talkov says new technologies allow information to collected and distributed instantly at essentially no cost. The website is based on WordPress and communicates with followers through the social media tools Facebook and Twitter, all of which are free.

When asked what drives this site, author Nate Hutchinson insisted “We want to continue to prove people wrong who claim there is nothing to do in the Inland Empire.”

M.E. Sprengelmeyer with the first issue of the Guadalupe County Communicator

It was a man-bites-dog story.

Young newspaper reporters have typically dreamed of working their way up from a small-town weekly to a big-city daily. The title of Washington bureau chief or foreign correspondent was the pinnacle of success.

Michael “M.E.” Sprengelmeyer had those dreams as early as age seven, when he decided he wanted to be a reporter. But something in the back of his mind drew him toward the small-town roots where he and thousands of other young journalists got their start.

Sprengelmeyer got to the summit, becoming a national reporter and foreign correspondent for the Rocky Mountain News. When the Rocky abruptly shut down nearly three years ago, he went searching for his childhood dream: To run a community weekly.

Strange Quest

It seemed a strange quest for a reporter who had been near the top of his profession, but Sprengelmeyer had caught the community itch at a young age. “At 17 I saw a movie called Milagro Beanfield War,” he said. “There was a character who ran a small newspaper and I always wanted to see what a newspaper could be if I ran it.”

Sprengelmeyer’s career had been anything but small town to that point. A graduate of the prestigious Northwestern Univerity journalism program, he had worked at a variety of small- and medium-sized papers before landing at the Rocky in 1999, a month before the Columbine shootings. His career advanced quickly. Within two years he was sent to the paper’s Washington bureau, where he arrived just before the Sept. 11 attacks on the Pentagon. That job morphed into a military beat, overseas assignments and a coveted job as a presidential campaign reporter.

But even as he was setting up the Des Moines, Iowa bureau for the Rocky to cover the 2008 presidential race, he kept searching for the opportunity to take over a small-town weekly. When the 149-year-old Rocky suddenly went up for sale in 2009, he was as surprised as anyone. But instead of wringing his hands, he stepped up his small-town search. “I was hunting for newspapers to buy within a week,” of the Rocky’s closure, he says.

When the paper shut down, he hit the road, eventually landing in the beautiful but impoverished community of Santa Rosa, N.M., on the staked plains where the Pecos River crosses historic Route 66.

The local Guadalupe County Communicator served up the usual local fare of local government meetings. The paper had a circulation of less than 2,000, but Sprengelmeyer saw potential. Despite its economic distress, Santa Rosa has a disproportionately large base of businesses on Rte. 66. Sprengelmeyer negotiated the purchase, leaving him with just $1,700 in the bank. He told the story of his quest on the blog of former Rocky publisher John Temple.

Changing the Model

Like many local weeklies, the Communicator served up coverage of local government meetings and photos of winning high-school football teams, but Sprengelmeyer wanted to take it to another level. “I kind of had a chip on my shoulder about the closure of the Rocky and I wanted to send a message about what a newspaper could be,” he says.

His first move was to shut down the paper’s website. “Community newspapers have a captive geography. As long as you can keep everyone within 10 miles reading your piece of paper, you can deliver value for your advertisers,” he says. “The Web gets people from all over the world, but you can’t tell an advertiser they’re going to walk in and buy avocados at his variety store.”

He then started investing. He hired a veteran daily photographer on a freelance basis, contracted with local stringers and engaged professional cartoonist Drew Litton. The first issue of the Communicator under Sprengelmeyer’s hand featured a giant photo from the county fair and the first editorial cartoon the paper had ever run. It was a shock to locals, but also a signal that the paper had turned a corner.

You can’t easily find high-resolution images of the Communicator online, but you can get a sense of the layout, story selection and headlines from thumbnails in the paper’s Facebook album. The look-and-feel is big-city all the way, with a clear emphasis on local government, citizen advocacy and people-oriented features. The headlines and story selection are cut from the major metro mold.

Pleasant Surprise

“The reaction has been incredible,” says Sprengelmeyer. While some residents miss the point-and-shoot photos of Little Leaguers on page one, most have responded positively to the tougher coverage of town government, crime and local regulations. The Communicator won seven state journalism awards its first year. Sprengelmeyer’s unusual odyssey has landed profiles in The New York Times, CNN and other national media outlets.

Scrutiny of local officials has ruffled a few feathers, but the newcomer says his outsider status and commitment to fairness has kept the pushback to a minimum. “You smooth out the feathers when you write an accurate, fair story,“ he says. And the Little League photos still run in the Communicator, but no longer on page one.

More importantly, circulation has grown to more than 2,000, or nearly equal to the population of Santa Rosa. Its Facebook page, which was started by a local enthusiast and is now maintained as a joint effort, has been liked more than 1,100 times. Circulation growth has been largest among native Santa Rosans who now live elsewhere. “I’m real proud of that, because we’re a town in economic trouble, where kids grow up, go off to college and settle elsewhere” says Sprengelmeyer. “Now they’re re-connecting with their community.”

Advertising business has grown steadily, if not spectacularly. The publisher’s philosophy is to invest most of the profits back into the property. “When you start cutting expenses to match revenue, you’re on a backwards slide,” he says. A small staff handles advertising sales.

And each week, the new Communicator becomes more embedded in the community. Sprengelmeyer still works seven days a week, but the hourly load has gradually declined. “I’m not banking a lot, but each edition pays for itself and I have enough left to pay my rent and fix my car,” he says.

“I won’t become a millionaire, but that wasn’t the point. The first year was about surviving. The second year was about expanding. The coming year will be fun. This started as a fancy way to spend my life savings in six months, only we’ve gone on for two years. It’s the best thing I’ve done and it’s still left me excited about what we can do next.”

To subscribe to the Communicator, e-mail your info to comsilvercom@plateautel.net and cc: ersthap@hotmail.com. Order a full year’s subscription and send a check for $30 (U.S. delivery only) to The Communicator, P.O. Box 403, Santa Rosa, NM 88435.

Update 10/29/11: The Communicator won 26 awards and “Best of Show” among small weekly newspapers in the 2011 New Mexico Press Association/Associated Press Managing Editors’ awards.