Let’s look at some recent stories about publishers who are reinventing traditional news operations and creating innovative new models. This is inspiring stuff.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports on how startup 8020 Publishing is producing two beautiful magazines consisting almost entirely of reader-contributed content. Everywhere is a travel magazine and JPG is for photo enthusiasts. People vote on the work that others submit and the best stuff goes into print. Photographers get a check for $100 and a year’s subscription. Big money apparently isn’t needed: the contents of the April/May issue of JPG was culled from photos uploaded by 16,278 submitters.
What’s especially remarkable about the model is its efficiency. The two magazines are produced by a staff of just 19 people. Both titles are expected to be profitable within a year and the company is looking to expand into other markets. “Any human interest can become a magazine,” says Halsey Minor, the CNet founder whose VC firm owns 8020.
The Hartford Courant has set up an online gathering place for citizens and is reverse-publishing in print. iTOWNS invites readers to submit news briefs, events, photos and videos to a website, with guidance from a local staff member. Every Sunday, selected content is published in six regional print editions. All the content comes from the community. “We reached over 3/4 of our ad goal before the first print edition was published. Amazingly we did all of this without a single new hire,” the Courant‘s designer tells Charles Apple.
The UK’s Press Gazette reports on ambitious plans at Guardian News & Media to overhaul its editorial operations. The company is merging the news staffs of The Guardian, The Observer and Guardian.co.uk in a platform-agnostic structure in which journalists working in specialty “pods” and feed stories to the appropriate department editors for publication in a variety of media. One radical concept: journalists will have the freedom to publish directly to their audiences on timely stories, without the intercession of an editor. Editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger says, “In the newspaper world, if a bomb goes off in Burma or there’s a flood in the Philippines, suddenly your story is taken down to two paragraphs. In this world the reporter isn’t going to have to hop around on foot to speak to [national news editor] Nick Hopkins – he can just publish it.”
Writing on Publishing 2.0, Scott Karp praises a New York Times blogger for practicing good link journalism. The online story he cites is one on oil prices in Mike Nizza’s The Lede. Nizza effectively consolidates information from more than a dozen sources into a summary piece and then links to the source material like crazy. “The value for the reader here is enormous…not only do they get Times blogger Mike Nizza’s framing and perspective, they get links to all of this original reporting and analysis on this issue,” Karp writes. The link journalism model is an emerging form of reporting that makes the journalist as much filter as a reporter. As newspapers can get over their not-invented-here syndromes, they’ll come to understand the reader value this provides.
The Society of Professional Journalists has embraced citizen media. The venerable organization recently launched three regional seminars to teach anyone who’s interested how to report the news. “There are quite a few bloggers, particularly in larger cities, who do work on a par with any journalist,” SPJ President Clint Brewer told Steve Johnson of the Chicago Tribune. Attendance at the $25-a-day sessions was underwhelming, Johnson reports, but the motivations of the attendees were an interesting mix of civic pride, activism and curiosity.
And Then There’s Also Denial, Distrust and Sneakiness
USA Today publisher Al Neuharth whistles past the graveyard, trumpeting miniscule circulation gains by his paper and The Wall Street Journal as evidence of the health of the industry. “That’s why newspaper-oriented media companies have a bright future,” he says. For another take on the same circ figures, see our post from that day. Gannett closed yesterday at $29.25, nearly 70% off its five-year high. (via Editors Weblog)
The UK’s Guardian asks ordinary citizens “How much do you trust the following [new organizations] to tell the truth?” and finds that faith in media has fallen sharply. Broadcast journalists from the country’s ITV commercial network have fallen the farthest, from 82% to 51% in five years. Trust in broadsheet papers is down 22% to 43%, and local outlets are trusted by just 18% of the population. Even the BBC is down. (via Editors Weblog)
Meanwhile, Editor & Publisher reports on the Audit Bureau of Circulation’s decision to reclassify copies given away in exchange for advertising consideration as part of its new “verified” circulation class. The concern is that some publishers are using free or almost-free copies to plug holes in their circulation reports. The big newsweekly magazines are especially fond of this tactic.
And Finally…
Alan Mutter reports on a free-paper war breaking out in the most unlikely place: filthy-rich Palo Alto, CA. The new entrant is the Palo Alto Daily Post, launched by two founders of the Palo Alto Daily News, a freebie that they sold to Media News Group in 2005. Mutter notes that free newspapers tend to target urban commuters, which makes this leafy San Francisco bedroom community a strange place for a showdown of this kind. Palo Alto residents are more likely to be seen reading pecking at their BlackBerries while driving 70 mph than reading a newspaper, he says.
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Last week marked the one-year anniversary of Newspaper Death Watch, a blog I started on a whim but which has built enough readership to merit several hours of my time each week. In posting more than 150 entries over the last year and reading many times that many articles, I’ve learned a few things that I thought I’d share on this anniversary.
That’s because I’ve followed the high tech industry for more than 20 years and repeatedly seen successful, stable businesses come apart at the seams when their environment changed: Digital Equipment, Compaq, Novell, WordPerfect, Wang Laboratories, Cullinet Software, Lotus, Silicon Graphics, and many others. It wasn’t a stretch to see two years ago that the same pattern was occurring in the newspaper business. The environment for publishers was changing in ways that would make their value proposition irrelevant very quickly. Demographic trends all pointed in that direction.
What went wrong
The inevitability of the industry’s self-destruction seems clear now, so there’s no news in that. But how could a business that was so stable and profitable for 150 years go into such a rapid tailspin? Two stories from the past year offered great insight into that question: Outgoing Wall Street Journal editor Paul Steiger’s farewell piece from the end of 2007 and Eric Alterman’s thoughtful analysis from the March 31, 2008 issue of The New Yorker.
Steiger’s piece was memorable for the stories it told about the excesses of the post-Watergate period. He remembers, for example, how one top editor put the kibosh on a proposal to tighten the belt by eliminating first-class travel for reporters. “I like flying first class,” Steiger quotes the man as saying with a smile. “You’re setting a bad example.” He also recounts internal struggles that occurred when newspapers went online, struggles that no doubt held back these papers from making the bold moves they needed to insure their survival. Steiger’s piece makes it clear that newspapers fumbled the opportunity to get out front of the Internet by focusing too much on protecting their print franchises.
Alterman notes the changes that occurred around the time of Watergate, when papers began to shed their partisan past and reposition themselves as impartial (read: bland) recorders of history. The scramble to win Pulitzers and duplicate the Washington Post‘s Watergate success resulted in millions of dollars being flushed on large Washington bureaus and expensive overseas correspondents. Basically, newspapers lost touch with their local constituencies and began writing for other journalists more so than for their readers.
Alterman also documents another ominous trend that began in the 1970s: the rise of the “insider journalist.” As reporters gained celebrity, their access to the great and powerful became a status symbol amongst their peers. Powerful people knew this, and they learned to exploit their access to leading journalists for their own gain as well. Readers weren’t served by any of this, and as the journalism world became clubbier during the 1980s and 1990s, the reading public lost interest.
This culminated in embarrassments like the Jayson Blair scandal and subsequent fallout in which a number of high-profile columnists at newspapers around the country lost their jobs. It was the low point of modern journalism: the profession had sunk so far that facts no longer mattered; if a reporter said something was true, then it must be true. Who had time to fact-check, anyway? There were gala dinners to attend and golf dates with a CEO.
Whistling Past the Graveyard
Meanwhile, newspaper executives knew full well what was going on around them. Circulation began sliding in the mid 1980s and demographic trends made it clear that young people didn’t read newspapers. A few papers saw catastrophe coming and made the leap to national circulation. They will survive the carnage.
The rest were addicted to the healthy and predictable profit margins of their business. Executives knew they were over-exposed to advertising from the shrinking department store industry and that their classified ad franchises were horribly vulnerable to online competitors. But why do anything? Their investors were fat and happy and there was no need to rock the boat.
This complacency is common in industries on the brink of collapse. IBM averaged $8 billion in annual profits during the decade before it lost $8 billion and nearly went out of business. Big companies often enjoy their most profitable years just before the undertow of market change sucks them under.
Watergate’s sad legacy
It’s too late for the newspaper industry to save itself. The average regular newspaper reader is 55 years old. Fewer than one in five people under the age of 25 ever reads a newspaper. They’re not going to start reading one now.
Reading accounts of the industry’s mistakes, I’ve become increasingly convinced that Watergate was the worst thing that ever happened to the newspaper industry. It transformed the role of the reporter from anonymous scribe to media celebrity. It distracted editors from the needs of their readers and diverted investment from productive local channels into wasteful global folly. For almost 30 years, the industry got away with these mistakes because it was the only game in town. Had executives acted a decade ago to dominate the online age, they might have saved themselves. But in this day of blogs, Wikipedia and Craigslist, newspapers don’t have a compelling value proposition.
Sure, online traffic is growing and online dollars are inching upward, but the top line is falling too fast. The union contracts negotiated two decades ago can’t be easily changed, the presses still need to be maintained and delivery truck drivers need to be paid. At some point during the next two years, the revenue and expense lines will cross, but there will be little left to cut without turning major metro dailies into expensive supermarket advertisers. There will be massive consolidation and a lot more layoffs.
I’ll continue to chronicle the sad decline of an American institution on this blog, but I’ll also write about some of the exciting experiments that are transforming journalism across multiple media. I firmly believe a new kind of journalism that embraces blogs, camera phones, Twitter, wikis, hyperlinks, search engines and millions of ordinary citizens will be far richer and more vibrant than the one that preceded it. We just have to clean up an ugly mess first.
[Eric Alterman’s piece on the sad state of newspaper publishing (owners don’t even try to spin their cost cut positively any more, he notes), includes these interesting factoids:
Newspapers’ share of Internet advertising is declining. Online ad sales were up 26 percent to more than $15 billion in the first nine months of 2007, according to Pricewaterhouse Coopers, but for the first time newspapers no longer received the largest share.
The time Americans spend reading newspapers has fallen to just fifteen hours per month.
Daily readership for people under 30 now stands at barely one in five.]
Ledger’s death a window into speed reporting – Los Angeles Times, Jan. 22, 2008 [An LA Times blog looks at the chaos and misinformation that surrounded the death of 28-year-old actor Heath Ledger. Some readers have complained that this was shoddy journalism, but the blog points out that it’s really an evolution of news reporting in the online world. “If the public wants its information as raw and immediate as possible, it’ll have to get used to a few missteps along the way, and maybe even approach breaking stories with a bit of skepticism, like a good reporter would,” it notes. -Ed.]
Don’t shoot the messengers – Reflections of a Newsosaur, Jan. 23, 2008 [Alan Mutter suggests that the financial situations at the Philadelphia Inquirer and Minneapolis Star Tribune are dire and that the owners could be close to defaulting on their debt. What to do? If the creditors come in to run the papers, they’ll simply slash budgets to restore profitability, but at what long-term cost? There are no clear solutions to this predicament. -Ed.]
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By paulgillin | October 11, 2013 - 11:23 am - Posted in Fake News
Google has arguably been the worst enemy of working journalists for the last decade, but now the tide is turning and the search giant is trying to repair the damage it has done. It deserves our patience and understanding as it continues on a course that hopefully will revitalize journalism as a career and rescue hundreds of thousands of freelancers who have seen their livelihoods damaged by the monster Google unwittingly created.
A little historical background: Google changed human behavior, which is a pretty big deal when you think about it. Before it burst upon the scene in the latter days of the first dot-com bubble, people mostly browsed for information. Today we default to search because it’s a better way to find stuff. Thank Google for that.
But one of the weaknesses of all search engines going back to Lycos is their dependence upon keywords. Spammers have always used keyword tricks to game search engines, but Google’s enormous influence gave birth to large companies that do nothing but vomit forth keyword-laden text, the sole purpose of which was to drive traffic through Google search results. We’re looking at you, Demand Media.
The Ascendance of ‘Top 10’ Lists
The growing influence of keywords has diminished the importance of content quality. Why pay for professional writers when you can get the same or better results by employing interns or offshore body shops that write to formulas defined by keyword frequency? The reason you see so many “top 10” lists and tip sheets online is because they perform well in search results, people click on the links a lot and they’re cheap to produce. We don’t think Google intended for this to happen; it just worked out that way.
Many capable writers have seen pay rates plummet by 75% or more over the last five years as publishers have pushed quantity over quality. The only way you can make a living at 25 cents a word is to churn out a lot of them. These journalism serfs are the real victims of the collapse of print media. They’re skilled professionals whose livelihoods have been stolen by publishers who make no distinction between writing and typing.
Serfs Up
Now Google is throwing them a lifeline. With the release of its Panda search algorithm last year, Google made its first strong statements that it’s cracking down on keyword farms. Last month’s release of the Hummingbird algorithm continues a campaign to elevate the value of quality content in search results and penalize formulaic gamesmanship.
For example, officials sent the PR industry into tizzy by stating that press releases can no longer be used to juice search performance, calling them “link schemes” and “advertisements.” Executives have made it clear that their mission is to deliver search results that most closely match what the user is looking for, not just those that have the right keyword combinations.
If you’re the best at what you do, these updates Google has been rolling out are opportunities to separate yourself from your competition. [Your competitors] may have been engaging in spammy tactics to get good rankings, but if you’ve been focusing on creating content that provides real value to potential customers, their days are numbered.
People like Mike Moran, who really understand search engines, have said for years that the only true search optimization is quality content. Google is finally speaking the same language.
It’s Good
So what does this mean for journalists? We think it’s all good. Marketers, who are hiring increasing numbers of journalists to stoke their content marketing efforts, are going to have to step up their game. They’ll need better content, which means hiring better writers who charge higher rates. Publishers will also need to re-examine the merits of paying for quality content instead of publishing anything turned in by someone with a pulse.
Does Google’s strategy point to the rebirth of traditional news organizations? Sadly, that horse is already out of the barn. But it does indicate that the days of search engine gamesmanship are numbered and that quality is going to count for something again.
Google can’t change the way search has commoditized news and diminished the value of media brands, but that’s only partially its fault. In any case, it’s hard to feel sorry for the rich executives who have seen their bonuses cut amid falling profits.
The victims we feel sorry for are the career beat reporters who couldn’t anticipate the seismic shifts in their field and who were ill-equipped to adapt. Perhaps their fortunes are finally about to change.
By paulgillin | - 11:23 am - Posted in Uncategorized
Google has arguably been the worst enemy of working journalists for the last decade, but now the tide is turning and the search giant is trying to repair the damage it has done. It deserves our patience and understanding as it continues on a course that hopefully will revitalize journalism as a career and rescue hundreds of thousands of freelancers who have seen their livelihoods damaged by the monster Google unwittingly created. A little historical background: Google changed human behavior, which is a pretty big deal when you think about it. Before it burst upon the scene in the latter days of the first dot-com bubble, people mostly browsed for information. Today we default to search because it’s a better way to find stuff. Thank Google for that.
But one of the weaknesses of all search engines going back to Lycos is their dependence upon keywords. Spammers have always used keyword tricks to game search engines, but Google’s enormous influence gave birth to large companies that do nothing but vomit forth keyword-laden text, the sole purpose of which was to drive traffic through Google search results. We’re looking at you, Demand Media.
The Ascendance of ‘Top 10’ Lists
The growing influence of keywords has diminished the importance of content quality. Why pay for professional writers when you can get the same or better results by employing interns or offshore body shops that write to formulas defined by keyword frequency? The reason you see so many “top 10” lists and tip sheets online is because they perform well in search results, people click on the links a lot and they’re cheap to produce. We don’t think Google intended for this to happen; it just worked out that way.
Many capable writers have seen pay rates plummet by 75% or more over the last five years as publishers have pushed quantity over quality. The only way you can make a living at 25 cents a word is to churn out a lot of them. These journalism serfs are the real victims of the collapse of print media. They’re skilled professionals whose livelihoods have been stolen by publishers who make no distinction between writing and typing.
Serfs Up
Now Google is throwing them a lifeline. With the release of its Panda search algorithm last year, Google made its first strong statements that it’s cracking down on keyword farms. Last month’s release of the Hummingbird algorithm continues a campaign to elevate the value of quality content in search results and penalize formulaic gamesmanship.
For example, officials sent the PR industry into tizzy by stating that press releases can no longer be used to juice search performance, calling them “link schemes” and “advertisements.” Executives have made it clear that their mission is to deliver search results that most closely match what the user is looking for, not just those that have the right keyword combinations.
Writing on Forbes.com, Joshua Steimle summed up Hummingbird thusly:
If you’re the best at what you do, these updates Google has been rolling out are opportunities to separate yourself from your competition. [Your competitors] may have been engaging in spammy tactics to get good rankings, but if you’ve been focusing on creating content that provides real value to potential customers, their days are numbered.
People like Mike Moran, who really understand search engines, have said for years that the only true search optimization is quality content. Google is finally speaking the same language.
It’s Good
So what does this mean for journalists? We think it’s all good. Marketers, who are hiring increasing numbers of journalists to stoke their content marketing efforts, are going to have to step up their game. They’ll need better content, which means hiring better writers who charge higher rates. Publishers will also need to re-examine the merits of paying for quality content instead of publishing anything turned in by someone with a pulse.
Does Google’s strategy point to the rebirth of traditional news organizations? Sadly, that horse is already out of the barn. But it does indicate that the days of search engine gamesmanship are numbered and that quality is going to count for something again.
Google can’t change the way search has commoditized news and diminished the value of media brands, but that’s only partially its fault. In any case, it’s hard to feel sorry for the rich executives who have seen their bonuses cut amid falling profits.
The victims we feel sorry for are the career beat reporters who couldn’t anticipate the seismic shifts in their field and who were ill-equipped to adapt. Perhaps their fortunes are finally about to change.
As 2009 draws to an end, about the best thing anyone in the US newspaper industry can say about it is, “Thank God it’s over.”
This was unquestionably the worst year in the history of the business. Circulation plummeted to pre-World War II levels and advertising revenues hit regions not seen since the Johnson administration. The year opened on a dismal note with the closure of major dailies in Denver and Seattle and threatened shutdowns in San Francisco, Boston and Chicago. Many pundits predicted a bloodbath with dozens of dailies folding during the year.
But then the unexpected happened. Union concessions and deep cost cuts brought the Boston and San Francisco papers back from the brink. While smaller dailies did give up the ghost in Tucson and Ann Arbor – and more than 100 weeklies shut down – the doomsday scenario never occurred. Instead, publishers came to grips with the reality of their plight and made earnest attempts to stabilize their operations. In a January column on WallSt.com, former Financial World magazine and Switchboard.com president Douglas McIntyre listed “Twelve Major Media Brands Likely To Close In 2009.” In fact, only one – Gourmet magazine – did.
As the year wore on, signs emerged that sales declines are slowing and circulation revenue from the core of loyal readers is making up some of the advertising gap. A broad consensus has emerged that the ink-on-dead-trees model is mortally wounded, giving publishers permission to turn their attention from saving a dying industry to managing it profitably downward while investing in new ventures that have growth potential.
Creative revenue ideas ranging from pay walls to behavioral targeting sprung up this year. Enrollments in journalism schools hit all-time highs and undergrads said they are approaching their careers with the idea of building personal brand rather than working for a big metro daily. Many industry veterans applauded their spirit.
As the second decade of the new millennium begins, there is a palpable sense of optimism, not only about the economy but also the potential to reinvent journalism. It’s an attitude we have tried to encourage in our own small way, for this blog long ago turned its attention from death to rebirth.
We’ll be posting less frequently during the first six months of 2010 as we tackle a new book on business-to-business social media. Your comments and many words of encouragement have been a constant source of delight in this otherwise dreadful year. We wish you better times in 2010. Keep your chin up.
For now, here are some of the more memorable items from the 178 entries we posted this year, presented in no particular order
Uppers
Doc Searles presented a well-reasoned argument why journalism isn’t disappearing from the earth but simply following the path already blazed by business. Much as personal computers and open source software moved computing innovation from the center to the ends of the network, journalism is undergoing a similar metamorphosis, he wrote. Journalism isn’t going away so much as being democratized.
Life magazine published a delightful collection of classic photos – like the one of Los Angeles gangster Mickey Cohen at right – about the contribution of newspapers to our culture under the banner of When Newspapers Mattered.
A team of publishing veterans that includes Backfence founder Mark Potts and super-blogger Jeff Jarvis announced GrowthSpur. The startup is building a back-end business system that it hopes will enable bloggers and small publishers to quickly monetize their businesses while building a network that multiplies opportunity for every member.
A team of veteran journalists and news technologists joined forces to create a technology to enhance the Web browsing experience while creating a new revenue stream for content producers. Startup CircLabs is developing a tool that learns from the user’s online behavior to deliver recommendations for relevant content. Founders include three top officials from the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri.
News-editor-turned-Silicon-Valley-entrepreneur Alan Mutter proposed ViewPass, a subscription service that would aggregate editorial content and collect visitor data that could be used to sell higher-priced ads. Mutter estimated that the system could more than double the CPMs that publishers charge advertisers and would manage copyrights more effectively than the current haphazard system.
Former Rocky Mountain News Washington correspondent ME Sprengelmeyer penned a splendidly written essay about the joys of rediscovering his journalist roots as publisher of a small weekly newspaper.
Writing in The New York Times, David Carr presented a glass-is-half-full perspective about the future of journalism. Carr observed that the new breed of technology-enabled young journalists see the collapse of media institutions as an opportunity to make a name for themselves based upon merit rather than survival. “The next wave is not just knocking on doors, but seeking to knock them down,” he wrote.
A new Bay Area nonprofit was funded to the tune of $5 million by a local investor. The venture is a collaboration between public broadcaster KQED and the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.
The Knight Foundation funded nine new-media projects to the tune of $5.1 million. The biggest winner was DocumentCloud, a project conceived by journalists from The New York Times and ProPublica to create a set of open standards for sharing documents. Other winners included one to help citizens use cell phones to report and distribute news, a project to develop a media toolkit for mobile applications and an online space where the people can report and track errors in the media.
Downers
The New York Times published a jaw-dropping correction from its July 17 “appraisal” of Walter Cronkite’s career. Among the eight errors in the story where Wikipediable factoids such as the date of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. Ombudsman Clark Hoyt was blunt in his explanation: “A television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work…editors who should have been vigilant were not.” The critic, Alessandra Stanley, has a history of being so careless with facts that in 2005, “she was assigned a single copy editor responsible for checking her facts.”
The owner of Editor &Publisher, which has covered the newspaper industry for 125 years, announced that it will shut down the magazine.
The bankrupt Tribune Company sent “14 reporters, columnists and photogs to this year’s Super Bowl, even though neither Super Bowl team came from a city where Tribune actually has a newspaper,” observed Mark Potts.
Many publishers apparently took advantage of recent changes to Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) rules to overstate their real readership numbers. The rules changes enabled publishers to count “bundled” subscriptions of paid and online editions as two subscribers, even if only one person was doing the reading.
Ahwatukee (Ariz.) Foothills News staff writer Krystin Wiggs told of being victimized by an elaborate hoax concocted by a young man who claimed to be a gifted and successful chef. The man convinced Wiggs that he had won scholarships to culinary school and landed a sous chef job at a top restaurant at the age of 21. He even enlisted an accomplice to masquerade as head chef at the restaurant for a phone interview.
BusinessWeek was put up for sale for $1. It was no bargain, since the legendary newsweekly was on track to lose $75 million this year. Bloomberg eventually paid up and then took a hatchet to the senior staff.
Sydney Morning Heraldtechnology writer Asher Moses was publicly embarrassed over comments he made about a sex scandal involving a prominent former rugby star. Although the comments were made during his off hours, Moses’ impartiality was widely questioned.
Amazon.com had a chance to win friends among the ranks of newspaper publishers by offering paid subscriptions to their products via the Kindle e-reader. Unfortunately, Amazon’s onerous licensing terms entitled it to keep 70% of the subscription fees.
Todd Smith, who was shot on the job while working as a reporter for the Missouri-based Suburban Journals chain of newspapers, was called to a meeting at headquarters on April 15. Smith thought that maybe the staff had won an award for coverage of the massacre. Instead, he learned that he and several others were being laid off.
Boston HeraldSunday editor Tom Mashberg reprinted an e-mail exchange between him and Keith O’Brien, the author of a harshly critical story about the Herald that appeared in the rival Boston Globe. The e-mail outlined O’Brien’s intention to include negative comments about the Globe in his story as well as the fact that the Herald was profitable while the Globe wasn’t. None of that information appeared in the final piece. “Looks like the editors got hold of this and turned it into a hatchet job,” Mashberg wrote.
Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth (right) canceled plans for a series of dinners at her home after an overzealous Post marketing executive issued flyers positioning the events as a way for sponsors to buy access to the paper’s journalists and members of Congress. Weymouth said the promotions “should never have happened.”
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said his government would double its advertising in print and online newspapers in an effort to prop up an industry that many people believe needs a radical overhaul more than money. That’s on top of previously announced subsidies that give every 18-year-old French citizen a free newspaper subscription.
The Chicago Tribune’s marketing department launched an experimental project to seek feedback on stories that hadn’t yet been published or even fully reported. A group of 55 reporters signed an angry e-mail in protest. Editor Gerould Kern issued a statement calling the experiment “a brief market research project.”
In a Vanity Fair profile of New York Times Co. CEO Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., Mark Bowden described one management offsite exercise in which Times Co. executives played a game that challenged them to decide between safe choices and riskier but potentially more rewarding long shots. An employee who had seen many groups play the game observed, “This is the most conservative group I have ever seen.”
A press release from the Washington Times, as reprinted on Talking Points Memo, also buried the lead about its own bad news: “The Washington Times today announced that it will begin producing a more focused Monday through Friday edition designed to feature its most distinctive news and opinion content.” In other words, it was killing the Sunday edition.
Kubas Consultants polled 500 newspaper executives in November and found them to be optimistic that the worst is almost over. Blogger Alan Mutter e-mailed the researcher who conducted the survey and learned that even he didn’t believe the resutls. “Optimism is better than slitting your wrists,” reasoned Ed Strapagiel.
A new newspaper in Detroit, the Daily Press,published just five issues before hitting “a bump in the road” and suspending further operations until the new year.
ZDNet blogger Richard Koman alleged that Yahoo had passed the names and e-mail addresses of hundreds of thousands of bloggers to Iranian authorities during the country’s controversial election. It turns out Koman‘s unnamed source for the story was an Iranian blogger with a vested interest in spreading misinformation. Paul Carr ranted about the incident and ZDNet retracted the entry and apologized.
Signs of the Times
The online-only Huffington Post set up a small investigative unit to examine the nation’s economy. The online news site is collaborating with The Atlantic Philanthropies and others on the Huffington Post Investigative Fund with an initial budget of $1.75 million and a staff of 10 investigative journalists to coordinate work done by freelancers.
HuffPo also began writing two different headlines for some stories and showing them randomly to viewers for five minutes. After that time, the headline that generates the most clicks becomes the default.
TVstations in Milwaukee, Lancaster, Pa. and Little Rock opened their daily news budget meetings to outsiders through video, live blogs and Twitter. News directors said the experiment has been a mixed bag, but has resulted in some solid news tips.
Writing under the pseudonym of @TheMediaIsDying, microblogger Paul Armstrong racked up more than 21,000 followers for his stream of tweets about the troubles of mainstream media.
One print paper did just fine this year.The Slammerboasts a newsstand profit margin that “is four times that of most local dailies, and its circulation has grown to 29,000 – up nearly 50 percent from 20,000 just last year,” wrote The Christian Science Monitor.The Slammer is full of mug shots, crime reports and allegations of misdeeds and carries the slogan “All Crime, All the Time.”
The Wall Street Journal launched an interactive map showing “adverse events at the top 100 newspapers” since 2006.
More newspapers began pooling resources to share stories, with consortia forming in Florida, Tennessee, New York and New Jersey. In New York, five newspapers banded together to exchange content in the largest such arrangement since the share-nicely trend began in 2008. Bloomberg and the Washington Post did a deal to create the Washington Post News Service With Bloomberg News. The alliance includes a revenue-sharing agreement to create a co-branded online business section on the Post’s website in the first quarter of 2010.
A Pew Research study in January found that the Internet passed newspapers as the preferred source of news among Americans. The survey of 1,489 adults found that 40% get most of their national and international news online, compared with 35% who rely primarily on newspapers. Television continued to be the number one choice, at 70%. Among people under 30, however, the Internet is now as popular as television for news.
In March, Mark Potts toted up the market capitalizations of publicly held newspaper companies in the US and came to a striking conclusion: Their combined value was just $1.3 billion, or a little more than the $1.1 billion that The New York Times Co. paid for the Boston Globe in 1993. Valuations had recovered somewhat by year’s end.
One-third of Americans under the age of 40 told Rasmussen Reports that Comedy Central’s Daily Show with Jon Stewart (right) and the Colbert Report are replacing traditional news outlets.
A survey of 95 editors by the Associated Press Managing Editors found that newsroom workers between the ages of 18 and 35 were the most likely to be laid off, despite the industry’s need to increase its appeal to precisely that age group.
Nevertheless, journalism schools saw an astonishing surge in enrollments. “According to an annual survey by the University of Georgia, the number of undergraduates enrolled nationwide in journalism and mass communication schools jumped more than 41% between 1997 and 2007,” reported the Capital Times of Madison, Wisc. Also, Forbes.com noted that journalism schools at Columbia University, the University of Maryland and Stanford University saw significant spikes in applications in 2008 — 30 percent, 25 percent and 20 percent, respectively.
Martin Langeveld calculated that in 1940 publishers distributed 118 newspaper copies for every 100 households. Today, the number is 33 copies per 100 households, down from 53 less than a decade ago.
Ninety-three percent of all newspaper sales “can now be attributed to kidnappers seeking to prove the day’s date in filmed ransom demands,” reportedThe Onionin a hilarious spoof of the industry’s downturn.
Notable Quotes
“Our newspaper’s biggest revenue source today is foreclosure notices.”
–Clifford Buchan, editor of the Minnesota-based weekly Forest LakeTimes.
“That’s like asking someone in another business if they want to get vaccinated with a live virus.”
“Students will work to make their blogging more vivid using the fundamentals of the craft, such as imagery, foreshadowing, symbolism, and viral paparazzi photos of celebrity nip slips.”
“There was nothing [in these newspapers] of remote interest [to] just about any sentient being. But that’s not what the paper’s editors were aiming for. The point is that there was nothing there that could possibly offend anyone.”
“I don’t know how to write an inverted pyramid story or even really what that is. I do know how to write for different platforms, be scrappy and break news. I’ve had zero important alum connections and never got an internship at a big daily. And, in hindsight, that’s probably the greatest stroke of luck I could have had.”
“The 500-year-old accident of economics occasioned by the printing press – high upfront cost and filtering happening at the source of publication – is over. But will The New York Times still exist on paper? Of course, because people will hit the print button.”
“There’s an enormous amount of vanity among journalists who forget that people buy newspapers not just for journalism but crosswords, cartoons, TV listings and indeed advertising.”
“‘Jon and Kate’ for first mention, ‘Jesus, ENOUGH’ afterwards.”
@FakeAPStylebook, a Twitter-based parody that has quickly amassed more than 82,000 followers.
“Completion of a tower that will give Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport controllers technology and visibility to monitor air traffic for the foreseeable future, settling a contract that will keep the controllers on the job and redefining air space corridors, are keys to the Valley airport’s future, Robert Sturgell, FAA deputy administrator, said Thursday.”
“It’s safer to make an outrageous statement about Saddam Hussein than to make a mild criticism of a local car dealer. It’s something newspapers don’t like to admit. It has always mattered who pays the bills.”
“This is the thought of the day and this is where you put the thought of the day as if anyone has a thought for the day. And can’t work out what the hell is going on. But who knows what is happeningishness. – Jesus Mark 7:21-23 (Bible for Today)”
-Dummy copy mistakenly published as the Thought for the Day in Australia’s Advertiser
Images
The AP posted this photo of discarded newspaper racks languishing in a San Francisco junkyard. Updated: This was the consequence of a new city ordinance banning stand-alone newspaper racks. However, the image acquired particular power in light of the industry’s plight.
An ad created by the North Carolina Press Association to urge citizens to fight legislation that would allow local governments to post public notices on the Web instead of in local newspapers appeared to portray newspaper readers as old and technophobic.
Christopher Ave, the political editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, isn’t a copy editor but he’s sympathetic to the pain of wordsmiths around the country who are falling victim to layoffs. He created this clever music video to dramatize their plight.
This monologue by a resident of Santa Cruz, Calif. testifying before the city council about, we think, vegetables, raises questions about whether as a population we can, you know, express stuff.
A 26-year old Berkeley musician named Jonathan Mann joined forces with the staff of the East Bay Express to come up with a solution to newspapers’ business problems. Wait till the end to hear it.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News took very different approaches to commemorating their final issues.
Nine summers ago, I left a job running a 75-person newsroom to become the sixth employee at an Internet startup. That was the thing to do in the late 90s, when stock options were plentiful and the Internet promised boundless reward. By 2002, that had all changed, and many dot-com entrepreneurs were slinking back to their old employers, asking if they could have their jobs back.
That didn’t happen to me, though. The media startup I joined, TechTarget, actually grew through the technology nuclear winter. It went public last year (although the stock has recently been sucked down by the media stock malaise) and now employs about 600 people.
One thing we did early on that challenged conventional wisdom was to tear down walls between advertising and editorial. At previous employers, it was accepted that sales people and editors not only never talked, they were often openly hostile toward each other. My new organization didn’t have cultural barriers like that, so we experimented with a more collegial process.
Ad sales and editorial people sat together in biweekly meetings to discuss story budgets and the sales climate. Things got pretty testy sometimes, but the debate was open and honest. Instead of calling people names behind their backs, each side shared stories about its successes and challenges. Over time, the relationships grew to be, if not chummy, at least respectful.
Once people respected each other, they began to work collaboratively. Management urged along the process by putting in place a bonus plan that rewarded everyone for a business unit’s financial success. Sales reps and editors openly batted around ideas for products that would have both advertiser and reader appeal. They came up with a lot of innovations. It turned out that collaborating didn’t mean infringing. Boundaries were still respected, but conversation wasn’t prohibited. Imagine that.
It was my job as chief editor to insure that the quality and integrity of the editorial product weren’t compromised. In five years in that role, I never once felt that my principles were violated. If ever there was a challenge, I appealed to the CEO, who always came down on the side of editorial quality.
Incidentally, a handful of people switched groups over these five years, including a few editors who realized their true calling was in sales.
This experience came to mind today reading Chris O’Brien’s Five Steps to Foster Innovation in the Newsroom. Among them: “Find new ways to get people from different areas to work together. This includes editorial and business side (Sorry, but it’s long past time to kill this sacred cow).”
Amen to that. Stick a fork in that well-done bovine. Building moats between the revenue side and the product side was excusable when profits were healthy, but now is the time to discard assumptions. Ad sales people aren’t contagious and talking with them won’t make you compromise your principles. If it does, then you have bigger problems.
Traditionalists are still resistant. Over at the San Francisco Chronicle, whose future is probably less secure than any major metro daily’s, “real journalists” are appalled about the decision to give former mayor Willie Brown a column because of Brown’s history of alleged self-dealing. People who aren’t disgusted by Brown’s column “are people who don’t put journalism first,” says one insider.
Puh-leeze. Giving a popular ex-mayor a column sounds like a pretty interesting way to spur circulation. And if the purists have a problem with that, have it out in public. Let the Chron columnists and bloggers debate the issue in front of everyone instead of grousing in the men’s room. Too many editors continue to use the shield of journalistic integrity to duck new ideas and then complain to each other instead of airing their opinions in public.
Newspapers need strong chief editors who support collaboration. They also need publishers who will rally to the side of quality journalism when a dispute occurs. Reporters and editors need to get over the old biases that never made much sense to begin with. I can’t think of another industry in which the people who sell the product are at such odds with the people who make the product. If you can make a persuasive case for maintaining this rigid separation, please contribute to the comments section. I just don’t see it.
The Futility of Corporate Secrecy
There’s an interesting discussion going on over at the Gannett Blog. On Wednesday, Editor Jim Hopkins picked up on an item in one of the Gannett titles that said corporate finance and accounting operations were being consolidated and moved to Indianapolis. He suggested that recent cutbacks at other Gannett holdings point to layoffs of as many as 2,300 people, or about 5% of Gannett’s workforce.
Blogs are a petrie dish for speculation, so when Hopkins asked reader for input, they responded. Gannett folk from Asheville, Detroit, Louisville and elsewhere are jumping in with their local version of layoff rumors. It sounds like something’s coming, and it isn’t good. Absent from the discussion is Gannett, which certainly should be aware of this popular site. If the rumors are false, why isn’t someone from corporate stepping in and correcting them? Perhaps it’s because the rumors are true. Absent Gannett’s voice, people will tend to believe that silence is confirmation.
Go East, Young Journo
Media markets in India are booming, thanks to the surging economy and the growing middle class, and some discouraged US journalists are picking up and moving east. New dailies and magazines are popping up every week and they’re hiring. Some TV stations are paying ex-print reporters up to $180,000 to go on-air, and that kind of money goes a long way in India. Five recent graduates of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism recently joined the Hindustan Times and say the experience has been great and the opportunity is greater. One expat says he turns down two or three assignments a month. “I’d like to see more freelancers move to India. There are too many stories to cover and just not enough time to get to them all.’
Miscellany
San Diegans may have reason for cautious optimism. The owner of a local TV station says he may make a bid for the distressed Union-Tribune. Michael D. McKinnon was a print publisher back in the 50s and 60s and he doesn’t want to see a local institution in the hands of an outsider.
Just because it’s user-generated, doesn’t mean it’s profitable. In May, we told you about Everywhere and JPG, two new magazines from 8020 Media that break the mold by deriving most of their content from readers. Well, it turns out that Everywhere wasn’t everywhere with advertisers, so 8020 has shuttered it after only four issues in order to focus on JPG. Management prefers to use the term “on hold” and said it’s still committed to the model. Interesting side note: only two editors lost their jobs.
While owner Blethen Maine Newspapers continues to seek a buyer, the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram bleeds. An unspecified number of people have been laid off in the fourth round of cuts in a year. The publisher is also adjusting trim size and consolidating some sections to save money on paper. Employee solidarity helped mitigate the pain; workers volunteered to take time off so that jobs wouldn’t be eliminated.
Management at the Los Angeles Daily News apparently thought that one way to boost sagging morale would be to implement a dress code. Employees didn’t agree. The idea has been scotched.
The McPherson (Kan.) Sentinel becomes the latest daily to eliminate its Monday edition. It will publish five days a week. Mondays are notoriously poor for ad sales.
James Cogan says it’s a great time to get into the newspaper business because chaos is a good time for innovation. We wish there were more people with his positive attitude.
Charles Apple has a practical, whimsical and uplifting essay on advice for the recently laid-off. Our favorite: “Your editor didn’t want to lay you off. Seriously. Make him/her a reference. Even if you have to apologize for throwing that potted plant during your HR interview.”
By paulgillin | April 10, 2008 - 7:46 am - Posted in Fake News, Paywalls
All News Must Stand On Its Own
Encyclopedia Britannica kicks off a “Newspapers & the Net Forum” with an excerpt from Nick Carr’s new book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google.He states what publishers have known for some time: the shift from print to online delivery changes the product entirely. No longer can high-margin classified ads support expensive investigative reporting. In today’s world, every item of content is an island and must stand on its own merit. Advertisers want contextual adjacency. This creates pressure to publish stories about high-definition TVs instead of stories about Iraq.
Among the more than two dozen comments is one that notes “I have a copy of Newsweek with a cover story entitled, if I am recalling correctly, “Are Newspapers Dead?†The magazine is from around 1965. So this debate has been going on a long time.” True, but this is the first time those predictions really appear to be coming true.
The Forum goes on all week with some other provocative topics that I promise to get around to reading. Here’s the index page.
Rethinking the Value of News
Tom Abate thinks newspaper publishers could learn a few things from the airline industry. In other words, figure out how to charge different prices for the same product. As he sees it, the background notes that a reporter collects, which would never be of interest to a mainstream newspaper audience, could be a gold mine to businesses that specialized in that area. Use a blog to publish those notes and attract those special-interest readers and then sell ads to businesses that will pay top dollar to reach those people.
Abate laments all the attention being paid to Fark.com, a snarky linklog with a juvenile sense of humor. Newspapers shouldn’t be trying to out-Fark Fark, he says (although, if you look at Fark, it sends a lot of traffic to newspaper websites), but should focus on attracting the highly engaged readers who appreciate depth and context. There’s sensible thinking behind his comments, although the airline industry isn’t exactly the gold standard of business models and the devil would be in the details.
Abate would probably find a soul mate in Ted Gup, a journalism professor at Case Western. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, he laments his students’ appalling ignorance of basic current events.
Quoting:”Nearly half of a recent class could not name a single country that bordered Israel. In an introductory journalism class, 11 of 18 students could not name what country Kabul was in, although we have been at war there for half a decade. Last fall only one in 21 students could name the U.S. secretary of defense. Given a list of four countries — China, Cuba, India, and Japan — not one of those same 21 students could identify India and Japan as democracies. Their grasp of history was little better. The question of when the Civil War was fought invited an array of responses — half a dozen were off by a decade or more. Some students thought that Islam was the principal religion of South America, that Roe v. Wade was about slavery, that 50 justices sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, that the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1975. You get the picture, and it isn’t pretty.”
In his view, we’re raising a generation of kids who are so distracted and self-absorbed that they’ve tuned out the rest of the world. And part of the problem is that the don’t read newspapers or watch serious television.
Confidence in the Future
The publisher of the LA Times says the company is getting it together. In a memo to employees published on Los Angeles Times Pressmens 20 Year Club, David Hiller talks of adding 400 new regional advertising accounts, expanding Spanish language products and topping 100 million page views online the last two months running. There’s a new organization, new management and a commitment to build a vision and financial model that is sustainable for the long term. He also mentions in passing that there will only be merit raises this year and that they’ll be three months late. The Pressmen tap dance on that news. More to come during an April 30 town meeting.
Meanwhile, the Albany Times Unionbelieves in the future of print. The company’s about to spend $55 million to enlarge its headquarters and install a new printing press that will print color on all pages. The additional 70,000 sq. ft. faciliity is also intended to position the Times Union as a printer for other publications in the region.
Silver Linings in Pink Slips
Slate’s Jack Shafer sees some goodness in the latest wave of buyouts: a chance to bring new blood into the organization. The boomers who sit atop the editorial pyramids at all the big publications are too invested in the way things have always been done, he says. Get some whippernsappers in there for whom experimentation is a way of life.
Quoting: “‘There goes our institutional memory,’ somebody usually laments whenever a graybeard leaves a news organization. The speaker is usually another graybeard who, if pressed, couldn’t tell you what is so vital about the institutional memory wheeling out the door.”
Buyouts can mean rebirth for those taking the buyout, too, Shafer says. Longtime Washington Post political reporter Thomas B. Edsall is now at Huffington Post, where he says seeing his work appear without the meddling of a dozen editors is a rebirth.
And Finally
Leave it to Canada to buck the North American trend. Newspapers are actually doing pretty well up there, says Editors Weblog: “Total 2007 revenues, including online operations, slipped only 0.8%, with print advertising decreasing 2.4%. In contrast, online revenue grew 29% over 2006. Newspaper circulation as well took a very minor fall in 2007, decreasing 1.2% after a 3.8% rise the previous year.”
By paulgillin | August 4, 2007 - 5:30 am - Posted in Fake News
Recent headlines:
Post-Dispatch offers more early retirement – “Calling 2007 a ‘difficult year for the newspaper industry,’ the St. Louis Post-Dispatch said yesterday it will offer employees early retirement packages. The offer comes less than two years after about 130 employees, including about 40 in the newsroom, retired early…[the publisher said] ‘This is a great market. Our actions now will enable us to face 2008 and beyond in a much better position.'”
Sadly, no. Early retirement incentives don’t solve a systemic problem where costs are wildly out of synch with future revenues. This is putting a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound.
Sun-Times Media Group Weeklies Target Jittery ‘Daily Herald’ Employees – “In an unusual ad campaign targeting employees facing what might be the first layoffs in the newspaper’s history, the Pioneer Press group of weeklies is offering jobs to staffers of the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago.”
Kind of a good news/bad news scenario. I think it points to the growing strength of localized media. It’s actually getting cheaper to publish in print and this could lead to a resurgence of activity at town/community levels. The death of metro dailies could be accompanied by a rebirth of small-town weeklies.
AP to Shut Down Premium ‘Asap’ Service – “The Associated Press is closing down a 2-year-old premium multimedia service that emphasized nontraditional methods of storytelling, saying that it had failed to gain enough traction with newspaper clients.”
Good for AP for trying this idea, even if it didn’t play out financially. These “nontraditional” methods are the future of journalism, even if the economic model hasn’t yet evolved fully.
And finally…
At the New York Press: Layoffs, Circulation Drop, and No More Hooker Ads!– Manhattan Media, new owner of the New York Press, says it’s going to challenge the Village Voice and build a high-end audience. For starters, sex ads are gone, a move that could cost a million in lost revenue per year. Hooray for a vote of confidence in print and a decision to take the high road.
The Hartford Courant has set up an online gathering place for citizens and is reverse-publishing in print. iTOWNS invites readers to submit news briefs, events, photos and videos to a website, with guidance from a local staff member. Every Sunday, selected content is published in six regional print editions. All the content comes from the community. “We reached over 3/4 of our ad goal before the first print edition was published. Amazingly we did all of this without a single new hire,” the Courant‘s designer tells Charles Apple.
Life magazine published a delightful collection of classic photos – like the one of Los Angeles gangster Mickey Cohen at right – about the contribution of newspapers to our culture under the banner of 
The owner of Editor & Publisher, which has covered the newspaper industry for 125 years, announced that it will 
