...but apparently not TBD's future.

Wow, that was fast.

Just six months after it was launched as the most ambitious hyperlocal news operation in the US, Washington’s TBD has cut expenses deeply and narrowed  its mission to arts and entertainment. One third of the staff – or 12 employees – were let go this week. The apparent chaos at TBD is evidenced by the fact that general manager Bill Lord, who came on board just two weeks ago, said layoffs were only one of several options being contemplated at that time. Owner Allbritton Communications cited low traffic figures as the cause of the cutbacks. Considering that TBD racked up 6 million page views in January, it must have needed a lot of traffic to cover expenses.

The breathtaking speed with which Allbritton reined in the TBD venture shouldn’t be lost on other hyperlocal publishers. Alan Mutter sums up the difficulties that all such organizations face:

• Small audiences are difficult to monetize in the first place;
• Finding and converting advertisers to reach small audiences is expensive;
• Advertisers are reluctant to spend a lot of money on online ads in general, particularly when the audiences are small.

Mutter calls AOL’s Patch.com, which now encompasses more than 800 hyperlocal sites, the next litmus test for the concept. AOL is reportedly spending $50 million on the venture, but the tone of Mutter’s analysis is that that money is probably wasted.

Keep reading, though,  if you want a different perspective. Nearly every one of the 20 or so people who weigh in on Mutter’s post disagree with him, some vehemently. They argue that hyperlocal news does work if publishers don’t get too greedy. Comment writers include several people who are successfully running the kind of small operations for which Mutter see so little hope.

“Hyperlocal is just a way of expressing the need for news that is more local, closer to the neighborhood or town level, than the metro daily ever could be,” notes  Jay Rosen. “And of course it corresponds to a class of advertiser that was priced out of and ill served by the metro daily and TV stations.”

Adds Oscar Martinez (left) of NeighborsGo, a successful hyperlocal venture by the Dallas Morning News, “If nothing else, [the Patch.com] effort should be applauded because the competition will remind newspapers that there IS money on the table and, more important, there’s still time to go after it.”  We interviewed Martinez more than 2 1/2 years ago, and his hyperlocal operation is still alive and kicking.

Our take: Mutter’s analysis is accurate, but publishers continue to debate the wrong thing. The issue isn’t whether there’s enough advertising out to fund a lot of successful hyperlocal ventures; there probably isn’t. The solution is in finding other ways to monetize small businesses in the area. We laid out our proposal two years ago, but with the exception of Sacramento Press, a hyperlocal venture that is truly flourishing, we haven’t seen a whole lot of interest.

Promoting Newsroom Innovation

Lauren Rabaino picks up on a Twitter chat with Jay Rosen in which the professor said newsrooms need to radically revamp their culture. Rabaino points to a few examples of how tech startups break the mold in interacting with the customers and investors. While her use of the word “awesome” is a bit excessive, her examples aren’t.  Why are biographies on news sites so boring? Probably because newspaper cultures have traditionally buried the identities of all but their most prominent columnists. In contrast, tech startups use bio pages to point out that there are real people behind the products. Why not humanize the staff that brings you the news? Chances are they’re members of the community, anyway.

There’s also an interesting idea about bringing webcams into the workplace, something that text-messaging startup Tatango has reportedly done for its investors (although we can find no evidence of it on Tatango’s website). We’re not sure if webcams in the newsroom would be very interesting to look at, but the idea of opening up news meetings to the public has always intrigued us. Yes, competitors would be free to watch the action, too, but might the involvement of the community in the news gathering process also give the open newsroom a competitive edge? We’ve always thought that when it comes to reporting the news, more participation is better than less. Some traditionalists still resist that idea.

In a similar vein, Editor & Publisher has an essay by Neil Greer, CEO and co-founder of ImpactEngine.com, about how to motivate people to innovate. We think the recommendations are mostly management common sense, but they’re valid anyway.. T

Miscellany

The Selma (AL) Times-Journal will put up a paywall next Tuesday, becoming the latest in a trickle of small papers to charge for access. It’ll cost you $48/year or $4.95/month to get the news, and PayPal is accepted. Print subscribers will get in for free, but only after paying the online fee and then asking for a rebate. The story about the paywall is bylined by Times-Journal news editor Rick Couch, who temporarily abandons journalistic impartiality in failing to explore the controversy around paywalls or the possibility that this could actually be a bad idea.

The University of Colorado should eliminate its standalone journalism major in favor of an integrated information science or digital communications program, according to the chancellor of the Boulder campus. If approved, the shutdown of the current journalism school could happen as early as  next year. Chancellor Phil DiStefano isn’t calling for journalism education to fade from this earth. Rather, he thinks it should be incorporated more holistically into a liberal arts education and perhaps become a minor concentration. Boulder’s Daily Camera presents both sides of the debate, including anxious statements from the current journalism faculty who will be moved, like displaced persons, to other corners of the campus.

The Detroit Media Partnership is borrowing an idea from the fast-food industry and offering a $5,000 prize to the person or group who can come up with the best idea “for helping The Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press increase their audiences or better serve the community.” Management is taking suggestions now and will hold a public vote in early April. Finalists will pitch their ideas to a panel of judges that includes Domino’s Pizza Inc. CEO Patrick Doyle, whose policy of responding to customer complaints about his company’s crappy product is credited with turning Domino’s around.

Detroit’s second most famous business – rapper Eminem – shook up the local journalism world a bit by snubbing hundreds of media supplicants and granting a rare interview to East Hills Middle School eighth-grader Annie Reed. Reed, who had pursued the interview at the urging of her newspaper instructor,  talked to the 38-year-old rapper for about 10 minutes. The word “cool” was apparently used several times. The Detroit Free Press story is more about how Reed got the audience with Eminem than about what was said on the phone. It’s an uplifting tale and the photo is great. Lose Yourself.

“Launch glitches” will keep Rupert Murdoch’s tablet-only Daily free for at least several more weeks, according to Publisher Greg Clayman. Users have been reporting frequent crashes and freezes, which Clayman said is not surprising for a digital news publication that sometimes exceeds 100 pages per day. While people we know who have tried the Daily mainly dismiss it as gossipy fluff, Clayman says subscriptions are running ahead of plan, although he wouldn’t be more specific

The quarterly earnings season is upon us, and newspaper publishers are reporting better results, but not on the print side. The Washington Post Co. earned $11.59 a share in the quarter, which is nearly $3 dollars better than analyst consensus estimates.  However, print advertising revenue dropped 12%, continuing the ugly trend of the last five years. The good news: online revenues were up substantially.

A.H. Belo Corp., which publishes the Dallas Morning News and Providence Journal, among others, lost $119.5 million, or $5.65 per share, during the final quarter of 2010. That’s way down from earnings of $5.6 million, or 27 cents per share, in the same period the previous year. However, a large charge to cover pension expenses responsible for much of the drop. Revenue was down about 4%.

Gannett reported a fourth-quarter profit increase of 30%, largely due to cost-cutting and strength in its broadcast division. However, advertising revenue on the publishing side dropped nearly 6% and circulation revenue was down 4%.

And Finally…

Thanks to Legends and Rumors for calling out this correction from The New York Times, which we publish in its entirety:

An article on Jan. 16 about drilling for oil off the coast of Angola erroneously reported a story about cows falling from planes, as an example of risks in any engineering endeavor. No cows, smuggled or otherwise, ever fell from a plane into a Japanese fishing rig. The story is an urban legend, and versions of it have been reported in Scotland, Germany, Russia and other locations.

With its $315 million sale to America Online, Huffington Post now has to be considered one of the U.S.’s most highly valued news operations, so it’s only natural that observers should begin to wonder when it’s going to start paying its contributors a meaningful wage.
The debate is fueled by HuffPo’s unusual content model, which is based upon a large volume of articles contributed free by unpaid bloggers, as well as syndication and aggregation services that effectively used other people’s content to sell advertising.
Arianna Huffington’s “blogger network is an amazing achievement; she’s persuaded untold numbers of people to write for nothing, to have their names on the page as compensation for their labor,” writes Dan Gillmor on MediaActive. That model fits perfectly with the one that’s emerging at AOL as it places new-media bets with sites like TechCrunch and the Patch constellation of local news sites. “There’s a common thread in many of the content initiatives: paying low (or no) money to the people providing the content,” Gillmor writes.
But is that wrong? After all, no one is forcing bloggers to write for HuffPo for free, and the site’s terms & conditions state that contributors aren’t entitled to any compensation. Writing on Columbia Journalism Review, Lauren Kirchner notes that unpaid labor can actually be illegal in some circumstances. People have even been forced to accept payment when they didn’t want it because their volunteer work was deemed to be an unfair competitive advantage for the organization that benefited from their labors.
Even arrangements similar to HuffPo’s have been successfully contested in the past. Kirchner points to a suit filed against AOL years ago by a group of unpaid community managers who alleged that their efforts contributed to the company’s bottom line. The suit never reached trial and AOL finally settled for a reported $15 million, denying the world a clear precedent.
It’s unlikely that Huffington will change the practices that have contributed to its meteoric rise any time soon. But pressure from prominent voices like Gillmor could make executives uneasy. “The Huffington Post’s business model is perfectly legal. But is it right?” Kirchner asks.
Maybe not, but right in what context? We believe the debate over Huffington’s pay scale is a straw man for the bigger issue of content devaluation brought on by the Internet. Nate Silver contributes a fascinating analysis in this respect. He dissects the Huffington Post’s revenue model and determines that free content generates just a tiny percentage of the business. “The median blog post, with several hundred views, was worth only $3 or $4,” he writes. Even blockbuster articles contribute less than $200 to the site’s revenues.
Silver’s analysis makes a number of assumptions, due to the lack of publicly available information, but the number that caught our eye was his estimate that HuffPo publishes about 100 articles per day. If you figure that nets out to 30,000 articles per year and revenues of $30 million, then the average article is worth about $1,000 to the site. Assuming that HuffPo pays a 20% royalty to the author, then the average writer would expect to receive no more than $200 per piece. Silver’s methodology, which is based on traffic, estimates the actual value at much less than that. Under any scenario, unsolicited content is worth no more than a few bucks.
Huffington Post is only the most visible example of the new economics of news in which writers can expect to receive much less payment for work than they did in the heyday of mainstream media. Forcing the business to pay more to its writers doesn’t change those economics. Operations like Demand Media are standing at the ready to pay a nickel a word. The market will continue to find its low-water mark.
The good news — if there is any — is that this dynamic isn’t new. Back in the pre-Internet days, The New York Times was able to get away with paying freelancers a pittance for their work because it was The New York Times. The value of the  byline was enough to reward contributors, even if the actual paycheck was only beer money.
We believe that there is an explosion of demand about to come from corporations that are embracing the new tactics of “content marketing.” These businesses must increasingly compete on the value of their content rather than the size of their advertising budget, and they will need to hire professionals to help them. This may be small consolation to many journalists, but at least it offers the possibility of a living wage that enables them to practice independent journalism, if only in their spare time.

Second-half magazine circulation continued to tumble in 2010, with Hearst down 6% and Condé Nast off 10%. The biggest culprit is declining newsstand sales as consumers increasingly turn to their smart phones for information. Paid subscriptions were actually up 3.2%. Magazines continue to cut distribution and increase subscription prices in order to prop up profitability.
An interesting side note to this story  is that Sports Illustrated will stop selling print-only subscriptions. Instead of paying $39 to receive the magazine, people will now have to pay $48 to get a bundled print, web and Android app edition . Why no iPad version? The publisher and Apple are still trying to work that out, but nothing is expected soon.

More shenanigans in the Tribune Co.’s Chapter 11 mess. It just gets uglier and uglier.

And Finally…

If you think “crowdsourcing” is destroying the economy, then don’t read this…

• “Princecharming” will type up a poem about anything you want and send it to you, signed, in the mail.
• “Nick0000” will turn a black-and-white image into a color image (left).
• “Berthold” will proofread 800 words of English or German.
• “sugars68” will write a unique original article for any keyword, with delivery in 24 hours.

What do these stunts have in common? They’re all things people will do for $5. At Fiverr.com you can find people to provide products and services ranging from the ordinary (deliver parenting advice) to the bizarre (design your name from energy drink tabs) for a lousy sawbuck.
Fiverr is a real e-commerce site. If you want to take someone up on an offer, click a button, pay by PayPal or credit card and wait for the results. Buyers can rate the quality of the transaction and sellers can accumulate feedback scores, just like on eBay. You can even post a request for people who will fulfill your desire. All for five bucks. Amazing.

With its $315 million sale to America Online, Huffington Post now has to be considered one of the U.S.’s most highly valued news operations, so it’s only natural that observers should begin to wonder when it’s going to start paying its contributors a meaningful wage.

The debate is fueled by HuffPo’s unusual content model, which is based upon a large volume of articles contributed free by unpaid bloggers, as well as syndication and aggregation services that effectively used other people’s content to sell advertising.

Arianna Huffington’s “blogger network is an amazing achievement; she’s persuaded untold numbers of people to write for nothing, to have their names on the page as compensation for their labor,” writes Dan Gillmor on MediaActive. That model fits perfectly with the one that’s emerging at AOL as it places new-media bets with sites like TechCrunch and the Patch constellation of local news sites. “There’s a common thread in many of the content initiatives: paying low (or no) money to the people providing the content,” Gillmor writes.

But is that wrong? After all, no one is forcing bloggers to write for HuffPo for free, and the site’s terms & conditions state that contributors aren’t entitled to any compensation. Writing on Columbia Journalism Review, Lauren Kirchner notes that unpaid labor can actually be illegal in some circumstances. People have even been forced to accept payment when they didn’t want it because their volunteer work was deemed to be an unfair competitive advantage for the organization that benefited from their labors.

Even arrangements similar to HuffPo’s have been successfully contested in the past. Kirchner points to a suit filed against AOL years ago by a group of unpaid community managers who alleged that their efforts contributed to the company’s bottom line. The suit never reached trial and AOL finally settled for a reported $15 million, denying the world a clear precedent.

It’s unlikely that Huffington will change the practices that have contributed to its meteoric rise any time soon. But pressure from prominent voices like Gillmor could make executives uneasy. “The Huffington Post’s business model is perfectly legal. But is it right?” Kirchner asks.

Maybe not, but right in what context? We believe the debate over Huffington’s pay scale is a straw man for the bigger issue of content devaluation brought on by the Internet. Nate Silver contributes a fascinating analysis in this respect. He dissects the Huffington Post’s revenue model and determines that free content generates just a tiny percentage of the business. “The median blog post, with several hundred views, was worth only $3 or $4,” he writes. Even blockbuster articles contribute less than $200 to the site’s revenues.

Silver’s analysis makes a number of assumptions, due to the lack of publicly available information, but the number that caught our eye was his estimate that HuffPo publishes about 100 articles per day. If you figure that nets out to 30,000 articles per year and revenues of $30 million, then the average article is worth about $1,000 to the site. Assuming that HuffPo pays a 20% royalty to the author, then the average writer would expect to receive no more than $200 per piece. Silver’s methodology, which is based on traffic, estimates the actual value at much less than that. Under any scenario, unsolicited content is worth no more than a few bucks.

Huffington Post is only the most visible example of the new economics of news in which writers can expect to receive much less payment for work than they did in the heyday of mainstream media. Forcing the business to pay more to its writers doesn’t change those economics. Operations like Demand Media are standing at the ready to pay a nickel a word. The market will continue to find its low-water mark.

The good news — if there is any — is that this dynamic isn’t new. Back in the pre-Internet days, The New York Times was able to get away with paying freelancers a pittance for their work because it was The New York Times. The value of the  byline was enough to reward contributors, even if the actual paycheck was only beer money.

We believe that there is an explosion of demand about to come from corporations that are embracing the new tactics of “content marketing.” These businesses must increasingly compete on the value of their content rather than the size of their advertising budget, and they will need to hire professionals to help them. This may be small consolation to many journalists, but at least it offers the possibility of a living wage that enables them to practice independent journalism, if only in their spare time.

Second-half magazine circulation continued to tumble in 2010, with Hearst down 6% and Condé Nast off 10%. The biggest culprit is declining newsstand sales as consumers increasingly turn to their smart phones for information. Paid subscriptions were actually up 3.2%. Magazines continue to cut distribution and increase subscription prices in order to prop up profitability.

An interesting side note to this story  is that Sports Illustrated will stop selling print-only subscriptions. Instead of paying $39 to receive the magazine, people will now have to pay $48 to get a bundled print, web and Android app edition . Why no iPad version? The publisher and Apple are still trying to work that out, but nothing is expected soon.

More shenanigans in the Tribune Co.’s Chapter 11 mess. It just gets uglier and uglier.

And Finally…

If you think “crowdsourcing” is destroying the economy, then don’t read this…

• “Princecharming” will type up a poem about anything you want and send it to you, signed, in the mail.
• “Nick0000” will turn a black-and-white image into a color image (left).
• “Berthold” will proofread 800 words of English or German.
• “sugars68” will write a unique original article for any keyword, with delivery in 24 hours.

What do these stunts have in common? They’re all things people will do for $5. At Fiverr.com you can find people to provide products and services ranging from the ordinary (deliver parenting advice) to the bizarre (design your name from energy drink tabs) for a lousy sawbuck.

Fiverr is a real e-commerce site. If you want to take someone up on an offer, click a button, pay by PayPal or credit card and wait for the results. Buyers can rate the quality of the transaction and sellers can accumulate feedback scores, just like on eBay. You can even post a request for people who will fulfill your desire. All for five bucks. Amazing.

It’s disconcerting when the CEO of one of the emerging giants of online publishing is quoted referring to the acquisition of a news organization as “the future of the content space.” However, that’s how AOL CEO Tim Armstrong apparently sees the hundreds of millions of dollars in recent investments his company had made to acquire properties like TechCrunch, Patch.com and now Huffington Post. He’s filling a space.

He could do worse than to fill it with the staff at Huffington, however. The $315 million deal, which was announced late last night, puts HuffPo founder Arianna Huffington (right) in charge of all of AOL’s editorial properties, which include TechCrunch and the rapidly growing Patch.com network of local news sites. She also gets Mapquest and MovieFone thrown into the deal. This should be a dream come true for Huffington, who launched HuffPo as a blog six years ago and who has taken only $1 million in investment capital since then.  The New York Times has all the facts.

Huffington has a chance to shape a new kind of media company as AOL struggles to recover from its disastrous merger with Time-Warner and its reputation for editorial superficiality. AOL has made some innovative strides in investing in Patch, and its earlier acquisitions of TechCrunch and Engadget demonstrate a willingness to invest in distinctive editorial models that challenge mainstream media. However, as The New Yorker noted in a recent critical profile of AOL and Armstrong (summarized on PaidContent.org), the company’s failure to hire an editor-in-chief has made it appear strategically aimless. The installation of Huffington in that job is a chance to fix that.

HuffPo is growing like a weed. The organization now has more than 200 employees and is on track to generate $60 million in advertising revenue this year. Paywall fans might want to note that HuffPo has no paid subscription model. In fact, as The New York Times points out, readers’ ability “to leave comments on Huffington Post news articles and blog posts and to share them on Twitter and Facebook has been a major reason the site attracts so many readers.”

AOL has been such a backwater of editorial mediocrity for so long that it’s hard to shake the assumption that the company will find a way to screw this up. However, Armstrong does appear willing to place bets on some properties that are breaking the mold of how journalism has traditionally been done. With Huffington at the helm, AOL has a strong leader in this “space.” Please just don’t call it that.

Shaky Daily

Have you downloaded your copy of Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily for the iPad yet? Don’t rush. A lot of early adopters are apparently still waiting for it to load. PaidContent.org says the app routinely takes a minute or more to start and that crashes and freezes are common. In ratings on the iTunes store, “even the positive reviews mention load problems and crashes,” writes Staci Kramer. Adds John Gruber, “My opinion of it has declined each day.”

Alan Mutter is a little more definitive, pronouncing The Daily “a dud” based upon its first issue. With “the barest possible news report back-filled by a bunch of vapid features,” the journal is “more like the Etch-A-Sketch edition of Us magazine than the ground-breaking news platform it purports to be,” he writes. Ouch.

To be fair, The Daily is in start-up mode, and anyone who has ever launched a new publication will tell you that the first issue is usually not portfolio material. Few people will remember these early negatives if the venture turns out to be a hit (remember Amazon’s frequent outages in the late 90s? Neither do we). One impressive achievement for the new publication is the stable of blue-chip advertisers it’s lined up. AdAge says they include Macy’s, Verizon Wireless, Land Rover, Pepsi Max and Virgin Atlantic. It also ran a 30-second ad on the Super Bowl, but that achievement is made less notable by the fact that its parent company owns Fox Broadcasting.

The Times They Are Delaying

It’s been nearly a year since The New York Times announced plans to charge for access to its online content starting in January. Now January has passed and we’re still waiting for what publishers hope will be a model for other subscription wannabes across the Internet.

Perhaps the Times is dallying because it doesn’t want the paywall to be another Daily. Times staffers are laboring to fix more than 200 bugs in the technology for charging readers, Bloomberg says. The difficulties apparently stem from the complexity of the app, which has several payment tiers and which must balance limited access with the offsetting needs to be visible to search engines and to enable readers to easily post links  on Twitter and Facebook.

While the world waits for the time strategy to unfold, the paper has quietly launched an unrelated and useful recommendation engine. Neiman’s Megan Garber caught up with Marc Frons, the Times’ CTO for digital operations, and discovers that the engine does a lot more than simply spit back articles that share similar tags. Frons says the program also looks at “people’s patterns, and how they move around the site, and what sorts of different things they might look at.” It tries to figure out what you might like even if you haven’t read stories in that domain recently. On the back end, it gives the Times greater insight into what readers want, which probably has some value in determining what they will pay for.

And Finally…

We were so stunned by the ad for coupon broker Groupon that ran on the Super Bowl last night that we fished it out of YouTube to be sure we hadn’t heard it wrong. We hadn’t. Actor Timothy Hutton delivers a solemn soliloquy on the suffering of the people of Tibet under Chinese rule. “Their very culture is in jeopardy,” he says. But there’s a bright spot: “They still whip up an amazing fish curry,” and you can get it for half off with your GroupOn membership.

We hope this ad is a subtle joke. If so, it sets new standards for subtlety. In a posting on the Groupon blog, founder Andrew Mason explains that the ad is partly satirical. “What if we did a parody of a celebrity-narrated, PSA-style commercial that you think is about some noble cause (such as ‘Save the Whales’), but then it’s revealed to actually be a passionate call to action to help yourself (as in ‘Save the Money’)?”

Actually, we think it’s a terrible idea. Using the suffering of people and the peril of entire species to sell advertising is sort of baldly offensive on its face, don’t you think? If the ad is intended to raise money for Tibet, it would have been nice to offer diners the option of sending their savings directly to Tibetan relief. But the ad neglects that detail.

If you agree that this campaign is over the top, please tweet your thoughts to Andrew Mason. Better yet, give to The Tibet Fund, where Groupon is saving face by matching donations up to $100,000.