Mathew Ingram offers a reality check on the state of journalism, citing a recent Digiday interview with Jack Shafer in which the media critic says, “news coverage has probably never been more accurate than it is today.” Ingram cites the ability of crowdsourced fact-checking projects as well as social networks to quickly spot inconsistencies that lead to embarrassments like Rolling Stone‘s recent University of Virginia rape story. Facts are now available with a quick search. So is misinformation, but through triangulation a journalist can usually arrive at the truth quickly enough.

What’s less discussed in the debates about online journalism is the contribution Google has made to unlocking expertise on a mass scale. In the pre-Internet days source development was difficult, often involving searches through clips in the morgue and calling around looking for somebody who knew somebody, and then hoping the person could be reached on the phone. Reporters often fell back to the same inner circle of sources who could be relied upon to return their calls. The result was insider news – small groups of people talking among themselves.

Today, the top Google result for “computer security expert” or “airline industry analyst” turns up names in seconds. And there are many more ways to contact them now, too.

Google’s Gift

This is one of Google’s under-appreciated gifts to journalism. When Messrs. Page and Brin conceived of the search engine, they made the decision that the principal driver of search results would be quality of content as measured by links from other high-quality sources. The algorithm has evolved considerably since that time, but the goal hasn’t, and all search engines today have fallen into line behind it.

You can’t buy the kind of authority that search engines bestow. Google decided that brand, circulation, marketing budget, employee count, volume of output and other size-related factors matter less than what you say. That’s why a dedicated blogger can – on a good day and with the right search terms – outperform The New York Times.

The journalist’s biggest handicap today isn’t information but time. In the caffeine-soaked frenzy that online news has become, fact-checking is a luxury that is sometimes easiest left to the crowd on the assumption that small mistakes can be easily fixed without anybody knowing. We’re not saying that’s bad or good. But when “every single reader is a fact-checker who can easily broadcast information,” as Alexis Sobel Fitts notes in Columbia Journalism Review, the stakes get high, particularly for the most trusted media outlets.

Which raises the question: Are media mistakes more common today or are they just more commonly exposed? What’s more amazing to us than the Rolling Stone example, which was an error in human judgment, is the embarrassment New York magazine suffered over its profile of a teenager from Queens who claimed to have made $72 million playing the stock market. Whatever fact-checking the editors may have done, why did nobody think to simply plug some numbers into a spreadsheet? Money did, and it quickly showed why the young man’s claims were too preposterous to be believed.

This is one reason the debate over journalism quality is to complex. There’s no question that journalists have more and better information available than ever. There’s also no question that they have less time to check facts and more pressure to publish sensational stories that generate clicks and shares. Journalism isn’t broken, but the business model that enables good journalism to thrive is still undiscovered.

On one level we can understand the teeth-gnashing that follow the Associated Press’ announcement that it plans to start using robots to write the majority of U.S. corporate earnings stories. Robots seem to bring out the Luddite in all of us. What we can’t understand is why anyone outside of a few shop stewards should want to preserve the jobs that will invariably be lost to this new kind of automation.

Actually, the AP says no jobs will be eliminated. “This is about using technology to free journalists to do more journalism and less data processing, not about eliminating jobs,” wrote Lou Ferrara, vice president and managing editor, on the AP blog. You can bet that robots are going to eliminate reporting jobs in the future, though, just like linotype machines replaced human typesetters and computer pagination replaced paste-up jobs. It’s called efficiency, and job loss is one of the distasteful consequences.

We’d suggest that much of the labor impact will actually be felt overseas, which is where the menial jobs have already migrated. Robo-journalists in India and the Philippines will need to improve their skills to continue to get work from U.S. and European publishers, and journalists in home offices will need to up their games as well. That’s a good thing.

What isn’t good is preserving jobs that eat up time and editors’ attention. In one of our recent assignments we worked with a technology news site that employs a small staff of seasoned journalists but that gets most of its content from an offshore body shop that rewrites press releases and news from other websites. The reporters who write this chum make about five cents a word, and in our view they’re overpaid.

Stories come in full of grammatical and usage errors, and many are missing basic facts or explanations. Professional editors spend hours each day fixing these mistakes and trying to educate the writers, which is a fool’s errand because most of them don’t last more than a few months on the job anyway. These tasks can now be automated, and many of them will be. The result will be at a better quality of work for everyone involved.

Will the stories that robots produce be as good as those that humans could write? Probably not, but it’s the market’s job to judge that. The only thing that’s certain is that the quality of robotic journalism will only improve over time. The human journalists who embrace this trend will learn to use their silicon sidekicks as research associates and fact-checkers. Robotics should ultimately make journalism a much more rewarding profession, but it will cost jobs.

Take heart in the fact that newsrooms won’t be hit nearly as hard as many other workplaces. “The factory of the future will have only two employees: a man and a dog,” said Carl Bass, the CEO of Autodesk. “The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.”

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The leaked “innovation” report from The New York Times that made the rounds in May recommends that the company take more risks, move more quickly and consider radical steps to reinvent itself. Steve Outing wonders what would happen if the Times abandoned daily print editions, and he’s built an elaborate “what-if?” model to test the idea.
Outing’s model doesn’t answer the question, but it does provide a new tool with which to evaluate options. “Most news companies aren’t very good at grokking what’s coming at them or what likely futures could be ahead for them,” wrote Outing in an e-mail to us. “What I did was demonstrate one tool of strategic foresight that news companies should consider using.”
Outing would like to get more consulting gigs working for news organizations that need reinvention, and we hope he gets some. A self-described media futurist, he’s been challenging assumptions about the slow-moving newspaper industry for the past two decades. Read more here. We were fans of a blog called Reinventing Classifieds that he launched back in 2008 that recommended radical new ways to revive the highly profitable newspaper classified advertising business. To our knowledge, no on took him up on his ideas.
For this exercise, Outing applies a “Futures Wheel” to envision a Times that only publishes on Sunday. The exercise is meant to envision every impact on the paper’s business, including staffing costs, production savings, new sources  of revenue and circulation revenue. Outing has modeled his scenario out to two levels of detail. To fully understand the implications you need to go to  third level, and that involves surveys and pilots. Outing will do you that for any newspaper that wants to hire him.
Asked what value news organizations can gain from this exercise, he wrote, “Technological change is accelerating at a faster rate; indeed, exponentially, when it comes to computing power. This means that anyone’s business model can be disrupted, if not obliterated, faster than ever before. So now is a critical time to start seriously using strategic-foresight tools and techniques (futures wheels being just one) to better prepare for likely and plausible challenges and opportunities.”
He’s right. How many media executives have the vision to take him on the offer? Click here to see an enlarged view of the image.

 

The leaked “innovation” report from The New York Times that made the rounds in May recommends that the company take more risks, move more quickly and consider radical steps to reinvent itself. Steve Outing wonders what would happen if the Times abandoned daily print editions, and he’s built an elaborate “what-if?” model to test the idea.

Outing’s model doesn’t answer the question, but it does provide a new tool with which to evaluate options. “Most news companies aren’t very good at grokking what’s coming at them or what likely futures could be ahead for them,” wrote Outing in an e-mail to us. “What I did was demonstrate one tool of strategic foresight that news companies should consider using.”

Outing would like to get more consulting gigs working for news organizations that need reinvention, and we hope he gets some. A self-described media futurist, he’s been challenging assumptions about the slow-moving newspaper industry for the past two decades. Read more here. We were fans of a blog called Reinventing Classifieds that he launched back in 2008 that recommended radical new ways to revive the highly profitable newspaper classified advertising business. To our knowledge, no on took him up on his ideas.

For this exercise, Outing applies a “Futures Wheel” to envision a Times that only publishes on Sunday. The exercise is meant to envision every impact on the paper’s business, including staffing costs, production savings, new sources  of revenue and circulation revenue. Outing has modeled his scenario out to two levels of detail. To fully understand the implications you need to go to  third level, and that involves surveys and pilots. Outing will do you that for any newspaper that wants to hire him.

Asked what value news organizations can gain from this exercise, he wrote, “Technological change is accelerating at a faster rate; indeed, exponentially, when it comes to computing power. This means that anyone’s business model can be disrupted, if not obliterated, faster than ever before. So now is a critical time to start seriously using strategic-foresight tools and techniques (futures wheels being just one) to better prepare for likely and plausible challenges and opportunities.”

He’s right. How many media executives have the vision to take him on the offer? Click here to see an enlarged view of the image.

 

Observers of the cratering newspaper industries in the US and Europe may be surprised at this news: Print newspaper circulation around the world actually increased 2% in 2013 compared to 2012. The pocket of strength comes from rapidly maturing economies in Asia and Latin America, where people who a generation ago might have used newspapers mainly for kindling are now finding them to be valuable for the purposes for which they were intended.

That’s the highlights from the latest World Press Trends survey, which was released last by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. The survey includes data from more than 90% of the news organizations that make up the industry’s total value.

There was no good news report in North America and Europe, where with print circulation dropped 5.3% last year and 10.3% over the last five years. Print ad revenues in North America are down a sickening 29.6% over five years. In Europe, print circulation declines have been even greater – 23% over five years – although advertising dollars have not fallen as quickly.

It’s quite a different story in Asia/Pacific, where print circulation is up 6.7% over the last five years and ad revenues have nudged ahead 3.3% during that time. Latin America is booming. Print circulation is up 6.3% over five years and ad revenues are up a stunning 50%.

It all adds up to an industry that’s a lot more stable on a global basis that many people thought. While overall revenue annual is down about 13% since 2008, results in 2013 were essentially flat, indicating that the industry’s freefall has slowed.

This is no time to celebrate, however. The last two years have shown that the developing world is migrating quickly to electronic media the expense of print, which still delivers 90% of the global industry revenues. While publishers report some success with packaged print and digital subscriptions (single-copy sales are down 26% worldwide but subscription sales are only down 8%), no one has yet solved the revenue problem.

 

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The Newspaper Association of America (NAA) was in denial during the early years of the industry’s crash, but lately the organization has been doing good work to highlight the new spirit of innovation that is taking hold across its membership. As the numbers in this infographic demonstrate, U.S. newspapers have a lot to be proud of. They reached 145 million unique visitors in January alone and the Washington Post and New York Times each drove more than a quarter-million tweets each week.

One of the things we like most about this infographic is the attribution. Go to the page on the NAA site to get clickable links to the source data. We wish more infographic producers would take this small step to make their numbers more believable.

A speech in The New York Times newsroom after the announcement of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winners (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We finally got a chance to read through the 96-page “Innovation” report commissioned by the management of The New York Times and leaked last week in the wake of the firing of Executive Editor Jill Abramson on Tuesday. Joshua Benton at Nieman Journalism Lab has already called the report “one of the most remarkable documents” he’s seen in his tenure, and detailed coverage has appeared on BuzzFeed, Mashable and numerous other outlets. We won’t go into detail on excerpts (Nieman’s coverage is the most exhaustive we saw) but thought it was worth sharing a few issues that stuck with us.
In a nutshell, the report makes a powerful case for a complete restructuring of the way the Times approaches its “paper of record” role. The extent of the criticisms contained therein will shock the many people who have come to believe that the Times is the standard-bearer for “digital-first” journalism among traditional media outlets, but there’s plenty of data and examples to support these conclusion.
Twenty years into the commercial Web, little has really changed about the culture at the Old Gray Lady, even as digital and print editorial operations have merged, the report says. Stories are filed late in the day in accordance with traditional print deadlines. Ambitious features are scheduled for Sundays, when print readership is largest but online readership dwindles. Mobile apps are organized by print sections. Traditional reporting skills dominate hiring and promotion decisions and a byline on Page One of the print edition is still considered the gold standard of success.
This is despite the fact that – as the report documents on page 81 – print readers are the smallest audience the Times has. Mobile and desktop readers together dwarf the print audience by a factor of 10. A dying medium still holds sway at the most prominent journalism institution in the U.S.
A few themes run throughout the document that we found noteworthy:

Audience Is Earned

One of the most compelling quotes we read was from Janine Gibson, editor-in-chief of The Guardian’s website. “For someone with a print background, you’re accustomed to the fact that if it… gets into the paper you’re going to find an audience,” she said. “It’s entirely the other way around as a digital journalist. The realization that [the audience is] not going to just come and read it has been transformative.”
This observation underlies some of the core recommendations of the report, which are that the newsroom needs to work much more collaboratively with design and promotion than it has traditionally. In most newsrooms, journalists work in a cocoon and throw finished products over the wall to designers and publicists for packaging and promotion. However, user experience has become critical to success. That’s because readers themselves are becoming the primary traffic-drivers. In other words, great journalism that isn’t easy to access and share doesn’t get very far.
The report has some internal traffic metrics that dramatize what most Web publishers have probably known for a while: Traffic to websites in general and homepages in particular is declining while content is increasingly being consumed through aggregators and mobile devices. The internal data also validates what has been speculated for a couple of years: Readers are now the dominant revenue source, making up 52% of 2013 sales compared to 43% from advertising.
With readers increasingly in control, the report recommends a step that still draws gasps from journalism veterans: Eliminate the wall between the newsroom and the business. “Increased collaboration, done right, does not present any threat to our values of journalistic independence,” the authors declare, recognizing what digital first publishers discovered a decade ago.
The Wall is still very much in place at The New York Times. Popular innovations like a searchable recipe database and the ability to follow stories of interest have come out of product and design groups rather than the editorial side. The Times does a good job of researching its audience, the authors say, but the newsroom has shown little interest in participating in surveys and focus groups. Designers complain that they are treated like second-class citizens. Editors who want to collaborate with colleagues outside the newsroom have to do so on the sly. Researchers said the vast majority of developers at the Times believe they aren’t even allowed to set foot in the newsroom.
Barriers between editorial and business functions are an expensive luxury that media organizations can no longer afford. What the Innovation report makes clear is that the business side contributes far more to the reader experience online than it ever did in print.

Platforms Matter More Than Packages

The Times enjoyed plenty of well-deserved praise for “Snow Fall,” a mesmerizing visual feature it published in late 2012. As beautiful as that package was, the fact that it hasn’t been repeated in 18 months points to the problem of putting resources behind what the report calls “labor-intensive one-offs”.

Snow Fall is cited repeatedly as an example of what the Times is capable of but fails to achieve in its daily operations because it fails to attend to the nuts and bolts of digital media. “Our competitors, particularly digital-native ones, treat platform innovation as a core function,” the authors write. They point in particular to BuzzFeed, which has equipped its editors with a wide palette of interactive storytelling tools, as a better model. While the results aren’t necessarily elegant, they are repeatable, and that’s more important.
In contrast, the Times has failed even to carry out a consistent approach to tagging, a well-established technique for categorizing content in a way that makes it easy to reuse. This has often-unforseen ripple effects. For example, the lack of tags has frustrated efforts to create a useful recipe database, hampered search engine visibility, prevented the paper from automating sale of its photos and limited its ability to target content by geography.

We Are All Publicists

Some of the report’s harshest criticism is aimed at the Times’ reluctance to promote its own work. The legacy of great journalism has become, in many ways, a handicap. Editors believe that journalism alone will carry the paper while competitors invest aggressively in promotion, data analysis and systems to move quickly and double down on success.
Publications like The Guardian, Huffington Post and The Atlantic expect staffers not only to promote their own work but to know how to write headlines that maximize sharing potential. Huffington Post won’t publish a story unless it has a photo, a search-optimized headline, a tweet and a Facebook post.
In contrast, the Times editors didn’t notify publicists of their acclaimed Invisible Child series on New York’s homeless children until it was too late to do any advance work. The reporter failed to even tweet about the feature for two days.
While the Times has millions of collective Twitter followers through its branded and individual accounts, the paper generates less than 10% of its digital traffic from social media. In contrast, BuzzFeed generates six times as much from those sources, the report notes. That’s because social promotion is considered an afterthought. For example, the Twitter feed run by the newsroom is used mainly for reporting rather than for audience development.
The report also criticizes Times management for doing too little to connect with readers. While competitors like Huffington Post and Medium have prospered by making their publishing brands a platform for anyone who wants to contribute, the Times still rejects dozens of op-ed submisions from thought leaders every day. The enormously popular TED Talks, which charge up to $7,500 per ticket, could have been a Times invention, but the paper has failed to market even its relatively modest Times Talks series. “One of our biggest concerns is that the Times will start a real conference program,” says a TED executive quoted in the report.

Gaping Hole on the Business Question

The most glaring shortcoming of the Innovation report is its lack of any creative ideas for solving the revenue problem. This may have been by design, since the team had no representatives from the business side. However, a small chart on page 81 shows the extent of this problem. Print still accounts for 75% of advertising revenues and 82% of circulation revenues. That adds up to $1.4 billion from the print side of the house compared to just $320 million online.
No one has figured out how to bring those numbers closer together, and in an environment of continually expanding inventory and declining CPMs, it’s unlikely anyone will. Marc Andreessen has proposed that publishers need to think differently about their businesses, seeking out much larger audiences with low-priced products. That sounds like a reasonable course, but the Times’ report makes it clear that BuzzFeed, Upworthy, Business Insider, and HuffPo are getting there much more quickly than the Old Gray Lady.
We’re impressed that the management of the Times was willing to commit resources to a project that was bound to return unflattering results and likely to be leaked. Now that the findings are there for all to see, it’s a question of whether management can follow through on them. Assuming that most newspapers are well behind the times in digital integration, it’s a fair bet that a lot of publishers will take cues from this research.

The Full New York Times Innovation Report by Amanda Wills, Mashable

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• The New York Times’ digital challenges, in 5 charts
• What Brands Can Learn from the Bombshell New York Times Innovation Report
• Changing The Times

A speech in The New York Times newsroom after the announcement of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winners (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We finally got a chance to read through the 96-page “Innovation” report commissioned by the management of The New York Times and leaked last week in the wake of the firing of Executive Editor Jill Abramson on Tuesday. Joshua Benton at Nieman Journalism Lab has already called the report “one of the most remarkable documents” he’s seen in his tenure, and detailed coverage has appeared on BuzzFeed, Mashable and numerous other outlets. We won’t go into detail on excerpts (Nieman’s coverage is the most exhaustive we saw) but thought it was worth sharing a few issues that stuck with us.

In a nutshell, the report makes a powerful case for a complete restructuring of the way the Times approaches its “paper of record” role. The extent of the criticisms contained therein will shock the many people who have come to believe that the Times is the standard-bearer for “digital-first” journalism among traditional media outlets, but there’s plenty of data and examples to support these conclusion.

Twenty years into the commercial Web, little has really changed about the culture at the Old Gray Lady, even as digital and print editorial operations have merged, the report says. Stories are filed late in the day in accordance with traditional print deadlines. Ambitious features are scheduled for Sundays, when print readership is largest but online readership dwindles. Mobile apps are organized by print sections. Traditional reporting skills dominate hiring and promotion decisions and a byline on Page One of the print edition is still considered the gold standard of success.

This is despite the fact that – as the report documents on page 81 – print readers are the smallest audience the Times has. Mobile and desktop readers together dwarf the print audience by a factor of 10. A dying medium still holds sway at the most prominent journalism institution in the U.S.

A few themes run throughout the document that we found noteworthy:

Audience Is Earned

One of the most compelling quotes we read was from Janine Gibson, editor-in-chief of The Guardian’s website. “For someone with a print background, you’re accustomed to the fact that if it… gets into the paper you’re going to find an audience,” she said. “It’s entirely the other way around as a digital journalist. The realization that [the audience is] not going to just come and read it has been transformative.”

This observation underlies some of the core recommendations of the report, which are that the newsroom needs to work much more collaboratively with design and promotion than it has traditionally. In most newsrooms, journalists work in a cocoon and throw finished products over the wall to designers and publicists for packaging and promotion. However, user experience has become critical to success. That’s because readers themselves are becoming the primary traffic-drivers. In other words, great journalism that isn’t easy to access and share doesn’t get very far.

The report has some internal traffic metrics that dramatize what most Web publishers have probably known for a while: Traffic to websites in general and homepages in particular is declining while content is increasingly being consumed through aggregators and mobile devices. The internal data also validates what has been speculated for a couple of years: Readers are now the dominant revenue source, making up 52% of 2013 sales compared to 43% from advertising.

With readers increasingly in control, the report recommends a step that still draws gasps from journalism veterans: Eliminate the wall between the newsroom and the business. “Increased collaboration, done right, does not present any threat to our values of journalistic independence,” the authors declare, recognizing what digital first publishers discovered a decade ago.

The Wall is still very much in place at The New York Times. Popular innovations like a searchable recipe database and the ability to follow stories of interest have come out of product and design groups rather than the editorial side. The Times does a good job of researching its audience, the authors say, but the newsroom has shown little interest in participating in surveys and focus groups. Designers complain that they are treated like second-class citizens. Editors who want to collaborate with colleagues outside the newsroom have to do so on the sly. Researchers said the vast majority of developers at the Times believe they aren’t even allowed to set foot in the newsroom.

Barriers between editorial and business functions are an expensive luxury that media organizations can no longer afford. What the Innovation report makes clear is that the business side contributes far more to the reader experience online than it ever did in print.

Platforms Matter More Than Packages

The Times enjoyed plenty of well-deserved praise for “Snow Fall,” a mesmerizing visual feature it published in late 2012. As beautiful as that package was, the fact that it hasn’t been repeated in 18 months points to the problem of putting resources behind what the report calls “labor-intensive one-offs”.

Snow Fall is cited repeatedly as an example of what the Times is capable of but fails to achieve in its daily operations because it fails to attend to the nuts and bolts of digital media. “Our competitors, particularly digital-native ones, treat platform innovation as a core function,” the authors write. They point in particular to BuzzFeed, which has equipped its editors with a wide palette of interactive storytelling tools, as a better model. While the results aren’t necessarily elegant, they are repeatable, and that’s more important.

In contrast, the Times has failed even to carry out a consistent approach to tagging, a well-established technique for categorizing content in a way that makes it easy to reuse. This has often-unforseen ripple effects. For example, the lack of tags has frustrated efforts to create a useful recipe database, hampered search engine visibility, prevented the paper from automating sale of its photos and limited its ability to target content by geography.

We Are All Publicists

Some of the report’s harshest criticism is aimed at the Times’ reluctance to promote its own work. The legacy of great journalism has become, in many ways, a handicap. Editors believe that journalism alone will carry the paper while competitors invest aggressively in promotion, data analysis and systems to move quickly and double down on success.

Publications like The Guardian, Huffington Post and The Atlantic expect staffers not only to promote their own work but to know how to write headlines that maximize sharing potential. Huffington Post won’t publish a story unless it has a photo, a search-optimized headline, a tweet and a Facebook post.

In contrast, the Times editors didn’t notify publicists of their acclaimed Invisible Child series on New York’s homeless children until it was too late to do any advance work. The reporter failed to even tweet about the feature for two days.

While the Times has millions of collective Twitter followers through its branded and individual accounts, the paper generates less than 10% of its digital traffic from social media. In contrast, BuzzFeed generates six times as much from those sources, the report notes. That’s because social promotion is considered an afterthought. For example, the Twitter feed run by the newsroom is used mainly for reporting rather than for audience development.

The report also criticizes Times management for doing too little to connect with readers. While competitors like Huffington Post and Medium have prospered by making their publishing brands a platform for anyone who wants to contribute, the Times still rejects dozens of op-ed submisions from thought leaders every day. The enormously popular TED Talks, which charge up to $7,500 per ticket, could have been a Times invention, but the paper has failed to market even its relatively modest Times Talks series. “One of our biggest concerns is that the Times will start a real conference program,” says a TED executive quoted in the report.

Gaping Hole on the Business Question

The most glaring shortcoming of the Innovation report is its lack of any creative ideas for solving the revenue problem. This may have been by design, since the team had no representatives from the business side. However, a small chart on page 81 shows the extent of this problem. Print still accounts for 75% of advertising revenues and 82% of circulation revenues. That adds up to $1.4 billion from the print side of the house compared to just $320 million online.

No one has figured out how to bring those numbers closer together, and in an environment of continually expanding inventory and declining CPMs, it’s unlikely anyone will. Marc Andreessen has proposed that publishers need to think differently about their businesses, seeking out much larger audiences with low-priced products. That sounds like a reasonable course, but the Times’ report makes it clear that BuzzFeed, Upworthy, Business Insider, and HuffPo are getting there much more quickly than the Old Gray Lady.

We’re impressed that the management of the Times was willing to commit resources to a project that was bound to return unflattering results and likely to be leaked. Now that the findings are there for all to see, it’s a question of whether management can follow through on them. Assuming that most newspapers are well behind the times in digital integration, it’s a fair bet that a lot of publishers will take cues from this research.

The Full New York Times Innovation Report by Amanda Wills, Mashable

Related articles

• The leaked New York Times innovation report is one of the key documents of this media age
• The New York Times’ digital challenges, in 5 charts
• What Brands Can Learn from the Bombshell New York Times Innovation Report
• Changing The Times

Are page views your primary measure of success for your website or a story thereupon? Well cut it out. Page views are about as relevant an indicator of content value as the height of the starting center is a predictor of the success of a basketball team.

The issue of what online publishers should measure was the topic of a panel at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia last week. Experts debated whether page views have any value at all. We think they don’t. In fact, we think they have negative value.

“Provocative headlines and images encourage people to click but it does not mean they enjoy the content…and the spreading of articles over multiple pages has also allowed many sites to boost their metrics,” said Tony Haile, chief executive of analytics firm Chartbeat, quoted in a piece on Journalism.co.uk.

People count page views because it’s easy, but the metric is almost meaningless. It’s easy to drive valueless page views to a website by posting celebrity photos and top 10 lists. Lots of people will visit, few will stay and almost none will return. What’s worse, panelists said, is that obsession with page views creates valueless traffic that drives down the value of inventory and, with it, advertising rates. In a world of infinite inventory, “the value of advertising space will always decline,” Haile said.

And the Alternative Is…?

So what’s better? No one agrees. Some people say social shares are a superior engagement metric, but research has shown that people share stuff without bothering to read it. Time spent on site is another popular alternative, but no analytics tool can distinguish between an engaged reader and a browser tab left open for two hours.

Steffen Konrath, chief executive of Liquid Newsroom, said the Holy Grail is relevance, which is determined by conducting research among focus groups and then giving people what they ask for. The problem with that is that what people ask for isn’t always what they should read. One of the principal values of traditional newspapers is that they give readers stuff they don’t ask for but need to know anyway. This service has been almost vaporized by the Internet echo chamber.

We once worked at an Internet publishing startup that was laser-focused on page views. From an advertising perspective this was understandable. Inventory was at a premium and the more traffic we could generate the more revenue came in. From an editorial perspective, however, the strategy was a disaster. Editors quickly learned that they could drive traffic by posting trivia contests and virtual scavenger hunts. Traffic grew quickly but repeat visits plummeted. The people who visited weren’t the technology professionals we coveted but rather gamers with time on their hands.

The Perugia panel discussion covered concluded that there is no one ideal metric, and they were right. As journalists, we think audience engagement is what matters, and that can be measured through a combination of factors like shares, repeat visits, comments, time spent on site and pages per visit. For advertisers, total eyeballs may matter more. What’s important is to measure the factors that everyone can agree indicate that the right audience is coming and that they’re staying for the right reasons.

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• Engagement Metrics Replace Pageviews, Uniques

Circulation revenue for U.S. newspapers grew for the second consecutive year, rising 3.7% to $10.87 billion in 2013, according to preliminary data from the Newspaper Association of America.

However, that wasn’t enough to offset continuing deterioration in the advertising business. Total revenues for the industry were $37.59 billion, off 2.6% from 2012. The good news is that the rate of decline appears to be slowing. The bad news is that digital advertising is growing more slowly for newspapers than it is for the industry as a whole. The U.S. online ad market grew by 17% year-over-year in 2013, but newspapers’ digital ad revenues increased by just 1.5%. Digital advertising now accounts for 12% of total industry revenue. It’s not clear how native advertising is being factored into those numbers.
Incidentally, online ad spending  surpassed broadcast TV revenue for the first time last year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
An interesting new area of growth is digital agency marketing services, in which media companies help local businesses build a digital marketing presence through services like online advertising and direct mail. That business grew 43% last year, although from a very small base.
Declines in traditional print advertising continued their numbing downward trend, falling 8.6% from the previous year. Classified advertising was off 10.5%.
An interesting factor in circulation revenue growth is the success of digital-only circulation revenue, which was up 47%. Bundled print and digital circulation packages increased 108%. However, print-only circulation revenue dropped 20%.
Read more on MediaLife.