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.

Related articles

• We are drowning in data about readers and attention, but which metrics really matter? You won’t like the answer
• 21 takeaways from the Journalism Festival in Perugia
• Time to ditch uniques and page views for engagement in measuring digital audiences
• Measuring engagement – Newsbeat debuts as robust, real-time Web analytics tool for news publishers
• Engagement Metrics Replace Pageviews, Uniques

With BuzzFeed and Upworthy reporting eye-popping traffic growth and planning to hire teams of reporters, many people are wondering whether sharing is the new currency of media success.

The idea is that if you give readers enough top-ten lists and animated GIFs they’ll do all your marketing for you. You don’t even have to worry about search engine optimization because nothing ever went viral on search. This philosophy has even given birth to a new style of headline writing that’s intended to stimulate sharing (“Why’s This Kid Throwing Coins? The Reason May Or May Not Blow Your Mind, But Something Does Blow Up,” reads one recent Upworthy example).

But maybe sharing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In a recent case study on USA Today, Michael Wolff looks at Business Insider, the hyper-caffeinated new-media brainchild of exiled Wall Street bad boy Henry Blodget. Business Insider is notorious for its fixation on being first and for driving its reporters to exhaustion. It’s a content mill – albeit with higher quality than many of its peers – that churns out large volumes of information in the quest to earn shares on Facebook and Twitter.

And it’s generating traffic: 25.4 million unique visitors in January, says Wolff. The problem is that Business Insider has low reader loyalty:

Only a small percentage of Business Insider’s traffic actually seeks it out and regards it as a worthy destination and a source with particular brand authority. Most other readers land on a Business Insider article because of search-engine results, or because of an engaging — tabloid-style — headline in a Facebook feed and other social-media promotions, which generate 30% of Business Insider’s traffic.

Wolff asserts that this drive-by traffic has little value because readers don’t identify with the brand. Worse is that the drive for big numbers becomes a race to the bottom.  As advertising rates continue to drift lower, publishers must seek ever-higher traffic volumes to stay in the same place. This means resorting to gimmicks like contests, cheesecake photos and celebrity gossip. That attracts poor-quality traffic which has low brand affinity and little value to advertisers. It’s a vicious cycle.

Digital Dimes

Blodget disagrees. In a response on Business Insider he says that the very problems Wolff cites are actually opportunities. New media companies don’t have legacy businesses to protect and so are free to disrupt mainstream competitors and steal revenue, he says. “We are better at serving digital readers than many traditional news organizations, so we can thrive on these ‘digital dimes,'” writes Blodget. His post displays a photo of what are presumably a group of happy young reporters in the company’s New York offices (Wolff says Business insider has hired 70 full-time journalists at a cost of more than $15 million a year. Do the math).

We think Wolff is on to something. Take a look at the chart below from the Pew Research Journalism Project. It depicts traffic to the 26 most popular U.S. news sites over a three-month period. It shows conclusively that visitors who reach a site directly (via a bookmark or typing the address into a browser) stay much longer, read much more and visit more often.

This isn’t surprising when you think about it. Typing “nyt.com” into a browser is an act of brand affinity, whereas headline-clickers on Facebook don’t really care where the headline comes from. The BuzzFeeds and Upworthys of the world must compete headline by headline. Is that a problem?

Attracting readers with gimmicks is nothing new. One of the myths of the news business is that people read newspapers primarily for the news. The reality is that they read for all kinds of reasons. Any veteran of the pre-digital publishing days will tell you that an embarrassingly large number of traditional newspaper readers bought copies for the coupons, Ann Landers, comics, the Jumble and the daily horoscope.

But at least in those days readers knew what brand to buy. Today’s audience has more affinity to the content than to the publisher, and aggregators like Flipboard are constantly looking for ways to supersede publishers’ brands with their own. Brand still matters. A click is not the same as a reader.

 

Related articles

• Think Upworthy is Just About Sharing Great Stories on Facebook? You’d Be Wrong.
• The Lesson Small Online Publishers Can Take From Business Insider May Surprise You
• Why Michael Wolff Is Wrong
• New cash, new questions for Business Insider
• Upworthy co-founder at SXSW: ‘This is what media should do’

Pretty much anything Marc Andreessen writes is worth reading, and his latest treatise on the future of the news business should be required reading for any publishing executive.

The man who arguably started all the trouble with the invention of the Mosaic browser in 1993 isn’t just an optimist on the future of the news business; he’s positively bullish about it. But the future he sees is much more like the newspaper market of the turn of the 20th century than the one that dominated the last 30 years of the 21st.

His 3,000-word prescription boils down to a few basic points, not all of which are new:

Run the news business like a business. Take advantage of the many new revenue sources that are emerging, in particular native advertising and subscriptions.

Take advantage of media democratization. Sure, anybody can be a publisher today, but that’s an opportunity as well as a problem. Universal media access creates noise, which presents opportunities for aggregators to simplify the cacophony. It also creates the possibility of much larger audiences than we have known the past. “The big opportunity for the news industry in the next five to 10 years is to increase its market size 100x AND drop prices 10X,” Andreessen writes. In other words, throw out the business model that relied upon scarcity and replace it with one that values abundance.

Stop playing defense. The good old days of news monopolies and oligopolies are gone forever, so get over it and focus on the future. The few organizations that have successfully crossed the chasm – he mentions The Guardian and The New York Times – began thinking digital-first years ago. What are the rest of you waiting for?

Find new revenue models. Bitcoin is going to make micro-payments feasible, so study up and start experimenting. And tear down that Chinese wall. It defeats too many new business ideas. Outlets like the Atlantic and the Times are finding ways to make blended advertising and editorial work and actually growing their influence in the process.

Andreessen provides numerous examples of new and traditional media enterprises that are succeeding and growing. They include several that we’ve talked about here previously as well as a few that we haven’t, including Anandtech, The Verge and Vice.

On the subject of investigative reporting, Andreessen is almost sanguine. “The total global expense budget of all investigative journalism is tiny —  in the neighborhood of tens of millions of dollars annually. That’s the good news; small money problems are easier to solve than big money nightmares.” He believes a combination of crowd funding and philanthropy can more than cover the costs of the necessary Baghdad bureaus and investigative teams.”

The future of news will see fewer large media empires and many more small, focused enterprises. These organizations will take advantage of improved economies that enable them to reach vastly larger audiences at much lower cost than in the past. The mainstream media survivors will be those that move the quickest to tear down old infrastructure and seize every opportunity to reinvent themselves.

Can Technology Save the News?

A considerably less optimistic but more diverse perspective is contained in an article from the excellent Knowledge@Wharton service. Technology Can Save the News — If Readers Change How They Consume It consolidates the opinions of several Wharton faculty members about how mainstream media can be saved. They agree that standalone, for-profit news organizations are unsustainable but that that independent journalism is too valuable to sacrifice.

The professors see promise in the interest of billionaires like eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos in owning media companies. Omidyar recently committed $250 million to a startup media venture run by journalist Glenn Greenwald and Bezos ponied up the same amount to buy the Washington Post last summer.

No one believes these investors are buying traditional media properties for their growth potential. Rather, they think media companies are undervalued and they may see synergies with their other businesses. For example, targeted advertising delivered by Amazon’s impressive recommendation engine could yield immediate sales for advertisers and drive up Amazon revenues.

Many rich people also have an interest in advancing political agendas out of either self-interest or ideology, and media companies provide an ideal bully pulpit. The risk is that these media come to reflect the politics of their owners too closely and contribute to the “echo chamber” problem in which audiences choose to listen only to the outlets that reflect their beliefs.

On this question, Wharton marketing professor Pinar Yildirim is cautiously optimistic. She believes that the proliferation of slanted outlets like Fox News will create a backlash as consumers seek independent voices. “Technology can bring us perspectives other than our own, if the ones designing it build that into the architecture, and the ones consuming the news are open to it,” she says.

Martin Langeveld is a 30-year newspaper publishing veteran who was for 13 years the publisher of several newspapers in Northwestern Massachusetts and southern Vermont. He also was executive vice president and director of interactive media for New England Newspapers, Inc., a four-daily cluster which is part of Denver-based MediaNews Group, Inc. He tipped us off last week to the impending closure of the 170-year-old North Adams Transcript, which he piloted for six years. We asked him for his thoughts, which he shared by e-mail.

I started my newspaper career at The Berkshire Eagle in 1978, served as publisher from 1995 to 2000, then did a stint as publisher at the Transcript 2000-2006 and at the Brattleboro Reformer 2006-2008.

For about 85 years, from 1896 to 1979, the Transcript was owned by the Hardman family, which then sold the paper to the owners of the Boston Globe. The Berkshire Eagle at the time was owned by the Miller family, who had bought the paper in 1892. The two families had a friendly rivalry, but when the Hardmans decided to sell, they let it be known that they would not sell to the Millers — because they were afraid the Millers would simply merge the two papers.

The Millers unsuccessfully attempted an end run using a straw man, and then they tried again, without success, when the Globe put the paper up for sale 10 years later and sold it to American Publishing. The Millers sold to MediaNews Group in 1995, and MediaNews bought the Transcript from American Publishing a year later. A couple of years after that, Michael Miller, a third-generation member of the former publishing family, asked me why we hadn’t merged the papers yet — thus confirming the suspicions of the Hardmans. (In the early 1980s, the Millers had merged two other papers, The Torrington Register and the Winsted Citizen in Connecticut, into the Register-Citizen.)

It’s a fact that we ran the numbers in 1996 and concluded that the bottom line was marginally better keeping the papers separate versus merging them, but the deciding factor was really Dean Singleton’s passion for newspapering and his conviction that North Adams was a separate place from Pittsfield and should continue to have its own paper. He brought in a designer, we improved the looks and content, and restored the original, handsome Gothic name plate. Over the years, of course, a long series of small consolidation steps merged the business and production functions of the two papers, and the Transcript’s building was sold, to the point where a final consolidation became the simple step it now appears to be.

Since there was not a huge bottom-line advantage to separate operations back in 1996, I doubt if there’s much financial advantage to merger today. The North Adams office is being retained, as is the journalism staff. The sales staffs were merged long ago and the business office functions were consolidated in Pittsfield. There might be a few circulation positions eliminated. But on the other hand, more copies of the larger Eagle will have to be printed; deliveries will have to be made to all the same places; and circulation revenue will be lost to the extent there was duplication. Back in the day, you could raise advertising rates based on the circulation increase, but that pricing power is gone. There was some duplicated preprint advertising which will be lost.

So my guess is that the justifications for the merger consist of (a) less management distraction managing two different brands in the same market, and (b) the perceived opportunities in focusing on a single region-wide brand. Readers really will gain something since the two papers duplicated coverage on a lot of events, so the expanded Eagle staff can now cover more. (Hopefully there will be enough newshole available to print what they write.) 

The region — the Berkshires — is a brand in itself, which has always been a strength exploited by the Eagle. So the move announced at the same time (making the Berkshires Week supplement, published since 1952, a year-round standalone publication) is a smart one, especially if it’s accompanied by a good online strategy.

It’s understandable the names of the papers will not be merged into Eagle-Transcript. But I’ve suggested that the Transcript logo be retained in a small way as part of the Eagle’s editorial page masthead. The Transcript’s 170 years of publishing history should not vanish without a trace.

Read more of Langeveld’s wisdom at the Nieman Journalism Lab.
North Adams Transcript website.

Martin Langeveld is a 30-year newspaper publishing veteran who was for 13 years the publisher of several newspapers in Northwestern Massachusetts and southern Vermont. He also was executive vice president and director of interactive media for New England Newspapers, Inc., a four-daily cluster which is part of Denver-based MediaNews Group, Inc. He tipped us off last week to the impending closure of the 170-year-old North Adams Transcript, which he piloted for six years. We asked him for his thoughts, which he shared by e-mail.

I started my newspaper career at The Berkshire Eagle in 1978, served as publisher from 1995 to 2000, then did a stint as publisher at the Transcript 2000-2006 and at the Brattleboro Reformer 2006-2008.
For about 85 years, from 1896 to 1979, the Transcript was owned by the Hardman family, which then sold the paper to the owners of the Boston Globe. The Berkshire Eagle at the time was owned by the Miller family, who had bought the paper in 1892. The two families had a friendly rivalry, but when the Hardmans decided to sell, they let it be known that they would not sell to the Millers — because they were afraid the Millers would simply merge the two papers.
The Millers unsuccessfully attempted an end run using a straw man, and then they tried again, without success, when the Globe put the paper up for sale 10 years later and sold it to American Publishing. The Millers sold to MediaNews Group in 1995, and MediaNews bought the Transcript from American Publishing a year later. A couple of years after that, Michael Miller, a third-generation member of the former publishing family, asked me why we hadn’t merged the papers yet — thus confirming the suspicions of the Hardmans. (In the early 1980s, the Millers had merged two other papers, The Torrington Register and the Winsted Citizen in Connecticut, into the Register-Citizen.)
It’s a fact that we ran the numbers in 1996 and concluded that the bottom line was marginally better keeping the papers separate versus merging them, but the deciding factor was really Dean Singleton’s passion for newspapering and his conviction that North Adams was a separate place from Pittsfield and should continue to have its own paper. He brought in a designer, we improved the looks and content, and restored the original, handsome Gothic name plate. Over the years, of course, a long series of small consolidation steps merged the business and production functions of the two papers, and the Transcript’s building was sold, to the point where a final consolidation became the simple step it now appears to be.
Since there was not a huge bottom-line advantage to separate operations back in 1996, I doubt if there’s much financial advantage to merger today. The North Adams office is being retained, as is the journalism staff. The sales staffs were merged long ago and the business office functions were consolidated in Pittsfield. There might be a few circulation positions eliminated. But on the other hand, more copies of the larger Eagle will have to be printed; deliveries will have to be made to all the same places; and circulation revenue will be lost to the extent there was duplication. Back in the day, you could raise advertising rates based on the circulation increase, but that pricing power is gone. There was some duplicated preprint advertising which will be lost.
So my guess is that the justifications for the merger consist of (a) less management distraction managing two different brands in the same market, and (b) the perceived opportunities in focusing on a single region-wide brand. Readers really will gain something since the two papers duplicated coverage on a lot of events, so the expanded Eagle staff can now cover more. (Hopefully there will be enough newshole available to print what they write.) 
The region — the Berkshires — is a brand in itself, which has always been a strength exploited by the Eagle. So the move announced at the same time (making the Berkshires Week supplement, published since 1952, a year-round standalone publication) is a smart one, especially if it’s accompanied by a good online strategy.
It’s understandable the names of the papers will not be merged into Eagle-Transcript. But I’ve suggested that the Transcript logo be retained in a small way as part of the Eagle’s editorial page masthead. The Transcript’s 170 years of publishing history should not vanish without a trace.

Read more of Langeveld’s wisdom at the Nieman Journalism Lab.
North Adams Transcript website.

It is neither major, metro nor daily, but we would be remiss in not marking the passage from the world of the printed page of The Onion, which has long borne the self-effacing tagline of “America’s Finest News Source.”

Founded by two juniors at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1988, the satirical journal has thrived online with its diet of satirical news stories written with such deadpan earnestness that The Onion’s entry on Wikipedia lists more than 15 prominent cases of third-party sources citing it as a legitimate news outlet, usually to their embarrassment

Unlike many newspapers that have left the print world, The Onion is merely following its overwhelmingly young and Web-savvy audience. The paper became international phenomenon when it hit the web in 1996 and traffic to theonion.com reportedly now averages 7.5 million unique visitors per month. Its YouTube channel has 670,000 subscribers and The Onion has been liked on Facebook 3.2 million times.

The Onion has been gradually withdrawing from the print market for years. Its last remaining print editions – which were in Chicago, Providence, and Milwaukee – published their final copies last week. Not surprisingly, they were a tribute to the durability of print. Headlines included: “‘ONION’ PRINT REVENUES UP 5,000%,” “Nation Just Prefers Feel Of Newsprint In Hands” and “Experts: Digital Media Revolution Still Another 70 Or 80 Years Away.”

We were subscribers to the print edition of The Onion for several years and keep its RSS feed in our carefully curated list of media sources. We still have trouble reading it without the milk coming out our nose.

 

It is neither major, metro nor daily, but we would be remiss in not marking the passage from the world of the printed page of The Onion, which has long borne the self-effacing tagline of “America’s Finest News Source.”
Founded by two juniors at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1988, the satirical journal has thrived online with its diet of satirical news stories written with such deadpan earnestness that The Onion’s entry on Wikipedia lists more than 15 prominent cases of third-party sources citing it as a legitimate news outlet, usually to their embarrassment
Unlike many newspapers that have left the print world, The Onion is merely following its overwhelmingly young and Web-savvy audience. The paper became international phenomenon when it hit the web in 1996 and traffic to theonion.com reportedly now averages 7.5 million unique visitors per month. Its YouTube channel has 670,000 subscribers and The Onion has been liked on Facebook 3.2 million times.
The Onion has been gradually withdrawing from the print market for years. Its last remaining print editions – which were in Chicago, Providence, and Milwaukee – published their final copies last week. Not surprisingly, they were a tribute to the durability of print. Headlines included: “‘ONION’ PRINT REVENUES UP 5,000%,” “Nation Just Prefers Feel Of Newsprint In Hands” and “Experts: Digital Media Revolution Still Another 70 Or 80 Years Away.”
We were subscribers to the print edition of The Onion for several years and keep its RSS feed in our carefully curated list of media sources. We still have trouble reading it without the milk coming out our nose.
 

We did a double-take when we saw this headline on Bloomberg last week: “BuzzFeed Said to Expect 2014 Sales of Up to $120 Million.” If you haven’t paid much attention to BuzzFeed, now is a good time to start, because this seven-year-old dark horse may have figured out the secret to making money in an environment of brutal competition and plummeting advertising prices.

The story relates some impressive statistics:

• BuzzFeed expects to book $60 million in revenue this year, up from an initial budget of $40 million.
• Year-over-year traffic is up fourfold.
• The site attracted more than 130 million unique visitors in November.
• BuzzFeed expects to field more than 600 ad campaigns this year.
• It has raised $46 million.
• It’s profitable.

Casual visitors to BuzzFeed might be tempted to dismiss the site as just another collection of top-10 lists. That’s understandable, given that top stories bear names like, “The 28 Funniest Notes Written By Kids In 2013,” but there’s more to BuzzFeed than mouse candy.

The site was founded by Jonah Peretti (right), an MIT Media Lab alumnus who also co-founded Huffington Post. Peretti has made a career of figuring out how to make stuff that people want to share, and his latest venture appears to have cracked the code (For more on the new journalism discipline of writing for maximum share appeal, read this article).

Everything on BuzzFeed is optimized for sharing because that’s the secret to building traffic. BuzzFeed eschews traditional search engine optimization. “We don’t spend that much time thinking about search,” Peretti told Fortune in this interview. It focuses instead on the psychology of sharing: What content do people instinctively want to tell others about? In the long run, Peretti thanks sharing by humans will be a more important factor in online success than search results.

Unlike some other content farms, BuzzFeed has designs on serious journalism. Peretti has said he plans to hire 200 professional journalists, and the site’s news section is beginning to look more and more like what CNN used to. In essence, the cat videos and wet T-shirt slide shows bring in visitors s

o serious reporting can happen.

BuzzFeed is perhaps best known for its novel approach to native advertising. Sponsored content appears in line with staff material (it’s lightly labeled) and uses the same format as everything else on the site: lots of lists, photos and captions. Sponsors are encouraged to come up with creative ideas that will fit the look and feel of the site. Intel has 10 Pieces Of Vintage Technology We Couldn’t Wait To Have and Ruffles came up with 12 Reasons Dogs Really Are Man’s Best Friend. Peretti told Fortune:

We told brands, “You have to tell a story.” This is actually something the magazine industry has been great at over decades — making advertising that actually adds to the product. It’s something that websites have completely failed to do…If you take all of the ads out of a fashion magazine, you lose half the photography, you know? So we really took the approach of, “Well, why can’t the web be like that? Why can’t we make great branded content, advertising, that has its own page that people want to click on and engage in and share and interact with?”

This may sound like heresy to journalism traditionalists, but BuzzFeed is breaking a lot of molds in an attempt to find a model that works.

In fact, the site’s basic content model isn’t all that different from traditional newspapers’. The reason most newspapers carry horoscopes, crossword puzzles, comics and gossip columns is because large numbers of people read newspapers solely for those features. If BuzzFeed’s 21st-century version of Dear Abby can provide some serious journalists with gainful employment, then we all owe Jonah Peretti a debt of gratitude.

Media Boomlet

BuzzFeed isn’t the only new media entity that’s benefiting from the aggregation craze, but there are questions about how far this business can scale and whether there’s much money to be made.

USA Today‘s Michael Wolff writes that Henry Blodget (left) is shopping Business Insider, reportedly asking a cool $100 million. Not bad for a site that’s less than five years old with just 62 editorial staff members listed on its masthead. Wolff runs the numbers, makes a couple of educated guesses and figures that Business Insider is probably getting a  CPM (cost per thousand) of between $1.50 and $3. That compares to $30-$40 CPMs that were common in the business magazine world just a few years ago.

Wolff sees the mass-market digital media landscape as being a race to the bottom, with publishers frantically searching for viewer eyeballs, regardless of their appeal to advertisers. “The digital traffic world, with techniques and sources and results that are ever-more dubious, is, as I’d guess the astute Henry Blodget has ascertained, not a sound long-term play,” he writes. Hence, it’s time to get out.

But the venture capital community, which is flush with stock market cash, apparently doesn’t agree – yet. CNN Money’s Dan Primack and Jessi Hempel say Flipboard is set to raise another $50 million, bringing to $160 million its total venture funding since 2010. Flipboard doesn’t even produce any original content. It’s a mobile platform that aggregates content produced by other media companies, and its licensing policies have raised some hackles.

The new high-volume aggregation model that’s attracting so much attention was outlined in The New York Times last year. It’s a caffeinated rush to get it first, and very little content comes from traditional journalistic shoe leather. Reporters are skilled at finding, assimilating and repackaging information in eye-catching packages. The assumption is that citizens are already doing a lot of the reporting on their Facebook timelines and Twitter feeds, and the media company that can be filter the noise adds significant value.

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“There is no longer a defined final destination for talented journalists,” writes Emily Bell in The Guardian. “The New York Times is surprised to find itself a stepping stone.”

Bell is writing about the sudden and surprise defections of a number of top Times journalists to other media outlets, often for substantial amounts of money. The Times lost three prominent editorial staffers in one day last week: Brian Stelter (right) quit to go to CNN, Sunday editor Hugo Lindgren is off to places unknown and chief political correspondent Matt Bai will join Yahoo News. Last month, gadget specialist David Pogue left to go to an unnamed Yahoo startup. In an unrelated move, Jay Rosen has also joined an unnamed startup founded by Pierre Omidyar of eBay fame.

All of a sudden media is cool again, or at least some media. While traditional publishers continue to struggle with declining revenue, money is flowing into new media companies. Buzzfeed has raised $46 million. AOL is investing in a big overhaul and expansion of Engadget. Snapchat just turned down a $3 billion offer from Facebook, indicating how frothy the social networking market has become. B2B community Spiceworks has raised more than $50 million for its novel media model that uses software and a community as delivery vehicles. Even the Washington Post is expected to get an infusion of cash from its new owner, Jeff Bezos.

This is translating into career opportunities for some accomplished journalists whose brands now arguably transcend the publications they work for. Bell suggests that the star-making apparatus of the media world is shifting in their favor. Not long ago a job at The New York Times was considered the ultimate career plum for news journalists, but belt-tightening has hit the Old Gray Lady just as it has everywhere else (although not as hard). With all-digital operations suddenly flush with cash, the appeal of working for publishers whose survival strategy is to wall off content from non-paying visitors is diminishing.

In many ways, traditional media companies dug themselves into this hole. In their rush to produce more content and add more advertising inventory, they turned some of their best reporters into rock stars. Thanks to blogs, video podcasts and branded talk shows, journalists now get unprecedented visibility. That makes them prime targets for new media firms who want to trade on their personal brands.

Turnover may also be an unplanned consequence of paywalls, which will soon be in place at 41% of US newspapers. The problem with paywalls is that they shut readers out, and readership is what journalists live for. The Times‘ famous Times Select paywall was abandoned six years ago in large part because the paper’s signature columnists complained that their readership had evaporated. The models have improved since then, but no paid-access plan comes without some loss of audience.

So while newspapers  erect barriers to readership, new media entities like Buzzfeed figure out novel ways to get people to share their sponsored content. Is it any wonder that ambitious journalists with growing personal brands are seeking opportunities to spread their work to wider audiences instead of hiding it behind credit card forms?

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Even reporters who don’t have million-eyeball reach may have new ways to monetize their audiences. A startup called Beacon has launched a service that enables journalists to derive revenue from their most loyal fans and share a little bit of the spoils with fellow contributors. Mathew Ingram sums up the model succinctly:

Each of the site’s journalists (there are currently about 50) has a page where their content lives, and a discussion forum. When someone subscribes to them for $5 a month, Beacon takes a cut — the amount is in flux, but writers keep around 60 percent on average — and then the reader gets access to all of the site’s other writers. Some of the proceeds from each subscription also go into a pool that is shared by all of the journalists on the platform.

It doesn’t sound like anyone will get rich from this business, but at least there is a direct correlation between work and reward. And we suppose Beacon could be a launchpad for a few new superstar journalists who build their audiences there. Like the crowd funding site Kickstarter, Beacon builds and manages the community. It’s then up to the participants to give the audience something of value. May the best journos win.

 

Related articles

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• Journalists are on the move in America – and creating a new vitality
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• Who’s Left at the New York Times?

History may well mark the typically somnambulant first days of August as the week that forever changed the U.S. newspaper industry.

In a stunning sequence of events, two young billionaires with no media experience bought iconic East Coast newspapers and affirmed their commitment to helping to rejuvenate an industry that has been in freefall for the past seven years.

The Washington Post Co. announced yesterday that Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos would buy the company’s namesake newspaper for $250 million, ending eight decades of stewardship by the Graham family. The news came just three days after billionaire commodities investor John Henry was announced as the new owner of the Boston Globe.
The news continues a trend toward deep-pocketed investors making substantial investments in news organizations, shoring up depleted reporting staffs and experimenting with new business models. Value-investing icon Warren Buffett has snapped up more than 60 dailies and says he plans to buy more. In Southern California, greeting card magnate Aaron Kushner and his partners at Freedom Communications are turning heads with an aggressive investment strategy at the Orange County Register that is showing early signs of bearing fruit.

This is the best news the newspaper industry has had in years, and we think the management styles of these investors symbolizes the kind of long-term view that the business badly needs.

Long-Term Vision

Why Billionaires Are Trying to Rescue the Newspaper Industry

Let’s look at the two newest arrivals on the media scene. We’ve watched both Henry and Bezos with interest for years, but for different reasons. Henry is the white knight who rescued our hometown Boston Red Sox from a tumultuous management struggle and brought the town its first World Series victory in 86 years. Bezos is an Internet pioneer who steered his company to greatness in a turbulent industry and forever changed retailing. The two men made their fortunes in very different industries but share a commitment to long-term vision and a belief in fundamental values.

When Henry took over the Red Sox in 2002, the team was actively negotiating to abandon Fenway Park and build a new stadium in the suburbs. The new owner promptly scuttled the negotiations and redoubled his investments in the team’s home field, shoring up the infrastructure, adding seats and experimenting with new revenue sources that would keep the team competitive with other big-market players. The strategy has paid off. The 101-year-old stadium is a huge tourist draw, and high ticket prices combined with innovative promotions have enabled the team to support a payroll and farm system that consistently keeps it at the top of the American League East. Fans complain about ticket prices, but they can’t complain about the team’s performance on the field.

Bezos was one of hundreds of online booksellers that jumped on the early Internet. He successfully steered Amazon through the ravages of the dot-com crash and intense competition from brick-and-mortar retailers to make it a $61 billion powerhouse that has changed the way Americans shop. Bezos has kept his focus on core principles like personalizing the shopping experience and delighting customers. He has resisted the urge to chase short-term opportunities and focused instead on big picture problems like chipping away at the cost and frustration of shipping. See Michael Moritz’s profile for a financier’s account of Bezos’ brilliance.

Amazon made some early missteps, such as investments in busted Web 1.0 startups like Pets.com and Kozmo.com, but it has executed almost flawlessly since the end of the dot-com bubble. It has sacrificed profitability for growth, but that hasn’t stopped the stock from rising ninefold over the last five years. With Amazon still under-performing in international markets and just beginning to crack the business-to-business opportunity, there is reason to believe its best days are ahead of it.

Rule-Changers

Long-term thinking as exemplified by Henry and Bezos is exactly the tonic the newspaper industry needs. Its woes are rooted in a merger binge that started in the late 90s, fueled by an appetite for short-term profits. As online competition has eaten away the circulation and revenue base of the U.S. industry, most publishers have responded by cutting costs, raising prices and hoping for the best. But you don’t transform an industry by cutting costs. You do it by changing the rules. Bezos and Henry are rule-changers.

Editor & Publisher reported last week on newspapers that are successfully experimenting with new revenue sources. We have long maintained that growth opportunities exist  for publishers in local markets if they can break their advertising addiction and partner with businesses in new ways. Wouldn’t it be nice to see the Post and the Globe blazing these trails?

It’s tempting to dismiss these relatively small investments (the $250 million purchase price of the Post represents just one percent of Bezos’ net worth) as low-risk bets by people with money to burn, but we think there’s more to it than that. Wealthy entrepreneurs know that healthy, independent media are essential to democracy and to capitalism. Media watchdogs keep government and regulatory excesses in check and ensure that markets operate predictably. They also provide business intelligence that isn’t easily available elsewhere. Both Henry and Bezos are avid newspaper readers.

We have no reason to believe that either of these new media owners has any plans to try to wring cash out of a dying business. On the contrary, Henry was quick to issue a statement affirming his belief in the importance of a healthy Globe to the region. Bezos is leaving the current Post leadership in place and said no layoffs are planned. “The values of the Post do not need changing,” he said. “The duty of the paper is to the readers, not the owners.”

Some people have speculated in recent years that the salvation of the newspaper industry would be donations from foundations and wealthy investors. Perhaps there’s some truth in that, but donations are a backhanded way of saying that a cause can never support itself. Warren Buffett, John Henry and Jeff Bezos all have their own philanthropic interests, but we don’t believe they see these newspaper investments as charity. They see value, growth and ultimately something  that has eluded publishers for the last several years: profit.

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