If you missed the live stream yesterday, and you care, the archive of my interview with Mel Taylor on BlogTalkRadio yesterday can be found here.
More interviews from the NAA conference can be found here.
UPDATE: My coworker Shannon Dunnigan also interviewed. I also just finished listening to my friend Bob Benz, who has some interesting things to say about his new venture.
Three top newspaper executives — including my boss, Mike Reed, CEO of GateHouse Media — spoke to a general session of the NAA Connections conference this morning.
I didn’t take close notes, but I’ll share a few points.
The best quotes of the morning came from Dean Singleton, CEO of Media News.
Dean: “If you read Romenesko every day and you hear our people in newsrooms whine — they whine and whine and whine wishing for the old days to come back. Damn it, I wish the old days would come back, too, but wishing for it isn’t going to make it happen. You must be focused on the future.”
And: “When we had to make cuts at one of our larger papers somebody in one of our unions put out a letter that said, ‘Well, we won’t be able to put out the same newspaper we have over the past 30 years.’ I said, ‘Precisely. Our readers don’t wnat the same newspaper we’ve been putting out over the past 30 years.’”
Brian Tierney’s strongest point as also about how the newsroom responds to change.
He noted that when he took over in Philadelphia, his team had to make the painful decision to cut 60 people, but today, he said, his papers are better journalistically than they were before the cuts. He gave credit to executive editor Bill Marimow. “Bill is a better leader. It’s about leadership, not numbers.”
Mike Reed’s primary points were about investing in sales — hiring more sales reps and training them better to sell more products. He said online is the biggest opportunity for newspapers and that is were most of the future revenue growth is going to come from. He also exhorted newspaper companies to spend 98 percent of their time on doing and only 2 percent of their time on talking.
Reminder: I’m on BlogTalkRadio from the convention at 1 p.m. today.
There’s lots of blather all over the web about the New York Times piece on John McCain.
I could link to something, but you’ve all seen it. Here are my own four comments:
First, the priestly class of reporters and editors in America have forever heaped spite on blogs for being cesspools of rumor and innuendo. So what’s so different about the Times piece? The opening concentration on McCain’s implied sexual affair is nothing but gossip from either unnamed sources or pure speculation. There isn’t a shred of direct evidence to support it, and as Dan Kennedy notes, its probably nobody’s business.
Second, the priestly class of reporters and editors in America routinely bemoan the dumbing down of journalism because of the innumerable stories about Britney Spears. How is the Times piece any different than celebrity gossip? The next time a guy like Jim O’Shea complains about Britney Spears coverage, just point him to the NYT McCain piece.
Third, anonymous sources. If there is a more cowardly way of reporting than using anonymous sources to create smear articles, I don’t know what it is. If you’re going to use anonymous sources, use them for real scandal — you know, like Watergate.
Fourth, I chuckled when I read the opening graphs of the story. The spin reminds me of this piece from the Onion. You can sensationalize anything if you want a story bad enough.
Folks, journalism is in serious need of reinvention, if this is what America’s finest paper thinks is news.
I’ll be in Orlando, Fla. for the next few day attending the NAA’s Connections conference.
Beth Lawton was kind enough to schedule me for an interview with BlogTalkRadio while I’m there.
Her post on it can be found here.
What I didn’t realize is that people — people like you — can ask questions live during the interviews.
There’s a pretty impressive cast of industry leaders among those slated for interviews throughout the conference. Check Beth’s post for a line up.
The BlotTalkRadio page for the conference is here.
My interview is scheduled for Monday at 1 p.m. I have no idea what I’m going we’re talk about or be asked, so it should be terrifyingly entertaining.
If you’re attending Connections and want to meet for drinks or coffee, drop me a line at howard owens (oneword) at gmail dot com.
It is a reasonable question: Why isn’t there a Google News for news video?
And the answer is: An entrepreneur in Norway has launched NewsClipper (via TechCrunch).
In light of my previous post on innovation, it’s fair to ask, why didn’t a newspaper company come up with this idea.
It’s a simple idea — take the example of an existing product (in this case, Google News), and imagine a new use for the same concept using available tools and build a product that is just good enough to launch.
So nobody is confused: I’m not saying this is the kind of idea that should necessarily come out of a newsroom (again, in light of some comments on the previous post), but that if newspaper executives freed up their programming talent to work on innovative ideas, then maybe they would come up with sites like these. The talent and staff is out there, and some of newspaper programmers are doing innovative work. But there’s an aspect to this NewsClipper idea that is, “duh!”
The good news is, NewsClipper isn’t fully developed. It’s only scraping a few top news sites. It’s a nice proof of concept, but it needs work. It needs more content. It needs more meta data. It needs a better UI. And it’s going to run afoul of major media legal teams because it strips ads from the content.
A product that can get to market first that over comes those limitations could stand a chance at success. Building it won’t be easy, but NewsClipper provides an example of where and how to start.
Bryan Murley and Angela Grant touch on the idea that innovation is incremental, not driven by sudden flashes on insight.
It’s tempting to get focused on a solution that you think will help your online efforts (let’s give everyone a video camera! Let’s give everyone a blog!), when experience says that real innovation is built over time.
He thinks professional media organizations have fewer challenges because they have dedicated web staffs.
I’m not 100 percent sure about that. Online staff members are really busy keeping up with the job responsibilities associated with the same old same old. Put the stories online. Organize the stories online. Put in a picture if you have time. These backbreaking duties significantly decrease the time available for stacking the building blocks of innovation.
These posts both reminded me of Scott Berkun’s book, The Myths of Innovation, which I previously wrote about in the context of the newspaper industry.
There are some false assumption going on, IMHO, in both Bryan’s and Angela’s posts.
Innovation can come from any where. You don’t need dedicated staff driving innovation. Creative people are innovators. It doesn’t matter what their job descriptions are. It’s a cop out to say, “I don’t have time to be an innovator.”
The important thing for a manager to do is to recognize this and give creative staff members room to roam — don’t just turn down every idea they present, or deny them the tools to try new things. The creative ones, the ambitious ones, will naturally come up with new and interesting ideas.
That’s why making blogs and video-capable cameras available to every staff member — and I mean every staff member, not just newsroom or online personnel, but advertising, production and circulation, too — is a good idea. You never know what wide distribution of these easy, inexpensive tools might yield.
Furthermore, its important separate innovation from incrementally following the leader. The web staff making incremental changes to a CMS is not innovation, as Angela seems to suggest. We all know what a modern CMS should do, what tools it should have — the fact that many newspaper lack these tools is more a matter of regret than R&D.
If you really want to be an innovator, it’s important to understand what innovation is.
Primarily, it’s standing on the shoulders of those who went before you. It’s a matter of looking at what tools and technologies already exist and figuring out how they can be used differently, remixed and recombined, to solve the unmet needs of your target consumers.
There was a great post from a developer named Paul Ingram the last week: Six Principles for Making New Things. The nut graph:
I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.
This pretty much defines using available technologies, finding unmet needs, getting them out the door quickly in a “good enough” fashion, and then incrementally improving the product or service as customer demand or opportunity dictates.
In other words, it fits in very well with The Innovator’s Solution, a book every journalist with an inkling of interest in innovation or “saving the industry” should read.
When I started at the Ventura County Star in 1999, more than one manager told me that so long as I did my job, I didn’t need to worry about losing my job. The Star had never laid off workers. E.W. Scripps, I was told, didn’t believe in layoffs.
This week the Star announced seven people will lose their jobs as part of the Star’s efforts to reduce expense.
This is how much the industry has changed in just a few short years.
I wonder how many journalists will get it that it’s their own reporting conventions that are being mocked.
Yes, any mundane event can be turned into news if sufficiently hyped. The only thing required is good writing.
I love how mundane quotes are given more dramatic context:
Ronald Jarrett, a professor of economics at George Washington University who left his office after darkness blanketed the D.C. metro area, summed up the fears of an entire nation, saying, “Look, it’s dark outside. I want to go home,” and ended the phone interview abruptly.
Previously: Ten things journalists can do to reinvent journalism, and also see the CEO story at the end of Maybe it’s journalism itself that is the problem.
This is a follow up post to Maybe it’s journalism itself that is the problem. It’s another thought exercise in trying to figure out how to discover what journalism should be to better serve today’s society.
The issues facing journalism today are not a technology problem, but an audience problem.
Declining readership did not begin in 1994, when the web began to take hold.
Household penetration began to drop in the 1930s. Serious readership declines accelerated in the 1970s.
There is no one reason why newspaper dominance of media started its decline 7o years ago. There was the advent of broadcast media, and changes in society (more working women, depressions and wars, new societal attitudes, changing class structures and commute patterns), but during that same time, literacy and education levels rose, women entered professional and educated life, the leisure time available for citizens to get involved with their communities increased, and soaring revenue for newspaper publishers allowed them to greatly expand staffs during most of the 20th Century (it’s one of the paradoxes of newspaper publishing that while readership declined, ad rates and linage went up).
In other words, one could reasonably conclude that newspapers should have benefited from circulation increases during the very time they were losing market share (for most of the 20th Century, actual subscriber numbers increased, while household penetration decreased at a faster pace).
From the 1970s through the close of the century, there were more newspaper journalists employed at all levels, and because of the explosion of journalism schools in the later half of the century, they were better trained than ever. And because of the likes of Woodward and Berntein, they were substantially motivated and inspired to do great, important work.
Yet, real readership declined.
Why?
Could it be, that journalism itself is at fault?
In the 1930s that the likes of of Walter Lippman began to agitate for a more professional journalism class, and journalism schools began to proliferate. Up until journalism became a profession rather than a trade, entrepreneurial publishers determined the tone and style of the journalism they published. Publishers paid attention to readers needs and wants, and hired and trained editors and reporters accordingly; whereas the professional journalist hues to a higher standard of story selection and presentation with considerations far removed from what readers might prefer.
We could debate which model is “better” in the academic sense, but my only real concern here is what’s better in the business, real-world sense. Being academically correct when it comes to marketplace competition doesn’t put food on the table. All of the high-minded ideals in the world don’t mean a thing if nobody reads your stories.
Previously, I said the issue for newspaper journalism is not a technology problem, but an audience problem.
Technology does play a role, however. It is the accelerator, the starter fluid that is putting both heat and light on the short comings of present-day journalism.
Consider again that while readership declined, newspaper revenue growth could only be slowed by recessions. Every decline or stagnation of revenue growth was merely a cyclical nuisance, not a harbinger of death. But up until the start of the current recession, newspaper revenue in recent years, especially in classified categories, was under constant downward pressure, while the overall economy continued to grow. That was a historical first.
The only way to save journalism, then, is to figure out how to spark audience growth.
My humble proposal, then, is that individual journalists start paying attention to what readers want. That was the point behind my reader satisfaction post. The goal is to find some meaningful measure of reader satisfaction and fashion a new journalism that meets reader needs.
I’m not saying I have the answer, just saying — we need to find measurements that help us discover a path forward.
A point to stress, however: This is not a puppie dogs vs. Iraq debate (see video of Sam Zell in Orlando), or a Britney Spears vs. election coverage argument (see Jim O’Shea’s farewell address). The focus on specific content subjects misses the larger point. The straw man of such supposed pandering evades the key issue.
The issue is, the current way important news is gathered, reported and written isn’t working. It hasn’t been working for several decades. It’s only now becoming a crisis, thanks to the likes of Craig Newmark, Realtor.com, AutoTrader.com and Monster.com.
As we examine what journalism should look like in the 21st Century, we should also look hard at just how professional supposed professional journalism is. Today I heard a CEO of a large insurance firm talk about the day his company eliminated 200 jobs — 200 out of 40,000. He talked about how he prepared his employees for the media onslaught he knew was coming, with anchors bellowing and headlines screaming about the downturn of the company’s fortunes. These weren’t even layoffs, but merely the elimination of unfilled positions.
There is something wrong with a journalism that can’t honestly put the context of events in an accurate light, but must play up the most sensational angle. We all know the CEO’s story is not an isolated incident, and it isn’t merely a TV-journalism condition, but something endemic to present-day journalism, print and broadcast.
If our readers so easily recognize that what we do isn’t trustworthy for its accuracy both in fact and spirit, then how can we expect to retain them as readers?
Something needs to change.
Discovering a journalism that does what journalism should do — match the needs of society rather than dictate to society what people should want from journalism — will be real hard work, and it will challenge assumptions and afflict comfortable mind sets.
I would like to think that journalists who entered this career with high minded ideals are up to the challenge.
UPDATE: Josh Korr is doing some ruminating on this top. Click here for some interesting reading (and follow the links).
In writing about NewzJunky the other day, I think I buried the lede.
It’s only deep into the post that I get to the point that NewzJunky.com has trounced, both in audience and volume of advertising (I have no idea what the actual revenue is) the local newspaper site.
That’s no small feat. I don’t know of any comparable event in online media.
I’m not sure that point has sunk in for many people.
If any readers know about another local newspaper getting beat by a direct local competitor, I would like to know about it.
As Jack Lail points out in the comments to the previous post, this is more than a pay-vs.-free story. It’s much more than that.
While in the NewzJunky.com vs. WatertownDailyTimes.com race, the newspaper’s former pay wall may have been a huge help to NewzJunky winning the race (for now — the race, of course, is not over), but newspaper.com publishers should not take too much comfort in the fact that they offer their content for free. There is an element of the NewzJunky story that demonstrates that any newspaper.com is susceptible to disruptive competition.
On the other hand — this is just one event. Currently, I’m reading Fooled by Randomness. The lesson of that book is just about any outcome in inevitable. Warren Buffet, the guy who gets all of his trades right, is inevitable, given the millions of traders who have tried, and it is probably inevitable that at least one local start-up will beat an incumbent media leader.
Still, I’m not sure newspapers can afford to take too much comfort in the vagaries of randomness.
This is a much bigger story than just a couple of blog posts. Is the sort of thing the trade press should examine more fully. Let’s see if they do.
UPDATE: I stumbled across Quantcast months and months ago, and then lost the link and couldn’t remember the name of the site … thanks to a friend, I just found it again. Relevance here, some confirming evidence that NewzJunky.com is indeed trouncing WatertownDailyTimes.com. Again, NewzJunky’s audience is twice the size of the Daily Times. Amazing.
Long ago, I disavowed my former praise of TimesCast.
As I dove deeper into web casts, I found a number that were stunningly good, and realized the bar was much higher for episodic video than daily news video. If you want people to watch the same show every day or every week, it better be good. An audience will forgive less technical and product quality for something they’ll watch only once for a minute or two, but to keep them coming back for an episodic show of three-to-six minutes, it needs to be good.
Webcasts are something where good enough isn’t good enough. They need to be good. Period.
Examples of good:
What do the good have in common:
So far, I don’t know of any newspaper webcast production that hits on all four attributes — many hit on none of them. The best of the lot, Miami Herald’s What the Five and Naples News Studio55 suffer from less-than-personal on-screen talent. The hosts on What the Five come across as a morning radio team dropped unexpectedly in a video studio, and Studio55 tries too hard to be TV.
And if I wanted to take the time — and be that insulting — I could surf around and find links to many truly horrid newspaper webcasts.
The most common fault is either trying to be like TV, or trying to shoehorn the newspaper (”Let’s read the headlines and ledes on camera!”) onto video. There is also the problem of putting people on camera who have no business on camera, or at least need a lot more training and coaching before they should be doing this professionally.
(I should mention, there is another class of webcasts — the lone reporter who has camera and access to YouTube and one day goes, “I’m going to make a news cast!” These productions rarely make it past the third episode before the reporter loses interest, but I applaud the entrepreneurial, willing-to-experiment-and-learn attitude. We need more of that in our industry.)
It’s not just newspapers that get it wrong, either. There are supposedly professional video companies trying to enter the webcast/video podcast space, and their results can be just as bad.
Consider Fountain Head Studios — supposedly a serious effort to produce great webcasts, and every one of their efforts so far fail miserably (hat tip to NewTeeVee). Compare Stock Rockets, for example, to WallStrip … clearly a ripoff attempt, but it suffers painfully from bad writing and bad talent and lacks WallStrip’s defined theme, except in a broad, unfocused way (it’s about stocks, not about stocks with an interesting story to tell in an interesting way). All of Fountain Head’s shows demonstrate the same lack of clear focus, plus poor writing and less than stellar hosts.
Let that be a lesson to you.
If you’re going to do a webcast, you should spend the money and take the time to get it right. You may get only one shot at getting right — and as music and television producers will tell you, it may take hundreds of shots to find one hit — this is tough stuff.
Here’s what little I know about David Sullivan — he’s a journalist in Philadelphia — I believe a copy editor — and primarily a person of print lineage — and new to blogging.
And in his first week of blogging about the newspaper business — and keep in mind, Sullivan is a newsroom guy, not a business-side guy — he’s pretty much nailed the very issues we’re all grappling with, such has how do we really measure audience, what is our real online audience size, what is our audience worth, how do we compete with free, and where our competitors come from and what they do.
And all of that in this one intelligent post.
Most importantly, he notes that a family-owned paper in Watertown, NY has dropped it’s pay wall on its web site (a significant act to contemplate for the cranky old journalists who think everybody should pay for everything).
The Watertown Daily Times operates in an isolated market — almost an hour north of Syracuse and hours away from anywhere else. Watertown, like most of outstate New York, has had hard times, but the Times as still managed to keep (in 2007 Year Book) a daily circulation near 29,000, down from 37,000 10 years ago — not as hard a decline as a lot of papers, but still in the 2o-to-25-percentish range.
The Daily Times, being a family owned newspaper and thus having neither stock analysts nor corporate overseers, decided to put the Web content behind a wall. Last week it threw up its hands and dropped the wall. Victory for the Web!
In a way. The Times subscription Web site had 1,000 paid subscribers. Which means 29,000 households took the print paper and 1,000 took the Web site, meaning — 7,000 of the circulation loss was people who simply had no use for paying for the Watertown Daily Times in any form.
David points us to a local news aggregation site that appears to be in direct competition with the Watertown paper, newzjunky.com. It’s success (more on that below) is object lesson for newspaper sites that fail to take the web seriously.
Newzjunky.com dominates the WatertownDailyTimes.com both in audience and advertising. It has way more local information than most local newspaper web sites, and all of it free, and none of it coming from the Daily Times (not a single link to a Daily Times article).
Newsjunky.com has managed to secure obits direct from funeral homes as well as other hyperlocal information. From their it acts as a super aggregator of links to other news sites with stories it believes will interest its audience (not just local news).
As I said, NewsJunky.com dominates the WatertownDailyTimes.com. Look at this chart from compete.com:
Never before have I seen a newspaper.com get trounced in its own market by any competitor — not even a TV station. NewsJunky.com has twice the traffic, and is growing faster, than the local daily’s news site.
Sullivan notes that even with NewsJunky.com giving it all away, there are still 27,000 households in Watertown willing to pay for home delivery. Fine. But according to compete.com — which I believe tends to under count audience, but is also measuring non-local audience (and one more caveat to that: numbers I’ve seen from Belden Associates suggests that 80 percent of a newspaper.com’s traffic is local) — more people visit NewsJunky.com on a monthly basis than subscribe to the newspaper.
If that doesn’t put a nail in the coffin of the “people should pay for our news” argument, I can’t imagine what will.
So if our only chance at survival is to give news away for free, how do we survive? Obviously, advertising is going to be a big part of it (though not necessarily advertising as packaged goods media has traditionally sold). Any such model requires much larger audiences than we’re currently getting. And, so, again, I refer you to this piece by Kevin Kelly about unlocking true economic value online. And here again is my own post inspired by Kelly.
UPDATE: Additional thoughts immediately after posting.
First, I bet NewzJunky has a fraction of the staff — lower overhead - than the Daily Times. It may, in fact, be a one-person operation.
Second, to those who object the idea that sites like this can only exist thanks to MSM (look at all the links to other news sources), well, then, yeah, and your point? Not all local information requires reporters (look at Everyblock) to gather. Even if the MSM sources all go out of business, sites like NewzJunky still have a sustainable business model. And when MSM sites go out of business (if they do), all the more audience and advertising for sites like NewzJunky. More revenue means more staff for original reporting. Even if such a site isn’t staff as well as the daily newspaper it put out of business, the daily newspaper is still out of business. This is how disruption works.
The point is — ignore the concept of sites like newzjunky at your own peril. Feel free to marginalize the threat in your own mind, and say, “it can’t happen here.” Tell that to the publisher in Watertown.
UPDATE: In an e-mail, Jim Romenesko passes this along: “NewzJunky was founded by one of my early tipsters (starting 1999), a guy named Stephen Smith. He *is* in fact a news junkie who, I believe, runs the site on his own. I don’t hear from him as often these days probably because of his increased workload and success.”
If you’re on Digg, you can find me here.
A few weeks ago, I finally decided to start trying out Digg. There is a perception out there that Digg isn’t as good as it used to be, since it got away from its tech roots. I actually find it more interesting now. It does surface some pretty amazing stuff that I might otherwise miss.
It’s a little difficult to submit items (Scott Karp did right with Publish2 by creating a tool bar), but I’ve been making a submission here and there (and not just my own stuff). But with only three or four friends, and not much of a reputation, my original submissions get little notice.
Maybe if I had more friends … I don’t know … my participation in Digg is still in the “experiment” stage … so next step is to see if having more friends does anything for me.
I just stumbled across this post from Kevin Kelly on the dangers of anonymity.
However in every system that I have seen where anonymity becomes common, the system fails. The recent taint in the honor of Wikipedia stems from the extreme ease which anonymous declarations can be put into a very visible public record. Communities infected with anonymity will either collapse, or shift the anonymous to pseudo-anonymous, as in eBay, where you have a traceable identity behind an invented nickname. Or voting, where you can authenticate an identity without tagging it to a vote.
Anonymity is like a rare earth metal. These elements are a necessary ingredient in keeping a cell alive, but the amount needed is a mere hard-to-measure trace. In larger does these heavy metals are some of the most toxic substances known to a life. They kill. Anonymity is the same. As a trace element in vanishingly small doses, it’s good for the system by enabling the occasional whistleblower, or persecuted fringe. But if anonymity is present in any significant quantity, it will poison the system.
There’s a dangerous idea circulating that the option of anonymity should always be at hand, and that it is a noble antidote to technologies of control. This is like pumping up the levels of heavy metals in your body into to make it stronger.
For the newspaper.com, it’s not enough just to confirm an e-mail address — identity is important. Even if you will not require (or try to) real identity, there should be a mechanism for enforcing some sort of identity, even if it’s persona-identity, but even then, it should be traceable to a real-world person.
Communities built around anonymity eventually lack cohesion.
I started down the Kevin Kelly path this morning because of this post on “Better than Free.” Kelly’s point is that in a world where free copies are abundant, economic value is derived from other factors. In context of this issue, a newspaper.com that makes trust/transparency, authenticity/authority part of its brand promise (which goes hand-in-hand with requiring identity from contributors), then it is building value — a competitive advantage into its online efforts.
More on Keven Kelly here. His personal site starts here.
Previously: Real identity helps foster healthy communities.
Interesting bit of news related to podcasting this morning.
eMarketer announced that the 2007 podcast audience reached 18.5 million active users. It’s good to take any projection with an ounce of skepticism, but the same study estimates the 2112 podcast audience at 25 million.
When you start segmenting that audience, however, it’s hard to see how the average newspaper podcast garners enough regular listeners to drive sufficient revenue.
That’s no reason not to try, however, but more on that below.
One question not answered by eMarketer is how they define podcast. To many people, podcasts are more than audio shows, but include episodic video as well.
Could video be driving podcast growth?
I know I prefer video “podcasts” to audio, but that could be just me.
Video, however, seems to represent great revenue opportunity because of the larger overall audience for online video and the visual nature of video advertising.
Either way, newspapers should tread lightly here. It’s one thing to take the lo-fi approach with illustrative video, or even periodic story video. It’s an entirely different matter with episodic audio or video.
Any time you expect an audience to develop a habit for a regularly scheduled shows, quality is paramount — and it’s not just production quality. The content must be engaging and the talent behind it must be finely honed. The demand for top-notch on-air audio and video talent will only grow as podcasting grows.
That talent isn’t likely to come from traditional broadcast, because of the more informal nature of online media, which is a mystery to highly trained professionals from traditional media.
In other words, these growth numbers, if true and they hold, represent opportunity for newspaper companies and journalists willing to try new things.
Remember back in the 1990s when Microsoft seemed unbeatable? That was a time when worries about anti-trust violations began to surface and most pundits figured Apple Computer would soon be out of business. Windows ruled the world.
Remember circa 2001 when just about every newspaper company in the world was trying to figure out how to turn its web site into a portal? The goal was to be the one web site anybody ever really needed. We talked about being sticky and keeping people on our site as long as possible. Where did the idea, and the buzzword, come from? We all wanted to be the local Yahoo!
This week, Microsoft, battered by declining market share and slowing profit growth decided that its best bet to survive was to buy Yahoo! — but not the Yahoo! of 2001, which was worth an estimated $90 billion back then, but a Yahoo! whose fortunes have sunk so deeply, its market cap was about a quarter that price (Microsoft is offering a 62 percent premium on Friday’s share price).
In a little more than a single decade, what happened to these two once seemingly invulnerable companies?
Change happened. Markets shifted. New competitors arose. New ways of doing business and making money were invented.
The names and business models of the competitors doesn’t really matter, because competitive turbulence is inevitable for any business.
Except, of course, newspapers.
No, wait. Newspapers are in trouble now, too.
Twelve years ago, who could blame a newspaper publisher for looking back on nearly 300 years of newspaper industry dominance in the media and think, “we will live forever.”
When you haven’t seen any real change in your lifetime, or whatever change came along (radio and TV, say), made only a marginal difference (”hey, we’re still running at 35 percent profit margins!), why worry?
We now realize, of course, that the same laws of business that change markets and make ensured survival impossible, can kill newspapers, too.
I’ve just finished a great book: The Halo Effect.
It’s a good book to cause a little further reflection on what business survival means.
I’ve known a few business leaders in the industry who have sworn by Good to Great or In Search of Excellence or other business books that promise some step-by-step formula for success.
The Halo Effect, by Phil Rosenzweig, makes a great case that following the management principles in those books is really like chasing unicorns.
For example, the research in Good to Great is faulty and incomplete. Jim Collins and his team failed to account for, among other things, the Halo Effect, which is what you get when you measure performance by post hoc evaluations. Because the performance was good, than the management must have been good, and if the management was good, then the leader must have been good, and if the leader was good, then he created a good work culture, etc. Those attributes add up to a cascade of halos.
Collins also failed to look for companies that did all the things his “good to great” companies did but still failed.
In other words, the book lacked scientific rigor.
The fact of the matter is, the real research, the boring research (not the good story weaved by Collins) is that all of the management rules in the world, if well implemented, can at best only achieve a 10 percent improvement in performance (or so cites Rosenzweig). At best.
And none of that matters if market forces change and the company does nothing to respond. That’s when sticking to what you know best becomes a liability rather than a good business practice.
What’s more important than “having the right people on the bus” and “level five leadership”? How about strategy and understanding competitive advantage, not to mention simply getting the job done once you know what to do?
Of course, When your business is essentially a monopoly, as newspapers were for many, many decades, who needs to worry about strategy?
Our industry hasn’t (collectively) done strategy well, and the worst part is, strategy is scary stuff.
The problem: You never really know if a strategy is going to work. If you know a business plan will work, it isn’t really strategy. Then, it’s merely tactics. Strategy is about taking risk and trying the untried.
We all know how willing newspapers have been to try new things.
That habit is changing, but there is still a big tendency among some industry managers to buy into the “Good to Great” hedgehog theory (which Rosenzeig notes Collins got completely wrong both in mythology and application).
Newspapers can’t simply just “stick to the core business,” as a Collins-like hedgehog would do. Newspaper managers must be more fox like — more nimble, more willing to seek and seize opportunities.
Which, I suppose, raises the question of whether we have the right people on the bus?
Probably at some companies and not at others.
It’s a hopeful sign that many managers have been willing to explore, if not embrace, the API NewspaperNext initiative, which at least attempts to get newspaper executives to dive deep into strategic thinking.
My question is: Are newsrooms willing to learn the lessons of business history and allow the news/journalism industry to evolve. Or will they insist that nothing at all needs changed. That seems to have been Jim O’Shea’s answer, and the journalism world applauded his “principled stand.”
I’m not sure, however, that taking a stand constitutes a well conceived business strategy.
When I started this video of the week thing, I said it would be hit and miss … as time permits and I think about it, sort of thing.
To make up for several weeks of not doing it, here’s three videos.
Local music: It’s a logical avenue into reaching a younger audience. It helps reflect what’s really going on in the community you’re sworn to cover. It ads depth of coverage to your newspaper.com.
And who doesn’t love a good music video? I’ve long suspected that the reason many reporters get excited about shooting video is they’ve watched a lot of MTV.
But you don’t see many music videos on newspaper sites.
The reason is simple, really. To do music video well takes time, and lots of it, good equipment, and costs can add up quickly, as well as real talent.
What you’re really looking at is significant expense and time away from doing the core business of covering news.
Yeah, but wouldn’t it be fun to make a music video?
The Canton Repository (a GateHouse Media paper) found a great lo-fi approach. During the photo shoot for its upcoming Battle of the Bands (a competition open only to bands comprised of high school students), the Rep filmed band members milling about the newspaper building, and in the photo studio.
The results are simple, elegant and engaging. The keys to success are good editing and well-composed shots of kids aspiring to the spotlight. All the videos are a reminiscent of Hard Day’s Night.
Some of the music ain’t bad, either.
Here’s my favorite:
Ya Dig? by PJ & The Whistlers
If you need something to spice up your Super Tuesday, why not help cover it socially? Check out the Publish2 Super Tuesday project.
There’s a huge opportunity to help voters find the best election coverage in the sea of election content. Yeah, you can do it by yourself — but on the web, the larger the network, the more influential the linking — time to break down those traditional media silos.
Great chance to learn and experiment with journalists using web 2.0 tools to engage audience.
UPDATE: More on Super Tuesday … a regular reader from the Chicago Tribune dropped sends along word that they’ll be doing interactive video chats tomorrow.