It’s no understatement to say I owe my career to Ron James. In 1995, I interviewed Ron — whom I’d known from my days as co-publisher of a little weekly in Ocean Beach — for an article I was writing for the San Diego Business Journal about local online publications. At the time, Ron was editor of the San Diego Magazine web site.
After the interview, Ron asked me, “How would you like to be our East County correspondent” — see Ron had a vision for the Web’s expansive possibilities, turning SanDiego-Online.com into a portal for San Diego before the web-meaning of the word was invented.
In response to his question, I said I had a better idea — what if I got together with a friend of mine who owned a group of six weeklies in East County and put those online. Ron didn’t hesitate. “Great,” he said. And East County Online, the first group of US weekly papers on the Web, was launched just two weeks later.
When we started, I didn’t even know HTML, but my online career was launched.
During my interviews for SDBJ, I also spoke with Jim Drummond, who was single-handedly launching what is now SignOnSanDiego.com. Back then, the San Diego Union-Tribune had no faith in this web thing and the original site was strictly real estate advertising. Drummond toiled with little support and staff for years, until the U-T hired Chris Jennewein.
If you don’t know Chris, you should. He’s a legend in the industry. He’s been doing longer than just about anybody I know and launched the original MercCenter for the San Jose Mercury News back in the 1990s.
Through Ron, I got to know Chris and have long considered him a friend and a mentor.
I’ve learned a lot about online audience growth from watching Ron and Chris’s work in San Diego. They’ve led the industry and set the example for creating web sites that do a great job at attracting readers. They have few peers in the industry. SignOnSanDiego has also been an industry leader in revenue growth.
It’s all too common for internal politics to overrun good business sense at family-owned newspapers. That’s the only explanation in this case that makes any sense.
UPDATE: There’s no way the U-T can come out of this looking good, but bless their hearts, they’re trying. E&P reports that Gene Bell has confirmed Jennewein’s departure.
“Among the changes, is the consolidation of strategy, product development and Internet sites under the leadership of Mark Davis, currently vice president of strategy,” the statement continued. “This change results in having to say goodbye to Chris Jennewein, vice president of Internet sites.”
Gene Bell, president & CEO, added: “We thank Chris for all he has done and his contributions over the years. His work has built a strong foundation for our Internet business and our evolution into a multimedia company – an evolution that will continue, as we adapt to our readers’ changing media habits and preferences.”
Great formula for ongoing growth — get rid of the people have provided your newspaper’s only true online leadership to begin with. Retreating is always a great go-forward strategy.
UPDATE II: A post on Voice of San Diego contains this interesting tidbit:
A reporter who attended a 2007 newsroom strategy meeting in which Winner laid out ideas for the company’s future said the editor closed the session with this request: Don’t tell the workers at SignOnSanDiego.com about what was discussed. …
Here’s a “must add” for your RSS reader and blog roll … the wild bunch (you know, people like Bob Benz and Wes Jackson) over at Maroon Ventures has launched a group blog.
This is a gang of smart people, so we should have high expectations for wise and insightful posts (just raising the bar, Bob!), especially now that they’re cut loose from their corporate newspaper jobs. You know what stiffs those corporate suits are like.
I’m by far no fan of Eric Alterman, but his seven-page piece on the state of newspaper journalism in the New Yorker is a must read. There isn’t a thought out of place or a misdrawn conclusion. There’s no need for me to comment on it. It stands on its own.
Long, thoughtful, thought-provoking piece from Zac Echola. It’s a must read for any journalist with any doubt that the game has changed radically and forever. This isn’t a “transition period” for newspapers. It’s a whole new game.
See, I’m kind of tired of people talking about how newspapers are going through a “transition.” As in, “we just need to get through this transition.”
Transitions have beginnings, middles and ends. Transitions eventually stop and you get a chance to take a breath and say, “cool, we survived.”
This is no transition, because the changing will never stop. This is no transition because this is a radically different world from the one of mass-produced packages dumped on people’s door steps. The fact that there is still news on paper may be a mere echo of history.
It’s hard to believe news on paper will ever die. It’s also hard to believe news on paper will survive.
We just don’t know, but even if print survives, it will only survive because people in our news organizations become adapt at adjusting to constant change.
The print business, if it survives, will never stop feeling the increased pressure of competition, changing lifestyles and evolving audience expectations.
Print revenue is not likely to ever grow again. Digital revenue, at least, has no known ceiling.
If we expect print to survive, then we need to keep those products going while adjusting to change. But we also need to make digital a higher priority, because that’s the once chance we have to grow revenue and save, if not create, jobs.
Part of that adjustment is recognizing that digital media is fundamentally and radically different from packaged goods media. It calls for a different kind of journalism, and a different mindset from journalists.
Here’s the hard part: For as long as it survives, your print product is largely fine. It could maybe use a nip and tuck, but the people who continue to get the print product like what you do and don’t want you to change.
Online, that’s a whole different story. You’ve got to be different, and radically so. You need to write differently, file your copy at different times, make sure to provide appropriate links, include some video or extra photos, make a map or two, respond to reader comments (correcting, amplifying or scolding), participate in blogs related to your coverage area, and you simply must be smarter and better informed about what you cover if you want to retain the respect of your readers.
The hard part is, you must do all this and keep your more traditional print product going in an era of diminishing resources.
I don’t have an easy answer, except “just do it.” It’s really up to each individual to figure out how to reconfigure his or her job to meet the demands of both the print and the online audience. The responsibility for change doesn’t rest solely in the publisher’s office. It’s also the responsibility of every reporter, editor and clerk.
I think it can be done. I see people doing it everyday. My concern is not enough journalists are even trying.
The main point is — stop calling it a transition. If there was a transition, the inflection point passed four or five years ago. We can’t keep calling it a transition hoping someday soon all this turbulance will end. It won’t. The fundamentals of the media business are altered radically and forever.
There’s been a great conversation on Poynter’s Online-News list about the value and relevance of local news.
What follows is what I posted to the list
Local news is a niche. It’s a vertical.
This is good news for local newspapers, because one of the things the web does best is help you create verticals.
Your local vertical won’t ever achieve 100 percent DMA penetration. That isn’t the goal of any vertical strategy. Being vertical means you reach the people who are passionate about that subject and make them loyalists; and you provide all of the hooks to keep infrequent users coming back often enough. If you do a really good job, you help engender some passion in formerly infrequent users.
To any local news site manager who has spent any serious time analyzing his or her traffic metrics, he knows there is a core group of loyalists who hit his site frequently. This is good news, because it gives us a place to start and gives us hope that local has some value still.
The goal behind a good local vertical strategy is to increase the size of your core audience, because for most local sites the current core audience size is too small for significant revenue opportunities.
Good verticals require great ownership. By that I mean, when you own a vertical, you should be the master of that subject area.
For a local vertical, you should have all the news (the most complete, comprehensive, up-to-the-moment source). You should host all the conversations. You should have lots of video. You should have all the related databases. You should have all the related links, even links to the cross-town rivals formerly known as your competitors (turn them into contributors by linking to their stories and videos) You should have all the advertising related to that niche, and nobody should want to advertising anyplace else because you so own your vertical.
I see too many local news operators coming to the web from a newspaper perspective, and treating their local sites as they treat their newspapers. Newspapers are appropriately and should remain horizontal packages, containing national and world news, crosswords, Dear Abby, etc. A good vertical has nothing it it that isn’t related to that vertical. For a local news site, for example, most of what you get from AP is not only useless, it’s harmful to the vertical brand. And you sure as hell don’t need Dear Abby on your local site. Now, if you can find the local Dear Abby ….
Because you own your vertical, everything you do should be distributable across the web. This gets to Mark Choate’s issue about being part of multiple communities. We can’t guess at all the communities an individual belongs to, so we should help our users customize their own web experience by disaggregating our own content. We should atomize everything we do so it is mixable and mashable.
Distribution helps drive traffic back to your vertical (thereby increasing the odds of finding and converting more loyalists).
Your stuff is going to get distributed anyway, so you might as well control as much as possible the methods and terms of distribution.
There is no reason that distribution can’t carry advertising with it.
Because local is a niche, the local media company formerly known as the newspaper can no longer rely just on local as its core competency, if it wants to significantly grow revenue. It must expand into other vertical areas, thinking well beyond just news, but getting to the interests of people in their community and attracting audience from people who may not care about news, but they really care about high school sports, or NASCAR or growing roses.
And the great thing is — because you’ve made your own content distributable, you can distribute content that fits into more than one vertical across all appropriate verticals, achieving the benefits of scale.
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.
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.
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.
It demonstrates what a one-man operation, or small-staff in a small market, can do. A small staff is more nimble and usually comprised of people with an ownership stake in the venture (talk about motivation!).
It shows that you don’t need a big news staff to win the local market online. Many journalists take too much comfort in the notion that, “we have a big staff, so we have an advantage.” Have you seen the news about layoffs recently — a big staff in the future is by no means guaranteed. The other side, of course, is that a small, nimble, hard working staff can beat a bigger, more institutional, bureaucratic staff.
It shows that traditional local advertisers will defect to viable local online competitors, and it shows there is a greater hunger for local advertisers to reach a local audience than many local sales staffs can admit. I’ve heard from many small publishers who say, “Our advertisers are not yet interested in online.” Bunk.
It shows that users will flock to a site where they can make their own local news contributions, and they value the contributions of other users.
It challenges traditional notions about design and usability — what matters is content, both in width (not necessarily depth, which is not the competitive advantage many editors assume it is) and frequency.
There are a lot of people in our communities who hate our guts — read some of the comments on the previous post … they will sound strangely familiar to people who have been in the business a while. Give those people an under-dog outlet to rally around, and they might just become the instigators of an inflection point.
It demonstrates perfectly how disruption works — delivering a product that is just good enough to take customers away from incumbent players, and that disruption can come in many forms.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
“Not since the merger of the Union and Tribune over 15 years ago have we faced such wrenching changes,” he (CEO Gene Bell) wrote. “At the same time, never in our history have we faced revenue losses as dramatic as those of the last 12 months.”
Observation: The U-T offered free classifieds and that did not stem the tide of revenue loses.
I’m not trying to draw a direct connection, just saying … it didn’t help.
The only time I’ve ever heard of an MSM newspaper offering free classifieds and using it to win market share was in Arkansas when Walter Hussman took the Democrat from second-tier player into only game in town.
There might be a very scary lesson about the inability of a market leader’s inability to use disruptive strategy to beat other disruptive players.
What worked for Hussman to beat a bigger paper, may not work for a market leader like the leading metro in town to beat Craigslist and other free-classified sites.
If that’s true, then sustaining innovations (which most newspapers have been pursuing in the recruitment ad space for a decade) may be the only way to go.
Many news organizations have bonus plans for newsroom personnel called MBOs (MBA speak for Manage by Objective). The idea is to reward people for doing work that helps advance the company’s strategic goals.
Is there any higher strategic need for news organizations today than becoming more digital savvy?
I suspect there are still too many non-wired journalists in most US newsrooms. Either out of fear, indifference or hubris, too many reporters and editors resist using the Internet for anything beyond the occasional Google search (and heaven forbid they ever click a search result link to Wikipedia) and a daily dose of Romenesko (and heaven forbid if you call him what he is, a blogger).
That just isn’t acceptable.
So to help newsroom managers advance the digital literacy of their organizations, I offer the following MBO plan. I recommend readers pass this along to the top editors at their newspapers. And for non-wired journalists ambitious enough to pursue their own MBO paths, I’ll offer a reward myself (strict rules and details at the bottom of this post).
Become a blogger. Start with a favorite topic. For example, if you’re a baseball fan, start with baseball. Find all of the baseball-related blogs you can and become a regular reader of five or six of the best of these blogs. Participate — leave comments; follow links. After three months of blog reading, start your own blog on that topic. Try to post daily for at least six months. For blog topics, avoid anything related to your beat or politics. First, you need to blog about something you are passionate about; second, there are too many political bloggers already (accept maybe for local politics, if you see that need in your community and it won’t conflict with your day job).
Buy a small digital camera that can take both stills and video. Open an account with a photo sharing site such as Flickr or Buzznet. Take photos and post them. If necessary, use some online tutorials for digital photography. (NOTE: If company will buy you this camera, great, but if not, remember you have a responsibility to invest in your own career.)
With the same camera, make at least three videos. Use the free video editing software that comes with your computer and edit those videos. Post them to YouTube and at least one other video sharing site. There are plenty of online tutorials for shooting and editing video. Your goal here isn’t to make great video, just to learn what is involved in making video so you have the capability in your online journalism tool bag.
Related to video, spend at least two hours a week for six weeks on YouTube. Search for topics that interest you and then follow the trails where they lead. Pay attention to the daily most popular and see what other people are watching. Be sure to watch both amateur and professional video.
Join a social networking site. Every professional should have a profile on LinkedIn, so make sure you do, also. Facebook has been hot in 2007, but I think you’ll get more out of MySpace, which still remains popular with your future readers. You will get more DIY (the backbone of modern media) experience with MySpace, if you take full advantage of the site features (which, admittedly, I have not). Do Facebook, too, but don’t neglect MySpace.
Use social bookmarking. Set up del.icio.us for yourself and use it every day. Learn about tags. Check out Digg and Mixx and similar sites. If you can, get into Scott Karp’s Publish2 beta.
Start using RSS. Use RSS to keep up with the news of the day and the blogs you are now reading every day. Make sure your blog has an RSS feed. Here’s Marc Glaser’s guide to RSS.
If your current mobile phone doesn’t handle SMS (text messaging), get one that does. SMS works best when you have friends who text, so figure out who those friends are (by now, you have them). For neophytes and gray hairs, a phone with a QWERTY keyboard (Treo, or iPhone) works best. Blackberrys aren’t great SMS handhelds because they mix SMS and e-mail together.
Learn to twitter. I’m not a big Twitter user myself, but Ryan Sholin and Jack Lail swear by it. I think there is something to be said for learning how this technology may change information dissemination.
Create a Google Map mashup. If you don’t know what those are, google it. If you don’t know what to do or where to start, google it (hint: or you can search this site). There are plenty of tutorials available. It’s easy. All you need is a spreadsheet with appropriate data and enough smarts to follow step-by-step directions.
After you’ve done these ten things, document what you’ve learned — write something, such as an essay to your editor or a blog post. Discuss how technology has changed media, and follow the string of where that change might lead. What will your job be like in 10 years? What will media be like in five? How will news reach young readers in a generation? Tomorrow?
For those of you who work for a newsroom that doesn’t offer an MBO, or you’re not being included in the MBO program this year (maybe because your editor perceives you as too stuck in the past), I’m here to help.
I will give a $100 Amazon gift certificate to one journalist who completes all of the objectives. Here’s the rules:
You must today be a non-wired journalist (which probably means a well meaning friend passed the link to this post along to you, because you, yourself, don’t normally read blogs). As a non-wired journalist, you only use the Internet for e-mail and a little web surfing, but not much else. You have yet to do anything along the lines outlined above.
To be eligible, you must first send me an e-mail (howardowens at gmail dot com) and tell me about your current level of non-wiredness. To help confirm your position, you will need to CC your immediate supervisor at his or her work address (for this exercise to be meaningful, it probably helps if you have your boss’s support, anyway).
You must be the first among the eligible participants to complete all of the objectives, and they must be completed in 2008.
Part of being online is to be public and transparent about who you are and what you’re doing, so when you nominate yourself to participate, expect me to post your name and news affiliation in a blog post. Our readers should be able to follow your progress. Of course, there’s some advantages for you — it’s a great career move to be known as a learner; and the people who read this blog are the kind of people who would be happy to help you as needed; and when you have your own blog, you’ll be grateful for the links. And there’s no shame in admitting it’s time for you to go digital — you’re not alone.
For supervisors who use this post to fashion an in-house MBO program, it would be great to hear from you, especially as the program progresses, so we can all learn from the experience.
I have this fear that many in the newspaper journalism world cling to aomw notion that if we can just get past this rough spot of Web2.0 disruption, some technology that will come along and save newspapers as we’ve always known them.
I’ve been looking for somebody to actually come out and say it, and we’ve gotten close a few times recently between various pieces on newspapers needing an iPod moment (never mind that the iPod has done a pretty hearty job of desconstructing the music industry as we once knew it) and the recent release of the Kindle.
Here’s an article that comes as close as I’ve seen as saying, “there is technology that will save us.”
I’m going to deal with some of specifics in the article, but before I do, let me dispel two myths:
First, we don’t need technology to save us. There’s no reason we can’t succeed on the web; in fact, we’re doing far better on the web than many “the sky is falling” types in newsrooms give us credit for.
Second, technology won’t save us. If we can’t succeed on the web, we certainly won’t be able to succeed with the Kindle or e-ink, because each of those new technologies will bring their own challenges to the traditional way of doing things. Consumers will decide how to best use these devices, not publishers, or they won’t use them. That’s the rock-hard truth of digital technology — users are in charge, not publishers.
As for the article itself, which posits a rather cherry picture of how newspapers might be able to forgo messy print in favor of cheaper digital publishing.
Some problems:
Not all print readers will switch to digital, even if print goes away. Smaller audiences mean less from advertisers;
You’ll still need a web site (in a Kindle/e-paper world), you can’t count on net-savvy readers making the switch, so you’re still fragmented and disrupted by your own free content.
Much of online revenue now is leveraged against print buys, so when print goes away you lose that leverage and probably have to lower your prices for the single digital buy.
You can’t completely cut your circulation department, because you’ll still need staff to deal with e-paper subscribers and their issues and problems. In fact, your costs may go up as you need a more tech savvy call center.
The ad sales model proposed in the article is deceivingly complex. If current ad sales staff struggle now to sell very simple CPM-based banner ads — a far less complex sale than many print ads — how quickly can they adapt to highly targeted ads on devices clients aren’t really even likely to own in early stages?
The article is optimistic about half of the newspaper advertisers making the jump from print to digital, but mistakenly makes that assumption on current ad rates. But with smaller, more fragmented audiences, even with targeting, ad rates are likely to be much lower — classified rates, which probably will not be targetted and make the bulk of newspaper revenue, will be much, much lower, if not free.
Newspaper people need to stop chasing the rainbow of “technology is going to save us” and get busy trying to help us succeed online, because that is the more immediate challenge and opportunity before us.
We need to operate as if either we succeed online, or we die and not live in technological fantasy worlds.
Just as last year, I’m making my own subjective picks for various categories of my own choosing for web site awards. This is just for newspaper-affiliated sites, of course. And as last year, Bakersfield.com and VenturaCountyStar.com (because of my previous management of those sites) are ineligible to win, as well as any GateHouse Media site. Also, admittedly, my awards are entirely US centric, since that’s what I know best.
Best News Site: Knoxnews.com. Just as in years past, Jack Lail and his team continue to do an amazing job. You want participation? They’ve got it. You want an aggressive, wide-ranging and creative video strategy? You’ll find it on knoxnews.com. There is lots of blogging and loads of extra content. Knoxnews.com continues to do what all sites need to do — move further and further away from being just a newspaper online. This site is also one of the best designed and conceived in the business. This year, btw, I gave demerits to WashingtonPost.com for its highly restrictive registration system.
Rookie of the Year: New this year, this award goes to a newspaper site that probably none of us ever paid much attention, but sometime within the past year got its act together. The first-ever winner of this award: VictoriaAdvocate.com. This small-paper’s site is one of the most active I’ve seen in the use of participation and blogs, to the point of loading up the home page with these web-centric features. Here is a small paper site that isn’t afraid to break away from being merely a newspaper.com.
Come Back of the Year: Another new category. This award goes to a site that should have been much better than it was in recent years (if not forever), but made great strides in the past 12 months. It was tempting to give the award to LATimes.com, but sister site ChicagoTribune.com takes the honors. ChiTri is doing a great job of integrating blogging and video. I love their video chats, such as this one.
Best Site Design: NaplesNews.com. I don’t think there is a site in the industry, from a purely design perspective, that has done more to completely bury the news-print connection. There is no attempt on NaplesNews.com to be the newspaper online. Even the main nav communicates — we’re a web news site, not a newspaper site. Plus, the site, right down the play button on the video player, is just gorgeous.
Best Entertainment Site: AmpifySD. Is there another newspaper site with both live-streaming programming and a local music wiki? This site is caulk full of useful information to San Diego’s nightlife mavens (I was once part of that crowd), and plenty of ways to interact and contribute. And it’s a great design.
Best Multimedia Story: Rocky Mountain News, The Crossing. This package is the most thorough, well-conceived and executed multimedia effort I’ve ever seen. I don’t think it has a flaw, from the quality of its journalism, to its video, to its subject matter to its design and Flash implementation. I found the subject matter absolutely engrossing and it is so full of real life, real people drama.
Best Participation: DenverPost.com’s Neighbors. I’ve never been entirely comfortable — but didn’t mind the experiment — with the citizen-journalism-as-content efforts of NorthWest Voice, Backfence.com or YourHub. The Post, right in YourHub’s back yard, has taken a different approach — to create a conversation site, a place where local residents can discuss local issues, without any pretension that it is news. To bad the recent deal Media News made with Topix is likely to kill this effort. That said, the next time your publisher suggests you start a Northwest Voice/YourHub type of site, point him to Neighbors (if it’s still around).
Best User-Generated Content Site: TBO.com’s local artist database. This is a great idea — take a subject that people can be absolutely passionate about, where subjects care deeply about what they do and are eager to express it, and the ability to use web technology to create a very interesting vertical, and you have a winner.
Best Newspaper Video Effort: NYTimes.com. The Times has the resources to both go after long-tail video content (a basic idea beyond my own video strategy) and use better equipment and take more time editing to do it. The times produces some truly interesting video and video blogs, but never tries to be like TV. Also, the video gallery page is well executed.
Best Revenue Effort: LJWorld.com’s Marketplace. You can just look at Marketplace and see that it is smartly conceived and executed, not to mention the fact that many, many local advertisers have obviously bought packages in Marketplace. The clincher for me though is my own personal experience: Several weeks ago, when I visited Lawrence and dropped in on a local furniture shop, I was impressed by the implied endorsement the shop owner gave me — he told me to visit his LJWorld.com page rather than his own web site.
Best Database Journalism: You could pick any number of Gannett sites since the birth of the Info Center and praise its database efforts — maybe the best thing Gannett has done with the Info Center — but IndyStar.com sure has a hell of a lot to offer. Database journalism ranks right with participation, web-first publishing and video for growing online audience. We could all lift a page or two from IndyStar on how this is done.
>> Don’t count newspapers out, says Richard Siklos, Fortune editor-at-large: “What is often overlooked is where newspapers rank, at least for now, in overall spending in the pantheon of media industries fighting for dollars from consumers and advertisers. They are number one, ahead of TV networks, magazines, billboards, you name it. And it’s instructive that no legacy medium has been obliterated by a new technology: consumers simply adjust and adapt. In the era of DVDs and downloads, we still go the movies and listen to the radio.”
Two reactions:
First, if technology were to remain static, meaning nothing would change from what it is today, half of the challenge to newspaper survival would be solved. (The second problem is that we’re not creating new readers and eventually current readers will all die). There is no doubt that newspapers today are in much better shape than conventional wisdom says, but this isn’t a static world.
Second, the assertion that new media doesn’t replace old is a shallow evaluation of history of media. Previous challengers to newspapers were more like newspapers than non like newspapers — they were all mass media, packaged goods media. Digital media is distributed media, it’s social media, it is personal media. It’s the opposite of mass media.
It’s important not to get too comfortable in our assumptions.
At this time of year I ask new students about their primary sources of news — where they normally look first. Is it radio, TV, newspapers or the web? Over the years the web has grown to be the first choice but last week newspapers did not feature at all among a group of around 20 students. It is the first time that has happened, not one hand went up.
I tend to be amazed by newspaper journalists who still seem to think they have a job for life — “newspapers won’t die in my lifetime.”
You may conclude, like Andrew’s students, that newspapers will live until the last reader dies, but business economics doesn’t work like that. At some point, it is no longer economically viable to keep a dying business alive — and that point is long before you lose all of your customers.
Let’s say you operate a 250K circ paper, and you lose 10,000 subscribers in a year, you might be able to sustain that lose and keep advertisers, but what about 20K, or 30K or 50K … in one year, or 50K or more over two years.
At some point, the slide becomes impossible to stem and advertisers won’t be happy.
I don’t care who owns the newspaper — a publicly traded company, a family, a non-profit — a newspaper that can’t turn a profit has no future.
Right now, profit margins are slipping but still potentially acceptable, and maybe at some point, the slide stops, but I wouldn’t count on it.
If your core customers are dying and you’re not creating new ones, how do you stay in business?
I’m not predicting that newspapers will die — I love newspapers (though I no longer regularly read any paper), and hope they’re always around, but it just seems insane to me that if you’re journalist that you organize your work day around putting out a print product. You should organize around the web and squeeze in enough time to keep the print product alive. The future is almost certainly digital. If we don’t figure out how to make money online (which begins with audience growth), then the future of quality journalism is in doubt.
“Dilbert” creator Scott Adams predicts that newspapers will die out within two upgrades of a cell phone.
“The iPhone, and its inevitable copycats, (let’s call them iClones) are newspaper killers,” he writes in the Dilbert Blog. “When you have a web browser in your pocket, a printed newspaper is redundant.”
He admits that 10 years ago, he predicted newspapers would die out in five years. So maybe newspapers will last for at least four upgrades of a cell phone.
Technology is the biggest competitor news on paper faces.
I’ve said before, technology is changing fast and the speed of change is only accelerating.
If it isn’t the iPhone, it will be something else that poses an even more serious challenge to news on paper than the web does today.
The threat isn’t from all people making the leap. It’s from just enough making the leap to turn newspapers from struggling but still profitable enterprises into money losing empty shells.
No newspaper owner, private or public, not even a “non-profit” one, is going to keep an enterprise going that is losing money and shows no hope of ever making money again.
We simply must get on top of this technology curve and figure out a profitable path.
And think about this — if dumping the print edition on the web isn’t a smart strategy, how much dumber will it be for mobile consumers, who are likely to be even more driven by “tell me what you know now” and “keep it short” than today’s web audience?
Greg Harman of Belden posted the following to the Feds-DigitalMedia list, and with his permission I’m reposting here, just because I think it’s fun.
Once upon a time newspapers were oh-so-au-courant — we used the very latest technology to get up to the minute news & our names reflected that “technology forward” attitude we had back in 1863. So we called our newspapers “The Telegraph” or “The Telegram” or some such thing.
But, 150 years have passed — perhaps we should envision new brandsâ — here’s some ideas.
The New York Modem
The Chicago Link
The Ypsilanti Keyboard
Altoona Mash-Up
Santa Fe New Internet
The Seattle HyperText
This post will seem counter-intuitive to long-time readers of this blog.
It’s a message to the average newspaper.com, and the message is simple: Stop posting all of your newspaper content online.
When I ran VenturaCountyStar.com, I did a very fuzzy calculation. I looked at our circulation declines, our web traffic gains, our registration data and came to a best-guess conclusion that the web site was contributing about two points to circulation declines.
When I look at a chart like this, I think my calculations can’t be too far off. It seems safe to conclude that some switching is taking place.
Back when I did that initial calculation, and for a long-time after, losing some print audience to the web seemed like an acceptable price to pay. We simply MUST grow our web audiences. If we have to eat our own to do it, well that’s just battling against the innovator’s dilemma. And besides, if we didn’t get those local eyeballs on our sites, somebody else would.
I considered getting that whole paper online a necessary evil, without stopping to consider that in reality, building a great local web site was is in no-way dependent on putting the entire paper online.
The flip side, of course, is that it’s hard not to rely on that daily dump of shovelware if your newsroom isn’t engaged in your web operation. That is still a problem today, but it was a much bigger problem in 2004 and earlier.
Putting the entire paper online every day (most papers do a daily dump between midnight and 5 a.m.), causes several problems for the average newspaper company:
It retards organizational growth. Journalists simply must learn to take the web more seriously, and the daily dump is a crutch that makes it easier for newsroom personnel to ignore the web.
It gets in the way of building a truly robust web site. That “we’re a newspaper” feel is never shaken from the site structure and it makes it harder to draw attention to the real web features of your site.
It entrenches core readers into the notion of “I’m reading my newspaper online” instead of getting them to see your site as something different and maybe better than what you do in print.
It encourages too many people to think, “why should I pay for this when I can get it for free online.”
We’re in a tough situation with circulation anyway, and encouraging people to switch only hastens the migration away from print. It may be inevitable, but our web sites aren’t ready yet to shoulder the load.
The good news is, there is a better way.
If, and that’s a big if, we can get our newsrooms to take the web absolutely seriously, and make doing web stuff a vital part of the daily routine, we can eliminate the daily dump.
What would a community news site look like that doesn’t overly rely on the entire paper online every day?
It would include:
A continuous flow of news. Reporters would be active in web-first publishing, publishing what we know when we know it, and letting the community know what is going on now.
There would be lots of opportunities for user participation and contribution — everything from comments on stories to UGC video and blogs.
The mindset would be, we’re part of the flow of the conversation, not the whole conversation, and there would be lots of links out to related community content.
Video (and other multimedia, but primarily video), and lots of it. The primary strategies would be a point-and-shoot video camera in the hands of every reporter, some better cameras for staff with the appropriate time and training, and some well-honed webcasts.
Lots of utility pieces, such as calendars, movie listings, and strong advertising tie-ins for classifieds and internet yellow pages.
Strong search. Almost no newspaper.com right now has really good search. We need good search. And it’s not about providing search for just our own web site, but serving the whole community.
Blogs. This is part of being about conversation (see above), but it’s also about creating original web content, more web content and developing staff literacy about online culture. Of course, not all site-affiliated blogs should be staff-written blogs. Many should be from community members.
Databases. Lots and lots of databases. If it’s data, and it’s relevant to our community and we can make it searchable and/or sortable, we should have it on our web sites.
We should also make sure our articles, our videos, our databases — pretty much everything on our web sites — is easy to share. We create individually-addressable links for discreet pieces of content, we use embed tags, we certainly have RSS feeds and e-mail links, and we also create widgets where it makes sense.
We have user profiles/social networking and the ability for users to customize their local online experience, including saving favorite stories, creating custom SMS and e-mail alerts.
If we can do all those things we will certainly have a community site that stands apart from the print-package newspaper. It compliments it rather than competes against it. It helps us serve our journalistic obligations better on so many levels. It helps us put out better newspapers (because we’re more engaged with our community and producing more content than we could ever use in print, so the print edition becomes our greatest hits).
Our web sites should be web sites, not newspaper sites. The daily dump doesn’t help us either in print or online and probably hurts us a lot more than we realize.
Will this strategy slow circulation declines? I don’t know. But I also think it’s conceivable it could lead to small gains. Who knows? It hasn’t been tried yet as far as I know. But it certainly can’t hurt, at least not the way current newspaper.com strategies are hurting. And I’m quite sure building better web sites is our number one mission.
