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Archive for the ‘Print media’ Category

Love won’t keep news together

Posted in Online media, Print media, tagged , , , on June 18, 2014| Leave a Comment »

One of my reporters seemed stunned recently to hear me say that one day most people probably would get all of their news, including their hometown news, from Web and mobile devices. She was barely out of college and a member of the generation of “digital natives” who grew up with the Internet, yet she somehow had a baby boomer’s romantic attachment with the printed page. The newspaper’s website to her was a public service, to make news quickly available in case it was needed, but not a replacement for ink on paper. Why would there not be a demand for a printed newspaper?

I think I was more stunned to hear her than she was to hear me. I thought maybe she was joking.

We had never had an extended discussion about the news business model. I knew she was adamantly opposed to charging online readers for access to the website. She knew that advertising essentially pays the bills for a newspaper but that print circulation and advertising have been in industry-wide decline.

Yet somehow she had not done the 2 + 2 math and thought out where that all leads.

And then today Steve Buttry posted a link to a piece by Clay Shirky that fairly bursts with exasperation at people who have remained stubbornly print-centric and cheered on Aaron Kushner’s attempt, now apparently failing, to reinvigorate the Orange County Register with a fiercely print-first model, investing in more staff and more pages. Shirky has an anecdote similar to mine:

A year or so ago, I was a guest lecturer in NYU’s Intro to Journalism class, 200 or so sophomores interested in adding journalism as a second major. (We don’t allow students to major in journalism alone, for the obvious reason.) One of the students had been dispatched to interview me in front of the class, and two or three questions in, she asked “So how do we save print?”

I was speechless for a moment, then exploded, telling her that print was in terminal decline and that everyone in the class needed to understand this if they were thinking of journalism as a major or a profession.

That’s a thought I don’t like to think. I know that there are people of all ages who like to read, and importantly there are children, teenagers and 20-somethings out there who read newspapers and printed books – I see them in coffee shops, or in photos that friends post on Facebook of their children – but in general the way of the world is moving in the opposite direction. Fewer people do.

A couple of days ago, my wife was in a coffee shop downtown when a teenage girl there was told by the shop owner that she was in a picture in our newspaper’s print coverage of the Pop Ferguson Blues Heritage Festival. The girl didn’t care. Then my wife told her that the newspaper also put the photo on Facebook. The girl instantly went to find it online.

Many people have a sentimental attachment for reading on paper. But sentiment isn’t a business model.

UPDATE: Another view: “Print is under pressure but it does have a real business model, one that brings in real revenues.

“The sensible strategy is to not walk away from a print business model that works, that continues to do great journalism, that provides many good journalism jobs. Keep that print revenue coming in and keep looking for new approaches on the digital side, trying to create a digital business model that brings in real money.”

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Newsrooms can’t use superheroes

Posted in Personal, Print media, tagged , , , , on June 8, 2014| Leave a Comment »

A few weeks ago, an article in The Atlantic by Daniel D. Snyder examined the clash between being a superhero with a secret identity and the ethics of journalism, namely being open and honest about who you are and how you got the details for your stories and photos.

It reminded me in a tangential way of a short story I wrote a few years ago after seeing “Superman Returns.” In that movie, despite being set in the modern world, the Daily Planet’s newsroom seemed culturally excavated from the 1950s — there were big, flat TVs and everyone had a computer, but it was as though the Internet didn’t exist. Reporters wrote. Photographers shot still photos. No one worried about minute-to-minute deadlines. And the more those thoughts stewed inside of me, I came to the conclusion that no superhero would find it possible nowadays to hold down a job as a journalist, which led to this story …

No Place for Heroes

As I left the news building for the last time, the breeze fluttered through cards in the Rolodex atop the box I carried. The old Rolodex had been with me since I started, filled with contacts made over more than two decades. It used to be every reporter had one, but over time you saw fewer of them around the room. Now it’s almost as much a relic as the lead spike sitting in the bottom of the box with my other things. No one has actually “spiked” a story since the day the last typewriter left the newsroom, but Ed, one of the old copy editors, couldn’t bear to take it off his desk, and when he retired a couple of years ago he handed it to me as a parting gift. Maybe I should have handed it off myself when they told me to clear out my desk, but as I packed the box, it was as though memories were piled deep on that spike, so I picked it up and placed it on the box to carry home.

News has been my life. Well, at least my work as a newsman made me feel a part of humanity in a way that nothing else did. There was electricity to working a story. It made me feel alive, charged. Not as charged as flying out and being in the action itself, actually catching the robbers or putting out the burning skyscraper, but being a reporter on the scene was always the next best thing, and there were plenty of times I could tell the trouble wasn’t so bad and the police or fire department could handle it while I took notes and shot bull with the other reporters.

Now, here I was, laid off, downsized, holding a box with a Rolodex, some personal files, cubicle knickknacks and mementos. A stuffed Cartman doll. A few photographs. A signed cartoon from the editorial cartoonist, who had been laid off a few years ago. A copy of the first A1 story I was part of, about a corrupt senator. A fragment of the rocket that narrowly missed hitting the city, last year’s biggest story. A Mason jar of river water, first captured and sealed up for an environmental story 17 years ago that became both mysteriously browner every year and also somehow now was a little more than half its original volume; a newsroom legend, and now it sat here, in my box, out in the sun for the first time in 17 years.

I just stood there by the car, looking down at the box. I hadn’t been unemployed since that first time I arrived in the city. Once, when unemployment rates were high, a man I interviewed told me how he remembered every detail about the moment he was fired – the ticking second hand of his boss’s clock, which snagged a half-beat near the 9 every time; the smell of cigarettes that clung to his boss’s shirt; the way his boss looked almost afraid of him. I understood him now in a way I didn’t before. Though truly what I think I will remember most is the powerlessness. I had never felt that before. I saw the end coming, as I had countless times before outside that building, but this time, sitting in that chair in human resources, there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.

About two dozen of us were let go today. Some simply left everything behind. Most, like me, gathered their things and walked out holding a box and trying to keep a brave face. A few I had seen leave were angry. Michael, for instance, strode out muttering loudly, punctuating everything with curses as his wiry, brown hair bounced around him. When he reached the sidewalk, he turned and drop-kicked his box at the building, then turned back and kept walking to the parking lot.

Walking toward my car, I passed Betty loading her box into her car. She looked at me and paused just a moment. “Early retirement,” she said, shaking her head. “I guess I’m lucky for once that I’m old.”

“Old” was the common denominator in the layoffs. Not old age. “Old” as in “old ways.”

Betty’s work habits had been the same for 37 years. She was careful, thorough and conscientious. That used to be enough to make her a model around the newsroom. But it wasn’t enough anymore. She refused repeated requests from the editors to participate in the newsroom’s expanding number of webcasts. She insisted on holding on to her stories until the absolute final deadline, polishing the words, and didn’t care about getting the story out early enough for the social media team to link to it before Facebook traffic peaked. She never got the hang or the habit of posting her stories to the website herself. She wouldn’t use a digital audio recorder. She never even included Web links – an editor looked them up instead – and she gently scolded colleagues who used “Google” as a verb.

Like all journalists, I had recognized the business was changing. More and more, reporters kept in constant contact with the newsroom and filed updates throughout the day, just a paragraph or two by email or cellphone or even text message. A reporter on a major breaking story in a city as big as this one often had to take a few minutes for at least a phone interview for use on the Web and TV.

All of this was exactly why I found my possessions in a box. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to change with the times or didn’t know how to do all those things. I just couldn’t. You can rescue a crashing airliner and later write about how it was saved, but you can’t interrupt the rescue to post a live update. Even once it’s on the ground, you can’t just whip out your phone and write a bulletin. The marauding alien bent on destruction won’t simply pause for a couple minutes just because you need to step aside to call the newsroom with the latest on which buildings have been seriously damaged and where traffic is blocked by debris.

Back when I started with the paper, you had a deadline. One. The job was easy. Whether I was in uniform part of the day or always playing the reporter, all I had to do at the end was write everything I knew was true and turn it in before Perry blew his top. I could type so fast I’d break the keyboard. But even if you’re fast enough to dodge a bullet, you can’t be in two places at once.

The company began offering multimedia training a year ago, and I signed up. But something always came up. Once I was headed for a session on recording and editing video for the Web, but a man in Chicago had set a bomb protected by lasers, so I had to skip it. Once I was in a session, but then a meteor was about to wipe out Fiji, so I pretended to be sick and excused myself early. Other times I showed up late.

Perry called me and several other reporters into his office a few months ago to preach to us about the “new media universe.” Afterward, he grabbed me by the elbow while everyone else walked out. “Jesus, Kent,” he said, “the whole world could be yours if you’d just reach out and take it. What are you thinking?”

That rolled around my head a few times as I stood outside my car, looking down into my box. I had heard it before, but not quite like that. I opened the back door of the car and slid the box onto the seat.

Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw someone coming, then I turned and realized it was my reflection in the window of a van parked beside me. For a moment, the figure I thought I saw looked frail, slumped. I straightened my shoulders.

Looking up at the building again, I saw Perry come out on his way to lunch.

I hope a meteor lands on your house, buddy, I thought. See if I lift a finger to stop it.

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Date a reporter? You can do better

Posted in Personal, Print media, tagged , , on June 6, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Attention, single people: If you meet a reporter through online dating site eHarmony, run the other way.

Not because reporters make bad partners – not that I’m saying they make good ones, either – but because eHarmony put out a list this week of the “15 reasons to date a reporter.” Although Kristen Hare at Poynter.org found at least some of the 15 to be “spot on,” little on the list resembles the people in any newsroom I ever worked in, or passed through, so I question whether the reporters on eHarmony are telling the truth about their occupation.

For instance, it says, “Reporters are usually self-employed and have flexible schedules.” What?! A self-employed reporter is usually an unemployed reporter, and for a reporter, “flexible schedule” most often means he or she will have to cancel a date to go cover a story.

“You’ll be getting a great Scrabble partner” – or you would, if he could spell. Newsrooms are full of dictionaries for a reason.

“Reporters meet deadlines”? When I worked in Winston-Salem, reporters’ deadlines were observed mainly in the breach. I have never heard another editor say that isn’t the norm.

“Reporters make great dates to parties and family events, as they’re great at asking questions and engaging others in conversation.” Hmmm. I have known such extroverted reporters, many of them TV reporters, but most newspaper journalists are introverts. We got into the business because we’re writers, not talkers. We learn to ask questions of strangers because it’s required by the work, but it doesn’t come naturally, and on our own time we’d rather not.

I well remember a party that a co-worker’s non-journalist spouse gave years ago, where she invited a bunch of her non-journalist friends in addition to her husband’s journalist co-workers. All the journalists gathered together and talked shop in a corner while the party went on without them elsewhere in the house. Afterward, she berated the entire newsroom for their behavior. Date a reporter and expect that, then be happy if your experience is not quite that bad.

“Your date will remember your birthday, the way you like your coffee, and that promise you made her last week.” Sure, just don’t ask my wife how reliable my memory is when it comes to events she has even written down on the calendar on our refrigerator.

“Reporters get invitations to swanky events” so you can “hobknob with the mayor and other local celebrities.” A reporter’s “invitation” usually translates into an assignment to cover the event and write about it. Little hobknobbing there, and free passes for spouses or dates are not included.

But the worst reason the list gave to date a reporter was saved for last: “Clark Kent. Enough said.”

Enough? Not nearly. I have to wonder whether the list-maker ever paid attention to the comics. Clark was a schlub. No one ever wanted to date Clark Kent, intrepid reporter. They only had eyes for Superman.

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There is a digital chasm in journalism

Posted in Online media, Print media, tagged , , , , , , , on May 14, 2014| 3 Comments »

The goat must be fed
In the 16 months since I came to the News-Topic, I have had the basic idea rumbling around my head for a post on the disconnect I see between posts about digital storytelling tools and the reality of small-town journalism, which accounts for the great majority of news organizations in the U.S. But I never had the time to pull my thoughts together.

Now the Duke Reporters Lab has helped do a lot of the heavy lifting for me with a study showing that there is a “significant gap between the industry’s digital haves and have-nots – particularly between big national organizations, which have been most willing to try data reporting and digital tools, and smaller local ones, which haven’t.”

I object to the word “willing” in that sentence. It may be the case in many places that there is active resistance to using data and digital tools, but I have not seen that at many of the small newsrooms I visited in my previous job or in this one. The spirit is willing at places like this, but the flesh is exhausted.

The study finds newsroom leaders citing “budget, time and people as their biggest constraints” but “also revealed deeper issues – part infrastructure, part culture. This includes a lack of technical understanding and ability and an unwillingness to break reporting habits that could create time and space to experiment.”

In the case of my organization – print circulation approximately 5,000-6,000 – I can tell you the issue is approximately 95 percent one of time and people. My news staff, including me, totals six people, one of them dedicated full-time to local sports. There is no clerk to compile our extensive events listings or obituaries. I am expected to have an all-local front page in the print product, and I have my own set of standards for what I will accept out front (and while the bar is lower than it might be at a major metro, it largely is set higher than “incremental” news). Three of my four writers have less than two years’ experience. And no matter whether I find some events very newsworthy, there are longstanding community expectations for coverage of certain things, and skipping them carries stiff costs in community relations. With all of that, I find that getting my minimum number of local stories worthy of A1 takes about all the staff time that can be managed.

I can recognize that digital storytelling is worthy in its own right, not just “bells and whistles,” and still say there is precious little room here for “difficult trade-offs” in coverage.

That’s the 95 percent obstacle. The 5 percent is primarily infrastructure and, to at least some extent, technical understanding. Simply put, our CMS seems terrible – it’s locked down, limited, balky and not at all user-friendly. But it’s possible we are wrong, since no one here has ever been able to get formal training for it. Whatever we know how to do is based on our knowledge of other CMSes each of us has used (I at other companies, and my staff at their school papers) or the bare-bones “this is how you post a story” knowledge that the existing reporting staff provided me when I arrived here.

This is not to say we don’t talk about the website, our online audience or how to engage readers online. We are active in social media, almost everyone on the staff has shot and posted video, and we have interactions with readers online. We do more online now than this newsroom ever has. We WANT to keep doing more, and I WILL keep looking for ways to do it.

But as the Duke report says: The goat must be fed. Everything else has to come later.

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America’s most miserable news site is …

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged , , , , on April 4, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Let’s be 100 percent clear about this: There is no survey that designated the Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton area, where I live, as one of the nation’s “most miserable cities,” no matter what you read on Facebook or in a newspaper or saw on the Charlotte TV news.

What did happen is that the Gallup polling organization and a company called Healthways – which sells its services to businesses looking for ways to decrease health costs while boosting performance – issued the 2014 version of an annual report that, among other things, ranked 189 metropolitan statistical areas based on a nationwide survey of more than 500,000 people, who were asked about their height and weight, how much they exercise, how many servings of fruits and vegetables they eat, whether they smoke, how much stress they think they are under and whether they have health insurance.

The pollsters plugged those answers into a formula and came up with a number expressing each area’s “overall well-being.”

Note that nowhere in the evaluation is any expression of miserableness.

If you look at the Gallup-Healthways site ranking the communities, you find stress on the positives, such as, “There are tangible policies that communities can adopt to actively cultivate and improve residents’ well-being.”

This is the most-negative thing that Gallup-Healthways said in its reporting:

“Huntington-Ashland also trailed all other metros in 2008, 2010, and 2011; its score of 58.1 in 2010 remains the lowest on record across five reporting periods spanning six years of data collection.”

This is the second-most-negative, and it involves our region and two others in the bottom 10:

“None of these metro areas are strangers to the bottom 10 list, with each community having appeared at least once on the list in a prior reporting period.”

That’s it. It’s not so bad, and it doesn’t come close to “miserable.” How could it when the 189th-ranked metro area’s overall score is barely 13 points lower than the top-ranked metro?

And if you study the individual scores in the separate categories of the survey, what killed the Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton area’s score was that too many people smoke and not enough people exercise regularly. In every other category, our scores were solidly in the middle of the pack, but in those two, our scores are pretty bad — we had the fourth-highest smoking rate and 12th-lowest exercise rate.

So where, you may wonder, did the term “most miserable cities” come about?

This is a tale of the Internet and the term “clickbait.” Companies that make most of their money from Internet advertising need to be able to get lots and lots of people to come to their sites because the advertiser pays based on how many people see the page that the ad is on. To do this, some sites write headlines that are at least somewhat misleading. In other words, they bait people into clicking the headline.

The “America’s most miserable cities” headline is one of those.

Whoever did it hoped that the reaction would be, “Oh my God! We live in (or know someone who lives in) one of America’s most miserable cities! I have to post this to Facebook!” Which then would be followed by lots and lots and lots more people clicking on the link to go to the site to see the list. Better yet, the headline also appears on a photo gallery, requiring people to click through all 10, which gooses the website’s statistics even more.

That “miserable” designation apparently originated at a website called 24/7 Wall St., and it spread far and wide via Yahoo!, among others (the one I saw on Facebook was on Yahoo!).

Until online advertisers decide that sheer volume of clicks is not a good measure of the value they get for their advertising dollar, you’ll probably keep seeing things like that.

But I can say this for sure: Any reporter or editor at any newspaper or TV station who picked up the “miserable” terminology without checking to see whether the word really appeared in the survey is a miserable excuse for a journalist.

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Don’t give up on news innovation

Posted in Online media, Print media, tagged , , , , , , , , on April 2, 2014| Leave a Comment »


If innovation is all about learning how to fail, the news business is innovating its butt off.

This morning brought the news that Digital First Media, which has been making the industry’s biggest, hardest, loudest pitches for transformation away from print-centered operations, is going to close its biggest innovation, Project Thunderdome, and may begin selling newspapers.

A number of the names attached to DFM’s digital push I first became aware of because of their work elsewhere, especially Jim Brady, Steve Buttry and Mandy Jenkins. Many of the things they have advocated have felt, on a gut level, like the right things to do to get to the future of the news business. They have demonstrated ways to build engagement online and build news audience online even as the decades-long decline in newspaper circulation, which long predated the Internet, continues and TV audiences erode.

The problem, as ever, is that while most people seem to agree that the future of news is digital and mobile, the “business” part of it doesn’t seem able to innovate or migrate its way as quickly as the news part can.

Now if DFM has faltered, as the innovative hyperlocal site TBD did before it, will others pull back?

Publishers have always been wary of venturing quickly into the digital realm without proof they can generate revenue there equal to what they lose by dropping print, so doesn’t this provide just one more excuse to slow down?

And because the Orange County Register’s efforts to boost business by reinvesting in the print product also appear to be going nowhere, the new mantra in news might just become, “Don’t just do something, stand there.”

But when you know the beach is eroding under your feet, just standing there isn’t much of an option. I think we all have to keep looking at the kinds of things TBD, DFM and others have been trying, and pick the ones that make sense in our own newsrooms with the staff we have. Pick up the flag and keep marching forward.

UPDATE: Steve Buttry makes the argument that you can’t call Thunderdome a failure (or TBD either) because it was never given enough time to succeed. I think he’s correct, but I don’t think the folks who can put money into these kinds of things will examine the merits of his argument closely. I’m afraid the narrative that will be constructed from the outside will say that what was tried at Thunderdome, and TBD, clearly failed or the plug wouldn’t have been pulled.

On another topic, I also just read the post from Digital First CEO John Paton explaining today’s moves. It says, in part:

“In the past two years we have learned a tremendous amount from Project Thunderdome much like others that have come before it like our Ben Franklin Project.

“We have explored, experimented but more importantly we have learned and have a much higher level of digital skills than we did before. And, best of all, a higher level of confidence in our digital abilities across our entire Company.

“Our skills in data journalism, video production, website and mobile developments are all the better for Project Thunderdome.

“But what once were fairly isolated skills located in one place are now skills shared by many in our Company. Where once initiatives, like Project Unbolt were led centrally, we now have divisions taking their own Digital First initiatives.”

In other words, Thunderdome was so successful that the company no longer needs it.

Project Unbolt, by the way, was announced Jan. 29. I guess that would make it the most successful digital initiative ever because it made itself obsolete in barely more than two months.

Maybe it’s not Orwellian of Paton to put it that way, but on a much smaller scale I have seen what happens when “successful” initiatives driven by corporate HQ suddenly end. Often, so does the success; what you thought was “buy in” was editors telling staff, “Just do it and get corporate off my butt, OK?” If that was the case at any DFM properties, it should be clear before long — probably in much less time than Thunderdome had to build these new skills and habits across DFM.

4/3/14 UPDATE: Good business perspective from Alan Mutter:

“In other words, the objectives of the Digital First investors were the antithesis of the patience – and multimillion-dollar commitment – required in the slog to identify successful interactive publishing models, whatever they eventually may turn out to be.

It would be a mistake to view the failure at Digital First as a failure of digital publishing or a reason to stop trying to get it right.”

4/4/14 UPDATE: Great contribution of context by Mandy Jenkins, which among other things further points out the corporate babble of Paton’s statement about Thunderdome having been so successful. Among other things:

“Thunderdome never even got the chance to carry out even the beginnings of our goals. Many of our long-planned channels just started launching. We had a number of new revenue-generating products on the horizon. We had just started building our in-house product team.”

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Standards matter, and I do care

Posted in Print media, Writing, tagged , , , , on March 22, 2014| Leave a Comment »

A rose is a rose is a rose.

But a rose is not a daisy or an iris or a pansy.

More is not less, and over is not under.

At least not yet.

The Associated Press hasn’t changed its mind on how journalists should use those words, but I wonder whether it’s only a matter of time.

This week the Associated Press changed a rule in the AP Stylebook. And the change was met with howls of disgust and outrage – mine. But I wasn’t the only one howling.

The rule in question governed the use of “more than” versus “over” when talking about quantity or volume. The rule has been essentially that you use “more than” for things you can count, and you use “over” for things that can be measured but not counted. For instance, “more than 12 items,” and “over a quart.”

But AP now says you don’t have to bother with the distinction anymore. Whatever works. It’s all good.

Why?

Because “it has become common usage.”

You know why it has become common usage? Because not enough people have bothered to learn what’s correct. That isn’t a good reason to lower your standards. It’s like the language equivalent of grade inflation — if no one can earn an A anymore, just lower the bar so what used to get a B grade is now worth an A.

One of the more amusing reactions to AP’s decision that “over” and “more than” were interchangeable came from Mike Shor on Twitter: “More than my dead body!”

Once upon a time, when you wanted to express the idea that something didn’t matter to you, you said, “I couldn’t care less.”

But it has been years since I heard anyone say that. What they say now is, “I could care less.”

Why would anyone say that? If you “could care less,” it means you care. If you care, it bothers you. It makes no sense to say that if you mean that it doesn’t bother you.

But because so many people now say it, it’s “common usage,” the same theory AP has used to say that “more than” and “over” are interchangeable.

And so it goes.

Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty in “Through the Looking Glass” said, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” And that’s exactly how we get to this point.

There used to be a difference between the meanings of “composed” and “comprised.” But some people didn’t learn it, others couldn’t remember it, some of each didn’t bother to check before they used one of the words, and after a while the dictionary started listing both definitions as correct for each.

“Common usage” doesn’t make it right.

And no, I don’t propose that those who know the difference go around correcting everyone publicly when people use words incorrectly. But if the people who use words for a living give in to the incorrect uses, then what?

If enough people say blue and yellow are the same color, eventually the words for them will come to have the same meaning, but that will mean only that the words have lost their usefulness.

If we keep rounding the edges off of words because we let people who don’t bother to learn the correct definitions rewrite the definitions, all we will be left with eventually is, “Well, you knew what I meant.”

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New hope that news audiences have more value

Posted in Broadcast media, Mobile media, Online media, Print media, Social media, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on March 18, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Reading about attracting news audiences and revenue for online news sites has often been depressing. Even for someone who believes in the need for meeting the audience where it is and adapting to the needs of online and mobile news consumers, at times it has felt like the future was heading toward a world dominated by Buzzfeedy listicles and clickbait and Upworthy-worthy headlines, where all advertising revenue is forever lagging and all audiences are zephyrlike transients.

You can simultaneously believe that not just journalism but locally oriented journalism is necessary for society but feel overwhelmed by skepticism about how many people out there have the same belief and will actively seek it in numbers that will support some kind of sustainable revenue model.

But recent weeks have brought some research to stoke your optimism.

The American Press Institute reported this week on a survey by the Media Insight Project, an initiative of the American Press Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, about news-consumption habits:

“When asked to volunteer how they came to the news, people tend think less about the device than the news gathering source and the means of discovery (social media or search). Taken in combination, the findings suggest that people make conscious choices about where they get their news and how they get it, using whatever technology is convenient at the moment.”

The survey also found that people do notice what strengths different news organizations have, for instance turning to local TV sources (TV itself or a TV station’s website) for weather, traffic, crime, and health news, and newspaper sources for news about their local town or city, for news about arts and culture, and for news about schools and education.

And hasn’t that been one of the underlying hopes of traditional journalists, that our existing “brand” is more than our traditional medium or platform, that the public associates our news organization with the news we produce?

That’s what this survey indicates is the case – they seek us out for news, not just, as often is said, wait for any news that really is important to find them:

“Overall, for instance, social media is becoming an important tool for people across all generations to discover news — but hardly the only one, even for the youngest adults.

“… People across all generations are most likely to discover news by going directly to a news organization, rather than letting the news come to them.”

Super.

We can check off that part of how to survive the future.

That still leaves revenue, the front that has been the bleakest, where analog dollars turn to digital dimes, if that.

But Tony Haile, the CEO of data-analytics company Chartbeat, wrote in a column last week for time.com on research by his company that finds that audiences drawn to actual news may hold more value for advertisers than those on other sites because they pay attention to the page and linger longer. Why that matters:

“Someone looking at the page for 20 seconds while an ad is there is 20-30% more likely to recall that ad afterwards.”

And best of all, it may be that news organizations have undervalued their advertising slots that are lower on the digital page, especially below the “fold” where ads and content aren’t seen unless the viewer scrolls:

“Here’s the skinny, 66% of attention on a normal media page is spent below the fold. That leaderboard at the top of the page? People scroll right past that and spend their time where the content, not the cruft, is. Yet most agency media planners will still demand that their ads run in the places where people aren’t and will ignore the places where they are.”

Pair this with the results of a study by the Pew Research Journalism Project that found that “People who visit a news organization’s website directly engage with its content more than those who enter ‘sideways’” through social media and other referrels, as Andrew Beaujon wrote last week at Poynter.org.

The Pew report, “Social, Search and Direct: Pathways to Digital News,” said:

“In this study of U.S. internet traffic to 26 of the most popular news websites, direct visitors — those who type in the news outlet’s specific address (URL) or have the address bookmarked — spend much more time on that news site, view many more pages of content and come back far more often than visitors who arrive from a search engine or a Facebook referral.

“… For news outlets operating under the traditional model of building a loyal, perhaps paying audience, obtaining referrals so that users think of the outlet as the first place to turn is critical.”

This doesn’t suggest to me that all the time newsrooms spend now trying to engage audiences on Facebook, Twitter or other social sites is wasted or even that it should be cut back. It puts your news in front of audiences, including some people who are not regular readers or viewers. That exposure may be critical in building your brand in the minds of that portion of the audience.

That makes it up to you to be sure that what you have lured them to is news they find worthwhile enough that they come back on their own.

And that has always been the name of the game for survival in news.

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News is what people want to read

Posted in Online media, Print media, tagged , , on January 31, 2014| Leave a Comment »

“The paper is mainly full of bad news.”

A reader, or maybe by now it’s more accurate to call her a former reader, included that in a letter this week. News, as defined by what most news organizations write about, was at the very bottom of the list of things she wants in a newspaper. (“Ziggy” was at the top.)

It’s a complaint that editors have heard at times literally for decades. It’s not true, though. Just looking through the past week’s front pages of my paper (which is published Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday):

Last Sunday had a story about a young boy who appears to be recovering from a near-fatal blood infection.

Tuesday had a story alerting readers of the coming Red Dress Dance to benefit the Wig Bank, one of the community’s many great charities.

Wednesday had a feature about John Hawkins, who plans to step down as director of the Caldwell Heritage Museum at the end of the year.

Thursday had a picture of children playing in the snow, and a promotional teaser about a feature on the sports page on the county’s high school runner of the year.

Friday had a feature about a man who puts together giant jigsaw puzzles.

We try as much as we can to present a mix, reflecting to some extent the variety of daily life in this community.

I don’t think it’s a majority view, but there definitely is a certain segment of the population who would rather the paper be filled only with positive news.

But that would not seem to be what most people want. Go to any newspaper in the country and ask to see the best-selling and worst-selling papers of the past year, and check the website metrics, and you’ll be able to tell. I have a list of ours, and the worst-selling papers almost all were dominated by feel-good stories: the first day of school, the fiddler’s convention, a feature on a man living atop a mountain who has a lot of weather-watching instruments, a feature on a retiree, a festival preview, a positive business news story – on and on.

The top-selling papers by far, and the top website headlines, have been anything involving a killing or anything involving the bankruptcy of Furniture Brands International, one of the largest local employers.

You might argue that the high interest in bad news indicates that people like prurient news, kind of the print version of reality TV, but that’s not how I see it at all.

One thing that makes bad news inherently more attractive as reading material is that it’s more dramatic, which makes it more interesting.

And sometimes there certainly is a “there but for the grace of God go I” element at play. Stories of lives upended grab people and engage their emotions. Often, people call the News-Topic wanting to offer help to people whose tragedies have been told in the paper.

But mostly, I think people are looking for things to talk about. When they get together with friends or coworkers, someone is going to say, “Hey, did you hear about,” and launch into the most interesting thing that person has heard or read recently, and there is always a lot more to talk about when something bad happens than when something good happens.

“Did you hear? All of the planes coming to Charlotte yesterday landed safely.”

By definition, news is something unusual or unexpected. You expect your house not to burn down. You expect to arrive safely at your destination. You expect not to lose your job because the company is going out of business. You expect all these things because that’s what almost always happens, and it’s unusual when it doesn’t.

That’s why if any newspaper, TV station or website focused on local news ever makes a lot of money reporting nothing but good news it will be one of the biggest news stories of the year.

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The audience for local news might be small

Posted in Print media, tagged , , , , on January 30, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Ziggy
Journalism school and 26 years working as a reporter and editor have prepared me for almost anything likely to come through the newsroom, but it still galls me that people are more likely to cancel their subscriptions over the disappearance of a pantsless cartoon character than anything I have actual control over.

And it illustrates a difficulty in answering the question of what the audience is for local news.

By “audience,” I mean the portion of the public who cares enough about local news that they would be willing to pay to support the reporting of it. The audience is not the paying base of print newspaper subscribers – certainly not the larger base of 15 years ago, and not even the shrunken one we have now. It is a subset of that – perhaps a small one.

For decades, newspapers added on sections and specific features so that no matter what your interest, there probably was something in that package of disparate material that would interest you. They did this not because there was any inherent relationship in the material or it seemed logical to package it but because it was the surest way to build the readership. Perversely, adding readership could even cost the newspapers more than what they charged for a home subscription, but the bigger the readership, the higher the rates that could be charged to advertisers, which is where the big money was anyway.

And that’s exactly why the industry’s reaction to declining advertising has fueled circulation declines.

Drastic declines in advertising revenue over the past decade led to a focus on newspapers’ “core mission,” which obviously is local news. That’s what we do that you can’t find anywhere else.

That meant cutting some features that newspapers paid to get, but it also meant cutting some staff – movie reviewers, NASCAR reporters, reporters covering college sports in a distant town, food writers, science writers – especially if what they covered was also provided by the wire services the newspapers already paid for.

But that increasingly left a product that is not exactly what we originally sold our readers, and I see that all the time in my job as editor of a small local newspaper.

I don’t get that many complaints about local news.

But I get a lot of complaints from sports fans that we don’t have enough college and pro sports results in the paper. We need more agate and box scores.

I get quite a few complaints that our main news section is actually too local, with not enough national and international news in it.

I get heated complaints when the person in charge of placing the Cryptoquote puzzle in the paper screws up and leaves it out or runs the same puzzle two days in a row.

But by far the greatest number of complaints during my first year in Lenoir came as a result of two business decisions: to drop our Saturday edition, and to change our comics lineup. And almost none of the complaints had to do with missing a day of news.

The Saturday edition was dropped because it had easily the lowest single-copy sales of the week and was the edition with the least advertising – virtually no advertising, in fact. The complaints: delayed sports results (Friday night results run Sunday), a day without a chuckle from the comics, and the possibility that an obituary might be pushed to Sunday when services were Saturday.

But predictably, the worst reaction was to the comics, which changed as part of a renegotiation with syndicates and a level of standardization to help the staff in our pagination and editing hub more easily handle all of the comics pages they are responsible for.

One unintended result of the change was that the size of the crossword shrank, which prompted several people to tell me that the “only reason” they subscribed was for the crossword, which now was too small to be used. After a week, we were able to move the puzzle and fix that.

But the dropped comics – which included “Ziggy,” “Peanuts,” “The Lockhorns,” “Family Circus” and “Belvedere” – have cost us quite a few subscribers. You might note that all of the dropped ones are quite old, and some (“Peanuts,” “For Better or Worse” and “Belvedere,” for instance) have been in reruns for years. Others are on their second or third generation of artists. But people hate change. Tell a fan of “Belvedere” that no new comic had been drawn since 1995 and the response is that the fan doesn’t remember that far back, so all of them seemed new to him.
“The paper is mainly full of bad news, and Ziggy always made me smile,” one reader complained.

And there’s that age-old complaint: All the news is bad. You never print any good news.

Neither is true, but a great many people just don’t want to be bummed out. Those are the people who bought the newspaper because of all of the things besides local news that came in the package. They tossed aside all the stuff they didn’t want and turned to their 50-year-old comic strip or their word puzzle, or their sports.

But the stuff they didn’t want is what I think any reasonable person would say is the “core mission” of the local newspaper. Everything else they can find somewhere else – and have been finding it, as their local newspaper has dropped feature after feature.

Perhaps that’s why the Orange County Register’s circulation has remained flat even as new owner Aaron Kushner has brought back a hefty number of features – while also beefing up the staff that pursues the “core mission” of local news.

I have had a number of longtime readers call or mail in to tell me how much they like the newspaper since I got here, that it feels like a “real” newspaper or that the local stories are more interesting. The publisher tells me that neither here nor anywhere else she has worked has she seen so many compliments for the news.

So I know local news has an audience. But I don’t think anyone has a clue how big or small that audience might be, and circulations continue to drop.

2/5/14 UPDATE: A similar, or at least related, argument but in a much more definitive (or depressing) way by Internet pioneer and investor Marc Andreessen. Or just read this quote for the gist of the thing: “I think main problem with local news is most people don’t care.”

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