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Posts Tagged ‘innovation’

Disruption in print media holds few lessons for colleges

Posted in Personal, Print media, tagged , , , , , on June 21, 2012| Leave a Comment »

UVa president Teresa Sullivan addresses students / Washington Post
The element that caught my eye from the outset in the uproar over the University of Virginia Board of Trustees forcing out the university president is the attention given in the trustees’ email exchanges to online education. Specifically, my attention was held one line quoted from a New York Times column by David Brooks, “The Campus Tsunami”:

“What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web.”

The rest of Brooks’ column is not nearly so hyperbolic – yes, hyperbolic. Most of what happened to the newspaper and magazine business could not possibly happen to higher education. The root of the disruption in print media is the exodus of advertising, which traditionally accounted for something around 80 percent of the industry’s revenue. Education has no remotely similar parallel, so instantly you eliminate 80 percent of the chance that the devastation that happened to newspapers and magazines will happen to higher education.

The remaining 20 percent, however, is what Brooks spends the bulk of his column on, and as far as that goes, he makes a good case, and here I would say the trustees simply jumped too far.

When industries are disrupted by technological innovation, as the trustees seem to fear is about to happen to higher education, it’s usually because the business’s leaders didn’t understand what their business really was. Railroads didn’t diversify into trucking because they thought their business was railroads, not moving freight; IBM passed over the chance to make personal computers because they thought their business was making and maintaining mainframes, not helping businesses increase productivity through technology.

Disruption (the oversimplified explanation) happens when someone comes up with something that meets a need that the existing business does not, and it provides it at a low enough cost that any flaws in the product don’t matter to the customer.

In the newspaper and magazine business, disruption hit on two sides: the advertiser side, and the reader side. A number of advertisers (especially those who placed classified ads in newspapers) have found that the free ad sites online, or the kind of targeted online promotions that are much less expensive than print ad campaigns, either meet their needs as well as or better than print ads, or else they are good enough and cost a lot less, freeing up money for other kinds of promotions. At the same time, a number of readers have found that the proliferation of free information online – of all kinds, not just news – fills their need for information or entertainment better than does paying for a limited bundle of information on paper.

As I said, colleges don’t have advertisers, so the reader end of the print media’s disruption is the only part that seems to have any parallel to what may be coming to higher education. The situation print media face is that what they provide may not be perceived as holding enough value for the reader that those people are willing to pay for it. A growing number of news sites are testing that, sometimes gingerly, setting up paywalls, usually offering full access for those buying a subscription and allowing everyone else a small number of free views a month before a payment is required. The essential choice for the reader is whether to pay for the site’s staff-produced content or just get by with all the free content available everywhere else. The value of that staff-produced content depends entirely on the perception of the reader. I like to quote one of my early editors on the value issue: She said she decided at the end of the day whether she had done good work by asking whether she would pay 50 cents for what’s in the next day’s paper. That can be a tough argument to make some days, which is why the Readership Institute in 2005 or so was making presentations about the importance of creating an “Experience” newspaper, the idea being that if you focused more attention on section fronts, specifically centerpieces, and creating buzz-worthy presentations, it could elevate the value of the overall newspaper beyond the sum of its parts, and if you did it consistently you created a role for yourself in a person’s daily routine that went beyond the simple gathering of information.

The value of a college degree, however, is a bit similar. To some extent, a person goes to college for the experience, and it’s not hard to get people to recall fondly the experience elements of college that made it rewarding. But people don’t go into hock for $50,000 for the experience of college, they do it because they perceive there is a long-term payoff, which supposedly is backed up by the market – in other words, someone will hire a graduate of the University of Virginia (just to stick to the subject at hand) because a degree from there is perceived by that employer as being worth more than a degree from other schools. Or, especially, from online schools.

Unless employers suddenly decide that online degrees are as valuable as any other degree, there is a market-driven value behind getting a degree from bricks-and-mortar colleges.

So what exactly where the UVa trustees getting at? They’re not talking so far, so it’s hard to say. On May 31, Rector Helen Dragas sent the vice rector, Mark Kington, the URL for a Wall Street Journal column about the “massively online open course” movement. According to Inside Higher Ed’s summary:

“The column argues that the MOOCs have the potential to change the cost structure in higher education, as long as institutions are willing to replace some in-person education with online education. ‘[I]n this way, college X might have its students take calculus, computer science and many other lecture courses online from MIT-Harvard (or other suppliers), and have them take other classes with their own local professors for subjects that are better taught in small seminars. College X can thus offer stellar lectures from the best professors in the world — and do locally what it does best, person to person.’”
What that describes is outsourcing basic-level lecture classes – those where 200 students pile into a massive hall to hear a professor essentially talk at them, not with them, for an hour. Or, as the subhead on the Wall Street Journal column put it: “The substitution of technology (which is cheap) for labor (which is expensive) can vastly increase access to an elite-caliber education.”

That would lower some labor costs for a college that didn’t need to hold its own lecture classes. It would be a revenue source for a college that offered online lectures by “star professors,” as Brooks called them.

There’s a certain revolutionary air in the idea that a course of study at one college could involve numerous lectures from places all over the world, and it probably would wind up meaning smaller faculties – though not, I suspect, an end to the rapid growth in administrative staff, which is the biggest upward pressure on college costs. Funny how that works.

Related reading: A post Wednesday on the Remaking the University blog has a good roundup of items related to what’s happening at the UVa.

(The Richmond Times-Dispatch as a PDF of the trustees’ emails.)

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Just because you don’t know how doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try

Posted in Online media, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 13, 2012| 3 Comments »


I hesitate a little to dive into attempting an answer to the question from Steve Buttry and Mandy Jenkins, “How should a news curation team work?” As the comments on many of Steve’s posts the past couple of years make clear, use of terms such as “curation” invites debates that often boil down to semantics and people talking past each other, even agreeing at times on general practices but disagreeing at the edges like alien cultures trying for but not quite achieving mutual understanding. But I’ll wade in anyway.

The idea of news curation has always seemed to me just the continuing evolution of what has long been standard operating procedure. In the 1990s at the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal during the summer, when a hurricane approached we usually had staff at the coast, and unless the storm was hitting point-blank where our staff was, the state editor (me) would blend staff reports with elements of several other wire stories, adding attribution where needed. As technology advanced and we all had access via the Internet to more news sources, we could blend in elements from more places. For instance, during the 2004 Democratic and Republican conventions, in addition to editing stories from Media General’s Washington reporters I supplied a one-column at-a-glance collection of highlights, a mix of my own reporting (whatever eye-catching protests were going on around the convention site), a detail or two lifted from advance copies of the night’s big speeches, and elements from wire services and the National Journal.

Technology now, though, opens a vastly wider world, including live conversations. Limiting your news gathering to a few wire services or mainstream news sources may be easier, but it leaves out a huge amount of perspective. All of this information of course is available for people to find on their own, but isn’t it a logical extension of the role of a journalist to help people sort through it? It’s the role of a journalist to say, “I can help you make sense of all this and point you to the best places for more.” Automatic tools can only do so much – Tweetdeck, Twitter search, Google alerts and the like can bring you a river of information, but it can be a torrent, or a swirling jumble. Human intervention to sort it, done right, is valuable.

That said, when I get to the specific questions Steve and Mandy ask – “How should we …?” – I find myself reminded of and answering instead a different question, one I saw recently on Twitter (I thought it was raised by Stijn Debrouwere, but at the moment I can’t find it – if someone out there has curated it already, please point me to it), which essentially was this: Why after years of people talking about all these ideas for remaking news is it taking so long for anyone to do much with them? As much as anything, I think it’s just the daily crush – you run around like crazy trying to keep up with everything that you already have to do, and you want to try these new things people are talking about … but you look up and suddenly you have already been at your desk nine hours or more. “Maybe this weekend,” you think. Of all the newsrooms I have visited over the past 11 years, there were only a few where suggestions for new things to try online met with resistance to the idea itself; usually it was more a matter of “where will the time come from?” There are exceptions – where the boss makes it a priority to try new things, which means being willing to drop some of the old, new things get done.

Most of the time, you learn things that are truly new by doing them, and something else then occurs to you, so you try it, and on and on, not because someone showed or told you what you should do – if there were a great mass of people out there who knew all about doing this thing, it wouldn’t be new, would it? So assuming you are among the vast majority of journalists or soon-to-be-journalists who have no actual experience curating the news on the fly, and you have no concrete answers to the “How” questions, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. I believe that at some point, good curation will be a key ingredient of any successful news organization. So go ahead, answer them.

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Future newsrooms will need fewer people but better pay

Posted in Online media, Print media, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on May 31, 2012| Leave a Comment »


I will take issue with the poynter.org headline The one chart that should scare the hell out of print media, for two reasons. First, it’s actually two charts, the second of which is above, from a presentation by KPCB’s Mary Meeker. The two illustrate what appears not to be a blip but a trend in the money end of the news business. The one above extrapolates the advertising revenue.

You may question whether it is reasonable to extrapolate a trend from the greatest economic collapse since the Depression. I would argue yes both because it started before the economic collapse and because of the second chart, comparing where advertising revenue is spent and where consumers spend their time:

Note on the far left: People spend 7 percent of their time with print media, but print gets 25 percent of the advertising revenue. Note on the far right: People spend a combined 36 percent of their time with Internet and mobile media, but those get just 23 percent of the ad revenue. Even if print will be perceived as a better buy (not a bet I would make), at some point those numbers seem likely to come closer to equalizing.

First conclusion: The ad revenue decline of recent years seems likely to continue.

This leads to a point made by Ken Doctor at the Nieman Journalism Lab: Money coming to news organizations from readers (paid circulation/online access) is growing as a percentage of revenue. Partly this is because of declining ad revenue — if you’re total revenue is $100, then $20 is a small percentage, but if your revenue drops to $50 then $20 is pretty big – but it’s also from the growth of various kinds of paywalls. I remain convinced that an all-or-nothing paywall closes a newspaper off from the possibility of luring new customers, but the trend toward metered paywalls seems able to draw in both avid readers and those who wouldn’t pay even for the bigger headlines of the day.

What the combination seems to lead us toward, as Doctor indicates, is a model where many news organizations will be asking for subscriptions more on the basis that NPR stations ask for memberships — not because they have something every day that you want know, but because you want free access because they regularly do. Advertising, in this scenario, becomes an increasingly less important revenue source; readers drive the revenue.

One fear I have read often in the past is that a news model driven by what is popular would gravitate toward the lurid and celebrity gossip, but I don’t think the above situation would do that. The kind of readers drawn by that kind of news would not be the ones who pay for regular access. Those readers would want at least the occasional substantial bit of civic journalism or in-depth news. You might make a living (a la TMZ) if you are at the top level of celebrity gossip, but at the local level that won’t cut it.

But what also seems likely is that the new level of revenue may not support seven-days-a-week newspapers in many markets, as Clay Shirky argued will eventually be the case even with the Washington Post. If that becomes the common model, then would mere daily scarcity of news drive enough people to buy online subscriptions to get news from “newspapers”? After all, in many markets there are TV and radio stations, which already send out news for free, and in many cases there may be small sites such as Homicide Watch (cited by Shirky) that focus on certain high-interest news areas more thoroughly. What then would spur people to pay for access to the mainstream non-TV news site?

Aggregation is part of the equation — if a news organization shows that no matter the source, it will round up all the news in the community, it could gain a loyal local following. But that seems not enough, to me. If less frequency is key, I wonder whether a higher quality of writing in the reduced number of publication days will be a major factor. If that’s the case, then the frequent publishers’ first instinct of holding down news salaries when budgets constrict could be counterproductive.

The keystone of my evidence, besides any manager’s common sense, is from a story by NPR’s “Morning Edition” in early May about new research measuring human performance in groups, which found that a minority of any group typically will account for a majority of the group’s performance. In other words, a few stars get more done at better quality than a larger group of more typical people. That runs counter to my experience of what managers at all levels do in the face of budget pressures, which is to replace departing staffers with someone who costs a lot less and is deemed “good enough.” “Good enough” hires, if you extend the logic of this study, actually cost more in the long run because they are not just a little but a great deal less capable.

There’s a tantalizing hint of this thinking in the memo from Jim Amoss to the Times-Picayune newsroom about changes in New Orleans from the paper’s reduction in days of print:

“Concerning pay in the new companies, I want to dispel some rumors: There could be some salary adjustments, depending on changes in job descriptions. But most people will make what they make today, if not more.”

I will repeat the relevant part: “most people will make what they make today, if not more.” In a world where the competition for eyeballs is not just local, the need for writers who can catch a reader’s attention is heightened, and it would make sense that if you find you have someone who can both produce the daily bits of news needed to keep a news site relevant while also producing stories worthwhile to the remaining partial-week readership, you would pay that person better than someone who could do only one of the two functions.

For that reason, I would reach back all the way to the early 2000s for a piece of advice I heard an executive repeatedly give (mostly in vain) to publishers: You get what you pay for. If you cut the size of your staff but increase the pay of the remaining people, so that your payroll overall is the same, you might be able to attract and retain the people you need. It is guaranteed that if you cut the staff size and hold the line on the pay – or, worse, cut it – you will never have the people you need, and who would want to pay to read your sorry rag at that point?

6/12/12 UPDATE: I’m gaining some hope about the above from an INMA article about the Star-Tribune boosting reader revenue closer to 50 percent:

“We’re asking users to pay more of the freight. But for that strategy to work, we knew we needed to focus on high-quality customers who see value in our products and have low churn. And to get those high-quality customers, we’ve focused on three areas: our core print audience, pricing/retention, and accessibility.”

If you’re going to focus on high-quality customers, you have to have high-quality staff to provide the value needed to hold onto those customers:

“The content we provide isn’t available anywhere else. This is local reporting — business, local sports, city council meetings. You are doing that, and you are relevant. Differentiate yourself from your competitors. Once you do that, you’re going to get people and you’re going to get them to pay.”

But it’s beyond content to a smart strategy on pricing and marketing. Those are not my areas of expertise, but the article’s points sound good to this journalist.

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I got there first

Posted in Print media, tagged , , , , , , on May 29, 2012| Leave a Comment »

If I had been blogging angry, my post last week about Warren Buffett’s letter to his company’s new editors and publishers might have sounded like Clay Shirky’s take on it:

“Buffett is famously the greatest investor alive, and almost as famous for plain-spoken observations about the market, so you’d assume his first public memo about Media General would offer insight into the current state of the newspaper business. The actual text, however, merely makes it clear that Buffett doesn’t understand that business.”

A lot of the rest is similar to what I said, though. I take no credit for influencing Shirky, I just wrote faster. But he has a line I wish I had thought of:

“Small-town residents of the sort Media General serves tend to adopt technology late, but the future eventually arrives, even in Opelika, Alabama.”

The CEO of Media General, in an interview with a Richmond-area business website, says something pointing in that very direction:

Publishing revenues are down about 50 percent over the past five years, Morton said, but much of the costs— printing presses, delivery drivers, etc. — have held steady.

“There was nowhere to hide from these revenue declines,” Morton said.

“Over the past five years, our first thought was that this was heavily due to the recession and, like many other recessions in the past, that this was a cycle. You tighten your belt, freeze hiring and even drop the number of people.

“So we went through a couple years thinking that was the way to handle it. But it kept going.”

It wasn’t until the second quarter of 2011, Morton says, “that we realized the world had changed.”

UPDATE: And from John Robinson, a briefer but better explanation than I gave of what these newspapers, unshackled from MG’s debt, ought to be doing:

“The real question is, what is the newspaper spending its profits on? And the follow ups: Is it investing in the future? Is it investing in its staff? Is it reducing the profit-taking so that more can be funneled back into the operation? Is it reducing its investment in the newsprint product so that it can increase an investment into digital news creation and distribution?”

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Hands-on management isn’t the real problem for news

Posted in Online media, Print media, tagged , , , , , , , , on May 25, 2012| 1 Comment »

Warren Buffett
I would wager you would have a difficult time finding an employee of any Media General newsroom that is soon to become part of Berkshire Hathaway’s BH Media Group who wasn’t thrilled by Warren Buffett’s letter to his company’s publishers and editors. It declares what he calls a “hands-off principle” in the management of the newspapers. As far as it is defined, it sounds as good as any management declaration that living journalists who don’t own their own papers would be able to remember.

On content:

“I believe newspapers that intensively cover their communities will have a good future. It’s your job to make your paper indispensable to anyone who cares about what is going on in your city or town.
“That will mean both maintaining your news hole — a newspaper that reduces its coverage of the news important to its community is certain to reduce its readership as well — and thoroughly covering all aspects of area life, particularly local sports. No one has ever stopped reading when half-way through a story that was about them or their neighbors.
“You should treat public policy issues just as you have in the past. I have some strong political views, but Berkshire owns the paper — I don’t. And Berkshire will always be non-political.
“… Our job is to reign supreme in matters of local importance.”

On the possibility of duplicating the debt levels that could not be maintained as revenue shrank:

“We shun levels of debt that could ever impose problems. Therefore, you will determine your paper’s destiny; outsiders will never dictate it.”

Read that again: “You will determine your paper’s destiny; outsiders will never dictate it.” That is where the rubber meets the road in this story, because it’s not entirely true, and the real question is to what extent editors and publishers understand that.

What is it that is driving the industry’s decline? The debt was a factor, so its removal is a great help and provides breathing room, but it’s not the driver. The level of debt that Media General had incurred might have been manageable at the levels of revenue that were coming in 10 or 15 years ago, and if those had kept up then everything would have been peachy. What changed? Buffett’s letter somewhat addresses this:

“We must rethink the industry’s initial response to the Internet. The original instinct of newspapers then was to offer free in digital form what they were charging for in print. This is an unsustainable model and certain of our papers are already making progress in moving to something that makes more sense. We want your best thinking as we work out the blend of digital and print that will attract both the audience and the revenue we need.”

Clearly the experiments with online paywalls now under way at a number of these newspapers will continue, but that doesn’t address the real driver. If you find the formula for paywalls of any kind that get you back to the paid-content equivalent of whatever your paid circulation was 15 years ago, you are not fixing the problem because paid circulation has never, at least since the 19th century, come close to paying the cost of producing the news. If you drop $1 in a newspaper box, the actual per-unit cost of creating that newspaper probably was $3 or $4. Traditionally, the bulk of that cost is covered by advertising because advertisers have thought it was well worth it to reach the mass audience. Newspapers produce news, but their business has always (at least since the 19th century) been selling eyeballs to advertisers, not selling newspapers.

Paywalls may help, to the extent that they provide at least some revenue and the lack of free local news online can stem the loss of print circulation, which in turn helps justify the rates charged to advertisers. But advertising has been declining for years for reasons that have nothing to do with drops in print circulation.

The real driver behind the industry’s trouble is that the Internet is not just an alternate delivery medium. As Jeffrey Cole of the University of Southern California’s Center for the Digital Future has put it, the advent of high-speed Internet is driving changes in society and personal behavior just as the advent of television did. That, not the decision by newspapers “to offer free in digital form what they were charging for in print,” is the force behind the growth of 24/7 news on mobile devices and tablets. If you somehow could put every newspaper in the world behind a hard paywall, that wouldn’t address all the TV networks, local TV stations, radio networks (NPR, to name one), web-only news sites, local place blogs, topic-oriented websites, and on and on and on. People expect to find everything they want to know online not because newspapers are there but because, as I said in a post last month, everything else is there. And because everything and everyone else is there, that is where many advertisers increasingly want to be – and they are not just trading print news sites for online news sites, they are exploring the Internet’s plethora of options for reaching an audience.

Buffett knows all this, I think. As he told the Richmond Times-Dispatch in an interview Thursday, “(Print) circulation for the industry will decline,” and experimentation is necessary:

“Some newspapers are experimenting with various pay-for-content models in their digital editions. Buffett didn’t specify what sort of model should be adopted, saying that is something the company’s newspapers will have to work out themselves.
“‘I think there is a better formula’ than the current revenue model, Buffett said in the interview. ‘I don’t think staying free over the next 10 years is the sound choice.’”

So we have to circle back to the “hands-off principle.” Here’s what the directive to publishers and editors boils down to in plain English: You make the decisions, as long as you maintain both your news hole (that’s one of the few things specifically spelled out in the letter) and profitability (not spelled out, but Buffett’s not running a charity, so it’s assumed).

The situation, then, is not much changed from what it was before, for these papers and any others: If advertising continues to migrate not just to other platforms but to non-news venues, what’s left is higher prices for readers, in print and online. Can a paywall for a small or medium-size news organization bring enough revenue to cover all production costs that are not covered by the remaining advertising? I hope so. I think so. If it can’t, hands-off or hands-on won’t matter.

Which brings us to this portion of Buffett’s letter:

“American papers have only failed when one or more of the following factors was present: (1) The town or city had two or more competing dailies; (2) the paper lost its position as the primary source of information important to its readers or (3) the town or city did not have a pervasive self-identity. We don’t face those problems.”

No, we don’t. But that doesn’t mean we won’t discover a No. 4 reason: The publisher and editor failed to recognize what the problem really was.

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Another thing about death that sucks

Posted in Online media, Print media, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on May 20, 2012| 4 Comments »

This is off the usual topics for this blog. Obituaries are completely out of the control of most newsrooms, so my intended audience — journalists — can do nothing about this complaint. But having dipped into the obituary pool Friday after my mother died, I can report with great authority that on this part of their business, this nation’s newspapers are practically lying naked across a table, eyes closed, holding a sign that says, “Whatever,” waiting for a madman with a knife to come along. If you have never made arrangements to place an obituary, let me assure you: It is messy, and it is EXPENSIVE. It is everything, in fact, that begs for someone to come along offering a simpler, easier, cheaper solution — an idea that was introduced to the news industry years ago as a job to be done. But of course no one really wants to make it cheaper, because that would reduce revenue. I remember once hearing a publisher gripe about a company-imposed mandate to simplify and beautify classified ads; the end result was a better-looking (bigger type, more photos), more enticing page that offered more options to people placing the ads, but the ads were bigger without the price going up, so revenue per ad was lower. Focusing on that is just short-term thinking — the number of classified ads has been dropping like a rock for years, driven by free online ads, so the intent of the change was to try to improve the printed ad experience and stem the decline, and maybe entice more people to come back. If you’re constantly watching your back, trying not to lose more ground, you can’t go forward.

Almost two years ago, Steve Buttry pointed out the problems and opportunities in the obit business. He was right then, and he’s righter now. But it’s even worse than I knew when I read his post in 2010.

I attempted to place my mother’s obituary in five newspapers — in the town where she was born, in the city where she began her journalism career, in the city where she retired, in the city where she lived for 10 years before a heart attack changed her life and mine, and in my own city. One told me that obits had to come from a funeral home, not individuals, which is a barrier because I’m not using a funeral home; my mother is being cremated by the Cremation Society of Virginia, which told me to handle the ads myself. I explained this but was told the ad had to come from a funeral home. So, one paper gets no ad. The cost at the other papers ranged from around $300 to nearly $500 (in my own city, the ad was free because I work for the company — an excellent employee benefit but one you hope never to use). In the accompanying listing for each at legacy.com (yes, each one has a separate, unlinked listing), my mother’s name appears as Anita Lucas, even though she never went by Anita — like many people, especially in the South, she went by her middle name, Gail — except for one listing: the obit placed in The News & Observer of Raleigh.

The News & Observer also was the only one that had a completely web-based system for placing the ad. It was easy and seamless. Every other place had me e-mail in the information, and they called me back to get credit card information. Not bad, but not seamless.

One day, probably in the not-too-distant future, someone is going to combine something like the N&O’s online obit-submission system with a cheap price, and at that point, newspapers will hear another nail pounded in the coffin of their revenue model. For instance, why not a TV station? TV has geographic market presence — which I’m not convinced is even necessary nowadays — and this is revenue TV stations don’t now get, so a low-cost, web-only model is nothing but a plus to them. Or some newspaper company, like the N&O’s McClatchy, might decide, “Hey, why don’t we roll out this web-based obit system as a national thing, like Craigslist, and not just limit ourselves to where we have a building?”

When the day comes that someone actually does this, newspaper executives won’t be able to say no one saw it coming or tried to warn them.

5/21 UPDATE: Through Twitter, legacy.com noticed my complaints and addressed its end of them, so her obits now appear online as Gail Lucas, and the guest books have been combined.

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Scattered information vs. journalism

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged , , , , , on May 7, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Stijn Debrouwere helps explain “the mess the news industry is in,” going over tangible examples of how the way people — primarily young people, but not just them — have changed the way they look for information and where they look. It’s a post solidly in the mainstream of examinations of industry disruption, which continue to be useful for helping traditional journalists look past their immediate source of distress: layoffs/buyouts and budget cuts (the latest example, from AdAge about a situation at the Washington Post). Those problems are just symptoms resulting from what Stijn calls the “death by nibbles.” He also does address the issue of what journalists should be doing, including stressing storytelling and personality; “joining the revolution” by considering alternate ways of distributing information, ways that you would not call journalism; become less boring (seriously, that is a huge issue); and “Do stuff that does still matter.”

5/8/12 UPDATE: It’s interesting to compare the above with what the CEO of the Deseret News Publishing Co. — which is seeing circulation gains — says are big ideas changing the media industry. One of the two he cited for content can, I think, wind up getting dismissed:

“Differentiate your content: Invest where you can be ‘the best in the world.’”

Don’t let “best in the world” send you off a cliff, particularly if you run a small newsroom. No one is saying a 20,000-circulation paper or small website needs to compete with the New York Times — or even the Deseret News. But what exactly is it your audience expects you to be best at? Probably not the food page. Town council coverage? Local youth sports? Much more likely. Put your efforts where they can make a difference.

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The new river of information

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, Social media, tagged , , , , , on April 28, 2012| 1 Comment »

Niagara Falls
This morning brought me a good composite illustration of the evolving media landscape, at least a snapshot of it, that is so challenging for traditional news organizations to adapt to.

On Facebook, a journalist friend vented about local sites’ aggregation practices, which several times a day summarize and link to news her staff has reported: “It’s my reporters doing all the hard work! Am I looking at this wrong?” It’s a type of heartburn, but keep it in perspective: It has been going on since the first time a radio talker read the news on the air.

Nieman Journalism Lab reports on how NPR is trying a new strategy for rolling out new shows, aiming to simplify the process and lower the cost while also making use of social media. My first thought was it just shows that NPR, perhaps because it relies on grants and donations rather than advertising, has been somewhat insulated from the economic issues confronting print and commercial broadcast news organizations because it has been several years since I became used to hearing the idea of “fail fast, fail cheap.” But my second thought was that it illustrates one problem for traditional media: We don’t like to do anything just one time. I don’t mean stories, I mean columns, features, shows, sections, segments. We’re used to the idea of stand-alone news and features, but anything that we would do more than once, but not at least weekly and not for the foreseeable future, is a giant barrier. Any traditional news source is tremendously structured and formatted. The idea of predictability is roundly accepted as a plus, that people want to know what they are getting before they even try. Try telling a newspaper editor (not to pick on newspapers; this is just an example) that certain stories should run in larger type. At best, he’ll convene a committee to discuss it for a few weeks, and if they tend to agree they’ll run off test copies on the press and discuss it some more. So in that sense, even though many organizations have been preaching “fail fast, fail cheap,” almost no one really practices it. “Fail fast, fail cheap” means you go ahead and do it, and if it clear quickly that it isn’t working, you stop.

Finally, John Robinson explains what I would call the cognitive dissonance in a Pew study of news habits, which reported that “31 percent of people ages 18-24 get no news on an average day, and 22 percent of 30-34-year-olds get none either.” The nut of John’s argument:

“The 18-24 year-old age group is the ‘if-the-news-is-that-important-it-will-find-me’ generation. Those folks are on Facebook. They get news every time they log on. Their friends tell them the news in their worlds. (And for you not on Facebook, don’t think that they talk about what they had for breakfast.) This generation doesn’t immediately call it news the way we old-timers do, but when they watch, say, the president slow jammin’ the news, it is news. When they see the ‘Trending Articles’ foisted upon them by Facebook, that’s news. (Well, some of them are.)

“But if you ask them where they get news, the answer is Google and Yahoo and Jon Stewart and Huffington Post. It’s rarely actual, traditional, mainstream news organizations. The news may originate there, but they don’t identify those as the sources. And that’s one of the problems with using the generic term ‘news’ in a survey.”

And that right there is the larger issue: Not just young people but almost everyone now picks up news everywhere throughout the day. It used to be far more structured; the morning paper (or, before that, the afternoon paper), the evening TV news and whatever people talked about during the day that was passed on by word of mouth or that was big enough to warrant a news break on TV or radio in the middle of the day. It’s all atomized now, or it’s increasingly so.

A further illustration: Although I started my day with the morning paper, all of the above was stimulated by things I found online — starting with Facebook.

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The past is gone

Posted in Print media, tagged , , , , , , on April 15, 2012| 1 Comment »


Late in the documentary “Page One: Inside the New York Times” — the SPJ Virginia Pro chapter held a viewing Saturday night at the University of Richmond — Times reporter David Carr tells a room of journalists in Minnesota something like (the quote may not be exact because I’m going from memory): “Don’t think about all the people who are gone. Think about the fact that you are still here.” It’s partly encouragement, partly a warning not to succumb to survivor’s guilt. It can also be taken — whether or not Carr specifically meant it that way — as an instruction to newsroom leaders: If you spend all your time thinking about the beats your news organization used to cover and all the bureaus everyone used to have but doesn’t anymore, you’ll paralyze yourself. You can’t stretch your current resources to make up for what has been lost and will never return. You have to think about what you have and what you need to do to best achieve your newsroom’s goals. Change the entire beat structure if that’s what it takes to get people to stop thinking of how things used to be done.

Back in the mid-’90s when I was an assistant state editor (a job that no longer exists at that paper), there was a reporter we had who was covering a county by herself against daily competition from three other papers. She seemed overwhelmed and was turning in briefs that were a day behind the competition, and she was not getting many stories because she was always trying to catch up. I and another editor (in hindsight, it was overkill to have two of us do this) pulled her aside one day and told her she needed to choose her battles. She couldn’t, all by herself, outreport all of her competition, so she needed to set her own agenda, pick what she thought was important, and if she got beat on something, well, evaluate how important that is on a case-by-case basis. We made her cry, which was not the goal, but she changed her approach, found her footing and became the reporter we all believed she could be. The situation currently facing newsrooms is not very different: You can’t do everything you want to do, so choose your battles.

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Journalists can learn from a fictional silent-film star

Posted in Broadcast media, Print media, tagged , , , , , , on March 6, 2012| Leave a Comment »


This is what it has come to: I can’t see an Oscar-winning movie without finding parallels in journalism’s changing landscape. In this case, while watching “The Artist” I was struck by the remark by the lead character, a star of silent film as talkies begin to sweep the movie industry, quoted in a newspaper that he would not do talkies because he was an artist. He dismissed the emerging technology of film as crass and lowbrow, less worthy of notice. The sentiment was very familiar; I’ve heard or read it a thousand times from traditional journalists about the idea of (pick any): blogging the news, aggregation, raw video, frequent (or sometimes any) web updates, Facebook, Twitter, engaging with reader comments, and probably a few that I can’t recall right now.

The at the end of “The Artist” you get, in the only spoken lines of the whole movie, why he really dismissed talkies. In case you haven’t seen it, without giving the whole thing away I will just say it came down to an ability. But the way he coped with that and adapted to the new medium was a different skill that had not been utilized by the silent films. He could act, but in the new world acting was not enough. But he had something else to add, and the combination worked.

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